Replacing the vacuum

Watching the canister of my new vacuum fill with dirt is almost hypnotic.

The air swirls round and round with cyclonic force, and soon, as if by magic, the little hamsters whose treadmill-pattering feet drive the motor have allowed the machine to collect another load. It is a measure of how empty my life is that I find this compelling.

My new Bissell Powerforce Helix is the first time I've gone the bagless route with a vacuum. A creature of custom, I've always preferred to use bags, even though my wife has told me for years that the world of suction has moved beyond this old model and in exciting new directions. In my usual Luddite fashion, I have resisted, but now in a matter of days, I have become an enthusiastic convert.

Not that the switch has been easy. First came the realization that my old sweeper had gone from sucking in a good way to sucking in a bad way. Even after hours on the surgical table, during which I replaced its belt and cleaned its hoses (all while hearing the narration from the opening credits of "The Six Million Dollar Man" in my fevered head -- "We can rebuild him ... We have the technology ...), it was doing little more than moving dirt from Point A to Point B. Somewhere, somebody was playing the requiem dirge.

A trip to the store revealed that replacements run the price gamut from $47 to $599. I find the concept of paying $599 for a vacuum ridiculous, although I suppose if you're the type who gives the butler a c-note to pick up a loaf of bread and milk from the store and doesn't bother asking for the change that it makes sense.

My philosophy with any type of mechanical equipment -- including sweepers, lawn mowers and automobiles -- is to purchase the least expensive models, work them hard and replace them three times more often than people who buy expensive versions.

Look, I know myself: I'm not going to keep up on the maintenance, and my three extra purchases are going to cost the same over time as one large cash outlay. Plus, I get the enjoyment of three new pieces of equipment to a do-it-yourselfer's one. So keep polishing and finessing that Cadillac of mowers or Porsche of vacuums if you want; I'll be footloose and fancy-free with my Kia Soul and Nissan Cube models.

I freely admit that my bargain-basement vacuum doesn't do some tasks as well as more expensive versions. For example, that $599 model has more attachments than a corrupt politician -- you could sweep the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or pull little Timmy out of a well once you snapped together all its nozzles and hoses.

The new Helix also wouldn't do much to repel burglars or fend off cookie-peddling girl scouts. It's so light that an infant could bench press it. When I was younger, we had an all-metal Electrolux sweeper that I swear my great-great-great-grandfather once used to defend the Alamo, and that a great-uncle brandished when he stormed the beach at Anzio. I myself earned gym credit for using it every Friday night as part of the all-house cleaning regimen.

(That's right -- we cleaned the house on Friday nights when I was a boy. None of this "go hang out with your friends at the mall" and "Internet on your smartphone malarkey" for my generation. Wanna know what my Internet was? A set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias that we earned one volume a week at Sparkle's Market. I shudder to think how many broccoli spears I had to choke down just for volumes W and XYZ alone.)

So I won't be defending Casa Schillig from home invaders with my Bissell Powerforce Helix anytime soon. But if all else fails, I can simply turn it on. If my attackers are anything like me, they'll be so entranced by the sight of swirling cat hair that I can pick them off one by one with the toaster. Which is also fairly new, but still packs a pretty mean punch.

Originally published in March 2012

Size matters

Size matters in pop culture. Or maybe it just matters to me.

Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by stories that hinge on size differentials. People who shrink, monsters who dwarf skyscrapers, bugs the size of Cadillacs — give me any or all of the above and the odds that I will like the book, movie, poem, radio drama or synchronized swimming event where they appear, especially if the big things are juxtaposed against smaller ones.

Most kids like monsters, I think, but I always preferred the really tall ones. The Frankenstein monster is more appealing than Dracula because Boris Karloff, who plays the monster, is taller than Bela Lugosi, who plays the vampire. (Plus, Lugosi has that really thick accent and walks like he’s stuck in jelly. “I vaaaant to succck your bluuuud,” he says, inching along at the speed of your average tortoise, while toddlers crawl past and old men in wheelchairs lap him. Not much fear factor there.)

We all root for the underdog, which is why we all cheer for David and his slingshot against Goliath, and why “Rocky” kept spawning sequels until the sight of Sylvester Stallone without his shirt became too grotesque for even the most stalwart of moviegoers.

I just take the term “underdog” more literally than most, wanting to see the conflict reflected in extra inches, feet and yards. After all, who could be more underdog-like than people fighting giants, or characters shrinking to the size of dandelions and trying to avoid a size 10 shoe?

As a last hurrah to the carefree days of summer, when long afternoons afford time to ponder such trifles as the greatest stories about things that are bigger or smaller than normal, here are a few of my favorites:

Jack and the Beanstalk — The story that started it all for me. Little boy, magic beans, giant vegetation, big guys who live in the clouds, even — if memory serves — a singing harp. And you can’t top the suspense of Jack chopping down the beanstalk as the giant descends, screaming “Fee Fie Fo Fum!”

King Kong — Maybe my favorite movie — and movie monster — of all time. Big ape, big dinosaurs, little people running and screaming in terror. What’s not to like?

Godzilla — Everything from King Kong applies, but with the addition of nuclear weapons and radioactive breath. Plus, Godzilla has been better translated into other mediums than Kong. The 1970s Marvel Comics version is still my favorite comic-book series of all time. ’Nuff said.

The Shrinking Man — Filmed as “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” this novel by the late, great Richard Matheson has the main character exposed to a mysterious mist that slowly reduces him in size, until he is living in his daughter’s dollhouse and fighting off a domesticated cat that is, proportionally, the size of a double-decker bus. If you’ve ever fantasized about shrinking to thimble size and dueling spiders in the basement (and who hasn’t?) this is the book/movie for you.

Jurassic Park — Again, you’ve got dinosaurs, plus the theme of humankind’s naïve belief that it can trump the natural order and Jeff Goldblum (in the movie) nattering on about chaos theory while an angry T. rex uses his colleagues as toothpicks. The sequels aren’t worth a tinker’s damn — or a tinker’s dam, depending on which etymological story you believe — but they do have big dinosaurs vs. little people, so they can’t be all bad.

(I really wanted to like Michael Crichton’s “Micro,” by the way, because he’s the author of “Jurassic Park” and it’s about shrinking people to microscopic size, but I couldn’t get into it. Too much pseudoscience, not enough screaming people. It’s no good if people don’t run around and scream.)

I could rattle off a whole slew of pop-culture references that fit the bill. Here are a few: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Gorgo, Reptilicus, Ant-Man, the Atom, Tarantula! (a movie so exciting that the exclamation point is part of the title), Tom Thumb, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Johnny Sokko, Ultraman, munchkins, Yoda, Tom and Jerry, and Fantastic Voyage.

Pacific Rim — the best movie almost nobody saw this summer. Giant creatures crawling from a hole ripped in the space-time continuum in the Pacific Ocean? Check. Global chaos as said monsters attack? Check. Humans piloting giant robots in a last-ditch effort to save the world? Check. One of the coolest sci-fi/fantasy films since the original Star Wars? Check and mate.

So there you have it — incontrovertible evidence that the bigger they are, the harder we fall for them. Or that I do, anyway.

Originally published in 2013. 

Of apes and flying monkeys

Charlton Heston drops to the sand and pounds his fists into the surf.

“You maniacs!” his character screams. “You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all to hell!”

The camera pans to reveal a half-buried Statue of Liberty, proof that Heston’s time on the “Planet of the Apes” has really been spent on his own Earth, ravaged by a nuclear holocaust that left monkeys in charge.

It’s one of the most indelible moments in American cinema, and it turns 50 this year.

In retrospect, Heston’s character is incredibly dense. After all, he and his fellow astronauts crash on a planet with earth-like atmosphere and gravity. They encounter mute humans biologically identical to themselves. The apes in charge speak and write English. Chimpanzee archaeologists find dolls, dentures and medical devices identical to those of Earthlings.

But not until he sees Bartholdi’s creation in the muck, its torch-bearing arm still held high, does he connect all the dots and have a head-slapping, “I shoulda had a V-8” moment.

But all this is Monday-morning quarterbacking several decades after the fact. When I first encountered the movie back in the early ’70s, on TV and not in the theater (I was born the same year the film was originally released), Heston’s belated realization didn’t concern me at all.

Instead, I was captivated by the talking apes, by the idea of a world scarred by some unfathomable disaster, by the mix of science-fiction and prehistoric savagery, and by the satire, even if I didn’t recognize it by name.

It helped that “Planet of the Apes” copied — one might even say “aped” — the structure of another favorite of mine, “The Wizard of Oz.”

Both are based on books that were monkeyed with by Hollywood. Both feature main characters who are transported far from home— Dorothy in her house because of a tornado, and Heston in a spaceship because of a wormhole. Both become strangers in a strange land, yet not so strange that we can’t recognize aspects of our own society. Both play with the idea of dreams — Heston muses that he is in one (maybe explaining why he is so accepting of apes speaking English), while Dorothy literally wakes up from one.

And, of course, both feature simians. The flying monkeys in “Wizard of Oz” have haunted many a childhood, and maybe the images of gorillas on horseback have, too.

Dozens of viewings haven’t cooled my crush on “Planet of the Apes.” If anything, I’m more enamored by its accomplishments.

Everything “Star Wars” did, the Apes franchise did first. Largely desert setting? Check. Nihilistic, cynical character? Check. Incessant merchandising, bottomless sequels, pop-culture cache? Check, check and check.

Additionally, the Apes series gives audiences serious social issues to ponder between our bites of popcorn. On the Deep Focus Film Studies website, writer Bryn V. Young-Roberts notes that the film examines a world where “a white man is now an ethnic minority,” complete with scenes that echo the Civil War, particularly as one of Heston’s fellow astronauts is an African-American male shot dead in a cornfield and Heston himself is blasted with a high-pressure hose, similar to police breaking up civil-rights demonstrations in the same decade the film was released.

On a recent viewing, I was intrigued by the orangutan character Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), the minister of science who also doubles as the simian protector of faith. The two roles are in opposition, a fact that does not bother Zaius much. But his desire to hide the truth, which includes lobotomizing any humans who can talk and suppressing any and all scientific evidence at odds with his religious symbol system, speaks to the dangers of mixing politics and religion and to the wisdom of separating church and state.

That’s heady stuff for a movie where most of the characters emote from behind latex masks and yak hair, but it’s also what allows it to remain socially relevant on its golden anniversary.


Originally published in March 2018.

The Bechdel Test and my reading list

I learn more from my students than they ever learn from me.

Case in point: Last week, one of my seniors mentioned a three-part test to determine if a book or movie has strong female characters. A little digging turned up the name — the Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who popularized it in a 1985 comic strip.

The first criterion is that the work must feature at least two women. Next, the two women must speak to one another. And their conversation must be about something other than men.

The Bechdel Test was a revelation for me. I started thinking about the works I assign to my classes and how they fare under these criteria. The short answer? Not too well.

Freshman year is “Romeo and Juliet.” It has several strong female characters, including Juliet, her mother, and one of Shakespeare’s most masterful creations, the Nurse. All three talk among themselves. Unfortunately, their conversations revolve around Juliet’s impending engagement or her desire not to be engaged. This play of doomed love fails the Bechdel Test.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is somewhat better. Narrated by the wonderfully strong Scout, Harper Lee’s novel features several conversations between women about rabid dogs, gardening, and missionary trips to Africa. It passes the Bechdel Test.

“Of Mice and Men”? Only one woman there — Curly’s wife, who doesn’t even merit her own name (which may have been Steinbeck’s point), and the ghost of another, Lennie’s Aunt Clara. No conversations between the two. Fail.

I don’t teach sophomores, but junior year brings “The Scarlet Letter,” which almost passes because at least it has two female characters — that hussy Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl — who talk a lot about the minister and the Black Man (the devil). But as one student noted, even if some of their conversations veer from strictly male-centric, they’re still “all about sin,” so that doesn’t count. Fair enough. Fail.

Next up, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. Many strong female characters, many conversations among them about a host of issues, including men. Pass.

But then along comes “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s tour de force about Vietnam. Great book, but woefully lacking in female characters. Fail. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” and “All the Pretty Horses”? Classics, all … but fail, fail, fail.

Senior year is the worst. Some selections don’t get past the first Bechdel hurdle: Having two women as characters. “The Lord of the Flies” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” have zero. “The Road” has one in flashback and one who appears for about two pages near the conclusion. “1984” has one. “Macbeth” has two — the scenery-chewing Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff — but they never speak to each other. “Hamlet” has a duo, Gertrude and Ophelia, but their conversations are limited to the title character. “Great Expectations” and the perpetually jilted bride, Miss Havisham, and her man-hating acolyte, Estella? Fergedaboudit.

To be clear, I don’t consider Bechdel to be a true test, per se. Books don’t really pass or fail based on arbitrary character counts, content, length or lexile levels. But in environments like school, where being as inclusive as possible should be a major goal, a blanket exclusion of fifty percent of the audience in the vast majority of titles gives me pause.

An argument could be made that school reading lists are still the province of Old Dead White Men, also known by unapologetic Eurocentrists as the Canon, and that the lack of female characters who live independently of men is merely a reflection of the social reality in which these writers worked. An argument can also be made — one which I can’t in good conscience refute completely — that replacing acknowledged classics with more contemporary titles merely to balance a ledger based on somebody’s idea of political correctness is problematic.

So I won’t be making a wholesale replacement of my reading lists next year, but I will be pondering more deeply the titles I select and their implications. After all, my students deserve an accurate representation not only of the past, but also of the world outside their classroom window.

Originally published in The Alliance Review in April 2015. 

Picking the best of 2021

It’s almost a New Year.

Cue the ball drop in Times Square and Groundhog Day jokes about 2021 being a repeat of 2020, albeit with diminishing returns.

In keeping with the season, the elves at Casa Schillig have taken a trip in the Wayback Machine and bestowed the following awards for the last 12 months, with the hope of better days in 2022:

Get Off My Grid, You Darn Feds Award to Texas officials, who ignored federal recommendations to shore up their power grid, the failure of which contributed to more than 100 deaths after a winter storm bulldozed the state in February. Being independent is great. Being independent at the cost of human lives is pigheaded and foolish.

The Red Planet, Calm Demeanor Award to a helicopter from the U.S. Perseverance, which flew on Mars in April, a first for robotic flight on another planet. Best of all, since no humans were aboard, nobody was arrested for bad behavior.

E.T. Phone Home Award: While we’re on the topic of outer space, how about that long-awaited UFO report by the Pentagon? In an examination of 144 cases, the report basically said that more study is needed. It was like watching “Close Encounters” but stopping after Richard Dreyfuss makes his mashed potato sculpture.

Are You Sick of Knowing What Your Neighbors Think Yet Award to social media. Facebook was a focus of concern for algorithms that push engagement over accuracy, but all social media platforms need to be more transparent about how they prioritize posts and comments. If a wizard waved a wand and made all social media disappear for 2022, many Americans would see decided improvements to their mental health.

Clock-Is-Ticking Award to all of us, citizens of the world. We must put climate concerns ahead of our own self-interests. The United Nations issued a report last summer that was anything but a lighthearted beach read, punctuated as it was by extreme weather events around the world, widely believed to be exacerbated by human-influenced climate change.

Sequel Nobody Wanted Award to “COVID-19: The Holidays Special.” Increasing infections, overrun hospitals, out-of-stock tests and a not-insignificant number of holdouts who refuse to be vaccinated, wear masks or maintain social distance. Can you cough to the tune of “Jingle Bells” or “Auld Lang Syne”? How about “Here Comes Peter Cottontail”? Because it looks like this turkey will be held over through spring.

Best-Dressed Seditionist Award was a tough one, what with all the whining little man-babies hoping for a 1776 moment when they showed up in Trump-inspired finery at the Capitol on Jan. 6, following the directive of their Orange Messiah to “fight like hell.” But I’ll go with the QAnon Shaman, with that horned helmet and fur hat look that inspired countless redneck Halloween costumes.

Biggest Schmeck/Schmuck Award goes to Jared Schmeck, who called the NORAD Santa Tracker on Christmas Eve, engaged in light conversation with President Biden and first lady Jill Biden, and saw fit to end the conversation by saying “Let’s Go Brandon!” The expression has a decidedly non-Yuletide meaning. Schmeck is now, predictably, playing the victim card over pushback from the exchange, saying that it was “just an innocent jest.”

Fight the Man Award goes to U.S. workers, who discovered economic leverage and used it to help drive up wages in traditionally low-paying positions, forcing employers to loosen the purse strings a little. If frontline workers in grocery stores and restaurants really are essential workers — and they are — then they should be paid accordingly.

Most Out-of-Touch Purveyor of Pop-Culture Award goes to me. I leafed through Time magazine’s Best of Culture section recently and realized I haven’t read, listened to or watched any of the publication’s choices for best nonfiction or fiction books, albums, movies, TV shows or podcasts. None of it. I guess I really do wrap myself in cotton at the end of the day and hole up in a closet until the next morning.

On second thought, maybe that’s not a bad way to face this New Year.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Are you a breaker, a fixer, or a brixer?

There are two kinds of people in the world: breakers and fixers.

Breakers cause things to fail. Fixers make things work again or clean up after breakers. It’s as simple as that.

I started using the terms when my daughter went through a particularly rough patch of breaking things. She broke a window to get back into her house after she had locked herself in the garage. In her underwear.

A few months later, she went for a jog and ran through wet cement, much to the chagrin of the workers who had just poured it.

These are classic breaker behaviors.

For a long time, I’ve considered myself a fixer. Admittedly, my fixing is of the jury-rigged variety — supergluing broken ceramics, using a pair of pliers to turn a shattered knob on the clothes drier, or reattaching wheels to a lawnmower with twine.

Don’t try this at home, kids.

But cleaning up breakers’ messes is where I excel. When the cat hacks up a hairball on the loveseat, I’m the person who removes it. (Yes, animals can be breakers, too.) If my wife leaves a half-finished can of Diet Orange Crush on the counter overnight, I drink it the next morning, even though it’s flat and even though I’ve just brushed my teeth.

These are classic fixer behaviors.

Recently, however, I’ve been involved in a few situations that make me think my daughter came by her breaker gene naturally, and not by way of the mailman.

The first instance was last fall, when I tried to move a mattress and box springs from the garage into the basement. The mattress slid right down the steps. The box springs, not so much.

Instead, they got stuck on the handrail. And by stuck, I mean impaled. Granted, this is because I was behind them, pushing and pushing, trying to stuff the bedding equivalent of ten pounds of excrement into a five-pound bag.

By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. The box springs wouldn’t go down, and the box springs wouldn’t go up. They were pinned, like a butterfly on a slide. Worse yet, they were pinned in such a way that I could no longer close the door at the top of the stairs.

I really needed a hacksaw to liberate them. Since I didn’t have a hacksaw, I used a rubber mallet. This caused the handrail to part ways with the wall, but it did allow the box springs, now completely ruined, to come back up the stairs.

Then last week, while attempting to clean a hanging light fixture in the kitchen, I snapped off the light while trying to screw in a lightbulb. (Don’t ask.) Definitely breaker behavior, and not just because I tripped the breaker in the circuit box as a result.

Let the record show I fixed the handrail on the basement steps myself. The light, however, required a patient brother-in-law who never once laughed at my ineptitude. At least to my face. He is not only a consummate fixer, but also a grade-A mensch.

Because of these mishaps, I’ve come to the conclusion that some people — maybe most or even all people — are both breakers and fixers. I call them “brixers.”

Because some days you’re the hairball, and some days you’re the guy who cleans up the hairball. And on really bad days, you’re both.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschillig on Twitter

Originally published April 21, 2016. 

Robert Burns and 'Auld Lang Syne'

From December 2019:

Revelers around the world will soon bid farewell to 2019 and welcome to 2020 with raised glasses and “Auld Lang Syne.”

The words to the song are attributed to Scottish poet Robert Burns, but he claimed to have transcribed them from an elderly man in 1788. Some scholars believe the song’s title, at least, dates to the 16th century.

“Auld Lang Syne” means “old long since.” In modern English, “days gone by.” In uber-modern parlance, “back in the day.”

However it’s translated, the sentiment is appropriate for New Year’s celebrations, as society takes a cue from the Roman god Janus, he of the two heads, one looking to the past and one to the future.

The older people are, the more rose-colored their glasses for “auld acquaintance” and a mythical past when things were allegedly simpler. This pining can be sweet and benign, yet it is also the belief that lies at the rotting heart of the modern white nationalism movement, or whatever vile euphemism it lurks under these days.

Similarly, older people are less optimistic for tomorrow because rapid change threatens to erase outmoded ways of thinking and living, no matter how ingrained into tradition they may be.

But pessimism infects our youth, too, and often for the same reasons. Some wonder — at New Year’s and other times — what kind of world they will inherit and how they will make ends meet as technology obliterates entire careers, sometimes through nothing more than a few lines of code and the push of a button.

Such fears and anxieties are natural byproducts of the age we live in, when the “cup of kindness” from “Auld Lang Syne” may be in short supply.

The speculation over past and future appears more forcefully elsewhere in Robert Burns’ verse, in “To a Mouse,” subtitled “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.”

The poem’s speaker addresses the rodent of the title, apologizing for the accidental destruction of its home. The mouse had hoped to ride out winter, “cozie here, beneath the blast,” until fate — and the farmer — intervened. The accident prompts a sincere apology from the speaker:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal.

Later in the poem, the speaker laments that “the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” often go astray, thus inspiring the title of John Steinbeck’s classic novel a few centuries later and reminding those of us thinking New Year’s thoughts how fragile the future can be.

Burns’ speaker actually envies the mouse, despite the loss of shelter, because “the present only” affects her, while he is cursed to “backward cast” his eye “On prospects drear” and look ahead to a future about which he can only “guess an’ fear.”

Despite this comforting absence of introspection and worry on the mouse’s part, I doubt many readers would want to trade places, to live only in the here and now with no recollection of the past, good and bad, and no thought toward the future. I’m reminded too of Dickens’ Scrooge, also timely at this time of year, who learns through an encounter with a plow of his own — in his case, the spirits of Christmas — to “live in the past, the present, and the future” (and to celebrate the holiday in a way that capitalists the world over would approve).

The truth is that in life, sometimes we are the mouse, out of doors, scrambling, lost, and sometimes we are the farmer, pushing the plow and inadvertently hurting others with our deeds and words.

When we are the former, let us hope that our trials and tribulations are brief. When we are the latter, let us strive to be kind-hearted and understanding, willing to fix what we have done wrong and recognizing our shared bond with those who struggle while we have so much. And let’s keep the memory of both states of being.

It’s a sentiment worth toasting in the New Year, with or without the maudlin refrain of “Auld Lang Syne.”

chris.schillig@yahoo.com



@cshillig on Twitter