Bungled bungalow

Okay, perhaps I need to spend a little less time staring at the picture, and a little more time flipping through old copies of American Bungalow, since I seem to have miscategorized the style of my new house. The American Bungalow people have a friendly, helpful feature on their website called "What Style Is My Bungalow", which reveals that the picture at right is a modified "Foursquare" style, a close relative of the "Prairie" style pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright and that crowd. That makes sense, since the Foursquare and Prairie styles are indigenous to the midwest, while the Craftsman style mentioned previously in this space is more commonly found in California.

In any case, I'm pretty sure it's not a ranch.

And yes, it was pretty sunny for a January day in Wisconsin.

Bagged one

I'm spending most of my time staring at the picture in disbelief. After going my whole adult life (which I'll grant you, is only the past 14 years or so) contentedly houseless, it took about 2 1/2 days to find and buy a house. And - to borrow from Red, Morgan Freeman's character in "The Shawshank Redemption" - I find myself so excited I can hardly keep a thought in my head. They say owning a home is the American dream, which I never really thought applied to me. But now that the Red Sox won a World Series in my lifetime, it's been a thought that's at least floated around in my head. Anyway, I'm staring at the picture of the house a lot.

We looked at 23 houses in the first two days of scouring the Milwaukee area. The fact that there were 23 houses in our price range anywhere amazes me in itself. There aren't 2.3 houses in Flagstaff we could comfortably afford. In fact, the entire southwest is full of houses which seemingly only people who have beamed in from Planet Zoog can afford. Somewhere in the last five years or so, the issue of home ownership has gone from being about "finding somewhere to live" to being about "making money off of people not yet able to own a home".

So we looked at 23 houses. Some of them were pretty nice. Some of them were pretty weird. We looked at one house which was still occupied by a woman who was running a daycare. Not only was the place in nightmare shape with clothes and other possessions everywhere, but the daycare - which was still going on - was our nightmare image of daycare - two kids sleeping on couches while the caregiver sat on one of the same couches watching soap operas.

In some cases, it took less than 10 seconds to figure out the house was wrong for us. Note to prospective home sellers: You might as well rip out the old magenta shag carpeting with the holes and tears in master bedroom. Even a plywood floor would be a more attractive option.

We saw one house we nicknamed the "Swinging '80s Bachelor Pad", which was in terrific shape, as long as you were looking for a pink kitchen, a basement festooned with full wet bar (draft beer nozzles included), beer signs and pictures of Ford Mustangs, and a backyard that included a gazebo with hot tub and stereo speakers. Not that I can't imagine taking an outdoor hot tub in Wisconsin this February, but, well, I can't.

We looked a beautiful Victorian in a stylish neighborhood in Milwaukee, which our realtor perceptively guessed was based on my desire to look into at least one beautiful Victorian in a stylish neighborhood in Milwaukee. (And for those of you who have never been to southeastern Wisconsin: Aren't you surprised there is a stylish neighborhood in Milwaukee?)

23 houses in two days. In the end, one of them felt like home. It was a 1925 craftsman bungalow, with hardwood floors, glass doorknobs, oak woodwork, original stained glass, and even a bathroom or two.

And that's the one we bought.

So I'm staring at the picture a lot these days, in between scanning copies of American Bungalow magazine and watching "This Old House". I can only imagine that actually living there will be even more fulfilling.

HWF season opens this week

The 19 Minutes household hits the road this afternoon for some house hunting. We expect it to be an interesting process, since neither my wife nor I has ever done this before, and so we're hopeful our realtor is open to lots of stupid questions ("Why, exactly, is this house $200,000?" "Is the basketball hoop included?"). It'll also be an interesting process since our 19-month old is accompanying us, which should quickly alert us to any potential safety hazards, in that Sylvi is immediately attracted to anything remotely dangerous.

The upshot is that I have no idea what the likelihood of my blogging is this week. I may have to ask to try out the computers in our potential homes.

Stay tuned.

19 Minutes's Neighborhood

As a trained public radio professional, I’m always happy to report on trends in television, for several reasons:

a) It gives me a vaguely superior feeling.
b) I watch plenty of TV.
c) Both radio and television are similar in the sense that they convey programming from a station or network to consumers in some way that employs physics and is thus, a complete mystery to me.

But it’s been a while since I’ve commented substantially on the medium of television. And so you’re probably wondering: Are there things about television these days that irritate you, almost to the point where you’d describe it as “frosting your shorts”? I’m pleased to report that the answer is a resounding “yes”. We’ll start with Mr. Rogers.

We watch plenty of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” around the 19 Minutes household. More specifically, we watch plenty of four episodes of Mr. Rogers, as our local PBS affiliate - which has no problem bombarding us with Mellow Talkers during pledge drive – recently dumped MRN in favor of “Barney and Friends”, who I would include in the “frosts my shorts” category, except that ragging on Barney is just a little too easy.

Anyway, we see a lot of the four episodes of Mr. Rogers that are on the two Mr. Rogers DVDs in the 19 Minutes collection, which has given us (well, me, anyway – 19-month old Sylvi has never actually pointed this out) insight needed to make the following keen observation: Mr. Rogers never puts his shoes back on at the end of the show. He comes in at the start of the show, singing “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood…”, takes off his dress shoes and replaces them with canvas sneakers. At the end of the show, as he sings “It’s a good feeling to know…”, we see him remove the canvas sneakers… but then he leaves them God Knows Where, and we never see him put the dress shoes back on. And then he walks out the door, out into the metaphorical neighborhood, presumably wearing only his socks. (On his feet, that is. )

And while we’re at it, shouldn’t the late Fred Rogers have been at least somewhat interested in teaching the nation’s public TV-watching youth the importance of proper punctuation? My copy of “The Elements of Style”, given to me 24 years ago as a Bar Mitzvah gift (in a stunningly prescient foreshadowing of my adult life), confirms that the program should have been called “Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood”. It goes on to note that the only exception to this standard punctuation of the personal pronoun possessive comes in reference to ancient people whose names ended in “s”. So if Kenneth Tomlinson had had his way with PBS and there were more religious content available, we could watch either “Jesus’ Neighborhood” or “Moses’ Neighborhood” and not object to the punctuation. Someone should get Lynne Truss on the case.

Onward.

I’ve noted before that the QVC shopping network entertains me, especially in the sense that anyone who can ad lib about fake diamond jewelry for four hours at a stretch deserves credit for their broadcasting prowess. But in channel surfing through QVC en route to “The Andy Griffith Show” at just before 10:00 pm MST (yes, it’s an exciting life I lead), I came across a new QVC feature that must be commented upon: They now run a countdown clock to forward-promote their upcoming “Today’s Special Value”, which is itself a sort of poorly defined concept, when you consider that it implies their other products are, well, run-of-the-mill values. Anyway, I’m not here to comment on the “Today’s Special Value” concept (too late), but rather, the countdown clock. The countdown clock runs for a whopping one minute and two seconds. If nothing else, you’d imagine QVC’s viewers at that hour probably aren’t going anywhere and thus, probably would have stuck around for the big 1:02 gap.

And finally, we note that the gecko spokesman for Geico insurance has apparently acquired a new accent. For years, he spoke in a chipper “Good on ya, mate” cross-between-English-and-Australian accent. Suddenly, a few weeks ago, he resurfaced on Geico commercials affecting a distinct Cockney accent. It’s as though the ad agency that produces the Geico commercials figured Americans would never notice the difference between the two accents.

On second thought, they probably have something there. But that line of commentary is probably an even easier target than ragging on Barney.

Legacy building

I'd just like to point out that as part of the major web redesign here in Public Radioland, we've created a new masthead for the site. And I'd just like to further point out that the background picture is a 19 Minutes original. Taken just in front of our office.



The view from my future Milwaukee office is not going to be quite the same, though the concept of snow will at least seem familiar.

Shouldn't it be an holistic conversation?

The best interviews I've conducted are the ones that sound the most like a holistic conversation. By "holistic conversation", I of course mean "naturally developing", as opposed to a conversation that involves organic foods, solar energy, and that whole gaia business. Although when you're at the closest public radio station to Sedona, you get a fair number of those conversations, too.

The irony is that the conversations that sound the most natural are the ones that involve the most prep work. It takes a certain amount of research to be familiar enough with someone's work that you can converse at a level that doesn't make it seem like you just scanned the executive summary of his or her life before you came into the studio. ("So, how did you come up with the title of your book? You are an author, right?")

So after a fair amount of prep, I went into a weekend interview with a well-known piano player feeling like it shouldn't be tough to pull together something interesting.

The problem with prepping, though, is it doesn't usually take into account the possibility that your interview subject will meander into, um, strange answers (say, a love for rhinoceroses) to seemingly straightforward questions. Or that the subject will veer the conversation in a truly unexpected direction (from, say, music to the Zapruder film).

[On a side note, a variety of conversations with other people since then tells me that you don't even need to ask what someone thinks about the Zapruder film - just that fact that someone would bring it up tells you everything you need to know. Unless, I suppose, the person brings it up in a conversation about amateur cinematic technique. But you never hear someone say, "Hey - how about that Zapruder film? That really put the whole Kennedy assasination to rest, didn't it?" But I digress.]

So, as it turns out, there was enough material in the 41-minute interview for a finished product that ran 5 1/2 minutes, including a two-minute harmonica piece.

This was actually a better ratio than the result of my worst interview ever, a 1996 exclusive with former Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz, who was attempting to get back into politics. His campaign people set up the interview shortly after a southern Minnesota fundraiser. Thirty minutes and dozens of contentious answers (most of which began with the phrase, "I disagree with the supposition of your question...") I had exactly one usable 25-second sound bite, which may not have been the media splash his campaign had been hoping for (which, of course, wasn't my problem).

Rule of thumb for people about to be interviewed: Bring along a harmonica.

Spelling "salchow" with the best of them

A brief confession: I enjoy watching figure skating. Really. Seriously.

Okay, so on the list of bombshell admissions, it probably ranks in between an affinity for baths and an addiction to Cap'n Crunch. But as a certified Guy Sports Fan who relishes a Saturday afternoon on the couch with the television showing a college football game between two teams with no relation to my life (say, Nevada and Fresno State) except that they're on my TV, the figure skating admission comes with a degree of sheepishness.

The truth of the matter is that -- just as I'm duly impressed by the fact that hockey players can ply their complex trade on ice -- it's pretty impressive to watch athletes launch themselves, backward, into the air, spin three or four times, and then land, upright, on skates. Without their legs actually detatching themselves from their bodies.

And if a typical figure skating broadcast consisted of a brief pre-game show, an hour or two of people skating around, jumping, and getting scores, I think there would be plenty of guys who would be comfortable with such a confession. Hey, there's no guy stigma about watching televised poker, despite the fact that it amounts to an hour of watching guys glare at each through their sunglasses.

But the typical figure skating broadcast has taken on such a significant degree of soap opera-like characteristics that it often doesn't feel like watching sports at all. For every five minutes of skating, viewers are subjected to an equal amount broadcast time featuring interviews with furry-parka-clad skating coaches and fuzzy, dream sequence-style video detailing skaters' triumphs over adversity. The current drama in the sport is the sudden influx of recently naturalized US citizens into national competition. Not an issue that turned up in last year's NCAA Final Four.

The problem is that we can't really identify with the lives of most skaters. At least when you hear about the life of a college football player, you can imagine him playing high school football, going on to college, going to practice each day, etc., etc. He probably doesn't study the way most college students do, but at least he appears to exist in some context besides football.

Of course, there are exceptions. Last night's broadcast of the US Figure Skating Championships on ESPN2 actually felt something like a sports broadcast - featuring a scoring analyst on a set that looked like the bridge of a space ship, and big name color commentators Katarina Witt and Kurt Browning.

We also learned that at least one of the competitors, Jane Bugaeva, is actually a full-time student at the University of North Carolina, and instantly we could identify with her experience. Bugaeva fell on her first couple of jumps (which we could identify with as well), but then she looked genuinely excited to hit her final jump, which - if we were actually talented enough to intentionally leave our feet while skating - seemed like a tangible and recognizable emotion.

Bugaeva finished in 13th place, which unfortunately leads me to believe the full-time-student-as-competitive-skater model will remain the exception, rather than the rule. Which is a shame, because it'd be nice - just once during the Olympics - to see a sepia-toned feature in which a skater talks about how Albert Einstein, or Mark Twain, or even Tom and Ray Magliozzi influenced her skating.

But I'll settle for a skating competition that ends in a shootout.

Looking for some frosted friends

As you may have gleaned from our previous dispatch, the 19 Minutes home office is currently planning a move to the sunny Southeast. Or at least southeastern Wisconsin. We have a lot of hopes, desires, and aspirations about this major life change. For me, the list begins with donuts.

Arizona is a Bad Donut State. (I think that's actually the slogan they're going to put on the official state quarter in 2008.) Flagstaff, current site of the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, has no donut stores at all. As I noted some months ago in this space, it may be the only place on earth that all the Dunkin' Donuts franchises have folded their tents.

A few years ago, we picked up an independent donut place. The "Arizona Donut Company" was operated by, if memory serves, one of the technical crew that produced "The Dukes of Hazzard". The store's gimmick was that it employed exactly the same equipment as Krispy Kreme Doughnuts uses. The store's downfall was that no one ever knew when it was open, which made stopping for donuts on the way to or from work a hit-or-miss experience. And since donuts - let's face it - are a something of an impulse buy, no one wanted to return three or four times a day, just to check whether they were open. The Arizona Donut Company disappeared from the Flagstaff donutscape after about 18 months. Of course, Flagstaff is also the kind of city where, to survive, a donut shop would have to have flavor offerings including hemp, tofu, Chocolate Clif bar, and elk.

Lest you think these problems are merely emblematic of life in a smallish city, I submit they're endemic across the state. We've been known to spend occasional weekend in the so-called Valley of the Sun (so-called, because daytime temperatures in August are approximately the same as the surface of the sun), to take advantage of the opportunities such as NHL hockey, decent Chinese food, Babies R Us, smog, etc. But we are unable to take advantage of better pastry opportunities, as Phoenix turns out to be the kind of city where the donut shops close at 5 p.m. Because as we all know, no one ever wanted to eat a donut after work.

So I'm optimistic about Milwaukee. I mean, the donutscape couldn't be any worse than it is in Arizona. And it's a cold weather place. The best donut scenes I've encountered are in New England, where Dunkin' Donuts even out-ubiquitous Starbucks, and in Baltimore, where donut shops serve as overflow for all-night diners that cater to the sobering-up crowd. And, as I've been led to believe, there are at least one or two taverns in Wisconsin.

When does HWF season open?

We’re house hunting, in our copious spare time at the 19 Minutes home office. This is a pretty unusual situation for me, since the last time I was involved in looking for a house, it was 1976, and I was seven years old. Though to be fair, I may not have had a great deal of input on that particular selection. I certainly hadn't done much reading up on the buying process, save for "Curious George Gets a Fixed-Rate Mortgage." My wife has a little more experience, in that she sat in with a friend of ours when she (the friend) closed on a house a few years back. (And just the fact that I consider that example as proof of anything should show you my level of expertise.)

Not too long ago, my interest in home ownership was limited to snickering at the participants on “House Hunters” on the HGTV network, who seemed to employ the “Three Bears” method of looking for a new place to live (“This house is too small. This house is too large. Say, this house is just right!”) They always showed the prospective homebuyers looking at three houses, as though there was actually some chance they’d choose the first house, even though that would have meant ending the show after only eight minutes.

I’ve lived in a succession of apartments since my senior year of college, and I’ve always figured they afforded me some unique living arrangements without the stress of homeowner activities such as fixing the toilet, or mowing the lawn, or washing the dishes.

My first apartment was directly above the general store in Lisbon, Iowa. It was appointed with vintage 1940s kitchen appliances, which worked out fine for me and my roommate, as this freed us up to make good use of the pizza place two doors down. It was quite the deal at $150 a month, especially when you consider bonuses like the plexiglas that covered the bathroom windows and the network of cracks on my bedroom ceiling. After staring at the cracks every night for months, I finally came to the conclusion that the cracks were a fairly accurate road map of Linn County, Iowa, and went ahead and labeled the roads. But the apartment’s highlight was our newspaper recycling bin, which by the time we moved out, contained nine months’ worth of newspapers and weighed approximately 150 pounds. It was a nice addition to the dining room.

After college, I lived in a couple of apartments in Decorah, Iowa. The first one was in the basement of a house, which meant there was a huge support beam in the middle of the living room. The owners had thoughtfully covered it with indoor-outdoor carpeting, which created the effect of having an enormous scratching post in the middle of the living room. The owners had also gotten around the problem of running plumbing underneath the basement by elevating the toilet on a large wooden box, making “throne” an especially appropriate metaphor.

Sadly, I moved out of that apartment just a year later, taking up residence in a building that had been converted from its previous incarnation, a Catholic school called the “Academy of the Immaculate Conception”. I had a whole bunch of follow-up lines planned in the event I ever brought a date home, which, of course, I never did.

My subsequent apartments were less eventful, unless your standard of measurement includes cockroaches, in which case my apartment in Rochester, Minnesota was pretty eventful.

My wife and I have been renting a townhouse here in Flagstaff for nearly seven years. Like most construction in Flagstaff, it’s made of a hearty combination of plywood and plaster, with beige carpeting accentuated by the occasional cherry Pedialyte stain. It’s on the small size, but it’s worked out okay, despite the twice-a-year inspection visit by out landlady, which is immediately preceded by our twice-a-year cleaning of the top of our refrigerator. She terms it “protecting our investment”, though most of the tenants here refer to it more realistically as “being nosy”.

As I said, though, it’s on the small size and, with a growing 19-month old, it’s getting smaller by the minute. And so my mowing gene is making itself more evident, and I’m beginning to imagine myself raking leaves on a crisp October morning.

So we’re looking for a house. There are several interesting neighborhoods around here, each with its own unique character. But, just to shake things up a little, we’re looking for a house in Milwaukee.

But that’s another story.

On deadline

Crashing on a bunch of items. Entertaining entry planned for this evening. Stay tuned.

The Sylvi Evening Kazoo

So, I've been trying to teach Sylvi to play the kazoo this evening. For those of you who are new to this space, Sylvi is 18 months old. Why, exactly, I would desire a situation in which a small child is charging around the house, playing the kazoo, is a mystery even deep than why the Entenmann's people would name their packages of chocolate chip cookies "Skarf 'Ems" (or how they qualify, as the Entenmann people claim, as "extreme" products).

Fortunately, it figures to be a while before Sylvi gets to that point. That's because most of our conversations this evening went like this:

Me (holding the kazoo): See? It goes like this... "Hummmm". (At this point, I go from humming to holding the kazoo to my lips and playing. I hand her the kazoo.)

Sylvi: Ba! (This is one of her all-purpose words. It could mean "ball", "balloon", or "the sound a sheep makes". In this case, I'm unclear as to what it implies.)

Me: No, see try this... "Hummmm."

Sylvi: Hummmm.

Me: Good! Now put the kazoo in your mouth and go "Hummmm."

Sylvi: Hummmm.

Me: Good! Now with the kazoo!

Sylvi (putting the kazoo in her mouth): Ba!

Me: No, like you were just doing - Hummmm...

Sylvi (taking the kazoo out of her mouth): Hummmm.

And so on. In all fairness, by the end of the evening, she was saying things like "Ha" into the kazoo that sounded a little like kazoo music. Or a little like an 18-month old with a kazoo in her mouth, anyway.

Not bad for a night's work. Worthy, perhaps, of a Skarf 'Em. Of course, Sylvi's already asleep, so I'll have to skarf 'em myself.

Hands on my time

Inasmuch as it's New Year's Day, time has been a recurrent theme passing through the transom of the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters.

It starts with a question as to whether we have enough time before our 18-month old wakes up in order to complete this afternoon's entry. (And the almost immediate answer, called out from upstairs: "No.")

[extremely long pause, 23 hours to be exact]

The Time Theme actually started on New Year's Eve, as the 19 Minutes household wimped out and decided to celebrate the New Year on Eastern Standard Time, or as it's known in Arizona: "10 o'clock". We had planned to go watch the Flagstaff New Year's commemoration, which is (really) the lowering of a large metallic pinecone from the balcony of a downtown hotel. (The tradition started a few years ago with a pinecone that was made from branches and, well, real pinecones, but apparently someone decided it looked too rustic. So the downtown business leaders went with the more-cosmopolitan look that only a metallic pinecone provides.) But with Sylvi's 30-minute afternoon nap in mind, we thought that might be pushing our luck. So we opted for the Dick Clark, rockin', televised version of the New Year.

Around 9:40, having gotten Sylvi into pajamas, we switched on the TV and found out two things:

1. Sylvi enjoys Bon Jovi music. (She gets this from her mom, I believe. Or she's already entering her rebellious phase.)

2. None of the Phoenix TV stations carry the Times Square New Year's celebration live. Yes, we saw Bon Jovi, then the return of Dick Clark, and then, at 11:59, we broke away to local news, which was topped by a near-drowning in a Phoenix swimming pool. Here's the thing: It's not as though they weren't picking up the East Coast feed of "Desperate Housewives". This was an actual live event that was going on in New York City (though, I'll grant you, we kind of all knew how it would turn out). Showing it two hours later, to coincide with the Phoenix New Year, sort of goes against the whole spirit of New Year's Eve. Plus, I don't imagine most local viewers believed people in Times Square were actually celebrating on Mountain Standard Time.

We ended up watching the ball drop on CNN (on coverage anchored by Anderson Cooper), which I'm not sure is ready to take over the "Rockin' New Year's Eve" franchise, unless "rockin'" refers to a chair.

Onward.

One of our last purchases of 2005 was a travel alarm clock, found in the clearance rack at Target. The 19 Minutes staff is now proud to present some highlights from the Operation Manual:

ATTENTION before you use it:

1. Please pull out the PVC insulation sheet Beside the battery-cover on the bottom, Then the music will come up. Press any Key to stop it. This is regular situation.

2. If the display shows up a disorder situation After you pull out the PVC insulation sheet, Please press the (RESET) key on the screen lide. Then the music will also come up. Please Press any key to stop it.

3. Please proceed to follow the instruction Manual after the above procedure.

So far, so good. I mean, I'd be happy to follow the instruction Manual, including such helpful instructions to use the Timer as:

Press (%) key to start non-zero setup (Count-down Timer), press again will suspend. At the moment, it may use (▲) or (▼) for liquidation.

But, lest you think that I have a problem with this travel alarm clock, I will point out that it has an alarm that sounds like a vague approximation of the "William Tell Overture" and a very spiffy mode that allows me, with one button push, to access the time in Karachi. Unfortunately it has no light, which makes it difficult to see the time in Karachi, or figure out how to shut off William Tell (when the music comes up).

Fortunately, I was able to wrap up my work with the travel alarm clock quickly enough that I could watch a few of the 730 hours of football available to me over the weekend. I quite enjoyed watching parts of ESPN Classic's Rose Bowl marathon, partly because it meant they weren't showing "Classic" billiards matches, and partly because it brought a couple of phenomena to the fore which have gone tragically underanalyzed, in my estimation:

First, of course, is the phenomenon of watching an event (in this case, sports, but it could also be a new broadcast, or even an episode of "Family Ties") that took place in your lifetime, but which now looks so horribly dated, that you can't possibly imagine how it looked modern while it was going on. And it did look modern then - even cutting-edge. The broadcast of the 199o Rose Bowl, between USC and Michigan, featured coaches wearing sweaters five steps beyond anything Theo wore on "The Cosby Show", approaching wardrobe entertainment levels heretofore only matched by that Mike Levy guy of "Amazing Discoveries" infomercials fame. The players themselves were in the "Shoulder Pads the Size of School Busses" phase. (There was one aspect of the broadcast that still rang true -- USC won.)

The other phenomenon is the ridiculous ability to watch a game that took place ten years ago, and treat it as though it were being televised live. I mean, I was pretty sure Northwestern lost to USC in 1996 (just as I'd be pretty sure they'd lose if they played USC tomorrow), but it was tough to watch the game and not root a little for the underdog - even though I could have found the result (USC 41, Northwestern 32) on the internet in about 30 seconds.

And finally, we can't let the weekend go by without at least commenting on Doug Flutie's appearance in the Patriots-Dolphins game over the weekend. Flutie came in after a Patriots touchdown and drop-kicked the extra point, a play that involves (uh) dropping the ball on the ground and kicking it through the uprights. It was the first time someone had done that in an NFL game since 1941 (also by Flutie). Patriots coach Bill Belichick deserves credit for a couple of reasons - for letting Flutie, a guy that has managed to stay in pro football until age 43 (despite the predictions of analysts who believed he would make it in the NFL past age 23), have one last 15 minutes of fame; and for remembering that at their heart, sports are a way for people to have fun; but most of all, for agreeing to let something truly bizarre (that doesn't involve drunks or cheerleaders) take place at a professional football game.

Web of intrigue

The problem with knowing a little about web design is that the people who know nothing about web design think you know a lot about web design.

I know a little about web design. Therefore, the last five days of my life have been consumed with completely reworking the website here in Public Radioland. It's been made easier by our new developer/host, which has a pretty easy-to-use interface. But it's hard to get past the fact that I'm really just a guy that doesn't know exactly what he's doing, disguised as a guy who sort of knows what he's doing. Basically, I'm a 4.5 on the "Knows What He's Doing Scale", rather than the 6.0 that I purport to be.

My major problem is lacking the proper vocabulary. (Witness my earlier use of "developer/host", made necessary because I don't know exactly what to call them.) There's a lot of lingo in the web design business that doesn't often find its way into journalism, and as a result, I spend most of my time with our way-more-competent "Client Relations Specialist" trying to explain exactly what I'm trying to do, though he might as well be speaking Estonian to my English.

The current issue is trying to make sure that when people type in our URL, they get our new site, and not our old site. A pretty simple concept, made more complicated by the fact that we need to do something called "transferring domains to another registrar", and provide somethign called a "zone file" to our new, um, developer/host. Also, we need to change the name servers for each of our domains. Or something. I generally know what this all means - it means we're making sure that when people type in our URL, they get our new site, and not our old site. Besides that, I have no idea.

I brought these problems on myself, of course, by actually having experience creating the website at the former 19 Minutes headquarters. It was a pretty clunky corner of cyberspace, given that it took me the better part of two days to create the navigation buttons, and probably a week to create the program grid, given that I had to first figure out how to write tables using HTML. But it was a fun era of experimentation on the web - the site included a scan of a North Country Public Radio bumper sticker that someone found on a trail in Wyoming because a) they sent us the bumper sticker, and b) we had a scanner. We "streamed" audio of news stories, but in a way that was only slightly easier than if listeners had just called and had us read the stories to them over the phone. The website has long since been redesigned by people who really know what they're doing, but they made the mistake once of telling me how impressed they were that I had created such a relatively complex old website purely by grinding my way through it in HTML.

This only encouraged me.

So I've grinded my way through the new website, using a minimum of HTML, and it looks, in my estimation, not bad. It still takes me the better part of a day to create buttons (which is why I've, uh, reappropriated what few buttons I used from other places), and I'm thanking my lucky stars that someone else is responsible for the program grid.

But it doesn't look bad. And if the stars align right this afternoon, the new site may actually go live, and someone else might actually see it.

Put down the duckie

You'd think I might learn at some point. Before Monday night, I'd eaten duck four times in memory. (I may have eaten duck baby food as a child, but somehow, I doubt it.) Each one of those four times, I was sick to my stomach, or very close to it.

After it happened twice, I was still willing to chalk it up to coincidence. The first two occurrences both happened after eating in the same restaurant in Washington, DC's Chinatown. So, I mean, hey, there's nothing that says I wasn't actually allergic to egg rolls, right?

I went about 5 years before trying duck again. This time it was in an unfamiliar restaurant in Ottawa. But both the taste and the results were strikingly similar, leading to an enjoyable drive back to Potsdam, New York that night, which was marked by fun-filled stops along Highway 416 in such hotspots as Kemptville (which became decidedly less kempt) and Spencerville, Ontario.

Still, the optimist in me decided to give duck another go a couple years ago in San Diego. I didn't feel great afterwards, but survived unscathed.

Emboldened, I set out for the home of our only local relatives to ring in Chanukah on Monday. They were serving something called "Turducken", which apparently is a turkey stuffed with duck, chicken, and - in this case - sausage. As a vegetarian colleague of mine noted, "That's like having meat with a side of meat, another side of meat, and then meat for dessert!"

(Never mind for the moment that we were about to celebrate a Jewish holiday with a meal that included sausage. For more on this theme, check out Andy Borowitz's column in Sunday's New York Times, in which he describes celebrating Yom Kippur by going to a Swedish smorgasbord restaurant.)

So, of course, the duck part of the Turducken came back to haunt me Monday night, though unlike the Chanukah miracle, the after-effects lasted considerably less than eight days.

What I can't figure out is why I would want to eat a duck in the first place? Ducks are cool birds. As my wife can attest, I've wasted no small amount of bandwidth on a variety of digital cameras capturing ducks in their natural habitat (at a museum in Sweden, in Bank One Ballpark, etc.). I read "Make Way for Ducklings" to our daughter dozens of times before she was born. Really. I owned three rubber ducks before she was born, too.

So in a first for this space, I hearby make the following New Year's resolution: No more eating ducks. Although maybe I'd have more luck with the rubber ducks...

Christmas thoughts from Studio 103

I'm on the air today, hosting Weekend Edition and a variety of holiday specials, and spelling our otherwise Gentile on-air staff. A little gift from the Jewish news director.

The traffic (such as it ever exists in Flagstaff, Arizona) is pretty non-existent on the way in to work at 5:30 am on Christmas morning. Not another occupied car on the road today. While some will be watching Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments" later, the ride through town was, for me, more reminiscent of Heston driving around a deserted Earth in "The Omega Man" - minus the blood-lusting zombies, anyway.

[It's now just occurred to me that "The Ten Commandments" might be more typically watched on Easter, rather than Christmas. I can't keep track of what you Gentiles watch and when.]

But speaking of movies, Christmas is always an enjoyable opportunity for me each year to go to a party and drop the conversational bombshell that I've never actually seen "It's a Wonderful Life". Unlike my ongoing boycott of "Rain Man" (too consciously Oscar-worthy), "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"(too many people telling me I have to see it), or "Caddyshack" (too many people doing bad Bill Murray imitations) I didn't start out to avoid that particular cultural commonality. It just wasn't part of the holiday tradition in the 19 Minutes household when I was growing up. As time went on, I decided that "I've never seen 'It's a Wonderful Life'" was a better conversation starter than "Hey, how about that Jimmy Stewart in 'It's a Wonderful Life'?" Plus, it moves the conversation to a discussion of iconic films we've never seen, rather than a discussion of a movie that everyone in the room but me has seen. (If that maneuver fails, my fallback position is to feign complete ignorance and express my amazement that Jon Stewart would be in a film so closely linked to Christmas, given that he's also available to work on Christmas morning, if you catch my drift.)

Lest you think I'm completely opposed to the Christmas assault on the airwaves, I'll point out that I'm a card-carrying member of the non-existent "A Charlie Brown Christmas" Fan Club. NPR's Diane Rehm Show devoted an hour to the 40th Anniversary of "ACBC" last Friday, a discussion that raised the question of whether there's something less-special about being able to watch the special on-demand via DVD, rather than having to wait for an entire year before it next aired.

And I submit that, yeah, there is something less special about throwing it in the DVD player, and missing out on all the commercials for Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars (is there another example of two different products that were always marketed together?) and Peppermint Patties (raising the question of whether York advertised Peppermint Patties on Peanuts specials purely because the candy shared a name with a Peanuts character).

On the other hand, if I watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas" on DVD, it lowers the risk that I might accidentally channel-surf my way over to "It's a Wonderful Life" and inadvertently ruin all my Christmas party talking points.

Joyeux Noël, Hauska Joulua, and - of course - Happy Chanukah, everyone.

Caramelizing Christmas

First, before we get on to the general theme of this evening’s symposium, I’ll pass along the winner of the ‘Phrase With Which I Never Expected to Start a Sentence’ Contest:

“So, I was making caramels the other night…”

Now then.

So, I was making caramels the other night in a fit of holiday spirit of some kind (I’m not sure which holiday tradition involves the making of caramels, but I’m sure there’s at least one), and ran into unexpected difficulty in the form of an ornery 18-month old, who decided she didn’t want to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.

I’ve groused in the past about unrealistic expectations by recipe authors – namely, the expectation that I’ll know what the heck I’m doing in the kitchen when the recipe calls for me to “sear” something. In the case of the caramels, I was pretty confident in my ability to follow the recipe itself, but as usual, the recipe included no contingency plan for what you do when your mixture is just about to reach optimal temperature and your 18-month old is letting loose with what the 19 Minutes household has long referred to as her “pterodactyl scream”. Let’s think of those contingencies next time, recipe authors! Thank you.

The caramels turned out okay. At room temperature, they make a good ballast ingredient, or could be used to provide traction for a vehicle stuck in ice. Heated in the microwave for 13 seconds, they do a nice impression of actual caramels. Heated in the microwave for 20 seconds, they do a nice job of coating the inside of the microwave with a sticky mess.

Onward.

Sylvi recovered from the other evening’s Non-Sleeping Pterodactyl Mode, allowing for a trip this evening to Target. It was a sociologist’s field day at Target, inasmuch as it was the Friday evening before Christmas. I get sort of a neurotic pleasure out of scenes like tonight's, along the same lines as the neurotic pleasure I got out of driving to the Mall of America on the day after Christmas one year, just to see if I could find a parking space (I landed in the first row, no less).

Anyway, there were a variety of personality types at Target this evening:

• The Intergenerational Arguing Families. They were gathered around the “One Spot”, where everything is a dollar, and they could get their pre-holiday aggression out by snapping at each other over whether to buy mini-photo albums or Shirley Temple DVDs as stocking stuffers. Ho ho ho!
  
• People cruising the toy department while consulting with unseen relatives (who may well have been in the Housewares section) by cell phone about whether “Hungry Hungry Hippos” is an appropriate gift for a four-year old. It does raise questions about how we, as a society, got along before we could use cell phones from the toy department. The answer is, we bought inappropriate gifts in those days. I remember being around 10 years old and getting a birthday present from an elderly relative that was way inappropriately young. Somehow, even at that age, I grasped that the embarrassment would be worse for the gift giver than it was for me, so I remember being pretty gracious about the whole thing. And it’s why, to this day, I try to err on the side of caution, which explains why 18-month old Sylvi will be receiving a subscription to Newsweek for Christmas this year.
  
• People only there to buy Kleenex or AA batteries. Poor saps.
  
• The freaked-out, clueless guy looking for something for his wife or significant other. I, myself, spent several hours in a mall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week in just such a mode, finding plenty of gifts that I would have enjoyed, and gradually expanding my mental notion of what would constitute an appropriate gift for my wife. ("Hmmm… how about Old Navy? Hey! There’s a pen shop! Hold on – maybe the Wisconsin Cheese Mart is open late!") So again, I went with Newsweek.

Notes from the spin cycle

Another hectic week in Public Radioland. Our local Morning Edition host is on vacation, and as usual, I’m first off the bench when it comes to filling in. Translated, that means waking up at 4:45, then at 4:54, then at 5:03, and so on, until my snooze bar builds up such a static electricity charge that it threatens to electrocute me if I don’t actually get out of bed.

Translated further, that means trying to get to bed early enough to sleep longer than three hours. This is especially key tonight, since tomorrow features one of my semi-annual appearances at the university commencement, at which I’ll be reading the names of the lucky graduates. And the university intelligencia generally asks me not to fall asleep in the middle of the master’s degree recipients.

So I’m going to try to wrap up the blog before I move the laundry to the dryer. Trust me, Woodward and Bernstein worked under the same deadline when they broke the Watergate story.

But on a week that has dealt me little sleep, tonight’s trip to Target inadvertently reminded me why the public radio thing is a good gig. The trip didn’t initally shape up that way – in fact, it had all the trippings of Disaster Trip 2005, as my 18-month old daughter chose this evening to have an Explosive Diaper Incident. And like any standard-style dad, I hadn’t actually checked the mini diaper bag (No, it is not a purse, thank you very much.) to see whether the packet of wipes was still serviceable. Hey, as a standard-style dad, it was pretty amazing that I remembered the diaper bag. Thankfully, my quick-thinking wife pointed out that we were in Target, which meant if nothing else, at least we could replace Sylvi’s pants with a new pair. And you wondered why I had to do laundry tonight…

Anyway, while my wife was changing Sylvi in the bathroom, I was paying for the rest of the shopping trip at the cash registers – at which point the woman who was next in line recognized me by voice. It’s a public radio kind of town. Moreover, she remembered an interview I had conducted with a landscape artist (which aired this week), and told me how much she liked it.

And that reminded me what I like best about showing up for work, even more than volunteers who bring in Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the staff. There’s something entertaining about becoming an expert on something – for a day. My knowledge of abstract landscape paintings is pretty minimal. In fact, my knowledge of artwork in general is pretty minimal.

I grew up in Washington, D.C., and every year, our elementary school would troop us down to the Hirshhorn Museum or the National Gallery of Art, and try to get us interested in art. But they never could satisfactorily explain why we, as 10-year olds, should be interested in the school of painting Dave Barry once described as “Enormous Naked Women Eating Fruit”. And so we’d feign interest (badly, I’m sure) in the art for a while, and then go back to bugging our teachers to take us to the Air and Space Museum.

So I had to do some prep work before I could conduct this interview. And I was ready with what I hoped were some prescient questions. And then, something remarkable happened. My interviewee explained what makes a good painting:

“It’s pretty,” she said, in just about those words.

I finally understand art.

But the spin cycle is about to end, and so tonight’s self-imposed deadline looms.

Car talk puzzlers

At the risk of co-opting all my material from the past weekend's New York Times, there was another interesting Sunday feature on the phenomenon of car window decals bearing memorial messages. It's a phenomenon that has its roots in Latino culture, which means the decals are a relatively common sight out here in the southwest. But the article notes the concept is transferring (not unlike a decal) to other segments of the populace.

In the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, it's just another aspect of the car culture that we don't completely understand. I can grasp why someone would want to commemorate the life of a loved one who has passed away, but I'm not altogether clear on why the back (or side) window of a car, or pickup, or SUV is the appropriate venue for such a tribute.

But there are many things about the vehicular world that are a little puzzling, several of which have made themselves apparent in just the last several days:

Vanity plates. I guess I can understand the philosophy behind personalized license plates. I was actually close to getting a vanity plate a few years ago, when a minor windfall from my three days on "Jeopardy!" allowed me to buy my first-ever new car. It was a German car, and I thought "Gefahr" (the German word for "Jeopardy") would be catchy, clever, and mysterious. But having my application returned for proof that "Gefahr" wasn't actually a swear word, I decided it would just be a puzzlement to other drivers. Likewise, the plate on the car I passed both on the way to and from the coffee shop the other day: "BIG GAL". An extra 50 bucks to put a vanity tag on your car seems like an extravagance for an inside joke that only 11 people will get.

Leis and rear-view mirrors. I'm not sure whether this is a phenomenon outside the west, but there's an abundance of Hawaiian leis hanging from the rear-view mirrors of northern Arizona. Besides making it difficult to see out of a substantial proportion of the windshield, I wonder about the function of these decorations. Is it an effort to create a little slice of Maui in the driver '89 Escort? (And if that's the case, does it work?) Are they left over from a luau? It seems unlikely the decorative touch will lead anyone to confuse Interstate 40 between Flagstaff and Kingman, Arizona with the road to Hana. Tough talk from a guy with Hawaiian print seat covers on his '87 Golf.

The Lexus as holiday gift. I'm sorry - do luxury car manufacturers really think those commercials that show a $40,000 car with a bright red bow on top will lead anyone to run out and buy their spouse, child, parent, or whoever a car for Christmas? Have we really gotten to the point that a $350 Xbox is the reasonably priced alternative for holiday giving? ("Yes", is probably the answer.) And are the car dealerships jammed on December 26th with people returning cars they don't like?

The more important question, though, is where do you get a bow that large?

Hack to the future

The New York Times did an interesting riff yesterday on how many of the recent developments in professional football were actually forecast in a 1962 episode of "The Jetsons". The episode, titled "Jetson's Night Out", included a domed stadium ("Space Coliseum") some three years before the Astrodome was built, and such innovations as Skycam, bar code scanners for tickets (rather than ripping the ticket at the turnstiles), and radio communications between the coach and the quarterback.

It was a pretty uncanny depiction of the future of professional football. But perhaps more importantly, it was probably one of the first citations of "The Jetsons" as an accurate portrayal of the future.

For years, "The Jetsons" has been the benchmark for describing how preposterous our vision of the future is. And, of course, my flying car is still on order and I'm bringing an actual dish to the staff holiday party this evening, rather than food in capsule form.

And yet, "The Jetsons" references endure, rivaled only by Jules Verne for cultural iconography. Funny, given that "The Flintstones", which was essentially the same show, hasn't been cited nearly as much in the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" school curricula.

Maybe it's because at some level, we're all still holding out for flying cars and robots that do the dishes. And maybe it's because we've forgotten about the Jetsons' take on the workplace.

De-Clausing the season

Sylvi turned the big 1-8 today. Yes, 18 months. She’s currently celebrating by having an animated conversation with the blanket in her crib, rather than actually napping as per the plan for this afternoon.

But earlier today, with my wife at work, the two of us accomplished a little of our holiday shopping. And somehow, we managed to avoid the ubiquitous chubby guy with the beard and red suit. This was a good thing, as far as I was concerned. My wife and I haven’t come to any resolution on how our household is going to handle the whole Santa Claus concept, and if we can avoid the mall for another two weeks, we will have succesfully diffused the issue for another year.

We actually have had one Santa encounter this season – a week ago, we took Sylvi to a symphony concert, which one could logically imagine would be a safe refuge from elves, reindeer, and the like. This, of course, meant that as a special treat for all the kids in the audience, Santa showed up at the end of the concert. Fortunately for us, Sylvi was significantly more interested in pointing at all the S’s in the program than she was in Symphony Santa, who for reasons that were unclear, was wearing dress shoes instead of his winter boots.

Part of it is Santa himself – being the Jewish half of a mixed marriage, I don’t really have a lot of Santa heritage to draw on. I was always the kid who would sit on Santa’s lap and, with a healthy dose of skepticism, made sure he knew I was actually planning on celebrating Chanukah, and thus, was just sitting on his lap to conform to a cultural norm. Though at age 7, I may not have put it into exactly those words.

But even if I had grown up among the goyim, I’m not sure I wouldn’t also be cool to the Santa concept. (The double-negative concept is a different story.) I mean, the idea of a munificent chubby guy that brings gifts -- asking only that children be good little boys and girls – is, on its face, not the worst thing in the world. I mean, hey – kids probably ought to learn that it pays to be good.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure about the other message that Santa sends – that if mom and dad save all year, take on extra work, and forego the more expensive, extra-lean steaks, then a fat guy in a red suit will bring the kids new bicycles. If the fat guy in the red suit agreed to babysit now and then, maybe I’d be more inclined to give him some credit.

But I also know Santa Claus is a cherished tradition in many households. And I would feel kind of bad if Sylvi was the only three-year old in her preschool that was going around and saying to the other kids: “Santa Claus? You have got to be kidding. What do you think your mom was doing in the toy department at Target last week? Buying herself a Lite-Brite? Don’t be so naïve. Pour me another apple juice, willya?”

So I don’t know. I’m seriously considering showing her the episode of “Friends” where the Holiday Armadillo explains the story of Chanukah – and presenting it as a factual documentary. She’d be the only preschooler yammering on about an Armadillo, but coming from our household, I imagine that she’ll also be the only preschooler yammering on about the Great Pumpkin and the Easter Beagle, so it’ll be par for the course.