Leno or Lame-o

Last week, I thought I would jump the gun and make some predictions about the success or failure of the new Jay Leno program on NBC at 10 PM eastern time. I was beaten to the process by just about everyone except the elementary school Weekly Reader if it still exists.

The thrust of all of it was dramatic television shows (i.e CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, et al) cost about $3 million dollars an hour to produce. Television audiences are fragmenting due to other choices (i.e. cable, DVRing and TiVoing). Advertisers are unwilling to pay top dollar for diminishing audiences, so, therefore dramatic series television may become greatly diminished by reality programming, Dateline type programs and less expensive programming like the Jay Leno Show. It is no secret that NBC has said we can be #4 in the 10 PM time slot because our product is significantly cheaper to produce and make a lot of money. I suspect some people think it is unamerican to strive to be anything less than #1, but it does make economic sense to lose the war and have the most money in the bank. NBC has been quite candid about their strategy and maybe it will work for them.

However, my beef is with my intellectual compatriots who began sniping at the Leno show from its inception last Monday night. "It's not very good, it's lame, it's disappointing," are some of the things I've heard.

Granted, it is all of those things if you believe that over the summer Jay went to Lourdes and stuck his wit into the water. Did you expect he'd become Jack Benny? George Carlin? The Python all rolled up into one?

No, he's Jay Leno. The guy who clearly won late night for the last 15 years. The truth is he is still Jay Leno who is mediocre at best but has done a fine job of casting himself as everyman who does a yeoman job night after night. He is what you've known and what you'll get. He is where he was and where he'll be.

Get used to it.

Again.

Riverhead Man Ranks High in NY Eye Hand Test

First of all I was waiting for famous people to stop dying because I had run out of original things to say about them. Also, I was tired of running the "dead letter" picture. However, the seagull is there as only a marker that really has nothing to do with what I want to blog about today.

About 9 months ago I decided to get an i phone. I swore up and down after an absence of 11 years from the corporate life, all I needed was a cell phone that made phone calls as a convenience to me and Ms. Ellen. However, there was something seductive about the i phone. I have had an i pod for a few years because I really couldn't stand listening to the radio. All I heard were the mistakes and I want more control over the tunes that assault my psyche. But, a device that had my tunes, my e-mail and access to the Internet might be a wonderful thing to have.

The trip to the Apple Store is a story for another time, but without too much trouble I came home with the i phone and familiarized myself with it by inputing my phone contact list as the low end Verizon phone I had could not be cloned. I did, however, keep my phone number.

After a while, I discovered i phone users are somewhat pack like and they are very proud of the "apps" or applications that you see advertised on TV. I suspect there is a lot of "app" envy among users. I was seated next to a guy on Friday night at a charity event who had an i phone and we jousted back and forth showing each other our "apps." He had some really cool stuff. But I have a Star Wars Laser saber complete with sound effects that almost decapitated him. So, now you understand the environment in which one lives and works with his or her i phone.

A few weeks ago I was visiting with our 24 year old nephew who works on Wall Street. He's a smart young man and quite competitive. He's a paint baller, car enthusiast and one time miniature rocket launcher. We were seated at dinner. We each had our i phones out of their protective holsters resting on the table close at hand. My nephew said, "Hey, Uncle Steve, have you seen this neat game that you can download for free, it's called Paper Toss."

Essentially, this game consists of tossing a piece of paper into a trash can by launching it with your finger. There is a fan that varies in position and speed so that you have to launch the paper at different angles in order to drop it in the can. The levels increase in difficulty by varying the distance from you to the can. Well, I was never an athlete of any kind. Always the last one picked and I still can't throw a ball overhand. But, when I found games like golf, fishing, target shooting and corporate and business warfare, where you competed against yourself, it changed my life. I found some things at which I could compete and sometimes win. It changed my self esteem and stature in life.

In the retirement years I missed the competition a bit, so Paper Toss became a passion. I chose to master the easiest level and was quite proud of my score of 79. Remember, I was competing against myself. Until one day I noticed that you could post your score. I pushed the button and saw that I was number 1 in Riverhead. I was very proud of myself even though I was the only Riverhead contestant. Today, I noticed I could check my rank statewide, nationally and internationally. Imagine my surprise to find that my score of 79 ranked me 18th in the state of New York. The other rankings are not important as I don't compete in those arenas as competing probably requires travel and I don't travel.

Well, I don't have a great, mediocre or poor ending for this piece, so I'll do what the late George Carlin did when he had no ending for a piece, I'll simply take a little bow.

Thank you.

Author's note: As of yesterday (8/11/09) I hit 91 which put me tenth in New York State. I'm finished counting now. Thanks to all of you who made this possible.

Steve

The Not So Grateful Dead

I thought I would blog about Michael Jackson's recent passing.  But, then I thought what could I say that many others have not already said and said  better.  Then I thought Michael has just begun to be dead, so after the initial hubbub ends and the last retro CD has been purchased, there will be significant new things to be said but I still think I will leave those comments to others.  

However, I would like to say that Michael Jackson was a great and original performer who left a huge amount of his work behind to be enjoyed by others for generations to come.  But, so too did Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Ian Flemming and Ray Charles just to name a few.  All of them had their emotional and physical limitations, but somehow soldiered on and cranked out the everlasting art we continue to enjoy

On the other hand, there are several artists who produced some fabulous work, but, as Neil Diamond said in his song of the same title, they were "done too soon."  I'm talking about Jim Croce, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, James Dean and most certainly Heath Ledger.  I am also thinking about Harper Lee who wrote "To Kill a Mocking Bird."  Sadly, it seems, she didn't live long enough for us to find out if she had another fine novel within her.  (Author's note:  Bulletin!  Harper Lee is not dead.  Therefore, we have to substitute someone else like the photographer Diane Arbus who committed suicide before photographing anywhere near the potential of her lifetime portfolio.  Furthermore, she didn't make very many of the classic prints for which we hold her in such high regard as an artist.) And then there is  "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell whose life was  cut short tragically by an auto accident.  Yes, within the last few years relatives found a manuscript entitled "Lost Laysen" among Ms. Mitchell's papers but nothing has come of it.  Maybe it just doesn't compare to her masterpiece.  How could it without her being around to shape into something akin to GWTW.

So, I guess the point of this is to remind ourselves to  treasure the artists that we discover early in their careers who touch that special place in our hearts and souls and dare not assume that they will be around any longer than it takes to type a semi-colon.

The Most Important News of Your Life in Less Than a Minute

I started thinking about this piece about 20 plus years ago. It was then that I began to notice that people's attention spans were getting shorter. I reached this conclusion by observing the popularity of the entertainment magazine shows on television, the slow but steady rise of USA Today as a news source in a time when newspapers were just beginning to feel pain of shrinking circulation and the emergence of CNN and the CNN Headline News service. Suddenly, news was available whenever one wanted it. I was traveling a lot in those days and it was most convenient to tune in CNN as soon as I arrived at a hotel in a new city. In 15 minutes, I knew all the pertinent things I needed to know to continue to appear to be a citizen of the world.

However, after growing up listening to long radio newscasts during the dinner hour which then gave way to long television newscasts during the dinner half hour (everything was shrinking), I began wondering why and how these start ups with their concise information capsules and, in the case of USA Today, the little charts that summed up some important issue could be as satisfying as the long form information I was accustomed to receiving. Very few of us thought "McNews" as it was called, would survive.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the generation that was about to take over the bulge in the population grew up on Sesame Street. You know, "Today's show is brought to you by the letter g, the color green and the number 4, boys and girls." So, if these kids were getting their information spoon fed to them in nice little mind sized easily absorbed chunks, how were they going to react to large mind numbing chunks of data that might require some sort of smack in the forehead to effectuate a kind of Heimlich Mind Maneuver to free a choking brain? Come to think of it, the music of the time had the same rhythm structure that nursery rhymes had. They were short, easy to learn and they rhymed. Just like the music, the news and information had a pleasant and easy to follow cadence. Sound effects were added to the newscasts to set it apart from the music. A Pavlovian teletype ticker separated the news from every other sound on the air. Even the voices of the news announcers had a certain timbre to them to further alert the audience to the fact that what they were listening to was the news. Maybe it wasn't the glass ceiling, sexism or lack of opportunity that banned the women from the on air news business for so long, but rather the culprit was their higher pitched voices being thought to be "unnews like." Women have been delivering news (good, bad and humorous) in their homes for years and everyone who heard these reports, understood them.

So, what's the point of this? The newspapers continue to fall like houses of ....well...wet newsprint. News has all but disappeared from many radio stations and television stations have added more news in hopes of staving off their declining viewership caused by the proliferation and fractionalization of cable and maybe the hope that without newspapers, they'll get another chance at regaining their once huge audiences. Video Rangers, that train has sailed.

The recent election in Iran where the government banned "traditional" news coverage, came right into our ears and eyes from the Internet, cell phones, Face Book and Twitter with its 140 character limit on content. It is a hoot to hear these news folks with their basso profundo voices explaining their information sources in terms of "tweets." The rabbit hole has been enlarged, Alice and we're all falling through it.

Late Night Wars

My late father was a big fan of vaudeville.  Although we were almost the last people on earth to get a television because dad thought it was a fad, once we had it, we were unable to pry him away from it.  Why?  Because the early days of television were run by people from vaudeville.  Where else were the networks going to find people with the abilities to stage entertainment programming?  That's why the early TV shows looked like stage shows.  Uncle Miltie and Your Show of Shows, Ed Sullivan and the rest all looked like vaudeville.  My father was overjoyed and he and I watched a lot of television together.  Because of this, I was and am a witness to a bit of television history.  I was in front of the set when Steve Allen hosted the first Tonite Show on NBC.  I saw his first show and his last.  I saw Jack Paar's first shot at the late night show and his last.  I was there for Johnny Carson's debut and his finale, which, by the way, was the most emotional.  Therefore, I couldn't miss Leno's debut or Dave Leterman's either.  At the time I wrote a long memo to the broadcast company I worked for telling them what a mistake NBC made in letting Dave get away from them and how they would regret giving Leno the job.  Obviously, I was wrong.  Leno beat Dave handily most of the 17 years they competed.

I'm not sure why that happened, but I suspect that Dave's irreverence infected the way he delivered his own writers' material leaving the audience to wonder, if Dave thinks this stuff is so bad, why should I watch it?  Dave just might be too hip for the room as they used to say.

Now, the torch has passed again with Conan O'Brien taking over the Tonite Show and going head to head with Letterman.  Despite what you read, this is not a level playing field.  Dave is a good 20 years older than Conan and so is his material.  One pundit I read said "Dave has to "up his game" if he ever hopes to be on top in the late night ratings.

I think Dave is faced with the impossible task of changing his game to compete with a younger more likable Conan who is essentially doing a form of Letterman's shtick in a nicer way.  He could grab a great number of Letterman's younger viewers and essentially decimate the CBS late show.  Conan is certainly likable enough to keep Leno's older viewers which leaves Dave with not much.  To level the field again, CBS,  ABC or Fox might find some likable character who appeals to the average aged late night viewer who could drive a wedge between Conan and Dave and take 75% of the combined audience and put Dave AND Conan out of business.  Will that happen?  I don't think so.  I just think Dave will fade away and NBC will outright own late night.

Now, why should we care?  Personally, I don't care because I can't stay up that late anymore and the humor on both shows is somewhat lackluster to me.  However, the former broadcast business guy in me knows that these shows are vastly profitable because they are very inexpensive to produce compared to anything else on network television.  The profits gleaned from these late night modern vaudeville shows can pay for some  better prime time programming which I think needs to be drastically improved.   

What do you think?  Do you care?  Or do you want to be the biggest loser dancing with the American idol nanny while she has her home improved by the vast cast from the huge number of Law and Order cast members?

Ladies and gentlemen, you may start your lives.

I have always wanted to be invited to speak at a high school graduation ceremony.  On only one occasion was an invitation extended, but unfortunately a scheduling conflict prevented me from doing it.   However, I have been thinking about what I would have said and I am going to share it with you now.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here.  

I want to congratulate you on the completion of your first major life project.  The twelve or more years you spent getting to this day were aimed at this result and the skills you learned during those years brought you to this day.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that this project is probably the shortest one you will do in your lifetime.  Other projects may include: marriage, parenting, career, taking care of your own parents and siblings, hobbies, religion, community involvement,  friendship and some things you will take upon yourself that I haven't mentioned because I can't think of all of them.  All of these things are part of the fabric of life and require time and skill.  As I said, these last twelve or so years will seem easy compared to the other life events I mentioned. However, in addition to the training you received here in this institution and at home from your family, I have prepared a list of things that I think will serve you well.

1.  Enjoy your family, your life and your job in that order.  Be defined by the former; not the latter.

2.  Mentor and be mentored.  Alway try to work for someone who is smarter than you are.

3.  Remember that voicemail, email, Twitter, Face Book, et al will be the undoing of us all because they are poor substitutes for human contact.

4. Never shop at Sears or allow Steven Segal to become more than a punch line.

5.  The environment that you create must contain the essentials sought by the characters in the Wizard of OZ; heart, brain and courage.  And don't forget that Dorothy was looking for a home.

6.  If you choose management as a career, remember to manage people's weaknesses.  That's what management is all about.  Their strengths will take care of themselves.  You can be most effective shoring up weaknesses.

7.  Use consultants, counsellors and other distributors of advice sparingly.  Frequently, they serve merely as coroners.  You will recognize terminal or dead when you see them.

8.  Always believe and trust in a higher power.

9.  Do something for other humans,  the animals and the planet on a regular basis.  The ecology is the issue of forever.

10.  There doesn't always have to be a number 10.  But, if you really need one, it would be to learn to edit yourself.

Well, that wasn't too hard.  Only took me 65 years and a few months to put them together.  You'll do it faster and better.

May whatever force you choose, be with you always.

Thank you.

Try a Little Churlishness

I am overwhelmed with Face Book, My Space, Twitter, Plaxo et al.  It started simply enough.  I received one of those e-mails saying, "Joe Blitzelplik has added your name to his list of friends and we need your confirmation that he is a friend of yours."  I haven't seen Joe since high school which was a long time ago, I didn't particularly like him then although I don't remember why, so I thought "why not, it might be interesting to see what Joe has been up to for the last 40 years."  I cut and pasted the requisite web info and ok'd Joe as a friend.  

It was like one of those aliens opened its mouth and swallowed my computer.  Suddenly I am confronted with more information about Joe than I'd bargained for and I was dumbstruck with the knowledge that this hockey puck has 610 friends.  610!  Impossible!  Well, then I started getting requests from people that I've never heard of who are friends of Joe and would like to possibly be friends with me.  

Hold on!

Or, as they say at the Jewish Chronicle, "Hold the back page."

I am one of those guys who believes that if you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand, you are indeed fortunate.  I don't think anyone could legitimately be interested in acquiring 610 "friends." other than Joe and the many others I see on these sites.   It's pathetic!  These web bandits are exhibiting behavior much like bird watchers who have been accumulating an ever expanding list of birds they have seen and the bigger the number the more impressed are their friends and fellow birders.  It's like asking someone how many baseball cards they have or how many tunes they have on their i pod.  It's insane and unnecessary information.

Having said all of that, the marketing guy inside me has to recognize that the sheer number of these sites indicates a desire for them by a large number of people.  This is something that cannot be ignored.  But, it does point out an apparent isolation and subsequent need that people who spend too much time in front the computer must be feeling.  Why else would these sites be proliferating?

My young college friend Sally Amanda Balustrade  (not her real name)  thinks that these sites are causing young people to "squander their social capital."  In other words, one doesn't have to work at developing relationships with people face to face.  All you have to do is keep your personal site up to date and comment on the inane things people write in the "What are you doing right now" space on their page.  Soon, they are going to tell us what they are really doing and it's either going to be great reading or nauseating.  It will probably be both.

However, to every point there is a counter point.  And here is mine.

I propose a site for people you don't like.  They could include people from work, school, your family, your childhood and your fantasy life.  After all the years of therapy, wouldn't you like to tell your imaginary friend that you have come to the conclusion that he/she stifled your childhood.  And that you never understood that "special" language you two invented.  We could call it FUB.   FUB of course stands for F U Buddy.  We could encourage the people we don't like and don't like us to join and we could spend the respite from sugar and spice land bashing these people and vice versa.  We could post the absolute worst picture of our least favorite person and they could do the same.  It could be a real competition.  The friend business is not a challenge.  Instead of sending winks, nudges and giggles, we could send piles of fecal matter and balloons containing noxious gases to these hose heads. 

Who knows, FUB may surface one of these days from the dregs of the Internet, but in the meantime, I suspect that those nudges and winks and, yes, gooses, that you fling every day are never going to be quite the same after you've read this piece.

FUB, Brute!

Elmo 1997-2009

As some of you know, my wife Ellen is in the cat rescue business.  It would follow that we would have a few felines of our own and that it is true.  In fact, 11 cats share our home along with a myriad of stray, homeless and abandoned cats every year.  The visitors are housed in guest quarters in the basement.

In 1997, when we lived in Columbus, Ohio, a young male stray was brought to us who had been found by some truckers by the side of a highway.  He had been burned with cigarettes and was generally in bad shape.  Ellen restored him to health and we spent six months holding him on our laps as we watched television so that he would learn to trust humans again. The strategy paid off because he relaxed and became part of the gang. We named him Elmo.   

In 1998, When we retired to the North Fork,  Elmo began to gain weight.  We really don't know why as he didn't eat any more than his 11 brothers and sisters, but he ultimately weighed in at 23 pounds.  He was a big but gentle guy. Because of his girth, there were places on his body where he could not reach in order to clean himself, so the others took over that task for him.  Suffice it to say that the others must have really loved him.

Over the years, Elmo became the official greeter at our house.  When visitors arrived, he would jump onto the kitchen table and roll over on his back exposing his belly to all the petting and scratching our friends, workmen and any other category of visitor were willing to provide.

On one occasion, we had a chimney fire requiring us to call the fire department.  The firefighters arrived quickly and marched into our kitchen where the first thing they encountered was Elmo flat on his back awaiting their undying attention and affection. The fire, which had pretty much gone out, was almost ignored by Riverhead's bravest as they attended to Elmo's inviting belly and purr.  He was like that with almost anyone who came to visit.

The short of this is that about two weeks ago Elmo died.  If this appeared in an obituary in a newspaper it would have said, Elmo, age 12 died after a brief but valiant bout with cancer.   He is survived by his 11 brothers and sisters.  Cremation was private at the Mattituck/Laurel Veterinary Hospital.  Friends are asked to plant a bulb or flowering shrub in their yard in his memory.

Goodbye, Elmo.  We will be interviewing greeters for a long time before we can find anyone who can fill the job as well as you did.

Paul Harvey.....Good BYE

As many of you know, Paul Harvey died yesterday at age 90.  I met Paul a few times both during my career at ABC and other broadcasting companies.  What you heard on the radio was what you got when you met him in person.  The voice was his and not an on-air affectation and he was as down to earth as you would expect this personification of a midwesterner to be.

To my knowledge, he was the only ABC personality who had final say over which commercial products were advertised on his program because he felt that since he was reading the commercial, he had to approve of the product.  Not much of a problem you might think, but one day he turned down the American Dairy Council.  He just had a feeling that milk was not good for us.  This was before the cholesterol days. The sponsors said, "Ok, how about skim milk?"  It was still milk as far as Paul was concerned and it did not get on the air on his program.

Dr. Scholl's products didn't get on the air either because although Paul didn't have a problem with the products, he had never used any of them because he had no foot maladies and had no way of assuring the listeners from personal experience that the products were any good.

ABC built his own studio for him in Chicago.  It was used about an hour a day.  He didn't  like the one he had originally because it had turntables  in it and "people who use turntables," he said, "smoke and I don't want that smell in my workspace."  He was ahead of his time.  It is no wonder that he lived to be 90.

In my early days as a disc jockey, I worked the 10 AM to 3 PM shift.  At 12 Noon, we carried the 15 minute Paul Harvey news and commentary program.  And I, at age 15, got to sit in the studio with my feet up on the audio console and eat my lunch while listening to one of the best radio entertainers ever.  One day as I sat there sprawled in my teenage revery with a mouth full of a 10 cent McDonald's (Remember it was a long time ago),  Paul Harvey gave his famous signoff, "Paul Harvey, Good Day."  I looked up at the clock and it was only 10 minutes after twelve.   He was supposed to be on until 12:15.  I had a mouth full of food and was fighting with the ancient swivel chair to get up to the microphone with the dread of every young performer running through my head that there's nothing on the air and it's your fault.  They'll fire you for this.  Me against Paul Harvey, who were they gonna believe?  As the chair slipped into place and I swallowed a giant chunk of hamburger rendering me unable to speak, Paul Harvey said, "Oops, forgot page 4."  He then read page 4 and ended exactly on time.  Many years later I told him about this event when we shared the dais at an industry function.  He apologized profusely, because he knew what "dead air" meant to a young announcer.

Paul Harvey was important to the moral fiber of our country.  When speaking of the Vietnam War on the air one day, he intoned (to Richard Nixon) "I love you, Mr. President, but you are wrong about this war."  Years later, Nixon said that when he lost Paul Harvey and Walter Cronkite, he lost the war.

And so we end this remembrance with what I remember Paul Harvey saying when Gracie Allen died.  "Good-bye, dear Gracie.  A lot more people left less of a legacy of happiness than you did.  

And Paul, a lot less people left less of a legacy of integrity than you did.  

And, of course, I am sure you have all of your pages with you for the big show.

An Experiment in Enhanced Performance

At the risk of being accused of over blogging, I felt it incumbent upon me to offer the following: 

With all of this talk of performance enhancing drugs and the controversy over whether or not they make a difference, I propose that we administer massive doses of these drugs free of charge to all bankers, investment portfolio managers and auto manufacturers.

Will these drugs work?  Historically, they haven't worked in October during the baseball playoffs, but, historically, the financial markets tend to suffer in October anyway.  However, we could use the other eleven months of the year to test this theory.

Can it help?

It couldn't hurt.

And these drugs should be offered (at the players option) free of charge to all athletes, regardless of sport, so "leveling the playing field" will no longer be considered a cliche.

And besides, some of these guys could use smaller testicles.

Retirement - It's Not a Job. It's the Last Great Adventure

It's been almost 11 years since I retired from my job.  It hadn't seemed that long until last weekend when I received a phone call from one of the guys I used to work with.   We had a nice chat about what retirement's been like and I thought I would share some of my feelings about it with you.

In August of 1998, I officially left my position as a corporate officer.  This wasn’t a resignation, a firing, downsizing, or retirement.  The parent company just decided to sell the division for which I was responsible and I joined the rolls of people enjoying early retirement.  

This exit from the work force came about a year earlier than my wife and I had planned. For eight years, we had been renovating our retirement home to fit our exact needs. The “adjustment” to our plan worked to our advantage as we were able to leave a year earlier with no financial penalty.

Although my official title was president, what I really did for a living was observe the human condition as it applied to the work place and the world as the company was in the radio broadcasting business.  I tried to spot trends in human behavior both inside and outside so  that we could capitalize upon these trends and have a happy work force inside  and a larger listening audience outside.  I’m not paid to do this anymore, but I still do it for my own enjoyment, to keep my brain functioning and to have fodder to feed  the blog.  What follows are observations from outside of the workforce.  It’s a primer, if you will, for those who are about to step out from under the safety of the company tree.   If this is not your plan for the near term, stash this away until the appropriate time.   I hope it helps.

1.  Although there is plenty of money, I have suddenly begun to focus on telephone calling plans, restaurant early bird specials, and various combinations of cable and satellite services that will give us the most channels for the least amount of money.  I think I do this because for the first time in fifty years I do not have a regular paycheck coming in.  I took back the bill paying duties from my wife Ellen (which she surrendered gladly) so that I could see just how much was going out each month.    I still don’t know for sure.  However, I did learn that Ellen no longer believes  that her late father owns the electric company, she thinks he willed it to me.

2.  I have developed routines for myself.  We live in a rural place so I must go to the post office each morning to retrieve our mail.  This is an excellent opportunity to snag any needed tradesman as they are there retrieving their mail as well.  I also get to meet and greet some of our friends and acquaintances.  While I am there, I go through all of our mail and throw away all of the junk mail as the postmaster is kind enough to provide large waste containers for this purpose.  I hope she is recycling this stuff.  So, in short, this is a half hour task that allows me to return home ready to retreat to my den to pay the bills (Our credit rating is outstanding as I turn the bills in 24 hours.  So much for cash management.) and deal with anything else that is generated by the mail.

3.  I spend a lot of time with e-mail.  I have appointed myself the official propagator of humor to a select group of about 125 friends and acquaintances.  This keeps me in touch with them and in tune with the humor of the day which has always reflected the mood and attitudes of the world at large.  Blogging has also become a passion and a way to stave off mental deterioration.  Crossword puzzles help as well. 

4.  I bought a larger Swiss Army knife.  For years I carried the Executive model with its orange peeler and tiny toothpick and scissors.  That little gem retired as well.  It is living in a nice wooden box on my bookshelf that is almost full of things I think I’ll need someday.  (I’m going to need some  more nice wooden boxes soon.) When you are retired, you need a major toothpick, larger scissors and a greater selection of screw drivers as I have noticed that every day  there are a far greater number of occasions to: (1) pick my teeth, (2) clip things out of newspapers or magazines and (3) tighten screws of various sizes, types and head shapes.

5.  A friend of mine related a story about a mutual acquaintance who  turned down a gazillion dollars for his company.  When asked why and how he was able to resist such a tempting offer he said, “I don’t want to be another one of those rich guys with nothing to do.”  To me, this is very sad because obviously this fellow has not developed an inner life.  He thinks he is defined by the company he owns.  He needs to find some other interest other than the work.   Many people have this same need.  I can’t count the number of retired executives I used to see in the building lobby of my former employer.  They were there more often than when they were on the payroll. They had developed no inner life so they had to come back to the mother building to regain their sense of self.  Many of them had business cards printed using the company logo (an illegal thing I think).  This card had their former title on it, their current home address and phone number and, somewhere, in small print,  the word “retired.”  Forget that “get a hobby” is a cliche and get one.  Find something that you will know as much about as you knew about your work.  Unless you truly hated your job, I suspect you will find this activity most rewarding.  I chose photography.  It has all the glitz and creativity that the work had.  It’s has equipment, varying techniques, changing technology and several publications dedicated to it that discuss the equipment, the varying techniques and the changing technology.  There are even contests in case you need the competitive buzz.

6.  If you retire to a place other than the one in which you worked, be prepared for the luxury of being no one special.  In the beginning, people here only knew us casually. They had no idea of who we were, who we are or what we did.  They had no social expectations of us.  They did not know anything about us.  Therefore, we could be who we actually think and know we are.  If we tend to expose our former social styles it is our choice and not one that is expected.  (No more “Wait till you meet this guy...he’s a joke teller, a jerk, a drunk, a bore, a fugitive, a fraud, a soothsayer, a pirate, a nay sayer, a prayer sayer, a dud, a big corporate guy.) If you ever really wanted to be accepted for who you are or think you are this is probably the last chance you’ll get.

7.  This is also a good time to check through your stuff.  At this point in our lives, the stuff we have is more or less permanent.  As you review your stuff you will find things you haven’t touched in years.   Chances are you are never going to touch them again.  Give them to a charity or the nice men with the big truck who come early in the morning.  On the other hand, if you have lusted after something like  new golf clubs, new boat, room addition, new furniture or any other thing you and/or your spouse think is essential to your well being, buy it now.  It will be almost impossible to talk yourself into it later. 

    

8.  This is also a time to give back to the community.  After all the community provided us with many luxuries.  So if you were ever going to do volunteer work, now is the time because for the first time in a long while you are truly in charge of your time.  Volunteer work can be anything you want it to be.  Lots of charitable organizations can use your skills.  Just remember that charity management is not about money (because there isn’t any for the administrators or anyone else for that matter) it is about power.  Let them deal with when the mailer goes out, how it will be folded and what color it will be even if what they have decided is, in your view, ridiculous.  It’s their payment and ego reenforcement.  Many of you may have been like this in your work and now you can see up close and personal just how stupid, time consuming and wasteful  micro management really is.  You should concern yourself with doing the real work for which  the charity was founded.   I know, it’s hard to be an Indian after you’ve been a chief.  However, you must remember you had to start out as a pretty good Indian to become the chief you became.  There is nothing wrong with Indiandom. 

9.   Think long and hard about that second home.  I’ve done the numbers and it does not  appear to be worth the worry of having the alarm company call you from hundreds of miles away in the middle of the night to tell you the smoke alarm has gone off, the fire department can’t get in and they want permission to break down the door.  Besides, for what you will spend annually on a second home, you can go to the finest resorts in the world for a month or two every year.  And if you don’t like the one you picked, return the keys and go somewhere else next year. 

10.  Make a daily date with your spouse.  Ellen and I try to sit down with a glass of something every day and just touch on what happened that day.  It’s easy to inadvertently live separate lives once you are retired.  You and/or your spouse are no longer road warriors with tales of the hunt to tell.  The job of retirement comes with its own set of tales and it is very easy to forget to share since we  think that because we are spending more time  together we are communicating more.  This will not be true unless you make it so.

What you have read is all I know about this part of the life adventure even after having lived it for almost 11 years.  However, I am keeping copious mental notes which I will share with you when I know more.

A Lighter Tone

I read my last few blogger posts and found them to be a bit ponderous.  So, I thought I would give you and excerpt from a piece I wrote a few years ago that is essentially some free association stuff.  Here it is:

Please read the following letter to Dear Abby carefully.  It is  representative of a society that depends on curing its ills easily.  Abby and her evil twin sister, Ann Landers, were "over the counter" before we ever identified or coined the term "generic."

Dear Abby:   

A few years ago, you printed a letter from a woman in Scottsbluff, Nebraska in which she described, step by step, the procedure by which her husband, an electrician's apprentice, removed her ovaries and uterus.  The operation, using commonly found household implements, was performed in their kitchen and seemed quite simple.  Unfortunately, I can't find the clipping.  Would you mind reprinting it?  Thanks, Abby.

Hoping to be Barren in Bangor

Dear Hoping:

Here it is, but speak with your clergyman before you proceed.

P.S. Be sure your husband washes his hands first.

Some quickies:

Television invariably projects those trends that were passe two years ago.  This includes television news.

My friend Gary's mother insisted that he wash his hands as soon as he got out of bed in the morning.  "You never know what you might have touched during the night," she offered in explanation.

My mother never opened the door without first asking who was there through the closed door.  (No peepholes then)  On one occasion, when told it was "New telephone book," she replied, "Go away, I haven't finished reading last year's yet."  

Some people save phone books for years but throw out instruction manuals.  They also save today's newspapers and magazines containing articles that seem urgent and relevant to their lives.  At the time they say, "I'll read this later."   Some people tear things out of magazines only to throw them away when, months later, they can no longer remember why they cut the piece out in the first place.  I am one of those people.  Except I keep the whole newspaper and/or magazine.

Some people, like sheep, often bleat when they are annoyed.  Andy Rooney bleats every week on "60 Minutes."

An Andy Rooney like bleat goes like this:  (As you read the following, imagine it sounding an octave higher than your normal speaking voice even if you are a woman.)

There are too many postage paid subscription cards in magazines.  One would do it.  It is a great waste of trees.  We should encourage people to tear them out and write in large letters, "YOU MUST STOP DOING THIS!" and mail them, unsigned, back to the magazine.  After paying 28 cents for these cards, maybe the publishers will cut down on the number of these insertions and save some trees.

Well, I feel better.

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Lowest Point on the Magical Misery Tour

Author's Note:  Remember, some parts  are apocryphal and some parts are not. 

Don't play practical jokes.  They are almost never practical.  Sometimes, they are tragic.

My last practical joke victim was Michael Horowitz a rotund fellow from the Bronx section of New York City.   We were sophomores in college together.  Michael had worn a tie once in his life and that had been to his grandmother's funeral.  He was proud of this and, for me, that pride labeled him a buffoon.  In 1962, Michael was barely in school clinging to his student deferment from the draft with a 2.0 grade point average.  In his way, Michael was trying to be accepted by trading on his superior strength which was bolstered by his superior size.  Michael would burst into our dormitory's student lounge dressed in his gym shorts and tank top, muscles bulging and announce, "Betch youse I can....."

All one had to do was fill in the blank with some challenge like, scale the outside of the building, break a cafeteria tray over your head or the ever popular put your fist through one of the plaster board walls in the stairwell.  (He was Bluto before John Belushi was Bluto.)The stairwell area from the first to the fifth floor was pock marked with Michael's willingness to accept any task that would show off his incredible strength.  I watched this behemoth perform his nightly rituals of power silently.  I never had any words to fill in Michael's random challenges although I secretly wanted to voice something that would make the giant look foolish.  One night, I stepped up to the hulk and said, "Betcha if we wrap you up in athletic adhesive tape you can't get out of it."

"Betcha I can," came the standard reply.

Within minutes, I had gathered all of the strong unrelenting tape available and, along with three other boys, wrapped Michael as tightly as possible from head to toe.

I yelled, "OK!" to the trussed up Michael and sat back to watch the struggle.  After thirty seconds a ripping sound was heard and Michael had pulled his arms straight away from his sides where seconds before they had been mummified by the tape.  Once he got his arms free, he ripped off the remaining tape and the challenge had been met.

The three other perpetrators clapped Michael on the back and laughed at me, their former leader.

I was infuriated and retreated to my room to conceive the greatest challenge of all time.  Late that night, it came to me.

The next day, I boarded the bus for Germantown, PA and my almost alma mater the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science.  (I was only there for one year.  It was during that year that I discovered the existence of a group of people who are waiting for slavery to be reestablished.  But that is another story)  It didn't take me long to find Marvin Goldbloom and even less time to talk Marvin into ordering a bag to be knitted in his father's textile mill in North Carolina.  The bag had a tensile strength of ten thousand pounds per square inch.  Within two weeks, the bag was in my possession.

The next night, with two football linemen in tow, I waited for Michael Horowitz to return from dinner.  As Michael entered the lounge to issue his challenge for the evening, the bag was dropped over his head, pulled down to his feet and he was wrapped head to toe in athletic adhesive tape.  This time there was no ripping sound.  The only sound was the thumping of Michael's body against the wall, the furniture, the doors and finally the floor where he fell exhausted.  He was our prisoner.

When we had shown everyone the "captured" Michael and stopped laughing and pouring beer on the iron like nylon bag, someone asked a very important question.

"Who is going to let him out?"

I had anticipated the question, and was ready with an answer.

"We'll roll him down the stairs and out onto the lawn and the campus police or somebody will find him and let him out."

And we did.

The campus police did come across the enormous bundle within a few minutes of its arrival on the front lawn of the dormitory.  It took them about fifteen minutes to free Michael Horowitz who was so enraged he was unable to thank them.  Instead he ran into the dormitory, up the stairs to the fifth floor and began battering every animate and inanimate object in sight.  The city police were called and it took two of them with night sticks to subdue the crazed Michael Horowitz.  My friends and I had fled the building after depositing our package on the lawn and did not return until after curfew and Michael had been taken away.  The dormitory supervisors conducted a thorough investigation, but no one would confess to the prank.  The only one punished was Michael Horowitz who was expelled thereby losing his student deferment.   He was drafted into the Army within six weeks.  Six months later, a North Vietnamese sniper hurled a 7.62 millimeter challenge at Michael Horowitz from a Kalashnikov AK-47that he could not overcome nor did he survive.

Hail to the New Chief

Today we inaugurate a new president. He has a hurculean task ahead of him and there is an important thing we can do to help him.

Pray?

Well, yes. Except that we're in a "no prayer in schools" phase. So what about good thoughts...positive thinking if you will.

Ever since November, I find myself humming "Happy Days Are Here Again." This song was written in 1929 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and I believe it is in the public domain. The chorus goes like this:

"Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
Altogether shout it now!
There's no one who can doubt it now
So let's tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
Your cares and troubles are gone;
There'll be no more from now on
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again"

Ok, it's simplistic.

But so are most mantras.

So, in the ensuing times of struggle (and there will be many), run this little song in your head and we will prevail and you'll feel better.

Thank you, Mr. Obama.

Happy days ARE here again.

A Small Sip From The Apocryphal Chalice

You may remember that apocryphal stories are those stories that are not true.  However, some of us are so taken by their sense of poetic justice that we dispense them thinking if we are diligent in our dispersal, they will become factual to at least some percentage of the receptors and that they will attest to the veracity of the story and it will become true by proclamation.  I suspect propaganda works this way.  

I digress.

Ever since we began warring among ourselves and others, we have found it necessary to take trophies from the people we bested.  We started with the valued possessions of our enemies and moved on (I was going to say progressed, but that would be a shameful thing to think) to making slaves of our foes and then to taking their body parts.  The Plains Indians, ever more civilized than we were, began the practice of counting coup (the "p" is silent).   The idea here was to get close enough to one's enemy so that you could touch him or steal something from him.  The more coup counts that could be documented, the more bravery that could be attributed to the warrior doing the "couping."

As time passed and we Americans became more and more enthralled with firearms, our soldiers began taking firearms from the bodies of our enemies and bringing them home as trophies of war.  Now some of these weapons qualified as heavy artillery, so our military leaders, through the use of regulations, made the act of bringing home enemy ordinance a serious crime complete with commensurate punishment.  It is the story of one man's attempt at sending a military trophy home from the front that we will examine in the following apocryphal story.

Sometime during the second world war, one enterprising GI liberated an enemy rifle and stripped it down to as many small pieces as he could.  He then began sending these parts home to his wife.  You need to know that all mail sent from the war zone was censored in the event that the mail was intercepted by the enemy, so our smuggler could not alert his wife as to what he was doing.

Week after week his spouse received all sorts of parts of various sizes and shapes while having no idea what the end result was going to be.  Eventually, the parts stopped coming.  She spread them all out on the dining room table and correctly surmised that it was some kind of rifle.  So, being the dutiful wife, she took it to a local gunsmith who confirmed it was indeed a rifle and told her that he would reassemble it for ten dollars.  The woman thought that was fair price and in about a week she stopped by the gunsmith shop and picked up the reassembled firearm.  From there she went directly to the post office and mailed the gun back to her husband.

I hope that's true.  Don't you?  

Of Kerosene & Pear Juice

My father kept a glass jug of kerosene in our garage. He used the stuff to clean his fishing gear and small outboard motor parts. The gallon container was tucked in the far right corner of the garage so that it was out of the way and would not be accidentally bumped by the car or the child as he played hide and seek or fort or whatever behind the closed doors in the front of the garage.

One day, my mother asked me to sweep out the garage. I protested loudly, but she appealed to the guilt that exists within people both large and small and soon I was heading toward the garage with a broom. Mom's instructions were simple. "Put everything in the driveway, sweep out the garage and then put everything back in the garage."

Every child charged with a task he or she does not want to perform will devise an "easier" way to do it. So, instead of removing everything from the garage so that I would have a complete and uncluttered field to clean, I moved everything to the back of the garage. I did this reasoning that, (1) I could hide some of the leaf accumulation behind the stuff in the back and (2), it would be easier to redistribute the stuff forward rather than schlep everything out to the driveway and then back from the driveway.

As I pushed my bike into the back corner, the front wheel nudged the kerosene container ever so slightly. It was just a tap with a rubber wheel, but it was just enough to crack the jug and start the flow of kerosene cascading gently toward the door and the piles of stuff I had moved from the sides to the center preparatory to flinging it all to the rear. To this day I don't believe that Kerosene is very viscous, so therefore it must have been my traumatized brain that saw the stuff spreading in slow motion to all corners of the garage. Watching its lava like flow paralyzed me.

Soon my fascination with the molasses like progress of the kerosene was replaced with an urgent need to do something. So I started slogging through the stuff dragging beach chairs, fishing tackle and ruined cardboard toward the door. In record time I had the garage empty and all the parts of our lives that had been relegated to the garage were strewn across the driveway.

Now, what to do about the kerosene? Not knowing anything about water and oil repelling each other, but with full knowledge that kerosene is flammable, I slipped through a basement window that I knew to be unlocked and hauled out the garden hose. I spent what must have been an hour with the hose and the broom washing the kerosene out of the garage, around and through our possessions and into the gutter. There was no rule of thumb to prepare me for knowing how long it takes to dissipate a gallon of kerosene from a garage with a broom and hose.

I was considering calling the police or the fire department when my mother's uncle Fred pulled into the adjoining driveway. He was a rotund bald man who paid me a dime a week during the summer months to get up before he did and roll down the windows in his Buick so that it would be cool when he went drove it to work. I resented him for the pretentious way in which he presented me with the dime each Sunday. The payout was complete with criticism about how early, how late, or how not at all I had performed the task. The only plus to this job was that he did not deduct anything for rainy days. To this day, the sound of morning rain still brings a smile to my face and to my heart.

All of that aside, I was happy to see an adult with whom I could share this disaster. I rushed over to him, and while trying to keep my ten year old heart in its place, I told him what had happened. He gave me the look he reserved for those 90 degree plus mornings when I overslept and agreed to survey the damage. Slowly, he walked by the rubble in the driveway and into the darkness of the garage. He lifted his shiny head and inhaled deeply testing the breeze like a bald lion in a man suit. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a pack of matches. Testing the aroma of the air again, he struck a match and dropped it on the wet floor. I held my breath. The match went out and he pronounced the garage safe for habitation by storables.

To this day, fifty plus years later, I can see him dropping that match in slow motion only this time; we are both vaporized in a fiery ball of exploding kerosene. In this twisted updated version, the police find only some bits and pieces of uncle Fred and me and a few heat fused 1954 dimes.

I've often wondered if Uncle Fred knew what he was doing. I think not. It was years later that I determined that sometimes adults do stupid things. Why? I guess it is because sometimes we just don't think. Sometimes there are things we don't think about because we can never imagine them happening. Several years ago, a friend of mine told me that the plastic that covered one of the family's television screens had become clouded. Upon closer examination, he saw that this plastic protective sun screen with which most portable models of that era were equipped, was not only clouded, but it appeared to have been etched or abraded as if someone had used sandpaper or thrown acid on the screen. After interrogating his children, one of them confessed that she had wiped off the screen with a napkin. Further probing revealed that she had used the same napkin to catch the drippings from a pear she had eaten. The acid in the pear juice had permanently clouded the sun screen of the TV.

So, when we are warning our children of the many dangers that lurk in the world, we must remember to tell them.....now remember, dear, whatever you do, don't wipe down the TV screen with pear juice and don't drop a lighted match into a garage that a ten year old has certified to be free of spilled kerosene.