Best-Selling Humorist.
Well, apparently the essay I recorded for WBEZ’s “848” program was broadcast this morning. That’s such a fast turnaround that they didn’t have a chance to email me about it. I only recorded it yesterday, and my phlegm-hampered delivery left the producer with a complicated editing job. Or so I thought. But I already received two emails about it, so apparently it happened. “Yay,” he said, flatfootedly.
When the link is posted on BEZ’s website, I’ll put it here.
Number One Son went to his first school dance tonight. A Junior High dance.
I ain’t ready for this.
I trust everyone had a reasonably fine Thanksgiving, and without too much heavy obligation, found a lot of things to be thankful for. It really is such a nice holiday, it’s a shame that so many horrible travel stories accompany it. Our family has plenty to be thankful for, but you might be able to guess many of them. But you want to know what I’m really thankful for?
I’m so thankful for the Nerf Arsenal, and the pandemonium it brought to our house on Saturday night, that I can only attempt to describe it.
My son Liam, who’s now eleven, had a couple of the boys from his old school over on Saturday night for pizza and video games. The idea and impetus was actually mine, because I thought it would be a perfect night for it, and December would be too busy for everyone’s schedule. In the afternoon, Liam worked on setting up the television room for it, even checking the settings on the Gamecube so there wouldn’t be any memory problems or technical snafus.
Then he got out his Nerf Arsenal and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. Mustering what he thought was a Schwarzenegger accent (like he’s seen many “Terminator” movies!), he greeted the boys at the door. They were stunned, “Wow, that’s the biggest gun I’ve ever seen!” For the rest of the night, allowing for respites in front of the TV, they ran around the house ambushing each other with orange foam projectiles and screaming and panting and laughing their heads off.
Why did all this chaos thrill me so much? Because Liam never has friends over unless it’s his birthday or something. Liam has Asperger’s Syndrome, which we diagnosed around his third birthday. For those of you who don’t know, Asperger’s is a form of autism that makes it hard to understand social situations. The best description I ever heard of it was that it’s like permanent culture shock, in which a person (usually a male) can’t really figure out why things happen as they do and how to keep himself involved in the interaction.
Asperger’s is a spectrum disorder, and not everyone is afflicted to the same extent. Liam is much, much better off than many with AS, and many people who meet him can overlook the condition completely. But I’ve seen him on his good days and bad, and I’m a worrier by nature anyway. For eight years, I’ve fretted about him–how he’s going to grow, how he’s going to function as a teen and adult, how much he’s going to get out of life, how much he’s going to enjoy himself.
So seeing him playing War with two other sixth graders–that’s about the best present I’m going to get this year.
When I bought him the Nerf Arsenal last year, my wife was reluctant. She’s not an incredible peacenik or anything, but the idea of these comically huge guns shooting missiles around her house made her a little uneasy. The trouble is, she never had a brother, and so doesn’t realize how much interaction and satisfaction men get from playing War. For Liam’s sake, I think any kind of interaction is worthwhile. And it looks like so far, I’m right.
So if you hear anybody this Christmas season get on their soapbox and spout off about how awful it is to sell toy guns, just remember that they can be very therapeutic, in a literal sense. It also helps the father, when he gets to shoot suction cup darts at the faces of football coaches on TV.
Thank you, Hasbro, for Nerf N-Strike, Action Blasters, and all your other fine squishy products!!
Fifteen years ago today, on a very frigid and windy Chicago day, my wife and I were married downtown. An intimate chapel in a larger, very beautiful church. Wearing my grandfather’s tuxedo from the 1920s. A wonderful ceremony that I can’t remember anything of. A rollicking reception at a restaurant around the corner. Dancing till all hours to the jump jazz of Dominic Bucci and the International Fingers. Tributes from performer friends during the band’s intermission. Never had a bite of food. Overserving the band quite a bit. Dancing the Batusi. Friends, family, and the official start of a beautiful life together. My brother said it was the best blues wedding he’d ever been to.
So we’re leaving the kids with my in-laws and taking a long weekend in San Francisco together.
It is indeed a wonderful life.
Three great things happened today. In no particular order:
1. I handed in my manuscript to my publisher.
2. Donald Rumsfeld resigned.
3. I got my iPod to work on my car receiver.
I was tempted to climb in bed at 4 pm, just so nothing could come along to wreck the day.
November is here. Probably the least appreciated month of the year, what with the dwindling daylight, the prospect of elections, somber Veteran’s Day, and that dutiful holiday called Thanksgiving. Don’t the calendar makers realize that every month should be fun fun FUN? Why are they keeping us from jumping straight from Halloween’s excesses to Christmas’ excesses?
Not convinced? Okay, here are some of the things we’re supposed to celebrate in November:
British Appreciation Month
Good Nutrition Month
National Alzheimer’s Disease Month
National Stamp Collecting Month
Religion and Philosophy Books Month
Peanut Butter Lover’s Month.
This dreary parade cannot even be saved by National Fig Week, which we are enjoying right now.
But I’m not letting it get me down. One reason is, I’m practically finished with the manuscript for my new book, which will eliminate a lot of tension around the house, at least until the weeks before publication in March. My editor and I have even agreed to a title, which is a long, boring story about which I may post sometime.
Another reason is, our TIVO is finally back and running, along with our DSL modem, cell phones, and dishwasher. Can you dispute the existence of gremlins at this time of year?
So it’s a good time to revisit my New Year’s resolutions and finally toe the line. One of those resolutions was, blog every day. This can still be accomplished, since I never designated a starting date. November 1 is as good a date as any, I guess.
Besides, Nov. 1 is also the birthday of the hydrogen bomb (1952) and the brassiere (1914).
Santa’s Village Amusement Park in Dundee, Ill., is a staple of the childhood memories of local Baby Boomers that closed last year. While nothing can take the place of those memories, those with the yard space can bring home big souvenirs tomorrow as they auction off the equipment and rides like The Dragonfly, the Fire Chief Crazy Bus, and the Tubs-O-Fun. The auction catalog can be found here. They’re even selling off their Zamboni machines. Come on, you always wanted a Zamboni, right? Probably cheaper than a Hummer.
All I want is one of their Skee-Ball alleys. With enough practice, maybe I could finally beat it.
Via Gaper’s Block.
Mich. OKs evolution curriculum
The State Board of Education on Tuesday approved public school curriculum guidelines that support the teaching of evolution in science classes–but not intelligent design.
Ex-Packers groupie seeks score at polls
The usually ho-hum race for Wisconsin secretary of state is being spiced up by one candidate’s tell-all book about her bed-hopping exploits with Green Bay football legends during the team’s glory days under Vince Lombardi in the 1960s.
Hail the beloved bluegill. This summertime staple, this amiable bream, this scintillating sunfish is now being used to fight terrorism in several major cities. This article explains how this patriotic panfish is being used to detect whether any type of toxins or contaminants have been dumped into our water supplies.
Small numbers of the fish are kept in tanks constantly replenished with water from the municipal supply, and sensors in each tank work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and swimming patterns of the bluegills that occur in the presence of toxins.
“Nature’s given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there,” said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the bluegill monitoring system. “There’s no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill.”
And here, I’ve been cursing them for stealing my bait. So put that bluegill back in the lake, little lady. He’s got to grow a little bigger so he can do his civic duty.
Wanted to alert the world (and especially that part of it in NY that supports the theater biz) that the showcase starring my brother Patrick Garner has had two performances added in the coming week.
“Desperate Measures” is the musical, an update of “Measure for Measure” set it in the Wild West. It’s playing as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival. There’s more info and photos at the link for Broadway World dot com.
So get out there and support live theater, unless you’re one a them lowlifes who hates both Shakespeare, musical theater AND cowboys. And if you are, I don’t know how you can live with yourself.
here’s my present to you. A picture of the birthday cake that my ever-lovin’ wife and kids made for me on Sunday.
You may not be able to tell, but this cake depicts a beach scene with a bunch of little Teddy Grahams running around. The Beach is the brown crumbly area on the left, and the water is on the right. The teddies are playing with tubes and such, and up in the right hand corner, the orange thing that looks like an arrow is actually a boat pulling two teddies on tubes. (The long bumpy things are some candy called Crunchy Gummi Worms. Go get a big tubful of them, even if you’re not decorating an elegant dessert like this one.)
At the right end of the cake, my son spelled out my age in Roman numerals, in Crunchy Gummi Worms. That eases the pain of getting older–the more years you chalk up, the more worms it takes to make your cake.
I’ve written too much about intelligent design on this blog. That will slow down soon, if only because I don’t feel much like wrestling with a pig. That which is barely worth discussing is almost not worth mocking. Almost.
A friend sent along an AP article about the Roman Catholic position on ID, elucidated in their official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution “represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.”
[snip]
“This isn’t how science is done,” he wrote. “If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.”Intelligent design “doesn’t belong to science,” he wrote.
“It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical and religious planes.”
Don’t have to get much clearer than that. I went to Catholic schools for 12 years, and while I have problems with some church teachings, my education was top notch. And I remember one very, very crazed priest–the kind whose very intensity and mania made you physically afraid to be near him–with a very 17th century mind, who told us impressionable freshmen, flat out, “The Bible is not a book of science, or of history. It is a book of faith.” Then he’d start acting out scenes from British POW movies, doing all the parts himself. His point was clear, and maybe our fear helped us remember it.
My favorite part of the article, though, was this:
The article echoed similar arguments by the Vatican’s chief astronomer, Rev. George Coyne, who said intelligent design isn’t science and has no place in school classrooms.
Who’d’ve thought the Vatican had a chief astronomer? Is that strictly a sinecure, left over from the days of Galileo? Does the Vatican need an astronomer for more practical purposes, say, a space program? Does the Vatican have eyes on space?
A word to the wise: when Mel Brooks filmed “History of the World” and the segment on “Jews in Space”, it was fiction.