Muley's World

Christmas Tonight

2011-12-12T11:45:00.001-08:00

Great scene from "The Jerk"

2011-09-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

Had to get something new up here after all this time. A great scene with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters from "The Jerk."

The Quebe Sisters

2010-08-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

Just heard of this group that is playing with Asleep at the Wheel on some of their dates -- the Quebe (kway-bee) Sisters Band. They play Texas fiddle and sing in three-part harmony. Great stuff.

Junior Brown: Sugar Foot Rag

2010-04-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

Junior Brown deconstructing the old classic, Sugar Foot Rag. Not sure exactly what kind of guitar he's playing, or what planet it is from. Sounds good, though!

Ukulele Boy

2010-03-23T14:25:00.001-07:00

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

2010-03-23T08:46:00.001-07:00

Coming to a theater near you...soon?

"Weird: The Al Yankovic Story" from Aaron Paul

"Weird Al" Yankovic's Really True Home Movies

2010-03-19T14:44:00.001-07:00

Ukuleles Live at Lewisville Estates

2010-03-08T13:31:00.000-08:00

Some low-fi videos of ukulele performamces by the Dallas Ukulele Headquarters group at Lewisville Estates on Feb. 20, 2010. First, Don Aspromonte performing Frankie and Johnny. Weird as it is, I want to be able to do stuff like this some day.

Next, a group rendition of "Ain't She Sweet."

Super Bowl commercials

2010-02-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

Getting ready for the Super Bowl this weekend, here's a few classic ads from past Super Bowls to warm us up.

Boilerplate

2010-02-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

A video about Boilerplate, a fictional robotic man put into real-life historical scenes by his two creative authors. I just got this book and am enjoying it a lot. Great vision and ideas.

The Boilerplate page is here.

A New Disney Princess?

2010-02-01T10:17:00.000-08:00

Hitler on the Massachusetts Massacre

2010-01-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

This seems to be the clip that can be modified for any breaking news story. Here is Hitler reacting to the latest blow to the Democrats in Massachusetts with the election of Republican Scott Brown as senator.

I must see the original movie that this was taken from sometime, so I can learn what Hitler was actually having a meltdown about.

Law and Order Chickens

2010-01-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

This is so right on -- it's the plot of virtually every "Law and Order" episode on TV, done by chickens. Could someone do a version of "House" next -- maybe with sheep?

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Melt

2010-01-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

I must say that whenever I count my blessings, one of the blessings I often fold down a finger for is the fact that my current day job requires me to attend very few meetings. While meetings can sometimes be productive and even fun (certainly more fun than resolving an issue through scores of long, meandering and barely literate e-mails, for example), meetings can often be boring, depressing and, yes, even dangerous. Lethal, if you must know.

A recent article in a scholarly publication -- the New England Journal of Applied Brainiology, I think it was – described the study of hundreds of medical case files and the conclusion that, in cases where subjects were exposed to excessive numbers of long and boring meetings, there was a downright decent chance that a number of the subjects would suffer a medical condition known as cerebellus gellus, from the Latin phrase meaning “melted brain.”

The article describes four distinct stages of “brain melt” (cerebellus gellus). In Stage One, the brain is in its normal state prior to the beginning of the meeting. In Stage Two, usually occurring within the first 20 minutes of an especially boring meeting, the normally soft yet firm brain tissue devolves into a jellied substance. Like Thanksgiving Day cranberry sauce plopped out of its can, the brain can now jiggle up and down and from side to side when moved or shaken.

In Stage Three, which occurs usually after at least 40 minutes of meeting time, or after viewing five or six overly detailed and hard to read PowerPoint slides, the jellied brain tissue continues to disintegrate into a gelatinous goo, much like heated rubber cement or a warm cup of Jello Pudding.

Finally, if the subject stays in a boring meeting long enough, he or she can enter Stage Four, where actual liquefaction of the cerebral tissue takes place. In severe cases, if the viscosity is low enough, the brain broth will actually submit to gravity and escape through the nasal passages, resulting in a real mess for the custodians and a hefty dry cleaning bill to boot. The victim will by this point be of little use in further brainstorming sessions, since the brain in question has essentially left the building. Often, a Stage Four event results in hospitalization or death, or requires the subject’s transfer to a more suitable position, usually something in sales or government service.

But the reason I have introduced you to this shocking information is not to scare or depress you, but to bring you news of hope. I’m not sure I should be endorsing any products in this space, but in light of the seriousness of this condition, and due to the large number of readers who undoubtedly slog through meetings every week of their lives, I’m sure the blogging powers that be won’t mind if I tell you about one heroic company that has stepped up to the plate and made brain melt survivable.

The company, TeamPlayerz®, has introduced a line of products aimed at those people who find themselves trapped regularly in boring meetings. And at least two of these products are designed for employees whose brains have disappeared as a result of the terrible condition I described earlier.

The biggest problem that cerebellus gellus causes, besides death, is that the victim is left without a working brain. While solidification science has found a way to reassemble all of that liquid brain matter close to its original shape, size and texture, the trauma suffered during brain melt usually renders the information once stored there to be lost forever.

That’s where the TeamPlayerz® Back Up Brain™ system rides in to save the day. Much in the way a computer user pays for an offsite company to back up the material stored on their computer hard drive in case of a fire or other accident, Back Up Brain™ stores an employee’s brain information safely inside a supercomputer hard drive located deep in the bowels of a Kansas salt mine. After brain melt occurs, the old tissue can be solidified by qualified medical personnel, then a simple download of the subject’s former memory stored by Back Up Brain™ is accomplished with a few wires and clips, much like jumping a car battery. In no time at all, the subject is ready to re-enter the conference room and take up those scintillating discussions of employment guidelines, inventory management and online marketing strategies right where they left off.

Persons who have had close brushes with brain melt find that the TeamPlayerz® Brain Bib™ is a handy thing to have on hand during subsequent meetings. This form-fitting plastic sheeting is almost invisible, and when worn discreetly over clothing can prevent stains and other damage caused by a melted brain escaping through the nostrils. It comes in floral, musk and unscented fragrance options.

The bottom line is – you no longer must suffer from the after effects of brain melt! But, you might be asking, what if my meetings are boring, but not quite boring enough to cause such spectacular damage? Well, TeamPlayerz® has introduced an entire line of products aimed at you.

When faced with a boring meeting, the first impulse for many of us is to begin losing our attention span. Sometimes we become so distracted that we drift off into our own worlds, and in extreme cases we can fall asleep sitting up. This proves embarrassing when we emit a telltale rivulet of drool down the front of our shirt and are then jolted out of our peaceful reveries by a command to “Wake up!,” or a question directed at us about the inane yet crucial content we missed while dozing.

Enter the TeamPlayerz® Thought Tingler™ 5000, designed to fire up enough neurons to see a user through a 2-hour meeting of extreme dullness without a battery recharge. The ThoughtTingler, which consists of a small control unit about the size of a cell phone and two thin flesh-colored wires, is attached to the user’s back on a belt or bra clip and run up inside the clothes where it cannot be seen. Flesh-colored electrical contacts at the end of each wire are attached to the back of the neck. A slight electrical charge can then be sent as often as the user wishes, at intervals of five seconds or longer, to help them stay alert through even the most snore-inducing performances.

A deluxe model, the TeamPlayerz® Thought Tingler™ 5000XL, also includes a small microprocessor with voice recognition software that can send a boost of electrical power to the user when words or phrases selected by the user are detected, such as the user’s name and department, pertinent project areas and personnel, and exceptionally overused words and phrases such as “outside the box,” “taking it to the next level,” “going green” or “paradigm shift.”

What if someone’s problem isn’t staying awake during a meeting, but is instead coming up with some intelligent, or at least coherent, words to respond with when asked a question out of the blue? Sometimes, all that’s needed is a little extra brainpower in reserve. The solution is simple -- open up and eat a tasty TeamPlayerz® Bit-O-Brain™ bar before a meeting. Resembling the classic Bit-O-Honey candy bar you might have loved as a child, the Bit-O-Brain bar provides at least 10 new thoughts per hour to the average user – just the edge you might need during that think tank on the proposed company mission statement. For smaller needs, bite-size Noggin Nuggets™ provide at least three new thoughts apiece. They’re available in chocolate, vanilla and mocha flavors.

Finally, if all else fails and it becomes evident that a person doesn’t have what it takes to mentally survive a meeting through its bitter end, sometimes the only solution is escape by flight. To allow that to happen in a way that does not pin blame on its customers, TeamPlayerz® has introduced the Panic Pack™. This small electrical device, which can be concealed easily inside a coat pocket, pants pocket or purse, uses wireless sensors to learn the codes and frequencies of all electrically controlled devices within 50 yards of a conference room. With the push of a button, the Panic Pack can make lights go off, fire alarms blare, sprinkler systems activate and sound systems and PowerPoint projectors suffer instant blackouts. (Warning: this item is not recommended for customers wearing cardiac pacemakers).

So, fellow meeting veterans, please share this encouraging news with others at your workplace. Feel free to copy or e-mail this or, better yet – why not call a meeting to discuss its contents? Just make sure during the meeting that if your nose starts to run, or you smell the faint odor of cranberries, run!

Ukulele Music: The Barnkickers

2010-01-12T07:55:00.001-08:00

Ukulele Music: Victoria Vox

2010-01-11T14:47:00.001-08:00

Ukelele Music: Julia Nunes

2010-01-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

My New Year's Resolutions

2010-01-06T12:22:00.000-08:00

Looking through the newspapers, magazines and blogs, it appears that I must be one of the few sentient people on the planet who has not announced what things they intend to do or not do during the coming year –– that noble list of good intentions known as “New Year’s Resolutions.” I believe I saw where even North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il has a resolutions list out. Resolution No. 1 was to launch a successful nuclear strike on another nation, while No. 2 was something about eating more fiber.

I am nothing if not “with it,” so I have decided to take the path of least resistance and go with the cultural flow. Here, then, is my list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2010.

1. Every list of resolutions (except those of crazed tinhorn despots) seems to start off with a vow to lose weight. In that spirit, I commit myself to a target I can hit. To prevent ingesting too much fat in 2010, I promise not to attempt to eat anything larger than my head.

2. As a further aid toward lowering my caloric intake, I resolve to stick to my core culinary principles by maintaining my decades-long refusal to knowingly eat all but microscopic portions of onions, bell peppers, eggplant, wax beans, liver, stewed tomatoes, celery and sushi.

3. Despite constant peer pressure from other parents in this overly permissive, affluent and acquisitive society, in 2010 I will resist all temptations to spoil my children with expensive frivolities such as new cars, winter ski vacations, air-conditioned summer camps, high-priced tickets to sporting and cultural events, and any electronic devices newer and nicer than the ones I have. One day my kids will thank me for this.

4. As I am now much more knowledgeable about the dangers of sun-induced skin cancer, and am also more mature than I once was, realizing the folly of physical vanity, I once and for all abandon my dreams of becoming a swimsuit model.

5. As a compromise with my neighbors and that rude man from the public health department, I resolve not to allow the grass in my lawn to grow more than 12 inches high, regardless of season. (I hope all of you are happy, because this is as far as I’m willing to go for the sake of a few busybody enviromaniac neatniks).

6. As I value both my finances and my mental health, I resolve not to pay money to see any movie whose title begins with “Attack of the,” “Revenge of the” or “Return of the”, or any movie whose title ends in “Movie,” such as “Funny Movie,” “Violent Movie,” “Car Crash Movie,” or “Incredibly Stupid, Moronic, Juvenile and Derivative Movie.” I furthermore will restrict my watching of new vampire movies to those whose main characters are middle-aged men with widow’s peaks who speak with bad Eastern European accents.

7. As a responsible citizen who seeks to keep himself out of the public eye, I resolve to not do the following during 2010: lock anyone in an electrical closet, show up uninvited to a White House reception, interrupt someone’s acceptance speech at an awards banquet, or enrage any woman who both has physical access to me and knows how to swing a mean golf club.

Ukelele Music: Sophie Madeleine

2010-01-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

Redneck Santa

2009-12-22T12:44:00.000-08:00

Christmas Letters: The Literary Fruitcakes of Yuletide

2009-12-16T13:52:00.000-08:00

Today I will begin my annual ritual or writing the Muley family Christmas newsletter, which my wife and I send out to a small group of understanding and forgiving relatives and friends across the country. For some insane reason I have written a family newsletter for more than a decade now, and I had to learn the hard way how to do it. I’ve discovered through painful personal experience that just sitting down at the keyboard and typing whatever fool thing pops into your head is often a recipe for holiday disaster.

So, as my Christmas gift to you, dear readers, I offer six tips on how to avoid common mistakes in composing your Yuletide missive.

1. Well, so this Christmas there’s a new baby in your house. Wonderful! Please share the news with family and friends in your annual Christmas newsletter. But let me offer a few words of advice. Yes, your readers want to hear about the new addition, and will even indulge you if in your excitement you share some detailed minutiae, such as weight, length, eye and hair color, dimple presence and other common features. But there is such a thing as going too far. By all means, include nothing whatsoever about your little one’s bowel movements (including color, consistency or frequency) or any details about his or her breastfeeding. There should be no mentions of infant rashes, warts, scabs or pustules, and no descriptions of recent illnesses involving technicolored phlegm or mucous, projectile vomiting or uncontrollable slobbering. If you must relate these embarrassing details, save them for the parents’ toast at your child’s wedding.

2. It’s okay to mention in a Christmas newsletter that you have separated from a spouse or partner (this will allow recipients to return at least one gift they might have bought for a welcomed refund), but it is considered quite bad form to use descriptive words such as “weasel,” “vermin,” “slimeball,” “scumbag” or phrases such as “toad-licking two-timer” in your prose. By the same token, it is frowned upon to describe in detail the physical deficiencies of the recently replaced, or share their personal information with your readers, such as your ex’s Social Security, PIN and credit card numbers, the location and passwords of hidden assets and embarrassing nicknames from childhood.

3. Did you take a family vacation this past year? This is prime source material for a Christmas newsletter entry. But in describing your journey, brevity should be your rule. Let readers know where you and your family traveled, the highlights of what you saw, and share any amusing stories that you know will be told for years to come anyway, such as when you dropped your new $1,000 camera down the Grand Canyon and your wife yelled at you for being an idiot in front of all those other people on the donkey trail. But please –– no detailed descriptions of routes taken, hotels and motels stayed in, restaurants visited or souvenirs purchased. Also, don’t include unwanted statistical data, such as the average miles per gallon achieved during your trip, comparisons of unleaded gas prices over five states, quantities of amenities in hotel rooms, and the length of time spent in lines for popular amusement park rides, as opposed to the unrealistically shorter times listed in the guidebooks.

4. If you or any members of your family suffered a serious ailment during the past year and are still here to tell about it, by all means let your readers know that you survived swine flu, or that little Bobby is totally healed from the broken leg he got after riding the pogo stick on the roof. But please, consider your readers. Avoid any in-depth discussions of medications and dosages, and even if physical ailments are mentioned, avoid the urge to include color photographs of incision scars or allergic reactions.

5. Financial solicitations, even if couched as offering a “business opportunity” to invest in gold or junk bonds or chinchilla ranches, or offers to sell anything, especially dubious items such as Dallas Cowboys playoff tickets or autographed copies of the Letters of Paul, are no-nos. Even appeals to buy items sold by your children, such as Girl Scout cookies or lifetime subscriptions to Grit, can come back to haunt you.

6. Finally, if you want to include a recent photo of you and the family with your newsletter, feel free. It’s a good way to let friends and family see just how much the kids have grown, and just how much older, balder and fatter you and your spouse have gotten since the last photo. But remember, almost everyone you send this to has access to both a photo scanner and the Internet. So, if you do something squirrelly like pose in antlers and matching reindeer sweaters, or dress up as characters from “A Christmas Carol,” be prepared to find that your family has earned a prominent place on websites like Awkward Family Photos that feature such goofy Yuletide poses. And remember, the Internet is forever.

(For a great musical performance touching on some of these themes, go here.)

Inspiration

2009-05-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

Here's what Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, had to say about inspiration in one's work. It's taken from her Nobel Prize lecture on Dec. 7, 1996.

I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself.

When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

Muley in D.C.!

2009-04-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

Photo taken on a recent trip with Mrs. Muley to Washington, D.C. Had a great time. (The way the wind is blowing my hair in this photo, I sorta look like Ed Grimley).

Now There's Two Places I Can Offend People

2009-04-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

The crazy folks here in Waco at the Waco Tribune-Herald have asked me to start doing what they call a "Community Blog," which is their way of saying "a blog by someone not on staff and, therefore, not paid by us."

This should be fun. As a result of doing this, I won't give up Muley's World, but I will probably do most of my stuff on the Trib site. Here's the link, if you're interested.

The good news or bad news, depending on how you feel, is that I will be much more regular with posts on this new blog than I have been lately on Muley's World. I have to play with the grown-ups now, and they expect some deal of regularity.

Rancid Rhymes

2009-03-31T09:35:00.000-07:00

Here's something I snagged off a departmental newsletter recently. It's supposedly the winners in a Washington Post competition, asking readers to write a two-line rhyme with the most romantic first line, followed by the least romantic second line.

1. My darling, my lover, my beautiful wife:

Marrying you has screwed up my life.

----------

2. I see your face when I am dreaming.

That's why I always wake up screaming.

----------

3. I thought that I could love no other

-- that is until I met your brother.

----------

4. Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.

But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the sugar bowl's
empty and so is your head.

----------

5. I want to feel your sweet embrace;

But don't take that paper bag off your face.

----------

6. I love your smile, your face, and your eyes

Darn, I'm good at telling lies!

----------

7. My love, you take my breath away.

What have you stepped in to smell this way?

Great Teleprompter Moments in U.S. History

2009-03-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

A fair number of people -- even liberal Democrats who support him heartily, it seems -- are commenting these days on how absolutely addicted President Barack Obama is to his teleprompter. All recent Presidents have used the handy device to deliver speeches at big events or for moments when every single word must be correct. But Obama apparently uses the teleprompter almost every single time he speaks in public, even at informal events made for off-the-cuff candor. This addiction has caused him at least one embarrassing moment, when a mix-up in the scripts resulted in Obama reading remarks that the Irish Prime Minister was supposed to deliver. As a result, Obama ended up publicly thanking himself for throwing such a great St. Patrick's Day bash before he snapped to it and realized something was wrong.

If I were a comedy television producer, or someone with the technology and crew to put together comedy skits on YouTube, I would create a video called something like "Great Teleprompter Moments in U.S. History," purporting to show that, far from being an aberration, Obama's teleprompter use merely follows a long tradition of U.S. history-makers relying on the wordy little screens at important moments. The video would feature reenactments of scenes such as these:

Oct, 12, 1492
The Bahamas

Christopher Columbus and a small crew emerge from a rowboat and walk the sands of a small island. As soon as the boat is emptied, it is sent back with two sailors to the Santa Maria and returns 30 minutes later, laden with a crude new device called el telepromptero. It is unloaded and set up, and as a crewman cranks the wooden handle that makes the scroll of parchment move upwards, Columbus reads the words claiming the land for Spain.

Sept. 22, 1776
New York City

Captured by the British after the Battle of Long Island, Nathan Hale, America’s first spy, is on the gallows preparing to be hanged. As the noose is placed around Hale's neck, a British soldier gives the order for his death. Before the sentence is carried out, however, a captured American teleprompter is lifted onto the platform and placed in front of Hale. As the crowd listens in respectful silence, Hale reads his stirring final speech, including the famous words, “I only regret that I have but one life to give my country.” Hale is then hanged, and the teleprompter is shot by firing squad.

Nov. 19, 1863
Gettysburg, Pa.

After composing the teleprompter text for the first speech of the day dedicating the Union cemetery at Gettysburg -- a two-hour oration of 13,607 words by Edward Everett -- the writing hand of the government transcriptionist cramps violently, rendering the limb unusable. As he waits for Everett to finish, President Abraham Lincoln orders the pained young man to rest, then proceeds to write out the words of his speech himself. Gazing into the teleprompter under a brilliant Pennsylvania sky, Lincoln delivers the address, which takes the audience by surprise because it is so brief, lasting only two minutes or so. Asked about this later, Lincoln confessed that he had about 30 minutes worth of material he wanted to use, but was only able to write about two minutes worth of text onto the teleprompter before it was his time to speak.

Aug. 5, 1864
Mobile Bay, Ala.

When Admiral David Farragut sees that Union ships ahead of him in the battle in Mobile Bay are turning around after hitting Confederate underwater mines (called torpedoes at the time), he calls for a cabin boy to bring the teleprompter up top. He tells the boy, who has an associate's degree in mass communication, to write him something to say relaying the idea "I wanna go forward, even though we may all get blowed up real good." The boy scribbles two short sentences onto the roll of paper, then as Farragut mounts the command deck, he looks into screen of the sputtering coal-powered teleprompter and shouts to his men, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"

July 20, 1969
The surface of the Moon

As millions watch on television back on Earth, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the Moon. As soon as his first step is completed, he turns around and looks back at the hatch of the lunar lander, where crewman Buzz Aldrin is doing his best to position a bulky, battery-powered teleprompter (LV-TELEPROMPTSAT, in NASA language) in the opening. As the world waits, Aldrin pushes the power button, the screen lights up, and Armstrong is free to read out loud the now famous words, "That's one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind." It's later revealed that Armstrong neglected to say the word "a" between "for" and "man" because Aldrin had his finger over part of the teleprompter screen.

March 30, 1981
Washington, D.C.

After delivering a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel, President Ronald Reagan is shot outside the hotel by gunman John Hinckley, Jr. Coughing up blood from a punctured lung, Reagan is rushed to George Washington University Hospital and is prepared for emergency surgery. Nancy Reagan quickly arrives and is escorted into the ER, where aides are frantically setting up a mobile teleprompter unit carried by the Secret Service. As a speechwriter ordered to the scene nervously taps on the keyboard, a visibly pale Reagan summons a smile, looks into the screen and says to his worried wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck." Aides then wheel the teleprompter into Reagan's hospital room, where it stands ready to give the President something to say when he wakes up after the surgery. Speechwriters busily compose a slew of message possibilities ready for use: "I am thirsty. Can I have some water?;" "Boy, am I sore;" "Did George Bush screw anything up while I was under?," and others.

Be a Hero

2009-03-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

I just visited this website, where you can make your own superhero. You choose the gender and lots of different characteristics, and then they assign a superhero name based on what you chose.

Here's my first creation -- a guy who does some serious grocery shopping:

I next tried creating a female of steel:

Give it a try, if you're in one of those "I'm so bored I need some mindless fun" moods.

Something Else

2009-03-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

That last post was okay -- needed, I guess -- but if I access this blog and see it once again at the top, I think I'll go crazy.

The problem is I don't have anything truly profound or even entertaining to offer you right now. I mean, the most exciting thing going now, I guess, is that we're headed to Dallas this weekend for a mini-spring break trip with the kids. As part of that, we're going to see the King Tut exhibit, unfortunately without Steve Martin playing the title role.

In lieu of a bracing personal entry (but I hope one will come soon), here's some quotations I've found lately that have struck my fancy, and might strike yours as well.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Our democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who are not.

Thomas Jefferson

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Jean Giraudoux

I began to understand that there were certain talkers — certain girls — whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces a conviction that whatever they were telling was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people — people like me — who didn’t concede this, but this was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after anyway.

Alice Munro, in “Some Women”

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

Charles Peters

Last time i saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other down on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

Les Paul, father of the electric guitar

When we did "School’s Out," I knew we had just done the national anthem. I’ve become the Francis Scott Key of the last day of school.

Alice Cooper

Staying recently in a South Yorkshire town called Rotherham — described in one guidebook as “murky,” an inadequate word for the place — I was interested to read in the local newspaper how the proprietors of some stores are preventing hooligans from gathering outside to intimidate and rob customers. They play Bach over loudspeakers, and this disperses the youths in short order; they flee the way Count Dracula fled before holy water, garlic flowers, and crucifixes. The proprietors had previously tried a high-pitched noise generator whose mosquito-like whine only those younger than 20 could detect. This method, too, proved effective, but the owners abandoned it out of fear that it might damage the youths’ hearing and infringe upon their human rights, leading to claims for compensation.

Theodore Dalrymple, in the Jan. 29, 2009 issue of City Journal

Farewell, Mr. President

2009-01-20T14:40:00.001-08:00

Amid all the news today about President Obama's nomination -- and my prayers are with him as he leads America -- here are some thoughts about the previous president you aren't hearing much about today, in the midst of all the gleeful celebrating. I don't think anyone -- even Republicans or conservatives -- believes Bush governed perfectly. I know there were a number of things he did that I couldn't support. But I think his real character and the things he was right about have been far too overlooked by the mainstream media.

So, I offer a few excerpts from a roundtable about the legacy of outgoing President George W. Bush at National Review Online:

JAY NORDLINGER

He took a tremendous amount of abuse, particularly from elite opinion, and did not buckle. Neither did he lash out. He showed tremendous personal grace, as during the recent shoe-throwing incident in Iraq. He could be a real cool cat, this president. He has his faults, as everyone knows: They have been well gone over. But what has not been well gone over is that he is kind, decent, honest, principled, devout — and full of love.

ANDREW BREITBART

The demonization of President George W. Bush was a fait accompli before he was even inaugurated. The rage and hatred against Bush developed before his election and before his political enemies got to know him...Given the circumstances of 9/11, one would think Americans would pull together in these trying times. But each election cycle the Democrats kept doubling down on the hate, and in 2006 they finally got their wish. They were now in power again. Still, their demand to pull out of Iraq was a weak cry. Because they know we won. Because they know Bush was right on the big issue of our time.

ROGER KIMBALL

When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda on 9/11, every expert in Alpha Centauri solemnly announced that it was only a matter of time — and not much time, either — before the United States was attacked again. Well, here we are some seven and a half years later and, guess what, it hasn’t happened. I know people — you see what low company I keep — who will tell you with a straight face that President Bush had nothing to do with this run of good luck. “Post hoc,” they sniff, “doesn’t necessarily mean propter hoc, and if America has thus far escaped another terrorist attack, there is no reason to think that W had anything to do with it.” No sane person, I submit, really believes that. Deep down, we all know that the reason the United States has not suffered another terrorist attack is the policies formulated by the president in the aftermath of 9/11.

GEORGE WEIGEL

I am grateful to President Bush for ignoring the rants and raves of the establishment press (and a few uncomprehending National Review contributors who shall remain nameless), while persistently doing what he had determined was the right thing to do. It is simply pathetic to watch E. J. Dionne and other victims of Bush Derangement Syndrome miss this part of the man’s character to the bitter end. After the triangulation of the Clinton years, after 9/11, and in the face of the biotech challenge, America badly needed a president who didn’t govern by focus groups and polls. That so many people resented this says, I fear, more about our political culture than it does about George W. Bush.

Good Friends

2009-01-06T15:27:00.001-08:00

Another break from the dadgum Grocery Chronicles, just to tell a quick true life story,

My daughter Rebecca had her wisdom teeth removed this past Friday, and her face has been very swollen since then -- so swollen, in fact, that for a few days she went around the house with a scarf over her face (an idea she got, I think, from the movie "Penelope.") We finally convinced her that, instead of making her less noticeable, the scarf made her look like someone about to rob the 3:45 stagecoach from Dodge City, so she eventually stopped wearing it.

We'd all agreed that if Rebecca was still quite swollen on Monday morning, her mother and I would let her stay home from the first day back to school, since she's a good student and had her homework assignments to work on. She woke up yesterday still swollen, so she stayed home and missed the day of school.

Even though she was still almost as swollen this morning, she knew she'd have to return to school or risk falling behind. So she went, not too excitedly. And she made it through, although she claims EVERYONE noticed.

Here's the unusual little story part. Rebecca's got a great group of girls as her friends, and they all knew why she was missing classes. It turns out that there was a party at school she had to miss yesterday, so her friends created some sort of Rebecca "puppet" or "doll" that they not only took to the party in her absence, but that they faithfully took to each or her classes and placed in her empty chair.

This story doesn't have any big moral, but I just think it's nice for her to have such good (and creative) friends.

The Grocery Store Chronicles: Checking Out (Part 2)

2008-12-23T07:15:00.000-08:00

Here's the second part of my list of some times you might want to avoid a certain checkout line in the grocery store. Ever run into one of these?

The Red Tape Runaround

If you get close to the checker and happen to notice that her receipt tape has a large red stripe visible, find a new line if at all possible. The red line means that the tape is almost gone, and will probably run out before or during your turn at the register. Since the checkers must replace the tape before resuming their work, you are in for a long wait.

Inevitably, the checkstand will not have an extra roll of receipt tape in its storage area, so a manager must be summoned. When he learns that there is no extra tape at the checkstand, he will scowl because he knows the difficulty of the task before him. He will disappear for a full 10 minutes as he walks to the very back of the stockroom, then climbs up a ladder to a small shed on the far corner of the roof where these elusive rolls of tape seem to be stored. He will finally reappear, a little windblown, and toss the roll to the checker as he runs off to do another errand.

This is when you will discover that, of course, your checker, despite having worked at the store for three years, has never had to switch out one of these tapes herself. After five minutes spent fumbling with the rollers inside the register, cutting her fingers in the process, the checker will give up and call again for the manager, who is busy swimming through the store’s underground swamp to the small island guarded by alligators where the extra rolls of dimes and quarters are stored.

You get my point. If you see red, move along.

The Conversationalist

How you’ll take this next advice really depends on what kind of person you are – whether you are a person of few words who wants to get in and out of the grocery store as quickly and efficiently as possible, or if you are a person who goes to the grocery store partly out of a desire to be around other people and engage in interesting conversation.

If you’re the latter type of person, this advice doesn’t apply to you. But if you’re like me and you usually want to make the grocery store experience as brief as possible (within reason), then avoid the checker who treats each customer as one of their long-lost best friends at a high school reunion.

It’s not that these checkers are bad people. In fact, most are cheery and engaging and funny, and are quite popular with customers and management alike, as evidenced by the many “Checker of the Month” and “Best Employee” badges they wear pinned to their vests. They will likely ask -- no, demand -- your name, and there’s a good chance that if you return even weeks later and once again choose their line, they’ll remember that name and call you by it. If by chance they don't remember your name, they will be sure to call you "sweetie" or "hon" or some other generic endearment.

I must repeat that the talkative checker is many times a wonderful person to be around, but if you surrender to their charms you must give up any ideas of getting out of the store before your butter pecan ice cream melts. Their work method is something like this:

1. Introduce themselves, giving a summary of their early life, then find out your vital information (5 min.)
2. Scan two grocery items (20 sec.)
3. Discuss what both of you have been doing the past few weeks (8 min.)
4. Scan a few more items (45 sec.)
5. Ask about your children and listen to response (3 min.)
6. Make sure to give a summary of their child’s recent adventures on a school field trip (5 min.)
7. Scan a few more items (25 sec.)

Well, you get the picture.

There are some people who gladly wait a long time in line just to be checked out by these happy raconteurs of retail, and it’s a highlight of their week to be able to catch up on what Checker #5 at Wal-Mart has been up to. More power to these folks. It’s nice these days to have a little humanity mixed into the grocery store experience. But if you indeed don’t want that ice cream to melt, you might choose another line.

The Government-aided Shopper

First of all, let me say I have nothing against people whose economic status compels them to use government food programs like WIC to help them get the groceries they need to feed their families. They deserve our respect and help when it comes to trying to make ends meet.

All I’m saying is, because of the crazy way these government programs seem to work when it comes to checking out at the grocery store, you might want to avoid someone using a WIC or similar type card if you’re in a hurry. These cards apparently work like a debit card that keeps track of how much the person using them has in their account. And it seems that it’s sometimes a very difficult task for customers to remember just how much they have left on the card when they do their shopping.

As a result, what often times happens if this. The customer might choose, say, $120 worth of groceries, but after they give the WIC card to the checker and he swipes it through the machine, it indicates that there’s only $80 left of available funds on the customer's card.

Sometimes the customer will dispute this fact, requiring time to resolve the matter one way or the other, but even if they accept the fact that they only have $80 left to spend, your time in line behind them will drag on. You see, they must now look at all the food they originally selected (which often has to be un-bagged) and figure out which items they can do without to knock $40 off the total. This can take a very long time, as they consider leaving one item, then another, since many times all the food items in question are essentials and not frivolities.

There’s also the danger that one or more of the items the customer has selected are not “approved” for payment through the card (beer and cigarettes are just the two most obvious), so in this case there's often another dispute, or at least a delay, while those items are weeded out and the card is re-scanned.

Again, the problem usually lies in the cards themselves instead of the people who use them. But if you want to avoid a delay at checkout, you might choose another line.

The Wide-eyed Innocent

This final one is fairly self-evident. If you can see that your checker is a brand-new trainee (possibly even being trained right then by a hovering manager), then if you’re in a hurry you might want to choose another aisle. If you hear the manager explaining what the keys on the register are for, and how those little black lines on a package magically make the machine go "beep" when passed over it, you definitely want to switch aisles.

That's it for checking out. Coming up in my next and final post in the series – “Murphy’s Law” as applied to grocery shopping.

The Grocery Store Chronicles: Checking Out (Part 1)

2008-12-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

In my last post I discussed some of the types of shoppers it might be wise to avoid in the grocery store. Now, over two posts, I’d like to offer some hard-won advice as to when you might want to avoid a certain checkout lane in the grocery store and choose another instead. Here are some common situations and types of people to avoid.

The Coupon Queen

If you notice that one of the shoppers ahead of you in line –– usually a woman –– is carrying what looks like a Pony Express mail pouch full of clipped coupons, then move immediately to another aisle. It’s a good bet that this shopper will keep you waiting at least 30 minutes while they attempt to clear the cash register.

It’s not just that scanning all of those coupons takes time. Inevitably, there will be some sort of snafu that occurs. The scanner might refuse to accept a certain coupon for apple juice, so first the bagger must dig through the piles of already packed bags to find the beverage in question, then the information on the label must be examined and checked against the coupon. When it is discovered that the apple juice the customer purchased is the 48-ounce size, and the coupon only is good for the 64-ounce size or larger, then what ensues is either a debate between customer and checker on why the coupon should be accepted nevertheless (with a possible call for the manager to referee), or the bagger is sent out to the juice aisle to swap out bottles. When he returns minutes later, the next coupon is scanned, only to discover that it requires two tubes of biscuits to be purchased for the discount, not the single tube the customer has purchased. And so it goes.

If you want to avoid a long wait, pass by the coupon queen.

The Lovers

Stay clear of any checkout line where the person doing the checking and the person doing the bagging seem to be infatuated with each other. When a young man or woman’s fancy turns to love, it’s a good bet that they’ll be so taken with the subject that they won’t notice they scanned your bag of peas twice, or absentmindely put the 20-pound bag of dog food on top of your carton of eggs in the basket.

A common example of this kind of cashier team is where the cashier is a teenaged girl, teamed with a teenaged boy bagger who is clearly infatuated with her and trying his best to win her over. He will talk almost nonstop to her, cracking jokes, making sarcastic remarks and asking questions. The girl will be forced to listen and respond (to be polite) and as a result, neither checker or bagger is even really looking at the products they are scanning and putting away. Besides slowing down the whole process, this can lead to incorrectly scanned items, improper bagging and a host of other annoyances.

In one memorable event, I once checked out at a grocery store, with a full cart of groceries, and neither the checker nor the bagger spoke once to me, or even looked at me, because they were so deeply involved in flirtatious talk. They were like robots attuned to some common frequency, just going through the motions of moving groceries down the counter out of habit. I could have been buck naked, wearing a sombrero on my head with illuminated Christmas lights wrapped around my body, and they wouldn’t have even noticed.

(If you read that last sentence just after eating a big meal, or after decorating your Christmas tree, I apologize).

The Clothes Buyer

If you are shopping in a store like a Super Target or Super Wal-Mart that sells both groceries and clothing, and someone ahead of you in line has a pile of clothing they are buying, there are even odds that you’ll avoid a long delay by moving to another line.

The problem is that, inevitably, one or more of the items of clothing the customer wants to buy has had the tag removed somehow. Since the checker can’t scan the item’s price in without a tag –- let’s say for purposes of illustration it's a woman’s dress -- this means that someone, usually a pimply teenaged bagging boy with no clue as to women’s clothing, is dispatched to the women’s department to try and find the dress with the tag, or at the very least determine the item's correct price. After 20 minutes or so, he returns and gives the checker the bad news. Either (1) he couldn’t find where those dresses were located, (2) he found where the dresses were, but the one in question is apparently the very last one, or (3) there are other dresses like this, but they don’t have tags, either.

When it comes to clothing, there is no end to the possibly delays. Sometimes the clothing item has a tag, but the shopper notices only at the checkout line that the item is ripped or stained, and then the same pimply faced boy must be sent to find a replacement.

Take my advice – find another line.

NEXT POST: We'll meet The Conversationalist and learn to avoid the "Red Tape Runaround."

Have you seen Twilight?

2008-12-03T09:34:00.000-08:00

While I'm still putting together the next entries in my grocery store series, I thought I'd share a few excerpts of a review in The Atlantic of "Twilight," the teen vampire romance movie my two girls and seemingly every other one of their female friends has seen. No teen I've talked to thinks the movie was as good as the book, but they liked the movie anyway.

After hearing what my girls said about the movie (they don't seem to be caught up in the Twilight fever some of their friends are), and after reading this review, I'm still not sure what to think of the book or movie. Even though these quotes make the author appear to think the movie is salacious or erotic, she actually seems to say elsewhere in her review that the movie harkens back to an earlier time of clear moral choices and stances, and provides a sort of alternate scenario of teen romantic relationships as mutually committed pacts instead of just quick "hook-ups." I don't plan on seeing "Twilight" myself, so I'll rely on any of you who do to tell me if she's got it right.

Twilight is fantastic. It’s a page-turner that pops out a lurching, frightening ending I never saw coming. It’s also the first book that seemed at long last to rekindle something of the girl-reader in me. In fact, there were times when the novel—no work of literature, to be sure, no school for style; hugged mainly to the slender chests of very young teenage girls, whose regard for it is on a par with the regard with which just yesterday they held Hannah Montana—stirred something in me so long forgotten that I felt embarrassed by it. Reading the book, I sometimes experienced what I imagine long-married men must feel when they get an unexpected glimpse at pornography: slingshot back to a world of sensation that, through sheer force of will and dutiful acceptance of life’s fortunes, I thought I had subdued. The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.

The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people.

From “What Girls Want” by Caitlin Flanagan, Atlantic December 2008. Go here to read the full article.

The Grocery Store Chronicles: Shoppers

2008-11-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

When you commandeer a metal shopping cart (with a wobbly right front wheel, no doubt) and head into your local grocery store, you join many of your friends and neighbors who are also trying to get in and out with the least possible trouble. Most of these shoppers will be like you -- calm. collected and considerate, aware of their goals and trying to get their shopping done quickly and efficiently, but not so fast that they endanger the lives or sanity of those around them.

And then, of course, there are the other people. Here's a short list of some of the notable types of grocery buyers I have observed that make shopping hazardous -- or at least more interesting.

THE PROFESSORS

Most of us come to the grocery store with at least one or two items we're not sure about. Maybe it's some new cereal our kids have begged us to get, and we have to really search the shelves to find it because we've never seen the name or the packaging before. Maybe a recipe calls for some exotic type of fruit or vegetable that we've never once used, or even eaten, and we're not exactly sure which section of the produce department it's located in.

As I said, it's normal to have a few items on the list that require us to do a little more searching than usual. But for some grocery shoppers, the ones I call "the professors," even the simplest purchases require a lengthy session of on-site research.

You might meet a professor in front of the yogurt case. As you patiently wait for him to move aside to allow you access, you notice that he is involved in an intense lab experiment regarding the visual forms and scientific qualities of cultured milkfat products. He will methodically pick up each and every carton of yogurt, examining the calories, fat and sugar content, checking for the presence of preservatives, detecting if the milk used came from cows not fed growth hormone, and making sure the company has listed a 1-800 number on the carton in case of complaints.

After each carton of yogurt has been individually inspected (phase one of the research), then the comparison phase begins. The professor will grab two different cartons of yogurt, turn them so their product information panels are showing, and then compare each to the other to determine which of the two has an overall higher rating of nutritional acceptability. Yogurt A has lower overall calories, but Yogurt B has fewer grams of sugar. Hmmmm. Let's set both aside and then compare C and D.

And on and on and on it goes. By the time the professor has decided on his two cartons of yogurt, he has examined all 256 varieties in the case, and probably has enough information to write a short article (with footnotes) for Dairy Product Research Journal.

Of course, if the professor stands in front of the yogurt so that you can't get to your four cartons of Yoplait vanilla, you will either have to come back in half an hour, or say "excuse me" as you lunge past him to grab your goods. Go ahead and do this, because he's used to it. Researchers call this "encountering variables in the field."

THE CLUELESS

On the opposite pole from over-involved shoppers are those who don't have the first idea what they're doing. One can usually spot a member of "The Clueless" by their glazed expression and seeming total lack of comprehension when they enter the four walls of a supermarket.

Who are the clueless? In most cases, from what I have seen, they are men. I suppose these are guys who visit the inside of a grocery store about as often as they enter the Oval Office to chat with the President. Some of them are older men who probably last entered a grocery store back when produce was sold from barrels and the manager wore a pinstriped apron and handed out penny candy to little girls in pinafores.

Undoubtedly, some great disturbance in the Force, or some temporal rift in the cosmos of his existence, has forced Mr. Clueless out of his comfort zone and to the store. Maybe his wife just got hit by a truck and is laid up in bed with a dozen broken bones, preventing her from performing her wifely duty of slogging to the supermarket. Or maybe his wife finally left for good weeks ago, and after doggedly eating through all the old cans of Spaghetti Os and the wormy packages of Ramen noodles at the back of the pantry, he is forced to find new nourishment or starve to death. Maybe he drew the short straw at the Friday night poker game and is forced to make the grocery run alone. There are lots of possible scenarios.

Whatever the reason, Mr. Clueless can be spotted easily by his wide eyes, gaping mouth and slow, almost shuffling gait. The last time this guy went grocery shopping the store had three aisles and two checkout stands. Now, he is entering a space the size of an aircraft hangar that has 36 aisles, 15 checkout lanes and seven separate departments, and is as busy as a big city commuter train station at rush hour.

When he starts trying to find the items his wife has written down on his list, he discovers how American wealth and ingenuity have made shopping insanely complex these days. For example, the list Mr. Clueless holds instructs him to return home with "Grape jelly." After wandering around the store for awhile he (by some miracle) finds himself in front of the jelly section. But when he goes to find grape jelly, what does he discover? That there are at least 30 different jars that might fill the bill. There are 20 different brands of grape jelly, and 10 brands of something called "grape jam," which looks like grape jelly but isn't, somehow. Even if he sticks to grape jelly, should he get the "regular" kind, the "low sugar" kind, the "organic" kind, the "organic low sugar" kind, or the "fruit only" kind? Should he even bother with a name brand at all, or just get the store brand -- or a plain label generic? And what size jar should he get? Is the 5 ounce size too small? Is the 24 ounce size too large?

This maddening variety confronts poor Mr. Clueless at every turn. His wife has written down, "1 doz. eggs." He visits the egg case to find, again, an incredible array of choices. Should he get medium, large, extra large or jumbo size eggs? Should they be white, or brown? Does he want "regular" eggs, or "cage free," or "free range?" Should he get the ones with something called "Omega 3" added?

If Mr. Clueless remembered to bring a cell phone, you will often find him in continuous contact with the Mother Ship as he picks up each product possibility and reads the pertinent information off. You'll then hear him rattle off a disjointed string of responses like, "No, there isn't a blue colored label, it's a purple one." "No, I don't see one that says 'with bleach.' There's 'extra strength' and 'lemon scented,' but none 'with bleach.'" "No, they don't have vanilla flavor in the 24 ounce box, just in the 16 ounce. Yes, I looked in the back of the shelf." And so on and so on, shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle.

When I see Mr. Clueless looking up in open-mouthed panic at a wall of breakfast cereals stretching half a city block, I am tempted to give the guy a reassuring pat on the shoulder and say, "I know what you're feeling. Let me help you." But I usually don't have time, and besides, in some cities this is probably considered a pickup line.

THE SOCIAL BUTTERFLIES

You all have seen this next grocery shopper many times, I am sure. As you head down the narrow aisle of condiments, sauces and marinades, you notice that your way is blocked by two carts, going in opposite directions, which have been brought to a halt together near the French's mustard. The owners of each cart (usually women this time, but not always) have temporarily abandoned their shopping and are standing close together in the middle of the aisle, talking. And talking. And talking.

The first trait that defines the social butterfly shopper is an affinity for gossip (which they will call something less negative, such as "catching up"). These people come to the supermarket, in part, to hear and be heard. They know at least half of the customers at any one time, or so it seems, and they are loath to pass up the chance to chat up any of them if it means they might hear some previously unknown news.

The second trait that defines the social butterfly shopper is obliviousness. While they are talking with a friend in the aisle, or chatting on a cell phone as they stand in front of the dairy case, they are totally focused on the conversation at hand. They do not see you and the 12 other shoppers lined up on either side of them, waiting to get by. They do not notice that if they moved just a foot or two to the left or the right, they would allow you and others to reach the items on the shelf behind them. They are not aware that their unsupervised children are running down the aisles, removing groceries from the shelves and making a general nuisance of themselves. They are totally focused on talking, and if you are so rude as to try to move their cart a bit to one side or the other, or to reach past them to get an item, they will often shoot you a glance as if you deserved to have slivers of bamboo inserted under your toenails for your cheeky presumption.

Sometimes the social butterfly shopper is a friend of yours, and this makes it a challenge when they stop you on your way to the checkout (with lots of cold items slowly melting in your cart) and begin conducting a thorough interrogation about you, your family and mutual friends, as well as providing you with a detailed accounting of their own life. If you have time to spare, this might be an enjoyable encounter. If you're in a hurry, you might want to duck down the housewares aisle if you see the social butterfly shopper approaching in your direction.

That's a little about three types of interesting shoppers you might find in the grocery. Next post, we'll look at what to avoid when choosing a checkout aisle.

The Grocery Store Chronicles: Introduction

2008-11-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit of an aberration, I suppose, in that I am a married, heterosexual male who enjoys grocery shopping -- or, who at least does not despise it as much as most men nowadays seem to.

I started grocery shopping when I was a carefree bachelor buying cheap canned meats and snack foods in college. I kept it up during my single days as a member of the workforce, then after I married I continued grocery shopping because, well, my wife wasn't all that thrilled with the task, and I seemed not to mind it. So, as a gift to her, I offered to roam the aisles each week.

One reason I don't usually mind grocery shopping is that I like to cook, and I enjoy trying new recipes (even if they are simply new "recipes" that have to be heated up or mixed up from a can or box). I spend at least a part of each grocery trip browsing the shelves to see what new, ingenious items have been introduced. You can get burned out on a dish pretty quickly, so it pays to find new things that seem promising to the palate.

Of course, now that the huge superstores I buy food in also sell things like books and DVDs, I spend some of my time in the store browsing among the new titles.

In my more than 25 years as a grocery shopper I have learned a lot about the practice, and about the different types of people -- customers and employees -- that can be found in the modern supermarket. In the next few days I plan to present a series of posts relating some of my hard-fought grocery wisdom. I hope you enjoy them.

Remembering Book Row

2008-11-07T14:41:00.000-08:00

No comparable substitute has developed [to New York City’s Book Row], no, not even in cyberspace or those overpopulated Internet burbs. Thanks to the broadband interests and proud diversity of the booksellers there, on Book Row there wasn't just a book for every need, mood or taste. Often there was a whole section of applicable books or even an entire bookstore for every taste, mood, need. The variety, independence and heterogeneity of the dealers and their books made Book Row a haven for reading and collecting diversity where Vive la difference meant three cheers for nonconformity. In their place have come drearily homogenized chain stores, a global electronic whirlpool erratically accessible mainly to persistent onliners with superhuman patience for slogging through vast swamps of World Wide Web distractions, and a wistfully few widely scattered individual bookshop survivors.

From Book Row: An Anecdotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade by Marvin Mondlin and Roy Meador (2003).

The only survivor of the many used bookstores that once populated Book Row in New York City appears to be the Strand Bookstore.

A Case of Divine Intervention

2008-11-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

Don't worry, this is not about yesterday's election. God is still in control of things, but my party didn't win, so I'm glum.

No, this is about a true story of divine intervention -- the kind of miraculous event that the unbelieving world chalks up to random chance or "luck," but Christians know is instead an instance of God moving in the lives of His people. The events described happened this past Sunday to a guy I work with who lives in a suburb of Waco.

This man has two kids in the high school band that was leaving Sunday afternoon for state marching contest the next day in Austin. There are approximately 150 kids in the band, which required chartering three buses to transport them down (about 50 kids per bus).

The buses were about ready to go when a local pastor happened to be driving by and noticed something funny about one of the buses. The hydraulic lift system that lowers the entrance steps to let people get in, and then raises the steps back up for travel, hadn't apparently raised back up all the way. The driver tried to get it to raise back into position, but it wouldn't budge.

A Department of Public Safety inspector had to be called out, and after an inspection and driving test he ruled that the problem didn't affect the safety of the bus and that they could get underway. This was good news, since the charter company didn't have another bus available. However, waiting for the clearance had put the band more than an hour behind schedule.

The kids and sponsors boarded the buses, then the first bus in the convoy pulled out of the school parking lot. However, my friend noticed as he was walking to get into his car that the second bus -- the one with his two kids aboard -- wasn't moving. A few seconds later, he heard his wife call from near the bus that there was something wrong with the driver.

My friend got to the bus and looked at the driver, a very large man. He was sitting in the driver's seat, looking out into space, and he was absolutely covered in sweat. The parents told him, "Look, come on out, you need help," but he appeared to shake off whatever had caused him to hesitate and said, "That's alright. I'm fine. Let's go."

The driver closed the door and started to move the bus ahead. A parent was standing next to him at the front of the bus, trying to get a DVD playing in the bus's onboard video player.

Suddenly, this woman at the front of the bus watched in horror as the driver slumped forward in his seat, passed out cold. She grabbed the extremely large steering wheel and somehow managed to keep the bus from going off into the ditch. At the same time, she was hitting the driver's shoulder and yelling "Wake up! Put on the brake! Wake up!"

Eventually, the driver was roused from his sleep enough to apply the brakes, coming within inches of hitting a power pole and a parked car. As soon as the bus came to a stop, he again passed out.

It turns out that the driver was a diabetic who hadn't taken his insulin, and he had gone into diabetic shock.

The bus company was able to supply a substitute driver who arrived quickly, and finally, after the long delay of about 90 minutes, all three buses were finally on the road to Austin.

My friend thought about this later and realized how fortunate that unwelcome mechanical trouble had proved to be. If the first bus hadn't had a problem with its hydraulics -- or if the pastor hadn't passed by and just happened to notice the problem -- or if he hadn't decided to flag the driver and stop the bus -- then all three buses would have left on time. And 90 minutes later, when the driver of Bus #2 (the one carrying my friend's kids) had his episode of diabetic shock, he would have passed out at the wheel not in a school parking lot, but doing 65 miles an hour on Interstate 35 somewhere near Georgetown. And it's highly likely that the bus would have been involved in an accident that would have resulted in many, many deaths.

There are some people who would chalk all this up to fortunate chance. But I know better.

Halloween memories

2008-10-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

When you're a kid, Halloween is the second biggest day of the year -- right behind Christmas in the "Boy, I can't wait -- how many days until it gets here?" department. A few days before Halloween, saliva would involuntarily begin leaking out of your mouth due to the anticipation of all that sweet stuff you had coming.

As an somewhat overweight child who liked to eat, Halloween was a big day for me. I lived in a fairly prosperous suburb of Houston, Texas, and back in those innocent days of the 1960s, Halloween had not yet gained the violent, ugly and overall negative connotations it has today. Parents accompanied toddlers trick-or-treating, but they thought nothing of sending their costumed elementary school children out into the neighborhood alone or with a group of friends, armed with nothing but an empty bag and a flashlight (which rarely if ever got used).

My memory is somewhat deficient, but I don't recall ever being a big fan of costumes all that much at Halloween. Those masks you bought at the store (with the laughingly thin rubber bands attached with staples) always were too small for my face, and were hot and uncomfortable to boot. I was usually too big for the manufactured costumes (Batman, Robin, the "fun" Joker), and although I probably took an old sheet and cut out eye holes and a mouth once to become a ghost, that was so cliche even back then to designate the wearer as an unimaginative loser.

So, I believe my usual costume disguise was "chubby pre-teen boy looking for candy." Since none of my school friends lived within walking distance, I usually teamed up with my younger brother. Lazy as we might have been on boring summer days, or when there was yardwork to be done, on Halloween night we were quick-moving, efficient machines of accumulation. While other kids might stop and talk with friends, admiring costumes or showing off props, we were focused like laser beams on the goal of visiting as many houses as we could and filling our sturdy bags as full of sweet swag as possible.

We would quickly scour the four streets in our immediate neighborhood, going methodically down one side of a street, then up the other side, then changing streets and repeating the process. We were always cheerful, polite and said "Thank you," as our parents instructed us to do, but we didn't hang around long.

Once we finished with our neighborhood, my enabler parents would drive us to a larger, somewhat richer neighborhood down the road where they would drop us off for a few hours. We had friends in this neighborhood, who we enjoyed seeing and chatting with, but again, our goal was conquest.

When we'd finally get home late that night -- some of the last kids out on the streets -- we'd come in the living room and dump out our bulging bags of hard-won treasure. The hundreds of pieces of candy that would spill out would cover half the floor. Our parents, on cue, after expressing amazement about how much junk we'd gotten, would warn us not to eat too much at once or we'd get sick. But we always ate a lot at once, and we never got sick, although by about the end of the first week of November we were secretly disgusted with candy, although we'd rarely admit it in case our parents would suggest we throw away the remains.

We'd always begin eating the best candy first, of course -- chocolate bars, Sweet Tarts, caramels, candy corn. After awhile the good stuff would disappear, and all we would have left is the second-rate remains -- rock-hard taffy drops, stale popcorn balls, mints, red licorice. But we'd eventually eat all that as well, unless it was truly nasty. If we couldn't feed it to the dog, only then would we throw it away.

Back in those innocent times, everyone went door-to-door trick-or-treating, and there were no "Fun Nights" or "Fall Festivals" sponsored by churches and other groups like there are today. But going door-to-door back then was truly safe. And every now and then, you'd find a house where the people really got into Halloween. They would have fake spider webs everywhere, with maybe some bloody monster dummies laid out by the front door with a record player blaring "Monster Mash" over and over. A great final touch would be the big black pot filled with water and dry ice to produce clouds of smoke over everything.

I remember at least a few houses in my neighborhood where the family temporarily cleared everything out of the garage, put up some dark curtains and black lights and made a "haunted house" they'd invite trick-or-treaters to come in and tour. In one area there was always a sheet with a hole cut in it, and when you put your hand through you'd be encouraged to dip it into a bowl of what you were told were human brains or intestines, but it always ended up feeling just like cooked spaghetti.

I also remember that Halloween night was a good time to determine which people on each block liked kids, and which did not. The kid-lovers had lights turned on and always had someone stationed by the door, ready to answer and dispense candy from big bowls. The non-kid lovers, by contrast, either had every light turned off (both inside and outside), or they had only a few dim interior lights left on. If you were brave or foolish enough to go up to the door of one of those houses and ring the bell, you'd wait a long time until someone finally opened the door, verrry slowly, and then asked, "Yes?," in a prickly tone as if you were selling life insurance or magazine subscriptions, or as if you had just relieved yourself on their orchids in the front flower beds. They never had candy.

This is hard to believe nowadays, but some people back in the 1960s actually took the time and trouble to make treats to give out on Halloween. They'd put together 700 popcorn balls (each wrapped in Saran Wrap and hand-tied with a little twistie), or make candy apples or little bags of homemade cookies. This wonderful tradition eventually stopped, however, when parents heard reports of sickos putting razor blades in apples and dousing baked goods with poison. Local hospitals would cheerfully offer to X-ray your candy for metal objects hidden within, but people just stopped making and accepting homemade goods.

This is the first Halloween where neither one of our girls is going trick-or-treating. They are both old enough now that they have switched roles and are working at our church's Fall Festival tonight. It's a fun night with big inflatable slides and jumping rooms, horse-drawn carriage rides and lots of games for smaller kids like ring toss and a cake walk. There's still lots and lots of candy given out, and I enjoy it, but somehow it just doesn't compare to those Halloweens of days gone by.

Have a great time tonight with your kids, and save the black licorice jellybeans for me.

A little Dave Barry

2008-10-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

16 Things that Took Me Over 50 Years to Learn
by Dave Barry, columnist and author

1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

2. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."

3. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

4. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

5. You should not confuse your career with your life.

6. Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.

7. Never lick a steak knife.

8. The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.

9. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

10. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

11. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.

12. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.

13. A person, who is nice to you, but rude to a waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)

14. Your friends love you anyway.

15. Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

16. Thought for the day: Men are like fine wine. They start out as grapes, and it’s up to the women to stomp the crap out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.

Putting a (Better?) Face On Things

2008-10-09T12:15:00.000-07:00

I just read the most interesting article in today's New York Times. It's about a new use of technology that I'm surprised hasn't been in use before now.

Basically, there is a computer program, called in the article a "beautification engine," that can input a photograph of someone's real face, and then show what that person's "ideal" face (i.e., the face found the most beautiful by others) might look like. The photos below show a woman named Martina Eckstut in her before shot (left side) and after shot (right side):

Here's a bit more from the article about what the computer program is and how it was developed:

The photograph on the right was doctored by the “beautification engine” of a new computer program that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining what programmers call an “unmistakable similarity” to the original.

The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.

Scientists took the data and applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.

Essentially, they trained a computer to determine, for each individual face, the most attractive set of distances and then choose the ideal closest to the original face. Unlike other research with formulas for facial attractiveness, this program does not produce one ideal for a feature, say a certain eye width or chin length.

On one level, I am saddened and disturbed by this. I mean, don't we all feel bad enough about the way we look without a computer program showing exactly how far away we are from looking our best? Will there be people who buy this program, print off the photo of their "ideal" look, and then go to their local plastic surgeon and say, "Fix me"?

Then again, I must admit I am dying to see what my mug would look like after being spruced up by having my 234 measurements tinkered with. Would I actually be...handsome? Could I contemplate a career as a billboard model for beer or fast food?

Anyway, I don't have any truly deep thoughts about this now. I just thought it was neat. To read the entire article, or to see more "before and after" photos, go here.

Texas Postcard Gallery

2008-10-07T17:55:00.001-07:00

This is not how all Texans view the rest of the country, but it's close. (Click on the postcard for a larger view)

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2008-10-03T07:08:00.001-07:00

WHAT'S YOUR PEN NAME?

Looking for interesting blogs dealing with writing, I came across a website that features something called a Pen Name Generator. You type in your name, indicate what gender you are, and after you submit the information it somehow generates a pen name for you. According to this gizmo, my pen name should be Jon Stall, which sounds to me like slang for a stopped-up toilet.

GIVE US A BREAK

Advertisers have figured out that they can no longer get away with advertising some products like they did in 1958. Remember all those old-time ads that featured women who apparently did nothing but sit at home and worry about whether their husband's collars were white enough, or if their floors had any waxy buildup? Those commercials made it appear that all women cared about was (1) housework and (2) pleasing hubby, and advertisers have figured out that nowadays that approach won't get them anywhere, because women -- if they ever were really that way, which I doubt -- aren't like that anymore. They have lots of interests besides housework.

So, if we can change an advertising stereotype concerning women, why can't we change the one which portrays all men as sports-obsessed TV junkies? I swear, every other commercial I see, especially in the fall, is about how guys will do anything -- lie to their wives, neglect their kids, spend more money than they should -- for the ability to park their butts in a chair, eat snacks and drink beer with "the guys," and watch televised sports from early Saturday morning to late Sunday night. I even heard a new AT&T cell phone ad on radio today, featuring a guy whose cruel wife was forcing him to quit watching TV sports to spend time in the park with her and the kids. But, alas!, his new AT&T phone connected with the Internet, so (whew!) he was able to spend all that time in the park checking on scores while he pretended to play with the kids.

Stop it. Just stop it. Yes, there are no doubt some absolutely maniacal, sports-crazed doofuses out there, like there are crazed doofuses of many different stripes, but I don't know any guys who worship sports above all else, do you? I do know guys -- myself included -- who will watch a game or two that interests them, but they have a lot more going on in their lives besides sports. If you can quit with the ads showing women falling in love with their vacuum cleaners, please quit with the sports addict ads.

DOGS CALL IT P-MAIL

At least three or four nights a week, Mrs. Muley and I try to take our two sheltie dogs for a walk. Our smallest one loves to hike his leg and leave his calling card on the curb about every 50 feet, while our larger dog waits to do his duty in a little patch of grass by a fence. Before he does, however, he must sniff vigorously like a bloodhound along the length of the patch, lingering longer on some smells than others.

It finally hit me the other night -- my dogs are just as connected to their world as I am to mine. When they're out on a walk, what they're basically doing is communicating with other dogs -- both sending and receiving messages. What I think of as doing a lot of time-consuming sniffing is really the same thing I do when I get to work each morning and fire up the computer. My dogs are checking their e-mail from the day before. And they never get spammed.

ANY TAKERS?

Visiting my local big box bookstore the other day, I couldn't help but notice a large table near the entrance filled with books relating to the upcoming Presidential election. There were books by Obama and McCain, books about Obama and McCain, books about how either the Democrats or Republicans are idiots, and books about how the country should vote one way or the other or risk bringing terrible destruction down on everyone.

My thought was -- I know publishers are always trying to make a buck, but is anybody buying these things? I mean, I've got to think that in this particular campaign, there are very few truly "undecided" voters who might need the information in one of these books to help them know which lever to pull in November. Most people, I'm betting, have known for quite some time which candidate they're voting for, and would rather spend their book budget on something else, like a good mystery or graphic novel, or maybe one of those hundreds of books with cute photos of puppies and kittens.

An Ike Wrap-up (Almost)

2008-09-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

Well, there's good and bad news to report on the people I know who got hit by Hurricane Ike.

First of all, my parents in Friendswood turned out to be some of the lucky ones. Not only did their house not see any major damage, but after losing their power early Saturday morning, they miraculously had their power restored Sunday night, when most everyone else in the Houston area was in darkness. We don't know why they got back on so quickly -- they aren't near a hospital or fire or police station -- but we're thankful. Now, all those heavily frozen and nearly petrified mystery meats down at the bottom of their freezer in the garage will not have to be thrown away. They can be preserved for study by nutritionists of future generations.

My wife's sister and her husband and daughter left Waco Monday afternoon for the long drive back to Humble, north of Houston near Bush Intercontinental Airport. They reported that it was very hard to get through because of all the downed trees and other damage all around. As of this morning, they are still without power, although because they have natural gas service they can take hot showers and cook some meals. Another blessing is this cold front we had blow in over the weekend, making the temperatures bearable, but I'm not sure what they do at night when there's no lights and no TV or computer. You can't even play Monopoly if you can't see the board.

Another of my wife's friends who lives near Humble in a place called Kingwood is also without power, and they have been without it longer because they stayed to ride out the storm. You can tell from this woman's e-mails how tiring and depressing it is being without electricity. They are thankful, however, that no trees fell on their house as they did elsewhere in their block. (She sent Mrs. Muley some photos of damage in their neighborhood, which I will display at the end of this post).

When I lived at home in Friendswood as a kid and for awhile as a college student we rode out a few hurricanes, and sometimes they were fun (when winds and damage were slight) and sometimes they weren't. Friendswood made national news back in the late 1970s when I was living there when a tropical storm that hit us stayed forever and dumped something like 18 inches of rain on us in a few days, causing what experts termed a 100-year flood. Our house, which was high above a creek and had always managed to escape big floods, got hit that time with about six inches of water inside. It was a pain having to cut out all our downstairs carpet and roll it out to the curb, and even more of a pain to walk on concrete slab for six months until we finally were able to get new carpet and flooring installed. But even that minor inconvenience was nothing compared to what so many people in Houston are dealing with now.

I think I'll try to talk about something else in my next post, because I'm tired of talking and thinking about Ike. But I'll hopefully remember to let you know when all my family and friends are somewhat back to norm al. And I appreciate all the prayers and kind thoughts from those of you reading these dispatches.

Ike Update

2008-09-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

Well, as far as Waco goes, we got just what I figured we would, based on past experience and the weather reports. If you didn't know there was a hurricane to thank, I'd say we got some much-needed gentle rain and a few cooling breezes.

But, for family and friends in Southeast Texas, things are not so great. My parents in Friendswood lost power overnight -- as did millions of people in and around Houston -- but luckily no trees fell on their house and no water found its way inside. They are lucky, although with the predictions being that it will take days or even weeks for power to get restored, they've got to figure out what to do with hundreds of dollars worth of worthless refrigerated and frozen food, and where to relocate until power is restored.

Mrs. Muley's sister's house, I'm afraid, fared worse. They live in Humble, just north of Houston, and we hear they lost all the big pine trees in their backyard, and had roof damage with rain invading their dining room and upstairs master bedroom. My two nephews stayed there and rode out the storm, so at least they will hopefully be able to do some kind of repair and salvage. But they are without power as well, so it makes it hard to fix food or pass the nights easily.

We have other friends and relatives in the Beaumont-Port Arthur area, which I hear got really drenched with the "dirty side" of the hurricane, but so far we haven't heard through the grapevine yet how everyone made out. They, too, decided to ride out the storm and not evacuate.

I'll post again when I hear more. Tonight, my 12-year-old daughter INSISTS that we go see her newest favorite movie, "Get Smart," with her at the dollar theater, which will be a trial (I hear it's bad), but an easy trial to sit through compared to so much real suffering elsewhere.

Waiting for Ike

2008-09-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

If I finish the Branson story, it will have to be later.

Everyone here in Texas -- at least the eastern half of the state -- is waiting for Ike, most with trepidation of varying degrees, some with total indifference. It seems evident at this hour (3 p.m. Friday) that Galveston Island will pretty much be under water before long. As in totally under water.

Mrs. Muley is watching live coverage from one of the Houston television stations, and there is already water in the streets of Kemah, a little town along Galveston Bay near NASA that has an amusement park and boardwalk we have taken our children to.

You would think everyone in Houston would be either gone or trying to get out by now, but my own family proves this idea wrong. Mrs. Muley's sister, her husband and their daughter are here with us in Waco, arriving today. However, their two adult sons decided to ride out the storm at their parents' home in Humble.

My own parents, meanwhile, who tried to evacuate during Rita but met with gridlocked highways and ended up turning back, have strangely decided to stick their head in the ground on this one. They live in Friendswood -- smack between Houston and Galveston -- but even though Mrs. Muley and I have told them that televised reports have repeatedly said Friendswood is under forced evacuation, they maintain that since they have yet to get some sort of automated message on the phone from the city telling them to evacuate, there really is no requirement to leave.

I and Mrs. Muley have both tried to convince them to leave and come stay with us, but it's apparent now this is one of my parents' stubborn quirks that we will not budge. Of course, I know what will happen. They'll come out fine -- maybe a small tree blown down and a little wet carpet -- and they'll tease us forever afterwards about what over-reactors we are.

Anyway, that's the situation here. I'm looking out the window in my new office (we recently were moved to the seventh story of a building overlooking the Brazos River) and the sky is blue with lots of puffy white clouds. I'm betting all we get here is some strong winds, no rain, but we'll see. Pray for all the folks here in Texas who will fare much worse.

The Branson Trip, part one

2008-08-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

Well, when it comes to quickness, I might just win a race these days with a slug -- if I cheated by pouring salt on it first, that is. Two weeks late, I finally post.

The Muley family did indeed make it to Branson. Overall, we had a great time, but there were moments and aspects of the trip that made us realize why patience is indeed a virtue.

When leaving Waco the first day, we opted to go the "fast" route (a highly relative term) by heading straight north on Interstate 35 and then U.S. 75 through north Texas and then eastern Oklahoma. Just before you cross into Oklahoma, there is a huge "Texas welcome center" that we always stop at, even though we're really leaving. Most Texas rest stops look like they were built with prison labor and modeled on the prisoners' own toilet facilities, but they do things up right here when they think tourists are coming in ready to blow money. There are lots of shady places to park, and inside are fancy bathrooms, an air-conditioned lobby with soft music playing, and rack after rack containing brochures on every imaginable Texas city and event ("Come to Smithville for Worm Wranglin' Weekend!"). I even thought I saw Miss Texas 2007 passing through with complimentary Lone Star wine and cheese.

But, then it was time to head back in the van and cross the bridge over the muddy Red River into Oklahoma. I know that I don't have the appreciation of Oklahoma that I should have, because the rare times I am in the state are when I'm doing my level best to speed through as quickly as possible on the way to somewhere else. This does not allow for the slow, quiet and searching meandering through scenic spots that causes one to grow to love a place.

If you see Oklahoma only from the highway, it seems as if there are just two important facts about the state: there are lots of Indians living there, and they want your money in the worst way. It hits you not 20 miles across the border in Durant, where you see the huge Choctaw Casino with what appears to be thousands of pickup trucks and campers parked outside of it, and a marquee announcing a future concert by some 50s crooner or 80s heavy metal band.

I counted three different Choctaw Casinos along U.S. 75 as we traveled. The one in Durant was the biggest, and as the towns they were in got smaller, so did the casinos themselves. The final Choctaw Casino I saw was in a little two-pump gas station town, and looked like maybe it was housed in a remodeled 7-11 convenience store.

There were lots of billboards for other temptations like bingo parlors and cheap cigarettes to see along U.S. 75, and what must have been about five thrift stores and flea markets for each small town. However, I was still sad I didn't have time to investigate a bit, because in some of the towns (with really cool Indian names hard to pronounce) I could faintly see blocks away from the highway lakes and trees and the beginnings of hills. But there was no time available in which to explore.

At some point we took a big right turn eastward and headed due east toward Arkansas. After what seemed like forever, we passed through northwest Arkansas, turned north and made it into Branson just before dark (passing about 342 Wal-Marts en route). I'll try to pick up the story in my next post. (We're heading out of town this weekend to attend my 30th high school reunion, so that should make another good post at some time in the future).

Still Alive, Muley?

2008-06-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am still alive. I just have not figured out yet what I want to do with the shriveled, neglected carcass of comedy and culture that Muley's World has become. I waver between jumping in again full-steam or pushing DELETE and sending the whole thing to cyber heaven.

To answer the question I posed in my last post from back in MARCH, the Muley family has decided to return to Branson for our summer vacation. We leave on July 7 and will return on Muley's birthday, July 11. We'll be staying at a hotel-water park combo that is adjacent to Silver Dollar City amusement park, which is where we will spend probably a day and a half. We'll also take the night cruise of the lake on the big paddlewheeler, and have a whole day to just bum around town, eat cobbler and buy garish trinkets. It should be a blast.

Anyway, I've felt so guilty every time I've seen this bookmark come up, knowing that I have this bad penchant for just up and disappearing with no explanation. Even though I've learned over time that this is not uncommon in the blogosphere, I thought I would write a few words here to let you guys know what's up. Maybe all those nights under the Ozark moon next month will give me a better idea of what to do with Muley's World.

In the meantime, I hope all of you and your families are well and having fun this summer. If we can survive this heat, $5 gas and the incessant lunacy that is Election '08, I guess we'll survive anything.

Back to Branson?

2008-03-27T17:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's like this. The Muley family (at least, at this point, Muley and Mrs. Muley) is trying to figure out where to go on a family vacation this summer. We had thought about just doing a few weekends close to home, but the more Mrs. Muley and I pondered this, we realized that we won't have too many summers left to travel together with our girls, and that we need to try to take as many trips as possible while our kids still want to go places with us.

Last year, thanks to a generous, unsolicited financial donation from my parents, we were able to splurge and take the girls on their first visit to DisneyWorld, which they absolutely loved. Well, we don't have the financial resources to do that again, so we are thinking a bit more economically. With the increasing expense nowadays of air travel, we want to go somewhere we can drive to instead of fly to. Even though the price of gas is outrageous, it's still somewhat cheaper to drive instead of fly (unless you plan on driving to Cape Horn in South America, which thankfully is not one of our contenders. I hear it is almost impossible to get Dr Pepper down in Argentina).

So, we are at the moment thinking of returning to the vacation oasis of Branson, Missouri. We were just there three years ago, but there are some advantages to returning so soon. First, it's definitely cheaper than DisneyWorld or Colorado or New York City or Hawaii -- some other spots on our ultimate family travel wish list. Second, we can drive there from Waco in a day's time. (That would give our girls a chance to catch up on all their DVD watching in the car). Third, we all had a good time in Branson the last time around, and if we go again this summer we'd be doing things we didn't before, such as possibly going to a huge amusement park and doing some cool stuff on the lakes.

The problem is that as we do some investigating on the Internet, it seems that in the nice places we would want to stay, the cheaper rooms and packages are mostly booked up. (ARGH! What's with these annoying, well-organized early vacation planner types?) We haven't looked very long at this, but hopefully we won't be faced with a choice of staying in a huge multi-bedroom suite in a nice place (and paying through the honker for the privilege) or staying in a budget one-room efficiency in the Ozark Outhouse Motel out beyond the city water treatment plant.

Have any of the three or four regular visitors to this site been to Branson recently? If so, any suggestions?

St. Patrick's Day Jokes

2008-03-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

I apologize for being such an unfaithful blogger lately. A lot of strange stuff involving home improvement projects, spring break and injury-inducing neighborhood dogs has taken up my time and kept me from regular computer time. I need to tell some of those stories on a good blog post, but until then, I'll share a few Irish jokes I received from Mrs. Muley today, in honor of St. Patty's

NUMBER ONE

Paddy was driving down the street in a sweat because he had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking place. Looking up to heaven he said, "Lord take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to Mass every Sunday for the rest of me life and give up me Irish Whiskey!"

Miraculously, a parking place appeared. Paddy looked up again and said, "Never mind, I found one."

NUMBER TWO

An Irish priest is driving down to New York and gets stopped for speeding in Connecticut . The state trooper smells alcohol on the priest's breath and then sees an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car. He says, "Sir, have you been drinking?"

"Just water," says the priest. The trooper says, "Then why do I smell wine?"

The priest looks at the bottle and says, "Good Lord! He's done it again!"

NUMBER THREE

Walking into the bar, Mike said to Charlie the bartender, "Pour me a stiff one - just had another fight with the little woman."

"Oh yeah?" said Charlie, "And how did this one end?"

"When it was over," Mike replied, "She came to me on her hands and knees.

"Really," said Charles, "Now that's a switch! What did she say?"

She said, "Come out from under the bed, you little chicken."

AND, NUMBER FOUR

Flynn staggered home very late after another evening with his drinking buddy, Paddy. He took off his shoes to avoid waking his wife, Mary.

He tiptoed as quietly as he could toward the stairs leading to their upstairs bedroom, but misjudged the bottom step. As he caught himself by grabbing the banister, his body swung around and he landed heavily on his rump. A whiskey bottle in each back pocket broke and made the landing especially painful.

Managing not to yell, Flynn sprung up, pulled down his pants, and looked in the hall mirror to see that his "cheeks" were cut and bleeding. He managed to quietly find a full box of Band-Aids and began putting a Band-Aid as best he could on each place he saw blood. He then hid the now almost empty Band-Aid box and shuffled and stumbled his way to bed.

In the morning, Flynn woke up with searing pain in both his head and butt and Mary staring at him from across the room.

She said, "You were drunk again last night weren't you?"

Flynn said, "Why you say such a mean thing?"

"Well," Mary said, "it could be the open front door, it could be the broken glass at the bottom of the stairs, it could be the drops of blood trailing through the house, it could be your bloodshot eyes, but mostly.....it's all those Band-Aids stuck on the hall mirror.

Rejected Valentines

2008-02-15T13:33:00.000-08:00

I missed this one yesterday. Here's a few Valentine's Day cards that didn't quite make the cut. I don't know -- I wouldn't have sent any of these, but I know a few of them would probably sell quite well. (PG content rating)

Movie Star Trivia

2008-02-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

If you are a fan of movies and Hollywood of days gone by, one of the best time-wasters on the Internet is to visit the Internet Movie Database site. Here you can find seemingly everything you'd ever want to know about every actor, actress or movie that ever existed.

One of my favorite leisure activities is to visit the entry for a movie, actor or actress and click through to the "Trivia" section. You can find some amazing little tidbits you've never heard before. Of course, since I believe that virtually anyone can submit these, I never know for sure if every single "fact" shown is 100 percent true.

Here's just a few of the interesting trivia facts I've found from past trips to IMDB:

Sophia Loren derives great pleasure from rolling her bare feet over a wooden rolling pin while watching TV.

Production of the Tom Hanks movie “Cast Away” was halted for a year so Hanks could lose 50 pounds and grow out his hair for his time spent on the deserted island. During this hiatus, director Robert Zemeckis used the same crew to film “What Lies Beneath” in 2000. It's also interesting to know that actual lines of dialogue were written for" Wilson the Volleyball" in the movie, to help Hanks have a more natural interaction with the inanimate object. Wilson even has his own credit and write-up in IMDB with his own IMDB page, which begins: "Wilson the Volleyball is one of Hollywood's most loved volleyballs."

Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart on the TV series “Get Smart,” had seven children with first wife Adelaide Adams. One of the kids they named Beige.

While Rhonda Fleming (called “the Queen of Technicolor") was always a competent actress, she was more renowned for her exquisite beauty, and the camera absolutely adored her. At one time a cameraman on one of her films remarked on how he was so struck by her beauty that, as a gag, he intentionally tried to photograph her badly. He was astonished to discover that no matter how deliberately he botched it, she still came out looking ravishing.

Suzanne Pleshette, best known as Bob Newhart's first TV wife, was the producers’ original choice for the role on Catwoman on the "Batman" TV show in 1966. When negotiations broke down, the part went to Julie Newmar, who made it her own.

Slim 1960s fashion model Leslie Hornby was known by a distinctive nickname. She was first nicknamed “Sticks” because of her reed-thin figure, but then switched it to “Twigs” and, finally “Twiggy.” According to “Celebrity Sleuth” magazine, her measurements were 31AA-22-32 at age 17, 32-23-32 during the peak of her 60s modeling career, 32B-24-32 in 1976 at age 27 and 36B-20-33 when measured in 1986.

“Alien” star Sigourney Weaver was born Susan Alexandra Weaver in 1949. Her father, a famous TV producer, originally wanted to name her Flavia, because of his passion for Roman history (he had already named her elder brother Trajan). In grade school, Susan Weaver was quite a bit taller than most of her other classmates (at the age of 13, she was already 5’ 10”), resulting in her constantly being laughed at and picked on. In order to gain their acceptance, she took on the role of class clown. In 1963, she changed her name to “Sigourney” after the character “Sigourney Howard” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

How to Hula While You Make Moolah

2008-02-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

I think it was that eminent philosopher Fonzie who said, "Sit on it and spin!" That might be a good slogan for something called "The Hawaii Chair," which I discovered on a blog somewhere. Check out this YouTube video of what has to be one of the goofiest products ever invented. If you want the sensation of working at your desk during an 8.4 earthquake, then I guess this is for you.

And just what, pray tell, is a "2800 RPM Hula Motor?"

My Vinyl Gallery

2008-02-05T14:14:00.000-08:00

There is a space between two windows in the Muley back room -- which serves as the office, library and playroom of the Muley house -- that, for the lack of anything more striking, I have made into a rotating exhibit space that might be called "Muley's LP Gallery." I still own hundreds of vinyl LPs from those ancient days before CDs, and so one day I bought a dozen LP frames from a crafts store, arranged them in three rows on the wall, and, "voila!," a gallery was born.

Instead of leaving the same record covers up forever, I decided to rotate them out every now and then for variety's sake. Sometimes they are chosen to match a theme ("Country music," "Standup comedy," "Female balladeers"), and sometimes they are totally random. Here is the gallery that appeared in December 2007 featuring Christmas albums.

Sometime in January, tiring of the cold and bleak winter weather, I took down the Christmas albums and replaced them with ones depicting the warm wahines of sunny Hawaii.

I suspect I am just about the only one who ever notices what records I put up on the wall. My kids think I'm a bit weird and ancient, to begin with, for even owning something as old-fashioned and outdated as LPs. I'm guessing that, to them, I could cut the fronts off of old boxes of cereal and slap them up on the wall and I wouldn't be doing anything any goofier or less visually arresting.

What about other oldtimers such as me? Well, we've had guests in the house for parties, and not once have I ever had anyone comment on the gallery, good or bad. Maybe they're too busy playing the vintage 1980s Nintendo games we have set up in the room (remember "Duck Hunt"?)

To be truthful, I don't really care all that much if no one else notices the LPs. It's sort of like my private Etch-A-Sketch on the wall. I have fun thinking about what theme I'll feature next. After Hawaii, I might do all Beatles albums, or maybe a set of great ol' cheesy 1950s lounge records I bought cheap at the library used book sale. Maybe I'll report back from time to time on what's featured in "the gallery."

No Anorexic Starlets Here, Please

2008-02-02T21:30:00.000-08:00

Ever think about how an illuminated sign's meaning can change significantly with the loss of just one or two letters? Here's the marquee of the local movie theater, seen by the Muley family on their way to dinner tonight:

Does this mean that film celebrities were dining inside our humble theater tonight, scarfing down fried chicken and pizza while they signed autographs? Or does this mean that all of the movies shown at this theater tonight dealt with food, such as "Babette's Feast" or "Super Size Me"?

Never Go to Work

2008-01-30T16:23:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite musical groups is They Might Be Giants. The group is two guys who do all sorts of nerdy, intelligent, sometime weird and downright goofy songs that only a complete dweeb like me can relate to. Their only big hit, I believe, was "Birdhouse in Your Soul" a number of years back.

Anyway, I was excited to learn that TMBG is coming out with their first CD of songs written just for kids. They have also done a number of video podcasts to promote the songs. I'd like to share the video they did for their song called "Never Go to Work," teaching kids about the days of the week. It's a catchy tune, and the video is neat. It might take awhile to load, but it's worth the wait.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does –– The Post

2008-01-29T16:34:00.000-08:00

I normally don't pass on unsolicited things that get mailed to me in e-mail. Half of them are downright boring, and most of the other half seem to be either scams, pornographic material or things that George Carlin supposedly said that he really didn't say.

But, Mrs. Muley today passed on an e-mail she received that included supposedly true accounts of dumb behavior supplied by people on the Internet. These aren't of the "dumb criminal" variety -- they're more like responses of people to everyday things that are lacking just a little in intelligence.

Whether these are true or not, a few struck me as funny:

"We had to have the garage door repaired. The repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a 'large' enough motor on the opener. I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one the manufacturer made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower. He shook his head and said, 'Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower.' I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4. He said, 'NO, it's not.' Four is larger than two.' We haven't used that store's repair service since."

"My daughter and I went through a fast food takeout window and I gave the clerk a $5 bill. Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her a quarter. She said, 'You gave me too much money.' I said, 'Yes I know, but this way you can just give me a dollar bill back.' She sighed and went to get the manager, who asked me to repeat my request. I did so, and he handed me back the quarter, and said 'We're sorry, but we cannot do that kind of thing.' The clerk then proceeded to give me back $1.75 in change. Do not confuse the clerks."

"I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road. The reason: 'Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore.'"

"My daughter went to a local fast food Mexican restaurant and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for 'minimal lettuce.' He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce."

"I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, 'Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?' To which I replied, 'If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?' He smiled knowingly and nodded, 'That's why we ask.'"

"I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the sake of her life, couldn't understand why her system would not turn on."

"When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver's side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. 'Hey,' I announced to the technician, 'it's open!' His reply: 'I know. I already got that side.'"

Gifted and Talented

2008-01-28T10:02:00.000-08:00

Muley, circa 1961, completing the reasoning section of the Iowa Basic Skills Test. Results withheld by request of the author.

I'm Now a Tumblelogger

2008-01-25T11:38:00.000-08:00

On a whim today, I took a little online discovery and decided to play with it a bit.

By listening to a recent Rocketboom podcast, and then doing a Google search and finding out some additional information, I decided to get in on what's called tumblelogging.

I went to one of the main tumblelogging site providers, Tumblr (sort of like blogger,com for traditional blogging), and within minutes I had set up my free account and designed my own tumblelog. I call it "Chain-link Deja Vu," and it's located here.

What, I hear you ask, is tumblelogging? Well, being fairly ignorant of the finer points (I still have no idea how it got started, or how many people are doing it), I can only give my impressions. From what I see, tumblelogging is designed for people who spend a fair amount of time online and who want to blog, but have very little time in which to do so. Another way I look at it is, it's blogging created by (and viewed by) people who, at least at some point during each day, have ADD-like attention spans.

Now, I still will keep on with Muley's World, this being the place where I will post when I want to really say something, especially when I want feedback from readers. But having a tumblelogging site, I think, won't really compete with Muley's World, but will complement it.

A tumblelogging site, in effect, is an online depository for all those neat or curious little things we find while surfing the Internet. We want to keep that stuff handy somewhere so we can experience it again, and we often want to let other people see it as well. But, we don't necessarily want to sit down and do a big descriptive post and manipulate a lot of screens and HTML language just to do that.

The tumblelogging site has buttons to let you add things such as quotes, pictures, videos, songs, text and even the transcripts of instant message conversations. Here's how it works. You download a little button on your bookmarks bar that says "Share on Tumblr." Then, if you happen to be surfing the Web and come across a neat photo or YouTube video or article, you just hit the "Share on Tumblr" button. You see a little screen come up with the item's URL code already entered. You give it a headline (if you wish) and maybe write a short explanatory description (if you wish), press the button, and it's automatically put on your Tumblr site. When you go later to look, it will be there.

I like quotations, and in Tumblr, all you do is hit the button marked Quotes, type in the quotation text and the name of the author, then send it to your site. It will automatically format it in quotation style for you. Neat.

Tumblelogging seems designed to be very simple, maybe too simple for some tastes. You can't do things like size photos, add tags or change posting dates and times, and there are no mechanisms for you to leave or receive comments, which I think is unfortunate. However, I think there might be a method they have of seeing what other people are "following" your blog, but I haven't investigated that yet.

I'm not sure how often I will use this. It might just be another one of those online nifties that lose their appeal after the newness wears off. But I'll still have a free way to store all my favorite online discoveries in one place, to revisit at my leisure. And that's worth something.

A Smattering of Quotes

2008-01-18T10:29:00.001-08:00

"When I was a student, I had two ideas about history, and one of them was that history was about dead men who had done dull things. History was dates and governments and laws and war and money - and dead men. Always dead men.

But I also read historical novels. And I adored them. People in historical novels loved, fought, and struggled to survive. They died violently; they were beset with invaders and famine and plague. They wore splendid clothes or picturesque rags. They performed miracles of courage and strength just to get something to eat. It was from novels that I learned that history was the story of survival: even something that sounded boring, like crop rotation or inheritance law, might be a matter of life and death to a hungry peasant. Novels taught me that history is dramatic. I wanted my students to know that, too."

--Laura Amy Schlitz, from the foreword to her 2008 Newberry Award-winning book Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

----------

"... And because in all other monasteries and nunneries all is composed, limited, and regulated by hours, it was decreed that in this new structure there should be neither clock nor dial, but that according to the opportunities and incident occasions, all their hours should be disposed of; for, said Gargantua, the greatest loss of time that I know, is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion."

--Rabelais, in Gargantua and Pantagruel

----------

"There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special 'reading class,' much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the 19th century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become 'an increasingly arcane hobby.' Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch 'The Sopranos' rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella To Each His Own, the culture goes on largely as before — both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable."

--From "Twilight of the Books," New Yorker, December 24, 2007

----------

"It has often been said there's so much to be read,
you never can cram all those words in your head.
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs
is making a chore for the reader who reads.
That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is."

--Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Seuss Geisel

(Don't) Send In the Clowns

2008-01-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

Scientists have finally confirmed a suspicion I've had for a long time -- kids don't really like clowns. In fact. I'm not sure who really, truly, enjoys clowns.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield, who were simply trying to figure out ways to improve the decor of hospital children's wards, did a study of 250 hospital patients between the ages of four and 16. What did they find? They discovered that every one of the kids they surveyed -- without exception --- disliked clowns because they were downright scary.

"As adults we make assumptions about what works for children," said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university. "We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."

I have never been a big fan of clowns. I can't remember how I felt about them as a kid, but I know that as an adult, whenever I went to a circus and the clowns came out to do their "comedy" acts, I was bored, just waiting for the next act when the little dogs jump through the hoops wearing tutus.

I got a different view of clowns when we took my oldest daughter to a circus when she was probably four or five. Whenever a brighly-colored and wild-haired clown came near, she began wailing in fright, as if the clown was carrying a bloody knife and was going to start carving on her stomach. I wasn't used to this reaction then, but when I looked around, I noticed other kids were reacting the very same way. Not all of them, but a good number.

My guess is that all of that clown persona -- the technicolor drag queen makeup, the towering orange and red Afros, the wild, ill-fitting clothing, the honking bicycle horns and the squirting carnations -- simply overloads a kid's circuits. I mean, weren't were supposed to be somewhat afraid of or repulsed by the Joker in the Batman cartoons and movies? And what was he if not just another made-up clown?

Of course, maybe my kids are just overly sensitive. Neither one of them would ever let us put them on Santa's lap to get a Christmas photo made -- they were scared of Santa, too. But come to think of it, a guy in a Santa suit is kind of like a clown, just with fewer colors and props to work with. I think many kids perceive a real, live St. Nick as they do a clown -- not as a friendly adult, but as a big, loud, weird-looking stranger. Maybe there's just too much chaos and uncertainty in a concentrated dose coming at a kid to have him react positively to clowns of any stripe.

Now I know that there will probably be reaction from lots of clown-loving adults and kids out there, and if that's how you feel, it's no skin off my big, round, red nose. And in fairness I must include a disclaimer -- I do like the way clowns tie those long balloons into the shapes of animals. That's a valuable skill, I guess, but I'm not sure you need to look like the survivor of an explosion in a paint and wig factory to put it to use.

Nursery Rhymes I Don't Understand

2008-01-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

Yankee Doodle

Picture, if you will, a five-year-old child who knows little or nothing about the American Revolution. Conjuring up this mental image should not prove difficult, given the colonial conflict’s failure to drive the plots of many Scooby Doo or SpongeBob cartoons. In fact, our imaginary child may not even know what the word “revolution” means, and his parents may be determined to keep this information from him as long as possible lest it give birth to plans for armed insurrection in the home.

Go further, and imagine that you are the parent of this child, and that he has just heard for the first time an unbowdlerized version of the American Revolution’s unofficial theme song, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Your child approaches you with a confused countenance and asks you to explain what in the world this apparent bastardization of the Barney theme song is all about. Daddy, what is a yankee doodle? (Sounds to me like some sort of forbidden Chinese wrestling hold). Why did the man call a feather macaroni? And what does it mean to be handy with the girls? Daddy? Daddy?

If you’re like me, these are difficult –– if not impossible –– questions to answer.

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring

This vicious little tune demonstrates how a sociopath would respond when asked to write a children’s nursery rhyme.

As is the case with many of these rhymes, the bare story line itself is simple. As a storm rages outside, an elderly man falls, hits his head, and is injured to the extent that he can’t get out of bed the next morning. The implication is that he was knocked unconscious by the fall, suffering a concussion which possibly resulted in a coma. Remember, it says not that the man was a lazy doofus who didn’t choose to get up the next day, but that he couldn’t get up. We are left to speculate –– will he ever get up again? Is he paralyzed? Or is this the swan song of a corpse?

Now, this simply might be a musical variation of the theme of elderly peril that gave us those daffy commercials with the old lady who complained “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” But of course, that old woman was at least conscious and able to call out for help. In this adaptation, Paw-Paw is out cold.

How strange it is that this scenario –– an accident to a senior citizen causing undetermined but possibly fatal injuries –– ever ended up being distributed to little children in preschool via a nursery rhyme. If there had been, say, a man diving into a shallow pool, hitting his head on a rock and sinking to the bottom, unconcious and slowly drowning, his air slowly seeping away, his lips turning blue, would the average onlooker with a musical bent follow their call to 9-1-1 by rushing to a piano and hunting for a cheery accompaniment? Would they then send the hastily scribbled sheet music for “He’s Diving, He’s Drowning” to Sesame Street for consideration?

A related offshoot of this is the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme, which tells the familiar story of Jack falling down and “breaking his crown,” with Jill repeating the same moves seconds later. The same themes are played out in the opening scene of “Chicken Little” and in every Roadrunner cartoon ever made.

I must ask –– what is this morbid, gleeful fascination with serious head injuries?

Rock-a-bye Baby

It’s highly likely that Rock-a-bye Baby is the only nursery rhyme created by, for and about squirrels.

Think about it. The only way this catchy little ditty makes any sort of sense is as a cautionary tale for young bushy-tailed rodents undergoing the challenges of high altitude parenthood.

You know the story. Mr. and Mrs. Nutsy, shut out of the highly competitive inside-hollow-tree housing market and unwilling or unable to move to a new forest, give into temptation and take the quick and easy solution to locate Nutsy Junior’s nursery.

As a temporary measure (so they rationalize) they place the little squirrel’s acorn-filled crib high atop the branches of their favorite old oak, and all is well until that big wind comes along, cracking the rotten wood and blowing the crib –– and Nutsy Junior –– over the edge and into a free fall to the ground far below. Our imaginations complete the screenplay: frantic leaping from branch to branch; the inevitable pounce of a snarling canine; excited, high-pitched chattering; a final view of the bloody, broken crib; slow fade to black.

I’m telling you, the squirrel scenario is the only way this sucker makes sense. So, I must ask –– which ambitious Hollywood script editor first got the crazy idea of substituting a human child in the role of victim? Not that all men and women are model nurturers, but in the history of the world has there been even one recorded instance of a human parent hauling their child’s crib up a tree and then climbing back down to watch what happens? Tarzan and Jane didn’t do it. The Swiss Family Robinson didn’t do it. The Three Stooges –– even Curley –– rejected knucklebrained stunts this perilously wacky.

And why do we continue to sing this musically soothing yet narratively disturbing song to our young babes at bedtime? My guess is we do it because it works –– it gets the little ones tired very efficiently. And we tell ourselves, for the most part correctly, that they can’t understand the words, so what’s the harm?

But what about a home in which there are older children present? How do they feel when each night they witness mommy or daddy lovingly rocking little brother or sister to sleep while giving melodic voice to their parents’ yet unrealized ambition to place the little tyke high atop the front yard pecan tree and wait for a good north wind? Hearing this, are these older children able to sleep at night? Do they harbor fears that their parents might maroon them on the roof in an orange crate during a tornado?

I say if we must continue to sing lullabies about babies placed in harm’s way, let’s invent some new ones and add them to the repertoire for variety’s sake. Let’s hear the following scenes played out to the gentle strains of Bach or Brahms:

––a baby is trussed up with ropes and then hoisted to the top of a tall flagpole during a lightning storm.
––a baby in its bassinet is left up in the crow’s nest of a ship during a typhoon.
––a baby in an infant seat placed temporarily on the car roof is then forgotten just before the car pulls out of a parking lot onto a busy expressway.
––a baby taken for a ride in a wagon by older siblings is left on the train tracks just before the 5:13 express blows into town.
––a young child left unattended in an airplane fiddles with the emergency door and is sucked out into the ether after it opens accidently.

These and other new tunes could be written, recorded and collected on a CD called Lullabies to Lose Sleep Over. At the very least, it would make a great Oprah show.

How Long Will You Live?

2008-01-11T07:20:00.000-08:00

If you remember your Bible at all, you know it says again and again that our days are numbered, that only God knows what those numbers are, and that our earthly demise can come unannounced at any time.

Of course, sometimes we wish we knew just how long we actually have to live. I mean, if we knew we only had a few months left, we might cash in the CDs and probably wouldn't worry about doing winter maintenance on the lawnmower.

Despite the fact that mortality remains a mystery, there's always someone trying to make a science out of predicting how long we have to live, whether by examining the length of lines on our palms, reading the stars or looking into a crystal ball. Now, some high-tech geeks have gotten in on the act with an online tool.

When you go here, you'll find a panel that asks you questions about when you were born and how healthy your lifestyle is. When you fill everything out, it supposedly tells you the exact day you should die.

There are some bugs I should warn you about. Mrs. Muley and I figured out that when it asks you about your "medicine status," it doesn't want to know if you take prescription pills. It's asking if you abuse your body with harmful drugs. The reason why we figured this out is, when we checked "yes," it had us dying fairly quickly. And when Mrs. Muley's 77-year-old mother tried it out and answered in the affirmative to the drugs question, it told her that she should have died back in 1986, a fact that she found both comical and a bit bracing. When all of us changed our medicine status to the negative, however, the program changed its tune and gave us all much longer lives, even raising Mrs. Muley's mother from her early grave.

What did it tell me? Well, I am supposed to die on Saturday, September 18, 2049, which means that Mrs. Muley will have to teach 6th grade Sunday School by herself the next day. As far as Mrs. Muley goes, she is expected to shuffle off this mortal coil on what would have been my 98th birthday, July 11, 2058. That will leave her almost nine years of wild widowhood in her 90s to go out and party without me.

You'll probably either think this is too morbid to mess with, or you'll take it with a big grain of salt, as I did, and have fun with it. If you fall into the latter category, let me know what the mystical cyber swami tells you.

What Lies Beneath

2008-01-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

Now that the Christmas season is behind us, my family is returning to our continuing project of renovating the Muley home. Last night, Mrs. Muley began removing the old wallpaper in our master bathroom. She was able to peel off our most recent wallpaper by hand, exposing the white backing paper underneath. To get this off, she had to use a chemical that softens the backing and allows it to be peeled off as well.

We got a kick out of what emerged once Mrs. Muley was able to strip off the first chunks of backing:

Floral fantasia! This, we quickly figured out, is the room's original wallpaper, dating from the house's construction during the groovy vibe of the late 1970s. (I remember having a very similar wallpaper pattern greet me every morning in the breakfast room of my house as I was growing up during elementary and junior high). I have no doubt that this pattern was considered tres chic back when it was first attached. Here's a closer look:

Intrigued by her archaeological discovery, Mrs. Muley went to our children's bathroom and peeled off a bit of the current wallpaper there. We we thinking there could be another remnant of the groovy 70s underneath -- maybe flocked or mirrored wallpaper, or wallpaper portraying Smurfs -- but all Mrs. Muley liberated was sheetrock.

Finding that old 70s wallpaper hiding undercover in our bathroom makes a lot of things clearer to me now, such as why whenever I take a shower I keep looking for a nonexistent soap-on-a-rope to be hanging from the shower head, and why I sometimes get this unreasonable fear that Alice the maid from the Brady Bunch is going to walk in on me by accident.

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

Muley by the Christmas tree, 1962. Those were the days of Tinkertoys and tricycles.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, and may you be close to family and friends.

Thingmaker: Make Toys or Grilled Cheese Sandwiches!

2007-12-21T12:50:00.000-08:00

This is the third in a series of trips down memory lane featuring Muley's favorite childhood Christmas toys.

This toy was a big favorite with me and my brothers. The foundation of the toy was Thingmaker, basically a heated metal plate that would take metal molds filled with liquid plastic and cook the plastic until the resulting shapes became hard and rubbery. But the product is commonly referred to as "Creepy Crawlers," which was the name given to the products of one of the most popular series of themed molds you could buy to work with Thingmaker.

If you go into a toy store nowadays, I believe they sell something under the Creepy Crawlers name. The idea is the same, but from what I have seen it is a pale imitation of the original Thingmaker system. The new one looks like a modified Easy Bake oven, with plastic parts and using the equivalent of a light bulb to bake the plastic. The original Thingmaker, by contrast, was like a little metal foundry in your home. The molds were made of thick metal, and the Thingmaker was able to heat that metal up so hot that you would burn the dickens out of your tiny, tender hands if you didn't remove the molds just right.

I would guess that Creepy Crawlers were probably the most popular things you could make with Thingmaker, but as you can see from the clipped advertisement here, you could also make other stuff like scary makeup items. I also remember that at our house we had molds that allowed us to create toy soldiers. One mold would make the front part of the soldier's body, a second mold would make the back half, and I guess you were supposed to fit the two halves together while the thing was still warm and sticky so that they'd dry into one figure. A third mold let you make rifles and grenades and such. The idea was that you could eventually create enough of the little guys to form your own army. But, unlike G.I. Joes, Thingmaker soldiers were as rubbery as the fake snakes and vampire teeth it also cooked up. It's as though some alien from space swooped down and removed all of the bones from a U.S. Army battalion.

Besides providing me hours of enjoyment being my own Dr. Frankenstein, I loved the sheer utilitarianism of the names Mattel gave to this toy and its components. The thing you made stuff in was called...the thing maker. The liquid goop you poured into the molds was called...goop.

When it comes to summing up Thingmaker, I believe radarmagazine does it best: "Nothing says safety like an open hot plate. And nothing says fun like using that open hot plate to create molten, rubbery insects you can throw at your sister while narrowly avoiding setting the house ablaze."

Major Matt Mason: Muy Molded Machismo!

2007-12-20T00:19:00.000-08:00

In Part Two of what I guess is now a series of looks back at my favorite toys from childhood 1960s Christmases, I want to introduce you to Major Matt Mason (surprisingly, not a product of the 3M Corporation).

I think it was a bit unusual, even back in the groovy Sixties, to have television ad copy read in rhyme. I believe this poem, titled "The Misbegotten Moon of Major Matt Mason," was actually one of the lesser-known works of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Penn Warren, based on a short story by Chekhov.

My little brother and I spent many hours of pleasure taking Major Matt and Sergeant Storm (as an enlisted man, he didn't rate a first name) on adventures across the floor in our dad's study. We would have been green with envy, though, if we'd seen the swanky fantasy play area the boys in the TV commercial have their space station set up in. Not many parents would let their children bring in beach sand and move boulders into the living room, even if they did look like those cardboard imitation boulders used on the original Star Trek episodes.

I don't remember the Captain Laser character at all. Being a battery operated giant, he probably had a giant price tag, which might explain why my parents never saw fit to bring him home to join our crew. Besides, being raised on Mars and all, could you really trust him? Would Major Matt wake up one day in the space station to find one of his rubberized legs chewed off up to his hips, with Captain Laser just licking his lips, his red eyes pulsing rapidly?

It Wasn't Called "Vrroom!" for Nothing

2007-12-19T11:58:00.001-08:00

If you were a red-blooded American boy in the 1960s, not old enough to drive and forced to settle for riding a bicycle or tricycle, this was something you wanted from Santa. I finally got one as a Christmas gift, and I can still remember our neighborhood in the days following, with me and other boys riding their bikes down the street, sounding like an invading army of locusts ready for a motocross race.

You just knew this was the coolest because you had your own special key to start the engine. It weren't no toy, you understand.

I love the commercial! Am I wrong, or can no kid have that many huge freckles on his nose? Do you think they painted them on with some sort of dye? And why do all little boys in 1960s commercials look as though their fathers cut their hair with a pair of pruning shears while drunk? Probably because, in many cases, they did.

A Smattering of Quotes

2007-12-18T07:03:00.000-08:00

"The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves."

--Elaine Morgan

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"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

--Theodore Roosevelt

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"English was good enough for Jesus Christ and it's good enough for the children of Texas."

--Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, Texas governor 1925-1927

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"In the final analysis, it's true that fame is unimportant. No matter how great a man is, the size of his funeral usually depends on the weather."

--Rosemary Clooney

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"Haydn's sense of humor often came into play during his thirty-year tenure with Prince Esterhazy. The prince had become complacent when listening to Haydn's symphonies, even falling asleep at the performances. This was something that seared the feelings of the diligent composer, especially when the prince emitted a loud snore during a part of the symphony over which Haydn had especially labored. Haydn decided to create a new symphony for the prince, a symphony that he hoped would 'get Prince Esterhazy's attention.' This particular symphony was written with a long slow movement, designed to be so soothing that the prince would surely fall asleep. On the evening of the performance, the prince did indeed drift off. Then, suddenly, a loud chord shattered the serenity of the murmuring movement. The prince awoke with a start and almost fell off his chair! Haydn adeptly gave the piece the name 'Surprise Symphony.'"

--from the Haydn biography on essortment.com

Muley at Christmas, 1963

2007-12-15T11:25:00.001-08:00

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2007-12-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

AN UNUSED FRENCH REVOLUTION SLOGAN?

Here's what kind of strange guy I am. Last night, walking the dogs in the neighborhood with my wife, we noticed a reindeer lawn ornament in someone's yard that had all of the lights in the reindeer's neck burned out. Seconds later, out of the blue, the following phrase was born in my brain:

"You can't wear a necklace if you're neck-less"

AND YET, I GOT AN "A" IN PHYSICS

To continue the ever-increasing proofs of my weirdness, walking in the cold with my wife and the dogs last night I got to wondering about molecules. Heat is when molecules in the atmosphere move more quickly, cold is when molecules move more slowly, right? Theoretically then, would it be possible for it to get so incredibly cold that all of those molecules would slow to an atomic crawl and eventually stop moving altogether? At that point, would the Earth's atmosphere just fall down to the ground like a dead weight? And would my insurance cover this?

DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?

Do you ever really listen to the lyrics of the Christmas songs that play endlessly this time of year? If so, do some of the lyrics ever puzzle you? They do me. For example, in "Winter Wonderland," why do they sound so darn glad singing to announce that "Gone away is the bluebird/Here to stay is a new bird"? Why are people so tickled pink that the bluebird has hightailed it out of town? Aren't they the birds that are supposed to bring us happiness? It's not as if a grackle has left town -- now that I would gladly celebrate in song.

And what about that line in "Deck the Halls" where they say "Strike the harp and join the chorus"? What kind of choir is it that requires you to damage an expensive piece of musical equipment before joining? Not any that I'd want to be associated with.

BATHROOM HUMOR

I guess my mind's been in the toilet lately, seeing as how this is the second restroom-related posting in the past week. You know those new automatic flushing toilets and urinals? Why do they each have that little slowly blinking red light? When I see that red light silently turning on and off, it reminds me of HAL, the evil supercomputer in the movie "2001." I'm half expecting the urinal to start talking to me in a soothing but menacing voice: "Is that all, Muley? Are you suuure you don't have anything more? You don't want to be coming back here in a few minutes, do you? Did you aim well, Muley? If not, I am programmed to spray water on you when I flush..."

The Secret of "P"

2007-12-13T18:16:00.000-08:00

Having not read this classic Raymond Chandler mystery, I am quite confused. Just why do you brand an otherwise attractive woman with the letter "P"? What descriptive personality or physical trait is it supposed to warn others away from? Preppiness? Persnicketyness? Phoniness? Pettiness? Permissiveness? Prissiness? Pit odor?

Or does it refer to some sort of unwanted or controversial medical condition? Psoriasis? Psychotic episodes? Periodontal disease? Plantar's warts? Pigeon toes? Perforated ear drums? Plastic surgery?

Could it refer to her somewhat unorthodox choice of career? Podiatrist? Pundit? Parking lot attendant? Pit boss? Pearl diver? Praline maker?

Just maybe, considering my discussion here, it identifies the wearer as one of the new century's most scorned home improvement show characters: popcorn ceiling owner!

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2007-12-11T18:14:00.000-08:00

I LOVE YOU, CHOP, CHOP

I passed by a display in my local grocery store the other day which I assume was meant to suggest possible Christmas gift ideas. On a table there were all sorts of objects that had been "personalized" with a photograph. A photo of an attractive woman was used in each example, her smiling face wrapped around coffee mugs and pencil holders and placed atop calendars and mouse pads. The idea, I guess, is that anyone can take a picture of a loved one and get that picture put on the object of their choice.

This is not anything new, of course, but I was a bit taken aback when I saw what one of the items available for personalization was. At first I thought it might be a super-sized mouse pad, but on closer inspection I discovered that the woman's face was now smiling from the surface of a cutting board. You know, like the ones you cut meat or chop carrots on.

I still have not been able to figure this one out. Why in the world would someone want to personalize a cutting board? And if they do, what kind of message is that sending? I love my kids and would never want to see them hurt, but if I send their grandmothers cutting boards with their cute little faces on them, am I not, in effect, asking them to stab and hack their darling little sweeties every time they chop celery for the soup? Could someone do this in good conscience?

And, if I send someone a cutting board with their own photo on it, am I not asking them to regularly simulate hari-kiri? Will they they get the idea that I want them to commit suicide?

I guess that if you had a bad breakup, you could order one of these adorned with the photo of your ex-spouse or ex-partner (chop, chop, HACK, HACK), but is there a huge market for that? Maybe so.

IT'S STILL A LONG WAY TO THE CAFETERIA

Content alert: the following paragraphs will be discussing toilets and their functions. You have been warned.

I have not done the scientific testing on this (and I never will), but I have come up with a theory involving toilets and their relative flushing power, based on elevation above sea level. This comes as a result of many years of personal experience in the field.

Can you relate to this? If I am in an office building of multiple stories, and if I go to a restroom on an upper floor and ask a toilet to do just what it is designed to do, more often than not, it fails. A toilet needs a certain, shall we say, hydraulic power to carry away what it is designed to carry away, but when I'm in a fifth floor restroom and flush a toilet, it disappoints. A toilet on a high floor seems to think it is a washing machine, content to just swirl water around the bowl a bit in an effort to clean its contents instead of carrying them far away.

By contrast, if I go down to the ground floor of that very same building and flush a toilet in a restroom there, I am met with a sound like that made by a 1962 model TWA jet. The toilet water will circle around and around with the ferocity of a whirlpool at the bottom of Niagra Falls, and if I make the mistake of covering every square inch of surface around the seat with my posterior, creating a seal of sorts, I will be in danger of getting sucked down into the churning bowl like a bird sucked into a jet engine. When the titanic suction ends, I will then be lodged somewhere down into the pipes until a janitor hears my frantic cries for help and rescues me.

Why does this happen? Can physics account for the difference? I will leave this for future scientific researchers to figure out.

What I Learned from HGTV

2007-12-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make, a confession that probably tells you more about my age and social status than I care to admit. I don't get the chance to watch much television these days, but when I do watch, there's a good chance that the show I'm watching is one of the many home improvement shows on HGTV or The Learning Channel.

I'm not sure why I end up watching so many of these shows. I tell myself, of course, that I am picking up ideas for future projects around my own house, but after years of passive viewing I have yet to transfer one project from the TV screen to the inside of my home. Maybe I watch because, as television shows go, the do-it-yourself programs on HGTV and TLC are relatively family friendly, and I can watch one with my daughters sitting nearby and not worry that the host will begin cursing or initiate a discussion of home design for deviant sexual practictioners featuring a lot of whips and torture equipment hanging from the walls.

Even though I don't seem to be practicing what they're preaching at me, my many hours of home improvement TV watching over the years has built up an impressive trove of remodeling wisdom in my brain. The tips and tactics given out by the hosts of these shows tend to revolve around the same dos and don'ts. As a public service for those of you who don't want to devote the same amount of time to watching home improvement shows as I have, I offer these lessons I have learned.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM HGTV

1. The most exciting and satisfying part of remodeling a home is not dreaming about possible changes, or buying new furnishings and fixtures, or watching new things being built and installed, or surveying the completed remodel with the satisfaction of a job well done. The most exciting and satisfying part, by far, is being able to take a sledgehammer and viciously pound all of that old, tacky wood and plaster and tile and laminates and sheetrock to a dusty pulp as part of the initial demolition progress (the “demo,” in HGTV-speak). It never fails – when mild-mannered homeowners are handed a sledgehammer and told to go to town, their eyes begin to glow and their resulting cheek-to-cheek Joker grins make them look as if they were being given the keys to Fort Knox. Their utter delight in completely demolishing everything in their path is palpable.

2. Textured ceilings, known derisively on home improvement shows as “popcorn” or “cottage cheese” ceilings, are considered the spawn of the devil, and must be removed immediately by any homeowner with a mite of good taste. If Joan Crawford was still alive, her maniacal admonition to her terrified children would no longer be “No wire hangers!,” but instead, “No popcorn ceilings!” If you are unlucky enough to still have popcorn ceilings in your home (as I am), you might as well also have red shag carpeting, inflatable furniture and a disco ball hanging in the living room, since nothing apparently identifies you as a taste-deficient 1970s holdout loser as those little pebbles on your ceilings.

3. Wallpaper is so 70s and 80s. The textured and mirrored kind is the tackiest, but even the more benign stuff is now patterned poison. You must rip it off the walls wherever it exists or risk social ruin.

4. Once looked upon as the flooring of poor people who couldn’t afford wall-to-wall carpeting, hardwood floors are now tres chic. If you don’t already have hardwood floors or can’t afford to install them, you must at least install cheaper modern laminates that mimic hardwood flooring. Carpet, while not totally out of style, must be used very sparingly, in back rooms only if possible, and must never be in any color brighter than beige or tan. Carpet in any colors used by an NFL team on their jerseys or by the Wiggles are definitely out.

5. Countertops must either be made of rock, or be cleverly designed to resemble rock. Granite or marble is preferred, quartz or even concrete is okay, but formica and wood are definitely out. Your kitchen and bathroom counters should be as hard and cold as those slabs in the morgue you put dead bodies on, as a general rule.

6. If you are to have any chance to sell your current house in this tough housing market (it’s always a tough housing market, no matter where or in what price range you are), you must “stage” your house first to make it attractive to potential buyers. In a nutshell, staging a house involves removing enough of the stuff inside as possible to make it look as if no one actually lives there. Any hints of personality (dismissed as “clutter” by house stagers) must be removed and either thrown away or stored temporarily somewhere off-site. What items must go? Any personal photos or mementoes, books and magazines, souvenirs, collectibles, DVD or CD collections, toys and games, excess or out-of-season clothing, pet feeders, pet beds and chew toys, wall hangings and anything else that looks as if someone might actually pick it up and use it. This will leave furniture (which will be weeded out as well) and possibly a potted fern or two. The goal should be to make the public rooms of your house look like the lobby of a nice hotel that isn’t visited very much.

7. When it comes to fixtures, shiny polished brass and aluminum are out. The preferred finishes are pewter or nickel, with bronze or antique brass running a distant second.

8. Wall-to-wall paneling is great, if your goal is to emulate the lifestyle of Archie Bunker. Otherwise, it is the second generation to popcorn ceilings as spawn of the devil. You must either remove it (preferable), or, if that is impractical, you must paint over it to hide its wood-panel-ness. The only type of paneling ever allowed is that very expensive stuff found in the libraries of big castles in Europe. If you can’t afford that, then don’t even consider buying or keeping paneling.

9. It might force you to sell one of your children to slave traders, but if you haven't already you must switch out all of your current kitchen appliances for stainless steel ones. Kitchens and bathrooms sell a house, we are told over and over again, and nothing will make a potential buyer begin drooling (or make your friends begin drooling in envy) than to spy a kitchen that looks somewhat like an industrial meat locker. If you can’t afford stainless steel, then your appliances must be either black (the preferred second choice) or white (just barely an acceptable wild card). Appliances must never, ever, ever be any other color, or you might as well move to Hooterville.

There's one final thing these TV shows have taught me, and it concerns either selling your house or buying another one. If you live in many parts of the Midwest or the South, you can still buy a fairly nice home with a reasonable amount of room for a reasonable price, say, under $200,000. If you live in New England, a big city on the East Coast or anywhere on the West Coast, even a two-bedroom, one-bath shack with termites, a bad foundation and a backyard that looks like a trash heap will cost at least half a million dollars – or more, if the popcorn ceilings have already been removed.

Technology Quotes to Eat Crow By

2007-12-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."

  --Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of radio and grandfather of television"

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

  --Broadcasting mogul David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."

  --Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

  --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."

  --The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what is it good for?"

  --Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

  --Bill Gates, 1981

May I Borrow a Battery? My Book is Dead

2007-12-04T14:23:00.000-08:00

I went on Amazon.com one day recently to check out something or other, and the opening page, instead of giving me the usual recommendations by categories, was almost completely given over to introducing me to a new product called the Amazon.com "Kindle." It's basically the company's version of an electronic book reader, which they say they've been working on for three years to perfect.

Explaining the genesis of his company's new product, Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said, "The booklover in me often has asked the nerd in me, 'Is there a way to get the emotions and experiences I love from books, but combined with the possibilities of advanced technology? Can something as evolved as the book be improved?"

Now, maybe I'm just hopelessly mired in the technological mud, but when I sit down in a nice chair with a good book (the pulpy-paged type), one thing I surely never think about is how to transform the book in my hands into another electronic gizmo, which I must pamper and recharge and repair when it gets broken. I'm quite happy, thank you, to just let The Brothers Karamazov be The Brothers Karamazov, and not lament the fact that any book I flip the pages of can't also get me stock quotes, show YouTube videos or allow me to spend more money with Amazon.com. This ability may represent an "improvement" to Mr. Bezos, but I beg to differ.

I'm glad that books have not really "evolved" since their invention, despite Mr. Bezos's claim. Yes, they're a bit smaller and made of different materials than they were in Gutenberg's day, and we no longer have to fashion them entirely by hand or crank them out one at a time on a crude press, but the essence of a book is still the same -- pages of text between two covers, pages turned one at a time and enjoyed at the leisure and pace of the reader.

I don't know how many times I've seen people come out with these "electronic book" gizmos, announcing (or implying) that the printed book is on its long-overdue deathbed, only to have the gizmo, and not books, soon bite the dust.

Then again, maybe an electronic book is inevitable. Maybe there's so many people these days whose attention spans have been worn down to the nub by a steady dose of TV and DVDs and video games that they won't -- or can't -- read a book without some sort of electronic diversion handy. But then again, I don't think those people are the ones truly longing for a good book to savor. Let's face it, the target audience for any new electronic book is not likely to go out and download Dostoevsky or Dickens or Joyce to read on it.

I am content to get drenched as I leave my finger in the dike. Invent what you will, and while I applaud your technical genius and even let out a "hey, cool!" every now and then, I'm happy to keep my books just as they've always been.

Hail to the Elf

2007-12-03T07:35:00.000-08:00

Since the Western White House down in Crawford is just a few miles away from my home, I end up getting invited over there whenever George W. is in town. I'll be sitting at home spending quality time with the wife and kids when the special red phone in our living room begins to blink and blares like an air raid siren. I will pick up the line, where each time I only hear these three words: "He wants you." This is the signal for me to get in the car and drive down to the ranch, where the Secret Service agents just wave me through without a second glance.

When I arrive in the house (where I invariably forget the "no shoes on the carpet" rule), I never know what the President will require of me. Sometimes he wants us to bake Tollhouse cookies, other times we share laughs watching DVDs of old SCTV episodes, and one time I even found myself playing "Risk" into the wee hours with the President and Vladamir Putin (I won,by the way, with my sneaky takeover of Europe). But even I was a bit nonplussed by the request made of me on my last visit to Crawford just a few weeks ago.

When I arrived, the President asked me, his wife Laura and Condoleeza Rice to put on special costumes provided for us and head outside, where a rare Texas snowfall had left the landscape covered in white. As the White House videographer taped away, we were asked to frolic for the camera. To see the result, click here to watch the video, recently declassified for public viewing.

(Note: if you use Safari as your browser, for some reason this probably won't play)

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2007-12-01T00:08:00.000-08:00

SO, WAS J.P. MORGAN THE TIN MAN OR TOTO?

I was reading an article in the Nov. 30, 2007, edition of the New York Times, a review of the new SciFi Network miniseries "Tin Man," described as a modern-day "high-tech refashioning" of L. Frank Baum's book The Wizard of Oz. About midway into the article, I ran across this paragraph:

Baum said that he sought simply to produce a modern fairy tale, but his symbolism was hardly subtle. The novel came to be understood as an allegory for debates about turn-of-the-century monetary policy stemming from outrage over the subjugation of agricultural interests to the imperialism of bankers on the East Coast. (In the book, unlike in the 1939 film, Dorothy's shoes are made of silver, not rubies. The notion of silver shoes ambling on a yellow brick road is thought to stand for Baum's advocacy of bimetallism, a shift from the gold standard that would have given farmers access to cheaper money).

At first I though the writer of the piece was joking, but then I realized he was dead serious. Do you mean that L. Frank Baum sat down and dreamed up Dorothy and Toto and tornadoes and munchkins and flying monkeys because his heart was aching to cry out about bimetallism?

Maybe this is true, but it only served to remind me of all those cruel, horrific English literature classes I endured in high school and college where every seemingly straightforward sentence had to be analyzed for its "deeper meaning." The old man in the sea wasn't really after a fish, he was after fame, or youth, or whatever the heck that astronaut in 2001 was looking for. I was asked to believe that authors NEVER wrote simply because they wanted to tell a good story, or wanted to make a pile of money and become famous. They always fashioned some piece of fiction as just a tricky smokescreen to hide their real messages about the alienation of man, the search for significance and their own repressed sexual desires.

Speaking of sex, I once made the mistake of taking an English class in college which combined study of Shakespeare with a study of Freud (I would kill two bards -- I mean birds -- with one stone, I thought). Boy, talk about digging up innuendo and hidden messages. All things in the text that were pointed or straight (like swords, castle towers or trees) were supposedly "male symbols," while all things rounded, or at least not pointed (like pillows, bowls and heads of cabbage) were "female symbols." Everything any character did in any Shakespeare play, according to this professor, had to do in some way with S-E-X. Sheesh, what a load of psychobabbling rubbish. I felt both angry and slimy after each class, and I considered thwacking my professsor on his rounded head with my Bic pen to relieve my frustration, but I was afraid he would interpret this act as some sort of a bisexual assault, or possibly an attempt at conception.

MY DAY RUNNER HAS OUTRUN ME ANOTHER DAY

I think the feeling of being so busy as to be almost overwhelmed is a universal one in today's world. I guess we're just on the same wavelength, or at the same place in our lives, but If I was ever forced to accuse someone of sneaking into my brain and stealing my own thoughts about the issue, it would be Rod Dreher in this spot-on post on his Crunchy Con blog.

Bite Into These Beans

2007-11-30T07:09:00.000-08:00

The Harry Potter phenomenon has given birth to any number of products spun off from the original novels by J.K. Rowling, including movies, calendars, mugs, bed linens, pajamas, board games and too many others to list here.

One of the most popular products to come on the market as a Harry Potter tie-in is Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, which of course are one of the treats enjoyed by Harry and his friends in the books. One of the unique things about Bott’s Beans is their unusual flavor palette. When you bite into one of these jellybeans, you might be welcomed by a traditional sweet flavor, such as cherry or licorice, but you also might find (to your horror or pleasure, depending on your bent) that you have bitten into a jellybean featuring flavors such as pickle, sausage, booger, vomit, rotten egg, earwax or dirt.

From what I hear, kids love the “nasty” flavors, even if they say they are disgusted by them. I’m sure that the shock value of biting into earwax and vomit has probably subsided a bit by now, since so many kids have experienced that, so I am proposing some new “gross” flavors that the manufacturers might want to consider.

Proposed New Flavors of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans:

Theater seat gum
Chinese toy factory
Liquid paper
Grout
Bile
Ship channel spume
Lutefisk
Witch hazel
Dog breath
Mohair
Taxi seat
Mucilage
Pustule
Nursing bra
Scabies
Charismatic preacher sweat
Styrofoam
Baby burp
Grandpa’s mustache

If a Blogger Posts in the Forest, and No One Reads Him, Did He Really Have Anything To Say?

2007-11-29T07:28:00.000-08:00

Well, it finally happened. Less than a week after I started posting to Muley's World again (after an eight-month hiatus), one of my old blogger friends, for some inexplicable reason, dropped by and discovered my return.

I told her in answering her kind comment that I wasn't sure how long I would be "back" because I wasn't exactly sure why I resumed blogging in the first place. I still am not, so I'm going to try and figure that out by writing this.

I started Muley's World and wrote my first tentative post way back in May 2005. It was done totally on a whim, after a friend who had a Xanga told me how easy it was and I found out that she was correct. It was easy and fun, and didn't require lots of expensive equipment, leave stains on the carpet or lead to social diseases or flatulence.

When I began Muley's World, I knew almost nothing about the blogosphere. The only blog I visited on any sort of regular basis was Dawn Eden's, and I didn't have a good idea of just who made up the blogosphere and why they had signed on.

I got into blogging for what I now see were wrong reasons, at least given the prevailing two-way, social, chatting-over-the-back-fence nature of the blogosphere. I have been a writer since my earliest days, and writing -- whether the result was a story, a column, a poem, a song lyric or a play -- was always an invigorating and challenging activity for me. I wasn't one of those strictly discipined and motivated people who can make themselves write every single day and always keep a significant long-range goal in mind for what they produce. I just like to write. In the same way some people love to work crosswords or fashion a gourmet meal from scratch, I enjoy the challenge of stringing random words together to make something greater than the whole. It's a puzzle I enjoy solving over and over again -- can I take this one absurdly simple idea, or this somewhat humorous picture in my mind, and expand it well enough to make a cogent, readable and (hopefully) humorous piece of prose out of it?

It was in this mindset, then, that I began Muley's World. I saw this blog as a wonderful new toy. Somehow, for absolutely no cost, I had been offered my own newspaper or magazine, to do with whatever I wanted. There were no boundaries at all! I could write essays, short stories, poetry, critiques, autobiographical memoirs -- heck, I could even type out my grocery lists -- and then publish them for an audience that conceivably could include readers in every country in the world. Wow! I was brimming with ideas and couldn't wait to get my words pixelated on the page.

Of course, I hoped that people would somehow find their way to my site and read what I had written. They soon did, thanks in part to a gracious, totally unexpected and wildly ego-stroking promo by Dawn Eden on her blog, and I was most pleased with the way things were working out. In the space of a few short weeks I had gone from being a somewhat frustrated wannabe writer to the owner and editor of an online publication that was attracting notice across the country. (In a small sense, of course -- no need to cue the John WIlliams orchestral score to begin here).

It didn't take me long, however, before I discovered that the blogosphere was a bit different than I'd first imagined it to be. I learned that blogs are expected to be quite communal little creatures. By blogging, you are in effect asking people -- strangers -- not only to read what you write, but to give you feedback on what you write through comments left after each post. If you simply read those comments, but do not return the favor by visiting the blogs written by the commentors and leaving comments of your own, you stand accused of being a (gasp) "lurker," a person who is considered to be as slimy and creepy and downright nasty as that ominous term implies.

In other words, if someone writes a column in a print publication and you read it without immediately mailing off a letter to the editor, you are considered normal. However, if you read that same author's columns online without once leaving a comment, you are considered a lurker who might just as well be peeping into the shutters of adolescent girls' bedrooms around bathtime.

Now, I am as social as the next person (well, almost), but I also have a huge shy, private streak. I didn't get into blogging as the means to a social end -- to meet women (I'm married) or to find a publisher (not actively, at least) or to discover new soulmates or beer buddies. I just wanted to write, and, as a secondary goal, to see if what I wrote might by some wonderful luck be interesting to anyone else. That's all.

I think of myself as a kind, caring and fair person, however, and I could understand why neglecting to even visit the sites of people who regularly visited mine, much less neglecting to read their pieces and leave comments in turn, could be viewed as selfish and unfair. I mean, after all, if I want you to visit my site, shouldn't I return the favor? Isn't that the Monroe Doctrine? Or is that the Geneva Convention?

And so I did visit. Often. As more and more people visited Muley's World, my blogroll got larger and larger, and I began rolling up into the driveway of the sites of my newfound cyberfriends on a regular basis. I learned a lot and laughed a lot, and got to enjoy stopping in for chatty, witty téte-a-tétes.

After a while, though, all of that cyber surfing started to feel less like an enjoyable hobby and more like a job with lots of overtime. Checking my site, reading any comments left, leaving responding comments on my site, then visiting the sites of the commenters, reading their new posts, leaving new comments, checking on my previous day's comments to see if those had been replied to and leaving a set of follow-up comments if necessary -- as that routine grew to encompass more than 20 blogs a day, I started having to steal time from work and family to keep up with it all. And, like it never had before, writing began feeling like a chore, an obligation, something I had to do or else I would let people down.

So I stopped. Cold. Twice.

Now I'm back, wondering why. Am I like an alcoholic who has been sober for months, wanting to test whether he can have a few teensy weensy sips of light wine each day without ending up in the gutter again? I haven't even told my wife or my friends that I've begun posting again at Muley's World -- that's how unsure I still am about all of this.

I do know one thing. I can't get back to that incredibly time-consuming whirl of blog-checking and drive-by commenting that I was on before. I don't think that means I never want to trade thoughts with my wonderfully sharp and funny cyber friends. Why deny myself that pleasure? But I don't think I can let that aspect of blogging guide what I do. To keep writing (and to keep sane) I think I need to adopt the philosophy that I will best serve my friends by hopefully writing things they might read to add a laugh or a provocative thought to their day. Period. Anything that I might be able to do beyond that will be gravy.

[A SHORT INTERMISSION. THE LOBBY REFRESHMENTS COUNTER WILL BE OPEN FOR 10 MINUTES. PLEASE DO NOT BRING SOFT DRINKS BACK INTO THE BLOG.]

I'm reading back over what I've just written and it all sounds so smug, so incredibly selfish. "I am such a writing talent that you should feel honored and lucky just to have the chance to read what I deem you are worthy to read." But I assure you that is not my intention.

You know what this blog is for me? Above all, it's not a vehicle to allow me to attract praise, but a tool that motivates me to get off my butt and do what I know I really want to do down deep inside, which is write.

If I get what I think is a great idea or a funny scenario in my head, and all I do is chuckle to myself about it and then resume my daily drudgery, then it's gone forever, and I've remained a lazy and flabby writer wannabe. If, however, I know that I have a blog that hasn't been updated in a while, I am motivated to take that small idea, chew on it, ruminate on it, let it spur my imagination to flex its muscles, and then let it lead me running to the keyboard to see if I can somehow corral all the wild thoughts flying around my mind into something cohesive and understandable. It's an incredibly fun test of skill that I never get tired of.

Then, after I have completed whatever piece I have written, if I think it's something worth sharing, if I think it's something that might be of value to someone else, then I have this wonderfully convenient thing called Muley's World where I can throw it in and let whomever wishes look at it. They can like it, they can hate it, but either way, it now exists in tangible form and I've had fun creating it.

This, as you see, is not at all the traditional model of most blogs, which seems to be basically "tell me about your day and I'll tell you about mine." Frankly, recounting most of my days would probably bore even your dullest friends and relatives, but maybe I can conjure up enough goofiness in my imagination to make all of you smile.

If there is anyone still reading this (and that is a highly doubtful proposition) I apologize for this very atypical Oprah-like confessional from me. I don't as a rule like to make my navel-gazing public. But more than anything, I wanted to wrestle with the issue of why I am blogging again to try and find the answer in my own mind, and if sharing some of that process with you in print has left you cold (or approaching REM sleep), I apologize.

I am glad to be back -- whatever that may mean. I thank Emma and any other longtime Muley readers who want to stop by, and I look forward to doing my best to return the favor from time to time. Above all, I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to stop talking to myself in public places and once again have a socially approved outlet for my malady.

Turning a Page in Life

2007-11-28T07:32:00.000-08:00

Isn’t it entirely possible that each of us harbors some sort of fantasy involving “leaving it all behind,” “it” being the secure job, the 9-to-5 existence, the totally tethered life, and heading out for unknown places as a romantic, risk-taking, free-spirited vagabond?

I think so, and recently I met someone who not only acknowledges those fantasies, but is doing something tangible to make them happen. It was at our public library’s used book sale, where I was working. I was in the “Hold” area, where people who fill bags full of dog-eared books they want to buy can temporarily stash them so that they can go out on the floor again, arms free, to buy even more.

When I got to the Hold area to begin my shift, I noticed about 20 bags full of books marked “T.Baker,” and wondered who this person was. I finally met her when she came to drop off another bag, and over the next few hours (as she dropped off probably 10 more bags) I got to know a bit more about why she was seemingly so book-crazy. She was in her late 20s or early 30s, and had driven in from a city more than three hours away to attend the sale.

When I first spoke to her, I told her I had come up with three possible theories to explain her mounting pile of bags:

1. She was preparing to move to an incredibly remote part of Alaska, where the nearest library, post office or Fedex station was a two-week journey by kayak and dogsled;

2. She was an insatiable reader, a literary nymphomaniac, devouring books like a drug addict pops pills; or

3. She was buying stock for a bookstore.

It turns out that the third scenario was correct, but the woman was not just dutifully buying stock to throw on the shelves of some dusty strip center bookstore. No, she has a full-time day job in a big city at a big corporation (which she despises) and knows that she is scheduled to get laid off in 2008. I’ve never met someone so happy (and eager!) to get canned.

Preparing for unemployment, she has started an online used bookselling business in her spare time, selling books through both eBay and amazon.com. That’s why she was buying all these books (more than a thousand dollar’s worth by the end). When she finally loses her steady job, she intends to sell used books full time, traveling across the country, hitting library used book sales, thrift stores and garage sales to buy new stock. She won’t get rich, she knows, but she says she loves books, and travel, and this is a dream of hers to combine those two. And, in her new career, every Ding Dong or Whopper or convenience store munchie she buys while traveling will be tax deductible.

I have to say, the idea of being able to head out on the road, at your own pace and on your own timetable, and go wherever your heart leads you, is a tempting one for me. Of course, if I tried to imagine the details of her situation at all, the picture gets a bit less rosy – the bad food, the smelly stores and rude people, living lean when sales are down, sleeping in cheap motels or even the back seat of the car to save money, being alone at night in yet another small town – some or all of that might indeed be ahead of her, but she isn’t worried about that now. She’s gloriously happy and excited by life, and it shows.

Given the chance, and even forced to do so by circumstance, wouldn’t we all be willing to leave behind the computer screen and the telephone and day planner and interoffice memos, and just fly away singing? At least on some days I think we just might, and damn the odds.

The World On Ice

2007-11-27T06:48:00.001-08:00

I just heard that there is now a version of "High School Musical" on ice. This confirms my belief that, eventually, all forms of entertainment, art and human expression will strap on skates and move onto the rink. Here's just a few shows we should be seeing advertised before we know it:

Citizen Kane On Ice
WWF Smackdown On Ice
Glengarry Glen Ross On Ice
The Christie Brinkley/Chuck Norris Infomercial On Ice
"Don't Tase Me, Bro" On Ice
The Battle of Midway On Ice (reenactment)
Dark Side of the Moon On Ice
The O.J. Simpson Kidnapping Trial, Live, On Ice
The Daytona 500 On Ice
TLC's What Not to Wear On Ice
Ken Burns' The Civil War On Ice

and, in a final ironic twist,

Al Gore's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, On Ice

Dem Bones, Dem Bones

2007-03-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

Here is Muley himself on a recent visit to a medical facility in Dallas, posing with someone he met there. Is this new friend of Muley's:

A) Tiffany Torso, the famous runway model, visiting the diet lab;

B) Tooten Myohn Horn, famed Egyptian pharoah whose tomb was recently pilfered; or

C) Bones McPhalanges, veteran Halloween costume model?

You tell me.

Somewhat Germane Quote of the Day:

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap."
 --Cynthia Heimel

Can They Do "The Scream" Next?

2007-02-14T14:15:00.000-08:00

Muley has been walking softly and carrying a big bottle of Zicam, trying to bat away a nasty cold that has already toyed with most of the other members of the Muley family. I've got some decent post ideas backing up in my brain, but just haven't had the energy yet to sit down and do something thoughtful and cogent. So, here's something flippant and superfluous.

It's another story to bolster my belief that lots of computer geeks have way too much time on their hands. According to a story on the BBC website, the aforementioned geeks (from the University of Amsterdam, where they've most likely invented the world's first wooden basketball sneakers) have figured out a way to use a computer to answer the long-debated question, "Just what the heck is the Mona Lisa smiling about, anyway?" While we still don't know who or what caused her sly little crinkle of the lips, the experts have determined that, by analyzing her smile, Mona was "83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry." Personally, I think that the rationale behind that conclusion is 73% silly, 17% misdirected, 8% questionable and %2 somehow causing my big toe to itch.

Quote of the Day:

"My all time favorite similes … come from the hardboiled-detective fiction of the 40s and 50s, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include … 'I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief' ( by Raymond Chandler)."

--Stephen King, in On Writing

It's a Clock. It's Cool.

2007-01-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

I found this today on John Gushue's blog. It's called a timeline clock. Moving from right to left, it shows the movement of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years...you get the idea. I guess you could use this as a screensaver if you wanted to, but I'd probably just sit there staring at it all day, getting nothing done.

Not that that's a bad thing, mind you.

Quote of the Day:

"I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on."

--Rosanne Barr

1927 Blog-a-Thon: I'm In

2007-01-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

As the years go by, I become more and more interested in learning about America during the 1920s. It seems that so many things I enjoy, or at least am intrigued by, either started or flowered during that time -- early jazz from artists like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, silent comedies featuring Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, commercial radio broadcasts, Babe Ruth...the list goes on and on.

That's why I was pleased, then, when I was browsing a great new blog I've found called The Sheila Variations and learned about something called the 1927 Blog-a-Thon. It's being hosted by a blog movie critic and old movie afficionado named "Goatdog" at his blog. Here, he explains the simple rules for the Blog-a-Thon:

You're invited to take part in a blogathonic celebration of the year that changed Hollywood: 1927 saw, among other things, the beginning of sync sound, the last great silents, and the birth of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Over the weekend of March 23-25, 2007, post something pertaining to film in 1927: a film released that year, a great performance, something historical—whatever strikes your fancy, as long as you can connect it to both film and 1927. All bloggers or writers are welcome, even if you don't normally write about film. During the blessed weekend, email me a link to your post, and I'll link to all of the entries as they come in.

My mind is already buzzing with possible 1927 film topics that I can research and write about. It should be fun.

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2007-01-12T10:20:00.000-08:00

Blue Hawaii

If you think you’ve got it bad paying your rent or writing the mortgage check, it would be worse if you lived in Hawaii. I just read an article in the January 11 Wall Street Journal which says that median rents in Hawaii are the highest in the nation. How high? Well, the going monthly rate for a two-bedroom apartment is about $1,901. That means you’d be paying $22,812 a year for rent on what’s probably a little crackerbox apartment.

Considering that the average wage for Hawaiian workers is just $36,355 a year (before taxes), then you can see why more and more people in Hawaii are becoming homeless, despite the fact that they hold down full-time jobs. The article says that many of them are setting up tents on public beaches and living there, which sort of takes something away from the postcard pretty image of Hawaii most people have.

One big reason rents – and housing prices in general – are so high in Hawaii, of course, is that land is quite scarce, and very rich types from the U.S., Japan and elsewhere have been driving prices up by buying vacation homes, or buying normal apartment complexes and transforming them into super-pricey condos.

To a slightly lesser extent, I’ve heard this same sort of problem exists in high-rent parts of California, where land prices and rents are so dear that regular workers – even people like professors, who don’t make chump change – can’t even live in the cities they work in, and have to drive in many miles each day because they have to go all the way out into Hicksville to be able to find affordable housing.

Thank goodness that housing prices in Central Texas are still a very affordable bargain compared to the rest of the U.S.

Did These Guys Get Hit By a Pitch Too Often?

I wasn’t too surprised this week when the news came out that former St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire was soundly rejected by the baseball writers who voted for the newest inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame. McGwire’s name was included on just 128 of the 545 ballots cast, a 23.5 percent showing that wasn’t even close to the 75 percent needed to get him into the Hall.

I wasn’t surprised McGwire got left out, despite the fact that he broke Roger Maris’s season home run total of 61, because of all the doubts about whether he took steroids. What did surprise me – no, make that what did astound me – was what I read on the chart the papers printed of the baseball players with the all-time highest percentages of approving votes for the Hall of Fame.

What I couldn’t believe was not the names of the players who got the highest percentage of votes. I mean, they’re baseball legends - guys like Nolan Ryan and Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and Hank Aaron. What is amazing to me is that none of these greats were voted in unanimously.

For example, take Babe Ruth, who arguably was the most famous American baseball player, if not the best player ever. When it came time for Ruth to be considered for the Hall of Fame, he was named on 215 of the 226 ballots, a 95.13 percentage. This means that there were 11 baseball writers (from Mars? Uranus?) who didn’t think Babe Ruth was worthy of being chosen for the Hall of Fame on his first eligibility. What sports writer, might I ask, could have been unconvinced that Babe Ruth deserved the Hall of Fame?

Ruth isn’t the only legend that’s been snubbed this way. Sixteen writers didn’t think Johnny Bench had the stuff for the Hall of Fame. Five writers snubbed Tom Seaver, six vetoed Nolan Ryan, four said no to Ty Cobb. Even Hank Aaron –– still the all-time career home run champion – was deemed unworthy of the Hall of Fame by nine professional sports writers.

I mean, what kind of nutcases are these guys? And what publications did they write for? Mad magazine?

Quote of the Day:

“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

--James Goldsmith

My Checkout Lane Fantasies

2007-01-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

I might have mentioned on this blog before that I do most of the grocery shopping for the Muley family. I know this is somewhat unusual for a married guy to admit, but since I like to cook, and I like to experiment with new recipes, and most of the time I really enjoy grocery shopping (or at least don't hate it as much as most guys do), I try to pull my weight and help Mrs Muley with the chores by offering to buy the groceries.

I tell you all this only as an introduction. During my frequent trips to buy groceries, at both a huge "Mart-type" store as well as a huge chain grocery store, I have noticed that all of the checkers ask each customer the same thing at the beginning of the checkout process: "Did you find everything that you need?"

Every single time, even when I have been unable to locate a number of items, either because they don't carry that brand, or are just temporarily out, I invariably smile (and lie) by responding, "Yes." And I have never heard another customer ever do anything else except say "Yes," too, when that question was asked.

I am sure that all of these checkers are not asking this same question by random chance. Undoubtedly, they have been instructed by the management to ask this of every poor sap who wheels his cart up to the line. But lately I have begun to wonder: WHY are these checkers told to ask this? What is the purpose?

I mean, let's say a customer approaches the checkout line, begins unloading groceries, is asked, "Did you find everything that you need?," and answers, "No, in fact, I was looking for the Porky Pie Farms 32-ounce jar of pickled pig's feet, and you're all out"? What would happen next?

My guess is that the sullen 18-year-old checker girl with the tattoos and the lip piercings would then just stare at the customer silently for a few seconds before replying, "Oh...bummer," before resuming dragging the food across the scanner. Or maybe she would ask one of the 18-year-old stockboys with the permanently attached blaring iPod to go look for the missing item, after which he would report back on its absence, followed by the checker replying,"Oh...bummer."

That's probably what would happen, but that's boring. My imagination has come up with some wonderful things that could happen when I said items were missing (if this were a perfect world):

1. A rotating light on the checkstand begins flashing, like the ones on Las Vegas slot machines, and the store manager comes up to me, gives me a crisp $100 bill, and explains it is the company's "Thanks For Telling the Truth" gift. He then takes my name and enters me in a drawing to win a dream home, a Hawaiian vacation and a guest starring role on "CSI."

2. The manager comes up, apologizes profusely for not having the item in stock, then pulls up his shirt and says, "Okay, look, hit me as hard as you want. I deserve it. No, come on, I can take it. Hit me a good one, right in the ol' gut."

3. The store manager comes out, apologizes profusely for not having the item, then offers me psychological counseling free of charge to help me deal with any feelings of distress or loss I might be experiencing. If I agree, I am guided to a small, plush room in back of the management offices, where a smiling psychologist has me lie on a couch while asking me to "share my pain" and "express my anger without fear of communal reprisal." If I seem to tear up a bit, I am offered my choice of day-old bakery items free of charge.

4. When the manager determines what department of the store the missing item is in, the supervisor of that department is quickly summoned to the front, and an announcement is made over the loudspeaker that "a punishment session will take place in five minutes next to the green vegetables." All the customers rush to where a portable stage has quickly been assembled. If this is the supervisor's first or second offense, he or she is let off with a light flogging, issued by a large woman dressed in a leather bustier and face mask, brandishing a thick bullwhip. If this is the department supervisor's third offense, a group of stockboys is issued loaded rifes and the offender is executed by firing squad (after punching out on the time clock, of course).

5. The last one is my ultimate fantasy. When I tell the checker about the item I could not find, she pushes a large red button under her register, and many things happen simultaneously: the doors into and out of the store automatically close tight, sirens begin to wail, primary lighting is shut off, and a voice over the loudspeaker blares, "This is an emergency product lockdown. I repeat, this is an emergency product lockdown. Everyone remain still until further notice."

At the same time, a message goes out to the company's main regional distribution center, listing the store number and the name and UPC product code of the missing item. Within seconds, the computer retrieval system drops the item on a conveyer belt and delivers it to a team of waiting store personnel dressed in emergency flight suits and survival gear. They hop into a helicopter waiting on a nearby helipad, and within minutes they fly to the store and land on the roof.

As I watch, amazed, a skylight opens above the checkout line where I still stand, a rope is dropped, and a man rappels down, landing directly in front of me. He bends down, kisses my feet repeatedly, then gets up and hands me my 32-ounce jar of pig's feet.

Before being pulled back up to his waiting helicopter, he looks me straight in the eyes and asks, "Sir, was there anything else you couldn't find today?"

And I say, "Well, there was this new brand of fat-free yogurt I'd heard about..."

Chicken Cordon Bleu Monday

2007-01-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

Another gem from Savage Chickens.

Self-inflicted Book Meme

2007-01-05T16:50:00.000-08:00

I imagine that taking the time and trouble to fill out a lengthy meme simply because you came across it yourself on someone else's site (and not because a friend tagged you with it, and you only complete it so that the guilt caused by your contemplation of ignoring it entirely will cease oozing out of your pores like pus) is considered bad form, or possibly a sign of lunacy, such as calling up a telemarketer and begging them (please! please!) to tell you about all the sweet deals they have to offer you.

However, when I was on my "Reacquaint Myself with the Blogosphere" tour today, I came across a book meme on Pages Turned called the Calvino Meme, and it intrigued me so much I decided to fill it out, as if it had been sent to me by a fellow blogger I owed money to.

And, in the same spirit in which I found it, I will not create any more bad karma in the world by tagging any of you with it. If you choose to answer it on your blog, it's your own pus. I mean fault.

Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages

The Divine Comedy by Dante

I want to read it, even though I’ve heard it’s not all that funny.

Bleak House by Dickens

I have made a life commitment to read all the novels of Charles Dickens, but for some anal retentive reason I am sticking to a resolve to read them in order of publication. I figure that if I don’t do this, I’ll never get around to finding the wherewithal to tackle such dull entries as Barnaby Rudge, which I’ve already slogged through. I’ve heard so much about what a great, entrancing masterpiece Bleak House is, but I’m only now reading Martin Chuzzlewit, so I’ve got a ways to go before I can tackle Bleak and not feel somewhat guilty.

The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Van Loon

When I was a young schoolboy, a couple of the other bookish kids I ran around with at Frostwood Elementary in Houston and I had a contest to see who could finish reading this tome, the thickest book we could find in the school library. It's not really all that long by adult standards (especially if you've read Tom Clancy or one of Dickens' doorstops), but for some reason I've never been able to get further than a few chapters into it.

Far from the Madding Crowd by Hardy
Ulysses by Joyce

The Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success

The Proven Way to Lose Weight, Have Great Sex and Make a Fortune By Doing Whatever You Fancy at the Moment, However Self-indulgent and Trivial

I can’t find this magical classic anywhere, no matter how hard I search.

The Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case

The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary

I want the real shelf-sagging McCoy, not the thing on compact disc. I want a dictionary you have to carry in a wheelbarrow.

The Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer

Does this mean that you put them aside because they're so dull you could wait six months to read them without any problem? Or are they so good and juicy that you're "saving" them for leisurely (ha!) vacation reading? I'm not sure, so I can't answer this.

The Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves

I'm collecting the entire All-American Ads series of books by Taschen. They each have hundreds of wonderful, full-color magazine ads from a decade or two of the 20th century, which offer a neat look at what kinds of things ordinary folks spent their time dreaming and partaking of. I own the ones for the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but they're somewhat pricey, and I haven't bought more yet. I still need the ones for 1900-1919, the 1920s, the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. There's not one yet for the 1990s.

The Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified

Old books of etiquette, such as the ones by Emily Post. It's amazing how things taken entirely for granted today were considered weird or downright scandalous just a few decades ago. For example, in the edition released the year I was born (1960), it says that public airings of buttocks cleavage and multiple facial piercings were not acceptable at a cotillion.

Any kind of pop-up books, the more intricate and innovative the better.

Books Read Long Ago That It’s Now Time to Re-read

All the novels of Jane Austen, especially Pride and Prejudice

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, one of my all-time favorites and one of the few books that made me laugh so hard I hurt.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Many of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Books That If You Had More Than One Life You’d Certainly Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered

The 11-volume, colorful and quite dusty railroad train of books on my top shelf known collectively as The Story of Civilization by the Durants, which I bought cheap at a Barnes and Noble sale many years ago and have yet to crack.

Quote of the Day:

"If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms around their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.”

--Charles Spurgeon

Is Book Browsing an Endangered Pastime?

2007-01-04T17:26:00.000-08:00

Since re-entering the blogosphere a few days ago after many months away, I’ve been busy checking through the blogs of some people I had read regularly back in the days. It’s been sort of like showing up at a high school reunion after many years – some people are exactly the same, while others have changed.

For one thing, there must be some kind of jammin', fertile electro-emissions coming from the computer screens when someone visits a blog site, because it seems at least half of the women whose sites I used to visit are now pregnant. In fact, most seem to be ready to deliver any day. There’s apparently been some very productive time spent away from the keyboard in the past half year or so. You rascals, you.

And I just about did one of those classic Oliver Hardy big-eyed double takes when I read the incredible news that Jeff was engaged. Man, people are getting together every which way around here! Did my mere absence cause all of this? (By the way, congratulations, Jeff).

My topic of the day, if I must have one, is books. Specifically, old, used, second-hand books, and the reading of them. In visiting my old cyber haunts, I came across this link to an essay by a Canadian, David Warren, lamenting the demise of antiquarian booksellers. An excerpt:

The Internet has been taking over their function -- inefficiently, since the main point of visiting a second-hand store is to discover books, not track them down. But the real cause lies deeper. Today, we have, especially among university graduates, a full generation of people who cannot read a book. This is especially true of graduates in the humanities, who have the additional disability of never having been exposed to one. They have learned only “theory,” from things that are not books. And their money is reserved for other “consumer durables.”

I also can relate to his description of his book acquisition habits, although I’m probably not as successful a winnower:

I once had a large library, of which I was inordinately proud. Thanks to accidents and vagaries of postmodern life, I now have a much smaller library, but one that has through the winnowing of necessity become more truly useful. So many books that I only piously hoped to read, went on to other pious hopers, leaving me only a core to which I cling, as to an identity.

If you’re like me, someone who actually enjoys spending hours wandering around a used bookstore or a large public or university library, just browsing the aisles to see what’s on them, then you’ve probably already gotten the feeling that this is an endangered pastime. More and more libraries are ditching their “physical” books, which take up space and must regularly be cleaned and re-bound, for “electronic” books that can be accessed so cleanly and easily in the four square feet of space it takes to support an Internet portal.

I work as a volunteer for my local public library’s used book sale. It’s our job throughout the year to sort and store all of the used books people donate. I was surprised to learn just how many of those discarded books are from the public library itself. Their only sin is that they’re not new or “hot” books, possibly covering subjects or by authors that are no longer in style, and I guess, therefore, irrelevant to the modern reader. It’s been eye-opening to me to see what librarians these days think isn’t worth saving shelf space for.

At the college where I work, long-range plans are being studied that would make indiscriminate browsing of the type I enjoy almost impossible. They’re thinking of one day going to an “off-site book retrieval system” of some sort. What that means is that they won’t actually get rid of the physical books, they’ll just store them where the public can’t get at them. To do so, we’ll have to fill out a request slip with the title, author and call number, and then some sort of mechanical Rube Goldberg contraption will reach into the bowels of the storage warehouse, put the book on a moving pathway and eventually deliver it to the circulation desk. That way, the library folks can get rid of those big shelves and have lots of extra room for more couches and computer terminals and espresso machines.

The main problem with this system, and with visiting electronic used booksellers on the Internet, is that it eliminates, or at least severely impairs, browsing with no specific end in mind. You pretty much have to know either the title of the book you’re looking for, or its author. There will be no more of, say, wanting to see what types of books the library or bookstore might have on one subject, and then getting completely captivated by books on another entirely different subject that were noticed along the way.

I have found some of my favorite books and authors by sheer indiscriminate browsing. I’ll go into the library looking for one certain book, find it, and then start looking at the books standing nearby on the shelves. If I notice an interesting title, or an attractive or exotic binding, I’ll pull out the book and start flipping through. Many times I’m disappointed, but I cherish those times when I find some author, possibly many years dead and unread for generations, who tickles my fancy.

I mean, how in the world are you supposed to pick out an attractive art book – or a book to read to your child before bedtime – unless you can phsyically pick them up and flip through them? Yes, yes, I know you can conceivably look at any book online, but how much time and trouble does that take? You can take down a book and decide quickly by looking into it if it’s not for you, then pick up the next and repeat the process. Imagine how much more complicated (and how less enjoyable) that task is online.

Of course, I know that you can go into a big chain bookstore like Barnes & Noble or Borders and browse to your heart's content. And if the book you're in the mood for is something recent, or something eternally popular, then you might very well be in luck. But you'll find none of the quirky, old, forgotten books that reside in libraries or used bookshops. And the selection will be a mile wide and an inch deep. Take the works of Charles Dickens. Sure, almost any chain bookstore will stock copies of Great Expectations or David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. But how many will stock every one of Dicken's novels? And will there be all those interesting books about Dickens and his life and times, and the other books analyzing Dickens' works, which a good library will have close at hand? Doubtful.

Oh, well. At least down here in Texas we have the Half Price Books chain, which is where I spend a sizeable amount of my disposable income each year (although I have to drive to either Austin or Dallas to visit one). They seem to be doing a boffo business, so I don’t see them disappearing anytime soon, even if the public libraries here go with one of these soulless retrieval systems.

...As I Was Saying Before I Was So Rudely Interrupted

2007-01-01T12:38:00.000-08:00

Well, it was like this, see. We were in the drive-in lane of a Wendy's in Albuquerque, waiting on an order of Frostys and Biggie Fries, when an incredibly bright light filled our car, blinding us all. Next thing I knew, I'm strapped on some sort of table under a lot of blinking lights and whirring machinery. I'm covered in what feels like last week's spaghetti, and some huge creature with a face full of eybealls and tentacles is poking and prodding me and making noises like I'd never heard before.

Of course, at first I thought it was all a bad dream brought on by too little sleep and too many saturated fats and hydrogenated solids. But I soon realized that my worst fear was coming true -- my family and I had been abducted by aliens. Large, rude, flatulent aliens, at that.

It's been an incredible five months, I can tell you. We were poked, probed, examined and forced to do any number of nasty chores by our captors. And believe me, it's never fun to wash underwear, but try doing it for beings with 23 legs! And don't get me started about their fondness for watching bad television. We eventually understood enough of their language to discover that they were supposedly sent here from planet Qrxttblavn to study human behavior, but the only shows they seemed to watch were reruns of "ALF" and episodes of WIlliam Shatner's new game show.

We'd still be there, laundering Swiss cheese undies while hovering miles above the Earth behind an invisibility shield, if it hadn't been for the untimely death of soul singer James Brown on Christmas Day. Our alien captors revealed that the Godfather of Soul was actually their leader, in human disguise, and explained that they were required to return immediately to Qrxttblavn to report the death and prepare for a national year of mourning and daily public singings of "Papa's Got a Brand-New Bag." On their way out of the galaxy, they unceremonially dumped the Muley family in the parking lot of an abandoned K-Mart in Wheeling, West Virginia. After a bit of using our thumbs, we returned to Waco on New Year's Eve, just in time to ring in 2007.

Of course, one of the first things I wanted to do was check in on Muley's World with an account of my experiences. I sure didn't want anyone to think I was some sort of lazy, self-absorbed, disloyal, egg-sucking bum who would simply walk away and neglect his blog for five months or more. No, sirree.

So, I'm glad to be back. I hope all of you had a great Christmas and New Year's Eve. I'll try to check in with everyone and see what's been going on in my absence. Take care.

Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Fe

2006-07-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Muley family is heading out tomorrow on the second leg of our World Vacation Tour 2006. This time, we'll be seeing some sights in New Mexico -- Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque -- with the Muley grandparents. The crew that all rode together in a van last summer for a week in Branson is back on the road! I'll try to post about our crazy adventures when I return in a week or so. Ya'll take care.

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2006-07-03T14:11:00.000-07:00

FAILURE TO PLAN IS PLANNING TO FAIL

Sometimes at work I pass by a room where they do training sessions for employees – you know, those sessions where they teach you things such as how to be more efficient on the job, how to manage your time and how to deal with psychopathic nut case bosses without involving the company health plan.

Maybe I’m just the cynic here, but I don’t think those training videos and teaching sessions really do what they’re supposed to do. Yes, the people who attend them might be fired up and full of new ideas while they’re sitting there missing work under the spell of a good instructor-motivator, but from what I’ve seen, about 99 percent of what they’ve learned never sticks with them for the long haul. Sure, sometimes they pick up a tip here or there that they end up using (“Big yellow sticky notes get seen easier than small ones do. USE THEM LIBERALLY!”) but I think most of the time, the trainees believe the trainers are just blowing smoke. And let’s face it, a person who has spent his lifetime being a messy, unorganized goof-off is not going to turn into an organized, trailblazing captain of industry after watching just one Stephen Covey video. When all the attempts at behavior modification are over, the driven perfectionists go back to nosing the grindstone, and the goof-offs go back to playing Internet poker and downloading photos of Uma Thurman.

CAN ANYONE FIX MY BROKEN BETAMAX? I NEED IT TO CHECK OUT THIS "LAW AND ORDER" SHOW

When sociologists discuss how different people affect or are affected by trends, some are the trendsetters, others are the “early adapters,” and then there are the sad people called something like the “clueless foot-draggers.” I’m in the last group. For example, I have just recently watched the first few episodes of the first season of “Alias” for the first time. I kept hearing how good the show was (like I incessantly keep hearing how good “24” is), so, courtesy of Netflix, I put my toe in the water. Now, I won’t say I’m absolutely hooked on “Alias,” but I think I could easily get there with a little more exposure.

DON'T WORRY, NO BLOG STUFF WAS ON IT

Speaking of how I adapt to technology, here’s how I can get smacked when I try to be too trendy. People here at work had told me I needed to have one of those little USB stick thingies to store my personal data on instead of the big, clunky Zip disks I’d been using. I kept resisting, but finally, I realized that since my PC at home doesn’t have a Zip drive (like my Mac at work does), I would need one of those stick thingies to transfer data back and forth from work to home.

So, I bought one, and loaded it up with all my stuff – my history research, my fiction writing, my essay ideas, my freelance journalism articles, even my haiku, which so far has never seen the light of day. The stick had a neat little hole to allow you to put it on your key ring, which I did. Well, the other day I looked at my key ring and found that the part of the stick that has the USB port and the memory was missing. I looked in a few obvious spaces, but I couldn’t find it.

I’m assuming that it popped of my key ring when I pulled my keys out somewhere to get in the car. So, it most likely was or is lying around some parking lot somewhere. I hope it gets crushed quickly, but if someone actually finds it and accesses the information inside, I have two competing fears. One is that they’ll think the writing inside is terrible, and hit me up for a ransom payment to prevent them from making it public. The other fear is that they’ll turn it over to a literary agent (with their name on it) and make big money as the newest star of the New Yorker. I’m expecting the first scenario, mind you.

I SEE DEAD PEOPLE (AT 30 FRAMES A SECOND)

Have you ever looked at an old movie or at old newsreel footage – maybe from the very early 1900s – and thought that all the people shown on the film, even the children, are almost certainly dead now, and that you’re watching something that doesn’t exist any more? Well, I have. Maybe I’m just morbid, but sometimes I get the idea that I'm watching the equivalent of theatre from beyond the grave.

NOW YOU KNOW...THE REST OF THE STORY

I was watching one of those reality shows on Animal Planet the other night – with a name like “Animal Cops” or something. Most of it was pretty routine stuff – ASPCA officers going after animal abusers or stray kittens caught in drainpipes. But then, the last segment surprised me. A police squad busted an illegal, high-stakes poker game, featuring those differing breed of dogs you see on the paintings everywhere smoking big cigars. Boy, that was exciting TV.

This Is Why Willie and Waylon Sing That Song

2006-06-30T20:45:00.000-07:00

Cowboy Muley, about one year old. I hadn't started dipping snuff yet, but I could sure hogtie a mean diaper.

A Smattering of Quotes

2006-06-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

I've been sort of an ADHD kinda guy lately when it comes to my reading -- haphazardly looking through all sorts of volumes and pulling out items to make a very disparate gumbo that has probably not enlightened me much, but has left me with a few tasty quotes to share.

--------------------------------

I've seen a lot of references to the French writer-philosopher Jacques Barzun lately in books of conservative thought, and I finally decided to check out a book of his essays, The Culture We Deserve, to see what he's made of. This was a quote from an essay titled "Exeunt the Humanities." It deals with something I see more and more of these days -- people devoting enormous amounts of time becoming almost obsessive experts on narrow little topics and hobbies, while remaining ignorant of a lot of seemingly "big picture" things in the world around them.

"The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by "buffs" and "fans" of all species -- the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke. They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts -- if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor."

--Jacques Barzun

If I am in danger of becoming one such obsessive pedant, it might be due to buying and collecting far too many old books. Here's another (more positive) way I found to look at my bibliophilia.

"Collecting books is like collecting other people's minds, like having people on the shelves -- only, you can just put them away when you want to."

--John Prizeman

There's probably as many definitions of creativity as there are people who claim to have that elusive gift in spades. Here's one description of what a creative person should look like that I found interesting.

"Creative people: 1, have their energy field accessible; 2, have the ability to tap and release unconscious and preconscious thought; 3, are able to withstand being thought of as abnormal or eccentric; 4, are more sensitive; 5, have a richer fantasy life and greater involvement in daydreaming; 6, are enthusiastic and impulsive; 7, show signs of synaesthesia (e.g., tasting color, seeing sound, hearing smells, etc.); 8, show different brain wave patterns than the less creative, especially during creative activity; 9, when confronted with novelty of design, music, or ideas, they get excitied and involved (less creative people get suspicious and hostile); 10, when given a new solution to a problem, they get enthused, suggest other ideas, overlook details and problems (less creative students analyze the defects rather than explore potentials."

--E. Paul Torrence and Laura K. Hall, Journal of Creative Behavior, 1980.

I must admit that in my focused daily trek to check off my "to do" list, too often I end up walking with my eyes watching my feet, intent on getting from point A to point B, and fail to see the divine light Thomas Merton talks about here.

"Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything -- in people and in things and in nature and in events...we cannot be without Him. It's impossible. The only thing is, we don't see it."

--Thomas Merton, 20th century Catholic monk

Besides not making enough time for God, I find it difficult to make as much time as I'd like to spend enriching my mind. As I plan to cut my overgrown back yard this week, I ponder this quote and wonder if its author managed to sell it to his wife.

"A man who wants time to read and write must let the grass grow long."

--Sloan Wilson

Maybe all I really need to do is listen to this next bit of wisdom.

"I think people don't place a high enough value on how much they are nurtured by doing whatever it is that totally absorbs them."

--Jean Shinoda Bolen

I love the NIV translation of the Bible, but I've recently done a little reading in the English Standard Version (ESV) translation, and have become a fan of some of its simple but eloquent prose. Here's a familiar verse in the ESV that I think sums up a Christian's marching orders quite well.

"Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life."

--Philippians 2:14-16 (ESV)

This is one of the best definitions of faith I've come across.

"Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation."

--Elton Trueblood, Puritan minister

Now for some fun quotes to wrap things up. First, who do you think was the most famous person in this encounter?

"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph."

--Shirley Temple

Have you read or heard anything about Joe Simpson, the stage father of singer Jessica Simpson? Some people have said Jessica's dad is downright creepy, and this quote from Dad about his famous daughter's...um, assets...might be one reason they think that.

"She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she's sexy in both. She's got double D's! You can't cover those suckers up!"

--Joe Simpson, on daughter Jessica

Finally, you might not know that when country singer Willie Nelson was starting his career in the 1950s, he worked for a time as a country DJ at station KCNC in Fort Worth. Here's how Willie opened his radio show back then. I wish I could have heard this live coming over the car speakers at the drive-in.

"This is your ol' cotton pickin', snuff dippin', tobacco chewin', coffee pot dodgin', dumplin' eatin', frog giggin' hillbilly."

No, I'm Not Dead, Or Even Rotting

2006-06-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

I've just been away from the computer for awhile -- for a week, due to vacation, then since Monday snowed under with all the stuff you have to do at home and work when you commit the rash act of taking a week off from the rat race. I will try to get a decent post in here soon.

Random Observations and Trivial Events

2006-06-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

EVER FORGOTTEN AN ANNIVERSARY?

I guess it's a sign of how little time I've been able to devote to this blog in the last few months, but my one-year blogging anniversary came and went and I didn't even notice it. I knew it was sometime in May (May 10), but by the time I checked for the date in late May it was too late. And here I am waiting until early June to even mention it.

Like most people, I didn't have much idea of what I was getting into when I started blogging. I started hot and heavy, writing at least one post a day for the first two or three months, then slowly began to slack off. Around Christmas 2005 I abruptly quit altogether for awhile, then slowly got back into it on a "when time is available" basis, which is I guess where I still am.

Despite some frustrations, I'm glad I began blogging. I've met some of the nicest, funniest, smartest and most interesting people. I run into a few wackos along the way as well, but that happens just about anywhere these days.

WILL THE TWINKLE LIGHTS BE OUT NEXT WEEK?

It just gets earlier and earlier. I was at Wal-Mart this evening and notice that they are already selling calendars for 2007. Last year it seemed that the new calendars came out around Independence Day, but now they're not even waiting until the present year is half over.

MISFORTUNE COOKIES

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant today, and once again, all of the "fortunes" contained in the fortune cookies were lame as could be. They really aren't even fortunes, for one thing -- more like maxims or proverbs. "You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," "When opportunity knocks, make sure you're listening," gems like that. They apparently don't have the guts anymore to say things like "You will meet a dark and handsome stranger," or "You will come into a lot of money soon." Besides seeing some honest-to-goodness positive predictions thrown in, I'd really like to see some dramatic "mis"-fortunes thrown in as well, such as:

"You will soon lose bladder control"

"An expensive part on your car will malfunction by the end of the month"

"The meat you just ate was not quite cooked thoroughly"

and

"Your spouse is having an affair. Check their cell phone records"

I WANT MINE VOICED BY THAT GUY WITH THE DEEP, SERIOUS VOICE

I got to thinking the other day how wonderful movie trailers are. They take a two-hour movie, and skillfully condense the parts of most interest, bad and good, tragic and humorous, into a fast-paced 90-second production. A skillful editor can take a terrible, boring movie, pick out the few good parts, and make a trailer that will convince you you want to see the thing.

Why can't everyone on the planet have their own trailer? This would take your life, including your character traits, hobbies, interests and quirks, and do a 90-second overview that would be available for viewing by anyone else on the planet. Anytime you met someone new -- in church, at school, on the dating scene -- you could simply view their trailer soon afterward and get the story of their life in a dramatic, exciting yet condensed form. Next time you met them, you'd be better prepared, see? Anyone interested?

To Everything Turn, Turn, or Do the Hokey Pokey

2006-05-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

It's a sad day in the Muley household today. Sad not because of anyone's death or injury, or because of any financial setback or career-related tragedy, but sad because today is the last day that we have a child in elementary school.

We've had two children in elementary school, and it's hard to remember a time when we haven't been there dropping off or picking up, or attending kindergarten graduations, Christmas programs, open houses and parent-teacher conferences. There's lots of memories of making our daughters' day by buying a special lunch and bringing it up to them as we ate with them and their friends at the small little chairs in the cafeteria. I can remember me and Mrs. Muley being room parents, bringing up cookies and drinks for classroom parties, and even one time I was persuaded to sit down in a rocking chair and read a story to the eager group of little first graders gathered around me on the floor.

What's strange is that our 10-year-old daughter is quite sad to be leaving elementary school. Now, when I was a kid, I was always happy on the last day of school, no matter what milestone might have been passed. But both my daughter and her best friend have been somber and even teary-eyed this week when the subject of the impending end of school -- and the farewell to their elementary school days -- came up. A good friend and classmate of theirs is moving to another town in a few days, so that makes it even worse.

Yesterday, Mrs. Muley and I volunteered to take time off of work and be chaperones for the fourth grade end-of-year field trip. All the students went rollerskating at the rink here in Waco and had a blast. I decided that I didn't want to spend two hours just watching kids skate, so I strapped on a battered pair of inline skates and got out onto the floor. I'm sure my daughter was probably a bit embarassed, but she'll get over it.

Looking around at all the fourth graders yesterday, it really hit me how similar, but how different, they are from my classmates when I was in fourth grade in the late 1960s. They are the same in that, well, they act like fourth graders. They boisterous and loud, and overall very happy. That world-weariness and cynicism that starts seeping in somewhere in junior high has not affected them yet. It's possibly the last pure, unadulterated spring of childhood for many of them.

However, how different these kids are from the ones I went to school with. I looked around and saw a rainbow of skin colors and backgrounds. There were black and white students, students from Hispanic, Asian and Indian backgrounds, and even three young Muslim girls who wore head coverings as they skated around the rink joyously. In my elementary school, meanwhile, located in a upper middle class suburb of Houston, we were an almost totally lily white student body. There were no blacks whatsoever, and only a few Hispanic students before anyone ever used the word "Hispanic." Our one example of true multiculturalism was a blond-headed, blue-eyed boy who had moved here from England with his parents. The only place we would have seen a group of young children as diverse as that at my daughter's school in the late 1960s would have been in a Coke commercial.

So, time passes. We'll get used to it, as we always do, but if you don't take the time and notice the changes, even if that involves a little mourning, they're likely to pass you by much too easily and quietly.

FINAL THOUGHTS: If you ever happen to find yourself being with a large group of kids at a skating rink, make sure that when they are all told to take off their skates and return them to the desk that you don't happen to walk through them as they remove said skates. I did this, and the aroma of 120 kids airing their feet after two hours of intense exercise just about brought me down on the psychedelic carpet. A form of this airborne substance is probably among the biological weapons Saddam is suspected of once hiding.

Also, if you men out there want to take on a new and fairly unique physical challenge, try using a men's restroom while wearing a pair of inline skates. I have found that it's a bit of a challenge on a tile floor to navigate a urinal while eight wheels are where your ten toes normally are. You sort of end up just rolling slowly back and forth and hoping your aim is true.

No Pain, No Brain, Again

2006-05-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

As I am writing this, rivulets of hard-earned sweat are coursing down my ruddy face. No, I'm not being mugged, and I'm not listening to rap lyrics (sort of the same thing, don't you think?), but I've just completed a nice long jog around campus, and I'm trying to cool off here at the public computer terminals in the Student Center.

I have begun the folly I begin about this time every year. You see, about six or seven years ago, I was someone who managed to lose about 55 pounds through nothing more than eating a sensible diet and running and lifting weights every week. I was thrilled at my success and my theretofore missing self-discipline, and physically I felt better at 39 and 40 than I did at 22.

During the following years, I managed to stay on a maintenance program that kept my metabolism high enough that I could pig out every now and then and not worry about gaining weight. I was never quite as faithful to the regimen as I was at my time of lowest poundage, but every week I managed to run three or four times and lift weights at least once. I mean, I was not in fear of answering my doorbell and seeing Richard Simmons beckoning to me with a forklift.

In the past few years, however, something has happened. That resolve I had seven years ago started gradually to slip away. I ran and lifted weights less and less, and although I still ate fairly healthy, I pigged out like someone with only a higher metabolism should.

The bottom line is, I'm now about 20 pounds above my "maintenance" weight, and about 33 pounds from where I was at my leanest, and where I'd love to get back to if I could. After a spring that saw me gradually exercising less and less, I've told myself (for about the 10th week in a row) that I've got to get back on the fitness schedule. No ifs, ands and butts.

Of course, I always end up doing these exercise comebacks the wrong way. It would be best to start a stepped-up exercise program in the winter, or at least in the early spring. That's when the weather is too cold to do a lot of yardwork (freeing up spare time), and on days when it's not actually freezing, the weather is so cool outside that it's a pleasure to go and run.

But do I take advantage of that, like an intelligent person would? No. In the winter and early spring, I'm indoors all the time, relaxing or working, and a bathing suit hardly ever gets put on. So, those extra pounds aren't as much of an embarrassment. Besides, I can hide out in nice wram sweaters, and no one seems to notice.

But when summer approaches, the sweaters come off, and I realize that in a matter of a few short weeks I will begin escorting my kids to beaches and pools and water parks. I WILL BE SEEN IN PUBLIC LOOKING LIKE LUMPY RUTHERFORD FROM 'LEAVE IT TO BEAVER.' So, I put on my shorts, run out into the humidity and heat of a late Texas spring, and begin huffing and puffing.

I know that I don't have the metabolism I did even a year ago. Then, I could run around this 500+ acre campus, and not have to stop even once. The only time I would stop was if I felt like it, or if I needed to remove a dog's teeth from my leg. Today, I must have stopped a dozen times. Instead of daydreaming and coming up with ideas for blog posts, stories and poems (which is what I used to do), my mind was focused instead on, Okay, I'll keep running to that big tree up there, and then I'll walk for a bit. No. No. I'm not going to make the big tree. Okay, I'll stop at the far side of the driveway. No. No. How about the near side of the driveway?"

But dang, it, I did it. More than 30 minutes, and this is my second day in a row. I feel good, especially since I also lifted weights at lunch. The only thing that is possibly a little troublesome is that the coeds I passed on the jogging trail, who normally are in iPod brain control mode and don't even notice me, seemed yesterday and today to be looking at me with a combination of shock and horror. I imagine they saw this 40-something guy, sucking in air like a broken bellows, and wondered if--eww, gross!--they were going to have to put to use their CPR training on a smelly heart attack victim. Of course, what they might really be thinking behind those horrified glances is

Rapist. Rapist! But thank goodness, an out-of-shape rapist I can easily outrun if it comes to that!

I've cooled off now, in body if not in mind, and it's time to go home. Maybe since I exercised today, I can eat a big dinner and have some of that cheesecake for dessert. Hmm...

A Smattering of Quotes

2006-05-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

In lieu of something original, here are some more quotes I've recently collected. Hope you enjoy them.

Since America's favorite pastime has begun again, here's one of my favorite movie quotes about baseball. It's said by an over-the-hill player remembering his short time in the major leagues.

"Yeah, I was in the show. I was in the show for 21 days once -- the 21 greatest days of my life. You know, you never handle your luggage in the show, somebody else carries your bags. It was great. You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains."

--Crash Davis, the minor league baseball player portrayed by Kevin Costner in "Bull Durham" (1988)

This quote from E.B. White (the author of Charlotte's Web and other classics, was bandied about a lot as an example of eerie prophecy in the days immediately following 9-11:

“A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions...Of all targets New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”

––from E.B. White’s essay “Here is New York,” 1949

I will now reveal my secret:

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

--Jules Renard

The rich, they say, are different from you and me. Here's one example why:

"I go to Bloomingdale's, to the fourth floor, and I buy 2,000 of the black bras, 2,000 of the beige, 2,000 of the white. And I ship them around between the homes and the boat and that's the end of it for maybe half a year when I have to do it all over again."

--Ivana Trump

I'm reading more and more Wendell Berry these days, and he's making me think on a number of things.

"We are destroying our country -- I mean our country itself, our land...Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us."

--Wendell Berry

I continue to give away my secrets:

"Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

--Elbert Hubbard

Finally, every now and then Hollywood celebrities let down the facade:

"With my sunglasses on, I'm Jack Nicholson. Without them, I'm fat and 60."

--Jack Nicholson