Brother, can you spare six dimes?

I noticed we don't have any songs for this new Great Depression of ours. No "We're In The Money" for optimism or "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" to make us aware of the plight of those who are struggling in hard times.

We're just too jaded by our distractions, two wars, high def TV, our iPods and our Blackberries to really get into a Depression mood. That's why I, out of the goodness of my heart and my sense of history, have reached back through the ages to bring you not one, but six versions of "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime" by E. Y. "Yip" Harburg and music by Jay Gorney.

I've alternated the old, nearly 80-year-old versions with the newer renditions, ending up with a David Letterman stint by Mandy Patinkin where it's played for laughs. Hey, in good times we could make a joke of the Depression.

Over-the-line Larry

During the season 7 premiere of HBO's hit comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, I watched Larry David doing his Larry David thing. While simultaneously admiring Larry David the comedian I've come to hate Larry David the character.

David has created a "me first", obnoxious, irresponsible, excuse-making, insulting, pissed-off-at-the-drop-of-a-hat person. I've known people like Larry. Politically Larry (the character, at least) is a liberal Democrat, something I share with him. Everything else, no.

Each season brings its own share of outrages by Larry, but Sunday night's show made me feel like whatever line of propriety there is, Larry David, both the character and comedian, has stepped over it. Larry's reaction to his girlfriend Loretta's cancer passed the point of being funny, even outrageous, just sick. I say that as someone who had cancer this year, attended a funeral of a family member in April after her death from colon cancer, and whose wife's friend and coworker has just been given three months to live after years of fighting cancer. In other words, as a theme for comedy it isn't funny. Not to me, anyway.

David co-created Seinfeld, and the Seinfeld actors were all extensions of Larry David, but those flaws we saw in them were mitigated. Instead of being insulting, we liked them for their human frailties. Until Sunday night's Season 7 opener I thought David's character was annoying and unpleasant, but still likable. Sunday night I thought he was just annoying and unpleasant.

Purrrrrr-fect Julie

Yesterday's post was about Batman so it's only fair to include Catwoman. Especially when the Catwoman I'm thinking of is Julie Newmar.

I saw Newmar for the first time in the 1950s in shows like Love That Bob with Bob Cummings. She was a perennial guest star on many TV shows of the era. At 5'11" with an hourglass shape and those long, long legs she was eye-popping. So eye-popping that she was Stupefyin' Jones in the 1953 Broadway production of Li'l Abner, and reprised the role in the 1959 film. As far as I was concerned in my pre-pubescent days, Julie Newmar was stupefyin' in all the ways I could be stupefied.

It seems unfair for her body (heh-heh) of work to be now remembered by shrinking to one character in one series, but Newmar is probably now best remembered for her turn as Catwoman on Batman. Catwoman was also played by Lee Meriwether and Eartha Kitt, who were both good in the part, but they just weren't Julie Newmar, who was purrrrr-fect in the part. All you have to do is look at her in the costume and you're glad you haven't been taken to a veterinarian and neutered.

Newmar is now 76-years-old, with a genetic disease that causes weakness in her muscles. It's hard to accept mortality with someone so stunning. We had to do it with perennial pinup Bettie Page, who died last year at an advanced age. Julie Newmar quit acting to care for her son who was born blind and with Down's Syndrome. I give her a great deal of credit for choosing her son over her career.

Happy Batday, Adam West

Yesterday was Adam West's birthday. I forgot to send him a card.

West was born September 19, 1928, which makes it his 81st birthday, although the "Born On This Date" column in my local newspaper said 79. West is still working, still going to conventions, still greeting his adoring fans who have never forgotten his most famous role, Batman, from the 1966-67 ABC television series.

Like Beatlemania before it, Batmania swept the nation. The Batman producers had rightly sensed the comedic possibilities of a grown man and boy dressed in oddball costumes, fighting oddball villains. The force of the show was such that it glowed hot for a time and burned out quickly. But its fans never forgot it, either.

I always thought West played the character perfectly. He had the look of a distinguished gentleman, and as Bruce Wayne was the perfect millionaire, but played it much the same when he donned his costume. He was a fighter, but he was a gentleman fighter. The folks who created the Batman show also realized that instead of the Batman and Robin team being a straightman and funnyman, a la Abbott and Costello, that they would both be played as straightmen to the assortment of villains.

West acted with some of the top character actors of the day, Frank Gorshin as Riddler, Cesar Romero as the Joker, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, and my favorite Catwoman amongst a rotating cast for that role, Julie Newmar, whose sexiness was a direct counterpoint to Batman's square and non-sexual demeanor.

And speaking of sex, in the early 1950s when the nationwide anti-comics campaign was going on, in his book, Seduction of the Innocent, Dr. Fredric Wertham, M.D., claimed that Batman and Robin of the comics were living in a homosexual fantasy. In 1966 the network censors would have been all over any references to a gay relationship and none was implied. Burt Ward, who played Robin, was older than Robin in the comic books, who looks more like he's 13 or 14 than Ward's twenty-something. Batman often refers to Robin as "old chum," which is far from an endearment.

Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, in his 1965 book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, grew up reading the earliest Batman comics in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He wrote that Batman was who he could grow up to be, but Robin was someone he was supposed to be right now. So he was glad to hear Batman and Robin were "fags." (Feiffer used that disparaging word in a less enlightened time.)

I wonder now, in retrospect, if gay people looked at the TV show as being a gay fantasy.

Batman as a show only lasted a short time, but lasted a long time in reruns. I don't think it's available now or it would be shown. It would still be popular today. It introduced the concept of camp, which is almost indescribable. The nearest I can come is something so bad it's good. I think it's more akin to the famous quote on pornography, "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it."

For the most part the producers of Batman succeeded in their campy quest, but there were some dud shows. I hated Otto Preminger as Mr. Freeze and Vincent Price as Egghead with his awful egg puns, "Egg-zactly, Batman..." On the other hand, I don't know a normal male anywhere who wouldn't want Julie Newmar purring away at him while wearing that skintight costume.

West was able to parlay his stint as Batman into a career of a lifetime, appearing for years with Burt Ward in their costumes at public functions, and even now West appears at conventions or in public appearances and signs pictures of his 38-year-old self as Batman.

For American kids, Baby Boomers especially, no matter who plays Batman in the deadly serious Batman action movies, we'll always think of Adam West bounding into Commissioner Gordon's office like he was stepping onto a tennis court. We remember the "Be here tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel" exhortation of the announcer at the end of each show. We remember Batman doing the dance, the Batusi. We loved to watch Batman and Robin climbing up the side of a building, actually a set lying flat and then set to vertical by the camera, and see who popped out of the window. Every Hollywood type vied to be on Batman.

Adam West entered our consciousness forever as that character. So, even though it's a day late, happy birthday, Adam. Hope to see you next year, same Bat-day, same Bat-month.

Talk like a pirate today

Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarrrr. I'm up for talkin' like Robert Newton as Long John Silver, aren't you?

If you were born in a cave you don't know that Newton, who was a British actor well known for not only chewing the scenery but masticating whole scenes, was cast as pirate Long John in Disney's 1949 Treasure Island. That faithful adaptation was a big hit, and seared Robert Newton into my brain as The Pirate , because he used terms like, "Avast, ye swabs!" and "Arrrrrrr" with such gusto.

In 1990 Long John Silver plundered Treasure Island again, this time in the person of the American actor, Charlton Heston. Heston, who was never accused of subtlety in any of his performances, was a good choice to play (or should I say overplay) Long John, and at times seemed to be channeling Newton.

In these scenes from that movie, the good guys escape to the island and man a stockade, which Long John and his pirates attack. I saw this movie in 1990 and thought it was exciting and well done. Too bad it's not on DVD. You can see the action photography is great and the music by the Irish band, The Chieftains, really sets a mood.

Settle in for about 14 minutes, mateys, and watch a couple of clips from this terrific adaptation.

Stockade 1



Stockade 2

*******

Now, arrrrrrr, Pappy's Golden Age Comics blog has a treasure of a story from a 1950 pirate comic book, starring Captain Daring, looking a lot like Errol Flynn from another great pirate movie, Captain Blood. You can check it out here.

Nowadays when anyone thinks pirate they think Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Depp based his performance not on Newton, but on Rolling Stone Keith Richards. Excellent choice. But to me The Pirate will always be Robert "Long John Silver" Newton.

All I Need To Know

You've seen this commercial, the folks at GE Aviation getting emotional over their work and their product.

Here's the commercial:



And here's the 1989 song they're singing, courtesy of Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt.

"Klaatu, borada nikto!"

The 1951 movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, was made at a time of great fear and paranoia. We were all wondering if the Russians would fly over and drop atom bombs on us. Flying saucers were in the news. If the Russians weren't going to bomb us maybe little men from outer space would invade us!

As much technology as we have we're scared of people with more and better technology, especially if they threaten to use it against us.

So we were scared. A perfect time for this movie. People like to watch movies of what they're afraid of, as long as they're allegorical. So we had a movie about an emissary from space arriving on Earth to tell us to get our act together or our time was limited. The film shows us fear of the unknown; something so powerful that it can suspend activity on the planet by stopping all technology simultaneously.

They remade The Day the Earth Stood Still in 2008, this time with Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, the alien visitor. The message in this movie is much more dire, but the outcome is the same.

Michael Rennie, the tall, distinguished British actor, played the original Klaatu. In both movies Klaatu is played as a Christ figure. Klaatu, who is resurrected, becomes "Mr. Carpenter" in the 1951 version. Keanu Reeves, an actor whose face is permanently frozen into one expression, also plays Klaatu as a Christ figure. Toward the end of the modern version Klaatu is able to resurrect a dead man and save us and our planet from a plague of tiny bugs that eat everything (the biblical plague of locusts). He is our savior, in one scene even taking on the bugs that had entered the body of a young boy, just as Christ took on the sins of mortals.

So how did all this work as a story, as two movies? Well, not bad if you like getting hit over the head with a moral. The problem is that no matter how many times we're presented with this sort of story it doesn't seem to stick with us. That's because it's cloaked as science fiction, and to us science fiction is Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind or ET. As thinking person movies they make us think for as long as it takes to get to our car from the theater.

Science fiction trappings of the Day movies include Gort, the robot. In both Gort is shown to react to violence. Someone shoots at him so he answers with a ray beamed out of an eye slot, causing maximum destruction. Nothing gets through to Gort. He is like the Angel of Death, only this time we can't put lamb's blood over our front doors to keep him away.

In the 1951 version Gort is a big guy but in the latest version he is a huge guy, as tall as a building. That's our outlook now. Bigger is better, especially when it's destructive. Look at those flying saucers in Independence Day, each one as big as a large city. No wimpy little 1950s flying saucers for us, no sir. They just don't scare us anymore.


At the end of both versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still the alien has come to appreciate humanity, despite our nauseating desire to lay waste to our environment and attempts to kill everyone who isn't us. I guess we have a few good qualities, although it's more a game of half-empty or half-full. You see the worst in humans as overwhelming or the good as being our major qualities.

Being science fiction these are movies featuring our ideas of aliens, movies made by human beings to be viewed by other human beings. Since we can't even understand our neighbors or other cultures it's hard to believe that any alien could come to our planet and we could understand them, or them us. We are wholly inconsistent, country to country, person to person. An alien would have an impossible task trying to understand us without alarm and skepticism, since a major goal since time began is our desire to come up with bigger and newer weapons to wreak destruction and kill.

Here's a pleasant thought. An alien race with the technology might consider humans a cancer, something to be cut out before it infects everything else.

The modern Day the Earth Stood Still credits the screenwriter of the original 1951 movie, but does not credit Harry Bates who wrote the story on which both movies are based. "Farewell To the Master" was published in Astounding Stories in 1940. I re-read the story today and there were small elements the screenwriters picked up on. Except for the robot and the spaceman the story is completely different.

[SPOILER ALERT] The robot is Gnut, not Gort, and Klaatu is not the master, Gnut is. We don't find that out until the last sentence of the story.

Jennifer Connolly plays Helen in the 2008 movie. This picture of Jennifer isn't from the movie, but I just really, really like it...

The original "It" Girl

After my blog about movie stars Amy Adams and Nicole Kidman having "it," I was reminded of the original "It girl," Clara Bow.

Bow has been mostly forgotten. Even when people have heard her name they might know she was a movie star, but don't know what she did that made her famous. While other silent film stars have become legends in American culture, for some reason Clara Bow has been left out.

It wasn't for her sex appeal, which was copious. But it had to do with the movies she was given. She worked into the sound era, retiring in 1933 to be a wife and mother, but she's most remembered for her silent movies.

This biography explains some of the facts and fallacies of Bow's life.

One of the problems with sex appeal is that people can assume all sorts of sordid fantasies on a woman who has it. If a woman projects sexiness people automatically assume she is using it for sexual purposes. It's happened--look at Madonna!--but Bow, born of a mentally ill mother, and who showed signs of mental illness herself in her later life, was probably more of a sex fantasy than sex reality.

In the way of early Hollywood stardom, Bow was huge, but no one can live up to that kind of publicity.

This two-page comic strip about Bow is from The Big Book of Weirdos, published in 1995. Many of the stories told about Clara Bow have been refuted by her fans, those folks who continue to this day to keep her memory alive. But sometimes a good story will trump reality every time.

All you've got to do is click on the pages to make them larger than life, just like Clara in her day.

It

A couple of days ago Sally and I watched Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War. Hanks was smart enough to use Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the best actors of our age, to complement himself. He also used a little known actress to play his assistant. Little known when she was signed for the part, maybe.

Amy Adams is one of those people who walk into a scene and my eyes immediately go to her. There were several beautiful girls in Charlie Wilson's War but none of them had what Amy has, star quality. I've never understood what makes someone a star, but whatever defines star quality, or it, Amy Adams has got it. We all know it when we see it.


In a review of Julie & Julia I opined that Adams is now getting parts Nicole Kidman got when she was Adams' age, like Kidman has somehow moved into the over-the-hill realm of movie parts.

Yesterday I saw the October 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, which featured not only gorgeous photos of Kidman, but also of Adams. I think its fair to say that I underestimated Nicole Kidman when I wrote those words and without salt or butter I now eat them.

I believe the truest test of a star is in their legacy. When I saw these pictures recently on the Life Magazine site, it reminded me that years after their movies were made, years after their deaths, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe are still stars.



I suspect that future generations will still be looking at both Nicole Kidman and Amy Adams and saying, "Those women were movie stars. They had it."

Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a candlestick

A few years ago, smitten with nostalgia by a display in a game shop, I had my wife, Sally, buy me a Christmas present, a commemorative edition of the original 1949 board game, Clue.

As a kid in the 1950s I played Clue endlessly. My goal was to be a detective in the Sherlock Holmes style, you see. I figured I needed as much practice as possible. I was pretty good at Clue, and just knew I'd make a crackerjack detective. All I needed was a Meerschaum pipe, deerstalker cap and a large magnifying glass. I never got the first two, but I have the magnifier. At my age I need it.

We played our Clue game for the one and only time on a snowy New Year's Eve. I won three games in a row and then we stopped because it wasn't a contest. Poor Sally was up against my Sherlockian logic and could not hope to win.

If you've never played the game, the cards you see in the illustrations, plus the room cards I haven't shown, are shuffled face down. One card is taken from each of the three stacks and put into an envelope unseen by anyone. With dice a player determines how many spaces to move forward, in and out of rooms. At some point when a player has asked questions of other players and amassed enough clues he is allowed to make an accusation: I believe it's Colonel Mustard, in the conservatory, with a candlestick. At that time the cards are taken out of the envelope and if they match that player's deductions he wins.

There is a time to enjoy childish delights and there is a time to put them away, so the game went back into a basement closet where it's been since, undisturbed, until I thought about it today. Parker Bros. did a nice job on this edition, The reproduction of the original board, murder weapons and cards is impeccable. It was just like looking at my original game of 50 years ago.

What struck me this time is that as you can see by the illustrations, the revolver is not a revolver, but an automatic pistol. I was always under the impression that Clue was set in a British house. American houses--at least the ones I knew--didn't have conservatories or libraries as such. But one of the weapons is a wrench, and we know that what we call a wrench of that type in England is called a spanner.

There are a couple of rooms missing, the bathroom and the bedroom. If you think about it, maybe Miss Scarlet was boffing the victim, Mr. Boddy (who is never shown, and like all most old-style murder mysteries, unimportant except for the fact he's dead), in the bedroom and Mrs. Peacock, a socialite widow who had been trying to get Mr. Boddy to marry her, caught them in flagrante delicto.

At the time this game was originally made, bathrooms could be shown in movies, but usually lacked a toilet. Bedrooms could be shown, but usually included double beds lest someone get the idea that a couple were actually sleeping together or...shudder...having sex. Parker Bros. avoided them altogether.

Scarlett O'Hara and Scarlett Johanssen notwithstanding, Miss Scarlet is probably a scarlet woman. Maybe they don't use that term anymore--it's probably gone the way of "soiled dove"--but it means prostitute.

Mr. Green could have killed Mr. Boddy because he's green with envy. Nice house, even without a bathroom or bedroom, and he had his eye on Miss Scarlet.

When you think about it, Clue is about murder. It's not about greed, like Monopoly, or even just getting home, like the Uncle Wiggily Game. It's about a body, Mr. Boddy, who has been slain by one of his guests. It's about murder weapons: a gun, a knife (to be fair, a butter knife), a rope for hanging or garroting, and both a lead pipe and wrench for some good old-fashioned blunt force trauma. In retrospect I'm surprised my parents let me play this game, and play it a lot, too. But then, murder is entertainment. We see it every night on television, we see it in movies, from the deadly serious to lightest comedy.

Entertainment, of course, unless it happens in real life. Or to someone we know.

In that regard, Clue is part of the past. I still love the game, and in the age of violent video games who's to say it's any worse--and it might be a lot better--than what kids use or watch today to entertain themselves. But for me, Clue will just stay in the closet until I decide to pass it on to someone else.

The Case of the Prolific Author

When I want to switch off my brain I pick up a mystery novel. I don't have any real favorites, and I've read across a broad spectrum of the mystery field.

For all my mystery reading I'd never read a Perry Mason novel until a couple of years ago when I ran across a used copy of the first Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. The novel was published in 1933, and at the time author Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the most prolific and well-paid writers of pulp magazine stories. He had created several series characters before Perry Mason.

I found a stack of Perry Mason hardcovers in a thrift store, but it was the one with a dust jacket, The Case of the Calendar Girl, that got me started. I'd bought three of the hardbacks, read them, then went looking for more. I picked up several paperbacks in another thrift store.

Perry Mason novels, like the Perry Mason television series starring Raymond Burr, are formulaic. In the novels Mason is a trickster. He sometimes does something illegal to help his client and trick the police (Lt. Tragg) or the D.A. (Hamilton Burger). The courtroom scenes are usually a highlight and appear toward the end of the books, since the murderer is almost also disclosed in the courtroom.

Gardner was a lawyer, although he didn't go to college for a law degree. He studied and passed the bar exam, then practiced for twenty years. The dialogue is right out of law books, with the lawyers trading lines like, "This is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial," and, "Objected to. Not responsive to the question which has already been asked and answered." It's what you expect to see in courtroom scenes in movies and on TV. It gives the scene some realism, especially considering the amount of chicanery Perry Mason pulls off.

Gardner used six secretaries to transcribe his books, which he recorded on Dictaphone, the ancestor of wire and tape recorders. He was said to dictate up to 10,000 words a day, which is a lot. Consider the average page of a book is 250 words. Using simple math you can see Gardner could dictate a whole book in a week or so. Gardner worked out his plots in longhand and had everything carefully planned before doing his dictation

Mason usually doesn't discuss money with the clients and you wonder why he's so successful since his clients often don't appear too well heeled. But in the novel I'm currently reading, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye, published in 1935, Mason asks a client for $1500, which was more than a year's salary at the time. The man produces 1,500 one dollar bills.


Huh! I blinked at that. It stretches credulity past the breaking point.

Another time Perry tells Paul Drake, the private detective, to "put your men on it. Put 100 men out there distributing flyers," as if 100 men were sitting around the office waiting for something to do. As a matter of fact, that's the impression the reader gets anyway, that Paul's men have nothing to do but Perry Mason's business.

The Perry Mason books are popcorn. They are light, fun, fast novels. You don't think about them too much or you'll be like me, picking holes in the plots. Despite having lots of those oddball moments where everything just dovetails perfectly (as if we ever doubted it), the Perry Mason novels are really great entertainment.

Also, there is a story between the lines of a love affair between Della Street, Perry's confidential secretary, and Perry. Gardner never writes of it except in the most oblique terms. During the course of the case Mason and Street are strictly business, but in the last paragraphs we get the idea how they're going to celebrate victory.

From The Case of the Cautious Coquette:

Mason nodded. "I thought," he said, "we could arrange for a congratulatory dinner, in celebration of squeezing out of a trap through a darn narrow opening, Della."

She glanced at him demurely. "Then why get rid of Paul Drake?"

"Because I didn't think we needed a chaperon."

"Sounds interesting," Della Street said.

Or from The Case of the Footloose Doll:

Della Street looked up at him with misty eyes.

"Will you please bend over," she said, "so I can kiss you on the forehead?"

Mason regarded her with eyes that were tender. He said gently, "I'm afraid, Della, I can't bend quite that far. You won't mind if I'm a few inches short, will you?"

"Not at all," she told him.

Della gets the last word. Perry and Della, gettin' it on, but not during office hours. What a great boss!

Twenty years to live!

This past January I got the news I'd been dreading. I had prostate cancer.

My wife and I sat in front of the urologist's desk while he told me my options. For the treatment of prostate cancer there are choices, but I went with his recommendation, surgery to remove the prostate and with it the cancer.

The doctor looked at me and said, "You look healthy otherwise," to which I agreed. Barring my arthritis and the just-diagnosed cancer I was probably as healthy as a younger man. "You could live another twenty years!" he said.

Suddenly it hit me. There is a timetable on my life. Oh, sure, I knew there was a timetable on other peoples' lives, and somewhere inside me I knew that included me, but what the doctor said rocked me back on my heels just as much as the news I had cancer. Twenty years? Just twenty years? And by then I'll be in my early eighties and what will be the quality of life? In an Alzheimer's home like my mother? Sitting in a chair at home with the television droning on and on, my glazed eyes glued to the set but oblivious to what I'm seeing?

I'm terminal! My doctor gives me twenty years! I remember twenty years ago like it was just yesterday. I put things into context; my brain has to organize things, events, chronologically. Dates and times are important to me. "Let's see, my son was in first grade, six-years-old, so I guess that happened in 1983," is how my mind works on recalling a memory.

In 2029 will I be looking back on twenty years, saying, "I remember when I got my diagnosis of prostate cancer in January 2009," knowing that it will be unlikely that I will make it yet another twenty years? Gulp. Sometimes the way my mind works doesn't do me any favors, let me tell you...

**********

Looking at this picture reminds me of time's passages. It was taken in 1979 of my son, David, and his great-grandmother, my grandmother, Venice Anderson, at her home in central Utah. David is now 32, and at the time the picture was taken my grandmother had another seven years to live. I'm not sure she thought like that. Maybe nobody else thinks like that but me.

Let's see, if I move real slooowwwwwww, maybe the twenty years won't go by as quickly as the last. Would that work? I'm about to put it to the test and I'll give you the results in about, say, twenty years...?

Future-past

(You know how it works. Click on the picture to see it full size.)

A future-past is a term I use to indicate a one-time vision of the future that has been superseded. It's gone, baby, gone.

During World War II and the postwar era the future seemed very exciting. We were going to be flying to work in personal helicopters. We'd have personal robots doing our work for us. Best of all, we were going to have TELEVISION!

Magazines like Mechanix Illustrated, Popular Mechanics and comics like the 1951 Flash Gordon where I got this page were full of predictions.

Some of the predictions did come true; television did finally get its foothold in the late 1940s, and the predictions about TV in this page are future-past. They have more than come to fruition and gone far beyond. Where the futurists who wrote this page got it semi-wrong was on the plastic clothes. They had their day. We had polyester clothes in the 1970s and everybody hated them.

For the most part future planning is based on an extrapolation of the current time. In 1951 warming was a very slow process. The writer who told of a warm Antarctica years in the future didn't know about greenhouse gases or global warming, which pushed up the timetable a few thousand years.

The writer also blew it on the predictions of meat being grown in laboratories. Much as I wish they didn't have to slaughter animals, I don't think artificial meat--unless you count soy-based meat-like products--are anywhere in our future.

Where the writer got it right was in the part about "artificial moons," which we call satellites. But weather prediction isn't the only thing they're good for, as those with satellite TV or GPS devices can tell you.

You won't find much about computers or related topics in postwar future-think. At the time computers filled up whole rooms, and no one saw them as being something small enough to sit on a desk at work or home. As recently as the early 1990s we were yet to know the impact of the Internet, or of cell phones and peripheral electronic devices on our lives. Instant communication is the norm, now, and we're used to it and apparently we want our iPods, Blackberries, 22" LCD monitors, HDTV, and Blu Ray disks a lot more than we want plastic clothes.

Futurism of the 1940s probably started at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and it was incredibly optimistic. They didn't take into account poverty or racism, both of which were major parts of our social fabric, but which the futurists naïvely assumed would go away under the avalanche of technology. What technology has created is a have/have not society where our children feel deprived if they don't have the latest cell phone technology and you feel less than adequate if you have less than 150 channels on your TV. The twin devils of poverty and racism are still with us, and the gaps grow wider as we, through our technology, grow more distant from the society around us.

Spider-Man swings with Mickey and Minnie!

I heard today that Disney bought up Marvel Entertainment, which includes the Spider-Man franchise.

I don't think we'll be seeing mouse ears on any of the Marvel Comics, but you never know. Mickey Mouse swinging from buildings. Hey, I'd pay to see that. NOT.

When I was in junior high school my friend Ronnie and I read monster magazines and comic books. This would be in 1959, 1960 or thereabouts. One day Ronnie told me that there was a new Marvel comic out called The Fantastic Four. I was curious and pedaled my bike to the Millcreek Pharmacy where I picked up The Fantastic Four #1. I sold it along with my other Marvel Comics after I got married in 1969, so I could start my first checking account.

In 1961 or '62 I picked up the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, and I read it for a couple of years. I think it had a lot to do with the adolescent power fantasy. Peter Parker, who is Spider-Man, is just a teenage nerd--like me. But unlike me he has special powers, gets to dress up in a costume and gets to kick butt. That appealed to me at that time of my life. I'm sure a lot of other boys felt the same way.

I have seen the movies and they brought back memories. They also brought back memories of selling the first issue of Spider-Man for 25¢. When the first Spider-Man movie came out I read that a copy of that same comic had been sold for $180,000.

Like a lot of things in my life, that one slipped through my fingers. I didn't feel too bad, though. Easy come, easy go.

Parade of perverts

In past entries to this blog I've mentioned adult women having sex with underage boys, and I've mentioned adult men, mostly teachers, with young girls. I had a story ready to go the other day when, like everyone else, I was knocked off my feet by the story of Phillip Garrido and his backyard tent city. For the three people who haven't heard this, Jaycee Dugard, at age 11, was kidnapped and had not been seen for 18 years. The other day she surfaced, now 29-years-old. Garrido and his wife had been holding her and the two children she had given birth to, fathered by Garrido, in tents with a makeshift shower and outhouse.

Alert people at the University of California, Berkeley, alerted authorities when they talked to Garrido, who was there with his two children. The whole thing looked wrong to them. After checking on Garrido they found he was on the sex offender registry and they contacted police. Good citizens! Garrido's neighbor had contacted police three years earlier, but the police officer did not check in the back yard or house, just talked to Garrido on his front porch and satisfied himself everything was all right.


In hindsight, probably not a good thing. But necessary. We don't live in a police state where police are able to just enter our homes and look under the beds and in closets for no reason other than suspicion. There's got to be probable cause, and that officer needed that.

It's an amazing story, still unfolding. The latest is that Garrido is being looked at as a "person of interest" in the murders of prostitutes.

In my home state, Utah, we still have our parade of perverts. The story I alluded to above has elements of the Garrido story. A St. George woman, Krista Leanne Wertenberger-Moss, 38, entered a tent at 2:30 a.m. where three boys, age 11 and younger, were having a sleepover. She wouldn't let them leave the tent for five hours, and when she did they told their parents. She was sentenced to a year in jail and four years probation.

I'm not sure of her motivation. No one has said. She did make them play a game that included sexually explicit questions.

Also in St. George a 42-year-old male teacher, Douglas Bullock, was charged with having sex with a 17-year-old boy. Despite the age difference, I just wonder when a kid is 17 how "underage" he or she really is. Anybody over 16 usually has enough smarts to know what's going on. The arbitrary law that says someone is under the age of consent if they're not 18 seems unrealistic in most cases. If a kid is 17 years and 364 days old when the sex occurs then it's a crime; the next day he or she is 18 years old and then has sex with an older person it's not a crime. Sheesh.

But then we have the case of the sexually naïve teacher. Christopher Page, a 20-year-old substitute teacher at a junior high was caught in his car with a 13-year-old girl, both of them with their shirts off. The evaluation of the teacher explained the guy is "immature with limited sexual experience." Page knew the girl and her family before he became a substitute teacher so he wasn't "a person in a position of trust," as the law reads; teachers can get socked extra hard for having sex with students. So the D.A. doesn't want him jailed or put on the sex offender registry. "A good person who made a bad decision," said she.

OK, the kid who is 17 is still a child in the eyes of the law, but the guy three years older is an adult, but not a sex offender, even though he's with a 13-year-old, because he's "immature."

Sheesh again.

"Honey, wake up."

I heard the words, "Honey, wake up."

I jolted awake, sat up. I was on the couch, and according to the cable TV box, it was 2:30 a.m.

I listened, but didn't hear anything. I thought I'd been dreaming. It was one of my better nights, which means no insomnia. I went back to sleep. The next morning I told Sally about my dream of her telling me to wake up. She told me a story:

That night she had been lying awake and thinking. That's deadly if you want to sleep. I know all about it. Anyway, she reached for a little recorder she has by her bed. When a button is pressed you get thirty seconds to say what you need to. She said, and I'm transcribing because I just listened to it, "Jon," "Rockapella," "girls," and "Glen Campbell."

Jon is her hairdresser, so she probably needed to make or change an appointment. "Rockapella" is a group that sings without instruments, a capella, rock songs, hence the name. Maybe looking for a CD, or a ticket to a concert? "Girls" means our granddaughters, so most likely she needed to send them something. She said "Glen Campbell" because the evening before we went to bed we'd watched a YouTube video of Glen singing the Paul McCartney song, "Mull of Kintyre." Sally may have been thinking of getting a Glen Campbell CD with that song.

So did I hear Sally talking into her recorder? Her voice in the recording is very low, and sounds sleepy, foggy. Would I have heard her in the living room, and translated it into, "Honey, wake up"? I don't know. Maybe if she'd yelled "Fire!" at the top of her lungs I wouldn't have woken.

-

You guys

We got close to the door of the Mexican restaurant when a young woman with a handful of paper came up to us. "Are you guys going into Rubio's?"

"We are," said Sally.

"Would you guys mind giving the guy at the counter one of these?" It appeared to be some sort of flyer for a sorority. "If you give them this then they give some money to us for a fundraiser."

"Sure, we can do that," said Sally.

"Great, thanks, you guys!"

We went into the restaurant and to the counter. The counterman, a young Latino, said, "What can I get you guys tonight?" We both put in our orders. He handed us one of those electronic pagers to let us know when our order was ready for pickup. "Here you go, guys."

We sat down and there was another young Latino with a broom, sweeping under the tables. "Hello, you guys," he said. We nodded and returned his hello. "If you need anything just ask." Great, we said we'd do that.

Since we were at the time the only customers in the restaurant we got our food delivered to our table rather than having the vibrator go off (much to my disappointment). "Here you go, you guys," said our server.

We ate and noticed some other customers come into the place, including a young Latina with a baby. The young man with the broom knew her, and he was talking to her when we got up to leave. "Thanks, you guys," he said to us with a friendly smile. "Come again!"

We stepped outside and the young woman with the flyers hailed us, "Thanks, you guys!" she said. We got in my car.

"When did this 'you guys' thing become the thing that young people call older people?" I asked rhetorically. Sally and I have had this conversation before.

When I thought about it there just doesn't seem to be anything that I can accept being called from young people. When they say "sir" to me I feel patronized. "Folks" seems, well, folksy, but "you guys" just sounds too familiar. I don't think the kids are thinking that, though. It's just how our language works; different greetings evolve in different places and at different times. I guess considering the age difference--I was old enough to be any of those youngsters' grandfather, and most kids think older people are retarded or at worst, fenceposts to be ignored--I guess I was lucky that their term for us, "you guys," was said with a friendly tone. As much as it chafes me, I guess there are worse things than young people calling older people "you guys."

"I bought it on eBay!"

Every once in a while I haul out some books and put them up for bid on eBay. I've been doing eBay business off and on--mostly off for the past couple of years--since 1999.

Back then I had a pretty good little business going, and I made enough every week for extra spending money, which sometimes I spent on eBay. But like a lot of novelties, eBay wore off for me and I stopped looking at the listings.

In those days it was easy for someone to win with a high bid and then not pay. Buyer's remorse was a real possibility with every transaction. The only real power sellers had over non-payers was to threaten negative feedback. Some people just didn't care about their feedback, but I did. I never got anything but positive feedback and I'm proud of that. I wish my customers would have been as conscientious about completing the transaction as I was.

Nowadays that threat to the buyer has been removed by eBay. A seller can't give a customer negative feedback, only positive or no feedback. How fair is that? A buyer who stiffs a seller loses nothing, but the seller has to go through the process of contacting eBay so they can get their seller fees back.

And that's another thing, the fees. In one way I think eBay is the most brilliant business idea of all time. They have a large staff, but they don't have to have any warehouses, unless you count all the bandwidth it takes for the listings as storage space. They don't handle anything directly. But they take, hooooo, Lordy, do they take! It costs a seller to place a listing, and the kind of listing can make it escalate in price; the seller is charged a percentage of the winning bid; if the seller gets paid through Paypal--owned by eBay--then a fee is assessed on the transaction. It's a triple whammy.

eBay doesn't have to do one damn thing except provide the means, and then they rake in the cash.

There's another thing that bothers me, and that's how easy it is for an unscrupulous seller to manipulate an auction. All he has to do is have a friend join in the bidding to inflate the price. The winning bidder wins, but who knows how much he's paying extra because of chicanery on the selling end?

Looking around my house I can see a couple of things I bought on eBay that I am happy I got, but I can also look around and see things I should just send to a thrift store or put out for the garbage pickup. I must've been caught up in the thrill of an auction. I wouldn't have bought the crap if I had seen it in a store.

Here's Weird Al Yankovic's take on eBay:

Funeral for a friend

Sally and I drove to Bountiful, Utah, last night to say goodbye to our old coworker, Rand. Rand died on Thursday when his wife decided he'd had enough, and his doctors said there was no hope. The previous Thursday he had a stroke, and never fully came out of a coma. Sunday night was a viewing, the funeral is today.

Rand had been diagnosed with diabetes as a child, but when I met him in the early 1980s he hadn't been to a doctor in years. I suspect it was because he had no medical insurance. He and his wife, Judy, had four children, all of them now grown up. When Rand went to work for the school district he was suddenly insured and then he sought treatment.

None of us knew how much Rand's disease had progressed until the December day a few years ago we found out he wouldn't be at work for at least a month. Some time before he'd stepped on a nail. Some versions of the story said it was days, some said weeks, but he couldn't feel the nail in his foot, and when he found it his surgeon put him right in for an operation.

Things just got worse from that point, and then there came a point where he could no longer feel his feet. That's dangerous on a job that required him to climb stairs several times a day.

The last time I saw Rand alive was in April at the retirement party of another coworker, Norm. He was supported by a cane, his face was chalk white, and he was nearly blind. Behind his back a couple of us said we thought he didn't look long for this world.

When I walked up to see him in his casket he looked great. He even had the little smirk you can see in his obituary picture on top. His wife marveled, "I wonder how they got that look on his face? It's so Rand."

I thought, but didn't say, that he looked healthier dead than when he was alive.

Rand had been married four times to three different women. He was married to Judy, with whom he had four children. She divorced him. He married Chris, who already had ten children. He divorced her. He married his son's former girlfriend, Allison, a girl decades younger than him. She divorced him. Then he and Chris got back together, and she is his widow.

At the viewing everyone looked happy because they knew that the terrible disease that had ravaged him his entire life was now gone. I guess sometimes the only way you beat a condition like that is to die, and then it dies with you.

S'long, Rand, old buddy.