TV Party Tonight!

The headline read, "Too much TV psychologically harms children: study." Or, for those of you unfamiliar with the parlance of the fourth estate, "There's a study out that says that TV is bad for kids." The fact that I read this story while staring at a slightly rectangular screen, I took it with a grain of salt, but less than I would had I seen if first on CNN.
The folks at the University of Bristol want us to know that kids who "spend hours each day in front of the TV or games console have more psychological difficulties like problems relating to peers, emotional issues, hyperactivity or conduct challenges, than those who don't." I could suggest that they talk to the pasty-faced kids eating paste whose parents don't allow a television in the house and see how well they interact with their peers, but that might seem a tad hostile. But what would you expect to a child of the TV generation? Most of the history I have witnessed has taken place on TV. Some of my happiest moments have come bathed in its warm glow. I remember who shot J.R. I remember seeing the Fonz jump the shark before it became a national trend. Captain Kangaroo started my day, and Johnny Carson ended it. Like most parents of that age, mine were alternately concerned and apathetic about the hours my brothers and I spent in front of the tube. My grandparents were probably worried about how my mom and dad spent all those hours with their ears pressed to the radio, and their parents fretted about the effect that vaudeville was having on them.
I tell my son to turn off the TV or close up the laptop. I try and count the minutes he spends in front of screens of any sort, and it makes me crazy. Especially when I try and justify the way my couch faces the big slab of pixels. It's video feng shui. Still, it is hard to argue with the wisdom of Aristotle, who insisted on moderation of all things, but then again, his buddy Plato had us all staring at shadows on the wall of a cave a couple thousand years ago. I wonder if his kids were hyper too.

We've Got Another Riddle For You

This was the image I stared at over the weekend. This was the image that stayed with me as I thought about all the ways that my family and I could keep the planet clean enough so that we could raise another generation on it. This is not a picture of Oompa Loompas stirring chocolate in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. These are community workers, wearing protective gear, cleaning a street flooded by toxic mud in the village of Kolontar, Hungary. The sludge continues to threaten the town as a hole fifty yards wide has been blocked, but cracks around the rest of the retaining wall show cracks and signs of giving way. Residents of Kolontar, accent on the "tar," have been evacuated, while the folks just up the road have been told to pack a bag "just in case."
Just in case the goop continues to creep down their streets and toward their houses. Just in case this ugly incident keeps getting uglier. For the record, the company responsible, the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, has apologized for their participation in the mess. The mess that includes seven deaths and one hundred and fifty injured, with three still missing somewhere in all that muck. The company says they are willing to pay compensation "in proportion to its responsibility" for the damage caused by the deluge. As the slop has already painted the Blue Danube red, and threatened countless flora and fauna in the region, one might wonder why that percentage wouldn't be one hundred percent. And then there's the fact that the head of the company has been detained by local police. Are you listening, British Petroleum?
There's not a lot of naturally occurring instances of bauxite being refined into alumina, but we can expect that corporate lawyers will be working as hard as the folks in this picture to keep the gunk from sticking to them. Something Oompa Loompas would never do.

Stories We Could Tell

Sometimes I like to give my father all the credit for my love of books. It was, after all, his life's work to bring the printed work to the masses. I learned about offset presses and binding machines by wandering through the press room and eventually finding myself working there one summer. It gives me shivers to see the spine of a book stressed to its maximum, laying face down on a couch or coffee table. The stitching and glue are strong enough, but show a little care, please.
For all the philos for biblio I may have found at my father's feet, I would still point to my year in Miss Stuart's fourth grade class as the point in my life where there was no turning back. Miss Stuart's room was lined with bookshelves, and it was a rare occasion when we needed to leave the friendly confines to search the school's library for something to read. Miss Stuart is the one who gave her class the rules for book etiquette: Don't lick your fingers before you turn the pages. It will turn the corners yellow and cause them to rot. Book marks should be thin, like a piece of paper, not thick like a pencil or ruler. And she was in complete agreement with my father about leaving books face down while unattended. Following these rules was the simple reason why she was able to amass such a wide selection of kids' books. We all shuddered when we saw the way other classes mistreated their library books. We knew that many of them might not last the year. We knew that if any kid tore a page or wrote in Miss Stuart's books, that kid might not last the year.
She was, as the phrase goes, "a tough old bird." She is the one who set me to writing. I had some brief success back in the second grade with "The Drunken Snake" and an account of how our dog, Snoopy, helped the Denver Broncos win a football game, but it wasn't until the fourth grade that I found my audience, my voice. It was Miss Stuart's suggestion that I write and illustrate a "picture-story book." I wrote "Arthur The Fish," a tale of loneliness and desperation from under the sea. It was eight pages long and had a happy ending. The fact that each page only had a couple of sentences on it along with a clever cartoon did not hinder me in the least. It worked for Maurice Sendak, so why not me? It was Miss Stuart who put the vision of Newberry and Caldecott Medals in my head. They became my driving inspiration for my next effort, "Larry the Lion." It was a tale of loneliness and desperation from the jungle. It was ten pages long and had a happy ending. I had found my stride. When another kid in my class asked if I would illustrate his book, "Bubbles the Bear," I recognized it as a cheap Arthur the Fish knock-off, but took the gig anyway. Everyone said their favorite thing about Bubbles was the funny pictures of the cute bear. I knew what I was doing.
I turned my attention next to science fiction, with a tale of loneliness and despair called "The Day It Snowed Ten Feet Deep." I was way ahead of "2012" and "The Day After Tomorrow" on this one. It was about this time that Miss Stuart started sending me on book tours. At first, it was next door to the other fourth grade class, where I became instantly aware of my mild celebrity status. Then I moved to the Kindergarten circuit, where I showed up as awesomely clever and wise.
And so it went. Each time I finished a story, it was carefully typed up for me and then handed back to me to carefully fill the lower half of the page with my most imaginative illustrations. I thought about Maurice Sendak. I thought about Robert Lawson. I thought about the time when I would simply ascend out of Miss Stuart's class and be well on my way to being an internationally famous children's book author. I had Xerox copies of my books at home so that I could practice in front of the mirror, peeking down at my upside-down text just enough to keep each reading fresh. The originals were kept in the classroom, on a shelf not far from where my inspirations dwelled.
My father was the one who got those stories typed up. He was the one who got them neatly bound with a plastic comb binding and a clear plastic cover to preserve his son's work. My father's love of books may not have been as profound as that of Miss Stuart's, but it was for those books written by his son.

Welcome To Our World

Maybe it was all some sort of cosmic coincidence, but last Friday when Wal-Mart announced that it was no longer going to be sharing its profits with its employees, and all the kids in Oakland had the day off school, a newly refurbished Toys R Us opened its doors just across the tracks in Emeryville. It used to be a Toys R Us. It used to be "our" Toys R Us. It was one of the places where I felt at home when I moved out here from Colorado. I bought my wife and I matching Nerf dart guns there that became our go-to present for newlyweds foolish enough not to register at a place we could afford.
The Wal-Mart thing is easy enough to understand. They're pretty stingy anyway, and it is my son's lasting conviction that they were the ones who originally came between him and his beloved toy store, the ones that turned it overnight into a Babies R Us. It wasn't any kind of a place for a boy over the age of three to be found unless dragged there by his parents on a mission to buy some plastic shield to protect him or the rest of us from the potential spewings of a child much younger than him. It was our Toys R Us too. Many dad and lad afternoons had been spent there, wandering the aisles with no particular purchasing intent. Just miles and miles of toys, and smiles.
And on that serendipitous Friday night, all that magic came rushing back. We had on our list of things to do: pick up baby shower present. That got us to the parking lot, and then, once inside those sliding doors we found shelves of toys stacked to the ceiling. Action figures and video games. Legos and skateboards. Sure, the left side was still all cuddly and smelled faintly of talcum, but once you crossed that center divide, there was a world of toys once again. This was where our good friend passed our family's audition by showing us that she could hang with the Cavens at Toys R Us. She spoke wistfully of her Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine, and joined us in a fast-paced critique of a wide selection of board games. We knew we had a keeper.
There was too much mojo on that spot to let it live out its days as a place to stop by when you need a refill for the Diaper Genie. This new hybrid will take some getting used to, but for now it's a relief to know where I can start shopping for my Tron: Legacy Light Cycle.

She Choked Me To Death With Science

My wife likes the Earth. She wants to save it. I like it too, but I don't spend nearly the time or effort that she does. That's why when she told me about 350.org, I gave her my customary response: I nodded and smiled. I am, after all, a pretty clever guy and I know all about "parts per million" and carbon dioxide. It's a fraction problem. It's a poison problem. No matter how you slice it, it's a problem. My initial shrug didn't seem to work as well when I started to consider the reality.
We all know that there has been and always will be carbon in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we have more than we can use right now. This is that "greenhouse effect" that Al Gore wanted to tell us all about with his "Internet." Instead, we used his invention to look up recipes and stalk old girlfriends. Now I'm using that power to let you know that three hundred and fifty parts of carbon dioxide per million in our atmosphere is the safe edge of scary. We are currently past that. The count is now three hundred and ninety-two. That creaking sound you hear is the Greenland ice sheet melting.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to imagine life without ice. Or breathable air. We saw that in countless science fiction movies from the 1970's starring Charlton Heston. They didn't end well, but this one can. It means giving some things up, and taking new things on. It means thinking about what's going to happen next instead of waiting for it to happen to us. It doesn't require a monumental sacrifice from any one person, but it will mean change. Change is hard. Coincidentally, so is breathing after that three hundred and fifty. Solar energy, conservation, and simply thinking before you buy something is an easy enough start. Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
It's like I tell the kids who are sitting in the Principal's office: "Make better choices." Or wait for Al Gore to invent the climate-fixing machine.

What A Country!

Yakov Smirnoff never knew how good he had it. Here we are, a year and a half after The Recession ended, and people are still looking for jobs and shopping with food stamps. So much so that Republican demigod Newt Gingrich has labelled the Democrats as "the party of food stamps." I don't know if Newt has been to the A&P lately, but it's pretty hard to party on four hundred and fifty dollars a month.
Forty-one million people are on food stamps in America, up from thirty-five million a year ago. Newt wants us to look to his party as "the party of paychecks." The once and future face of the GOP insists, "Most Americans would like to get a paycheck. Most Americans would not like to be forced to have food stamps handed out by liberal Democrats." The mental image of those left-wing ninnies strong-arming their way into people's homes to impose their charity on the otherwise hard-working families of our great nation is a painful one to me. How, exactly, does one force food stamps on an individual? It's my guess that the choice to accept this government assistance is not one that is taken lightly by any family or individual. The whole idea runs in hard contrast to the image presented by so many conservatives of the welfare state lining up with their lazy hands out, expecting to be paid for doing as little as possible.
But Newt wants their votes. If you feel victimized by Democrats for being forced to take their smelly old food stamps, and here comes a guy who tells you that he's got a paycheck waiting for you right outside your polling place on election day, you can bet there will be a lot of proud Americans willing to do the right thing. He wants you to know that the Republicans will cut taxes and spending so that you can get your job back, and get off the dole. The jobs that went away didn't start disappearing when the current administration moved into the White House. Nor have we miraculously turned the boat around and started sailing for greener shores. There is enough blame to go around, but you can't eat blame.
Did I mention Newt is considering running for President in 2012? He needs a real job. No word on when his food stamps run out.

The Air Up There

Sometimes it's nice to see the alma mater back in the news for something other than being nudged out of the top ten in competition for Party School of the Year. I know. I was there: A mile high and rising wasn't just a way to intimidate other schools' athletic teams. It was a good way to describe a large portion of the student body at the University of Colorado. It is also a way to connect to our astronaut alumni.
We had one of the first: Scott Carpenter. He was in "The Right Stuff" and everything, even if he wasn't played by a Quaid. And we had some guys go up in the Apollo missions, including lucky number thirteen. Jack Swigert gives us one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. We have also lost a couple to the "surly bonds of earth." Ellison Onizuka died in the Challenger launch. Kalpana Chawla was a member of the ill-fated Columbia crew. I guess I'm suggesting that, in the big book of space exploration, CU has certainly made their contribution by any measure. Boulder, Colorado even gave us Astronauts who could rock, like out of this world, man.
Now, the college from which I graduated is preparing a mission to Mars to investigate what life may have existed there, once upon a time. NASA has budgeted four hundred and thirty-eight million dollars for the expedition. No one from Colorado or any other academic institution will ride along with the suite of instruments that will probe the Red Planet's atmosphere and its interactions with the sun. No one, that is , unless somebody gets really wasted and passes out in the capsule the night before the launch. Stay tuned.