Auto Tune

As a kid in high school, it was my wish to have enough power in my car's sound system to make those fortunate to spend any time in my back seat to have a concert experience, so much so that I hoped to have passengers waving their lighters over their heads shouting, "Freebird!" Or at the very least, I hoped that they might wince as the volume creeped ever closer to that mystical Spinal Tap Eleven.
I accomplished this to a fair degree with the help of a few friends who worked tirelessly with me in my parent's garage for hours until we had moved the polite standard two-way speakers from the back and stuck them in the door, and installed a pair of big watt Jensen Triaxial speakers where the little ones used to be. It took many hours and several jigsaw blades, but before the night was over, I had one screamin' machine. There are those who suggest that putting that much time into the stereo of a 1972 Vega may have been an irresponsible investment of money, and effort. To them I would only ask if they had heard "Renegade" by Styx in my back seat. Without that experience, I feel they are unfit to judge me.
These days Styx still shows up on my iPod playlist from time to time. I think about the days when I spent most of my quality music time behind the wheel. I think about the cars driving by on my street that I feel blocks before they pass by because of the thumping bass that they carry around in their trunks. After they go by, I hear the rattle of ever nut and bolt, straining to hold the car together against the massive vibrations they are generating. There are even some who have rigged a speaker outside to share their music tastes beyond the booming bass.
The first thought through my mind is: "You kids turn that noise down!" Followed almost immediately by, "I wonder how many jigsaw blades they went through to get that thing installed.

Shadow Of A Doubt

Kudos, I say, to those who immediately responded to the release of Barack Obama's long form birth certificate with cries of doubt and suspicion. These are the values upon which this great nation was founded: "You colonies need to pay the King for that tea."
"I don't think so, King. As a matter of fact, we don't even think that tea will float." And so they tossed it into Boston Harbor. This was shortly before the colonists demanded to see proof of his majesty's birthright. In a world without fax machines or scanners, only those fortunate enough to have access to the royal papers in person and were able to read were able to make an informed decision. For everyone else, the suggestion that the King of England wasn't the boss of them was good enough to start kicking up a fuss, and the rest, as we say, is history.
Or something like that. It was a long time ago, and sometimes facts get mishandled or mistreated along the way and they don't come out looking like they did when they went in. What amazes me today is how quick the turnaround is. Texas Tech football coach and noted political analyst Tommy Tuberville joined real estate mogul and game show host Donald Trump to insist that our president prove that he was born in America. He did that and then faced a new flurry of skepticism from people with credentials every bit as impressive as these two.
The suggestion that there is no pleasing some people is guaranteed in our Constitution. So we expect that a travelling road show that would include both the actual paper document alongside the decaying and slightly fish-nibbled body of Osama bin Laden will be necessary to prevent another revolution. Or maybe the doubt is the thing that drives us. If we started trusting one another, or our leaders, we would soon find ourselves right back where we were in 1776. Right before the spaceship landed and those vaguely humanoid aliens helped us write the Declaration of Independence. Don't believe me? Can you prove it didn't happen?

Teachers Gone Wild

My older brother and I commiserate from time to time about our jobs. One of the things we tend to agree on is the way that certain jobs don't allow for bad days. Much in the way that Bill Cosby once suggested that doctors can't say "whoops," teachers and cops don't tend to get a lot of room for "a case of the Mondays." Nothing sweetens a headline like the phrase "off-duty cop" or "Las Vegas teacher." Such was the case of forty-year-old Carlos Enrique Barron.
Last week, Mister Barron fired shots at a television crew for the Spike TV reality show "Repo Games." A crew from the show was looking for a vehicle belonging to one of Barron's neighbors Tuesday night. He got upset that the crew's security van was parked in front of his home on Vigilante Court. It says Barron confronted the crew with a gun, slapped one of the crew's security officers and fired at least three shots. No one was hurt.
The first question would be: What would you expect to happen on Vigilante Court? The second one would be: Why didn't they offer this guy his own series? Instead, police were called and reports were filed. News gathering agencies added that Mister Barron has been suspended with pay from his job as a special education teacher at Smith Middle School while the investigation continues. I wouldn't argue the action, but it does make me wonder if he had been a car dealer or an accountant would his occupation and position been part of the press release? Maybe I'm just a little too sensitive. And unarmed.

Under New Management

My mom and dad dropped me off at Arby's after they drove me home from the airport. Not that I was yearning for a tasty Beef 'n' Cheddar, though that was an itch that could always be scratched, but because I needed to check the schedule. I had been away for a few days, and I hadn't put in a schedule request. I hadn't put in a schedule request in more than four years, relying on my personal connections with the powers-that-be to get me the shifts that I wanted. I had been working there since I had taken a year off to prepare myself to start college, and I had worked my way up to weekend closing manager. I have no idea how this was actually going to pave the way to my collegiate career, but making roast beef sandwiches for the masses certainly filled many a waking hour back in those days.
When I walked in the back room, I noticed that someone had cleaned up a little. Not that we ran a dirty restaurant, but the back room doubled as the break room and it had a certain amount of character. Not anymore. The desk was neat, the manuals were stacked in an orderly fashion on shelves above the filing cabinet. The first thing that I noticed was missing was the tape. Once upon a time, I had put a dotted line of electrical tape down on the floor to mark where the "office" was, including the door, as an homage to WKRP's Les Nessman, winner of the Buckeye Newshawk Award. It was also one of the best laughs I ever got from our regional manager. The other things I couldn't locate were the cartoons I had drawn for the bulletin board. "Clark Works Late Night?" Gone. "Mongoloid Smokers?" Gone. As a matter of fact, the bulletin board was clear with the exception of the freshly laminated "Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work" sign. Even more telling, the vacuum on which I had so carefully scrawled Wink Martindale's name in tribute to our regional manager's appearance on "Tic Tac Dough" was no longer in its corner. The fun, and the thrill was gone.
I looked out into the front where I recognized a few of the newer tuna, the employees who hadn't made it to the lofty position I had with its register keys and polyester vest. I knew the back of the head I was looking at: the new regional manager. The joy sucker. The one who had shown up and eliminated the reasons that I had hung around for so long. Working fast food is no one's idea of a really good time, but it had been made tolerable by a wave of whimsy that ran through the franchise where I did my time. Now it was just work.
I walked back to the desk, wrote my schedule request, and left my key. I requested more time off. A lot more.

Spring's Bustin' Out All Over!

The cherry blossoms have begun to appear in Washington D.C. Professional hockey and basketball teams are vying for spots in their respective playoff series. The Taliban announced the beginning of their spring offensive. Yes, it truly is that time of year when man's thoughts turn to love.
Wait a second. The Taliban have announced the beginning of their spring offensive. In a two-page statement, the Taliban said that beginning Sunday they would launch attacks on military bases, convoys and Afghan officials, including members of the government's peace council, who are working to reconcile with top insurgent leaders. Where was the grainy video or poorly recorded voice message about death to America? Sure, I understand it's all implied, but now that the leadership council of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban refer to themselves, are announcing their plans for terror in advance, it won't seem nearly as scary. Think of "Blair Witch Project 2." Once we all understood that the first one was just a cleverly concocted, made-on-the-cheap horror movie, the sequel was never going to have the impact of the first one. It's a little like trying to sneak up on someone while wearing corduroy pants: it's a giveaway.
It is the part of the war on terror that really does work. By shining a light on the monsters, we make them less terrifying. As soon as you start imagining the meeting that had to take place to come up with the title "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," then you start appreciating just how human these folks probably are. The fear of a suicide bombing is lessened ever so slightly by the image of a member of the Taliban searching in his desk drawer for a post-it on which he could write the names of possible martyrs.
Then again, there's not much we can do about taking the fright out of a few pounds of C-4. Maybe they should be taking their cues from the U.S. Navy Seals.

Mission Accomplished

It didn't take Chuck Norris, but heaven knows it probably wouldn't have taken a decade if he had been involved. Our long national nightmare is now at an end. My niece wrote me just moments after the announcement: "I'm rarely this jazzed to be an American, but..." And I knew exactly what she meant. We got the bad guy. We got him and killed him and we kept the body because we know that Donald Trump needs that kind of proof.
I confess that the "Wanted: Dead Or Alive" part of the post 9/11 America made me nervous, but I could never escape what had become a very personal vendetta against one man. Why should it be so personal? My usual liberal bias had a hard time absorbing this, and it was diminished by our subsequent invasion of Iraq. What was that about? Was I really going to be satisfied by the death of any old Middle Eastern crazy man?
Nope. Not really. It was a way to get at an itch that George the First hadn't quite finished scratching. It was like when James Bond takes out Oddjob at Fort Knox. Satisfying, sure, but it's not Goldfinger. We won't be happy until the big bad guy gets it. It was April 30, 1945, when Allied forces moved ever closer to capturing him that Adolph Hitler shot himself in the head. Sixty-six years later America managed to get there first. They got the bad guy and killed him. The guy that sent planes to crash into skyscrapers full of men and women, the guy who has been gloating about it ever since, Public Enemy number one, is no more. And as cathartic a moment as we've had since September 11, 2001 erupted. Better than beating the Russians at hockey in 1980. Better than passing a national health care bill. Better than a Super Bowl. Better than a Coke and a smile. Yes we can. Yes we did. Aloha, Osama.

Update Your Life

That was the headline of the article: "Update Your Life." The subtitle was: "iPhone 5 Preview." I had that momentary twinge of regret that all consumers do. You know the one. The one that says that your life would be incrementally better if you just had the newest best and did we mention new gadget or gizmo. How much better depends entirely on the gadget you get. For example, my wife just unloaded the automatic juicer that had been sitting on a cart that is loaded with our kitchen appliances. My mind immediately turned to all the fruits and vegetables that I never had a chance to liquefy. After a few seconds, that feeling passed and I was glad that we no longer had to store the big beige box with a plug on it.
The new iPhone? I'll probably be okay without that one too. Not that it would make juice, but it would give me a way to connect to Al Gore's Internet and play Angry Birds while I try and make a call to someone to explain why I am nowhere near a place that might normally support such activity. It reminds me of all those proto-car phone calls I got from my father back in the late eighties: "You'll never guess where I'm calling from!" I tried to play along, but after the first half dozen iterations, I started guessing "your car," and that was that.
The thing is, I don't know if my father's life was better because of this ability to reach out and connect with his son from the front seat of his Ford Explorer. Getting a signal back then was even more of a challenge than it is today with AT&T, so maybe the satisfaction of that struggle was something that he was able to massage into his life. He wasn't able to get 1080p high definition video, on a screen that is more than three and a half inches across. But not much more than three and a half inches. He was lucky to be able to squint and see the tiny slit that showed the number he was calling.
My cell phone isn't much better than his was. Twenty years later, if I push the right buttons, I can make my phone turn into a flashlight. When I hold it up and point it at kids I can pretend to take their picture. And when I turn it on, I can make phone calls with it. Sadly, I never owned a mobile phone while my father was alive. It would have been fun to be able to call him up and play his game, "guess where I'm calling from." That would have been sweet. Maybe the next iPhone will allow me to call the afterlife. I'd pay for that app.