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What I Learned from HGTV
I have a confession to make, a confession that probably tells you more about my age and social status than I care to admit. I don’t get the chance to watch much television these days, but when I do watch, there’s a good chance that the show I’m watching is one of the many home improvement shows on HGTV or The Learning Channel.
I’m not sure why I end up watching so many of these shows. I tell myself, of course, that I am picking up ideas for future projects around my own house, but after years of passive viewing I have yet to transfer one project from the TV screen to the inside of my home. Maybe I watch because, as television shows go, the do-it-yourself programs on HGTV and TLC are relatively family friendly, and I can watch one with my daughters sitting nearby and not worry that the host will begin cursing or initiate a discussion of home design for psychopathic mass murderers (easy-clean walls and counters and oversized sinks, I’m betting).
Even though I don’t seem to be practicing what they’re preaching at me, my many hours of home improvement TV watching over the years has built up an impressive trove of remodeling wisdom in my brain. The tips and tactics given out by the hosts of these shows tend to revolve around the same dos and don’ts. As a public service for those of you who don’t want to devote the same amount of time to watching home improvement shows as I have, I offer these lessons I have learned.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM HGTV
The most exciting and satisfying part of remodeling a home is not dreaming about possible changes, or buying new furnishings and fixtures, or watching new things being built and installed, or surveying the completed remodel with the satisfaction of a job well done. The most exciting and satisfying part, by far, is being able to take a sledgehammer and viciously pound all of that old, tacky wood and plaster and tile and laminates and sheetrock to a dusty pulp as part of the initial demolition progress (the “demo,” in HGTV-speak). It never fails - when mild-mannered homeowners are handed a sledgehammer and told to go to town, their eyes begin to glow and their resulting cheek-to-cheek Joker grins make them look as if they were being given the keys to Fort Knox. Their utter delight in completely demolishing everything in their path is palpable.
Textured ceilings, known derisively on home improvement shows as “popcorn” or “cottage cheese” ceilings, are considered the spawn of the devil, and must be removed immediately by any homeowner with a mite of good taste. If Joan Crawford was still alive, her maniacal admonition to her terrified children would no longer be “No wire hangers!,” but instead, “No popcorn ceilings!” If you are unlucky enough to still have popcorn ceilings in your home (as I am), you might as well also have red shag carpeting, inflatable furniture and a disco ball hanging in the living room, since nothing apparently identifies you as a taste-deficient 1970s holdout loser as those little pebbles on your ceilings.
Wallpaper is so 70s and 80s. The textured and mirrored kind is the tackiest, but even the more benign stuff is now patterned poison. You must rip it off the walls wherever it exists or risk social ruin.
Once looked upon as the flooring of poor people who couldn’t afford wall-to-wall carpeting, hardwood floors are now tres chic. If you don’t already have hardwood floors or can’t afford to install them, you must at least install cheaper modern laminates that mimic hardwood flooring. Carpet, while not totally out of style, must be used very sparingly, in back rooms only if possible, and must never be in any color brighter than beige or tan. Carpet in any colors used by an NFL team on their jerseys or by the Wiggles are definitely out.
Countertops must either be made of rock, or be cleverly designed to resemble rock. Granite or marble is preferred, quartz or even concrete is okay, but formica and wood are definitely out. Your kitchen and bathroom counters should be as hard and cold as those slabs in the morgue you put dead bodies on, as a general rule.
If you are to have any chance to sell your current house in this tough housing market (and it’s always a tough housing market on HGTV), you must “stage” your house first to make it attractive to potential buyers. In a nutshell, staging a house involves removing enough of the stuff inside as possible to make it look as if no one actually lives there. Any hints of personality (dismissed as “clutter” by house stagers) must be removed and either thrown away or stored temporarily somewhere off-site. What items must go? Any personal photos or mementoes, books and magazines, souvenirs, collectibles, DVD or CD collections, toys and games, excess or out-of-season clothing, pet feeders, pet beds and chew toys, wall hangings and anything else that looks as if someone might actually pick it up and use it. This will leave furniture (which will be weeded out as well) and possibly a potted fern or two. The goal should be to make the public rooms of your house look like the lobby of a nice hotel that isn’t visited very much.
When it comes to fixtures, shiny polished brass and aluminum are out. The preferred finishes are pewter or nickel, with bronze or antique brass running a distant second.
Wall-to-wall paneling is great, if your goal is to emulate the lifestyle of Archie Bunker. Otherwise, it is the second generation to popcorn ceilings as spawn of the devil. You must either remove it (preferable), or, if that is impractical, you must paint over it to hide its wood-panel-ness. The only type of paneling ever allowed is that very expensive stuff found in the libraries of big castles in Europe. If you can’t afford that, then don’t even consider buying or keeping paneling.
It might force you to sell one of your children to slave traders, but if you haven’t already you must switch out all of your current kitchen appliances for stainless steel ones. Kitchens and bathrooms sell a house, we are told over and over again, and nothing will make a potential buyer begin drooling (or make your friends begin drooling in envy) than to spy a kitchen that looks somewhat like an industrial meat locker. If you can’t afford stainless steel, then your appliances must be either black (the preferred second choice) or white (just barely an acceptable wild card). Appliances must never, ever, ever be any other color, or you might as well move to Hooterville.
There’s one final thing these TV shows have taught me, and it concerns either selling your house or buying another one. If you live in many parts of the Midwest or the South, you can still buy a fairly nice home with a reasonable amount of room for a reasonable price, say, under $200,000. If you live in New England, a big city on the East Coast or anywhere on the West Coast, even a two-bedroom, one-bath shack with termites, a bad foundation and a backyard that looks like a trash heap will cost at least half a million dollars - or more, if the popcorn ceilings have already been removed.
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Happy Birthday, Homecoming!
I apologize in advance for not posting here in so long. But you’re about to see one of the main reasons I have not been able to find the time to scribble a few lines here.
I’ve been busy doing one of the things I enjoy most — researching and writing about history. My subject has been the history of Baylor Homecoming, the first celebration of which took place 100 years ago in 1909. Baylor is celebrating their Homecoming Centennial in a big way this year, so I decided to help out by writing about some of the most memorable and interesting events from past Homecomings. And boy, when I started looking back into the newspapers for information, I found some great stories.
I just posted the article — you can find it here. Hope you enjoy it.
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The Friday Five
So glad it’s finally October! Here’s this week’s Friday Five.
A TOOTHSOME SURPRISE
I help out each year with the Friends of the Waco-McLennan County Library book sale (Nov. 12-15 this year, by the way), and one of our features this year will be a table filled with “vampire books,” those novels from best-selling authors like Stephanie Meyer and Anne Rice and others. To give the sorters a better idea of what authors to look for to pull and place on this table, I did a quick search on Amazon and was absolutely amazed at how many people are writing vampire novels out there. Not counting authors who have written just a single vampire book, I discovered at least 20 authors who have entire series of vampire books in print. There’s a lot more examples than that, too — after awhile I just got tired of counting.
And not only are there series of vampire novels, there appear to be sub-genres as well — vampire romances, vampire comedies, vampire mysteries, vampire manga, even erotic vampire novels with graphic sex scenes. I don’t think we’ll be offering any of the last type for sale in November, but if you’re a vampire fan, come out and check what’s there.
PREEMPTIVE SELF-BANNING
Speaking of books, I have some things to say about the annual Banned Books Week, but my comments would be somewhat political, and I’m trying not to make this into yet another contentious, dreadfully serious political blog. I attempted to summarize my thoughts in just a few lines here, but when I looked and saw that I had started in on the eighth paragraph and still had more to go, I realized it wasn’t going to work as a “Friday Five” snippet. So, no banned books segment, at least not now. Maybe one day I’ll write an entire post on that. Or maybe I’ll just be content to write about…
THE STUFF THAT MAKES YOU TALK FUNNY
What ever happened to alum? If you’ve ever watched an old slapstick comedy short, like one by the Three Stooges, or even a few old Warner Brothers cartoons, eventually you will see the following gag. Either accidentally or on purpose, someone will take a box of something marked “ALUM” from the kitchen pantry and pour it into an unsuspecting person’s drink. When this person drinks the alum-spiked mixture, it quickly causes him or her to begin talking with an extremely puckered mouth, sounding as if they’d just suffered a stroke and were trying in vain to form coherent words.
It seems that alum must have been a staple of household kitchens back in the 1930s and 1940s, but I’ve always wondered why I never see it today. So, I finally looked it up on Wikipedia, and there it talks about how alum has lots of industrial uses, and can also be used to preserve foods. Maybe that’s why we don’t see it today — no one I know is now busy canning pickles and okra for the winter. I want to try ingesting this in a drink sometime, though, and see if it truly does make me talk funny. Another life goal on the list.
STRANGE CARGO
My office overlooks the twin bridges across the Brazos River, so I can look down and see lots of cars and trucks pass by each day. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — the strange and scary vehicles I see pass by, everything from 18-wheelers carrying uncovered garbage or used Porta-Potties to personal trucks so old and decrepit they make Jed Clampett’s vehicle look like a step up.
TODAY’S QUOTE
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” — E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
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The Friday Five
Here’s this week’s Friday Five.
A real doorbell saver
It seems that there are more and more people these days going door-to-door with commercial or religious requests. This system seems inefficient for the providers, and it causes homeowners to have to answer the door more often. Couldn’t we streamline this a bit? There should be a company out there which provides trained door-to-door representatives. Various businesses and religions could then employ this company to have their pitch included in the representative’s visit. It would be sort of a one-stop-shopping idea that would work something like this:
SALESMAN: Hello, ma’am, I’m a representative of Acme Door-to-Door Services. Would you be interested in having someone cut and trim your lawn?
WOMAN: No.
SALESMAN: Then could I interest you in some tasty Girl Scout cookies?
WOMAN: No.
SALESMAN: Can I ask if you know if you’re going to heaven? I have a free brochure that will help you find out.
WOMAN: No, thank you.
SALESMAN: Would you consider voting for Joe Jones in the next city council election?
WOMAN: I’ll think about it.
SALESMAN: You know, I’ll bet you’d like some nice Christmas wrapping paper. It benefits the junior high chess club.
WOMAN: I’ve got all the wrapping paper I need.
SALESMAN: What about an inexpensive magazine subscription? We have a year of Earwax Collectors Monthly for $7.95, or a two-year subscription to Paula Deen’s Gristle Kitchen for just $9.95.
WOMAN: No more magazines.
SALESMAN: But what about some tasty chocolate chip cookie dough? It’s for the elementary school playground expansion fund.
WOMAN: Okay, I’ll go for that.
SALESMAN: Great! By the way, here’s your new phone book.
WOMAN: Thanks.
The representative could also ask Census questions, hand out product samples and offer to paint house numbers on the front curb. These guys would be trained and insured. People could get all of this out of the way in one simple visit. I think this could work.
Ocho is enough
I was out at a local Mexican food restaurant last week, and as I looked at order after order being delivered to the table, I had an epiphany. About 95 percent of all Mexican food, it seems to me, is a combination of eight basic components — cheese, flour, corn, chicken, beef, beans, rice and peppers. Even though people were ordering different dishes, we were all getting slightly different variations of the same meal. Burritos? Beef or chicken and cheese wrapped in a flour tortilla (served with beans and rice). Flautas? Beef or chicken and cheese wrapped in a flour tortilla and fried (served with beans and rice). Quesadillas? Beef or chicken put between two flour tortillas with cheese and cut into triangular sections (served with beans and rice). Enchiladas? Beef or chicken wrapped in corn tortillas and covered in cheese (served with — well, you know). And so it goes.
Grocery shopping down in Mexico must be so easy. You walk in the store , and there are only a few aisles - one for meat, one for beans, one for rice, one for tortillas, one for cheese and one for peppers and spices. That’s it, except for a small “specialty section” with exceptions to the eight-ingredient hall of fame, such as pork, shrimp or eggs.
They have strict zoning there, too
I know the trend in churches nowadays is to chuck the old denominational name, even when affiliated with a denomination, so as to put a more user-friendly face on things. But why do so many nondenominational churches these days choose names that sound like the names given to upscale subdivisions? Some examples of real-life churches I can think of include Saddleback, Willow Creek, Lakewood, Stonegate, Crossroads, Ridgeview, Countryside, Cross Points, Harmony Vineyard, Heartland, Cross Timbers, Stonebriar, Shadow Mountain and Rolling Hills. It gets me to thinking, will heaven have a golf course and country club that members can use for a modest maintenance fee?
Duh-oh
One sure sign that my brain is crammed with too many distractions — I come to work one morning this week and stand outside my office, absentmindedly clicking the button on the automobile controls on my key ring, as if that would unlock the door.
Today’s quote:
“The New Yorker’s [fact] checkers are justly renowned for their tenacious skepticism, but even they err sometimes. One reader was annoyed to find himself described as dead, and requested a correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, by the time the correction appeared, he really had died, thus compounding the error.” — from “Facts, Errors and the Kindle” in Intelligent Life magazine, autumn 2009
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Twice the Reality, Twice the Fun
When I first heard the promos for the new Oxygen Network reality show “Dance Your A** Off,” I suddenly realized the direction in which reality TV is now headed. There are apparently so many reality shows on the tube now that there are no totally new and original concepts left to try, so programmers must resort to combining the premises of two old reality shows to create a new hybrid. In the case of the Oxygen show, two old reliables, the “Biggest Loser” weight loss show and the “Dancing with the Stars” dance contest show (without the stars), have been combined to produce a new show that’s apparently doing well in the ratings.
If this is indeed the new trend in television — combining two or more reality show concepts to create a new show — then I have a few suggestions for hybrids that might just make it big.
American Idol Survivors
On this show, aspiring singing stars looking for their first big break are marooned on a deserted island somewhere for a number of weeks. They must not only survive the harsh environment, but also must put together a series of winning vocal performances under primitive conditions. For example, they must make their own performing costumes from plants and other natural substances found on the island (look for lots of grass skirts), resulting in comments from judges such as, “Your singing was atrocious, but I loved the carved coconut shell bra, my dear.” Contestants will also be given vocal challenges to master, such as singing a credible version of “Mack the Knife” while swimming through shark-infested waters.
Pimp My Kardashian
Those krazy Kardashian girls — Kim, Kourtney and Khloe — are back together again for their umpteenth reality show, this time stealing a move from the playbook of the show which takes old, junky cars and “pimps” them into showy new automotive excess. In this show, one or more of the Kardashians will get “pimped” each week by a team of plastic surgeons and beauticians, who will perform breast augmentations, nose jobs, tummy tucks, eyebrow implants, buttocks transplants and hundreds of other over-the-top surgeries on the eager reality stars. The Kardashian who looks least like her former self at the end of each episode wins.
What Not to Wear On “Cops”
The people arrested on the real-life police show “Cops” are usually dressed in fashions far from the trendy and upscale standards upheld by TLC’s wildly popular “What Not to Wear” show. In this new series, Stacy and Clinton visit habitual offenders and give them makeovers designed to either lessen their chances of getting arrested in the future, or making sure that if they are once again taken into custody they will look fabulous as they are handcuffed and shoved into the back seats of police cruisers. Show participants will learn such tips as “Wear dark colors during nighttime crimes,” “Wear flat heels instead of high heels if a chase on foot is a possibility,” “For your post-arrest safety, wear clothing that hides anti-police tattoos,” and “If you’re afraid of being arrested on drug charges, hide track marks with long shirts and pants.”
What Not to Hoard
Yet another spinoff of the “What Not to Wear” empire, this show provides a different angle on the brand-new A&E reality show “Hoarders,” which profiles people whose houses are filled to the rafters with thousands of tons of stuff because of their inability to overcome hoarding addictions. Stacy and Clinton will provide no help with overcoming hoarding (that’s for the medical experts on the original show), but will instead show people that if they must hoard, there are ways to do it with more class. For example, instead of piles of old “TV Guide” and “Readers Digest” magazines that reach the ceiling, participants are urged to invest instead in decades worth of more erudite and upscale publications such as “Town and Country” and “Paris Match.” Instead of cabinets filled with used can openers and coffee makers, Stacy and Clinton suggest filling those same cabinets with higher status items such as expensive but broken espresso makers and food processors. You get the idea.
Bachelor Top Chef and Bachelorette Dog Whisperer
Either of these hybrid reality shows might work. In the first, a group of lovely single women compete for the affections of a rich bachelor by seeing who can cook his favorite foods. To make it more interesting, they will have to cook the foods at the same time in the same space with an inadequate number of kitchen tools, prompting some exciting cat fights over spatulas and measuring cups. In the second TV show scenario, handsome single males must try to impress their potential rich bachelorette fiancee by attempting to tame a whole host of vicious dogs, including Pit Bulls, Rottweilers and psychotic Chihuahuas, without losing life or limbs.
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The Friday Five
Here’s the Friday Five for Sept. 18, 2009.
Speak words of literary analysis to me, my dear
I was browsing through the bookstore the other day (a favorite pastime) and I spotted a book titled How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Now, I know that today just about any sort of pile of flop can get published, and often does, but why would anyone of right mind want to publish this book — or buy it? Literature professors are those people who love nothing better than to take a cracking good book, a real ripping read like Huckleberry Finn, and proceed to systematically remove every bit of fun and excitement and good feeling you might get from reading it by analyzing it to death, focusing not on the great story or the funny situations, but on things such as narrative structure, point of view, literary devices and other things that only other scholastic OCD sufferers like themselves give even a hoot about. If this book I saw ends up being a best-seller, I’ll propose a sequel to the publisher: How To Make Love Like a Gynecologist.
Cherish is the word
How in the world did the 1966 song “Cherish” by The Association ever get to be the big hit it was on Top 40 radio? Granted, the melody is pretty enough, and the words are no more or less banal than many other hit songs over the years (“Cherish is the word I use to describe…All the feelings that I have hiding here for you inside…”). But how did such a quiet, conventional, square piece of middle Americana ever make it to No. 1 on the charts around the same time that the ever-trippier Beatles were releasing the albums Rubber Soul and Revolver, the Beach Boys were blowing minds with “Good Vibrations” and the Rolling Stones were menacing listeners with “Paint It Black” and “Under My Thumb”? And while I have nothing against The Association personally, wouldn’t you agree that on this record they sound as if they are musical performers on par with the Men’s Junior Varsity Glee Club at Sorghum State Teachers College? It sounds like a taped performance from their big spring concert, where they all had to wear light blue cardigan sweaters with a big letter “S” on them as they sang while standing on risers.
On-air personality
Every grade school had at least one guy who thought he was the funniest guy on campus, and never stopped trying to prove it. You probably remember him well. He was the nonstop source for unsolicited bad puns, crude and stupid jokes and completely lame imitations of famous people. About one time in 10 he would actually come up with something that would make you laugh a little, but the rest of the time he was either a nuisance or insufferable, depending on your mood. It’s my theory that most of these guys graduated and took jobs as radio deejays, and many of them are doing it still today.
Why so high?
Why are the standard prices for some seemingly simple things — such as bananas — so low, while the standard prices for other seemingly simple things — such as watch batteries and printer ink — so incredibly high?
Today’s quote
”The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.” — Ben Okri
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The Friday Five
I’ve decided to start a post every Friday I’ll call the Friday Five, where I can put small ideas and assorted flotsam and jetsam that don’t merit a full post. I love collecting quotes, so I’ll also throw one of those in each week as well. Here’s my first compilation.
Pecans and such
The other day (don’t ask me how) I found myself wasting a few minutes listening for the first time to a weekly public radio podcast for foodies. I wanted to hear what these knowledgeable cooking types had to say, and maybe pick up a few good recipes. I was excited that on the podcast I happened to sample, they began talking about a great hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Kyle, Texas (between Austin and San Antonio) that had lots of different kinds of pie on the menu. I was disappointed, but not at all surprised, to hear them go on and on about the wonderful PEE-khan pie they ate there, and about how a place that serves a good PEE-khan pie is a real find. They even played a bit of a song that talked about having “a piece of PEE-khan pie.”
I then heard one of these knowledgeable Yankee hosts insist that this restaurant just had to be located close to the famous King Ranch, since it had King Ranch Casserole on its menu. Isn’t that obvious? Of course, the truth (to anyone with $5 for a map) is that the King Ranch is hundreds of miles away from Kyle, directly south of Corpus Christi and all. But apparently it’s a rule up north that you can only serve foods named after places near those places. By this logic, I guess that a restaurant that serves both French fries and London broil must be located somewhere at the bottom of the English Channel.
One other thing I learned from the podcast — while I find cooking shows on television entertaining because I can see the food being prepared and cooked, just listening to people talk about food with no visual component is about as exciting as hearing paintings described via telegraph.
Pasta power
There’s something called pasta, and there’s something else entirely different called antipasto. They are both foods, but are they at odds with each other? If I eat them one after the other, will my stomach explode? Is the force released by mixing these two together the secret to our energy problems? Sort of the culinary successor to cold fusion?
Best-seller
I browse the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart from time to time, and although I’m not sure, it seems like the movie I keep coming across the most is something titled “Security Device Enclosed.” Has anyone seen this? It sounds like one of those suspenseful action pics that star Chuck Norris or Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Back on the horse
After a summer spent in enforced physical inaction, trying to transform my body to resemble a jellyfish, I have recently made a tentative start at running and lifting weights again. My immediate goal is not to instantly lose weight and add muscle, but merely to stop my body’s decline. It’s like a man who is skidding down a steep hill on his backside, heading for a ledge that will launch him into a long fall into a canyon if he continues moving in that direction. His immediate goal is not to start going back up the hill, but to stop his descent any way he can — by digging in his heels, grabbing a stationary object or some other trick. Once he’s done that, he can then start thinking about the best way to slowly begin climbing the hill.
Today’s quote:
“In a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” —Abraham Lincoln, from the Gettysburg Address
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Strange But True Waco: The Brave Dare of the Baylor Bares
Now that another season of Baylor football is about to begin, and hopes are running very high regarding the chances of the Bears to do well, it’s as good a time as any to tell a little story of collegiate high spirits and the willingness of the young to suffer for a good cause.
The year was 1929, the football season that began during the last few weeks of innocence before the stock market fell and the Great Depression was set in motion. In September 1929, despair was not yet on the scene. Hopes were high all around, especially in Waco among Baylor Bears fans. A charter member of the 15-year-old Southwest Conference, Baylor had already won two SWC football championships — in 1922 and 1924 — and just about everyone, it seems, from fans to coaches to sports columnists, was picking red hot Baylor to win the conference crown in 1929.
Maybe it was the lure of an apparent sure thing. Maybe it was a quest for campus bragging rights. Or maybe it was something stranger than usual in the Waco water. For whatever the reason, five male Baylor students, self-described as “several honorable and trusting gentlemen and two slimes” (campus slang for freshmen), decided to show their belief in Baylor’s gridiron superiority with a very public challenge.
On Sept. 27, 1929, the five Baylor students — Robert M. Bruton, Worth Wood, Merle Jamison, Milton C. Lewis and Trenton Vestal — took a document they had carefully composed down to a notary public in Waco and signed it in his presence. Here’s the meat of what they promised to the world:
“Whereas, we the undersigned, believing to the greatest extent in the football team of our beloved Alma Mater, known as the Baylor Bears of Baylor University; And Whereas, wishing to show how deeply we are confident that the Bears will win the Conference Championship for the year A.D. 1929; And, Whereas, we are moved to a feeling of loyalty and patriotism towards our Alma Mater, we do, hereby enter into the following agreement, to-wit That if the Bears shall fail to win the Conference Championship we do all and each of us bind ourselves and do agree to accept all penalties if default is made in same. Furthermore, we do all and each of us agree to have the hair of our respective heads shorn at 10 o’clock a.m. on, or about, the first Monday after it shall be definitely decided that the said Bears shall not be the Champions for the said year.”
One must remember that, while hair styles were definitely shorter as a rule back in 1929 than they have proved to be over the past 40 years or so, it was still somewhat unusual to see anyone outside of prison or the military walking around with a skinhead. In the Jazz Age, it was not the quickest ticket to Big Man on Campus status.
The document the young Baylor men signed ended by taking into the account the possibility that one of the five might be tempted to balk when it came time to submitting to the razor.
”It is Further Agreed, that if one of the undersigned parties shall fail those who have so faithfully entered into this agreement with him, and who have entered it confident that no one of the undersigned is an ass, for whosoever shall violate or default in any of the terms of this agreement shall be the same and shall be known as such by remaining undersigners.”
That’s about as tart as a public document signed by five good Baylor boys in 1929 could get.
It appeared that there was an incredibly good chance the boys would remain unshaven. In the season opener against woebegone Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College, Baylor pummeled the Lumberjacks 88-0, still one of the largest winning margins in Baylor history.
Baylor racked up impressive shutouts in its next three non-conference matchups as well, beating North Texas State (32-0), Trinity (43-0) and St. Edwards (19-0). The boys’ follicles were still resting comfortably.
The Baylor football bandwagon continued to roll merrily on as the Bears easily put away Arkansas, but during a hard-fought contest on the road the next week, Baylor lost to Centenary 27-12. But fans were not worried at this point by a non-conference loss. Baylor went on to shut out Texas Tech 34-0, and managed a scoreless tie against powerful Texas the following week. As Baylor headed into its matchup with Southern Methodist University the next week in Dallas, the Bears were still unbeaten in conference play.
But the ponies of SMU dealt Baylor a fatal blow that day in Dallas. They beat Baylor 25-6, leaving the two remaining unbeaten teams in the conference, SMU and Texas Christian University, to fight it out later for the conference crown. While TCU would go on to win the conference championship, after the Baylor-SMU game it was already crystal clear that 1929 was no longer Baylor’s year for football glory.
Soon after the loss, it was time for the group soon to be known as “Baylor’s Five Baldpates” to face the razors. They were spared the indignity of paying for their own scalping, as local barber Jimmie Gladden volunteered to do the job for free. The boys dutifully walked into Gladden’s shop and emerged as students who, as the newspaper said, “shine out more than any of the other 1,400 students on the Baylor campus.”
How did they respond to their new look? Most of the boys were like Milton Lewis, who claimed, “I’d cut my hair any time to win the conference,” and Robert Bruton, who said, “A little bit of hair is worth a conference championship.”
The only one of the students who didn’t seem able to take his close shave in stride was Merle Jamison. “If I ever start to do a wild thing again I hope that someone takes mercy on me and ties a rock around my neck and throws me in the river,” he groused.
Although most of them kept a positive attitude, it wasn’t all easy for the boys. They had to politely endure the earnest advice of numerous well-wishers who were sure they had the best angle on just the right scalp tonic to restore hair in a jiffy. And despite their bravado, the young men were evidently still a little embarrassed to walk around campus with noggins au naturel. One of them took to wearing a hat everywhere with “a very sad expression,” while others “resorted to neat little knitted caps to hide the calamity.”
It’s a good thing that these five high-spirited and loyal Baylor fans didn’t visit the notary the next season and make a new pledge to shave their heads every fall until the Bears won the Southwest Conference championship. They would have spent a good portion of the next four and a half decades bald, as Baylor did not win another conference championship until Grant Teaff’s legendary team performed the Miracle on the Brazos in 1974. And that’s a long time to walk around with a doily on your head.
Here’s wishing all the best to this year’s incredible Baylor Bears. Win one for the snipper, guys!
[Sources: Waco Times-Herald Sept. 29, 1929, and Nov. 19, 1929]
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Things I Don’t Understand: More Nursery Rhymes
In one of my earlier posts, I discussed my inability to understand “Rock-a-Bye Baby” as anything other than a nursery rhyme written for squirrels. Here are a few more popular nursery ballads I’m not quite sure I get.
It’s Raining, It’s Pouring
This vicious little tune demonstrates how a sociopath would respond when asked to write a children’s nursery rhyme.
As is the case with many of these rhymes, the bare story line itself is simple. As a storm rages outside, an elderly man falls, hits his head, and is injured to the extent that he can’t get out of bed the next morning. The implication is that he was knocked unconscious by the fall, suffering a concussion that possibly resulted in a coma. Remember, it says not that the man was a lazy doofus who didn’t choose to get up the next day, but that he couldn’t get up. We are left to speculate — will he ever get up again? Is he paralyzed? Or is this the swan song of a corpse?
Now, this simply might be a musical variation of the theme of elderly peril that gave us those daffy commercials with the old lady who complained “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” But of course, that old woman was at least conscious and able to call out for help. In this adaptation, Paw-Paw is out cold.
How strange it is that this scenario — an accident to a senior citizen causing undetermined but possibly fatal injuries — ever ended up being distributed to little children in preschool via a nursery rhyme. If there had been, say, a man diving into a shallow pool, hitting his head on a rock and sinking to the bottom, unconscious and slowly drowning, his air slowly seeping away, his lips turning blue, would the average onlooker with a musical bent follow their call to 9-1-1 by rushing to a piano and hunting for a cheery accompaniment? Would they then send the hastily scribbled sheet music for “He’s Diving, He’s Drowning” to Sesame Street for consideration?
A related offshoot of this is the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme, which tells the familiar story of Jack falling down and “breaking his crown,” with Jill repeating the same moves seconds later. The same themes are played out in the opening scene of “Chicken Little” and in every Roadrunner cartoon ever made.
I must ask — what is this morbid, gleeful fascination with serious head injuries?
Yankee Doodle
Picture, if you will, a five-year-old child who knows little or nothing about the American Revolution. Conjuring up this mental image should not prove difficult, given the colonial conflict’s failure to drive the plots of many Scooby Doo or SpongeBob cartoons. In fact, our imaginary child may not even know what the word “revolution” means, and his parents may be determined to keep this information from him as long as possible lest it give birth to plans for armed insurrection in the home.
Go further, and imagine that you are the parent of this child, and that he has just heard for the first time an unbowdlerized version of the American Revolution’s unofficial theme song, “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Your child approaches you with a confused countenance and asks you to explain what in the world this apparent bastardization of the Barney theme song is all about.
“Daddy, what is a yankee doodle?” (Sounds to me like some sort of forbidden Chinese wrestling hold). “Why did the man call a feather macaroni? And what does it mean to be handy with the girls? Daddy? Daddy?”
If you’re like me, these are difficult — if not impossible — questions to answer. I just don’t understand.
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The Unexpected Pleasures of Defensive Driving
I recently spent the bulk of a Saturday doing something I do grudgingly every four or five years, it seems. I’m not talking about cleaning out my sock drawer or flossing my teeth, although I could be. I’m talking about that great show of automotive penance known as attending a Defensive Driving class.
How did I end up doing this? Well, this time I attended to help dampen the effect of a traffic ticket one of our fine local suburban police departments gave me for driving 56 in a 45 zone on a nearly deserted road. Apparently I didn’t qualify for the kindness of a mere warning, either because I was considered a threat to public safety, or the city needed my cash to pay the donut bill or order replacement lights for this year’s community Christmas tree.
In any event, there I was at nine in the morning, taking part in a ritual that I have repeated many times since I first tripped a radar gun back in college. Of course, I realize that some of you out there are hardly ever tempted to speed, or allow yourself to become so distracted driving that you “inadvertently allow your rate of forward vehicular motion to rise beyond posted limits.” So for those of you who might find yourselves attending a Defensive Driving class for the first time, I want to offer some observations that hopefully will make the experience less frightening, confusing or embarrassing.
You see, I’m glad to inform you that you’ll gain more than automotive knowledge and enhanced driving skills by attending a Defensive Driving class. Here are four little-known benefits that only veterans such as myself are aware of.
You’ll feel much better
If you’re at all worried by the heinous crime you have committed by exceeding the speed limit, or are feeling that no one but you was dumb enough or reckless enough to make the mistake you did (and get caught), take heart. The first order of business in every Defensive Driving class I have ever seen is to take this burden of woe from your fevered brain.
A Defensive Driving class is basically a group therapy session in disguise. The instructor asks the class to take turns and introduce themselves to each other, telling their name, where they work, and why they are taking the class. And while there sometimes are a few odd birds who claim to be attending only for the insurance discount or to “sharpen my driving skills,” the large majority of folks are there for the exact same reason as you are — they are leadfoots who got caught.
This opening introduction session ends up resembling the start of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (“Hello, my name is Randy Fiedler, and I’m a speeder”). And as the baton of confession is passed around, it becomes evident not only that you aren’t the only speeder around, but that some of your classmates end up making your piddling little violation look like schoolyard stuff, as they rattle off crimes of being caught going 20, 30, 40, even 50 miles per hour over the limit. You instantly feel like less of a criminal, and occasionally you get the added satisfaction of learning that even supposedly untouchable types such as law enforcement officers, city officials and judges occasionally get nabbed by the dreaded radar gun. It’s like a big group hug that says, “Welcome home.”
You’ll take a walk down memory lane
About half of your Defensive Driving class will consist of the instructor going over the elements of safe driving found in a little booklet you are given at the beginning of class. The other half of the time, however, will be spent watching at least half a dozen videos on how to drive safely in different situations.
After attending these classes for decades now, I can say that one ironclad rule is that the videos you are shown will end up being between 20 and 30 years old. When I first took Defensive Driving back in the early 1980s, the videos were actually tapes of old black-and-white films produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
(You can always tell the age of any driving skills video by looking at the cars used in them and figuring out just how long ago those cars were common on the highways. Huge cars with fins? 1950s or early 1960s. AMC Pacers? 1970s or early 1980s).
Right now, at least according to the last two classes I’ve taken, Defensive Driving videos from the 1980s are most popular with instructors. My class previous to this latest one featured a video that dipped liberally into the Huey Lewis and the News catalog for its music. This time, the videos screamed “1980s” when they showed people dressed in 80s clothes, including men wearing rainbow suspenders and those 1980s glasses that were so large they looked like welding visors.
The videos also feature cameos from a wide variety of 1980s and early 1990s celebrities, such as newswoman Paula Zahn, Annie Potts (“Designing Women”), Craig T. Nelson (“Coach”), Tim Allen (in his early “Home Improvement” days) and Deidre Hall (“Days of Our Lives”). This time, we even got to see an excerpt from a documentary on drunk driving hosted by none other than Mr. 1980s Sensitive Man himself, silver-haired Phil Donahue (with his signature humongous glasses).
So, if you enjoy feeling nostalgic at all, spending a few hours watching these videos will be like a warm bubble bath of fond memories in the 1980s disco hot tub.
You’ll get to see great horror movies without all the gore
The videos they produce to show what not to do when driving are scripted and shot the same basic way that big-screen horror movies are. We all know that it’s not actually the violence itself in a horror movie that scares us most, but it’s the anticipation — knowing that the violence will happen any second if the characters on screen aren’t careful — that keeps us on the edge of our seat.
You’ll get this edge-of-seat experience watching driver’s ed classics such as “Paths of Thunder II” (apparently a sequel to the no doubt popular “Paths of Thunder I”), a movie I saw recently that demonstrates why it’s not the best idea to drive over a railroad track when a train is coming. If I’d had any popcorn, I’d have been munching it frantically as I watched the young mom with her small children stop behind other cars on the road, not realizing she’s on top of railroad tracks. Then, as the gates came down and the bells started clanging and the poor woman flooded her car trying to get it going, I realized in horror that she was oblivious to the huge train approaching quickly.
As the children started shouting at her (“Mommy! Look, a train!”) and the woman finally realized her predicament, I was frantic when I understood that her only response was going to be to continue vainly trying to push the accelerator and re-start the car. If this had been my living room instead of a classroom, I’d probably have stood up and started screaming, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car, you fool!,” much as I’d be screaming “Don’t go in there!” to some oblivious onscreen teen about to open a door to find a psychotic slasher killer inside with a knife the size of Florida. By the time I saw the close-up of the woman’s screaming face, followed by a long shot of the train ripping into the car on the tracks, I was spent.
Now, there’s no teenage sex scenes, and no close-ups of mangled limbs or barbequed livers, but these little videos are horror movies nonetheless. And they’re included with your class at no extra charge.
Finally, you get to watch things get blowed up real good
If you’re a fan of cable TV reality shows like “The World’s Craziest, Deadliest Police Chases” or “The Big, Coolest, Deadliest Explosions Ever,” then you’ve got a treat waiting in Defensive Driving class. Remember the train-car accident I mentioned earlier? In the old 1950s-era movies, things were more restrained. They’d simply show the accident about to happen, then cut to the aftermath, with a mangled car on the side of the tracks and maybe a few obvious mannequins strewn around to suggest victims. But now, even though there’s still no blood and gore, you get to see real, 100-percent genuine Demolition Derby contact.
I don’t care how you supposedly feel about violence on film. I’m telling you, when you know there’s no one inside the vehicles and no one’s getting hurt, it is cool to see actual footage of a real train doing 70 m.p.h. plow smack dab into a car on the tracks and turn it into crumpled soda can in seconds. If you attend Defensive Driving, you’ll also get to see cars blow up, burn up, flip end-over-end and fly off the sides of cliffs like Roman candles. You’ll get to see menacing 18-wheelers cause havoc by making left turns and crumpling cars parked too far out in the intersection, or shearing the backsides off cars pulling out into traffic without notice. There’s no wimpy models or cheap animation involved. This is true, metal-ripping, fender-crunching savagery in a guilt-free form. Enjoy it.
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Strange But True Waco: The Sniff That Snuffed the Sniffles
Shortly before the dawn of the 20th century, Waco’s most fashionable theatrical showplace was the Garland Opera House, located on Fourth Street downtown. As one description put it, “The beaus and belles of Waco and surrounding towns and all the lovers of things dramatic and operatic made it their mecca.”
Imagine the thrill, then, when a packed Garland Opera House audience watched renowned American actress Lillian Lewis perform her magic. Lewis, a star of Broadway and beyond whom the venerable New York Herald described as “a young actress with a fine figure and handsome face,” was best known as someone who could use a dramatic role marked by passionate emotions to thrill an audience and leave them drained.
In her Waco performance, Miss Lewis played the role of a woman whose heart was broken when she and her lover realized they must be forever parted. As her former lover left the stage after this no doubt wrenching breakup scene, the grieving woman, tears streaming from her eyes, knelt down beside a sofa on the set in a flawless portrayal of no-holds-barred agony.
As Miss Lewis continued her aching lament, there were very few dry eyes among the audience. Virtually all of the women, and many of the men as well, were forced to dab their eyes with a handkerchief to soak up the tears. The stillness in the theater was almost too painful to bear, and it seemed as if nothing would break the stifling tension that hung in the air like a poisonous mist.
It was at this moment, this apex of tragedy, that relief arrived in a most unexpected form. Joe Garland’s large bird dog, who was apparently allowed to roam free inside his owner’s establishment, felt a call to investigate a woman in distress.
As the prostrate Miss Lewis continued her Broadway-honed weeping across the sofa, the bird dog emerged from backstage and slowly approached her, the small bells on his collar tinkling as he walked, and proceeded to give her violently heaving body a few good sniffs. Then, evidently finding nothing of great interest, the animal walked to the front of the stage, rolled his eyes and then exited, wagging his tail as he went.
The reaction of the crowd, which had watched this surreal scene in stunned silence, was immediate. They began roaring with laughter, filling the theater with howls, which I’m betting caused the now moist-faced actress to look up from the furniture in sheer bewilderment, followed either by laughter at the absurdity of it all, or the angry resolve to never ply her trade in the Garland Opera House ever again.
But as far as that night’s performance went, they might as well have lowered the curtain right then and there because, as the published account concluded, “The spell of Miss Lewis’ mimic tragedy was gone.”
[Source: Waco Tribune-Herald, May 14, 1922]
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Waco Water, Thy Name is Mud
Okay, so what the heck is wrong with Waco’s drinking water lately? Now, I’m no water snob, always complaining about how Waco water is below par because its taste is not like expensive bottled water lovingly scooped up by beautiful blonde pigtailed girls from springs in the Swiss Alps. But even I, who usually can’t taste anything at all in our local water (besides water), have had a tough time of it since Monday. That was the day I ordered two fountain Diet Dr Peppers, and both tasted as if someone had dropped a garden spade full of potting soil into each one.
I’ve mentioned this to others, and have discovered that I’m not the only one who has noticed the recent foul turn Waco’s water has taken in the taste department. One person even said he could detect the dirt taste in a strong cup of coffee, which is saying a lot.
I’ve looked through recent news articles to see if anyone has offered an explanation, and I’ve found nothing. I did find one article from the end of July about a guy who drank a mouthful of Brazos River water and said it tasted just dandy. That’s all fine and good, except that I believe we get our drinking water from Lake Waco, which is filled by the Bosque River, not the Brazos.
When the official explanation for the bad water taste finally comes out, I’m sure it take the form of one of the old reliables - blooming algae, pooping cows, or the summer’s heat and drought messing things around. But I’m thinking that if the current flavor is so strong that it sucker punches even my taste buds, the usual explanations cannot apply. This has to be something special - something not yet seen before in the annals of Waco waterdom. I have therefore put my thinking cap on and come up with four eminently plausible and scientifically sound possibilities that just might explain it all.
A commercial conspiracy. I’ve read news stories that have come out since the economy took a nosedive saying that consumers are saving money by cutting corners on frivolous luxuries, one of those being expensive bottled water and elaborate water filtration systems. I mean, as long as the local tap water is drinkable, you don’t need to spend money to drink elsewhere, do you?
Well, I figure that some of those expensive water companies must be pretty desperate by now. What can they do to regain customers? Sure - fix the local water supply so that it will taste so terrible, forcing people to spend lots of money on designer water. To carry out this nefarious scheme, maybe these companies have hired helicopters to swoop over Lake Waco every night and drop in thousands of tons of dirt. Maybe they’ve hired frogmen to swim up the pipes coming from the water filtration plant and leave dirt-flavored chemicals, just like out of some James Bond movie. Let’s get Waco PD on this pronto.
The Loch Waco Monster. Put aside your smug, sterile, modern preconceptions and consider: What if Loch Ness in Scotland is not the only inland body of water with a prehistoric lizard hiding out at the bottom? Maybe there’s a real Loch Waco Monster who grew from a mutated baby alligator some crazy Cajun threw into the lake, and after years of sleeping quietly at the bottom, coming up occasionally only to swallow a Waverunner or two, the drought and the heat have driven the monster crazy, and its frantic, incessant laps around the bottom of the lake have churned up more dirt than the filtration plant can remove. Stranger things have happened, so I want this checked out immediately! Call Congressman Chet Edwards’ office and have him use some of the bailout money to send in squads of Navy SEALS - stat!
Little Timmy. This might all just be a case of youthful determination gone bad.
Little Timmy Farkleberry, still stinging from his “honorable mention” showing in the 2008 middle school science fair with a project (suggested by Mr. Farkleberry) titled “Will Drinking Lots of Vodka Allay the Pain of Fire Ant Bites?,” has decided to take revenge with a project that will surely win first place this fall because of its urgent societal impact.
For the past year, little Timmy and older brother Rusty have been busy at the family home on the banks of the Upper Bosque River. They have been collecting what Timmy calls “stinky stuff” of every size, shape and form, everything from dead animals (5 squirrels, 4 hamsters, 5 dogs, 3 raccoons and a deer hit by a car) to self-made compost piles to contents of neighbor cats’ litter boxes to three pair of used Odor Eaters from Mr. Farkleberry’s work boots.
This stinking load of sludgy stench was no doubt dumped by the boys into the Bosque River upstream from Lake Waco, and they are now measuring before and after levels of bacteria, fecal matter and algae, as well as keeping statistics on bottled water usage in Waco before and after the dump. If people don’t believe me and they don’t get caught, little Timmy might have a shiny gold trophy to display on the Farkleberry mantel come Science Fair time.
The prank that stank. My final scenario idea came after I heard that some of my extended family living in Waco are filling vessels with water in Elm Mott and bringing them home to have decent water to drink. This set off a chain of logical reasoning in my fevered brain. Elm Mott, as you know, is the nominal headquarters claimed by Baylor University’s notorious group of campus pranksters, the Noze Brothers. Just thinking about them made me realize that they could be behind this all. I mean, the Noze always plans a big show every year at Homecoming, right? And since this year Baylor celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first Homecoming, the Noze would undoubtedly need to pull off one of their most ambitious pranks ever to meet the centennial challenge, right?
Here’s how I figure it could happen. Somehow, the Noze Brothers begin filling Waco water pipes with tons of dirt containing a significant portion of metals - not enough to do anyone drinking it harm, but enough to make Waco residents into walking Brillo pads. If the Noze can then “borrow” a strong magnet, such as an electromagnet, from someone (if the Baylor science labs don’t have one, they can no doubt get a loaner from A&M), then when they turn that sucker on, any Waco resident who’s been drinking this metallic water for months will be attracted to the magnet like fleas to a dog.
The final act scenario goes like this. It’s the Saturday morning of Homecoming, with the Baylor parade winding through downtown Waco. The Noze Brothers have hidden their borrowed electromagnet inside the bell tower atop Pat Neff Hall on the Baylor campus. When the parade passes down Fifth Street in the middle of campus, the Noze flip the switch. Immediately, thousands of people lining Fifth Street to watch the parade find themselves drawn by powerful forces toward Pat Neff Hall. Despite their attempts to grab onto lamp posts and trees to prevent their progress, they find themselves almost running in the direction of the gold dome. Within a minute there are thousands of helpless people pressing against the base of Pat Neff Hall.
At that moment, the Noze Brothers emerge from the 5th floor balcony of Pat Neff Hall and announce that they are giving Baylor Homecoming the most memorable 100th birthday present ever by concocting the world’s large hot fudge sundae. As the magnetized crowds look up, they are helpless to dodge the 100 gallons of liquid fudge, 100 barrels of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream and the 100 large cans of maraschino cherries the Noze Brothers rain down on them. Immediate immortality in the Baylor history books for these dedicated pranksters.
I’m not saying any of it is, but these things could be happening, folks. So let’s find out what’s making my Dr Peppers taste bad before we all live to regret it.
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Questions I’ve Been Pondering Lately
If I swallow a piece of angel food cake, followed by a piece of devil’s food cake, will spiritual warfare be going on in my stomach?
After a lifetime spent living in the South, and mostly enjoying it, and after racking up hundreds of hours of listening that have carved the very words and notes deep into my brain tissue, have I finally heard the classic songs “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Rambling Man” enough times to die with a clear conscience?
Is there a good reason, apart from the American floral industry’s apparent desire to somehow cash in on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, that we are now being treated to the bad-LSD-trip-vision of tie-dyed roses?
In spite of our proud adult accomplishments, will we ever stop returning to think about the unhealed wounds, forsaken opportunities and lost loves of our youth?
Since we have things called Junior Mints, does that mean there are such things as Senior Mints? And if so, how old do you have to be to eat them? And do you need teeth to chew them successfully?
Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that there are dozens and dozens of member groups on Facebook that are united by one single characteristic — namely, that each member hates Facebook? Wouldn’t this be somewhat like large numbers of people taking out newspaper subscriptions, then buying ads every week announcing “The following subscribers hate newspapers”?
Do TV pitchmen every truly die? Since Orville Redenbacher died 14 years ago, and he’s still appearing on brand-new TV commercials, will we therefore be watching Billy Mays sell us Oxy Clean and any number of assorted gadgets two decades from now? Will they keep him fresh by making him a computer-generated human hybrid, sort of like Max Headroom in a blue shirt?
Has anyone but me noticed that movie trailers, which once had to be tastefully edited so as to merit the wording “The following preview has been approved for all audiences,” now only have to be cleaned up enough to meet the somewhat broader standard of approval for viewing by appropriate audiences?
Who is John Galt?
Can the center hold?
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10 Things I’ve Never Done
If you are active on the blogosphere, or spend a lot of time on Facebook or other social media sites, you end up getting a lot of invitations to complete lists of various types with personal information. Many of them contain the number 10, such as “10 Foods That Won’t Make It Down My Esophagus Intact, “10 Incidents Involving My Body I Regret,” and “10 Unusual Things I Have Stuck Up My Nose.”
I’m sort of in a meme mood today, so I have come up with my own list — 10 things I have never done in my life.
1) I have never traveled anywhere outside North America. In fact, I’ve never been far at all from the U.S. border — Victoria, Montreal, Toronto, Nuevo Laredo. That’s the exent of my international globetrotting. I would like to remedy this as soon as possible, but we’ll see.
2) I have never tried hard or illegal drugs, not even marijuana. Even if I didn’t have moral, legal or medical reservations, the acrid stench of marijuana alone would keep me from lighting up a doobie. I once sat for two hours behind a toking pothead at a Weather Report concert, and if I ever was tempted to just “try it once,” all I’d have to do is bring up memories of that wretched evening to nip it in the bud, no pun intended.
3) I have never ridden a motorcycle. Okay, once when I was about 13 I rode for maybe 20 seconds on the back of a friend’s tiny Honda cycle, but that hardly qualifies. Now that I think back, he was also the same friend who introduced me to cigarettes (a habit I luckily didn’t pick up). So I guess he was one of my teenaged bad influences.
4) I have never tried any of the “dangerous” sports. In this category I include skydiving, bungee jumping, parasailing, surfing, windsurfing, skiing, hang gliding, mountain climbing, flying a plane, tightrope walking, ballooning and attending a European soccer match. I once went waterskiing, but since they have small dogs in sunglasses and aqua queens in dresses and beehive hairdos routinely do this as well, I hardly think it qualifies as “dangerous.”
5) I have never served on a jury. I’m afraid when it comes to doing my civic duty in the jury box, I’m always a bridesmaid, never a bride. I’ve been called many times, but every time something happened to prevent my serving — the jury was seated before they got to me, the defendant plead out and canceled the trial, the prosecution team was eliminated by mobsters, whatever.
6) I have never eaten sushi or caviar. I have made a pact with my palate that all seafood must have at least a passing acquaintance with a stove, oven, grill or campfire before I will ingest said ocean delicacy.
7) I have never “gotten” the movie “2001”. All the stuff with the apes, the bone being thrown up in the air, the trip through the colored lights, the baby in the womb, the old man. What? WHAT? I always heard that hippies seeing the movie when it first came out in 1968 said that being high helped you understand all the cosmic meanings. Maybe that’s the key, but remember No. 2 above.
8) I have never been in a true fistfight. Being a fat kid with glasses in junior high school, I was picked on by bullies and suffered through the push-and-shove scuffles that condition invited. But the kind of fistfight you see in the movies — with fists hitting faces, blood gushing and people flying through the air and rolling around in the dirt — I’ve never had that happen, and I’m sure not looking for trouble now.
9) I have never learned a foreign language. Truth in blogging requires me to admit that I took four semesters of Spanish in college, but my remaining store of Spanish words and phrases is muy pico. I might be able to ask where the red house is or order a burrito while in Matamoros, but that’s about it. As far as a true working knowledge of a foreign language, el zippo.
10) I have never known the Muffin Man, walked a mile for a Camel, begun the beguine, or danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.
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Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Purloined Premise
Ever since my parents gave me a book of Sherlock Holmes stories when I was a young boy, I have been a big fan of the crime-fighting resident of 221B Baker Street. I like the character of Sherlock Holmes so much, in fact, that I have enjoyed (and sometimes merely tolerated) the twists and turns that modern screenwriters have subjected him to, such as making him a romantic lover, imagining him as a somewhat dense actor playing second fiddle to Dr. Watson, the mastermind actually solving the cases, and the liberties they take with wild plots involving him doing everything from solving the Jack the Ripper case to fighting Nazis.
So, I was excited to learn that yet another adaptation of Sherlock Holmes will be coming to the screen soon - this one starring Robert Downey Jr., a fairly good actor who did a fine job portraying other legends such as Charlie Chaplin.
When I went online and watched the trailer for the upcoming Holmes movie, however, my heart sank a bit. It didn’t make me want to cancel my plans to see it, but I do so now with the knowledge that the filmmakers seem to have succumbed to the current fad for making every other movie an action movie.
As anyone who knows anything about Sherlock Holmes can tell you, this guy was the epitome of the phrase “brains over brawn.” He began thinking about a new case even before the client managed to step in the door, and as soon as he did, Sherlock could tell the astonished client where he had just traveled from, what foods he liked to eat and what kind of wife he had, all deduced from simple observations of his clothes and manner.
True, Holmes crossed paths with a few dangerous criminals, such as the sociopathic genius Moriarty, and he therefore was involved in mysteries that in many cases involved physical danger. When attacked, he could certainly defend himself, but he didn’t devote his life to being a fighting machine, unless playing the violin and taking an occasional dose of cocaine counts as training. Whenever he anticipated the possibility of a little tussle with bad guys, Holmes would simply ask his faithful assistant Watson to bring along his revolver to pop off a few discreet bullets in the general direction of malcontents, if needed.
From what I can tell from the new Sherlock Holmes movie trailer, however, the crime-fighter played by Robert Downey Jr. is not the puffing-his-Meerschaum-while-thinking type of guy. This Sherlock Holmes appears to spend hours each day in the gym and have extensive training in martial arts, which he displays in bouts of whup-ass with bad guys in boxing rings, escapes buildings by jumping out of fifth-story windows into the Thames, survives huge explosions and barrages of bullets without a scratch, and at one point finds himself handcuffed to the bed of a woman dressed only in a corset, to which he replies only with a leering grin.
In short, this is not your father’s Sherlock Holmes.
They have taken the bare bones of the Holmes character and fleshed him out as a bona fide action hero, just a tad below Superman in the skills department. It’s the same super-sizing of fictional crime-fighters that moviemakers have done in the last few years with the latest movies featuring Batman, James Bond, and, just recently, the Star Trek crew.
If filmmakers are so intent on making beloved and legendary characters into invulnerable, vicious villain-thumping superheroes, then I might as well face the inevitable and make a tidy profit at the same time.
Here, then, are a few suggestions for supercharged plots and characters of possible remakes of somewhat tamer source material. (Please make sure and send me a check, Mr. Hollywood Producer, if you decide to use any of these ideas).
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE
Greedy speculators, angered that Pa Ingalls won’t sell them his homestead, which lies in the path of the deal with the railroad they are trying to put together, hire outlaws to take the family hostage in their home. They threaten to kill one family member an hour until Pa relents, giving him until sunup to think it over before the killing begins. Pa is tied fast to the pot-bellied stove and is unable to break free, but he gives a knowing wink to his children, who unbeknownst to the bad guys have had extensive training in Eastern fighting techniques they learned from Nakasuki Hambone, the former Japanese ninja who served as the cook on the wagon train that brought them all out west.
Laura and the girls are able to sneak out to the barn past the sleeping hired thugs and retrieve their homemade weapons, which include numchucks made of corncobs and twine, throwing stars cut from the bottom of tin cans and blow guns made from dried reeds from the creek. In the movie’s climactic scene, the girls incapacitate the bad guys with well-placed kicks and chops, then leave their bodies a battered and sliced-up heap of flesh after numerous hits from the deadly bonnet squad. Pa then sits the family down for a lecture on the value of family togetherness before Ma puts on a pot of sassafras tea and the credits roll.
Movie tagline: “When Laura Ingalls gets wilder, the prairie gets scary.”
Best fight move: Ma Ingall’s spine-cracking ladle-across-the-neck chop.
PETTICOAT JUNCTION
Joe Carson, a retired U.S. government “Black Ops” assassin whose time in the Soviet Union as an undercover agent on the Kremlin staff of Josef Stalin earned him the fond nickname of “Uncle Joe,” is relocated for his safety with his Special Forces team in the small rural community of Petticoat Junction. As a front, they pretend to be the operators of the Shady Rest Hotel (named by them as a private joke, since “sending someone to their shady rest” was spy code for a successful hit). Two active duty Black Ops agents, code-named “Floyd” and “Charley,” operate the local railroad train, the Cannonball, and act as liaisons between Joe’s team and their government handlers.
“Kremlin Kate” Bradley, who once almost took out Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev with a poisoned olive in his vodka, runs the hotel and supervises three junior agents posing as her daughters, Bettie Jo, Bobbie Jo and Billie Jo Bradley. They operate the sophisticated tracking and communications array hidden inside an empty water tower near the railroad tracks. Because of their long hours spent inside monitoring equipment, the three young women often bring fresh clothing and change on the water tower’s elevated gangway, usually during long, slow motion sequences shot with zoom lenses.
In the movie adaptation, homegrown terrorists from western Kansas hijack the Cannonball and load it with a small thermonuclear device made of spare tractor parts, hoping to force the U.S. government to mandate a rise in wheat prices. Uncle Joe and Team Shady Rest plan an elaborate counteroffensive, involving lots of explosions, murder and mayhem as Kate plays a rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on a Jew’s harp.
Movie tagline: “When these petticoats start rustling, you’d better quit your hustling.”
Best fight move: Uncle Joe’s neutralizing of an assortment of thrown knives, hatchets and poisoned blow darts using only his rocking chair as a deflection device.
GONE WITH THE WIND
In this muscular remake of “Gone With the Wind,” re-titled “God is My Witness,” the Confederate women and children left behind to tend for Tara are not the starved, beaten down losers of the first movie, but are instead highly trained vigilantes just itching for payback.
When unsuspecting Yankee soldiers stroll up to Tara, expecting an afternoon of leisurely looting and pillaging, they are surprised to be met with armed resistance on all sides. Scarlett (played by Angelina Jolie) uses her riding crop and Derringer pistol to send a dozen Yankees down, while Mammy (played by Queen Latifah) uses the Gatlin gun prototype smuggled in by Rhett Butler to mow down wave after wave of blue coats, despite a marked lack of help from her fellow servant Prissy, who protests, “I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout usin’ no Uzis!”
In a deleted scene available on the director’s cut DVD, Scarlett outfits the Tara crew in black night uniforms cut from her large selection of mourning dresses, and they meet up with a armed squadron of leather-clad ladies of the night, led by Belle Watling, to throw potatoes loaded with explosives into the homes of local carpetbaggers.
Movie tagline: “Tomorrow isn’t another day - if you’re a dead Yankee.”
Best fight move: Miss Melanie, on her deathbed, meeting the Yankees intending to molest her by raising the sheet and firing a small cannon filled with buckshot at them.
SESAME STREET
Angered by their increasingly limited amount of air time, Oscar and the Count plot to overthrow Sesame Street. In his underground trash can lab, Oscar uses the profits from the Count’s numbers racket to manufacture chemical weapons to be sold to Team Rocket on the Pokemon show, in return for Team Rocket’s help in carrying out a puppet pogrom on Sesame Street.
Soon after Big Bird learns of the plot, he is fed drugged bird seed by the Count and boxed up for a Thanksgiving shipment to Tyson Foods. But Big Bird’s faithful friend, Snuffleupagus, frees the trussed-up bird, and together they rally the Sesame Street forces (sponsored by the letter “M,” for “Mutilate.”) Mr. Hooper, rumored for years to be packing heat, cracks open a locked case in the deli to hand out machine guns and .45 automatics to astonished Muppets of all stripes. In a climactic final battle, choreographed to the tune of “When Used, Not Abused, A Gun Can Be Fun,” the Muppets, led by Kermit (a former Navy frogman) defeat Oscar and the Count and their furry minions.
Movie tagline: “The air is sweet (and so is revenge) on Sesame Street”
Best fight move: Loveable Elmo’s dexterity with a 12-inch serrated steel blade he calls “The Tickler” (“Would ya like to tickle me now, punk? Would ya?”)
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Strange But True Waco: Ray Halloran, the Man Who Hated Waco
Maybe things had gotten just a little too boring after the excitement of World War II. Maybe some prankster had slipped something into the city water supply that made everyone a little loopy. For whatever reason, members of a business organization in Madisonville, Texas, called the Sidewalk Cattleman’s Association had a unique idea to stir up some publicity back in 1948. They decided to sponsor a nationwide contest to find the American veteran who harbored the most hatred for the state of Texas, and then bring him here, all expenses paid, in an effort to change his mind.
(Well, now maybe there are worse ways to spend your civic time and money. But to me, that’s sort of like identifying the person who most hates brussel sprouts, then as a reward offering them a year’s supply of…brussel sprouts.)
Halloran was a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps during the war, and he was sent to Texas to learn how to be a navigator on B-29 bombers. He received his initial training at Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, and was also stationed at airfields in San Antonio and Houston before finally receiving his navigator’s wings in Hondo.
Halloran then was sent into the heat of battle in the Pacific, where he served as a navigator on B-29s operating from Saipan, one of the Mariana Islands, flying bombing missions over Tokyo. On his fifth mission, Halloran’s plane was shot down over Tokyo, and he spent the next seven months in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. His daily food ration in camp amounted to no more than a golf ball-sized serving of rice and one radish.
You’d think that living in a POW camp might top anyone’s list of regrets, but not Ray Halloran. According to the war veteran’s prize-winning letter to the folks in Madisonville, he seemed to harbor the most regret not for the time he spent in that Japanese hellhole, but for the time he’d spent in Texas.
“I often wondered why the Army selected such a miserable place [as Texas] as a training ground for so many service men,” Halloran wrote in his letter. “As the hardship of prison life mounted, it was then I discovered the purpose of Texas and I appreciated it. I appreciated it because it instilled confidence in myself. I continually consoled myself with the thought that if I had survived the terrors of Texas, I could certainly carry on under less adverse conditions in my new abode — Barracks No. 2 at Omori POW Camp.”
Compared to Texas, conditions in a Japanese POW camp were less adverse?
To leave no doubt about where he stood on the issue, Halloran wrapped up his letter by writing, “Time has erased most of my memories of the unpleasant hours spent in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, but eternity will fail to blur my wretched recollections of Texas.”
In his letter, Halloran, a bachelor, also confessed to somewhat less noble complaints, such as the fact that during his time in Texas he couldn’t find any beautiful Texas girls, although “believe me I tried hard enough.”
Saying they didn’t see how any man could have a worse opinion of Texas, officials of the cattleman’s club invited Halloran to accept an all-expenses-paid tour in May 1948, visiting Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and Wichita Falls before ending up with an appearance at a big barbeque in Madisonville. (I’m not sure they clarified beforehand whether Halloran would be a guest at the barbeque, or become the main dish at the barbeque).
How does Waco fit into all this? Well, for some reason — maybe a cockeyed sense of optimism, maybe latent masochism on a slow news day — when newspapers in Waco heard about Halloran and his story, they decided to send him a telegram asking what he thought of Waco, since so far he had been mum on the subject. The response, dripping in Halloranish invective, no doubt caused a few mouthfuls of coffee to be spewed down at the Waco Chamber of Commerce:
I am glad to report I have never had the misfortune to be stationed in or visit Waco. I used to fly over your city quite frequently while training as a navigator in the air forces, and from the air Waco appeared as a blemish on the earth’s surface. Friends who visited Waco furnished me only bad reports. Feel certain your city received its share of the atrocities that plagued Texas — that is, dust storms, rain, wind, biting cold, and unbearably hot weather; nothing scenically or historically worth while and very few beautiful girls, if any. Sincere sympathy to the unfortunate citizens of WacoA blemish on the earth’s surface? Them’s fightin’ words. The citizens of Waco decided they’d just have to bring Ray Halloran here and change his mind.
First, though, the sourpuss veteran had to run the gauntlet through a few other Texas cities. Before hitting Waco, Halloran visited Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and Wichita Falls, where press reports said he usually was met by shiny convertibles, ate thick steak dinners, and was “welcomed by so many beautiful girls that he says the lipstick is getting thick on his cheeks.”
There were some rocky moments. In Dallas, Halloran was the special lunch guest of the infamous Bonehead Club, and at the end of the meal club members placed him in a cell at the county jail with what appeared to be a dangerous prisoner. It was revealed later that the “crazed narcotic prisoner” was only a deputy sheriff with his hair rumpled, playing the part.
In Wichita Falls, Halloran seemed to have fared a bit better. He was so taken with a six-foot-tall brunette that he went to Sunday morning church services with her, a fact that had a Wichita Falls firm offering to outfit the entire wedding party if they ended up getting hitched. A Waco florist — name not recorded — offered to supply free flowers, but alas, the wedding never came to be.
Payback time, Waco-style, began around 5 p.m. on Monday, May 24. The crowd that had gathered to watch Ray Halloran’s entrance noticed that instead of riding into town in one of those shiny new convertibles, the Ohio veteran was introduced to Wacoans “riding in a wagon drawn by several not-so-shiny donkeys.”
After that initial dose of forced humility, it appears that Wacoans treated Halloran pretty well during his evening in town. He fielded a lot of phone calls in his hotel room from well-wishers and from local vets, including a fellow prison camp inmate, a local radio station had him on as a guest, and he was the guest of honor at a big Texas buffet supper.
But as you expected, a few people decided to have just a little fun with the Waco-hater. Police Captain Jess Gunterman had Halloran “arrested” after supper, releasing him only after the city’s guest was given a formal warning to watch his behavior.
It’s not recorded whether Halloran knew about another law enforcement-related activity that occurred in Waco that afternoon. Freddie Hyde, a former McLennan County deputy sheriff, decided to phone the governor of Halloran’s native state, Gov. Thomas Herbert of Ohio, to give him a piece of his mind. Hyde even had the gumption to try and put the call through collect, but when Gov. Herbert wouldn’t accept the charges, Hyde was forced to pay for the call himself so that he could give Ohio’s leader a little repayment for Halloran’s dissing of Texas.
“I was stationed in Steubenville, Ohio, during the war,” Hyde said, “and that is the worst place I have ever been.”
Asked later about his night in Waco, Halloran was complimentary. “That was a unique reception,” he replied. “I believe I could win the governor’s race if people everywhere met me like they did in Waco.”
If Monday night gave Halloran warm and fuzzy feelings about Waco, the next morning should have sealed the deal. He was awakened in his hotel room by Will Holloway, a masseur from the local YMCA, and given an invigorating rubdown. Then, a smiling Baylor coed, Mildred Cook, served Halloran breakfast in bed.
So it appears that Ray Halloran just might have changed his tune about Waco, and his good time here hopefully sustained him during his next stop in Austin, where he was escorted by State Police to the state hospital for the insane, where he was kindly disinfected. He was then was put back in swimming trunks and locked inside an “oversized birdcage” on the back of a truck, accompanied by five University of Texas coeds as he was paraded through the streets of the Capitol City. Once the truck stopped, Halloran was removed from his cage, handcuffed, and then led through the lobby of his hotel.
UNEXPECTED POSTSCRIPT
I must admit that when I first conceived this blog post, I planned a light, funny finish. But plans have a way of changing sometimes.
The Austin visit by Ray Halloran is when the 1948 newspaper accounts in the Waco and Dallas papers ended, but I’m sure that he also survived his final stop in Texas — the visit to the barbeque in Madisonville — because, in not so many words, he said so.
When I was doing Internet research for this story, I discovered that Halloran created his own website (doesn’t everyone these days?) There’s a link on the website that supposedly allows people to send him a message, so I did so. I explained about the story I was writing, and asked Halloran to respond with any memories of visiting Waco he might want to share. I can’t say for sure whether he’s still alive and saw my e-mail, though, because so far my request is unanswered.
Even if he’s dead now, the website that Ray Halloran created lives on. As I read it, I saw that while it lacks even a single mention of his time in the spotlight as a Texas-hater, it does tell the story of his wartime experiences, describing in grim detail the horrifying treatment he received in the Japanese POW camp. He appeared to brush that trauma off quite easily in his media quips in 1948, but on the website he tells how he was brutalized and forced to remain silent in a “cold, dark cage” on the camp grounds, being allowed to speak only during interrogations.
At one point, Halloran said his captors took him to the Ueno Zoo, stripped him naked and put him on display in a tiger cage so that Japanese civilians could view the hated American B-29 bomber crewman.
Halloran said he suffered through almost 40 years of nightmares following his time in the war, and said during his first years of freedom back in the United States — most likely including the time he won the Texas-hater contest — he “tried to wipe out all those bad memories of my time in Japan (but) I failed.”
The website then describes how Halloran finally traveled back to Japan in 1984. Over the course of seven more trips there he apparently was able to exorcise some of his demons by meeting and befriending Japanese citizens, including a former guard at the POW camp and — incredibly — the pilot of the Japanese plane that shot down Halloran’s B-29 bomber, a man who eventually became his good friend.
Halloran in his later years traveled the country talking about his time in military service, wrote a book about his wartime experiences called Hap’s War, and was interviewed for a network news documentary on the war in the Pacific. Near the end of his website narrative, he has this to say:
“There isn’t a day that goes by that my memories do not flash back and recall events of those long ago days…I appreciate and love Freedom. I appreciate even the simple things in life. I know how fortunate I was to survive and come home.”Mr. Halloran, thanks for all you did for America. If you are alive, I hope you are well and happy. And if you ever read this, know that I’d love to talk with you and find out more about your life, including your brief visit to a city you once said you hated.
And I promise never, ever to call the Ohio governor on you.
[Sources: Waco Sunday Tribune-Herald, May 16, 1948; Waco Times Herald May 24-26, 1948; Dallas Morning News, May 22, 1948]
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My Dog Could Be the Next Top Chef
Every time I am in the kitchen, there is Tanner, a very bright sheltie, looking up at me with his pleading eyes, wanting to know what I know about preparing delicious meals. At the slightest indication I am in the kitchen ready to create — the opening of the refrigerator door, the clank of the toaster assembly going down, the gentle purr of the can opener — Tanner magically appears, hoping against hope that this will be the time my confusing and magical actions will finally make sense to him.
When I am preparing a dish that involves numerous steps and varied ingredients, Tanner is a faithful silent witness. He watches each ingredient being added, each mixture being mixed, beaten and folded, and I can just hear his mind asking, “What is he doing now? What is that ingredient he’s adding? How much of that white powder is he putting in?” But, alas, he gets no answers to these questions. Oh, how this dog wants to LEARN.
My wife, though I love her dearly, can be quite the cynic at times. She says that Tanner doesn’t want to cook, he only wants to eat. One time she said to me, “Drop some raw hamburger on the floor, and see if he goes for a cookbook. He’ll eat that meat within seconds. He’s an animal. They do that.”
But how do I play Annie Sullivan to my dog Tanner in the kitchen? I have yet to come up with a way. I tried putting different ingredients down on the floor once and saying the name of each to Tanner, but in his excitement at finally getting to learn he ate each ingredient before I could finish. I’m thinking that I must develop some sort of language to allow me to communicate with him.
Sign language won’t work because Tanner doesn’t have fingers and thumbs. I have two ideas I’m chewing on. One is a modified form of Morse code, with short and long barks to represent letters. I could modify that to high- and low-pitched barks if it works better.
If I can persevere and teach Tanner to cook, not only will I be comforted to know that this deep yearning in his heart will be fulfilled, but I could get filthy rich. There would be TV appearances, a series of Tanner cookbooks, and cooking classes for dogs based on whatever method finally works. This could be how I occupy myself during the last half of my life — teaching America’s dogs to cook.
I just know it.
DISCLAIMER: No dogs or squirrels were injured in the production of this post. One jar of Ragu was slightly moistened.
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Riding the Technological Boomerang
Nowadays, I think that most Americans of average means follow a fairly straight trajectory throughout their lives when it comes to using technology. Specifically, when they are younger they tend to have access mainly to the simpler technologies, while each year they grow older their use of technology becomes steadily more sophisticated. This pattern continues throughout adulthood, at least until the years of rapid physical and mental decline.
For example, when a two-year-old child gets a music player, it’s probably something plastic from Fisher-Price that plays short snatches of songs when a large colorful button is pushed. As the child gets older, his music player of choice gets more sophisticated - evolving maybe from a simple radio or boom box to an iPod and then to some sort of high-tech home theater and sound system that costs hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. As the person grows older and matures, he steadily uses more and more sophisticated technology without looking back.
I’ve been thinking lately about technology - with two teenagers, it’s almost impossible not to - and in reviewing my past I made the surprising realization that I am not a person whose technological resume is expanding ahead of the curve. Instead, I seem to be riding a technological boomerang, with my days on the cutting edge getting further and further behind me.
I went to high school in Friendswood, a fairly affluent suburb city of Houston, and someone back then at Friendswood High was able to get their hands on some pretty impressive toys. This was in the mid-1970s, when personal computers were unknown and what computers did exist cost a king’s ransom, took up entire rooms to store and were owned solely by governments, large businesses and rich universities.
Yet, during my sophomore year I was one of a select few students in our school that got to take an advanced math course called “Computer Algebra II.” It was the usual Algebra II class, but the work was done in the Friendswood High School computer lab, something almost no high schools anywhere had at the time.
Our school didn’t actually own a computer. If we had that kind of money back then, they’d have spent it on a domed football stadium. What we had were three or four computer terminals that looked very much like teletype machines mated to keypunch machines.
We were very early users of dial-up, having to call a phone number in downtown Houston, then wait to hear the familiar whooshing garble sound before putting the phone receiver down in a little docking bay on the terminal. Once the signal was established, we were then able to create computer programs using the BASIC language, and store what we did on long strips of yellow paper tape that the terminal would punch with little memory holes. This was long before floppy discs or pull-down menus or anything we know today. It was 1975-76, and when I told people I was learning to program a computer as a high school sophomore, they either didn’t believe me, or were impressed.
Friendswood High School was also one of the first schools to get electric typewriters in the 1970s. In typing class there were probably 30 of the old-style manual typewriters, but I was one of the lucky few people who got to use one of the four IBM Selectrics sitting proudly at the front of the class.
While a journalism student at the University of Texas, one summer in the early 1980s I got a part-time job as a copy editor on the Daily Texan, the campus newspaper. The folks at the Texan were quite proud of the fact that in 1982 they were one of the very few college newsrooms in the country to own and use VDTs, or video display terminals. Instead of having to rip paper wire copy off a teletype machine and then retype the story using a typewriter, we simply sat down at our VDTs, pulled up the Associated Press feed and saved whatever stories we’d like to run. We could make edits and write new copy right on the screen. When we wrote headlines for stories, the VDTs would even tell us automatically how many characters we’d used, and how many we had left for the available space.
Now this might not sound all that impressive, but in 1982 many large city newspapers didn’t even have VDTs yet, and there I was using one in college.
My technological boomerang continued its forward motion during my first real job as a news director of a radio station in Temple, Texas. Our general manager at the time pinched pennies when it came to unimportant things like salaries, but he was an absolute sucker for gadgets. When they came out with the first car phones, he just had to have one installed in our news car. The phone weighed about 20 pounds and sat on top of the transmission hump in the front seat, with loaded sandbags on each side to keep the unit from sliding off onto the floorboards during travel. It looked like one of those big field phones you see in World War II movies, where a corporal carries it around in a big box and cranks it as the captain calls headquarters for orders.
Nevertheless, I’ll bet we were the talk of Central Texas broadcast journalism with our car phone, which allowed us to make private calls to any place that had a land line. All of our competitors had to use two-way radios, which could only call other two-way radios, not phones, and had the added disadvantage of being anything but private. When you used a two-way radio, your conversations could be heard by anyone else using that frequency.
When I left the radio station to move to Waco and go into TV news in 1986, however, my technological boomerang began its return arc.
The TV station I worked for - by far the cheapest in Waco - not only did not have VDTs or computers, it did not even have electric typewriters, which by the 1980s were in use just about everywhere. Reporters and producers had to use vintage manual typewriters to tap out scripts. Calling in a news story was done just like it was in those old 1940s movies you’ve seen. A reporter got on the phone and read his copy slowly while the poor person on the other end typed it up - tap, tap, tap - using a manual typewriter that appeared to have been dropped a few times from the back of a speeding car.
In 1985 or so, many years after it seemed that every other TV station and business had them, our management finally bought a newfangled invention called a fax machine, which allowed us to write out or type our copy on a piece of paper and send it miles away to the studio. Someone still had to take the piece of fax paper and type it all out again, but it didn’t matter to us - we loved that thing.
When I got the job I have now, I did manage to move up to an electric typewriter, but I had no computer or fax machine available. And even though I have continued to advance technologically in both my work life and home life, I am still lagging behind. When most people had color computer monitors, mine was still black and white. When most of my friends had cell phones, I was still using a beeper. By the time I got my first cell phone - a behemoth with a pull-out antenna - everyone around me had slim flip phones. I finally got a flip phone a few years ago, but by then everyone had Blackberries and iPhones and things that clipped to their ears and directed voice signals right into their brains.
I’m also behind the times at home, as my teenage daughters will attest to. Our computer monitor is still one of those big rectangular things that takes up most of the desk. Our TVs are like that too, except for the one HDTV we just got. It works fine, but we still are deficient because we don’t have Blu-Ray capability, and haven’t paid for an HD signal because it’s too darn expensive.
And, while I am a certified blogger using the Internet, the slow, patient crafting of online paragraphs is seemingly being left behind more each day by techie trends such as Twitter and instant messaging.
So, it appears my days as a technological trailblazer are long behind me. But I’ve concluded that I truly don’t care. It takes too much effort - and money - to be ahead of the pack these days.
To be honest, my only regret is that when my daughters ask for some newfangled electronic gizmo these days, I can’t give them any sob stories about how technologically deprived I was when I was their age, and how I had to make do with an abacus and two tin cans connected by twine. That would have been so sweet.
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Killer Rabbits and Their Habits
All fans of Monty Python, myself included, are well aware of the danger of killer rabbits, having seen the death and destruction they can leave in their wake after watching the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
You might be tempted to think that the cinematic treatment of killer rabbits begins and ends there, but if you think that, you’re wrong. I have recently discovered that a little-known B-movie classic made just a few years before “Grail” can lay claim to giving the homicidal little fuzzballs their first big screen exposure.
The plot description says a farmer was having trouble with rabbits eating his crops, so he hires some wacko scientist to help him get rid of them. The scientist, of course, injects the cute little bunnies with hormones and genetically altered blood, which goes bad, and the rabbits mutate into creatures the size of wolves who snack on cows, horses and…humans. Oh, the horror. They probably hang around Easter egg hunts, waiting for small innocent children to pet them.
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but it sounds fun because it appears that they spent no more than $12.95 making it, even though they had to pay for the acting talents of past-their-prime stars such as Janet Leigh (the shower girl from “Psycho”) and DeForrest Kelley (“Bones” from the original Star Trek). I wonder if there’s a character in the movie named Jim, so Kelley’s character can say the familiar “He’s dead, Jim” line over and over again as he views all the bodies covered with bloody tufts of fur and the gnawed ends of carrots.
The No. 1 reason I want to see this, however, is a scene I just have to experience for myself. Some authority type supposedly runs to a drive-in movie theatre and shouts, “Ladies and gentlemen, attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way!,” after which everyone everyone in the place, instead of writing him off as a pickled old head case, automatically believes him and runs away, screaming in terror.
Oh, man, call Netflix and pass the popcorn.
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A Re-do at Waco’s Zoo (part 2)
As I mentioned in the first part of this blog post, my family and I recently paid a return visit to the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, and I promised to give a report on what we found.
First of all, I must say that we picked a perfect day to visit. We went on my wife’s birthday — a Monday this year — and a day the kids had a holiday from school. As a result, we had the place almost to ourselves. As an added bonus, the weather was about as cool as it gets in May, so we were able to tour the grounds and concentrate on watching the animals instead of complaining constantly about how hot and humid it was.
Our recent visit to the Cameron Park Zoo was our first in perhaps five or six years. In that time, the zoo has added its popular new Brazos River Country exhibit, one of the main things we wanted to see. So, after making the obligatory introductory stop by Monkey Island to watch the residents’ swinging antics, we headed straight for Brazos River Country.
I must say that overall we were very impressed with what we found. In the early days of its home in Cameron Park, the zoo felt like small collections of asundry animals plopped down at remote points. There weren’t many animals to start with, and the walks between animals were sometimes long and featureless. This meant that seeing a squirrel cross your path could become a big event in the tour: “Look kids! See that? A squirrel!” “Wow, dad!”
Well, with the introduction of the Brazos River Country exhibit, the place is feeling more like a real zoo to me. There’s lots to see, including what I’m guessing is the centerpiece — a 50,000-gallon saltwater coral reef aquarium packed full of the required kid-friendly “Nemo” fish, as well as some tougher, gnarly types of swimming theatre.
After marveling awhile at these fish, you can see alligators swim in their own little swamp kingdom, watch sea gulls and pelicans fly around a large open-air aviary, and get views of animals such as bears, cougars and coyotes. Turn a corner and you can watch a herd of American bison mill around. If you are the type of person who enjoys annoying others you can have fun correcting people you overhear referring to the creatures as “buffaloes” by explaining that true buffaloes are found in Africa, while these animals are properly called bison. (You might pre-screen to evaluate just whom you pull this on, to make sure they are not larger than you and prone to public displays of violence).
One of the favorite new exhibits is the otter pool, featuring Doris and What’s-His-Name, the bewhiskered cuties you see on all those billboards around town. My family and I could have spent an hour just sitting and watching these otters swim, scamper and frolic, and I think our pleasure in this was shared by all the other visitors we met at the pool.
I’m not sure if this is part of Brazos River Country, but we walked through a little house containing night creatures such as bats and owls that I don’t remember being there the last time we visited. The bats were somewhat hard to see, as they are small and fly around quickly, but the owls sat placidly on their perches and stared hard at us, allowing us the chance for uninterrupted gawking. I’ve always thought that owls are fascinating creatures, but seeing them in real life — and up close — gave me a new appreciation for them.
There were a number of snakes included as part of Brazos River Country, so I thought that maybe the old reptile house had been either closed or remodeled for another purpose. But it’s still there, with a few animals moved out but many of the popular features, such as the rattlesnake den, intact.
And of course, all of the animals from the earliest days of the zoo are still around — the giraffes, lions, tigers, rhinos, elephants, tortoises, bald eagles and a striking turkey about the size of a Mini Cooper that was the most belligerent animal I think I have ever encountered behind bars. This big, aggressive gobbler would have gladly pecked out my eyes and fed them to the nearby deer, if only he could have jumped the fence to get at me.
When we were ending our tour, there was a final surprise — a boarded-up area called the “Asian Forest” under construction near the tiger compound, which will contain two of my favorite animals to watch — the goofy but somewhat somber orangutans, and the huge, deadly Komodo dragons. A sign said the exhibit is supposed to open soon, so I’ll have to make a return trip to see these new additions.
It was a great day, and all in all we enjoyed our day at the Cameron Park Zoo. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few areas I noticed where minor changes might improve the zoo experience.
First of all, I discovered that signage at the zoo is a hit-or-miss proposition. The signs that tell you how to get from one place to another are numerous and accurate, and many of the signs identifying and explaining the animals contained in the adjoining exhibits are colorful and full of information. But, for some reason, there are other exhibits that contain little or no signage telling you about the creatures you are looking at — even giving you the creatures’ names.
For example, the centerpiece of the Brazos River Country exhibit, the huge aquarium, had just one measly sign I could see, saying something trifling like “The Brazos River area is vast and contains lots of wildlife.” But there were no pictures or text to identify, for example, the major varieties of fish and marine creatures swimming around inside the huge tank. This lack of defining information can lead to some very uninformed conversations among visitors, such as the actual one I heard that went something like this:
Man #1: “What’s that big fish there?”
Man #2: “The long one with the pointed nose? That’s a swordfish.”
Man #1: “Nah, that’s not a swordfish. That’s got to be a longnose gar.”
Man #3: (Butting in) “I think that’s actually a sawtooth shark.”
Man #2: “That’s no shark. It’s a swordfish.”
Man #1: “And I’m telling you it’s a gar. I’ve caught dozens of them.”
Man #3: “Wait a minute. I know muskellunge are freshwater fish, but could that be something like a saltwater muskellunge?”
You get the idea. A nice sign telling us what the heck this formidable-looking fish is (I never figured it out) would have been helpful. Also, in the night creatures hut, signs are needed to tell what kinds of owls are which. Right now, there’s some sort of sign discussing the bats, but zilch about the wonderful owls.
In another area — I think maybe the aviary — there was identifying “signage,” but it looked like a project a fourth grader might have done for his “Animals and Me” project. Descriptions of each bird had been printed out on typing paper, then protected in plastic and put inside a three-ring binder that hung on a rail and flapped around in the breeze. To figure out which bird was which you had to flip through the binder, sort of like looking through the Yellow Pages to find the number of a Chinese restaurant.
All I’m saying is, few more signs would be welcome and would make the CPZ experience even better.
Another area for improvement — please, please do something about the poor bears. First of all, the bears are placed far away from visitors atop a high platform surrounded by a moat, probably for reasons of safety. But the bear complex at Baylor proves that you can bring bears very close to visitors while still maintaining a safe environment.
Also, seeing the bears was — shall I say it? — a morbid experience. This is because these regal creatures were surrounded by a Greek choir of buzzards, at least eight or nine of them, perched on the rocks overlooking the bears, as if expecting them to die any minute and provide dinner. It was a bizarre juxtaposition, and all I can figure is that there must have been raw meat lying around in the compound — bear food that wasn’t eaten yet — and the buzzards were hoping to fly down and snatch this treat when the bears weren’t looking. One of those big nets like the one over the aviary might keep the buzzards out, and make the bears sleep a little easier at night.
Finally, we didn’t get much time to look around the zoo gift shop before the park closed, so there may already be one of these on the grounds. But I can say authoritatively, after visiting zoos in big cities such as Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Denver and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., that you cannot be considered “in the big leagues” of zoos unless you have installed one of those machines that allows children to insert a penny and have it squashed and elongated with the image of the attraction stamped on top. Why, at the National Zoo they had one of those pressed penny machines every 50 feet, each with a different animal’s mug available for minting. So I suggest that if the Cameron Park Zoo wants to really get itself on the map that it buy and install such a machine immediately, if it hasn’t already done so. And if you choose to include the bear as an option, don’t show the buzzards.
Thank you, Waco, for a great day at the zoo.
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A Re-do at Waco’s Zoo (part 1)
My family and I revisited the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco recently, and the bottom line is we had a great time. You see, we had not been there for many years, and didn’t know exactly what we’d find. We’d heard there had been changes made — good changes — and I’m happy to report that the attractions they have added since our last visit made the experience better than ever.
A little background first. When I moved to Waco in 1986 to work as a reporter for a local TV station, the Cameron Park Zoo didn’t exist. When the movement to establish a permanent, modern zoo got rolling in Waco after World War II, many local animal enthusiasts pushed to have the city locate the zoo where it is now — in scenic, spacious Cameron Park. But, for one reason or the other (I’m betting finances were involved) the city council in 1957 voted instead to locate the zoo on land near the old Blackland Army Air Field near Lake Waco, site of today’s Waco Municipal Airport.
So, when I was first sent to do a TV news story on the Waco zoo, I drove out to what amounted to a huge slab of concrete baking in the Texas sun. Now, let me just say here that the old zoo did have its charms. It was compact, very easy to navigate, and had just enough trees and shade and water features to make spending a few hours there not an unpleasant activity. They were really, truly trying to do the best with what they had available.
But this was one of the traditional old-style zoos, where most of the animals were kept in incredibly small metal cages. There would be long rows of these cages, crammed with lions and other jungle animals abutting the cages of more common domestic animals. It gave the impression of a kennel, or maybe of a large prison complex, sort of a friendly Walls Unit for animals. And the inmates — I mean the animals — seemed to hate it, if hatred can be conveyed by sleeping 20 hours a day augmented with four hours of endless pacing back and forth.
(It was undoubtedly these terrible conditions that prompted a disgruntled lion at the zoo to relieve himself on me while I was in the middle of taping a TV news report. But that’s a story for another day).
The old Waco Zoo wasn’t the safest or most secure place to house potentially dangerous animals, either. The poor caged creatures had a habit of trying to escape, and every now and then one of them succeeded. During July 1958, for example, an alligator walked away from the zoo unseen, while nine days later, a deadly cobra snake on loan from another zoo joined him. It took a full month to locate the alligator and haul him back, but luckily the cobra enjoyed only 13 hours of freedom before being captured safely.
By the time I moved to Waco the desire for a “natural” zoo in town was mounting, and I was there covering the event in 1989 the night the returns were counted in the successful bond election that provided the money to relocate the zoo to Cameron Park. They told us it would take awhile for the new zoo to be built and to open, and they warned us that because more money would be needed over the years the exhibits and animals would be added in stages, a little at a time, but we didn’t care. We were excited that Waco was finally getting a facility it could be proud of.
I was one of the ones who rushed to the new Cameron Park Zoo soon after it opened in 1993. The natural beauty was spectacular, the overall design was impressive, but they certainly were right about the animals and exhibits — that was going to be a long-term project. There weren’t too many animals to see in those early days, and the facilities were definitely modest. I remember that the reptile house in those early days — a tiny display — was located in a small building that also housed the men’s and women’s restrooms near the park entrance. It was entirely possible to enter the wrong door by mistake and be faced with a row of rattlesnakes instead of toilets.
Nevertheless, my family and I enjoyed the zoo, and when my wife and I had children it became an especially popular place. We took the girls there to see the animals, and they attended many birthday parties in the children’s play area with the big tree slide and snake sculpture you could crawl around on.
Over the years, however, as my daughters got older and the zoo kept pretty much the same, we ended up visiting less often. When they opened the reptile house we went back a couple of times to see the alligators and snakes, but it seemed that much of the real estate consisted of empty fields with signs that said “Major Exhibit Coming Here…Someday…We Promise,” or something similar.
While we were staying away, the folks at the Cameron Park Zoo were busy funding and installing the large Brazos River Country exhibit, with a huge saltwater aquarium, a swampland area and other attractions. We had heard good things about the new animals added since our last visit, and we vowed that one day we would return to check it out. We finally did, a few weeks ago, and in my next post I’ll talk about what we found.
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Dang ear worms! Just your mention of “Cherish” put that insipid tune into my head for the rest of the day.
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What a delightful glimpse into Baylor history! Thanks for the terrific tale, Randy.
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Yes, I just saw that PSA today. It’s graphic and all too true. I prefer the Dukes of Hazzard/Demolition Derby style crashes in the Defensive Driving films, where you don’t see anyone getting hurt.
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Talk about Driver’s Ed gore… have you seen that British PSA about texting teens? Graphic to the max, but effective, I hope.
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