Think: Marley On Steroids

November 12, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Lifestyle | Leave a Comment 

If you sobbed your way through enjoyed Marley and Me, you may want to check out “The Philosopher and the Wolf” in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. It’s partly the story of the adoption and having a wolf around the house; partly a reflection on the nature of the bonds between people and pets.

The concept is easy to grasp: Mark Rowlands, an academic philosopher at the University of Alabama, buys a wolf cub, names him Brenin, and lives with him for the next eleven years.

The end is in the beginning and it gives you an idea of Professor Rowlands’ philosophical approach to things:

Brenin never lay down in the back of the Jeep. He always liked to see what was coming. Once, many years ago, we had driven from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, all the way to Miami - around 800 miles - and back again. And he stood every inch of the way: his hulking presence blocking out much of the sun and all of the rear traffic. But this time, on this short drive into Béziers, near the village where we were living in the Languedoc, he wouldn’t stand; couldn’t stand. It was then I knew he was gone. I was taking him to the place where he would die. I had told myself that if he stood up, even for part of the journey, I would give it another day; another 24 hours for a miracle to occur. But now I knew it was over. My friend of the past 11 years would be gone. And I didn’t know what sort of person he was going to leave behind.

A Real Handful

November 12, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Lifestyle | Leave a Comment 

Having given nary a thought to hand sanitizer in the past, it’s suddenly everywhere I look.  I’ve noted its semi-surreal appearance in the story of Barack Obama’s first White House meeting with George W. Bush.

And now I read in my local paper —the Alexandria Gazette Packet— an account of Congressman Vito Fossella’s recent DUI trial.

The 43-year old Republican congressman from Staten Island was arrested for running a red light in Alexandria shortly after midnight last April 30th.  He scored more than double the legal alcohol limit.

He had already had a long day that included some House votes, a White House reception for the Super Bowl winning New York Giants, and being thrown out of a Washington bar.

He was released to the custody of a retired Air Force Colonel — and that’s when things really began to unravel.  Before very long it was discovered that, in addition to his wife and three children on Staten Island, he had what amounted to a second family with the Colonel and their three year old daughter.

A once-promising and upward-trending career was dashed; he decided, undoubtedly wisely, not to run for re-election.  The seat was won by a Democrat.

The only reason for rehearsing the sorry and sordid story is…..hand sanitizer.

The Gazette Packet clearly had little time for the legal circus that rolled into court with the Fossella case.  What should have been a pro forma procedure took several hours and lasted into the night — thereby preventing other business from being done.  The defendant had lawyered up bigtime: 

The congressman brought three in-stripped laywers who each took their turn hurling a series of motinos at the court.

“You want opening statements on your motion?” the judge asked at one point.

Yes, the trio of lawyers wanted opening statements, closing statements and missing documents.

And when, you’re asking, do we get to the hand sanitizer?  Right now.

While waiting for votes on the house floor, Fossella testified last week, he would often use a hand sanitizer known as Purell.  Such was the case this particular Wednesday evening, when Fossella cast several votes before a night of partying at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse and Logan Tavern.

“You shake a lot of hands in this business,” said congessman [sic], whose laywers would later argue that the hand sanitizer may have contributed to problems with the Intoxilyzer machine that produce a document identified as “Commonwealth’s Exhibit One.”

The three pin-stripes produced a defense expert who testified that the ethanol in the Purell had skewed the results of the blood-alcohol reading taken several hours later.  

Judge Becky Moore wasn’t buying it, so Purell won’t be joining Twinkies in the pantheon of dubious defenses.  Slate disposed of the spurious claim pretty definitively:

A 2006 study among Australian health care workers tested this very question. Twenty workers applied Avangard—a hand sanitizer with 70 percent ethanol (compared with Purell’s 62 percent)—30 times during one hour, mimicking the usage in intensive-care units. One to two minutes after the final exposure, six of the workers did show a slight bump in breath-ethanol levels—between 0.001 percent and 0.0025 percent, about the same effect as one-tenth of a beer on an average-size male. Ten to 13 minutes after the final application, however, all the health care workers’ breath-ethanol levels had returned to zero. In Fossella’s case, a period of several hours separated his Purell usage and his breathalyzer test: He claimed to have used the hand sanitizer during the afternoon of April 30 and wasn’t pulled over until just after midnight.

It’s also very unlikely that alcohol would have remained on Fossella’s hands and thus affected the Intoxilyzer 5000’s analysis. Except for the trace amounts that get absorbed by the skin, the ethanol in the sanitizer would have dissipated once the liquid itself evaporated.

If you believe that things come in threes — then it’s only a matter of time before hand sanitizer is once again in the news, and you can count on me to keep you informed.

 

Imperial? Maybe. Bacterial? No Way.

November 10, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Bush Administration, Lifestyle | 1 Comment 

The reports indicate that today’s meeting between the President and the President-Elect went well.

Bill Sammon reported on their first meeting four years ago. Is it just me, or is this truly, deeply weird?  (And maybe even, in equal parts, offensive?)  Or should I just rush to the store and get me some of that Purell in a pump?

Four years ago, Obama and other newly elected members of the Senate were invited to the White House for a breakfast meeting with Bush, who pulled the young Chicagoan aside.

“Obama!” Bush exclaimed, according to Obama’s account of the meeting in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours — that’s one impressive lady.”

The two men shook hands and then, according to Obama, Bush turned to an aide, “who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.”

Bush then offered some to Obama, who recalled: “Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.”

Getting In Touch With Your Inner Snake Plissken

November 10, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Entertainment, Lifestyle, Technology | Leave a Comment 

Washington is like women in the old vaudeville joke: you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.* But for those who would like to try, and who have about 24 hours to spare, there’s Fallout 3, the new action role-playing video game from Bethesda Game Studios.

The setting is Washington, D.C. in the post-apocalyptic year of 2277 (that’s thirty years after the devastating nuclear war that was unleashed in 1998’s Fallout 2).

In today’s New York Times, Seth Schiesel describes some of his reactions to playing the game:

When I first ventured out of the dank Metro tunnel onto the ravaged National Mall — a snarl of trenches and barbed wire under the shadow of the shattered Washington Monument — I wasn’t thinking about politics. When I sneaked into the ruins of the Capitol and watched a band of mercenaries lob a Mini-Nuke at a raging 30-foot-tall mutant behemoth under the fractured dome of the Rotunda, I wasn’t thinking about filibuster-proof majorities.

Not until I finally battled my way up Pennsylvania Avenue — dispatching mutants with my plasma rifle at every turn to discover only a radioactive crater in the ground behind a twisted, warped yet familiar wrought-iron fence — did I see Fallout 3 in a real-world context. In this vision of the cost of hubris, the White House is not broken or burned. It is not the home of an evil mastermind. It is just gone.

It takes a lot of gumption to blow up the entire Washington area; render the wreckage in detailed yet almost painterly strokes; populate the wasteland with all manner of alternately deranged, endearing and frightening characters; weave a score of intersecting story lines; sprinkle on a thick layer of high-powered weaponry; and simply set the player loose. Yet that is what Bethesda Softworks accomplishes with Fallout 3, one of the most ambitious single-player role-playing games in recent years.

Fallout 3 can be almost intimidating, not in its difficulty (it is almost too easy) but in its scope. At first I basically put blinkers on and studiously ignored everything that was not directly related to the main story. In the game the player begins as a baby, and then picks up as a young adult who has grown up in a locked underground vault with other survivors of the atomic holocaust. You venture into the wasteland in search of your father, who has mysteriously taken off.

*Now you know why vaudeville died.

Dan Quayle’s Vindication

November 3, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Ethics, Lifestyle, Media | Leave a Comment 

When former Vice President Dan Quayle has been mentioned in the 2008 campaign, more often than not, it has been to compare the ridicule he suffered during the 1988 race and throughout his term in office to the mockery directed at Sarah Palin.  But this week comes news that a brouhaha which the media portrayed as a major gaffe at the time may have proven him to be far more prescient than anyone realized then.

On May 19, 1992, Quayle spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  His remarks decried the increased incidence of mothers choosing to bear children outside marriage.  In this context, he pointed to a storyline in the TV sitcom Murphy Brown in which the title character, portrayed by Candice Bergen, chose not to wed the father of her child-to-be, and said that this set an unfortunate example to younger viewers in particular.

Quayle’s speech attracted considerable controversy, and quite a number of printed and spoken words were devoted to ridiculing the idea that a mere TV show could have such an impact in real life. 

But, although the show itself made fun of Quayle’s argument, years later Ms. Bergen said she thought there was a point to what he said, and this week a study published in the estimable professional journal Pediatrics (which is already the subject of a Washington Post article and coverage in other newspapers) describes the results of a comprehensive survey of unwed and teenage mothers which appears to confirm the idea that adolescents are indeed encouraged to pursue promiscuity by what they see on television. 

So far none of the articles discussing the study have mentioned Quayle’s speech of 16 years ago.  But isn’t it time he got some credit for being right?

Oh Lordy Day: Has The Botox Reached His Brain?

October 14, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under DSPQ, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Lifestyle, News media | Leave a Comment 

The Washington Post finally surfaced the widespread blogosphere speculation that Senator Biden’s newly unfurrowed brow is a result of an encounter with a vial of Botox.   Maybe that beautifying botulin can also help explain the increasing numbers of gaffes and gaucheries that have been plaguing the always gaffe-prone Delaware politician.  

Here’s a bit of Toby Harnden’s American blog for the Daily Telegraph:

Joe Biden is enjoying himself so much on the campaign trail that occasionally he gets to thinking he’s about to become president. “In a Biden…an Obama-Biden administration,” he said during an event at an American Legion hall here in Rochester, New Hampshire this morning, catching himself just in time.

“We know, we know,” he responded jovially as the crowd realised what he’d said. “It’s hard to get used to. We got his thing the right way.” He pointed at a group of men who were barracking him good-naturedly. “These are my old buddies over here from the shipyard.”

Last month at an event in Fort Myers, Florida, he referred to the “Biden administration” before correcting the phrase and adding as he laughed and crossed himself: “Believe me, that wasn’t a Freudian slip. Oh Lordy day, I tell ya.”

The veteran Delaware senator may have an autocue and a set of notes in front of him but he tends to ignore them. “Let me begin by saying Happy Columbus Day,” he said at the start of the Rochester event. “I may be Irish but I was smart enough to marry Italian.”

Only Senator Biden and his dermatologist know for sure, but here are two videos that I shall label “BB” and “AB”.  

BB:

AB:

Wonkette has a predictably snarky take (and for this subject surely snarky is suitable):

There is something very charming about how cheaply and how obviously Joe Biden indulges his personal vanities. Surely he knows plastic surgeons and Hair Club type people who could do this stuff quietly and, you know, correctly, but down home Joe from Scranton takes the train home every day! So instead he says, “Oh noes I am losing my hair! I’ll just take these other hairs an’ plug ‘em into my head, in rows, and nobody will know the difference! Here, gimme that glue gun!” and also more recently, “Holy cow my forehead’s a-wrinklin’! Squirt a big heap of that paralytic virus in there and we’ll show America what a real monster looks like!” Now nobody can vote for Barack Obama or Joe Biden, because Joe Biden is a Botox addict.

Even assuming it’s true (it’s true), does this mean really anything?  The answer, of course, is: no.  Truth be told, there’s a lot of this afoot (or aface) these days.  And, considering our appearance and style driven society and politics, who’s to say it’s a bad idea?

But I can’t help thinking that if a similarly prominent Republican candidate suddenly turned up wrinkle free overnight, the media would be all over it as indicative of the individual’s superficiality and emblematic of the Party’s penchant for appearance over substance.

X Marks The Box

October 14, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Election 2008, Lifestyle, Media, Technology | Leave a Comment 

Talk about covering all the bases…..

The Obama campaign is sponsoring virtual billboards in the new online version of the popular and challenging auto racing video game Burnout Paradise, which became available for Xbox 360 download on September 25th.  

 

Perfect Commercials

October 13, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Lifestyle, Media, Perfect Commercials | Leave a Comment 

Directed by David Fincher

The POTUS And The Puter

October 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Internet, Lifestyle, Technology | Leave a Comment 

James Rosen —Fox News’ Washington correspondent and John Mitchell biographer— wrote an interesting op-ed for Thursday’s USA Today  —“Need A Tech Savvy President?”—in which he considered whether computer proficiency has become a criterion for being elected POTUS.

Historically, Democrats prefer exceptionalism in their leaders, Republicans populism.  JFK, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Obama, though all products of the old-fashioned political “machines” in their states, have presented themselves as cutting-edge types, solicitous of new technologies. Even the down-home LBJ, surveying his Texas-sized mistakes in Vietnam, navigated three TV sets at once.

By contrast, Republican leaders Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bush 41 and W. —  all thoughtful men frequently underestimated by their opponents — have willfully cultivated anti-intellectual, Luddite personas. At times, of course, artifice give way to reality: Nixon’s mechanical abilities were so deficient he reportedly had difficulty opening the boxes of cuff links he presented to Oval Office visitors (and thus could be forgiven for forgetting that his voice-activated taping machines were running even at moments when he later wished they hadn’t been).

Ultimately, the numbers could be on McCain’s side, even if the zeroes and ones are not. Census figures show that 64% of American voters cast ballots but that 72% of senior citizens do — and only a quarter of them use the Internet. 

What If? How Would We Do?

October 3, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Culture, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Lifestyle, UK Politics | Leave a Comment 

Last Sunday, as I shared my sermon with our congregation, I talked about the current economic crisis and reflected on the possibility of very difficult times ahead.

As I was speaking, my eyes fell on a man who is about 95 years of age. He was looking at me with eyes that seemed to say: “Pastor, you have no idea how bad an economic crisis can get.”

Of course, he is a Great Depression - and everything else - survivor. And I suspect that most of us need to find an octogenarian or two to talk to - someone who can show us the ropes.

In the same vein, I came across a column written by Max Hastings that came out a couple of days ago in the London Daily Mail. It’s entitled: New Age of Austerity. In the piece, Hastings reminds his readers that

“few of us, in our hugely privileged lives, have ever experienced the hard times we’re about to face.”

Here’s a link to “across the pond.”

Power Breakfasts

September 28, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Lifestyle, Media | Leave a Comment 

Saveur magazine surveyed the breakfasting habits of some prominent citizens of the nation’s capital.

Senator McCain’s favorite breakfast is age and health appropriate: coffee, cereal, and fruit.

But you have to wonder whether Senator Obama fully understood the question (or whether his metabolism deserves its own wing in the Smithsonian): Four to six eggs, potatoes, and wheat toast. Every now and then, fruit, bacon, and oatmeal.

Christopher Hitchens’ go-to way to start his day is “old-fashioned Irish oatmeal with salt, plus espresso and two squeezed oranges, which together give me the strength to mount my ROM [Range of Motion] exercise machine for the four-minute workout.”

Maureen Dowd doesn’t eat any breakfast.

Nancy Pelosi’s preferred prima colazione is chocolate ice cream (”but a chocolate donut will do in a pinch”).

Jim Lehrer confines his early a.m. chocolate cravings to a granola bar and black coffee — and, sometimes, an open-faced cheese sandwich.

One doesn’t see much of Walter Cronkite these days, but it’s good to know he has kept his sense of humor: “My morning breakfast ritual is pretty much the same as it’s always been—4,000 calories or so before swimming the four-by-100-meter race…. Not really, but most days I do enjoy a full, hot breakfast, with an occasional bowl of cold cereal for variety. The one constant in the morning is the time I spend reading through several newspapers—I can’t wait to get to the news.”

Jim Fallows clearly took the question very seriously:

“My theory is that breakfast is the meal where people most deeply crave their own native cuisine. Consistent with this theory, one of my goals is to reach the end of this current stint in China—we’re now two years into a planned three-year stay—without ever having to eat the standard Chinese breakfast gruel, called congee…. I am not a morning person, so I don’t have that rearin’-to-go attitude of those who consider a hearty breakfast the start to a productive day. Instead, I have this array of unimaginative and therefore comforting choices, depending on where I am each day.

“On the road in a nice hotel in Asia: A big, cholesterol-rich cheese omelette, with good toasted bread on the side and several liters of coffee (strong, black, a little milk, none of this latte stuff). In theory this might be bad for me, but I’m healthy otherwise, and it keeps me going a long time.

“At home in China, a day of writing ahead: A bowl of raisin bran (which we buy on resupply trips to the U.S.) with milk and several liters of coffee as described above. More coffee to follow through the next few hours at my desk. Sometimes, if we’re out of raisin bran, I’ll have some Chinese bread toasted with peanut butter. See comments above regarding health: I exercise all the time, so I don’t let doctors know what I eat in the morning.

“At home in the U.S.: Some combo of the elements above: sometimes an omelette, sometimes cereal, and of course the beloved bagel–and–cream cheese combo. Sometimes coffee yogurt. All liberally supplied with actual liquid coffee.

“If forced to violate my initial principle—breakfast is when you want the food you’ve known since your earliest days—I would choose to be transplanted to Germany, where I could have black bread and slices of cheese and pickles and cured meat. Plus the coffee.”

John Taylor’s pal Andrew Sullivan favors a large coffee and some ginger snaps. “Terrible, I know,” he says (although I don’t think I’ve ever met a ginger snap I didn’t like.)

My current hero, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, appropriately, eats a runner’s breakfast: Oatmeal and bananas, along with chamomile tea with lots of honey.

And former DC Mayor Marion Barry (who is not now and never has been one of my heroes) favors oatmeal, a peach or a pear, and a glass of juice when he’s at home, and treats himself to eggs benedict with a side of fruit when he’s out at a meeting. (Fill in your own joke here.) As the DC List blog notes (to which a tip o’ the cap for this item and the illustration), this information should finally put to rest “the malicious rumor that he eats babies for breakfast.”

Martin Tytell - 1913-2008

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, In Memoriam, Lifestyle, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

On the day after the 91-year-old co-defendant of the Rosenbergs finally admitted that he was, like them, a spy, comes word of the death of the 94-year-old typewriter expert who was dragooned into service for the appeal lodged by Alger Hiss’ defense team.

Hiss’ appeal finally boiled down to what amounted to a “who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes” defense.  The secret documents he was accused of stealing had been retyped before being passed on to a Soviet courier on a Woodstock typewriter — the typeface of which was identical to one owned and used by Alger and Priscilla Hiss during the period in question. 

Everyone knew that typewriters were like fingerprints — each unique and uniquely identifiable.  So, with the dramatic discovery of the Hiss’ old Woodstock, the case seemed to have been solved and closed.

And that’s where Mr. Tytell came in.  Hiss’ attorneys tasked him with recreating in his workshop a typewriter whose characteristic product would be identical —right down to the tiniest indented Rockwell serif— to that of the damning Hiss machine.  

Martin Tytell was apparently able, after two years working on it, to do what he was asked.  All his work went for naught when the the appeal requesting a new trial was unsuccessful.  

Mr. Tytell’s obituarist, Bruce Weber, notes that, in addition to providing the basis for the abortive appeal, Mr. Tytell’s recreated machine became, after Hiss’ release from prison in 1954, “the foundation of…the debate over his guilt, which goes on to this day.”  I don’t know anything about the circles in which Mr. Weber moves (presumably the ones in which Morton Sobell’s innocence is still an article of faith), but they must be pretty rarefied if that debate is still current among them.

 

 

 

 

I’m sure that at least some TNN readers are old enough to remember (and remember fondly) the typewriter technology of the mid-to-late twentieth century.  They will, like me, still revel remembering the sight and sound and feel of a stately solid old office Underwood (the kind PN would have used when she taught typing at Whittier High School, with the bell to warn you of the approaching margin, and the satisfying heft of the carriage return); or the sleek sensual thrill of boarding a plane carrying a bright new Olivetti portable (designed by Ettore Sottsass who, alas, died in Milan last January at the age of 90); or the no-nonsense authority of the IBM Executive (the only machine on which Rose Mary Woods would type RN’s White House documents); or the IBM Selectric’s “end of history” technology (with its easily interchangeable tying elements and its automatically spooling correction tape that made errors obsolete).

For those of us, there will be great charm —and not a little nostalgia— in the more professional details of Mr. Tytell’s obituary:

Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean, Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.

He made a hieroglyphics typewriter for a museum curator, and typewriters with musical notes for musicians. He adapted keyboards for amputees and other wounded veterans. He invented a reverse-carriage device that enabled him to work in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. An error he made on a Burmese typewriter, inserting a character upside down, became a standard, even in Burma.

Martin Kenneth Tytell was born on Dec. 20, 1913, the next-to-last of 10 children whose Russian Jewish immigrant parents lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Eventually, going to school mostly at night, he earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and an M.B.A. from New York University.

But as a boy he worked in a hardware store, carrying a screwdriver everywhere, and one day in school he got himself excused from gym class by volunteering to answer the telephone in a nearby office. Sitting on a desk was an Underwood typewriter, which he took apart. The man who came to fix it gave him his first lesson in typewriter repair. Before he was out of high school he had the typewriter-maintenance account for Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.  

In 1943, a contraband shipment that included 100 Siamese typewriters was seized by the federal government, and with typewriters needed by overseas forces and typewriter producers having largely converted to other wartime manufacturing, Mr. Tytell, then in the Army, was asked to convert the Siamese typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.   His machines, capable of reproducing 17 different languages, were airdropped to O.S.S. headquarters at various war fronts.

Mr. Tytell wore a white lab coat and a bow tie while waiting on customers who included writers and journalists such as Dorothy Parker, Richard Condon, David Brinkley, and Harrison Salisbury.  Both Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower were among his clients.  He was sufficiently established to have letters addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York,” delivered to his premises at 116 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan.

It is one of my firmly held (and, I realize, not entirely orthodox) beliefs that God, Who recognizes eternal excellence, continues to use His old Remington.  So perhaps Mr. Tytell is still wearing his lab coat and bow tie and simply pursuing his honorable old trade in a new and  better place.

Illustrations (top to bottom): Woodstock, Olivetti, IBM Executive, IBM Selectric, Underwood.

Life Imitates Art

September 1, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Culture, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Public Opinion | Leave a Comment 

Whatever the ultimate impact turns out to be on Sarah Palin’s candidacy, there can be no doubt that public attitudes towards the announcement of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy will be influenced by some milestones in the popular culture last year.

The phenomenal —and totally unexpected— success of the small indie film Juno raised the problem of unwed teen pregnancy and the solution of keeping the baby in the kind of warm and sensitive way that, coming from Hollywood, took many by surprise.

The raucous and raunchy Knocked Up — Judd Apatow’s hugely successful follow-up The Forty Year Old Virgin— had a solid and moral underpinning regarding dealing with the title’s dilemma.  It spent eight weeks in the box office top ten and grossed almost $150 million domestically.

The tough and touching Waitress, which premiered at Sundance and was critically well-received, would undoubtedly have achieved a greater audience if its writer-director-actor Adrienne Shelly had lived to promote it and champion its cause.

And at the end of last year, it was announced that Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16 year old star of Nickelodeon’s immensely popular Zoey 101, was pregnant and that she planned to have the baby and marry her 18 year old boyfriend.  That Zoey 101 was most-watched by girls 9-14 —it had won an Emmy as the Outstanding Children’s Program— made the news of this intrusion of real life especially controversial and its impact that much more significant.

Whether it’s the daughter of a vice presidential nominee or an anonymous teenager down the street, after 2007 the revelation of an unwed pregnancy, and the decision to keep the baby and marry the father, now have a pop culture context that will help frame public reaction.

 

The Handbags And Gladrags Of Loudoun County

August 30, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Culture, Lifestyle | 3 Comments 

If you decide to read this post, please click the arrow below and use the song as a soundtrack.  This will save your time and relieve me of having to supply all the head shaking, tongue clucking, finger wagging, and old fart moralizing for which this story cries out to heaven.

What father doesn’t want to give his children all the things he never had?  And what could be a more noble and inspiring motivation?

But what if all the father never had was…..everything?  When you start with rags, how do you calibrate the riches you find yourself capable of bestowing on your offspring?  

In today’s Washington Post, Laura Yao describes the birthday party —her sweet sixteenth— given by a local dad in honor of his high school sophomore daughter.

Although I will claim to be shocked, I can’t claim to be surprised.  I’ve indulged the guilty pleasure of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 often enough to know that such things exist.  But I never imagined they existed, you know, in real life — the kind of life that exists in the Virginia suburbs surrounding the nation’s capital.  

Here are the basics:

• The party cost $300k.  
• The theme —the birthday girl’s choice— was “Hollywood Chic”.  (A party theme based on an oxymoron is asking for trouble from the getgo — but she’s only 16 so we can cut her some slack on that I suppose).   
• It was given at a downtown DC nightclub that had been hired and specially fitted out for the evening.  
• The 200 invitees were picked up in a local high school parking lot in limo-busses.  
• The entertainers flown in for the event were rap stars Soulja Boy and Bow Wow.
• As if Soulja Boy and Bow Wow weren’t enough, Mom’s contribution to the evening was to pony up the extra dough to fly in R&B superstar Mario on a private jet just to sing “Happy Birthday”.
• Giant photographs of the birthday girl on the walls; 50 TV screens continuously looped more photographs of her; 72 LED panels were brought in just for the party.
• Outside the club the 15-foot JumboTron showed her face.

Aside from the already mentioned fact that the limo-busses picked up the guests in a high school parking lot, here are some of my favorite details from the article:

[the birthday girl] named the evening’s three mocktails after things she likes, says the club’s general manager, Sherwin Robinson: “Hollywood Mojito because that’s the theme, Sunset Smoothies because she likes sunsets, and Sweet Devil, I don’t know, I guess she has something with the devil.”

Gifts from her family include a tricked-out Range Rover from her dad with “Little Devil” plates. “My mom got me a ring from somewhere exotic; I don’t remember where. My sister got me a bunch of clothes and makeup because I love clothes and makeup.”

Poor Mom.  She clearly doesn’t get it.  She should have saved the money on that lame ring to which she devoted so much time and thought and done something that would have been appreciated like flying in Lil Wayne.

And my favorite detail of all — which may give a clue about how Dad (an immigrant from Turkey who arrived here a penniless boy) amassed some of his fortune:

“You would think she’s a celebrity,” says Soulja Boy. (He, by the way, is a little miffed because he thought it was a club performance, not a private party. He charges more for those.)

If you did as you were asked at the outset, the song to which you have been listening is Mike d’Abo’s “Handbags and Gladrags” performed by Chris Farlowe.  It has been one of my particular favorites since I first heard it on the radio in England when it was released in 1967.  The anger of its lyrics had a special meaning to the Britain of the late-60s when the transition from grim post-war austerity to Swinging London had begun to engender a backlash from its own Carnaby-Street-style excesses.

It has recently become familiar as the theme for the British version of The Office.

Ever seen a blind man cross the road
trying to make the other side?
Ever seen a young girl growing old
trying to make herself a bride?

So what becomes of you my love
When they have finally stripped you of
The handbags and the gladrags
That your granddads had to sweat so you could buy?

Once I was a young man
And I thought all I had to do was smile
You are still a young girl
And you’ve bought everything in style

But once you think you’re in you’re out
‘Cause you don’t mean a thing without
The handbags and the gladrags
That your granddads had to sweat so you could buy.

Sing a song of six-pence for your sake
And take a bottle full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds in a cake
And bake ‘em all in a pie.

They told me you missed school today
So I suggest you just throw away
The handbags and the gladrags
That your granddads had to sweat so you could buy.

Debt Therapy

July 22, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Lifestyle, Money | Leave a Comment 

David Brooks has a great op-ed piece in this morning’s New York Times called The Culture of Debt. He discusses the tension between our desire to place blame during this current credit mess on predatory lenders on the one hand, and individuals making poor choices on the other. And he talks about how much our individual decisions are influence by “the patterns and norms of the world around them.”

Here are a couple of thoughts from the column:

“And now the reckoning has come. The turn in the market punishes many of those seduced by financial temptations. (Sometimes capitalism undermines the Puritan virtues, but sometimes it reinforces them.)”

And…

“After the Depression, a savings mentality set in. After the dot-com bubble, a bit of sobriety hit Silicon Valley. Now it’s the borrowers’ and lenders’ turn. As the saying goes: People don’t change when they see the light. They change when they feel the heat.”

The Progressive Book Club Cometh

June 16, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Culture, Lifestyle | Leave a Comment 

Today’s New York Times brings news of the latest effort on the part of liberal and left-wing media figures to sway American public opinion - the launch of the Progressive Book Club.   Its CEO, nonprofit fundraiser Elizabeth Wagley (whose father John Wagley has long been prominent in Democratic circles and whose husband Joe Conason was one of the Clintons’ chief journalistic spear-carriers in the days of impeachment) offers this rationale for the PBC on its site:

“We started PBC because we realized that conservatives had used books, book clubs, and publishing to lend currency and legitimacy to their ideas - and that unless progressives learned to use these same tools, right-wing ideas would prevail for the foreseeable future.”

A quick review of the history of politically-minded book clubs is in order.  The first book club started in Germany in 1919. In 1926 Harry Scherman founded the Book-Of-The-Month Club in the United States, which proved an almost instant success, peaking at over a million subscribers in the years after World War II.  In 1927 Doubleday followed suit with the Literary Guild, and in the 1940s and 1950s set up a number of extremely successful subsidiaries (Science Fiction Book Club, Doubleday Crime Club, etc).  In the early 1990s, Bertelsmann acquired Doubleday’s clubs, and the Book-Of-The-Month Club as well, ultimately achieving a near-monopoly in the field.  But in recent years the number of subscribers to general-interest and fiction book clubs has markedly decreased in the US, to about 7 million (though the concept continues to find success in European and some Asian markets), and Bertelsmann now has its American book clubs up for sale.

The first politically-minded book club (in the English-speaking world, anyway) was Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in the UK, founded in 1936.  Its early titles were markedly Stalinist in orientation; Gollancz, indeed, rejected George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia.  The club reached its peak of 57,000 subscribers (in a population of about 40 million) in the fall of 1939, after which Gollancz, disillusioned with Communism after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, shifted the LBC selections to more moderately leftist titles; the club came to an end in 1948.

In 1941, a 25-year-old clerk in a remainder warehouse named George Braziller suggested to the leftist (and, indeed, Communist-dominated) League Of American Writers, shortly before its demise, that it sponsor a club similar to Gollancz’s; that organization, probably because of the LBC’s apostasy from Stalinism, declined.  The following year, Braziller borrowed $25 and set up the Book Find Club, which offered a list of fiction and nonfiction titles, some of the latter leaning toward the Browderist line of Communism, some in a more moderate vein.  The club proved an almost instant success, and by the high noon of postwar leftism in the spring of 1948 had over 75,000 subscribers - a fraction of the BOMC and Literary Guild membership, but impressive nonetheless.  (In fact, in 1946 or so a very short-lived rival was set up, under the sponsorship of James T. Farrell and other anti-Stalinist figures, to compete against the BFC.  Its name? The Progressive Book Club.)

By 1950, with the rise of McCarthyism, the fortunes of the BFC declined and Braziller dropped political books to focus on literary and cultural titles.  Around 1960 he sold his club to Time Inc, which operated it unsuccessfully for a little over a decade and then discontinued it.  (Braziller, meanwhile, had set up his own publishing company in 1954, and continues to run it to this day.) 

But it’s probable that the PBC’s principals have the model of the Conservative Book Club in mind rather than Braziller’s half-forgotten club.  The CBC was set up during the height of Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy by Neil McCaffrey, a former Doubleday editor.  McCaffrey, already prominent in the conservative movement for his work in marketing William F. Buckley’s National Review, was partly inspired by the millions of copies Goldwater’s The Conscience Of A Conservative had sold by mail-order.

McCaffrey’s initial promotion of the CBC was somewhat frustrated by the dearth of conservative-minded titles being issued in the mid-’60s; in those days, apart from Buckley’s bestsellers, Henry Regnery was nearly the only publisher ready to look at such books.  So McCaffrey set up his own imprint, Arlington House, which built up an impressive list of political volumes during the late ’60s and ’70s. 

Arlington House went under at the end of the 1970s but McCaffrey kept his book club going, with a smallish but staunch group of subscribers, until his death in 1994.  After a few fallow years, Tom Phillips of Eagle Publishing acquired the CBC around the same time he bought Regnery Publishing.  This brought about a dramatic change.  The CBC’s selections (often but not always Regnery books) received wide publicity on the shows of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan and other conservative-friendly radio hosts, and on the infant Fox News Network.  The list of subscribers zoomed above 80,000, and thus many CBC selections made the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Publishers Weekly.  Major publishers like Crown and Penguin set up imprints for such books. 

It’s not surprising that liberals tended to ignore the Conservative Book Club in its early decades; Lew Rockwell, one of Arlington House’s editors, has noted that the imprint’s only real bestseller during its decade-plus of existence was not a political book but Harry Browne’s How You Can Profit From The Coming Devaluation.  But the first mammoth bestseller of this kind in recent times, Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought To Be, came out 16 years ago, and the first title to reach #1 bestseller status partly thanks to CBC promotion, Gary Aldrich’s Unlimited Access, was published in 1996.  So it’s surprising that it’s taken this long to liberals to get something like the Progressive Book Club in gear.

The PBC site includes a page listing its editorial board, a somewhat diverse collection including novelists Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Barbara Kingsolver and Erica Jong; reliably leftist historians like Eric Foner and Todd Gitlin; Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker; Sir Harold Evans; the somewhat superannuated Lewis Lapham and the up-to-the-minute Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of DailyKos fame; and David Brock, John Podesta and Robert Scheer.   The titles offered include Sen. Jim Webb’s latest effort, and a few literary novels, most of them by writers not especially noted for political activism (though it seems likely that Orson Scott Card and Thomas Mallon won’t be PBC selections any time soon). 

It’s hard to guess whether the PBC will make a go of it.  In the Times article Andy Schwarz, the Conservative Book Club’s general manager, notes that the number of subscribers has leveled off: “We’re holding steady, but we’re not growing as much as we’d like.”  But it’s been 60 years since a fullscale effort was made to reach left-leaning readers via the book-club route, and if a significant percentage of the 25% of Americans who identify themselves as liberal (according to a Rasmussen poll last week) can be induced to sign up for the Progressive Book Club it could get off to a better start than was the case with Air America, so widely hailed when it debuted in 2004, so moribund now.

A Riot of Ranunculus

April 4, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Lifestyle | Leave a Comment 

It’s spring everywhere, but it’s especially spring in the famed flower fields in north San Diego county, California.