Wednesday, May 31, 2006

SCOURGE OF THE DANCE

White men should not do booty-shake. Most of us just look confused when we try. And yet each weekend, like lemmings marching to the sea, tame, suburban creatures wander onto dance floors and turn mating rituals into slapstick.

There needs to be a way of stopping these men from trying to unleash the inner satyr before it is too late. Tranquilizer guns are effective but carry too much risk of collateral damage; in trying to trank the dweeb, you may instead hit the hottie who should be dancing until dawn.

So I suggest red card/yellow card penalties for dance floor infractions. For instance, the first time you see a guy dancing like a puppy humping a coffee table leg or thrashing about like a sea otter getting electro-shock therapy, that's a yellow card warning. Next time is a red card and banishment from the club or bar for two weekends.

Or there could be some magic potion brewed to help. Just when Melvin J. Actuary is about to "get down" somebody could run up to him, give him a bottle and say, "Drink this quick! It's your inhibitions!"

Or one could simply resort to a lesson from history: Teddy Roosevelt did not "bust a move" when started work on the Panama Canal, and posterity has been forever grateful.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

PAGING THE ZEITGEIST

Whenever I want to buy I book I head down to the local Barnes & Noble and leisurely stroll through the store to see what interests me. Then I head home and order what I want at a lower price from Amazon. If there's an ethical problem there, it escapes me.

But I enjoy the strolls through Barnes & Noble very much because I think it gives me an insight into the American mind. I like to say that the best way to look into people's souls is to look at what's in their bookcases. And since Barnes & Noble is the closest thing I can find to a national bookcase, it is my favorite index of the Zeitgeist.

On my latest stroll, I noticed two things quickly. The first was the table filled with suggested books to give for Father's Day. There were books on famous battles, beer, muscle cars and firearms. There were a couple of picture books about the Louvre, I guess to keep dad's knuckles from totally dragging on the ground. All in all, if your dad the kind of guy whose idea of a good time involves a few beers, a few pistols and a little fast driving, then this table might prove quite handy. But it was a disturbing commentary on the average American Dad.

The second thing I noticed was the dearth of prominently displayed books from the conservative talk machine. Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly all used to be front and center, glowering on their book covers as though I had just nominated Jane Fonda to be head of Veterans Affairs. Seeing such faces right when I walked in the store instantly made me feel as guilty and awkward as a teenager trying to explain to his date's father why she was one hour late getting home and why her skirt was on backward. So I was kind of glad to see those books sent to the cornfield. What it means for November, I have no idea.

Though we have all heard that reading is good for us, there are at least two species of books that are just plain dangerous. One is the "Idiot's Guide" and "For Dummies" series of books. I have long hated these books in part because I thought they were propping up people who would have been selected out according to Darwin's rules. But now they are popping up in almost every subject area with a frequency that just can't be explained by market forces. So I think they are pod books; I think each night alien pods enter bookstores and transform harmless books into "Idiot's Guides" and "For Dummies" books. I mean, c'mon, how do you explain something like "The Idiot's Guide to Better Skin" unless it's an instruction manual for alien invaders? The breadth of subject these books handle is further proof that they are meant to smooth the way for creatures needing some help with human experience and behavior. So next time you see somebody reading one in the book stacks, you'd better shout, "You'll never enslave Earth, you alien bastard!" and deck him.

(By the way, the humility of the titles is probably just another ruse by our hyper-intelligent, would-be conquerors. Idiots my ass.)

But even if I'm wrong and these books are not part of an alien plot, they are still dangerous because they can impart a spurious sense of confidence. Some subjects are a little too dense to be absorbed from a "Idiot's Guide." Try talking about Italian Renaissance art with only an "Idiot's Guide" knowledge of the subject, and you will sound like, well, an idiot. These books might be handy if you think discussing a subject means chirping dates, names and events like a fifth-grader at a Quiz Bowl challenge, but they are probably less so in higher conversation. Furthermore, some are written in a breezy style that is wholly inapproriate for some subjects. "The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War II" contained a subject header titled "Making Hamburger of Hamburg," which discussed a horrific series of Allied bomber raids on the city in 1943 that created a firestorm that killed at least 40,000 people, many of them women and children. The raids were many things, but they were not the stuff of weak puns. Try talking about "Making Hamburger of Hamburg" at some cocktail party, and you will look like a callous fool; your parents will change their names and your girlfriend will glare at you and hiss venomously, "I am NOT breeding with you! EVER!"

The other odd species was the continuation. These are such books as "Scarlett" and tend to target beloved classics. The book most abused by the continuation was "Pride and Prejudice." I came across a one titled "Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife."

After flipping through a few pages, my fears were confirmed. Darcy, Elizabeth and the others were there, but they now inhabited a world that struggled mightily to harmonize the tone of the original with a "Sex and the City" spiciness.

The results are dreadful; intelligence and good taste had been banished in favor of a frankness that would have Dr. Ruth stuffing her ears with cotton. A passage in which Lydia describes in wretched, unsparing detail the mechanics and residues of sex to her sisters is about as delightful as watching your parents on "Oprah" boasting of their exploits in a swingers club. About halfway down the page I expected a plea for rescue to mysteriously appear in the margin: "Please help me get out of here. This woman is making fools of us all. Elizabeth Bennett."

Continuations are understandable and unfortunate. We want the magic of a great story to go on and on; it lifts us out of ordinary time and sometimes helps deepen our understanding of the human condition. But when we kick aside "the end," we're asking for trouble; we're messing with the magic.

For example, one of the things that's great about great stories is the fixed nature of the characters. We never get to the end of "A Tale of Two Cities" and find Sydney Carton boozing it up in some London tavern, gleefully plotting his seduction of the widow Darnay. He is always doing "a far, far better thing" than he has ever done. He is always heroic.

But we would find Carton a changed man in a continuation. For one thing, his head would be reattached (at least, I would hope so; and how the author would manage that I'd like to see). More importantly, though, his personality would have been hollowed out and endowed with traits that are supposed to be congenial to contemporary audiences. This would be a Sydney Carton that just had a nice long talk with Dr. Phil, who would probably have told him to quit fixating on an unattainable woman and try his luck with some nice tavern girl.

It has been said you can learn a lot from books and that's true, but you can also learn what I have learned: We are on a planet threatened by invasion, our most truculent pundits are in retreat and the American dad will be to busy drinking beer and driving muscle cars to take effective aim at our invaders. And we will not have the comfort of great literature. Time to turn on reruns of "The Rockford Files."

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

JUST WHAT ARE YOU PEDALING?

My beginnings in cycling are ignominious. Years ago, the state of North Carolina decided I needed a timeout from driving, so I decided to buy a bicycle as an alternative means of travel. However, my driving restrictions proved not to be too onerous, and the bike became a means of recreation and exercise.

At this time, I was just a guy who rode a bicycle. I thought it was an effective way to stay in shape to play basketball (the sport used to be a holy exercise to me) and to counteract the my gluttonous intake of beer and fatty foods. But I was not yet defined at least in part by cycling; I was not yet a cyclist.

In time, two things happened: I became too old to play basketball at the level I wanted to -- the thought that I was unable to guard some 21-year-old whippet without a harpoon was galling -- and I still enjoyed a high-calorie intake. Being too vain to let let myself get fat and too erratic to stick to a diet, I began channeling most of my athletic energies into cycling. And inexorably, I became a cyclist, which is to say I became a creature enslaved in several ways to the worst elements of fitness and fashion.

There are two great clans in cycling: the mountain tribe and the road tribe. I am a road cyclist and something of a snob about it. It's not that I despise mountain bikers -- several of them are good friends and excellent cyclists. It's just that as a whole I regard the mountain tribe much as an explorer might regard some exotic aboriginals: worthy subjects of pith-helmet anthropology but not fellows to be sponsored for club membership. So I will be talking mostly about the road tribe.

One of the most obvious things about road cyclists is that we tend to dress garishly, wearing jerseys and shorts that are about as subtle as a volcano. True, the clothes have functions that facilitate cycling, but they are also means of heraldry. The jersey says something about the rider. For instance, wearing the jersey of a European team signals that the rider is a serious cyclist who follows the sport and could easily hold forth about the skills of Manolo Saez and Johann Bruyneel as team managers. Loud jerseys tend to be expensive jerseys and say that the rider is not merely dabbling in the sport but is taking food out of his childrens' mouths to feed his enthusiasm. Simple jerseys tend to indicate the novice rider who has many miles to go before earning his plumes. But perhaps the most honest jersey that a cyclist could wear would be one that said, "I poured the family fortune into the money pit of cycling, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."

Such jerseys appeal to the peacock that lurks inside all cyclists, but there are limits to when they can be worn. For instance, the jersey is for cycling only; wearing one as casual wear is just sad, and recalls a comic strip boy who derived a sense of empowerment from his favorite pair of underpants.

There are basically two kind of rides to do on the road: social riding, which is done at a gentle pace and facilitates conversation and comradeship, and training riding, which is done at a brutal pace and facilitates Darwinism. In training rides, the cyclists organize a single-file pace line that is meant to enable riders to draft off one another and so conserve energy. In reality, the pace line is a means of weeding out the weak and making them feel it. "You thought you could ride with me, pal? Guess again; and if I see your bones bleaching on this stretch of road next time I'm on it, I'll say words over you." In its purest sense, a pace line is survival of the fittest.

But there are other risks to pace lines as well. If one is firmly ensconced in a pace line, one begins to act with the relentlessnes of a machine: just keep pedaling and don't think too much. Sadly, sometimes a real idiot gets to the front of a pace line and decides to show just how inhuman his strength is. So he leads ... and leads ... and leads until you realize that you are somewhere in the Yucatan Peninsula. Given that cyclist tend to wear bright colors and that bright colors often announce fertility in the wild kingdom, this could be extremely hazardous. "I say, did you hear about old Shuttlesworth? His pace line wound up in Uganda, and he was swept off his bicycle by a besotted baboon. Now he's a love slave to lesser primates in the rain forest. Bad show, that."

Social rides also have their risks, which usually begin with someone saying, "Say, why don't we ride out to (wherever). We've never been there." Last fall, a friend and I decided to ride out to the Ocmulgee National Monument (a national park in Macon) on the recently finished greenway extension. After reaching the park, we had a miserable time finding our way out, riding hither and yon in search of the exit. It began to dawn on me that there was a good chance that we would be lost there forever, and so might become an eternal fixture at the park. I could just hear the ranger saying in one hundred years "And if you listen closely enough under a full moon, you can hear the spectral voices of two cyclists who got lost here and never found their way out. We call them the Two Losers. They are saying, 'Is this the way out, dude? No, I think it's over here. We just went that way, dude. No, dude, we just went that way. I'm thirsty, dude, I want a beer.'"

Don't try to talk to a road cyclist after he or she has done a long ride. Usually, the rider is under such an endorfin buzz that higher cogitation is impossible. At best, you might get a few parables and have your questions answered with something like, "As the pebbles abide in the stream, so the wolf lays no eggs." But you will not get intelligible conversation.

And yet I love cycling. I love being out on the road alone with my thoughts and I love being out with friends. And I love the lore of cycling. One of my favorite stories is that of Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor. Anquetil was the first cyclist to win five Tours de France, and Poulidor was his luckless foil. Though Poulidor was a superb rider in the high mountains, he couldn't match Anquetil in time trials and so he usually finished in second place. They were fierce rivals with little love for each other. After Anquetil retired, it seemed that Poulidor's time to win a Tour de France had arrived. Until he was knocked down by a motorcycle in the mountains. While he was down, two of his rivals attacked, a gross violation of Tour protocol but not against the rules. As Poulidor struggled to catch them and limit the time they were putting into him, he was heard to say, "Jacques himself would never have attack in such a situation!" His words got back to Anquetil, and the rivals eventually became friends. In 1987, when Anquetil was dying of cancer, Poulidor was one of the people who visited him on his deathbed. Lore has it that Anquetil looked up at his old adversary and said, "I am afraid, Raymond, that you finish second yet again."

That was panache, and that is also part of cycling.

Friday, May 12, 2006

GETTING A WORD IN

Only a fool would hope to find the thrills of the jungle in copy editing. Our jobs are stressful, but we never have to fend off lions and only metaphorically shoot poison darts. Sure, we may come to blows about where to put hyphens and commas, but in the main our workdays are not likely to culminate in bloodsport.

But still we encounter a lethal risk: sheer boredom. About 90 percent of what we handle each day is interesting and challenging, but that remaining 10 percent is usually the blandest filler you could possibly imagine: such things as lists of meetings and classes or PR blurbs about local businesses.

Our biggest nemesis on this score is the Military Update column we run in Saturday's paper. The column relentlessly explores the world of TRICARE, which has something to do with military retirees health benefits. I really don't know, because I tune out usually by the third graf. But there is a way to beat this. I just substitute the word "sex" - or better yet, sex! (the juvenile bold italics is great) - for TRICARE in copy.

It works well:

The cloud in an otherwise sunny bill for TRICARE (remember, think sex!) beneficiaries hovers over the retail pharmacy program.

In December, Congress ordered three tiers of premiums for the TRICARE Reserve Select benefits, which are similar to TRICARE Standard fee-for-service coverage.

Because more than $700 million in TRICARE savings were "embedded" in the administration's 2007 defense budget request, the decision to block the increases meant trimming other programs.

An attempt to block the TRICARE fee increases, and the surprise boost in the 2007 pay raise were highlights of subcommittee actions on personnel provisions of the fiscal year 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (HR 5122).

Whether the Senate will approve any part of the administration's TRICARE fee adjustments is still a little uncertain.

What doomed that plan in the House were both the timing and the details, McHugh told Military Update - timing in the sense that the nation is fighting a war and that some of those warriors who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan soon would be among the pool of TRICARE beneficiaries targeted by the higher fees. That bothered many lawmakers, he said.

And now a side note to the loyal readers of this blog. This entry is pretty lame, and don't I know it. So now I stand before you, ripping the mea culpa from my chest like Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. "This blog entry is a fraud; it's a crime against the readers who come to me, and I committed it." OK, so I hit a creative low. But rest assured, I have the best pharmacists I can find working on the problem.