CALL ME SNAKE

It doesn't happen often in life, but it does happen. I'm talking about those times when a man needs to buckle down and buy a new belt. The one I'd been wearing for the past 15 or so years was wearing thin, fraying at the edges, and becoming somewhat of an embarrassment. So I needed to face up to this important, though easy to put off, task.

The Gap (product placement!) had an amazing sale, unloading their belts for $3.99 apiece. I took three. If I get 15 years out of each of them, I have to figure--even with the most optimistic actuarial assumptions--that I'm set for life, at least when it comes to belts. That, of course, raises the usual "good news/bad news" dichotomy--the good news being that after my $11.97 investment, I won't need to purchase another belt in my life. The bad news is that I won't need to purchase another belt in my life. And that is kind of scary, as it makes the whole mortality thing all them more imminent. And palpable.

Were I to do it all over again, I'd live my life in the present. And buy my belts one at a time.

I always felt that kids who are cut off from television are kind of out of it in a quaint, Amish sort of way. Which is why I've trained my children to become good TV watchers--or at least I'd thought they were trained as such. But now the strategy has appeared to backfire as my three-year-old is in open revolt. One night over the weekend we watched a family video (something about a dog?) and the next night the women's figure skating on the Olympics (which I'd taped the night before). The next night, as we were getting ready for bedtime, my youngest upstart remarked: "I hope we don't have to watch another movie tonight. That's boring!" Instead, I was forced to read her a book before bed, all the while feeling like a total, unmitigated failure as a parent. So I ask you (at the risk of repeating myself): What's the matter with kids today?

You know the old saying: The more things change, they more they get worse. That certainly has been the case vis a' vis development in "the fair city of Cambridge," as the Car Talk brothers call it. The colorful establishments that played a big role in making this a so-called "interesting" place to live are disappearing, one by one and score by score. The Plough & Stars, a legendary Irish pub (a few blocks from my house) that closed last year, is one such place. My wife and I had our first official date there (our first unofficial date occurred at the Brattle Theatre--another "colorful" Harvard Square landmark about to go under), and I've had a number of unusual experiences at the Plough over the years (though, truth be known, I'm not the pub type).

So we all got weepy last year, pulling out our hankies for the Plough and reading its obit. But lo and behold, the Plough is coming back! (Under new management; in fact, it's being renovated now.) So things don't always get worse, after all. Sometimes they get better. And if not better, well maybe they can almost get back to where they were.

In a 228-page report issued yesterday, the White House admitted that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was badly "botched" and issued 125 recommendations to prevent a recurrence of the "comedy of errors" that transpired after the storm struck in late August. The most significant recommendation, from a policy standpoint, is worded as follows: "Henceforth, natural disasters shall not occur during the president’s ‘vacation’ time in Crawford, Texas."

I've seen ads on TV for a new kind of show, "The Evidence," that features a new kind of gimmick. "We provide the evidence," the ad says. "You solve the crime." That sounds like too much work for the average coach potato. (I'm not one yet but I aspire to be one soon.) Whatever happened to screenwriters? Are they all on strike? I'd like to suggest an alternative proposal to ABC: "You write the story. We watch the show." (Well not me, actually, but maybe somebody will watch it--not that the world is actually hurting for another crime drama. Hence the gimmick, I assume.)

I was prepared to write my usual curmudgeonly bit about the decline of ice skating at the Olympics. The men's competition, from what I saw, was dismal. The heightened focus on jumping--which has been the trend over the last several Games--has hurt the sport, in my opinion. Skaters, both male and female, are under intense pressure to perform jumps that are somewhat beyond their abilities. The result is frequent falls which are no fun (and sometimes painful) to watch. The grace and artistry (of someone like Paul Wylie) is mostly gone.

I was all set to write that until last night when I was lucky enough to catch the last few female entries in the "short program." Sasha Cohen was marvelous--a revelation--and I'm now prepared to eat those words. We can only hope that Cohen and the other athletes will achieve similarly exalted levels during tomorrow's free skate competition.

I watched a few minutes of the "freestyle aerials" last night on the Olympics and was struck by how much this sport has evolved. I spent a year as a ski bum in Vail in the early-70s, while I was still a teenager, and that was the year that "hotdogging" (as we called it then) really got going--with both aerial and bump skiing competitions. There was practically no coaching or supervised training, and people took reckless chances. One guy I know tried a gainer (back flip) on the first day he skied and dislocated his shoulder. Other people in competition, sadly, broke their necks.

One of the skiers last night did a triple-twisting triple back flip and the commentators called the degree of difficulty low--to give you a sense of how much things have changed. Personally, I find all those twists and flips hard to watch. I like the good old days--apart from the terrible injuries--when people did simpler jumps like sidekicks, daffies (a kind of spacewalking), spread eagles, and helicopters with great style and flair. I did all these jumps as well, along with cliff jumping--another thing we did for fun--though not necessarily "with great style and flair."

It was a simpler era. There was very little money in the sport. And people were mainly out to have a good time. Now it's a big-time Olympic competition and the purses have grown commensurately. But I'll still take a good sidekick over a triple-twisting triple back flip.

I don't normally reprint comments, but this one (sent by "hance" on 2006/02/11 at 02:39:38) seemed so important, I decided to break with my time-honored policy. Here's what hance had to say: “We are the registered traditional culture group in tanzania dealing with various type of culture shows activities. moistly we are dealing with the shows playing with various type of snakes in TANZANIA and africa at all.we have been invited in some of eoropean countries for shows. Please we are looking for the groups all arround the world to have a relation in order to have an idea and even commercial agreements each other."

The note seems straightforward enough--an appeal straight from the heart. The rest is up to you. Let's make something happen. And remember, it all started here at Call Me Snake.

Donald Rumself scoffed at Kofi Annan's call to shut down the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Rumsfeld claimed that the UN Secretary had never been to Gitmo and that he was "flat wrong" to suggest that prisoners there had been mistreated. Annan's statements about Gitmo were "beyond comprehension," Rumsfeld maintained. "That place is being run as well as any detention facility can be run."

If Rumsfeld is so fond of the place, maybe he should spend his next vacation there. Or better yet, take up permanent residence at that jewel in the Caribbean. And while he's at it, he could take his friends--Bush and Cheney--along with him.

Released from the hospital and calling himself a "very lucky man," Harry Whittington took his turn before the media on Friday, apologizing for all the trouble he'd caused Dick Cheney by getting between a quail and Cheney's gun and--as a result of his ineptitude--getting "peppered" with birdshot. “I'm deeply sorry for all that the vice president and his family has had to go through this week," Whittington told the press corps. He wished Cheney a speedy recovery from all the stress he has been subjected to on account of his [Whittington's] exceptionally poor judgment about when to retrieve the fowl he felled.

By all accounts, Whittington is an uncommonly understanding individual--almost heroic in his efforts to defend his friend's faulty aim. If you had to pepper somebody in a hunting accident--and I'm sure not recommending it, seeing as I'm not even a hunter--you probably couldn't pick a better person.