One of these things is EXACTLY like the other

I know this statement is going to elicit a "well duh" from a lot of you, but conservative talk radio just doesn't make sense anymore. Let me qualify that statement by saying that I don't actually listen to most of talk radio. Glenn Beck is about the only show I will listen to, mostly because he is the only one who doesn't seem to be just a Republican stooge. But even he seems to have gone along with a lunacy brewing amongst all the conservative pundits lately in the form of an all out irrational fear and hatred of Barack Obama.

Look I get that conservatives would be against Obama. He is, after all, a Democrat and a liberal one at that. It's not that they hate him that has me puzzled. It's that they hate him SO MUCH MORE than Hillary Clinton. Like seriously, a lot of these guys are leading me and a lot of other people to believe that come November if the Democratic primary falls in favor Hillary, they will actually be voting for her instead of their own candidate, John McCain. You get that? They actually prefer Hillary to a Republican! But if the Democratic primary falls the other way, holy crap get ready for the apocalypse because apparenly if Obama becomes president everything in the world is just going to fall apart.

Can some rational person please please PLEASE explain this to me, because I have listened to both candidates. I've heard about where they stand on the issues. And save for a few minor details and the minutae of rhetoric, I see zero difference between the Hillary and Obama. Like none. Nothing. Zip. Don't believe me? These two graphics are from the very informative website ontheissues.org. It breaks down the political philosophy of every single senator and congressman based strictly on their voting record. Conservatives are trying to say that Obama is even more liberal than Hillary. Really?

Seriously, do you see a difference, because I really don't. Again, I get conservatives hating Obama. I just don't get how they can hate him so much more than Hillary. Really it's just a feat of logic that conservative radio has managed to dig down deep inside its soul and actually find positive things to say about a Clinton period. Isn't that a sign of the apocalypse right there? Hm... maybe they have a point about this Obama guy.

Science and Faith: The Real Missing Link

I preface this whole blog with the following statement. I am a Jesus-loving, God-fearing Christian with a firm belief that everything that we see (and a whole bunch of stuff that we have yet to see) was created by a sentient God.

That being said, I LOVE reading about evolution. I personally find the concept fascinating. And I cringe whenever I hear cases going before the Supreme Court where a well-meaning Christian dolt is trying to force a school district into teaching Intelligent Design. It’s not that I don’t believe in Intelligent Design. Quite the contrary. But I don’t understand how any reasonably non-moronic person can fail to grasp the essential difference between a science and a philosophy. You cannot test the existence of a Creator by scientific means – at least not yet – and I challenge anybody to state otherwise. Unfortunately for we Creationists, as of now evolution is the foremost scientific theory dealing with life on Earth and there is plenty of scientific evidence to back it up. And when a theory has that solid a foundation, the burden really does fall on dissenters to disprove it. And while, yes, there are flaws in the theory – which I think should be mentioned in textbooks right alongside the evidence – the fact is Creationists are going to have to present a bit more evidence of their own before they get rational school boards to allow a philosophy to be taught inside a science lab.

The book that first turned me on to how intriguing the science of evolution can be was the book How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Prior to that, I never really knew much about the topic beyond what I and everybody else learned in 10^th grade biology – which basically amounted to vestigal organs, a bit about dominant and recessive genes and something to do with finches and the size of their beaks. But what Pinker does in his book is to essentially “reverse engineer” a human mind, showing how every aspect of human life, from the way we see, to the way we think, to the way we interact, to the emotions we feel, to the way we “made up” the concept of “God” were all shaped by our evolutionary past. While the book was probably the hardest thing I have ever read voluntarily, it brings up a lot of fascinating points to ponder, even if you don’t fully agree with the concept of evolution (which I’m still not sure I do… for reasons I’ll get into later). It was a truly life-changing book that left me wanting to know more.

Well it’s been a couple years but I finally took another plunge into that wacky world of Charles Darwin. I just finished the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins – perhaps the most famous Darwinist short of Darwin himself. In a nutshell, Dawkins presents evolution and natural selection from the point of view of the gene. He paints a probable picture of how life might have originated in the “primordial soup” and shows how DNA has become the very thing that controls every aspect of life everywhere on this planet today. One can’t help but conjure up images of The Matrix as Dawkins talks about a gene’s selfish, almost maniacal need to survive in the form of exact replicas and copies of itself – passing itself down through generations upon generations of engineered “survival machines” (a.k.a. “us”). Yes, according to Dawkins, humans, plants, insects, fungus, everything on earth that can be considered “alive” are nothing more than just elaborate “vehicles” designed for one reason and one reason only: to protect genes for long enough to produce more copies. Of course, unlike the machines in The Matrix, everything the genes do is unconscious and brought about purely by random chance. Nothing happens for a reason. It’s all accidental. Genes do nothing by effort or foresight. If a mutation gives its “survival machine” an edge on a competition, it’s purely by mistake, with natural selection giving it blind creedence.

Even as somebody who believes in God, it’s hard not to be swayed by people like Dawkins and Pinker. Beyond being brilliant scientists in their respective fields, they have such a way with words and metaphors that they break down highly mathematical concepts and make them so a completely science-illiterate person such as myself can understand. (Dawkins in particular weaves such stimulating prose, producing such droll and compelling lines like “Sex: that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication.”) What I often find myself saying is, “If evolution really happens, then it makes total sense that this is the way it would work.” But there is one thing that I have yet to glean from anything I’ve read about evolution thus far. It’s the one thing that gives me hope that the theory might one day be disproved: TIME.

There is an adage that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. With just a bit of trivial mathematical understanding, this makes perfect sense. Sure, give anything an infinite amount of time and they’ll write just about any damn thing you want. The evolution of complex organisms such as ourselves seems to evoke that adage, with each successive generation (from primordial soup to all modern life forms) representing another “monkey keystroke”, and the long and intricate spiral of DNA representing their Shakespearian text of choice. Except in this analogy, the number of monkeys is FINITE, as is the duration of typing time. In this analogy, the monkeys haven’t had all the time in the universe to produce their magnum opus. And rather than banging out the complete works of Shakespeare just once, they have apparently done it a couple billion times – once for every complex species that has ever lived. How the hell does that happen, even once, purely by accident? Especially when, as Dawkins says, most mutations (which are necessary for evolution to happen) end up being a detriment to the new offspring, resulting in its death to natural selection. As near as I can see, in my admittedly puny scientific mind, there just doesn’t seem to have been enough time for evolution (as Darwinists present it) to have produced the insanely complex and diverse forms of life that exist today. The only thing that makes logical (albeit not scientifically verifiable) sense is if evolution was at least guided by an intelligent being.

I know to some Christians, even this is an unacceptable view of life on this planet. Anything short of the divine creation of the sun, the moon, and every living being on earth – completed in seven days less than 10,000 years ago – is a sinful mockery of God. I see their point, but I sometimes wonder if it’s necessarily an either/or thing. I personally look at evolution as being the “Helio-Centric Heresy” of our time. For those of you who flunked history, Galileo was nearly put to death for making the extremely sinful suggestion that it is the sun, not the earth, which is center of our universe. The faithful of that time thought it was a mockery of God to even suggest that we weren’t the very thing that all of Creation revolved around. Today we, of course, know the truth… turns out it was even worse than Galileo let on. But I daresay there isn’t a religious or secular person alive who thinks this scientific revelation in any way diminishes the power and majesty of God. And how silly do you think the scoffers of Galileo’s theory felt when they got to heaven and realized they had been invoking God’s name over a complete and total farce? I can’t help but wonder how many antagonists of evolution might end up getting to heaven and realizing the same thing. Yes, evolution may be wrong. We may have all simply appeared here in the blink of an eye. The devil may have even placed all those fossils just to throw us off the straight and narrow path. But won’t we feel silly to have spent so much time saying, “God does NOT work that way,” only to get to heaven and have Him say, “Uh… yes I do.”

Ben Stein is coming out with a documentary this year called EXPELLED which explores a growing group of scientists who are using actual science to try and prove Intelligent Design. Further, it explores how the science community as a whole has been systematically silencing anyone who even suggests that Darwin might have been wrong. While I’m initially leery of the film (based on research I’ve done into the blacklisted scientists) I am actually very intrigued to see what kind of new experiments are being done in this field. Short of a gloriously unexpected scientific revelation (like realizing our carbon dating methods were WAY off or, ya know, somebody inventing a time machine to actually go back into the primordial soup) I can’t imagine evolution will be disproved in our lifetime.

But that’s okay. The way I see it, somewhere between Science’s inherently flawed interpretation of the universe (the foremost theory in physics today can’t even be tested!) and Religion’s inherently flawed interpretation of the Bible (nearly every passage, according to scholars, can have as many as seventy possible interpretations!)… somewhere between these two extremes of thought lies the Truth. God is in there. Science is in there. There is room for both. We just need to figure out where they meet. Or not. When the end of our life comes and we meet Jesus in the sky, will any of these trivialities really matter? I doubt it. As such, I will continue to read about evolution (or quantum physics, or string theory or any other “ungodly” science), allowing myself to be fascinated and filled with wonder – while at the same time remaining skeptical of the evidence… the way any good scientist should.

Coolness and puke do not mix

Everyone knows that becoming a parent changes you, often in ways you never expect. First of all, whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not, once you have a kid, you are no longer cool. It just doesn’t happen. You can try and hang onto it, try and tell yourself and others, “Hey, I’m still the same guy I was before,” but no, it’s gone. All of it. The only thing to do is to reinvent yourself as a different kind of cool. You know the kind of cool where you know lyrics to Laurie Berkner and High School Musical songs. Nick Jr. cool.

Still the thing that changes most once you become a parent, is your level of tolerance for gross things. You obviously have to get past what a normal person’s gag reflex would be since you’ll be changing about nine thousand diapers per week. But it doesn’t stop there. What ends up happening is that grossness actually becomes a matter of convenience. That’s why you see mothers upending their infants, putting a nose to their diaper and sniffing. It’s just faster and easier to smell for poop than to undo a onesie, pull back the elastic on a Huggies and check to see if there’s something inside. When you see a dad pick a booger out of his toddler’s nose, the ick factor is simply more convenient than searching the house for one of those little bulb suction thingies—which said toddler probably hid inside the VCR anyway. This elevated yuck threshold obviously goes hand-in-hand with the loss of coolness I mentioned, because you simply cannot be cool while sniffing a person’s butt on a daily basis. It just doesn’t happen.

But this grossness thing reached new levels of abominableness when my entire family was recently sick with the flu. On one of those fun-filled nights my one-year-old, Jesse threw up on Lauren. But he didn’t just throw up on her. He threw up on her while he was nursing. You get that? He threw up… on her breast. This wasn’t just some relatively harmless baby spittle. This was full on, chunky, stomach flu ralphage. And do you know what Lauren’s response was? After her initial, knee-jerk, “aw gross” reaction, she quickly composed herself and said, “Okay, well at least it didn’t get on the couch.”

The couch? She has vomit on her boobs and yet she’s happy because it didn’t get on the couch? That’s how far we’ve come as parents—getting thrown up on has somehow become the preferable alternative to something else. When the hell does that happen anywhere else in life? Short of getting killed by an axe-wielding psychopath, how is getting thrown up on not the worst possible outcome of any social situation? I mean imagine you’re walking through the ethnic foods section of the supermarket and some guy just walks up and blows chunks all over you—lifting up your shirt and exposing your chest before doing so of course. Could you ever find a silver lining in that? Yet somehow, as a parent, having somebody puke all over your bare naked BOOBS is actually seen as a somewhat positive thing!

Man, I really hope my kids grow up to be rockstars because it would be a shame for them to siphon so much coolness out of me and Lauren and not put it to good use.

Would you like retards with that?

There are many reasons why I never ever ever eat at McDonald's, not the least of which being that I start farting about halfway through my burger and then don't stop for three and a half days. But also, I just find it utterly depressing that I have to deal with an entire team of people who are quite literally as stupid as a person can possibly get without qualifying for a bona fide "disorder."

I ordered a Happy Meal for my daughter tonight. A Chicken McNugget Happy Meal. There are two choices when one orders a McNugget Happy Meal: a 4-McNugget meal or a 6-McNugget meal. So when I stepped up to the register and placed my order with Tardface, I said, "Yes I'd like a four McNugget Happy Meal, please." So you can imagine my shock when I looked at my receipt ten seconds later and realized my credit card had just been charged fourteen dollars for a Happy Meal that should have cost about $4.50.

"Well you said you wanted four Happy Meals," responds Tardface.

Okay, I'm sorry, Tardface. I know you're stupid. But I also know that the corporation that employs you understands that you're stupid and so has broken down everything you must do into about thirty simple phrases: Big Mac, Fries, Number Six, Super Size... I simply can't imagine that I am the first person to ever come in here and verbalize this particular order to you. I know that you know that you have a four McNugget meal, so... why, Mister McDonald's employee wouldn't you have at least clarified what you thought you heard me say before charging me for four freakin' Happy Meals? Especially when you can clearly see I am standing her with ONE DAMN KID!

Now please go get your slightly-smarter manager to come give me a refund while I continue to fart in your general direction.

Mo-o-om... Marvin keeps taking my miles!

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces somebody to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not even making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-old sensibilities in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, that is suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU have!"

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality derives from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t have. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain the scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh god no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but damnit I will not let that bastard Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my three-year-old is going to notice.

Home runs or, ya know... HOME RUNS?

So Roger Clemens just went before Congress to testify about his “alleged” steroid use. I know I may not be the best person to comment about this whole matter considering I could really give a damn about any sport that I am not actively engaged in, but who the hell even cares if a baseball player wants to take steroids? If the Major League Baseball Commission (or whatever that ruling body is) doesn’t care enough to give frequent and mandatory drug screenings to their players, why should the government even get involved? If the powers that be want to ruin their own sport (have you noticed that, unless it’s the Red Sox, Yankees or Cubs, nobody REALLY cares about who goes to the World Series anymore?) I say let them – it’ll be one less game that makes me feel like a little girl because I can’t name any of the players or their stats.

Frankly I just don’t get the whole steroid thing anyway. Why somebody would willingly inject a foreign substance into their body – something that has been shown to cause (amongst other things) heart attacks, strokes, tumors and kidney failure – just so they can hit a ball a little bit farther is beyond me… especially when you consider the reason why a guy becomes an athlete in the first place. Professional athletes may feed you a line of crap about their “love of the game” or the “thrill of competition” blah blah blah. If that were really the reason the started playing baseball there would be no twenty million dollar contracts. The main overriding reason why guys desire to become big time athletes is simple: to get… LAID. Even those ridiculously lucrative contracts are only there to serve that main purpose. So if the main reason you got into professional sports was to get laid, then why would you take a substance that also shrinks your penis, makes you impotent and gives you acne and man boobs? Wouldn’t that pretty much rule out any laying of any kind? People talk about ‘roid rage as another side effect of steroids. Personally, I don’t think it’s the steroids. I think it’s the realization that after doing everything humanly (and chemically) possible to become the best athlete they can possibly be, in the end these guys are nothing but flaccid, tiny pricked neo-virgins with slightly better batting averages. I’d want to kick the shit out of somebody too if that happened to me.

So I say open up all professional sports to steroid use. If Roger Clemens, or whoever, wants bigger muscles and doesn't care about the eenie weenie peenie, more power to him. Once the women of the world realize that all those athletes they’ve been lusting after can’t even hold an erection, it’ll give my fellow audio/visual geeks a little more bedtime action.

How Ron Paul Cured My Apathy

I swore off politics over a year ago. Actually let me clarify: I swore off politicians over a year ago. Believe me, I've got opinions on just about every issue (global warming, healthcare, Michael Moore, Abu Ghraib, voting in general) that I'm always willing to share with anyone who will listen. There are all sorts of aspects about this country that I would like to see changed. The thing is, I've stopped believing that any real change would ever come about because of a politician. I mean did segregation end because of the politicians who were in office at the time? No, as near as I can tell it ended because the attitude of the public was finally starting to shift in that direction. Did the Cold War end because a Republican president figured out a way to bankrupt the Russian economy? No, it ended because the Russian way of government was inherently flawed and it bankrupted itself. Did our economy boom in the nineties because a Democrat took over as president? No, it boomed because the personal computer simplified entrepreneurship while the internet encouraged faster buying and selling. And did the Iraq War end because congress finally had a Democratic majority? No. In fact most of the Democrats who campaigned under the anti-war banner ultimately voted to keep funding the operation! As near as I can see, politicians don't tend to change things that aren't about to change anyway on their own.

As voters I think we understand this, at least subconsciously, which is why we tend to vote for politicians based more on what they believe than on what they'll actually do. We vote for somebody because they believe abortion should be abolished… even though they won't really push to overturn Roe vs. Wade. We vote for somebody because they think there should be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage… even though they won't attend more than a token assembly on the matter. We vote for somebody because they oppose the war… even though they won't actually do anything to stop it when the vote comes up.

I have barely lent a moment's worth of attention to the presidential primaries these last several months. I figured all the candidates would be saying pretty much the same things anyway. The Republicans would emphasize the war on terror while the Democrats rallied us toward universal healthcare. The Red states would be placated with speeches about the 2^nd Amendment and the sanctity of marriage, while the Blue states would be whipped into a frenzy over global warming and taxes on the rich. Come November, I felt pretty confident that we would be deciding between two candidates who had been deemed "most electable" by their respective parties, but whose ideas wouldn't vary all that much from the status quo… or even from their opponent's talking points.

Then I started reading about Ron Paul. I'd heard his name mentioned before, mostly by conservative talkshow hosts who considered him to be the token fruitcake of the Republican Party. Even though he operates under the Republican banner, Ron Paul's voting record shows a philosophy centered more in Libertarian than Conservative thought. What's more, he apparently has no problem telling his compadres in the Grand Old Party exactly when and how he thinks they're wrong. And his ideas, doled out in convenient-for-TV sound bites, did sound ridiculous. I mean he wants to eliminate the income tax and not replace it with an alternative source of funding! He wants to cut back or completely dissolve various government agencies including the IRS, the FBI and the Department of Education! He thinks the federal government has no right to determine the legality of moral issues like abortion, drug use or even prostitution! And, perhaps most insanely, he wants to pull back all of our troops, not just from Iraq, but from every single foreign base we have! This guy is a Republican?!? I was ready to write Ron Paul off as just some political nut who would never make it past the primaries.

Still, there was something intriguing about a presidential candidate who was so unapologetically different from any of his opponents. More than anything, Ron Paul struck me as the kind of person who, given the chance, would actually follow through on his ideas… even if those ideas made him inherently "unelectable." Even though I didn't agree with everything he had to say (or even most of it), I went to the internet to learn more about him. I read about the issues on his website. I listened to his interviews on YouTube. I scanned the blogs that painted him in a good light and compared them against the ones preaching his insanity. And the more I delved into the logic behind his "crazy" ideas the more I found myself saying, "Hey, you know what, that actually sounds crazy enough to work."

Where will our country get money if we eliminate the income tax?
Well, eliminating the tax has to go hand-in-hand with cutting trillions of dollars from our budget by eliminating useless drains like our military presence overseas.

Won't pulling our troops back make the terrorists come fight us on our own soil?
It may briefly encourage the leaders and the true zealots. But if they can no longer point to an American base in their neighborhood and tell people, "That is the enemy!" it's going to be rather hard inspiring people to fly thousands of miles to blow themselves up.

But is he really going to cut education from the federal budget?
Well why not let the local districts decide how best to impart knowledge to the children of their particular demographics… as opposed to teaching everyone towards some federally (and subjectively) standardized test.

And he could actually pave the way for legalizing marijuana?
Hey, if a guy suffering from chronic pain can get relief from a ten-dollar bag of weed purchased in the free market, maybe it'll encourage the drug companies to stop their price gouging.

But how can the free market solve the entire healthcare crisis without government oversight?
When you look at it, the cost of healthcare didn't start going through the roof until the government got involved with HMO's during the seventies. Politicians are obviously incompetent with this sort of thing so why not go back to a working system?

The more I read, the more I watched, the more I listened, the more it became apparent that Ron Paul wasn't merely a "one issue" candidate. Rather, he seems to view all the issues as inextricably linked to each other. We need to cut federal programs like military and healthcare to retain enough money in the budget so that we no longer need the income tax… which will leave more money in the pockets of citizens to afford healthcare. By getting the government out of the global warming arms race, you let the market – with its inventors and entrepreneurs – find us a more efficient fuel source. The moment some privately held corporation can turn a lucrative profit by producing energy that is cleaner, cheaper and safer than oil, you better believe we'll be spewing less carbon into the air… which would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil… which would eliminate our need to police the Middle East… which, in turn, would save us trillions of dollars and produce fewer terrorists.

No wonder it's been difficult for the pundits to sum up Ron Paul in thirty-second sound bites! He's not suggesting falsely simple band-aids for individual problems. Instead he's proposing an entirely holistic approach to success, trusting that each and every reform (aided by nothing more than the spirit of capitalism) will naturally lend itself to the next, ultimately producing a cure for everything that ails us… well maybe not "everything", but a lot of things.

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for a politician like this. A politician who understands that no issue exists in a vacuum. A politician who realizes that a strictly liberal or strictly conservative stance is not an effective way to solve complex issues. A politician who doesn't mind sounding crazy in thirty-second sound bites, but remains confident that the whole overall message will eventually get through to people… and that the message will appeal to a lot of them. What's more, this is a politician who doesn't sound like a politician, which I think I appreciate most of all. When somebody asks Ron a question, he doesn't launch into a circuitous line of rhetoric, striving for a happy balance of "electable ambiguity." He'll actually say, "Yes" or "No" before defining where that "yes" or "no" fits into his "big picture."

Even though my knee-jerk reaction has been to cringe at a lot of Ron Paul's ideas, I have found myself (quite unexpectedly, and in stages) agreeing with them wholeheartedly. Even more unexpectedly, I have found myself believing that this is a guy who will actually follow through on those ideas. That's right. After swearing off politicians altogether, I have found myself trusting in one to be my president. Oh the horror. I initially tempered that grinding shift of gears with the realization that Ron Paul would likely never make it past the primaries anyway. In an age where people want increasingly quick and easy fixes to their problems, a guy like Ron Paul, with all of his complex and un-sound-bite-friendly ideas, remains, as ever, unelectable.

But you know how buying a new car suddenly makes you notice the same make and model on the road everywhere you go? After deciding that Ron Paul was the kind of candidate I would actually vote for, I immediately discovered that I was hardly alone in my thinking. I started seeing his signs everywhere. I started hearing friends and family dropping his name into conversations. Even the talkshow hosts seemed to be giving him ample airtime now. According to news reports, even though Rudy, Mitt and Huckabee were routinely topping the official polls, Ron Paul somehow managed to raise more campaign money than any of them. To believe the buzz in forums like MySpace, YouTube and the always-lively blogosphere, Ron will likely command the entire market of Republicans (about 25% of them) who oppose the war, and may actually be the go-to candidate for all those "undecided" folks. The more I look into it, the more plausible it seems that this guy could be a real and viable competitor in the primaries, and not just someone with a small but vocal cult following.

I realized I could no longer be cavalier in my support of Ron Paul. If there was a legitimate chance that he could effect an upset victory in the Republican primary, well then it was my duty to help make it happen. I've donated money to the campaign. I'm registering Republican for the first time in my life so that I can vote in my state's primary. And I'm focusing as much effort as possible encouraging people to at least look into Ron Paul and see what he's about. It will require a bit of time and effort to understand the whole truth behind his positions. It will mean reading a few paragraphs on his website and not depending on those one-sentence blurbs from AOL's front page. It will mean watching an entire ten-, twenty- or even sixty-minute interview on YouTube, and not just those short-but-meaningless sound bites on Fox News.

The cynics and the pundits say the general public has neither the patience nor the interest to invest that kind of time into researching a candidate. The very fact that Ron Paul's ideas can't be expressed as TV-friendly blurbs would seem to be a crippling hindrance. Frankly I tend to think just the opposite. As a nation I think we're eager for somebody who is a bit more complex; somebody whose ideas can't be categorized with simplistic terms like "Red State" or "Blue State." We don't want to get into another election cycle where our only two choices for commander in chief are an apparent imbecile and a guy who can't seem to decide how he voted on something. I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one who has been waiting for a candidate like Ron Paul. I think there are a lot more like us out there.

I think my generation in particular has the unique desire and the ability to push for real change in this election year. We're in our mid-20's to late-30's – old enough to start caring about the issues, educated enough to sort out our own decisions, yet still young and idealistic enough to take a chance on something new and different. In a recent blog, I called this Generation X/Y hybrid "The MySpace Generation", and I defended our poor voting record and general apathy toward the current "Us and Them" state of politics:

Perhaps what looks like apathy is just "our generation" unconsciously biding its time, watching and waiting until "they" vacate the premises. We know there's nothing we can really do as long as "they" are still in control, so why waste "our" time and "our" energy on useless rallies and campaigns that will only serve to get another one of "them" elected?

I went on to suggest, completely tongue-in-cheek mind you, that perhaps MySpace would become "the platform where the new revolution begins." If numbers are anything to go by, that little joke may have been more prophetic than intended. Ron Paul's page on MySpace currently boasts over 107,000 friends. Compare that to frontrunners Rudy, Mitt and Huckabee, who have only 64,000 friends combined. There is a political passion running through the younger generation, and Ron Paul has tapped into it in a way that no other Republican has. And now that I'm on that bandwagon I can sense the momentum building. It's palpable and I'm daring to believe that we have not only a politician who is "crazy enough" to get the job done, but a fed up public who is ready and eager to embrace a little craziness.

I encourage everyone – but especially my proverbial "peeps" from the MySpace Generation – to spend an hour looking into Ron Paul. Look beyond the labels. Look beyond the sound bites. Look beyond the polls. Look at the big picture. And when you find yourself agreeing with his ideas for America (perhaps in spite of everything you previously believed) . Get registered now – not just as a voter, but as a Republican. Get out to the primaries and make your vote count for once by electing someone who promises real change and not more empty talking points. And while you're at it, encourage others to do the same thing. I think we can actually make a difference with the right person this time around – though it's going to require more than simply "friending" that person on MySpace.

So in the words of my generation: "Just Do It." Ron Paul cured my apathy. He made me believe again in the power of a politician. Maybe he can do the same for you. The Ron Paul revolution is on. Get in on it while there's still time.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED LINKS:

RonPaul2008.com - The official campaign site. Start by clicking on the Issues link and familiarize yourself with Ron's ideas.

The Ron Paul Library - Delve a little deeper into the issues with this archive of Ron Paul speeches and letters

The Google Interview - An hour-long dialogue with Google exec Elliot Shrage. Ron Paul takes the necessary the time to speak freely and fully about his stances on the issues.

The Glenn Beck Interview - A series of clips (5-10 minutes long) shot on December 18 where Ron once again has the time and freedom to express his views in more than just a sound bite.

Clip 1 - Our National Sovreignty Under Threat / A Grass Roots Majority
Clip 2 - The Economy and Government Spending
Clip 3 - The Currency Crisis / Eliminate the Federal Income Tax
Clip 4 - Iraq and the War on Terror
Clip 5 - Prosperity and the Power of the Free Market
Clip 6 - Ron Paul's Supporters
Clip 7 - Libertarianism and the Responbilitiy of Freedom

Oh and how about...

...anybody who has to work Labor Day weekend?

...and for that matter

Why doesn't "Happy New Year" piss Chinese people off?

And XMAS isn't a political statement... it's just easier

Hey look, I get it that people are fed up with the whole not being able to say, "Merry Christmas" thing. I really do see how putting "Happy Holidays" all over everything, especially images that are undeniably CHRISTMAS in nature (Christmas trees, Santa Claus, big bright stars shining over snow-covered stables), makes the 90% of us who celebrate Christmas annoyed. It doesn't bother me nearly as much as others, but I do get it. But then again, I also get why the stores are forced to do it the way they do. The fact is, nobody who celebrates Christmas is going to stop buying presents simply because the banner says, "Happy Holidays." I'm certainly not. So unless you're prepared to boycott every store that doesn't say "Merry Christmas," stop yer bitching.

All that being said, I had to laugh at an e-mail I got from Amazon.com today. "LAST CHANCE TO ORDER IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS!" Okay, you DO realize, Amazon.com, that Hanukah is over right? So like... what other holiday do you think people are actually going out and buying presents for? New Years? Kwanzaa? Solstice? While I'm not taking away that these are more or less legitimate holidays, they are the equivalent of, let us say, Memorial Day as far as gift giving goes. We all know what you really mean, so just say Christmas for Pete's sake. It's okay now.

Put a lead-based sock in it Boomers

I recently received this email forward from an older relative. Even though I can appreciate where the writer is coming from, and even tend to agree with a lot of the sentiment contained within the composition, for some reason it just pissed me off. It's a typical "Our generation is better than the new generation" tirade, which acknowledges all the things that made the previous generation great, but fails to recognize all the things THEY DID to screw it up for the generations who followed. So just to set the record straight, here is the original email in its entirety with my comments in bold italics.

======================================

Those Born 1930-1979!
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

Yes and I’m sure many of you are still dealing with health problems and your own addictions to the same substances to this day as a result.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Of course, the oceans weren’t nearly as polluted back then as they were now thanks to you, so mercury contamination in tuna wasn’t as much of a concern back then.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

Look around at the gluttony of TV ads for designer pills intended to take care of everything from chronic asthma to irritable bowl syndrome to erectile dysfunction. Look at all the fun new forms of cancer you’re getting that your parents never had. Apparently all that lead-based paint and other chemicals you’ve been introducing into every product on the market had some unexpected long-term effects.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

This was all during a time when all your parents had to navigate were rural two lane roads with 45m.p.h. speed limits where you encountered maybe ten other cars on your way to work. There were two intersections and one blinking traffic light in town. Unless your parents were particularly idiotic drivers, the only chance they had of getting into an accident was if a deer jumped out in front of them.

Today we’re driving on multi-laned highways with heavy merges, multiple exits to left and right, hundreds of signs pointing this way and that so that you’re never sure if you’re heading in the right direction. Not to mention the fact that we’re trying to run this gauntlet with about a hundred other cars surrounding us, all going the same 65m.p.h. So forgive us if we’re a little more worried about what might happen to our children if we ended up in the middle of a ten-car pileup.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

Again, back then you actually had roads that weren’t jammed with other cars, and nice soft grass to ride on. But you’ve paved over everything since then, meaning we’re riding our bikes on asphalt. So yeah, we want a little more protection for our head in case we wipe out on yet another of your oil stained parking lots.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

Great, and maybe if you hadn’t gone and polluted the water supply we’d be drinking from the hose too.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

This seems a bit disingenuous. Somehow I don’t think the “cootie” argument began with our generation.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because :

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !

We’d be outside playing too, except for the fact that you bulldozed the baseball diamond to put up luxury condominiums, you tore down the YMCA to build a WalMart and you drained the swimming hole to put in yet another massive parking lot for yet another massive strip mall (which you won’t allow us to skateboard on). You’ve kind of taken away all our outdoor places to go. We’d ride our bikes there, but again refer to the previous bit about those roads that you’ve made entirely unsafe for us to be riding on.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day.
And we were O.K.

Of course chances are you were playing at or near one of your friend’s houses with at least one parent or trusted neighbor at home who was keeping a loose watch on everything. Today, our neighbors are strangers and both parents need to work just to keep up in this two-income trap that you somehow managed to set for us.


We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

Do you really expect us to believe that you’re going to allow us to race a handmade go-kart down your hill? You won’t even let us SKATEBOARD on all those nice big parking lots you built.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computer’s, no Internet or chat rooms.......

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

Your friends lived across the street. Our friends live ten miles across town via one of those multi-laned highways we mentioned earlier. You know what we find when we go outside? Traffic.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

Those trees were in the backyards of your own houses. But since you’ve created a housing race encouraged by zero-interest loans you’ve priced us out of our own neighborhoods. We live in crammed-together suburbs and apartment complexes where the only trees around are owned by somebody else who puts a fence around the thing so that we risk impaling our testicles more than breaking our teeth should we fall out.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

Okay, but then YOU yelled at US for swallowing gum. Which way do you want it?

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

Again, you had your own backyards to do that stuff in. Our downstairs neighbors tend to call the police when they see us holding a gun, any kind of gun, in our common yard.


We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Yet again, your friends were a two-minute walk across the street. You’ve destroyed the idea of a town center so all our friends are scattered across a thirty-mile radius. We need phones and email if we’re ever going to talk to them outside of school.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

Because you still had parks and public pools and something called “recess”, it probably wasn’t such a big deal if you didn’t make the team. You had other things to keep you active. Since you’ve graciously ELIMINATED all these things for us, maybe we don’t mind creating a few extra Little League teams so that more of our kids have the opportunity to do something other than play those X-Boxes and Playstations you mocked just a couple paragraphs ago.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

Okay fine, I’m with you on this one.

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

It has also produced some of the most soulless, narcissistic, toy-hoarding, money grubbing greedy generations ever to grace this earth. People who gave up on the idea of "changing the world" to make it a better place once they realized that they could drive a BMW , own a condo and go on a cruise every year… Just sayin’.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

It’s also been an explosion of land, water and air pollution as you search for easier and cheaper ways to mass-produce all those innovations of yours.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

And you dealt with it by selling out the idealism of your youth in favor of stock options, middle-management positions and items that sell for thirty-nine cents less at WalMart even though it put some of your friends out of business. Quite frankly, I’m not impressed with what you did with all that freedom, success and responsibility.

If YOU are one of them . . CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good

Okay, excuse me but YOU PEOPLE are the ones IN CHARGE of the government right now!!! YOU are the ones who made these rules and regulations. If you don’t like the way the world has gone, you have nobody to blame but your old self-righteous self.

And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.

Brave? BRAVE??? Are these the same "brave" people who spit, cursed and threw blood at the soldiers who returned from Vietnam in the late 60’s? Yes, your generation turned out a few gems, but so does every generation... ours included.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?

No, it makes me want to strangle all you sell outs from the older generation for ruining it for us. God willing we'll do a better job with it for OUR children.

Zap Zap! Free Speech! Blah Blah!

I don't usually post random YouTube videos to this blog, but I've had two people bring this video to my attention thus far today and I just wanted to put my own two cents in before the media cacophony begins. The video shows a college student attempting to ask John Kerry a question during a Q&A session and then the escalation of events until he is arrested and eventually tasered. Watch first, then read my thoughts below:




Hm... I don't really even know what to think about this. Yes, the kid was exercising his fundamental right to free speech. Yes, he was trying to engage John Kerry in a dialogue of pertinent questions. And yes, he had his mic cut off and yes he was arrested and yes he was tasered because of all of this.

Unfortunately I can see this getting blown out of proportion as some kind of "free speech violation" when the fact is, the kid stood up and attempted to monopolize what appears to be a more or less informal Q&A session. He was told repeatedly to ask his question, but rather than asking kept spouting information from a book he'd read. Then once he asked the question, he asked MORE questions and then MORE questions after that. Yes, I get the point that this was his only available forum to ask these pertinent questions to John Kerry's face, so I AM tempted to react the way others are surely reacting, with anger at the fact that he was silenced and arrested, anger at the overreaction of the police.

Then again, he DID try to monopolize an event that was not his to monopolize. And when he was escorted away, he DID resist arrest to the point where it required half a dozen police officers to subdue him, and even then he fought. Personally I don't blame the police for tasering him when they did.

What this brings up is a larger problem, a larger question of: How do WE as normal everyday constituents find a forum to air our questions and grievances and expect to have them actually ANSWERED. Unless you are a member of the press, you can't ask these questions directly to a politician's face. And even then you certainly can't expect a real and legitimate answer to your queries and the opportunity to say, "No, excuse me sir but you DID NOT answer my question."

No clear answers on this one as far as I'm concerned. I just hope this opens up a HEALTHY debate and not just a bunch of crybaby activists whining about "free speech" this and "free speech" that.

Always so fowl?

Was there ever a point in time when the chicken joke was funny? The original one I mean. The one that has come to represent the quintessential definition of a joke in general, and a bad joke in particular.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To get to the other side.

It’s a reversal technique that gives this joke its intended humor. The setup indicates that the chicken in question had some higher purpose for crossing the road. But the punchline indicates that he was crossing the road just simply for the purpose OF crossing the road. A modern equivalent of this joke (at least the only one I can think of at 4:00 in the morning as I sit in a production trailer babysitting editors) comes from an episode of Friends.

FRANK: We were down at the courthouse, we were having lunch and we just decided to get married.
PHOEBE: Oh my god, what were you doing at the courthouse?
FRANK: We were having lunch.

The idea behind the chicken joke is this same kind of funny, but the thing is by the time we’re actually old enough to get the punchline, we’ve heard it like a million times in some other patently not funny context. So by the time we have the intellectual maturity to actually be able to find it funny, the joke has already lost any chance of eliciting a laugh because, well, it’s just “that stupid chicken joke.” Really, the only time anyone ever laughs at the chicken joke is when somebody (not unlike the original joke teller) throws out some kind of reversal on the expected punchline.

It can be done via a pun like:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the playground?
A: To get to the other slide.

It can be done with absurdity:

Q: Why did the frog cross the road?
A: Because he was stapled to the chicken.

Or it can be done by applying a third party personality to the punchline:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A (by Einstein): Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved beneath it depends on your point of reference.
A (by Martin Luther King): I envision a world where chickens are free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.
A (by Buddha): To ask this question is to deny your own chicken nature.
A (by Colonel Sanders): Wait, you mean I missed one?

But just where the heck did the original joke come from? And moreover, was there ever a point in time when people found it funny? Like did the first adult to ever hear this joke laugh when he heard it? As I said, the joke has become kind of a stock character of sorts representing all jokes everywhere and all bad jokes specifically. But that iconic status couldn’t have just materialized out of thin air. Was it a really popular joke that just got told too much, making people sick of it to the point where they finally started mocking the thing? It must have been based in something somewhere in the past. Catch phrases are like that too. We say them and we know what they mean, but when we really stop and look at them, we realize they don’t actually make any sense in our modern context.

Example: “Close but no cigar.”

Heh? What the heck does a cigar have to do with guessing the wrong answer? Well, fairground games used to give away cigars as prizes. So when a patron missed the ring toss by an inch, the guy running the game would let loose with a phrase that actually meant something in contemporary context. And even though the context has disappeared over the years, the phrase still holds meaning.

Likewise, even though the chicken joke is no longer funny, we still recognize it, not only as a joke, but as THE joke. But where? When? Why? How did this particular joke earn such dubious longevity?

And moreover… why a chicken?

You Got Wagged

Whenever I think back on the first year or so of this war (the one in Iraq in case there’s any confusion), I can’t help but think of the movie Wag the Dog. For the uninformed, the basic plot of the movie is that the president of the United States, in order to take people’s mind off a scandal he’s involved in, hires a Hollywood producer to “stage a war.” They rally the American people behind the phony war by using every possible gimmick they can think of to tug at the heartstrings and foster a sense of unity and patriotism. I actually hadn’t seen Wag the Dog until the Iraq war was about six months in and even though the movie was already several years old by that point the similarities between reality and fiction were downright eerie.

There was the compelling footage: In the movie it was video of a young girl running through the streets, dodging bullets while clutching a cat (which they CGI’ed in later) to her chest. In real life, there was footage of the Saddam statues being pulled down and the shots of Jessica Lynch being wheeled by on a stretcher.

There were the hit songs: In the movie, they hired Willie Nelson to compose numerous uplifting songs that would get people emotionally attached to the war. In real life, Toby Keith released “American Soldier” while the Top 40 producers infused quotes from soldiers, their families and the president into sappy pop songs.

There were media created heroes: In the movie, Woody Harrelson plays the war hero William Shuman (“Old Shoe”). In real life, Jessica Lynch gets a book deal and a movie of the week for being a cutie pie caught in the middle of a dramatic rescue attempt.

Then of course there were all the symbols: In the movie, the architects behind the war threw “old shoes” into trees and onto power lines in honor of the aforementioned hero. In real life, yellow magnetic ribbons and American flags with some variation of the slogan “Support the Troops” went on the back of every car on the road.

With the exception of the far-fetched idea that the entire war in the movie was completely made up Wag the Dog was, almost without exception, strangely prophetic of what would start happening in 2003. I’ve been thinking about that movie and its similarities to reality a lot over the last couple days as I read the book Last One In by Nicholas Kulish. The story is about a gossip columnist who gets embedded with the Marines at the beginning of the Iraq war. Amongst other things it explores how the media in this war totally dropped the ball and made a farce out of the whole operation by presenting a completely distorted picture of the truth, all in the name of better ratings of course. It talks about reporters smearing grease and dirt on their faces and posing for stand-ups in front of burning vehicles to make it seem as though they were right in the middle of some important battle. It talks about reporters making up stories about anything, even if it was ninety percent bullshit, just so they could fill airtime or print space. It’s a very intriguing (and funny) read, which I highly recommend.

Anyway, all that lead up was to preface the fact that Lynndie England has been in my head. Remember Lynndie England? She was the soldier who became the face of the whole Abu Ghraib scandal because of an infamous picture of her pointing at a naked prisoner while smoking a cigarette. She was sentenced to eleven years in prison for her part in the “torture” of Abu Ghraib prisoners. From the very outset of that whole Abu Ghraib thing, my spider senses were tingling. Something just didn’t sit right with me about the way it was handled, or covered, or just plain perceived. And even to this day, I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was just another incident of the tail wagging the dog – like it was nothing more than a big smoke screen intended to rally us together while distracting us from something else.

There’s no question that this war has been far from popular. Even before the decision was made to invade there were people screaming, protesting, sending up righteous anger at what they viewed to be evil and arrogant American imperialism. The “architects behind the war” did everything they could to rally people together with the aforementioned songs, symbols, heroes and whatnot. But I think they also sensed that even the people who were in support of the war needed some kind of outlet for their own anger. Supporters needed to show everyone that they only supported the “noble” aspects of the war. They needed everyone to see that they weren’t merely blind “let’s-just-kill-them-all” warmongers who had no respect for human life. Abu Ghraib and the accusations of torture gave them that opportunity. It allowed war supporters and detractors alike to meet on common ground where they could direct their anger at a few mutually agreed upon patsies. And the media, as predicted, went right along for the ride.

In case we’ve all forgotten, the “torture” in question at Abu Ghraib involved stripping prisoners naked, letting dogs bark at them and forcing them (the prisoners) to form naked human pyramids. As far as I was concerned, that always qualified more as a dumbass fraternity prank than anything that might resemble torture. And at first it seemed like a lot of the conservative radio shows I listened to thought the same thing. But then all of a sudden even they joined the angry throngs in condemning the “torture”, boldly stating that those involved should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. And as I said, Lynndie England became the ultimate face of evil in the whole thing. So much so that I can’t help but wonder if she’s in jail right now because she was simply a pawn in some evil and fucked up game of wag the dog.

She really did make the perfect villain. Unlike Jessica Lynch who was cute with long and pretty hair, Lynndie England had short hair and mannish features. The infamous picture that everyone has seen shows her with a cigarette not only in her mouth – an obvious “dirty” habit – but actually dangling from her lips in a way that could only be described as white trash. And of course, she was seen standing next to a naked man, pointing at his penis no less. Everything about that picture conjured up four words: “white trash dirty whore.” It was easy for people to hate her. It became easy for people to condemn her. I wonder if there would have been the same reaction had it been an attractively longhaired and feminine girl in that picture. But the thing is I firmly believe that this is the only way this whole thing could have transpired. The architects of this particular Alternate Reality Game knew what they were doing. They would never have allowed a picture of a good-looking person to be “leaked” to the media in relation to this scandal.

I honestly feel bad for Lynndie England. She is sitting in prison right now for the oh-so-heinous crime of pointing at a man’s dick. The country needed a bad guy (someone other than George Bush) and they got one. It’s like the old Hebrew ritual of the “scapegoat” (and actually where the modern term originated from) where once a year the priest would place the sins of all the people onto a spotless goat and then banish it to the wilderness so the nation could once again become blameless in God’s eyes. Lynndie England was our scapegoat in every sense of the word. We put our own sins onto her. Everything that we didn’t like about ourselves when it came to this war manifested itself in her smirking, cigarette smoking face. We put our willingness to go to war, our eagerness to go to war onto her. Our own righteous justifications for war – terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, taking down an evil dictator, liberating a people – weren’t enough. Even for those of us who were in support of the war, there was still an unspoken well of guilt for the sins we were committing to accomplish what we genuinely believed to be worthwhile goals. We needed to put that guilt onto somebody else and send them away lest we (God forbid) blame ourselves. The architects gave us Lynndie England as a worthy sacrifice. And we accepted her eagerly.

And that sickens me. That’s why I don’t understand people that are currently against the war who were once in favor of it. What made you change your mind? The media’s reports? People claim that the war is being run badly. That very well may be so, but my question is: How the hell would you know? Because the media says so? Because some politicians say so? Do we seriously still trust these two disparate but irreversibly interlinked groups for our Truths? What is it going to take for us to stop believing every freakin’ word that comes out of their mouths? When will the dog finally start wagging the tail for once? Or better yet, when will the dog realize that its tail has become incurably infected and simply gnaw it the fuck off?

The MySpace Generation... who cares?

I was cleaning out my computer this week and stumbled across something I'd written back around election time. It was originally written with the intent of submitting it to one of the local alt papers around here, but I apparently never found the time to actually finish and polish it. It was in pretty jagged shape when I came across it this week, but I thought the ideas I was presenting were good and valid and worth seeing the light of day. So I fixed it up a bit and, even though it's a little dated, I figured I'd finally share it with the world at large. Enjoy.

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WE ARE THE MYSPACE GENERATION… AND WE COULD CARE LESS
by Brian Hodges

I received a rather long internet forward on my MySpace bulletin board this week which basically said, "Hey couch potato, make sure you go out and vote next Tuesday!" Like most forwards that don't involve filling out surveys or watching videos of indie rock bands on treadmills, I gave it a only quick skim before devoting my attention to more pressing matters like creating my own South Park character and scanning for hotties amongst my friends' friends list. I fully expected the bulletin and all its content to fade from memory by the time I logged off the site. But before clicking away to post an animation of some fat chick having sex to a friend's comment area, my eyes happened upon one particular line: "They're calling our generation the Apathetic Generation."

The composition of this particular bulletin indicated an author of better writing skills than your typical 14 to 23-year-old MySpace user, so it made sense that the original poster was probably someone closer to my age and the apathetic generation to which he referred was my own. Born in 1978, I've always been rather confused as to which generation I technically belonged. A quick check of Wikipedia simultaneously places me in Generation X, Generation Y, The MTV Generation and something called "The Boomerang Generation." But no matter which "our generation" the author was actually indicating, I could only assume that the "they" to which he alluded meant the people of our parents' generation, which for the average MySpacer means the Baby Boomers.

Normally an attack like this doesn't bother me enough to give it a second thought (isn't that what apathy is all about?), but for some reason this particular criticism, made in this particular context, stuck with me well after I'd finished approving new friend requests and changing my profile song to "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. What this nameless "they" was saying, according to the author, was that despite being faced with a war, a nuclear threat, human rights violations and a laundry list of other issues, "our generation" is still too lazy and uncaring to go out and vote. I went back over the post several times and the more I read that one key line, the more self-righteous my apathy became.

When "they" say "our generation" is apathetic, what "they" are really saying is that "we" aren't like "them." "We" don't do all the things "they" did at our age. "Our generation" doesn't mobilize for reform on college campuses. "Our generation" doesn't march on the Capitol building waving placards and hurling slogans. "Our generation" doesn't engage in civil disobedience while singing defiant folk songs. And "our generation" certainly doesn't rally around political candidates who might end the tyranny, bring peace to our country and harmony to the world. If this is what "they" mean by an "apathetic generation" then I guess I'd say "they" are right.

But can "they" really blame us? After all, "they" are "our generation's" role models. "They" thought trying to change the world was all noble and groovy for about a decade or so until they realized there was more money to be made selling real estate. "They" were all about fighting The Establishment and standing up for the little man until "they" realized they could use their law degree to defend The Establishment against little man's lawsuits and earn a fatter paycheck. Woodstock, Marin County, the Sunset Strip, places where "they" used to hang out, smoke dope and say, "Love is all you need," are now nothing more than giant spaces for them to build luxury condos and hang billboards advertising Big Macs, timeshares, and the next season of Big Brother. "They" were passionate. "They" were going to make a difference. And yet look at what "they" produced. Frankly, I think things might have turned out better if "they" had taken a cue from "our generation" and just said, "Eh, whatever."

If there's anything "our generation" has learned from "them", it's that politics is not the way to change the world. We tried it out for a while… more to see what all the fuss was about I think. During the 2004 Democratic and Republican Conventions, "our generation" descended on Boston and New York and tried to capture some of the allure of the late sixties. We marched. We protested. We spoke out on matters we only kind of understood. But the trend died quickly… probably when all the young men realized this particular political revolution wasn't manifesting with its own sixties-style sexual revolution. And as soon as it became apparent that those hot Blue State chicks weren't putting out after the rally, we went back to work at Best Buy so we could save up enough money to buy a Razr phone with internet capabilities – allowing us to check our MySpace while on the go.

Maybe "our generation" doesn't vote. Maybe we don't give two shits about who ends up controlling Congress next Tuesday. But does anyone among us – from "our generation" or "theirs" – really and truly believe that a different set of politicians will be the thing that brings about a new and better America? "They" have already proven their own lack of faith in the power of the vote by moving on from the passionate activism of the 1960's to the apathetic consumerism of pretty much every decade since. All "our generation" is doing is skipping over "power of the vote" and going straight to apathy.

That being said, "our generation" is far from apathetic. We do care about things. We really do. It's just that right now, honestly, we have no idea whatsoever how to fix the mess that "they" created. Perhaps it will come to us in time. Perhaps what looks like apathy is just "our generation" unconsciously biding its time, watching and waiting until "they" vacate the premises. We know there's nothing we can really do as long as "they" are still in control, so why waste "our" time and "our" energy on useless rallies and campaigns that will only serve to get another one of "them" elected? Better to just sit here quietly, listening to our iPods, playing Final Fantasy, and deciding which MySpace friends to put in our Top 8 List. Who knows, maybe MySpace will become the platform where the new revolution begins. Maybe with every silly blog we post, with every YouTube video we embed, with every slutty self-portrait we upload, we will slowly but surely come together as one unit who will finally bring down The Establishment "they" were ultimately powerless to stop. And unlike the misguided stunts "they" pulled in the preceding generation, our tactics will be less likely to get us shot by the National Guard.

So to all the "they's" who want to call us "The Apathetic Generation," we say enjoy your election next Tuesday. We won't be there, but we'll be thinking of you. And when your solution to everything once again fails to solve anything, we'll be here, predictably not caring. We'll just keep on doing what we do everyday; hanging out on MySpace and waiting for you to die.

Take twenty-six!

I can remember producing TV shows back in college and how we would often put more effort into editing the blooper reel than anything else. The bloopers would usually end up being the longest segment of the whole show. These days every good DVD has a blooper reel in its special features section and people like Dick Clark manage to devote entire hours of prime time TV to nothing but snippets of celebrities screwing up on camera. What is it about bloopers that we find so damn entertaining? Why do we get such a kick out of watching somebody mess up a line, or drop a prop or bust out laughing in the middle of a take?

Personally I think bloopers are yet another byproduct of our voyeuristic mentality these days. It lets us take a glimpse behind the curtain, beyond the façade of all these characters we know and love. Even though logically we know those actors aren’t really like the characters they play on TV, and even though we know the news anchors can’t possibly be that dignified and professional every hour of every day, even though we know all that, our brains still can’t distance themselves from those perfect on-screen personas. Even imperfect TV characters always know exactly what to say at exactly the right moment. When they lose an argument, even in defeat they still have something witty to say. Nobody ever storms off muttering swear words under their breath and coming up with a worthy comeback five minutes too late like we would. These people are too perfect to be real. Which makes sense of course because they’re not real. But bloopers are our only real reminder of that. Bloopers are rare moments when that curtain is pulled back and our brains can finally see these perfect people for what they really are: lame and stupid and, above all, human just like us.

You’ll be watching bloopers on, say, the DVD for Home Improvement and the chick who plays Tim’s wife, Jill, will suddenly realize she said the wrong line. You see her bottom lip tuck under her teeth, hear a brief “Fff…” followed by a bleep and you realize, whoa, Jill just said “fuck”! Jill! You know, Jill? She was always so motherly, so matronly, so almost prudish in her mannerisms. The very idea that she could ever conceivably stoop so low as to say such a four-letter word on ABC of all places, the channel owned by Disney for crying out loud, between the hours of eight o’clock and nine! Why, she never would. But then you see the blooper reel and realize, “No seriously, JILL just said the fucking F-word!” No way. Way!

The funniest bloopers are when some really composed newsman like Walter Cronkite messes up a standup for like the tenth time and in frustration blurts out, “Ah shit.” They bleep the “-it” out of course so all you hear is “Ah sh-” but you know what he said… and it amazes you. Oh my god, Walter Cronkite, the most poised, unruffled man in America, just got mad enough to say the “S-word.” Not only that, he said it over something really stupid. It wasn’t like he was expressing frustration over some particularly dramatic news event like, “Ah shit, President Kennedy was assassinated today,” or, “Ah shit, forest fires ripped through Southern California this week,” or even, “Ah shit, we lost another battalion in Vietnam.” It was, “Ah shit, I can’t seem to say, ‘One smart fellow, he felt smart,’ for my report on J. Edgar Hoover.” How stupid is that? That’s the kind of dumb non-issue that we would say “shit” about. But not Walter Cronkite. It somehow feels good to know that even somebody like that shares those little human moments with us. Perhaps it means we’re not the gigantic losers we think we are. Hell if even Walter freakin’ Cronkite can’t keep it together without letting fly with the cuss words, maybe I’m not such a putz after all.

An Inconvenient Following

I am seriously this close to being done with the whole Global Warming movement. I’m sure this will be an unpopular blog. Or who knows, maybe there is a quiet mob out there like me who will echo the sentiment. Who am I kidding though – most likely nobody but my MySpace contingent actually reads this crap anyway so why hold back? I should back up for a second and clarify that it’s not the Global Warming movement in and of itself that has inspired this latest of rants. Anyone who has read my essay “Is the Truth Really That Inconvenient?” knows that I haven’t closed off my ears to the debate entirely… or even a little. I simply have a lot of questions that nobody in the planet-hugger community seems willing or able to answer. Beyond that, I’m frankly suspicious that this whole movement, while it may have started out with good intentions, is being hijacked by disingenuous people more focused on money and power than actually fixing the problem. Where I really grind my axe these days is with two specific groups: A) Loudmouth global warming activists who are painfully (or willfully) ignorant of how global warming actually works; and B) Al Gore groupies. But it’s when you combine these two groups of earthy well wishers that I actually start to become afraid for the next few years.

Let’s start with Group A. All of us probably know at least one person in this group. I’ll set the scenario for you. See if you recognize it. You’re chatting amongst friends or shooting the breeze with somebody on IM when you make the mistake of making an offhand comment about the weather. The people of Group A don’t hesitate a beat before responding, “Well, that’s global warming for you.” It doesn’t matter what your comment is. It’s hot outside. Global warming. It’s cold outside. Global warming. It’s windy. It’s rainy. It’s dry. It’s muggy. Global warming… Okay, let me explain how global warming works. First of all, look at the first word: GLOBAL. You cannot gauge the plight of an entire planet by pointing to a weeklong heat wave in New England, nor is a freak cold snap in April indicative of glaciers melting and the impending ice age. In fact, if you have a week’s worth of unusually hot weather and then a week’s worth of unusually cold weather, as far as the GLOBAL temperature is concerned, nothing has changed. If January is five degrees warmer than usual and July is five degrees colder than usual, in the eyes of the overall climate, everything has balanced itself out. But the people in Group A either don’t understand that or are deliberately ignoring it so they can fuel their own activist fires. To listen to these people rant, you’d swear there was never any such thing as droughts, monsoons or hurricanes before the Industrial Revolution.

I’m going to say this just as clear as I can. Even if we take this “environmental crisis” at face value, the day-to-day effects of global warming are not dramatic enough to be noteworthy. Pointing to floods, tornadoes, heat waves or even glaciers collapsing in slow motion does nothing to prove your point. The things that lend credence to global warming aren’t sensational or visual at all. You know what they are? Numbers. Statistics. Data from all over the world painstakingly compiled into hugely boring tables and graphs that show the GLOBAL temperature rising by fractions of a degree. One quarter of a degree on a boring chart like that is far more damning than ten degrees on a bank thermometer. That is where the inconvenient truth really lies… even if it isn’t as compelling to look at. So please stop invoking global warming every time I decide to make small talk about the weather.

Okay, now for Group B. The Al Gore groupies. These people infuriate me more than Group A, who at least have the luxury of just being ignorant. The Gore groupies are different in that they really do seem to understand the causes behind global warming and are willing to condemn people, countries and corporations for all the damage they’re causing via their actions. Yet when it comes the actions of Al Gore, they turn a blind eye to that inconvenient bit of truth. In his movie, Gore urges everyone to make sacrifices to reduce energy consumption and lessen their carbon footprint on the planet. Yet when Gore’s own energy consumption habits were examined, it turned out that his house consumed nearly twenty times more electricity than the average American home. Twenty times! Add to that the fact that he flew around the country promoting his movie in a private jet and one has to wonder just how seriously Gore takes his own message. These aren’t groundbreaking revelations I’m making here. Pretty much every conservative radio show in the country has used this information against Gore over the last several months. But what continually strikes me as so odd is the way the Goreists consistently absolve their fearless leader of his conduct simply because he is the one getting the message out. “The private jet’s emissions are worth it if it means he can speak at more assemblies,” they urge. What other committed following would say that? If some Christian evangelist traveled the country preaching against, say, homosexuality and then it turned out he had been getting it on with male prostitutes after the show, would his followers say, “Well that’s okay because he’s out there spreading the right message”? Of course not! They would disavow themselves of him and his actions immediately.

The one argument I constantly hear being made in defense of Al Gore and his carbon footprint is that he “buys carbon credits” to offset his pollution. Essentially he pays a certain amount of money to companies with low carbon emissions, or to companies developing renewable energy technologies, or to organizations who do things like plant trees. Something to that effect. I’m exactly not sure how it all works, but the bottom line worth focusing on here is that Gore is validating his sins against the planet by paying money for them. Is it just me or does this all vaguely similar to the medieval Catholic doctrine of “Indulgences” where rich people could pay money to the church who would then give them (no joke) a “pre-emptive license to sin.” If a man knew he was going to have an affair, he would pay a certain amount of money to the diocese, and then his priest, rather than encouraging him to turn from his sinful ways, would simply absolve him of all future adulteries. The inherent hypocrisy wrapped up inside this doctrine was one of the primary triggers for Martin Luther’s grievances and the resulting Protestant Reformation. So why, just because Al Gore has more money than the rest of us, is he allowed to pollute at will? If he's supposed to be at the forefront of this movement, why doesn't he pay out that carbon credit money in addition to reducing his carbon footprint? (And just to be completely forthright here, it’s actually Paramount Pictures, the film’s distributor who pays those credits, not Gore himself.) And why oh why doesn’t Gore’s entourage at least acknowledge the inconsistencies between his doctrine and his daily life and demand that their leader hold himself to higher standard?

This blog has been a long time in coming. It’s been on the tip of my (fingertips?) for months now but without the time to actually sit down and hammer out my thoughts. Then I heard something, actually two things, that finally made me take the time to get this out there. The first thing I heard – which really was reason enough – was a speech made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Live Earth concert on July 7 where he flat out accused people who don’t believe the warnings about global warming to be guilty of “treason.” Treason! As in being a traitor to the country, perhaps the utmost crime somebody can be convicted of. Sadly, Kennedy’s comment was merely the most visible example of a scary trend I see developing in this country, where any opinions on global warming other than the ones espoused by Al Gore and those like him are opinions that are, at best, not valid. And at worst, if Kennedy can be taken at his word, those opinions can apparently make a person subject to anything from censure to death. We’re not there yet. For the time being there are voices who are countering the “Al Gore’s Way or the Highway” mentality. People like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck who, love ‘em or hate ‘em, do make valid defensible points on the opposing side. The danger could exist however, if and when someone like Al Gore, somebody with his single-minded committedness to global warming, gets into a position of real power and opens up a new round of neo-McCarthyism.

I know that last remark sounds like I’m just being sensationalistic for effect, but I am dead serious. I wouldn’t have believed it myself except for the fact that I was also listening to the audio book version of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. The book is a memoir of sorts using Bryson’s childhood as a jumping off point for talking about America in the 1950’s. Bryson spends several minutes (pages?) in one chapter talking about America’s fear of Communism and how that fear was personified and ultimately manipulated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy instigated a nationwide witch-hunt for anyone and everyone who might be perceived as collaborating with communists in any way. As Bryson explains, well respected scientists, businessmen, humanitarians and, of course, Hollywood artists were accused of being communists and couldn’t find work simply because they had once had a conversation with somebody who had once written a paper expressing what was narrowly interpreted as sympathy toward the communist party. Lives, careers and reputations were ruined for anyone who was even remotely suspected of advocating philosophies that strayed from the accepted American capitalist ideal.

As I listened to this recording I felt an eerie sense of foreboding over the similarities between then and now. As I said, we are not to that point yet, but the fact that somebody like Robert Kennedy can so openly and so easily accuse others of treason – not a light choice of words by any stretch of the imagination – simply for disagreeing with the most popular views on global warming… The signs are all there. McCarthy played on the country’s fears and people went right along with him, even as he made claim after increasingly ridiculous claim. The fears surrounding global warming are also building and are already being played upon. For the time being it seems to be mostly corporations who are reaping the benefits of those fears, with the sales of hybrid cars, fluorescent light bulbs and whatnot. But as the government changes hands over the next few years, who knows who might come into power and what ridiculous things might they get the country to agree to in the name of global warming? Al Gore claims we have ten years to change “or else.” If the threat is truly that dire, what will believers do to ensure that change? Surely shutting up dissenters à la Joseph McCarthy will be the first step. And then what? America’s fear of communism almost put us into all out nuclear war. What could our fear of global warming push us into?

As I’ve said all along (and I feel compelled to keep restating), I am not denying the claims of the global warming camp outright. But neither will I simply be pushed along by the rising current without asking what I feel are pertinent questions. Blindly agreeing with popular opinion doesn’t help any of us. In fact it could end up causing us to focus our efforts in exactly the wrong areas as projects and programs get green-lighted unchallenged, only to realize the mistake several years too late. At best we could end up wasting money. At worst we could end up taking measures that would alter whole eco-systems, something that, as humans, we’ve never had much success with. Better that we all take the time and ask these questions now. So show your dissent. Challenge others. Don’t let offhand, “Look what global warming is causing” comments go unchallenged. That’s how it starts, but eventually it could become, “Do you now or have you ever owned or operated an SUV?”

I, for my part, am showing my own personal dissent through typically passive-aggressive techniques. Blogs like this for one. And deliberately sarcastic mockery and oh-my-god-is-he-really-serious apathy for another. To that end, I need help designing a few bumper stickers. The prototype slogans are:

BURN MORE COAL!
...because penguins are EVIL!

GLOBAL WARMING:
…because it’s too damn cold out there anyway.

STOP GLOBAL WARMING:
Shut your big fat mouth.

And my personal favorite:

GLACIERS ARE MELTING! …so?

Anybody with graphic design abilities, feel free to collaborate.

I take it bada-back

For lack of anything better to do, I just pulled up The Sopranos’ final scene on YouTube to actually see for myself what everyone was talking about (I'd post the link, but in the time it took me to write this, it has already been removed due to copyrights and all that stuff). Two days ago, I joined with the pissed off masses in condemning creator David Chase for his “nothing ending.” Well, I would now like to say that after watching the scene in its entirety, and readily admitting that I don’t know the context of the scene within the show as a whole, the ending actually does seem an appropriate end.

Over the course of the four-minute scene, a whole lot of nothing happens. Tony is sitting in a diner waiting for his family to show up and looking around at the various patrons of the restaurant. He picks a song for the jukebox, Journey’s now-infamous “Don’t Stop Believing.” As his family members trickle into the restaurant, they have a couple of meaningless, boring conversations about what to order and what they did that day. Meanwhile, Tony continues to look up every time the door opens, possibly checking to see any anyone is coming in to whack him. He does this probably a good half-dozen times over the course of the scene. The final shot of the show is of Tony looking up as, we can only assume, his daughter finally runs into the restaurant. And then, of course, the cut to black heard round the world.

Again, I’ve never watched the show, but I know a little about it. Tony is a mobster with a family, and a conscience apparently because he’s famously in therapy. In between his duties as a gangster, he has a typically boring domestic life. Or more appropriately, in between the episodes of his typically boring domestic life, he has duties as a gangster. What I understood from this scene is almost more heartbreaking and poignant than if Tony or his family had been whacked. What this ending said to me is, this is never going to end for this guy. He has been on this path his entire life and he’s never going to get off it. The rest of his life will be spent doing what he can to support his family, but he’s never never going to be able to stop looking up every time a door opens, for fear that some rival will come through it and end it all. I actually get sick just thinking about it, much the way I did upon reading the final page of The Dark Tower series.

Granted, I have the luxury of outside objectivity. I wasn’t personally invested in these characters over the course of however many seasons. But from a storytelling point of view, I am sorry to admit to all the irate fans, that while it may not have been the ending you all wanted, it was in fact the right ending to this story. My apologies to David Chase (who of course reads this blog). You got it right, man.

Virginia Te...(click)

I've mentioned in the past how I don't really keep up with the news, almost make a point NOT to watch the news and trust the fact that any news worth knowing about will still be news 2 weeks later when I eventually hear about it and take the time to find out what happened. The way I see it, all news is partial or complete speculation and/or spin until at least that long anyway.

But as with most of the nation, I too have felt compelled to watch at least a few reports about this whole Virginia Tech thing. I just finished watching the local 11 o'clock news report about the video tape the killer sent to the news networks. Except they're not calling it "the video tape the killer sent to the news networks." No, they are calling it, "Murderer's 1800-word Manifesto." Christ. That's seriously all it took and now once again I am off the news. Earlier in the night as I was flipping through the channels in the 15 minutes before LOST came on, I stopped briefly on each of the Big 3 news nets and each one was palpably foaming at the mouth over their "exclusive interview" with the killer's roommate, co-worker, classmate, etc. etc. etc. Basically pick a relationship anybody could have had and the reporters were on them like jackals, each trying to get their own unique perspective so as to show up the other news shows. Each station had built their own animated graphics specifically for the killings, incorporating the killer's face, or crying students, or V-tech sweatshirts, or a combination of them all. Each had accompanying sound effects designed to draw the viewer's attention which sounded like some kind of video game. And goddamn if each reporter didn't deliver their standup, punctuating those key words just absolutely perfectly so that every viewer knew what they were saying was deep, dark, poignant, timeless... poetic even. You couldn't help but wonder if they were seeing the tears in the students' eyes, or the glitter of their own Emmy's.

And now, the "Murderer's Manifesto." Does everybody remember Columbine? Does anybody remember that the two killers in that massacre recorded a similar video telling exactly what they were going to do? Anybody? No, because you know what? Out of respect, they never released that tape to the public. They gave transcripts I believe, but even that wasn't until MONTHS after the rampage. But when this guy actually mailed his video to NBC, what choice did NBC have but to run it? Of course we all watched it. We couldn't help it. We're curious as hell. We want to know why he did it. Did we get any answers? Of course not, other than confirming that yes, this dude was in fact insane. But did we get any answers? No. But NBC sure as hell got ratings. You almost feel bad for them that this didn't take place during sweeps.

I really haven't spent much time thinking about the massacre at Virginia Tech at all because honestly if I think too deeply on it, I know I'll break down crying. But that's not the reason I'm vowing to avoid all news reports about the story until at least 2 weeks have passed. I'm avoiding the news because honestly I would rather think of this tragedy with all the due horror and sadness that it warrants. I don't want to roll my eyes and think on it with disgust. And that's just what watching even a collective 20 minutes of the garbage that passes for "news" this evening did to me. I want nothing more than to reach through my TV screen and strangle every reporter I see covering the event. And that is what this is you know... an "event". That's all these things ever are in the eyes of the media. September 11 was the lone exception to that rule. Every single report, every single reportER I saw covering that day was real and genuine, simply because they were covering something unlike anything they had ever seen before in their lives. Their shock, their horror, their sadness was real, genuine, unscripted. But with VA Tech... they KNOW how to cover this kind of stuff. Hell they've been practicing for this day ever since April 20, 1999.

I only saw the tease for this story, didn't actually watch the full "report", but apparently Simon Cowell is in some hot water because he rolled his eyes at an American Idol contestant who dedicated one of his performances to the victims of Virginia Tech. To Simon, I say, "Right on man." If ALL the contestants had collaborated on a company number for the victims, okay, I'd give you that, but the way this contestant did it, all it did was USE the deaths of 32 people to draw sympathy and votes for his own performance. I know that sounds cynical as hell, and I know this particular contestant actually was from the state of Virginia, but damn man, this wasn't a tragedy for YOU to make your own. I'd have rolled my eyes at THE CONTESTANT as well. And I'm quite certain that's what Simon was doing. He wasn't rolling his eyes at the tragedy or the victims of it. He was rolling his eyes at the contestant for USING those victims for his own benefit. Shame.

Shame. Just like the news organizations. This is nothing new. Tragedy is the bread and butter of the news industry. I accept that, though I decided tonight that if I were running the universe, big domestic tragedies like this would be assigned by lottery. Only ONE news network would be granted permission to cover any given tragedy. NBC would get dibs on VA Tech because CBS drew the lot during Reagan's death, something CBS was actually bummed about because their tragedy didn't garner nearly as many ratings as ABC pulled in during Hurricane Katrina when their number came up, and CNN is crossing their fingers for a dirty bomb in Los Angeles because it's their turn next. As far as I'm concerned, that is the ONLY way for a tragic event to be covered fairly, honestly and tactfully - eliminate the competition. That way, nobody stoops to dispicable levels trying to "scoop" the other networks with THEIR "exclusive witness", or their exclusive "expert" on this that or the other. And certainly nobody tries to grab viewers with big exciting words like "Murderer's Manifesto". Without competition, without the need for sensationalism, the story can simply be told and the dead can know that they were not merely pawns in some grand scramble for ratings...

Mind you, this rule would only apply for the first two weeks following the tragedy. Because as I previously stated, any news really worth knowing will still be news two weeks later. After that time, the other networks would be free to start airing the stuff they shot, or decide that after 14 days, nobody cares anymore and it's time to discuss the paternity results of the latest celebrity death triangle.

To anybody who was affected by the VA Tech tragedy, my deepest and sincerest condolences. I can't even begin to know what to say. But for now, I am going to leave you to cope with your grief without another intrusive eye looking in on you. I'll catch up with you in about 11 days.

Tag, you're gone!

(deep SIGH)

First they took away Dodgeball, saying it was too violent. Then a couple of kids fell off the see-saw and monkey bars, so away they went. Soon after that, all the tall metal slides were replaced by short plastic corkscrew slides that don't allow you to pick up any speed at all. Before long somebody also said that even swings were too dangerous for playground play. Now just when you thought parents and schools couldn't get any more ridiculous and pussified than they already are, you know what some school board in Attleboro, Massachusetts decided this week? Apparently the game of Tag is no longer an appropriate game. Tag! I mean... TAG for Christ's sake! Claiming "Recess is a time when accidents happen," the Willlette Elementary School has now deemed one of the most basic, elemental and pure games of childhood to be too rough and dangerous for kids to play. What's more amazing is that there's nothing amazing about this particular decision. Apparently schools all over the country have been taking similar measures for years. In 2002 a Santa Monica school banned the game saying that it "creates self esteem issues among slower and weaker children."

I just don't even know what to say about this decision that isn't already self-evident to anybody who grew up in any previous generation, though I think George Carlin definitely said it best a few years ago when he said: "Grownups are taking all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It's pathetic."

I'll skip all the remarks and comments of how stupid and moronic this decision and other decisions like it are (I'm sure all of you reading have a least a dozen comments of your own that you could insert here... and if you don't, well then you're a hopeless case anyway who should never have kids of your own) and instead skip right ahead to the big picture and its long term implications.

Every generation fears the generation that comes after it. Our grandparents were horrified by the rock-n-roll that our parents grew up listening to. Our parents were horrified by the brain-numbing MTV programming we watched like Beavis & Butthead and Singled Out. It's expected. You think your parents are prudes and you wish your kids would be into the wholesome things you used to be into. But now that my generation is stepping into the roles of parenthood a new and disturbing trend is happening. We're actually saying that all the things we loved about being a kid are no longer good and valid forms of entertainment. Instead, we claim they're damaging to the body and psyche of our frail little children. That's what we're saying, but the more I think about it, the more I think it goes deeper. Parents aren't really vilifying things that are dangerous. What they're really trying to forbid is any activity that kids can participate in without the direct supervision of a group of adults.

I never made that leap of logic until I read a short article that talked about how soccer is now the number one sport engaged in by the youth of America. And what immediately occurred to me was that the article or the study or whatever it was had left out one key word from that declaration. What it should have said was that soccer was the number one organized sport in America. Whenever you see American kids playing soccer, it's almost without exception a structured, organized event with official teams, coaches, referees, and soccer moms from the boosters club selling refreshments and car magnets in the shape of soccer balls. You almost never see a group of four or ten unsupervised kids trying to kick a soccer ball through a makeshift goal they set up using a couple backpacks. That's what kids in every other country in the world do, but not in America. No, in America I would stake my life on saying the most popular sport that kids engage in, irrespective of any kind of supervision, is basketball. Kids don't need an organized group of parents in order to play basketball. As long as they have a ball, a net and a hard surface they'll shoot hoops for hours just for the sheer joy of playing. But since there's no way to poll every pickup game on every cracked asphalt court in the country, soccer is the sport that wins the most popular title.

And that suits the parents of my generation just fine. For some reason, parents my age just can't stand the idea that their kids could be having any kind of fun in any activity that they didn't personally orchestrate and supervise. Give kids the opportunity and a rubber ball or three and they'll organize their own game of dodgeball. They'll monitor themselves, coach themselves and referee themselves. Give them the chance and they'll run around for an hour, chasing each other and tagging each other in the most unstructured game ever created. There's no need for parents. There's no need to keep score. There's no need to even determine a winner. You just play the game until you get sick of it, at which point you move on to something else. I'm not sure why, but games like that, games that we ourselves used to play, freak out the parents of my generation. It's inconceivable to them that their kids would do anything without their direct influence. And that's why things like playground equipment and unstructured games like tag and dodgeball are going away. "Safety" and "self-esteem" are just easy scapegoats for the real truth, which is today's parents are scared shitless that their kids... might not need them.

I don't know where all this insecurity originated and why it seems to be unique to the parents of my generation. Is it that we wish our own parents would have spent more time playing with us that we feel compelled to make sure our kids never spend a joyful minute outside our presence? Is it the reports of kids being stolen out of their own yards are making us too scared to let our kids leave our personal guardianship for any reason whatsoever? What is it that makes games like soccer, where literally dozens of kids can be supervised all at once, more preferable to games like tag where kids can supervise themselves? Why on earth is our generation unique in vilifying ourselves by vilifying the things we used to love? And where will it end? How much of our children's lives will we attempt to structuralize with no thought given to what we're depriving them of?

RV People

HEY EVERYBODY, THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM A MUCH LONGER ESSAY THAT I'M WORKING ON AND WILL EVENTUALLY POST (HOPEFULLY BY THIS WEEKEND) ON MY WEBSITE. BUT I JUST SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE EVENING WORKING ON AND REWORKING THIS SECTION OF IT. AND I'M SO FILLED WITH PASSION AND IRE ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW THAT I FELT COMPELLED TO OFFER IT UP FOR APPRAISAL AND COMMENT... AND RIDICULE IF IT COMES TO THAT.


As you have probably gathered by now, I harbor quite a large reservoir of contempt for people in RV's. But more what it is, is an unbridled hatred of the people I refer to in my road trip travelogue as "interstate tourists":

These are the types of people who get annoyed that there isn't an interstate going straight through the middle of Yellowstone Park. Everywhere they go, they zoom in at 65m.p.h. and hop out of the car with the look of people who expect to see the Second Coming of Christ at every rest stop... They never stay long enough to take something in. They never actually look at anything except through the viewfinder of their camcorder. And they never spend the time seeking out those special nuances of an area that can't be described in a guidebook. They stick to the interstates where they never have to go more than thirty minutes between rest stops with bathrooms and Burger Kings.

RV people epitomize this travel ethic. Rather than looking at a road trip as an adventure, as the exploration of something new and exciting, with all the minor risks and aggravations go along with it, they prefer instead to insulate themselves inside a tin can from anything that they potentially didn't plan for. Using an RV insures that these people will never have to go out and interact with whatever environment they drive through - whether it be small town life, kitschy roadside amusement, or the great open outdoors. Instead they come to accommodating "campgrounds" by the droves where they park, hook up power and sewage lines and then spend the rest of the time sitting inside their antiseptic, air conditioned environment, watching cable TV, observing what they consider to be nature through a pane of glass, and talking about mindless idiotic jabber - primarily about the features and benefits of their RV's. When they do venture out of their Winnebago-designed ecosystem and into the out of doors, they make sure to pull out their state of the art comfy lawn chairs and extend the RV's built-in awning so that neither the heat of the sun nor the cool of the ground will disrupt the hermetically-sealed utopia they've worked so hard, and paid so much, to create.

I know what you're probably thinking: What do you care? You don't have to travel like that if you don't want to. So why are you bitching? I'm bitching because more and more I see the traveling culture leaning the way of the RV interstate tourist. More and more campgrounds clamoring for income are doing whatever they can to attract caravans of RV'ers of whom they can charge more than they would a mere family with a tent. And as more and more businesses cater to the RV crowd, more and more people begin to think that this is an acceptable form of vacationing, so they eagerly buy or rent the latest model. Without even needing to acquire a special license, they drive these lumbering, gas-guzzling behemoths down roads far too narrow for them to be traveling on (if only they would stick to the interstate), slow down traffic behind them, force oncoming traffic to ride the shoulder, make hundred-point K-turns into every parking lot they come to, then stink up perfectly good camping real estate with their gas fumes and sewage releases.

But those are just pet peeves. My real hatred comes from the fact that as I see it, RV's, RV people and RV culture are slowly but surely killing the allure and legacy of the great American Road Trip - and to a broader extent, destroying the very definition of "America" itself. The whole concept behind an RV is to be able to get to a destination as fast as you can so you can set up your temporary home away from home, then never leave its comforts unless absolutely necessary. You have no reason to go out and eat at Big Ed's Barbeque Pit because you can just boil up the spaghetti you bought at Wal Mart in your kitchen/bathroom. There's no need to buy a Coke from Mom & Pop's Roadside Convenience Store because you left home with your refrigerator-on-wheels fully stocked. In an RV, the only people you need to interact with are the ones you brought with you; other RV people who wander over to compare RV bells, whistles and penis sizes; and the occasional minimum wage amusement park worker who you'll viciously berate without pity for making the line for the roller coaster move too slow.

And as more and more people adopt this mentality, the very notion of Roadside, America will begin to die. As people stop passing through these little towns with their local fairs, attractions and colorful people, opting instead for the super-fast, super-convenient interstate, eventually there won't be any local fairs, attractions or colorful people to see. America will cease to be a vast and detailed canvas with wonderful things to see and experience everywhere you look. Instead it will become an uninspiring connect-the-dots of destinations, with busy divided highways zipping people from one dot to the next. And as the spaces in between those dots slowly languish and die, the land will be bought up by investors who will in turn build malls, condos and corporate parks, so that in time everywhere you go in this country will look exactly like everywhere else.

Already this is happening. The interstates alone - and the airlines for that matter - have helped perpetrate this slow death. Just ask anybody who traveled the famous Route 66 back in its heyday. Every little town along a major cross-country route had a name and an identity. Every hardworking person and every struggling family business had a real and genuine opportunity to carve out their own little niche in the American economy and way of life. Some accomplished this goal by providing a decent hamburger and soft-serve ice cream. Others did it by offering a cheap and cozy place to sleep. Still others did it by constructing items of a somewhat dubious nature (The World's Largest Buffalo, a giant cannon designed to shoot its creator into space, or even just a very tall pile of cans) and heralding their existence to anyone who might be interested - which they often were. Roadside, America used to define this country. It used to be one of the many definitions collectively affirming America as the land of opportunity where truly anything was possible.

These days giant corporations are ever trying to narrow down that list of definitions - preferably to ones that also contain their logo. These people deal in destinations and their very existence depends on people, hordes of people, arriving at those destinations day in and day out. They don't have time for the traveling public to poke around in Tractor Falls, Nebraska or Twineville, South Dakota. They need these people to get to their destinations, their destinations, as fast as possible and stay there for as long as possible before they race back home. And somehow they've succeeded in convincing most Americans that they also don't have time to waste between one destination and the next. Too many people have bought into the corporation-created notion of the destination reigning supreme - and nobody more so than RV people. And as more and more people adopt the mindset of the interstate tourist, the Great American Road Trip will die. And when that happens, the very definition of America, the very thing that made us great, will die along with it.

So fuck RV people and the cumbersome pieces of shit they rode in on.

You write one column with the word "lesbian" in it...

A few years ago I used to write a somewhat weekly column for an online e-zine called the Greenwich Village Gazette. I eventualy stopped writing for them after I'd created my own website simply because they were a pain to deal with - posted things incorrectly, screwed up links, etc. The last thing I ever wrote for them was what I considered to be a witty and sarcastic column about a court ruling in New Hampshire that said if a woman cheated on her husband with another woman, it wasn't considered adultery. I went off on not only the ludicrousness of the law, but also on the gay and lesbian community's official response, which I thought came off as incredibly self-serving and unsympathetic.

Apparently my article is still very much circulating the cosmos, because in the last week alone I have gotten close to a dozen emails about it. Curious, I typed in a few choice keywords and found that it has been posted, either in its entirety or as excerpts, on several blogs and news sites. Depending on who was posting, or on who was writing me emails, people were either giving me big old "Amens" or calling me an outright homophobe. The column certainly wasn't intended to come off as homophobic, simply pointing out hypocrisy where hypocrisy lay. If I were going to comment on anything here, it would be about how sloppily written the piece was... I've grown a lot as a writer since then. So, I could have been put off by those homophobia comments if not for the fact that a good majority of gay people who have written me in the last week, and in the past few years, regarding this column have echoed my sentiments, telling me I'm right on the ball: "Adultery is adultery."

It has also been really interesting seeing how people place assumptions on what I must believe based on this article. Depending on their point of view and their frame of mind, people have both commended and derided me because I obviously am in support of gay marriage, or else they have commended and derided me because I obviously don't consider gay relationships to be as valid as straight ones. Regardless of what I believe when it comes to those things, it's rather amusing watching on fire people use my 800 word essay as a springboard for their own conflicting points of view.

Anyway, I was just rather amused that something I wrote nearly 3 years ago was still circulating the internet and igniting such ire and passion in people. If you want to check out the original piece, you can follow one of the two following links and then tell me if you think I come off as homophobic(?), right on the money(?), badly written(?):

Greenwich Village Gazette Column

Hey Guess What Column

Because wolves don't suddenly decide to go vegetarian

Has anybody else from my generation noticed how the classic story "The Three Little Pigs" has been changed to become more "accessible" and "kid friendly"? Everybody remembers the basic story structure. There are three brother pigs who go off on their own to build houses. Two of the pigs are lazy and build their houses out of straw and sticks respectively. But the third little pig is an industrious forward thinker. He knows there are wolves out there who would try to knock down his house and eat him, so he builds a strong house out of bricks. Well low and behold, along comes the Big Bad Wolf who proceeds to "huff and puff and blow the house down" on the first two pigs. But the third little pig's brick house is too strong and the wolf is foiled.

Exactly how the wolf is foiled has evolved over the years. Well first of all, in certain versions of the story that I had read to me as a kid (or told free form) the Wolf actually ATE the first two little pigs. I don't think there is a version around anymore where this grisly turn of events still takes place. I think even if you manage to find a classic book of stories with "The Three Little Pigs" in it, it will have been changed so that the first two little pigs, after having their houses blown down, run to the house of their better-prepared brother. This specific rewriting doesn't bother me all that much. I know the original intent of that particular plot line was to reinforce the Christian work ethic in kids everywhere, basically saying: "Don't be idle and lazy or you'll DIE!" But as a writer, I know it's hard to enjoy good light and happy literature if two such lovable characters die a particularly gruesome death. So I don't mind creative license being taken there.

What bothers me is how history has tried to rewrite the ultimate fate of the Big Bad Wolf. Again, in the versions I always heard, the Big Bad Wolf died at the end of the story. After failing to blow down the brick house, he goes up on the roof and comes down the chimney where the little pig (or PIGS depending on the version) have put a kettle of boiling water into the fireplace. The Wolf slides down, lands in the water and is boiled to death. Again, depending on the version, his death goes down in one of two ways. Either a) the little pig(s) cooked the wolf and ate him or b) (the more palatable version) the wolf simply boils away into non-existence. Either way, the wolf gets his due comeuppance and the little pigs are freed from his reign of terror.

Well, that is not the way it happens today. In every modern version, the Wolf slides down the chimney, burns his bottom on the boiling water then scrambles back up the chimney and runs away into the woods where he decides to never bother the little pigs again.

(((I guess I should acknowledge the caveat that this isn't necessarily a new way of telling the story. The popular Disney version of the story includes this kid-friendly non-violent ending - and that cartoon came out in 1933. I guess it was too heavy to actually show three cartoon characters carving up another character on film. But as of the early 80's, when I was growing up, there were still plenty of printed versions of the story that included the wolf's boiling demise.)))

I know we're trying to save our children's fragile psyche's by eliminating all mention of death in their stories, but I must state for the record that I HATE this version of "The Three Little Pigs" with its non-violent climax. From a purely storytelling point of view, there is nothing satisfying about the Wolf escaping with just wounded pride and a sore bottom. I mean he just spent the better half of the story doing everything HE could do to kill and then devour three helpless little pigs whose worst sin was having lazy work ethic. Why shouldn't the Big Bad Wolf die at the end when, if he had succeeded, the pigs would have been the ones who died? It's just plain gullible to believe that the Wolf is going to give up after this. Do the rewriters really expect us to believe that the Wolf is just going to sit around moping in the woods and never bother the pigs again? Please! As soon as his ass heals, he's going to come back. Knowing he can't penetrate the house, he'll just patiently hide outside, knowing that these pigs are going to have to come out eventually and then he'll pounce. No, the only way to have full closure on this story, the wolf has to die or be subdued in some way. Maybe the pigs manage to tie him up and send him to Abu Dhabi or something. (Pat yourself on the back if you caught the Garfield reference).

The reason why I hate this version of "The Three Little Pigs" on a larger scale however, is because it is so indicative of the society we live in today. Though really, it is more indicative of the patty-cake-playing ultra-liberals who, when a psycho is arrested for chopping up his entire family, want to make sure the guy is treated well and gets basic cable in prison. When some evil dictator slaughters 100,000 people, rather than marching a battalion of tanks up the guy's asshole, they want to impose "sanctions" and "U.N. Resolutions" and other cute little solutions that equate to about as much as giving these people a little smack (or a burn) on their butts. But most of all, this ending epitomizes the growing mindset so many people in this country have of no consequences for your actions. You can be a non-stop maniacal prick, and the second somebody calls you on it, you can just run off into the woods, nurse your burned bottom and wounded ego and wait until people have stopped thinking about you to return to your former prickish-ness.

I know I'm overreacting, and I know it's just a kid's story, but if it is just a story then why are we so gung-ho about changing it in the first place? Why can't we meet half-way and let the wolf dissolve into vapor in that boiling cauldron? It's harmless. It leaves no lasting gruesome images. And it makes for better storytelling and lesson-teaching.

Not fair at the Fair

Last night, against my better judgment, I allowed Lauren to drag me to “Southampton Days” the local county fair, which is finishing up tonight. This was your typical traveling carnival complete with rickety rides that carnies assemble and breakdown in a matter of minutes; games boasting sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, sometimes dishonest odds, all for the chance to win a giant replica of Spongebob Squarepants stuffed with packing peanuts; greasy carnival food that most normal people only ever eat at a fair; greasy fat white trash people who you can tell eat carnival food every day of the year; local businesses giving away balloons, rubber bracelets and other chintzy trinkets to kids in the hopes that their parents will come into their tent and buy anything from blinking neon sunglasses to a new checking account; a little main stage featuring local performers (and sometimes nationally recognized ones depending on how big the fair is) putting on everything from boring puppet shows to lousy multi-instrumented musical revues.

But no fair would be complete without the final element, the one that makes all the other crappy things at the fair worth it. Actually, this final element is the only reason any of us ever put up with all those other crappy fair things: the local high school girls slutted up something fierce, wearing clothes that you’d swear they must have stolen from their older sister’s closet… provided their older sister was only four feet tall and far far skinnier than her younger sibling. I tell you it’s a sight to behold and really quite amazing actually: short shorts, hot pants, tight-fitting low-cut midriff shirts, bellybutton rings, push-up bras, open mesh baby doll t-shirts over bikini tops, not to mention lipstick, blush and eye shadow lathered on streetwalker style. Mind you I’m not judging, nor am I condoning. Just pointing out that it’s enough to bring the statutory rapist out in any man.

Especially at this particular fair. Every fair I can ever remember from my childhood and adulthood involved a much higher percentage of ugly, obese white trash women wearing tight and revealing clothes that they should not have been wearing – with the occasional token hottie sprinkled into the mix here and there just to give us hope. But apparently in Southampton, either the contingent of hot girls is higher, or else the less attractive ones are smart enough to know not to wear the kinds of clothes that make us turn our heads and notice.

So I walked with Lauren around this fair last night, pushing Allison in her stroller, and repeating this mantra to myself: “You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a… DEAR GOD, that twelve-year-old has bigger breasts than Jenna Jameson!”

Now the only reason I spent so long speaking about the slutted-up teenage girl element of state and county fairs (beyond the fact that I’m a sick, perverted F---) is to point out another element of fairs that I found conspicuously missing from the Southampton Days: creepy stalking older guys who prey on said slutted-up teenagers. Now by “older guy” I don’t mean middle-aged men or really old farts. By and large, these guys are in their mid-20’s to early thirties. They’re young-enough-looking that it doesn’t seem overtly weird that they would be hitting on the hot teenage girls. They’re generally relatively good-looking, or at least good-looking enough that the girls they’re preying on aren’t immediately grossed out by them. The way it usually works is they find a group of girls who are clustered together and either ask them if they want to go get high or if they want to go to some party that his friends are (supposedly) throwing. They know that generally only a couple of the girls from the group – usually the ones with low self-esteem, false-high self-esteem, or just with something to prove to nobody in particular – will actually come with them, detaching themselves from their group and effective safety net. In a good scenario, these gazelles cut from the herd are only the victim of quasi date rape. They end up so high and intoxicated that they’re only more than will to do whatever the guy (and possibly his friends) wants.

Worst-case scenarios can go pretty much as far as your grisly imagination can take you. That’s why fairs have always kind of given me the creeps. Not the fairs themselves, with their brightly lit amusements, rides with loud calliope music, and, by and large, families and friends having a few hours of harmless mindless fun. It’s the areas just outside the fairgrounds that make me uneasy. Since these are usually ragtag operations set up on the cheap by traveling companies in towns that don’t want to pay a lot of money, there’s generally no security or cop presence outside of the actual carnival. “Security” pretty much means the local geriatric WalMart greeter who’s directing traffic out of the elementary school parking lot. As soon as you step outside of the brightly lit midway, the surrounding fields are by contrast almost dangerously dark and shadowy. Those lurking shadows are the perfect place for a murderer-rapist to do whatever he wants to a frail slutted-up teenager, trusting that her cries for help will be muted by the speakers on the Tilt-a-Whirl blasting 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready 4 This.”

There’s a reason the vampire movie The Lost Boys was set where it was. The shifty, leathery teenage vampires (of whom Keifer Sutherland was their leader) took most of their victims from the carnival boardwalk or just outside in the parking lot. As a father of a little girl who I can already tell is going to grow up to be a head turner, it scares me to death thinking of letting her and her friends go alone to one of these things, knowing the kinds of people who might be lurking there. But as a parent, you can’t just not let your kids go. You just can’t. They have to be able to do their independent thing, be with their friends and have fun with that feeling that they run their entire universe. Honestly, they need to go out and dress sexy and know that the teenage boys from school (as well as their fathers and grandfathers) are ogling them. After all, as I said, that’s the very nature of the local fair. As a parent I guess you just have to hope to God that you’ve raised your kid the right way to know that she’s going to be responsible and isn’t going to leave her group of friends to go off with any members of the creepy older guy element.

But as I said, that element wasn’t even there last night. At least not that I could detect. Honestly, Lauren and I were the only people our age I saw there last night. Everybody else was either sixteen, forty or sixty. I’ve mentioned before that we live in some kind of generational vortex in eastern Pennsylvania where people somehow just skip their twenties and go straight from high school to middle age. So any guys accompanying a group of teenage girls were likewise either teenagers themselves or their parents. So unless that creepy stalking man presence has just gotten better at concealing itself, it just didn’t exist at this fair. I can’t imagine that though because as a teenager, that element was always very conspicuous, mostly because you couldn’t help but notice that they were stealing all the chicks that you wanted. Who knows, maybe Southampton just isn’t as easy pickings as other places. After all, any area where the ugly girls have the self-esteem to not slut themselves up as much as their much-hotter friends, its obviously an area where the girls are smart enough not to walk off into the shadows with strange guys offering drugs. It gives me hope as a dad.

Russell Crowe had NOTHING on these guys

You know what TV show I used to love as a kid? American Gladiators. What an awesome show that was. To a ten-year-old boy, that show was like gym class for superheroes. I mean you had dodgeball, except the balls in this case were tennis balls fired at you from a high speed canon while you shot back with giant Nerf crossbows and rocket launchers. There was a rock wall with the added element of a really big guy chasing you, trying to yank you off. You had an obstacle course, though it was more like a mythological gauntlet full of smoke, flashing lights and really big guys trying to knock you down.

I don’t know if that show would impress kids these days, what with the gluttony of fast-paced action-filled cartoons and kid shows they already have at their disposal. But when the most exciting shows we were used to watching were Growing Pains and Muppet Babies, American Gladiators was like a forbidden look into the hidden lives of action stars or something. The fact that it came on late on a Saturday night, right after Saturday Night Live where I lived, only added to the allure that you were somehow breaking the rules and seeing things that only grownups were meant to see.

As kids who played sports, my friends and I would often talk about wanting to go on American Gladiators. To be honest, I don’t even know what kind of prizes the winner of each show received. For us, it wasn’t about winning, it was about competing. But really it was about playing. Hardcore, meat and muscle, violence-for-fun playing. Running inside a giant metal sphere and bashing into your opponents in an effort to score points. Walloping a guy twice your size with a big foam jousting stick, trying to knock him off his ten-foot pedestal. How freakin’ awesome would it have been just to be allowed inside that auditorium and be given the chance to compete in any of those games.

I read in TV Guide one time the qualifications needed to be considered as a contestant for American Gladiators. I don’t remember them all, but I do know you had to be able to do something like thirty chin-ups in a minute. That was crazy. Even at my strongest I’ve only been able to do ten of those things. I’m sure other qualifications were you had to be able to run a mile in less than five minutes, you had to be able to lift a certain amount of weight with your legs and arms. Stuff like that. Stuff that only somebody at the very peak of physical strength and fitness had any hope of accomplishing.

I wish they’d bring back competition shows like that. Shows where you actually had to have, not just talent, but extreme talent to compete. What an awesome bar that gave us to shoot for. To get onto American Gladiators you had to aim high and work hard. These days, most of the competitions shows you see on TV require no other qualifications than not being a convicted felon. Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race. Anybody can, in theory, appear on those shows. The only thing that increases your odds of being chosen isn’t superior strength or talent, but above average looks and a quirky personality. I guess that appeals more to people these days. The average viewer can watch these shows and actually picture themselves on that screen competing as they are, without any new skills or improvement. Hell, William Hung taught us that you didn’t even have to be a good singer to appear on American Idol.

Is this all a sign of where we’re headed as a country? As a civilization? As a species? The bar used to be high. Impossibly high no doubt. None of us were going to attain the superiority required to appear on American Gladiators. But in the end, was that really such a bad thing? It gave us something shoot for and even when we didn’t hit that mark, we landed higher than we would have had we shot for a low mark. These days, there’s no mark to shoot for. The message competition shows send out today is, “Just be yourself… your regular, stupid, talentless self, and you too could be a star.” If this trend continues, the human race is doomed. Evolution cannot progress if we aren’t constantly challenged in our daily lives.

I’ve split no hairs about my thoughts on the abomination that is “Reality TV.” I refuse to watch any of it. But I promise all you TV executives out there, if you were to bring back American Gladiators, I would watch. But it’s got to be the real thing. The standards have to remain high. Contestants actually need to be able to pass a physical test to compete. And for the love of God, if I don’t see ugly people in the mix along with the hotties, I’ll tune you out forever. Because strong people with talent come at all levels of beauty.

Bring back American Gladiators. The future of the world depends on it.

Wheel... of... DEATH!

I was sitting around in the edit truck the other day and Live With Regis and Kelly was on. Well apparently Reeg was out sick or something because they had a very special guest host on: the one and only Pat Sejak. Can I just tell you how incredibly weird it was to see old Pat on this show. First of all, can I just say, man that dude is getting old. Pat Sejak always struck me as a Dick Clark kind of guy. His face remains plastered permanently at whatever age he was circa 1985. Probably because that’s the last time I really watched Wheel of Fortune. But also, and more so, it was just weird to see Pat doing anything but that show He’s been doing it for how many years now? His face is synonymous with that big clicking wheel and the idiots who spin it every weeknight. Same with Vanna White. You cannot hear her name or see her face without immediately picturing her in front of that big green and white board.

There are only a few other game shows and game show hosts that are like that. First of all, that other Merv Griffin hit, Jeopardy. The only time I can remember seeing Alex Trebek on a show other than Jeopardy was when he was on Cheers playing himself as the host of Jeopardy. And then of course there is the long standing The Price is Right with the longer standing Bob Barker.

As I sat there watching Pat Sejak on Live, a couple thoughts occurred to me. The first being, why have I never noticed before just how freakin cute Kelly Ripa is? You could just put her in your little pocket and take her home with you she’s so dang cute.

But back to the whole gameshow thing, I couldn’t help but wonder what is going to happen to the three gameshows I mentioned when their key personalities either retire or die? Like I said, their names and faces have become synonymous with those shows, but more importantly, I don’t think anybody in America could picture those shows without those names and faces. People tune in to watch The Price is Right as much to see Bob Barker as they do to watch an hour-long commercial for TidyBowl. I remember Vanna White was planning on leaving Wheel of Fortune several years ago after nearly two decades and the studio somehow threw enough money at her to get her to stay because they knew people tuned in to watch her more than the silly game.

Actually I find her whole situation funny in and of itself. Those of us who grew up with that show during the 80’s remember that she used to actually spin the letters around when they lit up. It was like that had to give her some semblance of a function to distract people from the fact that she was really only on screen to be eye-candy. These days they don’t even pretend that she has a larger function than that. Now when the letters light up, all she does is touch them while some production assistant backstage presses a button to make them actually flick on.

But back to my point, what are these shows going to do when their personalities move on? Because it certainly doesn’t seem to me that they’re doing any planning for that certainty. At least shows like The Tonight Show will bring on a guest host every now and then so it isn’t such a huge shock when their main guy retires. But have you ever seen anybody other than Bob Barker hosting The Price is Right? How about Wheel or Jeopardy? Of course you haven’t. These producers are certainly putting all those eggs in the proverbial basket full of more fabulous prizes. Bob Barker alone is a ticking time bomb. He’s starting to look like Pope John Paul II did toward the end, like he’s about ready to collapse into himself. Vanna White is eventually going to get old and cease to be pleasant eye-candy anymore. And at some point I’m sure Alex Trebek, who I’ve heard is quite the asshole off screen, is going to draw a line in the sand and demand more money than he’s worth and that will be the end of that. And dear Pat Sejak. Who knows, maybe he’ll get a taste of greener pastures doing these little guest host stints he’s doing and finally have the three-quarter-life crisis that sends him on his merry way.

And then what happens? What happened before? I know Alex Trebek wasn’t always the host of Jeopardy. Can somebody older than myself tell me what happened when he took over for the previous host? Was it a hard transition? Did they not like him at first? Was there some other letter bimb that Vanna muscled out? Was there a catty breaking-in process for her and the rest of America? And what about Pat? I know he’s charming and charismatic now, but did people take to him right away or did they say, “Who’s this yutz with the poofy hair?” I know things obviously worked out in the end because here they all remain. But then again, studios have lot shorter attention spans these days. Will the producers and audiences of these three shows have the patience and loyalty to break in a new personality? Or will the producers simply allow the shows to die along with their hosts?

Does anybody know? Anybody?

Dunk this

I was watching a little bit of the NBA Finals tonight and a couple of thoughts occurred to me. The first was just a reaffirmation of how much I really and truly hate spectator sports. I mean, I enjoy playing basketball but watching it is just so incredibly boring. Same goes for baseball. I enjoy it when I'm actually sitting in the bleachers because it's all about the overall experience. But to watch it on TV... just can't do it. I can kind of get into football, but with as much as the play constantly starts and stops and goes to commercial, it's hard to stay excited about what's happening. And I certainly can't follow a team game for game all season.

About the only sport that I could truly sit and watch an entire game of on TV, and never get bored with, is soccer. I've realized this week, with the World Cup being on TV in just about every bar, restaurant and production truck I walk into, soccer just sucks me in and keeps me in. I think the fact that soccer doesn't get broken up by commercials is the first and most important factor. But also, soccer is the only sport where I feel like I have to watch every minute of the game. In basketball, they score a basket an average of every thirty seconds. A goal in soccer, on the other hand, is sometimes scored only once a game. And it could happen at any point. If you walked away from a basketball game and came back to realize ten points had been scored during your absence, you wouldn't really think too much about it. But if a soccer goal was scored while you were looking away, it would be a very big deal that you missed it. That goal could in theory be the only point scored all game. That goal, scored perhaps within the first ten minutes of the game, would essentially then be the winning goal. I've always felt that the only exciting part of a basketball game is the final two minutes. And then only if the game is close. Because only at that point does every point count. All the baskets scored in the first 38 minutes of the game are essentially null and void at that point and all that matters is what the two teams do during the crunch time at the end. But in soccer, every single goal counts because they're so hard to score and they are so few and far between.

And when you do score a goal... I remember watching an interview with some soccer player a few years ago who compared soccer to basketball. He said that a really good player in the NBA will score maybe 30 points in a single game. And each basket he scores will give him a little charge and cause the crowd to applaud. But scoring a goal in soccer is like taking the little charge and little applause for each basket and cramming it all into one single moment. And that's why soccer is far more exciting and can draw me in more than basketball. Every drive to the goal, every shot on goal, your nerves seize up and then release when it doesn't result in a point. But then on that one key moment when a shot finally gets through, all those nerve seizures that have been building and building over the course of the game explode in an veritable orgasm of triumph because you know, you feel, how big a deal it is. The only comparison you can have to that feeling watching a basketball game is when a winning shot is scored right at the buzzer. That is as close as a basketball fan can come to experiencing what a soccer fan feels every time a goal is scored.

So that was the first thought I had tonight watching the NBA Finals. The second thought came during a short bump back into the game in which a large graphic was shown of the earth, and all the countries that were broadcasting the game were highlighted in red. Apparently this game is being broadcast to something like 250 countries around the globe. That's mindblowing. Do that many non-Americans really care about who wins this game? In the last couple years, ever since the start of the Iraq war, all I've heard about is how much the rest of the world hates us, how much America is such a joke, a laughingstock to the other countries of the world.

The popular conservative response to that is, "Well if they hate us so much, then why are so many of them trying to get in here?"

I'll take it a step farther than that. If they hate us so much, if they think we're all just a bunch of big fat ignorant slobs, then why on earth do they care so much about the stupid games we play? Why is the Superbowl the most widely watched event in the world? Why would somebody in India care whether Brokeback Mountain won Best Picture? If everything we stand for is so stupid then why are all our most popular TV shows repacked and not only aired in Europe but viewed by more people than their own native programs? In America we don't clamor to watch rebroadcasts of popular British or Japanese shows. If anything, we take their concept and redo it American style. Is it because we're close-minded xenophobic stupid Americans who can't appreciate things from other cultures?

Or is our shit just better than theirs?

Truly, if they hate us so much, why are they all so eager to experience our experiences, from Friends to the Academy Awards? If the World Cup is on right now, why the hell would somebody in France be watching the NBA Finals?

Write every blog...

You know what quote I hate and think is used entirely too much? Of course you don't, but I will explain:

"Live every day like it was your last."

People use this quote as a kind of bleeding heart encouragement to follow your dreams and not sit around either doing nothing or waiting for things to happen. Okay great sentiment, but if I thought I was going to die tomorrow, I'm not going to sit down and start writing the novel I've been putting off for the last year. I'm going to spend the day with my family, praying, crying, saying goodbye.

I get the point they're trying to get across, but there's gotta be a more appropriate quote for it. Perhaps Nike's old mantra works better. JUST DO IT. I guess it's not as poignant and dreamy, but it's a better kick in the ass I think. Besides if you need to invoke the thought of death in order to motivate yourself, well maybe you should just MAKE this day your last.

Dress it down kiddo

I know we’re several months off for this, but I was thinking the other day about just how retarded Halloween is when you have a kid who is too young to go trick-or-treating. The last two years, people have asked me, “So what is Allison going as this year?”

For some reason, my response floors them, “Uh, nothing.”

What’s the point really? She isn’t at the age yet where she gets a kick out of, or really even notices, what she’s wearing. It’s hard enough to get her to wear a hat, nevermind a mask, a pair of angel wings, or a set of bunny ears. She hates it when we wash her face, so why would we aggravate the task by smearing on hard-to-remove makeup? She’s too young to get the concept of trick-or-treating, and to be honest, we’re trying to keep her away from candy for as long as possible anyway, so why would we bring her around the neighborhood filling a bag with it?

Let’s be honest, parents who dress their two-year-old up for Halloween are doing it for themselves way more than for their kid. They do it so they can take that one adorable little picture which they can show to all the other parents at Mommy and Me and share one of those phony my-kid-is-better-than-your-kid chuckles.

“Oh look how sweet. Broderick went as a Hobbit this year.”

Nevermind the fact that Broderick probably screamed for thirty minutes while mom tried to force him into that costume. Nevermind the fact that he got bored after the first two houses and fell asleep on Dad’s shoulder as he carried him from house to house. Nevermind the fact that if mister ((my parents used my name in a vain attempt to show everybody just how simultaneously creative and trendy they could be)) had actually ever SEEN Lord of the Rings at two years old, he would be waking up with night terrors until he was thirty-seven. I’m sure little “Broderick” would have been just as happy wearing a bowl on his head all night while dumping Cheerios into his plastic pumpkin. But that doesn’t make for good photography does it?

I’ve never really bought into the whole cliché dumbass parent thing of taking your kid somewhere and pretending it’ll be so much fun for them, when really, it’s all about rounding out that photo album that you bought at your last Pretentious Memories scrapbooking party. Do you think there’s a two-year-old on earth who really truly gives a crap about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? At BEST they don’t care. More often they’re full fledged terrified because the giant flesh eating rabbit from their dreams has finally manifested itself. As far as I’m concerned, any activity where a parent finds themselves saying, “Honey stop screaming, Mommy’s trying to take your picture,” you might want to rethink your motivation for it.

Like taking your kids to Disney World. Oh we all have such a warm place in our heart for Disney World. And as soon as we become parents, we want nothing more than to fill that Daisy and Donald photo album that we found on sale at WalMart with pictures of our family vacation to the happiest place on earth. We build it up in our minds just how perfect it will be. The kids will get to see Mickey Mouse. They’ll squeal with glee on all the rides. They’ll giggle whenever their ice-cream cone accidentally bumps their nose and mom and dad have to kiss it off.

BULL… S---!

Disney World is a disaster waiting to happen for any family who brings in a kid under ten years old. After all, you’ve just shelled out enough money pay for a really high-class hooker and now you have to get your money’s worth. But of course your kid is too scared to go on ninety percent of the rides. So you wait an hour in line just to ride thirty seconds on the lame flying Dumbo’s only to spend the entire ride hovering along the ground because your kid freaks out every time you press the button to make the elephant go up. Finally, by the end of the ride you’re shouting at your five-year-old, “We waited in line for an hour because you wanted to ride the Dumbo and how we’re going up in the goddamn air! Stop screaming and wave to Mommy!”

It’s a hundred degrees out. Water costs five dollars per eight-ounce bottle. The line to see Mickey Mouse somehow corresponds exactly to the capacity of a young child’s bladder. And forget about kissing the ice-cream off your kid’s nose. If you’ve ever been to Disney World you’ve seen at least one crying toddler holding an empty waffle cone, standing next to a splattered chocolate scoop, and a red-faced parent screaming into their child’s face, “Look what you did! Didn’t I tell you to hang onto this?!? I did, didn’t I! Well that’s just great! Ten dollars right down the f---ing drain!” It’s truly a special moment when you see somebody inducing childhood neurosis over a chocolate dip.

For your money and relative aggravation you’d be better off shelling out sixty bucks a night at the Musty Fart Motel off Interstate 4 and spending the entire week using the in ground pool. It may have no diving board, no slide, no flotation devices and no pool toys, but you’ll never hear a five-year-old say, “I’m bored,” or “I want to go home.” He’ll spend five hours just jumping off the side into the shallow end over and over again, squealing, “Okay everybody watch!” before each jump. Get him a five-dollar pair of goggles and you’ve just bought him a bonus three hours of entertainment. He’ll put those things on and examine every square inch of that pool and never fuss for a moment. The only thing you have to do is act like you give a crap for six seconds when he wants to show you how long he can hold his breath. It really is the perfect vacation. Seriously, how can anybody get mad at the motel pool? The only tears that are ever shed happen when water goes up somebody’s nose. But thirty seconds later, they’ve already shaken it off and are begging you to watch their cannon ball again.

Allison is going to be two-and-a-half this Halloween and no, we will not be dressing her up. Maybe we’ll put a dress on her and say, “Look, you’re Maggie,” a girl at daycare who wears dresses every day. For Halloween, we’ll likely do what we do on any other day. Take her to the park, let her swing on the swings, climb the rock wall and slide down the slide, unencumbered by some ridiculously bulky costume that only frustrates her and gets in the way. We’ll go home, have dinner and let her have some chocolate milk before bed – which is as close to candy as I want her having right now.

Insanity, one bubble at a time

There's just something about bubble wrap isn't there? It's such a great stress reliever. I mean it's not as therapeutic as other things like sex, drugs or breaking stuff. On the other hand, as far as cost goes, it's way cheaper than most of the alternatives. If you work in an office that gets anything via UPS or FedEx more than once a week, it's pretty much a guarantee that there will be sheets and sheets of free stress relief kicking around somewhere in the vicinity of the mailroom.

And I'll admit, I partake in the 'wrap as much as the next guy. I find it's good for about thirty seconds of mindless entertainment, though I approach it differently than most people. I actually don't derive pleasure from the dull popping noise each individual bubble makes as you squeeze it. My enjoyment is a bit more subtle. I like to gently squeeze the bubble with the thumb and forefinger on each hand until a second bubble starts to form on it. You know what I'm talking about? It kind of grows off the main bubble like a pimple. The plastic starts stretching out until the slightly cloudy material becomes perfectly clear and THEN it pops. And that pop, my friend, is ten times more satisfying than if you'd just callously gone at the main bubble like a thirteen-year-old who's just seen his first breast. The sound is a little bit higher pitched, like the sound of a cap gun, and it signifies that you applied just the right amount of pressure. Too much pressure and the main bubble pops with is signature dull snap. Too little pressure and the clear pimple you've formed just kind of fizzles out anticlimacticly with no sound at all. But executed precisely, that pimple cracks open with a satisfying BIH-TZ.

But even a sound as gratifying as that will, again, only entertain me for about thirty seconds before I go off in search of hookers, dime bags and old computer monitors. Not like some other freaks I have met in my life. There are some people in this world who view bubble wrap as some kind of metaphysical Rubix Cube. They concentrate on these bumpy pieces of plastic so intently that you'd swear they were trying to discern the secrets of the universe from the broken capsules. And they truly would spend all day popping these things if you gave them the chance and a Staples giftcard.

There was a girl I worked with at a production company in New York a few years back who had just such a fascination. And one day she got the motherload. We got a huge shipment of tapes or something in the mail, and protecting this cargo was a ten-foot-long, three-foot-wide throw rug of bubble wrap. And this chick went... to... town on this thing, alternating between popping a series of individual bubbles to taking a large handful of the sheet in both hands and twisting, eliciting a fast series of firecracker snaps. And mind you, she was the receptionist in our office. In the waiting room where she was conducting this occupational therapy were producers, a casting director and multiple actors preparing for their audition. But she just kept popping, cheerfully oblivious of the entire room staring at her in pissed off amazement.

A couple months ago, I was working late and ordered deliverly from a sandwich shop down the road. When the delivery guy got there, he spotted a rather large sheet of bubble wrap sitting on the table. After handing me my food, he said, "Oh wow, bubble wrap!" then picked it up and started popping the bubbles. Okay, no problem. I went into the next room to get the petty cash to pay for my dinner, figuring he would get his therapy in, then leave after I paid him. Well as I handed him the money, he didn't even reach out his hand to accept it. He just kept right on popping.

And then he said (and I swear to you this is verbatim and not at all embellished), "You gotta give me a few minutes man. I love this stuff. I had a sheet of this at my house last week and I spent like two hours popping it." (emphasis mine)

I laughed and said, "Oh, there you go," which is what I always say when I either don't care about what somebody is saying or think they're a complete freak but don't want to say so. In this case, obviously both situations applied. So I went over to my dinner, unwrapped my meatball sub, took the straw out of its paper and stuck it in my soda, took a drink, took a bite, took another drink and finally said, "Dude, you can take that with you if you want."

You'd swear I'd just offered him one of the expensive computers I was busy prepping. His face lit up and he gushed, "Really? Oh wow thanks man, that's awesome." He grabbed his tip and walked back to his car, popping with the utmost concentration the entire way. I locked the door behind me then went looking for porn on the internet.

Operator... well can you help me send this text message...

Lauren and I got new cell phones a couple of weeks ago. Lauren’s sister Lisa had just upgraded her phone and told us about a sale that Verizon was having, so we went out and got a good deal on two camera phones that will allow us to take and send pictures and videos in addition to regular text messages. When we’ve talked about getting camera phones in the past, it’s always been seen as more of a practical device.

“Oh, this will be good if one of us is ever involved in a car accident. We’ll be able to take pictures of the scene for court.”

Well, it might have been that way if Lisa and Lauren hadn’t gotten the exact same phone with the exact same capabilities. Now the two of them, I swear, are like teenage girls, sending cutesy little messages back and forth all day long, shooting and sending pictures of everything they see, dressing up the pictures with pretty borders, attaching different ringtones to the pictures and typing the text messages to make it seem as though one of their kids wrote the sentiment.

One of them (I won’t reveal who) actually took a picture of her own butt and sent it to the other. Maybe they aren’t like teenage girls at all. Maybe the new phones are bringing out the teenage BOYS in them. “Hey Marc, lookit ‘dis. ‘Dat’s my BUTT! Heh, heh, heh!”

When they send something, it of course prompts the other person to call them back, and then they proceed to have an hour-long conversation. They sit up until midnight chitty chatting on the phone about this and that. Except instead of whispering about the boys they snuck a kiss and a trip to second base with behind the dugout, they’re gabbing on about their latest Tupperware parties and PartyLite orders. And rather than Lauren’s dad yelling at her for racking up the phone bill, it’s me, her husband yelling at her for going over her minutes.

But it’s the videos that are the most out of control. You can shoot fifteen-second videos with this camera and send those to your friends as well. I’ll even admit that it was fun for the first couple of days. I’d shoot a scene of Allison on the swings or throwing rocks at the neighbors’ kids and send it off to Lauren for a quick laugh. But these sisters think they’re Martin Scorcese armed with a cell phone. The thing about it is, it’s really all the same video. Fifteen seconds of one of the kids saying “Hi” to their aunt.

I can remember watching a busload of Japanese tourists one time taking pictures of just about everything. Except it wasn’t really everything. What it was was Mom and Aunt Lilly in front of the entrance sign. Then Mom and Aunt Lilly in front of the exhibit sign. Then Mom and Aunt Lilly in front of the restroom sign. Now just Aunt Lilly in front of the restroom sign. With Lauren and Lisa it’s kind of the same thing. Except here, it’s “Hi Aunt Lisa” on the slide. Then “Hi Aunt Lisa” in the car. Then “Hi Aunt Lisa” at the grocery store. Then “Hi Aunt Lisa” in no place special except for the fact that Allison is just being really cooperative with the camera this time around.

I’d get mad, but it really is very cute, the two of them. They think it’s the pictures of their kids that are adorable, but really, it’s the two of them who are just so precious. Like little boy-crazy girls with technology. Can’t wait to see our next wireless bill.

Jack, no George, no Frederick, no Sue, no...

I took the day off today and spent the whole day with Allison. Around lunchtime we went down to visit Lauren at the birth center. On Thursdays they have a sort of "Mommy-and-Me" get together and the place was filled with moms and their babies. While we all sat around talking, there was one mom there who had just had her baby about two weeks earlier. And apparently, she still hadn't named him yet. The kid is two weeks old and still has no name!

This is hardly an unusual occurrence. In her years as a labor-delivery nurse, and now as a midwife, Lauren has come across I'd say at least a dozen couples who, by the time they leave the hospital, or even by the time they come in for their TWO WEEK checkup, still haven't been able to come up with or agree on a name. How does that happen? Seriously, how? Believe me, I understand the dilemma that comes with picking out baby names. Lauren and I started brainstorming names before we were even married. It took forever to agree on one we both liked. But even then, that wasn't the end of it. A lot of times, I'd be crazy about a name which Lauren was opposed to. After months of bringing the name back up again, she would finally start to come around to liking it... right about the time I decided, you know what, that's actually kind of a dumb name. Boys names were (are) the worst. We've got all our girls names picked out one after the other until one of us goes either barren or senile. But after nearly 6 years of discussions, we still haven't found a single boys name that we both liked consistently, and at the same time, for more than a month or two.

So yes, I get the hardship that comes with picking out your kids' names. After all, this is a decision that will be with them for their entire lives. But to not have a name picked out by the time your kid is born, much less two weeks AFTERWARD! It's not like it was a surprise that the kid was coming and would need a name. I mean, you had at least... let's say seven months from the point when you first figured out you were pregnant. You're telling me in all that time you didn't spend a little time thinking about what you might name this kid? That's kind of like putting off writing your doctoral dissertation until the night before it's due isn't it? Or really, it's like handing it in TWO WEEKS LATE.

So as of now, this poor kid still doesn't have a name. What do you call a kid - your kid - for two weeks if you haven't named him. The birth certificate and hospital papers can just say "Baby Boy" but geez, can two parents coo that informally over their own son?

Can somebody who has gone through this little dilemma personally please explain it all to me? Because I just don't get it.

Going WHAT?

I was listening to a stand up comedian the other day and in one of his bits he said something to the tune of how we should send postal workers into dangerous situations like Iraq and whatnot, because they would have the crazy violent ability to straighten everything out. I laughed and so did the audience, but what amazed me was that that joke is still funny. Can anybody remember the last time you heard somebody use the words, “Going Postal”? I mean actually said those words. Honestly, the last time I heard them used was in the movie One Night at McCool’s which was made in 2000. So it’s been six years. And it's probably been way longer since I heard an actual real person say it.

Does anybody remember how that phrase originated? Of course you do. If you were of a conscious age in the early nineties, you remember a string of incidents where disgruntled postal workers were coming into the post office and shooting up their co-workers. It was kind of funny in a sick way. The whole idea that delivering the mail was such a stressful job that it was causing people to freak out and snap.

Here’s the weird thing about it though. Although here and there throughout the past several decades there have been several random post office shootings, the phrase “Going Postal” was set off somewhere around 1993 because over the course of several months there happened to be a string of post office shootings all in a row. In fact, in May of that year there were two seperate post office shootings on the same day - one in California, one in Michigan. I honestly don’t remember how many shootings there were total that year. It was probably only 3 or 4, tops. Just enough for people to notice the pattern and start talking about it. But once it came into the limelight, and really, once people started using the term “Going Postal” the shootings stopped. I honestly cannot remember hearing about a single post office shooting since people started using “Going Postal” in everyday conversation. I guess the post office finally wised up and started treating their employees better.

So why the longevity of the term? Or at least why the continuing mentality that postal workers are unstable? In addition to the comedy routine I heard the other day, I can remember a scene in the 2001 movie The Mexican starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts where a side character makes the comment, “Guns don’t kill people… postal workers do.” What is it about that particular series of events in the early 90's that struck such a chord with us that after ten years it's still so funny? Honestly, even though I haven’t actually heard anybody use the term “Going Postal” in a long time, I don’t think it would strike me as odd or out of place if I did hear it. It’s that ingrained in my vocabulary from the past decade.

What about the next generation? Do teenagers know what “Going Postal” means? And if they do, do they know why it means that? I’d be curious to find out.

And I Used to Watch Rambo at 8

I took Allison to the park the other day and while we were there another father showed up with his five-year-old son. The kid was your typically rambunctious boy - loud, excited, lots of energy. He'd brought with him to the park a toy gun. A very realistic looking toy gun. Like the kind that could get you accidentally killed by the police in the wrong situation. I was surprised they made those anymore. Don't toy guns have to be painted bright green or something now?

I know all about playing guns when you're a kid. My sister and I used to play a game we called "Spies" which was essentially just hide and seek with guns. And I really hate the way the pansy-girl ex-hippies have tried to ruin good harmless pretend violence. I hate how as soon as a kid uses his finger as a gun and pretends to shoot his friend in school, all of a sudden people freak out, call the principal, put the kid in counseling. I personally think we're setting ourselves up for more disaster by NOT allowing kids to get out their aggressions in a playful manor.

But when this kid started pointing his play gun at me and Allison and making loud "POW POW" sounds, I'll admit, something inside me said, "This is wrong." And it didn't stop there. The kid started shouting, "Better watch out or I'll shoot you. Watch out or I'll kill you." Mind you, he was laughing the entire time. There was certainly no malicious intent behind his words. He was just playing. And I KNEW he was just playing. I was even playing back at him, pretending to be hit by a bullet when he shot me. But even so, something rubbed me very wrong about this whole situation. Especially when he ran up to other random kids and started shooting THEM.

Why did I feel that way? Have I allowed the patty-cake liberal movement of the 1990’s to infect me? Or was there something truly unique about this particular situation? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of the fact that I didn’t know this kid. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know Allison. He didn’t know any of the kids he was shooting at. I guess when I was a kid I never pretended to shoot anybody a) who I didn’t know and b) who didn’t know for certain that this was a game and they could shoot me back. We never said, “I just killed you,” to random strangers, even as we said it constantly to each other, to our friends and siblings. Maybe that’s the difference.

Man, I HOPE that’s the difference. Otherwise who knows what other core values I may have gradually turned over to the creampuff bourgeois in the last 15 years?