Quickie sex ed

It was the spring of 1979 and seventh grade was almost over. Time was running short for our Health Ed. class to cover sex education, as had been promised earlier in the semester. We’d all been anticipating it in giggly fashion for months.

Now just a couple of classes remained before the end of the school year. At that time and place I’m not aware of any political controversy about sex education in public schools; as far as I know the semester simply got away from Mr. Washington, our young and hip teacher. In one of the final classes he apologized and suggested a way to cover the eagerly awaited topic quickly: we’d all write down one or two anonymous questions about sex, drop them in a hat (or a bag or a box, I don’t quite remember), and Mr. Washington would pick some at random and answer them. No question was out of bounds, nothing was too big or small to ask. Mr. Washington pledged a complete and honest answer to every question, all but promising to kill the fun with an excess of earnestness.

I can’t remember what question I dropped into the hat, nor do I remember most of the other questions that eventually came out of it. Some were no doubt excellent ones based on real curiosity. Information about sex was not quite as easy to come by then as it is now. After all, this was before the frankness made necessary by AIDS, before Dr. Drew and even Dr. Ruth, back in the days when “Internet porn” consisted of an academic in some university office printing a topless woman made of typographical symbols on six sheets of green-and-white fanfold paper.

The hat (or bag or box) passed solemnly around the room. Each of us dropped a folded piece of paper into it, apprehensive in spite of the anonymity that some humiliating bit of cluelessness would be revealed to all. Mr. Washington received it back and, just as solemnly, fished around for the first slip of paper to answer.

He unfolded it — and cracked up laughing, bent over double! It took several long seconds for him to regain his composure; meanwhile, the tension was broken for the rest of us. Finally he read the question: “What’s it like?”

I can still hear Mr. Washington’s immortal and carefully enunciated answer, after our own laughter died down: “It is as good as they say it is.”

News haiku

In addition to miscellaneous status updates I also post “news haiku” from time to time, originally on a now-defunct site my sister was involved with, then to Facebook and more recently to Google+. Here are some examples.

News of the future:
Madoff shivved, owing inmates
Fifty billion cigs

Bin Laden kept porn!
Evil though he might have been
He was one of us.

Super committee:
Failure! Suggestion: Super-
duper committee.

Eight trillion in loans
Profits, just thirteen billion
No wonder banks fail

Cain reassessing:
“Am I heading for mere loss?
Or for epic fail?”

Your Senate at work
Yes: tax hike on workers. No:
Habeas corpus

Post office bankrupt
Path to profit: Make snail mail
Even snailier

Newt? Seriously?
Nostalgia and all, sure, but
Seriously: Newt?

Iraq War over
World War Two-type victory
Eludes us again

Miss Michele Bachmann
Bows out of the race. I won’t
Miss Michele Bachmann

SOPA, PIPA shelved
The public’s confused response:
“We won one for once?”

Mo’ bon mots

Here again are some of the Facebook (and Google+) status updates I’ve been writing in lieu of actual blogging. This is what happens when your longest available nugget of creativity time is five minutes.

  • Inexpert phlebotomist. Ouch.
  • Damn him, just as I’m about to write him off, Obama goes and says all the right things!
  • I chose “super saver shipping” for my Portal 2 preorder? Curse my sense of economy!
  • [On the death of bin Laden.] Message to terrorists: do not fuck with us! If you try to bankrupt us or destroy our freedoms, we will BANKRUPT ourselves and DESTROY OUR FREEDOMS in singleminded pursuit of your overdue and meaningless demise!
  • Saw an 800-year-old copy of the Magna Carta at the Legion of Honor. PFC. (Pretty cool.)
  • A key to happiness: park sooner, not closer.
  • I forgot how much fun it is to peel a sunburn! Kinda makes up for all that pain a couple of weeks ago.
  • Archer does a pretty good Marvin the Martian now. “I claim this planet in the name of Mars!”
  • Now I know what NFS stands for. “Not fast. Slow.”
  • Groupon’s attempts at Woot-like clever sales copy cause me actual pain.
  • Just when the day was shaping up to be blah, along comes the headline, “Arkansas weatherman found in hot tub with naked dead man wearing dog collar.”
  • [For my puzzle-loving friend Wes.] I feel a birthday limerick coming on!
    There once was a fellow named — guess!
    The last letter of his name is an S
    The rest of his name
    Is spelled just the same
    As a homophone for the French word for yes.
  • Me, at the wax museum yesterday: “That’s Gandhi, he was an important leader in India. He helped show people how to get what they want through peace instead of fighting.” Archer: “How? With puppy-dog eyes?”
  • Prepping for the CERT class final tomorrow — and watching episodes of Emergency! from 1972 with the family! Life is good.
  • I am a California certified disaster service worker.
  • Another day, another certification: have just completed an American Heart Association First Aid/CPR/AED course.
  • Andrea. Bob. TV food celebrities with the initials A.B. We got it covered.

  • Less tolerant of misspellings today than usual. And that’s saying something.
  • A weekend that ends with the family driving home, singing along with side 2 of Abbey Road, is a pretty good weekend.
  • What am I doing up so early on my birthday, rather than sleeping in? I started my day standing in my driveway in the darkness, a hot cup of coffee in my hands, neck craned way way back, enjoying the Orionids: a birthday light show put on for me by debris from Halley’s comet. Now that’s how you start a birthday. Orionids Meteor Shower 2011
  • Today I’m 45. But every morning in the shower, by force of habit rather than necessity, I still use the amount of shampoo of a man half my age.
  • S! is for super
    U! is for unique
    Z! is for Zamfir, master of the pan flute
    A! is for awesome
    N! is for no way is my baby sister 42
    N! is for no way is my baby sister 42, weren’t you listening?
    E! is for even if my baby sister were 142 she’d still kick all our asses, including Zamfir’s, in super unique awesomeness
    What’s that spell? SUZANNE! What’s that spell? SUZANNE! What’s that spell? SUZANNE! Yaaaaaay!
  • Viruses invade my cells. They hijack my cellular machinery to copy themselves. They subvert my immune response to cause me to sneeze and cough them everywhere. Then they invade someone else’s cells. Ah the circle of life!
  • “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.” is the new “My God, it’s full of stars.”
  • The promise of grilled cheese is never quite matched by the reality.
  • The rainy season arrived yesterday. So the kids started asking, “When can we watch Singin’ In the Rain?” Raised ’em right.
  • “Locking nuts” my ass.
  • I get it now. It’s not that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, per se; it’s that the old dog’s attention is divided into slices so thin that no one of them is suitable for learning new tricks.
  • Yes, its stated goals (save taxpayer money, solve more crimes, and protect the innocent) are all excellent. But my favorite argument in opposition to the death penalty is that there are things worse than death, and there are some criminals who deserve them. SAFE California
  • Lord of the Rings + A Midsummer Night’s Dream + The Wizard of Oz – any sense of things mattering or making sense = Willow
  • Things change, and here’s the proof: the teenaged me thought “48 Hrs” (the Nick Nolte/Eddie Murphy film) was a rollicking good time, but the middle-aged me is appalled by it.
  • Two full weeks to do nothing but exercise and practice guitar. Is that too much to ask?
  • Each morning I arrive at work and park my car in YouTube’s garage. There are hundreds of spaces on multiple levels, and on any given day I’m as likely to park on one level as on any other. I’m somewhat absent-minded — in the shower I often cannot remember whether I’ve shampooed yet — so you’d think I’d constantly be forgetting where my car is. But almost without fail, at the end of the day, I ask myself, “Now where did I park?” and can recall the spot I pulled into that morning — not the morning before or the morning last week. Why am I able to do this?
  • Reamde: finished! It’s as if someone complained to Neal Stephenson that too little happens in Anathem and it takes too long to get going, so Stephenson, taking this as a challenge, said, “Oh, yeah?” and rolled up his sleeves and wrote this.
  • How do you complain about a great employee perk like a fancy new smartphone every year? Like this: I lost all my Angry Birds levels!
  • When your kid makes a series of unreasonable requests, and you have to say no again and again, and then he makes a perfectly reasonable one but you say no anyway, without thinking, that’s “nomentum.”
  • Archer, watching football: “What does NFL stand for?” (and then, before I can answer) “I think the N stands for National. The F stands for… the F word. And the L stands for linguine.”
  • I do hereby pronounce 2012 to be a year of love, happiness, and prosperity for all.
  • If I lived in Manhattan I’d eat at Grey’s Papaya for lunch every goddamned day.
  • Is it my imagination, or did bananas used to be easier to begin peeling?
  • Who is the mad genius who first came up with chicken-fried bacon?
  • Tonight I had the opportunity to say, “I remember Husker Du.” But no one got the joke.
  • I love Paul McCartney as much as the next guy — for his talent, of course, but also for his famous down-to-earth genuineness. But there’s no way that’s still his natural hair color.

Ranter Claus

Climbing down your chimney with a bagful of opinions slung on his back. (Previously.)

You better not think
Of greeting this guy
You better look busy
I’m telling you why:
Ranter Claus is coming to town

He’s making a list
Of assholes and fools
And all the wrong things
They’re teaching in schools
Ranter Claus is coming to town

Preventing you from sleeping
He runs his mouth all night
You can never get him to shut up
Even if you say he’s right

So find someone who
Has time on his hands
Or some poor slob you can
Run faster than
Ranter Claus is coming to town

(Previously.)

Make money the old-fashioned way

Dear film industry, music industry, and all other trade associations that lobby Congress for laws to protect their revenue streams:

You are not entitled to your profits. You are required to earn them anew, every single day.

If new competitive pressures come along and you’re unable to adapt, we the people are under no obligation to help you keep earning profits by tilting the playing field. In fact, quite the opposite.

Homeopathic democracy

What was the cry of the Boston rioters in 1773? “No taxation without representation.” What would they have said about taxation with just a teensy amount of representation?

Before George Washington became the first chief executive under the U.S. Constitution, he presided over the Philadelphia Convention at which the Constitution was drafted. Throughout the entire proceedings — which had its fair share of passionate disputes — Washington spoke up exactly once on an issue under debate. The proposed size of the U.S. House of Representatives was too small, he said. It would have meant one congressman for every 40,000 citizens. He insisted that one per 30,000 would produce a better, more responsive democracy, and so the change was made.

Within thirty years, as new states were admitted and the population grew, the ratio had grown to the level against which Washington had argued: 40,000 citizens per congressman. Four decades later and it more than tripled: 127,000 to 1. By this time the population of the country had grown from under two million to over 31 million, and the House of Representatives had gone from a cozy 65 members to a rowdy 241.

In 1912 the House of Representatives swelled to 435 members — roughly one for every 212,000 citizens — and there it was capped by legislation in 1929, by which time the ratio was more than 280,000 to 1.

If we had maintained that ratio, today the House would have 1,093 members. If we had maintained Washington’s ratio, today it would have 10,291 members. As it is we’re stuck with 435 — fewer than one congressperson for every 700,000 people. Some U.S. citizens have proportionally more Senate representation than House representation.

What was the cry of the Boston rioters in 1773?1 “No taxation without representation.” What would they have said about taxation with just a teensy amount of representation? No wonder our democracy is presently working about as well as a course of Oscillococcinum (the flu remedy so dilute that one dose contains none of its so-called active ingredients).

A ten thousand member Congress would probably be unmanageable. But a nation of three hundred million is (I think we can conclude from current events) ungovernable by a legislature so relatively small. Perhaps it’s time to reconstitute our national government. Here’s one idea off the top of my head for bringing representation closer to the people: add a level of hierarchy between the state and federal levels, according to the ten regions of American politics.

  1. No evocation of the modern day Tea Party is intended. [↩]

Poetry schmoetry

One Internet craze from the early days of the World Wide Web was to compose haiku about Spam (the lunchmeat, not the unwanted e-mail). My friend Eric Pivnik wrote the best possible one of all time:

Old man seeks doctor
“I eat Spam daily,” he says.
Angioplasty.

Also:

Pink tender morsel
Glistening with salty gel.
What the hell is it?

His efforts inspired some of our coworkers in the mid 1990’s to write their own. Here’s mine:

Pink ingot of meat
Bit by bit it goes in me
Now I am Spam too.

Not long after that I challenged everyone to write double dactyls, a very specific comic-rhyme form with several rules:

  • There are two stanzas of four lines each;
  • Lines 1, 2, 3 and 5, 6, 7 are double-dactylic: they have the rhythm “DA-da-da DA-da-da”;
  • Lines 4 and 8 have the same rhythm but with the last two syllables chopped off;
  • Lines 4 and 8 rhyme;
  • Line 1 is a repeated nonsense phrase, like “Higgledy piggledy”;
  • Line 2 is a person’s name;
  • Line 6 or line 7 is a single, six-syllable, double-dactylic word.

I started it off with this one.

Clickety clickety
Andrea Dougherty
Always takes pictures at
Every event.

Her secret fantasy:
Selling her photographs
Capitalistically
Paying the rent.

David Hartmann came back with this terrific one:

Higgledy piggledy
Robert S. Glickstein our
Poetry overlord
Starts a new thread

“Picture yourself in a
Boat on a river” gets
Beatlemaniacally
Stuck in my head.

Christine Martinez-Begle wrote this about her husband:

Piggly Wiggly
Doug is in Charleston
Prowling at night for an
Innocent hick

Diving in dumpsters for
Cannibal comfort food
Chicken-fried free-swingin’
Steak on a stick

which, apart from being macabre, has a few problems in its structure, so I wrote this to poke fun at her:

Poetry, schmoetry
Christine Martinez-B
Thinks Piggly’s syllables
Add up to three

Probably she’s just like
Those who say “fire” is
Polysyllabical
(That includes me.)

Finally, for Salon.com’s “dot-com haiku” challenge in 2000, in addition to a few forgettable haiku (the best of which was: Start a company / Get funding. Show promise. Fail. / Start a company) I offered this double dactyl:

Hump-i-ty Dump-i-ty
Jeffrey P. Bezos’s
Company made him Time’s
Man of the Year

Loyal investors say
Uncategorically,
“He’ll turn a profit soon,
Never you fear.”

Cover to cover (to cover to cover to cover…)

Tonight I finished a project I’ve been working on for years: reading all of the Harry Potter stories to my family, all seven volumes, all 4,167 pages.

Tonight I finished a project I’ve been working on for years: reading all of the Harry Potter stories to my family, all seven volumes, all 4,167 pages. Correction: I read almost all of them. Jonah took over for one chapter a little while ago when my voice was too hoarse, like Sam to my Frodo.

I am so, so happy that I prohibited the boys from seeing any of the movies before reading the books; and I feel so, so sorry for anyone who’s only ever seen the movies and thinks they know the stories. Naturally there are a lot of great scenes and there is a lot of rich detail that never made it into the movies, but that is true with any novel adapted for the screen. Also as with any adaptation, some of the changes made by the filmmakers were improvements on those unavoidable parts of the books that were not great or rich.

But the films do worse than leave out scenes and detail — they get key characters wrong. (Or at least, numbers 1 through 6 do. None of us has yet seen parts 7a or 7b.) The film Dumbledore may be a powerful wizard, but he has none of the book Dumbledore’s warmth, deep wisdom, or mischief. And Harry Potter may stir himself to heroic action on film when the need arises, but there is no sense of the fierceness of purpose to which he is so often roused in the books.

I’m sure countless Harry Potter fan sites have debated these things endlessly so I won’t belabor them, but I can’t let it go before giving one example to illustrate my complaint. Spoilers ahead.

Continue reading “Cover to cover (to cover to cover to cover…)”