“I wonder why all old pictures are in black and white,” he said.  I finished up my French fries.

“That was all they knew how to do a long time ago,” I said.  “They invented black and white film first and didn’t invent color film until much later.”  Daniel swallowed the last of his double cheeseburger, but seemed to have a hard time swallowing my explanation.

“That’s not right,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  Daniel paused for dramatic effect… and to test his Blizzard by turning it upside-down for a moment.

“Think about it,” he said.  “Color pictures must be easier to make because they just show the world like it is.  When you take a black and white picture, all the colors have to be changed.”

“Shades,” I corrected.  I couldn’t help myself.

“Shades?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Black and white pictures have shades of gray, no colors.”  Daniel gave me a long look.

“Dad, are you obfuscating me?”

I almost choked on my malt.

He continued, “I can save color pictures on my computer and make them black and white after I take them.  My camera has a setting to make pictures look old fashioned, but it normally just takes color pictures.”

I asked, “Did you ever think maybe pictures were always in color, but the world was in black and white back in the old days?”

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” said Daniel.  I nodded.  We’re both fans of Calvin and Hobbes.  After a moment he shook his head.

“That’s not it,” he said.  “They still took pictures in black and white after color film was invented.  Why would they do that?”  I shrugged and sipped the last of my malt.

“Money,” I said.  “Color film cost more than black and white film when it first came out.”  Daniel almost leapt over the table.

“A-ha!” he exclaimed.  “That’s why they did it.  Money.  They wanted to save color film for later so they could make more money.”  Daniel sat back with the smug satisfaction of someone with all the bases covered.  I had to admit it made an odd sort of sense; it didn’t even occur to me ask who “they” were.

“Follow the money,” I said to myself.

“Where did you hear that?” Daniel asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” he answered.  I was surprised.  I didn’t think Woodward and Bernstein were required reading in the sixth grade.

“Congratulations.  You’ve uncovered your first conspiracy,” I said.  “So, what do you think?  Did man really land on the moon?”

“Sure,” said Daniel waving his hand dismissively.  “But don’t ask me why they only took black and white television pictures.  You don’t want to know.”

Daniel was excited. “Welcome to the future!” he exclaimed. Twelve-year-old Bob looked around the living room. It didn’t look much different than the one he’d left at home in 1982 except for the colors (or lack thereof). Daniel ushered him up the stairs to his room.

“I like your television. It’s flat,” said Bob. Daniel laughed.

“That’s not my television. That’s my computer,” he said. “I don’t have a TV in my room.”

“That’s the opposite of me,” replied Bob. “I have a TV in my room, but the computer is in the den.” Daniel sat down and turned it on. They watched the status line cycle under the Windows XP logo.

“It’s kind of slow,” said Bob after a few moments. “My TRS-80 turns on immediately.” Suddenly, the screen turned a sickly shade of blue with strings of command code. Daniel sighed and turned it off.

“It crashed,” he said. “I hate when it does that.”

“I know what you mean,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “Sometimes I’ll be loading a program and I’ll get the C-star error up in the top corner of the screen. That means there’s something wrong with the cassette.”

“Cassette?” asked Daniel. “I thought you used those for music.”

“I have a bunch of music cassettes,” said Bob. “But I also have them for the computer.”

Daniel nodded. “That’s like our CD’s,” he said. He showed twelve-year-old Bob a silvery disc. Bob was impressed it was played with a laser.

“That’s more like it,” he said with a smile. “Very Star Trek.”

“You watch that too?” asked Daniel. “I like that show. Do you have Doctor Who in 1982?”

“Sure,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “Every Sunday night. Is it still on the air? What regeneration is he on now?”

“Eleventh,” said Daniel.

“Wow.”

Meka called them to come downstairs. We were expecting twelve-year-old Meka, but apparently it was too hard for her to get from Michigan in 1987. It wasn’t like she could ride her bike. Twelve-year-old Bob sat down with Daniel at the kitchen table, enormous slabs of cake on their plates. They talked about rockets they had launched and movies they had made.

“We used a web cam to make my Penguinzilla movie last year,” said Daniel.

“What’s ‘web’ mean?”

Daniel explained the Internet. Twelve-year-old Bob nodded. “We have Bulletin Board Systems,” he said. “My friend Greg got a modem for his computer. Last year I sent an e-mail to NASA to get information on the Space Shuttle program.”

“That’s cool,” said Daniel. “We don’t have the Space Shuttle anymore.” He glanced over at forty-one-year-old Bob accusingly, adding, “And I’m not allowed to have e-mail yet.”

They ate cake until their mouths were coated in blue and yellow from the thick buttercream frosting. After some pop (orange Jarritos and Coca Cola from a glass bottle), they sat together on the couch in the family room. Daniel showed off his new XBOX 360. Twelve-year-old Bob complained there were too many buttons on the controller.

“You know how many buttons David’s Atari has?” he asked. “One. That’s easy to remember.” I could commiserate. Twelve-year-old Bob pressed “B” instead of “A” and watched in dismay as his avatar on the screen stumbled blithely into some fatal situation. Daniel played a bit more and then shut the game off. The sun was setting. It was getting time to go.

“How’d you like the future?” asked Daniel.

Twelve-year-old Bob looked around and nodded a few times. Daniel echoed the move. “It’s not what I expected exactly,” he said. “Did you know the world was supposed to end in a month?” asked Bob. “All the planets are going to be on one side of the sun in March and it’s supposed to cause big earthquakes.”

“A guy said that the world was going to end back in May, but it turned out he made a mistake,” said Daniel. “I think it’s supposed to happen in October now.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked Bob. Daniel shook his head.

“No, but there are terrorists nowadays,” said Daniel. “And global warming.”

“We worry about nuclear war,” said Bob. “Someone presses a button and we’re all gone in a flash of light.”

There was a moment of silence.

“But I’m not worried about it now,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “I’m glad you invited me.”

Daniel opened the front door and held it open for him.

“Maybe you can come back when I turn thirteen,” he said. “Assuming the world doesn’t end in 2012 like the Mayans predicted.”

“I think it will be fine,” said twelve-year-old Bob. “If you want to make sure, invite your thirteen-year-old son along next year. We’ll all have a blast.”

“What’s so funny?” I asked.  Daniel grinned and shrugged.  I asked if he had a good day at school.  Another grin and shrug.  I asked if he wanted to stop at the corner gas station, get a bottle of orange Fanta before heading home.  Grin.  Shrug.  Finally I asked if he had any homework.  This was apparently the question he had been waiting for.

“No,” he said with a laugh,” but you do!”

One of his Language Arts teachers sent home a blue page addressed to parents.  “You know your children better than I do.  Please tell me in a million words or less about their passions and their strengths.  How do you think their story will be written in the future?”  Wow, I thought to myself, it’s been a long time since I had to write a theme for school.

“You really should sit down at the kitchen table and do this right away,” said Daniel.  “Otherwise you’ll be working on it at 3:00 in the morning before school on Monday.”  I took some comfort that – despite outward appearances – Daniel had actually been listening to me all these years about homework.  I sat down and thought for a few minutes while Daniel set up a game on the Wii.

“You don’t have to mention Oscer,” said Daniel suddenly from the family room.  Oscer is a stuffed blue dog.  He’s been Daniel’s sidekick since Kindergarten.  They used to go everywhere together.  Lately I’ve noticed Oscer is more of a recluse; he only plays with Daniel when they are alone together.

“Isn’t he your prized possession?” I asked innocently.

“Yes, but – you know – you don’t have to write about that,” said Daniel.  “And you don’t have to write about when I was a baby.”

“Aren’t you losing your game?” I asked.  Police had Daniel’s car surrounded.  He reset something and was off to the races again.  I put pen to paper.

“Daniel, how do you spell ‘goofy’?”

There was a screech of tires from the family room.

“Never mind,” I said.  “I’ll just get the dictionary.  I make you look up words before asking for help.  I should do the same.”  Daniel was clearly focused on his video game, not at all watching me from the corner of his eye as I looked up various words – ‘diaper’ and ‘naked’ – and jotted them down on a sheet of notebook paper.  I was leafing through the pages, looking up ‘booger’, when Daniel finally snapped.

“What on Earth are you writing about me?!” he demanded.  I handed him my paper.

Daniel is a good kid.  He has many strengths.  However, he falls for Dad’s practical jokes all the time.

Daniel tried his best to scowl, but he kept smiling instead.  Finally he laughed.  It was the last laugh, by the way, as I didn’t finish the actual theme until 3:00 Monday morning before school.

We were all heading home from the western suburbs. It was after eight and while we were hungry, we weren’t really hungry. White Castle and their “fun sized” hamburgers seemed like the perfect choice. Unlike most fast food places, White Castle burgers aren’t wrapped in waxed paper, but are housed in small open-ended cardboard boxes. To cash in on the fortune cookie trend, White Castle prints pithy sayings on the bottoms of the boxes. Some have wise sayings, others have amusing riddles. Daniel grabbed the box out of my hand as I slid my third hamburger onto my five inch paper plate.

“If you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, they would stretch to the moon and back with plenty left over for lunch,” he read aloud. “Is that true?” Meka shook her head. I wiped the corner of my mouth off with a napkin and pulled out a pen to do some quick calculations. A White Castle hamburger (typically known as a “slider”) is a square patty about two inches wide. It’s wider than it is tall, so that’s why I used that measurement.

“Fudging your data?” said Meka, our resident scientist. “Your results are going to be suspect at best –” I bought her silence with a pair of jalapeno cheeseburgers and got to work. With my standard slider measurement, there were 6 sliders to a foot and it would take 31,680 sliders to stretch a mile. While that’s a lot of burgers, I worked at Burger King when I was in high school. We would typically sell a thousand Whoppers a day; thirty thousand sliders didn’t seem like all that many in the grand scheme of things.

But the moon is pretty far away. Even at the so-called “supermoon” approach back in March, it was still 221,565 miles from Earth. I started writing across the narrow edge of the napkin, but had to switch to the other side and redo my math across the long edge instead; the numbers got big pretty quickly. I came up with 14,038,358,400 sliders required to reach the moon and back.

“You forgot the ones for lunch,” said Daniel.

Oops. I came up with 14,038,358,404 sliders.
Fourteen billion is a lot of sliders, but was it an impossible number? According to the vintage poster hanging above the booth, White Castle sold 50 million hamburgers in 1941. At that rate, White Castle wouldn’t reach the moon until the summer of 2061.

“You’re just assuming one long string of hamburgers,” said Meka. “For something that tall, you’d need more of a pyramid structure in order to get the necessary strength –” I slid my box of fries across the table and she withdrew her protest.

Back in the olden days, White Castle’s motto was “Buy ‘em by the Sack”. Nowadays, you can pick up hamburgers by the case or even the crate. It took White Castle forty years to sell their first billion hamburgers, but only seven years to sell their second billion. If their sales stayed at 1968 levels, White Castle burgers would have reached the moon by now, but would have barely begun the journey back.

I felt it was a reasonable assumption their business has continued to grow since the sixties. The two White Castles I visit most frequently were built since I was born. And you don’t have to go to White Castle to get sliders anymore. Frozen White Castle hamburgers are available in the freezer section at Wal Mart (and if you stacked all the Wal Marts from here to the moon… well, that’s another story). I figured their sales had to average 96% better year-over-year since 1968 in order to get the slider trail all the way back to terra firma. White Castle is a privately owned company. I couldn’t find any hard data on their website. However, they did mention building a plant in 1992 that could make 200,000 hamburgers a day. That would have added 51% to their annual burger production capabilities, or more than 43,000 slider miles since the day it opened.

While my final numbers were incomplete, I felt I could say with some confidence to Daniel that – yes, if you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, it was possible they would reach the moon and back.

“Nope, you’re wrong,” said Daniel.

“I’m wrong?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a trick question,” said Daniel with a laugh. “If you stacked all the hamburgers sold, it wouldn’t be a tall pile at all. They’ve all been eaten!”

“He has a point, you know,” said Meka. I gave her the last half of my shake before she could say “I told you so” and threw out my napkin in the trash.

Greg was camped out by the closed door to the hallway. There was a hole in the wall shaped like the doorknob. Light poured in through a similar doorknob shaped hole from Dave’s brother’s room next door. Dave had two brothers: one older, one younger. They weren’t invited to the sleepover, but made their presence known by injecting things via the hole, most of them landing on Greg’s face. At one point, disgusted, Greg piled up all of our suitcases to block the hole. Bad idea. They poked a broomstick through the hole and knocked them all down on top of him. Tim and I helped extricate Greg from the pile. Tim grabbed the broomstick and pulled it in with us. There were a few cries of “no fair”, at least one “you suck” and the light faded from the other room.

The three of us sat together in the dark. None of us were sleepy. We decided to tell ghost stories. And not plain old generic ghost stories. We told ones from our family histories. I told about my great grandmother who could predict the future with a Ouija board. I think Tim told two, one from each side of his family. Greg told us a tale from one of the times he went visiting his relatives on Cape Cod back east. All these stories were real. All these stories were unnerving, even terrifying. In a very short time, we were all huddled together in the corner of the room, fearful for our very lives.

About that time Mike Cichy decided to roll over in his sleep. Greg swallowed and pointed towards something directly behind Tim and me. I felt my stomach drop down into my lap. Every hair on my arms stood straight up. Tim and I looked at each other and slowly turned around to see what had so freaked Greg out. Cichy was asleep and laying on his back, but his eyes were wide open. Apparently he was dreaming about his own brain because his eyes were rolled all the way back in his head, leaving only the dead white areas visible via the thin strip of light from the space between the curtains and the edge of the window.

“What do we do?” asked Tim. He was afraid Cichy was going to get up and start walking around at any minute. That was too horrible to contemplate.

We contemplated it anyway.

“Okay…” I whispered, drawing them into a huddle. “One of us has got to go over there and close Cichy’s eyes -”

“I’m not touching him!” yelled Tim. Greg shushed him. Cichy didn’t move. We waited slightly less than nine hundred years before breathing again.

“He might be contagious,” said Greg. “I remember hearing about this kid who touched a dead bird’s eye -”

“I heard that too,” said Tim. “I don’t want to get no Cichy Eye Disease.”

“There’s no such thing as Cichy Eye Disease,” I said.

“Then you close his eyes!” Crud. Caught in the web of my own reason.

I stood up slowly and pivoted around. The floorboards under the carpet made a low creak. Greg and Tim shushed me as if the shoddy Levitt construction was somehow my fault. I took a step; another creak, another flurry of shushing. Cichy must have been tired; he never stirred. With glacial speed, I moved across the room in the dark. I had plenty of time to think of the old horror movies I had seen staying up way too late at night. Cichy looked an awful lot like one of the pod people from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He lay on his back, arms folded under the covers. I would not have been surprised if he suddenly loomed up straight like Nosferatu (I would have died, of course, but I wouldn’t have been surprised).

I swear each step I took sounded like a scream in my hyper attuned ears. The house was literally falling apart underneath us. I could hear my heart beating, pulsing behind my eardrums. I could hear the sharp intakes of breath from my companions across the room. Cichy was making this odd gurgling noise. It was either a sinus condition or a large parasitic worm was preparing to crawl up out of his throat and eat my face. I clenched and unclenched my hands again and again. I was almost to the bed, almost ready to lean over him and gently push his eyelids down, when I stepped on my watch. The electronic tones of “Dixie” filled the room. I jumped back about six feet. Tim and Greg leapt to their feet, screaming and we all crashed into one another and ended up in a heap. Amazingly we managed not to wake up the entire neighborhood. Cichy rolled over. We couldn’t see his eyes anymore, but it didn’t matter. We knew they were still open and somehow still watching us… and waiting. We sat guard on him until the gray light of dawn.

1)     Eat at the Sonic Drive-In.

2)     Take the Metra train to Chicago.

3)     Launch the rocket that was out in the garage.

I built model rockets when I was Daniel’s age.  I even launched a few (rocket motors being more expensive than the rockets that surrounded them).  I had a Mosquito, a Wizard and a Star Streaker to name a few.  However, the one I wanted more than anything else was the Astrocam.  It had an Instamatic camera built into the nosecone and could be set to take a picture while the rocket was in the air.  My friend Greg had one.  I remember he had a couple of dim prints looking down at the farm field we used as a launch site.

Years later, I was on my lunch break at work.  I had to stop in Wal Mart for something and noticed a complete Astrocam rocket kit by the check out lines.  I don’t make many impulse buys, but my co-worker noticed the nosecone sticking out of the plastic bag as I put it in the trunk.

“What are you going to do with that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe I’ll save it for my kids.”

So, here we were, thirteen years later.  I blew the dust off the box and was happy to see it was in perfect condition.  I had never even taken the plastic wrap off.  We set up the launch pad, put batteries in the launch controller and put an engine in the Astrocam.  There’s a big field not too far from where we live.  We drove out there and planned to set it off.

Unfortunately, thirteen years in the garage had taken its toll on the glue holding the rocket together.  The launch lug – the piece that holds the rocket on the launch pad – fell off as we tried to set it up.  Later, we noticed the engine mount was loose.  If we had launched, the engine would have flown off without the Astrocam.  We took it home and put it back in the garage.  Daniel was disappointed, but we took a trip to the hobby store in Rockford (after lunch at Sonic) and bought some new model rockets.  By the fall, we were launching rockets every other day.  By the winter, we started building rockets from kits.  In February, I finally felt we might be able to repair the Astrocam.  It took us the better part of a day to finish up, but we were ready to go in March.

Things have changed since we first planned to launch Astrocam.  Daniel and I have more than a hundred launches under our collective belts.  Our launch controller doesn’t rely on feeble AA batteries.  We have one that plugs directly into a car battery.  We don’t have misfires anymore.  Multiple cameras cover the launch pad, including a high-speed camcorder aimed at the engine to catch the first flames at ignition.  Daniel and I both were able to follow the rocket in flight.  Once it landed safely, we stayed in contact via a pair of walkie-talkies.  The flight itself was a complete success except for one thing.  The Astrocam didn’t take any pictures in the air as they stopped making 110 film back in 2003.

Weekday mornings were generally a slow time at Radio Shack.  I used to watch The Price Is Right on the eleven Realistic brand televisions lining the far wall.  If anyone was going to come in, it would be a know-it-all.  We had two types of customers at Radio Shack: the know-it-all customers and the know-nothing customers.  The know-it-all guys would show up right after the doors opened and make a bee-line to the parts.  Radio Shack featured a couple of aisles of discrete components: transistors, resistors, diodes and so on.  It didn’t matter; it was never enough.

After an hour of muttered grumbling, they’d stalk to the counter with an armload of electronic whatnot and rant how I had half a dozen PNP transistors in stock, but how could I be so incredibly dense as not to have matching NPN transistors?  What on Earth was I thinking?  I’d promise the very next time I traipsed back to the stock room to whip up a steaming batch of transistors, I’d be sure to make a couple of NPN’s… just for them.  Then I’d ring up their 450 parts… which totaled about eleven dollars.

Sunday afternoons were the peak time for the know-nothing customers.  I could tell them the instant they opened the door.  We had a security sensor that would chime like a doorbell when someone walked in the store.  The know-nothing customers froze at the sound.  And since the sensor was still making contact, the ringing would go on and on and on until I walked over and helped the customer all the way inside.

“I don’t know if you can help me,” they’d start.  The answer was probably not, but perhaps I could sell them something.  Invariably they had a “thing” at home and they needed it to connect to “this other thing”.  I’d take them by the hand and lead them around the store, pointing at various things and asking if – by chance – our things looked like their things.  Sometimes we’d luck out and find out that one of their things was actually an answering machine or a VCR.  Other times they weren’t so sure; the color was wrong, it was a different shape, they couldn’t decide it the thing was a cell phone or a clock radio (they were alike in so many ways).  Then I would usually sell them a splitter of some kind – phone, cable; it didn’t matter.  Nine times out of ten, whatever they bought was never going to leave the bag it was sold in.

We did have a third type of person.  They were usually friendly and knowledgeable and eager to make some big ticket purchase.  Maybe it was one of the Sensation! brand computers we featured at the front of the store.  Sometimes they were in the market for a stereo or maybe a television.  I always tried my best to be friendly though they weren’t really customers.  After half an hour of bold talk, usually their wives would peek their heads in and ask them to come out to the car; they were done shopping at the supermarket.

I was wrong.

“You won’t believe what we have to do for school,” he said.  “We have to look at the moon.”  He looked at me for reaction and seemed to be annoyed I wasn’t sharing his sense of outrage.  We have looked at the moon through our small telescope.  We’ve watched documentaries on television about the Apollo missions.  I thought it would be right up his alley.

“But we can’t use a telescope,” he said.  “We can’t look it up on the Internet or anything.  We’re supposed to just look.”  I got another sigh that belied the weight of the world on his fifth grade shoulders.  “How can I find out anything about the moon just by looking at it with my eyes?”

It occurred to me this was a case of too much information.  We’ve trained telescopes on the moon for four hundred years.  We’ve sent spacecraft past it.  A dozen men have walked on it.  When you can go to a museum and inspect a piece of the moon up close, what can you discover with a standard set of eyeballs from a quarter million miles away?

“Why don’t we try to forget everything we know about the moon and see what we can figure out for ourselves?” I said.  “I bet we can figure out ten things about the moon on our own.”

So far, we’ve determined the moon rises later every night as it goes from a crescent to a full moon.  It moves quite a lot compared to the stars.  The moon seems to move about ten moon-diameters east every day.  The stars have moved slightly in the past couple of weeks, but nowhere near as fast as the moon.  We figured that meant the stars were farther away than the moon.  We also figured out the clouds are closer than the moon.  A number of nights, clouds prevented us from seeing the moon.  However, we’ve never seen any clouds covered up by the moon.

“It’s funny we were able to think of something when we didn’t see it,” said Daniel.

We also figured out the moon always faces the same way towards us.  It was possible the moon was rotating once a day and we just happened to be catching it at the same time every night.  However, last Saturday we switched to Daylight Savings Time, so while we were still looking at the moon at 8:30 on Sunday night, it was like we were looking at it at 7:30 Saturday night.  And it looked the same every time.

Since the spots on the moon always looked the same to us, we determined they weren’t clouds.  Clouds on Earth move and change shape.  And since there are no clouds on the moon, there probably wasn’t any rain or snow either.  That meant the spots probably weren’t lakes or oceans.  Daniel thought they might be “bumps”.  He noticed the edge of the moon – where sunlight meets darkness – didn’t seem to be completely straight.  I couldn’t tell for sure, but gave Daniel the benefit of the doubt since his eyes are thirty years younger than mine.

I’m not sure if all this adds up to ten things about the moon or not.  We’ve only been at it for a couple of weeks.  In any case, none of our discoveries are – pardon the phrase – Earth shattering.  But it made us think about the people who looked and sat and thought about the moon when they didn’t have all the modern conveniences we have now.  And considering how much we could figure out just by looking at the moon for a few extra minutes every night, it makes me wonder how much more we might be able to see around us if only we look a little harder than normal.

One weekend in 1979, my dad drove us past his house.  It was being systematically disassembled by police and we couldn’t get very close.  What really struck me was the rest of the neighborhood.  It was so – normal.  The trees were taller and the styles of the houses were slightly different, otherwise it could have been my neighborhood.

That thought stuck with me for a long time.

I was 24 when he was executed, in the same age range as his victims.  I stayed up late to hear the news and was relieved when they reported after all these years, he was finally dead.  I wondered what had taken so long? My primary concern with the Death Penalty was if someone as obviously guilty as John Wayne Gacy had taken fourteen years to get through the system, how long would it take someone who had committed horrific yet less newsworthy crimes?  I wondered if an inmate on death row was more likely to die of old age rather than lethal injection.

I assumed the long delay was the result of safety precautions built into the system to prevent an innocent person from being killed in my name.  I thought that right up until a group of journalism students at Northwestern University proved someone on death row shouldn’t be there.  And then they did it again.

And again.

And again.

Actually the students worked very hard, sometimes for years, to disprove the cases against these men, but – at the time – all I could think was “how flimsy are these convictions that students are able to blow them wide open?”  It sure didn’t say much for the state of journalism in Illinois, or the state of justice for that matter.

I looked up the costs of death penalty cases and couldn’t believe how expensive they were.  Richard Speck – the man who killed eight nurses in Chicago in 1966 – had originally been sentenced to death.  His sentence later changed to a mere 1,200 years in prison.  Believe it or not, it would have actually been cheaper to keep Speck imprisoned until the year 3167 than kill him outright (and the fact he died in prison long before his term was up saved the state even more money – thanks, Dick).

That led me to ask the obvious question: “How does one get the death penalty in Illinois?”  I really didn’t know.  It wasn’t automatic for murder; there seemed to be all these “extenuating circumstances”.  I’m a relatively intelligent person.  I like to think I’m smarter than most criminals.  If I didn’t see any hard and fast way to get executed in Illinois, how could it be a deterrent?

In 2000, Governor George Ryan decided to put a moratorium on the death penalty.  The state legislature began looking at ways to “fix” the system and make it work better.  After ten years, they decided there was no way to really make it work any better than it did.  Last Wednesday, Governor Pat Quinn abolished the death penalty in Illinois, making us the sixteenth state in the nation to get rid of it.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist.  We have a set of seven principles that help us with questions of morality.  The death penalty bumps up against four of them at least.  Despite that, I do have a nagging suspicion there are certain acts that so violate societal norms that – yes, they should merit death.  But I can’t say – specifically – what they are.

Take Osama bin Laden… please.

Should he get the death penalty if caught?  No, he wants to die if caught; he wants to be a martyr to his cause.  I can think of no better punishment than not to kill him and instead have him tried, found guilty, sentenced to life in prison without parole and then have him tied up in civil court day after day, month after month, year after year as every individual who was affected by 9/11 has the ability to sue him for damages and mental suffering.  And if Osama f^&*ing bin Laden doesn’t merit the death penalty then maybe this is the right thing to do.  Maybe we can live without it as a society.  Let’s give it a try.

“Daniel, Daniel, bo Baniel
Banana fanna fo Faniel
Fee fie mo Maniel
Daniel!”

For Excel to play the game, it needs to know the person’s name first.  This is a variable and is stored in the first column: “A”.  I tried to keep things simple by naming this column NAME.  The “B” column also has to be defined to contain the result.  I called this one VERSE.  A lot of the verse is actually the same no matter what the name is.  “Bo”, “fo” and “mo” stay the same.  For every “fee fie” there is a corresponding “banana fanna”.  These are constants in the equation and can just be left as themselves surrounded by quotation marks.

Stripping out the first letter of the name sounds simple enough, but it is a little tricky because we can only tell Excel to start selecting characters in the NAME column from the left or the right.  So, instead of saying “take the first character off the left”, we’re actually saying “keep all the characters from the right except the leftmost one”.  And every name can – potentially – have a different number of characters.  So, we need to count the number of characters in NAME first, subtract one, and then have the computer keep that number of characters from the right.  After that, I need to add a “B”, “F” or “M” at the beginning, depending on the point in the VERSE we’re at.

But there’s a catch.  If the first letter of the name is a “B”, “F” or “M”, then replacing it with the same letter won’t work.  The song says if this occurs, just drop the first letter completely.  So “Meka” would be transformed as follows:

“Fee fie mo Eka.”

To accomplish this, I need to use an IF-THEN-ELSE statement.  If the defined condition is true – in this case, does the first character on the left equal the letter “B” – then just keep all the characters from the right except the leftmost one.  Otherwise, add a “B” to all those characters.  This same syntax can be used for “F” and “M”.

In the end, the VERSE column contains the following equation:

=A2 & “, ” & A2 & “, bo ” & (IF(LEFT(A2,1) = “B”,(RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1))),(“B”&RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1))))) & “Banana fanna fo ” & (IF(LEFT(A2,1) = “F”,(RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1))),(“F”&RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1))))) & “Fee fie mo ” & (IF(LEFT(A2,1) = “M”,(RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1))),(“M”&RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2)-1))))) & A2 & “!”

In reality, “The Name Game” is more complex than this.  Though the song mentions first letter, what Ms. Ellis actually meant was first sound.  “Shirley” is not “Mo Mhirley”.  And names that start with vowel sounds – such as “Anna” – should keep their first letter (i.e., “Banana Fanna Fo Fanna”).  However, what I came up with in Excel was good enough to allow me to play the game with Ruby, Mitch, Bart and Tucker.

“I think I’m pretty funny,” said T-Rex suddenly.

“Funny looking,” said Daniel with a laugh.

T-Rex smiled, showing rows of long white teeth.  “I mean I have a good sense of humor.  Tyrannosaurus Rexes were known for their sense of humor.”

“Really?”  I said, “I didn’t know that.”

“We’re natural joke tellers,” said T-Rex.

“Tell us a joke then,” I said.  “Please.”

T-Rex cleared his throat, a low sound that rattled the window.  “What do you call a pig that does karate?”

Daniel and I looked at each other.  Daniel shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “What do you call a pig that does karate?”

“Delicious!” said T-Rex, laughing.  Daniel chuckled a bit and I smiled politely.

T-Rex calmed down and took a breath.  “Okay, okay, how about this one?  What do you call an Eskimo who has been sitting on the ice for six hours?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Delicious!”  T-Rex roared.  Daniel frowned; and it wasn’t from the warm blast of meat breath that ruffled through his hair.

“Here’s a good one,” said T-Rex.  “What do you call four bullfighters in quicksand?”

“Quatro cinco?” suggested Daniel.

“No,” said T-Rex.  “Delicious!”

I blinked a couple of times.  Daniel looked up at the ceiling.  T-Rex stopped laughing and looked at us.

“Don’t you get it?” he asked.  “They’re delicious!”

“No,” I said, “no, we get it.”

“Don’t you know any other jokes?” asked Daniel.

“I know a million of them!” said T-Rex.  “What do you call one hundred lawyers in a volcano?”

“Delicious?”

T-Rex looked surprised.  “You’ve heard that one before?”

“Do all your jokes end with the same punch line?” asked Daniel.

T-Rex thought for a moment.  “Well, our brains are the size of walnuts,” he said finally.  “It’s hard to remember more than one punch line.”

“Are you sure Tyrannosaurs are natural storytellers?” I asked.  “I mean, could it be – possibly – brontosauruses are natural storytellers?”

“There’s no such thing as a brontosaurus,” said T-Rex stiffly.  “They’re actually brachiosaurs.”

“My mistake.”

T-Rex shook his head.  “No.  Do you know what you call a brachiosaurus that can tell a joke?”

Daniel sighed.  “Delicious?”

“Exactly!” laughed T-Rex.  “Isn’t that a knee-slapper?”  He looked down.  “Well, it would be a knee-slapper, but… you know…”

“Short limbs,” Daniel and I said together.  “We know.”

T-Rex chuckled.  “Delicious,” he said to himself.

“So, do you know any jokes that are funny?”

T-Rex frowned.

“You don’t think my jokes are funny?” he asked.

“They’re a bit predictable,” said Daniel.

“So, you don’t think they’re funny?”

“Sorry.  No.”

“That’s unfortunate,” said T-Rex, licking his chops.  “Do you know what I call someone who doesn’t like my jokes?”

The new satellite – called Explorer 1 Prime – is not an exact replica, but contains a similar suite of instruments designed to do the same functions.  Both satellites gave their designers serious engineering challenges to overcome.  Explorer 1 was over six feet tall, but it was only six inches wide and the scientific payload could weigh no more than thirty pounds.  Dr. Van Allen relied on state-of-the-art transistor technology to reduce the size of his equipment.  Explorer 1 Prime is about the size of a softball and weighs 90 percent less than its forebear.  Luckily, engineers were able to employ 21^st century miniaturized electronics for the components and use solar cells instead of heavy batteries for power.

NASA picked Explorer 1 Prime as its first cubesat mission.  However, it has waited more than two years for the chance to “hitch a ride” on a rocket carrying a larger – dedicated – payload.  This week – if all goes well – it will roar into space from the Vanderberg Air Force Base in California, a guest of NASA’s Glory satellite.  Explorer 1 Prime will study the Van Allen belts like its namesake and have the chance to relive history thanks to a Geiger tube donated to the program by Dr. Van Allen himself.  And like its namesake, Explorer 1 prime relives history as it follows into orbit a miniature replica of Sputnik 1.

“This is an important message from School District 100,” intoned the recording.  “Due to poor weather conditions, school and all school activities have been canceled.”  This was the second time this winter school had been closed down due to bad weather.  The first time was a few weeks ago when the temperature dropped below zero.

Now I hate to use the phrase “back in my day”.  It makes me sound old and crotchety.  But – dagnab it! – back in my day, we went to school in the snow.  We went to school when it was below zero.  We bundled up, we stood out in the whipping wind and waited in line like a human snow fence for an unheated school bus to come pick us up and carry us off to school.  It was cold.  It was miserable.

That was the point.

I believe we are shortchanging our children when it comes to those unpleasant experiences we all must have to become better parents and grandparents.  How will the children of today be able to face their kids tomorrow and make them do something they don’t want to do?  It’s been enough of a challenge for me.  When I was young, they had changed the laws of topography.  No longer could we go uphill both ways.  We didn’t have to beat off Mongol hordes or wild Indians (or whatever it was my grandpa used to say) to get to school.  But in January in the seventies in Chicagoland, no one was talking about global warming; I can tell you that.  Can you imagine what our children will have to go through when facing their own children in a decade or two?

“When I was your age… well, we got to stay home where it was warm and – sometimes – we got to drink hot chocolate.”

We must be clear.  We must be firm.  We must wake our children in the dim hours before dawn, bundle them up in boots and coats, hats and scarves and send them out in the morning – every morning – to wait for the bus to school.  And if it happens to be Saturday and the bus isn’t coming for a couple of days… well, won’t that just be an even better story of human suffering to pass on to the next generation?  It’s for their own good.

Trust me; they’ll thank us later.

“The Bears won the NFC North Division!” said Daniel.  I thought a moment and realized that – yes –with a win against the Vikings; there was no way any other team could catch up with the Bears.  I was a little surprised Daniel had figured that out.  I asked him how he knew.

“Look,” he said, pointing to one of the players on the sidelines.  “He’s got it on his hat.”  By the grace of our HDTV I could make out the stitching of the baseball hats being worn by smiling Bears players: 2010 NFC North Division Champions.

Obviously the Bears had made up the hats in advance with the idea they might be needed that night in Minneapolis.  But it got me thinking; for every action there is a reaction.  For every team that wins, another team has to lose.  At some point in the season every team (with the possible exception of Detroit) did the math and figured they had a shot at something worthy of printing on a T-shirt.  But a lot of these items would become sadly unnecessary come January.  What happened to them?

It turns out the NFL has been working with charities like World Vision for almost twenty years, donating the clothes that aren’t needed once a team loses.  Short sleeve shirts go to poor people in far away tropical climes.  Cold weather gear heads to the needy in remote mountainous regions.  In fact, the remoter the better; the NFL works hard to make sure none of these “alternate reality” items ever makes it back to the United States or anywhere else that has access to eBay.

The Bears lost their bid to go back to the Super Bowl a couple of Sundays ago.  It hurts, but the knowledge that our loss helps someone in need does take a little of the sting out of it.  I take comfort in the notion the Bears aren’t just the 2010 NFC Champs in my dreams, but also in the steppes of Mongolia.

The cells in my stomach lining live only a few days (probably less when I eat something spicy).  The red blood cells that flow through my veins rarely last more than six months.  While the cells in my major organs may be months or years old, most of them have been replaced at some time in my life, perhaps twice, perhaps more.

Some cells – such as the ones making up the lenses of my eyes, the muscle of my heart and the neuron cells that send brain impulses throughout my body – don’t get replaced.  However, they were part of me before I was “me”, dividing and dividing while I was in the womb, pre-dating my official date by up to nine months.

My body is made of something like 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.  About fourteen nitrogen-14 atoms are created in my body every minute from the decayed remains of the carbon-14 radioisotope.  The carbon-14 itself is not that old as far as atoms go.  Sadly, a number of them were probably created in the last sixty years or so during the age of above ground nuclear tests along with some atoms of caesium-137 and strontium-90 that lurk deep within the marrow of my bones.

As Carl Sagan liked to say, “We are made of star stuff”.  Atoms of carbon and oxygen, potassium and iron in my body were created in the cores of ancient stars.  The zinc and selenium, iodine and even the silver in my fillings required the tremendous heat and pressure of an exploding supernova to come into being.

All of these atoms are not only older than me, but all of us as a species, our planet and even our solar system.  And some – perhaps most – of the hydrogen atoms that make up two-thirds of my atomic population date back to the time when the universe first cooled down enough after the Big Bang for baryonic matter to exist, somewhere around thirteen billion years ago.

I am somewhere between 1 minute and 6.8 x 10¹⁵ minutes old; you’ll forgive me if I don’t answer with greater precision.  My age is irrelevant.  It’s inaccurate at best and breaks down laughably as you get technical about it.  It’s a measure of how long I have been an individual entity, nothing more.  It has no bearing on who I am.  It has no bearing on how I think, act or dress, what I buy or watch on television.  As far as birthdays are concerned, they are absolutely meaningless.  They are a good excuse to eat cake and should be given no more credence than that.

And the fact my 41^st birthday happens to be coming up this week has nothing to do with my attitude.

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

– Walt Whitman

“I’m not sure how to do this problem,” he said, pointing to the bottom of the sheet.  I took a look.

“There are eleven kids in the class.  Three of them can be picked to make a team.  How many combinations of kids can make up the team?”

It sounded simple enough.  From the depths of my mind, I recalled the word “factorial”.  Basically it means the first time you pick a kid, you have eleven to choose from.  Then the second time you pick you only have ten to choose from.  The third time you pick you have nine to choose from.  It doesn’t matter which kids you pick, you will always have these same numbers of kids.  The numbers are what are important (it’s math, after all).  So, I multiplied 11 x 10 x 9 and came up with 990 possible combinations, patted myself on the back and went back to troubleshooting a recalcitrant SQL Server.

Wait a minute.

There was a trick in there.  While there were 990 possible combinations in terms of the kids and the order they were picked, there were actually less real combinations.  That is, my calculation would count Tom, Dick and Harry on a team as a different team than Dick, Tom and Harry.  In the real world the order they got picked wouldn’t matter because – in the real world – the kids are what is important.

I knew there had to be a way to do this.  I even – sort of – remembered doing it when I was around Daniel’s age.  That was the problem; I hadn’t done it in the thirty years since.  I couldn’t even think of what the concept was called to look it up.  In the end, it took two hours, three adults plus a lucky find online to figure out the answer.

“You better not go on that show!” laughed Daniel.  I knew it had to happen eventually; one of these days he was going to bring home something I couldn’t do.  I’m secure enough that I can admit I don’t (quite) know everything, so I laughed along with his joke… though – to be technical – I was smarter than a fifth grader.  After all, Daniel hadn’t known what the answer was either.

I typed that into my word processor to begin my blog entry.  No red line appeared underneath it.  No alternate spellings were suggested.  I have run into that issue, living in towns Microsoft Word didn’t consider real.  If I accepted spell check, I currently reside in Bleeder, Illinois.  I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than my previous address in Hangover Park.  But Chicago – as the third largest city in the United States – apparently merits an entry in the built-in dictionary.

Chicago.

I typed that into Google.  In .12 seconds, the web site returned more than 720,000,000 links.  Again, no alternate suggestions came up.  Google didn’t politely ask, “did I really mean to search for… ?”  While a Chicago search on Yahoo! did offer some alternates, they all included “Chicago” in them: Chicago Cubs, Chicago Bears, Chicago Tribune.

Chicago.

I really hoped to give the staff working up north at the Green Bay Press-Gazette the benefit of the doubt.  Green Bay is a nice little town full of folks who are good and solid citizens.  But – no matter how I try – I can’t figure out how they screwed up last week when the Packers beat the Falcons and the paper led with the following headline Monday morning:

Even now, my word processor is screaming at me.  While its first guess – Chicano – isn’t right either, Chicago makes the top three choices.  Google actually comes out and finds Chicago information for me when I type in CHICACO.  It doesn’t return a blank page, it doesn’t helpfully suggest, it just knows that I spelled it wrong and this is what I really want to know about.

Chicago.

Mistakes happen.  You can see misspelled words all around.  I cringe every time I drive past McDonald’s and see the broken English announcements on the yellow board below the main sign.  The Chicago Tribune magnanimously pointed out they once thought Dewey would defeat Truman.  But – in their headline – both names were spelled correctly.  Big illuminated signs don’t have a spell check function.  I’m thinking whatever software they use to publish the Press-Gazette probably has a dictionary function built-in.  Ten minutes of research on the Internet proved that and one of those minutes was lost when I typed in “newspaper sofware” by mistake.

Chicago.

The Green Bay Press-Gazette regrets the error.  They probably regret the error more now that it has been reported around the world.  They understand how to spell Chicago.  They promise not to spell it wrong again.  They further promise to spell Dallas correctly, the home of this year’s Super Bowl.  That will – of course – come in handy next Monday when they have to report on who will be making the trip there.

Chicago.

Daniel has reported on many events around the house and at school.  He’s written a number of posts for his online blog.  We looked over the directions and Daniel got to work… eventually (this was Winter Vacation after all).  He finally came up with about a dozen articles, a few ads and even a letter to the editor saying the colonists should protest the tea tax by drinking more alcohol (signed “a tavern owner”).  I typed it up in the computer and converted it to a three-column newspaper format.  It looked pretty good, but – in my opinion – it wasn’t quite good enough.  I helped Daniel find some pictures online of the cast of characters he wrote about.  I had to veto the picture of Nigel Hawthorne playing King George III.

“But that’s the only picture that we can find,” said Daniel.  “All the others are just drawings.”  Following a short discussion of the history of photography, we found some suitable engravings and paintings from the era.  It looked all the world like an antique copy of USA Today.  Almost.  It was still lacking a patina of age.

I remembered in my own Golden Age of School Projects, we made a treasure map look old by burning the edges of the paper over a candle.  I printed out a copy of Daniel’s “Georgia Gazette” and tried it out on one of the little candles we keep in the guest bathroom.  It helped.  The edges were rough and yellowed, but the rest of the paper was pristine.  Too pristine.  I crinkled it up.  That didn’t help.  I soaked it in the sink.  The text got a little softer, but the paper was as white as before.

Perhaps we could bake the paper in the oven.  I lay a copy flat on the center rack.  Our oven isn’t precise enough to read 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but I figured 475 was close enough.  I flipped on the inside light and followed the progress through the thick glass window.  Almost immediately the paper started smoking.  I quickly opened the door and realized it wasn’t smoke, but steam.  It was still wet from the sink experiment.  As it dried, the paper flexed and bunched up like an 8½ x 11 piece of bacon.  And while it did turn yellow – even brownish in a couple of places – it only looked old if you had a brand new piece of paper to compare it with.

Perhaps we could dye it with something.  I rummaged around the kitchen for suitable solutions.  To no one’s surprise, Diet Pepsi was first on my list.  When that didn’t work, I tried soaking the paper in a cold pot of leftover coffee.  That stuff is next to impossible to get out of the carpet, but the paper shrugged it off.  Ironically, if you ever have the need to print up your own newspaper from Revolutionary times, you will get the best results with tea.

Normally, this is not a big deal.  It wasn’t like he was cutting in line.  I was still a few steps away from the register.  Still, there is a certain protocol that should be followed when you are in the lead position in line.  The guy had gas, but decided to read through the newspapers in the wire rack next to the counter.  Fine.  That’s why they put them there.  They are an impulse buy.  I’ve glanced at many a headline in my day, but – really – I believe if you need to pick up the paper and open it up so you can continue reading inside, buy the paper.

The Sun Times was returned to its place when he noticed the rolls of lottery tickets in their clear Plexiglas display, looking all the world like the dials on a slot machine.  If you are in line for gas, I believe it is perfectly acceptable to add a lottery ticket to your purchase.  However, a line leader should have – as a minimum in my opinion – the basic knowledge of how lottery tickets work.  It’s a clear violation of line etiquette if you ask question after inane question.  How much can I win?  Are they all scratch-off?  Can I cash them in here at the gas station?  Are some better than others? By this time, I wasn’t the only one standing behind him in line.  And I wasn’t the only one annoyed by his conduct.  I believe I heard death threats muttered behind me in at least two languages.

Eventually the guy bought a lottery ticket.  I half expected him to pay by a low numbered check, but he surprised me and used a credit card.  I paid for my pop and jogged back to my truck.  Normally my journey to the gas station takes about ten minutes from start to finish.  Seventeen minutes had already elapsed.  I drove down the exit lane and stopped where it met the road.  Normally, I go left to go home.  However, it was near the end of the day and traffic – such as it is in Belvidere – was reaching its peak.  It might take me some time to turn left.  While it was a shorter distance to drive, I might be better off turning right and then making a left at the stoplight.  I have to admit that I pondered this conundrum longer than I would normally because Lottery Ticket Man was sitting behind me in line.  I felt embarrassed and ashamed and guilty.  I felt silly and small for exacting such a petty revenge.

And I continued to feel this way for exactly four minutes.  That was how long I waited until I finally turned and let him escape.

“You can’t throw all the old food out,” said Daniel.  “What will the ghosts eat?”  That stopped me a moment.  We live in a haunted house, according to my ten year old.  Daniel has told us tales of a white owl outside his window and a man with no face who floated up our stairway.  After his first pet died, a goldfish named Goldy, Daniel told us how she still tried to swim like a normal fish, but kept passing through the glass of the aquarium by accident.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say ghosts tend to eat expired food.  But how does food become ghostly?  Does it transubstantiate the instant the expiration date is passed?  Or is it more like a radioactive half-life; over time, more and more of the food molecules becoming supernatural?  That might explain why a lot of old stuff I was throwing away had sort of caved in on itself, developing a wrinkly hide and pulling away from the sides of the container.  And where did this process end?  Was it limited to food?  Do ghosts play ancient Atari games on the tube televisions that were replaced by HDTV?  Maybe ghosts are decked out in the latest fashions circa 1992, or boo-ing away on old rotary phones.

In the end, with the choice between the living and the dead, I had to side with the living.  Some of that stuff was downright scary looking and possibly dangerous.  Daniel eyed the pile in the recycling bin with grave concern.

“Well, it’s not like the ghosts are going to starve to death,” I said.

Daniel didn’t even crack a smile.

“Look,” I said.  “Old stuff gets thrown away, but new stuff takes its place.  No doubt we’re going to forget about something in the fridge sooner or later.”

Daniel brightened.  “Maybe we’ll forget the turkey tacos!” he said with just a little too much excitement.  Still he felt better and – to be honest – so did I.  Given the choice, I’d like to think our cast-offs are serving time in Heaven rather than just lying in the limbo of the neighborhood landfill.

Check the transmission?  What for?

Tune up?  What’s that?

A knowledgeable driver can add their own windshield wiper fluid.  With sufficient motivation, a car owner can change their own oil, add air to their tires or replace the occasional headlight.  There are more black boxes under the hood than cylinders nowadays and very few user-serviceable parts.  While this is generally a good thing, for people in the market for a modern day sports car it is just another division between Man and Road.

General Motors has come up with something they hope will add to the visceral thrill of owning a sports car (other than dropping the $75,000 MSRP).  Starting with the 2011 Corvette, potential owners can help build the car themselves.  Apparently, GM will allow owners to put together the car’s engine at the assembly plant.  It will take you about six hours (not including travel to Michigan) and run you an extra $5,800 (again not including travel, though the price does include an overnight stay in a nearby motel).

To me this sounds akin to one of those “Rock and Roll Fantasy Camps” where adults meet up with some faded idol from their youth, learn some guitar chords and then play on some stage and live out a small imitation of a secret dream.  Here you will get to play Carroll Shelby for a day (sorry, this is Chevrolet; you will get to play Harley Earl for a day).  You will get to assemble your car’s engine like an advanced Lego set under the supervision of someone from GM who really knows what they’re doing.

$5,800 seems a bit high for a driver to pay to work on their own car.  For that kind of money they could buy three or four 1980 Volkswagen Rabbits and work on them as much as they want.  However, like the commercials say, the story Corvette drivers will have about “building their own car” is priceless.   Maybe they will relate it to friends over dinner.  Maybe at one of those restaurants where they “allow” you to cook your own food.

Almost the entire movie takes place on the far away moon of a gas giant called Pandora.  The lower gravity allows the trees to grow to the size of skyscrapers.  The natives are ten foot tall blue giants called na’vi.  The atmosphere of Pandora is poisonous (though fires can burn, so there must be at least some oxygen).  Humans must wear gas masks outside, march around in large mecha straight out of Robotech or interface with avatars, hybrids comprised of human and na’vi DNA.  I had no doubt Pandora existed.  Cameron wisely directed the movie with a minimum of swooping impossible camera shots that plague so many other CGI movies.  Everything seems like it was shot on location and he isn’t afraid to show us detail (and there are lots of details on Pandora).  The biosphere is as varied as any rain forest on Earth.  It’s populated with all creatures great and – well, greater (Pandora is deeper and darker than any African jungle could dream of).  The plants glow with bioluminescence.  The flowers and prehistoric tree branches light up under the feet of the main characters like Michael Jackson in the music video for Billie Jean.

The character design is very well done.  In a movie that ran almost three hours, I can only think of one shot where the characters seemed a little off.  That’s not bad at all.  James Cameron developed a new method of capturing the performance of an actor and adjusting it to the slightly alien shape of the na’vi anatomy.  It makes their performances very realistic and natural.  If you told me leading actress Zoë Saldana is actually the daughter of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Smurfette, I would not blink an eye.  The other performances by Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington are also well done.  In fact, I liked Worthington’s performance better as the big blue alien rather than plain old human.  However, that might be because the avatars get to go places and do things that are so much more neat-o than where the humans hang out.  Their corporate / military base complex is done up in typical gray metal futuristic office world décor that would have been at home in Outland or Aliens.  I’ve seen the future and – frankly – it’s kind of dull.

This leads me to the weakest part of Avatar: the screenplay.  I’ll give credit to James Cameron for pulling out most of the cringe-worthy dialogue found in so many action movies.  And when he “borrows” plot elements, he has the decency to borrow from good sources at least.  If you liked Dances with Wolves, you’ll like Avatar.  If you liked Dragonriders of Pern, you’ll like Avatar.  Ultimately, there are few surprises.  If you have seen an action movie in the past three decades, you’ll know what happens to each character shortly after they’re introduced.  You have Tom Blankslate the main character who meets up with Chief’s Beautiful Daughter.  Sure she’s annoyed by him at first, but – come on, what do you think is going to happen?  The human compound is run by Colonel Nastyscar whom the audience loathes from his very first line.  I don’t have to tell you where the Colonel ends up at the end of the movie; you know what happens to bad guys who are not only bad but are dickwads about it, don’t you?  I found myself keeping a mental checklist of all the points the movie was making and just checking them off as – one after another – they were introduced along the way like plot mile markers.

When I came down hard on James Cameron’s previous epic, Titanic, I found I had to defend my criticism against all those who thought it was just “the best movie ever”.  Since my constructive criticism contains spoilers to the plot of Avatar, I’ll just link to my thoughts here.  You can take it or leave it.

In the end, I’m glad I made my midnight run to see Avatar.  I enjoyed the eye candy on the screen as much as I liked my three dollar box of chocolate covered raisins.  When it comes out on BluRay (DVD just won’t do for Avatar), I’ll be sure and buy the version with the ten hours of documentaries describing in exhaustive detail how the movie magic was accomplished.  However, there will be a day – probably not in the too distant future – when the $300 million on the screen will be superseded.  At that point, Avatar may lose some of its luster.  After all, candy – any candy – is enjoyable at the moment, but ultimately is just empty calories.

Was there no way to make the Colonel any less of a dick?  From the hackneyed “you’re not in Kansas anymore” opening line to the arrogant racism that defines his character throughout much of the rest of the movie, you know – just know – he’s going to get a fatal comeuppance.  And it won’t be some big old anonymous explosion.  That’s reserved for extras.  No, we’ll need to see that smile ripped off his face in order to achieve audience catharsis.  That’s the ancient character algebra employed in every action movie since Dirty Harry.  If I had written the movie, I would have given the character some positive traits.  I think I would have made him less like General Custer and more like General Sherman.  Maybe make him a man defined by what he is.  He isn’t proud of killing.  He may not even agree with it, but – damn it – he’s very good at his job and he’ll do the best he can to accomplish the objectives he’s been asked to perform.

I didn’t buy the Corporate Weasel character either.  He explained the stockholders are concerned about quarterly profit statements.  That’s understandable, except the movie explains that it’s taken almost six years to get to Pandora from Earth.  That’s twenty four quarters and it just didn’t make sense based on what the movie gave us.  I would have made him more of a middle management wonk.  Maybe he discovered a lode of mineral early on and now it’s gone, but the time lag means his bosses don’t know yet and he’s getting desperate to keep up production.  Better yet, take a page out of current corporate management.  Have the unseen bosses on Earth provide his cool displays some unemotional pie charts in the 2150 version of PowerPoint that force him to implement some policy that he knows may be disastrous, but he doesn’t have the clout to defy.

The company in charge of Pandora is looking for the rare element unobtanium.  Yes, True Believers, you heard me: unobtainium.  Honestly, you didn’t need to throw the comic book guys a bone; they were lined up to see giant blue alien babes.  In any case, we’re not told anything about unobtainium except that it’s really expensive and worth killing off an alien race to – well, obtain it.  While I don’t deny greed for greed’s sake is not a powerful motivator, it makes the audience pick a side really quickly.  I would have explained the need for unobtainum a bit more: it’s the only thing we have that will plug the hole in the ozone layer, it will stop global warming before it’s too late.  We’re going to seed the sun with it, so it doesn’t go supernova.  By making the Earth’s situation more dire, the idea of an alien holocaust might seem more understandable, possibly even necessary from their point of view.  Actually, unobtainium does have one defined characteristic: it seems to defy gravity.  The Corporate Weasel character has a chunk that of it floats over a dish on his desk.  Later on in the movie, the main characters escape to the flying mountains.  My first thought was they must be made of unobtainum.  Ergo, why are the evil Earth guys busy cutting down trees with the giant tractors?  Why don’t they just hack off a chunk of floating island and haul that back to Earth?  It would seem to solve a lot of issues… though of course the movie would only be about ten minutes long.

Even as predictable as Titanic was, the good guy was allowed to drown while the bad guy was allowed to live his life.  There were few surprises in this movie.  I liked the main characters, but I wonder how it would have turned out if maybe Jake had died.  Just a thought.

Avatar is a straight black and white morality tale.  Humans are bad, Na’vi are good.  Na’vi ultimately triumph.  I think by making the good slightly less good; maybe show some unsavory aspects of Na’vi society.  Even the guy who dislikes Our Hero and was supposed to marry Zoë Saldana’s character steps into line without much argument.  There was no jockeying for position in the tribe?  And when Our Hero goes out to meet the other tribes of Na’vi around the world, are there no differences between them that might have put them at odds?  On the human side, could they have been slightly less bad and perhaps more desperate?  Moral ambiguity would have kept the audience guessing longer than the opening credits.  It would have made it into a movie that made audiences say “hmm” as well as “whoa”.  And I would have liked to have seen some kind of compromise made between the sides.  Perhaps something akin to Nelson Mandela’s ability to forgive his oppressors once he gained a position of power.  In that way, there wouldn’t be the need for petty revenge by Earth (can’t they nuke the site from orbit… sorry, wrong movie) and bad feelings all around.

Of course, in this political climate full of Hate Radio and paranoia that overlooks the obvious basic goodness of people, the idea that two such disparate peoples could come together and work for a peaceful solution would probably seem like the most fantastic element of the movie.

So, how easy would it be for aliens to tune into Earth?

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has historically focused its efforts in picking up radio signals from other solar systems.  People on Earth have been broadcasting since the beginning of the twentieth century.  Thus, it is believed signals from Earth would be visible to any star in a sphere some 200 light years around.  However, the first transmissions were short wave and medium wave bands (AM radio).  The good news is signals in these areas of the spectrum bounce off the ionosphere and allow listeners to tune in from around the world.  The bad news is the signals never make it through the atmosphere, so alien listeners would be out of luck.

FM radio broadcasting was invented in the late 1930′s.  These frequencies don’t bounce against the Heaviside layer and radiate into space.  Television transmissions do the same.  Perhaps aliens missed Jack Benny on radio in the 1940′s, but couldn’t they pick up his TV show from the 1950′s?  The largest radio telescope on Earth – Arecibo – fills an entire valley in Puerto Rico.  It is sensitive enough to be able to pull in a TV signal two trillion miles away.  That is impressive, but the nearest star is close to twenty-six trillion miles away.  And the signal sent from Arecibo 35 years ago was aimed at a group of stars some 5,000 times farther away than that.

While specific data might be lost in the vast distances between the stars, the sheer amount of radio energy coming from the Earth would alert our aliens that something was going on, even if they didn’t know what exactly.  UHF carrier waves are thought to be detectable by Earth type equipment sixty light years away.  However, as the switch to digital television transmission takes place around the world, the total amount of energy being blasted into space is decreasing.  On top of that, the digital data transmissions look an awful lot like random noise, unless the aliens have a converter box.

With an infinite amount of spectrum available, SETI researchers have picked certain key areas to search.  One considered most likely is the 21 cm band (1,420.4 on your FM dial, if it went that high).  This frequency contains the hiss of neutral hydrogen from around the galaxy.  Astronomers use this measurement to “see” in radio what they can’t in visible light.  Ironically, aliens listening in on this frequency and tuning into Earth would not pick up much of anything as this particular frequency is not in use.  And the one signal sent out deliberately from Earth was broadcast at 2380 MHz.

In 1977, a SETI team picked up a 72 second signal that seemed to match what an alien transmission might look like.  On the printed paper copy, the scientist in charge wrote “Wow!” next to the data.  Upon further review, no follow-up signal was ever detected.  One wonders if some alien somewhere was just testing its equipment long ago before setting back to listen once again.

Sputnik was essentially a large metal globe about two feet in diameter.  It had a pair of antennae – like television “rabbit ears” – that stuck out eight or nine feet.  Inside, the interior was mostly taken up with heavy batteries, enough to power the one-watt transmitter for a couple of weeks.  There were two switches – like those in a thermostat – that controlled a fan.  If Sputnik got too hot, a switch would activate a fan.  If it got too cold, the other switch would turn the fan off.  A third switch measured the pressure of nitrogen inside the satellite.  If Sputnik were hit by a micro-meteor, the switch would have activated a radio signal.

These days, pressure and thermal switches are available “off the shelf” using cheap components the Soviet scientists in the mid 1950’s could only dream of.  One watt radio transmitters can be built to fit in the palm of your hand and even the batteries required would be perhaps a quarter of the size of the originals.  As for the outer shell, the design is obviously well known.  A firm in Arizona has even posted the plans on their website.

The launch to orbit would be the biggest challenge.  It’s not a technological issue anymore, but rather an economic one.  Today, the average satellite launch runs somewhere around $120 million dollars.  That’s six times more than the entire budget of the Soviet space program in 1957.  It’s possible a Sputnik might be launched in conjunction with another – larger – satellite.  By current definition, a 23 inch aluminum sphere would be considered a pretty small satellite.  Perhaps even someone might be willing to launch it for “old time’s sake”.  In 1997, high school students built their own version of Sputnik 1 and the Russians put in on board one of the supply ships for the Space Station Mir.  That fall – near the 40^th anniversary of the first Sputnik – astronauts took a spacewalk and “hand launched” it into orbit “towards the moon”.

Grandma had her finger on the pulse of the town.  She seemed to know everyone (and assumed I knew everyone too; people were just referred to by their first names).  While the names changed from letter to letter, the circumstances were always the same… and they weren’t good.  They were feeling poorly… when they hadn’t just outright died.  Even if they were okay, they were losing their jobs or their house, their sons or daughters were running away (and never with anyone good).  Car accidents, bad storms; I’d usually get three or four pages of this and – I hate to say it – it would make me feel better about how things were going with me.  Sure, I might have a bad test or a class that wasn’t going well, but compared to the people in Grandma’s letters, I didn’t have a care in the world.

My friends noticed I never seemed to be fazed by anything and I found myself spreading the Word of Grandma.  Soon, you could hear it across the campus of the University of Illinois.

“You think that’s bad?  You should hear what Bob’s grandma said…”

“Ah, Bob’s grandma wouldn’t even mention something that trivial…”

“Come on!  Bob’s grandma knows two people worse off than that and they have no legs.”

One Friday I didn’t get a letter.  I have to admit I didn’t write as regularly as Grandma did; I think she beat me about three to one.  I was a bit concerned (after reading Grandma’s letters, it was hard not to be concerned).  I called upstate long distance.  To my relief, Grandma answered the phone (that ruled out a meteor hitting her house and an earthquake swallowing the town).

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I didn’t want to write because I didn’t have any mad money to send you this time.”

“The money’s nice, Grandma,” I said, “but I really like hearing from you and getting the news from home.”  There was a pause.

“Well, I can’t think of too much that’s happened.  I guess I’ve just been so worried about so-and-so.  She’s not been feeling good…”  And I sat back and listened and tried to keep the smile out of my voice.

“How does it feel to be ten?” I asked.

“I’m not ten yet,” he told me.  “I was born at night, so I’m still nine until tonight.”  That’s technically true.  I asked if he wanted to hold up opening his presents until 10:38 at night.  He shook his head; after dinner would be close enough.

“Do you feel any different than being nine?” I asked.

“Well, my voice hasn’t changed yet,” he announced with a sigh.  Daniel yawned.  “And I’m more tired than when I was nine,” he said.  I nodded.  I’ve noticed you get more and more weary as you get older; weight of the world and all that.  “I’m hungrier now,” he said.  “I’m going to need lunch.  And cake.”  Well, that could be arranged.

He thought for a bit.  “I still like Hot Wheels,” he decided.  “But now I’ll like them just because of all the fond memories I had playing with them when I was nine.”

“There you go,” I said.  “All blown up.”  Despite the enormous crowds on hand, it was strangely silent.  Daniel didn’t laugh, didn’t even crack a smile.  His eye lasers were set to flambé.

So, I ended up inflating the balloon to Daniel’s specifications.  It ended up a little bit larger than I would have made it myself, but I thought it was manageable.  I was wrestling with the end and trying to knot it up when I noticed Daniel was standing with his eyes closed and his hands across his ears.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence!” I said.  Daniel opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Oh, I knew you could do it,” he said.  I didn’t say anything.  I just let the balloon deflate in my hand; a juicy raspberry sound.   He asked me again if I would blow up the balloon.

“Well, do you trust me to do it?” I asked.  He nodded.  I took a deep breath and got it near to the size it had been when – suddenly – it popped in my face.  I flinched backwards with the latex end still hanging between my lips like a damp cigarette.  Daniel didn’t say anything, just handed me another balloon from his pocket.

“Here you go,” he said.  “You have my confidence!”

“I noticed you just happened to have a second balloon,” I observed.

“I knew that you could blow up the balloon,” said Daniel, “but I figured you might need some practice.”

The Impala had an AM radio with a hairline antenna built into the windshield.  I remember it had two knobs.  One had a set of lines on it and the other had a music note icon.  That was kind of funny because we never listened to anything else in the car except the news.  My dad had WBBM tuned in; we could see the tall broadcast antenna out the side windows if we wanted.  I remember the sun was almost down when the President came on.  I wasn’t all that interested in what he had to say, but both my parent’s shushed me.  This was important.  My mom turned around to look at me.

“Listen to this,” she said.  “This is history.  You’re going to remember this for the rest of your life.”  She was right.  I still remember President Nixon saying he was going to resign at noon tomorrow, thirty-five years ago.

“Look, Dad,” he said, “it’s tomorrow!”  I smiled, but shook my head.

“No, it’s today.  It’s always today.” I replied.  Daniel furrowed his brow and looked back at the clock.

“But it’s past midnight,” he said.  “Tomorrow starts at midnight.”

I said, “A day starts at midnight -”

“Tomorrow!”

“No,” I said, “tomorrow is just a word that means the day after today.”

“But it was Saturday when we went to Chicago,” said Daniel, yawning.  I nodded.  “And now it’s Sunday.  It’s tomorrow.”

“Saturday and Sunday are the names of actual days,” I explained.  “Today and tomorrow are descriptions.”

“You mean adjectives,” corrected Daniel.  Touché.

I continued, “The word today means the day it is right now.  So on Saturdays, today is Saturday and when it becomes Sunday, today automatically changes to Sunday.  It’s the same thing with tomorrow.  It just means the day after today.  At midnight, when today shifts to the new day, tomorrow also shifts.  So, it’s never tomorrow, always today. ” 

I was pretty satisfied with the answer and the argument did end there… mostly because – by then – Daniel has fallen asleep in his seat.

A few weeks back there was a notice taped to the check-out counter.  The price of refills was going up from 59 cents to 79 cents.  That didn’t sound like much on a Pepsi by Pepsi basis, but it was an increase of almost 34 percent.  We’re talking health insurance premium style increases.  I shopped around; stopping at other gas stations on other corners.  I might have saved the gas.  They all ran about 79 cents for a refill.

While my corner station offers cups maxing out at 44 ounces, the tollway oasis cups hold 64 ounces.  I picked up one on my way home from Chicago one evening and washed it out.  I refilled it with Diet Pepsi at my corner station.  I noticed it took significantly longer to fill it up completely.  I non-chalantly brought it up front and paid my 79 cents.  So, while the cost has gone up 34 percent, I’m getting 45 percent more Diet Pepsi each time.  I have to admit, finding a loophole in the fine print that breaks my way for once feels pretty good.

It would probably feel better if I wasn’t so jittery all the time and could sleep at night.

“This game is called ‘Pointer’,” said Daniel, “otherwise known as ‘Lucky’.”  He shot a couple of baskets and explained the rules.  If we scored a basket, we got one point.  That sounded straightforward enough.  Sometimes in Daniel’s games, we get more points the farther away we are.  Shooting from the street nets five points in “Freeze Line”.  My personal favorite is “Robbed”; if your shot goes in and out of the basket, you still get one point for trying.  I stepped up and made my first shot; no good.  Daniel shot and scored.

“It’s five to zero,” he announced.  I was confused.

“How do you have five points?”  I asked.  “I thought each basket was worth just one point.”  Daniel explained the shots he took while demonstrating counted because “they were educational”.  I didn’t remember that rule at the outset, but let it slide.  I set and shot.  The ball bounced off the backboard into the net.

“Five to zero still,” said Daniel.  Wait a minute.

“How come my basket didn’t count?”  I asked.  It turned out it did count.  However, after the ball came down, it bounced into one of the puddles on the driveway left from the storm that went through earlier.  Puddle splashes cost a point.  Daniel made his next basket.  I stepped up to the line.

“Wait!” said Daniel.  The ball overshot the backboard and bounced into the garage with a crash.  I turned to look at him.

“What, Daniel?”

“I was just going to say ‘good luck’,” he replied.  I stumbled into the garage and retrieved my basketball wedged in a pile of gardening supplies on the far side of the lawnmower.  I came out just as Daniel was scoring again.

“That’s nine to zero,” he told me.  Hold it.

“How did you get nine?”  I asked.  “You just had six!”

“I made three baskets while you were getting your ball,” he explained.  It was a previously unknown rule allowing the other person to make as many shots as possible instead of delaying the game.  Daniel made another basket, but his ball rolled through a puddle afterward.  “Ten to zero now.”

“But your ball went through the puddle,” I complained.  “It doesn’t count.”  Daniel carefully explained how it wasn’t the puddle that mattered, but the splash.  My ball had bounced into the puddle and made a splash.  His had just rolled through the puddle.  That was allowed.

I did – eventually – score some points in ‘Pointer’, but ended up losing 40 – 30 as the sun went down behind the house across the street.  I demonstrated good sportsmanship by congratulating Daniel on a good game.

“It’s too bad you lost, Dad,” said Daniel.  “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with a different game next time.”  I have no doubt our next game will have different rules and regulations.  However, no matter how it’s played, I believe it will be called the same thing: Daniel Wins.

Based on my research, a lot of them have been restored from originals made at the turn of the twentieth century.  If you happen to have one lying around in the barn somewhere, there are a number of people around the country specializing in stripping down old horse drawn carriages and rebuilding them like new.  I was surprised a restored twenty year old car probably costs more than a restored hundred and twenty year old wagon.  To be fair, that’s just the cost of the carriage.  The horse (of course) is extra.

I don’t have a spare carriage lying around in the garage… at least I don’t think I do (our garage is a bit of a mess).  However, I found a couple of carriage works online that build brand new ones.  They offer new models with lots of glass and regular rubber tires and suspensions.  They don’t even need to be drawn by horses; I found one designed to be hauled behind a motorcycle.  I don’t know how well these sell; I would think the average horse drawn carriage buyer is probably more of a traditionalist.  Carriage works also offer new versions of classic carriages and wagons.  When I say classic, I mean classic.  I found a Roman style chariot for sale, straight out of Ben Hur.  The offerings seemed reasonably priced to me.  I could either buy a Smart ForTwo or pick up a stagecoach that seats six on the inside.  Seriously, which one would look cooler parked in the driveway?  There are some differences in buying a horse carriage as opposed to the horseless variety.  A lot of features found in the most basic car are options on a carriage; headlights and brakes, for example.

With high priced gas and two of the Big Three auto makers in bankruptcy, many hear the death knell of the American auto industry.  However I found nary an “I told you so” on all the carriage websites I checked.  In fact, one carriage works in Michigan has a deal: if you’ve purchased a new GM or Chrysler product, they’ll take ten percent off the price of a new four wheel carriage.  I did note Ford cars were not eligible; after a hundred years maybe a few hard feelings still linger.

The reality is it’s easy to get lazy and it’s easy to cheat.  The weather in Belvidere averages “rotten” with occasional lows in the “crappy” and “downright nasty” range.  It’s very easy to look out the window and come up with an excuse not to take a long walk in the park.  It’s easy to cook up something and not weight it out exactly.  It’s easy to estimate the number of points.  Therefore, it’s easy to gain weight back.  That’s where the meetings come in for me.  Once a week, I get together with a bunch of people who are in the same boat.  After sixteen months, I don’t think I’ve run into any situation someone else hasn’t already brought up.  I’ve received good advice on making the best of tricky situations: holidays, vacations, business meetings.  If no one has any ideas, at least I can get some genuine sympathy.  And that goes in both directions.  There have even been weeks when our leader has come in and confessed of some transgression.  Double-stuffed Oreo cookies are her Kryptonite.

I’ve attended meetings in other towns and states when I’ve been on the road.  I have to say we have a really good leader.  She’s very dynamic and she’s funny.  The meetings run half an hour and the time flies by.  I’m inspired by the meetings.  When I come home Wednesday night, I’m set to start a brand new week with my patented point tracker.  I find the meeting keeps me going through Thursday and Friday.  Saturday is a bit of a challenge; I don’t have a set routine to help me make good choices.  Sunday is even harder.  My motivation picks up on Monday and Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon, I’m downright frightened.  I’ve come to the conclusion I am a consummate liar.  I seem to have no problem lying to myself.  I ate all the right things all week, I say.  I exercised right and left.  And if I can lie to myself, lying to family and friends is – frankly – no big deal.  I like the meetings and learn a lot, but I’ve found I can lie to everyone there as well.  Everyone except the scale used for the weekly weigh-in.  I may have myself convinced it was a pretty good week… until that digital readout shatters the illusion.

Greg and I could type in statements in English and ELIZA would respond back in English.  While that was a novelty (generally all typing on the TRS-80 was in BASIC), the actual conversations with ELIZA sound more interesting than they really were.  The original ELIZA program was written in 1966, the same year Star Trek debuted on television.  The TRS-80 version of ELIZA struggled to make conversation from whatever words could fit into 4,000 bytes of memory.  Pretty much anything we typed in was answered with something like “That’s interesting, please go on.” or “Why do you say that?”  It was like having a conversation with a Magic 8-Ball.

Surprisingly, the concept behind ELIZA – having a large pre-programmed list of words and phrases – is still in use in artificial intelligence programs today.  The major difference is speed and scale.  Even a basic system today can hold a million times as much data and access it in nanoseconds.  I was curious to see how these new artificial intelligences matched up against old ELIZA.  I found a few so-called “chatterbots” online.  They all seem to work the same way.  A chat window is available on the page.  You type in English and it answers in English.

The first one I tried – Yeti – was pretty bad.  Everything it answered with was all in caps, so it seemed like it was shouting random things at me.  I guess it could have passed for human if the person was seriously deranged. I had a better time with Jabberwacky.  I managed to talk back and forth with it a half dozen times before things started to get a little… off.

JABBERWACKY: London is my favorite place in the world.
ME: Why?
JABBERWACKY: My friends don’t like me. 

I lost my connection to Jabberwacky shortly after that.  I hope it didn’t do anything rash.

After talking to machines that were obviously machines, I thought I’d try an actual Turing Test.  I was supposed to have a chat for five minutes.  Sometimes the site connects to actual people, other folks talking the Turing Test.  And sometimes it connects to a machine.  My chat partner was named “Landru”.  We had a very pleasant chat for about a minute and a half before he froze.

Apparently Meka was right.  I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.  Like Captain Kirk in so many episodes, I am able to bring a machine to its metaphorical knees just by having a discussion with it.  So, note to NASA: if Pioneer 11 shows up again, rebuilt as a planet killing death machine, give me a call.  I should be able to take care of it in a jiffy.

I keep forgetting Belvidere doesn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.  Instead we have a four day festival that (sometimes) coincides with Independence Day.  A few years ago, Heritage Days wrapped up on the Fourth of July.  They closed the main bridge downtown.  We all went out there with lawn chairs and watched a brilliant display flowering over the Kishwaukee River.  It was beautiful.  This year, however, Heritage Days were last weekend.  So much for professional fireworks.

We’ve had a good run of crazy neighbors over the years.  My dad’s neighbor Maynard and his twin brother (not-Maynard) used to come back from Wisconsin with a station wagon full of fireworks for Independence Day.  This was the 1980’s; when a station wagon still denoted a car with the same square footage as a battleship from World War II.  Later on when we lived in Hanover Park, our neighbors would celebrate with a simulated nuclear attack on the neighboring suburb of Bartlett.  It would take us three days to pry the dog out from under the kitchen table.  And here in Belvidere, our neighbors spend their weekends drinking and shooting off fireworks.  They start as soon as there’s a dry Friday night in the spring and keep at it until the last Saturday night before the snow flies.

You can imagine my surprise when – come 2:00 in the morning – I had no thunderous blasts rattling the window, no debris raining down on the roof.  In fact, I didn’t hear anything: no hooting, no whoo-ing, no profanity.  Even the hair band music that thumps off the siding of the houses in the cul-de-sac behind us was silenced.  I felt like stalking over there, waking them up out of their blackouts and telling them how disappointed I was.  Didn’t they know this was bigger than any mere kegger?  They were letting me down, my family down.  Heck, they were letting America down.

Daniel decided to take things into his own hands.  I picked him up from summer camp Friday night.  He asked me if we could buy some fireworks.  He had about seven dollars and change.  I had about a dollar more than that.  We strapped into the Corolla and drive north to the border; home of cheese, gifts and fireworks.  We walked in and the gift shop area was empty.  There was no one in the deli section either.  The fireworks counter was doing a brisk business though.  I grabbed a plastic basket and waded into the fray.  It didn’t take long to figure out we were in over our heads.  I suppose we could have pooled our money together and bought one of the rockets mounted behind the counter, but that would have been it.  And it didn’t make us feel any better when little kids – half Daniel’s size – were lugging Roman candles taller than they were into line ahead of us.

I was despairing, but Daniel inspected every nook and cranny of the store.  He found fifty cent boxes of snakes.  I was going to buy a fountain that shoots out sparks for eight dollars.  Daniel found a package of four for half that price.  On top of that, they had a “buy one, get one free” offer.  Daniel managed to fill a respectable portion of our basket for fifteen dollars.  By my estimate, we should be able to light up the street in front of our house for a few minutes; long enough to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” and maybe throw in a rousing rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” as well.

The magazine selection was solely made up of so-called “women’s magazines”.  There was Woman’s Day and Family Circle.  If I couldn’t find any articles to page through, I was hoping for a little eye candy at least.  Sadly, Good Housekeeping dropped the ball on that one.  Their cheesecake shot was… literally cheesecake.  I thought Wal Mart should have the courtesy to put a few magazines up front to counterbalance the recipe-centric periodical selection.

Out of the eleven people in line with me, seven of them were men.  Yet we had no representation on the magazine rack.  Maxim would be nice, but I understand it’s a “family store”.  How about Popular Mechanics or Motor Trend?  Even women in line might like a break from Soap Opera Weekly to take a look at Newsweek or Time.  I’d even settle for TV Guide.  Better yet, here’s a suggestion.  Open up some more f$%^ing lines so your customers don’t have so much time on their hands to ponder the paucity of available reading material.

BLOOP-BLOOP-BLOOP!

We use instant messaging at work.  My message window may stay closed for days, but as soon as I need to be totally focused on something, I hear this sound and my mouse control is taken away from what I’m doing.  IM is considered a “mission critical” application though most of my messages seem to be either “R U There?” or end with someone asking me to call them on the phone.

CHIRP-CHIRP!

We had Nextel phones at my previous job.  While we were all supposed to be using the Push-To-Talk feature, the only person who did was my boss.  I’d hear the PTT sound followed by his deep grumble courtesy of half a century of cigarette smoking.

“Br- B- Fr- Ma- Ha-”   Our main office was in a skyscraper in the middle of the Loop.  We didn’t have the highest cell signal there.  I’d send back I couldn’t understand him and a moment later my phone would ring.

“Br- B- Fr- Ma- Ha-”   It never occurred to my boss if Push-To-Talk didn’t work, calling me directly from the same cell phone wouldn’t work either.  This was doubly annoying because I knew he was sitting in his office with a perfectly functioning landline on his desk right next to where his feet were propped up.

DING!

When I started working for the phone company, my PC was a 386 running at 12 megahertz.  This was slow even then.  My hard drive was so small; I couldn’t have Word and Excel on it at the same time.  Every few days I had to uninstall one and install the other from a tall stack of floppy disks.  Needless to say, this didn’t make my computer very stable.  Pretty much anything I did would cause it to emit the Windows patented “Ding!” sound to tell me something was wrong.  While it drove me crazy, it actually drove one of my “pod mates” crazier.  After listening to my system through the fabric walls of my cubicle for months and months, he graciously volunteered to give me his new Pentium machine.  The IT department moved with uncharacteristic swiftness; I actually got to use the new computer a few times before I was downsized.

THWEEP!  THWEEP!  THWEEP!

We had a speaker mounted to the wall in the drive thru at Burger King.  The alarm would go off any time a car pulled up to the menu.  It was loud enough to be heard as far as the stalls in the men’s room and it wouldn’t stop until you ran all the way back to the window to answer.  The speaker system was old when I started, but our franchise owner was cheap.  We kept it until it died.  The good news was we got modern headsets to wear.  The bad news was the sound was the same and so was the volume.

Our radio station broadcast in stereo, but I thought of it as surround sound.  Everywhere you went in the station, sound would follow.  It poured from the speakers in the hallways.  It was emitted from small monitors built into the mixing boards.  I heard it in my headphones and my co-workers’ headphones (they all have tinnitus now).  Some of the stabs would make me jump.  Some of the stings would make me wince.  Some of the songs we played made me nauseous.  However, there was one sound that made me go cold and drop my stomach into my shoes.  That one sound above all, one sound worse than the rest.  That one sound that set me off more than any other: the sound of total silence.

“He should have been a lawyer,” she said.  “He would argue anything and everything.”  I nodded.  David loved to argue.  He was passionate if not always correct.  I learned a lot from arguing with my brother (mostly that it was pointless to do so).  “He’d never admit he was guilty,” she added.  We both remembered a time when David had decided to stick a pencil eraser up his nose.  He was in Kindergarten and this seemed like a perfectly good move… until it got stuck and he couldn’t get it out.  The nurse managed to pluck it out with tweezers.

“‘Well, the Tooth Fairy didn’t stick that eraser up your nose,’ said the nurse.  David jumped all over that and had her arguing all about the Tooth Fairy,” said my mom.  “She forgot all about the original argument over who stuck the eraser up his nose.”  That was David’s favorite tactic; feint and watch your opponent over-commit.

“And the time he burned a hole in the side of the couch,” Mom said.  “I knew it was him, but he would not admit to it.  It just drove me crazy!”

“Oh, I burned the hole in the couch,” I said.  This was back in 1988.  I was a senior in high school.  The light had been lying on the floor about eight inches from the side of the couch.  The heat melted the artificial fabric and made a hand sized hole.  I hadn’t noticed it until my mom was rearranging the furniture several months later.  I didn’t realize David got into trouble about it.

I also didn’t realize my mom didn’t know I did it.  She looked at me for a long moment and narrowed her eyes.  And for the first time in about thirty years, I found myself grounded.

“Where do you want to go to eat?”  I ask.

“Burger King,” replies Daniel.  I back down the driveway and shift into DRIVE.

“Burger Queen, huh?”  I say, “Well, okay.”

“Dad…” warns Daniel, eye lasers heating up.  “It’s called Burger King.”

This is a little game I invented, mostly in self-defense.  I call it “Push Daniel’s Buttons”.  We turn the corner and make a left at the retention pond in the center of the subdivision.

“How about Burger Prince?”  I ask, trying to maintain a straight face.  This is key to getting a reaction.

“Da-ad…” says Daniel.

The object of the game is to get “Dad” stretched out into as many syllables as possible without Daniel actually exploding.

“We could even go to the Burger Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince.”

I thought it was pretty good, but apparently I was the only one.  I don’t get a “Dad”.  Strike one.

“How about Burger King?” he says finally.

I ask, “You don’t want to try Burger Chief?”

“Dad, let’s just go to Burger King!”

I make a left and head out of Farmington Fields.  Traffic is slow going into town.  There are not many cars, but the ones that are there tend to drive below the speed limit.  There’s plenty of time left on the clock.

“What about Burger General?”

“Dad…”

“Burger Sultan?”

“Da-ad!”

“The Burger Meister Meister Burgher?”

“Da-a-ad!!!”

Daniel’s nose is crinkling now.  I wait for the stoplight by the bank to turn green for my lane, so I can head down the main street of Belvidere… ironically not called Main Street (that’s two blocks over).

“We could always try Burger Dictator,” I say.  Daniel’s face clears up.

“What’s a dictator?” he asks.

Oops.  I might have overplayed my hand.

“A dictator is someone who is in charge of a country without being elected,” I explain.

This play could make or break the game.  Daniel smiles.

“So, a Burger Dictator is like a Burger King!” he says triumphantly.  I laugh.

“Nope, dictators don’t have to transfer their power via family members,” I respond.

“Rats,” says Daniel under his breath.  He knows he’s been skunked.

“I know,” I say.  “We can go to Burger President!”

“Da-a-a-ad, we are not going to Burger President!”

“Burger Senator?”

“Da-a-a-a-ad!”

“Burger Congressman?”

“Da-a-a-a-a-ad!!!”  Daniel is bright red and practically foaming at the mouth.  “We are not going to Burger Congressman or Burger Senator or President!  We are going to Burger King!  You hear me?!  Burger King!!!”

We’re sitting at the red light by the Piggly Wiggly.  I look at him for a long moment.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”  I say finally.  “You only had to tell me.”  Daniel smacks his forehead with his hand and shakes his head.

“Sheesh!” says Daniel.  “To get what you want these days, you have to go nearly crazy!”

We cross the river and head towards the row of fast food restaurants.

“So, we’re not going to Burger President,” I say.

“That’s right,” says Daniel.

“And we’re not going to Burger Queen or Senator,” I say.

“That’s right,” says Daniel.

“We’re not going to Burger Congressman or Prince or Sultan or Generalissimo,” I say.  Daniel growls a bit.  I ignore it.  “If I see a Burger Pope on the side of road, I’m going to just drive right by.”

“Da-ad…”  I hold up my hand and cut him off.

“Nope, we’re not going any of those places.  We’re going where Daniel wants to go.”  Daniel nods warily at the news.  I put on the blinker to pull in the parking lot.

“Next stop, Booger King.”

“Da-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ad!!!”

Things didn’t seem to go well.  As far as I can tell, they spent most of the evening alternately arguing or pouting.  They argued and pouted over the Wii.  They argued at pouted while building an airport out of Legos in Daniel’s room.  They even asked to borrow my digital camera – the one that takes movies as well as pictures.  They made a number of jerky videos of themselves arguing silently and pouting.

I escaped in the truck for an hour to pick up pizza at Little Caesar’s (actually the pizzas were ready in fifteen minutes; don’t tell anyone).  Both were pouting by the time I got back.  Neither of them ate much pizza.  The Wii was done for the night, so I put on a movie.  They argued about popcorn.  Daniel wanted some; his friend didn’t.

They retired to Daniel’s room and continued to argue and – I assume – pout.  We could hear the arguing through the walls; pouting is a quiet activity.  I’m a night person and so is Meka.  However, they outlasted us, squabbling through the wee hours into the cold gray light before dawn.  They were up a few hours later.  I slowly came to and could hear them rumbling and grumbling outside our bedroom door.

Ironically, they both could agree it was “the best sleepover ever”.  As his friend was packing up to go, they both asked if they could have another sleepover soon, maybe even tonight.  Not so ironically, Meka and I agreed on the answer: no.

“What does it say?”  I asked.  At first he wouldn’t tell me; he thought fortune cookies worked like wishes upon a star.  Finally, he handed me the piece of paper.

“Do you know what that means?”  asked Daniel gleefully.  I had a pretty good idea.  It doesn’t take much to start Daniel talking about all the things he wants.  His flights of fancy tend to be non-stop normally; here he’d been handed an E Ticket.  I tried to listen as I munched the stale bits of my fortune cookie, but Daniel’s verbal torrent kept threatening to overwhelm me in its rushed run-on sentences.  As far as I could gather, Daniel’s plans included everything shown on commercial television mixed in with the car ads pulled from the pages of the Bargain Hunter we get when we go to Burger King.  It was Christmas and his birthday and everything Meka or I have ever said “no” to.  I finally had to cut it off.  He hadn’t taken a breath in about eleven minutes and I was worried he’d pass out.

“Daniel, it’s good to have dreams –”  I held up a hand to stop him; I knew “dreams” and “plans” were two different words.  “But how are you going to pay for all of that?”  Daniel explained he was going to be a “millionaire architect” and design the sort of buildings he’s always constructing in SimCity.  I felt my attention drifting away with the tide.

“… and I won’t have to go to school…”  I heard that.  He felt the fortune would be enough to get some high-paying architectural commissions.  In fact, it sounded pretty much like Daniel planned to have people to just stop by and throw money at him.

“You’ll probably still want to go to school, Daniel,” I said, “just in case the fortune doesn’t work out.”  Daniel smiled.  He had thought of that already.

“No, I can still be rich,” he told me.  “If my plans don’t come true, I can just sue the restaurant!”

“What kind of wedding should we have?” asked Meka.  I wanted something small and simple, informal and fun.  I said I wanted a “hippie wedding”; to be barefoot in a meadow, maybe take our vows by a stream.  Meka was on the same wavelength.  She thought it would be nice to get married with a few friends and close family in her parents’ backyard.  After the ceremony, we’d have a cook out on their deck.  We had the whole thing figured out by the time our entrees arrived.

This sense of accomplishment lasted about a day, until we told our respective parents.  Wedding invitations – we were instructed – were based upon social obligations.  They had been attending weddings for years; we had to reply in kind with invitations of our own.  Meka called me at work that week and said her mom had a list of 100 people to invite.  I laughed… until my mom handed me another list of 100.  The backyard idea was out.  I was threatened under pain of death to wear something nice at my own wedding.  Shoes were mandatory.

Meka drove into town that weekend and we went out to dinner.  We sat shell-shocked in the booth waiting for our food.  There was a lot more to wedding planning than we realized.  One of Meka’s co-workers asked when we were getting married.  When Meka replied June, she asked what year.  I remembered setting up one of my first database projects to help out a friend of mine at work.  We had to come up with a table arrangement for her reception.  She was planning on several hundred guests, all of whom apparently disliked one another.

“I’m beginning to understand why people cry at weddings,” said Meka quietly.  The whole thing was beginning to spiral out of our control.  We discussed what was really important about getting married and decided almost everything – frankly – didn’t matter.  We decided if someone had an idea, we’d put them in charge of it.

“What if it still gets out of control?” asked Meka.

“Easy,” I replied.  “We elope to Vegas and get married by Elvis.”

It turned out delegation was the key.  Meka’s mom and her aunts had a great time planning the details.  My mom worked on getting wedding pictures.  Every so often, things would still get crazy.  The invite list went through about six hundred revisions.  Someone would remember someone needed to be invited (“though I’m sure they won’t come”).  Meka and I would sit back, smile and nod, look at each other and think “Elvis”.

In the end, we didn’t have the wedding we originally envisioned, but it was remarkably similar in spirit.  I wasn’t barefoot, but I wasn’t in a tuxedo either.  We split the difference and I bought a suit.  We didn’t get married in her parents’ yard, but we did get married outside next to the Fox River.  We didn’t have a cook out, but we arranged a nice dinner for everyone that did not include rubbery chicken.  And while we weren’t forced to elope to escape the craziness, five years later we flew out to Vegas to renew our vows under guidance from “The King”.

I didn’t want Meka to miss a minute of our special day.  I woke her up early with breakfast in bed.  The tray was a bit beat up; they haven’t made TV trays out of tin since I was a kid.  I found one on eBay in reasonably good condition.  Meka held it tight in her lap so the left leg wouldn’t give way.  She passed on the canned fruit cocktail I had poured out.  It was in heavy syrup (and when they say heavy, they mean heavy; it was essentially fruit flavored gravy).  I guess she didn’t care much for the guava nectar either.  It was imported from Mexico and the only kind of juice I could find in an actual tin can.  Most beverages are in aluminum cans these days.  Meka got up to brush her teeth.  I heard her gasp.

“I probably should have mentioned the new toothpaste,” I said through the closed door.  “Crest Pro Health uses stannous fluoride instead of sodium fluoride.”

“What happened to the lights?” she asked.  I had forgotten about that.  I put in brand new fluorescent tubes.  They have a tin based powder inside.  It’s what gives them that special kind of light that accentuates all the detail on people’s faces.  She got dressed and followed me downstairs.  I had picked up one of those special magnets made of tin and niobium they sell through the scientific catalogues.  I had stuck it to the fridge, but I couldn’t seem to pull it loose.  Well, she’d find that later.  I had plenty of gifts.  I handed her an envelope.  Meka opened it slowly.

“Stock?” she asked.  She pulled out the certificate and looked at the attached print-out.  “What’s Temple-Inland?”  I explained they were a company out of Texas.  They specialized in making cardboard boxes and building materials.  The housing bust had hurt their business.  They had closed some plants and let a lot of people go.

“I thought it was symbolic of us,” I said.

“Moving from ‘buy’ to ‘neutral’?”  I laughed and pointed to the Dow Jones ticker initials: T-I-N.

“Get it?”  She got it.  Meka smiled when I handed her a small present.  She opened it up and looked surprised to find it was Altoids.

“You think I have bad breath?”

“Of course not,” I lied.  “They come in a tin.”  She nodded.

“I was kind of hoping for something… you know…”  I knew what she wanted.  Over the years, I’ve tried to shower Meka with jewelry.  Unfortunately, it’s been more of a thin drizzle.  She was excited I had something for her to wear while we were out.  She closed her eyes and I placed the tinfoil crown on her head.  I got the idea from Lone Star Steakhouse.  They make you one special when it’s your birthday.  The tin is impervious to rusting by water.  I told her it would last a long, long time.

“We’ll see about that,” Meka replied.

We jumped in the car and drove downtown.  A number of buildings in Belvidere date back to the late 19^th century.  The town was a transit hub and one of the biggest makers of tin toys.  Meka wanted to stop and take a look at the antique stores and maybe have some ice cream, but I kept her moving.  Eleven stores still have their original hammered tin ceilings.  I wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a single one.  After that, we drove down to Byron to look at the nuclear power plant.  Maybe I seemed a little too excited when I explained a tin based alloy coats the fuel rods.  Even though it was our anniversary, the guard at the gate wouldn’t let us in.  It was still a nice drive; about an hour there and an hour back.  I explained they use a lot of tin alloys in manufacturing processes, including making beer and pharmaceuticals.

“Did you get me any pharmaceuticals for our anniversary?”  I laughed and shook my head.  “I don’t suppose you bought me any beer,” she asked.

“They haven’t made beer in tin cans in a long time,” I replied.  “Besides, you wouldn’t want to start drinking so early, would you?”  Meka didn’t say anything; I think she was admiring the view.  We got home as the sun was setting.  I put on the movie I ordered from Netflix.  Believe me, it wasn’t easy locating an industrial film on the Peruvian Mining Industry.  It was in black and white, but the sound was pretty decent, considering it was produced in 1937.  They probably used tin ribbon microphones in the studio.  It was a very educational hour and a half.  I got up and gave her first choice for dinner.

“We have Beefaroni and Spam,” I said.  I heated up the tins and handed her a dish and silverware from an old Boy Scout camping kit.  We sat on the couch and ate slowly while watching The Wizard of Oz on BluRay.  Meka seemed pretty engrossed in the movie.  I slowly leaned over, put my arm around her shoulder and whispered in her ear.

“Oil can.”

Meka screamed and acted like she was trying to stab me in the chest.  The knife was made of tin and just bent on my shirt.  I thought it was a pretty good joke and had a good laugh.  Meka apparently laughed so hard, it made her cry.

Daniel doesn’t start summer camp until next week.  I felt bad he was left downstairs most of the day – alone – with just snacks and toys and television and the Wii and his Pokemon cards and two magazines.  I offered to throw the football around with him at lunchtime, but he declined.

“It’s really hot out,” said Daniel.  “And the hot won’t get off your skin.”  I knew what he meant.  We went out to get something to drink.  It was north of ninety by mid afternoon.  There was no breeze at all, rare for Belvidere.  My hair started to curl up and out as soon as I opened the front door.  Daniel sat in the passenger seat and proceeded to turn all the vents towards his face.  He was disappointed to discover the air conditioning in the truck isn’t instantaneous.

We had dinner and watched a show together.  The sun set around the time Daniel got ready for bed.  I made a list for the grocery store.  A large anvil cloud, dark purple, hung in the western sky like a mountain.  It loomed over the store as I walked in.  I wasn’t in there long, but by the time I came out, a gentle rain was falling.  People all around me were running past.  I took my time however.  All the groceries were bagged in plastic and I’m not made of sugar.  Actually, it was rather pleasant.  The warm rain washed away the heat of the day.  I let it soak into my shirt at the shoulders and I could feel it working its way through my tangle of hair.

I stood by the truck until the shower was over; two minutes, maybe three.  It didn’t take long for the still air to regain its oppressive nature.  But by then, I was in the truck, heading for my air conditioned home.

Meka and I were watching The Daily Show one night.  As part of the opening segment, Jon Stewart cut into a video clip and said, “Yeeeeeeesss???”  Everyone laughed in the audience.  Meka and I chuckled at home on the couch.

“Where is that from?” she asked.  I don’t think she really expected an answer, but I had one.  I like to listen to old-time radio programs.  They air them on NewsRadio 78 at midnight.  Unlike a lot of the broadcasts, The Jack Benny Show is still pretty funny.  It doesn’t rely so much on topical humor or ethnic humor more cringe-inducing than funny to modern audiences.  Jack Benny created one of the first “sitcom families”.  It consisted of Jack and the regular cast along with a number of frequent minor characters, including a put-upon sales clerk that seemed to work at every store Benny visited.

“Gale Gordon,” I answered.  “The ‘yeeeeeeesss???’ character started on The Jack Benny Show and was played by Gale Gordon.”

I happened to be looking up something totally unrelated to Gale Gordon, Jack Benny or Jon Stewart on the Internet the other day.  I stumbled upon a mention of Frank Nelson, who of course played that put-upon sales clerk on The Jack Benny Show –

Wait a minute…

A couple of hours of research later and I realized I had made a mistake.  It was Frank Nelson who had the recurring role on The Jack Benny Show.  Frank Nelson was the one who moved to television and did voice work, playing the same put-upon sales clerk on The Flintstones and The Jetsons.  Comedians continue to pay homage to Nelson’s character.  There’s a recurring “Yes Guy” on The Simpsons and – of course – Jon Stewart does a mean Frank Nelson impression.

Gale Gordon did work on radio.  He was part of a couple of classic “sitcom families”.  He played the put-upon Mayor LaTrivia on the Fibber McGee and Molly program before becoming Lucille Ball’s husband on radio before I Love Lucy started on television.  Later on he worked with Lucy again, playing her boss Mr. Mooney on The Lucy Show.  He would frequently growl, “Mrs. Carmichaelllllll???”, but he never said “yeeeeeeesss???”

I explained all of this to Meka in the interests of keeping the record straight.  I didn’t want her to spread a mistruth about who originated the “yeeeeeeesss???” character.  It turned out I didn’t have to worry about that.  Like I mentioned, the old saying is true: you learn something new everyday.  However, often times it is not exactly Earth-shattering in importance and you may find that no one else cares.

I guess I learned two things that day.

Daniel wanted to show me the “secret way” to the gas station.  He had discovered it when he made an unauthorized visit a couple of months ago.  First, we had to ride past all the other things he had discovered.  There was a house succumbed to foreclosure; the grass growing two feet high in the yard.  We passed the Farm and Fleet.  Through a gap in the houses near the end of the subdivision, we could see some light industrial buildings in the distance (his words, not mine; Daniel is a big fan of Sim City).

The problem was none of these sights were anywhere near the gas station.  I turned us around and we pedaled a more direct route to the Road Ranger.  The sweat was dripping down from hair into my eyes, making it hard for me to see.  The last quarter mile was a steep incline where the road rises from the pit dug by the developers up to the natural level of the land.  I half rode, half dragged my bicycle with its whining back wheel up to the parking lot of the gas station.

I bought a pop for each of us.  Daniel had some money burning a hole in his pocket.  He spent his cash on a bag of candy ranging from sour to super-sour.  The Road Ranger has a wide sidewalk to nowhere on the side of the building; perfect for parking and sitting in the grass.  After forty-four ounces of pop and a few minutes rest, I was ready to head home.  Daniel took the lead again and led me down a “short cut” he remembered from his travels.  I should have known better…

An hour later we stumbled into the house and collapsed on the couch.  I was hot, tired and we still didn’t have anything to drink at home.  Luckily, Meka got back only a few minutes after we did and she had picked me up a Diet Pepsi when she stopped to get gas.

It was only a matter of time before Daniel decided the fate of Belvidere.  We were out in the backyard, not mowing the long grass.  Daniel walked over to the swing set and gave it the once-over.  The swing set is made of treated wood.  Meka and I stained it when we put it together six or seven years ago, but it’s fading in places already.  Daniel showed me cracks in the wood.  There was a chip missing where the baby slide used to be attached.  Water will get in and that means “freeze cycles”.  This is a favorite mode of destruction from the show.  He stood on the platform and inspected the swings.  The metal chains would rust away.

“They’re covered in plastic though,” I said.  Daniel shook his head.  The plastic would crack and peel over time.  Daniel figured it would be gone in a hundred years; a hundred and fifty at the most.  The parrots would get out of their cages after we vanished.  Their babies would sit on the swing set.  The seeds they drop (and brother, they drop a lot of seeds) would grow up all around and cover the swing set in a grassy forest.  I thought I might mention Akane and Pepper are both female, but decided against it.

The Cub Scout birdhouse would come crashing down when the fibers of the Nylon rope holding it in the air snapped one by one.  The plastic rings would fill with water and fall off in bad weather.  The tornadoes roaring through would be the final straw.  Their winds would knock down what was left.  After a thousand years, Daniel concluded, you would still be able to tell the swing set had once stood in our backyard, “but only if you were an expert.”

While both nations looked up to the highest heights, the US Navy was planning to dive into the deepest depths.  The Trieste was an experimental bathyscaphe.  It had already explored the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and was engineered to withstand the pressure at 20,000 feet.  The Navy purchased the Trieste and began a program of extensive modification.  In the 1870’s, the British ship Challenger had discovered an area of the Pacific Ocean that was more than 30,000 feet deep.  Project Nekton was designed to send men to explore the bottom of the sea.

The Trieste’s habitation module – where the crew would sit – was a round steel sphere less than seven feet around.  This was slightly larger than the bell shaped Mercury capsule and slightly smaller than Vostok.  However, it could hold two crewmen.  Like its rocket counterparts, the habitation area was only a small part of the entire craft.  The Trieste was primarily a large tank of gasoline; used for buoyancy rather than fuel.  Gasoline is lighter than water.

Anxious moments abounded in all of the programs.  Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok spacecraft almost spun out of control when it failed to detach from its equipment module.  A faulty sensor causes astronaut Scott Carpenter to overshoot his landing by almost 250 miles.  As the Trieste descended, the outer glass of the window cracked.  Communications were a challenge for all three craft.  The Soviet Union lacked a deep water navy and could only communicate with the Vostok spacecraft when it was over friendly territory.  The United States set up a global network of listening posts and they could talk to their astronauts for at least a few minutes every hour.  While the Trieste was technically traveling only seven miles, round trip conversation time was fourteen seconds; five times longer than the lag the Apollo astronauts had when they were on the moon.

Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight lasted slightly over fifteen minutes.  Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit took an hour and a half.  It took the Trieste almost nine hours to get to the bottom of the ocean and back, but the crew was only able to spend twenty minutes there.  And while more than five hundred people have followed those first pioneers into space, no other human being has ever returned to the deepest part of the ocean.

Software tends to be more of an art than a science.  There may be many ways to do the same thing and some ways work better than others.  I planned ahead; I had time in the budget to do “basic troubleshooting”.  I checked through the processes I had written – one by one – and tried to isolate where the problem was happening.  I got it down to a single step.  It would add the information in one place, but not the other and that was preventing the rest of the process from working.

Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me why the information was not being added.  Believe it or not, I like error messages.  They give me suggestions as where to look next.  In this case, the process said it was working fine, but it just wasn’t.  I thought I might be going crazy.  I tried some alternatives; rewriting the process in a bunch of different ways.  Finally, I started getting an actual error: Invalid Subscript Reference.  That wasn’t too helpful.  The official definition of the error was a subscript reference was not found.  I was an English major in college; I figured out the context all on my own.  I looked the error up online and got references to applications and projects.  None of which were even close to what I was doing.

I had one final place to go for help: the software developer.  I hate to say it, but most “software bugs” I have found tend to be caused by improper usage.  I’ve called developers to complain, only to discover I forgot some minor (yet key) detail that blew everything up.  I ran and re-ran the process to make sure the error happened every time I ran it.  I even took the unprecedented step of rebooting the server.  Seriously, you’d be surprised how many sins are forgiven when you do that.  I wrote everything down and sent the developer the step by step, blow by blow account.

To my surprise, it actually was a bug in the software.  I received a very nice apology for my inconvenience and – even better – I got a software patch to fix the problems I was having.  I applied it to the machine and was relieved the information was added to both places like I expected it to.  I wasn’t crazy and I hadn’t forgotten some obvious step.  I felt the same vindication a driver feels when they take their car into the shop and it still makes the same mysterious noise for the mechanic.

When I worked at Burger King in high school, our microwaves were industrial strength.  I could heat up a Whopper patty to a temperature that would burn my hand in eight seconds.  One slow afternoon, I placed a cleaning rag in one of the ovens and jammed the pre-programmed buttons so it would microwave continuously.  The rag dissolved into a pile of smoking thread in about six minutes.

Our first home microwave was permanently mounted to the cabinet above the stove.  Microwaves were still pretty new back then; it came with a color booklet that explained what you could cook via “radar range”.  It also explained you should never microwave anything that had an unbroken skin or shell.  Beans would burst and hot dogs would split down the sides.  And we were warned: under no circumstances should we try to hard boil an egg.

My friend and I waited until my parents were gone for an afternoon.  We debated how many eggs we should cook and settled on “all of them”.  I didn’t want to make a mess; I put a dozen eggs in a bowl and covered the top.  I set the digital timer for 99 minutes and 99 seconds.  The oven hummed to life and we went into the living room to wait.  I flipped on our Wurlitzer organ and played a few songs until there was a loud blast from the kitchen, right on the down beat of the electronic chords.

The kitchen was full of smoke and steam and it smelled like burning eggs.  Slimy egg juice was dripping down the far wall of the kitchen above the table.  The explosion had literally blown the door off the microwave.  It was hanging open by one hinge and – to my horror – it was still on!  We dropped to the floor to dodge the deadly radiation.  I crawled on my belly across the kitchen and managed to whack the CANCEL button with the end of a long wooden spoon.

We opened all the windows downstairs though it was December in Chicagoland and the temperature was somewhere south of freezing outside.  My friend went through a roll of paper towels cleaning up the wallpaper and the counter and the floor.  I gingerly aligned the plastic ceiling of the microwave so it wasn’t obvious that it was broken in half.  I slipped the door back on its hinges and crimped them shut with a pair of pliers.  The microwave still worked after our little experiment, but the safety features were compromised.  You could open the door and it wouldn’t turn off automatically.  Luckily, we had just got it.  My parents thought that was how it was supposed to work.

Every small town in America has a place like the Dari Ripple.  At least, every small town should.  They specialize in soft serve, but have the “hard packed” stuff as well.  There’s no drive thru window.  There’s not even an inside.  We parked the car and got into the line waiting on the sidewalk.  I think some of the folks had been waiting there since the stand first opened in 1952.  Daniel killed fifteen minutes reading over the menu printed on the side of the building, even though he already knew what he wanted: a banana split.  I watched the moths flopping around the long fluorescent tubes hanging on the eaves above the order windows.  It was a welcome distraction from the clouds of mosquitoes sucking me dry.

I was surprised by the blast of hot air pouring out from behind the screen window where I placed my order.  I just wanted a small shake.  That was two scoops of vanilla ice cream, milk and some malt powder crammed into a steel cup and placed under a mixer pole the size of a light saber.  I watched as a young woman worked on Daniel’s banana split.  The banana was quickly lost under ice cream, half a can of whipped topping, cherries and a liberal dose of rainbow sprinkles.

There are a half dozen picnic tables behind the Dari Ripple to seat the approximately fourteen thousand customers.  Daniel found us a place at the one covered in about fifty coats of bright red enamel.  We shared it with a family of six.  Except for a quick mumbled greeting, no one said a word.  We were all too absorbed with our ice cream.  Daniel had picked a flavor called “Blue Moon”; his favorite, he told me (though I didn’t remember him ever ordering it before).

“What does it taste like?”  I asked.  Daniel slowly rolled a spoonful of turquoise colored ice cream around his mouth, from one cheek to the other and swallowed.

“Blue,” he replied.  That wasn’t much help.  I asked if it was like blueberry.  Daniel shook his head.  I tried again.

“Grape?  Is it like a Bomb Pop?”  Daniel shoveled up a big scoop and handed it to me to taste.  It was candy sweet, sort of fruity, but totally unlike any natural flavor I could think of.  Daniel was right.  It tasted like blue.  The sun was low in the west and the whole world was bathed in a golden light.  I sipped my malt slowly; not wishing to get a headache, not wishing to race through a perfect moment.

I’m no civil engineer, but three million dollars for six miles of road seemed a little pricey.  Every few years, I hire someone to do my driveway.  It runs me about fifty bucks.  Doing the math and doubling the answer (Route 20 is wider than my driveway in places), I ended up with a $60,000 estimate.  Surely that had to be on the high side; my dad is always telling me I pay too much and I should do it myself.  Excepting the life-size bronze statue of President Obama gazing heroically towards Marengo (I kid!), where was the rest of the three million dollars going?  Well, there is more to a shovel ready project than the shovels.  The workers wouldn’t live long if they started digging up the road without warning the drivers.  You need traffic cones, barricades, barrels, and a whole slew of signage.

I found a company in Bloomington that specialized in traffic and construction signs.  I don’t know if IDOT chose them, but I thought they were a good choice.  They’re local; the project will not only keep construction jobs, but also keep a few sign-making jobs here in Illinois.  Also, we’re close enough to Bloomington to qualify for free next-day delivery.  They sell traffic cones in bundles of ten and – ordered in bulk – they’re less than $1.60 a piece.  The cones need to be spaced every fifteen feet; that’s almost two-thousand traffic cones.  Actually, cones would not be required for the entire six mile stretch of road; they are mostly at the beginning and end of the construction area.  The middle part is dominated by barricades and traffic barrels.  Unfortunately, both cost significantly more than their little orange buddies.  A basic sawhorse barricade, painted black and reflective white, runs about ninety dollars.  Barrels run about sixty-five, but that doesn’t include the cost of water to fill them up.  On top of that, the little blinking yellow lights are additional.  They cost $20 each without batteries.  Luckily, the construction zone runs past Wal Mart here in Boone County.  D-Cells were on sale over the weekend (each light takes four D cells).  When the workers stop to get batteries, they could also get their fill of water from the dispensers in the back by the soft drink aisle.

The project planners saved themselves a lot of money on lane paint.  The quick drying latex runs about $70 / gallon and that doesn’t include a mix of reflective beads to make a glow in the dark traffic Blizzard.  Instead they opted to use Portable Variable Message Boards (PVM’s in the industry).  These solar powered signs announced the lanes were unmarked for the next five miles and to use caution.  Unfortunately, a three line PVM costs about $15,000.  It might have been cheaper to just buy the paint, especially when factored in with the pairs of arrow boards set up to blind motorists half a mile away.  They run about $4,000 each.  Metal construction signs come in different sizes and grades.  I believe the resurfacing project should use the top of the line.  It’s a good investment.  This is Illinois; they’ll be used again somewhere.  Each orange sign costs $190 and includes such familiar favorites as ROAD WORK AHEAD, RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD, WORKERS, BRIDGE OUT, FRESH OIL and many, many others.  One bargain was a large 48 x 24 inch sign in brilliant fluorescent orange.  It ran $74.50, but no taxpayer behind the wheel would quibble over the cost if they could see this sign coming up ahead:

My roommate from college was an electrical engineer.  I gave him the challenge to help me build a cylinder player from scratch.  He designed a set of circuits to connect the player to an amplifier, just like any other piece of audio equipment.  He also came up with a novel method to control the speed of the motor using a disk with holes punched in it.  A light was set on one side, a sensor on the other.  A small computer kept track of how many times the light blinked and adjusted the speed accordingly.  However, when it came to the practical aspects of the project – machining the mandrel to set the cylinder on, for instance – he wasn’t much help.

The 34^th Annual Phonograph and Music Box Show was held over the weekend.  It runs every June and I’ve meant to go for the last several years, but I usually remember it around August.  I drove out to Union early Sunday morning.  The equipment was spread out in a large meeting room and a neighboring roofed over patio.  Everyone looked a little fatigued.  I’ve seen that look at garage sales on the last afternoon.  Still, everyone I met was more than happy to talk shop and explain the basics of antique phonographs to a novice.

By the end of the day, I found out my cylinders were the two-minute variety.  They were probably recorded around 1905.  I had to worry about mold; one gentleman showed me a cylinder covered in what looked like specks of white paint.  I liked the Amberola players that were integrated into a wooden cabinet.  However, I was told these were only for the later four-minute cylinders. I would need to get a standard model phonograph that looked like a big wooden lunchbox.  Who knew Apple and Microsoft didn’t invent incompatibility?  I headed towards the door around 3:00 with a bag of records and a sheaf of notes.  One of the guys who had answered a bunch of my questions while balancing his lunch on his lap waved me over to his booth.

“So, do you have everything you need?” he asked.

I laughed, “Everything but the money!”

At first, I’m sure of everything.  I know I’m right.  There are no dissenting opinions, unless you count what morons think.  However, there is that second thought.  Perhaps I don’t know everything.  It’s possible there’s a scenario, some possible fact, that doesn’t fit my orthodox world view.  About that time, Wikipedia and the local library come into play and erode my certainty still further.  Is it possible a point of view different than mine could be not stupid?

When we yell at one another, it may make for good radio or dramatic television, but yelling isn’t convincing.  No one listens.  No one learns.  There are some advantages to speaking softly.  Based on the comments I’ve received over the past year, many of my readers don’t share my religious beliefs or my politics or even follow my sports teams.  Yet, it seems like they are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and continue to read, even if they don’t agree with me all of the time.

Sometimes I wish I could stick to stereotypes though.  I find in that first moment – suddenly – everything seems so much simpler.  Most of the so-called “big problems” we have in the world today can be taken care of with a metaphorical wave of the hand.  The rest can be used as punch lines.  My blog would probably get much more activity if I came out and issued blanket assumptions based on nothing more than other assumptions.  Everyone loves a flame war.  I am a master of the put down; ask any of my friends from junior high.  Curse my UU-ism with its principled moderation!

On second thought… scratch that.

I have a dream journal on my bedside table.  However, it’s gray with dust and I’m not sure if the pen still works.  The last entry was jotted down more than six years ago.  Dreaming, of course, requires one to sleep.  That’s something I have a hard time doing.  Still, the nights when I can get to sleep, I rarely remember it.  It’s as if I blink and it’s morning and the alarm is going off.  At best, I’ll slowly fade in from a deep warm feeling.  Sometimes I’ll wake up with a nagging sensation like I’ve forgotten something important.

Meka says she dreams almost every night and remembers most of them.  Not only does she dream in color, but the colors are more intense than in the waking world.  She says she has some ways to tell herself she’s in a dream.  When she reads something, for instance, it never reads the same thing twice.  From there, she’s able to take charge of the events in the dream.  Often times, she tells me, she likes to go flying.

If I have ever flown in my dreams, I don’t recall it.  I do remember having a recurring dream where I slowly fell into a deep, dark cave that seemed to stretch into forever.  The walls were made of brown rock.  Every so often a piece would stick out into the hole.  I had to stretch myself out or curl into a ball to avoid them.  I saw Alien when I was nine years old.  I remember having an on-going dream where the monster had grown inside someone, but hadn’t burst out.  Instead it was wearing their skin like a Halloween costume, controlling them.  It was slowly chasing me around, calling for me in the person’s voice.  However, I could tell it wasn’t really them.  The alien’s feet had burst out and its sharp claws scraped against the bare floors.

With dreams like that, maybe it’s a blessing I don’t remember them!  However, I have always tried to pursue my dreams, even the nightmares.  The alien sound of claws scraping inspired to write a story called Figments of the Imagination in high school.  Another became elements of a short story called The Changed.  One of the last dreams I recorded in my journal is very creepy.  I started working out a novella from it, but – unfortunately – I woke up before the dream ended, so I don’t know how the story ends.

Fifteen years later, viewers were held spellbound by video from space.  Apollo astronauts bounced around their capsules and beamed back pictures of the home planet from hundreds, then thousands of miles away.  When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Eagle on the moon, almost a billion people on Earth tuned in to watch this latest miracle of technology courtesy of another miracle of technology.

It is our fate to become jaded by wonder.  While I can understand the pride of CBS demonstrating their abilities to broadcast literally “coast to coast”, I can’t say it was all that impressive to me, a modern TV viewer.  The grainy video of men on the moon is interesting (because we haven’t gone back since then), but doesn’t compare to the views we get these days from the shuttle or the International Space Station.  I can remember when “VIA SATELLITE” was plastered over every interview outside the studio, reminding us just how amazing it was we could actually have a two way video conversation with someone so far away.  Nowadays it’s just taken for granted.

The last analog signals have been televised here in the United States.  Soon we will have completed the digital transition.  At that point, it won’t be long before people forget all about static and snow and lack of detail.  It won’t be enough to broadcast just a beautiful picture.  At that point, high definition television will just become “television”.

The park was maybe fifteen miles north of the city.  If it had been in Chicago, I would have been in the middle of suburban sprawl.  However, the roads narrowed and grew more and more winding.  The houses thinned out.  I slowly ascended a long set of hills.  I hit the highest point and found myself looking down at a valley of grass.  Ironic; I was two thousand miles from Illinois, but found myself on familiar ground.

Once I crossed over and drove up one last hill, the difference was literally night and day.  The sun shone down from a crystal blue sky over the grassland and it was already getting pretty warm.  However, once I crossed into the forest, the trees eclipsed the sun.  I parked then had to go back to the car for my jacket.  I bought my pass and got a pedestrian map at the gate.  I had about an hour, so I thought I’d take the short tour to a stand of redwoods known as The Cathedral.

The regular trees were maybe five stories tall, their trunks a few feet around.  It was difficult to gauge how big the redwoods were because it was literally impossible to see the forest through the trees.  I wandered down the path about a quarter of a mile and found one of the giant redwoods standing guard.  At ground level it seemed more like a partition.  The rough red bark was splintered and fibrous; long crevasses as deep as my hand cascaded down the sides.  Whispery white strands of spider web caught drops of water from the misty air.

There were only a handful of people on the path with me.  Few of them said anything aloud.  The air was still like the dim moments before dawn.  Occasionally there was a crackle in the shaggy green undergrowth.  I caught a glimpse of a small animal, maybe a coyote.  There were birds in the high canopy, but their sound seemed very far away, echoing down like a ghostly memory.  Otherwise, all I could hear was the steady ripple from a nearby brook.

I thought the millionth English word might be something obvious that had been overlooked up to that point.  “Word” was listed.  “English” was in there as well.  “Millionth” was – technically – out of the running.  The FAQ (also out of the running; “FAQ” is an acronym) said they didn’t count numbers that were written out.  Otherwise, “million” would literally be the millionth word.  Names didn’t count either.  “Bob” is in the dictionary, but it describes the action of waves upon a floating object.  For example: “What do you call a man with no arms and no legs in the middle of the lake?”

In the back of my mind, I did have some doubts as to whether or not there really were a million words in the English language.  I was an English major in college.  Less than twenty years ago, our copy of the Oxford English Dictionary defined slightly over 200,000 words.  Could the language really have quintupled in that time?

By the way, I checked “quintuple”; it was listed.

Maybe the monitor system counted all the misspellings on the Internet as separate words.  Ironically, the biggest problem I had was not with the words, but with the math.  If a new word was created every 98 minutes as they claimed, that meant English started out with a single word back in 1822.

While I was researching the words for this post, the Global Language Monitor website refreshed and the clock stopped in celebration.  By the way, GLM is an Internet firm that tracks word usage around the world, keeping their eye on trends in language as it pertains to culture, politics and their clients.  The official millionth word in the English language was “Web 2.0”.  The official definition: “The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.”

Words escaped me at that moment.

“Ovaltine” isn’t counted as a true word, being a copyrighted trademark.  However, I felt a bit like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he discovers the secret messages so important to Little Orphan Annie are nothing but crummy commercials.

“Awesome!”  Daniel cried.  “All decks are on sale!”  I poured him a glass of orange juice and set it down next to his elbow.  Daniel barely noticed.  He was poring over an ad for a big box hardware chain.  We don’t have a deck.  Unless they were marked down about 100% for the sale, it was unlikely we would be getting one.

“Awesome!” he said again.  “They have new showers on sale!  And tubs!”  Daniel continued paging through the paper, proclaiming each item on sale.

“Awesome!  Power tools are up to 20% off!”

“Awesome!  All fences are on sale too!”

“Awesome!”  he exclaimed.  “Floor tiles are just 49 cents each!”  That was the last straw.

“Daniel, do you know what ‘awesome’ means?”  I asked.  “You say awesome when it’s something spectacular.  You say awesome when you’re standing at the base of a mountain at sunrise or the first time you see the ocean.”  I gestured at the flyer.  “Please don’t waste it on floor tiles.”  Daniel looked a little sheepish.

“That’s a good price,” he said quietly.

“That makes it ‘good’,” I said, “not ‘awesome’.”  I placed a plate of waffles and syrup under his long face.  Daniel took a bite and started to say something, but stopped.  I smiled.

“So, are the waffles ‘awesome’?”  I asked.  Daniel shook his head.  “It’s okay,” I said, laughing.  “You can say awesome this one last time.”  He looked at me, exasperated.

“Come on, Dad,” he replied.  “These are just frozen waffles.”

“We’re going to see a movie at the drive-in,” I explained.

“Wow!” exclaimed Daniel.  “Great!”  There was a bit of a pause and then I got the question I had been expecting.  “What’s a drive-in?”

Half the movies I saw growing up were from the back seat of a car in a gravel parking lot.  Generally, going to see a show at the drive-in meant a complete night out.  We’d eat at McDonald’s if we were headed to the 53 or the Sky-Hi.  Going west to the Dundale meant dinner at Lottaburger.  There was a 7-11 on the way out to the Cascade.  We’d buy candy and hide it under the seat.  I would giggle the whole time we waited in line, but apparently I looked pretty innocent to the drive-in staff.  Our illicit snacks were never discovered.

Drive-ins showed two movies, even at the single-screen theatres.  One was the main draw and the other was the “insurance”.  I remember being disappointed with Moonraker, but at least I got to see Star Wars for the 26^th time.  We drove all the way to the Twin to see Poltergeist II when it came out.  It turned out the better movie was something I’d never heard of called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  I really liked going to the double screen drive-ins.  If both windshield movies were bad, I could turn around and watch the other screen out the back window.  That’s the way I saw The Exorcist and Jaws.  Of course, there were some drawbacks to a drive-in movie.  The portable speakers tended to be a crapshoot.  My dad would drive from spot to spot, testing them out before we parked for the night.  Even in the seventies you could pick up the movie sound on your AM radio, but that was just substituting one tinny speaker for another.  The picture was big at a drive-in, but dim.  Dark movies were the worst.  When we saw Aliens at a drive-in up in Milwaukee, it was essentially a radio show.

Daniel and I drove down to the Cascade, one of a dozen remaining drive-in theatres in Illinois.  The last movie I saw there was Jurassic Park about fifteen years ago.  The Cascade looked pretty much the same from the outside; a tall screen like a corrugated billboard rising high above a line of trees.  They don’t charge by the car anymore, it’s individual admission now.  On the plus side, you can bring in your own food.  You can even bring stuff to cook on the grills where the playground used to be at the base of the screen (bring your own charcoal though).  We parked and Daniel was fascinated with the chunky metal speaker on a string hanging from a pole next to the car.  We had to hang one on my window though the Cascade broadcasts in stereo these days.

Daniel didn’t cotton to the idea the movie would start “whenever it got dark enough”.  We took a little walk around the lot to kill some time.  A few cement plugs marked where the swings used to be.  The “grass” was about the same as I remembered; dirt and some scraggly weeds.  The mosquitoes were the same too.  Daniel and I didn’t stick around long.  We walked back to the concession pillbox and waited in line around the horseshoe shaped counter.  It all came back to me: the boxes of popcorn, the self-serve hamburgers in their foil envelopes.  Daniel watched the purple, red and yellow “drink” rain down the sides of their respective aquariums and just had to have a cup.

It was almost dark by the time we got back to the car.  The Corolla is probably half the size of the Impalas my dad used to drive to the show, but Daniel and I were pretty comfortable.  We reclined the front seats.  I jammed the bucket of popcorn between us.  A cool breeze blew gently through the car windows.  We bundled up under our respective comforters, snuggled tight with our candy and cokes, and sat back to watch Land of the Lost and A Night at the Museum II.

“I call it the Note to Self show,” he said.  He pantomimed a scene where he was sucked down into an escalator and dragged back to the top.  He stood up and acted like he was dusting himself off.  “Note to self: don’t do that!”  Daniel laughed loudly and I quietly drew the drapes across our sliding glass door so the neighbors couldn’t see any more.  As he started his next act, I found a yellow card on the kitchen table and began writing on the back.  Daniel stopped in mid-discombobulation to see what I was doing.

“You’re going to need a business card if you’re going to be in television,” I said, handing him my idea for his title in the credits:

PROFESSIONAL SILLY KIDDO

Daniel squinted at me; switching his eye lasers to excoriate.  He asked me for my pencil and rummaged through the junk drawer, looking for something to write on.  He found a notepad courtesy of LaQuinta and sat down across from me.  He wouldn’t tell me what he was writing, of course; his printing was blocked by a wall of fingers.  Every so often, he would look up to glare at me and giggle to himself.  I cleared my throat.

“You know, I bought some Mike and Ike,” I said.  “I was planning to give it to someone for dessert.”  Daniel looked up at me.

“Of course,” I continued, “I wouldn’t be giving it to just anyone.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“Well, Mike and Ike are pretty delicious,” I explained.  Daniel nodded.  I could see in his eyes he was thinking of assorted fruity flavors in convenient capsule form.  “I was planning to give it to someone who was deserving of it, someone who was nice to me.”  Daniel looked around the room.

“Of course, if someone is mean to me – you know – writes nasty things about me…”  I paused for dramatic effect.  “Well, then, I would probably just have to eat all the Mike and Ike myself.”  Daniel’s writing hand paused behind his hiding hand.

“You didn’t really buy any Mike and Ike,” he said.

I placed a light green bag of Mike and Ike on the kitchen table between us.

“I don’t want to affect what you’re writing; freedom of speech is very dear to me,” I explained.  “I just thought I’d state the facts and let you draw whatever conclusions you think are appropriate.”  I gave Daniel a smile and watched as he looked at the bag of candy on the table then down at his writing.

And so that’s how I ended up with my new position as head of Wonderful Dad Company, motto: I HEART My Nice Dad.

However, while it was easy to write, it was also easy to win.  The problem was the “strategy”.  There are nine possible positions on the board.  A number generator would pick one at random, check to make sure the space hadn’t already been played and draw it on the screen.  There was no intelligence.  I might have two X’s going across the top row and the computer would pick the lower right corner.  I win.

I started trying to build a better Tic-Tac-Toe player.  The resulting program ended up being quite involved, about thirty times longer than my original Tic-Tac-Toe attempt.  It was also a bit slow.  However, it was pretty hard to beat and most games ended in a tie.

Since there are only nine possible plays in the game, I figured it wouldn’t be that hard.  The first thing I did was figure out the logic of why a certain spot on the board should be picked.  I assigned each space a number.  Originally I had them as one through nine, but that turned out to be an issue.  I ended up doing them in powers of 3.  The first space was 1; the next was 3, then 9, and so on.  Each potential winning row had its own unique value if you added the spaces together.  Therefore the computer could “predict” where I might try next and block me.

If there was no chance of me winning in the next move, the computer had a choice of offensive moves.  I had a number of lines looking at possible winning scenarios and checking them against whether or not they were still available based on what I had picked.  This took the most time to write.  The original program just ignored it when I was in the way.  It would cheat to win!

“This is my first CD!” said Daniel.  I was a little put off at first; I’ve burned many a mix of songs for Daniel over the last few years.  He amended his statement, “This is my first CD that wasn’t just made!”  Daniel might not have caught the commercials for Kids Bop over the years, but I have.  The “Kids Bop” concept is basically a bunch of kids singing pop songs.  I was quite prepared to detest it, of course, but had to admit I was intrigued by the song selection.  Who were the ad wizards who picked Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls?  I tried to imagine a bunch of kids singing “su-i-ci-dal, su-i-ci-dal” without generating some vast parental s%^&storm in the process.

After dinner, we rushed home so Daniel could slip the Kidz Bop 3 CD sampler into his stereo at home.  My office is just across the hall from his bedroom, so I got plenty of exposure to the music pouring forth.  The songs were relatively well produced; all the kids sing on key.  I have to admit I didn’t think it was as bad as I predicted.  The lyrics were bowdlerized in Beautiful Girls.  They sing “in denial” instead.  However, that and Hey There Delilah sounded like the kids were singing along with the artist rather than complete remakes.  Kidz Bop has sold something like eleven million records; I suppose they have the clout to get the real artists in the studio with a bunch of kids.  Daniel rummaged around his room and got ready for bed.  Kidz Bop 3 was set to “infinite loop” on his stereo (actually, it only made it through six times before I snuck into his room in the dark and switched the music from CD to FM).

I can remember when Daniel was little like that and all of the stuff we carried around “just in case”.  One of us would carry Daniel – complete in the rocking chair / car seat – and one of us would carry the stuff.  Daniel’s diaper bag was the size of a small cooler.  It was packed with changes of clothes, bibs, washcloths, wipes, nail clippers, nose drops, lotion, formula, and bottles with extra nipples.  Sometimes we even had diapers in it. 

I watched as the baby stuff came forth and completely covered a meeting table designed to seat six people.  I could relate.  It’s so hard to know what is going to make a baby happy or sad.  Like most parents, we overcompensated and tended to bring everything.  We always had Daniel’s favorite toys; things that squeaked or made a tinkling sound.  Everything was brightly colored, oversized, thickly padded and chewable. 

As we learned with Daniel, the little girl managed to keep herself entertained without all the trappings.  She was quiet through the meeting; quite content to just lie on a blanket and chew on her own feet.

Awhile back, one of my clients wanted to take advantage of the free upgrades they pay for every year to the software developers.  Right off the bat, they were less than thrilled to find out the “free software” wouldn’t actually be free.  Their system was old and complex with lots of integration.  Half of it was compiled code with no documentation; as far as we could tell it ran on “magic”.  Since the software was considered mission critical (their business would dry up and blow away without it), I strongly recommended setting it all up in a test environment first.  That decision went all the way up to their board of directors, but it did get grudgingly approved.

The computer they ran everything on was actually a “virtual machine”; a really powerful computer running a program that acts like RAM and hard drives and computer chips.  The good news was we could copy this virtual machine pretty easily and set it up somewhere else as a test bed.  The bad news was their machine was in pretty sorry shape.  I ran into issues almost immediately.  The software threw random errors.  Even simple tasks would cause the system to lock up.  At the best of times, it’s difficult to isolate a single piece of software to check it for problems.  Even when a computer is “idle” there may be three dozen processes running in the background.  After several days (and nights) of effort, I got the system stabilized.  I ran it through the upgrade process, checked the data, checked the functionality and did more troubleshooting here and there as problems cropped up.

In the end, I developed an upgrade process that – while more complicated than sticking a CD in a drive and pressing <ENTER> – was pretty bulletproof.  I took into account all the issues their system had and while I did all of this, their employees were still using their existing system.  With the process, the client would only be down for a fraction of the time it took me to do things in the test environment.  We ended up not too far over budget.  Because of the size, age and complexity of their system, I figured I would run into some problems and had included time for that in my original estimate.

Of course, that’s not how the client saw it.  It was all my fault, of course.  I should have known what the issues were immediately.  I shouldn’t have wasted so much time trying things that turned out not to be the problem.  The mere fact I asked to test it all first showed how little I knew.   If I was truly an expert I would have been able to do it all without any practice.  I suppose a lot of people in my position would have been annoyed, but – as a professional pessimist - I believe no good deed goes unpunished.  I knew – just knew – they would be unhappy no matter how things went.  And – like I said – while I hoped for the best, I planned for the worst.

It started out innocently enough.  I was looking up information on one single topic.  In fact, I was using Google to do so.  One of the links just happened to go to Wikipedia.  I think you know what happened next.

One article wasn’t enough, of course.  There were additional hyperlinks throughout the text.  I had to click on some of them; I didn’t understand where the article writer was going in some cases.  Those led to other articles.  Those articles led to even more.  I was led further and further down the garden path.

I bookmarked Wikipedia in my browser.  It took longer and longer to write my blog; invariably I’d start writing and then find myself casually – almost unconsciously – loading up Wikipedia on my second monitor.  It was important to have it at my fingertips, I told myself.  It wasn’t dangerous, it was helpful.  It was like Spell Check.  It was just a tool.

I had it under control.

Soon, I was looking to Wikipedia for not only answers, but for inspiration as well.  I wrote about historical events, mathematics and science.  When I wasn’t writing, I used Wikipedia to “broaden myself”.  I was spending less and less time in my usual cyber haunts, choosing to spend all my online time navigating through the labyrinth of Wikipedia.  I pushed away my friends and family; who likes a know-it-all anyway?  I descended into a world of trivia knowledge, public debate and Unitarian Universalism.

I’d like to say that I’m all better now, but it’s not something you can cure with pill or injection.  I listen to talk radio and still have the urge to do fact checking.  Someone will send me an old clip of Dennis Miller on YouTube and I’ll have to send it to my SPAM filter.  Daniel asks me why something is the way it is and my hands start to shake when I realize I don’t know.  I watch more television now – TV Land seems to deaden my senses effectively – and I just take it one day at a time.

My mom is a natural storyteller.  When we ran out of Golden Books to read when I was a kid, she’d tell me about the things she remembered before I was born: the big blizzard in 1967, watching the news the day President Kennedy was shot, putting my infant aunt to sleep by playing her Little Richard records.  My dad didn’t volunteer too many stories, but – if asked – he would tell me about what it was like serving in the peacetime army between Korea and Vietnam.  He remembered when radio didn’t mean music, but shows like The Shadow, The Fat Man and Inner Sanctum. 

My Grandpa Ramsey didn’t talk much, but one time – without prompting – he told me about how bars in Chicago when he first came to the city before World War II offered free lunches.  Most of them were nothing good; hard boiled eggs and pickles.  However, he smiled as he remembered one that had a big bowl of cocktail shrimp every day.  My Grandma Francis remembered going to the movies before they had sound.  She loved the actor Francis X. Bushman and she cried when she heard Rudolf Valentino died.  My Grandpa drove a “Tin Lizzie” to school; before that, he rode a horse.

While my grandparents were old, I knew there were people still older that must have seen things even farther back in history.  I remember a man interviewed by Johnny Carson who remembered when President McKinley was assassinated.  That was 1901.  The Guiness Book of World Records had people listed who had been born in 1860.  There were people who remembered the Civil War still alive in my lifetime.   

I’ve always felt like a single thread intertwined in the middle of a patchwork quilt that makes up our history.  As I asked my mom and dad about the past, Daniel asks me now about watching the Bears win a Super Bowl, remembering when President Nixon resigned, seeing Scooby Doo on television when it was brand new. 

Millvina Dean was only a few months old when the Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage.  She had no personal recollections of the trip.  She couldn’t provide any details that weren’t reported in contemporary accounts and the myriad of books written in the past century.  However, she provided us with a personal doorway to those distant events of 1912; that door now forever closed as the Titanic slips down into secondhand history.

Cold Stone Creamery is less of an ice cream shop and more of a shoppe.  The ice cream was stored in large tubs behind a clear glass window along with containers of various chopped items: nuts, candies, cookies.  I had a small cup of French Vanilla and asked for some ginger snaps mixed in.  The barrista - sorry,  server; I forgot this wasn’t Starbucks – scooped out a shiny mass of ice cream and set it on a (cold) stone cutting board behind the window.  She proceeded to massage it with a pair of thin wooden sticks.  It looked like she was making an ash tray at summer camp.  The ginger snaps were gently laid in the depression in the middle, broken apart and gently folded into the mixture.  I was impressed.  If you have ever wrestled with a box of ice cream, trying to pry out a chunk with a cold metal scooper, you would have been impressed too.  It reminded me of watching the guys flip pizza dough at Italian restaurants when I was a kid.

I Cream is a new place.  I think it has a better take on the future of ice cream than Dippin’ Dots.  Any ice cream shop (or shoppe) will scoop to order.  I Cream takes it a step further by actually making the ice cream on the spot.  They had four main “types” of foundation: ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbet.  They also had something called “hot pudding”, but since it was the first eighty degree day we’ve had, I didn’t see anyone actually order that.  Each foundation has various subtypes.  You can get regular ice cream, light, organic or soy based.  I picked light ice cream.  From there, I could choose from a long list of flavors.  I didn’t count them all, but it was at least as long as the old Baskin-Robbins list I remember as a kid.  If the flavor you picked didn’t lend itself to much color, you could also add in a dash of red, green, blue and so on.  They had clear tubs of toppings and mix-ins.  While this was the future of ice cream, I went with the old standby of crushed Oreo cookies.  A pair of gentlemen dressed in industrial white added the ingredients to an industrial mixer plus a flash of liquid nitrogen from a hose dropping down from the ceiling.  My scoop of ice cream was thus created with a flourish of foggy condensation that reminded me of a trick by David Copperfield.

I didn’t order the same thing at both locations, so I can’t make an exact comparison.  The ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery was creamier (go figure) and very smooth.  I have eaten enough ice cream in my life (more than enough actually; one of the reasons I’m on Weight Watchers) to know high quality ingredients.  The ice cream at I Cream was unlike any I’ve ever tasted.  It was very light and airy, almost the crystalline consistency of a snow ball.  Very tasty and welcome on a warm afternoon.  Which one was better?  The jury is still out on that; I think we’ll have to visit Aunt Amy a few more times before I issue a final decision.

Believe it or not, someone threw this out.

On the other hand, my brother David had a knack for coming up with buried treasure.  In the mid nineties, we were living together with my mom in a townhouse.  David kept the garage full of stuff he’d found.  At any given time we might have garden tools, books, bicycles and various car parts.  Saturday morning he would load up his little pick up truck and take his haul over to one of the flea markets in the area and pick up some extra cash.  Soon he was cutting deals with other flea marketers.  One guy would buy any lawnmower David could find, regardless of condition.  Another guy was looking for radios and electronics.  I remember David had a map of Chicagoland tacked up on the wall in his bedroom.  The suburbs were all color coded based on what night their trash was put out for collection. 

One night my mom got a call.  It was my grandma.  She was upset because her television had expired and she didn’t have any money to get it fixed.  Neither my mom nor I had enough money to buy her a new TV.  David didn’t bat an eye.

“What size would she like?” he asked.  That night, he came home with half a dozen television sets; everything from a portable five inch black and white set you could take to a ball game to a stately wood grained console set that took the two of us to drag it out of the bed of his truck.  We spent the night cleaning and testing.  I used my year of Radio Shack experience to adjust colors and take the static out of the sound when the knobs were turned.  Needless to say my grandma was ecstatic to get not one, but two TV’s that weekend.  We set one up in her living room and put the other in the back room for my younger cousins to play video games on.

Like the cartoons I watched as a kid, the plot of Pokemon is pretty much the same in every episode.  The “Pokemon Trainers”, a group of kids and their sidekick monsters (Pikachu and Squirtle, to name a couple), travel to some exotic location, looking for a new Pokemon.  Meanwhile, the bad guy and his incompetent minions also happen to be looking for the new Pokemon (what are the odds?).  After some twists and turns and usually right after “when things look their worse”… well, there is a commercial break.  But immediately following that, the bad guys get their comeuppance and the good guys win the day.

I didn’t mind the repetition.  After all, I watched Scooby Doo for years as a kid.  However, what got me was the writing.  Each Pokemon has a name.  If you don’t catch what the name is, the little monster will helpfully tell you all the time.  That’s how they communicate.  Dogs bark, cats meow, Pokemon say their name.  They say it happily, sadly; they can say their names with more inflections than a surfer can say “dude”.  I can only assume the script for a Pokemon episode looks something like this:

POKEMON TRAINERS
(surprised at the wondrous sight before them)
Huh?

PIKACHU
Pikachu!  Pikachu!

SQUIRTLE
Squirtle?

PIKACHU
Pika-chu!

SQUIRTLE
Squirtle!  Squirtle!

POKEMON TRAINERS
(amazed at the wondrous sight before them)
Ahhhh!

This is the job I want.  I think I was born to write for Pokemon.  The above sample only took me thirty seconds; I was that inspired!  While I’m sure the writers get paid ten times more than the average firefighter, the real reason I’d want to write is for all the children around the world.  Daniel would look at me with new respect… at least until he turns ten and discovers some new show on television.

The video was critical.  I planned to have two camcorders going at the same time.  It would allow me to have two different angles of the same action so if someone got up and walked in front of one camera or the other, I’d be able to edit around them.  I bought my main camcorder right before Daniel was born.  It can take widescreen video at the cost of turning off the stability functions.  No problem.  I planned to take a tripod with me to keep the picture rock steady.  I had a second tripod for my high definition camcorder in the back of the auditorium.  I would take a wide shot of the entire stage, and – because it was HD – I could use software to zoom in and pan around the action without losing too much clarity.

Capturing good audio is just as critical as getting the video right.  My first camcorder’s stereo microphone would pick up the “wild” sound; crowd noise and the ambience of the room we were in.  As a backup, I had a portable MP3 recorder also recording.  My other camcorder had a long “shotgun” microphone aimed at the stage.  I wasn’t sure what the setup would be, but the last time Daniel’s class was at the high school, they used a mixing board.  I threw a long XLR cable that would allow me to plug in directly to their sound system.

We arrived about twenty minutes early.  I had everything neatly packed into a single backpack.  The floor on the sides of the auditorium slants upwards towards the “cheap seats”.  One side had a flat platform, but I assumed that Daniel would be on the other side (Murphy’s Law).  I set up on the slant, but I had a bubble level attached to the tripod to make sure the camera was on an even keel.  I set up my high definition camcorder on its tripod and attached the audio module.  I aligned the shotgun microphone and located a patch panel from the auditorium’s PA system.  The whole thing took five minutes to arrange and I breathed one small sigh of relief.  I flipped on the camcorders to start taping and… nothing.  The battery on the HD camera had apparently decided to die somewhere along the five minute trip to the high school from our house.

While I hadn’t exactly planned for this contingency, luckily I had a “backup parent” with me.  After a small amount of pleading, Meka drove home and brought back the AC adapter.  I untangled the cords in the dark, located an outlet and plugged it in.  The camera came to life as the kids were climbing onto the risers for the first song.

“Dad, can I play the Wii?”  If the stars have all aligned, which they usually do (Daniel’s a good student), he’s allowed to play the Wii for an hour in the evening.  Daniel like his games the way he likes life: fast.  He likes the games where his character will run around the screen.  He likes the games that feature frenetic fight action.  And he really likes driving games because the cars all go – well, fast.

“Let’s race,” said Daniel.  Daniel doesn’t ask me to play with him on the Wii very often.  Two player driving games take away a portion of his Wii playing time.  Also, I’m not very good.  We only have one steering wheel controller for the Wii and when we play together, I don’t get that one.

I find my real world experience as a driver actually hinders my playing ability.  Steering with a horizontal wand doesn’t feel natural.  The race track is crowded with cars and I’m soon trailing the pack.  I’ve been driving real cars since I was sixteen.  Squeezing my virtual race car into narrow spaces where I know it won’t fit runs counter to all of my instincts.  Daniel laughs as he laps me once, then twice.  My wand shivers in my hand as he gives me a “friendly” bump from behind.

Daniel – of course – has no problems driving recklessly.  He jumps up and down as he knocks the cars out of his way.  The only time I’ve ever beat him directly is when his car has suffered so much damage that I have the time to just toddle past his wreck.  More often, I take an indirect approach.  After five or ten minutes, the thrash metal music comes to a halt and Daniel cheers his victory.  I smile and we shake hands.

“The Wii records the action,” says Daniel.  “Do you want to watch it again?”  I shake my head.

“I’ll watch the race again later,” I say.  “I’ll just wait until you’re sixteen and want to borrow the keys to the real car.”

My dad’s parents purchased their first home – a two-flat on the south side of Chicago – after my dad was grown and in the army.  When he came back and got married to my mom, that was their first home together too.  My parents lived upstairs and my grandparents down below.

The first house I remember was in Schaumburg.  It had three bedrooms and a single car garage.  My dad was “upwardly mobile” in the seventies and we moved through a succession of homes, each bigger than the last.  The final house we had all together was a four bedroom split level with a two car garage and good sized basement.

Meka and I lived with my mom in a townhouse when we first got married.  It seemed like a tight squeeze for the three of us plus Daniel (when he came along).  Every weekend, we’d look at the houses for sale.  The suburbs were too expensive, so we looked out farther and farther until we came across Belvidere.  We saved our money and finally put a down payment on our first house.

If I had to describe our house, I’d call it “cozy”.  Some might call it small.  It’s the second smallest model available in our subdivision.  However, that’s a relative measurement.  Our first house is about the same size – square footage wise – as my parents’ last house together.  It rivals my grandparents’ two-flat and is bigger than my mom’s house she grew up in, even taking into account the addition my grandpa added later on.

Daniel and I stopped at Lowe’s the other day.  He wanted to look through all the sheds and outbuildings they had for sale in the parking lot.  His favorite was a tall red barn.  It covered an area larger than our two-car garage.  It had a long workbench and plenty of shelf space.  At the back of the barn was an L shaped stairway leading to the second floor.  The area upstairs was about the size of our master bedroom.  Daniel led me by the hand, showing me all of the accoutrements: the vents, the windows, the skylights.

He finished, “Wouldn’t this be the perfect clubhouse for me?”

I didn’t say anything.  I just smiled; thinking about what Daniel’s first home will look like.

I opened up the bag to the planter and pulled out the dead flowers from last season.  People stopping by David’s site tend to bring things that remind them of him: old cell phones, little dog statuettes, cigarettes and roses.  I know that everything in there is sentimental to someone, but most of it just isn’t built to last.  I gently sorted the trash out first then picked through the other items, washing them off with the hose and a scouring pad.  My mom bought a little gas station building – David was a mechanic – but it wasn’t quite little enough to fit in the planter.  I had to use the house she bought last year instead.

I planted the house first, arranging it a little to one side.  The geranium was next, on the short side by itself and then I placed the begonias in a horseshoe pattern on the other side.  There were three dog statues from last year; I placed the cleanest one in the center of the ring.  I added a couple of pinecones.  Those have been in the planter since the first spring David was buried.  They’re gray now, but still pretty firm.  Someone had placed a Chinese throwing star in the planter a couple of years ago.  It reminds me of David as well, but I was worried the groundskeepers might find it.  I pulled the house up out of the dirt and stuck the star underneath.

I set the planter in place while Daniel drove his Hot Wheels on his stone, jumping from date to date like The Dukes of Hazzard.  I didn’t think David would mind.  Other people had already been out there; there was a bouquet of white plastic flowers and a small American flag stuck in the soil.  I was going to take them to the truck, but I happened to look around the “neighborhood”.  Ahead of David’s row was a pair of military gravestones.  Staff Sergeant Joseph M. Sowa and Marine Frank Schultz had both served in World War II.

The grass around each stone had begun to creep over the edges.  Frank was down to “rank” until I pulled back the green and brushed away the dirt.  He had died in 1985.  Sowa had passed away in 1979.  Judging from the condition, I have a feeling their loved ones may also have passed on in the intervening years.  I placed the bouquet on one (after taking the price tag off) and the flag on the other.  Daniel and I gave them both a salute before walking over to the chapel.

The Kishwaukee River flows through town and cuts across Route 20 about a mile and a half north of our house.  There’s a railroad bridge there and a place to park.  Daniel and I drove over and staked out a place on the north side of the bank.  There were a few trees and tall grass.  We beat down an area and had a seat.  I carefully pulled out a worm from the Styrofoam container and attached half to my hook, half to Daniel’s.  He wrinkled his nose.  My first cast went about three feet, but my next one hit the river.  Daniel did better; he hit the deep water on his first try.  And when we left after an hour or so, our little Styrofoam cooler had his sole catch on ice.

I’m not sure exactly what kind of fish it was.  It put up a pretty good fight for being about seven inches long.  I got my Swiss Army knife and peeled back one of the options that I rarely use.  I cut the fish open and started pulling it apart.

“What are you doing?” Daniel asked.

“I’m gutting the fish,” I replied.  “I’m taking out the organs.”  Daniel looked at the mess with horrified fascination.

“You mean the insides?”  I nodded.  The backbone of the fish came out in one piece and I set it aside and flipped the fillets over.  “Now what are you doing?”

“I’m taking the skin off,” I said.

“Wait,” said Daniel.  “If you took all the insides out and now you’re taking the outside off.  What are we going to eat?!”

We got to Yorktown early, but the parking lot was already packed.  My dad was a salesman and spent much of his time on the road.  Slowly circling a mall on a Saturday morning was not his idea of fun.  I could hear him mumbling low under his breath as we searched for somewhere – anywhere – to park.  The line for Star Wars stretched out of the theatre lobby; outside and around the building.  My dad continued to grumble.  Can’t believe this… this is crazy… all these people… just to see a movie… The line slowly moved forward.  We finally got to the box office.

“Six dollars?!” he roared.  “This is a matinee!”  The young guy in the ticket booth was wearing a yellow coat like Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football.

“It’s opening weekend, sir,” he explained.  “All movie showings are full price on the opening weekend.”  My dad gestured at me.

“But he’s only six!” he cried.  To be technical, I was seven.  However, I knew the drill.  If I was six, I got in for free.  But not today.

“Sorry, sir,” said the boy behind the glass.  “It’s opening weekend.”  My dad continued to pantomime protest.  If we had been at a ball game, I’m sure the umpire would have changed his call.  However, Howard Cosell Junior was having none of it.  He waited impassively behind the glass while my dad – grumbling again – took out his wallet and pushed six dollars through the hole.  Our tickets popped out of the stainless steel counter and we walked inside.  The popcorn smelled good and I almost asked my dad if we could get some candy.  One look at his expression and the words died somewhere in my throat.

“Six dollars…”  I could hear him say over and over.  “Six dollars for a movie…”  We stalked past the concession area and waited behind a velvet rope.  More and more people filled the hallway.  I was basically at butt level and getting a bit nervous as the crowd closed in.  My dad picked me up and sat me on his shoulders.  Packing us in like sardines… six dollars… He shook his head.  The doors opened and a crowd of people poured out of the theatre, laughing and whooping, making comments and quoting things that made no sense.

The ushers quickly cleaned the theatre and finally opened the floodgates.  My dad waited for the teenagers to push past.  That turned out to be a mistake.  The whole audience was teenagers except us.  My dad always likes to sit near the back of the theatre, preferably to one side.  Those seats were taken, of course.  In fact, the only two seats together were in the first row, right in the center.  My dad just stood for a long moment, hands on his hips.  He sighed and we sat down, leaning way back to stare up at the billboard sized screen.  I heard one more refrain of “six dollars” before the lights dimmed and the movie began.

In retrospect, we had the best seats in the house for Star Wars.  I remember just staring – mouth agape – as the gigantic Star Destroyer cruised into the opening scene.  It just went on and on and on; endless spectacle.  The whole movie was like that.  I blinked in the garbage compactor scene; it hurt because I hadn’t dared close my eyes for an instant up to that point.  The final space battle over the Death Star can best be appreciated front row, center, at a full sized movie theatre.  I felt my stomach fall into my legs as we dropped altitude and dipped into the trench to fire our torpedoes.  It was just like being there.  I was glad I didn’t have any popcorn.  When the Death Star exploded, so did the audience.  Everyone was cheering the screen and applauding, even my dad.

Daniel doesn’t get many choices when we go grocery shopping, but he does get to pick out a few TV dinners from the freezer section.  I keep a bunch of them in reserve in case of emergencies (like being hungry and wanting to eat within ten minutes).  Daniel loves Meka’s chicken, so it was no surprise he came back with the fried chicken meal from the freezer.  He was all set to cook the dinner, box and all.  I told him to read the instructions.

“Slit the plastic over the chicken and potatoes,” he read.  “What does ‘slit’ mean?”

“It means make a cut in the plastic wrap,” I said.  I took a steak knife from the wood block on the counter and handed it to Daniel.  He got his whittling badge in Cub Scouts a couple of months ago; I figured he could handle making a slit.  With all the sensitivity of a fine neurosurgeon, Daniel delicately cut through the plastic with the tip of the knife and slowly (too slowly for my grumbling stomach) made an incision across the tray.

“Microwave for three minutes,” he continued.  Daniel placed the tray in the microwave, careful to center it on the glass plate.  He pressed the “3” key and hit START.  The microwave blinked for a moment then stopped.  I explained that he had to type it in minutes and seconds.  Daniel got fancy; he knew sixty times three is one eighty and typed that instead.  The microwave hummed to life and he watched as the tray slowly rotated around.  Every so often, he’d give me an update.

“The plastic is shaking!”

“There are bubbles on the chicken!”

“The corn is bubbling too!”

At the three minute mark, we took the tray out carefully and pulled back the plastic over the mashed potatoes.  Daniel stirred them for about five minutes and we set the dinner back in the microwave.

“Microwave for another 1½ to 2½ minutes,” Daniel read from the box.  “How are we supposed to know?”

“Let’s cook it for the minute and a half,” I replied.  “If it’s not done, we can always keep cooking it.”  Daniel typed in the numbers on the keypad.  He even figured out it should read “1:30” without explanation.  When it went off, I pressed the button to open the door, but Daniel stopped me.

“We need to let it set for two minutes, Dad,” he said.  So we set the kitchen timer and waited exactly two minutes.  Daniel pulled off the plastic and carried the tray to the table.  I poured him a glass of milk and found him a fork to go with the spoon we used to stir the potatoes.  Daniel dug in, closing his eyes and smiling at the first bite.

“Mmm!” he said.  “You just can’t beat home cooking!”

I was out in the yard over the weekend, edging the lawn with our electric trimmer.  I finished up the front and was working on the back when I ran out of the little plastic wire that spins around and cuts up the grass.  I knew we had a spare spool of wire in the garage.  I went in to look for it.

I didn’t find the spool, but I did come across a roll of duct tape.  I had been looking for the duct tape earlier.  I have a window unit air conditioner for my office.  With enough electronics to launch the Space Shuttle crammed in a 9 x 12 room, the ceiling fan just doesn’t cut it in the summer.  The window unit is smaller than the window itself.  I have a set of sliding panels that attach like ears to either side of the air conditioner to fill in the gap.  The unit had been sitting on the floor of my office in front of the window, waiting for me to find the duct tape to fix the cracks in the plastic accordion-style panels.  I taped up the cracks, but I noticed a screw on one side was loose.  It’s an odd size, but I have a specific screwdriver to handle the situation.

I couldn’t find the screwdriver in the garage.  However, I happened across the bottle of wood glue.  I had been looking for it the week before.  Daniel had locked us out of the house and I had to kick in the garage door. I needed the glue to fix the broken piece of door frame.  However, wood glue doesn’t exactly set instantaneously.  I needed a set of C-clamps to hold the pieces in place while the glue dried.

Actually, I found the C-clamps without a problem.

I was putting the C-clamps away when I came across the screwdriver I had been looking for to fix the air conditioner.  It had fallen down off the peg board and was wedged between the wall and a box of Diet Pepsi that still had three cans in it from Christmas.  Running to the corner gas station for a pop is one of my recurring tasks; this discovery would delay the trip for at least an hour.  I tightened the screws on the side of the air conditioner and set it into the window frame.  It did not slip out and crash into the backyard and within an hour I could hang meat in my office from the ceiling fan if I wished.

I took the duct tape and screwdriver back down to the garage.  As I was setting the tape down on the shelf by the foot pump (that reminds me; Daniel’s football is a bit flat), I finally came across the lost spool of plastic wire for the electric trimmer.  So, I’m set for this weekend to finish up the rest of the trimming around the yard.

I suppose it might be a good idea to add “clean the garage and get organized” to my list of projects.  I have two problems with that.  First, it’s hard enough to get motivated to do the to-do’s.  Being able to switch from one to the other prevents me from getting bored and not doing any of them.  Second, in order to add it to the list, I’d need a pen and – honestly – I’m not exactly sure where one is at the moment.

“So what did you do in school today?”  I asked.  I ask this almost every day and usually get one of the following answers:

• “Same thing as yesterday.”
• “I don’t remember.”
• “I had recess and then I ate lunch.”

This afternoon I got a surprise.

“I learned some art today,” said Daniel.  He seemed to be in a better mood than normal.  That was a good sign.  We got into the truck and I waited for the click of Daniel’s seat belt before starting it up.

“What did you learn about art?”  I asked.

“Origami,” replied Daniel.  When I took Japanese in college (so I could understand what they were really saying in the monster movies), we learned some basic origami.  I learned to fold a piece of paper and make a little bird.  When you pulled on its tail, the wings flapped.  I was impressed they were teaching Daniel the art of Japanese paper folding in third grade.

“Very cool,” I said.  “What kind of origami did you learn to do?”

“I know how to make a circle,” he said with a smile.  I wasn’t familiar with making a circle in origami.  I ripped out a piece of paper from my blogging notebook on the passenger seat and offered it to Daniel.

“Can you show me how to make a circle?”  I asked.

“Sure!” said Daniel.  He took the piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball.  “See?  It’s a circle!”  That was a pretty good gag, especially for Daniel.  We both laughed all the way to Logan Avenue.

We had used a simpler program called Micro Music.  It allowed you to enter musical notes by name (A, B, C) and note length (quarter notes were 4’s, half notes were 2’s).  So, Mary Had a Little Lamb looked something like this in Micro Music:

That had been pretty cool… in 1978.  It sounded like someone plunking out the melody on a piano with a single finger.  Orchestra-80 had four “voices” that could play notes simultaneously.  This allowed us to not only play the tune, but the chords as well.  However, more abilities meant more work for us.  Notes were converted to numbers based on how close they were to Middle C (which was zero), whether they were sharp (+) or flat (-), and how long the note should be played (like Micro Music, quarter notes were 4’s).

It wasn’t enough to just type in long strings of note information.  With four voices going simultaneously, it was easy to get out of sync with a single mistake.  Like real music, Orchestra-80 split a song into discrete “measures” that only contained a small number of notes, rests and voice information.

The beginning of the song contained information relevant to all the measures: clef, key signature, tempo, what instrument each voice was playing the notes on.  Greg and I spent a lot of time entering a single song – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by the Beatles – into Orchestra-80.  We had to translate the musical notes on the page to the numbers the application would understand.  We had to come up with a way to write out the chords so they would simulate a beat.  Finally, as we started playing the song back, we had to make corrections to the music from typos and actual goofs in the music book where they had one note, but we heard a different one played on Abbey Road.  We debuted it in our music class at school that fall.

The syntax of the Orchestra-80 software was based on the MUSIC programming languages developed in the fifties and sixties.  When we were typing in songs, we were actually writing a program that would be compiled into music.  I haven’t typed a song into Orchestra-80 in twenty years, but the idea of breaking up a large “song” into smaller pieces – measure, voice, note – is something that resonates with me when I write programs today.  Almost all programming languages are “object oriented”; they split a complex program into smaller, manageable chunks.  When any programmer finishes their latest “killer application” and they run through it successfully for the first time… no matter how dominant their logical right brain might be, it’s literally music to their ears.

I heard a dramatic sigh.  “Dad, can we go now?”

“Let me finish what I’m writing,” I said.  “Then we can go home.”  Daniel continued to slurp noisily, capturing the last few shake molecules at the bottom of the cup.  He craned his neck to peer at my half-finished page.  He frowned.

“I can’t read your handwriting,” he said.  “It’s too messy.”

“You can read it when I type it into the computer,” I replied.  That gave me an idea.

“You haven’t written anything for your blog in a long time,” I said.  “Want to write something while you’re waiting for me?”  Daniel nodded.  I ripped a page from my notebook and gave him my backup pen.  He tapped it a few times and put it to his mouth to think.  After a few moments, he started writing quickly.  I returned to my own blog, but found my attention wandering over across the table to the latest edition of Daniel’s “Dear My Life”.  Daniel noticed this too.

“Dad, don’t copy me,” he warned.  “You can read it when you type it in the computer.”

Over time, the cyber blush faded from the performance rose.  Joon kept it updated through the late nineties, but – eventually – it was consigned to the scrap heap of history otherwise known as my basement.  By then the bays were filled with all sorts of interesting hardware.  I remember removing a video card here, an ISA sound card there.  I still use a set of its drive rails inside my current “frankenputer”.  Eventually I pulled out everything I was ever going to use (and then some).  I dragged the steel husk up to the garage to be recycled.

After I mow the lawn, I roll the lawnmower to the street and use something heavy to hold down the handle while I wash the blade off with a hose.  Nowadays, I use Daniel for this.  Before he got big enough to help, I would grab whatever was handy and heavy: bags of fertilizer, grass seed, mulch.  One weekend – when Meka was particularly productive – the garage was bare.  I looked around and couldn’t find anything heavy enough to hold the mower in place.  Then, I noticed the old steel computer case.  I rolled it down the driveway and set it on the lawnmower handle.  It worked like a charm!  I ended up keeping the case next to the mower throughout the rest of the season.  Sure I got some looks from the neighbors; after all, how often have you seen integration between a PC and a lawnmower?

“I think I’m losing my mind,” said Daniel.  I had to ask.

“Why do you think you’re losing your mind?”

“I found my Floam in the basement,” he said.  “I forgot that I had ever bought it.”

“I don’t think you’re losing your mind,” I replied, taking another sip.  “You only lost a thought.  It happens to the best of us.”  Daniel pondered this and absent-mindedly slurped a spoonful of semi-liquid ice cream in his mouth.

“What if I lose more thoughts?” asked Daniel.  I watched a vanilla drip slowly roll towards his chin.  When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I reached over and blotted it with a napkin.

“You probably have already,” I said.  “But look on the bright side.”

“What bright side?”

“Well, when you found your Floam, it was like getting a new present, right?”  Daniel nodded.  I continued, “So, if you clean your room, I’ll bet you find all sorts of things you’ve forgotten about.”

Daniel smiled, “It will be just like Christmas!”  I smiled back.

“That’s right.  For all of us,” I said.

Not that long ago – geologically speaking – Illinois was subsumed in an immense sea of grass that stretched to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  In the 1830’s, a man named John Deere (yes, there was a real John Deere) invented a type of metal plow that could cut through the dense soil and over the next century almost all of Illinois was cultivated: corn and soybeans and finally boxy houses.

What settlers called “the prairie” was actually more than just a lot of grass.  Even in Illinois, the prairie was subdivided into seventeen distinct types.  Each type was literally packed with different species.  Restored prairies can pride themselves on having a hundred different plant species in a single acre.  Natural prairie was more than twice that.

The Clinton Administration turned over some 15,000 acres near Wilmington, Illinois, for tallgrass prairie restoration.  It is the largest restoration project in the country, but thirteen years later the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie is still a work in progress with decades of work to come.  In the entire state, less than four square miles of original prairie survives, split up into an acre here and an acre there.  Large species such as the bison haven’t been seen outside of zoos in Illinois since the 19^th century.  More than twenty smaller species are threatened or endangered.  Even the so-called Common Barn Owl isn’t that common anymore.

The prairie was plowed under in the name of progress and cash crops.  Ironically, sawgrass – a prairie plant – has been found to generate 50% more ethanol than a similar amount of corn.  There is a path through the middle of the prairie project behind the UU Church of Rockford.  Walking into the middle and kneeling down, one can almost imagine what the Illinois of the past might have looked like, or possibly a dream of its future.

Every so often, something would happen and take Daniel’s mind off his hurting belly.  Meka had an old cat – Coco – that made her home down in the basement on our couch.  She didn’t meow, but she purred like no one’s business.  One evening, Coco came waddling over to inspect Daniel, purring like a motor with a bad bearing.  Daniel stopped in mid-cry, eyes wide with astonishment at the sound.  Coco was our new best friend.  The next night, I actually carried Coco over to Daniel (not a mean feat; she was pretty chunky).  Daniel looked at her for a moment then pushed her away and started sobbing again.  Coco was demoted back to the couch.

There was nothing I could do that seemed to help Daniel, so – actually – it was kind of boring.  I would read a bit until my eyes got tired (after three months of no sleep, that didn’t take very long).  Sometimes I would log onto the Internet with my dial-up modem.  Downloading a picture or a song would kill an hour.  Most of the time I watched television.  I watched a lot of Classic Sports Network and CNN.  One night, I was flipping through the channels and stopped at VH-1.  They were airing a video from Shania Twain called Man! I Feel Like a Woman.  It was a pretty catchy song and Ms. Twain was easy on the eyes.  The next song started and Daniel began to cry again.  It was only then I realized he had stopped while the video was airing.

VH-1 played the video a couple of more times that first night.  Each time, Daniel stopped crying.  Mercifully, the song was a big hit that fall and the video stayed in rotation.  Other stimuli came and went and Daniel kept on whimpering through the night; sometimes sobbing, sometimes whining, sometimes screaming.  About the time I thought I would snap from one more minute, I’d hear Shania Twain call from the television, “Let’s go, girls.”  Daniel would sit up straight and I’d lay back and relax for four minutes.  I’m not a bit country music fan.  I have an album by Marty Robbins, an 8-track of Waylon and Willie.  My third one is a CD of Come on Over by Shania Twain.  I never listened to it much; Daniel couldn’t see straight yet, but he only seemed to like the video on TV.  Still, I count myself as one of Shania Twain’s biggest fans, at least one of the most grateful.  The $12.98 (plus tax) I paid at Circuit City was the only way I could think of to say thank you for keeping me sane.

There were a myriad of ways I could have answered the question.  I might have answered with just a simple “no”.  I might have said I used to text quite a lot, except back then we called it “sending a postcard”.  I split the difference and explained that – no – I didn’t text when I was young.  The technology hadn’t been invented yet.  Daniel looked surprised.

“But the telephone was invented in the 1800’s,” he replied.  “Was it just really expensive to have one when you were young?”  It occurred to me that Daniel’s definition of “phone” is different than mine.  To him, a telephone is a little handheld device that you can take anywhere, take pictures, shoot movies, play games, look at the Internet, write people and even talk to them.  I explained that – when I was his age – the telephone was just used to call people.  It couldn’t do anything else.  We couldn’t go anywhere with it because it was attached to a box with a cord and the cord was plugged into the wall.

Daniel brightened.  “It was like the ones we built for Cub Scouts!”  I laughed because the “telephones” we built for Cub Scouts were a pair of tin cans attached with string.  And I laughed even harder because – frankly – Daniel wasn’t too far off from the truth.

The bus dropped me off from school a few minutes before the show started.  I would race home down the street to catch the opening teaser.  I didn’t always make that, but I never missed the theme song.

Here we come…
Walking down the street…
Get funniest looks from…
Everyone we meet…

I wasn’t the only fan of The Monkees in my neighborhood.  My friends Scott and Dave from school would watch with me sometimes.  Charlie – when he wasn’t busy throwing my toys in the lake behind the house – also liked the show.  I was surprised to find a record by the Monkees in my parents’ collection in the living room.  I played it practically to death on my little portable record player.  Most of the songs were featured on the show and – with a little practice – we all knew the words to Daydream Believer and I’m Not Your Stepping Stone, I’m a Believer and Mary, Mary.

It was my dream that we could be just like the Monkees.  There were four of us and there were four of them.  Out of our group, I was the only one who played any kind of musical instrument, but – even then – I didn’t see that as a major obstacle.  We watched the show, we knew the songs, we could even act out a lot of the skits (though we couldn’t figure out how they could run so fast).  I had the Monkees on the brain and talked at my parents about them all the time.  They smiled and nodded a lot.

One day, the show ended with a clip of the Monkees playing a concert.  They mentioned they would be playing “at a town near you” very soon.  Well, I had to be there.  I began pestering my mom and dad about it.  They continued to smile and nod, say “we’ll see” and so on.  That wasn’t good enough for me; I needed a firm commitment.  Finally, my dad had enough.

“Bobby, the Monkees broke up a long time ago; before you were born,” he said, exasperated.  “You’re just watching the reruns.”  I was a step ahead of some of my classmates.  I knew that little men weren’t hiding inside the television.  Still, I had assumed the people in the shows were live out there somewhere and living in those houses and apartments they showed.  The idea that none of it was real and that it could have all happened a long time ago…  I was shocked.  It was a sober moment after school when I gathered my three friends out on our new patio and had to tell them the Monkees were no more.

“I guess Mike went north, Mickey went south, Davy went east and Peter went west,” I said.  Charlie’s normal shit-eating grin vanished.  Scott’s jaw hung open and Dave was uncharacteristically still as he worked through the news.  We shared a long, quiet moment together, with the cool wind whipping the dust of the uncompleted neighborhood around us.  No one felt like playing.  Scott took off on his bike and Dave walked around the front of the house.  Charlie headed east, walking slump shouldered; he didn’t even pause to throw anything of mine in the lake.  I slipped open the patio glass door and went down to the basement.  It was too late to watch The Monkees and none of my regular shows were on.  I found PBS showing a movie about four other guys who looked like the Monkees.  They got chased by girls and played music on a train.  I liked the songs they did.  I liked them a lot actually.  But that’s another story.

It was one of those old school steakhouses done up in Early American Dungeon.  Everything was brick and wrought iron with thick wooden beams stained dark like walnut.  Each booth came equipped with a small lamp with a bulb about the size of the one in a refrigerator.  It didn’t help; the black Naugahyde seats seemed to suck the very light out of the air.

Despite this, the service was excellent and the food was terrific.  I like a good piece of fish and I like it “blackened”.  This is a gamble; most places used “blackened” as what your tongue will look like after you eat their spice combination.  Here it was just enough to enhance the flavor and give my mouth a little kick.  I upped the ante and ordered a slice of Key Lime Pie for dessert.  This is only guaranteed to be edible in climes where limes might actually grow.  It’s a crap shoot everywhere else.  Despite their geographical handicap, they performed admirably.  The pie was delicious.

I got the check and couldn’t read the entire amount by the light of the booth lamp.  While it could be covered by the client without too many raised eyebrows, I realized that I would have to walk across the parking lot in the opposite direction tomorrow night.  Rally’s has quite a selection of offerings on their sixty-nine cents menu.

When Daniel does something, he goes all out.  He throws a ball as hard as he can; never mind accuracy, never mind control.  When he runs, he runs as fast as he possibly can for as long as he can manage it, then stops.  As soon as he catches his breath, he’s back running as fast as he can.  If he ever goes out for track and field, I’m sure he’ll be a sprinter rather than a marathon runner.

I hadn’t ridden my bike in a long time.  The muscles in the back of my legs were throbbing from the effort.  It took me a bit, but I found a sedate but steady pace.  Daniel flitted around me like a silver and red mosquito.  Sometimes he would be a block or more ahead.  A moment later he would be far behind, resting along the side of the path.

“Slow and steady, Bub,” I said, quoting the tortoise from Looney Tunes.  “Slow and steady.”  Daniel led most of the way around the track, but I would occasionally catch up with him as he tried to recover.  I would sing the tortoise song as I passed by.  Daniel would shake his fist and glare, then jump back on his bike and pedal for all he was worth.  In the end Daniel was waiting for me, his bike parked at the edge of the parking lot.

“About time you got here!” he said.  “The rabbit beats the turtle for once!”

I got off my bike at the curb and walked it over the edge.  “Confidentially,” I said, “the race was to the truck.”  At that second, my tire touched the back bumper.  “I win!”

However, Comic Book Guy had to admit as we all waited in line at the box-office, this isn’t the first time Star Trek has been redone.  There have been four other shows with totally new characters and new takes on the original mythos.  Regular Guy enjoys the original series, but is also a fan of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.  And when Gene Roddenberry – the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself – was “rebooted” off the Star Trek franchise, his replacement – Harve Bennett – gave us The Wrath of Khan.  Comic Book Guy had to agree with Regular Guy and Jerry Seinfeld that – really – that was the best of those movies.

We picked up a “mega tub” of popcorn (more than enough for Regular Guy, Comic Book Guy and Daniel to share) and found a place to sit, just slightly right of center.  Regular Guy had some concerns about the movie’s rating.  It’s suitable for kids over thirteen, but Daniel is only nine.  I remembered when I was nine, I saw Alien for the first time and it basically left me psychologically scarred.  I leaned over and whispered that if I thought a monster was coming, I’d let him know and give him time to cover his eyes.  However, the alien monster – when it finally showed up in the movie – didn’t seem to faze Daniel at all.  He spent more time during the movie covering his ears than his eyes.  This movie is loud.  If Spinal Tap can hit eleven on occasion, I think Star Trek peaks around seventeen.  I expect cosmic spectacles like black holes and supernovae to be loud in movies (Comic Book Guy does point out there is no sound in the vacuum of space; a bit of science the film gets right), but everything else is loud in Star Trek: wind noise roars and electronic equipment squeals and shrieks.  Dr. McCoy’s ubiquitous hypo sounds like a shot from an air rifle.  All the while, the bombastic score rattled our ribcages.  Actually, I liked the music; it reminded me of the over the top musical cues used in the original series versus the new age pablum of the other shows.

The visuals are well done and I liked the retro-future look of everything.  The new transporter effect looked right.  The warp drive didn’t seem as “cartoonish” as it has in previous films.  The design of the new USS Enterprise takes the best of the original design of what Comic Book Guy thinks of as the real USS Enterprise and gives it more detail without going overboard.  The interior would be right at home at any Ikea; that’s futuristic enough for Regular Guy.  But the whole movie is very jumpy and chaotic.  It’s probably unfair to single Star Trek out when most movies look like they were edited by hyperactive mice on crystal meth.  Still, it was very difficult to figure out what was going on at times.  There was a fist fight near the end of the film.  I won’t say who was fighting whom because – frankly – it was hard to tell.  The scenes kept cutting away before the punches connected.  I realize “motion picture” contains the word “motion”, but – please – could we have just a few scenes that aren’t bobbing and weaving around and around?

There are parts of the movie that were needless.  A young James Kirk steals a 1966 Corvette and drives it into a quarry.  Comic Book Guy recalled A Piece of the Action, an episode where an older Captain Kirk attempted to drive a car with a lot less finesse.  Regular Guy just watched with eyebrow raised.  Driving a Corvette that far in the future would be like breaking into the Smithsonian and taking George Washington’s carriage out for a spin.  Where does one get leaded gas in 23^rd century Iowa (for that matter, where does one get leaded gas in 21^st century Iowa)?  While it’s possible the car is a replica or something (Comic Book Guy argues replicator technology won’t be available until Captain Picard’s time), this love of “ancient history” runs pretty deep.  Two hundred years from now, the clubs will still be playing those thumping techno-metal mixes.  The alien monster was unnecessary; all it did was bump up the MPAA rating from PG to PG-13.  It chases Cadet Kirk around Delta Vega (which is apparently a moon of Vulcan now).  As Comic Book Guy expounds, Vulcan has no moon and Delta Vega used to be located at the edge of the galaxy.

The area of the movie I thought I would have the most issues with – the characters – turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  Zachary Quinto has an “old school” take on Mr. Spock, channeling some of the early episodes of the show rather than the later films.  Comic Book Guy had to agree that made sense.  The Kirk family saga was a bit over the top, but I did like Chris Pine’s take on Cadet James Tiberius.  And Uhura’s subplot was not traditional canon, but interesting (one could even say fascinating).  Comic Book Guy agreed, remembering how Spock could “not think of anyone more capable than Ms. Uhura”).  The movie also did a good job explaining how everyone could have been different ages on the original show, yet all graduate from the academy at roughly the same time.  Chekov is only seventeen in the movie.  Kirk is a little older than Sulu and Uhura because he’s been a troublemaker and enlists late.  Dr. McCoy is older than everyone else.  When asked why he joined up, he replies caustically, “She took everything on the planet in the divorce.  Space is all I’ve got left.”

Enough familiar lines and mannerisms are there to start a new drinking game.  But take the pre-defined characterizations, the sound and the fury of the special effects, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot left.  I liked the plot concept.  Comic Book Guy liked it in the Star Trek novel Killing Time better.  Nero, the movie’s bad guy (no obvious parallel there) runs around the galaxy, wiping out billions of people and permanently changes the universal timeline.  He has his reasons, of course, but it ends up sounding like a rehash of another Star Trek movie villain whom I won’t name.  We see Romulans torture Captain Pike using a method which looked awfully familiar.  Comic Book Guy screams out in frustration, how does anyone know it’s a Romulan ship anyway?  The episode Balance of Terror explains no one has ever seen a Romulan.  They’ve all been hiding behind the Neutral Zone since Jonathan Archer’s time.

The original show had some episodes that were – shall we say – a bit light on plot and character development.  However, you could usually count on Gene Roddenberry to spoon feed a message to those viewers watching “way back in the Twentieth Century” on their new color televisions.  If there was any message in the new Star Trek, it must have gone over my head.  But in the end, as the Third Rock from the Sun style credits rolled, both Regular Guy and Comic Book Guy agreed it was worth the price of admission.  Most importantly, Daniel had fun.  He ate approximately sixty four pounds of popcorn, drank about three and a half gallons of orange and wolfed down a bag of Sweet Tarts that cost more than a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.  We walked out to the truck together and Daniel quoted me his favorite line; something Mr. Scott says when confronted with one of the most thought provoking moments of the film.

“So, in the future are there still sandwiches?”

I made a circuit around the house with Daniel sheepishly trailing me.  The screen door was locked.  The windows to the living room were closed.  Akane – our guard parrot – ruffled to life as I checked out the ones facing the backyard.  The sliding glass door was unlocked, but a thick piece of dowel rod was sitting in the door rail.  Considering how cheaply made our house seems, the windows turned out to be surprisingly secure.  Most of the windows have double panes and double locks.  The little kitchen window over the sink has only a single lock.  I thought I might have some luck there.  After explaining to Daniel that he was never allowed to do what I was about to try, I pried the spline away from the screen with my little finger.  I peeled enough away to get at the pull tabs that allow you to take the screen out of the window frame.  However, even the single lock turned out to be pretty rattle proof.

“We could just throw a rock and break a window,” Daniel suggested.  That was true, but we were handicapped by the fact we owned the home.  Unlike a burglar, I had to be concerned with entering without breaking as I would end up paying for it all.  However, time was running out.  I had to catch a plane.  Meka was still at school in DeKalb.  I could see my cell phone on the kitchen counter next to my keys, taunting me.  Finally, I told Daniel to wait in the backyard.  I walked into the garage and closed the door behind me.  The inside door to our pantry is up two stairs and that side of the garage is a mess.  I wasn’t going to be able to get much of a running start to hit the door with my shoulder.  I did some deep knee bends instead and tried to stretch out like I was running a race.  I took a deep breath, hoped the door didn’t have a deadbolt style lock and gave it a kick like they do on the cop shows on TV.  It moved slightly.  Two more kicks and there was a loud crack as the wood gave way.

I have never had the motive or the opportunity to kick a door down before.  I have to admit it was pretty cool.  It worked (almost) like it does in the movies.  That sense of satisfaction I felt with myself is probably the only reason Daniel isn’t grounded for life right now.

“Can we get Fruit Loops?” he asked.

“We are getting Fruit Loops,” I replied.  Daniel shook his head.

“No, I mean real Fruit Loops.”  Now it was my turn to sigh.  We’ve gone through this before.  We buy a lot of generic items at the store: bags of frozen vegetables, gallons of milk, my allergy medicine.  If the only difference is the container, I don’t see why we should pay more.  The “Fruit Spins” taste just like the real ones and we save $1.30 per box.

“We never buy real stuff,” Daniel complained.  I looked down in the cart.  We had several cans of Campbell’s soup because it tastes better than the generic versions.  We tried Sam’s Cola once (once) and now we buy Diet Pepsi again.  And while Great Value potato chips cost a lot less than Lay’s, they are hardly a “great value” when no one eats them.  I admit if Wal Mart sold its own diet bread, I’d consider buying it.  Since they don’t, I buy the name brand.  It costs twice as much, but I save half the Weight Watchers points.  Daniel wasn’t convinced by any of this, of course.  I knew he wasn’t interested in the price, or taste, or calories.

“Daniel, if I told you we’d buy the real Fruit Loops, but you wouldn’t get the toy, would you still want them?”  I didn’t get a verbal answer, but Daniel looked down at his feet and I heard another small sigh.  In the end, we found a “compromise” cereal.  Wal Mart had Frosted Flakes on sale.  These were the real Frosted Flakes with Tony the Tiger on the box.  On sale, they were close to the price of the generic box.  Even better, they were the reduced sugar version; I could eat a full cup serving rather than ¾ cup for the same number of points.  The additional benefit of being able to get the eight box tops required to get the official Star Trek USB drive that much quicker did not weigh into the decision at all.

I thought I might save a bit of time by doing the self-service check-in and just take my overnight bag as carry-on.  Whatever moments I saved were lost waiting in the line for security.  The people were relatively efficient (as these things go), but there was only a single line.  Then my carry-on bag had to be examined twice.  On the bright side, I got to stand an extra five minutes on the anti-bacterial floor mat in my socks.  I probably won’t get athlete’s foot anytime soon.

I really like the moving sidewalk setup in the Louisville airport.  The signs tell people who are standing still to stay on the right side.  This allows people who are walking to pass them on the left side.  However, I got behind a guy who was – technically – walking, but moving so slowly that people walking (walking, mind you) on the non-moving floors on either side were passing us by.

My flight was out of gate fourteen.  The signs only showed fifteen gates.  “At least I’m not at the absolute last gate,” I thought to myself.  However, there were gates on both sides of the walkways, so – actually – I was at the last gate.  I’m not exactly sure what the logic was in putting my flight there when the first eight gates were dark and deserted.

On the plus side, I didn’t have to wait very long to board the plane.  I think I had time to catch my breath and then I was onboard.  I sat back and let myself relax.  I had plenty of time; the flight got delayed and we sat for a bit on the runway.

I was leery of just paying Daniel some set amount to do the whole thing.  We have a good sized yard and I’m not sure if he’s up to mowing it all yet.  At the same time, I didn’t want him to get used to only mowing a small part of it because a fraction of the total payment was “good enough” for his needs.  Like a lot of employers, I felt I had to come up with a way to motivate Daniel to go from what I expected to what I wanted.  I sat down at the kitchen table and started figuring out a “compensation package”.  After half an hour or so, I came up with a plan I felt would get Daniel to do what I wanted, but if he couldn’t do it all (or didn’t want to do it all), at least he’d get something for helping.

First, he would be paid by the row.  This would be his base wage.  I really wanted him to help me with the whole lawn.  I proposed splitting the yard into four areas: the front, the back and the two sides.  He’d get an additional payment for each area he mowed with plus a “bonus” payment if he helped with all four.  Finally, I had an additional bonus if he managed to mow the entire yard by himself.  I added up all the rows and section bonuses to come up with this last payment.

The idea is he would get paid a small amount to help me here and there.  If he stuck around to help me with the whole lawn, he’d earn enough money to buy something at the store.  Once he took on most of the lawn, he’d make enough to buy a few Hot Wheels cars every week, but – ultimately – he’d be motivated to go that extra mile and do the whole yard.  However, as I started writing all the rules down it occurred to me Daniel would probably be more confused than motivated.  I have that problem myself with our bonus plan at work.  And as I tried to figure out how I was going to track and enforce everything, I came to the conclusion it would be far easier on me to keep mowing the lawn myself and paying Daniel “under the table” for his assistance with the occasional trip to McDonald’s for ice cream.

It turned out to be a pre-recorded message from Daniel’s school district.  In a way I had been expecting it all week.  Someone in Belvidere may have a case of H1N1 and – even though they hadn’t been in a school building for almost a week – the entire school district was closing down “until further notice”.  All school buildings were closed, all activities were canceled.

I should have been more worried.  I’ve been watching the news and seen the reports of H1N1 spreading around the world.  I understand the potential of a pandemic.  I’ve read accounts of the influenza outbreaks in 1918 that killed more people than World War I.  Heck, Stephen King’s The Stand is one of my favorite novels.  However, I found myself more annoyed than anything else.  Frankly, between the stress of college and jobs in a world plagued by terrorism, warfare, global warming, energy crisis and economic meltdown, I’m afraid I am just fresh out of fear for Swine Flu.

Cereal was the opening course.  My grandma kept the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the refrigerator.  They were crisp and cold and terrific with a spoon of sugar on top and bathed in whole milk.  Orange juice was served in small glasses, not much bigger than a shot.  I didn’t drink coffee, but my Grandma would open the can of Folgers (also kept in the refrigerator) and let me smell it before she filled the tin coffeepot on the stove.  About this time, the water in the kettle would announce it had come to a boil.  She’d pour it in and serve my grandpa a steaming cup on a saucer, complete with sugar and milk.

That kept us busy as Grandma slipped a tall pile of Roman Meal wheat toast onto the table with a saddle shaped lump of butter.  Grandpa didn’t slice the butter from the side, but rather scraped the top with a serrated steak knife.  Small curlicues of butter would melt evenly across the surface of the bread.  Next up was a plate of bacon, crisp.  There is a fine line between crisp bacon and burnt bacon.  When we’d go out with Grandma, she would fight with waitresses over this point.  Her bacon was crisp to the point of being dry, but never burnt.  It crumbled in your mouth.  Grandma would use the grease from the bacon to cook up the eggs, whipping them with a fork as she went.  The frying pan was close to glowing red by this time.  It seemed like only an instant would pass and there were plates of “scrambled eggs” set down in front of us.

Almost as good as eating, was watching Grandma work her way around her kitchen.  Everything was in its place.  Everything went like clockwork.  It was like watching a choreographed ballet, set to the news commentary from the table radio in the living room.  The pattern had not changed in more than forty years and she worked so fast, she was almost a blur at times.  She managed to sit down and eat with us before the Corn Flakes got soggy.  And Grandma was already up and washing dishes by the time Grandpa and I cleaned our plates with the last bite of toast.

Daniel got up a few minutes early.  He was ahead of schedule through his shower, cereal and putting on his shoes (we have this timed down to the second).  I was finishing up my breakfast banana when he called me from the living room.

“Come see!”  I walked in and there were the fish, swimming placidly in full view.  We shared a moment, watching them as they slowly swam in circles and darted around the rocks Grandpa Dave brought back from Canada.

“I think I’ll name them Swimmy One and Swimmy Two,” he told me.

“You mean you haven’t named them in all this time?”  I asked.  “We’ve had them almost a year.”

“I never see them to say hello,” he explained as he put his jacket on.  “I forget if I named them or not.”

Daniel had a point.  I say hello to our hamster – Hamstersaurus Rex – when he pokes his nose out of his nest for an evening stroll around the wheel.  I talk to Akane and Pepper – our rental parrots – and threaten them with consumption by name at least once a day.  But the fish hide so much, I think Meka just feeds them on faith; assuming they’re still in there… somewhere.  Almost every guest we’ve had to the house has asked if we plan to get fish for the tank.

Later, at lunchtime, I did check on the tank again.  No fish in sight.  I hope they make a repeat appearance; I like the names Swimmy One and Swimmy Two and would hate for them to slip into anonymity again.

Can you find the fish in this picture? Me neither.

My mom had used my TRS-80 in the past, so she knew what a BBS was and how to send e-mail.  She asked me what the Internet was all about and why it was so different.  I explained how all these computers around the country and around the world were connected together and if I hooked into one, I could pretty much look at stuff anywhere.

“What kind of stuff can you see?” she asked.  At the time, Yahoo was The Search Engine on the web.  They had a button on the front page that sent you to a random site somewhere.  I clicked the button and after a moment found my computer connecting to a mail order bride site in the Philippines.  While it wasn’t exactly the impression I wanted to make, it was powerful demonstration of the Internet’s connectivity.  I’ve never forgotten it… mostly because my mom has never let me live it down.

However, as I write this I am on the hunt.  There is a good sized spider somewhere in my office.  The fly swatter lays on my desk next to the keyboard, ready to go into action at a moment’s notice.  I’m not that afraid of spiders.  I think cockroaches are much higher on the “oogy” scale.  As a family, we’ve had outings; observing spiders in the wild.  I’ve taken pictures of their webs dazzling in the sunlight, dew drops dangling from each thread.  Lovely.

However, spiders need to realize their place in the interdependent web; it’s outside.  Summer will be here soon.  I’m sure we’ll have some pretty big spiders living among the slats of the fence out back.  Last year we had a couple of garden spiders that were as colorful as Pepper, our rental parrot.  I left them alone out there to spin their webs, catch their bugs and crawl around wherever they pleased.  In the fall, if I found them in the house, they were dead.  Worse, if they surprised me, they were dead and in pieces.  There is a clear connection between how badly I’m startled and how extreme my prejudice is when it comes to spider killing.

I had a bad experience with a spider back in school.  I worked long hours at a radio station and once I was too tired to make it back to my dorm.  The large studio in the back was filled with old beat up furniture.  I lay down on an avocado green vinyl couch and dropped off.  I came to a few hours later with a sensation of someone lightly brushing my cheek.  I opened my eyes to find a daddy longlegs working its way across my face.  I realize it is bad form to judge an entire taxonomic order based on the actions of one daddy longlegs.  In fact, daddy longlegs aren’t even true spiders; maybe I’m going after the wrong species.