Whaddya know, mosquitoes still whine

Last year I wrote,

I know and accept the reality of age-related hearing loss, especially in high frequencies […] Can it be that we’ve had silent mosquitoes flying around? Is it possible I lost my hearing at only the precise frequency that mosquitoes emit?

Would that I had! Mind you, I’m not saying I want to be deaf. But last night, around 2am:

eeeEEEEEE!

A mosquito in my ear! In two seconds flat I was on my feet and wide awake, a process that usually takes two cups of coffee and about three hours. I turned on all the lights in the house and hunted the mosquito, hyperalert. (It was a warm night, so Andrea and the kids were sound asleep in a tent in our backyard; I was indoors because I worked at the computer late into the night.)

I got one glimpse of the mosquito but couldn’t kill it, and after a fruitless half hour of stalking it I did the only thing I could: turned off all the lights, smeared citronella oil all around my head, and got back into bed, eyes wide open and muscles tensed to leap from bed once more and deal hot mosquito death.

By 3am I was asleep again, finally. The box of citronella wipes said they last for about 3 hours, and this morning at 6am:

eeeEEEEEE!

I’m afraid to go to sleep tonight. If I am again awakened by a keening whine in my ear I believe I’m fully capable of doing a Harry Caul on my bedroom in search of that damn bug.

There is no end zone

[This post is participating in Strange Culture’s Dads In Media blog-a-thon.]

Some time ago I wrote,

The movie […] teaches that worry is an inextricable part of parenthood, which is a comfort in a way. Thanks to Finding Nemo, when I encounter a worrying situation in my role as a father, I cope a little better. I know that it goes with the territory, that it’s universal, and that there’s a right way to deal with it.

An even more potent touchstone for teaching us to accept the worries of parenthood is Parenthood, the 1989 film by Ron Howard, and its central point is nicely summed up in a scene between Frank Buckman (Jason Robards) and his son Gil (Steve Martin). Frank has learned that his black-sheep son, Larry, is in deep trouble with the mob. While ostensibly asking Gil’s advice about whether to help Larry pay off his gambling debt, Frank’s really coming to terms with the hardest truth about having children: no matter how long you and your children live, if you love them, you never stop worrying about them.

Just earlier in the film, Gil had a fantasy in which his troubled young son Kevin grows up to be confident, successful, and happy, praising his dad in his valedictory address at college. Fantasy-Gil reveled in a job well done. Now here is Gil’s father with the dismal news that:

There is no end zone. You never cross the goal line, spike the ball and do your touchdown dance. Never.

And yet for all the worrying about children (of all ages) that occupies the film’s many parents, the message of the movie is a positive one: that lifelong worry is a small price to pay for the profound joys of parenthood. This too is summed up neatly in a scene where Grandma interrupts Gil’s obsessive fretting with a seemingly irrelevant story.

Back in business


Joseph Costanzo, Jr. and infant Jonah
at The Primadonna, October 2002

I’m not the only one who started a new job this week. I have company in the person of Joseph Costanzo, Jr. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, once lionized (including by me) as the region’s greatest restaurateur, then disgraced, now resurgent with the opening of his new restaurant, Cafe Costanzo, in the “Uptown” neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Buona fortuna Signore Costanzo! I will keep my promise and visit your new restaurant soon.

Vitamin C

Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, a cult classic, was published in 1992 and set in a mildly dystopian not-too-distant-future. (One that reality grows increasingly to resemble bit by bit.) In the story, it becomes the goal of some characters to capture and analyze a sample of a new street narcotic called “Snow Crash.” But distribution of Snow Crash is so tightly controlled that when a user buys a hit from a dealer, it comes in a dispenser with a ten-second timer, already counting down. The user is obliged to inhale it on the spot, or watch it spray uselessly into the air when the timer reaches zero. Posing as a buyer, Y.T. receives her hit and, rather than inhale it, tosses it straight up into the air. A flying machine zips in overhead, catches it, flash-freezes it in liquid helium, and disappears with it. Other devices facilitate Y.T.’s escape from the dealer’s lair. The security expert behind the operation, Mr. Ng, later says, “We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed.”

I know how he feels. On Monday I started my new job, as a software engineer for Google, a plum position for someone like me that (despite the vast size of Google’s engineering organization) is notoriously hard to get. It was the culmination of a job-hunt process in which I was fortunate enough to have more than one Silicon Valley technology giant vying for my services, and as a result, I’m riding a confidence high.

When you have successes like that under your belt, it’s easy to be confident. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: to succeed in the first place, you need confidence to try things worth succeeding at.

This is something that has been weighing on my mind and Andrea’s for a while, at least since our last meeting with Jonah’s kindergarten teacher. She told us that he has the capacity to be a class leader and lacks only the confidence to step up to some challenging tasks, to stop following the pack. This critique rang true; we’d observed in Jonah a tendency when trying new things to expect he’d be unable to do them. This despite our encouragement and his obvious competence.

Where can you get the confidence you need to achieve your first successes?

Understanding this catch-22, my dad sought to instill confidence in me and my sister from a very young age. He referred to it as “vitamin C” and frequently touted its magical power to make the difficult easy. The way to have confidence, he told us again and again, was to be sure ahead of time that you could do whatever it was you were trying to do — hit a softball, ride a bike, flip a pancake. Before trying something tricky, focus your mind. See yourself accomplishing it. Then do it. If you fail, it’s not because you can’t do it — obviously, since other people can do it, so why not you? It’s only because you didn’t use enough vitamin C. Try again, and focus harder on feeling confident.

This approach worked on me and my sister, after a fashion. We grew up feeling confident and we were therefore adequately bold in the choices we made (which is, after all, the very purpose of confidence). Much later in life, though — after I had developed real confidence — I recognized my childhood version of that feeling for what it really was: bravado, the insubstantial cousin of confidence, insubstantial because it’s unfounded.

Bravado does some of the work of true confidence, but it fails you when you need it most. Worse, whereas a surfeit of confidence makes a person calm, cool, and collected, an excess of bravado produces arrogance. For I had learned that “Vitamin C” meant being sure you could do anything, and if deep down you really aren’t, then how can you convince yourself that you are — other than to tell everyone how capable you are? Other than to brag, that is.

So how did I finally develop “real” confidence? By the passage of time, mainly, during which I racked up meaningful successes once in a while, developing my skills and developing my self to the point where I’m finally satsified with who I am and what I can do. Many years ago I would have claimed to be satisfied, but I would have been wrong, and here’s how I know: I no longer feel like I have something to prove all the time. When I was younger I did, boy howdy did I.

So now I’m in a serene confidence zone, which is great for me, but what about Jonah? He’s only six. He hasn’t had decades to develop his skills or his personality. We’re back to our main question: Where can you get the confidence you need to achieve your first successes?

Until this past Sunday, I had a gimmicky answer to that question: to get real confidence, act as if you have it to begin with. Just as pretending to laugh can lead to real laughter, pretending to be confident can get you through tricky situations, producing real confidence.

For example: when I started college, I didn’t know a soul in Pittsburgh. For the first several days I was desperately lonely until finally I’d had enough of that and decided to do something about it. Spying a group of fellow freshmen chatting together — complete strangers — I pretended confidence, strode over, broke into their conversation, and made them my friends. Lifelong friends in some cases, as it turned out.

So the pretend-confidence thing worked for me on that occasion, and on a number of others. With pretend confidence I was able to accumulate enough successes to form a foundation for real confidence. And until Sunday, that’s the advice I gave whenever the subject arose of how to become confident.

But then on Sunday I saw something that made me change my mind. I had decided it was time for Jonah finally to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike. (I wrote many months ago that he already had, but it turned out to be a false alarm.) Andrea and I took him and Archer to the empty schoolyard and began giving cycling instruction. Archer lost interest pretty quickly, but Jonah gamely tried several times to balance the bike, standing on one pedal while kicking off the ground with the other foot, as if riding a scooter. He was getting visibly better, his kicking foot staying off the ground for longer and longer intervals, when he declared he was tired and would do more next time. He unbuckled his helmet.

At this point, Andrea channeled her high school self and began cheerleading. She encouraged him so insistently and so, well, cheerily that he could not resist — he refastened his helmet and did another circuit of the schoolyard, this time a little better than before. Again he told us he was done and again Andrea cheered him on to another lap, and another, and another. Finally she persuaded him to try sitting down while pedaling and letting me let go of the bike — and away he went, a little wobbly but undeniably riding a two-wheeled bike entirely on his own!

Jonah lost all trace of tiredness. He rode around and around the schoolyard with the biggest possible smile on his face, so drunk with accomplishment that when he fell and scraped up his legs, or when he rode his bike straight into a wall, he wasn’t deterred even a little bit. He just wanted to keep riding. And that’s when something about the past few months clicked into place for me:

In the time since our parent-teacher conference, Jonah has learned to read ever-more challenging books and to write a paragraph-long “book report” each week; he has started taking piano and karate lessons; and he has cultivated a new and better group of friends than the ones he had before. Each of these developments was accompanied by more or less whining from Jonah about being unable to do this or that, but these protests fell on unsympathetic ears as Andrea and I insisted that he not only could, but he must. And because we compelled him, he saw again and again that his protests were false: with a little work he could figure out a sentence full of long words on his own, he could find the right notes in a tricky piano exercise, he could learn to ride a bike in a single afternoon. And now Jonah is visibly more confident than he was just a short time ago.

So now I think the premise with which I started this article is wrong. To succeed in the first place, you don’t necessarily need confidence to try things worth succeeding at. Just as good is having someone loving, persistent, and occasionally merciless driving you to discover for yourself the amazing things you can do.

Ready for my WGA card

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night. To my great surprise, I was entertained throughout! I expected it to suck badly, and now, in the cold light of day and outside the excitement of actually watching the film, I agree with the many substantive screenwriting complaints that Mystery Man is collecting on his website. (Warning: spoilers galore on that site.) I think what happened is that The Phantom Menace (et al.) set the bar so low for George Lucas movies, and Firewall (et al.) set it so low for Harrison Ford movies, that with Steven Spielberg’s countervailing, still-pretty-good filmmaking sense, the new movie vaulted those bars easily.

Of course I already knew from the trailer that the film alludes to the 1947 Roswell UFO incident, just as my own speculative Indy IV story did more than a year ago — but I had a tiny moment of amazement when Indiana Jones actually uttered the word “Etruscan,” which also figures in my story. What are the odds? And where’s my royalty check?

Update 26 May: Mystery Man has a new post up that comprehensively itemizes the serious flaws in the Indy IV script. I agree with almost all of it, and like commenter Kevin Lehane I like the movie less the more I think about it.

Indiana Jones and the Musical Gimmick

[This post is participating in Cerebral Mastication’s Indiana Jones blog-a-thon.]

Speaking of subtle filmmaking techniques

The rousing musical score that John Williams wrote for Raiders of the Lost Ark included several melodic themes: two for Indiana Jones and one for Marion, a motif for the German army, and of course a theme for the lost ark itself, suitably spooky. As an avid fan of the film and of John Williams I’ve listened to the score countless times over the past 27 years. But as a musical layman, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I noticed something clever that John Williams seemed to be doing with the Ark Theme.

We hear the Ark Theme for the first time when Indiana Jones shows an illustration of the ark to the Army intelligence men who come to meet him.

As you can perhaps hear in that clip, the melody doesn’t quite resolve; it segues into a few notes’ worth of Indy’s theme (a.k.a. “The Raiders March”). But the Ark’s theme is heard again just a few moments later when Marcus expresses his misgivings about this assignment to Indy.

In this clip, Indy starts out thinking about his old flame — “Suppose she’ll still be with him?” — and Marion’s theme plays for a few bars, but then Marcus tells him, “For nearly three thousand years, man has been searching for the lost ark,” at which point the Ark Theme comes in. But once again it does not resolve, segueing this time into the flying-boat travel montage.

The next time the Ark Theme appears, Indy is in the Map Room. This scene is divided into four sequences, each of which includes a rendition of the Ark Theme, each separated from the others by a cut to Indy’s friend Sallah, who’s waiting for him outside.

In the first Map Room sequence, Indy lowers himself by rope into the room and looks at the miniature city on the floor. The Ark Theme plays almost to completion, but leaves off the final note when cutting to Sallah being harassed by some German soldiers.

Next Indy deciphers some hieroglyphics and checks the position of the sun. The Ark Theme plays barely halfway through this time.

Now Indy affixes the medallion to the Staff of Ra, places the staff in the proper hole, and fervidly awaits the proper alignment of the sun. At last the angle is right and a brilliant beam of light reveals the location of the Well of the Souls! The music reaches a crescendo and a satisfying resolution — but while Indy was waiting for the sunlight to creep across the Map Room floor, the melody modulated into another key. We still have not heard the Ark Theme play from beginning to end!

In the coda to the Map Room scene, Indy snaps the Staff of Ra in two and looks for his rope to climb out, but it’s missing. Sallah drops an improvised replacement into the hole. The Ark Theme peters out on a visual gag: Indy discovering a Nazi flag knotted into his makeshift rope.

In the very next scene, Indy, disguised (poorly) as an Arab, ducks hastily out of sight when some soldiers approach too closely. He enters a tent and discovers, tied to a tent pole, Marion — who he thought had been killed! He’s about to free her when he realizes he can’t without raising an alarm. Marion wonders why he’s not cutting her bonds. He tells her, “I know where the ark is, Marion,” and we hear the Ark Theme again. As he explains and she becomes frantic, the music segues into Marion’s theme.

Next, Indy uses a surveying instrument to convert his Map Room calculations into an actual location for digging. A variation on the Ark Theme plays, still unresolved.

A short time later, Indy arrives at his calculated location with a team of diggers. He clambers up a rise alone, scopes it out, and calls his team over. The first half of the Ark Theme plays three times in slightly different forms, and there’s a crescendo as Indy removes the first shovelful of sand, but it’s still not a resolution of the complete Ark Theme.

We get a few notes of the Ark Theme again (listen closely) as Indy and Sallah heave the stone cover off the chest protecting the ark…

…and then a few more as they lift the ark out of its container…

…and another few when Belloq spots the illicit dig early in the morning (“Colonel, wake your men!”)…

…and then once more as German soldiers converge on Indy’s dig site. Once again the final resolving note is left off.

The next appearance of the Ark Theme comes much later. The main characters are now all on a secret Nazi island submarine base. The Ark Theme accompanies the procession of Belloq, Marion, a lot of Germans, and the ark itself (and secretly Indy too) across the island to the ceremonial altar. It’s interrupted when Indy steps out of hiding and levels a bazooka at the group.

Indy’s bluff is called, and he’s captured and brought to the altar to witness the opening of the ark. Belloq mutters some sacred words in Aramaic, the ark is opened — and the stone tablets are not inside, just a bunch of sand. (Psych!) Disappointment turns to bewilderment, though, as the electrical equipment shorts out and an eerie fog spills out of the ark. Here’s the Ark Theme again. This time, just before it resolves it gives way to a danse-macabre version of itself.

That version also doesn’t resolve. Instead it becomes a staccato nightmare as the power of the ark is unleashed.

Finally, the one and only time in the whole film that the Ark Theme is heard from beginning to end, complete with a melodic resolution in the same key, comes as the ark purifies the island by fire, then seals itself back up.

The long-awaited resolution of the Ark Theme creates a sensation of finality. The music subconsciously reinforces the action on the screen: hearing the melody conclude at last, there can be no question that that’s all we’ll see or hear from the ark. Not even the film’s final scene, in which the ark is packed away in a crate inside a gigantic warehouse, repeats the resolution.

Now let’s see if the new sequel betrays that satisfying sense of finality by “going back to the well,” as it were (the Well of Souls!) and unearthing the ark again.

The colors of Star Wars

[This post is participating in Too Many Projects’ Production Design blog-a-thon.]

As I’ve written before, there were a lot of things that bothered me about The Empire Strikes Back. But I was only thirteen when I saw it, and a diehard Star Wars fan. It took years even to admit I didn’t like it much, and decades to be able to articulate my complaints. But there was one problem with it that I was able to identify immediately in the summer of 1980: the soft, pinkish light in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. It hadn’t looked that way in the original, where the cockpit was shades of grey and fluorescent lighting and harsh shadows.

Had Han Solo had an interior decorator revamp his ship between the two films?

I wondered why the new lighting scheme bothered me so much. It could have been simply that change is painful — after all, the Millennium Falcon was already the coolest spaceship in sci-fi history, and you don’t mess with success. But I felt there must be a more substantive reason, and as I searched for it, I slowly awoke to the importance of production design, and specifically the cleverness of the color palette in the original Star Wars.

In that film, space is black, sprinkled with white stars. Spaceships are off-white and gunmetal grey. Stormtroopers, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia wear white. Darth Vader wears black. The surface and buildings of Tatooine are shades of beige, bleached by the sun. Inside the Death Star: grey walls and floors, grey-uniformed officers, black prison cells.

Everything is stark. There is almost no color in Star Wars — except when lasers are firing, lightsabers are clashing, and spaceships are exploding. Then what might have been only a modestly exciting action sequence is amplified, by contrast with the rest of the film’s chromatic drabness, into literally a dazzling thrill.

In 1939, when The Wizard of Oz shifted abruptly from dreary greys into Technicolor, audiences were exhilarated. Ingeniously, the art directors of Star Wars took that one tremendous sensation, chopped it up into small doses, and meted it out to their audience in electrifying little jolts throughout the entire movie — a strategy that the designers of Empire, with its more liberal and therefore less effective use of color, unwisely chose to forgo.

Whips and change

[This post is participating in Cerebral Mastication’s Indiana Jones blog-a-thon.]

As high school wound down for me in the spring of 1984, my class load was pretty light and I put in more time at my afterschool programming job in the Flatiron district. My occasional wanderings in that neighborhood — running errands, finding lunch, etc. — took me past several wholesale import shops, some with large storefronts displaying selected items from their stock in the window. One day as the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom grew near, I passed one such store and saw something that gave me an idea.

Two years earlier, my friends and I had attended a sneak-preview screening of E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. When the house lights came up at the end, we noted with amusement two manly men seated a couple of rows away, complete with Caterpillar trucking caps, too overcome with emotion to get up and leave the theater right away. “This is going to be huge,” we predicted. And we had an idea.

A few months before that, New York magazine published an article about our school called “The Joyful Elite” (original article). It inspired equal measures of pride and outrage: pride because it said we were some of New York City’s smartest kids, and outrage because it said we acted like we knew it. The school was in an uproar for several days because of it; and so my friends and I capitalized on that. In those pre-Zazzle days we found a novelty printing shop in the Yellow Pages (called “Abat,” which I’ll never forget because of the memorably gruff way the owner answered the phone: “’Lo, Abat”) and ordered a large batch of “Joyful Elite” buttons. When we got them a couple of days later, we carried our supply through the hallways between classes, selling them to students and faculty for two dollars apiece. They sold like hotcakes and we made hundreds of dollars! (A big deal, in high school in the 80’s.)

So when the lights came up after E.T. and we knew it was going to be a hit, we saw a profit-making opportunity. We had Abat print up a batch of “I ♥ E T” buttons and congregated outside a big midtown theater on the film’s opening day. Aware that we were crossing some sort of a line with respect to merchandise licensing, we prepared a story to tell any law-enforcement official who asked that the buttons meant, “I love Edison Tech,” our (made-up) alma mater. Fortunately no law-enforcement official ever required us to test the quality of that lie — perhaps because we sold a grand total of two buttons to exiting moviegoers. Our immediate post-mortem explanation for our failure was that everyone who sees E.T. leaves the theater too verklempt to engage in crass commercialism. On further thought, a button was not much of a way to commemorate the E.T.-viewing experience; but at that time the only tool we had was a hammer (the hammer of printing novelty buttons) and every problem looked like a nail. The excess inventory, a cartonful of “I ♥ E T” buttons, sat in my mom’s apartment for decades. If only we’d had some sort of item to sell that was more subject-matter-appropriate.

Anyway, when I passed that importer’s storefront two years later — with the opening of the first Indiana Jones sequel just a few days away — and my eyes alighted on bagsful of six-foot-long imitation-leather bullwhips for a dollar apiece, I snatched up several dozen.

I brought them with me to the premiere showing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I arrived early enough to be near the head of a line that eventually wound from the box office of the Loews Orpheum (then on 86th Street — where I also lined up early for the premieres of Return of the Jedi the previous year and The Empire Strikes Back three years before that), down the block, and around two corners. I set a big bag of bullwhips on the ground by my feet. When my friends arrived later to hold my place in line, I made periodic forays along the ever-lengthening queue of people to sell my bullwhips for five bucks apiece, and I cleaned up. Many eager purchasers wanted to know why I wasn’t selling fedoras, too. (Answer: I’d thought of that, but they were too expensive.) A cop came and tried to shut me down but I talked him into accepting a free bullwhip instead and he left me alone.

I made hundreds!

Update: I’ll be damned, it looks like Abat still exists.

The magic painting

Who does this painting make you think of?

Did you answer, “Me and my dad?”

When we put this painting (by local artist and acquaintance Judy Morris) on the wall a few years ago, I commented to Andrea that it made me think of me and my dad, when I was a kid.

A short time later, we asked Jonah what it made him think of. He said, “Me and Daddy” — which made me wonder why I identified with the child in the picture and not the adult. I really did think it looked like a long-ago version of my dad and me — but no one else thought so. I really didn’t think it looked anything like me and Jonah — but Jonah does.

So, is it in fact a magic “me and my dad” painting, altering the perceptions of all who view it?

How I’m doing on the 75 things

One of the big memes cruising the Information Superhighway last week was Esquire magazine’s list of “The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master.” I’ve reproduced their list here (but not the commentary accompanying each list item; I hope this constitutes “fair use“) in order to explore how well I’m doing on each of the things in the list. Without further ado:

  1. Give advice that matters in one sentence. Like “Secure endcap or die?”
  2. Tell if someone is lying. Easy with some, hard or impossible with others.
  3. Take a photo. My strategy: take one million photos and trust to random chance to make some of them good.
  4. Score a baseball game. I know that “K” means strikeout.
  5. Name a book that matters. Heh: Writing GNU Emacs Extensions.
  6. Know at least one musical group as well as is possible. As well as is possible? That sounds like it could devolve into a philosophical debate.
  7. Cook meat somewhere other than the grill. Check.
  8. Not monopolize the conversation. I can do this, honestly, but you’re at the wrong website for me to demonstrate it.
  9. Write a letter. Check.
  10. Buy a suit. Check.
  11. Swim three different strokes. Check.
  12. Show respect without being a suck-up. Check.
  13. Throw a punch. I know the theory, but the last time I tried for real, it didn’t avail me too well.
  14. Chop down a tree. I spit once in each palm before seizing the axe and striking a single mighty blow, right?
  15. Calculate square footage. Got that one covered.
  16. Tie a bow tie. I’ve tried. I’ve not yet succeeded.
  17. Make one drink, in large batches, very well. One drink, eh? I’ve cooked entire Thanksgiving dinners for forty people!
  18. Speak a foreign language. Sí se puede.
  19. Approach a woman out of his league. Done, sort of.
  20. Sew a button. Done.
  21. Argue with a European without getting xenophobic or insulting soccer. Fast kicking! Low scoring! And ties? You bet! What’s to insult about soccer?
  22. Give a woman an orgasm so that he doesn’t have to ask after it. Gentlemen don’t tell.
  23. Be loyal. To a fault? Check.
  24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope. Is it too unmanly if my “poison” is a Cosmopolitan?
  25. Drive an eightpenny nail into a treated two-by-four without thinking about it. I admit: I stink at this. I bend more nails into useless shapes than I manage to drive in properly.
  26. Cast a fishing rod without shrieking or sighing or otherwise admitting defeat. The one and only time I did this was 1976. I did OK.
  27. Play gin with an old guy. Just wait, soon I’ll be the old guy.
  28. Play go fish with a kid. Haven’t done it, and it’s high time I did.
  29. Understand quantum physics well enough that he can accept that a quarter might, at some point, pass straight through the table when dropped. In fact I understand it well enough to know why some people might think this is possible but also why it will in fact never happen.
  30. Feign interest. Check.
  31. Make a bed. Check.
  32. Describe a glass of wine in one sentence without using the terms nutty, fruity, oaky, finish, or kick. That’s a cinch. At home, where we have many bottles of wine that predate having children, I can often be heard to say, “I think this wine has turned to vinegar — but I’m not really sure.”
  33. Hit a jump shot in pool. Gonna have to work on that one.
  34. Dress a wound. Hey. I have two young boys. We have a whole shelf that’s just Band-Aids and Bactine.
  35. Jump-start a car (without any drama). Change a flat tire (safely). Change the oil (once). I have attended, but not performed, oil changes. Same thing with jump starts; they scare me a bit. I have changed a flat tire a couple of times and did a fine job of it.
  36. Make three different bets at a craps table. I’ll see your “make three different bets at a craps table” and I’ll raise you a “write craps-playing software.”
  37. Shuffle a deck of cards. Check.
  38. Tell a joke. My favorite:

    A cop is parked at the side of the highway when he sees a convertible go by with the top down. A man is driving and in the back seat there are six penguins. The cop says to himself, “This oughta be good,” pulls onto the road, and in a minute has the convertible pulled to the side.

    “What are you doing with these penguins, sir?” he asks the driver.

    “Honestly I’m not really sure what to do with them, officer,” says the driver. “They just showed up in my car this morning. I’d be grateful for any suggestions.”

    The cop rolls his eyes and says, “Why don’t you just take them to the zoo?”

    “The zoo. OK, thanks!” says the driver, and the cop lets him go.

    The next day, the same cop is in the same spot by the highway and sees the same convertible drive by with the same six penguins in the backseat! Again he pulls the car over.

    “I thought I told you to take those penguins to the zoo!” says the cop to the driver.

    “I did!” says the driver. “And we had so much fun, today we’re going to the movies!”

  39. Know when to split his cards in blackjack. Yes, but you’ll seldom catch me playing blackjack, because I don’t like the nasty looks I get from other players at the table when they think I’ve made a wrong play and they don’t get the cards they were supposed to.
  40. Speak to an eight-year-old so he will hear. Check.
  41. Speak to a waiter so he will hear. Check.
  42. Talk to a dog so it will hear. Check.
  43. Install: a disposal, an electronic thermostat, or a lighting fixture without asking for help. Does it have to be one of those three specific things? I’ve done several other, similar things.
  44. Ask for help. Check.
  45. Break another man’s grip on his wrist. Don’t you have to be a Vulcan or something?
  46. Tell a woman’s dress size. I thought it was universal for a man to tell a shopgirl, “She’s about your size,” when buying clothes for his gal.
  47. Recite one poem from memory. Check (including one or two that aren’t even by me).
  48. Remove a stain. Check.
  49. Say no. Yes.
  50. Fry an egg sunny-side up. Here again, I must admit to many tries and many failures. What could be easier? And while I’m pretty handy in the kitchen, I’ve never once managed a sunny-side-up egg that wasn’t brown and rubbery.
  51. Build a campfire. I’ve never been camping. (All together: “You’ve never been camping?!”) But I’ve built some decent fireplace fires in my time, even with no Duraflame logs around.
  52. Step into a job no one wants to do. Done.
  53. Sometimes, kick some ass. With rhetoric? Check.
  54. Break up a fight. The opportunity hasn’t presented itself.
  55. Point to the north at any time. I can point north most of the time, except for the first several months after moving to California.
  56. Create a play-list in which ten seemingly random songs provide a secret message to one person. Huh? This is one of the seventy-five things? (Or is this a secret message to one person?)
  57. Explain what a light-year is. Check.
  58. Avoid boredom. Check.
  59. Write a thank-you note. Check.
  60. Be brand loyal to at least one product. Check.
  61. Cook bacon. It almost cooks itself.
  62. Hold a baby. Check.
  63. Deliver a eulogy. Check.
  64. Know that Christopher Columbus was a son of a bitch. Check.
  65. Throw a baseball over-hand with some snap. Check.
  66. Throw a football with a tight spiral. My spiral could be tighter.
  67. Shoot a 12-foot jump shot reliably. Not if my life depended on it.
  68. Find his way out of the woods if lost. You keep your left hand on the wall — no, wait, you carve an X on each tree you pass — no, wait, you build a small fire and watch which way the smoke blows — no, wait you — oh screw it, I’ll just summon some friendly anthropomorphic woodland creatures by singing and they’ll help me.
  69. Tie a knot. Right over left; left over right. Got it.
  70. Shake hands. Check.
  71. Iron a shirt. Check.
  72. Stock an emergency bag for the car. Check.
  73. Caress a woman’s neck. Check.
  74. Know some birds. Personally?
  75. Negotiate a better price. Do I get extra points for having haggled over jewelry in the ancient bazaar in Jerusalem’s Old City?

Missing from the list is “be man enough to be satisfied with the skills you have,” which I am.