Field of Steve

It may be too much to ask that fictional cartoon characters behave rationally. From what I remember, though, the extreme possibilities available in cartoons were so outlandish and fantastic that they were beyond the scope of believable. Bugs Bunny did things I wanted to do, such as tormenting Canadians, but knew I really couldn’t. So I didn’t really draw any life lessons or anything else of value from the rabbit other than a few comebacks that could net me a fist in my face.

I became most troubled by what saw the other day on a show about a bilingual kid who travels the world carrying a backpack that has a map of every place I’ve never been and takes with her a pink-booted monkey.

Because we have a television and aren’t afraid to employ it as an occasional baby sitter, Apollo has developed a love for Nick Jr.’s Marina of the Fresh Beat Band, Max & Ruby, Diego, the Backyardigans, Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, and the show that gets today’s study,Dora the Explorer.

It’s a show I’ve seen a lot. Dora speaks Spanish and English, which is all good. She asks questions and waits for answers. Not once have I seen any of my kids answer out loud. By the time they’re old enough to figure out that Dora wants a response, they’ve outgrown her. Recently Dora’s mother had twins, which they didn’t realize until they were born, something that just doesn’t happen anymore, but I won’t quibble with that detail. The other day the twins escaped the house, crawl into a stroller, which makes it start rolling out of the yard on a path that will eventually lead them to a geyser, the Gooey Geyser, to be precise.

Aside from your standard negligence, so far it’s all good. Before the geyser is a farm and a garden. The parents have joined in the chase and when they all get to the farm they split up on three different paths. In the barn Dora and Boots meet a horse who tells them that he has hunger. “Tengo hambre,” he says, wanting three apples.

You know, it’s fine that the horse wants some apples and that he wants help from Dora and Boots, because I’m certain he didn’t understand that Dora’s little siblings were on their way to a boiling death in the Gooey Geyser. But I think the hungry horse would have been content going hungry a little while longer had Dora explained that she was trying to save a couple of lives. But no. Dora wants to please eveyrone and asks for our help in finding apples, then carrots. So now if those babies get cooked, we’re accomplices, unless we yell at Dora to have the sense to get going, which I have a hunch she wouldn’t have heard, despite the pretense that we’re along on this trip.

Later the group is heading through the garden and the flowers in the garden decide they won’t let anyone pass without A. Being woken up, or B. doing a funny dance, or C. making a funny face. Knowing what these babies are headed toward, I’m thinking Dora should be pulling out the weed whacker and telling the flowers to back the #$%&! off. But no, they all do their dances and faces and other unreasonable things. They end up getting to the kids just in time, but it’s all so unnecessary if they had hurried a little more, or not left the gate unlocked, or the stroller in the yard or the babies’ window open.

I’ve been watching too many of these shows.

If you’ve ever seen Dora, you’ll love this video:

I found this video here. Its title is “Are women born this way?” I know at least one who was, and, no, I am not married to her.

By now almost everyone has seen the clip of Susan Boyle. If you haven’t, go to the link before reading on. You can read this stuff anytime. You shouldn’t wait another second before seeing her.

A piece by Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly encapsulates well why this video resonates, even brings tears to my eyes.

In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging — the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts — the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace.

Schwarzbaum writes more that I would have included, except that it would have made it almost unnecessary for you to go to the EW site, and I’m sensitive that her work should be seen where it was originally posted, giving EW another penny and a half because you stopped by.

The scene causes me to wonder about Boyle’s 47 years. She lives with her cat. She’s never been married or even kissed. Somehow in anonymity she walked out on stage without a lick of style or an ounce of pretense. She was who she was, convinced that her voice would overcome what she lacked in appearance, or naive to the fact that often the giftwrap matters more than the gift. Maybe that was her strength. She lowered our expectations and then blew us away.

My prayer for Boyle is that this moment launches her into a better 47 years than the ones she’s had. She is revered now. My hope is she never arrives at a place in which she’s despised for her success, as so many who achieve loftiness are. I hope this story is as amazing as it seems right now, that I can always point to her performance as one that rocked us all on our heels and woke us up, that Susan Boyle forever becomes the definition of happily ever after.

Out of some curiosity the other day I looked up the band Death Cab for Cutie. The lead singer went to high school where my kids would go if they don’t go to the other one in the district (separate story). The band performed here several months ago and I had meant to look them up for some time. Now that I find out Sarah likes emo music (Finding out what “emo” means takes a few conversations for this adult. Sarah hasn’t gravitated to some of the troubling aspects of emo, but I’ve got my eye on her. I’m so lucky my parents didn’t have the Internet and had to rely on rumors to get the word they wanted on music we liked.) and that DC4C is considered by some to be emo, it made me all the more curious. Sarah hasn’t yet gravitated to Death Cab, though, favoring the musical stylings of My Chemical Romance, Panic at the Disco and others.

One day last week I had free time at David and Geeta Fyffe’s (brother-in-law) apartment and looked up the cab on YouTube. I found this video, called “What Sarah Said.” The piece is a bit advanced for someone my Sarah’s age, (She’s 10.) but not, I suppose, if I were to sit down and discuss it with her. In tone it reminds me of the movie What Dreams May Come, in which Robin Williams risks spending eternity in Hell to get his wife out of there.

After watching the video and not understanding the French in it, I found out what singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard (the Bremerton boy) was thinking when he wrote the song.

“Gibbard depicts the anguish and frustration of a hospital waiting room, and after the song melodically lulls to a gentle, hushed hum, he attests both mournfully and assuredly that ‘Love is watching someone die.’ Gibbard isn’t even sure that he fully understands the gravity and force of such a statement. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever really understand it until I’m in that situation,’ he admits, ‘but there’s something really dignified in a weird way about being with somebody and holding someone’s hand as they’re slowly leaving the world. I think that it really takes a lot of love to watch somebody you really care for deteriorate. The easy thing to do is walk away from it, or check out from the whole situation, and with the people in my family we’ve lost over the years, the most difficult thing was to be there. But you’re there because you love that person, and that’s what makes it difficult.’”

The Sarah in the song apparently really did say, “Love is watching someone die.” It was a woman, a friend of Gibbard’s, on a walk with her beau. She broke down when she realized one of them would likely have to watch the other die.

The video, to me, seems more like someone self-destructing, but that can’t be easy either.

In 1998 I watched my mother die of cancer. More profound to me, however, was watching my father watch my mother die. For days his hands were there to hold hers as he called her all the sweet nicknames he had created for her over their 50 years together. He was precisely the man he needed to be for her in her final moments. Never had I been so moved my father. For all the disciplining and counseling he tried to give me and my brothers all these years, nothing taught me more about him than seeing the tenderness of the man as the love of his life was passing on.

People keep saying how glad they are 2008 is over and that they are looking forward to next year, which starts Thursday. This year is an ex-spouse, the bad pizza, your nephew who calls you collect from prison. The year had its promise. The SuperBowl was super, the elections were genuinely interesting, but then the media reported Sarah Palin’s press release about her pregnant daughter, which caused Washington Mutual to collapse. Stupid media.

Like spouses, pizzas and relatives, you can always find another one. That’s where 2009 comes in. The new year comes to save us. We get to write new numbers on our checks, and a new president. It will be like watching Idol and going from “The Hotness” to Kelly Clarkson.

Trouble is, 2008 doesn’t take all its baggage with it. Instead 2009 gets the Oakland Raiders, a bad team with incompetence everywhere that hamstrings even the best of coaches. The good news for 2009, it can’t be fired for another year, whether it’s “ohhhh-fullll” or just “a little pitchy.”

When I wasn’t quite yet 17, a few years away, Janis Ian was a buzzkill about the world I was aspiring to conquer, the world of high school popularity. She sang the song “At Seventeen,” which is a devastating and accurate take on life in high school for those who don’t have a shot at living the ideal. When the song came out I was in junior high school. I wasn’t immensely popular, but it wasn’t hopeless for me, either. I knew this song wasn’t written about my life, but I wasn’t unsympathetic. Despite my own quest for emminence, I wasn’t out of touch with those for whom such a quest was futile.

“To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
the world was younger than today
when dreams were all they gave for free
to ugly duckling girls like me…”

Perhaps every kid my age could relate to this song, I don’t know. To some degree didn’t we all question how we measured against our peers? Even the most popular girls and boys experienced some rejection, didn’t they? For just a moment or several, it’s hard for me to imagine that every kid did not have at least one experience of being the outcast. I’m not talking about the kid in the dirty clothes who found a way to get in a fight every day. I think even the kid who was popular with all the girls and got in trouble for smoking pot off campus, which was just about the coolest thing a kid could do back then, had to have doubts about himself.

As a kid who only walked the outskirts of the popular neighborhood in junior high, it’s understandable I related to the song, because Ian actually wrote it about her years between age 12 and 14. “At seventeen” sounded better musically. During those years I heard from girls other than my mother that I was cute, I didn’t believe it. My brothers, much older than I, had grown into attractive men, but I still felt like I had an awkwardly ugly face. Even when I did achieve the pinnacle of popularity by getting elected president, I still felt awkward and unsure of myself. Hard to believe now, I know, because of how dashing I have become.

A few nights ago I watched a pretty lame program. They were announcing nominees for the Grammys. I won’t watch the Grammys themselves and I don’t need a show to announce who gets nominated. But I’m on vacation and it seemed like there could be some good music. Some of it was.

It’s not cool anywhere to admit liking Celine Dion, but she sang “At Seventeen” and was wonderful. You can see the video here. There are also a few videos out there of Janis Ian, too, and I recommend you go see them.

As I mentioned a day ago, I’m participating in the annual National Novel Writing Month, the challenge that is exactly what its title suggests. You write a novel in a month. There is no judging of the work, only the word count, and an acknowledgment that a lot of what will be written will be crap. As I said previously, the magic is in the editing.

When midnight struck on Nov. 1, I was in the middle of watching a movie. Once that ended I took to writing my first bit. To get to 50,000 words, the target for those doing this, you have to write about 1,667 words every day. I broke 2,000 the first night and went to be around 3 a.m. Before bed on Saturday I broke 4,200 and tonight I surpassed 6,300. So I’m about 1,300 words ahead of schedule.

I think I need to be. For one, fear of not finishing has overtaken me. I’ve got an idea that’s going somewhere and I’ve got a deadline. Second, I want the certificate and Web badge you get for doing the work. Third, there’s an election Tuesday and I’m aware that on that day it might be kind of tough for me to carry on with this project. So when I start again I don’t want to be behind.

The odd thing was, today I knew that even if I wrote nothing, I’d be ahead of schedule because I had technically done more than two days work on the first day. And yet later in the evening I decided to pick up the laptop, because I had thought of an ending and I knew where the story was going next. So I decided to write at least the ending. I did so and found out I had added about 600 words pretty easily. That was enough to get me going back to where I was in the story to continue on.

Tonight I had little intention of writing and no expectations about where I’d end up once I started, yet when I did so it was the most enjoyable chapter of this whole experience. I guess that should tell me something.

This could be dangerous for me. It’s probably way too soon to speculate like this, moments after watching the opening sketch on Saturday Night Live. I don’t know how John McCain will appear on the rest of the show, but that opening sketch seemed like it would have been far more appropriate, for lack of a better word right now, next Saturday.

The sketch had all the energy of an after-the-loss skit. When Sarah Palin was on her appearances had her come off as authoritative, someone with a shot. The skit tonight had the air of a post-election concession. McCain’s own part in the skit was probably fine. The 10 blank plates joke was funny. So was Sarah Palin talking about Palin 2012 and becoming a white Oprah, but it would have been better next week. Tonight, being in a skit with Palin angling for 2012, (Well, someone playing Palin.) it looked like an admission of defeat for McCain to be taking part. If it had been Darrell Hammond playing McCain, it wouldn’t have been as funny, but it still would have somewhat funny.

I’m certain McCain doesn’t see it that way. He’s having a good time, getting some air time and perhaps generating warmth from those watching. The skit will be replayed thousands of times between now and Wednesday. There is a benefit to taking your critics’ arguments and having fun with them yourself. But I also believe three’s an art to it. The skit tonight didn’t measure up to that. Instead, it left an impression of McCain as the loser.

If I would have been in his shoes, I would have done the show, but not that skit

I’m watching the skit about Keith Olbermann now. This one is good, nice tone by Affleck.

UPDATED at 12:20 a.m.: I did a little searching to see if anyone else was opining on the McCain appearance. I found the LA Times recap of the episode. I haven’t seen Weekend Update yet, and apparently he’s on that. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t sound like I would change my general thought.

UPDATED at 12:26 a.m.: OK, that wasn’t bad.

Every once in a while I read a book I enjoy so much that I read it twice. I just finished one for the first time that I’m sure I’ll go through again.

The Blind Side tells of Michael Oher, who plays left tackle at Ole Miss. If the story were that simple the book wouldn’t be much more than the standard sports bio. If any of us had met Oher and his family before he became a teenager, we would all have predicted much less for him. Through a sequence of chances he now finds himself an all SEC lineman and a surefire NFL prospect.

On Saturday he may not have lived up to that reputation. Ole Miss lost to Vanderbilt 31-17 and Vandy linebackers got behind the Ole Miss line for six sacks.

Even if he doesn’t end up in the NFL, which seems unlikely, his life story intertwined with the evolution of the left tackle makes for a fascinating read by Michael Lewis, who also wrote Moneyball. This book is getting less attention than Moneyball, but I enjoyed it more.

I bought the book a couple weeks ago after finally making it all the way through Hubris. That book was dense. Interesting, yes. Important as well, but dense. Lewis’ book is a breeze to read.

Oh, and there’s a BYU angle to it as well.

Work paid my way to go see The Simpsons Movie, otherwise I might be waiting until the DVD came out. Then again, it’s had pretty good reviews, so I might have found a couple hours to sneak the movie in. On the movie’s Web site I created this character, Scoop Gibson.

My comments about the movie can be found here. The short version is I really liked the movie, but it would have been a lot more meaningful 10-15 years ago. As days have gone on, however, I find myself wanting to see it again. That’s not a bad sign.

I just finished the final Harry Potter book. There are plenty of other places to read about the book itself, so I won’t go into my critique, other than to say I enjoyed it.

What I noticed, however, was how afraid I was that some buttball out there might ruin the ending for me. I had attended the premiere of the fifth movie, in part to be part of the shared experience of being at the first showing. I liked the movie and liked the event. You know, sometimes it’s just fun to take part in something because everyone else is.

When the book came out I took my kids to Barnes & Noble to get it, because it was a belated birthday present for my daughter. I looked for moments she wasn’t reading it and snatched it away.

All the while I avoided my e-mail and feared opening it at work. I avoided the Web at home and steered clear of some sites while I read the book, because I was afraid someone, innocently or not, would spoil the ending for me. I read about it on Eric Snider’s blog here, how some people purposefully seek to destroy the ending by placing spoilers in unrelated places. There’s also a discussion in the comments about whether we fans are lemmings. I wax on there about it.

Thankfully I finished the book before anyone said too much, though someone did say something that kind of spoiled it for me. In the end what she said was vague and was something that I probably could have assumed about the ending.

Nothing like the time before I got to see Rocky II and my friend said, “It’s just like Rocky I except Rocky wins.” Furnunculus Bruce Luttrell.

Bear scare locks down Redmond school

According to InStyle magazine Heidi and Lauren are feuding. It’s on the cover, with their pictures.

Here are two attractive women who are so famous that the magazine believes it can simply use their first names and I have no clue who either is.

Since Roger Ebert has been sick, his “Ebert & Roeper” place has been filled in with a mix of real critics and celebrities for the past several months. On Sunday I watched John Mellencamp, once known as “John Cougar,” fill in. Mellencamp isn’t a bad choice as far as celebrities go, because he did once make and star in a film that was well received by the critics. Nonetheless, his turn as a critic was both difficult to watch and inspiring. It was inspiring in that he went to these movies the way most of us do. We’re not experts in the craft and generally aren’t difficult to please. But it was difficult because you soon figured out that he must not have a lot to do if he’s going to recommend we waste two hours of our lives on every movie ever made.

My favorite was when the two were critiquing “Vacancy.” Roeper thought it bad. Mellencamp gave it a thumbs up, offering praise that’s sure to make it to the movie’s ads. The makers of the films Mellencamp reviewed should use the following quotes from his TV appearance.

Vacancy
“I thought that it was, uh, not as bad as you think it is!” raves John Mellencamp, “Ebert & Roeper.”

Lonely Hearts
“I didn’t have any trouble following timelines!” proclaims John Mellencamp, “Ebert & Roeper.”

In the Land of Women
“I think it’s something to be learned by the story!” shouts John Mellencamp, “Ebert & Roeper.”

Fracture
“I thought that kid was handsome, though didn’t you? I mean he was a handsome guy. There’s got to be merit to that!” exults John Mellencamp, “Ebert & Roeper.”

One of the fears I have, even as I demand answers, is that my quest for understanding begets more of the same. Schoolyard killers in the past have spawned discussions of bullying and the like, yet I haven’t seen much to answer why one kid out of a million who get bullied decide to kill innocents.

An answer as good as any I’ve seen comes from Time Magazine’s David Von Drehle in his piece “It’s All About Him.”

“I’ve lost interest in the cracks, chips, holes and broken places in the lives of men like Cho Seung-Hui, the mass murderer of Virginia Tech. The pain, grievances and self-pity of mass killers are only symptoms of the real explanation. Those who do these things share one common trait. They are raging narcissists. . . .

A generation ago, the social critic Christopher Lasch diagnosed narcissism as the signal disorder of contemporary American culture. The cult of celebrity, the marketing of instant gratification, skepticism toward moral codes and the politics of victimhood were signs of a society regressing toward the infant stage.”

Let’s be honest, even this blog is an exercise in narcissism to some degree. I’d say many politicians are narcissists. Anyone who writes an autobiography should be suspect. But I’ve always known about my self-absorption. I suspect we all have it to some degree and that we keep it in check. As a little kid I always knew there were other people in the swimming pool with me. The day I stopped peeing in the pool was when I realized those other people mattered.

In my life I have had a few moments of feeling disconnected, most notably with fellow members of the LDS church. Even as I served an 18-month mission, deep in the throes of seeking more to join us, I sometimes felt disconnected with the larger Mormon culture. I still do. Yet it has never occurred to me to punish those who seem to feel fine in it. I’ve always assumed it is more about me, both the good and bad parts of me, then it is about them.

Someone with unchecked narcissistic traits just wouldn’t go there. If I’m a true narcissist, I blame people I reject for my disconnection.

I don’t understand it, and that’s probably a good thing.

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband is suing Bill O’Reilly for calling Mr. Gabor, er, “Prince” Frederic von Anhalt, a “fraud” for claiming to have had a 10-year affair with Anna Nicole Smith and possibly being the father of her baby daughter.

From CNN:

“Look, this guy’s a fraud,” O’Reilly said, according to a transcript of the show posted on the network’s Web site. “We know he’s a fraud. But let’s — what I want to talk about is — he’s done. His credibility is — is finished.”

O’Reilly says the guy is “done?” Who was Frederic other than Gabor’s husband anyway?

His credibility is finished? Listen, O’Reilly, just because you may not have slept with Anna Nicole Smith doesn’t mean the “prince” didn’t. I’m thinking it probably wasn’t a difficult thing to do. It can’t be any tougher than marrying a Gabor sister.

Since the show aired, von Anhalt said people give him dirty looks when he goes to the grocery store.

“They say, ‘Look, here comes the fraud,”‘ he said. “I get lots of e-mails from people bad-mouthing me. It’s very embarrassing.”

What self-respecting prince and Gabor spouse does his own grocery shopping? I saw Zsa Zsa in an the Atlanta airport 25 years ago and had a hard time believing she had to walk the ramps like us commoners. I can’t imagine her squeezing melons in the produce aisle. Slapping a cop? Sure. Comparing prices on Hamburger Helper? No way.

I believe the “Here comes the fraud” part. O’Reilly is that powerful. After an hour of watching Billo I’m ready to label someone a “secular progressive” for ordering French fries.

How did so many skeptics find the prince’s e-mail address?

And finally, Zsa Zsa is still alive? I was always partial to Eva, who lives in Hooterville.

In mid March I wrote about the David Sedaris book I bought, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I had read Me Talk Pretty One Day and was excited to read the newer book.

The jacket of the “Corduroy” book claims that Sedaris “lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity below its surface.” There’s a good reason the absurdity is below the surface. No one witnessing the events above the surface would have seen a lot of what Sedaris writes about. His memoirs are largely made up. Or as Sedaris freely admits, he exaggerates.

I got to this story through Al Romenesko at the Poynter Institute, where you can see the links to the Slate story on Alex Heard’s New Republic piece, in which Heard seems to me to make a pretty good case that Sedaris’ stories are based in truth, but then are embellished to make them funnier. Quotes and entire scenes are pulled entirely out of Sedaris’ imagination, according to Heard. When you go to the Poynter site, a lot of people defend Sedaris, indicating that no one should expect a humorist to be telling the whole truth. It is true that when I read Dave Barry, I don’t assume that everything he’s telling me is factual. His context, however, makes that obvious. For me, Sedaris doesn’t. If it makes me an idiot to not have been clear all along that these were fanciful versions of real events, I confess to being an idiot, then.

J. Peder Zane writes in the Charlotte News & Observer that Heard’s story is a bit much, because Sedaris’ readers were in on the joke anyway. I suppose I always wondered if this day would come, so the news wasn’t much of a surprise.

Sedaris defends himself in New York’s Newsday

Sedaris has always freely acknowledged that he exaggerates. He came to fame talking on NPR in 1992 about his stint as a Santa’s elf at Macy’s (a true story, The New Republic asserts). But did he lie about his experiences working at a mental hospital or taking guitar lessons from a midget? Heard says Sedaris wildly and willfully mischaracterized what went on.

“What do you think a state mental hospital is?” Sedaris reponds. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re a real hellhole, a real pit.’… If I got the style of the buildings wrong [Gothic instead of Tuscan Revival], excuse me. I still stand by what I wrote…. People aren’t buying my books or showing up because they think every word is true. They’re showing up because they want to laugh.”

Given controversies about such authors as James Frey, Sedaris says, “It was just a matter of time before somebody wrote this article. It’s just in the air. I’m probably lucky the person who wrote it is so incompetent.”

Sedaris mentions the architecture, which is a minor point. The major problem with the mental hospital story, though, wasn’t the description of the architecture, it was Sedaris’ retelling of something that he said transpired there that apparently didn’t happen.

No question Sedaris is funny. But according to Heard, Sedaris’ book Naked begins with a statement that the stories are true. I guess that’s the first lie of the book.

In the book I’ve almost finished, Sedaris recounts telling his brother about a documentary of a child who had a secret twin dead inside him. It had really long hair.

“It’s a bunch of baloney,” my father said.
“No, really, I saw it.”
“Like hell you did.”

“Like hell” to any of it.