Entry 227: 227

From ages 8 to 12, I watched prime-time sitcoms every night of the week.  I was old enough to understand what was going on (save for all the sexual innuendo).  But not old enough to realized how fucking stupid the shows I was watching actually were.  Because of this, there is a sweet spot in TV history, circa 1986-1990, in which I know virtually all the popular sitcoms (and their theme songs).  A few of them are classics I could still enjoy today (The Cosby Show); a few of them are bad but could be watched ironically (Doogie Howser, M.D.); most of them are just randomly forgettable.


   
The show 227 falls into this latter category.  I bring it up solely because this happens to be the 227th entry on this blog.  227 wasn't a great show, but it did have a pretty interesting cast.  It was primarily "The Show that Marla Gibbs Did after The Jeffersons".  But it also starred Jackée (who was a big deal for about five minutes) and a young Regina King.  And let's not forget Kevin Peter Hall.  You might not recognize his name, but you will definitely recognize his face:

I thought that 227 also starred the legendary Sherman Hemsley (his acting was almost as good as his name).  But I was conflating 227 with his show Amen.  I believe they came on one right after the other.  I kinda dug 227, but I never liked Amen.  I guess even at a young age I had an aversion to religion.

227 was set in D.C., which meant nothing to me in 1987, but now I might like to watch it to see if I could catch glimpses of neighborhoods I know.  Like on Homeland when they go to Columbia Heights or some place like that.  Although, I don't recall them going out on the town much in 227.  I guess when you name a show after the number of an apartment building, you gotta stick mostly to the building.  Also, my friend RT determined that 227 couldn't have been set in real-life D.C. based on the position of the Washington Monument in the opening (seen in the YouTube clip above) and the D.C. street grid.  I'm serious.  He actually took the time to painstakingly deduced this (you have to scroll past all the New Year's stuff).  It's not that weird if you know him.

Anyway, enough about '80s sitcoms.  Let's get to what the people really want: Me kvetching about my minor health problems.

I'm sick right now.  It's just a cold, but it's done-whupping me good.  Back in the halcyon days of my youth (when I blissfully rotted my brain with shitty TV) I never got sick.  From kindergarten through undergraduate school, I think I missed about three days of school total from sickness.*  But things changed when I moved to the D.C. area, and I started catching colds much more frequently.

I think it was new germs, and then right when I started building up an immunity to these germs I had a kid.  Now it's game on -- and by "game" I mean sickness.  For one thing, I don't get much sleep making me (presumably) more susceptible to various maladies.  For another, kids are really just blobs of agar.  Part of their evolutionary role in human society is to be a medium for transporting sickness.  It's to help prevent overpopulation.  Seriously, I'm not making this up.**  It's science.***

Also, you might recall from a previous entry that I was having trouble with my right hand.  It's better now.  Kinda.  As it turns out, my self-diagnosis of a partially torn ligament was wrong.  There is no structural damage.  This is both good and bad.  It's good, because, well, it's obvious why not having a torn ligament in one's hand is a good thing.  It's bad, because now the doctor doesn't know what is wrong with it.  He gave me a shot of cortisone, and it helped, to the point I can barely feel the discomfort.  (But I can still feel it.)  The doctor said that sometimes people get inflammation in their hands for no good reason and then have to get cortisone shots a few times a year indefinitely.  That wouldn't be the worst thing in the world -- lots of people have to do these types of health maintenance things -- but it certainly isn't something I was hoping to start at age 36.

Anyway ...

That last thing I want to touch on is the "nerd war" between Paul Krugman and Nate Silver.  It's pretty interesting.  Basically Krugman criticized Silver's new ESPN-based 538 website (he's not the only one), and Silver shot back with a satirical "analysis" implying that Krugman is being overly harsh on him because he left the NY Times (Krugman's employer) under somewhat acrimonious circumstances.  Jonathan Chait (whom I now read regularly) does a pretty good job summing up the whole thing in this post.

I like Nate Silver; his election analysis was one of few in the mainstream media that relied on math instead of meaningless punditry, and I'm about to win my office March Madness pool for the second year in a row by relying heavily on his tournament probabilities.  With that said, I'm definitely with Krugman on this one.  For one thing, I think Krugman's general point has a lot of merit.  Silver made his name using statistical modeling to accurately predict outcomes many "experts" got wrong.  But he did his work mainly in two fields (sports and politics) where the experts aren't actually experts but "experts".**** Now he's trying to taking his game to other fields (like climate science), ones with true-blue experts, not just palavering talking-heads, and it's not working so well.  (To be fair, the site just launched, so it might get better.)

For another thing, I seriously doubt that Krugman, even if he was wrong, is doing all this out of some sort of hard feelings over Silver leaving the NY Times.  Why would he really care about that?  Krugman can be pretty acerbic towards people he disagrees with, but he's usually not petty about personal things.  Silver's comeback to Krugman is a stretch at best, an embarrassment at worst.

Speaking of stretches and embarrassments, I've started doing yoga.  And I love it.  It's true.  I'll tell you about it later.  For now, I gotta go.

Until next time ... 

*Although I do remember missing the "tolo dance" my senior year because I was in bed experiencing what Mark Renton experiences in Trainspotting when he sees the baby on the ceiling.  (I wasn't in withdrawal from heroin, by the way.)

**I'm making this up.

***It's not science. 

****At least in the mainstream media.  There were (and still are) plenty of smart, statistically savvy people in politics and sports who were doing good work long before Nate came onto the scene.  In fact, I sometimes wonder why he became so famous when others doing equally good work didn't.  I guess it's like anything else: a good product and better timing.  

Entry 226: "Get" Out of Here!

Every week I jot down a few topics to discuss on this blog.  Typically I'll have about five new things on my list by the time I actually sit down to crank out an entry.  Of those five, I actually discuss about one of them every two weeks.  This means, of things I set out to talk about, I don't get around to 90% of it.  (You can spare me the "If I'm reading your best 10%, I'd hate to see what the other stuff looks like" jokes.)  Inevitably, what happens is, right before I start an entry, I think of another random topic, and since that's the one freshest in my mind, that's the one I write about.

So it goes again today.  This morning I read this article, which is so absurd, I can't not discuss it.  Other topics be damned.  If you don't want to read the article, I'll give you an overview.  It's about the plight of an Orthodox Jewish woman who can't get divorced.  Well, she can.  In fact, she did, legally -- she got divorced in California over seven years ago -- but her "husband" refuses to grant her a "get", the document needed to officially end a marriage in Orthodox Jewish law.  So religiously they remain married.  But there's a catch.  Due to a loophole in their religious dogma, he was able remarry, but she is forbade from taking another husband until he officially releases her, which, by the way, he won't do because he's a colossal prick (or so I infer) and is holding out for a half million dollars.  Until he get's paid, forever a spinster she will be.

All I have to say to this is who ... wha ... I ... just ... you mean ... why ... not ... uh ... er ... WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?!  This whole story just makes no sense to me.  I cannot possibly fathom why somebody in the USA in 2014 -- a time and place when we have more personal freedoms than any other society at any other point in recorded history -- would abide by these arcane "laws".  That goes for everybody involved -- her, her husband, her friends, her family, her temple.  Everybody.  What is wrong with you?  What are you doing? 

It's like they're all playing a big game of hot lava.  Somebody a thousand years ago declared the ground was on fire, so now they all walk around outside with fireproof stilts and jump from piece of furniture to piece of furniture when they get home.  And if, heaven forbid, somebody looks around, sees all the other people using the ground (without burning up) and decides "I'm gonna start using the ground too" they become a pariah and get ostracized by everybody else in their community.  It probably seems like I'm exaggerating for effect, but I'm really not.  I defy anybody to tell me how the scenario I just laid out is fundamentally different from the one in the article.

The difference, of course, is that we're conditioned to accept religious hooey as something other than, well, hooey.  If people behave irrationally in the name of faith, we as a society give their actions far more credence than they deserve.  And when we don't do this -- when we actually call bullshit bullshit -- there is a significant portion of the population who accuses us of waging a "war on religion" or some other such nonsense. (Remember the "religious freedom" brouhaha over that anti-gay Arizona bill a few weeks?)  If you think you're an aggrieved party of this anti-religious crusade, here's a test: Keep being religious, but stop acting like an idiot.  Then see how many people are still "warring" against you.

I've come to the conclusion that religion is a lot like masturbation: Done privately -- alone or with other consenting adults -- it can be a wonderful, life-changing thing.  Otherwise it's very intrusive to others.  And it can really weird people out.

Religion and jack-off jokes -- I'm getting dangerously close to plagiarizing Bill Maher.  I had better switch topics.

 
Lil's S is doing really well.  A few days ago, I took him to his 18-month checkup, which was tortuous -- two kids had to be triaged ahead of us because they were having asthma episodes,* so we waited two hours to see the doctor -- but ultimate we got some good news.  He's moved up from the 3rd percentile in weight at his last checkup to the 25th percentile.  Directly, this is only good news for S, as I was never worried about his weight.  But indirectly, it's good news for me too.  You know, happy wife, happy life, and whatnot.

We figured out the secret to getting him to gain weight: Meat.  He can devour some cold cuts (particularly salmon) like it's nobody business.  I'm obviously okay with him eating meat, since I meat.  And S has come around on it too.  Her kidatarianism trumps her vegetarianism many times over.  If meat is the only protein our kid will eat regularly, so be it.

He's learning a bunch of new words now, which is cool, and he's also becoming a little hellion, which I have mixed feelings about.  On the one hand, I want him to get into roughhousing and sports and stuff like that because I'm into these things, so we could have something in common.  But his energy level is relentless, and his body is developing faster than his brain, so he's constantly getting himself into precarious positions that he needs help getting out of.  (He doesn't yet understand "no", which adds to the challenge.)  I'm also slightly apprehensive about being the type of dad who pushes him into athletics too much; I want him to be make up his own mind about things.  I wasn't worried about this until I had the following conversation with S a few days ago.

S:  [As she's stopping him trying to climb onto our mantle by standing on the very top of a chair while he's holding a mini basketball]  Ugh ... He is turning into such a little dude.
Me:  Do you think we're socializing him to act this way to some degree?
S: Yes!  Well ... you are.  I'm not.
Me:  How am I doing it?
S: You bought him like ten balls, and now they're all he wants to play with.
Me:  Yeah, but I let him play with whatever he wants.  I don't make him.
S:  You encourage him.
Me:  I encourage him with whatever he chooses to play with.  He just always wants a ball.  It's not my fault. 
S: Babe, you bought him a full sized Wiffle Ball bat before he could even walk!
Me: ... ... You have a point.

And with that, I'm through.

Until next time ...

*"Sucks to your ass-mar".  Can you name the book this quote comes from?

Entry 225: Too Drunk to Blog

Well, not drunk, but hung over.  And even that is a mischaracterization.  I was a bit hung over this morning, but the effects have worn off, except for the tiredness.  I'm really tired.  So the title of this post should be "Too Tired to Blog", but that just sounds stupid.  Plus "Too Drunk to Blog" is a play on the Dead Kennedys song "Too Drunk to Fuck" off their album Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death, which 16-year old me used to rock on the reg.  Here's a jazzy, trippy cover of it by a band called Nouvelle Vague.



All of this is to say that that I'm not posting a longish entry this weekend.  Some old friends came to town Wednesday, just for a few nights, and we went out last night and tied one on like it was 2002.  Now I'm too tired to blog tonight, and I'm leaving town tomorrow morning and will be gone all weekend.  Don't worry.  I'll be back next week with my usual bullshit.

Happy Pi Day.

Until next time ...

Entry 224: Photographs and Memories

Don't worry.  This entry isn't as sentimental as the title might lead you to believe.  The photographs to which I refer will not evoke any feelings of nostalgia.  If you are me, they will evoke feelings of irritation, and if you are you, they will (hopefully) evoke feelings of amusement.  See, from time to time I take pictures of things that annoy me, so that I can share them on this blog (like the picture in this entry of some guy's stuff all over the locker room).  But I've been a bit remiss on this recently, so this is my chance to get all caught up on annoying photos; this is my Irritating Picture Catch-Up Entry (IPCUE, if you're in the biz).

Picture 1: A few months ago I went to park my car on the street nearest to my house.  Roughly 95% of the time I'm able to find a spot.  This time I wasn't and had to park on a neighboring street.  This did not irritate me.  It's the price of non-suburban living.  But then it did irritate me when I saw this jackass.

Perfectly placed between the two signs so that nobody can legally park in front of him* and nobody can legally park behind him.  This person either doesn't realize he's taking up two spots, or he does and just doesn't care.  Which is worse, a narcissist or a sociopath?  To be fair, maybe he's on a really tight budget.  After all, with gas at $3.50 a gallon, pulling forward those extra five feet would've cost nearly a tenth of a cent.

Picture 2:  Since we're on the topic of parking.  Around this same time, I got a parking ticket.  Again this in and of itself is not particularly irritating; it's the price of non-suburban living.  Sometimes you take a chance with a spot that's not 100% legal and sometimes you get popped.  But you shouldn't get popped when you park at a meter and pay the meter and return to your car before it expires.  And yet that is precisely what happened to me.

My car is the silver Prius.  You'll notice a car is parked in front of me.  You'll notice there are two meters.  I paid the back one.  And I had plenty of time remaining when I returned, so you can imagine my surprise when I noticed the meter maid (I'm sure they have a more PC term now, but I want to be as degrading as possible) placing a ticket on my car.  My recollection of our conservation is as follows:

Me: Why are you writing me a ticket?  There's still time on the meter.
Her: You're pulled too far forward.
Me: What?  Too far forward from what?
Her: The meter.
Me: What? I pulled up behind that car, there's plenty of room between us, and I paid the meter.  What did I do wrong?
Her: You should've parked a few feet back.
Me:  What? ... Why?
Her: Sir, you can protest the ticket if you want.
[She starts to walk away.]
Me: [Shouting] THANKS FOR RUINING MY DAY!
Possibly homeless man who just watched this all:  Now, now, I done told that woman not to write that ticket. 'That man paid the meter', I told her.  That ain't right.
Me: I guess I'll have to fight it.
Man: Hahahahaha ... You bes' call your lawyer 'bout this one.

I didn't call my lawyer (in part because I don't have a lawyer), but I did fight it.  And I won.  And by won I mean I wasted an hour of my time writing a letter and compiling evidence (pictures I took of the scene) to protest it.

One thing that isn't relevant to the story at all, but still feels like it bears mentioning for some reason is that the meter maid had a pierced eyebrow.

Picture 3:  Over Thanksgiving I was with the family in South Carolina visiting the in-laws.  One day I went for a run around the neighborhood.  The streets aren't laid out in a grid or anything like that (it's deep suburbia), so to avoid getting turned around, I remember the street names and then run back on the same route I took out.  I did this -- so I thought -- but I still got lost somehow.  It wasn't a big deal; I had my phone with me, so I could just use the map app.  But still, I couldn't figure out how I got lost, as I was pretty sure I had remembered the streets correctly.

Then I saw this, and it all made sense.

  
Or at least it made sense how I took the wrong street.  Why anybody would have Holiday Ct. cross Holiday Rd., however, makes no sense.  Although, to be fair, there are only, what, 100,000 suitable names for streets?

So those are my photographs.  Now I'll tell you about my memory.

Last Saturday I was hit with a really strong sense of -- I don't know what the right term is -- deja vu, let's say.  Just a vague sense of reminiscence with nothing specific.  But as the day went on it started to slowly congeal into an actual memory.  It was a song my dad used to play on his record player -- an obscure, silly novelty song from the '70s called "I am the Tiger".  The title came to me because I remembered telling an older kid about it, and he insisted that I was thinking of "The Eye of the Tiger", but I wasn't.

I tried Googling the song, but I couldn't come up with anything.  Then I remembered a few of the lyrics; it had the word "ding-dong" in it (which I thought was funny as a kid); and it had something to do with a flood.  So I tried Google again, and this time I found it.  It's actually called "I am the Lion", and it's not a novelty song.  It's Neil Diamond.  And it's on the same album as "Cracklin' Rose" (Tap Root Manuscript), so it probably doesn't qualify as obscure either.  It is kinda silly though.  I'll embed it below.



Thinking about this song -- about how in my memory it was something so exotic and mysterious, but in actuality it's a mainstream song by a huge recording artist -- made me wonder if the things I play for Lil' S now are going to seem that way to him someday.  Or has the Internet pretty much killed all the mystery of things now?    

Next I started thinking about Lil' S being my age.  And that set off a full-on existential freakout in my head, where I thought about how I would be dead someday.  And I don't mean I thought about it like how I'm thinking about it now, I mean I thought about it.  About once a year I have this type of existential crisis where I briefly understand the implications my demise will have on me, only to realize that there are no implications because I won't be here.  It's a real mind fuck, and I'm glad it only happens about once a year.

Well, as Roger Ebert once said, "I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state."  That's about as comforting as it gets for nonbelievers like myself.

Until next time ...    

*When I use "him" in a generally sense, I mean him or her and just don't want to write it out every time because it reads weird.