Tick Tick, Bong Bong

Most of us are probably familiar with the depiction of the New Year as a baby, often brought in by a stork. The idea is that once the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, something brand new arrives, along with infinite possibilities. A clean slate.

Really? Of course, we know that the dropping of the ball at Times Square, the chimes of midnight by Big Ben, and, in this case, the change in the final digit of the calendar year don’t really clean much on our slates. Most likely, the same set of circumstances we face at 11:59 p.m. will still largely be there at 12:01 a.m. – the bad along with the good.

To further complicate matters, we all don’t observe this change in digits at the same time. The champagne corks start popping in New Zealand, and the sound works its way around the world to Hawaii. Calendars and clocks are human inventions. It was only fairly recently that the world agreed on which calendar to follow among numerous choices. Clocks only became critical in the 19^th century, triggered by the rise of the railroad. And even now, time is subject to human decision-makers. Arizona doesn’t recognize Daylight Saving Time (nor do some of my older electronic devices, since Congress changed the opening and closing dates for DST).

They say our brains are wired to remember the bad things more vividly than the good, and as the New Year reminds us we’re not getting any younger, we consider some of the less-than-brilliant decisions we’ve made, occasionally at critical times. If we could only go back, we think, and undo that thing we did, or failed to do, life would be much better today. Would it? I don’t necessarily believe in “God’s plan,” but I do believe in chains of events. You can’t pull a link out of the chain and assume that all the links that followed would necessarily have been any better. Different, yes. But we are always forging new ones.

A young friend changed her life in 2013, selling her home in one state and moving to another where housing is cheaper, taxes are lower, and most important for her, the people seem more genuine. There was also a unique set of circumstances that allowed her to do it. That said, you can’t discount her courage in moving to a destination where she knew nobody. I often tell her that while there was wind beneath her wings, she’s the one who did the flying, often through storms.

But even she couldn’t change everything -- and how could she? The slate is never “clean.” At this moment in time, we are all the sum total of our experience. The changes we make ourselves, good or bad, are only possible because of previous events. We are all the product of our past, whether we like it or not.

Are the possibilities before us truly infinite? More so, it would seem, for some than for others. Infinite or not, we can all agree that possibilities are out there for all of us, and there’s something uplifting in that at seasons such as this.

But that’s always the case – not just at midnight on 1/1.

The Solstice Isn't Simple

Here in the West Coast city where I live, the winter solstice is supposed to arrive a little after 9 a.m. tomorrow (Saturday 12/21). The summer solstice is about my favorite time of the year – the time of the longest days. The winter solstice is also a favorite, but only because the nights will finally start to get shorter. But which is exactly the shortest day – and conversely, the longest night? The online charts don’t seem to agree on that issue. If tomorrow is the shortest day does that make tonight (Friday) the longest night of the year? As I write this, it’s too early in the morning to do math. For you solstice celebrators, at least it’s a weekend, so you can begin and end it when you want. Just go easy on the mead if you’re driving, OK?

North of the Arctic Circle, the sun doesn’t rise at all – and won’t until the first week in January. The town of Inuvik in northern Canada actually has a festival every year to mark the return of the sun, which will have been a no-show for about a month.

Scholars seem to agree that it’s tied in with Christmas. December 25 is the traditional day of Jesus Christ’s birth – but was he actually born on that day? The evidence seems to point to the holiday being related to pagan solstice festivals – it may actually have been created as religious competition for those older celebrations. And does our annual orgy of Christmas lighting figure in? At the most basic level, the lights fight the darkness, here in the Northern Hemisphere at least, so there’s a similar principle at work.

However it happens, the behavior of the sun – or more precisely, the Earth wobbling on its axis -- is something we count on. For us, it’s the universal constant in what is otherwise an uncertain existence.

There is no better way to end this discussion than to leave you with one of the most beautiful songs in American musical theater, from “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened on Broadway in 1964, and later became a movie:

Sunrise, Sunset 

TMI

The first two bullets fired in what could become one of the biggest legal battles in American history have struck a target. A federal judge has ruled that the NSA’s massive collection of phone data on millions of us appears to violate the Constitution, and ordered it to stop doing so on two plaintiffs.

A big section of pavement has been laid on Edward Snowden’s likely road to sainthood. If it weren’t for him, of course, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place. But if it weren’t for the government taking on private contractors to operate this system, there probably wouldn’t be an Edward Snowden, either. How many other private contractors are there, with access to information on us, who just might not be as interested in the greater good?

When a sitting federal judge throws around terms like “Orwellian,” it tends to get your attention. Personally, I have no problem with the use of modern information systems to prevent terrorism. But does this massive NSA program actually work? As critics have pointed out making the haystack bigger only makes it harder to find the needle.  

I have this creeping suspicion that while our lives are becoming more transparent to government (and Google, Microsoft et al, BTW), government operations are becoming more and more opaque. Is it really all about safety and security? Do you think sometimes, when government power is exercised, it’s just because it’s there and justifies someone’s job?

Of course, these issues are not as black-and-white as the Snowden fans would have us believe. But 9/11 happened in large measure not because the dots weren’t already there, but because nobody connected them, which seems to be a factor in many high-profile man-made tragedies, such as school shootings. Can we have a reasonable discussion about what information the authorities need about us and what they don’t – and what government operations need to be secret and what don’t? The deep end isn’t all that far away, and I’d really hate to see us go off it.

Skin in the Game

We’ve been having a lot of fun – at least I think it’s been fun – about Fox anchor Megyn Kelly’s assertion a while ago that Santa Claus was white – kind of like Jesus. I hope the comedians and satirists out there send her thank-you notes for this great holiday gift. Saves paying writers for it.

Let’s start with the hard one first (or is it the easier one?). Scholars have debated this for a long time, but to my mind, there’s a much better-than-even chance that Jesus was Semitic (BTW, a designation that could apply to other Middle Eastern ethnicities besides Jews). Which means he likely had dark, curly hair and olive skin. Fine. Many classical artists, on the other hand, have depicted him as white. Why? I don’t think they were making political statements – more likely, that’s what they were surrounded by and were used to. It seems doubtful, given the difficulties of travel in his day, that Jesus would have been either white or black. But he didn’t do selfies, and the Shroud of Turin isn’t going to shed any light on this one, either.

Seems artists have had similar problems with the Virgin Mary. Images of her as a white woman seem to predominate in our culture, but unlike Jesus, she’s apparently been “coming back” over the centuries on a semi-regular basis, and doesn’t always look the same. Hispanics in this hemisphere have depicted her as one of them – based, I suppose, on one of her regional appearances.

Santa? Well, he would seem to be a Northern European invention – snow, reindeer, etc., so the depiction of him as white does not seem to cause too much pain, at least for me. As a young man, he may have even been blond before his beard turned white. But hang on a minute: If Santa Claus is actually based on St. Nicholas, who was a real figure, there might be a problem. St. Nicholas was Greek or Turkish. There’s a good chance, then, that he had olive skin and curly hair as well, right? (And while we’re dealing with popular symbols, is Santa, as commonly depicted, sending the wrong message to kids about obesity? Just wondering…)

Even the reindeer have their secrets. From what I heard yesterday, male reindeer shed their antlers in the winter, while females, who also grow them, hang onto theirs until after they give birth in the spring – meaning all of Santa’s reindeer, according to the depictions of the season, have to be girls. So what does that make Rudolph? A “transgen-deer”?

I think the Muslims may have a point. They forbid depictions of Allah. No white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud hurling lightning bolts at them. This has allowed those of that faith to move on to other issues. Shouldn’t we?

Language Barriers

In just a couple of weeks now, 2013 will be history – for some, it will be more historic than for others. It was especially so for a friend who was summing up her life events of the past 12 months. I commented that for her, it was an historic year – unaware that I had just stepped on a verbal land mine.

Not long ago, she and I were part of an industry that required working with words, so for us, stepping on such explosive devices is a more likely occurrence, perhaps, than with most people. Anyway, my use of “an historic” was called into question. What’s the “n” doing in front of a hard “h”? she wanted to know.

OK! Well I have always written it that way out of habit, and as far as I knew, it was still accepted usage – which brought back the equivalent of ,”Oh yeah? Where?” And I was double-dared to Google it – which I did, and found several discussions which led me to believe that the issue wasn’t entirely settled. The most reasonable explanation was that certain English words that were derived from French, in which the “h” was silent, as in “histoire,” could take the “an” in front. While my former colleague was willing to accept the explanation, she still didn’t accept the usage itself. Pet peeve, she said.

Still awake here, folks? In any case, this wasn’t a battle I felt like fighting to the death. I have to admit that she has a point, in the sense that only snots who have read too much English literature (like me) write that way. You can be sure that in writing to her, I won’t go THERE again.

But when it comes to language, we all have things that make our blood boil. A TV anchorwoman in the city where I used to live would end lists of items with “and etcetera.” That makes me almost homicidal.

Fortunately, publishers and media companies have developed style books for both the written and the spoken word. Otherwise, the murder rate in newspaper offices and TV newsrooms would be much higher than it is today. 

But language evolves, and we all have to evolve with it. I still occasionally call the big white (or chrome or brushed stainless) thing you put food in to keep it cold an “icebox”. Didn’t people stop using those most of a century ago? I think it’s an Eastern thing. Or maybe my former colleague is right – I need a good dose of evolution.

 After all is said, written, and done, isn’t the goal just plain old getting your point across? If your usage interferes with that goal, then “…what we have heeahh…” to quote the warden in Cool Hand Luke, “…is a failyuh to communicate.”

Watt's New?

Holiday lighting is cheery…up to a point.

Like everything else in America, it has been turned into an Olympic sport.  A few white lights on the tree outside used to be sufficient. Now, every other house is Disneyland. At the newspaper where I worked, the photographers went out to shoot the most spectacular displays, and we published a different picture or group of pictures for several weeks. Fortunately, we stopped short of awarding prizes.

A few spiders, skeletons and cobwebs got the job done for Halloween. Why do you need 500 lighted reindeer on your front lawn? I’m very glad to know there’s a happy – and well-heeled -- family living in your house, but geez Louise, when does artistic decoration turn into actual light pollution?

Is Dad outside on a ladder stringing these lights along the roofline himself? Of course not, there are companies that do this, and it’s a growing business.

Now I’m not a complete Scrooge. There are homeowners on certain streets who deliberately choose to go all-out and light everything up, publicizing it ahead of time, and welcome parades of cars through the neighborhood. I assume new homebuyers have to be told what’s expected of them if they move in. But if this is the way that street wants to share holiday cheer, have at it.

On the other hand, there are homeowners’ associations that turn into little police states. If you want to put colored lights on your outside tree, that’s a no-no, “We don’t do that here at Snotty Acres, white lights only, please.”

The good thing about this holiday season in the Northern Hemisphere is that thanks to the lights, we can see where we’re going in the dark, which is two-thirds of the day in the dead of winter. Anything that keeps us from slipping on black ice.

Wrap Sheet

First, I need your solemn promise that you won’t share this post with any of my relatives. Deal?

This is about gift wrapping, one of the things I most hate in life and which is required this time of year, or seems to be.

Like everything else in America, this is something of an Olympic sport now, at least in my family. While we have gift boxes that already have appropriate decorations printed on them, there’s still an unwritten rule that we have to freshly wrap everything. It is noticed when someone has produced a wrap job with absolutely flat corners. While the degree of difficulty is adjusted for large cubical boxes or odd shapes, there are still unspoken points taken off by the judges for excessive use of Scotch tape.

I especially hate the ribbons, because they are always miserably twisted when I try to wrap. I simply quit the team on this one. I will wrap the boxes, but it’s my wife’s job to do the ribbons. She even does the thing where you make them curl by pulling on the ends of the ribbed ribbons with half a scissors.

As if this weren’t enough, there is the UNwrappping. My position has always been that if I’m opening a gift, I cut and tear vigorously to get into it and ask questions later. But there are family members who are so enamored of the wrapping paper that they sloooooooowly remove it, being careful not to wrinkle or fold it, because it’s so beautiful that it must be used again for something next year. We do keep bows. We have a green garbage bag ready for the wrapping materials to be discarded and a white bag to save the bows – and a few scraps of precious paper -- for re-use. They work on birthday gifts, too, fortunately.

But if you run across me in my next life and you want to give me a gift, it’s OK if you just hand it to me as is, I’m 100 percent down with that. It’s just that in this life, we don’t usually have quite as much time to spare. Ya think?

Where Were You?

That’s the question of this day – actually, the question of this month, as the 50-year anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is observed.

In order to answer the question, of course, you have to be a certain age, which I am, so here’s my story. I attended a fancy New England prep school, one of many in that part of the country. For today’s discussion, though, it’s significant. It was the Choate School, then an all-male institution, which JFK also attended, in his case, in the 1930s. I was there a generation later.

On the day of the President’s killing, I had taken a math exam which I didn’t do especially well on – fortunately, because of the news of the day, it seemed they weren’t graded quite as strictly as usual. We were all glued to the TV sets in the housemasters’ apartments, watching events unfold. It hit especially hard, as we knew President Kennedy had used the same sidewalks, sat in the same classrooms, and crossed the same athletic fields we did on a daily basis.

When JFK was at the school, according to historical records, he was a bit of a troublemaker. His older brother Joe, who would die later in World War II, was a top athlete and scholar at the time, and as the story goes, the younger Kennedy compensated for his second-fiddle status with pranks, one of which was blowing up a toilet seat with a firecrcacker. At a chapel service, which was required for students, the headmaster denounced the “muckers,” as he called them, who pulled it off. Kennedy adopted the name for his group, forming the Muckers Club.

The mood on campus was somber in the days following the news of his death, especially those daily chapel services. As a U.S. Senator, Kennedy had addressed students from the same pulpit from which the headmaster had excoriated the muckers.

This was the most significant shared American moment since Pearl Harbor – the only one since that time for which people could say they remembered where they were at the exact moment they heard the dreadful news. It’s difficult to think of another one quite like it since then. But it was only the emergence of electronic media that had made such moments possible.

Personally, I’m distressed that exploration of the events of November 22, 1963 has been turned into a hobby. I don’t think there is now or ever will be a set of facts that will completely convince some people that there wasn’t a conspiracy to kill the President. And even if that turns out to be true, by the time it’s revealed, the shock value will have greatly diminished.

What is going to happen is that this event will officially fade into history after this. The 51^st anniversary just won’t be the same, nor will the 75^th, though I may not be around to make a judgment about that one. The beat, as Sonny Bono reminded us later in the 1960s, goes on.

'Tis the Season

My brother-in-law got upset the other day when he saw a Christmas-type commercial on TV during one of the breaks in his football game. A radio station in the city I used to live in has already started playing holiday music.

Meanwhile, the days are shorter, which I abhor. It’s depressing to see the sun setting at 5 p.m. This time of year, almost two-thirds of the day is in darkness or semi-darkness here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I get a little depressed.

Last year, a friend told me this is known as SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and that I would feel better if I only took Vitamin D pills. Another friend, in Seattle, is acquiring some kind of ultraviolet lamp. Well, OK then, I understand, that’s Seattle, after all. What am I complaining about – it hasn’t even rained here yet. Meanwhile, the East dipped below freezing this week, but we in my part of the West have yet to see the other side of 40 degrees F.

Something in me, however,  resists the notion that this annual depression is just some kind of chemical or physical imbalance which can be righted by pills or artificial means. I actually think moods are useful. Some of our best literature and music has been written by those in certain moods, often brought on by natural environmental changes. I actually write pretty good stuff when I get depressed (not necessarily this, of course!).

I especially resist being told how I am supposed to feel over the holidays. Suppose I’m not feeling thankful at Thanksgiving or filled with cheer and brotherhood at Christmas? Suppose it doesn’t make me happy to learn from your holiday letter that your son has been named a Rhodes Scholar? What if some years I want others to join me in a chorus of “Bah, humbug”? But I digress.

In the town of Inuvik in Arctic Canada, they have a ceremony the first week in January to mark the return of the sun, which disappears for 30 days in the dead of winter at that latitude. The sun just begins to reappear on the horizon on Jan. 6, and that’s a good reason to party.

One of my favorite quirky horror movies is called “30 Days of Night,” in which a pack of Eastern European vampires visits Point Barrow, Alaska during its month of darkness. That’s when vampires can go on a real bender – no sun.

The only cure that would work for me, I guess, is an expensive one: getting a winter home in the Southern Hemisphere. Perth or Cape Town or Buenos Aires, here I come!

But they still do the same holidays in those places, too, where it’s hot. Must be tough on the reindeer.

PC Virus

You thought this was a place to come get your computer fixed. Wrong. The PC and the virus I’m talking about have to do with Political Correctness, and now it’s open season on sports teams. The latest wave started with the Washington Redskins. OK, that name might actually be considered a racial slur. If Bob Costas says it is, it must be.

But a high school in the Southern California desert whose teams are known as the Arabs is coming under criticism from some quarters. Coachella (you know that name) Valley High’s mascot is an angry-looking hook-nosed Arab, which some Arab-Americans feel is a racial slur. While the name and mascot may seem odd, it goes back generations, thanks to the date industry (I mean the fruit, folks). That desert area represents the largest date-growing region in the world outside of the Middle East, from which date palm trees were imported long ago. Every year, there’s the National Date Festival (a.k.a. the Riverside County Fair), which features a parade including young women wearing fetching Arabian Nights harem costumes. It’s all part of the region’s culture. BTW, the Arabs’ big rivals down the street are the Rajahs of Indio High School. Farther up the Coachella Valley, the Palm Springs High School teams are called the Indians. Even the late longtime chairman of the local tribal council didn’t have a problem with that. But there are other institutions with similarly named teams that have chosen to change names and mascots to preserve feelings.

I’d like to scream, STOP IT, but the comeback is going to be that I’m white and of course I don’t have a problem. No, I don’t. But being partly of Irish descent, I certainly would have had one if I’d lived a couple hundred years ago in the United States, when the Irish weren’t treated all that much better than black slaves. BTW, when it comes to sports teams,  a friend tells me that JFK High School in La Palma, California, has a leprechaun for a mascot.

What’s the solution to all this? I don’t have one, except, isn’t there an “unreasonable” or “overboard” light hat goes on in most of our heads? I’m surprised PETA hasn’t objected to the use of animals. Or maybe they have, don’t know.

Some high schools have a sense of humor. At Key West High in Florida, the teams are known as the Fighting Conchs. That’s a shelled sea creature, for you landlubbers out there.

Don’t worry, if your own ethnic group or country of origin hasn’t been slammed yet, the spotlight just hasn’t fallen on you – your turn will come. But when will we embrace each others’ differences instead of trashing them, or conversely, beating others over the head with the misrepresentation of our own marks of distinction? Do we really have this much time on our hands?

Lightening Up

It always is a source of amazement to me how many people get uptight about Halloween. For most of us, it’s fun, but for some, the idea of calling forth demons or the troubled souls of the departed is sacrilegious. I think just the opposite. For one day a year, we have a license to escape from ourselves.

Actors get to play roles all the time, and some are even paid handsomely for it. Other people are not so inclined or so fortunate – but at this season, they can do it anyway, without fear of judgment. The donning of a costume allows them to don a new personality for a few hours. Is that such a bad thing for children?

Naturally, for me, the Halloween transformation of women is most interesting. They are more experienced at makeup. The ordinarily demure and professional manager or executive sometimes graces us with view of her we’re not used to. I worked with one woman who was a devout Christian during the week – and showed up at the Halloween party in an angel outfit – except it was flesh-colored, and anatomically correct. Oddly, some people have to put on a costume to enter the human race.

I couldn’t go through Halloween without my horror movies. My list of faves has been shared with you in an earlier post on this blog. The challenge is finding a film that really gives you a chill without resorting to sharp tools. The real world is scary enough; most movies are tame by comparison to actual events, no?

So I would ask you Bible-thumpers out there, or thumpers of whatever other book, for whom Halloween causes you grief, lighten up please. It will all be over in a few days. We promise you can have your world back.

PR 101

So it’s the signature effort of your campaign. You’re trying to get everyone’s buy-in -- literally, in this case. And your website fails. What are people going to remember about your product?

It’s very sad that the Obama administration can spend billions on something and then have its rollout botched by what have to be avoidable mistakes. Just to start with, the Obamacare site developer said what screwed things up was that the administration, at the last minute, wanted users to sign up for an account before they could browse the site. Hey, you want people to look at your product – you don’t require them to register or sign in first. Isn’t that a barrier to retail success?

One congresswoman said this week that companies like eBay deal with zillions of customers without problems. Perhaps the administration should have waved a few bucks in front of the site developers for those entities. My running joke is that the powers-that-be should kidnap Edward Snowden, bring him back from Russia, and offer him amnesty if he fixes the Obamacare site.

Obamacare is a noble experiment to fix something that’s really broken: the American healthcare system. Maybe from a technical medical standpoint, it’s the best in the world, but who can argue that doing nothing to fix its delivery was ever an option?

If you stay on this planet long enough, you will see things you thought could never change collapse in a heap. It happened with the auto industry. I have seen it happening in journalism, my old profession. Personally, I think maybe one of the next things to go might be the whole private health insurance industry as we now know it.

But from heaps of rubble rise new ways of doing things. The auto industry is an example, and even in journalism, evolution is taking place. Maybe what needs to go is the employer-based health insurance concept, which, as I understand history, was only a patch so employers could get around wage freezes to attract employees.

Obamacare is a Rube Goldberg system designed to offer a better product to consumers without pissing off the corporations overmuch. With all its limitations, it should be given a real chance to succeed or fail. In the meantime, though, President Obama needs to take a PR class. I think such a thing is available at most community colleges at minimal expense.

Horror Movies I Like

Well, it’s getting to be that time again, when you decide on your favorite Halloween rentals. I prefer the classics, both vintage and recent. These are some of my faves, NOT ranked, BTW, in any kind of order. My only rule for good horror flicks is, scare me, don’t terrorize me or excessively gross me out. Leave the knives, hatchets and chainsaws in the garage. Teeth are OK, though. Some additions this year.

1. THE MUMMY (1932) – My favorite of the great Universal classics.
2. DRACULA (1931) – Lugosi was an actual Rumanian, Authenticity counts.
3. FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
4. THE WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935)
5. THE BLACK CAT (1934) – Lugosi and Karloff, an interior decorator must-see.
6. THE WOLF MAN (1941) -- Lon Chaney Jr.
7. NOSFERATU (1922) – Silent classic

 (The above are almost obligatory) More:

  

8. DRACULA (1979) – Good production, not sure about Langella as the Count..
9. THE OMEN (1976) –The girl’s suicide haunted me for weeks. LOUSY sequels.
10. THE EXORCIST – Get the uncut one with the spider walk.
11. THE EXORCIST III – Surprisingly good sequel, Geo. C. Scott & Ed Flanders.
12. GHOST STORY – Very creepy with wonderful cast.
13. CAT PEOPLE (1982) – Sexy, and the cats are nice, too.
14. THE SHINING (1980) --  Here’s Johnny!
15. SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE – Is it a movie project or for real?
16. THE HUNGER -- Catherine Deneuve a vampire. I’ll stop there.
17. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – They shoulda had a cell phone with them.
18. THE RITE – I’m the only one who likes this, but it does have Anthony Hopkins.
19. PSYCHO – Showers or baths?
20. ROSEMARY’S BABY – It may give you morning sickness.
21. POLTERGEIST – Talk about homes being underwater!
22. ANGEL HEART – Back when Mickey Rourke was…Mickey Rourke.
23. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS – Join me in a nice chianti, Clarice.
24. THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW – Haiti, zombie HQ
25. THE DESCENT -- For those of you who think caves are fun. They’re not.
26. 30 DAYS OF NIGHT – Why vampires prefer winter.
27. VAN HELSING -- Not great, but I love the flying bat-girls.
28.  QUARANTINE -- w/Jennifer Carpenter. A Blair Witch thing for journalists,

SCI-FI (not exactly horror, but close enough for Halloween)

1.      ALIEN and the folo, ALIENS (not the later two).

2.      THE FLY (Jeff Goldblum version)

3.      INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS – the 1978 remake was shot in SF.

4.      MIMIC – If in NYC, you’ll think twice about ever taking the subway.

5.      THE THING (1982) – Much better than the original (or later) versions.

6.      PITCH BLACK – Before Vin Diesel was a star.

I know I’ve left a lot out, but these should get you started. Feel free to make suggestions!

Welcome to the Pigeonhole

One of the things we humans love to do in varying degrees is label things – especially each other. If your skin is a certain color, it’s assumed that you behave or think a certain way. The same goes for where you live or come from. We've been eagerly pigeonholing since ancient times.

I often joke with friends about astrology, and one reminded me this week that it’s not scientific. I was born near the end of August, and top astrologers can’t agree whether I am a Leo or a Virgo. That makes me a bicuspid, I guess, LOL. But it assumes I have certain personal characteristics. The interesting part is that the sun actually appears to cross more constellations in the universe than astrology gives it credit for, like Cetus the Whale. Including Cetus would really bollox up the works, and all those professional astrologers who have us neatly classified might be out of jobs.

At one time, I did a radio talk show. Of all the heavy and controversial subjects we dealt with, no guest generated more calls than the numerologist, who could tell people what their characteristics were just by knowing their birth date, from which she derived the numbers that influenced their lives. My primary number is 5, she said. I have forgotten what that means.

The Elizabethans had “humors.” You were either sanguine, coleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic, and through such classifications they could tell you what bodily organ governed you, and even why you were healthy or unhealthy, as well as your general temperament.

We have more modern systems, but I wonder how different they really are. An especially popular one is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), developed by a mother-daughter team of psychologists during World War II, mainly to determine what kinds of jobs would be most comfortable for all the women entering the workforce while men were away fighting the war. It was derived from the work of Carl Jung, and it is still in use in the shrink world. One I consulted some years back desperately wanted me to be an INFP, but I took the test a bunch of times, and it became fairly clear I was an ISTJ, although a good friend who knows about these things calls me an INTJ, which I took as kind of a compliment. I’m not going to explain all this -- it would take too long.

Another friend once invited me to lunch at a fancy restaurant. A few minutes into the meal, he shoved a clipboard at me with a multiple-choice MBTI test on it, which I dutifully filled out. He told me he was doing this to all of his friends.

This next comes under the heading of “things I should have said when I had the chance but didn’t think of until later.” I would have said, “Fred, don’t you think it would be nice to simply experience another human being without filtering the encounter through some artificial matrix to give yourself the illusion of control over it?” But I’m glad I didn’t say that. He was, after all, paying for lunch.

I think I have learned, sometimes the hard way,  that human relations are a lot messier than we’d like them to be – and that maybe they’d be deeper and more satisfying if we learned to put up with a little mess now and then, and leave the classifications on the shelf.

Sea Changes

Let me see…we were about to launch an attack on Syria, but now we’re talking to the Russians about their plan to secure and destroy Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons. And now the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, has ended the denial of the Holocaust and wants to negotiate over that country’s plans to become a nuclear power. What’s going on here? What triggered this? It’s not spring. But could it be an equinoctial thing?

Probably nothing so semi-metaphysical. I think it’s more about enlightened self-interest. The Russians have substantial military and economic interest in what happens in Syria. Putin & Co. would probably like to see the Assad regime stay in power for as long as possible. In Iran, maybe reality is setting in. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who interviewed Rouhani, says he wouldn’t be making nice unless he had authorization to do so from the religious leaders of his country, and why would they provide it? Could it be that economic sanctions are actually hurting, and the old men who run that country realize that the general population, which is much younger and less hateful of America, might be upset with them if they don’t change their attitudes? Is it a case of  “the devil knowing his time is short”?

Some Americans may have trouble trusting either the Russians or the Iranians, after our past history with their respective governments. But there are few more solid foundations for trust than an opposing party doing something that’s good, simply because circumstances are leaving no other choice.

So the next question is, if our worst enemies are finally doing something we want them to do because they have to do it, can the same principles work with forcing Congress to work through differences on Obamacare and the debt ceiling?

I think locking members of Congress in the Capitol and locking all the bathrooms there until they get this done would work just fine. There are few more powerful incentives than having to go because you have to go.

Habemus Papam

"...If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist,  if he wants everything clear and safe, he will find nothing...Those who always look for disciplinarian solutiions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists -- they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies."

It has bgeen crystal clear for years that the Catholic Church has needed an overhaul. Perhaps it will begin with the sea change that has occurred at the very top. The words above are from an interview given to a Jesuit journal by Pope Francis I -- a welcome breeze through the musty catacombs of an institution that needs it.

I am no longer Catholic, but I was raised that way in a time when things were different.The Mass was in Latin. Fridays, and quite a few other days, were meatless -- I had one of those calendars with the fish icons signifying when meat was off-limits. I kept close track of my sins, so much so that I was afraid to fly unless I had been to confession, in case the plane should crash and I should die with a blot on my soul and be sent to the place with eternal central heating. It was a scary time to be a child, much less an adolescent. The church has since lightened up, to a point.

There's something about religions. They start out with a simple mission and then turn into corporations with a hierarchy and sets of rules, regulations, and judgments -- often combined with the conviction that the world won't be quite right unless everyone is converted. Judaism had turned into one of these when Jesus came along. If he had a mission, it was to bring religion back to its original purpose. Would he approve of what has been done in his name since he left? For that matter, would the Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him) be happy with what's happened to Islam? I think we know the answers.

I am becoming less "religious" as I age, when I've always been told it should be the other way around. My problem with most religions is that they consider being human some kind of inferior status. When we screw up, we're told we're "only human." The phrase "human nature" usually refers to something negative. I often wonder what would become of art, music, and literature in a world where humanity is continually discounted. Would we all be singing hymns instead of love songs?

A worthy goal of religion would seem to be to put us into alignment with our "better angels." But it also has to let us breathe. I may be reading too much into the new pope's words, but I think this is one of the things he's trying to tell us. It will be enlightening to hear what else he has to say.

Russian Roulette

Let’s be clear about one thing. Russia doesn’t do anybody any favors. But sometimes, self-interest is the best motivator. By proposing a plan under which the chemical weapons Syria now has would be secured and destroyed under the auspices of the U.N., the Russians have persuaded President Obama to take his finger off the trigger for the time being. Hey, and didn’t the Syrian regime admit that it has chemical weapons? All-in-all, not as bad a day as it seems.

Syria – and in particular, the Assad regime — are very important to Moscow. Russia has a huge naval base in Syria. Under an unfriendly post-Assad government, they could lose it. Second, if the chemical weapons possessed by Syria fall into unfriendly hands, they could be used by Islamic activists in Russian republics. Finally, Syria is the tail and Russia is the dog. Assad will do what Moscow tells him to do.

All of this points to the chemical weapons being secured, or at least not used, which is sort of what we’re after, correct?

The only problem is, we have to listen to a useless debate in the U.N. about all this. We often hear it said that the United States is not the policeman of the world. That would be a great principle if the world had a police department – which theoretically is the U.N. We can see how well that’s working for us.

I wish the Obama administration would stop saying we will have no boots on the ground in Syria. The fact is, the boots are already there. They’re being worn by CIA operatives advising the rebels; can overt military advisors be far behind?

I also wish the President would stop talking about children, and asking us to watch the videos of children suffering and dying from Sarin gas poisoning. Like none of the 100,000-plus previous Syrian fatalities were children, and like they didn’t die equally horrible deaths. The current “crisis” is a concocted one, laid on top of the real one that’s been going on for more than two years, around which the world has danced.

But put me down for this: If Assad takes advantage of this muddled period to use chemical weapons again, I’d be very pleased if we re-aimed our missiles and blew him to the next dimension.

Just Do It

Relax! I’m not talking about attacking Syria or trying to sell you athletic equipment. This is about courage – not the kind that helps you rescue trapped people from burning buildings, but the everyday kind you need to function in life.

Example: In spite of many years experience as a broadcaster, I am not an expert in doing my own audio mixing with software. The job I’m contracted to do called for a very minor mixing operation, but I had been afraid to perform it with this software. Thanks to the Internet, I discovered that this was a wheel I did not have to re-invent – others had done it, and showed me how. So I did it, and experienced tremendous elation when the simple task was accomplished.

It’s like the time I first learned to replace light switches. There was no opportunity to call an electrician, so I figured it out myself by opening up the wall housing (with the power off!), looking at how it was wired, and using the same wiring on a new switch. Presto! I flipped the switch on an off a hundred times just to watch it work, and wanted to replace every other switch in the house immediately, but resisted it, choosing instead to wait until something was actually broken before I fixed it.

Depending on the complexity of the task, of course, you need more courage if you have to do it yourself. A good friend had to move to another state on the other side of the country with her three cats. Shipping them or finding hotels that would accommodate the “family” was out of the question. My friend decided on traveling by RV, which involved not only buying one, but learning how to drive this large vehicle and hook it up to utilities at RV parks. In the process, she successfully made the cross-country trip by herself, visited more than a dozen new states, and had a built-in inexpensive place to stay in her destination city while she spent weeks looking for the perfect house to buy. Brilliant solution, brought about by necessity.

Similarly, another friend was deathly afraid of flying some years ago, but a new job required her to make numerous business trips. She doesn’t really enjoy the trips these days (they’re work), but she has lost her fear of flying, and has amassed hundreds of thousands of frequent-flier miles to use on international travel at some point.

My wife found public speaking very daunting (unlike me!), but obtained a contract job which required her to do a lot of it. Like my frequent-flier friend, it’s still not her favorite thing, but she no longer loses a night’s sleep before she has to be “on stage.”

It’s a simple fact that since almost all of us put our pants on one leg at a time, we can learn to do what we need to do. When we admire people who have overcome small – or large -- personal hurdles, we should take a minute to realize that it can happen for us, too – we just have to do it.

Bark or Bite

The good news is, American missiles won’t be flying toward Syria today. The bad news is, we just kissed most of the credibility we had in the bank goodbye with President Obama’s decision to seek approval from Congress for a strike on Syria -- after all the run-up that has already taken place. If Congress says no to an attack, President Obama will have little choice but to follow British Prime Minister David Cameron’s lead and stand the military down.

Does that mean we will have given Mr. Assad the green light to continue to use chemical weapons? We have green-lighted innumerable atrocities up to this point, so we might well wonder what’s different now.

Personally, I feel the time for messaging has long since passed. If Mr. Assad personally gave the orders to use chemical weapons, as we have charged, he is already a war criminal of the first order, right up there with Hitler and Pol Pot. If he sees a green light here and resumes the use of such weapons, that should be a green light for us to send a lot more than a message. We will have no reasonable choice – if we want our credibility back -- but to take out Assad – or arrest him and put him on trial. Will that be Iraq II? Can we remove Assad from power, face down Iran and Russia, and let the remaining Syrian factions determine their own fate (which means fighting it out)?

We cannot effect real change, unfortunately, without getting our hands dirty – and if we’re not prepared to do that, we should indeed stay out of Syria and take our credibility lumps. The last war we can take credit for winning (and not solo credit) ended almost 70 years ago. We’ve been tinkering around with war since then, at a great cost to the lives of our young men, and these days, women.

A Syrian woman interviewed on the radio this morning quoted a proverb to the effect that the louder and longer a dog barks, the less it’s apt to bite. We need to stop barking and bite something, or else put the muzzle on and go back to bed.

Hearing the Dinner Bell

For the better part of two years, the Obama administration has told us that all options are on the table to deal with the crisis in Syria. The table is set, and dinner is about to be served.

On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry’s words of warning were clear: there was no question that chemical weapons had been used on civilians – a moral obscenity, and the clear crossing of the so called red line had occurred.  It wasn’t all that long ago that another Secretary of State, Colin Powell, displayed graphic evidence, or so we were given to believe, of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Ah, but this is different, right? Syria really does have chemical weapons. And apparently, the regime no longer has compunctions about using them. But as for moral outrage about this, do you think it might be possible that at least one of the 100-thousand-plus civilians who died by what we might call conventional means may have suffered equally horrible or even more agonizing deaths than the current nerve gas victims? The red line was drawn in a strange place.

What we have been learning the hard way about the Middle East is that dictatorships have served as artificial lids on boiling pots. Military action on our part won’t turn down the heat in Syria.

Is the red line really about U.S. credibility? In the case of Syria, we lost it two years ago. So is firing off a few missiles really going to send the message to Iran and/or Russia that we’re not to be trifled with? They’ve been trifling with us a long time. What is different about this moment?

To my mind, there is only one justification for military action: obtaining control of the chemical weapons or destroying them so that the Assad regime can’t use them on civilians anymore and so that they don’t fall into the wrong hands. Unless military force attains those goals, it’s a waste of time and resources. Our attention might better be paid to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by this conflict, many living in desperate situations in countries that can’t handle them.

If we really have to sit down to dinner, it might be a good time for someone to say grace – and pray hard before we pick up the knife and fork.

Thankless Jobs

These jobs I would never do. I don’t care how much I was paid. Am I talking about cleaning sewers or working in a mortuary? Nope

OK, well I probably wouldn’t do those either, but today I’m talking about customer service work – being on the other end of a phone line with someone who has a problem with a product.

The thing that amazes me is how cheerful and cooperative most of these folks are. Their jobs largely consist of saying the same thing over and over to a succession of callers, some of whom are angry. It’s not the customer service person’s fault that something was wrong with the product or it wasn’t delivered, but these are the individuals who have to absorb customer frustration, belligerence – and even threats.

True, you sometimes get connected to one of these folks who are trained to dodge your questions or not listen to you. But that’s because the company they work for has trained them to deliver that message. I’ll bet relatively few of them enjoy it.

Just because I hate doing this dance, if it seems like it’s welcome, I try to chat up these folks a little bit. Maybe I’ve been to the city or town where their call center is. Often, they have unusual names, especially the women. I talked to one this morning, for instance, whose name was Timber. No, she told me, neither of her parents worked for the Forest Service – it was just the only name they could agree on when she was born.

Yes, I even try talking to the people in India – but to Western ears, they all have unusual names, which they often ditch in favor of something American-sounding.

Look, these folks go to work every day – even on the days when they have serious problems of their own and don’t feel like being nice to anybody -- but they somehow manage to do it. This is true not only of call center people, but of anybody who has to wait on others. If I were a waiter in an Italian restaurant, the first customer who gave me a problem would have a lap full of clam sauce, and I probably wouldn’t bother to close the door on my way out.

So if your job involves serving others, and you can do it well and be consistent about it, you have this writer’s deep sympathy and undying admiration.

Send Out the Clowns

 The flap over the now infamous Missouri State Fair rodeo clown’s spoof of President Obama is not just a simple tempest in a teapot.  It only adds to my wonderment at the nature of humor. For years, I have asked myself why some who make one quip perceived as racist have to quit their jobs, weep and gnash their teeth in eternal banishment while others get away with it, even make a way-more-than-comfortable living at it.

For decades, Don Rickles packed auditoriums in Vegas. Bill Maher would seem to be his logical successor, with shtick full of comments about blacks, Asians and others that are clearly racist -- but most of us laugh anyway. On the female side, there are Joan Rivers and perhaps her successor, Sarah Silverman, whose main goal seems to be to shock us.

Many comedians work “dirty” these days, with shtick full of f-words. Personally, I think Robin Williams is a stitch without the injection of such language, but he does it in concerts. Maybe that’s just me. When I was young I laughed very hard at Red Skelton, from whose lips a dirty word never issued on stage or screen.

In one of those famous Woody Allen movies whose titles all run together in my head, Alan Alda, playing a TV star, is seen telling a group of up-and-comers, “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny!” Sometimes it’s about the material. The joke just doesn’t work. Or the comedian can’t make it work.

Is it about conscious – or even unconscious – intention? The Missouri rodeo clown could have been just plain mean. But were those who made fun of Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, Clinton or Carter any less mean? Does Obama “deserve” it any less than they? I return to Bill Maher, who makes jokes about Obama’s race on practically every show.

Maybe it’s about the comedian internally laughing along with us, bringing to the surface attitudes many of feel we have to suppress or are afraid to recognize in ourselves. Prejudices, if you look at them from a distance, are actually fuuny, largely because they make no sense. But there’s a chord that has to resonate someplace in us to bring out the laugh.

As you can see, I haven’t begun to figure this out, but I’m not sure the myriad of minds out there better than my own have figured it out either. Don’t even think about applying concepts like fairness or consistency to this problem. You will fail miserably, as I have.