Bom Chicka Wah Wah!

Not sure of the month, but this column originally ran in 2007. It's been a few years since Axe has been popular among America's young men, but I still remember the odor. 

The Unilever company ought to be tried for olfactory crimes against humanity.

It is the maker of Axe, the cologne of choice for teenage males. In television commercials, gorgeous, sophisticated women are reduced to whorish tarts over the product, throwing themselves at the feet of gawky boys solely because the latter had the good sense (but not good scents) to douse themselves in Axe. All these women belt out “Bom Chicka Wah Wah!” as they attack their male prey.

Heady stuff, to be sure.

But I’ll let you in on a little tip, guys: Axe should be spelled Ass, because that’s what it smells like when applied as liberally as many of you do.

All things in moderation, said Ben Franklin. Except Axe, he would have amended, if he had the misfortune to live in a world awash in the stuff.

Axe reeks. Axe stinks. Axe is just plain gross.

As a high school teacher, maybe I’m more sensitive than most, as my room reeks of Axe intermingled with the sweat of gym class and the sour odor of test anxiety, a pungent brew that lingers even after I’ve thrown open windows, wiped tears from my cheeks, and prayed for a whiff of anything sweeter – trash, cow manure or rotten eggs.

In the hallways, I can take attendance by closing my eyes and inhaling deeply. Axe has 15 variations – body sprays and deodorants in a mélange of musky scents – and I can recognize each from the distinctive way it makes my skin crawl.

But maybe that’s just me. From a young age, I’ve rebelled against the bottles of cologne given to me at holidays and birthdays by well-meaning relatives determined to make me smell like a man. Or to keep me from smelling like a man, if one thinks about it. It is doubtful the first Neanderthals returned from a long day’s hunt, the smoking pelts of wooly mammoth around their necks, smelling lily-fresh from the prehistoric version of Axe they’d applied liberally during the day’s stalking.

(My mother-in-law was taken aback a few years ago when, snooping through my bathroom cupboards – not really, but the image is too vivid to resist – she found all the cologne she’s been giving me for Christmas since 1989 stacked up neatly in a corner. She hasn’t given me any since, and I thank her for it publicly.)

I hate the smell of cologne, all cologne, and drenching myself in it would make me long for a hot shower. I don’t want to have a distinctive smell, thank you very much, unless it’s the smell of nothing.

I’m apparently in the minority. Some men keep bottles of Axe – or Axe-like products – in their pockets, whipping them out in restaurants, airports, and movie theaters, apparently in need of a little Axe Effect, as the commercials term it, that “Bom Chicka Wah Wah!” moment when the sweet young waitress, baggage handler or ticket taker will tear off her clothes while moaning the company’s slogan.

Meanwhile, a small but significant minority of the population reaches for inhalers, hoping to keep airwaves open long enough to escape the reek. It’s a class action lawsuit waiting to be filed, I tell ya.

So here is a little Axe challenge of my own. If any of these smelly guys can – in real life – make women behave in a way that approximates the Axe commercials, I will donate a case of Axe to the elementary school of his choice, to help the next generation of virile, young studs achieve a similar level of success with the opposite sex.

My guess is that women are just as grossed out by the smell of ass – er, Axe – as I am, and that they have never been drawn to an otherwise geeky male simply because he smelled like every other geeky male on the face of the planet.

But that’s just my guess. If anyone can prove otherwise, that hotties will really prostrate themselves before a man because he smells like something that can be bought by the gross in every Walgreens and Wal-Mart in North America, I will cheerfully admit my error and start bathing in the Axes of Evil myself.

After all, I’m not opposed to more Bom Chicka Wah Wah in my life, only to smelling like a manure spreader to get it.

The unread piles keep piling up

“Tsundoku” is a way of life for me.

The Japanese word refers to buying books and letting them pile up without reading them. At least that’s what Wikipedia says it means, and nobody on the Internet ever lies.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to read and do a lot of it. But my acquisitions are outpacing my completions by a ratio of 10 to 1. Maybe more.

Next to my side of the bed, much to my wife’s consternation, is an ever-growing pile of books. These include the books she and I are reading together, a habit we have cultivated during the pandemic, and the titles I’m tackling solo.

The pile is very egalitarian. F. Scott Fitzgerald is sandwiched between James Patterson and Linda Castillo, writers of more modest literary aspirations. Activist attorney Terry Gilbert’s autobiography, “Trying Times,” is perched atop a Library of America collection of crime novels.

Mixed into the pile are various magazines, dogeared or opened to specific pages. I have about a half-dozen articles in process at any one time, but drift off to sleep before I get to the end of any of them.

Nowadays, my tsundoku pile is almost as large in the digital realm. Comixology — an Amazon company, dontcha know, but these days, what isn’t? — often sells collections of comic books at ridiculously cheap prices, ripe for the downloading. Many times, these are books I read in childhood and then lost or sold, so it’s enticing to revisit them, in bright new colors, complete with issues that I might have missed due to the vagaries of newsstand distribution back in the 1970s and ’80s.

This, on top of articles I find on various newspaper websites — there’s an oxymoron, yes? — that are bookmarked in my phone and on my browser. This is the stuff I peruse in waiting rooms and grocery lines when I’m not subjecting the world to my brilliant opinions, rapier wit and scintillating poetry on Twitter and Facebook.

(It speaks volumes about me that one day last week, when I’d broken into a cold sweat because I’d forgotten to take my wallet to the car dealership to pay for an oil change, I spent my time not solving my dilemma but instead tweeting about it. Luckily, the dealer accepted Apple Pay.)

Every now and then, when the book pile gets too high, both in hard and digital copy, I’ll cull the herd, stacking some books in hidden piles in out-of-the-way corners of the house.

This is, however, a dicey proposition, because as the tectonic book plates shift, new titles rise to the surface, and I end up crawling back to the original bedside pile and adding other books that I’d forgotten about, including some I’ve already read but want to revisit.

Bam! Tsundokued again.

I’m sure a wonderful 12-step program somewhere could cure me of this malady, complete with a bookmobile backing up to my door and little bookworms wriggling in and out, whisking away my titles and leaving only multiple indentations in the carpet to show where the titles have been.

If somebody knows of one, preferably in book form, just send me the name. I’ll get it added to the pile and read posthaste — one of these years.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

'Sermongate' is reminder of other types of plagiarism

“Do your own work.”

If I surveyed readers about which statements teachers said most often, this admonition to write your own papers and not to copy homework would certainly be near the top. Maybe somewhere between “be nice” and “raise your hand.”

Outside of education, however, how often does “do your own work” really apply?

I’ve pondered this while the latest high-profile accusation of plagiarism has unfolded, this time over the so-called “sermongate” in the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC’s newest president, Ed Litton, is accused of lifting key ideas and phrases, without attribution, from a sermon by J.D. Greear, the SBC’s former president. Now, Litton’s detractors are calling for his resignation.

Modern technology has made it much easier to catch plagiarism. In Litton’s case, it took only uploaded video of his sermon from 2020 along with his predecessor’s in 2019, according to the New York Times.


Since the dust-up, Greear has written on his website that Litton asked for permission to use certain parts of his work, which he, Greear, granted. Interestingly, Greear revealed that he, too, had been inspired by yet a third person, similarly uncredited, for parts of the same 2019 sermon.

Greear says his reflections are “usually shaped by the input of many godly men and women,” which is fair. Nobody expects a writer or speaker in any forum, on any subject, to create “ex nihilo.” We are all influenced by the thoughts and words of those who come before us.

But when we borrow explicitly from a source, when we share key ideas and concepts unique to another person, or pass along anecdotes that represent somebody else’s lived experience, then we must provide attribution, even when we change that source’s language.

In other words, tell the audience who said it first and where you found it; and if you’re using somebody’s exact words, make it clear when speaking and use quotation marks when writing.

Baptist speakers are hardly the only practitioners of plagiarism. The same Internet that made it a simple matter for Litton’s detractors to expose him is also the place where Facebook users regularly copy and paste other people’s observations and memes without concern over intellectual rights. Often, these swipes are done with the intent to shame another person, to point a finger at some offending element of society, or to engage in a civilian version of stolen valor.

It’s too much work for some people to write their own excoriation of a celebrity, politician, or hot-button issue when hundreds of wiseacres have already done so. Their work is just floating there, ripe for digital picking.

My teaching colleagues and I have been formulating a potential plagiarism policy for the last few months. One of our primary goals is prevention. Teaching students what can and cannot be used fairly and how to credit sources is far better than punishing them after the fact.

We have a sense that we are engaged in an endless battle, especially when so many prominent people continue to flaunt the work of others. Yet the fight is still worth having. In at least one public venue, the stakes are incredibly high.

In 2019, the USA Today Network, working with the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity, found that over an eight-year period, special-interest groups had written more than 10,000 bills for statehouses across the nation, and that legislators had introduced most of these with little to no changes. While these bills overwhelmingly favored specific industries or conservative causes (4,301 industry, 4,012 conservative, 1,602 liberal, 17 other), both parties engaged in the practice.

Call it “model legislation,” “copy-and-paste bills,” or “corporate ghostwriting.” To many, it smells like old-fashioned plagiarism.

Can we really say that we, as a nation, are better served by legislators who don’t take time to gain expertise on a particular issue by researching and writing about it, but instead use the equivalent of a “buy your research paper here” service? No wonder we end up with laws that reflect the most abject cronyism and show a bias for big business over individuals.

This practice should be at least as objectionable as a Southern Baptist Convention president nicking a speech or Junior leaning on Wikipedia for his book report. Do your own work, indeed.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Hair today, gone tomorrow?

From June 9, 2005, here is the follow-up column to an earlier piece on my hair.   

Two weeks ago, I shared that my ponytail was an endangered species. 

What I grew in my late teen and early twenties to impart that rock-star quality had, in my mid-to-late thirties, finally paid off: I looked like a rock star, all right, but the wrong one. Instead of the Roger Daltrey look, I ended up with the "original members of Lynyrd Skynyrd" look — male pattern baldness in front, mangy mess in the back. 

I bemoaned then that I had two choices: Cut it all off or effect the world's longest comb-over. 

Enter Alliance High School art teacher Martha Crookshank, who threw caution and taxpayers' dollars to the wind by assigning her students the task of giving me options, and lots of them. Obviously, some of their creative coifs are displayed here for your edification and amusement. A few require much more hair than God has seen fit to leave me, and at least one — the Castaway look — requires more facial hair than I could grow in a decade. 

But I appreciate the thoughts, kids, and I hope to have every one of you in class next year, where a special grade has been reserved for those with the temerity to mock the teacher. 

I haven't decided which style to go with, so for now, the tail remains, and the tale remains unfinished. 

Bald v. comb-over: Time to decide

I got a little wistful over this column because it's from a time — May 26, 2005 — when I still had hair. Look for the sequel in a couple of days. 

Maybe it's time I cut my hair. 

My wife and I were sitting in a restaurant Friday night when a waitress came up behind me and asked, "Can I get you ladies something to drink?"

Her face turned beet red when she looked at my scruffy, unshaven face and realized her mistake. 

Her apology only dug the hole deeper. "I'm sorry, but you have such a pretty ponytail," she said, and I rolled my eyes. My wife, smirking, was mentally recording the whole exchange; she'll retell this story for years to come. 

My picture [here] is an aberration. I've spent most of my adult life with hair much longer than the male norm. On the few occasions when I've cut it short, I always go right back to work growing it out again. I'm not sure why. 

As a teenager, I thought rock guitarists were really cool, and most of them had long hair, which seemed to get them plenty of women. Of course, they had talent and money, too, but such subtleties were beyond me. 

Growing long hair seemed easier than spending hours in my room fiddling with strings and learning to play chords. I have a tin ear, anyway. 

These days, I don't troll for women much, and I no longer idolize guitarists like I did at 16. But the hair remains. 

Because I keep it in a ponytail so often, I almost never think about it, except when it gets tangled on my shirt collar or stuck in a car window. (These things happen.)

Every once in a while, though, like my waitress Friday, somebody reminds me. 

A few years back, I was standing at a urinal in a public men's room when an older gentleman shuffled in. He took one look at me, said 'Sorry, ma'am, I must have come in the wrong door," and walked right back out. I never had been able to figure it: Maybe he was from Scandinavian country where women's restrooms are equipped with urinals?

(After typing the last sentence, I did a little research. Such contraptions really do exist. Last year, the outdoor Glastonbury Festival in England offered women "a special, anatomically shaped funnel" to be used at pink-colored urinals, according to the Reuters news agency. Festival organizers called the urinals — I kid you not — She-pees.)

Then there was the incident several weeks ago. 

One of my freshman English classes was reading a novel where a red-necked hunter was described as bald on top with long hair flapping down on either side of his face and hanging on his shoulders. 

Some wiseguy in the back of the room, waking up from the self-induced coma he's been in since September, piped up, "Sounds like Schillig." Grrr. 

As my hair on top continues to thin, I will soon be faced with a choice: pull the ponytail to the top of my head and create the ultimate comb-over, or take a scissors to it and act my age. 

If I choose the latter, I'm going all the way in the opposite direction and shaving myself bald. 

That way, the next time a waitress approaches our table from behind, she can ask, "Can I get you and your father something to drink?"

That ought to turn my wife's smirk into a full-fledged grin.  

She's trying to kill me ... with love

 

We still talk about this at family parties. From February 24, 2005. 

My wife and I celebrated Valentine's Day and our anniversary this month, and I remembered both. I haven't missed her birthday or a special occasion for years. I pull my own weight around the house — I sweep, mop, dust and take out the trash. 

Nevertheless, she's trying to kill me. 

Superman has his Kryptonite, Achilles his heel, and King Kong his Fay Wray. My weakness is food, and she exploits it to her advantage. 

In the past, she's tried to take me out with chicken potpie and brownies. The potpie is still memorable years later: a mass of viscous goo that looked like something a young Steve McQueen would jab at with a pitchfork in The Blob. Only a cast-iron stomach and a call to Pizza Hut saved me. 

The brownies were just as memorable. They weighed 17 pounds if they weighed an ounce, a black lake of chocolate frozen solid in a baking dish. 

I cracked them over my head and they snapped in half without spilling a crumb. I gnawed through one or two chunks with the help of a gallon of milk. Presumably, the rest is at the bottom of a landfill where its radioactive half-life will keep farmers' fields barren until 2067. 

I'm still alive. 

Last week, she became desperate. I know this because she's repeating tricks. It was her second attempt at killing me with sloppy joe sandwiches. 

The first time was a family party several years ago, when she enlisted the help of her sister. Sis whipped up a dish that resembled sloppy joe in name only. They were sickly brown with a layer of scum on top that would have been right at home on Lake Erie in the 1970s. 

Nevertheless, I ate three helpings. I learned her sister had tossed some bizarre combination of taco seasoning, ketchup and herbs into the mix. For the next two days, I did nothing but roll on the bed, hold my stomach and race for the bathroom. 

This week, my wife fixed her own sloppy joe recipe and served me two sandwiches. I noticed a strange odor, barely masked by the scent of Manwich, but since I was hungry and sloppy joe is one on my favorites, I wolfed them down and went for a third. 

My wife took a bite of her sandwich and immediately began scraping the meat off the bun. "It tastes funny," she said. 

Instantly, it clicked. "Yes, it tastes like ... soap." 

"Oh." Her eyes grew large and she told me that as she was draining the grease from the meat, she was also cleaning another pan, and it was just possible she accidentally squirted Dawn dish soap into the meat. 

They weren't sloppy joes, they were soapy joes, and I knew how I would be spending the next 48 hours. 

To be fair, my wife is only trying to kill me with love. I didn't marry her for her culinary skills, just as she certainly didn't marry me for my mechanical know-how. 

It's love that keeps her from commenting when my attempts to drive a nail straight go awry, and love that keeps me dutifully — and mostly silently — eating her cooking, including the periodic pus-filled potpie, blackened brownie or soapy joe. 

Of course, there's a case to be made for gluttony, too. 

Or, as a friend of my daughter commented when she heard that I'd eaten three sandwiches laced with dish soap: "Eating one is love, eating three is just stupid." 

'Running While Black'

Many white people, myself included, don't think about how something as simple as exercising has a racial component. This column originally ran on May 30, 2020.

A former restaurant on West State Street has seen some recent activity, with lights on and new plywood across the doors, fueling speculation that will reopen as an outlet shoe store or another restaurant.

In the last week or so, that plywood has either come loose or been moved to the side, leaving the building open with no cars or construction vehicles in the parking lot.

I often jog in the area, and it’s tempting to detour a few steps and poke my head inside. A looky-loo, that’s me.

I haven’t done it yet. It would be my luck to fall into some unseen hole, twist my ankle or maybe end up on security footage and be embarrassed.

The fear of being shot has never entered into my calculations. That’s an example of white privilege, writ large.

Ask a person who is brown or black why they might not peek into a vacant building and you may receive another reason — fear of interactions with other citizens and/or law enforcement that could escalate to the point of arrest or even death.

It happened to Ahmaud Arbery in February. The Georgia man had gone inside a house under construction along his regular jogging route. Later he was shot to death after three men confronted him and attempted to make a citizen’s arrest, which Arbery resisted.

And if you’re saying, well, he shouldn’t have resisted, ask yourself what you would do if three strangers attempted to take you into “custody” when you were out for a jog or a walk. Under what authority do they have that right? Where are they taking you? Who will know you are gone?

What these three fine, upstanding paragons of justice and virtue could have done, if they felt they had to do anything at all because they were convinced Arbery was a nefarious thief, was to follow him from a safe distance, note his address, and phone the police with their suspicions.

Instead, they were so assured their cause was righteous and so secure in their white privilege that they filmed their interaction and almost got away with a “resisting arrest’ narrative before national and international outrage over the footage, released months later by one of the assailants, forced or shamed authorities into taking another look.

The New York Times did a follow up examining the phenomenon of “running while black,” talking with runners of color who contend with the reality of misunderstandings and suspicion every time they lace up their shoes.

Me, I just stretch a little and run. Again, white privilege.

We see the excruciating reality of racial disparities again and again, but often only when it is being recorded by a private citizen. Take the incident in New York City’s Central Park, where a person of color asked Amy Cooper, who is white, to leash her dog. She threatened to call the police and say, “There’s an African-American man threatening my life.” (Many commentators appeared more concerned that she was choking her pet during the exchange, recorded by the man, than that she was conniving to use race to get authorities to come running.)

Or, far more tragically, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this week after an officer kneeled on his throat while three others stood watching. Floyd said “I can’t breathe” twelve times. All four officers were fired, but a man lost his life, all over an allegedly counterfeit $20 bill.

Zeba Blay, writing about the Amy Cooper incident for the Huffington Post, notes there is “a level of self-examination and self-awareness that white people are not doing that they must do. There’s something that white people, even the ones who believe that they hold no biases, that they wield no power, must admit to themselves and begin to unpack. They are complicit — and even participatory — in the system of white supremacy. Individual white people may not believe they are, but their ability to tap into that system is always within reach.”

Conclusions like these are hard for Euro-Americans to swallow, similar to how hard it is to accept being labeled “Euro-American” and live with a hyphenated existence that acknowledges whiteness is not the default setting in this nation.

If that hyphen rankles, maybe that’s a starting point: a realization that every day one can spend without considering race is a luxury that more than a quarter of this nation does not have.

This reality affects everything — from important considerations about where people live and work and how they interact with neighbors, to more mundane things, like satisfying their curiosity with a quick peek at a building under construction.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Fox eyes the skies in latest audience bid

Fox Weather is low-hanging fruit, isn’t it?

Within moments of a New York Times story announcing Rupert Murdoch’s new streaming channel, social media unloaded with a tsunami of commentary.

In one tweet, a hypothetical Fox meteorologist tells the audience it’s sunny and perfect in Miami. Meanwhile, a tropical storm batters the city.

In another, a writer predicts Fox Weather will blame climate change on undocumented people at the border. (The channel will refer to them as “illegals,” of course.)

A third tweet speculates on how Tucker Carlson might comment on a tornado, by noting that they disproportionately strike areas where white people live. Carlson blames George Soros.

Another wit wonders if Fox Weather will offer hourly updates from “the former guy,” armed with a Sharpie, too close to the reality of 45’s explanation of Hurricane Dorian from 2019 to be funny.

My own imagination went to the nascent channel’s possible coverage of any protest outside the National Weather Service headquarters in Silver Springs, Maryland. There, a mob contradicts the reality of climate change and seeks to overthrow the meteorologists in charge.

Despite the presence of a noose on the lawn, by the next day the Fox

Weather team dubs the rioters “peaceful protestors” and “tourists.”

The jokes illustrate a few things. For one, they indicate why Mad magazine stopped creating new material a few years back. When topical humor can be shared seconds after an announcement or event, publishing similar schtick months later is pointless. (SNL has the same problem.)

On a deeper level, jokes about the new weather channel acknowledge how deeply Fox News has exploited its audience. For regular viewers, and especially those who watch Fox to the exclusion of everything else, the world is strikingly different from what the rest of Americans see.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote earlier this week about the Republican Party’s embrace of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and their “narrative in which Democrats were dangerous socialists, out to destroy home and family.” Cox notes that the network’s commentators have “skewed reality” for their audiences.

Certainly many Americans have strained relationships with parents, grandparents and lifelong friends due in large part to the broadcast crack-cocaine of various Fox personalities, who are profiteers in exploiting division.

The gulf between Fox viewers’ “consensus reality” and objective reality is perhaps best exemplified by a Reuters/Ipsos poll from mid-May. It found 53 percent of Republicans believe Donald Trump won the November election, despite zero evidence of widespread voter fraud. Only 3 percent of Democrats believe Trump won, and only 25 percent of all Americans. (That last is almost as concerning as the Republican number.)

Ironically, having whetted the appetites of a portion of the public for zany conspiracies, Fox News now finds itself on the outs with some viewers who don’t find the channel crazy enough. Hence, the rise of One America News Network, aka Fox without even a small shred of decency. Maybe this explains Fox’s decision to expand into weather.

Whatever Fox Weather’s intentions are – other than making gobs of money for Rupert Murdoch – viewers cannot afford to delude themselves on climate change the way they have on the pandemic and the election.

Encouragingly, at least for now, a majority of Republicans and like-minded independents (59 percent), in a Pew Research survey, believe human activity causes climate change (compared to 91 percent of Democrats).

The overwhelming consensus among scientists and researchers is that climate change is real and the world is rapidly running out of time to address it. America needs to be a leader in this cause, reversing the disastrous environmental policies of 2016-2020 and guiding the world away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner, renewable energy.

But if Fox Weather follows the trend of Fox News, look for junk climatology theories to receive more exposure, green-friendly policies to be criticized, and a new wave of anti-regulation candidates to flood the ballots.

In other words, a punchline for our children and grandchildren, who will find climate change is no laughing matter.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Do (vacation) clothes really make the man?

My twenty-year retrospective continues with this (lightly revised) column from June 3, 2004. Honestly, nothing about my vacation prep has changed. I still hate to buy new clothes to see people I will never see again, and my wife still insists on it. 

I can tell it's almost vacation time because my wife has become very concerned with my wardrobe.

Apparently, my clothes are just fine 51 weeks of the year, when I come into contact with people I know and respect. But they are totally inappropriate for an 800-mile trek to the beach, where I will interact with complete strangers whom I will never see again. 

To hear my wife tell it, these people will return to Boise or Cheyenne with nothing better to tell than the story of some slob from Ohio with bleach stains on his shirt. 

My usual attire during the 51 weeks when I'm permitted to dress myself is jeans and a T-shirt. Most of the T-shirts are promotions from Mount Union Theatre, with Spider-Man, Star Wars and other movie logos on the back. They're comfortable and durable. 

In spring and early summer, I shift into denim shorts. Admittedly, they have seen better days. But the holes they have are strategically placed and don't reveal too much, as long as I keep my shirt untucked. 

Perfectly good beach attire, and isn't that the point: To be comfortable? 

No, says my wife. The point is to be presentable, whatever that means. It's a variation on the old riff where Mom tells Junior to be sure to wear clean underwear when leaving the house, in case he is in a traffic accident. As though the only place he will leave skid marks in an accident is on the road. 

I'm an old hand at this "old dog, new clothes," schtick. In my callow newlywed days, before I had been trained by years of good-natured (I hope) browbeating, I put up quite a fight whenever we came within 30 yards of a clothing store. But now I go quietly, like a medicated prisoner making that last walk to the gallows. 

She is impressed by how docile I am. I pick a few shorts and shirts off the racks at random, favoring neutral colors. (If off-white and beige can sell a house, they should sell her too, right?)

She shakes her head and dubs my selections "old man clothes," offending all the old men nearby who think they are pretty natty. 

I wish I understood what she means by "old." They're just shorts and shirts; they don't scream AARP or have a Ben-Gay logo stitched into the label. 

I resist the urge to say that trips with her to the clothing store are making me old before my time. They are, in fact, aging me in dog years. I allow her to take my hand and lead me to the trendy section, just a few aisles over from the geriatrics. 

"Look at him," she says, pointing to a mannequin. It's dressed in cargo shorts (I know this because they're labeled), a white T-shirt and an unbuttoned checkered shirt. 

To me, Mr. Mannequin looks like a slob. Nevertheless, she stares up at him — how quick we are to assign genders to inanimate objects! — as if he were a man of letters, probably multi-lingual with a smattering of psychology and Shakespeare and able to whip up a mean martini. 

Moments later, I'm in the dressing room, trying to live up to the mannequin's plastic perfection. The labels in these clothes are "Urban Up." Very trendy. 

"You look wonderful," she says as I pirouette outside the dressing room. I'm not sure if she's addressing me or the mannequin. 

I don't feel wonderful. The only things I'm missing are a backward ball cap and a half dozen body piercings. I'm about to regress to newlywed mode, when I fought for the wardrobe. 

Until I remember that I'll only be wearing these clothes 800 miles away from home, for those good people vacationing at the beach from Cheyenne or Boise. After that, the purchase goes down like a vintage bottle of Merlot. 

At home, I can return to my slovenly self, a walking billboard for movies and swiss-cheese denim cutoffs. On the beach only will I transform into Rico Suave, an aging stud muffin still trying to emulate Don Johnson. 

Yo yo yo. The vacationer's in the house. 

Rawhide Kid (1985) 1-4

Marvel's Rawhide Kid mini-series from 1985 is buried in multiple layers of nostalgia. There's the nostalgia the reader feels today, looking back on the Marvel of the mid-1980s. There's the nostalgia for the bygone days of Marvel's Western comics, when characters like the Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid were published regularly. Then there's the nostalgia felt by the Rawhide Kid himself, an older character in this mini-series, for his youth, when he could "roam the country freely, riding four weeks without seeing another human face, let alone having to circumnavigate a fence."

Writer Bill Mantlo, one of Marvel's busiest scribes in the 1980s, does a good job balancing modernism with the Old West of so much dime-novel and Hollywood myth-making. The Rawhide Kid in Mantlo's script is both a beneficiary and a victim of this myth-making, being the star of a series of magazine adventures that exaggerate his prowess and burnish his legend. The stories are a source of income, but they also lead to gunfights in every city he visits when young turks anxious to make names for themselves attempt to outdraw him. (It's never explained why Rawhide — "Don't call me Kid! Ah'm old enough t'be yore daddy!" — doesn't just change his clothes and go by a different name.)

Fans of the original Rawhide Kid stories will find much to appreciate here. He still shoots the guns out of his opponents' hands, rides backwards on his trusty steed, Nightwind, and swings off buildings like a trained acrobat. While he complains occasionally about his age and arthritis, neither condition keeps him from outdrawing and outfighting his enemies. Each issue is mostly self-contained. Young Jeff Packard, Rawhide's "understudy" who is on the run from Pinkerton agents, does provide an overarching subplot from month to month. 

The most successful issue is the first, illustrated by Herb Trimpe and John Severin, and colored by Marie Severin. Not surprisingly given the Severins' presence, it evokes classic comic-book Westerns of the past. The first issues also gives readers a quick recap of the Kid's "origin," where the young character seeks revenge for the death of his Uncle Ben (shades of Spider-Man!). 

Trimpe pencils the remaining three issues, inked and embellished by various hands — Gerry Talaoc on issues two and three, Dan Bulandi on the fourth. It's all easy on the eyes and clearly delineated, although it's hard to see any of Trimpe's style throughout; the inkers and finishers really overpower the pencils. 

At various points, Mantlo addresses social concerns outside the realm of Marvel's earlier  Westerns. In the second issue, Rawhide demonstrates empathy for the plight of Native Americans: "Grey Bear and his people didn't have no real way o' defendin' themselves against the white folks who flooded over their lands an' swept their way o' life away!" The third issue features an African-American bounty hunter and the Ku Klux Klan, although they are never called by that name. It's a welcome concession to the larger realities of the nineteenth century that are too often glossed over in the genre. 

That last issue is where a mostly pleasant series goes off the rails, as Rawhide spends too much of the story having nightmares about his own death and fighting under a cloud of hallucinations, fancying that he faces many of his previous enemies. It feels a lot like those Marvel anniversary issues of old, such as The Incredible Hulk #200, where the title character faces phantom versions of all his foes while traipsing around at microscopic size in somebody else's brain. And I was disappointed that the Terrible Totem didn't put in an appearance. As one of Rawhide's strangest foes, he definitely deserved a shout-out. 

I'm not sure what to make of the ending. Has the aged Rawhide outgrown his legend? Embraced it? Does he ride off to further adventures? Or to a life of peace? He does show up fifteen years later in two fantastic mini-series written by John Ostrander and Leonardo Manco, but is that the same Rawhide we see here? 

Regardless, the final issue is the one misfire — get it? — of an otherwise enjoyable series of adventures with one of Marvel's earliest characters. I don't believe these four issues have ever been collected, but I can't believe the originals would be hard to come by or very expensive.

Face front!

This column was first published in May 2008.

Sometimes, the wood grain on my bathroom cupboard looks like a vulture in profile.

Other times, it looks like a creature from “The Dark Crystal,” an old movie by Muppet master Jim Henson. But when I blink, it goes back to being wood grain.

Humans have a tendency to recognize images, especially faces, in inanimate objects. The scientific term for this is pareidolia, a word so obscure my spell checker spits it out like rotten meat.

We practice pareidolia from infancy because life rewards it. The first time we smile up at our parents, recognizing them as separate and distinct from the swirls of light and color around them, we receive positive reinforcement in the form of hugs and kisses. This tells us it’s good to know people. Recognizing faces becomes so ingrained that we keep seeing them wherever we look.

Taking this to the next level, psychologists speculate that designers unwittingly copy the human face when they create. Call it ego, going with what you know, or an extension of all those koochie koos they received as babies.

Check out a three-slotted electric wall socket – two eyes and a nose. Some sockets have additional red and black reset buttons underneath – a mouth and a moustache.

How about the front of an automobile? Two headlights (eyes) and a grill (a smile, albeit one with braces). Many houses, with front doors flanked by two windows, appear vaguely human. (Kids draw them this way all the time.)

The masons who worked on Glamorgan Castle dropped a few faces into the stonework around the building. These aren’t technically gargoyles, which are connected to spouts to throw rainwater away from a building. In gothic terms, Glamorgan Castle hosts “grotesques,” fantastic faces and forms with no utilitarian purpose. Of course, I could be imagining faces where none exist. (You have to get out of your car and walk around the building to see – or not see – them.)

Our penchant for face finding isn’t limited to manmade objects. We spot faces in clouds, ashes, mountains and fields. Remember the photo of a devilish visage in the smoke above the Twin Towers? While Photoshop tricks and religious indoctrination helped the illusion, it also illustrates the power of pareidolia.

The sight of the man in the moon is another example, although only dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy freaks believe it is there by design. Photos of Mars by the Viking Orbiter show what appears to be a face – some say Jesus – etched into the red planet. Again, it says more about us and our face-recognition software – i.e. our eyes and brain – then it does any welcome mat put out by God or little green people. Look at the same images with better resolution and different contrast and you can’t discern a face at all.

An entire website – inanimatefaces.com – is devoted to photos of faces in unlikely places: chairs, boxes, telephones and book bags. The shortcut language of e-mails and text messages depends on pareidolia. Otherwise, how would we know people are happy, sad or surprised when they type :), :( and :0.

Some enterprising souls turn a profit from pareidolia. The faces of the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, John Lennon and Elvis spotted on cookies, grilled cheese sandwiches, greasy napkins and boogered-up Kleenex tissues fetch far more than they’re worth on eBay. Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said that if you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back?

Maybe I should put my section of bathroom cupboard for sale on the Internet. Surely, a Muppet fan somewhere is willing to pay top dollar.

Adventures in Personal Hygiene

This column originally ran in October 2008. I remembered nothing about it before I opened the document a few minutes ago. It was probably too emotionally scarring, so I pushed it deep down into my memory.

Picture the hypothetical man pushing a cart alone through the grocery store, list in hand. Dozens of items are on it, including body wash, lunch meat, cheese slices, and feminine-hygiene products.

Wait a minute! Feminine-hygiene products? Is he nuts?

Our hero had a moment of doubt when his wife added them to the list, but he quickly squelched it. After all, he’s a 40-year-old man, not some callow kid whose voice goes up three octaves when he asks the pharmacist for a pack of prophylactics. “Grow up,” he said to himself, “you can do it.”

But this was at home, when the prospect of wheeling the cart past the toothpaste and mouthwash and into That Aisle was a half-hour away. Anything a half-hour away is an eternity to a man, hardly worth mentioning until it is much closer.

And now it’s much closer.

Our hero wipes his sweaty palms on his shirt. He cruises past the display, casually looking in its direction, spotting the light-blue box with the yellow banner, the same style colors he has seen for years in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cupboard, the drawer that may as well be marked with a skull and crossbones and the word “poison.”

He almost makes his move, but people are all about. A mother with her children, an old man with a cane, a couple ornery kids doing God knows what with the liquid soap, all too close for him to grab the product.

“It’s a natural part of life,” he hears his wife whisper, like the phantom voice of Obi Wan Kenobi telling Luke to use the Force. “Yeah, what’s the big deal, Dad?” his daughter wants to know. Another disembodied spirit heard from.

He makes a second pass. Mom and kids are gone, the old man has tottered off, and the Lever brothers have slithered away. The coast is clear. He looks down into his empty cart – why, oh why, didn’t he pick up some other items first, so he could hide the “no big deal” products beneath!

His hand shoots out. Bam! One box goes into the cart. Bam! A second box is almost ready to join its partner – when a customer turns the corner.

Don’t ask if the customer is male or female, young or old, singular or plural. Blood rushes to his cheeks, his face goes four shades of red and he feels as if he might faint. The only thing that keeps him upright is the potential embarrassment that would accompany passing out in That Aisle.

Meanwhile, he still has a stranglehold on the second box, which hangs precipitously over the cart. One involuntary muscle spasm later, it drops – plop! – into the chasm. Picture the Coyote slinking off after a trap to catch the Road Runner has blown up in his face and you’ll know how the man exits the vicinity.

The worst is surely over, our hero believes. All he has to do is get the other items on the list, use them to cover the two “no big deals,” and get the heck out of Dodge. But then he sees a former student, one who has likely noticed that his teacher is escorting two boxes of Kotex through the store in an otherwise empty cart. Making small talk while driving a shopping buggy at 55 mph is an art, but our hero masters it.

He runs into two more students, but not before he’s boxed in his special selections with cat litter, a head of lettuce and a can of Pledge.

All that remains is the minor indignity of the conveyor belt and the checkout line. Mercifully absent is anybody he knows. In the car on the way home, he sighs in relief. This has certainly been a character-building experience, an expression people use for any job they aren’t man enough to do themselves.

Would our hero do it again? Certainly he would. Hypothetically, of course.

A crappy story

This column originally ran in October, 2012. 

Less than two weeks before Halloween, and I was facing my fear of heights to fish a bag of poop off the neighbor’s roof.

I wish I could say I was a Good Samaritan, that the nice couple next door had reached out in need because hooligans had taken the “trick” part of “trick or treat” to heart.

But I can’t, because I threw the poop up there myself.

Before I go further, let me explain that I’m not the world’s best neighbor. Living next to Chris Schillig doesn’t exactly guarantee property values will drop, but it is a sign that you should contact a real estate agent soon.

You know the neighbor who obsesses over his lawn and shrubs, trimming and pruning to surgical precision, using a leaf blower the way a holy man might wield a crucifix, covering porch railings and mailbox with fresh coats of paint every spring whether they need it or not?

Well, I’m not that neighbor.

My sole goal for mowing is to set a new PR each time I pull the cord. My idea of weeding is to run that same mower through the flower beds, as long as it doesn’t detract from my overall time. I consider Mother Nature to be the best leaf blower, especially when she shuffles fall’s foliage out of my yard and into somebody else’s. The one time I tried my hand with a paintbrush, I stopped mid stroke and hired somebody else-- the cheapest somebody else I could find -- to finish the job.

In other words, I’m less Ward Cleaver and more Homer Simpson.

But I do have standards, lax though they may be -- weeds in the crack of the hypothetical sidewalk that even I refuse to cross. And tossing feces on the neighbor’s roof definitely is on the wrong side of that line.

Not that I intentionally threw the poop there, of course.

See, while I am in other regards a neighbor to be avoided, if not outright abhorred, in one regard I am the picture of fastidiousness: cleaning up after my dog.

Whenever I walk him, I take an ample supply of doggie bags, and not the kind they give you in restaurants. Wherever and whenever my pooch squats, I am there, usually with plastic Walmart sack in hand, plucking every last trace of steaming doggie DNA from the frosty autumn grass.

The problem is that I fancy myself a major-league pitcher. When I return home, I stand at the end of the driveway, between my neighbor’s house and mine, and hurl the bag of poop toward my detached garage, aiming for the garbage can.

Usually, I miss the target. Bags often carom off the backyard fence, the side of the house and my wife’s car.

But on one memorable Thursday night, the dog jerked his leash as I went into the windup, and the bag did not shoot down the drive toward friendly-fire targets, but rather up, up, up into the air and splat! onto the neighbor’s roof.

It was awfully dark that night, so inky black that I wasn’t certain where the bag had landed. But I hadn’t thrown it high enough to escape the atmosphere and enter orbit, and it hadn’t come back down, so I suspected the worst.

(Actually, the worst would have been through their living room window and into their laps as they watched TV, but still …)

For one moment, I considered slinking inside the house and pretending like I hadn’t violated a social norm bigger than Antarctica.

And actually, that’s just what I did.

But then my conscience kicked in, and I knew I would have to confess.

So that’s how, one day later, I ended up balanced precariously on a ladder, using a broomstick to bridge the gap between the top of the highest rung and the offensive bag of feces.

It was a growth experience in many ways. Halloween should be all about facing your fears -- whether a fear of social embarrassment or a fear of heights.

For me, the first was much worse than the second. Not only did I have to confess to my neighbor that I’d thrown a steaming bag of crap on his roof, but because I’m the kind of neighbor who isn’t the least bit handy, I also had to borrow his ladder to get it down.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com @cschillig on Twitter