Lichtenstein's 'borrowing' still a source of discomfort

Roy Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!” hits me hard, like the fighter plane and missile it depicts, but not in the way the artist intended.

A lithograph of the two-panel work hangs in the Canton Museum of Art’s POP! exhibit through March 6. The first panel shows a plane launching a missile; the second is the explosion of an enemy aircraft. Most people with an interest in pop art of the 1950s and ’60s are familiar with it and know it is modeled after a comic book.

But “modeled after a comic book” is a euphemism. More accurately, “Whaam!” depends entirely on All-American Men of War No. 89, published in 1962 by DC Comics. The original artist is Irv Novick, a workhorse of the industry. Lichtenstein appropriated comic book drawings by Novick and others as his templates, making significantly more money – some might say obscenely more – than the work-for-hire talent who first did the work.

Claiming that Lichtenstein merely copied these artists is an oversimplification. He reworked the originals as he painted. For “Whaam!,” he broke a single image into two and streamlined the finished product. Still, nobody who looks at the inspirations for “Whaam!” or any of Lichtenstein’s other works can fail to see the resemblance.

Lichtenstein’s genius, if you will, was reframing – no pun intended – comic book illustrations and elevating them to high art. He followed Andy Warhol, who did the same with images of soup cans and celebrities. (Warhol also experimented with comic book iconography before Lichtenstein but abandoned it when he saw the latter artist’s work.)

If not for Lichtenstein, most of the appropriated panels would be forgotten today, except by comic aficionados. He is partially responsible for making comic books the subject of academic debate and a format worthy of more ambitious literary efforts. Additionally, the appropriations by Lichtenstein and other pop artists anticipated creative applications of existing work in other fields, such as music, where sampling has further enriched us culturally. He’s had an impact.

So, why does Lichtenstein’s work hit me so hard and leave me so divided?

It’s the lack of credit. One could argue that Lichtenstein didn’t identify Novick because he wasn’t named in the original comic book that Lichtenstein swiped. Yet he invited the comic book’s editor to a gallery show and asked that editor to invite artists who worked for DC, so Lichtenstein had the means to learn Novick’s name. Lichtenstein and Novick also served together during World War II. Whether Lichtenstein was aware, at least initially, that it was his acquaintance’s work he was appropriating is something I haven’t been able to verify.

Credit would have been some comfort to Novick, Tony Abruzzo (whose art inspired Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl”) and Ted Galindo (whose work is sampled in “Masterpiece”). But money would have been better.

Even if Lichtenstein had no legal obligation (if anything, he would have owed the copyright holders), he had an ethical one. Long before publishers paid royalties to comic book artists, these craftsmen worked for low page rates, without insurance benefits, ownership of or profits from their work. Many died in poverty. Even the smallest percentage of the money Lichtenstein realized from their efforts would have been life-changing.

Today, after all the principals are dead, at least they receive credit. Novick is mentioned on a placard at the Canton exhibit. And David Barsalou’s Flickr and Facebook pages, both called Deconstructing Lichtenstein, offer exhaustive examples of Lichtenstein’s sources.

Tellingly, the POP! display runs concurrently with another show at the museum, “Marvelocity,” which spotlights Alex Ross. A highly regarded artist who applies photo-realism to renditions of superheroes, Ross has painted many original comic books. He has also appropriated iconic poses, panels and cover designs of Captain America, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, among others, by artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

When he does, Ross signs his name at the bottom, along with “after XXXX,” supplying the name of the original artist.

In other words, crediting his sources. Something Lichtenstein should have done, as well.

This article originally appeared in The Alliance Review

No cursing over cursive, but stop it anyway

Ohio’s lawmakers have solved all the state’s woes.

They have banished poverty, eradicated hunger and annihilated unemployment. They have fixed our aging infrastructure and devised a plan to keep major manufacturers from stampeding for the borders.

We know they have accomplished all this because they are now focusing their considerable gifts on much smaller worries.

How small? Well, last week the Ohio Senate passed a bill requiring the State Department of Education to develop a curriculum by year’s end to teach cursive writing to elementary kids.

This follows the Ohio House’s passage of the bill in June. The legislation was sponsored by two Republican lawmakers who cite studies that say proficiency in cursive handwriting leads to better literacy and thinking skills, according to a story from NBC-4 in Columbus.

Fortunately, the law does not mandate that schools actually teach cursive, only that the curriculum is available if they elect to do so.

And I hope schools exercise their right not to.

I can hear traditionalists’ moans of anguish. Cursive is a necessity, they will argue.

Here are some other “necessities” that are no longer taught in schools:

Driving a horse and buggy

Telling time with a sundial

Using a washboard

Shoveling coal into a home furnace

Emptying night slops from a chamber pot

The truth — and it’s not even a sad truth, but merely a reflection of the rapidly changing world we live in — is that people just don’t write by hand very much anymore. And when they do, printing suffices.

But how will students communicate with one another? How will they sign checks? My response: Email/texting and direct deposit.

I’m not arguing that students should not be taught cursive at all, just that it needs to take a backseat, and a far backseat at that, to other lessons.

By all means, teach kids how to write their names in cursive so that they can, on those few occasions when they must (like buying a car or house), sign their names. Offer after-school instruction or summer enrichment for children who are really interested in penmanship, perhaps alongside calligraphy.

But the traditional instruction in loops and whorls? The long, laborious exercises where teachers circle stray marks that have gone a millimeter past the dotted line or extend a whisper too far into the margin? The formal cursive versions of the capital G, Q and Z, which nobody outside of school marms has ever written correctly?

Fuhgettaboutit.

If lawmakers are so worried about students’ literacy skills, they should mandate that reading instruction includes ample time for free reading, not just practice for high-stakes tests. If they are concerned about fine motor skills, offer kids more opportunities to learn how to draw, paint and build.

Cursive writing is more about conformity than creativity and critical thinking. Moreover, it’s a skill with little application to the daily lives of most kids.

Educators should give it — you’ll pardon the expression — no more than a cursory nod.

Originally published in December 2018 in The Alliance Review

Revisiting an old friend in the Little House books

Prevailing wisdom among people who study pre-teen reading habits is that girls will read books about boys, but boys are less likely to read books about girls.

Maybe this is changing because of the success of “The Hunger Games,” with a strong female lead whose exploits in three bestselling books are a hit with not only the YA crowd, but adults as well.

I’ve always been an exception to the boys-not-reading-about-girls rule, myself. One of my earliest literary adventures was “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” with spunky Dorothy traveling down “the road of yellow brick,” encountering eccentric companions and showing off her silver slippers to good effect. (Her route became “the yellow brick road” and her footwear turned ruby only in the MGM movie.) I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, and Judy Garland was one of my first big-screen crushes, even if she was too old to play Dorothy.

Recently, I had a chance to revisit another childhood favorite with a female protagonist: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, newly reprinted in two handsome hardbacks by the Library of America.

These books hold a special place in my heart. When I was a new student at Washington Elementary School in 1976, my second-grade teacher, Melva Jean Watson, read aloud from “Little House on the Prairie” almost every day. Something about the Ingalls family leaving Wisconsin and heading West in a covered wagon struck a chord with me, even if my own migration from Middlebranch to Washington Township in the backseat of a car wasn’t much by comparison.

I am still impressed by the family’s moxy. Laura’s father, referred to mostly as Pa, decides the woods of Wisconsin — immortalized in the first book of the series, “Little House in the Big Woods” — are becoming too crowded. “Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa’s ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun,” writes Wilder, who refers to herself in the third person. “The path that went by the little house had become a road.”

Those all sound like good reasons to stay in Wisconsin, not leave it, but nobody has ever accused me of having an overabundance of pioneer spirit.

In the books, little Laura and her sisters often take a backseat to the story of their parents, and Laura’s main occupation is to observe the ways of pioneer families. Not surprisingly for people who lived for — and by — the harvest, the books are filled with food, much more than I remember from age 8. (Maybe Mrs. Watson omitted some parts.)

The Ingalls’ attic in Wisconsin is a veritable produce stand: “The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

In “Farmer Boy,” which tells the boyhood story of Ingall’s husband, Almanzo Wilder, in New York, mealtime is almost sensuous. “Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed …”

All that’s missing is a cigarette afterward.

Nearly every page of the “Little House” books are filled with industrious people planting, nurturing, harvesting, storing, slaughtering and building for winter. It’s impressive, especially to a reader whose winter preparations involve nothing more than covering the air-conditioning unit with a tarp and buying a new ice scraper for the car.

Wilder’s characters have fun too, going to the occasional dance and inviting extended family to visit at the holidays, but mostly they work.

One of my favorite sequences in the books, however, has nothing to do with harvests or dances. Later in “Farmer Boy,” Almanzo’s teacher drives a group of disruptive students out of his classroom using an ox-whip. Taking the biblical injunction to spare the rod and spoil the child almost literally, the teacher thrashes the students, jerking them off their feet, tearing their clothes and bloodying their bodies.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I always thought Mrs. Watson read that section with even more vim and vigor than the other chapters.

It’s always nice to revisit old friends, and even nicer to find out that they are more companionable than you remember. So it is with the Little House books. While these new editions omit the classic illustrations by Garth Williams, they are hardly missed. Laura Ingalls Wilder still holds me in thrall with stories of pioneer pluck and an almost-vanished lifestyle that appeal to either gender and all ages.

Originally published in April 2013 in The Alliance Review

Are you highly satisfied with this blog?

Everybody wants my opinion, and everybody wants me to be “very” or “highly” satisfied.

Just the other morning, a nice woman named Shirley (not her real name) handed me a sticker in the drive-thru line of Dunkin’ Donuts. It said she’d love to know if she had “made my day.”

That’s a tough question to answer. Could the wave of good feelings created by a large hot tea and toasted blueberry bagel be enough to carry me through the troughs of the next twelve hours? Later that night, from the vantage point of a comfortable chair, slippers on my feet and warm pipe smoke encircling my head, would I look back over the business of the day and recognize that a 23-second transaction had changed my destiny?

In a word, no.

Yet these silly surveys persist in almost every line of business. If it’s not a clerk thrusting a receipt in my face with a 1-800 number circled at the bottom, it’s an email after the sale, asking me to rank, with “1” being the lowest and “10” the highest, how satisfied I was with my transaction, whether it was for a $20,000 car or a $2 loaf of bread.

And with every inquiry, there is unspoken pressure: “We want you to be very satisfied” or “Is there anything standing in the way of your being highly satisfied today?”

The answer to that last question is yes, many things are standing in the way of my highest satisfaction.

For one thing, I’m eating on the run at a fast-food joint, standing in line behind some pajama-pant-wearing mother of fourteen whose kids all have what looks like ebola running out their noses. Nobody knows what to order, despite having held up the line for what feels like hours. One of them is consistently stepping on my foot, and another is digging orangish wax out of his ear with a plastic spoon he found on the floor, effectively killing any appetite I may still have.

Or I’m in the drive-thru lane behind a diesel truck whose driver believes that everybody wants to hear the beer-drenched musical epic blaring out his speakers, even overtop the revving of his engine. He’s ordering enough food to feed a small army and flirting with the voice on the loudspeaker, calling him/her/it “honey” and “babycakes,” unaware that he’s caused a six-car nuclear meltdown behind him.

So, no, I’m not highly satisfied, very satisfied, or even just plain old satisfied.

And what if I were, indeed, only satisfied? On many surveys, “satisfied” translates to a 7 out of 10, a perfectly acceptable score. But I’m always pressured into being “very” satisfied, usually by employees with large, limpid eyes and wheedling voices whose very existences seem tied to the score that I, a complete stranger, will assign them through an automated phone call.

To me, “very” satisfied means you’ve followed me home, waxed my car, shampooed my carpets, and fed me grapes on the couch while fanning me with palm leaves. Throwing my change at me and stuffing my greasy burger into a sack is not enough to merit the modifier “very.”

Worse yet are the surveys that ask me to describe my satisfaction in words. How the hell am I supposed to do that? “The way Agnes drizzled guacamole on my cheesy potato burrito was nothing short of sublime?” “The replacement windshield, needed because some punk kid didn’t know how to catch a baseball, was artfully installed by Sidney, illuminating the interior of my car just as surely as Michelangelo’s paintings illuminate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?” Gimme a break.

Sometimes, companies entice you to take surveys with the promise of a prize. “Just take our brief survey and you could win an iPad Mini!” and “Call this number for a chance to win $500!” are pretty common come-ons.

Of course, you have a better chance of being plucked out of your bed by aliens from Uranus than you do of winning any prize. And as soon as you indicate that you are anything other than very satisfied, your entry goes directly to the bottom circle of Dante’s Sweepstakes Hell. As a consolation, now that the company has your phone number or email address, they can sell it to other companies, who will in turn attempt to get you to buy their junk and rate their associates.

All of which is why, Shirley, I’m not going to log on to any website and rate our transaction. I smiled at you when I pulled up to the window — you might have thought I looked constipated, but trust me, it was a grin — and thanked you for your efforts. That’s the extent of our relationship. Let it be enough.

This column was originally published in 2014. I don't know if Shirley still works at the local Dunkin' Donuts.

Supreme Court rules against commonsense mandate

It’s a shame the Supreme Court blocked President Biden's vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 employees.

The mandate gave the Occupational Safety and Health Administration authority to require vaccines for some 84 million American workers. It would have made the nation healthier and saved lives. Additionally, it would have provided a cover story for employees who fell under its auspices: They could have received the vaccine and still maintained their street-cred as conservatives.

Because after the obligatory griping about government overreach, tracking chips and other unfounded foolishness, most workers would have rolled up their sleeves and taken the jab.

Americans saw evidence of this last year when United Airlines required employees to get vaccinated. Despite complaints by a vocal minority, 96 percent of the airline’s employees were vaccinated by the fall.

Significantly, as of Jan. 11, United reported it had gone eight weeks without a single employee death from COVID. While 3,000 of the airline’s workers tested positive for COVID last week, none had been hospitalized.

This is a strong indication the vaccines are protecting people from the most adverse effects of the virus.

I wonder how many United employees and their families were secretly relieved when the company required the vaccine. The decision saved them from publicly backtracking, something many people are reluctant to do, and still offered them protection. It reminds me of a colleague’s teenage son. He was willing to receive the vaccine but begged his parents not to tell anybody. He didn’t want to be identified as a liberal.

Under the now-blocked Biden mandate, workers who refuse the vaccine would have to wear a mask — something both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated should be doing in public during times of high transmission, anyway — and get tested regularly.

Most of the holdouts would have been driven to the needle by the sheer inconvenience of these alternatives. Again, a win for short- and long-term health.

At least the court upheld Biden’s mandate for healthcare workers. When working with vulnerable populations in hospitals, nursing homes and clinics, workers should be vaccinated.

Individual companies can still mandate vaccines, of course, but few will without federal support. Starbucks, for example, scrapped its vaccine requirement after the high court’s decision.

Balancing personal freedoms with public welfare is a tricky business. Many medical professionals and average Americans disagree with the ruling, on these grounds: If COVID weren’t contagious, if it weren’t contributing to significant strain on our hospital systems and making it harder for people to get treatment for other conditions, then workers could decide if they should get the vaccine. When only your health is affected, you can make whatever decisions are best for you.

But the virus is contagious and does affect all Americans. The Supreme Court ruled to hobble a response to help end this health crisis sooner.

The mandate would have made workplaces safer, which is OSHA’s main purpose. As a byproduct, it would have made customers safer too, ensuring more of them would be around to keep the economy humming, which is a major conservative tenet.

It’s ironic, then, that the court’s conservative majority is what stood in the mandate’s way.

Tipping the valet

I blame it on seeing “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” at an impressionable age.

The scene where two parking-garage attendants sail Bueller’s cherry-red Ferrari GT California up and over railroad tracks, punctuated by the “Star Wars” theme thundering in the background, left an indelible mark. I have never trusted parking attendants since, and I am especially irritable at the thought of tipping them.

Tipping, in general, is a custom I don’t understand. I understand that gratuities in a restaurant bridge the gap between what the business pays a server and a living wage. I don’t blame the server, nor do I necessarily blame the restaurant, but I do blame the restaurant industry as a whole for a system that entices customers with low-priced specials and then shakes them down on the check.

But I have options when it comes to eating. I can choose to dine at a fast-food restaurant where tipping is not expected, or I can elect to stay home and prepare my own food. Nobody holds a T-bone to my head and forces me into a restaurant.

I could also choose not to leave a tip, but that way is fraught with peril, including the prospect of wearing a glass of water on my next visit or eating, unbeknownst to me, a thin thread of saliva garnishing the butter on my baked potato. So I always tip.

However, I don’t have many choices when it comes to parking, especially at hotels in big cities, where the only feasible option is often the hotel’s own facility, monitored by bow-tie wearing employees who hover around the entrance like fashionably dressed hobos, sucking cigarettes and waiting for the next easy mark.

My wife knows the drill, because I repeat it every time we travel. We pull to the curb and the penguins start to flock. I whisper to my wife, “Don’t let them help us with the luggage. I can get it myself. Remember, no luggage.”

By then the attendants have opened the doors and pasted on their best come-on smiles. But soon they notice I’ve turned off the car and put the key safely in my pocket, and the smiles falter just a bit. One of THOSE, they’re thinking.

I inquire about available public parking, even though I already know the answer, found on Page 57 of “Parking Attendant Careers for Dummies”: “Tell the mark that the nearest public parking is at least eight blocks away, that it charges exorbitant prices and is only open from 9 to 5 daily with no in-and-out privileges. Say that the public parking lot floods three times a week and that cars are routinely washed away. Mention that last month alone, 37 cars there were broken into, glove boxes pillaged, and gas tanks filled with sugar.”

Truthfully, most of my tipping angst with hotel valets comes from a lack of knowledge. I don’t know if I’m supposed to tip when the valet drives off in the car or when I ask him to retrieve it for me. I don’t know how much is appropriate. And I especially don’t know why I should be obligated to reach for my wallet when my arm is already being twisted.

Miss Manners, that usually reliable arbiter of taste and refinement, is no help. She says to tip a buck for valet restaurant parking but that no tip is necessary at a commercial parking garage “if you were planning to have bodywork done on your car anyway,” which I guess is a joke, but who can really tell?

Because of all this pressure, any interaction between a valet and me is tense. In my mind, the cityscape with its honking cars and hissing bus brakes melts away, and I’m standing in the middle of an Old West town, all tumbleweeds and swinging saloon doors, squinting into the sun on a cloudless day. I’m wrapped in a serape. The valet is dressed the same. Somewhere, somebody plays the theme to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as my hand hovers over my holster, which contains not a gun but a wallet. If I draw, I lose.

My opponent and I lock eyes. In his steely gaze I see society’s expectations — tip! tip! tip! In mine, he sees the mantra of the tightwad — no! no! no! My hand shakes, I falter. I look away, my embarrassment and shame almost getting the better of me, but then my true nature, the part of me that hates having this service thrust upon me, unwanted, unasked for, asserts itself.

I sigh and hand over my keys to my vintage 2002 Dodge Neon — it’s so choice, as Ferris might say — but I insist on taking my own luggage. It’s a matter of pride, mostly, but also a way for me to feel less like a bum when I stiff him.

Because a valet can coerce his way into my car, but he will never pry open my wallet.

This column was originally written and published in July 2012. I'm much more generous today, although I still struggle with tipping the valet. 

Getting up the gumption to paint

In the name of domestic tranquility, many household tasks at Casa Schillig are left to professionals.

This includes anything that involves measuring, pasting or power tools. My definition of power tools is generous enough to encompass hammers and screwdrivers, so I consequently do very little that qualifies as “handy.” Sure, I’ll slap together “some assembly required” lawn chairs, but my work is so shoddy I don’t trust anybody except my mother-in-law to sit in them.

A few years into the marriage, my wife and I decided it would be better to hire out these jobs than endure the petty arguing that comes from doing them together. I would rather work a second (and even a third) job to pay a professional than subject myself to spousal browbeating for seven hours on a Saturday or accidentally glue shut my mouth — or hers — with wallpaper paste.

Still, every year I pick one task that I can accomplish on my own, just so I can feel manly and join in water-cooler conversations with burly co-workers who routinely knock out walls, thread electrical wire through ceilings, and bench press the foundations of their homes with a cold brew in one hand and the TV remote in the other. (Said bench pressing being accomplished with their teeth, apparently.)

This year’s project was painting the basement floor.

Actually, it was last year’s project too, but I successfully avoided it with no ill effects to my masculinity. My excuse was provided by one of those Hungry-Jack-dinner-eating contractor types who waterproofed our basement in 2009. He told me not to paint the floor until the newly poured concrete had cured, which conjured up images of Ernest Angley slapping some unfortunate upside the head and intoning, “You are healed!” but apparently is something else entirely since Mr. Angley never appeared in my basement. He recommended waiting six months to paint. (The contractor, not the Rev. Angley.)

In my mind, six months really meant a year, which I somehow stretched to almost two years, letting cobwebs build up in the corners while I pretended not to notice.

But last week I could procrastinate no longer, so I broke out the power washer (the only power tool I feel qualified to operate, since it’s really nothing more than a squirt gun made legitimate through a power cord and frequent on-box warnings) and made a big mess in the name of eliminating those cobwebs. Then I bought some paint, rollers and brushes and got to work.

They say the hardest part of painting is the preparation (“they” being the first 100 people in the phonebook), but I bet they’re not referring to mental preparation. Regardless, I wasted a lot of time pacing the basement, sighing and bemoaning my fate. One day, I even ran off to the movies, so I suppose it’s poetic justice or karma that I saw the pretty-rotten “Cowboys and Aliens.” It wouldn’t have been fair to see something good.

When I finally popped the top off the first paint can, I was surprised by how quickly the job went. I strategized successfully, relocating the cats’ litter box and food bowls to the top of the stairs (painting upsets delicate feline ecosystems), moving everything else to the center of the basement and painting the corners. The next day, I moved everything back, minus the litter box, before painting the center of the room.

The hardest part — well, after working up the gumption to start, that is — was painting my way up the steps, which involved a backward spider crawl that would be the envy of any professional contortionist. At one point, I forgot that I had already painted the handrail and used it to steady myself after all the blood rushing to my head (which at many points was lower than the rest of my body) made me dizzy. This gave me a battleship-gray palm but saved me from a potentially life-ending tumble.

I’d like to believe I didn’t kill too many brain cells by breathing in paint fumes for the last few days, and that the job really does look decent. Not professionally decent, mind you, but decent by my own inept standards, which means there isn’t too much paint on the walls and ceiling and that the places I missed are covered up by strategically placed boxes of Christmas decorations.

And even if it’s not, it’s just a basement. The only reason my wife allows me to tinker down there is that nobody except the cats will ever see it anyway, and they’re so grateful to have their litter box back in its rightful place that they won’t complain about the results.


Originally published in 2011

How many points for THAT word?

Success is always a plus, but in Scrabble it earns only 11 points.

I’m headed toward failure (10 points) when my wife digs out the venerable game board for a seemingly innocuous hour of play on a winter night. In our house, Scrabble is a death sentence, and she the executioner.

It doesn’t matter if I spell words like “angelic” (10 points), “plenary” (12) or “caitiff” (15). She’ll come back with “cow” (24 points with the “w” on a triple-word-score space), “tax” (26 points with the normally 8-point “x” doing triple duty), and “king” (42 with double-letter score for the “K” and a triple-word bonus).

It’s enough to make me spell “castrate,” but even then I’ll get only 12 points.

What I lack is strategy, which is why a dull 6-year-old can annihilate me in checkers, and his equally dreary 8-year-old sister can do the same to me in chess. I am a guileless guy; pondering the long-range ramifications of anything beyond what will happen if I don’t stop for gas when the needle is on empty or why sticking my wet finger in a wall socket is a bad idea is beyond my walnut-sized brain.

“Don’t think of big words,” my wife advises. “Stick to little ones and put them in the best spots.” Her advice reflects her philosophy: All one- and two-syllable words to teach me to stop relying on three- and four-syllable ones.

Not that she doesn’t stack the Scrabble tiles against me. A few years ago, I caught her flipping a “V” upside down and using it as one of the two blank tiles. How long had this been going on? Cheaters never win, except at Scrabble, when maybe they emerge winners in almost every game for more than a decade.

Then there is the dictionary. Our official one is a little spiral-bound article that belonged to her grandmother. Apparently, it was bequeathed to my wife sometime during the Reagan presidency. An ancient K-Mart sticker on the cover, right next to the “America’s No. 1 best-selling dictionary” tagline, indicates it cost $1. The world map inside still shows East and West Germany. Heck, it probably shows the original 13 colonies.

It is the only volume we are allowed to use to settle disputes during game play, but any word of hers will be validated by the slim booklet, while any word of mine is conspicuously absent. I’m convinced I generate only new words, while she sticks to timeless classics. As words go, she’s classic rock; I’m hip-hop.

In the early days of our marriage, any aspersions cast on the dictionary (or suggestions that we upgrade to something with pages less yellow) brought out a pouting lip and charges that I was desecrating the memory of her dearly departed grandmother.

That gambit no longer works. Today, I have written across the title page, “Warning: This dictionary contains no words that could be even remotely helpful in playing Scrabble.”

Yet the dictionary remains. I openly mock it, but I’m not risking a family curse by arranging any accident for the book (maybe a chance encounter with the stovetop, for instance).

Things are looking up, however. In our last match, I took an early lead and held it throughout the game. At one time, I was ahead by 50 points, a lead which narrowed to less than 10 by game’s end, but I still won.

Whenever that happens – and it isn’t often – I refuse to play again for a while, preferring to bask in the glow of victory for months on end. But while I gloat, new words are introduced into the language, words that don’t have a chance of ever appearing inside the little spiral-bound dictionary, and I ruin my chances for next time.

It’s what’s known as a Catch-22, which would net me 12 points minimum, if there were numbers on a Scrabble board, which there aren’t.

There I go again, focusing on what can’t be, when I should be spelling “cat,” “dog,” and “toe” for uninspired but rock-solid points.


Originally published in 2009

Remembering Edgar Allan Poe

Some musings about the great E.A. Poe, written and published in 2019, on the week of his 213th birthday.

“To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness,” said Edgar Allan Poe.

It is an apt quote from the famed American writer and poet, whose 210th birthday is celebrated on Jan. 19. After his passing in 1849, Poe’s rival, a little man named Rufus Griswold, wrote an unflattering obituary, amplifying Poe’s personal faults. Griswold later admitted to Poe’s literary genius, but opined that it was “in a singular degree wasted or misapplied.”

Rather than destroying Poe’s reputation, however, Griswold’s calumny may have had the opposite effect. The website of the Poe Museum speculates that the criticism fostered further interest in Poe. Griswold certainly cemented the writer’s reputation, especially among readers who enjoy believing that the writer’s life was as lurid and morbid as his most famous stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Just how unhappy Poe’s life may have been is a matter of some conjecture. Aficionados know the lowlights.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and orphaned by the age of 3. He was taken in — but not adopted — by John Allan and his wife, Frances, of Richmond, Virginia. He studied at the University of Virginia, where he amassed a considerable gambling debt in an attempt to pay for his studies. He did not graduate. A later stint at the United States Military Academy at West Point ended with his dismissal.

His fiancee became engaged to another man. He later married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, a fact that incites equal measures of nervous laughter and disgusted looks among high school freshman when they first hear it.

Poe’s dream of becoming a great poet clashed with his constant poverty, and a series of low-paying editorial jobs often ended in termination, either because of his nettlesome personality, penchant for drinking or both.

After his wife’s death from tuberculosis, Poe reconnected with his first fiancee, who was now widowed, and they planned to marry. But then Poe disappeared while on a trip to New York and Philadelphia. When he resurfaced five days later, in Baltimore, he was drunk and raving. He died shortly after, from causes that have been variously attributed to alcoholism, rabies, and even election fraud.

While this has every appearance of a sordid life story, it must be countered with what were undoubtedly pleasant years and events, including a marriage that was, despite the strangeness of its origins, happy; his tenure with the Southern Literary Messenger in Baltimore, where he came into his own as a magazine writer; and the smash success of his poem, “The Raven,” which brought him fame, but not fortune.

Whether these moments were enough to counter the many setbacks Poe encountered is unknown. It’s easy to believe that, because Poe chose such morbid topics for his poetry and fiction, his life must have been equally bleak. Yet authors, like the rest of us, are more than the sum of the milestones from their biographies, and lurking behind Poe’s tragedies and addiction might have been a contented person.

Happiness, however, doesn’t sell as many books.

Ironically, for a man who struggled with debt for most of his life, Poe’s works in the years since his death have generated millions of dollars. His creation of the detective story spawned the mystery genre, which continues to sell more books than anything other than romance, year after year. His stories and poetry have been printed in countless editions and have been adapted for stage, screen, videogames and podcasts.

Those last are especially apt, as Poe was also a visionary. In the 1840s, he correctly read the trends and recognized that magazines were the future of publishing, reflecting Americans’ penchant for shorter works, delivered more often and more efficiently. If he were alive today, he would be tweeting out his stories in 280-character bursts or publishing them as eBooks on Amazon, I’m convinced.

As for Rufus Griswold, perhaps his biggest contribution was disproving the Poe quote at the top of this column. Like Aaron Burr to Alexander Hamilton, Griswold lives on as only a footnote in the life story of a writer far greater than he.

So raise a glass and a book to Edgar Allan Poe this month. His short life spawned literary immortality.

The Evel that men do

Evel Knievel has cleared the last great jump that awaits us all.

If that sounds overly dramatic, it’s no more so than the stuntman’s life, a history of hard-living, pithy sound bites and breathtaking stunts that ended last week with his death at the age of 69.

If you grew up in the ’70s, Evel was part of the backdrop of childhood. He was a real-life superhero decked out in a red, white and blue costume who did the kinds of crazy things that characters only did in comic books or cartoons – jumping over buses or through rings of fire on a motorcycle, or strapping himself to the back of a rocket to hurtle over Snake River Canyon.

To an 8-years-old, that’s heady stuff.

He broke bones. He shattered his pelvis. He was comatose for a month. But nothing stopped the guy. Like the Energizer Bunny, he kept going and going and going.

As a kid, I had the Knievel action figure, its rugged good looks sculpted in plastic. More importantly, I had the stunt cycle little Evel perched on. It came with a ripcord that you pulled to rev the back wheel and put the toy into motion.

My little Evel sailed off the top of the basement steps, over the family dog and into its water dish, across the tabletop and into the great airy expanse of the kitchen.

Some of the simulacrum’s stunts were successful, some were not. My little doll was pretty banged up, but unlike the real Knievel, his convalescences were short, often nonexistent.

I’ll bet, despite millions of Knievel toys and accessories sold, collectors have a hard time finding them in mint condition today. We didn’t keep our Knievels in their for later resale value. We took ’em out and ran them through mud and water, dangnabit.

The only other stuntman vying for a piece of the collective hearts of kid-dom in the 1970s was The Human Fly, a more obscure thrill seeker who took the Knievel mystique one step further by never appearing without a red-and-white mask. Marvel Comics published a short-lived comic book based on him, but the stories that were far more make-believe than real.

The ’70s Human Fly should not be confused with the Human Fly from earlier in the century, Harry H. Gardiner, hired by the Detroit News in 1916 to scale the Majestic Building in downtown Chicago.

No, the disco-era Fly was allegedly Canadian stuntman Rick Rojatt, who jumped 27 buses on a rocket-powered motorcycle inside the Montreal Olympic Stadium. I say allegedly because Rojatt has disappeared from public view; Internet searches for his name produce only a few scattered hits, mostly to the comic book series.

Despite his mystique – or maybe because of it – the Human Fly never captivated the world the way Evel did. There was just something about Knievel, garbed in those American colors, defying death and making a heck of a good living at it, that epitomized capitalism and coolness in equal measures. Other people might come along and top his records – indeed, most of his stunts have been replicated and surpassed – but Evel did it first, or at least did it with more flair than the barnstorming daredevils who inspired him.

That counts for something.

Ladies and gentlemen, Evel Knievel, the man for whom the expression “Kids, don’t try this at home” was invented.

Or if it wasn’t, it should have been.

Originally published December 2007

Snow days from years gone by ...

Ahead of tonight's forecast winter storm, here's an oldie from 2006 about snow days.

The season’s first flurries have fallen, and children’s thoughts turn to … snow days.

Snow days, the Shangri-La of the American education system, a day salvaged from the drudgery of reading, writing and arithmetic by the happy union of Mother Nature, Old Man Winter and their offspring – Snow, Ice, and (the newest arrival) Wind Chill Factor.

We’ve only had one good dusting. The day after came nowhere near meeting requirements of a snow day here, although some neighboring districts were blessed with one.

Nevertheless, what child could resist the temptation to stay up later, blow off homework, or offer up a prayer that the following morning would dawn with his school on the cancellation list?

It takes a saint to avoid that temptation, and most saints grew up in warmer climates. They probably wished for sand days, instead.

Judging from the jubilant cries that ring from every rooftop (or, more likely, every child’s bed) when a snow day is announced, you would think school children are subjected to every kind of cruelty, toiling in Dickensian sweat shops of sadism that make sufferers echo Pink Floyd’s mantra, “We don’t need no education…”

As a teacher, I would like to think this isn’t the case, that school is a good experience, a place to learn, socialize, and even have fun. So why the near-universal chorus of hoorahs for cancellations?

I believe it has more to do with the unexpected nature of a snow day, the fact it is a rare gift, unscheduled and beyond the control of know-it-all adults. On a snow day, a newly emancipated student can do almost anything – sleep ‘till noon (but who wants to waste the day sleeping?), shovel snow, shovel food into one’s mouth while watching eight straight hours of television, or even – Egad! – catch up on schoolwork.

Whether the time is squandered is immaterial. It is, after all, a snow day, and you will be no further behind for wasting it.

Like most special occasions, an entire body of superstition and tradition has built up around the snow day, as students plot ways to wish them into being.

One superstition is to go to bed the night before with underwear and pajamas inside out. The hope is that the following day will be equally turned around – hence, no school.

A second is to place a photo (for slackers) or an effigy (for overachievers) of the principal in your freezer, putting the deepfreeze on the person most kids assume is responsible for calling off classes. Since that duty rests most often with a superintendent, it makes better sense to put a picture or Zuni fetish doll of him or her in the icebox, but kids are more familiar with principals, so in they go, instead.

Under no circumstances should the word “snow day” be uttered the night before one may occur. This is a jinx of the highest order and makes school a virtual certainty. For the same reason, teachers who plan for snow days (“Class, if we aren’t here tomorrow because of the weather, your test will be Friday instead of Thursday”) will reduce their likelihood to nearly zero percent.

The weather has to be really rotten for most working adults to benefit from snow days. Hence, the first things most grown-ups think of when they see snow flying in the evening is how will it affect the morning commute, will the car start in the cold, and where the heck is that snow scraper, anyhow?

How different their thoughts would be if they expected to turn on the radio or the TV the next morning and learn work was cancelled!

I like my job, and I like being at my job. But sometimes, when the night skies threaten and crystalline flakes plummet earthward, I consider all the things I might do with a surprise day off, and the 10-year-old lurking inside me pops out.

I’m a lot smarter than the average 10-year-old, though.

I place the Bible and the entire yearbook in the freezer. Somewhere between those four covers is the responsible party, and I like keeping all my bases covered.

Furthermore, wearing my underwear inside out means I can wait an extra day to change them.

The science of killing cacti with alcohol

A cactus thrives on vodka.

I gained this priceless piece of information from my high school science fair project. It’s vital to know if you’re ever in the desert, need to kill some cacti, and have access to nothing except a bottle of Absolut. I’m here to tell you: Don’t even bother.

I remembered my abortive career as a wannabe plant killer while my daughter and her friend worked on their own science fair project earlier this week. They are researching which detergent best removes lipstick stains from clothing, a topic of vital importance to business executives and their collars since the invention of the secretary in the late nineteenth century.

(Which sounds more like the premise for a bad episode of “Bewitched” than a science project, but I digress.)

Undoubtedly, my brighter classmates gleaned much more from their experiments. They were like Jimmy Neutrons to my Bart Simpson, performing groundbreaking research in smart topics like quantum physics and hydroponics while I labored in vain to keep stenciled letters from smearing on my poster board.

It didn’t help that I waited until the last minute and then fabricated all the research. 

Backdating my log entries to give the appearance of being an intrepid young scientist probably took longer than doing the experiments correctly, but it’s exactly what I did, bleary-eyed one Sunday night at the kitchen table, desperately trying to make “The Effect of Alcohol on Household Plants” match my hypothesis.

My first mistake, of course, was waiting until ten days before the project was due to begin the experiment, even though my “log” indicated I had been working on it for two months.

My second mistake was being too cheap to buy appropriate plants. Some petunias or daffodils would have succumbed easily to alcohol poisoning, I bet. Instead, I used a cactus we had around the house, a stunted little thing that my mom was willing to sacrifice in the name of science and a passing grade in biology class.

Except the damn thing refused to die.

I drowned it in vodka, pouring so much into the pot that it overflowed into the kitchen sink. I put it in the closet, reasoning the absence of light would help it die sooner. Wrong.

It didn’t even appear sickly, but stayed a bright, happy shade of green, enjoying its vodka ablutions and looking as healthy and toned as a supermodel.

This can’t be, I remember thinking. Alcohol is deadly to all life, a lesson I learned from staring endlessly at slides of diseased, pickled livers in health class. I can’t walk into school with a cactus thriving on a daily diet of poison.

Finally, in desperation, I poured bleach into the pot. That did the trick, but only barely.

I remember the sinking feeling the day my class presented their projects. All around me were Einsteins who had solved the mysteries of perpetual motion, created lasers in their backyards or built cars that ran on grass clippings, and here I was with an albino cactus (the Clorox bleached the green away) and a project more appropriate for fourth grade.

Even my poster board, which I had to roll up to take on the school bus, looked lame, propped against the classroom wall with one corner drooping, a pathetic but apt symbol of ineptitude.

I stammered through my presentation, tried not to look too guilty when my teacher sniffed the cactus, and collected my C+ (a mercy grade – only kids who didn’t do a project at all scored lower). 

In retrospect, I should have reported the findings accurately. I may have been on the cusp of an exciting discovery, that vodka was linked somehow to immortality, the hitherto mythical fountain of youth in a glass bottle.

Instead, I threw away a promising career by fabricating my results, perhaps anticipating a similar scandal late last year involving a South Korean researcher and his bogus cloning report.

I hope my daughter hasn’t inherited my anti-science gene, and that her experiments in lipstick removal are more aboveboard.

Which leaves me to wonder: What effect might vodka have on lipstick stains, other than a person is more likely to get them after a heavy bout of drinking?

I wonder if anybody would fund my research into that topic. 

Originally published in 2006. 

The mysterious jar of peanut butter

My wife and I returned recently from a trip to find a jar of peanut butter on the breakfast bar.

While we were gone, our daughter stayed at the house for a couple of nights. Because the peanut butter is Skippy Natural Creamy and because she is a healthy eater, we assumed it was hers. The next time we saw her, we tried to give it back.

Except she said it wasn’t hers.

OK. My parents also came over to feed the cats while we were gone. I couldn’t fathom why my mom or dad would be eating peanut butter while spooning cat food or scooping litter, but whatever. I texted them to say I had their jar.

Except they said it wasn’t theirs.

Now here’s the thing: My wife and I both loathe Skippy Peanut Butter. On the taste scale, it falls somewhere between asparagus and butt. If I had a choice between eating Skippy or eating roadkill, I’d … well, I’d still choose Skippy, but I would have to think about it first. It’s that bad.

Add to this my loathing of “natural” peanut butter, which eliminates two of the product’s greatest assets, sugar and hydrogenated oils. This particular jar, which I am staring at while I type these words, promises, “No need to stir!” Hardly a ringing endorsement.

In other words, no way did this peanut butter accidentally fell out of the cupboard. Nor did we ever buy it. And the three people who had access to our house while we were gone don’t own it, either.

There’s only one solution: Somebody threw an unauthorized party.

Years ago, one of my students told me about a huge soiree he had thrown while his parents were out of town. He said he had dozens of people in the house, dancing and singing and doing whatever else mice do when cats are away at a Barry Manilow concert. Before the party broke up, the guests cleaned everything. Tidied the bathroom. Removed all the beverage containers. Even ran the sweeper.

“So you got away with it?” I asked.

“No,” he replied with a sulk. “Some jerk peed in my mom’s flower vase, and she found it the next day.”

The story is perfect — maybe a little too perfect to be true. But it illustrates one of Schillig’s Unalterable Laws of Life: It’s impossible to throw a party in somebody’s house when they are away without leaving evidence behind.

So somebody was partying in my place, and one of those somebodies left behind an incriminating jar of Skippy Natural Creamy peanut butter, with No Need to Stir.

When was this party and how many people were here? In addition to sitting around eating Skippy Natural, what other insidious activities might they have taken part in? Secret cornhole tournaments in the back yard? Clandestine games of rummy in the dining room? Playing the soundtrack from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” at high volumes after midnight?

Now that I look around the house, it occurs to me that some of our photos have moved slightly, as if unknown hands returned them to not-quite-right positions after a jitterbug contest in the living room. And one of the slats on the kitchen blinds is off kilter just a hair, as though somebody raised it to see if police were responding to a noise complaint. Worst of all, episodes of “The 700 Club” have appeared on the DVR. Brrr.

Yes, something happened here while we were gone.

I know a surefire way to validate this, but it involves opening the jar of Skippy.

Remembering the lesson of my student and his mother’s flower vase (and fearing peenut butter), I haven’t — and I won’t.

Some parties, like some cover-ups, are best left a mystery.

Originally published July 2015. The mystery is still unsolved. 

Farewell to a print dinosaur

A relic from the distant past showed up on the front porch last week: A telephone book.

For readers under a certain age, allow me to explain. Once upon a time — oh, about 20 years ago — each house had a big, ugly box screwed into one of its walls or perched on an end table. This box had a large dial that looked somewhat like the inside of a grapefruit.

Instead of eating it, though, we would stick our index fingers into the parts where the fruit would be and rotate the dial, which allowed us to place calls to people or businesses that were too far away to drive to directly. This was a primitive telephone, although we were too ignorant back then to know it was primitive, so we just called it a telephone.

These big, ugly boxes weren’t mobile like the phones we carry in our pockets or stick into our ears today, and they weren’t connected to a 24/7 information source that could find any number instantly. Oh, you could use your index finger to dial “0” and talk to grumpy operators on a crackling line that made them sound like Radar O’Reilly addressing the 4077th via public-address system, but most of us didn’t because, paradoxically, dialing “0” cost money.

Instead, we used that telephone book I mentioned earlier. It listed residential numbers so we could find the name of our secret crush, work up courage for days and days, call and promptly hang up when she came to the line. (Sorry, had a bad case of the autobiographies there.)

The telephone book also listed area businesses. Lots and lots of area businesses. With big, full-color ads, each one trying to outshine and outshout the competition: plumbers, attorneys, car mechanics, and strip clubs. OK, maybe not strip clubs, unless they were New York strip-steak clubs. These ads were in a special part of the book called the Yellow Pages. I bet you can guess why.

When I grew up and took a job selling newspaper advertising, the Yellow Pages were the Great Satan. We lowly newspaper advertising reps would travel from business to business, week to week, peddling the glories of black-and-white newsprint (such as they were), while the Yellow Page salespeople would ride into town once a year in their Mercedes and Lexuses (Lexi?), wearing three-piece suits and impeccably coiffed hairstyles, their wrists dripping with gold, and wine and dine our customers and most of their budgets. In a market where familiarity bred contempt, I was among the most contemptible, a walking pariah with a briefcase.

But how the worm has turned in the 21st century. The explosion of the digital information age has freed us from that box on the wall and put our phones wherever we are. Similarly, the ability to search for information instantly — our cars, in line at the grocery store, in the flooding basement when the pipe bursts and it’s awfully inconvenient to swim for the steps and go fish out the phonebook from a desk upstairs — has freed us from the tyranny of the Yellow Pages.

Rejoice, my children, rejoice.

Now I’m not denying that the information explosion hasn’t affected newspapers, too. Many people believe they can find out everything they need by following the breaking news that flashes on their phones or by visiting a variety of websites through the day. And this mindset is definitely hurting the bottom line of the newspaper industry.

But here’s why newspapers aren’t ready to go the way of the buggy whip or the transistor radio just yet: In small communities, we are still the only medium that will cover local government, run photos of the prom king and queen, and give scores for the little league tournament at the corner park.

Sure, lots of people are posting some of that same stuff on Twitter and Facebook, but a reader who wants it all — or even a good portion of it — would have to follow (ital.) a lot (end ital.) of people to get it. It would be a full-time endeavor, so much so that the reader might be tempted to hire somebody to assemble it all in one convenient place. Which — ahem! — is the newspaper.

Meanwhile, when I saw the phone book on my porch, I paused a moment to reflect on nearly defunct endeavors and their high-powered salespeople. I wondered what they were selling today. Maybe medical equipment. I pondered this on the short walk from the porch to the recycle bin, where I deposited the phonebook without even opening it.

A moment’s silence, please, for a print dinosaur, thrashing about in an inky tarpit and sinking fast. Farewell, and godspeed.


This originally ran in June 2015. In the seven years since, printed newspapers have damn near joined phone books in the obsolescence pile. 

The fourth Rice Krispies' elf

Did you know there was once a fourth Rice Krispie elf?

His name was Pow! (exclamation point mandatory) and he joined Snap! Crackle! and Pop! for two television commercials in the 1950s. In a recent article for Smithsonian.com, a Kellogg’s spokesman explains to writer K. Annabelle Smith that Pow! was never intended to be an ongoing character, but rather a guest-elf of sorts.

This minor deity in the animated pitchmen pantheon got me thinking about other erased or marginal characters in long-running concerns, whether they were TV shows or comic books or commercials.

Does anybody remember:

Castor Oyl — brother to Olive, the string-beaned girlfriend of Popeye the Sailor. When most of us think of Popeye, we imagine the classic cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s. But Popeye made his first appearance in the “Thimble Theatre” comic strip in 1929, after the strip had been in existence for 10 years with Castor as the main character.

These days, Castor is a pop-culture relic, although he did have a role in the “Popeye” movie starring Robin Williams and, more recently, appeared in new Popeye comic book adventures. Yet I doubt most people could identify him today. (Visit my blog, http://blogs.dixcdn.com/leftofcybercenter/ for a visual.)

John Doggett and Monica Reyes — These two characters replaced FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) on seasons eight and nine of “The X-Files,” also known as “X-Files: The Seasons Nobody Talks About.” Played by Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish, respectively, Doggett and Reyes faded into obscurity when Duchovny and Anderson returned for the series’ swan song and two successful films. Patrick’s biggest claim to cinematic fame remains his portrayal of the T-1000 Terminator that bedeviled Ah-nold in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

Mycroft Holmes — the older, smarter, fatter and lazier brother of Sherlock Holmes. Writer Arthur Conan Doyle used or mentioned him only a handful of times in four novels and 56 short stories about the famous detective. He is said to exert great influence over decisions of state, but otherwise just sits around the Diogenes Club, smoking and eating. There are worse ways to live, I suppose.

Chuck Cunningham — Ritchie’s older brother on “Happy Days.” At some point in the second season, he was written out of the series, never to return, and the Cunninghams went from having three kids to only two. His disappearance has even inspired a term, “Chuck Cunningham Syndrome,” used for any characters unceremoniously erased from continuity.

Uncle O’Grimacey — In the world of McDonald’s advertising, O’Grimacey is the uncle of Grimace, the purple, milkshake-loving companion of Ronald. Unlike his nephew, O’Grimacey is green, befitting his role as head huckster for Shamrock Shakes. He last appeared in the mid-1980s and has presumably retired to a small cottage in Ireland.

An Internet search for “McDonald’s characters” will reveal dozens of oddities, such as the Griddler, Iam Hungry and CosMc, an alien who spoke in surfer lingo. I believe all the McDonald’s characters, with the exception of the head clown, have been quietly phased out, relics of a more innocent time when it was acceptable to use cartoon characters to coax children to eat fattening, processed foods.

Word has it the McDonaldland gang rode off into the sunset on the back of Joe Camel, guided by the Budweiser frogs.

Let’s hope they all say hello to Pop!, Chuck, Castor and all the other retirees in the Forgotten Hallows Retirement Center out in Obscuria, Oregon.

Originally published in September 2014. 

Going back in time

H.G. Wells, a pioneer of science fiction who penned the original alien invasion story, was probably also the first to write about time travel.

If you only know “The Time Machine” from the great George Pal movie of 1960 or the not-so-great remake of a few years back, you may not know that Well’s original novel (novella, really) is 111 years old. Hollywood may disdain anything older than the latest supermodel starlet, but it is surprising how often it turns to the classics for inspiration.

In the original, the main character has no name. He is simply The Time Traveller, with two l’s in the British fashion and his title capitalized.

Wells also identifies other characters in the story solely by their professions – the Psychologist, the Medical Man, the Provincial Mayor and, my favorite, the Very Young Man. (One could quibble this last is not a profession, but for many, being young is full-time work.)

I believe Wells made his characters safely anonymous in hopes of creating verisimilitude, a sense his story might be thinly fictionalized reality. He knew he had drawn up from the well two primal archetypes: our voyeuristic desire to watch what came before and what might come after, and our urge to “fix” what has already happened.

How often have you said, “If I knew then what I know now…,” followed by the changes you would have made – taking or not taking that job, moving into that house, buying that car, ripping that half-gallon of ice cream out of the hands of your younger self before you gained an extra forty pounds.

The expression, “hindsight is 20/20,” taps into the same vein of wish fulfillment. It expresses a desire for time travel by people who may have never considered the concept.

For me, the desire to flip though ages of history like a reader flipping through pages of a history book pales next to the desire to time travel within the last five minutes of my life. I could avoid so many sticky situations if I could just relive selected 300-second intervals.

Boring meeting? Jump back five minutes and run like mad for the door before the boss announces it.

Wife asks for an honest opinion and you are naive enough to give it? Flip back five, anticipate the question, and then tell her she looks great.

Need extra cash? Check lottery results, then go back and buy the winning ticket. Not with all numbers correct, mind you, because that would draw attention. Five of the six is still a nice chunk of change, you greedy slob.

Time travel continues to exert its hold, evidenced by the dozens of books, movies, and songs expressing a desire to change the unchangeable. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a killer robot from the future sent to assassinate a future leader. A time safari hunter seeking to bag a dinosaur steps on a butterfly and affects the presidential election sixty million years in the future. (Hey, maybe that’s how we got Bush.) Cher wants to turn back time and take back those words that have hurt you so you’d stay. In the latest, due out this summer, Adam Sandler gains possession of a remote control that allows him to rewind and fast forward life.

But then there is the “grandfather paradox,” which asks what would happen if you traveled into the past and accidentally killed your ancestor before he had a chance to further the bloodline.

Would you simply disappear? Would you create an alternate timeline where you never existed? And what if you, erstwhile Time Traveler – or Traveller, according to Wells – bumped into an earlier or older version of yourself along the way.

Would you sit down and have tea? Drown in a veritable sea of conundrum? Compliment yourself on your fashion sense and dashing good looks?

One’s things for sure: Time travel would be a boon for aspirin sales. Just thinking about all those paradoxes makes my head hurt.

I'm not sure when this column ran originally in The Alliance Review. I would guess 2006, based on the George W. Bush reference and the age of The Time Machine, first published in 1895. 

If I revised this, I would mention Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol as an earlier novel that featured time travel, as Scrooge travels to the past to observe his younger self. 

'Big Lie' adherents cannot be swayed by evidence

Discouraging news from a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll on the first anniversary of a shameful day in American history, the Jan. 6 insurrection.

According to the results, only 9 percent of Donald Trump’s voters now believe that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. Last January, 13 percent believed Biden won.

This, after the vote was certified state by state; after all Trump’s legal challenges were found to lack merit or were decided against him, sometimes by judges he appointed; and after numerous investigations, including one set into motion by pro-Trump forces, found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have impacted the outcome of the election.

Nevertheless, Trump’s Big Lie has not only taken root, but has actually grown in the 12 months since a pro-Trump faction attempted to subvert the Democratic process by storming the Capitol building.

And if many of the insurrectionists looked more like clueless tourists wandering around the rotunda, well, there were enough others with more nefarious goals. This latter crew broke down doors and shattered windows, tussled with Capitol police, flew the Confederate flag, threatened to harm members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, and contributed to five deaths.

Be that as it may, the Big Lie is durable because it is simple and unassailable by logic.

The gist of the lie is this: Trump won, Biden lost, and the official count is wrong because of large numbers of mail-in ballots, rigging of the voting machines or thousands of votes flown in from China. (Remember the fruitless hunt for bamboo?)

As each of these explanations is shown to lack merit, supporters simply move to the next, then the next, then the next. When they get to the end and still lack evidence, that’s proof that the conspiracy runs even deeper. Or that the godless liberal media are lying when outlet after outlet debunks each myth, providing carefully sourced explanations.

After all, these Trumpian acolytes sneer, there is no way that Trump lost. Just look at all the support he had.

I’ll never deny that Trump supporters are louder than Biden supporters, or that they haven’t invested more of themselves into backing their candidate. Trumpism was and is closer to a cult than a political movement, and deprogramming cult members is notoriously challenging and not always successful.

Cult comparisons aside, at this point espousing a belief in the Big Lie is just so much virtue (or vice) signalling for many. It’s an easy way to establish loyalty, and even Republicans who should and probably do know better — especially ones running for office in 2022 — have to tiptoe carefully around this constructed unreality lest they run afoul of voters.

Bernie Moreno is an example. In November 2020, the Ohio businessman tweeted that conservatives had to accept the election’s results. He even congratulated Biden and Kamala Harris. Those tweets were deleted when he became a candidate for the Ohio Senate. In recent ads, he states that the election was stolen.

I’m convinced that most of the 91 percent of Trump voters who say that their candidate won really don’t believe it, not in their heart of hearts. But they can never admit it, not even to themselves. After all, most Flat Earthers don’t really think somebody can sail off the edge of the planet; literal belief in a pancake model of the world is unnecessary as long as one pledges allegiance to the wackadoodle theory in a figurative sense.

The same is true with the 2020 election. As long as you state that Trump won, then you belong — ”gabba gabba we accept you we accept you one of us.”

Sadly, while the grueling yet necessary work of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the United States Capitol trudges on, Trump loyalists in the GOP continue their own inexorable mission of eviscerating state voting protections and financing cronies for state secretary of state offices. This way, the next attack on democracy will be carried out not by a violent mob storming the Capitol, but by men in suits and ties, operating under the veneer of authority, rejecting vote tallies unless they favor the candidate whose party already bought and owns them.

The visible parts of the Jan. 6 insurrection were quintessential Trump — poorly conceived, mostly flash, little substance.

But like all Trumpian ploys, the spectacle diverted the eye while even worse chicanery occurred elsewhere. And it still is.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig

Where do you get your ideas?

I'm not sure when this originally ran, but it must have been sometime after October 2007, when the Peanuts book was first released.

Where do you get your ideas?

It is a question many of us would like to ask the creative people whose works we enjoy – artists, novelists, composers and filmmakers who chart new worlds or who combine familiar elements in unfamiliar ways – even though we realize they have been asked hundreds of times.

For Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts,” the answer to that cringe-inducing question was most likely “everywhere”– his own insecurities, family, fellow artists and faith – even when he denied it was so.

This is evident from a new biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” by David Michaelis. Again and again, Michaelis demonstrates how Schulz drew from even the homeliest details of his own life to create what was essentially a thinly veiled autobiography coded into the deceptively simple squiggles that became Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.

Schulz’s WWII experiences – leaving home for boot camp shortly after his mother’s death, surprising himself by coming out of a self-imposed shell to be a leader, his service in France and Germany – transmogrified into Charlie Brown’s experiences at summer camp (he becomes well-respected before returning home to anonymity) and Snoopy’s prowling of the war-ravaged countryside as a World War I flying ace.

Similarly, Schulz’s failed romances earlier in life became the impetus for Charlie Brown’s unrequited love, the Little Red-Haired Girl; childhood trips to the movies with his grandmother inspired a memorable strip where Charlie Brown is fearful his grandmother will leave the theater after the newsreel; and his cousin Patty and her roommate Elise led to the creation of Peppermint Patty and Marcie.

Schulz was a magnet, metaphorically drawing these ideas to himself and then literally drawing them onto the Bristol boards he shipped to United Feature Syndicate.

He took a working-class upbringing, filled with the requisite share of hits and misses, and parlayed it into a goldmine. Only last week, on a Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities, Schulz was number three, behind cultural icons Elvis and John Lennon and ahead of luminaries like George Harrison and Albert Einstein.

Sometimes, when reporters asked Schulz if he was Charlie Brown, he answered yes. Increasingly, later in life, he would become more philosophical, noting that he modeled aspects of Charlie Brown clearly after himself, but not entirely.

Creative people always reveal pieces of themselves in their works, whether they intend to or not. Edgar Allan Poe, orphaned at an early age and all but abandoned later by the family who took him in, wrote always of alienation, isolation and loss, although these themes were dressed up in the rags of gothic fiction as premature burials, pestilence and insanity.

In the same vein (pun intended), Alfred Hitchcock’s films betray – among other things – a man fascinated by aloof women, especially blondes. Steely blondes meet ghastly fates in at least three of his movies – Kim Novak falls to her death from a bell tower after being remade a blonde by an obsessed James Stewart in “Vertigo,” Janet Leigh is knifed to death in the shower by a character with his own women/mother issues in “Psycho,” and poor Tippi Hedren endures a horrific winged attack in “The Birds.”

Hitchcock did not write his own screenplays, but he was definitely instrumental in their creation and evolution.

Would Poe, who wrote about the art of writing, have recognized his tortured past in his own work? Would Hitchcock?

In both, we can see evidence of the puppeteer behind the stage. How much or how little we read into these peeks is up to us, along with how much credibility we give such readings.

Similarly, in each “Peanuts” strip we can almost see Charles Schulz moving his ink-dipped pen across the page, giving life to his characters the way Beethoven, the idol of Schulz’s Schroeder, gave life to one of his symphonies: one captured squiggle at a time.

Free writing advice is often worth what you pay

I had the opportunity to speak to a writers’ group over the summer, and I hope I didn’t scare them away from the craft.

They were a wonderful audience, although hard-up for guest speakers if they had to invite me. My goal was simple: not to send any of them screaming into the street, breaking pencils and smashing keyboards and vowing never to write again.

They thought writing is great fun, an outlet for pent-up creativity. Most of the time, I feel that way too. But when ideas won’t come, writers without regular deadlines can step away for a day or so, no harm no foul.

Writers on deadline don’t have this luxury. Even when ideas aren’t there and words won’t come, fingers must keep pushing keys or pencils pressing paper. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of muscle memory, typing the same words over and over until something new squeezes out.

Somebody asked about writer’s block. I said I don’t believe in it. I subscribe to the William Zinsser theory. In his must-read book, “On Writing Well,” Zinsser treats writer’s block like a myth. Plumbers don’t suffer from plumber’s block, carpenters don’t have carpenter’s block. They just do the job.

I told the group that when I can’t come up with the words but know that a column is due, I mentally strap myself into a chair in front of a computer and tell myself that I won’t stand up again until I’ve completed a draft.

I’ve never had to literally strap myself into a chair, but the day may come. For now, I tell myself that I can get up and get a drink, eat a snack or use the bathroom only after I’ve written an allotted number of words. If that happens in twenty minutes, great. If it happens in three hours, not so great.

Is this fun? No. Is it productive? Most of the time. Good for my bladder? Assuredly not.

Procrastination in writing is like procrastination in most things, I suppose. When most of us face an unpleasant task, we find other things that must be done first. Need to make that tough call and eat crow over something you’ve said? Suddenly, Fibber McGee’s closet beckons, or the attic must be cleaned, or the sink screams for scouring.

I go through a whole series of maneuvers before I reach the writing “strap-in” point, which I call writing crow instead of eating it. Usually, I do tasks I hate even more, but ones that require little concentration. If I’m mowing or sweeping or, heaven forbid, waxing the car, I’m avoiding a particularly rough topic.

I used to fool myself when I did these things, saying that they really needed to be done. Now I’m honest: I’m ducking out on writing, I’ll say, but only until 10 a.m. Or noon. Or whatever time I select.

When I do start to write, thought, I don’t get up until I’m done. Usually, the morning is my best time. But I’ll sit there all day long if I have to, trying not to fiddle too much on Facebook or Twitter and often failing. I’m only human.

One weird writing tick I possess is a reluctance to move on to a new sentence until the one before it is as good as it can be. This often means that when I’m done with a column, I’m really done, because I’ve pored over it dozens of times, one sentence at a time, until I reach the end. My first finished draft is often simultaneously my thirty-first draft.

While I tell my students that there is no wrong way to write, except not to do it, I also tell them that my method is one of the worst. It’s easy to work for hours and have only two or three paragraphs to show for your efforts. Two or three perfect paragraphs, but far from a finished piece.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t go back later — a day or two, at least — and revise. Revision is, for me, the part of writing that is true joy. I especially like to peel away excess words and rewrite sentences when the piece I’m revising is so old that I can barely remember writing it. That’s when I’m most honest, when I can effect the most changes. Sadly, I seldom sit on a piece that long.

So why am I telling you this today? Because I’ve been sitting here for hours already, and I really have to use the bathroom. And now I can.

Originally published September 2014.

If 'The African Queen' were remade today

About three minutes.

That’s how much time elapses in “The African Queen” from the moment the Germans tighten nooses around Charlie and Rosie’s necks until the gunboat explodes.

Before you can say “Hollywood classic,” Bogie and Hepburn are swimming toward shore, none the worse for having endured a swarm of mosquitos, a broken propeller and — in the case of Bogart’s character — serious withdrawal after the teetotaling Hepburn pours all his gin into the river.

When thinking about how slowly “The African Queen” unfurls, how much care director John Huston takes to define both lead characters and their upstairs/downstairs-type romance, and how this languid pace is contrasted by a brisk and efficient finale, it’s hard not to compare the film to Hollywood blockbusters of today, where characterization takes a backseat to endless explosions and one-liners, and where the pace is always faster than Ricochet Rabbit ping-ping-pinging off walls in those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

If “The African Queen” were made today — say, by director Michael Bay — instead of 1951, it would be a much different film.

For one, Rose would show more skin. Her schoolmarmish outfit, despite being appropriate for a missionary woman in 1914, would somehow find a way to be torn open at the midriff, and ample cleavage would be revealed as she helped navigate down the river.

Charlie would have a dark and haunted past, one that tied in with the Germans skulking about in their gunboat. Maybe he would be a German expat instead of Canadian, and the commander of the gunboat would be his brother, just waiting for this opportunity to finish off his woebegone sibling.

Rosie’s plight would also be accentuated. Charlie’s evil brother, attracted to her bare midriff and heaving bosom, would attempt to persuade her to leave the bumbling Charlie. In a scene of candlelit faux romance, the bound-and-tied Rose would spit on the brother, much to the delight of the audience.

Either Rosie or Charlie — or maybe both — would be schooled in ninja-style fighting tactics, somersaulting over the gunwale, dodging bullets, shrugging off copious amounts of head trauma, and going all John Rambo on the Germans, who would be unable to subdue their foe despite outnumbering him or her sixty to one.

And that three-minute climax? Fahgettaboudit. Now it’s thirty minutes, filled with hair-raising escapes, hand-to-hand combat and explosions. Plenty of explosions. Because a modern movie without explosions is like a White House press conference without Sean Spicer — no fun.

And while the 1951 “African Queen” can get by with just one jury-rigged torpedo, made from material that Charlie has (somewhat plausibly) onboard ship, that’s not a big enough boom for modern audiences.

No, in 2017, Charlie would be an arms smuggler with a heart of gold, and he would have a boat full of bombs, guns and grenades, all of which could be pressed into service to make his humble craft a floating engine of death.

But wait, there’s more. That German gunboat would be carrying a nuclear bomb. Nevermind that it’s 1914, it would have one just the same. Or the time period would jump to the modern day, because nobody likes period pieces anyway. And that bomb, when it explodes, could start a chain reaction that would destroy all of East Africa, and possibly the entire world.

Because stakes have to be global and involve billions of people for a modern movie to mean anything, don’tcha know?

And, yes, Charlie’s torpedo-lined boat hitting the German gunboat would appear to be the catalyst for apocalypse, making Charlie at least as big a menace as the one he’s trying to stop, but luckily Charlie or Rosie is a nuclear scientist and, if he or she has just a few minutes alone in the bowels of the gunboat, can defuse the bomb, so that the impending explosion kills only the evil Germans and none of the good guys, except maybe for a sidekick who has to succumb to prove that the stakes were really high.

And if the audience buys a lot of tickets, you’d better believe that Rosie and Charlie will be back in a few summers with “The African Queen: Dark Corridor of Dripping Death” or somesuch.

Well, it makes no sense and it makes good sense, because that’s how movies are made today. Strap yourselves in, pass the earplugs and check your IQ at the door.

Originally published in June 2017.