New pandemic: Inanity. Way worse than that hog fever

AVOID SWINE FLU! DO NOT LICK PIGS!!

Being the kind of guy who needs to feel plugged in all the time, I use Google Alerts to send me news stories about Napa. Back when I was on the radio every day, it seemed essential to have a fairly good idea of what the heck was going on around town, and ever since I started trying to know what's going on, people started expecting me to know what's going on, so now I actually need to know what's going on, or else I will let everyone down and I can't have that on my conscience. Expectation created, expectation pending, expectation must be fulfilled, or else I lose face. Tools like Google Alerts make it a lot easier to stay informed than it used to be (and a lot cheaper than using a clip service.) In my job with the City of Napa, then, I continue to try and have a clue most days.

So my Google Alerts generate these emails that have headlines and a few sentences from online news stories. All of these stories have the word "Napa" or the phrase "Napa Valley" in them. The majority are from the good ol' Napa Valley Register, and I have usually read all those stories, but the Google Alert also catches stories in the Bay Area press and online newspaper content from all over. Typically, it's a travel story about visiting Napa Valley. Always enjoyable to read those and see what restaurants are hot, and which hotel is hip (or really discounting like crazy) at the moment. (I also get a certain number of news stories that have to do with NAPA Auto Parts, and stories about a beach resort called Ayia Napa in Cyprus, and now and then a story about a boxer named Ian Napa. Amazing the things one may learn about without any desire to learn them, isn't it? I suppose if I created Google Alerts for a dozen other keywords - teakettle, rutabaga, oxycontin, hair plugs, Jimmy Durante, for example - I could expand my knowledge in many directions with very little effort. Or I could put all those words into one Alert so I would only get stories that contain every word. I wonder how many times I would get a message that someone has written a story involving teakettles, rutabagas, oxycontin, hair plugs and Jimmy Durante? My old junior high science teacher taught us that maxim about "possible" versus "probable" - that if you had a million monkeys with a million typewriters it was possible that one of them would type out the entire Bible. Possible, but not probable. But today with the internet, I think we do sort of have a million monkeys with a million typewriters, more or less, so there is probably someone out there who is writing regularly about Jimmy Durante and how he considered getting hair plugs but gave up the idea during his oxycontin addiction years - a habit he only kicked by drinking rutabaga tea. But I digress.)

So today my Google Alert merrily popped up in my email box, and there was a story that mentioned Castle Rock Cabernet. I don't know much about Castle Rock other than the fact that they make one of the best cheap everyday grocery store pinot noirs, but the name caught my eye so I clicked on it. What I get to then is something like "Tom and Judy's Wine Blog" (and I wouldn't link to them if I could find it because I wouldn't want Tom and Judy - if that's even the right names - to read what I am about to write because it might hurt their feelings) which turns out to be a very sincere, straightforward, well-presented blog that tells us all about the cheap, grocery-store wines they've been drinking, paired with something like tuna noodle casserole. "This big fruity red wine stands up well to the amazingly oversalted Hamuburger Helper and Rice-A-Roni feast that Tom I enjoyed while watching Wheel of Fortune," it very well might have said, but don't quote me. My brief glance told me that Tom and Judy were steadfastly blogging about their $10 bottles paired with TV dinners just about every single day.

Now it's all well and good for any citizen of the world with rudimentary language skills and at least dial up to write and post any damn thing they want. It's a free country, and thank God Al Gore invented the internet for us, I say! However, while this kind of "citizen journalism" may be self-satisfying, and fun, and sort of a hobby and all that, it is also overpoweringly inane.

(Let's pause a momemt and ponder this wonderful word - "inane" meaning silly, pointless, empty, fatuous, vacuous, complacently and unconsciously foolish, asinine. It's a beautiful word to use with someone who is being it. Usually someone who is being inane will not have the vocabulary to know what inane means, so you can call them inane and they will look somewhat puzzled but not offended.)

This deluge of inanity we're living in today is difficult to escape from. If it's not somebody's inane blog, it's the inane post on Facebook like "Off to the dry cleaners!" or some mouth-breather talking endlessly about sports. I don't care how much you know about sports - more than thirty seconds on any sports topic is about twice too much. And then there's politics - a topic everyone seems to think they need to spout off about. Truth be told, if you don't have an original idea - that being something you thought of yourself - chances are the talk show host you're parroting said it better when you heard it in the first place, so I generally don't want to hear your version, bub. Having survived what I think was a bout of the hog fever, I feel strong but I am not sure my immune system can handle the inanity pandemic.

Before your nostrils flare in disgust and you cleverly decide to post a comment saying "Hello Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle! Your blog, sir, is as inane as they come! How dare you! When you point your finger remember there are three other fingers pointing back at you!" Before you post that, just keep in mind that I already know all that. But at least my fingers just got a good workout.

How I Survived a Chilling Three-Day Ordeal!

Throughout the annals of history (and it is in the annals where all the best history happens) there have been many well-known stories of survival against the odds. The Israelites and their forty days in the wilderness - that soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes and went cannibal - Dick Cheney toughing it out in his undisclosed-location bunker - all inspiring in their courage, fortitude and sheer will to live on! Nothing, however, can compare with the horrendous crisis from which I have just escaped...

THREE DAYS WITHOUT FACEBOOK!!!

That's right, my friends - three long, anxiety-wracked days and sleepless nights deprived of my social media of choice. A 72-hour soul-searching test of resolve. A gut-wrenching off-line stress-a-lapooza!

How did I do it, you ask? Draw nigh and hear my tale of woe.

It all started with an email. An email that looked fully bogus, in fact, telling me my account was disabled due to my violation of the FB terms of service. I'm sure you, like me, have read, understood and memorized the terms of service, which prohibit harassing people, stealing other people's intellectual property, taking more than nine quizzes in one day, and posting porn, among other offenses. I have never done any of these things. OK, I have harassed a few people, but they have all been close friends - and deserving of harassment for sure. I harass because I love! But in the realm of the online brigands I am as innocent as a babe. Honestly, officer.

So I get this email and just ignore it, in part because I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, and in part because I could still log on. And we all get so many scammy, manipulative emails I was sure this was just another in that vein. Unfortunately, to my dismay, it was all too true. (Dah-dah-daaaahhh!)(That was dramatic music.)

Fast-forward about 18 hours. It's mid-day Monday, and suddenly I can't log on. I CAN'T LOG ON! A message pops up when I try to, and it says my account has been disabled. DISABLED! Imagine the weakness in my knees, the lump rising in my throat, the anguished cry welling up from the deepest crevasse of my being! "Save me!" I wailed, "Don't make me go back to MySpace, there's no one there!"

And so began my journey through the fire, my three days as Job. So began the endless hours during which I had no way to know who had joined Farmville, who was seeking weaponry in Mafia Wars, who had thrown a sheep at me. Endless hours of having no clue who was excelling at Bejewelled Blitz or who had taken the "How much do you know about (random person I hardly remember from high school) quiz?" Endless hours when I lost touch with the extreme political views from both left and right, boiling down complex concepts into single sentences with lots of !!!! Endless hours of just not knowing who was thinking "Time for lunch" and "Off to bed" and other deep thoughts that I wanted to share in. Try to imagine my misery.

So this episode of feeling violated will take its place alongside getting burglarized in the night while we slept upstairs, alongside getting our bank accounts emptied by some identity thief, and alongside two or three occasions of someone stealing my credit card number. (Do I have a big "kick me" sign on my back?)

To make a long story longer, I will simply say the problem was suddenly resolved and my account was restored. I have been exonerated of wrongdoing by the Gods of Facebook (perhaps aided by the intervention of a highly-placed FOAF - thanks Katherine) and yet I have no idea of what prompted the whole kerfuffle in the first place. And so my beloved Facebook is back - and just in the nick of time, because I was right on the verge of actually doing something productive.

Men are scum but Nick Hornby's ok and so is Glee

This just in:

TLC drops Jon and keeps Kate:TLC says the new show, which debuts November 2, will be "Kate Plus 8."

Let me be frank here - I have never grasped the pleasure of watching these people try to manage their lives with 8 freaking kids running around. And the few times I accidentally glimpsed some of this "reality" show, it always seemed like mom and dad were barely tolerating each other. So it came as no surprise that this guy was getting some side action. I mean, even the most devout husband would be looking for any excuse to get out of the house that had 8 freaking kids running around with poopy diapers and snotty noses. Granted, he should have joined a fantasy football league or taken some night classes or something rather than go on the make, but there you go. Men are scum, we all know that.

So now TLC can spin the whole thing into much more of a soap opera that it was before. I bet the ratings go through the roof if we have scenes of them yelling at each other, her throwing his clothes out on the lawn, him trying to turn the kids against her. A beautiful American tableau in the making.

And speaking of dysfunctional men, Nick Hornby's new book is just released and my copy showed up in the mail today. It's called "Juliet Naked" and I have no idea what it's about but I know it will be good, maybe great. Hornby never disappoints. OK, I overstate. "The Long Way Down" was a long letdown, but only because my expectations were so high. When you have written things so touching, like "About a Boy," and so heartfelt and true like "High Fidelity," you can leave your fans with some fairly high expectations. And somehow his good books become good movies, instead of "not as good as the book" movies. The guy has a magic touch. Writes a lot, writes well. Cheers, Nick, and I hope Arsenal has a good season for you.

And now looping back to where I started, I am starting to get the feeling that reality TV could actually be starting to peter out - and from my lips to God's ears! I know, I know, there's a lot to be enjoyed in watching people break each other's hearts, cheat and lie to win money, and suffer through weeks of public weight loss. But just spending a little time watching something like "Mad Men," "Sons of Anarchy," or "Glee," (shows within my reach with the basic cable and hulu.com that are my lot in life today) reminds me that reality is no replacement for fiction. Reality is just not all is stacked up to be. And besides, we all know they're feeding lines and situations to those reality show people anyway. It's just an unsophisticated script performed by amateurs. Reruns of "The Sopranos" never looked better.

Because you never know

"'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

-Benjamin Franklin, 1789

Death and taxes. Inevitable. (How about death BY taxes? Some would say that's about to happen, too, but that sounds like the start of a political rant and I've lost all enthusiasm for those.) Funny that these two things we all know are so certain are the things we are so poorly prepared for most of the time. I mean, after all, you know you have to file by April 15 every year, and yet we still file extensions and fuss over it another six months. Human nature, I guess. And no surprise that so many of us shuffle off the mortal coil and leave it to others to pick up the pieces. When the eternal footman holds your coat, by the way, no extensions can be filed. Unless you have a really, really good CPA.

I had my little glance at mortality a few months ago when I joined the melanoma club. Made me take notice of things left undone. And lately it seems like people are just gone all too suddenly, unexpectedly. Napa lost a really good man this week, just 56 years old. (RIP Chris) There are no guarantees of living to your dotage (universal health care or no) - no guarantees of waking up tomorrow for that matter, or even making it to the other side of a busy street. We're all just hanging by a thread. So a person should be prepared.

To that end, I blog my last will and testament. Not a legal document, perhaps, but if it becomes my lot to take the dirt nap on short notice, here's the way I'd like it to play out:

1. Salvage the parts: take anything that's usuable and give to someone who needs it. I believe in recycling.

2. Into the fire: in my view it's an uncalled for trauma to the living to prop up the dead for display in a box. Just burn up the used meat sack and let a nice picture of me - something entertaining - be the remembrance. Apologies to the bottom line of the funeral home and the casket makers. It's pointless, but if you want to scatter my ashes I'll take Shubert Alley.

3. Whistle past the cemetery: graves and headstones are great for genealogy but otherwise just creepy and sad. Who wants to remember the dead by standing in a graveyard? Skip it.

4. Take care of the little ones: Flowers are nice but buy some for yourself, someone who can enjoy them. Money for the grandkids college fund is a lot better, meaningful gift, don't you think?

5. Party on, Garth: A lot of people have "a celebration of life" that is too much like mourning and not a lot like celebration. When I'm having the big sleep I want everybody who knew me - check that - everybody who liked me, let's say - to have a great big raging fucking party. A party with a lot of loud music and loud laughing and very loud drinking. A party where the cops come two or three times, like a fire that just keeps reigniting. That's how to celebrate, I say. So that you have such a bad hangover the next day you feel sorrier for yourself than the poor bastard who kicked off.

That's all there is to it. Simple last wishes. Party it up and move on. The best remembrance for anyone's passing is to take an even bigger bite out of life the next day and live with joy. Because you never know.

A bunch of things I like

I haven't had any dog bites or bee stings, but for some random reason I feel like making a list of a few of my favorite things, in no particular order, and here she goes:

1. Almonds

2. When people laugh so out of control they snort

3. That first morning it smells like fall, or spring, or summer, or winter

4. Email

5. Manhattan (New York, not Kansas)

6. A long, heavy overcoat

7. When somebody drives one deep and everyone rises to their feet all at once

8. Sleeping with the fan on. And the TV. And hitting the snooze button a lot.

9. Reaching a par 5 in 2 (setting up a 4 putt)

10. Frank Capra movies

11. The sound of a cello

12. The memory of sneaking a look at a Playboy magazine as a kid

13. Fighter jets in formation

14. When little kids laugh so hard they lose all bodily control

15. Manzanita

16. Good pinot noir

17. Sondheim

18. The vegetarian burrito at Soda Canyon Store

19. Making people laugh

20. Buying a gift for someone I love

21. The first pass with a new razor blade

22. High speed trains

23. A perfectly struck bicycle kick

24. Mockingbirds

25. T.S. Eliot

26. That feeling of barely controlled panic when you walk out on stage in front of a live audience

27. Fedoras

28. Turning up the music in the car until the mirrors are vibrating

29. A quality smoke

30. Soft lips

31. French fries in a paper cone

32. Nick Hornby

33. When a blog post is finished

Because you really don't want to take your laptop into the john

It was random but today I got an email (by mistake, I think) and someone sent me this news story with the headline:

Newsstand sales of US magazines drop 12 percent

NEW YORK (AP) -- Consumers are buying fewer magazines at newsstands given the deep recession and the availability of plenty of free reading material online. An industry group said Monday that single-copy sales tumbled 12 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2008. That followed a year-over-year decline of 11 percent during the second half of last year.

Some group called the Audit Bureau of Circulations (and don't you wish you had THAT job!) gave out these numbers

...Cosmopolitan is still the most popular magazine at newsstands, though sales fell nearly 8 percent to 1.6 million. In overall circulation figures, Playboy and TV Guide Magazine fared the worst, down 9 percent and 10 percent, respectively. People magazine's circulation fell nearly 5 percent and Reader's Digest saw a 3 percent decline.

And so here's the list - what America's reading. It may come as a surprise that we're still reading anything at all, but the magazine survives, more or less. This is a list of our most popular magazines right now, followed by a number of smart ass remarks:

1. AARP the Magazine (Ok, isn't this magazine, like, free? Something they send you when you join AARP, which is something you join so you can get discounts at Arby's? Should this count as a magazine at all? No.)
2. AARP Bulletin (Ok, more of the same shit, This list is really stupid so far.)
3. Reader's Digest (Stupidest magazine ever. Packed with inane advice, predictable humor, and maudlin sentimentality, all written with a third-grade vocabulary. When I have an appointment at Kaiser I devour it, nonetheless. So comforting.)
4. Better Homes and Gardens (They actually are still chopping down trees to print this?)
5. National Geographic (OK, first magazine on the list that is not a total embarassment to have in your home. And yet off the scale in boredom inducement. I mean, you've see one primitive culture, you've seen them all. If I want to see backward, unwashed tribes I can go to a Raiders game.)
6. Good Housekeeping (A magazine for people who find Better Homes and Gardens too challenging. )
7. Woman's Day (About 4 million people are still reading this. Hello? It's 2009.)
8. Family Circle (Are you fucking kidding me?)
9. Ladies' Home Journal (That's it, I'm taking poison. Goodbye, world.)
10. AAA Westways (This one comes free with AAA membership, right? Doesn't count.)
11. People (Utter waste of time with zero cultural or social value. How completely irresistable and brilliant!)
12. Game Informer (First one on the list that stumped me. As you might guess, it's a magazine about video games. Good to know not all people are wasting their time with Reader's Digest and are spending their time more wisely with --- oh, never mind...)
13. Time (former news magazine that is now sort of a preachy and annoying version of People, with "news" about things that happened two weeks ago and about which you already read everything relevant a week ago.)
14. Prevention (A magazine about - preventing things, I guess. I am all for that. Things should be prevented. I think.)
15. Taste of Home (Had to look this one up. It's a recipe/cooking mag. First recipe I saw had Roman Meal bread as a key ingredient. Where's that poison I was taking?)
16. Sports Illustrated (Finally a magazine worth having! Pictures of people playing sports for 51 weeks of the year, and nearly naked women for one week a year. Mirrors the average American male's ratio of sports watching time to sexy time - 51:1.)
17. TV Guide (Consider: This publication is the same thickness today where there are 937 TV channels as it was 30 years ago when there were three TV channels. Still, it's remains an essential tool for those who just can't figure out what's on the goddamn TV without a magazine.)
18. Cosmopolitan (Amazingly, the same magazine printed 12 times a year, just with a different cover and a new name for the quiz each time.)
19. Southern Living (What the hell is published in Southern Living? "Scatching Itchy Tick Bites: Up and Down or Side to Side?" - "Okra vs. Grits: A Redneck Side Dish Throwdown!" - "Getting Your Baptist On")
20. AAA VIA (More free crap.)
21. Newsweek (See Time)
22. Maxim (Originally a sort of Playboy for younger guys, with a painful monthly effort to be edgy and hip and current. What do you mean, "just like this blog?" That's just mean.)
23. AAA Going Places (Stop it with the AAA shit!)
24. AAA Living (I mean it!)
25. Playboy (Thank God this bold defender of the First Amendment survives so we can all just read it for the articles!)

So there you have it. No Atlantic, no New Yorker, no Wired, no Utne Reader, no Harper's, no Vanity Fair. Also, no Popular Mechanics, no Popular Science, no Psychology Today. This list is, with only a couple of exceptions, a direct relic from 1965. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'd like to write more but there's some compelling reading in the latest issue of the AARP monthly - something about how to stay young through righteous indignation and sarcasm.

The Mindless, the Witless, and Jean-Paul Sartre

When I was a senior in college majoring in theatre, my directing class project was a play called "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre. This was a precious choice, a choice fraught with meaning, because I needed so much to do something outrageous and avant garde and non-Midwestern. This was the choice of a pretentious young guy who wore 1940s suit coats from the Goodwill and smoked Gitanes and Russian cigs with gold tips and came within a hair's breadth of donning a beret on several occasions. So for making a statement, "No Exit" filled the bill.

The play is about three people who find themselves in this - place - and gradually discover they are dead. (Kind of seems like a plot you've seen before, right? Like on "Twilight Zone" or something? But I think Sartre may have been first out of the gate with this setup.) There's a man and two women, and the man is tormented by the fact that one woman rejects him heterosexually and one rejects him homosexually, and the women reject each other, too, and it's all so very French because it's all so sexuality based and they all realize they are in Hell and Hell is a place where you are sexually frustrated for eternity, sort of like real life. Fun stuff! Barrel of laughs! Sarte is the not the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with. Too much thinking, too much angst. Smile, J.P, is it all really that bad? Actually, for him I think it was. His thesis in "No Exit" was essentially that "Hell is other people."

Let's face it - the man was onto something here. Other people can create Hell in the living world in so many ways! By teasing, tormenting, withholding, withdrawing - by embracing, absorbing, assimilating, smothering - by ignoring, neglecting, negating - by judging, condemning, disapproving. And these are just the emotional Hells, not the financial Hell, physical Hell, or the other many and various Hells that we can become caught up in.

But, jeez, such a heavy opening! Am I channeling Sartre? I intend instead to speak of other, more mundane Hell makers in our world - namely, Mindless Pausers and Witless Phoners.

Mindless Pausers are a special subcategory of Slow Walkers (previously chastised here.) MPs are most often found offending me at the top or bottom of an escalator, staircase, or elevator ride. The MP gives no thought to the other people behind them on these conveyances - he/she just stops flat at the top of escalator, or one step from the elevator door, and stands and rubberbnecks around, and hasn't a care for the dozen(s) of others behind trying to get somewhere. Advice to the Mindless Pauser? Get your lame, thoughtless ass out of my way! I KNOW where I'm going, and if I don't, I KNOW I am going to act like I do and keep striding on somewhere. If you are truly confused, move off to the side and figure it the hell out. The Mindless Pause in the midst of a flowing crowd is comparable to stopping your car in the fast lane on the freeway to read your map. Pull off on the shoulder, you inconsiderate goofball! Seasoned travellers prefer to keep moving - ala "I'm lost but I'm making good time."

The Witless Phoner is a newly developed species of human who loses 98% of their bodily functions when their cell phone rings. Sometimes a Witless Phoner becomes a Mindless Pauser as a result of the "my phone is ringing!" paralysis - legs stop moving, body becomes rigid, WP digs in the pocket or the purse, traffic stacking up in every direction, phone finally comes out, call gets answered, WP stares off into the distance as if they're alone on the moon. This sequence of events seems to occur often in doorways. "Here's a good place for me to stand - right here in this doorway," muses the WP. Studies show it actually is possible to move while talking - it IS possible to explore one's pockets and maintain leg function - it IS feasible to be at least semi-aware of one's surroundings during periods of consciousness!

Alas, perhaps I ask too much of my fellow man.