Fiendishly brilliant

Both Bushes -- HW and W -- had truly inspired choices for vice president. Yes, they chose wisely when they selected the men who would be, as they say, a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Back in the early 80's, of course, it was Dan Quayle. Not only was he portrayed as goofier and dumber than any other choice the elder Bush could have made, his wife was truly scary. Yes, scary. On so many levels.

And, of course, the younger Bush selected Dick Cheney, the scariest man on the planet. Even scarier than Marilyn Quayle.

Now, don't both of them seem like the best insurance policies the Bushes could have? Who would take a shot at either the father or the son if the result would be Quayle or Cheney in the White House? And who would move to impeach either Bush if the result would be President Quayle or President Cheney (just the thought gives me shivers).

You have to admit: it's a pretty smart move to make your own replacement option far scarier than you. Gotta give them credit.

Random musings from 'boken

Okay, so I was wrong about Tony. I have to admit that I liked Chase's ending much better. In both cases, let's face it, Tony has to spend the rest of his life with eyes in the back of his head. Not a way to live a life, is it?

"The state crushes the individual."

"What, New Jersey?"

Since the end of the Seinfeld experiment, the Mets have been tanking and the Yanks have been surging. Still and all, I refuse to go back. Hmm. Ironically, that's the opposite of what I would have done in the past. Only one thing to say: "Newman!" Oh, and the Amazins have to take two of three this weekend. Please.

Hoboken, once the land of drunken post-college frat boys, appears to have become an Aprica stroller showroom. From public vomiting and urination in the street, the scene has evolved into dirty diapers and spitting up on a bib. I expect that in another 20 years, those who are soiling the Huggies will be back to barf on the sidewalk after the bars close. The cycle of life, indeed.

Tony Soprano gets it in the end

With the last episode of The Sopranos ready to air tomorrow night, many theories on Tony's fate are being floated in the media and at office water coolers.

Last week's episode ended with an ominous scene: Tony laying down on a bare mattress in a safe house, bringing to bed a shotgun whose business end he positioned -- just for a moment -- eerily close to his mouth. One had to wonder - if his intent was self-protection, why wasn't the gun pointed at the door? Did he intend to protect himself by shooting murderers bursting through the door, or was he ready to beat them to the punch by offing himself?

A lot of people think he'll get whacked by the rival New York family, with Paulie ending up as boss of a much weaker Jersey crew, which would be a lame finish to what's been a groundbreaking and widely analyzed drama.

I don't think Tony comes to a fatal end -- at least not from the corporeal sense. What, for him, would be a fate worse than death? Here's my thought on the closing scene of the final episode:

Reprising an oft-used scene, we see Tony's slippered feet once again walking down a macadam driveway, stopping to pick up a newspaper at his feet. This time, however, it isn't the Newark Star-Ledger (the Newspaper for New Jersey), but The Journal-Star, (Lincoln, Nebraska's News and Information Source). The same dingy white bathrobe loosely opened to reveal his boxer shorts and guinea tee, he opens the paper to read the headline: "Nebraskan Anderson Soars in Space Shuttle." A resigned look on his face, he turns to walk back to the house, a suburban split level ranch house.

Tony Soprano is dead, replaced by Kevin Finnerty. No good capicola (gabbagool), no bracciole, no strip clubs, nobody to drive him around, and no wife wearing expensive clothes and an array of guilt-induced gift jewelry.

The question David Chase leaves us with is: What would be worse -- getting whacked by the New York crew, or a life without the spoils of a life of intimidation and brute force? Is Agent Harris' solution any better for Tony than Phil Leotardo's?

Then again, it wouldn't be half bad if Tony were to get a job at an animal shelter. Maybe getting some unconditional love would do him some good. That is, if he didn't go after the people who abused or neglected the shelter animals in the first place. We all remember what happened to Ralphie Cifaretto when he had Pie-O-My's stable torched.

(And gee, I just realized this makes two consecutive posts featuring TV characters played by balding, middle-aged guys from Jersey. Actually, three, if you count Joe Pantoliano. I promise I'll stop.)

The Seinfeld experiment is over!

Y'all were right. The quirks got way too annoying.

So much for doing the exact opposite of what hasn't worked in the past.

All I can say is "Not groovy."

Now all we can hope is that the Yankees continue to tank.

Photos

I often travel on my own, which sometimes opens up opportunities to chat with people or have experiences I probably wouldn't have if I were with someone else. You know the way it is: a lot of the time, it's far easier to approach one person than it is to go up to a pair or a trio or more.

One thing I notice -- and this started when I worked near Rockefeller Center in New York -- is that people find it easier to ask you to take a picture of them and their friends in front of some famous site or other. I don't mind doing it. In fact, I often volunteer my services as a photographer to groups of people so everyone can be in a photo together. I've gotten more confident about it with the advent of digital photography. Now I can look at the photo and know with certainty that they won't go back to Sweden or whereever and curse the American who cut off Uncle Bjorn's head in the picture at the Statue of Liberty.

Anyway, I thought this same thing was happening during my last sightseeing visit to San Francisco. I'd hiked my way across the Golden Gate Bridge and back, ending up at the scenic overlook where they'd thoughtfully put a parking lot and a souvenir stand. (They knew what they were doing when they built that bridge.) It was the last thing on my list of to dos in the city, and it was my last day on vacation, so I was feeling good, and accustomed to being asked to take photos for people.

So... I wasn't all that surprised when a pair of young Japanese men (boys, really) came up to me with a disposable camera and motioned to me that they wanted a picture. They pointed to each other and then to me.

Okay, no problem. I nodded and reached for the camera, and the one holding it shook his head no as the other put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me toward him. Oh boy. Before I knew it, my new friend was holding his other arm out triumphantly, giving a big thumbs up for the camera. The picture taken, they both smiled broadly and nodded their thanks. Then they walked away.

It all happened so quickly I didn't realize until later that at least one of them wanted to look as if he was, uh, successful on his trip to the States. Probably now half of Nagoya thinks he got lucky with this red-haired American woman. Unless, of course, his friend gave me the same photo-blunder fate as I once feared would befall Uncle Bjorn at my hands.

One can hope.

Number one with a bullet!

Happened to mention the words "Shellpile" and "my blog" (independently -- not referring to one as related to the other) to a friend, and he later told me he'd found the blog. Seemed a little scary until I Googled to find... when you type in "Shellpile," the first reference is to... THIS BLOG!

Although, maybe that's just on my computer or something. Check it out, let me know...

The consequences of free speech

There's been a lot of back and forth lately about free speech. What can a radio personality say and get away with? What's defamatory or racist language, and what's a mere expression of thought, either serious or intended as a joke?

As a Rutgers alumna I heard more than my share of the recent tsimmis about Imus and his comments about the RU women's basketball team. What he said was ill advised and stupid, and the team was well within its rights in being upset that they'd be disrespected that way.

I'm not going to get into opinions on whether Imus deserved to lose his job over the comment; plenty's been said on both sides by people more qualified than I. What I'm fascinated by is the free speech argument.

Those who defend Imus say that he has the right to free speech, just like anyone else, and that he shouldn't be fired for exercising that right. I agree with the first point, but I think the second one doesn't account for a certain reality.

There's an old saying about yelling fire in a crowded movie house (or shouting "movie" in a crowded firehouse, but that's another story). You cause a riot, you get arrested. That's the consequence of that free speech. Bottom line, you have the right to say whatever you want, but then you have to accept that there's a cost attached.

There are countless examples of people being fired for making objectionable statements. In fact, broadcasters of some shock jocks budget for the inevitable FCC fines, figuring they're the cost of doing business.

Imus surely was aware of the fines, bad press and firings his compadres have experienced. He had the choice to say what he said, or to hold his tongue or say something tame. By reasonable person standards, it wasn't surprising that he got called on the carpet.

It all comes down to two simple guidelines. If you have no problem with the consequences of your words, speak away. When you're at risk of losing something that matters to you, think about it before you spew.

Bandaging the scar

RayPod recently posted about memories that come to mind while walking down the Hudson River walkway in Manhattan.

It led me to think about the World Trade Center site itself, my own feelings about what happened there, and what is happening now. Over the past couple of years, I've found myself drawn to Lower Manhattan ... for the history of New York's earliest years. More often than not, I take the PATH train in from Newark to the WTC site.

The PATH predates the WTC by many years; it was originally the Hudson & Manhattan railroad, leading to Dey Street, and was taken over by the Port Authority in the early 60s. When the world's tallest buildings were erected, the PATH station was included in the plans and ultimately was relocated to the basement mezzanine level. The tracks swept underneath the outer borders of the WTC property, just skirting the streets above.

That station was closed temporarily after the attacks; when it reopened, riders saw an unusual site -- glimmers of outside light poking into the tunnel below the building that was no longer there. Over time, the tunnel itself was taken down, so you could see directly into the pit that used to be the building basement. For the dollar fifty you spent for the train ride, you got a ground floor view of the remnants of tragedy. You could see the metal ties that anchored the building to the concrete foundation and walls; the ground seemed almost totally swept clean of dirt and, sadly, human remains. There were few pieces of construction ... or demolition... equipment for a year or more as officials wrangled over the future of the new "Freedom Tower" to be built there. Like everything else in New York, it couldn't materialize without some controversy to delay the inevitable.

Every time I rode into that station along the perimeter of the pit, I would fall silent in contemplation of that day, what happened there, the ghosts that remain and the fact they'd just been there to work another mundane day at their jobs. Any tourists on the train would murmur remarks to each other, some pulling out cameras to preserve the sight. Though I'd come to take photos of my roamings, I felt that it's inappropriate to treat it like a tourist destination. The only thing I ever photographed was the street-level entrance to the station which, though temporary, is an appropriate sign of rebirth, of life in the face of tragedy.

I don't know if I feel that way about what's going on there now. Now the train ride is more like a tram ride through a Disney exhibit. A few weeks ago I rode into the station and found a true construction site: a beehive of activity, equipment and the germination of a skyscraper. You can't look straight across the pit anymore: your view is now obstructed by beams and rebar and concrete.

I guess it's progress, but I can't help but feel they're desecrating hallowed ground. But, as the hackneyed expression goes, New York's always reinventing itself. It rebuilt itself over the ashes of great fires in the days of the Dutch colony. It's torn down history wantonly and erected skyscrapers in its place. It's evicted working class people and torn their homes down for highways.

But until now it's never made such a grandiose gesture to build over a fresh, deep, aching wound. Maybe it's good - maybe it is the salve to heal an unspeakable tragedy. But I can't help but think that it's way, way too early to move to replace what was there and what was lost.

What's a quirk, and what's intolerable?

An episode of Seinfeld focused on the totally shallow reasons why some people choose to end relationships. You know, things like "he picks the green marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms and leaves the rest," or "she doesn't know the theme song from The Brady Bunch." A story in today's New York Times offered another dimension: being repulsed by the stuff your prospective honey may have in his apartment or home that is slightly scary, like a real stuffed seal or a set of aged and fading cartoon print bedsheets. Someone who's downright attractive on paper suddenly looks like a freak.

I found this article very timely, as I recently started dating someone who warned me, before I went to his home, that his place doesn't reflect "him." He'd moved there really quickly for family reasons and thus didn't want to be judged or assessed by it. Well, the place seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but somehow it seemed to make him feel uncomfortable.

To me, this was ironic. What he didn't realize was that since date one, said date has truly been testing my own shallow criteria. Great guy, but wrong favorite ball team, wrong vehicle, wrong music, wrong pre-sets on the car stereo, you name it. I keep wondering when I'm going to totally lose it and go off on him for all of these things that don't really matter.

I have been trying really hard not to blow off potential relationships due to surface stuff. Maybe I've been much too picky in the past, and focused on my own too-exacting standards, to notice that there are some pretty nice guys hiding behind those one or two minor shallow "flaws" I find so objectionable. I have no illusions that I would be able to wean someone off of an addiction to the early years of Full House, but maybe I could tolerate the obsession. At some point, you need to compromise, but somehow I can't seem to find the golden mean. How much must one person compromise?

In the interest of full disclosure, same date noted that I have three litter boxes in one room, for one cat, about three feet apart. I fully admit that it's quirky, but not any more so than my rubber duckies, is it?

Somehow I don't think this is what they intended.

The deconstruction of Asbury Park

They've started the "renovation" of one of the iconic structures on the Asbury Park boardwalk: the Casino.

Shellpile readers will remember a post last summer where I described my experience walking into the small bit of the Casino which was open to foot traffic. It was a corridor linking the Asbury Park boardwalk to the neighboring town of Ocean Grove, and it offered just an indication of a building that had sat idle for close to 20 years. The portion of the building that stood over the beach was decrepit and inaccessible; trees growing inside the building could be seen through the broken windows and holes in the roof.

Now, that expanse over the beach is no more than a pile of milled rubble. The eeriness of the structure has dissipated in the brisk ocean winds of late winter. And the sound of demolition equipment surrounds the area; it's the most activity that particular bit of beach has seen in quite some time.

Though the building is partitioned away by temporary fencing, I could see into the corridor I'd walked through last summer. The sign for the Casino Skating Palace is gone; with any luck it's being preserved along with an old chandelier they found in the building. I wonder where the ghosts have gone -- the screams from the haunted house, the laughter from the roller rink, the clandestine pleading from the Tunnel of Love.

Last I heard, the people who bought the Casino are rebuilding it to look exactly as it looked in its heyday. They'd wanted to preserve the structure but found it was unsound. Allegedly they are working to keep as much standing as possible, but I don't know. Those things tend to stray from plan, especially in New Jersey, where they take every renovation project as an opportunity to tear down what's there and replace it with McMansions. I guess we'll see.

Asbury Park Casino: May 6, 2006

Asbury Park Casino: March 10, 2007

Jehovah's Witnesses Go Postal

These days, it's truly unusual for me to get a handwritten envelope in the mail. None of my friends are Amish, so I tend to get most of my correspondence by electronic means. Even my mom, in her mid 70's, has started sending me birthday cards by e-mail.

Today I was a little more than surprised when I got an envelope in the mail with a cursive script address. At first I thought it was one of those computer-generated mass mailings with the fake handwriting that intends to fool you into thinking someone wrote you a letter, but it was the real McCoy. For a second I thought maybe it was my mom, sending a newspaper clipping about something I last cared about in the ninth grade. Nope, not her handwriting.

These days, you really need to be careful what you open, but I forgot that when I tore open the envelope. Inside was a handwritten note, along with a small pamphlet. The note read:

Dear Mr. ________ :

My husband and I live in your area. We do not Know You Personally, but We have some important information to share. A sample is enclosed in a tract.

We have tried in the past to contact you With No Success. We realize most people are Very busy today.

As a Bible Student We are sharing as Volunteers in a Worldwide Work being done in over 234 Lands.

If after reading the enclosed Tract you are interested, contact us at the above address.

Sincerely,
Eleanor Myers
Jehovah's Witness

This led me to wonder: have the Jehovah's Witnesses gotten so lazy that they are resorting to letter writing instead of knocking on doors? Not that I'm complaining -- I really don't want to talk about God with people who won't celebrate their own birthdays -- but come on, put a little effort into it, guys. I didn't realize that if I want to be proselytized, I have to be the one doing most of the work.

Or maybe they've finally gotten the hint? Have they gotten so weary of rejection that they're mailing out letters in the half-hearted hopes that someone will actually take the bait? Maybe it's the redemption lottery: the more letters you send, the more likely that one person will respond.

Come to think of it, there's a big opportunity here that millions of people have probably hoped for yet never had. What would Mrs. Eleanor Myers do if I showed up at her door and wouldn't leave until she accepted SpongeBob Square Pants as her personal savior?

It's tempting, but why take the chance?

Only in New York.....

Apparently they get a rabbi to say "om" over the food as it's prepared...

The hazards of equality

When first named to lead Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina was asked what it felt like to be the first female CEO of a major high tech company. "I don't know," she famously said. "I don't know what it's like to be a male CEO." Admirably, she downplayed the impact of her gender on her role, acknowledging that she had been raised with the belief that she could achieve whatever she wanted. Her upbringing had been tempered neither with the message that she was held back from some things because she's female, nor that she had to work and fight all that much harder because she's a woman. If she worked hard, she could succeed. She confronted her share of discrimination along the way, but she faced it and overcame it, as any ambitious person would.

When Carly ran into difficulties at HP and ultimately was very publicly relieved of her duties, some pundits opined that she never really fit in because she was a woman in a male-dominated industry. Never mind that HP has quite a good track record of promoting and hiring on merit, regardless of gender. Never mind that she showed immediate and persistent disdain for the company's much heralded consensus-based culture. And never mind that her own substantial hubris had kept her from adapting her strategy when it proved unworkable.

It led me to think: we've achieved equality only when we have the chance to fail equally as spectacularly as we want to succeed. If women are to be judged on their own merits, we have to take the bad with the good. If we want a fair opportunity to succeed, we have to be willing to suffer the consequences of failure. To expect otherwise is to ask for preferential treatment -- just the thing feminists fought against when it was granted solely to white men.

If people in a business - or a society - expect to be treated fairly in a meritocracy, it seems to me that they'd want to be judged solely on what they achieve and the talents they bring to the table. They wouldn't want to be granted a mulligan after they err. If you insist on swinging from the mens' tees, you can't demand the womens' handicap when your shot misses the hole by five feet. Yes, it stinks to fail, and yes, it really stinks to lose something you've worked so hard and so long to gain. But that's what makes it so precious to win in the first place.

Said another way, "They wouldn't let me succeed because I am a woman" is the flip side of "they only gave me a chance because I am a woman." No ambitious person - male or female, Caucasian or otherwise - wants to be judged that way.

Maybe history doesn't remember those who come in second place, or the people who fail. At the same time, it does remember those who recover and go on to win. (Just look at the '69 Mets) I think that the real prize of equality is getting the opportunity to bounce back from failure or setbacks.

Here's to more second acts. And more chances to risk spectacular failure.

Meet me halfway, dude: dress the part.

What's the deal with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? I'm not going to get into politics ... we all know the guy is both deranged and evil. I'm talking about his image:

Why can't the guy wear a tie?

In every picture I've seen, he's wearing a sport jacket and a dress shirt with one or two buttons unbuttoned. It's not a bad look, but come on. The guy seems to think that it's casual Friday every day. Isn't it reasonable to expect this guy to find a respectable outfit befitting an evil despot?

Every self-respecting dictator or deranged leader puts some thought into an evil costume -- a look he makes his own. It's like the villains in Batman or Superman. Think about it: Kim Jong Il has that weird hair. Castro has made the rumpled fatigues look his trademark. Khadafi has had two distinct looks: when he was an axis of evil guy, he had that snappy army uniform with a bit too much ornamentation. Now, as a man of peace, he's got the Arab getup.

You dress as any one of them (or someone worse, as Prince Harry discovered) for Halloween, and people immediately know who you are. Dress like Ahmadinejad, and people assume you had to work late and didn't have the time to change before you came to the party. You look like that guy on the NJ Transit train who had a rough day, pulled off his tie and started drinking beer out of a can smuggled in a paper bag. Let's face it - it's one step better than the lame "let me cut a few eyeholes in a sheet and I'll go as a ghost" costume.

Now, I have nothing against the casual, no-tie look. Most men can pull it off. But does it command respect? Does it engender fear? I'd say no. For a lot of guys, it wouldn't even get them a date at a singles dance. So Ahmadinejad thinks it's going to ensure him permanent status in the Axis of Evil? Seems mighty doubtful.

What's funny is that Katie Couric recently noted the mnemonic she uses to remember the pronunciation of his name: "I'm a dinner jacket."

The new social disease

You carry it without knowing. After staying out all night. Even in the best hotels.You can never tell who's afflicted. Sometimes they don’t even know, until the embarrassing hives and itching appear.Herpes? The clap? No (well, maybe, but not here). It’s bedbugs.

Yes, bedbugs, the scourge of tenements and, well, the 18th century, are back. Bedbugs (or bed bugs) are small nocturnal insects of the family Cimicidae that live by hematophagy, feeding on the blood of humans and other warm-blooded hosts. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Resurgent due to increased global travel and the banning of DDT, they’re showing up all over the place, and they’re remarkably insidious. From a health standpoint, they’re pretty much harmless, except for the aforementioned itching and hives. Oh, and their uncanny ability to drive their host into a spiral of madness.

I had the unfortunate privilege of bringing these tiny hitchhikers home from an August trip to Ireland, a country which, as you know, has had reasonable sanitary standards for quite some time. Roaming the countryside of County Kerry, I assumed I was running the risk of picking up some sort of sheep scourge from all of the scat I stepped in, but I never expected bugs.I stayed in five different hotels, all of which seemed nice and clean. There was no reason to believe that they harbored any insects that wanted to come home with me.Then again, one of my college roommates said the same thing about one of her Friday night hookups, and that one required a visit to the health center after a few days. (Itching and rash, oddly enough.)

Anyway, all seemed fine through September. I attributed a few small itchy spots to a stray mosquito that might have made its way through a window screen somehow. Then came the onslaught.By the time I found them in October, I had a nice rash of bites on my back, arms and legs. I discovered a bunch of sated bedbugs on the underside of my spare bed pillow, deceased after happily engorging themselves on my blood. Yeech.

If you're unlucky and took months to determine the cause of your misery, the little fu- I mean suckers -- will have totally infested all of your bedroom furniture and perhaps the cracks and crevices of the walls and floorboards and... well, you get the picture. I had a relatively minor case, which I determined had come in from the luggage I'd brought to Ireland and stored underneath my bed.

As you can read in the Wikipedia entry, the next step involves basically boiling all of your bed clothes, all of the clothes in the furniture anywhere close to your bed, and then vacuuming the living daylights out of your bedroom. Then you get the pest control guy in. I say "pest control" instead of "exterminator" because he or she can't do it all. Even when they reach every living bedbug during a visit, it's not over. You end up becoming a partner in the eradication, vacuuming and boiling clothes and changing your sheets almost obsessively. While the poisons or enzymes or whatever the professional used are good, they still won't kill the eggs, so you have to wait for them to hatch and then murder the nymphs. I guarantee you'll be seeing your new best friend, the pest control guy, at least once again. Fortunately they include a second and third visit in their fees. They know.

Oh, and they'll encase your newly treated mattress and boxspring in vinyl covers so the bugs that are in the bedding can't get out. You've got to leave the covers on for a minimum of a year until the bugs all die off (yes, they can live that long without another meal). I chose to look at the positive side: if I ever start wetting the bed, at least I won't wreck the mattress.

Unluckily for me, all of this happened during a very hectic and stressful time at work, when I was working longer hours and coming home totally exhausted. I was in no state to change the sheets, boil the crap out of them and vacuum like June Cleaver on speed. I had no time to have the bug control guys come back for the second visit, so when the bugs reappeared, I did the best I could with the enzyme solution the pest guys left me. I smoothed cortisone cream over the hives to control the itching.

And meanwhile, I was going absolutely mental at work with the stress of my job and the anguish of these little fuckers literally sucking my lifeblood out of me when I didn't have the strength to do anything about it. Not fun. I bought a few six packs of Guinness, not just to appease the Irish bedbug gods, but to get absolutely plastered to forget them for a while.

You really start wondering why they chose you, of anyone, to come home with. What, were they expecting to sleep with me and get their little green cards? This country is so set on keeping terrorists out of the country that they're harassing perfectly innocent people, when they could be sending these #*$&@^ to Guantanamo instead.

But I digress.Back to the social disease aspect. If you're dealing with a bedbug issue, you have to be careful who you tell, because you're apt to be classified as a moron or as someone in deep denial. Or maybe a hypochondriac. Very few people know about them and that having them is not an indication of poor hygiene or sleeping around in fleabag motels. Many people will tell you that you should have the pest control guys show up day after day after day and bomb the place. They'll tell you to throw out the mattress and boxspring and maybe the whole bed. When you tell them that those options won't help (and often mean that you'll pay good money for a new bed that will eventually get infested, too), they'll look at you like you're delusional. Everyone's an entomologist.

I couldn't do much at work but suffer the anger of my boss for all of the fuck-ups I was committing on some major projects. No way was I going to go chapter and verse into my angst-inducing infestation. Maybe I should have, but I figured it wasn't worth looking both incompetent and delusional.

The social life suffers, too. Forget about inviting overnight visitors over. Imagine the conversation:

"Uh, before you come over with your toothbrush and a change of clothes, there's something I have to tell you."

"Oh, boy. Do you have herpes? Hey, it's okay, I'll wear a condom or three."

"Uh, no, I have bedbugs."

"Good God!" *noise of screeching tires as the guy can't get away from you quickly enough*

Let's face it, no condom is big enough to cover the whole body. Well, unless the guy is really, really small, in which case he has enough problems to deal with.

So, bottom line, you've gotta be careful. The world is divided into two types of people: those who've had bedbugs, and those who will. The only solace is to remember that they were pretty much ubiquitous before the invention of DDT. Our ancestors survived them just fine. Except they were really, really itchy.

American culture creep manifests itself in weird ways.

Indigenous cultures around the world have a variety of religions and faiths, having escaped the incursion of missionaries spreading the various flavors of European and American Christianity. The South Pacific island chain of Vanuatu, however, persists in an American-influenced, yet not-Christian religion: the cargo cult of Jon Frum.

The natives of these islands saw their first white man and their first glimpse of modern convenience during World War II as the Allies hopscotched their way through the Pacific. In their airplanes and ships, these visitors brought jeeps and canned food and a host of other mysterious and alluring items that must have seemed otherworldly to the natives.

Then the war ended and the visits from the white (and black) men stopped. The desire for their gifts, however, did not. When weeks and months passed without further gifts from the skies and seas, a legend, and then a faith emerged. The white man would come from his otherworldly place, with gifts of Spam and Coca-Cola, and maybe even a washing machine. Jon would come Frum America, his heavenly home. The Vanuatuans even built airstrips to ease his return, specifically on the island of Tanna. They also created a Jon Frum flag of a red cross on a white background. Not to denote Christianity, of course, but to represent the flag so many of the white men worked under.

Lest you think that this is some sort of materialistic, possession-based culture, consider one of the basic tenets of the cult. As a sign of faith, members are encouraged to throw away all money and let their land go to seed. They believe that Jon Frum will provide all. Eventually.

Over the years, some Vanuatans claimed to have a special gift that enabled them to hear Jon Frum from deep in the earth. These seers claim that Jon will be coming soon... yet he never does.

Their provider's reticence, however, doesn't stop the islanders. In fact, it only provokes more devotion. Every February 15, they celebrate Jon Frum Day, the expected date of his return to Vanuatu. Members of the Tanna Army (a tribute to the US Army, created on Frum's behalf) conduct a parade, with "USA" painted on their bare chests and carrying crudely-fashioned US flags.

Weird, yeah, but when you look at it, it's not that much different from any other religion -- salvation, gifts for the believers, an unseen provider. Most faiths, however, aren't based on the delivery of fresh C-rations.

Anyway, there's also a Prince Philip cult somewhere in the Hebrides, but that's a different story.

September 11 Memorial... Small Town New Jersey
Late December 2006

The Holidays

A few thoughts on holidays and merriment:

I live in a part of the country where the population is very diverse. Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Bahai, and every denomination of Christian. You name it. Thus, around this time of year, you hear a lot of "happy holiday" greetings, and not a lot of "Merry Christmas," "Happy Hanukkah," and so forth.

Now, I'm all for inclusiveness and consideration, but I'm struck by how silly all of this can get. After all, the day is what it is. In my mind, they're all an opportunity to party and have fun, and can't we all use more of that?Do we not say "happy new year" on January 1, despite the fact that the Chinese and Jews and the Bahai, among others, celebrate the new year on other dates? Let me tell you, the Chinese know how to throw a new year's party, so why not have two new year's parties and celebrate with them. I mean, with this agnostic logic people are throwing around, no-one would say "happy birthday" to anyone but themselves or someone else who was born on the same date. So, really, what's wrong with saying 'happy whatever' on the right day?

Another thing: Santa Claus. Around this time of year, you inevitably hear some psychologist on the TV or radio talking about the right time to tell a child the truth about the jolly fat man. Should a parent tell the child before classmates do? How do you tell them?

So many questions, and so much tsimmis. Seems to me that the answer to the Santa question is simple. Who's questioning a stranger who leaves you presents with no expectation of the favor of a return gift? Sure, he sneaks into your house, but who cares, as long as he doesn't walk off with your Playstation? What's so bad about letting kids believe in that as long as humanly possible? There's a Jewish saying about one of the highest forms of charity being a gift where the recipient doesn't know who the giver is. Seems to me that the concept of Santa Claus helps perpetuate that concept. It's a pretty darn nice one, I think you'll agree.

Parents will tell you they might as well fess up because their kids are smart and will easily figure out that it's Mom and Dad who are leaving the toys under the tree. I submit that those are exactly the kids who are going to keep the faith in Santa for as long as possible in the hopes of getting more and more interesting stuff from the jolly fat dude. I mean, why question it? It's just more fun to keep up the charade.

And it also means that you get it all for the price of putting out some cookies and milk. Not a bad deal.

PR Lady's limerick

She was a doctor of spin
With sound argument she'd always win
Negotiations did fail
When she stepped off the trail
And sank in straight up to her chin.