Since Thanksgiving week is all about eating, naturally my thoughts turn to zombies.
I mean, they live to eat. Even though they don’t, technically speaking, well, live. And even though it makes no sense that they’re ravenous for human flesh, because why would a corpse have an appetite?
I was thinking about all this last Sunday night when I was watching The Walking Dead on TV. In case you don’t know, this is weekly series that’s broadcast on AMC. Which, extending the theme of counter-intuition, stands for American Movie Classics. The Walking Dead is neither a movie nor a classic. Rather, it’s an episodic television show, based on a series of graphic novels (hifalutin’ comic books) about a small band of survivors of an unexplained (in the show, at least) apocalypse that has killed most of the world’s population, littering the landscape with corpses. Many of whom (but not all, somehow) have reanimated—in the sense that they can move, see, hear and smell, if not breathe, enunciate beyond hisses and moans, or mitigate the stench of their steady decomposition. Furthermore, these “walkers,” when not eating survivors wholesale, lethally infect them with bites that turn them into zombies, too.
None of it frankly makes any sense, even within its own little suspension-of-disbelief universe. Which tends to makes the plots head-scratchingly stupid. Not only that, but the show’s writing, character development and acting are pedestrian at best (pun sort of intended). That’s why I write that, in addition to not being a movie, The Walking Dead isn’t a classic by any stretch. It’s in only its second season, so there’s time for it to become one, I suppose. If, that is, it somehow can fashion its own framework of absurdist logic and hire new writers and actors to implement it.
So, why do I watch this program? It’s stupid, yes, but it’s stupid fun. The makeup, prosthetics, etc, are excellent, and the zombies are genuinely frightening. (An aside: How did “zombie” come to be synonymous with the undead dead, when the term used to be applied to a living person reduced by voodoo to a trance-like state?) The show, thus, is suspenseful, and sometimes delightfully nerve-wracking.
Also, much as watching The Biggest Loser makes me feel good about my ability to exit my house and car without the aid of a crowbar or the fire department, watching The Walking Dead makes living in our real world of environmental, economic, political and civil collapse feel at least slightly more tolerable. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m as disgusted as you are that our congressional “supercommittee” promised steely resolve, then crumbled like tinfoil. And yes, it’s hard not to feel that all may be lost when Americans are so desperate for leadership that Newt Gingrich can rise to the top of the GOP presidential field simply because he has ideas—however wrongheaded and disproven and egocentric those ideas might be. Still, just as Tom Waits once famously sang that he’d rather have “a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” so, too, would I—speaking of brains—rather not have mine ripped from my cranium and gobbled up by ghouls. As depressing as real life can be, come The Walking Dead’s conclusion at 10 pm Sunday nights, I feel grateful that I’ll soon be sleeping in a comfortable bed, beside a spouse who may punch me to stop snoring but at least is unlikely to cannibalize me.
So, anyway, getting back to eating. Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead included a scene in which a woman standing in a hayloft emptied a sack of live chickens onto a barn floor, where a group of walkers were lurching and hissing and moaning, as the undead dead are wont to do. Please don’t ask why a bunch of zombies were being held captive, rather than having been dispatched by the standard methods—a bullet to the brain or beheading. Again, none of it makes any sense, even within its own crazy context. How is it that something that’s already dead can be killed, anyway? If I told you that these particular zombies are being protected by a flipped-out retired veterinarian who thinks they’re only “sick,” and that they shouldn’t be stigmatized simply because they’re rancid killing machines, would that help sort things out? I didn’t think so.
Moving on. The woman, a daughter of the nutty veterinarian, emptied her sack of chickens and the zombies below—who happened to include the Corpse Formerly Known as Mom—went into a feeding frenzy. Again, why do the dead need to eat at all? If they like chickens so much, shouldn’t survivors tote a supply of Rhode Island Reds at all times to buy themselves getaway time whenever the zombies get close? I read on a Web site somewhere—naturally, there now are more Web sites and chats devoted to The Walking Dead than those dedicated to sustainable agriculture and nuclear disarmament—that the walkers will eat only live animals. Now, why is that?! Is it because the show would be much less horrific if survivors could simply leave a freshly-baked pie on the window sill for a passing zombie to conveniently “steal,” leaving the humans alone? Are walkers ever satiated, anyway? Were they to feast on us at the Thanksgiving table tomorrow, might they later in the day go into a tryptophan coma and doze to the sound of football on TV? While that seems unlikely, it would make about as much sense as anything else in the zombie universe.
I suppose that, in a certain sense, zombies are eating my brain, because I spend a lot of time puzzling over supernatural inconsistencies and illogic that could be better expended on any number of other things. But at least I’m not the only one wasting brainpower in this way. Per my earlier mention of Web sites, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of people who labor over this nonsense at far greater length than do I. I recently picked up a copy of the Washington City Paper to find the syndicated “Straight Dope” column, which is written by Cecil Adams, the self-proclaimed “world’s most intelligent human.” The question posed by a reader was this: “Putting aside the brain-eating and all that, how dangerous is the combined smell of all those ambulatory corpses? I assume they’re giving off methane or ammonia or some other noxious gas. Would the aggregate stench of hundreds of walking dead make your mall sanctuary uninhabitable, even if you managed to keep from being bitten?”
OK, first, why “how dangerous is” the smell, as opposed to “how dangerous would it be”? Does this reader live in a town where creeping malodorousness suggests a looming ambulatory-corpse crisis? Second, while Cecil Adams at least is smart enough to get paid to answer zombie questions, is this really the smartest use of a stratospheric IQ that otherwise might be put to use identifying new energy sources, or perhaps a way to isolate and neutralize the gun-nut gene that daily makes me want to strangle my own country?
Adams’ answer, while circumstantially irrelevant, was based on science and made for fascinating reading. Did you know that “aptly named gasses cadaverine and putrescine are primarily responsible for dead-body smell”? Me, neither! (Actually, I probably did know it, when I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Life of Cadavers, but I’d since forgotten.) To make a long response short, Adams concluded, “While the stench of zombies probably won’t kill you”—again, why “won’t” as opposed to “wouldn’t?” does Adams know something?—“it may gross you out of existence. If you’re somewhere that makes you constantly want to throw up, that to me is a good working definition of an uninhabitable environment.”
See, that’s the thing. The world in which we actually live no doubt makes every one of us want to vomit from time to time. One can reasonably argue, too, that—given global warming and its predictably dire consequences—Earth is becoming less habitable with each passing year. For now, though, our immediate environments—climatic and personal—remain (at least for those of us with jobs) within the comfort zone.
Put another way, if we aren’t able to keep our food down tomorrow, it will be because we overstuffed our guts, not because a shuffling army of zombies are harshing our mellow and stinkin’ up the joint.
That being the case, allow me to wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving. And bon appétit.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Return of the Bird
News a couple of weeks ago that the Baltimore Orioles will feature the goofy, grinning cartoon-bird logo on team caps next season for the first time since 1988 made me grin just as goofily. It’s a feel-good image in and of itself, but more than that, it hearkens back to the days when the following the Orioles was fun.
The cartoon bird reminds me of the great teams of the 1970s, when future hall of famers Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Frank Robinson were being profanely pushed to the limits of their talent by Manager Earl Weaver, himself later enshrined in Cooperstown. It brings back images of Memorial Stadium rocking to cheers led by bearded, beer-gutted cab driver Wild Bill Hagy.
Which obviously is why the team brass has dusted off the cartoon bird, supplanting the “ornithologically correct” bird associated with the reality of 14 straight seasons of losing under the bungling yet defiant ownership of Peter Angelos. Team ownership won’t change in 2012, but perhaps the Orioles’ fortunes somehow will, the cartoon bird’s reappearance is meant to suggest. Anyway, how’s about turning that frown upside down and joining the impish bird in a break from all your worries? Why not simply crack open a cold one, sit back and enjoy the game, whether you’re watching at Oriole Park at Camden Yards or at home on your TV?
Presumably this was a marketing decision many months in the making. It probably had nothing to do with the suicide of Mike Flanagan this past August. But for me, there’s a connection that’s more sweet than bitter.
Flanagan was a mainstay of the Orioles pitching staff in late 1970s and early 1980s. He won the American League’s Cy Young Award as its most outstanding hurler in 1979, a year in which his team came within one victory of winning the World Series. In a 17-year major league career spent primarily with Baltimore, he won 167 games. He threw the last pitch by the home team at Memorial Stadium in fall 1991, then retired the following year.
Flanagan served as the Orioles’ pitching coach for two seasons in the 1990s, as the team’s executive vice president for baseball operations from 2006 to 2008, and as an Orioles broadcaster for many of the years in between. He broadcast games until late August of this year, in fact. When, on his property in the Baltimore suburbs, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thereby ending his long career with the team and his 59-year association with the planet.
Why did he do it? Reports conflicted. Money woes apparently were a factor. But some sources suggested he also was despondent about the franchise’s long slide from relevance, and perceptions in some quarters that he’d been part of the problem. It’s hard to imagine where Flanagan got that, since, for most Orioles fans, the blame begins and ends with Angelos. It’s difficult to imagine an unkind word having been uttered about Flanagan, an earnest, hard-working, wry New Englander who always stood out as an island of competence in a sea of miscalculation and outright haplessness.
The suicide shocked most everyone, even people who’d known him well. Not so much his wife, who vaguely alluded to demons of long standing. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man whose pain is so deep, whose perceptions are so warped, that he thinks self-negation is the only way out?
But let’s say money was part of it, and losing another part. And let’s assume that, like pretty much every other middle-aged man, Flanagan mourned, to at least some degree, the loss of youth. Let’s go out on a limb and speculate that he felt his best days were long past. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that, until the very moment his long-shrinking Happy Place vanished entirely, that portal in his mind opened out onto a long-gone ballfield located several miles from the Inner Harbor, where Flanagan was still a pitcher in his prime, in tip-top shape statistically, physically and on the balance sheet. Where his team won far more often than it lost. Where the hats were goofy but the baseball wasn’t.
Mike Flanagan won’t be back at Camden Yards next spring. But his talisman, his ornithologically incorrect little buddy, will be. And that somehow makes me smile. The cartoon bird won’t make a lick of difference in the standings, of course. If the team improves at all, real-life ballplayers will make that happen, not some animated mascot. But the bird’s reappearance will make a difference to me. It will feel much more like a tribute to Flanagan than did the memorial patches the players wore on their uniforms in September. It will feel like a breezy reminder of a happier time.
The cartoon bird reminds me of the great teams of the 1970s, when future hall of famers Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Frank Robinson were being profanely pushed to the limits of their talent by Manager Earl Weaver, himself later enshrined in Cooperstown. It brings back images of Memorial Stadium rocking to cheers led by bearded, beer-gutted cab driver Wild Bill Hagy.
Which obviously is why the team brass has dusted off the cartoon bird, supplanting the “ornithologically correct” bird associated with the reality of 14 straight seasons of losing under the bungling yet defiant ownership of Peter Angelos. Team ownership won’t change in 2012, but perhaps the Orioles’ fortunes somehow will, the cartoon bird’s reappearance is meant to suggest. Anyway, how’s about turning that frown upside down and joining the impish bird in a break from all your worries? Why not simply crack open a cold one, sit back and enjoy the game, whether you’re watching at Oriole Park at Camden Yards or at home on your TV?
Presumably this was a marketing decision many months in the making. It probably had nothing to do with the suicide of Mike Flanagan this past August. But for me, there’s a connection that’s more sweet than bitter.
Flanagan was a mainstay of the Orioles pitching staff in late 1970s and early 1980s. He won the American League’s Cy Young Award as its most outstanding hurler in 1979, a year in which his team came within one victory of winning the World Series. In a 17-year major league career spent primarily with Baltimore, he won 167 games. He threw the last pitch by the home team at Memorial Stadium in fall 1991, then retired the following year.
Flanagan served as the Orioles’ pitching coach for two seasons in the 1990s, as the team’s executive vice president for baseball operations from 2006 to 2008, and as an Orioles broadcaster for many of the years in between. He broadcast games until late August of this year, in fact. When, on his property in the Baltimore suburbs, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, thereby ending his long career with the team and his 59-year association with the planet.
Why did he do it? Reports conflicted. Money woes apparently were a factor. But some sources suggested he also was despondent about the franchise’s long slide from relevance, and perceptions in some quarters that he’d been part of the problem. It’s hard to imagine where Flanagan got that, since, for most Orioles fans, the blame begins and ends with Angelos. It’s difficult to imagine an unkind word having been uttered about Flanagan, an earnest, hard-working, wry New Englander who always stood out as an island of competence in a sea of miscalculation and outright haplessness.
The suicide shocked most everyone, even people who’d known him well. Not so much his wife, who vaguely alluded to demons of long standing. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man whose pain is so deep, whose perceptions are so warped, that he thinks self-negation is the only way out?
But let’s say money was part of it, and losing another part. And let’s assume that, like pretty much every other middle-aged man, Flanagan mourned, to at least some degree, the loss of youth. Let’s go out on a limb and speculate that he felt his best days were long past. It isn’t hard for me to imagine that, until the very moment his long-shrinking Happy Place vanished entirely, that portal in his mind opened out onto a long-gone ballfield located several miles from the Inner Harbor, where Flanagan was still a pitcher in his prime, in tip-top shape statistically, physically and on the balance sheet. Where his team won far more often than it lost. Where the hats were goofy but the baseball wasn’t.
Mike Flanagan won’t be back at Camden Yards next spring. But his talisman, his ornithologically incorrect little buddy, will be. And that somehow makes me smile. The cartoon bird won’t make a lick of difference in the standings, of course. If the team improves at all, real-life ballplayers will make that happen, not some animated mascot. But the bird’s reappearance will make a difference to me. It will feel much more like a tribute to Flanagan than did the memorial patches the players wore on their uniforms in September. It will feel like a breezy reminder of a happier time.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Week That Was
It’s been quite an eventful past week in the news. So, for what it’s worth—and remember, when you read a blog that’s free, you get what you pay for—these are my quick takes on some of the major and not-so-major stories of the past several days.
Students riot in State College, Pennsylvania, in wake of Joe Paterno firing. Sure, it’s outrageous that anyone should defend Joe Pa’s complete lack of moral accountability in the child sex-abuse scandal surrounding his one-time aide, let alone that Paterno’s defenders should resort to violence and vandalism. On the other hand, though, the disgraced octogenerian probably can expect a commendation from The Vatican for his indifference, and complimentary membership in the American Man-Boy Love Society. (As I understand it, the latter includes monthly issues of society’s provocative periodical, Standing Behind Youth.)
Sexual harassment accusations mount against GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain. With his poll numbers slipping, as both credible victim accounts and inconsistencies in Cain’s own version of events mount, the embattled candidate might want to rethink his planned ace-in-the-hole defense: Inviting former DC mayor and current city councilman Marion Barry to share with the news media his belief that “the bitches set Herman up.” (Cain also, frankly, probably shouldn’t characterize anything, at this point, as being “in the hole.” I’m just sayin’.)
Race tightens for GOP presidential nod. Speaking of Herman Cain, in the latest nationwide poll of Republican primary voters, the embattled candidate nevertheless continued narrowly to lead the party’s presidential field—with a jaw-dropping 61% of respondents saying Cain’s alleged behavior toward women mattered not at all to them. In what may be a related development, left-for-dead blowhard Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the US House of Representatives sometime in the 19th century, now is tied for second place among GOP primary voters. Time was when Gingrich’s hypocrisy as a cheating-spouse Family Values candidate was held against him by the party faithful, but it seems that the power of Cain’s appeal to overwhelmingly white Republican voters as a conservative, unthreatening black man has opened the floodgates of GOP compassion for misogynists. Gingrich’s rise also appears to be the latest indication that Republican True Believers would rather concede the election to President Obama than hand the nomination to Mitt Romney. I might not even rule out a “Draft Paterno” movement.
Mississippi voters reject ballot measure to define a fertilized egg as a person. This one honestly shocked me—in a good way. Whenever I catch wind of an insane ballot item anywhere in the Bible Belt—whether its aim is to name Jesus Christ the official State Savior, or to mandate the bludgeoning of anyone with a Darwin symbol on his or her car, or to hereby resolve that “The War of Northern Aggression was never about slavery, but anyway, what exactly was so bad about an institution that boosted the economy and spawned some outstanding spirituals?”—I always assume the witless initiative is going to pass. But one news account I read suggested that the Mississippi measure was defeated because its language went too far—it also would have had “far-reaching impacts on birth control, in vitro fertilization, and a doctor’s ability to provide care for pregnant women.” Still, I fully expect proponents to tweak the language and give it another go at some point. Perhaps next time they’ll employ a non-threatening mascot to broaden the entreaty’s appeal. I just can picture it: The joyous, accordion-wielding Zygote Zydeco, back by his rockin’ Cajun band, the Moments of Conception.
Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus, dies at 89. While I’ve always found Keane’s single-panel God-and-family comic, now drawn by his son Jeff, to be saccharine and insipid, it has spawned some great parodies by other cartoonists. Which Keane, to his credit, always seemed to take in stride. I also was amused—in a way I never was by the cartoon itself—by this anecdote that turned up in Keane’s obituary Wednesday in the Washington Post:
In 1984, Mr. Keane told the Post about how he decided to add a new character to The Family Circus by introducing a baby into his cartoon family.
“My wife was outside the studio working in the garden,” he recalled. “I ran out of the studio and said, ‘Thel, what would you think of adding a new baby to the family?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s all right, but let me finish the weeding first.’ ”
Ha! That’s good stuff. Maybe Thelma should’ve written the comic.
Duggars announce they’re expecting—again. Speaking of babies, in an appearance on The Today Show, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the prolific procreators who birthed the TLC reality TV show originally named 17 Kids and Counting, announced that we can count on little Duggar number 20, currently in Michelle’s delivery system. My first thought was, “Man, the pressure really is on Octomom now!” No, my real first thought was that unless Jim Bob, a former Arkansas state legislator, is planning to reenter politics and cruise to victory on family votes alone, these people are insane. Also, were I Michelle’s uterus (don’t dwell on that image), I would sue for reckless endangerment. Why are people who go out of their way to deplete the Earth’s limited resources rewarded for their efforts with a TV show and constant publicity? Speaking of which, I’m wondering when Hotpoint will dangle a promotional deal for a series of “buns in the oven” ads.
Berlusconi exit makes it official: These are tough times for playboys. First, porn magnate and fossilized hedonist Hugh Hefner earlier this year was jilted on wedding’s eve by his nubile fiancée, in a triumph of revulsion over commerce. Then, actor George Clooney’s much-younger ex-girlfriend, Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis, told the media a month or two ago that she had considered him more of a father figure than a boyfriend. This suggests on its face an alarming family dynamic in the Canalis household. But it couldn’t have heartened Clooney’s ladies-man ego to have the world know that when his sultry ex used to cuddle up on his lap, she merely was angling for a bedtime story. Finally, yesterday, 75-year-old Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—he of reported palace orgies and a criminal investigation into his relationship with a 17-year-old girl—was forced from office by an economic mess that’s disastrous even by Italian standards. According to an account in this morning’s Washington Post, “Crowds of demonstrators erupted in a joyous yell and waved Italian flags as news spread of Berlusconi’s resignation. One group sang choruses of ‘Hallelujah’ to celebrate his departure.’” To a man who likely has paid legions of prostitutes to sing that exact same chorus at a certain key moment, it must have been a sadly humiliating scene.
Students riot in State College, Pennsylvania, in wake of Joe Paterno firing. Sure, it’s outrageous that anyone should defend Joe Pa’s complete lack of moral accountability in the child sex-abuse scandal surrounding his one-time aide, let alone that Paterno’s defenders should resort to violence and vandalism. On the other hand, though, the disgraced octogenerian probably can expect a commendation from The Vatican for his indifference, and complimentary membership in the American Man-Boy Love Society. (As I understand it, the latter includes monthly issues of society’s provocative periodical, Standing Behind Youth.)
Sexual harassment accusations mount against GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain. With his poll numbers slipping, as both credible victim accounts and inconsistencies in Cain’s own version of events mount, the embattled candidate might want to rethink his planned ace-in-the-hole defense: Inviting former DC mayor and current city councilman Marion Barry to share with the news media his belief that “the bitches set Herman up.” (Cain also, frankly, probably shouldn’t characterize anything, at this point, as being “in the hole.” I’m just sayin’.)
Race tightens for GOP presidential nod. Speaking of Herman Cain, in the latest nationwide poll of Republican primary voters, the embattled candidate nevertheless continued narrowly to lead the party’s presidential field—with a jaw-dropping 61% of respondents saying Cain’s alleged behavior toward women mattered not at all to them. In what may be a related development, left-for-dead blowhard Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the US House of Representatives sometime in the 19th century, now is tied for second place among GOP primary voters. Time was when Gingrich’s hypocrisy as a cheating-spouse Family Values candidate was held against him by the party faithful, but it seems that the power of Cain’s appeal to overwhelmingly white Republican voters as a conservative, unthreatening black man has opened the floodgates of GOP compassion for misogynists. Gingrich’s rise also appears to be the latest indication that Republican True Believers would rather concede the election to President Obama than hand the nomination to Mitt Romney. I might not even rule out a “Draft Paterno” movement.
Mississippi voters reject ballot measure to define a fertilized egg as a person. This one honestly shocked me—in a good way. Whenever I catch wind of an insane ballot item anywhere in the Bible Belt—whether its aim is to name Jesus Christ the official State Savior, or to mandate the bludgeoning of anyone with a Darwin symbol on his or her car, or to hereby resolve that “The War of Northern Aggression was never about slavery, but anyway, what exactly was so bad about an institution that boosted the economy and spawned some outstanding spirituals?”—I always assume the witless initiative is going to pass. But one news account I read suggested that the Mississippi measure was defeated because its language went too far—it also would have had “far-reaching impacts on birth control, in vitro fertilization, and a doctor’s ability to provide care for pregnant women.” Still, I fully expect proponents to tweak the language and give it another go at some point. Perhaps next time they’ll employ a non-threatening mascot to broaden the entreaty’s appeal. I just can picture it: The joyous, accordion-wielding Zygote Zydeco, back by his rockin’ Cajun band, the Moments of Conception.
Bil Keane, creator of The Family Circus, dies at 89. While I’ve always found Keane’s single-panel God-and-family comic, now drawn by his son Jeff, to be saccharine and insipid, it has spawned some great parodies by other cartoonists. Which Keane, to his credit, always seemed to take in stride. I also was amused—in a way I never was by the cartoon itself—by this anecdote that turned up in Keane’s obituary Wednesday in the Washington Post:
In 1984, Mr. Keane told the Post about how he decided to add a new character to The Family Circus by introducing a baby into his cartoon family.
“My wife was outside the studio working in the garden,” he recalled. “I ran out of the studio and said, ‘Thel, what would you think of adding a new baby to the family?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s all right, but let me finish the weeding first.’ ”
Ha! That’s good stuff. Maybe Thelma should’ve written the comic.
Duggars announce they’re expecting—again. Speaking of babies, in an appearance on The Today Show, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the prolific procreators who birthed the TLC reality TV show originally named 17 Kids and Counting, announced that we can count on little Duggar number 20, currently in Michelle’s delivery system. My first thought was, “Man, the pressure really is on Octomom now!” No, my real first thought was that unless Jim Bob, a former Arkansas state legislator, is planning to reenter politics and cruise to victory on family votes alone, these people are insane. Also, were I Michelle’s uterus (don’t dwell on that image), I would sue for reckless endangerment. Why are people who go out of their way to deplete the Earth’s limited resources rewarded for their efforts with a TV show and constant publicity? Speaking of which, I’m wondering when Hotpoint will dangle a promotional deal for a series of “buns in the oven” ads.
Berlusconi exit makes it official: These are tough times for playboys. First, porn magnate and fossilized hedonist Hugh Hefner earlier this year was jilted on wedding’s eve by his nubile fiancée, in a triumph of revulsion over commerce. Then, actor George Clooney’s much-younger ex-girlfriend, Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis, told the media a month or two ago that she had considered him more of a father figure than a boyfriend. This suggests on its face an alarming family dynamic in the Canalis household. But it couldn’t have heartened Clooney’s ladies-man ego to have the world know that when his sultry ex used to cuddle up on his lap, she merely was angling for a bedtime story. Finally, yesterday, 75-year-old Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—he of reported palace orgies and a criminal investigation into his relationship with a 17-year-old girl—was forced from office by an economic mess that’s disastrous even by Italian standards. According to an account in this morning’s Washington Post, “Crowds of demonstrators erupted in a joyous yell and waved Italian flags as news spread of Berlusconi’s resignation. One group sang choruses of ‘Hallelujah’ to celebrate his departure.’” To a man who likely has paid legions of prostitutes to sing that exact same chorus at a certain key moment, it must have been a sadly humiliating scene.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Steamed
When I recently read the obituary of songwriter Paul Leka, it was accurate, in a sense, to say that I felt pretty steamed.
What, that name doesn’t ring a bell? It wouldn’t have for me, either, except that the full New York Times headline read “Paul Leka, a Songwriter of ‘Na Na Hey Hey,’ Dies at 68.”
If that song title isn’t familiar to you, chances are you haven’t been inside a sports stadium in a very long time.
The full name of the tune is “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” It was a number-one hit on the pop charts in 1969 despite—or probably because of—its repetitious banality. Fully half of its four-minute running time consists solely of the title words being chanted over and over, to an equally droning musical accompaniment. It’s sort of like the even-longer “na-na-na-na” ending of “Hey Jude,” except without those great Paul McCartney screams, the imprimatur of The Beatles, or—most importantly—the memorable lyrics preceding it. Whereas “Hey Jude” famously and inspirationally urges John Lennon’s then-young son Julian, and by extension all of us, to “take a sad song and make it better," “Na Na Hey Hey” in its initial two minutes is just a guy’s plea for the girl he likes to dump her boyfriend.
“Na Na Hey Hey” is a stupid song, but one that nevertheless appealed to my musical sensibilities when I was 11 years old. Not because of its boy-girl dynamics, as I wouldn’t yet date for another, oh, never mind how many years, but thanks to that oddly mesmerizing if seemingly endless chorus. I bought the single and pretty much wore it out over the course of the next few months.
But then I was done with it. And so was the rest of the world, until 1977, when—according to Leka’s obit—the organist for the Chicago White Sox employed the chorus as a taunt whenever the opposing team’s players struck out or when one of its pitchers was removed. Crowds who previously might have shouted “Sit down!” or “Sox rule!” at the departing opponent found it infinitely more satisfying to elongate their derision by singing “Na na na na/Na na na na/Hey hey hey/Goodbye!”
Somehow, some way, the chant went viral, in an age long before the Internet and social-networking tools existed to facilitate such contagion. As a result, over the course of the past three decades the ending chant of “Na Na Hey Hey” has become a staple at athletic venues around the world—because taunting the opposition knows no specific sport or nationality.
So, while presumably few people outside of his own family and a smattering of fellow songwriters and musicians of a certain age recognized Paul Leka’s name when it recently joined all the others on St Peter’s eternal registry, the song title “Na Na Hey Hey” resonated with many readers. As had been the case with me. But here’s the thing. I’m dead certain (no pun intended) that very few people reading Leka’s obit—even individuals like me who once had owned the 45 of “Na Na Hey Hey”—knew that the recording artist to which the single was credited was a group called Steam.
See, this is the kind of thing I tend to remember, while so many things that it would be infinitely more useful to recall—names of professional contacts, my online passwords, whether a dear friend is recovering from cancer or lost a kidney or what—are sacrificed. I no sooner had seen the headline associating the late Paul Leka with “Na Na Hey Hey” than I thought, “Ah, yes, the song that became a stadium phenomenon, performed by that one-hit wonder, Steam." But then, no more than a few seconds later, I asked myself, “Why the hell do I remember that?”
I mean, sure, I owned the single. But the name of the band was written in tiny type on the label, and it isn’t as if I’ve set eyes on that name in probably 40 years. It also isn’t as if I’d periodically been reminded, over the decades, that Steam was “the band behind the monster hit ‘Na Na Hey Hey’" when the combo swung through town for a widely promoted gig at the state fair or a nightclub devoted to revival acts. In fact, what I learned in Leka’s obituary was that there wasn’t, and never had been, a real band named Steam. Leka and his friend Gary DeCarlo, who co-wrote “Na Na Hey Hey,” recorded the song together and made up the name Steam on the spot, perhaps because their musical partnership was as ephemeral as the stuff arising from a still-hot cup of coffee. There would be no Steam follow-up hits, tours or merchandise. Steam would not live on at all, except as one more pebble of pointless trivia taking up precious space in the rock pile of my brain.
It’s confounding. It’s annoying. I take no pleasure in the motley conglomeration of discrete, rhyme-or-reason-less facts and figures that seems to add up to a disproportionate percentage of my collective memory.
It isn’t even as if I’m a kind of idiot savant who may forget the date of a key interview or the name of a close friend’s son, but who at least could kick ass in a sports trivia contest by rattling off the names of every player on the roster of the “Murderers Row” 1927 Yankees, or could impress film buffs by recalling who won all the major Oscars in 1987 or 2003. When I wrote the word “discrete” just now, I meant it. Even my accumulation of arguably or patently pointless knowledge is completely scattershot. I remember things like Steam, and the fact that President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and the pairing of character actors Herb Edelman and Bob “Gilligan” Denver in a short-lived sitcom called The Good Guys in the late 1960s. (I also remember that the show’s bouncy theme song began “We’re the good guys, who never let a friend down/Friends forever, ask anyone in this town.”)
But, can I even recite in order the names of all the American presidents of the last half of the 19th century, for whatever that may be worth? Is my familiarity with TV theme songs anywhere near encyclopedic enough to get me into the final rounds of some obscure competition on the Game Show Network?
No, and no.
Much has been written, I realize, about the neuroscience of how and why the human brain remembers what it does, forgets what it forgets, and might go about retrieving what it can retrieve. As much as I’d like to be glib and tell you I just keep forgetting to check out that array of potentially insightful resources, the fact is, last year I bought myself one of those works.
It’s called Moonwalking with Einstein, is subtitled “The Art and Science of Remembering Anything,” and was a bestseller in 2010 for author Joshua Foer. You might have seen him on talk shows, discussing how a year of “memory training” transformed him from being a guy of average retention to winner of the US Memory Championship. I’m looking at the book flap right now, and it says that Foer “draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human remembering.” If that sounds potentially dry, the back cover features a glowing endorsement by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, the hilariously accessible science author Mary Roach.
Of course, I have not, to date, read Moonwalking with Einstein. In fact, I had to fish it out of a box in our basement when my chagrin over this Steam business brought it to my mind. I have no trouble, however, remembering why I bought it and then didn’t read it. Per the book flap, “Foer’s experience shows that the memory championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.” It was the “perseverance” thing that had pushed the book to the back of my reading list. I’d ultimately decided that, while I’d love to have a better memory and all that, I didn’t much want to work at it. I might rather read books that didn’t give me homework assignments.
In the wake of this Steam Incident, however, I’ve changed my mind about reading Moonwalking with Einstein. I figure maybe I can at least pick up a few tips—minimally effortful ways to train my unruly and un-sharp mind just a little better, with the effect of maybe remembering a few more substantive things than I might otherwise retain. And perhaps not even at the expense of my Steams and other pieces of useless minutiae, because author and National Public Radio commentator Stephan Fatsis writes in his back-jacket endorsement that “Joshua Foer proves what few of us are willing to get our heads around: there’s more room in our brains than we ever imagined.”
What Fatsis means, I gather, is not that our brains are partially empty (although I sometimes feel the jury’s out in my case), but that there’s always space for more to be retained. I’ve long despaired over my poor hold on new information, so the possibility of losing less of it intrigues me greatly. On the other hand, though, my reading retention is abysmal, which poses a huge catch-22 in trying to draw lasting lessons from Foer’s research and narrative.
What I’ve decided is, Moonwalking with Einstein is going to be the next book I’ll read. Maybe it’ll hook me and convince me to make a real effort to improve my memory. But then, I imagine it’s the kind of thing where even minimal exercise is better than none at all, and presumably I can coax the self-discipline to do the equivalent of a few sit-ups or toe-touchers. At worst, the book stands to be a painless read. I mean, my girl Mary Roach—author of the fantastic Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers—touts Foer’s book as filled with “humanity, humor and originality.” How much of a slog can it be?
So, I’ll start Moonwalking with Einstein soon. I mean it. I owe this to myself and to all the people in my life for whom my lapses of memory have adverse consequences, be they small or substantial. And frankly, I don’t want to feel quite so annoyed the next time, in a single 24-hour period, I miss an office meeting whose date I forgot and find myself singing the entire "Ballad of Jed Clampett"—including the part that accompanied The Beverly Hillbillies’ closing credits.
What, that name doesn’t ring a bell? It wouldn’t have for me, either, except that the full New York Times headline read “Paul Leka, a Songwriter of ‘Na Na Hey Hey,’ Dies at 68.”
If that song title isn’t familiar to you, chances are you haven’t been inside a sports stadium in a very long time.
The full name of the tune is “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” It was a number-one hit on the pop charts in 1969 despite—or probably because of—its repetitious banality. Fully half of its four-minute running time consists solely of the title words being chanted over and over, to an equally droning musical accompaniment. It’s sort of like the even-longer “na-na-na-na” ending of “Hey Jude,” except without those great Paul McCartney screams, the imprimatur of The Beatles, or—most importantly—the memorable lyrics preceding it. Whereas “Hey Jude” famously and inspirationally urges John Lennon’s then-young son Julian, and by extension all of us, to “take a sad song and make it better," “Na Na Hey Hey” in its initial two minutes is just a guy’s plea for the girl he likes to dump her boyfriend.
“Na Na Hey Hey” is a stupid song, but one that nevertheless appealed to my musical sensibilities when I was 11 years old. Not because of its boy-girl dynamics, as I wouldn’t yet date for another, oh, never mind how many years, but thanks to that oddly mesmerizing if seemingly endless chorus. I bought the single and pretty much wore it out over the course of the next few months.
But then I was done with it. And so was the rest of the world, until 1977, when—according to Leka’s obit—the organist for the Chicago White Sox employed the chorus as a taunt whenever the opposing team’s players struck out or when one of its pitchers was removed. Crowds who previously might have shouted “Sit down!” or “Sox rule!” at the departing opponent found it infinitely more satisfying to elongate their derision by singing “Na na na na/Na na na na/Hey hey hey/Goodbye!”
Somehow, some way, the chant went viral, in an age long before the Internet and social-networking tools existed to facilitate such contagion. As a result, over the course of the past three decades the ending chant of “Na Na Hey Hey” has become a staple at athletic venues around the world—because taunting the opposition knows no specific sport or nationality.
So, while presumably few people outside of his own family and a smattering of fellow songwriters and musicians of a certain age recognized Paul Leka’s name when it recently joined all the others on St Peter’s eternal registry, the song title “Na Na Hey Hey” resonated with many readers. As had been the case with me. But here’s the thing. I’m dead certain (no pun intended) that very few people reading Leka’s obit—even individuals like me who once had owned the 45 of “Na Na Hey Hey”—knew that the recording artist to which the single was credited was a group called Steam.
See, this is the kind of thing I tend to remember, while so many things that it would be infinitely more useful to recall—names of professional contacts, my online passwords, whether a dear friend is recovering from cancer or lost a kidney or what—are sacrificed. I no sooner had seen the headline associating the late Paul Leka with “Na Na Hey Hey” than I thought, “Ah, yes, the song that became a stadium phenomenon, performed by that one-hit wonder, Steam." But then, no more than a few seconds later, I asked myself, “Why the hell do I remember that?”
I mean, sure, I owned the single. But the name of the band was written in tiny type on the label, and it isn’t as if I’ve set eyes on that name in probably 40 years. It also isn’t as if I’d periodically been reminded, over the decades, that Steam was “the band behind the monster hit ‘Na Na Hey Hey’" when the combo swung through town for a widely promoted gig at the state fair or a nightclub devoted to revival acts. In fact, what I learned in Leka’s obituary was that there wasn’t, and never had been, a real band named Steam. Leka and his friend Gary DeCarlo, who co-wrote “Na Na Hey Hey,” recorded the song together and made up the name Steam on the spot, perhaps because their musical partnership was as ephemeral as the stuff arising from a still-hot cup of coffee. There would be no Steam follow-up hits, tours or merchandise. Steam would not live on at all, except as one more pebble of pointless trivia taking up precious space in the rock pile of my brain.
It’s confounding. It’s annoying. I take no pleasure in the motley conglomeration of discrete, rhyme-or-reason-less facts and figures that seems to add up to a disproportionate percentage of my collective memory.
It isn’t even as if I’m a kind of idiot savant who may forget the date of a key interview or the name of a close friend’s son, but who at least could kick ass in a sports trivia contest by rattling off the names of every player on the roster of the “Murderers Row” 1927 Yankees, or could impress film buffs by recalling who won all the major Oscars in 1987 or 2003. When I wrote the word “discrete” just now, I meant it. Even my accumulation of arguably or patently pointless knowledge is completely scattershot. I remember things like Steam, and the fact that President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and the pairing of character actors Herb Edelman and Bob “Gilligan” Denver in a short-lived sitcom called The Good Guys in the late 1960s. (I also remember that the show’s bouncy theme song began “We’re the good guys, who never let a friend down/Friends forever, ask anyone in this town.”)
But, can I even recite in order the names of all the American presidents of the last half of the 19th century, for whatever that may be worth? Is my familiarity with TV theme songs anywhere near encyclopedic enough to get me into the final rounds of some obscure competition on the Game Show Network?
No, and no.
Much has been written, I realize, about the neuroscience of how and why the human brain remembers what it does, forgets what it forgets, and might go about retrieving what it can retrieve. As much as I’d like to be glib and tell you I just keep forgetting to check out that array of potentially insightful resources, the fact is, last year I bought myself one of those works.
It’s called Moonwalking with Einstein, is subtitled “The Art and Science of Remembering Anything,” and was a bestseller in 2010 for author Joshua Foer. You might have seen him on talk shows, discussing how a year of “memory training” transformed him from being a guy of average retention to winner of the US Memory Championship. I’m looking at the book flap right now, and it says that Foer “draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human remembering.” If that sounds potentially dry, the back cover features a glowing endorsement by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, the hilariously accessible science author Mary Roach.
Of course, I have not, to date, read Moonwalking with Einstein. In fact, I had to fish it out of a box in our basement when my chagrin over this Steam business brought it to my mind. I have no trouble, however, remembering why I bought it and then didn’t read it. Per the book flap, “Foer’s experience shows that the memory championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.” It was the “perseverance” thing that had pushed the book to the back of my reading list. I’d ultimately decided that, while I’d love to have a better memory and all that, I didn’t much want to work at it. I might rather read books that didn’t give me homework assignments.
In the wake of this Steam Incident, however, I’ve changed my mind about reading Moonwalking with Einstein. I figure maybe I can at least pick up a few tips—minimally effortful ways to train my unruly and un-sharp mind just a little better, with the effect of maybe remembering a few more substantive things than I might otherwise retain. And perhaps not even at the expense of my Steams and other pieces of useless minutiae, because author and National Public Radio commentator Stephan Fatsis writes in his back-jacket endorsement that “Joshua Foer proves what few of us are willing to get our heads around: there’s more room in our brains than we ever imagined.”
What Fatsis means, I gather, is not that our brains are partially empty (although I sometimes feel the jury’s out in my case), but that there’s always space for more to be retained. I’ve long despaired over my poor hold on new information, so the possibility of losing less of it intrigues me greatly. On the other hand, though, my reading retention is abysmal, which poses a huge catch-22 in trying to draw lasting lessons from Foer’s research and narrative.
What I’ve decided is, Moonwalking with Einstein is going to be the next book I’ll read. Maybe it’ll hook me and convince me to make a real effort to improve my memory. But then, I imagine it’s the kind of thing where even minimal exercise is better than none at all, and presumably I can coax the self-discipline to do the equivalent of a few sit-ups or toe-touchers. At worst, the book stands to be a painless read. I mean, my girl Mary Roach—author of the fantastic Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers—touts Foer’s book as filled with “humanity, humor and originality.” How much of a slog can it be?
So, I’ll start Moonwalking with Einstein soon. I mean it. I owe this to myself and to all the people in my life for whom my lapses of memory have adverse consequences, be they small or substantial. And frankly, I don’t want to feel quite so annoyed the next time, in a single 24-hour period, I miss an office meeting whose date I forgot and find myself singing the entire "Ballad of Jed Clampett"—including the part that accompanied The Beverly Hillbillies’ closing credits.
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