I Know What I'm Missing

The message came to me, appropriately enough, through the "Messages" tab on my cable TV interface. It told me to expect that the NFL Network would soon disappear from my channel menu. It was the antithesis of a "coming soon" announcement: "Evaporating on this spot!" And my initial impulse was to fly into yet another frenzy of trying to find television service provider that would offer me all the choices that I so desperately require.
Then I remembered: I have already been down this particular rabbit hole. I know that I could have called my cable provider at any time this past season and, once the check cleared, they would have flipped the switch to bring me not just regular season games, but hours more football related programming. There are a variety of ways that I could spend my weekends watching more televised sports. Most of these involve ever-increasing outlays of cash money for the opportunity to watch my favorite teams on Sundays. And the occasional Saturday. And Thursday. And Monday. Getting my football from a satellite in outer space would have allowed me an even larger choice of venues and teams. I could be watching the draft combines. I could be sitting on the couch for even longer stretches of time watching others exert themselves. Saying yes to any one of these packages would require me to deal with someone whose chief reason for existence is to encourage me to buy that one more service that would make my sports fantasies a reality. At least that's been my experience over the past few years. Maybe the NFL will start a program to stimulate fan interest and ticket sales by offering all of their programming to the public at limited or no expense to the average fan.
Maybe John Elway will be starting quarterback for the Detroit Lions next season. I surrender my need to see every down, every penalty, every time-out. I know that games can and will take place without my active participation. It was one of my wife's friends that pointed out how much more fun and satisfying it is to watch only the highlights of the day's games. She has a point. even though the immediacy of the contest is eliminated, you get to see the parts that really mattered. Until they start making me pay extra to watch Sportscenter.

Rise Of The Machines

Today when I got to school, I thought I should check our rolls to see if there was a John Connor enrolled. Those of you who got the reference can feel free to wait while others follow the link. Now that we're all safely back together, it's time to face the facts: The machines are winning. Not because they are so vastly superior. We built them after all. But because they don't have any feelings.
I thought about this as I recalled my "hassle-free" interaction at the grocery store where I scanned my own items, bagged them, and walked out of the store without a single personal interaction. Just like the electronic check-in at the airport. Not a word needed to be spoken. Unless you count those utterances under my breath when the bar code reader wasn't able to make sense of my carefully printed boarding pass.
Guess what? Even if the machine did hear me, it didn't care. It kept right on doing the thing that it was supposed to do. Without a smile or a frown. It kept right on beeping and booping like it was made to do just that. And it was.
Machines are not required to care about the quality of the experience. They are designed to process a transaction as efficiently as possible, and if that means you don't get any pleasant conversation as you meander through your day, so be it. Of course that means you also get to avoid the occasional surly manner or fed-up-with-this-boring-job-attitude. Which leaves you with even less to commiserate about with the humans that you interact with.
I thought of all the science fiction movies and novels that included the replacement of all service functions by machines. Doctors, police, food service, care maintenance, and even teachers put out to pasture by robots: machines without feelings. Ironically enough, it is precisely those emotions that I believe makes me a better teacher. And a better human being.
Until Cyberdyne makes an even better one.

Listening In

From the Presidential News Conference March 24, 2009:
Q: But on AIG, why did you wait -- why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the attorney general's office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, look, we're outraged. Why did it take so long?
OBAMA: It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.

Lately our new president has been taking some heat for his use of a teleprompter. Maybe we are about to discover the limits of this man's rhetoric. So be it, I say. If it will keep him from popping off with witty bon mot about Special Olympics, I might suggest that he continue to stick with his prepared remarks. Leave the awkward moments to the Vice President. Joe seems much more accustomed to humiliation and ridicule.
Our new president does not. He wants to be prepared. This is in stark contrast to "The Decider." President Pinhead periodically gave the impression that policy was being created at the podium, and quite possibly it was. The "outrage" called for in the past eight years has been all too easy to see and hear. We didn't send troops in to occupy AIG or attack it with cruise missiles. That seems like evolution. Barack Obama is a thoughtful man, and I think we can expect much more direct and directed communication from him. If we have to wait an extra day or two to get a straight answer from our commander-in-chief, that's a price I'm willing to pay. His Nielsen ratings may be slipping, but he's got more to worry about than pre-empting "American Idol."
It may be a while before we get another rafter-shaking bit of elocution like the ones that got him the job in the first place, but I will still be happy with some straight talk while we're waiting for the fire and brimstone.

Purple Hazing

My son came home on Friday with a story that struck me square in my parenting solar plexus. He told us that it was "Freshman Friday." What, his parents asked quizzically, was "Freshman Friday?"
"It's the day that all the seventh and eighth graders beat up the sixth graders."
All of them?
"Not all of them. Mostly just the boys. Before P.E."
And now my heart sank. All of the joy that my son had been taking in his progress and participation in middle school physical education was suddenly at risk of evaporating into the ether. Didn't the coach do anything to stop it?
"We had a sub today, and it all happened before they came out."
Thus began a days-long project of getting to the bottom of this "tradition." We discovered that it was a hand-me-down from high school, and it had occurred to the seventh and eighth graders that since they were destined to be embarrassed and pummelled when they became ninth graders, it was only fair that they pass along their potential torment ahead of the actual grief to kids who had no reckoning of such torture. There are, after all, no freshman in middle school.
We talked to the principal and his P.E. teacher. We told him how it was really a backhanded (unfortunate choice of words) compliment. The boys who shoved him around were welcoming him in a way that made little or no sense to him or his parents.
But it reminded me of the fear I felt from the first day of spring when I was in sixth grade. The kid down the street had told me that I should look forward to "initiation" into junior high. I walked quickly past his house, or avoided it by walking the long way around the block. A few friends suggested that I could just surrender to the inevitable and get it over with, but I had heard stories from other friends who got "smeared." I had no interest or inclination to have shaving cream in my hair or lipstick on my face, arms, neck, back, and so on. It would also, almost certainly, involve a degree of pain with which I was uncomfortable.
That's when I came back to the present. I realized that there were no reassuring words I could offer my son. We can walk him to and from school, and he can eat his lunch in the science room, but there is always some nimrod out there ready to share his fractured vision of acceptance when you least expect it. And for the record, the kid down the street never did follow through on his threats. I just spent the summer in hiding. This is how we learn.

Love, Exciting And New

David Letterman finally married his longtime girlfriend, and mother of his child, Regina Lasko last week. I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt best wishes to the newlyweds, and I hope they have many happy years together. But I can't help but feel just a little sad. Regina wasn't the woman I had hoped Dave would end up with. I had hoped that he would have lived happily ever after with Merrill Markoe.
Way back in the eighties, Merrill was the head writer for both Dave's morning and his original "Late Night" shows. That was back when they were "an item." They didn't have any kids, but they did raise a pair of German Shepherds. They inspired the creation of "Stupid Pet Tricks," as well as serving as set dressing: in photos behind his desk. Alas, when the eighties were over, so were they. She went to California, and he became the king of "late night tellyvision." They just seemed so good for each other.
Workplace romances never pan out. Still, I was hoping that Burt Reynolds and Sally Field would end up together. They seemed to have such a nice influence on each other, she kept his ego from swelling disproportionately and he kept her from being too cute. It was a pleasant symbiosis. Then he went and married Loni Anderson. Yeesh. I wonder how often he wishes he could have that one back.
It's tough to keep a relationship afloat in the seas of everyday life, but when you toss in a typhoon of celebrity, it becomes a challenge few manage to navigate without incident. Spencer Tracy never left his wife for Katherine Hepburn. Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson are "just good friends." And poor Jennifer Aniston. Sigh.
I can remember how sad I was, when I was just a kid, to find out that Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore weren't married in real life. Maybe "real-life" is just overrated.

What's The Pontiff It All?

Nobody asked me, and it's probably none of my business since I have no particular religious affiliation, but I think the Pope is off his nut. That is to say I believe that that pointy hat may be concealing an even pointier head. For most of my adult life, I have been quietly pleased and happy with the work of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. Maybe it's because he's named after one of my favorite song-writing teams, or perhaps it's because he worked to bring about more understanding and thought among the world's religions. He was a uniter, not a divider.
Pope Benedict XVI, though named for a very tasty egg dish, has little of John Paul's public demeanor. This is the gentleman who recently told reporters, "You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem." The "it" in question is the AIDS epidemic, and his comments were made en route to Africa, the continent estimated to have more than sixty percent of the world's AIDS-infected population. He also said that 2009 will be "The Year of Africa." For those who survive.
I know that Benedict has the same party line as John Paul when it comes to condoms, but this comes fast on the heels of the excommunication in Brazil of doctors who performed an abortion on a nine-year-old girl who had become pregnant after being raped by her stepfather, along with family members who sought the abortion. If the father had used a condom, would souls have been spared?
On the flip-side, a bishop who had denied the Holocaust saying that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed," had his excommunication lifted back in January. For the Vatican, there is a line between heresy and lying, and they are keenly aware of the difference, regardless how it may seem to us out here leading less-than-Catholic existences. While in Angola, the Pope took a stand against sorcery. The faculty of Hogwarts Academy could not be reached for comment. Meanwhile, two teenage girls were killed in a stampede at a youth rally for the Pope in Angola on Saturday. No contraceptives were involved.

Spring Cleaning

I am sitting at my desk, looking out the window into my front yard, watching the first blossoms from our plum tree swirl around in the first spring breeze. It looks calm, in spite of the wind. Friday evening I was sitting in the same place when I looked up to see a car pull into the parking lot of the apartment building next door. A pair of young men jumped out, and as the driver polished off the can of whatever was in his brown paper bag, the passenger scooped the contents of the back seat out onto the ground. I thought it was an odd time and place for this chore, and it became a little more suspicious when the passenger scurried to the curb to drop a purse into the trash. To be more precise, he dropped it into the compost-only green bin. Then they were back in the car, heading up the street.
I made a note of the color and model, as well as the lack of license plate. Then my wife, the adventurous one, went to fish the purse out of the compost. There was a library card, some mail, food stamps, and a few other personal items. The only way these items were trash was if they didn't belong to you. We called the police with a description of the car and its occupants, along with the contents of the purse, along with the papers from the back seat.
If I lived in Mayberry, I might expect some straightforward resolution to this story. Hoodlums from Raleigh, no doubt. Instead, I live in Oakland. The first three items in our local news Saturday were about shootings, one of which occurred just a few blocks from where I'm sitting. I quickly checked that one for more information on the off chance that there was some connection between my incident and the homocide. Somehow, to me, it would be more reassuring if it were all connected. A crime wave perpatrated by a kingpin, a druglord who was on the verge of being apprehended as his empire crumbled in the light of a new day.
No such luck. In spite of the change of season and our new administration, bad things continue to happen right outside our door. I know that it is no different than any number of large urban areas, but this is the one I call "home." Outside the branches wave their assent.