Keeping score

Heard something on a BBC radio report the other day. A Hong Kong guy was interviewed about discrimination and prejudice in his life. He's an ethnic Indian, and the point of the interview was discuss what roadblocks he's run into in his business career.

One thing the guy said stuck with me. In describing his own lack of prejudice, he said he has nothing against anyone based on religion, race, or sexual orientation. He summed up his philosophy as:

"If knowing you is something that can help me make money, then you are my friend. But if knowing you is somehow going to cost me money, then you are not my friend."

What a way to evaluate people. Contrast that with what I recall Vonnegut saying in praise of someone: "He didn't keep score with money." That's a far better way to go through life, I think.

Berle, Hackett, and pocket change

I defy anyone to analyze this dream I just had and come up with some coherent meaning. I dreamed of a TV talk show with Milton Berle and Buddy Hackett at a round wooden table. There's no audience, and the set is one of those daytime TV kitchens.

Berle mentions at one point that he's "almost 90" but he's vibrant and alert and full of beans. Hackett functions as his stooge. And the show consists of Berle taking out a bag of pocket change and spilling it onto the table, then picking out one coin, and then reminiscing about that date: show biz, personal life, history, whatever.

The show had the feel of some kind of PBS thing, like the old Steve Allen "Meeting of the Minds" show. It's not a bad idea, and it appeared in my dream as a finished and polished production.

Where did that come from?

And now, I've just gone to find an image for this post, and to do so I entered "Milton Berle Buddy Hackett" just to see what would come up, and look what did: an image of Berle, Hackett, and Steve Allen.

I should have mentioned Ernie Kovacs and Lucille Ball, because it would have been fun to see them in the picture as well.

Sometimes life is a little weird.

Hey, there's de-icer in my ice cream!

Every once in awhile I make a connection between two disparate areas of interest. The other day it was ice cream and airports. My wife has been bringing home tubs of a certain brand of ice cream (yay!) that I enjoy. But then I actually read the ingredients, and I was surprised to see "propylene glycol" listed. I'm no chemist, but my obsession with airports (see Airline Terminal Mania) allowed me to recognize this as a key ingredient in aircraft deicing fluid. And that can't be good. (The brand is Edy's, by the way.)

So I checked around and yes, propylene glycol is considered safe to ingest, and is often added to processed foods to help them retain moisture. Fine, but that's not enough to reassure me. I can't help but think of the "high fructose corn syrup" factor in this. That chemical, which replaced sugar as a sweetener in most processed foods in the U.S. around 1980, is considered safe, too, but I'm convinced it has long-term effects that we just aren't aware of. I've tried to eliminate it from my diet, but that's not always easy in the land of overprocessed foods. Still, it's been a long time since I've thoughtlessly swigged soda sweetened with HFCS.

One interesting thing about high fructose corn syrup is that it was developed by the Japanese, which made me want to write an international conspiracy thriller where high fructose corn syrup was exposed as a plot by the Japanese to get even with the U.S. for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stay tuned on that one.

Back to ice cream: So yesterday, the grocery fairy caused a tub of another brand of ice cream to materialize in the freezer—this one marketed on its packaging as "all natural." That can mean anything, but I looked, and sure enough, there was no propylene glycol listed in the ingredients. And you know what? It kinda tasted better and felt more "right" going down.

How much of that is just psychological I'm not prepared to say. But it's me and all my hang-ups and emotions and non-scientific judgments that are in charge of what I actually eat, and that's good enough for me to steer clear of deicer in my ice cream from now on.

Except maybe in winter.

Two books, two worlds

Moving books around the house has prompted me to re-read a couple of favorites.

One is 'North of Monadnock,' a 1961 collection of essays about life in back-country New Hampshire by Newt Tolman, a man my father knew. The other is 'Shock Value,' a collection of essays by schlock auteur John Waters, published in 1981, just after his most fertile period of movie-making, I think.

I love both books. But the worlds they come from could not be more different.

One is old-time Yankee writings from a guy whose family had lived in Nelson, N.H. since before the Revolution, and still does. The other is the proto-punk musings of a filmmaker from Baltimore whose aim at the time was to shock the sensibilities of the American middle class.

But these two books (and their authors) have more in common than you might first realize.

First, they are both written by individuals with a worldview that is complicated and interesting and all of a piece. The worlds are worlds apart, yes, but both writers are able to make a compelling (and entertaining!) case for them.

And their views flow naturally from their life experiences, which take place in settings that are completely different from each other -- one rural New Hampshire, the other urban Baltimore. I find each man's response to life completely justifiable, given their backgrounds.

But the most important connection they both share is subversion. The energy in Tolman's writing, it seems, comes primarily from a desire to dispel a hundred clichéd notions about quaint Yankee life. The old-time country store was not a friendly down-home kind of place, but a filthy rat hole often run by the most disreputable character in town. (Being a shopkeeper was no life for a grown man, it was felt.) The subversion in the Waters book is far more obvious: when Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversion includes 'The Human Puke Eater,' it's hard to miss.

I think I'm drawn to both books, to the point of wanting to spend time reading them again when so many other books beckon, because both men succeed in explaining their worlds so thoroughly and completely and entertainingly. They are both superb tour guides to places they know very well, and both trips are so good they're worth taking again. Hence the re-reading.

For me personally, the Tolman book represents my childhood, and not just in a general way. We spent our summers in that area (where my dad grew up) when I was a kid. I personally knew a few of the people Tolman writes about, and got just enough of a whiff of the whole scene for everything he relates to really resonate.

The Waters book, I think, represents my rebellion -- not in any specific way (I didn't go to Baltimore and join in the underground film scene), but the general rebellion that all adolescents work through in their own ways. In my case, I rebelled by going to college in New York City and eating at the White Castle.

But both books are windows into worlds worth knowing. I'm glad the great slot machine of life somehow led me to them long ago, and glad for the chance to revisit them. It's a rare case of me being grateful for being a packrat, and I'll take it.

Wait, there's more

Here's another little snippet from the same Jonathan Franzen piece (see below) in the New York Times:

"BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love."

Passion is by definition uncool. Wow. I think humanity is divided into two groups, depending on whichever side of that statement you fall. You either have passion and are uncool, or the opposite. That explains a lot of what goes on around me, and how I relate (and how I don't relate) to people around me.

Alas, I believe the people who'd rather be cool far outnumber the people who "betray real passion."

Chairs are used for sitting

Here's a shard from an op-ed piece by Jonathan Franzen, published in the New York Times on May 28, 2011. The topic is "liking" in the Facebook sense, and how that applies to stuff we could buy:

"This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)"

So there's a clue -- that serious art and literature should not be preoccupied with you liking it.

Not sure how much I agree with that. Me, I think there's art in creating art that is popular and serious, or at least in creating art that tries to meet the audience at least half-way. To ignore this aspect of art is like being a furniture designer who creates this really cool chair that can't be used for sitting.

A daughter's view of "the freedom to think"

I just read an obituary for Tom West, the computer engineer, who was found dead earlier this month at his home in Westport, Mass. He was 71 and died of either a stroke or heart attack.

Some of the things in the New York Times obit resonate with me. To wit:

His daughter Jessamyn West said he was driven “to understand everything.”

“He knew a million things — it didn’t matter: worms, plumbing, literature. He could give you a discourse. It seemed like he could never rest until he had a sense of control over the things around him.”

And...

“My dad loved routine. He rolled his sleeves up exactly the same way every morning. He went to work at exactly the same time every day. It was what gave him the freedom to think.”

I think that's a key motivator for me in how I structure anything I do. I crave the freedom to think, and anything that takes away from that is a negative. So that's why, I think, I go crazy when software gets updated and you have to learn a whole new interface, etc. It's not that I don't want to learn new things. Rather, I'd rather stick with a routine so that my mind can get the running room to take off.