Monday, August 31, 2009

I Finally Figured Out How to Express This

Living in Minnesota, you get used to the conversations about weather. I'm not really a big weather follower myself -- I never seek out forecasts, don't watch local news, and am often surprised to discover that it's cold or warm on a particular day. But when someone wants to talk about the weather, which they often do, I try my best to hold up my end of the conversation. "Yes. It is cold. I expect it will continue to get colder until it gets very cold, at which point the earth's annual rotation will begin to gradually bring about a more perpendicular angle between the sun's rays and the surface of our region. Greater average temperatures will then occur, and Minnesotans will then remark that it is getting warm."

The one thing you never get used to, though, is people who aren't from Minnesota dissing our state's weather. Pussy-ass Californians or Texans often come here, experience 50-degree weather, and then say "Ooooh, it's so cold! Brrr ... how can you live here?!?!" Well, I guess we manage it because we have balls. We can withstand a bit of cold weather and not collapse like a bunch of hothouse flowers.

That's not really what I say. I usually then say that I prefer the weather in Minnesota, because you get a change in seasons. I especially enjoy it this time of year, when the season is actually changing pretty rapidly to autumn. Of course, this is a stock response and gets you nowhere. So I searched for a long time for a better way to get across why having seasonal changes is better than long, uninterrupted stretches of climatic niceness.

I finally figured it out. Southern California weather, see, is like watching nothing but "Frasier" every day. It's a fine show, not exactly challenging or ground-breaking, but pleasant enough. But if you had to watch it every single day, wouldn't you get a bit tired of it? Wouldn't you eventually yearn for some piece-of-shit documentary on VH-1 in which third-rate comedians make snarky comments about the greatest Christmas-themed novelty songs of 1983? Wouldn't you ache for an episode of the hot new reality show "Semi-Attractive Morons Hitting Each Other in the Head"?

Cuz that's what weather is like in Minnesota. At least half the year, probably more, is a mix of "According to Jim" reruns and Disney's "The Jonas Brothers Do Their Taxes -- LIVE!" But when those "Frasier" episodes come on in the spring -- man! You appreciate those "Frasier" episodes so much more than you would if it were nothing but "Frasier," all day, every day. And it's not just "Frasier" either -- some nice days are "Seinfeld," some are "The Simpsons" -- I might be taking this a bit far, but you hopefully get the idea. There are so many different types of nice days in Minnesota. Right now, there's a bit of a nip in the air, which is exciting in its own unique way. In Southern California, meanwhile, this kind of weather would betoken a tragic ice age and thousands of Californians would huddle in corners, shivering madly, shaking their heads, and cursing the evil Lord Xenu for implanting thetans of frigidity in their souls.

In Minnesota, weather provides variety, and from that variety, drama. A major storm is a exciting event that we all experience together and compare notes on later. In the dead of winter, we all snuggle together indoors and gripe happily about the cold. In the summer, Minnesotans stage so many outdoor fests and fairs that you'd think we were the heartiest partiers in the world (we're not). One way or another, the weather binds us together in common experiences.

Meanwhile, poor Southern Californians are deprived of the daily drama, conversation topics, and source of cohesion that bizarre weather fluctuations can provide. So what do Californians do instead? Apparently, any crazy shit they can come up with. They start cults and get plastic surgery and make shitty movies and have referenda on whether the government should provide everything imaginable while simultaneously cutting taxes, etc., etc. I think it's all rooted in a need for drama that isn't being fulfilled by their weather.

To gather further proof that Californians are desperate for drama, I recently visited the God-forsaken hellhole they call San Diego (great town, by the way -- America's Finest City, I hear). There was this beach that the constructed specifically for children, complete with a wall that created a sort of alcove, which allowed small waves to come up but prevented a major undertow. The problem was that they didn't construct the wall quite right, which somehow made the beach very attractive to seals (who are known fanatics for shoddily produced civic projects). So the seals are always hanging out there, being cute, which sparked a decades-long vicious battle between pro-seal and pro-children factions as to which uncontrollable animal should be given exclusive rights to the beach.

And a vicious battle it was. Pro-seal fanatics formed human chains to prevent children from entering the beach. Pro-children fanatics continued to squirt out brats at an exponential rate so as to overpopulate the world and drive all other animal species, including seals, to extinction. Meanwhile legislatures tried to resolve the issue through the time-tested method of floating crazy, half-baked ideas, such as setting up speakers that constantly play dog barks to scare away the seals. (This plan was shot down when it was discovered that seals aren't afraid of dog barks -- true story.)

No one apparently thought of maybe building another beach, and this time doing the wall right. Maybe this one could have a fence at the mouth of it, maybe 40 feet from shore, that keeps the seals out but allows modest waves to get through. No, this was not considered. Because if this problem were resolved, what would the pro-seal and pro-children factions get excited about? How would they spend their time? Watching "Frasier" reruns?

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Movies I Found a Titch Disappointing: No Country for Old Men

I'm a big fan of the Coen Brothers. "Fargo" is one of my favorite movies. So of course I was excited about "No Country for Old Men," which was apparently their best movie since it won the Academy Award, right?

I think old men should have been disqualified from voting for Best Picture that year. This movie pandered like crazy to old men, specifically grumpy old men. (By the way, "No Country for Grumpy Old Men" is definitely a movie I would see. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau raised from the dead and going on a killing spree. "Gruff but endearingly homocidal" could be the tagline.)

It took me a while to really get into words what was wrong with this movie, but after I had an argument with a stranger on Facebook I got it down. (Ain't that always the way?) This guy on Fecebook waxed pretentious about how the movie "bespoke some sort of deep internal disquiet about modern life," that the country and indeed the world had turned away from old men and seemed foreign and dangerous and blah blah blah.

And that is indeed what a big part of the movie seemed to try to bespokinate. Tommy Lee Jones and some other guys were old men who were scared and baffled and downright helpless in the face of the threats of the modern world, what with its proliferation of Dorothy Hamill-coiffed serial killers and suchlike. There's one long and incredibly dull scene at the end of "No Country for Old Men" in which Tommy Lee Jones goes to some other old guy's house in the middle of Bumblefuck, Texas and they trade pithy platitudes about the world creeping to hell in a handbasket, or something. I wanted to tell them to grow the hell up.

This gets to what I call have long called the "grumpy old man argument." It's a tried and true device in which grumpy old men complain about the modern world by saying that everything was better in the good old days. These arguments usually start with phrases such as "In my day" or "I remember a time when," etc. They're almost always bullshit.

In essence, the grumpy old man argument is really "The world has passed me by. I don't really get what's going on nowadays. Therefore, it's the world's fault." It always involves looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, looking at the present with bile-covered glasses, and then just completely making shit up.

Here's an example: Have you ever heard a grumpy old man say "I remember a time when people were kind and decent to each other!" Yeah, pops, except to minorities. And women. And foreigners. And you know, even among white men, there were lots of fistfights. I'll grant that there was less gun violence (although, violent crime levels are currently at lows not seen since the '50s), but if you read any history about ordinary life in the first half of the 1900s, it's little besides fistfights and suicides. Lots of suicides. Of course, the grumpy old men only remember how Old Man Johnson would come by each morning and say "hello" to the family. They leave out the part about Old Man Johnson beating his kids and blowing his salary each week on whiskey.

I'm not saying that everything is great nowadays. For one thing, a lot of attempts at positive change are being impeded by grumpy old men and other, younger conservatives who are terrified that if we change the worst health insurance system in the developed world to something more closely resembling the best health insurance systems in the developed world, we'll suddenly all be standing in bread lines and praising our Great Benevolent Leader Obama. It's not based on logic, just on that primal, irrational fear of change that is the grumpy old man's stock in trade.

But all that aside, the reality is that the world is not more or less sinister than it ever was. It's just as sucky, but in different ways. Yes, we now have global warming and terrorism and Jonas Brothers. But we used to have World Wars and institutionalized racism and Andrews Sisters. Grumpy old men only think it's worse now because they're not used to it all.

Which gets us back to "No Country for Old Men." Basically, the premise of a lot of it is that the world has become scary and freakishly violent -- this being embodied by Anton, the aforementioned Dorothy Hamill-coiffed denim enthusiast who just walks around killing people for no reason. The problem is that Anton, as scary as he is (and he really, really is, thanks in part to a brilliant performance by Javier Bardem), is not some archetype of modern life. Guys like Anton don't simply don't exist in the real world. There have been plenty of serial killers (very few lately though, have you noticed that? It seemed like you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a serial killer in the early '90s. But when was the last time you heard of one these days?). But most real serial killers are a lot more like Jeffrey Dahmer -- nerdy, conniving, private, sexually perverse. They're horrific, but not in a showy, charismatic way. They simply don't just walk around town with a cow-puncher killing people for no reason and constantly get away with it. And moreover, they're extremely, extremely rare.

You know who does walk around killing people for no reason though? Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, etc. Anton is one of the great movie monsters of all time, but that's it. He's not a commentary about modern life, because modern life simply isn't like that. Violent crime rates are low, the threat of nuclear war is at a lower ebb, and even terrorists are not the master villains that we've made them out to be -- they're just a small collection of lunatic fringe radicals that really don't have very good resources and will never really get normal folks on their side. (And that opens a can of worms that I will now close and perhaps re-open in another post.)

Bottom line is, people in this country are as safe or safer than they've ever been -- they're paranoid, to be sure, perhaps because they watch too much exploitative news -- but safe. We have lots of actual things to be scared of, from climate change to falling house prices to idiots screaming into cell phones, but if Anton is supposed to be a metaphor for that kind of thing, the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy really need to go back to metaphor school.

Of course, it's obvious what Anton is really supposed to be a metaphor for -- he's the boogieman that grumpy old men invent in their tiny minds to reconcile their discomfort with the unfamiliar with their own massive egos. Maybe the United States isn't exactly a country for old men, but it could be one if old men were willing to say hey, this new world might make me feel a bit odd, it might not be what I'm entirely used to, but things change, and maybe I should try to stretch myself a bit and meet it halfway. But no, that can't be it. I'm perfect. The problem is that this goddamn world is crawling with serial killers with funny hair! That's it!

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

More Amazing Inventions!

1. The Fart Sweetener: There must be something you can stick up yout butt that will convert the terrible smell of farts into a pleasant, floral aroma. I wouldn't necessarily recommend just putting a Glade Plug-In up your ass, but I do think Glade should investigate some version that can be inserted rectally. Even if it were just a filter, maybe in your underwear, that activates upon contact from fart molecules and covers up the smell with potpourri. Imagine if you were at a pleasant dinner party, and over cups of tea and dainty finger sandwiches, your host could say, "Ronald, (your name is Ronald), I'm finding the odor in this room to be a trifle stank. Would you mind farting?" And then you say "but of course!" and let out a bit juicy fart. Then suddenly everyone breathes in deep, with pleased expressions on their faces, and all say simultaneously, "Ahhh ... Country Fresh, I believe!" And then you nod and everyone chuckles happily. It would be great.

2. The Honk Specifier: Since I first became able to drive, I've decried the inspecificity of honks. A honk is the only way to communicate with fellow drivers, and it is the most clumsy and blunt tool imaginable. A single honk can mean:

  1. Fuck you!
  2. Hey, pay attention.
  3. Excuse me, do you mind terribly? Thanks!
  4. Hey, I know you!
  5. Oops, I slipped and hit my horn.
  6. I was just in a crash and am dead.
Sometimes you can guess at what was meant by the length of the honk, but that's rare -- most honks are medium-length ones that are completely inscrutable. Add this ambiguity of intent to the fact that on a crowded street, no one has any idea who is honking, or to whom they have honked, or which whom they will have had had gehonkened. It's a mess. It's as if we only had one word in the English language, "Blargh!" and we had to say "Blargh!" at every occasion. Imagine if "hello" was "blargh," "good-bye" was "blargh," "I love you" was "blargh," "go to hell," was "blargh" -- granted, you could use different tones and inflections, but I still think there would be lots of misunderstandings.

So I propose a whole set of different honks. They would vary in pitch, and each pitch would mean a different thing. You'd have a high pitch for "move ahead please!" and a low pitch for "Go to hell." And maybe you could have a second sound for the location that you mean to direct the honk. Maybe the car could just say "North!" And it would always have to identify the sender of the honk, maybe by automatically tacking on "blue Honda!" assuming you drive a blue Honda. So if you were in a blue Honda and wanted the car in front of you to know that the light has turned green and it's time to go, your car says "North from blue Honda, (polite, high-pitched beep)!"

But that could be awfully noisy. Maybe instead you need an electronic news-ticker style thing on top of your car. You'd need four, one for each direction -- then you could light it up only in the direction of the person to whom you're honking. So you press the direction and type of honk. Each type of honk automatically corresponds to an intended message, and puts it on the correct electronic sign.

Then when you hear a honk, you look to see if you can see an electronic message. If you don't see one, you're in the clear, but if you see something saying "Move your ass!", then you know that that specific car is telling you specifically to move your specific ass.

You do run into the problem of too much thinking being required for each honk. But really, wouldn't that be good? Now people honk at the drop of a hat -- wouldn't it be nice if people had to stop and think for at least a split second exactly what they mean to communicate and to whom? Maybe you wouldn't end up with people honking like morons in the middle of a traffic jam that is no one's fault.

And I guess you'd still have to have a "panic" one that you can just quickly hit in an emergency. But if you did the "panic" one in non-emergencies, you should get arrested, or something. I haven't worked out all the bugs. But you get the idea.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Blog Jazz

Skee bop doodle-e bop de bop ... hey, all you jazz fans out there, I'm going to try a little improv bloggin' right now ..,. straight from my brain to the screen, that's right ... Hey! I know I said I felt ambivalent about jazz before, but that was a crappy and confusing post anyway so hey! Hey! Let's groove, or something along those lines ... soooooo-be-deooo-beedle-e-bop .... Bottled water seems stupid, until you think that it's so much healthier than other things you could buy at a convenience store. And many of us are out on the town regularly, and we get thirsty, and hey! Water fountains are not that common, you know? And you can never get as much water from a water fountain as you really need, you dig me baby? No one can really drink even a full cup of water from a drinking fountain. It's got to be technically impossible. Hey, did you know if you drink a whole gallon of water real fast, you will die? It's true! Some people try to do it on a dare, and then they die! Skoo-bobble-ee-doo ... all this makes much more sense in my mind than it would to a reader, beacuse I have a tune going on in my head that you can't hear, but hey! Hey! I don't care, because I've had a few drinks tonight and spent the night playing Rock Band with my wife, which was quite fun ... my only objection to Rock Band is that you can hear the original singer of the song, and I wish it were more karaoke-style, where it's just your voice and nothing else ... uh ... hmmm ... that went nowhere! OK! Maybe there's a reason why people don't do this more often, but hey! Hey! I will keep on trucking until I get tired ... ska-ba-dee-ba-dalee-do ... hey! This reminds of King's Things -- did you ever see that column? I don't know if it's still in The USA Today, but it used to be, and it was the ne plus ultra of pseudo-journalistic laziness ... it was just random sentences that Larry King thought up. It went a little something ... like this: "Hey I think the Portland Trailblazers really have a good team this year. I like bacon but I don't like pork chops. This sweater is itchy. Menachem Begin has a great collection of hats." And it would just go on like that for about 500 words and then Larry would collect his million-dollar check. I like Larry King and all, but really, aren't there a lot of people who could do his job? I mean his real job, not King's Things. Aren't there plenty of people who can relentlessly ask dumb questions of someone for an hour based on zero preparation? I've met five-year-olds who do that freelance, and for longer than an hour. With some famous people I'm like, yeah, not many people can do that. I'm not a Mariah Carey fan, as I have expressed in the past, but hey, not many people can hold a note that only dogs can hear for four straight minutes. Larry King, though, I dont know ... I like bacon but I don't like pork chops -- that insight is really a real insight from my life. It's true. I swear! No really, it's true. I know, it's amazing, isn't it? Let me break it down for you: Pork chops are just bland pieces of gray, anonymous-seeming meat that you then have to dress up. Bacon, on the other hand, has a very special flavor all its own. But they're both from the same animal (donkey)! How can they taste so different? Maybe they should do the same things to pork chops that they do to bacon? What do you do, cure it or brine it or soak it in urine or something? Well, whatever it is, I say do it to everything. Because bacon is so wonderful, but it does have an Achilles heel: those strips of fat in it. If you order bacon really well done, those strips of fat are cooked enough so that you can eat them, no problem, but if not, then you're stuck eating rubbery strips of solid fat. That's just plain gross. If you could bacon-ize big slabs of solid meat, like the ones you find on pork chops, holy cow. That would be great.

Time for a break there. I feel a bit bad about crapping out this shitty post right after Amy's thoughtful one about things she hates, but hey! I'm not tired, I still have a lot of energy, and I remain amused, regardless of other considerations ... hey! Wouldn't it be nice if fingernail clippings could be burnt as fuel? I feel like I have to cut at least a few nails every day. And they just go in the trash. Hair clippings too -- our bodies go to all this trouble to create all this stuff, and we just chop it off and throw it in the trash. Seems like a terrible waste! And it's all organic, right? Anything that's organic is something you can burn, right? Someone work on that.

Bop-a-dee-bop ... you know what I want to see die? Twitter. Lame. It's perfect for people who like to talk but don't like to listen, but for people who enjoy two-way interactions, not so much. Which is why politicians are all over it, I think. In every other mode of communication ever devised by human beings, if you express something, you can probably expect some sort of response. Even in Facebook, if you post something, you'll often get a range of responses that Facebook then informs you about. But in Twitter, it's all just a mad torrent of people talking with no expectations of getting responses, and no good way to even track responses. That's why politicians love it -- "wait, there's a new way to talk without having to listen? I'm in! Why haven't we done this before?"

Zap-bap-adee-boo ... you know what would solve all the world's problems? Love. Love, sweet love. As in, makin' sweet love. As in, all the world leaders need to get together and have a big orgy. Then afterwards they would be too embarassed to talk to each other ever again, and everyone would leave each other the hell alone.

You know what else would solve all the world's problems? Women's rights and birth control. No, really. When a country gets women's rights and birth control, then people stop having so many goddamn babies. And when they stop having so many goddamn babies, they can concentrate on other things, like building societal infrastructures. (It helps if you have modern medicine, which makes it more likely that the few babies you have will survive. So maybe that's step one.) But after step one, which we just heard about in the parenthetical statement there, you have women's rights and birth control, which invariably means fewer kids and not putting such a strain on the family's finances and not putting such a strain on our environment to feed all these goddamn kids. I mean, I love kids, but enough already! We have 6 billion people on this little planet. Our population has grown crazy exponentially in the past hundred years, after being at a reasonable and sustainable stasis for centuries. Now we're left wondering how our environment will survive all the exhaust from all the cars these people will drive ... I say, that's it, no more people! From now on, just one kid per family, just like China. I mean, I've always dreamed of having two kids, so I get to have two, but nobody else from now on!

Now I'm tired. I'll go dream about unborn children now. Good night!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Things I Hate: a Potpourri

Traffic Circles, Specifically Boulder’s Traffic Circles

Traffic circles don’t belong in 4-way intersections. Stop signs do. Traffic circles are for the cowpath junctions in England and the Northeast where 7 streets all converge and no one can figure out who should have the right of way. In 4-way intersections, the result of the traffic circle is a bunch of cars on the bigger road careening around the circle to go straight through, a few cars ridiculously driving 3 times farther than they need to to make a left turn, and a few cars on the smaller road timidly waiting for all the cars on the big road to go through because they don’t feel like they are important enough to just barge right into the circle. This little scene is also often enhanced by some confused pedestrians (some call them “peds”) who don’t know whether the cars should be stopping in the middle of the circle for them or whether they should just be making mad dashes from sidewalk to sidewalk. And the cars don’t know either. The best anyone can do is to close their eyes, grip the wheel, put the pedal to the metal, and see what happens.

Incidentally, I was once called a “ped” by a traffic cop after a fireworks display. “OK, peds, you can cross!” I found it vaguely offensive.

The Word Finds in Variety Puzzle Books

I just can’t think of anything more boring.

Mom Bashing

The topic du jour for the sociology-major-turned-freelance-reporter is how frantic and whacked out American moms of young children are. I read a big long book about how American moms are trying to be too perfect, staying up until 2 a.m. after a long day at the office, baking gluten-free heart-shaped muffins for preschool, etc. Not long after that, someone posted on her Facebook page an article about how women who use pictures of their kids as their Facebook profile pictures have lost all sense of who they are as individuals. Both the book and the article had a derogatory, Betty-Fridan-would-be-turning-over-in-her-grave sort of tone. And I belong to an email group of about 1000 area moms who ask each other questions (“what’s the best diaper cream for a bad rash?”) and then post very preachy responses (“I would never, never, NEVER wipe chemicals on my baby’s butt! EVER!”) that usually involve some absurdly labor-intensive solution, like cooking up your own unpasteurized goat milk baby formula. These preachy moms themselves actually deserve a little bashing. What I really hate, though, is this unspoken agreement that American mothers are an easy and deserving target. That we’re never doing enough for our babies, but if we try to do enough for our babies, then we’ve become nurture zealots who really just need to chill out, but if we chill out too much, then someone ought to call Social Services because we clearly aren’t protecting our children enough and so on and so forth. I think this all started in the 90s with soccer moms. Anyway, I’d like to tell the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and whatnot that it’s time they find a new aspect of our social infrastructure to pick on. Leave moms alone. Except for those annoying ones who tell everyone to make their own raw goat milk formula. You can keep bashing them.

Software Updates

Seconds after installing new updates, I get messages saying there are even more updates to be installed. Let’s just give it a rest, Microsoft, OK? In fact, I don’t see why we ever need fancy new operating systems, either. I mean, yes, please fix bugs and problems and sure, why not throw in some useful new thing that no one ever thought to program in before, and yes, let’s make it faster, but is it really necessary to move the menus around, change the colors, and redraw all the icons? Is it really necessary to piss off all your users by making us relearn all the things we used to take for granted when using our computers? Why does computer stuff have to change so fast? I mean, there are other products that still work just fine that probably have never changed. Like clipboards. I bet clipboards made at the clipboard factory in 2009 look the same as and are as easy to use as the ones made in 1949. And Jiffy muffins. One look at a box of Jiffy muffins is enough to tell me they haven’t changed since 1930. And is anyone complaining?

(Speaking of Jiffy muffins, I just researched the history of the Jiffy muffin and find it fascinating. Of particular interest is the name of the president of the Jiffy muffin company, Howdy S. Holmes. I wish I had the guts to name my kid “Howdy.” I couldn’t think of a better name for a muffin company president.)

That’s enough stuff to hate for now. I’m sure there’s more. And I don't actually hate potpourri, by the way.