Random Reflections and Rambling Ruminations

The Emergency Room

2012-01-22T13:22:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, for the first time in I have no idea how long, I decided to get on my stationary exercise bike. I won't go into all the reasons I hadn't been on it for so long, but if you've read some of the things I've written here, like this post, you can probably guess that they were illness-related.

But I've been feeling pretty good lately, so I thought I'd spend an easy half hour on the bike -- nothing intense, just some leisurely pedaling in front of a television. I was a little achy when I was through, but that didn't worry me. After not doing any kind of exercise for so long, I figured anyone would be a little achy and that I'd feel better in the morning.

I actually felt a little worse in the morning, but not so bad that I couldn't go to work. But just to be on the safe side, I brought my cane in case I needed it later.

I don't know what it was -- maybe all the long stretches of sitting -- but each time I stood up, I felt a little worse until I was in so much pain that I couldn't think, which is basically what I get paid to do. So I decided to go home, but I could barely walk either, and when I finally got to my car, I found that it was sort of hard to drive as well. I could move my foot back and forth between the gas pedal and the brake pedal, but since the brake pedal is just a tiny bit closer to the foot than the gas pedal, I had to lift my foot a little each time I needed to brake, and that was sort of painful.

If I were a wiser man, I probably would've had someone drive me home, but I managed to get home in one piece, and my car managed to get home in another piece, so between the two of us, we managed to get home in two pieces, which is exactly the way it should be.

But once I got home, I couldn't find a comfortable position. I couldn't stand, I couldn't sit, and I couldn't lie down without feeling intense pain. So I took some ibuprofen and I took a few Vicodin tablets that were left over from the last time I hurt my back, but they didn't do any good. For the record, I don't think Vicodin works on me at all. The last time I had some, I finished off most of the bottle and it didn't relieve the pain even the tiniest little bit. But you always used to hear about some celebrity or another who became addicted to Vicodin, which I could never understand until I decided that Vicodin probably only works on the rich and famous. That's my theory at least.

Anyway, I didn't look forward to the prospect of driving to the emergency room, especially since it entailed parking the car in a huge lot, from which the actual emergency room is a rather long walk. (To be fair, it's not that long a walk, but when you can barely take one step, any walk seems like a long walk.) But I needed medical attention that night, so I figured I'd better call an ambulance.

But I wasn't sure about how to do that. I knew I could call 911, but this wasn't an emergency, technically speaking -- it's not like my house was on fire or I was being attacked by rabid dogs. I figured I could get some paramedics to come over to the house, and maybe they could treat me right there with some pain killers, but I couldn't find "Paramedics" in the phone book.

So I called the local police department and asked them what to do. They told me I should call 911. "Even if it's not an emergency?" I asked and they said yes. So I called 911 and they asked me what was the nature of my emergency. I told them it wasn't really an emergency and then I explained the situation to them. They told me they'd notify the fire department, who would have an ambulance at my house in a few minutes.

A few minutes later I heard sirens blaring loudly in the night and a few seconds later the ambulance was at my house, along with a huge fire truck and some other very large vehicle. I guess it's standard procedure to send a fire truck, some other huge vehicle, and an ambulance -- all with sirens blaring -- when you report a non-emergency, but it was a little embarrassing for me, especially since I try to keep a low profile.

I'd left the door unlocked so they came into the house, picking me up and putting me on a gurney. It seemed like more and more people came into the house, even after I was on the gurney, and one of them was asking me all sorts of questions.

The only one I remember is, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much pain are you feeling right now?" I told him 9, since even though I was in a lot of pain, there were times when I've been in a lot more pain.

The next thing I knew they were wheeling me out of the house and into the ambulance, and about 15 minutes later I was in the emergency room.

Now, here's something you may not know. I'd heard it before and accepted it as true, but had never had the chance to verify it. If you drive to the emergency room, no matter how sick you are, you have to sit in the waiting room and fill out forms while you wait for your name to be called. But if you arrive by ambulance, they wheel you right into the emergency room with no waiting whatsoever. Once inside, though, I did have to wait a few minutes, because all the beds were filled, but fortunately I'd found a somewhat comfortable position on the gurney.

While I was waiting, somebody asked me the same "On a scale of one to ten" question, word for word the way the last person asked it. But this time I had a difficult time answering it. I said, "Well, right now, I don't feel all that bad because I'm in a somewhat comfortable position, but when I called the ambulance it was about 9."

Anyway, it feels like I'm taking way too long telling this story, so I'll just cover the highlights: When I met the doctor, she decided to give me an IV cocktail of morphine, Valium, and Vicodin. (At least that's what I think was in it. I'm sure about the morphine, but I've pretty much forgotten what the other ingredients were. It doesn't really matter. The important part was the morphine.) The IV didn't seem to do much for me, though, because when they wheeled me into another room to get an x-ray, I had to slide off the gurney and onto the x-ray table, which was a semi-major ordeal. After they wheeled me back to my room and the doctor told me my x-ray didn't show anything abnormal, she asked me how I felt and I told her about the same. So she gave me another IV. That one seemed to do the trick. She let me rest for a while, but I knew I'd have to find a way home, so I called a friend of mine, told her I was in the emergency room, and asked her if she could give me a ride home. (I don't know why that idea didn't occur to me when I needed a ride to the emergency room -- possibly because I was in so much pain that I couldn't think.) After a while, the doctor decided to write me a couple of prescriptions and discharge me, but before she did, she asked if I wanted another IV. I told her I didn't think I needed one, but she decided to give me one anyway and I couldn't think of any reason to object. When I was discharged, my friend was already waiting for me. I was groggy but feeling no pain, so walking to her car was no problem.

When I got home, I looked at the prescriptions. There was one for Vicodin and one for Valium, but nothing for morphine.

The drugs wore off by the time I woke up the next day, so I could feel some pain again, but I've been improving day by day and I think I'll be back to normal soon. I've been walking with a cane, but that's mostly to warn people to steer clear of me -- I seem to rely on it less and less.

But last week, I had an appointment with a different doctor for a different condition, and she asked me about the cane. I told her "This is proof that exercise is bad for you" and she agreed. At the time, I thought she understood I was just being wry and sardonic, but over the last few days, it's occurred to me that maybe she thought I was being serious.

Alexander

2011-09-17T11:44:00.000-07:00

A friend for Apajala, perhaps:

Alexander Not-Culvert II was the middle child and only son of Dorothea Not and Alexander Culvert I. Although his parents had always addressed him as Alexander, he was known to his friends and classmates variously as Alex, Lex, Xander, Axle, or sometimes simply Al.

He was raised in the northern provinces of Hordovan One and Two, where for generations his family had been engaged in the profitable venture of legume farming. Prominent among their crops were the ankle nut, the redstone nut, the northern wood-leaf nut, the tea nut, the finger nut, and the two-horned pea.

It was anticipated that Alexander would carry on the Culvert tradition, even though he had no particular interest in—nor any recognizable aptitude for—any aspect of legume farming. After completing his mandatory education, he moved to the village of Milton by the Lake and enrolled in college, choosing to dedicate his academic career to the study of pseudo-science and revisionist history.

Plagued by scandal throughout his undergraduate years, Alexander was encouraged by college administrators and counselors to withdraw from the university and forge a path better suited to his needs.

As a young man with no certificate or diploma, Alexander went from one job to another, trying his hand at various trades and occupations. He eventually discovered his gift for the culinary arts, and diligently pursued a level-three degree in High-Temperature Cookery, the studies and lab work for which he completed in record time.

He quickly found work as an outdoor barbecuist, and sometime later discovered he had a natural talent for performing emergency appendectomies, tracheotomies, and other minor life-saving procedures, making him invaluable and highly sought after during times of neighborhood calamity. He found the work rewarding, and continued it as a hobby throughout his cooking career, but as a man who relished his privacy, he was markedly unenthusiastic about the attention it sometimes brought him.

The Summer House in my Backyard

2011-09-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

Obsessive readers of this blog may remember that back in 2005, I had a new garage built in my front yard, because the old garage, which was in my backyard, was too difficult to get to. It had a long narrow driveway with a slight curve around the house, and it seemed like it would be impossible to back out of the garage without bumping into something. So I never even tried.

Six years later, I'm still very happy with the new garage. In all the time I've used it, I've never bumped into anything. But there is, of course, a problem.

Actually, let's not call it a problem. Let's call it a puzzle instead. The puzzle can be posed as a question, like, "Now that I have a garage in front of my house, what should I do with the garage in back of my house?" It's an easy question to ask, but it can be answered many different ways. For the past six years, I didn't answer it at all. I just continued to use the old garage as I've always used it: as a storage area and workshop. But in the back of my mind I always knew I would eventually turn it into living space.

It seems like most things in the back of my mind just end up dying there, but every now and then, one of them makes it to the front of my mind. And that's how I decided to finally turn the garage into living space. But as far as the answer to the puzzle goes, I still haven't settled on an answer.

I told you all that as sort of an introduction to the current state of the project and all the setbacks and delays I've experienced so far. That part of the story is longer and more interesting than the introduction, but to be honest, I've told it so many times that I don't feel like going over it all again. Suffice it to say that what started out to be a simple (and relatively inexpensive) project has just about quadrupled in price. So what started out as an inexpensive way to add 400 square feet of living space turned into a reasonably priced way to add 400 square feet of living space. But it didn't stop there because at this point, it seems like a sort of expensive way to add 400 feet of living space. I should also mention that the project was originally scheduled to take about five weeks to complete, but it's been a couple of months so far and there's no scheduled end in sight.

It's actually not a big deal, because I've done enough work on the house in the past to expect it to always cost more and take longer than I estimated. Even when I used to do a lot of the work myself, it ended up taking more time, and sometimes more money.

But the funny thing is that I have no need for more living space. Absolutely none. And it's not like I'm that desperate to spend a ton of money either. So sometimes I get a little embarrassed when people ask me how I'm going to use that space and I have to tell them I don't know. Sometimes it even seems pathetic. I can imagine some people getting really excited about a project like this and they can't wait until it's finished so they can start using it. That's not me at all.

For some reason, the architect decided to call it a game room, so that's what it says on the plans (as well as on the permits and the county tax records), but I have no plans of playing any games there. I was going to call it a study, but I'm not planning on studying anything there either, so for a while I decided to call it a studio. It would actually be a pretty great studio, and if I still had any artistic inclinations like I did in my 20s and 30s, it would be a great space to use. I might even be a tiny bit excited about using it.

But those were different times. Now I half-jokingly call it my summer house, and there are a couple of good reasons for that. One reason is that I think of a summer house as a metaphor for something expensive and unnecessary. The other reason is that it'll be better-insulated than the rest of the house since I had to bring it up to 2011 building codes, I bought an efficient air conditioner for it, and since it's only one room, it will get good ventilation. Besides, as far as I know (and admittedly, this isn't very far), there's no law saying your summer house can't be in your backyard, less than 10 feet away from your real house.

The only problem is there's no plumbing. I'm not saying there won't be some day, but at this point, plumbing isn't in the plans. The city has a lot restrictions determining what you can put into a detached structure, and I didn't want to have to deal with them about their plumbing rules. The other thing is, I figure it'll cost me another ton of money, bringing the cost of the project to two tons, and I can't afford that at the moment. (As a side note, I'm keeping the old slab floor -- even though it has a crack in it -- until I put in some plumbing. There's no point in pouring a new slab just to break it up later.)

But even if I could afford to add plumbing, two tons is a lot to spend on a structure I don't even need. Even one ton is pretty hard to justify, since it already feels like I'm flushing money down the toilet (figuratively speaking, of course, since there will be no actual toilet unless and until I decide to put in some plumbing).

Oh by the way, please don't tell me I could put in some plumbing, then rent the place and offset the construction costs with the rental income. It's a great idea, but I've already thought of it. I'm not saying I've considered the idea and rejected it -- I'm just saying don't suggest it to me. If you do, you'll be forcing me to post another blog entry listing all the pros and cons. And that's not something I want to do.

So that's it. I'm spending a lot of money to build something I don't really need. The only way I can justify it is by arguing that even though I don't need it, the house needs it. If that doesn't make any sense to you, it's probably because you never wanted to be an architect when you were a kid, and even though you thought that dream died a long time ago, traces of it still force you to pick up a pencil every now and then so you can sketch out an idea for a floor plan or roof line or something like that.

And if you're wondering why I'm only "half-jokingly" calling it a summer house, there are a few reasons for that, but the most important one is probably that it's not funny enough to be a full joke.

Glitch in the Grid

2011-09-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

Glitch in the Grid is the latest film from Eric Leiser. Like its predecessor Imagination, it combines live action and stop-frame animation to create a what Leiser calls a "personal, magical realist film."

The magical realism isn't as strong in Glitch in the Grid as it was in Imagination -- as a matter of fact, despite the director's assertion, the overall tone of Glitch in the Grid is more "home movie realism" with scattered bits of Christian symbolism.

Leiser describes his film as being "between documentary and fiction." I don't know how fictitious the fictional parts are, or even which parts are fictional, but since Eric, Jeff, and Jay -- the three main characters in the film -- are played by Eric Leiser, his brother and composer/sound editor/sound mixer Jeffrey Leiser, and their cousin Jay Masonek, the film does have a documentary feel. Unfortunately, as I already hinted at, the film sometimes crosses the border between documentary and home movie. And if you're not sure where that border is, when things start to seem a little bit too self-indulgent, it probably means you're in home movie territory.

However, I liked the idea of Eric, Jeff, and Jay acting as (possibly fictionalized versions of) themselves, since it gave a sense of honesty and truth to the film. It didn't feel like anyone was acting. (In my opinion, the biggest flaw of Imagination was that a lot of the acting was amateurish to the point of being distracting. That is not a problem with Glitch in the Grid.)

From a cinematic standpoint, Glitch in the Grid is a well-made film. The animation was creative and inventive and a pleasure to watch, the music was engaging and well-suited to the film, and the cinematography seemed fluid and effortless, making the overall experience of watching Glitch in the Grid a positive one.

But watching a film is one thing, understanding it is another.

Before I continue with my review, I'm going to cheat a little and quote in its entirety the synopsis included in the press materials:

Jay Masonek is feeling down and out. Although he is a talented artist, Jay has seldom left his small town in Northern California. One day, Jay's cousins Jeff and Eric (who are also artists) visit from LA. They offer Jay the opportunity to come live with them for a period of time in Hollywood. Hoping to cheer him up, the brothers show Jay the city and take him to film castings, even though it's during the economic recession and jobs are scarce. Jay soon begins to feel the oppression of what he describes as "the grid", heightening his spiritual crises. In his desperation, Jay reaches out to God, who in the form of a dove directs and leads him toward hope and renewal. Eventually, Jay returns to his small town, where he find a “green job” in the California redwood forest. Meanwhile, Eric and Jeff pursue relationships in New York and England. At Eric’s wedding, the three come together again. Although he still feels alone, Jay, through a powerful moment, makes the biggest decision of his life.

Now that we know what the film is about, the question is, how successful is Leiser in conveying it to the viewer?

I don't believe it was a great success. The narrative is much less enigmatic than in Imagination, but unless you know in advance what the movie was about, or unless your mind works in the same way as Leiser's -- it's a challenge trying to extract all the meaning that Leiser imbued it with. I don't like things spelled out for me, but for a movie that strives to deliver a message, a little bit of spelling would have been helpful.

The main story arc centers on Jay, who as a young adult has yet to find himself. He spends a lot of time skateboarding and making more sophisticated versions of the sort of drawings high school kids doodle in their notebooks when the class gets too boring. He wants to be an artist but it's tough finding work and Jay doesn't really seem willing to leave his childhood behind.

A lot of the movie consists of Jay talking about his life, and in his discussions with Eric and Jeff, we find that no one really has anything insightful to say. That's not to imply they don't have anything important to say -- it's just that everything said or implied in their conversations has already been said by millions of other people as they realize they've entered adulthood without any real understanding yet of what it means to be an adult.

I suppose my biggest problem with the film is that it requires too much interpretation. Maybe this was deliberate and maybe it wasn't, but as a result I got the feeling that there was a message buried in there somewhere but I didn't know how to dig it out.

For example, to cite a part of the film that's briefly mentioned in the synopsis, at one point we see Jay in a redwood forest as part of a group learning how to make trails and uproot iceplant and other invasive species, learning about the native wildlife, and in general learning about the ecology of the forest. He seems content with this work, but I don't know why this scene is in the film. It's not a bad scene -- I just can't figure out its relevance to the story arc.

My guess (and it really is just a guess) is that it's supposed to signify that Jay is happy now that he's found something meaningful to do, something that gives his life purpose, something that grounds him. But if that's the message, it was all but lost on me. All I saw was someone drifting through life who came to land upon a job working with the Ecology Youth Corps. There's no indication that this is anything more than a temporary job for Jay, that it's more than something to just keep him occupied for a while. He doesn't seem excited or even particularly interested in it, and if he had drifted to another job a day or two later, it wouldn't have surprised me. At the scene's end, we do see him looking up toward the sky, and we soon see the animated dove flying through the forest, so the symbolism isn't lost on us. But if his job has any meaning or importance to Jay, it's not at all clear what that meaning is.

For that matter, nothing about Jay's character is particularly revealing. I saw nothing that looked even remotely like despair or suffering through a spiritual crisis in Jay's behavior, and the only sense I had that he felt oppressed in any way came from the fact that he couldn't find work as an artist. But even if he had come right out and said, "I'm suffering from a profound sense of oppression and despair, and I'm having a spiritual crisis that's made me so confused that I don't even know who I am anymore," I probably wouldn't have believed him, because there's never any expression in his voice. The words sometimes come out, but his feelings and emotions always remain inside him.

To be fair, Jay does tell us that he's not the type of person who vocalizes a lot of the thoughts he has, that he does a lot of quiet soul-searching and has always had an off-and-on struggle to reconcile what the material world offers with what his spiritual purpose is on earth is. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that -- the only problem is that people who think a lot but don't often express themselves don't always make the best movie characters or documentary subjects.

Some of the other scenes didn't add much to the movie either -- it just seemed like Leiser thought they'd be interesting for the audience to watch. For example, there's a scene of Jay and a friend painting colorful images on a car, and making small talk that eventually leads into Jay improvising a song. They eventually drive off in the car, but the scene goes nowhere. In most films I would call a scene like this "filler" -- in a documentary I would call it self-indulgence.

Ultimately, the film is not mysterious enough to be enigmatic and it's not obvious enough to be straightforward. If it were more enigmatic, it might have been more engaging to the viewer (like Imagination was), and if it were more straightforward, it might have been less frustrating to watch. Instead, it relies on the viewer to interpret things the way the writer intended, which is not always easy. A good example is in one of the final scenes: Does it show Jay reconnecting with his family and finding the comfort and strength that a family can bring, or is he merely helping someone walk downstairs? I'd like to believe it's the former, but there was nothing other than my imagination to suggest this, and since the scene looked so much like home movie footage, I didn't feel compelled to look for any deeper meanings.

Glitch in the Grid is a very personal movie, and personal movies can sometimes be emotionally powerful, but like the pages of a journal, they can sometimes be a lot more interesting to the writer than to anyone else.

Body Modification and Predictions about the Future

2011-05-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I was talking to some guy and somehow we got on the subject of the younger generation. It didn't take me too long to realize his attitude was a lot different from mine. His attitude was pretty much "Kids today don't know anything" while my attitude was more like "These kids will kill you and eat you."

When we got to the subject of tattoos and body piercings, he recited the familiar trope that when these kids go out into the real world, the only jobs they'll be able to get are the ones where they ask, "Do you want fries with that?" First of all, I didn't think that was a very clever remark the first time I heard it, and by the time this guy said it, I thought it was even less clever. So I couldn't give him any points for originality. But secondly, I didn't even agree with him.

I told him that as more people get tattooed and pierced, it will become more socially acceptable, and more people will do it at an earlier age. So by the time they enter the job market, such body modifications won't seem the least bit strange or off-putting. If you're a college graduate with tattoos up and down your arms, and the guy in his mid-thirties who's interviewing you happens to have a few tattoos as well, it might even work in your favor. As a matter of fact, you might have the advantage over another applicant who doesn't have any tattoos.

Does that sound far-fetched? I don't know. It seems possible to me. I'm not very good at predicting the future, though, so the best I can do is hope that my lack of tattoos and piercings will never put me at a disadvantage.

Okay, here's another idea related to body modification. I remember when women who got plastic surgery generally didn't want to admit it. I guess the idea was they wanted people to think they looked that way naturally, and didn't need a surgeon to make them look good. For that matter, women used to be equally coy about whether or not they died their hair.

But look how things have changed since then. Not only do women not hide their surgical attempts at looking good -- some of them actually brag about them. They talk about what procedures they've had, and what procedures they're thinking about getting. And men are slowly becoming just as bad.

So here's the idea. As more and more people have plastic surgery, it will eventually become the norm, so the people who haven't had plastic surgery will be regarded as oddities or freaks. That's bad, but what's even worse is that those of us who are naturally good-looking will have a difficult time convincing others that we never resorted to surgical means. I dread being told, "You couldn't possibly look this good on your own! You must have had something done!" My only hope is that in the future, I won't be as handsome as I am today.

Okay, I may have been stretching things a little, perhaps especially in regard to my own physical appearance, but my prediction is still very plausible. As a matter of fact, I think I've actually understated what things will really be like, because I didn't mention how popular liposuction, bariatric surgery, and other means to turn fat people into lean ones will become. As these procedures improve, or are supplanted with safer and more effective procedures, they'll become commonplace, and perhaps even de rigueur.

My final thought today doesn't have anything to do with body modification, but because it's a prediction about the future, I'll include it here for your consideration.

You've probably heard that in Shakespeare's time, there was no standardized spelling. Most people were illiterate so they didn't even write things, but those who did (William Shakespeare, for example) just spelled things in a way that made the most sense to them. The commonly-held belief is that standardized spelling was a result of the printing press, because it centralized the publication of news and literature. As a side note, television and movies are credited with having a similar effect. Although television networks may have started in New York city, as the medium became increasingly popular a lot of broadcasting was done in Los Angeles. This, combined with the fact that all the movie studios were in Los Angeles, is responsible for the West coast accent becoming so predominant and why all the people in the United States who use a different accent sound like they talk funny.

But let's get back to the printing press. Or, more specifically, the centralization of publishing. Or, more accurately, the decentralization of publishing. It's been going on for a while, but publishing at the present time is very decentralized. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can create a web site and publish whatever he wants to his heart's content. And I'm all for that because, let's face it, who doesn't want to read a bunch of nonsense endlessly spewed out by halfwit morons?

But I'm not going to focus on the content of such web sites -- I'm going to focus on the spelling, because I believe that just as the centralization of publishing led us to a standardization of spelling, the decentralization is leading us away from such a standard. This isn't just a theory, by the way. I've seen some of the same words misspelled on different web sites and I believe some of these will eventually be accepted as acceptable spellings. This isn't really anything new, since language changes all the time, and it usually changes when a lot of people make the same mistakes over and over until the mistakes are no longer considered mistakes. Consider the words yogurt and donut, for example. But in the past, the new way of spelling something eventually replaced the old way, whereas today, the old way and new way will probably coexist, as long as the people who know how to spell have as many web sites as the people who don't.

Okay, that's all I have to say on this matter. As a matter of fact, it's more than I have to say on the matter. All I really had was that one sentence about how decentralized publishing will lead us away from standardized spelling. I should have quit there, because after that it started to get sort of boring. So there it is. Unfortunately, I don't have a clever remark to end with, so I'll just wrap things up by warning you not to be too surprised if in the future, everyone has plastic surgery and tattoos and nobody knows how to spell.

I Had a Dream

2011-05-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting dream the other night. I probably have interesting dreams every night, but I don't always remember them when I wake up. Sometimes I think that the more interesting the dream is, the more likely I am to remember it the next morning. It's an appealing and reasonable explanation, but it may not be the right one, especially considering that the dream I had the other night wasn't actually that interesting after all.

I dreamed I was staying in a house that wasn't my own, and it was located in a place I'd never been to before. There were a lot of other people in the house, and they were all visitors there as well. I remember that the room I was staying in -- and for that matter, the entire house -- was decorated in a style that I would have never chosen myself.

I didn't really know most of the other people in the house. I knew one woman, but she wasn't in the house. She may not have even been in the dream. But she had a pet mouse that for some reason liked to stay in my room.

Like all mice, it was very cute. It was also very tiny and it squeaked a lot. At some point, and for some reason -- possibly to muffle its squeaks, or possibly to keep it safe from being accidentally stepped on -- I placed the mouse inside the mouth of a flexible plastic toy animal and zipped the mouth shut.

I took the plastic animal downstairs with me, and whenever people heard it squeak, they'd come over to me and ask what was inside. So I'd unzip the mouth a little and they'd see the mouse inside and say, "What a tiny little mouse! It's so cute!"

I went from one room to another, trying to ignore the interior décor, and encountering different people in each room. Some people I didn't know at all, and some people I knew only vaguely, but they all had the same reaction to the mouse: "What a tiny little mouse! It's so cute!

The mouse was cute. There's no denying that. It was mostly white with some more-or-less symmetrical white-brown patches on its sides. It had a cute little face too, much more expressive than the faces on the mice you see in real life. And, of course, the fact that it was so tiny made it even cuter.

I remember showing the mouse to some guy I may have been related to, and then walking into another room and showing it to someone else. "It's so tiny!" she told me. "I know," I said. "Isn't it cute?"

Intelligent Design

2011-04-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

I was all set to write about Intelligent Design today, but before sitting down to start typing, I decided to eat a mango. I really like mangoes. As a matter of fact, I like a lot of tropical fruits, such as papayas and coconuts. I also like the look of tropical plants, and if I had an aquarium, I'd probably fill it with tropical fish. I don't think I'd like the weather, though -- I've never been too big on oppressive humidity and hurricanes.

But as much as I like mangoes, I don't eat them very often, because I've never been able to figure out how. They've got a peel on the outside and a big flat seed in the middle, so if you try cutting them in half with a sharp knife, all you'll end up with is a mango with a cut all around the perimeter.

At that point, I'll usually try something like twisting one half of the mango off the seed. It never works, but it's the only thing I know how to do. What happens is that some most of the mango will stick to the seed and the rest will stick to the peel. The only thing to do next is to scrape the mango from the peel with your teeth, and then gnaw the rest of the mango from the seed. Then when you're done with that, you do the same thing for the other half.

It's kind of a messy job, but it's worth the effort because mangoes are so good. I can't help thinking I'm eating like some wild animal, though, like maybe a raccoon or something. And that's why I believe there's no good way for a human to eat a mango.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk a little about Intelligent Design. It gets attacked for all sorts of reasons, such as being a religious belief pretending to be science, but that's not why I don't believe in it. And it's not because I'm an atheist or anything like that. My reason is much more fundamental.

About a year ago, I was seeing a physical therapist about my bad back. He always told me that my hamstring muscles were too short, which was contributing to my lower back problems for some reason. I don't remember the reason exactly -- all I remember is that it makes me take shorter steps than I should, which is somehow bad for my back. But here's the thing: I'm a little taller than average -- about 6'0" or 6'1", depending on my mood -- and my therapist was telling me that taller people have a tendency to have disproportionately short hamstrings. That didn't make any sense to me so I told him, "So much for Intelligent Design."

And that little story pretty much illustrates why I don't believe in Intelligent Design: We're not designed very intelligently.

Oh, we're pretty cool, there's no doubt about that. I like how if I get cut and start to bleed, the blood will coagulate and the flesh will heal, usually without even leaving a scar. It's not as cool as automatically growing a new arm if our old one breaks off, the way a lizard can do with its tail, but at least we've got bones that, if broken, will eventually fuse back together.

We're also designed sort of efficiently in some ways. A lot of our organs have two purposes. I can think of the ears, the mouth, the genitals, and the nose, right off the top of my head. There are probably others. Having an organ for one specific purpose seems sort of ad hoc, so having multiple functions is pretty clever. And the mouth actually has at least three -- it can be used for eating, talking, and even breathing when the nose is unavailable. And I'm not even mentioning all the lesser functions, such as kissing and glass-blowing.

But these multi-function organs can be a curse as well as a blessing. For example, you can't talk while you're eating without sounding incomprehensible or having food fall out of your mouth. If we had two dedicated organs, this wouldn't be a problem. If you were really hungry and also had a lot to say, you could satisfy both of those needs simultaneously. But with only one organ responsible for eating and talking, you're out of luck.

And that's not even the worst of it. Another reason I don't think we're very intelligently designed is that sometimes we get injuries that can't be healed, such as, in my case, a bad back caused by a few herniated discs in the lumbar region of my spine. There are other incurable conditions as well, and if you've read this blog before, you know that I have a couple of them. I just don't see what's so intelligent about susceptibility to fatal diseases.

But even if humans never got sick and were physically invulnerable to severe permanently life-altering accidents, I still wouldn't think we were all that well thought out, at least not compared to some of the other creatures on the planet. We can't breathe underwater like fish, and we can't fly like birds. We can't hear as well as dogs and cats, and we can't track other animals by scent. Childbirth for women can be difficult and painful, whereas for most other living things, it doesn't seem like that big a deal. We can't change our color like chameleons and some types of octopuses, and we can't jump from tree to tree like a bush baby. For that matter, we can't even eat a mango without a sharp knife, and even then the results aren't very pretty.

The Super Bowl

2011-02-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

Well, last Sunday was the Super Bowl and on that Sunday and every Sunday before it, I somehow managed not to watch the Super Bowl. It's not that I'm against football or professional sports or anything like that; I'm just not that into sports -- either playing them or watching them being played.

But having said that, I'll say this as well: Based on previous experiences, I know that if If I did watch the Super Bowl, I'd probably enjoy it. That's because I'm just as susceptible to mob mentality behavior as anyone else. We all are. It goes back to our caveman days, or maybe even before that.

But even though I don't think I've ever watched a Super Bowl, I used to love Super Bowl Sundays. Back when I used to be a semi-avid bicyclist, I realized it was the greatest day in the entire year for a bike ride. That's because nobody was in their cars and the streets were practically empty -- everyone was sitting at home on their fat lazy asses guzzling cheap beer and shoveling mounds of junk food into their gaping maws.

Okay, that's such an exaggeration that it's almost not worth counting all the ways I deliberately maligned everyone who watches the Super Bowl. Obviously, I did it for humorous effect and not to denigrate all the people who watch the Super Bowl. But I'll count all the ways anyway.

To begin with, I know for a fact that they don't all have fat lazy asses. And for that matter, even though an ass can be fat -- and many of them are -- an ass can not be lazy. It's a small matter though, since we recognize that the term "lazy ass" is an example of synecdoche, and we therefore understand the sentence "Get your lazy ass out of bed!" for example, to mean get out of bed.

Secondly, "guzzling" may be an overstatement in many cases. Also, I have no way of determining the quality of the beer -- or for that matter, any other beverage -- that people drink while watching the Super Bowl.

Next, to my knowledge, nobody actually shovels mounds of food into their mouths, be it junk food or any other variety. As far as I know, no one has ever made a shovel small enough to fit into the human mouth. The closest thing to it would be a large spoon, I suppose, or possibly a ladle.

And finally, the term "gaping maw" is just plain insulting.

But ignoring the hyperbole for a moment, it is true that people tend to eat a lot while watching athletic events. This, by the way, is not behavior that we can trace back to our pre-caveman days. I don't mean the pre-cavemen never watched athletic events -- I'm sure they did, since this is probably part of our genetic make-up. What I'm I'm talking about is cramming huge quantities of food down our throats and into our bellies while otherwise sitting around idly. I think this sort of idle behavior might not have even existed in our early history -- I'm not even sure laziness can exist in a society where there is constant struggle for survival.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about today, so let's start all over, from the very beginning. I didn't watch the Super Bowl game last Sunday.

When I got to work on Monday, some people were talking about the game, and one woman who said she doesn't care much for football said, "I even thought the commercials were a disappointment." And then on Tuesday, I was having lunch with a few of my co-workers and one of them asked me if I watched the game. When I told him I didn't, he asked, "Not even the commercials?"

And this brings us to what I wanted to talk about today. Unfortunately, it's not very interesting so I'll try to keep it short.

Anyway, I told the guy what I'm about to tell you. No, I didn't even watch the commercials. To watch TV in order to see the commercials goes against human nature. We're not supposed to like commercials, we're supposed to be annoyed by them. Commercials are just a way for businesses to convince us that we can't be happy until we buy something they sell, even though it's usually something we neither need nor want. The goal of a commercial is to try to make us feel bad about ourselves and then tell us that the only way we'll feel better is by buying whatever product or service the commercial is advertising. It's that simple. So why would anyone want to watch something like that?

We can't fault the advertisers, of course -- they're simply doing what they're supposed to be doing. But our natural inclination should be to resist this sort of psychological abuse -- we're not supposed to be voluntary participants in our own brainwashing.

So not only should we find commercials disappointing, we should find them manipulative and annoying and insulting. And for the most part, we do. Normally, when a commercial comes on, don't people mute it, see what's on another channel, or use the time to prepare a snack or make a quick trip to the bathroom?

I remember reading a book in high school. It was written by a guy named Vance Packard and was called The Hidden Persuaders. All I really remember from it is his assertion that commercials are deliberately written to be stupid in order to make us feel smart, so we'll let down our defenses and not resist the messages that the commercials are delivering. I don't know if that's actually true, but it would explain why most commercials are so idiotic.

So, we know commercials are bad for us, and yet we watch them anyway. And for the Super Bowl, apparently some people actually look forward to them. I don't understand it, but it doesn't really surprise me either -- especially when I see people walking around with the logos for their favorite products on their T-shirts and bumper stickers. Those people are not just passively absorbing some commercial message -- they're actually paying to advertise some corporation's product. It's bizarre. It shows how much the world is out of balance.

So no, I didn't watch the Super Bowl or any of the half-time commercials last Sunday. I saw a couple of commercials on YouTube on Monday, and one of them was supposedly the most expensive Super Bowl commercial ever made. It seemed kind of long and boring to me, though, so I thought it was a huge waste of money. And it didn't want to make me rush out and buy some ugly new car either

Curiosity and Hope

2011-02-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

They say curiosity killed the cat, but I don't think cats are actually all that curious.

I don't claim to have any particular insight into the cat mind, but if a cat is walking down the sidewalk and happens to notice an old mattress lying in the middle of an empty lot, I don't think it's going to ask itself a lot of questions like, "What's that mattress doing in that empty lot?" or "Did someone put that mattress there deliberately, and if so, why? Was it simply to dispose of an old mattress, or was there some other reason the mattress was brought here? Is there something about mattresses and empty lots that I don't understand? Is there a special purpose for either that I'm unaware of? And why is the mattress in the middle of the lot? Why wasn't it just left near the edge of the lot, which would have required a lot less effort than dragging it across the ground until it was at the approximate center? On the other hand, if bringing the mattress to this lot was not a deliberate act, then how exactly did it get there?"

I don't think the cat would ask those questions or any others. I think it would just trot over to the mattress, lie down on it, and stay there until it felt like doing something else. I don't think cats are deep thinkers. And I don't think they're particularly curious. As an old college friend once said to me, "They have brains the size of walnuts."

These aren't anti-cat remarks, by the way. I like cats just much as the next guy (unless the next guy is one of those animal hoarders they have a show about on TV). But more to the point, cats aren't unique in this regard. The same can be said of dogs, snakes, rabbits, or, for that matter, humans.

Okay, I will grant that a lot of humans are more curious than the average dog, or even more curious than the most gifted of dogs, but if you compared an average human to an average dog, I'm not sure which way the scale would tip.

However, that isn't even my point, because no matter how curious human beings are, at some point in their early lives, they don't really question a lot of things. They don't ask questions like, "Why are most rooms rectangular?" for example -- they just see that most rooms are rectangular and then use that observation in the formulation of their world view. In other words, they accept things as they are and learn to live with them, in exactly the same way that a cat would.

Here's an example from my own childhood. I went to two elementary schools when I was a kid, and architecturally they had a lot in common. I won't go into all the details, because they're totally irrelevant, but I will mention that both schools had a chain link fence that went all around the perimeter. There was a main entrance, and probably a secondary entrance, but in the first school I went to, there was also an auxiliary gate at one corner. That corner was farthest from all the buildings, and it was usually locked. I don't even know why the gate was put there, except maybe as some sort of emergency evacuation exit. But I do remember it being open a few times, and one of the things I remember is that on the concrete pad between the sidewalk and the gate, someone had carved the word HOPE in big block letters.

It's one of those things I noticed every time the gate was open, but I never thought much about it. It was just like a mattress in an empty lot to me: I saw it but I never wondered why it was there or who put it there or if it had any meaning. To me, it was just the word "HOPE" etched into concrete. I knew that someone must have written it with a stick or something sharp when the concrete was still wet, but beyond that, I never gave it any thought. I assumed it was nothing more than defacement of public property, although somewhere in the deep recesses of my unconsciousness, it probably seemed to me that "hope" was a fitting message for young elementary school students.

I never wondered anything more about it, and it never even occurred to me to talk to any of my friends about it. I probably would have eventually forgotten about it completely, except that one day, I was near the gate with a few other kids and some guy told us how it got there.

It turns out that "hope" in this case had nothing to do with optimism about a better future or anything like that. Hope was simply a girl who carved her name in the concrete a few years earlier. She used to go our school, and she had the reputation of being a bad student and a troublemaker. She might have even gotten expelled -- I don't remember.

An Uncommon Man

2010-12-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

The year is almost over, and I can't think of a better time to post my last blog entry of the year. My last post was about six months ago, and since I can't think of a better topic than the one I was writing about back then, I'll just continue with that topic today.

A while ago, I wrote on my Facebook profile that I had just been diagnosed with two more medical conditions, bringing the total up to four. I mentioned that they began with the letters A, B, C, and D, but I didn't I didn't spell out exactly what they were, so I'll do that now.

A. I keep forgetting about this one, so if I'm not thinking I'll sometimes say it's amnesia, but it's actually anemia, which I was diagnosed with in late June. My count was about half of what it's supposed to be, which meant I was pale and tired all the time. I thought I was pale because I'm a white guy who spends too much time indoors, and I thought I was tired all the time because I was waking up early to go to my physical therapy appointments for my bad back. But I ended up getting a blood transfusion, and my color and energy level eventually got back to normal.

B. This is an old condition, something I've had for about 20 years. I've got a few herniated discs in my lower back, and most of the time they don't bother me, but when they do it's sometimes so debilitating that I can't walk, or sit, or lie down, or do anything else. I don't know if there's a medical term for this condition, so I just call it a bad back.

C. This one's easy. When you think of a medical condition that begins with the letter C, what do you think of? Cystinosis? Conjunctivitis? Chondroblastoma? Chicken Pox? Maybe you do, but chances are you think of cancer instead. I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005, and if you know a little about pancreatic cancer, you know that it can be extremely aggressive, but if you know a little more about pancreatic cancer you know that there are two kinds: the aggressive adenocarcinoma (which Patrick Swayze died of not too long ago), and the much less common, much less aggressive islet cell tumor (which Steve Jobs has). As I mentioned once before, I happen to have the less aggressive type, but that's pretty much all Steve Jobs and I have in common, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that we're both male humans of roughly the same age. For example, I'm not a billionaire, I don't wear black t-shirts, I'm not an egotistical despot, and I don't own any Apple products. Of course, there's always a chance that we could have a lot more in common than either of us knows about. For example, we might have the same blood type, or maybe we both enjoy solving crossword puzzles. But getting back to the topic at hand, one of the anti-cancer drugs I was taking has a side-effect of anemia. For various reasons, I'm not taking that drug anymore, and I no longer have anemia. Maybe that's just a coincidence.

D. On the day I found out I had anemia, I also learned that I have diabetes -- type 1 diabetes, to be specific. I don't know if you know this, but you get type 1 diabetes when your pancreas is no longer able to produce insulin, and my poor little cancer-stricken pancreas can no longer cut the mustard in that regard. So I'm pretty sure I got diabetes as a result of having pancreatic cancer. Anyway, it turns out that all that weight I lost was due to my untreated diabetes.

The interesting thing (to me, at least) is that type 1 diabetes is much less common than type 2, just as islet cell tumors are much less common than adenocarcinomas. For what it's worth, I also have a very rare blood type. This is all medically insignificant, of course -- I'm only mentioning it to illustrate that where cancer, diabetes, and blood type are concerned, I am anything but common.

Okay, that's enough of that because, believe it or not, I don't really like talking about my medical health. It sort of feels like I'm violating my own privacy. But here's the thing about cancer and other incurable diseases: People are always saying stupid things like "live life to the fullest" and "live each day as if it were your last." Fortunately, nobody's ever said those things to me, but they're still pretty common sentiments. If you don't believe me, look them up on Google. I did, and here's what I got:

"Live life to the fullest." 2.6 million hits
"Live each day as if it were your last." 62.4 thousand hits
"Live each day to the fullest." 1.79 million hits

I didn't check any of the other linguistic variations on this particular theme, except for this one:
"Living life to the fullest." 306 thousand hits

So it's a popular notion, as well as a romantic one, but the reason I think it's stupid is that, unless I completely misunderstand it, it's just a meaningless platitude. I don't think you should live each day as though it were your last, unless you inhabit some weird sort of artificial reality such as the ones depicted in bad movies. If I thought each day was my last, I'd never do my laundry or clean my house or shop for groceries. And I certainly wouldn't pay any bills. I probably wouldn't even write this blog, and then what condition would the world be in?

But as I said, maybe I don't really understand this idea of living life to the fullest. Maybe you have a different understanding. If you do, you should leave a comment for this post. And if you agree with me, maybe you should also leave a comment, just to let me know I'm not alone. And if you don't have an opinion, or you have an opinion but you're not sure what it is, you should probably still consider leaving me a comment.

I invite all comments, but I know I'm just wasting my breath, because I realize that very few people actually read this blog, and those that do aren't generally inclined toward commenting on my brilliant posts. But today I generously extend the offer anyway, in the spirit of the holiday season.

But to continue with the theme of this post, instead of living life to the fullest, I think you should just take care of the things that need taking care of, and the rest of the time just enjoy yourself. If you're lucky, you'll enjoy taking care of all the things that need taking care of. If not, that's okay too.

Enjoyment is sort of a nebulous concept, of course. We all know what it means, but in practical terms, it means different things to different people, since we don't all enjoy doing the same things. So just decide what it means to you, and then do it.

But you don't have to enjoy yourself to the fullest, just do whatever you want. For example, sometimes I like to do crossword puzzles, sometimes I like to stay up late watching bad movies on cable, and sometimes I like to read the idiotic comments that people post to articles they've read online.

But while we're still on the subject of meaningless expressions, another one I don't really like is "Happy New Year." It's okay as long as you say it to someone during the first week or so of the new year, but it doesn't make sense when you say it during the last few weeks of the old year, which is when you hear it a lot.

You could argue that it's short for "Have a happy new year," but that doesn't make a lot of sense either, since the new year is only new for about a week. So when you say "Have a happy new year," you're telling someone to enjoy the upcoming year, but only while it's still new, which, as I said before, is only for about a week.

So what you should say at the end of every year is, "Have a happy next year," which this year is good all throughout 2011. Or better yet, you should tell people what I'm about to tell you: Have a happy next year, but don't bother trying to live it to the fullest because it won't make you any happier. Just do what needs to be done, and the rest of the time enjoy yourselves.

Waiting

2010-06-27T16:25:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I talked about weight, so in this post I'll talk about waiting.

I've been spending a lot of time in doctors' offices over the past few years, which means I've been spending even more time in waiting rooms.

The time I spend waiting varies from doctor to doctor, but it's usually pretty consistent for each doctor. You shouldn't really have to spend an hour in a waiting room just to see a doctor for five or ten minutes, but I don't really mind, since waiting rooms are sometimes pretty good places to catch up on your reading. Not always, though -- sometimes they're too noisy.

I'm pretty easily distracted, but I don't need absolute silence or anything like that when I'm reading. So if people want to quietly speak to each other, that's fine with me. But a lot of people are unfamiliar with this simple courtesy, so they speak in loud voices and end up making a lot of distracting noise.

As I said, this varies from one waiting room to another, so naturally I have favorites. But in most of my favorite waiting rooms I don't even try to read, since I know from previous experience that the wait won't be more than maybe ten or fifteen minutes.

I have a few herniated disks in my lower back, but most of the time they don't bother me. However, every now and then I'll do something like lift something too heavy, or lift something the wrong way, and I'll end up in severe pain. So I have a back doctor that I see once in a while. You always used to have to wait forever before seeing him, and it was a fairly quiet waiting room, which made it an ideal place to read, as long as you weren't distracted by the intense debilitating pain in your lower back. But the last time I was there, they'd added four or five widescreen TVs that constantly and repeatedly play videos advertising how highly-rated their physicians and orthopedic facilities are. The sound blaring from the speakers was so loud that I couldn't avoid it, no matter where I sat. I tried reading, but it was impossible. The next time I go there, I'll have to bring earplugs.

One of my favorite places to read has always been the outpatient cancer center at Cedars-Sinai. You can usually find a fairly quiet place -- especially now that they've done some remodeling -- which is fortunate, since this is one of the places I usually have to wait the longest. And when the nurse takes you to an examination room, you usually have a pretty long wait there as well, but it's even quieter, except for the occasional nurse who wants to take your blood pressure or your temperature or ask you a bunch of questions about your symptoms or what drugs you're taking.

But even though I just got through telling you about one of my least favorite and most favorite waiting rooms, that isn't really what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about is what I've been reading in some of these waiting rooms. I don't remember everything I read, nor do I remember the order I read them in, so they're listed here in the same order they appear in my bookshelves: alphabetical by author, then chronological by year published, except in cases where there's no room on a particular shelf, which forces me to stack some books on top of the row of books.

First, there's Paul Auster, one of my favorite writers. He's often referred to as a "postmodern" writer, but that's a pretty useless term as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, the books I read in waiting rooms are Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark, and Invisible. There was a piece on him in the New Yorker a while ago, and not a very complimentary one. The guy said that Auster's work is too formulaic. Well, sometimes it is, I suppose, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since the formula changes enough from one book to another to keep things interesting.

Then there's Roberto Bolaño, whom everyone seems to like. He was recommended to me by an old friend of mine who also happens to teach poetry at the university level, and even though his tastes and mine don't always mesh, I don't dismiss his recommendations offhandedly. The book I read was The Skating Rink. It got pretty high reviews on Amazon, as did all his other books, but you're probably more interested in what I thought. Well, there is something lyrical about the way he wrote but, sorry all you Bolaño fans out there, this book didn't do much for me. I admit I read it in less-than-ideal circumstances -- I read it on and off over a couple of months, so each time I picked it up, I had almost no memory of what I'd read the previous time. Still, I'm not likely to read another Bolaño book for a while.

This post looks like it's going to be a lot longer than I wanted to be, so from this point forward, I'll try to keep it brief.

The Women by T. C. Boyle: I'm a big fan of Boyle, but I don't always like his historical fiction. (I had to plow my way though Riven Rock, for example, but that was about the worst of it.) The Women is about the women Frank Lloyd Wright was involved with, but no matter how dramatic or explosive those relationships were, after a while I just lost interest. I also thought I should be reading an actual biography of Wright rather than a fictionalized history of him. Still, anything he writes, I'll read, because most of the time I really enjoy his books.

Falling Man by Don DeLillo: I don't remember this book too well -- I vaguely remember that it was somehow related to the 9/11 incidents -- so I'll just say something about DeLillo in general, which is that I tend to like his newer books more than his older ones. His early books seemed heavy and dense, but his more recent stuff seems breezy and airy without being any less engaging.

Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich: I just finished reading this book a few days ago. Back in the '80s I read a lot of her books, but as they became more about American Indians and less about people in general, I sort of lost interest. But I read a glowing review of Shadow Tag so I decided to pick up a copy. It's definitely worth reading.

The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, and Zeroville by Steve Erickson: I read these books one after the other with no other books in between, which may seem like a lot of Erickson to take in at once, but it turned out to be the right way to do it. The Sea Came in at Midnight and Our Ecstatic Days were written years apart, but in some ways they could be different chapters of a larger book, and Zeroville is just one of those books you don't want to put down, for some strange inexplicable reason. Reading anything by Erickson is usually a challenge, but the rewards are generally worth the effort.

After I finished the Erickson books, I thought about reading the Inherent Vice, the latest book by Thomas Pynchon. I'm so far behind on my Pynchon that it isn't even funny. The last book of his I read was Gravity's Rainbow, and that was back in the '70s. He's written a few books since then, and there a copy of each one in my bookshelves, but I haven't read any of them yet. He can be pretty challenging to read as well, so I decided on something more accessible instead.

But before I get to that, I have to mention David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I read it, but I honestly don't know if I liked this book or not. Maybe it's because it's actually six loosely-connected books whose literary connection is sometimes more tenuous than the glue and binding that physically holds the pages together. That's not a criticism, though -- it's exactly the way the book should be. Reading it wasn't always that great an experience -- especially the part that was written in some post-apocalyptic patois that bore only the flimsiest resemblance to modern-day English. I'd never heard of David Mitchell before -- maybe you haven't either -- but a lot of people apparently have, and a lot of people apparently liked Cloud Atlas, since it's supposedly being made into a movie sometime this year. When it comes out, I'll definitely see it, if for no other reason than to see how anyone could possibly turn this book into a movie.

Okay, the next book on the list is Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler. This was the book I decided to read after I got through all the Erickson books. I've read every one of her novels, and this is her most recent, but the strange thing is, I don't remember this one at all. I don't know why. But since I liked all her other books, I'm pretty sure I liked this one too. I have a vague memory of reading it, and I have a vague memory of liking it. I just can't remember what it was about. I read the blurb on the book jacket to refresh my memory, and it turns out it's about a guy with amnesia, which is interesting to me but not very helpful. Maybe I'll just have to read it again.

And that, my friends, brings us to the end of the list. I have an appointment with a new doctor on Monday, so I have no idea how long the wait will be, but just to be safe, I've decided to bring a book along. The book is Point Omega, the latest novel by Don DeLillo. I haven't started reading it yet, but if I ever write anything more about doctors' waiting rooms, I'll be sure to let you know what I thought of it.

I Know What I Weigh

2010-06-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

I know how much I weigh, so you don't need to tell me I've lost weight.

Well, strictly speaking, that isn't true, since I don't actually know what I weigh. But I'll address that a little later in this post.

But here's the thing: In the last five years or so, I think I've lost almost 35 pounds -- most of it in the past few years -- and people I barely know are making comments to me about it. It gets sort of tiresome after a while -- especially when they ask how I did it, since I don't even know -- and I guess I'd be happier if the loss of weight weren't so obvious to everyone, but I suppose it's still better than gaining 35 pounds.

If you read my previous post, you know that I was diagnosed with cancer about five years ago, so you might jump to the conclusion that I'm being slowly eaten alive by cancer, and I'm losing weight accordingly.

That idea had crossed my mind, and I still haven't ruled it out, but my oncologist doesn't think it's a factor. He tends not to jump to conclusions, however. So far, in my conversations with him, he has jumped to one conclusion and has refrained from jumping to two others. But as far as my weight loss and cancer are concerned, he doesn't think there's a connection.

He says that people with cancer lose weight when they don't eat enough -- for example, if they can't tolerate their medicines or if they're prone to nausea or if they're just too sick to want to eat.

So far none of those conditions holds true for me. I haven't had any side-effects from the medication, I can't remember the last time I felt nauseous, and I continue to eat like a two-headed pig.

And one other thing: when I said I lost 35 pounds in the last five years, that isn't necessarily true. Since I don't have a scale at home, I never weighed myself. It wasn't until the last five years that I got weighed regularly, because that's when I started seeing doctors regularly. And because I don't have a scale at home, I don't know what I really weigh, since they weigh you when you're fully dressed at all the doctors' offices I've been to.

So perhaps it's appropriate to explore some other possibilities.

Since I'm always weighed with all my clothes on, maybe my weight is remaining constant and my clothing is losing weight. A simple investigation of the lint trap on my clothes dryer seems to confirm this possibility, but I'd have to guess that my clothing has, at most, lost only one or two pounds.

The second possibility has to do with exercise. I know, usually when people stop exercising they get disgusting and flabby and fat, but not always. In my case, I know I've lost some muscle mass, mostly in my thighs. I don't know if I've lost 30 pounds of thigh muscle, but I do know that it's easier to fit into pants.

Or maybe my metabolism is changing as I grow older. I know that as you age, it's harder to stay lean, but maybe I'm an exception. I don't have anything scientific to back this up -- all I have is the fourth possibility, which is that I'm entering the next phase of my metamorphosis.

And by the way, by "metamorphosis," I don't mean that I'm mutating into something (since I believe, possibly incorrectly, that mutation can only occur from one generation to another) -- I'm thinking more along the lines of what happened to Gregor Samsa in the short story "The Metamorphosis." Just to refresh your memory, I'll quote the first sentence from the Willa and Edwin Muir translation: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

And as a further side-note, in casual discussions about the story, people often talk about how Gregor Samsa turned into a cockroach, but in two of the English translations I know of -- the Muir translation and a translation by Ian Johnston that I just found online -- no mention of the word "cockroach" is ever made.

So I don't know what the next step of my metamorphosis will be -- or even if there will be one. Keep in mind that at this point, it's only a theory, but my guess is that whatever is causing me to lose weight is probably a combination of the possibilities I mentioned above, along with any explanations I'm likely to think of in the future.

But I don't think I'll come up with any future explanations, because the truth is, I don't really care that much. For the last three months or so, my weight hasn't changed at all.

Five Years of Cancer

2010-05-16T22:52:00.000-07:00

It's been five years since I was diagnosed with cancer, so I thought I'd commemorate the event by posting something about it on this blog. But what I'm posting here today isn't something I wrote recently. Sometime in June 2005, after reflecting on my situation for several weeks and organizing a few thoughts that were wandering around in my head, I started writing things down. A few weeks after that, I ended up with what follows.

When I found out I had cancer, I didn't know how to react. I knew I wasn't supposed to be happy -- and I wasn't -- but I thought there were a few stages I was supposed to go through, like denial and anger, which I seemed to have completely bypassed.

(Before I go any further, let me clarify something. I understand that a lot of people have written about their experiences with cancer. I've never read any of those accounts, but I imagine that some of them are uplifting and inspiring, while others are poignant and bittersweet. Some are possibly a combination of the two. This account will be neither, since I'm not particularly inspirational by nature, and I'm not very good at being poignant. With that out of the way, I'll continue with my story.)

You might think that when you're told you've got cancer, it would come as a big shock. Maybe it would, but it didn't for me. One of the reasons the news was so easy to digest in my case is that it was fed to me in small doses. I didn't think I was perfectly healthy one day and find out I had cancer the next -- I learned it slowly over the course of a few weeks.

The first thing I learned was that I had a high level of amylase in my blood. I didn't even know what amylase was, but I found out it's an enzyme secreted by the pancreas. My doctor told me that a high amylase level didn't necessarily mean anything, but he said it was worth looking into. So he ordered a CT Scan.

When I went to get the scan, they had me get out of my clothes and into one of those hospital gowns that tie in the back. The dressing room had a full-length mirror that I couldn't avoid looking into, so I had an opportunity to look at myself without all my clothes on.

The first thing I noticed was how good I looked. I was in pretty good shape for a fifty-year-old guy who hadn't been inside a gym in about fifteen years. (I stopped working out somewhere in my mid-thirties, after I herniated a few disks in my lower back, but that's a story for another day.)

Anyway, I was happy to see how fit I looked. Even if my waist wasn't quite as narrow as it used to be and my upper body wasn't quite as muscular, my torso still looked more like a V more than any other letter in the alphabet. (I'm referring here to the Roman alphabet, by the way. There might be a closer match to my torso shape in the Greek or Cyrillic alphabet, but I haven't verified this.) For the past decade I'd been a vegetarian -- and practically even a vegan -- so I figured I had that to thank for my decent physical condition.

But a few days later, I got the results of the test: a two-inch tumor on my pancreas and a few abnormalities on my liver. My doctor ordered some more tests: a liver biopsy to find out what those spots on my liver were, and an endoscopic ultrasound of the pancreas, which in my case served no purpose other than to facilitate the transfer of money from patient and insurance company to hospital and doctors.

The doctor said I should have those tests right away, but due to an overabundance of sick people, the hospital was all booked so I had to wait a while for the procedures. The liver biopsy was scheduled for the following week, and the endoscopic ultrasound was scheduled for the week after that.

So I had two weeks to learn everything I could on the internet, and everything I read pointed to pancreatic cancer. The most depressing thing I learned is that it's usually fatal and that most people die from it within six months of the initial diagnosis. I started thinking of everything I wanted to do, and I wondered if I'd be dead before I had a chance to do it all. As it turned out, there weren't that many things I wanted to do -- which may be a revealing comment about my life in general -- but six months still didn't seem like a lot of time.

I'll spare you the details of the liver biopsy, other than to tell you that it's about a 30-second procedure that required me to stay in the hospital for seven hours.

Well, I will say one more thing about it. As soon as I found out I had a tumor, I gave up vegetarianism and started eating a lot of salmon. My diet had been heavily carbohydrate-based, which I wanted to change, but mostly I wanted to increase my intake of Omega-3 oils, which I was told have been shown to decrease the size of tumors. The only reason I mention this is that after the biopsy, they showed me the liver samples they removed from my chest, and I thought they looked a lot like slivers of raw salmon.

As for the endoscopic ultrasound, I don't have much to say about it, but only because I was so heavily sedated that I slept through the whole thing.

I didn't mind the tests so much; what I dreaded was the office visit -- the one in which I'd find out the results of the tests. I dreaded the thought of sitting in the waiting room for half an hour, then waiting in an examination room for another half hour, and finally being told that I have cancer.

Fortunately, I never had to endure that particular variety of mental torment. For some reason, when the doctor who performed the endoscopic ultrasound introduced herself to me, she casually mentioned that she had seen the results of the liver biopsy and they indicated that I had a cancerous islet cell tumor in my pancreas that had spread to my liver.

So the office visit on the following day was nothing to dread. I already knew the diagnosis: I had pancreatic cancer that had spread to the liver. That was the bad news. But there was some not-so-bad news as well. According to everything I read, it turns out that as cancers go, pancreatic islet cell tumors aren't so bad. People die from them, but it takes a long time -- a lot longer than six months. And the next day, the doctor more or less confirmed this. He said that islet cell tumors were rare and incurable, but they're slow-growing and not as life-threatening as the more common adenocarcinomas. So after reading so much about pancreatic cancer fatality rates, when I found out I had a less aggressive kind of pancreatic cancer, it was a relief.

As a result, I felt better knowing I had cancer than I did a few days earlier when I still wasn't sure. There probably aren't too many people who can say that.

I was in pretty decent spirits that day, all things considered. I don't know why -- maybe I was just being foolishly optimistic. But when I went to bed that night, I had trouble getting to sleep. It was confirmed: I had cancer. One part of me wondered if I'd live to see the next day, but that wasn't what was troubling me. What kept me awake that night was that I was afraid of what I might dream. I wasn't so worried about having nightmares -- I was more worried about having happy pleasant dreams, only to see them vanish in the morning when the reality of my condition hit me.

But each night was a little easier for me, and not being able to fall asleep at night was never really a problem.

It was harder to wake up each morning and face the day. Sometimes I'd lie in bed and ask myself, "What's the point?" But I don't know if that had anything to do with having cancer, since being able to get out of bed every morning was never one of my strengths to begin with.

I didn't have any symptoms, so most people didn't know I had cancer. I didn't try to hide it from anyone, but I wasn't exactly advertising it either. So one of the problems I faced early on was trying to decide how to respond when someone who didn't know about it asked me something like "How are you?" Most of the time, I just said "Okay," which seemed like a reasonable compromise between "Fine" and "I've got a rare form of incurable cancer."

The first time I did tell someone I had cancer, I heard the words come out of my mouth and they almost startled me. I'd never heard myself say "I have cancer" before. But with each person I told, it got easier for me. So the word "cancer" never had any special power over me. There was another word that gave me a lot of trouble, though. That was the word "incurable." I'd heard that word all my life, but it was just another word to me and I never paid much attention to it. But hearing it applied to a disease of mine gave it a whole new importance.

*
When you find out you have cancer, it's all you can think about at first. Everything else fades into the background. But life goes on and other thoughts keep entering my head, so knowing I have cancer is no longer the first thing on my mind. Sometimes it's the second, sometimes it's even the third or fourth. Sometimes I'm so busy with other things that I don't even think it's on the list.

I don't think about it much anymore, but during the first few weeks after my diagnosis, sometimes I lost my desire to live. It never lasted very long, and I never felt like actually killing myself -- but there were times when I just didn't feel like going on with my life. For example, one time I was stuck on the freeway in a traffic jam that lasted for about half an hour. We were barely moving, and there was nothing to look at except cars and angry drivers and concrete and asphalt in every direction. It was an ugly sight, and I found myself thinking, "This wouldn't be such a terrible place to leave behind."

I don't have thoughts like that anymore, and knowing that I may have a relatively short time left on this planet sometimes fills me with a certain peace. Suddenly, it isn't so important whether or not I accomplish anything significant in my lifetime, and as a more practical matter, I may not have to worry about having enough money for my retirement.

But I still don't have any symptoms, I still look good in front of a full-length mirror, and I feel just as healthy as I ever did, so I haven't stopped contributing to my 401-K plan yet. Maybe I don't know how to be poignant or inspiring, but at least I can be optimistic.

Write Your Own Blog!

2009-12-05T11:54:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, I mentioned that I was thinking about not posting to this blog anymore. It's now almost a year later to the day and I'm still writing, which probably means I'm some sort of procrastinator, since I still haven't acted on my urge to stop writing.

That doesn't mean I'm going to keep posting -- my urge to quit is sometimes very strong -- so I'm not promising anything. I'm just saying that there may come a time when I abandon this blog forever.

If I ever decide to quit writing and you're one of the few people who actually reads and enjoys this blog, you're probably very concerned that you'll miss it when it's gone. But if that's what's troubling you, then don't worry, because I have a solution.

Ever since I began this blog, people have suggested that I write something about one topic or another. My response to them was usually, "Write your own blog!" Or if I skipped a week or two and someone pointed it out to me, I would usually reply with "Write your own blog!" And when I first started this blog and had comments disabled, whenever people complained about that, I often told them "Write your own blog!"

As far as I know, no one ever took my advice, but that never stopped me from giving it. So if you're agonizing that you'll miss my blog when it's gone, in today's post I will show you how you to write a blog of your own.

First of all, choose a subject. This is a lot easier than you might expect. Just reflect on the events of the past week and choose something that happened to you, or something that you did. If nothing happened or if you didn't do anything, just recall something you thought about when you should have been thinking about something else. It doesn't really matter what your subject is, because your stream of consciousness will undoubtedly lead you to several other subjects before you're done writing.

Next, write a long, meandering introduction. It's not always such a good idea to just jump head-first into your topic. You want to let the reader get acclimated. You can do this by writing about whatever is on your mind, and gradually leading the discussion to your chosen topic. Or you can shift to the topic more abruptly. In either case, the introduction will allow the user to relax and enter your frame of mind, thus becoming more receptive to whatever it is you have to say.

Third, find your focal point. When I was in college, I took a drawing class. During one of the first classes, the teacher had an arrangement of objects placed out on a table and told us to draw what we saw. Most people drew all the objects on the table. Some even drew the table. But I focused all my attention on one particular object. I drew it in great detail and I ignored everything else. This is sometimes a useful way to write as well. For example, if you went to a movie and you want to write about it, it isn't necessary to write about the entire experience -- maybe you just want to write about how difficult it was to find a parking space, or about the idiot sitting behind you who wouldn't stop talking.

Those are the basics, but here are some other helpful hints.

It's always a good idea to pepper your writing with references to things most people have never heard of, or to salt it with obscure quotations, theories, or philosophies. This way, your post will not only be entertaining -- it will also be informative. But don't make the mistake of thinking you know more than your readers. Even if you do, it's still a mistake to assume it. So don't try to teach your readers anything -- it will only make you seem pompous and arrogant. If your readers understand a reference you make, that's fine, but if they don't, they can always look it up.

Don't be afraid to play with words a little. Think of language as a toy that also happens to allow you to communicate with others.

When you're done with your post, it's time to think of a title. I've listed this last, but you can actually think of a title any time you want. You have a lot of latitude here. You can use a descriptive title, or you can quote a few words from your post out of context, or you can use some famous quote. You can also use the title of some book or movie. It helps if the title you choose is somehow related to the topic you write about, but it's not absolutely necessary.

If you've followed all my instructions and your post still falls short of your expectations, don't be discouraged. It takes practice. Your first few attempts at blogging may not be all that successful, but don't worry. If your blog is anything like mine, chances are not many people will actually read it anyway.

And now, in strict adherence to my policy of expressing myself in verse, here is today's bad poem.

Don't wash your car, don't mow your lawn, and don't play with your dog.
Just turn on your computer and then write your own blog.
Don't ride that bike, don't lift those weights, don't even try to jog.
Just tap on all your keyboard keys and write your own blog.
Don't drink until you can't stand up, don't fill your head with fog.
Just stare into your monitor and write your own blog.

Agríla Baglóda Tahíb

2009-11-29T12:53:00.000-08:00

I just flew back from the Washington DC area, and even though a lot of times in the past, I've complained about the flight on this blog, I'm not going to do that this time. It's not necessarily that there isn't anything to complain about -- it's because I don't think you want to read about it. I know you'd much rather read this week's bad poem, for example.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, a very small percentage of the English-speaking population reads this blog. So it dawned on me that the poems I post to this blog need not all be written in English.

However, since I don't really know any other languages, my only choices are to write in English or write in some language that I just made up.

For this week's poem, I decided to use a made-up language. But since I didn't invent a writing system, I decided to use the Roman alphabet. And since I didn't invent any pronunciation rules, you can pretty much pronounce this poem anyway way you want, as long as you're consistent. (If you aren't, some of the rhymes may be lost.) If you recognize that this poem is in the form of a limerick, you should have no problem determining which syllables should be stressed, but for your convenience, I've added accent marks anyway.

And now, without any further introduction or delay, I present you with today's bad poem.

Agríla baglóda tahíb
Kora fénaba králimo tíb.
Nepáti océya,
Orámi nadréya.
Ko págli haráta paríb.

Raising and Lowering the Bar

2009-11-21T12:48:00.000-08:00

I think I may have outdone myself with last week's poem. It wasn't exactly a work of literary genius, but compared to most of the other poems I've recently featured on this blog, it was pretty close. The problem, of course, is that once you write something of such high quality, you feel the need and desire to achieve that level in subsequent poems.

Unfortunately, this week's poem will probably not reach that level, irrespective of my needs and desires. Or, to put it in verse:

My poem of last week will be hard to beat.
I really enjoyed it a lot.
I don't think that this one can even compete.
It might but I tend to think not.

Uplifting and Inspirational

2009-11-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'm breaking with a tradition I established and have adhered to when I first started writing bad poetry for this blog. Today's poem bucks this tradition in several ways. First of all, I wrote it many years ago, so unlike my other poems that you have read and enjoyed, today's poem wasn't written expressly for this blog. Secondly, this isn't what I consider a particularly bad poem. As limericks go, I think it's actually a pretty good one. And finally, in a very rare departure for me, this is a romantic poem. (And as a side note, it's also more uplifting and inspirational than the past few poems I posted.)

So in a way, it's a shame that such a tiny percentage of the world's English-speaking population reads this blog, because it means that hardly anyone will be able to enjoy this poem. On the other hand, I didn't really write it for others to enjoy; I wrote it for myself to enjoy, and I enjoy it a lot.

Of course, if you're one of the select few people who read this post, you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not you like today's poem. And since you won't be able to make a meaningful decision until you've actually read it, I am including it below.

There was a young robot from France
with a stainless steel dick in his pants.
His girlfriend from China
had a metal vagina,
and together they found true romance.

Slow Week

2009-11-07T09:39:00.000-08:00

In keeping with my recent decision to express myself in doggerel, this post will include a poem. And this should be of no concern to you, but it wasn't particularly easy for me to crank out a poem for today's post. Writing poetry is hard enough -- even when it's bad poetry -- but it's a lot harder when you don't have anything to say.

It's been a slow week, and I don't have much anything to write about, so for today's poem, I decided to compress an entire slow week into a single slow day. In this poem, rhyme and rhythm are greater concerns than anything else, so I've exaggerated the truth a little and I've also thrown in an irrelevant detail for good measure.

And now, here is today's bad poem. I hope you enjoy it.

Nothing's going on today.
And nothing makes me smile.

I'm writing something anyway,
Since quitting's not my style.

My tortured heart is on display.
It's hideous and vile.

There's nothing else I want to say.
I'll see you in a while.

Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween, everyone. Today's bad poem doesn't have a Halloween theme, and there are two reasons for this. The first is that writing a Halloween poem on Halloween is just a little too unoriginal, as I believe it's been done many times in the past. The second reason is that I didn't actually write this poem today. I wrote it a little earlier in the month when I had some free time.

So, to ask (and answer) an obvious question in the form of a rhyming couplet,
If this is not a Halloween poem, what is it about?
I don't really know, myself. Read it and find out.

And now, without any further delay, here is today's non-Halloween bad poem:

Morons pounding on my door
keep me up at night.
My friends don't like me anymore.
They only want to fight.

The kids across the street from me
are playing on the grass.
I gaze into the troubled sea
and watch the hours pass.

My neighbors flee their cages
and scurry toward the hills.
It's been like this for ages
but still gives me the chills.

I leave my house without a sound
and float up to a cloud.
The children see me from the ground
and cry my name out loud.

I'll never know what underlies
this life I can't defend.
I close my heart and shut my eyes
and wait for it to end.

See you next week, everybody!

Go Ask Alex

2009-10-24T12:17:00.000-07:00

The recently discovered Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton is 4.4 million years old. And if you believe in science and evolution and all that crazy stuff, it's the oldest known human ancestor. So, considering what an important archaeological artifact this is, why do we insist on naming it something silly and cute like "Ardi"? We did the same thing with that 3.2 million-year-old partial skeleton when we named her "Lucy." Ardi and Lucy don't sound like our earliest ancestors -- they sound like people you might see at a supermarket, stocking up on groceries and other household necessities.

It's not that I'm against giving things cute easy-to-remember names, but 35 years after Lucy was unearthed, how many people know she was a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species? And in five or ten years from now, how many people will remember that Ardi is short for Ardipithecus ramidus? Probably not a lot of them.

And to be fair, there's no reason why they should. Listen, I don't care if people don't remember this kind of stuff or not -- I've already forgotten it myself, but that isn't the point. However, I happened to be watching something on either the Discovery Science channel or the National Geographic channel earlier this month, and they kept plugging their show on "Ardi." That's what they showed on the screen, that's what the narrator called it, and that's probably what the show is called. In the commercial, they showed the word "Ardipithecus" for less than a second, so it's clear that they want us to think of this thing as "Ardi," and not as Ardipithecus, let alone Ardipithecus ramidus. Something about that just rubs me the wrong way.

Like I said, it's not important. The only reason I'm bringing it up is that a while ago, a couple of people I know were teasing me for complaining about some terminology in the latest IKEA catalog, which we were looking at online. Specifically, IKEA has a product they refer to as a "drawer unit on casters" and since everything you can buy at IKEA has a cute little name, this product is called "Alex." The "drawer unit on casters" description is very accurate, by the way, since that's exactly what it is, but we've already got a word for drawer units on casters and that word is tabouret. The word has been around for a long time, but you may not know about it, so I'll quote from Wikipedia: "...a small portable stand or cabinet, with drawers and shelves for storage. It is used as a method to bring organization to a work area. This name for a portable cabinet is common to artists."

I don't know why IKEA doesn't simply call it a tabouret, but my guess is that they don't use that word because most people don't know that word. It makes perfect sense, until you realize that the reason most people don't know that word is that nobody ever uses that word. It's a vicious circle that keeps us ignorant and stupid. If IKEA started using the word "tabouret," most people would see the word and look at the picture and realize that a tabouret is a drawer unit on casters. In other words, they would have learned something. Knowledge would have been gained, and nothing would have been lost.

I don't know about you, but I like to be presented with information (such as the names Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis, and tabouret) so I can decide for myself whether or not the information is useful to me. If I decide to call something a "drawer unit on casters" or maybe simply "Alex," I want that to be my decision, not IKEA's. And I'm picking on IKEA because this tabouret incident happened recently and is still fresh in my mind, but you really see this sort of thing happening all over.

With that in mind, here's today's bad poem:

I couldn't fall asleep
when I went to bed at night.
I was wide awake until the early morning.

But instead of counting sheep,
I just turned on every light,
then got dressed and fell asleep without a warning.

I realize this poem has absolutely nothing to do with anything I was talking about earlier in today's post, but it was too hard to think of something that rhymes with "Ardipithecus."

There Was A Young Man From Nantucket

2009-10-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

Today's bad poetry challenge is to write an inoffensive limerick that uses the word "Nantucket." Although "Nantucket" limericks are usually lewd, dirty, suggestive, licentious, salacious, pornographic, or otherwise unsuitable for the easily-offended, I'm sure I'm not the first person to write an inoffensive one. So this may not be a totally original idea, and to make up for that, I've decided to include a bonus limerick that picks up where the first one leaves off. That's probably not such an original idea either.

There was a young man from Nantucket
who slept with his head in a bucket.
When someone asked why,
he had no reply
so he finally decided to chuck it.

The bucket then rolled down a hill
to a town in the north of Brazil.
A day or two later
it was at the equator.
Some say that it's lying there still.

Postmodernism

2009-10-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

The funny thing about postmodernism is that everyone uses the term and nobody really knows what it means. That's not the funny part, though. The funny part is that the fact that nobody knows what it means is sort of built into the whole idea of postmodernism, since there are people who claim that the term itself, as well as the underlying theory, are more or less undefinable.

Literally, it means "after modernism" and we can understand this to mean a reaction against modernism, but that only tells us what postmodernism isn't -- it doesn't tell us what it is.

Part of the problem is that postmodernism means different things within different disciplines. For example, it has a completely different meaning in literature than it does in architecture and design.

In architecture and design, it's sort of easy to figure out, because you can actually see it expressed in buildings and furniture and graphic design. It's a reaction to the strict formalism of modernism, so it's more of an "anything goes" kind of philosophy. (Have you ever noticed that a lot of contemporary building design is a perverse attempt to combine the old and new, even though the old an new mix about as well as oil and vinegar? Have you ever walked into a furniture store and wondered why all the supposedly "modern" furniture looks like it was designed in the 19th century? Have you noticed that a lot of new cars looked like they were designed in the '40s? Do you remember all the aggressively ugly "read me if you can" graphics on T-shirts, trendy magazine covers, and just about everywhere else in the '90s?)

In literature, it's harder to define, so I won't even try. I think it might have something to do with decontextualization and subjectivity, but I'm not sure. In any event it turns out that a lot of the books I read in my younger days were written by postmodern writers, such as Pynchon, Barthelme, Borges, DeLillo, Burroughs, and even Auster, who I still consider one of my favorite writers.

It doesn't surprise me that I'm such a fan of postmodern literature despite the fact that I absolutely detest postmodern architecture and design, because the term seems to be applied without much discretion. I think the term gets applied a lot when people can't figure out how else to label something. For example, I've heard the magical duo of Penn & Teller described as postmodern magicians, which is a term that probably makes no sense at all. If anything, I'd say they were deconstructivist magicians.

Anyway, if you remember, last week I told you that each post to this blog would be written in verse, and I'm not going to break with that young tradition today. The brief introduction above turned out to be a little longer than I expected, but today's poem is forthcoming. But first, I wanted to include some brief quotes from two documentaries I've seen in the last few months.

"Postmodernism is to architecture the way a female impersonator is to femininity."
- Architectural historian Reyner Banham (as quoted by Julius Shulman in the documentary film Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman)

"...and also in the '80s, with their minds completely confused by that disease that was called postmodernism, people were just going around like chickens without their heads, by using all kinds of typefaces that could come around that could say 'not modern'..."
- Massimo Vignelli (from the documentary film Helvetica)

Okay, now for today's bad poem.

Postmodernism is a term broadly applied to literature:
I can't think of any two writers more different than
William S. Burroughs and and Don DeLillo, for example.
(Or maybe I can, but that isn't the point.)
Still, there are great postmodern writers, such as Paul Auster.
Postmodern architecture, on the other hand,
is one of the worst inventions to ever plague mankind.
And postmodern design isn't any better.

I realize that probably didn't sound a lot like a poem. It may qualify as some sort of free verse, but I'm not sure. Maybe it doesn't fit neatly into a genre. For that matter, it may not even be a poem. Maybe it's just a few lines of italicized text. But assuming that it actually is some kind of poem, it sort of looks like a reaction to more structured forms of poetry, so let's just call it a postmodernist poem and leave it at that.

I also realize that this wasn't a very interesting post. The poem is unimaginative and the prose is humorless and pedantic. Not only that, but you probably don't care about postmodernism in the first place. To be honest, neither do I. As a matter of fact, the only reason I wrote this little essay is so I could sneak in the quotes by Banham and Vignelli.

Something New!

2009-10-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned last week, I'm not really a creature of habit. That's not completely true, of course, but sometimes when I find myself in a rut, I try to crawl out of it, especially if it's not too deep.

I've been maintaining this blog for quite a while now, and even though each post is filled with insight and wry humor and astute observations, the format seems to be getting a little stale. That's why starting this week, instead of writing long meandering essays, I've decided to express my thoughts in short poems.

Although today's poem has the formal structure of a Limerick, they won't all. For example, future poems might might follow some of the rules of Haiku. And some poems may have no formal constraints at all. As a matter of fact, the only thing they'll have in common is that they will be short. And they will all fall under the general rubric of doggerel, so they won't be very good. (Bad poetry, in my opinion, is an under-appreciated art form. What I like the most about it is that it doesn't have to be very good.)

So without any further delay, here is today's poem.

I thought I would try something new.
(After such a long time, so would you.)
So I'm writing in verse
And this post will be terse.
After only five lines, I am through.

Labels, Old and New

2009-09-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not really a creature of habit, but there are certain things I do out of habit just because I don't want to think about them. That's how I ended up using the same brand of shampoo for years and years and years.

I started using it because the list of ingredients didn't contain a zillion and one chemicals. I don't know if anyone's ever gotten sick from all the chemicals in shampoo, but that's not even the main reason I buy it. I buy it because it's also fragrance-free and I don't want my hair to smell like a fucking herb garden.

A little while ago, I realized I was running out of shampoo, so I bought some more the next time I went shopping. I still have both containers in the shower because the first one's not empty yet.

I must have felt like reading in the shower yesterday, because for some reason I took the two containers and compared the labels. I noticed that they differed in small but significant ways.

On the front of the old label, it read "Safe for the Chemically Sensitive" but on the new label it read "Safe for the Fragrance Sensitive." That concerned me a little, since being chemically-sensitive seems more serious than being fragrance-sensitive and I was worried that the shampoo was no longer safe for the chemically-sensitive, possibly due to the addition of new ingredients.

So I looked at the back of the labels and saw that the only difference was that germaben had been replaced with propylparaben.

Just as an aside, I should mention that they've changed the ingredients before (which, by the way, is one of the reasons I wrote "the same brand of shampoo" instead of "the same shampoo" in the first paragraph of this post). The last time this happened, I saw that they had added either sodium lauryl sulfate or sodium laureth sulfate -- I don't remember which, but neither of them is particularly good for human flesh. So I wrote the company about it and they assured me that it was no longer an ingredient in their shampoo. To allay any fears I may have had, they also sent me a new label, which I could peel the back off and stick over the existing label.

Anyway, if you've never heard of germaben, don't feel bad, because neither have I, despite the fact that I've apparently been pouring it onto my head every day for I don't know how many years. There are some safety concerns with it, since it contains parabens, which are known carcinogens, but whether germaben itself causes tumors is, at this point, anybody's guess. The new ingredient, propylparaben, also contains parabens, so it's probably no better than germaben. And I'm not a chemist, so I don't know, but somehow I doubt that one ingredient is safe for the chemically-sensitive and the other is safe for the fragrance-sensitive.

That wasn't the only difference between the two labels, by the way. The new label advertises that that shampoo is gluten-free, although for consistency with their other punctuation errors, they wrote "gluten free." Why do these people hate hyphens so much? The new label also informs us that the shampoo contains "no tree nut or peanut oils." I don't want to get too picky about this, but as far as I know, all nuts other than peanuts are tree nuts, because all nuts other than peanuts grow on trees. And as we all know, peanuts aren't even nuts; they're legumes. But the real question here is, are there some shampoos that contain nuts or peanuts? And if so, why?

As another digression, not too long ago, you used to hear a lot about children being allergic to peanuts. The media treated it like it was practically an epidemic, but I never believed it, even before I found out that the statistics were based almost entirely on anecdotal information, such as a mother telling a doctor her child was allergic to peanuts and the doctor simply believing it without ordering any allergy tests. That was about the time we started seeing labels on everything warning us that some product or another was either made with peanuts or made on equipment that was also used to process peanuts. The thing is, nobody ever asked why so many children were suddenly allergic to peanuts, so I came up with my own theory: I don't think they're allergic to peanuts in general; I think they're allergic specifically to GMO peanuts. I forget what the statistics are, but I think something like 90% of peanuts are GMOs. So, in short, kids haven't changed much, but peanuts have. And if that sounds like the rambling of a paranoid lunatic nutcase who reads the labels of his shampoo bottles, then try to come up with a better theory.

But returning again to today's topic, I decided to visit the shampoo company's web site, to see if they had any explanation as to why they switched ingredients, but I didn't learn much other than that I can buy the shampoo directly from the company in gallon jugs for a little over half the price of the equivalent amount in 16-ounce containers. As far as I know, I've never bought shampoo in a gallon jug before, so maybe I'll start doing that. After they tack on the shipping costs, it might not be such a bargain, but that's not the point. Remember when I said I'm not really a creature of habit? I guess I just feel like trying something new.

Once Every Minute

2009-09-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

There's a TV commercial I've seen that asserts that every 60 seconds, somebody somewhere buys a Tempurpedic "sleep system." In case you're wondering, a "sleep system" appears to consist of nothing more than a mattress and some sort of frame to rest it on. If you're like most people, you're probably more comfortable referring to this mattress and frame combination as a "bed."

Actually, that's not quite true. While most speakers of the English language would be more comfortable with the term "bed," most French speakers would be more likely to use the term "lit" and most Spanish-speaking people would undoubtedly prefer the term "cama." But even if we accept that many people on this planet do not speak English, we can still maintain that a "sleep system" sounds like it should be more expensive than a "bed" -- a point I'm sure has not escaped the attention of the Tempurpedic marketing department.

Anyway, believe it or not, that's not really what I wanted to write about. You can argue all day about why it should be called a bed or a sleeping system, but at some point you're just splitting hairs. And there's no real point to splitting hairs all day, since all you end up with is a day's worth of split hair.

What I really wanted to address is the claim that someone buys a Tempurpedic bed every minute. I don't care if it's true or not -- that isn't even the point -- but whenever I hear something like this, the first question that comes to my mind is, "So what?" What's the point of this statistical tidbit? Is the idea that I should buy a certain type of bed just because so many other people have bought one? That's probably one of the worst reasons to do anything. If you're considering doing something just so you can go along with the crowd, maybe you should first consider that crowds generally include a lot of stupid people, and doing something just because a lot of stupid people do it is probably not in your best interests. Not only is it not a good thing for smart people to do -- it isn't even a good thing for stupid people to do.

So blindly following the masses is rarely a good idea, but in this case, it turns out that the masses aren't actually buying that many Tempurpedic beds in the first place. Let's do some arithmetic. If someone buys a Tempurpedic bed every 60 seconds, that means that 1,440 people buy one every day, that 10,080 people buy one every week, and that 524,160 Tempurpedic beds are sold every year. That may sound like a lot, but I'm willing to bet that millions and millions of mattresses are sold every year, which means that most of them are not Tempurpedics.

Since Tempurpedic beds constitute a minority of the beds sold every year, if we wanted to just follow the crowd and buy whatever everyone else is buying, we should probably buy something else. Maybe we should buy a bed we feel comfortable lying on, for example. Or maybe we should buy an environmentally-friendly natural latex mattress. In other words, we should buy a bed based on our own personal criteria. And by the way, despite what I said a little while ago, I'm not actually willing to bet on anything having to do with the sales of different types of mattresses. So let's move on.

I read another interesting little statistic lately, namely that every 40 seconds, somebody on the planet commits suicide. That comes to 2,160 suicides per day (as opposed to only 1,440 people who buy a Tempurpedic bed). So the first conclusion we might jump to is that every year, more people will commit suicide than will buy Tempurpedic beds. That's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

First of all, the people who commit suicide and the people who buy Tempurpedic beds may not be mutually exclusive. So it's theoretically possible that everyone who bought a Tempurpedic bed committed suicide in the same year. It's also possible that someone bought a Tempurpedic bed and for whatever reason, it drove him to commit suicide. Having never slept on one, I can't speculate about how this might happen, but we still can't rule out the possibility. Or maybe the guy bought a Tempurpedic bed and later killed himself for some completely different reason. Maybe he was distraught at the prospect of losing his job, maybe his wife just left him, or maybe he had suicidal tendencies that were exacerbated by the daily use of certain anti-depressants. Or maybe got in a car accident and the resulting chronic pain he suffered from couldn't be ameliorated by spending his days lying in bed.

On the other hand, if there's no overlap between the people who commit suicide and the people who buy Tempurpedic beds, we might be tempted to believe that a lot of people would rather commit suicide than buy a Tempurpedic bed. We'd probably be wrong of course, since we're implying that there's some sort of causal relationship between the two activities. But we can't even conclude that committing suicide is simply more popular than buying a Tempurpedic bed. For one thing, a lot of people who commit suicide have probably never even heard of a Tempurpedic bed. We should also bear in mind that many suicides are committed by people who don't have a lot of money -- people for whom buying a Tempurpedic bed was never a viable option to begin with. So we're sort of creating a false choice (but interestingly, perhaps, not a false dichotomy).

And that's pretty much all I have to say on the matter. I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know -- the only thing you probably don't already know is why I'm telling you this. Well, I don't know either, but even if I did, I wouldn't waste your time trying to explain it. So let's just wrap things up by saying that for reasons I won't go into, I have no plans to commit suicide or buy a Tempurpedic bed.

Still, there are probably a lot of people who commit suicide (through asphyxiation, drug overdose, a bullet to the head, or whatever) while lying in a Tempurpedic bed. I wonder what the statistics on that are. Or actually, no I don't.

Two Parts H and One Part O

2009-09-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

First of all, I never ever buy bottled water. And whether you drink it or not, you probably already know all the reasons you shouldn't, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

First of all, the standards for bottled water are lower than they are for municipal water supplies, so if you drink it, you're probably drinking something that isn't as good as what comes out of your tap. And as if that weren't bad enough, chemicals from the bottles can leach into the water, making the quality even worse. It's also a lot more expensive than tap water. The bottles don't biodegrade, and although they can be recycled, recycling is energy-intensive and expensive, and it probably releases chemicals into the atmosphere. By the way, the same thing is true when they make the bottles -- production of plastic bottles is oil-intensive, and the manufacturing process causes a lot of unnecessary pollution. Then of course, transporting the bottled water all around the world increases oil consumption and creates even more pollution. And finally, at least in the case of Fiji water, every bottle you buy goes toward propping up the military dictatorship of Fiji, while the water supply for the native Fijians is barely fit to drink.

Those are just the reasons I could think of off the top of my head. I could probably come up with a few more if I thought about it. For me, any one of those reasons is probably good enough, but all those reasons put together make drinking bottled water the wrong thing to do on just about every level. That's why I never buy it and that's why I never drink it.

Okay, having said all that, I should mention that I bought some bottled water last week. It was sort of an emergency and I hated myself for doing it, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was at a movie theater and I didn't feel well for some reason. It was around noon, and it was a hot day, and I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since I went to bed the night before, so I thought that if I had something to drink, it might make me feel better. My only choices were bottled water or soft drinks or sugary bottled "juice drinks." So the bottled water was the least of three evils.

It didn't make me feel any better, but that's not really the point. And if you're wondering what the point is, don't ask me, because I'm not really sure if there is one.

But here's my point: You don't need to buy bottled water unless you feel the need to waste your money, ruin the environment, or support a repressive military regime. Your best bet is probably to filter your own water. If you have a relatively new refrigerator with a water and ice dispenser on the freezer door, you've probably got a filter inside the refrigerator that all the water passes through before it reaches the dispenser. So all you have to do is fill up a container from the water dispenser and put it in your refrigerator. Then you'll have as much nice cold refreshing filtered water as you can drink.

But if you don't have a water dispenser built in to your refrigerator, there's no need for despair. Just buy one of those pitchers with a built in filter. I'm not sure how they work, because I don't have one, but I think you just fill the pitcher by pouring the water through the filter and in a few minutes all the impurities are removed.

On the other hand, if you want to spend a lot of extra money, you can buy a whole house filter. They're about five or six feet tall (depending on your water filtering needs), and you install them where the water line enters your house. But if you don't want to spend a lot of money, you can just get one of those screw-on filter attachments for your kitchen sink.

Or you can do what I do and just make your own water. Just put two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen in a sealed container, then shake vigorously until you hear the sound of water splashing around inside. It's just as easy as it sounds. It might take a little more effort than buying already-made water, but most things worth doing require a little effort. And the results will be worth it, because you'll end up with some of the freshest water available.

I should probably disclose something here, which is that even though I never buy bottled water, I do buy bottled juices. Fortunately, half the stuff I buy comes in glass containers, but regardless of what the container's made of, you should always read the label. Make sure it's organic and without any added sweeteners, if that's important to you, but more importantly, make sure it's 100% juice, or else you could be buying mostly water without even knowing it.

And this should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: Don't actually try to make your own water from hydrogen and oxygen using the process I've described above, because it won't work. I don't know what will happen, but I'd be very surprised if you ended up with much water.

2009

2009-08-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

For a while, it looked like 2009 was going to be remembered as the year of celebrity deaths. I won't rattle off the whole list, but just to refresh your memory, I'll provide a brief recap of the highlights.

Patrick McGoohan started the year off when he died in January. John Updike and Lux Interior were both dead less than a month later. Not too long after that, Natasha Richardson, Marilyn Chambers, J.G. Ballard, and Bea Arthur were dead.

David Carradine started off the summer season with his death in June, but the apex wasn't until later in the month when Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Sky Saxon, and Billy Mays all died within a five-day span.

Things have tapered down since then. Karl Malden died, as did Robert McNamara, Walter Cronkite, Corazon Aquino, and John Hughes, but that was over a five-week span.

That's not the entire list -- there are a lot of celebrities I didn't mention, and it's early August, so there are almost five months left in the year. But barring some sort of catastrophe -- such as a bomb going off at some awards ceremony -- I think the celebrity death syndrome is pretty much behind us.

But I don't think 2009 will necessarily be remembered as the year of celebrity deaths. I think it may be remembered as the year of 40-year anniversaries.

You're undoubtedly aware that 2009 is the 40-year anniversary of the Apollo moon landing (or moon landing hoax, as some people still insist on calling it). That's been all over the news ever since about July 20, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, walked around a little, planted a flag, collected some rocks, and then flew back home.

The other big 40-year anniversary this year is for the Woodstock festival (which most people just refer to as "Woodstock"), which will turn 40 a little later this month. What started off as a concert turned into an event that was just as historically significant as the moon landing, if not more so.

And then, of course, there are the Tate-LaBianca murders (which are also know as the Manson murders). Today marks the 40-year anniversary of the Tate murders, and tomorrow marks the anniversary of the LaBianca murders.

Those are the big three 40-year anniversaries, and they all took place with a month of each other, but those aren't the only 40-year anniversaries we're commemorating this year. Here's a short and incomplete list of other notable events that took place in 1969: the Stonewall Riots, the birth of TV's Sesame St., the publication of the first edition of Penthouse magazine, the Ted Kennedy incident at Chappaquiddick, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire due to all the toxins and pollutants it contained. That last one might not be so famous to people outside of Ohio, and the only reason I know about it is because Randy Newman immortalized it in his 1972 song "Burn On."

So here's another one for you: The Unix operating system is 40 years old this year. According to what I found on the web, the first version of Unix was completed in August 1969 (although it was unnamed at the time and wasn't named "Unix" until the following year). Even if you've never heard of Unix, you've probably used it, or at least you've used some software that runs on top of Unix. If you've used a Mac in the past few years, you've used Unix software. If you've ever connected to a web server, mail server, or file server, the chances are extremely good that you've used Unix software.

But the list doesn't end there. As it turns out, on August 8, 1969 -- exactly 40 years and one day ago -- the famous photograph that became the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album was taken. To be honest, I don't know why this is such a big deal, probably because I don't understand why that picture is so famous. Abbey Road was the last album the Beatles recorded together, and the photograph is visually compelling, but that's not enough to make it famous. There was also the whole "Paul is Dead" theory, but that was only marginally associated with that album cover.

If there's any Beatles album photograph that deserves to be famous, I think it should be the original cover for the Yesterday and Today album. That photograph was so controversial that it had to be replaced by a completely different one. If you're a die-hard Beatles fan, you already know about that, but if you're a die-hard Beatles fan, you probably also understand why the Abbey Road photograph is so popular. And while I'm on the subject, the Beatles were great, and they were a cultural phenomenon unlike any other, and their influence on popular music is immense and undeniable, but why are there still die-hard Beatles fans in 2009? And by die-hard Beatles fans, I mean people like the ones who swarmed Abbey Road yesterday in commemoration of the anniversary of the Abbey Road photograph.

In closing, whether 2009 is remembered more for its celebrity deaths or its 40-year anniversaries is probably anyone's guess. Maybe it'll be both. But here's a thought that just crossed my mind. It's sort of stupid, so I shouldn't even mention it, but here it is anyway. If two astronauts hadn't landed on the moon 40 years ago, would the dance move that Michael Jackson popularized in 1983 still be called the moon walk?

I wouldn't bother pondering that question for too long if I were you -- as I said, it's a pretty stupid thought. And I don't really like ending my blog posts with stupid thoughts, but I couldn't think of a better way to end this one. I couldn't think of a very good title either.

Laser Cheese

2009-07-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

If you're old enough, you may remember when the Laserium was first invented. But in case you aren't old enough or your memory isn't that good, a Laserium show was basically a few lasers creating complex patterns on the ceiling in time to some music.

I don't know when I first heard about it, but I remember seeing a Laserium show in the auditorium of the Griffith Park Planetarium when I was a freshman in college, at home for the Christmas break. It wasn't a horrible experience or anything like that, but I'm pretty sure I thought the show didn't live up to all the hype.

I never gave it much thought after that, and I guess I just assumed that the Laserium died with the 1970s, but I have come to find out recently that it's still around.

Last weekend, I went with a friend of mine to see a brand new Laserium show at the Laserium CyberTheater on the fabled corner of Hollywood and Vine. But before I get into that, I'll just interrupt myself for a while to tell you that as far as I'm concerned, calling something a "CyberTheater" makes it sound really outdated. I mentioned this to my friend and she agreed, saying it sounded like something from The Terminator. To make things worse, it turns out that the Laserium CyberTheater just opened last month. But all that notwithstanding, the name is inappropriate for another reason. Just look up the word "cybernetic" to find out why.

But hokey and inappropriate though the name may be, the new Laserium technology is much more advanced. They use a lot more lasers, and more colors than I remembered from back in 1972, and they're better at creating representational images, such as words and faces, with the lasers. But despite all that advanced technology, the show seemed just as cheesy as the first one I saw.

While we were waiting in line, I asked my friend how she heard about the new Laserium shows. She told me she gets a weekly email that lists all the local events you can buy tickets for through a particular ticket retailer. I asked her what other events she'd been to and she mentioned that she'd seen a live performance by the Moscow Cat Circus.

I didn't think you could train cats to do tricks, but apparently you can. And if you don't believe me, go to YouTube and search for "Moscow Cat Circus." You'll find videos of cats walking tightropes (actually, loose ropes), climbing up poles, and jumping from one person's shoulders to another's.

She told me that since cats tend to be recalcitrant by nature, sometimes one of the circus cats wouldn't perform a trick. But whenever that happened, they just shooed it away and brought on a cat that was willing to perform. So the cat tricks never stopped, and the show was fun to watch.

I sort of wish I'd seen the cat circus instead of the Laserium show. The Laserium show wasn't bad, but the best part was the music. The lasers weren't all that interesting, because after a while the visual effects just get old. There were basically three shows, each one featuring a different band from the '60s and '70s. We saw the Beatles show. If we'd gone on another night, we could have seen the Led Zeppelin show or the Pink Floyd show. I wanted to see the Beatles show because I was never much of a Pink Floyd or Led Zep fan, but in retrospect, maybe we should have seen the Pink Floyd show instead.

And here's why: Regardless of what anyone says, Laserium started out as a form of pseudo-psychedelic entertainment for stoners -- you could get high, sink into a comfortable upholstered chair, then stare at the ceiling and watch lasers spinning around to what was then called "acid rock" or sometimes "psychedelic rock" -- the music of Pink Floyd, for example -- or "electronic music," which had been gestating in avant-garde circles and was just beginning its emergence into the mainstream at the time.

Despite its roots in the drug culture, the Laserium of today is more of a family thing. Sitting to the right of me was a family of three, and the girl was probably four years old at the most. The music didn't bring back memories of the '60s and '70s for her, as it did for me, but she seemed to be enjoying the show nonetheless.

When the show was over, it was still sort of early -- maybe about 10:00 or 10:30 at night -- so we walked down Vine to a coffee shop. It was a tiny little coffee shop, and it was crowded inside due to some sort of Klingon gathering. So we sat at a little table on the sidewalk next to some Klingons.

I'm not a trekkie or a trekker or whatever they like to be called, but based on my limited experience, it seems like of all the different humanoids that populate the Star Trek universe, Klingons are the most popular by far. You never hear of Star Trek fans dressing up as Romulans, Cardassians, Ferengi, or even Earthlings, for that matter. Everybody always wants to be a Klingon. Maybe it's because they look so menacing.

Just as an aside, did you know that the Bible and the works of Shakespeare are being translated into the Klingon language? Did you even know there is a Klingon language? For some reason, I know this, but it's because I've been interested in linguistics for a long time and not because I'm a fan of Star Trek. I read an article a few years ago about the Klingon Language Institute, which was founded by a linguist who basically invented the Klingon language himself. I don't know how much his language has to do with the language spoken by the Klingons on TV -- not much as far as I can tell, since the TV Klingons mostly spoke English -- but it doesn't really matter, since neither language is actually a real language, despite the likely protestations of the Klingon Language Institute.

Anyway, as the night wore on, the Klingons at the coffee table decided it was time to go. But before they left, they decided to get out of their Klingon costumes. After they packed up their fake swords, removed the wigs and latex masks from their faces, took off their robes, and replaced their boots with their street shoes, they didn't look so menacing anymore. They were two guys in their late 50s or early 60s, both balding and mild-mannered, one wearing glasses and the other a bit on the short side. I wondered if they had any kids, or grandchildren, and if they did, what their offspring thought of them. Were they proud? Were they embarrassed? We may never know, but I didn't see any young-looking Klingons there, if that's any sort of clue.

We decided to leave a little while later, and since I live sort of far from Hollywood, I probably got home around midnight. I wasn't tired, though. I'm rarely tired at midnight -- that's just the way my biological clock is set -- but the coffee I had probably played a part in keeping me awake as well. I didn't feel like reading or watching TV, so I turned on my computer and watched a few clips of the Moscow Cat Circus.

It Started with a Cat

2009-07-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

There's a woman who works at my local Whole Foods Market. I don't see her every time I go there, but sometimes when I'm there she's working behind one of the cash registers. She tends to wear short-sleeve or sleeveless tops, so I can usually see her arms, and one day when she was totaling up my grocery bill, I happened to notice that she had a Hello Kitty tattoo on one of her arms.

That seemed like some sort of trademark violation to me, but I know it's not the first time someone's gotten a tattoo of a corporate logo. Consider the many motorcycle gang members with Harley-Davidson tattoos on their arms. As far as I know, not one of them has ever been sued for trademark infringement.

Anyway, back to the woman at Whole Foods. When I first saw that little stylized cat head on her arm, I wasn't even sure it was actually a tattoo. It looked like someone had drawn the Hello Kitty logo on her arm with a ballpoint pen. I couldn't tell for sure, but by the time I'd gotten back to my house, I'd completely forgotten about it.

Then I saw her again a few weeks later. She still had the Hello Kitty logo, so I assumed it was a permanent tattoo. She also had a smaller tattoo somewhere else on her arm, but I don't remember what it looked like, nor do I remember which arm it was on. In any case, once again, by the time I got home, I'd forgotten all about it.

But then I saw her again several months later and she had multi-colored tattoos all over both arms. The original Hello Kitty tattoo was all but invisible.

I've been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately, by the way. A lot of people are getting tattoos that go up and down each arm. Men do it and women do it, although men usually stick with the classic dark blue, while women tend do go with multiple colors. Also, men tend to get what have become known as tribal tattoos -- possibly because they vaguely resemble the tattoos worn by the Maoris in New Zealand -- while women tend to favor more representational designs, such as flowers and birds and trees and Hello Kitty logos.

I don't know how I feel about this whole thing. Sometimes all those tattoos look okay, although I've always thought that tattoos look better on the upper arms than they do on the forearms. That's just a reflection of my own personal aesthetic, however, and beyond that, I don't feel like I'm qualified to make any judgments since I don't have any tattoos myself, and probably never will for as long as I live. But it's not because I don't like them -- it's more that I don't see the point.

People with tattoos get criticized a lot, it seems, and a few years ago some guy was telling me that anyone who gets a lot of tattoos as a teenager might find it difficult getting a job in the professional world as an adult. I disagreed, telling him that by the time that teenager becomes an adult, a lot of other people will have tattoos as well -- including his potential boss -- because by then tattoos will be so common that they won't have the stigma that they have today.

He didn't have any response to that, leading me to believe that I was right and he was wrong, but if I'm right, it probably means that in the not-too-distant future, when more than half the people are covered with tattoos, people like me -- the ones without tattoos -- will be stigmatized. So watch out whom you look down upon, because one day, when they are in the majority, they will probably look down upon you.

If you don't believe me, then just wait. And it's not going to be limited to people with tattoos either. Consider this, for example:

Right now, fat people outnumber fit people. And as the ranks of the fat people grow and the low fat people become more of a minority group, anyone who isn't more than a few pounds overweight will be treated like an outcast. I'm not saying we won't deserve it, because fat people have been teased and taunted and discriminated against for longer than I've been alive. But it won't stop there, because the fat majority will eventually be outnumbered by the ever-growing community of obese people, who might eventually outnumber all the fat and fit people put together. And when that happens, they'd be justified in turning their scorn and their wrath toward us, because of the cruel way we've made fun of them over the years. Things could get ugly if they become violent, but at least we'd be able to outrun them. On the other hand, if they decide to taunt and tease and ostracize the rest of us, I don't know how many of us would be able to deal with the humiliation.

But please don't think I'm singling out the fat or the obese. I'm just using them as an example.

I believe stupid people already outnumber the rest of us, but instead of admiring us or even simply tolerating us, they ridicule us by calling us eggheads and elitists. (As an aside, where did stupid people learn the word "elitist"?) It doesn't happen a lot, because very often they're too stupid to realize that we're smarter than they are. I can tell when I'm in the company of someone a lot smarter than I am, but a lot of stupid people foolishly think that they're just as smart as anyone else. But getting back to my original point, stupid people -- when they recognize an intelligence greater than their own -- will often ridicule it. I've been a victim of this, myself. You probably have been too.

This is the tyranny of the masses. When the lowest common denominator gains power, it uses that power to discriminate against everyone else. And as each generation follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, and the lowest common denominator gets lower and lower, we as a people will become useless and irrelevant. And this is how humanity will end.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the pendulum will one day reach the end of its arc and swing back in the opposite direction. Maybe people will once again recognize the importance of intellectual curiosity and the value of thinking for themselves. Maybe one day, more people will decide to take a walk around the block and enjoy the sensation of muscles contracting and relaxing in harmony instead of vegetating in front of the television.

Or maybe not. Either way, it doesn't matter to me. I'm still not getting a tattoo.

What Goes Down Should Go Up

2009-06-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

The engine light on my car went on about a month ago, and after one week of ignoring it and three weeks of wishing it would turn off by itself, today I finally took my car to the service department at my local Toyota dealership. The guy there told me it would cost about a $100 to diagnose the problem, which would be applied to whatever parts and labor it took to fix it.

He called me a couple of hours later and told me that the seal on my after-market gas cap wasn't tight enough, so air was leaking into the gas tank or something. He said he could replace the gas cap with a genuine Toyota gas cap.

So the gas cap is essentially costing me $100, but I don't care. As a matter of fact, I'm delighted. It's a lot better than finding out that my engine needed major repairs which would cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

But here's the part that doesn't make me so happy. A couple of months ago, I took the car to a local mechanic to get it a smog check, which you need to do every two years in order to register your car in California. The car failed the smog check, but not because there was anything wrong with the car itself. It failed because the seal on my gas cap wasn't tight enough. In order to get the car to pass, he sold me a new gas cap for $25 -- the very same after-market gas cap that caused my engine light to go on about a month later.

So that kind of bugs me, since I've never spent $125 for a gas cap before, but it doesn't make me angry -- there's just something too funny about the whole thing for me to get angry about it.

But I've really only told you about half the story, because I didn't mention that besides the engine light going on, the car had another problem. The front passenger window didn't always go up or down when I pressed the button. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't, but usually it would get stuck in the halfway position.

I don't know how long I've had that problem, because I never open or close that window. But three or four months ago, I had a few people in the car, and after the guy in the front seat opened the window, he discovered that he couldn't close it again. After playing with it enough, we finally got it to close again, but I didn't get it fixed because I never opened that window that much in the first place.

However, when the engine light went on, I decided to have them look at the window as well. As with the engine light, the guy told me it would cost about $100 to diagnose the problem, which would be applied to the cost of parts and labor. I figured all together it would cost me a few hundred dollars to get the window fixed, because that's what other people I knew told me it would cost. And even though I rarely open that window, I decided to get it fixed, because as far as automobile windows are concerned, if they go down, they should also go up.

Anyway, when the guy called to tell me about the new gas cap, he also told me that the window needed a new regulator. Don't ask me what it regulates, because I don't know. All I know is that if the regulator doesn't work, the window won't work. The bad news is that for my particular car, the regulator and the motor are one unit, so even if your regulator's good and your motor's bad, or your motor's good and your regulator's bad, you have to buy the entire regulator and motor unit, which means you'll end up paying maybe twice what you'd pay if they were separate parts. I'm not going to even tell you what it's costing me, since I'm too embarrassed to admit it, but let's just say it makes $125 for a gas cap seem like a bargain.

That's not the only bad news, though. He also told me that he didn't have the part in stock and couldn't get one until Tuesday. And I couldn't just pick up the car and take it in again on Tuesday because the door panel is all disassembled and if they were to put it back together again and disassemble it again on Tuesday, they'd have to charge me for the additional labor.

Fortunately, I have another car. Well, actually it's a truck. I hardly ever drive the truck, since it's almost 20 years old and it's not in the best condition. It's safe to drive and it's fairly reliable, but it makes a lot of noises, it looks awful, and a lot of things no longer work -- like the heater, the stereo, the air conditioning, the trip odometer, the windshield washer, and the gas gauge -- but I keep it because sometimes it comes in handy. I seem to drive it less and less each year, but every now and then I might need a sheet of drywall or something else that won't fit in the Camry, and sometimes I drive to places I wouldn't want to leave the Camry, such as airport parking lots during extended trips. One time a friend of mine and I went to Watts Towers, and I took the truck because I didn't feel safe leaving the other car unattended in that part of town. It turns out I needn't have worried, but that's not the point. The point is that I hardly ever drive the truck. But now it looks like I'll be driving it until Tuesday, which makes me happy I still have it.

For years, I've been telling myself I should get rid of it, because it's hard to justify paying the registration fees and insurance premiums on it every year. So I don't even try to justify it. I just pay the money and forget about it. Besides, even though it's a funky old truck, it's never failed a smog check, and since you have to manually roll the windows up and down, there's never any danger of having to buy a new window motor or regulator.

Protection Money

2009-06-13T19:30:00.000-07:00

As I was driving down the street the other day, I noticed a van parked in front of a house. On the side of the van was a sign advertising baby protection services.

I've heard of baby protection before. We all have. It first became popular in the mid or late '80s, and at that time it consisted largely of taping towels to the edges of sharp coffee tables so a crawling baby who bumped his head on the edge of a table wouldn't sustain any traumatic head injuries. It always seemed like a pretty good idea to me. Sure, it made the coffee tables look kind of strange, but that's a small price to pay for the safety of a small child.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was another kind of baby protection before that, which I think became sort of popular sometime in the early '70s. It was just a little thing, so it's easy to forget about, but do you remember those plastic covers you could plug into unused electrical outlets? The idea was that they would prevent a curious toddler from sticking a metal fork or knife into the outlet and inadvertently electrocuting himself. It's a great idea, of course, and so simple too, but if your toddler is toddling around with a knife or fork in his hand, a plastic outlet cover may not be what you need to protect him from danger.

And just as an aside, what exactly is a toddler? Or more to the point, what does it mean to toddle? I always thought a toddler crawled around on the floor, but apparently that's not toddling, that's just crawling. According to a couple of online dictionaries I just checked, to toddle is to walk with short unsteady steps -- the idea being that a child just learning to walk would move in such a manner. Well, I never had any kids, so I guess I can be forgiven for not quite knowing the meaning of the word, but just to build upon my original point, if your child is crawling or toddling around with a sharp metal object in his hand, that electrical outlet on the wall might not be his most immediate threat.

But let's return to the more general topic of baby protection. Just how much protection does the baby need? What I mean is, is making a "baby-safe" home such a daunting task that the parents can't do it themselves? Do they really need to hire a professional baby protection company? The answer is probably no. I realize there's more to it than just covering the edges of sharp furniture -- you also want to make it difficult for your child to accidentally tumble downstairs and hurt himself. You probably don't want to polish your hardwood floors so that they're too slippery for your toddler to toddle upon either. And as I hinted at before, you'll want to keep those forks and knives at a safe distance from your children. I just thought of those things off the top of my head, but there are probably a lot of other things you should do as well, and if you don't have thoughts like that on the top of your head, you could probably read a magazine article or two and get all the information you need to know.

So I think professional baby safety companies probably benefit the owners of those companies more than they benefit anyone else, such as the customers or their children. I think it's just another way for people to make some money by scaring new parents with horror stories about how unsafe the typical home is. And the more you can scare them, the more money you're likely to make. It's a simple economic principle.

But the big question in my mind is, does all this baby protection stuff actually help protect babies? Have any statistical studies been made? Or failing that, is there any anecdotal evidence that a smaller percentage of the baby population today is being accidentally electrocuted or injured by sharp-edged furniture?

The reason I ask is because I grew up before all this baby protection stuff was available. So did my sisters, so did all my college friends, and so did everyone else I ever knew who was born around the same time as I was. And yet, I don't know of a single person my age who ever stuck a knife in an electrical outlet or bumped his head on the edge of a coffee table. It's possible, of course, that the children who did suffer such misfortune never lived to tell about it, but I've never heard about any such cases, not even from a friend of a friend of a friend.

Still, I don't feel comfortable recommending that people leave the sharp edges of their furniture exposed. But if children need that kind of protection today, and they didn't need it when I was a kid, it probably either means that coffee tables today are sharper than they used to be or babies' skulls today are softer than they used to be. I doubt if the tables are getting any sharper, and if you have any doubts about that, go check a furniture store. I also have doubts about babies' skulls being softer, although there's no good way to test this for yourself. But if furniture is no more dangerous than it was when I was a baby, and if babies themselves are just as rugged and hardy as they used to be, it probably means that maybe the only thing different is that we've become a lot more over-protective.

You can argue whether or not all this over-protectiveness is actually good for the children, but I think the question may be moot because I don't think it will last too much longer. Now that we're tottering on the brink of an economic depression, it might not be too long before children are considered nothing more than an easily-exploitable source of cheap labor, just like they were in the past, and just like they still are in many impoverished countries throughout the world. So if some politician proposes that we reduce our budget or decrease our trade deficit by overturning the child-labor laws, don't be too surprised.

I hope it never comes to that, and I don't think it will, but you never know. It depends on how bad things get. In the meantime, while we're still over-protecting our children, if you need some extra money, you could probably open a baby protection service. You can do all the research you need by reading a few magazine articles, and after that all you really need is a van with a sign on it.

A Couldn't Make It

2009-06-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills last week, there was a screening of John Smith -- an hour-long segment for the Showtime version of Ira Glass's This American Life. The screening was hosted by Ira Glass, and all the tickets were sold within an hour or so, so they added a second screening on the following day. The bad news was that Ira Glass wasn't there on the second day, but the good news was that the tickets were half the price and they weren't all sold within an hour.

I was planning on going with my friend A, but because of quotidian vicissitudes, A couldn't make it, and I ended up going with my friend J instead.

I was only at AMPAS once before in my life. I don't remember exactly when, but it was to see a pre-release screening of Platoon, so that'll give you an idea of how long ago it was. I was going out with some woman at the time and she got the tickets from a friend of hers. I met him, and he seemed like a jerk.

We didn't sit near him or talk to him after the movie, so I'm basing my assessment of him on the three or four seconds it took to shake his hand. A few seconds may not seem like a lot, but you can sometimes learn a lot about someone by shaking his hand. For example, if you're shaking someone's hand but you're looking over his shoulder, scanning for other people in the audience you might know, then you're just going through the motions. That's what this guy did, and that's what made him a jerk. I don't remember much else from that night, but I remember that insincere handshake quite vividly. Keep that in mind the next time you're shaking someone's hand.

Things never went too well with that woman I was seeing, and that friend of hers was a total jerk, but at least Platoon was good. I think it may have even won an Academy Award.

Anyway, you don't care about any of that, so I'm going to write about today's actual topic, which is seeing the Ira Glass thing at AMPAS.

The first thing I noticed when we got inside the building was that we couldn't even get to our seats without going through security gates. They didn't have anyone waving a portable wand all over you like they do at the airports, and you didn't have to remove your shoes or belt, but I did have to empty my pockets into a little plastic tray.

The guard noticed that I had one of those miniature Swiss Army knives on my key ring, and he told me I'd either have to take it back to the car, or I could check it with him and pick it up from the main desk on after the show. I didn't think there was time to walk all the way to the car and back, and it wasn't even my car in the first place -- it was J's -- so I decided to check the knife with him. It seemed like they were making a lot of fuss over a little knife, so it made me glad I decided not to bring a duffel bag full of semi-automatic machine guns with me.

We got past the gates and took our seats, but before the show began, the woman who introduced it told us that no gum chewing was allowed in the theater. That didn't bother me so much because I never chew gum, but J had some, which she discreetly removed from her mouth and wrapped in a piece of foil paper. It's not like they were going down the rows looking inside everyone's mouth, but J has a healthy respect for the law and was willing to comply.

As for the program itself, I'm not going to review it. But I liked it a lot, and J liked it a lot, and it seemed like everyone else in the audience liked it a lot as well.

So it was an evening well spent, but before we left, I had to retrieve my weapon.

It came as no surprise to me that I wasn't the only person who had to check his weapon. When I went to pick it up at the main desk, I saw an array of tiny knives and other sharp objects. The guard was explaining to some other guy that they weren't worried that audience members would use their knives to harm others -- it was more a matter of preventing people from slashing the seats with them. He went on to explain that chewing gum wasn't allowed because people had a habit of sticking their gum to their seats.

To be honest, I didn't expect that they'd have that kind of problem at AMPAS. I could see slashing the torn and faded vinyl seats of a dirty graffiti-covered bus that runs through the inner-city ghettos, but not the seats at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I know this is going to make me sound like some kind of elitist, but I didn't think AMPAS attracted that sort of crowd.

Slashing seats and sticking gum under the arm rests is never appropriate, but I think it's a lot more appropriate on an old bus than in a well-maintained theater in Beverly Hills. But the people at AMPAS wouldn't have paid all that money to buy security gates and hire security guards unless they had a good reason.

Of course, I'm hardly an expert on the matter, since I've never slashed a seat with a knife. It just doesn't seem like it would be that much fun, especially with one of those tiny Swiss Army knives. It might be kind of fun with a really sharp chef's knife, but I wouldn't go out of my way to try it. Shooting holes though a seat with a semi-automatic machine gun might be worth trying, but it's probably very noisy, and it would make a big mess, and when you were all done, there'd be one less theater seat in the auditorium. So I think we should leave the seats alone. We should sit on them -- they exist for our comfort, after all -- but we shouldn't harm them. But that's just my opinion, and as I said before, I'm hardly an expert on the matter.

Necessary Ice

2009-05-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

I just flew back from a week-end jaunt to the East coast and are my arms tired! (From all the flapping of my arms. It's an old joke.)

I flew out to celebrate my dad's 90th birthday, but I didn't fly by flapping my arms -- I decided to make the trip in an airplane instead. Or actually four airplanes, since I had to catch a connecting flight going there and coming back. And since it's fresh in my mind, I thought I'd share my experiences with you.

You may recall that I wrote a similar post about a year and a half ago, when I was flying back East for Thanksgiving. You may also recall that I referred to the same joke at the beginning of that post as well. I don't know why. It was never a funny joke. It's more like a classic joke. I probably first heard it more than 45 years ago.

And in answer to the question I often get asked when I mention that I'm going back East to visit a member of my family, no, I'm not from back East. The confusion might arise from the phrase "back East" which could be interpreted to mean that I'm going back to the East, implying that that's where I came from. But that's just a phrase. We don't say "back West" or "back South" or "back "North" -- we say "out West" and "down South" and "up North." I think the only reason we say "back East" is that this country of ours was established in the East.

Anyway, I'm from California. But my older sister and my dad live in different parts of the East coast. And even that's not quite accurate, since even though my dad lives in one of the states on the East coast, he probably lives about 400 miles inland.

But to get on with today's topic, now that that the airlines have lost so much money, they try to pass on as many costs as they can to the only people they can: the passengers. They've always been doing this, of course, except that now it's so much more overt. For example, it's almost impossible to pay for an airline ticket with frequent flier miles. It used to be simple: You accrued something like 20,000 or 25,000 miles and you could redeem them for a ticket. But now -- on United Airlines, at least -- they have the standard mileage award and some other kind of award. For the standard award, you only need 30,000 miles for a domestic round-trip flight, but there are so many restrictions and black-out dates that you can never actually use them. For the other type of award, it seems like the more miles you've accrued, the more miles you need to book a flight.

They don't serve complimentary meals on cross-country flights anymore, but they stopped doing that long before they started losing so much money. And to be honest, I don't think anyone minds. You can still buy a meal, but I've never seen anyone do it. So this was a wise move on the airlines' part.

I always buy my ticket online. I check in and print my boarding pass online as well. When you check in online, they give you all sorts of upgrade options, such as paying more for additional legroom, or faster check-in. I don't know what the faster check-in upgrade is all about, but it seems like a rip-off. And I used to think that the extra legroom upgrade was a big rip-off, but that was only because I chose that option on a small plane for a short flight, and I think I paid about $30 for an inch or so of extra legroom. I remember trying to get my money back from United, but they were unrelenting. And you don't want to complain too much to an airline, or else they'll put you on the national "no fly list" and screw up your life forever.

But this time, I decided to try it again on the two longer flights. It was $49 extra for each flight, and for that $49 you get about three or four extra inches of legroom. It doesn't sound like much, and at about $15 per inch it sounds like a rip-off, but it was well worth it, because those few extra inches make all the difference between feeling like you're trapped inside a tiny cage and feeling like you're trapped in a larger, more comfortable cage. All you're really getting for your extra $49 is the about the same amount of legroom they used to give you with a regular economy class seat about 15 or 20 years ago, but in this day and age of reduced expectations and increased corporate rip-offs, it feels like a luxury.

You don't get as much legroom as you would on a more expensive seat, but even if I had the money, I don't think I could justify paying out the wazoo or out the yin-yang for a business class or first class seat, respectively. And I'm not sure of this, so is the expression "out the wazoo (or yin-yang)" or "up the wazoo (or yin-yang)"? I had a brief discussion with my older sister about this, but I'm not convinced there's a right answer. I think they might each be correct in different contexts, which is to say that they might not be completely synonymous.

But here's another thing that made me think the airlines are in financial trouble. It used to be that no matter how short the flight, they'd still offer what they call "complimentary beverage service," but on the two short flights I took, they mentioned that since the flights only lasted about about 35 minutes, they wouldn't be providing that service. They did decide to offer us water on one of those flights, however. That's no big deal, and it's hardly worth mentioning, but what's more interesting to me is what happened on one of the longer flights.

But first, to put this whole thing in some sort of historical context, I have to mention that in the past, whenever they wheeled the drink cart down the aisle, I used to ask for orange juice. The flight attendant would then take a cup, fill it with ice, then pour the orange juice over the ice and hand me the cup. I realized I was getting approximately equal parts of orange juice and ice, so I started asking for orange juice with no ice. But then I noticed that if you order something from a can, they gave you the entire can so, for example, instead of getting about six ounces of orange juice, you got maybe 16 ounces of apple juice. So I started asking for apple juice.

But on my recent flight from Los Angeles to Washington DC, when I asked for apple juice, the attendant asked me, "Do you need any ice with that?" My first thought was that United Airlines must really be struggling if it's trying to save money on ice costs. Keep in mind that you used to explicitly ask for no ice. But this time I was asked not just if I wanted any ice, but if I needed any ice. Of course the answer is no -- nobody needs ice for a can of apple juice that's already somewhat cold, but I answered yes anyway, just because I don't want to see the day when they start charging passengers extra for ice.

And since you can't talk about airline service today without thinking about what it used to be like, I couldn't help remembering something that used to always happen in the late '80s and maybe early '90s. This had nothing to do with the airlines but with the passengers themselves. It seemed like about 20 years ago, whenever a plane landed, all the passengers would applaud. Well, not all the passengers -- I never applauded, for example, because I thought it was a stupid thing to do. I could see applauding if we were flying through a dangerous storm and the pilot had somehow managed to snatch the passengers from the jaws of certain death, but for a normal, everyday flight, there's really no reason for it. And I don't think the flight crew feels slighted if they don't get any applause -- I actually think they'd feel insulted if they were applauded. If some guy told you you did a really good job on something you didn't consider all that difficult, wouldn't you feel like he was underestimating your abilities?

Anyway, I'm glad that that embarrassing custom has died. I would have forgotten about it completely, but there was a woman on one of my flights who tried to resurrect that childish behavior. Fortunately, no one followed her lead, so her attempts at resurrection were unsuccessful. That made me feel good. It made me feel more confident about the future of the human race.

But here's some behavior that makes me feel a little bit worse about it. I never saw myself as the Law and Order type, but there are certain laws that I follow without question, because they make a lot of sense. For example, if the airline luggage policies state that carry-on luggage must be no greater than a certain size, I wouldn't try to stuff a bag that was two or three times that size into an overhead bin. But I saw that happen a lot. I don't know why the people who check the boarding passes as you enter the plane always look the other way when someone drags a huge bag behind him. There's rarely enough room in the overhead bins anyway, and when someone brings a huge bag aboard, the flight attendants just have to take the bag and check it in, which slows things down for everyone.

It's not that I don't sympathize with the passengers, by the way. The maximum size for carry-on luggage is pretty small, and you're only able to take one piece on the plane with you. So if you're going on an extended trip, you're probably going to have to check some of your baggage. Of course, that means you've got a pretty good chance of never seeing your baggage again, but that's just how things go: You pay your money and you take your chances.

Anyway, on the flight from Dulles back to LAX, when it came time for the complimentary beverage service, I asked for some apple juice and the flight attendant gave me some ice without even asking me if I needed any, but then she asked me if I wanted the whole can. So I inferred that United Airlines has no specific beverage policy, and I can only assume that the flight attendants were acting on their own rather than acting on orders from above.

Incidentally, on that flight, they came around twice with the beverage cart, and on the second time I asked for apple juice with no ice, which is actually the way I prefer it. When drinks are too cold or too hot, most of the flavor is masked by the temperature. So I never use ice when I'm at home.

The Writing on the Wall

2009-05-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, about a month ago, I mentioned that someone had spray-painted some graffiti in front of my house.

There was graffiti on the retaining wall, on the sidewalk near the wall, on the approach to the driveway, and on the streetlight adjacent to my house. I didn't mention this in my original post, but there was also some graffiti on the curb across the street from me.

I bought some graffiti removal products and went to work. The writing on the wall came off pretty easily, and the graffiti on the sidewalk in front of the wall came off pretty easily as well. I didn't have as much luck with the streetlight or the driveway approach, though. I removed most of the paint, but you can still see it. As for the curb across the street from me, I decided that that was my neighbor's problem.

So I took the advice of the person who commented on the original post: I called the Los Angeles County Graffiti Removal Hotline. They answer their phones 24 hours a day, so I thought it would be a simple matter to contact them, but the first time I called (sometime around 8:00 at night), they put my on hold and I never heard from them again.

So I went to their web site and filed a graffiti report online. Their online form also allowed me to submit pictures, so I included some of the pictures I'd taken. I waited for four or five days, but I never heard from them, so I resubmitted the report again. When they still hadn't contacted me a week later, I reasoned that their online form submission page might not be working.

They're supposed to get the work done within 72 hours of receiving the report, but they hadn't even contacted me yet, so I called them again. This time the woman was very helpful and friendly, but she told me that they didn't handle all of LA county, and she thought that the area I lived in might not be covered. But she wrote a work order anyway and told me that if the job hasn't been completed within three days, I should call back and give them the work order reference number, and they'd give me a local number I could call.

Three days came and three days went, but the graffiti didn't go anywhere. So I called back, but I got transferred to someone's voice mail. I told her the story and asked her to call me back with the number of someone I could contact locally.

Unfortunately, I wasn't near a phone when she returned my call, so she left me a message, and in that message the number she gave me to call was my own number -- the one I had told her to call me back at. I think she was a little confused.

So I called my city's Department of Public Works and asked them if they had a graffiti removal program. The woman who answered told me that if the graffiti was on city property, they'd take care of it, but if it was on my property, it was my responsibility to remove it. So I told her the three places on city property where the graffiti was.

When I mentioned the approach to my driveway, she told me that that was my responsibility. "Even though it's on city property?" I asked her. "Yes," she told me.

So I asked her about the curb across the street, and she told me that that was the homeowner's responsibility as well. "Even though it's on city property?" I repeated. "Yes," she repeated back to me.

Then I asked her about the streetlight. I didn't see how that could possibly be considered the homeowner's responsibility, and as it turns out, it isn't. "That's the responsibility of Southern California Edison," she informed me.

I suppose if the graffiti was painted on the walls of city hall, they might consider it their responsibility, but then again, they might not.

As for me, I'm going to hire a guy to remove whatever graffiti I couldn't remove from the driveway approach. I contacted him the day I first noticed the graffiti, and his bid for the whole job was a few hundred dollars. That seemed reasonable, but I figure it should be less now since I removed most of the graffiti myself. Of course, he might figure otherwise, but we'll see.

And if his bid is low enough, I may even have him clean the streetlight. I know I could call Southern California Edison and have them do it, but I've dealt with them before and trying to get them to do anything is more trouble than it's worth.

As for the curb across the street, that's still my neighbor's problem.

The Swine Flu Pandemic

2009-05-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

When I write something on this blog, I usually don't get a lot of feedback. And I know that if I stop writing on it forever, the world will little note nor long remember it.

It actually seems like I get more feedback when I don't write on this blog. It's usually from the same guy, but whenever I let a week or two go by without posting something new, he'll often remind me that I haven't written anything lately.

Another guy has told me more than once (which is to say, twice) that my posts are too long and rambling. I told him that was deliberate, but it didn't seem to make him any more interested in reading my blog.

So today, after not having written anything for the past two weeks, I will write a very short post on swine flu.

If you read the news, it seems the term "swine flu" will strike terror into the hearts of people around the world. As a matter of fact, before swine flu made the news, I'd never heard the word "pandemic" used so often in my life. But if you read the news, you also can't help noticing that a lot of doctors and epidemiologists are telling us that compared to many other flu strains, swine flu isn't actually all that terrible. Sure, maybe a few hundred people died from it, but thousands of people die every year from other types of flu.

Just for fun, I decided to see what information I could glean from the words themselves, and here is what I found: If you take the letters from the phrase "swine flu pandemic," replace the "w" with a "y," the two "i"s with two "o"s, the two "n"s with two "t"s, the "e" with an "o," the "u" with a "y," the "d" with an "h," and the "c" with an "l," and then rearrange all the letters, you'll get the phrase "mostly a lot of hype."

A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

2009-04-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

I could have just as easily called this "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" but the Proust title popped into my mind first, so that's the one I'm going with.

I have a medical condition that requires me to get a CT Scan and an MRI every few months. Well, that isn't quite true, so let me rephrase it in a way that is. One particular treatment for my medical condition requires me to get a CT Scan and an MRI every few months.

As you probably already know, CT Scans used to be called CAT Scans. I don't know why they changed the name, but they did. "CAT" stands for Computer-Aided Tomography, so it makes sense to call a scanning method using this technology a CAT Scan. And when they were first introduced, that's what they were called, possibly to help differentiate them from DOG Scans. But somewhere along the way, that extra letter in the middle must have seemed too cumbersome, so they dropped it and the CAT Scan became the CT Scan.

As far as I know, MRIs have always been called MRIs. But that doesn't mean all MRIs are alike. In the early '90s, when I started having back problems, I had a few MRIs, usually whenever I popped a disc in my lower back. So I can speak with some authority when I say that MRIs are no fun.

As a matter of fact, one time as I was entering the tube, I had a mild panic attack. I'm not sure why, because I'd already had a couple of MRIs before and they didn't make me panic. The feeling went away pretty quickly, and the whole procedure took about 20 minutes, so brief panic attack notwithstanding, it was not an unpleasant experience.

People who have had MRIs usually complain about the loud throbbing noise or the claustrophobic feeling. Or maybe they complain about both.

I happen to like the noise, it gives me something to focus my attention on. You can think of an MRI as a huge percussion instrument that you're inside of, and you can think of the noise as beats, which you can divide any way you want. I suppose it's natural to divide them into fours or sixes or eights, but I sometimes like to count them out in fives or sevens or elevens, just to make things more interesting. And if that doesn't seem all that interesting to you, you should understand that there isn't much else you can do when you're all but completely immobilized inside a narrow tube.

So I like the noise, but I'm not wild about the claustrophobic feeling. As a matter of fact, that's what caused my panic attack in the early '90s. Some MRI facilities provide you with prismatic mirrored glasses that let you see at a 90 degree angle, so even though your eyes are facing forward, what you see is the opening at the end of the tube where your feet are.

When I learned I was going to have an MRI every few months, I bought a pair, but the truth is, I don't really need them, because it seems like MRI tubes aren't as cramped as they used to be. Either that, or I'm just getting used to them. Still, the glasses are pretty useful when you're first being drawn into the tube.

Anyway, I had a CT Scan and an MRI on Friday, which is why I'm telling you all this.

The MRI was pretty much like the previous one, except this time, after I was all strapped down and covered with supplementary magnets, the technician put some headphones on me so I could listen to music. I've never listened to music during an MRI before, and I didn't really want to this time, but I'm always open to new experiences, so I didn't voice any objections.

The music wasn't all that bad, by which I mean it could have been a whole lot worse, but it was as bland as music can be and still be considered music. It was insipid and uninspired "lite jazz." It didn't even deserve to be called "light jazz" because when music is this bland, proper spelling is no longer an issue. The music was streamed over an advertiser-supported internet radio station, so the ads were the reason for the station's existence and the music was just a means of getting people to listen to them. Remember the old adage "Corporate rock sucks"? Well guess what? Corporate jazz sucks too. What a surprise.

It was basically "easy listening" music with a saxophone, which might be just what some people want to hear when they're having an MRI, because it helps soothe and relax them. But it had the opposite effect on me -- I like music with a little more personality so it just made me annoyed. "Easy listening" music is safe and tasteless -- it's an easily-digestible lifeless mush that's designed to placate and calm you and make you a willing subject of our corrupt and cynical corporatocracy.

But even worse than the music were the advertisements I was forced to listen to. The first time they came on, I asked the technician if she could turn down the music, but I guess she didn't hear me. The technicians are in a separate room, and there's an intercom they use to communicate with you, but I guess they can only hear you when they flip the switch, and they only flip the switch when they want you to respond to a something they ask you. So basically, they can't hear you unless they want to. I was holding a push button that I was supposed to use in case of an emergency, but as bad as it was being forced to listen to advertisements, I knew it wasn't worth stopping the MRI for.

I can't stand listening to advertisements. They are one of the the most venal forms of noise pollution, and when I'm not stuffed inside an MRI tube, I do my best to avoid them. They're toxic waste for the ears. Whatever damage the radiation from all these scans is doing to my body, the advertisements are doing to my mind.

During my time in the tube, there were three sets of advertisements, but fortunately, the throbbing noises masked out most of them. But one time it was relatively quiet inside the tube, so I was forced to hear them. But at least I wasn't forced to obey them, because the technology for that doesn't exist yet. It's only a matter of time, though, so be prepared.

By the way, the MRI is supposed to take 45 minutes. That's what they tell you when you make the appointment, and that's what they tell you when the procedure begins. And for some reason I always believe them, even though they always last a lot longer. The one I just had must have taken about twice that long, and the previous one probably lasted about an hour and a quarter.

And that isn't just based on my subjective sense of time. It wasn't a matter of time appearing to pass very slowly the way it does when you're really bored or you're forced to endure excruciating torment and agony. It was more a matter of looking at my watch when I got there and looking at it again when I left.

I've tried to account for the time, but if it was only a 45 minute procedure, then things just don't add up.

I got there before 11:00, waited a short while before I went through the admissions process, and then I had the CT scan. The CT scan took about 10 minutes, but I sat in the waiting room for a while, so it was about noon when I was done.

Then I went to the MRI waiting room. I wasn't there for very long, but let's say I was there for a half hour before the MRI began. So if the procedure began at 12:30 and it only took 45 minutes, I would have been finished by 1:15, but the MRI wasn't over until 2:00.

So that's an hour and a half. And in case you're wondering what it's like being stuck inside a tube for an hour and a half, almost completely unable to move, well, let's just say that it isn't a lot of fun.

And another thing is, I've never liked wearing headphones, so being forced to wear them for 90 minutes didn't make things any easier for me. These were the big bulky kind that pilots wear. They fit over your ears, and if you had ears that stuck out before you put on the headphones, they'd be flush with your head by the time you took them off.

And here's something else you may find interesting (and by "interesting" I mean something you can occupy your mind with while you're crammed inside a tube): A lot of images had to be taken while I was holding my breath, presumably because each inhalation and exhalation would have moved my internal organs around a little and made the images turn out blurry. I didn't mind that -- it was never more than 20 seconds or so, but what I found amusing are the breathing instructions that the MRI technicians gave me.

For my previous two MRIs, the guy just said, "Breathe in and hold." And then 20 seconds or so later, he'd say, "Okay, breathe." It was simple and straightforward, with very little room for ambiguity.

But for the one on Friday, the woman said "Take a little breath and hold." So I took a little breath, but the oxygen I inhaled from that little breath was barely enough to sustain me for the entire 20 seconds. So all the other times she said it -- and she must have said it at least 20 times -- I took a bigger than normal breath. I just wanted to make sure I had enough air to last the full 20 seconds.

I don't know why she kept asking me to take a little breath -- maybe she thought that if she told me to take a deep breath, I'd puff myself up like a blow fish, or maybe blow myself up like a puffer fish. Whichever.

In any event, halfway through the procedure, they changed technicians for some reason.

The new technician didn't tell me to take little breaths. Instead, whenever he wanted me to hold my breath -- and I can quote him exactly because he must have said this at least 30 times -- he told me, "Breathe in. Hold it in. Don't breathe."

My first thought was, "Is he an idiot?" but then it occurred to me that maybe he didn't think I could follow simple instructions. I quickly dispensed with that idea, of course, and decided that he must talk that way to everyone, because perhaps some people don't realize that holding one's breath is exactly the same thing as not breathing. Or maybe he finds reassurance in all the redundancy somehow.

By the way, the previous time I had an MRI, they switched technicians halfway through as well, which further supports my assertion that the procedure takes a lot longer than 45 minutes. You don't change technicians in the middle of a short 45 minute procedure -- that's something you do for a long hour and a half procedure.

So the MRI took a lot longer than 45 minutes. That is an inarguable fact and I don't know why everyone who works there thinks it doesn't. Or maybe they just say it doesn't. Maybe they know full well that the procedure takes a long time, but if they tell the patients it only lasts for 45 minutes, then it won't seem so long. It is out of kindness that they lie to us.

On the other hand, maybe the constant exposure to high-powered magnets messes with their sense of time somehow. That, plus they spend all day in a suite of basement rooms with no natural lighting, so they never have a good sense of what time it is. It could be day, it could be night, or it could be any time in between, but they'd never know the difference because they can't look out a window. Their biological clocks could be broken beyond repair. Maybe time as we know it is nothing more than some intangible and incomprehensible abstract concept to them, like fractional-dimensional spaces or M-theory.

It makes a lot of sense, but do I really believe it? No, not necessarily, but those are the kinds of thoughts that pop into your head when you're stuck inside a tube for 90 minutes.

Felony Paint Attack

2009-04-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

I was all set to write an informative and entertaining blog post today, but when I went out to get the paper this morning, I noticed that some graffiti had been applied to the sidewalk in front of my house, a small area of the retaining wall near the sidewalk, the approach to my driveway, and the streetlight next to my house.

I called up the police and filed a report with them. I knew it wouldn't do any good, and the police confirmed that when they came out to my house. So I wasn't disappointed. I just wanted to complain to someone, and that's what the police are for in cases like this. They did tell me that each application of graffiti was a felony, but they also told me that it would be almost impossible to find the guy who did it, particularly since crimes like this are rarely committed in the semi-exclusive bedroom community I live in. It never occurred to me that they'd even look for the guy, and they more or less confirmed that as well, but I printed out some photographs for them anyway.

So I'm not going to write anything informative or entertaining today. Instead, I'm going to shop for graffiti removal products. According to one web site I visited, any money I spend on graffiti removal -- whether I do it myself or hire someone to do it for me -- is tax-deductible, but I don't know if I'll bother with that. Doing my taxes is enough of a hassle without trying to figure out which form I need to deduct the cost of graffiti removal products and services. Or maybe I'll start using TurboTax the way it's meant to be used, instead of just filling in the forms I think should be filled in.

This Little Piggy Went to Market

2009-03-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, before I get started, let me apologize for this week's title. It has almost nothing to do with the subject of this post. As a matter of fact, the only thing even vaguely related is one word of the title, and then only if you use a different meaning of the word. If I'd wanted to spend countless hours thinking about it, maybe I could have come up with a better title, but as I've mentioned before, thinking of a title is more difficult than it might seem.

Anyway, back when I used to have money to burn, rather than burn it, I sometimes invested it in the stock market. The result was usually the same, but I didn't have to deal with matches or smoke or fire or ashes, so it was a little more convenient for me since I didn't have to worry about clean-up and lingering odors.

Since I never knew much about financial stuff in general or the stock market in particular, my investment strategy was pretty simple. I basically just put my money in stocks that other people I knew were investing in. This was all before the March 2000 bursting of the stock market bubble, when you could make money investing in just about anything.

I also had a couple of accounts with stockbrokers, and my results with them were about the same as my results without them: Sometimes I made money, and sometimes I lost money. There was one broker I trusted, and he always told me that whatever he recommended to me, he also bought for himself, but if that's true, he probably lost a lot of money. So sometime around three or four years ago, I decided to get out of the stock market (although the bulk of my retirement accounts are still in the market and are hence currently worth slightly more than the paper my quarterly statements are printed on).

But that's not what I really wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about that one broker I trusted. He had an assistant, and I couldn't really tell in what ways she assisted him -- all I know is that whenever I called him, she answered the phone. So I figured she was more of a secretary than assistant.

Just as an aside, I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line, the word "secretary" became a pejorative term, and we started calling them things like administrative assistants instead. I think this happened in the late '80s when a lot of other job titles were subjected to the same sort of pointless elevation to a higher stature as well. Interestingly, perhaps, the term "secretary" is still okay when it's part of a title like Secretary of the Interior, or Secretary of Commerce, or Secretary of State.

Anyway, three or four years ago, I said goodbye to my stockbroker and his assistant, and I never heard from them again, until a couple of weeks ago, when his assistant (who is now his former assistant) gave me a call. She told me she was working for a new investment firm and, with the permission of her former employer, she was contacting some of his old clients. We talked for a while, and I told her I was pretty much out of the stock market, but she asked if she could send me a business card, and for old time's sake, I said yes.

I just got her card in the mail last week, and her new title is Senior Investment Consultant. That sounds like a pretty big jump in three or four years, doesn't it? From assistant to Senior Investment Consultant in just a few years. That has to be more than simple title inflation -- a Senior Investment Consultant is not just a fancy term for an assistant. But it makes me wonder if she was ever a Junior Investment Consultant or an Intermediate Investment Consultant. I always thought you had to work your way up the ladder, but maybe she was able to skip a few rungs. Of course, it's more likely that there's no such thing as a Junior or Intermediate Investment Consultant. I wouldn't buy stocks from one, and I don't think anyone else would either.

But getting back to the original topic, maybe I was wrong about her back when she was an assistant. Maybe her job consisted of doing more than just answering the phones. Maybe she was researching the fundamentals of all the companies my broker was recommending to me. I don't know.

But what's in a name, right? So it doesn't really matter what we call her. But even if her skills as a Senior Investment Consultant are unimpeachable, I'm sure there are plenty of investment consultants and stockbrokers with fancy titles who don't know much more than I do. What I remember is that for most stockbrokers I ever dealt with, the only real skill they needed was the ability to talk you into buying whatever stock they were pushing that day. If they hadn't decided to become stockbrokers, they could have been very successful vacuum cleaner salesmen. All they have to do is convince you that you really want what they're selling, and that if you don't buy it, you'll be missing a great opportunity that you'll regret for the rest of your life.

Or at least, that's been my experience. It seemed like the value of a particular stock wasn't based so much on anything about the company issuing the stock -- it was more about the salesmanship of the stockbroker. It seemed like they'd get a little bit of news -- like maybe one company was planning on merging with another company -- and use that to convince their clients that the resulting company's stock would skyrocket. Sometimes it happened, and sometimes it didn't, but the brokers got their commission either way.

So that's why I don't trust the stock market. Even when you're making money in it, you're usually not making money for any sound reasons. That's why people use terms like the "psychology of the market" -- the whole thing is just one big mind game, or at least, as I said before, that's been my experience.

So what's going on here? Am I trying to imply that we've got a bunch of unqualified people passing themselves off as qualified stockbrokers, and that's why the market is in the mess it's currently in? Or that the same incompetent stockbrokers were somehow responsible for the bubble that burst nine years ago? No. That would be overly simplistic, in addition to being completely untrue. So what's my point? Where am I going with this? I don't really know -- maybe I don't even have a point. I just got a business card in the mail and I sort of took it from there.

Cross-Disciplinary Cultural Movements

2009-03-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

You've probably noticed that when some sort of artistic or literary movement takes hold, it often migrates into other fields, like the modernist movement, for example. Its influence spanned multiple disciplines, such as art, literature, design, poetry, and architecture. The same thing is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of the minimalist, post-modernist, and deconstructivist movements, and probably others as well. We see examples of those movements in art, literature, architecture, and design.

But there are some cultural movements that don't cross disciplines so well. I'm thinking in particular of dadaism and surrealism. They were firmly established in art and literature, as well as in the theater and movies, but they never crossed over into architecture and design, mostly for practical reasons, I imagine.

I'm not even sure what a surrealist house would look like, for example, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live in one. And if I did, I'd definitely want to rent it instead of owning it.

First of all, if I owned it and wanted to sell it, I'd probably have a hard time finding a buyer. It's difficult enough selling a modernist house -- not because there's anything wrong with them, but because there's something wrong with the home-buying public. For the life of me, I don't know why a decade into the 21st century, people still want houses that look like they were made in the 18th century. I think it's because people are mostly ignorant and stupid. Or maybe they're just resistant to anything new, even if, as in this case, "new" means between 50 and 70 years old.

But I'm covering old ground here, so I'll move on to the second reason, which is that if I rented it, I could move out any time I wanted, and that might be important because I don't know how long I'd want to live there.

On the other hand, maybe I'd really love living in a surrealist house and I'd want to stay there forever. I can't really say, because, as I already mentioned, I don't even know what a surrealist house would be. The first thing that came into my mind were the buildings in the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but I'd actually consider those buildings to be more like precursors of deconstructivist architecture, and the movie itself is an example of German expressionism. So maybe a surrealist house would have design motifs like the arms coming from the walls in Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Or maybe it would take its cue from some of the earlier films of Luis Buñuel and combine playful elements that seem to be pulled out of thin air. Maybe I'd really like living in a house like that.

As for what dadaist architecture and interior design would embody, I'm at even more of a loss. The house would obviously have to be some sort of non-house, and as for the furniture, I don't know, but it seems like sitting on a dadaist couch would probably be really uncomfortable, if not downright impossible.

Personalities

2009-02-28T17:32:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, I mentioned that the Whole Foods market near me sometimes rearranges the products on its shelves for no reason other than to confuse the customers. What I didn't mention, but what is nonetheless true, is that on more than one occasion, the rearrangement of the shelves coincided with the rearrangement of the shelves at the local Trader Joe's. Since Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are in the same shopping center, I typically shop at them both in the same day, so I can attest to this from first-hand experience.

Normally, I shop at Whole Foods first, and then go over to Trader Joe's. But the other night, I forgot that I needed to do some grocery shopping until about 8:30, so I went to Trader Joe's first because it closes at 9:00 -- an hour before Whole Foods closes.

It was about 8:50 when I got to Whole Foods, and as I entered the door, I heard a voice on the PA system reminding us that Whole Foods would be closing in ten minutes. So I figured they must have changed their hours.

I knew I'd have to hurry, and it didn't help that Whole Foods had rearranged their shelves again. If they'd changed all the signs to reflect the new layout, it wouldn't have been so bad, but when I walked down the aisle with the Chips and Salsas sign, all I found was pet food.

As an aside, I don't often buy chips, but I do like to always have a few bottles of salsa in my refrigerator. It enhances the flavor of just about every food imaginable, with the notable exception of breakfast cereals, which I don't eat anyway. But whenever I find a salsa that I like, it seems like Whole Foods eventually stops carrying it. This has happened about three times in the past few years, and I expect it to happen again.

I wasn't willing to substitute a bag of pet food for a few bottles of salsa, so I looked in a few nearby aisles. I didn't find any salsa, but I did find a guy who worked there. When he saw me, he reminded me that the store would be closing in a few minutes, and when he was finished, I told him there was dog food in the salsa aisle and I asked him which aisle now had the salsa.

He pointed the aisle out to me, and when I got there, I found all brands of salsa, but I didn't find the one I was looking for. It's too soon to say whether or not they've stopped carrying it -- maybe they just happened to be out of stock. I'll know more the next time I go there. So I bought three other types, hoping that I will like one of them.

I'm not normally this fussy about foods, by the way, but I am sort of picky about salsa. If you go to any store and look at all their salsas, you'd find dozens of varieties, but most of them are medium or mild. I like my salsa hot -- not so hot that it burns your mouth, not so hot that the piquancy overpowers the taste, but I want it to be spicier than a bunch of chopped tomatoes and a little bit of cilantro. It's kind of funny, but some salsas that are made with hot peppers are still sort of mild -- it's as though they add peppers to the salsa the way some people add vermouth to a martini.

So I'm picky, but I'm not as picky as it might sound. I will eat and enjoy many varieties of medium salsa -- it's just that I prefer hot salsa. And as for mild salsa, well, I honestly don't see the point.

However, as interesting as all this may be, it's not what I wanted to talk about today.

I wanted to talk about personalities, or more accurately, personality types, or even more accurately, types of personality types as determined by various types of personality tests.

You can take all sorts of personality tests online, and each test is based on a different personality model. For example, there's the Myers-Briggs classification, which is based on the Jungian archetypes, and there's the Enneagram model, which classifies personalities into nine types, conveniently labeled "one" through "nine." There are also the doshas, which are based on the principles of Ayurvedic medicine.

But even though you can take those tests online, the corresponding personality models were developed well before anyone knew what the internet is. So the notion of personality tests is hardly new.

And long before the first web browser was even a gleam in someone's eye, you could always take a Scientology self-assessment test, in which you answered hundreds of questions, mailed in your test, and then discovered that no matter what kind of personality traits you had, you could benefit immensely by signing up for an array of expensive Scientology courses.

I don't know if the Scientology test is available online yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. On the other hand, there's a short test in Gary Null's book, "Who Are you, Really?" that as far as I can tell is not available online.

These tests may have some value, but I don't put much stock in them. Or maybe it's that I don't see the value of classifying my personality into one of several types. But in case you're interested, according to the Myers-Briggs model, I'm an INTJ. According to a sample Enneagram test I took, I'm a tie between a Type 6 and a Type 9, but according to a slightly longer Enneagram test, I'm a tie between Types 1 and 5 with Type 9 running a very close second. In the Ayurvedic model I'm either a Pitta or a Vata Pitta combination, and according to Gary Null's book, I'm a Creative Assertive. I don't think I've ever taken a Scientology test, but I'm pretty sure I'll do just fine without signing up for any of their courses.

By the way, not only can you take personality tests online, you can also take IQ tests. The tests I've taken all seem to be skewed toward certain types of intelligence, such as problem solving and spacial relationships, and lacking in other types, such as analysis of poetry or literature, but to be fair, there's only so much you can test for in a multiple-choice test.

Of course, it's possible that the IQ tests are so well-designed that your skill in solving various problems can also indicate your aptitude for literary analysis. Although somehow I doubt it. As a matter of fact, I take the IQ tests with a grain of salt, or maybe even a few pinches of salt. The only reason I think they have any validity at all is that according to those tests, I'm really smart. On the other hand, the reason I don't put much stock in them is that I happen to think I'm a lot smarter.

Three Ds and Two Mistakes

2009-02-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

In a recent post, I made two mistakes. I'm not sure, but I think that may be a new record for me. Fortunately, two of the intelligent and knowledgeable people who read this blog sent me comments in which they corrected my mistakes.

The first mistake is that I repeatedly referred to Michael Phelps as Mark Phelps. I actually knew his name was Michael, but I guess that somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking of Mark Spitz. The other mistake is that I thought "all-wheel drive" and "four-wheel drive" are the same thing, which they're not, even if all you've got is four wheels. I looked up the difference, but it would take more time to explain it here than I want to spend. So let's move on.

If you search for "the three Ds" in Google, you'll get some interesting results. I think it's because a lot people like to describe things using three words that begin with the letter D.

For example, one of the first hits I got was for delirium, dementia, and depression. There's also a site that lists the three Ds of new habit formation, which are decision, discipline, and determination. There was another site that listed the three Ds of home security as deterrence, denial, and detection. There were thousands of other hits, but I didn't look at them all. However, I did find a reference to a 1999 paper that appeared in the Annual Review Of Phytopathology which lists the three Ds of PCR-based genomic analysis of phytobacteria as diversity, detection, and disease diagnosis.

And in case you're wondering what prompted me to search for "the three Ds," it's because last night I saw the movie Coraline, which is the first 3D movie I've seen in a long time. I think the last time I saw a 3D movie was in the late '70s, when I saw a double feature consisting of Flesh for Frankenstein and another movie known variously as The Bubble, The Zoo, and Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth. You can look that movie up on IMBb if you want to know why it has three titles.

Flesh for Frankenstein, by the way, also has more than one title, because it was originally released as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. However, like most movies that have Warhol's name in the title (such as Andy Warhol's Trash, Andy Warhol's Flesh, and Andy Warhol's Heat), Andy Warhol had nothing to do with it. Those movies were all made by Paul Morrissey, who in some cases, wrote, directed, filmed, and edited the whole thing himself. Morrissey apparently never thought much of Warhol, but he knew that without Warhol's name in the title, his films would never get released. Fortunately, Warhol's name is not present in the DVD release titles.

So that's about it for this week, but before I go, I should probably say a word or two about Coraline. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about seeing it, and I went mainly out of scientific curiosity, since I wanted to see how 3D technology had changed in the last 30 years. I didn't think I'd like the actual movie itself, because I didn't particularly like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Monkeybone, which are the only other movies I've seen that Henry Selick directed. I thought The Nightmare Before Christmas was tedious and annoying, and I thought Monkeybone was just plain stupid, as well as annoying. But I really enjoyed Coraline. It was visually appealing, the 3D was used to good effect, and the story was engaging.

So go see it, if you haven't already. And make sure you see it in 3D. But you'd better see it quickly, because there aren't that many theaters capable of showing 3D movies, and a friend of mine told me that next week, all those theaters will be showing some 3D movie starring the Jonas brothers. I don't even know who the Jonas brothers are, but I understand that they're very popular and that any theater that shows their movie will be raking in the cash.

By the Foot

2009-02-15T09:53:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I mentioned that, pound for pound, the rather expensive but also rather hefty Case Study Houses book I bought a while ago was actually less expensive than most other books. As an example, I chose Man in the Dark by Paul Auster, for which I paid $21.95 a pound -- not exactly a bargain when compared with the $8.40 per pound for the Case Study Houses book.

As far as I know, the option of buying books by the pound is as of yet unavailable to the book-buying public. However, you may be interested to know that you can buy books by the foot.

This service is intended for interior decorators who want to add warmth to a room by stocking it with books, but as far as I know, anyone can buy books in this manner, as long as they aren't too particular about the books they're buying, because they don't get to chose the titles. According to one web site I looked at, buying books by the foot is not only an ideal way to give a room a particular look, but also an inexpensive way to create an instant library, ideal for retirement homes and vacation homes.

You can buy complete sets, such as law books and professional books, you can buy modern cloth hardback books in various colors, you can buy vintage books to help give your room an antique charm, and you can buy cloth hardbacks of a particular color, including earth tones.

The price ranges from $6.99 to $39.99 per linear foot on the web site I saw, and for some selections there's a minimum order of two feet, but there might be other places where you can buy books by the foot as well.

By the way, at the beginning of this post I said that, pound for pound, the Case Study Houses book is a better deal, but did you ever wonder about that expression "pound for pound"? According to Wikipedia, it was originally a boxing term, used to compare two fighters in different weight classes. But since then, its use has broadened to the point that it's now a way to compare any two things without regard to the actual quantities of the two things being compared.

So, when we say that pound for pound, the Case Study Houses book is less expensive than Auster's Man in the Dark, we mean that a pound of the Case Study Houses book costs less than a pound of the Paul Auster book.

It makes perfect sense, but I think I'm more inclined to use the phrase "dollars per pound" in this particular case. However, in the United Kingdom, where the unit of currency is the pound and the unit of weight used to be the pound (before they switched to the metric system), both the expressions "pound for pound" and "pounds per pound" could have been used, although I doubt if the second one ever was because it sounds so stupid.

But here's an interesting little fact you might not be aware of: Even though the United Kingdom's conversion to the metric system was completed in 1995, the use of the Imperial system is still mandated in some cases. To quote from Wikipedia, "draught beer must be sold in pints, road-sign distances must be in yards and miles, road-sign clearance heights must be in feet and inches (although an equivalent in metres may be shown as well) and road speed limits must be in miles per hour."

So, as I said, that's an interesting little fact, and I don't know if there are any other examples of things that have to use the Imperial system, but I think books in the United Kingdom would probably be sold by the meter.

Bumper Stickers

2009-02-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

There's an elementary school not too far from me, and whenever I drive anywhere near it on a weekday morning, I encounter the traffic guard. Traffic guards, as you probably know, ensure the safety of the school children. Whenever a school child wants to cross the street, the crossing guard holds up a big read stop sign, and then accompanies the child across the street.

A crossing guard probably isn't all that necessary on the particular street that I drive on, because there's a four-way stop at the intersection so all the cars have to stop anyway. On the other hand, some little children may be afraid to cross the street on their own, so what the crossing guard provides is a sense of security for those children.

Whenever people want to walk across the street, the crossing guard near me stops all traffic and accompanies them across the street, regardless of their age. For example, I've seen housewives walking their dogs being accompanied across the street by the crossing guard. I think this sort of perverts the original notion of what a crossing guard is there for, but I don't really mind. I do have to say, however, that if I were walking across the street, I'd be sort of embarrassed to be accompanied by a crossing guard holding a big read stop sign above her head.

Here's something else, which would be totally unrelated, except for the fact that I happened to notice it on the car in front of me while we were waiting for the crossing guard to lead some dog walkers across the street. The car had the letters "AWD" on it instead of "4WD." When did auto manufacturers abandon the use of the phrase "four-wheel drive" in favor of the more general "all-wheel drive"? Do they have plans to introduce cars with more wheels someday and are adopting the phrase "all-wheel drive" in preparation for that day? I think it's more because advertising phrases get old and tired after a while so new ones have to replace them, even when the new ones don't tell us anything more (and in this case actually tell us less) than the original phrase.

Okay, now on to the more important events of the past week...

There were two news stories that just wouldn't die. One of them concerned Christian Bale and his repeated use of the word "fuck" and some of its many variants during an angry tirade directed at a director of photography, and the other concerned a photograph of Michael Phelps taking a hit off a bong at some party.

These stories were in the news all week, which I think is sort of strange, considering they're not that interesting and they're not that unique. My initial thought was, "Big deal" -- or as Christian Bale might put it, "big fucking deal."

But stories like these often take on a life of their own. For example, the Christian Bale incident inspired the Los Angeles Times to post an online article about famous celebrity tantrums of the recent past. The article catalogued the uncontrolled outbursts of such celebrities as Mel Gibson, Naomi Campbell, Russell Crowe, and Sean Penn.

Of course, Christian Bale and Michael Phelps have already made their public apologies, and if they're the least bit sincere about those apologies, then I have no respect for them, because they have absolutely nothing to apologize to the public about. When people make public apologies, they are apologizing to people who were in no way harmed by anything they did, so such apologies are completely gratuitous.

Christian Bale probably should have apologized privately to the guy he was yelling at, but Michael Phelps doesn't need to apologize to anyone. If anything, the guy who took the picture should apologize to him.

But now that they've made their public apologies, does everyone feel better? I don't. That sort of public humiliation does nothing for me.

And I hear it cost Michael Phelps a Kellogg's endorsement, which I never even knew he had. But I don't think he should have lost it. If anything, he should have lost the Rosetta Stone endorsement -- not because he deserved to, but because he made such an idiotic commercial for them. First of all, it rings untrue -- does anyone actually expect us to believe that Michael Phelps was spending his time trying to learn Chinese when he should have been training for the Olympics?

All commercials lie, of course, so I shouldn't be bothered by that, but that's not even why I didn't like the commercial. I just think it was stupid. For example, what was his dog doing in that commercial? Also, Michael Phelps sometimes slurs his words a little. Did anyone besides me notice that when he said "fastest way to learn a language" it sounded more like "fascist way to learn a language"? I absolutely hated that commercial. Whenever it came on, I had to turn the sound off.

However, the stories about Christian Bale and Michael Phelps made the story about the single mom with octuplets almost seem like actual news. Almost.

But I understand why stories like that are so important, especially now. After all, it's not as though there's anything going on in the world that actually affects us, like the slow painful death of our economic system and the record levels of unemployment and bank closures it led to.

But before I leave the subject completely, I've got a little bit of advice to people who take pictures at parties: Don't take pictures at parties, especially if the ingestion or inhalation of controlled substances is taking place. No good can possibly come of it. But if you ignore my advice and take pictures anyway, try not to let your precious pictures and videos find their way into the hands of the media. So for example, if you took a video of your friend acting obnoxious and vomiting a lot after the consumption of too much alcohol, try to resist the urge to post the video on YouTube. This should be a no-brainer, but as I have discovered, a lot of people have no brains and need to be explicitly taught simple, obvious things like this.

Okay, before I go, I just want to make a few comments about bumper stickers. First of all, bumper stickers should only contain short easily-readable messages. I've seen bumper stickers that contain three or more lines of text in a typeface so small that, in order to read it, you practically have to smash into the car in front of you. And recently, I saw another one that was only two lines long, but in order to fit all the text on the bumper sticker, they had to use a compressed typeface, which also made it difficult to read. Secondly, they're called bumper stickers for a reason, and that reason is that they're intended to be placed on the bumper of your car (or now that cars don't actually have bumpers, in the region of the car formerly occupied by a bumper). If you put a bumper sticker on the side of your car, nobody's going to be able to read it except the guy next to you while you're waiting for the light to change, or the guy who walks past your car when it's parked on the street. And finally, don't even put a bumper sticker on your car in the first place. They junk up your car, they're almost impossible to remove, and no message I've ever seen on a bumper sticker was so important that it needed to be displayed to anyone.

The Right to Make Noise

2009-02-01T10:08:00.000-08:00

Remember a little while ago when I was writing about those vehicle code regulations that prohibit talking or texting on a cell phone while driving?

Well, as I was in my car waiting at a red light recently and listening to the thumping of the bass coming from the stereo system of the car next to me, I remembered another vehicle code statute that never gets enforced. I'm referring, of course, to California Vehicle Code Section 27007, which pertains to sound amplification devices and states in part that "No driver of a vehicle shall operate, or permit the operation of, any sound amplification system which can be heard outside the vehicle from 50 or more feet when the vehicle is being operated upon a highway, unless that system is being operated to request assistance or warn of a hazardous situation."

So this law, if enforced, means that someone would be within his legal right to turn up his car stereo loud enough that the music coming from it could be heard by anyone with a 50 foot radius.

That's pretty loud.

I'm not sure of all the details, but this law could be interpreted to mean that someone could park his car on a street in some residential neighborhood and turn the volume up so loud that it could be heard inside the five or six houses nearest to the car.

Maybe they should have limited it to 20 feet. That's still loud enough to hear from anywhere inside most cars.

One time -- maybe about 10 years ago -- I was inside my house and I heard some music coming from outside. So I opened up the front door and saw that some guy across the street had his car stereo playing at maximum ear-splitting volume. It was so loud that he couldn't even hear me when I walked up to him and yelled at him to turn the volume down.

It turns out he was vacuuming the inside of his car and he wanted to be able to hear the music over the noise of the vacuum cleaner. And when I finally got his attention and told him to turn it down, he seemed confused as to why the loud music would annoy anyone. I don't know who he was -- he was visiting the people who lived in that house -- but fortunately, he hasn't been back since.

People like that are really inconsiderate, whether deliberately or not, so it seems like a good idea to have laws against making excessive noise.

We used to call it "noise pollution," by the way. As a matter of fact, the 50-foot rule may have been referred to as an anti-noise pollution law. The phrase never caught on, though, because it sounded so stupid, since there were more dangerous types of pollution at the time, like air pollution and water pollution. Somehow, excessive noise, no matter how objectionable people found it, wasn't perceived as being the same sort of threat as undrinkable water and unbreathable air. And that was just the beginning of the list. We had fish contaminated with mercury, farmland destroyed by pesticides, and I can't remember what else.

We've still got all those types of pollution today, and they're just as big as ever, and we've got a few new types as well. I'm not going to list them all, so let's just agree that noise pollution isn't as bad as, for example, poisoned food.

It's still annoying though, but if we have laws against it, we could find ourselves on a slippery slope.

For example, some people might think of public profanity as noise pollution. In response to the argument that people have the right to say anything they want in a public place, they'll whine that they have the right not to hear something they don't want to hear, which is, of course, both ridiculous and completely untrue.

No one has the right not to hear something. They have the option not to listen, but the last time I checked, the so-called right not to have to hear something wasn't protected by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or any state or local statute. The right to free speech, on the other hand, is protected by the First Amendment.

But you probably already knew all that, and maybe you're wondering why I even bothered to write about it.

I don't know. I guess it's because I couldn't think of anything else to write about. That's been happening a lot lately -- it seems like I've been posting things to this blog without much conviction lately, and with this post, I'm just honoring that tradition.

I've already established on this blog that not everything I write is going to be a work of literary genius. But I'm not unique in that respect. In the world of cinema, for example, consider the Coen brothers, who have made many great movies, such as Fargo and The Big Lebowski, but have also made some no-so-great movies, such as the tepid Burn After Reading. Or consider the films of Pasolini and Jodorowsky. Or for that matter, David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, and David Mamet.

So nobody's perfect and everybody's entitled to a few misfires, but it's still more fun writing about something that's interesting to me than writing about something merely because I can't think of anything else to write about, and that's why a while ago I said was going to stop posting here for a while. I liked my previous post a lot, and I liked one or two of my other recent posts as well, but today's post is, for the most part, uninspired. Even the title isn't very good.

I wish that everything I wrote here was a literary masterpiece, but I know it won't be. Fortunately, I have the right to write anything I want here, no matter how mediocre, and you have the option not to read it. As a matter of fact, you have more than the option, because I'm going to go ahead and grant you the right not to read it, assuming, of course, that the granting of such rights falls within my purview.

Fifteen Pounds

2009-01-18T14:28:00.000-08:00

I gained 15 pounds during the Christmas holiday season. I'm not the least bit worried, though, because none of the weight is from fat. But it's not from muscle either. Nor is it from bone, brain, bodily fluids, or anything else the human body is made of. It's from cardboard, ink, and paper.

What I gained was a 15-pound book. So maybe it's more accurate to say that my coffee table gained 15 pounds. And even though I got it during the holiday season, it wasn't a gift, unless something you buy for yourself can be considered a gift.

Remember a few years ago, when I was thinking about buying a huge $200 book about the Case Study Houses? If you recall, one of the reasons I decided against it was because I figured I'd look at it once and then forget about it, just like I did with my $400 first edition copy of Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus.

The other reason, of course, was that I didn't want to spend $200 on something I didn't really need. Buying things I don't need and won't really use puts me in the category of people known as mindless consumers, which is a category I don't like to find myself in. But despite that, I feel the need to buy something every now and then.

So I picked up the Case Study Houses book. I got it from Amazon for $126, making the price per pound of the book somewhere around $8.40. I think that's a pretty good deal, especially when you consider that most hardcover novels are about $20, and they weigh a lot less than two pounds. I haven't actually ever weighed one, but just to give you an idea, you can get a hardcover copy of Paul Auster's Man in the Dark from Amazon for $15.64. According to Amazon, that book weighs 11.4 ounces, putting the price at about $21.95 a pound.

That doesn't mean you should buy the Case Study Houses book and not buy Man in the Dark, however. You should probably buy them both, especially if you have more than a casual interest in both modern architecture and contemporary fiction. But if you want to limit yourself to one or the other, I'd have to recommend Man in the Dark, or for that matter, any book by Paul Auster, such as Oracle Night or Travels in the Scriptorium.

The price per pound of his books might be sort of high, but you'll probably find them to be very engrossing. Of course, you might find the Case Study Houses book to be engrossing as well, but I can't say for sure. As a matter of fact, I can't even tell you if I find it engrossing, because I haven't looked at it yet. I basically just unpacked it and put it on my coffee table, where it has remained untouched for the past few weeks. I've been sort of busy with other stuff lately, but I'll get around to looking at it one of these days.

Unlawful Text

2009-01-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

Well, it's 2009, so have a happy 2009. But do you remember toward the end of last year when they had all those articles and comics about how glad people are to be finally saying goodbye to 2008? The idea was that since 2008 was the year of a huge economic disaster, now that it's finally over, the economy will start to improve again.

Well, we know better than that. We know that simply making the transition from December of one year to January of the next year doesn't do a thing. Poverty and sickness don't automatically disappear, wars continue to be fought, and the overall level of stupidity stays about the same.

That seems pretty obvious, but I may have overstated my case a little, since some things did automatically change on January 1st, 2009. For example, it's now illegal in California to drive while sending or reading text messages. As of last July, it was illegal to use a cell phone while driving, so I guess it was just a matter of time before the government took away our right to communicate via text messages as well.

Actually, I'm kidding about that part about the government taking away our rights. I'm totally in favor of the new law, although I'm not sure it would have ever been enacted if it weren't for that train crash last September in which 25 people were killed because the conductor was sending text messages when he should have been concentrating on not crashing the train.

So it's a good law, but to be honest, we shouldn't even need a law like this. We don't have laws prohibiting people from driving while engaged in the act of sandwich preparation or small appliance repair, nor do we have a law prohibiting people from driving while practicing the ancient Japanese art of paper folding known as origami.

In other words, we shouldn't need a law to prevent people from doing things that anyone with half a brain would never consider doing in the first place.

But keep in mind what I said earlier about the overall level of stupidity staying about the same. Apparently, many people lack the requisite amount of brain power, and it apparently never occurred to those people that driving while engaging in an activity that requires the use of both hands while looking at something other than the road in front of them is a potentially dangerous activity.

In any event, given the need for such a law, it's sort of amazing to me that when the law against talking on a cell phone while driving was made, our lawmakers apparently decided that texting while driving was still okay, considering it's so much easier to talk then to text.

I have trouble texting even when I'm not driving. But that might just be a matter of practice, since I never actually sent a text message to anyone. I just never saw the point in using a phone to send text messages when it's a lot easier and faster just to talk. It's sort of like if you're in a room with someone else, but instead of talking to each other, you decide to communicate by exchanging hastily-written notes.

There is a use for texting, like if you want to let someone know you'll be late, or to give someone a phone number, but for live interactive communication, it's clumsy and slow. I guess if you're a little kid and you want to carry on a conversation in class without having your teacher find out, texting is a decent substitute for a real conversation, but for everyone else in the world, it's just a dumb idea. You've already got a phone, so talk on it.

So I'll never be very adept at texting, and I can live with that. As a matter of fact, I decided to disable that feature on my phone, so don't try texting me because I won't receive your message. The reason is that I kept getting text spam, usually in the middle of the night, and the message would cause my phone to beep, which would wake me up. And then, of course, I had to pay for each incoming text spam message I received. And to make things worse, I couldn't read the messages because they were sent in HTML for some reason, so all I could see was the first 160 characters of an HTML file.

By the way, Japan, which always seems so far ahead of us in finding new uses for technology, has found a new use for text messages. Within the last five years or so, a lot of young Japanese women have written novels on their cell phones and published them one screen at a time. Apparently there are sites that allow you to post text messages publicly, and some of these sites have become so popular that the cell phone novels have been published by traditional book publishers, and the most popular of these books have sold millions of copies. Some of them have been adapted into plays, TV shows, and movies. The books have an abbreviated, slangy literary style, just the way most text messages do, but even some of the authors don't think they have any literary value. They're basically whining stories of troubled romances and teenage angst.

But the stories remain popular. As a matter of fact, there's at least one Japanese web site that allows you to convert your traditional manuscript to a cell phone style novel. I think it would be sort of interesting to compare a few original manuscripts with the converted ones, but it only works on Japanese text. However, cell phone novels are already being written in China, so it's just a matter of time before young women in the United States start writing them too.

I can't say I'm particularly looking forward to that. But at least when it happens, we'll already have a law preventing people from writing cell phone novels while driving.

No Ordinary Cardboard Box

2008-12-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

If you've ordered a pizza to go recently, chances are it was presented to you in a simple cardboard box. That is, of course, unless you ordered your pizza from Domino's.

What Domino's gives you may look like a simple cardboard box, but it isn't. And to prove it, let me quote some of the informational messages printed on the Domino's box I got the other day.

The first one must be pretty important, because it's displayed in three places. It reads, "Caution: Steam Exhaust Port." To the untrained eye, it merely looks like a small slit in the back of the box, but without it, the steam from the pizza would presumably build up to unsafe levels, possibly scalding you when you lifted the lid.

The steam exhaust port sounds like a good idea, but I don't really think it's absolutely necessary, particularly because of the advanced technology on each of the side flaps. The message reads, "Thermo-Exhaust Technology - This box has been engineered with thermal exhaust ports for optimal crust consistency."

But the features of the Domino's pizza box don't start and end with exhaust systems. Another message, displayed on each of the side flaps and titled "Corru-Skeletal Technology," states that "This box has been engineered to protect the pizza inside against crushing forces." I'm not sure what sort of crushing forces they're talking about -- usually the only thing you put on top of a pizza box is another pizza box -- but still, I'm glad my pizza was protected against such forces.

However, that message may contradict a warning that appears elsewhere on the box, which consists solely of a picture of a broken glass above the simple message, "Caution: Fragile." To be honest, I'm not sure if they mean that the box is fragile or the pizza is fragile -- but neither one looked like it would shatter to pieces if it fell to the floor.

The warning right beside it is a lot less ambiguous. Underneath a picture of fire, the words "Caution: Hot" are displayed. I'm assuming that this message refers to the pizza and not the box, although I've never had a pizza that was as hot as fire, especially if that pizza came in a box equipped with a steam exhaust port and other examples of thermo-exhaust technology.

On the front tab, there's an instructional message to the pizza consumer. It states, "For heat retaining corrugated cardboard technology to function, close tab." So not only does the cardboard (or maybe I should call it the "corru-skeletal technology") protect the pizza against crushing forces, it also keeps the pizza hot. This is apparently so important a message that Domino's saw fit to reiterate it in a more direct -- if somewhat awkward -- manner: "Close tab between slices to keep pizza hot."

These messages are all pretty ridiculous, of course, but if Domino's realizes it, I don't think they really care, because they know that most people won't ever read the box -- they'll just open it up and grab a slice of pizza. But for better or worse, I have a tendency to read things. If I see words printed somewhere, I'll usually read them. I even decided to read the bottom of the Domino's box, although I'm not sure what exactly compelled me to do that.

But Domino's was one step ahead of me, because on the bottom of the box was the following message: "Why are you reading this? We sure hope the pizza isn't in the box while you're flipping it over."

On the Road

2008-12-20T12:33:00.000-08:00

It seems like I've been doing a lot of driving in slow-moving traffic lately, and even though all that traffic made it take longer to get anywhere, it also gave me a lot of time to observe the behavior of other drivers. So that's what I'm going to write about today.

I'm not going to write about all the bad behavior I observed -- that would take me well into next year and it wouldn't serve any useful purpose. So I'm just going to mention one thing that I saw drivers doing repeatedly.

In case you don't know it, here in California a law was passed last July that made it illegal to drive while talking on a cell phone. Or to be more accurate, the law made it illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving, unless a "hands-free device" is used.

So a lot of people bought bluetooth headsets -- those little things you stick on your ear that connect wirelessly to your cell phone. Some people only use them when they're driving and they want to make or receive a call, but other people put them on as soon as they get into their cars. And there are still others who wear them all the time, whether they're in the car or not. Those headsets make people look like dorks, so ever since last July, there have been a lot of people walking around in a state of almost permanent dorkiness.

But having people walking around with dorky-looking things coming out of their ears is a reasonable price to pay for fewer traffic accidents caused by inattentive cell phone users, isn't it?

If only things were that simple.

I'm not going to get into all the arguments about how hands-free devices don't reduce the number of cell phone-related traffic accidents, and I'm not going to talk about how your situational awareness decreases whether you're wearing a bluetooth headset or holding the cell phone to your ear. I'm not even going to argue the case that driving while using a cell phone increases your chances of getting into a traffic accident. Like most things, it's probably not so cut and dried. I think there are people who can manage to do both without causing any problems, while there are others who are likely to get into accidents even if they're not talking on the phone, just because they aren't very good drivers, or because they're stupid.

But here's the thing: Whether it's a good law or not, it's still a law. But you'd be surprised -- or maybe you wouldn't -- at how many people routinely and flagrantly break that law. I can't even count the number of people I saw driving while talking on a handheld cell phone.

Part of the problem is that if you get caught, it's only a $20 fine for the first infraction and $50 for subsequent infractions. It's not a lot of money, but you can get a decent bluetooth headset for between $20 and $50, and it's probably less expensive in the long run to buy one, unless you never get caught. And you're not likely to, since the police aren't likely to scour the roads hunting for violators. They're much more likely to look for people who commit big-ticket infractions like going over the speed limit and running red lights.

By the way, don't run red lights. Not only is it dangerous, but the last time I got pulled over for running one, the fine was $351. The officer didn't actually give me a ticket, since I didn't actually run a red light -- I went through while it was still yellow. I think he was confused because the moron in front of me stopped at the green light for some reason before turning right. Anyway, I didn't get the ticket, but the officer told me it was $351, and that was probably about five years ago -- it's probably a lot more now.

As for speeding, you'll have to decide this one for yourself. As with all vehicle code infractions, it's best not to speed if there are any cops around, but if there aren't, just use your own good judgment. The problem, of course, is that if you don't exceed the speed limit, you'll make a lot of drivers really angry, since the speed of traffic tends to be a lot higher than the posted limit.

So there's probably nothing wrong with speeding a little -- providing you don't get caught -- since the posted speed limits are usually a lot lower than they need to be. Of course, having said all that, I have to admit that speeding hasn't been much of an issue for me recently, since I've been driving in a lot of slow-moving traffic lately.

JB and the Little Hyphen

2008-12-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

I don't expect you to be reading this after my announcement last week that I wasn't going to post anything to this blog for a while. So if you're not reading this, I understand completely, but if you are, well, I guess I understand that too.

Anyway, one time back around 1981, "e" (my girlfriend at the time) and I were at the Nuart theater watching a couple of films starring Alec Guinness. One of them was Kind Hearts and Coronets and the other was The Horse's Mouth. They're both good movies, but that's not what I'm going to write about.

I don't remember the movies that well, but I remember that before they started and the theater lights were still on, we noticed John Baldessari sitting a few rows in front of us. If you don't know who John Baldessari is, you can always look it up online, but if you don't want to do that, I'll just tell you now: He's an artist. So I guess it kind of makes sense that he was there, since The Horse's Mouth is a movie about an artist. Or maybe he just liked the films of Alec Guimness.

Seeing him in the audience wasn't any big deal, so I pretty much forgot about it over the years, but earlier this week, a friend of mine and I were checking out the new building at LACMA, and I saw a guy who looked just like John Baldessari. I guess it kind of makes sense that he was there, since he's an artist and LACMA is an art museum, but it's also worth noting that the new LACMA building happened to have some Baldessari works on display.

So I'm pretty sure it was him. He looked a lot older, but so do I. So do you. So does everyone.

By the way, I hope you noticed that I referred to "e" as "my girlfriend at the time," and not as "my then-girlfriend." I never liked the construct obtained by prefixing a noun with the word "then." People do it all the time, but I never liked the way it sounds, and I also believe it's based on a misunderstanding of the underlying linguistic structure.

The convention arose because people used to say things like, "In 1977, Jimmy Carter, who was then president of the United States, declared unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders."

Using existing rules of the English language, this was shortened to, "In 1977, Jimmy Carter, then president of the United States, declared unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders."

And this is where all the trouble began, because the next thing we knew, people were saying things like, "In 1977, Jimmy Carter, then-president of the United States, declared unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders."

Those last two sentences sound exactly alike, but that one little hyphen changed everything, because as soon as "then-president" became a noun-phrase, it became okay to use expressions like "the then-president" or "my then-girlfriend," which both sound awkward and clumsy.

And by the way, just to make this clear, I'm not blaming any of this on Jimmy Carter, either directly or indirectly. I'm just using him as an example. I could have just as easily said, "In 1972, Richard Nixon, then president of the United States, visited the People's Republic of China." And just to further clarify, I'm not blaming any of this on Nixon either, or for that matter, any other public figure. If anything, I blame the millions of people who through continual usage of this linguistic abomination allowed it to perpetuate.

Anyway, the other thing I liked about the LACMA exhibit is that on the first floor of the new building, there were two installations by Richard Serra: "Band" and "Sequence." There were only about two other people on that floor, so we could see those pieces the way they're intended to be seen, without a bunch of people milling in and out and destroying the quiet serenity those sculptures engender.

The new building, by the way, is called the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, named after benefactors Eli and Edythe Broad. I think they use the abbreviation "BCAM," which you probably either already knew or could have easily guessed. The only reason I'm even bringing it up is so I don't have to keep referring to it as "the new building." But I'm pretty much done talking about it anyway. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty much through with this week's blog entry. And whether or not I write anything next week is still anyone's guess, which is to say that your guess is as good as mine.

A Little Extra Time Each Weekend

2008-12-06T16:58:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, there was a slight inaccuracy in my previous post. Toward the end of that post, I mentioned that I didn't think I had ever let two weekends go by without posting something to this blog. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had the vague suspicion that I had done precisely that, but I didn't bother to confirm that suspicion since it was much easier to simply deny it.

But after checking the dates, I now see that after I posted something on June 14th of this year, I didn't post again until July 5th, which means that I didn't post anything on the weekends of June 21st and June 28th.

You might have noticed that I didn't post anything last week either. And for that matter, I wasn't really planning on posting anything this week, but I decided to anyway. It wasn't because of the "butterfly effect" -- it was because I wanted to let you know that I probably won't be posting as regularly to this blog as I've done in the past.

So if you don't see any updates to this blog in the next few weeks -- or maybe even the next few months -- don't be alarmed. It doesn't mean that I got too sick to write, or that I died, or that anything as drastic as that befell me. All it means is that I didn't post something for a while.

It probably won't ruin your life to have to go from week to week without my witty and scintillating prose to sustain you, but even if it does, I'm sure you'll be able to endure it and ultimately emerge a stronger person in both body and mind.

As for me, I can usually find something to do that's enjoyable and rewardling and likely to keep me out of trouble, so I'm not too worried about what I'll do with the extra time each weekend. But if I can't think of anything, you'll probably be hearing from me.

The Flapping of Tiny Wings

2008-11-22T14:01:00.000-08:00

The title of the week's post is a reference to what is commonly known as "The Butterfly Effect."

I'm not referring to the movie The Butterfly Effect, nor am I referring to the movie A Sound of Thunder, which was based on Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name. Both the movies and the short story were centered on the idea that going back in time and making a seemingly insignificant change could result in drastic changes in the present. The movie The Butterfly Effect, despite its title, doesn't feature any actual butterflies, although it was obviously inspired by the Bradbury story, which does feature an actual butterfly.

I always used to think the whole butterfly effect thing was named after the Bradbury story, but according to Wikipedia, both the idea and the name were conceived of long before Ray Bradbury was even born. And, as it turns out, the real butterfly effect doesn't have anything to do with time travel -- it has to do with small changes in a system ultimately causing significantly greater -- and often unpredictable -- changes.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that I didn't post anything last weekend, and I don't really have anything to talk about this weekend either. But the last time I didn't post anything for two weekends in a row, there were significant consequences. You'd think that if an insignificant little blog like mine weren't updated regularly, it wouldn't cause any major changes in world events, but the last time I let this happen, a young man in Kuala Lumpur got in a fight with his older brother, an elderly woman living in Tokyo accidentally dropped and broke a vase, and a bicyclist in Salem, Oregon rode his bike through a red light and was given a ticket.

Those are just a few of the minor mishaps that occurred. There were also a fair number of accidental deaths, traffic accidents, and robberies.

Of course, not every change was bad. I'm happy to report that healthy babies were born, students did well on tests, and dogs throughout the world enjoyed playing the game of "fetch" with their owners.

It's hard to determine if the good outweighed the bad, but that isn't really the point. The point is that having the power to alter the course of world events -- even if unwittingly -- is a lot of responsibility to place on one person. And that is why it's so important for me to post something today. And having posted this, I must now attend to other matters that demand my attention.

But before I go, I must apologize to the man in Kuala Lumpur and the woman in Tokyo if my failure to post anything twice in a row caused you any inconvenience. I have mixed feelings about apologizing to the bicyclist, however. In all my years of bicycling, I've never once run a red light. I've never even failed to stop at a stop sign, and I can't imagine anything that would compel me to -- not even the butterfly effect. So I'm not apologizing to the bicyclist.

As a matter of fact, I'm rescinding my apologies to the guy in Kuala Lumpur and the woman in Tokyo as well, because now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I never let two weekends go by without posting anything.

I Voted Again

2008-11-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

I guess you've probably heard that we elected a new president recently.

I was one of the many people who voted, and when I turned in my ballot, they tried to give me one of those "I Voted" stickers. You may recall from an earlier post that I have a real problem with those "I Voted" stickers, the problem being that they're a waste of paper and they're not recyclable.

So when the guy tried to give me a sticker, I told him I didn't want it. Perhaps to get me to reconsider my decision, he told me that it was good for a free drink at Starbuck's. I told him the sticker wasn't recyclable and one or two people chuckled briefly. Then I left.

By the way, I am well-aware, as a friend of mine pointed out, that whether I accepted the sticker or not, the environmental damage had been done. The sticker was still going to be thrown out -- if not by me then by some other voter or some Starbuck's employee or some election worker who was in charge of getting rid of all the left-over stickers. So my refusal to accept the sticker was entirely symbolic. I understand that.

But I have a hard time accepting the fact that places like Starbuck's are essentially bribing people to vote. To me, it's the same sort of thing as parents paying their children when they get good grades. Parents, if you don't understand why you shouldn't pay your kids when they get good grades, I'm not going to explain it to you -- you are already lost. But kids, there's still some hope for you, so I'll give it a shot: Bribery is bad. Good grades don't have a cash value. The value of a good education is that you learn things, not that your mom or dad will pay you for doing well. Besides, if you're capable of getting good grades, you shouldn't need any additional motivation, such as the lure of a few dollars.

But getting back to Starbuck's and the election, I hope our democracy hasn't been reduced to a system in which we encourage people to vote by offering them free coffee drinks.

And I don't mean to pick unduly on Starbuck's. It turns out that across our great country, according to an article I read, various businesses were offering free merchandise to people who voted. For example, Krispy Kreme was offering star-shaped doughnuts with red, white and blue sprinkles to voters. And at least two adult stores in New York City were offering free sex toys to anyone who voted. There were a lot more stores according to the article, but those are the only ones I can remember. And I have no doubt that for our next major election, the number of places offering free gifts to voters will be even greater. Furthermore, maybe decades from now, children will probably sit on their parents' laps and listen to stories about the olden days when people voted because they felt it was their civic duty, and not because it was a good way to get free doughnuts or dildoes or whatever.

But here's the thing. The guy at my polling place turned out to be wrong. You didn't need the sticker to get the free drink at Starbuck's. According to the article, all you had to do was tell them you voted -- they didn't ask for proof. So, on election day, you could have gone to every Starbuck's in your community -- there are probably over twenty in mine -- and gotten a free drink in each one. Then you could have hit all the Krispy Kreme stores and gotten your fill of star-shaped doughnuts. And, yeah, if you happened to be in New York City at the time, you could have dropped in at those two sex stores. But even if you weren't, chances are there were a lot of other places that were giving away free stuff to people who said they voted.

The key thing, of course, is that you didn't actually have to vote -- all you had to do was say you voted, since they didn't ask for the sticker as proof. So, as I maintained from the outset, the stickers are absolutely unnecessary, as well as being a needless waste of paper and drain on our natural resources.

I'm old enough to remember when they didn't hand out stickers to people who voted, so I'm optimistic that we'll come to our senses one day and abandon that childish practice. On the other hand, I think even back when I was in school, some parents were paying their kids to get good grades. It probably wasn't nearly as widespread as it is today, but it's been going on for so long and it's probably so ingrained in our culture that it's too late to do anything about it now. On the other hand, we're supposedly entering an era of change, so maybe that behavior will someday change as well.

Refrigerators vs. Dogs

2008-11-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when we wanted to indicate that something wasn't yet completed, we would say it was "in progress."

Remember that quaint expression? I never hear it anymore. What I hear now is that it's "in process," which doesn't actually mean anything. I assume that this bizarre linguistic anomaly comes from some moron combining the expressions "being processed" and "in progress" and if that were the worst of it, I would do nothing more than grit my teeth and silently complain every time I heard the phrase. But that isn't the worst of it, because now we have a newer (and even more incorrect) term. So today I feel compelled to speak out.

I bought a new refrigerator a while ago. Because it's an Energy Star-compliant refrigerator, I'm entitled to a rebate from my electricity supplier. In the past, in order to get a rebate, you had to fill out a form, mail it somewhere, and wait for months and months to receive your check. But now, thanks to the convenience of the internet, you can just fill out and submit an online form, and then wait months and months to receive your check.

So I filled out and submitted the form, and I'm now awaiting the check. The good news is, I can check out the status of my rebate claim online anytime I want. The last time I checked, the status of my claim was listed as "in processing," which doesn't even seem grammatical, unless you assume "in processing" is short for "in the state known as 'processing'." Maybe that's what they mean, and maybe I'm being too picky, but I think everybody would be happier all around if we just went back to using "in progress."

By the way, I'm actually sort of surprised we're still using the word "rebate." I thought it was gone for good when all the car manufacturers stopped using the term in their television ads and started using "cash back" instead.

Now, onto the subject of my new refrigerator. You may recall that I initially complained that the bins for storing fresh fruits and vegetables are smaller than the bins on my old refrigerator. Well, I'm happy to say that although that's true, it's also false. It turns out that two of the bins are slightly deeper than those of my old refrigerator, so I can actually store more fresh broccoli (to use a real-life example) in the lower bins of the new refrigerator. So something that I didn't like at first, I quickly grew to appreciate.

"Fine," you may be saying, "but what does this have to do with dogs?"

I have a couple of friends, one of whom I hadn't seen in a long time, and one of whom I had. They're not a lot alike, but they're probably not that different either. For example, they're both human Earthling females, they each know me, they both happen to have names with the initials "AK," and they each have a dog. I saw one of them on Thursday and the other on Friday, and they each told me the same thing, which is that although they couldn't imagine life without their dogs, when they first got them, it took a while before they stopped wanting to get rid of them. The first AK had her dog for about a month and a half before she wanted to keep it. For the second AK, it only took ten days.

So that's it, basically. I didn't like my new refrigerator at first (until I actually put some fresh vegetables in it), and the two AKs didn't like their dogs at first. But now everybody's happy. And if you think it's sort of misguided to compare a refrigerator to a dog on that basis, you're probably right. But there are some even more misguided dog vs. refrigerator comparisons, such as any of the following:

- Dogs and refrigerators sometimes make strange noises.
- A lot of dogs like to run around, whereas most refrigerators just stand in one place for their entire life.
- It is not practical to store a lot of (fresh or frozen) food inside your dog.
- Depending on the breed, a dog and a refrigerator may have approximately the same life span.

Those are just a few comparisons I thought of off the top of my head. You can probably think of a few more yourself. But if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother.

Two Classics

2008-10-25T17:49:00.000-07:00

Remember a little while ago when I mentioned that I wouldn't buy the Salo DVD unless I developed a burning need to spend my money on something I didn't really want? That's still true, but I was almost tempted a couple of times to buy it recently.

It turns out that whenever you buy things from Amazon, they make personalized recommendations for you. Based on your previous purchases from them, they present you with a list of things you might also enjoy buying from them. On the list of DVDs, Salo was right up there at the top.

That was kind of interesting, but there are a couple of things worth mentioning. The first is that their method of determining what customers might enjoy is pretty unsophisticated. A long time ago I bought the Criterion Collection edition of Down by Law, and that was apparently enough for Amazon to recommend that I buy any DVD released by the Criterion Collection, including the notorious Salo.

The second thing worth noting is that they made over 500 DVD recommendations for me based on my previous purchases. I'm not sure what the actual number was -- they only show 15 items per page and I was getting tired of hitting the 'Next' button. But I have a suspicion that if I hadn't stopped hitting it, Amazon would have eventually recommended every DVD in its inventory.

So the temptation of buying something because Amazon personally recommended it to me didn't last very long.

But just out of curiosity, I decided to see if anyone was selling the DVD on eBay. As it turns out, a few people were, but the listing that caught my attention was for a used copy that was watched only once -- the seller claims he could barely stand to watch it. The initial bid was one cent, and after a fews days of bidding, the bid was about three or four dollars. That seemed like a pretty reasonable price -- if you ignore the fact that watching the movie is possibly one of the most unpleasant cinematic experiences you are likely to have, and by that reasoning, any price is too high a price to pay.

As it happens, I did ignore that fact, and I went back to eBay the day before the bidding ended and checked the price again. By that time, the price was already up to $24. I didn't find out what it eventually sold for, but I imagine it probably ended up pretty close to the retail price for a new version.

So that temptation to buy Salo on DVD didn't last very long either.

So where am I going with all this? Nowhere, really, but while we're on the subject of movies, I want to say something about the 1956 classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which I do happen to own a DVD copy of). I've always liked this movie despite its obvious flaw. And I'm not talking about that tacked-on happy ending -- I'm talking about the fact that in the beginning of the movie, the pods would take the form of human beings and physically replace them while they slept, but toward the end of the movie, Dana Wynter's character briefly fell asleep and when she awoke, she was no longer human. She hadn't been physically replaced by a pod that looked like her -- her originally human body remained intact but her mind had been replaced by a pod mind.

So that's a flaw, but it can be easily overlooked because the movie is so much fun to watch. The only question in my mind is why in the ensuing decades, people have found the need to make three remakes, none of which is even remotely as good as the first one.

The first remake was that 1978 mess starring Donald Sutherland. A lot of critics seemed to like this one, but I just found it annoying. When I saw it in the theater, I remember wishing I was watching the original instead.

And then came Abel Ferrara's 1993 Body Snatchers. You'd probably think it was a decent horror movie if you'd never seen the original version, but I didn't think much of it. To its credit, it's the best of the three remakes, but that isn't saying much.

And then, most recently, came The Invasion starring Nicole Kidman. I didn't expect much from this movie based on the previews, so I waited until it went to cable. To be honest, I don't even remember this movie. I know I saw it, but it didn't make a lasting imprint.

And even though past results are no guarantee of future performance, if anyone ever releases another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I don't think it will be very good. And no one's ever going to do this, but if someone ever made a new version of Salo, I don't know what I'd expect that to be like. It would probably be better and worse at the same time, which is to say it might be easier to watch, but at the cost of sacrificing its visceral impact. If that doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry about it -- like I said, nobody's going to remake Salo anyway.

Environmentally-Conscious Garbage

2008-10-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

The hard-copy mail I get can be pretty easily divided into two categories: bills and junk mail. Since I've been paying all my bills electronically for a while, the bank that holds my mortgage decided not to include a return envelope every time it sends me a bill. That was fine with me -- it saved me the trouble of tossing the envelope into the recycling bin, even though I thought it was a bit presumptuous of them. But then a little while later, they informed me that the were going to send all future bills to me via email. This wasn't something I could opt in or out of -- I had no choice but to get my statements electronically.

Again, it was a bit presumptuous of them, but I can understand why they did it. And I expect that as time marches on, more and more of my bills will be sent to me electronically. This will mean, of course, that eventually the only hard-copy mail I'll receive will be junk mail.

There are all sorts of junk mail, but the kind I'm going to talk about today is the kind where some organization sends a request for my financial support. And since I'm a socially- and environmentally-conscious guy, most of the requests I get come from socially- and environmentally-conscious organizations.

Sometimes I donate money, but most of the time I just toss the requests into the recycling bin.

So you see the irony, right? Some environmentally-conscious organization wants me to donate some money, so they send me a letter and a return envelope and a form to send back with my check, and all these things are made of paper. And in order to make that paper, someone either had to chop down some trees or recycle some other paper products. In either case, a lot of energy was expended to send out hundreds of thousands of requests, most of which probably ended up in various recycling bins -- or even worse, in trash cans -- throughout the nation.

But that's not the bad part. The bad part is that many of these environmentally-conscious organizations seem to think that I want a plastic bumper sticker or window sticker advertising their organization. I don't, and apparently a lot of other people don't either, because I don't think I've seen more than maybe a dozen cars whose windows or bumpers are adorned with these stickers. And since the stickers are not recyclable, they have to go into the trash, where they are then carted off to various landfills, where they will sit for thousands of years while they silently decompose. Sometimes they don't send stickers, though. Sometimes they just send pages of self-stick address labels which I also have no need for, so they end up in the landfill as well. It seems to me that these environmentally-conscious organizations should be a bit more environmentally-conscious.

So they should get rid of all the throwaway plastic stickers, obviously. But it's a little harder to fault them for sending the requests that end up in the recycling bin. They could use email, and that would be a lot more environmentally-conscious, but it's so ridiculously easy to hit the Delete button that if they relied on email alone, they'd probably go broke. They could always use the telephone, but they'd probably make even less money that way. Whenever some organization calls me to request a donation, I just tell them I'm not interested and hang up. It doesn't even matter who they are or how strongly I believe in their cause -- if they call me on the phone, I'll hang up on them. It's a matter of principle.

And because of that principle, tons of envelopes and requests for donations are needlessly sent through the mail, tossed into the recycling bin, and recycled into new paper, some of which is used to make new envelopes and stationary on which requests for donations can be printed. It's an endless cycle, and you can probably blame it at least partially on people like me who don't like people calling them up and asking for money.

You can't blame the bumper stickers and window stickers and self-stick address labels on me, though. I don't have anything to do with that.

Keeping Cold Things Cold

2008-10-04T15:53:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to agree that the economy is pretty bad shape these days, but they don't all agree why. The Democrats love to blame the the current Republican administration for its concerted efforts to deregulate everything, whether it should be regulated or not. And the Republicans love to blame Bill Clinton.

I don't know anything about economics, but I think the economy started to slide downhill as soon as we shifted away from a production-based economy toward a consumer-based economy. I remember thinking years ago that the economy doesn't have a chance as long as it's based on people spending their money rather than saving it.

But maybe I was just projecting my own beliefs onto the general population. I assumed that just because I don't like to waste my money on things I don't really need, everyone else doesn't like it either. I was apparently wrong about that, since shopping has become a hobby for so many people. As a matter of fact, simply pretending to shop (also known as window shopping) even qualifies as a hobby for many people.

One of the reason I don't like to shop is that it's a waste of my time. No matter what I'm doing, it's usually more interesting than acquiring more material possessions. I don't need to buy new clothes every few months and I don't need to get rid of my old car and buy a new one. I don't even need to get rid of my hopelessly outdated CRT-based televisions and replace them with LCD flat screen models. One of my TVs is 12 years old and the other one is 24 years old, but for better or worse, they both work fine, so I can't think of any reason to get rid of them. The only possible reason would be that newer TVs would enhance my television viewing experience, but I already know that they won't. Whenever you buy something new, it's interesting for about a week -- a month if you're lucky -- and then it just becomes something else you own.

However, after having said all that, I feel it's only fair to let you know that I just bought a new refrigerator today. As you may recall, my old refrigerator started acting erratically a couple of months ago. It still kept the food cold, but the freezer no longer froze anything and the ice maker stopped working.

I ignored the problem for a while, hoping it would go away. (I know how silly that sounds, but it's the same strategy our government has been using with the economy until very recently.) The problem, of course, did not go away, so a few days ago I called up an appliance repair place to see if they could fix it. The guy came out to my house, took apart the refrigerator, and informed me that it was leaking Freon. He also told me that to fix it would almost cost what a new refrigerator would cost. So I bought a new refrigerator, and it's supposed to be delivered sometime within the next week.

When I was talking with the salesman, he asked me how long I had my old refrigerator. I told him I'd had it for 19 years. He seemed pretty impressed, so I told him I'd heard that newer refrigerators aren't built to last that long, and he confirmed that this is true. I asked him how long a refrigerator made today would last and he told me about eight to ten years. When I asked him why, he said something about how they're now built with smaller, more energy-efficient compressors, which wear out more quickly. And then he said that at the rate refrigerator technology is changing, most people wouldn't want the same refrigerator for 20 years, just like they wouldn't want the same car for 20 years.

That sounded sort of ridiculous to me, but maybe it isn't. Maybe what I require from a refrigerator is much less than what others require. I just need it to keep frozen things frozen and to keep cold things cold. Refrigerators have been doing that for longer than I've been alive.

And as it turns out, there isn't much difference between my old refrigerator and the one I just bought. The biggest difference is that the old one is 19 years old and that it's leaking Freon. Other than that, they look about the same, they're about the same size, they have the same features, and they have the same capacity.

Actually, there's another difference, but I don't consider it a change for the better. My old refrigerator has three bins that you can put fresh vegetables in. The new one also has three bins, but two of them are pretty small. (All the other refrigerators I looked at had only two bins, and they were also pretty small.) But all the new refrigerators have door-mounted shelves that are wide enough to hold one-gallon containers. I don't buy anything in one-gallon containers, so that's sort of a waste of space, especially since the more space the door-mounted shelves take up, the less space is available for the rest of the refrigerator.

But refrigerators, like everything else, just reflect the trends in our lives, and I guess one of the current trends is not to eat a lot of fresh vegetables. The other trend is apparently to buy gallon jugs of milk and soft drinks. So today's refrigerators are not meant for people like me, but I'm sure I'll find a way to adapt. It may not be easy at first, but I've adapted to a lot of other things, so I think I'll probably be able to adapt to the new refrigerator. And if I can't, in eight or ten years when I need to buy a new one, maybe the pendulum will be swinging in the other direction and people will be eating fresh foods again.

Too Easy, Libya

2008-09-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, it seems like the major problems facing us were the never-ending war in Iraq and the imminent global environmental collapse. Those problems are still with is, and they're just as important as ever, but they've taken a back seat to the latest problem, which is the impending worldwide economic disaster.

Last week, the big news was the $85 billion bail-out of AIG. That seemed like a big deal at the time, but this week $85 billion seems like nothing, compared to the proposed $700 billion we're being asked to fork over so our government can buy more worthless mortgage-based securities from Wall St. investment firms at a price many times greater than what they're actually worth.

But enough of all that. Things are bad and they're going to get worse, but if we live long enough, we might see them get better again. So on that optimistic note, let's move on to today's topic.

A few months ago, a colleague of mine pointed out that the flag of the United States is not an easy one to draw, particularly for children, because of all the stars. His presumption was that at some point in their academic careers, all elementary school children in this country are given the assignment of drawing the United States flag.

To be honest, my elementary school education took place so long ago that I barely remember anything about it. Specifically, I don't remember ever having been asked to draw the flag of the United States as part of any classroom assignment. I do have the vague sense that I've drawn a few United States flags in my childhood, however, and I can verify that drawing those stars is what makes the task so difficult. It's not that drawing a star is particularly difficult, although creating a white star on a blue background requires that the background be drawn everywhere except where a star should be. This is not an easy task, particularly for a child. For anyone, regardless of age, it is a tedious chore. The proper arrangement of the 50 stars in alternating rows of five and six stars is also rather complicated, but most children don't concern themselves with this level of accuracy.

So drawing the United States flag is far from easy, but on the other hand, it's much easier to draw than many other flags. Consider, for example, the flags of Afghanistan, Albania, and American Samoa. Or for that matter, Belize, Bhutan, and Cambodia. I'm not going to go through the whole list, but flags with a coat of arms, like Moldova and Guatemala, or flags that contain writing, such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq, seem especially difficult to draw, and by comparison make drawing the United States flag seem like child's play.

I think there are quite a few flags that would present a challenge to the average elementary school child, but they aren't so difficult that they would cause the child to give up in exasperation. I'm referring to the flags of countries like South Korea, Macedonia, Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Suriname.

There are also a lot of flags that I think wouldn't be challenging enough for the typical school child. Any of the Scandinavian flags would probably fall into this category, with the possible exception of Norway, as would all of the flags that simply consist of two or three color fields, such as Gabon, Germany, Hungary, Colombia, Indonesia, and France.

And finally, there is the flag of Libya, which consists of nothing but a solid green rectangle. The only challenge facing the child who is asked to draw the Libyan flag is to ensure that the entire flag can be drawn without running out of green crayons. There's no frustrating arrangement of stars or coat of arms to draw. There aren't even any lines to draw. Most children wouldn't even waste their time, because the Libyan flag presents absolutely no technical or artistic challenges. It's just too easy.

Anyway, remember a little while ago when I told you I had an idea for this blog but I didn't think it was interesting enough to actually write about? Well, this was it, and I apologize for not warning you in advance. I realize you probably would have been better off reading another of my recent posts, such as this one or this one. Or maybe you would have enjoyed one of my older posts, such as this one. Today's post isn't nearly as interesting, but I never promised that everything I write is going to be a work of literary genius.

Too Big to Fail

2008-09-20T16:39:00.000-07:00

In a generous $85 billion gesture of corporate socialism, our federal government has decided to bail out AIG, the failing insurance industry giant. The government, which was already in pretty deep financial trouble, will finance the transaction by passing the cost on to the U.S. taxpayers, essentially forcing us to buy billions of dollars worth of bad debt.

The stated reason for the bail-out is that AIG is too big to fail. Apparently, if AIG were to collapse, it would have devastating worldwide consequences. Maybe it would -- I can't say, since I don't really know anything about finance or economics -- but I do have a question, and that question is, how can one corporation get that big? Or more to the point, should a corporation be allowed to get that big?

Advocates of unregulated free trade will enthusiastically say yes, but I have my doubts. You could take half of Western Europe, blow it off the face of the Earth, and it probably wouldn't have the same disastrous worldwide economic consequences that failing to bail out AIG would have. And I'm not convinced that a single corporation should have more of a global economic impact than half a continent.

But the truth is, if you got rid of Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Belgium, the rest of the world probably wouldn't suffer much financially. As a matter of fact, you could throw in all of Scandinavia and it still probably wouldn't matter that much from an economic standpoint.

But before you get the wrong idea, I'm not advocating that we blow up any part of Europe or Scandinavia. Even though the financial consequences might be minimal, those countries are rich in culture and history, and the loss of all that would be something that no amount of money could ever compensate for.

But the real issue here is not the financial clout of AIG or Europe or Scandinavia. The real issue is that I wish I were too big to fail. If the government were willing to bail me out anytime I made a series of stupid mistakes, I'd be a very wealthy man. And I wouldn't need $85 billion either. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't even need $85 million. I'd be very happy with $8.5 million, but the truth is, I'd be quite content with $850 thousand. And even though I don't want to sell myself short, if you talked me down to $85 thousand, I'd still feel very fortunate.

Another Word for Bitch

2008-09-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I don't discuss politics. That's because politics have become so polarized that there are probably few subjects more divisive. And I am a uniter, not a divider, so politics are pretty much off limits. So even though last week I mentioned John McCain's comment about the outcome of a hurricane being "in the hands of God," I wasn't attacking McCain or whatever religious beliefs he may profess, I was merely examining a phrase he happened to use.

By the way, a guy I know took issue with the term "act of nature" as a substitute for "act of God." He felt that it implied an anthropomorphization of nature (such as "Mother Earth," for example) by suggesting that nature is somehow capable of conscious and deliberate action. His point is well taken, so perhaps a better term would be a "natural occurrence" or a "natural event" or something to that effect.

Anyway, this week, I'd like to look at a phrase used by McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin. As we all know, this self-described hockey mom told her audience that the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom is lipstick. This is apparently an old joke, but I'd never heard it before, possibly because I don't spend much time with pit bulls or hockey moms.

Sarah Palin was applauded for her now-famous observation, but if I ever called a woman as a pit bull with lipstick, I'm pretty sure she'd take it as an insult. And if she didn't, she should, because it's not a very nice thing to say. It's just another way of calling her a bitch.

The phrase isn't at all complimentary to women, but it's not particularly kind to pit bulls either. Pit bulls already have a pretty bad reputation -- the way people talk about them, you'd think they were hounds from hell. Granted, they were bred to be fighting dogs, but if they're properly trained, they can be suitable pets. As a matter of fact, according to a study published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, the pit bull rated average or below average for hostility towards strangers.

To complicate matters further, there's really no such breed as a pit bull. The term "pit bull" is apparently just a catch-all designation for several types of dog that look somewhat alike and were originally bred for fighting. And I don't want to get into the whole Dog Whisperer thing, but when any dog, regardless of breed, is aggressive, it's usually because of its owners. So rather than further malign the pit bull, we should be maligning the pit bull owners for not knowing how to take care of their dogs.

So let's summarize what we learned today. We learned that if I call a some woman a pit bull with lipstick, she'll probably be insulted. We also learned that pit bulls shouldn't be spoken of disparagingly, because they're just dogs, and you shouldn't criticize a dog for being a dog. And finally, we learned that it's fine to criticize a human for being a bad dog owner, because humans are supposed to be smart enough to know better, even though a lot of them obviously are not.

And just to make one final comment, I don't know about you, but however distasteful I find the phrase "a pit bull with lipstick," I find the image of a pit bull wearing lipstick to be even more distasteful. I usually don't even like it when women wear lipstick, especially if it's really bright red or something. Some colors look nice on a woman's lips, but they'd look awful on a dog's lips. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure that dogs have lips, so you'd probably have to apply the lipstick to the fur around the dog's mouth, which would look terrible and would be degrading to the dog.

Acts of God

2008-09-06T13:29:00.000-07:00

People still talk about "dialing a phone number" even though telephones haven't had dials for decades. This is an example of how our language doesn't always keep pace with our changing world.

I guess it's sort of the same thing when John McCain recently said about Hurricane Gustav that its outcome was "in the hands of God." I don't care how religious you are, you probably realize that hurricanes aren't really acts of God. As a matter of fact, even Baptist minister and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee objects to the term. Way back in 1997, he refused to sign some legislation pertaining to natural disasters until the phrase "acts of God" was removed. He didn't think destructive and deadly forces should be considered acts of God.

As it turns out, calling a hurricane or a flood an act of God is about as inaccurate as you can get. Unlike our primitive ancestors, most people today probably realize that any amount of rain -- from the slightest drizzle to the most violent storm -- is a well-understood meteorological condition and not the doing of some rain god. Even the most pious and devout people would have to agree. There's no controversy over this. No one is saying, for example, that there isn't enough scientific evidence to support the theory that changes in the weather aren't part of God's plan.

But we still use the term "Act of God." And it's not just a casual term -- it actually has a legal definition. It means an event outside of human control, although, oddly, it doesn't imply that the event was actually caused by God. So maybe we should just stop using the term altogether and replace it with "Act of Nature."

And while were at it, we should stop talking about dialing a phone number as well.

One-Hit Wonders

2008-08-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

If Pier Paolo Pasolini made one good movie during his lifetime, it would have to be Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I'm not saying it's actually a good movie -- I'm just saying it's the closest thing to a good movie he ever made. Of course, that's a pretty indefensible position for me to take, considering I've only seen one or two of his other movies. But I think most people will agree that Salo is probably his most famous, as well as his most infamous, movie.

In case you never saw it, here's the story in a nutshell: Around the end of World War II, a group of Italian Fascists assemble a group of children and young adults and take them to a remote villa, where they torture them, humiliate them, sexually abuse them, and eventually kill them.

The reason I'm thinking about this is that I happened to notice a small ad in the latest New Yorker announcing that Salo is being released to DVD by The Criterion Collection. That surprised me, since I wouldn't have thought there was much of a market for this particular movie. I'm not planning on buying it, unless it turns out I have an extra $30 or so that I desperately need to spend on something I don't really want, but when I saw the ad, it reminded me of my experiences when I saw the movie.

The first time I saw it sometime in the early '80s, I was overwhelmed. The violence wasn't particularly explicit for the most part, but the overarching cruelty in the film made me feel dirty when I left the theater. I couldn't stop thinking about it for days.

Since the move was shown very rarely and only at revival theaters, the second time I saw it was probably a few years later. I was prepared for it this time, so I was able to look past the violence and cruelty and see the underlying poetic structure. Don't ask me what I mean by that, because I won't be able to tell you. All I can say is that when I saw the movie the second time, I remember thinking there was an underlying poetic structure.

The third time I saw it was probably in the late '80s. I shouldn't even count this because I watched the movie on what was possibly the worst film to VHS transfer of all time. Not only were the video and audio quality below all reasonable standards, there were actually gaps in the tape where they changed the film reels. So it was hardly the ideal viewing situation, but this time I was able to look past the violence and cruelty, and I was able to look past the underlying poetic structure as well. As a matter of fact, all I was able to see was that the movie was pointless and stupid.

I may be judging Salo too harshly, of course. I'm sure there are deeper meanings to the film that I probably missed, and maybe if I'd seen a better copy of it the last time I wouldn't have ended up with such a low opinion of it. So I should probably buy the DVD, just so I can give the movie a fourth chance. Maybe if one day I bump my head and can't think straight or something, I'll break down and get a copy. But it's not exactly a top priority item on my list of things to do.

While we're on the subject of people who may have made only one good movie, I have to mention Alejandro Jodorowsky. If Jodorowsky made one good movie during his career, it would have to be El Topo. Unlike Pasolini, Jodorowsky is still alive, so there's a chance that he might make a better film someday, but I'm not holding my breath. I've seen a lot of Jodorowsky's films, and they're all heavy-handed, pretentious, and overwrought with mysticism and religious symbolism.

That's true of El Topo as well -- as a matter of fact, it may be more true of El Topo than with other Jodorowsky films, but at least El Topo is engaging and fun to watch. I don't even know how many times I've seen it. It used to get shown in theaters every now and then, and whenever it did, some friends and I would invariably drive out to see it. It wasn't available on Region-1 DVD for a long time, apparently due to some legal battles and personal feuds, but when it was finally available, I picked up a copy. Unfortunately, it's only available as a boxed set, so you're forced to buy a few not-so-great Jodorowsky films, as well as some soundtrack CDs that aren't worth listening to, but that's the way things go.

One of the interesting things about El Topo is that back in the days of double features, it often got shown with Greaser's Palace, probably because they're both religious allegories of one sort or another. Greaser's Palace, by the way, may be the only good movie that Robert Downey ever made. And I'm not talking about the actor Robert Downey, Jr. -- I'm talking about his father, the director Robert Downey (who these days, to avoid any confusion resulting from his son's successful career, goes by the name Robert Downey, Sr.). Greaser's Palace wasn't his most famous movie -- that distinction would probably have to go to Putney Swope, which in my opinion wasn't nearly as good. As a matter of fact, of all the Robert Downey films I've ever seen, Greaser's Palace is the only one I've seen more than once. I have the DVD as well. It's a classic. I almost feel like I should be watching it instead of writing this post.

So that's about it. I don't know how to end this post, so I'll just jump abruptly to another topic. As I mentioned, a while ago, I injured my back recently. I went to see my orthopedist a couple of times and when I went to settle the bill, I noticed that printed on the bottom of the credit card receipt was the message, "Thank you! Come again!"

I don't know about you, but I think this is the wrong message to be giving your patients. It's sort of like saying, "Stay sick! Don't get better!" Maybe I'm the only person who reads the messages on credit card receipts, but I much prefer the message on the receipts I get from the physical therapy place I've been going to. It's just a simple unambiguous "Thank you!" to which my only response is always "You're welcome!"

Refrigerators and Superstitions

2008-08-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, my refrigerator stopped working. It didn't stop working completely -- it just stopped working as hard as it used to. It was still keeping food cold, but the freezer wasn't cold enough to keep things from partially thawing, and the ice maker stopped making ice. I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but the refrigerator is about 18 or 19 years old, so I decided it's probably just going through a teenage rebellion phase.

I gave it a day to see if it would start working again, but it didn't. So on Sunday, I looked up the names of a few authorized service centers. I figured a repairman might be able to take a look at the refrigerator and see what was wrong with it. I also looked at a few refrigerators online, just in case I had to buy a new one.

I was too busy during the week to call any of the authorized service centers, and I was too lazy to go refrigerator shopping, but an interesting thing happened. When I got home Tuesday night, I checked the freezer and there was a batch of freshly made ice in it. So I figured the refrigerator must have been aware that I was thinking about having it fixed or replaced, and it decided to start working a little harder.

Do I really believe that refrigerators are self-aware? Do I really think refrigerators can intuit human intent? No. Of course not, because I tend to be rational about most things.

Rational people tend not to be superstitious, and if you ask a lot of people if they're superstitious, I bet most of them will say they aren't. That's a good thing, but we live in a world so full of superstitions that sometimes we don't even recognize them.

A long time ago -- maybe about thirty years ago -- I briefly went out with a woman who lived in unit 12A of her apartment building. One day, I realized that the apartments were numbered 12, 12A, and 14, which meant that she was actually in unit 13. She sort of freaked out a little when I told her that. She didn't pack a suitcase and move out that night or anything like that, but she was genuinely upset about living in what by any other name was actually unit 13 of her building.

But that's nothing. Office buildings today are routinely built without a 13th floor. There's no floor 12A either -- the 13th floor is simply gone. It just goes from the 12th floor the 14th floor. So our superstitions are built right into our architecture, and the funny thing is, I bet most people wouldn't have any problem working on the 13th floor of a building. Of course, I've made the mistake before of thinking everyone is as rational and level-headed as I am, so maybe I'm wrong. But I do think it's kind of strange that even though our technology has advanced to the point that we can build super-skyscrapers that soar hundreds of stories into the sky, not one of those buildings is likely to have a 13th floor.

The problem is that even as we get smarter about some things, like how to build tall buildings, we remain just as stupid as our ancient ancestors were about other things, like superstitions and irrational fears. I guess that means that intelligence and stupidity are located in two different parts of the brain. I like to think that for most of us, the stupidity portion of our brains has atrophied while the intelligence portion has developed, but it seems like there are a lot of people for whom that isn't particularly true. People believe things without even knowing why they believe them, and that's not likely to change in the near future, no matter how quickly our skyscraper technology develops.

But back to more immediate concerns, I'm hoping that our refrigerator technology has grown in the last 18 or 19 years, because I think it's just a matter of time before I'll need a new refrigerator. The current one does its job well enough at the moment -- I don't really need ice, and if I turn the knob to its maximum setting, things in the freezer stay more or less frozen. But I'm mot in denial about this -- I know that some day soon the refrigerator will probably die on me and I'll have to get a new one.

Unfortunately, according to a friend of mine, they don't make refrigerators like they used to, and if I were to buy a new one today, it probably wouldn't last for 18 or 19 years. So for now, I'm just avoiding the issue. That's because the procrastination portion of my brain is pretty well-developed, maybe almost as much as the intelligence portion.

"Nothing up my sleeve..."

2008-08-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to write about what I said I might write about last week. I was planning on it, but something else popped into my mind, so I'm going to write about that instead. Maybe next week I'll get around to writing about that other thing.

On August 18, 2007 -- almost a year ago to the day -- I enabled comments on this blog. I didn't expect to get many, and -- not surprisingly -- I didn't. That's not particularly interesting, but here's something that might be. On July 15, 2006 -- more than a year before I enabled comments -- I wrote a post that has received more comments to date than all other posts combined. And the most recent comment was made just last month. That may not be so interesting to you, but I'm not going to explain why it's sort of interesting to me. Instead, I'll just continue with this post and assume that if you aren't interested, you'll look for something else to read instead.

In the July 15 post, I mentioned that magicians like David Blaine and Criss Angel are often accused of being the devil, because they're able to perform magic tricks that confound and amaze the people who witness those tricks. I didn't think I was saying anything controversial, but apparently I was wrong.

About half the comments took the position that even though Criss Angel might not be the devil, performing magic tricks is exactly the sort of thing the devil would do to lure hearts and souls to his evil ways. Although that might make sense to some people, it also implies that anyone who performs magic tricks can be suspected of being in league with the devil.

Not surprisingly, because I have been given the gift of intelligent rational thought, I disagree completely. No matter who you are -- devil, attorney, or salesman -- I happen to think there are much better ways to win people over to your side. If all it took were a few magic tricks, every politician in this country would be studying the art of prestidigitation. But have you ever seen John McCain doing any magic? How about Barack Obama? Has he been performing any magic tricks recently? I haven't been following the campaigns, but from what I've heard, they mostly just give a lot of speeches. I don't believe anything either of them says, by the way, but it's not because I think they're liars -- it's because they're making campaign promises, and campaign promises are meant to be broken.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who takes everything they say with a grain of salt -- or actually, with an entire salt mine -- so they're probably just wasting a lot of time and money flying all over the country and telling us the lies they think we want to hear. On the other hand, if performing magic tricks could win them votes, believe me, they'd fire all their speech writers in an instant and spend all their free time in magic stores.

But let's turn our attention back to Criss Angel and David Blaine. They certainly aren't the first people to perform magic tricks -- and the tricks they perform aren't all that different from tricks performed by many other magicians -- but as far as I know, they're the only two magicians who have ever been accused of being the devil in disguise. To my knowledge, no one ever called Harry Houdini the devil, for example. No one ever called Doug Henning the devil either. No one calls Lance Burton the devil, and no one calls Penn and Teller the devil. No one has ever called Siegfried and Roy the devil, nor has anyone ever called David Copperfield, The Amazing Jonathan, or Princess Tenko the devil.

But that's not all. It turns out there are a lot of Christian magicians plying their trade. These people are not merely magicians who happen to be Christian, or Christians who happen to be magicians -- they are magicians who perform tricks to illustrate the teachings of the Bible. So it's probably very obvious to most of us that you can be a magician without having any demonic intent.

So what is it about David Blaine and Criss Angel? I've got a theory, and I could be wrong, but if you think I am, maybe you can come up with a better one. David Blaine is half Puerto Rican and as a result, his skin is darker than that of many people born in this country, and that kind of thing still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Criss Angel's skin is as white as snow, but he has long stringy hair and dresses in a sort of Goth/Death metal style. So I think people believe they're the devil simply because of the way they look. If Criss Angel cut his hair, wore something other than his usual black leather clothing, and lost about 10 pounds of metal chains and bracelets, people might even think he was cute, just like they did with Doug Henning. There's not much David Blaine can do about his skin color -- he could bleach it like Michael Jackson did -- but that's kind of a big step to take just to test my theory, and I don't recommend it. But much more to the point, the theory doesn't need to be proven -- it makes a lot of sense, so we can just assume it's probably true.

Besides, nobody seems to think David Blaine is the devil anymore -- now they just think of him as an attention-grabbing self-promoter. And as for Criss Angel, I don't know if his show is even on anymore. I sort of lost interest in him after watching his show for for a season or two, but if he were the devil, he'd probably have some kind of power that would prevent people from getting bored with him so easily. And even if his show is still on the air, it's probably still on A&E. You'd think the devil would at least be able to cut a deal with one of the major networks.

Lorem Ipsum

2008-08-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

I've had an idea floating around in my head for a few weeks now, but I haven't been able to muster up enough enthusiasm to actually write about it. Maybe that means I don't think it's such an interesting idea, or maybe it means I have better things to do. Or maybe it means both, or maybe it means neither. In any case, I'm not going to write about it this week. Maybe I'll write about it next week. Or maybe next week I'll write about something more interesting instead. But since I'm not going to write about anything this week, I'll leave you with the following place-holder text instead.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consenuetur adisplising eli, set diam nonumy eiusinod temtor incidunt et laboril ut dolone magrina. Ut neniquer ad minim pariatur, quis suscipit exercitato ullamaris corpor nostrud ladori nisus ut consequiat et commondoris aliquip. Dulis aurem veleum est dolora innure in reprehend en volutate veplit esse molestaie in consequat, fugiat nulla vel illum praesent eu inveniam. Et liber eos in accuseram et modagio dignisser um qui luptatum delenit aigue blandit duos et qui laborum excepteur sint occaept cupidat non providentie, simil iusto et tempor in culpa.

Qui sunt officia deserat mollit ce anim est molestias et dolor fuquer. At haried id dererald facil est er expedit conscient. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consenuetur adisplising eli, set diam nonumy eiusinod temtor incidunt et laboril ut dolone magrina. Ut neniquer ad minim pariatur, quis suscipit exercitato ullamaris corpor nostrud ladori nisus ut consequiat et commondoris aliquip Dulis aurem veleum est dolora innure in reprehend en volutate veplit esse molestaie in consequat, fugiat nulla vel illum praesent eu inveniam. Et liber eos in accuseram et modagio dignisser um qui luptatum delenit aigue blandit duos et qui laborum excepteur sint occaept cupidat non providentie.

Dorks, Nerds, and Geeks

2008-08-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

In the furtherance of my mission to write about things that most people couldn't care less about, today I'd like to talk about dorks, nerds, and geeks -- or more specifically, the words "dork," "nerd," and "geek."

At one point all three of these words were more or less synonymous, but with the passage of time, they have acquired subtle -- and sometimes not so subtle -- distinctions.

Originally, "dork" was a slang term for "penis," in much the same way that "dick," "prick," "weenie," "cock," et al still are today. I believe I first heard the word "dork" used this way in the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal, and if my memory serves me correctly, I believe this was the last time I heard the word "dork" used this way as well.

For some reason, "dork" never caught on as a slang term for "penis" -- probably because there were hundreds of competing words that were already in frequent use. (Note that the fate of the word "dork" is not unique in this respect. The word "wang" enjoyed a certain amount of popularity at one time but is now rarely, if ever, used.)

Nonetheless, "dork" somehow made the jump from literal slang term for "penis" to figurative slang term for "penis," so calling someone a dork is now somewhat akin to calling him a dick or a prick or a weenie.

(As a tangential remark, I think it's interesting to note that even though "dork," "dick," "prick," and "weenie" are basically synonymous in their literal definitions, they are not interchangeable when used in describing a person. Calling someone a weenie has a completely different connotation than calling someone a prick, for example. And, inexplicably, calling someone a cock has no meaning whatsoever.)

So that's enough about the word "dork." Perhaps more interesting are the words "geek" and "nerd."

"Geek" is a fairly old word, by which I mean it was in use long before I was born, although its current definition may be relatively new. "Nerd," on the other hand, is a fairly recent addition to the English language. I think it was first used sometime in the '70s. As a matter of fact, I remember seeing a poster back then of a stereotypical nerd in which all the elements of nerd attire (such as off-brand running shoes, pocket protector, food-stained shirt, and broken horn-rimmed glasses repaired with tape) were identified and labeled. It wasn't a particularly funny poster but what I remember about it is that rather than spelling the word N-E-R-D as we do today, it was spelled N-U-R-D, indicating that the word was so new back then that a standard spelling for it hadn't even been agreed upon yet.

For the longest time, "nerd" and "geek" were synonymous, and it was considered an insult to be called either of them. But then, sometime in the early '00s, "geek" became somewhat less pejorative. People started referring to themselves as geeks to indicate a certain level of expertise or interest in a particular field. It wasn't uncommon to hear people identify themselves as computer geeks or art geeks or movie geeks, for example. I even knew a stockbroker at the time who referred to some of the people in his offices as geeks, the implication being that they studied the market very closely and examined the financial details of certain companies in much greater detail than a lot of other stockbrokers. At the same time, "nerd" was still considered an insult and no one would even think of applying that label to himself.

However, all that has apparently changed recently. I have heard from two independent sources that "nerd" has lost most, if not all, of its negative connotations and today "geek" is considered the more pejorative term. I doubt if there's any sociolinguistic explanation for this shift -- it can probably be attributed to nothing more complicated than the fickle habits of the English-speaking public. Nonetheless, I think it's sort of fascinating.

But then, it's exactly the sort of thing I would be fascinated by, because I'm what you might call a word geek. Or maybe now you'd call me a word nerd, just to keep up with current definitions. I, however, would never call myself a word nerd because I don't like the way it sounds. The rhyme is unfortunate because it makes the term a little too cute, and what's needed here is not a term with cuteness but a term with dignity and respectability. It's no big deal, though, because, as I said before, I'm not going to call myself a word nerd. And in case you're wondering, I'm not going to call myself a word geek either.

Snooze

2008-07-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

My alarm clock has a nine-minute snooze button. I'd like it a lot more if it had a 10-minute button, not so much because I want the extra minute, but because nobody wants to have to do arithmetic in the morning. If I had a 10-minute snooze button and I set the alarm for 8:00 a.m., I'd know that the next time I hit it, it will be 8:10, then 8:20, then 8:30, and so on until I finally decide to get out of bed around 10:00 or so. But with a nine-minute snooze button, I have to do some early-morning calculations. The first one isn't so hard. 8:09. Okay. But then the next one will be 8:18, then 8:27, then 8:36., and to me these just seem like strange times to be getting out of bed. The math isn't difficult, but it's not as easy as just adding 10. And to make matters even worse, the hour after that is completely different -- the alarm goes off at 9:03, then 9:12, then 9:21, and then 9:30.

I wouldn't mind having an alarm clock with a 12-minute snooze button. A little bit of arithmetic is involved, but no matter how many times you hit the button, you'll know that it's always going to be on the hour, or 12 minutes past the hour, or 24 minutes, or 36, or 48, regardless of the hour. So you can keep hitting the button hour after hour and you'll always have a pretty good sense of what time it is.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that I happened to see an ad for an alarm clock with a four-minute snooze button. Yes, you read that right. Four minutes. A whopping 240 seconds. What's the point of that? Why would anyone want an alarm clock that's going to annoy them every four minutes? It's insane. You might as well get up when the alarm rings the first time, just so you won't have to hear it every four minutes. Or you could do what I'd probably do: just turn the alarm off and get out of bed when you feel like it.

The thing is, I have a feeling that a four-minute snooze button is exactly what some people want. It seems like the world is getting increasingly fast-paced and competitive, and no one has a minute to lose. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, someone makes an alarm clock with a two-minute snooze button. And a few years after that, the snooze button might disappear completely, to be replaced by an alarm clock that pinches you and pushes you and taunts you until you get out of bed.

Or more likely, the alarm clock as we know it may become obsolete. Instead we'll have some sort of subcutaneous implant that will jolt us with tiny bursts of electricity when it's time to get up. It can be implanted when we're babies, at the same time they implant the miniature cell phones, media players, ID tags, and medical and financial record storage areas under our skin. I know, it sounds like science fiction, but at some point it'll just be science. And it probably won't happen that far in the future. So sleep while you can, and use that snooze button as much as you can while you've still got one.

Acronyms and the End of the World

2008-07-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

Everybody thinks they know what an acronym is, but nobody agrees on what it is. For example, a lot of people might think that LHC is an acronym for Large Hadron Collider, but others will claim that since LHC isn't pronounceable as a word, it isn't really an acronym -- it's just an abbreviation made by taking the first letter from each word. Compare this to NASA -- short for National Aeronautics and Space Administration -- which can be pronounced as a word and is therefore a better candidate for acronymy. On the other hand, I know a guy who claims that NASA isn't really an acronym either, since NASA isn't an actual word, unlike, for example, CAT, which is an acronym for Computer-Aided Tomography but is also the word to describe those furry little animals that sleep and eat and meow and purr.

I'm not so strict in my own usage of the term. I think LHC is a perfectly good acronym, for example -- even though it doesn't meet every criterion of the strictest definition of the term -- if only because there's really no better word to describe it. There are words such as "initialism," but to me they seem awkward and clunky. On the other hand, I've always been a little uneasy about acronyms made from other acronyms, such as APLA, which stands for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and AIM, which is short for AOL Instant Messenger.

But it doesn't really matter, since that's not what I wanted to write about anyway. What I wanted to write about are the acronyms that supposedly don't stand for anything. I'm talking about acronyms like KFC, SAT, and AARP. They once stood for something, but the official word today is that they're just letters.

KFC, as I'm sure you probably know, originally stood for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but at some point when people started becoming health-conscious and thought of eating fried foods as some sort of unspeakable act, the corporate executives attempted to make KFC stand for Kitchen Fresh Chicken. That never caught on, so nowadays KFC doesn't stand for anything. They still sell tons of fried chicken every day, however.

The story behind SAT isn't so clear. When I was a kid, SAT stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test, but apparently, for some mysterious reason, the people who own the test changed it to Scholastic Assessment Test. I don't know why -- one seems as good as the other to me. But the point is now moot, since SAT no longer stands for anything. It's just three letters.

As for AARP, this used to stand for American Association of Retired Persons. But that posed a problem, because you don't actually have to be a retired person to be a member -- you just have to be at least 50 years old. As a matter of fact, if you retired at age 49, I don't even know if they'd let you join. So it makes sense that AARP shouldn't stand for anything that has to do with retired people, but the people at AARP took it one step further and made AARP stand for nothing.

And this brings us to the words "shit" and "fuck." Ever since I was in elementary school, I've heard that "fuck" is an acronym for "Fornication Under Consent of the King," "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," and various other unlikely expressions. I was young and naïve back then, but I was never stupid enough to believe the word "fuck" was an acronym. But apparently a lot of people are that stupid, and possibly even stupider. According to the documentary Fuck, which I saw a few months ago, something like 70% of the American people think "fuck" is an acronym.

A long time ago, H. L. Mencken told us "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," so it's hardly Earth-shattering news that people are stupid, but it is sort of depressing. And to make matters worse, a few months ago, there was a commercial I occasionally heard on the radio. I don't remember what it was advertising, but they somehow worked in some false etymology for the word "shit," claiming it was an acronym for "Ship High In Transit" -- which was supposedly what they used to write on crates of cow manure to ensure the crates were kept far from the engines to prevent the fumes from igniting and blowing up the ships. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but I bet there are millions of people who actually believe it.

I suppose we can be thankful that we're not as stupid as these people, but we can't afford to be smug about it, because these stupid people breed. And they vote. And they already outnumber us. It makes me doubtful about the future of humanity.

Which brings us back to the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. A lot of people are against it, because there's a chance that as soon as you turn it on, it will suck the whole Earth into a huge black hole. It's theoretically possible but extremely unlikely -- if a black hole were created by the LHC, it would probably be so unstable that it would be destroyed before it had a chance to do any damage -- but if it did create a black hole strong enough to swallow the Earth, I don't think it would be all that terrible. It would happen so quickly that we wouldn't even know what hit us. It would be a quick and painless extermination, rather than a slow lingering one in which, for example, each day the Earth becomes less capable of supporting animal and plant life. We'd all be living our lives, ignorantly believing in all sorts of stupid things, such as the origin of the words "fuck" and "shit," and then a moment later, we'd all be gone. And all our stupidity and ignorance would be gone with us. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

Disappointments and Happy Endings

2008-07-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

Last week, I may have implied that I spent the July 4th holiday on the moon. So just to clear up any possible misunderstandings, I didn't actually go to the moon. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever been to the moon. The truth is, I mostly spent that whole week and the week that followed within the confines of my house, except for a brief excursion to the emergency room.

I didn't have an actual medical emergency -- I wasn't suffocating or bleeding to death, for example -- but I was barely able to move due to all the excruciating pain I was suffering from.

Here's the short to medium-length version of what happened: Sometime in the early '90s, I herniated a few discs in my lower back, causing the vertebrae to pinch various nerves, including the sciatic nerve. It didn't happen all at once -- it happened over the course of a few years, during which I spent a fair amount of time in and out of physical therapy. I'm mostly pain-free these days, except that every now and then (such as during the recent July 4th holiday, for example), my back will give out on me, sometimes without any warning. Usually it gets better on its own, but this time it only got worse. I tried making an appointment with my orthopedist, but he was booked solid until the end of July, so I got in the car and drove to the emergency room.

Driving wasn't a problem for me, but getting in and out of the car was a challenge. Nonetheless, I made it to the emergency room, and waited for over two hours to see a doctor. He looked pretty young -- I figure he probably wasn't even in high school when I first injured my back -- but although he wasn't an orthopedist, he seemed to know what he was talking about. Before he left, he wrote me a couple of prescriptions -- one for Ibuprofen, which is an anti-inflammatory, and one for Vicodin, which is a pain killer.

Vicodin is also a narcotic, and it's one of those drugs that rich and famous people are always getting addicted to. For the life of me, I don't know why -- it seemed like all it did to me was make me drowsy, without killing any actual pain. So I don't really see the appeal, but maybe I would have liked it more if I were rich and famous.

Anyway, that's not really what I wanted to write about. If you're ever confined to your house and in too much pain to do any actual thinking, you'll probably end up watching a lot of TV. Or at least, that's what I did. Actually, I didn't watch that much -- just enough to remind me why I don't normally watch a lot of TV. I did end up seeing a few movies on cable, though, and a few more movies on my computer.

I'm not going to mention them all because I don't remember them all. I'm just going to mention one for starters and see where that leads me. The movie is Happy Endings. I downloaded this movie, and sometimes when I download a movie, I'll burn it to a DVD so I can watch in on my TV, and other times I'll just watch it on my computer. If it's a long movie (such as the director's cut of Bis ans Ende der Welt, for example), I'll usually burn it to a DVD (or in the case of Bis ans Ende der Welt, two DVDs). My reasoning is that it's more comfortable to watch a movie on my couch looking at a TV screen than on a chair looking at a computer monitor, but in this case, the comfort issue wasn't that important, since you're never all that comfortable when you've got severe back pain.

But anyway, back to Happy Endings, which I watched on my computer even though it was well over two hours long. After a few minutes it started to remind me of the movie The Opposite of Sex, and not just because Lisa Kudrow played the same sort of frustrated pathetic woman in both movies, or that both movies wove several stories into one, or that some of the plot developments were just too absurd to be believable, but because they both had the same basic tone, which was cynical and sarcastic yet still warm-hearted and optimistic somehow. So when Happy Endings was over, I looked it up online and discovered that it was written and directed by Don Roos, the same guy who did The Opposite of Sex. I can't say I was surprised -- as a matter of fact, I probably would have been a lot more surprised if they hadn't been made by the same guy. I think Happy Endings is a pretty good movie, as is The Opposite of Sex. It can't take away the intense pain of severe inflammation in the lower back, but no movie really can.

The only other movie I want to say anything about is Redbelt, David Mamet's latest movie. I saw this movie the week before my recent back problems began, so I saw in the theater. It was hard to find a theater that still played this movie, since it wasn't very well received by either audiences or critics.

It's not Mamet's best movie by far, but it's still worth seeing. It's nowhere near as good as The Spanish Prisoner, Heist, or State and Main, but I still liked it. I don't know why, but for some reason, Mamet sometimes likes his actors to pretend they can't act. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch Lindsay Crouse in House of Cards, or Campbell Scott in The Spanish Prisoner. It's an odd directorial style, but it's part of what gives his movies their unique charm.

There was no deliberately bad acting in Redbelt, but the plot was somewhat ridiculous and some of the characters did things that people in their position would never do, but Mamet probably knows this and he makes them do it anyway. For the viewer, it's sometimes frustrating, but if you can suspend your disbelief, you'll usually end up enjoying yourself, and I'm sure that when Redbelt starts getting shown on cable, I'll watch it a few times, just like I've done with just about every other Mamet film I've seen.

By the way, a few months ago, David Mamet wrote an essay on why he isn't a brain-dead liberal. I read it, and it was sort of frustrating to read -- in the same way his movies can be frustrating to watch -- but the big disappointment for me was that he never really explained why he isn't a brain-dead liberal.

Anyway, you may have noticed that before last week's post, I let two weeks go by without writing anything. That's partially because I had better things to do, and partially because there wasn't anything I was really interested in writing about. I briefly considered writing about Redbelt and the brain-dead essay, but I didn't care enough about either of them to devote an entire post to.

I was also thinking about writing about the fact that some of my favorite filmmakers seem to be devoting their skills to making movies that are impossible to watch. I'm not talking about Mamet-style frustrating movies, I'm talking about people like Peter Greenaway and David Lynch.

Greenaway probably hasn't made anything really worth watching since The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover. That never stops me from seeing anything he makes that gets released in this country, but I'm usually disappointed. Try sitting through 8½ Women and you'll see what I mean. So maybe it's just as well that most of the films he makes never get released here. Nonetheless, I always wanted to see The Baby of Mâcon, even though I don't think it ever got a single good review. I think it played in the United States for one day at one theater, so I never got the chance to see it, and like a lot of other Greenaway films, no NTSC Region 1 DVD was ever released. But somebody posted a copy of it online recently, and although the video quality wasn't very good, I decided to watch it anyway. To be fair, it wasn't half-bad. As a matter of fact, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, which is a strong testament to the power of low expectations.

I also always wanted to see everything in Greenaway's The Tulse Luper Suitcases series, but as far as I know, those films were never released in the United States. If an NTSC Region 1 DVD collection had been made, I probably would have bought it, mostly out of curiosity, but as far as I know, that never happened. However, the Sundance Channel showed The Tulse Luper Suitcases 2 last week, and I saw some of it. I don't know exactly how much I saw because I fell asleep while watching it. That isn't necessarily an indictment of The Tulse Luper Suitcases 2, however, since it was shown late at night and I may have just had some Vicodin, but what I did see didn't make me particularly eager to see the rest. It wasn't painful to watch -- it was just sort of remote and uninteresting. Well, it was interesting from a purely cinematic standpoint, I suppose, but it wasn't very involving, which was probably deliberate. But deliberate or not, it didn't hold my attention, which is a shame, because Greenaway is capable of so much more.

The same thing is true with David Lynch. I've written about him before, so I won't repeat myself here. I just wonder if it's possible for him to make a movie even worse than Inland Empire. He's a director of considerable talent, so if anyone can do it, he can, but let's just hope that he decides not to.

So after being disappointed by some of my favorite filmmakers, I'm glad there are people like Todd Solondz. Or more specifically, I'm glad there is Todd Solondz. I've only seen four of his movies, but he's only made five features and one short film, so I've seen the bulk of his work and I've never seen a movie of his that I didn't like. I wasn't all that wild about Storytelling, but after I saw it in the theater, I still decided to watch it a couple of times when it went to cable. His most recent movie, Palindromes, seems to have pinched a few nerves, however, at least judging from the love-it-or-hate-it reviews it got. You can read the external reviews at IMDb if you want, but it's a lot more fun to read the user comments, especially the negative ones. As you read them, count the number of times people use words like "perverse," "offensive," "sick," and "horrible."

So that about wraps it up for this week. And if you're wondering how my back is doing, it's a lot better, thank you. I still don't have full range of motion and I'm still in occasional pain, but it's getting a little better every day, so the next time you hear from me, I'll probably be fine.

Dancing on the Moon

2008-07-05T16:51:00.000-07:00

It was July 4th yesterday, which also happens to be Independence Day in the United States. Things can get pretty crazy here with all the fireworks and stuff, so I decided I'd take a long week-end and spend a few days on the moon.

But with gas prices so high these days, I didn't think I could afford it if I went by myself and none of my friends wanted to go, so I decided to try and thumb a ride. I haven't hitch-hiked anywhere since I was in college, and it wasn't always easy to get a ride back then, but it's a lot harder now, especially if you're going someplace far away, like the moon.

But I figured I'm also a lot more patient than I was back then so if I had to wait a little longer, I wouldn't mind so much. And as they say, the journey is just as important as the destination, so I thought I would just focus on the hitch-hiking aspect of my trip rather than the fact that I was actually trying to get somewhere.

So I didn't really mind that it took so long to get a ride. It was hot outside and I had to wait a few hours before anyone picked me up, but the wait wasn't that terrible. My first ride wasn't going all the way to the moon, though. As a matter of fact, they weren't even going half that far. But they took me as far as they went, and then they let me off at some diner.

It was an okay place, but I didn't have to wait there very long, since people were coming and going all the time and it wasn't too hard to get another ride. This family with two little kids picked me up, and I thought the kids might be a problem, since they were young and the moon was far away and I thought they might get bored and whiny after a while. But they were cool. They had games and movies to keep them busy, so they never got impatient or anything. The parents were pretty cool too. They traveled a lot, and they were both good conversationalists, so they had plenty of stories to tell and it never got boring. I offered to chip in some money for gas, but they said it wasn't necessary.

So I got to the moon and thanked them for the ride, but after that, I realized there wasn't much to do up there. So I wandered around aimlessly for a while until I found a small encampment. There were a lot of people there -- most of them were inside the cabins, but a lot of people were just hanging around outside. Some of them were doing a kind of group dance thing, or it looked like they could have been exercising, even though no two people seemed to be doing the same thing at the same time. Another group of people was preparing some food over a huge open fire, so I helped out with that, even though I wasn't really hungry.

After a while, it started to get dark, which also made it get a lot colder. There wasn't any room in any of the cabins for me to sleep in, since I was one of the last people to show up there, so I set up some blankets at the side of one of the buildings, and that wasn't too bad, since I got some of the heat radiated from inside. I wouldn't say it was the best night of sleep I ever had, but when I awoke, I felt invigorated and refreshed, so I decided to run a few laps around the encampment before breakfast. Normally, I don't like to run, but gravity isn't much of an issue on the moon, so you feel a lot lighter and you can run a lot longer before you get tired.

I kind of liked it up there. I was actually thinking of not coming back until tomorrow, but a lot of people were packing up this morning and I figured it would be a lot easier getting a ride if I didn't wait until everyone already left.

I got a ride easily enough, but the people who picked me up weren't from Earth -- they were just stopping there on their way home. I forget where they said they were from, or maybe they didn't even tell me. Their English wasn't that good so I'm not exactly sure what they said the whole time. They didn't talk that much in the first place, so the trip back seemed longer than it otherwise would have. Plus, wherever you go, it usually seems like the trip back home takes a lot longer for some reason.

Another Green World

2008-06-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

I never watched the Discovery Home channel very much. It seems like the only time I ever watched it was when Kylie Kwong's cooking show was on. But as you probably already know, Discovery Home has recently changed its name to Planet Green, and it also changed its programming to reflect its new focus.

I'm all for environmental awareness, and even though I'm not a fanatic about it, I used to do environmentally friendly stuff way back when it was still relatively difficult. For example, I was recycling stuff in the early '80s, and back then, most cities didn't have a curbside recycling program, so you had to load up your car with old bottles and newspapers and drive to a recycling center, provided you could find one.

So I was looking forward to seeing what kind of programming Planet Green had to offer. I was hoping it would be like some of the shows on the Sundance channel. I really like some of the Sundance shows. They profile backyard inventors who are living off the grid using generators of their own design, or people who have designed conversion kits to allow cars to run on used cooking oil, or architectural and city planning firms that specialize in sustainable architecture using renewable resources. There's a lot of useful and interesting information in shows like that, and I was hoping that that's the kind of thing Planet Green was going to offer.

But based on what I saw last Wednesday, it doesn't even come close. Admittedly, I only watched for about 30 minutes, which might not be enough to form an educated opinion, but on the other hand, 30 minutes was about all I could stand to watch.

I don't know the name of the show I was watching, but it was hosted by Adrian Grenier, who is billed in their advertisements as "one of Hollywood's top stars" or something like that. But don't feel too bad if you've never heard of him -- I only know of him because I've seen countless promos on HBO for its show, Entourage. I've never actually watched that show, but from what I've seen of the promos, I can tell I'm not actually missing anything.

Anyway, on his Planet Green show, Adrian Grenier doesn't have an entourage, but he does have a "posse." From what I saw, he and his posse just act hip and trendy and cool and congratulate each other on how "eco" they all are. Well, there's a little more to the show than that -- they also go to trendy boutiques and buy things made out of recycled materials. I don't know what they do with those things when the show is over, but I guess it doesn't matter, since by buying the products, they're demonstrating to us that they support the green movement.

And apparently, from the show's perspective, the reason for supporting the movement is to feel better about yourself. As a matter of fact, Grenier was interviewing some woman who was doing something "green" -- I forget what it was but maybe she was growing vegetables in her backyard using compost produced from leaves and grass clippings or something -- and he said something like, "I bet this makes you feel good about yourself." Fortunately, she had more sense than he did and she replied, "You don't do this to feel good about yourself -- you do it because it's the right thing to do." It was the only moment of truth in the entire show.

The other show was called Hollywood Green or something like that, and from what I could tell from the 15 seconds or so that it took me to find the remote and turn of the TV, the show just highlights the various "green" activities that famous movie and television stars have engaged in. I've never understood celebrity worship -- probably because I formed a lot of my core beliefs between the late '60s and mid '70s, and there was a pretty strong backlash against celebrity worship back then. However, even though that probably sounds like a reasonable explanation to you, it may not be the correct one. As it turns out, I know plenty of people who are a lot younger than I am and they don't seem to care much about celebrities either. So even though it might have something to do with how old you are and when you grew up, it probably has more to do with how smart you are or how much common sense you have.

But whatever the reason, since I happen to think that famous people aren't necessarily any more interesting than anyone else, I don't particularly care about some actor who put hardwood floors made from reclaimed wood in his expensive oversized mansion. That's just a hypothetical example, of course, and using reclaimed wood is the right thing to do, but there's no need to advertise it on TV.

So those are my initial impressions of Planet Green, where the focus is on entertainment at the cost of information. And just to make things clear, I'm all in favor of entertainment, as long as it's actually entertaining. But if it isn't, then it's just a waste of time. And if it's annoying, that's even worse.

But to be fair, I watched the channel again a few days later and the show I was watching was actually somewhat interesting. The host was mildly annoying, of course, but that's to be expected, whether a show is on Planet Green, HGTV, or sometimes even the Food Channel.

So I haven't written off Planet Green for good -- I'll probably tune in every now and then, just because the potential for it to be an interesting and informative channel is so great, and once the channel matures a little, it may get on the right track to meeting that potential. So I haven't given up on it completely. But I do sort of miss Kylie Kwong, even though all her shows were reruns.

Changing the Past

2008-06-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

I don't really like my dentist. That's not to say I don't like her as a person -- she's actually very nice -- but I don't know if she's actually that great a dentist. To make things worse, every time I see her, she tries to get me to let her do some expensive procedure that I don't think I need. So when it's time for my next appointment, I think I'll go to a new dentist.

I don't know what it is about dentists -- I never dreaded going to the dentist, but apparently a lot of people do. My dentist must realize that a lot of people have an aversion to dentistry because she tries to pamper her patients to make their appointments seem like spa treatments. As a matter of fact, she refers to her practice as a "Dental Spa" -- if you look it up in the phone book or on the web, that's what it's called.

I don't particularly like being pampered, though. It goes against my nature. So when she asks me if I want to watch cable TV while she's working on my teeth, I always say no. And after she's done, she always asks me if I'd like a hot towel over my face. The first time I saw her, I opted for the hot towel, but it didn't do a whole lot for me, so after that, I always politely declined.

I saw her last week, and before she began cleaning my teeth, she asked me, "Are there any changes to your medical history?"

I told her there weren't, but as I was answering, it occurred to me that there are never any changes to anyone's medical history, since it's impossible to change history. Or maybe it isn't inherently impossible, but given today's technology and our current understanding of time, it's for all intents and purposes, infeasible.

If I could change history, I'd probably change two or three things right off the bat, and maybe more if I gave a little thought to it. And I'm just talking about my medical history. If I could change my entire history, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I'd keep most of it, but I'd probably get rid of a few bad decisions and youthful indiscretions here and there. It would be nice to be able to undo all the things I shouldn't have done, and to add a few things that I should have. And if we could all take back the things we've said or done that unintentionally hurt someone else, I can only imagine what a better place the world would be.

But for now, we're stuck with the world we've got, and we're stuck with who we are. We can't change the past -- we can't even change our medical history. As a matter of fact, we can't even change our dental history. So brush regularly, don't forget to floss, and get a new dentist if you don't like the one you have. This may become less important in the future, when we can go back in time and correct all our mistakes, but at this point, it's the best we can do.

No Art Guard Comments

2008-05-31T17:45:00.000-07:00

I had some free time last week, so I decided to go downtown and check out an art exhibit I was interested in seeing. There were actually two exhibits at the museum, but the one I was interested in was the Allan Kaprow "Art as Life" exhibit.

The other exhibit was by a guy named Lawrence Weiner. I don't know if I've ever heard of him before, but he's been an artist for more than 40 years and apparently one of the key figures of the conceptual art movement of the '60s.

The Weiner exhibit consisted mostly of words and phrases painted in big block letters on the museum walls, and I don't want to criticize the guy, but for some reason, his work just didn't resonate with me.

It's not that I've got anything against words painted in block letters. A lot of John Baldessari's work consists of text painted on canvas, and Ed Ruscha used words in a lot of his art as well. For that matter, Barbara Kruger has made a career of applying block-letter text to walls. But Kruger's text has a social message, Baldessari's text was usually a statement about some aspect of art, and Ruscha's text was often wry or whimsical. Weiner's text, on the other hand seems (to me, at least) to have no real message, which I guess is one of the precepts of conceptual art. Maybe I would have liked the exhibit more if I'd seen it in the '60s.

Anyway, the Kaprow exhibit was more interesting to me. I'd always heard that Kaprow was the originator of the term "happening" (used as a noun and applied to a specific sort of art event), but I never knew much about the nature of the actual happenings themselves. So to me, the exhibit was mostly interesting from a historical standpoint. The exhibit consisted of some films and slides of happenings, as well as some written descriptions of various happenings he planned or created. One of things that was interesting to me was that for some happenings, no spectators were allowed. The only people who could witness them were the participants. And he didn't often film them or even photograph them, so for many happenings, the only documentation is a hand-written or typewritten set of instructions and rules.

Before Kaprow began creating happenings, he made abstract collages. The exhibit included maybe half a dozen or so collages hanging on one of the walls, and as I was looking at one of them, a security guard moved out of my way so she wouldn't block my view. She was just standing against the wall between two of the collages, so a little later, as I was moving on to look at the next collage, I decided to ask her what she thought of the exhibit. She smiled and told me, "Security isn't allowed to comment on the art. We're not allowed to comment."

I can't say I was disappointed to hear that. It's not like I expected her to enlighten me with some profound insight -- I was mostly just curious about her opinion. So I just smiled back and said, "Okay."

But then I started thinking about what she said. If security wasn't allowed to comment on the art, it means that the people who run the museum had specifically established that rule. And they probably established it for a reason, since most people don't create rules unless there's a reason to. And that led me to wonder just exactly what sort of problem they were having with the security guards. I've been to a lot of museums in my life and I've never once seen a museum visitor ask a security guard to comment on the art, nor have I ever seen a security guard offer an opinion to a visitor without being asked. So I suspect that there's no real reason for the rule.

But even if without my knowing it, security guards were constantly offering their opinions to museum guests, I still don't see the problem, since no harm is done, so it still seems like sort of a pointless rule to me.

But here's something else to consider. I bet most security guards don't even have much of an opinion about the art exhibits they're hired to monitor. And I don't mean that as a slight against museum security guards -- the truth is, I don't think a lot of people you see at museums have much of an opinion about what they're looking at, especially when it's modern art, and particularly when it blurs the distinction between art and life, like Kaprow's does. Most of the people I saw last weekend had blank expressions on their faces as they wandered through the exhibit looking at the art. Nobody seemed to either like it or hate it, as far as I could tell. And I wasn't any different -- I'm glad I saw the exhibits, but that doesn't mean I have a strong opinion about them. It's not as though the exhibits made me think about art in a whole new way or anything dramatic like that. So if you asked me my opinion of the Kaprow exhibit, for example, I couldn't really tell you -- and not because there's a rule prohibiting it, but simply because I don't really have much of an opinion.

A Lot of Little Strawberries

2008-05-24T11:47:00.000-07:00

It's Memorial Day weekend here in the United States, but in case you're in another country and you aren't familiar with this holiday, here's a very brief history: Memorial Day was established after the end of the Civil War as a day to honor those who died in military service to the United States. Originally a somber day of remembrance during which people traditionally visited cemeteries and memorials, it has since become a day of storewide sales at auto dealerships, department stores, and home improvement centers.

Okay, that's the end of our history lesson. If you read my blog last week, you probably noticed that I didn't write anything that week. But if I had written anything, it probably would have been about how everything seems to be getting bigger.

I saw a documentary called Maxed Out on Showtime last week. It was about how more and more people have huge credit card debts, including a lot of college students with no source of income and who probably shouldn't have been given credit cards in the first place. But it turns out that banks love giving credit cards to people who can't possibly pay off the monthly balance, because they don't make any money unless their customers are paying interest. And the worse your credit rating is, the higher your interest rate will be. In some cases it can go as high as 28%.

Of course, banks don't just make money on credit card interest -- they also make money on mortgage interest. And as it turns out, according to one banker, the most profitable segment of the mortgage business is in sub-prime loans.

Okay, banks are evil -- they engage in all sorts of predatory lending practices -- we all know that. Of course, that doesn't mean the people who let themselves get into debt aren't somehow responsible for their situation. On the other hand, if you're poor and you can't afford groceries and you get a pre-approved credit card offer in the mail, you'll probably accept the offer so you can feed your kids. You'll go deeper and deeper into debt, of course, and the bank will hound you until your dying day, but at least your kids won't starve. It used to be that you could declare bankruptcy, but the Bush administration passed some legislation (written entirely by MBNA, a bank) making it more difficult for individuals to declare bankruptcy.

According to Bush, the legislation was necessary because of the relatively minuscule percentage of people who fraudulently file for bankruptcy. This was such a clear-cut case of corporate lobbyists subverting what's left of our democracy that I won't even comment on it. I'll just mention that just about every president from Ronald Reagan onward has "borrowed" money from our Social Security reserves to help pay the interest on our national debt. And I put the word "borrowed" in quotes because there's no way we'll ever be able to pay it back. We basically stole the money from Social Security so we could give it to all the countries we owe money to.

Now here's the point I wanted to make. In the documentary, they interviewed some woman who was talking about the planned community she lived in. She was saying how wonderful such communities are from an investment standpoint (provided the bank doesn't foreclose on you after your teaser interest rate expires and your variable interest rate goes through the roof), but she also mentioned that people are demanding bigger and bigger houses. For example, people want kitchens with two stoves and two dishwashers, and probably two refrigerators as well. As a matter of fact, she was saying that some houses in her development are so big that they have two laundry rooms -- one on each floor.

Because my early adulthood took place during a time when the book "Small is Beautiful" was somewhat popular and the phrase "less is more" was bandied about a lot, having such a huge house seems like pointless excess to me. Of course I'm just one person, so I probably don't really need two laundry rooms.

Anyway, if you have a chance, watch Maxed Out. I thought it was very illuminating, but I wasn't planning on writing about it on this blog. As a matter of fact, I watched it one day and pretty much forgot about it the next. It wasn't until a day or two later that I started thinking about it again.

The thought didn't just arbitrarily pop into my head, by the way. I was doing some grocery shopping and I happened to see some fresh organic strawberries. They smelled so good that I decided to buy a container. As you know, whenever you buy fresh strawberries, you should examine them very closely to see if any are bruised or covered with mold. You also don't want to get any that are overripe or underripe, although that seems to be pretty much impossible these days.

So as I was looking at one strawberry container after another, it struck me that most of the strawberries were absolutely huge -- many times the size of normal strawberries -- and I wondered how they got to be so big. Were they the result of some sort of freak genetic accident, or are strawberry growers deliberately growing them bigger? I suspect it's the latter, which leads me only to wonder why. Maybe the growers are victim to the misguided notion that bigger is better, or maybe they're just serving the needs of a strawberry-buying public that has fallen victim to the same bizarre notion. Maybe normal strawberries simply look too small resting on the countertop of an oversized multi-dishwasher kitchen.

As for me, I don't like such huge strawberries. They taste just as good, but I still think they're too big. And since the containers they come in are a fixed size, the bigger the strawberries, the fewer you get. It's just a matter of personal taste, of course, and maybe no one else shares my opinion, but I'd rather have a lot of little strawberries than a few big ones.

Whiz Kids

2008-05-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I posted an article about greed in which I talked about how a lot of people are making money with their blogs and web sites by placing ads all over them, essentially turning their sites into little more than corporate billboards.

I didn't mean to imply that the internet ushered in a new age of greed. It simply provided a new avenue for it. Greed is nothing new.

For example, don't ask me why, but when I was writing that article, I thought of Barry Minkow. He had nothing to sell, but he made millions of dollars selling it, advertising heavily on TV long before most people had ever even heard of the internet. He was basically a con man who was found guilty and sentenced to prison. But since he was so young at the time, people tended to refer to him as a "whiz kid." And even though they knew what he did was wrong, they remained in awe of his skills and admired him for how long he got away with it.

I don't know if he was a whiz kid or not. I think he might have been just a slick con artist who learned his chops at an early age.

But while we're on the subject, it might be worthwhile to examine the term "whiz kid" for a moment or two. It clearly comes from the combining of the two terms "whiz" and "kid," but the real issue is the etymology of the word "whiz." Everybody's best guess is that it's derived from "wizard," so the issue then becomes a question of where that "h" came from. There no explanation for how it got there, so maybe we should actually be using the term "wiz kid" instead of "whiz kid" when we're referring to children of uncommonly high intelligence or aptitude.

This becomes especially important when we consider that the word "whiz" has another much more popular definition, as exemplified in the sentence "Honey, there's a strange man in our back yard and he's taking a whiz all over the gladiolas."

Okay, enough about that. There's another expression I'd like to spend a little time examining. That expression is "It's so bad it's good."

Recall the following dialog from the movie Ghost World:

Rebecca: This is so bad it's almost good.
Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.

They were talking about their high school graduation dance, but you mostly hear it used in reference to movies. And even though it's definitely true of some movies, there aren't a lot of other things it can be applied to. I suppose it's true of most types of art, if your tastes are broad enough, but that's really about it.

For example, I doubt if anyone has ever eaten some really bad food and thought, "That was so bad it was good." And no one has ever tried to drive a car that barely runs and thought, "This car is so bad it's good."

I could go on and on with examples, but I'm sure you get the idea. So I'm going to end right here. But before I do, I'd like to visit the subject of whiz kids again. When Barry Minkow was 16, he started his business, which began as a legitimate one. So whether or not he was a whiz, he was definitely a kid.

But you also hear the term applied to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, referring their youth during the early days of the microprocessor. But they were already in their 20s when they founded Microsoft and Apple, so even though they may have been whizzes, they were no longer kids -- they were actually adults. As a matter of fact, most whiz kids are actually young adults, so maybe we need another term to describe them. I'll leave it to you to think of one, but if it involves a derivation of the word "wizard," please don't try to sneak an "h" in there.

More of the Same

2008-05-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

Today I'm just going to expand a little on what I wrote about last week, so if you didn't find that post particularly interesting, you shouldn't bother with this one.

After my dad read last week's column on counterculture, he sent me a message about the first counterculture in the America. And by "America," I mean the United States, of course, although this was way back in the 1630's, so technically, the United States didn't even exist yet.

Anyway, sometime in the 1630's a group of people in the Massachusetts Bay Colony got fed up with the strict Puritans and set up a mock colony outside of Boston, which they called Merrymount. To quote from The New England Canaan, Book III, Chapter 14 (courtesy of Wikipedia): The Inhabitants of...Mare Mount...did devise amongst themselves...Revels and merriment after the old English custome; (they) prepared to sett up a Maypole upon the festivall day...and therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beare...to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day. And...they had prepared a song fitting to the time and present occasion. And upon May day they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drumes, gunnes, pistols and other fitting instruments, for the purpose; and there erected it with the help of Salvages, that came thether to see the manner of our Revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot longe was reared up, with a peare of buckshorns nayled one somewhat neare unto the top of it: where it stood, as a faire sea mark for directions how to finde out the way to mine Hoste of Mare Mount.

In other words, they got drunk, consorted with the people we now call "Native Americans," and generally did things that annoyed the Puritans. But things didn't stay that way for very long. Things changed pretty quickly when Miles Standish was sent by the Pilgrims to restore order. That's a story that has been repeated over and over in the centuries that followed: Step out of line and you'll be oppressed by The Man.

My dad also mentioned the Transcendentalists of the mid-19th century, who were basically the hippies of their day, to use a possibly unfair and extremely gross simplification. And the next day, he sent me a link to a review of a book entitled "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy" by Peter Gay. The review wasn't entirely favorable but it did get me thinking a little, since I've always found myself attracted to modernism in various forms, such as art, music, architecture, and (to a lesser extent) literature.

The book uses a much broader definition of modernism than the one I'm used to, roughly defining modernism as beginning some 250 years ago. But the thing is (and this is what I've always known but never really thought much about), modernism was more than just a new way to write or paint or compose music or design buildings -- it was a revolt against the established way of doing things, which also makes it a bona fide counterculture.

So there you have it. But before I leave this topic, I have to mention another book review I read this week. The book was by Suze Rotolo, who was the girlfriend of Bob Dylan in the very early '60s and who appears with him on the cover of his 1963 album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. I'll probably never read the book, but there was an interesting quote from it that resonated with me, since it neatly sums up the difference between a counterculture and whatever passes for one today. She wrote that the '60s were important because back then, people "had something to say, not something to sell." I couldn't have said it better myself.

I was also talking last week about the environmental movement, which I regard as sort of a failure, since during its 40 years or so, things have only gotten worse. Of course, I can't really blame the environmentalists for that -- if they hadn't been around, maybe things would be even worse today.

The only reason I'm bringing this up is that there's a lot of what I consider pseudo-environmentalism going around these days. I'm not talking about "green-washing" -- the tactic of corporations in which they spend zillions of dollars advertising how environmentally conscious they are instead of spending that money to lessen the damage they do to the environment. I'm talking about things like telling people to replace their incandescent lights with long-lasting energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs.

I'm not the first to say it, so you probably already know this, but I'll say it anyway: The problem with fluorescent lights is that they contain mercury vapor, and mercury is a poison that gets released into the atmosphere every time a fluorescent light is thrown away. When they burn out, you're supposed to dispose of them properly, which means taking them to a recycler who accepts fluorescent lights. Assuming everyone can find such a recycler, and assuming they actually make the effort to take the lights to a recycler, and assuming none of the lights accidentally breaks while the recycler is hauling them to the place that safely removes the mercury and disposes of the glass, then I guess there's nothing wrong with fluorescent lights. But those are a lot of assumptions to make. So keep buying those inefficient incandescent bulbs, and if you want to be environmentally conscious, then don't leave all the lights on all the time. And when LED bulbs come down in price -- I think they currently run about $90 per bulb -- start using those.

Counterculture

2008-04-26T14:23:00.000-07:00

Maybe this week I should be writing about Earth Day, because the 39th annual Earth Day occurred a few days ago on April 22nd, but I'm not going to. I will say, however, that when Earth Day was established back in 1970, the idea behind it was to raise public awareness about our slowly collapsing ecosystem and prevent it from deteriorating much further. But 40 years later, the only thing that's really happened is that the quality of our environment has gotten a lot worse, and Earth Day has become nothing more than a day to pay lip service to being "green." And as for raising public awareness, Earth Day comes and goes each year without most people even being aware of it. So any thinking person who celebrates Earth Day must be aware of the irony in celebrating a day that marks our 40-year failure to do anything about our worsening environmental conditions.

But while we're on the subject of the Earth, here's something I've always thought was kind of strange. As you know, the word "Earth" with a capital E refers to the planet, and the word "earth" without the capital E simply refers to the ground we walk on. It makes sense at some level, but it's also sort of reductionist, since the Earth consists of a lot more than just dirt. As a matter of fact, why did we name our planet after the dirt, when most of the planet is actually water? Why didn't we name the planet "Water"?

Or maybe I've got it wrong. Maybe we came up with the name of the planet first, and then named the dirt after it. If that's the case, then what do we call the ground on Mars? Do we call it "mars"? And what about the stuff on the moon? Do we call it "moon"?

And speaking of the moon, why is it that every other planet has names for their moons, but we don't? Jupiter's moons have names like Io and Ganymede, so how come our moon doesn't? It's weird, because it's not like the people of Jupiter named their moons -- those moons were named by astronomers on Earth, so why did they decide to name the moons of other planets and not ours? The same thing is true of the sun. It's got a name -- The Sun -- but all the other stars have cool-sounding names, like Andromeda and Betelgeuse and Sirius.

Okay, let's forget about the solar system for a while, so I can ask you a simple question: When was the last time you heard the word "counterculture"? I haven't heard it in so long I can't even remember, and do you want to know why? It's because nobody uses the word anymore because there isn't really a counterculture anymore.

Before you shake your head in violent disagreement, let me explain what I'm talking about. It seems like for just about every decade or so, there was a counterculture that defined the era. In the '50s there were the Beat poets and writers, but this was more than just an isolated literary movement, because the Beat movement attracted a lot of followers and wanna-bes, and it didn't take long before people started dressing in black and growing goatees and drinking in cafés and ignoring the prevailing societal standards of the time.

I don't know what countercultures there were before the Beats, but I'm sure they existed. I was too young to be aware of the Beats when they were around, so anything that preceded them is just ancient history to me.

But in the '50s, there were also the Greasers, named after the way the guys slicked back their hair with some sort of greasy hair product. I never saw the movie Grease, but my understanding is that it took place in that era.

And by the way, I don't claim to be a historian -- or even particularly knowledgeable on the subject -- so I could be getting a few facts wrong, but the Greasers were also part of the burgeoning Car Culture movement.

Before I go any further, I'll just state what's probably obvious: These countercultures were primarily youth cultures, and at their core was a rebellion against the establishment. Even the Car Culture, which was mostly involved with customizing cars, was a sort of rebellion against societal norms.

Then of course there was the Surfer culture of the early and mid '60s. This counterculture was so popular that it gave birth to a new form of music, and people who had never touched a surfboard or even seen an ocean were listening to surf music and using expressions from the surfer patois.

And then of course came the hippies -- perhaps the most widely-known subculture of the past hundred years. It's almost impossible to think of the '60s without thinking of hippies. Hippie culture became a worldwide movement, and even though it was pretty much dead by the time the decade was over, there are still hippies here and there all over the world.

Then, in the '70s, there were the punks. They didn't last very long -- only a couple of years, according to some calculations -- but in that short period of time, they made their presence very well known. Regardless of what they thought of it, everybody knew about punk rock, and everybody knew about punk style.

For that matter, all the countercultures I mentioned had their own music and their own style of dress. Maybe that's what made them so noticeable. Of course, at their core, they also had their own style of thought.

So there's my brief summation of late 20th century countercultures. But before I move on, here's a question for you: What do all those countercultures I just mentioned have in common? Give up? Don't care? Okay, I'll tell you. They were all defined by the people who were part of them -- they weren't something pushed on the youth population by advertisers and corporate marketers. As a matter of fact, they were a revolt against the dominant culture telling them what to wear, how to live, and how to think.

Of course, most of those cultures were quickly co-opted by the corporate world -- hippies originally made their own tie-dye shirts, but it didn't take long before anybody could buy one in a department store, and I also seem to recall people being able to buy pre-torn and safety-pinned punk attire from trendy boutiques.

Be that as it may, I can't think of any countercultures after the punks -- or at least no major ones that defined an era. There were the yuppies, of course -- and they certainly defined the '80s -- but they were so much a part of the establishment that they couldn't be considered a counterculture.

There were also fads, of course, like the whole disco thing in the '70s and the work-out craze of the '80s. And there have always been subcultures as well, but those are different. Motorcycle gangs have been around for longer than I have, but they're more of a subculture. The same is true of skate culture -- it's a firmly entrenched culture but it's not very widespread. It spans continents, but it's a culture that most people never see any signs of, so it can hardly define an era.

So what's the closest thing we have to a counterculture today? I can't think of one, but the second-closest thing I can think of is probably online culture. Everybody and his dog uses the internet today, so you could definitely say that online culture is what defines our era, but it's not a counterculture -- it's the dominant culture. There might truly be an online counterculture -- the people who spend all their free time in front of a computer (as opposed to people who do it because that's what they do for a living) -- but by its very nature, online culture is invisible. You can't just look at someone and tell he's a gamer or a hacker, for example. So the online counterculture, if there is one, can't define an era, just because so few people are even aware of it.

That's about all I have to say about that, as I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear. I don't know what made me even start thinking about it in the first place. It might have been because I was thinking about music and I remembered that once upon a time, "indie" music was truly independent. People recorded their own songs in their garages or wherever, and distributed the cassettes themselves. Or maybe they paid some company to press a few hundred records for them, and they tried to sell the records after live performances. A lot of punk music was indie music -- you used to see record labels you'd never heard of before and haven't heard of since. But today it seems like indie and punk are just genres, nothing more than different styles of music, like rock, pop, hip hop, or whatever.

But all this talk about countercultures and subcultures and movements has got me thinking about Earth Day again. I'm trying to figure out why the environmental movement has had so little effect on the planet in the last four decades or so. Unlike all the countercultures I mentioned, they never did anything to annoy people -- like listen to music that most people thought sounded like noise, or dress in a way that scared people -- they just brought attention to the fact that cars pollute the air too much and toxins pollute the sea. In the '70s, car manufacturers starting worrying about gasoline efficiency, but I don't know if that was because of the environmental movement or the problems we were having trying to get oil from the Middle East.

Our problems with the Middle East are a lot worse now, of course, and gasoline currently costs about five or six times as much as it did back then, but gas mileage on most cars built today is no better than it was in the '70s -- it might even be a little worse. And despite the fact that everyone knows about global warming, whether you believe it's caused by human activity or just part of the Earth's natural cooling and warming cycle, you can't help noticing that Greenland is melting a lot faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted it would, or that most of the glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park are gone. Not so long ago, there were more than about 150 of them, and now they number somewhere in the twenties. So happy belated Earth Day, everyone. Let's see how bad things are a year from now.

It Never Stops Moving

2008-04-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, earlier this year I put to rest the antiquated notion that there are only five physical senses, thereby establishing "scientific education" as one of the many themes of this blog.

In keeping with that theme, this week I'd like to dispel the idea that there is no such thing as perpetual motion.

Don't worry, this isn't going to be a long preachy lecture about the N-Machine or any similar device -- I'm talking about naturally occurring perpetual motion.

Examples of perpetual motion are all around us, yet amazingly, so few people believe in it. I think this is just another example of a lie being repeated until people believe it's true.

Have you ever seen a waterfall? If so, have you noticed that the water falls all the time? It never stops moving. It doesn't shut off at night and it doesn't turn itself on again in the morning. It just flows and flows and flows, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Nobody knows how it happens -- we just know that it does. Waterfalls predate human civilization and they will continue to flow long after the human race has become extinct.

But wait, you may be thinking, waterfalls aren't truly an example of perpetual motion because they can be dammed up, or the water can evaporate, or the erosion caused by the water might eventually grind the cliff out of existence, leaving the water nothing to fall from.

I have considered these ideas, and I have rejected them, for all the obvious reasons. But rather than go into that here, let's move on to some other examples of perpetual motion.

We live on a planet known as the Earth. The Earth spins around on its axis, making a complete rotation once a day. It also orbits around the sun approximately once every year. All the other planets in our solar system orbit around the sun as well, and if that weren't enough, our solar system is constantly moving as well. As a matter of fact, the entire universe is expanding, and some astronomers even say the rate of expansion is accelerating. What's more, this has been going on ever since the presumptive Big Bang, which occurred billions of years ago, and is likely to continue for billions of years into the future.

Hold on a second, I hear the skeptics cry, just because something has been moving for billions of years, that doesn't mean it will keep moving forever.

Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say the universe blows up zillions of years from now. I'm not an astrophysicist, so I have no idea what that really means or everything it implies. Does it mean that all matter will cease to exist? Does it mean complete and absolute nothingness? If it does, I'm willing to concede that perpetual motion doesn't exist, because at that point nothing exists, and in order for something to move perpetually, first it must exist.

However, if there's just one tiny little atom left after the universe blows up, then perpetual motion will still exist. Because within that atom, electrons will be tirelessly orbiting around the nucleus, never stopping to rest, all throughout eternity. At that point, perpetual motion will be about the only thing that does exist.

Time for a Change

2008-04-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday and I'm posting this week's blog entry. Usually I post the entry on Saturday, but I had a few errands yesterday so I didn't have the time. I could have found the time, of course, but I wasn't really looking that hard.

One of the errands was to get an oil change for my car. I have two cars -- or actually, one car and one truck -- but I hardly ever drive the truck. It's old and rundown and I only keep it around because I figure it might come in handy someday. So the truck probably doesn't need an oil change, unless oil can go bad just by sitting around inside an engine that hardly ever gets started up. Maybe it can. I don't know. In any event, I had the oil changed for the car. I'll worry about the truck some other time.

When I was in college, I didn't need a car, because the public transportation system was pretty good, and it was free for students because of some deal the university made with the transit district. I had a few friends who had a car, but most of the people I knew just took the bus. There were a few times when it would have been more convenient to have a car, but I managed to get through those times somehow.

But after I graduated, I needed a car so I could look for a job. The car I bought was only about seven years old, but it hadn't been taken care of very well, so it seemed a lot older. I only had it for about two years before I decided to get rid of it, because things were always breaking down and as soon as I fixed one thing, something else stopped working. I calculated that I'd spent about as much on repairs as I spent when I bought the car.

In the thirty years since getting rid of that car, I've owned three other cars -- or actually, two cars and one truck. They were all manufactured by different companies, but they all had one thing in common. Actually, of course, they had many things in common. They all had four wheels, a windshield, and an internal combustion engine, for example. But the one particular thing in common that I'm talking about is that they all had a routine maintenance schedule of 7,500 miles.

That means every 7,500 miles, you're supposed to bring in your car so they can perform the scheduled maintenance, which varies somewhat, but typically includes things such as checking the brakes, tuning up the engine, replacing the belts, rotating the tires, and whatever else they think is important. They also change the oil and replace the air filter.

So here's a quick question: Regardless of what kind of car you drive, how often do they say you should change your oil? That's right, every 3,000 miles.

You probably already know where I'm going with this, but I'll tell you anyway. If you change your oil every 3,000 miles and bring your car in for service every 7,500 miles, you're going to get a few unnecessary oil changes. For example, let's say you buy a brand new car with 0 miles on it. After you've driven it 3,000 miles, you change the oil. Then, after you've driven it 6,000 miles, you change your oil again. And once you hit 7,500 miles, you take your car in for service and they change your oil, even though you've only used the old oil for 1,500 miles and you could have driven another 1,500 miles without an oil change. That seems like a waste of perfectly good oil to me.

So I bend the rules a little bit. Rather than change my oil every 3,000 miles, I change it every 3,750 miles, since 3,750 is half of 7,500. That way, when I bring the car in for service and they change the oil, it actually needs an oil change. I've been doing this for thirty years, and the cars don't seem to mind a bit. It's a perfectly rational and sensible thing to do, so I'm sure a lot of other people do the same thing. But I bet a lot of people don't. As a matter of fact, I bet most people don't. I wonder what they do instead. Maybe they do something that seems perfectly rational and sensible to them. Or maybe they don't, since a lot of people aren't very rational or sensible. I have a feeling they just do whatever they feel like.

The Ubiquitous LCW

2008-04-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

It seems like you can't be a capital-M Modernist these days unless you've got at least one LCW or DCW chair in your house placed very deliberately against a wall or in a corner as though it were a work of art.

And of course, in some very real sense, it is a work of art, but that's not really the point.

The point is, I'm seeing these things everywhere these days -- not in real life, but in books and magazines and even a series of TV commercials aimed at baby-boomers. It's getting to be really annoying.

The thing is, I've always thought the LCW and DCW were sort of ugly. Yeah, I know that a statement like that is considered heresy among those who practice Modernism as a religion, but if I were going to decorate my house with chairs of that era, I'd get a few LCM chairs instead.

But that's a decision I'll never have to make, because I'm also against the idea of using furniture as art. I think it should be used as furniture, which by the way, is an attitude more in keeping with the Modernist ethos. It should be beautiful to look at, of course, but first and foremost, it should be functional.

In any case, I think the LCMs and DCMs are sleek and beautiful, while the LCWs and DCWs are relatively ugly and clunky-looking. Of course, you may say it's just matter of taste, and you may even be right, but my taste in this matter is unerring, which is just another way of saying I'm right.

As far as I'm concerned, the LCW screams "1940s" but the LCM gently whispers "timeless beauty." And that may be the reason for their popularity. Maybe the idea is to have a piece of furniture that can't be mistaken for anything other than an icon of the Modernist era. The LCM is just as iconic, of course, but they were also so popular that if you saw one today and didn't know what you were looking at, you might not even pay any attention to it. The LCM has a delicate unobtrusive beauty. The LCW on the other hand, begs for attention, which I guess is the point of self-conscious interior design.

So that's my opinion, and it is the correct one, but in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I'm not a capital-M Modernist. I'm a small-m modernist, which means that I prefer a certain type of design, but a piece of furniture doesn't have to be an authentic design from the Modernist era for me to like it. It could have been designed yesterday, I don't care. If it has the understated beauty and timeless elegance of what we now refer to as Mid-Century Modern design, I'll buy it and put it in my house.

Well, not literally of course. A lot of it is out of my price range, and besides, my house already has enough furniture, so I don't really have room for anything more.