Thoughts While Shaving

George Carlin

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

When George Carlin died recently, our world lost not just a comedian, but a man of considerable intelligence who educated his audiences nearly as much as he entertained them. I remember the first time I heard Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weather man, when Carlin, fresh shaven and wearing a suit, appeared on a national television variety program, popular in that era.

The Vietnam War and the sharp shift in the zeitgeist carried him off in another direction - bearded and wearing nothing but black, and he remained outside the frame making his shrewd observations about himself and us for over five decades. His monologue on the seven words which could not be said on television got him into considerable hot water, but it turned out to be an important contribution to our appreciation of the essence of free speech.

His specials on HBO were extremely funny, even as he ripped at our sensibilities with the sharpness of his observations. I cringed sometimes, but I laughed a lot, and underneath his bravado and anger, one could sense a man of considerable sensitivity and even kindness.

In homage to his long and brilliant career, I have decided to follow in his footsteps and refer hereafter to George W. Bush as "Governor Bush," the last position to which the Current Occupant was legally elected.

Feel free (literally and figuratively) to join me.

A Bad Attack of Gas

2008-06-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

We were filling up our diesel rental car in a small town in Scotland a couple of weeks ago. The price was £1.31 per liter....say about $2.60 a quart over here. When I paid the bill and started up the car, She Who Would Command inquired whether I had filled the car up.

"No," I said, "we've got about three quarters of a tank," and before the next question hit my lap I added, "when the tab hit 60 pounds [$120+ dollars), I decided that was enough and shut that puppy down."

As it stands, for all our moaning about the price of automobile fuel, we're still paying about forty per cent of what our friends in Great Britain are. The conclusion is inevitable...we just need to shut our pie holes about fuel costs (to quote the unbeloved Donald Rumsfeld, "It is what it is") and concentrate on driving both less and more efficiently.

Our UPS driver said that his wife drives by five WalMarts on her way home and, shortly after her return, gets in the car and goes back to one of them. "That's gonna change," he concluded.

I read somewhere that SUVs (the aircraft carriers of the highway) and large pick-up trucks are getting more difficult to trade in...sounds like the same sort of negative equity problem with which our housing market has been wrestling of late.

But most of the vehicles whipping by me on the freeway are - guess what - SUVs and pick-up trucks. Conclusion: Intelligence may be normally distributed in the population, but - statisticians to the contrary, stupidity may not.

OK, so I've been driving a hybrid for the last three and a half-years. DO YOU THINK I LIKE PAYING FORTY BUCKS EVERY TIME I FILL IT UP?

Well, under the current circumsances, yes I do......

Spring Approacheth, Part II

2008-04-14T06:26:00.001-07:00

After the last snow a week ago, most of us went from ordinarily cranky to really bitchy. On the assumption, that the white stuff would melt quickly, I didn't even think about starting up the snow blower, and as last week wore on, the snow did disappear, and our hopes for Spring renewed.

However, the cold and wind continued, so we were left to look out the window for Spring. On our small lake, the geese walked on the ice and looked uncomfortable as they searched for open water. Ditto for the ducks. Juncos appeared in the junipers, and when we stuck our noses out the door, we could hear cardinals, robins, gulls, and the occasional red-wing blackbird.

Sunday began brightly without a cloud in the sky....not much traffic on the way to church, but on the way home after a stop for lunch, the roads were chock-a-block with traffic - no doubt others searching actively for Spring. The sky continued to be cloudless, and so we stopped to pick up Islay The Scotty at the house and headed for a ramble on country roads to the north.

It was the clarity of the light that made hope real. Rounded clumps of snow-ice lay at the side of many roads - they would be gone by this morning, and the snow on the north sides of homes and trees and such looked very "thin."

We returned home not having seen the thin fingers of Spring creeping across the landscape, but in the next three days, oh, what possibilities will fill our hearts.

Spring Approacheth

2008-03-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

The hold of winter is beginning to release, with one, maybe two snowy blasts yet to come. We know that these final attempts of Father Winter to hold us in thrall will be short-lived, because all around us the spidery fingers of Spring are increasingly visible.

In late February it was the bird songs which suddenly proliferated, then the angle of the sun began to change, and with the arrival of so-called "daylight savings" morning began later but the afternoons began to linger almost to dinner time - another hopeful sign.

We are still trying to explain to ourselves why this winter has been so trying. Snow falls were not too burdensome, although ice underneath remained a constant threat (something to do with my, I expect). We had some very cold spells which, when combined with wind, made being outdoors a legitimate threat, and that combined with gray day after gray day, was dispiriting.

Yet...and yet, the signs of Spring began to multiply: Canada geese honking away low in the afternoon sky, the snow receding between the house and the lake, and the day before yesterday, three snowy egrets flying right down the shore to the part of the lake where they nest.

There is an aerator on the other side of the lake which makes it possible for aquatic birds to remain optimistic no matter what else might be going on around them, but it is the egrets which lifted our hearts and minds...until the next palpable symbol of Spring is knitted into our seasonal pattern.

Paul Scofield

2008-03-20T06:14:00.000-07:00

The news of the death of the English actor Paul Scofield came at breakfast. He was one of the"next" generation of great actors which arrived immediately after Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Emlyn Williams, and Alec Guinness among others.

His performance in the film "A Man For All Seasons," was riveting, but I have a clearer memory of a "Volpone,"directed by Peter Hall at the Royal National Theatre in 1972, with Scofield in the title role, Ben Kingsley as Mosca, and John Gielgud as Sir Politic.

Gielgud "dried" during the performance, and either the prompt thrown or received was delayed - we caught our collective breath, then things were righted, and off we went.

Scofield's performance might have overwhelmed everything on stage, but it did not. The greatness of his performance was that it was not grandiose, scenery chewing, showy - you get the drift. But you could not take your eyes off him (a characteristic which Ian McKellen carries on).

After the play, my American friend and I sat for some moments in silence, trying to process all that we had seen that evening. Eventually I turned to her and said, "This is one of those nights when one understands the link between theatre and religion, as it was in ancient times." She nodded, and we left in that companionable silence which allowed what we had seen to settle in memory.

Where it remains to this day. Those who saw him on the screen or in a theatre will continue to find him very hard to forget, and that is a sufficient legacy.

Caucuses in Minnesota

2008-02-06T12:20:00.000-08:00

We don't have a primary in Minnesota in presidential years; we have caucuses - we gather in schools and such to vote, to argue various proposals, to select delegates to party conventions, and so on.

Until last night, I had never been to one of these things, having heard tales about arguments going on until all hours of the night. This year, I learned that I could cast a vote for President and leave the building and the wrangling to others. Sounded good to me.

After dinner I set off for one of our high schools and found the parking lot filling up at a rapid rate. I found the right room, registered, and voted. Because I was tired, I decided to let democracy go forward without me and headed for the car and home.

When I got to the main road, I was startled, no, make that amazed, to see that the line of cars waiting to turn down the road to the school I had just left was about a mile long. Really!

I tuned in to the local public radio news station, and the hosts were marveling at the fact that in another Twin Cities suburb, people were tired of waiting in line, so they were abandoning their cars in the road and walking to the caucus site.

Turns out, four times as many of us went to the caucuses than have in the past. No matter what your political perspective, it's heartening to know that at times, we can make a difference. With the prologue approaching its end, we need to maintain vigilant attention to the conventions and campaign to come.

So, with apologies to Neal Postman, we need to clean and oil our crap detectors - they're going to get a lot of use between now and November.

Finding The Center

2007-12-17T12:36:00.001-08:00

Women seem to have a unique capacity to find the middle of an aisle, a doorway, the space in front of an escalator, while men seem to focus on finding the path from point a to point b.

I first noticed this years ago in supermarkets. A cart is left in the aisle so that the, dare we call her, pusher can browse. In smaller buildings with narrow aisles, I have found that whether one wishes to pass on the left or right, it is not possible to do so. In larger markets with wider aisles, the pusher adopts the "strolling browse" technique: Standing to one side of the cart, the pusher moves to the side to contemplate the cans, boxes, or bags. This effectively blocks more than half of the aisle, and passing is impossible.

More recently, I have observed at parties that females tend to stand in the middle of a doorway, and as more acquaintances arrive, the doorway is now not much more than a human door.

Similarly, at the bottom of escalators, small groups of females will stand two strides in front of the escalators departure point while they discuss which part of the store they will assault next.

As I have thought about it, I have come to believe that men are logistical - always creating a plan to get from point to point as efficiently as possible. This may account for the lousy driving habits we males do tend to have.

Women, on the other hand, seem to place the interpersonal element higher on the scale of essential values. So rather than think about blocking the path to the bar, they focus on seeing Martha who hasn't been out much lately, greeting Phyllis who's been in New York seeing the grandkids, and hugging Jennifer who just tossed her spouse over the wall.

Now you may think I am just another male chauvinist, so let me leave you with this parting thought. Just watch the average woman when it comes time to pay for something - put the purse down on the counter, open the purse, open the smaller purse, pull out the check book, open it to the register page, ask what the date is, and what's the amount again, fill in the info, write the damn check, close the checkbook, put it in the small purse, put the small purse in the large purse, close the purse, and put it back on the shoulder.

Geez, George Balanchine couldn't choreograph a ballet any better than that performance. Unless he was standing behind our examplar in line.

I rest my case. Brickbats are available at any convenience store.

Depression & Recession

2007-11-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times about the enormous gap between citizens' assessment of the quality of their own life and that of the state of the country. Never has the gap been so large, and I'm not surprised.

Most of the people I know are bummed out, depressed, frustrated, angry because the state of the country seems bleak and gray, and it's beginning to color our attitudes.

We are a country beset by misadventures, malodorous judgements, deceits and fabrications, despicable treatment of people whom we think to be against us, and beyond all this, our civil rights have never been in such a fragile state.

With fourteen months to go in this administration, I suppose we could look forward to the next one. But the parade of candidates suggests that they are insubstantial stylists, driven by polls and professional advisers and not, so far as I am able to discern, by a singular vision of what the country might achieve, or by a sense of hope, bordering on downright optimism, that he or she can make a significant difference in the lives of the average joes and janes who head off to a job, not knowing precisely when it will be outsourced to India or lost in a merger. This is no time for sissies.

But our President threatens and chides - and that's to us Americans. God knows how others around the world perceive him, but he and and his ilk do love to rattle their swords and stomp their little feet.

Yes, it is true that we shall probably not have to live through a great depression, although I'm less certain about our not living through a third world conflict, and we might have to fall back on what we learned from our parents who survived both of those cataclysmic events:

Live simply, work hard, pay cash, vote in every election, and pray that our government finds a way to work for more of us and not so much against us.

What concerns me is that we may not have the right stuff to manage the future, in our bleak house, divided.

The New York Times, Midget Edition

2007-08-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

On August 6th, 2007, The New York Times, the grey lady, is reducing its page width to twelve inches, the so-called new national standard. It's a dark day for those of us who grew up with newspapers but a who cares day for the young who prefer their news in a gossipy, comedic, excerpted in short grainy videos taking by people of their own ilk.

Hey, with the Internet, what can't you learn?

Plenty, it turns out. Our educational system is leaving lots of young people behind, and the curriculum has become sufficiently pallid that not even great teachers can compensate for it.

Tomorrow will be a sad day for me...the Times takes one more giant step to a tabloid format, and next they will be encouraging us to subscribe to the new electronic version which offers an identical copy of each and every page, as well as all the adverts.

No more complaining about the ink coming off on our fingers as it did up until a few years ago, no more of that exhilirating feeling of spreading your hands wide apart when you snapped the middle crease to make the next page easy to handle. Not much satisfaction in folding it down twice to put under your arm or in your brief case - it's basically folded already.

O Brave New World of the Midget Newspaper! Another great advance we are told, which is, in truth, nothing but another retreat.

I wonder if you can fold the new size into a pair of cranky pants to send to the publisher...

6th August Update:

I pulled today's mini-Times out of the paper box and forgot to control for the usual weight of the paper. Almost threw myself into the road. Anyway, I waited until I'd had a cup of coffee before examining it, and I've still got my cranky pants on.

Everything seems too small, too light, for a publication as important as "the Times." Sounds odd, I know, but that's my first take on it, and given my advancing years, I doubt I'll change my mind on the matter.

What else makes me cranky....oh,yeah, product packaging which requires a hacksaw to open, but then we all agree on that, don't we?

Beating The Harry Potter Deadline

2007-07-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

Is there no appreciation of the significance of surprise these days? The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani published her review two days early, and while her review only revealed the shape of the conclusion and not the details, she managed to take some of the fun out of our finding out the "resolution" of the story when we were supposed to - in two days' time.

Apparently others have followed suit, and probably their thinking is that because this is the last in the series, to hell with whatever agreements might have been signed with the publisher and its distributors.

Yes, it's probably true that book purchasers will open their copies to the end of the book in order to know what happens to their loved and hated characters, but it seems to me that all this leaked information is simply taking the fun out of the surprises.

Adults just spend too damned much time lousing it up for the kids, kids who have loved speculating about each book as it arrived, kids who discovered the joy of reading.

We just can't leave well enough alone. Poor us!

Ever Think About Applause?

2007-07-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

For some reason, the other day I began to think about the word applause and its physical meaning, and then being it was early in the morning, the phrase "standing ovation" came right into my head.

We in the midwest part of the USA will celebrate any performance, however misguided, lame, or inept with a standing ovation, and it comes, as these things do, in three different forms.

There is the immediate standing ovation; this occurs when the performer appears to be near retirement or worse or is of such world significance that the audience wishes to convey its appreciation that (fill in the blank - examples include Madonna, McCartney, Streisand) deigned to take time from counting his/her wealth in some distant world capital to come visit us and charge us only $400 a seat for a 90 minute set of what are often "golden oldies."

There are two subsets of this model - both have to do with time. Our normal standing ovation is a couple of minutes in order to coax the performer to play what s/he has already scheduled to play as an encore. As the clock approaches 10 pm, the ovation begins to diminish as people's minds turn to such things as a toilet, a drink, escaping the parking ramp, and getting home in time for the sports on tv.

The rarer standing ovation is the one which goes on and on, often involves the throwing of bouquets on the stage, and represents the highest accolade an audience can give a performer or performance.

As ballet dancers have been retiring from major dance companies lately, this kind of ovation has been experienced more frequently in recent weeks. It is honest, heartfelt, determined, generous, loving, and an immeasurable gift.

Then there is the reluctant "Aw, shucks" standing ovation, our equivalent of "Well, you did pretty good, didn't you?" In this model, not everyone stands, and those who do wait until well into the applause before they issue their verdict.

I have never stood often, but I can recollect performances by Hillary Hahn, The Globe Theatre of London, anytime Elisabeth Söderström graced us with her artistry, and the second performance of Hamlet at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis on May 8, 1963, but who's keeping track? Sometimes, in truth, I stand to stretch my legs and plan my escape from the venue.

Applause comes from the Latin meaning to strike upon or to clap, and ovation also comes from the Latin - supposedly, after a victory, a general would burn a sheep, and all would stand to witness.

You may draw your own conclusions about all this. What I know is that too many audiences these days don't have a clue as to what an extraordinary performance is, and by standing all the time, they reinforce the ordinary.

They don't know, but I'll wager the performer does, cf sheep, op.cit.)

A Walk At Dawn

2007-07-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

Islay the Scotty and I were out for our very early morning constitutional, partly because we wake up early and partly because I wanted us to get done before the heat of the day arrived in full blast. She and I have this agreement - I get to ride my geezer trike slowly, and she gets to trot next to it. In addition, she has the right to pause pretty much whenever she wishes, and I have the right to admire the light, the wildlife, and so on whenever I wish.

This very morning we headed out the driveway and down the bikeway next to the lake - about 6:10 am, I guess. A few hundred yards from home I saw a woman walking briskly towards me with that dreaded arm position of the cell phone affixed to the ear.

As she came nearer, I heard the voice chattering away and at quite a volume, I thought. She went on by without a nod, and the voice receded in the distance.

Islay and I achieved our usual goal and turned around to head for home. Not long after starting, I recognized our cell phonatic returning to her starting point, and yes, the hand was clutching the cellphone next to the same ear, and the chatter continued as loudly as before.

En route, Islay and I had paused to observe the egret standing along the shoreline, mother goose and her goslings working their way along the northern shore, and several gatherings of ducks moving around a bit further out. It was blissfully cool with the sun just about to come over the treeline, and one could hear various species of birds chattering away throughout the trip.

I doubt that our walking caller took in much of it, and if she did, it was certainly at a remove from any direct experience of mother nature and her wonders.

There is a time not to multitask, and walking along the shore of the lake on a gorgeous summer morning should be one of those times.

Harumph!

Driving Is Not For Monotaskers

2007-07-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

Every day when Islay and I go for her walk, I note with fascination and a certain amount of real dread all the drivers who pass us by, generally well above the speed limit and nearly every one on a cell phone.

It is probably true that talking on one's cellphone is no worse than having three young children, a chatty passenger, or a balky GPS unit in your vehicle. It is probably also true that most of the conversations on the cellphone in the car are not about world peace, the imminent collapse of a building, or some politician's brilliant comment on what really is wrong with (fill in the blank).

Multitasking in general is a way for you to persuade yourself (and perhaps others) that your frenetic behavior indicates that you are doing something significant or memorable - unless you are a female, in which case you were born to multi-task, you do it well, and to keep the spinning plates in your life on top of their poles, you have no choice but to multi-task, and don't please get me started on the multi-tasking charade which men perform, almost always unpersuasively.

Last year I observed a Dutch mother manage three males, one three, one five, and her husband in early middle age, in the Reykjavik airport. It was a performance of such subtlety and grace and accomplishment that I damn near applauded. There isn't a man on this earth who could have managed to do what she did, and women do this every day and generally without an ovation. Men remember to put their dirty clothes in the hamper and expect the Hallelujah Chorus by way of both notice and gratitude. Sorry for the meandering, so let me get to the point:

When you are pushing several thousand pounds of metal, plastic, and human tissue around above about fifteen miles an hour, you are a damn fool if you are multi-tasking - and quite possible a dead one, if not today then down the road, both lit and fig.

Yes, I've read my mail while I drove, and I've tried to find somebody's phone number or address from some electronic device, and I've been passed by people with a newspaper on their steering wheel, mascara enroute to an eyelash, or at a recently picked up meal.

Recently, I had a problem with one of my eyes - the vision declined rather quickly in one eye, and that led to some recent retinal surgery. Somewhere in that stretch I decided that if I got behind the wheel, I had to be a committed monotasker. I'm still not perfect, but then when a woman driving a large SUV backed into my relatively new car in a parking lot and told me she had three girls in the car, I decided to be understanding.

It did occur to me to talk to her about monotasking, but I thought better of it. She had come into the pet food store to search out her victim, and she promised to call her insurance agent, and I thought there was no point in discouraging her any more than she already was.

The damage, which appeared modest, will cost something over a thousand dollars to repair. Needless to say, I have repeated my monotasking vows to avoid finding myself in the same situation she did.

For us men, some days monotasking is all of which we are capable, barely.

Islay The Scotty

2007-07-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

A while back I adopted a Scotty from the local humane society - she is probably the last in a long line of them in my life and has been the most intriguing one of all, probably because she does everything a little better or faster or higher than all the others I've known. I named her Islay (eye-lah) after my most favorite island in Scotland's Inner Hebrides.

A couple of weeks ago, she became seriously ill with blood showing up at both ends, a bad case of listlessness and no interest in food at all. Off to the vet we tore, and after a lot of expensive tests, she got antibiotics, a potion to put good bacteria back in her gut, and some anti-nausea stuff. Accompanying her home was a supply of canned dog of the most bland variety.

My response to all this? I stayed home from work for three days to keep watch over her. I don't recall ever doing that for any other dog, but just before I took her to the doc, I saw "the look" in her eye, and that changed everything.

You know about "the look" from a partner, companion or spouse...something along the lines of "If I had a blunt instrument, I would...." "The look" from a dog translates to, "I'm in real trouble here, and I hope you're a bright enough person to figure that out."

Islay lay around for two days, and on the third day she became more alert, tasted her bland chicken-rice food, and pricked up her ears. By the fourth day, she was bouncing around and hung at 90% for a few days, and then after about a week, she was back at full speed.

I found some tastier bland dog food, and when she sees it going into her dish, she leaps off the floor again and again in anticipation - she's never done that before, and when I put the dish down, I have to get my hand out of the way before she chomps down on it.

So at last the crisis, probably colitis, slipped away for good, and I feel very lucky. When I hear the nails clicking across the bare floor or Herself tearing into her food with happy crunching sounds, these are reasons enough to keep getting out of bed in the morning.

Yes, I do have others - reasons that is, but not many that bring as much pleasure as those.

The Flag

2007-06-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

Not long after I bought my old farmhouse on the lake, I decided it needed a flagpole, and after hunting around, I found a Swedish one which was eight meters high and, thanks to a hinge at the base, could be easily lowered to the ground for repairs and such.

I grew up with a flagpole in the backyard of my parents' home, and it just didn't seem right not to carry on the tradition. For some reason, I prefer flags from the earliest days of our country, so either the "Betsy Ross" or the "Bennington" flags are at the top of the pole. If there's a party going on, I'll add a custom flag of a rampant scotty underneath the national flag; or if there's a visitor from the UK or Sweden, their flag will be added.

The flagpole and its array of flags have always given me a great deal of pleasure, so you may wonder - even as I do - why, the day before I left home for a long vacation across the Atlantic, I lowered the flag to half-staff where it remains.

It's that damned war.

I considered flying the flag upside down, the sign of distress, but that didn't seem quite right, and half-staff did.

One cannot think about the dead, the greviously wounded - both in mind and body - and not yield to the need to mourn. Each day the numbers increase, and because little has been asked of us, but a great deal of our children and grandchildren who will be saddled with the immense debt of this misadventure.

Beyond the military, journalists, and civilians who have been deprived of their futures, I mourn for our country which seems to have lost much of the essence which made us unique in the world - a weakened democracy, with Russia growling at Europe and China growing by leaps and bounds in very way.

There is no pleasure in my flagpole now, and it is not clear whether there ever will be, but it is a price which pains me each and every day, and I consider that almost a necessity.

Update

2005-09-05T18:28:00.000-07:00