Road to the White House or Trail of Tears

As of Friday October 31, 2008 there are 80 days left in the presidency of George W. Bush. Judging from his approval ratings there will not be many tears shed as he totes his last box of personal effects out of the Oval Office. Do you think ex-presidents swipe towels? I would at least make off with some office supplies.
We are less than a week away from the official Election Day deciding who goes into that office after him. Do you think a new president sits at the desk and spins around in the chair laughing maniacally only stopping long enough to pick up the phone and pretend to authorize an air strike on the home of the sixth grade teacher who told him he would never amount to anything as long as he had that attitude?
These candidates have been running longer than Frank Shorter ever dreamed possible. Think about it. Sen. Obama officially announced 633 days before Election Day and Sen. McCain officially announced 558 days ahead. In that time frame a woman could have conceived, carried to full term and given birth to a child, twice.
Here’s a fun story problem. Usain Bolt takes a magic potion (not steroids) which makes it possible for him to run as fast as he does in the 100m dash continuously. If you figure he can run a mile in about two and half minutes and he started running when Sen. Obama announced his candidacy how many times could he have run the entire equatorial circumference of the Earth? This is even better than the train questions in those college entrance exams.
The question which truly comes to my mind is “Why?” Why would anyone want to put themselves through running for president? I would almost rather run the circumference of the equator, in ill-fitting army boots. At least when you run around the planet the likelihood of being interviewed by Sean Hannity is not very great.
The press has to be the worst aspect of the whole thing. Originally the word “press” was used in regards to the media because of the printing press. Now “press” must refer to a different definition of the word: to use a steady and significant force to put weight on something. No matter which guy you are voting for you have to feel sorry for them both as they are asked question after question by everyone from Larry King to the Live at Five reporter who has the same knowledge of international affairs and current tax laws as does your average sock puppet.
I could never run for president. The first time some hatchet man from the opposing party started saying I did something I never did I would give a news conference which would make Peter Finch’s character from the movie Network look like Mahatma Gandhi.
For years I have said the people who really ought to be president will never run because they are too smart to put up with all the (place your own word to describe animal solid waste here) which surrounds the process. One of the reasons I say this is because of a different George W. I knew.
George W. Pyle was a city manager for over 30 years. A city manager is a non-elected person whose task it is to serve the public. There are probably a few readers out there who remember him in Hutchinson. I knew him pretty well. He was my dad.
He took the public trust very seriously and he worked tirelessly to do what was right for the people in his community. He came from a background which included the sacrifices made during The Depression and World War II, and the call to arms of John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.”
I know who he would vote for. He would vote for the candidate who was most likely to ask the country to work together for the good of everybody, most particularly the least of us. He would vote for someone who wasn’t afraid of asking for sacrifice even if it meant a little hardship now in order to ensure prosperity later. He would vote for someone who possessed intellectual curiosity, valued ideas and was looking for the opinion of others. Most importantly, he would vote and then he would do his best to make his part of the world a better place no matter who won.

I believe the answer to the Usain Bolt story problem is 46.

To Uni-Hemisphere Sleep, Perchance to Dream

For thousands of years various cultures have done many different things to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood. Some are simple ceremonies and others cause many different parts of my body to tighten and my stomach to get queasy just having them described. I am very grateful the culture in Hutchinson, Kansas circa 1975, as I entered adolescence, did not require ritualistic scarification to be considered an adult; otherwise I would be a bearded, pot-bellied, gray-haired eighth grader still today.
As is often the case with the human race it seems to me this “now you are a man” stuff has been made more complicated than it needs to be. As a father of three and a former child myself I can easily point to the moment when children cross the line into maturity. It is when they start to sleep, voluntarily.
I fully realize toddlers cannot spell but they seem to think “nap” is a four letter word. The energy expended every day in this country by parents trying to cajole, beg, trick, force, and coax kids to just lie down and go to sleep far surpasses anything T. Boone Pickens ever dreamed of. If we could harness that domestic renewable resource the chant would go from “drill, baby, drill” to “naptime, baby, naptime”.
Recently I learned a bunch about sleep, a subject very dear to my heart. Every animal does it, but there are big differences in how. The reason for the various methods used by different animals in order to get sleep is simple, death. One scientist stated it is dangerous to sleep and if natural selection could have gotten rid of it it would have.
Think about it. You are a happy little mallard blithely napping on the shore of a happy little pond. When a happy (and hungry) little fox, who is very much awake, comes strolling by. Suddenly the happy duck is a happy meal without the toy.
Well, I learned mallards can sleep with one eye open. They actually rest one half of their brain at a time. Each eye is connected to the opposite hemisphere in the brain so the duck places itself in a group with other sleepy ducks. Some ducks watch one direction and different ducks watch the other way. This gives one half of the brain a right good snooze. Then they switch sides and the other half sleeps.
Another one of the many animals who does this “uni-hemisphere” sleeping is the dolphin. These animals live under water a good deal of the time. They also need to breathe air. They also need to sleep. Because of all of these factors a dolphin cannot go into complete sleep. They have to keep one half of their brain going at all times or they would drown.
Truthfully, I had never considered the fact that dolphins are conscious breathers. Unlike us they have to make a distinct decision to breathe. It requires thought. The obvious joke would be to say it is a good thing there aren’t any blonde dolphins, but luckily I would never make the obvious joke.
Smarter than me scientist guys explained that man can sleep with both eyes shut and truly go unconscious to the world around them because we do not have the predation risk most animals have. This started a long time ago when we would go into caves and hide from saber toothed tigers and continues today when we go into condos and hide from predacious sub-prime mortgage lenders.
This uni-hemisphere sleeping intrigues me. I love sleeping. I never get as much as I would like to get. Yet everything I do does not require my full attention. If I could sleep like a dolphin I would love to. There are meetings I have attended that I could easily grasp the content with one cranial hemisphere tied behind my back.
One last tidbit about sleep. It appears sleep is integral to learning. No, I am not suggesting kids sleep in class, even though I had a couple of social studies teachers who seemed to be trying to induce unconsciousness. As we sleep the brain gets “washed”. All the clutter from the day’s activities, important and trivial, is eroded. This leaves the ones which were most prominent still standing and the others all but unnoticeable.
Therefore the special maneuver you learned while playing Mortal Combat XXIX: The Revenge of the Torn Spleen for five hours remains fully remembered and the thirty minute discussion in school about Gandhi is washed away like crumbs off a plate. Wait a minute, that can’t be good.

It's Not What You Know It's When You Know

I may have mentioned this before, but I am surrounded by people who do not understand me. The previous statement was not made due to angst ridden self-absorption like a morose teenager. I truly mean they do not understand me.
My place of work houses over 500 people who were born fifteen years after I graduated from high school. Age has caught up to me in many ways. The waist measurement will never be 32 inches again. My hair is getting lighter in color and in weight. My knee twinges when the barometric pressure fluctuates. But, the times I feel the oldest are when I make references to things I think everybody will understand and they look at me like I just spoke in the language of the aboriginal inhabitants of Outer Mongolia.
Years ago I was teaching a sixth grade class. A kid in the back row was tapping his pencil on his desk, incessantly. I was able to ignore it for a while, but it finally got to me. Instead of racing to his desk taking the pencil from his hand and breaking it into tiny pieces, which is what I wanted to do, I stayed professional. I calmly put my hand on his shoulder and asked him to stop doing his Ringo Starr impression. I received that speaking Mongolian stare. Neither he nor anyone else in the class knew who Ringo Starr was so my statement made as much sense as asking him to carefully insert a lobster into each nostril.
I recently learned there is a phrase other than the over used “generation gap” to point out the different worlds in which different age groups live. It is called a “mindset”. This makes sense because the mindset people have is dictated by the world they know. There is a website published by Beloit College in Wisconsin which makes lists of things pertaining to students who would be graduating in the years 2002 to 2012. It makes for interesting reading.
Technology is the starkest difference between the generations. This is discussed at the website, but I am reminded of another instance I came across as a teacher. This was many years ago. We were doing a fire safety lesson with fourth graders and in order to make it more physical we had the students do actions for the different things one should do in case of a fire. They would actually stop, drop and roll. They would crawl a short distance to show them how they should move in a smoky house. Then we had them run a short distance (as in getting to a neighbor’s house). The last thing was to pretend to call 9-1-1.
This was downright funny. The kids would be in a lather as they did all the physical activities and then they would come sprinting up to the phone we had sitting on a chair for them to make their emergency phone call. They would grasp the receiver and their pointer finger would be poised over the dial. The dial?! They had no idea how to “dial” a phone. They had only seen buttons. There was that Mongolian look again.
Stop and think about the most memorable things in your lifetime, the cultural things, not just your first date with that hot girl from algebra class. Kids going into college this past fall do not have the same collective unconscious we had. They can’t discuss where they were when Kennedy was shot, when Reagan was shot, or even when J.R. was shot. For them the argument has always been Mac versus PC, not Ford versus Chevy. A text is a group of letters on a tiny screen not the book you have to read for history class. These people have no idea why whenever there is a controversy in the world we tack on the suffix “-gate”.
Personally, I look to one very particular aspect of my life that my children will not experience. It is not earth-shattering, deeply philosophical or something that will be discussed by historians in the 22nd century, but I think it is representative of how the world has changed. They do not get to watch Johnny Carson each night.
The persona of Carson showed kindness, intelligence and humor. These traits are not played up nearly enough in the mass media of today. There is more interest in Simon Cowell, political knife fights (still only figurative and verbal, but it could turn literal very easily), and jokes about human effluvia. The mindset has changed.

Being Articulate and Stuff

I like to learn things. Let me put a qualifier on that. I like to learn some things. Learning how to properly eviscerate a large woodland creature for the sake of crawling into the fresh cavity in order to avoid freezing to death on the frozen tundra of an area of the world from which one can see Russia, is of no interest. Learning how to use such phrases as “properly eviscerate” and “frozen tundra” in the same sentence is. Now, if I could only learn how to add the phrase “a touch of whimsy” to the same sentence I would feel truly fulfilled.
Education was highly valued in my family. This did not mean my folks fussed about grades or cracked a whip as we did homework. My mother did try to help me. The difficulty for my mother was not the work. It was the attention level of her pupil, who could often be found playing with the honey filled bear left on the kitchen table while she slaved over quadratic equations. She learned algebra. I learned if you squeeze the bear just right the little plastic stopper can reach gravitational escape velocity.
Since the job which allows me to pay my mortgage is in education I probably shouldn’t say this, but maybe I can get some of that bailout money if I get fired. My father used to say school was ancillary to education. The very fact that he used the word “ancillary”, properly, in a sentence reinforces the fact that smart was important to him. I think he meant school is important for getting a good education, but if you only actively try to learn within the confines of those ubiquitous blond brick buildings you will not be a fully educated person.
Learning new words has always been a pursuit of mine, in and out of school. I like finding words which really express something in a very precise way. The French have term for this. I think it is “c’est la guerre”. Nope, that’s wrong. Maybe, “pate de foie gras”? That’s not it. I need just the proper word, the perfect fit, le mot juste. Oh, well, I guess I’m not going to remember.
People who try to throw words around in order to put lipstick on a pig (sorry couldn’t resist) bug me. The other day I was at a meeting and there was a whole set of things we were to do. One of them was to write down our thoughts on a “tuning protocol”. I found out that was a piece of paper divided into categories. After that we were to spend some time on “silent reflection”. Back in my day we simply called it “thinking”.
I learned a new word earlier this week reading the New York Times online. This electronic newspaper has the coolest feature. If you’re reading an article and you come across a word you do not know (which is to be expected while reading the big city left-wing elitest press) you can simply double click on the word and a screen pops up with a dictionary entry giving the pronunciation and definition of the word. If only those Green Lantern comics I read in my youth did that. The word I learned was “lacuna”.
Lacuna means an empty space or a missing part. The word was used to describe a certain politician’s gap in knowledge. Now you may ask of what use is it to know this word? Well, it was immediately obvious to me how I could use it. I could write the William F. Buckley version of a song from a Disney movie. It would be all about the voluminous empty spaces where intelligence should lie in the world of politics. A song telling the story of no WMDs, a missing Osama Bin Laden, and politicians who seem surprised that CEOs of big corporations could be greedy. I would call the song “Lacuna Matata”. No smarts, no worries.
It just doesn’t seem the general population values intellect. The word intellectual is used as an epithet. The dictionary in my computer says the word means: having a highly developed ability to think, reason, and understand. Call me crazy, but that sounds like something to aspire towards. But, no, intellectuals are thought of as pocket protector geeks only good for programming your TiVo, working on particle colliders in Switzerland, and being an expert witness in the trial of the cool guy in class who embezzled millions of dollars to maintain his trophy wife and jet setting lifestyle.

Fifty States of Mind

We always say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Actually, we don’t always say that. If we always said that we would be really crummy conversationalists.
“Hey, Jim, what do you think of the presidential candidates?”
“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
“OK, Jim, what about the financial situation the United States is facing?”
“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Well, where do you want to eat tonight, Jim?”
“You can’t judge, ooowwww…”
Jim did not finish that sentence because his friend just gave him a swift kick in the shin and walked away muttering something about judging a friend by his intelligence.
Anyway, it is fairly common for people to prejudge things. Sometimes that way of thinking makes sense. If a man walks up to you wearing a leather jacket, a patch over one eye, boots with spikes capable of ruining Ben Hur’s chariot, and a tattoos of a skull and crossbones on one shoulder and the phrase “Waterboarding is for Sissies” on the other, chances are he is not going to ask you if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Chances are more likely you are about to meet your personal savior.
One way people judge each other has to do with where a person calls home. Admit it. If you ask a stranger where they are from and they answer Scranton, Pennsylvania you will draw different conclusions about them than if they answer San Francisco, California.
A recent study discussed in an article in the Wall Street Journal seems to say there are things one can assume about a person who comes from a particular place in the country. A research scientist from the University of Cambridge in England (this immediately brings to mind a stereotypical tweed wearing, meerschaum pipe smoking, crumpet eating, Shakespeare quoting, aesthete who tips the machismo scale somewhere between Clay Aiken and that kid you knew in eighth grade who was the target of choice in every single dodgeball game ever played) has put together information from over 600,000 questionnaires in order to tell the “personality” of each of the fifty states.
These questionnaires measured what is called the “Big Five”. The five personality traits defined are: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Can you imagine a person strong in all five? I’m sure after you imagine a person like that you can easily imagine yourself resisting a powerful urge to slap him across the face because he would be more annoying than fingernails on a chalk board and Dennis Miller, combined.
Just like people, no state was strong in all five areas. Extraversion sounds like it is the director’s cut of a movie on DVD, but it really refers to the outgoing nature of a person. The number one state for this was North Dakota. There will now be a slight pause as all readers go: “Huh… North Dakota?” My guess is in North Dakota there isn’t much else but each other to occupy one’s time.
The winner amongst the fifty states for agreeableness is North Dakota. I am starting to smell a conspiracy here. Is it possible the Cambridge researcher was given a sizable bribe to make North Dakota sound like a wonderful, friendly place to live thus increasing its population and making South Dakota insanely jealous?
The top state in the conscientiousness department is North…just kidding, New Mexico. This is also the only personality trait for which Kansas made the top five. This is no surprise. Kansans pride themselves on their sense of duty and self-discipline. This might explain why we don’t score very highly in the two remaining categories.
Kansas is 34th in neuroticism and 38th in openness. Neuroticism measures things like stress and anxiety. (Digression for an old joke: A psychotic person thinks two plus two is five. A neurotic person knows two plus two is four, but hates it.) Well, we Kansans have too much self-discipline to allow ourselves to be anxious. That and a very high per capita intake of Prozac.
Being 38th in openness must be a surprise. There cannot possibly be thirty-seven states with more open spaces than we have. Wait. When this study says openness they mean openness to new ideas. We can be a bit set in our ways. The majority of Kansas voters voted for a Democratic presidential candidate forty-four years ago, a Democratic senator seventy-six years ago and each election still has a number of write-in votes for Eisenhower. We still like Ike.

From Monogamous Mice to Androgynous Anchovies

Many scientists are reporting that Genes may be even more influential to how humans behave than was previously thought to be the case. I can kind of see what they mean. Gene Rayburn hosted my favorite game show, Match Game. Gene Kelly was one of the best dancers ever. Gene Simmons has one of the longest tongues ever. Gene Moore is considered the top window dresser of the 20th century. (I did not make that up. I found it on Wikipedia.) But I fail to see how these giants in their fields influence all of human behavior.
What’s that? Oh, I feel somewhat embarrassed. It is not “Genes” its genes. Genes are those tiny little doohickeys hanging out within our DNA which lay out the blueprint for the building of people. Back in the 1800’s a scientist guy named Gregor Mendel studied inheritance in pea plants and hypothesized about how traits are passed from parent to offspring. Most the time this concept was simply applied to what color a kid’s eyes would be due to the eye color of the parents. Do you remember doing those Punnet Squares in tenth grade biology? I hated those things.
It seems the more we learn about genes and how humans are hard-wired the more it becomes clear we really don’t know how much influence they have over many more nuanced aspects of who we are. A recent study done by a group of Swedish scientists discusses how a certain gene in men can lead to having better marriages.
This relationship enhancing gene is in charge of modulating the hormone vasopressin. The word “vasopressin” is from an archaic East Indian language and translates to “one who admits he is wrong even when he is not”. Okay, I made that up. It really means “one who considers having power over the remote control a god given right”. I made that up, too.
The thing is all this stuff I’m making up is not all that strange compared to the real story. The scientists first became tuned into this gene and the attendant hormone while studying voles. Voles? I had to run to Wikipedia yet again.
Voles are rodents. Great, when deciding what to study in order to get an insight into how men do well or not in a long-term relationship scientists look to rodents. I’m offended. I mean voles are not even tough rodents. Why couldn’t it have been capybaras? They are rodents with attitude, weighing in at over 170 pounds. But, no. They had to go and compare us to male voles. Animals that have a list of predators longer than the list of people who want to slap Britney Spears. They do not even grow bigger than seven inches long, and here’s the kicker, the female is larger than the male. That might explain why a vole is monogamous. She can kick his short hairy tail.
Here is a direct quote from the article as it appeared on the Yahoo News webpage. “They (the researchers) found that men with a certain variant, known as an allele, of the vasopressin 1a gene, called 334, tended to score especially low on a standard psychological test called the Partner Bonding Scale. They were also less likely to be married than men carrying another form of the gene. And carrying two copies of the 334 allele doubled the odds that the men had undergone some sort of marital crisis over the past year.”
Well. I have only one thing to say to that. Huh?
The very next day after I read about rodents being a “vole” model for men committed to their relationship I read another scientific report. This report talked about how all those chemicals man keeps pumping into the environment have effects on genes. Pair that with what I just learned about the importance of genes in regards to how people function and this news is as frightening as one of those John Stossel reports on 20/20.
The scientific genius guy reporting in this article said the chemicals leaking out into the water supply are likely the reason why many fish species are mutating. How are they mutating? They are developing both male and female sex organs. That’s quite a mutation.
If this phenomenon expands to humans there is a bright side. Men with the 334 allele will have a better chance of maintaining a long term relationship if it is with himself.

To Be Paid in Kind

Whenever a person takes up pen and paper (or, in a more contemporary tone, keyboard and laserjet) it is known to the author the message he is trying to impart has probably been done. I realize what I have to say has been said before. We have John Milton, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, and Mel Brooks. I cannot possibly measure up to their skills. This does not mean I am going to give up.
One of those great writers was Henry James. He was a brilliant man from a family of great thinkers. He wrote over twenty novels not to mention numerous novellas, criticisms, journals and plays. I have read almost none of his stuff, but I still think I can accurately say the best thing he ever wrote was the following: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
I am going to put my spin on what Mr. James said because I fear kindness is as common in everyday life as Big Macs are at a convention of Vegans. Okay, I’m dabbling in hyperbole when I say that. I do see acts of kindness on a regular basis. Working at a school affords me opportunities to see children do small acts of kindness, teachers take extra time to help a kid grow, and counselors go above and beyond the call of duty to make a kid feel better about himself.
This week I was an audience member for a presentation from a group known as Rachel’s Challenge. This group was named for an extraordinary young lady who was a victim of the tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado. I am already straying too far from my job as a humor writer so I will spare you the horrible details. Luckily, the bulk of the message revolved around her outlook on life and how acts of kindness can make a difference in people’s lives. The chief hope of this program is that getting others to chip in with acts of kindness will create a chain reaction, snowballing until kindness becomes the norm instead of the anomaly.
I truly believe kindness is the most valuable character trait for people I want to spend time with and the one I try hardest to impart to the next generation. The fear which is growing in me is people will see that the antithesis of kindness gets people what they want. The chain reaction this behavior sets into motion is dangerous.
I recently listened to a lecture by Phillip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and the author of the book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He discussed how situational and systemic factors can make people behave in awful ways they would not think of doing if the environment was different. He specifically looked at prisons and the horrific behaviors at Abu Ghraib.
If you look around it seems the situational and systemic factors most prevalent are impolite if not downright mean-spirited. I just read an article on the CNN website about the presidential election. 15 paragraphs into the article they started talking about education after getting all the important sniping and downright lying taken care of first. I have liberal leanings so there may be a smattering of partisan prejudice, even though I try not to do so, but the Republican convention seemed chock full of sarcastic comments and invectives. The Democrats took their share of shots at their opponents, but it didn’t seem to be as bitter or nasty.
Political talk on Fox and MSNBC is angry far too much of the time. I have never missed John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite, and David Brinkley so much in my life. If Edward R. Murrow tunes his astral television (even better than Hi-def) to present day television news there wouldn’t be enough cigarettes or bourbon in the world to get the bad taste out of his mouth.
Reality television trades on the worst of people. Duplicitous behaviors can win you a million dollars (as well as eating bugs and foregoing personal hygiene for weeks on end). If Big Brother is watching he is watching people stab others in the back. If you want to be just like Donald Trump I think it is time to reexamine your value set.
This country should be a beacon of humanity. Instead it spends too much time peddling pettiness and impoliteness. That is not who we are, but it could be who we become.

Life Isn't Always Fair

The next ten days are a big deal for Hutchinson. There will be tractor pulls, arm wrestling contests, chainsaw artists, pigs racing and pigs just standing around, bands who last hit the Billboard charts in 1986, a performer who had his first top ten hit when you could still buy 8-track tapes and a performer who was born seventeen years after that song was on the charts. The Kansas State Fair is off and running.
I grew up in Hutchinson so the Fair is part of my earliest memories. The very first thing that comes to mind when I think of the Fair, not something their PR guys would want me to say, is mud. It always seemed to rain during the Fair. The second thing is road signs. The first real hint the Fair was coming was when I was walking home from Roosevelt Elementary School there would be sign posts with no signs. The city would put up “No Parking” signs on several streets close to the fairgrounds, but the posts would go up before the signs were added.
We lived close enough we would be serenaded by the dulcet tones of race car engines on weekends and we could catch occasional bars of music wafting over the treetops from the rock groups at the Grandstand. We also lived close enough I could easily walk there. This meant when I got old enough to go without parental escort I could do so without even asking for a ride. Asking for money? Yes. A ride? No.
My best friend, Rob, and I would go to the Fair. As was the case in many aspects of our friendship, he was the adventurous one and I was not. He wanted to go on the rides which would make Alan Shepard throw up. I did not. He would talk to long-haired men with tattoos chiding us to play their midway games. I would not. He would actually get the little crane thing to grab a prize and drop it through the little door which meant it was now yours. I would not. The crane thing isn’t really all that adventurous; it’s just another example of his fair going skill and my lack thereof.
Another thing Rob loved about the Fair more than I did was free stuff. He would load up on giveaways from businesses and political candidates like it was pirate treasure. Once Rob loaded up on stuff at the Democratic Party booth. The Republican booth got more trade so the Democrats probably didn’t mind. Anyway, he got a bunch of bumper stickers which simply read “Glickman” for no other reason than we both thought the name was funny. We didn’t know at the time that little known Glickman guy would go on to become the Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, the group who brings us the Oscars and decides if a movie has too many dirty words to be rated G.
When I was in high school I worked on the school newspaper so I was actually able to attend press conferences for two performers in the Grandstand: Bill Cosby and Red Skelton, two giants of the comedy world who are personal heroes of mine. As stated above, I am not adventurous so I didn’t say anything, but I do have framed on my office wall Red Skelton’s autograph and a picture of a much skinnier, bad hair wearing Chris Pyle sitting quite close to a comedic genius. Awfully cool.
I haven’t been back to the Fair much since I moved out of the family home. I will be taking my ten-year-old son there this weekend. I am looking forward to a few things. I want to see the place through ten-year-old eyes again, even if it is vicariously through George’s reactions. I want to get free stuff from booths in the Sunflower Building. I want to see a gigantic sculpture made from butter. I would really like to get a candied apple, but the last time I went you could only get the caramel kind. Some government watchdog probably found the glass like candy substance used to encase the fruit was carcinogenic, darn them. It’s food on a stick. It’s not supposed to be good for you. I’ve never seen a Pronto Pup represented on any food pyramid, yet they haven’t stopped selling those.

P.S. They had candied apples. I bought one. It tasted...horrible. You can't recapture those halcyon days of one's youth.

Lack of Generation Gap Backfires

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

Going for the Gold...naaahh

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

My Brain Hurts

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

The alchemy and science of words

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

Loading up the Family Truckster

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

A Dad by Any Other Name Would Still be Clueless

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

Seussical Children

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

Alice is JoJo and Emilyjane is Mayzie LaBird.

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

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

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

Oil companies can be pretty slick

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

One nation, under stress, with liberty...

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

The right brain is the right brain

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

The red badge of activity

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

Some choices are easier than others

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

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

As if I didn't have enough to do

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

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

It is only a movie

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

Nothing like that summertime feeling

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

The Few vs. The Many

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