The Soda Ban = Apartheid

I saw something pretty strange the other day on my bike ride home: an ad on the back of a Pepsi-Cola delivery truck depicting, in silhouette, a man triumphantly raising a cup, as an Olympian might hold his torch or a gladiator might hold up the severed head of his vanquished foe: in a pose of defiant triumph.

DON'T LET BUREAUCRATS TELL YOU WHAT SIZE BEVERAGE TO BUY

This refers, of course, to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to ban the sale of sodapop and other sweetened beverages in sizes larger than 16 ounces. in an effort to slow the avalanche of childhood obesity.

How dare he!

There has been a surprisingly strong public outcry in opposition of this move here in the city -- there was a hearing about it the other day, and the hearing was attended by activists with signs and everything. Yesterday the New York Times reported on a citywide poll that found two-thirds of city residents not in favor of the motion -- most of those quoted in the piece framed it as a civil rights issue, as in "who is the government to tell me how much soda I can drink?"

Well, a couple things about that: one, the government is not telling you how much soda you can drink. They are telling you that if you want to drink more than 16 ounces, you'll have to buy two. It is an effort at portion control, which studies I have not read have been said to show is one of the most effective tools we have against obesity.

People are not necessarily wrong to feel that this is a government overreach. It kind of is. I'm not sure I want to see it pass, even though I'm certain that I will sleep just fine at night if it does pass. I don't care at all one way or the other. What I find interesting about the debate on the matter is that a debate at all. Not because it's not debateable -- there are strong cases for and against, if you ask me. The fact that anyone cares enough about how much soda they're allowed to drink through one straw to protest it, to make a sign about it and carry that sign on the subway and then wave it around and shout when they get to where they're going is absolutely insane to me. 

Don't let the government take away our right 

to sell you sugared water at a 700% markup!

The country's economy is supposedly terrible (though I must say I would have no idea of that if I didn't read or watch the news). There is a presidential campaign happening, and its results are likely to have a substantial impact on the social contract between the government and its citizens. The nation's banks collapsed as a result of their own greed and recklessness, and no one (no one) has been prosecuted. There have been three firearm massacres in public places in the last six weeks. Government officials are showing shocking ignorance to the rights and basic functions of women's bodies.

And this is what people want to demonstrate about? This is what gets people off the sofa: ironically, the idea that they might have to get off the sofa more than once to slake their unquenchable thirst for demonstrably, obviously fattening beverages? I'm sure there's a perfect Woody Guthrie protest song for this occasion, it's just too bad poor Pete Seeger isn't here to sing it.

Having said that: Look. If you are an adult, and you feel like you need 32 ounces of Co-Cola to get through a movie -- and if you are such a person, I would be interested to hear your bathroom strategy -- I don't begrudge you that right. But this is not about you. It's about the kids. I spend a lot of time with a 5-year-old boy these days, and I have learned a thing or two (and been reminded of a thing or two) about the way kids are with sodas and sugary things in general.

Put simply: they are like junkies. Once they've had a taste of a Coke or a Sprite or a Dr. Pepper, they will lie, cheat, or steal to get more. Kids don't drink beer or booze, they drink sugar, and sugar, as my good friend Colin told me when his son was my son's age, is the gateway drug.

When she burps it smells like Freedom

This morning at breakfast we had an argument that we have a lot: My son protested that I hadn't poured enough milk in his cereal. He had not eaten any cereal yet; he hadn't even put his spoon in the bowl. He just looked at it and felt it didn't look like enough milk. I stood my ground and told him it was enough milk, and after a little more back-and-forth he went ahead and started eating. A few minutes later, after he'd eaten most of his Cheerios, I pointed out that there was still a good bit of milk left in the bowl.

Here's the point: kids don't do portion control. If they know they like it, there is no such thing as too much of it. My wife jokingly suggested that we fill a mixing bowl with Cheerios and milk, and the boy readily agreed to that plan.

And this is just plain Cheerios, a food he's lukewarm on at best. If I offered him a 64-ounce Coke, which would be more Coke than he has blood in his body, he wouldn't just take it, he'd run off with it and hide it somewhere. He gets this look in his eyes, when he gets a little taste of something sugary and knows there's more to be had in the vicinity: it's like a crazed raccoon or a dude on a (small-c) coke jag.

Really?

So if a kid walks up to the snack counter at the movies, or at the mall, or wherever, chances are that kid is going to order the biggest soda he can carry. As the rise of giant soda options seems to have coincided with the rise in childhood obesity in this country, it doesn't seem like a terrible idea to me to restrict that kid's portion to 120% of his actual stomach capacity.  If that seems an inconvenience to those of us who like our beverages big enough to have an undertow, well, buy a second one and slurp away with my gravest sympathies for this awful infringement on your personal rights.

One more time, to be clear: I don't care if this law passes. My relationship to it is the same as my relationship with the Mets: I'm not rooting for it, and I'm not rooting against it. I can see the logic of it, but that's as far as it goes. But if you are really upset about it, I would suggest that you a) closely examine your relationship with soda, because nothing sold in such bright-colored packaging should inspire such passion, and b) redirect your efforts to something a little more substantial, like getting Caprica uncanceled or making sure the fat guy doesn't win The Voice. 

Obama Staged The Moon Landing

A couple of nights ago Megadeth founder Dave Mustaine, last seen in the mortifying Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster groveling/mending fences with Lars Ulrich 20 years after being kicked out of the band for excessive debauchery -- quite a feat in a band once known to friends as "Alcoholica" -- made some controversial comments onstage with Megadeth in Singapore.

Behold the face of stupid

Megadeth is one of those bands that's been around forever but who no one seems to like. I am certainly no stranger to metal, but I don't think I've ever actually heard a Megadeth song. The only thing I know about them is that Mustaine started the band when he got kicked out of Metallica, and that they are credited with bringing political awareness to thrash metal, on the strength of their 1987 album Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?

I never gave much thought to what Mustaine's political point of view might be on that or any of his subsequent records. Turns out it is somewhere to the right of Timothy McVeigh. 

"My president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders," Mustaine told the crowd, and then went on to list the Aurora massacre, the Sikh temple massacre, and the "Fast & Furious" operation in Mexico as examples.

I have to wonder what Dave means by "staging." Does he mean that these murders were faked, like the moon landing? Was no one actually killed in Colorado? Or in the Sikh temple? Or maybe Dave means that the president arranged these massacres, like Bush arranged 9/11? Either way, it's clear who the bad guy is in these tragedies: President Barack Obama.   Obviously, both suggestions are insane and not even worth discussing (as are those about the moon landing and 9/11, I should add in case your sarcasm detector is low on batteries), but either way, Dave is voicing an extreme version of a common Right-wing opinion: Barack Obama has a radical secret anti-gun agenda all set up and ready to go the moment public opinion swings his way. The NRA has devoted itself for the last 20 years to screaming this message from the rooftops: The Democrats are coming to take your guns! It's the organizing principle of all the NRA's fundraising and voter turnout drives, and it's worked out great for the GOP. The thing is, there is no secret gun control agenda. It's a political nonstarter and it always has been. For a variety of reasons ranging from silly to totally legitimate, there's not a swing state in the Union that would go blue if serious gun reform on a national level were part of the Dems' platform, and any Democrat running for national office is smart enough to stay away from the issue completely. (Obama never mentioned it at all during the 2008 campaign.) Even if they'd like to, and I'm sure a lot of Democrats would, they will never, ever make any real move toward gun control. I feel as secure making this prediction as I would predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow and that the Knicks will be terrible again this year. How can I be so sure? First, because of the political reality I just described. Americans, particularly the ones who live outside big cities, love guns, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Second, because Obama, whose top adviser was once quoted as saying the administration should "never let a crisis go to waste," has not said a single word (A SINGLE WORD) about gun control, even after an obvious head case marched into a movie theater armed to the teeth with legally purchased weapons and opened fire. Nor did he say a word about it when a congresswoman was shot in the head in a parking lot. Or when a group of people were shot in their place of worship. If there was ever going to be a moment where the public might be inclined toward some gun control, we are right in the middle of it, and Obama has not (and will not, mark my words) made even a nod in that direction. The Democrats are generally a pretty pathetic bunch, in terms of strategy and messaging and purchasing suits that fit. But give them this: at least they focus their opposition on reality. They're worried that Republicans will try and privatize Social Security -- imagine for a moment how that would have worked out in the fall of 2008 when the banks collapsed -- because Republicans tried to privatize Social Security. Campaigned on it, published papers about it, and George W. Bush made it his first priority in his second term. Democrats worry that Republicans want to deregulate the banking industry, despite the clear result of lax regulation in the fall of 2008, because Republicans are out there campaigning on it right now. Democrats worry that Republicans will drive up the national debt, because they are promising reduced revenue without specifying any offsetting spending cuts. Democrats worry that Republicans want to start a war in Iran because they can't stop talking about it, and because they just did it in Iraq ten years ago. On the other hand, all of Republicans' worries about what Democrats want to do seem to be based on guesses and extrapolations and their imaginations and their nightmares, and are frequently in direct contradiction to their actual deeds: Obama's a Socialist! (A Socialist who saved the largest Capitalist enterprise in the history of this nation, General Motors.) He hates bankers and wants to put them out of business! (Prosecutions against the executives responsible for the banking crisis: zero.) He wants the Government to take over health care! (But he still bent over backward to keep the for-profit insurance model in place.) He wants to kill your grandma! He wants to give full amnesty to illegal immigrants! He wants to, he wants to, he wants to. Dear Republicans: There are genuine and substantive differences between your positions and those of the Democrats. They do not require embroidery or embellishment. For example: given the required majorities, the Democrats will raise upper-bracket tax rates from 36% to 39%. We know this because a) they've said so repeatedly and b) they've done it before (1992-2000, which we all remember as the worst economic period of the last... wait, let me check my dates.). Please do us all the favor of focusing your campaigns and your rhetoric and your misspelled signs on those real differences, so that we might have intelligent and informed debates on the issues and, with a little luck, perseverance, and goodwill, perhaps form a more perfect union. Or you can just keep making shit up. Whatever.

Paging Dr. Google

I could have gone to pieces when my wife told me she has Parkinson's Disease. But I feel that with things like this, it's best not to overreact. To stay calm, because it's what she needs from me. It won't do either of us any good if we're both panicking. I could get emotional, I could start railing at the fates, but I've learned that it's best to stay calm when talking one's spouse out of her self-diagnosis.

Because she doesn't have Parkinson's Disease. She has a runny nose and a sore back and a headache. But thanks to the wonders of Google, she can search on those symptoms and get a whole array of possibilities. And wouldn't you know, she tends to skip right over the ones like "common cold" and "24-hour flu" and spend the next 48 hours agonizing between it being Hepatitis or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

If, as the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, it seems in the Internet era that a lot of it is even worse. Certainly, for certain things, it's great to be able to tap into the giant hive mind that is the Internet and apply its accrued wisdom. Computer problems are the best example I can think of. I can't remember the last time I called tech support, or took my computer somewhere to fix it; I just Google whatever it's doing (or not doing), and pretty soon I've solved my problem. I rewired my whole house armed only with a pair of pliers, a quart of screw-on wire couplers, and my computer. I'm sure if I was one to work on my own car, the Internet would be an invaluable resource.

But working on cars and computers, even your own, is not the same thing as trying to figure out what's wrong with your own body. No matter how much you love your car, it's still possible -- difficult, maybe, but still possible -- to take a step back and think rationally about it. But, in the absence of the ten-year medical education and real-world experience that doctors bring to bear in an exam, and burdened instead with the natural anxiety and fear and emotion that are such an unfortunate part of the human condition, the accumulated medical learning of the last thousand years is reduced to a demented Rorschach test, where our worst mortal worries can flower into awful purple-thorned tentacles choking off all our better logical impulses.

Thus, when my wife gets a little sweaty under the blankets at night from time to time, the likely and relatively benign diagnoses of hypoglycemia, or "idiopathic hyperhidrosis" (literally, sweating for no reason) -- are immediately and automatically overlooked in favor of the much scarier early menopause. (The conception of our son put this particular worry to rest -- for a while, anyway.)

When she has a short muscle spasm, it's not just a cramp, or fatigue, or restless leg syndrome; not when Lou Gehrig's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis are at the bottom of the page. When she gets a canker sore, it's obviously Herpes, even though she's been with me for 14 years and I don't have Herpes.

There's a wide array of these medical websites, chock-full of terrifying information for the so inclined, and they are of course full of warnings and disclaimers;  Each listing of possible causes of a given symptom is prefaced by the warning that before any diagnosis can be made, a full accounting of a person's age, medical history, and family history must be analyzed by a doctor. But those warnings are like the "please drink responsibly" in tiny print at the bottom of a beer commercial depicting 400 people bouncing on a roof to terrible music and in no way drinking responsibly: that is to say, a pro forma indemnification, there only to be ignored. In the heat of a fevered (fever being the surest sign of bacterial meningitis, by the way) late-night Google session to determine the cause of one's diarrhea, cooler heads that might point to any number of innocuous causes are hard to come by -- likelier is the conclusion that acute cirrhosis of the liver has set in, and death is imminent.

I'm not exactly innocent here -- I've certainly been known to self-diagnose via Google. But where my wife will take the opportunity to confirm her worst fears (or in many cases, welcome some brand-new ones), I tend to go the other way: I've been having a lot of head rushes when I get up lately -- actually fainted a couple of times, in fact -- and when I Googled that problem I passed by "Addison's Disease" and "Multiple System Atrophy" and decided "Low Blood Pressure" must be the problem, because it's benign and there's no need to go to the doctor. Case closed!

I hope this doesn't come off as an attack on my wife, because I don't think this tendency of hers is at all unusual -- my it's-probably-nothing approach is probably the less common of the two. It's more a measure of how supremely fucked the healthcare system is in this country: Rather than go to a doctor, who in all but a few legitimately awful cases would dispel their patients' fears and send them on their way with an Advil and a few minutes' free therapy, we're all forced to try and figure this shit out ourselves. It seems better than the alternative, which is to try and navigate the primary care physician out of network referral deductible maze that is the modern HMO.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm having a hard time concentrating on writing this -- I just Googled "loss of concentration" and in only two clicks I determined that I'm in the midst of a congestive heart failure, so I'm going to sign off and try and dash off a living will real quick.

Snoop Dogg's New Record Is A Name-Changer

Snoop Doggy Dogg
Snoop Dogg
Snoop Lion

This week I saw one of the most -- I don't want to say "unbelievable" in a world where a sentient tetherball named Snooki gets paid seven figures to wobble drunkenly around the boardwalk in lucite heels, so let's go with "interesting" -- one of the most interesting pop culture developments in a few minutes: Snoop Dogg has changed his name again.

His first name change was in 1998, when, once again following the example of John Cougar Mellencamp (as has always been his wont), Snoop dropped the frivolous "Doggy" to go with the much more upright "Snoop Dogg." Now he's switched again to "Snoop Lion," which is of course a nod to his rich Jamaican heritage, which dates back to last February, when he went there to record an album.

Jumping right over the weird incongruity of putting the words "Snoop" and "Lion" together -- a dissonance on par with "Los Angeles Lakers" and "Utah Jazz" -- everybody went right to a variation on the same joke: "I'm not sure I want to upgrade to Snoop Lion." I love operating system-based comedy!  

But performers change their names all the time these days. Puff Daddy's done it like half a dozen times, and so has Roseanne. Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and NFL wideout Chad Johnson changed his to Chad Ochocinco (Spanish for Eight Five, his jersey number, because he's a genius) and they both changed them back. And I don't think any list of silly name changes would be complete without Metta World Peace, ironically the worst cheap-shot thug in the NBA.

But none of them did what Snoop is doing, which is fundamentally changing what he does. Snoop has been doing rap -- specifically, guns/pimps/hos/Crips/Bloods West Coast gangsta rap -- since 1992, when his guest verses on Dr. Dre's The Chronic were the obvious highlight of an instant classic. His solo debut, Doggystyle, was released a year later, and is to this day one of the five best hip-hop albums ever made (for my money), if not the best. (I'm partial to the G-Funk, what can I say.)

We can argue about which is the best rap album ever -- I'm biased to the classics of the early '90s myself -- but I would contend that Snoop is the best rapper ever. His voice is a totally distinctive instrument, like Coltrane's or Eddie Van Halen's.  It only takes one word to know who you're hearing. He lays way back on the beat, which makes everything way funkier (it's no accident that Doggystyle is constructed almost entirely from P-Funk samples). And, above all, he makes it seem so, so easy. He never raises his voice, he never runs out of breath, and he never falls off the beat. There are a lot of great talent out there, but if there's a better rapper than Snoop out there, I haven't heard him. I concede, of course, that without a Dr. Dre-level producer, his records aren't that great. I haven't even heard one in years. Has he had a hit since "Drop It Like It's Hot?" What was that, like '96? (And by the way, why is "Drop It Like It's Hot" the only Snoop song club DJs ever play when it's like the eleventh best Snoop song?) Anyway, yeah, his records have been spotty since Tha Doggfather, but I'd still insist that in terms of pure microphone talent, Snoop is in a class by himself. Which is why it's so surprising that he wants to give it all up and be, of all things, a reggae artist. Yes, Snoop went to Jamaica to record his 12th rap record, but he quickly went native, and (he says) was "called by the spirit" to abandon his familiar idiom, grow some dreadlocks, smoke a massive amount of Mother Nature (though to be fair, he would have done that anyway) and make a dub reggae album. Other than Dee Dee quitting the Ramones to make the worst rap record ever, or Garth Brooks turning into Chris Gaines and making the worst emo-soft rock record ever, I can't think of any analogue to this in the music world. But I can think of one in the sports world. In 1993, after his third consecutive NBA title, and third consecutive Finals MVP, Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls, claiming that he'd lost his motivation, having reached the pinnacle of his career and having nothing left to prove. At his press conference announcing this new reggae album, Reincarnation, Snoop said much the same thing: "Rap is not a challenge to me. With no disrespect to other rappers, but they can't fuck with me in rap ... I've won every accolade you can get." These two press conferences were exactly the same, except that Snoop's smelled like a kennel that only boarded skunks.

When Jordan quit, rather than disappearing into the world of million-dollar golf skins games like everyone expected, he surprised everyone by signing a minor-league baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox and playing a season with their farm team, the Birmingham Barons. He didn't change his name, but he traded his signature number 23 for 45. Everyone thought he'd fall on his face, and while he didn't make the majors or anything, he did put in a respectable showing before returning to the NBA a year and a half later, where he promptly won three more titles, three more Finals MVPs, and two more league MVPs. One could argue (and many did) that the time away from "the game of basketball" (as Jordan insisted on calling it at all times) refreshed his love of the game and was essential to the Bulls' second three-peat.   So maybe that's what's happening with Snoop. Let's face it, Snoop is not the angry, downtrodden 22-year-old Crip that took over the rap game with "Gin and Juice" and "What's My Name." Dude has been a kajillionaire for almost 20 years now. He's neither pimping, nor strapped. If you step to him, his likeliest reaction is to step back quickly to get out of the way of his eleven bodyguards, who will soon teach you not to step to Snoop. (They may or may not teach you how to Dougie. See kids? I'm hip!) The point is this: rap is an angry young man's game, and despite his peerless microphone skills, Snoop is definitely not that. So let him go play baseball for a while. He's not so bad at it: his singsongy tenor was always somewhere between rapping and crooning anyway, and it's pretty well suited for this music. He's even kind of selling the Jamaican accent. And I would argue that this new single has the best production (if not the best material) of any record he's done since he parted ways with Dre. Dude wants to mellow out and smoke tons of weed and sing (sing) about peace and love and Jah? Who could possibly begrudge him that? More than likely though, he'll come back and headline some huge package tour with Ice Cube and Ice-T and the Tupac hologram and the Biggie hologram and the Eazy-E hologram in a couple of years. Maybe he'll even reunite with Dr. Dre for another record (if Van Halen can get back together, absolutely nothing is impossible). You can't make a big comeback if you don't leave. Let's just make sure there's no comeback after that. Nobody wants to see Snoop playing for the Washington Wizards.

Anyway, here's Snoop's new reggae single. Am I completely crazy, or is it not too bad? 

It's My Narcoleptic Piano Teacher's Fault

My kid is starting kindergarten in the fall, and his new school has a menu of options for his extracurricular afterschool activities. We plan to enroll him in the afterschool program, as gainful employment precludes us from picking him up at 3pm. Martial arts and art are among the options, and as the boy has the energy to power Doc Brown's Delorean, and spends most of his sitting time drawing pictures of ninjas (actually ninjas, dragons, disemboweled supervillains, dinosaurs, skulls, skeletons, and Spider-Man), it seems martial arts and art are the obvious way to go.

One of his other options is music, specifically Suzuki Piano. I have no idea what the difference is between a Suzuki piano lesson and a regular piano lesson, but I'm a little leery of starting him on music lessons so young, particularly with a teacher at his school.

That seems counterintuitive even to me, because music has been my biggest hobby (and "hobby" doesn't feel like a strong enough word, but let's face it: my lifetime music earnings are south of a grand) since I was a teenager. I've played in a lot of bands, and in most cases I was the least gifted musician in the room. I got kicked out of bands for that very reason. But I stuck to it, and I got better, but one thing hasn't changed: in a room full of rehearsing musicians, figuring out how to play this piece or that, I always feel like a kid who flunked freshman algebra sitting in on an astrophysics debate.

That's because I can't read music off the page, I only know the names of about eight chords (the easy ones), I don't know what 5ths or 3rds are, I'm totally out to sea when musicians talk music. I'm able to keep in good musical company because I have good ears, and can figure things out myself given an extra moment or two, but that's no substitute in a pinch for just being able to play a diminished seventh when asked.

I taught myself to play guitar staring when I was 14, but I didn't take lessons. I resolutely refused them (not that anyone was begging me), and took a kind of weird pride in the fact that I'd taught myself, aided only by a chord chart and a stack of Guitar World tablature magazines. I got pretty good, but it took me probably three times as long as it would have if I'd just taken a couple of lessons.

I'd taken music lessons before, starting in the second grade. One of my best friends in the neighborhood let it be known that he was taking piano lessons from our second-grade teacher, Mrs. Waln, after school a couple days a week. Mrs. Waln would send our class home, and then come over to his house an hour after school and teach him beginning piano for 45 minutes. I was at this friend's house, and he played something on the family piano well enough that I was impressed, and immediately decided this was a skill I wanted. I told my mom about it and before I knew it, I too was signed up for afterschool piano lessons with Mrs. Waln.

I'm trying to think how to describe Mrs. Waln to you. She seemed to my 7-year-old eyes to be about 150, but in hindsight I'm going to say she was around 60, maybe 70. She walked kind of hunched over, she wore a very '70s pair of glasses on a ball chain around her neck, and she dressed like the Church Lady. If present-day Vicki Lawrence were to put on her old "Mama's Family" wardrobe (and why doesn't she? She's finally the same age as the character!), she'd look like Mrs. Waln.

With a deep sigh, she'd come in when I answered the doorbell, nearly dragging a big flowered tote bag, full of beginning piano books, lesson plans, teachers' textbooks, and unchecked tests. That's just what I could see -- the bag was vast, and clearly contained multitudes. I'd open the piano bench and pull out whatever book we were working from at the time, put it on the rack, and we'd sit down, she on the right, me on the left.

She taught me the names of the notes, that the black keys were the sharps and flats, and how to read basic sheet music for piano. Before long, I was playing songs, sight-reading (that's what it's called when you play something as you're reading it) simple traditional songs from the simple traditional piano books she'd brought.

I was excited to learn how to play piano, and I caught on pretty quickly. I practiced and I got pretty good, or at least I thought so at the time. I'm trying to remember how long I took lessons with Mrs. Waln for, because though I want to say it was a short time, it had to have been at least a couple of years, considering how much I learned.

In any case, however long it was it was long enough that I came to dread each lesson with Mrs. Waln. It wasn't that she was mean, or impatient, or belittling, or anything like that. She was just too old. Maybe not too old, but too tired. And who could blame her? She was an over-60 (maybe over 70) woman who just spent the day in a roomful of 7-year-olds. Of course she was tired.

But it did not make for a fun piano lesson. My lasting memories of these sessions consist of two things. One: in mid-lesson she could always be counted on to produce a sandwich bag (the non-Ziploc kind with the foldy pouch) full of damp-looking Nilla wafers, which she would chew slowly with her mouth open while I struggled through "Camptown Races." I can't be certain that they were Nilla wafers, of course, as I never saw any packaging other than the sandwich bag, but when she chewed them right next to my face as we shared a piano bench, they sure smelled like Nilla wafers (or their generic supermarket equivalent).

And two: her method of teaching, once I was good enough to sight-read something, was to sit there silently while I played, and write notes in the margins of the sheet music. If I had trouble with a particular bit she'd write "faster" next to it, and if I did something well she'd write "good." These notes weren't much good for later practice, but they were a good way to let me know how I was doing without stopping me or distracting me by talking.

But after a certain point, the lack of pep in her step advanced to full-on narcolepsy, and she would fall asleep, sitting up next to me on the piano bench as I played. Her felt-tip pen was as always unsheathed and resting at the margin of the sheet music, but as she dozed it would ever so slowly start to droop, so before long all my piano books were full of squiggly lines in the margins, where Mrs. Waln's hand had dragged down the page as the slipped deeper and deeper into sleep. Her tongue would always just barely stick out, too, and I distinctly recall her once drooling on Middle C. 

These lessons were the first time I was confronted with true human frailty, with the reality of aging, with the decay of the body, the loss of vigor and the onset of fatigue. It was the first time I realized I wouldn't be young and spry and able to stay awake through a piano lesson forever. It was the first time I saw an adult drool. It was a far deeper gaze into the existential abyss than my young mind was ready to process. Also, it got boring, because I couldn't learn anything from someone who was asleep.
In any case, the experience with Mrs. Waln turned me off the idea of taking music lessons, so when I got interested in guitar a few years later I was determined to learn on my own, not to bring some weird stranger and their personal habits/medical conditions into it. And even though it took me forever and I'm still totally out to sea when I try to play with more learned musicians, it's more or less worked out. So even though I'd like to see my son get all the same joy from playing music that I have, I don't think we'll be signing up for afterschool piano lessons with a teacher from his school. At least not without a more rigorous interview process than my folks put Mrs. Waln through.

When Collect Calling Ruled The Airwaves

I was watching the basketball game the other night, and during one of the many commercial breaks, I couldn't help noticing how many ads there were for various cell phone data plans, trumpeting higher speeds, and the relative superiority of their networks, and on and on and on... THIS one doesn't lock you into a contract! THAT one offers unlimited text! This OTHER one has the fastest data network in the country! This one HERE says it's the most reliable!

So many phones, so many carriers, so many data plans, so much technical jargon to absorb! It's enough to make a person of a certain age long for the simpler days when there were no such commercials, because cell phones were strictly for rich people and assholes, and the rest of us were forced to use olde-tymey phones with cords and no touchscreens that didn't vibrate or send text messages or provide turn-by-turn directions to restaurants it recommended itself.

Of course, the networks did not just show test patterns before cell phone commercials came along. Just as cell phones made landlines obsolete, cell phone commercials displaced the many, many commercials for long-distance and collect-calling plans, which by my scientific estimate accounted in the '90s or 96.9% of all commercials.

For a long time, 1-800-COLLECT occupied this space unchallenged, trumpeting that you could "Save up to 44%!" on collect calls. Eventually, the slogan was dumbed down to "Save a buck or two!" but I would argue that to most lazy motivationally challenged Americans, a buck or two is not worth all the trouble of dialing eleven extra digits, particularly if you're not the one saving the buck or two.

Then 1-800-CALL ATT came along to contest 1-800-COLLECT's hoarding of the ultra-lucrative collect calling market. "Know the code!" was their slogan, but since "COLLECT" is a lot easier code to know than "CALL ATT," they switched to "Dial down the center!," because CALL ATT dials as 225-5288, and 2, 5, and 8 are in the middle of the three-column keypad on olde-tymey phones.

It wasn't too long after that that long-distance calling options started popping up: "Dial 10-10-220 before the number you're calling! Calls up to 20 minutes are only 99 cents!" Then there was 10-10-321, and 10-10-900, and on and on, a numeral soup of calling options promising to save us money on our long-distance calls. This was after Sprint and MCI had been advertising reduced-rate long-distance calling for years, so having to dial a seven-digit prefix before dialing the actual number (we used to actually dial entire phone numbers every time we made a phone call, sometimes on *gasp* rotary phones) seemed shady, especially when the extra seven digits didn't spell anything clever.

You see, kids, at one time phone bills were divided into local and long-distance calls, and long-distance calls were very spendy. A phone bill could be a source of enormous contention in shared households. Roommates who otherwise got along famously would come to blows over the culprit in a 25-minute mystery call to Wilmington, Delaware or wherever. And God forbid a 976 number (usually a phone sex service and always four times the normal long-distance rate) turned up on one of those phone bills -- someone might have to move out.

In my freshman year of college, I completely cut off contact with a close friend I'd made a few months prior because I discovered he'd used my dorm-room phone to call home, to call his girlfriend, to call God knows who, and ran my bill up over $100. (That's 1991 college freshman dollars.) Never talked to him again. Long distance calls were a precious commodity is what I'm saying.

Now that we can all call Kandahar or Melbourne or Walla Walla, Washington for the same price on our cell phones, this all seems quaint, but even at the time I wondered who was making so many collect calls that it should be the most hotly contested sliver of commerce in television advertising. I don't think I made more than two collect calls in my whole life -- it seemed to be something you only did in emergencies, like if your car broke down on the highway and you didn't have change for the pay phone, or you got thrown in jail, or you were being chased by wolves and fed them your wallet in hopes it might distract them long enough to close the phone-booth door. (We used to have something called a "phone booth.") Under those kind of circumstances, saving up to (the "up to" obviously meaning "less than") 44% is not a high priority, particularly not for a two-minute call.

10-10-220 was not a collect call service, just a long-distance service, and it trumpeted that all calls up to 20 minutes were only 99 cents. Isn't that adorable, and weird to think about? Before text messages, people used to talk on the phone!  And 20-minute-plus phone calls were common enough to be mentioned in commercials! What did they talk about? I only remember this period dimly, and I've long been told that I have a very brusque, let's-get-this-over-with manner on my own phone calls, so I can only speculate. Did they talk about their feelings? Their hopes? Their dreams? The Iran-Contra scandal? Who shot J.R.?  I don't think my last 50 phone calls would add up to 20 minutes.

Weirdly, these services seemed to be a unique draw for celebrity endorsements, even in the '90s, when the grunge generation disdained advertising and equated it to selling out. I recall Jay Leno taking a lot of flack for appearing in a bunch of Doritos commercials right after he got the Tonight show. What does he need the money for? Could there be anything America needs less than more snacks? That kind of thing.

Bill Hicks was not quite a mainstream act when he recorded this rant, and I think the extremity of his position on the issue may have been part of the reason for that, but it does reflect a growing sensitivity in the culture at the time to artists *air quotes*selling out*air quotes,* and a disdain in young people for the ones who did it in the crassest form: by appearing in a commercial on TV. You do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call. All that seems to have gone out the window when 1-800-COLLECT, or 1-800-CALL ATT, or 10-10-220 came calling, though. There are some surprising, (and some not so surprising) names that sullied themselves with 1-800-COLLECT: Phil Hartman and Chris Rock. This one kind of breaks my heart. Phil Hartman was, in my opinion, the single most talented cast member ever on Saturday Night Live. NewsRadio was the most underrated sitcom of the '90s, and there should be a statue of him in the lobby wherever they do The Simpsons; even if he were still alive and celebrating his 15th year as Ronald McDonald's TV chauffeur, he's got a free pass from me. All Chris Rock does is stick his head out the window to goose the star power up a notch; I can't decide if that's better or worse. Buffy and Angel. In character! Gross! It undermines Joss Whedon's whole achievement and taints everything he's done since including the highest-grossing movie ever! They sure did make a handsome couple, though. The Simpsons. Seems shocking until you remember that Bart was the Butterfinger spokesman for quite a while there. And he had a video on MTV. And there was almost nothing you couldn't buy with his face on it if you were so inclined. Right in the midst of their prime (seasons 3-7, obviously)! Mr. T. Not shocking, not disappointing. I'm sure Mr. T made an uncomfortably heartfelt pitch to be the permanent 1-800-COLLECT spokesman, and I would pay $1,000 for video of that pitch. $1,200 if it was in 3D. Ed O'Neill. He was still on Married... With Children at the time, which makes it very difficult to suspend disbelief and accept him as an officer in the Phone Patrol. Can't really get mad at someone from Married... With Children for cashing in, though. If memory serves, 1-800-COLLECT finally found its Maytag Repairman, its Ronald McDonald, in the person of Alyssa Milano's unforgettable character Eva Savealot. She was a private eye or something, and knew how to make third-party long-distance calling just sexy enough to stay on daytime TV.   1-800-CALL ATT's roster is a little less impressive: Paul Reiser, David Arquette, and a bunch a faceless young slackers. I did find this one interesting, though, because the subtext of the whole ad is the whole don't-tell-me-what-to-do '90s anti-consumerist ethic I mentioned earlier, under a totally not dated slathering of Extreme Sports! culture: The kicker came when I realized the voiceover was by none other than Janeane Garofalo, the poster girl for the whole don't be a sellout, be suspicious of corporatism in all its forms, ethos. "I'm not trying to be bossy," she says nonthreateningly, before closing with a singsongy "but if you use 1-800-CALL ATT you'll save some money!" Familiar as I am with her work -- I even nursed a little crush on her at the time -- I found this one surprising. I'm sure she got paid well and I'm sure at the time she needed the money, and I have no axe to grind with her, but still: weird, huh? 10-10-220's lineup had a couple of eyebrow-raising names on its call sheet: Dennis Miller. This was the first moment I realized one of my favorite comedians (thanks entirely to his run as "Weekend Update" anchor) might not be that cool. Time would prove those suspicions righter than I could have imagined. Christopher Lloyd. Since he's driving a cab, we can agree that this is a toned-down reprise of Reverend Jim Ignitowski, right? Like post-rehab Jim? That's kind of sad. Like when Richard Dreyfuss reprised his character from Jaws in Piranha 3D and got eaten in the first five minues. (Note: This is not a joke, it really happened.) It's one thing to do a commercial, but isn't it worse to drag your beloved character into it? (See also: Buffy and Angel.) George Carlin. This one is so heartbreaking it actually caused a stir at the time, and Carlin even talked about it onstage. Maybe he thought -- maybe they all thought -- who cares, it's an easy paycheck. Maybe he rationalized it, like it's not like this is some kind of Earth-raping capitalist conspiracy, it's one company buying telecom access from another and selling it at their own price -- who's getting hurt? What's the harm? Whatever they thought, it turns out they were right, or at least, not so wrong, because nobody remembers any of these commercials now, probably because they were for an industry that's vanished entirely. And anyway, they were ahead of the curve, Ms. Garofalo in particular, because uncredited celebrity voiceovers are all the rage in TV commercials right now. They think I don't hear them, but I do!

Keeping Track Of Your Keys

My wife is smart, a great mother, she's easy on the eyes, fun to hang out with, she makes me laugh, and we agree on most matters, be they political, personal, or domestic (other than interior design, where I have learned to just keep my mouth shut). Fourteen years into our relationship, I genuinely enjoy her company and look forward to our evenings together (to the extent that she can stay awake for them). I love her with all my heart and more all the time. 


She does have this one habit that gets on my nerves, though. Actually it's the absence of a habit, and I am taking the unusual step of airing this matter in public in case any of my vast audience suffers from the same problem, because it so happens that I have an easy solution.

It starts with this noise. She makes it a few times a week. It's kind of like an "Uggggh!" of exasperation, but repetition has attuned me to a particular timbre that says without words or syntax exactly what's going on: she can't find her phone. Or, she can't find her keys. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both.

The noise is always heard at critical moments, when she's about to head out the door somewhere, and thus needs her phone and keys. We've all been there, and it's maddening to have your coat on and the backpack packed and realize you have to stoop around the house looking for something seemingly designed to be invisible among household flotsam. That disappointment is closely followed by a semi-frantic search through the house, though I must say that whatever may be going on inside of her emotionally at these moments, she keeps to herself -- I assume because she doesn't want me to know, or at least she doesn't want to hear what I have to say, about her predicament.

But she doesn't have to say anything -- the noise says it all, and I can hear it from the other end of the house, even when she does it quietly. And it's happened often enough that I have learned to make a mental note whenever I see her keys or her phone in a strange unusual unconventional place like the top of the refrigerator, or the windowsill in our son's room, or in the medicine cabinet, or on the toilet tank; when I hear the noise, I can gently ask if she's looking for her keys, and then point her in the right direction.

I'm not suggesting that I am any more intelligent or together than my wife. I am my own very special kind of mess, just not this kind. I'm not suggesting that losing her keys so frequently is a symptom of any kind of mental deficiency on her part. I mean, it's a symptom, but it doesn't even make her top ten. (Kidding! I love you so much honey!) It is only because I have better habits, habits I developed when I got tired of losing my keys.

And my habits are these: my keys are on a keychain with a little squeezy hook that I put on the belt loop nearest my right hip. I then tuck the keys into the pocket nearest that belt loop to prevent jingling. When I come home, I pull the key out of the front door and put the ring in the exact same place, every single day. That way I know exactly where to look for them. I slightly adapted this method for my phone -- when I put my phone down (to the extent that I ever put it down, embarrassingly rare) I hook it up to the charger, whether it needs charging or not. That way I can avoid resorting to my wife's method of lost phone retrieval, which is to find another phone (mine) and call her own phone and then play Marco Polo with it while it rings until she finds it in the dog food bag.

My wallet, my sunglasses, my cocaine grinder -- everything I carry every day has a place where it lives when it's not in my pocket, and it saves me a lot of stress. I get stressed out watching my poor wife go through it, and though I have tried to help her adapt to my proven methods, she either can't, doesn't want to, or (most likely) would rather die than adapt to any method of my devising. I've gradually come to understand that she's just not wired that way.

To make it easier on both of us, I drilled a couple of holes in the wall directly opposite our front door and hung up a couple of fancy old-looking antique hooks she found somewhere.  The hooks were small, too small to put much of anything on them but a set of keys and a pair of sunglasses, and mine can be found anytime I'm at home on the hook on the left. The hook on the right holds my wife's keys about 50% of the time -- sometimes she hangs her purse on it, sometimes she hangs our son's coat on it. Sometimes I come home and she's got a purse on her hook and another purse on my hook, and after I take a deep breath and refrain from attacking her with the extra purse, I'll go to the bathroom and notice her keys in the shower soap dish. She doesn't have a system is what I'm saying.

My results speak for themselves, but I'd be lying if I said it was perfect. Every once in a while I'll slip up and misplace my wallet or my keys -- dragging my bike through the door, I've left my keys in the front door from time to time, and my wallet falls out of my pants pocket and under the bed when I'm undressing on occasion -- and I'm so certain that I can't possibly have put them anywhere but where they're supposed to be, I'll stalk around the house looking for them silently cursing my wife, who's obviously LYING when she says she hasn't seen them, and probably hid them just to MESS WITH ME because she's JEALOUS of my system that she's just too STUBBORN to adopt herself. I know better than to suggest any of these things to her directly, or to say them out loud, because I know these thoughts are wholly inappropriate and misguided at best, but they are there.

This kind of thing is the reason that I look back with such fondness on the brief period in my early 20's when I lived alone in a studio apartment. I wouldn't trade living with my wife and son for anything, but when you live alone, there's nobody to get mad at when you come home and find unwashed dishes in the sink, or a mess in the living room, or can't find the TV remote or your phone or your keys. When you live alone, you need only look in the mirror to know how things got the way they are in your domicile, and the total removal of even the potential for blaming someone else is more than a little liberating -- even more liberating than the usually false hope that someone you live with is directly responsible for your not having your act together.

This may come off as one big knock on my wife, but as I said I am my own special kind of mess so in the interest of fair play, I admit that she is justifiably driven insane by how I park our car -- more specifically, my failure to tell her where I parked it.

When I come home from my bar shifts, around 5am, I'm tired. After working all day at my day job, then coming home for a couple hours to kiss my family goodnight, then heading out to work on my feet all night, I've been up for about 21 hours, so I'm gibberish-talking, eyes-closing-involuntarily, hallucinatingly tired, so when I get home I park our car in whatever space I can find, with only perfunctory regard to whether it will have to be moved for street cleaning a few hours later. I get lucky a lot more often than you might think, but a lot of times I leave it in a bad spot.

So whether it needs to be moved, or whether my wife just needs it in the morning while I'm sleeping off the shift, it is up to me to let her know where it is, and I have not always been as diligent with that as I should. More times than either of us would probably care to remember, she has been forced to wake me up only a couple of hours after I went to sleep and ask me where the car is, and then stands there for a couple of minutes, with our boy in tow, both with their coats on, while I try to blinkingly remember where I parked it. I must say my wife deserves extra credit for not cutting my throat with her car keys during these moments.

I came up with an invention that I thought would solve this problem, and in theory it should have: a map of our neighborhood glued to a metal plate, with a magnet to indicate where the car is and another to indicate whether and when it needs to be moved in the morning. But even more maddeningly from my wife's point of view, I have seldom remembered to use it in those bleary after-work moments when I first get home from the bar. I've fantasized about creating an iPhone app that would serve the same function, with the information shared between our two phones automatically, but what can I say, I don't know how to create iPhone apps. Maybe you can help me with that, dear reader -- any app geniuses reading this thing?

Speaking of iPhones and inventions, I did have another idea for an invention that I strongly felt would be a smash, and ties into the lost phone/lost wallet problem: an iPhone case with a little door on the back where you can store your ID and debit card. With this, you wouldn't need a wallet, you'd dramatically lighten the load in your pockets, and you'd have a GPS attached to your ID and debit card. Or at least you'd be able to find them by grabbing your husband's phone and playing Marco Polo. 

Alas, a few weeks ago I went to a family reunion in Missouri and found that my sister-in-law has exactly such an iPhone case. Beaten to the punch! I guess I'll have to go back to my other Million Dollar Idea: superhero wetsuits for surfers. (Patent pending.)