Meditations on Annoying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Annoying is a well-crafted, valuable read. The authors give generous treatment both to the social psychology and physical science mechanisms of much that annoys. That includes public cell phone conversations, the blaring of sirens, the buzzing of flies, the cracking of knuckles, the machinations of Newman on Seinfeld. As a closet Lothario, I was intrigued that attractive traits in courtship like independence and caring can prove annoying in marriage when they morph into aloofness and cloyingness. As a Red Sox fan, I was grateful to the authors for their resurrection of Yankee reliever Joba Chamberlain’s ordeal in the 2009 playoffs against both the Cleveland Indians and swarms of annoying midges from Lake Erie.

Forgive the authors’ occasional digressions that treat descriptions of scientific processes as ends unto themselves. They are, after all, science hounds. (Joe Palca is an NPR science reporter; Flora Lichtman is an NPR multimedia science editor.) Most of the time though, their physical science is apropos, like their description of the genetic and cellular mechanisms that screw up oxytocin flow, which correlates with an individual’s capacity to empathize and absorb stress (i.e. to be less annoyed and abrasive.)

Rare in popular social science books is the authors’ admirable scientific restraint in refraining from generalizing beyond their data—Don’t expect a unified field theory of annoying. But they do offer the insight that much that annoys us may be attention-commandeering stimuli that once presaged dire outcomes (evolutionarily speaking). In evolutionary terms, schlumps who got annoyed were more likely to survive. That makes annoying in the  21st century truly affordable. Why not, in gratitude, elevate your next dinner party with tales that enchant and annoy. Here's an example from Wig and Pen:

A Horological Annoyance. In the mid 1970s my late father’s wife redecorated the family homestead with a pseudo-antique table clock that announced its presence on the half hour with a metallic stridency that might have been a soundtrack for a cartoon featuring animated cookie cutters. One afternoon, while the lady of the house was out and about, a friend who repaired clocks as a hobby and who could stand the sound no longer, marched over to the clock and gently adjusted its chime hammer. Presto! Hyde became Jekyll. Metallic annoyance became dulcet. But my friend had only massaged a symptom of the underlying problem. When the clock’s owner returned, she immediately detected its kinder, gentler timbre, and demanded immediate restoration of its previous persona. I heard the clock’s annoying ring for the final time in 1983 on the night of my father’s funeral.

Glass-Is-Half-Empty Weather Forecast Images

Consumer advisory: In its popular 7-day forecast web page, the National Weather Service assigns a weather image to each day and night ahead that often views the weather-glass as half empty. As a former U.S. president might have complained, Those stormy pictures are often big hat, no cattle. That is why this blog as a public service has grafted two Seasonal Affective Disorder lights like bookends around the sorry sequence of weather images above. Note that 40% and 50% chances of rain receive decidedly rainy images. We might, of course, just as well be looking at 60% and 50% chances of dry weather.

Even more inspirational for the umbrella trade is the torrential rainy image at left, where the chances of no rain are 70%. Perhaps the Weather Service in its image choice is emphasizing the intensity rather than the chance of ill weather. On the other hand, if there is a 100% chance of only a 15 minute downpour, will the NWS serve up a tsunami image?

To date, this blogger has failed to resolve these troubling questions. Perhaps his friend, Dr. Roberto—an often reluctant economic forecaster—is right when he says: “Although weather forecasting is more reliable than many of our other predictive arts, the Weather Service like the rest of us may have much to hedge about, especially in covering for themselves should bad news prove worse.”

Graduation Wishes from on High

For the second year running, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony featured a nationally prominent keynote speaker that mirrored the university’s increasing national stature. Last year, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair got the call. On Friday, May 13, national political pundit and former advisor to four presidents David Gergen was at the podium welcoming his own generation’s future passing of the leadership baton to the generation that includes the 2011 graduating class.

Exit, Stage North. While few among the Class of 2011 were unenthusiastic about that prospect, they and Mr. Gergen were absolutely wowed by the message from outer space from astronaut Catherine (Cady) Coleman that followed on several supersized screens. Seated in the International Space Station with her hair coursing upwards in zero gravity, Coleman, who holds a Ph.D. in polymer science from UMass Amherst, emphasized the importance of teamwork. After releasing a miniature bobblehead likeness of the university’s mascot—the Minuteman—into weightlessness—she bid adieu to the Class of 2011 with the Serling-inflected message—I look forward to your future! Then she released her own seat restraint and levitating northward, vanished from the frame. View Cady’s extraterrestrial remarks and choreography here:

CadyProRes

Turning away from the American Public, Obama Embraces Us

At the end of his 9-minute announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s demise, President Obama threw his audience an unexpected behind-the-Barak-pass. Speech over, he turned 180 degrees and ambled off down a hallway with his backside to his audience. A remarkable forensic sayonara from an American president.

To decode that nonverbal passage, this blog spoke with several marketing professors and practitioners. “It’s about closure,” one of them remarked. “By showing us his back, he’s closing the book on Bin Laden and much of the 9/11 trauma. Obama’s body says better than W’s words ever did:  Mission Accomplished!" “After walking away from us, Obama takes a sharp left and disappears into another room,” noted a second observer. “His gait is calm and business-like as if he’s about to take care of more business of state, even though the nation is about to party.”

Another marketing pundit was more prescient: “By walking ahead and away from us, especially when he’s just registered a political slam dunk, Obama is inviting us to follow him--for six more years.”

The final 30 seconds of the Obama speech:

This Is Not a Peccary?

This is not a pig!!--Such a comfort for the zoo-going  public at the peccary corral at the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem. To cover most bases, the signage is in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Arabic. And it terminates with two exclamation marks to underscore its urgency and transcendent import. (See the photo below; the sign, of course, reads right to left.)

Source: FRGDR blog

 After all, “the other white meat” and the animal that gives it up are anathema to Orthodox Jews and Muslims. According to Leviticus, the pig has the desirable “cloven” hoof but doesn’t ruminate (i.e., chew its cud). To be zoo- and dinner-worthy, you need both assets.

Leviticus explains:

the pig, for though it divides the hoof, it does not chew cud, it is unclean to you. You shall not eat of their flesh nor touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you.

And the Qur’an's unambiguous position on pig consumption boils down to this: Just Say No! (or else!)

Enter the Peccary. But the peccary is a pigoid above the fray. So what if it they are known commonly as skunk pigs? So what if they are as hairy as Sean Connery’s back before Hollywood insisted that the original 007’s dorsal required a blade more persuasive than Odd Job’s? So what if they are members of the family Tayassuidae, a.k.a, New World Pigs, which belong to the artiodactyl suborder Suina, which also includes the bona fide pig family, Suidae.

Not to worry! In addition to cloven hooves, peccaries are blessed with the missing link to orthodox cred: a nonruminating stomach. (even though the organ has three chambers and an internal cuissinart that allows them to process roughage like prickly pear cacti.)

Peccaries for Peace. With that said, isn’t it time to elevate the peccary as a symbol of rapprochement in the Middle East? You’ve got a better idea? Let’s begin with our mutual tolerance for the little critters and erect a peace that lasts. Let's bring Arab and Jew to the peace table--a capacious table where all eat peccary together.




This Is Not a Peace Pipe?



Letting Their Freak Flags Fly

James Taylor;Paul Simon

There comes a time in many a follicle-challenged pop-star’s career when the decision to conceal hair loss looms large. After all, for many of those ageing baldies, the seductions of marketing still pander to their roots in a culture where youth’s magic horn plays on. Check out, then, the Maginot Line in the career of James Taylor—a boundary where the hatless vagaries of youth give way to concealment by haberdashery and other wiles. Note the career tipping point below between his Dad Love’s His Work (1981) and That’s Why I’m Here (1985) albums. For Paul Simon, concealment came much earlier in the 1970s. Paul opted for hairpieces, which he finally traded in for hats in the mid-1990s.

Across the Great Divide:
Dad Loves His Work (1981); That's Why I'm Here (1985)

On album covers, both artists have sported a frolic of hats. And both have embraced additional concealments like cropping their heads/faces right where hairlines might have launched in younger days.

Finally, they’ve also dispensed entirely with their own images on album covers (including Simon’s latest). Is Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints a subliminal longing for plumage lost? Is JT’s Never Die Young a lusting for hair beyond the pale of his and our species?

It troubles Wig & Pen that both ageing boomers--true American artists--continue to duck and cover.  Can they reconcile their roles as tragic artists with membership by default in what Larry David celebrates as "the bald community."  Here's hoping they reconcile and let their 21st Century freak flags fly.

Hitlers in America

In the clip below, Chris Hitler, an investment and real estate specialist in Mequon, Wisconsin, wants you to know that he is passionate about personal storage. Listen to the clip, and you’ll hear Chris, without pretentiousness or guile, deliver his pitch. For Wig & Pen, the experience was revelatory—everything about Mr. Hitler exudes middle American normalcy except, of course, the drop-dead weight of his surname. Comics pursuing straight-man roles should study this offering. It could raise the late Phil Hartmann from the other side.

This blog discovered Chris Hitler in the indispensible web article, A Brief History of Hitlers in America, by Howard Altman. Altman describes the town of Circleville, Ohio as Hitler Central. You can find five generations of Hitlers buried in its Hitler-Ludwig Cemetery. For marmoreal photos, click here.

At the Gates in Circleville

The End of the Line? Altman’s article is a great read but like many writers who embrace a subject, he is excessively bullish about it:

You might think there wouldn’t be any Hitlers in America. But they’re everywhere, Altman remarks. ". . . In fact, there are 50 or so Hitlers living in these 50 states and their history with our country goes back over 200 years.

Fifty Hitlers is what I call a one-way trip to extinctionville. Let’s be generous and say that 40 have child-bearing potential. Twenty of the 40 would likely be women, who I think would be itching to trade in their surname for a spouse’s. That would likely apply to the trend in hyphenated married names, including those of the implicated offspring. What self-respecting American bride would prefer the married name of Hitler-Messerschmidt to the less controversial, more efficient Messerschmitt?

That leaves us with 20 male Hitlers. Even given a reproductively fit cadre from this subset, how many women do you think would line up to be the first on their block to conspire in Hitler, The Next Generation?

Inspiration for this post came from the pathbreaking TV series Hill Street Blues. In several episodes of season three, a traffic scofflaw—profession: unemployed stand-up comedian—sported the name Vic Hitler. Valuing true talent, Hill Street Detective J.D. LaRue signed on as his short-lived agent. But the jokester was doubly cursed: his name proved a liability with club owners and his on-stage narcolepsy proved a show stopper. Sample this Hitler’s day in court in the clips below.

The Brand that Was You--2011

The brand that was Lou

For a second year running, this blog celebrates the enchanted craft of branding. What a growth industry it has become! Just like power tools, ping pong balls, universities, and New Age retreats, individuals have their own brands too. Such hopes had I for the improvement of my own personal brand 14 years ago after discovering Tom Peters’ heady article, The Brand Called You !

But even though I’ve repeatedly failed to realize my brand potential, it’s a comfort to know that future opportunities for revisionism await, if not in life, then afterwards via my local newspaper’s obituary column.

For several years, the Northampton, Massachusetts-based Daily Hampshire Gazette has turned to reader-penned necros.  Beside the honoree’s name and age, the author gets to distill a lifetime’s "footprint" in a word or two. Without purgatorial delay, here’s my Top Ten Roster from the past year. I’ve changed the names and ages of the innocent (and the experienced), but left their personal "brands" intact.:

10. Inez Gomulka, 87,~
       Lived All Her Life on the Family Farm
 
 9. Tobias Z’Beard, 58,~The Perfect Gentleman

 8. Chadwick Cook, 74,~ Protector of Special Places

 7. Abigail Sweeney, 88, ~World-Class Grandmother

 6. Dianne Boger, 82, ~Data Entry Pioneer

 5. Arthur Colovito, 71, ~A Quiet Man

         ~Tied for 4th place~

 4. Thaddeus Prosky, 62, ~3 Holes in One

 4. Ned Romanowski, 91, ~Golf Fueled His Life

 3. Ozgood Curtis,75, ~Career in Funeral Services

 2. Sidney Charles, 38, ~Saw Humor in Everything

 1. Grady Gerber, 58, ~Born to Ride

Ave, Pope Jeremy!

Still Wafer-thin after all theses years

The Borgias, which debuted last night on Showtime with the no-holds-barred episode, “The Poisoned Chalice/The Assassin,” stars Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, a.k.a. Pope Alexander VI. Without question Alexander could really fill a vestment (See above.) Jeremy Irons, on the other hand (like the late George Harrison), has—to euphemize—gaunt good looks. Who would spite him for not bulking up like Robert De Niro in the final segments of Raging Bull?

Irons, of course, is so convincing a thespian that he should easily overcome the slings and arrows of horizontal challenge. Especially since Showtime has gone out of its way to omit likenesses of the real Rodrigo from its marketing (i.e., we are not anchored to his true image). To underscore Irons’ dramaturgical gifts, this blog dares to present the original Rodrigo and his Showtime scion side by side. The Borgias’ dramatic grist, of course, should also help Pope Jeremy to rise to the occasion. After all, combining Church corruption and “Family” business (a la the Sopranos) should prove an unbeatable, transcendent opportunity.

Entranced at Amherst College

“I know trance music when I hear it,” might have been the response of late U.S. Supreme Justice Potter Stewart had he attended last Friday night’s (March 25) concert as the final installment in this year’s Parallels Series, an inspired new music series at Amherst College. For a nonstop hour and 45 minutes, Ethiopia’s greatest singer, Mahmoud Ahmed, backed by Boston’s Either/Orchestra—a progressive ten-piece jazz ensemble—had the audience of 400+ under its power.

What was it about that dark, eclectic music that provoked college-age women to rise up from their seats, shaking and swaying in serpentine thralldom? Or the rest of us to embrace a more seat-bound version of such submission?

Seduced by the darkness. The relentless pulse gained power via the dark confines of the music’s architecture. A pentatonic scale that almost never resolved on “comfort” notes like major fifths, and a tonal range that rarely exceeded two octaves kept the listener in a state of willing confinement. So did horn tones that avoided primary colors and excessive brightness.

The effect was to propel the audience forward in a truncated musical space--as if through a dim-lit subterranean passageway just high enough to stand in. Along the way, periodic syncopations from Mahmoud’s baritone and the horns added spice to the relentless forward progress. The musicians offered additional digressions--call and response vocal and instrumental volleys and extended instrumental improvisations (some of them excellent).

The redoubtable Grace Zabriskie

During one of the concert’s many sultry moments, it occurred to me how splendidly the music might work as a soundtrack in some of David Lynch’s tawdrier movies—perhaps even in Twin Peaks. Swaying in my seat, I closed my eyes and all at once saw a giant likeness of Grace Zabriskie’s face homing in on my own. A true demonstration of the power of music to enchant!

Mahmoud Ahmed’s basaltic voice originates in the back of his throat and takes you for a ride. At age 69 he remains a vocal marvel; his commanding presence got stronger as the evening progressed. Listen to a clip of him below with the Either/Orchestra,which--just like in in Amherst--offers a stunning exploration of crepuscular soundscapes through nuanced arrangements and dark dissonances.

A Chip off the Old Corporate Block

The next time you reach for a Dorito, consider its rounded corners. Those beveled vertices are soft, but it wasn’t always that way. Before the great Dorito makeover of 1994, they came to sharp points, just like at your friendly Mexican restaurant. In the company of a good sangria, who hasn’t felt the prick?

I first became aware of Doritos’ rounded corners ten years ago on a tour at a Frito-Lay factory. When we got to the Dorito production line, our host showed us the metal molds, each with a myriad of soft-cornered triangular negative spaces awaiting infusions of cornmeal. No sharp points; fewer law suits to worry about, he confessed.

That explanation, of course, was never part of the official Pepsi/Frito-Lay party line back in 1994. (Nor will you find it in Dorito’s present-day Wikipedia entry.) It’s easier to eat them without the sharp corners, noted Jerry Vogel, Frito-Lay’s then Director of Corn Products in a 1994 New York Times article. . . a lot of the scrap in the bag, he added, was from the corners breaking off.

Will the real Dorito take a bow!

No doubt about that, but back then high-profile lawsuits against food manufacturers/purveyors and, of course, the tobacco industry, were all the rage and the source of deep-dish corporate neuroses. Remember the great McDonald’s scalding coffee incident of 1992? Seinfeld did, in an episode when Kramer bungled a sure-thing settlement in the wake of a scalding latte tucked inside his pants. Who told you to put the balm on? demanded his motor-mouth attorney, Jackie Chiles. In a later episode, Jackie experienced similar frustration when Kramer kissed off a windfall from the tobacco companies. But by redesigning the Dorito for architectural superiority, Frito-Lay made its chip litigiously bullet proof. And brace yourself--they did consumers a favor.

View the legal tete a tete here.

New Glocks on the Block in Amherst, Massachusetts

Last week, when my son’s alarm failed to detonate for school, trouble ensued. So I promised that we’d buy a new clock at our local oasis for controlled substances, CVS. Perhaps because of the aura of drugs, we began riffing compulsively—a la Who’s on First—about buying not a clock but a Glock—e.g., a high-performance Glock with a quiet mechanism, etc. Of course, it was easy pickings to home in on several stylish Glock-branded Clocks via Google.

A Glock in a Clock; that sounds like Dr. Seuss material, observed a friend who has never fired a gun. That immediately evoked fond memories of The Cat in the Hat, featuring its superhero’s precarious balancing acts with concatenations of household objects (see below) This high-profile blog would never alter such copyrighted material, but invites you—consider it a rainy-day family project—to photoshop the requisite alarm clock and Glock to the top of the heap.

What, no Glock on a Clock?

Finally, while flat out on my New Age chiropractor’s training table last week, I mentioned my recent blog post on forthcoming legislation in Texas that will allow concealed guns onto the Lone Star State’s public university campuses. My chiropractor’s response: You should have seen the Valentine’s Day ad that I saw for a pink derringer-size Glock surrounded by chocolates—all in a heart-shaped box. So far, this blogger’s searches for that keepsake have come up empty. But Wig & Pen is pleased to submit the forensic evidence below, no less felonious to the diabetically challenged.

Fishy Business Revealed



Source: The Wall Street Journal

When I was five, my family lived next door to an affable guy who owned a fish market on Water Street, the old Jewish commercial center in Worcester, Massachusetts. His wife was a bleached blonde and a chronic malcontent--often with him in the crosshairs. “Nathan—don’t come near me until you’ve showered,” was her ritual greeting to him after a fishy day’s work. He was a good provider; but she had higher aspirations, my father told me years later. And, added my father, she subscribed to one olfactory truth--that you could take Nathan out of the fish market but you’ll never take the fish market out of Nathan. How did he de-scent? A shower must have just been the beginning, my father speculated.

Those buried memories rose to the surface last week when I saw the artful cuts of salmonized graphics (see above) accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s March 2 feature, The Slippery Business of Picking Fish. What a paean to the salmon!—graphics that suggested salmon wall-plaques, salmon contra-dance skirts and the kindest cut of all—a salmonic likeness of the Green Mountain State. (So what if it’s Wild Pacific Salmon?)

The Mostest in Symbiosis. Salmon and Vermont, in fact, have coevolved in landlocked harmony even before Wig & Pen. Vermont salmon (Salmo salar) are genetically and physically identical to their Atlantic brethren—both are balletic leapers, spawn in streams, and migrate to open waters—the latter to the ocean and the former to Vermont’s lakes (Champlain, Dunmore, the Northern Lakes of the “Northeast Kingdom).  Click here for more than you want to know about Vermont’s landlocked salmon.

And how might a veteran fish monger best exorcise the smell of Vermont salmon or, for that matter, an entire fish market? There’s no silver bullet, remarked the proprietor of North Shore Seafood on King Street in Northampton, Massachusetts. “Throughout the day I use hand soap and lemon juice,” he confessed. “Of course I shower when I get home and use a bit of bleach on my clothes. One thing’s for sure: if I go out at night, it's not in clothes that I’ve worn at work--I do value what's left of my social life.”

Guns in Texas College Classrooms: A Shot in the Arm for Online Education?

Will Kevlar Save in Texas?

Blogger’s preface: Two years ago, my friend Osgood,* a dynamic professor of accounting, left my campus in Amherst to head up an accounting department at a large private university in Texas. Lately, I’ve been thinking about him in light of forthcoming legislation in the Lone Star State that will give college students and their professors the right to pack heat—including concealed handguns—on the state’s 38 public university and college campuses. Although the law targets public higher education, my friend’s campus and other private universities will no doubt be in the crosshairs of change in the “Don’t Mess With” state—change that aspires to make gun possession a protective right for (almost) all.

That’s especially poignant for my friend because introductory accounting regularly ranks high among courses that fail the most students. Credit two factors: the course’s level of difficulty and its status as a gateway for majors outside accounting. If you plan, for example, to get a business degree in marketing or human resources, soldiering on through intro accounting is a rite of passage. (After all, it is the language of business; isn't it? ! Ask your CPA. See the top ten list below for Temple University.) Passing intro accounting, then, is analogous to, but less formidable than, passing organic chemistry if, say, you plan to become an orthodontist or a proctologist.


Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com

 Gird Thy Loins. The bottom line, then, for my friend and his intro accounting staff is—Protect yourself at all times from students who may harbor resentment and,of course, guns. If you’re on the dais in a lecture hall, you’re the alpha target in the house. If 20% of the 200 students in your class are failing, and just 25% of them (i.e., ten) are armed and dispersed among the audience, their own accounting problem becomes your logistical problem. First, Wig & Pen recommends that you seek intimacy with Kevlar. Like the professor depicted above, wear a suit that declares—“I'm a bipedal fortress.” Avoid nambi pambi Kevlar executive vests: Don’t conceal your protective cred like a hidden asset in an accounting footnote. (Explore the latest in protective wear here.)

Second, value good marksmanship when hiring teaching assistants. Remember, they are your first, best line of defense. Position them tactically and if possible, assign failing students to a pie-wedge-shaped sector that widens toward the front of the hall. Just imagine, the hapless, ill-intentioned student in the second row doing a depreciation problem. Before he can say “straight line,” he’s fit for amortization himself, felled by friendly fire.

And finally, if like Wig & Pen you’ve never fired a gun beyond Boy Scout camp, consider this strategic prospect: Online education is becoming as expansive as all of Texas!

*I’ve changed his name to protect what’s left of our friendship.

Old Man Walking—Just like a Train

Get Out of My Way, You Jerk, a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, examined the causes and consequences of pedestrian sidewalk rage. The feature cited average rates of locomotion in Manhattan for men (4.42 feet per second), women (4.10 fps), cellphone users (4.20 fps), tourists (3.79 fps), and others.

And it sparked my memories of an elderly Brit with two oversized canes and the air of a professor emeritus whose forward progress gave new meaning to the word glacial. Until last June’s heat wave, he would walk each day onto my campus (the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), eventually stopping for lunch at a campus cafeteria.

Although he moved at a tempo apart, no one who ever saw him failed to admire his grit and his walk ethic. Still, when he extended a cane onto the crosswalk at Massachusetts Avenue—a large thoroughfare that bisects the campus—he became the scourge of most drivers at directional cross-purposes. At those crossings, prominent Ped-X-ing signs and tight campus police enforcement ensure that foot traffic rules.

So how long might a driver on the wrong side of the cane wait for our friend? One day I timed his passage across the two east-bound lanes (15 feet across total). Getting across both took him 42 seconds—an eternity if you’re behind the wheel, perhaps an eternity and a day if you’re a student behind the wheel.

A 42 second stroll--15 feet across

Just like a train. “For me it’s not unlike coming up short at a train crossing,” observes a friend who studies the behavior and psychology of decision making by accountants. “At first there’s shock and disappointment that you just might have an indeterminate wait on your hands. How you adjust—how you shift gears mentally and emotionally—is critical, of course, to your short-term disposition. Why not count train cars from Peoria or root for the aging professor as he goes for the gold?”

Sometimes, though, a more pragmatic response can present itself. If you’re in the far lane, and the cane has just touched down on the crosswalk, you have 21 seconds before it reaches your lane. Many drivers, in fact, grab daylight while they can. But a strict interpretation of Massachusetts law, i.e., “law driving,”--the stuff you learn to get your license—requires that you stop your vehicle whenever anyone sets foot (or cane) on a crosswalk. Fortunately, there are broader interpretations of the law: “In a situation like that,” observed a campus police officer, "my recommendation is—use good driving judgment!"

New iPhone App Will Not Replace Confession; Will Not Replace Priests

Say what you will about the Catholic Church--unlike many American institutions, it has protected its key employees—i.e, the priests, from the scythe of downsizing via outsourcing and replacement by new technologies. Heaven knows the American Catholic Church has bills to pay. To this end, it has embarked on an unprecedented fire sale of church property and parish consolidations. Priests, of course, have been shunted about, but it’s mostly the property that’s been downsized.

What a comfort, then, to learn that the Vatican disapproves of a new application that allows for fingertip preparation via iPhone for confession. Cooked up by the Indiana company Little iApps, the program, Confession: A Roman Catholic App, recently debuted after securing approval from Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. But the Vatican doth protest:

I must stress. . . to avoid all ambiguity, under no circumstance is it possible to confess by iPhone, emphasized Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi last week.

The Vatican’s principal motive, of course, is not pecuniary but spiritual. “It is," continues Lombardi, "to require a personal dialogue between penitents and their confessor, [which] cannot be replaced by a computer application.”

Rightsizing: A Confession. But if a full-confession app did catch on and became confession-as-usual, it would no doubt cut into a priest’s workload. When Wig & Pen’s own priestly friend Guido headed up a medium size parish, he devoted three to five hours each week (more during the Lenten season) to the confessional. If you multiply 4 hours per week by the nation’s 19,000 Catholic parishes in 2006 (the number of parishes has undoubtedly declined after the recent consolidations), you get 77,000 hours. That would be quite a bone for Corporate America’s spread sheet “right-sizers,” who might crunch even a fraction of hours saved into fewer priestly positions.

Fortunately, the church has conservative values of a different stripe. How sinful it would be, for example, if an app were to obliterate the practices that inspired Jerry Seinfeld’s brush with the confessional in the clip below.

A Nixon in China Artifact

This year’s long-overdue Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams’ Nixon in China (introduced by the Houston Grand Opera in 1987) is a big deal. It is coming (simulcast) to a cinema or auditorium near you this Saturday afternoon at 1 p.m. (A reprise performance is planned for early March.) In Nixon, Adams moved well beyond minimalism, incorporating wafts of big band jazz; didactic, politicized Chinese ballet; and  reflective airs bordering on melancholy. Adams and librettist Alice Goodman teamed up with great deftness to portray characters that almost never became caricatures—quite an accomplishment considering the principals: Mao, Chou Enlai, Chiang Ch’ing (Mao’s wife), Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Nixon Agonistes himself.

The bamboo curtain was cinched tightly around China before Nixon’s seminal visit in 1972 (think of today’s North Korea). Nixon—the bête noir of anyone left of center—deeply offended many Republicans with his visit—the price of which was to boot Taiwan (then known as the Republic of China) out of the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. itself. (Taiwan still hasn’t gotten back in; it needs China’s Security Council vote for readmission.)



Presidential Material: A Li River boat cruise

Wig & Pen Stumbles upon a Nixon in China Artifact Several years ago, this writer walked into a drab, two-room commercial gallery in a waterfront community on the outskirts of the southern Chinese city of Guilin, gateway to the Li River. (Although most Chinese have never visited the city, many American presidents have. Chinese hosts consider a boat cruise for top visiting dignitaries past the river's “floating-world” karst outcroppings as de rigueur.)

The gallery offered much forgettable artwork, but then I saw something really special. It was a framed gloss photo of the Nixons in 1972 on a Li River tour boat surrounded by a dozen crew members in cloned satin uniforms. As a friend and I admired the photograph, the gallery’s owner, a woman in her mid-40s who spoke no English, pointed to a uniformed teenage girl standing just behind the Nixons. Then she pointed to herself. In 1972 she had been an eyewitness to a historical watershed; 34 years later she had traveled far beyond, along a propulsive river of cultural and economic transformation.


A helping from the Met's Nixon in China Banquet Scene:

Greetings from Quebecachusetts!

A tip for New Englanders who are stressed out over the elements. Seek out a Canadian for a saner hibernal perspective. It worked wonders for me, especially after I had convinced myself that this Massachusetts winter might well rival a winter in Quebec.

Thankfully, my septugenerian Canadian mentor, born and bred in Fredericton, New Brunswick, set me straight. Yes, she conceded, the past month has suggested a winter in Quebec. But a timid one.

Now I'm warming up (maybe not); I'm less hounded by meteorological injustice.

Also, when you consult with your Canadian, remember that his kind are among the planet’s savviest cold-weather pragmatists. They have black belts in removing just enough snow from roofs, wrapping wet pipes with towels and other reachables, and striking a golden mean in sartorial layering.

And they offer advice with scarcely a trace of superiority. To do otherwise, of course, would be un-Canadian, even American.  All the better for them:  revenge, as they know, is best served cold.

Choose a Canadian regional forecast from the Weather Channel here.

Owls and Messiaen Offer Levitation, Inspiration

One week ago at 3 a.m., I heard an owl from the trees behind my house. It offered several repetitions of the same sustained note in a dulcet alto that belied the bird’s predatory ways. Then, I heard a second note—a perfectly pitched fifth above the first—presumably from the same owl. But I was wrong. The fifth had come from a second owl. And then it happened. The two owls combined their notes simultaneously to create a stunning tonic-dominant interval. After several minutes of unrequited waiting for a reprise, I staggered back to bed in shock and delight.

Several days later, I got the skinny over the phone from naturalist Ted Watt at Amherst, Massachusetts’ Hitchcock Center for the Environment, which adjoins the wooded area behind my house. After quizzing me with a couple of his own diagnostic hoot impressions, Ted identified the birds as Great Horned Owls. January and February, he noted, is their time to nest, so I had been an aural voyeur to a mating ritual. Ted had never heard the simultaneous tonic-dominant interval himself and suggested that I try to record it. A small tape player now sits next to the water pick in my bathroom.

My Own Private Messiaen. My epiphany brought to mind the avian obsessions of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). A devout Catholic mystic and tireless amateur ornithologist, Messiaen visited bird habitats on at least four continents and jotted down the note patterns of bird songs and bird conversations for over 100 species. (Bartok, who wrote down folk music in the field in European and Northern African villages, did analogous work with Homo sapiens.)

Avian inspiration is conspicuous in many of Messiaen’s greatest works. His most popular opus, Quartet for the End of Time, (1940-41) offers a 7+ minute clarinet soliloquy that explores a bevy of avian activities. (see the video performance at the bottom of this post.) His extended work for solo piano, Catalog l’oiseaux, (1956-58) musically paints the personalities of 13 species, including the tawny owl (La chouette hulotte), portrayed by Messiaen with considerable left hand gravitas, yielding occasionally to upwardly mobile clusters that suggest enchantments of a starry night. (Messiaen’s pianist-wife and collaborator, Yvonne, introduced the Catalog and many other Messiaen piano works to the public. Her surname, Loriod, received proper homage in the Catalog via a musical tribute to le loriot, the golden oriole.)

Messiaen’s lavishly orchestrated Des Canyons aux Etoiles (1971-1974) depicted the U.S. western desert, and Utah's Bryce Canyon and nearby Zion National Park. The musical excursion explored geology, the night sky, and, of course, avifauna. The VIB’s included orioles, robins, mocking birds, and several smuggled-in Hawaiian birds that the composer had encountered in the Pacific. And in what many consider to be Messiaen’s culminating masterwork—Saint Francis of Assisi (1975-1983), (for spirituality it rivals any mass that I know of), the composer devoted an extended final scene in Act II to the saint’s ravishing Sermon to the Birds. For Messiaen, birdliness was next to godliness. Take it from Saint Francis and Messiaen in the passage below:

Brother birds in all times and places, praise your creator. He gave you the freedom of flying. . . He made you a present of the air, the clouds, the sky. . . He allowed you to sing so marvelously that you speak without words, like the speech of the angels, by music alone.

On the Aging of Aquarius

My first memory of collective Boomer decline came in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, shot in November of 1976. Close up after close up revealed road maps of dissipation on the faces and physiques of iconic music makers of My Generation. When Van Morrison, portly and prematurely middle aged, bounced out on stage, the graffiti was on the wall: the Boomers might just be mortal after all, like any other generational cohort. Five years later, after gaping at the vast latitudes of Gerry Garcia and David Crosby, I fantasized a dark futuristic tale in which the last veteran of the Woodstock Festival—a la the last Civil War and WWI veterans—would reminisce to skeptical younger generations about uncertain glory days.

I am, in fact, a Woodstock alumnus, but odds are overwhelming that I will not be the final survivor of that mud fancier’s Valhalla. In fact, I’d bet my son’s inheritance that the last man standing will be a woman. For the U.S. population 65 and above, women outnumber men 4 to 3. But if you’re a guy and you make it to the final cut of supercentenarians (age 110 and over), you’ll be utterly eclipsed. Only five males grace the Gerentology Research Group’s international roster of 85 supercentenarians.(←Click there.)

While that ratio may prove enticing to some incontinent members of the Y chromosome elite, it offers Wig & Pen scant titillation. Back when Boomers still boomed, this blogger, just out of high school, rebuffed the advances of the poet Robert Bly after a reading at Worcester State College. Years later, Bly became a founding father of the men’s movement. No surprise then that Wig & Pen has looked askance at their incendiary desert romps and pachydermal forest pursuits. But given my gender’s long-term prospects, perhaps a men’s group is in order, maybe even our own Woodstock.

Burning Y Chromosomes in the Desert