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Saturday, December 25, 2004
Winter Howdies to all!
Well, now, last year I made a New Year's resolution to blog more often, and here it already is, twelve months and six posts later. Sigh. Maybe in 2005. Anyway, the title of this post comes from a phrase that I started hearing several years ago from a bunch of my friends, either as a standalone greeting, or in phrases like, "I still have to mail out my winter howdies this year." I wasn't quite sure what it meant at first, but I was able to glark from context that it was a generic, nondenominational, universally-inoffensive term for seasonal greetings, Christmas cards, family newsletters, Hanukkah cards, etc. Clever!, I thought, and began using the phrase myself. A year or so passed, and Christmas rolled around again. I was visiting my friends Qarin and James, when Qarin happened to mention something about her winter howdy cards, and I stopped her to ask, once and for all, where the heck "winter howdy" had come from. "From you," she said. "Say what?" "From you. You coined it." "I did what?" James jumped in. "On icb, a few years ago. You don't remember?" "Um... no." "We were talking about how it's always a hassle with mixed families to be sending Hanukkah cards to some people and Christmas cards to other people, and you said, 'Why not just say Winter Howdy! and make it easy on yourselves?' and everybody liked that and started saying it to each other. You really don't remember this?" "You are so making that story up." "I'm not! It was totally you!" This went on for a while, and eventually, when the events were confirmed by the testimony of other witnesses present at the scene of the alleged coining, I had to confess that I must indeed have been the progenitor of the Winter Howdy. I still have no recollection of it whatsoever. But... it seems that it has continued to spread; it was a year after that conversation that I first received a personalized printed card that read "Winter Howdies!" Not many Google hits yet, but it's out there, it's out there... And it is a festive addition to the holiday-greeting canon, don't you think? I may not remember it, but I'm certainly pleased by it. And perhaps the world needs it. From what can I glean from the blogosphere, it seems this year there was a little flurry of political dudgeon on cable TV over "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays", with assorted GOP spokesvermin like Fox News's Bill O'Reilly trying to convince their followers that these two phrases--which most people had long understood to be harmless, cheerful expressions of friendly wishes at a time when many Americans are celebrating--were in fact coded messages meaning, respectively, "Enjoy the yuletide celebration, my fellow patriotic, Christian Republican," and "Fuck you, baby Jesus!" (I exaggerate a bit, but judging from the quantity and intensity of the flamage that made it onto the internet in the wake of this made-up controversy, not that much.) Of course, very few scholars believe the Christmas holiday originally had anything to do with the birth of Jesus; pretty-much everyone agrees that the Catholic Church simply adopted a pre-existing pagan holiday. Why do such a thing? Because people do love their holidays, and if you can find a way to piggyback your message onto the rituals and traditions that families and communities happily re-enact each year, you've got yourself a very potent--and self-sustaining!--marketing message. And that, of course, is exactly what O'Reilly and his ilk are trying to do now--graft their message of antiliberal hatred onto the holiday traditions so it all gets mixed up in people's heads. Just as the Catholics successfully exploited a pagan holiday to spread their story, O'Reilly wants to exploit it again to spread his. With, unfortunately, some success. I say "Merry Christmas" all the time (sometimes in August, if I happen to be feeling whimsical), and I say "Happy Holidays" equally often, and never gave it much thought or got any notably surly responses to either one. But, as Kevin Drum at Washington Montly recently said, this year's GOP effort to turn seasonal greetings into political shibboleths has succeeded at making me feel self-concious every time I used either one to a stranger--concerned that, if this person happened to be an O'Reilly viewer, he or she might be reading messages into what I said that were not there. Which is exactly what O'Reilly and the others wanted, and it bugs me that they manipulated me so easily. (I don't even watch TV!) It is into this charged climate that I hereby offer, to any of you looking for a way to express feelings of warm respect and holiday cheer to your fellow men and women without participating in these jerks' latest kulturkampf, the humble Winter Howdy. Suitable for any occasion, and so far completely uncharged with negative associations by schmucks on TV. May it serve you long and well! And to all a good night. Friday, August 20, 2004
And speaking of the woods...
I spent yesterday afternoon with Mike, and a friend who was visiting him from out of town. The three of us took a lovely hike up into the Forest of Nisene Marks state park. Our destination was a signpost, way out in the middle of the forest, that marks the precise epicenter of the massive 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. That was a day when, I can tell you from vivid memory (and perhaps in a future post I will do so), the forces of nature made it very clear that they're a lot bigger and more powerful than people are. So to commemorate the day, some people went out and put up that signpost. It's the only human-built structure for a half mile in any direction. Turns out, sometime in the past year, a gigantic tree fell over and smashed it to shit. I'm not sure I can explain why, exactly, but I find that completely hilarious. Jesus Christ, what were the odds? Monday, August 16, 2004
Monday, May 10, 2004
Soon, this page will be #1 for chair hanging sex
Mike's recent post about an experience with a hilariously outre spambot has, it turns out, propelled him from a Google ranking of 43 on a search for "chair hanging sex" to numero uno. This has given me an idea for a new internet toy: You type in a URL, click "submit", and a perl script reads the URL, puts together a hundred or so random combinations of two or three words from the page, submits them to Google, and presents to you your Google ranking for each phrase--sorted numerically so that your #1 rankings show up first. For example, this program might be able to tell me that my blog has a Google ranking of #5 for the words evil CSN. It's fun! All I need now is a catchy name like Googlewhacking or Googlefight, and to forget the whole idea because who the hell has time. Friday, May 07, 2004
A little pre-Mother's-Day appreciation
I gave my mom the address to my blog the other day (not, of course, without some slight trepidation), and her response to the nostalgiathon in my previous post was: Your mother would have blistered your bottom if she had known you were crawling around in that dirty creek. . . That's the other side of the reminiscence thing - if you could have properly appreciated it then, just think what I would have thought! . . . but on second thought, I don't think I'd have stopped you. Children need episodes such as these - you just grit your teeth & pray that any hurts are transient. Modern parents are unfortunate - they have to be so panicky about children alone - pick them up at school even when they are perfectly capable of walking a few blocks. Uphill both directions, of course. Right on. And thanks, Mom. Thank you. One of the difficult, and more than a bit creepy, aspects of parenting in this decade is the apparently widespread, paralyzing fear that Something Bad Will Happen. I was walking six blocks to school and back when I was five years old, stopping to watch trails of ants, float leaf-boats in the rain gutters, feel the sticky sap oozing out of a pine tree. But these days? Do five-year-olds still get to do that? It sure doesn't seem like it. I mean, it was nice to see families playing at the Hidden Parks the other day, but you know what I didn't see? I didn't see kids playing unsupervised in the open courtyards of my old apartment complex, where thirty years ago there would have been armies of 'em. Nor did I see any children walking by themselves for the pure joy of it. And actually, maybe a casual observer wouldn't have seen those things so readily back in the 70s, either. Perhaps I only remember them as uibiquitous sights because I was a kid, and tended to be out and about when kids were out and about. But I don't think so. I think America--at least the suburban America I'm familiar with--has undergone a real shift and become, in the words of Barry Glasser, a Culture of Fear [gratuitous partner link]. We fear insane things, ridiculous things, like Anonymous Lurking Kidnappers (who do, unquestionably, exist, but in such tiny numbers you'd be better off worrying about lightning strikes). And razor blades in Halloween candy (though nothing of the sort has ever happened). And we fear cars hitting our children, so we keep the children in the back yard, or safely tucked away in the house watching TV, and we drive them to and fro in our SUVs and minivans, and the sidewalks become dead zones while the streets fill with deadlier vehicles. And you know what studies have shown happens when there are fewer kids along the sidewalk? People drive faster. Which makes the street even more dangerous, and discourages even more families from letting their kids play out front--and, probably, drives the sales of even more SUVs and minivans. Now, one of the great joys of my life is acting snooty and elitist and superior and pretending I'm above the concerns of Ordinary Dumbshit Americans, but of course I'm not. I'm part of this culture too. I may intellectually know them to be irrational, but I still feel the same fears. It's already a real challenge for me, and I know it will get harder as time goes on--to let go, restrain my control-freak instincts, and let my son have the mad adventures every kid deserves to have. It's a struggle. Ben likes to play with electrical outlets and plugs: Should I stop him? Yell at him? Slap his hand away from outlets? Inculcate in him a fear of something that is, properly handled, harmless? Or teach him the proper method of handling a plug, and just be ready to comfort him when he gets the inevitable shock? Until a few days ago, he was afraid to go down slides at the playground. Wednesday evening, in a moment of sudden impatience, I plopped him down on his butt and pushed him down a slide. "Yes yes yes yes yes!" he said, all the way down, and has been sliding down slides fearlessly ever since. Before, I would have said that a parent who forces a child to play a game he clearly doesn't like is a fool or worse. . . but somehow it turned out to be the right thing to do. I realized several things just then. Principally, that I'd been coddling him--and that helping him face and overcome fears is a better thing to do than helping him maintain them. But also, it dawned on me that he may well have gotten that fear from me. I'm afraid of heights myself (a fact I wasn't aware of until I learned to fly). I love heights and wide views, but I'm afraid of falling, and so naturally I'm afraid of my son falling. I tense up when I see Ben tottering high along a play structure, jerk my hands out to steady him. Surely he notices it. Surely it sends the message that he's not in a safe place, and that I don't trust him to keep himself secure. I must, I must, learn to stop doing this. And, as he grows, I must face my own fears, and let him out of my sight more and more, so he can learn about the world without me acting as fretful nervous intermediary. Given the incessant yapping of our cultural messengers of doom--Our schools aren't safe! Our streets aren't safe! Our food isn't safe! Is your child at risk? Film at 11!--it may be harder, this decade, for parents to overcome that fear than it was thirty years ago. But you know something? It can't ever have been easy. It obviously wasn't easy for my mom. And she still did it. Thanks. And Happy Mother's Day. I love you. Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Speeding Up Memory Lane
I was meeting Martin for a dinner date last night at a spot about halfway between where each of us lives. As it happened, the spot we chose was a half mile or so from the neighborhood where I'd lived from the third through fifth grades... and I arrived at the restaurant about 40 minutes early. So I took a little pilgrimage to see a fondly remembered place... I remember as if it were yesterday, though in fact it was late summer of 1976, a day when I'd strolled from our apartment over to the library to deposit my latest bolus of recently-devoured Hardy Boys mysteries, and stepping away from the book return box I was suddenly and inexplicably seized with eight-year-old wanderlust. There was a street on the far side of the intersection, tree lined and shady and filled with suburban houses and gardens and parked cars, and I'd never gone to see it up close! It was time to rectify that error. Off I went. 28 years away, I'm no longer sure what held my interest: I surely wasn't paying attention to the fine points of ranch-style architecture or admiring flowers, but something in me loved knowing the streets around my home intimately. In any case, after a flew blocks of wandering along Hacienda Avenue, I did something I might not have bothered to do if I'd been a few years older: I decided to walk to the end of each cul de sac I came to. And so I turned left. And happily I strolled along, and then I noticed an oddity. There at the end of the cul de sac, off to one side, were two houses that had not one but two parallel fences dividing their yards from one another. What was between those two fences? I looked closer: it was some kind of alleyway. I walked into it, and a dozen yards on, I emerged into... a park. A city park. A big rectangle of lush green grass, surrounded on all sides by tall fences and taller trees, a well-appointed playground in the middle--slides, jungle gym, half-moon swing, sand--benches and a water fountain and birds singing and nobody was there but me. There were no cars: There was no parking lot. The whole park was completely enclosed, and only accessible through a half dozen little alleyways just like the one behind me, each of them connecting to the end of a suburban cul de sac. In something like a daze, I stepped forward into it, and reverently walked around examining every detail of the place. Now, you have to understand that when you're eight, and you're exploring, and you find something like this, you don't think Oh, a park! How nice of the city to build such a fine facility for the public's enjoyment! No, you think: I am the first person to discover this park. No one else has ever walked here before me. God put this place on Earth for me, and I am the sole keeper of its secret. Some time later, I whispered my precious discovery to the woman who babysat me after school, and she said, "Oh, Hidden Park! Which one did you find?" I don't remember what I said, but perhaps it was "Whahuh?" "Why, there are two of them, you know." Well! This was so interesting I almost forgot to be devastated by the news that I hadn't actually been the park's discoverer. So the next time I had a free moment I went looking for the other one, and in due course I found it, a couple of blocks away, concealed just as the first one was. Hidden Park 2 (as I always thought of it from then on) was, oddly, not as nice as Hidden Park 1--the grass was a little scruffier, the playground equipment not quite as nice, and it got more shade in the afternoon and felt colder--but what, I was gonna complain? Two parks! So anyway. Yesterday afternoon, before my dinner date, I went to visit the hidden parks again. They're still there, still beautiful. The trees are bigger. In Hidden Park 1 they've replaced the playground equipment with the new, safe kind (alas, no more moon swing), and the sandbox was gone in favor of tanbark underlain with foam rubber. But I guess Hidden Park 2 is still a little neglected, though, because it still has the same old equipment I remember: The exact same jungle gym, exact same slides, I'm sure of it. One thing's clear: The parks have both got better PR now than they did 28 years ago, because they were populated: Happy families pushing kids on swings, a girl's softball team practicing throwing and catching, a fella chipping golf balls into an empty flowerpot. I strolled around for a while, and then went to look at a few other childhood haunts: The library--now apparently closed, either for renovation or for tearing it down and building a new one--and the bridge over the shady creek where I used to scale down the almost vertical banks and catch tadpoles (and let's hear it for eight-year-old intrepidness, because I never realized until yesterday what a scary-lookin' place that was. Pretty, though). And then I drove off to meet Martin, and as I drove I continued the nostalgiathon: Right about there is where the Sears used to be, and over there is where the movie theatre used to be, and here's the mall: These days it's a hideous shrine to consumerism and capitalist excess, but in those days it was the mall, you know? And at that moment it came to me: One of the abiding problems of the world is that our nostalgia is out of sync with reality. Think about it. It seems highly probable to me that when I was a third grader puttering around that neighborhood with its rosy-golden glow of childhood idyll, some thirty-six year old man was driving around thinking sadly about how great it used to be. And lord knows I didn't appreciate those days particularly at the time. Yet I'd pay big, big money to experience one of them again now. The day before yesterday, surfing the net, I happened across a page about collectibles that discussed cute old signs from Sinclair Oil gas stations, with a friendly green brontosaurus logo. Sinclair itself went extinct in the late '60s, and now their signs are quaint. You suppose anyone thought they were quaint at the time? Of course not. Here's what I think: We need to find a way to speed up the nostalgia process so we can properly appreciate now. How would this work? Bah, don't ask me: implementation detail. Perhaps a nice "soft focus" spraypaint. Or a pill! Because someday, someone is going to look at an image like this:  ...and think "Oooh, how darling! That takes me right back to 2004! Gosh, I wish I could go back there again and appreciate it properly." And why can't they think it today, when they actually do have the opportunity to appreciate it properly? It would save so much time and trouble. Monday, May 03, 2004
Karma
Since it was announced on the first of April, I've been fascinated by Google's planned email system, GMail. So imagine my delight when I heard that people with Blogger accounts--such as the one I'm using right now to edit this post--were being invited to join the GMail beta program. Then I discovered that they had to be active Blogger accounts, and apparently my highly infrequent posting (which I already felt kinda bad about) isn't enough to rate an invite. Grump. Well, in the unlikely event that any person or AI at Google notices this post: Please? Please please please? Pretty please? Can I pleeeeeeeeeaaaaase have a GMail account? Please? UPDATE: A big thank you to Mike Taht; I now have an account. ethanol@gmail.com is now the email address listed at the left column of the blog. Somebody drop me a line so I can see how it works, eh? Monday, March 08, 2004
The Passion of the Snowman
This is an old chestnut of mine that I usually perform in December, but Mel Gibson's latest action thriller has made it kind of topical, so what the heck. Several years ago at a Christmas party, some friends and I got to discussing the fact that Christmas carols used to be these deeply spiritually significant hymns, then gradually became more and more secular, and the ones that have been written in the last fifty years--"Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" and "Up on the Housetop, Click Click Click" and so on--have no more depth than the average advertising jingle. I thought it that it was time someone wrote a Christmas song that recaptured the true meaning of the holiday while retaining the pop accessibility of the modern songs. This is how it came out. (Tune of "Frosty".)
Was the son of god they say With a virgin mom and a perfect birth In a manger full of hay Christ the messiah Was the king of all the Jews When the Pharisees acted hard to please He just showed what he could do There must have been some magic in that silver grail he found 'Cause when he put in fish and bread... There was enough to go around! (Yum!) Christ the messiah Was as holy as can be All the poor folks said he could raise the dead And he made a blind guy see But Christ the messiah Really made the Romans mad So the local boss said to build a cross And to put thorns on his head Thumpity-thump-thump, thumpity-thump-thump Watch him drag his cross! Thumpity-thump-thump, thumpity-thump-thump While all the kids throw rocks! (Ouch!) Christ the messiah Died for all our sins that day But though his blood was shed, the disciples said... He'll be back again someday! See what I mean? It takes the story of Jesus and gives it a little excitement, a little pizzazz. Pity I didn't think to offer it to Mel as the theme song for his movie. Woulda fit right in, after I added a verse about scourging.
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