Our two grandgeniuses

Sally and I love being grandparents. My son, David, is a good dad, he's in a good marriage and has a couple of great kids, both girls. Bella was 4 in December, and Gabby will be 3 at the end of June. Bella is very smart, and by having her precedent to guide her, Gabby is ahead of the curve for her age.

One of the things about grandkids is you get to hear funny stories and I love to share. Recently David sent me a note saying that he got out his digital camera only to discover that Bella had taken some pictures. That wouldn't be a big deal, but he had shown her once how the timer worked, so she set up the camera on the coffee table, set the timer, and took pictures of herself and her sister. David also tells these stories about the pair:

The girls didn't want anything to do with the Easter bunny when they saw him at the mall. When I told them that the Easter bunny was coming to bring them stuff (to make them act good), they kept asking me if the Easter bunny would stay outside and not come in our house. I had to assure them that the Easter bunny would knock on the door while they were sleeping and give Mommy and Daddy the treats, but NOT come in the house!

They're both starting to develop their own personalities. Gabby is going to be the class clown, and is more extroverted. Bella is like me, and introverted, but thinks about things logically. I don't know if I told you, but we bought them a little table and chair set. It had to be put together. When I put the chairs together, I let Bella help me screw in the screws. Now, one of her favorite things to do is get the screwdriver and take apart the little chair and put it back together. It's only four screws, but just like the camera, you can show her once, and she remembers. Maybe she'll be an Engineer, whereas Gabby could be a lawyer-type.

Gabby won't take no for an answer, and she figures out ways to barter for what she wants. Sometimes she gets what she wants, because she makes a good case. One example, on Easter, we gave them chocolate. We let them only have a certain amount. Gabby found an extra piece of chocolate, and we told her that she had to wait until tomorrow because it was too late. Bella would have said okay and gave us the chocolate back. Gabby, on the other hand, tried to make a deal with us and said, "It's OK, just let me hold it. I'll keep it safe, and I won't let anyone eat it!". We ultimately got it back, because her attention span is still shorter than ours.

See what I mean?

What the hell are you thinking, people?

I had one of those nude-in-public dreams last night. In the first part of the dream my brother Rob and I are trying to pitch a script idea to a producer. I'm nude, but no one seems to notice. In the second part of the dream, still nude, I'm heading to the cash register at a restaurant. My wife says, "Do you have the check?" I say, "Look at me. Do I look like I'm keeping the check somewhere?" When we leave the restaurant I remember feeling sorry for the other patrons who had to look at me.

Some people make these nude dreams come true! The Internet is a place where, with a bit of looking, you can find amateur sites where exhibitionists can send in pictures of themselves, in lingerie, nude, having sexual intercourse, performing oral sex, bondage, you name it!

The sky is the limit when it comes to debauchery and compromising one's self.

Despite that, the site I am referencing has rules: No pictures of menstrual pads or blood, no stool, and no kids under 18. Well, at least they have some rules, because they don't have any rules against people making fools of themselves.

Here are some pictures I've culled off that site. It'll be nameless. I don't want to get sued by them. The people in these pictures can't sue me for public defamation because they've already defamed themselves.

Many of the folks blur their faces, crop off their heads (in the photos, not literally), wear masks or otherwise disguise themselves.

Some should disguise themselves.

Other people seem proud to be showing their goods to the world.

Did I mention the guys who like to dress up?


Some day I might see you on this site, but you'll never see me. God bless the Internet and its endless entertainment.

I did a double take when I saw this Macy's ad last week in my local newspaper. Welcome back 1960s!

That dress looks a lot like dresses my wife wore in 1969, the year we got married. Forty years later time has reversed itself and we are revisiting the '60s.

I think the skirt could be a little bit shorter. I remember them as shorter, or maybe it's just my feverish imagination. Life published some mini-skirt pictures in the '60s, not all of which are represented on their photo website. But this is one I remember from the time.

Yesterday Sally and I watched CBS Sunday Morning with a segment on the musical Hair, which is making another run at Broadway. The creators of Hair aren't the hippies they were 40 years ago, but the play looks like it's going to be a hit all over again. This time it will not only be playing for people my age, but their kids and grandkids. The kids can turn to their parents and say, "And you criticized me for being a punk?" The grandkids can say, "Jeez, and you think I'm weird!"

There's a movie coming up on the Chicago 7. If you don't remember Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, John Froines, Rennie Davis and Tom Weiner, (and Bobby Seale, who made them originally the Chicago 8) then you'll get a chance to see what we saw on the news every night as we followed their trial.

A few years ago I started noticing the boys in high school sprouting hair; they went through a short hair period, then the unruly hair started popping up on more and more young guys. It looked like the same moptop hairdos we tried to grow in the early '60s when the Beatles took us by storm in America, and that our parents and school administrators fought so hard. This time the boys grew their hair out the universal reaction was so what? Nowadays everywhere you go you see people with long hair. It doesn't look as radical now because we've had almost 50 years to get used to it.

In the 1960s rebellion was mixed with fashion. Long hair made a statement. Now it's just fashion. Now that I look like a square old man looking bemusedly upon young men with mushroom hairstyles and girls with skirt hems up to their bums, that the tables have turned. I am now what the older generation was at that time looking at us.

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Tall hair and long dresses

I wasn't surprised to see the polygamous FLDS sect open their YFZ ranch to Oprah Winfrey on Monday, March 30. It is part of a carefully orchestrated PR effort by the group. I think Oprah was sucked into the stories the women told, but to me they sounded more coached than spontaneous. They were uncomfortable with questions about jealousy among wives, and said they had to "overcome those feelings," which is the reason they were there, to progress past those very human feelings.

The whole openness thing was so opportunistic I'm surprised Oprah, who isn't dumb, was taken in.

I have lived around polygamy. I live in Sandy, Utah, the real-life town that is the hometown of the fictitious Hendrickson polygamous family of the TV show, Big Love. When I moved here in 1975 several Mormon fundamentalist (polygamist) families lived in the neighborhood. I don't think they were FLDS, but their women dressed like the FLDS women: tall hair, long dresses. They were a bunch that didn't communicate with anyone outside their group. If you were to try to talk to them in a store they wouldn't stand and chat. They'd move on. They want to be left alone. Some of it is because of the men, who are like an American Taliban. Women have their place, and their place isn't talking with outsiders or strangers. If the women don't show jealousy it doesn't mean the men don't. (And I don't for one minute believe there isn't jealousy amongst the wives.)

A lot of people feel live and let live with the polygamy community, and I'm OK with free exercise of religion as long as it doesn't involve sexual abuse of children or ritual human sacrifice. The FLDS in the Oprah piece denied knowing anyone who got married too young, but marriage was what the young girls who were interviewed aspired to.

When the FLDS lived in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, they were ignored by the law and society for decades. They could do anything they wanted, even marry girls 12, 13 or 14 years of age to older men. When Warren Jeffs was their prophet (before he became a convict) he banished several young men because they competed with the older men for the young girls. They showed up in Salt Lake City, homeless and unprepared for life outside their former community. They were called the Lost Boys. None of that was covered in the Oprah interview, and even if the question had been asked the members would have played dumb. Their goal with permitting the interview was public relations, not any revelations about dirty secrets within their families or communities.


A journalist who has covered the YFZ story had this to say in a blog last summer:

. . .the FLDS is very coercive indeed. Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet." At the very least, women who do decide to leave the sect leave without money, skills, or a friend in the world. Most of them have no choice but to leave large numbers of children behind -- children who are the property of the patriarch, and whom many of them will never see again. If a woman is even suspected of wanting to leave, she's likely to be sent away from her kids to another compound far yonder as punishment for her rebelliousness. For a woman who's been taught all her life that motherhood is her only destiny and has no real intimacy with her husband, being separated from her children this way is a sacrifice akin to death. At the very worst, death is indeed what awaits them. The FLDS preaches "blood atonement" -- the right of the patriarchs to kill apostates who dare to defy them, usually by slitting their throats. And they've done it: [Jon] Krakauer hung his entire book on the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her year-old daughter, who were both killed by her husband's brothers because Brenda rejected (and mocked) her husband's desire to take plural wives. (Warren Jeffs also liked to rouse people out of their beds in the middle of the night for dramatic mass meetings testing their readiness for the Final Judgment -- meetings that had dark shades of Jonestown.) Brenda is the only one known to have been killed, but others who've left report being threatened with the same fate. There's a whole lot more depth and nuance to this story, and I'll try to get at some of it over the next several days. But let's start with the premise that almost nothing you're hearing in the mainstream media about this group can or should be taken at face value.

--Dennis Neiwert writing in the blog Orcinus.

By going to their YFZ Ranch Oprah did more good for the FLDS than anyone else could have done. She has very high credibility, and I'm sure a lot of viewers left with a feeling about the FLDS: they're odd but harmless. But anyone fooled into thinking that the answers she got to her questions were honest is very naive, and hasn't lived around these secretive people.

Obsessive love

I've had a couple of posts recently about women who have sacrificed their families, careers, and dignity to have sex with young teenagers. I've wondered why, and what would make them throw away everything for sex with such a young partner. When it comes to sex, sometimes people just do bizarre things.

In 1977 Joyce McKinney was a worldwide tabloid sensation. She had kidnapped a Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in England, taken him a rented cottage in Devon, tied him to a bed and had sex with him repeatedly.

She spent her life savings on this endeavor. She dragged along an accomplice, a man as obsessed with her as she was with Kirk Anderson. They both ended up in jail, both ended up skipping out on their bail, getting back to the States by posing as mute Irish actors. Wow.

McKinney had been a beauty queen; although born in North Carolina she had once been Miss Wyoming. She converted to Mormonism and attended BYU, where, by some accounts, she went after Wayne Osmond of the famous singing Osmond family. Wayno said no, no, and she moved on, changing her obsession to the young, tall, dark and handsome Anderson.

If the story ended there it'd be good enough, but it actually gets better. McKinney moved back to North Carolina, and ended up in the news again when she paid to have her dead pit bull, Booger, cloned by a South Korean company. She traveled to Korea to pick up the puppies, and used the name Bernann McKinney, but the British press wasn't fooled. They realized quickly that the eccentric American woman who had paid $50,000 to get her doggie duplicated was the same American woman who had kidnapped and had sex with the Mormon missionary. She initially denied she was the same woman, but later changed her story.

Now that is a really great story of obsessive love. We've seen it in movies like Fatal Attraction, we've read about people stalking or killing the objects of their obsessions. Unfortunately, it's all too common. But rarely had the events come together like McKinney and Anderson. The images of him spread-eagled on a bed, handcuffed to the bed posts, and McKinney in a see-through negligee having her way with him were irresistible.

It was a short-lived story, though, and until she popped up again in 2008 to claim her puppies in Korea it had been mostly forgotten. Probably not by Anderson. In 1984 she was caught in Salt Lake City where Anderson lived, in what everyone assumed was another run at getting him alone. The ropes and bondage gear in her trunk led police to that conclusion.

Spending your life savings to have sex with a guy thinking that will make him yours...spending $50,000 to have a dog cloned...these are all part and parcel of obsession. When more stories surfaced about McKinney after the cloning story broke, she was shown to be a litigious person who sued others over trivial matters. Obsessive with love, and all-in-all, a real pain in the ass.

No end in sight

There're always people who think the end of the world is imminent. We used to see cartoons of guys with wild hair and beards, dressed in robes and sandals, wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR. Sometimes it's hard to take their fervor seriously.

A local group is claiming they can feel the hot breath of God on our necks because gay people want to be married. If it isn't war news from some faraway place it's crime at home. It's Internet porn; it's the drug problem; it's the economy, stupid. It's like Roseanne Roseannadanna: "It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another thing." They read signs of the end just like ancient sorcerers read the entrails of goats.

In 1964 I remember the Apocalyptic types going after the topless bathing suit. If you remember that you're as old as I am, or maybe you heard about it. In the year of the Beatles and Hard Day's Night, Johnson and Goldwater, Civil Rights marches, and the heating of the Vietnam conflict, here came a simple swimsuit that caused people to say it was the end of the world. I turned 17 that year, and still young and naive enough to think that when other people said it, especially people who I thought had more experience than me, that maybe, just maybe, they knew something I didn't. So I remember a few stabs of guilt that I was very curious about what designer Rudi Gernreich foisted on the public that caught their imagination in such a way. I was halfway sure it would bring about God's punishment in some awesome and awful way, just like the religious people were saying.

If you look at the suit in this famous photo of model Peggy Moffitt, you see it exposes the breasts, but covers expansively the rest of her naughty parts. Her navel doesn't show. Many swimsuits over the years have exposed much more, especially in the lower area, than the Gernreich suit. But it was one of those things that caught public attention and for a time caused a firestorm of controversy and talk. It also caused some public officials in places worldwide to enact ordinances that prohibited wearing the suit on a public beach.

All I can say is the folks who got upset about the topless swim suit--and it upset me, in a horny teenage boy sort of way--should have looked 45 years into the future and they would have seen that not only did the world not end, things got much, much sexier.

Now you tell me...?

I won't make you read this March 19, 2009 article about prostate-cancer testing unless you want to. Click on it to make it full size.

I was referred to my urologist by my family doc, who felt a hard node on the left side of my prostate during a routine digital rectal exam December 17, 2008. I've been getting those since I was in my forties. I'm used to them now, but some men are skittish about having someone's finger in their bum. Anyway, for years I've had BPH, which meant my prostate was enlarged. I've also taken a PSA test each year, which is a blood test that can indicate specific antigens in the prostate, leading to a clean bill of health or--brrrr, shudder--cancer.

In my case the PSA number was 258, which is pretty well within the normal range. It was higher than last year's test, but not that much, and the urologist asked why she referred me with that number. As soon as he felt the hard spot he knew. On January 16 I had a needle biopsy and on February 14 I had my prostate removed. The left lobe of my prostate was 19% cancer and the right lobe 1%.

Now comes a study that says that men who get PSA tests don't live any longer than men who don't. So maybe they're right, because as the urologist told me, "Many primary care docs wouldn't send me a guy with a PSA this low." So the guy would have cancer and no one would suspect because the PSA didn't show a large number. So what does it all mean? It means that men need the combination of the PSA and digital exam to see if there is anything unusual about the prostate.

Men are often told that prostate cancer is slow growing, so watch and wait. I have no idea whether my cancer was aggressive or slow-growing. The hard spot on my prostate was not there the year before, and then 1/5th of my prostate had gone malignant. Is that aggressive? I don't know, but I knew I wanted it out of my body, and the urologist agreed.

My friend has a dad who was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 78. His doctor told him, "We won't take it out because prostate cancer is slow growing and something else will kill you first." (I hope the doctor didn't put it that bluntly.) Now my friend's father is 88, his cancer has spread and is killing him. So my friend is mad at the doctor for not taking the prostate out originally. Who knew he'd live long enough that the doctor's prediction didn't come true? Anyway, something will get us eventually, but I want to hold off as long as possible. I've got some things to do yet, and die of cancer at a young age is not one of them. My urologist said, "You could live another twenty years!" I try not to think like that, because it puts a timetable on my life. Cancer has a way of making you sit up and take notice that what I've been denying all my life is true: there is a timetable on mine and everybody's else's life. I've just got to push it back a ways.

If eyebrows could talk

Audrey Hepburn sat across from me. I was on the sofa, and she was sitting in a large chair. Her legs were crossed, and she was wearing the shoes she was wearing on the cover of this 1957 Harper's Bazaar magazine.

They were cute, but she was also wearing the black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's, and they didn't match. Her hair was short, pixie-like, and she looked about 25-years-old.

Audrey had her elbow on the arm of the chair, her fist to her chin, profile to me, watching, wistfully, I thought, some children playing on the lawn. They could be my granddaughters, but didn't want to get up and break her reverie by peering out the window. My mind spun. I had Audrey Hepburn in front of me, and now what do I say to her? I thought, oh, I know. I started to talk, "You know, there are only three movie stars who have really stood the test of time. When it comes to beauty, I mean. There's Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and you." If I expected a reaction to what I said I was mistaken, because she acted like she didn't hear me. I continued, this time thinking that I'm going to talk, but I'll make a fool of myself: "Of the three, you are the most beautiful, Miss Hepburn."

She finally turned to me and looked at me full face, but didn't say anything. I was startled, because her eyebrows were very thick. They went almost to her hairline. I wanted to say, "Good Lord, hasn't somebody told you your eyebrows are out of control?" but I never got the chance. I woke up.

Eyebrows notwithstanding, Audrey Hepburn has a quality I find appealing. I like to look at her. I'm sure that even in her movie star days when she took off her makeup, put on a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, her hair in curlers, she didn't look so good, but that's the magic of Hollywood, the power of the glamour factories that turn out young and attractive women by the trainload. They're all cute, vivacious, have great teeth, perfect skin, perfect boobs, but they're also fake. I believe Audrey didn't need any of the stuff they have now. There was something extra about Audrey, something that Hollywood and the publicity machines can't manufacture out of today's crop of lovelies.

Audrey died when she was nearly 64, way too young. I've seen her movies and the pictures of her as a mature woman, but when I think of her I think of the young woman with the impossible eyebrows, the huge, luminous eyes. See you in my dreams, Audrey.

Goodbye Ron Silver

Yesterday Sally and I watched the 1990 movie, Reversal of Fortune, then found out via TV news that actor Ron Silver had died. Although Silver played lawyer Alan Dershowitz, on whose book Reversal of Fortune was based, he wasn't the lead character. The two leads were Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as Claus and Sunny von Bulow, respectively. The movie presented more than one point of view, relegating the Dershowitz character to an almost secondary role.

But Ron Silver was no second banana. You've seen him on various television programs and in some movies, but he was primarily a stage actor, and that's the way he comes across on screen. He projects to the last row. This picture of him as Dershowitz, with his eyes burning, is typical of his style, which I'd describe as intense.

I saw him play a quiet role, once, in The Arrival, starring--of all people--Charlie Sheen. Silver played Sheen's boss in a less histrionic manner, but you couldn't help but think there was something underneath the quiet, and there was.

Ron Silver was 62, and died after a two-year fight with esophageal cancer.

The thing that surprised me--or not, in retrospect--was that Silver went from being a liberal to a conservative "9-11 Republican" as he called himself. Under the right circumstances anyone can change a political viewpoint. Look how many Republicans voted for Obama. But that isn't what I'll remember about Ron Silver. I'll remember the burning eyes and the way he could take a scene away from another actor. Even Jeremy Irons, whose Claus von Bulow portrayal is one of the screen's greatest, took a backseat in some of the scenes he played with Silver. That's talent!

Loverboy

A local story is getting a lot of attention: two female junior high school teachers had affairs with the same 13-year-old boy at different times in the past year. The had no knowledge of each other's relationship with the boy. Both women have been arrested and charged with sex crimes.

My former coworker, Mary Ann, was vice principal of a junior high school. Years ago when Mary Kay Letourneau was in the news because she wouldn't let go of her similarly-young lover, and even went to prison over him, Mary Ann said to me, "I don't understand why a grown woman would be interested." She pointed at the young kids in the office. "Look at them. They're little boys." The way she said "little boys" sounded like she thought of them as being infants. Come to think of it, they weren't that much removed from that stage, based on their immature behavior in the halls and office.

When I look at the mugshots published in the newspaper of the two teachers I see pictures of a couple of moms, maybe even grandmas. One is is 39, the other 46. Both have their own teenage children at home. There are a lot of double standards when it comes to older women/younger men. If you think of a man aged 46 having sex with a 13-year-old girl you get quite a different mind picture than a woman having sex with a 13-year-old. With the man you think of pure perversion, with the woman you think...what? I think of some sort of emotional need being fulfilled. That was the way it was with Letourneau. Letourneau got a lot of media attention. She was constantly bombarded with the question, "Why?" I heard her answers but I'm not sure anyone was ever satisfied. C'mon, Mary Kay, we all asked, you're in your 30s and you're risking your home and family for a kid who is 12? No wonder everyone wanted to know why. Since we hear more and more stories about grown women having sex with boys as young as 12 or 13, we should ask ourselves what they are after. A woman's sexual needs are so different than a man's, especially in the emotional range, that finding some sort of sexual attraction with a 13-year-old sounds less perverted than just weird.

Beyond the reasons for it, any teacher having sex with a student is walking through a minefield. If the kid tells, and kids tell their friends everything, she's going to be found out. Even if he said nothing now, even if he waited until he was an adult and then told, the law could still come after her, because there is no statute of limitations on sex crimes with minors.

Personally, I don't see the boy as victim. He had sex with two women who were old enough, older even, than his mother could be. He kept his lovers from knowing he'd had sex with the other. What kind of kid is this? Is he some sort of superstud, some sort of Svengali hypnotizing the objects of his lust? I have no idea. He deserves to spend some time on the psychiatrist's couch, too, just to see what is going on in his horny little head.

In an entry for this blog called Gerrie, I wrote about my 14-year-old lust for my 8th grade English teacher. Every time I read about these teachers having sex with their male students I wonder what would have happened had Gerrie taken advantage of me. I don't have to think too much about it because it wouldn't have happened. If Gerrie had the desire to have sex with any male student I would have been at the absolute bottom of the list of boys she'd have sex with. And even if all the stars, planets and comets had come into alignment and she had wanted to have sex with me, at the age I was then my mother didn't let me out of her sight for long periods. If I'd been gone after school she would have been looking for the reason why. According to news reports, these teachers took the 13-year-old to various places, but didn't have sex in the school. Where was the boy's mom? Dad? Why did he have time enough to have sex with his teachers?

I hope they helped him with his homework after they were done with him.

Let's root for the rooter man!

Yesterday morning I was in my downstairs bathroom, just finished my shower. Sally was using the upstairs bathroom and ran some water. I saw the water in my toilet bubble up like lava in a volcano dome, then heard a distinct "blurble" noise.

Weird, I thought. I flushed the toilet. Within seconds I had a flood, had the back off the toilet, stopped the water. I got out the mop, used every towel in my bathroom to get the water off the floor. I threw the towels in the washing machine and told Sally I'd had a flood. She was ready to go to work and really didn't want to hear about it. I went downstairs in a few minutes and saw that the laundry room was flooded, with water gushing from the floor drain. Time to call the rooter man!

The first guy I called, who we've done business with a few times in the past, couldn't make it, so he called a friend and in about an hour a young man showed up at my door. The first thing I thought of was that he looked like someone out of Li'l Abner. He was huge, 6'4" at least, and fat. He wore overalls rolled up at the bottom. He was a very pleasant young guy who introduced himself as Dave. He said, "How did you get my friend to refer me? I'm glad I can help, but we're both swamped (I don't think there was a pun in there) with calls today."

I told Dave the truth: I said, "My wife is at work and from there she'll be leaving for a couple of days, and I'm recovering from cancer surgery." Man, that cancer surgery stuff opens doors and gets attention. "Oh, wow," Dave said. "Of course, yeah, we'll take care of ya!" I'm shameless, but it worked.

The problem was he couldn't get the problem to repeat itself. We stood at the toilet flushing it and on about the fifth flush it suddenly started to flood. He stopped it before it overflowed. He said, "Has the shower backed up?" I looked in the shower stall, "Yup." "How about the floor drain in the laundry room?" "Yup again." "Okay, it's your sewer."

Dave got his 280 pound frame up on my roof with his rooter equipment and I could hear it whirling through my sewer pipes. We ran the shower full blast while he did his rooter work, then after 20 minutes or so came in and said he had heard the clog break up and the water rush down the pipes. We checked all of the toilets, showers, etc., and everything looked normal, so he charged me $120--which I was glad to pay--and left for his next job.

Why do people make jokes about plumbers? Here are guys who deal with things the nurses after my surgery dealt with, gross stuff. Neither is a line of work I'd particularly like, but I'm sure happy there are people out there who do it. You've got to root for the rooter man. Away go troubles down the drain, as the old advertisement went. Considering how I felt yesterday--not one of my better days, and a lot of it using the very equipment that was backing up--I was very happy to have myself rooted.

Sexy Sean

When I saw this ad in the November 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, I thought holy cow. Sean Connery is still a sex symbol. Connery, who was born August, 1930, will be 79 this year. So I wonder how it feels to be sexy when you're too old for sex? (I don't know anything you don't know. For all I know Connery could be having sex every day.)

When he found out I was having surgery my brother gave me a set from the Ultimate Bond series. There are a representative sampling of James Bonds in these movies: Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and two movies with Connery: Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever. If Goldfinger is one of the peaks of the set then Diamonds Are Forever would be the low point of the valley. After this 1971 movie Connery quit (again), until Never Say Never Again in 1983 which was his final Bond film.

My top three Bond films with Connery would be From Russia With Love (that fight in the train with Robert Shaw), Dr. No (a science fiction fantasy), and Goldfinger, which began a more lighthearted approach to the character, Bond as superhero, but still dramatic and suspenseful. Diamonds Are Forever has a thin plot and the script is loaded with lousy characters: A couple of stupid killers who call each other Mister, Charles Gray as multiple Blofelds, Jill St. John as a sexy criminal who hardly ever wears clothes.

Last but worst of all, Sausage King Jimmy Dean as the Howard Hughes-like Willard Whyte. Do I have to go through everything that's wrong with this movie? It would take all day.

The sex is something about the Bond movies that made them popular, but I suspect it was with adolescent males, and adult males who hadn't outgrown their adolescence. Every woman Bond beds is beautiful and completely willing. He doesn't even take them to dinner before shagging them. Those are porn fantasies, fueled by the 1960's Playboy lifestyle of Hugh Hefner and his free love hedonism. With the Baby Boomers just coming of age in that era, millions of hormone-saturated teenage boys to buy tickets to see beautiful girls, car chases, and explosions, it was a sure thing. We're still paying for that today. The guys who went to the movies in the '60s are a generation making movies. The old, safe formula is still around.

I always wondered how 007 was able to get all those chicks, and as I was typing this out it struck me. Of course. "Q", the gadget-maker for British Intelligence, gave 007 a device. Maybe it's a ring. "Now, 007, when you get within range of a beautiful woman you push this button on the side of the ring. A cloud of pheromones will envelop you. By the time the pheromones have worn off you'll be gone, off dodging bullets, racing your Aston Martin down a mountain road, or playing Banco in the casino at Monte Carlo!"

And in every country in the world there are hundreds of James Bond Juniors running around who have never known their father.

When Sean Connery took the role of James Bond in 1962's Dr. No, he was a character actor, but 007 made him a star. He outgrew the role, he was skillful enough, talented enough, and sexy enough to transcend the Bond character, and the silliness of movies like Diamonds Are Forever.

I've got to admit; if I was to have what Connery has at age 79 I'd be modeling for Louis Vuitton, too.

28 Weeks Later

28 Weeks Later is an extremely paranoid 2007 British film, made as a zombie movie, but also a parable about a pandemic and what happens when a population gets sick and infectious. These are things we'd rather not think about, so 28 Weeks Later--just as star Robert Carlyle does to his wife in the movie--gives us two thumbs in the eyeballs.

What's the scariest thing that can happen to kids? To lose their family, to be on their own, unprotected. In this drama the rage virus that infected London in the predecessor to this film, 28 Days Later, has been eradicated. A green zone, a containment district, has been set up for survivors by the U.S. Army, which is in charge after the collapse of the British government. The rage virus comes from contact, and turns people into instant homicidal maniacs who move fast and hit their random victims hard. Two children, Tammy and Andy, have survived, and are reunited with their dad, Don, played by the great Robert Carlyle. Dad hides the secret that he ran to save his own skin, leaving his wife to infected attackers.



The children miss their mother, and escape from the containment zone to go home, where they find her, a survivor. As we learn, Mum is a carrier of the rage virus, but for some genetic reason doesn't have the disease. Unfortunately--and here's where the real problems begin--she infects her husband, which starts a chain of events that spiral quickly out of control. The rage virus is back, and the only thing to do is eliminate everyone, infected or not, to keep it from getting away from the zone.

Every few years we get a scare about a flu epidemic, like the 1918-19 worldwide epidemic that killed millions. Epidemiologists say it's inevitable we'll have another catastrophic flu epidemic, but it's going on a century and it hasn't yet happened. AIDS popped up and caused a major public scare, but unlike the rage virus of the movie which comes on its victims instantly, AIDS takes up to 10 years to develop from a virus. We're not immune from public health problems (remember SARS in 2003? Remember (shudder) Ebola?) and 28 Weeks Later does a really good job of encapsulating those fears of a disease that runs rampant, for which there is no cure, killing everyone in its path.

The movie doesn't forget it's a movie, though, and operates as a story with beginning, middle and end. The kids, Tammy and Andy, remain the constants while around them the adults who are protecting them change. The dad and mum are replaced by two American soldiers, a sniper who doesn't want to kill innocent civilians, and a female officer/doctor, who wants to preserve the kids because of their genetic traits against the disease. I can't say enough about the performances and the acting, which is superb. Robert Carlyle is always great, but Jeremy Renner as the Army sergeant/sniper and Rose Byrne as Scarlet, the Army doctor, are believable and fit into a category of noble characters I'd call the self-sacrificers. They give up their own lives so that others can live. If I'm ever being pursued by murderous zombies I want Sergeant Doyle and his sniper rifle at my back.

But 28 Weeks Later was sold as a horror movie, a take on the zombie movies of George Romero which have been done and re-done over the past 40 years. 28 Weeks has its blood and gore moments. Zombies have become a whole genre of horror, like vampires or werewolves. Where 28 Weeks Later separates itself from the pack of zombie flicks, is in its respect for the brains of its audience. It's more than just a horror movie: it shows us how quickly society and civilization can fall apart during a crisis, and that we are all just barely this side of anarchy and the complete collapse of society.

Good night nurse

Before Friday, February 13, 2009, I'm sure the last time I was nude in front of several women was on the day I was born. February 13 was the day after my cancerous prostate was removed, and I was in a very low state. According to my surgeon, he did the operation in such a way as to minimize both pain and blood loss, so I should be able to go home on Friday.

What actually happened was I had more blood loss than expected, and by Friday morning my blood pressure was dangerously low. It had been low enough during the night that the nurse called my doctor at 2:00 AM to tell them her concerns. He came in at 7:30 the next morning, dressed in a workout outfit, to look at my incision, tell me there had been internal bleeding, mostly into my butt. After a few more words he left, and the nurse got me out of bed. I needed to go to the bathroom and the orders were, after every toilet call there would be a shower; the incision was close to where there are a lot of Bad Bacteria. (I loved the way they emphasized that phrase, just like my mother used to emphasize "Bad Companions," when describing my friends.)

I don't want to unnecessarily gross anyone out, but in the bathroom I exploded in a volcano of fluids. The nurse, whose name was Chris, got me off the commode and out of my gown so I could take a shower. I was standing and then suddenly I wasn't. I heard a voice, "Wake up! Wake up!" and the unmistakable feeling of my face being slapped. Chris could not lift me off the floor and immediately the nurse assistant, Matilda, moved in to help. My wife ran down the hall to the nurses' station, but there were no nurses. There were two doctors talking and as my wife explained the problem they avoided looking at her and kept talking. She asked again. No help there. She found an orderly. By the time she got back I was in a shower room, nude, with three women. Chris was yelling, "Keep your eyes open!" because my lids had a tendency to droop. If they closed I'd be out again. Why she let me take a shower on my own I'm not sure, but she allowed me to go into the stall and close the door and clean myself off.

I stayed awake with Chris on the other side of the shower door yelling, "Are you OK? Are you staying awake?"

A few minutes later, back in a hospital gown, hooked back up to various IV's, in my bed, I was aware of activity around me. It'd been nearly 24 hours since my surgery, and I was still drugged, still out of it. Through the haze I could see Matilda with a mop and bucket heading for the bathroom. She gave me a dirty look. After a few more minutes a young Asian nurse came into the room. "How it goin', Matilla?" she asked. I was alert enough to notice her mispronunciation of Matilda's name, which made me think of Attila. Ha-ha. Attila the nurse. "It OK in bathroom, Matilla?" she asked. "OK," said "Matilla," in a very broad German accent. "It's just poop und blood." Another dirty look in my direction.

JUST poop und blood? No, no, Matilla...it was MY poop und blood. I went mercifully back to sleep, but this time in the bed and not on the cold floor.

I was watching TV commercials when a football game broke out

Sunday night we celebrated the annual Super Bowl ritual in America.

We sat down with friends, relatives, cases of beer or other alcohol, plenty of food, then gorged ourselves while watching a bunch of new commercials. Oh yeah, somewhere in there was a football game.


I'm not what would be considered a football fan, although I usually catch parts of a few games during the season, and if the teams playing in the Super Bowl are interesting to me then I might catch part of the game. The commercials I don't care about. What I can't understand is groups of people watching the event just to see the commercials. Jeez, folks, we're inundated with commercials, at least a quarter of every hour of television viewing is made up of people pitching products at us. And you go out of your way to watch them?

Of the commercials I saw this year I can't really think of any that I thought were especially clever or well made, despite some advertising pundits on the 10:00 o'clock news pronouncing which ones were flops and which were hits. So what? If Coke spends millions making a catchy commercial and pays $3M to play it on the Super Bowl does it make me more prone to go out and buy a case of Coke? Hell no. That's me. I am seriously jaded by advertising. But I'm not the typical consumer advertisers are trying to reach. The scary thing is, for many consumers, advertising is how they find out what useless products they want to spend their money on.

Thirty-five years ago I worked with an advertising man who had worked in television when it first came on the air in Salt Lake City, in the late 1940s. He worked for KUTA radio, which started KUTV, Channel 2, still a powerful station in our area. He told me stories of the earliest days of TV. Speaking of commercials, he had been to a local company called Southeast Furniture to sell them television time. The owner of Southeast Furniture was a prominent local businessman, Horace Sorenson. Horace didn't want anything to do with the fancy new medium of television. Newspaper ads and word of mouth worked just fine with him. Rod was authorized to make an offer: He would run a couple of spots for free on their evening movie (no network TV at that time ran programs after a certain point, so locals had their own programming after 9:00 PM.)

Horace said he had some ugly green chairs he'd never been able to sell. Rod brought a photographer in who took pictures of the chairs, Rod wrote some copy, and the commercial appeared a couple of times around 11:00 o'clock that night. The next day people came into the furniture asking for those chairs they'd seen on TV, and Horace sold all he had in stock. After that he advertised on TV.

Advertisers spend billions of dollars to influence us to buy. They might be advertising hamburgers, prescription drugs for erectile dysfunction, or new cars...but they're really still just ugly green chairs.


Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Congratulations, Pittsburgh. I was rooting for you all along. And I liked the Bruce Springsteen halftime show.

Eaten by ants!

I'm sitting here thinking about my mortality. Having cancer will do that for you.

When I was a kid, nine-years-old or so, a bunch of us kids would get together and talk about stuff that nine-year-olds talk about. I remember one subject stuck in my mind. One of the kids said, "The Indians would take a cowboy, bury him up to his neck in the desert by an ant hill, then pour honey on him and the ants would eat his head!" I also heard various other versions of this tale, taking place in South America, or the Congo. I remember thinking how awful it would be to get eaten alive by ants.

Well, I still think it's pretty awful, although getting eaten by cancer probably ranks a close second.

I found some pictures of guys getting eaten by ants. The two magazine covers are from the great book, Men's Adventure Magazines, published by Taschen Books, and the comic book cover, above, is from Heritage auctions.

Apparently I wasn't the only person who thought that getting eaten by ants was a pretty bad way to go, if the motif has been repeated over the years in various forms of popular culture. We're attracted to things that oddly enough, also repel us.