50 Word Film Reviews (number 1 in a series): Vanishing Point (1971)

(I know; I need to get these to under 140 characters. I'm working on it. I just felt like broadening out a bit to, say, fifty words. Yeah. Fifty.)

 Kowalski. Just...Kowalski. If you have seen this film and ever considered driving a car way too fast, it's just..it's Kowalski. Trust me. Barry Newman. The Man. The Myth. Kowalski. Say it soft, and it's almost like praying.

Missing the Pop Culture Zeitgeist Completely (Or, a Response of Sorts to an Essay About “The Runaways”)

I haven’t seen the film The Runaways yet, but I know I’m going to like it. I’m a sucker for 70s nostalgia; I enjoyed “Dazed and Confused,” and count “Boogie Nights” as one of my all time favorite films.

I find it interesting, however, that thoughts of The Runaways turn neither Carolyn’s thoughts nor my thoughts to the 1970s. In Carolyn’s case, the band turns her thoughts to her halcyon early 1990s days in New York, specifically the Lower East Side. In my case, the band turns my thoughts to my bleak early 80s days on Long Island, specifically Great Neck.

For me, The Runaways mean Joan Jett. And for me, Joan Jett means March of 1982. Because, in March of 1982 the number one song in the nation was Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll.”

And at first I hated that song.

Specifically, I hated that song—and hated Joan Jett—because she had knocked another song off the top of the charts, a song that was on its way to a record for weeks at number one. I now must admit that at the time, I loved that song more than I loved Joan Jett, who has become an icon.

In much the same way that some teenagers must have passed up the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium for the chance to see Soupy Sales at a nondescript location, I passed Joan Jett by, and bet my passion on another song. And now, for the rest of my life, I must live with the fact that I chose this song and this band over Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

That song was “Centerfold” by the J. Geils band.

If you grew up in the 1980s going from thoughts of Joan Jett to the J. Geils Band is a bit like driving a sports car at top speed, slamming on the brakes, and whipping the steering wheel around so that the car faces in the opposite direction. The paradigm shift—particularly with the benefit of hindsight—is so dramatic, so jolting, that the brain feels as if it is spinning around in its skull case.

Time has, of course, been far kinder to Joan Jett than the J. Geils Band. Joan Jett has become an iconic symbol not just for strong independent women, but also for strong independent lesbians. This is not to say that you have to be a lesbian to be inspired by Joan Jett; as Carolyn’s essay made clear, any woman of any orientation could find her story inspiring.

This is not to take anything away from the J. Geils Band. They were a fun band that worked their way through Boston pubs, and in addition to “Centerfold,” they’re probably best known for the fun song “Love Stinks.” “Freeze Frame,” the title track from the album on which “Centerfold” appeared, which reached number four on the charts but by now faded from most people’s memory, was a catchy, upbeat tune.

But no offense, even though Peter Wolfe is a way cool guy, The J. Geils Band did not even hold a flickering candle to the force of nature that was Joan Jett. This was, after all, the woman who founded her own record label, Blackheart Records, and released the sensational album “Bad Reputation.” In addition to its scorching title song, this album also has one of the all time great album cover photographs (that's the one at the beginning of this article, where Joan is airborne).

Let me put it this way before moving on: I bypassed Joan Jett for a band that featured a harmonica player who willingly referred to himself as "Magic Dick."

So “The Runways” makes me think of Joan Jett, and Joan Jett makes me think of J. Geils. This in turn, makes me think of myself at the age of 15. And this, in turn, forces me to contemplate an inescapable truth:

God, what a pathetic little pencil-necked geek I was.

Put it this way: I know what a genuine pencil-necked geek is. I know this because of the novelty song by professional wrestling manager Freddie Blassie called, appropriately enough, “Pencil Necked Geek.” I know this because the song figured prominently on Dr. Demento, a radio show that played novelty records.

And so, while my only two friends in tenth grade listened to such bands as The Bad Brains, Stiff Little Fingers, The Sex Pistols, Public Image Limited, The Cure, The Stray Cats, The Buzzcocks, The Undertones, Ultravox, Kraftwerk, The Dead Kennedys, Squeeze, The Jam, The Specials, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, The Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmonds, Rockpile, Madness, and countless others, I was obsessively listening to “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes.

True, some the sharp musical tastes of these friends rubbed off on me, and I did indeed listen to these bands, dilettante that I was. Nonetheless, as these friends matured and I remained trapped in the immaturity that comes from listening to too much Weird Al Yankovic—not to mention being trapped in the body of an eleven year old in tenth grade—these friends outgrew me and began to drift from me. Sensing this, I switched schools, and transferred from Great Neck South to Great Neck North.

The story has a happy ending. Once at North, a group of girls took me under their wing, and I sort of became their mascot. My musical tastes blossomed, and a few years later, I was in a band with some of them.

It was sort of like how I imagine it would have been if I had been in a band with Joan Jett in high school. I like to think that if I had gone to high school with Joan Jett, she would have beaten the crap out of anyone who picked on me. I would have been proud to drum with her band, and would have felt the way Encyclopedia Brown felt when he befriended Sally Kimball.

Eventually I realized the error of my ways. I went on to listen to such great girl groups as The Pretenders, Throwing Muses, The Breeders and the Donnas. I often played with female musicians who were far more talented than I was, and felt not intimidated, but just honored that they considered me good enough to sit in with them.

So it is with bittersweet memories that watch The Runaways trailer, and it will be with bittersweet memories that I watch the film. Back then, I had little to guide me in the treacherous minefield of what is worth listening to, and what isn’t. Fortunately, I eventually had a group of strong, understanding women who knew that childlike adolescent omega males often need nothing more than a few big sisters to guide them in the right direction.

Be Glad This is Not Your Job (Or: a Trip to an Egyptian Exhibit at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Puts Things in Perspective)

I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston yesterday, and I’m glad I’m not Qebehsenuef (pronounced keh-buh-SEH-noo-wef).

Let me get you up to speed.

Vickey and I are vacationing in Boston. Because Vickey is an artist, we’ve made it a point to visit art museums. If you’re in Boston and you want to visit art museums, you make it a point to visit The Museum of Fine Art, which is sort of the grand old museum of Boston.

It’s a great museum, full of classic works, but when we went we spent most of our time checking out an exhibit called The Secrets of Tomb 10A.

The exhibit displays the contents of the tomb of Djehutynakht (juh-HOO-tuh-nahkt), a bigwig Egyptian governor who clearly had a lot of wealth. Even though robbers cleared out most of the valuables from the tomb long ago, the plaster and wooden artifacts—such as the coffins—remained. A team of restoration experts spent a century restoring the contents of the tomb—which the robbers had thrown around when they ransacked it—and it’s a great exhibit, complete with, among other things, the restored coffins (which have extraordinary artwork on them) and 36 models of the various boats that were to carry Djehutynakht and his wife to the afterlife in style.

When we talk about Egypt and we talk about tombs, we need to talk, of course, about mummification. We know that mummification made the body’s face look like that of Osirus, the god of the dead. We know that mummification preserved the body for the perilous passage through the afterlife, one that would be either on land or sea. We know that passage on land took the soul through perilous peaks and valleys, and past The Lake of Fire of the Knife Wielders. We know that passage by sea took the soul past such monsters as Dog Face, Great Face, He of the Sharp Teeth, Protector of the Two Gods, and (my favorite) He Who is Driven off With Two Faces in the Dung.

It’s glorious stuff, this afterworld journey, and it sets the mind thinking of the pantheon of Egyptian gods. There’s Ra, god of the sun; Nut, goddess of the sky; Seth, god of the desert; Amun, god of creation; Thoth, god of writing and wisdom; Hathor, goddess of love, music and dance; and, in addition to many more, Horus, the patron god of Egypt.

And it is with Horus that we now come to Qebehsenuef.

To understand where Qebehsenuef fits into this, let’s go back to mummification for a moment.

Here’s another thing we know: when priests mummified a body, they removed the organs to aid in the preservation of the body. Each of the organs went into a container called a canopic jar. In the passage through the afterlife, various gods looked after each of these jars, making sure that the soul would have all the body parts it needed in the afterlife.

One of these jars was on display at the exhibit, and as the information placard said, this particular jar was protected by Qebehsenuef.

For this was the job of Horus’s children (and I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to pronounce their names). Imsety protected the liver. Hapi protected the lungs. Duamutef protected the stomach. Finally, Qebehsenuef protected the intestines.

When I said that I was glad I wasn’t Qebehsenuef, I wasn’t entirely accurate. What I should have said was that I’m glad I’m not any of these four guys. Let me elaborate.

If Christian theology is a good model for this kind of thing, being the child of a god is a lot like being Michael Corleone from The Godfather. Often, a parent has a career in mind for their child, and it’s usually an unpleasant job. To make things worse, the kid usually has no choice but to do whatever mom or dad tells the kid to do.

Granted, there are exceptions. Eros has a lot of fun making people jealous of each other, and Perseus did his father proud with that whole Gorgon business. Still, these are the exceptions; most of the time, the kid’s got a rough road ahead.

Which leads to my point, which is this: poor Qebehsenuef.

I mean, imagine the guy. He goes to college, probably majors in English. Maybe he writes a witty column for the school paper. People like him, and girls go out with him from time to time.

Granted, he’s not as cool as Thoth’s kids. Thoth’s kids write the kind of stuff that sparkles, and Hathor’s kids play in a band that’s going to be signed any day now. Even better, this is, for these kids, something that their parents totally support; after all, writing and making music are, for these kids, just carrying on the family business.

That’s not the case with Qebehsenuef, though, and that’s why he dreads graduating from college. Because no matter how witty those columns are, Qebehsenuef has to go into the family business. It doesn’t matter that he’d rather work at a radio station, or perhaps an alternative newspaper; once he graduates, he will, for the rest of eternity, need to guard one set of intestines after another through the afterlife.

Take a moment to imagine this. At cocktail parties, the children of Thoth discuss how they inspire poems and political manifestos. The children of Hathor discuss the music and dance that they inspire, which also, no doubt, fan the flames of passion and love.

Qebehsenuef, meanwhile, tries his best.

“You know,” he says, “it’s not just anyone who can shuttle intestines through the afterlife. It takes real skill.”

At this point, the woman he’s trying to talk up nods politely and strikes up a conversation with one of Thoth’s kids.

So think about this when you’re in your cubicle lamenting the less desirable parts of your job. You can always leave your job if it gets excruciatingly painful, but Qebehsenuef can’t. He’s stuck in that cubicle for an eternity, with a desk full of travel coupons, all of them for one underworld trip after the next.

But it doesn’t end there. Because one other thing that the exhibit made clear was that over time, mummification became something was no longer limited to the pharaohs. As Djehutynakht showed, if you had the money, you could be a mummy. This means that Qebehsenuef now had countless more intestines to shuttle through the underworld, again and again and again.

It just puts things in perpective.

Miniature Graffiti (Or: The Smart, Sharp Humor of College Students)

I'll have a longer entry later about what it must be like to be a minor god who graduates with a B.A. in English (yes, you read that right). For now, though, I just need to share this minor gem.

The above picture is a detail from the tilework in and around a urinal in the men's room at a Border's bookstore on Newbury Street in Boston. For the uninitiated, Newbury Street was, at one time, the hip happening place in Boston, kind of like Boston's answer to New's York's Lower East Side. It had cool used clothing shops, and Newbury Comics, which was sort of the jewel in that area's crown.

Alas, with the passage of time and exploding rent prices, the area is now mostly one major chain store after another, followed by one fashion boutique or mega-expensive art gallery. Of the stuff that used to be there, only a few places--such as Newbury Comics, which has become mega successful--survive.

Still, however, you get these occasional small reminders that you're visiting a college town, perhaps the most college populated city in the United States, if not the world. My friend Jeff, who grew up in the nearby suburb of Newton, once told me that there were well over 100 colleges in Boston, and that something like a third of the population of the city, at any given time, is students, which may explain why Boston feels like a ghost town during the summer months.

Any city with that many college students is bound to have subtle reminders that young people are all around, people with energy, people with wit, and, most endearingly, people with way too much time on their hands.

And so it is with this masterpiece of micrograffiti, of which the above photo is just one detail (forgive me for only one photo, but I wasn't going to stand around for a long time and take pictures; the site of a 43 year-old man photographing the walls above a urinal...I'm going to stop writing now...you get the idea). Yes, "Much Ado Agrout Nothing," written with an ultra fine pen, was charming.

But then, as I looked at the wall, the effect was much like those times you look at the ground, see a few ants, and then suddenly realize that no, there are several dozen. No, there are several hundred. No there are several thousand.

It was just like that with this graffiti, because slowly, quite wonderfully, it became clear that whoever did this has added to this cavalcade of puns, perhaps one or two a day. THE GROUT GATSBY. GROUT EXPECTATIONS. GROUT OF AFRICA. SHADOW OF A GROUT. Or perhaps it wasn't just one person; perhaps it became, over time, a communal effort.

I must admit at this point, that some of these--particularly the last one--are ones I'm just thinking up off the top of my head. I don't remember all of them--as I said, I wasn't going to stand in front of a urinal all day long and read graffiti--but I couldn't help but admire the kid who wrote all that stuff.

Because it had to be a kid. Okay, maybe a stunted adolescent such as myself would have done the same thing. I am, after all, the person who came upon a heart surgeon's car with the vanity plate GINADOC and left a note next to it that said "please God, tell me this is not the vanity plate of an OB/GYN."

No, I prefer to think this is the work of some kid, fresh out of college, working at Borders and then going home to the apartment that he shares with, I don't know 20 or 30 guys, considering the rents in any major city, and then, during his free time, writing stories, and thinking up puns to get him through another day of organizing the Romance Section.

It's small survival techniques such as this that make me happy.

It's also the type of thing that provides my mind with something to work on when I'm starting into space, which if often. Ozzy Osbourne's Grout at the Devil. Give me some men who are grout hearted men. Grouting Thomas. Schubert's Grout Quintet. The eeny weensy spider climbed up the water grout. Agrout Schmidt.

Bless that kid.

How many can you think up? I tell you, I'm slow to get on the Twitter bandwagon, but if ever there was a prime candidate for tweets, it would be this. As Vickey said, Twitter is pretty much the digital equivalent of writing on the bathroom wall.

An Empty Swedish Fish Candy Bag (Or: Space Invaders, The Candy Store, and Other Pieces of a 1970s and 1980s Great Neck Childhood)

I was chaperoning a field trip, and on the bus, a kid held up a Swedish fish candy wrapper, and asked to whom it belonged. Another kid asked if there was anything in the bag, and the first kid said yes. The second kid now really wanted the Swedish fish bag, and of course when he got it, there was nothing inside. That first kid was smart, I tell you; the bag was no longer her problem.

Anyway, the second kid went on about how he now had an empty bag, and I said that actually the bag had a lot of things inside it. The first thing the bag had inside of it was the memory of the Swedish fish. It also still had the smell of that Swedish fish candy, which, for an old person like me, is a lot.

The smell of Swedish fish candy reminds me of The Candy Store, a key place for any child of 1970s and early 1980s Great Neck, New York. The Candy Store was one of the places in town that had coin-operated video games, which were really big back then. The others places that had coin operated video games were Jay’s Candy Store, Roma Pizza, Great Neck Bowl, The Shirting Gallery (a place that sold iron-on t-shirt decals, which were really big in the 70s and early 80s), and, further up Middle Neck Road, Colony Stationary Store, Barry’s (a coffee shop) and Scotto’s Pizza.

None of these places exist anymore, and that makes me feel old. Still, if I want to feel really old, all I need to do is talk about technology with my students. I talk about things ten years ago, and it feels like I'm talking about the days before humans walked upright; when I talk about the technology of my childhood, I feel like I’m talking about the Pre-Cambrian Era.

When they ask about technology my childhood, I tell them the following:

You have to remember that back then, computers weren’t all that powerful. I got my first computer in 1983. It was a used Apple II Plus, and I paid a thousand dollars for it, which was actually a good deal back then. There were no internal hard drives, and you stored everything on a five-and-one-quarter-inch square piece of plastic called a floppy disk; a floppy disk held something in the neighborhood of one-ten thousandth the information you can fit on a 1GB thumb drive.

(Stop snickering. Most kids today have no idea what a floppy disk is. Trust me.)

Apple was one of the three or four computers you had your choice of when you were growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of the others were the Commodore Pet (which sort of looked like a 1960s science fiction computer terminal, with the screen built into the machine) and the TRS 80, which most of the brainy nerds bought. Forget about IBM; they didn’t start putting out personal computers until much later.

Of course, come to think about it, we pretty much have forgotten about IBM in general. Any kid reading this would have difficulty conceiving of a world in which Dell was not the computer you had on your desk. Not too long ago, it was IBM; now those days are gone.

The computer games they had for personal computers back in the day were nothing like the computer games you have now. They were often simplified versions of arcade games that were themselves, by today’s standards, incredibly primitive games. If you go to a website such as Addicting Games and play a simple arcade game, you get some idea of the sort of games I actually paid money to play.

That’s because as primitive as those arcade games from Addicting Games are, they are miles beyond the types of games you could play on a home computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And don’t even get me started on the Atari Home Arcade System which was the gold standard for home entertainment consoles back then. Yes, some of the games were good, but it was all blocky graphics, blips and bleeps.

Computers didn’t talk to each other easily back then. If you owned an old school modem, you actually placed the part of the phone you hold up to your head on a cradle that was hooked up to the computer. Then your computer would send a series of beeps over the line, which the computer on the other end would hear.

At this point, if I needed to elaborate on this, I would say: if you want to see an old school modem in action, check out the 1982 film called Wargames. That’s still one of my favorites.

(To people my age who can’t conceive of a world in which no one knows the significance of the name “Joshua,” I say: you’re old. Deal with it. And it’s a strange game, Professor Falken; the only winning move is not to play. Anyway, I digress. Onward.)

This is pretty much the way computers talk to each other today, but the computers back then were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times slower. When you used a modem back then, about the most you could send to another person was a message, and you sent it one letter at a time. Each letter took about a second or two to send. It was excruciating.

But let’s get back to playing games on the computers. If you wanted to play something like Space Invaders—a monumentally popular game from my childhood, along with, take a deep breath now, Asteroids, Missile Command, Dig Dug, Mr. Do, Mr. Do’s Castle, Star Castle, Sinestar, Defender, Stargate, Galaxian, Galaga, Breakout, Lunar Lander, Pengo, Pac-Man, Tempest, Tron, Discs of Tron, Gyrus, Q*Bert, Major Havoc, Spy Hunter, Moon Cresta, Gorf, Zaxxon, Crazy Climber, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Atari Football, Spinout, Battlezone, Xevious, Qix, Ms. Pac Man, Gauntlet, Targ, Robotron 2084, and God knows how many others I left out—you needed to play on a coin operated video game.

I’m sorry. I need a moment. You’ve no idea the flood of memories I get from just listing those games.

Okay. I can go back to writing now.

Each game cost 25 cents and some even cost 50. I vividly remember emptying several dollars worth or quarters into those machines. So did a lot of other people; when Space Invaders was first released in Japan, there was a shortage of 100 yen coins (the Japanese quarter), so great was the demand to play the game.

After I wasted my allowance on video games, I would usually have a couple of cents left over to buy Swedish fish. The Swedish fish that The Candy Store sold were bigger than the tiny Swedish fish that were in the empty bag that I took off the hands of the kid who was disappointed when he saw that it was empty.

You could buy the fish by the pound, or you could by them for 12 cents apiece. I would usually buy one, because if I had a quarter, I would spend the money on video games.

The thing that I’m just thinking about now is how even though so much has changed—The Candy Store and all those other places don’t exist anymore, kids play videogames on their personal computers, we send incredible amounts of information over Ethernet lines, and all those personal computers I mentioned are considered antiques of a bygone era—the Swedish fish haven’t changed. They still smell exactly the way they did when I was a kid, and they still taste exactly the same.

And I wouldn’t have thought about any of this if it hadn’t been for that empty bag, the one my students were all convinced contained absolutely nothing.

One more thing: if you want to check out some those old school games, go to the Classic Video Games website here.

Revolting Musings on the 1973 Animated Version of "Charlottes Web"

First off, just to be clear: none of this is about the book. I loved the book. I loved Garth Williams's drawings. Let's just leave the book out of this.

I also have no comment about the 2006 film with Dakota Fanning, who currently stars as Cherie Currie in the biopic The Runaways. I haven't seen the 2006 version of Charlotte's Web, although I am still trying to reconcile the Dakota Fanning of a children's film from a mere four years ago with the Dakota Fanning of The Runaways, but any parent of a 16 or 17 year old female has articulated these thoughts much better than I ever could. So forget about the 2006 version of Charlotte's Web. Just let it go.

No, I'm talking about the 1973 animated film, in which Debbie Reynolds did the voice of Charlotte, and Paul Lynde did the voice of Templeton. Yeah. That one.

I admit that I loved the film when it came it came out, and still had a genuine affection for it when I got older. Still, however, there is one thing that I just need to get off my chest, once and for all:

God, did I find Wilbur annoying in this film.

I get it, honestly, I get it. Wilbur is, in effect, Charlotte's child, and she saves him from the slaughterhouse. I know. He's Some Pig. He's Terrific. Radiant. I know.

I also understand that he's bound to be a bit stressed out, especially considering that he's going to be slaughtered when he gets big enough. This has to be a difficult thing to wrap your mind around when you're a child. I understand that Wilbur's upset about this, and in the book, I'm with him; I want Charlotte to save him as much as anyone else.

But he's so annoying.

Voiced by character actor Henry Gibson, you understand why the rest of the farm animals are reserved in their opinions of him. Okay, the little chick who's the runt of the litter likes him, and says something about how he doesn't want him to be turned into crispy bacon. Still, most of the rest of the farm animals find him annoying.

They find him really, really annoying.

God almighty, does he complain. Charlotte, Charlotte, what are you going to do, Charlotte? Help me Charlotte. I'm not going to leave you alone Charlotte. Don't get any sleep, Charlotte. It doesn't matter that eventually you're going to give birth to hundreds of children, Charlotte. It doesn't matter that you probably ate your significant other after mating, Charlotte. Help me, Charlotte. Do everything for me, Charlotte. Save me, Charlotte.

Once again, I understand. He doesn't want to be killed. Still, he just gets on my last nerve. In the book, he's an innocent child, crying out for his mother to save him. For all I know, in the 2006 movie he's as adorable as Babe.

And while we're on the subject of Babe, there's a pig who took matters into his own hands. He made himself useful. Learned a trade.

Not Wilbur, and especially not the Wilbur in the 1973 film. He's infuriating. Whining. Complaining. Whining. Complaining.

It's enough to make anyone snap.

And that's why I admit that in my head, I've succumbed to that pathetic, "look at how hip I am, why don't I just hop in a time machine and move to Williamsburg back in 1992 or so before it got all played out" kind of thinking in which I reimagine the 1973 version of Charlotte's Web.

Before I go on, let me state again: this is not, in any way, a statement about the book. The book is a beautiful piece of writing. Let's leave the book out of this.

Once again and again, let's just focus on Henry Gibson's infuriating Wilbur, who Charlotte gives her life for. Let's also remember that it's not even Wilbur who saves the goddamn egg sac; it's Templeton, the lowest of the low, who does the dirty work. And don't tell me that Wilbur is all noble because he gives Templeton dibs on his breakfast slops for getting that egg sac; I don't care, and anyway, it's still Templeton who performs the service that saves Charlotte's children.

Wilbur blubbers and wails when the spider children abandon him, but there are three left behind. It made me wonder what life-sacrificing chores Wilbur will have them do. Already, he shortened Charlotte's life considerably by having her write epic tomes in her web. Now, he's got three more slaves to do all the work while he once again wins a medal at the state fair for...nothing. He did nothing. They gave him a medal just because he had a spider who wove a magic web for him. It's more depressing than The Giving Tree.

So I say, in response to the 1973 film, that I reimagine the way it plays out. I take elements from George Romero's The Crazies, and imagine a neurological virus that slowly causes all those infected to slowly lose their minds, becoming unusually susceptible to religious delusion. Then I imagine Lurvey, the farmhand who finds Charlotte's messages, becoming stricken with the illness.

In my version, Charlotte weaves chapters and verses from the bible into her web, and then tears them out the moment Lurvey sees them. This causes everyone, including Mr. Zuckerman, to believe that Lurvey is insane. Lurvey, already insane, comes to believe that only he is truly sane, and that he must do what Charlotte commands him to do.

"Yes, yes," he says, flagellating himself like medieval monk, "but what exactly does she want me to do?" The web, after all, says:

SIROCH 21:5

..which is a reference to a book contained in the Catholic Bible, but not the Protestant bible, which leads Lurvey on an obsessive search through all the churches in town, until finally, he turns to the chapter, and comes to rest upon the phrase that he starts muttering to himself on the way back to Zuckerman's farm:

His judgement cometh, and that right soon

And yes, Lurvey thinks to himself, as the virus takes full control of his brain, it is he, Lurvey, who is God's instrument of divine judgement. And so, like many other spiders across the land--for Charlotte is not the only spider who has gotten sick of the whining and complaining of the pigs in the farm, and Lurvey is not the only farmhand to lose his mind--Charlotte watches from the barn as Lurvey goes into the Zuckerman household, axe in hand, muttering with ever increasing volume "there is power in the blood..."

Still later, the farmhouse is in flames, and Lurvey, wearing nothing but a loincloth made from the skins of animals he's slaughtered, descends on the barn to sacrifice Wilbur. He needn't bother. Jack and the hunters have beaten him to it. Ralph, meanwhile, with pieces of the shattered conch on his clothing, looks into the eyes of the pig's head mounted on a post, the sacrificial god of the boys who have degenerated into primitive savagery. Ralph looks into the lifeless face of Beelzebub, The Lord of the Flies, and screams "Pig on a stick! It's just a pig on a stick!"

Outside, Napoleon and the rest of the pigs from Manor Farm walk on two legs as farmhouses across the land burn. Wilbur never learned to walk on two legs, and as Napoleon is quick to say, while all animals are created equal, some animals are more equal than others. Benjamin the mule hides in the shadows with Clover, Jack and hunters dance a neolithic dance of glee, and the mad crazed tapestry that Charlotte and the rest of the scheming spiders have created throws flickering shadows on the barnyard wall.

"Humble," Lurvey mutters, his axe slick with crimson, "humble, humble humble."

Amen.

Phineas Gage (Or: The Stupid, Brain Damaged Behavior of Adolescents Explained)

When I start talking about Phineas Gage, a number of people will say "oh, yeah isn't that the guy with the iron bar in his head?"

To which I add: yes, and he is the medical case that helps strengthen my contention, from 17 years of working with young adults, that adolescents are brain damaged.

A bit about Phineas Gage for the uninitiated, from the superb young adult book Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science, by John Fleischman:

Phineas Gage was the foreman of an explosives crew that blasted apart rock formations that blocked proposed railroad paths. Back then, the choice of explosives was far more limited than the more stable compounds-such as dynamite-that would later come into use. Back then, if you wanted to blow up part of a mountain to make way for a railroad, your only choice was black powder, which ranks among the most unstable of explosives; the slightest spark can set it off.

To really understand what happened to Gage, it's best to know exactly how an explosives crew operated back then.

First the crew would drill a hole in the rock. Then, the powder man would (very gently) pour the black powder into th"e hole. Next, the tamping man (Gage's job, and I'll get to what "tamping" means in a moment") would very gently poke a hole into the black powder, so that the fuse man could place the fuse in the black powder. Still, however, the explosives needed to be packed into the hole.

It is at this point that we need to discuss the tamping man's job in a bit more detail. In particular, we need to discuss the tool a tamping man used for his job. It was a thirteen foot iron rod, which had a point on one end (imagine a thirteen foot iron pencil, and you get the idea). Now, as was said before, the tamping man's first job was to (carefully, oh, so carefully) stick the pointy end into the exposed black powder to make a hole for the fuse.

He did this carefully because, of course, an iron bar carelessly placed in a granite hole strikes sparks.

By now, you're probably beginning to see what's coming.

But first, a bit about the sandman. The sandman's job was to fill the hole with sand. This, in turn, allowed the tamping man-who, you will remember, had poked that small hole in the black powder-to do his second job. Once the sandman had surrounded the fuse with sand and put a good sized layer of sand between the black powder and the hole's entrance, the tamping man, by inserting the rounded part of his iron into the hole, would pack ("tamp") the explosives. Yes, it would strike sparks, but the sand prevented the sparks from hitting the black powder.

So now imagine that is September 13, 1848, and Phineas Gage is using that thirteen foot tamping rod, with the pointy side facing him, to pack those explosives into that hole. Imagine all of those sparks.

And now imagine what would happen if, on this day, the sandman forgot to put sand into one of those holes.

In the instant that the black powder exploded, the tamping rod shot out of the hole as if fired from a cannon. The rod entered Gage's head just below his left cheekbone, came out the top of his head, and clanged to the ground several feet from the site of the explosion.

In computer reconstructions of the accident, it becomes evident just how extraordinary Gage's injury was. Had the bar gone through just a millimeter in one direction of the other, it would have clipped major blood vessels, or areas of the brain that dealt with key bodily functions, and Gage would have died immediately.

But no. As witnesses reported, Gage didn't even lose consciousness. He sat up, with blood running down his face (obviously), and just started talking about the explosion. His stunned explosives crew piled him onto a cart, where he made a point of making an entry in the foreman's time book.

Within ten weeks, Gage was back at work, and except for scars at the entry and exit points and the loss of vision in his left eye, he was fully recovered.

But he was no longer Phineas Gage.

In addition to a number of subtle difficulties in mathematical judgement, Gage had completely lost his ability to control himself. He cursed constantly and with no consideration of the people (and children) around him; he got into fights; and he often began one task, abandoned it, and then moved to another. 

He soon lost his job at at the railroads, and worked various odd jobs until his death.

But let's go back and consider that injury.

When that tamping rod plowed through Gage's head, it took with it a good portion of the front of his brain. This part, called, appropriately, the frontal lobe, is generally considered to be the most recent part of the brain in evolutionary terms. Generally speaking, the frontal lobe is the part of the brain that considers the impulsive thoughts of the hippocampus-the almond sized, primitive component at the very center of the human brain-and says "wait a minute...maybe that impulse to get my face tattooed with a four-color dragon is a bad idea."

Now imagine a life in which that part of the brain is gone.

Or, to put it another way, imagine the brain of an adolescent.

Because, generally speaking, the adolescent brain is pretty much a brain without frontal lobes.

Oh, it works occasionally, but as any neural scientist can tell you, the frontal lobes of teenagers just don't work as well as those of an adult. In fact, you can find out more about the sluggish frontal lobes of teenagers in this story, courtesy of NPR. Basically, it discusses how the frontal lobes of teenagers just can't talk to the rest of the brain the way an older person's frontal lobes can; in other words, it discusses how teenage brains function as if the front part has been obliterated by a tampting rod plowing through it after a massive black power explosion.

So that's it. As I often tell my students, if you're a teenager, you're brain damaged. Your frontal lobes aren't working. If you do stupid stuff, as I did when I was a wee slip of a lad, it's not because you're a bad person. It's because you're brain damaged.

And that's not just the ramblings of a jaded brown belt librarian. That's science.

The Omnivore's Near Incarceration

"So the judge looks at me," said Bob McKee, "and he shakes his head and just says 'turkeys? You're here because of turkeys?'"

Yes he was, because Bob McKee, psychologist at North Shore Middle School, was not the dedicated man he seemed. True, he so deceived the students and teachers at the school that virtually all of them would have called him one of the most caring and decent people they had ever met. Sadly, McKee had a dark secret, one that a conscientious neighbor bravely brought to light with an anonymous phone call to the police, two days before Thanksgiving:

Bob McKee was raising two turkeys in his backyard.

"I had read 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' about the need to raise the animals we eat in a conscientious and humane way," McKee said, recounting the twisted mindset that led to his devious plan. "I figured that by raising turkeys for Thanksgiving, I would teach my children a lesson in humanity. I wanted to teach them that what we eat is indeed God's creation."

"They were almost part of the family," McKee said. "Pesticide free, hormone free. I wanted my kids to see how meat tastes when it's free of that stuff. It was a sacrifice to raise those turkeys in my yard, and I wanted my kids to see being humane requires sacrifice. We should respect what we eat."

Two days before Thanksgiving, in a daring raid, officers from the Town of Babylon Quality of Life squad swarmed the McKee household.

"This woman from the town threatened me with a 1000 dollar fine, and possible incarceration if I didn't respond to this. I was supposed to get rid of the turkeys, but that was always the plan; I mean, I was going to eat them, after all. But no, the town said I had to get rid of them immediately, and I refused. One of them went to my brother. He said it was the best turkey he ever ate."

McKee finally went to trial on March 8th.

It was a sensational trial, one that legal scholars will, no doubt, write about for years to come.

"The Judge had cases that day where he was dealing with things like major toxic waste spills," McKee said. "Then he got to my case, and he just started laughing."

After a few questions, the judge-clearly demonstrating activist tendencies by expressing the shocking belief that two turkeys in a backyard were not as severe as a toxic waste spill-dismissed McKee's case.

"By this time, the whole courtroom was laughing," McKee said. The judge said 'let this be a lesson to the court: get your turkeys at Zorns or McKees.'"

"I ate the other turkey for Christmas," McKee said. "Best turkey I ever had."

As residents of Long Island and citizens of the United States, we can take pride as we see our law enforcement and legal system--paid for with tax dollars--so hard at work.

A Photograph From Rolling Stone (Or: A Sobering Reminder of How the Distant Past Becomes More Distant Each Day)

(First, shameless self-promotion: I have a website, and I wrote a book that you can read on said website. To get to all these things--along with a handy index that directs you to some of the more witty and snappy essays in what already a banquet of wittiness and snappiness--click here.)

So Tom Flaherty, I guy with whom I went to college, posted this photograph on Facebook. It's a picture of guitarist Jack White. In the background is a young woman, probably about 20, give or take.

Considering that this was a post from someone with whom I went to college, a flood of memories came back, and for about five seconds there, I was back at the University of Massachusetts, in the Butterfield dorm (more about that later).

And then the photograph's caption caused any of those college thoughts to implode:

"Hey, that's my daughter with Jack White in the new issue of Rolling Stone."

For a moment I just sat there.

Daughter? One of my contemporaries now has a college-age daughter?

For a few seconds, I just thought to myself: no, this cannot be. I cannot be this old.

But, of course, it is, and I am.

This isn't the first time I've had other people's kids crowd in on my memories of the past, of course. A friend of mine has kids who are now teenaged, and whenever he talks about them, it takes me back to when I was teenaged, when every moment was high drama, and everything, everything, everything was of the greatest importance. Still, though, none of my friends and acquaintances had a kid who was a true adult.

Until now.

I could tell from the comments on the photograph that I wasn't the only one who felt a surreal sense of the past and present existing at the same time. We were all happy for Tom, and all equally happy for his daughter, Fiona. At the same time though, and I mean this with the utmost kindness, there were some of us who were a bit freaked out.

To understand why, it's probably best to understand the memories that mill around in my head when someone or something comes along to stir up thoughts of my years at UMASS. These are for me the first memories I have of feeling like an adult, as if other adults finally treated me as one of them. It was the first time that I would speak to people decades older than me and feel as if I were not a child speaking to an adult, but an adult speaking to a contemporary.

This is only part of it, however. During my years at UMASS, I took many classes I enjoyed, and I still remember them. More than that however, there was something else about my years at UMASS that made them truly memorable: like Tom, and like many others who posted comments when Tom posted that picture from Rolling Stone, I lived in the Butterfield dorm.

The Butterfield dorm still exists at UMASS, but it is not what it once was. When I went there, the dorm had its own dining room in the basement, and students often worked there, myself included. This arrangement in what was far and away the smallest dorm on campus caused you to meet everybody in the dorm, which led to a community atmosphere not found in other dorms.

But this scholarly antiseptic description of Butterfield doesn't in any way hint at what a wonderful place it was to spend a couple of years of your life.

There are not many college residences that inspire a wiki, a MySpace page, and a Facebook group. Somehow, if you lived there up until about 1993, you find yourself talking about the place should the conversation turn to college experiences.

I have friends today that I met at that dorm. Butterfield was like that. You'd meet people--usually over a 1 A.M. game of pool in the rec room that was adjacent to the dining room--and the next thing you knew, three hours had gone by, you had played countless rounds of eight ball, and you now had a friend. That's the way it was.

Yes, there were aspects of the dorm that were annoying. There was a politically correct atmosphere long before that expression even came into being, and it could be stifling. Also, because of its small size and highly social structure, everyone knew everyone else's business, often before the person in question even knew their own.

Still, these were small prices to pay for a dorm in which everyone, it seemed, had something interesting to discuss, every other person played a musical instrument, and every fourth person drew and painted.

The place definitely had an Island of Misfit Toys quality to it, in which outcasts of all affiliations coexisted. Though the dorm had a reputation as a "hippie" dorm--whenever The Grateful Dead played nearby, the dorm emptied out for the weekend as dozens of students went to follow them--it was more like a dorm for decidedly different people, in which, for the most part, everyone was just allowed to be themselves.

I inhabited the figurative dark places in that dorm. It was I who clipped out articles from Jay Robert Nash's crime encyclopedia Bloodletters and Badmen and posted one article a week, calling it my "mass murderer of the week wall." Whenever the week was over, all types of people--hippies, punks, buttoned-up preppies--asked me who the next mass murderer would be. Richard Speck? Howard Unruh? Ed Gein? Albert Fish? Good times, good times.

Then there were the coffeehouses. Every couple of months, a whole bunch of students would perform in the dining room. There was an incredibly talented guitarist named Henning Ohlenbusch who never, it seemed, stopped playing his guitar. Together we wrote a series of sick rock operettas, all of them usually involving someone taking revenge on a bad person in a bloodthirsty way.

I never really knew joy until we had a room full of hippies screaming gleefully as Billy, the small, bullied hero of one of these pieces, enlisted the help of an evil clown to dispatch various members of the football team and cheerleading squad. The profound title of this work was "The Clown," and I will always be distinctly proud of that piece of writing. Once again: good times, good times.

(Henning, by the way, continues to make music in the Amherst/Northampton area. You can check out his band, School for the Dead, here.)

I also remember, during one of those coffeehouses, when a tiny young woman performed Joni Mitchel's "The Circle Game." It was the first time I heard that song; I'll never know her name, but she was amazing. I just remember being there, in those days before Flip Cameras and cel Phones and small digital voice recorders and thinking "this is a moment that isn't being recorded; this is now, and then it will be gone, and I will always remember this."

There were a lot of songs and albums that I heard for the first time in that dorm, and even now, I'll always associate them with that place: "Don't Let's Start," by They Might Be Giants; "Pale Blue Eyes," by The Velvet Underground; "Hot Rats" by Frank Zappa; Brian Eno's ambient music, "Thursday Afternoon" in particular; "Paul's Boutique," by The Beastie Boys; "Solitude Standing," by Suzanne Vega; "If I Should Fall From Grace With God," by The Pogues; "Blue" and "Ladies of the Canyon" by Joni Mitchell; "Surfer Rosa" by The Pixies; "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart," by Camper Van Beethoven; "Too Long in the Wasteland" by James McMurtry; "Only Life" by The Feelies. I am sure that after I post this, I will think of many more.

A few years after I graduated UMASS, the dorm changed, becoming, unfortunately, a place known more for wild parties, heavy drug use and vandalism than for the sense of community I felt when I lived there. The gory details about this sad decline are easy to find on the Web if you look for them, but I prefer not including much about it here. I have fond memories of Butterfield, and would prefer to focus on the positive.

Because it is, in fact, these incredibly warm memories that, paradoxically, pose a danger. Baldly stated, if your past was miserable, it's easier to get out of the habit of dwelling on it. If you have good memories, though, it is far too easy to live in those memories, particularly when the present is a difficult and rocky place.

For the longest time, I lived in the past. I would take the lessons that I had learned from the present, and, in a chilling sort of magical thinking, spend far too much time going over that past so that I could work out exactly the way I would have liked it to be. Yes, I would say to myself, my college years (and my Butterfield years) were great, but now, knowing what I know, I could have made them even better.

It's a scary, slippery slope, and it's far easier to slide down when you have no children. I'll say this for kids: they keep you focused on what's happening right now. If you don't have kids, the next best thing is to work in a school, where pop culture references date faster than sour cream on a hot day. It keeps you in the present, because you must be there if you are to be an effective teacher (or, in my case, librarian).

Yet even if you're surrounded by kids at home and/or in the classroom (or the school library), that temptation to immerse one's self in the past is stong. And perhaps I'm not entirely right when I say that kids keep us in the present. Sometimes, when they're driving us crazy, it is far too easy to fill a mind with thoughts of coffeehouses, late night conversations about the meaning of life, marathon games of pool, and a dorm with a basement that was open for breakfast at 7 every weekday morning, and 9:30 every weekend.

And that's why I'm grateful to Tom's daughter for her success, and grateful to Tom for posting that photo from Rolling Stone. I think we all need to have our contemporaries say of their children: here they are at the age we were. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are not our past. We only have the present to find something as meaningful now as certain things were back then.

And so, as I think fondly of the Butterfield I knew, I also face the fact that my contemporaries have sons and daughters who will grace the pages of Rolling Stone. They will also write novels, make movies, play instruments, participate in sporting events, act on the stage, act in movies, appear on television, teach children, hold political office, build houses, do people's taxes, build computers, fix computers, develop the next big advance in computers, and, in addition to all these things and countless others, have children of their own.

Before having those children, though, they will have experiences during their late teens and early twenties that are, for them, what Butterfield was for me and many others. Finally, when they have children of their own, and those children are in their twenties, this next generation of parents will look back on their own twenties I hope, with the same fondness I look back on my years in Butterfield.

I wish them well.

H-E-A (ay! HEY! My chest is coming apart!) R-T-A (ay! HEY! I'm dying here!) T-T-A-C-K (Or: The humor of a heart attack at Disney World.)

So a friend of mine is going to Disney World later this month, and his trip has got me thinking about someone having a heart attack in the middle of Disney World.

This, in turn, has caused me to occasionally laugh to myself.

Before I go on, I should elaborate on this laughing thing. It's also probably a good idea to explain how I could, in any way, find a heart attack at Disney World--or anywhere, for that matter--funny.

Let me explain the laughing to myself thing first.

I have this terrible habit of smiling and laughing to myself when I find something funny. Compounding this unfortunate habit is the fact that I often think of funny things. Well, maybe you don't find them funny, but I find them funny.

So here's why I've been laughing to myself when my friend tells me he's going to Disney World at the end of the month.

You need to know a few things:

The first thing is something that a friend told me years ago: if you work at Disney World and are dressed as a cartoon character who must wear a headpiece (Mickey Mouse, for example), and you take your headpiece or three-fingered gloves off while you are in the amusement area, you lose your job. Immediately. I have no idea if this is true or not, but in order to understand why I've been laughing to myself, let's just assume it's true. So: if you're Mickey Mouse at Disney World, you cannot take your gloves or headpiece off.

The second thing you need to know is that workers at Disney World seem to spontaneously appear in the amusement area and then disappear. This is because there are no clearly marked doors for the employees to exit the amusement area and change in the employee's area. Instead, there is a vast network of unmarked doors and secret passageways, the better to preserve the magic atmosphere which the park's workers strive to maintain.

The third thing to know about Disney World--at least the third thing that I've heard about, and the third thing, however untrue, that I think about when I laugh to myself--is that when someone gets badly hurt at Disney World and needs medical attention, he or she suddenly finds him or herself surrounded by park workers whose job is to get that person out of the amusement area as quickly as possible. After all, a badly injured person seriously tarnishes the illusion of magic. And so, even if it is not true, I now have the image of this injured person being suddenly surrounded by a team of medics who have swarmed out of those secret passageways, all focused on getting this person out of the amusement area as fast as possible.

So, just to recap: Mickey can't take his gloves and head off; there are secret passageways; and when someone is injured, medics swarm from those passageways, and Disney medics come out of nowhere so as to get the afflicted person out of sight in a minute or so.

Still, however, we have not arrived at the image that makes me laugh.

To get there, we need to consider a few more factors:

Millions of people visit Disney World each year.

Several thousand people have heart attacks each year.

This makes it distinctly possible that someone has had a heart attack inside Disney World.

So now, come inside my mind and imagine someone having a heart attack right in front of Mickey Mouse.

Imagine that the employee playing Mickey is torn. He's trained in CPR, but he doesn't want to take his gloves off and lose his job. He knows that the stricken tourist needs mouth to mouth resuscitation, but to do that, he would have to remove his headpiece, which would, again, threaten his employment.

Suddenly, one of the other employees kneels down to help, because the medics haven't emerged from the secret passages. The other employee, who is also trained in emergency medicine is dressed as Snow White.

The two Disney characters regard each other. Obviously, Mickey can't give mouth to mouth resuscitation, because that would mean taking off his headpiece. And so, while Snow White gives the kiss of life to the stricken tourist, Mickey straddles the tourist and begins to administer CPR.

It isn't easy to interlock his fingers, because Mickey doesn't want to lose his job; the gloves are cumbersome and have only three fingers. Still, Mickey is able to press on the tourist's chest and start the heart massage. At this point, though, Mickey is faced with another dilemma: how should he count out the chest thrusts? Is speaking in his normal voice considered the vocal equivalent of taking off the headpiece?

Mickey makes the decision. No, he needs his job. And so, consciously punctuating his voice with the occasional quick "ha-ha"s that are the trademark of his voice, Mikey starts to count, speaking in the mouse's unmistakable falsetto:

"One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. Ha-ha, ha-ha, check his pulse, check his pulse. One and two and three and four. Ha-ha, ha-ha. One and two and three and four."

Japanese tourists ring the spectacle, all of them snapping photos furiously. Finally, out of the secret passageways, the medics arrive, just as Snow White, also speaking in the high, unmistakable voice of the character from the movie, says "Oh, gee wilikers, a pulse! He has a pulse!"

The medics tend to the man, who opens his eyes to thunderous applause. Standing up, Mickey and Snow White bow to the audience as the medics focus on getting the man off of the amusement area, away from the magic.

"Get some Ringer's in him, he's dehydrated," Mickey says, still in the falsetto voice, still in character.

Later, both Mickey and Snow white will get letters of commendation in their files. Mickey finds himself falling for Snow White, and she for him.

Now they are safe in the depths of Underground Disney World, and Snow White is not looking not at a mouse anymore, but a man, his headpiece off, and his face flushed from the effort of the CPR.

"You know," she says, "relationships that begin under stressful conditions are doomed to fail."

"My name is Don," he says, taking her in his arms, his four fingered hands pulling her closer.

"Mine's Daisy," she says.

And they live happily ever after.

And this is one of the reasons I giggle from time to time, seemingly for no apparent reason.

Now you know the reason.