Creating my own alien abduction

Yet another Halloween-based column, from Oct. 31, 2011. 

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Alien abductions might not be that alien.

New research making the rounds on the Internet claims that people can be “trained” to meet extraterrestrials while in a lucid dreaming state. How much credence you give such information depends on how long you’re able to suppress a giggle when you learn this study comes from the OOBE Research Center in Los Angeles.

OOBE, which sounds like a term a kid might use for something he fished out his nose or the chorus of a really bad ’80s rap song (Oo, Bebe Bebe), really means “out-of body experience.” As in, “I drank a bottle of tequila and had an OOBE.”

You know your crackpot scientific theory has really arrived when it has its own research center in L.A. I can only hope it’s not federally funded, like all those studies where researchers spend years watching kids sit on couches and stuff their mouths with potato chips before announcing that, wonder of wonders, inactivity and junk food make children fat.

Out-of-body experiences, according to the OOBEs at the OOBE Research Center, are just one part of a larger phenomenon called “the phase,” which includes lucid dreaming and astral projection. The OOBE prefers “phase” because the term has not been corrupted by, in the words of its website, “strange people with strange views on life.”

This might also explain why trash collectors prefer to be known as “sanitation engineers.”

Anyway, the OOBEs put volunteers into “lucid dream” training to show them how they can control the contents of their dreams. After only three days, volunteers were able to insert themselves into vivid situations where they met and traveled with aliens.

The bottom line, then, is that those stories of humans cruising along the Milky Way (not to mention the Snickers) with aliens in their late-model flying saucers are products of human imagination. I, for one, am glad they cleared that up.

Just for kicks, I decided to try a lucid dreaming/out-of-body/phase experiment for myself. So before bed one night, I drank some warm milk, watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” listened to Holst’s “The Planets,” and re-read my well-thumbed copy of “Alien Visitors and the Humans Who Love Them” until my eyes grew heavy.

Before I knew it, I was looking down at my slumbering body, passed out there on the couch. (Memo to self: Cut toenails.) I floated through the wall and checked out the kitchen, where I harassed the cats for a few minutes -- they can’t see astral projections, but they can smell them (evidence suggests APs smell like a mix of dead rats and KFC original recipe) -- and then drifted into the back yard. I thought it was safest there, as I was shielded from the prying eyes of any psychic neighbors who might wonder why my astral projection was naked. (Second memo to self: Be sure to wear clothes when travelling between states of consciousness.)

Despite the fact that it was nighttime, no aliens made themselves known, even when I drifted over to the new Chipotle, where half the city’s been hanging out. Depressed, I returned home to my body.

The next morning, I noticed a handful of political ads stuck to the front door that hadn’t been there the day before. Apparently, my subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between “politician” and “alien.”

Or maybe they’re more alike than we think. Nobody believes what most people say about aliens, and nobody believes what most politicians say. One is a wild figment of the imagination, and the other says things that are. Furthermore, they both tend to disappear at approximately the same time: aliens right after Halloween, and politicians one week later.

Maybe they travel in the same mother ship, after all.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

The startling truth behind hair cells

Age-related baldness may have more in common with “The Great Escape” than “The Bucket List.”

Researchers at Northwestern University recently discovered that stem cells in the hair follicles of aging animals don’t die. Instead, they squeeze out — or are squeezed out — and disappear, perhaps gobbled up by the immune system, according to a New York Times article.

The discovery could revolutionize the study of aging. Or at least start a healthy debate among Hair Club for Men members.

If you look at the picture that accompanies this article, you can see why hair loss is such an important issue for me. Decades ago, the stem cells in my hair follicles peaced out, escaped, went on strike or headed for Bermuda, where they never call or write. Ungrateful little buggers.

I don’t know if male-pattern-baldness is caused by the same slacker stem cell issues as age-related baldness. At my age, I’m likely suffering from both. It’d be just my luck if science could find a way to corral only some of these AWOL cells, leaving old guys like me with half a head of full, luscious hair and half a head of Sahara desolation, dermatologically speaking.

And isn’t it just like the kill-or-be-killed, nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw world we live in that a stem cell finally breaks away from a humdrum existence at the bottom of a hair follicle — which, let’s be honest, is not party central — only to get eaten by the immune system?

What kind of shoot-Bambi’s-mother’s world is that?

I prefer to imagine a scenario where all these escaping stem cells get together annually and hold a big bash. Or where they combine to create a big, hairy simulacrum to wander the earth, doing all the fun stuff they were denied before.

Maybe the hirsute guy in line in front of you at Chipotle or sitting across the waiting room at the doctor’s office is just a conglomeration of escaped stem cells that formed down in the bayou and gained sentience. Now, he does things the rest of us only dream of. Like eating two big bean burritos and a side of chips and guac at one sitting, washing it all down with a margarita and then cruising around town with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” blaring from open windows.

It certainly would explain a lot of boorish human behavior to find out that most boors weren’t human, but just a bunch of expat hair cells asserting themselves outside the follicle.

So all those people raging on Twitter about ’Merica and the right to go vaxless and spread germs in a pandemic? Hair cells.

The drivers that zoom past 50 cars when a lane on the highway is closed, only to cut in front of the driver who’s been waiting patiently for 20 minutes? Hair cells again.

The shoppers that bang into you with their carts, check out with thirty-four items in the “ten items or fewer” lane? You guessed it.

I once read a novel about a race of Neanderthals that lived a secret existence alongside human beings — looking like us, acting like us, but not us. They were actually bent on the destruction of humanity.

If all this were true, but with escaped stem cells from bald people in place of some fantastic extinct branch of the human tree … Well, then truth is stranger than fiction.

But it’s probably not the case. These cells likely just get vacuumed up by our super-efficient bodies.

So it ends up that this news is more “Maid in Manhattan” or Mini-Me than Steve McQueen.

Call it the bald, unvarnished truth.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com, or @cschillig on Twitter.

Facing hard truths about Facebook

Why am I still on Facebook? Why is anyone?

Such questions are unavoidable after Frances Haugen’s Congressional testimony this week. The former Facebook employee, now the pre-eminent whistleblower against the social media giant, says the company prioritizes profits over the mental health of users, especially teen girls, and leans on algorithms that amplify fake or misleading news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired back, asserting Haugen’s charges make no sense and that advertisers would desert in droves if the company were peddling hate speech and deceit.

Granted, a trip through most Facebook feeds reveals a lot of innocuous content. Currently, my feed shows my mother-in-law congratulating her granddaughter on a volleyball win, images of old comic books, and a meme about Kermit the Frog’s weight gain. Hardly the stuff of Congressional hearings or parental nightmares.

But I don’t have to scroll much further to find posts by “news” organizations that lean far right and far left, where content is so biased it makes Fox News or MSNBC appear fair and balanced. And the more I click on this material, the more like-minded content Facebook will send me, as its faceless bots determine how to keep me there longer.

Even this would be no problem if:

• Users were consuming Facebook material as one part of a balanced news diet that included newspapers, magazines, professional journals, network and cable news, reliable websites, podcasts and blogs.

• Facebook was not blending its personalization and amplification algorithms to promote engagement over all else.

In other words, too many users are getting too much of their information from Facebook, and Facebook isn’t being careful enough about how it curates said news. (In a related issue, Facebook-owned Instagram worsens body image for one in three teen girls, Haugen said of the company’s own research.)

This isn’t a Facebook-only problem. A Pew Research study last month noted that 19% of respondents said they “often” got news from social media (which includes, but is not limited to, Facebook) in 2021, and 29 percent said they “sometimes” did.

These numbers are down slightly from the year before, but in such small percentages that it’s hard to draw much encouragement from the decrease.

One eyebrow-raising exception is TikTok users, 29 percent of whom access news through the service, compared to 22 percent in 2020. TikTok’s demographics skew young, and even a casual scroll through its largely user-created content demonstrates that much of this information is served with unhealthy dollops of sass and cynicism.

How to stem this tide of social media snark and misinformation has been the subject of strong debate. Dissenting voices should not be stifled, lest we run afoul of the First Amendment and the protections it affords.

But a certain percentage of Facebook and other social media content, designed by multiple bad actors specifically to sow division, and then amplified wittingly or unwittingly by the companies’ own policies of engagement, would seem to fall outside the First Amendment purview, broad as that may be.

Roddy Lindsay, a former data scientist at Facebook, writing in The New York Times, suggests changes to a 1996 law that shields social media corporations from lawsuits. He believes that if Facebook and other companies could be sued for libel and illegal content, they would drop so-called “engagement-based ranking,” pushing the trash back to the bottom.

Lindsay’s idea is more feasible than my plan: allowing negative publicity and the free market to sink Facebook and other engagement-based platforms without government intervention. If more users abandoned these sites voluntarily, their influence would wane, perhaps inspiring them to reinvent themselves in more prosocial ways.

But if I’m being honest, my last attempt to leave Facebook lasted all of three days before I came crawling back. I doubt I’m alone in such failed attempts. Expecting people to leave voluntarily the very drug that has addicted them is not realistic.

If we can’t quit social media on our own, and if companies won’t provide more transparency and demonstrate a sincere willingness to stop spewing flat-out lies, then the government needs to get involved.

Opening Facebook to litigation is one way to hold the company that holds the megaphone responsible for the shouting it amplifies.

Halloween Traditions, from Poe to Pilkey

 

Here's another vintage Halloween-themed column. This one was first published in The Alliance Review on Oct. 28, 2013.

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Halloween is one holiday where my traditions aren’t firmly established.

For previous Beggars’ Nights, I’ve decorated the house with pumpkins and with abandon, but not this year. The spirits are willing, but the flesh is weak. Or lazy, to be more exact.

Nor will I be hiding beneath a pile of leaves in the front yard, waiting to scare the bejeezus out of passing princesses or cowboys. The last time I seriously contemplated this was the same year I herniated a disc in my neck, putting a literal crimp in my plans.

Since then, I’ve erred on the side of caution and left the scares to younger folks, like a family in the neighborhood who erected a mock graveyard, complete with a seated figure of Death that gave me a good jolt one dark morning when I saw it from the corner of my eye.

On Halloweens past, I’ve run marathons of classic Universal Studios horror movies (“Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and their ilk). Sadly, the monsters have to stay in cold storage this season, brought low by my poor time management.

The best I’ve done this year is a collection of “scary snippets,” excerpts from classic fright films that I show to my Advanced Placement class. They then analyze, in writing, the elements that make each clip effective. (Yeah, I know, an English teacher can drain fun from an assignment quicker than a vampire drains blood.)

Most years, my wife and I hand out candy on Halloween. But sometimes, like this year, our schedules won’t permit it.

When that’s happened in the past, I’ve put a bowl of candy on the front porch under the watchful gaze of a life-sized Creature from the Black Lagoon cardboard cutout, along with a sign that reads, “Honor System: Take One Piece.”

Like Montresor, the mad narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” I know enough about human nature to realize that a handful of hungry ghouls gets the biggest portion of the Schillig loot.

Montresor needs an empty house to commit murder, so he orders his servants not to leave the premises while he’s gone on business. It is an edict sufficient, he knows, “to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as [his] back was turned.”

My motives haven’t been as sinister, but the results are likely similar: People doing the exact opposite of what they’re asked.

This year, though, my wife is absconding with the candy for a kids’ party elsewhere, so the Creature will stay in the attic and no porch light will blaze. I guess I’ve become the Halloween grinch.

One tradition, however, is immutable: my annual reading of “The Hallo-Wiener” by Dav — no “e” — Pilkey, creator of the Captain Underpants series.

The story of Oscar, a wiener dog whose mom dresses him as a frankfurter for Halloween, eliciting howls of laughter from his canine pals, was a perpetual hit with my daughter when she was younger, so much so that we kept reading it together long after we’d both memorized all the words and long after most dads stop reading to their kids.

A few years ago, I recorded myself narrating it and mailed a CD and a copy of the book to her at college. Now that she’s in grad school and just as busy as her old man — cue “Cats in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin — we often enjoy the book asynchronously. This is a fancy word thrown around online education circles that means “not at the same time.”

This year, though, maybe I’ll surprise her by phone, and we can enjoy Oscar’s travails simultaneously, through the magic of Ma Bell. Or Ma iPhone.

Because any book that features lines like “Farewell, my little Vienna sausage!” and “Help! We’re being attacked by a giant frankfurter!” is too good to be left on the shelf.

Happy Halloween. May all your frights be pleasant ones.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschillig on Twitter

Disease-driven entertainment for your Halloween enjoyment

Here's a column from Oct. 26, 2014, that hasn't aged well in many respects. Still, the list of pandemic-related entertainment at the end is solid. I would add Paul Tremblay's Survivor Song and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven to the list. 

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It wouldn’t surprise me to see a few more hazmat suits and protective-gear costumes among trick-or-treaters this year, and that’s a positive sign.

Some people find it crass to parley the Ebola virus into Halloween dress-ups, but I’m not one of them. It’s uniquely American to spit in the eye of death, so a little gallows humor in reaction to wall-to-wall Ebola coverage is not only natural, but healthy. Truth be told, your odds of being struck by a bus — or even a comet — are better than your chances of contracting Ebola, which isn’t airborne (not yet, some pundits proclaim) and is barely even in the United States, so the only thing holding Americans back from an orgy of ebola-themed costuming is that the fear isn’t real enough.

Meanwhile, Americans should also be checking out the post-apocryphal landscape in stories and cinema. Here’s my pick of the best disease-driven entertainment for your Halloween pleasure.

• The Stand (1978) — Some readers may find the scariest part of this novel is its size. A brick at more than 1,100 pages, Stephen King goes all Book of Revelation in the second half as survivors of a worldwide plague must decide to join the forces of good or evil. But the first half is all about Captain Trips, a flu-like disease that wipes out most of the world’s population after woebegone military and healthcare officials fail to contain it.
•  Contagion (2011) — A great ensemble film by Steven Soderbergh looks at another end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it (but I don’t feel fine) scenario involving a pandemic. Unlike King, Soderberg keeps the Devil at bay, but society’s flubs are scary enough. I watched this for the first time with my wife, who was nursing a wicked cold and sneezing constantly. It made the movie all the more unnerving.
• The Hot Zone (1994) — Richard Preston made a name for himself with this nonfiction account of Ebola and several others deadly viruses. I read it on vacation in a copy that I’d bought secondhand; Preston’s description of how various virulences spread made me no longer want to touch the book or any public doorknobs, toilet seats, or restaurant tables. Creepy.
• I Am Legend (1954) — Skip the so-so movie with Will Smith from a few years back and go straight to the source, Richard Matheson’s novella of the same name. Granted, the plague that’s being spread is vampirism, which isn’t exactly Ebola, but the results are the same: the crumbling of civilization. If you must see a filmed version, 1964’s “Last Man on Earth” with Vincent Price is a winner, while 1971’s “Omega Man” adaptation is a hippie-dippie look at a funky future.
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) — Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers” is the basis for this McCarthy-era tale of paranoia. Whom can you trust when aliens that look just like your family and friends come a-knockin’? Answer: Nobody. These aliens are as invisible as Ebola and ten times as deadly.
• “Fever Dream” (1959) — This short story by Ray Bradbury is the quintessential infectious-disease tale. A sick little boy feels that his body is being calcified from the inside out, but the doctor finds nothing wrong except a slight fever. First his legs, then his arms, then his head are subsumed, leaving behind something that only looks human. I often read this aloud to my students on Halloween because it’s so effective and affecting.

I’m sure I’ve left out some good stories about bad viruses, including tons of zombie books, movies and TV shows, so send suggestions via one of the methods below. In the meantime, wash your hands frequently, keep them away from your eyes and nose, stay home if you’re feverish, and happy Halloween.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschilllig on Twitter

Ahoy, matey, time to onboard!

I’m old enough to remember when people were fired and hired.

Nowadays, however, companies “separate” and “onboard.”

The former I understand. “Fired” is ugly. “Separating” sounds like a mutual decision, a no-fault divorce where both parties agree to stay friendly for the kids’ sake. Which means they snipe at each other exclusively by text.

Onboarding, though, is weird. I mean, what’s so wrong with just being hired?

My wife, who is transitioning from the medical profession, with hundreds of its own buzzwords, and into a role as a business office manager, told me last week she had to onboard a new employee. I asked if I should be concerned, or if she had something she needed to tell me.

“No, silly,” she said. In truth, she called me something much worse than silly, but this is a family newspaper. Besides, she didn’t really mean it.

She explained that onboarding is what used to be known as “filling out paperwork,” the reams of eligibility, direct deposit, benefits and tax forms that every new employee must contend with.

In the old days, completing this documentation meant slouching over a warped table in a musty room, the walls yellow with cigarette smoke exhaled by long-dead employees. You wrote your address, again and again, signed your name on multiple X’s, and smiled shyly at your soon-to-be colleagues as they wandered in to use the ancient coffee machine, send a fax or check out the fresh meat.

If you were lucky, the powers-that-be paid you for this drudgery.

If you were a little less lucky, they sent you home to fill out the forms without pay, but at least you could sit near a window, minus the staring strangers, and ponder how much better your life would be if you had been born a squirrel or a chipmunk. Even when said critter had been obliterated by a Ford F-150 on the double-yellow line in front of your house.

When you arrived for your first shift, you deposited this bundle of dead trees (brave soldiers, sacrificed for the corporation) into the maw of human resources, where shadowy figures with glowing eyes and arcane job titles would ever so slowly induce a process that ended, weeks later, with the birth of your first paycheck.

No more, at least at my wife’s company, where they use employee-directed onboarding. New hires themselves are responsible for entering all that data directly into an app or program, minus the middlemen. Woe be it to those who transpose digits on their bank routing number or forget their SSN. These mistakes could cost them, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

Honestly, I’m glad I’m not in the market for a new job these days. I feel like the world has moved on without me. I don’t want to sit in some impersonal kiosk and fill out an application on an iPad or wait for a text from a prospective employer asking when I want to come in for an interview. (“Do you like me? Check yes or no.”)

Nor do I want to be onboarded. It sounds too much like waterboarded for comfort. But maybe, given the daily indignities of many jobs, waterboarding isn’t such a stretch.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter