Is this what I've come to?

I had a scary experience, nearly an epiphany, with the TV Guide crossword. I am something of a devotee of the magazine; I’ve been a subscriber on & off for about 20 years – and by the way, I’m still recovering from the shock of the revamped version. After a lot of years when they always seemed to be looking for excuses not to write about TV, suddenly with the new format comes a renewed focus. Who would have ever guessed that the articles in TV Guide would be about TV shows?

In any case, however, the crossword page has always been my second-least favorite page, behind the hard-hitting journalism and indispensable information of the horoscope page. They’ve regained my attention lately by adding a Sudoku puzzle, which I love, but the TV Guide crossword puzzle over the years has mostly been only good for insults. As in, “You’re too stupid to finish the TV Guide crossword.”

The other night I finished the Sudoku and glanced at the crossword. With clues like “1 – First three letters”, I didn’t figure it would take too long (What, they couldn’t at least base the clue on the TV network of the same name?). And there were definitely some clues of the caliber that have made the puzzle famous… for example, “Leave ___ Beaver (two words)”.

But there were several other clues that were fairly obscure, but that I knew anyway. Kinda made me wonder if there’s such thing as a brain tumor that forces you to remember esoteric TV trivia. That has to be the most logical explanation, right?

Here are some of the clues I got right off, and for which I’m vaguely ashamed (answers below):

1. Ray of Married People
2. Rosalind of AfterMash
3. Shera of Ace Crawford, Private Eye
4. Jethro’s sister on The Beverly Hillbillies
5. Janitor on Night Court
6. Kathy of The Real McCoys
7. John of MacGruder and Loud

I’m pretty sure the most recent of these shows went off the air in 1991. The oldest was cancelled when I was 18 months old. And while I watched all these shows at least once (with the exception, I’m proud to say, of the rollicking Tim Conway vehicle Ace Crawford), I’m certainly not a fanatic for any of them. Nor is anyone else, I don’t believe.

I do have to confess that I’m very fond of a book called “The Complete Directory to Prime-Time and Cable TV Shows, 1946-present”. I own the 8th Edition, after having several others, and I really am capable of reading it like a novel, from ABC Barn Dance (1949) to Zorro and Son (1983). And I have a decent memory for trivia, which at one time made me the scourge of our peers with regard to Trivial Pursuit. But I swear, I haven’t read the book in at least months, maybe a year!

Before I continue, the answers to above, which I do hereby affirm and attest came completely out of my brain without the aid of the book:

1. Aranha
2. Chao
3. Danese
4. Jethrine
5. Art
6. Nolan
7. Getz (OK, I didn’t remember that one till I had a couple letters filled in. But seriously, whoever heard of John Getz?)

So it’s clear to me that there are only two possible courses of action (Note: I have already considered, and discarded, the option of “turning off the television and having a life”): Either I check into the local hospital for an immediate CAT scan in search of that tumor, or I go online and see if I can find the complete DVD collection of MacGruder and Loud.

The Rare Dodo

I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one of my kind. Although I suppose everyone feels that way at times, I’m thinking mostly of the way our family works.

Gender roles have certainly shifted over the past … what, 30 years? However, you don’t always see that reflected in the media or in the way people think. Since our older child was born, I have been working part-time; when our daughter was born, I cut back further to half-time. My wife works full-time, so I am the primary caregiver for the kids. In fact, as a minister she has a lot of evening commitments, so that means extra responsibility for me.

Beyond that, food-related tasks have never been her forte, so I am also responsible for cooking and grocery shopping. And since I have less time committed to my job, I also do the vast majority of the laundry and dishes. The temptation, of course, is that anything that needs doing goes in my column (“since you only work part-time”), but I definitely resist it.

Hey, we’ve basically worked it out between ourselves in a way that (usually) works for us, but I still get the feeling that I’m a mutant in the eyes of “the world”. A few relevant examples:

• It’s a disorienting experience for a dad to read a magazine like “Parents” or “Parenting”. Or maybe I’m just expecting them to live up to their names. They really should be called “Moms” and “Mothering”, because there’s seldom any acknowledgement that dads are part of the equation. The articles that relate to dads are usually advising women how to get their tentative or just lazy husbands to take a more active role in raising the children (I’m thinking that the only way I could be more involved is to carry them in a pouch like a kangaroo).
• Some time ago I was running errands with the kids – which of course is the only way anything ever gets done around here. I popped them out of the car and we headed for the door of the bank. There was a bank guy standing outside the door smoking a butt; he kind of smirked at me and said, “Babysitting today, huh?” I always try to set an example of calm and reason for my children, so I didn’t hit him. I kept right on going, but as I passed him I said, “No, just being a dad.”
• It’s not just the parenting stuff either. I still get remarks sometimes when my wife has to go out of town for a few days – “Guess you’ll have to cook for yourself!”, or, you know, “How are you going to survive on your own?”

I don’t know, I can’t see into everyone else’s house. Maybe every other dad comes home from work, plops down with a cold one, and lets “the little woman” handle the kid stuff. And I certainly didn’t get into this setup to get other people to tell me how swell I am. I have learned, however, about the power of expectations... so if we hope for parents to be equal partners, maybe we ought to at least act as if it's theoretically possible.

Locker Room -- Those Who Forget the Past...

As a longtime Mets fan, I have seen a number of approaches to the offseason task of reshaping the roster for the next year. In the early 70s, when I first became aware, it was often a case of picking up one guy who was supposedly going to be the answer – often a third baseman (Joe Foy, Bob Aspromonte, Jim Fregosi, Joe Torre). He usually wasn’t much good, and/or over-the-hill. Didn’t usually work (with the probable exception of Le Grand Orange, Rusty Staub).

In the late 70s, the team in the largest city in the US decided to go on the cheap. They rounded up whoever didn’t have a job somewhere else (Elliott Maddox, Tom Hausman, Kevin Kobel, Dock Ellis), with the hope of having enough guys to fill out a roster. Didn’t ever work (sorry, Lenny Randle: one good year doesn’t create an exception).

In the 80s, they began targeting value deals, cashing in their assets for guys with “upside” or to fill a specific role (still no free agents, by the way). I guess you could say it worked (Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Gary Carter, Howard Johnson); see also, 1986, 108 wins, World Champions. Or better yet, ask the ’86 Red Sox.

In the 90s, there was a seismic shift. Suddenly the club started handing out free-agent dough like it was one of those AOL CDs. Really, really didn’t work – not only were the players lousy AND jerks (Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman, Eddie Murray, Bret Saberhagen) but the contracts made them difficult to unload and the budget was already spent.

In recent years, we’ve seen some high-profile trades and a couple of free-agent splashes (Mike Piazza, Cliff Floyd, Roberto Alomar, Carlos Beltran), with the net result of one playoff loss, one World Series loss, and a slow drift through mediocrity to less exclusive neighborhoods.

Throughout, the conventional wisdom on the guys in orange and blue has been: not enough offense. Get us at least one more big bat. So many of the trades have been in search of some real thumper. It always seemed to me, subjectively, that the new guys never quite measured up. I wasn’t sure, so I decided to measure them.

I used OPS, a popular stat that combines on-base percentage and slugging percentage for a quick but descriptive shorthand of a hitter’s production, and found the top 20 OPSs for players the year before they became Mets. Then I compared their production in their first Met season. I excluded anyone who came over in midyear, with the exception of Mike Piazza (since he arrived pretty early in the season). The players in OPS order, with their first Met year: Piazza (98), Roberto Alomar (02), Cliff Floyd (03), Carlos Beltran (05), Duke Snider (63), George Foster (82), Bobby Bonilla (92), Rusty Staub (72), Mo Vaughn (02), Kevin McReynolds (87), John Olerud (97), Gary Carter (85), Dave Kingman (81 – the 2nd time), Jeromy Burnitz (02), Bernard Gilkey (96), Todd Zeile (00), Richie Hebner (79), Frank Thomas (62), Willie Montanez (78), and Robin Ventura (99).

Any Met fan of a certain age knows where this is headed; several of these guys were the most expensive and high-profile flops in Mets history. And indeed, 16 of the 20 declined in OPS, ranging from 0.4% (Thomas) to 26% (Alomar). The two big successes were Gilkey (up 12.6%) and Ventura (up 15.7%); note that both of those guys lost considerable altitude the year after that. The weirdest case was Gary Carter, who had exactly the same OPS as the previous year.

Averaging the percent changes, which isn’t really mathematically accurate since it’s not weighted by at-bats, the group as a whole declined by 7.6%. I also figured change in home runs (-10.1%) and RBIs (-7.6%).

This info is of national-security importance because of the arrival of Carlos Delgado, the latest slugger/savior. He had healthy numbers to start with (his year-before OPS ranked 2nd to Piazza), so a decline is not necessarily catastrophic. If he follows the trend, he ought to end up with an OPS of .909, and a line of .281-30-106, which any Met fan would sign off on today. I guarantee you, if he hits 30, no one will care where he stands for (or on) “God Bless America”, even if he stands on his head.

Metablog – Breaking the Code

As I have begun to get into this blogging business a bit, I have been struggling to understand how it’s really supposed to work. It’s definitely a form of communication with its own unique challenges….

It’s kind of like a diary, but there’s at least a theoretical chance that someone else will read this – so while I intend to be honest, it may be best not to be “nakedly” self-revelatory!

On the other hand, if it actually were a two-way conversation, that conversation would be informed by the relationship between me and the other party. You change the way you communicate based on who’s listening, but if you don’t know who’s listening, how do you set the style?

Even a work of fiction has its own internal logic and conventions, and as you read through, you hopefully come to understand the characters and watch them progress. However, even if you assume there are readers, they can jump in (and out) anywhere – in fact, they don’t necessarily even read them in the order you intend. So, pretty hard to shoot for "character development".

I’m not sure that many of the blogs I’ve scanned have given this concept (or anything else, but that’s another story) a lot of thought. I have to think that if I’m going to do this at all, it ought to be worth doing right. I just hope I eventually figure out what that looks like.

When I write our family's annual Christmas letter, I always have to keep in mind that it's the family's Christmas letter, not just mine. That means I am not always free to say everything that comes to mind, in whatever style I wish. If it were all me, it would be about 50% puns and wry observations. And, of course, my vocabulary tends to be a bit... I don't know, florid? Baroque? I have to admit that I come from the school of, "if a 50-cent word is good, a two-dollar word is better." In some circles that's seen as showing off, but really I just find it amuses me. In this I am following in the footsteps of some of my favorite funny writers such as Twain, Thurber, and PJ O'Rourke.

So one thing I have determined about writing this is that I'm going to indulge my own unique word sense to the hilt. They say you should "write for yourself", and since it's probably myself I'm writing for anyway, I have nothing to lose.

A&E - A Cracking Time

Although we are not big filmgoers at our house, there is one movie we are eager to see. It looks like it’ll have to be on video, which is not all that unusual around here. So in a few months, you’ll probably find me sleeping outside the video store, waiting for the arrival of the Wallace and Gromit movie.

Certainly I can tell you all about the first time I saw my wife, and I have a similar clarity about my love affair with W & G. We were living in Ohio, about 1995, in an apartment just outside Dayton. Kelly was in seminary and I was working all sorts of part-time jobs to pay the bills. It was late one evening – it strikes me that it was a Saturday night about 11 pm. I don’t know why we didn’t just go to bed, but instead we were lying on the couch flipping through the TV channels, when we hit upon the public TV station playing an odd sort of animated show.

Within minutes, I was lying on the couch alone – because my wife, whose strongest response to the comics page or a TV sitcom (or my jokes) is usually, “That’s funny,” had begun to laugh so hard she had literally fallen on the floor… an instance of ROTFL that predates instant messaging.

Needless to say, that viewing of “The Wrong Trousers” made us instant converts. Thanks to our friends at that Cincinnati PBS station – and we really owe them a donation! – we soon had a chance to watch the first W & G, “A Grand Day Out”. And to complete the experience, the third short, “A Close Shave”, came to a theater in Dayton some months later.

For the uninitiated, Wallace is a middle-aged and eccentric inventor who is continually developing ideas to improve "our modern lifestyle". Gromit is his dog, the real brains of the operation. Their inventions are often aided by Gromit's perusal of his well-thumbed (um, well-pawed?) copy of "Electronics for Dogs".

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the whole series is that Gromit is a well-defined and consistent personality despite the fact that he doesn't speak. However, he communicates more intelligence and humor with his eyes and eyebrows than a full season of your average sitcom.

We’ve been waiting desperately for a follow-up ever since our Ohio days (what I always call "the exile" -- perhaps a topic for another day), and finally our dream has come true. If the movie got you hooked, or if you didn’t “get” what all the fuss was about, anyone who hasn’t seen the short films should check them out… in the following order:

• “A Grand Day Out” is pretty entertaining, but obviously the first in the series. It looks a little like they shot it in someone’s basement. I have to admit, I would be hard-pressed to give a plot synopsis beyond "the lads run out of cheese and decide to go to the moon to get more" -- it just didn't stick in my head. Give it the bronze medal.
• “A Close Shave” is very funny and technically quite good, but somehow doesn’t take the gold for me. It does have the advantage, and also the disadvantage, of featuring a larger variety of characters. Also, although it is animated, and very funny even for kids, it does have some pretty scary moments, so parents might exercise caution. Very enjoyable, but I have to give it the silver.
• I guess you never quite get over your first – if you have to pick one, go for “The Wrong Trousers”. It’s just packed with classic moments; if you haven't seen it, I fear I will fail to explain why a penguin giving a sidelong glance is hilarious. And I honestly believe in my heart that the train chase sequence is perhaps the funniest 3 or 5 minutes of film you will ever see. I just defy anyone to watch that without laughing.

I'm proud to say that I'm not alone in my high esteem for these guys... see Roger Ebert's review of the movie ("arguably the two most delightful characters in the history of animation"). I broke down and bought the DVD collection for my wife for Christmas, so with any luck I will survive till the big-screen version arrives on video as well.

Christmas Performance Review

So I flunked Christmas.

OK, I don’t think I flunked, but I probably get something like a ‘C’. As a dyed-in-the wool traditionalist and all-around sentimental fool, I have a certain set of expectations for how the holiday season should go. Long-standing family traditions should be gently unwrapped and held up to the light again; children’s eyes should sparkle in wonder at the magic of the Yuletide; every secular, gift-related moment should be counterbalanced with a quiet, yet profound and heart-touching spiritual lesson on Christmas as Jesus’ birthday (my 3-year-old sinks to her knees, hands clasped in reverent prayer)….

Maybe this is just a different time, or maybe my parents’ generation was just better at this stuff (and everything else related to parenting), or maybe I just always wanted the full-body holiday experience so much that I saw something that wasn’t even there. I suppose it’s also just vaguely possible that I’ve set the expectations bar a little higher than reality can support.

In any case, if I had it to do over again, I’d:

• Spend more time reflecting on Advent. I had a very nice Advent calendar with a daily Scripture reading, which I put in my “inbox” and never saw again.
• Do more special things with the family. The Advent wreath got lit once, the angel chimes got lit once (and promptly burned down to barely-visible stubs), and we visited one nearby house to look at lights – and then only as we were on our way home from somewhere else.
• Stage-manage a little better. We had cookies for Santa (which we forgot to put out) and magic reindeer food (which we forgot to put out). Fortunately, my wife woke up with an “oops” and ran downstairs to dress up the set a little, while I tried to stall the children.
• Take seriously the concept of “some assembly required”. One of this year’s gifts was an indoor basketball hoop which, due to other commitments and a missing part, didn’t get assembled till the 28th. In addition, batteries were unsurprisingly not included, and our usual backup cache was not entirely sufficient to meet the demand. But more than anything else, I should’ve recruited some sort of Ocean’s Eleven-esque team of commandos to help break into the packaging ahead of time. Between the hermetically-sealed plastic clamshell packages (which, by the way, present razor-sharp edges if you get past the first line of defense), and the yards of wire twist-ties that bind everything to the package, it takes longer to get a toy out of the package than it did to buy it, or perhaps to manufacture it – which guarantees restless, grumpy children.

Of course, I do have to do it again. With a 6-year-old and a 3-year old, I’m guaranteed at least a half-dozen more attempts at a Christmas that’s the perfect marriage of Billy Graham and Martha Stewart.

On the other hand, maybe along the way I’ll learn to take it as it comes, not sweat the small stuff. After all, we got to spend time with friends and family, as a family. I was really proud of the gifts I got for my wife this year (all wrapped before the 24th), nothing elaborate but every one attuned to who she is and what she needs. I should mention that this was a vast improvement over the year when I got 2 weeks from Christmas with no ideas at all and had to take her shopping so she could point at things she liked – my most shameful Christmas memory!

We did actually talk about the meaning of Christmas, and though the kids still love Santa, they’re excited about Jesus too. I think one of my daughter’s favorite moments was getting to put Baby Jesus into our manger scene on Christmas morning. If nothing else, the kids got heaps of presents, and seem to enjoy playing with the ones that I’ve been able to get out of the package and find batteries for.