Monday, June 12, 2000
I’m not the biggest science fiction fan on the planet, but here’s an interesting item I ran across in the news last week: someday, we may have humongous sailing ships in outer space.
At the International Aerospace Exhibition in Berlin, a group of engineers unveiled a prototype of a solar sail. The idea is to have the sail capture the power of the sun to transport people and cargo through outer space without engines or fuel.
It certainly is the stuff science fiction is made of, that’s for sure. The sail supposedly could drive a space ship at speeds of 223,220 mph, which would be almost 10 times faster than the space shuttle. At that speed, you could get from Los Angeles to New York in a little over 60 seconds. Unless you ran into rush hour traffic or a tie-up at the bridge toll booths.
To be fair, the notion of a solar sail is not new, but this device may be the first one not carrying the “Buck Rogers” name. Imagine shifting our thoughts of space travel from gargantuan steel capsules belching flames to something sailing silently through the void. It makes way for futuristic fantasies combining big, drooling alien thingies and atomic death rays with the swashbuckling derring-do of old-fashioned pirates.
The sail they showed in Berlin is too small to carry anything larger than a microsatellite, whatever size that is. To transport a human, the sail would have to be several square miles in size. Imagine, then, how big it might have to be to transport several people or cargo.
Even if rocket engines are replaced by silent sails, I still don’t want to go into outer space. The whole idea of space travel leaves me cold.
Thank goodness, then, that modern science does not limit itself to studying interplanetary travel. There are still some scientists with their feet planted firmly on the ground who are searching for answers to questions that vex some people.
A physicist from Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Mass. reportedly has figured out why opening candy bars in movie theaters makes so much noise.
Yes, that’s right. Would I kid you about something like this?
The research results were released during a meeting in Atlanta of the Acoustical Society.
The noise is caused by pops and clicks as creases in the packaging material are pulled apart, says the physicist.
What do they pay a physicist at Simon’s Rock College of Bard a year? And he had an accomplice, uh, I mean a partner, a scientist from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. Does the “national” in that name mean you and I helped pay for this? Oh, geez, I certainly hope not.
Now, sailing ships in outer space may be fascinating, but who cares why candy wrappers make a lot of noise in a movie theater? Is this a major problem I have missed? Are their thousands of moviegoers who are missing crucial lines from movies because of this phenomenon? I doubt it! Maybe we should study how blowing through a Jujy Fruits box makes that squeaking sound!
Have you been to a movie lately? When the theme music starts, or the gunfire erupts, or the characters start talking, the little acoustic hair-like things in my ear — you know, the stuff that actually lets us HEAR things? — lay down, never to work again! The decibel level is stultifying! Maybe these scientists should do some research into how man of the future is going to be able to hear, after thousands of years of booming movie soundtracks and riding around in closed cars with MegaBassBoomBastic EarBlaster Stereo systems playing compact discs featuring songs consisting of nothing but amplified electric bass guitars and bass drums.
Makes you almost long for the quiet of a nice solar sail through space.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, June 6, 2000
At my age, at my specific station in society, at my precise mark on the wall chart of my life, I suppose you could say it’s a pretty safe bet I won’t be running off any time soon to become a war correspondent or climb Mount Everest or venture into unexplored regions of the world.
I managed to sidestep an enticing trek to the jungles of Peru scheduled for later this month, if you want to know. I daydreamed about it furiously. Weighed the pros and cons. Weighed such weighty issues as my weight versus the rain forest. Worried how I could cope with the breathlessness of obesity as intensified by ridiculously high humidity. Fretted over the inevitable, innumerable, inescapably irritating, and perhaps infectious, insect bites. Did not look forward to the general steamy sogginess of the jungle.
And, in the end, I was saved from actually having to wimp out by simply not being able to afford the trip.
Which worked out just fine. Sure, I would lose bragging rights to a genuine adventure, but the general scope of the trip had been changed at the last minute. Instead of just some old fogeys tiptoeing through the Amazon, it was to be a hard-core week at the Peruvian Air Force Jungle Survival School and would be filmed and turned into a program for the Discovery Channel. (Imagine, folks sitting at home watching this jungle documentary. “Hey, mom! Look at the fat guy! He can’t do anything! He keeps scratching all over! Why’d they let him come along?”)
Oh, and the dates of the trip were changed, too. The departure date now is the day before my impending nuptials.
Anyway, as I come to terms with the realization that any wanderlust I had must have wandered off somewhere and that I am too fat, lazy, cheap, poor, sedentary, finicky — put your own adjective in there if it makes you feel any better — to sleep in the jungle, eat monkeys and bugs or climb Kilimanjaro, well, I must willingly accept the notion that I am content to be a Walter Mitty.
I have had a certain number of actual adventures during my lucky life and probably will have some more before I’m through. I have done some things other see as outrageously adventurous.
On the other hand, I DO enjoy daydreaming about true adventure.
So I have to thank people who help me with those daydreams. Like Robert Young Pelton. The fourth edition of Pelton’s book, “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” has just come out. At more than a thousand pages, this is not your typical travel guide. Pelton’s “take it to the bank” information about not-so-nice-neighborhoods in the world is interspersed with clever and tongue-in-cheek writing.
The book will take readers from Afghanistan to Yemen and every edgy place in between. Pelton provides serious been-there, done-that information about the dangers of dangerous places.
A chapter called “Making the Best of Nasty Situations” includes his suggestions on how to survive war zones, revolutionary places, fundamentalist places, corrupt places, poor places and terrorist places.
The book covers all sorts of things: war, journalists who cover combat, bribes, drugs, crime, getting arrested, terrorists, mercenaries, militias, land mines, rebels and kidnapping.
It’s funny, how you look at danger and annoyance. I wasn’t thrilled with the concept of being eaten alive by South American insects, worried how my stomach would handle an exotic diet of monkey and lizards and was pretty relieved when I knew I wouldn’t be going to Peru with my buddy, Jeff Randall.
But when I learned that Jeff and another friend, writer Jerry VanCook, were considering making a sort of side trip the following week to cross the border into Colombia to follow the paths of some Sendero Luminosa rebels, travel through the coca fields and go on some maneuvers with the narco-police — well, NOW you’re talking my kind of adventure!
On the other hand, maybe those impending nuptials of mine are adventure enough for right now!
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, June 5, 2000
Are we becoming too gullible? I don’t know. You tell me.
Two Miami residents were recently charged with selling “go-boxes” for between $69 and $150. Go-boxes are remote-control devices that turn red traffic lights to green. Use one of these electronic babies and your drive time can be dramatically reduced.
The story I read didn’t say how many go-boxes the couple sold through the Internet. It did say, though, that the device doesn’t exist. Some customers got schematic drawings and instructions to build what turned out to be nothing more exotic than a flashing strobe light. Others received nothing at all for their money.
Sometimes, gullibility is increased by a larcenous spirit. Those who fall for the dumbest scams often have larceny in their hearts.
The con men of old preyed on that combination. If you’re larcenous enough, you may believe anything. Con men would pretend to have found someone else’s money. Instead of just returning it, as an honest person would do, they’d convince their marks to share it — as long as the mark put up some “good faith” cash of his own.
There used to be guys around here who would sell TV sets and stereos dirt cheap. They’d hint that the merchandise was stolen — “it fell off the back of a truck” — to get the larcenous juices flowing. They’d show the mark a dynamite stereo or big-screen TV set, but sell him a box that, when opened later at home, turned out to contain rocks or bricks or something.
Cable boxes and telephone black boxes and doodads meant to get around traffic lights are all devices that break laws.
Sometimes, larceny clouds the vision beyond all reason and the gullibility factor goes way up.
Week before last, a guy hijacked a Philippines passenger jet, robbed the passengers and crew, then parachuted out at about 6,000 feet.
There was larceny in this guy’s heart. Of that, there can be no doubt. But the larceny blinded him and made him way past gullible.
It made him gullible enough to think he knew something about parachutes and such. He tried to pull this caper off with a homemade lavender parachute. The chute, of course, didn’t work.
They found the man the following day. His body was embedded “in the ground with only the hands protruding,” police reported.
I suppose you can get suckered into believing ridiculous things even without a dishonest heart, although I believe it’s harder for those who are pure of spirit.
The Labor government in Britain has published a booklet that is truly testing the gullibility of the people. The author of the booklet wants teachers to ban the children’s game of musical chairs because it urges aggression.
“A little competition is fine, but with musical chairs the competition is not fair, because it is always the biggest and strongest children who win,” wrote the author. “Musical statues is better because everybody wins.”
Now, THERE are some important lessons for kids to learn. Let’s make sure they understand the facts of life. Competition is ALWAYS fair. The biggest and strongest don’t always win. There are many situations in which everybody wins.
Now, once the kids understand these facts, they’re ready to go out into the world on their own. And when they go, I’ve got some go-boxes I want to sell them. Oh, and a doohickey that will attract UFOs to your backyard. And an attachment for your TV set that allows you to watch first-run movies as they are being projected in your local theaters!
Where’d I get them? Uh, well, they just fell off the back of a truck.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, May 30, 2000
Now HERE’S a real stupid idea.
Tourism and commerce officials in Utah decided to hire inmates at Utah State Prison as telemarketers. Imagine! Prison inmates and telemarketers — a marriage made in heaven!
You probably already know I think telemarketers are the spawn of Satan. Please, if you’re a telemarketer, don’t take this personally. I don’t know you. I can’t judge you. I have nothing against you as a human being.
I’m sure executioners and cess-pool cleaners and slaughter-house workers are all lovely human beings, too, but I don’t want them doing their jobs in my living room, either.
I consider telemarketers to be telephonic home invaders, dialing into my private space, interrupting my life, trying to sell me something. I wouldn’t buy something during a telephone call I didn’t initiate under any circumstances.
I especially don’t like computer-generated telemarketing calls. You can always tell when a computer dials the number, because when you pick up the phone and say “Hello,” there’s dead air. If you wait a few seconds, someone will start talking.
If I answer the phone and hear nothing, I immediately hang up. If I DO get caught by a live caller, and it’s not someone I know or want to talk to, I simply tell them I’m not interested and that I am going to hang up. Then I hang up, as promised.
It’s all very simple. I would prefer not to have those calls come into my home at all, but since they do, well, that’s how I deal with them.
Last year, after my Closest Companion hung up on a telemarketer, the extremely repugnant wretch called back and started berating her for hanging up. She threatened my Closest Companion, saying “You don’t hang up on me. I know where you live!”
Nice, huh? It’s so comfortable to think that some deranged telephone solicitor may be stalking you.
So imagine, then, the convoluted thought process that lead Utah officials to hire prisoners and let their otherwise incarcerated fingers do the walking.
The Utah Travel Council had inmates answering its 800 number. Potential tourists were giving their names and addresses to these prisoners, some of whom were sex offenders.
Some kids working on school projects would up calling inmates, too.
Utah was getting a great deal, of course: three prisoners for $7.50 an hour.Still, look at what they got in the bargain. A 15-year-old girl in Texas answered a phone call from a prisoner soliciting for a Utah outfit that markets family oriented films. Some time later, the girl received a bonus — a suggestive letter from an inmate. Isn’t that nice?
Sometimes, this world is just topsy-turvy. Prison inmates are earning, what? $2.50 an hour? And in New Jersey, upstanding citizens make only $5 a day for jury duty. For seven hours of work, that comes out to only 72-cents an hour!
Do the math. Bad guys who have broken the law and been sentenced to serve time in prison can earn more money annoying the general populace than you can make by sitting in judgment of bad guys who have broken the law.
As you sit there, earning your 72-cents an hour, remember that if you sentence someone to serve time in prison, that person could wind up calling your house and getting all sorts of details about you and your family.
And make more money doing it, too!
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Monday, May 29, 2000
I’ve always gotten a kick out of the way military training has devolved in recent years.
I was in the National Guard, but I trained with Regular Army recruits.
When I went through basic training in 1966, I had to go through an obstacle course in the dead of night. As we crawled on our bellies — a group of scared kids in Army suits, carrying empty M-14 rifles — machine guns fired overhead and land mines detonated around us. Our drill instructors warned us not to raise our heads or we’d get them shot off by machine gun fire!
Truth is, the machine guns were probably firing so high we could have stood up and not been hit. The land mines were low-load explosive devices, not much more than big firecrackers.
Despite that, they WERE live explosive devices and they WERE real machine gun rounds whizzing by overhead.
About 22 years later, while visiting Parris Island, home of the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp, I was amused to learn that rookie Leathernecks who crawled through a similar obstacle course did so to the tape-recorded accompaniment of machine gun fire. No live rounds for these tough warriors! That was, in the modern age, way too dangerous during training.
It was funny to think that I had technically been under live fire, and they hadn’t. Oh, my!
I read last week that British Royal Navy recruits attending artillery school are being told not to fire live rounds because they cost too much. The shells cost 642 pounds each.
Sailors at the gunnery school check coordinates, line up a target and go through all the motions of arming and aiming their big guns. Then they shout, “Bang!”
No, really.
The whole notion is ticking some people off. Sailors say it’s a mockery, like playing cowboys and Indians.
While this may sound novel or revolutionary, it’s nothing new.
Let me tell you a story I heard many years ago.
A drill sergeant told his soldiers there had been some drastic cost-cutting measures and there were no real weapons with which to train. The troopers were angry and confused.
“It’s not such a problem,” said the drill instructor. “Take these broom handles and point them like rifles. When you’re out in the field, just point them at the enemy and say, ‘Rifle!’ and the other guy will fall down and play dead. We’ve got it all worked out.”
The troops still grumbled and growled, but lined up with their broom sticks and started handling them the same way they would handle actual rifles.
The maneuvers began, with the Red Team versus the Blue Team and, after some initial silliness, the trainees started getting into it. They’d sight down the boom stick, aim at a target and shout “Rifle!” The guy they were aiming at would drop to the ground and lie still.
The Red Team was working its way through the Blue Team’s area, shouting “Rifle!” and mowing down the Blue enemy soldiers for most of the day’s exercise.
Suddenly, despite a whole platoon aiming their broom sticks and yelling “Rifle!”, there appeared on the ridge a big, hulking Blue Team soldier. He looked neither left nor right, but ignored the shouts of “Rifle! Rifle!” as he approached. Men tried to physically block his path, but he knocked them out of his way.
All the Red Team members wondered what was going on, until, as the big guy walked past the bewildered soldiers, they could hear him chanting something in a low, deep voice.
“What’s he saying?” yelled the sergeant.
“He’s saying, ‘Tank. Tank. Tank.’”
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, May 23, 2000
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, what you would call a daredevil.
Oh, sure, I have flown a paraplane, strolled across a bridge strut 25 feet above the traffic crossing the bridge, received a death threat from a drug lord, was taught to rappel by a SWAT team and posed for photographs in Marrakech with venomous pit vipers draped around my foolish neck, but I am not a daredevil.
I’m all for taking chances, for engaging in risky behavior now and then. If that’s what it takes for some people to get that adrenaline rush, well, fine.
Having said that, though, I think we might be getting a wee bit carried away with this trend toward the extreme: extreme sports, extreme wrestling, extreme adventures and extreme just about everything else.
For instance, one of the big trends right now on TV are programs featuring the world’s fastest, scariest, stupidest and most dangerous police chases.
Let’s face it. We love car chases. Some movies have had just enough of a plot line to justify nearly two hours of car chases.
Car chases are fun to watch on TV. See cars smash into trees and other cars and houses and through road barricades. See cars spin, turn over, fall apart, burst into flames. Wow, what a chase! Glad everything turned out OK and they caught that guy!
But, see, everything didn’t turn out OK. No one comes on after the commercial to tell us how badly people might have been injured in the chase. No one comes on and explains how much that chase cost private car owners, or how much their insurance premiums may go up afterwards. No one comes on to tally up how much the chase cost the taxpayers who are footing the bills for all those banged up police cars and maybe having to pay out for private cars damaged because of the chase.
In real life, most cops I know love the chase, but, these days, strive mightily to avoid it. There are local, county and state procedures now that must be followed for cops who think they need to chase someone. Frivolous chases can also cost the cop.
I have never been of the opinion that TV and movies induce people to commit crimes or even to act in certain ways. I do not agree with those who insist violence and sex in movies and TV programs leads people to commit violence or engage in sex crimes.
But now, with this new tendency toward the extreme, I’m beginning to wonder. Are too many people — or maybe just the wrong kind of people — being seduced by the ludicrous lure of extreme sports?
It’s one thing to sit back on your La-Z-Boy recliner, slugging brewskies and munching on cheese puffs while you watch crazy people jump off mountains on skateboards or parachute into volcanoes or bungee jump over alligator swamps or climb the side of the Eiffel Tower.
But it’s quite another thing altogether for you to watch this stuff on TV and somehow get the twisted notion in your cheese-puff addled mind that YOU can do this stuff, no problem.
Over the weekend, two goofs decided to climb up the sheer face of a cliff somewhere. Halfway up, one of the guys suddenly realized he was out of steam. He couldn’t climb up any further. He also couldn’t go back down. His buddy made a valiant effort to help, but to no avail. So the buddy climbed up and called for help.
An entire rescue team was required to come out and get the stalled climber. Somebody had to pay for all that rescue talent. Like people who pay taxes.
The newscaster thought it was a hoot, saying the guy got stuck because he hadn’t eaten a hearty breakfast. A hearty breakfast wouldn’t have helped this bozo, unless it was heavy on some kind of brain food.
Somewhere else in the country, some other guy got into trouble during a canoe trip and similarly had to be rescued. Probably saw extreme canoeing on TV and thought it was a bright idea. Again, his rescue was courtesy of us.
So, bunky, if you’re thinking about leaping off the couch to go bash some professional wrestlers’ heads, or trekking through the coca fields in Colombia looking for rebels, or zooming through the subway tunnels of New York on your inline skates — well, I don’t want to pay for it if the whole misadventure turns sour.
So, leave a sizable deposit for the rescue, will you?
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, May 22, 2000
The world is certainly becoming a more dangerous place, day by day.
Remember the old days? No, not the Middle Ages, when guys in chain mail roamed the countryside whacking people with their swords. No, not the old days when our men were off killing and dying in foreign countries to save the world.
I mean the not-so-long-ago old days, AFTER our boys saved the world and came marching home again. The days of malt shops and mom-and-pop corner stores and drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants and Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best.
Folks could mosey down the street unscathed. Parents could let their kids out to play with a reasonable expectation that the children would be returning in good shape, not counting the occasional scraped knee or black eye.
Things are a bit different now, though, aren’t they?
The real danger today is that people you’d never suspect of harboring violent tendencies are hurting people. Weapons are turning up in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely hands. And in some cases, they’re unlikely weapons.
Now, first, you should understand that I am one of those old-fashioned, hard-nosed types who believes that if everyone were armed, we’d probably have a more polite society. Who’s going to give you a hard time if they know — or even just have a strong suspicion — that you’re packing heat?
But even with that kind of knowledge, you don’t always know where trouble’s going to pop up.
In Vancouver, for instance. A police officer was suspended the other day for, well, not road rage, exactly. More like road-repair rage. He got into an argument with a road construction worker and wound up spritzing the guy with his pepper spray.
The officer was suspended for abuse of authority.
In Houston, a guy who’d been fired from an oil drilling company way back in the 1970s created panic at a stockholders’ meeting last week when he pulled out a hand grenade.
The disgruntled 72-year-old was arguing with an executive about financial matters when he pulled the hand grenade from a bag.
“Do know what this is? This saved my life in Vietnam,” he said — and pulled the pin. About 60 stockholders beat feet for the doors. The grenade didn’t go boom, though, and the man was wrestled to the ground by company officials, who were apparently a bit braver than the 60 stockholders who had vacated the premises. Turns out the grenade was inert and wouldn’t have exploded, but who knew that when the old coot pulled the pin?
He was charged with making terroristic threats.
In Belfast, Northern Irish police are looking for a machine gun and ammunition they lost last week. The gun fell out of a police car. It was a Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun. You’d recognize it. It’s the same kind of gun in the famous photograph of the Border Patrol guy arresting Elian Gonzalez in the closet.
Having such a weapon in the hands of the locals is a bit awkward right now, in the midst of negotiations for disarmament. Why, it was just a couple of weeks ago that IRA leaders said they would disarm. Well, not disarm exactly. They said they’d put their weapons in bunkers and lock them up. The British seemed to accept this as a form of disarmament. With thinking like this, it’s no wonder the sun has set on the British Empire.
The trouble with all this violence is that you can’t always see it coming. I mean, who would think a feud between a 40-year-old woman and her 74-year-old neighbor in Yonkers, N.Y. would end with her killing him?
It’s not every day a man is killed because he was using his leaf blower to clean his driveway and exchanged harsh words with the woman next door who was wearing a dust mask and threatening him with a pitchfork.
Leaf blower and pitchfork. Deadly weapons, huh?
Well, no. The woman jumped in her car and ran over the guy several times.
Heck. This IS a dangerous world. We might not be able to prevent all types of violence, but maybe it’s time to consider enacting some serious car control laws.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, May 16, 2000
There’s a lot about this world in which we live that I just don’t get. Well, to be honest, there’s some stuff I haven’t gotten for a long while.
I don’t get, for instance, why movie ratings seem to allow kids to be exposed more to violence than to sex.
There are a lot of stars and celebrities I don’t get, either, like Sharon Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio and Sisqo and the artist formerly known as — heck, I don’t know. What WAS Prince’s name before it was unpronounceable? Jerry? Mel? Bucky?
I don’t get why schools and parents seem to embrace the Pokémon phenomenon, despite the outrageous violence in the animated TV show, but get queasy about Harry Potter.
I don’t get the reasoning behind the choice of music for TV commercials. For some time, it has been apparent to an old rock-and-roller like me that you can hear more “Classic Rock” by watching TV commercials than you can by tuning in to a “Classic Rock” radio station. But some of the match ups between music and products leave me totally confused.
Right now, there is a commercial featuring the psychedelic, Jimi Hendrix version of the “Star Spangled Banner.” It was pretty revolutionary in its day, like 30 years ago. Pretty far out. So what is this radical song selling on TV these days? Pop Tarts, that’s what! Where, pray tell, is the connection? I don’t get it.
I also don’t get how and why names are chosen for hurricanes. This year’s list was released last week and I’m sure you’re not surprised to learn that “Jim” is not on the list. Again.
I could try to say they leave me off the list year after year because my personality is less like a hurricane and more like that of a tornado, but you’d probably say, “Bullfeathers!” And you’d be right.
Government storm experts — there’s another job description I missed when I was choosing a career path — are predicting a busier-than-normal hurricane season.
Why do hurricanes even need names? What prompts us to anthropomorphize destructive tropical storms with friendly first names? Those in the know say we name the storms to prevent confusion when more than one hurricane is active at the same time.
But how are the names chosen? I don’t get it.
According to a wire story I read, they are selected by a committee of the World Meteorological Organization to represent the ethnic makeup of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
This year’s official names are Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Debby, Ernesto, Florence, Gordon, Helene, Isaac, Joyce, Keith, Leslie, Michael, Nadine, Oscar, Patty, Rafael, Sandy, Tony, Valerie and William.
They’re all very nice names, but I don’t get why we can’t broaden our view of the relevance of hurricanes on society.
Sure, Alberto might be a suave way for Al Gore to try to reach the Spanish-speaking population and William could be construed as representing the President, but that doesn’t really go far enough.
Hurricane names should reflect popular culture and current events. Why not Al, Bill, Darva, Elian, Fidel, Giuliani, Hillary, Iverson, Janet, Lazaro, Marisleysis (or Monica), Osama, Putin, Saddam, Tripp, Uma and Zeta-Jones, for instance?
We’re letting perfectly good hurricane names go to waste.
I just don’t get it.
Oh, and before I forget, Oprah, Riverdance, Regis and extreme wrestling.
Nope, I just don’t get it.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, May 15, 2000
Here’s good news for all you prospective mothers who aren’t sure if parenthood is the career path you really want to follow.
If you aren’t quite satisfied with your new baby, you can just give him back.
That is, if Jack Collins’ new law gets passed.
I don’t know what he’s calling it, but it sounds like a Child Lemon Law to me. It sounds good on the surface, but I think the legislation could use some final tweaking before it gets put on the books as law.
Right off the bat, for instance, I think the warranty period is too short. You’ve got only 30 days to decide you really aren’t into motherhood and would rather be doing anything else instead of feeding and changing and powdering and burping and keeping a constant eye on the kid.
I mean, you carry a child for nine months. You ought to get a bit more than 30 days to decide whether you want to keep her.
I don’t think the lemon law should contain an open-ended return period, though. The day I heard about this, I mentioned it in the newsroom and two women loudly announced their disappointment that the law wouldn’t allow them to return their teen-age children.
The apparent reason for the proposed law is to keep mothers from hurting or killing newborns they don’t really want. I know that kind of thing happens now and then, but is it really a widespread problem? Jack Collins, the speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, maybe knows something about the frequency of post-partum patricide that has not made it into the newspaper.
That, of course, brings up another proposed law, one that would make public access to public documents easier for news people and just about everyone else. That is not the case, under current law. Too many official documents are exempt from public access laws.
I heartily endorse any law that makes public information really public. Assemblyman George Geist is pushing this one. Attaboy, George!
See, this should be pretty clear. Any politician who is NOT for full public access to government records is, no doubt about it, trying to keep things from you. Not from the newspaper reporters, not from me, not from Connie Chung or Wally Kennedy or Geraldo Rivera, but from you.
Always remember, nasty stuff flourishes in the dark. Exposure to light destroys nasty stuff.
Anyway, we weren’t really talking about secrets, we were talking about a law that would let mothers drop off their babies, no questions asked. The proposed law doesn’t really provide full immunity, so mothers who have damaged or abused their less-than-month-old babies won’t be able to escape prosecution.
I suppose this is reasonable. If you have 30 days to return some merchandise you bought, you generally have to return it undamaged.
On the other hand, if a mother has already damaged her baby in some way, she would seem to be a prime candidate for this new law. If she hurt the child and knows she cannot drop the baby off and walk away, well, maybe her next option is no option at all and she does something way more drastic. Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
There are also no incentives with the Child Lemon Law. Gun surrender programs around the country usually involve some kind of payoff. Turn in a gun and get cash or baseball tickets or something. Maybe the state could spring for new lingerie or a bottle of champagne for the newly childless mom, or at least a pair of tickets to a movie she wouldn’t get to see because she was stuck at home with that caterwauling kid.
Not only will the kids who are turned in be a little safer, but we’ll all save a few bucks on Mother’s Day cards.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, May 9, 2000
Custody battles are never pleasant, but some just turn downright mean.
An important custody battle is shaping up in federal court, a battle that could set former friends against each other, neighbor against neighbor, relative against relative.
No, I’m not talking about the potential custody fight over Elian Gonzalez.
The custody tug of war I’m talking about is the one over Howdy Doody.
Some of you youngsters probably don’t even know who Howdy Doody is, but for many of us, he’s an old friend.
Howdy has not been on television for about 30 years. His alter-ego, Buffalo Bob Smith, passed away not too long ago, after taking his act on the road for many years.
Buffalo Bob created the character back in the 1940s, for a kids’ radio program. It was a Western-themed show and Bob Smith came up with an oafish character named Elmer, who would say, “Howdy doody!” to say hello.
The kids liked Elmer, so Smith renamed him Howdy Doody and refined the character a bit. When the show came to TV, a marionette was designed by Velma Dawson and used by Connecticut puppeteer Rufus Rose and his wife, Margaret. A copy of the puppet went to the Smithsonian Institution in 1980.
Now a U.S. District Court judge must decide who owns the original Howdy Doody marionette: the Rose family or a Detroit museum. The museum insist NBC and Rose wanted the puppet to go to there, but the family says that, while Rose did consider leaving the marionette to the museum, he and his survivors were not obligated to do so. The family also says the Howdy Doody they have is not the original, that the original’s whereabouts are unknown.
The Howdy being fought over is in a safe deposit box in Connecticut.
For years, Buffalo Bob was forced to travel and do his shows without Howdy because somebody — NBC executives, whoever — wouldn’t let the puppet travel.
Howdy and his neighbors were like family to kids from 1947 to about 1960. There was Clarabell the Clown, and Phineas T. Bluster, Chief Thunderthud (who created the word “kowabunga”), Princess Summerfall Winterspring, Dilly Dally, Flub-a-Dub and Howdy’s sister, Heidi. They all lived in Doodyville, by the way.
Eventually, Howdy’s show was challenged by the Mickey Mouse Club and Gumby. We Baby Boomers were growing up and it was hard to compete with Annette.
Who can forget the last Howdy Doody Show, on which the normally mute Clarabell actually spoke the words, “Goodbye, kids.” Chokes me up to think about it.
So now they’re fighting over who should get Howdy.
I don’t know who I should side with in this particular custody fight. If the Rose family gets to keep Howdy, I’ll never get to see him. Of course, chances of me traveling to Detroit to see him in the museum are also pretty slim.
I could see him easier in Washington, D.C., I suppose.
Doesn’t matter, I suppose, where the puppet is kept. The real Howdy will live on in the hearts of his fans forever. That’s probably where he belongs, anyway.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, May 8, 2000
The jack-booted federal agents haven’t shown up at my door yet, thank goodness.
Since last week, when I wrote about my travails with a stalking census taker and my refusal to answer his questions because I had already mailed in my form, I have heard from at least three other people about similar incidents.
One has gotten telephone messages from a census taker, even though she sent her forms in. Another had someone come to the house, even though she sent her forms in.
The third was a bit disturbing. An older woman called me to tell me that, despite the fact that she and her husband had mailed their forms in before the deadline, a census taker showed up the other night at dinner time. They told him they’d sent the form, but the guy said the government didn’t get it. He insisted they answer his questions. They protested. It was dinner time. They’d done what the government asked them to do.
This guy, however, must watch some TV. “Is that your final answer?” he said, emulating Regis Philbin. They said it was.
That’s when this guy told them he could have federal agents come to their door and added he could have someone bother them until they complied.
I think he scared them. While the woman tried to keep dinner warm, her husband stood in the driveway answering the census taker’s questions for 10 minutes.
I looked up the federal law on this. Refusing to answer the census can result in a $100 fine. It’s my understanding that the government isn’t even considering the utilization of jack-booted thugs to enforce the census.
(I checked the definition of jack-boots and was surprised to learn that jack-boots are heavy boots that come above the knee. Sounds more like pirates would wear something like that, and even then, they would probably look kind of kinky.)
Anyway, in case I am wrong about all this and wind up being carted away in the dark of night by guys in riot gear, I have been doing some research into prisons.
Prison is not a nice place to be. The couple of times my job has taken me into jails or prisons, I was overcome with claustrophobia and discomfort. I have heard of the so-called “country club” prisons where rich people and white-collar criminals are sometimes incarcerated. I would hope that refusing to answer the census, if it is a crime, is considered a white-collar crime.
On the other hand, you might be surprised to learn that the prison experience overall seems to be mellowing all over the world.
Take Bucks County Prison in Doylestown, Pa. You might remember, from all the Big House movies, how inmates use cigarettes as legal tender in stir. Well, what can cons do today, in a smoke-free prison?
In Doylestown, they use Tastykakes. The cupcakes and pies are given to inmates who do extra work. In the old days, prisoners who worked in the kitchen or laundry got two free packs of smokes a week. If the inmate didn’t smoke, he got Tastykakes. Now, with the cigarette ban, it’s all Tastykakes.
One official noted, “Now they are addicted to sugar instead of nicotine.”
The 16 varieties of Tastykakes cannot be bought in the commissary, so the only way to get them is to earn them with extra work, or barter for them. Officials say it’s not clear if there is a denomination scale, whether Butterscotch Krimpets are worth more than Kandy Kakes. (Thank goodness Tasty Baking Co. of Philadelphia was wise enough to rename that particular treat. Many years ago, if my memory serves, besides regular chocolate cupcakes, the company sold peanut butter cupcakes under the name Tandy Takes. Made you sound like Tweety Bird when you went to the store.)
In neighboring Montgomery County, Pa., prison inmates can buy Tastykakes in the commissary. Prisoners who do extra work are given commissary credits and can use them for all sorts of things, including candy bars, potato chips, Tastykakes, soap, toothpaste, anything for sale.
It’s not just county prisons that are trying to become kinder, gentler places.
In one of the world’s toughest prisons, Roumieh jail in Beirut, Lebanon, authorities will be offering singing lessons to inmates. Tra-la.
This place was the venue for riots a couple of years ago, in which several cons were wounded.
Since then, there have been several concerts at the jail by international and Lebanese performers. I don’t think Johnny Cash has been there yet, but you never know. Broadway shows will probably be next.
So, based on these revelations, you might think that, if I am busted by the feds, my prison time could be, if not pleasant, at least less miserable.
Not so. This would be a no-win situation for me. If I go to the slammer, I’ll either gain a hundred pounds stuffing my face with cupcakes or be forced to audition for the role of Daddy Warbucks in “Annie.”
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Tuesday, May 2, 2000
You saw the photograph, I presume? You know the one I mean. The snapshot of the heavily armed federal agent rousting 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez and fisherman Donato Dalrymple out of the closet in Miami. Right. THAT picture.
Well, I’m afraid you may soon see another version of that photo taken at my house, with my face and the beautiful face of my Closest Companion replacing those of the kid and the fisherman.
And it’s all because it’s getting harder and harder to obey the law.
And because my federal government lied to me.
Fill out your census form and mail it before a certain deadline and no census taker will come to your house. Since I dislike strangers coming to my door for any reason, I filled out my census form and mailed it before the deadline, so that no census taker would come to my house.
Well, a census taker has come to my house. Several times.
Last week, I found a notice in my door, informing me that a census taker had called and found me not at home. He asked that I call him and invite him back at a more convenient time. I, not liking strangers coming to my door for any reason, and knowing full well that I had mailed my census form by the deadline, so that no census taker would come to my door, ignored the request. I figured it was just some paperwork snafu.
The guy apparently has been back a time or two since, skulking around my place. I say skulking because of the way he stalked and approached us on Sunday.
My Closest Companion and I were getting in the car, on our way to dinner, when this guy comes galloping up to my Closest Companion’s side of the car, like he’d been hiding out waiting for us or something.
He wants to take a few minutes of our time to ask his questions. Nope, sorry, said we, we sent our form in under the deadline so no census taker would come to our door. He must be mistaken in thinking he needed to talk to us.
He protested. I protested. “I sent the form in before the deadline.”
“Well, we don’t have it,” he insisted. I was amazed that some guy in Pitman, NJ could say with such certainty that the behemoth government did not have my form. I had mailed it, though, so if they didn’t have it, I explained, that was not my problem. I figure that would be a problem between the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Postal Service. It would seem to be out of my hands.
The guy kept insisting and asking for my telephone number. We asked for copies of the form, so we could consider filling it out again, but he wouldn’t part with any paperwork.
So, after explaining again that I had already done my part, and not being thrilled about being ambushed by this guy in the first place and feeling like we were dealing with a telemarketer in person, we gave him a final turn down.
“So you’re refusing?” he said in a funereal tone.
“Yes,” I declared in my official voice, “I am refusing.”
There. I confessed.
So, if I get in trouble, it’s only because my government lied to me.
On our way to the restaurant, we passed a cop who had pulled over a driver and was ticketing him. The cop car, while fully marked, had no light bar across its roof. There were blinking red lights flashing from where they were hidden behind the patrol car’s front grill, but nothing atop the car.
My Closest Companion said she wouldn’t have pulled over for the cop, would probably have continued at a reasonable speed to the next convenience store or something, just because the guy didn’t have the light bar.
“That’s because you’ve been hanging out with me too long,” I said.
See, most people would have accepted that the blinking red lights belonged to a cop, but if you’ve been in my house long enough to read the catalogs I get, you’d know that blinking red lights that can be installed behind the grill of a car can be purchased easy enough by mail order.
That’s when I realized obeying the law is getting harder and harder for people like me. I guess knowledge IS a dangerous thing.
Well, luckily, no cop tried to pull us over while we were out, but I imagine jackbooted, machine-gun-toting thugs from the Census Enforcement Bureau will be breaking down my door any day now. I probably will need someone to handle the press for me.
I wonder what Marisleysis Gonzalez is doing these days?
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, May 1, 2000
I’m in the wrong racket. I’ve known for a long time that newspaper guys do not ever make big bucks, but now I’m being lured by the siren song of easy money.
I’m thinking seriously about becoming a federal researcher. Or a covert book supplier.
I heard on the radio that federal researchers have determined there’s a link between cheap beer and sexually transmitted diseases in teen-agers.
When I heard that, I wondered if they meant Old Iron Shavings Pilsner was dangerous, while fancy, expensive Ivy League Lager was safer.
Turns out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a health economist, whatever that is, study gonorrhea rates and increases in beer taxes. The researcher and his cohorts decided there is a link between cheap beer and sexually transmitted diseases. When the cost of beer goes up, the rate of gonorrhea among teen-agers decreases.
“Alcohol has been linked to risky sexual behavior among youth,” said the heath economist. This guy is a master of the understatement.
The study estimates that if we raised the tax on a six-pack of brew by 20 cents, the teen-age gonorrhea rate would be reduced by 9 percent.
This makes me wonder whether raising the price of the beer by 40 cents would reduce the rate by 18 percent and, beyond that, would each 20-cent increase reduce the STD rate by another 9 percent or would the reduction become exponential?
I tried to work all this out mathematically, but I got a bigger headache than the kind I get after drinking beer, cheap or otherwise.
So, anyway, I’m keeping my eye open for any federal researcher positions that open up.
In the meantime, I’m considering embarking on a life of possible crime.
It has come to my attention that a local school has banned Harry Potter books in school. Not in the curriculum or in the school library. The ban prohibits kids from bringing Harry Potter books to school. Period.
From the scuttlebutt I hear, I can’t tell whether it’s a decision by the school administrators or just one teacher, but the books have become unwelcome because they are about a 10-year-old boy who is a wizard. Or pretends to be.
I wanted to tell school officials that there is lots of sex, violence and the supernatural going on in the Bible, too, but that’s probably already banned in schools.
What’s next? Fairy tales? King Arthur and Merlin? The Wizard of Oz?
Personally, I believe in encouraging kids to read, no matter what it takes. If it takes novels about a little unwanted boy who imagines himself a magical character, or if it takes Star Wars novels that revolve around The Force, or if it takes X-Men comic books, so be it.
But if books are to become contraband, I’m contemplating turning to the dark side, myself. Perhaps I should start devising clever smuggling systems.
I could become, not a drug smuggler or a gun runner, but a covert book pusher.
My boss suggested we could start hiding books inside guns to smuggle them into schools, but he’s a bit more jaded than I am.
Imagine. The black market will become the book market. Kids will start sneaking books in everyplace they go. Into school. Into family rooms. Into fast food restaurants. Into churches. Just picture these kids, reading all over the place.
Heaven knows, books give people ideas. There is a danger that kids who read will develop ideas of their own.
Heh-heh-heh. I love this, I think.
Psst! Hey, kid! Wanna buy a book?
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, April 25, 2000
The public debates continue: Was the decision to take Elian Gonzalez Saturday morning at gunpoint right or wrong? Was the raid conducted in a tactically safe manner? Did the raiding party need to carry automatic weapons? Should Elian be with his father or the more distant relatives in Miami? Has the U.S. been duped into playing politics with a little boy? Why can’t they bring “Miami Vice” back in reruns? Was “Cop Rock” really the worst TV police show in history?
Well, I don’t think I have the answers to any of those questions, or at least answers that will satisfy everyone. These debates will rage on and on, until something else occupies our national attention.
I do, however, recognize what a tough job we have in policing ourselves in this country. We have certain rights which must be protected. We must follow certain rules in enforcing the law.
That’s why we don’t whup terrorism as easily as we’d like. We play by the rules, and must do so, while the terrorists don’t have any rules.
But this adherence to certain rules and the protection of individual rights doesn’t just affect global topics like terrorism. It also affects local law enforcement and the way we are allowed to handle those who cause us problems.
So you might as well get used to the fact: if the government has trouble dealing with terrorists who want to kill and maim, you’re never going to have an easy time trying to deal with neighbors whose stereos are too loud, people who park in your spot and kids hanging on the corner.
It’s frustrating, I know. But there’s no easy solution in sight.
There are some creative solutions to annoying problems, but most of them come from countries that are, how shall I say this, much more restrictive than the United States.
Here’s a recent example:
In the city of Medina, in Saudi Arabia, some students at girls’ schools and their parents complained about a bunch of boys milling around outside the schools. A local newspaper declared this juvenile loitering to be immoral behavior. The prince of Medina has organized a committee to mete out strict punishment. The punishments being considered? Prison sentences and public flogging.
Wow!
Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising. This IS a part of the world where thieves have their hands lopped off!
I know, I know, behavior like this is generally frowned on in less-than-polite democratic societies, but still — Well, it’s fun to daydream now and then.Just imagine for a brief moment how peaceful your summer evenings could be if the loud-mouthed oafs who hang out nearby — generally, they seem to be right under your open bedroom window — carousing until way past your bedtime blasting their stereos and defying all civilized attempts to shut them up knew they could wind up in the slammer, or worse, be flogged in the center of town?
Once your wishful thinking is over, though, it’s comforting to know we ARE protected by our Constitution after all.
Still, sometimes, I don’t think the Constitution goes far enough.
After watching Marisleysis Gonzalez cry her eyes out on cue all weekend long, for instance, has made me long for constitutional protections against unregulated civilian overacting.
Oops! There I go, daydreaming again
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, April 24, 2000
I kind of like the idea that I can perform a public service through this column now and then.
No, I’m not going to take a colleague’s advice and suggest putting Elian Gonzalez on e-bay and letting people bid to keep him here or send him back to Cuba, although I think ending the ordeal — no, not for the kid; for all of us — could get me nominated for a humanitarian award.
I will, however, make some appropriate suggestions now and then.
Today’s suggestions are: Duct tape and no Easter eggs for Fido.
I’m one of those people who are convinced that duct tape is the Force referred to in all the Star Wars movies. It does, after all, have a dark side and a light side and it does hold the universe together.
It is good for all sorts of things.
Now, it seems, it can help protect you from an alligator attack.
I wrote, not long ago, about a neat little book that offers advice on how to survive worst-case scenarios: how to fend off attacks by sharks, snakes and alligators, how to fly a plane in an emergency, what to do if your parachute doesn’t open, how to jump from a moving car.
That book, though, didn’t contain information about how to protect yourself from an alligator attack in the first place. But thanks to a guy with the unlikely name of Gemini Wink, we now know.
Duct tape.
Wink, visiting a pal in Florida, went traipsing through a swamp taking pictures of an alligator. He was marking his trail with pieces of duct tape, which is pretty smart. No one uses breadcrumbs anymore, especially in an environment in which critters would EAT the breadcrumbs.
So wrapped up was ol’ Gemini Wink that he didn’t realize, a) it was getting late, b) he was getting lost and, c) he was getting in over his head.
Well, over his hips, at least. He was suddenly in waist-deep swamp water. Up to you-know-where in alligators, as the saying goes.
If he could stalk a gator, Wink figured, a gator could stalk him.
So he clambered 40 feet up a tree and duct taped himself to it so he could sleep without falling into the clutches of a hungry alligator.
Luckily, he heard noises coming from nearby and started hollering for help. His buddy also reported him missing. Cops launched an all-out dog-and-helicopter search and found Wink in his tree. Safe from gators. And only about 400 yards from his buddy’s house.
I don’t know whether it’s good for gators to eat people, but apparently, it’s not good for dogs to eat your leftover Easter candy.
The National Canine Defense League in London said chocolate contains a chemical called theobromine that can be toxic to dogs, if ingested in large quantities.
Milk chocolate is the least harmful and cocoa powder is the worst.
So, be kind to your four-footed friend and keep those chocolate Easter goodies away from the pooch.
I, of course, perform these public services without a fee.
There’s a woman in Italy who is trying to make a few bucks from it.
The 26-year-old housewife in Varese, recognizing that many people are just too darned busy to pray, will do it for her clients.
For 3,000 lire — that’s a buck and a half in American money — she says a prayer or makes the sign of the cross for you or some lost relative. She has other services, that can cost as much as 50,000 lire (for that amount, she’ll say a rosary.)
For 25,000 lire, she’ll come to your house to say a little prayer in your house — she does charge extra for travel costs.
You’ve got to love her slogan. Her brochure points out you have only one soul and says, “If you don’t have time to save it, call me; I’ll take care of it.”
I wish I’d thought of that first.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, April 18, 2000
The teen-ager who has fathered two children with his school teacher has decided to cash in on what once was true love. Superman’s tights are up for grabs. And having a social conscience is now as easy as shopping at your neighborhood convenience store.
In Seattle, the kid who started having sex with his teacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, when he was only 12, and who has fathered two children with her, has decided it’s time to go for the bucks.
You probably remember this story. Mary Kay had one baby and was sentenced to serve time in prison for child rape. She was released, on condition that she stay away from the boy, but they got caught in the back seat of a car, so she’s back in the slammer, and has had his second child.
The kid and his mother have insisted from the start that this wasn’t something cheap and superficial. He and Mary Kay truly love each other.
Ah, but now the kid is 16 and the father of two girls and he apparently has come to the cold realization that keeping two babies in Pampers and pureed peas and buying the latest Nikes and a Sony PlayStation can be rather expensive. He and his mother have now decided he was a victim after all. They have sued the town and the school district, claiming they failed to protect him from the sexual advances of a woman nearly three times his age.
The law suit is seeking at least a million bucks in damages.
Of course, if you have a million bucks and you don’t need it to buy baggy pants and baby wipes, you’ll be able to bid on some of the movie and TV memorabilia being auctioned in New York: A pair of ruby slippers made for Judy Garland, the Cowardly Lion’s costume, Auric Goldfinger’s Rolls Royce from the James Bond movie and Superman’s capes and tights.
Anyway, where would someone keep this kind of stuff? I run out of space at home for books and magazines I accumulate. How do you display Superman’s tights?
Unless, of course, you were planning to use this stuff. I suppose a pair of Superman’s tights, impervious to everything but Kryptonite, might have been something Mary Kay could have used, but it’s too late to worry about that now.
I’m not bidding because the ruby slippers wouldn’t fit me and, besides, most of the stuff being auctioned off is expected to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I suppose I COULD bid on the yachting cap worn by the Skipper in “Gilligan’s Island,” which would fit my style more than a Superman outfit or ruby slippers, but even Alan Hale’s cap is expected to fetch about 10 grand.
Those of you not shopping for collectibles but for causes might want to check out the next big protest demonstration.
From what I’ve heard, at the weekend’s big rally against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, you didn’t actually have to protest against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
At the gathering point at the Ellipse on the National Mall in Washington, there were about 13 different tables set up. Each represented a different cause and each, conveniently enough, had picket signs available for those causes.
Now THIS is a great idea. Grab your “Down with the World Bank and the IMF” sign, run downtown, get hit with pepper spray, get your nose bloodied, get arrested and bailed out, then run back and pick up a sign that says “Save the Narwhal” or “U.S. Out of Miami,” whatever. Police said they used smoke bombs to help disperse the crowds, although protesters insisted they had been tear gassed. What self-respecting protester would want to admit they’d been vanquished by simple smoke?
In the old days, protesters actually had to make their own signs and carry them to and from demonstrations, along with bladders of pig blood and not-so-easy-to-carry containers of manure. This new development could attract a whole new generation of social activists.
Although, if you are not willing to make a protest sign yourself, I would question just how ACTIVE an activist you really are.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, April 17, 2000
I love my job. No, really, I do.
Oh, sure, some days it does get a bit dicey around here. When a handful of reporters have to get information from all 24 municipalities in the county at 4 p.m., or when there are too many important meetings happening on the same night, or when the yogurt hits the fan, it can get pretty tense in the newsroom.
Even on a regular day, people can make your life interesting, calling to complain about this or that, wanting you to write a story about what is probably the most important thing happening to them, asking you to send a photographer out right away to get a picture of their children playing in the snow. My favorite is people who call to complain about obituaries, who start out telling you how insensitive you are in their time of loss and who end up with curses so foul passing through their lips you wonder how they can eat without being poisoned.
Yes, sirree, I really do love my job.
On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be a gas to do other peoples’ jobs for a day now and then, just for the heck of it.
Whose jobs would be fun to try?
Well, I wouldn’t want to try my hand at teaching. I have been a special guest in classrooms, from third grade to college, often enough to know I don’t want to try educational pursuits.
I covered law enforcement for 10 years and know I don’t need to give the policing profession a try.
And neither do I want to be a lawyer for a day. The books they need to read look pretty boring.
Sitting in as a judge for a day might be quite enlightening. Trouble is, I don’t think judges in this day and age are actually allowed to shout, “Off with his head!” or “Hang him!"
Maybe I could fill in as one of Elian Gonzalez’’ Miami relatives for a day. How hard can it be to convince a 6-year-old boy that if he stays here he can play with his electric car and video games and eat cheese puffs all day and have people like Gloria Estefan, Andy Garcia and his supermodel-wannabe-cousin Marisleysis around to play with 24 hours a day, but if he goes back to Cuba, where that Spawn of Satan Fidel Castro eats children, he will have no friends, will have to chop sugar cane all day and will have to eat day-old dog food?
Maybe I could join the Cuban-American community in Miami and, carefully forgetting for the moment that we weren’t strong enough to launch a successful attack on a teeny-weeny little Caribbean country in 1962, threaten to bring the United States government to its knees.
But I think the real fun might be pretending to be a politician for a day.
I wonder if I have the temperament for wheeling and dealing? Maybe I could be a freeholder for a day, or a state senator or assemblyman for a day. Maybe our governess, Christie, would allow me to fill in for her in the State House for a day.
Of course, I really DO love my job. I think I’ll probably just do what people have accused me of for many years.
I’ll just keep pretending to be a newspaper man.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, April 11, 2000
A friend of mine recently sent me, via e-mail, the winners of the latest Darwin Awards.
The Darwin Awards are loosely based on naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, or survival of the fittest. These awards are probably part truth, part fiction, but they can be quite entertaining.
They are given to people who manage to do away with themselves in quite stupid ways. I believe the descriptions of these stupid events are a bit too graphic for general consumption. One example I can mention involved a guy who had the bright idea of running electrical cords from his home into the nearby river. He electrocuted loads of fish, which came to the surface, belly up. Elated that his plan had worked, our hero waded out into the river to collect his bounty. He forgot to turn the electricity off. Zap!
Anyway, based on the wide circulation of the Darwins, I think I will have my own awards for really goofy people who show up in really goofy news items. I don’t quite know what to call them yet, but here are some inaugural nominations.
A Philadelphia police woman with four years on the job recently managed to get lost driving from a hospital in center city to the Bridesburg section. The woman’s marked police car disappeared at about 9:50 p.m. Cops searched for her like crazy, even using a helicopter. She says she made a wrong turn off an interstate, crossed into New Jersey — wasn’t the bridge over the Delaware River a tip-off? — and wound up northbound on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Somewhere near the Newark Airport, she decided to flash her lights and sound her siren to pull over a state trooper — a New Jersey state trooper, of course — and ask for directions. She got back to the city at about 2 in the morning.
And you thought reluctance to stop and ask directions was a guy thing.
In Erie, Pa., a 45-year-old woman was sentenced to two years in prison for pouring gasoline on her boyfriend’s porch and threatening to torch it with him inside.
“I still love her,” he said of the woman he’d met a year and a half ago in a counseling session for substance abusers. He said his main squeeze had been drinking the night of the attempted cremation.
“She just flips out. She hates all men when she drinks vodka. The beast comes out,” he said.
He had posted $2,000 bail when she was busted and pleaded for leniency for her in court. The man, who lost his legs in a car crash 20 years ago, said she cooks, cleans and does “everything a good woman is supposed to do for her man.”
He’ll be waiting for her when she gets out. Given their history, they’ll probably celebrate with Bloody Marys.
A laptop computer was snatched in a subway station in London last month. That isn’t all that amazing, until you learn that it was stolen from an employee of MI5, Britain’s internal security agency, which is sort of like their version of the FBI. Oh, and the computer contained secret intelligence information about Northern Ireland.
Ooops.
In Ohio, a judge refused to allow a man to legally change his name to Santa Claus. If he’d allowed the name change, said the judge, eventually this guy would die and there would be an obituary in the papers for Santa Claus.
“What kind of parent would tell their child, ‘Oh, look, Santa is dead.”’
Talk about being a worry-wart.
And, finally, in New Hampshire, an 18-year-old guy was elected to the post of school district clerk, even though he had no idea what a school district clerk does.
Imagine that, a candidate for public office who doesn’t have a clue. Oh, wait. There’s nothing unusual in that. Never mind.
Anyway, you can probably come up with some nominees on your own.
Now all we need is a cool name for the awards.
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Monday, April 10, 2000
While it may be true that you can’t go home again, sometimes you can get close enough to catch a glimpse of the old neighborhood.
My Closest Companion and I traipsed over to Hell Town in Philadelphia the other night to hear some excellent music by Guy Clark and Jesse Winchester.
Hell Town is that section of old Philadelphia along 3rd Street, just above Market. The show was at the Painted Bride Art Center on Vine Street. The center has been there 15 years. I used to live just around the corner, near 4th and Vine, back in the mid-1970s. Just down the street from where the Painted Bride is now is where the old JR Club, an after-hours joint, was located. A few doors away was the Cockroach Club, a storefront American Legion Post where neighbors could get a beer now and then.
At the time, I lived in an apartment under a speakeasy.
The neighborhood is a bit different these days. It still looks a little gritty, but it has gone a little bit upscale since the days it was home to down-and-out honky-tonk singers like me.
Still, it was kind of fun to head into the area Friday night. And, if that wasn’t pleasurable enough, I found a parking place on Vine Street right in front of the Painted Bride Art Center!
Then it turned out that one of the guys behind New Park Entertainment, the company that was producing the show, is Bill Rodgers, someone I knew in the music business at least 25 years ago.
But then, things really got good!
Jesse Winchester has mellowed like fine wine. Despite his gentile Southern speech and homey approach to life, Winchester is one of the most erudite, sophisticated songwriters ever to have strummed a guitar. I’m sure most people don’t immediately recognize his name, but some have perhaps heard his most famous compositions: “Mississippi, You’re On My Mind,” “Yankee Lady” and “Brand New Tennessee Waltz.”
With Winchester, there are no smoke or mirrors and no need for them. He’s a slight, soft-spoken guy with gray hair and beard, wearing a comfy looking sweater and boat shoes. His small, classical acoustic guitar has an electric pick-up installed, but he under plays just about everything, the more to emphasize the magic he makes with his voice.
Jesse simply opens his mouth and the songs fall out on their own. There is no shouting. He finds the highs and lows naturally and his voice IS the instrument. He’s so laid back, even his sighs and breaths, his hand motions and facial expressions, become integral parts of the songs.
My Closest Companion was perhaps familiar with only “Yankee Lady” in Winchester’s repertoire. Despite that, she was spellbound by every song. One even brought unexpected tears to her eyes.
“That was beautiful,” she said when Winchester left the stage and left the audience breathless. “I’d never heard the songs before, but, one after another, they became like old favorites.”
Guy Clark IS an old favorite. I have been listening to his songs since the early ’70s. I think I was introduced to them by Bruce Sturtevant, the folkie who emcee’d the old Perimeter Coffeehouse at Rutgers in Camden. When I was playing music for a living, I performed many Guy Clark songs: “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train,” “Like A Coat from the Cold.” There’s one, a kind of talking blues thing called “Let It Roll,” that, without fail, makes me cry the minute Guy starts singing it.
When he did a song he wrote for his father, Clark pulled the plug out of his guitar and stepped on our side of the microphone to sing it REALLY unplugged for the intimate crowd.
For at least 25 years I have been trying to analyze the appeal of Guy Clark songs. The best I can figure is that he consistently makes you think he’s been reading your mail. He just writes stuff that seems to come out of YOUR soul. It’s stuff you’d write, if you could write like Guy Clark.
His songs always seem to contain words to live by. As often as I listen to his songs, I continue to find new things all the time. The latest wisdom I came up with is this: “There ain’t no rule if you don’t break it. There ain’t no chance if you don’t take it.”
Let it roll, Guy, let it roll.
Thanks for taking me to the old neighborhood again.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, April 4, 2000
He’s everywhere you look these days, this extremely photogenic little boy from Cuba. The omnipresence of the story is mind-numbing.
You all know the original story by now, don’t you? Little kid’s mother drowns on the way to Florida and the Free World from Castro’s Communist Cuba. Boy miraculously survives.
That could almost have been the end of the story. He could have been sent home or kept in this country, and that might have been the end of it.
But that was not to be. The Cuban émigré population of south Florida rallied around the boy. The kid was transformed instantly from a motherless boy into a political football.
I read somewhere that 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, in a recent TV interview, seemed to indicate he thinks his mother is still alive. Maybe she’s lost or just doesn’t know how to find him, he thinks.
Having survived the tragic stormy sea, Elian surely doesn’t deserve to be in the center of this purely political maelstrom.
Some immigrants who become troublesome get stuck in barbed-wire compounds to sit out the legal bickering. Others get booted out of the country. Some simply fade away. Remember little Amerikan? His father turned out to be a lazy freeloader; we wished him a bon voyage and good riddance as he took the family back to Kosovo.
In the beginning of all this, I believed Elian should have been returned to Cuba. Sure, maybe his mother died trying to get him from Cuba to the U.S., but I figured the kid’s family, or what was left of it, was in Cuba, so he should be there, too.
I keep getting the feeling this country has kidnapped the boy as a political ploy, to tweak Fidel’s nose.
Since Elian has been here, he has been staying with relatives. I don’t know exactly what the relationship is.
One thing I do believe is that the young woman with whom Elian is seen and photographed most often, his cousin Marisleysis, is certainly sucking up her 15 minutes of fame. She seems to be in almost every photo.
Cuba wants the boy back. His father says he wants his son back, although I don’t know for sure if Elian was actually living with the man before all this. I tend to think not. Nevertheless, dad is vying for “Father of the Year” honors now.
Angry crowds of Cuban émigrés have formed in Miami and there is continuing concern that, if the U.S. does not send the boy back to Havana, there will be rioting in the streets.
Amazing. All this over a 6-year-old boy. Unfortunately, a decision on his fate gets more difficult to make every day.
Here’s a little boy who survived an angry sea that killed his mother. That’s pretty traumatic. Are there psychiatrists in impoverished Cuba who are equipped to deal with the problems this kid may have as he grows up?
And why would this kid want to go home now, anyway? Just look at the pictures. Elian with his new baseball glove, bat and uniform. Elian with new toys. Elian with his cute new pet bunny. Elian playing on a swing set. Elian driving his new, electric toy car. Elian out on the town, dating supermodels in South Beach.
Well, not exactly, but almost. That kid is doing things dirt-poor Habaneros will never get to do, at least not while Castro and Communism remain in power there.
The boy’s grandmothers were here, but failed to negotiate his release. It’s possible his father may come next.
Say, has anyone seen Jesse Jackson or Jimmy Carter? Maybe they could bring this mess to a peaceful, honorable solution.
-30-
Monday, April 3, 2000
I’m beginning to question my resolve in my campaign for more accurate English.
I have long advocated the use of proper grammar, especially in the written word, yet I have also espoused the elimination of the much-misused apostrophe.
I have favored the creation of new words, yet I have also railed against the increasingly informal style of writing, punctuating and spelling often found in e-mails and online communications. Am I being open-minded about all this? Or am I just being wishy washy? Use of the English language is very important to me. I get passionate about it.
If I believe we should do away with the apostrophe and accept what the language would look like without it — “Id drive Jims car if hed let me” — I should be able to accept this: “if you’ve received an e-mail that loks like this...you’r NOT alone!!!!!!!!!:-)”
I hate it when I find myself being on the fence like this. I like to think I am quite opinionated and ready to make a decision about something. On the other hand, I like to avoid confrontation.
I like to think I’m an OK writer and I enjoy being able to use the language, but why shouldn’t I be able to consider using the language in other, less-established ways, as well?
Back in the ’60s, when I was beginning my long love affair with writing, I sometimes experimented with methods Beat writers had used before me. I wrote short stories and poems entirely in lower-case letters. I thought it looked pretty hip and it was certainly easier to type that way.
I grew out of that. Maybe I just learned to type better.
I maintain an interactive forum online and recently, a friend of mine posted a joke. The joke contained a word, an epithet, I do not like. I removed the joke from the forum and e-mailed my friend an explanation.
Then I started second guessing what I had done. I hate censorship. Just because I dislike a certain word, I excised it. Isn’t that censorship? Yes, of course it is.
If you believe in astrology, you should know I am a Libra, depicted by the scales. I don’t especially believe in things astrological, but I must admit the supposed traits of Libra describe me perfectly. I was born in the dead center of the Libra cycle, so I strive not only for balance but perfect balance.
Yet, despite what I have just said, I also am a rebel and an iconoclast and have trouble following rules and taking orders. I can’t explain how the two extremes manage to co-exist in the same person.
There is one thing of which you can be certain: I will not be embracing the use of smileys or emoticons, those horrid little faces made up of errant punctuation marks. The lame excuse for their use is that it’s hard to convey emotion when writing on the Internet.
How, may I ask, is writing on the Internet any different than writing for any other medium? When monks labored to copy books by hand, for readers in far-flung corners of the known and unknown world, they didn’t find it necessary to draw little smiley faces throughout the scholarly tomes they were printing to make sure people understood the emotions being conveyed.
And neither do I.
Personally, I think people are going overboard with cyber-English. Shorthand is fine, I suppose, but some of the abbreviations being used online are absurd and then you run across sticklers for Internet style who not only use those ugly little faces but insist that WRITING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IS YELLING and rude.
What? Yelling? I’m rude because I type in upper-case letters? Are you crazy? One cannot yell in print! That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! Listen, you want yelling! I’ll give you —
Excuse me. I’ll be all right now. This just gets me all riled up.
Maybe we should just change the subject. Want to talk about politics or religion?
-30-
March 28, 2000
It’s been 25 years since the fall of Saigon and I still have some unfinished business.
I didn’t serve in Vietnam. I was in the Army National Guard for six years, learning how to quell riots in the streets, should they happen — a skill we never had to use, thank goodness — and providing relief after floods, something we were called on to do.
My unfinished business has nothing to do with the war and everything to do with some of those who served in it.
Back in 1992, Ray Milligan, who was then police chief in Deptford, told me of a visit he’d made to Vietnam for a medical aid program. In the streets of Da Nang, there were vendors selling American dog tags.
I don’t know why, but the very thought ticked me off. Milligan was due to return to Southeast Asia that summer, so I gave him a hundred bucks and asked him to buy me as many of the dog tags as he could. At least they’d be back home, I thought.
Milligan added a few bucks of his own to the pot and, when he came back, he handed me a bag of dog tags, maybe 500 of them.
I was overwhelmed, I think. I didn’t know exactly what to do with them.
Some of the oblong metal pieces are dirty and bent. Some obviously were thrown out when whoever was stamping them made a mistake.
But what of the rest? I don’t know if they are fakes or what.
My immediate plan was to match the dog tags to the names on the Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial, in Washington, D.C. To do so then would have required flipping pages through printed lists of the names on the Wall, looking for matches with the dog tags. It would have taken forever.
It’s something that seemed to be a daunting task. I think I got the tags sorted into bags by branches of the military, but I never got past that point.
I still don’t know what the outcome of this project should be, but something nags at me now and then to get the darned thing finished.
But, what will that mean, finishing the project? If I come across a dog tag bearing the name of someone killed or missing in Vietnam, what then? If the GI’s identity can be confirmed, do I try to contact relatives and see if, after 25 or more years, they would want that dog tag?
I don’t know for sure. I just know I felt that those old, dirty metal relics should not have remained in Vietnam, should not have been sold as souvenirs.
Now, the names on the Wall are computerized. There’s an Internet database available. You can type in whatever information you have about a GI and let the computer search the names on the Wall. The dog tags have names and service numbers and maybe some other information that will be useful in searching for matches.
Unfortunately, it’s STILL an overwhelming task — at least for me. So I figured, if I’m ever going to get this done, I need help.
But who? Maybe we need a school, someplace with a computer lab with Internet access, where several people can do searches at the same time.
Then we need some volunteers, people who are computer savvy, to do the searches. Maybe the county veterans’ office has some suggestions. Maybe veterans’ groups in the county could help.
If we attack the project with a small army of volunteers, we might be able to go through all these old dog tags in no time flat. Maybe there ARE some matches.
We’ve got about two months until Memorial Day. Maybe we can have some new memories to honor by then.
If you want to help, get in touch.
©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, March 27, 2000
For years, there has been talk of computers replacing newspapers.
It’s the wave of the future, the latest thing, the newest technology, you’ll get your news off your computer screen and won’t need your newspaper anymore.
I scoff at these prognostications. Newspapers may be affected by the availability of news online, but they will never be replaced by computers.
First of all, some people simply do not like reading articles from a computer screen. They will be the holdouts.
There are other reasons, of course, why newspapers will not be rendered obsolete. You can’t wrap stuff in your computer when you’ve finished reading the news. You can’t line the bottom of your birdcage with a computer. And most people really do not have laptop computers, so they won’t be able to read the news in the bathroom.
So, I think the printed newspaper will survive.
Magazines I’m not so sure about.
The latest Webolution — that’s Web revolution, for those of you not accustomed to seeing newly created words — will not be faster videos or screaming music downloads or blinking doodads. The latest Webolution will be smells.
That’s right, boys and girls. Your computer will soon be able to give off aromas.
There’s a company — called either DigiScents or iSmell — doing research on “scentography” right now. (Talk about made-up words.) They have a little box that contains little tubes of oils. The device heats them up and combines them to create appropriate fragrances. The doodad is called an odor synthesizer.
A magazine writer who witnessed a demonstration of the stinky little device said he was able to smell orange peels, cedar, wood smoke, bananas — a total of 26 scents in all.
All of this is just fascinating.
Just think about it. Not all that long ago, the Internet was a network of text, ugly and devoid of style, being sent from one military facility to another. Then we got graphics and the graphics got better looking. The computers got faster and more sophisticated. We got moving pictures on the computer screen. We started sending sound, we can talk to each other in real time and now can download digitized music with incredible sound fidelity.
We can flash photos of the new baby clear across the world in a matter of nanoseconds. We can shop online. They’re even putting coupons online — although I think you STILL have to print them out to actually use them.
So I guess smells are the logical next step.
Personally, I don’t want aromas wafting from my computer. The world around me is redolent enough, thank you, without computer-generated stink being added to the mix.
But this is why I think magazines may be facing a serious challenge from computers.
Magazines no longer are content to offer just words and pictures. For years now, many magazines have reeked with a plethora of perfumes and scents. The smells are so strong in some perfume ads, I find it difficult to page through the magazines.
So now, with this Webolutionary new computer smellware, personal computers will not only drive you nuts when they crash or take long to do some simple task, but will be able to irritate your sinuses and annoy you in a more efficient manner.
Right now, according to the latest industry rumors, hardware companies are attempting to create something that will allow annoying little advertising cards to drop from your computer and fall all over the floor.
Whew! That’ll REALLY stink!
-30-
Tuesday, March 21, 2000
I suppose you could call this “The Aging of Rock and Roll, Part 2.”
My Closest Companion and I went to see music legends Dave Mason and Leon Russell Saturday night.
First of all, let me tell you about the place they were appearing. It was the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood. New Park Entertainment put the show together. They will be presenting Bruce Cockburn there in May and, hopefully, have many more shows planned for this place. It’s an amazingly intimate theater setting. The sound was a little funky for Leon and loud for Dave, but that was more the sound crew than the room.
This place is easy to get to, has adjacent parking, was easy to get out of. The staff was friendly and there was even soap at the sinks in the men’s room.
Anyway, the age thing was a repeat of when we went to see Boz Scaggs last year. I am always surprised to see how old these rock-and-roll fans are! Gray-haired guys with ponytails. Guys who are bald on top, with ponytails. Gray-haired women in shawls and long, hippie dresses. Many of the men seem to be a bit pudgy. Some wear leather hats that probably rest carefully in closets in between concerts and music festivals.
Where did all these old people come from?\Well, yes, you’re right. I am just as old. But it’s still a shock.
Of course, it’s not just the audience that’s being affected by time.
Leon Russell is ageless. He has had long, white hair for the last 20 or 25 years, at least. It’s always been hard to figure just how old he is. He was “older” way back when. His snow-white mane flows out from under his straw cowboy hat down past his shoulders, merging with his long, full snow-white beard. He must be in the neighborhood of 70.
Saturday night, though, Leon walked out on stage leaning on a cane. It appeared he has a leg or hip problem. THAT was a shocker.
The cane didn’t seem to affect his music. It’s still adrenaline-producing, as always.
Leon and I go back a long time. I first saw him at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia at the Joe Cocker Mad Dogs and Englishmen concert in 1971, I think.
Saturday, I got goosebumps when he did “Delta Lady” and did my best not to cry out loud when he sang “A Song for You.”
Dave Mason, one of the original rock guitar heroes, was likewise incredible. Gone is HIS long hair, though. Mason has his hair buzzed to within a whisper of his scalp and his beard is just as short. He looked a little — well, pudgy — in black, baggy high-water pants and white sneakers.
He’s a few years older than me, apparently, although I outpace him on the Pudge-O-Meter, I’m afraid.
His appearance did absolutely nothing to diminish his music. It also did nothing to diminish the ardor of the fans who wanted to get up and boogie.
The players in both bands were pretty young, but they have done their homework. In Leon’s band, the drummer is his son and there's a young woman who plays the African beaded gourd — yep, that’s all she played. Everyone was wondering if she was a musician’s girlfriend, or something. Turns out, she was Leon’s middle daughter.
The audience was almost as much fun as the artists. It seemed almost everyone in the audience knew each other. I was feeling so left out at one point, I stood up and waved to a really geeky looking guy on the other side of the room. I didn’t know him, but I wanted people to think I knew SOMEBODY there. He was grateful to have someone waving at him, too, so he grinned and waved back.
Luckily, it turned out I DID know some people there. There were several lawyers and a councilman and even a judge in the audience.
The judge got paged just as Leon was ending his set. Somebody needed a restraining order. The judge climbed over his seat and went out into the hallway. It was still pretty loud, so he got in the elevator where it was quiet and rode up and down, talking on his cell phone. The doors of the elevator opened and Leon and his band got on. Just as the elevator started to move, the judge said, “OK, I’ll grant the restraining order.”
The entire band turned in unison and stared at him. The judge smiled and said, “Great show, guys!”
Ah, it’s only rock and roll, but I like it.
Monday, March 20, 2000
A book called “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook” is receiving a lot of attention these days. It was written by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht and published by Chronicle Books in November.
It’s a natural, really. The book has a Web site that offers excerpts from the book, explaining how to escape from quicksand, ram a car, fend off a shark, take a punch, jump from a bridge or a cliff into a river, jump from a building into a trash dumpster, perform a tracheotomy, treat a bullet or knife wound, land a plane and survive if your parachute fails to open.
This is the stuff that appeals to the Walter Mitty, would-be adventurer in all of us. There will even be a sequel, a book dedicated to worst-case travel scenarios - with information on how to escape from a burning hotel room and how to pass a bribe - to be published next spring. There will be a 2001 calendar coming out.
I think this book is a great idea. In fact, I think I ought to be able to come up with something similar, but different.
The book I want to put out would be a sort of consumer’s guide, the kind of stuff you won’t find anywhere else.
I think I’ll call it “Don’t Go There!”
It would mostly be companies and services to avoid.
Like the name of the company that provided security at George Harrison’s house when someone managed to get in anyway and stab the former Beatle. (According to the news reports, it was George’s wife, Olivia, who actually fended off the attacker, whacking him in the head with a lamp. There’s no word if George sang “She’s So Fine” afterwards.)
So if you’re looking for a bodyguard service - don’t go there! And if you want to put in a good security system - don’t go there!
Or the name of the trucking company that was hired to deliver the Oscars but somehow lost the gold statuettes or allowed them to be stolen from the loading dock. You’d think it would be tough to misplace - or even steal - 54 eight-pound Oscars, each standing 13.5 inches high. That’s 432 pounds of Oscars!
So, if you’re shipping something valuable - don’t go there!
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is scheduled to give out the awards on March 26 - Wow! That’s next Sunday! There are reports that new statues can be delivered at the last minute. If not, we may watch the stars being handed IOUs or certificates good for one Oscar.
There was some mixup when the Oscar ballots were sent out early this month. Sacks containing 4,000 ballots were misrouted and the Academy had to send out new ones and extend the voting deadline to just three days before the TV show. I suppose Price-Waterhouse, who counts the ballots, will be working overtime.
But it wasn’t a trucking company that lost the ballots. It was just the good ol’ U.S. Postal Service, I hear.
So, if you want to send something by mail - oh, right. Never mind.
By the way, as I was digging through absurd news stories for this column, I read that the reward for the unidentified guy who, in a fit of road rage, hurled a dog to its death in California recently has risen to $110,000.
One hundred ten thousand dollars!
I have never seen a reward that high for someone who killed a human.
Wait! I could pursue this subject, but I think I’ll heed my own advice: don’t go there!
Tuesday, March 14, 2000
The whole world is going crazy and there’s no way to hide from it. I don’t advocate burying our heads in the sand when it comes to the lunacy that seems to be affecting our planet, but I think we should be able to take a respite from it now and then.
Trouble is, that seems to be getting harder and harder to do.
In the news, you see that a 27-year-old Connecticut woman was arrested for sending her two sons to school with tools. That sounds pretty odd at first, but read on.
Mom says she had her boys, 5 and 7, tote along a screwdriver and a hammer, not to help build something in shop class, but to use as defensive weapons. Mom apparently believed her sons were being harassed on the school bus.
What kind of mother hands boys that young tools and explains how to use them to hurt another person? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I believe in self defense and I believe in our right to use tools, weapons, whatever it takes, to defend our own lives, but these are little boys! Besides, mom could wind up in the slammer for up to 10 years for somethinglike this.
Remember, Mother’s Day isn’t too far off. Maybe this mom is a candidate for Mother of the Year.
I don’t know which is worse, mothers equipping their kids with weapons masquerading as tools, or schools busting kids for having nail files or innocuous pen knives. Both disturb me a great deal. But sometimes we see this stuff on the news and we get tired of it. We’ve heard enough about airplane explosions and bus plunges and mothers who send their kids to school with tools. So we grab the remote and decide to indulge in some primetime TV distraction.
What a choice! Shows about teen-age witches and teen-age vampires and teen-age werewolves and teen-agers affected by a 1947 UFO crash in New Mexico and teen-agers affected by puberty. Shows about people who can read your mind, see the future, geez — I don’t know. It’s like we have traded prime-time TV drama for the metaphysical.
Of course, we could switch over to the UHF channels and watch totally inane sitcoms and martial arts movies, or click onto the cable networks and see shows about the secret lives of old movie stars, movies that are so lame they went straight to video and never appeared in theaters, investigative reports about murderers, World War II documentaries, nature shows, fashion shows, cooking shows and reruns of Bob Vila avoiding hard labor.
If you are particularly adept with the remote control device, you may be able to catch reruns of “The A Team,” “Matt Houston,” “Matlock” or “The Waltons.”
And now, lucky us! We get to watch shows called “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” and “Greed” and “I’ll Do Anything For Big Bucks.”
Of course, at any hour, day or night, you are absolutely guaranteed to find a wrestling program and a station showing “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I think it’s in the Bill of Rights.
If you get fed up with all that stuff, you can switch back over to the regular networks and watch news magazine shows. Of course, they’ll be doing reports on airplane explosions and bus plunges and mothers who send their kids to school with tools.
Do you think maybe it’s time to read a good book?
-30-
The suspense is killing me. Who, oh, who, will be this year’s candidates for president?
I don’t know — could it be George Dubbaya Bush versus Al Gore?
Ooops. Sorry. I didn’t mean to give anything away.
Well, let’s see. It probably won’t be Christie Whitman or Bill Bradley. We can probably eliminate those who don’t have a snowball’s chance in a microwave oven: Forbes, Trump, PeeWee Herman, Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise or Regis Philbin. Well, maybe Regis could be considered a dark horse, although I doubt it.
John McCain has “suspended” his Republican campaign. That means that, despite getting whupped by Dubbaya in the primaries, he is reluctant to actually give up. McCain did get some delegates in the voting, so he will have something to say when the Republican National Convention rolls into Philly. But what will he be able to do? Flex some puny muscles and bombastically give his delegates to Bush? That would be a surprise, huh?
Bradley has some delegates, too. But he didn’t just suspend his campaign, he threw in the towel.
Gore and Bradley — now there was an exciting pair. It was hard to tell when they were awake or asleep.
Well, that’s not true. When Gore’s awake, he’s usually telling us he invented the Internet, posed for Rodin’s “Thinker” and consulted with DaVinci on paint colors, claims to know nothing about some illegal fundraising event he attended, says he single-handedly fought the war in Vietnam, missed winning a Pulitzer for journalism by just THIS much, could sing opera, win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating and fly the space shuttle if he really wanted to and generally is a good guy. When he’s asleep, he just doesn’t say as much.
Dubbaya, on the other hand, is a mystery figure for me. What has he done? What does he stand for? Who the heck knows?
Politics is so phony. Just days ago, Gore and Bradley were at each other’s throats. Now Bill is making nice and has endorsed Al. Well, he has endorsed Al while suggesting it might behoove Al to run a cleaner campaign from here on. It is important to put the party first, after all.
It’s the middle of March. The only serious contenders have withdrawn, leaving Dubbaya and Al. We have all spring and most of the summer to go, listening to the never-ending rhetoric, dreading the coming of the conventions at the end of July and beginning of August. Television schedules will be disrupted for four days for each of the conventions and, for what? Barring some political miracle, these are the two guys who will be on the ballot in November.
I can’t imagine Tipper Gore in the White House. It makes my blood run cold to think of the woman who insisted we label all our rock-and-roll music tinkering with the White House china and the good silverware. It’ll be like having Barbie in the executive mansion.
Many years ago, when I lived in Philadelphia, I swore that if a certain guy became mayor, I would be forced to leave the city. I couldn’t imagine life under this man’s administration.
Well, he was elected and I didn’t move — not then. I continued to live in the city through his entire time in City Hall and was none the worse for wear because of it.
That’s when I formulated my theory. For most of us, it doesn’t matter who’s president. I am too low on the totem pole to be affected by what happens up top. Because of that, it generally does not make any difference in my life who is in the White House.
Now, faced with the growing possibility that either Gore or Bush will be the next president, well, whew! I hope that’s true.
If it’s not, we’re all in for trouble.
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March 7, 2000
I’m proud to be one of the first wave of Baby Boomers.
We’re the children who started appearing on the scene when Johnny — and Jim and Bill and Bob and Phil — came marching home again after World War II.
We are the first rock-and-roll generation. We were, in part, a very rebellious lot. Some of us rebelled against authority, some of us rebelled against our parents, some of us rebelled against the war and the government.
Those who were teen-agers in 1955, a previous generation, had James Dean and “Rebel Without A Cause,” but not us. We had a million causes.
Unfortunately, while we were protesting and tuning in and dropping out, some of us were dying too young, from drugs and other needless and unheeded hazards.
We thought we were the first in everything, but we were wrong. There were protests against things before us. There were music rebellions before rock-and-roll.
But the one thing we Boomers had that no one had before us was television. It may have been pioneered by our elders, but it was — and is — uniquely ours.
We watched when local stations broadcast for only a small portion of each day. We watched as, for the first time, war was broadcast, delayed by only a day or two, from the jungles of Vietnam to our living rooms at dinner time.
We watched a president and then his killer assassinated live. We watched the president’s brother shot to death. We watched as man walked on the moon.
We were able to watch something as important as the McCarthy House un-American Activities Committee hearings and tune into something as inane as the Academy Awards.
We learned things, as well. It’s hard to tell whether what we learned was good for us or not.
I know I learned how to fence by watching movies and TV shows. Back then, we called it swordfighting, not fencing. We watched it on TV and then practiced it out on the street with wooden and, later, plastic swords.
In 1965, I fought a fencing duel with a couple of Englishmen I was working with. Both had studied fencing. I had watched “Prince Valiant” movies on TV.
I beat both of them.
In the late 1970s, I got to fence with a friend who was taking fencing lessons. I had all the same moves. From the TV shows.
I was not only pretty good with a sword, I was heck with a quarterstaff. Learned that from Robin Hood TV shows, of course. There hasn’t been a lot of call for quarterstaff fighting in my life since the late 1950s, so I don’t know if I still have the skills I once had, swinging not an oak stave but a bamboo pole that had been used as a carpet roll.
I was switching TV channels the other night and happened on Clint Eastwood in “Pale Rider,” from 1985. I’d forgotten that one of the bad guys in this movie was John Russell. Russell had played Marshal Dan Troop in the TV show, “The Lawman,” which was on from 1958 to 1962.
I smiled when I saw Russell. I was a big fan of “The Lawman.” Marshal Dan Troop was one of the guys, along with Arvo Ojala, who helped teach me to draw a gun. (Arvo was the guy who lost to Marshal Matt Dillon at the opening of “Gunsmoke” every week. He was a fast-draw artist who taught most of the Western stars.)
I don’t have much call to do a fast draw these days, either, but in the 1950s, it was an important skill. I seem to remember being pretty fast when it came to slapping leather and getting my Mattel “Fanner 50” pistol out of its holster. You remember the “Fanner 50”? It was one of the first cap pistols that actually looked like a real six-gun. They had white plastic pearl handles and shiny silver bodies and big, wide hammers for fanning. The coolest part was that they had actual bullets. You could stick little plastic bullets on the metal cartridges and when you shot, the cap would go “bang” and the plastic bullet would fire.
No one that I know of got hurt by one of these things. Once you got over the initial coolness of it, the plastic bullets were a real pain in the neck to find and pick up after you shot them.
But this got me to wondering what else I may have learned over the years, as I was growing up with television.
Was there a show about newspaper guys I watched a lot? I don’t remember.
Maybe I can speak Italian or Portuguese. Can I perform surgery? Could I defend a case in court? Be an explorer? I might be able to fly a plane.
I guess I won’t know unless I try.
March 6, 2000
The world is, without question, striving mightily to become a more violent place.
Well, OK, so maybe in the Dark Ages, perhaps a larger percentage of people were being hacked to death by rogues with broadswords, but you know what I mean.If you follow the news, you can easily see that violence is rampant. Children killing children. Gunmen running amok. A carjacker dragging a child to its death. Shopkeepers being murdered. You get the idea.
So it may seem a bit odd that, in the midst of the bloodshed, law enforcement agencies sometimes try harder and harder to be less-than-lethal. Sure, that might be hard to believe, what with stories of that guy in New York being killed in a hail of police bullets, but in some police departments, extreme efforts are being made to soften the blow of the long arm of the law.West Virginia State Police last week ordered 50 additional sets of something called RoadSpikes. That makes 275 sets in use there. Police in Pittsburgh, Pa. ordered 200 sets. RoadSpikes are placed in the path of a vehicle fleeing from police. It flattens the tires. That’s all it does. If it’s the gizmo I think it is, it is a strip of sharp, hollow spikes. As the tire is punctured, all the air simply escapes through the hollow spikes. That way the tires go flat without blowouts, which are unsafe at any speed.
The devices are becoming popular because of the increasing number of deaths and injuries from high-speed chases.
A lot of cops like chases. The general public likes watching chases. On the West Coast, TV stations have helicopters with cameras that follow chases live and they break into afternoon and evening programming to broadcast chases.
If you check your TV listings, you’ll find programs called “Dangerous Police Chases” and “Death-Defying Police Chases” and “Supersonic Dangerous Police Chases” and even “Police Chases So Fast We Couldn’t Videotape Them So We’ll Just Tell You About Them.” On these programs, you will see police cars crashing into fleeing cars.
Police administrators do NOT like when that happens. They have to pay for repairs out of their budgets and that makes them irritable.
Despite that, some cops love chases. I once stood in a police station in one corner of the county, listening on the police radio to a wild chase going on clear across the county. There were so many police cars in this chase that cops trying to join in from side streets couldn’t make it out onto the highway, because of the high police traffic.
Despite this obvious glut of cop involvement, two police officers standing next to me — clear across the county from the chase, remember — wondered out loud if they could make it to the scene in time to join in.
I have been in a police car when the driver floored the accelerator and there IS a certain amount of adrenaline that starts flowing, that’s for sure. And, if you listen to a police scanner, you can tell when a cop starts chasing someone by the way his or her voice goes up several octaves in seconds. It’s as if they were inhaling helium. (LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Inhaling any substance other than air or prescribed medication is not a good thing.)
It follows, then, that if injuries and deaths from high-speed pursuits are things to be avoided, injuries and deaths from shootings are downright undesirable.
Which is why we should commend the Dover Township, N.J. police for using bean bag guns whenever possible. The guns fire tiny fabric bags that contain metal pellets. The bean bags can stun you, they say, but not kill you and they supposedly won’t cause serious injury. It’s a more Politically Correct way to knock the hoo-hah out of some bad guy, I suppose.
If you were to whack someone with a sock filled with metal pellets, it would be considered cruel. If you shoot him with the same sock, it’s considered humane.
Anyway, I hear there is no truth to the rumor that one company is working on the development of an even more PC gun that shoots Beanie Babies at bad guys. That’s too bad, because I think it’s a great idea. Imagine the humiliation of not only being brought to justice by a bean bag, but by a Beanie Baby! How would you explain that to your cellmates?
“I was zooming along in that stolen Mercedes when they got me.”
“And then they crashed into you?”
“Well, no. I just had a flat tire.”
“And then you had a shootout, right?”
”Well, no. I tried to make a run for it, but they knocked me out with a couple of Beanie Babies in the shape of a bunny.”
Now THAT’S cruel and unusual punishment.
Feb. 28, 2000
New Jersey is making a move toward becoming a high-brow kind of state. It's going to choose a Poet Laureate.
Governor Christie Whitman signed the law, which provides for the selection of a "distinguished poet" to be Poet Laureate for two years, promoting and encouraging poetry in the state. Under the law, the William Carlos Williams Citation of Merit will be presented to the Poet Laureate, along with a $10,000 honorarium.
The New Jersey Council for the Humanities has been asked to head a committee to make the selection, in consultation with the state Council on the Arts. They're seeking a published poet with a strong record of public engagement.
At first I was confused about why they would name a medal they plan to give to the Poet Laureate after a former superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, but then I realized the medal is not named after COL.CARL WILLIAMS but WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, who, I'm willing to guess, was a poet.
Letters of nominations explaining a poet's qualifications and his address may be submitted through March 15.
Remember, I spell my name S-I-X, just like the number. You can use the newspaper's address.
I don't know how distinguished I am, though. I have had a poem on a friend's Web site for a couple of years and I think, in this cyber age, that constitutes publication.
If that's not enough, try this, a poem I wrote recently, called "Poems."
"Poems to the left of me, poems to the right.
Poems on the way to work; poems late at night.
Poems in a paper bag and in the broad daylight.
Poems on a table top at the break of dawn.
Poems when you first arrive, poems when you're gone.
Poems in a mountain creek swim upstream to spawn.
Poems in the swimming pool; poems on the lawn."
There. I am now a published poet, no matter how you want to look at it.
Not everything I write is quite so easy to understand. I can be just as obtuse and impossible to fathom as the so-called "serious" poets. Check out this excerpt:
"Don't try to tell me how hip you are because you're just a kid.
The things you're itching to learn how to do I already did.
So don't go gettin' stupid on me and thinking you might be the first.
I been there, done that, left and came back,
I'm the good, the bad and the worst."
See? Do you understand that? Well, neither do I.
I am more than a little troubled by the honorarium. It's only 10 grand, a mere five thousand a year. You'd think a Poet Laureate would be worth a few more honoraria than that. Spin doctors for state political appointees make at least 40 grand a year, but all they're willing to pony up for the Poet
Laureate - the very first official Poet Laureate of New Jersey, at that! - is a crummy 10 Gs!
They obviously want the state's Poet Laureate to be a part-timer. He or she should be a professor or a postal worker or a newspaper guy or something, but not a full-time Poet Laureate.
I urge the governor and her minions to reconsider the honorarium. Boost that baby to a living wage, for Pete's sake!
"If you've got the money, Christie, I've got the time.
I'll spend every waking hour, making up a rhyme.
But for a measly 10 grand, please don't waste my time.
But if you'd up the ante, to maybe 50 thou,
I'd do the very best I could to rhyme 'New Jersey.' Wow!"
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Feb. 29, 2000
You thought we got off scot free, didn’t you? Jan. 1, 2000 came and went and the world didn’t end. In fact, it didn’t even falter.
Well, I hope you haven’t sold the generators and the six-day candles yet. We still have to get through today.
That’s right. It’s Leap Year Day.
This means different things to different people.
Traditionally, Leap Year is when unmarried females may turn the chauvinist tables and propose marriage to their loved ones. I don’t think this matters much anymore, since we have achieved perfect equality between the sexes and genders and everyone earns the same amount of money and everyone is free to do whatever they want in the field of human relationships. In such a well-balanced world, there’s no need to have a Sadie Hawkins Day mentality on Leap Year Day.
Another thing today marks is the once-every-four-years birthday of people who are born on Feb. 29. I’m not sure how people like that manage to survive. Sure, it might be fun to be only one-fourth as old as you should be, but it would be darned annoying when you want to apply for a driver’s license or Social Security retirement benefits.
Luckily, my nephew, affectionately known in these parts as Scootch McGootch, turned 4 yesterday. He won’t have to worry about the Leap Year Day thing at all.
But perhaps the biggest worry is the concern that the Y2K Bug may still rear its so-far totally invisible and unsubstantiated head today.
White House officials — the ones who told us not to worry about Y2K but to stockpile some supplies anyway, just in case — have voiced some fears that some computers won’t recognize Feb. 29, 2000 and will enter today’s date as March 1.
I always thought computers were supposed to be smart. At least a little smart.
Unfortunately, the government’s concern is turning into a hard sell. The White House spent billions of dollars to put into place defenses against a frontal Y2K assault that never materialized.
Of course, it’s like the old joke. The guy walks around town blowing a trumpet in a very unmusical manner. “Why are you blowing that horn?” someone asks.
“To keep the tigers away,” the man replies.
“There are no tigers within 3,000 miles of here,” he’s told.
“See, it works,” he says.
So we poured money on the Y2K problem and nothing happened. “See, our efforts paid off,” we are told by the Y2K gurus.
Anyway, now they’re trying to tell us today could mark additional problems — well, additional if there had been problems in the first place, which there weren’t.
This year, though, is pretty special. This is not your normal, run-of-the-mill leap year. Every four years, an extra day is added in February to bring the earth’s cycle roughly into step with the calendar. Leap Year Days are usually skipped in years ending in “00.” The rule is all years divisible by four are leap years, except those divisible by 100, unless they are also divisible by 400.
Whew! I think this means that, while 2000 is a leap year, 2100 won’t be.
So the worry is that the Y2K Correction Programmers may have forgotten that and not programmed computers to accept 2000 as a leap year.
But, let’s look at the record here. We were warned that April 9, 1999 — the 99th day of the year — could be problematic. It wasn’t. We were warned that Sept. 9, 1999, or 9-9-99, could be troublesome. It wasn’t.
The White House has reopened the Y2K Council's Information Coordination Center for today. But the center is scheduled to close its doors permanently tomorrow.
Hmm. In my experience, appliances always break down right after the warranty expires. I think I’ll keep my survival supplies just a little while longer.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2000
I think the time has finally come to change our language.
At least parts of it.
You may recall that I wrote some time ago about how a lot of people simply do not know how to use punctuation - especially the apostrophe.
I confess, I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to the use of the English language. I don't mean I'm a Shakespearean traditionalist. I certainly do not espouse the use of words such as "verily" and "forsooth" and "thy." In fact, I am not a big Shakespeare fan at all. I think the Bard is overrated, personally.
What I think of as traditional language is simply language the way I learned it, using punctuation in its proper place and spelling things the way they are spelled in the dictionary.
Alas and alack, the day of traditionalism seems to be passing. I think I have to embrace the changes as being symbolic of a language that continues to evolve, a language that lives and breathes and grows and moves. We need to keep changing the language to prevent it from going the same way as Latin, I think.
We have already started the changes. When new versions of the dictionary come out every five or 10 years, new words and phrases are included. We employ a sort of shorthand when writing that is not technically correct. We refer to a "boro" instead of a "borough." We call each other by shortened versions of our given names. With the advent of e-mail and Internet chat rooms, we have started a whole new level of language evolution. Not only have we started writing "R U there? I don't C U," but we have started using abbreviations for everything, starting with "LOL" for "laughing out loud" and moving on into quite complicated, convoluted abbreviations. And I don't even want to talk about Smileys or Emoticons, the little so-called faces created from punctuation marks on the computer keyboard that are supposed to convey emotion.
The thing is, it's kind of ironic that a generation of people who don't seem to be capable of using punctuation marks as they were meant to be used have created a whole new way of using them.
I think it's time to make some drastic changes in the language and I think we should start with the apostrophe. Many people just do not know how to use the apostrophe and I think maybe we should just give in and get rid of it.
Here's what I mean:
Joe's mother said, "You're the ones who have to get your truck off its jack and it's time to do it now."
That sentence would make some of us cringe, trying to figure out where to put the apostrophes. Now, thanks to the problems many of us have with apostrophes, we could probably understand the sentence just as well without the apostrophes:
Joes mother said, "Youre the ones who have to get your truck off its jack and its time to do it now."
The ability to function without apostrophes has been helped along by the widespread use of e-mail and the Internet. Addresses in cyberspace do not allow for the use of apostrophes. Bob's Butter Barn becomes simply Bobs in a Universal Resource Locator or URL, which is a World Wide Web address. Even a member of our South Jersey Newspapers Co. group has succumbed to this; the URL for Today's Sunbeam in Salem is www.todaysunbeam.com - losing not only the apostrophe but one of the Esses. (I checked. That's the way to spell more than one ess.)
Recently, I discovered a very strange phenomenon connected to church names. All my life I have written the names of churches thusly: St. Mark's Church, St. Joseph's Church. The other day, though, I realized that it might be some quirk in our nature to want the name of a church to end in an ess. For example, you mostly see St. James Church or St. Barnabas Church. I don't recall ever saying or writing St. James' Church or St. Barnabas' Church. Ever.
Anyway, I don't know why that phenomenon exists, but I do know the apostrophe has just about worn out its welcome. Let's just do away with the apostrophe. It has served us well but it's time now to bid it a fond adieu. The world will be a less confusing place without it, I assure you.
Today the apostrophe. Tomorrow, who knows?
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2000
I need to make a phone call.
Deciding that is the easy part. The rest of it is pretty complicated.
I don’t know whether to use my home phone, a cordless phone, a cell phone or a pay phone. If I use my home phone, should I use the one with the speed-dial feature, the one with the speakerphone feature, the one with the Caller ID display built in or the one with the built-in answering machine? If I use a cordless telephone, should I use the one with two channels, six channels or 10 channels? Should I use the one with the two-day battery or the five-day battery?
OK, so maybe I should use a cellular telephone. Should I use an analog phone? A digital phone? The one that lets me read my e-mail? One that doubles as a two-way radio? The one that allows me to connect to the Internet? One with the hands-free feature? One with the dialing-by-voice feature?
If I use a pay telephone, should I use one owned by the regular telephone company or an independently owned outfit? Should I pay $5 a minute at one pay phone or try to find one that charges less?
Maybe I should use a card when I use the pay phone. Should I use my AT&T card or my Bell Atlantic card? Should I charge it to Sprint, MCI or some company that wants me to dial “10-10” first? Should I forego the calling card and use a pre-paid telephone card, or a credit card or my check card or debit card?
Whew!
If I use a pre-paid phone card, should I buy it at the drug store, the supermarket or the convenience store? Is there a pre-paid phone card store at the mall?
I don’t know whether to pay full price, 10-cents a minute, 7-cents a minute or 5-cents a minute. Should I pay a buck for 20 minutes or a buck for 10 minutes? If I use the 20-minutes-for-a-dollar rate, what happens if I talk for 15 minutes?
Maybe I shouldn’t pay at all. Maybe I should call collect. But should I call collect through my regular phone company or should I use one of the special collect-call outfits?
Is the person I’m calling in the 609 area code or the 856 area code? My home number is in the 856 area code, but what about my cell phone and my electronic pager? Which area code are they? I think there’s a difference but sometimes I need an area code when calling home from my cell phone and other times I don’t. Why is that?
Is calling directory assistance free or isn’t it? Why do I have to choose before I get the number I’m looking for if I want it dialed automatically? Why do they think I am so lazy I can’t dial the number myself? And why does James Earl Jones have to butt in to every telephone call I make? He has a lovely voice, but, frankly, I am WAY past tired of hearing it.
This is all more confusing than making a phone call should be. I want my phone calls to be invisible. It’s supposed to be about the conversation, or the information I give or get on the phone, not the act of making the telephone call.
But wait! I reached an automated telephone system! Press 1 for this, 2 for that and 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 for the other. Press 0 if you have no idea what other number to press. Which button is the panic button?
Hey! It’s voice mail! What’s the extension of the person I’m trying to reach? If I don’t know the extension number, will it ask me to start spelling the name of the person I am trying to reach? Do I need a Personal Identification Number? What about a passcode?
If I call from the new superphones in the office, which buttons do I press? MSG? DND? SPKR? VM? How the heck do I PROG this phone, anyway?
Sheesh! Now I forget who I wanted to call.
Maybe I should just use the mail.
Should I use e-mail or snail mail? What’s the ZIP code?
©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, Feb. 14, 2000
I had it all figured out. I was going to write this hilarious column for Valentine's Day.
The idea was, I was going to ask some prominent folks hereabouts this question: What is the most romantic thing you've ever done?
I thought it would be fun and maybe funny, getting a glimpse into the private lives of some politicians and other well-known characters.
The trouble is, most of those I called just laughed. Personally, I think it was nervous laughter.
"You mean, with my wife?" one guy asked. Uh-oh, I thought. This isn't exactly where I wanted to go with the question.
Another woman reminded me that she has been a widow for 15 years. I said that was OK, I wasn't placing any time restrictions on the answers. The lady, who is a very religious person, called me back the next day and gave me her answer: "It was fascinating. It was awesome," she said, but it was unprintable and it preceded her finding Christ. So I didn't get any details.
I tried to be quite reasonable about it. I told the few people I DID talk to that I really didn't want to make them uncomfortable. I told them they could think it over and call me back. Most of them never called me back.
One guy called me from his car. I told him what I wanted to know and he ad-libbed an answer. "You can tell people I am the most romantic man in the world," he said. I heard a strange noise over the phone and asked him what
it was.
"Oh, that's my girlfriend laughing," he said.
"I drove my wife to work on a snowy day. She doesn't do snow," said another guy. He added, almost unnecessarily, "I'm not a romantic."
One lawyer was quick with an answer to my invasive question.
"Every Valentine's Day, or around there, I make a complete, multi-course dinner for my wife. Candlelight. Romantic. I even do the dishes," he said. "I don't know, but she tells me that it's romantic."
I know many women who would simply swoon at the thought of their husbands doing the dishes. Unfortunately, doing the dishes wouldn't be romantic in my house. I don't cook, so the deal is that if my Closest Companion cooks, I clean up.
One prominent guy said if he could put four or five events together, he might be able to come up with something really romantic. The best he COULD come up with was the time he picked up his wife and, despite not liking the shore, took her walking on the boardwalk.
"I was going to give you a big story about violins and a limo, but once you get caught lying...," he said. I think my question did have a positive effect, though.
"I'm going to work real hard on this Valentine's Day. You've got me thinking."
I finally realized I was really asking the wrong people. I realized that I didn't even know the answer to the question. What was the most romantic thing I have done?
I called my Closest Companion at work and asked her.
She reminded me of the time I filled her station wagon with balloons and the time I spent all day delivering 13 dozen roses to her at work, and the time I sent a barbershop quartet to sing to her - although the songs they sang were so melancholy they had everyone crying.
The thing she thought was most romantic wasn't something I would have considered.
"The most romantic thing all year is you being there with hugs when I need them," she said.
Oh.
Well, whatever you do this Valentine's Day, make it as romantic as you can.
Even if it's just a hug.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, Jan. 31, 2000
Quick. Rapid. Swift. Fleet. Speedy. Breakneck. Celeritous.
In a word, fast.
Things can't be fast enough for us these days.
For many years, man wrote with a hammer and a chisel. Then with a stylus on wax slates. Then with a quill pen. Then with a typewriter.
Now we write with word processors and computers. We can correct our typing mistakes almost as quickly as we make them. In fact, if the computer doesn't do what we want it to do, and do it within a matter of nanoseconds, we curse and mutter, aloud or under our breath, because the darned thing just isn't working FAST enough.
We are a fast society.
Internet connections allowed people all around the world to connect with each other in no time flat, but that wasn't enough. Computer modems that allowed us to send and receive information from anywhere on the globe - and beyond - evolved from rates of 300 kilobytes per second to the current standard of 56,600 kbs. Something called an ISDN upped that rate to 128,000 kbs and TS-1 lines transmit data at somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 million kbs.
Yet, this still isn't fast enough for us. Now cable television companies are offering cable service that is supposed to be faster than a speeding bullet or something. We crave fastness.
We had drive-in movies to save us the time of parking and walking into a movie theater, then finding seats. That wasn't really fast enough, though, so we got rid of the drive-in movies and got videotapes and VCRs with fast-forward controls, instead. So now we have INSTANT replays and smart VCRs that fast forward through commercials so we can watch an hour-long program in 50 or so minutes.
We didn't like the notion of parking and traipsing into a hotel, so we created motels, where we could park in front of our room and come and go faster.
We had drive-in restaurants to save us the time of parking and walking into a restaurant, then finding a table. Car hops, sometimes on roller skates to speed things even more, would come directly to the car, take our orders and bring us food, which was prepared by short-order cooks. That wasn't really fast enough, though, so we got rid of drive-in restaurants and replaced them with drive-through restaurants. Now we can drive up to a microphone or a window, place our orders, wait a few minutes, get our orders and zoom off to someplace else, where we will no doubt scarf down the fast food in scant minutes.
People like the drive-through concept for saving time. There are drive-through delicatessens, drive-through dry cleaners, drive-through video rentals, drive-through liquor stores in some states and even drive-through pharmacies.
Still, none of this seems to be fast enough for us.
In states that allow self-serve gasoline pumping, some stations have little doohickeys you can wave at the pump that is like a credit-card reader that charges you for the gas so you don't have to walk into the office to pay.
Lately, we've been hearing a lot about how E-ZPass is speeding up how we pay bridge and freeway tolls. You get this little doodad to attach to your car and pay money into an account. Every time you zip through the toll booth, the electronic device deducts the appropriate amount of dough from your account.
Well, buckle up, buckaroos! It looks like E-ZPass contraptions aren't just for paying tolls anymore.
According to a wire story, five McDonald's restaurants in California have signed a deal with a local transportation authority that will allow their customers to get their Big Macs even faster, by zipping through the drive-through line without having to stop and pay. Sure sounds like the E-ZPass thing to me.
"Wow!" you say.
Yes, indeed. Imagine the time you will be able to save doing this. The normal wait at the pickup window is 131 seconds. This new device will save you a whole - 15 seconds!
For once, I am speechless.
I don't need to be that fast. I think I'll just stay half-fast.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2000
I hate to say this, but I'm beginning to think we're drowning in gadgets.
Don't get me wrong. I am a true "Mr. Gadget." I love gadgets and doodads of all kinds. Always have.
In the early 1960s, when inexpensive portable reel-to-reel tape recorders first made their appearance, I had one. Well, I had several. Each time something new would come out, I would get one. I still own more little tape recorders than I really need.
Back in the 1980s, some outfit made a tiny gadget word processor. It printed on adding machine tape, as I recall, and was hardly convenient to type on, but I had one, anyway.
Years ago, I carried all my telephone numbers in a little electronic device. I insisted it would henceforth take the place of my battered, well-traveled black loose-leaf telephone book. It was cool. Punch a few tiny buttons and any name or number would instantly appear.
Then the battery died and I didn't immediately replace it. When I needed a phone number, I turned to the old, reliable phone book. I have no idea where the little electronic device is these days, but the phone book is about a foot away.
I can't tell you how many compass gadgets I have bought over the years for my car. No, I rarely find myself someplace where I'd need a compass to find myself, but I have always liked compasses. I put them in the car, play with them for a little while, bore passengers with constant updates on what direction we're traveling and, invariably, the adhesive fails and the compass falls onto the floor. I put it in the backseat or in the trunk and, eventually, it disappears to the Lost Gadget Graveyard or wherever all these unwanted gadgets go.
I still have an old TV set that didn't come with a remote control. You have to watch the TV through a VCR to use a remote, and the VCR is an old, two-head model that allows the pre-programming of only two events to record. Shameful, huh?
For some reason - probably because they're pretty expensive - I have not fallen under the hypnotic spell of the latest state-of-the-art TV gadgets now available. I don't seem to feel the need for Web TV, digital cable, picture-in-picture, big screens, live instant replays or any of the clever new gadgets available for the home viewer.
I do have a Caller ID unit and a telephone with built-in Caller ID and things like that, of course. For someone who is crazy about gadgets, I do sometimes feel that the gadgets are actually driving me crazy. Caller ID units suddenly go wonky and the readout shows indecipherable symbols and the time in Malaysia or someplace.
I had to replace my electronic pager not too long ago. The old one I had didn't do anything but page me. It would beep or it would vibrate. This new one takes an engineering degree to understand. It vibrates, offers at least three different beeping sounds, requires that I manipulate three buttons in specific order to do anything at all, tells time, sounds alarms and probably would double as an emergency defibrillator if I knew how to program it.
Despite my penchant for gadgets, I pine for my previous pager, thank you.
We seem to be awash in a tidal wave of gadgets now. Exercise gadgets, house-cleaning gadgets, computer gadgets, all manner of digital doodads and gadgets, telephone gadgets and - well, enough is enough. I think we should start drawing the line.
For awhile, I wanted one of those monster vacuum cleaners that whistle, whirr and whoosh around under their own steam, cleaning carpets and the air at the same time. Then my Closest Companion made me realize that, if I had such a gadget, she would expect me to use it now and then.
Hmm.
Maybe there's a sale on little tape recorders someplace.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, Jan. 24, 2000
Snow.
Oh, no.
You know I hate snow.
In fact, I sometimes find myself at a loss to describe just how much I hate snow. It's difficult to make people understand what snow does to me.
The moment it starts snowing, I grumble and growl, I simmer and seethe.
I know, so what make that different from any other day?
Ha ha.
Maybe it's all the years I absolutely, positively had to be somewhere, no matter how much snow was falling or how bad the roads were. I spent several years working at a radio station 25 miles away from home. I had to be there in the wee hours of the morning, no matter what. I often was out before the snow plows. I would maneuver my front-wheel-drive car of the moment through flurries and blizzards. One time, in particular, stands out in my memory. That was the day my car got stuck in a snow bank at 4 a.m. and I got soaked to my underwear trying to get unstuck.
I arrived at the radio station that morning and divested myself of what wet wearables I could while still maintaining some sense of propriety. I had socks draped over one radiator and wringing-wet undershorts and shirt draped over another as I shivered through the early newscasts in a sopping wet pair of trousers, a soggy World War II-era wool coat and bare feet.
When the stores finally opened, I wore this funky ensemble on a quick run to the local five-and-ten store (remember them?) to buy shirt, pants, socks and undershorts.
I have driven to nightclubs when I was still playing music for a living, taking three hours to make a trip that normally took no more than an hour. I have sat in snowbound traffic, helpless, as my car slid sideways on ice.
I have returned from gigs at 3 in the morning and become trapped in snow drifts until snow plows finally came by and rescued me.
I used to insist I knew how to drive in the snow. "It's everybody else I worry about," I'd say. Driving in the snow wearies me. I feel like I'm driving for me and everyone else. When the 20-minute drive home takes 45 minutes, well, that stresses me out. I get a teensy bit tense.
Snow sports? Hah! Snow sports to me is just getting from one place to another safely.
I had a poetic English teacher in high school who used to rave about visiting Broadway in New York City and walking in the falling snow. He'd rhapsodize about looking up at the falling snowflakes, lit from above by street lamps.
Believe me, I have tried to rhapsodize about the snow. It doesn't work.
I grew up in the city. City snow gets yellow, gray, black and brown immediately. It is ugly, I tell you. There is nothing romantic about it. City buses slide sideways as easily as cars do. There's a certain helpless feeling you get when you're at the wheel of a car sliding sideways toward another car. I don't care for that feeling at all.
"But," some of you may cry, "in the suburbs or the country, snow can be beautiful!"
OK, fine. I recognize your right to think that way. It's a free country.
I suppose I could be persuaded to marvel at the serene, surreal beauty of snow-covered pine trees, the picture-postcard loveliness of acres of pure, unbroken, unmarred whiteness punctuated by a hardy squirrel or a foraging deer or a feeding bird, the prismatic light show of sunshine or moonlight
peeking through ice crystals — I mean, anything's possible, right?
I could learn to appreciate all that - IF I didn't have go out in it, IF I didn't have to drive in it, IF I didn't have to be anyplace, IF I were someplace that was warm, comfortable and well-stocked with food and drink, IF I could stay there and not go stir crazy with cabin fever for as long as it took for every single, solitary snowflake to melt and for the resultant ice-water runoff to disappear from the face of the earth!
So, all right, we've had some snow. Let's get back on track with this global warming thing, OK? When the heck does Spring get here, anyway?
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2000
Tall guys get the girls.
British and Polish scientists say they have finally confirmed what many people have believed for a long time. Charles Darwin certainly believed it. Movie producers have insisted on it. I suppose this makes it official.
The scientists say tall men are more sexually attractive and have more children than shorter men.
These tall dudes supposedly have more children because they are more attractive, said the researchers. They're more likely to get married, but even if they stay single, they have more offspring.
They, the scientists, probably spent a lot of money to come to these conclusions.
What this shows me, all 5-feet, 8-inches of me, is that these tall guys are long on irresponsibility, procreating like crazy just because they can.
The guy who led this study is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool. He was assisted by colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw. They studied the medical records of more than 4,400 Polish men between the ages of 25 and 60.
According to the study, childless men in all age groups were about 1.2 inches shorter than men with at least one child. Bachelors were also found to be shorter than married men.
I know people who have fallen prey to this tallist elitism.
In 1973, a good friend of mine married a tallish blonde of Swedish extraction. He spent the night before the wedding, not getting drunk and dancing with strippers in true bachelor-party tradition, but shopping for shoes with what were then called Cuban heels, kind of like flamenco boots, hoping the taller heels would give him the extra couple of inches he needed to just match his bride's height.
Another friend of mine was sometimes bothered by a woman's height when he dated, but that was to be expected in his case. What can you expect when everyone calls you "Little Joe"?
My dad was about an inch shorter than me. He was in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War and was a belly gunner on a B-24. He'd ease his short self into one of those revolving, Plexiglas ball turrets on the bottom side of the big bomber and shoot a machine gun at enemy targets. Nothing between ol' Sixie and the ground 40,000 feet below!
There are some disadvantages to being short. Being short AND fat these days, my inseam measurement is less than my waist size and sometimes it's hard to find trousers that are really short enough for me.
On the other hand, I always wind up in the front when group photographs are being taken.
I don't really care that much about how tall I am or am not. I dated a woman once who was about 5-feet, 10-inches tall. She was also rather — how should I say? — voluptuous. When we walked down the street, she would drape her arm across my shoulders. I was not embarrassed by this. In fact, I thought it was kind of cool and, judging by the glances of admiration that were cast our way, other guys thought so, too.
I am comfortable with my shortness. My feet don't stick out of the bed. Someone can sit comfortably behind me in my car. No one asks me to play basketball. I am not asked to get things down from high places.
And, lucky me, I got the girl I really wanted the most. So, who cares what these scientists think, anyway?
They're probably all tall guys.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, Jan. 17, 2000
I understand Donald Trump is running for president.
What I DON'T understand is why anyone would take Donald Trump seriously as a candidate for President of the United States.
Imagine, the White House being torn down and something that looks like Trump Castle going up in its place.
Well, yeah, there'd probably be a trophy wife in the new Trump House, but having a First Babe is not really reason enough to take such a drastic step away from sanity.
Why, just imagine the kind of world we'd live in if Donald Trump became president.
We might have police officers in western Illinois insisting they saw a big ol' UFW (Unidentified Flying Whatzit) zooming around less than a thousand feet off the ground.
We could possibly have people flocking to an apartment complex in Houston to gaze upon the face of the Virgin of Guadalupe in a stain left by spilled, melted ice cream. The non-believers might see only a crusty smear on the ground in front of a soda machine, but the more religiously attuned would be moved to rapture by the sight.
In such a world, a gallery owner in New York City might stage an exhibition of photographs of lynchings from a less-than-honorable period of our country's history.
In such a weird world, Hitler might be in the running for Person of the Century, alongside Gandhi and Einstein. In a society this topsy-turvy, well-meaning computer vigilantes would hack into kiddie porn Web sites and destroy the work of pedophiles.
In a world gone Trump, we might all be so frightened by the thought of violence in schools that we'd start suspending kids for bringing X-acto knives and nail clippers to class with them. Never mind that kids have been seriously jabbing each other with drafting compasses for eons. Never mind that there are ways to maim and kill with common, everyday school supplies such as rulers, pencils and erasers.
In a Donald Era, we might see a 36-year-old Connecticut man charged with allowing his 2-year-old son to smoke in a restaurant. No, not just, "Here, Junior, have a puff," but a kid seeming to handle the cigarette like a long-time smoker, in a manner that suggests he is familiar with the rituals of smoking.
In a society gone totally haywire, genealogists might suggest that former President Jimmy Carter and Elvis Presley are sixth cousins, once removed, thanks to a mutual 17th-century German ancestor. Elvis, who some say died in 1977, would have turned 65 on Saturday. It's hard to imagine the legendary rock-and-roller at retirement age, isn't it? There are folks who insist Elvis is still alive and well and working as a pizza delivery man named Raul in Pitman.
So, imagine all these far-fetched things —- oh, wait!
Never mind. These things have already happened in the past two weeks.
So, I guess it really doesn't matter who is in the White House, does it?
If that's true, I see no reason to put off putting my hat in the ring this year. The campaign will be called 6P2K: Six for President in 2000.
Remember my campaign slogan: Six for President in 2000 - How much worse could it be?
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©2000 New Jersey Newspapers Co.
Monday, Jan. 10, 2000
What a way to start the new year: riots in Miami, the English form a task force to protect the Earth from errant asteroids and the Rolling Stones have the top rock-and-roll song ever.
But the funniest story of the week is the one about the Brooklyn woman who wants her bank account — which contains almost $450,000 that doesn’t belong to her — unfrozen.
This is like the old joke explaining the Yiddish word “chutzpah” — a kid who murders his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.
Back in 1998, a series of wire transfers from all over the world put $701,998 in Susan Makador’s bank account. She noticed the money and, according to her lawyer, thought it was winnings from some international lottery.
Riight.
She quit her $23,000-a-year-receptionist job, spend a hundred grand to buy a laundry business, set up a college fund for her son, paid of $30,000 worth of credit card debt, furnished a new apartment and leased a van. How does a receptionist making 23Gs a year rack up $30,000 in credit card bills, anyway?
She was trying to buy a liquor store when the bank figured out the money actually belonged to the United Nations Environmental Program and had gotten into her account because of a one-digit error. Ooops.
Let’s face it, if I looked at my bank account one day and saw a whole slew of zeroes attached to the numbers, I would be amazed, overwhelmed and flabbergasted.
I would also be worried someone was going to bust me, because the money wasn’t mine. Even the people who work at my bank would know it wasn’t mine. They have seen my pay checks for 16 years. They probably could figure out I don’t even KNOW anyone who has that kind of money.
If a couple MILLION showed up in my account unannounced, I might try to transfer it to some offshore bank and move quietly, under cover of night, probably, when no one would notice.
But it would have to be enough money to last me the rest of my life as I drifted aimlessly from one tropical beach to another around the globe, kicking back in worn rubber flip-flops and khaki shorts with cargo pockets and a wooden tiki figure around my neck, acting out “Adventures in Paradise.” It would have to be enough to support my Witness Protection Program-style self-exile, since I’d probably spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for the dough’s rightful owner to show up and demand it all back, break my knees or kill me. Or all of the above.
A couple of months ago, the payroll department made a mistake and I got a check for two weeks instead of one. I figured it was what I am really worth, but knew that the minute someone found the error, I’d be stuck for the money, so I returned the check immediately.
The woman in Brooklyn has already spend a bundle of the U.N.’s dough and wants to get her hands on the rest of it. Her lawyer says she has come to depend on the money and will suffer financial hardship unless she can resume spending it right now.
I’m in tears here, I’m laughing so hard. It’s that old “money for nothing” attitude. The cash is in her bank account, after all, so it must be hers. The U.N. is being forced to fight for its return.
That’s the good thing about being honest and righteous. We get to laugh at the grifters and the thieves. Even when they seem to be getting away with it.
Ha ha ha.
Thank goodness laughter is free.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.
Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2000
Survived the Y2K Apocalypse, did you?
Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you everything would be all right.
Frankly, I believe all the hype and hoopla about impending doom and gloom of the Year 2000 was merely a diversion to lull us into a false sense of safety. Let’s face it, Y2K may have fizzled, but we still have to face the Y2KF Bug and the potentially disastrous LY2K Bug.
The Y2KF Bug is, of course, the current influenza strain that is affecting just about everyone you run into. You’re not safe anywhere. You want to know how insidious it is? One of our reporters did a story about the flu affecting our area recently. The last things the doctors she spoke to talked about were these two new anti-flu drugs that seem to be working in some cases.
Someone — one of the copy editors, perhaps? — cut that paragraph out of the story before it was published. They said it was because of space constraints, but those of us who know about the Y2KF Bug conspiracy believe otherwise.
Then there’s the frightening and mystifying LY2K Bug. Yes, friends, for everything else that the Year 2000 might be, it IS a leap year. The Leap Year 2000, or LY2K, Bug automatically adds a day to the month of February and the year itself.
What kinds of problems might this little-known LY2K Bug cause? Well, it’s cleverly designed NOT to affect your computer-driven electronic devices, but it WILL adversely affect most wristwatches that display the date. Imagine: people may find themselves a day ahead of themselves, thinking it’s really the first of March instead of the 29th of February! What an awful situation!
I, personally, don’t believe the rumors that the original Y2K predictions were meant to divert our attention from another impending plot. Those rumors insisted that the real trouble would come at some unknown time in the future, when a criminal mastermind with nefarious intentions, known only by the nom de guerre of Col. Coffee, triggered hidden computer instructions to common household appliances driven by computer chips. It was rumored that under Col. Coffee’s command, our coffeemakers, microwave ovens, clock radios, VCRs and telephone answering machines would rise up and slaughter us in our sleep.
How ridiculous!
I firmly believe that we are clear from the Y2K dilemma.
Now, for those of you who stockpiled stuff to get you through the disaster, here’s what you can do with all that canned food and dehydrated noodles. There are, you should remember, people who are hungry in this country and around the world. No one is suggesting you send your SPAM to Third World countries, but why not make sure those in the need locally are cared for?
There’s a national food drive, thoughtfully named “Y Go 2 Waste,” being conducted by “America’s Second Harvest.” They’re suggesting you give your canned goods and other nonperishable food to food banks.
The nearest official food bank is the Food Bank of South Jersey in Camden, NJ at 856-963-3663.
Locally, you can also try the Tri-County Community Action Agency in Paulsboro, NJ. Call 856-423-0043. They’ll be happy to accept your donations.
There are other organizations who probably would take your contributions, but no one I called got back to me by deadline.
So, don’t despair. You can give away some of that extra food to someone who will be happy to have it. You’ll use up all those batteries eventually. It’s good to have some stuff socked away in case of a blizzard or hurricane, anyway.
Oh, and, just to be on the safe side, keep your eye on your coffeemaker anyway.
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©2000 South Jersey Newspapers Co.