Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Idol Zombies!

As if we didn't have enough to worry about these days, now the damn zombies are attacking the American Idol try-outs! Will the nightmare never end?

The mainstream media are curiously silent on the subject of zombism, but I understand there have been a number of similar attacks this summer. They're a new fad that's evolved from the "flash mob" phenomenon of a few years ago, in which a group of people quietly organize using the Internet, cell phones and other electronic means, show up simultaneously at the same public place, do something weird to attract attention, and then leave. While I always thought flash-mobbing sounded pretty pointless, the zombie-mob idea amuses me. The thought of badly made-up pretend-ghouls shambling around in broad daylight is so patently absurd that I imagine only the uptightest people could avoid smiling at the sight of them, and Lord knows we could all use a few smiles after reading the latest news from the Gulf Coast.

Incidentally, the American Idol producers were tipped off that this prank was in the offing, and they were ready for it. To their credit, they didn't meet the zombie mob with stern-faced security guards and cease-and-desist orders, but rather with a fistful of release forms. That's right, the new season of Idol is going to feature zombies as well as wanna-be pop-singers. Not that there's a lot of difference, of course...

The Idea of a City

I have a list of cities that are special to me. They're not places I've actually been to -- that's an entirely different list. Rather, these are places I'd like to go to. But that makes it sound like this list is just a roster of possible vacation spots, and it's more than that. The cities on this list are places that occupy large tracts of my imagination and which exert a pull on my spirit that is somtimes difficult to explain. I associate them with works of literature I've enjoyed, or movies, or ideals. They represent things to me, and I feel like I know them without ever having actually set foot on their streets.

One of these places is New Orleans, the legendary city of Mardi Gras and the Delta blues, of Tennessee Williams and The Vampire Lestat. Many times I've imagined myself strolling through the French quarter to the sound of a mournful sax drifting down from an iron-framed balcony, or touring the grand old mansions and mossy graveyards, or breakfasting on strong coffee and beignets and supping on spicy foods that, like a short-lived affair based entirely on lust, I'll enjoy at the moment and regret afterwards. Yeah, I know they're cliches and that there's a lot more to a city than postcard slogans and imagery cadged from lush gothic novels. But that imagery is much of the reason why I find New Orleans compelling; my sense of the place, my desire to see it, stems from overheated sources. I guess it's fair to say I'm in love with the idea of cities like New Orleans, rather than the actual places themselves.

Either way, I hope we'll be left with more than just an idea of New Orleans by the time Hurricane Katrina blows herself out. The last I saw on CNN.com, the protective levees were failing and parts of the city were under six feet of water.

My hopes are with those who couldn't or didn't evacuate in time.

More on the JWST

For any who be interested, here's another article about the James Webb Space Telescope. This one is a little more generalized and "big picture" than the one I linked to yesterday...

This Year's Mindset List

Boy, this is just frightening. And depressing. Seems Beloit College has released its annual "mindset list" for students entering college this fall (Class of 2009). The ostensible purpose of this list is to gently remind college faculty that the touchstones they take for granted may not mean anything to this new generation.

The practical effect, however, is to make we who are fast approaching middle-age feel impossibly out-of-touch. If the items on this list won't do it for you, this little factoid will: the kids who comprise the Class of '09 were mostly born in 1987... the year I myself entered college. Oy.

Here's the list, for those who might want to know where this year's crop of freshmen is coming from:

1. Andy Warhol, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, and Lee Marvin have always been dead.
2. They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors.
3. Heart-lung transplants have always been possible.
4. Wayne Gretzky never played for Edmonton.
5. Boston has been working on the "The Big Dig" all their lives.
6. With little need to practice, most of them do not know how to tie a tie.
7. Pay-Per-View television has always been an option.
8. They never had the fun of being thrown into the back of a station wagon with six others.
9. Iran and Iraq have never been at war with each other.
10. They are more familiar with Greg Gumbel than with Bryant Gumbel.
11. Philip Morris has always owned Kraft Foods.
12. Al-Qaida has always existed with Osama bin Laden at its head.
13. They learned to count with Lotus 1-2-3.
14. Car stereos have always rivaled home component systems.
15. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker have never preached on television.
16. Voice mail has always been available.
17. "Whatever" is not part of a question but an expression of sullen rebuke.
18. The federal budget has always been more than a trillion dollars.
19. Condoms have always been advertised on television.
20. They may have fallen asleep playing with their Gameboys in the crib.
21. They have always had the right to burn the flag.
22. For daily caffeine emergencies, Starbucks has always been around the corner.
23. Ferdinand Marcos has never been in charge of the Philippines.
24. Money put in their savings account the year they were born earned almost 7% interest.
25. Bill Gates has always been worth at least a billion dollars.
26. Dirty dancing has always been acceptable.
27. Southern-fried chicken, prepared with a blend of 11 herbs and spices, has always been available in China.
28. Michael Jackson has always been bad, and greed has always been good.
29. The Starship Enterprise has always looked dated.
30. Pixar has always existed.
31. There has never been a "fairness doctrine" at the FCC.
32. Judicial appointments routinely have been "Borked."
33. Aretha Franklin has always been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
34. There have always been zebra mussels in the Great Lakes.
35. Police have always been able to search garbage without a search warrant.
36. It has always been possible to walk from England to mainland Europe on dry land.
37. They have grown up in a single superpower world.
38. They missed the oat-bran diet craze.
39. American Motors has never existed.
40. Scientists have always been able to see supernovas.
41. Les Miserables has always been on stage.
42. Halogen lights have always been available at home, with a warning.
43. "Baby M" may be a classmate, and contracts with surrogate mothers have always been legal.
44. RU486 has always been on the market.
45. There has always been a pyramid in front of the Louvre in Paris.
46. British Airways has always been privately owned.
47. Irradiated food has always been available but controversial.
48. Snowboarding has always been a popular winter pastime.
49. Libraries have always been the best centers for computer technology and access to good software.
50. Biosphere 2 has always been trying to create a revolution in the life sciences.
51. The Hubble Telescope has always been focused on new frontiers.
52. Researchers have always been looking for stem cells.
53. They do not remember "a kinder and gentler nation."
54. They never saw the shuttle Challenger fly.
55. The TV networks have always had cable partners.
56. Airports have always had upscale shops and restaurants.
57. Black Americans have always been known as African-Americans.
58. They never saw Pat Sajak or Arsenio Hall host a late night television show.
59. Matt Groening has always had a Life in Hell.
60. Salman Rushdie has always been watching over his shoulder.
61. Digital cameras have always existed.
62. Tom Landry never coached the Cowboys.
63. Time Life and Warner Communications have always been joined.
64. CNBC has always been on the air.
65. The Field of Dreams has always been drawing people to Iowa.
66. They never saw a Howard Johnson's with 28 ice cream flavors.
67. Reindeer at Christmas have always distinguished between secular and religious decorations.
68. Entertainment Weekly has always been on the newsstand.
69. Lyme Disease has always been a ticking concern in the woods.
70. Jimmy Carter has always been an elder statesman.
71. Miss Piggy and Kermit have always dwelt in Disneyland.
72. America's Funniest Home Videos has always been on television.
73. Their nervous new parents heard C. Everett Koop proclaim nicotine as addictive as heroin.
74. Lever has always been looking for 2000 parts to clean.
75. They have always been challenged to distinguish between news and entertainment on cable TV.

As if all of this wasn't enough to make me feel as dated as an episode of The Mod Squad, my buddy Cheno just pointed out to me at lunch that I'm of sufficient age to be (in theory, at least) the father of one of these hypothetical college freshmen.

I don't know about you, but suddenly I feel the need for a drink...

Coming Soon: The Next-Generation Space Telescope

My entry awhile back on the recent space shuttle mission triggered a comment-section discussion between myself and my friend Robert about, among other things, plans for a new space telescope to replace the aging Hubble. Well, Robert, just for you, I'm linking to this article about that new telescope, which has just reached a big manufacturing milestone related to its primary mirror. Fantabulous factoids about said mirror and the telescope to which it belongs follow:

The [James] Webb [Space] Telescope features a 6.5-meter (20 feet) aperture primary mirror comprised of 18 beryllium segments and will be the largest deployable telescope ever launched. ...JWST will peer into the infrared at great distances to search for answers to astronomers' fundamental questions about the birth and evolution of galaxies, the size and shape of the universe and the mysterious life cycle of matter. The space-based observatory will reside in an orbit 940,000 miles from Earth at the L2 Lagrange point.

The Lagrange points, for the non-geeky among us, are places in space where an object will be stationary relative to both the Earth and the Moon, rather than continuously changing position like ordinary satellites.

This has been another interesting but essentially useless exercise in trivia, courtesy of Simple Tricks and Nonsense. You may now return to your regularly scheduled Web surfing.

Modern Jewish Girls in Sandy, Utah?

In case you were wondering, you can indeed find my friend Ruthie's book, The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, here in the Salt Lake area. Anne and I went shopping last night at a local Barnes and Noble store and located it with no trouble at all. There were, in fact, two copies available. And we weren't even at the big store downtown. We were out in stiflingly dull, virtually monoethnic, suburban Sandy. The book was located in the Judaism section, which is next to the Bibles and around the corner from the LDS stuff.

So who would have thought there was a Judaism section at the Sandy B&N? I was stunned...

Brock Peters

All the standard obituaries for Brock Peters, the imposing actor who died yesterday at the age of 78, are emphasizing his role as Tom Robinson in the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird. But for me, he'll always be the voice of Darth Vader.

Or perhaps I should say, one of the voices of Darth Vader. While everybody knows that James Earl Jones voiced the Dark Lord of the Sith for the Star Wars movies, it is a somewhat more obscure fact that Peters spoke from the helmet in the Star Wars Radio Drama that was produced by NPR in the early '80s. If you've never heard that program, I really can't recommend it highly enough. You wouldn't think an old-fashioned radio show adapted from such a visually oriented film could work, but it does, and I think it works rather brilliantly. Written by the late Brian Daley, the radio show downplays the more spectacular scenes from the movie, which of course could not be fully reproduced in an audio-only medium, and concentrates instead on filling in details about the settings, situations, and characters. The radio show, along with Daley's trilogy of novels about Han Solo, was the beginning of what SW fans have come to know as the "Expanded Universe" -- the tapestry of novels, comics, video games and other materials that have fleshed out Star Wars far beyond what we've seen on-screen. And even though there will always be arguments among the fans about which parts of the EU qualify as "canon," Uncle George himself has accepted elements of the radio drama as "official." (I'm thinking in particular of the name of the Alderaanian transport, seen in both the original Star Wars and Revenge of the Sith. You had to be sharp to catch it, but in ROTS, Bail Organa refers to the ship as the Tantive [pronounced Tan-ta-vee]. That comes from the radio show, in which the ship was called the Tantive IV.)

Brock Peters' take on Darth Vader in the radio drama is quite different from James Earl Jones' movie performance. Jones played Vader with a sort of detached menace and a trace of wry humor -- I've always thought his reading of the line about Admiral Motti's lack of faith is pretty funny, for instance. Peters, on the other hand, fills the Emperor's Apprentice with a barely-contained rage that threatens to explode at any moment. I suspect he chose this approach to compensate for the limitations of radio. While Jones knew that Vader's costume and helmet would provide much of the character's impact, Peters had to somehow make the character intimidating with his voice alone, and he definitely succeeded. The scene in which Vader tortures Princess Leia to learn the location of the rebel base is especially uncomfortable, and not just because she was later revealed to be his own daughter. It's a great performance in a work that is every bit as meaningful to me as the movie it was adapted from.

In addition to his place in Star Wars lore, Peters also contributed to the Star Trek franchise. He appeared in two of the six feature films that starred the cast of the original series, playing the same character both times, and he had a recurring role on Deep Space Nine as Joseph Sisko, father of the heroic Captain Sisko. In fact, his role as Joseph was so indelible that I had completely forgotten he played Admiral Cartwright in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, at least until I read a Trek-oriented obit this morning. But even when he was playing kindly old Grampa Sisko, stirring up a pot of gumbo for his son Ben and grandson Jake in the family restaurant in 24th Century New Orleans, I only had to close my eyes to see the gargoylish mask of a fallen Jedi...

Space Stuff

There are some interesting tidbits over at Space.com today that probably won't make it onto the evening news, so I thought I'd provide a valuable public service and bring them to the attention of my three loyal readers.

First, the Japanese are preparing to test a prototype of a supersonic passenger plane intended as a successor to the now-mothballed Concorde. The end goal is a production plane that will be able to carry 300 people from Tokyo to LA in four hours, but without the engine noise and piggish fuel-consumption that always plagued Concorde.

I've long been fascinated by the thought of supersonic flight, and especially by the Concorde aircraft. This is going to sound weird, but I think my interest comes from seeing an Airport-style disaster movie on TV when I was a kid. You'd think that would have discouraged me from wanting to even set foot on one of those planes, but it actually had the opposite effect. The characters in the film (as best I can recall) kept touting the plane as the future of travel, and I believed them. I used to be certain that by the time I was in my 30s, we'd have flying cars, easily affordable weekend getaways to the moon, and a sky filled with SSTs (supersonic transports). Yes, I was a little geek, and probably gullible to boot, too, but science-fictiony visions of the future really did seem plausible back then. Hell, Concorde actually looked like a spaceship, so what was so unbelievable?

I eventually gave up on flying cars and lunar holidays, and there never more than a handful of Concordes built, but I still hoped I'd be able to afford a ride in one someday, just to say that I'd done it, right up until the day they were retired. I came very close to pulling money from my savings account to make one of those final flights, actually. Maybe I'll get my chance to go supersonic on a Japanese SST.

Moving along, a ceremony today at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center has corrected a historical oversight by awarding astronaut wings to three civilian test pilots who flew the X-15 rocket plane into space back in the '60s.

The X-15 was a wicked-looking machine that occupied the shadowy middle ground between a true spaceship and an airplane. A descendent of Chuck Yeager's legendary X-1 -- the first plane to fly faster than the speed of sound -- and a direct ancestor of the space shuttle, the X-15 was carried aloft under the wing of a B-52. After being released by the mother ship, the X-15 pilot would ignite his rockets and take the plane as high and fast as he could get it to go. Eight of those pilots managed to get the plane above an altitude of 50 miles, which is beyond the atmosphere and officially into space. Five of these eight were military men, but the remaining three -- William H. "Bill" Dana and the late John B. "Jack" McKay and Joseph A. Walker -- were civilian flyers employed by NASA. While the military pilots got to call themselves astronauts, complete with official insignia for their flightsuits, the honor was withheld from these three, until today. It's about time. I always feel a pleasant little glow when ancient wrongs are redressed and proper respect is at long last paid.

And lastly, if you've been wondering about those little Martian rovers that just seem to keep going and going like that damn toy bunny, here's an update on one of them: after a long drive, Spirit has finally reached the summit of a mysterious land feature called Husband Hill, and the view is spectacular. Details here.

That's all for tonight. Catch you on the darkside...

Klingon Fairy Tales

The off-beat Web site of off-beat publisher McSweeney's -- which produces anthologies of short fiction with titles like Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things -- today posts up a very funny list of Klingon fairy tales, i.e., familiar fairy-tale titles given a perverse twist. I don't think you have to be a Trek fan to enjoy these, so long as you understand the basic characterization of Klingons. (Hint: their entire culture is based on combat and personal honor. And personal honor that is obtained through combat. And combat over matters of personal honor. And... well, you get the idea.)

Here are my favorites:

"Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others"

"The Three Little Pigs Build an Improvised Explosive Device and Deal With That Damned Wolf Once and for All"

"Old Mother Hubbard, Lacking the Means to Support Herself With Honor, Sets Her Disruptor on Self-Destruct and Waits for the Inevitable"

Go check out the rest... Qapla'!

Ruthie Gets Published!

My friend Ruth Ellenson has just emailed me with some very exciting news: her first book hits the stands today! (How ironic, in light of the previous entry's gloomy assessment of modern American reading habits, but this isn't the time for pessimism...)

Yes, it's true, I happen to know a published author. (Imagine me gripping my lapels and looking smug as I say that.) Actually, she was the editor of this volume rather than the author, since it's a collection of essays, but hey, it's still her name on the cover, right? Close enough to famous for my money. Here's the message she sent me:

Ever worried about worrying enough, failed to live up to the Zionist ideals of your parents, or contemplated getting a pedicure on Yom Kippur? Then do we have the book for you....

The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, published Monday, August 22, explodes with truth, humor, and insight into what it means to be a Jewish woman at the dawn of the 21st century. The women in this anthology bravely invite you along as they struggle to strike a balance between their heritage and their modern lives. Whether it's the pressure of hearing a grandmother's biological clock start to tick, the horror of being outted as a lesbian at
your mother's Yiddish club, or the burden of being the only kid in Hebrew school who actually cares, their predicaments will make you laugh, cry, and howl in recognition.

Here's what early reviews are saying:

"Wide-ranging and thought-provoking....fresh and funny." --Publisher's Weekly

"A lively and intelligent gathering...what Jewish essayists may have cornered is the ability to write exhaustively and entertainingly about the subject of guilt, as further evidenced by this hip, first-person girl-centric collection." --Seattle Times

"Trust me, you'll feel guilty if you don't read this hilarious and poignant collection. Move over, Woody Allen." --St. Petersburg Times

The book can be found in stores and online at:

Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Powell's

If you'd like to further ease your conscience, please join us on the road for the following readings, events, and festivities:

• Sept. 15 LOS ANGELES
  Writer's Bloc presents at the Skirball Cultural Center
  2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
  7:30 PM
  Aimee Bender, Lori Gottlieb, Gina Nahai and Ruth Andrew Ellenson
  Moderated by Dan Futterman, author of the upcoming film "Capote"

• Sept. 19 NEW YORK
  Brandies House
  12 E. 77th St.
  7:00 PM
  Elisa Albert, Pearl Gluck, Francesca Segre and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Sept. 20 NEW YORK
  Barnes & Noble Village
  396 Ave. of the Americ as
  7:30 PM
  Wendy Shanker, Susan Shapiro and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Sept. 25 LOS ANGELES
  Dutton's Brentwood
  11975 San Vincente Blvd.
  2:00 PM
  Sharon Brous, Lori Gottlieb, Amy Klein, Francesca Segre and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Sept. 28 NEW YORK
  Happy Endings Reading Series presents "Guilt Night"
  302 Broome St
  Between Forsyth and Eldridge
  8:00 PM
  Jennifer Bleyer, Baz Dreisinger, Wendy Shanker, Rebecca Walker and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Oct. 2 WEST HOLLYWOOD
  West Hollywood Book Fair
  8300 Santa Monica Blvd.
  3:00 PM
  Amy Klein, Gina Nahai and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Oct. 5 NEW YORK
  Joe's Pub
  425 Lafayette St.
  Joint Performance with Nice Jewish Girl's Gone Bad
  9:30 PM
  Elisa Albert, Wendy Shanker, Sheryl Zohn and Ruth Andrew Ellenson
  featuring: Judy Gold, Vanessa , Goddess Perlman and Ophira Eisenberg

• Oct. 6 NEW YORK
  Upper West Side JCC
  334 Amsterdam Avenue
  8:00 PM
  Rebecca Goldstein, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Daphne Merkin, Susan Shapiro and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Oct. 8 NEW YORK
  Heeb Magazine Party
  Mo Pitkins
  34 Avenue A, b/w 2nd and 3rd Sts.
  Featuring a performance by Pharoh's Daughter's Basya Schechter
  7: 00 PM
  Kera Bolonik, Pearl Gluck, Molly Jong-Fast, Cynthia Kaplan and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Oct. 14-15 BERKELEY
  University of Calirofnia at Berkeley Hillel
  Ayelet Waldman and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Oct. 20-21 OHIO
  Ohio University Hillel
  Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 6 SAN FRANCISCO
  San Francisco Jewish Community Center
  3200 California St.
  11:00 AM
  Aimee Bender, Daphne Merkin, Rebecca Walker and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 8 CHERRY HILL, NJ
  Katz Jewish Community Center
  1301 Springdale Road
  7: 00 PM
  Lauren Grodstein, Wendy Shanker, Laurie Gwen Shapiro and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 9 SCOTTSDALE, AZ
  Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center
  7: 00 PM
  Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 10 NEW YORK
  Makor
  35 W. 67th St.
  7:00 PM
  Elisa Albert, Jennifer Bleyer, Lauren Grodstein, Dara Horn, Molly Jong-Fast,
  Amy Klein, Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Sheryl Zohn and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 13 WASHINGTON DC
  DC Jewish Community Center
  1529 16th St. NW
  5:00 PM
  TBA and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 16 SPRINGFIELD, MA
  Springfield JCC
  7:00 PM
  http://www.springfieldjcc.org/
  
  TBA and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 17 BOSTON
  Brookline Booksmith
  279 Harvard St.
  7:00 PM
  Rebecca Goldstein, Rachel Kadish, Tova Mirvis and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

• Nov. 30 PASADENA, CA
  Pasadena Jewish Community Center
  Cal Tech Anatheum
  1200 E. California Blvd.
  2:00 PM
  Amy Klein, Gina Nahai and Ruth Andrew Ellenson

  
  

• Dec. 6 LOS ANGELES
  Wilshire Boulevard Temple
  11661 W. Olympic Blvd.
  7:00 PM
  TBA and Ruth Andrew Ellenson
  

Please pass this on to whomever you think would be interested.

Happy reading,
Ruthie

Curiously enough, I don't see Salt Lake City on her book tour. Perhaps the publisher didn't think there would be much of a market for it here?

In any event, I wish her much success with the book and sincerely hope she enjoys this experience. I intend to live vicariously through her for a while, since the closest I've come to publication is this little vanity project right here on the Web. If any of my three loyal readers have any interest in this subject matter, or if you just like the idea of supporting a new literary voice (who, I understand, is currently working on an actual novel), then please click one of the links above and buy a copy...

Kids Today...

Writer Peter David tells a heartbreaking story today about a little boy who loves Spider-Man. He wears Spidey-branded shoes, plays the Spidey video game, owns the Spider-Man movies on DVD and regularly watches the animated series on the Cartoon Network. But he's never read a Spider-Man comic. Even worse, he has no interest in reading one. Zero. Zip. The very source of the character and stories that he's made the center of his young life holds as much appeal for seven-year-old Steven as sitting through a grad-school lecture on macroeconomics. (Not that a lecture on macroeconomics holds much appeal for anybody except the tiniest handful, but you get my point.)

It is stories like this that are propelling me down the road to premature Grumpy Old Man-hood.

Now, I know that a lot of people, probably even most people, don't give an adamantium crap about comics. They've always been a ghettoized form of literature that traditionally has received only slightly more respect from the uninitiated than pornography. Moreover, I suspect a lot of the pasty-skinned folks you see at comic shops like it that way. (If comics were to achieve mainstream popularity, it wouldn't be cool to like them anymore, kind of like when alternative music bands make it big and their fans from the old days start accusing them of selling out. I personally blame many of the problems the comic industry is experiencing on this short-sighted, insular attitude.)

I also know that older people have always lamented the declining intelligence, curiosity, imagination, modesty, morals, and hygiene of the generation coming up behind them. And that fans of aging media have always decried the tendency of the new to shoulder aside the old, which means that many of my sentiments are only an echo of things that have been said before. Paperback novels replaced pulp magazines and TV put an end to live radio dramas, and fans of those earlier media no doubt grumbled about how sad it was that kids of their day just didn't get "it," whatever "it" may have been.

Nevertheless, I can't help but think there's something seriously wrong in America today if kids aren't interested in comics. It's not just because I liked them as a kid and don't want to see them fade away. It's because I think a lack of interest in such an accessible and pleasurable form of reading probably indicates a lack of interest in reading generally.

Consider: it used to be that a lot of kids (myself included) cut their literary teeth on comic books. Comics in the '70s weren't all that sophisticated as a rule -- nothing like some of today's very adult graphic novels -- but they were a form of literature, despite what my teachers always told me. From comics (as well as TV, movies, and, yes, actual books, too, that I loved as a child), I learned the basic methods of storytelling, as well as the themes and motifs that have inspired readers for centuries. More importantly, they acted as a kind of gateway drug that led to bigger and better things. I don't think I'm all that unusual for having read the "classic comics" version of Dracula and then seeking out the original novel when I got a little older. It seemed then and it seems to me now to be a perfectly natural progression.

Similarly, there was always a symbiotic relationship, at least for me, between movies, comics, and print literature. For instance, I saw the Star Wars movie, I read the Star Wars comics, and I read the Star Wars novel. Again, it semeed perfectly natural to me -- each medium told the story according to its own strengths and created a stronger overall experience and understanding of the story. And in time my affection for the Star Wars novel drew me to other, similar stories told through the print medium, and then eventually to other types of stories altogether. And I honestly believe the comic book was a part of my progression toward more sophisticated literature.

But what is the progression today? From the movie to the video game to the branded merchandise and back again, without a print component at all? That would seem to be the lesson taught by little Steven, the Spider-Man fan who has never seen Spidey in his original element. I don't know about you, but I find that lesson extremely worrisome...

Vive la Book-vending Machines!

Say what you will about the French -- and I know people who will say plenty -- they are the clever folks who brought us the wonders of the self-cleaning street toilet. And now they've come up with another "duh, why haven't we had this before?" invention: the Maxi-Livres book-vending machine. Five such machines, stocking 25 titles that range from The Odyssey to a French-English dictionary, have been installed in various locations around Paris. According to the linked article, the books cost only $2.45, an incredible bargain these days, especially when you factor in exchange rates. And the thing that makes these machines really cool?

...Maxi-Livre's distributors were designed to bypass the characteristic vending-machine-drop, which can be punishing for books.

"We knew that French bibliophiles would be horrified to see their books falling into a trough like candy or soda," [Maxi-Livre president Xavier] Chambon said. "So we installed a mechanical arm that grabs the book and delivers it safely."

While my first choice will always be a quirky, independently-owned bookshop -- preferably one with a live-in cat or other animal mascot -- I really like this idea. If nothing else, it would solve that nasty problem of what to read on the train-ride home if you finish your book during your lunch break...

Boomer Trivia

What does it say about me that I know more about Baby Boomer pop culture than my parents?

To explain: my folks don't have their own e-mail addresses, e-mail apparently being something akin to the arcane arts of blackest magic as far as they're concerned. That means that all their buddies who are e-literate tend to send their jokes and stories and other assorted spam to me, hoping that I will be a good son and relay it to the parental units. Most of the time I don't bother because very little of it is worth their time, or mine, either. (I especially despise the would-be heartstring-tuggers!) But every now and again something comes through that's kind of fun and worth passing along.

Case in point: a trivia quiz that arrived yesterday, composed of questions about TV, music, and historical events from the late 1950s and '60s. When I first opened the message, I was confident that I'd know quite a few of the answers, since I spent a good part of my childhood watching re-runs of the previous decade's television programming, but imagine my surprise when I got more of these correct than my parents. Obviously something is seriously amiss in the space-time continuum...

Here's the quiz, slightly edited by me for grammar and such:

This is a test for us, old kids! The answers are printed below, but don't you cheat.

READY????? Here we go!

1. After the Lone Ranger saved the day and rode off into the sunset, the grateful citizens would ask, "Who was that masked man?" Invariably, someone would answer, "I don't know, but he left this behind." What did he always leave behind?

2. When the Beatles first came to the U.S. in early 1964, we all watched them on The __________________ Show.

3. Finish the song lyric: "Get your kicks ___________________."

4. Finish this tagline: "The story you are about to see if true. The names have been changed___________________."

5. Finish the song lyric: "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, ________________."

6. After the Twist, The Mashed Potato, and the Watusi, we "danced" under a stick that was lowered as low as we could go in a dance called the "_____________."

7. Finish the song slogan: "N-E-S-T-L-E-S, Nestle's makes the very best _______________."

8. Satchmo was America's "Ambassador of Goodwill." Our parents shared this great jazz trumpet player with us. His name was _________________.

9. What takes a licking and keeps on ticking?

10. Red Skelton's hobo character was named __________________ and Red always ended his television show by saying, "Good Night, and_______________."

11. Some Americans who protested the Vietnam War did so by burning their____________.

12. The cute little car with the engine in the back and the trunk in the front was called the VW. What other names did it go by?

13. In 1971, singer Don MacLean sang a song about, "the day the music died." This was a tribute to ___________________.

14. We can remember the first satellite placed into orbit. The Russians did it. It was called ___________________.

15. One of the big fads of the late '50s and '60s was a large plastic ring that we twirled around our waist. It was called the________________
    

ANSWERS:

01. A silver bullet.
02. Ed Sullivan
03. On Route 66
04. To protect the innocent
05. The Lion sleeps tonight
06. Limbo
07. Chocolate
08. Louis Armstrong
09. A Timex watch
10. Freddy The Freeloader, and "may God Bless."
11. Draft cards (Bras were also burned.)
12. Beetle or Bug
13. Buddy Holly
14. Sputnik
15. Hoola-hoop

If you scored:

0-3 Does your mother know that you are out this late?!?!?!
4-6 Still gets carded at the Bar!!
7-10 Getting close to 40 but still can pass for 30!!
11-14 Starting to show your age... and proud of it!!!
15 The "Old Folks Home" is looking for you!!!!!!

Send this to your "old" friends. It will drive them crazy! And, keep them busy and let them forget their aches and pains for a few minutes!

For the record, I missed only one of these, number 10, the one about Red Skelton. I'm aware of who Skelton is, of course, but I don't think I've ever seen his program and I'm absolutely unfamiliar with any of his characters or catch-phrases. Everything else on this quiz seemed rather elementary to me, which means, according to the scoring key, that I'm "starting to show my age... and proud of it!" Except that, by implication, my age must be about twenty years older than my birth certificate says it is. My parents' scores, by contrast, indicate that they're still passing for 30.

Yep, something definitely wrong with space-time. It's the only explanation...

Joe Ranft

Boy, this one is sad: Joe Ranft, part of the creative team at the computer animation film company Pixar, died yesterday in a horrific accident (he was a passenger in a car that went off a Southern California cliff into the ocean). He was only 45.

Most people have probably never heard of Ranft unless they're major animation buffs, but he was a big-time force behind four of Pixar's amazing raft of hits -- Toy Story and its sequel, A Bug's Life, and Monsters, Inc. all benefitted from his writing talents. He also provided character voices for several other Pixar films, most notably Heimlich, the overweight and food-obsessed caterpillar, in A Bug's Life. If you've watched the DVD supplements on any of those films, you'll likely recognize his face.

In addition, a check of his filmography reveals that he had a hand in several other significant animated films of recent years, including Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Disney's Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and the film that, as much as anything, is responsible for the modern renaissance of film animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. I myself am not a big fan of animated movies, but looking over this list I realize that I am a fan of most everything Joe Ranft worked on. What a bummer...

If you're interested in reading more, The Hollywood Reporter obituary is here, and the blog Cartoon Brew has rememberances and links to other relevant material here.

The Legacy of Our Culture

Here's some news that will make the blood of moral crusader-types run cold: an Australian researcher has determined that nudie magazines are practically immortal.

During an investigation into the rate at which wood-pulp products degrade in landfills, this intrepid scientist found that magazines with coated, glossy pages -- the ones with lots of pictures, in other words -- were the best preserved of all the printed matter he uncovered. A 1979 copy of Playboy was described as being in "near-mint condition" after decades in the dump. The smart-alecks at Fark (quoted by the other smart-alecks at Boing Boing) say this means that "porn will be this civilization's gift to the next civilization."

So, am I wicked for finding this impossibly droll?

Is This The Best We Can Do for Movie Stars?

So, I saw the movie Wedding Crashers over the weekend. It was likable enough, if not quite deserving of the critical praise that's been heaped upon it. I suspect folks are making a big deal out of this one because it's the first film of its type in a very long time that appeals to grown-up sensibilities, rather than pandering to the mid-teen demographic. In other words, it's an R-rated comedy about 30-something guys that happily admits to being what it is instead of compromising itself down to a PG-13 that's too hard-core for kids and too wimpy for adults, as so many others have done in recent years. In that respect, the movie was quite refreshing, and I personally enjoyed seeing the aging-but-still-beautiful Jane Seymour and the aging-but-still-uber cool Christopher Walken in memorable supporting roles.

The movie did leave me with one big, nagging question, though: what is the deal with Owen Wilson?

Seriously, can any of my three loyal readers explain to me the appeal of this guy? How is it that he's achieved leading-man status? As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, he probably would've made a decent living from sidekick roles but I doubt he would've had a shot at the lead. These days, however, he apparently fits somebody's definition of "movie star," and I'll be damned if I can figure out why.

Don't get me wrong. Mr. Wilson seems like a nice enough chap, and I don't really mind watching him. Unlike, say, Adam Sandler, I don't want to injure him every time he appears on the screen. But he's so damnably, stubbornly, defiantly ordinary that I don't understand how he could've possibly become the lead -- the romantic lead, no less -- in a high-grossing, box-office hit.

I guess I have a hopelessly old-fashioned idea of what a movie star is supposed to be.

Consider this: if Wedding Crashers had been made fifty years ago, Wilson's role would've been played by Cary Grant, or maybe Tony Curtis. If it had been done in the '60s, Sinatra and Dean Martin could've handily substituted for Wilson and his co-star, Vince Vaughn (whose burgeoning stardom I do understand and condone, by the way). In the '70s, we might've seen a Wedding Crashers made with Redford and Newman, and an '80s-vintage WC probably would've cast Tom Selleck as the nice guy who's tired of the game, the part Wilson plays today. You see where I'm going with this? Movie stars used to be larger-than-life, both in the way they looked and the way they behaved. They weren't so beautiful or exotic that we in the audience couldn't identify with them, but they had a competitive edge on us average joes and janes, and we loved them for it. We looked up to them. We wanted to be them. And even when the movie stars weren't any better looking than us -- and there were plenty who weren't -- there was still an ineffable something that set them apart from us. They were stronger, cooler, funnier, classier. Something.

But that was the old days. Things are different now, as I said the other day. And to see how different they are, we need look no further than to the star of Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson.

Let's start with his appearance. He's a reasonably attractive guy, but not what I would call "handsome." Granted, I'm appraising him from a solidly heterosexual male perspective, but at best I'd call him "cute." His customarily shaggy blond haircut is the age-inappropriate 'do of a guy who never got past his glory days as a teenage surf-bum. His pouty lower lip has a tendency to crease right in the middle, making it look as if he didn't use enough ChapStick during the dry season. (For about half of Wedding Crashers, I was wincing in sympathetic pain for that nasty split lip. Then I realized that it's not split at all, that's just how the guy's mouth looks. Ugh.) And then there's his nose.

My god, Owen Wilson's nose.

I don't think I've ever seen a nose that's so... eccentric. Seriously, everytime Wilson's nose is in frame, I can't think of anything else. I obsess on it, trying to imagine what the hell must've happened to it. It looks like Wilson must've called Jake LaMotta a pussy, then got the thing set by a drunken quack, then did a faceplant into a mail box before it finished healing and ultimately decided to just let nature take its course. Bob Hope's nose was often likened to a ski-jump, but Owen's schnoz resembles a ski-run, complete with moguls and flat spots and that whole back-and-forth topography that eventually gets you down the hill. Not to be too judgmental, but a nose like that is about all the proof you really need to demonstrate how far our standards of male beauty have slipped.

But it's not just the man's nose that makes me wonder at his stardom; it's his persona, as well. Like I said, there have been movie stars in the past that weren't all that good-looking -- Humphrey Bogart, for example, was a pretty ordinary guy in the looks department, but he exuded what we would later come to know as cool. Or, to use a less colloquial word, he had charisma. Charisma is like a magnetic field that radiates off those who are lucky enough to possess it; it draws us in, makes us want to watch that person. Again, Owen Wilson seems like a nice guy, but I can't see anything radiating off of him at all. He's just like everybody else in the charisma department, i.e., he's basically lacking it. His laid-back drawliness is perfectly pleasant, but not at all exciting. He's like that guy you knew back in high school, the one you always liked but haven't thought about in years, not until you find out that he's running the shop where you have your oil changed.

Yes, that's right: we've reached a point of such pop-cultural blandness that our old gym-class buddy who manages the Minit Lube down the street could be the same guy who sweeps the pretty girl off her feet in this week's number-four at the box-office. Some people probably find it appealing, maybe even comforting, to think that our movie stars aren't any different than the rest of us. Me, I just don't get it...

But it was an okay little movie.

The Long National Crisis is Over

Dick Clark will be returning to Times Square this New Year's Eve. Even though the title of Clark's annual broadcast, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, hasn't been strictly accurate in years -- how much rocking can you really do with musical guests like Kool & the Gang? -- Clark on New Year's is an institution, and I, for one, missed seeing him last year. I know he can't last forever, despite all the jokes about him being an android; the linked article notes that Ryan "I have lousy taste in clothes and no discernable charisma" Seacrest is warming up to take over for Clark permanently. There'll be a time, probably not too distant now, when Dick Clark will be just one more old-school pop-cultural reference that garners blank stares from the whippersnappers. But in the meantime, I really hope ol' Dick's got a few more New Year's broadcasts left in him. We have so little continuity in our society these days, so few common points of reference, that we need to prolong the careers of our cheesy, beloved, old TV hosts as long as we possibly can...

Another of Those Time-Wasting E-Mail Survey Thingies

This entry is pretty much just what the subject line says it is, a little survey called "Getting to Know Your Friends" that found its way into my inbox the other day. It's silly, but it's something to do on a late-summer afternoon that really seems interminable...

1. What is your occupation?

   Until very recently, I earned my living by writing soulless, superficial, mind-numbingly dull technical and marketing documents. Now I earn my living by proofreading soulless, superficial, mind-numbingly dull technical and marketing documents. That's just the day job, though. I'm really a novelist and screenwriter. Just like everybody else I know.

2. What are you listening to right now?

   The whoosh of an air conditioner, the drone of a female voice coming through someone's speaker-phone several cubicles away, and the clickety-clackety of lots of fingers on lots of keyboards.

3. What was the last thing you ate?

   A handful of free pretzels from the break room. Also known as Purina Proofreader Chow.

4. Do you wish on stars?

   Not since those unfortunate incidents involving the little wooden boy and the alien mother ship.

5. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

   "Raw umber." Which, I understand, Crayola no longer makes. Figures.

6. How is the weather right now?

   Air-conditioned and fluorescently lighted.

7. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?

   My significant other, Anne.

8. Do you like the person who sent this to you?

   I hope so, otherwise one of my enemies has gotten hold of my e-mail address.

9. Favorite drink?

   Anything that gives off smoke and has "one large gold brick" on the ingredients list.

10. Favorite sport to watch? On TV???

    Since I don't enjoy sports in general, I'm not really qualified to answer this. But if you really twist my arm... female beach volleyball. As if you couldn't see that one coming.

11. Have you ever dyed your hair?

    Hair? What hair?

12. Do you wear contacts or glasses?

    Glasses, ever since someone said something to me about the trees on the ridgeline and I said, "There are trees on the ridgeline?"

13. Pets?

    One. A psychotic border collie named Shadow. Although I'm also an adoptive father to Anne's poodle, Rusty. And a benevolent, god-like provider of food to the dozen or so feral cats that live in my backyard.

14. What was the last movie you watched?

    In a theater? Fantastic Four.
    At home? On DVD? A.I. Artificial Intelligence. On VHS? The Graduate.
    Sorry if that's more information than required, but the question was imprecisely worded.

15. Favorite day of the year?

    The last one before fall teeters into winter.

16. What do you do to vent anger?

    It varies, but it almost always involves "colorful metaphors."

17. What was your favorite toy as a child?

    Hm. Tough one. I had so many. My old Star Trek phaser was cool, until Dad took the batteries out because he got tired of the sound effects. And then there was that electronic starship toy that made roaring engine sounds that changed in pitch depending on the ship's angle. Until Dad took the batteries out. And I had a cool police car toy with a working siren. At least it worked until Dad took the batteries out...

18. Fall or Spring?

    See my answer two items back.

19. Hugs or kisses?

    Neither unless you promise to respect me in the morning.

20. Cherry or Blueberry?

    Cherry, of course.

21. Do you want your friends to e-mail you back?

    It is the polite thing to do...

22. Who is most likely to respond?

    Oh, you mean if I were to have sent this survey around by e-mail instead of blogging it? Hell, I don't know...

23. Who is least likely to respond?

    See above.

24. Living arrangements?

    In a house.

25. When was the last time you cried?

    While watching Fantastic Four. Make of that what you will.

26. What is on the floor of your closet?

    Several pairs of shoes I don't wear anymore, coated in lots and lots of dust.

27. Who is the friend you have had the LONGEST?

    Keith Jensen.

28. What did you do last night?

    The usual: dinner, aimless channel-surfing in the hopes that I might find something worth watching, a phone call to Anne, and a nightcap of Fudge Stripe cookies and milk.

29. Favorite smells?

    Woodsmoke on a crisp evening, coffee brewing on a crisp morning, fresh-cut alfalfa, new leather, and vanilla...

30. What are you afraid of?

    Failure. Humiliation. Arriving at work without my pants. The usual.

31. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers?

    Cheese. Because everything's better with cheese.

32. Favorite car?

    I'm rather fond of a particular 1963 Ford Galaxie. But my '03 Mustang is cool, too. And I'd like to have a DeLorean someday. Or a Cobra. Or a '61 'vette, or a Mercedes Gullwing, or if you want to get really crazy, a Duesenberg roadster. Mostly I'd like to own Harrah's Car Collection.

33. Favorite dog breed?

    Well, aside from being genetically predisposed toward obsessive-compulsive disorder, border collies are pretty cool.

34. Number of keys on your key ring?

    Two. But I also carry two more in my pocket. Hey, I don't always drive, so I don't need the car keys all the time...

35. How many years at your current job?

    It's more a matter of weeks, actually.

36. Favorite day of the week?

    Sunday. It's the only one when I usually have no obligations the moment I wake up in the morning.

37. How many states have you lived in?

    Well, in the strict biological sense of life-functions occurring while I was in a particular state, nine. If you're talking long-term residency, then only one.

38. How many cities have you lived in?

    Short-term, as described above? Probably a dozen or so. Long-term, then only one.

39. Do you enjoy receiving these [surveys]?

    Sure. I'm all about narcissistic rambling...
    

If anyone's still out there reading this so late on a Friday evening, it's time to log off now. Go and have a good weekend, folks...

Friday Afternoon Reading

I'm a shade too young to have owned the famous poster of Farrah Fawcett (or, as I believe she was known at the time, Farrah Fawcett-Majors). It was originally released in 1976, and I wouldn't become interested in hanging my first girlie poster until sometime in the '80s. Nevertheless, anyone who was alive and had their eyes open during the late '70s surely knows that image of Farrah: the billowing mass of blond hair, the red swimsuit, the big, scary, "say cheese" smile. It's an icon of its age, so much so that movie-set decorators often use it to help evoke that long-lost time when collars were wide and sex was just good, clean fun.

It turns out there's an interesting story behind the poster, a tale of two brothers who started small, made a fortune, then lost everything, including each other. If you don't have much on the agenda today and need something to while away your afternoon, check out this article about Mike and Ted Trikilis and their one time poster-publishing empire, Pro Arts Inc. It's a pretty long piece, but I found it fascinating. It's also rather sad, but then, many of the best stories are, aren't they?

(For the record, the first pin-up to grace my bedroom wall was as much an icon of the '80s as the Farah shot was of the '70s, specifically that one of Heather Thomas in a pink bikini. Don't know who Thomas is? She used to provide eye-candy for a TV series called The Fall Guy. Which, oddly enough, starred Farrah Fawcett's ex-husband, Lee Majors. Hmm. There's gotta be some kind of cosmic symmetry there, don't you think?)

Literary Immortality

Picture yourself curled up in your favorite chair on a cool autumn afternoon, sipping a cup of your favorite hot beverage, lost in the pages of a good novel... and all of a sudden a character steps into the scene who shares your name and maybe even looks like you. Sound like fun?

Well, then, check this out: a dozen or so notable authors including Michael Chabon, Amy Tan, Peter Straub, Lemony Snickett, John Grisham, Stephen King, and Neil Gaiman (from whose blog I got this little tidbit of news) are auctioning off the opportunity for your name to appear in one of their upcoming books. It's all for charity, with the proceeds going to the First Amendment Project, an advocacy group that defends the freedom of expression. Complete details about this charity auction are available here.

Personally, I'm thinking I'd like to be immortalized by Stephen King. If you know his work, it probably won't surprise you to hear that he's offering the most elaborate prize for your auction money; whereas the other authors promise simply to use your name somewhere, King intends to have his way with your fictional doppelganger:

"...Buyer should be aware that CELL is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whiskey, it's very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I'll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don't give a rip)."

A buyer who wants to die at the hands of cell-phone-induced zombies... I love it.

The auctions are being held in three separate blocks, with King's prize up for grabs during the September 8-18 block. You know, my birthday happens to fall within that span of time. If someone really wanted to impress me...

What the Hell Happened to Sophistication?

I've been planning to write something about the recent death of TV news anchorman Peter Jennings, but I obviously haven't gotten around to it yet. My plan was to follow my usual obituary schtick and be simultaneously nostalgic and curmudgeonly as I discussed how Jennings' passing marks the end of an era, which was, of course, a better time than our current Dark Age of debased superficiality. But it looks like someone has already beaten me to that angle:

...it seems certain that, at least stylistically, Jennings will have no heir. News managers today aren't looking to hire Cary Grant, the man of distinction; they're looking for Matt LeBlanc, the dude next door. In fact, if young reporters in 2005 were to emulate the air of aristocracy that rocketed Peter Jennings to stardom two decades ago, they'd likely be shown the door. Q-score focus groups interpret urbanity as snobbery these days, which may be why Jennings himself lost ratings supremacy to Tom Brokaw when the glamorous 1980s gave way to the naturalistic '90s. Once the millennium arrived, forget it: His brand of romantic persona had been supplanted by Britney Spears making pig noses and reality-TV contestants eating and vomiting up live worms. ...Male news anchors no longer exude savoir-faire... because Hollywood actors no longer exude it. Yesteryear's debonair hero has passed the torch to today's cute goofball mensch: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Ashton Kutcher.

That's from a piece on Salon called "Peter Jennings and the Death of Panache", by Richard Speer. It's worth a read, if you don't mind sitting through a commercial to get to it. (Sorry, Salon's difficult that way.)

Speer's central point -- that American culture has largely abandoned elegance, decorum, style, and dignity -- is something I've been pondering and fuming about for quite a while. As he points out in the Salon piece, today's public figures are almost aggressively grubby, or silly, or, at the very least, self-consciously "just like us." Bad manners and stupid behavior have somehow become things to aspire to, while "book learnin'" and refinement is distrusted at best, despised at worst. Oh, and god help you if you actually enjoy dressing up, because you're obviously strange or snooty, and most likely you're putting on airs and acting like you're better than the rest of us. Unless you're gay, of course, because gay people are expected to dress well... which is funny, because the handful of gay people I've known over the years didn't have any more fashion sense than anybody else.

From my perspective, no one has much fashion sense anymore, or much sense about anything else either. Our whole society has taken a hard turn towards crudity in the past fifteen years. I don't mean crudity in the sense of profanity or vulgarity (although there is plenty more of that than there used to be), but rather in the sense of a lack of sophistication. Nobody really seems to have it all together anymore, and moreover, no one seems to want to. As a society, America has become anti-suave. You can see it in who we put on our magazine covers. Who wants marquee idols like Cary Grant, impossible ideals that we average mouthbreathers can't begin to live up to? No, it's much better to reassure ourselves that it's perfectly normal to look like hell in public because even Brad Pitt, as beautiful a specimen as he is, dresses like a total schlub most of the time when he's not on a movie set.

It's not that I pine for the days when women wore dresses and little white gloves and a man couldn't leave the house without his hat. I myself wouldn't be comfortable if I had to be buttoned into a three-piece all the time, and I admit to being as baffled as anyone when it comes to etiquette and fashion. But after a long slide toward the casual end of the spectrum, I think we've finally arrived at the extreme, and I really don't know how it happened. When did we all become such freakin' slobs?

Take flip-flops, for instance. Back in my day (yes, I know I sound like the crabby old retiree I'm no doubt destined to become), you wore those things around the pool or in the public showers at the gym. Now you're seeing them at the White House, for god's sake! (For the record, I wasn't offended by the Great Flip-Flop Scandal of '05 the way a lot of people were; I didn't see it as a disrespectful affront to Office of the President or anything like that. I mostly just think flip-flops are dumb-looking and shouldn't be worn anywhere except at the pool and in public showers. I thought those young ladies looked ignorant, not disrespectful, and I find ignorance a lot more offensive most of the time. Hell, flip-flops even have a dumb-sounding name, now that the term "thong" has come to be associated with an entirely different piece of attire.)

Another one that drives me crazy is this trend of wearing baseball hats -- excuse me, trucker hats, another pointless change of appellation for something that's always had a perfectly serviceable name -- with the bills turned sideways. Granted, that one's mostly perpetrated by young males, who have always been guilty of questionable sartorial choices, but someone really needs to tell these kids that they don't look edgy; they look like Forrest Gump. They look like they don't have the brainpower to figure out how to put their hats on straight. Yes, I know that the whole point of young people's fashion trends is to annoy older folks like me; mission accomplished, at ease. The problem is that these trends no longer stay confined to the ages of 18-24 like they used to. They tend to bubble up into populations that, thanks to the Baby Boomer example, think they can stay forever young if they just wear what the kids are wearing. Bzzzzzt! Sorry, don't work that way. The day I see a man my age wearing a hat turned sideways is the day I give up hope for the human race.

In case you're wondering what put the yellowjacket in my underwear this morning, I think my bad attitude is motivated by the same thing that moves all grumpy old men: the nagging belief that the world has moved on and hasn't bothered to take them with it. I no longer know what I ought to be wearing and that makes me feel vaguely irritable. Even worse, I'm downright repelled by much of what I see out there in the stores and on the streets. I haven't seen a pair of athletic shoes that I've actually liked in years, not since they started sticking all kinds of weird little greebly doo-dads all over them. I don't want shoes with pumps in them and I don't want big, puffy shoes that look like Mickey Mouse feet. I want plain-old, unobtrusive, non-flashy, non-Michael-Jordan-branded, 1985-style sneakers. Good luck trying to find any, though.

Mostly I just want to feel like I'm not clueless and that everybody else isn't clueless either, and that even if individuals are clueless, our society isn't glorifying them for it. I guess that's really the problem I've got with the current state of society. The mishmash of dumb clothing styles, the reality shows, the sloppy celebrities and non-personalities that the media thinks we're supposed to care about -- it's all based on and fueled by cluelessness. It's like something broke down along the way and we stopped learning how to do things like dress well and behave properly and speak clearly, and then to make matters worse, we became militantly opposed to learning those things, and now we've convinced ourselves that everything is better this way. We're living through the final triumph of tackiness, people. Peter Jennings, being someone who apparently valued sophistication, intellect, and dignity, got out just in time...

I Got Dem Cozmic Paranoid Space Shuttle Blues

I'm sure everyone knows by now that space shuttle Discovery landed safely yesterday morning at Edwards AFB in California. I'm pleased about that, of course, and also pleased that the mission went as well as it did, including the unprecedented repairs to the shuttle itself that were performed by astronaut Steve Robinson. Post-landing glow aside, however, this Interested Observer found himself deeply troubled throughout most this flight, and it wasn't because of the constantly looming specter of another Columbia-style disaster.

Rather, I've been bothered -- irritated, to be more precise -- by the effect the Columbia accident has had on everyone's attitudes about the Discovery mission, and the shuttle fleet in general. I'm talking about the overriding preoccupation with the condition and safety of the shuttle and its crew. Does anyone even know what the shuttle astronauts did up there for two weeks, aside from inspecting their own spacecraft for launch damage? Hell, I follow this stuff faithfully and even I'm not entirely sure of what they did while their ship was moored to the International Space Station.

(I'm just kidding, folks; they installed a platform outside the station's airlock, replaced a failing gyroscope, dropped off fresh supplies for the station's crew, and brought home a cargo module filled with junk. But the average person would never know that from all the hand-wringing stuff they've seen on the evening news.)

Some degree of trepidation is to be expected when you're following up a horror like Columbia's final re-entry, but I thought the media coverage of "NASA's return to flight" and even NASA's own actions throughout the mission bordered on the paranoid. One little factoid that barely received a mention in the press was that this shuttle launch, despite the big breakaway foam-chunk that spooked everyone and those protruding gap-fillers that Robinson had to remove, was one of the cleanest in the history of the shuttle program. When Commander Eileen Collins performed a nifty "backflip" maneuver in front of the International Space Station, she revealed a spacecraft that was practically flawless compared to the nicked-and-dinged shuttles of earlier missions. (I'm willing to bet dangling gap-fillers after a launch are nothing out of the ordinary; it's just that NASA's never paid attention to them before.)

I'm not arguing the need to be cautious, and it was really Buck Rogers-cool when Robinson dropped beneath Discovery's belly to play space-handyman (a significant "first" and something we'll need to be able to do if we ever head for Mars). But I think all the emphasis on launch damage and chipped heat-shield tiles and falling foam isn't creating the public image that our manned-spaceflight program needs right now. The shuttles used to be seen as objects of national pride, the pinnacle of American technology, and the toy that no other country had. Now, after a couple of decades and two regrettable, preventable accidents, a lot of people seem to be talking about them as if they're inherently fragile, outdated, overly expensive clunkers that ought to be consigned to the Air-and-Space Museum.

I will grudgingly admit that there is some truth to the boondoggle charges. The sad fact is that the shuttle design never lived up to the promises made in the early days of the program. The cost of launching and operating these ships never fell over time, as it was supposed to do. The turnaround time between landing and launch, once optimistically predicted to be a matter of days, has remained stubbornly lengthy. And the actual purpose of the shuttle has been unclear from the very beginning; designed to do a number of jobs adequately, it's never really excelled at any of them.

But the growing perception that the shuttle is a rickety failure akin to the old Ford Pinto rankles me. NASA has flown over 100 missions aboard space shuttles, with only two catastrophic accidents. That's really not a bad record, as devastating as the actual accidents may have been. Consider the Apollo program, the space agency's greatest glory: there were only seventeen Apollo missions and there were two catastrophic accidents among them. The fact that the crew of Apollo 13 survived and made it home was largely dumb luck -- they easily could've died in the early moments of the disaster that crippled their ship, before they had a chance to do anything heroic -- and the astronauts of Apollo 1 never even made it off the ground. In a purely statistical sense, the shuttle has been five times safer than Apollo.

If I sound callous, believe me, I'm not. I was absolutely heartbroken by what happened to the Columbia astronauts, and to those aboard Challenger back in '86. But space is an unforgiving environment. Absolutely unforgiving, in a way that I don't think most people really comprehend. That makes spaceflight dangerous. If we're going to fly humans in space, they are occasionally going to die. There's no way around it, and I find myself very annoyed by the timid fantasy that you can have a 100% safe space mission. Because safety shouldn't be the only consideration behind everything we humans choose to do. One of the finest moments on the old Star Trek series is Captain Kirk's often-qutoed "risk speech" from the episode, "Return to Tomorrow." When the rest of the crew expresses doubts about a particular experiment, saying it's too risky to continue, Kirk tells them that, "Risk is our business. It's why we're out here." I believe that philosophy applies to real-world space exploration, too. We ought to do everything we can to minimize the risk, of course, but we shouldn't let the possibility of risk prevent us from doing the thing in the first place. And I worry we may be dangerously close to doing just that when it comes to flying space shuttles.

I've got a lot of other thoughts on this subject, on why the shuttles should keep flying, and how the shuttle catastrophes have been due to problems with the launch system and not the orbiter itself. I'd like to detail my theories about why the shuttle program hasn't amounted to much (I don't believe it's entirely the fault of the shuttle design). But I'm running long, I think, so I'll save all that stuff for another time. For now, I'll leave you with a selection of spectacular photos that came back from Discovery's flight:

Steve Robinson's self-portrait.

Discovery's nose-on beauty shot.

International Space Station, seen from above.

International Space Station, seen as Discovery backs away.

Well, Now, This is Pleasing...

Hey, kids, it's time for another one of those silly Internet quizzes, because I know how much you all love 'em...

This one determines which Looney Tunes character you are based on the usual bizarre, somewhat personal, and seemingly irrelevant questions. You know the drill. Honestly I don't know why I fool around with these things, since the results almost always disappoint me. Almost inevitably, I'm told that my personality traits most closely align with the lamest, most uninteresting whatever of the available categories. I'm never Han Solo, according to these things; I'm Threepio, or Uncle Owen, or Red Six. I'm never Captain Kirk, I'm always Transporter Chief Kyle. In the universe of these quizzes, it appears that most people are sidekicks and background characters, not heroes. So when I settled in to take this one, I figured I'd be assessed as Sylvester the Cat, or Elmer Fudd, or one of those no-name, one-off characters like Sylvester's creme-colored doppelganger, Claude the Cat. So imagine my surprise when I got these results:

Bugs Bunny!

You scored 42 Aggression, 71 Sophistication, and 71 Optimism!

You have all the sophistication and charm one would expect from such a high-class hare. Very upbeat and generally laid-back, you are remarkably calm and peaceful even in the midst of the most stressful of situations. On those rare occasions that your anger is aroused, your retaliation usually results in embarrassing the aggressor and laying-bare how foolish he or she really is -- rather than doing any real harm. You likely have many friends and more than a few admirers and would make an excellent leader, if you had any interest in being one. But, being a leader would require hard work and attention to detail, both qualities you are lacking in. In fact, if you are not careful, your laid-back attitude will often lead you to drift through life completely oblivious to the changes happening around you. You also tend to have a horrible sense of direction.

Not to make too much out of this, but these results are very pleasing to me. Not only is Bugs the most heroic of all the Looney Tunes, he also happens to be my favorite of the regular stable of characters. Other characters make me laugh harder -- Wile E. Coyote and Marvin Martian can both reduce me to tears -- but Bugs is the one I've always liked as a person. Er, rabbit. Whatever... he's the 'toon I would most want to hang with if we lived in a Roger Rabbit-style world where humans and animated characters could interact.

In fact, I was well-nigh obsessed with Bugs Bunny when I was a young boy. Somewhere in the Bennion Archives, I've still got a whole stack of homemade Bugs cartoon strips, crudely drawn on the backs of brown paper grocery sacks. I used to doodle Bugs-heads on my school papers, too, and I once had a teacher tell me she thought it was unhealthy for a boy to be so preoccupied with a cartoon character. (Yes, because exercising one's imagination as a child is always bad, bad, bad, and you should be more interested in playing sports or something "practical." I love our public school system... grumble grumble grumble...)

Anyhow, I don't know that the above description of me is remotely accurate -- I don't think my sense of direction is all that bad, for instance -- but it was nice for a change to be told that I equate to a character I actually like, instead of one of the dorky guys.

Follow the link, take the quiz, amuse yourselves, and if you like, post the results in the comments thread below. Just beware, the spelling on the quiz questions is... eccentric. For instance, have you ever participated in a "quiz bowel?" Me neither...

Slowly Going Mad

I'm sure everyone has had the experience of hearing a catchy song and having it continue to play in your head for hours or even days on end. But have you ever had a piece of music spontaneously pop into your mind for no apparent reason? It happens to me sometimes... I'll just wake up with the mental iPod churning out a song or even just part of a song, and then it stays there all freaking day.

Often when this happens, the accursed audio fragment is the theme from an old TV show, usually one I haven't heard in years, and usually something that just drips with Velveeta. You know what I mean, the sort of theme that you're ashamed to admit you ever heard once, let alone remembered well enough to resurrect as a continuous loop.

Case in point: I've had the theme from Knight Rider running non-stop through my brain ever since breakfast.

Won't somebody out there please kill me now? Please? Just do it quickly and humanely...

Happy Birthday, Anne

As you might have surmised from the subject line above, this is the day my Significant Other first showed her face to the world. And I've got to be honest, I am woefully unprepared for its arrival this year. I've been in a near-panic for a couple of months as I have tried (and most likely failed) to think of something really good to give her. You see, we've been together for a long time, so a lot of the obvious tokens have already been exchanged. We've also both reached that age when you pretty much have everything you need, and you pretty much have most of the little objects you want, too. Or at least you're in a position to just go ahead and buy them for yourself as they come to your attention. So what does that leave one to offer as a gift?

Well, how about a public display of good wishes and affection? It's the best idea I've come up with so far, and it saves me the trouble of actually going shopping, so here goes:

What do you think, Loyal Readers, is that enough? Or do I still need to find some kind of tangible gift, too? (Just kidding, folks. Well, mostly kidding. I really am lousy at thinking up good gift ideas...)

Extreme Makeover: Utah Edition

Fans of the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition may be interested to learn that the show is currently filming right here in Utah. Specifically, Bountiful, Utah, which, for you out-of-staters, is a quiet little burg just north of Salt Lake City.

If you're unfamiliar with EM:HE, it's basically a touchy-feely reality show in which a needy family -- typical attributes include chronic diseases, tragic deaths, and/or physical challenges -- gets sent away on vacation for a week while a team of contractors and community volunteers "remodel" their home. This "remodelling" process more often than not involves the total demolition of the existing house, whereupon an all-new, entirely customized structure is built for the lucky fam. The gimmick of the show is that all the work must be done within seven days, or as close to that limit as possible. The end results are revealed to the family in a theatrical fashion, and many tears usually ensue.

I'm not a big fan of the show, for a number of reasons. The host and ringleader of the construction team, Ty Pennington, is a little too hyper for my personal comfort level, and the whole-house demolitions strike me as being more about spectacle for the cameras than actual engineering necessities. In addition, the big weepy endings generally make me feel twitchy, rather than surrounded by the warm 'n' fuzzy glow the producers are going for. But then, as my Significant Other frequently reminds me, I am kind of a curmudgeonly old poop, and not easily moved by the things that work for other folks. (For the record, Anne enjoys the show quite a bit, and I tolerate it for her sake.)

So why am I blogging about a show I don't much like? Easy, it's a slow newsweek... no, actually, I always find it interesting when Utah ends up in the national spotlight, and having a local family and community appear on the #4 TV show in the land definitely fits that bill. Plus, I'm trying to be a good neighbor here by providing a valuable service: if this show is your sort of thing, then by all means check out Bountiful's official Extreme Makeover Web site, and watch for the episode some time in the winter...

(Incidentally, do they even still do the original, human-edition Extreme Makeover?)

Big Enos

It may surprise some of my friends and loyal readers to learn that one of my favorite movies is... Smokey and the Bandit. Yes, I am talking about that 1977 ode to redneck tomfoolery and car-crashes, and yes, I know the movie is horrible in about nine hundred different ways -- not least of which is that it can be seen as the direct progenitor of the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard feature -- but, general stupidity and misbegotten descendents aside, SATB is one of the few movies guaranteed to bring me up when I've had a really rotten day. Burt Reynolds was a charming lead before he became overly fond of his own face, Sally Field was (and still is) a genuine cutie, the jokes are clever enough in an amiable, poke-you-in-the-ribs sort of way, and Jackie Gleason... well, what can I say about Jackie Gleason? The man was a friggin' genius. Nobody has ever done impotent, spluttering exasperation better than him, and the interplay between Gleason's Buford T. Justice and his idiotic son Junior never fails to crack me up.

There's another funny father-and-son team in the movie, too, which most people tend to forget about: Big and Little Enos Burdette, played by Pat McCormick and Paul Williams, respectively. If you'll recall, these are the two guys who hire the Bandit to make his famous beer-run to Texarkana. Well, I learned today that the "big" half of this team, Pat McCormick, passed away over the weekend at the age of 78.

Like many of the deceased actors I write about here, I imagine most of my readers don't know his name, but you'll probably know his face when you see it. He appeared in a lot of movies and television programs during the '70s and '80s (he was a regular fixture on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show for years). He was also a comedy writer of some note as well as one of those physically large men who lead equally large lives, fueled by booze, pills, and women, and dedicated to outrageous behavior. Sadly, this boisterous, quick-witted man spent his last few years in a state of silent decline after suffering a stroke in 1998. I've had some experience with stroke victims; it's a horrible way to end one's life, a slow, gradual fade into the darkness.

Naturally, Evanier knew McCormick; he writes about him here and here. The LA Times obit can be found here. (You may need to register to see that one, or use bugmenot. Sorry.)