Eight Is Enough

When I first heard the story of the octuplets being born to a Southern California woman, I winced. Then I heard that she already had six kids. I winced again. Fourteen kids. She's got enough for first string, second string, and still got enough to come in off the bench. Fourteen. And not spread out over the years. She has a house full of kids all under the age of eight. The more we find out, the less it sounds like a sit-com and more like something from the mind of David Lynch.
Nadya Suleman was interviewed Friday on the Today show. She explained that six embryos were implanted for each of her pregnancies. When asked why so many embryos were implanted, Suleman said: "Those are my children, and that's what was available and I used them. So, I took a risk. It's a gamble. It always is."
What, exactly, is the risk she is referring to? Does she mean that this thirty-three year-old unemployed single mother is taking a chance on being able to properly care, clothe and feed that many children? Does she mean that she wants to set some sort of dubious record? Did somebody bet her that she couldn't hold that many embryos in her womb at once?
"All I wanted was children. I wanted to be a mom. That's all I ever wanted in my life," Suleman said in Friday's interview. Even though there is no law in the United States dictating the number of embryos that can be placed in a mother's womb, doctors say the norm is to implant two or three embryos, at most, in women Suleman's age. Now the California Medical Board is left scratching their collective head, trying to determine just how ethical this particular treatment was. Whatever the outcome of the investigation, it certainly puts an interesting twist on any further discussion about "pro-choice."

Up In Smoke

Nobody asked if he inhaled. Michael Phelps' picture holding a pipe was enough. That he was shown smoking marijuana from that pipe was more than enough. Now, the greatest athlete of our time is considering packing it in for good. The man who would be Superman, or at least Aquaman, appeared to be a completely ordinary twenty-three year old. He no longer lives in that rarefied air of "winner of eight gold medals." He now belongs to the group of twenty-somethings who smoke pot with their friends.
The immediate reaction was correct: Polite contrition for this desperate act. “You know, it happens,” he said. “When stupid things are (done), bad judgment is made and mistakes are made, it happens.” Phelps said the attention the photograph attracted has forced him to consider retiring but he will talk with his family and his coach, Bob Bowman, before making a final decision. Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year is ready to call it a career.
It's not the first time Michael Phelps has been in trouble. After the 2004 Athens Games, he was arrested for drunken driving, pleaded guilty and apologized to his fans. Remarkable physical feats aside, he's still a kid finding his way. The United States Olympic Committee’s code of conduct doesn’t apply to athletes once the games are over. The penalty may be more severe in the real world, with massive endorsement deals with Speedo and Visa that could disappear in a puff of smoke.
So far, his sponsors are standing by him, but what will happen to Michael Phelps if he decides not to swim professionally anymore. Mark Spitz showed up on the Sonny and Cher Show, and did a guest spot on "Emergency," and then he drifted from view. We're a fickle bunch, and now that we have a superhero for a president, Michael Phelps can start counting the days until we anoint the next "greatest athlete."

Warning: Sign Ahead

Barack Obama wants to stimulate the economy by rebuilding our infrastructure. The stimulus package contains billions of dollars to spend on our highways and interstates, but I think it would be great if he would earmark just a few bucks to control the zombies.
In truth, now that Dick "Dick" Cheney has slithered off into the mist, we Americans have little to fear when it comes to the undead. Such is not the case with practical jokers. Pranksters in several different states are re-jiggering electronic road signs, alerting drivers of potential hazards: "DAILY LANE CLOSURES DUE TO ZOMBIES," "RAPTORS AHEAD — CAUTION," and the delightful hybrid "NAZI ZOMBIES! RUN!!!" Even in Illinois, these were not the problems that the signs were meant to point out. Not everyone was amused. "We understood it was a hoax, but at the same time those boards are there for a reason," said Joe Gasaway, an Illinois Department of Transportation supervisory field engineer. "We don't want people being distracted by a funny sign." I assume he means the same way that I was just distracted by his silly last name.
But isn't this kind of thing really a boon to the average commuter? If you drive the thirty miles of gray asphalt every day to and from your job, wouldn't it be nice to have a story to tell about how you narrowly avoided being torn to bits by prehistoric creatures, or maybe fled the scene of the latest George Romero opus? For the average motorists, those blinking signs just mean more bad news of the inconvenient type. What a happy gift it would be to see something clever on the side of the road.
Like mom said, "It's always funny until someone gets hurt," and so far it's still pretty funny.

Maybe There's Kryptonite In The Water Supply

It has been a tough two weeks. Even for a guy who was not supposed to have much of a honeymoon, fourteen days seems like a short time for our new president to get comfortable in that big chair. Nothing is getting fixed fast, and discussion about how to fix things has slowed to a crawl. It's back to business as usual in our nation's capital.
Or is it? President Barack Obama to CBS: "I screwed up."
Obama to CNN: "I think I screwed up, and I take responsibility for it."
Obama to NBC: "Did I screw up in this situation? Absolutely. And I'm willing to take my lumps."
This is our president's response to, by his own admission, mishandling the confirmation of some of his cabinet appointees. Where is the plausible deniability? Where is the obfuscation? Where is the chest thumping rhetoric? After eight years of Bizarro-World President. This feels like a breath of fresh air.
But even too much fresh air can give one pneumonia. We are approaching the thirtieth anniversary of Jimmy Carter's infamous "National Malaise" speech. This was the straightest talk our country may have ever received from its chief executive, and most historians point to that moment as the end of any hope Carter had at a second term: "I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" This was thirty years ago. Many of the problems that were left unsolved back then are the same ones that have only become worse with age: The economy, the environment, the situation in the Middle East.
I appreciate the candor, and I can only hope that our president's straight talk rebuilds the trust that has all but disappeared in the past three decades. That is my hope. Now I'm waiting for the change.

What Do You Get When You Cross A Snail With A Shark?

I had never heard the word "snarky" before I worked in a book warehouse. I would like to say that this is because, being ever-so-literate, I was able to find time to peruse the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll. "The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony In Eight Fits)" owes much to his shorter piece, "Jabberwocky" in tone and silliness. But I've never read it. I was introduced to snark by the head of our order department.
For her, snarky was a an adjective used to describe the relative pleasantness of an interaction with a customer. Depending on the level of snark, one could be labelled "really snarky" to "not snarky at all." She preferred the ones who were less snarky, but she was able to deal with large doses of snark over the phone. That's how she got her job: her ablilty to deescalate snark.
Over the years since then, I have received a number of odd looks when I have used this term to describe unpleasant interactions. Imagine my chagrin when David Denby, film critic for The New Yorker, chose to write a book about snark, titled "Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation." It is his assertion that dismissive, superior, jaded discourse is becoming all too prevalent in a world that spawned TMZ.com and its antecedents. "We are in a shaky moment," Denby writes, "a moment of transition, and I think it’s reasonable to ask: What are we doing to ourselves? What kind of journalistic culture do we want? ... What kind of national conversation?"
In the past few months, we have been as fascinated by our new president's washboard abs as we have been with his policies. We have twenty-four hour news networks that feed us the same twenty-four second news bites in endless loops. It's easy to be snarky in this world. The challenge, as I learned way back when, is how we choose to deal with it.

Cerebration

Punxsutawney Phil popped out of his hole on Gobbler's Knob and saw his shadow, letting us know that winter will continue to drag on. Barack Obama stuck his head out of the Oval Office and saw the media, letting us know that the current recession will linger on for several more months. Meanwhile, we who are neither President nor groundhog continue to find ways to divert ourselves from the obvious.
For example: I saw a car parked on the street as I rode my bike home this evening. It had a "For Sale" sign taped in the back window. I did a double-take, because the price was $1,300. Some mental math told me that it was only $420 more than my first car. Both of them were used, and this one had the distinction of being some thirty years newer than the Vega I bought back in 1979. Did I mention the car for sale was a Mercedes Benz?
This is where my reverie began to unfurl. My younger brother bought a Mercedes when he was building his initial empire as a grocery checker back in high school. It was a beautiful thing, with leather interior and real wood on the dash. He even gave it a name: Cecilia. The car I saw would never be mistaken for Cecilia, but it was a four-door Mercedes.
What could possibly be so very wrong with any car that it would cost that much? You wouldn't need to drive it that much. You could live in the back seat to avoid the hassle of refinancing your mortgage, and just move it twice a month on street-sweeping days. Cars for a thousand dollars and gas for two dollars a gallon? How could I afford not to own it?
Then reality clicked back on. We just spent three hundred dollars making our other car work. I get plenty of exercise riding back and forth to school. Fuel for me is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty cents a gallon. And if I had a car, how would I spend my time wondering when Spring will finally come?

You've Got To Play To Win

I'll bet you I can tell you the score of this year's Super Bowl before it starts: I don't care. Get it? Okay, maybe that's not exactly how it's supposed to go, but it's all a part of what has become the most vicarious of all possible sporting events. I have friends who would like me to commit to one team or the other, but I remain firm in my convictions that I just want to see a really good game. Currently there is no line to bet on "a really good game" versus one that merely separates the commercials.
When I was a kid, my neighbor down the street saw every event and occurrence as an opportunity to wager. "I'll bet you I can make that shot left-handed." He had, of course, spent the previous six hours perfecting his left-hand technique. "I'll bet you we're gonna have pizza this week." Some of us had yet to realize that the school lunch menu was an item that could be read and memorized up to a week in advance. Who knew?
I lost a lot of milk money to that guy, until I realized that he only bet on things that he could control. The most impressive example of this trait was the casino he built in his parent's garage. Using episodes of "McHale's Navy" as his inspiration, he called it, "Little Vegas." It featured Roulette, Blackjack, and Craps. He had painstakingly rigged all of these games for the house to win. No matter that the odds for all of them are already tipped heavily in that direction, he wanted to be sure. By this time, I had learned my lesson from too many hard looks from my parents. But that didn't keep him from rounding up the other kids in the neighborhood to fleece them. Maybe I should have warned them, but that's why they call it "gambling."
So when you feel compelled to put your money down on a square, or bet the spread or who wins the coin toss, just remember all those ten-year-olds who learned that it's impossible to make eight the hard way with loaded dice. Me? I'm just hoping for a good game. And I've got twenty bucks that says Bruce is going to play "Badlands." And you can take that to the bank.