I dislike silence -- too much quiet and I start to listen to myself think, and nothing good ever comes of that.
So mostly I have the radio on in the background, but sometimes I'll put on Netflix and play TV shows that I liked -- focusing on TV shows that don't require that I watch them too closely, that rely on language more than visuals for their humor.
I've found that most TV can be listened to without losing much in the translation -- so much so that I probably would have liked living in the old days of radio, except then I wouldn't be able to occasionally stop working on suing banks and petting zoos (true story, in a way) and watch the shows as a break, and if I didn't do that I wouldn't have ended up watching the deposition scenes from the episode of Better Off Ted when the company gets sued for inventing a perfume that attracts angry wasps:
Veronica: Remember that perfume your team developed about a year ago? In 3 out of
5,000 women, it reacts with their body chemistry and attracts hornets
who want to mate with them.
Ted: And when the hornets realize they've been deceived, do they just laugh it off?
Veronica: If by "laugh" you mean sting over and over again in endless
waves of fury, then yes, they have a wonderful sense of humor.
And if I hadn't watched that part (which was work-related because if you think about it, watching a sitcom deposition is pretty much identical to what I actually do for a living) I wouldn't have noticed the Hot Extra, Janet Varney:
Janet, in the Better Off Ted episode, plays a lawyer representing the wasp victims, and she has the better of the three lawyers who appear in that scene. Credited just as lawyer, she has more lines than male lawyer, and the third lawyer, who in the show sits to the right of the Veridian witnesses, doesn't have any lines.
I wonder how much you get paid to sit at a conference table and frown at the show's stars in a lawyerly fashion? Because I feel like that's a career move I want to make.
My favorite roll Janet's ever played? Attractive Woman Driver, in Drillbit Taylor.
Do all of these things have to be about a letter? Fine: this is J.
Right now, unbeknownst to you, your every need is being prepared to be met. Did that sentence make any sense? Probably not. But let it go! We've got more important things to talk about, like things regular people invented.
Letting regular people invent stuff is all the rage right now, and why not? When we leave inventing up to the geniuses like Leonardo Da Vinci they do stuff like leave themselves little post-it notes about how they have to remember to measure the dead using their finger as a point of reference. Good enough reason to celebrate the common man, as Always The Bridesmaid Rick Santorum proposed we do by never ever educating people ever.
You may remember a while back (about a year ago) I mentioned a new website called "Quirky" which for $10 would take your brilliant idea for an ergonomic broom and crush it into tiny pieces (the idea, not the broom) and then sprinkle those tiny pieces over the sad, slumped shape of your dreams of being a rich millionaire inventor.
Not that I'm speaking from personal experience.
(That broom was a billion dollar idea, dang it!)
Quirky, possibly because of the name, wasn't populist enough for you people, though -- too many high-falutin' inventions dealing with wine and iPods, is my guess-- and so inventing, or, inventin', as it might be, has been dropped another level of sophistication with Wal-Mart's "Get It On The Shelf" campaign.
As a diehard fan of Wal-Mart, I will tell you that this is not an ad for them at all; I'm not (unlike most opinions I put on this site) being paid for telling you about this, beyond the satisfaction I get from making fun of people who think that it's oh so simple to invent something. It's not. We live in a world where I will probably never realize my dream of having an "In the Cupboard Dishwasher," no matter how much sense that makes, because even though I have the ideas I do not have what experts refer to as "practical skills" and so cannot actually make my inventions a reality.
Also, I never wanted to measure a dead guy with my finger. That appears to be an entry-level requirement into inventing.
Or it was. Because Wal-Mart, which previously made it simpler for guys like me to buy packing crates full of bite-sized Twix bars which is one of the wonderful things about living in 2012 -- we can do that, buy candy by the crate-- has now made it easier for reg'lar folks to invent stuff with this "Get It On The Shelf" campaign, which lets (as I understand it, having done no research beyond reading Da Vinci's diaries and getting grossed out) people come up with ideas that Wal-Mart will then sell.
And the finalists are UP! And they are an intriguing bunch that I think we can all agree should all definitely be sold by Wal-Mart. Allow me, if you will, to review them each briefly because I know that you are too busy to care about society the way I care about society, so once again I have to do all the "hard" "work" around here because I am 100% devoted to hard work, society, and getting things done.
(NOTE: Last night, I was supposed to vacuum out my car and instead I took Mr F and Mr Bunches for a walk and we blew dandelions into people's yards.)
(But they were dandelions that were already in those people's yards, so it was fair. It's the circle of life.)(Or something.)
(Don't hate me because I'm beautiful, is what I'm trying to say.)
We begin with Humankind Water, which at first I thought was water sold by The Human Fund but it's not, it's even more spurious: the ad copy says it's trying to do the impossible, which in this case is not "sniff a Cadillac up your nose" (mention in the comments if you get that reference without Googling it) but instead is "giving 100% of their net profits" to provide clean drinking water to the 1,000,000,000 people dying without it.
Which latter part is noble and hopefully not impossible and which former part is neither particularly noble nor impossible. Giving "net profits," however that is defined, doesn't mean that it's a charity -- costs and salaries might still be paid, for all I know, and they might be outrageous salaries, for all I know. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt because on their website they point out that all they really need is $6,000,000,000 and they are correct that individuals alive right now could provide that amount of money and make sure that nearly everyone in the world has clean drinking water.
Then there's Soleeze Spring Loaded Insoleswhich if there was any rule regarding "Truth In What I Immediately Imagine Your Advertising Means" would be Bouncing Shoes that would let me take 7-league steps but which instead are apparently better insoles, better because they have springs.
It's interesting what's happening in the worlds of shoes and mattresses -- as mattresses move away from springs, shoes are moving towards springs. Can we be far away from the day that mattresses promise to revitalize and de-stink us, while shoes lull us to sleep?
Soleeze's video, which you can watch here, makes a bunch of claims like "the average foam" in a shoe lasts "200 miles." Why would I doubt the word of a company that puts twelve springs into a shoe insert?
Then there's the Bill of Rights Silver Bracelet. Ever find yourself in an argument with a werewolf about who, exactly, has a right to a jury trial? Been there, done that, am I right? This little beauty'll solve that problem in no time flat. "Much like the principals in my Constitution, the words in my bracelet won't fade," says the nice lady in the video. And I'm just now realizing that these aren't really inventions, per se -- they're things that already exist that people want to sell in Wal-Mart but for some reason Wal-Mart hasn't been willing to sell them and won't unless someone votes them in. So all of these things are like the Mitt Romney of merchandise.
Which means I'm going to wrap it up by picking my own personal favorite, the "T-Shirt That Only Really Matters When It's Wet," which is every t-shirt, am I right?
(I am convinced that saying Am I right? after something makes it even more hilarious. I plan to try this out when I argue a case in front of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals tomorrow. I bet they'll love the showmanship.)
The person who posted that video on Youtube will not allow you to, in comments on his video, say anything about politics or ponies. That's what he says in the video description, anyway. Comments are disabled on the video, which means I bet every person who saw it did what I was going to do, which was post a comment about which Little Pony we'd vote for for President.
(I myself would only vote for one who wears a Bill of Rights Silver Bracelet. These colors don't run, horsey!)
The T-Shirt That Only Works When Wet is the "Mr. Spritz Mysterious Shirts," and you have to watch the video to truly appreciate the wondrous disutility of this article of clothing:
"After working hard, you know what I want," says "Beer" man, and the answer is apparently "A beer and a quick hosing down." Even better is "When I get splashed by a puddle, I just want to smile." Because that man is lying. He doesn't want to smile, he wants his shirt to smile for him. So to be honest he's saying "When I get splashed by a puddle, I'm either too lazy to actually smile or I want to fake a reaction that will lull you into a false sense of security."
I cannot imagine a use for a shirt that only says something when wet. But that's probably because I'm not inventor-y or creative enough. I bet Leonardo Da Vinci could've done something with that shirt. Like measure a dead guy with it. While smiling.
Today's Hot Extra comes from the video for Fun.'s song We Are Young, which is only an okay song:
As an anthem, it doesn't have the same power as, say, Wavin' Flag or anything, but it's still better than Pumped Up Kicks, in the ranking of anthems/hot songs. If it matters to you, apparently the video is supposed to be an allegory of losing one's virginity, if comments on Youtube are correctly interpreting it.
As for the girl, I'm not exactly sure who she is. The question Who is the girl in the We Are Young video was asked on Yahoo! Answers, and the answers:
She's the image of porn starLindsey Strutt. Look at the video info. I LOVe fun. Omg im seeing them in march
Show why we are ranked about 375th in the world in terms of intelligence and productivity. Seriously, why log in to provide an answer if you don't know it?
Also: who knows what porn stars look like by heart?
So instead, I did a Google Image search of that picture up there to see what happens with that, but it was taking forever to load the image, so I gave up and instead watched this video of what happens when you do a Google Image search of a transparency, and then search that, and so on, recursiving yourself back to the dawn of time, or something:
But they're scary foreign umbrellas, not good God-fearing American umbrellas, so I got really worried about what my search results might lead me to. Could I, by trying to figure out who this girl was, accidentally uncover some sort of Chinese plot to invade us with nonwaterproofed robots that require umbrellas to protect them from the rain, umbrellas which would (naturally) be equipped with pull-out swords?
I mean, if that's the case, don't I have a duty to try to figure out what that site says so that I can spread the word about the Swordfighting Chinese Robot Invasion, since Ron Paul's campaign literature doesn't mention that enough already?
So I was fully prepared to learn Mandarin Chinese and translate that page, but two things happened:
(v) I thought "What if that girl's not even 18? That makes this the creepiest possible way to spend a Saturday morning." and
(brown) Mr Bunches announced that he wanted to go play skee-ball, which sounded pretty fun to me.
Why is the guy talking to "Jake From State Farm" at 3 a.m.?
In his pajamas?
In the dark?
I get that people may need sometimes to call their insurer in the middle of the night.
But there didn't seem to be any emergency reason to call Jake From State Farm at 3 a.m. in his pajamas, standing in the dark.
Also: no, I don't get that people need to call their insurer at 3 a.m. Why do they? Let's say you have a tree branch fall on a power line on your driveway in the middle of a snowstorm, as we once did... but that it happens at 3 a.m., instead of at 3 p.m., when ours happened. What's the insurance company going to do, at 3 a.m.? That they couldn't do at 9 a.m.?
And before you go thinking (a) I'm a perv for thinking Jake From State Farm is up to something creepy in that 3 a.m. phone call or (b) I'm stupid for not knowing a good reason for Jake From State Farm to be at work at 3 a.m., consider this:
POP!Best! is my weekly attempt to write something about pop culture. Before you laugh, it's also how Ernest Hemingway got started, only his was more bull-fight-y.
This week People named the Sexiest Man Alive, 2011, and, as usual, the pick proved both controversial and completely not, depending on who you talked to and whether who you talked to had any sense whatsoever and/or was trying to simply beat a dead horse of an old joke.
By which I mean: Those people who every year make a joke about the naming of the Sexiest Man Alive and how "wasn't there a Sexiest Man Alive last year, and isn't he still alive, so shouldn't he be the sexiest man alive?"
No.
People age, and what is deemed sexy once may not be deemed sexy later on, unless what is deemed sexy is Lucy Lawless, who looked like this way back when
and who looks like this now:
That is timeless.
Stephen Colbert, while theoretically making the same old tired joke about sexy once sexy always, actually appeared to be mocking it:
The fact that every year, most people react to the Sexiest Man Alive issue by making that same joke serves as yet another reason for me to hate people, and to buttress my belief that most people (a) think they could be in entertainment but (b) clearly could not be, a belief that is proven fact by listening to people call in to talk radio shows. Ever do that? Listen to people call in to talk radio shows and listen to them as they do so attempt to be funny, or witty, or smart. They're not. Such calls inevitably make some sort of inane, or incomprehensible, or both, joke at the outset, as a lead-in to their call, almost as if each caller thinks he needs a monologue. The calls always go something like this:
Host: Thanks, Previous Caller, for making that point about Obama once having eaten a kitten for breakfast. I didn't understand that at all. Let's go on to Jeff, who's calling in from Fresno.
Jeff From Fresno: Hi, Host! Boy, that guy before, he should have been kittened, am I right?
Host: Where'd I put that Xanax?
The point being: you're probably not funny. Or clever. Or witty. That's why you, Jeff from Fresno, are not hosting a radio show, but are instead calling in to that radio show. It's like Jerry Seinfeld said about most people: Most people are not hot. And most people are not funny. So just do whatever it is you do (probably dentistry) and forget the jokes.
Unless whatever it is you do, of course, is something even stupider than dumb jokes about the Sexiest Man Alive. Like, say, a conspiracy theory about how the Sexiest Man Alive got to be named the Sexiest Man Alive. From the site "hot Goss," (capitalization in the original) comes this story, which I imagined was being read in a breathless-but-pluckily-upbeat manner:
People magazine exclusively broke the news that Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lopez force be an item in September, after exposure that the pair had a romantic dinner at Per Se in New York. The magazine fanned the relationship flames in October by publishing exclusive photographs of the stars on a Saturday afternoon jaunt.Wednesday, they named Bradley Cooper their Sexiest Man Alive.In April, they named Jennifer Lopez the most gorgeous woman in the world.Their two sexiest stars of 2011 in a relationship that People just happens to always have the inside track on?Is a touch fishy going on?“JLo and Bradley are obvious choices for most sexiest, but the extra bonus of coupledom will not be lost on the editors and publicists of People magazine,” Sarah Ivens, the former Editor in Chief of OK! Magazine said about the thought process magazine editors use when deciding who to place on their covers, and what tales to run. “I always plotted covers with the equation that one A-lister plus another A-lister makes three era the sales. The combo is more intriguing for the reader and this would have really played a part in them both being named winners.”
I didn't doctor that quote at all, so make what you will of "Is a touch fishy going on?" When you're reporting on something as important as SexyGate -- the SEXIEST SCANDAL EVER!-- you've got no time to proofread.*
*Yes, I know that this site is never very well proof-read and often filled with terrible grammar and obvious misspellings and once I posted a picture of William Howard Taft and labeled it "pizza," but in my defense, I hate proofreading but I like making fun of others, so what can you do?
Naming CoopPez -- see why that trend of combining last names of celebrity couples died out before it should have? -- as the Simultaneously Sexiest People Alive Who Are Also Dating didn't just fan America's conspiracy flames, which, let's face it, never really die out -- Americans are always only 1 degree of separation from a conspiracy, and I include myself in that, because every single day that I get stuck in traffic I conclude that it's because the people who run Madison are anti-car and have deliberately set up the traffic flow so that it's less convenient to get around by car than by any other means of transportation, and also I secretly blame them for that time I got stung by all those bees -- but the naming of Bradley Cooper also caused other fallout, like the fact that Americans proved they're always willing to go beyond wild conspiracy theories and take to the streets to protest something completely inane.
Yes, in the grand tradition of people who built on our forefathers' noble revolutionary instincts by completely watering them down, turning "We hold these truths to be self-evident" into "Goddam Netflix raises my price a dollar? I'll show them," protestors took to the streets about the Sexiest Man Alive, as reported by Uproxx:
There are those who will say they were joking, that they were poking fun at the #occupy protests and having a laugh, as it were, and then there are those (me) who will say "This is a country where nobody worries that one of the major parties, the one that controls 1/2 of Congress, has seriously put forth a plan in which they want to balance the budget by taxing the poorest people in the country, a plan which, if put into effect, could take 100% of the money from the poor and would still not close the budget deficit, and yet a plan which somehow enjoys inexplicably wide support" and the people like me, who know those things, worry that "Occupy Wall Street" will get conflated with "Occupy Ryan Gosling's Abs" and you know it will and by doing that, the Occupy Ryan people have just helped kill the Occupy movements.
Also: They spent money and time and effort not on, say, volunteering at a soup kitchen, but on protesting Ryan Gosling's lack of Sexiest Man-Ism, and by my rules, they now owe an equal amount of time to humanity. My rule is that whatever money/time you spend frivolously, you have a moral obligation to donate an equal amount of money/time to a worthy cause. Get a one-hour massage for $100, and you owe $100 and an hour to humanity. It's a good rule, because it lets you enjoy the nicer things in life while also giving something back.**
**I do this. I frequently donate money -- this month it was to political causes -- and I volunteer my time for the Autism Society of Greater Madison and every year I do a stint of bell ringing at the outset of my couple of days off for Christmas, and I volunteer at the local foreclosure clinic. You should try it. It really makes life better and then I don't feel guilty owning a Kindle.
Anyway, all the Conspiracy Nuts and Ryan Gosling Supporters/Society Wreckers ought to relax a little and do science, like I did, because there's no big secret behind how someone gets to be the Sexiest Man Alive. If you look at the history of the Sexiest Man Alive, a history that dates all the way back to the halcyon, now-faded-sunlight-tinged days of 1985, you can review all the Sexiest Mans Alive and see, statistically speaking, what it takes to be Sexiest, and once you understand that, you will be able to rest easily, knowing that in this one area of life, at least, there is not a massive complex conspiracy aimed at keeping you down and miserable.
That conspiracy exists everywhere else in life.
But not in the Sexiest Man Alive.
I reviewed the list of what it takes to be the Sexiest Man Alive, and I compiled a set of statistics about that list, and using those statistics, we can examine, scientifically, as it were, what goes in to the Sexiest Man Alive, and, doing that, we can then also see who the Hypothetical Sexiest Man EVER Alive would be.
Let's get to the stats! Always exciting, those stats!
First, you have to be white. There's been only one non-white Sexiest Man Alive, ever: Denzel Washington, in 1996.
It also helps to be 39 years old. That's the average age of all the winners over time, including the few who have won more than once. Tom Cruise was the youngest when he won (28); the oldest was Sean Connery at 59 when he was named.
Of course, averages aren't all that much help when determining reality -- the average of 1 and 100 is 50.5, which tells you nothing, and the only winner who was actually 39 when he was named was Patrick Swayze.
It would probably be more helpful, if you wanted to be the Sexiest Man Alive, to be 36; that was the most common age at naming, 4 of 26 of the winners being 36 years old at the time.
You of course have to be an actor -- only one non-actor, John F. Kennedy, Jr., -- ever won the award, but more importantly, you have to be a movie actor -- Mark Harmon and Harry Hamlin are probably better known for their TV roles than their film roles, but they were named decades ago, when people (or PeopleTM) still thought this whole "TV" thing had a chance of competing with films for public attention. We know how crazy that idea looks, now!
It wouldn't hurt to have played James Bond -- two of the past winners have portrayed the Master Spy Who Nobody Cares About Anymore on film -- and lately, you're better off having blond or light-colored hair; 10 of the past winners have dark hair but they weren't recent winners.
A secret hidden indicator? It helps to have won before: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, and Richard Gere each have two awards, so in 26 years there have been only 22 winners.
It goes without saying that Americans are sexier; 5 of 22 of the winners have come from outside The Only Country Blessed By God, but four of those have come in the past decade, so this may be a precursor of the end of The American Century. Are Americans getting less sexy?
Hard to say.
You could've figured all that stuff on your own, though, I'm sure. A blond, American film actor who's 34 years old? Of course that's sexy. If I read those words to Sweetie, she'd probably swoon, because people still swoon.
But here's more hidden indicators, like start your last name with a C -- four winners have last names starting with a C -- or at least with a letter in the early part of the alphabet. 6 winners have last names starting with letters A-D.
If Americans are sexier -- notwithstanding that picture-- which Americans, exactly, are the Sexier-est? People from the Texas area, it seems: Two winners were born in Texas, one in Nebraska, and one in Oklahoma. That'll stop, I'm sure, now that Rick Perry has turned Texas into a for(his)-profit toxic waste dump. Unless "Sexy" changes in such a way that we like people with hideous melted faces.
Miss Texas 2023
Improbably, two of the Sexiest Men Alive (Clooney and Depp) were born in Kentucky. Three were born in California, though, so as with every other single thing in life, you're better off living in California than Kentucky.
Smart isn't sexy; at least 12 of the Sexiest Men Alive never finished college. Sexy takes at least 9 years -- Tom Cruise has the shortest time span between his first onscreen role and winning Sexiest Man Alive (9 years); the longest time span belongs to Harrison Ford, who edged out Sean Connery by 2 years: it took Han Solo 34 years of acting to be deemed sexy.
It actually doesn't help to be good at acting; the only black Sexiest Man ever is also the only one with an Academy Award for best acting -- Denzel Washington (so he may have the last laugh, as actors who win an Academy Award may live longer than actors who don't.)(Denzel's also the only one who ever starred as "Grape" in Fruit of the Loom commercials.)
Also: It can't hurt to date someone hot -- as the conspiracy theorists noted, Bradley Cooper was linked with Jennifer Lopez this year, and won. Previous winners who were dating someone considered hot include Richard Gere (who won Sexiest Couple while dating Cindy Crawford before winning on his own), Brad Pitt (who was married to Jennifer Aniston when he won the award the second time). More importantly, it can't hurt to date Jennifer Lopez; Ben Affleck also dated her and he won.
With all this science, you might wonder: How do they actually pick the Sexiest Man Alive?
The actual methods are shrouded in secrecy***
***You just know that there is a glass of wine and perhaps a lip-synch to Ain't No Mountain High Enough involved, though, don't you?
at least judging by this research I did to determine the methods:
A combination of box office appeal (who hasn't seen The Hangover movies?), undeniable good looks and the lengths he'll go to for romance. Asked the sexiest thing he's done to woo a woman, Cooper tells PEOPLE, "Getting on a plane to go get them."
So, from that we can conclude that "Sexy" means "Making a lot of money," and then "being willing to spend that money on a woman," as at least 2/3 of the combination of sexy, which means it's true: Women really aren't all that hung up on looks.
They're hung up on money.
With all that sexy science under my belt, it's time to apply that knowledge and make a BOLD AND SEXY PREDICTION for next year's Sexiest Man Alive 2012, and I'm serious about this: I predict that Sexiest Man Alive 2012 will be:
Daniel Craig.
Daniel Craig hits almost all the marks: He had three movies come out this year (counting Girl With The Dragon Tattoo later on this year) and he's played James Bond and will do so again next year in Skyfall. He's blond. While he graduated from college, it was drama school and he only went for 3 years, so that's obviously some weird English thing. He's recently married Rachel Weisz, who people (me) consider hot. He's of Welsh decent, and that's pretty much the only part of the British Isles not yet represented by People's Sexiest Men populace.
Science never lies: Daniel Craig, congratulations on being the Sexiest Man Alive, 2012.
POP!Best! is a weekly look back at the week that just happened. In case you forgot. Or were in a coma or something. Or maybe you were just busy. Who am I to judge? But I do judge. Oh, how I judge.
Back in the fabled time we now think of as "the 80s," every assumes that life was all feathered hair, popped collars, and guys cutting the fingers off of their gloves
for no real reason, and that life was simpler and easier back then, what with Reagan being still 75% alive and Bill Cosby having not gotten all old and bitter.
But people forget that the unenlightened denizens of that darker time didn't have all the answers, like we do today, and frequently forgot all the important things in life, which is why they needed reminding of the things they needed to know to live via the awe-inspiring idea "All I Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten."
That simple idea -- that in kindergarten we'd learned everything we'd ever need to get by in the world -- took the 1980s by storm, even though it was published in 1988 and therefore was a little too late to do anything about all the bad ideas that had already been spawned by the 1980s:
But, late as it was, it's fair to say that Robert Fulghum's simple poem inspired the world, and for decades after the publication of his book of essays, we no longer sought out excesses, we no longer were mean to each other, we did not wage unjust wars or help trample the dreams of millions to enrich ourselves.
Which is why we were, until this week, living in a veritable paradise where people shared, and ate warm cookies and cold milk, and flushed, but then, this week, as we all know, the entire equilibrium of this and every other universe (yes, even that one where everything rhymes with orange) was upset when the unthinkable happened and a celebrity marriage turned out to not be based on romantic notions of love at all!
Never mind that, by my count, 99.9% of all marriages are based not on love but on other emotions, less fanciful, less poetic emotions like "She was the first and only person who would sleep with me more than once" or "I'll show my sister who can get married first," (both of which are lesser-recognized emotions in the pantheon but are still valid): whatever the standards we set for our own marriages (low, judging by the fact that Mexico now thinks 2 years is about how long anyone can stand to be married), celebrity marriages are something different. Something beautiful. Something for us to aspire to. Something for Americans to watch since we foolishly gave up having our own real royalty over 200 years ago and now live empty dreary lives.
Celebrity marriages are more than just a way for someone who stored bat guano in her house to legitimize our view of her and somehow become a U.N. ambassador and "role model" in spite of all evidence to the contrary; celebrity marriages are how we, as a people, made sure that traditional values of love, and romance, and four-hour TV specials, were still respected, here in the United States and probably everywhere else in the world but who cares about them because we now have forty-nine different states where it's totally legal to go into an elementary school carrying a concealed shotgun. (USA! USA! USA!)
Until this week, that is.
Past celebrity marriages never failed to live up to our standards and ideals. People like Britney Spears and Jennifer Aniston and...
...um...
... and other celebrities who got married*
*I'm kind of the wrong person to ask about this, in that I don't really know who celebrities are. I'm far more likely to remember the name of Jaggers' clerk (Wemmick) than I am to remember the name of the girl who played in those vampire/werewolf movies (Kate Beckinsale, whose name I only know now because it came up, improbably, in a work meeting yesterday). My go-to celebrity informant is Sweetie, who knows everything there is to know about celebrities, including, importantly, who they are. I asked her on the spur of the moment to name famous celebrities who got married famously and she gave me "Britney Spears to that Jason guy who lasted a day; Prince William and Kate; Khloe Kardashian, Brad and Jennifer, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise..." before petering out, which, in retrospect, is kind of a disappointing performance from Sweetie.**
**After a few minutes she added "Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. And also I realized that Brad Pitt and Angelina never got married, but I'm not going to go back and change the post at this point. It's too late for that. We march onward! USA! USA! USA!
invariably served not just as conduits for our own frustrated emotions (Why can't I get paid $20 million just to run around on a movie set and fight Jonathan Rhys Meyers? Besides the fact that I can't act and am out of shape to the point where I look like I might be kind of melting, I mean?) but also as symbols of our highest ideals ($600,000 on a dress? USA! USA! USA!), but all that changed this week when America -- and, probably the world, but, again, who cares? Let them deal with Greece, we've got our own crisis going on right here! OCCUPY WHEREVER IT IS THE KARDASHIANS LIVE! -- began to feel that perhaps it had been duped by a celebrity marriage.
And we were duped, and that outrage you feel is not just regular ol' outrage, but a white-hot-burning kind of outrage that can only be inspired when Americans really truly really honestly have something to be mad about, like Netflix increasing their price by about twenty bucks a year, or Kim Kardashian making more money off people who can't understand why it was so dumb to let her make any money in the first place.
What happened this week was more important, I'd say, than every other thing that ever happened in the world, combined, judging by the outrage and talk and sheer amount of time I'm assuming The View spent talking about the Kim Kardashian divorce, and you're probably expecting me to make some point about how weird/stupid it is that people could devote so much energy to talking about the Kardashivorce when there are serious things going on in the world, like whatever it is Greece is up to, but I'm not because I, perhaps alone among people, understand that this is more than just Ewoks blinking, which, important as that was to denounce, wasn't quite as Earths-shattering as the news was this week.
The Kardashivorce (TM), as I said, upset the equilibrium of the multiverse, an equilibrium that had been established back in 1988 when, after exactly 1,988 years since God created the world, we'd finally learned how to live. Now, we stare bleakly into exactly the kind of post-apocalyptic world we've always dreaded and imagined, albeit one that admittedly has fewer zombies than recent pop culture would lead one to expect, but a post-apocalyptic world nonetheless, a world in which the rules have changed and nobody is sure how to proceed.
What should we look up to? What ideals will hold true in this new world? Will there still be Oreos?
Those are the questions that all week long, humanity was afraid to ask and nobody had the answers to... until now, when I have painstakingly pored over all of the coverage I could bear to read about the Kardashivorce, and gleaned from it a new set of rules for us to live by in this Brave New World*4
*4: Suck it, Aldous Huxley. You can't copyright a title. USA! USA! USA!
that we are about to march into. And I have put them together into a little poem I call:
All I Really Need To Know I Learned From People Talking About Kim Kardashian's Divorce.*5
POP!Best! is my weekly look at The Best in pop culture from the preceding week. You know, because you don't hear about pop culture anywhere else in the universe.
That story bugged me all week because (a) I really have very little control over what my mind does and when it is supposed to be doing things like "preparing briefs" or "remembering to put gas in the car" it is instead thinking "I wonder where it began, this idea that candy got tainted?" and (b) I don't really have a (b), although I did when I started that expression.
I mean, everyone knows by now that there really hasn't ever been an actual incident of poisoning on Halloween; even the recent pot-laced candy story isn't all that new: stories about pot-laced candy go back to at least 2006 when the feds - -in a crackdown aimed at breaking up the California medicinal marijuana trade -- busted a guy who was making such "clever" pot-laced candy-knockoffs as Buddahfinger, proving again that stoner "humor" is not funny.
But where, I wondered, does the story come from? How did it become taken for granted that Halloween candy could be tainted? How, in short, does an urban legend start?
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Once upon a time, in America, candy was even more evil than it is today.
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So I went looking for the answer to how this particular urban legend began, doing so during an insomniatic Friday night while I watched Sports Center and wondered how I could get that job, and I am now able to report to you that the actual inception of the tainted Halloween candy story is...
... I don't know.
The reports of tainted candy appear to have coalesced from three stories: The dad who poisoned his son using Pixy Sticks to collect on life insurance, a boy who accidentally overdosed on his uncle's heroin and the family tried to cover it up by sprinkling heroin on his Halloween candy, and the poisoned Tylenol capsules in the early 1980s, according to Mental Floss, which goes on to note that as early as 1959 there were reports of sharp objects in candy but the first documented instance of that wasn't until 2000 -- which makes it seem like the guy got the idea from the rumors, not the other way around.
But poison candy goes back way farther than just the halcyon days of the 1950s, when Ward would come home from his job at the Corporation (which back then was benign, and not yet a person!) and laugh over a hearty 37-course dinner with the boys before sneaking off to the lodge to slip razor blades into apples. In World War I, reports surfaced that the Germans, or, as they were called back then, "Hessians," (I know they weren't called that, but it's fun to say Hessian, and anyway, whatever happened to Hessians?) were poisoning candy and dropping it on French villages, and back at the turn of the century, in 1899, parents began blaming poisoned candy for their children dropping dead. Doctors, or, as they were called back then, "people who had no particular training but who were allowed, for some reason, to operate on other people" blamed not poisoned candy but meningitis. In reality, the likely cause of death was probably "living in 1899."
Even parents in 1899 were repeating an old myth -- that same article says that in 1874 the "National Confectioners Association" had commissioned a report to debunk myths that candy caused kids to die-- and if they did so in 1874, you know that the rumors had to have been flying around via that 1800s' version of the internet (Pamphlets. Seriously) for a long time.
The article where I got a lot of that information makes a significant point: People back then blamed candy for everyone dropping dead because the things that really were making them drop dead (again: living in 1899) were harder to deal with, those problems being things like poverty, rot, slime, gas leaks, robber barons, and the fact that most "medical schools" prior to 1930 were diploma mills that provided no practical education and didn't require you to go to college before attending them.
In short: blaming candy was easier than fixing society, which may be why the single biggest news out of the White House this week was that Michelle Obama wrote a book about vegetables.
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So there's this guy, and he keeps running into the Devil...
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Since I don't know exactly where the rumor that all candy will instantly kill you if you take it from your neighbor's hand started, let's (a) blame it on the Hessians, and (b) move on to other Halloween history that raises important questions like "Why would someone actually try to get into Hell?"
That's the question I asked myself after I decided to look into the secret origin of the Jack O'Lantern and learned that Jack O' Lantern's exist because of "Stingy Jack," a guy who got his name because, apparently, he was stingy. Although being stingy had nothing to do with why we still know about Jack and his O'Lantern; his nickname was irrelevant to the fact that he tricked the Devil into something or other.
I'm not being lazy there; I'm being accurate and there's a difference: People don't agree on what Stingy Jack, who really should be called something like Tricky Jack but I didn't make him up, so I didn't get a vote in the matter, did to trick the Devil, but they do agree that he tricked the Devil. Some say he tricked the Devil into climbing an apple tree, a story that needs a little fleshing out: Why did he want the Devil to climb the apple tree? Why was he talking to the Devil in the first place? Why an apple tree? Is that a biblical reference? Is that why we give out apples on Halloween? Does anyone really give out apples on Halloween? Those people suck.
Also: No. We give out apples on Halloween because they were symbols of immortality (that star you see if you cut the apple in half the right way) and because if you peeled an apple in front of a mirror in candlelight, you would see an image of your future spouse, which I would go try but it's the middle of the night as I write this and I'm easily freaked out. (Once, when I watched Jeepers Creepers by myself late at night I couldn't go to sleep until I watched Disney's Hercules.)(True story.)
(People disagree about the mystical powers of apples vis a vis future spouses. This site says you have to slice the apple and eat it by candlelight to see Future Ms. Right, and then peel the whole peel in one slice and throw it over your shoulder to learn her initial, and also that if you put an apple under your pillow you will dream of your future husband, to which I'll add "And your wife will probably say 'What, exactly, are you doing with an apple under your pillow?")
A different version of the Stingy Jack story has Jack inviting the Devil to have a drink with him, but not wanting to pay for the drink -- always buy the first round, the party never gets smaller -- so he tricked the Devil into becoming a coin, (and then didn't pay anyway, keeping the coin in his pocket)(Is that the Devil in your pocket or are you just... what? It really IS the Devil? I'm out of here!) only to later trick the Devil into climbing a tree, the Devil not having learned his lesson the first time around.
All of the Stingy Jack legends end the same way: Jack eventually dies and goes up to Heaven where, despite his obvious skill in tricking the Devil, he's not wanted on account of his general meanness, so he goes down to Hell to try to get let in even though whole point of all this trickery was to avoid Hell, but the Devil, who's the kind of person who carries a grudge (but you'd guess that about him, wouldn't you?) won't let him in, and so Jack wanders the Earth, with naught but a piece of Hellfire to light his way -- that piece of Hellfire having been given to him by the Devil, who's really not such a bad guy after all in the end.
I mean, Heaven didn't give Jack a flashlight or even one of those reflective strips of tape to put on his costume.
Jack carried his Hellfire in a turnip (or, as they're known now, "pomegranate") and that's why we now put candles in pumpkins and if you think I skipped a step there, you're right, but so does every other source; nobody says why turnips ended up being pumpkins, so there must be some sort of transitive property of foods nobody really eats that says turnips = pumpkins.
Does the story of a guy who so doesn't want to pay his bills that he repeatedly consorts with the Prince of Darkness and eventually is banned from Heaven and doomed to walk the earth in misery carrying a Hellfire-bearing turnip sound like the kind of play you'd want to put on for middle schoolers? Stanford Middle School thought so, which is why those plucky youngsters put on a show entitled "Watch Your Back For Stingy Jack!" But this play takes a uniquely American, no-doubt-Tea-Party inspired look at this heartwarming family story:
On a present-day Halloween night, Laura and her friends gather around Laura's dad, Bill, to hear the mysterious origin of the Jack-o'-Lantern. Through Bill's narrative, the girls learn about the ghost of Stingy Jack, a mean tax collector from old colonial America who haunts the town after being robbed of his fortune. With horrifying twists surrounding lost treasure and curses, audiences will leave with one thing in mind: never let the light go out! A rollicking introduction into the folklore that inspired the Jack-o'-Lantern.
See? You didn't know that taxes were actually collected by a tool of the devil. But now you do, so never ever pay taxes again.
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And now onto something more wholesome: Asphyxiation!
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Speaking of heart-warming traditions and future spouses, how about choking to death to find out if you'll get married that year? That is the horrifying story behind apple-bobbing. Apples apparently have a long tradition of being associated with romance, going way back to when Hippomenes tricked Atalanta into marrying him by beating her in a footrace; he only outran her by tricking her along the way with three golden apples, proving that woman can not resist an apple.
Which brings us to trick-or-treating, and if you think I skipped a step there, I did, again. Trick-or-treating, many sources will tell you, began as a combination of the custom of souling, in which poor people would go around and sing for the dead souls of people in exchange for food. According to what is a no-doubt reliable source on this subject (the website "Things That Go Boooo!" ),
The American tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives.
The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for the returning spirits on Halloween night. The practice, which was referred to as "going a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.
So, if you are keeping score, in England, where many of our ancestors came from, kids could go around on Halloween and get beer and money. In America, where many of our ancestors came to, people try to stop trick-or-treating by claiming candy causes meningitis.
(That's in case you needed proof that perhaps the best-and-brightest were not the ones who left. Proof beyond "also, many of our ancestors settled in Minnesota," I mean.)
Trick-or-treating is, of course, not an American invention -- the meningitis, remember -- and has been around long enough to have been written about in that godawful Olde Englishe that Chaucer also used and which for some reason schools insist on making kids read. In his poem Hallowe'en, Robert Burns wrote about trick-or-treating:
The lasses feat, and cleanly neat,
Mair braw than when they're fine;
Their faces blithe, fu' sweetly kythe,
Hearts leal, and warm, and kin';
The lads sae trig, wi' wooer-babs,
Weel knotted on their garten,
Some unco blate, and some wi' gabs,
Gar lasses' hearts gang startin'
Whiles fast at night.
Then, first and foremost, through the kail,
Their stocks maun a' be sought ance;
They steek their een, and graip and wale,
For muckle anes and straught anes.
Poor hav'rel Will fell aff the drift,
And wander'd through the bow-kail,
And pou't, for want o' better shift,
A runt was like a sow-tail,
Sae bow't that night.
Or at least, I'm told he mentions trick-or-treating. I can't understand a single word of that. And there's like 37 more stanzas. The poem is no less comprehensible when translated into Belorussian, which it has been.
Here in America, trick-or-treating was originally called guising, according to St Nicholas magazine, which is rapidly becoming my go-to source for information, and, according to Wikipedia, the term "trick or treat" wasn't used in America until 1934, when the Helena Independent broke this story:
Pretty Boy John Doe rang the door bells and his gang waited his signal. It was his plan to proceed cautiously at first and give a citizen every opportunity to comply with his demands before pulling any rough stuff. "Madam, we are here for the usual purpose, 'trick or treat.'" This is the old demand of the little people who go out to have some innocent fun. Many women have some apples, cookies or doughnuts for them, but they call rather early and the "treat" is given out gladly.
I'm sure that august local paper went on to warn parents that the "treat" (or, as it was sometimes called "Hessian Pomegranate") was likely laced with marijuana and razors.
Why did trick-or-treating get so popular, given that Americans were 100% certain that candy, and not stagnant sewage water in the streets, was killing their kids? It probably had something to do with stopping kids from blowing up churches and corpse-stealing -- the spoilsports!
Early Hallowe'en efforts had focused more on the "trick" end of the spectrum, and the tricks ranged from pipe bombs to blocking railroad tracks to stealing corpses from a medical school to hang in front of a butcher shop. Adults fought back with all the restraint adults have traditionally shown in dealing with kids: Two children were shot, one for tapping on a window and one for soaping another window.
Surprisingly, having the death penalty for minor pranks didn't stop them -- that same website notes that the "pranks" escalated to killing cops and cross-burning, and
Extreme pranking incited extreme measures on the part of the police. It was normal in the 1920s for a city like LA to add 800-900 extra men for the night or to post one hundred men on the LA rails to guard the tracks against Halloween mayhem. It wasn't a huge leap from this large-scale defensive position to an offensive one. In 1942, for example, the Chicago City Council voted to simply abolish Halloween.
See where I got the headline from? Again, surprisingly, an overwhelming show of force didn't manage to quell the unrest, and so America got tricky and decided to bribe the little monsters via trick or treat, the theory being: give them candy, and they'll stop killing our police officers and toting corpses around, probably because they'll die of meningitis.
Trick or treating still wasn't immediately popular. Again, from that site:
Some homeowners were downright hostile: a woman in Miami (1950) gave red-hot coins to a gang of kids who demanded money. Police in Greensboro, NC rode around on Halloween night with 5,000 packages of cookies to give to gangs of kids in hopes they wouldn't bang on homeowner's doors. There were angry pieces in the newspaper claiming it was extortion; even some of the kids themselves protested: the 1948 Madison Sq. Boys' Club parade featured signs saying, "American boys don't beg."
Hmmm. You see where this is going: There will be stories next year that kids are being handed out red-hot coins laced with marijuana.
In any event, in these troubled times, it's nice to think back to a those golden days of our country, when people were more innocent, and America was a nicer place where neighbors said hello, people never locked their doors, and police were sent out to bribe pipe-bomb carrying hooligans before they could riot. Happy Halloween!
POP!Best! is a weekly look at pop culture from the 7 days prior. Usually it's a little more upbeat than this.
Today finds me in a meditative mood of sorts; I've been thinking all week about Norman Colwin, a guy I'd never heard of before who died this week at 101.
I heard about Norman Colwin dying on the radio, which is fitting, because Colwin was called the 'poet laureate of radio' when he wasn't being called a 'citizen of the world.' I don't know what the latter means, but I do know what the former should sound like, and the brief (radio) broadcast I heard about Colwin's death made me miss someone I'd never even known existed until just that moment, and want to know more about him.
Radio, I think, gets kind of a bum rap these days, and maybe rightfully so, provided that you narrowly define radio. But I've always liked radio, in all its incarnations as I think of them, including things that aren't really radio.
I once wrote a post called "Football On The Radio, The Importance of Being Close To Canada, and a Quick Latin Lesson" (I'll link to it below.) In that post, I reflected on how I used to listen to football games on the radio, waxing poetic:
I first started listening to football on the radio back when Sweetie and I began dating. She lived about 60 miles from me, and sometimes I'd go drive my Ford Festiva up to visit her on Sundays. We'd hang out, maybe watch the Packers, maybe eat dinner, and then I'd have to drive home ... I would tune in to the NFL game, whichever game was being played, and listen to that,
...As I drove past sleeping farms and dark houses with warm glows flowing out of their windows, I'd focus on the road as the announcer told me someone was back to pass, it's up, and I'd drive and wait for it's caught or dropped or picked off and he's heading the other way.
The invisible men playing football in my mind ("kicking off, my right to my left..." announcers would say, and I'd picture them on the dashboard of the car) have always been larger and stronger and more enjoyable than the life-sized men playing on the football fields in real life
The radio has always been a big feature of my life. When I lived in Milwaukee, as a college student, I worked in the admissions office of the University. This was in the early 90s, before the Internet and iPods and even CDs were still pretty new. So we listened to the radio in the office. Every city had an assortment of music stations back then: there was the Oldies station and the Classic Rock station and the Top40 station and, if you were lucky like we were because we had two major colleges in Milwaukee, you had a "New Rock" station that played bands like Belly:
I remember listening to New Rock 102.1 when Belly, a group I loved, came out with their new album: the DJ said "Belly's just released a new album that sounds great. Here's their hit song "Feed The Tree," which was off their old album, and I didn't get how New Rock could get away without playing new rock.
I know now: Years later I read an article that talked about why radio stations don't put new music on more often, or more challenging music, and do you know why? It's because of us, and also because of how easy it is to change the radio station when you're in the car, which is where most of us listen to the radio, always. Most people, if they hear something unfamiliar, change the radio station. So radio stations play mostly familiar stuff, even the ones that promise new rock. The new rock they play is the same old stuff new rock fans want to hear.
I'm still that way, a lot. My radio now is my iPod, filled with songs that I download sight-unheard, and podcasts, and sometimes I'll put my 11,000 songs on shuffle and then click until I hear something familiar, if I'm in the mood for something familiar, although these days I'm at least slightly more adventurous in my music listening, which is how I got to hear new music that I downloaded based on its description, music like Regina Spektor, whose song Fidelity I downloaded without ever hearing it, and then loved it, and then went and got all of Regina Spektor's albums, which, fittingly enough for this post, includes "On The Radio":
A song that talks about ascribing some significance to listening to the radio so late at night that the DJ is asleep and plays the song November Rain twice, making the moments even more memorable.
Back in the 90s, we'd listen to music at the office, but we also listened to talk radio, which then was in its infancy and hadn't become nothing-but-conservatives. I recall a show called "That Jay Marvin" who tried to be kind of moderate, but moderation has no place on talk radio. I also recall listening to The Mark Belling Show and being goaded into calling and arguing with him by my boss, who would wander in, hear Belling saying something, and say "Call him up and argue with him" and so I'd do that because it beat filing, and the other office workers would go listen on the radio in the other room and laugh as I tried to argue a proposition I knew nothing about.
Once, Mark Belling told me an argument I'd made was the stupidest argument he'd ever heard. I kind of take that as a badge of pride, and also, I've heard that exact phrase repeated to me twice in my life. (The other one was a judge. Long story. But it was a stupid argument.)
Later on, a few years later, when I came back to Milwaukee after living in Washington D.C. and Morocco for 3/4 of a year, I moved into an apartment but couldn't afford a TV right away, so all I had was my stereo and a radio to listen to. At night, I'd listen to talk radio again, conservative talk-hosts slowly giving way to Art Bell Coast-To-Coast, and Art would talk about aliens and demon possessions as I laid there in the dark, the radio echoing off the bare walls and hardwood floors of my apartment.
Radio's been a big part of my life in part because I'm always doing something else: I'm driving somewhere or typing something or playing with the twins or working in the yard, and I can listen but I can't watch because I've got to watch what I'm doing. But, truth be told, I've always been somewhat impatient with visual media anyway.
I grew up reading books, graduating from comic books to book-books, and a book is like a mental radio: Someone feeds words into your mind and you build them into a world. I read almost every single book in the Hartland Public Library, and I'm not kidding about that. When my brothers and friends were watching TV (movies being a rare thing back before VCRs and cable) I'd be reading.
I've always liked the images I get in my mind, actually, more than the images that life actually throws at me. I've got a wonderful imagination; it's in overdrive, all the time. I fall asleep imagining stories and literally dream them up to begin writing them. It's really hard to compete with the special effects my mind can create.
I remember when they made The Lord Of The Rings into movies. I was concerned because in my experience, the movies never looked the way they should. I liked my Middle-Earth, my Frodo and Sam and Sauron. I didn't want to see someone else's versions of them, and was relieved that Peter Jackson actually made things look, more or less, right.
In that Football On The Radio essay, I noted that having listened to a portion of a football game on the radio once, I came home to find the game was being taped by The Boy, and watched the plays I'd just heard, and found the actual real plays to be less exciting than the plays I'd imagined, listening. Radio is like that: It can broaden the scope of what you're hearing by making your mind work.
Which brings me, temporarily, back to Norman Corwin. Here's what he's most famous for, in a world where, really, he wasn't famous at all anymore: The broadcast "On A Note Of Triumph." You can hear it at that link, which goes through NPR, or you can do what I'm doing and listen to it as you read this:
That's Corwin's broadcast on V-E Day, an hourlong celebration of the winning of the first half of the war. It's worth listening to, for lots of reasons, not just because you cannot imagine any radio (or TV) announcer these days talking like this:
"The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of the common men of this afternoon."
Corwin was in part, lucky: he was a radio broadcaster when only radio was broadcast, and he was a radio broadcaster when the U.S. achieved the greatest victory in its history -- but luck isn't just there for the picking; it has to be taken and run with. Lots of people get lucky and blow it. Corwin got lucky and didn't.
His career, if you read about it, was more than celebrating "far flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free" (seriously, go listen to it! Just put it on in the background while you read this). His biography notes that he published books of prose and poetry, got an Oscar nomination for his script about Van Gogh ("Lust for Life") and then, at the age of 80, came back to NPR and recorded a series of programs including "Good Can Be As Communicable As Evil", again speaking in words that almost nobody would dare to use, talking about how even if simply being kind won't cure all evil, it's still worth doing... now:
So long as conscionable and caring people are around, so long as they are not muted or exiled, so long as they remain alert in thought and action, there is a chance for contagions of the right stuff, whereby democracy becomes no longer a choice of lesser evils, whereby the right to vote is not betrayed by staying away from the polls, whereby the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, and dissent are never forsaken
(People in Wisconsin, and other areas, who stayed away from the polls now realize how foolish it is to forsake the freedoms of speech and vote as they exercise those freedoms to exorcise the people who rushed into the gap left open by those who didn't vote. But that's for another day and another blog.)
I've been listening to Corwin's broadcast as I type this -- hearing the crowds in Piccadilly and Times Square, and Corwin's words: ("This is it, kid. This is the day. This is what we were waiting for... but through the din and clamor we can hear a voice... listen: a flash across the dark Atlantic.. listen closely..." and he teases you until you can't wait to see what it is you're supposed to be listening for.
(I'm not going to tell you what you're to be listening for. Listen to it.)
I wouldn't have listened to Corwin's broadcast if he hadn't died; I didn't even know he lived, and I wouldn't have probably cared about Corwin's death if I wasn't one of those people who loves radio and even loves what radio has become and thinks it should become more.
Radio isn't dead, even if you don't like listening to nothing but conservative talk-show hosts on AM Radio; sure, they've taken over but that's just temporary, just like the rightward swing in politics is temporary, and we have to hope that no permanent damage is done under the fever-throes of fervor, to either the body politic or radio.
Radio these days isn't a wasteland, after all; every city still has their same stations: Madison, where I live now, has a "Classic Rock" station on which I listen to Alice Cooper's musical choices on Sunday nights, and they have a Top 40 station, and they have a New rock station that doesn't just play new rock and they have a hard rock station, and they even have one of those automated "We Play Everything" stations that, frankly, I like, because that's the closest radio comes to my iPod, playing Escape (The Pina Colada Song):
and then immediately following it with Macarena:
And I'm not going to apologize for liking either one of those, even if I sometimes do make up my own words to macarena and they go something like this:
Come on now a say a macarena
Why did you say that word the macarena?
I said the word cause you said say the macarena
Hey, macarena!
But we also have NPR, and we have the local talk radio station that has local hosts who talk about interesting things like local fetish shops (Hi, Forward With Kurt!) and, of course, sports radio -- we have two of those.
And then I have podcasts, which let me listen to radio when I want: Planet Money and Freakonomics Radio and Stuff You Missed In History Class and This American Life and the Savage Love podcast and more (I subscribe to about 10 of them), all of which I can listen to during what is otherwise dead time.
Dead time like when I was driving to court yesterday morning, leaving at 6:45 a.m. and driving until 8:15 a.m. and then driving back from 9:30 to 11 -- three hours in the car, time I would, absent radio, have spent just staring at the scenery.
I love the radio. I love listening to the more-sophisticated-than-me people on NPR's pop culture podcast -- a podcast is just radio, after all -- talk about X-Men: First Class or the Royal Wedding, and I like hearing Dan Savage alternately rant and laugh and offer sound advice, and sometimes, as I began noting in that earlier post I wrote, I just want to hear another human voice; sometimes, driving around in deserted landscapes at night, worn-out, it's nice to just listen to people talk, and to talk back to them, even if they can't hear me.
"That's crazy," I'll say, or "Well, right," listening to someone saying something and having a one-sided conversation.
I never got much into music videos, and a lot of the time, I treat TV as a radio -- I'll put on a TV show I like (usually one I've seen before) and listen to that without watching it, cleaning up the kitchen while Arrested Development plays over the computer speakers.
Most people are visual people, I know. But not me, not that way. I don't want to be told what to see, which is one reason I stopped reading comic books and found them, ultimately, unsatisfying. I want to imagine my worlds.
And I think that radio, using that term loosely to include podcasts and music and iPods, entertainment that is audio only, can be more than it presently is. I wonder, sometimes, why we have 24-hours sports-talk radio but no pop culture talk radio, and at those times I think "I should make a The Best Of Everything podcast and create pop culture talk radio," which is egotistic, I know, because if you look at podcasts for even a second you'll see that there's a plethora of pop culture talk radio, but there could be more, right?
I could do it, too. I don't just listen to radio; I've been a DJ, on a college radio station that for some reason broadcast only over cable, so you had to have cable radio to listen to us and I'm pretty sure nobody ever listened, but that didn't stop me from going on the air twice a week and playing indie rock and reading public service announcements for a whole semester, talking to people who might not have even been there.
I bet I'd have liked Norman Corwin. He seems like he was the kind of person I imagine myself to be: focusing mainly on one thing but doing lots of things and doing them well, back in the era when people did do lots of things. As we've become a more-visual, more-focused, culture, sometimes, I think, we've narrowed our scope. Look at the Founding Fathers. They did a zillion things. I read biographies of people in the 1700s and 1800s and they did everything. They were scientists and doctors and writers and politicians and farmers and then in their spare time they developed a theory of gravity:
Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 ...was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."
Norman Lewis Corwin (May 3, 1910 – October 18, 2011) was an American writer, screenwriter, producer, essayist and teacher of journalism and writing.
My own Twitter tagline is "Lawyer... writer... and also... um..." and when people these days ask what I do, what anyone does, would any of us reel off a string of things we do? We wouldn't.
When celebrities these days, for good or bad, do more than one thing, we mostly try to push them back into that one thing. I'm as guilty as anyone; I laugh at Keanu Reaves writing poetry and discount the political opinions of Gwyneth Paltrow (the latter probably being more likely the right move than the former, maybe) and DJs make fun of Billy Bob Thornton or Russell Crowe being rock stars as well as movie stars.
Actors and directors, we get. Actors and writers? We say no way.
And maybe that's a result of the increasing visualization of the world. Maybe video really did kill the radio star -- maybe, as we got more and more used to being told what to see, we learned to only see one thing -- there couldn't be more than one way for Harry Potter to look after we saw how Harry Potter looked, and maybe that has slowly conditioned us to be only one thing, our minds narrowing in ways we can't even comprehend until after it's already occurred, a world that can only be one thing because our minds no longer know how to do anything but replay the image we were given.
That's what I fight against, sometimes: the feeling that we can only do one thing, or even one thing at a time. Why must I only be a lawyer? Or a writer? Or, worse, why must I only write one kind of thing? Why can't I be all these things at once?
I'll put it this way: If you did listen to Corwin's description, taking you from the celebration in Times Square across the Atlantic to Europe, how did you picture that passage as he described it. (Again, if you didn't listen to it, why not? Just put it in the background. It won't take any of your time.) Did you fly, disembodied, across dark waters to an England that was celebrating wildly? Did you travel on an airplane? Did you whiz low over the waves of the Atlantic or soar above the clouds, seeing both North America and Europe on either side of that cold ocean?
As Corwin talked, you could do any of those things, but if he'd shown you, using CGI or live-action, you'd have only done one thing.
Norman Corwin was a radio pioneer, but more than that, he was a way of thinking. There is a world where any thing is possible, and there is a world where only this thing is possible. I worry, sometimes, that we're moving from the first to the second, or that we've already done it, and Norman Corwin's life ending seems to me to be proof of that happening.
And maybe I'm stuck in that world. But if I have to live in that world, nothing keeps me from keeping on driving down dark roads, listening to voices from far away, giving me the building blocks of football games and wars and relationship problems and more, building my own worlds in my mind, and making sure that I can be everything I imagine I am, and the world can be everything I imagine it to be, even if only for a little while.
Even parents in 1899 were repeating an old myth -- that same article says that in 1874 the "National Confectioners Association" had commissioned a report to debunk myths that candy caused kids to die-- and if they did so in 1874, you know that the rumors had to have been flying around via that 1800s' version of the internet (Pamphlets. Seriously) for a long time.
