Friday, January 27, 2006

Bowling

Last Sunday, I very roughly planned my morning around going to the gym at about 10, so I could watch football while exercising. Just before I left the house, I looked at the paper and it turned out the game wasn't on until 12. Damn. Had my gym clothes on, so I went ahead and went. Well, there was no football on the gym TV, so, instead, they had on . . . bowling. (On ESPN, just like in the old days, before ESPN showed roughly 50% college basketball, 25% exercise shows and 25% SportsCenter.)

Yes, bowling. Don't watch bowling much. When I was a kid geeking out on sports on Saturday, I used to watch bowling once in a while because it came on between college football games and Wide World of Sports. Anyway, I still geek out on sports, but not to that pretty pathetic extent anymore.

So there I am on the elliptical machine, exercising away, and I notice that one of the bowlers was wearing a HEADBAND. Yes, the bowler, he was bowling away so much, exerting so much energy, sweating so much, that he needed a headband. Now, granted, the guy was bald. I suppose that it's possible that the TV lights are pretty warm and, when reflected on the clouds of cigarette smoke floating near the ceiling of the bowling alley, might make someone sweat, the bald guy who was wearing one on TV especially, I guess. But, oh my God, have some "athletic" pride. You're a bowler, not an NBA player. I still haven't quite gotten used to NBA players wearing headbands all over -- I still blame the Kings' loss in Game 7 of the 2002 Western Conference finals on the fact that, for some damn reason, Chris Webber decided to wear a headband that day for the first time ever for some ungodly reason -- but I totally understand the need for them in the NBA.

But, in bowling, please. I saw a comedian one time who said that bowling was the only sport you could play while simultaneously shooting heroin. That might be a slight overstatement, but I'm pretty sure that headbands are uncalled for. I mean, what's next? Renting you headbands that other people have used while bowling? Why stop at renting you random shoes? Renting socks?

Professional bowlers should not wear headbands. Not even professional golfers wear headbands. Of course, that's probably because, if a professional golfer wore a headband, he or she couldn't rake in as much endorsement dough because headbands are too small to really show off those nice corporate logos on TV. Caps and visors make much better billboards. I mean, do you ever watch golf on TV? Those guys are like human stock cars.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Homework

Man, homework is not fun. Not my homework, mind you. Sometimes, I have to schelp work home and that's not my favorite thing, but it goes along with being an attorney and the associated deadlines. So that kind of homework is just an occupational hazard.

No, what I'm talking about here is The Mermaid's homework. I don't mind helping The Mermaid with homework in the abstract and, in fact, The Muse does most of the work in helping The Mermaid with homework. (Thanks for that, Muse.) No, what mostly gets me is the sheer amount of homework. We're talking about at least an hour, sometimes two, just about every weeknight. Part of that is due to the fact that homework takes longer with The Mermaid due to her condition, but I don't think that the amount of time that The Mermaid works is a quantum jump from what other kids do. And I don't think that our local school district is especially burdensome in this way. The Mermaid's in fifth grade. I don't remember anywhere near this much homework when I was in the fifth grade. The Muse doesn't remember this level of homework in fifth grade either, and her school wasn't just across a chain-link fence from a working cow pasture.

Why are we doing this to our children? Why are we burying them in homework? From what I hear from teachers and other school-types that we know, it sounds like a lot of it is driven by the new emphasis on standards and testing in the last 10 years or so and The No Child Left Behind Act, in particular. That kind of stuff seems to be driven by these things you hear about "American children ranking 47th out of 50th industrialized countries on math tests."

What exactly are we trying to achieve in doing all of this? Certainly we need to improve our schools. Any time you have to fight and get hostile over a period of a couple of months to get your special-needs child the assistance that everyone agrees is necessary, things aren't perfect. And we live in one of the best school districts around.

But dumping all kinds of homework on fifth-graders and kids of similar ages really limits the time that they have to be kids and do the things that teach them to be creative. And isn't it being creative that really is what makes things work here, in California and in the U.S. generally?

There was a very interesting article in Newsweek a couple of weeks ago about this. The columnist -- I think that it was Fareed Zakaria -- interviewed the education minister from Singapore, which has some of the highest test scores in the world. The minister was saying that Singapore really needs to learn from the U.S. about encouraging that. The columnist also quoted a friend of his who was from Singapore, but who had lived in the U.S. with his children for several years. According to the friend, in American schools, his children had picked up that it was good to comment and to express their ideas, but that, in Singapore, when his kids tried to that, they were viewed as weird and obnoxious. The friend moved his children to Western-style private schools in Singapore.

Kids definitely need to know their multiplication tables by fifth grade. They need to be figuring out word problems, grammar and basic analytical skills in social sciences. But lots of two-factor algebraic word problems? Geometry in 8th grade (which apparently is now available)? Settle down, people.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Aaron Burr + TV = Crazy Hilarious

If you've seen Lazy Sunday, you know that two of the funniest things that have ever been on TV -- Lazy Sunday and the "Get Milk" ad where the guy can't answer the radio trivia question because his mouth of full of peanut butter and he has no milk -- prominently feature Aaron Burr references. (If you haven't seen Lazy Sunday, where you been? Go to YouTube.com, type in "lazy sunday" and download it. "Are you buyin' what we're handlin'?/You can call us Aaron Burr/From the way we're droppin' Hamiltons.") I'll bet if you had told Burr's contemporaries 200 years ago that he would be such a good source of jokes, they wouldn't have believed you. This is the guy who ran for Vice-President on a ticket with Thomas Jefferson and, when they tied in the Electoral College (because someone screwed up and didn't withhold one vote from Burr), wouldn't defer and threw the election into the House of Representatives.

Oh, well, apparently even heavy, balding and not-very-honest Vice-Presidents can be funny eventually.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Please Stop Fighting

If you have watched cable or satellite TV in the last few years, then you have undoubtedly at least flipped past some show with people yelling at each other.

It really started with Morton Downey, Jr., I guess. One of the summers that I was working in a pizza place after high school, one of the other cooks was always talking about how he would watch this crazy show late at night after we would close up the pizza place. It was on Channel 26 out of Fresno, which was a sign of the show's anti-quality. (Channel 26 was/is the Fresno FOX affiliate and this was back when FOX was pretty scummy. Pre-Simpsons.) So I watched this Morton Downey, Jr., show a couple of times and it basically was a guy who would get a couple of guests on, always with a cigarette dangling in his fingers, and then they would fight and he would fight with them. It was pretty dumb.

Well, little did we know what would happen. First, Geraldo had a big fight on his set and his nose got broken and Newsweek had this outraged cover story about how awful the whole thing was. Then Sally Jesse Raphael had to get cheap to compete. Then came Jerry Springer and we all know about that (although it did spawn a brilliant song by Weird Al Yankovic based on the Bare Naked Ladies' "One Week.")

At some point, this virus of trashiness jumped over to supposedly more respectable things like CNN's Crossfire. Being a total political junkie in college, I used to watch that when I got home from the warehouse where I worked during the summer. I got pretty sick of it, though, because it basically turned into people yelling at each other about politics. Every day. Pat Buchanan would say, "I just can't believe that the Democrats don't want to improve the economy by cutting the capital gains tax. Whatever liberal guy they had then would say, "Well, I can't believe that how the Republicans want to concentrate all wealth in the top 1% of America. Buchanan: "God, you liberals never stop with that LBJ Great Society stuff. People need personal responsibility." Liberal: "You mean like how Herbert Hoover wanted to encourage personal responsibility?" Well, pretty much every political show on cable news now seems to feature people yelling at each other. This is no great insight of mine. Have you seen when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and told them to stop yelling because they were "hurting the country?" (He also told them he wouldn't "be their monkey." That was pretty cool.)

Sports shows have always featured people yelling at each other, but, hey, that was usually about something important like whether Shaq gets too many calls. (He does, damn it!) The absolute depth to which yelling culture has sunk, however, leapt out at me over Christmas.

Here I was, sitting in the little breakfast room at the Comfort Suites in Clovis. The hotel was pretty nice, but the breakfast room, well, I found it kind of wanting. No Equal for my cereal. The orange juice tasted funny. Only melons among the available fruit. (As an aside, I think that you can really tell the quality of a free hotel breakfast by the fruit. If all they have is cantaloupe and honeydew, you know it isn't going to be good. Step up to the pineapples and strawberries, people.) But they had ESPN on the little TV, so that was good (at least for we males).

But what they had on ESPN was this show First and 10 and what was happening on First and 10 was that two chuckleheads and the token attractive-female hosts were discussing their favorite sports movies. They get around to Caddyshack, of course, and one chucklehead declares something like:

"I think that is just about the best sports movie because it really makes fun of the stuff about golf that needs ridicule."

Then the other one says something like:

"You know, I really never liked Caddyschack very much. I mean, Bill Murray was really funny, but he basically had nothing to do with the rest of the movie, which wasn't great."

And there they went:

"Are you kidding me!?! Caddyshack is one of the funniest movies of all time!! I mean, Chevy Chase alone was hilarious!!"

"Please. All Chevy Chase did was act like he always did on Saturday Night Live! That had nothing to do with sports!"

"Give me a break. I mean, if you asked half of the American population, they would say that Caddyshack is hilarious! Look, even the dumb cameraman agrees with me!"

At which point, the token attractive-female host breaks in to say:

"Yeah, I think he's right. The crew does seem to agree with him about Caddyshack. Let's go to a commercial break, which will feature a Cialis ad, a beer ad and then a Bowflex ad." (OK, I made that last dependent clause up.)

At this point, I officially had reached my absolute fill of faux fighting culture. I know that there are a million cable and satellite channels and people need to get viewers to keep them all on, but, God, shut up with the fighting. On ESPN Classic, when they have one of their countdown shows (e.g., Best Plays (usually ending with Kirk Gibson's home run as #1, as it should be), Best Rose Bowls, Worst Chokes (Buckner, #1 of course -- God that's still horrible to watch)), they now have a little piece at the end where two ESPN Radio debate the list. And they fight, of course. Why, why, why?

All of this made-up fighting is just bad for us, I think. I think that contributes to people just refusing to listen to other people's points of view. Like Jon Stewart said, it's hurting the country. It encourages obnoxious people like Rick Santorum and Howard Dean. Shut up a minute. Have some nice chamomile tea or a beer, depending on your preference. Watch some Blue's Clues or Jeopardy. Just please stop fighting.