Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Wandering away to Wordpress.

2010-01-23T13:21:00.000-06:00

Starting today, I'm putting all new posts (and there aren't that many of them) on my news Wordpress site, also known as Dave's Fiction Warehouse. I hope the five or six people who look in here periodically will also start looking in over there. Comment early and often. Thanks.

At play in the fields of Pandora

2010-01-11T11:26:00.001-06:00

I finally saw Avatar. My short review: Fabulous effects, pedestrian story. James Cameron has certainly set the bar at a great new height for all future action movies, but he hasn't broken much new ground when it comes to sophisticated writing.

Not that it matters. This is not a boring movie, and you won't rue the price of your ticket. It's the first 3D film I've ever seen, and I'm glad I waited this long. For the first few minutes, the 3D effect seems a distracting gimmick, but as the movie unfolds it becomes much more natural. I considered only one scene gratuitous: a machine gun barrel protruding out of the screen. Elsewhere Cameron showed admirable restraint. In the Pandoran jungle, the judicious and subtle use of 3D makes the alien flora and fauna seem vividly real.

My only problem with Avatar is that every character is a stereotype drawn from other films. Remember Vasquez in Aliens? She's back, as Trudy Chacon. Wind in His Hair from Dances With Wolves? That would be in Tsu'Tey in Avatar. And so on. David Brooks has a smart column in the New York Times where he illustrates this quite well. But you don't need to read it recognize this latest incarnation of the White Messiah theme in Avatar.

No, that's not the worst thing in the world. As they say, there's nothing new under the sun. But when you're invoking such an oft-used narrative, it's probably a good idea come up with a few surprises. From the moment you meet each character in Avatar, it's possible to guess the story arc and status of each one by the movie's end. If you haven't seen the movie, try it. Avatar disappoints because the only surprises are visual.

Larry King and his cast of liars

2010-01-07T13:52:00.000-06:00

You know, I don't even blame Richard Heene any more. He's just a terrible human being, and sometimes you have throw up your hands and accept that a person's shortcomings are so comprehensive that he just can't help himself.

Heene, of course, is the guy who lied about his son taking flight in a homemade balloon, finally plead guilty to perpetrating the hoax, and then on "Larry King Live" lied again, saying his earlier lie was not really a lie, and ... well, you get the idea. Heene evidently hopes his awfulness will at last reach critical mass, and, like Rob Blagojevich, earn him the coveted spot on "Celebrity Apprentice" that is his by birthright. I'd say his chances are good.

Awful people show up on "Larry King" all the time, don't they? Somehow they are multiplying. I guess if we want to blame anybody for that, Larry himself is a good place to start. Larry doesn't discourage venal, self-serving bullshit, nor does he draw the line at turpitude of any kind. Far from it. The greater the depravity, the better he likes it. If Jeffrey Dahmer were still alive, he'd probably be on Larry once a week hawking his cookbook.

This old man has much to answer for, and not just for those stupid suspenders. Yes, so do the people who watch his show in droves, but I don't have their names handy. So Larry will have to do. Remember, any place Americans are behaving badly for the cameras, they're not just doing for themselves. They're doing it for Larry.

Having tea with Ms. James

2010-01-06T10:48:00.000-06:00

One of my Christmas gifts this year was P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction. At less than 200 pages, it might be the shortest thing she's ever written. But for anybody who enjoys crime-writing in general and British crime-writing in particular, it's a fun, illuminating look at the evolution of the craft over the last 150 years.

The title doesn't exactly grab you by the throat, does it? But it's accurate. It's like having tea with Ms. James as she warms to her subject -- which, as she puts it, "was one of the few on which I felt competent to pontificate." She talks about Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie, but also discusses her own work and those of the modern masters like Ian Rankin. I gather she's not a big fan of Christie, and her view of the Golden Age writers on this side of the pond -- Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald, say -- may be something short of unalloyed admiration.

Which is another reason I like this book. I hate the book jackets where one famous writer is fawning over another, knowing that a return favor is part of the deal. P.D. James is near 90 and past that now, and has nothing to gain by doling out insincere praise. When she says something she means it. And because of that, I also take heart from her line near the end: "We may well be at the beginning of a new Golden Age." As someone who loves to read detective fiction and aspires to write it, that's good news indeed.

Decamping to a site more complicated

2010-01-05T17:53:00.001-06:00

Because nothing is ever good enough, I've decided to migrate Dave's Fiction Warehouse from good old Blogger to my own domain and Wordpress. The domain is davesfiction.com.

Why? That's an excellent question, since I've burned numerous hours learning the intricacies of the new system, and will probably burn a lot more before I know what I'm doing. In the meantime, I'll keep posting here and use the new one as a lab site. I'll experiment and fiddle incessantly there, then put the word out when I feel it's ready for my seven or so regular readers to have a look at it. Just so you know.

One of the best things about Wordpress (I hope) is this theme called Thesis, which allows for a huge amount of customization without the need for learning a lot of code. That's also one of the worst things about it, since the sheer number of choices and non-intuitive menus make for a steep learning curve.

Should aulde resolutions be forgot?

2009-12-30T11:22:00.002-06:00

January is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looks into the future with one face and into the past with the other. That's kind of where I'm at, too. On these dark days following the winter solstice, I look at the year ahead and resolve to be better in some small way, even as I look at the year past and realize how unlikely that is.

Was it just 12 months ago I was standing in front of this same mirror, vowing to hit the gym five days a week, cut down on the fatty foods and take it easy on the wine? I think it was. Those vows are too easy to make after the excesses of the holiday season. Suddenly the waistband is a little too snug and you've got some acid reflux going on, and a little headache just behind the eyes, and you realize that in a whole year all you've achieved is another trip around the sun with everybody else. It really is time to make a change, you think, and this time the change will extend beyond the first week of February.

Which no doubt why the Romans invented old Janus, god of gates and portals, god of transitions. In 21st-century America, the transition most sought is the one from fat to slender, or from obscurity to fame, but the idea is the same: If you want to be good-looking and get your own reality show, once a year it's a good idea to take a few minutes and see how things are trending.

Thus are born New Year's resolutions -- the temporary triumph of hope over experience. I make fewer of them than I used to, but I still do. They're mostly mundane: gonna get fit, gonna get better on the guitar, gonna be nicer to everybody. I don't write them down anymore, since it's better not to leave a paper trail, but I still try to convince myself each January that this time it will be different, that I will end the year a better man than when I started.

We'll see about that, won't we? For now, let's drink to the end of an odd year -- and the end of a decade that seemed not so great, even by my lowered expectations. Things can only get better, right? Happy New Year, all.

Check your dignity at the gate

2009-12-29T11:23:00.011-06:00

As long as they've got a limitless supply of credulous young males who don't mind cramming explosives into their underpants and trying to kill everybody around them, we're not going to prevail in this airport-security thing. Because all we've got are 50,000 TSA employees who are most concerned with preventing your grandmother from getting through security with an artificial hip. If you're a radical young Muslim returning from Yemen, don't have any luggage and are on a terror watch list, basically you're good to go.

If there's a bright spot in the Flight 253 incident, it's that one al-Qaeda-inspired idiot is today having trouble urinating, as the result of a badly burned schlong. Sorry, Umar Farouk Abdul-whatever: That's what happens when you don't pay attention in suicide-bombing class. If permanent disability is too much to hope for, then I wish you a long and painful recovery. Good luck with the 70 virgins. I guess we can also hope that this will be a setback for al-Qaeda recruiting.

Presumably, this means the rest of us will soon be exposing our privates, in one way or other, as a condition of boarding an airplane. Personally, I can't wait. But I wonder: At what level of indignity will travelers finally decide they really don't need to fly to that business meeting in Duluth? Sure, it's a long drive, but at least nobody's frisking you at rest stops, or deciding you've got too much styling gel. And usually you don't have to sit beside some mouth-breathing fanatic with a suspicious bulge in his BVDs.

Look: The terrorists are definitely winning. OK? Their army of mind-numbed robots is apparently bigger than ours. And certainly more committed. Anyway, they really don't have to blow up any planes; they just have to make us all disrobe and bend over at the command of somebody making $13 an hour. So far, that seems to be working.

The climate outside is frightful

2009-12-09T11:18:00.002-06:00

This morning in Wichita, in the pale light of a low-rising sun, the temperature's not so far above zero. That's pretty darned cold for these parts, though it is December and the news stories today about winter storms "crashing" into the Midwest and "hammering" New England seem a little overwrought. People forget from year to year that a certain amount of cold and snow, in the few weeks surrounding the winter solstice, is not really remarkable. At least if you live anywhere north of Texas.

I've seen worse. I'd be happy to share anecdotes about the winters in Montana, the times it got 50 below and your spit, if you were a spitting person, would freeze before it hit the ground. It was way too cold to take a leak outside or start any kind of engine; you bundled up like the Michelin man to grumble through your chores and then you hunkered close to the stove and argued about who was going to bring in some more wood. By the way, if anybody needs advice on unthawing frozen pipes, I'm an expert on the subject.

Most of my weather stories are lies, of course, magnified and distorted through the murky lens of several decades, but I still say they don't make winters like they used to. Which brings me to the subject of global warning, and the idiots who weigh in on the comment boards of newspaper Web sites. Today on the Wichita Eagle's site, the daily weather story has devolved into the usual impassioned diatribes between left and right. One cold snap apparently proves that global warming is a sinister fraud perpetrated by the Trilateral Commission, or somebody. On the other side, it proves that people unsure of the science are creationist morons. As with all discussions among those who prefer to remain anonymous, it's a debate characterized by mindless certainty. Just a matter of time before the Nazi metaphors start flying.

A not-so-great man once said, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?" I'll field that one, Rodney: The answer is no, as long as nobody's using their real name and every disagreement becomes a matter of faith rather than reason. Look, there can be no question that climate change is occurring, just as it has from the dawn of time. The question is the extent to which mankind causes it, and the extent to which mankind might make it better. There's also the question of weighing the cost of mitigation efforts against the benefits that can be expected to accrue.

Those are complex questions, and way beyond the ken of a man sitting in his bathrobe on a cold winter's day. I have my own opinions on the matter and I will vote accordingly, but at the moment I don't feel like trying to convince some other idiot in his bathrobe that my view is the only one with merit. I suppose that's why I never sought public office. I know it's why I don't attend church regularly. On Planet Dave, there are just too many things that can't be known.

Fortunately, the weather outside right now is not one of them. In a few minutes I'll have to go out in it. Nothing like a wind-chill factor of zero to clear the mind of extraneous details.

Hundreds of candles in the wind

2009-12-08T09:12:00.002-06:00

Every year I get more of these ghosts of Christmas past in the room. They don't say much. They don't have to. I already know that the best Christmas in middle age cannot match the least one of childhood. Then it was about things yet to come. Now it's about memory. But I have a feeling those ghosts expect me to pretend otherwise.

I think of them every year when my neighbors and I come forth to set out our luminaries. It's a tradition in my Wichita neighborhood: one weekend in December, we grudgingly honor a pact to line our ordinary streets with points of light. I thought it a little goofy when I first moved here, and kind of burdensome to keep those candles lit in a freezing drizzle. But I'm a true believer now.

You take one paper bag with a candle in it, it's not really much to look at. You take hundreds of them and put them in a row, and the effect is magical. That well-worn way to work becomes a runway to heaven. I guess it's that way with acts of kindness too. A single one can get lost in the shuffle, blown out by a passing truck. But multiplied they change the world.

I know; it's a cliché. Peace on Earth, and all that. But our time here is short and contrary to popular belief, our opportunities to do the right thing are not infinite. If you've ever lost a loved one, you know this is true. Last year at this time I was talking to my sister on the phone. She wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be able to make it home for Christmas. I made a joke or two and told her I'd see her in the spring. And I did – at her funeral. It wasn't the first time in my life I thought of all the candles I'd left unlit.

So, yeah: Do the deed. Put out your luminaries, and not just at Christmas. You're not going to get a pat on the back for each one, but maybe kindness without publicity is the most sincere kindness of all. And certain candles will burn all through a long December night. Maybe yours will too.

(This is a variation on a post I submitted to Do The Deed, a Wichita campaign promoting small, and great, acts of kindness. Check it out. And Merry Christmas. -- Dave)

Give me that remote control

2009-12-04T10:47:00.003-06:00

I've been watching more TV lately. I suppose it could be another sign of creeping, slack-jawed sloth, but I prefer to think it's because there are better shows now -- even though I concede that crap like "Real Housewives" and "The Bachelor" and "Who Wants to be a Publicity Whore?" remain depressingly popular.

But doesn't it seem that TV sitcoms are finally reclaiming some of the territory so long despoiled by reality TV? That's my thesis. In a tough economy, a few good jokes can defeat a whole division of vacuous and venal blowhards. Paula Abdul's ouster from "American Idol" is a good metaphor for this. Market pressure hasn't yet killed the show, but it did force the replacement of one dim bulb. Let's hope it's a trend. America will be better for it. Sorry Paula. Sometimes, just being yourself is not quite enough.

My favorites at the moment are "Community" and "30 Rock." I still watch "The Office," although recent scripts have veered well afield of the milieu that made the show great. Now that the gentle tension between Jim and Pam is gone, the writers are forced to rely on increasingly bizarre and implausible behavior by Dwight and Michael. The best humor is rooted in recognizable reality. Take that away, and all you've got is slapstick. "The Office" deserves credit for leading the sitcom revival, but it's gone on at least one season too long. Even so, I'd still watch the worst "Office" episode over the best "Everybody Loves Raymond."

I regularly watch one other show, although I'd prefer you didn't tell anyone. It's "Glee." I like it not for the writing -- since the scripts rely mainly on each cast member developing a crush on every other cast member on a rotating basis -- but for the dance numbers. I love those dance numbers, love the choreography, love those lithe young bodies leaping through space. It's like "American Idol," only with high standards and a lot of rehearsal. You can't call "Glee" a sitcom, since Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester is the only funny thing about it, but it's great eye candy. And yeah, the music isn't that bad either.

A very "Seinfeld" reunion

2009-11-20T10:29:00.004-06:00

In the annals of crappy television, nothing is crappier than the reunion show. And in the annals of crappy reunion shows, there can be no competition for "A Very Brady Christmas," wherein the kids come home for the holidays and Mike Brady ends up getting trapped in one of his buildings. (Nice job on the architecture there, Mike.)

Then again, "The Brady Bunch" was pretty bad to begin with. "Seinfeld" wasn't, and Larry David's mustering of the original cast for a fictional reunion show, in this season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," is as good as it gets. Shows you what good writing, adequate rehearsal and great comedic talent can do in the fullness of time. It also shows, by comparison, how tired and lame the real "Seinfeld" finale was in 1998.

Speaking of comparisons, Larry David's current show begins to look kind of crass and clumsy too. Instead of honed scripts and comedic timing, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" relies on situations that are increasingly crude and implausible, with David and his cast barely containing their smirks while they ad-lib through each scene. The bit about the little girl's rash was just too much. Contrast that with the table read and the few scenes we saw of the fictional "Seinfeld" reunion, and you long for a return to a more sophisticated time.

That said, I loved how they handled Michael Richards' little problem with the racial epithets a few years ago. If Richards lost his mojo then, he's got it back now. The scene where he opens the door the guy in the Louis Farrakhan outfit is best in show.

Fun in America: "Modern Warfare 2"

2009-11-18T17:21:00.001-06:00

We've got modern warfare going on all over the place, but we still can't get enough of it. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has now made $550 million in about five days. That's a record not just for video games, but for anything ever offered by the entertainment industry. Suck this, Harry Potter. Last I checked, Half-Blood Prince, the biggest cash-machine in the world, had barely exceeded half that.

No, I'm not going to bemoan this American fascination with killing virtual people and blowing up virtual things. Or, in the case of Grand Theft Auto franchise, beating up virtual hookers. Fact is, violence is pretty fun when you factor out all the real-world misery, death and permanent disability. But when a video game devoted exclusively to military mayhem so completely eclipses any movie, book or long-running TV series, I suppose you have to ponder what it means.

Unfortunately, I have no idea. For me, the bigger mystery with games like this is why I suck so completely at playing them. There's an episode in The Office where Jim has his avatar stuck in a corner, trying to deploy a smoke grenade. Karen's avatar strolls up, waits until he turns around, and shoots him in the head. It's one of the very few ways I'm like Jim Halpert: not so adept on the virtual battlefield.

I do wonder if Call of Duty buffs don't occasionally speculate how they'd do in, um, the real thing. You know: real guns, real carnage, real friends really dead. Really crapping your pants when it all becomes a bit overwhelming. Probably not. Video games have been around about 30 years now; most people are keenly aware of the vast distance inserted between reality and the monitor.

Maybe the popularity of Modern Warfare 2 isn't a great reflection of who we are as a society, but it does highlight a nice reality we tend to take for granted: As a population, we have no experience in war. None. Closest we came was Sept. 11, 2001, and like a video game the vast majority of us experienced it entirely through the small screen. We don't know much about war, and so we tend to view it as an athletic contest in which even couch potatoes might excel.

Thanksgiving approaches, and we can enjoy all the combat we want in the comfort of our homes, without the mess or the mortality. Now that's something to be thankful for.

Just a little unfriendly advice

2009-11-17T09:46:00.008-06:00

Now that the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen unfriend as its word of the year, I guess it's official: all nouns are now legitimate verbs, and by extension so are their opposites. Like you, I somehow overlooked the intermediate delineation of friend as a verb, but there's no sense being pedantic about it. Language constantly evolves. You get on board or you get the hell out of the way.

New words arrive because there's a need for them. The concept of unfriending has been with us for centuries, but the explosion of social media has forced us to formalize and streamline the process. Used to be, if you became tired of a relationship, you had to be cagey about it: You'd see the person's number on the caller ID and not pick it up. You'd make up an excuse not to attend their dumb President's Day party. You'd be fortunate enough to spot them first in the frozen-food section of the supermarket, and you'd lurk in housewares until they were safely out to the parking lot. It was all about managing the gradual transition from friend to total stranger, and no ploy was too subtle.

Facebook and Twitter have rendered all that quaint and meaningless, not to say horribly inefficient. If you had to hone strategies for getting rid of every Facebook blowhard who came down the pike, you'd be tapping away at your iPhone 24 hours a day. (To those of you who already do that, I mean no disrespect.) Things are much easier now. If someone is posting too many random celebrity links, or is too frequently crowing about their Farmville accomplishments, they can be gone with a single tap. If somebody is re-Tweeting Rainn Wilson or marveling over the weather every few minutes, presto: they're banished for the foreseeable future. Unfriend and Unfollow: two essential tools for the busy online lifestyle.

It may sound cold, but it isn't. In the new calculus of social media, one physical friend who might have to use the bathroom is the equivalent of about 17 Facebook friends who won't; on Twitter, the ratio expands to one and 432. It's one thing to LOL at someone's retweet, quite another to feed them supper and laugh at their jokes and share with them your medium-quality wine. So don't be too reticent about it. In any garden, weeds will emerge. When they do, they're best pulled early.

Of course, unfriending is a two-edged sword. At some point, when you're conducting your weekly inventory of social-media buddies, you may notice that some of them have quietly decamped into the ether. Don't take it too hard; like you, they have a vast stable of contacts. Maybe you LOL'd at an update meant to be poignant. Maybe you misspelled the word lose too many times. Maybe that last "Which Horse's Part Are You?" quiz pushed them over the edge. No matter. Let them go. Facebook friends must be free, like Mediterranean fruit flies. Anyway, they're a dime a dozen.

When bumper stickers become books

2009-11-16T11:06:00.003-06:00

I have two rules in life: I never order the shrimp special and I never buy books written by former governors who would like to be president. So it's not really an ideological statement to say that I won't be standing in line tomorrow for a copy of "Going Rogue: An American Life." That Sarah Palin remains pretty easy on the eyes, but at this point I feel I know everything I want to know about her. Maybe a little more. In the parlance of our times, it's getting late in the day and it's time to move on, Sarah Palin-wise.

But every time such a book comes out, I always wonder: Who buys stuff like this? Who are these millions of people who immediately spring for the hardcover and propel it to the top of the New York Times nonfiction list? What do they hope to learn from people like Newt Gingrich and Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck and Al Gore and Kate Gosselin? Do they not know that if they just wait a few months, they can acquire these tomes, unopened, for about 50 cents a copy on yard-sale tables all over town? And that the insights thus obtained will therefore be priced just about right?

I don't know. At a time when nobody's buying good books, it sure seems there are a lot of people buying crappy ones. They buy them despite knowing in advance, through blogs and infinite talk shows, every essential point the book might contain. In Palin's case, we can probably reduce it to a paragraph: "I'm quite a bit smarter than I seemed just a year ago. McCain's people and the Mainstream Media screwed me over big time. I'm an ordinary person who would prefer to remain extraordinarily famous -- with my own talk show, say, or the presidency. And 2012 is coming right up."

Then again, I haven't read the book. And won't. Being an ordinary person myself, I guess I don't find them all that fascinating.

Mac vs. PC? A pox on both their houses

2009-11-07T10:35:00.002-06:00

I've never gotten sucked into the hoary Mac vs. PC debate. As far as I'm concerned, they both suck. They both keep us perpetually off balance, technologically speaking, and both leave a trail of obsolete peripherals in their wake.

This morning my wife got on the laptop I'd just loaded with Windows 7 and reported (I'm paraphrasing here): "This *&$^% printer doesn't work." I checked it out and was able to confirm her findings. Microsoft's own support site tells me that my little printer, about two years old, is not compatible with their latest and greatest OS. No apology, no hints on how to make it work. Basically, if I want to print anything from Windows 7, I'm going to have to take that 2-year-old printer to the curb and get a new one.

Just for fun, I checked on Apple's site, to see if a Mac running Snow Leopard might have better luck. Maybe it was time to switch. But nope. My printer's dead to Apple, too. But they'd be happy to sell me a new one that would work.

Home computers are wondrous machines, able to Hoover up hours of vitality and convert it seamlessly into useless butt time. You can play amazing games, watch streaming HD video, play JibJab mashups and organize millions of crappy photos and videos into convenient libraries you will never use. But try to print a single black-and-white document after an OS upgrade, and things can get difficult.

I get it, OK? It's cutting-edge technology. The idea is that we upgrade everything on the same cycle and send our perfectly good stuff to the landfill with every incremental advance. But I've been doing that too long. I've owned computers since 1984 (the first was an Apple IIe) and I shudder to think of all the functioning hardware I've disposed of since then: printers and modems and headphones and monitors and mice and scanners. I love tech as much as the next guy -- maybe more -- but those landfills can only hold so much.

A family without grownups

2009-10-16T15:18:00.004-05:00

OK, I'm going to recommend that Richard Heene, part-time "scientist" and full-time twit, be horsewhipped. And I'd be happy to throw in a good spanking for little Falcon Heene, the foul-mouthed brat who might have benefited from an actual balloon ride straight to Camp Cut-Me-A-Switch, where children learn not to curse at grownups and otherwise waste the valuable time of their elders.

Corporal punishment may seem harsh, but remember that the balloon stunt wasn't the first of their transgressions. There's also the matter of their "Wife Swap" appearances, where they took the show's unvarying theme -- free-spirit vs. control freak -- and drained it of even marginal interest because viewers hated everyone involved. The Heene clan came across as precisely what they are: pre-adolescent narcissists who will do anything -- anything -- to get on TV. Richard is the dad only by virtue of his age; it can't have anything to do with maturity or judgment.

Was the balloon thing a hoax? Who cares? The man named his son Falcon, for crying out loud, and that's a crime right there. Besides, anybody who calls the NBC affiliate before calling 911, as Heene did, clearly has bigger fish to fry than securing the safety of his son.

But this is what a decade of reality shows has brought us: A national stage for every quirky buffoon willing to up the ante in outrageous behavior. One of these days somebody's going to get hurt. Let's just hope they get it on tape.

Now that's some writing

2009-10-14T11:30:00.002-05:00

I keep meaning to enter the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, but I also keep forgetting to get my entries in. Still, it's always worth a look when the year's winners are announced. Yes, I know the announcement itself was several months ago, but that's in keeping with my general record of procrastination and partial recall.

Anyway, read this from the 2009 Grand Prize winner and see if it doesn't make you want to take pen in hand:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."
David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

The runner-up is also inspiring, for those of us who like to make people laugh:
"The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor--the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn't use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride."
Warren Blair
Ashburn, VA

The doctor will not see you

2009-10-13T09:42:00.003-05:00

All this ink and air time being burned on the intricacies of health care in this country, and I'm no wiser on the subject than I was five years ago. I don't even care any more. Maybe all we really need to know is that nobody wants to make less money, and health care can't be cheaper unless somebody does make less money. Since the most influential voices in this debate are the corporations that make a huge amount of money, and the politicians who rely heavily on the trickle-up, and the dopey masses who can be mesmerized by a bumper sticker, I think we can see where this is heading: Things will stay pretty much as they are. If anything changes, it will be this: The usual cohort of scammers and venal swine will end up making even more money than they do now. I guarantee you that no insurance company will make less.

This is a cynical view and I apologize. But let's face it. The truth is, if you're worried about health care, your only realistic option is staying healthy. I suggest you work out, eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, quit tapping the little keyboard on your mobile device while you're rocketing down Highway 54, look both ways before crossing the street, floss regularly, avoid trampolines, lock up your firearms, get that mole looked at, and buy nothing under the warming lights at Quik Trip. Oh, and knock wood. Because Dr. Sanjay Gupta does not make house calls.

If you're already indisposed, if you're morbidly obese and your primary means of getting around is a power scooter with an oxygen bottle on the back, well, good luck. Have another Marlboro and remember what a great time the '60s were. If you have a weird growth on your neck, consider it benign. If you have symptoms of fibromyalgia or Crohn's disease -- hey, who doesn't? If you have leukemia or pancreatic cancer, take the long view: It'll be over before you know it.

And it'll be over way before anything gets through Congress. These people have little sense of urgency; they all have nice insurance plans and they all have supper waiting. The people they heed the most -- the corporate oligarchs -- prefer the precise opposite of urgency. The oligarchs' best strategy is to run out the clock. Fortunately for them, that's not so hard to do in a town like D.C. Even the charismatic Obama is a politician, and politicians don't get any points for falling on their swords.

What's to be done? Beats me. If I had any clue, I'd be having lunch with Sen. Max Baucus as we speak, maybe sharing my genius with Anderson Cooper. As it is, I must content myself with watching CNN and hoping I stay healthy for a good long while.

In Riverdale, there's no need to choose

2009-10-06T10:10:00.003-05:00

As a kid, I envied Archie. He had the easy life: the clever friends, the car, the adoration of beautiful girls. The number one hit song in 1969. He never had to grow up. The only thing I didn't envy was the stupid hair, but at 12 years old I guess that's a price I'd have paid.

Archie was different from my other comic favorites: Green Lantern; Flash; Sgt. Rock; Turok, Son of Stone. He was always in his street clothes, for one thing. Maybe that made him easier to identify with. He never faced down any fiends, never killed any Krauts, never tussled with any pterodactyls. The only problem he ever had was which nubile maiden would win his affections in the end.

Turns out he didn't even have to worry about that. Archie finally married Veronica in May, but next month he'll marry Betty too. Archie Comic Publications is framing the story as an alternate history, calling it a meditation on Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Never mind that Frost was talking about the singular, irredeemable choices we make in life; in Archie's hometown, you get to have your cake and eat it too.

No mystery why the story line has brought a whole bunch of new fans to the redhead from Riverdale. We're tantalized by the idea that diverging roads at major intersections lead to distinct destinations -- and if only we'd taken that other one ...

But really, the few big milestones matter less than the thousands of small ones that multiply over decades. You stay too long at a party, you have another donut, you pick up an Archie comic when you could have picked up Dickens. You tell a lie or you text while driving. Or, in the case of Archie himself, maybe you shrug amiably and string the girls along for another issue, secure in the knowledge that none of you are getting any older. Or any wiser.

The places in the road that matter aren't really forks at all, just gentle curves in the yellow wood. Each step along it is a choice in itself, toward a destination you realize only when you reach it. Unless you're Archie, you have to live with that. But why he didn't pick Betty in the first place is beyond me.

Trapped in the trite? Try these:

2009-10-01T10:28:00.003-05:00

Facebook and its mildly retarded cousin Twitter have unleashed a huge demand for pithy remarks, single sentences so clever and incisive that they are instantly echoed around the globe. If one's worth is measured by the number of followers one has, then the exponent of that worth is the number of one's pithy messages that get re-Tweeted. Alas, the supply of cleverness has not kept pace with the demand.

Maybe this accounts for the proliferation of the phrases "Go figure" and "Just sayin'." If a tweeted observation seems particularly banal, just add the ironic eye-roll "go figure" and you've got the sophisticated air of one who's seen everything. "Just sayin'" works much the same way: It implies an amused exasperation with this absurd world, a touch of whimsy that is not immediately apparent in the trite thought that preceeds it.

If those don't work, there are always the "LOL!" "OMG" and "Snort!" These handy interjections -- employed in front of the re-Tweeted or linked item, not after -- show that your discerning eye has discovered something incredibly amusing. Almost as amusing as if you'd thought of it yourself.

The Count abides

2009-09-30T10:04:00.007-05:00

Can any book be considered truly frightening these days? Maybe not, what with an entire generation now conditioned to equate horror primarily with power tools and torture porn. But there was a time when certain books kept a lot of people awake at night, alert for a subtle creaking on the stairs, a scratching at the window. That time started in 1897, with the book Dracula.

Bram Stoker's Dracula was the first really scary book I ever read. I was 13 or so. I picked it up again a couple of days ago, since my wife bought a copy -- her book group has selected it for October in a nod to Halloween. I can report that the book is less terrifying this time around, possibly because its style and structure have been appropriated and diluted by so many imitators since. Stephen King, for example, in his first novel Carrie, used Stoker's idea of presenting the story as a series of journal entries, letters and news reports. It's a good trick, and it must have seemed doubly so in 1897.

So many other authors and filmmakers have based their work on Stoker's prototype that the original now seems trite. Stoker didn't invent vampire lore, of course, but he was the first to invest it with such authenticity. I can imagine how horrifying the book must have been 112 years ago, when science and folklore remained equal competitors. It's too bad readers new to the book won't get that.

Somehow, I don't think the ladies will like it. Bram Stoker was no Amy Tan. The characters, especially the female ones, might seem a bit one-dimensional. And the book, in 2009, seems longer than strictly necessary.

The newest edition of Dracula has a long, scholarly introduction, the usual claptrap about Victorian sexuality and repressed longings and the obligatory hints of homoeroticism. I say, who cares? If you read the book, forget all that. Forget Bela Lugosi, forget Dark Shadows and Anne Rice and especially forget the execrable Twilight series. Imagine a time when only guttering lamps lit the darkness. Imagine discovering the Count's true nature through a series of reports from those unfortunate enough to encounter him. In short, suspend your disbelief. You might find it a little frightening yourself, even all these years later.

Autumn and algebra

2009-09-27T12:31:00.002-05:00

Autumn cometh. Snow in the mountains, leaves in the wind. Just kidding about the snow, since we're in Wichita and there are no mountains within several hundred miles. But the leaves really are beginning to drift up at the edge of the yard and and we've run the furnace a couple of times. Something about fall: this is the time of year some of us ponder the middle distance and reconsider our old best dreams.

My dreams never involved taking introductory algebra again. About 40 years ago I was happily certain I'd left that subject behind for good. And yet here I am, sitting a classroom every day, struggling through the little tricks involved in graphing polynomial equations. I don't hate it as much as I expected to. Algebra has an elegance of its own, not least because the correct answer is not a matter of subjective judgment. After working exclusively with English words for nearly all my life, with all their unruly ways, it's kind of refreshing to learn the precise language of mathematics.

Anyway, that's what I've been reading lately: Introductory Algebra, 10th Edition, by Marvin Bittinger. The plotting is wooden and the characters nonexistent, and the used paperback version I bought cost $85 -- about three times what Dan Brown is getting for The Lost Symbol. Let's just say it's not for everybody.

The dusty streets of Blog City

2009-08-31T08:26:00.004-05:00

It's remarkable how quickly the blogging craze came and went. For awhile we were all out there panning the stream, sifting every aspect of our mundane lives and collecting page views and comments like flecks of gold. Some of us, I think, secretly fantasized that it might turn into something that would be beat working.

A year or two later and most of the personal blogs are ghost towns, the wind sighing down a dusty street, the occasional tumbleweed rolling by. That includes this one: Until today, the last update was about six weeks ago. I didn't make a conscious decision to pull the plug on it; it just happened. To belabor the ghost town analogy, the rail line never made it here, veering instead toward the more vibrant community of Facebookville.

Not hard to see why. You can only read a blog; on Facebook, you can take a quiz and easily determine which make of car or mythical creature you might be. And with a blog, you feel like you should write several complete sentences; with Facebook, a single pithy phrase will suffice. Good thing, too, since it's tiresome to do more than that on an iPhone keyboard.

Life hurries on. But you wonder what will become of all these abandoned blogs. Because they're mostly free, people have no incentive to take them down. I guess they'll last as long as the Internet infrastructure does, silent scrapbooks of days gone by. Look at these 2D pictures of frolicking children who are now adults, these quaint dinner parties from an earlier age, these reviews of long-forgotten books and movies. Ah, the days before the holographic monitor and the neural interface; I remember them well.

Raised on guns and dynamite

2009-07-16T08:23:00.012-05:00

I was on the treadmill yesterday watching Rio Bravo on AMC. It's been called Howard Hawks' finest film, and that may be, but sweating through my fifth mile I was struck mostly by how cheaply life was regarded in the glory days of the Western.

In one scene, John Wayne and Ricky Nelson gun down three outlaws who have been distracted by a flower pot tossed out a window. The poor saps are just standing there, and then they're dead in the street without so much as a "drop your guns." When the Duke notices another man trying to flee on horseback, he kills him too. Fifty yards out and a moving target, that's pretty good shooting. But the guy was running away. Might want to review your guidelines on the use of deadly force, sheriff.

So we've got four men dead in about 15 seconds of screen time. By way of comparison, the actual gunfight at the O.K. Corral resulted in three fatalities, and we're still aware of it 128 years later. I swear, I watched dozens of movies like Rio Bravo during my formative years and I sometimes wonder today why I don't use more gunplay in my daily routine.

Or more dynamite. In westerns, dynamite appears only slightly less often than Colt revolvers or Gatling guns. Rio Bravo has a sequence where Walter Brennan is hurling sticks of it at an outlaw hideout. John Wayne and Dean Martin then detonate the sticks by shooting them as they land on the porch. The house gets blasted to kindling, of course, but the surviving outlaws stumble out with limbs somehow intact. Message: Dynamite is not just for contractors.

Dynamite has a starring role in another Western I viewed on the treadmill: Two Mules for Sister Sara. This one, starring Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine, also has a body count that seems a bit jarring in a movie billed as a comedy. As part of his scheme to steal a chest full of gold, Eastwood enlists the aid of Mexican peasants who hope to get rid of their French oppressors. In the climactic firefight, about 140 of them die horribly -- a fair number by running mindlessly (as extras so often do) into the business end of a Gatling gun. That's a lot of fatherless families to think about. But it's all good, as Eastwood and MacLaine ride wisecracking into the sunset.

I like old Westerns as well as the next guy -- maybe somewhat more than the next guy -- but I have to agree that movie-making has come a long way since then. Today even bad movies attempt to consider the consequences of gunshot deaths, if only to show how messy they are. And yet, somehow, guns get used in real life a lot more now than they did when the Western ruled the screen. Dynamite, thankfully, has been slower to catch on. I guess it's possible to overestimate the influence of pop culture on human behavior. It doesn't form us, after all; it only reflects.

Showing "Twilight" how it's done

2009-07-10T16:12:00.010-05:00

I've grown disgusted with vampire movies over the past few years. Now that the simpering Gap models of "Twilight" have taken over, with their finicky diets and childish crushes, I'm about ready to put a stake in the heart of the entire genre. Bela Lugosi must be rolling in his crypt right now. Assuming he's still in it.

And yet, I come to praise a recent vampire movie that also blends romance and horror. Unlike "Twilight," it succeeds. It's moving, it's horrifying and it's somehow believable. "Let the Right One In," a Swedish film released last year, is the most engrossing movie I've seen in many months -- and that includes quite a few that didn't involve the undead.

Briefly, it's set in 1982 Stockholm, where the misfit boy Oskar has become the target of bullies. You can see why: He's a pale, sensitive lad who seems barely strong enough to lift his own limbs. He goes out at night to role-play some revenge, jamming his little knife into a tree and reciting the litany of insults his tormentors have just inflicted on him. When he turns around, there's a girl watching him from the jungle jim. It's snowy out, and bitter cold, but she's not wearing a coat. More importantly, she doesn't seem to need one.

Oskar's new friend is Eli, who turns out to be quite strong, quite a climber and quite adept at solving a Rubik's cube. On the downside, she can't stand daylight and can't enter a dwelling without being invited. When her true nature begins to dawn on Oskar midway through the film, he asks if she's very old. "I'm 12," she says. "But I've been 12 for a long time."

If the movie were only about vampire puppy love, it would get old a bit more quickly than Eli. But director Tomas Alfredson creates a cold, dark Stockholm where despair and foreboding seem to haunt every shadow. And Eli isn't one of those vampire vegetarians, like the dopey Edward Cullen in "Twilight." She needs to feed, and it isn't pretty. That's another thing I like about this movie: It remains true to the conventions of genre even while giving its vampire some sympathetic qualities.

Even if you don't like vampire movies, you might like this one. It's subtitled, but that doesn't matter, right? Dave Bob says check it out.

We'll say goodbye -- just not right away

2009-07-07T11:13:00.007-05:00

I'm not going to be one of those people grousing about all the Michael Jackson coverage. Yes, it's kind of remarkable that he's been dead nearly two weeks and he's still not in the ground, but that's up to the family and the promoters -- and of course the millions of fans, who seem a little too enthusiastic to be called mourners. Fact is, you can't jam several thousand people into the Staples Center and not have a casket there. Let's just hope they had the good taste to keep it tightly closed. I keep thinking of the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in 1989, where the mourning got so out of hand the cadaver actually fell out of the coffin.

To put things in context, it took just under one week to bury Princess Diana. But then she didn't sell 750 million records. Also, she was quite good looking and seemed to represent a sort of class and dignity that Jackson himself had largely abandoned. You didn't like to think of her being carted, 12 days dead, into a large sports venue; with M.J., you sense this is just what he would have wanted. Also, not to be crass about it, but his face in death could not be a lot less expressive than the odd face he'd crafted for himself over the last 15 years.

With Jackson, it's hard to know exactly what to mourn. The man himself? Maybe, but he's not been seen much anyway, apart from the footage where he's dangling the kid off the balcony or moonwalking atop a van after his child-molestation trial. His music? Well, he seemed to have quit that too, and it's safe to say the best of his music isn't going away -- ever. His incisive take on current events? Hmm. I can't remember M.J. ever saying anything that wasn't about his own celebrity.

I liked much of Michael Jackson's work. I wouldn't say, as so many have, that any of it changed my life. That's overestimating the power of pop. And it's not like he was going to write a lot more of it. I'm sad he died the way he did, but mostly I'm sorry he never got around to redeeming himself. Maybe that wasn't going to happen either, but I like to think he might have tried harder, if only he'd known what was coming.

Bad choices equal hard times

2009-07-01T08:23:00.013-05:00

I need some income. I'm not kidding. The writing thing has not turned into the major score I had hoped, and I'm pretty sure there won't be anything for me in Michael Jackson's will -- not since that day I saw him hitchhiking with his dog outside Winnemucca and slowed down like I was going to stop, then took off laughing just before he reached the pickup. In hindsight, that may not have been my smartest move.

I did have some money put away, but I'm starting to think it might not be enough. I mean it wasn't enough before the economy tanked, so I'm not kidding myself. Maybe I shouldn't have taken all my blackmail dough and invested it with this friend of a friend, this cat named Benji or Bernie or whatever. That was in November. I've been trying to call him to see where I stand, but nobody's answering the phone. He makes me show up there in person, he's going to be sorry.

Looks like all that cash and cocaine I funneled to the Norm Coleman campaign isn't going to pay off either. My fallback position has been always been landing a cushy job as a Senate page, maybe sell a little blow on the side. I thought my generosity would help them look past the fact that I'm 58 years old. Who knew Stuart Smalley had the stones to stay in the race for eight months and eventually pull it out? Hey, those are the breaks. You win some and you lose some.

But I am going to need some work. Something doesn't open up pretty soon, I'll have to start calling in some IOUs. I have plenty of them, believe me. There's that guy down in Honduras, I once took a bullet for him in a bar fight at this dive called Carmelita's just outside Puerto Cortes. I hear he's done pretty well for himself since, got elected president. Soon as I finish breakfast, I'll give Manny Zelaya a jingle, remind him of old times.

iOmelet -- it's the killer app

2009-06-29T08:41:00.012-05:00

I am a petty, bitter man, especially when it comes to iPhone fanatics raving incessantly about the amazing capabilities of the device. About half the posts you see on Twitter pose some variation of the rhetorical question, "is there anything this iPhone can't do?"

Turns out you can also fry eggs on it. This amusing post describes the overheating problem being reported by some users of the new iPhone 3G S. "Toasty doesn't even describe how surprisingly hot it got," one user reports. Another put it under his pillow and awoke with a scorched ear.

Being petty and bitter, this is the sort of thing that brings a smile to my face. Not that I hate iPhones, of course, or those who wield them. I have an iPod Touch myself, which is currently at an undisclosed location in California, being scrutinized by a team of Apple techno-shamans who, like me, cannot fathom how I managed to brick it while trying to upgrade the firmware to version 3.

No, I'd step up to an iPhone tomorrow. Except I can never get past that immovable barrier of having to shell out a minimum of $1,200 a year to make it work. It's the pettiness thing again. Also, I hate talking on the phone, and never go anyplace requiring a GPS to find, and already have a little camera. Really, the only reason I covet one is because everybody else has one.

And how do I know that? Because the iPhone is designed expressly for the purpose of announcing one's presence to the world. It's the reason Twitter exists, the reason Facebook is thriving. It begs to be used in public --usually at gatherings where the people who aren't there become more tangible and interesting than the ones who are. Watching those little screens rule the room, even the most silent and cynical can't help but feel small pangs of longing.

And now that it's capable of making a grilled cheese sandwich ...

A study in hypocrisy

2009-06-28T11:26:00.005-05:00

Every once in awhile, you run across a line you really wish you'd written. So it is with this lede by Maureen Dowd in her latest column:

As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes.

That's almost poetry. I'm not one of Dowd's biggest fans -- sometimes she flogs her metaphors beyond endurance and comes off as simply sophomoric -- but her take on the two sides of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is brilliant. There's Mark, the penny-pinching prig; and there's Marco, the lying Latin lover. Her damning contrast between the two, between Sanford's conservative talk and libertine walk, should be required reading at the hypocrisy-prevention seminars the GOP must surely be planning by now.

The stuff that really matters

2009-06-27T07:41:00.009-05:00

The King of Pop giveth, and the King of Pop taketh away. In his last official act, Michael Jackson batted poor Farrah Fawcett straight back to page A8 but also gave South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford some breathing room at a time when it really came in handy. The guy (Sanford) has to be thanking his lucky stars. Those erotic e-mails might have echoed for days had not the King succumbed to all his bad choices at such a fortuitous time.

When a major celebrity dies, it's bigger than World War II, at least for a day or two. The stars get realigned -- literally, because there's one less of them, and figuratively, because big stories have this way of becoming small when something bigger comes down the line. Who cares about Sanford any more? Who cares about Iran? We are talking Michael Jackson here, who has Touched Us All in ways we will still be discovering years from now. Personally, the coverage I've found most poignant is this piece about the time Michael Jackson inadvertantly dropped his sequined glove in the toilet. Hey, I've been there bro.

In the New York Times, there's this story about Shock and Grief Around the World. The former president of South Korea summed it up best: "We lost a hero of the world." A number of the memorials planned -- including one here in Wichita -- featured somber moonwalking. A stunned Paul McCartney, putting aside their petty differences over the Beatles catalog, called M.J. a "massively talented boy man." Even the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who normally shuns publicity, found time to show up at the family home in Encino. But then, we are the world. Maybe it takes a moment like this to make us realize what's truly important.

Kicking Scientology in the shins

2009-06-23T10:58:00.009-05:00

Most of my thinking on Scientology parallels last year's South Park episode, which nicely parodied L. Ron Hubbard as both a second-rate writer and a third-rate god. I also view the organization he founded as a church only in the sense that it exploits childlike credulity on a breathtaking scale. I know: Companies like Apple or Amway do that too. But unlike those companies, Scientology has grown fat servicing celebrity egos and selling nothing for something -- I refer here to the ludicrous but undeniably profitable concept of auditing. And unlike other successful companies, Scientology is tax-exempt.

Now comes the St. Pete Times to reveal a bit more about the organization. In a three-part series, its current leader, David Miscavige, emerges as something like Kim Jong Il in a better suit. Among other things, he is said to routinely abuse sycophants and conduct bizarre tests of loyalty. Readers might be reminded of other cults of personality -- Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, for example, or David Koresh's Branch Davidians -- but the analogy soon pales. Scientology is so vast that all the believers wouldn't fit in tiny Guyana, and if anybody's going to drink special Kool-Aid or perish in flames, Miscavige and his minions would no doubt prefer it be nonbelievers. He may be a raving megalomaniac, but as CEO of a profitable business, he needs to grow the market, not shrink it.

You have to hand it to the St. Pete Times. Scientology is a formidable enemy, powerful enough to make the IRS grab its ankles on the subject of tax-exempt status. Its litigiousness is legendary, and these days few newspapers see a percentage in paying reporters to afflict the comfortable. And yet, here's this series, carefully reported and solidly sourced, just like in the days of old. It may not hurt Scientology much, in the end, but it sure helps the case for professional journalism.

No rush to reunite

2009-06-05T08:22:00.010-05:00

When I think of my high school years, it's always with a little embarrassment -- or a lot, depending on the memory. I committed a number of heinous acts for which there can be no redemption. I wore my shaggy black hair in the style now associated with Rod Blagojevich. I wore pants pegged so tight they looked like leotards. I was paralyzed by shyness. If I really liked a girl, my only strategy was to ignore her. I smoked unfiltered Camels in the belief it made me manly. I went along with any stupid scheme cooked up by friends, most involving copious amounts of beer. To the few good teachers who tried to rouse me from utter haplessness, I returned nothing at all.

You can't go home again, but people keep trying. This summer, the class of 1969 at the little high school I attended is having another reunion. If I go, it'll be my fourth. I say if because it's the first one I have doubts about attending.

I wouldn't have missed any of the others. Each was literally the party of the decade. In 1979, it was all about proving we were better than we'd been, grownups at last and on the way up. It was the kind of party where you had the urge to buy stylish new clothes or show up in a rented Cadillac.

Ten years later we were at the height of our powers, such as they were. We had our careers, our families. Some plain, unnoticed girls were now attractive women, some formerly boorish jocks were now brimming with bonhomie. Time again seemed the great healer. We all danced with abandon, as though celebrating the end of the cliques and classes that had defined us before.

Ten years after that, a kind of ruefulness had set in. We still got up to dance, but with a bit less exuberance. Mostly we wandered around trying to remember names, joking about getting older and exchanging remembrances that no longer seemed quite plausible.

They were all fun parties. They were also illuminating in an anthropological sense: A graduating class is a little control group, each personality a prototype for someone you'll meet after. Every 10 years, you can note the effects of time, the shifting tides of success and loss, the poignant impermanence of lustrous hair. On the long ride back home, there's some comfort in knowing that the erosion of time does not happen to you alone. That despite all the varying paths, you and your classmates are in it together.

Except that after 40 years, growing old together seems less of a comfort. The passage of a decade no longer seems completely benign. Now we've watched our parents get old and we know what awaits. All our youthful potential has been spent or squandered; from here on out the pieces start falling off. You're not sure you want to participate. You look in the mirror. You imagine the sultry cheerleader who was the object of so much teen lust, now a prim grandma immune to lust of any kind. You look at a poem you wrote then, its meaning now obscure. You look at the invitation to the 40-year reunion and think: The rest of you go on; I'll catch up later.

Inconspicuous nonconsumption

2009-05-21T09:01:00.005-05:00

I own five digital cameras and three computers and an assortment of MP3 players. All became obsolete about 15 minutes after unpacking, displaced by newer models with more features. I've often wondered what I was thinking when I acquired all this crap, and now Robert Tierney, writing in the New York Times, offers an answer: It's my primal need to impress strangers.

Thanks for the tip, Bob. I still wouldn't be complaining if it worked -- there are worse things in life than the fleeting admiration of passersby. But Tierney points out that sending messages with material goods is futile. If I thought my 8-gig iPod Touch might garner adoring glances from the chicks at the gym, I thought wrong. And not because they all have 32-gig iPhones. Turns out it has more to do with social invisibity. And that derives from my relatively flat scores in the "Big Five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

Hey, stability! One out of five ain't bad. But to raise my profile in the other four areas, I'm afraid it might take more than the latest iToy. Perhaps more than a BMW. Or a sailboat, or a place in the Hamptons. In fact, I've begun to suspect that acquisition of property is not 100 percent reliable as a path to self-transformation.

It's sad in a way, this weird idea that happiness can't be bought. But if Americans are beginning to question the benefits of rampant consumerism, at least the timing works for me. The lack of a steady paycheck curbs the means of shopping anyway, if not the urge. I still pore over the Best Buy circulars every Sunday, but I never buy anything. My car's eight years old and running a little rough. The last pair of decent sunglasses I acquired were a set of Ray-Bans I found during a walk in the park. A new camera? Forget about it.

Strangely, I don't feel much different than when I was impulse-buying like the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Life proceeds as before. Shopping doesn't make you happy, true, but here's my little epiphany: Not shopping doesn't make you sad.

A memorable morning in May

2009-05-18T09:33:00.006-05:00

I started this blog with a narrow focus on crime fiction, but it's been all downhill since. I've since veered into inane mini-reviews of TV and movies, descended into celebrity mockery, then went down a couple more pegs with trite remarks about the weather. Roughly a third of my posts now are about how pointless it is to do a blog at all. Today, it has come to this: I'm down to personal recollections.

Because today is May 18. Anybody who lived in the Northwest corner of the nation in 1980 remembers that day pretty well. We were living in Yakima, Wash., where I worked for the daily newspaper. It was Sunday morning and we woke to the sound of an approaching thunderstorm. I went outside with the kids, and there to the west was a wall of gray, laced with lighting. A storm, yes, but there wouldn't be any rain that day. The radio informed us that Mount St. Helens had just exploded, and the ash cloud was headed our way.

I didn't know much about volcanoes, but I knew one had annihilated Pompeii. I hustled the kids inside and put our Honda Civic in the garage. I ran some drinking water. Then we huddled inside and watched in awe as night fell at about 9 in the morning. It felt like judgment day.

Naturally, the paper called shortly after to summon me to work. That was always the way with the newspaper career: When anything big happened, the last place you could be was with your family. It was an eerie drive to work, midnight at noon, the streets choked with ash, the few people outside wearing bandanas over their faces, wielding shovels or brooms to no great effect. I remember well my bleak realization that this stuff would never melt.

It was probably the longest newspaper shift I ever worked, right up there with the 2000 presidential election and 9/11. We came up with a paper we were proud of, which I hoisted for the camera the next morning during a break in shoveling ash. The Herald-Republic later put the page on souvenir coffee mugs, but the red headline quickly faded in the dishwasher. Now it just shows a tiny picture of the huge cloud that was inbound that morning. The page is gone too, lost in one move or another -- but newsprint is meant to last for days, not decades.

Anyway, who needs a souvenir for something like that? Seen in the rearview mirror, what is life but a collection of the days you remember without them? Come back in November and you'll learn what I was doing the day JFK got shot.

A bit more rain to prime the pump

2009-05-01T08:13:00.007-05:00

I like rain in the morning, even knowing how much of it is going to end up in my basement. I like dark skies and thunder and the dog curled up at my feet, largely oblivious. I like the first of May, and the saturated greens of the grass and the trees viewed through rain-dappled windows. I like listening to NPR, at least for those fleeting hours before Diane Rehm comes on. Oh, and brown paper packages tied up with string ...

Which is my way of saying that I have nothing else to write about this morning. On the news it's all flash-flood warnings and swine flu precautions and Chrysler's collapse. Not much to say about that. I have a novel on a flash drive that will embarrass me if I send it to another agent and will embarrass me more if I don't. (One of the downsides of pretending to be a writer is that you're expected, occasionally, to provide some evidence of it.) But the rain precludes yard work and I've read all the news sites, so this will be a writing day. Or a rewriting day. And this is me warming up.

Before I go, some swine flu info

2009-04-28T07:30:00.006-05:00

The rest of you should probably go ahead and panic, but it's too late for me. I already have swine flu. When I got out of bed this morning I had certain aches and pains, not a lot of energy and the vision in my left eye was a little fuzzy. Also, that large bowl of popcorn I consumed before bed was not setting too well. These symptoms are eerily similar to the ones I experience every morning, but given the national news it seems clear that swine flu has arrived in east Wichita.

I just wish they'd come up with another name for it. "Grim Reaper" would be good, even if it seems a slight exaggeration at this point, with U.S. lethality hovering around zero. "Captain Trips" is not bad either, assuming the World Health Organization can wrest the rights from Stephen King. I'd even settle for "common cold." But "swine flu" is just so '70s. And I'm really not comfortable dying from anything related to pigs.

Anyway, while I'm still well enough to type, here are some quick answers to frequently asked pandemic questions:

Q: I need to run to the store to pick up some pork rinds. Should I wear a surgical mask?
A: Pork rinds? Are you sure? The "experts" say you can't get swine flu from eating swine-based products, but why take a crazy chance? And yes on the mask, especially if you supplement it with a big Target bag, as in the picture. If you can afford it, a full set of scuba gear offers the best protection of all.

Q: I need accurate, up-to-date information as this deadly pandemic brings the world to its knees. Where should I turn?
A: I use Twitter, which can instantly echo and amplify all data on the disease, pertinent or not. It's the most trusted source of information on what somebody's brother heard on the radio that one time. If you're not on Twitter, try Glenn Beck, who should be bouncing off the walls right about now.

Q: Is diarrhea a symptom of swine flu?
A: Yes. But it's also a symptom of too many bean burritos, so keep that in mind when Tweeting.

Q: Can I have your stuff when you're dead?
A: No. I'm putting it on eBay as we speak.

Something to be said for staying put

2009-04-23T07:26:00.008-05:00

It says here that Americans are moving less, another one of those symptoms of the crappy economy. It's also a cause, since Bekins and Mayflower and U-haul and Ryder could really use the work right now. But maybe it's not such a bad thing if people stay put for awhile. Maybe they'll get to know the neighbors. Maybe they won't have to face how little the house is worth if they give up trying to sell it.

I've moved a couple dozen times in my life. It was almost always for better job, although once it was for a better view and the time after that it was because of the divorce. I always thought it made sense at the time. There's something invigorating about moving on, packing up what you really need and getting rid of what you really don't. There's also something poignant about it, looking around the empty rooms for the last time, aware of the echos and the memories and the knowledge that you won't be back. Like a funeral, a move concentrates the passage of years into a day or two. It reminds you again that all things pass.

Thanks for the tip, right? At certain age you don't really need to change houses to make that point. It's gotten so I can't wrestle a mattress or a dryer into a new place without picturing the day I must wrestle it back out. If the bad economy postpones that day, fine with me. I'd rather have this couch in the living room than in the truck.

But move on we must, sooner or later, good intentions and bad economy notwithstanding. No doubt there are few more ahead, before that final move to the big gated community in the sky. For that one, fortunately, there's no need to pack.

In spring, an autumnal point of view

2009-04-16T08:36:00.005-05:00

If you're looking for an excuse to stay in shape, consider this: One day a truck might pull into your driveway and two taciturn men will unload tons of compost, mulch and shrubbery. And then you'll have to haul it all into the backyard and plant everything.

Trust me, in a situation like that, it helps to have a little upper-body strength. Or at least I'm assuming it does. My own upper-body strength appears to have gone the way of disco and drive-in movies. Not sure how that happened. Hard to believe, but I once was capable of bench-pressing something larger than a clock radio. Back in the day, I'd be toting these bags of compost three at a time, instead of dragging them individually across the lawn with a rest break along the way.

I know: The older we get, the better we were. Those of us with gray hair like to brag about the glory days, even if they weren't so glorious. Why not? Nobody can prove we're lying. And sometimes it seems important to emphasize that we weren't always this way, that we were occasionally up to it when muscle mattered. Youth goes, but vanity sticks around.

Too bad vanity tends to disregard the evidence. This morning a number of long-dormant muscles have lodged formal protests. I'd be happy to give them a break, but I notice that the rest of those shrubs have not yet planted themselves.

Music for a song? That's theft

2009-04-08T11:19:00.012-05:00

I'm not outraged that Apple has bumped the price of its music downloads a cool 30 percent, a move followed a day later by Amazon and then by Wal-Mart. I'm not sure why they don't raise the price 50 percent, or 100 percent, or 1,000. The music industry is on the ropes, after all, and it needs every extra freaking dime you people can spare. Screw Darfur; let's step up for Sony and EMI.

All these music retailers have taken pains to point out that not all songs will cost more. Some will cost as little 64 cents -- really great songs by Yoko Ono (above) and assorted American Idol alumni who did not make it to the top 10 in season three. It's quite a bargain. Just think: Under this new pricing structure, you can have 100 tunes nobody wants for the low price of $64. Pennies, really -- 6,400 of them.

I'm for anything that helps this beleaguered industry survive. I'm for anything that will put food on the table for Madonna and Britney Spears and, to a lesser extent, Kanye West. These people have to eat too, and occasionally adopt Africans, and a 30 percent raise is certainly not too much to ask of you, the consumer, in these economic times. Same for the suits at Warner: think it's easy having no talent and being forced to feed on the lifeblood of those who do? Think again. I think we should all show some genuine compassion -- and fork over the extra 30 percent without grousing.

I know, this isn't going to go down well with a lot of people. A lot of them might turn to sites like Soundsbox.com, which offers a comprehensive catalog of completely DRM-free music for about 14 cents a track. Some of these people, who shall remain nameless, having been buying music that way for years. Some of these people roll their eyes and smirk when they see other people buying iTunes gift cards, which are now worth about 30 percent less than they used to be. Some of these people rationalize their behavior by noting that nearly everything they buy this way is something they've already bought numerous times in now obsolete formats: LPs and cassette tapes and CDs. I mean, how many damned times must I -- that is, these people -- buy the Beatles' White Album or Fleetwood Mac's Rumours?

Forget that last part. Buying music through our Russian friends is stealing from the American music industry. And if there's any stealing to be done, far better that the industry steal from you, rather than the other way around.

Anna of the two religions

2009-04-03T08:24:00.008-05:00

Turns out even the Episcopal Church, widely known for its tolerance and understanding, can get a little impatient when its ministers can't make up their minds about the religion thing. Just ask the Rev. Anna Holmes Redding. She's been with the church for 30 years. When she converted to Islam and accepted Muhammad as the prophet in 2006, it raised some eyebrows. But she kept showing up for work, so the church waited to see how this thing would play out.

And waited -- for three years. Talk about tolerance. But even Episcopalians have their limits; Redding was finally defrocked this week. Tough break. Losing a fulltime job is going to hurt in this economy, even if you've got Allah pulling for you. Redding expressed regret at such narrowmindedness. "It simply hasn't been my experience that I have to make a choice between the two," she said.

I wish her all the best. But maybe she'll want to rethink the career track. I don't darken the doorway of a church very often, but when I do I like to think the person up there preaching knows exactly what she believes. I've got enough vagueness and doubt to fill every pew; I don't need any more of it emanating from the pulpit. If you believe everything, after all, you really don't believe anything.

Hancock, we hardly knew ye

2009-04-02T10:02:00.009-05:00

Yesterday I sent the movie Hancock back to Netflix unwatched. Sorry, Will. But I've had it laying around here for about a month and the time just never seemed right to spend two hours with a surly superhero. It appears Knadler's Law applies to Netflix movies the same way it applies to things decomposing in the refrigerator: They never seem more attractive the next day. You think that potato salad is a bit iffy now, wait until Monday.

Sending a Netflix movie back unopened usually means it's time to cancel or suspend my subscription. I do that about once a year, after realizing I've seen all the newer movies I care to see and crowding the queue with stuff I might not pick up if I saw it lying on the sidewalk. I've got a few of this year's more obscure Oscar nominees on there, but they're all marked "Short wait," or "Long wait," or "releases sometime in the distant future." I wonder: Do I really want to see Doubt or Milk? And if I have to wait, why not wait without the inconvenience of a subscription fee?

Which, incidentally, has just gone up. Netflix recently notified me that they're bumping the cost of getting Blu-Ray movies. It's just an extra three bucks a month, but since I'm not watching the Blu-Ray movies I'm getting now, maybe there are better uses for the dough. Donuts from The Donut Whole, for example.

I'll think about it. The question is always whether to run out the queue or just go cold turkey. If I quit now, it'll mean a very long wait indeed for such films as Quantum of Solace, Hard Candy, and, way down at the bottom of queue, Help. If I stay, it's probably hurting the environment somehow and is certainly depriving me of much-needed donut money. Not to mention the guilt I'll feel when I send them back unopened.

These errors are starting to add up

2009-04-01T11:07:00.005-05:00

A year and a half ago I got a letter from the IRS. They wanted more money. The letter pointed out that while I had declared as income the few hundred I'd made from selling a story, I'd neglected to pay the self-employment tax. The upshot was that I'd better remit another $70 posthaste, or there'd be trouble. I got the letter not long after filing my return. And I hadn't even been nominated for a cabinet post.

I always think about that when I hear about the little tax problems of those who have been nominated: Tom Daschle and Tim Geithner and, most recently, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. Between them, their unpaid taxes come to well over 200 grand, but only Geithner managed to raise eyebrows at the IRS, and that was well after the fact. Stories like these are beginning to add up. You wonder: Does anybody pay the taxes they owe? Have I been a sucker all this time?

No, I don't think any of these people are crooks. No doubt all of them made understandable mistakes, just as I did when I inadvertently cheated Uncle Sam out of his $70. But there's something wrong with a system that detects tiny discrepancies and lets the big ones slide, a tax code that even the political elite can't seem to figure out. My $70 mistake triggered a red light somewhere at the IRS; Gov. Sebelius' cool $8,000 went unnoticed. There's the whole appearance-of-fairness thing. Of course the system's not designed specifically to screw the obscure and coddle the connected. It only looks that way.

Finally, can we retire the phrase "unintentional error" in connection with these tax stories? Sebelius used it again yesterday. Kathy: If it's intentional, it's not an error. It's a crime.

Nice, but where's my f***ing profanity?

2009-03-30T17:52:00.012-05:00

I was an early and unlikely fan of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Normally I go in for hard-nosed crime fiction where at least five people die horribly before the denouement. In Smith's books, a very kind and overweight woman goes around solving mysteries of a less-menacing nature. People do occasionally die in these books, but never at the hands of depraved serial killers. If you like curling up with a writer like Thomas Harris, A.M. Smith takes some getting used to.

He has a finely tuned ear for West African English, which makes every character sound both simple and profound. Even the antagonists can be charming. This charm comes across very well in the HBO series of the same name, which we watched last night. The series is perfectly cast and perfectly written -- which is to say it matches the expectations of longtime readers like myself. As in the books, the pacing is pleasantly sedate, driven more by character than plot. If you have HBO, it's definitely worth a look. Smith now has 10 books in the series, each as good as the last, so we're assured of good writing for this debut season at least.

As an aside, during last night's show I was struck by another thing: This is an HBO series, but not one character referred to another as a m*****f****r. What's up with that? In fact, I'm pretty sure the writers didn't deploy any f-bombs at all, neither as verb, noun, adverb, adjective or interjection. Ditto the C-word. After years of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Deadwood, this is a jarring omission. I predict a writers' strike at some point: Think how much harder you have to work when you can't pad the dialogue with obscenity. There were places in The Wire where the only words that didn't start with F were the conjunctions.

It's kind of refreshing, but this could be a risky route for HBO. After the suits fine-tune it we may yet see Precious Ramotswe beating up hookers and cursing like a drunken sailor with Tourette syndrome. What's the point of an HBO show if its scripts could pass muster on network TV?

A morning without power

2009-03-28T11:52:00.009-05:00

Guess it's a storm after all. The power went off at 3:30 a.m., and didn't come back on until around 10 a.m. In the meantime, our good friends were good enough to have us over for a nice hot breakfast. Thanks, D & D!

Now everything is covered in ice and certain branches are hanging dangerously low, and wet snow is coming down hard. But the furnace is on and I'm going to take a nice hot shower while I can -- day like this, you can't take continuous power for granted.

As the picture at left suggests, we won't be barbecuing for dinner tonight. Good Lord willing, we'll be tasting wine and eating pizza instead. Speaking of which, here's a poem I wrote at the request of tonight's hosts, in praise of tonight's featured grape:

I think that I shall never know
A wine so useful as merlot,
A modest grape that won't offend
When crowds of people must attend.

Though other wines may have more fame,
The alcohol is much the same;
It's not too heady, nor too light,
And usually the price is right

And though we gather just to taste,
To spit it out would be a waste
And though it's just a tiny pour,
It's never wrong to have some more.

But so that you will not seem dumb,
Pretend to note "a hint of plum"
And give your lips a thoughtful purse,
Allowing that you've tasted worse.

Stocking up and hunkering down

2009-03-27T14:45:00.009-05:00

The big news here is that a major blizzard is on the way and it's going to hit this city but good. Forget Fargo and its 112-year flood; we've got a half-inch of snow on the ground and now it looks like some sleet. This could be rough. I expect to see CNN vans on every block of this city by the close of business today. It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but just you wait.

People here love bracing for a winter storm, particularly at this time of year when tornadoes are more likely than a foot of snow. I love it too, monitoring the situation from the relative safety of command central. I left the house just once today, to pick up some stew fixings at the grocery store. Evidently I was the last one to think about stocking up: there wasn't much left in the meat aisle and all they had for milk was some 2 percent that was very close to the sell-by date. Would have picked up some guns and ammo too, except you can't find that stuff around here either, what with Obama in the White House. I just hope the snow is deep enough to deter all the looters and cannibals.

Of course, it could happen that the blizzard doesn't quite meet expectations. The magnitude of events often correlates inversely to the hype about them beforehand; if the forecast is for a Force 5 tornado, for example, you can pretty much count on light wind and partly cloudy skies. Remember that Y2K catastrophe? Neither do I. Perhaps because it never came to pass.

Then again, this really could be the big one. We'll see. Whether we get two feet or two inches, I guess we can be grateful that it's only snow.

Hits, twits and falling idols

2009-03-26T09:03:00.012-05:00

Here's a grab bag of items on a day when nothing in particular rises to the fore. Such days seem entirely too frequent.

* Just finished reading Hit and Run, Lawrence Block's latest in his series about the hit man J. P. Keller. These days I rarely finish a book on the same day I acquire it; when I do, I have to give props to the author. Block is no literary genius, but he's a master at crime fiction. He keeps you believing the story and turning the pages. That's what good fiction is all about, and it's a lot harder than he makes it look. Particularly if the protagonist is a hired killer who collects stamps, and not all of the people he kills have it coming. If you haven't checked out his Keller series, do so. Just don't expect a warm and fuzzy feeling to result. This is not the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

* I mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago that I'm a fan of American Idol. I'm pretty close to demanding a retraction. I skipped last night's episode, not because I was otherwise engaged or the DVR wasn't working; I just realized I wasn't up to another evening with the four smirking judges. These people are phoning it in. Their repertoire of criticism has devolved into a tired assortment of catchphrases. They are each as banal and predictable as any of the contestants on any given night. Give us a show called American Talent Show Judge, and every one of them would be going home by round two.

Of course, I'm not so off the show that I skipped reading the recap in the Washington Post. Glad to see I didn't miss much.

* A few more thoughts about Twitter, since nobody else has anything to say about it. I'm kidding. Over the last few months, I got a Twitter account, quit in disgust, then got on again. Nowadays I mostly lurk, following 20 people I actually know. As far as I can see, they're having the same experience as me: you post some thought you deem to be clever, describe some activity, link to some picture, and presto! -- the comment is universally ignored. Presumably we're all reading each other's tweets, but it's like we're sitting in empty rooms, tapping our little missives into the void. It's called social media, but it sometimes seems the opposite.

Twitter couldn't exist without the proliferation of handheld devices on which to tweet. For all the talk about networking, I think its popularity is more about having something to do with our new toys. I'm constantly updating Twitterrific on my iPod Touch, just because I can. Without that, I'd be forced to check my e-mail twice as often, or look up the local weather again in lieu of actually stepping outside.

No doubt everyone's already seen this, but here's a video that lacerates the Twitter fad pretty well.

The time for mourning is over

2009-03-23T18:04:00.009-05:00

I'll tell you what: I'm getting tired of all these sob stories about newspapers shutting down. Not that I have anything against newspapers, which until recently afforded me a life of unimaginable luxury. But I cringe at the poignant and somewhat accusatory tone of stories bemoaning the demise of yet another big-city rag. You'll all be sorry when we're gone, they say; you won't have the Daily Bugle to kick around any more. And beware: If you don't have a newspaper, you don't have a democracy. Who'll afflict the comfortable without the Bugle's crack investigative team sniffing out corruption?

Then again, the investigative thing and the corruption thing kind of fell by the wayside over the last decade or so. Surveys revealed that what readers really wanted were anecdotal trend stories, whimsical lifestyle pieces and 20-minute recipes. So newspapers went that route, realizing too late that the readers who answered the survey were already getting all that crap online. And the reason they were was because the Bugle and its brethren were putting all that crap online. Absolutely free. But they all reasoned that you'd continue to pay for the print product because it's good for democracy.

I sometimes wonder where the industry would be today if all the big players had conspired, sometime in the late '90s, to boycott the Internet. In court, probably. But in retrospect, it might have been worth a try. It might have bought some time. I might still have a job. As it happened, the tipping point arrived about a year ago. In another year ... who knows? I have a few friends still working in newsrooms, and I hate to write anything that will make their lives even more miserable. But a year from now, I doubt many will still be feeling that slight tremor, nearing midnight, that meant the presses were starting and the next day's paper was on its way, with all its flashes of genius and avoidable errors. Talk about poignance: For me, that tremor also meant the end of another shift.

Now, of course, all the shifts are ending. Just a matter of time, which marches on. Let's not get weepy about it. Let's not pretend that something precious is going away. If it were truly precious, people would want it. It appears they don't.

Adios, Bugle. Don't let the screen door hit you on the way out. If there is anything indispensable about newspapers, let's see what arises to fill the void. For now, about all we can do is pray it's not Twitter.

Take this yard and shove it

2009-03-18T13:38:00.004-05:00

Blogging is no piece of cake, what with the need to motivate the research staff, root out cliches and watch the profanity, but after all is said and done at the end of the day, it's as simple as pie compared to yard work. Which has again reared its ugly head.

I started the morning wandering around with a landscape guy, who didn't take long to figure out I'm a lot dumber than I look, at least where it comes to planting things and keeping them alive until his pickup is out of sight. He made some notes and promised to come back with a plan even a chimp could follow, but I'm not optimistic. Look, it's like Zarathustra said: I am become death, destroyer of gardens. Also trees and ornamental bushes. I have good intentions, but my skill set swings between criminal neglect and lethal pruning, with nothing in between.

The guy we bought the house from loved roses. He had a nice bed of them and they were a beauty to behold that first year. Now they're all brown canes and wicked thorns, withered and mutated as though we'd been mulching them with spent reactor fuel. I'd take them out pronto except those thorns discourage interaction. For now, I just brood at a safe distance, and slowly lay my plans.

I can't be sure, but I think the lawn used to be nicer too. It used to be green, for one thing. Now it's dead bermuda grass punctuated by strange weeds, and patches of bare earth where the dog
performs frenzied maneuvers without regard to aesthetics. How did it get this way? Does it need water or something? Fertilizer? My impulse now is to carpet-bomb the whole area with a foot of cedar mulch and be done with it, but no doubt that would create a different set of problems.

Ah, spring. Young men's hearts turn to love, and older men's hearts turn to Roundup.

These downfall stories don't quite do it

2009-03-16T09:12:00.008-05:00

If there's a bright spot in the economic meltdown, it's all these stories about the formerly rich who are now living with their parents and trolling for job offers on Craigslist. Here's the lates t, a CNN piece about an out-of-work banker bemoaning the loss of his fancy cars, expensive suits and extravagant vacations.

I was really enjoying the story at first. There's nothing better than seeing venal swine get what they have coming to them. Then I got to the part about how much the guy made during his "high-flying" days in the banking industry: $70,000 a year. Can that be right? How fancy could those cars have been, how extravagant the vacations? Was he driving to a reservation casino in a 3-year-old Hyundai? I'm going to guess CNN dropped a zero there at the end. If not, I feel kind of guilty about my initial chortling.

However, I was still happy to read that real estate has tanked in the Hamptons. New York Times Magazine has a story about it, leading with an anecdote about a home initially priced at $2.2 million, now under $1.7 million and still languishing on the market. Hard times indeed. Then I read a little more and realized that's still twice what it sold for in 2003. And it's still the owners' second home. Don't cry for me, Argentina. Only New York Times Magazine could wring pathos from that.

I guess I'm still looking for the definitive riches-to-rags story, the one that will prove America has learned its lesson and that all greedy crooks eventually end up pushing their belongings around in shopping cart. Yeah, Bernie Madoff is going off to jail, but what about everybody else? Shouldn't his wife be reduced to turning tricks in Queens? Shouldn't the geniuses at AIG be collecting aluminum cans instead of drawing bonuses? The occasional stories about fatcats getting thin are gratifying, but they're no substitute for justice.

Two worth watching. Or not

2009-03-14T14:24:00.006-05:00

Here at the Warehouse, I watch out-of-date Netflix movies so you don't have to. Here are a couple of oddball gems I've found in the past couple of weeks:

Brick, released in 2005, is a strange blend of two genres: classic film noir and teenage angst. Imagine if Pretty in Pink (1986) had been written by Mickey Spillane. Brooding loner Brendan Frye finds his girlfriend dead, and spends the rest of the movie finding out how she got that way. The clipped, hardboiled dialogue is straight out of Double Indemnity -- no kids talk like this, and you're never quite sure if Brick is taking itself seriously or is nothing more than a sly sendup.

Either way, it kind of works and kind of doesn't. In one scene, our protagonist is meeting with a dangerous drug dealer when the dealer's mom wanders in to serve the boys orange juice and cookies. See, it's her house, and her son runs his drug ring out of the veneer-paneled basement. In another scene, Brendan cuts a deal with the authorities -- not the police, but the assistant vice principal at his high school. Funny stuff, but it's still film noir: People get killed and beaten and betrayed, and nobody comes out ahead.

Brick might not be for everybody, but it might be for you. Dave Bob says check it out.

Primer (2004) is another strange movie, unfolding mostly in a series of conversations between two young engineers who are working out of a garage to invent something -- anything -- they can sell for a lot of money. The two stumble on to a puzzling phenomenon that, on closer analysis, appears to be nothing less than the secret of time travel. Naturally, they put this amazing discovery to work enriching themselves in the stock market. Complications ensue.

It's more complicated than that, of course. Way more complicated. After a couple of viewings I still don't understand half of what happens in the film, but the low-budget visual style and earnest, barely-comprehensible discussions between the two protagonists make it all strangely believable -- and therefore engaging. Check it out sometime with a very smart friend in the room -- and keep your hand on the rewind button.

Small-town Minn., small-town Mont.

2009-03-13T09:57:00.010-05:00

What I'm reading: Liberty, by Garrison Keillor. Basically it's another extended "News from Lake Wobegon," and that's not a bad thing. Community pillar Clint Bunsen, 60 years old and unhappily married, is sorely tempted by the young and beautiful Angelica Pflame. Nobody does small-town intrigue and midlife angst better than G.K., and every character here is someone you know. Consider this wonderful description of Clint's old man:

"He like to pretend to pull his thumb off and then hold out his little finger and when you pulled, he let out a fart. He loved the Sunday comics, Jiggs and Maggie, Little Iodine, Gasoline Alley, and he smoked a pipe like the dads in the comic strips and he had a mustache too. Daddy was a deacon of the Lutheran church but he was no more Lutheran than Roman Navarro was. He used Jergens hand lotion and Swank cologne. He came home from church on Sunday and sang "It Ain't Necessarily So" to irritate Mom and fixed himself a gin martini and a plate of Ritz crackers with deviled ham and put Frank Sinatra on the turntable and got a dreamy look in his eye."

Swank cologne. Ritz crackers with deviled ham. I love that kind of thing. After all these years with his Lake Wobegon people, Keillor may be phoning it in by now, but that's all right with me. Keep 'em coming.

Nails, by Peter Bowen, also meanders among the foibles of small-town folk, these in the fictional town of Toussaint, Mont. When the nude body of a young girl is discovered at the side of the road, Bowen's series character, Gabriel Du Pre, is on the case. Chief among the suspects: a clan of Christian fundamentalists recently arrived in the area.

This is the first Bowen novel I've read, but he's written more than a dozen Du Pre books. He's been compared to Tony Hillerman, and the reader reviews I've seen are all positive. He must be an acquired taste. I found Nails to be tough sledding in the early chapters. The mystery takes way too long to set the hook, lingering on quirky and not-quite-plausible scenes involving peripheral characters. Those familiar with the series may enjoy this more than I did. Secondly, the colloquial dialogue among Bowen's characters -- salted with improper pronouns, random commas and odd contractions -- takes some getting used to. No doubt it's an accurate representation of the way these people talk, but it sometimes required a second read to divine the meaning. It did get easier as the book went on.

The good news: Profits are unchanged

2009-03-12T09:07:00.008-05:00

It's tax time here at the Warehouse, so we've been busy pulling together records for the accountant. Basically, it looks like gross income will again be zero for the year, resulting in a net income of, let's see ... also zero. We do have another year of depreciation on the coffee maker and the Herman Miller Aeron chair we bought in more prosperous times, but we suppose the lack of income renders that moot.

Readership remains at about 30 hits a day, although closer analysis reveals 20 of those hits to be ourselves, checking to see if there are any comments. Comments, which we've been accepting in lieu of cash, have declined slightly from minimal to statistically insignificant. But that's probably because we're no longer juicing the numbers by replying to our own posts. So it is the opinion of the board that the Warehouse is weathering the economic meltdown pretty well.

Our Twitter initiative has not performed to expectations, producing even fewer comments than the blog. Our smart, amusing updates are frequently garbled due to the tiny iPod Touch keyboard, and so far have been universally ignored. The board has often wondered if the damned thing is even working.

Going forward, the board is considering a number of strategies. Most of them involve shutting down the blog and seeking employment with the lawn-maintenance crew we've noticed working across the street. We've also considered posting pictures of nude celebrities, but can't find any. The other option -- timely, insightful analysis on a topic people actually care about -- yeah, right. We'll get right on that.

She's many things, but not a pit bull

2009-03-11T17:13:00.009-05:00

As the owner of a dog who resembles a pit bull, I guess I can live with Wichita's new animal ordinance. The requirements -- microchip, spaying and a limit of two -- shouldn't greatly compromise my active senior lifestyle.

Especially since I don't have a pit bull. The dog currently occupying the recliner downstairs does possess some of the characteristics spelled out in the city's ordinance: "deep brisket, well-sprung ribs and slightly-tucked loins"-- but then, so do I. No, our dog is bull boxer mix, or, if you prefer, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She's not a collie. She's not a chocolate lab. And she's definitely not a pit bull. Just want to put that on the record.

Because people always ask. Yesterday in College Hill Park a guy walking his own mutt assumed a defensive stance 20 yards away and shouted, "what kind of dog is that?" The tone didn't convey friendly curiosity, so I shouted back: "Pit bull!" I was just pulling his chain. I thought he was going to pick up his little dog and sprint in the opposite direction. Bull boxer mix just doesn't have the same impact.

My dog Bella doesn't have any of the aggressive characteristics people associate with pit bulls, probably because she isn't one. That's too bad, because if she were a little less submissive I might be able parlay her appearance into a lucrative dog-fighting franchise. Instead, the only benefit I get is the exercise from the long walks she has come to expect. She does a few tricks, although rarely for free. I'm trying to teach her to poop less frequently, too, but that's not going so well.

Which brings me to my only real beef with the new animal ordinance. When I walk Bella, I always take a couple of plastic bags to pick up after her. Judging by the sea of glistening dog turds that is Cypress Park, I'm the only person in east Wichita who practices this quaint custom. How about a law mandating draconian fines for the slobs who don't? It needn't be breed specific.

Not the way the world ends

2009-03-10T10:45:00.007-05:00

You have to love WorldNetDaily. Since its founding in 1997, the site has emerged as the nation's premier source of information about the coming apocalypse and, more recently, secret plans by the Obama administration to steal your money and crush your soul. Where else are you going to get that kind of content? Diane Rehm? Wake up and smell the coffee! Bookmark the site now and refresh it every few minutes from your safe room down in the basement. At least until the power goes out.

Which should be any time now. On Sunday, WND posted an "exclusive" warning that global catastrophe is imminent. It came from Pastor David Wilkerson: "An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen. It is going to be so frightening, we are all going to tremble – even the godliest among us."

Presumably that would include him. Think about it: If even the godliest are trembling, then it's only a matter of time until the least godly start rampaging through the streets, screaming and rubbing their own feces in their hair. It's going to be that bad, people. The good news is that it should only last 30 days. According the the Rev. Wilkerson, that's how much food you'll want to stockpile. He doesn't mention firearms and ordnance, but when buying ammo one rule of thumb is to estimate the number of godless people in your area and multiply by 20.

I have some familiarity with predictions of the End Times. I was still a newlywed in the early 70s when my then-mother-in-law first thrust a copy of The Late Great Planet Earth into my hands. In the years that followed, she never missed an opportunity to proffer more books, and pamphlets and personal studies. All declared that doomsday was nigh. As each specific date quietly came and went, she always wrote it off to slight errors in Biblical interpretation and cheerfully set a new one a year or two down the road. As a prophetess of doom, her failure rate remains at 100 percent. Somehow, so does her faith in eventually nailing it.

But then, the same could be said for Hal Lindsey and David Wilkerson and the thousands of others who have been predicting the world's end for the past couple of millennia. Some people make a nice living doing that kind of thing; others just alienate their families and friends. All of them seem fascinated by the idea of the godless perishing in a rain of blood and brimstone -- while those with the foresight to heed scripture and hoard food are spared.

Someday, maybe, someone will get it right. Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn. But I'd put my money on T.S. Eliot before Pastor Wilkerson: When this world ends, it probably won't be with a bang. And the amount of groceries in your basement is unlikely to pertain.

Haven't they suffered enough? Not really

2009-03-06T12:01:00.008-06:00

During these trouble economic times, what we really need is a good scapegoat. Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Madoff are happy to oblige. Just when public outrage over Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme begins to subside, his lovely wife Ruth comes forward to claim that the mere $62 million she was able to salt away during the good times has nothing to do with Bernie.

See, he had his business, systematically robbing charities, and she had hers -- systematically counting the money as it arrived at their Manhattan penthouse bundled on wooden shipping pallets. Completely separate! Should she be penalized for Bernie's errors in judgment? That would be un-American, your honor.

You can only shake your head. Crime of the century, and the Madoffs remain free, rich and unrepentant. At worst, they're facing a reduction in status from billionaire to millionaire. That's a little too subtle for my taste. But it appears my recommendation of public flogging and lifetime poverty has fallen on deaf ears.

I know, it wasn't just the Madoffs who ruined this country. But as scapegoats, they're looking better and better.

Diane Rehm on the radio: Why?

2009-03-04T12:56:00.006-06:00

Moving now to media criticism, I would like to respectfully suggest that NPR move The Diane Rehm Show to some time slot when I'm not listening. Let's say 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. As it stands, I'm forced to curse and make pained facial expressions during the two morning hours she's on KMUW here in Wichita. And that's not always convenient.

Look, I know about the spasmodic dysphonia, the vocal condition that makes her sound like somebody's dotty grandmother trying not to slur her words after a second bottle of white zinfandel. That's a tough break and she can't help it. Far be it from me to criticize someone's disability. On the other hand, since there aren't many slots open for radio personalities, you'd think they could find one with the minimum qualification: a voice that does not evoke fingernails on a chalkboard.

You'd also think they could find one with a personality. That's my real beef with Diane Rehm: the personality. She has no sense of timing, she interrupts knowledgable guests to interject inane non sequiturs, and worst of all, she has no discernible sense of humor. Don't ask me why she's smiling in the picture; maybe she's imagining a deadly strain of ebola that infects only Republican males. That's another thing about Diane: she eschews any pretense of objectivity. Fine, there are plenty of right-wing ranters out there too. But couldn't she at least make a joke once in awhile?

The prosecution rests. Except to add that Diane Rehm's familiarity with world events doesn't appear to extend much past 1997. All in all, it's a crappy radio show and I'm at a loss to explain its purported popularity.

Maybe Sin City isn't much of a muse

2009-03-03T17:05:00.006-06:00

OK, I've plunged back into crime fiction, but I seem to have started at the shallow end of the pool: Murder in Vegas, a 2005 anthology of short stories edited by Michael Connelly. I found it at the library a few days ago and I was in a hurry.

I like short stories, even though it's rare to find a really good one. The yarns here -- set, as you might imagine, in Las Vegas -- are entertaining enough but only one ("The Sunshine Tax") is close to memorable. The rest all seem a bit derivative and predictable and lean heavily on violence to resolve plot complications -- which is the sort of thing I'm perfectly capable of writing myself. I read short stories for fun, but also to gain insights about the craft, and these didn't yield many.

They didn't yield many new angles on Vegas, either. We were there in December. While the city remains a glittering petri dish of vice and weakness, it has a pathetic air about it now. You walk the sleazy Strip and don't think much about heists and high rollers and hit men. You occasionally think about noirish lascivious ladies, but only because of those stupid pamphlets always being thrust at you. These stories are all set in the present, but they seem to reference a time when Sinatra and the Rat Pack were boozing it up on stage -- a time when Las Vegas was, in fact, unique and maybe a little dangerous. I guess that's why none of them seem particularly relevant.

This isn't a review, of course -- what kind of an idiot reviews a four-year-old anthology? Mostly it's just another reflection on what makes a decent short story. And it's a challenge to myself. I've long thought about doing a yarn set in Vegas; now I'm going to try to write one. Talk is cheap; let's see if I can do better.

Convenience at a cost

2009-02-27T08:49:00.006-06:00

The last time I mentioned Amazon's Kindle, it was in that dismissive, mocking tone I reserve for things I don't fully understand. Basically, I was incredulous that anybody would shell out several hundred bucks for a device that seemed much less convenient than the paperback book it purports to replace.

Now, as is so often the case, I see that I was wrong. As this piece in Slate points out, the second generation Kindle "makes buying, storing, and organizing your favorite books and magazines effortless. You can take your entire library with you wherever you go and switch from reading the latest New Yorker to the latest best-seller without rolling out of bed. ... The Kindle is the future of publishing."

OK, that shows how much I know. If you've got an extra $359 around to buy one, fine. But keep reading the Slate article: the thrust of it is not how great the Kindle is, but how bad it might eventually become for this pursuit we call reading. The problem is twofold: No more reselling or sharing the e-books you buy, and everything you buy must come from Amazon.

Sounds like the Kindle has become cool and convenient enough to become the next iPod. But with that kind of acceptance, it makes you wonder what might eventually become of public libraries. Applying DRM to the printed word just seems wrong -- no matter how convenient it might seem now.

It's my birthday too, yeah

2009-02-25T14:33:00.008-06:00

So far it hasn't been a great year, but today dawned clear and warm with the smell of spring in the air and it all seemed to augur well for another trip around the sun. The exact number of this trip shall remain unspoken -- such is the foolish vanity of baby boomers when they start getting mail from AARP. Let's just say the proprietor of Dave's Fiction Warehouse is not all that anxious for the senior discount.

Which is not to say I'm ready for a life without birthdays. True, as a reminder of my advancing age, they're nothing to celebrate. But as a reminder of how many people might miss me if I weren't around, they're not bad. Gift cards come in the mail, and phone calls come in from the kids, and my wife takes me out to lunch. I guess if you want to measure success in life, you just count up the number of people who feel obligated to remember your birthday. If it requires more than, say, one hand -- well, how bad can life be?

Anyway, if growing older isn't great, the alternative is less so. You don't want to go gentle into that good night, but you don't want to be bitter about it either. So today I took the dog for a long walk to College Hill Park, and took special note of the yellow and lavender croci rising amid the brown grass and the dog turds. Springtime in February, how often does that happen? And for me, it's New Year's Day. Might as well enjoy it.

Sick of yourself? So am I!

2009-02-24T06:50:00.008-06:00

This year I'm taking a break from fiction writing to concentrate on finishing up my motivational book, Seven Years to a Less Hideous You. It'll soon be dominating the entrances of Barnes & Noble stores everywhere, but I'm offering regular readers a "sneak peek" long before the rest of the rubes and suckers. It's my way of giving back to the community.

I feel good about Seven Years. My basic premise is that, despite the glacial corrosion of time and the occasional bout with alcoholism and unemployment, nearly everyone can leverage my hard-won insights, delicious recipes and sex secrets to become, if not the person they always wanted to be, at least a better person than that creepy dude they're always running into at the library.

I know; you're skeptical. Like me, you've probably got a copy of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in a box down in the basement. I didn't get anything out of that one either, probably because the chapters were too long. My chapters are short. Each one is a nugget of pure gold that an idiot like Covey could only dream about. Some samples:

Chapter 3
Always wear your glasses when you look in the mirror. Without them, you might miss that errant nose hair curling down like a superfluous apostrophe. Then in a week it becomes an exclamation mark and has cost you an important career opportunity.

Chapter 17
Dave's Invigorating Tea:
Put a cup of water in the microwave for two minutes on high.
Put in a teabag.
Enjoy.
Don't forget to remove the teabag at some point, or after a couple of days it will adhere to the side of the cup and you'll need a kitchen knife to pry it off.

Chapter 23
Never forget: Highly successful people do something every day. Presumably, one of those things is getting out of bed. So up and at 'em, champ!

Chapter 49
Sex secret No. 1: Real sex requires another person who likes you. Good luck with that. In the meantime, a dog can make you feel at least marginally appreciated. And if you record all of the dog's amusing antics in notebook, you might have a bestseller on your hands when the dog inevitably dies.

Feeling better? That's just a taste. Seven Years will be available both as a book and an iPhone app, and I don't care which because they're both $29.95.

Should we silence the insensitive?

2009-02-19T16:56:00.003-06:00

So for three days running, a top story on all the news sites was the chimpanzee who ran amok and tore off somebody's face, and was then shot for his trouble. It was eclipsed only by the ongoing story about the federal stimulus package and its myriad shortcomings. So you'd think that when a cartoonist attempted to play off both headlines, the result would be polite yuks at best, bored shrugs at worst.

Then again, this is America, where Al Sharpton remains at large and the only thing we have more of than bad debt is sweet, sweet outrage. Sharpton was among the professionally aggrieved who looked at the cartoon Wednesday and perceived in it the specter of racism. The president of the National Association of Black Journalists, evidently unaware of the 24/7 coverage of the rogue chimp, saw a direct racial caricature of President Obama. A New York state senator saw a tacit endorsement of assassination and fond nod to the days of lynching. And those were the more moderate interpretations.

Look, I know I'm not black and therefore my opinion on this worth exactly nothing. But here's what I see: a cartoonist suggesting, none too subtly, that the stimulus bill is so imperfect it might as well have been authored by a crazed lesser primate. I don't need to point out that the authors include both houses of Congress as well as the president. As political criticism and satire, it's perfectly legitimate. Other presidents have fared much worse, and Obama probably will too.

Remember those Dutch cartoons about Muhammad, and how so many Muslims the world over went so laughably berserk? By rampaging over a caricature, they became caricatures themselves. It's probably too late for Sharpton, but the others tearing out their hair over a dumb cartoon should give that some thought.

What it means to kill the killer

2009-02-18T11:43:00.005-06:00

Jodi Sanderholm's murder is just another atrocity in a nation full of them. If you don't live in south-central Kansas, you've probably never heard of it.
The big news here in Wichita today is that Justin Thurber has been sentenced to die for killing her in January 2007. As might be expected, the sentence has prompted a lot of hand-wringing from death penalty foes, who are always quick to point out the obvious: killing the perpetrator won't bring back the victim.

OK, I think we all understand that, just as we understand that the possibility of a death sentence does not necessarily deter those predisposed to commit unspeakable acts. One look at the simian Thurber, and a cursory review of his short, useless life, and you realize that this is not a man given to reflection on cause and effect. Look at the evidence presented during the trial, and it's hard not to conclude that if ever a man deserved to die, it's him. Jodi Sanderholm deserved to live, too, but we can't give her that. So it's time for Justin to roll up his sleeve.

Is that justice? Maybe it's as close as we can come. But the death penalty is not really about restoring the cosmic balance, just as it is not about deterring the next mindless sociopath who sees an opportunity and takes it. Capital punishment is a societal expression of outrage over the most heinous of acts, a public statement that the continued existence of the perpetrator is an affront to any notion of civilization. Fuzzy notions of closure and deterrence are beside the point.

I won't be carrying a bleeding-heart sign when Justin Thurber rides the needle, just as I won't be posting gleeful remarks beneath the stories marking the event. State-sanctioned killing is not pleasant and is nothing to celebrate. There are legitimate reasons to oppose it -- the possibility of a mistake, the idea that we must pay individuals to become executioners, the fact that capital cases require far more time and money to prosecute. But enough of the facile argument that killing the killer won't bring back the victim. We get that, already. And it does not pertain.

Time to consume some printed content

2009-02-17T18:02:00.008-06:00

Read any good books lately? Neither have I. In fact, since the start of the year, I can count the number of books I've finished on one hand -- and three of them I've read before.

What's up with that? The hip, facile answer would be to blame New Media. These days the Web is full of people talking -- with a strange sort of pride -- about how things like Twitter and Hulu and Facebook and YouTube are pushing Old Media, like TV and movies and books, off to the side of the road. The thrust of this CNET piece, for example, is that the guy spends a lot more time these days Tweeting about things than actually experiencing them. You can see how far this has gone by pondering the headline: "How the Web changed my content consumption."

Did I refer to "TV and movies and books" in that last paragraph? What I meant was "content." You don't read a book or watch a show anymore, you consume content. And you'd better be quick about it, or you'll end up consuming something that's as stale as an SNL episode on a Monday afternoon. Good luck Tweeting about that -- kiss of death, baby. It's hard enough live-blogging every episode of 30 Rock without also having to pick up a freaking book.

That would be the easy explanation: too much content out there for one man to consume. But for me, it's not really true. I've largely abandoned Twitter, quit looking every 15 minutes to see if somebody responded to whatever useless remark I'd formulated regarding something I'd seen on TV. I gave up Facebook, I'm indifferent to YouTube, I don't care to watch fragments of TV shows or amusing commercials on tiny screens. I've got all the time in the world to read books, but I haven't been reading them. For some reason, every book jacket I look at makes the book itself seem like way too much trouble.

I don't what's behind this sharp decline in my reading. Maybe it's a result of trying to write for a living myself. Maybe on some level I can't bear to read successful authors who are either worse or better than I am -- the first group creates bitter resentment, the second despair. Who needs it? Or maybe -- and this is the most likely scenario -- I've just gotten lazy and preoccupied with other things. A book isn't like a Flight of the Conchords video; it takes a certain amount of commitment to see even a good one through to the end.

In any case, I'm not quite ready to to make the leap the CNET guy did, and give up reading books altogether. Old Media or not, I'd better get back to it. Time for a determined trip to the library, with a stop at Border's. Recommendations, anyone? I lean to crime fiction, but all suggestions will be considered.

Report from the Netflix queue: 'The Nazis'

2009-02-13T16:34:00.008-06:00

I've been watching The Nazis: A Warning from History, which is probably not the best way to dispel a dark mood in the dead of winter. Especially with the world as we know it now atilt, and the objects on it trembling slightly toward the edge.

OK, maybe I exaggerate. I'm not one of those dummies who equates every small bump in the road in America with Hitler's Germany; I hate when people do that. But this two-disc BBC documentary (1997) does seem alarmingly current in its calm portrayal of something that happened 70 years ago. And it's not reassuring to see how normal, under normal circumstances, so many of the perpetrators were. In interviews, they are just old people with their memories and their reasons -- and chillingly devoid of convincing regret.

One former businessman seems almost wistful as he recalls bleeding the Jews of the Lodz ghetto of everything they owned in exchange for ever smaller amounts of food. For him, it was just the time-honored law of supply and demand. Another Lithuanian man just shrugs when asked how it was possible for him to shoot women and children. "What can I say?" he asks blankly.

Watching stuff like this, you might hope to learn why something like the Holocaust could never happen again. Instead you see again how little it takes: a dash of paranoia, a pinch of chaos, and someone strong to say it's OK. It makes you think of Rwanda and Srebrenica and Darfur and a dozen other places where the same thing has happened since, although on a much smaller scale.

The Nazis is thoughtful and instructive, but not if you're prone to depression in the wintertime. Maybe keep it low on the Netflix queue for now. For now, if you must see something with Nazis in it, try renting The Sound of Music instead.

I feel stupid, and contagious

2009-02-11T10:41:00.003-06:00

Now they tell me. Turns out the worst thing you can do when you have a cold is blow your nose. I've been blowing mine about every 90 seconds for the last two days, ever since this cold swept down like the wrath of a vengeful god. Also, my head aches, my joints creak and my throat feels like somebody slipped ground glass into my Cheerios. Under these circumstances, blowing my nose had become a bright spot in the day.

But no, they say. Don't blow your nose. Use decongestants instead. And presumably, let mucus run all over your upper lip and shirt should the decongestants take awhile to reach full effectiveness. OK, now I'm grossing myself out. I hate the word mucus. But here's another helpful tip from the geniuses at the University of Virginia: If you must blow your nose, blow one nostril at a time. Hey, thanks for the heads up. Never would have thought of that on my own. Just blow the problem nostril, not the other one, right? Got it.

I hate letting a cold run its course. But I hate getting older, too, and the possibility of tornadoes in February. Some things are just going to happen. "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on ..." I just wish, in this case, that it would move on a little faster.

The tawdry truth can now be told

2009-02-10T22:37:00.005-06:00

Look, if A-Rod has the stones to admit using performance-enhancing drugs, I guess it's time for me to step up as well. There were times during the late '60s and early '70s when I used certain substances to enhance my performance on the dance floor. For that, A-Rod and I are on the same page: We are "very sorry and deeply regretful." That's a measure of how sincere we are: a guy blowing smoke would only be "very sorry" or "deeply regretful," but not both.

Hell, as long as I'm at it, I'll admit using performance-enhancing substances on a number of other occasions. Most involved large parties or talking to attractive girls. Like A-Rod, "I felt like I needed something, a push, without over-investigating what I was taking, to get me to the next level." And so when friends would pass back a bottle of warm Bali Hai, I was only too happy to bogart the damned thing until someone else demanded a swig. What can I say? I was young, I was stupid. I was naive. I thought you had to be somewhat impaired to function in certain social situations.

Actually, I was right about that. To this day there's no getting me on the dance floor without three or four beers and a half-pint of Bushmills. If I go to a party where I don't know most of the people there, I'll be the quiet guy lurking near the bar with a glass that's never empty. Introduce me to a pretty girl and I might forget the glass and start drinking right out of the bottle. Fortunately, I don't meet a lot of pretty girls these days.

And that's the ugly truth. I don't know how this is going to look in the record books. I hope I'm not stripped of my already austere dating record. And every joke I ever told at a party will now carry an asterisk: Was it Dave, or was it the booze talking? Whatever. Now it's time to be a man, like A-Rod. I throw myself on the mercy of the fans.

Reflections on some ancient tomes

2009-02-08T11:10:00.004-06:00

Whenever I visit my folks' place in Montana, I can never head back home without a sack lunch and a hundred pounds of books. Mom's always got a lot more food around than the two of them can eat -- some of it a few weeks past the sell-by date -- and a lot more books than her groaning shelves can safely hold.

Putting away the lunch was the easy part. Now I'm wondering what to do with these dusty books. My own shelves are long since full, mostly paperbacks that I'd be embarrassed about should President Obama wander through. The stuff Mom sent home with me defies easy categorization: Best Tales of the Yukon, a collection of Robert Service poems; The Walls of Jericho, by Paul E. Wellman (Mom thought I'd like it because it's set in Kansas); The Waverley Novels, by Sir Walter Scott. And a whole raft of other ancient tomes by authors unknown to me.

Whether I'll ever get around to reading them, I can't say. But it's been interesting to look them over. Most were part of a library collection at some point; the first volume of The Waverley Novels was first checked out from the Butte library in January 1927. Now, 82 years hence, it's come down to me. I think of all people who've read it since then, all the hands that have held it, all the brows furrowed in incomprehension at Scott's lengthier paragraphs. I look at my own bookshelves, see a slim modern novel like Calibre by Ken Bruen, and ponder the evolution of the story and the printed word.

I suppose the book I find most interesting here is the one entitled simply Short Stories. It was printed in 1934, apparently as a high school text. A number of classic tales are included: "The Speckled Band," "The Monkey's Paw," "The Fall of the House of Usher." But there are also quite a few titles and authors now faded to obscurity. The lead story, "The Token," is by one Joseph Hergesheimer. Never heard of him -- my apologies to those who have. When the collection was published in 1934, he was apparently at the height of his powers -- known, as the introduction states, "primarily as a novelist."

What I find endearing about this book is the premise that students might actually want to write something themselves. And so there are words of advice and encouragement. While warning the student against reliance on technical elements in writing, the book goes on to spell out the 24 types of short story:

1. Tale
2. Fable
3. Legend
4. Plot
5. Setting
6. Dramatic incident
7. Mystery
8. Supernatural
9. Ghost
10. Detective-Ingenuity
11. Humor
12. Psychological
13. Problem
14. Local color -- Regional
15. Atmosphere
16. Theme
17. Love
18 Animal
19. Terror
20. Adventure
21. Dialect
22. Character
23. Fantasy
24. Cross-section

Also, lest students think writing is an occupation for academics and elitists, the introduction goes on to note that "Contributions to our American literature have been made by Negroes, lumberjacks, cowboys, sailors and others." That's good to know.

A cold night in January

2009-01-26T21:03:00.010-06:00

Solitary road trips are always a time for reflection. But when the purpose of the trip is to see a beloved sister for what seems likely to be the last time, reflection turns easily to regret. Today I covered about 700 miles under a low sky the same color as the pavement, the dun fields on either side wheeling by like the gears of time. If there's a suitable venue for contemplating life and how it ends, that's as good as any. Every mile I thought of Val, the impetuous girl she'd been and the kind, patient woman she became, and how my memories between the two are far fewer than they should be.

That's where the regret comes in. I could have have been a much better brother. Could have sent birthday cards, could have helped out, could have dropped by once in awhile with a bucket of chicken and a smile. I could have done a lot of things; I hate knowing that I didn't. I hate that every feeling I have about this is a cliche. Most of all, I hate that my sister is dying and there's nothing I can do about it except curse the cancer and wallow in self-indulgent melancholy. And drive 1,200 miles to say goodbye after years when I wouldn't drive a quarter of the distance to say hello. Here's another cliche: If you care for somebody, let them know -- don't wait until you have to.

It's deep winter here in Wyoming. Tonight it's supposed to hit 25 below. There's a bunch of semis outside, all idling through the night lest they be dead in the morning. A better writer might wring a metaphor from that. I won't try it. It's a winter night, cold enough to hurt, and there's going to be a death in my family. No metaphors are required.

Some rags for Mr. Madoff

2009-01-25T11:15:00.008-06:00

We saw Slumdog Millionaire yesterday. It's a gritty story, less buoyant than grim, until an improbable ending that could only happen in the movies. We loved it anyway. It's the only one of this year's best-picture nominees I've seen, but I'll go ahead and award the Oscar now -- and wait, as I usually do, for the Academy to rubber-stamp my pick.

Rags-to-riches stories have universal appeal, especially one told so artfully as this. But I wonder if Americans aren't ready for a look at the other side of the coin: Riches to rags. As uplifting as it is to see kids overcome cruel poverty, a better fantasy might involve billionaires going in the opposite direction. Imagine Bernie Madoff in ragged shorts, combing through a garbage dump in Mumbai. Tell me that's something you wouldn't pay to see.

But the rich never seem to get poorer, do they? Even the most venal and crooked seem to weather personal disgrace just fine. As far as I know, Mr. Madoff is still gazing down on Manhattan from the great height of his upper East Side apartment. Same with the other titans of greed, and there are a lot of them. Failure's always an option and the consequence is a comfortable retirement. This is America: You hit a certain level of obscene wealth, and you become untouchable. In a good way.

Somebody makes a movie like Billionaire Slumdog, I'm first in line at the box office. I don't want to see all the blameless greedheads blinded, necessarily, or dipped in excrement. But I would like to see them poor.

This is no time for illusions

2009-01-23T10:02:00.004-06:00

Yeah, it's a minor deception, but it still feels like a letdown. Turns out that beautiful inaugural piece "Air and Simple Gifts" was not really being performed in the cold sunshine of D.C. It had been recorded two days before, so some of the best musicians in the world could finger-synch along.

And yeah, there were a lot of good reasons for that: the New York Times points out "the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation" at a time when everything had to be perfect. But under that logic, maybe Obama and Justice Roberts should have taped the swearing-in part in advance too. After all, it also had to be perfect. And it wasn't.

“No one’s trying to fool anybody," the woman in charge of the ceremonies said. But that's not quite right, is it? The entire point of a fake performance is to deceive, to create the illusion that here is a talent and a time too great to succumb to circumstance. In the case of Ashlee Simpson, we can understand why technical help is essential. During the Beijing Olympics -- well, it's the Chinese, who have little faith in the genuine. In the case of Obama's inauguration, I was sort of hoping for the real thing.

If it's too cold to play the cello, then just play the damned recording. Don't trot out the artists and make them go through the motions. It's a new day in America, right? I think we can handle the truth.

A few moments to remember

2009-01-20T12:08:00.008-06:00

That was quite a speech. I like the part about "a new era of responsibility," even though I have a feeling everyone is still thinking of somebody else when they think about responsibility. But you have to hand it to Obama. He wasn't exactly promising us a rose garden. And as far as I could tell, the man did not mangle one single sentence. It truly is a new day in America.

It was classy of the Obamas to walk the Bushes down to the helicopter. Ex-President Bush looked just as small as he did eight years ago when he was standing next to Bill Clinton. The look on his face was identical, too: A man in over his head, feeling not quite equal to the day. His will be an interesting memoir, as long as he finds the right person and the right time to write it. Then again, maybe he'll want to leave well enough alone.

At first I thought Obama muffed the oath; now I learn from CNN that the gaffe belonged to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. You know, it's not that long an oath. Would it have killed Roberts to rehearse it a couple of times? Another sign of Obama cool, though -- he remained unfazed.

Not sure about that inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander. It seemed a bit pedestrian, almost prosaic. Maybe her careful pronunciation robbed the work of some feeling. Personally, I've come think we could dispense with poems written specifically for inaugurations. The last really good one was by Robert Frost in 1961, and it wasn't the one he'd planned.

Then there was Dick Cheney in that ridiculous black fedora and wheelchair, wielding a cane. He reminded me of Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, hunched there thinking, "These fools." I'm surprised he bothered to attend.

I recorded the event. I plan to watch it in eight years -- although surely technology will have rendered my DVR useless by then. For now, a toast -- just tea, at this time of day -- to our new president. I wish him all the best. And I'm taking this responsibility thing to heart.

The ghosts of presidents past

2009-01-19T22:52:00.005-06:00

In America, a new presidency has a significance quite separate from politics. It's personal milestone too. You remember what your life was like when the last president was sworn in, and you reflect on all that's different between then and now. You wonder what changes, great or small, will occur in the next eight years. The night before an inauguration is like New Year's Eve without the booze. It's a time for taking stock.

When I think back on presidents past, each of their names is like a snapshot from that time in my life. Mostly, presidents are like wallpaper, a bland background to real life. But they become a entwined with your personal experience: Eisenhower and toy sixguns; Kennedy and Playboy magazine; Johnson and bell-bottom pants. Mention the name Gerald Ford and I think of Saturday Night Live, and the dopey clothes I wore as a cub reporter.

I hope President Obama imparts more significant memories than that. I think he will. But thinking back on all the presidents who have served during my time on the planet, I can't think of a single one who had greater impact on my life than myself, or the people closest to me. It's worth keeping in mind that for all the hope a new president inspires, real change -- for better or worse -- starts right there in the mirror.

Maybe worship is a bit much

2009-01-18T21:39:00.004-06:00

Let the record show that it's Sunday, Jan. 18, and this is undeniably a blog post. This keeps alive my string of daily consecutive posts since the start of the year. And thus my New Year's resolution to post every stinking day. So suck on that.

It was a day distinguished by the Philadelphia Eagles' ignoble loss to the Cardinals -- a team named not after a city, but a state jam-packed with oldsters. Arizona is the new Florida. Or maybe Florida is the old Arizona, I can never be sure. It's enough to to say that if you're going to cheer for laundry, you might as well cheer for laundry that wins. All hail Pittsburgh. On Super Bowl Sunday, I will be watching C-SPAN instead.

Since there were no good games to watch, we occasionally switched over to stations carrying the orgasmic celebration of Barack Obama's inauguration. Let me just say this: Stevie Wonder is fat. Bruce Springsteen is not a working man. Samuel Jackson is wearing the same Kangol hat he was born in. The inexorable march of time hasn't improved Sheryl Crowe.

It's sad that the adoration of celebrities is not enough to create a great presidency. If it were, everything would be jake this morning, and we could look for the Dow to surge 1,000 points. All the boys would be coming home from Iraq, and somebody else would be making my house payments.

But maybe it's better to wait. Maybe we should see what the man can accomplish before we decide he's already done it. And if I read one more time that Obama's moment "is one that I never thought would come," I will puke. Yeah, it's a great moment, historic and everything. Who could have seen it coming? It was also great when he was nominated. And when he accepted the nomination. And when he'll be sworn in. Can we give it a rest now? Can we treat the man as a president, instead of an affirmative-action poster boy? I'm just saying.

What would Mickey do?

2009-01-17T11:28:00.006-06:00

A few words in praise of Garrison Keillor, whose gentle, avuncular demeanor has been sorely tested under the Bush administration. Now that Bush is transitioning from leader of the free world to leader of the George W. Bush DVD Library, G.K. seems a lot more at ease. The role of political scold never fit him that well.

Keillor's column in Salon is one of the few I look for each week. His latest, contrasting "girlish, moody fiction" with the sort of stuff people might really read, is something I dearly wish I'd written myself:

"...what readers really want is the same as what Shakespeare's audience wanted -- dastardly deeds by dark despicable men, and/or some generous blood-spattering and/or saucy wenches with pert breasts cinched up to display them like fresh fruit on a platter. ...

"Unfortunately, writers are a gloomy bunch given to whining about the difficulty of getting published, the pain of rejection, the obtuseness of critics, etc. They sit at their laptops and write a few sentences about pale reflections and then check their e-mail and Google themselves. Maybe click onto a Web site where young women display their breasts like ripe fruit. They get busy messing around and don't have time to write fiction so they write poems instead."

Of course, I'm not one of those writers. Not me, no not at all. The biggest difference is that instead of writing poems when I get distracted, I fiddle around with this stupid blog.

It's a funny column, but Keillor has an excellent point about fiction, and writing in general: Readers like stories. They like conflict; they like cause and effect. They like it when something actually happens. All the self-indulgent interior monologues and sensitive observations in the world won't make the pages turn if the reader is convinced that's all there is. We shouldn't all write like Mickey Spillane, but for a lot of us, it might be a useful exercise.

Call Nancy Grace; there's a poem missing

2009-01-16T12:04:00.008-06:00

This month's poetry selection is not really a poem, but the half-remembered fragment of a poem. I came across it a decade ago while at work, and printed it out and memorized as much of it as I could. Now the printout is long gone, and my memory isn't much of a backup system.

The poem, I'm pretty sure, is called "Song on Turning 70." It's by John Hall Wheelock, and even the power of Google has been insufficient to recover the complete work. Guess it's time for a trip to the library. My apologies to readers -- and to the estate of Mr. Wheelock -- for the words and line breaks I have inevitably gotten wrong:

Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?
Great night, hold back
a little longer yet the mountainous black
waters of darkness from this shore,
this island garden, this paradisal spot
the haunt of love and pain
which we must leave, whether we would or not
and where we shall not come again.
More time. Oh, but a little more ...

Does that ring a bell with anyone? I'd love to have the whole poem, but as I say, Google -- which is so diligent about indexing every scabrous blog and bus schedule, doesn't help much with works of poetry. And don't get me started about Wikipedia: Its original entry for John Hall Wheelock cited him as the author of Spoon River Anthology -- which is the best-known work of another favorite poet, Edgar Lee Masters. Be careful when you Wiki, folks.

UPDATE:
The title of the poem is "Song on Reaching Seventy" (italics mine), which may account for why at least a few of my earlier searches came up short. The rest of them -- well, I'm not as smart as I look. Turns out it's helpful to put quotes around the lines you're sure of. Sorry, Google. The poem may be found in The Best Poems of 1957, published by Stanford University Press, and other volumes.

For anyone who cares, here's the entire poem:

Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?
He would be braver than that bird
Which shrieks for terror and is gone
Into the gathering dark, and he has heard
Often, at evening's hush,
Upon some towering sunset bough
A belated thrush
Lift up his heart against the menacing night,
Till silence covered all. Oh, now
Before the coming of a greater night
How bitterly sweet and dear
All things have grown! How shall we bear the brunt,
The fury and joy of every sound and sight,
Now almost cruelly fierce with all delight:
The clouds of dawn that blunt
The spearhead of the sun; the clouds that stand,
Raging with light, around his burial;
The rain-pocked pool
At the wood's edge; a bat's skittering flight
Over the sunset-colored land;
Or, heard toward morning, the cock pheasant's call!
Oh, ever sight and sound
Has meaning now! Now, also, love has laid
Upon us her old chains of tenderness
So that to think of the beloved one,
Love is so great, is to be half afraid --
It is like looking at the sun,
That blinds the eye with truth.
Yet longing remains unstilled,
Age will look into the face of youth
With longing, over a gulf not to be crossed.
Oh, joy that is almost pain, pain that is joy,
Unimaginable to the younger man or boy --
Nothing is quite fulfilled,
Nothing is lost;
But all is multiplied till the heart almost
Aches with its burden: there and here
Become as one, the present and the past;
The dead who were content to lie
Far from us, have consented to draw near --
We are thronged with memories,
Move amid two societies,
And learn at last
The dead are the only ones who never die.

Great night, hold back
A little longer yet your mountainous black
Waters of darkness from this shore,
This island garden, this paradisal spot,
The haunt of love and pain,
Which we must leave, whether we would or not,
And where we shall not come again.
More time -- oh, but a little more,
Till stretched to the limits of being, the taut heart break
Bursting the bonds of breath,
Shattering the wall
Between us and our world, and we awake
Out of the dream of self into the truth of all,
The price for which is death.

JOHN HALL WHEELOCK

For average acts, please remain seated

2009-01-15T19:20:00.009-06:00

When's the last time you attended a live performance that did not culminate in standing ovation? Here in Wichita, I don't think it's ever happened. This city is charming in a lot of other ways, but the obligatory Standing O has become one of my pet peeves. You can be Pavarotti or one of the freak acts from American Idol, and people are still going to leap to their feet when the song is done.

OK, we're nice here in the Midwest. But standing up while applauding is about the highest gesture of appreciation an audience can bestow, short of women throwing their underwear. This is not something you award to any schmuck who walks by whistling Dixie. Doing so rewards mediocrity and makes the standers look like rubes, grinning bumpkins who are just real glad somebody decided to spend the night here in Punkin Holler.

I'm glad to see Miss Manners and I are on the same page on this: You reserve exceptional gestures for exceptional performances. You clap for everyone, that's just courtesy -- but you only stand up for the very best. If everybody gets a gold medal for showing up, then what's a gold medal worth? Treating both the mediocre and the marvelous as Special Olympics contestants doesn't help either of them.

Next week: Why getting killed in the workplace doesn't necessarily make you a hero.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

2009-01-15T08:56:00.005-06:00

This reality show has been plummeting in the ratings for about six years, so the finale might not do so well either. President Bush gets on TV tonight (7 p.m. Central) to bid farewell to a grateful nation.

Except the nation is not all that grateful. Yes, terrorists haven't knocked down any skyscrapers since 9/11, but they might as well have: The financial geniuses who worked in those skyscrapers have mostly decamped for the high weeds, taking with them the unearned wealth we'd all hoped to coast on during our golden years. So many of their offices are empty now, it's like a neutron bomb went off on Wall Street. Thanks, Mr. Bush, for keeping the country safe. Turns out the biggest threat to national security was thieves in expensive suits. They didn't even have the decency to send crappy audiotapes warning of their intentions.

I was never a Bush hater. I always thought he was a decent man who had trouble putting sentences together. I was somewhat late in realizing that he's really not very smart, not very interested in being smart, and far more malleable in the hands of scheming advisers than he will ever admit. When you're president, being decent is nice, but it's not quite enough.

He seems more reflective now, but I don't think he's a changed man. The last few years have been a been a time ripe for epiphanies, but I don't think he's partaken. So I won't be watching his address, and my DVR will be otherwise engaged. I'll leave it to The Onion to parse his meaning.

Speaking of the Onion and President Bush, this is one of the best things they've done:

Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

God help me, I do love it so

2009-01-14T15:01:00.007-06:00

I suppose if a man runs a personal blog, there's no great harm in disclosing an embarrassing personal detail once in awhile. Here's mine for January: I watch American Idol. What the hell, here's another: I like it.

Not that I would ever admit this while watching the show in the company of others. During the two-hour season premiere last night, I was all snorts and sneers, dismissive of the talented and untalented alike. Somewhere in my childhood, I must have been taught that it was unmanly to watch shows in which people willingly trade dignity for camera time. Of course, I may have been taught that it's unmanly to bloviate on topics about which I know nothing, but I've forgotten about that too.

Every Idol season starts off scripted for freak-show appeal -- how else can you explain Humongous Afro guy or Monotone Bass guy getting in the door? I cringe at that sort of thing. But every now and then there's something surprising and funny. Biggest laugh of the night was the video of the five or six adolescent girls waiting for the results of last year's finale. When it turned out not to be David Archuleta, their anguished spaz-out was a joy to behold. I've got to watch that again -- thanks, DVR. Second biggest laugh was Ryan Seacrest trying to high-five the blind guy -- realizing one second too late that a blind guy might not be able to see his proffered hand.

Then there's Bikini Girl -- who can sing, yes, but her true talents seem to lie elsewhere. Wink wink.

I'll be watching it again tonight, so no phone calls between 7 and 8 p.m. Central. And I would like to stipulate that no matter how much I watch the stupid show, I will never, ever hit speed dial to cast a vote. That really would be unmanly.

By they way, strictly off topic: a prize to the first person who identifies the source of my headline on this item.

Times are tough? Here's how you cope

2009-01-13T10:34:00.007-06:00

Look, I try not to be so cynical all the time. I didn't exactly make a New Year's resolution to see the good in all things, but I have flirted with the idea that a more positive outlook wouldn't hurt, in certain situations. So I'm grateful that Victoria Osteen is out there offering positive reinforcement. A wretch like me can use it.

Victoria, the beautiful millionaire and co-pastor of the 16,000-seat Lakewood Church in Houston, is touring the country offering tips, to those who aren't beautiful and aren't millionaires, about coping during these uncertain times. If people ask, she will also mention her new book, Love Your Life: Living Happy, Healthy and Whole, which debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list but has since vanished from view.

In her interview with CNN, Victoria sums up the section on finances: "I think we could all do better sometimes of not overextending ourselves as much. It's easy in our day and age to just extend ourselves in the credit line and things like that."

We? Let's not go there. That would be cynical. She got a tough message, but it needs to be said: Restraint, people. You think Victoria buys a new Bentley every time she wants one? No, because it's all about family. And God. Don't forget to tithe. All major credit cards accepted.

On the strength of the interview, I recommend everyone buy this book. The thing is, if you're not gorgeous and wealthy in these uncertain times, you're going to need all the help you can get.

The show must go on. And on.

2009-01-12T08:51:00.011-06:00

Last night, while watching a bit of the Golden Globes, I wondered: What if actors had to write their own lines? We wouldn't be doling out movie awards each year like blocks of government cheese. That's because there wouldn't be any movies to see.

How about that Mickey Rourke? He's begun to look like a claymation caricature of himself, and sound like the guy you encounter at Stockman's Bar after a few too many 7&7s. Kate Winslet is still easy on the eyes, but I now feel truly blessed by all the awards she didn't win: the woman is a windbag, babbling away like an 8th-grade valedictorian hyped up on Mountain Dew. Colin Farrell is even more tedious, boundless narcissism emanating from every carefully coifed hair as he rambles his way through far too many minutes of our fleeting lives.

But we love that kind of stuff, don't we? Love to see the beautiful people make asses of themselves, clutching their awards and droning on like regional honorees at an Amway convention. Love the painfully practiced smiles of those who didn't win. Love every stammered word and clumsy expletive. It makes the Hollywood gods seem a little more mortal, a little more like ourselves. Makes us thank the Lord for writers.

Then again, a little of it goes a long way. This year I'm thinking of putting the Oscars on DVR, so I can race past the tedium and see, for my own edification, how much time it really takes to announce the nominees, show a few clips, and present the damned award. I'm guessing a half-hour, tops. But I'm also guessing the wife won't hear of it.

You've got no mail

2009-01-11T14:49:00.010-06:00

I hardly ever get e-mail these days. In fact, without my good friends at Dell, Netflix and L.L. Bean, I'd go entire weeks without getting any. In 2009, it's come to seem as clunky and time-consuming as what we used to call snail mail. Blame the advent of texting and Twitter. A dozen years of rampant spam hasn't helped -- forever associating the e-mail inbox with Nigerian schemes and lurid porn come-ons and unsolicited offers to supersize one's salami. "You've got mail!" used to be good news; now it seems more like "You've got herpes."

It wasn't always that way. I remember the dawn of the Prodigy network in the early '90s, how wonderful it seemed to write to somebody and know that they'd get the message instantly -- or at least as instantly as a 300-baud modem would allow. The graphics were chunky and the connection tenuous, but it was a heady feeling, typing out a few pithy phrases and sending them out into the ether with the press of a key. You might wander back to the computer a couple of hours later and there would be a reply. In the early days of e-mail, I remember thinking that family and friends would never again have a good excuse for not staying in touch.

With Google, it got better: Now I could reach out not only to people who were close, but to people who weren't. I went through a phase where, during idle moments at work, I'd look up the names of old friends from work or school. If they had an e-mail address, I'd sometimes shoot them a message: "Hey, how's it going? You may not remember be, but ..."

I renewed quite a few old acquaintances that way, and with some I actually corresponded for quite awhile. But the years went by. The e-mails tapered off. At some point I think we all came to understand that there's a reason people lose touch with each other, and it doesn't have much to do with the lack of technology. It's about natural affinity, and a shared world-view, and maybe a shared history extending beyond a couple of years at a rural high school or a backwater newspaper. None of those things can live on text alone; none are nurtured by forwarded jokes. When people forget each other, whether once-close friends or casual acquaintances, it's because neither of them saw much reason not to. But that's not something they're going to come out and say. Better to just let things slide.

So yeah, I'm not bemoaning the end of e-mail so much as the end of thinking that it might make life better. Turns out it didn't greatly expand my tiny circle of friends. It didn't open up this broad range of contacts to further my brilliant career. In the case of certain family members who've given up on checking their e-mail, it doesn't even obviate the need to keep envelopes and stamps around.

That's fine. If somebody really matters, you go with what works. You can write a real letter, you can pick up the phone, you can tap on the wall between your cells. Yes, you can also Tweet, although I may be past that too. But finally, it isn't the medium. It's the message.

Sex is timeless, the book not so much

2009-01-10T09:25:00.007-06:00

Raise your hand if at any time in the '70s or '80s you had a copy of The Joy of Sex tucked away in a bedroom drawer. No? Must have been just me, then.

Monica Hesse of the Washington Post has a funny essay on the revised edition of this not-so-timeless classic, the original of which can still be found on the back tables of garage sales everywhere, sandwiched between copies of The Thorn Birds and The Complete Book of Running. I haven't picked up a copy in years, but I still remember how wonderfully erotic all those drawings seemed at first, and how quickly they became blase. The woman was cool; the guy sort of reminded me of Chuck Mangione.

As Ms. Hesse points out, the drawings are now photographs, and the randy couple now look like J. Crew models, without the benefit of J. Crew apparel. This edition includes 42 new sections -- apparently a lot has changed since people started having sex in the primeval suburbs of 1972. I suppose I should have a look, to keep up with the latest developments.

Then again, maybe not. I think the market for tastefully titillating sex manuals has gone the way of Fu Manchu moustaches and enormous shirt collars. Hard to imagine much demand in the age of the Internet.

Pixar pathos and box-office gold

2009-01-09T09:10:00.010-06:00

I probably shouldn't admit that I'm kind of neutral on WALL*E, Pixar's latest animated feature about a couple of robots that rescue humanity. It scores 98 percent on my favorite film site, rottentomatoes.com, and even jaded critics are deploying phrases like "entertaining and inspiring," "flat-out thrilling" and "almost heart-breakingly tender." Only a small-hearted, small-minded man would conclude his Netflix screening with the phrase, "Well, I've seen worse."

I loved Toy Story, Pixar's first computer-animated film about a lovable loser who eventually wins. But that's been 14 years ago, and every holiday season since we've seen a replicating mob of computer-animated films -- all about lovable losers who eventually win. For me, the cynical regularity of the plots and release dates of these things has become tiresome.

WALL*E isn't a bad movie. In many ways, it's pretty good -- as long as you accept that robots might experience physical attraction for each other, and that they might also possess an affinity for plants. Right. I did like the vision of a distinctly American mankind evolving into fat blobs on hovering lounge chairs, whose only interest is mindless chatter and empty calories. Take away the hovering chairs, throw in an iPhone and a Ford Explorer, and you have a portrait of America in 2009.

That's the best part about WALL*E: Under the bland syrup, a bit of bitter social commentary. But as an Oscar contender? I don't think so.

Trouble in the Mideast? Call Joe

2009-01-08T09:04:00.007-06:00

Picture this: It's the day after a terrorist attack, you've lost everything in spectacular fashion and the media's dying to talk to you. You're expecting Anderson Cooper, but the guy who steps out of the van is Yoab the Drywall Man. You wonder: What the hell is CNN thinking?

And I wonder: What the hell will Israelis think of Joe the Plumber as war correspondent? Samuel Werzelbacher, the guy who skyrocketed to prominence by asking Barack Obama a single disingenuous question, has been hired as a reporter for the conservative Web site pjtv.com. He intends to let Israel's "Average Joes tell their story."

I don't have much to say about Samuel Werzelbacher. I don't know the man. But I will say that Average Joes, the ones proud of uninformed views and crappy grammar, are way overrated when it comes to writing books or running for political office or wandering around a war zone with a press pass and a microphone. Samuel Werzelbacher has now expressed interest in all of those things, without yet distinguishing himself in the profession for which he's best known: Plumbing.

We can take comfort from the fact that pjtv.com is no CNN. But will the American celebrity mill ever tire of elevating dumbasses out of obscurity?

Thieves, yes. But not that lovable

2009-01-07T10:50:00.004-06:00

We've all seen the movies: Lovable thieves make a nice living ripping off the corrupt and venal, until one day they rip off the wrong people and complications ensue. Maybe Sonja Kohn has seen those movies too. She's the Austrian banker who harvested billions in Europe for the cash-incineration machine that has come to be known as Bernard L. Madoff.

Sonja has dropped out of sight recently. As this New York Times story mentions, it's probably not just to catch up on her reading. Turns out some of the investors she suckered are Russian oligarchs -- people not known for simply committing suicide when things go south. If someone must die as the result of a swindle, they generally prefer that it be the swindler. Dropped out of sight? Sonja Kohn is lucky she's not been dropped off a bridge. I'm guessing she's doffed that red wig for something a little less conspicuous.

I'm just hoping this possibility has occurred to Mr. Madoff himself. Yes, being forced to pad around a luxurious Manhattan apartment, mailing off expensive jewellry to family and friends, is punishment enough -- but I wonder if those mercurial oligarchs will see it that way. I hope not. Bernie could use a little more drama in his life. But maybe I've seen too many of those movies myself.

Love the movies, hate the theater

2009-01-06T10:24:00.011-06:00

When I'm at a party and the conversation lags (it tends to do that a lot when I'm at a party), I have one sure-fire technique for getting it going again that does not involve me leaving the room. I just start talking about some movie I've just seen.

Movies are the one safe topic in any situation, unless you get somebody who loved The Horse Whisperer arguing with somebody who hated it, such as myself. But mostly, everybody goes to the movies, and everybody loves to go on and on about their favorites, to the point of reciting lines of dialogue and expressing inappropriate urges towards the actors. Don't get me started on Renee Zellweger's turn in Chicago. I fully intend to abide by the restraining order.

Good thing party season is over, because these days I don't have much to talk about. Of the 22 films Variety.com lists has having a shot at major Oscars, I've seen exactly three of them: Burn After Reading, The Dark Knight and W.

The rest? I don't know. I've got Wall-E coming from Netflix and I'm interested in seeing Clint Eastwood's last role in Gran Torino, but I'm just not that curious about the rest of them. Benjamin Button sounded intriguing when I first heard of it, but I've seen so many stories and reviews since then I feel like I've already seen it. I'm sure The Changeling is a fine picture, but I find Angelina Jolie's lips a distraction, dominating every scene like a pair of fresh pork tenderloins.

But really, the biggest reason I haven't seen more of these movies it that it's not that much fun to go to the movies anymore. I spend the first third of any film waiting for some idiot to take a business call, or start talking to some other idiot seated next to him, or to start texting, his wonderful little iPhone screen an effective distraction to anything happening on the big screen. These things don't happen very often, but the expectation that they might always puts me on edge. I fear I might become confrontational, and any enjoyment the movie provides might quickly dissipate during the ensuing fistfight in the parking lot.

I may have mentioned my big TV. It's no subsitute for the grandeur of a movie screen and THX sound, but I prefer the TV because I can tell the dog to shut up and she's unlikely to want to make something of it. I can use the captions if I want. Also, my popcorn is better. The downside is that it takes me longer each year to get around to seeing the nominees. And there's always the matter of locating the remote when it's time to hit the bathroom.

We have a party each Oscar night, in which we pass around ballots for five bucks a pop and award the winnings to whoever makes the most correct picks. Tess and I always try to see as many of the nominees as possible, in the false hope of narrowing the odds, but that's not looking so good this year. I'm going to rule out the three I've already seen for the following reasons: the Coen brothers scored big last year, Heath Ledger died a year ago instead of a month ago, and George Bush is already yesterday's news.

That leaves 19 others. What do you think? Check out the Variety list and pick a couple of likely winners.

A brief list of some lists of 2008

2009-01-05T09:09:00.010-06:00

I love this time of year: When everybody comes out with their lists of the best and worst things of all time, or at least 2008. Or at least in very recent memory. Without preamble, here's my list of the best lists out there. Well, perhaps not the best. But they are definitely lists:

1. The 10 Best American Movies by Stanley Fish. Surprising for its inclusion of Groundhog Day, which certainly belongs on some list. The rest of them ... meh. I don't want to see Double Indemnity on any more best-movie lists. I watched it in 2008 and it seems like a parody of itself. Ditto with Shane. That Joey kid was annoying in 1953, and he hasn't gotten less so.

2. The Best of 2008 by Malu Fernandez of the Manila Standard, which, in the manner of most lists, weighs in with the most recent moment the writer can remember: the profane rant by Kathy Griffin against a heckler in Times Square -- a pivotal moment in celebrity history that shall surely outlive us all. Malu also considers Kath & Kim the best TV show of the year, so you may want to take the rest of his list with grain or two of salt.

3. Time Magazine's list of everything that occurred in 2008. Actually, they missed that time I was rear-ended by a cell-phone using driver in April, but everything else is there, collated in convenient list form. Sometimes the categories seem a bit narrow as a result: Couldn't Top 10 Campaign Gaffes, Top 10 Campaign Video Moments and Top 10 Open Mike Moments have been combined into one Big Political Embarrassment category? Note to Malu Fernandez: Check out the top 10 TV series. Kath & Kim is not on there.

4. The Quigley Poll's list of the top money-making movie stars, in which Will Smith comes out on top and Tom Cruise doesn't place. This is news you can use. But whatever the hell happened to Chuck Connors?

5. The Religion Newswriters Association's list of the top 10 celebrity meltdowns. Just kidding, it's really a list of the top 10 religion stories of the year, starting with our friend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and concluding with the thousands killed during the free exercise of religion in Iraq. Conclusion: It's been quite a year for religion. At least there were no hajj stampedes.

6. Yahoo's list of the Top 10 searches. Leaving aside the question of who uses Yahoo to search for anything these days, it will come as no surprise that the number-one search term is actually two words, and those words are Britney Spears. Moving down the categories until we come to Influential Women, we find that the most influential woman of the year is ... Angelina Jolie. Followed by Sarah Palin. I want you all to think about that for a moment.

And that's enough of that. Who ends a list at six? I do. But I'm not getting paid for this and I have other irons in the fire, so to speak. See you tomorrow.

Generation Brayden, Jayden and Caden

2009-01-04T16:51:00.010-06:00

I was born during the Truman administration, a time when all parents named their children Michael or Dave or Linda or Cathy and they didn't need a stupid book or Web site to do it. I took this for granted as a kid, but I've come to appreciate it later in life. Here in Wichita, every male I meet who's within a few years of my age is also named Dave, and those who aren't are named Randy. Needless to say, within this circle I don't forget names very often.

I have a harder time remembering the names of the kids born to my various nieces and nephews over the last decade or so. In fact, I can't quite bring them all to mind. There is a Telmar, and a Shiloh and a Gabe and, I think, a Tiell. There is also an Aiden, although it may be spelled differently than that. Aiden, at least, will probably run into a few folks with the same name over the course of his life. According to this piece in the Wichita Eagle, Aiden has emerged as one of the most favorite baby names in Kansas. It's right up there with the other top boys' names, Brayden, Jayden and Caden. For some reason, variations like Fraiden, Gayden, Maiden and Bin Laden aren't on the list.

For girls, we have Addison and Madison, Kaylee and Hailey. Also the occasional Emma and Olivia, but it seems most new parents in Kansas favor names aimed toward a lucrative career in cheerleading.

The curmudgeonly thing to do would be to complain about this trend of christening kids with random collections of syllables, or with names that rhyme with random collections of syllables. But I'm not going to do that. Parents have a right to name their kids whatever they want, without regard to how it will elicit snickers somewhere down the line. Parents have the right to discard the venerable names of the saints, the ones used by IT guys and carpenters and math teachers and truck drivers the world over. Dave's been a good enough name for me, but far be it from me to foist it on Jayden and Caden, or little Addison -- who's perfectly happy to be named after a disease.

Thing is, it's a competitive world out there. The best way to make your kid stand out is to give him a name no one's sure how to spell. Every time he corrects somebody he's going to get noticed. Maybe that'll take off some of the pressure to actually perform.

No, my only concern is the beleaguered souvenir sellers, the mom and pop shops unable to unload their huge inventory of coffee mugs and key chains and miniature license plates pre-stamped with names that used to be common. Once in awhile a Pete or Denise or Hank or Betty will wander in, but those people are dying like flies. I suppose it's too late for the souvenir industry to ask for a bailout. But they should anyway.

Seen "Ghost Town"? Why the hell not?

2009-01-03T10:34:00.005-06:00

Turning now to the cinema, here's a plug for Ghost Town, the finest comedy of 2008. Too bad nobody bothered to see it during its brief run in theaters.

The wife and I watched it last night, courtesy of Netflix and my great big 52-inch television. Ricky Gervais is not precisely the same character he played in the original The Office and Extras, but his role as a dentist named Bertram Pincus isn't quite a departure, either: a veneer of British civility stretched way too thin over a fundamentally misanthropic personality.

After a colonoscopy complication leaves him clinically dead for seven minutes, Dr. Pincus finds himself beset by a variety of spirits who want him to help complete their unfinished business in the physical world. Complications ensue. It's Sixth Sense with a sense of humor -- and surprisingly, a bit of genuine poignance at the end.

Ghost Town was hawked heavily in trailers and TV spots before its release; usually this means you see the funniest parts so often that the movie itself feels like a rerun. Here, the ads don't do the film justice. The biggest laughs come not from the sight gags but the deft dialogue. SNL's Kristin Wiig has a slight role as a clueless doctor, but she delivers some of the film's biggest laughs.

Four thumbs up here. Dave Bob says rent it now.

Keep the stock. I'll take the Subaru

2009-01-02T09:36:00.010-06:00

I drive an 8-year-old Subaru with average miles and a couple of dents. As of today, it's worth about 14,000 shares of Lee Enterprises. When I left the company in 1997, the same sort of vehicle would have been worth about 120 shares. Maybe Lee should have been selling used cars instead of newspapers.

I worked for a Lee newspaper -- The Missoulian -- for 14 years. The highlight was the annual Christmas party, distinguished by a lavish buffet and easily counterfeitable drink tickets. As with all Lee papers, there was a stock-purchase plan. You bought stock through a payroll deduction at 15 percent less than the current value. Most of us then turned around and sold our paltry 15 shares and squandered the cash on a vacation or a VCR. The stock was always going up, but it always felt like we'd gotten away with something.

Turns out, we didn't. Most of us were also putting as much as we could into the company's 401(k) plan. We all know how that turned out. The vacations and the VCRs are now but a memory, and so is the dream of a comfortable retirement.

The New York Stock Exchange is warning Lee that it may be delisted. Not hard to see why: It's a penny stock now and nothing on the horizon suggests any reason for optimism --except maybe some wild pump-and-dump scheme, but even Nigerian e-mail fraudsters have more credibility at this point. Somebody tells you he's got a sure-fire way for newspapers to turn things around, it's probably wise not to disclose any personal information.

I get misty. I loved those Missoulian Christmas parties. But this is the last time I bemoan the fate of newspapers. They all spent the better part of a decade paring the product, maintaining big profits, and trying to figure out how to cash in on the Internet. Hey, two out of three ain't bad. Now it's time to move on. Somebody offers me 14,000 shares of Lee for my Subaru, the answer's no.

A modest resolution

2009-01-01T11:59:00.005-06:00

This year I resolve to post something to this blog every day. If the past is any guide, the resolution will expire sometime after lunch on Jan. 27 -- about the same time the treadmills start emptying out at the Y. But until then, fasten your seatbelts: You thought my posts were windy and narcissistic before, wait until I start doing them like clockwork.

So far, 2009 has been a good year. I got back from Montana to find a contract from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the mail. They bought my story "Dead Black Cadillac," which I sent off six months ago. It takes forever for them to accept a story, and another forever for them to actually print it, but I love Ellery Queen. They buy almost everything I submit -- as long as I send them only one or two stories a year. Unfortunately, the pay scale hasn't changed much since the days of Dashiell Hammett. Let's just say I'm not planning on a new Lexus anytime soon. And I'm not sure about the readership, but I'm guessing it's gone the way of all print media: right down the toilet. Still, if there's a better market for short crime fiction, I'm not aware of it.

Speaking of crime fiction, I'm still working on that novel I mentioned on this blog about, oh, a year and a half ago. It's been tougher than I thought. Turns out any dummy can write a good beginning, and a passable middle, but a decent ending is what separates the true writer from the dilettante. I stand around at parties and tell people I'm a writer, but until I get this damn book done and sold I'm just a poseur. It's getting a little embarrassing. Kind of wish now I'd kept my mouth shut. But when people are bracing you about your work, it's such a buzzkill to mention you're unemployed.

So: a writer I remain. And now I'd best get to it.

Borrowing a bit of good cheer

2008-12-31T09:34:00.011-06:00

The New York Times runs a blog called Proof, wherein various contributors hold forth on the meaning of booze in their lives. As you might guess, a fair number of them are alcoholics or the children of alcoholics. Their posts smolder with the pain of a drunken past and austere pride at having taken a better path. I salute them. That can't be easy. In fact, I propose a toast ...

I started drinking at 16. Vodka and 7-Up in a paper cup. It tasted like kerosene; in retrospect, maybe it needed a bit more 7-Up. But it made an impression, the magical way acquaintances became friends, mundane thoughts became profound, sophomoric jests became uproarious. I didn't get sick, didn't black out, didn't even have a hangover the next morning. I was a shy person who'd stumbled on to a reliable way of becoming less shy. Imagine if you had a bad case of acne and you could apply something that would make the zits vanish, if only for an evening. That was how I felt.

I've been drinking ever since -- socially, as they say -- even though I learned early on that booze has a tendency to take more than it gives. Through the rest of a misspent youth, it smoothed out some embarrassments and created a few new ones. As I became an adult -- somewhere around the age of 27 -- I realized that drinking at a party was like taking out a loan: you always had to pay it back, with interest. Sometimes being the life of the party was worth it; sometimes not. But the loan analogy came to moderate my consumption. I don't like waking up in the morning with Jose Cuervo hammering at the door, demanding payment.

New Year's Eve is the high holy day of drinking, but I've passed as many stone sober as I have under the influence. Blame my newspaper career -- it always meant working nights and certain holidays. Where New Year's was concerned, I didn't much care. If I got home early enough, I'd go outside at midnight and listen to the sporadic car horns and fireworks as another year rolled by. Being sober and slightly melancholy at such a time isn't a bad thing. And the moral superiority you get from watching drunken revelers on the street below is something everyone should experience.

Tonight, well, we've been invited to a great party. We'll go. Presumably drinks will be served. I'll partake. Any luck, I'll make a joke or two and people might laugh. I might imagine myself as a lot more witty and attractive than I am. Such are the modest gifts of the bottle. Thanks, Mr. Cuervo. The check's already in the mail.

If you have an outfit ...

2008-12-15T11:00:00.005-06:00

We flew back from Vegas on the Galoot Express, an Allegiant Air flight packed with guys in cowboy hats coming home from the National Finals Rodeo. All were identically arrayed in tight Wranglers and oversized snap-button shirts and belt buckles the size of turkey platters, and all swaggered onto the plane braying about their drunken exploits in affected drawls taken from movies and crappy country music. They all wore cell phones, tilted forward for a faster draw. This is the vanishing breed of rugged individualist that made this country great.

Even after four days of galumphing around Vegas in painful cowboy boots, they were an ebullient, self-satisfied bunch. They had accomplished much in a short time: guzzling gallons of Bud Light and making lewd propositions to dozens of cocktail waitresses and keeping awake countless tourists unlucky enough to have a room on the same floor. As one guy on our flight yelled to his companion: "Life's too short not to have a good time." Boy howdy. Straitlaced Las Vegas, which doesn't see a lot of boorish hedonism, never knew what hit it.

I was reminded of Bike Week in Daytona -- another event built largely on apparel. There it's all Harley Davidson regalia, even down to underwear and earrings, and people wandering around reveling in the conformity of the tribe. At both events, people sport clothing commemorating the event while it's still going on. That's just in case you don't get it.

There are no real bikers, of course, just as there are no real cowboys. You need a real-world job to pay for all the merchandise and travel to these annual bacchanals. That means a real-world life in the long months between party time, selling auto parts or insurance or shuffling papers or any of the other prosaic pastimes that can't be expressed in the clothes you wear. I don't blame anybody for donning a different persona once in awhile. I do wish they'd give it a rest on the packed flight home.

Justice delayed: O.J. on ice

2008-12-05T16:34:00.009-06:00

So O.J.'s going to jail and nobody much cares. It's about time. We've come a long way since 1995.

I remember the first O.J. trial. Every white person in the room was stunned, not so much by the verdict as by the ensuing images of black people celebrating the acquittal. I was struck then by how clueless I'd been about race: A black man skates on a double-murder rap and people are dancing in the streets like he's just won the Super Bowl. I was thinking at the time: OK, I get it now.

It looks like O.J. will be on ice for about half as long as long as he's eluded responsibility for the two killings he so obviously performed. That's long enough to write another book. But maybe he won't want to. His last one, If I Did It, might have had something do with his last diehard defenders finally folding their tents. Before that, if you squinted just so and discarded all the evidence, it was possible to believe he'd been the victim of a racist conspiracy. But there he was confessing for cash, and any pretense of victimhood went right out the window.

O.J. was a lucky man, until just recently. He was a brutal, sloppy killer who got off by somehow becoming the poster child for every racial injustice committed in this country since the Civil War. But there's a saying: Luck never gives; it only lends. The day he rolled into a Vegas hotel room with a coterie of thugs, the bill came due.

I won't miss O.J. Simpson. I won't miss Fred Goldman, whose hair and outrage seemed more synthetic with each passing year. I sure won't miss the knee-jerk racial sensitivities of the '90s, which made a sociopathic millionaire a cause celebre.

Tis the season to suck it up

2008-12-04T12:50:00.007-06:00

After a certain age, Christmas becomes a season of regret: The loss of loved ones over the years, the loss of friends, the loss of youth. The loss of all those Mattel toys that would now fetch a fortune on eBay. The sad truth is that the best Christmas in middle age cannot match the least one of childhood. But the important thing is to pretend otherwise.

I go back and forth on this, but today I figure the holiday is bigger than I am. It's not really my right to succumb to cynicism and say to hell with the lights and the tree and the travel and the shopping. I figure Christmas has lasted this long because guys like me see a little bit of ourselves in Ebenezer Scrooge, and each year take small steps to minimize the resemblance.

So this weekend I'll again be up on the ladder, cursing lights that in 12 months have become a Gordian knot. I'll be setting out luminaria, as is the custom in my neighborhood, and cursing the candles that won't stay lit --also a custom. I'll wander dazedly through a discount store, trying to intuit the tastes and sizes and color preferences of those I count close. I'll resist the urge to curse the crowds.

Yes, it's a tremendous hassle and you wonder if it's worth it. An Old Navy sweater can't perfectly express what someone means to you, but it's better than a gift card, and a whole lot better than nothing. My holiday lighting may tend toward the austere, but when families drive by at night, the house won't be dark. I am prone to introspection, but I guarantee I won't be passing up any party invitations.

You lose a lot over the decades. You don't want to lose your traditions. December's a dark month, a cold season. Christmas is the crackling fire, and only a foolish man would foreswear the wood to keep it going.

If you don't Tweet, you ain't sheet

2008-12-03T09:14:00.007-06:00

Perhaps signaling the imminent demise of Twitter, the Wall Street Journal has posted a guide for using it. The guide runs 1,200 words and does a good job of explaining why this is something you may not want to bother with. Whenever I see the phrase "social-networking tool," my eyes glaze over.

Not that I mind Twitter. I've been on it for a couple of months. I now follow 13 people. I am being followed by 33, which is weird because my "updates" tend to be non sequiturs, and infrequent enough to render my ranking just short of nonexistent. I never look at my Twitter ranking, of course. I'm much too cool for that.

My own guide for using Twitter is this: Don't follow anyone you haven't had dinner with. But know that following friends will make you immediately and exquisitely aware of every party to which you've not been invited. Finally, while it's easy to follow someone, it's not so simple to quit. Thanks to a dopey service called Qwitter, anyone you discard can be instantly notified of the fact. Thanks, Twitter! Building strong relationships, and ruining them too!

I'd add a few guidelines for what makes a good Twitter post, but unfortunately I have no idea. Mine run to to unfocused musings that are not very clever and vanish into the Tweetosphere like little farts in the wind. I see a lot of updates about about dining out, or funny things the kids say, or traveling, or plans for the holidays. Over Thanksgiving, one guy appeared to be Tweeting right at the dinner table, mocking his dotty relatives while shoveling in the mashed potatoes. It's only 140 characters; what you lose in sober reflection you gain in spontaneity.

Want to follow me? I didn't think so. But daaronk is the name and Tweeting's my game. I don't use Qwitter, either. So we'll both be spared the pain.

Be sure to wear some flour in your hair

2008-12-01T11:59:00.005-06:00

You've heard of live blogging; this is dead blogging, where I scrawl my ruminations longhand and transpose them into my computer later with only minor editing. I left the laptop at home on our trip to San Francisco, feeling vaguely virtuous about it, wondering if maybe the organic process of putting pen to paper might somehow awaken some inner muse. So far, mostly it's awakened a dull pain in my writing hand and forearm -- a reminder of years of disuse.

The modern ease of putting words on a screen and rearranging them at will -- does that make you a better communicator, or a lazier one? You still hear of writers who prefer longhand, who claim it makes one more careful with composition, the way shooting film requires more thought than shooting digital. I don't know. It's hard to imagine writing a full novel this way. But then, I haven't quite written one the new way, either.

I'm sitting close to a gas fireplace which is operated by remote control. This beautiful, cavernous rental house is a bit chilly now that the rain has arrived. It's a lovely home but it feels a bit too spacious, designed for a larger life than the now-divorced owners could quite fill. The furniture has been selected and arranged more for appearance than comfort. Our house in Wichita seems small and shopworn by comparison, but it is probably more livable. Whatever that means.

One of the good things about living in Wichita is that when you travel out of state, you can look around at your new surroundings and invoke the timeless phrase: "We're not in Kansas anymore." Ha ha. I've used it a hundred times, but that doesn't preclude me from using it again.

You get used to Kansas. And it's only when you travel elsewhere that you realize what you've gotten used to. I grew up in Montana and used to roll my eyes at tourists who would prattle on about scenic grandeur. I see what they mean now. The first thing that struck me driving north on Highway 101 from SFO was the sight of hills with houses on them. Real hills, bulking up against the urban lights -- not the barely perceptible changes in elevation that are christened hills in Kansas. Hills everywhere, and soaring bridges in the distance, and water that glows when the sun goes down.

It's a beautiful place, but I don't think I'd live here even if I could afford it. Too much traffic, too many windows looking down on you from those scenic heights. Here you spend too much time on the freeway, an anonymous obstruction to the Mercedes and Jags and BMWs flying by on either side. In Wichita we had to adjust to the phenomenon of always arriving early for our engagements; in San Francisco it was back to always arriving late, drifting along for hours in a sluggish river of taillights. You'd think the gorgeous views might impart some serenity, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe it's just me.

It's the Somali pirate's life for me

2008-11-21T09:46:00.004-06:00

Often overlooked in the hand-wringing over the slumping global economy is continuing growth and upbeat outlook in the piracy sector. Just last year, Kenya's foreign minister reports, a band of hearty swashbucklers, led by the mischievous Captain Farrah Adid Sparrow, extracted at least $150 million in ransoms from hapless ship owners. As they say in Mogadishu, that's a lot of shillings.

And it'll only get better. Governments and shipping companies whine about it, but $150 million is still chicken feed in the global marketplace. International conglomerates have a lot of money, but not many destroyers. The last time piracy flourished like this, it took about 30 years before the U.S. government got it sorted out. If Farrah Adid Sparrow's men don't start grabbing Carnival cruise ships, they've got a good future ahead of them.

This is African aid you can believe in. No doubt most of the pirate's profits have been earmarked for infrastructure, AIDS prevention and higher education, but if these roguish buccaneers are smart, they'll also take a hard look at the theme-park and movie angle. Fat oil tankers are one thing, but nothing beats a multi-picture deal with Disney.

And now, more about me

2008-11-17T08:33:00.017-06:00

My wife Tess has asked me to play along in a game of blog tag. Because I'm a fun, agreeable guy, I'll comply. Basically, the rules are these:

Write 6 random things about yourself.
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Tag 6-ish people at the end of your post.
Let each person know he/she has been tagged.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, here are six things about me:

1) I am not, technically, a high school graduate. Two weeks before graduation, I was arrested at the senior kegger. Normally this kind of thing was punished by probation or community service, but the kegger was held on some forest land owned by the mayor, who was also president of the school board. The primary bonfire at the kegger somehow spread out of control. Owing to some previous infractions, a close friend and myself spent a night in jail and were denied our diplomas. We later viewed the ceremony from outside the gym doors without much regret. I ended up acing the test for the prestigious GED certificate the following fall. But this will be our little secret. (Not pictured: Yours truly.)

2) I'm a regular Cossack in the saddle. Or used to be. I grew up on a ranch at a time when you handled cattle with horses rather than ATVs. I became good at it, and could actually throw a passable lariat. My proudest moment as a teenager was hearing an uncle remark, after watching me and my stepbrother race our horses downhill through heavy timber, that he'd never seen a kid more easy in the saddle. It helped that I had a great horse, whose name was Breeze. (That's Breeze on the right.)

3) I have a pilot's license. It's lapsed now, but I used to rent airplanes and fly them around Montana just to look around. My best memory of flying is circling above a rural school in the Flathead Valley, watching the kids out for recess look up and wave. I attempted to waggle the wings in reply, and almost achieved a power stall in the process. Note to self: When waggling wings, it's best to be in level flight. (I learned in a Cessna 152 a lot like this one.)

4) My former wife and I once rode the train from El Paso to Mexico City, just on a lark. It was not as much fun as we'd hoped. It was summer and there was no air conditioning. Just before arriving, the porter appeared in our compartment and proceeded to lift up the floor, from which he removed several bottles of bootleg liquor. A few minutes later, a couple of surly federales moved through the train, apparently looking for . . . several bottles of bootleg liquor. When they got to our compartment, we were keenly aware that the floor panel had been improperly replaced. We were thinking hard about that movie Midnight Express, but they only frowned and moved on. We ended up flying home. (That's us at Teotihuacan.)

5) I'm a crappy guitarist. I've owned guitars of one sort or another since I was 16, but I've sometimes gone years without playing and am no better at it now than I was then. Big mystery. I keep meaning to teach myself new things, but always end up strumming a tortured version of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." Or "House of the Rising Sun," but I think it's now illegal to play my version within earshot of any sentient adult. If not, it should be. The only tune I can really pick is the Ventures' "Walk Don't Run." (That's the guitar my brother built for me)

6) At last count, I own six digital cameras -- seven, if you count the one I gave Tess for her birthday. None of them take the kind of pictures you see in National Geographic. Maybe I should get a new one. The cynical might say I'm just not a very good photographer, but the cynical would be wrong. That's my story, anyway. (All my DSLR gear is Olympus. Don't ask.)

Since I don't know that many people with blogs, particularly people who would be interested in this sort of thing, I'll include some who probably have already participated. And I can only think of five. Sorry.

David
Denise
Lori
Peter
Maxine

As seen on TV: three for $22

2008-11-07T08:06:00.009-06:00

So it has come to this for print journalism: selling souvenirs.

Most of the time, the Wichita Eagle has trouble giving away its print product. Drive down any residential street late in the afternoon and you'll see plastic-wrapped Eagles still lying in the driveways where the carrier tossed them that morning. Then you get an historic event like the one we've just witnessed. Then people realize they don't have a hard copy of what they've just seen unfold via the magic wall and the fake holograms of CNN. On that one day, they're kind of glad they subscribe.

As noted in the New York Times, most newpapers saw a huge spike in demand for their post-election issues. Demand remains robust: the Eagle is charging $10 for a paper that normally goes for 50 cents -- or three for $22. Other papers are peddling T-shirts with the front page on it, and framed copies to hang on your wall. They'd probably sell you some earrings, too, if the headline could remain legible. Some idiots on Craigslist are shelling out $200 for a single copy of the New York Times, demonstrating that while the Times may be hurting, the pain is not yet universal.

There's something undignified about this, but face it: For print journalism, dignity has become a luxury. When an industry is drowning, you can't blame it for latching on to the first thing that floats. It's a shame that historic events don't come along very often -- guess that's what makes them historic. For some reason, people don't want to commemorate stories about budget shortfalls and downtown development. And they damned sure don't want the T-shirt. Too bad. Something like that could keep the industry alive.

How about this: instead of waiting for earth-shaking news to stimulate souvenir sales, why not go hyper-local? Maybe Karl Peterjohn and his immediate family would like coffee cups emblazoned with the story of his triumph in the county commissioner race. Maybe the guy whose house was shot up in southeast Wichita would like a decorative plate to remember it by. Maybe the folks losing their jobs at Hawker Beechcraft would treasure the moment more if it were on a T-shirt.

Or maybe not. Just thinking out loud here. It's just that newspapers need something to sell. As I can attest, the news itself is not quite getting it done.