To Be (We're Not Dealing With a "Not To Be" Option) - The Birth of a Theatre

The first of the projects we're working on that was conceived was the nonprofit Theatre. I've done theatre in almost all of its dozens of costumes for 20+ years. I've acted, directed, built sets, designed and hung lights, written, produced, and ushered, all with varying degrees of success (as an actor, I'm a great director). On the organizational side, I've been a Managing Director, an Artistic Director, a Box Office Manager, and a Treasurer on a Board of Directors. For everything from tiny community theatres to professional Equity houses. One of the things these experiences all had in common was that I had my own opinion of how they should be done. Ah, the vanities that are me.

I knew I wanted a theatre with a classical bent, as well as one that would function as a teaching venue. And one that would be a "residential" playhouse as well, not as in to reside in, but to house a cast of season-long "regulars". The following is the mission statement excepted from the Theatre's business plan, and gives an overview of what separates us from the unwashed (and washed) masses:


Our mission has four cornerstones: To provide the community with a quality theatre experience, through both new and classical works; To provide the community with a platform for education, about both the art and the craft of theatre; To provide access to the theatre experience to those who might not have it, and to provide the local theatre community with a safe and challenging venue for practicing their craft.

We have provisions for the Board of Directors, as well several innovative (well, we believe them to be innovative, anyways) programs, including classes, internships, and several other, more covert ones.

We are planning on a season of either four or five shows per, depending on how ambitious we finally decide to be: A classical piece (Shakespeare, or other such period piece), a revival of a perennial favorite, redone, a world premiere, with preference given to local writers, and something specifically based on a work of literature. The fifth, if there is one, will be at the Artistic Director's discretion.

The basic structure of the nonprofit organization will be based on both the entertainment/cultural value of the shows and the educational value of the classes and programs. We're currently working on structuring the application to the IRS for our nonprofit 501(c) as well as the nonprofit designation for the state.

Tomorrow: The Bed & Breakfast

Lazarus, The Prodigal Son, and Me.....

"They're baaaaaaack!!"
(Carol Ann, Poltergeist II, 1986)

Okay, we're somewhere between the Jewish new year and the secular one (and a few months past the Chinese one for that matter), but it's a new year and a new start for me and my new old friend, the blogosphere.

This is going to be a new concept for me, because the focus of this blog will now shift, radically. From the random political and social ramblings of the egocentric, to the lessons I am attempting to learn daily.

Not to worry, this is not going to be a "Daily Affirmations" page, nor "Life Lessons in Pastoral Harmony". Simply put: I am involved now in several huge, life-altering projects, and I am very recently aware of the mindboggling amount of pure information I need to process. This blog will track these projects, and hopefully collate some of this info to help me absorb it, as well as allow for feedback from those people who wish to follow the bouncing ball with me. And thanks, Danny, for showing an interest in the various and sundry projects.

The aforementioned projects include:

• Resurrecting my mostly dormant nonprofit Grantwriting business (ETA: immediately)
• A nonprofit Theatre (ETA: 2-3 yr plan for opening)
• A Bed & Breakfast (B&B) to co-reside with the Theatre (same ETA, if the right property is found)
• A working Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) mini-farm, to co-reside with the B&B

I will attempt to write on this almost daily, and hopefully post a couple of times a week or better, as progress (or lack thereof) occurs.

Today, it's off to the library for a couple more research books on the nonprofit regs, before finding out how much of it we're going to need to need to go a lawyer with. The business plan for the Theatre is done (and overdone, on double digit revisions), and we're working on the B&B one next.

Tomorrow, we'll look at what we have, and what's next for each project.

Seven Weird Things About Me

All righty, I've been tagged. The big leagues have come a calling. There is a blogging type called a meme, and while I've seen them in others' blogs, I've never participated in one before. Mostly because I haven't been asked. So, I looked it up, and found, among other references, this blog on blogging that explains memes. For our purposes, it's a common theme that many people pass on to many others, to get their take on. I'm sort of thinking chain letter for story-tellers. My friend and blogging big-wig Danny Miller invited me to this party, to share seven weird facts about myself. Rather than think this to death, I decided to copy my inviter and do this as spontaneously as I could do. While I HAVE rewritten parts of the explanations for content, the seven items themselves were literally written down at once, and within 5 minutes. I haven't even changed the order, although I don't believe the order is relevant to much:

1. I have been a groom in four different religions' wedding ceremonies, and a groomsman in two others. Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Methodist were the ones I've said "I do" in, although the first two were the same day and one marriage. I've also been a groomsman in a Greek Orthodox and a civil wedding. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the Buddhist ceremony was easily the most beautiful, and, as might be expected, the Catholic/Jewish weddings easily won the most chaotic day prize. Of my life. A full mass before the first wedding at the church, then the Jewish wedding at the reception hall. The Buddhist ceremony was surreal and so calming I was afraid the wedding party would fall asleep. The bride and I almost did. Our 'wedding march' was the hum of two very large prayer bowls being rubbed around the rim by large padded sticks, and then we were blessed by a Buddhist monk that looked older than the one that called Kwai Chang Caine 'Grasshopper'. Very sedate, zenlike and beautiful. Not a bad gig for a nice Jewish boy.

2. Johnny Carson signed my high school yearbook on prom night. It was 1976, we had just been to prom, my date and I, along with 3 other couples, were looking for a place for dessert, and one of us had heard of a little restaurant with a piano bar in Lincoln Park that was open til the wee hours, and we all thought it would be very cool to get out in our tuxedoed finery. We strolled in, completely full of ourselves, until we realized the only other occupied table in the place was a large round one near the stage that had about 10 people at it, one of whom was quite obviously Johnny Carson. The hostess who seated us saw we recognized the celebrity, and ceremoniously walked us to our table right past Mr. Carson and his entourage. We attempted not to gawk too much, but it was probably in vain, because as we were passing his table, he said "Prom night, eh, folks?" To which we replied, glibly and en masse, something profound like "uhhhhh huhhh". He chuckled, during which I recovered just barely enough English to ask if he'd mind signing a yearbook. He said sure, and four of us actually ran out to the car to retrieve our yearbooks. He signed each one graciously, and we let him be. Their party finished their meal and left before our dessert even showed up. When we finally asked for the check, our waitress said it was taken care of by Mr. Carson. How cool was that??

3. I have been in four musical productions (two professional), and 17 non-musical ones (11 for money), and I cannot sing a note, nor dance a step, and I am a lifetime stutterer. And please believe me when I tell you this is not false modesty. Although the stuttering is much less a problem than when I was a child, it always astounds me that when on stage, although I am as nervous as I can imagine ever being, it focuses me to the point that I have never frozen on a line or stuttered a letter. But the singing and dancing. The singing they've been able to hide me fairly successfully, but not always as a "dancer". One brief anecdote: I was cast as Pedro (the lead muleteer) in a college production of Man of La Mancha in the mid eighties. The other muleteers (there were 4 others) were professional dancers. They had several choreographed numbers, but only one that included me. Their whole rehearsal schedule before entire act runthroughs was something like a total of three hours... A couple of very simple background dances they could do in their sleep. Those poor souls. Their one number with me took something like 10 hours of total rehearsal time. And every one of these sainted souls put up with me with good humor and patience. I wish I could remember their names and give them credit. And for those of you with dance knowledge, the toughest part of my whole choreography was a very simple ball change. I don't even have two left feet. I apparently have no working feet.

4. I used to live in Steve Goodman's old house, and he was Bar Mitzvahed with my cousin. Chicago folk/blues legend Steve Goodman ("City of New Orleans", "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request", "Lincoln Park Pirates", etc) was a close family friend and when he moved to do high school at Maine East in the Chicago suburbs, my family bought their old house on Monticello Ave in Chicago, where I lived from preschool through half of third grade. Because he was 10 years older than I was, I never knew him beyond meeting him a couple of times in a group. But it IS a weird fact nonetheless.

5. I am in the midst of a thirty year "Seder Strike". My grandfather used to lead Passover seders before he died (1975), and he led them with the iron hand of a Conservative Jewish Patriarch. Not the four hour Broadway productions of some of our Orthodox friends, but nevertheless, it was a good two hours before getting to the bulk of the food. After grandpa died, the consensus was for me to run them, being the member of the family most able to read the Haggadah in both Hebrew and English. But the natives became restless. They insisted on the shorter, food-friendlier version. This being the peak of my holier-than-thou period, I refused to run a seder any shorter than the full-book version. The family called my bluff, and instead decided to run the "Things I remember" version, where they do a blessing or two, name the stuff on the seder plate and ask the Four Questions. Since my brother's wife, children, and soon-to-be grandson have never seen a real seder, my mom and dad say they'd be willing to sit through one. Thirty years from my last real family seder, I now plan to get back to Chicago some day to actually lead a seder. My version of "Next year in Jerusalem".

6. When I die, I want to be cremated. That's not really the weird part... lots of people wish to be cremated when they die. The weird part is the reason. It's not religious, it's not for 'green' reasons, it's just cause I'm afraid I'm going to wake up in the coffin in the grave. Tell me all you want that I'll be embalmed, or otherwise preserved... and that it won't be physically possible for me to wake up buried. I believe you. I also believe I might wake up in the coffin.

7. I hate to fly. Also, not a weird fact, in and of itself. The weird part, at least according to what I've heard, is that I have flown at least 40 times in my life. Every person I know who has flown that much has at the very least developed a coexistence with flying. Some may not like it that much, some do like it, some love it.. but they've all at least dealt with it sans histrionics. I have spent four days traveling across the country on a train, IN COACH, because I didn't want to spend 6 hours in a plane. I do love train travel, even in coach, but it's much more because I can't get on a plane without hyperventilating and pacing and panic attacks for days before, sometimes weeks. But yet, in some cases (work, or where the train doesn't go, like Vegas) I have flown. And never, ever, gotten used to it. Not even a little bit. That seems weird to me.

Memories Poisoned In The Blink Of An Eye

Four years, when followed by twenty seven more years, leave certain memories, some crystal clear, some gently foggy, some just feelings and impressions. I'm fairly certain that all of those memories, from today through the rest of my life, have just been irreparably altered. And that makes me both incredibly sad, and really pissed off.

Dekalb, IL - August 1976: It stinks here. Not meta- phorically, but literally. I've just moved directly from my parent's house into one set of the "high rise" dorms here, Grant Towers, and I have a majestic view of corn fields. And post-harvested corn fields too, not the well ordered green and gold waves of corn stalks from middle Americana. For reasons that I've never found out (being agriculturally challenged), the barren, corn-less stalk fields all smell like fertilizer. I remember thinking "why don't they fertilize BEFORE they plant (as I later learned, they do, it smells like this for three seasons a year)?" For weeks, all I smell, morning, noon, and night, is manure. Probably a lot longer than weeks, but I'm betting I just got used to it. What you see in the picture above was taken from the field at the opposite end of my old dorm and campus. But you get the general idea. I've got my "Frampton Comes Alive" alternating with the Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle" album (yes, Virginia, in vinyl), just newly released and wearing my record player needle to a nub.

The tallest building within 30 miles in any direction (besides the 4 high rise dorms, which towered to something like 10 stories) is the student union, at a whole 4 stories high. That's pretty much it til you get to Aurora, IL to the east, and probably until you get all the way to Rockford in the west.

Not that it was all Mayberrys and cream, mind you. There WAS the time that we had to scrounge up $300 at 3AM on a Saturday morning to bail my roommate out of the Sycamore County Jail for theft and vandalism. It seems that the previous morning he had broken the last of our alarm clocks (mine in fact) when he completed his daily wakeup ritual, which regularly included activating its snooze alarm by throwing it against the wall. The night in question, my roomie decided he liked the practicality of having a huge wall clock, just like the one that hung over the elevator on the other side of the towers. So he simply strolled over to the girl's side of the tower, stood on a chair, removed the clock, tucked it under his arm, and walked across to our side of the building (right in front of the lobby staff) to put it in our room. The lobby staff, being duly observant, if a bit non-plussed, called the cops, who visited my roommate within about 5 minutes. It was a slow night at the Sheriff's office. Oh, and did I mention, there were some illicit intoxicants involved here. Fast-forward a bit to:

Dekalb, IL - Winter, 1978: Just come back to school for what's euphemistically referred to as "Spring Semester" barely ahead of one of one of the worst snow storms in recorded Illinois history. Wasn't here a day before everything is shut down. There are literally 20 and 30 foot snow drifts across the huge open fields that lay between campus and the housing areas. By now I'm in a fraternity, living on Greek Row, which, by grace of God and probably architects, is about a half a block from a strip mall. This strip mall consists of my favorite bar, the Red Lion, my favorite pizza place, J.P. Hannigans, and a movie theatre. Nothing else there. And it was even legal. At the time, Dekalb was allowed something called "home rule", whereby a township could make the legal age for hard liquor 18. So while in most of the rest of Illinois you had to be 21 for hard liquor (18 for beer and wine), in Dekalb, freshmen of 18 just had to prove it to drink their favorite cocktail. Yeah, life is good. Of course, most people anywhere near campus didn't even have cars, or need them, because the buses were free, into and out of campus.

So anyways, the school is closed. There are pathways, most of them actually tunnels, through the drifts, from every doorway to the street, where they connected, like a giant ant farm, to the strip mall that had the bar, pizza place, and theatre. Did I mention life was good? It was more than a week before they opened the school again.

Dekalb, IL - February 14, 2008 - The parties, the relationships, the football games, and even the classes. These were the the things I remembered about Northern Illinois University. Until today. Today I saw the pictures. I heard the interviews. Squad cars lined up like some bizarre parade. Students milling about aimlessly in shock. Parents, students and faculty hugging and crying. It's 4:54 AM right now, and I haven't been to bed yet. Even though very few of the people in Cole Hall on Friday were even born the last time I was there (and in fact, the shooter was born the year I left Dekalb 27 years ago) , there will always be a link between what happened to them, and what I think about when I remember N.I.U.

I doubt I know anyone even near campus, much less anyone involved, but everyone there who was a part of it will be in my thoughts and prayers. We're linked, for better or worse, because their memories are now tainted the same way as mine. And always will be. I hope, for their sakes and mine, that some day BOTH sets of memories will be equally accessible.

The War Comes Home

Just when you think things couldn't get much more screwed up in the 'War On Terror', not one, but two bizarre things happen within days of one another, and, strangely enough, they didn't happen in the labyrinthine halls of Washington, DC, nor the distant deserts of the Middle East. They happened in Sea-Tac Airport (the airport that serves the greater metro area of Seattle and Tacoma, WA), and in the tiny town I live in, Port Orchard, WA, just across Puget Sound from Seattle.

First, the airport story. Two soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis had just arrived with the body of a fallen comrade killed in Iraq, escorting it home to Virginia. On the tarmac, an impromptu honor guard was formed by Port of Seattle police, airport fire and rescue, and military personnel. One of the police officers then took the two soldiers up to security. The TSA screener checked the ID of all three, including the police officer, and sent the soldiers through the metal detector. Because both soldiers were decorated veterans, their combat ribbons and medals set off the detector. Rather than send them through again, or wand them, or even take them to a private facility, this defender of America in a TSA uniform, had them strip down to tee shirt, pants, and socks, in full view of everyone there. While I have no problem with a politician or a bureaucrat having to wait in the same lines as everyone else in airports, this begs the question: "What the fuck were you thinking?!?"

Then it gets weird. As a preface, I should give a brief overview of the town that I reside in now. It's a slightly bluer collar version of Mayberry. You're just as likely to see a postcard-picture view of an idyllic harbor as you are to see a 50 year old mobile home with weeds up to the windows. Half-million dollar gated homes may be blocks away from a working chicken farm. Bikers and brokers pass each other on the street every day. It's diverse, but the scale is small. There's somewhere around 8,000 people here, if that. And this is the county seat too.

Anyways, Port Orchard, WA got a visit yesterday from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. Have you heard about these folks? The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies this sect as a 'general hate group'. They go around the country disrupting funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. Not because of a war protest, but because they believe those soldiers are killed because of 'divine retribution' for the U.S. tolerating homosexuality. Several Westboro Baptist members (anywhere from 6 to 15 of them, depending on the news source) came to Port Orchard to protest the funeral of Sgt 1st Class Johnny C. Walls. They carried signs that said things like: "Pray for more dead kids", and "God hates fags". Nice, huh? But then, something extraordinary happened.

Even before the Westboro protesters showed up, hundreds of counter-protesters lined the streets around the intersection. They carried flags, they carried signs. They were bikers, they were housewives. They were gay rights activists, they were truck mechanics. They hooted, they honked, they cheered, they wept. Groups that on a different day wouldn't notice one another, high-fived and whooped across the street, as well as when they passed one another.

This isn't where I grew up, and Chicago will always be Home for me.... but from yesterday on, I'll always be proud of Port Orchard, Washington.

Checks and Balances - and Other Lies My Teachers Told Me

No one part can be
more powerful than any other is.
Each controls the other you see,
and that's what we call checks and balances.

"Three Ring Government" - Schoolhouse Rock

It was scary enough when he won the Electoral College vote in Florida, the final and deciding state in the election, certified by Katherine ('Tammy Faye Bakker, The Next Generation') Harris, a Republican fund-raiser and Attorney General under the President's brother Jeb. But okay, maybe it was sour grapes. We moved on (well, some of us did).

Then the war on terrorism. Without declaring war. And the WMDs that were there.. then weren't. Then were. Then of course the links between bin Laden and Hussein that weren't. Then the links between the 9/11 attack and the Iraqis (Never mind that 17 of the 19 terrorists were actually Saudi nationals, and none were Iraqi).

But most of that was gleaned from clandestine organizations, so the White House could do a "he said, he said" song and dance, and most of the "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" goings-on were at least debatable on the left and right.

The most bizarre stuff (for me at least) has happened in the last few months. Either believing the Cheney/Rove cabal, or with the "what me, worry?" of a lame duck president, Dubya has figured out a way to single-handedly turn a republic into a monarchy.

For those of you who don't remember the famous "Checks and Balances" portion of your 7th grade Government lessons, it works like this: The Executive Branch (the President) is limited by the Congress, who can create laws to regulate Presidential powers. The President is also theoretically watched over by the Judicial Branch, who interprets the laws of the land.

The problem here occurs in some of the "side benefits" of the office. For instance, the President is entitled to declare "National Emergencies" and make decisions to send troops overseas without the proper declaration of war. The words "National Defense" have become the "Simon Says" of this administration. We can apparently wiretap without the inconvenience of due process, or even judicial notification, U.S. citizens, because the National Defense is at stake.

Okay, even that I can give latitude on, because I DO understand that I DON'T understand, all the implications and complications of covert operations. But then we get this: Months ago, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired eight U.S. States Attorneys, allegedly for purely political reasons (in several cases, to hire more "loyal Bushies", in the words of Gonzales' former chief of staff). When the Senate and House Judiciary Committees issued a subpoena for former White House Counsel (and briefly Supreme Court nominee) Harriet Miers to testify about what role, if any, she and/or the White House had in the firings, the White House reiterated it's long standing demand that no current or former White House officials would be permitted to testify under oath, to the committees, citing 'Executive Privilege'. The interesting thing about this, should Congress hold Ms. Miers in contempt of Congress, she would still have Dubya to pardon or commute any sentence. And try as they may, I can't see a National Defense defense for Gonzales, Miers, or the White House.

Think this is an exaggeration? Two words for you: Scooter Libby. Scooter was Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, and also served as a chief assistant to the President. Scooter was also the man convicted of one count of obstruction of justice, one count of making false statements to the FBI, and two counts of perjury to the grand jury, all during the investigation that Scooter leaked the information about a covert CIA agent's identity, then lied about it. Libby got 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine. He could have received a maximum prison term of 25 YEARS in prison and a $1,000,000 fine. So it wasn't like he had the book thrown at him. But apparently Dubya thought it was too much anyways. Before spending a day in jail of his sentence (he was ordered jailed pending his appeal), Dubya commuted his sentence, saying in part:

"I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison."

Yeah, the portion that made all four counts convicted on punishable by up to 25 years...reduced by 90% - that portion is 'excessive', so we'll make it nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Judges? We don't need no steeenking judges... George W. Bush: Oil Magnate, Baseball team owner, Texas Governor, President of the United States, Judge, Jury, Commuter. Three Ring Government indeed.

A Long Overdue Salute to Dad

One of the earliest posts on this blog was about my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. There I gave a brief description of my mom and dad and their background, but today, on Father's Day, for obvious reasons, I'm thinking more about dad.

About 13 years ago I was running a Theatre box office in Skokie, a suburb of Chicago, when I got a call from dad. He was calm, quiet, but insistent. He needed me to take him to the hospital. After the immediate "what's wrong?", he told me he felt fine, but his doctor, on getting his test results from a routine checkup earlier in the week, was meeting him at the hospital. Pronto. As I only worked about four blocks from where he lived, and the little hospital rendezvous concerned his heart, the doctor and my dad decided it'd be prudent for me to take him. He was admitted that day and operated on the next. A double bypass.

The good news is it was a complete success, and his recovery so complete that even now his doctor's usual response to dad's regular checkups is a lament that a 73 year old is in better health than his 50-something doctor. The reason this incident comes to mind is how my thought processes ran that day.

It's a pretty amusing little irony that while I can't remember what I had for lunch two days ago, I remember exactly what I was thinking while I waited for the outcome of that operation thirteen years ago. The only close family mortality issue I had ever dealt with up to then was my grandfather's death, and that was a sudden heart attack. No surgery, no extended hospital stay. It was right to the mourning stage. This was scary. There was time to think. Everyone kept telling me it was going to be just fine, it was routine. Like any open heart surgery is going to be routine.

My first thought was how would I deal with it if he didn't make it? Cliches kept running through my head. Would my first thought be: "I haven't told him I loved him?" I decided it wouldn't be, because although I hadn't said it to him in many years, I knew he knew. I actually began to (speaking of cliches) sort of see HIS life, as it passed before MY eyes.. his life with me, that is. I remember thinking, even at the time, that I was putting together a eulogy of sorts for the man, in my head. What I came up with, with regards to regrets, was a rather simple one: I had never told him how proud I am of him.

Dad and I saw eye to eye on virtually nothing when I was growing up. He was a 'wrong side of the tracks' kind of guy, a greaser who hung out with questionable crowds, went into the army shortly after high school. Not a big reader, or the intellectual type.

What he was (and is) is the hardest working human being I have ever met. When my brother and I were growing up, dad managed paint and hardware stores (mostly for Alan Saks, opening and running any new Saxon Paint stores up in the Chicago area). He worked five days a week on a good week, six or seven on most others. He worked a couple nights a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays - that's another odd thing to remember). We lived in a middle class Chicago neighborhood where everyone on the block knew everyone else.

We got by most times, and in a good year, we did better, in lean ones, maybe a little worse. But we never lacked for anything. I never appreciated the work he did, until much later, after I'd spent a number of years in retail management after college. And his work was much more physically demanding than mine ever was. Every time I saw him at work he was on a ladder fixing a lighting fixture, or dismantling a display, or boxing cartons, or building something.

In time, when he was in his 50s, my parents came into some money when the people who raised him (my great aunt and uncle) passed away. One of the things I find most remarkable about the man is his life didn't change when he came into the money. Not that it was millions, mind you, but enough that they didn't need to worry about the bills. Probably for the first time in his adult life in fact.

When the time was coming for him to finally retire (he had, from his late 50s on, finally given up management and was working as a salesman for a paint wholesaler), my mother and I had a bet that he wouldn't actually retire.... She said he'd finally settle down and relax, I disagreed. Sort of. Dad's concession to retirement was to cut down the hours. He travels some now (reluctantly), and still goes, three or four times a week, a block away to work at the car wash. Dad has always loved cars, and talking to people, so now he gets to talk to people while he supervises the kids who dry the cars. Oh and mom? I win the bet.

Anyways, the whole point of this is just to give Robert Henry Paullin a shout-out on his day. I love ya dad, and I'm very proud of you. And see? You made it into print (of sorts), and it didn't involve a subpoena... ;)

The Party of the First Part.... Or.... A Platform and it's Planks - A Debate of One

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004)

Well, after my latest (and lengthiest) hiatus (we'll pretend you noticed), I've decided to respond to the first sets of debates the Democrats and Republicans set up (semi-affectionately referred to as The Clueless and the Evil Empire, respectively).

For years and across many subjects, my criticisms and complaints have been met with choruses of "Well, do YOU have a better idea?" And now, at long last, I do, thankyouverymuch. So I've decided to make my own platform, complete with planks. The issues as I see them for 2008 and beyond:

Immigration:

The problem: We have 1,952 miles of border separating America from Mexico, and another 5,525 miles of American/Canadian border to patrol, not counting the thousands upon thousands of coastline bordering the U.S. against the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico. And tens of thousands (the actual number varies greatly by the political color of the teller's state) of illegal immigrants are taking American jobs and social services, especially in the migrant worker-related industries.

Let's look at the SOURCE of this massive influx of humanity: They want, and get work. How do they GET this work you ask? Most of the time, it's because they'll work for pennies on the dollar compared to the legal minimum wage. How is that possible, you ask? Because there are only two groups of people in this country who worry about the welfare of the illegal immigrants in this country: The civil libertarians (The A.C.L.U. and like-minded groups), and the owners of the businesses the migrant workers work for. From small, family-operated farms to huge conglomerates, every season they all are strapped for field workers to harvest time-sensitive crops. Even the groups that CAN afford to pay a living wage say that it literally becomes impossible to get and keep workers. So, will they turn their collective backs on a group not only willing to work in their fields, but willing to work there for a small fraction of the money they'd have to legally pay? Sorry, no matter what your motives, that's an almost impossible temptation to pass up. The rationalizationists get to say they're helping their fellow man (or woman), as well as keeping the rest of us from having to pay $15 a pound for seedless green grapes. This of course leads to red faces galore when the Immigration and Naturalization Services people get around to checking green cards periodically.

The solution: The solution is in two steps, one which might piss off the left, and one the right might find equally wrong: First, make the borders truly secure. Not close them, mind you, but make every square mile of American border a true checkpoint. Impossible you say? We haven't the manpower, nor the funding to even begin such an endeavor? That's the beauty of this plank of the platform. I HAVE the solution to that, but, curiously enough, it's in the solution section of the next plank. For now, just trust me, we could make this work, at least a lot better than it does now. AND cheaper.

The second step involves one of those things the right hates: Actual government enforcement of its own laws. Once the procedures are in place for regulating the immigrations into America, every single incident of paying a worker, legal or not, an ILLEGAL salary, would be met with fines AND jail time.

The War in the Middle East:

The problem: Fairly self-explanatory. A civil war that we're intervening in (interestingly enough, there seems to be almost as many Shiites as Sunnis protesting American occupation of Iraq lately) that is being touted by the Bush administration as protecting us (and the world) from terrorism is being waged, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars a year, not to mention the priceless cost of young lives. Here are some horrifying statistics for you: On May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared the end of "major combat operations", according to CNN, the U.S. government reported that 139 Americans had been killed. More than 3,000 more Americans have been killed AFTER the end of "major combat operations". According to some estimates, over $392.5 BILLION has been allocated to the Gulf War. And how effective has it been in curbing world terrorism? As of April, 2005, as reported in both the Washington Post and the SF Gate, the U.S. State Department, in it's annual report to congress, decided not to include the little factoid that worldwide, terrorism had gone from the previous record high of 175 reported incidents, to 655 in 2004 . That included incidents in Iraq (which Bush had previously said was 'stabilized') that had gone from 22 to 198 in the one year. Can't imagine why the State Dept. didn't want to include that to the public.

The solution: This is the centerpiece of both this plank and the one above on immigration. Unlike some bleeding heart liberals, I DO believe in a strong defense. I believe in defense of our way of life. I believe that every one of the U.S. soldiers in the middle east should be brought back to America, and be given the job that they were promised in the recruiting offices: Protect our country. They can be stationed on every border, and can see their families on a regular basis. The border patrols would be more than a bit improved, going from a squad of I.N.S. border rangers in jeeps and SUVs, to patrols of trained Rangers, Strykers, and Marines in humvees and tanks. Train the soldiers, use the borders to perform war games and exercises, and use the Navy to patrol U.S. waters around them. The Canadian coalition forces can still participate and do their thing on their side of the border to help out too.

And as a bonus, these border forces would be a lot better trained and equipped to deal with the drug runners in Florida, along the Gulf coast, and across the Mexican border. Would there still be illegal aliens? Of course. But I can pretty much guarantee the reduction of casualties by probably 99%, along with a huge reduction in imported drugs.

Gasoline/Oil Prices and Supplies:

The Problem: Yes, I know that globally we pay less than half what most of the rest of the world pays, and I've heard the arguments from the left that unless it becomes too expensive, the U.S. won't conserve what fossil fuels we have left, nor have any incentive to find alternatives. But what bothers me about the current state of affairs in this niche is, it's simply illegal. The anti-trust laws as I understand them, state categorically that competitors cannot conspire or collude with one another to set a price, high OR low, for their product. Every time the price of crude oil goes up, the pump price is raised, within a day or two. OK, that makes some sense. But when it goes DOWN, the pump price doesn't follow. Here's another interesting tidbit of info: Here in the Seattle metro area, the local radio just announced a one cent per gallon decrease in the average gas price all the way down to $3.40 per gallon. The price of crude oil just dropped over $2.00 a barrel this week, down to $62 and change. What's interesting about this is that that same local radio station just mentioned that this time last year, gas prices locally were $2.40 per gallon. And according to NYMEX numbers, the price of standard light sweet crude oil was up over $65.00 a barrel in May of 2006, or $3.00/barrel MORE expensive. I think I know where all the former Enron accountants are working now.

The Solution: The reality is, the oil lobby has been bulletproof for a whole lotta years where collusion investigations are concerned. Whenever anyone looks into anti-trust, collusion, or price-gouging in the oil industries, men in black suits, red ties, and big cowboy hats scream about government control and 1970s gas shortages. Yes, the oil companies are allowed to make a profit, but just like any other industry, they should also be allowed to be investigated for collusion strategies. And if regulation becomes the only way, since apparently they can't or won't regulate themselves, then it needs to be done. And investigated by an INDEPENDENT prosecutor, not a Justice Department that is filled with political appointments (see Alberto Gonzales do his version of "Who's on First" following the partisan firings of all those States Attorneys).

And for the less important planks (less important to me that is):

I can't figure out why a 'National Language' designation for English pisses so many people off. No one is proposing the language police restrict what language you speak, nor who you speak it to. I'm unfamiliar with a lobby for American turkeys who were turned down for the Nation's symbolic bird (Although it is true that no less a personage than Ben Franklin lobbied FOR the turkey to be that symbol on the U.S. seal). Personally, beyond the occasional American tourist boorishly feeling that English should be understood WHEREVER Americans may visit, I'm not aware of, for instance, a movement in Mexico to make people speak English. I go to Mexico, I presume I will have to make myself understood in Spanish. Especially if I decide to move there. But, it's not that big a deal for me, so we don't have to do anything about it.

Flag burning/desecration amendment. Hmmm... Another one I just don't get the logic to. Yes, I understand the symbolic nature of the flag, and that people believe that people have died for it. The problem is, people have NOT died for the flag. They HAVE died for the IDEALS that it represents. One of the biggest of those ideals is, ironically enough, freedom of speech. Not 'good speech', but speech. The freedom to express anything you want to express, simply because we are not fascists. In my youth, there was a big to-do about hippies wearing a flag patch on their jeans... many WWII and Korean vets were outraged that 'those dirty commie hippies' would 'sit' on the flag. In the 80s, 90s, and beyond, people literally wrap themselves in the flag now as a gesture of patriotism, including wearing a flag emblem in a many more dubious places than the seats of jeans. The right rails furiously against the left trying to take away their 2nd Amendment rights 'to bear arms', but might shoot you with those arms for availing yourself of the 1st Amendment. I'm not sure any amendment was more important to the founding fathers than another, but IF there was, I'd think the first one would have been the one they thought of first.

Okay, that's all I can think of for now, and I have only one thing to add, with apologies to the enigmatic Lyndon Baines Johnson: "I will not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of any party for a term as your President." Although, I don't look bad in a black suit and red tie.

"That Trick NEVER Works!" / "This Time For Sure!"

My brother just turned 46 yesterday, and, in a bit of bizarre bit of transference, I think I'm having HIS midlife crisis. As ugly as it was facing my own 49th birthday almost 3 months ago, somehow his birthday this year is more disconcerting. My kid brother, who I taught how to play baseball AND basketball (very shortly before he began to beat me at both sports, the ungrateful spawn) is 46 years old, complete with wife, 4 kids, suburban home, very successful mid to upper management career, multi-car garage complete with multiple cars in it. I'm not certain, but I think somewhere along the line. a gypsy switched our lives.

On the upside, he's fatter than I am (barely), and has less hair (considerably) than I do. But I'm not bitter. Ok, not THAT bitter. Ok, so I am that bitter.

But moving right on, before the senility kicks in again, this charming little reverie got me to thinking about the underlying rant for tonight's theme: Cartoons. Not anime, not graphic novels, not computer generated anything, but honest to God hand-animated cells. I realize everything evolves, including entertainment, but, at least through the rose tinted glasses of hardly-20/20 nostalgia, the cartoons of a couple of generations ago were smart enough to be entertaining for me when I was in grade school, as well as being cynical enough for me in high school. Rocket J. Squirrel, Bullwinkle Jay Moose, and their friends Boris Badenov, Natasha Fatale, Fearless Leader, Captain Wrongway Peachfuzz, Dudley Do-Right, Mr. Peabody, Sherman, Snidely Whiplash, and the gang in 'Fractured Fairytales' (yeah I know I'm showing off, but I prefer to think of it as celebrating, and I'll be getting a lot deeper into cartoon esoterica shortly) were funny, witty, AND a satire of the Cold War.

Boris and Natasha (Boris' name is probably a play on Boris Gudenov, a 16th century Russian Tsar, and/or from Boris and Natasha of War and Peace fame) were spies from 'Pottsylvania' (Russia) who worked for the nefarious Fearless Leader (who always reminded me of a skinny version of General Burkhalter from "Hogan's Heroes" (actor Leon Askin, who passed away in June of 2005 at the age of 97). They were always foiled in their bids for world domination by our plucky heroes. Mr. Peabody and Sherman used the Wayback Machine to tell pseudo-historical tales, complete with pithy pun-filled closing lines.

"The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" may have been the Citizen Kane of cartoon shows in my youth, but they weren't the only stars back then. There was Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole, Atom Ant, the Tennessee Tuxedo crew (Chumley, Phineas J. Whoopee, Commander McBragg, Klondike Kat, Savoir Faire, and the Go-Go Gophers), there was Underdog and Polly Purebred, Tooter Turtle and Mr. Wizard, and many many more.

And the voices.... Don Adams (Tennessee Tuxedo), Wally Cox (Underdog), Paul Frees (Boris, Captain Peachfuzz, Inspector Fenwick, and many others, including, oddly enough, the voice of "Josephine", the female persona of the Tony Curtis character "Joe" in "Some Like it Hot" as well as "Crusty" the hermit crab in "The Incredible Mr. Limpet"...the last two I didn't know until tonight), Larry Storch (Phineas Whoopee), William Conrad and Edward Everett Horton (narrators on Rocky and Bullwinkle and Fractured Fairy Tales, respectively), Hans Conried (Snidely Whiplash), and so many others.

And that doesn't even touch on the classics from the 40s and beyond that were still very much in vogue in the 60s and early 70s.... The Warner Brothers most spectacularly. And while we're mentioning cartoons, and Warner, a moment of silence for my own personal choice as the Most Valuable Entertainer in history (MY history anyways), Mel Blanc. He'll get his own tribute from me at the end of May on his birthday.

But for now, for reasons that elude me, just remembering those old cartoons has the calming, reassuring feeling of visiting an old friend - I'm sitting here at 1:25 AM, remembering Mr. Wizard's incantation-answer to Tooter Turtle every time he wandered off and got into trouble: "Drizzle Drazzle Druzzle Drome, time for zis vun to come home." And you know what? It ALWAYS worked.

Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Steroids

Ahhh, the sounds of spring approach. Major League Baseball spring training games have started in Arizona and Florida, optimism from Seattle to New York, from Milwaukee to Miami is as high as it's going to be all year, and the bitching about steroids in general and Barry Bonds in particular, is back in full throat.

For those of you who just bussed in to Earth, hate sports, or live in Kansas City, I'll recap Bonds-Gate: San Francisco Giants' right fielder Barry Bonds, who went from a very slim, very fast, very talented youngster who hit lots of home runs and stole a lot of bases in the late eighties (top picture) to a very talented bald old guy with bad knees who hits even more home runs and who now is built more like actor Ving Rhames (bottom picture) , is now the second most prolific home run hitter in major league history, with Hank Aaron's crown in sight this year.

The issues first started a few years ago, when a scandal broke out about former home run hitter Jose Canseco and steroid use. This 'blockbuster' news shocked almost no one, as Canseco looked like he stepped right off of Muscle Beach, hit long home runs, and had a very short career (at least in good years). The scandal took off when Canseco revealed in his book "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big", that 85% of major league players took steroids. While that number has been hotly disputed by many in the game, several of the big names named by Canseco have since either admitted steroid use, tested positive for them, or both.

Since then (2005), several 'sub-scandals' have been reported, most notably from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) allegedly supplying steroids to a number of baseball players. Barry Bonds trainer since 2000, Greg Anderson, was the BALCO employee indicted. Despite three separate reports that federal investigators were about to indict Bonds for perjury last year in denying he used steroids, and despite an admission later in the year that Bonds was indeed a target in that federal investigation, no indictments were ever filed, failing any proof. There was also a big story just a week or two ago about Human Growth Hormone (HGH) being sold on the internet, in numbers exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars, to groups from high schoolers to pro baseball and football players.

Of the players, coaches, trainers, and ex-players either naming or named by these scandals, none is receiving the backlash that Bonds is. Sportswriters who complain bitterly that Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame despite his admitted gambling on baseball are jumping on the "asterisk" record bandwagon. These are the people who say when Bonds breaks Aaron's record, he should have an asterisk by it, denoting it was somehow questionable. This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Most of those same sportswriters (the older ones) were writing when Aaron himself was chasing Babe Ruth's record back in the early 70's. Nobody seems to remember the death threats, the disrespect, the plain old-fashioned bigoted hatred that stalked Aaron. The protests, the death threats, the boycotts. That a black man would DARE to claim the home run record from the legendary Babe Ruth. But this too passed, and now, bizarrely enough, the outsider is the 'home run king' that's being subverted by the pretender with the 'performance-enhancing drug' crutch.

My problem with all the Barry-bashing isn't about whether or not he does or has used steroids. It's about the double and triple standards that come with every record that falls eventually. And all of them do, sooner or later. But legends not only die hard, they die really really cranky.

Let's look at the objections one at a time: He built his body up chemically. Ok, let's assume for just a moment, that he didn't. Let's assume, just for one split second, that it was done with state of the art training and nutrition. Training and nutrition that didn't exist 40 years ago. On machines that didn't exist. With the benefit of 40 years of sea changes in body building. Obviously that's a benefit that Bonds' predecessors didn't have. Is that cheating?

Secondly, let's assume the allegations are indeed true. If steroids are indeed that prevalent, even if only half or two thirds use them, why is Bonds achieving so much more than his contemporaries? He's presumably hitting against genetically engineered pitchers, and other hitters are doing the same, yet he's hit more home runs than anyone in history but one. Not to mention, if he's so bulked up, how is he able to hit the fastest pitches from these chemically created Frankensteins? From 2002-2004, he hit .370, .341, and .362 (two of those three led the league in hitting).

Thirdly, times and the league itself change. Let's look at the legendary Babe Ruth. From 1901 until 1919, the home run leaders in the American League averaged 8.9 home runs. All season. This was in the so called Dead-Ball era, when the ball was literally wound very loosely, the same ball was kept in play for over 100 pitches, spit, and other, more disgusting foreign objects were legal, and foul balls were not counted as strikes. Players like Frank "Home Run" Baker, who led the American League in home runs four years in a row, and Frank Schulte, who held the major league home run record with an absurd 21 in 1911, have never been heard from again, after the ball and rules were changed in the 20's and players like Babe Ruth started hitting them. How fair was that to the previous record holders? Ruth, and Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx, the golden boys of the golden era, played the best ball of THEIR time, and were the record holders. No one "asterisked" their records because of "unfair" advantage.

Players get bigger, better, have better training regimens, and the sport evolves. Every sport does. Perhaps baseball's biggest draw is also it's biggest bigotry: It's a game that evokes the past, and things pastoral. It's played in a 'field' or a 'park', and almost everyone has waves of nostalgia when they think of baseball in their youth. But the people that play the game evolve. They play to compete, they play to win, they play to make money. To vilify the use of some of the tools and not others, is just plain hypocrisy.

Role Models: The New Parent Trap

Two disparate and incredibly stupid incidents occurred on the "public stage" recently, both of which are classic examples of the types of things I'd love to avoid even knowing about, but have been on television, the radio, and in the papers. They have another thing in common, and I'll get to that in a bit.

Britney Spears (I paused here while typing that, as I was half afraid my computer would crash as I wrote it...It didn't) apparently walked into a hair cutting establishment, asked the stylist to shave her head, and when the stylist refused, Britney shaved it herself, the front half of her head now looking like Sinead O'Connor, and the back looking like Lenny Kravitz. She then went and got a tattoo on her lower hip and another on her wrist. This is apparently front page news on MSNBC and Reuters'.


On Wednesday of last week, former NBA star Tim Hardaway, apparently unable to contain himself at the recent coming-out-of-the-closet of former NBA non-star John Amaechi, spewed the following hogwash in a radio interview: "You know, I hate gay people, so I let it be known. I don't like gay people and I don't like to be around gay people. I'm homophobic. I don't like it. It shouldn't be in the world or in the United States." Does Timmy have a right to his opinion? Of course he does. Does he have a right to use a public interview as a forum for his opinions? Absolutely he does. Just as any advocate of gay rights would have the same right. My problem with it in fact, has little to do with his opinion (no matter how moronic). My problem is with the media that keeps the story going on and on and on. In the last 5 days, I've heard no less than 7 stories (or sidebar pieces) on this one lunatic ramble, on the radio or television. When I've heard exactly none about the public support he's gotten, including one of his coaches in the NBA (I only found out about it while looking up stories on Amaechi to make sure I got the quote in it's entirety).

Anyways, for some reason, today I got to thinking about one of my oldest rantable peeves, the argument that celebrities should be expected to be role models. Because the celebrity gauntlet runs so wide, I'll concentrate on athletes here.

[BACKINMYDAY ALERT....BACKINMYDAY ALERT]

There was a time, probably up until the late 70s or early 80s in fact, that athletes' personal lives were their personal lives. Even on the field. Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, noted for bumping, spitting, kicking dirt, and worse at umpires in the middle of a game, on national television, used to call his star relief pitcher Don Stanhouse "Full Pack".... Because, said Weaver, that was how much he (Weaver) used to smoke when Weaver would bring Stanhouse in to finish a game. Yep. He'd stand on the dugout steps and smoke, not 5 feet from the fans. Many of the stars in the game then (the 60s and 70s) were hugely out of shape, even for baseball players. "Boog" Powell looked pretty much like you'd think he'd look with that name. Mickey Lolich, a pitcher on the world champion Detroit Tigers in 1968 had a belly that Santa would envy. Gaylord Perry, a Baseball Hall of Famer, was so famous for his spitballs (along with assorted other foreign objects put on the ball, all against the rules) he titled his autobiography "Me and the Spitter".

Rookies were hazed, veterans were respected. Players and managers that drank, caroused, gambled, and were sometimes arrested, were treated with a "boys will be boys" attitude. Billy Martin, a legendary player and manager for the N.Y. Yankees for 35 years, had fights numbering in the double digits with baseball players, including not one, but TWO separate incidents with pitchers on the team he was managing at the time (different teams). He drank often, and had fights beyond his 60th birthday. One of my favorite Billy Martin episodes was in 1972, when he was managing the Tigers, the Topps Baseball Card Company took his picture for his baseball card. He smiled and extended his middle finger. It wasn't caught until the card was released. Oh yeah, Billy Martin's number is now retired by the Yankees, and his plaque hangs in Monument Park in Yankee Stadium.

The point is (yes, Virginia, there IS a point here somewhere) that athletes are paid lots of money to do one thing: Put butts in the seats, so the people paying them all that money can make even more money. I guarantee if people stopped paying admission prices, owners would stop paying multi-million dollar contracts to anyone who can fill their auditorium with bodies.

Straying once more to the entertainment field, I'll finish with the band Judas Priest, and their trial in 1990. They were sued when two young men, one 20 and one 19, killed themselves, after listening to what their parents said was a subliminal message in the song "Better By You, Better Than Me". While the suit was dismissed on its merits, the implication is still scary today. If you write a depressing book, can you be blamed if someone reading it takes his or her life? If you choose to use steroids and take the attendant risks, are you endangering someone else's child? If your parents raised you badly and you become famous, do you take over the responsibility of someone else's child-rearing skills? How bone-chillingly frightening is it to raise your child for so many years, then have a 20-something year old spoiled brat come by and muck it all up? Actually, I think it's a pretty chickenshit position. You raise your child as best as you can, then you trust him or her to look at the world that's out there, and make the right choices.

A Chef Out of Time

So here I was last night, watching one-third of my holy trinity of latenight cable television channels, The Food Network (the other two being ESPN and The History Channel, a.k.a. "All Hitler, All the Time"), when I realized what a truly culture-changing phenomenon this is. The Food Channel. It's made icons of Emeril Legasse, Rachel Ray, Alton Brown, Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, and dozens more. "Iron Chef" has become a party game at many of the trendiest parties (at least here in the northwest). Rachel Ray has three regular TV shows as well as her face on Nabisco products and Extra Virgin Olive Oil (there's a Popeye joke in there somewhere, but I'll let it be), Emeril has cookware, spices ('Essence of Emeril' no less), and more, not to mention the fact that you can probably go into the heart of the smallest towns or the biggest cities all over the world, throw an imaginary pinch of salt hard at the ground and yell: "BAM!", and most of the people within earshot of you will laugh and point and say: "Emeril!"

And with mostly 24/7 coverage of all things food, there's enough smart cooking shows (Alton Brown's "Good Eats", Batali's "Molto Mario", or "Iron Chef" for example) to avoid the insipid ones ("How To Boil Water", "The Secret Life of...." and "Rachel's Tasty Travels" leap to mind). But it's the star-making power that boggles my mind. Until 10 or 15 years ago, cooking shows, from the fun ("The Galloping Gourmet") to the serious ("Julia Child") were all on public television. The four major networks wouldn't, as a rule, touch them.

Which got me to thinking about my favorite television chef, the Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith.

Jeff Smith (1939-2004), the "Frugal Gourmet" was a native of Tacoma, WA, near where I live now, and made his name at the public television station right near where I grew up, WTTW, in Chicago. He apparently had two completely different personalities, depending on who you talked to. Some have said Smith was a megalomaniacal dictator who had to have everything his own way, and micromanaged his staff into oblivion. Others, including two of his long-time assistants, and a host of longtime friends and associates, say he was a man who laughed easily, was magnanimous, generous, and a culinary genius. About 10 years after he moved his production back home to the Seattle area, seven men charged Smith with sexual abuse as young men years earlier. He denied the allegations and was never charged with any crime, but he and his insurance company settled the suits out of court, and his career was over. He continued to cook for charities and charity events, even while confined to a motorized cart until he died in his sleep after a long bout with heart disease in 2004.

I obviously don't know any more about those incidents than what was subsequently reported, but I think I understand, a little, about how a parishioner can stay loyal to their man of the cloth when he is accused of something as scandalous as that. I met Mr. Smith in the mid-80's, when doing a story about his Frugal Gourmet show, for a college newspaper article. After inquiring with the producers at WTTW, they in turn referred me to Mr. Smith directly, who not only agreed to an interview, he invited me to watch two days of his show's taping, from script meetings to filming. It was a fantastic experience for me. He was "on" every moment of his time in the station, whether it was in meetings, pre-cooking sessions, or in front of the camera. He was indeed a bit of a control freak, which he freely admitted to when asked about it: "When the show is seen, whether by 1 person or thousands, they assume I'm responsible for everything that goes on on my show. And because I take that responsibility, I'm going to do my best to make sure that I know about everything that happens on it. If I mess something up, I'm going to make sure I tell the audience that I messed it up." I saw him yell at several of his assistants in those two days, but I've got to tell you that he pled "mea culpa" about his own missteps a lot more often, and the times he spent laughing with the crew were much more plentiful.

I watched other cooking shows like Julia Child's, but back then her show (for me) was more akin to how I watch do-it-yourself construction shows now: I didn't understand a thing about it, but it was fascinating to watch the techniques. It was like auditing a Quantum Physics lecture, in Chinese, but with it somehow producing really good looking food at the end. But The Frugal Gourmet was different. He explained it, from the historical and cultural background of sitting down at the table with friends, to why it can be cooked like that, or not like that, to short cuts to the same tender morsels. I'm hungry now, I'll be right back. Feel free to grab a bite while I'm gone.

Ok, that's better. I understand that those allegations are horrific, and, if true, gave Jeff Smith his just desserts in ending his career. But since I don't know if they are, what I base The Frugal Gourmet's impact on my life is what I know. I love to cook, I love the history of food, and I love to eat, which accounts for my body type (besides, who needs six-pack abs, when you can have a whole keg?). At least two of those three things I attribute almost exclusively to Jeff Smith. I like to think he would have at least three good shows on the Food Network if things were a bit different. Hell, maybe I'd even watch less of the History Channel then.

What If They Gave A War, And No One Came?

In June of 2006, Ehren Watada, a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, stationed right near here at Fort Lewis, WA, made headlines when he became the first commissioned officer in the U.S. armed forces to refuse deployment to Iraq. His first court-martial began February 5, 2007 and ended today, two days later, with a mistrial declared.

Lt. Watada has said he's willing to deploy to Afghanistan, which he considers an "unambiguous war linked to the Sept. 11 attacks". His request to be deployed to Afghanistan was denied, as was his attempt to resign his commission. He has added that he is not a conscientious objector, as he is not opposed to all wars as a matter of principle, and that he believes this war (the war in Iraq) is an illegal war, based on the War Powers Act of 1973, requiring the President to receive congressional approval for military operations within 60 days, as well as the the basic charters from the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, and the Nuremberg Principles, all of which bar "wars of aggression." Lt. Watada contends that any approval obtained by President Bush was based on incorrect information regarding weapons of mass destruction and the ties of al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.

It is further Lt. Watada's position that based on the doctrine of "Command Responsibility", he could be tried as a war criminal. Interestingly enough, the Command Responsibility Doctrine is sometimes referred to as the "Medina Standard", based on the "My Lai Massacre" in Vietnam, which Capt. Ernest Medina failed to prevent. It holds that a commanding officer, being aware of a human rights or war crime violation, will be criminally held responsible if he does not take action to stop it.

With the Army charges, Lt. Watada is facing up to four years in prison and a dishonorable discharge if convicted (a charge of "contempt for officials" was dropped at the outset of the court martial). And before the mistrial today (one of the papers Watada signed earlier was apparently in error, so they have to start again) , it looked like a very quick trial and conviction for the Lieutenant. The bulk of Lt. Watada's defense was based on the illegality of the war, and with it the war crimes liability connection. But on January 16th, the presiding judge in the pre-court-martial hearing ruled that Watada would not be allowed to present evidence regarding the Nuremberg Principles or the legality of the war, because the legality of a war is a "nonjusticable political question", and consequently ruling that the order Watada received to deploy was legal. Let the butt-kicking contest begin, Mr. One-Leg.

Anyways, to the point of this blog. I don't know Lt. Watada at all, and can only hope his sincerity is real. Because he's probably going to be a sacrificial lamb for his beliefs. I suspect that when all is said and done, he'll face very little (if any) jail time, but he's got to be looking at a dishonorable discharge, and he's going to be about as popular as a Dixie Chick at a NASCAR race with a sizable crossection of the U.S. armed forces and their veterans.

The reality is, there's no way the government can do anything but win this case. If they somehow lose it, precedence is set for every single soldier, sailor, marine, and flyboy to pack it up and go home. AND, if that weren't enough, the rest of the world that aren't coalition-ing suddenly has a whole wing set aside in the Hague for American war criminals.

So no, Lt. Watada, you ain't gonna win. What you might accomplish is an eventual resumption of that time-honored tradition of going to war when we actually have a country to go to war against, not to finish up the First Dad's missions. I'm hoping it will help define what war is really, and that war really is hell, and that the reasons for undertaking it should never be based on "U.S. interests." Only on U.S. freedom and survival.

Reading And Writing And.... ?

Awhile back I wrote a curmudgeonly little piece on the abandonment of the liberal arts curricula in today's schooling. Upon further review, I want to amend it to include the apparent abandonment of education of almost any kind.

Two different brouhahas have surfaced in the last few weeks in this state (Washington) that just make me shake my head about the state of education today. This state has a pretty good reputation for its intellectual habitues, from companies like Microsoft and Boeing, to renowned institutions like the University of Washington and Washington State University.

A few months ago, the first outcry began filtering out as a result of the decision last year to make passage of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) mandatory for high school seniors to graduate. This test has been given for years, but was more of a monitoring guideline for the various Boards of Education to compare against. The WASL gives pass/fail grades in four categories: Reading, Math, Writing, and Science. The WASL is given every year from 3rd through 8th grade, and then in the 10th grade. The passing grade is based on meeting or exceeding that particular grade. Anyways, last year the legislature (or the WA state Board of Education, I don't know which) passed a measure that said that by the time the current freshman class graduated high school, they needed to be at least at a 10th grade level in the four WASL categories.

There were the usual complaints, valid or not (that's a different discussion), about cultural biases in the construction of the WASL, but the feces didn't hit the fan until a couple of months ago, when the first wave of WASL scores were released. Now bear in mind a couple of things. First of all, if a child fails the WASL at any point, he/she can make it up. As far as I can tell, in fact, they can make it up as many times as becomes necessary. AND, they only need to retake the portion of the test they failed, not the entire set. AND, they have a number of free tutoring options available to all students. A month or so ago, a committee was set up to actually repeal the requirement that students pass the math portion of the WASL before graduating. As I write this, they're still discussing this option.

Before writing this, I checked the "Washington State Report Card" put out by the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction to see what those WASL scores have been. As of the '05-'06 school year, the statewide scores were: Reading: 82%, Writing: 79.8%, Math: 51%, and Science: 35%. Yes, 65% of the Washington state sophomores, juniors, and seniors combined were scoring below 10th grade level in science, and almost half were below 10th grade math levels. No wonder parents are panicking.

And then came the kicker (at least for me). This past fall and winter have been particularly nasty for most of the state weather-wise. This fall there were floods in large portions of the western half of the state (the part that includes Seattle, Tacoma and all their suburbs), and this winter we've already had snow and ice storms exceeding anything the natives have had here for many years. The number of days many school districts had to close this school year already has made it impossible for those children to log as many hours in school as they are required to by law, without either extending the school year or the hours per day in class. The same children who reveled in those days off are now, of course, incensed at the prospect of having to go to school into June and in some cases even longer. Their disappointment I understand. They're kids. It's the indignant parents I'm not sure I get. A good many of the same parents who insist their children shouldn't have to be held accountable to an actual learning standard are insisting they be taught more, faster, and with less class time than ever.

It's a Catch-22 of classic proportions: Everything is automated and computerized and hand-held, to the point that math done in one's head is about as necessary a skill as being able to weave one's own sweater on a hand loom. On the other hand, the skills that need to be in place to put together those automations and computerizations and miniaturizations, are being cut off at the base. We're creating a smaller and smaller sub-class of science and math professionals to operate the next phase of whatever area of industrial or scientific revolution we are in for. It's a bizarre reverse Darwinism: Survival of the Thickest.

In the heyday of the intellectual, people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft) Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (Intel), and hundreds more, made computer-related breakthroughs by pioneering developments in math and science that pushed the envelope for their field of study. And made lots of money too. Will the culled and cultivated intellectuals eventually come out on top again? Or will the pyramid be inverted? Will the brightest minds in math and science be nothing more than money-making tools for the business elite?

If you're young, and a prodigy (i.e., you can do multiplication tables without using your toes), the world may well be your oyster as you get older. If you don't wind up on some future assembly line of developers for someplace like Microsoft, designing the operating system for Windows 2020, in a room, ironically enough, without windows.

A Long Time Ago, In A Jungle Far, Far Away

And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

Country Joe and the Fish
"Fixin To Die Rag"

This past Tuesday, January 30th, was the 39th anniversary of the beginning of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, arguably the most famous series of battles in the Vietnam conflict, and also arguably, the turning point, both politically and militarily, of the war. Some of the most indelibly imprinted images of the war came from this period, including the breaching of the U.S. Embassy walls, the subsequent reinforcing of Embassy personnel, as well as the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by Eddie Adams of a summary execution of a Viet Cong prisoner.

Today, we have the proposed "troop surge" in Iraq, and I'm confident that the debate going on about this is manned by men and women much more eloquent and adept than I am at this. So I'm going to talk about the American "Police Action" of the internal civil war in that other country, the one two generations ago.

Actually, that's not accurate. I'm only going to refer to Vietnam in "Big Picture" terms. The reason I was thinking about the Tet Offensive in particular, and that war in general, is tied to a memory, nearly spontaneous, that I had this week, about the man who gave me one of my earliest regular jobs - a man who was a teacher, a mentor, and a friend.

The year was 1974 or 75, I don't remember which, but I was either a sophomore or junior in high school in Chicago. About three blocks from the high school, a new ice cream parlor was opened. The guy who opened it was a hippy in his mid twenties, complete with long hair and tye dyed shirts. Barry was a childhood friend of an older cousin of mine, so when he asked about local help when he opened, I was recommended. The first interview lasted probably two hours. More precisely, the interview lasted about 5 minutes, when he offered me the job. The rest of the conversation was more... eclectic, to say the least.

We talked about the name of the new place, and its significance. He was calling it "Teth", he said, because of its Kabbalistic meaning, as a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Much to my dismay, I can't recall many of those specifics. It sucks being old with this porous of a memory. Later I learned he was also in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. I don't remember him telling me the name had significance to the offensive, but in retrospect, I am sure it did. We talked about ice cream (This guy was Ben AND Jerry, combined), we talked about Jimi Hendrix (he insisted that the real line was "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy", as during both shows he saw him in, he proceeded to kiss his bass player. I've always suspected he was trying to yank my chain, but in the years I knew him, he never failed the straight face when telling me that "fact"). And we talked about just being a 'mensch' - doing right by people, regardless of who they were. Customers, vendors, staff, or people on the street.

Business started off pretty well. We were busy most of the time, although being short-staffed probably made it seem even busier than it should have. It was probably about six months later that I began to notice the first changes. The off-season wasn't going as well as he had hoped, and the bills began to get a bit bigger. As one of only two employees he had then that were with him from the beginning, I was working a lot of hours for a high school kid. Then those hours were trimmed a bit.. and a bit more... I'd be hanging out there, just talking to Barry, but not on the clock, as we didn't have much to do besides talk. There were days it resembled Floyd's Barbershop in Mayberry. Just hangin' out, talking.

Slowly, the clouds began to hover around those conversations. I'd never seen even a hint of a temper where Barry was concerned, the voice was slow, and measured, and always with a hint of a smile, way deep down. Then, a comment about a vendor that "had it in for him". I thought it was a joke, but the trademark smirk never surfaced.

Barry had always been a spiritual man, more Kabbalistic than a classically religious Jew. He'd frequently talked about ghosts, but in a benign, naturalistic way. It wasn't too long before 'they' were out to get him. Vendors who wanted to get paid became ghosts who were after him. In his defense, Barry was the kind of man who would think nothing of letting debts owed him go unpaid, until the person got back on their feet. In fact, he did this frequently with his own customers. He was just unable to understand why anyone who wasn't evil wouldn't do the same for him. A wonderful man, scary-bad businessman.

The paranoia got worse. Agents were lurking behind all doors. THEY were out to get him. Stories about Vietnam began to filter out. Early on, he wouldn't mention his time there at all. Direct questions about it were gently steered away. But the occasional story, mostly about the violence, the evils of war in the jungle, began to work their way into the conversations. He would actually look over his shoulder, seeing things he wouldn't mention, then forcibly block them from his thoughts.

But there were times when you could tell the scary stories from places like Khe Sanh and Hue were beginning to hang out in the now, for Barry. The dislocation was getting more pronounced.

To be honest, I don't remember if I left to go off to college, or if he went out of business before then. But either way, it was a short and troubled life for the Teth Ice Cream Parlor on Foster and St. Louis Avenues in Chicago.

The pseudo post-script here isn't any better. A number of years later (sometime in the mid eighties), I saw, sitting on a street corner in Uptown, with a full beard and in old camouflage fatigues, Barry, or his doppleganger. He was talking softly to himself, complete with small gestures. I didn't say a word to him, probably so I could keep the pretense in some part of me alive, that maybe it wasn't Barry. And maybe it wasn't.

There have been a wide range of reactions to the soldiers of the Vietnam War, from taunts of baby-killers to chants of hero, to everything in between. The veterans of that era have had faces from those portrayed in "Born On The Fourth Of July", to "Casualties of War" to "Once We Were Soldiers", but mostly they were kids in their teens and twenties, dropped into a place they'd never heard of, asked to do the unthinkable to people they'd never met. The casualties were absurdly high, but when I think about my friend Barry, I think those casualties were much worse than most of us realized.

Let's Talk About You. What Do YOU Think About Me?

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

So here I was the other day, indulging in that creepiest of children's games this side of "...step on a crack and break your mother's back", the counting of celebrity deaths in groups of three. There was James Brown on Christmas day, 2006, Gerald Ford a day later, and Yvonne De Carlo on January 8th, 2007, to name the three that leapt to mind. I realize that many famous people die almost every day, certainly every week, and that we simply group them in threes and then start the next three whenever we notice. I suspect it probably has something to do with ancient superstitions going back to pre-druidic practices. Or maybe a Victorian prank, I don't know.

At any rate, there's been a longish lull between posts here recently for a couple of reasons: First, and the lesser of the reasons, is I haven't had much of any import to impart. The reason that's the lesser of the reasons? Having anything of import has never been a criterion for any of my rants, rambles, or musings. The more substantive reason slowly became more and more apparent over the last few weeks.

I was in a minor accident earlier this month (minor in terms of cosmic importance anyways, it shook me up pretty good). I was rear-ended while stopped and waiting to turn in a rainstorm. Car is still getting fixed, my shoulder was separated but getting better, and I've already received a fair settlement from the other driver's insurance company. The problem is, this is the first accident I've been involved in in 33 years of driving, so now, of course, I'm driving like a little old lady, which can't be a particularly safe thing to do, not to mention that I approach intersections like a S.W.A.T. team approaches a meth lab. And believe me, I know how to drive offensively AND defensively. I grew up in Chicago.

The followup to this little life-glitch happened a few days after the accident. I find out that a friend of mine was just recalled to Iraq for the second time in 8 months, because he teaches bomb and mine disposal. He has a couple of kids at home and his wife has Macular Degeneration in both eyes and is almost blind in one. Oh yeah, and this friend of mine is in his late forties and ALREADY did a full tour in Desert Storm I.

AND THEN, I'm reading blogs like Mother Courage, by a high school classmate of mine (I've mentioned her before), about a mother with a son in the line of fire in a desert.

And I, bless my ego-centric heart, am writing about pet peeves, cloned food, and reunions. I suddenly felt like Burt Bacharach sitting between Bach and Beethoven the first day in Composing 101. Suddenly Saliere seems an even more sympathetic character to me.

But, much like the old joke that ends: "...But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do YOU think about me?", I realized that scale is a relative thing, and a blog (this blog at least) is for presenting who I am and what I think, much like the original use of places like Chicago's Haymarket Square, where the original soapboxes (real soapboxes) were set up for anyone to state an opinion, and hundreds did, from the trivial to the monumental. So, what the hell. Back to the podium, if a bit tentatively.

This last bit of reasoning got me to thinking about mortality, raison d' etre, and legacies. It is said that no one dies as long as someone remembers them. The reality is no one remains immortal, and the most famous of the famous is gone from memory in the blink of an eye, in the greater history of the world. Memory becomes history, and we've already talked about how screwed-up history can be. Then history becomes legend, and legend becomes myth (didn't I steal that from one of the Lord of The Rings prologues?) The most famous (or infamous) last the longest, but everything fades as mythos after mythos rise and fall.

Beliefs are obviously a difficult concept to discuss, especially in a world where there are people who will not only die but kill (and in some cases both) when your beliefs contradict theirs. I've spent many years fairly comfortable in the position that I believe in very little, but I believe in the possibility of almost everything. There's another old joke about a very pious rabbi who is on his deathbed, when his family comes in to see him receiving the last rites from a priest. His children are aghast, and when they ask what in the world he's doing, the rabbi replies: "Couldn't hurt." I don't know what happens to me after I die, and I expect that I'll find out when the time comes. I wonder because I don't know, along with everything else that I don't know. That being said, if God (in any incarnation) actually DOES contact me, I expect I will believe with every fibre in my being. Proof doesn't necessarily have to be empirical, just convincing. If not, I just hope He/She/It understands a questioning mind and skeptical nature. If not, oh well. I can't justify "in-case" belief (In case there IS a vengeful God who'd be irritated I doubted).

So one does what one can do. I'm not actually a believer in the concept of reincarnation (although I may be as close to a believer in that as anything), but hell, if I can get a mulligan on this life for a shot at living a better one, I'm there. Short of that though (***TRITE ALERT***TRITE ALERT***), the more people you influence positively, the longer you live. Sure you get remembered for negative influence too, but who needs THAT kinda Karma?

Send In The Clones

Did you read recently that meat from cloned animals is apparently getting closer to FDA approval? That the FDA declared in December that cloned meat and milk is no more unsafe than it's old fashioned cousin? Do you care? To be honest, I thought I'd care more about this by now. I seem to be caring less about the ramifications of eating a cloned Kobe steak today, than I do, say, the ramifications of warrantless secret wiretaps being legal in America solely on the sayso of some deputy bureau chief in the CIA, NSA, FBI, DoD, or any other random collection of letters. Wow, that was some run-on sentence there, wasn't it?

When Dolly the sheep was presented to the world in 1997, people were polarized (well, some people were) - Was this a good thing? Was it the first chapter in a real-life "Jurassic Park"? Or maybe "The Boys From Brazil"?

I am not a medical ethicist, speaking of which, is a pretty odd notion: There apparently are codes of ethics, set up much like federal, state, and local laws are, including professionals whose job is to interpret these codes, for an entire profession. But that's another blog for another time. Anyways, NOT being one of these professionals, I find it interesting that the twists and turns of advancing medicine always seems to fall over itself when it comes to codifying those ethics. At what point is life being alive? A heart beat? A brain wave? For half a minute? For a minute? What happens if you get a life support machine to restart a heart, or lungs, long after any measurable brain function? Does the soul, or mind, or whatever ineffable criteria by which someone defines a human, remain when no part of the brain functions? If one is in excruciating pain (we'll just work for the moment within the realm of physical pain, not emotional) every moment of his or her existence, is this life? Is life defined by quality or quantity? And if one measures life according to a pulse or a breath or a brain wave, why do we (with few exceptions), have no problem with euthanizing an animal in pain that can't be healed, while we charge doctors who assist a terminal human in suicide with murder? The A.M.A. and their lobby occasionally remind me of the writers on all the incarnations of "Star Trek": The Prime Directive, that holiest of holies - sayest thus: 'You shall not interfere in any manner of a native culture's development or history - Unless it contributeth to the story line'. Bearing in mind that I'm a huge fan of most of the 'Trek incarnations, you hafta wonder what Gene Roddenberry was smoking when he developed THAT as the Prime Directive of a group dedicated to exploring the galaxy and meeting and interacting with new cultures.

Lest you think this thought is meandering away again, I think it's relevant to any discussion of clones, and what constitutes a life, as well as what constitutes an artificial one. For example, take the fairly straightforward concept of artificial insemination. Widely held a very reasonable next step for a couple unable to conceive the old fashioned way. Ok, take it one step further (or, perhaps not further, but a different course): fertility drugs. They will promote ovulation, as well as markedly raise the risk of multiple births. Let's say you have taken a fertility drug, increased your ovulation, and produced quadruplets. Is this in any practical way different from having a single baby cloned three times? Besides the random effect of whether or not the extra ovulation will take, you are using artificial methods to reproduce a baby.

And yes, I realize the above example is a hugely simplified one, in a complex conundrum. But I meant it to illustrate that the technologies contained within cloning are a lot more involved than worrying about skinheads cloning Hitler. Actually, I think it's a lot like the development of the atom: It's a weapon, as well as the basis for radiology. Were more people saved by X-Rays than killed by an atomic bomb?

Cloning technology is the laboratory for cures of diseases at the genetic level. And I'm not unmindful of the abuse potential inherent in any genetic manipulation. But the questions that are begged are not unlike any technological leap forward. Many on the religious side of the fence (and this includes any of the Judeo/Christian ones), for instance, make their case against allowing the 'plug' to be pulled (on terminal patients hooked up to life support) based on the fact that man shouldn't be "allowed to play God". I never see it postulated that man is ALREADY playing God by hooking up the patient to a machine man created to keep the patient alive in the first place. Or by curing any disease at all, for that matter. As much as it horrifies me to hear of parents who refuse medical treatment for their children on religious grounds (and very little makes me angrier or sadder, actually), at least it is consistent with the man playing God theory. The bottom line is that for good or ill, man makes those calls based on his or her own conscience.

And personally, I believe that mankind should work to cure every ill he can, however he can, including at the genetic level. Every generation in recorded history has shown us madmen and monsters that can (and will) use whatever technology is at hand to manipulate power. The best that we can do is the best that we can do.

And to tie this back to the more immediate future, much of the negative reaction people seem to have to having meat from cloned animals is safety-based. Have you ever been to a modern-day meat-packing plant? Know what's in a hot dog? Ask a friend (or the child of a friend) who works in almost any fast-food restaurant about the horror stories. Here are a couple more tidbits that might put you right off your feed: According to the New York Times (referenced through Wikipedia), every year, 5,000 deaths, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 76,000,000 illnesses are caused by foodborne illnesses within the U.S. alone. And according to the World Health Organization, in industrialized countries, the percentage of people suffering from foodborne diseases each year has been reported to be up to 30%. And that's just the reported cases.

Now, again, not purporting to be a genetic scientist, it still seems to me that if you can isolate the healthy animals in the food chain, reproduce them, and serve only the healthy byproducts of that reproduction, count me in.

Paging Dr. D.... Happy Birthday, Grandpa

For many years I memorialized my grandfather on the anniversary of his death with the traditional Yahrzheit candle, then just a few moments of reflection on both his birthday as well as the day he died. But this year, as it is his first birthday since the birth of this blog, I thought I'd introduce (albeit posthumously), a hero of mine, and one of the most remarkable people I've ever met personally.

Milton A. Dushkin was born in Chicago on Wednesday, January 4, 1911. His father, Sam (Shmuel), was a talented painter from Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania). In fact, we still have several of Sam's works hanging in my parents' house. He came to Chicago from Kovno in 1903, some 39 years before it was turned into the ghetto shtetl that saw over 80,000 die in the Holocaust there.

Young Milton was a prodigy. He got through grade school, high school, and college in 13 years (7, 3, and 3 respectively), and medical school a semester early. He finished his residency and had his own medical practice before he turned 24. His younger sister Leah also did well in school, in a time and place where not many young Jewish women in Chicago did.

The newly-degreed Dr. Dushkin hung out his shingle in Des Moines, IA as a General Practitioner. In the '30s this meant he was a pediatrician, obstetrician, family doctor, and even surgeon. Before the outbreak of World War II, Milton enlisted in the army with his brother-in-law and best friend (also a doctor), Werner Eisenstadt. They were both commissioned officers, and when war broke out, Milton was assigned to the China/Burma/Indian Theatre of operations (CBI), and Werner to the European War. Funny thing about that was that Werner, to his dying day in his 90s, spoke with the heaviest German accent I've ever heard.

But back to our Dr. Dushkin. He plunged into the war with both feet. He was a Major when he was assigned to Dr. Gordon Seagrave, a.k.a. "The Burma Surgeon", who headed up what would eventually become the first M.A.S.H. units, mobile surgical units that went with General Stillwell and Merrill's Marauders, to carve and keep open a path from India through Burma to send relief to China, with the bulk of the Japanese army determined to stop them.

In his book "Burma Surgeon Returns", Dr. Seagrave writes about my grandfather: "I selected my executive officer, Major Dushkin, a fire-eater who seemed determined to take vengeance on the Japanese for all the sins of the Axis against the Hebrew race." And..."It became immediately apparent to Dushkin that the captain in charge was determined to have nothing to do with him. But you couldn't do such things to Dushkin. You couldn't keep him quiet if you put him in a padded cell. At Ningham, in order to keep everyone from going mad, we had to issue an order forbidding him to pull any wisecracks before 3 P.M. Dushkin blithely changed P.M. to A.M. and kept on going."

And finally, also from "Burma Surgeon Returns", this snippet sums up the man (seated in the picture left) as an officer: "Major Dushkin was a wonderful letter writer - to his wife. He used to write her such wonderful letters that he lost his censorship privileges for three months! He wrote to no one else, not even reports to his C.O. I soon learned that once Dushkin got away from me on a flank move, he and his detachment would be completely lost, then suddenly reappear again half a hundred miles away. It was no use worrying about him. He would undoubtedly take good care of himself, or his boys would see to it that he didn't get hurt." Although I wouldn't come into the good Doctor's world for another 15 years, that was exactly the same man I knew and loved. Oh, by the way, I have a box full of those letters he wrote to my grandmother and mother. I doubt it was all of them, but there ARE a bunch... And sure enough, parts of them are blacked out, or even cut out. Gotta love the Army.

Moving on a few years, Dr. Dushkin moved up from Major Dushkin, to Lt. Colonel Dushkin, to bird-Colonel Dushkin, staying active duty and, because he apparently didn't think being the father of two, a Colonel in the U.S. Army, and a successful doctor was quite enough on his plate, he decided to go back to medical school and become a Psychiatrist. And he finished this degree a year early too.

By this time, my father had just completed his tour in Korea and had married my mother (the former Tanya Dushkin). My father, unlike his new father-in-law, had no intention of making the Army his vocation. He was a corporal who had seen quite enough of the 38th parallel, the DMZ, and even kimchee. As part of his enlistment deal, he had to serve 3 years active, then either 6 years reserve, or 3 years "active reserve". He chose the latter. As part of that he had weekly meetings with his reserve outfit, where they trained in case they were ever to be called up.

During one of these training weekends, my grandfather, who by now was the Chief Medical Officer for my father's division, decided he'd like to have a bit of fun. As part of the readiness training, all active reservists had to be kept up on all inoculations, in case they were needed to go overseas. They all had shot records with them, and all shots had to be updated on a yearly basis. There were something like 9 shots, all with large-gauge and painful needles, to be given. But you spread them out over a year and it wasn't so bad. My father had just gotten the last of his shots for the year when he was stopped in the hall by Colonel Dushkin (who made him salute at full attention, just because it amused him). After the salute, the Colonel asked Corporal Paullin for his shot record. My father grinned, knowing it was full and correct, and handed it to the Colonel, who promptly tore it into little pieces. The grin turned into a near sob... Colonel Dushkin then handed a blank shot record to Corporal Paullin and told him he had til the end of the day (their last day on this training weekend) to get it filled.

My parents lived right next door to my grandparents, with both houses connected by an intercom. That night my father answered the intercom with difficulty, because both of his arms were almost useless. My grandmother asked him what was wrong. He proceeded to call her husband all sorts of names. My poor, perplexed grandmother only replied that must be why her husband was laughing so hard he was almost crying. Later, he claimed that "If the Army offers you something for nothing, you take it." But I think it was for marrying his only daughter.

After he retired from the Army, his flourishing Psychiatric practice really took off. At various points in time he headed up the Psychiatry Departments at Cook County Hospital, Thorek Hospital in Chicago, and the Elgin Mental Health Center in Elgin, IL among others, all while handling a large private practice. He is credited (at least by Time Magazine) with naming the ailment many had in 1961 "nucleomitophobia" - fear of the atom. He even had the distinction of being one of convicted serial killer Richard Speck's Psychiatrists.

I was the first (of his eventual 4) grandchild. And personally, I like to believe I was his favorite. While my brother inherited my father's work ethic and people skills, I was the intellectual clone of my mother, who in turn had her father's proclivities for reading and intellectual pursuits. Even as an adolescent and teenager, my grandfather and I had discussions, debates, and even arguments. Although those were few and far between, because we also shared most of our liberal views.

My grandfather's father died when he (Sam) was 56. So in fact had several other males in his family. And given that by the time my grandfather was approaching 56, he was about 80 lbs overweight, a pipe and cigar smoker, and had had several previous heart attacks, he was pretty excited when he passed his 56th birthday without incident. But he knew, even then, that he was on borrowed time, and he decided that he had lived his life on his terms for a lot of years, and wasn't about to diet, or give up anything that contributed to his love of life.

One of those loves was the Cubs. He took my brother and me to probably 10 or 15 games a year at Wrigley, and we'd never miss a home opener. He would good-naturedly complain every year about the prices, and loudly looked forward to the day he'd qualify for senior citizen rates. When he had his last heart attack, in May of 1975, he was 64 years old. He had missed it by 11 months. Months after the funeral, my mother and I were the only ones in the family (including extended family) that really hadn't cried. This perplexed most of the family, considering we were probably the two closest people to him in his life, besides his wife. But mom and I both knew that he had lived exactly the life he would have chosen, almost without exception. In fact, to this day, I believe his only real regret would be missing out on the damned senior rates at Wrigley Field.

Those Who Choose to Ignore History are Doomed to Rewrite It

A day or so after Iraq's highest court decreed that Saddam Hussein would be executed in 30 days or less, the execution was carried out. Shiites, as well as many Iraqi Christians and Iraqi-Americans danced in the street. To those that experienced, or had loved ones that experienced, Saddam's reign of terror, this is a perfectly understandable sentiment.

This brought my A.D.D.-afflicted mind round and round, about war crimes and justice, and terrorist versus freedom fighter, and so this blog will meander about quite a bit.

It's an oft-quoted truism that history is written by the victor. And this is never more true than in the history of governmental conflict. On the one hand, we treat the war on terror much as we did the war in Korea and the War in Viet Nam. When we treat with foreign nationals we believe are terrorists, we have a convenient double standard: We can suspend habeas corpus because they are prisoners of war, yet we have no declaration of war, and we can dispense with Geneva Convention constraints, because they're not really P.O.W.s, they're domestic terrorists. But in Korea, Viet Nam, and Desert Storm, we had a nation we went to (undeclared) war against. That kept things a bit neater: If you were North Korean, Chinese, Viet Cong, North Vietnamese, or Iraqi, respectively, you were the enemy. AND, you were over there too. The enemy today is the enemy within. Sort of like what the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) feared was the case 50+ years ago. Then the fear was that communism would undermine our way of life. Now the fear is that way of life will be blown up.

A major 'Catch-22' of our founding philosophy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is that freedom allows things many of us think are just wrong to occur. An example of this well before terrorism has occurred for years in the judicial system. An accused criminal is entitled to ALL the legal benefits of the judicial system, whether guilty or not. The right to a vigorous and thorough defense has created loopholes big enough to drive a truck through for the guilty, as well as methods to exonerate the innocent. Do you amend those rights to punish all the guilty? How do you separate the guilty from the innocent? And do we even know what constitutes a crime? Remember the famous definition of pornography: "I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it." Are "unAmerican" statements illegal? Does voicing the opinion that a terrorist is right constitute "aiding and abetting the enemy"?

Every country, every culture, every group of people writes their own history based on their preconceived notions. The very same rationale that the founding fathers listed in the Declaration of Independence could have been quoted (and probably was) by the legislators in South Carolina on December 20, 1860, when they were the first state to secede from the Union. We won, it was our war of independence. They lost, they were the rebels. They said they had a right to self-government. The Federal government said they didn't. The same Federal government that "four score and seven years" before that, said they HAD that right.

The balance of power isn't about right, wrong, or fair, it's about the biggest kid on the block, and a game of Armageddon-chicken. In October of 1962, Soviet Premier Khrushchev sent a load of nuclear missiles to the communist island of Cuba, where they would have a 20 minute flight time to Washington, D.C. The C.I.A., the Defense Department and John Kennedy were incensed about this, and they ordered a blockade. Never mind that the U.S. already had nuclear missiles in several bases in Europe, including in Izmir, Turkey, which had a 15 minute flight time to Moscow. When it's our missiles, they're there for defense, when it's theirs, they're threatening us. They blinked first (although Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw the missiles from Turkey - still keeping the others in Europe) and turned the missile boats around back to Russia. This was, of course, AFTER we had tried the badly messed-up coup to depose Castro in Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Bottom line, we do what we need to do, and I understand that. We do apparently need to sacrifice our ideals for the freedoms we keep, at least until we can figure out a way to do it while keeping safe AND free. I'd just sometimes wish we weren't quite so unapologetically smug about it.

The Death of Literature, The Adolescence of Technology, and the Birth of a New Art

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - ), "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

It wasn't too long ago that a liberal arts education said that you were well-rounded, intelligent, literate. A leader. Now it says you couldn't decide on a major, plan to be a student until you're 35, and will be grossly underemployed. In the nostalgic haze of, say, the 30's, you hear archeology department at an Ivy League school, you think 'Indiana Jones'. Today, you think 'Van Wilder'. A favorite semi-truism in Iowa City, IA, home of the University of Iowa (one of the highest per-capita cities of Masters' Degree holders in the country): "You know the last thing they teach in Graduate School? They teach the best way to say 'You want fries with that?'" And I first heard this from the Chair of a prominent U of I department.

My niece Kamryn (she's the one without the beard) is learning Spanish and French, as well as reading, writing, problem solving, and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning computer. Oh yeah, and she just turned five. I'm a college educated, Mensa-qualified, well-read English Lit major who has taught Shakespeare in college. And my five year old niece can count in Spanish higher than I can. Not to mention can probably locate as many South and Central American countries on a map as I can (Damn you, Dora The Explorer). Yeah, well, I'd like to see Kammy conjugate a verb or write a scene in Iambic pentameter.

The point here is that there's been a sea change in what as well as how, we teach, and the subsequent value we put on the other stuff. At the risk of this morphing into another of those tired "things were so much better in MY time..." whines, literature is a curiosity. Television, in its infancy, tried to bridge the gap between the staid, "professional" news and entertainment industries, with "Playhouse Theatre" shows that showed live-to-tape stage productions, and the heyday of the respected news anchor, from Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite.

Somewhere just past the Apollo 11 moon landing, with all of it's Cold War Space-Race results, and the increasingly complex arms race, the world, and most of all America, began to focus like a hyperactive ferret-on-cocaine, that is, on anything and everything that moved faster, farther, and smaller. Phones that were "mobile" went from being on a cord hardwired in your car, to being carried in a bag, to itty bitty gadgets you can talk on while taking a picture while listening to music while driving a car. And it's everywhere, from computers in preschools to bluehairs on bluetooths (blueteeth?).

Quality today is quantifiable. You judge the newest technology by how fast it goes. By how small it is. By how many tasks can be multitasked into the smallest (and thereby, most portable) container. Online Universities advertise online for people to learn how to program more online University website ads. It's a vortex of technology teaching more technology. Call me paranoid (and you wouldn't be the first), but I keep waiting for Keanu Reeves to show up at my door and tell me Morpheus wants to see me.

Best-selling books are either warm and fuzzy or tough love self-help tomes, or they're tell-alls about what the butler saw through the keyhole. Or they're mile-a-minute thrillers with the mystery du jour plot (du jour right now is, of course, anything Jesus/Mary Magdalene related that wants to be scandalous). Short attention span theatre, along with whatever you can do for me today. I fully realize that many, if not most, of what has been considered classic literature for a lot of years was, in its creator's time, under appreciated. But it scares me that in a hundred years, my great-great grandson might be faced with an opportunity to purchase a first edition Dr. Phil for a thousand dollars.

How many people with advanced degrees (Besides the ones with English Lit majors) today know what Juliet was really asking when she quoted one of Shakespeare's most famous lines: "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo"? And I'll give you a tidbit you can probably win a bar bet with - back in the day, wherefore was 'why', not where. She wasn't looking for Romeo (hence her surprise when he calls up to her), she was asking rhetorically, why he had to be a Montague, of all people. The one family her family has been feuding with for years. Does knowing this little factoid help you in any way, shape, or form? Certainly not in any quantifiable way. But if you ever see or read "Romeo and Juliet", you might understand one tiny part of a piece of great literature, just a bit better. Knowledge, any knowledge, used to be useful for no other reason than it was knowledge. Now it needs to be useful knowledge. Moving to a point knowledge. Life is too fast and too important to dwell on things that just sound good. Or look good. Or make you think.

Some people like to just listen to good jazz. Or blues. Not to dance to, or to get psyched up to, just for the 'feel' of the music. I read for that reason. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Swift, Hobbes (both philosopher Thomas and the cartoon tiger), Dickens, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss. And so many more.

And yet, as miserably depressed as I can get about the state of art and literature nowadays, there passes before my eyes periodically (as I browse the bedeviled technology Internet for hours at a time) evidence of the new art. The techno-art. The Computer Aided Drawing stuff (I love the fact that this piece of technology's acronym is cad. It somehow seems appropriate). The picture under the 'About Me' title above was done on a computer. Courtesy of Visual Paradox (Copyright 1999-2006 by Brian Kissinger). Mr. Kissinger has gallery after gallery of incredible art. Fractal geometry, Computer Generated Imagery (cgi just doesn't have the Edwardian flair that cad does).

It is the new art, and while it's still a bit antiseptic for me, perhaps it is in a phase of evolution. Machine becoming something more. Something with a life to it. Something with a soul. I don't mind the idea of the machines taking over the world quite as much if I can think of it converting digital files to music. Converting bits to pictures. Creating life from lifelessness.

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" (Unless Thou Art a State or Federal Judicial System)

I periodically have a discussion with a member of my girlfriend's family about the merits of capital punishment. This member of her family (for discussion purposes, we'll just call him "Ed") is roughly two ideologies to the right of Barry Goldwater. Since I have actually "won" this discussion (I call it a win when "Ed" agrees to disagree amiably), I thought I'd take it public (public being a relative term, considering that to my knowledge there are roughly 10 people who read this with any regularity).

I used to be a devout capital punishment advocate. This despite the fact that normally I am just to the left of Timothy Leary (yeah, I know, but there really aren't nearly as many colorful leftists as there are right-wingers, and nobody else leapt to mind). My old standard reply was: "You commit a premeditated murder, you lose all your rights to life, as well as liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This view sufficed for me for much of my adult life. A few years ago, and I have no idea when or why exactly, I realized I didn't feel that way any more. Every one of the arguments I was presented with in favor of capital punishment, I disagreed with. And basically, I was left with one overriding axiom:

If killing is wrong, be it on moral, religious, or ethical grounds, it simply doesn't get made right because the state says so.

We'll look at some of the tried and true answers for the capital group in a moment, but first, a disclaimer: This post is full of statistics. The first statistics professor I had in college had an enlightening (if sophomoric) analogy about the perils of statistic quoting - He said that stats are "like string bikinis - what they show is very interesting, but what they hide can be essential." The statistics below are by no means the be-all-end-all, but for me, they do illustrate the points.

1) It's a deterrent. This one's just plain silly. I'll give you a couple of good examples: In the state with the most executions since 1976 (when it became legal again), Texas, they have executed 376 people since then. New Jersey, since it re-enacted the death penalty laws in 1982, has executed exactly no one. Zip. Nada. Nil. Their current murder rate is 4.8 murders per 100,000 people. Texas' rate is 6.2 per 100,000. And lest you think it has anything to do with the law already on the books, let's compare Michigan, home of Detroit, often competing for the coveted title of murder capital, and one of 12 states without the death penalty. 6.1 per 100,000. That's just a shade less than Texas. Here's another related tidbit: According to a NY Times study, 10 of the 12 states without the death penalty have homicide rates below the national average, while half of the states with the death penalty were over that average. While I'm certainly not saying it encourages anyone to murder, I am saying there seems to be no hard evidence that it stops anyone either.

2) It costs the taxpayers less to execute a criminal than to keep him/her locked up for life. This is one of those counter-intuitive arguments that seems to be obvious, but isn't. In fact, in most instances it's simply not true. First of all, there are states like the afore-mentioned Garden State. Since 1982, New Jersey has spent $250,000,000 on 197 capital trials, resulting in 60 death sentences, of which 50 were reversed. There were no executions, with 10 people currently on death row there. That's approximately $5,000,000 per accused. On the 'cheaper plan'. Then there was a study done in Indiana by the Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission that concluded that from trial through incarceration to execution, capital sentences were 38% more expensive than if all defendants were sentenced to life without parole. That presumes a 20% overturned verdict ratio, including re sentencing. I won't bore you with more statistics, but suffice to say, for me, this was the one toughest argument to refute for me. Now it's at the least possible that it's as cheap or cheaper to incarcerate than to execute.

3) They killed (an) innocent person/people. It's just justice that they be killed themselves. Now this one would make sense to me on several levels. Except that the state keeps pretending it's justice and not revenge. In fact, I have less problem with a notion that would allow a victim's family to kill the murderer in just the same fashion as they killed their victims than the current system. That would at least be a true act of vengeance, and arguably, the just resolution. The most bizarre part of the capital punishment judicial code is the part about 'cruel and unusual' punishment. You're going to be KILLING him/her. You are going to be taking away their life. Forever. It is somehow cruel and unusual to make it uncomfortable while you do this??

For me the entire process of the death penalty is epitomized by what happens right before the injection. The lethal injection. The lethal injection that's supposed to kill you in seconds. They swab the condemned with alcohol. They certainly don't want you to get an infection, days, or weeks after they've already killed you. Talk about the height of hypocrisy.

But let me also be clear on a couple of other things: I do believe in life in prison without parole. I don't believe in bargaining down what qualifies as first degree murder to 12 - 25 years, with time off. I also believe that if you didn't actually do what you are convicted of, spending the rest of your life in jail allows your innocence to be explored. Before they have to grant you an acquittal posthumously. I believe the millions spent each year on capital cases (and their appeals) as well as the tens of millions spent each year on prisoner conveniences, should be put towards more penitentiaries and higher guard salaries. I'm not sure a weight room, color televisions and rec rooms are worth early releases for thousands of violent criminals because we haven't got a room at the inn.

I'll have the CoorsBudweiserGuinessMillerSamAdamsPabst, please. On tap.

This is going to be a singularly unimportant rant, as rants go, but then again, it's probably more socially significant than the previous entry on pet peeves, if only by the narrowest of margins.

The two ostentatious vices I indulge in, albeit rarely (because in addition to being ostentatious vices, they're also expensive ones), are smoking good cigars, and drinking good single malt Scotch. The latter, being the rarer for me, is tonight's topic of bewilderment.

For those unfamiliar with the world of Scotch, there are two types of Scotch drinkers: The single malt people and the blended people. The single malt drinkers view the blended drinkers much as wine connoisseurs view people who prefer their wine with screw-off tops (and colorful names like Boone's Farm and MD20/20), and blended scotch drinkers view single malt patrons as pretentious snobs. Being periodically pretentious and often snobbish by nature, I am, and always have been, a single malt Scotch drinker. However, in this case, I just don't understand the alternative.

Blended Scotches (including some very famous and well-regarded brand names like Chivas Regal and Dewars) are literally amalgams of dozens, if not hundreds, of single malt Scotches that have been pawned off by single malt distillers, mostly their leftovers. Much of the distinction of any specific Scotch lies in two root ingredients - the local water, and the local peat. Like it's hoidy-toidy cousin the wine-grape, the local region produces very distinct tastes, based on the area within Scotland that it comes from. Saltiness, smokiness, peat content, and other criteria, combine to give every single malt locale a distinct flavor and a passionate following. Some are Highland fans, some Islay, and others places in between, mostly along the Spey river in Scotland.

Now I get the fact that some people don't like Scotch. It's an acquired taste, to be sure. And even within the single malt community, you'll have arguments over the 'best' place to distill Scotch. Much like wine afficionados fighting over regions of France, or Spain, or Italy, or Australia, or California or New York wines. And like brewers that tout their beer based on the local waters they brew with (think Coors in America, or Guiness in Ireland).

What perplexes me is the people that LIKE a blended Scotch. If you like a good Chardonnay, for instance, would you order a glass of wine that you knew was made from dozens, if not hundreds, of different kinds of wine grapes? That could have come from France, or California, or Kansas, for that matter? That they could be from any type of wine grapes, sweet or dry? Methinks not. You've probably developed a taste, or at least a mood for, a certain kind of wine, and more often than not, probably a favorite place that it comes from.

Bourbon, that most American of hard liquor, has evolved into such a specific entity that by U.S. trade law, it must be at least 51% corn (typically closer to 70%), with the rest of the recipe containing wheat and/or rye, and malted barley. No other dry ingredients are allowed. A concurrent resolution of the U.S. Congress restricted Bourbon to U.S. production (in 1964). No hybrid blends here either.

I'd never tell a Highland-type Scotch drinker that his lighter Scotch was inferior to the smokier tastes of my beloved Islay (Lagavulin, Laphroaig) or Spey malts (Macallan), because at least that's a specific choice made. A blended Scotch is much more akin to the 'garbage can punch' stuff we had in college.... You know, where everyone brings a bottle of something and pours it into the punchbowl. You'll get drunk either way, but with a single malt, you can at least enjoy the taste.

Free To A Good Home: Adopt A Pet Peeve Today

Since I don't do New Year's resolutions, but still like to self-evaluate and tweak the complex and often bizarre set of behaviors that are me, I decided to see if I couldn't find homes for some of my more troubling, and yet deeply unimportant, pet peeves. In no particular order:

Just don't call it 'White Chocolate'. There is no such thing as 'white chocolate'. From unsweetened to bittersweet to semi-sweet to milk, and all shadings therein, the central ingredient common to all chocolate is chocolate liquor, the liquid or paste made when cocoa beans are roasted and ground. This carpet-bagging imposter contains no chocolate liquor, just cocoa butter. I have no idea why this is a peeve of mine.

When you say 'Irregardless', it doesn't mean what you think it does. This is a double-negative.

There is no such word as 'Supposably'. I had a supervisor, an adult woman with an advanced degree, who managed the entire Training Department for one of the top five auto insurance companies in the country, that used this word every time she wanted to say supposedly. And no, she has no accent whatsoever, and her family goes halfway back to the Mayflower.

The state in the midwest that Chicago is in is not pronounced the way it is spelled. My teeth grind every time I hear 'Ill-i-noise'.

It's a lot funnier when Homer Simpson talks about 'Nuculer' disasters than when the President does. Don't you think that ONE of the speechwriters the White House employs in the Communications Department would explain to the chief executive how that word is actually pronounced? Especially when the vast majority of the times he uses that word it's in a pretty important context?

His parents named him Colin, but he pronounces it like a part of the body most closely associated with the rectum? The man was General of The Army, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State, would it kill him to be referred to the same way most other people with that name do? Think Colin Ferrell or Colin Firth. Although it was a nice picture caption with the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State (at the time) that could be called: A Bush, A Dick, and a Colin, when pronounced his way.

If it's new, how can it be improved? Self explanatory, except to advertising execs.

It won't hurt you to say please and thank you. Just be polite, dammit. The subset to this one is, if I stop to let you into traffic, a polite wave and/or smile will cost you very little of your roadrage momentum. I promise.

Feel free to give a good home to any of the above.

Youth Really Is Wasted On The Young - or - 'When Did They Get To Be So Interesting?'

I've been battling an affliction for months now, and it's getting worse, not better. Probably upwards of four or five months ago I first heard the vaguest of rumors, just the distant echoes of drums in the wilderness. There was going to be a reunion. Thirty years ago, I graduated high school.

So what? Personally, I figured there would have been a twenty-five year reunion, but since five years ago I didn't care any more than I did ten or twenty years ago, it's safe to say I wasn't all that miffed about not being able to miss another high school reunion.

The first one (at ten years), I went out of my way to miss. That one I had gotten the info on and couldn't wait to not go to. Ok, I did wait, but just long enough to tsk and cluck at the outrageous price they were charging, plus a cash bar. Feh (and feel free to insert your own cultural stereotype here). My indignation didn't last long, and it was forgotten.

I didn't realize I missed the twentieth anniversary until somewhere near the twenty-fifth anniversary. No invite. No problem. I figured I was much happier then than I was in high school anyways. I had sculpted asocialism into an art form by the mid-nineties.

At any rate, these first Rumblings of Reunion in '06 didn't do much for me either way. Although, in hindsight, I think I did notice the stirrings of a curiosity I didn't recognize. Then, quite by accident (I don't remember what I was initially searching for), I discovered a blog (as a quick digression, this thing isn't a blog so much as it is part musing, part autobiography, part community happening) that was walking me through life in a Chicago grade school in the mid-to-late 1960s. Not just from my generation, but my actual gradeschool. And my actual class. Yikes.

As I read it (and then read it again), I was astounded to learn that I was flooded with fond memories. Although I knew, in theory, that I was much happier in elementary school than in high school (Yes Virginia, there were no junior highs when and where I went to school. We didn't need no steeekin middle school - you went from vaunted 8th grader directly to taunted freshman after a single summer - but I digress again). Anyways, the author of this excellent blog (Jew Eat Yet), Danny Miller, who was one of the organizers of the reunion, was a sort-of acquaintance, in that what social circles we each had sort-of intersected at times. Much like a Haley's Comet sort of thing. I'd even been at his house for a party or two back in the day. I wrote a comment on the blog, basically thanking him for the trip down memory lane, he dropped me a note afterwards, and we each started comparing reminiscences. The quiet, smart kid with the way long hair and baby face who kept messing up the curve in school had turned into a witty, erudite, successful, semi-retired writer and editor. Overnight. Ok, thirty years of overnights.

Got me to thinking. I was now getting really curious about the whatever-happened-to-baby-jane factor of this reunion thing. My mother thought I was nuts ("You haven't seen or heard from these people in thirty years, why now?"), my girlfriend thought I was nuts ("You've never mentioned these people before, why now?"), my cat thought I was nuts ("Quit looking at 'Classmates.com' and feed me, dammit!").

Then, as if this wasn't weird enough yet, another of the organizers of the impending reunion - we had gone to a relatively small high school, so they were organizing a triple-class reunion with the classes of '75, '76, and '77 - dropped me an email on the very day Danny wrote me back. Barb had seen my comment on Danny's blog and wanted to say hi. Barb (a year younger than me) was a closer friend (closer in the context that we actually hung out periodically - I didn't have a lot of friends back then that I saw with much regularity), and when we caught one another up on our lives the past thirty years, saw a bunch of parallels. Someone else that turned out to be a fascinating adult.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get to the reunion, and to my complete amazement, I agonized over not going. To make the point even more indelibly, Danny sent me a link to another of our classmates' blogs, an expatriate now living in England (as is Barb, by the way). Donna is another of those that I literally spent nine or ten years in classes with, but never ran in the same circles. Her blog is a thoughtful, witty, intimate, and at times heartrending set of writing based mostly about her only son who's a U.S. Marine in Iraq now. And this from a dyed-in-the-wool liberal dove. Regardless of your personal views of American involvement in the middle east, you need to read this one too (Mother Courage). Yet another of the classmates I never got to know in all those years that have wonderful stories to tell. Who knew?

So here I am, eager for more stories, more experiences. I'm suddenly fixating on the next reunion, and I don't do patience very well. This will be an annoying ten years. And I blame you, Danny.

A Small Hole in the World, Only Noticed Years Later

(Blogger's Note: I wrote the piece below, all but the last paragraph, almost a year ago, initially intended to be included in a blog - I left it out because it seemed somehow too personal. Last week I got the souvenir booklet from my 30th High School reunion, which I wasn't able to attend, and on the 'In Memoriam' page, I saw my friend's name and picture. Somehow, now, this piece seems more relevant, although I have no idea why)

About a year ago, my mother, in a phone call, told me that a childhood friend of mine had died. This isn't someone I've remained close to. In fact, I don't think I've seen Esther in upwards of 35 years. At the time she told me, I remember saying: "Oh, that's too bad.." and that was that.

Lately, I've been thinking about that reaction. First, a bit of background on my 'neighborhood' at the time: The first house I remember living in was on a small, close-knit block on a one-block long cul-de-sac street called Monticello on the north side of Chicago. Actually, cul-de-sac isn't even accurate. It was a single city block that simply stopped at the end, which abutted up against a river (which in reality was probably a creek, but to a 5 year old, it was a raging river, thank you). In front of that river, up on the bank, was a large, sturdy chain link fence, which in turn was set up behind a number of concrete embuckments (I seem to remember something like five of them). These embuckments were large, rounded rocklike things, probably about 5-6 feet high, that were painted industrial green. I have trouble remembering what I had for dinner last night, but I can still recall the exact feel of the cold painted concrete on my hands as I climbed up those rocks to sit, as if it were yesterday. And I was last on this block in 1966.

This block was pretty much a complete world for me. The neighbors were always the people we saw, in every social situation. They were family. This was in the early to mid sixties, and it was a time when neighborhoods in the city were much like what the suburbs were going to become later in the decade: Block parties, doors left open, eveyone looked out for everyone else. The block had something like six families with children, several elderly couples, dogs that everyone knew, petted and fed, and you knew every house by the people who lived there, and they had lived there for years. Our house (which seemed more than big enough for me, mom, dad, and my kid brother) was a tiny two-bedroom postage-stamp of a house that had a front door that was really a side door, and that side door was about 10 feet from the side door of the house next door. Esther's house.

Esther was a grade ahead of me, and something like six months older. My brother wasn't even in preschool yet, and Esther was a combination sister, buddy, co-conspirator, and girlfriend (in a 1st grade kind of way). We'd play GI Joe, baseball, and doctor, all in the course of a sunny afternoon. Sure there were the others on the block, the Goldens with their troop of six kids, Little Jody and Big Jody (the odds of two different families on the same block having girls named Jody never amazed me as much as it probably should have), and the older kids a few doors down, but when push came to shove, it was always Esther and me. There probably wasn't a total of five days in four years when we didn't play together.

Then we moved. Not far the way I measure distance now, about a mile and a half, but to a third grader before the advent of soccer moms (or many moms that even drove at all, much less an SUV), it was another continent. Fortunately, third graders are also remarkably bulletproof when it comes to the trauma of relocation. And the new house was a two-story Georgian of positively gargantuan proportions (at least by third grader standards). By the time I got midway through grade school, the house on Monticello was a quaint memory that I had no time for thinking about.

Esther and I ran into each other probably a total of three times since I moved from there, all when we were both in different high schools. Then I heard, when I was in college, that she was sick. Again, I was too self-absorbed to manage anything more than an "oh, that's too bad..."

I don't know how old she was when she died, but I do know it was way too young. As I get older, the regrets compound, and certain periods of one's life take on the "golden age" tinge that we middle-aged baby boomers harp on over and over (and that we spent years making fun of in our parents).

Mostly though, I regret I never got to tell Esther the place she had in who I was, am, and will be. And all in the space of a few scant years. I have had many, many acquaintances since then, and more than a few friends, but there's only one first real friend in your life, and despite all that goes on around you, there's a little hole in the world that stays there when that friend is gone. Even when you don't notice that space for years at a time. I miss her a whole lot, and the worst part is it's years too late.

If you have the good fortune to have your first friend ever somewhere in your roll-a-dex, or even know what city they live in, do yourself a favor and look them up. There will come a day when you (or they) will regret not doing it, only after it's too late.

I M 2 Lazy 2 Write.. R U?

Every now and again, there is a nice byproduct to voting, even in local and statewide elections. This past Tuesday I got to help a candidate lose his election bid, rather than help one win. I realize this might sound like semantics, but sometimes you just want to see someone lose more than wanting someone else to win.

In my little corner of the world, an area on the opposite end of Puget Sound from Seattle, WA, sits the Washington State congressional district 35, a nice mix of blue collar (Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, as well as logging, automotive, and construction businesses) and white collar (the older affluence of Gig Harbor, and the newer money of Port Orchard and Bremerton). You're as apt to see a beat-up '79 Chevy half-ton pickup covered in mud driving past you on the road as you would an '06 Mercedes SL convertible.

The incumbent, a distinguished-looking 69 year old man named William "Ike" Eickmeyer, has been a state representative since 1997, and has had a quietly undistinguished career so far (head of a local canal committee as well as serving on the Natural Resources and Capital Budget committees). No scandal, no heroics.

Enter the challenger. A 40 year old Republican named Randy Neatherlin. I first saw Mr. Neatherlin's name on a campaign poster that said: "Randy Neatherlin... I M 1 of U." For the rest of his qualifications, I quote from his campaign website directly:

"Randy's many ventures included being a cowboy, bodyguard, tree trimmer, logger, roofer, drywall hanger and both sales and management for Colonial Corporation, where he was responsible for about 50+ employees. Randy is currently creating a television advertising and marketing firm which already has three customers under contract. Randy currently is the owner of My Friends Carlot, a used auto sales dealership and repair shop. Randy also still owns one of his first companies, a cedar shake and shingle mill in Belfair.

With such a wide variety of experiences, he has truly earned his tagline, 'I M 1 of U.' "

I'm sorry, but abbreviating am, one, and you is fine for a text message to a high school classmate, but not for a serious adult vocation, like being a State Representative, for example. I have no problem with Mr. Neatherlin personally, and in fact, agree with several of his stances, notably on limited government and taxes. But a shorthand sentence that he is one of us is hardly the qualification I would want my Representative to be leaning on. I don't want 'one of us', I want the 'best of us', I want someone above the crowd, to lead, not be an example of the ones who are lead.

Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of politics, education, athletes and role models in general. No one wants a leader, no one wants an ideal. Everyone looks to find the warts, which in turn makes those who aspire to leadership roles sink to the lowest common denominator in order to 'fit in,' to be 'just one of the guys'. I don't think it necessary to gloss over people's flaws, nor to spin them into acceptability. By the same token, I think it's still acceptable, in fact necessary, to highlight what makes these leaders different. Not all important decisions are good ones, but most of them are controversial, and pandering to the masses will accomplish nothing great, save perhaps a great ability to pander.

Secrets of a Long and Happy Marriage

(Note: This blog was actually done 10/2/06, and brought over here from another blog. I wanted it to be a part of this one - and they had a lovely anniversary, and are still married more than a month later)

In five days, my parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. I find this an exceptionally remarkable milestone, all the moreso because to this day I find it hard to believe they ever even dated. Not because they're "the parents" (well, not solely because of that), but because it's entirely possible that two more dissimilar characters have never dated in all of recorded history.

My mother came from a reasonably well-to-do family on the "nice side" of Des Moines, IA. Her father was a successful doctor, her mother the prototypical doctor's wife, aka the perfect hostess and mate. Mom was an intellectual, the daughter of the single brightest mind I have ever known personally. Mom's careers have ranged from a librarian to executive secretary for firms as large as Leo Burnett and Marsh & McLennon. She's as familiar with Spongebob as she is with Springsteen as she is with Shakespeare (thanks primarily to her grandchildren, my younger brother, and myself, respectively). Oh, and she's completely and utterly cooking-impaired. The reason I included that tidbit will be made apparent later in this blog.

My father, on the other hand, comes from Chicago, raised by a very frugal and hardworking couple (his aunt and uncle). His father died when my father was 18 months old, and his mother couldn't afford to raise my father and his sister, so their aunt and uncle did. Dad struggled to get out of high school, went right into the army, served in Korea as a corporal (radio operator in the Signal Corps), and has war stories...hundreds of war stories.. Dad was (and is, for that matter), a salesman. He's what used to be referred to as a people person. He's also the hardest working person I've ever seen, but he is a product of his environment. If I were to tell him that Leonardo Da Vinci was an artist, a sculptor, an inventor, an advisor to royalty, and a writer, he'd be just as likely to answer "Man couldn't hold down a job."

Mom's version of the perfect vacation day is reading by the pool. Dad's is talking to the hotel engineer about how well the filter in the pool works.

In the old days (read: when my brother and I still lived at home), he'd yell, she'd smile and nod, he'd yell some more, she'd smile and nod, ad infinitum. In the 30ish years since then, they've both sort of moved towards the center. He rarely yells now, and she in fact sometimes does. Neither of them confesses to any idea at all how they've lasted this long, but I have a theory.

I mentioned earlier that my mother can't cook. This, by the way, is not a secret to her. She doesn't like her cooking any more than I do. You know the old joke about what the jewish wife makes for dinner (reservations)? My mother's picture in on the original printing of that joke. My father, on the other hand, actually likes it. Not like a devoted husband tolerating it for his wife's sake, but asking her to cook. My mother and I would BOTH be complaining about what we were having for dinner (while she made it) more times than I can count when I lived there. But dad, bless his heart, loved it.

Which brings me to my theory: The first few years they were married, it was the whole 'opposite attracts' thing.... then it was the kids....not many people they knew divorced who had kids...of course, it could be that both were afraid they'd wind up with custody... and finally, after my brother and I moved out, they reached the key component to marital bliss:...::::::drumroll::::::: they figured out the perfect compromise to food. Now they split going out to eat and cooking in. Going out let's mom eat food she actually likes, and dad gets to talk to the waiter, manager, busboy, and customers... When they stay in, mom has to cook, but at least afterwards she can read a book or watch TV, and dad gets to eat food HE likes.

Happy anniversary mom and dad.

Vote Early, Vote Often - Oh Wait, I Don't Live in Chicago Anymore

It is that time of year again, the first Tuesday in November of an even-numbered year. This is the year I vote in all the available elections, as opposed to the one in two years, when I vote for every office except the big one.

Before I defend not voting in the Presidential election, I've got something to say to those people who get righteously indignant, puff out their collective chests, and huff: "If you don't vote, you don't get to complain". My response: "Huh?" Silly me, I thought that the first amendment guarantees the right to free speech to all citizens, not just the ones who choose to exercise their voting rights. It always seemed to me that that argument was similar to the ones raised by the "America - Love it or Leave it" contingent. Free speech is for speech, not for "good" speech. Note I didn't say ALL speech, because I understand there are things one can say that can affect everything from personal to national security. But I have a hard time with the stretch that if I think a given administration is behaving badly, someone or something might be at risk. Except perhaps, that administration's next term.

But about the Presidential election. There are really only a few things you need to know about the Electoral College, and they're probably things you were taught in school, but perhaps didn't fully understand. The usually accepted version of the form of government we live in is a democracy. It is not. At least not fully. And I'm not talking about conspiracies, lobbies, and 'shadow governments'. Our major form of government is a republic. We elect officials for a given term of years who make laws (the exception here being 'binding referenda', where the public votes on a policy, law, rule, or policy). If those officials don't make the laws we like, we vote them out in the next election that their term comes due in.

For the President, we elect the people who elect the President. Sort of. Those electors are elected in various procedures at the state level. States have differing numbers of electors based on the populations of the states. Can you name a single elector in your state? I know I can't. Some states have rules on how their elector has to vote (popular vote tallies, etc.), but 24 states do NOT have any rules on how their electors vote. Let me repeat that. 24 state electors, representing some 257 electoral votes, have NO rules on the books on how they have to vote. If a candidate gets every single vote in Illinois, for instance (one of those 24 states), those 21 electoral votes could, legally, go to his opponent. Is that likely? Of course not. But it can. Corruption, back-room deals, and conspiracies significant enough to alter an election are a lot more plausible in a pool of 538 votes than one of 120,000,000+.

There have been at least three incidences of the winning Presidential candidate losing the electoral vote since 1824, when the current system was put in place (1876, when Hayes beat Tilden, 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Cleveland, and of course, 2000, when Bush beat Gore). Think about that for a moment. More people, in three separate elections, voted for a single LOSER in an election than a winner. How does one reconcile the one-person/one vote, your-vote-counts philosophy with the reality? Are the people really more important in Texas, California, New York and Pennsylvania than they are in South Dakota, Maine, New Mexico, and Nevada? That's why both parties spend the dollars and invest the time in visiting the populous states. They only have to win a handful of states, not the whole country. Instead of disenfranchising one area of the country, they can do it to every region.

So, while I will continue to vote in every election I am eligible to vote in that does not include an electoral college, I certainly won't condemn anyone who doesn't vote and say they don't have a right to complain. Personally, I don't mind at all if my neighbors don't vote. In fact, I'd prefer it. I saw a comedian doing a bit a long time ago about prejudices against gay men. He said, "Hell, I wanna see more gay men. The more men date one another, the more women in the pool." The less voters in my district, the more weight my vote carries.

Commercial or Propaganda? If You Believe The 'Truth', I Have a Bridge I Want to Sell You

One of the truly interesting and strange byproducts of having a career that scoffs at traditional nine-to-five hours is you get to watch some surreal television. Specifically television advertising. And I'm not even talking about the local productions, the guy in his mid-sixties with the bad comb-over singing you a hoe-down on the joys of buying your next mattress from him. No, some of these are national commercials.

Some of them are well-produced enough that you don't even blanch at them until almost the next commercial break. My current favorite is for Match.com. Now, I've never used their product, and it may well be a wonderful and useful service. However, this is their actual guarantee (as seen on TV): If you're not completely satisfied in 6 months (presumably with your dating life through their service), then they will give you 6 months free. Let me see if I fully comprehend this: If, for some strange reason, I don't think your product does what you tell me it'll do, I get to have it not work for me for ANOTHER six months? Talk about delusions of grandeur. Here's a company that figures their product is so good, even if it doesn't work, that I'll want to put my life on hold for a half a year more, their treat, just so I can see that it must not have been their fault I couldn't get a match I liked.

But the ones that are positively Goebbels-worthy, and what this blog is actually about, is a whole series of ads, ones that masquerade as public service spots. The 'Truth.com' folks. Not only can they tell half-truths along with the occasional untruth, there isn't even a venue for rebuttal, since tobacco advertising has long since left the airwaves. Allow me to help. As a semi-public service.

Every tobacco company in the world is a separate company. Certainly they have groups, and they lobby for legislation. Every industry in the world does. If an oil company breaks a law, and/or tries to cover it up with loss of life or ecological damage (think Union Carbide in Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez) the individual company is taken to court, not the oil industry. Were there internal memos circulated years ago to market cigarettes to minors? Undeniably there were. Was every tobacco company indicted? Nope. Yet every single tobacco company was included in the government's lawsuit, and every one of them is paying on the settlement. What do you think Shell Oil Company's reaction would be if the Federal Government sued them to pay an equal portion of the cleanup for the Valdez? Do you think Conoco was sued for negligence on Union Carbide's part?

Take some personal responsibility. The main thrust of the anti-tobacco lobby is that the tobacco industry has perpetrated a hoax on the American people about the dangers of smoking. I've been a smoker for well over 30 years, and before that. as of 1965 in fact, federal law mandated warnings on the every pack of cigarettes sold in America. First they said it was bad for you. Then (still upwards of 35+ years ago), they specifically stated: "...The Surgeon General's Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy." AND...."Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." AND... "Smoking By Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, And Low Birth Weight." AND..."Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide." Did those warnings sound indecisive?

Incidently, ask any scientist what the definition of cause and effect is, and you'll find that cigarettes do not 'cause' Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema. According to the definition of cause and effect, as soon as you have a person who smokes that does not get one of those diseases, you can no longer say it causes it. Almost everyone I know has a friend or relative that has smoked for years that never developed any of those diseases. And since the list of known carcinogens in our environment increases exponentially every year (and those are just the known ones), cause and effect does not apply. Does the empirical evidence suggest that smoking can greatly increase your risk for such diseases? Certainly. That is not to say that one causes the other. Another interesting correlation is how drunk driving is handled. Virtually no one, outside of MADD perhaps, says that alcohol kills. They warn that it impairs your judgement, and to 'drink responsibly'. A drunk gets behind the wheel after a couple of six packs, kills a family of five, gets a DUI, and goes home to watch a football game with three beer commercials every change of possession. But no one seems to see a corollary to alcohol ads and DUI accidents. Only cigarettes.

As I mentioned, I am a smoker. Not much, but I've smoked anywhere from a pack a day in my younger days, to the less than half a pack these days, for over 30 years. I am aware they are, at the least, bad for me, and at the most, contributing significantly to any number of respiratory diseases in me. I do not smoke indoors, including at home, and in fact, I have NEVER smoked indoors when I lived or worked with people who didn't, including well before the laws mandated it. I believe (I hope, anyways) that I would have the balls to take personal responsibility for my own smoking if it contributed to lung cancer, and not sue some evil boogie-man in the suit at Marlboro's parent company, RJ Reynolds, who somehow 'brainwashed' me into buying his product, while all the while he rubbed his hands and cackled maniacally. I am reasonably confident that I wouldn't sue because just a few years ago I had a lung cancer scare (that turned out, thank goodness, to be benign), and during the time between first suspicion and the negative result, I wasn't calling a lawyer, nor did I plan to. And yes, I am aware of the 'No Atheists in a Foxhole' theory, and that were I to get very sick I might change my mind. I simply hope I wouldn't.

When the AMA says that no matter how long you've been smoking, if you quit today, you stand an excellent chance of reversing the damage (before the disease is full-blown), I have even less sympathy for people who smoke for years upon years, and then upon discovering they have lung cancer, probably contributed to heavily by their smoking, blame the tobacco industry because they couldn't quit. When a participant in bungee-jumping is injured or dies in an accident, I don't remember hearing about bungee cord makers being fined universally for the inherent danger in their product. Even gun manufacturers have had all such universal suits against them thrown out in court for the danger of their products.

So, you know what? If you smoke, and you're worried about your health, then stop. There are thousands of support groups and aids to help, and hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) in the US today that have successfully quit smoking. By the way, just for the record, I have quit for a year once, and for six months another time, in my adult life. I simply enjoy smoking.