Five Things No One Knows About Me

My friend Broschat has tagged me to play along with a bloggers’ game of revealing five things nobody knows about me. This confirms my growing realization that Broschat has become a nerd. In high school, he was the coolest guy I knew, but years of working with computers have taken their toll.

I should get out of this blog business while I still can, but for now I’ll play along.

Since this exercise could lead to humiliation, I’m tempted to write witty but obviously untrue items: “Abandonded by my parents in childhood, I was raised by wild rabbits.”

The truth about my parents is that they were notoriously cheap and overprotective, and even into my early teens, they made me go with them to square dances. I lived in fear that someone would find out my parents were square dancers.

Notice the curly blond hair in my blog photo? My Aunt Katie nicknamed me Rossie Tossie Cottontail. I still kind of like the name.

I comment on Broscat’s blog that I was once nearly arrested in France for public urination. That’s true. I actually got roughed up by a gendarme. In France at the time, public urination was as common as spitting on the sidewalk, so I won’t say any more about why I was singled out for attention. I do know I was very drunk.

I like to think I am fast on a motorcycle.

I was a poor trumpet player in the high school dance band. However, I once sang a scat solo to “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” at a parents’ night concert. I was good enough that the band director had me take two extra choruses. At home, though, my parents said they didn’t understand what I was singing.

I’m the only guy I know who lost his virginity while—oh, wait!—that was five.

Free to Roam

I’ve been trying to keep a good attitude about my temporary disability, but the truth is I was getting cranky. I know it’s supposed to be comforting that I have it way better than some Sudanese farmer watching the Janjahweed ride into town, but this is my Winter Vacation and I’ve been pretty much confined to quarters. It hurts to walk and it hurts just to stand up for more than a few minutes.

As usual, the practical and emotional solution to the problem lies in getting some new wheels. Candy-apple red!

At last, I’m free again to go shopping and hang around in video arcades. Now all I need is some competition.

Also, I haven’t found the motor on this thing yet, but I know there has to be one.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

The poor little electric car never had a chance. GM made only one mistake. When the California Air Resources Board (CARB) told automakers in the mid-1990s that they had to make ten percent of their fleet “zero pollution at the tailpipe” by 2002, GM turned the project over to its Saturn Division, which actually thought its job was to build a great electric car. Before GM realized its mistake, Saturn had done just that and leased several hundred of them to drivers in Southern California.

Within a few years, hundreds of fully electric EV-ls were in use on the roads and freeways of SoCal. What’s amazing is not so much that GM recalled the cars from loyal owners and buried the project, but that they did such a good job of burying the story.

It took a few years in the late 1990s for the automakers and oil companies to stack CARB with their sycophants and get the new standards eliminated. Once they did, they began to call in the leases on the EV-ls. By 2004, GM had recalled all their electric cars and actually crushed them in wrecking yards. Today, there is only one known EV-1 in an auto museum, and it’s just a shell. The motor, batteries, and drive train have been removed.

The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? tells the story through interviews with owners, engineers, Saturn executives, and former CARB board members, as well as lots of footage of the cars on the road. The film can be rather depressing, as these David and Goliath stories usually are (only in the Bible did David win), but it’s a fascinating study and it ends with two hopeful notes: one, hybrid electrics aren’t as good as a totally electric car, but the automakers are willing to produce them; and, two, with a Democratic majority in Congress, we might still see more on the electric car.

And if you thought you already hated the Bush administration, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I highly recommend Who Killed the Electric Car, available through Netflix and your local video store.

The Care and Feeding of Your Hernia

I initially took the news of my hernia rather hard, (“Why me, God!? The horror!”) but I’m actually adjusting to the enforced confinement rather well.

True, I’m impatient to get the operation done and get back to my good old self, however good my old self might be. I was even going to call some local surgeons and see if I could get put on standby. Maybe they lose a patient on the table early in a procedure and they're all scrubbed already, it's a shame to waste all those gowns and latex gloves. What do they do for the next four hours, play canasta?

But probably I'll just lounge around like Cleopatra for another five or six weeks. Frankly, I don’t want to do anything that might rush or confuse folks up at the local hospital. They only recently stopped advertising “Now, with anesthetic!” And “cutting edge” is not a comforting hospital slogan.

Despite the enforced confinement, it cheers me up to make a list of things I can’t do and can do. Basically, I can’t do anything that involves lifting or being on my feet for more than about two minutes. This would include all the labors of Hercules, plus such lowly chores as

Help Mary unload and stack two tons of hay for Woody
Shovel snow
Wash the dishes
Vacuum and dust
Clean up dog poop

Things I can do include

Feed myself
Move from one chair to another
Watch DVDs
Play video games
Read
Write letters to the editor about what an idiot the president is
Start an ant farm
Go to bed

I can also watch television, which I’m finding has an occasional fun program. I get four or five stations with my rabbit ears. (I have free television; think about it!) I’m becoming a fan of Ellen Degeneris, who has an afternoon show. I think she’s funny, and I like the idea of a self-deprecating lesbian comic who doesn’t do attack comedy or gross potty-mouth humor.

All in all, this is a life some might call perfect. People a little over-stressed from work who can’t afford a month off in the Caribbean might opt for an elective hernia. I’m comfortable as long as I stay seated or reclining. Mary is always cheerful if I ask her to fluff my pillow or bring me a mint.

Not My Job Award

My Christmas Vacation

I don’t know what the rest of you dudes are getting for Christmas, but I got a hernia.

This was not one of the items on the list I text-messaged to Santa last June so he’d have time to get it right before the advent of the chaotic holiday season, now generally acknowledged to begin the day after Labor Day (renamed by the Bush administration National Right to Work in America Day).

Santa usually totally blows my Christmas list. I ask for a Power Commander titanium slip-on muffler for my VFR, a muffler which will deliver to this fine motorcycle a guaranteed 3.2 percent increase in torque and horsepower and which will allow me to finally blast my zero-to-sixty times below the insufferable three-second barrier known as “The Great Wall of Inertia.”

Santa brings me a wool scarf and says “Hey, an elf checked ‘muffler.’”

Or I ask for a Street Sweeper semi-automatic combat assault shotgun plus a few dozen bowling pins and some watermelons, and Santa delivers unto me a holiday CD, Enya Sings The Sacred Celtic Hymns of the Winter Solstice. It sounds to me like bats on Qualudes.

This year I thought I’d try to lowball Santa and only asked for a new snorkel and three weeks in Belize. Instead, right after classes got out, I was catching up on my laying on the couch when I started to feel some discomfort and pain in what is commonly referred to as the groin and general pubical area. My tolerance for pain is less even than my tolerance for Enya.

Over the next few days, the discomfort grew worse, accompanied by swelling. Of course, my first thought was I have cancer. Cancer runs in my family like some families get frequent lice. If I have a toothache, I assume I have tooth cancer. Pretty much the slightest ache or pain and I go to an emotional DEF-CON 3 and start planning for hospice care.

My second thought was a hernia, maybe a malignant hernia. I wasn’t sure what a hernia actually was, but I had the notion that if you slightly underfill a water balloon and then squeeze it, a hernia would look a lot like that. This seemed like a good description of my groin, so I self-diagnosed probably a hernia

I called Old Doc Novak and made an emergency appointment because my groin was about to explode, and after a record-low three hours in the waiting room I was rushed to the inner-office where another of the interchangeable cute nurses who I had as students only a few years ago went to work measuring my blood pressure and checking my weight. (Am I here because I’m fat!!??)

Novak came in after a few rounds of golf and gave me his usual cheery greeting. “Take off your pants.”

And so, after just a few minutes of groping my balls and sticking his fingers in my butt, Novak diagnosed a bilateral hernia and told me to make an appointment with a good surgeon. I don’t happen to know any good surgeons offhand, so he gave me a few names. As I was leaving, he offered a cheerful parting observation, “This will lay you up for a few weeks.”

“And a happy religiously and ethnically appropriate winter holiday to you and yours as well!” I wished him and his.

I thought, well at least I’m on winter break and I can just pop into one of these surgeons’ offices and get this thing tied off or lasered or whatever they do these days. I’ll use my break time to be laid up and let Mary wait on me. But when I start calling around for a surgeon with a little slack in his calendar, I find the earliest appointment I can get is mid-January.

“What is this, Canada?” I ask my short-list of Professional Office Administrative Assistants Tasked With Scheduling. “Not! This is America! I have insurance!”

But to no avail. I have to spend my winter break nursing a swollen and painful groin, then when I go back to work in January, I have to get practically major surgery and limp back into the classroom within days to lecture on faulty parallelism and other venal sins.

Or maybe I could show a movie, but I’m just an adjunct now. I don’t have sick leave, and if you miss even one day of class they fire you and give all your remaining courses to one of the many Middle-East immigrants on expired work visas who have an Associate’s in General Studies and who will lecture for food.

Life is so unfair, but at least I’ll be getting a handicapped parking sticker. They’re good for a year and you can cut off fat people driving old Buicks and get the parking place right by the Fred Meyer front door. And maybe my insurance will pay for one of those electric wheel chairs to use during my long convalescence.

I want one with a Power Commander.

Introduction to Poetry

I’ve only recently begun to read poetry, a strange confession for someone who graduated with honors in literature some thirty years ago. But then I haven’t read Moby Dick yet, either, nor Don Quixote, never mind the whole dizzy slew of postmodernists like Pynchon.

(I feel compelled to point out I’ve read plenty of difficult stuff and even partially understood some of it. But my list of things I haven’t read will always be longer than things I have.)

Reading poetry, I sometimes feel angry at the author.

“Why does it have to be so difficult? Why can’t you just say what you mean?” Some poems seem to mean something on a literal level which I can’t quite penetrate. Others seem intended to resist any kind of literal paraphrase.

I find, though, that I’m often drawn more to poems which are hard to understand. I can often say I like it, I just don’t know what it means. (My friend Broschat makes the same observation about films over on his Montlake blog.)

Here’s a poem I think I understand, but I like it anyway. It says something about how I try to read poetry.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

Or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Oregon’s Republican Senator Gordon Smith has made his strongest remarks yet about the war in Iraq: “I for one am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd.”

He used the word "criminal."

Smith said he’d like to see US troops withdrawn “quicker rather than later” and that he would not have voted for the war if he’d known the intelligence had not been accurate: “It was not accurate, but that is history.”

If Smith were a Democrat, people would be crying “cut and run” and calling him a “flip-flopper.” Since he’s a Republican, some are saying he’s just worried about his election in 2008. Granted, no United States Senator gives an opinion on so much as broccoli without thinking about the next election, but I think it takes courage to admit you were wrong and change your position.

I’m proud that all of Oregon’s Congressional Democrats—Senator Wyden and four Representatives—voted against the war. They were right from the start.

How To Save Iraq

The blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group has recommended a slow withdrawl of US troops from Iraq. Not a timed withdrawl exactly. More of a drawdown, but not a drawdown with any particular timetable. A phased redeployment maybe. Something time-released.

Even Donald Rumsfeld, it turns out, was thinking exactly the same thing just two days before he resigned as Secretary of Defense. He said pulling a few troops out would force the Iraqis to "pull up their socks."

I know this is good military strategy because I heard it first thing every morning in Army basic training (1967) when Drill Sergeant Johnson would turn on the lights and roar "Drop your cocks and pull up your socks!!" And by God we did, and just a few months later we were all in Vietnam, and everybody knows how that turned out.

Now, though, conservative pundits are pointing out correctly that if we leave Iraq, things will only get worse. Liberal pundits are correctly pointing out that we've been there going on four years and things have done nothing but get worse. You can see why the President needed a Blue Ribbon Study Group, but I have to say, I have some better ideas, and I didn't even get an expense account.

First, as others have been discussing on the Web, we could rehabilitate Saddam and bring him back.

Dust off the fedora. Give him back his gun.

He's just the kind of tough leader we need right now, and the fact that he's a criminal shouldn't stop us. After he was pardoned by President Ford, Richard Nixon was rehabilitated and was seen as a kind of elder statesmen. I think he even went to China a few times, and China is our friend now.

Still, lots of people would have a problem with that, which is why I did some more thinking and realized there's only one guy who can negotiate a settlement in Iraq.

Dr. Phil.

Dr. Phil is kind of a bully and he wouldn't have any problem telling the Shiite death squads they need to knock it off with the electric drills and all the time dumping bodies.

He would tell the Sunnis, "Saddam's gone! You're not it charge any more! Get over it! "

Like all good counselors, Dr. Phil speaks in exclamations.

These are just ideas, but Henry Kissinger has been hanging around the White House lately, and the last thing we need is to let him get involved. It took him years to get us out of Vietnam (Peace with Honor), and he already has a Nobel Peace Prize. Give somebody else a chance!

Celebrity Diplomats

When Captain Kangaroo died a few years back, millions of parents faced the tough decision of how to tell their kids. Most didn't want to say Captain Kangaroo was dead because kids that young don't understand death. Instead, many parents chose to say he had been "cancelled." Since then, a lot of kids have been hoping Captain Kangaroo would come back one day.

And now he has.

Turns out, the good Captain was hiding out as the US Ambassador to the United Nations under the assumed name of John Bolton.

Now he's resigned because of what President Bush called the "stubborn obstructionism" of the Senate, which refused to confirm him.

Others thought the Captain had some management issues. In an unprecedented public letter to the Senate, 64 former American ambassadors and diplomats wrote "On many occasions, [Captain Kangaroo's] hard core go-it-alone posture . . . alienated the bulk of the diplomatic community and cost the United States its leadership role with the U.N."

Oops.

The Captain, at least, can return to his role as the beloved host of his popular children's show. But who will the President nominate to be our next Ambassador?

Actually, I know a former kid's show host who's looking for work.