Category: Journal

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

I recent­ly con­nect­ed on Face­book with an old friend from high school. I offered an apol­o­gy to her for my sad teenage ways and assured her I’ve spent decades get­ting my head out of my ass. She respond­ed with

Sounds like you’re being a lit­tle hard on yourself…You always seemed to have your act togeth­er — respon­si­ble job, car, etc.

Well, I did have a job. I worked at a cor­ner phar­ma­cy through­out high school. I have no doubt that my employ­er con­sid­ered me to be gold. I was con­sci­en­tious, depend­able, and com­pe­tent. So I con­cede that.

Car? No. I had no car. I had ready access to my moth­er’s Ply­mouth sta­tion wag­on. If she knew how I drove it, I would nev­er have been allowed to dri­ve a car belong­ing to my par­ents again. I street raced con­stant­ly. I was rou­tine­ly dri­ving 50, 60, 70, 80 or more in 30 and 40 mph zones. There was a train cross­ing that I drove over fre­quent­ly that was pitched just right so I could “jump” it (I don’t know if the car left the ground or not, but it sure felt like it. Peo­ple stand­ing on the cor­ner would dis­ap­pear as I came down the street after “land­ing”). There was one late night vari­a­tion of the game of chick­en that could have eas­i­ly end­ed with Mom’s car in the lake. I was a mani­ac. How I nev­er got caught I’ll nev­er know. I am pos­i­tive I am only alive today because I was always stone cold sober. Mom and Dad usu­al­ly kept cars for four years. They trad­ed that wag­on in two think­ing it was a lemon since it con­stant­ly need­ed brake work, sus­pen­sion, etc. But I nev­er scratched it.

OK. I con­cede the point that not doing drugs or drink­ing booze would be con­strued as hav­ing my act togeth­er. I did smoke though. And I had tried mar­i­jua­na three times and found it to have no effect oth­er than to smell bad and irri­tate my throat. I tried to like drink­ing but I could not stand the taste and the one time I got drunk felt like the end of the world the next morn­ing. I was­n’t sober from lack of effort to be otherwise.

I was a ter­ri­ble stu­dent. I had no clue what I want­ed to do in life. In ear­ly grades I always got good grades with­out hav­ing to put out any effort. So when the mate­r­i­al got hard­er I had no study skills to apply to it. I rarely stud­ied. I occa­sion­al­ly read assigned read­ing. If I liked the teacher (which usu­al­ly meant if the teacher liked me) I paid atten­tion in class and if I did not like the teacher I paid lit­tle atten­tion in class (and in one case I sim­ply slept through every class the entire year while sit­ting in the front row).

Then there was my vio­lent tem­per which I seemed to have no con­trol over (though I don’t believe it ever appeared while at school, and cer­tain­ly nev­er at work, so I must have had some con­trol). For­tu­nate­ly I was the prover­bial 98 pound weak­ling so I nev­er actu­al­ly inflict­ed harm on any­one while flail­ing away with my fists. Ves­tiges of that tem­per still linger.

So while I may have always seemed to have my act togeth­er, appear­ances can be deceiving.

2001

The recent Acad­e­my Awards remind­ed me of a bit of triv­ia that I’ve had rolling around in my head for many, many years.

I have been a big fan of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey since I saw it in the the­ater in 1968 when I was 13 years old. I believe I man­aged to see it in the the­ater two or three times, an unprece­dent­ed event for me (and has rarely, if ever, hap­pened since).

In 1970 the book The Mak­ing of Kubrick­’s 2001 came out. I bought it prompt­ly. There are a cou­ple of pages devot­ed to the efforts required to make men look like ape for the open­ing sequence of the movie. At the end is a quote from Arthur C. Clarke: “2001 did not win the Acad­e­my Award for make­up because judges may not have real­ized apes were actors.” For a few decades I remem­bered that with the small addi­tion that the award for make-up went to Plan­et of the Apes. It turns out that the Best Make­up cat­e­go­ry did not exist until 1981.

But Plan­et of the Apes “was giv­en a Spe­cial Hon­orary Oscar for John Cham­bers’ ground-break­ing, out­stand­ing make­up.” Per­haps this is what Clarke was referencing.

For those who may not remem­ber what 2001’s apes looked like (the baby apes are real):

That make­up leaves the apes in Plan­et of the Apes look­ing very bad indeed.

Anoth­er bit of triv­ia that I learned from The Mak­ing of… is that “in the mid­dle of Absolute­ly Nowhere, Africa, the 2001 car ran into an oncom­ing truck and two of the pho­tog­ra­phers were injured.” I have cit­ed this in con­ver­sa­tion once or twice in my life when some­one observed that a cer­tain dri­ver was safe because there was no traf­fic where he or she was dri­ving. The car of pho­tog­ra­phers was in Africa tak­ing pics to use for the back­grounds of the ape sequence that was filmed in the stu­dio in England.

Who’s So Vain?

There seems to be a bit of renewed dis­cus­sion about just who Car­ly Simon’s song is about. Even The New Repub­lic and NPR are in on it.

It is pos­si­ble that You’re So Vain is about a par­tic­u­lar man. It is pos­si­ble that all of the details arise from one indi­vid­ual man. But I doubt it.

It is far more like­ly that the song is about many men and no man. Some of the details are like­ly made up from whole cloth, the rest from var­i­ous peo­ple that she knew or heard about. Car­ly was a beau­ti­ful woman from a bit of wealth who was mak­ing a liv­ing in the music indus­try (the song is on her third album). It is not a stretch to think that she had dat­ed more than one or two vain men

On Simon’s web­site is a com­pi­la­tion of bits of inter­views over the years on the sub­ject. In one she says:

I was at a par­ty and some­body walked in and my friend said to me “Does­n’t he look like he’s just walked on to a yacht?”. So, I thought to myself — hmmm, let me write that in my notebook.

At times she inti­mates that the song is about a com­pi­la­tion of men. At oth­er times she hints it is about one man. She seems to have a good idea of how to keep inter­est up.

Here we are in 2010. Simon has bare­ly been heard from since 1990’s Have You Seen Me Late­ly. The Wikipedia discog­ra­phy lists eight cd releas­es since then, but I don’t believe there has been a lot of suc­cess with any of them. Her lat­est release admits as much in its title: Nev­er Been Gone. She would­n’t have to tell us that if we did­n’t think she had been.

Three of those last eight cds were all cov­ers. One was an opera which I guess did so bad that she put a piece of it on the next cd, Let­ters Nev­er Sent, in hopes that the added expo­sure would help.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, Nev­er Been Gone is all cov­ers of her own ear­li­er (more suc­cess­ful) material.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, Car­ly sneaks in a whis­per to get every­one talk­ing about You’re So Vain once again after all these years.

For the record, I had always been a big fan of Car­ly Simon. But I have not been much excit­ed about her music since 1990.

Oh yeah. This is my 101st post!

The Aesthetics of Roofing

Deb­by and I went to the Fort Wayne Home and Gar­den Show today. All of the usu­al were there: sev­er­al exhibitors giv­ing away a house­ful of win­dows, plen­ty of exhibitors promis­ing a dry base­ment, lots of land­scap­ers and lawn care providers.

New for me (we haven’t been to a Home/​Garden show in a few years) was the lat­est in met­al roof­ing. Sev­er­al ven­dors were push­ing met­al roof­ing coat­ed with the same ceram­ic gran­ules that asphalt shin­gles are coat­ed with. So the high end, expen­sive met­al roof is made to look like the cheap­est avail­able roof­ing product.

By this log­ic, the next advance in sid­ing will be made to emu­late vinyl siding.

A shud­der went down my back as I typed that last sentence.

Some Thought Must Have Been Involved

The ques­tion often aris­es “What were they think­ing?!” Or, more often, in my own mind “What was I think­ing!?” In my expe­ri­ence the answer to such ques­tions (expe­cial­ly the lat­ter) is invari­ably “Think­ing? There was no think­ing involved.”

But there must have been some thought involved at the Low­er Meri­on School Dis­trict in a Philadel­phia sub­urb. They man­aged to enable them­selves to spy on the stu­dents, even when the stu­dents were at home, through the lap­top web­cams. This did not just happen.

This leads to the ques­tion “How did these peo­ple come to be in charge of edu­cat­ing our children?”

Noth­ing leads a child down the straight and nar­row like the feel­ing of not being trust­ed, right?

Evan Bayh’s Goodbye

Evan Bayh, sen­a­tor from Indi­ana, today announced that he is not going to run for re-elec­tion. Although Bayh is a Demo­c­rat, he has always been on the con­ser­v­a­tive side of the tent. The most recent exam­ple of this was the Mass­a­chu­setts spe­cial sen­ate elec­tion. The moment it was clear the Repub­li­can won the race, Bayh was mak­ing state­ments sup­port­ing the idea that health care reform was dead.

To the end (not that this nec­es­sar­i­ly con­sti­tutes the end), Bayh has been less than help­ful to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. He drops out of the race with a cou­ple of days left to file to run in the pri­ma­ry. This isn’t enough time for some­one to jump in and gath­er the nec­es­sary sig­na­tures to get on the pri­ma­ry bal­lot, so the can­di­date for the fall would be picked by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.

Except there was one per­son already out gath­er­ing sig­na­tures to run in the pri­ma­ry against Bayh. Tamyra d’Ip­poli­to, a cafe own­er in Bloom­ing­ton, claims to be 1000 sig­na­tures away from the num­ber need­ed to get on the ballot.

I’m not con­fi­dent she will make it, but it might have been bet­ter if Bayh had wait­ed a day or two. It is like­ly that Bay­h’s absence real­ly ener­gized d’Ippolito.

If Tamyra d’Ip­poli­to gets the sig­na­tures she will be the only sen­ate can­di­date on the pri­ma­ry bal­lot. So she will be the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date in the fall. Judg­ing by her web page, she has no polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence and she has an uphill bat­tle to win.

I think the Democ­ra­t’s chances for win­ning in the fall would be much high­er if the par­ty could pick the candidate.

With luck d’Ip­poli­to fails to get the sig­na­tures and it will make no dif­fer­ence. In any event, thank-you Evan Bayh.

Hat tip to TPM.

But How?!!?

From The Huff­in­g­ton Post:

For­mer Con­gress­man and 2008 Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Tom Tan­cre­do told an audi­ence on Thurs­day at the Tea Par­ty Con­ven­tion in Nashville that “peo­ple who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in Eng­lish, put a com­mit­ted social­ist ide­o­logue in the White House.”

“His name,” Tan­cre­do said, “is Barack Hus­sein Obama.”

It is inter­est­ing how all of those vot­ers who can­not spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in Eng­lish man­aged to elect the can­di­date they want­ed, isn’t it?

Cabbagetown

A few years ago (2001) Deb­by and I were in Toron­to, Cana­da. One of the things we did there was walk through Cab­bage­town, a his­toric neigh­bor­hood. A few days lat­er, when a local heard that we had been in Toron­to and had vis­it­ed Cab­bage­town his response was “You came to Toron­to and vis­it­ed our slum!”

My response to him was that if Cab­bage­town con­sti­tut­ed a Cana­di­an slum, then Cana­da was in very good shape indeed. Yes, the neigh­bor­hood did not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly high end, but a slum it was not.

This evening on HGTV’s Prop­er­ty Vir­gin pro­gram was a young man look­ing for his first house in Toron­to. Two of the hous­es he looked at were in Cab­bage­town. They were both priced over $550,000.

Geez, $550,000. In the “slum”. I guess I could nev­er afford shel­ter in Toron­to (or maybe Cab­bage­town isn’t a slum…)