A selection of dystopic futures:

• Totalitarian government controls our very thoughts and prohibits sex. Barcodes tattooed on everyone’s foreheads.
• Ravening undead spread across the globe seeking brains to consume. Shotgun and chainsaw prices skyrocket.
• Emboldened by death of Charlton Heson, marauding aliens enslave humanity, force us to build enigmatic monuments to confuse future archaeologists.
• End of oil leads to an BDSM-inspired biker gangs battling through an anarchic desert landscape.
• Giant astroid headed for Earth, government efforts to stop it held up by bureaucratic red tape. Survivors envy the dead.
• All social interaction conducted through Facebook, and food rations are determined by how many friends we can get to add our application.
• Newly-sentient computers make war on their creators, humans acquiesce to machine rule, having forgotten how to live without email.
• Current packaging trends carried to their logical conclusion. With all food encased in impenetrable blister packs, humans starve to death.
• Environment trashed, humanity attempts to flee to a new planet, only to realize that no one ever really bothered to figure out interstellar space flight.
• Proliferation of antibacterial hand washes leads to an outbreak of drug-resistant pinkeye that decimates humanity.

Passover Follies

Passover starting on a Saturday night this year, I had the opportunity of being with my family for both seders. That’s particularly nice now that our traditional first night seder with my father’s family takes place at the Jewish Home in Worcester, the nursing home where several of my great-grandparents spent their last days, site of some of my earliest memories, and my grandmother’s current residence.

For those of you who don’t know, a seder is the ritual meal that begins the holiday of Passover, during which we retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Think of Thanksgiving dinner with a 45-minute religious service tacked on to the beginning. Like any essentially-family-oriented event, it gets a little odd when it’s conducted in an “institutional” rather than a family setting.

If you can picture the following, you’re halfway there:

A group of geriatric Worcester Jews being asked to sing “Go Down Moses” to a Muzak-style “reggae” beat pumped out of a portable karaoke system.*

The seder leader singing the aforementioned in a voice that (presumably unwittingly) is an eerily precise echo of Ana Gasteyer’s middle-school music teacher from Saturday Night Live.

Constant feedback from the sound system, exacerbated by the leader shouting into the microphone, while one attendee shouted from the back that he couldn’t hear.

My offering to sing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” for the crowd after my sister sang the Four Questions.

My Mom was convinced we were going to get kicked out. Of a Passover seder. At a nursing home. Believe you me, cognitive dissonance ain’t in it.

*”Go Down Moses” has, however absurdly, become a seder staple. Sure, the subject matter is appropriate, but Lenny Bruce’s opinions aside, I’ve always felt that Jewish singing lacked something in the way of what’s conventionally called “soul”. I realize that I may be in the minority opinion here.

Talk is cheap, but profitable

John McCain seems to just about have the Republican nomination wrapped up, but Mike Huckabee, who by his own admission favors miracles over mathematics, is staying in the race, for reasons only he could really speak to. Perhaps he’s encouraged by Rush Limbaugh’s assertion that he (along with several other members of the conservative punditocracy) just won’t support McCain.

Whenever ol’ Rush manages to claw his way back into the mindspace of the mainstream public, I always start wondering how to look at him. Is his rhetoric prescriptive or descriptive? Does he actually influence the segment of the public that constitutes his audience, or does he just reflect their views? “Dittoheads”, the sometime self-applied appellation of his listeners, suggests that they see themselves as echoing his views, but I think that it’s a little more complex than that.

There’s a certain sort of entertainment that consists mostly of repeating people’s views back to them, giving them a cheap feeling of validation out of hearing themselves echoed by someone with a microphone. Performers in Boston will sometimes make jabs at New York sports teams, which always produces raucous cheers. For a moment, it’s like we’re on the stage, because someone’s up there saying just what we’d say. It’s especially effective if the views being echoed are ones that we feel we’re a bit persecuted for. After a while, it becomes a bit symbiotic, and you can’t really tell who’s echoing whose views anymore.

I’m encouraged in this view of Limbaugh by the way that he talks out of both sides of his mouth about his own role. To his listeners, he’s a political oracle. To his critics, he presents himself as an entertainer, almost as if he’s just playing the part of a rabid conservative, while actually going home at night, drinking merlot, and voting for Dennis Kucinich (in fairness, I consider this scenario unlikely). It reminds me a bit of Jerry Springer. While obviously exploiting some of the worst and most extreme in human nature under the thing guise of helping people resolve their problems, Springer says it’s just a job. I had the intriguing experience of listening to him speak once (at my alma mater), and he said that given the choice, he’d host a show on his main interests, sports and politics, but that his show is what he’s paid to do. Just a job. Only following orders. Nolo contendere?

Be it as it may, there’s something uniquely American about pursuing entertainment and money no matter how destructive it might be, and oddly, I don’t say that in a wholly condemnatory manner. In the immortal words of Red Green, “It’s not smart, or correct, but it’s one of the things that makes us what we are.”

More Favorites

Work is dull at the moment. Dullness leads to Internet browsing, which leads to the desire for Internet content creation. And since the easiest way to generate content is recycling, you’re getting treated to another episode of “The S Post Facto Mid-Oughts Top Fives”.

Yeah, yeah. Two posts in two days. The world must be ending.

Top 5 Favorite TV Shows

5) Mystery Like so much on public television, an American-made portal for British content, and for a long time a comforting ritual to keep away the looming anxieties that Sunday night brings. I’m a particular fan of Inspector Lynley and Foyle’s War, but I don’t watch as much anymore.

4) Doctor Who Like you didn’t know I was a huge geek already. I grew up mostly on the Tom Baker and Peter Davison doctors, and I’m really enjoying the new series. I’m just hoping that they can get their act together and get Series 4 on the air in the US sooner rather than later.

3) The Simpsons For a long time, the smartest show on TV. For some reason, I don’t really watch anymore, although the occasional rerun still makes me happy. I’d probably peg “22 Short Films About Springfield” as my favorite episode.

2) Monty Python’s Flying Circus If I have to explain why I like this, you’ve learned nothing. Unless you haven’t seen it, in which case, I don’t want to talk to you until you have. People who know the Pythons only through the movies are missing out. A lot.

1) Northern Exposure I remember watching this on TV with my parents when it was first on, and being extremely confused about whether it was supposed to be drama or comedy (come to think of it, I had the same problem with Dragnet), but I really fell in love with it in college, when watching it in reruns on A&E would frequently make me late for class. A full analysis of why it appeals to me would probably read more like a psychological profile, but it’s painted for me about the only really appealing picture I’ve seen of small-town life.

Closing note: This isn’t a current list, obviously, but writing it up has reminded me that I don’t really watch that much TV these days. I’m reluctant to get involved in watching new shows (even shows I enjoy, like the new Battlestar Galactica). Even with the immense convenience of timeshifting via DVR, following too many shows starts to feel like an imposition. An unfortunate consequence of this may be that when I do watch TV, it ends up being semi-mindless flipping, which is an inefficient use of my leisure time.

Super Bowl et alia

Well, it’s over. The quest for perfection has ended at 18-1. Quite simply, the Giants outplayed the Patriots tonight, on offense and defense, and the Pats just couldn’t make the clutch plays they needed to hold them off. Oh well. It was still an incredible season, with a plethora of records broken, and the only 16-0 regular season ever. Besides, it’s less than two weeks until spring training starts.

A few miscellaneous items that I’ve been meaning to get up:

It’s old news by now that Scrabulous might be going away, but it’s still an alarming thought that lives at the back of my mind. At this point, I have no idea how I’ll get through the workday without it. I picture myself huddled under my desk in the fetal position, shaking as the withdrawal runs its course. What will really be interesting to me is whether Facebook will lose some momentum if Scrabulous goes away. I know a number of people (including myself) for whom it was a primary motivator for joining in the first place.

I’ve been working on a personal project lately, and it’s been a fun change of pace to turn the apparatus on a problem and really get into working on it. When work requires that depth of involvement, it’s usually because I’m staring down the barrel of a deadline, which tempers the exhilaration somewhat. Working on something that’s just for my own personal use takes that stress away and leaves only the pursuit of the High.

Sheryl remarks on a phenomenon that I’ve been experiencing as well: people I haven’t talked to in years suddenly cropping up again. Has this been happening to anyone else? It’s a little eerie.

Favorites

It’s funny in a way…I have a deep gut feeling that the time from late November to New Year’s Day is the downswing of the year. The days get shorter and shorter, darker and colder, but I always feel that once I get into the new year, that the world is back on the upswing. Inevitably, this feeling is somewhat deflated by the fact that the coldest weather of the winter seems to hit in January. On the other hand, there was light in the sky at 4:30 today, which was definitely not the case a few weeks ago. The world turns.

For a while, it was our habit at work to bring a top five list to our weekly project manager meetings. We assigned ourselves a topic (favorite books, music, etc.) and shared our favorites. It was an illuminating peek into our coworkers’ minds. I dug a few out the other day and thought I’d post one, with some annotations on why I made my choices. I’ll post a few more in future. These are circa mid-2006, for those as might care.

Top 5 Favorite Songs
5) Men at Work — “Down Under” Colin Hay and company’s stirring evocation of Australian patriotism has always struck a chord with me. Also, in college, there was an accompanying dance. That, I’m not going into.

4) Jethro Tull — “Thick as a Brick” After running across a cassette of this album/song in my Dad’s collection, it lived in my car’s tape player for a month or more. The lyrics, the flutes, the operatic scale of the thing…to an adolescent pretending to intellectualism, it was heady stuff.

3) Arlo Guthrie — “Darkest Hour” Guthrie is a great storyteller in prose or song, and this sweet little dreamscape centering around an assignation with a mysterious lover hit my ears around the time I really fell in love for the first time. ‘Nuff said.

2) They Might Be Giants — “Ana Ng” Everyone’s heard Flood, but the listening to the geeky anthem of disconnected love that opens Lincoln was, I think, the first time that I really rocked out, to the extent that a 14-year-old in Converse high-tops and a beret can do so.

1) Paul Simon — “Boy in the Bubble” I’m generally skeptical of the idea of a book, movie, or song changing someone’s life, but hearing Simon’s Graceland for the first time was a revelatory experience, and the opening accordions and lyrical depictions of a world of chaos and miracles still bring that back to me.

Closing note: As I wrote these up, I noticed that my reasons for choosing most of them harked back to my adolescence. Since I hated adolescence, I found this puzzling. I suppose that each of the songs above represents a formative moment of some sort for me. Perhaps if I try the exercise again in another decade, I’ll be writing about the songs I listened to in my mid-to-late twenties.

Irrelevant note: It just occurred to me that when you’re ordering a latte, specifying small, medium, or large just indicates how dilute you want your espresso. The only thing that’s changing there is the amount of milk. This is obvious, sure, but not the obvious kind of obvious.

Bememed

Looks like I’ve been tagged for a meme by John, so here goes. Apparently what we’re doing here is a mix of random facts about me along with near-brushes with fame.

1. I was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when it was apparently nicer than it is today. I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, which means that until I went to college, I had spent my entire life in former mill towns in New England. It is my opinion that I have not yet fully explored the effect that this had on my psyche.

Digression: My alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, hosts a symposium each year, and one of the guests one year was the famous Jerry Springer (he totally brought Steve with him, too). It was the only academic talk I’d ever been to at which the audience chanted the speaker’s name before he got up on stage. Afterwards, through the machinations of a fellow Mancunian, I was invited to an event where I got to shake his hand. I still have his autograph on a cocktail napkin somewhere.

2. Since graduating from college, I’ve been working in the field of educational publishing. As I’m now in my second job in that area, I guess it qualifies as a career now. I guess I’ve now answered the question of what one does with a degree in creative writing. I was asked that once by an English professor at Hopkins, and to this day, I kind of regret not asking him what he thought the English majors under his tutelage were going to do with their degrees (English and the Writing Seminars are separate departments at Hopkins, and they don’t get along at all).

Digression: I once shook Al Kaprielian’s hand, which was my reward for answering a question he posed correctly. If you didn’t grow up in New Hampshire, that means nothing to you. If you did grow up in New Hampshire, you’re probably wondering why in the hell I think that’s worth mentioning. Forget you. Al’s cool.

3. As I’m writing this, I’m listining to Van Morrison and the Chieftains singing Star of the County Down. Sometimes I wonder if Morrison can sing without sounding like he’s drunk. Somehow I don’t think it would be as good.

Digression: I once had dinner with Ben Stein and a woman who wasn’t his wife, but with whom I later received hearsay evidence that he was intimate. I got to choose the wine. It was a Zinfandel. Oh, and there were about ten other people there, and my contribution to the wine choice was more along the lines of saying that I didn’t like Merlot. This is my favorite story that is both completely true and totally misleading.

4. I was once present at a theft on an overnight train between Switzerland and France. People just walked into our compartment in the middle of the night, and while I argued sleepily with one in broken French, the other took my friend’s wallet and passport. This is one of my favorite travel stories.

5. I sometimes think that I’m the only New Englander who doesn’t like lobster and the only Jew who doesn’t like rye bread. I do love me some fried scallops and a good knish, though.

6. Watching Northern Exposure on DVD has made me wonder whether I really would enjoy living in Alaska. Generally, at this point, I decide I need to get out of the house more often.

7. Aside from two overnight business trips to the Chicago suburbs, I have never been to the midwest. As I generally believe that civilization extends north to Concord, NH; south to about Providence, RI; and west to Worcester, MA, I don’t really regret this.

At The Last Trump

Good Lord.

The Patriots had every chance to lose that game, and took pretty much all of them. A bad time out call by Baltimore and a fortuitous penalty kept them in the game, and even then, the touchdown was reviewed, and then, finally, Baltimore made a catch not more than a yard outside the end zone. If there had been any time on the clock, the perfect season still could have been ended.

Of course, to me, it was obvious what was happening. The Ravens had summoned up the tortured spirit of Edgar Allen Poe, and were using its power to affect events on the field (hence Brady’s sudden inability to complete passes). Sometime in the second half, Belichick performed some similarly hideous act of black magic in order to conjure up supernatural assistance of his own. Personally, I’m betting that he called up the dark imaginings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

High Fives With Strangers

It’s 1:25 a.m. on Monday as I write this, and the Red Sox have just won their second World Series of my lifetime.

The Thirsty Scholar is right around the corner from me, and I honestly don’t go there enough. It was packed to the rafters tonight when we headed over between the 7th and 8th innings to watch the end of the game with fans rather than alone. I watched a few of the other playoff games there, and it’s a great feeling to be surrounded by people with whom you share a common goal (albeit one you can’t really contribute to), even if you share nothing else. John (Emlyn) made that point well in his comment on the previous post: The Sox hold Boston together like nothing else. Call it the history, call it the proximity (Fenway just seems so much more “in-town” than even the Fleet Center/TD Banknorth Garden/Whateverthehellitis), call it whatever. The Sox pull us all together. As I walked home, you could already hear the car horns and screaming celebrants echoing through the streets.

Just because I can, I’ll leave you with some mildly pretentious words written on the same occasion in 2004, after a stroll down into Copley Square.

The moon shone through a haze of cigar smoke as it came out of eclipse over Copley Square around midnight, as October 27 became October 28, and a generations-long drought finally came to an end. Perhaps the stellar conjunction was appropriate, given the near-cosmic resonance this moment carries across New England.

The revelers walking through Copley may or may not have noticed the words carved on thes tones under their feet, part of the Boston Marathon monument, which quotes Tennyson’s Ulysses:

“One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For a nation of fans who’ve waited eighty-nine years (since before women could vote, as the TV helpfully pointed out), these words seem equally applicable. This is a drought that outlived a major superpower, for crying out loud (Soviet Union, 1917-1990).

It would, of course sound sacreligious to compare this to any other event in sports history, but in my brief perambulations, I was reminded of the 2001 Super Bowl. It was my junior year at Johns Hopkins, and the Ravens hadonly been in town a few years, ending a long absence of football from a football-loving town. I had attended the game that clinched them a playoff berth, so I had witnessed some of the excitement that finally came to a boil that night, but it was nothing compared to what we saw cruising downtown after the game. People ran between the lanes of parked-car traffic, slapping hands with the people sitting on the windowsills of their car doors. Pretty wild stuff, all in all.

Play Ball

Sittin’ at work, sporting a Papelbon shirt. Something about the death stare/Riverdance combo really appeals to me.

A confession: until recently (the past five years or so), I never really followed baseball. Sure, if I was asked, I always said I supported the Red Sox, and to the extent that I was ever paying attention, I did. To be perfectly honest, I found baseball a little boring, even when I finally decided during my college years (thanks to cheap last-minute seats at spacious Camden Yards) that a game was a pleasant way to spend a sunny summer afternoon.

I think it was moving back to New England (and eventually back into Boston itself) after college that really did it. I know a few people who are planning on moving here in the near future, and I’ve made an effort to explain to them that baseball seeps through your pores here, but I don’t think that I’ve really captured it. It’s hard to convey that while you do need to know a few things about the Sox and how they’re doing to keep up at the water cooler, you don’t need to worry, since it’ll seep in through your pores, no matter your expressed level of disinterest. What’s more, someday you’ll get the warm feeling inside that comes from hearing the cheers from next door and knowing that everyone around you is doing the same thing at the same time.

Will Leitch in the New York Times thinks that the success of the Red Sox in recent years has made Boston fans more “normal”, and less into the martyr complex that people (often non-Bostonians) seem to feel that everyone here has. He may have a point, and he may not. Boston was, for a long time, and Irish town, and to quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan (in a wildly inappropriate way, as he was speaking of the assasination of John F. Kennedy): “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.” Being a Boston sports fan used to be about suffering, but now it’s about fun. Is one nobler than the other? Is fun the point of sport? Is victory too simplistic an outcome for the psychosocial drama that we construct around sporting events? Hell, I don’t know. I’ll save a deeper meditation on sport for later in the series.

Go Sox!