X is for eXit

The nearest eXit may not be the most obvious.

When my daughter was three and four, she used to watch this video called – well, actually I don’t remember. What I do recall is there was this cartoon dog character giving suggestions on how to get out of the house in case of fire. It had some good advice on knowing where all the available eXits are, making sure there is no clutter on the stairs that could hinder escape, checking to see if the door is warm to find out whether an eXit might be blocked, staying low when there is smoke because the air’s better closer to the ground, and identifying a meeting place to gather when everyone has gotten out.

Recently, she was required at school to go through this drill put on by the local fire department, which involved climbing out a window. She NOW wants us to practice the drill I had been showing her on TV five or six years earlier.

I’m supposed to be in charge of our department’s eXit strategy at work in case of fire or other emergency. The current building owners are not very helpful with feedback, but I do know: the nearest eXit may not be the most obvious, and to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

One of the most distracting part of flying is that pitch about the best way to get OUT of the plane, should one need to do so. Certainly, it is not what I most like to think about, but when the flight attendant says, “Know where your nearest exit is, making note that it may be behind you,” I ALWAYS look for it, whereas, it appears, most people keep reading their magazines.
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Gary David Goldberg, ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Spin City’ creator, dies at 68, My favorite of his credits was the short-lived TV series Brooklyn Bridge.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

Colonoscopy preparation day!

If I’m a little slow visiting your websites, you will know why!

Preparing for my second colonoscopy

I’m having a colonoscopy tomorrow. Oh boy! The preparation starts today. Actually, it started a week ago, when I purchased the laxatives and the clear liquids to take today. Then a couple of days ago, start a low-fiber diet, avoiding nuts, seeds, popcorn, and corn. Yesterday, drink at least 8 glasses of water or other clear liquid while maintaining a low-fiber diet.

Today, low residue breakfast: eggs (not fried), bananas, apple sauce, juice without pulp. Clear liquids for the remainder of the day. At 3 pm, start the laxative/clear liquid regimen, finishing up tomorrow morning, which of course will keep me…busy. The actual procedure will be around 12:30 pm tomorrow, and my wife will bring me home.

So if I’m a little slow visiting your websites, you will know why!

Here’s what humor writer Dave Barry said about HIS colonoscopy back in 2008: “Which brings us to you, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Ms. Over-50-And-Hasn’t-Had-a-Colonoscopy. Here’s the deal: You either have colo-rectal cancer, or you don’t. If you do, a colonoscopy will enable doctors to find it and do something about it. And if you don’t have cancer, believe me, it’s very reassuring to know you don’t. There is no sane reason for you not to have it done.”

I did this before, a decade ago. It was no big whoop; I don’t believe that I watched the procedure on the monitor. My wife gets one every five years – her brother John died of colon cancer at the age of 42 in 2002 – and she likes to watch.
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Colonoscopies Explain Why U.S. Leads the World in Health Expenditures: “The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care…, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.”

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Television as a cultural anthropological prism

Recently, I referred to my wife as Ramsey Gordon, which was that she was the total opposite of Gordon Ramsey, that mean chef on whatever that cooking show he’s on that I have actually never seen five minutes of.

Ike and Mamie watching TV

I think I keep reading about, and therefore writing about television, despite the fact that I watch it in decreasing amounts because I find it a fascinating cultural phenomenon. I was at our choir party this month, and we were talking about how networks, particularly ABC, will start broadcasting a serialized show and either never show the ending (The Nine, which I watched) or truncate it badly (this season’s Last Resort, which I wouldn’t watch for that reason). I saw the ads for the Dana Delany show Body of Proof; first, the season premiere was supposed to be the first week in February, but then it got kicked back to the third week in February. Why? Because they failed to realize that they had never broadcast the last show of the previous season, after which wholesale cast changes took place.

What particularly interested me is Mark Harris’ case against binge-watching in Entertainment Weekly, which I really related to. He has binged himself, but: “Sometimes your deep engagement with a series turns out to be intertwined with your patient willingness to spend weeks and months in the company of its characters, getting to know them in what feels like real-time and living their evolution as you live your own.”

His piece was in response to the disappointment some have felt over the fourth season of Arrested Development, 15 episodes available en masse on Netflix. I tried to watch the first season, but never got engaged. Some folks, particularly Gordon, suggested I give it another chance, and I saw seasons two and three, mostly enjoying them. Whether I ever see Season 4 – on DVD, because I’m not getting Netflix – depends on my time and inclination at that point. If I DO watch, it’ll be one or two episodes at a time.

I admit I liked the Daily Kos piece on How ‘Arrested Development’ explains the Republican Party. Also enjoyed the NSFW video parody of Girls: Season 38, featuring the original SNL’s Laraine Newman, even though I’ve never seen one minute of the Lena Dunham show.

Here’s an interesting side-by-side comparison of three cable news networks with their coverage of President Obama in Germany.

Recently, I referred to my wife as Ramsey Gordon, which was that she was the total opposite of Gordon Ramsey, that mean chef on whatever that cooking show he’s on; I’ve not viewed it. Weird how the brain picks that up.

Speaking of food shows, Paula Deen is getting booted from hers because of some nostalgic racist language. Heck, I thought she should have been let go after continuing to promote her high-calorie meals while hiding her Type II diabetes last year.

Apparently, the first season-ending of Game of Thrones, featuring a beheading (can that be a spoiler, from two seasons ago?), was not nearly graphic enough, so this season has the infamous ‘Red Wedding’. Big time thanks, but NO thanks.

Another show I’ll never see is Pregnant & Dating on the We network; Ken Levine’s description could have come from The Onion. It is “complete with the usual crying, angst, pretty people, upscale settings, cloying background music, and jaw-dropping stupidity.”

Read about the Latina stereotyping that’s endemic in a show such as Devious Maids. Someone once said to me that I can’t judge a show fairly unless I watch it; I totally disagree.

On the other hand, I TOLD you seeing the Tonys was worth it. Here’s the opening number which was THE highlight of the show.

I watched Paul McCartney on the Colbert Report, of course. Watching TV with commercials is brutal, and Colbert’s schtick wore thin but loved seeing Sir Paul, especially on Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite!, which he said he’d never performed before. On the other hand, I loved what Colbert said about his late mom this month.

Still, most of my affection for television is nostalgic. This video about Johnny Carson, delving into his Nebraska roots, is quite entertaining; it features Dick Cavett, one time Carson writer, then a competitor. Cavett writes about going to his high school reunion. Ken Levine shows – part 1 and part 2 – what a CHEERS outline looks like. Although he met him only a couple of months ago, Levine has an interesting story about the late James Gandolfini.

Chuck Miller reminded me of all the weird pets fictional people had. Ah, a picture of MTM and DVD on the set of the Dick Van Dyke Show. And Evanier showed my absolute favorite TV commercial when I was a child; it was that nifty 4th verse. Unfortunately, he has no idea who the singers were, and neither do I.

The Scotland story

I did not anticipate that when she got back to town a few days later, she not only decided to go out with me, but to quit her job.

After the anniversary post, I noted that there was a sidebar story involving Scotland. Well, it’s mostly not. Shooting Parrots asked for it, as did Island Rambles, and so you all get it.

I need to explain that Carol and I went out from the fall of 1994 to the spring of 1996 then broke up, for good and reasonable reasons, it seemed at the time. She then went out with other people – her boyfriend was a particular jerk to her, but that’s another matter – and soon I was trying to get back with her. We were both in her brother Dan’s wedding to Tracy in September of 1996; that wasn’t awkward AT ALL…

Then in August 1998, I made this one last effort to woo her back. I remember kissing her at Five Rivers nature preserve in October 1998, much to her surprise. Then there was the party she helped plan for watching my first appearance on the game show JEOPARDY! on November 9. But she wasn’t there; her high-paid, but stressful job in insurance had her in Madison, Wisconsin that day.

So I did not anticipate that when she got back to town a few days later, she not only decided to go out with me, but to quit her job (which she did in February 1999), and go back to school to become a teacher again. (She had taught for two years in the mid-1980s.)

Soon enough, we decided that we would get married, but I didn’t ask her specifically, because her brother Mark was getting married to Leanne on January 1, 1999, and we did not want to upstage them. We got engaged at an Albany restaurant called Justin’s on January 16 and decided that waiting a long time to get hitched was not a great idea, given our ages, especially if we wanted to have children.

We threw together a wedding in less than four months, due in no small part to the help of my father, and, as noted, got married on May 15, 1999.

Now, Carol had planned a trip to Scotland in July 1999 with her friend Jeanne. (Sidebar: I went out on one date with Jeanne in October 1998, with the primary intent to make Carol jealous.) They had booked this trip before Carol and I were even going out again. We, as a “modern” couple thought it would be fine; we weren’t people who were “clingy” or “defined by our spouse.”

I’m in this old house I wasn’t that familiar with, the one she’d bought seven years earlier. Every creaky noise, which MUST have been there the two months I had been living there, sounded so loud I couldn’t sleep; I was pretty miserable. And while Carol had a reasonably good time, she was pretty unhappy without me for a week.

We’ve been away from each other since then, the longest when she went to Ukraine three years later, but no separation we experienced was as bad as that first one.

That purported gay/black antipathy thing

There DOES seem that there is a certain hostility by some black leaders towards what certain goofy people call “the gay agenda.”

Arthur at AmeriNZ asked a question earlier in the month:

Here’s something that worries me…: Racism. The spokesperson for the leading radical rightwing religious-political anti-gay hate group seemed to go WAY out of his way to praise black Democratic legislators in Illinois for not supporting the freedom to marry. That same hate group, of course, famously said that one way to defeat marriage equality was to deliberately create divisions between the LGBT and Black communities. All too often, LGBT people buy the racist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. And, it seems to me, some Blacks are too willing to buy the propaganda of mainly (or exclusively) white anti-gay groups.

So, I’m wondering two things. First, what do you think can be done to expose the racist lie of division for what it is, and second, how do you think we can persuade the two sides to ignore the (white) man behind the curtain who’s trying so hard to sow racial division?

One of the things that I’ve long believed is that “justice for all” ought not to be a meaningless slogan, but rather the reason people who don’t SEEM to be affected should support the rights of, for lack of a better phrase, the “other.” Whites should support black civil rights; men, women’s equality; straights, LGBTQ justice. (That’s one of the reasons I didn’t much like NYC mayor Ed Koch; he seemed to stir up hostility between blacks and Jews, when they had been traditional allies.)

Yet, in my freshman year at college, my next-door neighbor was astonishingly hostile to me, from the get-go. He was gay, and I always wondered if he had heard what I had heard somewhere or other, that black people did not like gay people, and therefore dismissed me out of hand.

To the specific point, there DOES seem that there is a certain hostility by some black leaders towards what certain goofy people call “the gay agenda.” I think some of it clearly comes from religious leadership. You saw this in the Prop 8 vote in California a few years back. All that so-called down-low behavior of some black men so closeted, they even hide it from themselves, comes from some cultural/religious disconnect.

I knew one openly gay black man – worked with him, actually – who was supposed to be coming home for Thanksgiving when he was about 21, but he felt his family wouldn’t understand his sexual orientation and would be unforgiving. They never knew where he was for decades. When they discovered that he died, 26 years later – from something I blogged about – they were devastated. Perhaps in the intervening years, their position on homosexuality had changed and having been in contact with his sister after his death, I believe it had.

Mostly though, and the video you linked to after the Illinois defeat of marriage equality actually touches on this, it’s a bit of an oppression competition. The gay rights movement has appropriated some of the language of the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and later, rightly so, I believe, but some black folks of a certain age just don’t like it. I kid you not, it sounds a little like “hey, they can pass for straight, but I can’t pass for white; we were enslaved, they weren’t.” And so on. It’s less an antipathy towards gays per se, as much as it’s a “make them wait their turn, keep them in their place, until WE achieve full civil rights” thing. This is incredibly parochial, and dare I say, stupid; “a high tide raises all boats,” and all that.

That said, I also do believe other nefarious forces are at work, quite possibly poised to embarrass one person: Barack Obama. The President comes out for marriage equality a year ago, and it passes, in one form or another, in a half dozen states, including in the Midwest. Where does it fail? In the state from which he was elected, Illinois. Can this be a coincidence? (Cough – Koch Brothers – cough.) Maybe, but I’m too cynical to believe it.

What to do about it? Oh, probably nothing. Let them just die off.

But you know what random thought flashed through my mind? That ad you pointed to with this back-and-forth:

“[Attractive young man] clicks to buy [a Kindle Paperwhite] and suggests [he and attractive woman sitting next to him] celebrate with a drink.

“‘My husband’s bringing me a drink right now,’ chirps she.

“‘So is mine,'” smiles he as they turn and wave at their male loved ones sitting together at a tiki bar.”

I’ve since seen the ad on the TV show Modern Family. Now if any of the participants were BLACK, you KNOW that would give the thing a whole ‘nother spin.

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