Less

 Here at Entropical Paradise we do not shy away from the hard-hitting news of the day, nor do we shirk our responsibilities to account for global shifts in our priorities. 

That is why  I am here today to speak on the matter of lite. 

An absurd reality here: the spell-check elves did not bother to put a squiggly red line under the last word of that last sentence. That is because in a world filled with mystery and confusion, this bit of creative spelling is allowed.

Nay, encouraged. 

Etymologists will tell you that "lite" springs from the Old English, the dialect and not the furniture polish, meaning "few; little; not much." 

Fast forward a few hundred years to 1962, when it had become a word-forming element in product names. It was a way to shorten the burden of that five letter word to a more compact four. This new version now facilitated by the use of the silent "e" sound to make the "i" a long vowel. No more need for that unruly "gh" in the middle to confound those who might question your rite to fite to party. 

I spent a decade or so emptying cans of Lite Beer without fully considering the fact that they were the same weight and volume as Miller's "regular beer." I was entranced by the notion that I might actually end up losing weight because I consumed so much of it. It continues to be "a third less filling than their regular beer." Same great taste, awkward spelling. 

These days it's hard to turn around in your local supermarket without knocking over a display for some variation on a "regular" product that claims to be "lite." Things like cream cheese. Or Ranch dressing. If these are the places you're hoping to make inroads on your new healthy lifestyle, just stop. Stop now. 

Additionally I have recently become aware of "lite apps." These are software applications that are smaller and generally more efficient in order to function on less powerful devices with limited storage. This is most definitely not supposed to be confused with the flashlight app on your phone. Or maybe they could make one of those that still tastes great, but has a third fewer calories than your standard flashlight app. And with only those four letters instead of the burdensome five, think of the space you'll save. Maybe the condensed version of Breakfast At Tiffany's could tell the story of a young lady named Holly Golitely. 

If this ever comes to pass, remember who suggested it first. Frst. Whatever. 

Prep Work

 When my son was in high school, he and a group of friends began formulating their Zombie Apocalypse Plan. This afforded a group of young nerds the opportunity to try and regulate the unprecedented times in which they were living. They came of age during September 11, Katrina and a war in the Middle East that never quite ended. It is through this lens that my son and his gang of nerds set about preparing for ZAP. 

Among the features of his all-encompassing survival system was the need to be prepared at any moment to fight off a surging mass of undead. At a movie theater. In his back yard. On vacation. All of these contingencies were considered and variables such as available cover and weaponry became codified as they were written down. 

It is only now as my son crests the hill into adulthood that I realize how important these exercises were. This is the guy who has insisted to me time and again how much he would rather be living in precedented times. His parents are painfully aware of just how much heavy lifting we have left him and his generation. I believe the deep emotional scars we have gifted him thanks to climate change, global pandemics and the failure of democracy will generate an evolutionary change.

He and his buddies may never get a chance to hole up in an abandoned shopping center, or wander the wastelands searching for other survivors. That is fine. He will be able to stare down the ugly realities of his very real timeline. He has lived through a time when active shooter drills became as commonplace as fire drills and daily attendance in the schools he attended. 

As it turns out, his childhood fears of spending nights away from home were probably partly inspired by his genetic connection to his father who never managed to get that comfortable anywhere but the house he grew up in, but also because he was already considering how to be safe when the monsters showed up. 

The monsters didn't turn out to be the shambling, decayed corpses looking for brains to consume, but a series of horrible mistakes made by the world in which he found himself living. The legendary Marvel Comic book Howard the Duck was introduced with the line, "Trapped in a world he never made!" That pretty much sums up what I believe my son's motto might be. 

Except he probably kept the one he had when he was seventeen: "Don't be a snack."

A Gift

 You might think that a guy who was once impeached for attempting to make a deal for Ukraine to look for dirt on his political opponent in exchange for arms might be a little shy about sniffing around anything that carried even the faintest whiff of impropriety. 

You might also think that such a person, after a second impeachment would be a less viable candidate for dog catcher, let alone a return trip to the White House. And subsequent convictions on felonies along with being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. 

And so on. 

They used to refer to Ronald Reagan as The Teflon President. Ol' "Dutch" traded arms with the Contras in exchange for hostages and his approval hung pretty steadily alongside his love for jellybeans. I expect that the former game show host currently making a mockery of our system of government and justice looks to Ronnie as a model, substituting the jelly bellies for Diet Coke. 

Because now his mockingness wants to take a "floating palace" home from Qatar. This would replace the current Air Force One which has been in service for thirty-five years. This comes from a "president" who has been insisting that "little baby girls" don't need thirty dolls, and should instead be happy with the lump of sod that their parents can afford. 

A four to six hundred million dollar aircraft, depending on whose estimate you use, that will be in service toting Dear Leader from golf course to golf course until such time as he slithers out of office at which point it will become the property of The Trump Library Foundation. 

You know who else has a 747 hanging in his presidential library? Ronald Reagan. 

Prior to his career in politics, Ronald Reagan was in show business. 

He never hosted a game show. 

He never accepted a jet from a foreign government. 

One can only imagine what the quid pro quo for a 747 is. 

Lack Thereof

 For years I have listened to the calming voice inside my head that says, "They're only children," when the discussion turns to my hair. Or lack thereof. 

More often than not, the questions are innocent enough. "Mister Caven, why don't you have hair?" I do the best I can to give them a direct and sincere answer, but the bottom line tends to fall in the "because I'm old" range. This can still leave a dangling thread, specifically "how old are you Mister Caven," but that is an answer that I have given up being coy about. My age is no longer a source of embarrassment for me, but rather a badge of honor. It couples nicely with the other time-related inquiry, "How long have you been teaching here?"

I used to leave it simply at "forever," but now I have no real difficulty letting my young charges know that I am approaching three full decades of service at Horace Mann Elementary. There are an increasing number of children who have parents whom I taught that can piece that puzzle together. The question for them becomes, "Did you have hair when you were my mom's teacher?"

The answer to that one is a qualified "yes." The pictures of me in my first years of teaching show off my rather shaggy mass of curls that neatly covered the back of my head, accompanied by a beard and mustache that tended to diminish the effects of the radically receding hairline at the top of my rapidly emerging forehead. The reality is that I showed up to work as a teacher going bald, and my years of service have done little or nothing to diminish that trend. 

So much so that some years back I switched from a once every three months scalp purge to keeping a clean-shaven dome at all times. Maintenance has become a matter of keeping hair off my head, rather than trying to find clever ways to diminish the aforementioned ravages of time. 

"Mister Caven is bald," isn't the putdown that many of my young charges feel that it should be, though it does tend to obscure my relative worth as an educator. If discussion has turned to my capacity to grow hair on the top of my head, things have slipped off the track of elementary education. Even a quick lesson on genetics would probably fail to satisfy the attempts of keeping things light since the common wisdom seems to be that you get your hair or lack thereof from your mother's side of the family, but my mother's father had a pretty nice head of hair before he passed on to the big drugstore in the sky at a relatively early age. 

So, when the kids start in calling me "Mister Clean," I tend to remind them that when I started this job, I had hair. Leaving some of them with the notion that when I am done with all of this teaching stuff, I will return to the Hair Club For Men. 

I'm not just a member, I'm one of the founders. 

Car Guy

 What do you get for the man who has everything?

A new car? 

Well, in the case of my son who is turning twenty-eight years young today, that would be a lot like bringing coals to Newcastle. In case you're not familiar with that expression, there is a town in northern England where mining coal is the chief industry, so importing that particular resource would be a wasted endeavor. 

My son already has a lot of cars. The number fluxuates, but for some time now it has rarely dipped below four and has at times exceeded six. He has several roommates, but he has one side of the driveway and the garage all to himself. For this he willingly accepted the small bedroom next to he kitchen. A bedroom that includes a number of pictures of cars as well as dozens of Hot Wheels, mint in box, stuck to the walls. 

Which is probably his parents' fault, since we did nothing to discourage his fascination with wheeled things from the time he was an infant and tipped his stroller over so he could play with the spinning disks that continue to fascinate him to this day. The mild relief to this saga may come in the revelation that initially he was fixated on trains, and maintaining a private railroad outside of the rare game of Monopoly is much less likely than keeping a fleet of automobiles in various states of repair in front of his house. 

Eventually, my appreciation for this "hobby" stems from the fact that keeping one car running at a time was sometimes too much for me when I was his age. Not only does he manage to stay on top of his automotive purchases, he actively seeks out opportunities to procure cars for his friends and family. Having a gearhead in the family has made my own fear of broken car bits less of a worry and more of an opportunity. 

For him. 

As yet, his parents have not misused this superpower. We try not to complain or ask too often, instead we try to slip naturally things like, "So, what does it mean when the Prius makes a ticking sound after it starts up?" into a conversation about his welfare. Which today is all about having a birthday. 

That ticking sound the Prius makes after it starts up can wait. 

But for how long? 

Only The Best

 The very stable genius who is currently trying to make Amierca "great again" certainly has a different definition of "great" than I do. 

Just a short time ago, I had a reminder of a very old joke about a guy whose doctor asks him why he keeps hitting himself. His reply: "Because it feels so good when I stop." This is the punchline that creeped into my head upon witnessing Elongated Mush's retreat from Washington. Apparently his plans to save the United States a trillion dollars fell well short of his goal, and the richest man in the world kept arguing with the guy who likes to pretend he's one of the richest men in the world. 

Someone had to go. Certainly after watching his DOGE-y attempts at chainsawing through government efficiency were distracted by the hit his personal fortune took, but just like his old boss said after the new Canadian Prime Minister announced in front of the convicted felon, "Canada is not for sale," the twice-impeached beast with one thousand whines burbled, "Never say never."

Which brings us to the newest appointment from the man who brought Rudy Giuliani into the White House. The new acting U.S. Attorney for Wahsington DC will be Jeanine Pirro. If that name doesn't sound familiar to you, congratulations because that means you haven't spent enough time staring slack-jawed at Faux News to become aware of one of their former talking heads. It is important to note that the term "acting" is placed before her new title, since that seems like the best way to describe her journey through Americana. She was once district attorney for Westchester County in New York, and she was on her way to becoming Attorney General of that state when, shock of shocks, a scandal broke. Jeanine was, in a fit of irony, caught on tape insisting that she wanted to bug her family's yacht to catch her husband cheating on her. She lost the election in a landslide. This is the person that the Orange Furher picked after his first choice Ed Martin fell out of favor for being associated with the "Stop The Steal" movement, including defending the January 6 2021 rioters and demoting anyone he felt disagreed with him and his Dear Leader. 

So Dear Leader went back to the wells: Faux News, from which crawled his embarrassing pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Jeanine will join a dozen other former Faux hosts and contributors who are already roaming the halls of the White House, genuflecting in the direction of their master. Doesn't this sound like a sound hiring practice? Or maybe it shows just how limited the seventy-eight year old's imagination is, limiting himself to celebrities from the only channel he watches. 

Might I suggest someone switch channels one day and see if he starts hiring folks from Cartoon Network? 

The Look

 Alright. I can confess it now. 

My wife and I both spent time poring over the river of images generated by this year's Met Gala. 

Like it mattered. The annual fundraising dinner for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute provides us, the unwashed, a glimpse into the world of high price couture and the people who slip inside these "wear it once" fashion dares. It has been going on since 1948, and the first themed Gala was held in 1973. 

This was long before I became an interested bystander. I have my wife and her own innate sense of style to thank for getting me to stare at celebrities mincing about in clothes that are created for form not function. This event in May caps off what began months ago as we took in the Academy Awards' Red Carpet meander, the celebration of the phrase, "Who are you wearing?"

It should be noted here that the fashion statement that I made ahead of our wedding to my wife was that I wanted all the groomsmen to wear Hawaiian shirts. I wore a white tux with tails, accentuated by a vest and tie handmade by my wife from scraps of an Aloha shirt that did not make the cut. I wore my father's pants, not specifically because I needed "something borrowed," but rather because in my haste to get up into the mountains to prepare for the celebration in the meadow, I left them in my mother's closet. 

The all-black Converse hi-tops were not a case of forgotten footwear. These were specifically purchased for the event and worn with all the pride. They were my statement. And that statement was, "I'll wear a tuxedo, but I'm still wearing sneakers underneath."

I did much the same thing when I was by my then fiancée to accompany her to the Art Deco Ball, an annual event held in Oakland to help preserve and appreciate that era. I wore a tuxedo to that as well. My wife helped coordinate my cufflinks and studs with the maroon pair of Chuck Taylors I wore with it. She understood my quirky sense of style, brought about by my own inner twelve year old. 

Since then I have worn more occasion-suitable apparel to events such as weddings, funerals, and the occasional Bar Mitzvah. Even my shoes. I own more than a dozen ties, but I don't have much call for practicing the knot. I am most often found in a souvenir T-shirt and a pair of well-worn jeans, with the ever-present threat of my wife asking me, "Are you going out in that?"

Which brings me back to the finery on display this past week in New York City. I looked for the telltale signs of Converse Hi Tops, relieved to discover that no one had appropriated "My Look."