Optimism is a waste of time. Pay attention, kids, because this is one of those life lessons that you'll fall back on time and time again: take whatever tracks and sectors of your wetware that are currently devoted to that sort of thing, overwrite it with zeroes, and use that space for something that's actually useful, like Decorative Napkin Folds. See, I've just leaned back and given it some thought, and I can say this with confidence: I have gotten far more mileage and reaped far more rewards out of knowing how to execute a perfect Bird of Paradise Fold than I have from occasionally cueing in on some new development or subtle shift in society and concluding that the world is becoming a better place. The former has gotten me long and valuable conversations with strangers, many free drinks, and one or two free restaurant meals. The latter has brought me absolutely zip.

I was walking out of the Red Cross Donor Center this afternoon. Outside there were newspaper machines for the Boston Globe and the Herald, and the exact same photo peeked through both windows: Episcopalian Bishop-elect Gene Robinson hugging a parishioner. My first natural reaction was that I'd slipped through a wormhole and landed on the Planet Of Cheap Made-For-TV Movies, where only one photo is ever taken of anything and when you turn on a TV set it immediately tells you that the Senator's daughter is still missing but it is presumed that she's being held captive somewhere within the Three Oaks area. Unable to spot Meredith Baxter or Valerie Bertinelli anywhere in the vicinity, however, I quickly moved on to another conclusion: that Massachusetts' two biggest newspapers had evaluated the same Commonwealth and the same planet and they independently decided that this was the most important story of the day.

See? The top story was not that a body had been discovered somewhere. Not that any of a six-pack of popular and unpopular wars was escalating with no end in sight. Not that an economy was in crisis and the most under-served members of the community were about to get it in the neck again. It wasn't about a political scandal, or kids getting killed by career drunk drivers, or cost overruns on a federal highway project. "When," I wondered, "was the last time that the huge, Page One, above-the-fold story on both city papers was a piece of good news?"

Yeah, I call this Good News. On the basis that Society has historically never been happy to welcome gays and lesbians into its upper levels of prominence and influence, yes: the installation of an openly-gay Episcopalian bishop is very, very good news. I'm neither gay nor Episcopalian, but I have to see it as a tangible sign that our society is outgrowing certain attitudes that ultimately work against its best interests. Progress for one group represents progress for everyone. Absolutely.

I should have just been amused by the papers' use of the same photo and walked on. Instead, the last thought I had before jumping into my car and pointing it homeward was that there was indeed Cause for Optimism.

It turns out that I was in a bad made-for-TV movie after all. I got home, I tossed my keys on the kitchen table, I turned on the TV, and the first thing the local newsguy announced was that the Bishop-Elect's confirmation was being postponed due to "troubling new allegations." Coming from one person, who accused the Bishop-Elect of a vague "inability to maintain appropriate boundaries with men" and running a website which "contains pornographic links." These charges forced the delay of a decision that (rightly or wrongly) would inflame a significant percentage of the Church, and it came in at the last possible moment before the vote.

How adorable.

I'm prepared to eat my words if these allegations prove to be (a) serious and (b) true. What do I know? But how many times in my life did a man put a hand on my shoulder without quickly barking "Hey, how about them Celtics?" out of courtesy, just to confirm that it wasn't a prelude to talking me into sharing a Provincetown sub-let with him some summer? On that basis, 25% of my former teachers currently awaiting confirmation as Episcopalian bishops ought to be reaaaallll worried right now.

As to this allegation of "links to pornographic websites," I'd like to see the links...and not just for the sensible, compelling reasons. I once invented a game called "Web That Smut." It was like "Name That Tune" except instead of identifying a song after hearing an agreed-upon number of notes, the goal was to find pornography within an agreed-upon number of mouse-clicks, starting from a completely innocuous website. This was inspired by the asinine legislation proposed by a then-sitting Congressman, which promised to cripple the Internet by making each Web publisher legally responsible for all Web content everywhere. If a visitor could reach a clown-porn site from your Andy Williams fanpage, congratulations: you were a Clown Pornographer, in the eyes of that law.

I wrote it up as a column. For my big finish, I played "Web That Smut" with the Congressman's own website. As I recall, finding a path to porn required only six mouse-clicks...and the one crucial weblink that made it all possible was his link to an online copy of the Constitution. That column was about four days late, solely because I couldn't stop giggling long enough to send it in. I'm sure this charge of "links to porn sites" will shake out to be a similar sort of thing.

So again, Optimism is like Global Thermonuclear War: the only way to win is not to play. Learning how to fold a napkin to look like the Sydney Opera House is a way, way better investment in your long-term happiness and success than Maintaining A Hopeful Outlook.

Give it a try if you don't believe me. You'll thank me later.

| |

Putting Colin Farrell — I very nearly typed "Hollywood superhunk-of-the-moment Colin Farrell" out of sheer reflex, but wisely reconsidered — on a talk show is dangerous, dangerous business. I've just finished watching last night's Letterman show and yes, he used an ample amount of potty language that had to be bleeped out, but that's not the risky bit.

No, the danger comes in the form of his profound charm and the effect that it can have on men prone to self-delusion. You can go out and buy a lottery ticket if you want, but the odds of a successful result are profoundly stacked against you. Nonetheless, 1 out of 140,000,000 people do win the lottery, and the dramatic success of that lone positive example causes a great many people to do some very, very silly things. Like, drive from Massachusetts (a non-Powerball state) to Rhode Island once the jackpot creeps towards a quarter billion dollars. We'll happily make the trip for a PawSox game and up until a few years ago it was our only option when we had the sort of desire to piss off our parents that only an impulsive and instantly-regretted tattoo could fulfill. Otherwise, a visit to the Ocean State is solely the province of the foolish and the desperate.

(And even then: we need to see at least $200,000,000 on the table before we grab the keys to the Toyota.)

Colin Farrell won the Powerball of Charm. He can curse, but it comes out as Charming, thanks to that fake Irish accent of his. He can show up on a talk show wearing torn jeans, an old tee shirt, and the sort of knit hat that you might have seen in the opening titles of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it just comes across as Unpretentious. His week's worth of unshaven stubble is Casual, his tales of hard drinking and soft women mark him as a Dashing Rogue.

I mean, the man pulls it off marvelously. Maybe it really is the Irish accent. It also helps that he's a multimillionaire, and is only becoming more multimillionaire-ish as time goes on. Here in America, people who dress like an assistant groundskeeper of a AA-league ballpark have a much greater shot at appearing Charming if their Next Big Project involves Sony Pictures' summer tentpole release. Instead of, say, finding a new bass player for their AC-DC cover band.

But does the general male populace appreciate that Colin Farrell arrived at Charm Island only after successfully navigating some desperately long odds? Of course not. So off they go, pointedly not shaving. They start cursing during wedding receptions, appearing in public wearing a crusty vintage Harlem Globetrotters tee shirt, smoking plastic-tipped fruit-flavored cigars in restaurants and stabbing them out in the desserts of nearby patrons. Through miracle or accident, they may find themselves speaking to women; on these occasions they eagerly speak of how much time they spend vomiting during any given day. They are serenely certain that the giggles and phone numbers they receive as a result are all completely genuine.

Tom Selleck did it with moustaches. Samuel L. Jackson did with big floppy hats. Jesse James did it with enthusiastic and ambitious tattooing. Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris did it with enthusiastic and ambitious alcoholism. The rest of us can't pull it off. We want to emulate these men and Lord knows we try, in our moments of weakness. But within about ninety minutes the best of the rest of us will realize that metaphorically-speaking, we've just gone to Providence and blown a hundred dollars on lottery tickets.

| |

I want to apologize to everyone who made a special trip down to Rhode Island College this weekend for Ukulele Fest 2003, expecting to see me there. In point of fact no, I wasn't announced to appear there, nor at any point between mid-June (when I learned about the event) and this weekend did I actually mention to anybody that I intended to go.

Still, I'm very sorry. Just think of the sociological implications of such a gathering. This is a three-day festival centering around an object which is more more credibly classified as a Souvenir rather than a Musical Instrument. Cartoon animals play ukuleles. When was the last time you heard about a real rock-and-roller playing one, apart from Pete Townsend, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Jeff Beck, or David Gilmour? Yesyesyes: Mark Knopfler, Frank Zappa, and John Lennon, whatever. But who else? Hmm...?

So here are 210,000 festivalgoers —

(I'm actually just guessing at the attendance. The US Festival drew a quarter-million people at $37.50 per three-day ticket; Uke Fest '03 costs $40 and I have to assume that the extra quarter-sawbuck is going to put some people off.)

-- who heard about the event and immediately thought "Pure Tabasco. I'm so totally in." I mean, what are the odds? Do you have any idea how greatly this streamlines the dating process? Normally, you need to spend five, six, sometimes ten dates on dangerous conversations about movies, books, the roles and responsibilities that befall our nation by virtue of becoming the Last Superpower Standing, and the far more serious Coke versus Pepsi issue. And in the end, it wouldn't make you one tenth as confident about your mutual compatibility. "We met at a national ukulele convention," you realize, and the next logical step after that is to figure out whether to get married on the Drachen Fire at Busch Gardens, or if a wooden roller coaster would be more appropriate, given the dignity of the occasion.

Alas, my desire to attend UkeFest 2003 was superceded by my desire to be a good boy and get ahead on my work. I wasn't interested in hooking up with ukulele groupies, anyway. I was — and am — genuinely interested in the things. Call it a lingering after-effect of my MacMania cruise around Hawaii. The ship tried to beat any potential affection for ukulele music out of me by commissioning a highly improbable rendition of Styx's "Come Sail Away" and playing it with Branch Davidian-ian frequency. But they couldn't control what I listened to while wandering around various port cities. It was, shall we say, a rather target-rich environment for ukulele music. When you've spent your life hearing an instrument played as a kitsch object — sort of the musical equivalent of "The Brady Bunch Movie" — and you finally hear it played by someone who treats the thing seriously, with respect for what turns out to be an ample tradition, the impact is doubled.

I really liked the music. I was also thinking it was time to take up another instrument. I'm actually a fairly non-terrible blockflote player, and I have a series of pathetic operating systems to thank for it. It occurred to me that as a geek, a great deal of your time is spent waiting for a machine to re-boot or finish downloading a huge file or for the fire to die down just enough to push the remains through an open window with your foot and remember not to ever install Microsoft alpha software ever again.

"If I devoted this time to a specific pursuit," I thought, "I could one day take over the world."

I decided to test this theory by flossing.

I kept a spool of floss next to the keyboard at all times. And whenever I was faced with the [fill in the blank, choosing an example from the OS of your choice] Of Death and five minutes to kill before my machine would be ready to do anything productive, I'd floss. Result: pink, healthy gums that invited a great deal of positive comment from my dental hygienist. As I recall, they had to close the office early that day, as they'd never had anyone respond truthfully and positively to the question "Have you been flossing regularly?" and the staff really didn't know how to react. It really forced them to sit back and re-consider a lot of the fundamental concepts upon which they'd based their whole world-view.

The Proof of Concept went well, so since then I've always had some odd project standing by. I could never draw with a steel quill worth a damn, so I kept a pot of ink and a couple of nibs above my mouse. Result: I still can't draw with a steel quill worth a damn. But the linework is fairly competent. I bought the most improbable puzzle that Games People Play carried; it was like some unholy cross-breeding experiment between a Rubik's Cube and the classic Magic Rings, with the Towers of Hanoi watching from the sidelines and making occasional suggestions. I solved it within five days.

Lately, I've moved into musical instruments. I've always played keyboards, but installing a MIDI synth under the desk seemed like a copout. I gave up on the harmonica because it was just too loud. And then, while attending a conference at a university and browsing through the bookstore — greatest places in the world, university bookstores — I saw a hopper loaded with plastic recorders at $4 a throw.

Now here was a challenge. It was days before I could even figure out how to blow properly, and then there was the problem of figuring out how to create specific notes at will. All I had to go on was the little scrap of paper that the good folks at Yamaha had included inside the handsome vinyl carrying case. But I had it within a week and was feeling my way around several tunes by the end of the month.

The recorder was actually spot-on perfect for this sort of environment. When I was hunched over my pen and my sheet of Bristol Plate, I wouldn't know that my computer had completed its labors until a half hour later, when its screen went into Sleep mode. When you're learning the recorder — which I chose to refer to as a Blockflote for the sake of manly self-image — you can't cheat by looking at your fingering because your eyeballs don't bend that way. So part of my brain worried about whether this was the part of Beethoven's "Pastoral" symphony when I have to tap the middle hole below the neck halfway while another noticed that my Macintosh had stopped doing even that One Thing it had seemed most interested in...ie, continue to spin its rainbow mouse pointer.

The other beauty of the blockflote was that it rested quite neatly above my row of function keys.

I can't say that I've mastered the blockflote. I can proudly state that I've grown bored with it, though, which via tortuous logic is just as impressive an achievement. So when I got interested in Hawaiian music it appeared that I had a ukulele-shaped hole in my life which I could spackle rather easily.

In fact, I very nearly bought a uke right there in Kauai. They were cheap, but then again, I wanted cheap. Thirty bucks could have bought me a handsome instrument built out of genuine wood, plus an illustrated guide explaining how to how to play it without looking like quite such a perfect dork.

I must have picked it up and put it down four or five times before I noted several realities: (1) this was a new impulse, and I try to save my impulse buys for stuff like one of those life-sized Darth Vader statues from The Sharper Image, so I don't feel like I'm totally unrestrained in my spending. (2) I felt secure and comfortable being a tourist flying home from Hawaii wearing a luau shirt and carrying a big camera, but flying home in a luau shirt and a big camera and carrying a tourist-grade ukulele would have really crossed the line. "We have standards," they would have told me upon reaching San Francisco International, and with a certain pride that The System Works, I would have accepted immediate banishment to Canada. (3) It finally occurred to me that perhaps ukuleles are, in fact, available outside of Hawaii.

I felt very smart when I finally put the uke back. As a reward, I purchased a set of fruit skewers shaped like an enormous resin pineapple.

I felt very dumb a couple of weeks later, when I emailed a pal of mine who's been taking ukulele lessons for the past year and asked for his advice.

(Aside: How long have I been sharing these little tales with you? Well, a danged long time, anyway. And occasionally I get emails from people who tell me that a group of people in their office (dorm, detox center) is taking bets regarding exactly how much of this stuff I'm making up, and the correspondent is seeking some inside information. "100% fair-dinkum true, given that (a) it's all from my perspective and (b) I retain the option to share only part of the story if I wish," I reply. But when I sling in a line like "I emailed a friend of mine who's been taking ukulele lessons for the past year" I realize that I'm demanding a certain investment of faith from my audience. I hardly know what I can say or do to effectively underscore the veracity of this claim but I thought I'd at least tell you folks that your continued policy of shrugging your shoulders and reading on is appreciated. End of aside.)

No, Jim's a true wiz at so many things, and he's definitely the first name that comes to mind when the Jeopardy! category is "Ukuleles." But the experience reminded me that consulting a true Expert is sometimes not the best option.

"It's a good thing you didn't buy that $20 jobbie," he immediately explained. "They're total junk. They won't hold their tuning for more than a few hours and you'll be lucky if you're still playing it after a year."

I confess that the latter point had already occurred to me. I'd have been very pleased indeed if my interest in learning the uke had lasted a whole year. Amortized over the entire period, it worked out to about $2.50 a month. On that basis, learning the ukulele would actually be cheaper than sponsoring one of Sally Struther's children and in this sort of economy, every thirty-nine cents counts. Plus, I imagined that I'd celebrate my one-year anniversary by setting up the camcorder at the bottom of the stairs, re-staging that scene from "Animal House" with Bluto and the folk musician, and then sweep up the splinters and buy a slightly better instrument.

Well, I was happy that Jim found my actions so admirable. But he went on.

"I mean, particularly when a proper 'student' uke is so cheap. Believe it or not, you can pick one up for..."

And here he spoke a number that was so high that I reflexively translated it into terms of other consumer goods. Goods which have never been tainted by the image of being hugged and manipulated by Tiny Tim. For some reason, before he spoke his next sentence I worked out that it was enough to buy a McDonalds' cheeseburger for each and every man, woman and child who attended that talk I did where they had to move it into a larger room and even so, people wound up having to stand at the back.

It seemed like a heavy responsibility to place upon an innocent, guileless ukulele. "A roomful of conference attendees did not get cheeseburgers because a month earlier, I bought you. Now then. Are you going to help me play 'My Grand-Dad's Flanelette Nightshirt' — and I mean play it flawlessly — or do I cue up 'Animal House' eleven months ahead of schedule?"

Still, Jim was helpful and I valued his advice. Later he set me hip to a far cheaper alternative. It would only allow me to buy sandwiches for a fraction of the crowd, and I think that alternative would have caused an unsettling amount of tension in the audience...so the uke was by far the more attractive alternative.

Naturally, I haven't bought myself a uke. Still don't know if I'm actually interested in it or not, and I still don't know if I can't get in and out of it for just twenty bucks. Hence my interest in UkeFest 2003. It seemed like a cheap way to get some Ukulele-immersion, sort of a reverse cold-turkey approach in which I'd either decide that I have effectively had as much exposure to the ukulele and all ukulele-related fields as any one man should, provided the man has led a life as selfless and Christian as I had. Or I'd decide that I was on the right track.

As for the quick and sure-fire search for Mrs. Compatible, well, I have other irons in the fire. If I get far enough ahead on my deadlines, I'll have time to take a minor road trip up North. I'm as big an idiot this year as I was last year but aha: this year, I'm an idiot with a valid passport. So I can spend eight hours driving to Canada just to get an ice cream cone, have my passport stamped, and then turn right around and go home; neither government can say boo about it.

When I pull into Mountie's Best Ice Cream, I'm going to keep my eyes peeled. If I spot a girl who pulled in with Connecticut license plates and kept the motor running, I'm askin' her out.

| |

Gorsh-a-hootie...my mailbox is full of people reacting to this week's Sun-Times column, in which I talk about satellite radio. (You can read it on suntimes.com, somewhere; my little hands are tuckered out from answering so many messages and I can't bear the effort of looking up the exact URL.)

90% of the column addresses people's prejudices against the fundamental concept. Lord knows that I shared 'em. Why would I spend money on something I can get for free? Particularly when you consider that I don't consider radio worth listening to even when I'm not shelling out any cash for it. But after having both radios in my car and in my house for nearly a month, I was won over by the programming. At the moment, I'm listening to XM channel 28: all Broadway, all the time. Other favorites include Channel 14 (all bluegrass), 73 (all Sinatra and Sinatra-equivalents), and 162. That's the E! Channel. Nearly 24 hours of True Hollywood Stories every day. Go ahead: name a TV show or a band, and I'll tell you which member was a total jackass who let success go to his head, and then let it go to his nose, and shortly thereafter it became clear that every rose has its thorn and that even to Camelot, an end must come. Et cetera.

The upshot is that with 100 channels of programming which don't have to compete with each other for ratings, Wonderful Things Are Possible. XM has three whole channels for comedy. It's as if that one hour I spent every Sunday night listening to the Dr. Demento Show as a kid now lasts the whole week.

Inevitably, though, I have to say "Which service is better?" Folks expected it. So I said that I prefer XM, but you really can't make a decision until you hit the service's websites and examine their lineups. Sirius offers dense coverage of NBA basketball, for instance. That'll seal the deal for many people. I don't give a toss about the NBA. I'm sure that...

(OK. You know what else is cool about XM? They have a PC edition, which is running on my Media Center PC. Because the signal is digital, the tuner can sample the data from channels you're not listening to. So I'm listening to the Broadway channel, but the window lists every song currently playing on every channel I've selected. Channel 30 is "Special K," which proudly claims to play "the music that absolutely nobody wants to hear." Out of the corner of my eye I notice that it's playing the Norfolk Singers' version of "When I'm Sixty-Four." Gotta see what that sounds like.

So good news: the same fidgety channel-surfing that makes it impossible for you, a cable box, and any third party to tolerably share the same room now comes to the world of radio.)

Continuing. I'm sure that for many people, one comedy channel is more than adequate to cover their comedy needs. Me, I'm thrilled that I can hear Bill Hicks, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, or Godfrey Cambridge — when is Godfrey Cambridge ever on the "real" radio?!? at any given moment.

So as you can expect, people who own XM radios are praising me for my thorough and reasonable comments. Folks who subscribe to Sirius are eager to tell me that if I think they're not fully aware that I didn't do a lick of research into the subject, have never listened to Sirius, and that as a member of The Media, I'm a puppet of commercial advertising, well, then I have another think coming.

This is partly my fault. The crucial words "I think" were trimmed from my manuscript after I filed it, and that's my bad, not my editors'. I'm not writing a haiku, here: if my meaning is obscured by the deletion of two words, then I wasn't clear enough. Still, the response is dullingly partisan as you can understand.

The problem here is that the Sirius people aren't making sensible arguments. More interestingly, they're making the same arguments, in more or less the same sequence, which makes me think that this is all being generated by a single message on a board somewhere and that these people didn't read my actual column.

So in case any of my readers came here for additional illumination, here are their objections:

1) I didn't mention that Sirius, unlike XM, has sixty channels of commercial-free programming. True. That's because Sirius' marketing claim doesn't tell the whole story: that leaves (if I remember correctly) forty channels with commercials. And it's not like the commercial-free ones are without interruptions. You still have to listen to promos and teasers. XM doesn't make any commercial-free claims, though this seems to be more of a practical decision. Some channels have ads, some don't. In the past three hours, I haven't heard a single ad. Plus, this isn't like traditional radio, in which you'll hear one cut off of "Lose Your Illusion" and then twenty minutes of ads for tires and part-time vocational classes.

2) I didn't mention that Sirius has a way, way better satellite. Absolutely. The General Electric KLV-1029? Where does XM get off putting that pig into orbit? You might as well launch an IBM selectric up there. What an embarrassing oversight on my part.

No, no, no. Both radios delivered the same sound quality and selectability. If anything, Sirius had a harder time locking onto a signal than the XM rig.

What else, what else...

3) Throughout the article, I refer to "channels," when Sirius has STREAMS, not channels! STREAMS!!! Which seems like lawyer-talk to me. As a compromise, I have agreed to call them Melmans in the future. The complainers, that is. Anyone who thinks this is a spittle-worthy issue deserves to have the term Sir or Madam rescinded from their correspondence for the next three months.

4) I neglect to point out that there's a model of Sirius radio with a built-in FM modulator. Which seemed like an odd complaint. I re-read my manuscript and nowhere did I cite any putative Sirius FM-modulator inadequacy, nor did I equate it with a local meat-packer knowingly selling tainted beef patties to local middle-school cafeterias. So what's the trouble? One guy ended this line with "...but that would have required a little in-depth research, something most of today's reporters have abandoned" for extra fluorish.

5) I neglect to mention that XM has debt, while Sirius remains mostly debt-free. Look, sir...I'm not asking people to put their 401K's into these companies. I'm just suggesting that maybe they want to spend $100 on a box so they can listen to The NASCAR Channel from time to time, all right?

So no, I didn't mention that. I also didn't mention that XM has a far larger audience...they have two or three times the subscribers, if memory serves.

There. The sourpusses have been dealt with. Just take the basic nugget home with you: satellite radio is megahypersuperginchy stuff. The weird thing is that XM has deeply cut into my iPod listening. It's so easy to find a channel that's playing exactly the sort of stuff you want to hear that there's no longer such an immediate needs to keep my iPod filled with fresh merchandise. On that basis, $10 a month for XM might be a bargain.

(I glance over at the TV screen. XM 30 is now playing The Dr. Demento Show's Elvis tribute show, aired on the 25th-anniversary of Presley's successful attempt to finally stop abusing prescription drugs. Dude! I'm there!)

| |

You ever notice that the big, evangelical advocates of past-life regression always buttonhole you with stories of having once fought alongside Charlemagne, or posed for Leonardo, or about how they originated the role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the debut production of "Guys And Dolls"? Nobody ever comes out of one of those $400 two-day sessions at the Ramada Inn saying "Two words, my friend: Thomas. Edison. I once worked in Omaha as a copy-clerk in the office of a mercantile owner, and he was always saying that he bet one day everything would be lit by electricity instead of gas. Except he really wasn't very clever and the idea never got any farther along than that. Though after Edison and his boys invented the light bulb, he grumbled a lot about how any damned fool could have done that, provided they didn't have to spend so much damned time worrying about what Marshall Damned Fields was going to do to the damned dry-goods market."

A similar vibe radiates from geneology buffs, too. Why isn't it enough that your great-great-great-grandfather emerged from a childhood of enormous hardship and made a new — if historically unremarkable — life for himself in America? Hostility and violence awaited anyone who had the unmitigated gall to turn up on these shores, unless you had the financial wherewithal to start exploiting the proletariat within three weeks of your arrival. Even so, folks treated you with suspicion, until one of your workers was crushed to death by falling steel ingots and you sued his widow and orphans for the cost of the lost load.

I mean, simple survival was a remarkable achievement. But far too many people aren't interested in the stories of the people who made their current lives possible. That's just tangential; they're more interested in discovering a personal connection to a famous person or event. It's all about beefing up your self-image.

That's much on my mind, as Arnold tosses his hat into the gubernatorial ring. Why is it that when a celebrity or a successful businessman decides that He Wants To Give Something Back To This Great Nation That's Given Him So Much, he never announces "And so! I wish to officially declare myself a candidate for the currently-vacant seat on my town's Board of Selectmen!"?

This week's Boston Globe Sunday Magazine had a neat article about Nick Lopardo, a tycoonish-financier who, after leaving his firm, wanted to own a professional sports team. So he bought the North Shore Spirit, a ballteam that plays in the Northeast League. It's professional baseball in the sense that the players get paid, but just barely. The Spirit aren't affiliated with any major-league team, so technically this doesn't even qualify as minor-league baseball.

But Lopardo wanted to get into the business, and this is where he decided to start. It's not about hobnobbing with sports superstars and entertaining celebrities in the Owner's Box. It's about pacing the infield dirt, wondering if the kid who cleans the dugouts remembered to sweep the stairs, looking up at darkening clouds and worrying that he won't sell the 2,000 tickets he needs to break even for the night. In the end, there's absolutely no glamour about this. When he tells the story, nobody's going to be impressed by how he spent his day. There's just endless hassles and liabilities, and the only real benefit he gets is the knowledge that he's truly committed to a goal, and for all the right reasons.

The article doesn't leave me with the sense that Lopardo has any deep love of baseball in particular. He seems more fascinated by the business of professional sports in general; he was actually hoping to buy a minor-league hockey team. But he talks about his final thought before deciding to buy the Spirit: "If I'm going to take a shot, let's take the first shot here."

I'd be more impressed by these movie stars and businessmen and sons-and-cousins-of-famous-politicians if they took the same tack. If you want to serve your country — even if you hope some day to be Governor Corleone or Senator Corleone or... — take your first shot in small, local government. Take it out of the national spotlight and off the big playing field. Spend two years sitting through public meetings and reading endless reports and briefs. Get so involved that you find yourself actually worrying about the width of the water mains serving the site of a proposed industrial park.

You'll pick up the skills you'll actually need when your desks and your staffs get bigger. And — here I confess that I'm speaking to one person in particular — nobody will wonder whether or not you'd still be running if "Terminator 3" had done a little better on its opening weekend, you know?

| |

It's officially August 15 and I'm eager — nay, proud — to take part in the international "Bear and Valance" protest. Today's the day when everyone has been encouraged to litter their websites with bears and valances, as a united symbol of...well, to protest the...

OK, I confess that I don't really know what this is all about. I only heard about it a couple of nights ago, when I was listening to my neighbor's cordless-phone conversations on my police scanner. He really seemed pretty worked-up about it, too, and given that he was the only one on the whole street who managed to get his trees through that big gypsy moth infestation that tore through the area last year, I have to conclude that he must be on to something.

So. Bears: I'm happy to say that I've never had any problems with bears. If I've ever had a bad run-in with one of them, they were extremely well-disguised, as a butterfingery FedEx guy or as a United Airlines passenger who gets ahead of me in the check-in line and tries to negotiate the purchase of a Whirlpool washer and dryer with hie frequent-flier miles, for instance. And if so, it just makes me respect bears even more.

I really wouldn't put such a thing past them, either. It's brilliant, how the various North American bear species managed to team up and make sure that their food needs get met. You've got your brown bears, and you've got your black bears. One kind is the hearty, outdoors-type and prefers to chase after its food. The other wants to expend as little effort as possible; it'll scavenge whatever's lying around and then return to the maintenance of their online fantasy-league baseball team.

Naturally, this means that there are two opposite pieces of advice regarding what you're supposed to do if you find yourself being chased by a bear:

If It's One Kind Of Bear: Fall to the ground and play dead. The bear will nose around you for a little bit but will eventually leave you alone.

If It's Not That Kind Of Bear: Then run like hell. Better yet, run the way Hell would run if it were being chased by an enormous predatory bear. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to outrun it, but Possible Death is a huge improvement upon Certain Death.

Hence the difficulty. I'm not being chased by a bear at the moment. In fact, I'm sitting on a very comfortable sofa and I've got an ice-cold bottle of something on the end table. I have lots of friends, fond memories of lasting relationships with beautiful, intelligent women, and I'm doing extremely well in a career I love. Thus, the environmental conditions for clear and rational thought couldn't possibly be better. Yet I'll be dashed if I can match the correct Algorithm to the correct Bear Species.

Which plays straight into the bears' hands. If you're a predator, you want to bamboozle your prey into stopping and dropping. Yes, when there are documentary crews nosing around you want to make a good show of your speed and cornering ability, but when it comes down to the basic 9-to-5 drudgery of maintaining your caloric intake you're happy and grateful to encounter some prey that's willing to at least meet you halfway.

And it works out well for the scavengers, too. This confusion means that they can sit down and enjoy a meal from time to time. The bear just has to find something to keep yourself busy near the campsite — catch up on some correspondence, maybe try and scare up a date for a recently-divorced sister — and then when the camper's finally finished pulling that 20-pound Butterball out of the Smokey Joe and has the table all set, the bear simply ambles out. Everyone starts running like hell and it's free to sit and reflect on higher things as it eats, without fear of being chased away.

From the bears' point of view it's a terrific system. As yet, we've failed to come up with any sort of fun mnemonic or poetic device to keep those two species and algorithms straight. Even if we did, our second thought would be "...but should we really trust a rhyming song we read about in an airline magazine?"

So I'm really not the guy to tell you about bears. Instead, I'll refer you to one of the greatest books ever written: More Alaska Bear Tales, compiled by Larry Kaniut. 275 thrilling pages' worth of thrilling, first-person accounts of being attacked by bears. From the back cover:

"The bear charged forward, grabbing me by my lower right leg as he ran by. He picked me up, swung me over his head and actually threw me like I was a feather pillow. I landed on a rock several feet away, barely hitting the ground before the bear was on top of me, chewing my upper right leg."

Certain people will read it from cover to cover and will find the book far more balming and uplifting than any product from the "Chicken Soup For The Soul" series. I refer to these people as "my target audience."

Onward to Valance. Well, I'm afraid to say that I have no personal experience with that, either. "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" always struck me as one of those "lower Westerns," like "The Sons Of Katie Elder." Don't ask me why. How can a Western starring both John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and directed by John Ford not be worth watching?

I suppose it's just prejudice. I've always thought that the era of Westerns In Color didn't begin until Sergio Leone decided that Spain and Italians could sub for Mexico and Mexicans just fine, wisely concluding that when you only have $250,000 to work with, well, Foreign is Foreign.

In my kind of Western, the saloon never features an upright tinky-tonky piano being played by a guy in a bowler hat. Saloons are where people go to get drunk, and a piano wastes space that could be better occupied by either more drinkers or more drinks, or possibly a prostitute -- not a showgirl, not a courtesan, please: a praw-stitute -- who's beyond saving. And in my kind of Westerns, saloons are pretty much superfluous anyway. People drink in their offices, they drink on horseback, they drink on the privy, they drink pretty much wherever and whenever they have a free hand.

They drink with purpose and determination. They drink as though it's a condition of their probation. In my kind of Westerns, there is no right or wrong...just Drunk and Drunker. As a prime motivator for people's actions, alcohol only takes a backseat to Hate and even then, it's usually credited with an assist.

Liquor and hate. You have to watch a whole bunch of these films before you really understand how important those two factors are. You're sort of trained to slot characters into certain roles, sure, but the second or third time you see "High Noon" it hits you that there has to be a reason why the Marshall is so determined to raise a posse and go take out the badmen.

The story: Gary Cooper has succeeded in cleaning up the small New Mexico town of Hadleyville, freeing it from the grip of the Miller Gang. Three years later, the change is miraculous: Hadleyville has metamorphosized from a state of bloody lawlessness into a town with fluorishing businesses, a church that's full on Sunday, and streets filled with children at play. His job well done, Marshall Kane has taken a bride and is about to retire to a farm when news reaches him that Miller and his men have been released from prison and will be arriving on the noon train to kill him.

His bride doesn't want Kane to get killed. The townspeople's reactions vary, from (a) not wanting their belived Marshall to die, to (b) not being terribly keen on getting killed themselves, and (c) wanting to make sure that street-level gunplay remains part Hadleyville's colorful past and doesn't become part of its ongoing future. So the consensus opinion is clearly that Kane should pack his wagon and get the hell out of town, quick. Kane will hear none of it. He intends to meet Miller and his gang at the station...whether he's backed by a posse or not.

So why doesn't he just boogie out of town? Yes, the traditional answer is "Because a man can only do so much runnin' before he realizes that what he's a-runnin' from is hisself." But if you engage in a bit of lateral thinking, you quickly realize that it'd be a simple matter for Kane to leave word at the train station and skedaddle a couple of miles down the pike, where he can take care of business without dragging the town into it. If he meets Miller in the middle of the desert and plugs him, problem solved. If he doesn't, then the town has a new martyr to rally behind and another day to prepare for the fight. And who's to say that Miller wasn't planning to just move on after getting his revenge?

But it can't work out that way. Kane hates Miller too much. Miller's not a problem that needs to be solved, or a threat against the community that needs to be addressed. Kane needs to rally the townspeople and kill him on Hadeyville soil. It's the ultimate comeuppance. The Marshall wanted Miller to die knowing that absolutely everything that the badman accomplished in this town had been completely undone. Hadleyville is a town of law, not lawlessness. Its population is a community, not a collection of blind and frightened self-interests. Miller is a relic of the past and will be forgotten; Kane has forged a legacy for the future.

And to cap off his years of work, Kane wanted that one last vote of respect. Call it his retirement present. He wanted to demonstrate that his prominence was so great that he could raise an army behind him with a wave of his hand. When the town reacted by staring at their feet and mumbling about scheduling conflicts, why was he so damned determined to face the Miller gang alone? Hate, again. This time, the target was the town. If he dies...boy, will they be sorry. That'll teach 'em.

"High Noon." "My Darling Clementine," which isn't necessarily a deconstructionist western but Henry Fonda plays a lawman with such terse venom that it's close enough. "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly." And of course, "Unforgiven," which simply must be seen on video, alone. The theater experience is only worthwhile if you can interview the audience in advance to make sure they're the sort of people who won't cheer in the wrong places. When Clint Eastwood picks up that bottle of whiskey with one hand and a rifle with the other and he starts settling scores, that's a failure and not a victory. Those are the Westerns that I return to, time and time again.

I'll get around to seeing "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" someday. I have cable and a TiVO: the simple law of averages suggests that our paths shall inevitably cross. Besides, it's a John Ford Western. He liked to create towering heroes with size fourteen boots and feet of clay. You don't stick a hipster tag like "deconstructionalist" on his work. John Ford is a genre all to himself.

So there's my Bear and Valance piece, to mark this epic day when once again, The Man was reminded that he can't keep putting good, honest, decent people down. I think. Like I said, I'm pretty unclear on what the point of all this is. But a deal's a deal and I will indeed be mailing a hardcopy of this to Bear And Valance Campaign Headquarters, along with three boxtops from a qualifying General Mills hot cereal. When cruising the bars you need every edge you can get. You never know when the difference between going home alone and not going home until two days later comes down to an "I Took Part In That Big 'Bear And Valance' Protest You Might Have Heard About" lapel pin and a grad student who gets turned on by acts of vague social activism.

Update: It has come to my attention that the theme of this online protest was, in fact, "Fair And Balanced," not "Bear And Valance." Apparently this whole thing was suggested by Neal Pollack, to tweak Fox News Channel's nose in retribution for their rather bitchy lawsuit against Al Franken, who pinched their slogan as part of the title of his latest book. I don't what Fox's problem is. The use of the phrase "Fair And Balanced" is obviously ironic in intent...and Al Franken used it in the exact same spirit.

Personally, I think the greatest revenge is that (a) Fox managed to make themselves seem even sillier than usual, a feat that I thought would only be physically possible under microgravity conditions, and (b) pre-orders for Franken's new book have gone through the roof as a result. But I suppose Neal knows what he's doing.

| |

Welcome to glorious South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, a Cape Cod town which is more or less perfectly-situated. You don't want to be too close to Bourne. If the Cape is shaped like a bent arm (and it is...I just checked), Bourne is right at the shoulder-joint that connects it to the rest of Massachusetts. As the border town that all the Summer People have to drive through on the way to their cottages, it's an excellent place to get three things: outlet-store shoes, an overpriced meal from a nationally-franchised family restaurant, and looks of unvarnished hatred from the year-round residents, who want the Summer People to drive halfway around the Bourne Rotary, toss their wallets and purses out into the safety island, and then keep right on going until they find themselves back on Route 3 and headed towards Boston again. Unless you're interested in any of that stuff, keep on driving.

But if your vacation spot is too near Cape Cod's "wrist," you'll wind up near the trendier, higher-rent areas. Which isn't a bad thing in and of itself; it just means that when you go out to get some ice cream, there's an excellent chance that you'll be standing in line behind someone who desperately needs to hear that his or her last movie totally sucked. In such a situation only vacationers gifted with a flawless command of self will succeed in purchasing ice cream.

But South Yarmouth — located somewhere between the tricep and the elbow — is right in the "sweet spot." It's isolated enough that you can spend a tranquil day lolling and splashing on beaches that are largely free of yahoos, yet a South Yarmouth cottager is presented with plenty of opportunities to play 18 holes of pirate-themed minigolf. Both activities are equally key to a successful Cape Cod vacation.

And being in South Yarmouth means you're four miles closer to Miami. To people who've never swum in the New England edition of the Atlantic Ocean, this will seem like an insignificant detail but believe me: you can really feel the difference. The waters of the Cape's northern beaches are the perfect temperature for bobbing around in, assuming you're a casualty of the Titanic. Decomposition will slow to a crawl and good luck to any seagull who tries to mess around with your corpse. They can peck and peck and peck at your lifeless flesh but they ain't gonna so much as make a dent in it. No sir, if your body is fished out of Nobscusset Harbor, you're sittin' pretty: it'll be an open-casket funeral, no worries there.

Swimmers who are still fairly ambitious about converting oxygen into carbon dioxide will prefer the sultry, Latin-influenced waters of Menauhant and Popponesset. Here, the sea's cool enough to make you appreciate the wonderful difference between an actual Ocean and a Holiday Inn swimming pool, but it doesn't get all in your face about it. Nantucket Sound — unlike Cape Cod Bay — makes its point and then lets you enjoy the rest of the afternoon. I don't know...maybe the Bay has insecurity issues or something. It's not a pretty thing, I'll tell you that much.

So I spent the morning with 2/3rds of my current inventory of nephews. It's been a while since I've written on the subject of Uncling, so why don't I take time to impart a some more advice to those of you who are just getting your feet wet in the field. The advice comes in the form of something I shouted to the kids as they played in the water:

"Boys, if you're going to chuck seaweed at each other, I want you to move away from those other people over there, okay?"

Honestly, if you break down and understand this directive, you're well on your way to becoming a capable Uncle. Yes, the subject of Chucking Things At Each Other is treacherous, treacherous territory and should generally be frowned upon. But like a good circuit judge, you should gather data and make your pronouncements only after due deliberation and reflection. The first question: "Is the chucked item capable of inflicting injury?" No; they were wet, sloppy, sticky clumps of seaweed, and I proudly noted that both kids were aiming for the torso, not the head. Thus the ultimate goal was clearly not to inflict physical harm but to gross the sibling out. Personally, I believe that this sort of thing builds character and lays the groundwork for basic skills that will come in handy as the kid stumbles onward towards adulthood.

But the second question is just as important, and should be considered in almost any situation in which you have been placed in a supervisory role: "Are the kids about to do something that will get them in trouble with their biological parents?" And here I had to slip the iron hand from its velvet glove. What if that elderly, vaguely Rabbinical-looking fellow in the SpongeBob shirt got slapped in the butt by a halibut-sized wedge of green algae?

As an Uncle, you're there to maintain the broader policies of your nephews' parents but you're also there to look out for the kids' interests. Any friendly-fire incident would likely result in their parents revoking their right to chuck anything at each other at all, which would be a danged shame given that they only have another couple weeks of summer vacation left.

There you have it. Did the boys comply? Of course they did, and immediately. Overuse of the velvet glove invites contempt; overuse of the iron hand invites rebellion. Applying both of them shrewdly and appropriately will guarantee that the air will continue to be full of smelly wet vegetation and that your status as a good and worthy Uncle — in the eyes of the kids as well as their parents — remains undamaged. Write that down: I was recently voted into my fifth two-year term and I didn't get where I am today without keeping the electorate pleased and satisfied with the way I execute my duties of office.

The Cape is a palace of delights, as usual, but there's still one bit of potential bad news in the offing: What Of The Kreme N' Kone?

This veritable Parthenon of fried seafood burned down back in May, surprising no one. Given how giddy they were about deep-frying things hitherto thought of as unfryable, and the fact that they applied this line of thinking consistently and without interruption since the Eisenhower administration, it was like hearing that there was an explosion at the abandoned propane depot. Arson, an improperly-extinguished cigarette, someone in the parking lot playing his radio a little too loudly...something was going to cause a fire there, and once it started, the only smart course of action would be to just grab the autographed photo of Bobby Orr off the wall and pour off a pitcher of Coke to enjoy at the curb outside, while you watch those purple and green flames consume the entire building straight to its foundations.

The KnK is over in Chatham (at the Cape's elbow) and I haven't had time to drive over and eyeball the site myself. Back in May, the owners promised to rebuild, but who knows if they're currently in any position to turn wet and slimy things into crispy golden things.

In the meantime, I've been visiting the little clam shack that's within walking distance of the beach. It's good stuff, but the Whole Fried Clams basket just isn't greasy enough. There was something practically interdimensional about the way the KnK fried a clam: you popped one in your mouth and it (delightfully) seemed to contain a quantity of grease that exceeded the strict volume of the actual clam.

Incidentally, here's an insider's tip: clam shacks include one or two token chicken or vegetarian items on the menu solely to smoke out people from Connecticut. Stick to the lobster roll, or the fried scallops, or similarly credible items. If you order the Grilled Portabello Sandwich, the manager will sneak out into the parking lot and snap off your car antenna or peel off your PBS bumper stickers. I've seen it happen. Beware.

| |

Back home from the Cape, to spend a couple of days doing office-type stuff before heading back down to that shangri-la of seafood, sand, and secondhand books. While I prepare a few FedExes, deal with a bunch of analog-based communiques, and give the bellows a couple of quick pumps to keep fires lit under a few ongoing projects, I'm running through the shows that my TiVO recorded in my absence.

(When you have a TiVO, watching television is an important responsibility. You need to get hopping on it the moment you get home. First, because this beautiful black box has worked so hard for so long expecting so little from you in return. If I return home after a week away and I don't bother to pick up the remote, well, it's like coming home after a business trip and not acknowledging that your wife met you at the door wearing a Princess Leia costume (not the neck-to-floor gown from "A New Hope," not the thick, insulated snowsuit from "The Empire Strikes Back"...you know the outfit I'm thinking of here, boys, as well as 10.6% of you gals). It's a hell of a way to repay someone who has done something rather marvelous in the sole interest of making you happy. You also run the risk that they'll be discouraged from putting in that sort of effort ever again. And that would be a shame. A damned shame. A terrible, horrible, damneddamneddamned life-altering bloody shame. End of aside.)

I'm watching The West Wing at the moment. The Bartlet White House is deciding on a nominee to replace a retiring Supreme Court justice. They choose someone with star-making credentials who'll easily win confirmation. But days before announcing their choice, the President's staff learns that a couple of decades earlier, the nominee wrote a paper promoting the view that the right to privacy is not guaranteed by the Constitution. They call him into the Oval Office and he and the President go back and forth about what the Founding Fathers' intentions were.

The nominee is played by Ken Howard. Ken Howard's most famous role is as Thomas Jefferson in "1776," one of my favorite movies.

(OK, In truth, Ken Howard's most famous role is actually as the basketball coach in "The White Shadow." But work with me here, people. Look, I pointed you to that website, didn't I? Isn't that worth a little show of gratitude?)

Anyway...I love stuff like that. Naturally, TV shows can go way too far with "cute" choices (qv Michael J. Fox's "Family Ties" TV dad returning to play his psychiatrist in "Spin City"). But when I'm watching a final-season episode of "St. Elsewhere" I have to appreciate the effort that the show's producers put into establishing that Dr. Mark Craig attended the University of Pennsylvania and doing a location shoot — all simply so that "1776" fans could hear Dr. Craig described as "obnoxious and disliked" during his undergrad years, and briefly singing "It's hot as hell/In Phil-a-del...phiaaaa."

Granted, it pales in comparison with a niftily-evolved woman in a metal bikini. But you take what you can get.

"West Wing" ends and I move on to "InsideOut," the first offering from VH1's new documentary series. Cameras follow Warren Zevon from October through recent months, as he struggles against his deteriorating health to compose and record as many songs as possible before he succombs to inoperable cancer. What a wholly gripping and compelling hour of television. But how the hell is VH1 going to follow it up?

"Postscript: 'Wind,' Warren Zevon's final album, was released to immediate and universal acclaim, and is already regarded as one of the most important albums of the past decade. Zevon died on November 11, 2003, surrounded by family, friends, and overwhelming love from his millions of fans.

"Be sure to tune in next week, when our cameras will follow Beyonce Knowles' lawyers as they negotiate her contract for 'Austin Powers 4.' Will their insistance on receiving gross points from the merchandising jeopardize her participation? Find out right here next Sunday, at 10 PM Eastern."

| |

Well, sensation-seekers...Truth and Self-Image are butting heads at the moment. I really wouldn't be impressed with a person who, after hearing about a fatal plane crash, thought "Aw, man...and I missed it?!?" but while I'm entitled to hem and haw and try to change the subject two or three times, if you pin me down for an answer I'm forced to admit that yes, that was my reaction to news of a crash just off the Cape.

I mean, two pilots died. The captain seemed like quite a character, too. He was an accountant who took up flying in his 30's and made it his career, and his Mom told reporters that he's also worked on an Indy pit crew. I'm sure the latter is absolutely true, but it made such an impact on me that I've instructed my Mom that in the event of my untimely death, she should go ahead and make up something colorful about me.

("Not many people know this," a teary Mrs. Ihnatko told reporters, "but my son was a backup mission specialist on the space shuttle Endeavour's eighteenth mission, having designed an important onboard experiment concerning the effects of microgravity on ferrosilicate propagation." Pausing to wipe her eyes with an index card she happened to be holding in her left hand, she went on to to describe the many challenges the late journalist faced while becoming the first man to travel from Boston to San Diego via pontoon boat.)

Still, I was sorry that I'd chosen these two or three days to go back home and do a little office work. My bags were packed for my return and everything. I got a phone call from the cottage to check on whether I'd be back on the Cape in time for dinner and was told that the beach was closed. The plane crashed just a couple of miles away and officials aren't yet certain about where all the fuel and oil and whatnot are headed. On top of that, they're using the beach's parking lot as a staging area for investigator's boats and emergency vehicles.

Yes, I wished I were there to check out all the excitement. No, I'm not proud of that. I suppose I should just accept that this is a normal, human reaction. That's a very positive thing. If I'm reacting the way a human would, it means that I'm learned to mimic your ways so well that it's become second-nature. It'll take me at least another 270 years to finish my report for the invasion fleet and I wish to continue to observe, infiltrate, and influence your quaint society with as few slip-ups as possible.

Another day, another couple of hours of TiVO. I'm nearly caught up. This afternoon I watched "Short Fuse," one of the six best episodes of "Columbo" ever shot. Roddy McDowell plays a playboy whose late parents founded a mighty chemical company, which is being run by his uncle. In order to prevent the company from being sold and to assume the CEO's office himself, McDowell places a small bomb in his uncle's limousine that causes it to careen off a cliff.

I've seen this episode so often I've long-since lost count. But today, I noticed two things for the first time...both of them in the same very same scene:

1) The limo's driver was killed along with the uncle. At one point, Columbo is describing a puzzling aspect of the "accidental car crash" and refers to the black fortysomething chauffeur as "the old boy." As in, you know...boy.

2) Roddy McDowell is wearing skintight pants and the man def-in-ite-ly isn't wearing any underwear. It's as if the pants were vacuum-sealed over him to lock in freshness. He is wearing such a total lack of underwear that it's almost like we have to record it in the scorecard as five missing sets of underwear and not just one. There are three other people in the scene — all properly-attired, I'm sure — and you'd have to toss a couple three-packs of Fruit Of The Looms into the room to achieve a 1:1 ratio of Underwear to People.

I still haven't exorcised the image so I will continue. I think a comparison between Global Warming and Roddy McDowell's package in this scene would be apt. Obviously, it's been around for years and years and years without inspiring any sort of reaction. But once you notice it, you're shocked and horrified. Above anything else, you're absolutely incredulous: how...how the bloody hell did something so immediately and obviously wrong escape everyone's notice for all this time?

(1) and (2) explain how two things can be equally shocking for completely different reasons.

| |

Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents are © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.