People Say The Darndest Things

Sarah Palin says a lot of things:
Buck up or stay in the truck.
We eat, therefore we hunt.
I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out.
We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn't that ironic?
"Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!
They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan.
They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
What's the difference between a pitbull and a hockey mom?
Drill baby, drill.
She also says she could beat Obama in 2012.
She also said, "I quit."
Winter is coming.

The New Computer Age

My wife likes to tell a story about the Harmonic Convergence, as in the happy portion of the end of times. Back in 1987, many people believed this two day event ushered in a period of peace and understanding. The outward evidence my wife, her mother and her brothers experienced was the amazing windfall of airline tickets, hotel rooms, and cash awards when they were bumped from their flight back from Europe where they were broke and becoming a little desperate. They found their way home after a couple nights' stay in plush accommodations with money in their pockets, ready to face the end of the world.
That was what the seventies and eighties were all about for many. It was the New Age. Folks wore crystals around their necks and searched the stars for answers to the problems found here on our home planet. They used pyramids to sharpen razor blades, cure diseases and improve their alpha states. They listened to angels and spirits and any other voice that might have had wisdom for them coming from the great beyond.
That was thirty years ago. Now we use computers. The Internet gives us all kinds of important perceptions that might not have reached us without the oracle on our desks. Al Gore's Internet has been implicated in the deaths, or rumored deaths of dozens of celebrities, yet we continue to trust it. We feel compelled to forward bad poetry to one another in hopes of spiritual awakening or face impending bad juju. Good fortune comes our way on a regular basis from bankers in Nigeria, or Bill Gates. There is a world of virtual oneness waiting at the end of your connection to the World Wide Web.
And skeptics like me keep bursting that bubble. There are no easy ways to get rich using just your Internet connection. Most of those opportunities are merely opportunities to have your bank accounts drained. If you open an e-mail from a stranger that tells you that you have just received a major cash award, enjoy the moment. Then delete it. The magic comes from the way that we can reach out and interrupt strangers' lives with a simple key stroke. Photoshop enables us to amuse each other with "real pictures" of sharks attacking helicopters and kittens doing the most adorable things. But there is no real magic. For that you must consult the Magic Eight Ball. You might start with: "Will the world really end in 2012?"

Beatles For Sale

I read some of the hype before it happened. There were plenty of people who wondered if having The Beatles available on iTunes would be any sort of revelation. After all these years of holding out, would there be any mania left? Many complained that it would stick a pin in the magic balloon that was the Beatles magic: Albums. Buying "A Day In The Life" for ninety-nine cents without the music that necessarily proceeds it? Sure, completists can now have their single of "I Know Your Number (Look Up My Name)" on their mp3 player, but at what cost? I don't mean the thirteen dollar per album cost, either.
Cynics like myself will point out that the last few years have found the corporation that has come to represent the Fab Four has cannily found ways to connect with anyone who might still have a way to spend money on the Beatles' catalogue. The Cirque de Soliel show in Las Vegas proved that "Love" wasn't really all you need. You'll need the CD of songs that you already had, remixed especially for the show. You'll want the T-shirt and the souvenir program. And before you know it, you'll need the video game where you can sing along with John, Paul, George and Ringo.
I may be a cynic, but I found my way to the local electronic noise emporium to snap up some of these items.
I didn't buy any of the newly remastered versions of all the Beatles' albums last year. Part of me pined for them, while the rest of me bristled at the calculated capitalism of it all. Now I can buy the same sounds in an inferior quality for less than a dollar a song? I shouldn't be surprised. As long as there have been artists, there have been agents, patrons, or hangers-on willing to squeeze the last dime out of whatever creation the artist manages to produce. How else could one explain the existence of a "Milli Vanilli Greatest Hits" package?
It was Brian Epstein who got the lads into suits and ties in the first place, long before they ever wore marching band uniforms. For now, I'll go ahead and line up for the digital Revolution. Not because I am so gullible, but because there is still some magic left in those lads from Liverpool. And their accountants.

Night Moves

Whenever I hear Bob Seger singing "Night Moves," the first thing I think about is: What does "tight pants points hardly reknown" mean? I know that the rest of the song is about making out in the full heat of adolescent passion, but I have no idea what those points are. Then almost as quickly I remember my own back seat memories.
What I remember most is that I wasn't there. Instead, I was such a good friend to my buddy, who was a year older but had not yet made the commitment to buying his own car, that I drove him and his girlfriend around the dark cul de sacs and mountain lanes of Boulder. I listened to the stereo while they steamed up the back window. Every so often I would get a command from the rear, like "Change the station," or "Hold my watch." These things I did dutifully for a pair of reasons. First of all, I was so desperate to please my upperclassman friend that it never occurred to me that when asked the question, "Will you drive me and my date around this Friday night?" I could answer "no." Secondly, I imagined that I was somehow involved in this tempestuous love story that had me as the go-between, the savior of their relationship. I was doing something almost literary in its nobility.
Or maybe I was simply being used. Looking back, it is the portion of my youth that I have the hardest time reconciling. I gave up plenty of evenings when I could have been pursuing my own companion for my own back seat. I could have been home watching "Fantasy Island." I could have found a job babysitting and been paid to watch "Love Boat." Instead, I was using my gas and spare time to drive this tangled mess of heavy breathing around the outskirts of town. It's a self-esteem thing, and I wish that I could go back and tell my sixteen-year-old self to get some esteem, but it turns out that it was one of those events that helped to shape me. And make me flinch every time I hear Bob Seger.

Lip Reading For Amateurs

"Read my lips: No new taxes." Those words came from the father of best-selling author George W. Bush. While history has begun to reveal that the elder Bush was far less objectionable than his progeny, this loud assertion put him in a most untenable position. This attempt to channel Clint Eastwood may have been the high point of his peevishness. It also gave many people in our deluxe-air-cushioned-built-for-speed country that this was some sort of clever option. Republicans love to tell us that taxes are bad and that we should be able to keep our hard-earned money. Thank you, Republicans! Now I can afford to go out and buy my own health care coverage and pave the roads of my state and keep the doors of my public schools open.
I learned to hate taxes way back when I used to play Monopoly. Seventy-five bucks for "luxury tax?" Can't you see I'm constructing an empire here? Did you expect me to redistribute my wealth to the other money-grubbing thieves sitting around the table? That's my hard-won cash, and I'm not giving back to the bank just because I had the misfortune of landing on that space instead of Boardwalk or Park Place.
But rules are rules, and I am no cheater, so I paid up and waited for my turn to come around again. Now it's the Republicans' turn in the House of Representatives. They just rolled double sixes and they want to make sure that the tax cuts that were put in place under the Son Of No New Taxes. Those are the ones that protect Americans making more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. The current President, who has also made a lot of promises, would like to see those people "pay more of their fair share." Meanwhile, the guy who wanted to be President but made some bad choices of his own had a suggestion: "They should be extended until we are out of this recession," John "You Picked Who For Your Vice-President?" McCain said. "At such time we can look at other tax hikes. But when we're in a serious recession I cannot believe that raising taxes is a good thing on anybody." Somebody wake John up and tell him that the recession is over. Especially for those lucky enough to be making more than two hundred thousand dollars a year.
And so the dance continues. The debt clock continues to tick away in the background, the debate over how we're going to pay for all of this. I suggest we start tossing all our extra money in the center of the board until somebody lands on "Free Parking."

Relativity

It happened before. There have been plenty of mornings when we have stood on the porch looking wistfully at our son as he heads off into his future. Most of the time, however, one of us had to drive him, so the moment wasn't quite as poignant. This was the second time that he has spent the weekend at college. The waking hours, anyway. The rest of the time he was in a car traveling back and forth to Palo Alto. I was the one watching him go.
This time he was going as an eighth grader. He is now scant months from his freshman year in high school. A couple weeks back, we went to a prospective parents' night and listened to teachers and administrators talk about how they wanted every student to be prepared to go to college upon graduation. Advanced Placement, College Credits, sending kids up the road to Berkeley to take upper division classes, choosing an academy that would give them a better chance at getting into the college of their choice. It made my head spin.
A few years back, I made the joke that, as a fourth grade teacher, I would no longer be able to help my son with his homework once he was promoted to the fifth grade. Standing in the Engineering Department of his prospective high school, I watched my son's eyes light up as he sat at a drafting table. As a cartoonist, I could only imagine how straight the lines in his head were, and as an elementary school teacher, I could only wince in anticipation of the work he might be doing in the coming years. Maybe my hope for a flying car was sitting right in front of me all along.
This child. The one who still carries his Bionicle backpack to school every day. The kid who sleeps above one of the largest privately-owned collections of Lego in the continental United States. The boy who listens to the same CD of Winnie The Pooh stories he first heard when he was four. The same kid who has started talking to girls. The same child who has to be told to turn his Linkin Park down. My child. My son.
Driver's licences, dating and a thousand other tiny rites of passage await between now and the day that he pulls out of the driveway for that first day of college for real, but for now I feel the pangs and the wonder at how far we've come and how far he still has to go.

When It's Time To Go, It's Time To Go

Sometimes it's better to get out while you're ahead. Back in August, the creative genius behind the "Cathy" comic strip, Cathy Guisewite decided to pack it in. After thirty-four years of creating a daily comic strip of unparalleled humor and pathos, Ms. Guisewite put up her pen and paper and she also revealed that after three and a half decades of meeting newspaper deadlines she could not give time to her family and failed to meet her “personal deadlines” which made her take this decision of not to “procrastinate” any longer for her retirement. Take a moment to savor the unnecessary quotation marks.
She went the way of her idol, Charles Schultz, creator of "Peanuts." In this case, the quotation marks are necessary to set the title of the work apart, the work of a lifetime. With fifty years of syndication, Mr. Schultz created a world of happiness, fear, sadness, security and imagination. His comic inspired classic TV moments and a number of giant helium balloons that have appeared in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Cathy never did that.
But Jim Davis did. I mention this because Mr. Davis managed to do something that neither the queen of low self-esteem or Old Sparky did: He ran a strip on Veterans Day in newspapers across the country that shows a spider daring the pudgy orange cat to squash it. The spider tells Garfield that if he is killed, "they will hold an annual day of remembrance in my honor." The final panel shows a spider-teacher asking its students if they know why spiders celebrate "National Stupid Day." Garfield's creator said that the publication of this particular comic on Veterans Day was the "worst possible timing," and it came as a complete surprise since he had written the strip over a year ago. Davis said his brother served in Vietnam, and his son is a Marine who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he is grateful for the service of veterans, and called any offense "unintentional and regrettable." Feel free to figure out what those quotation marks mean.