The Learning Tower of Evil

I used to think that all of the bad toys of young Boomers had been eradicated by consumer protection laws and common sense. I used to think that only those 40 and over had horror stories about metal-tipped lawn jarts, jagged-glass made dolls, and toys guns that performed like real guns.

Then my wife bought one of these:

http://www.mylearningtower.com/

My wife is a sucker for anything that contains the words “family bonding.” And to be fair to her, the makers of this gizmo are pretty convincing in their persuasion that if one were to get this Learning Tower device that it would increase the odds of his/her family staying together, working together, and loving one another better. And, to boot, some cool learning would ensue as well.

So. My wife ordered one. Put it together. Within 8 hours of the first time my toddler son bonded with this device, he learned from the Learning Tower to do the following (not necessarily in order):

–Turn the burner knobs on the stove.
–Cover the kitchen floor in water and ice from the frig water and ice machine.
–Unsheath sharp knives from their counter holders
–Call long distance on the telephone
–Push breakable bowls and glasses off the kitchen counter.
–Crank the volume on the CD player
–Put “stuff” in the coffee grinder
–Turn on the garbage disposal
–Beat the hell out of the fish tank and attempt to jab our goldfish with wooden spoons.

Well, you get the idea. You may ask “where were you, Bill, or your wife when all this was going on?” A fair question. We were right there. In the room. Watching. Closely.

The Learning Tower is made from some light, space-age type of wood that allows it to be pushed across ceramic floors at the speed of light. My son got so adept at transporting this device throughout the kitchen in record time that we as parents could only get “Brendan no–” out of our mouths before he had pushed the device across the kitchen floor, grabbed a carving knife off the counter, and played operation on the cat. And the dog.

To be fair to the manufacturers of The Learning Tower, they probably have a disclaimer somewhere that this device is designed for normal, docile, children and not children genetically engineered to circumvent safety features and official-use tenets of toys.

None of which apply to my kids. Of course.

But I’ve got a sneaky hunch I’m not alone in that.

The (Un)Fairness Doctrine

Once upon a time, when the three major television networks used lobbyists and beat back the advance of the cable television successfully for several decades, we had in this country a thing called the “Fairness Doctrine.” It, in short, required a mass media entity such as a television station to provide equal time to opposing political views. Ronnie came along in the 80s and killed it, along with communism, the Berlin Wall, hope, and balanced budgets.

Now there is a cry by some in Congress (okay, Pelosi) to bring back the Doctrine. I understand the sentiment. While traveling through northern Michigan late last week and having to rely on my Ford Taurus’s meager radio capabilities, it was impossible to get any radio station that didn’t feature either Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh–two clowns not on my Christmas Card list. Both cause me to break out into hives and search for the nearest oak tree to crash my car into. It’d be nice to hear something else on the radio in the rural northern Michigan than neocon dribble and deliverance music.

But that wish aside, the Fairness Doctrine is a horrible idea. The Doctrine during its heyday actually squelched free speech. Media stations, gun shy about the need to provide BOTH candidate A and candidate B to their viewers/listeners, understandably started saying “screw it” and had no one on.

My car experience aside, we have much more choices and avenues for receiving information today than 40 years ago. During an era that saw the Beverly Hillbillies have 3 of the top-10 all-time viewed shows, there was a danger if a network showed bias or only provided information for one side of the political spectrum. Today there are many avenues of information and with little efforts citizens have access to thousands of them.

Free speech is free speech. Let people like Hannity and Limbaugh do their thing and say what they will. Let’s not respond to that by being whiny that there needs to be “equal time” and “fairness” for retort time to their idiocy. Simply tune them out and find the station out there you like–or, if trapped in rural northern Michigan and armed only with basic radio that came with your 90s car, practice your duck call while driving (which I did).

Say no to the Fairness Doctrine. It didn’t work before; it certainly won’t work now.

Davy Crockett and the case of the missing Taco Bell

I’ve never been addicted to pain killers, never had sex with my mother (or father), survived a harsh winter by eating my siblings, suckled a wolf. But had I known this memoir thing was going to be big, I would have spent more time wearing my sister’s underwear and journaling about it thirty years ago.

When I *think* I’ve found a good topic, 10,000 others have beaten me to it—even if I’m submitting to an obscure publication found buried in a link in a piece of SPAM on erectile dysfunction.

This is of course, an old ax that writers grind: the rejections far out-pace the acceptances. And there’s something eerily disconcerting about rejection—even if you occasionally get a bite and have things published here and there. In fact, no matter what success you have as a writer, the next rejection will leave you wondering if perhaps you smell bad or have spinach stuck to your teeth.

Out go the shiny submissions; back come the rejection letters like flotsam off a shipwreck:
“I’m sorry to say we can’t use your story—especially considering I grew up on Lake Erie and have seen some ice myself.”
This in reference to a memoir piece I wrote about riding ice sheets in Lake Huron. Apparently, floe floating, like Pong, was so 1970s.
“Seeing as how you grew up on Lake Erie at a time when it was catching on fire every-other day, I highly doubt you’ve seen ice,” I reply. Hey, at least I don’t have to publish in order to keep my dean off my back. In fact, my dean becomes highly suspicious if I have enough free time to floss regularly, let alone submit memoir pieces to publications for the possible payoff of “two copies of the journal and (my) by-line.”

Why, then, do I keep trying? That’s a question for Dr. Phil. Once we figure that out together, I will have a memoir piece worth publication.
Another rejection floats in on the tide of credit card applications: “I’m sorry we can’t use your piece…but subscribe to our journal now and save 40 percent off the cover price.”

I know what you’re thinking (no, not that my attitude needs work, silly): “it’s a numbers game, Bill. There are 9.5 memoir submissions made each year for every child, woman, and man in this country, 6.5 for every dog and cat.”

True–which means I’ll probably have to sleep with a Norwegian Forest kitten to beat the odds.

I rifle through a folder of long-forgotten drafts. Here’s one. Loved this piece. There’s a Taco Bell across the street from the Alamo. Saw a blurb on it one night and wrote an essay that mused about Davy Crockett ordering a Burrito Supreme during a cease fire.

So I Google “Alamo” (thanks, Al Gore for inventing the Internet!) and find a phone number for the Alamo Gift Shop.
“Hello,” says a pleasant-sounding woman on the other end.
“Hi–hey, can you see a Taco Bell across the street from the Alamo?” Just checking facts.
“Um, no. There used to be one a few years ago, but now there’s just a Pizza Hut and Subway.”
“Are you sure?” I find this question always helps open the floodgates of information.
“Um, YES, I’m sure,” she replies. “It’s gone.”
Crap.

I hang up on gift-shop lady and find a listing for a couple of Taco Bells in the online yellow pages for San Antonio. The first number is for a Taco Bell in Alamo Plaza—bingo!

“The number you are trying to reach is no longer in service.”
Double crap.
I dial the second Taco Bell number.
“Hay-lo, Taco Bell, how can I help you?”
“How close is your restaurant to the Alamo?”
“What?!”
“How close is your restaurant to the Alamo?”
“I dunno…about ten minutes. Why?”
Ten minutes?! In ten minutes I can go from Eastern Standard Time to Central Time where I live—and blow a half-week’s paycheck on quarter slots at the Indian Casino when I get there.
“Didn’t there used to be a Taco Bell right across the street from the Alamo?” I ask.
“Just a minute.” The worker puts down the phone and I hear her yelling-half-laughing voice boom through the restaurant. “Hey, does anyone know if there used to be a Taco Bell across the street from the Alamo?” There’s a muffled response I can’t hear. I unwrap a Little Debbie snack cake and wait. Damn, these are good. I wish my cholesterol wasn’t 240 and I could eat a box of these like it was seventh grade all over again.
She comes back on the phone.
“Yeah, there used to be one but it went out of business about three years ago.”
Triple crap with Java Olives on top. (Never settle for worn phrases when writing—that’s what all the successfully-published authors say.)

I ponder changing the restaurant in the essay to Pizza Hut. Then I remember Oprah slitting Mr. Frey open like a bluefish, and Anna Quindlen’s angst over not remembering the barometric pressure the night her mother died. I pass.

I sulk. I pout. I ask God: “WHOEVER HEARD OF A TACO BELL GOING OUT OF BUSINESS?!” I consider welding. There’s always a place in life for a fine arc weld, unlike a good story which may or may not ever exist depending on the whims of editor gate-keepers and other fidgety souls who shuffle Taco Bells across the landscape at random. A good weld never goes to waste.

I blame everyone for my plight: grad programs churning out memoir writers like snack foods, my dad for not getting me that GI Joe helicopter when I was eight, my sixth grade teacher for spanking me with a canoe paddle, my first wife for being, well, my first wife, my mother for passing her family’s bald gene unto me.
It then occurs to me I haven’t yet written about these things. Hmm.
Renewed and full of purpose (among other things), I vow that someday I shall be a published memoirist, my life and those of my family and friends splayed open—all for the coveted price of two journal copies and that magical by-line.

Update: I had an epiphany and cut the whole Alamo-Taco Bell thing out of the story completely. Flashquake published the shortened version in Winter 08. Maybe I have to stop over-thinking this stuff so much and just cut when cutting is the cuttingest thing to do.

Palin’s Theme Song

Lyrics by Bill Milligan

Music by The Commodores

Palin’s Theme Song (sung to the tune “She’s a Brick House”)

(chorus)

She’s a Republican—and how

She’s a mighty righty, just letting it all hang out

She’s a Republican—and how

She’s backed by Pat and that’s a fact

and all the rest of his pack.

 

She’s a Republican—and how

She’s the one, the only one

Built like a Ronnie statue

They’re all together everybody knows

and here’s how the story goes

(verse 1)

She knows she’s got everything

A conservative needs to get McCain, yeah.

How can she use the things she use

AIP—banning books—firings,  what a winning hand!

(repeat chorus)

(verse 2)

The bizness suits she wears, her right-wing ways

Make Johnny and Lieberman wish for younger days

She knows she’s built and knows how to please

Sure enough to knock an evangelical to his knees

(repeat chorus)

(bridge)

Shake the public, shake the public down now (repeat)

The old, the stale, the pale

First off, I admit a bias. I have for a multiple of reasons (the last 8 years being just the tip of the ice berg) already decided that I’m voting for Obama. If you don’t swing that way, you’ll probably want to stop reading now and save yourself the aggravation of my subjective commentary. I’m not going to change your mind; you’re not going to change mine.

Whenever South Park went to commercial break tonight, I flipped to Fox and caught snatches of the RNC.  Each time it was a like a freeze frame: an old, balding, white guy ranting. Maybe it was the same guy. Maybe it was different guys. Maybe it was my grandpa(s) back from the dead. The images blurred together like a gray snowstorm. There were war images, medal-ed men in the audience.  And then at one point that Bush dude showed up like the wicked witch in the crystal ball, which caused me to audibly gasp and change the channel.

Mass media has always fascinated me. As has political messages that too often abuse the media by insulting the intelligence of our citizens, messages that play to base hopes, fears, biases, and prejudices. And, sorry, no party does this better–treats the public with such brainless contempt–as does the Republican party. They’ve rode the FEAR mantra into the White House nearly a decade ago and they’re still clinging to that dog and pony show and throwing out cliches and reactionary statements.

Gas $4 a gallon? Hey, don’t think about that: the terrorists could strike again! Your house is being foreclosed? Don’t think about that! Be thankful a terrorist didn’t fly a plane into your living room. Lose your job and become a statistic in the big business worker cleansing? Don’t think about that! Be thankful you’re not being attacked by terrorists while standing in the unemployment line.

And Lieberman? Is he trying to star in a movie called “How to lose your credibility in ten days?” Where will see him next year? Cover your eyes, throw a dart at a political map, then open your eyes. Probably a good guess.  If things are going so grand in Iraq, pick up a rifle yourself, old man, and get over there and mop up. Shouldn’t be too hard, given how grand and fantastic and wonderful it is over there. A regular American-dream utopia, from what I understand.

Enough. If people are gullible enough to tack on 4 more years to the previous 8, we all richly deserve whatever calamity and catastrophes coming our way. Buckle your chin straps, then, straddle the bomb and ride, ride, ride it into a nude sunrise.

Teaching my son life’s lessons

I don’t like to brag or anything, but I’ve got this father thing down. I fathered two daughters when I was barely out of my teens, and have fathered two sons here on the flip side just scant years away from an AARPA subscription.

Yep. I’ve seen it all. You’ve got to get up pur-ty early to fool me anymore. Because of my vast store houses of experience and knowledge concerning life, I find it necessary (if not, patronizing) to have to set my 6-year-old son Bradley straight on a daily basis. Most of the lessons are binary and involve physics (“Yes, you will most likely end up in the hospital, son, if you drive your bike off the roof of the house”).  Some involve flash card-like games of rote memorization:

“Son, what is this?” (I turn my Sasquatch coffee mug that reads “I believe” so the picture of the beast is facing my son.)

“Sasquatch.”

“Correct,” I say.

“But he doesn’t exist,” my son always blurts.

“WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” I say. “Damn, they’ve gotten to you, haven’t they?”

“Who’s they, dad?”

“You know–the government, the secret–” (usually at this point my wife appears and orders me downstairs.

Anyhoo…

Last week on Thursday afternoon at around 2 p.m., my son had the bright idea of making a lemonade stand.  This was my perfect opportunity to teach the boy about location, location, location, and timing. Our street is pretty deserted at 2 p.m. Most families have two working parents and kids in daycare. At best, you could expect to maybe hit the mail lady up for a cup of lemonade at that time of day.

I did my best to discourage him, which is the perfectly responsible and the perfectly American fatherly thing to do. It’s what my dad did to me, his dad to him, his dad’s dad to his dad…well, you get the idea. Discouraging him involves me patting him on the head and saying cute things like “ah, sure you want to sell lemonade…that’s nice! But there ain’t no way in God’s green earth you’re going to make a single penny selling this time of day. Now run along and watch some TV.”

Usually at this point, my wife intervenes, which happened this time as well. And ten minutes later my son was sitting in a tiny chair at the end of our driveway, a small table, lemonade, paper cups, and a carboard sign in front of him.

“Poor kid,” I sniffed. This was one of those lessons he was going to have to learn the hard way.

Within an hour he made $10. Golf carts pulled up, SUVs…people with out-of-state license plates. Had the presidential helicopter touched down in a front lawn and George W bought a glass it wouldn’t have surprised. The kid was raking.

Had he not stopped to go to karate lessons he might have made enough for his first year of college.

Being the good father that I am and one who always knows what he knows, I put my arm around my son and told him how proud I was of him.

“I told you selling lemonade this afternoon was a great money-making idea,” I said. “Pure gold, son. Pure gold.”

And I won’t even get into the lesson I taught him a few days later at the fair about how he should never ever play those rigged fair games. I’m still trying to figure out where to put the ginormous stuffed shark he won.

Recycling into a new me

I’m not the most politically correct guy when it comes to this “being green” thing. I admit that openly, as a way to practice and reinforce the mindset I need to write nonfiction.  No sense trying to sugar coat it. It’s not that I’m against being green (I like the concept), it’s just that the flesh is weak, as they say.

I could probably get away with foisting blame for my weak-willed attempts at going green on my parents (even though doing so went out of vogue about ten years ago, it seems). My dad back in the day changed the oil on the car and dumped it into the ditch. But not to worry: he eventually buried the ditch and created a lot of out of the swampy morass next to our house by having truckloads of fly ash (a by-product waste from making particle board at a local factory) brought in and dumped and smoothed out with a grader. Instant yard. That the local factory readily trucked this stuff for free to our house and did so quite willingly (the pesky DEQ makes them burn it today in special incinerators) is another story for another time, but the bottom line is, hey, the notion of disposing of waste in the most readily convenient manner was something ingrained in me early on.

But we grow, we learn, we go to school, and sometimes go horribly in debt to go to college, and we learn that dumping used oil in a ditch and filling your yard in with fly ash is a bad thing (okay, you can learn that without going to college, but I digress).

Take recycling. Anyone can do it, right? A trained monkey.  Perhaps even a red squirrel that had lived under power lines for a length of as to develop an inkling of critical thought. But I’m not a trained monkey or mutated squirrel.

My wife keeps me on the straight and narrow, God bless her. I freely confess that if not for her I would sit around all week and want to recycle but probably procrastinate and think about thinking about it until I heard the garbage truck approaching down the block and then I’d say “ah, f*** it” and toss it all–bottles, plastic, used motor oil–into the garbage can and sit it at the curb. Then I’d feel guilty, most likely purging my guilt through many, many cardboard-box pizzas, which would only start the vicious cycle all over again.

So through my wife’s “encouragement,” I’ve developed the ability to (semi) consistently put certain items in a specially-designed bin that, every 2nd and 4th Monday, gets put at the curb with the other garbage (the stuff that can’t be composted or made into trinkets, bird feeders, etc).

If this were a fantasy, I would tell you right now how good this makes me feel. Unfortunately, I write nonfiction and the hard truths contained therein: I haven’t been able to as of yet shake the nagging feeling that on recycle day I’m actually working TWICE AS HARD and making TWICE AS MANY TRIPS to the curb. And this evening, a real corker: the paper sack with all the magazines ripped open halfway down the driveway.

Rather than go back in the house and get a new bag, I threw a few of the magazines into the regular garbage. I’m hoping the garbage man comes tomorrow before my wife finds out (or reads this).

For now, I will bravely press on and try to become the green person I think lives somewhere deep inside my really-I’m-not-kidding-I-want-to-do-the-right-thing soul.

Aqua Dots Strike Again!

I confess ignorance when it comes to the latest toy crazes out there. Nothing much escapes my 6-year-old son, though, whom I’d be suspicious has fillings in his teeth where messages of “MUST BUY! MUST HAVE!”  from  corporate  boardrooms end their journey…except my son doesn’t have any fillings.

So one day last year Aqua Dots shows up on our kitchen table.  I had never heard of this toy before but my son “MUST HAVE! MUST BUY!” was well versed in its possibilities. I’m not sure how it even ended up in our home. I don’t remember buying it. No doubt I ordered it while under some weird hypnotic trance (re: “dad, buy that for me…” Okay son, sure”). Perhaps I ate some Aqua Dots and then ordered Aqua Dots. Don’t know.

Turns out–and here’s the funny part–that if someone ingested these little plastic dots (and they look oh so pretty), he or she could suffer the same effect as if he or she gulped down the date rape drug. Unfortunately–and here’s the sad part–my wife boxed up the Aqua Dots and sent them back before I had a chance to take some to poker night and see if this were really true.

Flash forward to July 18, 2008: we received our replacement Aqua Dots in the mail, with the promise that these wouldn’t cause any drug-induced hallucinations if ingested.  Not that eating plastic dots is a good idea, mind you, but it’s reassuring (I guess) to know that if I did it now I wouldn’t get high and probably just suffer from stomach cramps or something. Or maybe nothing would happen at all.

The letter that came with the replacement Dots was reassuring: “We have LEARNT (emphasis mine) a lot,” the drop ship company said in the officially and beautifully written statement. Yes, Aqua Dots are still made in China–but it’s a different part of China than before and a different factory than before.

I feel so much better now, as does my son, who has waited patiently for months for the replacement Dots because you know he just MUST HAVE! MUST BUY! and there really isn’t even any debate about it. We are at the complete mercy and whims of Chinese toy makers because, well, we just gotta have the stuff, that’s a given. We can only pray that the stuff we get, if ingested, won’t make us hallucinate or suffer internal bleeding.

What should teachers make?

The question of the day. Bloggers who shade to the right of center (not that there’s anything wrong with that, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld) and who are not teachers themselves (for the most part) and part of a business model where they squashed heads all the way up the ladder to the top, tend to complain a lot about teachers, their unions, tenure, teacher pay, teacher benefits, etc.

But I have yet to see anyone espousing these views to offer a clear number on what teachers should be making (and believe me, I ask them–all the time!) I usually get the standard answer of “the free market should determine what they make”–meaning, of course, teachers need to be at-will employees, tenure needs to be thrown in the trash, and THEN the free market should decide.

I contend the free market has already spoken–and is speaking. What, pray tell, should someone in this type of field be making:

–a field where the jobs cannot be outsourced

–a field where there will be an acute shortage in just a few years

–a field requiring advanced degrees

–a field where the employees are entrusted to spend more time with children each week than their parents.

I’d love to hear anyone who fits the bill I’ve described above (anti-union, anti-tenure, etc) to share with me what they think a teacher should make and why.

Be the first brave soul to answer these questions for me. Know in advance I’ve asked these questions of politicians, school board members, employees of conservative think tanks, etc etc etc etc. The response so far? crickets chirping.

Scary math and the revenge of ultra right (or how I learned to hate technolgy)

So yesterday the news breaks that the US has somewhere around a million names on its terrorist watch list. Interesting. No doubt with that many names on it you either know a “terrorist” or perhaps you’ve been labeled one yourself by agents of our government. I wonder what the rubric is once you start getting down around, say, name 998,000 on the list: “his favorite author is George Orwell”…or “voted Green Party last election.” Down at the very end of the list, it simply must be stuff like “I never did like this person.”

This news on the heels of the passing of the new surveillance law that allows the government to spy on people for a short period of time without having to get any court approval or be answerable to anyone (oh, forgot: only if there’s a “reasonable expectation” the person lives outside the US ).

Put the two stories together. Scary, eh?

I wonder if we’ll see abuse stories in the months ahead, similar to the type of stuff where celebrity medical files were rifled through by curious gawkers at a California hospital. Think about it.

(NSA employee): “hey, I wonder ever happened to that dork___________I knew in high school. Man, that guy was a real dick. What say we spy on him for a few days.”

But that would never happen! And of course I should stop being flippant about something so serious. We all know civil rights can’t exist in post-9/11 world. There can be no secrets, no privacy. The world needs to be made safe!

Smile for the cameras! Say cheese!

As for me, I’ll wave a certain appendage of my hand.