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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.

Out camping in Hawaii and run out of fuel for the cooking stove? Don’t mind a slight sulphurous smell to your cornish hen? Then check out tips on how to cook with the power of lava. Hey, it’s all natural.

Link via Cynical-C blog.

Okay, so… these days, there’s big money to be made in home health care, right? No one has insurance, no one wants to bother going to the emergency room for things, everyone is more into do-it-yourselfing, etc.

When is a big company going to market a home medical staple gun?

Think about it. Sutures are rarely used for gashes and gouges anymore–it’s all done with a little modified Black & Decker. So why not sell little sanitary staple guns for the home first aid kit, with really expensive replacement cartridges for the staples? Wouldn’t such a little wonder be appealing to the man of the house, who could just seal himself up after an accident chopping wood? Wouldn’t the kids be fascinated by the mechanism while they’re being patched up? Wouldn’t a company love to manufacture some of these and sell them to consumers with a big scary campaign, even if they were pretty certain people wouldn’t use them?

Happy 2006 to everyone out there! I trust that your holidays were good ones, and that you’re all tan, rested and ready for the year to come.

No? Me neither.

I’m not saying the Christmas break wasn’t a good one. It had more high points than low ones. It’s just that getting back to the things I ignored in the last month of 2005 is leaving me less than excited. The last weeks of December were spent in a mad dash to design family calendars for our two famlies featuring pix of the kids (not just mine but all the brothers’ and in-laws’), getting out Christmas cards (which of course have to be homemade, b/c my kids love to draw and everyone now expects such personalized items), doing last-minute shopping, getting year-end finances together, and various other nagging projects. Thank heaven I’m not employed–I’d be out on my ass in an instant.

Gee, you think THAT’s the reason I haven’t had a book out in a couple years?

Then, throughout the holiday, two things wore me down: weather and guests. December gave Chicago a record amount of snowfall and about three weeks of subzero weather. Great! thinks I. When we get up to Michigan, that means lots of sledding, cross country skiing, and skating on our lake.

Of course, it wasn’t meant to be. I just didn’t think 10 days of 38 degrees and no sun would leave me feeling like I need electroshock just to carry on a conversation.

And as much as I love my family, this time we had way too much of everyone. From the 24th to the 1st, we had approx. 12 hours in which we weren’t hosting people or at a reception or party of some kind. My mom would answer my complaint sarcastically as follows: “Ooh, it’s hell to be popular.” Said sarcastically, to underscore my lack of popularity as a kid. At least she wasn’t among the people we were hosting.

During the week, I’m a complete troll. Work in the basement all day. Maybe go out once a week, pass some pleasantries, then back to my cave. If it’s possible to groom yourself for agoraphobia, I might have the system down. So seeing so many people in such a short time might be something I need, but it’s strong medicine.

On the plus side of the vacation: Seeing my son so incredibly happy to get a Nerf weapons system that’s the size of a European car, seeing my daughter so happy to get a new American Girl doll (she wanted the Gilded Age one, because nothing sad happens during her story), seeing a few old friends in from Los Angeles, decorating our perfect Frasier fir with homemade and paper ornaments, seeing “King Kong”, not having to watch both the Wolverines and the Bears lose this week, and drinking lots and lots of scotch, port, beer and wine.

Doesn’t the phrase “Nerf Weapons System” sound like an oxymoron?

Here’s to a good new year. We sure could use one.

My calendar tells me that today in Scotland and New Zealand, it is officially the “Day After New Year’s Day”. I’m glad they have that all settled.

This will be my last post until the new year. I had intended to post a Christmas story today–I write one every year for my wife, and some are pretty good–but I had trouble figuring out how to do it in Adobe so that it would be more difficult to borrow without credit. Nothing says Christmas like copyright infringement! That’s what makes an iPod such an ideal gift. Maybe I’ll figure it out by next Christmas, so you can all enjoy the tale of the Headless Elf and the Brimstone Reindeer! (Ooops, wrong holiday)

So be good, drink a lot, recite “It’s a Wonderful Life” until somebody throws a punch, and have a great holiday. Let’s look forward to 2006 as a year of goodwill, peace, and prosperity, just like we did last year.

For some cool obscure holiday music, follow this link to the “Sound Opinions” radio show, but get there before the end of Boxing Day:

http://soundopinions.com/christmas/index.html

“Hey, dig me–I’m givin’ out wings!”

When I was a teenager, I loved nothing better than putting on my headphones and listening to “Exile on Main Street” at a body-shaking volume (it being usually late at night when I got the chance). Later on in a misspent youth, quite below the legal drinking age, I made it in to a lot of the first punk bars in Detroit. Clubs like Bookie’s and the New Miami, for those who want to get nostalgic. And when tours were announced for bands other than Journey and Kansas and the Babys and whatever other kind of bastardized rock you can name, I snapped up tickets to those, too, and did everything I could to let the music pound through my body as if I were a jellyfish. After a triumvirate of the Ramones in November 1978, the Police two months later, and the Jam two months after that, I remember feeling like someone had rammed a spike down my ear canals, giving me unsettling pain to go along with the expected ringing in my ears.

The pain eventually stopped, but the ringing never has, and has actually gotten worse over the years.

We could never figure out why I got it quicker and more severely than any of my friends, some of whom were musicians (shouldn’t being in Big Black have had some kind of corrosive effect?). But such is life. Since losing my hearing was the worst thing that ever happened to me (how’d you like to be a writer and not be able to overhear conversations in public?) , I’ve badgered all my nieces and nephews to wear ear protection at concerts. Being smarter than me, they have actually followed my advice. And for anyone reading now, considered yourself badgered. Earplugs have never been easier to find at the store.

If you want to know what it feels like to have constant ringing in your head, check out this story on NPR about composer Brent Michael Davids. A sufferer of tinnitus (the medical name for the high-pitched ringing), Davids wrote “Tinnitus Quartet” to give audiences an idea of what it’s like to have this condition. Listen to that high A in the short snippet in the newsstory, and then imagine having that in your head day and night, every day of your life.

Ironically, even though The Jam was the band that broke my ear’s camel’s back, I didn’t even like them all that much. About three years later, they were one of my favorite bands

It doesn’t make you look like a Yukon fur trader.

It makes you look like a Yukon pimp.

You’ve got it made. Or so says the old joke about acting. But now it appears to apply to marketing as well.

The folks at Urban Outfitters—the same people who last year brought you the feel-good board game for all ages, Ghettopoly—are lending their unique tinsel touch to Christmas decorations. Now, for a mere $24, you can own a replica of that eloquent statement against the commercialization of Christmas, Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.

No word on what they would charge for replicas of Zuzu’s petals, but it’s only a matter of time with these kinds of places, who cater to people with disposable income but no style, imagination or (apparently) sense of irony.

Reminds one of those gargantuan Christmas pageants that some megachurches put on, complete with choir, orchestra, and camel riders, that intend to hammer home Christ’s humble beginnings in the most outlandish manner possible. “Christ may have preached a gospel of humility, but really, this is the kind of birthday celebration he’d really like.”

Nothing sells like humility, baby. Milk it, milk it!

When you hand out the sweets at Halloween, do you give the kids the candy you don’t particularly want or like first? If you were down to giving a kid a Reese’s cup—I mean, a full Reese’s cup—and a roll of broken Smarties, you’d give the kid the Smarties, right?

I’m asking because some of the kids who came to my house may be surprised to find leftover Easter candy in their bags. Hey, beggars and costumed extortionists can’t be choosers. They might not even be surprised, and will just eat whatever gets tossed at them.

This weekend, the Cub Scouts were cleaning out their storage locker in the church basement, and were throwing out a bag of Easter candy. This year’s candy, I presume. My son, being admirably frugal, picked the bag out of the pile and brought it home to augment our Halloween candy. And I encouraged him. I thought it was a great idea.

First off, I always freak out on Halloween that we’re going to run out of candy. With every trip to the store, I’ll grab an extra bag of treats, just to have in reserve. When the kids stop home for a break, I make them pull out the things they won’t eat so I can pass them along to someone else. (And who can blame them for getting rid of Three Musketeers bars? Can we send this one to the candy afterlife like Maple Buns and Charleston Chews?)

These weren’t just any Easter nibbles. They were chocolate eggs. (I mean, Marshmallow Peeps would start to get a bit hard by now.) And, they weren’t just any chocolate eggs. These were eggs made of Nestle’s Crunch and Butterfinger and other attempts at crossover monopolization of holiday sweets. So, you know, nothing from the Dollar Store that advertises its chocolate as having “really chocolate flavor.”

When kids I didn’t know came up to the house, I didn’t slip them the Twix bars or the York Peppermints or the M&Ms. Those packets were all visible in the basket, nice and shiny. But I made a little pile of the chocolate eggs right up in the front of the basket, where their little eyes couldn’t see them, and grabbed a couple to toss into the first bags. (Dropping in more than one item always creates a sound that makes me look really generous.) All I’m saying is, if we’re going to end up with any leftovers, it better be the stuff that I’m gonna eat. I even ate one of the little eggs, and it was fine, just fine. I’m still here, aren’t I? It’s not like I really pimped them by handing out toothbrushes or religious pamphlets. Those kinds of people deserve to be deported.

And hell, it wasn’t Christmas candy. That would’ve been a little much. Well, maybe not. Does peppermint have a half-life?

Suicide Mistaken for Halloween Decoration