Monty Python Got It Right

I love a slow news day. 

 Wake up.  Pour the coffee.  Turn on the TV to accompany your preparations for the day. 

And our top stories this morning: 

·         Princess Katherine’s wedding gown on display! 

·         Lindsay Lohan wears $1000 Manolo Blahnik shoes while claiming she cannot afford court-ordered psychological counseling. 

·         Do men do their share of household chores? 

·         And Donald Trump may announce, again, he’s running for president. 

Hooray!  We can exhale.  We can start the day free of new stress. 

Remember Simon & Garfunkel?  “I can gather all the news I need from the weather report.  Hey!  I’ve got nothin’ to do today but smile!” 

Yeah.  No news is most definitely good news.   

All right, you may say there is, in fact, news.  The “heated” debate over raising the debt ceiling, for example.  But this, for me, is not exactly news.  Or maybe it’s news in the same sense that professional wrestling is sport.  The players are in costume.  They’ve rehearsed their roles.  The outcome is decided.  We just watch to boo and hiss on cue.   

The oppressive heat wave dominating so much of the nation is news.  That weather report is nothing to smile about.  Unless like me, you used to live back there with thirty-one straight days of 100+ degrees and the concomitant double-digit humidity.  I try not to rub it in too much with my Okie relatives.  Poor form and all. 

The last flight of space shuttle Atlantis is sad news for the American dream.  But I heard this morning that NASA plans to put an astronaut on the surface of an asteroid by the year 2025.  Not exactly riveting in the moment, but something to look forward to in an abstract way.  

The players’ lockout is resolved for professional football.  Thank God. 

The SF Giants met President Obama to receive his personal congratulations for winning the World Series last fall.  That’s cool.  Tardy, but still cool. 

Best of all, nothing new to worry about today.  Nothing to add to the list of disquiets that we mull over a little bit each day.  Reviewing them.  Taking them through step-by-step, from the beginning.  How did it start?  How will it end? 

No new contingents of suffering in the world.  Only those already categorized and compartmentalized.  No new wars, or oil spills.  Only the wretched, distressing, but normal batch of car wrecks and shootings.  One animal attack, but everyone’s going to be OK. 

If anything’s startling, it’s what we take as routine, even expected, though not quite acceptable. 

So it’s make the bed.  Brush the teeth.  Get the husband off to work.  Read email.  Plan dinner.  Buy groceries.  Write.  Putter.  It’s all pretty darn good.  In the big picture. 

I’ll just thank God in Heaven for the incredible life I’m privileged to live, feeling especially free from the weight of a big news day.  Only the same old straws today.  Not a single new one. 

Coming up:  Four new ways to barbeque chicken!  I can deal with that.  I love barbequed chicken.  Matt, Natalie, Al, and Ann all wearing aprons.  Cute.  I miss Meredith, but network life goes on. 

Wait.  Uh oh.  Breaking news?  Oh no.  An explosion in Oslo.  Awful.  Absolutely awful.  Terrorists?  No.  One man!  One truly screwed up man.  Young people on a remote island.  Horrific. 

Damn.  I thought the world might maintain its status quo just this one day.  Maybe not an equilibrium of all good things, or even equally bad things, but a balance of sorts.  No new dreadfulness just this once. 

Alas.  

Our globe is populated by human beings after all.  Flawed.  Unenlightened.  Messed up.  Selfish.  Greedy. 

But wait.  What’s this?  The Good News Network!? 

Our Top Stories today:

·         Gates Gives $42 Million to Safe Sanitation Projects

·         Young Baseball Fan's Act of Generosity Caught on TV

·         North and South Korea Hold Constructive Talks

·         Logging Plummets in Mexico Reserve for the Monarch Butterfly

·         Terrified Kitten Rescued From Irish Freeway

·         Danish Mystery Donor Leaves $200,000 in Red Cross Bin

·         Healthy Snow Leopard Population Found in Afghanistan

·         From Down and Out to Happiness: It’s a Wonderful Life (If you let it be)

·         "Liter of Light" Brings Sun into Dim Shanties Using Only Plastic Bottles

·         Dalai Lama Offers A Roadmap to Inner Peace

·         Former Child Refugee Becomes Hero to Hundreds of Afghan Orphans

·         Teen Athlete Gives Entire $40K Scholarship Prize to Runners-up

·         U.S. Returns Recovered Artifacts Taken From Iraq  

And the best news of all:

·         Research: People Who Look on the Bright Side Age Best

Congressional Priorities like Lost Rainbow Toads?

The Rainbow Toad of Borneo gives me hope.

Last seen in 1924, the spindly-legged creature was dismissed as extinct by the less-than-faithful among amphibian specialists in the scientific community.  Yet, it lives.  It survived in obscurity. 

The precise location of the adult male, adult female, and juvenile toads found in three separate trees in the Penrissen Mountains of Borneo is protected by the scientists of Washington-based Conservation International.  Poachers seeking brightly hued amphibians cannot be trusted.

Think of it – not seen in 87 years, but alive, well, and perhaps most remarkable, not forgotten!  If the Rainbow Toad can resurface, why, so could good manners in public places.  Even generosity.  We might find and revive courtesy on the roadways.  Dare I say it?  We could see cooperative policy making in Washington, D.C.

Maybe it’s not too far-fetched to harken back to the days when our elected representatives recognized the common goals of our country.  They worked on our country’s issues with a problem-solving approach, once, ‘way back when.  They understood the well-being of our country ranked above their party loyalty and their re-election didn’t they?

If scientists can find a 2-inch toad in Borneo after it spent 87 years alone in the rain forest, maybe politicians can find courage in Congress today.

If that little toad survived all this time, minding his own business, clinging to trees, being beautiful, contributing to the ecosystem, doing his part when we weren’t looking, maybe Democrats and Republicans can take a lesson.

Of course, there is another, less encouraging angle on the “long lost” phenomenon.  It’s reflected in the love letter rescued from the dead letter purgatory of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, post office, and now on its way to its intended recipient after 53 years.

Since the letter, signed, “Love forever,” was written to Clark C. Moore, he has married twice, fathered 21 children, retired from teaching, converted to Islam, and become a Muslim cleric.

The 74-year-old Moore, now known as Siddeeq, currently lives in Indianapolis and says he waits with mixed emotions for the letter to arrive in his mailbox.

"I'm curious,” he told reporters, “but I'm not sure I'd put it under the category of 'looking forward to it.’”

He and the letter’s author married later in the year it was written, 1958, and had four children before divorcing.  They no longer speak.

Siddeeq told reporters that the romantic piece of mail is "just a testament of the sincerity, interest and innocence of that time."

Well I wouldn’t entrust the fate of the Rainbow Toad of Borneo to him!  How cold!  How cynical!
 
OK, maybe we can never recover our innocence.  But sincerity and interest forever gone?  Say it ain’t so!

I hope our elected officials can reach into their hearts and minds and find the sincerity and interest that inspired them to seek office in the first place.

I hope they will muster the mettle to step up in the face of the jaded around them.  It’s pretty important. 

We don’t just need a new debt ceiling; we need thoughtful restructuring of our borrowing, spending, and raising of funds.  We need stable funding, I repeat, stable funding for our schools.
 
We need accountability and justice for the engineers of the bank failures.  We need jobs!
 
We need to stop spending $10 billion per DAY on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We could feed hungry people at home and around the world. 

No more blaming.  No more posturing.  No more lost interest in the work or false sincerity of effort.  The American economy is not a lost love letter.  The sentiments of the American people cannot be dismissed as a quaint reminder of times gone by.

Washington scientists placed the Rainbow Toad on the “Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Frogs” list (really).  They persisted in their search and found him.  Let’s hope his location doesn’t become his undoing.

Some of us are like the lost Rainbow Toad of Borneo, making it just fine on our own, thank you.  We often wish Washington would quit focusing on our stuff and leave us alone. 

But too many of us are not doing fine.  Too many may be unable to survive and thrive without a team of representatives who will go to the ends of the earth on their behalf.

Maybe Washington could establish a “Top 10 Most Wanted Lost Priorities” list and start working on that.

You Are What You Watch

I have to wean myself off the murder and mayhem.  You know, “Cold Case Files,” “The Investigators,” and “Body of Evidence.”  My husband is starting to worry about himself.  He wonders if I’m studying all this stuff for a reason.

 I’m not planning to do anything weird.  But he seems concerned, so I’ll make the effort until he’s more comfortable.  Heh, heh, heh.

 It all started with “Law & Order,” the original.  I just fell in love with Homicide Detective Lenny Briscoe.  Who wouldn’t?  A little bit world weary, a little bit My Favorite Uncle, Lenny just makes the murder seem… normal.  A natural part of life.  His life anyway.

Lenny gets lied to in every episode.  Maybe it’s all those years I spent as a high school principal, but I can relate.  I got lied to, too.  Kids make up a lot of stuff to protect themselves and their friends. 

Lenny just shakes his head and points out the inconsistency to the prevaricator of the moment.  Sometimes they stare, dumbfounded, stunned that they’ve been figured out (I love that).  Other times, they leap to another lie, to shore up the first failed one.  Either way, they’ve been had. 

 I learned lots from Lenny.

Then there’s Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy.  Flawed, driven, beautiful to behold.  Just like Jack, I loved getting the bad guy and bringing him to justice.  That’s probably my flaw too.

Anyway, from there it wasn’t too far to “Law & Order: SVU,” “Law & Order: LA,” “Law & Order:  Downtown Newark.”  (It got a little silly and much less compelling with all the spin offs.) 
  
That’s when I branched out to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”  OK.  But some of the wannabes display an unsavory focus on the gore.  Have you ever seen “Bones?”  They want to gross you out!  Eyeballs slipping from their sockets, larvae in telling stages of development.  But the characters are so loveable, you just have to watch.

I felt mature when I graduated to “Forensic Files.”  They don’t make it a funny story.  They don’t dwell on the sex lives of the detectives.  They talk about the evidence, ma’am.  Just the facts.  They follow the minutiae right down to the bad guy, and they NEVER give up.  I love that the best.

You can run, but we’re never going to forget the miss-folded flap on this envelop found next to the body.  Only YOU could have left it there because we found out you worked at the factory where the machine miss-folded all those flaps that day ten years ago!  Ha!  Ha! 

But I digress. 

My husband has been eyeing me suspiciously, maybe because a fair share of the stories on “City Confidential,” for example, profile a conniving woman who goes from man to man, sizing up his bank account, and wheedling her way into his heart, only to poison him and cremate him before swooping off to Miami. 
He hates Miami.  All the humidity and bugs. 

That, along with being forced down onto my back with a relentless muscle spasm that’s lasted for days on end, has me shopping around for more wholesome television fare.  It’s not that hard to find, though you must measure your dose of budding new talent shows and wend your way through “real” housewives from assorted locales.  Now that will drive you to murder. 
There’s plenty of ghost watching so long as you don’t tire of green-lit scenarios in run-down houses with the host telling you it just got cold where he’s standing.  I admit one of the celebrity ghost stories creeped me out.  But I didn’t recognize the celebrity, so where’s the thrill? 

Biography Channel seemed promising until I spent an hour with Jennifer Anniston.  Don’t get me wrong, she’s adorable, and a very good comic actress.  But an hour?  She was born in Sherman Oaks.  She dyed her hair purple and acted in high school plays.  Imagine.
  
So I’m on to the Science Channel with Morgan Freeman.  We’ve traveled through the wormhole to the birth of the universe and repulsive gravity.  Really.

I’ve watched “How It’s Made” until I want to blow it up.  Come on.  A pipe wrench?  A snowplow?  OK.  Fascinating.  Who knew. 

Here’s the cruelest twist of all:  my husband doesn’t want to hear about the skateboard factory, or the giant sewing machine that stitches the stars on 224 flags at a time.  See, that’s just wrong. 

It’s the very kind of thing that could put a bad idea into a woman’s mind.

If Darth Vader Calls, Don't Answer!

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, announced this week that budget cuts have forced its Allen Telescope Array into hibernation.

The array comprises 42 telescopes in the Hat Creek Area of Northern California that scan for radio signals from outer space. With this effort, SETI has been engaged in one of the most profound enterprises in human history: the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

SETI directs the telescopes to scan planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zone around their parent star, like Earth around the Sun, and ask, “Anybody home?”

Turns out the universe teems with radio signals. SETI has amassed an immense volume of signal data, so much in fact that they cannot be sure if their computer software detects every signal, and every kind of signal that might be broadcast from afar.

Their brilliant solution to this stultifying problem: Gamify! It’s a new word – means make it a game. SETI invited all the game-playing geekoids around the planet to invent ways to make the tedious analysis fun. They also hope to monetize the search process in an effort to make the project self-sustaining. Good thinking.

SETI’s complementary project, Earth Speaks, addresses the next logical question: If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, should we reach out to them, and if so, what should we say?

The first impulse is to call out to another intelligent civilization, right? Like first-timers in France, we would stretch our necks and wave high overhead. Camera around neck, black sox, hairy legs, and sandals:

“Hey!” we’d say, with our big, goofy, American grin, certain we’ll be greeted in kind.

“Bonjour!” ET would reply. “Bienvenu! Please share my croissant.”

The Extra-terrestrially Intelligent would see our inherent worth right away and want to chat us up. We’d go on to become BFF’s, exchanging our Twitter accounts and holiday recipes.

They’d be surprised to see us, of course. It would take them a moment to focus, trust their eyes, look at their buddies and say, “I’ll be darned. Look. That funny looking guy’s trying to get our attention.”

But what if, as some surmise, such a civilization is eons ahead of us technologically, spiritually, morally? We might more likely need to pull our shoulders up around our ears and say, “Oops. Sorry! Didn’t mean to cause all that____________.” Fill in the blank: Pollution, noise, nuclear waste, animosity, political gridlock, self-serving greed.

Earth Speaks invites participants from around the globe to submit online text messages, pictures, and sounds that convey the sentiment they would want to communicate to an extraterrestrial civilization.

A text message? “Zup?” Somehow, I don’t think a text message will embody the yearning of the human spirit. LOL.

Pictures? OK. Let’s send pictures of babies from around the world. Baby animals too. Show our potential, our sweet nature, our desire to learn.

But what would you say?

Actually, if it’s ever found, the Golden Record onboard Voyager 2, hurtling through deep space, already speaks for us. Carl Sagan and his associates at Cornell University assembled 116 images, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Jimmy Carter and U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim along with a variety of natural sounds - surf, wind, thunder, and animal sounds including the songs of birds and whales. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, featuring artists such as Mozart, Stravinsky, and Chuck Berry. Roll Over Beethoven. Tell ET the news.

But there is that other thought: That once the Frenchman, er, ET looks up from his knitting, he’ll focus on us with calculating precision, assesses our signals, and find us inferior. He just might reach out with the mentality of a praying mantis and snarf us up like an ear of corn.

So it’s not a question to be taken lightly….if we boldly seek and find someone, should we call out, or tiptoe back behind the moon?

Let’s say we set aside our terror at becoming an inter-galactic hors d’oeuvre, reach out and tap these guys on their alien shoulders

We’ll say, “Greetings.”

They’ll say, “Step into my parlor…”

My apologies. I don’t mean to let my paranoia overtake me.

I want SETI to survive. I don’t want to give up hope in that miraculous, transformative possibility.

Or, as Fox Mulder would say, “I want to believe.”

Shout Out to Sweden!

Hello Sweden!  Thanks so much for reading Think Dream Play!

I appreciate you SO much!

Fireworks are for Old Folks

I used to tell my friends I’d be the oldest living person at America’s Tri-Centennial Celebration. That would put me at 127 years old. Turns out I’m not as far off as it might have seemed back then.

At the recommendation of the Wall Street Journal, I completed a longevity calculator - four different ones, in fact; and they’re telling me I could live well into my 90’s. All of them.

I guess that’s good news.

What I’d really like to do is get my friends and family to run the numbers on themselves. See, I’m unsure how much fun it will be to reach 99.8 years, as one of the calculators predicts, if I am to be alone with my oatmeal.

Susan, my cat, is 21 years old. I think that’s about 300 in cat years. She moves in slo-mo now, carefully securing solid placement for one paw before lifting the next. Like a sloth.

Her life doesn’t seem so bad though. It’s just that her world has shrunk.

Gone are the days when she roamed our lot stalking squirrels and birds and bugs, tormenting our passive yellow lab, Ted, (whom she’s outlived by nine years), and romping through the house with her favorite leopard skin catnip mouse.

Now she has a meal, a poop, (in one of the multiple boxes strategically placed for her echolocation), and a day sunning on the deck, or napping on a heating pad. We can dream of such an existence.

And she’s virtually weightless.

OMG! Just the thought of becoming so tiny. Especially after being so…not tiny.

I want to be one of those surprising old women. The one who’s still writing, who college kids think is a kick. I don’t just want to say what I think; I want to think funny, incisive, no, piercing thoughts.

Yes, when folks are at their wits’ ends, casting about, wondering “what the heck?” suddenly, something I’ve said will pop into their heads and they’ll feel better. Lately, it’s been: When you’re going through hell, keep going.

I stole that of course. But I’m going to start recording all my clever insights, so by the time I’m 80, let’s say, or 85, I’ll have amassed a veritable panoply of pithy sayings.

The Anderson Cooper of the era, no, the Jon Stewart, will call me up for on-air interviews. Like when David Letterman calls his mom. You won’t see me; you’ll only hear my voice, bright and tinny. I’ll lampoon the newest president, poke fun at democrats and republicans, and make you laugh with my snappy wit. If you’re still alive, that is.

Of course I’ll be a dancer. I’ll be one of those tiny curved women who wear a leotard in front of a mirror, waving her spindly arms in the air, glorious. Feeling as if she looks good. Just like now when, on a rainy day, I play my “Just Dance” CD on the Wii and pretend I can keep up, pretend I rock. I still have the moves.

If I have to go to an old folks home, I’ll be the spark, the one the nurses won’t mind feeding. Maybe a high school girl will volunteer her time as a part of her senior project. She’ll sit with me and tell me about her boyfriend. I’ll make her blush, just as my grandma did me.

But in the short term I have to go to my husband, the man who helped me retire a year ago, and tell him I might live a long, long time --- longer than we expected. He’s already a little suspect of my earnings-free existence. I don’t know if we have 99.8 years’ worth of rent and Top Ramen. I might have to mow lawns to justify the added years.

He’s younger than I am - my husband. And since women typically outlive men, I’ve always thought it would average out and we would die more or less on the same day. I like the concept since it involves no sorrow. I’m already steeped in sorrow for those who’ve gone ahead. Not sure I could bear it if he up and decided to go before me.

He has better genes than I do, so the calculators are probably on his side. But I don’t want to go first.

I want to light a Roman candle at the Tri-Centennial.

Room Rates are High at the Gray Bar Hotel

Murderers fall into three categories as near as I can tell: Those who murder as a result of their insanity; those who murder in a fit of passion; and those who are fully sane, knowing precisely what they’re up to, and in the coldest and most dispassionate frame of mind, plot and scheme and murder believing they can get away with it.

None of these killers is deterred by the death penalty.

Crazy people don’t think ahead to the consequences of their deadly acts. Instead they listen to the voices. They remove the tin foil from their bonnets just long enough to tune in to the vibes of the “insider” who pinpoints their enemies. They are not discouraged by a chamber or a chair out of their radar’s range.

A fit of passion might seize an otherwise sane person. Perhaps, in a moment of extreme stress, he explodes outside his own control. That may be temporary insanity, (see above), or it may be rage at the overwhelming machine that controls him.

We can speculate as to the sources of this rage, but no matter; he is not, in that white-hot moment, dissuaded by a rational thought of what will happen to him if he kills. Engulfed by an incomprehensible internal firestorm, he lashes out and murders. The death penalty is impotent in that moment.

Finally, we have the calculating killer. Too smart. Smarter, at least in his own estimation, than all those around him. Smarter, so he believes, better prepared, and more thorough than law enforcement, stealthier than forensic science. Morals are no issue for this mind. His goal to free himself of a perceived hindrance drives him. He will not be entangled by any legal means of achieving his goal as this could deprive him of his possessions. Think Scott Peterson.

No penalty will deter such a person, one who believes himself invincible and superior to all.

Enter our economic recession and California Assemblyperson Loni Hancock with a proposal to scrap the death penalty. It’s accompanied by the not-so-new news that in California we can save $184 million dollars a year, a year!, by replacing death penalty sentences with life-with-no-chance-of-parole sentences. Presumably the numbers are similar in other death penalty states.

I’ve never seen an item-by-item break down explaining why it’s so much more expensive to house a death penalty inmate than a life-without-parole inmate, though I’m sure someone somewhere could explain it to someone else’s satisfaction. Is his cell more secure? Doubtful. Were there competitive bids? That seems doubtful too.

Nevertheless, if we accept the statement of potential savings, and the failure of the death penalty to deter murderers, we face a challenge to our system and our sensibilities.

Include the fact that since 1978, fully thirty-three years ago, we have executed only 13 inmates. Seven hundred more remain on death row. I don’t know the average age of a murderer, but an actuarial table might suggest that the death penalty equates to life without parole in about 98% of the cases. At $184 million, those 700 are housed at nearly $263K per year each.

Could it be that delays in carrying out the death penalty figure into the twisted mindset of a potential murderer? Evil people think in evil ways. Maybe they figure, “Why not? They’ll never get around to killing me anyway.”

But before we dispose of the needle, we must address the need for retribution. Death penalty laws, at least in part, grew out of the human impulse toward revenge. Murderers kill and in turn should be killed.

We relate to the outrage of Mark Klaas speaking about the man who raped and killed his daughter, whom we all anguished for, Polly. “He was sentenced to die according to California law. And now someone has drafted a law to spare his life!?”

Could you be satisfied with a solid life sentence in such a case? How about for $184 million?

If $184 million funneled away from death row inmates every year, and instead went into our schools and our infrastructure every year, could we bear knowing that those killers lived on for all their days in fear and degradation in the cold gray hellholes we’ve built for them?

What is the price of retribution? What is its value?

Can we set aside revenge? It’s cheaper to “care for” a murderer than it is to kill him --- maybe more cost effective for our souls too.

Or we can all go broke and blind.