Our Bewildering Universe

2011-12-31T20:36:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (36): “Don’t waste paper,” said the tree to his office coworker, “do you know how many human skins go into one ream?”

2011-12-31T15:17:00.000-05:00

140 Character Fiction(35): He was lost, joyless, in a sea of phlegm, blood, black and yellow bile. “Where’s my sense of humor?” he yelled.

2011-12-31T15:00:00.001-05:00

140 Character Editorial (1): 2 questions to answer under oath, Newt: 1) Have you ever lied under oath? 2) How do I know you're not lying?

2011-12-30T22:03:00.003-05:00

140 Character Fiction(34): She could not be photographed, recorded, drawn, or written about. She only existed in the stories people told.

2011-12-30T22:02:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction(33): He still had five pieces of the magic Halloween candy that, for 24 hours, took him back in time to the age of ten.

2011-12-29T23:47:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (32): As a mover, he knew two things: everything has to go somewhere, and it often has to go somewhere else.

2011-12-29T23:44:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction(31): He stared at the train coming toward him, a look of placid grace on his face. Then he ate the strawberry.

2011-12-27T11:46:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (30): “Nothing ever really ends,” he said, “in time, we all get to see the other side of every star.”

2011-12-27T11:45:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (29): “The only way to kill it,” she said grimly, “is to cut off your arm and stab it with the living bone.”

2011-12-27T11:44:00.000-05:00

140 Character Fiction(28):From her indoor perch on the kitty condo she sketched thebirds—her best friends—and chronicled their migration.

2011-12-26T12:04:00.003-05:00

140 Character Fiction(27):Rush, head and nose full of Oxy, watched the Times Square countdown, nodding.“Talent on Loan From God,"he slurred.

2011-12-26T11:37:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (26): Bill unwrapped the gifts Sean had given him. “Oh, Hannity,” he said, “loofah and baby oil…you shouldn’t have.”

2011-12-26T11:32:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (25): He had managed to watch Fox news for 60 straight days. Having survived, he then began his martial arts training.

(and an aside, for a moment...kind thanks to the upwards of four people who read this. I...love you guys.)

2011-12-25T18:50:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (24): “They mocked me,” Rudolph said to Santa, “and you did nothing. I want top billing. And a percentage of the gross.”

2011-12-25T18:49:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (23): “It’s the precious,” said Gollum, holding the holiday fruitcake covetously. “All yours, man,” said Frodo.

2011-12-25T13:57:00.007-05:00

140 Character Fiction(22):“We have a four year life span,and all we do is make toys,”said Roy. "Pris, Zora, Leon...we’re going on strike."

2011-12-25T13:57:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (21):He fell down the blast furnace smokestack,and children around the world heard his screams as he roasted to death.

2011-12-24T17:39:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (20): Tyler Durden lined the eight small Christmas trees in a row, doused them with gas, and lit a match. “Happy Chanukah,” he said.

2011-12-24T17:26:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (19):He had broken in.He held a blade to the brat’s neck. “I remember who's been bad or good,” he said, “I always do.”

2011-12-24T15:11:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (18) :With the implant, just enough of his brain focused on his mindless job, leaving the rest free to think and dream.

2011-12-24T15:10:00.000-05:00

140 Character Fiction (17): “The bug is wrapped in the nerves of your teeth,” he said, “and we can’t use anesthetic.”

2011-12-23T08:08:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction(16): He suddenly knew that the best day of his life would be the last. Whenever he was happy, he would think: is this it?

2011-12-23T08:05:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (15): His finger caught in the hole as he fell, and, with a crunch, dislocated in mid digit, nail touching knuckle.

2011-12-22T11:22:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (14): “Things are different here,” he said as the fistfuls of coins he threw all landed on edge.

2011-12-22T11:21:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (13): “Yeah,” said Long Duk Dong, laughing, “I used to wear red shoes. Now I can buy you out a million times over.”

2011-12-21T08:38:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (12):“You know,”he said, snacking not on humans, but roadkill,“this rising from the dead thing isn’t really half bad.”

2011-12-21T08:34:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (11): He went beyond “Minecraft,” creating paradise worlds of Nirvana that people lived in for virtual eternities.

2011-12-20T11:05:00.003-05:00

140Character Fiction (10): The stingers of the wasps he had tamed pressed againstthe bully’s corneas. “Leave me alone,” he said, “please.”

2011-12-20T11:04:00.003-05:00

140 Character Fiction (9): Robert Wadlow, world’s tallest man, picked the boy up from his wheelchair and placed him on his shoulders.

2011-12-19T21:53:00.002-05:00

140Character Fiction (8): “I don’t know,” said the terminator, “there’s more to lifethan hunting humans. I want to paint and write poetry.”

2011-12-19T21:49:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (7): The notebook contained the first words he had ever written by himself. “I am,” he muttered, smiling.

2011-12-18T08:05:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (6): There was awful silence after he told Dad everything. “Forget about the car,” Dad said, “Jesus, are you all right?”

2011-12-18T08:02:00.000-05:00

140 Character Fiction (5): The worms were thumb sized, with a body-length mouth that spit up milky mucus and opened to reveal rows of teeth.(Inspired by the short story "The Day of the Worms," by Loann West.)

2011-12-17T13:24:00.001-05:00

140 Character Fiction (4): The multibillion dollar atom smasher sat idle, unused, while the scientists played with the cardboard boxes.

2011-12-17T13:11:00.006-05:00

140 Character Fiction (3): His face was a Jackson Pollack of red on white. He laughed. “That’s what I was afraid of?” he yelled, “That’s it?”

2011-12-17T13:11:00.002-05:00

140 Character Fiction (2): He had so much money that he could choke on it. That’s how they found him, face blue, mouth full of bills.

...in which I jump on the Twitterature band wagon (or: 140 Character fiction--1 in a Series)

2011-12-17T13:09:00.000-05:00

140 Character Fiction: The fireplace mantelpiece was now clean, and the broken crystal littered the floor. Her work done, she stretched out on the mantelpiece and purred.

(and yes, I know it's actually less than 140 characters, because the "140 Character Fiction:"prefix takes up 22 characters. Such is life.)

Black Belt Librarian

2011-11-19T20:52:00.001-05:00

I have really nothing more to add at this point. I will write more later, as I reflect on the fact that six years ago, at the age of 39, I decided to begin karate.

I now hold a black belt.

This is pretty sweet, especially considering that I can now, and for all time, call myself The Black Belt Librarian.

The Kids Who Create (and Blow Up) Worlds (and Cover Them With Lava)

2011-11-15T22:40:00.001-05:00

“Okay..Mr. Leif, the first thing you have to do is make a shelter. If you don’t make a shelter, the mobs will kill you (creepers, most likely, but ghasts, zombies, spiders, slime, and silverfish are also out there). Just use your pick to dig through the trees, and grab the logs when they appear. Use those logs to make sticks. Use those sticks to make a crafting table.“

“And remember, Mr. Leif, you have to kill a cow. If you don’t kill a cow, you’re not going to have food, which means you’ll starve. Also, you’re going to need the the leather that you can make from the dead cow.”

These are the exact words spoken by one of my students during seventh grade lunch recess, which takes place during seventh period (that would be 12:36 to 1:20, for those who don’t have our school schedule memorized).

This student was trying to help me stay alive. I was, after all, playing the “Survival Mode” of Minecraft, not the “Creative Mode,” which, for some reason, all of my students tell me to avoid at all costs.

So it’s survival mode. Yes. I must survive.

And I’m realizing that it’s going to take a long, long time for me to have the slightest idea how to survive.

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. For those you who know about Minecraft, just…just skip a whole bunch of paragraphs. You don’t need to read it. Go play whatever video game your parents let you play.

Okay, now…for those of you who’ve never heard of Minecraft (meaning, I’m going to guess, an awful lot of parents who are utterly bewildered by their child’s fascination with Minecraft):

“Minecraft” is a low res game (the graphics are blocky, as if this is a game from the late 1980s), and it’s a first person game in which you build things as opposed to shoot at them. You start out with a simple tool, and with this tool—with which you dig resources, starting with wood—you gradually build more tools. Having then built tools, you build a dwelling, and as you keep doing this, you start acquiring tools that allow you to collect ever more specialized resources, which in turn allow you to build more specialized things.

Or, to put it another way:

Minecraft is a game where you go from prehistoric to civilized human, and, once you’re there, gives you vast power over the world you’ve built.

I still haven’t really played “Minecraft,” but I’ve watched my seventh graders play it, and I’ve watched them explore it, and I’ve watched them establish domination over their world, and furnish it with incredible structures (there are single-player versions, where you’re the only settler, and, therefore, God).

I find this incredibly cool, but I must point out something:

Every boy who plays this game likes to blow things up, and/or cover everything with lava.

Every last one of them.

Yes, you can create gunpowder in this world, and it seems that once boys have built their virtual palace and gathered all of their earthly needs, their legacy, when people in this Minecraft World write about them, will be “He was a cruel God who blew up endless things, and covered whole cities with lava.”

Yes, I have seen an entire mountain covered in lava.

I believe the student who did this said something like “Mr. Leif, come over and look at the mountain that I covered in lava.”

This is what middle school boys would do to the world if they had dominion over it.

Which is why I think girls should play Minecraft.

To be sure, I know that many girls enjoy blowing things up, and probably enjoy the prospect of covering the earth with lava.

It's just that I think girls would do other things besides blow things up and cover them with lava. I'm sure they would create certain zones in this world where you could blow things up (and cover them in lava), but then have other parts of this world in which people exchanged ideas on such topics as “what else is there to do besides blow things up and cover the world with lava?”

Soon girls would, I don't know, be organizing virtual dances in these worlds, and everyone would immediately feel comfortable dancing, no one would be awkward. Every style of dancing would be in fashion at these dances, so even jumping up and down would be an acceptable dance move.

In this virtual world, many male and female Minecraft players would meet while jumping up and down at one of these virtual dances. Then they would each think that the other looked cool just jumping up and down, and would subsequently start to hang out together in the real world as well. Aw...

Then they each build worlds in which, from a distance, you would see that the entire world was a carefully designed mosaic portrait of that person they met at that virtual dance, a portrait that you could only see when you traveled through virtual outer space.

And of course, by this point, having created space travel in this virtual world instead of blowing things up, girls would create whole galaxies of worlds whose inhabitants live in harmony and dress well.

And the boys in these worlds do other things besides blow things up and cover them in lava.

So now, perhaps in this other place, girls would finally get a chance to show a guy the right way to build a world.

The Kid With the Neon Racing Flats (Not Running Shoes, Racing Flats)

2011-11-01T18:41:00.000-04:00

"They are RACING FLATS, Mr. Leif, not running shoes."

So said the email from the owner of the racing flats (not running shoes) shown in the photo above. Said student would also like me to add that she plays the cello, is a high honors student (not simply an honors student, she would like me to clarify, but a high honors student), took Math Research (which entails so much more work than the general research class that I teach that they really should call it Honors Research, or, more appropriately, College Level Research), and, presumably, solved the country's debt crisis before lunchtime.

I have written a paragraph about this student, and already, I am tired.

I suspect that this student does not sleep. Or, quite possibly, said student is like rechargeable batteries, where she talks (a lot) and moves around (a lot) and does (a lot) of things (well), and then, quite suddenly, says "Tired, must sleep," and simply lapses into a coma-like sleep for a couple of hours, after which her eyes snap awake, and she says something like "Awake. Day begins," and once more starts doing (a lot) of things (well).

I was not like this in middle school.

Okay, to be sure, I did stuff. I acted in shows. I played drums in the band and orchestra, and was, in fact, the section leader. I was in honors classes.

I was not, however, a high honors student.

I was one of those kids who drove teachers mad. I scored high on aptitude tests, but somehow couldn't quite make the jump from the standardized tests that measured my intelligence to academic tests that measured my grade point average. When it came to academics, I was often...average.

Anyway, about this student:

She is a middle school student, and she runs a mile in six minutes.

...and here we get to the heart of the matter.

Okay, when I was 19 and in the best shape of my life, I ran a mile on a whim. Granted, I ran it in jeans and a tee shirt, and I ran it at night, so I couldn't check the stopwatch setting on my wristwatch to push myself a bit more. Still, I cranked out a respectable 5:51.

In other words, as an adult, I was only able to beat this student's time by nine seconds.

Such things are humbling. And if you work in a middle school, that is only the start of it. For if you really get to know your students, you will find out that there are countless people who are already, in their early teens, doing things better than you ever did (or will do) them in your life.

In other words, I have had numerous students who I know could run circles around me athletically, musically, and academically.

You get used to it, and you learn humility; if you don't have this humility, I can't see how you'll make it as a teacher (or, in my case, a school librarian). You learn to accept that many, many people will do many, many things better than you. And having accepted that, you are free to do something genuinely life affirming: you can cheer these students on. And having done that, you are then free to notice something equally wonderful: this is a great way to make a living.

Too often, there are news stories about kids doing awful things (particularly now, the day after Halloween). You would often think, from reading these stories, that the next generation is basically a brainless, shambling zombie attack, bent on nothing but destruction.

The more that I embrace my central tenet of this blog--to write nothing but positive things about students--the better I feel about the future.

Today, when I was discussing my writing of this blog entry, a number of other students said that I should write about them.

"Fine," I said, "just come in tomorrow ready to talk about something you're proud of."

I know that the more I do this, the more students will approach me (I hope) about aspects of them--their accomplishments, their abilities--that they want the world to know about. I know, if this becomes a steady source of writing, that I will often write about students who already have a level of mastery of various skills that will leave my abilities far, far behind. This, I now know, is a great, great thing.

This student is already a better academic, a batter athlete, and a better musician that I will ever be. Good. There are many other students like this student.

I want to talk to them, and I want to write about them. So many of them embody what journalist Pete Hamill called "The Talent in the Room."

And Pete Hamill writes far better than I ever will. Trust me. Click here if you don't believe me, and you can read some of his stuff and see for yourself; this guy rocks.

A Motto for the Wall Street Protestors (That is, the Other 99%)

2011-10-22T14:57:00.000-04:00

You may disagree with it. You may think it's the craziest thing you've ever seen. You may think it makes Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan seem positively perfect.

It is, however, in a nutshell, one of the main things that the Wall Street protestors are trying to say: Tax Them Like it's 1954.

(You can get a copy of these tax rates--along with the amounts scaled up to 2011 dollars--by clicking here.)

(And before I go on: a quick shout out to Kevin Christopher, whose "All Ages" font is the one you see in the graphic above. This guy in a true artist when it comes to fonts. You can check out some of his other fonts here.)

In 1954, under Eisenhower, this country had the most progressive tax structure in its history. The top wage earners paid 91 percent on their taxable income. Lyndon Johnson cut the top bracket down to 70 percent, and it stayed that way till the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan cut it down, by 1988, to 28 percent.

I know that when I propose going back to the 1954 tax rates, the reply from many will be "Americans will never stand for this kind of tax structure."

And my response to that is the same as my response any time I hear someone say "Americans will" this, or "Americans will never" that:

Who are you to speak for all of America? I'm American, believe it or not. Who are you to speak for me?

I don't mind it if you say "Millions of Americans won't stand for this," the same way we can say "Millions of Americans didn't vote for Lincoln," or "Millions of Americans would like to see Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security completely demolished."

But if you're going to speak for people, stop just saying "Americans" without any qualifier, because you're not speaking for me.

Yes, I know that progressive taxes may only account for a 1% dent in our massive debt. To that, however, I do ask: where did you get these figures? I wonder if all economists believe that its positive affect on our national debt would be that low.

And I also ask: how much of the debt that we have now wouldn't exist if we had kept the Eisenhower tax brackets throughout the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s?

As anyone who owns a credit card knows, that 2000 dollar debt you have now is the runaway interest on that 100 dollar item you bought ten years ago but could never completely cover with your monthly payments.

I've read and listened to countless pundits exalt the wealthy for creating jobs. Okay, but they also spend vast amounts of money on themselves. They also have far more to lose if this country goes under.

A progressive tax structure may not, initially, be a huge step toward fixing this country's troubles. Still, it is a start, a statement that the poorest 99 percent of this country have had enough with carrying that hallowed 1%. And often, the best shifts in a country start with the smallest changes.

So I say: Tax Them Like It's 1954.

The Kid Who Gave Me a Shoutout

2011-10-22T14:14:00.000-04:00

One of the things that takes some getting used to is the fact that people actually take the time to read the things that I post.

Astonishingly, it would appear that my readership has grown to the double digits.

My ode to a student who dares to wear steampunk welder's goggles (which you can read here) made me nervous for a day or two. I feared I would get email from concerned relatives of the student, saying that I had somehow traumatized said student by mentioning him in my blog.

Surprisingly, the opposite was the case. I got some genuinely kind emails from folks (not just this student's family) saying that it was wonderful that I wrote about this student. People need encouragement and approval, they said, and to let this student know that there's an adult who prizes their individuality is an awfully good thing.

To which I say: this works both ways.

I would love to tell you that I'm able to work without the slightest concern as to whether students respect me, or, for that matter, like me. I would love to tell you that I am able to make all of my decisions without the slightest thought as to my own ego. I would love to tell you that I completely, thoroughly, totally understand that school is all about the students, and that as a teacher (okay, librarian), 100 percent of my concerns involve nurturing my students intellectual and emotional growth, and I'm able to completely shut out any desire for their approval.

Alas, I am human.

I know. I get it. I cannot let concern over student approval get in the way of the need for a disciplined and well-run classroom. I cannot let this concern get in the way of stepping in when I see student disrespect of any kind, be it for the school, for teachers (and librarians), or other students.

(I need to stop, by the way, and underline something: ESPECIALLY OTHER STUDENTS. Few things bring me closer to the boiling point than witnessing students disrespecting other students, either through physical torment, or even more insidiously, through verbal taunting. Anyone who said "names can never hurt me" never attended middle school. Hating is real, and it destroys the soul, particularly in this modern age of social networking; I find it disgusting.)

(Oops...another digression before I go on. I don't have too many iron-clad rules for my blog, but one of them is this: I WILL ONLY WRITE POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT MY STUDENTS. There are a number of teacher blogs out there that complain about students; this will not be one of them.)

So...anyway. About receiving student approval:

Heck, it's a nice thing.

Yes, the graphic at the top of this blog entry is from a student's Tumblr blog, and the student in question sent me a link to that entry. I would be lying to you if I told you it didn't make my day.

When you work in a school, you live in something of a vacuum. You don't really know what students think of you behind your back. There is, after all, that vast world that exists beyond the boundaries of school, which is that world of The Rest of Their Lives, when they talk about what they really think of you, and, occasionally, empty those thoughts into their text messages, their social network posts, and, yes, their blog entries.

It is a life affirming thing to have a student let the world know that you are doing the right thing.

To that student, I offer my sincere thanks.

(And, by the way, to said student, I offer my sincerest apologies for not including a link to your Tumblr blog. It is worth explaining why, and in doing so, might help shed a light on the minefield that is writing about students at the school in which you work.)

(The world of the middle school student--in fact, the world of anyone between the ages of about 11 and about, oh, 30 or so--is replete with expressed thoughts and feelings that may not always contain words and ideas appropriate within the walls of a middle school. I do not use these words or expressions in school, and, in fact, to set an example and be a role model, I don't use them in this blog.)

(I want students to express themselves. At the same time, I have a reputation to uphold. Alas, posting links to student blogs invites an avalanche of implications and insinuations that will tie my writing to my student's lives. Sadly, even in the virtual world, I must draw a line.)

(So, though I don't provide a link to this student's blog, I nonetheless, once again, offer that student a sincere thanks for the shout out.)

(And by the way...the zombie thing has to do with a research project I have students do in which they study how to survive in the event of a zombie attack. As any reader knows, this is a valuable and useful skill to teach the future of this country.)

500 (Or, a Writing Ritual)

2011-09-22T22:25:00.002-04:00

I need to get to sleep, because I'll be getting up at 5:30 tomorrow. I will then shower, shave, and get dressed, but I won't put on my button-up shirt over my undershirt just yet.

I need to write first, and It's not as comfortable to write while wearing a collared shirt and tie. I need to be relaxed. I listen to Brian Eno's "Ambient" music while I do this. I've referenced Brian Eno's "Ambient" music in another journal entry; I love that music.

I now know this: I'm a morning writer, and I have a quota: 500 words.

It doesn't take long. I'm working on the first draft of a novel, and I just put the words down. I've charted out the plot. I know where I'm going. I write 500 words, and it advances the plot by another inch or so.

I didn't do this until recently. For more than 20 years, I kept journals, dumping random thoughts onto many, many computer screens over the years.

And until recently, that personal obsessive writing (I called it "comfort food writing") was pretty much all the writing that I did. Then I went to Los Angeles. I have no idea what it was about Los Angeles that snapped me into this groove, but now I can't get through a day without writing 500 words of fiction.

I do it this way: I pick one project (I have a whole bunch of other projects lined up), and I call it my JWTDT project. This stands for "Just Write the Damn Thing." I have no idea whether it's any good. I don't care, really. I just want to finish it, polish it, and then be able to say "hey...I wrote a book."

Then I will start another, and this next project will, too, be a JWTDT project. After I'm done each morning with my 500 words, I'll spend some time revising the previous JWTDT project.

I will write these books one after the other.

I'm in good company with this sort of thing. Anthony Trollope wrote every morning for three hours, making sure to write 250 words every fifteen minutes. If he finished a book while he was in the middle of writing session, he would write "The End," and then start another book. That's the way I am, and that's the way that I'll write.

I've already gotten into this mode that doesn't dwell too heavily on how good this is going to be. I know that whatever I write, the next thing that I write will be better than the previous thing that I wrote.

And once I write those 500 words of JWTDT writing, I'm free. Free to write emails to friends. Free to write a stream of consciousness rant. Free to scribble an outline for a vague plot so that it starts to take shape.

It used to be 500 words of journal writing, and then 250 words of fiction in the morning. Now it's in reverse. I write those fiction words, and then type out my journal entry. I often pick up my uke in the middle of these sessions and strum a few chords. Right now, I'm teaching myself to play a classical ukulele version of "Waiting Room" by Fugazi. I am enjoying it, and making progress on shifting from F Minor to C# Major. Soon I will learn the chorus; it's tricky.

I don't have much more to say about this. I write every morning. On weekends, I'm going to shoot for 1,000 words. that's 4,500 words a week or, if I just write 500 words on the weekends, it's still 3,500 words.

Anyway. Tired. Bedtime. Good night.

The Kid With the Steampunk Welder's Goggles

2011-09-21T22:10:00.012-04:00

To all my loyal readers, all half-dozen of them: you're rolling your eyes, I know. Steampunk has become a cliche. You've been all over this stuff for years, what with your manual typewriter computer keyboards, your penny-farthing motorcycles, your round-trip tickets to Europe via airship, and your autographed copies of The Difference Engine.

As for me, I had no idea welder's goggles were such an integral part of the whole steampunk getup until one of my students came into the library wearing them.

I asked to try them, and immediately, I wanted a pair.

I now have a pair. They make me happy.

When I ordered the goggles on Amazon, by the way, every comment said "Great Steampunk Goggles!"

I felt behind the curve.

My affinity for welder's goggles, by the way, had nothing to do with the steampunk thing. I like them because I liked Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. Also, the goggles make me look like one of the scientists from La Jetee, or as if I belong on the cover of Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless.

Now, about the kid:

There's something life affirming about a middle school student who wears a Victorian vest, a pair of welder's goggles, and proudly carries around "The Steampunk Bible." It would be one thing if this were a middle school trend, but no; this kid is alone.

Most of us would never have been able to pull something off like this back in the crushingly conformist environment of middle school. This kid, however, does it effortlessly.

One of the best parts of my job is seeing a student who has the courage to be different, to completely be their own person. I meet a number of these students, as they often seek refuge in the library either after school or during lunch recess. They are not out of sync with the world; the world is out of sync with them.

It gets better.

As this kid showed me his welder's goggles, he talked about how he took a pair of 3-D glasses, and, with a Dremmel, fashioned a pair of 3-D lenses that fit inside his welder's goggles.

So he wears welder's goggles to 3-D movies.

This kid deserves a medal.

I know that among the geekeratti, steampunk is mainstream, past its selling date. But it's still barely on the radar here at middle school. And this kid is there, with his welder's goggles, thinking of plans, no doubt, to create a clockwork interface for an Ipad, and to use, in the place of a cel phone, a flock of passenger pigeons.

Priceless.

Helen Keller in the Social Network (or: Facebook Exile, Dispatch 3)

2011-09-18T19:02:00.001-04:00

No doubt about it: I've struck a nerve, and I really, honestly, have no idea just how much of a nerve I've struck.

Let's go over this, one more time, so that I can be clear: I'm still on Facebook. I did not delete my account.

I just don't have friends.

So I'm still in that room, with social hives buzzing around me. But I can't see or hear anyone.

I feel like Helen Keller at a cocktail party. Maybe everyone is talking about me. Maybe--okay, more likely--no one is talking about me. To me, it is all the same.

With that said, however, some have passed me braille notes in the form of email, or have, in the form of Facebook messages, taken my hand and started signing the manual alphabet into my palm.

It has been interesting, so interesting, in fact, that I was talking about it this morning with Jeff Pomerantz, a friend of mine in the Library/Information Science department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.. Being that I'm a librarian, we're occupational colleagues, so occasionally our conversations turn to...well, libraries and information.

In this case, of course, we started talking about virtual communities and social networks. Though there have been many studies of them, there have been few, if any, studies of a person who voluntarily choses to leave them the way that I have. So this is an experiment in which I am the guinea pig.

As I said, it has been interesting.

Here is something that I notice: to some people, leaving a virtual community is akin to suicide. I have literally gotten emails that say things such as "I hope you come back." And I want to say "wait. I didn't leave. I'm still here. Alive, and everything. You can email me. We can talk. We can grab coffee."

I mention the grabbing coffee part, because there is one aspect about this that particularly intrigues me: the people who send me emails suggesting that I get help.

I have indeed received these emails.

Let's go over this one more time:

My past was unpleasant.

Facebook reminded me of this unpleasant past.

So I took myself away from Facebook for a while so that I wouldn't see these names that would remind me of this past. I wanted to enjoy my present.

Which is why I was puzzled when someone wrote me and asked why I was dwelling on my past. And I just shook my head. For me, I wanted to say, Facebook made me dwell in my past (as Jeff said, "Facebook is all about having your past looking over your shoulder"). So I unplugged myself from it, and now (here we go again) am just, for the time being, using it as a way to get back in touch with people.

And it was cumulative, honest. Yes, I know that many of the people I unfriended were people where I sent them friend requests in the first place. Realizing that the problem was Facebook felt, for me, like a guy walks into the ER saying he has a pain in his head, and turns to reveal that he's been shot with an arrow.

Two things have occurred since I pulled the plug last Thursday. The first is, I spend a lot more time in the present, thinking about the life I'm living as opposed to the life I've lived. The second, which is even more interesting, is that I spend a lot more time...well, being social.

I've written more blog posts, had more interesting conversations, and answered more email in the last week than I have in a long, long time.

Now, let's go over this: I've become more social, I've been writing more, I've been living in the moment, and, in doing so, have come to see that there were, indeed, some wonderful moments embedded in that shudderingly miserable past.

Despite that, however, some still question my actions, my motives, and my sanity.

And to them, I say the following:

Question away.

Just so long as I get to do the same to you.

It all does make me wonder: suppose I'd just taken down my Facebook profile. Would it have made even a ripple?

The answer, I think is no. There is something about unfriending and choosing to remain friendless that, to some at least, rocks some people to the core.

Notes from Self-Imposed Exile (or: a friend request that triggers horrible memories)

2011-09-18T01:48:00.003-04:00

First off, let's be clear about something:

I really, really, enjoy my life now. I have a wife who means the world to me. I love working as a middle school librarian. I adore my insane students. I look forward to the first meeting of the ukulele club that I started (Tuesday, after school). I am 36,000 words into a novel I'm writing, and I write every morning. I have a Shotokan Karate black belt retest coming in November (I've taken it twice already, and sports stuff never comes easy to me; here's hoping the third time around is the charmer).

What I am saying is: I did not write my posts concerning my self-imposed Facebook exile as I was standing on the ledge of a building while listening to the music of Nick Drake. I was not counting out sleeping pills while listening to the music of Eliott Smith. I was not loading a gun while reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

People, apparently, become deeply concerned about you when you choose to become the Facebook equivalent of Jandek on Corwood (and I'm talking about the mystique of Jandek on Corwood, not the music; if I were to become the Facebook equivalent of the music of Jandek on Corwood, I would be deeply concerned about myself as well).

What I did, simply, was this: I wrote as someone who spent far too much time thinking about a far too grim past, and wanted, instead, to focus on this moment, right here, right now.

I like now. A lot.

What I wrote must have hit a nerve with some folks, because I got some deeply touching emails. One of them was from a person I knew peripherally in high school, and in it she discussed how she, too, didn't quite fit in anywhere (a sentiment with which, I know, many of my half-dozen or so loyal readers can identify). Another was from someone who discussed the pain of being single. I got still another email from a completely anonymous person from my past who told me that they have an autistic child, which in turn made me think of what it was like to grow up with an autistic younger brother.

I got another one from someone who was clearly deeply hurt by what I did, and I feel so bad about that. With her, it was nothing personal, but associative. She was a classmate back when I was in a fifth/sixth grade interage class with a teacher who chose a select group of students as her favorites, and made the lives of the rest of the students a living hell. She was one of the lucky ones; I was not so lucky.

Just seeing this person's name brought that class back, all of it. The stress. The misery. The feeling that I was worthless, and would never be as smart and witty and shiny as those favored few.

That sadness is right here, on these words. I mean it. Just seeing that person's name in my email box under the Facebook subject heading "message from..." made me talk to my wife about what it was to be in this teacher's class. Perhaps I will write about the details in some future post. Or perhaps not. It takes a lot out of me.

To be clear: this person never said a bad word to me, ever. But she reminded me of a part of my past. A terrible part of my past that I hadn't thought about until...well, until I saw this person's name. That's the way it is, I guess.

I'm sure that I'll have other things to write about (in fact, I do actually have a number of other things to write about), but right now, if there were a virtual room in which I were writing, it would be a zen room with a rock garden, a table, a chair, and Brian Eno's ambient music playing softly, all the time.

It is, as you may very well guess, an empty, surreal thing to log onto Facebook when you have no friends. I keep getting this prompt to update my account, and I have to keep indicating that no, I want it just the way it is. You can click on my name and send me a message. You can email me.

Or you can stop by and talk.

Unfriending

2011-09-16T18:02:00.006-04:00

The last time I had any friends was Thursday evening, September 8, 2011.

I was chatting with a friend from high school.

He was one of the last to go.

What I’m talking about, of course, was my slow, steady unfriending of everyone on Facebook.

Maybe the whole thing was a bit extreme. I tend to do that.

Yet at the same time, as I sit here, shut away from the ability to look up people’s profiles and check out pictures from their past, I feel…free. My profile picture is now me holding up a card that says “I HAVE NO FRIENDS.” If you read about me, you’ll see that I welcome anyone who wants to get to know me (or get back in touch with me) to email me at leifderek@gmail.com.

I am grateful to Facebook for allowing me to get back in touch with some people: a cousin who has become more like a sister to me; an artist friend who lives in Virginia. And yes, there are a couple of friends where I genuinely enjoyed seeing what was going on in their lives. And yes, I may sheepishly crawl back to them and ask them to re-extend me their online friendship.

But for now, I just needed to break away.

Because goodness, logging onto Facebook for these occasional gems from my cousin and those few friends was simply not worth the toll that all those other profiles and posts of all those other people took on my psyche.

Yes, I did indeed say that it took a toll on my psyche.

Look, for those of you who had a past with cool moments that you documented with pictures, then by all means, set up that account, and share your charmed life with everyone. Explore the lives of your Facebook friends, and talk about shared memories, special times that you hung out in high school and college, times when it felt as if the moments were golden and life was oh, so very heaven.

Just don’t feel hurt if, at the moment, I say “no, thanks.”

It is not simply that such things remind me of a painful past (they do). Certainly, as I look at these other photographs of other lives, I see people who had pasts full of experiences far more pleasant than mine.

Even more painful, though, is the other realization that grew as I trolled through Facebook: when I wasn’t going through some sort of awful experience, I really wasn’t doing much of anything during my past.

Let me try to summarize the exquisite pain that Facebook gives me with a single photograph.

I won’t name the person, and, now that I’ve unfriended everyone, I can’t get the photograph, and I wouldn’t repost it, anyway. Trust me, though, a description will do. You’ll get the idea, promise.

A long, long time ago, way back in the early ‘80s, I attended Great Neck North High School. I was in Community School, which was kind of an alternative English/Social Studies thing in which you attended classes with people ranging from sophomores to seniors. You got to know all of these people. It was a community, in other words.

Anyway, one of the folks in CS was a girl who had this adorable and endearing trait of sucking her thumb. Trust me, it was adorable and endearing. Anybody reading this who remembers this person is now nodding their head and saying “yup, you’re right there, Derek…it was pretty darn adorable. And endearing.”

I mention this because the picture in question is a head shot of this person asleep on the beach, sucking her thumb. She’s wearing a tee shirt, and she’s using someone else as a pillow.

That’s it. That’s the picture.

Now let me explain why viewing this photograph made me the saddest I’ve been in a long, long time.

It was not the person.

It was the context.

That photo, I know, was taken during Senior Beach Day, when seniors at North would ditch classes and go to Jones Beach for the day. I am sure a number of things occurred between some students on Senior Beach Day that are best left unwritten—I work in a middle school after all, and am well aware that some of my students may read this—but those are not the things I’m writing about.

I’m talking about those moments that can seem so simple when they’re occurring, but become these cherished things that we draw upon later in life. I’m talking about those times where, upon reflection, people say things such as “we just hung out on the beach and talked, and it was one of those times that was so simple and mundane, but I just get so happy when I think back on it. And there she was, asleep on the beach, with her thumb in her mouth, using someone else for a pillow, and that photograph totally takes me back to that moment.”

For a number reasons I’d rather not get into, vast tracts of my past involved learning of moments such as these after they occurred. I did not see The Who at Shea Stadium in 1982, nor did I see the Police there in 1983. And believe me, I’m sure many, many other people didn’t do these things.

It’s just that Facebook reminds me of so many of them.

There’s more. There was the seductive misery of comparing myself to other people, and mining my past for people I wish I’d gotten to know better. There was a slow, insidious slide toward marinating in my past, and somehow thinking that it was possible to go back and change it if I thought about it, wrote about it, and talked about it enough.

That does not work. Do not try it. It is unpleasant. As someone said while scolding me for this: “You are not your past, Derek.”

And through it all, there were those status updates, most of them from people way back in those dark times. Status updates that made me compare the progress of my life to people I barely knew. People who barely knew me.

Because the people you friend on Facebook are, most of the time, not your friends. They’re people you met in your past, and some of them, without even being aware of it, can trigger memories that are excruciating, and, at the same time, tangible, memories that actually seem to have mass and volume.

What I am saying is that Facebook made me feel more alone than I ever have felt in my entire life.

I took inventory of the genuine friends I had on Facebook: my cousin, six friends from college, two acquaintances from college, three friends from high school, a person I befriended through a close friend who is not on Facebook, and…and maybe, after I post this, I’ll think of another one or two.

Maybe I will change my mind about this at some point in the future. And, quite likely, I will sheepishly ask those ten or so people if they could re-extend me their online friendship.

For now, though, on Facebook, I am, for the moment, a man with no friends.

Why I Work in a Middle School

2011-06-14T22:39:00.003-04:00

Let me put it this way:
In the world--okay, in Scotland, specifically--there has to be someone who craves haggis. Mind you, this someone doesn't just tolerate haggis. Somewhere, in the annals of history, there has to be someone who woke up--or is waking up at this moment--and said (or is saying) "what I really want is a sheep's heart, liver and lungs mixed with suet and oatmeal, which I will then cook inside the sheep's stomach. Yeah. That's what I want."
And that is why, in spite of all that is sensible, in spite of all that is sane, in spite of all that is rational in the universe, yes, this is a run on sentence, but god dang, that is why I love teaching in a middle school, and why I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I guess it's sort of the way that Patty Hearst, after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, embraced her inner Tanya. Middle school has a way of doing that to you. For the first few months, you're shell shocked, as these children, who have learned to be obnoxious as only an adult can be obnoxious, test your patience, your dignity, and your sanity.
And of course, in about the sixth month or so, you do the only sensible thing in such a situation: you go insane. You slowly start to love working in this building festering with 700 not-yet-adults, and you grow to laugh at the way they joke with you, and you even start to laugh at the way that they test you.
Because yes, they are testing you. They are submitting you to something more mind fraying than any No Child Left Behind nightmare standardized exam. And when you pass, when you actually win the respect and admiration of these students, you feel as if you have found the holy grail, thrown the ring into Mount Doom, destroyed the Death Star, and seen The Matrix as a series of ones and zeros. Camelot is reborn. The Shire is once again safe for hobbits. The Force is With You. Keanu Reeves looks at you and says "whoa."

So yeah, give me the haggis. I crave it. I need it. I can't live without it.

A Real Sentence Concerning the Vicious Cycle of Livestock Bullying Other Livestock

2011-03-23T14:58:00.005-04:00

(With the warmest admiration for William J. Rapaport, professor of many, many disciplines, SUNY Buffalo. Obviously.)

(And by the way, Professor Rapaport's website is here, and the Wikipedia article about Professor Rapaport's sentence is here.)

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Let me explain.

The above sentence describes a sad but true fact about bullying: victims of bullying often become perpetrators themselves...often upon the very beings that their assailants push around.

This phenomenon is particularly apparent when the livestock in question are buffalo. Not bulls, not cows; only buffalo.

And specifically, it is particularly noticeable when the livestock come from Buffalo, New York.

To simplify things, let's call those livestock "Buffalo buffalo."

Furthermore, it is necessary to describe the kind of bullying that takes place. Simply stated, these buffalo like to push around their own kind. They like to shove them hard.

They like to buffalo them.

Even more insidiously, they like to push them around--or "buffalo" them--in a style not found in any city but Buffalo, New York. In fact, so unique is this style of pushing around, this style of buffaloing, that when the perpetrator does it to another perpetrator, they are said to "Buffalo buffalo" them,

Put simply, buffalo from Buffalo, New York, tend to push around--or "Buffalo buffalo"--other buffalo from Buffalo, New York.

So Buffalo buffalo "Buffalo buffalo" Buffalo buffalo.

But it gets worse. The livestock that these bullies push around tend to pick on other livestock in the same fashion.

In other words, Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo "Buffalo buffalo" themselves "Buffalo buffalo" Buffalo buffalo.

Or, to put it more simply Buffalo buffalo Buffalo Buffalo "Buffalo buffalo" "Buffalo buffalo" Buffalo buffalo.

Or we could just lose the quotation marks, in much the same way that a track and field coach, upon commenting on one of his or her high jumpers choosing to vault backwards (as opposed to the traditional Western Roll) might just write, in correspondence, that his athlete tends to "Fosbury Flop it," choosing not to put quotation marks around "Fosbury Flop."

Then we could just write this sentence plainly, as a sad commentary on the cycle of bullying among upstate livestock:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Tragic.

(And by the way: The Fosbury Flop is named for Dick Fosbury, who used his unconventional technique to win a high jump gold medal in the 1968 summer olympics in Mexico City. You can read more about it here).

The Insidious, Depression-Inducing Spectre that is Facebook

2011-01-22T19:16:00.002-05:00

I'm going through a period of catch phrases lately.

I'm also still big on the one sentence paragraph thing. I can't help but noticing that when I come across blog entries with huge paragraphs it all kind of blurs together.

Anyway, I've pretty much been able to sum up my goals for the rest of my life in a sentence (today's catch phrase): I want to do things, go places, and meet people. For much of my life, I did nothing, went nowhere, and knew no one. In other words, I spent a good portion of my teen years home alone watching television.

I'm going somewhere with this, I promise. First, though, a bit more about my past:

I did not play much Dungeons and Dragons.

I was not cool enough for the people who played Dungeons and Dragons.

This gives you some idea of where I was in the social strata of my school back in the day.

There is more, so much more. I will avoid the internal monologue, which would explain some of the following, but is simply too personal. Instead, I will simply go through a selected inventory of known facts:

I remember having a mind so cluttered that I repeatedly got parts in shows, and then stopped showing up for rehearsals. One of these shows was "Our Town." Another was "Lorelei," both of which were performed at Levels, a wonderful youth center that is part of The Great Neck Library.

I also played percussion in another one of their shows, "Pippin," only to announce, a week before the show went on, that I was quitting.

I look back on these things with a kind of numb bewilderment.

I had a ticket to see The Jam at The Palladium that I never used.

I also had tickets to see The Who at Shea Stadium on October 12th, 1982. I sold them.

I also had a ticket to see them the following day, but I didn't go.

I look back on this with more numb bewilderment.

Then there are things that simply happened:

In eleventh grade I was in a band that was something of a big deal in my school. I was in the band for a few months, and will always remember the afternoon that two of the members of said band caught up with me as I was walking to my job at The Great Neck Library to tell me that there was another guy who they liked better, and that I was fired. I remember just standing by the side of the pond that borders the library, and just letting the news settle over me and I looked at the library's reflection on the pond.

Still more numb bewilderment.

I look back on these things-back on most of my life between the ages of eight to about twenty-and come to the following conclusion:

For some of us, Facebook is the most shatteringly depressing creation in the history of humanity.

I look at photo albums of classmates, and I see people doing things, going places, and making friends. I know that these people went through their own difficult times, but I also see other people in those photographs who helped them pull through those times.

I see these photos, and am reminded of a trip I took to London when I was in eleventh grade. I took tons of photos, and when I got them developed, I noticed that there weren't any other people in the photos; they all could have been postcard photos, and carried little or no weight of shared memory.

I could talk about the bullying, I suppose (one vivid memory involves someone who repeatedly told me to kill myself). That, however, is beside the point.

No, the point here is that, for a number of reasons, I wasn't present in my past. I ate, I slept, I breathed, to be sure, but for most of that time, I was barely there.

And so I look at these photo pages of people from my past-people in which I was a shadowy, peripheral part of their pasts-and am overcome with an almost palpable feeling of depression. It is a depression that has a definite mass and volume, one that, when I look at these photographs of people with a definite past, almost seems to fill the room and draw out all of the air.

Yes, Facebook has allowed me to reconnect with my second cousin, who was one of my best friends when I lived in Los Angeles. Yes, Facebook has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from college, and the correspondence from these friends is a priceless gift.

At the same time, though, it keeps making think of the line "gather ye rosebuds while ye may," and forces me to conclude that, unlike many of my peers, I emerged from that time in my life virtually empty handed.

Yet it also serves as a reminder of something far more important: today will be gone, and I can't get it back. There are things to do, places to go, and people to meet. Tomorrow, there will be more of the same. And years from now, when someone comes along with a miserable past who believes that it is too late to start living, I will have the photographs to prove that life always starts now, and always offers more opportunities later.

Back From the Dead, and Not Quite Sure How to Rise From It

2011-01-02T15:40:00.001-05:00

I check the blogs of my friends frequently, and always feel down when I see that they haven't written anything.

Now, sadly, I must face the fact that for the past six months, I have been one of these people.

I can imagine the bitter disappointment of the six or seven people (a generous estimate) who actually stop by to see what's going on in my life. For what it's worth, I'm teaching a class this year (in addition to my librarian duties), and the first year of this sort of thing tends to be a time suck of epic proportions.

Anyway, now that I'm here, writing, I once again face the difficult task of deciding exactly what parts of my life I want all of my students to know about.

Yes, I said "all of my students," because when you work in a school, you tend to think that way. Anything you write, if it's good and juicy and personal, is going to be something that one of your students may very well read. This means that if it's particularly good, all of them will know.

This puts me in a difficult position. I actually can think of a bunch of things I'd like to write about, and I just won't do it.

In other words, I have such pedestrian things to write about.

Hmmm. Well, I can write about my cats. I like my cats. Their names are Clementine and Gracie Lou. Clementine is big like a feline puma, and would play catcher on any softball team composed of cats. Gracie Lou is built more like a cheetah and would play shortstop.

I don't mind my students knowing this.

Other things I don't mind anyone knowing:

--I drink a lot of lot of coffee. A lot. I've been drinking it since I was eight. It is my one true vice, along with...

--Diet Coke, of which I drink vast amounts. In fact, I drink so much of it that the principal of my school once said that the mere sight of me caused a Pavlovian response in which he immediately craved a Diet Coke. It's sort of like seeing Jim Carroll and craving...no, I'm not going to go there. Students will read this. Focus.

--I've no doubt that one of my more intelligent students who has moved on to high school or college will know who Jim Carroll is, and will see the somewhat sick humor of that last item. Hilarity will ensue.

--I play the ukulele. I enjoy it.

--When I announced on Facebook that I enjoyed my ukulele and was planning to play in Manhattan on an open mike night, I got a snide response from a Facebook friend who posted a link to a song he had written in which the lyrics basically stated that anyone who plays the ukulele is a pathetic poseur hipster wannabe.

--I unfriended this person.

--Said person takes pride in having planted a computer virus in his college's network back in the day. Said virus crashed the network, and the college kicked this person out.

--This person also makes sure that his name contains archaic ASCII letters so that it's basically impossible for anyone to look him up. When I saw this, I said to myself "and I'm the poseur who's trying to show everyone how cool I am?"

--I am the most uncoordinated karate student who ever lived, and can proudly state that I have already failed my black belt test twice.

--Another student in the class, who has studied karate for over twenty years, told me that she failed her black belt test three times. This made me feel better.

--I continue to find the idea of being both a middle school librarian and a karate student to be amusing.

--I run a ukulele club at my school.

--It is difficult to be depressed when you are teaching five middle school students to play the ukulele, and are listening to one of them play Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

--One of my most cherished guilty pleasures is "World's Wildest Police Videos." I could watch this show for hours. John Bunnel's narration is a thing of rare and exquisite beauty. I love how, after the pursued car smashes into an embankment or goes off a cliff, they show a replay, and Bunnel always says something in which the car crash punctuates his sentence, such as "This meth addict thought he was an instrument of God. But this instrument is no match (CRASH) for the long arm of the law."

--Whenever I watch this show, I find myself talking like Beavis from Beavis and Butthead, saying things such "Yeah...yeah....just...like...crash it. Smash it up."

--If you have never watched this show, watch this classic chase in which some guy drove a tank onto the highway:

--As might be obvious from the above, one of my favorite films is The Hidden, and the first five minutes are a glorious thing. If you haven't seen it, see it.

--I ran a trivia quiz on this blog for a few weeks, and then the pressure of preparing for this class I'm teaching got in the way. In fact, there's still one person who didn't get their prize. Deepest apologies to you, Lisa Currie...your prize is on its way this week.

--There will be more weekly trivia, for the five or six of you who miss it. Give me a week or two.

--I have tremendous difficulty reading any blog in which the paragraphs are longer than three sentences or so. When I come across long paragraphs like that, I just sort of skim, and find myself imitating Strong Bad from Home Star Runner, particularly the email in which he says that the best way to deal with the office dullard is to simply nod your head and say "Yeah? Oh yeah. Yeah? Oh yeah."

--I am currently listening to Janelle Monae's The Archandroid and finding it just ducky.

--I own a Nintendo DS and just got a couple of games for it. Not the most mature thing, admittedly, but what can you do.

--I'm always amused by films in which there is a lava flow, and you're safe just so long as you don't touch it, as if it's the cooties or something. In other words, I love how in these films (such as The Return of the King) the lava is curiously missing the radiant heat that, in any other volcano, causes things within a radius of several yards to spontaneously combust.

--I like the Michael Mann film Heat, but I like Thief better.

--I prefer Manhunter to Silence of the Lambs.

--Brian Cox's Hannibal Lechter in Manhunter is far more real than Anthony Hopkins's, and is therefore, in my opinion, far more disturbing.

--I've gotten good at hypnotizing people. Honest.

--I have done tarot card readings in which I have explained to people that I view it as nothing more than a highly stylized coin flip, and continue to be amused when people tell me "oh my God...that's exactly what's going on in my life."

--I am fascinated with carnival sideshows, and can spend far too much time telling you about Johnny Eck, Prince Randian, The Hilton Sisters (twins cojoined since birth, not Paris and Nikki), along with Todd Robbins, a modern day carnival performer who drives nails into his nostrils and eats glass.

--One of my most cherished pieces of correspondence is an email from Todd Robbins in which he told me how to walk on broken glass.

--I aspire to drive nails into my nostrils to the degree that I actually asked Todd Robbins detailed questions about this. We also exchanged emails about Melvin Burkhart, the original "Human Blockhead."

--My wife is not happy about this.

--Speaking of Todd Robbins, if you live in New York and haven't seen the show Play Dead, get up right now, and see it. It is the most purely entertaining thing I've seen in years.

--Though I haven't seen it, I've read that the ending to the 1956 version of 1984 has Winston and Julia being cut down in a hail of bullets as they shout anti-party slogans. I say this because I once had a dream in which I was watching It's a Wonderful Life, and it ended this way, with Jimmy Stewart dying after screaming anti-Potter sentiments.

--The thing about the dream is that I tend to have emotionally vivid dreams in which I feel very specific feelings, so while I was watching this movie, I was feeling the sort of emotional catharsis that comes with seeing a life-affirming movie such as Dead Poet's Society.

Anyway, that's about all the lame things I can think about at the moment. Happy New Year. And I apologize for typos. My posts are riddled with them.

140 Character Review (#1 in a Series)

2010-06-29T19:29:00.001-04:00

140 Character Film Review. Runaway Train. 1985. Jon Voight is so cool. Eric Roberts does not ruin this film. Rebecca De Mornay…Sigh

My New Word Game: the Tweeted Film Review

2010-06-29T19:19:00.001-04:00

(Just a warning, here. Look, the Billy Jack photo really has nothing to do with this post. But it's Billy Jack. Look, it's just...it's Billy Jack. There are two people in the world: those who know what I mean when I say "It's Billy Jack," and those who don't. The people who don't are often wonderful people, but they just won't get it, and I hope they don't hold it against me. But it's Billy Jack.)

I admit to having gotten hooked on a new pastime, one that I'm sure you're hooked on as well:

I try to compose 140 character film reviews.

I know. Other people are doing this already. Fine. Good for them. They are far more up to date on these things then I will ever be. I meanwhile, am like an Otaku without any computing skills.

Actually, I'm even worse than that. I barely know what Otaku is. All that I know of it comes from the Karl Taro Greenfeld article "The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures Who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds" from the March 1993 issue of Wired magazine, which, I'm now realizing, I once owned. Wow. I bought the first issue of Wired. Imagine that. Me.

Anyway, you can link to that Otaku article here.

And oh, yeah, two more things. The first is that the "Wired" article was reprinted in Greenfeld's incredible look at Japanese subcultures "Speed Tribes," which you can buy here. I have incredible difficulty getting into books, which means that if I can't put a book down, it's probably worthwhile. This book is amazing. A bit dated now, but amazing. Trust me.

The second thing, just to maybe salvage the slightest bit of obscure knowledge cred here, I'd just like to point out that the title of Greenfeld's article is 1964's "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies," which you can read all about here.

But enough about my complete lack of vision when it comes to spotting the next big thing until it's passe. I still like writing 140 character reviews (and remember, just tweeting "140 Character Reviews:"takes up over 20 characters).

Here are some of mine:

A 140 character film review (it’s been done, I know). Let’s see, Hmmm. Okay. Young Victoria: proof that adorable and loving can also be hot.

140 Character Film Review. Pandorum. What, in the name of all the space in this tweet, was going on? Ben, please tell me. Please, Dennis.

...and finally, just because I wanted to see if I could get that last review to 140 characters, here goes:

140 Character Film Review. Vanishing Point. 1971. It’s just…it’s..it’s Barry Newman. Kowalski. Say it soft, and it's almost like praying.

I am hooked.

...and yes, I know every entertainment magazine has these. I know. Really. I also know there are many people who tweet 140 character reviews.

I know this. In fact, here is someone who's already doing that.

Still, I am hooked. Other people have given 140 character reviews before. And now, I am one of them.

That's just the way it is.

Oh, yeah, here's my Twitter page.

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

2010-06-29T18:26:00.001-04:00

(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.

I Want a Political Belief and Faith Just Like in Monsters Incorporated (or, Time to Write and Stop Asking Stupid Questions)

2010-06-22T21:37:00.002-04:00

Okay, no more trivia. Sorry. Got to write.

And at this moment, I just want to state this, right off the bat. It a statement of faith, and I...I just need to say it:

I want a faith that's the end of Monsters Incorporated.

Okay, here's what I mean. At the beginning of the film there's this construct in which fear is energy, okay? And the people who are best at scaring the living daylights out of people are in power, because that's all that they know. All they know is the fear. Fear is energy. And by god, they're gonna drill for fear anywhere they can.

So they have to create more fear. And the fear has to be, you know, more intense. Intense fear.

Stay with me, please.

So anyway, let's get to the end, where we find out that the whole power structure has changed. Laughter is ten times more potent than fear. So now it's the guys who make people afraid who are working for the guys who make people laugh.

And, that's what I mean. I want to live in a world where even though there's reason to be afraid--I mean, there's Always a reason to be afraid, because we're all going to die at some point--I get to spend my energy laughing.

I want a political belief where it's okay to laugh from time to time, and not always at someone else's expense.

In other words: I want funny people who know how to laugh at themselves. Yeah. That's what I want in my political party and my faith: I want funny people who know how to laugh at themselves.

And my faith tells me to beware of people who want to make me afraid, and people who can't laugh at themselves, and love to laugh at the misfortunes of others. Bullies can't laugh at themselves. And they're incapable making people laugh in a life affirming way. For this, I distrust them.

And that's my test. If a good person of my faith--you know, The Monsters Incorporated faith--doesn't know how to make people laugh, they at least know how to laugh at themselves.

And if the person's funny, I want them to be able to laugh at themselves. I can't stress this enough. I mean, Mike Wazokski (that's Billy Crystal) isn't afraid to swallow a microphone and cough it up for a laugh. For this I love him.

So people who can make me laugh--without the laughter being at the expense of others--and who, in addition, know how to laugh at themselves are my people. Bill Cosby's "Chicken Heart" monologue. Everything Bill Hicks ever did (although he was pretty rough on the New Kids on the Block. It's on You Tube. If you're a kid, don't...oy...look, if I were a kid now, I'd want someone to tell me about Bill Hicks. I just would). Everything Jake Johannsen's ever done. Mitchell and Webb, what little I've seen of them, anyway. Fry and Laurie. Monty Python, of course. Mr. Show, although they could get nasty from time to time. You have your choices, I have mine.

And I'm still on the fence about the Ricky Gervais stuff with Karl Pilkington. I can't tell whether it's brilliant or one of the most mean spirited things I've ever heard. I just don't know.

Anyway, yeah. Funny people who know how to laugh at themselves, and know how to make other people laugh without the laughter being at anyone's expense. Yeah. These are my people.

And that's what I want: I want a faith and a political believe that makes me want to laugh, by golly.

I'm sorry, but I just can't curse at this point. Don't want to offend the parents.

And to all of my friends who are far smarter and more well-read than I am (in other words, to all my friends):

I'm sure I could have put the whole Name of the Rose thing in here somewhere, where the whole plot hinges on laughter and comedy, but it's honestly the only Eco book I've read, and I didn't want to seem like any more of a dilettante than I already am.

Brilliant. Simply Brilliant. (Contest #7)

2010-05-28T13:08:00.002-04:00

Remember:

--Send your answer to leifderek@gmail.com

--Include your name and address so that I can send you your prize if you win

--if you're camera shy and don't want your name mentioned, don't hesitate to say so; i'll still send you your prize, and post my 250 words of praise for you.

--All entries must be in by Thursday, June 3rd at 3 PM.

--Winner will be chosen randomly from correct answers.

--Winner receives a cheap, borderline-worthless trinket purchased at thinkgeek.com, and 250 words of praise which will be published in this blog, along with a personally signed letter with those same 250 words of praise. Wow.

--New question every Friday or Saturday, depending on when I get to it.

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

For a cheap Think Geek trinket and 250 words of praise, WHAT COMPANY--CLEARLY NOT THE MOST RELIABLE COMPANY--MANUFACTURED THE MANY GADGETS WITH WHICH WILE E COYOTE TRIED TO CATCH THE ROAD RUNNER?

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION:

I got a record number of correct answers to last week's question, which means that this blog's readership numbers have exploded to at least a dozen people. Amazing. What is also amazing were the vast numbers of people who knew that Fahrenheit 451 was the only book to be published in a fireproof edition.

The winner for this week is LISA CURRIE, who, as promised, will be getting a cheap trinket. Specifically, she will be getting a Japanese Funny Sounding Button keychain, from the good folks at Think Geek. For the curious, it looks something like this:

Of course, Lisa also, as a winner, gets a personal, 250-word note, written by me, attesting to her brilliance. As promised, here are 250 words of praise, and they belong to Lisa, and no one else:

May 28, 2010
5:32 PM

Dear Lisa,

Of the traits you possess, the greatest is modesty.

There simply can be no doubt. The fact that you, with your vast and intimidating mental faculties, can pretend that your intelligence is merely human requires an act of self discipline that no Buddhist monk can hope to master.

How, we humans ask, are you able to possess this kind of intelligence without making the rest of us leave our houses of worship and proclaim you as the true deity, the unifying god who unites all faiths? How, we ask again, can such a mind, in which brilliance radiates with the light of a nova, exist with the meager case of human flesh and bone?

It is these questions that cause us to ponder, and ponder deeply, the mysterious paradox that your existence poses. Surely, we say, it is impossible for a mortal human to be in possession of such godlike intelligence. Surely remaining humble while being in possession of such intelligence requires such discipline that it is remarkable that you are able to do anything else—breathe, walk, talk—while you allow the rest of us the amusing illusion that we are in the presence of a human being with human intellect.

And so it is that even though we bow to your brilliance, it is humility that truly amazes us. Without it, we would rightly think that we are not worthy to occupy the same space, the same planet, nay, the same universe that you inhabit. For such humility—and with it, such decency—we owe you a deep debt of gratitude.

Enjoy your Japanese noisemaker as a token of our appreciation.

Yours truly,
Derek Leif
Administrator of derekleif.blogspot.com
“Serving my half-dozen loyal readers since…well, since very recently

So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World. Charlie. My Boy. You've Won. (Contest #6)

2010-05-20T20:33:00.003-04:00

Remember:

--Send your answer to leifderek@gmail.com

--Include your name and address so that I can send you your prize if you win

--if you're camera shy and don't want your name mentioned, don't hesitate to say so; i'll still send you your prize, and post my 250 words of praise for you.

--All entries must be in by Thursday, May 27th at 3 PM.

--Winner will be chosen randomly from correct answers.

--New question every Friday or Saturday, depending on when I get to it.

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

For a cheap Think Geek trinket and 250 words of praise, WHAT 1953 RAY BRADBURY NOVEL IS THE ONLY BOOK TO BE PUBLISHED IN A FIREPROOF EDITION?

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION:

It is almost painful to be surrounded by such brilliance. So many of you, so, so many, knew that it was "Ring Around the Rosy" that is thought to be a song about The Black Death (even though it's not).

The winner for this week is ERIC PEARL, who, as promised, will be getting a cheap trinket. Specifically, he will be getting a Japanese Funny Sounding Button keychain, from the good folks at Think Geek. For the curious, it looks something like this:

Of course, Eric also, as a winner, gets a personal, 250-word note, written by me, attesting to his brilliance. As promised, here are 250 words of praise, and they belong to Eric, and no one else:

May 20, 2010
4:35 PM
Dear Eric,

Deep inside the vast canyons of your mind, where all the knowledge in the universe resides, is the correct answer to last week's question.

The depth and breadth of your brilliance is astonishing sir, but even more staggering to contemplate is the speed with which you access this information.

For most of us--for myself, at least--accessing that information is a tricky task, one akin to venturing into a dusty, unlit basement, and, after wading though cobwebs and colonies of rats, coming at last to the rusted over file cabinet that contains the vital piece of information I seek. This, in turn, is followed by the long, slow journey up stairway after stairway, all the way up to the higher functioning parts of my brain that can actually make use of this information.

Not you, sir, not you.

For you, each piece of your vast knowledge--and it is vast, for it is, after all, the combined knowledge of the universe--is an electron that you command to make its way toward you at the speed of light, tickling the necessary neurons of your brain until the answer rockets through your fingers, allowing you to type it with grace and ease.

Given this vast sea of knowledge, is it any wonder that you should also be graced with the luck that allowed you to be this week's winner? Of course not. For you, sir, have all the knowledge there is to know, and you have seen all the possibilities that this week promised you. You saw this victory before it even happened, so this letter, of course, is a mere anticlimax to the triumph you already saw inside that vast and awesome structure that you modestly call your intellect.

Enjoy the noisemaker sir. You, after all, forsaw this moment. You, after all, know all that was known, all that is known, and all that will be known.

Yours truly,

Derek Leif
Administrator of derekleif.blogspot.com
“Serving my half-dozen loyal readers since…well, since very recently

Still More Winners. We Just Can't Stop It (Contest #5)

2010-05-15T13:58:00.001-04:00

Remember:

--Send your answer to leifderek@gmail.com

--Include your name and address so that I can send you your prize if you win

--if you're camera shy and don't want your name mentioned, don't hesitate to say so; i'll still send you your prize, and post my 250 words of praise for you.

--All entries must be in by Thursday, May 20th at 3 PM.

--Winner will be chosen randomly from correct answers.

--New question every Friday or Saturday, depending on when I get to it.

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

For a cheap Think Geek trinket and 250 words of praise, WHAT CHILDREN'S SONG/RHYME HAS OFTEN BEEN THOUGHT TO BE ABOUT DYING OF THE BUBONIC PLAGUE (BLACK DEATH)...ALTHOUGH THE GOOD FOLKS AT SNOPES.COM SAY THAT THE WHOLE BLACK PLAGUE THING IS NONSENSE?

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION:

So much brilliance, so many people who knew that the government agency established to stop counterfeiting was the Secret Service.

The winner for this week is JIM WINSTON, who, as promised, will be getting a cheap trinket. Specifically, he will be getting a Japanese Funny Sounding Button keychain, from the good folks at Think Geek. For the curious, it looks something like this:

Of course, Jim also, as a winner, gets a personal, 250-word note, written by me, attesting to his brilliance. As promised, here are 250 words of praise, and they belong to Jim, and no one else:

May 14, 2010
7:35 PM
Dear Jim,

I cannot look at you, Sir, and I cannot draw a likeness of you.

To look at you would destroy this mortal body, equipped as it is with only a human’s intelligence, and a human’s capacity for comprehension.

I cannot draw a likeness of you, for to do so would blaspheme against the divine power that is your intelligence.

How does one go about discussing your brilliance and your vast resources of luck without melting just like one of those Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark?

The answer, sadly, tragically, is that I must talk around the issue without discussing it directly. I must simply accept the fact that your brilliance, like the sun, must be experienced through a filter, lest the vitreous humor in my eyes heat up, causing them to boil in their sockets. I must also accept the fact that, as I said, I must discuss this indirectly, not much acknowledging the power of your mental might—and your random fortune—as discussing the dangers of praising you directly.

And so I will discuss those dangers.

A direct discussion of this massive mental might would very well bring about nothing less than a complete vaporization of one’s being. Some may laugh at this, but they have not known the danger of every cell in a body wanting to be free, wanting to run and jump, wanting to sing the praises of your abilities, wanting to scream “Jim Winston has won. Jim Winston has not been chosen as a winner, oh no; instead, Jim Winston has chosen to win.”

And so sir, to avoid exploding just like Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen—and that’s going to be it for movie /comic book references, I’m afraid—I merely thank you for choosing to win my humble contest. It will be so much the better for having been graced with your presence.

Enjoy the Japanese noisemaker, sir. And please don’t look at me.

Yours truly,

Derek Leif
Administrator of derekleif.blogspot.com
“Serving my half-dozen loyal readers since…well, since very recently

Someone Won Again. There's Just No Stopping It (Contest #4)

2010-05-07T10:35:00.003-04:00

Remember:

--Send your answer to leifderek@gmail.com

--Include your name and address so that I can send you your prize if you win

--if you're camera shy and don't want your name mentioned, don't hesitate to say so; i'll still send you your prize, and post my 250 words of praise for you.

--All entries must be in by Thursday, May 13th at 3 PM.

--Winner will be chosen randomly from correct answers.

--New question every Friday (sorry I was late this week!)

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

For a cheap Think Geek trinket and 250 words of praise, WHAT DIVISION OF THE UNITED STATES TREASURY--WHOSE CURRENT MAJOR DUTIES WOULD PRETTY MUCH GIVE THE QUESTION AWAY IF I LISTED THEM HERE--WAS ORIGINALLY SET UP TO STOP COUNTERFEITING?

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION:

So much brilliance, so many people who knew that it was The Hal 9000 computer who became fully functional on January 12, 1992. Only one winner, though.

The winner for this week is LOANN WEST, who, as promised, will be getting a cheap trinket. Specifically, he will be getting a Japanese Funny Sounding Button keychain, from the good folks at Think Geek. For the curious, it looks something like this:

Of course, Loann also, as a winner, gets a personal, 250-word note, written by me, attesting to his brilliance. As promised, here are 250 words of praise, and they belong to Loann, and no one else:

Dear Loann,

We speak so often of God’s gift to the world. Yet have we ever thought to contemplate the world’s gift to God?

Thankfully, I no longer need to think on such weighty matters. The answer of, course is that it is you, with your infinite wisdom, towering intellect, and, this week, your outrageous fortune, that God himself views as the most precious present of all.

This indeed is the week in which we have conclusively proved Einstein wrong. God does indeed play dice with the universe, and I would not be surprised if he made sure to load them in your favor. This week, you receive the praise and awe that you deserve.

For you have won, and on this, the week of your stellar victory, the very nature of my faith shudders as I must, in good conscience, ask the question: is it possible to be smarter than God?

Perhaps it is. For under the light of your divine intelligence, I fall to my knees in supplication. I feel as Paul felt on the road to Damascus, and I will follow you wherever you go, and will join you on your crusades. Or not; it is best not to stalk a deity.

Nonetheless, before your awesome brainpower, I write to the Corinthians and ask “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the face of Loann West’s intelligence?”

This is indeed a day for celebration. It is not an understatement to say that your victory this week is, indeed, the Second Coming. Ra, Zeus, Odin…these deities are but trifles next to the power of your intellect.

Now…if you could possibly do something about including a public option in our nation’s health care program, that would be great. Work on that, please.

In the meantime, congratulations to you. Enjoy your Japanese Random Noisemaker.

Yours truly,

Derek Leif
Administrator of derekleif.blogspot.com
“Serving my half-dozen loyal readers since…well, since very recently"

Another Person Won Stuff. It Just Keeps Happening (or: Trivia Contest #3)

2010-04-29T22:05:00.003-04:00

Remember:

--Send your answer to leifderek@gmail.com

--Include your name and address so that I can send you your prize if you win

--if you're camera shy and don't want your name mentioned, don't hesitate to say so; i'll still send you your prize, and post my 250 words of praise for you.

--All entries must be in by Thursday, May 6th at 3 PM.

--Winner will be chosen randomly from correct answers.

--New question every Friday (sorry I was late this week!)

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

For a cheap Think Geek trinket and 250 words of praise, WHAT CHARACTER FROM A SEMINAL 1968 SCIENCE FICTION FILM "BECAME FULLY FUNCTIONAL...IN URBANA ILLINOIS ON THE 12TH OF JANUARY, 1992?"

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION:

So many correct answers. So, so many. And all of them knew that Leon's last words in the Film Blade Runner are "Time to die."

The winner for this week is JEFF POMERANTZ, who, as promised, will be getting a cheap trinket. Specifically, he will be getting a Japanese Funny Sounding Button keychain, from the good folks at Think Geek. For the curious, it looks something like this:

Of course, Jeff also, as a winner, gets a personal, 250-word note, written by me, attesting to his brilliance. As promised, here are 250 words of praise, and they belong to Jeff, and no one else:

Dear Jeff,

Today, sir, General Zod kneels before you.

Specifically, he kneels before your intellect.

For you, sir, have won. Few knew the correct answer to this week’s trivia question, and even fewer were lucky enough to be randomly chosen from among the correct answers.

In fact, only one was chosen.

You, sir, are the chosen one.

What can I say about your sheer brilliance that hasn’t already been said already? Women, clothed in diaphanous gowns, have wept at the sheer potency of your brilliance. “It is too much for us,” they have said, “it leaves us spent and fatigued.”

Men, meanwhile, have simply gazed upon your intelligence and, realizing how small and insignificant their minds are in comparison to yours, have simply thrown themselves off the highest cliffs in despair.

And who can blame them? These words are a feeble tool to convey the awe that I feel at your monumental brilliance. Before such brainpower I feel as Moses must have felt when he gazed upon the burning bush.

So be careful when you flex your mental muscles, for you are nothing less than a quantum evolutionary leap, and we, mere humans that we are, may feel the need to simply stop breeding so as to make way for the next generation of humanity. That next generation is you, and we have the unenviable task of acknowledging that we are last year's model.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, sir, and your brain is a heavy crown indeed.

Congratulations to you. Enjoy your Japanese Random Noisemaker.

Yours truly,

Derek Leif
Administrator of derekleif.blogspot.com
“Serving my half-dozen loyal readers since…well, since very recently

Somebody Won Stuff. Now You Can, Too (Contest #2)

2010-04-23T17:49:00.013-04:00

Remember:

--Send your answer to leifderek@gmail.com

--Include your name and address so that I can send you your prize if you win

--if you're camera shy and don't want your name mentioned, don't hesitate to say so; i'll still send you your prize, and post my 250 words of praise for you.

--All entries must be in by Thursday, April 29th at 3 PM.

--Winner will be chosen randomly from correct answers.

--New question every Friday (sorry I was late this week!)

THIS WEEKS QUESTION:

The above image is a screenshot from the film Blade Runner, and those Spanish subtitles are not entirely accurate. Leon (the rather intimidating specimen to the left, played by Brion James) has just finished beating the cheese out of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), and he has just finished saying "Look up!," which is not exactly what "Despierta!" means (it actually translates to "awake!").

Anyway, the second subtitle is the approximate translation of the three words Leon says immediately after that command. They are also the last three lines he says in the film, as he is immediately thereafter dispatched by Rachel (Sean Young), Deckard's love interest.

For a cheap Think Geek trinket and 250 words of praise, WHAT ARE THE LAST THREE WORDS OF DIALOGUE THAT LEON SPEAKS IN THE FILM "BLADE RUNNER?"

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK'S QUESTION:

So I got a number of entries for my first week's trivia question, and that's a good thing. All of those nasty gangs from last weeks question are out to get THE WARRIORS, Walter Hill's 1979 film about the title gang's quest to get back to their home turf without getting taken down by all those other gangs mentioned in last week's question.

The winner for this week is BRIAN LORBER, who, as promised, will be getting a cheap trinket. Specifically, he will be getting a Japanese Funny Sounding Button keychain, from the good folks at Think Geek. For the curious, it looks something like this:

Of course, Brian also, as a winner, gets a personal, 250-word note, written by me, attesting to his brilliance. As promised, here are 250 words of praise, and they belong to Brian, and no one else:

Dear Brian,

It comes as no coincidence that your name is an anagram on “Brain.”

What a massive, potent, wrinkly brain you have, sir.

I admit it: I bow before your intelligence. I weep at your mental acumen. I also grovel before your luck, your ability to stare into the face of randomness and charm it into smiling upon you.

For you, sir, are victorious. You have won. Just like Charlie in Willie Wonka’s factory, you, sir, have navigated the tricky byways of last week’s trivia question, and your mental acumen has triumphed over ignorance. In addition to this, luck, chance, and fate have conspired to confer upon you not just this letter of praise, but also this cheap, borderline-worthless trinket in recognition of you brilliance.

Think about the joy you will have as you use your Japanese Random Noisemaker to advertise to the world the massive brain that has allowed you to wield said noisemaker. It is astonishing to me that your head is of regular size, and that you are not hydrocephalic. For indeed, to master this question is to have a head so big that one is surprised not to see, upon your shoulders, a head big enough to make the Rocky Dennis kid from the film “Mask” say “man…that’s a big head.”

So be careful when you sleep, sir. Your head, in addition to being so full of brilliance, must be full of dreams as well. Take care of that head, and take care of those dreams. You are the music maker, sir, and you are the dreamer of dreams.

Congratulations to you.

Yours truly,

Derek Leif

Administrator of derekleif.blogspot.com

“Serving my half-dozen loyal readers since…well, since very recently”

Know More Than Other People. Win Stuff. Get a Letter Attesting to your Potency (or: Contest #1)

2010-04-19T20:49:00.002-04:00

I can't help it. It's time to give away stuff.

Specifically, it's time to give away trinkets of little monetary value from the good people atthinkgeek.com.

It's so simple. There will be a new question here every week, and of course, the answer to the previous week's question.

--Send your answer (with your address, please) to leifderek@gmail.com with TRIVIA #1 in the subject heading. Get your entry to me by Thursday, 3 PM.

I will count the number of correct entries, and then use Random Number Generator to pick a winner.

But that's not all, faithful readers (all six of you), no siree bob. I will mail you a letter of at least 250 words, telling you how brilliant you are. I will also publish that letter here, just so that you can point to it and say: "you see that praise he spent part of his life writing? That praise is forme."

And you, of course, will have the original signed letter to prove it.

It does not matter that I don't know you; I will know that you I randomly picked you among that week's correct answers, and that you are therefore smart and lucky. Because of that, you will always be two words that make me imagine the type of line Maria Pappadimos (lrene Papas) would say to Colonel Andrea Stavros (Anthony Quinn) in The Guns of Navarone: "They say you are both smart and lucky, and that one succeeds when the other fails, eh?"

So that's what you'll get. A cheap trinket. A letter attesting to your brilliance, written by me. All for answering:

Trivia Question #1

I cannot escape being in a 1970s mood:

Tonight, The Moonrunners, the Orphans, the Turnbul ACs, The Van Cortlandt Rangers, The Destroyers, The Jones Street Boys, The Saracens, Satan's Mothers, The Baseball Furies, The Boppers, The Electric Eliminators, The Gramercy Riffs, The Hi-Hats, The Hurricanes, The Lizzies, The Panzers, The Punks, The Rogues, and The Savage Huns, are all out to get....WHO?

As the bad guys say in The Great Escape: "Good luck."

And as Long as I'm Waxing Nostalgic (Or, Vivid Memories of What Was, For Me, at the Time, the Most Harrowing Movie Ever)...

2010-04-16T18:00:00.004-04:00

With the character of Chris Hargensen--played by Nancy Allen in the film--Stephen King warned us about Sarah Palin over 30 years ago.

A Brief Post that Honors Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (or: A Post that Recalls a Very Specific Part of My Childhood)

2010-04-16T17:39:00.004-04:00

Try to remember,

The kind of September...

When, the spring before, you heard these words for the first time:

"....it just came out this week, and the song is called "Surrender.""

A Short Sentiment About Being Ahead of the Curve (Or: Thoughts on the Epitome of Coolness)

2010-04-13T20:41:00.003-04:00

A thought: can you imagine how eternally cool you would feel if you were alive in the early 60s and actually had said "Let's go to the Cavern Club...there's this new band I want to check out. Trust me, they're better than Rory Storm."

A Short Secular Sermon (Or: The Divine Wonders of Technology)

2010-04-13T20:35:00.004-04:00

I am an atheist.

My wife has no sense of direction.

I just bought her a Garmin GPS.

She once was lost, but now she is found.

A Love Letter in 90 characters that Only My Nerdy Friends Will Understand (Or: For Vickey)

2010-04-12T16:32:00.006-04:00

Speaking as a school librarian, I love you like an obscure Buffy reference, Miss Calendar.

(90 characters. If I actually had a modern phone, I'd tweet this or something, right?)

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

2010-04-11T14:23:00.007-04:00

Carolyn Raship, a friend from back in the day, wrote an excellent essay/review about the film The Runaways that you can read here. I haven’t seen the film 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, reached number four on the charts, and has by now faded from most people’s memory.

In other words, 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 to listen to 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 beta 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)

2010-04-02T01:55:00.005-04:00

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)

2010-04-01T11:20:00.007-04:00

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 an 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)

2010-03-25T13:20:00.016-04:00

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"

2010-03-22T18:36:00.005-04:00

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)

2010-03-19T12:23:00.011-04:00

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

2010-03-14T19:37:00.009-04:00

"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)

2010-03-11T19:42:00.008-05:00

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.

The Joys of Unitasking (Or: A Love Letter to the Alphasmart Dana)

2010-03-10T19:20:00.009-05:00

It usually happens like this: I’ll be someplace writing, and someone asks me about what I’m using for my writing. They don’t ask this when someone’s using a laptop or a netbook; somehow, this boring thing with a screen the size of two credit cards causes people to ask questions.

“It’s an Alphasmart Dana,” I say “it’s basically and old school Palm Pilot with a keyboard.”

And that, pretty much, is all that it is. I type on it, and then hook it up to my computer by means of a USB cable. I open up Microsoft Word, hit a button that says “send,” and then watch as the words that I typed feed into the Word file the lines of text zipping across the screen one after the other. Then I save the Word file, empty out of the text in the Dana, and write some more. And some more.

And that’s it. There is some sort of primitive email program that I’ve never figured out, and there’s a “to-do” list program that I never use, and a date book and phone book that I never use. I write with my Dana; I do nothing else with it.

I couldn’t live without this thing.

You turn it on, and it goes on immediately, faster than any laptop or netbook. The battery lasts for something like 12 hours, and should it run out on me, I can, in a pinch, swap out the rechargeable battery pack and swap in three double A batteries (which I always keep in my pack). Everything I write is password protected, and I have it set up to automatically shut off after thirty seconds of inactivity; that means that if I need to walk away from it for a moment, it will shut off, and anyone who turns it back on will need to enter a password to read what I wrote.

This is a device for schools, which means that you can drop it and nothing happens. Finally, it’s cheap—less than 100 dollars, if you buy it used—which means that if someone steals it, it’s an annoyance as opposed to a catastrophe. Remember, I clear this thing out each day, which means the most that’s ever in this thing is a couple of hundred words of writing. I have no other personal information here at all.

In other words, it does one thing. It does only one thing. It does one thing very well.

I consider this a lost art. Several years ago, my friend Jeff and I were talking about multitasking, which apparently is the fine of doing a number of things adequately, if not well particularly well. As we talked, I started to long for the good old days of unitasking; that is, the art of doing one thing—and only one thing—well.

Someone once asked Boris Karloff the secret of success, and he said: “find one thing that you do very well that no one else does.” I view my Dana this way. I carry it with me everywhere, I turn it on, and get to the business of writing.

Some would probably consider the lack of internet connectivity to be a liability. Not for me. Like a lot of people who write, I look for ways to procrastinate. I surf the web; I check my email; I go on Facebook, which is such a time suck that I put it in a separate category from surfing the internet.

I’m sure there are some people who love having all these things at their fingertips while they write. I’m sure some people are comfortable reading someone’s blog, chatting on Facebook, and checking Ebay to see the status of their bid on the complete boxed set of “Space 1999,” all while working on their novel. I find these people extraordinary, but I would feel more comfortable if they didn’t do all of this while they were driving.

When I use my Dana, I have no choice but to write. If I’m working on a piece of correspondence with a friend—and yes, I often compose my emails on this, and then dump the text into the email program—I want to focus all my attention on the person to whom I’m writing, not the DVD boxed set of Space 1999.

The more that I’ve noticed how much of my life was given over to multitasking, the more I started to contemplate a disquieting question: exactly how much have I been a part of someone else’s multitasking enterprises? When I talk to that person, are they, in fact, the person who is driving up the price of that Space 1999 boxed set? Sadly, they probably are, and my conversation is no match for Ebay. Or Twitter. Or Facebook.

In fact, the more I write with this thing, the more the humble philosophy of the Dana—do one thing, and do it well—starts to permeate other areas of my life. When I play ukulele, I’m not doing anything else but playing my uke. I like this. When I go to karate class, I’m not doing anything else but practicing karate. I like that, too.

I don’t want to get too philosophical with this, but I have, unfortunately, brought karate into this, so it’s too late now. Here goes: again and again when I go to class, my sensei harps on this idea that when you enter the dojo, you’re supposed to leave everything behind for the hour or so that you take class. There may be tons of things going on in your life, but during class, you’re supposed to imagine that all of that stuff is out of your head, if only for the duration of class.

So I now do three things in which their very design doesn’t allow me to do much else when I’m doing those things. There isn’t much else to do when I’m practicing karate except, well, practice karate, and my ukulele doesn’t have any other use, except, perhaps, for hitting someone over the head. So far, I have not done that with my ukulele; I just play the thing.

And when I sit down with my trusty Alphasmart Dana, there isn’t anything else to do but write. Websites and email can wait, as can my ukulele, where am hard at work learning to play the theme to “Space, 1999.” For now, let me focus on this one thing, and this one thing only.

(Um…I should say, before I end this essay, that I in no way am interested in the show Space 1999, although I am teaching myself to play the theme on the ukulele. That and a 1920s swing version of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” I gotta start uploading this stuff to You Tube, I tell ya…)

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.)

2010-03-09T21:17:00.004-05:00

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.

Aw, Look at the Adorable, Cute Cuddly Killer Whale (a cynical essay on the nature of, well, nature)

2010-03-06T19:54:00.013-05:00

I will try to be kind as I write this. Somebody died, after all, and as I get older and closer to the grave, I find it more difficult to make snarky comments when someone dies tragically. Sadly, in this case, it is a mighty temptation.

I’m writing, of course, about Dawn Brancheau, the animal handler who died at SeaWorld. This was tragic and horrifying. You can read about it here, here, here, and here. but for those of you too lazy to click and read the story (I’m horribly lazy about clicking on things that take me away from blog posts) the basics are this: she was in the middle of a show when Tilikum, a killer whale, suddenly grabbed her with his massive jaws, dragged her to the bottom of the pool, bit her in the waist—turning the pool red—and then drowned her.

(Okay, I got this far. I can’t resist.

At this point, before I make the point I wish to make, I must stop and make a tasteless comment about one of the articles in Time, specifically this one, written by Jeffrey Kluger.

Again, this is going to be tasteless, so I apologize in advance.

Here goes: when discussing this tragedy—which occurred in full view of a paying audience—Kluger described it as “an otherwise routine show."

Think about those words: "otherwise routine."

Think of a parent coming home from SeaWorld with their traumatized child who has seen a killer whale shred a human being right in front of his or her eyes.

Now imagine Grandpa saying “so…otherwise, how was the show?”

"So, otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Anyway, enough of this. Back to the essay.)

There is really not much more to say. A woman died tragically, and she has a family, I’m sure, and they are now coping with something horrible. I honestly realize that.

And yet...

And yet…

Okay. Let’s just get to it.

I have a finite amount of sympathy, and it tends to make me come across as an awfully cold bastard from time to time. For example, I have little sympathy for paralyzed football players. They are playing a game in which those involved are encouraged to be ferocious and violent, and hideous injuries occur when people are violent.

If I’m going to have sympathy for a paraplegic, I will take the sympathy I would have spent on the football player, and instead save it for someone who in no way contributed to his condition, such as the hapless motorist who gets slammed by a drunk driver.

Many will shed tears over Dawn Brancheau, but I just can’t muster much sympathy. Instead, there is a nagging question that tugs at my mind. It is an obnoxious question, I know, but here it is:

Well, what did you expect?

Just in case there is shock at my asking this question, I will ask it again:

What did you expect?

When I think of this tragic death, I’m reminded of Montecore, the white lion who almost ended the life of Roy Horn, half of the famous Siegfried and Roy duo who dominated the Las Vegas magic scene for decades. When that lion attacked Horn, there was a collective shock in the magic community, followed, shortly thereafter, by an almost collective sense of the same “well, what were we thinking” attitude that I now find myself feeling.

Put it this way: the day before that lion clamped down on Roy Horn’s head, had you asked a professional Las Vegas magician “what is the most dangerous trick on the Sunset Strip?” he or she probably would have said the double bullet catch that Penn and Teller do at every performance, in which they each aim Magnum pistols at each other and fire.

Yes, it’s dangerous. Still, though, true magic is about making things look dangerous as opposed to being dangerous; Penn and Teller are known in the magic community for taking every safety precaution imaginable. The trick is actually far less dangerous than it looks.

No, it wasn’t until the day of that attack that every magician realized that the most dangerous act in Vegas involved the simple act of walking up to a 600 pound white tiger and expecting it to act like a trained housecat.

Because who really knows why that lion attacked Roy Horn? Who, in fact, really knows if it was an attack? I have a cat who gives me little love bites when I scratch her stomach; what if she weighed several hundred pounds, and decided to give one of those love bites to my head, opening her massive jaws and biting down with teeth the size of my middle finger, and applying about one ton of pressure on my head?

It would be bad.

And no one thought about that in Las Vegas.

Which brings us back to SeaWorld.

As my extremely wise wife Vickey said: “there is a reason they call them ‘killer whales.’”

Even Time magazine seemed to be ignorant of this simple fact. The headline to Kluger's article reads “What Made Tilikum Snap?” Once again, the general attitude seems to be that there had to be some sort of trigger that made a 12,000-pound predator decide to act like a predator. As I read the article, I couldn’t help but mutter, “Maybe he was being himself.”

He had shown his true self before. In 1991, he and another killer whale drowned a trainer at a park in Vancouver. Then, in 1999, he killed a man who had snuck into Sea World and jumped into the tank, no doubt expecting Tilikum to cuddle up to him like a puppy.

There’s a great Aesop’s fable in which a farmer finds a snake almost frozen to death. He takes the snake inside and thaws it out. Instantly, the snake raises it’s hood and is about to bite the farmer’s daughter. The farmer picks up an axe, and cuts the snake in half.

“Why did you do that?” the farmer says “I saved your life.”

And with his dying breath the snake says “F—k you. I’m a snake.”

And so, as some people no doubt call for destroying an animal that was guilty of being an animal, I once again ask: what did you expect? If you take an eight-ton predator out of its natural habitat, don't expect it to be a cute character in a children’s story. Though I was a children’s librarian—and though there are some great children’s books that anthropomorphize animals—it is good to remember that killer whales and white lions are not cuddly animals that can talk; they got to the top of the food chain for a reason.

So as traumatizing as Tilikum’s performance was, we need to give him credit for one thing: he gave the most real performance at SeaWorld. By dragging Dawn Brancheau to her death, he once again reminded us of what is real. Killing is what killer whales do well, and that is not sad, tragic or evil; it is reality.

Just in Case the Two or Three People Who Read My Blog Haven't Seen This...

2010-03-06T11:06:00.004-05:00

It's wonderful, brought to you by OK Go, the same folks who gave us the exercising treadmill video:

This makes everyone happy. And if you want some information about the video, you can find it here.

A Strange and Horrible Dream in Which My Wife Says Something About Inflatable Beavers

2010-03-01T18:28:00.018-05:00

Tell me that the 21st Winter Olympics ended with Neil Young.

Please.

It happened like this:

I needed to get to bed at ten o’clock (working in a school, I usually get up at six, sometimes earlier), and I woke up this morning remembering a bizarre dream from the night before, when my wife was describing the end of the Winter Olympics.

Because it must have been a dream. Surely I was dreaming when my wife told me, through my haze of twilight sleep, that there were inflatable beavers at the closing ceremonies.

My fingers have never moved across a keyboard that way before, and I honestly think that before yesterday, except in the offices of the Vancouver Olympic Closing Ceremonies Planning Committee office no fingers had moved across a computer keyboard in the way I’m about to make them move across a keyboard for a second time:

Inflatable beavers.

Yes. That is indeed only the second time in my life that I have put those two words together.

They do not belong together.

No, this could not have been. This just could not have been. The games must have ended with Neil Young.

They must have ended that way because that, of course, would have been the embodiment of the soft spoken, modest Canadian ideal. Just Neil out there with his guitar, singing “Long May You Run” as the Olympic torch went out. Games over. Go home. See you in Sochi in 2014.

Yes, that must have been the way the games ended, because just watching Neil all alone up there, with the Olympic torch slowly going out, well, it got me. Honest. What a great way to end the games.

So that whole dream I had where Vickey came up to bed and told me about the inflatable beavers must have been just that. A dream. It must have been a dream, because in this dream, she discussed other things, horrible things. Inflatable moose. Inflatable mounties. William Shatner. Nickelback.

Look, I admit I’m getting a bit emotional here, but ever since I was a kid, the extinguishing of the Olympic torch gets me all choked up.

I vividly remember the first Olympics I watched faithfully. They were the 1976 Olympics from Montreal, when Romania’s Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in gymnastics. These were the Olympics where my father, who worked for Proctor and Gamble, brought home a copy of The Guinness Book of Olympic Records, which they were giving away when you bought a large box of Tide or something.

Whatever the case, that book became my bible.

This was the summer in which Channel 13—the New York public television station—ran a series called “The Olympiad,” and I watched every episode. Bud Greenspan, who has since sort of become the official documentarian of the Olympics, became my god. Even now, as I write this, I’m whistling the theme to that show, a tune that I have honestly not thought about for 34 years, but that I can now hear in my head, note for note.

I would watch this show with my Guinness Book of Olympic Records in hand, and look up the athletes profiled on each episode. From this I learned about the great Al Oerter, who won four consecutive gold medals in the discus in 1956 (Melbourne), 1960 (Rome), 1964 (Tokyo), and 1968 (Mexico City). I learned about the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, who dominated the longer distance track events in the 1924 Paris Olympics. I learned about Emil Zatopek, the only runner to win the 5,000 meters, the 10,000 meters, the marathon all in the same Olympiad, and the first runner to win golds in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters in two consecutive Olympiads, 1952 (Helsinki) and 1956 (Melbourne, just in case you weren’t paying attention the first time).

I could discuss how Finland’s Lasse Viren would, in the 1976 games, duplicate Zatopek’s accomplishment of getting 5K and 10K gold in two consecutive Olympics, having won both races in 1972 (Munich) as well, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

What I’m saying here is that I was religious about the 1976 summer Olympics, having watched the great Austrian Franz Klammer take the gold medal in the men’s downhill at the winter games earlier in the year at Innsbruck, Austria (remember, this was still when they held the summer and winter games the same year). I remember how Cathy Rigby Mason just kept saying “beautiful” as Nadia Comaneci attacked the uneven parallel bars, on her way to that perfect 10. I remember how the scoreboard couldn’t even record her score, listing it as 1.00.

I remember how the other broadcaster (I think it was Chris Schenkel, but don’t hold me to it) mispronounced her name as “Co-mah-nee-chee” instead of “Co-mah-neech.” I remember the subsequent mispronunciations of her name, and how they finally asked her, through an interpreter, how to pronounce her name correctly, and I remember her saying her last name first, as if she were reading her name off her passport.

I remember the great Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut, who had been the darling of the previous games, just not having her mojo this time around.

And in that way that trivial things can seem so much more vivid and important when you’re a kid, I remember feeling such a profound feeling of sadness when those games ended. This had, after all, been the summer of the Bicentennial, and I remember how the upcoming Olympics—which started at the end of July—offset the letdown of that holiday coming to an end. I remember that the games ended on August 1^st, that awful day when, as a kid, you get the first, sad realization that your endless summer vacation will eventually end.

Neil Young brought all of these vivid, bittersweet memories back in about four minutes.

And the Olympics ended there, right?

Tell me there were no inflatable beavers. Those two words sound like something from a William Burroughs novel.

There were no inflatable beavers, right?

Right?

The Simple, Harrowing Educational Logic of the Brush Bandit Tree Chipper

2010-02-28T15:51:00.014-05:00

Working in a middle school for 14 years—and working with adolescents for another three, as a young adult librarian—has taught me a simple fact about education, and a simple fact about human nature.

It is this: students will only do something if there is the real promise of a reward, or the real threat of a genuine consequence. Bluntly, students move toward pleasure, and away from pain. And to be even more blunt, this is pretty much a distillation of human nature.

Suppose, in a perfect world, learning math caused an adolescent male’s body to secrete a pheromone that made women swarm over him. And, on the other hand, suppose that failing math caused the brain to secrete a beacon that caused this same boy to become a lightening rod, so that bolt after bolt struck the young man until there was nothing but ashes. If, only, if only.

In other words, the best rewards and consequences are those that come directly from the thing itself, not from the teacher. Every teacher secretly wishes that there were an obvious, concrete, built-in reward for achievement, and a built in consequence for misbehavior and inattention.

Which is to say: if only the consequences of being inattentive in class were as cut and dried as the consequences of not fully heeding the warning labels of the Brush Bandit tree chipper

Bush Bandit tree chippers are the perfect middle school teachers. They don’t need to hand out treats for learning their correct operation, because they offer built-in pleasure; that is, the endless amusement of watching things get shredded by heavy machinery.

More importantly, though, is the way the Brush Bandit tree chipper handles inattentive students. The Brush Bandit doesn’t need to shout, doesn’t need to hand out detention slips. Unlike most teachers—who really can’t offer concrete, immediate reasons for paying attention, save for “because I’ll punish you”—tree chippers have built in consequences that are obvious, and hideous.

To put it another way: if you want to see a set of warning labels that take the consequences of inattention to harrowing extremes, look no further than the Brush Bandit tree chipper.

The Brush Bandit tree chipper has no less than ten warning labels, which stand in almost surreal contrast to the adorable cartoon of a cute lil’ racoon chewing on a tree branch:

Aw, what a cute cartoon! See the cute little tree chipper.

And, as the warning labels make abundantly clear, respect the rules of the tree chipper.

And for the love of all that is good in the world, you need to follow the rules of the Brush Bandit tree chipper.

The first warning starts out small. It advises you to respect what is, after all, a powerful piece of heavy machinery:

Fine, we’ve all seen this type of thing before. As you look closer, however, you begin to notice that some of the labels have terse, strong language:

Yes, as one of the labels says (and as every middle school teacher pleads, no matter what the subject): Read and Believe. The consequences are more than a simple detention or suspension. Death. Dismemberment. These signs aren’t kidding around.

But the Brush Bandit isn’t finished. As if those signs weren’t enough, the Brush Bandit also has explicit diagrams that point out why you must respect and fear The Brush Bandit tree chipper.

The first of these diagrams hedges it’s best with a curiously light cartoon:

Still, the implication is clear: if you’re stupid enough to, say, throw metal into the tree chipper, it could basically become a shell fragment, resulting, once again, in Severe Injury or Death.

But all these labels are prelude. Just in case you don’t understand the meaning of Severe Injury or Death, the Brush Bandit tells you exactly what it means by this.

This is the point where I can see some of the more obnoxious middle school students saying “but Mr. Brush Bandit, why should we listen to you? I’m not going to listen to you. My parents are lawyers. They’ll sue you for telling me what to do.”

And very calmly, you can hear the Brush Bandit saying “fine. If you want to stick your hand under me when I’m operating. Let your parents sue me; whether they sue me or not, here’s what’ll happen:”

“Yeah kid. I’ll mangle your arm, and no amount of lawsuits will change the fact that shards of your massively compound fractured arm will be littering the pavement like bloody ivory dominoes.”

“And another thing, kid. You want to play near the chute where you feed the tree limbs? Fine. You know what? I can’t do a damn thing if you chose not to take your Ritalin. Still, considering that some of your friends may have a brain in their heads, I offer the following three words of advice, three words that should be hardwired into the brains of every adolescent who ever lived:”

“But you’re not going to stop and think, kid, are you? No, of course not. So just in case you skipped over that part in which I said that no act of God will save you, why not take a closer look at this cheerful diagrams of what happens if you disobey me:”

“See that cartoonish look of puzzlement on the man’s face? Yeah. Let me tell you what the man is saying. He’s saying ‘Oh. There seems to be a bit of confusion here. My arms are getting torn off because I didn’t obey the simple rules of the Brush Bandit tree chipper.”

“And just in case I didn’t make it clear, here’s another sign just to remind you how important it is to obey the rules of the Gaping Maw of Death and Dismemberment:”
But there’s more. In addition to the undercarriage axle that can mutilate limbs, and the grinding mechanism that can, well, grind them, the Brush Bandit also, apparently, has a spinning blade that must be similar to the type of blade you find on a circular saw. Apparently, if you remove the metal casing that covers the grinding mechanism, you will uncover this spinning blade. And so, after graduating from urgent warnings to cartoons to stark diagrams, The Brush Bandit finally offers a realistic rendering of what happens if you don’t pay attention

Finally, as if to say “and I mean it,” The Brush Bandit, with it’s arm breaking axle undercarriage, its limb crushing grinder, and its finger-chopping rotating blade, now offers one final, horrifying warning:

Yes, it says. I can give you a high-pressure injection of engine oil, which will clog your circulatory system, and stop your heart.

Cumulatively, the lesson is simple: I am the Brush Bandit tree chipper. Fear me. Obey me.

Here endeth the lesson.

Class dismissed.