Fuzzy Wuzzy

I think of two people when I think of beards: First, I think of George Carlin. It's hard to think of him without one, since his was a kind of a badge of honor. When I listened to "Class Clown," long before the notion of shaving my own face occurred, I heard this: "That's the thing. The word 'beard' shook a lot of people up. Beard! It's not American sounding. BEARD! Lenin had a BEARD! Gabby Hayes had 'whiskers'. Monty Woolley had whiskers." Whiskers were the things my father would rub against my cheek before he sent me to bed. Hippies wore beards. Hippies like George Carlin.
My dad had a lot of opinions that he seemed to have acquired from a manual on the first day of Dad 101 training. Don't chew gum, it make you look like a cow. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. And people who wear beards are hiding something. I heard these pronouncements as a kid, and they became part of my road map. I still flinch mightily in the presence of gum chewing. Most home improvement projects involve me channeling my father's advice on how to open or close a valve or tighten a screw. And I have never taken growing a beard lightly.
In my late twenties when I had a job moving furniture, I figured that shaving was  a chore I could leave for another time or place, and I grew quite scruffy. I remember telling my father, who never asked, that the thing I was hiding with my beard was my interest in shaving. When I moved to California, I brought my beard with me, and it may have been hiding something, but once my son was born, it had to go. I shaved off my beard and mustache when I saw how his little face squished up when I leaned down to kiss him goodnight.
Imagine my surprise when, after a decade and a half, my son asked me why I didn't grow a beard. It was summer vacation, and having recently shaved my head, my chin was free to be the place where hair sprouted. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth day when those whiskers began to organize themselves into a more recognizable form. I thought about the ads in the back of comic books that offered paste-on facial hair. I thought about the way gray hair made my face look. And I thought about what I might be hiding. For now, I guess I 'm hiding from all that worry about what I might be concealing in the depths of my soul. That and I'm too cheap to run out and buy new razor blades.

“Crime is naught but misdirected energy.”

Those words are from Emma Goldman. Nobody needs to tell me that we have a lot of misdirected energy here in Oakland. A recently released report gave the police department's ninety day crime suppression program mixed reviews. One area showed "a small reduction in homicides, but there also has been an increase in other major crime categories during that same time period, including auto theft, assault with a deadly weapon and burglaries." Three hundred and twenty thousand dollars later, "Robberies, burglaries and shootings (also) continue to be a challenge." In the past week there was a shooting at a local movie theater, and another out by the zoo. Motivation for all this gunplay? Maybe the ten fifteen show of "Spider Man" was sold out, or perhaps the Meerkat enclosure was closed.
Maybe they're just plain mad. Out in Chicago, things are worse. Chicago already has had two hundred seventy-five murders this year. Putting an extra thousand officers on the street didn't make the dent city officials had hoped. Mayor Rahm Emanuel blames gangs. "We've got two gang-bangers, one standing next to a kid. Get away from that kid. Take your stuff away to the alley. Don't touch the children of the city of Chicago. Don't get near them. And it is about values. ... And I don't buy this case where people say they don't have values. They do have values. They have the wrong values. Don't come near the kids—don't touch them." He asked nice. Sort of.
Back here in the Bay Area, the Santa Cruz police department has decided to let computers help out. Officers are dispatched to places where machines anticipate there might be crime. You may have seen this in the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film, "Minority Report." Future crime. Arrest them before it ever happens.
Or try and eliminate the causes of crime in the first place. Use computers if you have to. And stay away from the kids.

The Borg

When I heard the Borg was dead, the call went out. Not to my wife, who is the one who cared about The Next Generation of Star Trek, but to my buddy out in NYC. This was not a Picard-related issue. This was the Borg: Ernest Borgnine. The guy who beat Frank Sinatra to death in "From Here To Eternity." The guy who battled Ethel Merman to a standstill in their six-week marriage. And yes, the guy who killed Socrates. I'm guessing Willard would have gone much easier on Ernie if that wouldn't have happened. Alas, some things just can't be undone.
Like the passing of the Borg. He lived just five years short of a century, won an Academy Award, and always got the best of ol' Leadbottom. I spent my youngest days watching a nearly uninterrupted loop of "McHale's Navy" reruns, always relating more to Ensign Charles Parker than the burly, conniving Commander Quentin McHale, but still respecting and admiring the work this slab of a man put in. That's why it was such a revelation to discover that Ernest Borgnine had been a very busy man when he wasn't racing about the Pacific on the PT-73. More than two hundred film and television credits, including his Oscar-winning performance in the title role of "Marty." It should be noted that in this film, he beat no one to death, man or rat.
But that's not the reason I e-mailed my pal in Manhattan. It was our shared fascination with another of his less celebrated roles: Jonathan Corbis. Yes, that's him giving some mild credibility to a cast that included Eddie Albert and William Shatner. The guy in the man-goat makeup. It's a pretty scary movie. Or at least it was back when we saw it at a drive-in in 1975. For a thirteen-year-old, man-goat trumps Academy Award just about every time. A few years later, he showed up as "Cabbie" in John Carpenter's "Escape From New York," mostly so people could say, "Hey! Is that Ernest Borgnine?" It was almost enough to make you forget that the guy behind the eye patch was the computer that wore tennis shoes.
Ernest Borgnine was the guy who, for us, originated the "boxed credit." You know, where everybody else was listed in order, but he was listed at the end, with a box around his name. Like John Lithgow in "Footloose," only way before that. The sadistic sheriff in "Convoy?" Ernie with a box around his name, and we started to refer to him as "The Borg." Long before Jean-Luc and his crew began to quake in fear of being assimilated, we knew resistance was futile. Aloha, Ernie.

You Know, For Kids

A while back, Hamas had a kids' television show that featured a Mickey Mouse clone who encouraged his viewers to "help wipe out the Jews." International outrage from individuals both private and corporate put a stop to that nasty little bit of anti-Semitic imagery. Instead, they now have a more generic pink bunny who reminds children how they will lose a hand if they get caught stealing, for example.
That's what's happening on one end of the Axis of Evil. Meanwhile, a little further to the east, we find more Disney characters cavorting about on North Korean television. The most notable thing about this appearance was that they were not spouting anti-American rhetoric, nor were they shouting the praises of their beloved leader, Kim Jong Un. Though Mickey and friends were definitely there for Kim's entertainment, it should be noted that the Korean Central News Agency has announced a "grandiose plan to bring about a dramatic turn in the field of literature and arts this year." If that includes bringing to the Korean masses Disney-fied versions of classic tales of Winnie The Pooh, Beauty and the Beast, and so many others, it is potentially a very expensive one. Disney lawyers threatened to sue the producers of the Oscar telecast back in 1989 when Rob Lowe sang "Proud Mary" with a girl who looked just a little too much like "their Snow White." While they might not have squeezed any cash out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you can spend a good long time looking for video evidence of such an occurrence on Al Gore's Internet and come up empty. It's like it never happened.
Which brings up back to the new openness of North Korea. Rather than the more traditional shows of dancing pandas that reflect their country's ties to China, the million or so televisions were able to receive pictures of dancing rodents and a cubby all stuffed with fluff. Kim Jong Un probably doesn't fear our missiles as much as he does our Intercontinental Ballistic Litigators. Stay tuned.

Cult Of Personalities

One of those freedoms that we here in the United States enjoy is the freedom of speech, which is odd, since it sometimes bumps up against other freedoms, such as our freedom of religion. There has been plenty of rumbling about whether or not we could survive with a Mormon as President of our great land. All that talk of magic underwear and Frontier Jesus, not to mention an avoidance of caffeinated beverages, makes people nervous. It doesn't seem to matter that we've had a Muslim in the White House for the past four years, so why start getting nervous now?
Maybe because we're not as tolerant as we make ourselves out to be. For the past week or so, I have avoided wading into the whole Tom/Katie pool of sorrow. Tom Cruise is neither Muslim nor Mormon. He is a Scientologist. That means that his beliefs are crazy and his wife and children should flee them as if their very lives depended on it. Doubters point to the practice of using an "e-meter" as an interrogation device, answering lengthy lists of questions founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote that a member should be asked by an "ethics officer" to make sure they weren't hiding any covert hostilities to the organization. Even if that member is only six years old. Then there's all that science fiction stuff about Thetans and so on that makes us rational folk frightened. You know, those of us who believe that there is a ghost that hovers around us, forgiving us whenever we remember to ask him to, or those of us who have no qualms about whittling on newborn's privates.
I'm not going to make excuses for Tom or Katie, just like I won't exclude my choices for elected office based on their spiritual beliefs. When those beliefs start to cross the line into policy decisions, then we have something called a Theocracy, and that's something right-thinking Americans have avoided ever since we stopped putting "In God We Trust" on all of our currency. Wait a minute -

Numbers Don't Lie

My son would like everyone to know that summer vacation has only just begun, but if a certain New Hampshire state legislator had his way, it might go on for a while longer for some of his state's youngest students. Bob Kingsbury recently claimed that analyses he’s been carrying out since 1996 show that communities in his state that have kindergarten programs have up to four hundred percent more crime than localities whose classrooms are free of five-year-olds. Bob's municipality has the only kindergarten program in the county and the most crime, including most or all of the county's rapes, robberies, assaults and murders.
Is it any wonder then that he opposes New Hampshire's public kindergarten mandate? "We're taking children away from their mothers too soon," Kingsbury said. Never mind that essentially every other published bit of research suggests just the opposite, Ol' Bob points out, "In World War I, London was being bombed by the Germans and they sent the children out of the city. That was a disaster for England." If you're having trouble with that train of logic, hold on. It gets shakier. "Children go to kindergarten at the point of a gun," Kingsbury said. "Children go to day care and it's not the same; there is no point of a gun." Day care and preschool are choices. Kindergarten is not. Never mind that for many working parents, having a place for their school age children to go is not a choice, not that anyone is pointing a gun at them. That would be a crime, and would have to be included in those very curious statistics he's espousing.
Did I mention that Bob is a Republican? A Tea-Party-ish Conservative Republican? Maybe the kind of guy who might be able to fathom the relationship between the global average temperature versus the number of pirates over time. After reading all of this, you might reconsider that job as a kindergarten teacher and decide to become a pirate.

Lights, Camera, Eternity!

A few days ago, a Fourth of July Fireworks Extravaganza occurred in San Diego, California. Four barges of fireworks were ignited, due to some technical glitch, at the same time. Instead of a twenty minute show of "oohs" and "ahhs," there was a twenty second barrage of sound and fire in the sky. For many, this would be described as "an epic fail." My son chose not to see it that way. "Are you kidding?" he enthused, "I'd pay to see that." Once again we see that beauty is, at least pyrotechnically, in the eyes of the beholder.
It also got me thinking about Tralfamadorians again. Their concept of time, specifically the one espoused in "Slaughterhouse Five," suggests that past, present and future exist all at once. For this reason, they see everything as predetermined. Everything is as it was and will be. For a Tralfamadorian, the show in San Diego was every bit as enjoyable as a three hour display. It's also helping me think about the recent flurry of activity that surrounded my fiftieth birthday. For nearly two weeks, friends and family hovered about, sent greetings and remembrances of my time on Planet Earth. All that attention was, at once, both edifying and embarrassing. Why fifty is any more significant than forty-nine or fifty-one was lost on me at times. Then I was caught up in that whole "half century" notion. Yet, in the big, Tralfamadorian picture, it was all a show of enthusiasm for all the years I've been here, as well as those I will ever be here. With that perspective, two weeks is a blink of an eye when considering a lifetime. And those fireworks in San Diego are still going on.