#105 - Strainz from the Stereo

Strainz from the Stereo

2/18/07 (#105)

For those of you who don't watch children's television, you likely live in what must be a blissful paradise of ignorance, unaware that music---that broad and beautiful art form that offers both uncanny solace to the soul and impromptu defibrillation to the adrenal glands---has been contorted into an improbably disdainful affront called "Kidz Bop". This heinous "product" ("music" seems an overstatement) was apparently shoplifted from the CD player in Hell's waiting room, repackaged in colors so garish they would make a box of laundry soap blush, and distributed as part of a fiendish plot to make drunken karaoke seem like high art. I dream of the time when I knew nothing of this chalkboard scratching, the way a man allergic to carbon monoxide must dream of life before Henry Ford.

Kidz Bop is an ingenious idea, if you consider making armloads of money by producing cheap, inane crap to be an exhibition of genius. The premise behind this series ("Kidz Bop 11" comes out this month) is to herd a dozen or so kids into the studio and have them sing along, simultaneously and in almost-unison, with the previous year's radio hits and misses. While it's difficult to sift through the drench of pubescence to determine the sonic particulars, it seems they simply record a synthesized version of the original song and have the "talent" sing along with that---literally a recorded karaoke session. Kidz Bop is the bastard offspring of that annoying children's chorus from An Affair to Remember* and Casey Kasem's American Top 20, a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party burned directly to compact disc. Do you own a minivan but just can't find eight or nine little brats to populate the seats and sing with slippery tonal accuracy those insipid pop songs that, even when sung by the original artists, climb uninvited into your ears and spend the rest of the day devouring your sanity? Now you can have all of the sonic annoyance without the spilled juice boxes.

The Z in "Kidz" should already have signaled the dubiousness of this item. Divide the world into two subcategories---things that have benefited humanity, and things that have contributed to the downfall of the species---and you will find any item that mutates the grammatically correct S to the faux-hip Z in the latter category, along with "nu" in place of "new" and "Kool" in place of "cool." The Z says to the consumer, "My son the Phys. Ed. major is the head of Marketing"; the Z says, "Next year I will be the most populous item at your local landfill."

While I have not actually listened to a CD (for the same reason I have not stared at the sun), the television ads flaunt the major attributes of the discs with enough accuracy to make it clear what is being offered: 15 or so songs vocalized by Oz's Lollipop Kids along with which a child can gleefully caterwaul while their parents try to recall why child rearing seemed a better alternative than seminary school. (The answer will most certainly not come to them while the "play" button is depressed.) I once sat at a cacophonous Cecil Taylor concert and my friend leaned over and said, "This is the music they would use to torture my mother"; Kidz Bop would be employed in the event that Cecil wasn't able to do the job.

Kidz Bop would not fail.

As a parent, I live in mortal fear of this type of product. People joke about hell being populated by lawyers, but I'm certain the marketers of children's toys get the seats closest to the fire. I've acquiesced to Barbie, and Walt Disney has been granted more access to my daughter's imagination than a child psychologist would condone, but I've got to pick my battles: When the store aisles and internet links feature a dog that both eats and shits (and it's the same little brown plastic pellet involved with each activity---isn't that charming?), the Bratz dolls (note the Z) that seem to be small children with caked-on eye shadow, bare midrifts and conspicuous "bling", and discs of multiple soprano-and-higher kids caroling like Alvin and the Chipmunks sans sense of humor, Barbie can park her convertible anywhere she likes.

I've known of Kidz Bop for several years, but have avoided acknowledging its existence in hopes that it would not acknowledge mine. Because we don't listen to schlock radio, my daughter doesn't recognize the songs, so it's been easy enough to change the channel to anything when that helium-sucking choir comes on the screen. ("Look Sage, that man is filling out a 1040 form...can you say, 'itemized deduction'?") But the pitch for Kidz Bop 11 demonstrated that even the most cringe-worthy concept can be made more loathsome: the disc includes the kids singing "Irreplaceable", a song originally performed by Beyonce Knowles.

Let me be clear, I have no issues with Beyonce Knowles. I don't seek out her music (too much package, not enough content), but I like that she's fine with her body image (which doesn't match the waifish American media image, though considering she has only one accentuated proportion to her otherwise enviable body, that doesn't seem like a hard pill to swallow) and she seems charming in interviews. But Beyonce sings songs about being an adult, in adult situations, and "Irreplaceable" is hardly a template for how the average 8-year old should run her life. Take this example from the song:

So go ahead and get gone, and call up on that chick and see if she is home
Oops, I bet ya thought that I didn't know, what did you think I was putting you out for?
Cause you was untrue, rolling her around in the car that I bought you

Awwww, isn't that a sweet sentiment for your elementary school daughter to mimic? And what junior-high boy can't relate to having his girlfriend provide him with a new car? I acknowledge that kids are growing up fast these days, but with my own daughter, I was hoping to broach the subject of infidelity and materialistic leeches a little later in her life, perhaps after long division. And in case your impressionable child doesn't catch those references, they can't miss the saccharine soaked melody that professes (half a dozen times):

I could have another you in a minute, matter fact he'll be here in a minute

Gee, it almost sounds empowering, except the lyrics indicate that the narrator has been exploring her options with only slightly less ardor than her tramping beau. (No wonder, she had less opportunity---it's clear from the verse that the boyfriend always had the car.)

Razor & Tie, the label making the money on Kidz Bop, informs us that the series is "the best-selling children's audio series in the country with over 8 million CDs sold in the past 5 years....Kidz Bop 9 entered the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart at the incredible #2 position, the highest charting non-soundtrack children's release in Billboard history. Billboard named the Kidz Bop KIDZ^TM the #1 Children's Music Artist for the fourth year in a row. ...Kidz Bop is now a certifiable phenomenon, with a number of brand extensions in the works."** I think about those disheartening figures, and the mercenary taunt implicit in the phrase "a number of brand extensions," and a horrible thought runs through my mind, a once-unimaginable contemplation that, every time I startle the pets with my urgent lunge for the television remote, inches closer to the tip of my tongue:

Barney, come back. All is forgiven.

* I love the verbal repartee in that movie, but I twitch in my chair when those tone-deaf little cherubs come on the screen, knowing that their contract apparently requires them to sing in every scene. I haven't done the math, but I think their repertoire is strictly limited to 9-minute songs, and they perform six or eight of them during the movie. We're supposed to believe that Deborah Kerr is charmed by the cloying "sweetness" of these kids, but every time I watch the movie, I ache for Deborah to scream, "Stop! Stop! Fercrissakes, why couldn't it have been you punks in front of that cab?!"

** http://www.razorandtie.com/kidsmusic.html

©2007 wpreagan

#104 - Ruining the Polish Joke

How many Polacks does it take
to ruin the Polish joke?

2/11/07 (#104)

Adolph Hitler had the worst looking mustache in history. Just a 1-inch-wide vertical stripe of hair on his upper lip, it could easily be mistaken as over-ambitious nostril hair, yet the man managed to make it his signature look. (A fact that must make Charlie Chaplin roll in his grave.) Not surprisingly, that so-called mustache died along with him---it is so distinctly a "Hitler mustache" that outside of adult Halloween costumes and an occasional TV sight gag, it has never been seen again. (I doubt anyone wants to repeatedly explain to every chatty sales clerk, "No, I am actually not sympathetic to the mastermind of the world's most infamous genocide---I just think it looks sharp.")

As facial hair goes, there are limits to a man's available fashion statements. Beard, mustache, goatee, side burns---excepting a few varieties of each of those styles, there's nothing more that can be done with the bristly thatch that grows on our faces. Folks like Salvador Dali and Fu Manchu may push the tonsorial envelope to the limits of its tensile strength, but even those fashion deviants fit under the primary categories with the simple addition of an extra adjective: Dali's is not technically a "handlebar mustache", but it's close enough to call it a "zany handlebar mustache"; Fu Manchu managed to get a minor beard-and-mustache modification named in his honor, but it's little more than a "pimped-out goatee." Yet as small as the list of options is, Hitler single-handedly managed to make it shorter, scratching one off for perpetuity.

This is no small feat for a single person---to permanently close one avenue of the cultural road map. I'm not recommending Hitler get a round of applause for his inadvertent efforts, but the elimination of that miscarriage of facial fashion is a noteworthy feat. Yet such is the life of extremely notable individuals, becoming two-dimensional caricatures of their most newsworthy achievements while their lesser items of note are left out of the picture---in Hitler's case, it's no wonder that his heinous facial grooming habits got less attention than his more-heinous national grooming campaign. A similar thing happens when a person's positive accomplishments dwarf their minor victories---Lech Walesa's resume, cluttered with bullet points about leading a shipyard strike that precipitated the demise of Poland's communist government, becoming Time Magazine's "Man of the Year", and eventually winning the Polish Presidency, has little room for noting his essential role in the near-elimination of the Polish joke.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, the Poles were the consistent brunt of jokes involving stupidity:

"How do you get a one-armed Polack out of a tree? Wave to him."
"How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Four---one to hold the bulb and three to turn the ladder."

In fact, most of these jokes are hardly "Polish" at all---they are generic jokes into which the user installs their victim of choice, versatile put-downs that allow any demographic to be ridiculed. Regional biases personalized these all-purpose put-downs for whatever ethnic group was amassing a sizable regional population---I recall visiting cousins in Fall River and hearing Portuguese jokes; in Massachusetts I heard more Irish zingers; and in Maine the victim of choice was anyone who wasn't from Maine. (The natives used to half-joke that there are two types of people: Mainers, and people "from away"; doesn't matter if it's London, England or New London, Connecticut, you're just from away.*) Yet somehow, there was a consensus that the Polish were the punch-line champions for such humor, the most fitting fools for a one-liner like, "Did you hear they had to close the Polish National Library? Someone stole the book."

Because these jokes is so universally malleable, there are some who argue that it's "just a joke", that someone needs to be the brunt and it's not a commentary on a particular people or culture to star in such chestnuts. But if that's true, why the dearth of Brazilian jokes? And why have the Dutch been historically spared from such barbs? (Ironic that the Poles may have become the de facto brunt of the "dumb" one-liner because Americans weren't smart enough to learn geography.) Imagine a joke that begins, "An American, a Russian, and an Icelander walk into a bar"---it's up in the air as to what could happen, the punch line a mystery until the listener gets more information.** But change the preface to, "An American, a Russian, and a Pole walk into a bar" and you know right away who is going to play the fool. (The Russian might be mimed with a cartoon Kremlin accent, but he'll be free and clear when the wisecrack detonates.)

Whatever the cause of the Poles rise to punch line prominence, Lech Walesa, with help from Polish-bonn Pope John Paul II (elected to head the Roman Catholic church in 1978,) put an end to that. Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, having proved himself as a courageous David to the Communist Goliath, a tireless champion of the underdog who more than spoke of freedom---he risked all to earn it. Walesa provided the world with a positive, powerful icon of the Polish people----hardly the image that come to mind when you think, "Have you heard about the Polish cocktail? It's Perrier and water." After Walesa, if you cracked a knee-slapper about Polish schools, in place of guffaws you'd get an indignant comment like, "Well you try learning when the Soviet Block is breathing down your neck." Lech did more to protect the Polish people from ridicule than anyone in history ever has. It's time he got the credit he deserves. (Consider that no matter how talented and influential, no blond in history has ever been able to stifle the ever-popular blond joke.)

The shift in the international humor balance that Walesa initiated begs the question, "Who has stepped up to fill the ethnic joke vacuum?" The French make semi-regular appearances in the American one-liner vernacular, but it's a starring role usually cast as retribution for their refusal to capitulate to America's political will, making such flare-ups wreak of pettiness, not jocularity. Frankly, political correctness of the 1990's and globalization of the 2000's has been very bad for the ethnic joke---such so-called humor is simply a hard sell in the 21st century. And while the dearth of ethnic jokes is certainly a positive step in the progress of humanity, it has been nothing but bad news for politicians, those perennial bloomers on the American humor landscape that garnered no protection from either political correctness or globalization. In fact, about the only solace many politicians can find is that at least they're not blond.

* "From away" is a phrase with far-reaching comprehensiveness---even if you were born in Maine, if your folks were from away, then you are still from away. As the an old Maine adage goes, "If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don't call 'em biscuits."

** I admit, in jokes such as these, we all know that the third character will be the fool, just as we know that if Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy and a red-shirted ensign named "Smith" beam down from the Enterprise, Smith's career path in Starfleet Command is about to come to a gruesome halt.

Thanks to my friend Bruce Morritt, who spoke the wry observation that inspired this column.

©2007 wpreagan

#103 - Sassing The Man

Sassing The Man

1/25/07 (#103)

In Bangor, Maine, it was an autumn tradition for high school boys to woo the object of their affection by leaving a monographed pumpkin on the doorstep of her home.* While the most ambitious boys would scribe a poem of their own creation (usually some not-quite-clever twist on a familiar phrase, such as "Violets are blue, roses are red....", though it was ill-advised to use the most obvious rhyme for "red", lest her father be the first to find the pumpkin), most of us scoured the record sleeves of albums from The Baby's or Duran Duran in hopes of finding just the right words to capture the romance inherent in cluttering a stoop with an oversize squash. (An acquaintance of mine once scribbled the lyrics of a Blue Oyster Cult song onto his pumpkin---I didn't have the heart to tell him that if BOC can properly express your amorous inclinations, your love is suspect.)

It was just such an errand that brought my friend Bernie and I to Veazie one cold evening, a tiny burg immediately north of Bangor. Veazie is hardly a town at all---it was easy to drive through without realizing that you had, one of those hamlets whose budget allowed for only one police cruiser; as such, if you passed a Veazie cop as you crossed into their district, you knew you had carte blanche with the speed limits until you got to Orono, the next town north on Route 2. Most of their cops were probably from Veazie, as it was hardly the kind of assignment an academy graduate would seek out, and as such the cops knew everyone. I have no doubt that speeding tickets were strictly reserved for interlopers, with one or two issued to neighbors as retribution for adolescent offenses unrelated to the traffic infraction.

The goal of our journey was to leave a pumpkin on the doorstep of Donna Wampler, a girl I had recently dated but who had more recently realized that she was just too much for me. (To her credit, she was right about that.) But she was brainy and beautiful, and I was young and stupid, so I held out hope that a well-penned pumpkin might give her pause about her unceremonious dismissal of my affections. We stopped at Doug's Shop 'n Save en route to get the pumpkins, picked up a small pepperoni pizza at Papa Gambino's, and parked Bernie's Mom's orange 1976 Chevy Malibu in the parking lot of a darkened building around the corner from Donna's house. There, we ate dinner, laughing about which Blue Oyster Cult song not to use ("So I suppose 'Godzilla' is out?"), and got to work with our black sharpies. (Bernie was enamored with a Bangor girl, and we'd be dropping his pumpkin on our way home.)

Part of the allure of the secret pumpkin serenade was the danger of transporting it to the front porch, an often-precarious passage that underscored the impressive effort of the deed. Rumors and reality were replete with mock horror stories: pumpkins accidentally smashed on front walks when delivery coincided with the release of the family hound; orange orbs so large that a drop-and-run caused an unnaturally loud thud, the residents looking out the picture window to see a clumsy fool tripping through the hedge in fevered retreat; one poor sap even managed to bowl over and break a line of porcelain figurines, requiring him to ring the doorbell and sheepishly face the girl and her mom, embarrassed for his error but suddenly more embarrassed for having chosen the lyrics of Def Leppard as his poetic ambassador.

We anticipated no such drama during my delivery, as Donna and her family were out of town for several days. The mostly-eaten pizza sat on the dash and our pumpkins rested in our laps while the ink dried (heaven forbid one prematurely tuck the rotund messenger under their arm and smear the word "love" into something unrecognizable) when we were startled by a knock on the window, a sound generated by the doughy hand of a Veazie policeman.

Bernie rolled down the window to greet the man. The first thing we both noticed---the first thing anyone would have noticed---was the enormity of the man's belly. This gut had left the modifier "beer belly" behind many years ago; this was the kind of stomach to which your immediate thought addresses practicalities: "How does he find shirts that fit?!" Even your thought would have a tone of incredulity. If Veazie was Hazzard County, this man was Boss Hogg.

The bulk of the conversation is hardly worth reporting. In response to "Whacha doin'?", we explained exactly what we were doing: penning a pumpkin to drop on Donna Wampler's doorstep. (Fortunately, we were doing nothing wrong---for the first time in years, we hadn't even snatched the pumpkins from some innocent's porch.) According to the officer, the building in front of which we sat had issued a silent alarm---had we seen anything suspicious? We looked at the building---an old concrete box with a single metal door, with neither a sign nor a sign of life---and recognized his "good cop" methodology of making the suspect an ally. (We could see his partner walking the perimeter of the building, curious if there really was an alarm or if the Veazie police simply had enough time on their hands to enact an elaborate charade in an effort to convince us of the veracity of their claim.) We hadn't seen a thing, officer (we hadn't), and we'd be leaving momentarily. He smiled, wished us well, then issued the strangest non-sequitor I have ever heard from a policeman:
"What kind of pizza did you get?"
"Papa Gambino's."
"No, the toppings."
"Pepperoni", Bernie replied cheerfully. "Want a slice?"
He gave a bit of a chuckle. "No thanks. You boys have a nice night."

Bernie rolled up the window as the officer went back to his car. The ink now dry, we began donning our hats and gloves to prepare for the sprint to/from Donna's house, still marveling at the apparent tensile strength of the officer's belt, and were just about ready when the police car suddenly lurched up next to us.

It seems that in the car, the officer had relayed our alibi to his partner, a Veazie native who knew Donna---and knew she was out of town. Bernie and I later joked that it must have felt like a real Colombo moment in that cruiser, the cover story of two smooth-talking city boys blown by the keen observational skills of the Veazie police department. Poems on pumpkins? Bullshit, Roscoe, we got ourselves some criminals. The big man came to the car as fast as his waddle could take him while Bernie rolled down the window, and as the officer arrived, Bernie delivered the perfect line, straight-faced and serious, his voice so rich with generosity and sympathy that it perfectly disguised his insolence:

"Change your mind about that pizza?"

The cop didn't laugh, but I sure did. In fact, I still do.

©2007 wpreagan

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* While this was a yearly ritual for my friends and I, my friend Zeth comes from Orono (8 miles north) and had never heard of it. I would love to hear from anyone who is familiar with this tradition.

#102 - Algebra and Aloo Mutter

Algebra and Aloo Mutter

12/31/06 (#102)

Hailing from New England, I was raised on a diet of casseroles, shepherds pie and various one-pan assemblages that fit squarely under the heading, "Comfort food"---a culinary category that, despite its simplicity, is rarely mastered by restaurant chefs. Some try to dress it up, others make too much effort to dress it down, and usually, I leave such dining experiences missing Maine, my Mom in particular.

I've found that the best way to satisfy a craving for comfort food is not to visit some faux-New England eatery, but instead stop at an Indian restaurant. Almost every item on an Indian restaurant menu is a saucy, curried variation of my gastronomic heritage. (With one notable exception: Indian food is unspoiled by that spongy, dirt-flavored filler known as the mushroom. Any cuisine that recognizes the true value of the mushroom---and consequently leaves it out completely---is good eating in my eyes.) If I had to limit my dietary intake to a single region of the world, India would get the contract. (Of course, I base this on the Indian food available here in the States. Before I commit to this nutritional hypothetical, I would want to be certain that the dinner scene featured in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was fabricated---"Monkey brain" and "live snakes" are two of only a few dishes in the world that could have me asking, "Um, do you have any mushrooms?")

I like the vegetarian meals most, primarily because chicken---when presented in a sauce---can be a dicey entree. Not only must one gamble with white meat vs. dark meat (both enjoyable, though hardly interchangeable), but depending on the chef there may be tendons and cartilage and who knows what else. I know that in some countries tendons are considered edible---they're actually on the menu at a Thai restaurant near my office---but if I bite into a meal that includes even a tiny chunk of unexpected rubbery resistance, I inevitably chew the rest of the meal with slow-motion suspicion, not so much enjoying it as enduring it. (Texture issues have a significantly larger impact on my diet than my taste buds: there is no flavor delectable enough to make adjectives like "slippery", "rubbery" or "sea urchin-esque" tolerable.) Vegetables remove these variables from the eating experience---since there is no part of the pea or the potato that is better than another, it is a much more relaxing meal.

That's why I like aloo mutter. Like most of the dishes offered at my local Indian restaurant, it's a soupy stew of deliciousness, free of textural surprises, consisting mostly of peas, potatoes, and whatever it is that makes up the soupy stew. (Since it's blended, and doesn't contain mushrooms, I really don't care what it is as long as it's delicious.)

Were it not so delicious, I would never order aloo mutter. While my northeast accent will sometimes slip into remission, certain words cause inevitable flare-ups: Pop Tarts (pop rhymes with yup, and tarts seems to contain several h's but no r's), quarter (the syllable that follows the percussive K is like a culvert catching the tire of a car, and the word crashes headlong into a sludge of south Boston unintelligibility), and, I self-consciously notice every time I order it, aloo mutter, which inevitably sounds like I'm about to break into a round of Allen Sherman's "Hello Mudda! Hello Fadda!" I asked the woman behind the counter if I was pronouncing it correctly, and she looked back at me like a clerk at a porn store would respond to the question, "To which food group do those edible panties belong?" Realizing I was earnest in my inquiry, she grumpily mumbled, "I knew what you meant." Great news, but it didn't answer my question---I was asking in hopes that I could come here regularly without being known to the staff as 'that funny-sounding white guy.' Either she didn't understand, or she didn't want to be known to the staff as 'that one who made the funny-sounding white guy not funny.' I took my food and thanked her for her help.

Back at my desk at work, I popped the plastic top on my gourmet $4.35 meal and stabbed in a spoon---Delicious. But when I looked at the divot left by the utensil, I realized that I had a horribly disproportionate meal---if you imagine a bowl of aloo mutter and rice as the earth, and cut it in half, the rice occupied all of the area of the cross-cut labeled as "core", "mantle", and "crust"; the aloo mutter occupied the thin layer of the illustration labeled "grass". The skimpiest chocolate sundae you have ever eaten had a more even distribution of elements. If I wasn't careful, I'd wind up halfway through my meal with nothing left but half a bowl of rice.

I suddenly flashed back a few decades, sitting in sophomore Algebra thinking, "When will I ever use this is my life?" This bowl of food was the answer to my question. Algebra, geometry, statistics----some sort of ratio-based mathematics would be required to optimize the enjoyment of this lunch, ensuring that I didn't run out of aloo mutter before I was sated. I had hacked through the mathematical weeds of Mrs. Brann's algebra class, and later endured a year of doodling with a compass and protractor with Mr. Beuhler---I was ready for this challenge. (Plus, I was famished.)

First, I decided to calculate the ideal consumption pattern using Algebraic methods: If A represents the aloo mutter, and B represents the rice, then the ratio of A to B as a whole should be represented in each bite of lunch; estimating the bowl held approximately 30 bites, then each bite would be three percent of the meal, and would be represented by the equation "Bite=(Ax3%)+(Bx3%)", or "Bite=(A:B)/30". (I'm glad this was aloo mutter, because the plethora of As and Bs would have made for a boring bowl of alphabet soup.)

Unfortunately, This would require constant adjustment on bites 2 through 29 if I wanted to ensure bite 30 was the same ratio of flavors as bite 1, as any variation from the formula on one bite would require compensation on the next bite. I surmised that this was simply too much work to try to fit into a too-brief lunch break, and algebra was discarded.

Next I endeavored to divide the meal geometrically: The bowl was approximately 6 inches across, and since area is derived from Pi-R-Squared, and the radius is 3 the surface area of the bowl is approximately 28 square inches. I had estimated there were approximately 30 bites of lunch in the bowl, so as long as I removed 1 square inch of surface area---all the way to the bottom---with each bit, I would have essentially equal bites of food each time, and I would not run out of entrée while still having a unappetizing pile of starch.

Trouble was, the thickness of the aloo mutter was inconsistent, as pools of sauce had filled gaps in the rice, so while the surface of the meal was essentially flat, there was no way to determine from above if a particular bite would feature more aloo mutter than rice. As such, each bite would be essentially random in its ratio. Was there a forgotten formula for identifying a pattern in the inconsistencies? Was there some postulate yet unpostulated or theorem unthought that would ensure even distribution of flavors among bites, thus maximizing the enjoyment of this culinary delight? And while we're at it, why struggle to impose a rigid pattern upon chaos if the results of the efforts will be chaos?

Why indeed. This is a chaotic world, and possessing a growling appetite, I felt qualified to step back in time and answer the younger version of myself who had asked, "When will I ever use this is my life?"

You won't, kid. By the time you need algebra---or at least what you dimly recall as algebra---your knowledge of math will have sat dormant for so long that your vaguely-remembered glossary terms will only further confuse your misunderstanding of those complex concepts. No amount of study of "sines" and "cosines" today will help you when, two decades later, some pompous buffoon at a cocktail party asserts that cosines are an essential metaphor for the city's ongoing public transportation issue. (You will sense it's bullshit, but you will be helpless to demonstrate this to your fellow cosine-illiterate party-goers.) At 40 you'll be balancing your checkbook and momentarily forget where the 2 gets carried off to when you carry the 2, and you'll suddenly imagine a dark, numberless future that includes carrying an oversized Texas Instruments calculator in your pocket so that you can figure the tip on a check.

But then I'll cheerfully remind the child that the moment when all of this comes crashing down upon you, when time and space and public education noisily collide in your head, a more satisfying realization will arrive with it: Life is like a bowl of aloo mutter---sometimes it's heavy on the rice, other times heavy on the sauce, but every time, its mostly delicious. Stop trying make it as dull as Mrs. Brann's Algebra class and dig in! No one is going to ask to see your math.

©2006 wpreagan

#101 - Dispatch from the War

Dispatch from the War

12/22/06 (#101)

The fighting has been lighter this year, with everyone in the nation except Bill O'Reilly and his elves grateful for the reprieve, but the relative calm belies the chilling truth: The War on Christmas wages on. Anywhere you see a simple star where a complex nativity once stood, know that one more manger has fallen to the enemy. (Unless the owner of the house is simply trying to save electricity, then it's technically not a war casualty, but a guy who dies of a heart attack while his plane is crashing is still considered a victim of a plane crash, right?) Anywhere a bell-ringer stands outside a mall punctuating the metallic din with comments like, "Policy prevents me from talking to you because I might inadvertently make a reference to egg nog, thus offending your holiday traditions and causing the mall to lose the $28 you had planned to spend on that Disney-character cheese-knife set", know that this war is far from over.

This confusing conflict over who is most worthy to drive the final float in the Macy's Parade might seem unworthy of a War, but such an attitude fails to take into account that America has a history of declaring war without concern for whether the war can be won. We declare war because people tend to rally around a war---even when there is no strategy for how we will achieve victory, even when there are no provisos for how to respond if the enemy refuses to adhere to our singular, narrowly focused vision of how events will transpire, and even when we have no clear sense of who we are actually declaring the war against.

I'm not talking about an actual war being fought by our armed forces (though the shoes described above seem to be a disappointingly good fit for recent events), but the metaphorical and ideological wars that allow leaders to name an enemy, then utter trite war-time analogies in hopes of co-opting genuine patriotic spirit for a task that is doomed by a terrible marketing concept.

Ever heard of The War on Poverty? It began in the 1960's, though I'm not really sure who the enemy is in that war---it seems that we declared war on a noun. (Of course, wouldn't it be just like our government to declare a victory in the War on Poverty, a triumph achieved by committing to future use of phrases such as "base economic strata" instead of "poverty level", and people who once suffered from poverty would instead be "unburdened by materialistic trappings.") I haven't researched the tensions that preceded the War on Poverty, but I am compelled to ask: If war is considered a last resort after all diplomatic efforts have failed, what diplomatic solutions were brought to the table when negotiating with Poverty: Sanctions? (I doubt it, because what had we ever given to poverty that we could later take away?) Economic incentives? (Poverty is unlikely to have believed our good intentions if it knew we were simultaneously negotiating AND preparing for war.) We've spent billions of dollars in this War, and all we've managed to do is fund a series of reports that read like vacation postcards from Poverty: "Enjoying myself here in downtown Los Angeles, where Tom Hanks makes $25 million per movie but 'skid row' has grown to be six-blocks square. Wish you were here!" I researched the status of the War on Poverty with two guys who were foraging though my recycling bin on Wednesday night---I can't confirm their credentials as analysts, but they assure me that Poverty is winning.

The 1980's brought us The War on Drugs, which sounds more like the title of a book of war essays by Hunter S. Thompson than it does a public policy measure. I regularly hear news stories about people dying of heroin overdose or losing their lives (literally or figuratively) to meth addiction, yet I never hear about any drugs suffering casualties from that war---I'm sure I'd remember if The Oregonian had run the headline, "Hashish found dead in Southeast Apartment." Sure, we've had some successes in the War on Drugs---pharmaceutical companies have valiantly labored to replace the scourge of dangerous, cheap street drugs (the kind that ruin your life) with a vast arsenal of dangerous, over-priced prescription drugs (the kind that make your life wonderful), and the fact that you have to knock on the bullet-proof glass that surrounds the pharmacy section of you neighborhood drug store and ask to fill out the paperwork that will allow you almost enough Sudafed to declare war on your sniffles shows how we've got crystal meth on the run---but all in all, drugs seem completely unconcerned about the war that we've declared on them. (Frankly, I think it's only the government that declared war on drugs; several of my glassy-eyed friends have obviously negotiated a peaceful detente.)

The significant difference between these wars and the War on Christmas is that in the earlier examples, America is the aggressor, the defender of morality and justice and government appropriations. The War on Christmas is a civil war, pitting neighbor against unwitting neighbor, a resolute defense of the right to put an enormous flood-lit manger scene on your front lawn without the neighborhood infidels (commonly referred to by the political left as "children") stealing the baby Jesus and replacing it with a brown-skinned Cabbage Patch Kid. It's about the right to self-righteously chastise anyone who devalues one of our most sacred traditions by referring to it in print as "X-mas". It's about the right to have someone say "Merry Christmas" to you and your wallet when you arrive at the door of your local electronics behemoth in early November instead of that offensive phrase being perpetrated upon the nation by the Hollywood liberals who hate America enough so much that they are shredding the very fabric from which this great nation was sewn. That phrase?

Happy Holidays.

What seems to have been lost in the debate over this phrase---along with all logical sense of proportion for the various issues that are facing us individually and collectively---is that "Happy Holidays" is not a covert political action being perpetrated by the ruthless KGDF (Kwanzaa Global Domination Front), but is in fact a phrase born from the unlikely marriage of mid-December cheer (when, suspiciously, all of the "holidays" in question occur) and unabashed anti-social laziness. Radio pundits like to talk as if "Happy Holidays" was first uttered by Michael Dukakis in his so-called presidential campaign, but the origins date back decades before, to the first person working the register at Woolworth's department store who mistakenly said "Merry Christmas!" to a Jewish customer and had to endure a dull, droning explanation of the menorah and Passover and why the yamaka doesn't cover the ears. On that day, a more efficient phrase was born, one that was not intended to represent a blurring pluralism that would one day take down Jesus (already weakened by his yearly wrestling match with that fat bastard capitalist Santa Claus), but which was designed to be as inoffensive as possible so that each retail-addled lemming might quickly exit with their bag of future return items and make room for the next surly chump who has spent 90 minutes scouring the aisles of the K-Mart for a useful, tasteful, and beautiful gift that costs less than ten bucks.

I have said "Happy Holidays" for years, and have never considered myself a pawn to the anti-Christmas forces. I said it because I'm really bad at guessing who is Jewish, and I get embarrassed when I constantly have to say, "I'm sorry, Mister Rodriguez" and "My mistake, Mister Murphy." Concerned I might have inadvertently contributed to the salvation of several 6-foot Noble Firs, I recently poured over the statistics on national trends in holiday participation (published annually in "Holidays Monthly" magazine---ironically not a true monthly since they have no August issue) and have noted that Hanukah has not grown in popularity since I began using the phrase. (There was a brief spike in the early 70's that coincided with Woody Allen's early film success, but it faded in 1978 with the release of Interiors.) If Hanukah is making no gains, and Kwanzaa remains a mysterious vagueness worthy of being named in the axis-of-holiday-evil (but not worthy of reading even the brief Wikipedia posting in order to understand what it is), then it seems Christmas is doing just fine.

It amuses me that some blustering egocentric media boob thinks he should to come to Jesus' defense regarding which party the flock attends on his birthday. O'Reilly seems to think that if we can push aside the man who founded America (Christopher Columbus, whose "discovery" of a nation is less celebrated since we collectively realized he "discovered" a fully-populated continent and brutally vanquished its residents) then, apparently, the founder of Christianity is sure to be next. But Jesus has weathered two millennia---including crusades, plagues, inquisitions, even Scientology---with what can only be described as incredible staying power. I think it's going to take more than a cheerful two-word salutation to bring him down.

Happy Holidays!

©2006 wpreagan

#100 - An Uncomfortable Level of Comfort

An Uncomfortable Level of Comfort

12/7/06 (#100)

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
---John F. Kennedy, 1961

I have been thinking about those famous words lately, impressed that a leader would speak to individuals so directly: There is no collective "we" in his exhortation, a word too easily interpreted as "everyone except me"---it is a personal address from the President of the United States to each of our nation's citizens. Kennedy recognized that "the nation" is not an enormous abstract, some political assemblage to which we can choose to belong as our favor suits---a nation is the sum of its people, and if we expect the nation to achieve greatness, we should expect a contribution to that goal from its populace. The problems that faced us as a nation in 1960 required a collective effort to confront, and Kennedy was asking for our help.

Our leaders today never ask me to do anything---we don't have that kind of relationship. Our dynamic, oversimplified, involves the government taking money from my paycheck and, if I'm lucky, telling me how they spent it. I've come to accept this arrangement because this is the relationship the government has defined, and I love the nation more than I loathe the government. (Not this party or that party---the whole money-fueled machine that has mutated out of the mostly-noble designs of our nation's founders.) A politician claiming to solve our problems without asking for our help is like a person assuring us that they can make the bed without asking the person in it to get up, so I endured an entire election season of news-hour commuting waiting to hear a candidate dare to use a word rarely heard in political speeches, one little word that would have enlightened me to the existence of a leader I could support, who didn't pretend that she or he could solve our problems for us instead of with us. That one word? Conserve.

When I think of my youth, I recall a much stronger sense of social nationalism (as opposed to belligerent nationalism), when despite our differences, people seemed to recognize that we were all in the same proverbial boat, and it would float or sink depending on our mutual efforts. There were national campaigns that stick in my memory, efforts to galvanize the nation behind a cause---not huge political issues (like civil rights, ERA or Roe v. Wade), but housekeeping items that concerned every American. While the most famous is likely the pollution ad featuring the Native American in traditional dress, surveying various environmental offenses before turning to the camera to reveal a tear running down his cheek, the example that illustrates my point came in the wake of the oil crisis, when Americans found themselves sitting in their 8-cylider muscle cars while queued up at the gas station. At that time, the Advertising Council promoted the tag line "Don't Be Fuelish", with newspapers running full-page advertisements that featured cut-outs which could be attached to light switches emblazoned with the slogan "Last Out, Lights Out: Don't Be Fuelish".* Conserving fuel (a finite resource) was a national concern, and efforts were made to raise the national consciousness to the merits of conservation. It wasn't a change for the government to make, it was a change for us all to make. (Easy for me to say---I was about eight at the time, and my banana-seat bicycle used the oldest form of bio-fuel: pedal power.)

30 years later, with worldwide oil reserves further depleted, we are in a boat of regrettably similar design, yet our leaders seem less interested in keeping the boat afloat than in making sure that their opponents are blamed for the water rushing over the gunwales. Public debates over Global Warming regularly devolve into charges of political posturing that dismiss years of research by scores of scientists as nothing more than Al Gore's shameless effort to make a political comeback, and too often the quest for solutions is impeded by obsessive effort to assess blame for the cause. (I have seen statistics that make a fair argument for both sides of the Global Warming debate, but to use an inverted analogy, imagine the earth as a house---as it gets cold in the winter, one could argue that it's merely the season, and the season will change. But until then, isn't it wise to take action---close the storm windows, caulk the foundation, etcetera--- rather than sitting around waiting to see if Spring will solve December's cold?)

I was looking for a candidate to use the word "conserve" because it seems like a taboo among national leaders. Over the summer, fuel prices were among the highest rates in history, yet the 8-cylinder SUVs still lined up at the pumps, some requiring over $150.00 to fill the vehicle in a single stop. President Bush called attention to our energy reliance in his 2006 SOTU address, saying, "here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology."**

Technology? The best way? Amazing---imagine someone proposing that the best way to beat addiction to heroin is through technology: Perhaps, but first, you have to stop using the drug. With a national audience watching, why not throw a bone to the concept of conservation? Why not urge Americans to take advantage of public transportation and carpooling? I will bypass the cynicism that says Bush, an oil man, has vested interests in not conserving oil, because I think the bigger reason is that politicians do not want to require anything of their voters---for decades, our so-called leaders have consistently promised to do this and that and anything at all as long as we elected or reelected them, and no one wants to have the reputation as "that candidate who expects something of me." They are afraid to making us uncomfortable; uncomfortable people tend to adjust their circumstances until they are comfortable again, and a politician doesn't want to be mistaken for something that can be adjusted. Thus, the policy of "give the people what they want" (or at least tell them that you will, even if you can't deliver) becomes the status quo, like parents who find it easier to placate their children with acquiescence (and toys) rather than saying, "No." Because saying no is difficult---it requires confrontation, and in the case of politics, opens the candidate up for attack by an opponent who finds it politically profitable to keep promising the toys. So rather than standing firm, the candidate simply promises toys before the other candidate can. And if their opponent promises better toys, tell the children that those toys won't work. To continue that metaphor, I'm personally fed up with being treated like a child.

However, while politicians are an easy target, it's not a simple matter that most are (to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen) no Jack Kennedy. Kennedy's quotation involves two parties, and when was the last time any of us asked what we could do for our country? (In most elections, nearly half of eligible citizens don't even make the effort to cast a vote.) The current political culture has caused many of us to mistake "the nation" as synonymous with "the government"; we might be willing to make personal sacrifices for the nation (at risk of sounding obsequious, our soldiers do that every day), but not for this or that administration, as if our concern over whether the ship sinks or floats is dependent on who is sitting in the captain's chair.

Kennedy seemed to be trying to shift the onus back to the American people---solving issues is OUR responsibility, not the government's. I didn't feel that under Clinton, and I certainly don't under Bush. So if they're not going to ask for our help, what can we do in the meantime?

We can try to ease our dependence on oil ourselves. I love driving as much as anyone (in fact, more than many) but we sold one of our cars two years ago, and while we occasionally curse the single-car lifestyle, it's been a mostly-painless process: Portland is well serviced by buses and trains (we promote the bus to our daughter as a fun adventure, rather than a frustrating necessity, which on the coldest days it can sometimes be), and we're investigating Flex-car in case a second vehicle is ever needed; I carpool to music shows with neighbors, saving the waste of three or four vehicles making the same journey; the family wear sweaters and slippers at home rather than heating the house to faux-summer environs. Please don't mistake this for bragging---it's a simple matter of fact: We (and by "we" I mean "everyone including me") need to stop using so much oil, and these are adjustments that could be made without significantly changing my lifestyle. Beating an addiction is not a battle fought in the future---it's completely present tense, finding a way to not take the drugs at this particular moment. Hopefully, with each successful moment, the next one becomes a bit easier. It doesn't require technology---it requires the will to make a change, and the strength to endure a discomfort until, incrementally, it is no longer uncomfortable. It necessitates effort, but I've opted to conserve because my so-called leaders won't, and every evening I'm greeted at the door by a little girl who reminds me that I'm not conserving for myself, but for future generations who may one day ask why we didn't act when circumstances clearly called for some type of action.

And if nothing else, one of those actions is voting---yes, politics is saturated with pointless posturing, and yes, it's a money-driven machine that sometimes seems irredeemable; but it's the only system we've got, and any change in the system that you want to see will not be achieved by sitting out of the process.

Thinking back to Kennedy's quotation, voting doesn't seem like too much too ask.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
** http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2006/

©2006 wpreagan

#99 - Fuse Box Repair Made Simple

Fuse Box Repair Made Simple

11/3/06 (#99)

My wife called me at work, telling me that the lights had suddenly gone out on the main floor of the house---upstairs was fine, the basement was fully powered, but the ground floor was in the dark. She called hoping that I might shed some light on the subject, probably hopeful that on some past lazy Sunday afternoon I had lacked the ambition to change the channel and instead watched an episode of This Old House that covered the intricacies of the fuse box.

Normally I relish the opportunity to be a phone-in hero, to put minds at ease with a quick dispensation of some obscure factoid that saves the day---but normally, these queries involve the intricacies of Lionel Ritchie's lyrics or arcane references made in Owen Wilson movies. My collected knowledge of fuse boxes could easily be printed on a postage stamp. Even the two-cent size.

"Have you tried flicking the breakers back and forth?" I asked, hoping my wife had somehow regressed to a Dick-Van-Dyke-era Mary Tyler Moore-ish character whose idea of trouble-shooting was to make a cartoonish face and then call her husband at work. I was disappointed to learn that she had already tried jiggling the various switches.

"Maybe try them again," I recommended, feeling a need to contribute something, and since I had only one solution to every possible fuse box issue, my only option was to repeat the one thing I did know. She had already done them all, three times. (Three times? She was quickly becoming a fuse box repair specialist.) I pondered for a moment, hoping some obscure episode of Tool Time had lodged itself in my brain, then recalled the outcome of most of the "repairs" done on Tool Time---she needed to get the lights on, not blow up the stove. I sensed the opportunity for heroism was slipping away, and I resigned myself to failure.

Steph called the electric company, and it turned out to be an issue outside the house. A crew arrived with a cherry picker, a man was lifted to the top of the pole, and a few minutes later, the lights came on. One might think I would be jealous that someone else had snuck into the hero costume that I had hoped was fitted for me, but I could live with that---after all, this guy was restoring power to the refrigerator, where a fresh half-gallon of Dreyer's Caramel Delight ice cream awaited my return. He was my hero, too. And whatever he did up there on the pole, I doubt I could have done the same thing with repeated toggling of the breakers.

When I arrived home, all was well, except the clothes dryer didn't work. Steph had to go out, so I assured her that I would see what I could do about fixing it. (Not telling her that I had already dispensed the full breadth of my fuse box knowledge with my "jiggle the switches" recommendation earlier that day.) She went out, and I went down to the basement to have a look at the fuse box.

Popping the metal cover, I saw an efficient adhesive sheet on the inside of the cabinet door, numbered in the same pattern as the fuse box, perfect for finding and solving a fuse problem in a matter of seconds. Or would be perfect if it was used as it was designed---it was less effective in our case because only five of the 16 spaces had any writing, including the not-quite-reassuring posting of "Garage???" beside #14. Next to each of the switches was a small white label, an even more convenient spot to clearly identify each switch---here, 11 of the 16 spaces had writing in them, including three that were clearly marked, "dryer". (It seemed to have been written in a fourth spot as well, but like everything that had ever been written in that spot, it was lost to oblivion under the fevered scratchings of a ball point pen.)

I wondered how anyone who had ever owned the house had been able to survive with such horrible documentation. But seen from another angle, it was a fuse box perfectly designed for someone with exactly my level of electrical expertise: perfect documentation would mean only one fuse could solve the problem, but the vagueness of our breaker database justified the cover-my-bases tripping and resetting of every switch, an activity that at least offered the illusion of proactive intervention, though the only tangible result of my actions was to remotely restart my daughter's Little Mermaid DVD a few times.

As I stared at the box (unofficially known as "step 2" in my fuse box repair regimen), I noticed a slight bulge in the adhesive label on the back of the cabinet door, and was delighted to pull out three scraps of paper with hand written notes, crib sheets from previous outage adventures, numbers and scribbles that promised to reveal the actual powers of each switch. I was certain these brittle sheets contained the primer for decoding the fuse box puzzle, and flipped one to reveal the first clue:

7 = ???

This was a clue? Why was this sheet even deemed worthy of storage? It was opposite of information---it was the written evidence of acquiescence to a more formidable foe. I wondered why there wasn't a similar note for all of the other numbers---what was so special about not knowing what was on seven? I flipped the next document, penned in a scrawl I recognized as my own:

10=
11 =
12 = bedroom outlets, back hall, front porch

I was encouraged to have at least one of the fuses accurately identified, but the particulars of that documentation were suspect: The three regions attributed to this one switch were as distant from each other as any three areas of the house could be. The back hall and the front porch on a single fuse? Either my previous investigation had resulted in bad data, or my house had been wired by a madman.

The third note was the crucial piece---or would have been, had I extracted it 20 years ago, before age left the ink faded and barely legible. It was written in an ancient, grandmotherly cursive, full of graceful swoops and sharp angles, with a pen that was apparently sharper than a surgical scalpel. (My grandmother used to write her birthday cards to me in this same script, often leading me to believe she was wishing me a "Koppy Birdday" and that she "haped I libe the nnittens.") I scoured the note, looking for clues---there was the dryer, next to "5", disheartening because 5 was not one of the three switches in the box with "dryer" written next to it; there was nothing written next to 10 or 11, confirming the accurate uncertainty of my other note; next to 3, the only listing was "dishwasher"---an appliance we do not own, and considering our kitchen is smaller than a good walk-in closet, I don't know where the previous owner ever put it. We can't even find counter space for a juicer.

I examined the available materials and saw only one option---and began clicking everything off and on again. (When I flipped #9, I heard "Dad!" bellowed from upstairs---and quickly etched "TV/DVD outlet" onto the tag, optimistic that we would never move the television, lest "TV" one day overtake "dryer" as the item with the most redundant power supply in the house.) When I had completed flipping the two columns of switches, I went over to the dryer and pushed start---it obediently complied. Problem solved.

When my wife got home, she immediately asked for status on the dryer, and I nonchalantly responded that it was fixed. "How did you do it?" she asked, incredulous.

"I flipped all of the breakers again, and it worked."

"I did that, too. It didn't help when I did it."

I shrugged, unable to explain my success.

"Well...thanks," she said begrudgingly, her tone much less enthusiastic than it had been when she talked about PGE fixing the problem at the pole. I was no hero---I was the janitor who cleaned up the glass after the hero crashed through the window to save the day.

Oh well. As I sank the scoop into the Caramel Delight ice cream, I took solace in the fact that the world needs janitors as much as it needs heroes. I'll just keep my cape in the closet until Steph has a question about a Commodores lyric from 1979---suffice to say, there will be no calls to the electric company that day.

©2006 wpreagan