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’24’: Totally Sensitive

During tonight’s broadcast of “24,” Fox ran a short public-service announcement from Kiefer Sutherland. The message, in essence: ” ’24’ depicts a group of really evil Muslims. But you, Mr. and Mrs. American Television Connoisseur and your extended families, should bear in mind that not all Muslims are bad people. Please keep that in mind as you watch me, as agent Jack Bauer, kick some evil Muslim butt.”

In case you need a translation, that’s America being real sensitive to minority sensibilities. Actually, it should be noted that on tonight’s episode, Kiefer/Jack didn’t confront any evil Muslims directly. But just wait. Their hour of reckoning approaches.

Even more significantly, it should also be noted that Tony Almeida’s Chicago Cubs mug made another appearance on tonight’s show — the first time it has been seen since the first season of “24,” I believe. Unlike its first supporting role, when it likely contained a brewed hot caffeinated beverage, the Cubs mug tonight served as receptacle for a brewed cold alcoholic beverage. Yeah, the actor who plays Tony (Carlos Bernard, aka Carlos Bernard Papierski) is a Chicago-area native who apparently advertises his roots with his Cubs mug. From which he now drinks beer.

(January 15, 2006 update: Tony and the mug are back — check out the details — for the new season.)

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Our Past for Sale, Again

Oakhilldrive

My sister Ann sent me (and my brothers and dad) an email today that she had gotten from a friend she grew up with. The message said, "Is this your former home?" and included a link. The link (which includes the picture above) goes to a real-estate listing for a "contemporary, raised ranch" home near the town of Crete (about 30 miles or so south of Chicago); it’s got four bedrooms, two baths, a hot tub, two-car garage with an upstairs studio, a wraparound porch, and an acre lot in the woods. Ann’s friend is right — it’s the house my mom and dad had built in 1965-66 (we moved in June 10, 1966) after we had lived in Park Forest, just a mile away, from 1956 on. The hot tub, wraparound porch, and garage have all been installed since our time.

The first thing I looked for in the listing was the asking price: $300,000. Not much by San Francisco Bay Area standards or compared to what similar places are going for in the New York area or Chicago’s northern and western suburbs, but a lot by the standards of the ’60s. Mom and Dad had the house built for something like $35,000; I remember hearing them talk about the lot, which now has undeveloped public land on two sides and is relatively secluded on the other two, and I think they bought it for $10,000 from a family we knew, the Fitzgeralds, who lived a couple blocks from us in Park Forest. The sale listing reduces the house to a series of dimensions. Strange to see, knowing what went on in some of those rooms (which have been inhabited by others for a long time and have a completely new set of experiences and memories imprinted on them). I noticed the listing has the building date wrong, putting it at 1970.

Just out of curiosity, I searched for the property address on Google and got a single hit (with the picture below). It was an online listing for the house last August. The asking price then, six months ago, was $219,900. The jump in price made me curious: Is a new owner trying to flip the property for a big profit? Or, unlikely as it seems, had the old owners put it back on the market for a higher price? An agent’s phone number was included in the old listing, a guy apparently working out of Park Forest. I called. It turned he’s the husband of the house’s last owner, the one who put it on the market last year. He said it sold for a little under their asking price.

When I told him the house was listed again and the current price, he said, "No way that house sells for $300,000." So it looks like the quick-profit scenario is what’s actually going on. I think this is the third or fourth time the house has been up for sale since my parents sold in early 1986 (for a fraction of last year’s sale price) to move back into the city.

I have to say the old owners had the right idea, picturing the house during the summer, when everything in the woods is intensely green. The current listing’s snowy landscape doesn’t look nearly so inviting.

Oakhill2

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I Dichotimize

Some matters of pressing importance:

Patriots-Eagles: Eagles. Dad points out that the Eagles’ quarterback, Donovan McNabb, went to Mount Carmel High School — the team is nicknamed “The Caravan” — with which my mom’s family has a long association. That’s enough for me. Go Eagles.

Sunni-Shiite: Tossup. You got to like the Shiites’ numbers. But the Sunnis know how to put the hurt on infidel and co-religionist alike, especially with their patented triangle offense. This one could go into OT.

Social Security (old)-Social Security (new): Old, for the moment, because at least we know what it is and what the problems with it are. Bush’s “new” deal has got the stink of Enron to it — a hustle that will make a few people rich

Schwarzenegger (actor)-Schwarzenegger (politician): He sucked as an actor, but I liked him better then because you could walk out of the movie theater or turn off the TV and be done with him.

To be continued … or not.

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Arnold, Our Arnold

Most excellent Arnold line from late-night CBS TV comedy guy Craig Ferguson:

“The U.S. Mint has released a new California state quarter. On one side is Governor Schwarzenegger’s head and on the other side is the rest of his head.”

(Thanks, Lydell.)

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Pleats for Fun and Profit

I’ve written news stories, editorials, op-ed columns, magazine features, TV news segments, obituaries, educational copy for a financial services firm, poems (yes, a few), journals, more blog entries and emails than the world needs and too few letters when I should have, personal essays, something approaching a short story, checks, job applications, resumes, letters of reference, explanations of firings, layoff speeches, and likely many things it’s good I don’t remember.

But there’s always something new. For instance, writing about draperies, fans, desks, and storage lockers for a retail catalog that will remain nameless. About the “polished artistry” of a curtain’s inverted pleats. About the “thrilling textile art” that is Belgian linen. About “the multifaceted refinement” of a beveled-glass mirror made in China.

If nothing else (but there is something else — money), the writing’s instructive. You actually need to find a story in every product. If you grew up in the “Seinfeld”/J. Peterman era, naturally you think of the absurd tales invented around items like 10-gallon hats or duster coats. Sitting at a desk, looking at bad black-and-white pictures of drapes made of Thai silk and wondering what little slice of reality and fantasy might make a readable short paragraph that would lead someone to think of buying, I was reminded of my dad’s career at Spiegel’s.

It was a mail-order house that grew from a family dry-goods business founded in the 1860s. Dad used to be one of the guys responsible for merchandise control, as I understood it, which essentially meant keeping track of everything Spiegel’s bought and sold. So that meant having a line on all the goods the buyers were contracting for in current and future catalogs and everything that the company shipped out to customers. It was a big operation, at one time rivaling Sears and Montgomery Wards when those places were retailing giants.

The Spiegel’s catalog was a fixture in our house every season. I’d pore over it when it Dad brought it home. I had no interest in a lot of the stuff — the clothing, for instance, which mostly seemed pretty square. But mostly I was taken with a muted sense of amazement at all the different kinds of things in the book. The tools and shoes and sports equipment and camping gear and tires and automotive supplies. I think there was even a whole car you could buy. What a job to write all the copy for all that merchandise.

One year, we got Dad a birthday present out of the catalog: gaucho boots. I’m pretty sure the catalog actually described them as “Brazilian gaucho boots.” Made in Brazil, used in Argentina, I guess. There was a gimmick: The boots had a pleat above the ankle to afford flexibility. A boon to all hard-riding gauchos. The item in the catalog — probably written by the Spiegel’s shoe buyer at the time, a guy Dad often talked about named Sig Mach (correct me on the spelling or any other details, Dad, if I got them wrong) — really sold me. The way I remember it, I wouldn’t be satisfied until we got those boots. We ordered. They came. They were black leather pull-ons that came about halfway up the calf. They had little leather tassels that I didn’t remember being prominent in the catalog picture. I think Dad actually liked them. Or at least he was a good sport. I remember him wearing them a few times, anyway.

Back to today. Writing about the wonders of a retro government-style metal desk, priced at close to $2,000, makes you think about the sort of catalog stories you’d really like to write.

“Exclusive to us, these no-nonsense hardwood cudgels were hand-turned on trusty steam-driven lathes by faceless factory drones deep in North Korea — a testament to beloved leader Kim Jong-Il. Sold in sets of two; buy more for family fun!”

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Happy Groundhog, Happy Jim

If there were any groundhogs in these parts, they’d be able to see their shadows today, whatever that portends in this Mediterranean climate of ours.

Meantime, it’s James Joyce’s birthday (1882, in Dublin). By way of The Writer’s Almanac, a couple of quotes:

To a publisher who objected to the vulgarity of some of his writing in “Dubliners”:

“It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization [sic] in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

A life observation:

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

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Winter’s Harsh Reality

Midwinter has set in with all its typical grim ferocity here in the Berkeley flatlands: sunny, clear, breezy, 74 degrees (down to 65 now, an hour-plus after sunset).

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Going Soft in the Head

My friend Garth wrote yesterday about his distress at a study from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that more than a third of high school students believe the First Amendment goes too far in safeguarding our freedoms of expression, the press, religion, assembly, and to petition the government for redress of our grievances (good luck with that last one).

In a way, it’s old news that a lot of Americans don’t hold with the fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. But Garth speculates about the trend:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the growing anti-intellectualism in the context of the voting majority, but I hadn’t realized that it had infected children’s minds as well. I guess it only makes sense that fundamental misunderstandings about our government would be passed on. My worry is that this is only a trend that will worsen over time as these teenagers grow up, and that our government will be quickly taken over by those who would seek to exploit that ignorance, as opposed to fighting it.”

I think he’s right on about the current of anti-intellectualism and the trouble it’s bringing. A more disturbing piece of evidence is presented in a New York Times story today about how many science teachers are avoiding explicit discussion of evolution in their classrooms to avoid controversy.

” ‘The most common remark I’ve heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken,’ said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama’s curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.”

And the reason teachers are fearful of talking about evolution is that, Dr. Christy aside, conservative Christians are waging a war against it because the idea doesn’t pass muster with their interpretation of the Bible. You sort of expect that the anti-evolutionists, who are free under the First Amendment to propound any hare-brained ideas as the word of their god, are the same people who feel most strongly that the First Amendment goes too far.

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Back to Business as Usual

Thank [your deity here], we’re done with the Iraq vote. Now we can back to the really important stuff: The 9 a.m. (Pacific) CBS radio news led with Michael Jackson arriving at the courthouse as jury selection began for his trial on child-molestation charges. In the correspondent’s breathless report, you could hear the throngs screaming in the background.

In San Francisco, meantime, people actually protested the Iraq vote and, I guess, the way it’s being portrayed. It’s all well and good to point out all the conditions that made the event less than the dawn of full-fledged democracy in Iraq: martial law, the heavy military presence, the polling places that didn’t open, et cetera. But it’s a losing proposition, in PR and human terms, to demonstrate against the vote. Regardless of all the flaws, regardless of the long-term meaning, regardless of our government’s untruths in leading us into the war and its calamitously misguided actions in conducting it, when given the opportunity, a group of people who have suffered a degree of oppression we glimpse only in nightmares got a chance to change their future and jumped at it (one view of the event from The New York Times’s John Burns; and another from Salon, hardly a friend of the Iraq project). In my mind, that’s something to be celebrated, no matter how angry I happen to be about what has led us to this point and how much doubt I entertain about the future course of events there.

And in Iraq today, things are going back to business as usual, too. The insurgency is still on. Several U.S. troops have been killed in combat. I’m sure that soon it will be apparent that, in terms of creating a new government and new political reality in Iraq, yesterday was the easy part.

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New Words

Fisk (or fisking). I had never seen this word before, then last week, bam, two or three times in a couple of days. In this post, for instance. It turns out to have its own entry in the Wikipedia. The word sprang from right-wing bloggers who rushed to whack British reporter Robert Fisk for displaying left-wing tendencies in his work. It’s expanded now to encompass any long and detailed (or tiresome and tendentious) rebuttal to another journalist’s or blogger’s long and detailed (or tiresome and tendentious) argument.

Emo. According to some online resources, I’m about 20 years late picking up on this one. Nevertheless, I only heard this word for the first time about three months ago, when The Resident Teen was filling us in on a musical genre he had recently become enamored of. As you might guess, emo has something to do with the word “emotion”; the word encompasses lyrics full of personal reflection (one exhibit: Elliott Smith; I’m especially enamored of his song “Independence Day,” which I think you need to hear to appreciate), an attitude, and a lifestyle. Here’s a semi-scholarly take on it, as well as a more-than-semi-snotty one. Next: Brace yourself for screamo.

Thug. You’re probably thinking this is a violent, threatening person in the mold of bad Iraqis, street toughs, or Rep. Tom DeLay. You’d be right, but you’d be wrong. Thug in the new sense is a term of approbation for anyone who shows an extreme degree of nerve, skill, strength, or courage (or, for extra points, all of the above). A recent example of this kind of thuggery on Fox’s “24”: Agent Jack Bauer goes into a terrorist stronghold, alone against 16 “hostiles,” to rescue his woman (and her dad, who happens to be the secretary of defense). Jack and Mr. Secretary wipe out most of the evildoers, leaving just a few to be mopped up by late-arriving Marines. That makes them co-thugs. But Jack was really the main thug. Another example: Lance Armstrong was a thug on every mountain stage of last year’s Tour de France. He was mad thuggin’ — whoops, I’m losing control — on the 17th stage, when he rode down one of his opponents in the final kilometer and charged past him at the line.