Lance Mannion

Able to leap tall sharks in a single bound

Never cottoned to the catchphrase "Jumped the shark." It's a useful one, a clever bit of shorthand to refer to the moment when a TV show goes bad. Some decision by the writers and the producers made in a desperate attempt to shore up ratings or a result of an egomaniacal star's unfortunate inspiration sends a
show careening into silliness. For me Fraiser jumped the shark when the producers decided that Niles' lunatic obsession with Daphne was really a true love that deserved to be rewarded, as if all along Niles had been Sir Tristram instead of walking the fine line of stalker-dom.

There's a website devoted to this, if you want lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of other examples.

But even though I know the origin of the phrase (Happy Days. Fonzie. Water skis. You don't want to be reminded if you don't know.) I can't use it comfortably because A.) it makes me see sharks and I hate sharks, and B.) it's too abrupt; it implies you've settled down in front of your TV, remote in one hand, bag of chips in the other, and without warning a moment of such incredible stupidity leaps out at you that all of your muscles reflexively tighten in horror and the bag of chips explodes in your suddenly clenched fist.

Plenty of shows have gone bad without there being a specific episode in which they jumped the shark.

I can't put my finger on when it started, but over the course of I think the fourth season Mad About You became less and less fun to watch until it was so bad that I couldn't remember its ever having been good. Some fans would probably say that the show jumped the shark in the episode where Paul and Bruce Willis had to break into the hospital and do a lame parody of Die Hard in order to get Paul in to see Jaime and the new baby. The birth of babies is a bete-noire among the Jumped the Shark crowd, ranking just ahead of marriages. I liked that episode, but I remember thinking, This is the first the show's made me laugh in a long, long time. And that was the last episode I watched.

Other shows I liked a lot but gave up on didn't jump the shark, or even experience a slow slide into awfulness. They ended, but they didn't end. That is, the show finished off a narrative arc that turned out to be the point of the whole show. The story was all told but the producers didn't know it and kept turning out new episodes for a while, episodes that seemed to belong to a different, and lesser show. Miami Vice did that. And it happened to Northern Exposure.

The real tension driving Northern Exposure wasn't whether or not Joel and Maggie would get together. Their will they or won't they back and forth turned out to be a part of the larger question of whether or not Joel would stick around Cecily after he completed his side of the bargain.

One of the things that made NE a great show was that as much as the show's producers loved the town they'd created and loved all its quirky citizens, they saw themselves in Joel's shoes and knew that like him they would be horrified at the prospect of being trapped there for the rest of their lives. Joel's prickliness and his often overt hostility to the town and his refusal to give in and become one of the gang weren't signs of a character that needed to be saved and reformed. They were expressions of his integrity. He didn't belong there. He belonged in New York and he was driven by the fear that he would never get back there.

And then they did a show in which Joel, feeling the need for a vacation, goes on strike, and the town sues him. He expected them to understand how tired he was and sympathize. What he discovered was that they didn't see him as a quirky character like themselves. They saw him as just the doctor. They didn't like him or dislike him. They just needed his services.

When Joel realized that all his supposed friends in Cecily thought of him that way, as not really one of them, as an outsider, he relaxed. The episode didn't end with Joel feeling sad or angry or with there being any sort of reconciliation. It ended with Joel defeated but happy. Because from that moment he knew there was no chance of his staying when it was time for him to go. And as soon as he realized that, the show was over.

Fans of the Sopranos talk of it as being like a good novel. Northern Exposure was a novel. Which is what you'd expect, given that one of its producers, Joshua Brand, had a master's degree in English Lit, and the other, John Falsey, was a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They'd structured the series as a picaresque novel and each episode was a chapter. They accidentally wrote the last chapter before they were ready to close the book. Northern Exposure continued for a few more seasons. They even tried to keep it going after Rob Morrow quit and Joel really left, but it was never near as good. I guess you could say the show Jumped the Shark in that episode, but the phrase implies a moment of fatal silliness, and that's not what happened.

Smallville is a big hit in our house. Not just with the guys. With the blonde and me as well. It's not
great. There are too many Everwood/One Tree Hill/Gilmore Girls explorations of teen angst and sudden flare ups of soap opera sex when the blonde and I lunge to cover the boys' eyes. Last week's episode was as much about Clark and Lana naked as about whether or not Clark had been taken over by the evil computer he thinks is Jor El. And next week Lana kisses another girl. I've already told the guys we aren't watching.

I'll tape it and watch it later, alone, after everyone else has gone to bed.

Despite its shortcomings though, it's fun. Michael Rosenbaum, the actor who plays Lex Luthor, is terrific, as is John Glover as his evil father, Lionel. Tom Welling is almost as perfect casting as the soon to be Superman as Christopher Reeve was. The show has a sense of humor about itself and about the Superman story, which it takes seriously but tweaks playfully from time to time. And it has actually added to the myth, which the Reeve movies didn't---except for Reeves' portrayal of Superman, which defined the role forever, and all the comic books and cartoons that have followed and all the movies in the future will have to live up to what Reeve did. Making Jonathan and Martha Kent fairly young was a great decision. And, although it didn't invent the idea, it has expanded beautifully on the idea that Lex and Clark were once friends.

I'm afraid, though, that Smallville has jumped the shark the way Northern Exposure did.

One of the premises of the show has been that Clark is still a long way from being Superman. He doesn't have all his powers yet. He doesn't know how best to use the powers he does have. His father always refers to his superpowers as "abilities," an allusion to the opening narration of the old TV show---"powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men"---but also a characteristic way of teaching Clark that he is not to be simply power-ful. One of my favorite lines from the first movie was when Glenn Ford as Pa Kent tells a frustrated Clark that though he's not sure why Clark was sent to earth he's sure there's a reason, but he's also sure that reason "wasn't to score touchdowns and hit home runs."
It was Pa Kent's way of saying that someone with Clark's powers and abilities had responsibilities, that he wasn't put on earth to gratify his own ego and vanity or to be cheered and admired just for having those abilities. On the show, Jonathan calls those powers abilities as a way to downplay their potential for being used to control and coerce. He also calls them gifts. This underscores the fact that the show is mainly about one boy's learning how to be a responsible adult. And so in most of the episodes the superheroics are put off as much as possible and Clark has to solve his problems by thinking them through. And very often he makes mistakes in his thinking because he is, after all, a 17 year old kid.

With that as its premise, the show's natural end is when Clark has learned enough that he can become Superman. The last episode's last scene will be when he pulls open his shirt to show the big red and yellow S. The producers have said they see the show finishing. They've promised it'll be over when Clark moves to Metropolis.

Last week, Lois Lane showed up, and with her Metropolis came to Smallville. Except for Erica Durance, the actress playing Lois, being sexier than Margot Kidder (I can't believe I wrote that. It's true though. It was those 70s fashions.), last night's episode came very close to being an extended out-take from the movies.

Next week's episode looks like its plot was taken right out of one of my old comic books.

Except for the lesbian smooch.

Superman was DC after all. Not Marvel.

I'm being followed by a moon shadow

There's some kind of disturbance in the time-space continuum.  Great chunks of my past are erupting into my present.   It's happening because a playful god has decided to remind me of the musical soundtrack of my romantic history in increasingly curious ways.

First, Leonard Cohen turns an age I know he can't possibly really be, because that would mean I'm an age I can't possibly be and a whole generation's passed since his music caused pretty girls to start weeping at parties and throw themselves into my arms for comfort.

And now Cat Stevens shows up on our doorstep and, after a side trip to Bangor, Maine, is told to go back home.

What's next?  Seals and Crofts arrested for robbing banks?

Harry Chapin rising from the dead?

Linda Ronstadt headlining at a casino in Vegas?

Oh, wait.

Anyway.  My head is full of music and song lyrics I would have sworn I'd forgotten bringing backs times I wish I could forget.  It's as if I'm stuck inside a bar where some drunk has plugged the jukebox full of quarters forcing everyone in the joint to listen over and over to the soundtrack to his failed marriage, with the tunes the girl he should have married loved making the most frequent encores.

(Couple years ago I was in a restaurant where the Muzak was all 70s and 80s pop hits.  All of the wait staff was college age and younger.  I asked our waiter if he minded having to listen to his parents' music all night long.  He shrugged and said, good naturedly, that it was pretty much the music he and his friends listened to anyway.  "Classic rock"  dominated the play lists on the radio stations he listened to and the repertoires of the bands that he and his friends played in.  This was when Napster was just reaching its pinnacle and IPods were new.  Maybe now that kids have more alterative ways to find music they can take rock and roll away from their parents.

Have to say though that I like what I've heard of the soundtrack from Garden State, enough to think I might buy the CD.  But you can definitely tell that the Shins grew up listening to same music I did.  Maybe this explains why my friends with teenage children get along so well with them.)

Stevens' music never re-wired my brain the way Cohen's did.   But the first girl I ever loved truly, madly, deeply adored his stuff. 

She used to copy out his lyrics and give them to me to study, which I did, faithfully, because I loved her, truly, madly, deeply.  (Mine was an innocent, unrequited love.  She was an older woman.  A junior, while I was a mere slip of a sophomore.  She thought I was cute and fun to have around, like a puppy.)   As diligent as I was---Launcelot didn't sally forth to do battle for Guenevere's sake with much more devotion to his lady faire---I never worked up much enthusiasm.  My sister owned his albums.  She also owned a lot of John Denver and Elton John and so I tended to lump them all together.  They all might as well have been Bobby Sherman as far as I was concerned.  I was an ignorant lout when it came to music back then.

This girl who loved Cat Stevens was the same girl who was such an emotional train wreck from seeing Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers that she sat behind the wheel of her car in the parking lot afterwards and wept for two hours.  Neither my friend Hank nor I who were with her had our licenses yet, so we were all stuck there until she pulled herself together enough to drive home.  We'd gone to the late show and it was close to three in the morning when she dropped me off at my house.  My father was waiting up for me and he was furious.  No cell phones then and since the theater locked up right after we were out the door we couldn't get to a pay phone so I hadn't called to tell my folks why I'd be late.  He was going out of his mind with worry and, naturally, he expressed his concern by lighting into me with a vengeance.  My dad is not a yeller.  He usually let me know I'd screwed up with a short, quiet, "Oh,geez, Lance," that devastated me as if he'd delivered a rant of Shakespearean length and eloquence.  But that night he delivered for 15 minutes, at the pitch and volume of one of Howard Beal's outbursts in Network, doing inspired variations on the themes of my thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness and self-centeredness.  A normally quiet man, my dad, but he was always articulate and, boy, did he let go with some zingers.

Unfortunately for him, and I'm sure unfortunately for the improvement of my character, he got carried away with his own verbal dexterity.  At a crucial point in his sermon he said, "The man came on the television and said, 'It's eleven o'clock.  Do you know where your children are?'  And I didn't!"

Note to parents:  Never reach for a punchline in the middle of giving a scolding.

My brother, who had sneaked down to hear me get the verbal tanning I deserved and was hiding on the stairs, broke up.  So of course I broke up.  And my dad would have broken up but he had great self control.  He said, quietly, "We'll talk about this in the morning," and hurried up to bed, where he told my mother what had happened.

She broke up.

I told that story with Wild World playing in my head.

I haven't been able to find a news story to explain to me exactly what happend with the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens who is now Yusaf Islam.  (Win yourself a drink the next time you're at a bar.  Islam was born Steven Demetre Georgiou.)  So I don't know if it's ridiculous that he was sent packing, as Ken Layne thinks, or a kind of ironic just dessert, as Juan Cole suggests (scroll down), or plain stupid and scary, as Matt Yglesias implies.

The one question I had right off---If he's on a list of people not to let into the country, how come he was allowed on the plane to begin with?---doesn't seem to have a good answer.   Something to do with whether or not you spell it Yusef or Youssouf?  That doesn't cut it.  Islam isn't an American citizen.  Didn't he have to get a visa to come here?  If he did, then he went to the American embassy in London and asked somebody who's job it is to know who's allowed to come here and who isn't.

Which means that either the State Department needs to update its list or the list on the clipboard of some low level customs agent standing at the arrival gate is wrong.  And here is where it gets scary.  The first line of defense against terrorists sneaking into the country is exactly what it was on September 10, 2001.

Minimum wage earning security guards with clipboards.

I don't know if Islam belongs on both lists or neither.  I suspect that these lists are a lot like the lists of Un-American organizations from the checking-for-commies-under-the-bed era, drawn up by paranoiacs, xenophobes, ignoramouses, and vindictive people with political axes to grind.  Your name gets on the list, or is kept off it, according to who you know and who you've offended.

So we stop Cat Stevens from going to Nashville to make music but let in...?

Whatever happened, it is wrong that the person who stopped Islam from getting off the plane was a flunky with a clipboard.

We shouldn't be at the mercy of underpaid, underappreciated functionaries with only enough authority to enforce the rules but not enough to waive them, people with not much imagination, no real training, and a deathly fear of losing their jobs.

Those are the people Mussolini employed to get the trains running on time.

And that little rant was delivered with Peace Train wailing in my head.

Oh well.  At least it wasn't Morning Has Broken.

Nuts.

Shouldn't have said it.

You hear it now too, don't you?

Sorry.

Mostly Harmless

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of grip, whether it's the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.

It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why. In wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

From Mostly Harmless. By Douglas Adams.

The Midnight Blog of Paul Revere

Longfellow had a blog.

Really.

Somewhat cut off from everyday German student life, Longfellow and [his pal Edward Deering] Prebble diverted themselves by producing their own four-page, quarto-sized, handwritten newspaper...Mildly ribald in tone and full of student jokes, it was intended not for their families but for a small circle of male Portland intimates.  Longfellow did most of the writing and drew the many illustrations, and Preble added comments or filled in the blank spots...

...Much of the text---snippets from their reading in several languages, allusions to politics back home, odds and ends of student lore---has lost its bite, but illustrations reveal Longfellow's unsuspected gift for caricature.---From Longellow:  A Rediscovered Life.  Charles C. Calhoun.

Snippets from their reading.  Allusions to politics.  Odds and ends.  Small circle of readers.  Sounds like a blog to me.

Calhoun goes on to describe the tone of Longfellow and Preble's newpaper.

"The satire is coarse, the humor sophomoric, the anger real."

Yep.  Definitely a blog.

The New York Times Magazine has a piece on the rise of The Blogs.  I'm not going to link to it because everyone of the blogs I'm linking to below links to it.  The focus of the piece is on liberal political blogs, which is what you'd expect from the Times.  If the Times can find a way it will convert its Sports section to politics, the way it has its Books section.  But the celebrification of left (sort of left, anyway) bloggers has right wing bloggers hopping mad, according to Jesse over at Pendagon.

These are people who think that Al Gore thinks he invented the Internet and that proves Gore is crazy who now think that they both invented the blogosphere and simultaneously destroyed the Death Star known as the old Liberal Media, blowing it up with Grand Moff Rather still aboard.

Darth Koppel escaped but they'll track him down and rescue him from the dark side in Episode VI.

Michael Berube, whose humor is not sophomoric, whose satire is not coarse, but whose anger is real but productively sublimated into one of the most enjoyable and intelligent blogs in this or any other virtual reality, makes hay with the Times and with a dour, sour grapes throwing op-ed in the LA Times.

(I suspect Berube of being an android constructed by a super-intelligent alien race who've sent him to earth to humiliate all Earthling academics, writers, and would-be satirists, as well as fathers who think they're doing a good job, and middle-aged weekend jocks, with his preternatural brilliance, energy, good humor, devotion, and hockey prowess.  But my friend Steve Kuusisto has met the guy and says he appears to be human, just way smarter and more productive and energetic than the rest of us, which makes him even more insufferable.)

Kevin Drum, as usual, has the most thoughtful take.

But my favorite response has been Matt Yglesias', naturally, because his opinion comes closest to my own.

...one good thing about the piece [sez Matt] is that it starts to bring out the extent to which there isn't much to say about blogs per se. It's a kind of technology that's used in wildly variant ways, as demonstrated by the enormous differences between Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette. These sites are united, more or less, only in virtue of being produced by blogging software and by being popular. But we understand that a bestselling cookbook, a National Book Award winning novel, and Lies and The Lying Liars Who Tell Them don't have a great deal to do with each other all in virtue of being books.

The implicit by-the-by here is that blogs aren't anything but a content delivery system.  That is, they're a way for people with a lot on their minds, and the arrogance to think that lots of other people want to hear it, to get the words out.

There's been a lot of breathlessness about the revolutionary nature of the internet, of the web, of personal webpages, of blogs.

(Or to put it the way it might appear on Typepad or Yahoo:

Internet>World Wide Web>Personal Web Page>Blog>Lance Mannion)

But little of the panting commentary takes into account that what we're talking about here is a lot of flashy new technology built around a component that's a result of a very old technology.  There's a human being at every keyboard, doing what human beings have been doing from the beginning, buttonholing their neighbor and shouting into his ear, "Hey, pay attention to me when I'm talking!"

Longfellow and his friend's newspaper used the technology of the day to deliver content to their friends back home.   Printing presses and packet boats and human beings working for the post office.   I think what Ben Franklin and his brother were doing with their printing press was producing a blog.  Poor Richard's Webpage.  If the technology had been available in the 18th Century Hamilton and company would have produced the Federalist Blog.  And St Paul was blogging to the Ephesians and the Colossians and the other ians.

In the beginning was the word.

And the word became pixels and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

The delivery system is a million times faster and the interface a lot prettier, of course.  But I'm not sure that blogs are all that more efficient than broadsheets.  In fact, there are times, when I'm staring glumly at my traffic stats, when I think that I'd be better off printing these entries on my Inkjet, going downtown to stand on a busy street corner, and handing them out to everyone passing by.   At least some of them might read them before throwing them away.

 

Repent, ye writers!

Maud Newton's finding she's growing dogmatic about the art of writing as she works her way deeper into her novel.

She's a long way from being ready to climb on a soapbox and start preaching at the passing crowds to repent, the Day of Wrath is at hand, when her book will be delivered from the heavens, there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among writers who have sinned by not modeling their aesthetic after Maud's, and the sheep will be separated from the goats, the Roths from the Updikes, the Moodys from the Pecks, and the Eggerses from the Safran Foers. But it sounds to me like she could get there after a few more chapters.

Meantime, she has intelligent things to say about solving the problem in writing her book that Philip Roth tells the Guardian all writers struggle to solve in writing their books, an interview you can get to from here, but which I got to by way of Dan Green's page.

Which is a reminder to me that one of the things I plan to do on this site is climb on a soapbox and shout out my own writerly doctrines and dogmas. Which is a warning to you to steer clear, I suppose.

Trials of a teacher's life

"When Longfellow was about to enter college in 1822, he thought some friendly gesture to his former teacher was in order.  'I remember,' he wrote later, 'the Schoolmaster at the Academy; and the mingled odor that hovered about him of tobacco, india-rubber, and lead-pencil.  A nervous, excitable man...I went with a schoolmate to take leave of him and thank him for his patience with us.  He thought we were in jest:  and gave us a stern lecture on good behavior and the trails of a teacher's life.'"

That's from a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow I'm reading, by Charles C. Calhoun.  I liked this little episode because it made me feel fondly toward Longfellow.  In 1822 he was 16.  I got a kick out of thinking of him as being or pretending to be so mature and gentlemanly towards his teacher, and I got another kick out of his teacher, who knew what kind of kid he was, assuming right away that Longfellow was trying to be funny.  Funny's not the word that jumps to mind when you think of Longfellow.   There aren't a lot of yuks in Hiawatha or Evangeline.

The Courtship of Miles Standish, though, contains one of literature's great punchlines.

And Priscilla gets off another zinger, at Standish's expense.  Told that the less than tall and more than hot-tempered Standish might be angry at her, she says---"between laughing and earnest" is how Longfellow describes her tone---"He is a little chimney, and heated hot in a moment!"

Tell me if she wasn't also being naughty.

You think a guy named Longfellow didn't hear a lifetime of those kinds of jokes?

But it wasn't Longfellow himself I got to thinking about.  It was his teacher.  I wondered if it wasn't a case of the man's thinking that young Henry was being a wise-ass.  I wondered about the feelings of that poor man, whose one suit of clothes---everybody had only one suit of clothes back then; at least only one that got them through the week.  They might have owned a second suit for special occasions.  People recognized each other by their clothes back then, which is why plays and novels with plots revolving around cases of mistaken identity were plausible to them---this teacher's one suit of clothes reeked of pencil shavings, ink, and snuff, which is to say he smelled of his classroom and his one vice, and what a way to be seen by the world, as being nothing more than your less than glamorous job and a bad habit.  I wondered if he assumed Longfellow was teasing him because he assumed none of his students would be grateful for his teaching.   And I knew that if he assumed that, probably few of them were.

Not that he wasn't a good teacher, although he probably wasn't, there aren't very many good teachers.   It's just that even the good ones are far from appreciated.   A few brilliant scholars are heroes to their best students.  A few charismatic lecturers are minor celebrities in the hallways and quads.  A few very dedicated and hard working ones save the lives of some of their students and are loved by those students forever.  But all of them, the good, the fair, and the bad, are disliked much more than they are liked, much, much more than they are admired, even the charismatic minor celebrities, who are often seen as being arrogant show offs and clowns by those not swept away by their charms.

It's a fact.  Nobody likes teachers.  Nobody likes dentists, cops, or prison wardens either.

We just don't like people whose job it is to make us sit up straight, sit still, and behave.

Longfellow's teacher would have known that most of the young men who passed through his classroom thought of him as ridiculous or contemptible.  And maybe he'd gotten to thinking of himself as ridiculous and contemptible.  Which would explain why when a by all acounts thoroughly decent and likable kid---and a future teacher himself.  Longfellow had a long and distinguished career as a professor of Modern Languages at Harvard---stopped by to say goodbye and thank you, the man immediately thought he was being made fun of.

My senior year in high school I was president of the Drama Club.  Mrs Kestenbaum, who was both brilliant and charismatic, and hard working and dedicated, was our advisor and directed all our shows.  But that spring her husband got very sick and she decided she couldn't direct the spring production.  A new teacher volunteered to take over for her.  That teacher got off on the wrong foot with us at the first meeting to announce her choice of plays by making it plain that she had searched for a play that wasn't above our talents.  We were full of ourselves, having just done very highly regarded productions of Shakespeare and Arthur Miller---which we pulled off because Mrs K and her co-director Mr Jakemen were very smart about the art of casting---and were not pleased to hear that there were plays above our talents.   The play she'd chosen was a completely and deservedly forgotten piece of sentimental fluff called Love's Old Sweet Song.  (My brother figured out immediately that the anagram for the title was LOSS, as in "a complete...")  I hated the play, not just because it was presented to me as being easy enough for us to handle, but because it was insipid.  Mrs K was a great teacher, remember, and one of the things she'd taught us was how to recognize good.  LOSS wasn't.  So I decided, what the heck, I'd been in a whole bunch of plays, I'd played the lead in the Crucible that fall, I wanted to direct a play of my own for the arts fair at the end of the year.  I didn't need to bother.  So I didn't try out for LOSS, which was no loss, for me or for the show.

What was a loss was that I'd unintentionally led a boycott.  None of the other Drama Club hot shots tried out either.

LOSS had close to 30 speaking roles, and the director wound up with a cast of freshmen and sophomores, of whom about 8 had ever acted before.   It turned out that the play wasn't above their talents, though.  It turned out that teaching 22 kids how to act was far above the director's abilities.

Not that she didn't try.

But she tried too hard in all the wrong ways and after a month of rehearsals, just a couple weeks before the show was supposed to open, the cast was in rebellion.  They were all going to quit.  As president of the Drama Club, I thought it was my duty to do something about that.

I held a secret meeting of the cast and talked them into sticking with the show.  Then my best friend, who was the vice president, and I went to talk to the director to tell her about the cast's feelings and to make some suggestions about how to save the show.

Pompous and arrogant little twit, wasn't I?  But I meant well.

The meeting with the director was not a success.

She started crying.

I'd never felt so bad.

She knew she was doing an awful job.  She knew the kids in the cast hated her.  She was probably no more than 25 and she was looking at if not the end of her teaching career, at the end of her image of herself as a young heroine.  Because, almost certainly, she'd gone into teaching thinking of herself as a force for good.  She probably saw her job idealistically and had hoped she'd make the world a better place for her students by teaching them all about literature and poetry and the theater!  And not only was she failing miserably, here she was being humiliated by a teenage pair of Redford and Newman wannabes.

And while she was weeping and literally tearing her hair, I realized something.

I never, ever, ever wanted to be a teacher.

Guess what.

 

Jeeves and the Greasy Bird

Today's Wodehouse, for Mrs Norman Maine. It's from the story, "Jeeves and the Greasy Bird."

"Oh, Jeeves," I said, "I hope I'm not interrupting you when were curled up with your Spinoza's Ethics or whatever it is, but I wonder if you could spare me a moment of your valuable time?"

"Certainly, sir."

"A problem has arisen in the life of a friend of mine who shall be nameless, and I want your advice. I must begin by saying that it's one of those delicate problems where not only my friend must be nameless but all the other members of the personnel. In other words, I can't mention names. You see what I mean?"

"I understand you perfectly, sir. You would prefer to term the protagonists A and B."

"Or North and South?"

"A and B is more customary, sir."

"Just as you say. Well, A is male, B female. You follow me so far?"

"You have been lucidity itself, sir."

"And owing to...what's that something of circumstances you hear people talking about? Cats enter into it, if I remember rightly."

"Would concatenation be the word for which you are groping?"

"That's it. Owing to a concatenation of circumstances B has got it into her nut that A's in love with her. But he isn't. Still following?"

"Yes, sir."

I had to pause here for a moment to marshal my thoughts. Having done so, I proceeded.

"Now until quite recently B was engaged to---"

"Shall we call him C, sir?"

"Caesar's as good a name as any, I suppose..."

What did you do in the War, Daddy?

Over at Brad DeLong's website today, the good professor put up a short post about Lt Bush's lost years in the Texas National Guard. I couldn't resist throwing in my two cents in the comments section. I had nothing new to add. I was really just engaging in some egregious self-promotion, trying to lure some customers into my shop.

I'm sort of standing out here in cyberspace like the lonesome Pakistani restauranteur in Seinfeld watching people pass by my restaurant without even noticing it.

Jerry, if you're watching from your window, please, don't try to help me.

Anyway, some time after my comment someone else commented that all this commenting on W's vanishing act from the Guard was a waste of time. The commentator was spitting mad and when I first read his rant I thought he was a Republican defending Bush. But he was just furious that the rest of us were chasing moonbeams, speculating about how Lt Bush got himself yanked from the cockpit of a fighter plane.

The commentator's point was that Kerry's in a tough fight and he's not winning at the moment and it's not doing him or us Democrats any good to keep harping on an issue that the voters at large have clearly decided doesn't matter.

The commenter was right. As an election year issue W's going walkabout 30 years ago is a loser. We should let it go.

But it's hard.

Because it does matter.

Just not as politics.

I think I can now sympathize with how Republicans felt about Clinton's sexual sins. They couldn't understand how come the rest of the country wasn't outraged by his outrages.

A Republican might point out here that, unlike Bush's misdeeds, Clinton kept his up right up into his presidency. But Bush has too. Because the thing that matters about what Bush did and what makes it so hard not to try to use it against him now is that Bush did keep it up right up into his presidency.

First off, he has lied about it everytime he's ever talked about it since the day he left Texas for Alabama. He lies about it now. I'm not surprised. He disgraced himself somehow back then and he's ashamed, I'm sure.

Second, what he did then---use his daddy's influence to save himself work and bother and then use it again to bail him out of the trouble he got into while not working and not bothering---is not just an episode from his past. It's his whole resume. He's at it even now, except that this time his daddy's pals may not be able to save him.

It's hard not to point at Lt Bush and President Bush and scream at people, They're the same guy! They're the exact same guy!

And it's frustrating that most people don't seem to see it, or want to see it, or care when they do see it.

It's also frustrating that Bush was able to benefit from smearing John Kerry by having paid slimeballs lie about Kerry's real heroism while we're unable to benefit from pointing out the truth about Bush's real cowardice.

It is also disgusting to watch the chickenhearted slacker send kids to their death in Iraq and know that if George Bush was 21 years old now he wouldn't be going anywheres near a recruitment office.

But that's how it is and we really need to let it go and focus on the issues that do matter...

...politically.

We don't have to let it go personally. Because it matters. Just as it matters that Bill Clinton was a bad husband.

With Clinton it mattered in exactly that simple moral way the "What do we tell the children?" tut-tutters said it did. What they couldn't grasp is that a lot of us had no trouble telling our children, Bill Clinton did a bad thing, he hurt his wife, he hurt his daughter, he hurt Monica Lewinsky, and he hurt his friends, that was very wrong of him, but he's still a good president and he shouldn't lose his job for it.

I can't help thinking that Conservative parents are telling their children something a little different. "George Bush served his country. He got an honorable discharge. He did his duty. And he's good a president and he shouldn't lose his job."

I'm just going by what the talking heads and the typing hands defending him are saying. I don't know what conservatives say to their children because it's their business.

I'll tell you what I've told my kids. And I want to point out that I've only talked to them about it because they've brought it up. They're hearing about it in school. According to the 8 year old all Bush did when he was in the Guard was "party, party, parrrr-taaaay!" I'd like to meet the parents of the kid who passed along that piece of information. I need friends.

But what I said in answer was, When George Bush was a young man he believed in something but when the time came for him to stand up for his beliefs he ran away to somewhere safe. In order to get into that safe place he promised to do something fairly dangerous, which was brave of him, but then he gave up doing what he promised to do. Maybe he had a very good reason for breaking his promise, maybe he was just partying too much. We don't know, because he keeps lying about it.

I went on to point out that Bush was a young man at the time and young men make mistakes (If my kids were as precocious as Brad DeLong's kids appear to be I'd have handed them a novel by Anthony Trollope. Probably The Three Clerks or The Claverings. But almost any novel of his will do, since one of the most dominant themes in all Trollope's work is how stupid, foolish, cad-ish, and out and out hurtful, to themselves and those they love, even basically decent and well-meaning young men can be.) And I told them that because Bush was a young man and young men make mistakes, we shouldn't judge him by what he did then.

Unless of course he never stopped making the same sort of mistakes. And I'm not circling back to the political point. This is part of the moral point. It's the same thing with Bush as it was with Clinton. (Here's where I stopped talking to the kids. We'll deal with adultery another time.) Neither one stopped making the same sort of mistakes.

Clinton running around on Hillary when he was 30 was a mistake. Running around on her when he was 40 was cad-dish. Cheating on her when he was 50 was inexcusable.

The big difference between Clinton and Bush, of course, is that nobody died because of what Monica did with her cigar.

(Although...the impeachment crisis did prevent him from taking the action he needed to take against Osama. But I think the Republicans can share some of the blame for that.)

Bush never stopped. The way he was in the Guard is the way he's been ever since. When his defenders try to argue that W. isn't as dumb as he's made out to be, they point to his Harvard MBA. I'm willing to bet that he got into Harvard the same way he got into the Guard. I'll bet more money that he didn't do the required work. And double or nothing says that he found somebody to do his work for him. If I'm wrong then that was the only interlude of dilligence and responsibility in his life, because right after it he went into business where he was a cheat and a screw up and came away smelling like a rose because his daddy's pals saved his bacon. His supposed reformation when he stopped drinking is all talk. All he did was stop drinking. Which means he no longer even had that excuse for his life long pattern of making messes that others have to clean up, of letting others do his heavy lifting, of letting others suffer the consequences of his actions, and of lying about it, denying it, and when confronted blaming other people. The mess in Iraq is now John Kerry's fault, you know.

This is very bad behavior. Talking about it, recognizing it, deploring it are good things to do. It's important that we constantly remind each other what's right and what's wrong. This is how we keep a civilized society going. It's how we teach the children. Since what Bush did (and failed to do) thirty years ago was emblematic of the way he has lived his whole life as a man, then telling the story is morally useful.

The twin stories of John Kerry and George Bush should be part of our national mythology, along with the story of George Washington and the cherry tree and Abe Lincoln doing his homework by firelight and walking 6 miles to return the money when he realized a storekeeper had given him too much change, stories I can't help feeling George Herbert Walker Bush never told his sons.

We can tell our kids.

We just shouldn't tell the neighbor when we're trying to convince him to vote for John Kerry.

Bec's Clocks

Here in our new stomping grounds we have views.

Back where we used to live, in the quasi-city of Syracuse, we had characters.

Five years ago today at a clock store in our neighborhood:

At Becs Clocks late this afternoon. Inspired by a friend's new enthusiasm for old typewriters, I'd taken mine there a couple of weeks ago. Bec repairs typewriters as a sideline to fixing and selling clocks. The old Olivetti couldn't be repaired, at least not at a reasonable price, and he refused to gouge me. Gouging me wasn't worth his time. He has a four month waiting list on clocks that need fixing. So I went back today to retrieve my new collection of spare parts.

Clocks, clocks, and more clocks, on the walls, on the floor, on the counter of the service window. Old clocks that look new, new clocks that look old. Grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, kitchen clocks from the 1950s. The frosted glass face of the tower clock from some nearby town's town hall, which he is restoring, leans in a corner. Musical clocks and neon Coca Cola clocks. A whole big box full of wind up alarm clocks with bells on top, the kind people in 1930s movies were always picking up and throwing across the room when they went off because the shut off button's so hard to find. Ugly metal clocks with dented casings that are worth a lot of money because they're collectables now. The woman who manages the place---Bec is always out on a call and must work on his clocks late at night when the elves show up to help him--sighed wistfully about how the strangest things have become collectables. I said how I'm always surprised to find out how much my old toys would be worth now if I had never played with them. She said that she used to own mint condition Barbies and a Chatty Cathy doll, but her "step-monster" appropriated them when she left home. She'd asked for them back but the stepmother said, "No, you left them here. That meant you didn't want them. They're mine now."

She doesn't talk to her stepmother anymore, the stealing of the dolls being only the last straw in a very big haystack. I said a lawyer might talk to her stepmother for her, if she thinks the dolls are worth that much money. She shrugged. She would like her dolls back, but not to sell.

She’s a short blonde, a little plump, with the complexion of a teenager---unlined but pimpled. My first impression was that she’s a few years older than me, but I’m beginning to learn that when I think that about someone, it usually means she’s younger than me, maybe by as much as 10 years. Not in this case. That Chatty Cathy doll makes her a little girl in the 60s. My sister's age. Closing time, 5:30, came while we were talking. All the clocks that chimed began to do it, and some of the cuckoo clocks went off as well.

She would like to design her own clocks, but she can't find anyone to build them for her. Bec doesn't have time. She has an idea for a clock for Father's Day. It's slanted, the face is tipped so that 12 o'clock is where 10 ought to be---it's a recliner clock.

Don't panic

42.

That's the answer.

To which you might ask, Well, then, what's the question?

Fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy know that it's, What do you get when you multiply 6 by 9?

Which explains why Life, the Universe, and Everything is such a cock up.

The math is all wrong.

The BBC's started a new radio dramatization of the last three books of "the increasingly innacurately named" Hitchhiker's trilogy.

First episode's available online.

Go listen.

Remember. Don't panic.

And bring your towel.

The glass is half full

The President sez that the Iraqi people are optimists. Little things like their country being in a state of siege don't get them down. Over there, it's a replay of London during the Blitz, as it was so realistically portrayed in movies like Mrs Minever. The Iraqis are gathered around the piano in the local offy, singing "The White Cliffs of Dover" and "When the Lights Go On Again," as the car bombs go off in the street outside. And shame on those of us over here in America who are being pessimistic (John Kerry) and pointing out that life's not all skittles and beer in Fallujah when the Iraqis themselves are being so darn plucky!

If you aren't reading Juan Cole's website, you're missing a lot of information about what's going on in Iraq. And apparently the President doesn't read it. Which is too bad. Because Cole would like him to think about just how cheerful we Americans would be if life over here were like life over there.

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.

What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?

What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?

Go read the whole thing.

He's got more questions like this for Mr Bush.

To which the Prez would probably reply, triumphantly:

Yeah, well, what if the classrooms in a lot of our schools had fresh coats of paint?

And what if most of the cell phones worked at least a few hours every day?

And what if sometime soon the air conditioning would be up and running?

What then, huh? Huh? How about that, Mr Cole?

Calls for another rousing chorus of "A Long Way to Tipperary," don't you think?

That place by the river

Leonard Cohen turned 70 last week.

I was surprised to hear he's still around.

Not that I thought he was dead. He's such a fixture of my past that when I think of him I think of him as being stuck back there, as though the past's a place I stupidly bumbled my way out of and can't find my way back to, like Ronald Colman tossed out of Shangri-La at the end of Lost Horizon. That's the way it is with a lot of the heroes of my childhood and youth. Alan Alda is still 36 and filming the second season of MASH. Tom Seaver's on the mound in July of '69. My parents are still loading all of us into the car for a trip to Cape Cod.

It's a shock when I see them all walking around in the present and Time hasn't left them alone.

Cohen wasn't really one of my heroes. But he was something almost as important. His songs got a grip on me at a very impressionable moment in my life, like Altman's Nashville, The Family Arsenal by Paul Theroux, Eva Dorsey's cheekbones, and the Marx Brothers.

There's a section of my brain built around his music, where all the synapses are linked in a perpetual chorus of "Hallelujah."

Just by conjuring up "Suzanne" in my head---and I do a fairly passable impersonation of Cohen...in my head---I can bring back my freshman and sophomore years. Not any particular event or person. But I can re-experience my mood from the time, vividly.

In a word, miserable.

I didn't own my own copy of "Songs of Love and Hate," but just about everybody I knew did. Definitely all the girls I dated did. I hung with an intellectual and angst-ridden crowd. You couldn't get through a night without hearing it spun on somebody's turntable, although I knew his songs better from my friends' singing. I had several friends who were musicians and did the college coffee house circuit. And, frankly, I still don't think a flute solo belongs in "Suzanne," but I wasn't about to tell her that.

This is a very long introduction to my pointing you to this post by the redoubtable Ken Layne. Cohen was and is one of Layne's heroes. And he says it better, in fewer words.

Law and Orbach

I miss Lennie.

But then I still miss Stone.

And Logan.

And Adam Schiff.

The only one of the junior ADAs I ever liked was Jaime.

And I miss her.

A few years down the road, when every show on NBC is called Law and Order Something or Other, and Dick Wolf decides to fire Dennis Farina or ship him off to one of the spin offs, I'll probably miss Fontana.

But I really miss Lennie.

Ed: They say the food is pretty good here.

Lennie: Oh, it's to die for.

Equinox

According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, the autumn equinox is at 12:30 this afternoon.

First day of fall, depending on your point of reference.

Civilized people, which is to say, baseball fans, will tell you that fall arrives the day after the regular season ends.

Roadside botanists mark the beginning of fall from when the goldenrod and asters replace the day lillies.

For kids and their parents, fall starts on the first day of school.

For the owners of businesses in resort towns, fall begins when all their help quits to go back to college, which, with luck, is the day after Labor Day. (Summer starts Memorial Day weekend, of course.)

People who know how to bake a pie and the people who love them know that fall begins when apple picking begins...

...and ends when the apple trees are picked bare, well over a month before the Winter Solstice.

That doesn't mean winter begins. Here in the Northeast we have another season, a no longer fall, not yet winter season of gloom and inwardness, November.

Up in Hudson Bay it's been fall for a while, if it's not winter already, and down in Texas they're still wearing shorts, and out in Southern California they're asking, "What's a fall?"

Up this-a-way, between the Poconos and Mt Marcy, and out that-a-way, west to the first prairie dog, the area of the country I know best, autumn gets going in fits and starts, and people sort of ignore it until all at once they can't. There are flares of red in a few maples, the sumacs turn scarlet, farmers start mowing down the corn shocks and what's left standing has begun to brown. The geese are more active and noisy overhead, you start reaching for a sweater in the evening, and one night you notice it's pitch dark at a time when it seems that just the other day there was still bright sunshine. The whole James Witcomb Riley "frost is on the punkin" autumnal revue.

Myself, I know it's fall when the first pumpkins appear for sale at the roadside farm stands, which this year, occured THREE WEEKS AGO!

How did that happen?

Nance, who knows more about these things and keeps better track, says that the whole harvest is early this year because of how cool the summer was. She's concerned that she won't get out to the orchards before the Cortlands are picked over.

I'm worried that by the time we're ready to carve our Jack O Lanterns all the pumpkins will have rotted and turned to mush.

A Halloween without Jack O Lanterns?

Scary thought.

Way before "Love Shack"

You read my About page, right? So you know I'm planning to post clippings from my notebooks here? You don't mind? Great. Thanks.

Here's one. It's dated September 21. Many, many moons ago. I was a young fogey at the time, which explains the expression "peculiar to New Wave rock and rollers." I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now. Post tells the story of the first time I heard of the B-52's. And the first time I ever met a saint.

Sunday night in Harvard Square, waiting for the Allston bus. The bag lady who blessed me for a quarter I gave her in Kenmore Square two weeks ago is also waiting for the Allston bus. She wants to get to Cleveland Circle. Her possessions are in green polyurethane bags that she holds by the necks, straight-armed, one in each knobby hand, all their weight pulling on her shoulders, and two heavy cardboard boxes. The bags are perfect globes and they clear the sidewalk by a safe inch. She is kicking the boxes ahead of her as she goes. Today she is dressed for the brisk fall breezes, the hint of one of which everybody else is dying for. The bag lady is wearing an olive green overcoat and maroon pants that are rolled three time to halfway up her brick-shaped calves, revealing yellow knee socks. She wears heavy ankle-high walking shoes. The shoes are made of orange leather. They are brand new, not even scuffed. They would fit an average-sized man and she is not even an averaged sized woman so they are way too big for her. So she walks awkwardly. She wears a salt and pepper fluffy knit hat. Wisps of black hair stick out from beneath the hat at the sides and trail over her collar in back.

Her walk is a sort of waddle. Picture a drunken rectangle, long side up, nudging itself forward. One corner nudges itself ahead, then the rear corner drags itself forward to catch up. The bag lady, like the rectangle, could be easily toppled, tipped forward, to the right, to the back, and like the rectangle she would go over with all her lines and angles perfect. No bends or wiggles. She would fall flat.

The bag lady is after information. She wants to know if the Allston bus will take her where she wants to go and she wants to know when the bus will come. She waddles down the line of people, asking us. When she asks a question, she doesn’t lob it into a cluster of people hoping someone will field it. She asks each man, woman, and child, personally, standing square in front of him or her and looking right into their eyes. She receives varying temperatures of reception and conflicting answers. On Sundays the T is irregular, buses run different routes and have different arrivals and departures than they do on weekdays. (Saturdays are different altogether.) The information booth at the Brattle station is out of schedules for the 86 bus and the attendant doesn’t know the schedule. All anybody is able to tell the bag lady is that the bus runs once an hour. But at the quarter? The half? Three quarters? Ten past, sixteen to? Nobody can say.

She is coming to me soon. I can hear her repeated questions growing louder. Her questioning is lucid and her voice is clear and loud as a bell peeling. I don’t know any more than what she’s already been told, but prepare to answer her questions in a direct and friendly fashion.

“Excuse me, young man. Do you know if this bus goes to Western Avenue?”

I look up from the bulletin of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Her oatmeal cookie face is too close. The curls of her beard point up at me and do in my tolerance.

“No!” I kept eye contact only long enough to show my hostility. The bag lady shuffled down the line.

A young man stood on the curb, his thumb stuck out in the road, hitching. He was tall, pleasant looking; a square-jawed saint in sandals. He spoke to the bag lady before she even saw him.

“Do you like the B-52's?” He said. He’d noticed a pin with the band’s logo which the bag lady wore on her droopy coat. I didn’t catch her answer. The young man said, “Did see them when they were in town? They were very good. We were dancing all night. Like this. You know?” He demonstrated his dancing—the lunatic, looseboned, hopping up and down on both feet dancing peculiar to New Wave rock and rollers and incompetent electricians who have crossed the wrong wires.

The bag lady didn’t say anything. She was afraid yet fascinated by the hitchhiker and she stood and stared quietly at him the way a little girl might watch a magician at a side show. The roles of freak and gawker reversed themselves under the hitchhiker’s direction. His voice was gentle and boyish, but still adult. He answered all her questions about the bus even though she never asked him.

They stood together awhile and he talked to her quietly about many things. Her attention never faltered, his interest never grew patronizing.

He’s kept his thumb out the whole time. Now a car stops for him and he’s free to say his good-byes. But he doesn’t dismiss her as she expects him to. “Come with me,” he whispers, as he opens the car door. Then he says loudly, “Get in the car, Mom.”

All heads turn.

The bag lady looks terrified.

“This is my mother,” the hitchhiker says to the driver. The driver’s mouth gapes. The hitchhiker bundles the bag lady into the car. “Are you going to Brookline?” The driver nods. “This is great,” the hitchhiker says. “Are you ok, Mom? Good. Let’s go.” He hops in and puts his arm around her.

The car drives off.

Clouds of Glory

We live in sight of the Shawangunk Ridge. Not in the shadow, but close enough that on clear days like today you don't need a very powerful pair of binoculars to study the rock strata.

You can click on the picture for a larger image.

By the way, that's pronounced "Shongum."

I have no idea.

The boys' walk to school takes them up to the crest of a hill and a gorgeous view out across the valley to the ridge. This morning there was a layer of white clouds lying just above the valley floor, below the ridge line.

The 8 year old thought it would be swell to jump off the ridge into the clouds.

With a parachute, of course, put in the 11 year old, pragmatically.

No, said the 8 year old, without a chute. Just with straps that you could hook onto the clouds as you fell through them. Then a cloud would hold you up and you could just hang there in the sky and look down until the cloud sank under your weight and lowered you to the ground.

That's exactly the sort of thing the 11 year old would have said a few years ago.

I could go all sentimental and Romantic here and ruefully wonder, When do they lose that wonderful creativity? Who takes it from them? Is it beaten out of them by school, by society, by the demon time?

Something happens. There are far more bright, creative, and playfully imaginative kids than there are adults. There always has been. It's an old observation and an old truth. A lot of children who would say things about the ridge and the clouds like the 8 year old grow up to be adults who look at the ridge and see only a good site for building a casino or a motel.

A lot more don't even see the ridge at all.

To which I say:

Lighten up, Lance. For one thing, the 11 year old is still a very creative kid. In many ways he's more of a poet and an artist at heart than his little brother, whose gift of gab right now shows more signs of an incipient lawyer than a budding poet. The 11 year old's seemingly prosaic observation about needing a parachute wasn't a bit of reflexive realism brought about because, pace Mr Wordsworth, a glory has faded from his earth. Shades of the prison house haven't begun to close on this growing boy, my dear old sheep of the Lake District. This boy was expressing a soon to be young man's thirst for adventure.

The 8 year old's vision of the clouds was a dream. The 11 year old's was a plan of action.

What happens to that wonderful creativity is they begin to apply it to the real world. They put it to work.

This is how bridges get built, and rockets get launched, and how poems get written down and paintings get put on canvass.

That wonderful creativity is adorable in an 8 year old, but it becomes truly miraculous when they look at something and say, Now, how would I really go about that?

The Clicking of Cuthbert

"The least thing upsets him on the links. He misses short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows."

Wodehouse, again.

Hallelujah , Come on, Get Angry...

Was going to title this post, "Rage, rage, against the dying of the Right."

First, because I am encouraging rage, and second because I think the Right is dying.

Really.

The question is whether they'll go out slowly, spontaneously combust like Krook amidst his hoarded papers in Bleak House, and leave only a greasy film on the windows and a strange shower of viscous ash in the air or incinerate themselves and the whole oil rig like Cody Jarrett in White Heat, screaming "Top of the world, Rush! Top of the World!"

They'd probably rather think of themselves as going out like John Wayne's Davy Crockett at the end of The Alamo, holding off a thousand Mexicans singlehandedly and then falling back with a lighted torch into a roomful of gunpowder, taking half of Santa Ana's army to hell with him.

Fine with me. Just as long as they go. And they are going. How do I know? That's another post. Just believe me. We're watching the End of Days.

We just have to worry about how big a mess and how many casualites they'll leave when they go.

In the meantime, it's ok to be a bit steamed at them. Not just for the mess they're making and the mess they'll leave behind, but for being such shitheads while they're here.

They are shitheads in so many ways, but one of the big ways is the way they project their barking, foaming, rolling on the floor, last stages of rabies anger on us.

"You're full of rage!" they screech and cackle. "You hate George Bush!," they shriek and giggle. "And your hatred is madness! Madness, we say!"

We're supposed to feel bad for being pissed off? We're supposed to accept their word for it that our Bush hatred is irrational? We're supposed to take this from people who still wake up in damp sheets, sweaty and with hearts pounding, after yet another nightmare of Hillary Clinton, gloating and probably nude--- They are very weird about her, and I'm sure some of them have seen Roman Polanski's Macbeth ---as she steps back from the freshly murdered body of Vince Foster?

Of course, we're mad. And of course we don't like George Bush. What's to like? He's a sneaky, lying, cringing spoiled brat of man. A sanctimonious bully, to boot. He's a moral as well as a physical coward. He's afraid of the press, he's afraid to go out in public, on September 11 he was afraid the terrorists were going to kill him or he was afraid somebody might ask him to make a real decision or he was afraid people would find out he knew al queda was up to something and he didn't do anything to stop it, so he hid in a bunker in Nebraska, and he's afraid he's going to lose this election, so he's letting his henchpeople lie, smear, demogogue, and when it comes down to it on election night, I'm sure, steal votes for him. What's not to hate?

(Personally, I don't hate him. I hate Cheney. I hate Ashcroft. I loathe Karl Rove. And I have contempt for Condoleeza Rice. Don Rumsfeld just makes my head spin. He's like a bad acid trip. But I despise George Bush. I'd like to say it the way Bogie said it about Peter Lorre in Casablanca. W: You despise me, don't you, Lance? Me: If I gave you any thought, I probably would. But that would mean I had the luxury and the good fortune of not having to give him any thought.)

The Blogosphere's new hero, James Wolcott, gave Washington Post hand-wringer Richard Cohen a good and well-earned throttling the other day. Cohen wrote a column in which he went all schoolteacherish on the subject of Bush hatred. Anyone with a son in grade school knows that among the values being taught nowadays are tattle tale-ing, running away, and "talking things through," which is what you do while you are backing out of range of the bully's fists prior to running away to find a teacher to tattle to. This is called "conflict resolution," by which school administrators mean, "avoiding lawsuits."

Everything school administratrators say these days translates as "avoiding lawsuits," but never mind.

Cohen more or less recommended that Democrats adopt the school playground strategy of "conflict resolution" in dealing with the Bush slime machine this year, and Wolcott carried him up to the top of the jungle gym and tossed him off.

The Star Wars movies are good movies despite how stupid most of the dialogue and plot devices are. One of the stupidest things anybody says in all five films so far is Yoda's line, "Anger leads to fear, fear leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side."

This is such a piece of hogwash that even George Lucas himself doesn't believe it. Luke whips Darth Vader only because he gets angry. He gets angry for a good reason. Vader has just announced he's going after Leia. Luke leaps up and knocks the stuffing out of Vader. And never for a moment are we expected to worry that Luke's going over to the Dark Side.

I'm not saying we will win because we are like Luke, full of righteous anger and blessed by the Force. I'm saying that there is anger, and there is anger. Anger doesn't lead to fear, although fear often leads to anger---ask any honest Right Winger. (Good luck.) Sometimes anger leads to hatred, and sometimes, in a lot of Liberals apparently it leads to upset tummies, migraines, cases of the vapors, and little, ugly wrinkles on their foreheads, right there, above the bridge of my nose, see? Which is why they want to avoid it at all costs. But some things and some people deserve to be hated, and there are plenty of things we need to be mad about.

And hatred can be controlled, and it can stop, when the cause is vanquished. We hated the Germans in World War II. Yeah, I know, the Right cries foul whenever we compare them to Nazis. Isn't it just like us to do that, too? Being that we're like the terrorists and want them to win and wish Saddam was back in power? But I'm not about to compare them to the Nazis, despite the way they fetishize and hero-worship their Leader, how they lust for the extermination of our enemies, how they love a parade, and how all those closet case gay bashing Congressmen keep popping up in their ranks. I was just going to say, that we hated the Germans in World War II, and as soon as the war was over, we stopped hating them. And if we could forgive the Germans for the Nazis, when the time comes we'll be able to forgive the Republicans for George Bush. (Let me spell it out for you, before you scream: In that sentence, implicit in the comparison is that George Bush is nowheres near as bad as the Nazis. The balance of the sentence implies that W. is much less an offense to humanity and God and therefore much easier to forgive and forget than the Nazis. Unless you happen to be an Iraqi or the parent of a dead US soldier or Marine.) So, don't worry, you can hate them, get mad at them, rage, rage, against the dying and the lying of the Right. It's ok, and as Digby has pointed out, it's necessary.

Ruh roh!

Family movie night. Pizza, wings, and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed . Kids liked it. Best thing to be said about the whole Scooby phenomenon was said in Slate when the movie hit the theaters.

"The most ham-handed of children's shows try to stuff a moral message down the audience's throat. But the moral code of Scooby-Doo permeates the entire enterprise without you ever noticing it. The Washington Post's Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the "Scooby worldview" when the first live-action movie came out: "Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it." What needs to be explained about that?"

Scooby dooby dooooooo!

A World of Gods and Monsters

The blonde wasn't feeling well last night, so Family Movie Night's been postponed till tonight. Sorry, Scoob.

Instead we had a Guys Night at the Movies. The feature?

Bride of Frankenstein.

Big hit with the guys. I enjoyed it too. But was there really a time when Una O'Connor was considered funny?

It was the boys' idea to watch the movie. They've seen the original Frankenstein, at their request, and they're clamoring to see Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Lon Chaney's Wolfman. I don't know how they even know these films exist. My brother tells me that his kids are on a classic monster movie jag too. His daughter especially wants to see Creature From the Black Lagoon.

What's going on? Who starts these fads? I don't mind this one. Better than Yu gi oh. But how is that kids here and kids in Connecticut have rediscovered the classic Universal horror movies at the same time?

Was there a memo?

Maybe Bill Cosby is right. There's some kid who never grows up who goes from school playground to school playground passing along the ancient lore of kid-ness to each new generation.

At any rate. I recommend both Frankensteins. James Whale was a great director. Or at least a great black and white photographer. And in Bride, the young Elsa Lanchester is very pretty, which will surprise anyone who knows her best from the string of potty English spinsters she specialized in during the 1960s.

I don't mean as the Bride, although there are an awful lot of people who seem to get an erotic thrill out of her in her bandages and Osterizer blender style hairdo, as evidenced by all the young women and some young men who dress up like her for Holloween.

I mean as a dewy and sexually aquiver Mary Shelley in that weird and campy and totally unnecessary prologue in which a strutting and clearly corsetted Lord Byron attempts to seduce her right under the nose of her passive, nose in a book, and clearly gay husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and which probably inspired Ken Russell's weird, campy, and totally unnecessary film, Gothic.

Next up?

Young Frankenstein, of course.

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