I'm gaining on Jackie Robinson!

I didn't know that Linda Lovelace was dead.

For those of you old enough to remember, Linda Lovelace was the star of Deep Throat, unquestionably the most talked-about porn film of the 1970s.

And guess what? She lived exactly 10 days less than I have. How ABOUT that?

Welcome to one of my addictions. It's a web site called Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. This web site can tell you whether almost any famous or once-famous person is alive or dead, and if they're dead, it will tell you when they died and sometimes, how.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds ghoulish, doesn't it? You're thinking I'm some grown-up incarnation of the character Bud Cort played in the film Harold and Maude. Remember that one? Until he meets Ruth Gordon, he's a kid so relentlessly morbid that his hobby is attending funerals.

I encourage you to visit Dead-or-Alive-Info.org. But unless you have a thick skin, don't question the accuracy of anything you read there in anything so froward as an e-mail. The webmeister is a guy named Kent. I have had some dealings with him. "Prickly" would be a charitable way to describe Kent. He usually responds to corrections with snarky replies. He LOVES being right, and if you turn out to be wrong, he'll tell you so in very nasty tones.

That said, I occupy a distinguished position vis-a-vis this web site. Kent has a standing offer for all of his cyber-visitors: if you can catch one famous dead person before Kent does, you'll win a $10 reward.

As far as I know, I'm the only one in the history of this website who has actually won the ten bucks. One day I came across the obituary of Mercedes McCambridge, the great actress, then checked the site and Kent had her listed as alive. I informed him of this, and he sent me the $10.

But this is how prickly the guy can be. In a subsequent e-mail I made reference to having won the prize. He quickly came back with "You didn't win it, you earned it." How prickly can you get?

Kent's website doesn't just list dates of births and deaths. It has other swoopy lists like "People Alive Over 85," "People Who Lived to 100" and "Put 'Em In Order Quizzes." (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Tsar Alexander I, and so on.)

Not too very long ago Kent added a wrinkle that I find barrels of fun: "Who Have You Outlived?"

Now, this is cool. You poke in your own date of birth, and then the website tells you how many days you've been alive. Then, listed above and below you are the names of famous people who, respectively, lived fewer days than you have, and lived more days than you have. These are the people you have to catch up with.

Another cool twist. You can set "Who Have You Outlived" for high, medium or low, which gets you paired up with "A" List Celebrities, "B" List Celebrities and finally, people like Sonny Tufts and Julius LaRosa, whom nobody remembers anymore.

This morning, for example, learned that I, at age 53, have lived 19,470 days, and I have outlived the following people on the "A" List:

Grace Kelly (171 days)
Judy Garland (2,291 days)
John F. Kennedy (2,492 days)
and...
Elvis Presley (3,909 days)

Now it gets really cool. If I live another 155 days I will have lived as long as Jackie Robinson did. If I make it another 1,369 days I catch up with Humphrey Bogart. And after that I'm breathing down the necks of Richard Burton, Clark Gable and Truman Capote, the last of whom I don't think I'd particularly want to be caught breathing down his neck.

On the B List I have outlived:

Gene Siskel (87 days)
Maurice Gibb (of the Bee Gees) 91 days
Jerry Garcia (104 days)
Lou Costello (115 days)

Those on the B List I still have to catch up with include:

Cleavon Little (32 days)
Jim Henson (122 days)
Vivian Leigh (132 days)
Warren Oates (160 days)
and...
John Denver (174 days)

John Denver (whose real name, by the way, was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr.) occupies an honored position in my pantheon of famous dead people: he died on my birthday. Denver crashed his plane into the Pacific Ocean on October 12, 1997, the day I turned 42.

Now, on to the nobodies...This will test your knowledge of famous people you never heard of.

I have outlived:

Cornelius Gunter (8 days) (He was a member of the Coasters, and he was murdered.)

The aforementioned Linda Lovelace (10 days -- seems I didn't "choke." Sorry.)

Mohammed Amin (Kenyan journalist, also murdered insofar as he was aboard a jetliner that was deliberately crashed into the ocean) (25 days)

Mary Ford (1950s singer and wife of guitar virtuoso Les Paul) (27 days)

On the C List, there are a cluster of names I'll be catching up with very quickly:

Terence McKenna (drug guru) and Spike Jones (bandleader) (27 days)
Jack Wild (remember him on H.R. Pufnstuf?) (40 days)
Jim "Catfish" Hunter (42 days)
Vic Morrow (47 days)

Baseball fan that I am, you'll have to forgive me for being thrilled. This is as close as I'm ever going to come to matching records set by the likes of Jackie Robinson and Catfish Hunter.

Hey, I take my achievements where I can get them. Is it my fault I'm healthy?

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dig up (get it? "dig up?") the Washington Post obituary page and see if I can cadge another 10 bucks out of Kent.

Party Time on Garbage Mountain

I just had a terrific idea for a novel.

If I can find Thomas Pynchon (I'll probably need the assistance of the FBI--he hasn't so much as had his picture taken in 40 years) I'm going to suggest it to him.

If you're familiar at all with the works of Pynchon, you know that he was to paranoia what Lawrence Welk was to champagne bubbles. Conspiracies of every conceivable kind abound in the works of Pynchon, including, in one of his early novels, a shadow post office. I kid you not.

Well, if Pynchon is fascinated by conspiracies, I've got a hell of a notion for him.

Supposing the spammers are organized.

Scary, huh?

Picture it: right now, at this very moment, a couple of thousand of the sleaziest creeps this planet ever puked up might be meeting in some off-the-beaten path little town like Bullhead City, Arizona where they won't be noticed by anyone, all of them keeping a low profile by staying in scattered motels along Interstate 8, getting together in little pockets of eight and ten at a time to share trade secrets and arcane software that they developed themselves: "FilterBuster," "Back Door Man," "Under The Radar," "MegaWorm." At night they have a secret conclave in the back room at Denny's, where some malignant Poindexter wearing Nikes, Dockers and an Arnold Schwarzenegger T-shirt, speaking in a low voice and using a PowerPoint program on his laptop (with the door closed) explains the logarithm system by which he has just figured out 3,560,956,743,289 new ways to spell "Viagra" and "luxury watch."

Did I say I was going to tell Thomas Pynchon? Oliver Stone would love this.

I'm drawn to these musings because I got up this morning and, after my second mug of Folgers (I've had to give up Eight O'Clock whole bean due to budget constraints) I went to check my e-mail.

Now, I always expect to see spam in my inbox, and just as methodically, I go in each morning and mark each spam message, whether it's some slimebag offering me the Dick of Death that will Keep Her Moaning All Night, or a great new opportunity with an up-and-coming company that's so legitimate they're farming Craigslist for e-mail addresses to call in the suckers, or a chance to buy a $5,000 Rolex for $39.95, "ADD TO BLOCKED SENDERS LIST."

Generally it's a question of one, two, maybe three pieces of such garbage at the most. But this morning when I opened Microsoft Outlook, I had nine new messages, and every one of them was spam. I went in like I always do and started clicking away, siphoning all of these chances for great sex and great bargains right off into the cyber-sewer where they belong.

But lo and behold, more kept coming, even as I sat here. I went to refill my coffee cup, came back and there were three more.

In other words, I'm getting the impression that spam somehow runs a cycle, like a woman's menstrual periods. But unlike a woman's menstrual periods, this cycle has nothing whatever to do with natural causes or biological evolution.

This has to be PLANNED somehow, somewhere, by someone. I mean, all the spammers in the world wouldn't suddenly become active, like fleas on a summer afternoon, unless they were somehow (shudder!) organized.

You know, I think this scares me almost as much as the idea of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

Once, in Berlin, I stood before the now-defunct Berlin Wall and saw where someone had spray-painted on its western side "Tyrone Slothrop, where are you?"

Tyrone Slothrop was one figure in Thomas Pynchon's epic novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973.) He's the object of a massive, supersecret conspiracy involving Germany's V-2 rockets, the ones that rained down on London during World War II.

I'm thinking about poor old Slothrop this morning. Where is he? And is there a coven of techno-maniacs hiding somewhere inside a mountain cave somewhere in Maryland, plotting the creation of some modern-day Schwarzgeraet like the one in Pynchon's novel, this one with the purpose of jamming every inbox on earth, at the command of the Grand Spammer, (who lives in a town in Norway so small that it's not even on the map) with so many advertisements for sexual potency and bogus real estate mortgages that, at a stroke, all the world's governments will be more paralyzed than usual and some latter-day Blofeld out of Ian Fleming, only wearing thick glasses and sporting a bad haircut, will be Master of the Earth?

Sean Connery, where are you?

Here they come again

I've been re-reading Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. Published in 1511, it's one of the most famous satires ever written, and still gets read a lot, usually in university survey courses dedicated to the culture of the Renaissance. But it's funny, real bite-ass funny, and one of the reasons it's still read today is because it's still relevant. Boy, is it relevant. Old Erasmus was 400 years ahead of his time.

Folly herself speaks, in the guise of one of the gods of antiquity, or perhaps as the muse of the truly stoopid. Erasmus spares no one: kings, princes, popes, philosophers, the mighty, the low; Folly speaks of them all, and praises them for how unfailingly they follow her counsel. To hear Folly speak, the entire human race is hellbent on doing whatever and precisely does not make sense.

If Voltaire and the other architects of the 18th century Enlightenment knew this book, and it's probably safe to assume they did, one wonders where they got the idea that man is a reasoning, rational animal. Erasmus was telling it like it is 200 years before any of them came along, and it ain't pretty.

How seemly to be reading this classic screed on the subject of the relentless lack of good sense shown by the entire human race since time immemorial, when we're about to have a change of administration here in Washington.

Now, don't hit the panic button, anybody. I'm not going to discuss politics. Well, maybe sort of, in the sense that it's hard to bring up the subject of taxation without mentioning politics, since politicians are, after all, the source of all our taxations, right?

Sometimes I think that Washington is the only city in the world in which the word "DUH" has no meaning whatsoever.

A couple of days ago I posted a list of things I would like to see disappear forever in the coming year. Included on the list was "do-gooders." I cannot stand do-gooders. Charity is one thing, but the relentless refusal to mind your own business is something else entirely.

Unfortunately, the relentless refusal to mind your own business is the chief prerequisite, or so it seems to me, for a career in politics.

I smoke cigars. And I regularly receive cigar catalogues in the mail, since I buy most of my cigars online. And just last week I received such a catalogue from a cigar dealer who was advertising an "S-CHIP sale."

What, I hear you cry, is an "S-CHIP?" I didn't know myself, so I read the introductory blurb about the inevitable arrival of this S-CHIP, whether it's a man or a horse.

Well, surprise! It's a proposed government program. Grab your wallets.

S-CHIP appears to be the latest attempt by those relentlessly determined moralizers in our government to Punish Sin by forcing it to Subsidize Virtue.

S-CHIP stands for "state children's health insurance program." The idea is to create a health insurance plan for children. Now, nobody could be against a health insurance plan for children. The part of that acronym that gives me the willies is that "S." "State." Any time the State gets mixed up in anything, something is going to be done Stoopid.

The rub here is that S-CHIP is going to be funded entirely by tobacco taxes. Now, all of you anti-smoking bores out there are jumping up and down yelling "hallelujah" at the reading of these words I'm sure, because there is nothing a zealot loves more than hearing that the thing he hates is going to be punished in the kingdom.

Yes, they're at it again. The do-gooders are out to stamp out smoking by making it pay for health care, in this case for children. S-CHIP would amount to yet another tax on tobacco products, this one 53 percent. As it is, nearly all of that $5.00 a pack you pay for Marlboros is taxes, but no, they want more. That health badness just has to be punished, punished, punished!

This tax was actually passed twice last year, but was vetoed twice by that ogre Bush, who is obviously in the pocket of Big Tobacco, right?

Well, in giving this bill the veto, Bush reasoned that it doesn't make sense to fund a program that's going to grow over the years by slapping a tax on a product whose sales are declining.

But the Democrats take over Washington this month, and arguments like that one are lost on them. Sin taxes have an irresistible allure on the left side of the aisle, like the odor of Chanel No. 5.

Here's where "DUH" comes in. Regardless of what you thought of Bush, he, like my father, couldn't always be wrong about everything. My father was wrong about practically everything, but every now and then, once every leap year or so, he got something right. By the way, my father was a smoker, and every time the price of cigarettes went up he would merely shrug. "If I'm dumb enough to smoke these things, let them raise the price to $20 a pack if they want," he said.

You can't be more candid than that.

Now regardless of what you think about anything else the Bush administration did, it's hard to deny the validity of Bush's logic in this particular veto.

Ah-HAH! I hear you zealots yelling. "DUPUIS IS IN THE POCKET OF BIG TOBACCO!!"

Would that it were true. I could use the money.

But would you please please please please (to paraphrase a character in Hemingway) THINK about this for a moment?

Funding a health insurance program for children by slapping a tax on a product whose use we are trying to stamp out.

I'll go get a cup of coffee while you all think about that for a minute.

Okay, I'm back.

Now, if the truly lunatic logic of that proposal hasn't sunk in yet, let me offer a couple of hypothetical parallels. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that the states have already figured out ways to funnel tobacco-tax money intended for anti-smoking programs into such things as road-building projects, creating what Dave Barry himself called the perfectly idiotic situation wherein if we want more and better roads, we have to smoke more cigarettes.

Let's just set that aside for a minute.

Imagine we're back in the beginning of the last century. It's 1900. Horseless carriages are beginning to huff and chuff along the nation's roadways, pushing aside the horses and buggies that have had those roadways to themselves since the beginning of the republic and before.

Now, I'm a progressive congressman of 1900, and I see this as progress. So I decide I want to help this process along, encourage more people to put Old Bessie out to pasture and buy a Winton Flyer or a Stanley Steamer or whatever.

And I come up with this great idea: to encourage more paved road-building and encourage more people to swap their horses-and-buggies for automobiles, what we should do is slap a tax on the blacksmith industry! Blacksmiths are holding up progress by providing a service dedicated to All Things Horse, right? So we get the blacksmiths to pay for the new roads! Brilliant!

To Wile E. Coyote, maybe. Do you see the problem here? As the horses disappeared, so did the blacksmiths. Blacksmithing as a trade is obsolete now except on your occasional horse ranch here and there. So...where would my pool of money to pay for roads go when the blacksmiths vanished?

DUH.

Now don't get me wrong. I do understand why people get emotional about this issue, causing logic to fly out the window. I had real difficulty, for example, explaining my position on this to my friend Holly Inder. Her 14 year-old son Mason suffers from asthma, and she recently caught him with a pack of cigarettes, causing her to bristle and fume, as any parent would. Because her emotions were involved, she had trouble wrapping her head around my idea that funding children's health insurance programs by punishing people for using tobacco just doesn't make any reasonable sense. You persuade the goose to lay the golden egg, then you start chasing it around the barnyard with an axe, trying to kill it? Holly?

Or if that cliche doesn't do it for you, you know the old cartoon gag where the guy climbs up into a tree and then starts sawing away at the branch he's sitting on...BEHIND him?

I am all for providing health care for children, but funding it by taxing a product you're trying to get people to quit using is...well, I'd like to hear what Erasmus would say about it. Why not a tax on something whose use is increasing, like say, Sony Playstation? (Or are we already taxing that for programs to fight childhood obesity?)

Isn't this sort of thing that the state lotteries were supposed to be for? Folly would be a happy camper if she showed up today and saw how many billions of dollars are being ponied up by idiots to play a game in which their chances of winning riches are one in 150 million. How about funding these children's health insurance programs with another lottery? I promise you, you'd have no shortage of players. Or maybe a tax on gambling in general? A special casino tax?

Ah, but there the moral message is being lost, right? The idea here is not so much to provide a needed service, but to punish the sin that made that service more urgently needed, right? Why punish the gambling industry? Gambling doesn't give kids asthma. The most important thing here is to make sure we're punishing the right people.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it must be equally true that the road to Washington is paved with the queasiest theology since a bunch of anabaptists somewhere back around the time of Erasmus decided to take Christ's exhortation that they "become as little children" literally, and began sitting around in a circle, babbling baby-talk at each other.

Don't believe me. Go look it up.

Some of those people could have found great jobs in Washington.

The List

It is January 2, 2009. Those who follow my blog regularly (both of you) know that for four years now I have been kicking off the new year with my annual list of things I hope will go away this year, but probably won't.

We're doing something a little bit different this year. Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears are being left off the list. And no, it isn't because Britney has a "new look," nor is it because Jennifer appeared nude on the cover of the last issue of GQ and we were told that she is now "hotter." (I never thought she was "hot" to begin with.) It's because every year I wish they would go away and every year they don't. I give up. I think I'll just start wearing dark sunglasses when I go to the grocery store in the hope of somehow avoiding both of their vapid, stupid mugs on every other magazine I walk past.

Okay, here's my list of things I hope not to see anymore next New Year's Day:

1. Superannuated election campaign bumper stickers. Do you know there are still some yo-yos driving around with Kerry/Edwards stickers on their cars? What are you people, bitter? Obama gets inaugurated Jan. 20th. Get over 2004, already.

2. Stupid white guys wearing baseball caps backward because they think it makes them look like rappers.

3. Stupid white guys wearing baggy pants that practically show butt-crack because they think it makes them look like rappers.

4. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and that whole asinine "New Atheist" fad. I always suspected that the "New Atheist" fad had something to do with George W. Bush anyway, and he's packing up to move back to Texas, so it's time for the next pseudo-intellectual fashion trend.

5. Speaking of fashion trends, can we get rid of those shoes for women that make them look like medieval court jesters? You know the ones I'm talking about, those shoes so long and pointed that they look like the best accessory to go with them might be a cap and bells.

6. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, or whatever the hell it is the "food police" are calling themselves this year. I'm talking about that prune-faced bunch of busybodies that comes out every couple of years wagging its fingers at us about something we're not supposed to eat. I'm not especially inclined to eat movie popcorn, seeing as how I haven't been inside a movie theater to see a feature film since 2006, but if I want to eat movie popcorn, dammit, I'll eat movie popcorn. Get out of my face, you freaking do-gooders.

7. Do-gooders in general, and PETA in particular, that organization of whack-balls who think Bambi and Thumper are not only real, but should be provided with lawyers so they can sue Disney for larger dressing rooms.

8. I don't know why this annoys me so much, but I'd like a stop put to people walking around in near-or-subfreezing weather wearing rubber flip-flops on bare feet. Rubber flip-flops are for the beach in July, not downtown Chicago on Christmas. What are you people, stupid?

9. Speaking of doing things at the wrong time, how about let's crack down on those die-hard NFL kooks who drive around with banners for their favorite football team flapping every which way all over their cars...in the middle of baseball season?

10. And speaking of baseball, allow me a personal foible here. I wish the San Diego Padres would get rid of Kevin Towers. As long as that cheapskate keeps yelling "poorhouse" and going on a salary-dumping binge every year, we Padres fans are never going to see the postseason again.

11. Never mind about people driving while blabbering into hand-held cellphones; I've squawked about that enough, including letters to newspapers and legislators. If the cops aren't going to do anything about it, nobody will. But how about people who walk mindlessly down the street, just rag-chewing away, completely oblivious to the world around them, just because they CAN? More than once I've been tempted to run over one of these cud-chewing morons on the premise that he or she probably wouldn't notice I'd done it.

12. Washington, D.C. residents who go around sporting "Barack Obama" T-shirts and hats. Folks, this is not a concert tour!

13. Television advertisements for fitness equipment featuring people who don't need it.

14. Since I brought up advertising, why is it that the only kind of beer you ever see advertised on TV is LIGHT beer? I happen to regard light beer as a crime against nature. Can we at least advertise REAL beer? What is this, some kind of sop to the nation's collective guilt about calories?

15. Body-piercing. Come on, enough is enough.

16. Ted Kennedy and his girdle.

17. Obnoxious buttheads who think it's funny to gun their engines and race past bicycle-riders within inches, at 90 mph.

18. That goes double for truck drivers who do that.

19. California Congressman Bob Filner, who has the grin of a jackass and all the charm of a dock strike.

20. I wish spammers would run out of ways to spell "Viagra."

21. Now that we're finally going to have a black president, can we get rid of Al Sharpton?

22. Computer games for kids that center around mass murder. What is it with us, anyway? We get hysterical if Junior glimpses a woman's nipple on cable TV, but we have no problem with him playing XBox games all day long with names like Grand Theft Gang Rape Part IV and Genocide Raiders of The Planet Splat.

23. Grossly-obese guys with shaved heads. Since when was Jabba the Hutt a fashion plate?

24. People sitting in restaurants texting while they eat. "Enabling" is something else that's gone too far.

25. And the best for last, because it actually looks like this one is going to happen.......O.J. SIMPSON.

Happy New Year.

Non, je ne regrette rien? Well...

If this doesn't attract at least some male interest, then I'm a worse marketer than I thought.

Is it just me, or do they not make Playboy playmates-of-the-month the way they used to?

Pictured above is Paige Young, Miss November, 1968. She died in 1974 of an overdose of sleeping pills. But boy, in November 1968, when I had just turned 13, was she hot! The kind of airbrushed fantasy that we junior high school boys of that era would ogle together, huddling in the bushes of the canyon across the street from our school with a copy of Playboy that one of us had swiped from his Uncle Sid's den. (Ever notice how in those days, uncles with easily-pilfered collections of Playboy were generally named "Sid?")

Had sweet Paige not died in such an untimely manner when I was in college, bless her heart, she'd be about 61 now. (And probably the hottest 61-year-old you ever saw.)

That is correct. The dream girls of my youth are now either grandmothers or dead.

After sadly learning the fate of poor, doomed Paige, I looked up one of her colleagues from my boyhood, Barbara Hillary. Barbara was Playboy's Miss April for 1970. She adorned my bedroom wall when I was in the ninth grade, until my father made me take her down.

She's 59 now, and was last seen doing charitable work in the Philippines with cataract victims.

In those heady days when I was fighting acne and cruising the underground world of late-night sex-via-masturbation with the likes of Paige and Barbara, girls who posed for Playboy were usually aspiring actresses willing to rip their clothes off for some publicity.

I don't know what devils drove pretty Paige to her ignominous date with barbituates, but Barbara apparently had no showbiz ambitions. (She was from Alaska, by the way, if that has any relevance nowadays.)

For whatever reasons, Barbara Hillary, 1970's Miss April, shucked her clothes, had her 15 minutes of fame, adorned God-knows how many ninth-graders' bedroom walls, and went her merry way.

Good for Barbara. Sorry for Paige, and for Dorothy Stratten and Anna Nicole Smith and all the others who either self-destructed or had help. Being a Playboy playmate, like any other form of fame, is obviously a two-edged sword that has to be handled carefully. Some do it well, some don't. If you live long enough, you get to be old. If you don't, you get to be a good-looking corpse. Ave, atque vale.

If this isn't sufficient to put a guy in an autumnal frame of mind...

Actually, I'm not in an autumnal frame of mind. That might come as a surprise, seeing as how this is the time of year when a lot of people are in the mood for it. Christmas is over; it's the dead of winter (61 Fahrenheit in Washington, D.C. yesterday) and the Super Bowl is a month away. It's that suicide time of year. People with Seasonal Affective Disorder are missing the sun and clubbing themselves with Jim Beam.

Of course, that's only around here. I have friends in South Africa, where it is at this moment high summer. But I'm sure they have their own things to be depressed about.

But me? I'm fine. I turned 53 in October, but that's okay. On the whole I'm healthier than I was at 26. I'm taking two antidepressants; I'm reasonably focused and have sufficient energy if not a surfeit of it. I published a book last spring and I'm working on another one. My wife Valerie gave me a really fabulous Christmas present: she's converting the basement of our house into a library for me, complete with bookshelves, flat-screen TV, rack stereo, furniture, the whole nine yards.

Two of my own paintings hang on the wall down there -- I took up oil painting last summer.

All in all, not a picture of a guy getting ready to shoot himself. Still, something in me wishes I could go and track down Barbara Hillary and maybe Christine Coren (Miss March, 1970). Hopefully they're both alive. I'd like to invite both of them to Washington and take them both to lunch at once. Picture it: these two (hopefully well-preserved) grandmothers and me, noshing on shrimp cocktail at the Old Ebbit Grill three blocks from the White House, having a colloquy on coping with Scoundrel Time. And drinking a memorial toast to beautiful, doomed Paige Young.

This time of year (in the northern hermisphere, anyway) is traditionally given over to evaluation and reassessment, which is why so many of us end up making those lists of New Years' resolutions which we keep until, oh, January 3rd. I'm not going to bother with that this year; the truth is I usually don't. I know myself well enough to know that there's no amount of self-tut-tutting that's going to get me to change my ways unless a real alarm bell goes off -- like finding out last year that my weight was up to 214. THAT got me on a diet, let me tell you.

I was down to 187 last September, back up to 191 two months later. But I'm determined never to see 200 again, let alone 214. Who knows? Maybe with the new year I'll actually be able to get my ass back to the gym that hasn't seen me since the November election.

Resolutions, no. But reassessment and evaluation, yes. And because, to paraphrase the late Robert Graves, the god of the new year just slew the god of the old and the ghosts of ancient Roman Saturnalia can be imagined romping among the ruins of the Colisseum, it's time to slap Edith Piaf on the old CD player and see what "Non, je ne regrette riens" inspires me to think.

I'll tell you what. It inspired me to think that the song reflects so much bravado. Is there really anyone among us who has nothing they regret?

Speaking for myself alone, I have quite a laundry list of things I regret. And I can think of no better time of year to annoy everybody I know with it. The usual offer applies, all you folks out there in blog-land. You are more than welcome to make up your own list of things that the Catholic liturgy calls "What I have done and what I have failed to do" ... and share.

Here are some of mine:

1. I regret never having gotten a graduate degree. I've been fussing for more than 30 years about this one. (In fairness to me, I did apply to a couple of MFA programs last year and the year before, at Eastern Washington University and the University of Maryland. Both turned me down. May the Terps never win another division title.)*

2. While we're discussing education, I wish I had tried harder, both in high school and college, to get good grades. But I was always more grasshopper than ant, and paid the price for it.

3. And while we're discussing discipline, I regret that I never had enough of it to learn a foreign language, (although I did study Portuguese when I lived in Brazil, and Russian when in Moscow) or play a musical instrument.

4. When I was in high school I had a weekend job pumping gas. Teenagers did that in those days. One Saturday afternoon I said something really stupid to an old lady and offended the daylights out of her. I still get hot flashes thinking about it, even though she's probably been dead for 30 years.

5. At some point when I was growing up, I should have stood up to my father and invited him to go ahead and slug me like he was always threatening to do, then called the cops and had his ass thrown in the jug for assault and battery. I doubt if he ever would have laid a finger on me again.

6. I regret my first marriage. Chris and I got married for the wrong reasons, and in the face of any number of warning bells that only trouble lay ahead. Dumb.

7. And while we're on the subject of marriage, I regret not having married Anna Predeina, the sweetest, prettiest and most adorable girl in all of Russia, when I had the chance to. I let her get away.

8. I regret having wasted 14 years of my life in the U.S. Department of State. They had me stuck in a stupid, menial job and despite my best efforts to move on to something better within the Department, seemed determined to keep me there. I should have smelled the coffee after two or three years and moved on.

9. Related to that, I regret not having persevered in radio news. I gave radio two years and then chucked it and went off to join the government. Radio was a heck of a lot of fun, if the pay was a disgrace. I have pretty good pipes and I'm a reasonably-competent journalist. I know I could have ended up with ABC or CNN radio if I'd stuck with it.

10. I wish I had gone out for baseball in high school. I love baseball, but once I had reached the upper age limit for Little League, I never played again. I steered clear of sports in high school in order to vex my father, with whom I did not get along. And I probably wouldn't have been much of a ballplayer, but maybe junior varsity. Who knows?

11. I wish I hadn't taken it so hard when Jamie Hartshorn dumped me to marry Michael Damer in 1985. That was what drove me into the foreign service, so that gives me two things to regret. Looking back, getting shed of her was the second best thing that ever happened to me. (The first best was being forced to quit the State Department in 1999.)

12. I regret not having stood up to a stupid, skinny, poorly-educated government jerk-off named Richard Allen in 1989 when he got in my face at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia. Instead of backing down, I should have invited him to swing and then promptly had his sorry ass fired. (See #5, above.)

13. I regret that, as a result of a breach with my father in 1996, when my mother died in 2000 I hadn't seen her in more than four years.

14. I sometimes regret the two subjects that were my college majors: journalism and history. They're fine subjects, but sometimes I feel that I "copped out" in not pursuing a literary major and then going on to teach. On the other hand, when I see what peckerheads some professors I know turned out to be (and he knows who he is), I'm glad I steered clear of academia.

15. I regret that it took me until age 52 to really plunge into painting. I had dabbled in watercolors a few times over the years, but I never knew how much fun painting could be until I decided that it didn't matter whether I could draw or not (I can't) and took up the oils.

16. I regret that the Weekliner newspaper, published in Arlington, VA, crashed and burned after only three issues. I was managing editor, and until I got into a barroom brawl with the stupid hillbilly who was bankrolling the project, I was having the time of my life. But the issue over which we fought was the paper's last issue anyway.

17. I often regret never having had children. But just as often don't.

18. I regret never having served an internship in journalism when I was an undergraduate at San Diego State. That postponed my first newspaper job by at least two years.

19. I regret having been churlish enough, at age eight, to return the candy cane my fourth-grade teacher gave me at our class Christmas party rather than acquiesce to my mother's demand that I go and thank her for it. None of the other kids were saying thank-you; why should I be the only one, was my thought? My mother was so upset she started to cry, and I felt so guilty I went back later intending to say thank-you to Miss Seabrook, but she had gone home.

20. I regret having spent so much time regretting things.

Bring on 2009. I have a book to finish.

*In anything. Not even squash, synchronized swimming or hot dog-eating. Man, I'm bitter.

Will Success Spoil Joe Strazcynski?

Ecce Homo: ambitious 18 year-old (above) and middle-aged blowhard. (right.)

The 1972 Chula Vista High School "Smile committee:" BACK: Diane Vranes, Joe Straczynski, Mel Hallam, Kelley Dupuis. FRONT: Karen Martin, Mary Falk.



Herman Wouk's now-forgotten 1962 novel Youngblood Hawke begins with the words, "Did you ever know a famous man before he became famous?"

Well, yes I did. But I part paths with Wouk's next assertion, which is "chances are he seemed like anyone else to you."

No, the guy I'm thinking about never "seemed like anyone else" to me.

Once upon a time there was a very ambitious boy. At a very young age he had already decided upon his calling: he wanted to be a writer.

So far I could be talking about myself. But this story gets far more interesting than anything I could tell you about me.

The boy in question refined his ambition early and stayed true to it. He would wander in numerous directions while in pursuit of his ultimate goal, but he never lost sight of it.

He wanted to be a great science-fiction writer. Besotted with tales of the bizarre and the otherworldly, he dreamed not just of becoming the next Gene Roddenberry, the legendary creator of Star Trek, but of outdoing him. Writers like Rod Serling, H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury were his models.

Yes, to J. Michael Straczynski, as he likes to call himself, (friends and enemies alike call him "Joe," and when he was young he used the nom-de-plume "Jay Stark" for a while, presumably to cover his tracks while publishing cheap pulp fiction in trashy sci-fi magazines--it was all part of the grand plan) writing science-fiction stories was only the first rung on the starlit stairway. Even when he was barely out of high school, his eyes were already on the ultimate prize: Television.

When I was young we used to talk about the importance of "rising above our environment," which to my little circle of friends meant getting our butts out of Chula Vista, California and moving on to bigger and better things. Joe was born in New Jersey but spent most of his formative years in southern California. It goes without saying that he was set upon rising above his particular environment. He did so. As relentless in his own way as any other individual obsessed with achieving great things in this world, (think Lyndon Johnson, Hitler, or J. Pierpont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying ) Joe, through hard work and persistence, transcended his environment step-by-step. He "made it," as we Americans like to say.

He paid a price of course, and from an early age. I'm talking about high school, of course, which is where I first met Joe. He was a member of the Chula Vista High School Class of 1972. I was Class of '73.

Joe was something of a "perimeter fence" character on campus, by which I mean you did not see him going out for track or running for student council. He was usually seen walking about the grounds with a volume of Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov tucked in among his schoolbooks. He was very tall and lanky, wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a stubborn shock of hair that was always falling down over his forehead. The glasses and the hair earned him the nickname "Jerry Lewis" from his classmates. His idea of a witticism was to describe himself as a "Transcendental determinist with atheistic tendencies," which he did, often.

In short, Joe was what was known on campus in those days as a "nerd."

I know whereof I speak, by the way, not only because I knew Joe, but because I was something of a nerd myself. I didn't share Joe's fashion habit of combining button-down short-sleeve shirts with basketball sneakers, but like him I was a somewhat marginalized character, not given to extracurricular activities like sports, (although I did sing in the choir and, during my senior year, was on the speech team) noteworthy, if at all, chiefly for my ambition, which somewhat resembled Joe's. Like him I wanted to be a writer. The main difference between us lay in what Tim O'Brien might have called "the things we carried." Joe lugged around Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; my authors were guys like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. In short, Joe wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be an Author. His was the more realistic ambition.

I remember how we met. It was in the winter of 1972. Joe's senior year, my junior year. Some misguided soul on the student council had decided that something was needed to "break up the third-quarter blahs." That something, the student council decided, would be called "Smile Week." It would be a week of jokes read over the P.A. system every morning during homeroom plus other assorted frivolity, the whole thing culminating with a Friday-morning assembly in the gym devoted to a comic skit which would be performed in front of the entire student body. I was dragooned by my creative-writing teacher, Mrs. Joanne Massie, into participating on this committee along with a group of fellow students which also included Joe Straczynski. Now it can be told: I, Kelley Dupuis, actually performed in one of Joe's earliest productions. He wrote the skit for the "Smile" assembly, and I appeared in it doing my imitation of the late sportscaster Howard Cosell. (Impressions were the hot thing in stand-up comedy in the early 1970s.)

The assembly's climax came when my friend Johnny Keersmaeker, appearing as the school vice-principal, a fascistic moron named Richard Armbrust, demanded to know who the author of this "skit" was. Joe Straczynski arose from the audience, and Keersmaeker, using the pistol they used to start track meets, "shot" him in front of the whole student body, after which two guys carried Joe, the dead body, out of the gym. Big yucks.

About this time, Joe, the self-proclaimed "transcendental determinist with atheistic tendencies," just happened to develop a huge crush on a girl named Cathy Williams, who was one of the campus Jesus freaks, as they were known in those days. Unswervingly true to his principles, Joe dropped the atheistic pose and became a Jesus freak himself, presumably in the hope of getting Cathy's attention. I wouldn't mention this petty detail were it not for the fact that Joe remained a dedicated born-again Christian for the next three or four years. Even after he'd gotten over Cathy and graduated, he continued to make a pest of himself pitching Jesus left and right. He didn't have a lot of friends and he clearly wanted to be friends with me, which was perfectly all right with me except for the fact that his relentless salesmanship for Jesus in those days made me uncomfortable, and not inclined to want to be around him for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now, Joe might launch a counterattack to this screed and point out that when we were boys, I shunned his friendship because I was jealous of the fact that he was having more success getting published and noticed than I was. Well, I've already admitted the truth of that in a blog posting I put up nearly three years ago. And it is true: I was jealous of Joe's early successes. That's because at 18 I didn't know any better. I didn't have enough perspective to realize that Joe was writing for a clearly-defined market, the sci-fi market, a market with a built-in audience. I was dreaming woozily of becoming the next James Joyce. Not much percentage in that.

He was talented; no question of it. Very talented. And he was placing stories in pulp magazines when I was still experimenting around at my desk trying to whip up something that would make the world recognize me as a genius. My ambitions were hopelessly lofty. Of course Joe had more success than I did, in the way that most of us define success. But I had lost interest in science fiction when I was 15. Joe was mining a vein that I'd abandoned. I wanted to write mainstream fiction. I wanted to write Literature. Joe just wanted to get published and make money. Viva Joe.

But jealousy wasn't the whole story. If I shunned Joe's company in those days, I did it as much for his relentless campaigning for Jesus as for the fact that he was getting published at an age when I was getting ignored. I just didn't want to buy what he and his friends were selling.

Joe and I attended Southwestern College together, and then later, San Diego State University. When we were students at Southwestern, circa 1974-75, I would occasionally give him lifts home from school in my car. On one of these afternoons he took me into his room, where he showed me some documents he acquired from God-knows where. He had them hidden in a drawer and bound up with wire. But he brought them out, undid the wire and shared.

They were documents relating to the study of theurgy, which, as he explained to me, is the craft of summoning up demons and evil spirits without putting your own soul at risk.

Oh-kay. I got out of there as quickly as I could that particular afternoon.

About this same time, Joe wrote an indignant letter to our college paper, the Athapascan. Seems there had been some sort of Jesus concert and some college rowdies had been making noise, destroying the mood, so to speak. Joe was highly indignant, indignant enough to write to the paper.

In fact Joe spent a lot of time in those days being indignant. He took a dislike to one of his teachers, wrote the poor man an exhaustively long hate letter, and slid it under his office door. Talk about bold courage. Talk about ego; I mean, imagine writing somebody a ten-page hate letter and then assuming they're going to read all of it.

Joe did the same thing to me once. In those days writing hate letters was his idea of being boldly assertive. Somehow he got the idea that I had "cut" one of his stories from the San Diego State University magazine, Montezuma Life, when I was majoring in journalism and served on the magazine staff one semester. In truth I had no such authority on the magazine; on that issue I was merely a copyeditor. I didn't decide what went in and what didn't.

Which didn't stop Joe from writing, and mailing to me, a meticulously typed, single-spaced ten page hate letter telling me in great detail what a son-of-a-bitch I was. I read the first sentence of this rant and threw the rest into the wastebasket. But Joe, I'm sure, went around for days strutting around like a rooster, chest thrust out, thinking he had really told me. I'm sure he did think I'd read through all of his venom. More's the pity.

Oh, and by the way, the Jesus thing eventually did a 180. Joe next surfaced in the public eye (if you want to call this surfacing in the public eye) when he went before the local city council demanding that it remove the Bible from the shelves of the public library. He identified himself for the newspaper as a representative of the San Diego State University Atheist Students' Union. Knowing Joe as I did, it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that he was the Atheist Student Union's entire membership. Slaloming back and forth between whoopee-for-Jesus and self-proclaimed militant atheism: I'll leave it to the reader to decide what that might suggest about someone's emotional stability. But it was the seventies; we were young, and when you're young you're enthusiastic, yea or nay. But anyone could see that the boy who described himself as a "transcendental determinist with atheistic tendecies" in high school was back, i.e. the nerd was back.

Joe and I didn't speak again until the mid-1980s. By then we had both decided to let bygones be bygones, I guess. We were grown men now, in our late twenties both of us. Joe called me up one night when I was living in Vacaville, California, where I worked as a newscaster on the local FM radio station. Joe was at that time writing for a kid's cartoon show called He-Man and the Masters of The Universe. He had realized his ambition of making it into television. I was pleased for him and said so.

Shortly after that I left radio and went into the Foreign Service. I sort of kept track of Joe's progress through my mother, who informed me a few years later that Joe was writing and also producing episodes of Angela Lansbury's show Murder, She Wrote. Mom cited one script Joe had written which she thought especially clever, in which the skullduggery afoot involved a computer.

I next spoke on the phone with Joe in 1993. He told me he had a new project in the works: he and a partner had cooked up a scenario and a script for a new science-fiction series they were hoping to get into syndication, Babylon 5. As I said before, I gave up science fiction when I was a sophomore in high school and I've never watched Babylon 5. But in the years that followed I congratulated Joe on its success plenty of times.

The spring we had this telephone chat, I was on my way to Moscow, where I'd been assigned to the American embassy. Joe had just a few months earlier attended his 20-year high school class reunion. Mine was coming up. I wouldn't have made it in any case because I was to be in Russia when the reunion took place, but Joe advised me strongly not to go, even if I were able to. Then he told me a funny story to explain his advice.

"If I expected to be greeted as some kind of conquering hero, you know, the guy who became a successful television writer and all that, I was to be disappointed," he told me. "Hardly anyone even remembered me. After a while I went to a pay phone to call my wife and tell her I was coming home. When I got off the phone, I looked down and noticed that my fly was open. That was it, boy. The high school nerd had come back to haunt me. I got in the car and drove straight back to L.A."

With Joe active in Hollywood writing for TV and all of his other projects, and me working for the government now, we were pretty much out of one another's orbits. He lived in Sherman Oaks somewhere; I was back-and-forth between overseas and Washington.

Circa 1996, when I was in D.C. but getting ready to decamp for Europe one more time, Joe and I swapped a few e-mails. He gave me his personal e-mail address and told me to use that one to communicate with him rather than the one that the Babylon 5 fans used, which apparently always had a very full in-box. I congratulated him once again on the success of B5, and he told me he had another series in the works of which, if anything came of it, I never found out.

In 2006 I posted a blog essay about having known Joe when we were young and how proud I was of his successes. Jealousy was long past; I enjoyed "bragging on him" to friends. I learned later that he was aware I had written this essay, but never said anything to me about it. I suppose I should have considered that a red flag, a hint that at 52 the boy might be getting too big for his britches in the sense of accepting praise and kudos as simply his due.

And so it was with pleasure that I e-mailed Joe again early in November upon reading in the newspaper that he had just written his first big-budget Hollywood movie, Clint Eastwood's Changeling. He had come a long way from He Man and the Masters of the Universe, and I acknowledged the fact. We chatted a bit about the difficulties of his profession. I even asked him why he was still working. Years earlier he had once told me that he wanted to "Get out of the Hollywood rat race, retire to England and just write novels for the rest of my life." Well, I would think that the success of B5 and all of the subsequent franchising that went with it had made Joe quite a wealthy man by 2008. But the dream of the English countryside had apparently been tabled, at least for now. Who could blame him, for a chance to work with Clint Eastwood?

Joe was friendly enough that I didn't think there would be any harm in including him occasionally on distribution for some of my blog musings. I mean, what the hell? If he didn't want to read something I sent him, he could delete it. And if he didn't want to be included on distribution for my stuff, a polite I-don't-have-time-to-read-everything-people-send-me would have sufficed.

Instead, imagine my surprise when I opened an e-mail from him in mid-November and found his tone so screechy that I could almost see the spittle on his computer screen. "I did NOT give you my personal e-mail so you could send me your every errant thought!" he practically screamed, and then peremptorily requested removal from my distribution list.

So much for good manners, and by the way, a pretty strong indicator that the boy known as "Jerry Lewis" to the Class of '72 had indeed gotten too big for his britches. Hob-nobbing with folks like Clint Eastwood and Mick Jagger had apparently convinced the one-time geek who dabbled with theurgy in his bedroom at his parents' house that he was now a Real Important Guy, and much too busy to be bothered with all of these pesky hangers-on and autograph-seekers.

Oh, and by the way, he hit "reply to all" when he sent me this very curt diss, so everyone to whom I had sent my blog posting also got Joe's little nastygram, which prompted inquiries like "Who the hell is this guy?" "What's his problem?" and "Who IS this asshole?"

By then the reviews of Changeling had begun to appear in the newspapers, and it occurred to me that they might have played some role in Joe's foul mood. The reviews I saw ran from fair to poor; the Washington Post, Washington Times and Wall Street Journal were of one mind that the film wasn't up to Eastwood's usual standards, and at least a couple of them singled out Joe's script as part of the problem. The movie review website Rottentomatoes.com has given Changeling reviews that run about 59% positive and 41% negative. Not terrible, but not exactly your average Christmas blockbuster either.

Stung by Joe's rudeness, I replied to his nastygram, suggesting that perhaps Changeling's less-than-superlative reception by some of the critics was what was making him crankier than a nauseated wolverine that weekend.

He replied within moments, practically yelling in print that the reviews were overwhelmingly good (whose?) and suggesting quite strongly that I should never darken his doorstep, electronic or otherwise, again.

Well, okay. No problem. With friends like him I don't need big-headed celebrities, do I? And by the way, you would be surprised how many Babylon 5 fans don't know who Joe Strazcynski is. I mean, who watches the credits, right?

And then of course there's the old joke about the blonde who comes to Hollywood intent on stardom...and promptly sleeps with a writer. The low place of writers on the showbiz totem pole is the stuff of legend.

But don't try to tell that to J. Michael Straczynski, hometown boy who made good. He seems to think that he REALLY made good. Good enough to make him too good for the rest of us. So. Has success spoiled Joe Straczynski?

Let's see what the fan mail says.

Oh, yeah. He's also a welsher. In 1974 I bet him five dollars that he couldn't read Finnegans Wake. He couldn't, and he has yet to pay me my five bucks.

Un centenar de cosas sobre mí

A couple of days ago I was asking a friend some questions. You know, easy stuff like "What's your favorite movie?" "Who's your favorite singer?" That kind of thing.

I sometimes get asked questions like that when I'm filling out forms. I'll bet you do too.

So I decided to sit down and make out a personal Trivia List. Here, if anyone cares, are One Hundred Things About Me.

Review my list, then make one of your own. Share.

1. I’m a day person, not a night person. I’m up with the chickens and generally don’t like to get to bed any later than 11 p.m. at the latest.

2. I only like coffee if it’s hot. I can’t stand tepid coffee, nor can I stand stale coffee. If it’s more than an hour old, I’ll throw it out and make a fresh pot.

3. I like early music early in the morning. Before 9 a.m., I only want to hear music written before 1800.

4. Cars generally don’t excite me. My feeling about cars is, the easier to park, the better. I like my PT Cruiser, but I’d also like to have a Mini Cooper, which would be even easier to park.

5. When I go to a baseball game, my favorite place to sit is at field level along the first base line. I can almost never get seats there.

6. Most people who like opera prefer Italian opera to Austro-Germanic. I’m the other way around. I like Italian opera fine, but a list of my favorite operas would be heavier on Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss than it would be on Verdi and Puccini.

7. I do NOT watch television. Period. If I’m sitting in front of a TV screen, it’s either playing a baseball game or a DVD movie. I haven’t watched a TV series since the 1980s and have no desire to.

8. I don’t especially care for Indian cuisine. I’ll eat it, but if we’re talking about going to an “ethnic” restaurant, I’ll tend to steer somewhere other than Indian. Curry isn’t my favorite thing.

9. Hot weather drives me nuts. My least favorite activity is sweating. When it’s hot outside I just want to stay inside with the air conditioning blasting away.

10. I detest people who hate cats. I love cats. If you hate cats, you have a mental problem, and I don’t want to hear your excuses. Go die.

11. Loving cats doesn’t mean I hate dogs. I like dogs just fine. Most of the time.

12. Christmas presents should be opened on Christmas morning. If you open them on Christmas Eve, that leaves you with nothing to do Christmas Day. What fun is that?

13. I’m usually extremely impatient. Sorry about that. I just am. I do NOT like to kept waiting, and if I see a line in front of something I want, I’ll come back later.

14. When it comes to staring at women, I’m more of a leg man than a chest man. High heels and shapely calves will catch my attention faster than big boobs.

15. I enjoy cigars, and no, I’m not interested in quitting, so don’t even bring it up.

16. Bicycles are almost a fetish with me. I’ll wander into a bike shop and drool over the goods like some guys will wander into a BMW dealership and do so. If I were as rich as Bill Gates I’d probably have a dozen bicycles. As it is, I have three.

17. I have a similar thing about sound equipment. I must own six radios, and I’m forever perusing audio catalogs and magazines, dreaming of the ultimate high-end system that would make my basement sound like Carnegie Hall.

18. I hate to write checks. Consequently I have a bad habit of paying bills the day before they’re due.

19. I have an adversarial relationship with anything mechanical. They say there are two kinds of people: those who are good with people and those who are good with machines. I’m definitely in the first category. I can get along with almost anybody as long as they’re polite. But let a machine malfunction on me and my first impulse is to hit it with a sledge hammer. I think my problem with machines is that they won’t listen to reason.

20. I’m a Russophile. I’ve been fascinated by Russia and Russian culture since I was 13.

21. I have no desire whatever to visit any country known for its hot climate. (See 9, above.) I’ll take Norway over India any time.

22. My favorite city in the world is Paris. My favorite city in the United States is Spokane, Washington.

23. The funniest show in the history of television was The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko. It aired on CBS from 1955 to 1958. Before the advent of home video, I would stay up late to catch reruns of this great comedy.

24. I can’t stand bourbon. It’s too sweet. I prefer Scotch.

25. If I never see another picture of Britney Spears or Jennifer Aniston, it will be three weeks too soon.

26. Beethoven’s String Quartets in C-Sharp minor and A Major, respectively, op. 131 and 132, represent the highest creation of the human mind. Nothing more beautiful has ever appeared on earth than these two pieces of music.

27. Early morning is the best time to make love. (But grab the Listerine first.)

28. One of my most cherished dreams is to live someplace where I don’t have to own a car.

29. I don’t write poetry any more, but I love poetry. I surely do.

30. I once got to be managing editor of a weekly newspaper for a few weeks, and decided it was the most fun I could have with my clothes on.

31. One of the things I will most regret having to give up when I die is being able to hear Mozart.

32. I love to cook, and I’m good at it.

33. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a flawless novel, but Tender Is The Night is underrated.

34. Allen Ginsberg was a charlatan masquerading as a poet.

35. I agree with W.H. Auden that all Christians are part Protestant and part Catholic, because the truth is Catholic, but the search for it is Protestant.

36. One of my greatest regrets is that I never learned to speak or read French, the language of my paternal ancestors.

37. I’m a third-degree Mason. And no, we’re not secretly running the world. Most of us are retired.

38. I was born with no pectoralis muscle on the right side of my chest. I’ve only met one other guy in my life with this particular oddity. The right side of my chest is nothing but bone and cartilage.

39. I can’t stand loud noises of any kind. I live near two hospitals and a fire station, and the sirens all day drive me absolutely batty.

40. My parents were both poorly-educated, and they frequently embarrassed me.

41. Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March is one of the truly great novels in English.

42. One of my favorite sounds in all the world is that of a dove cooing early in the morning in southern California.

43. I once took a few surfing lessons, and would like to get back to learning how to surf.

44. When I’m not writing or cooking, I love to paint. I can’t draw worth a tinker’s damn, but there are creative ways to get around that.

45. I regret never having learned to play a musical instrument, but being as relentlessly left-brained as I am, I could never get the hang of reading music.

46. I was a State Department telecommunications specialist for 14 years, and hated every minute of it, although I enjoyed the traveling that went with the job.

47. Speaking of which, I have lived in Germany, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire and Russia. While living in Brazil, I reached the “intermediate” level in studying Portuguese. I know how to make feijoada, the Brazilian national dish, and I have actually tasted samogon, Russian moonshine. It’s vile.

48. Global warming is the biggest con game since P.T. Barnum.

49. I’ve been keeping a journal more-or-less steadily since I was 13. In my basement I have two footlockers filled with notebooks of various kinds, and my computer contains folders which in turn contain my journals going back roughly 10 years. The extant notebooks in the basement go back as far as 1974. I sometimes wonder what, if anything, someone will do with all this after I die. Probably toss it, but I can say it gave me something to do.

50. Partly because of my journal-keeping, I have a memory that some people find remarkable. Be careful what you tell me; I probably won’t forget it, because I just might write it down.

51. Before e-mail came along, I also used to keep letters from people. I have found letters in my footlockers dating back as far as 1970.

52. I love pizza. Homemade pizza on Christmas Eve was a tradition in my family for years.

53. I have no desire to own a Kindle or any such gadget. Books! Viva books!

54. People who jabber into handheld cellphones while driving should be summarily shot.

55. The CIA is not the world headquarters of evil. Quite the contrary; the CIA is incompetent. I wouldn’t trust the CIA to deliver flowers. They’d wind up on the wrong continent.

56. I was never happier in my life than when I lived in Bad Godesberg, Germany.

57. I once drove in a demolition derby.

58. I was in Moscow in 1993 when President Boris Yeltsin sent in the tanks and shelled his own parliament. A buddy of mine shot video that day and I have a copy of the tape somewhere.

59. Also in Moscow, I was in the audience at the Great Tchaikovsky Hall the night the visiting Washington National Symphony, under Mstislav Rostropovich, played Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto. The piano soloist that night was Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the son of the great Russian dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. That night I became a true believer: I knew that Communism was finished.

60. I was one of the founding fathers of the Hash House Harriers chapter in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. I ran 51 hashes over two years, and hosted 17. I was so active in the Hash chapter in Brasilia that when I left post in 1991, the Hashers threw a party in my honor.

61. I’m proud of having been born one week after the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in the World Series for the first time.

62. I can’t stand the sight of Ted Turner, and if the slick magazines don't knock it the hell off with Michelle Obama, she's going to join the list too.

63. I have trouble getting along with people who have no sense of humor.

64. I agree with Mark Twain that school boards were created to give the feeble-minded something to do.

65. Nobody regrets the institution of slavery in America more than I do. If it hadn’t been for slavery then, I wouldn’t be hearing rap music now. (Of course I wouldn't be hearing jazz either, and that would be a tremendous loss.)

66. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a loyal American who got a raw deal.

67. I’m on my fourth espresso machine, still looking for one that makes decent espresso.

68. Jack Liles Nolen, my high-school speech coach, was the only teacher I ever respected.

69. I wish they would find Osama bin Laden, then stuff him with pork chops and hang him by his dick from the Empire State Building, with Pat Benatar singing Hit Me With Your Best Shot in the background and the whole thing live on CNN.

70. I do not believe in UFOs. Whatever dirty bizniz is going on at Area 51, it doesn’t involve E.T. More likely it’s just the government up to its usual stupidness, like trying to invent invisible sneakers or something.

71. On a hot summer day there is nothing, and I mean nothing, better than ice-cold lemonade.

72. Stan Musial was a better ballplayer than Mickey Mantle, but Mantle got all the publicity because he played in New York while Musial played in St. Louis.

73. I detest PETA. I’m a wholehearted and enthusiastic supporter of the ASPCA and the Humane Society, but PETA, whose premise is that animals should be treated exactly as if they were people, is a nut group. These are people who think Bambi and Thumper are real. Yeah, well, Chip and Dale should gather them up for the winter.

74. I generally prefer red wine to white, but I like a good pinot grigio.

75. I do not consider Ernest Hemingway a great novelist. He was a very great short-story writer, but not a great novelist.

76. Handel’s Water Music is one piece I never seem to get tired of, and there are many, many pieces of music about which I can’t say that.

77. Carnations are my favorite flower.

78. Two smells I absolutely love are those of freshly-ground coffee and gasoline, though not mixed together.

79. Frank Sinatra’s 1943 recording of If You Are But A Dream brings back one of my most cherished memories, which believe it or not involves ironing a shirt.

80. Henry Fonda’s performance in Mr. Roberts is probably my favorite performance ever given by any actor in any film, ever.

81. Light beer is a crime against nature.

82. I’ve sometimes wondered why, if the Devil is supposed to be so smart, he keeps making sucker bets with God and losing them.

83. Speaking of religion, I think I would have an easier time loving Jesus if he had just once said “Ain’t got no,” or cracked a mother-in-law joke. (How do you say “Ain’t got no” in Aramaic?)

84. Interleague play in Major League baseball absolutely, positively sucks.

85. If there are two fashion trends I wish would go away, they’re square-toed shoes for men and those ridiculously long, pointed-toe shoes for women.

86. Guys who cover themselves with tattoos are jerks.

87. Girls who cover themselves with tattoos are jerk-ettes.

88. Jay Ward made the funniest cartoons of all time.

89. Bulked-up bodybuilders are a revolting sight. Muscles are fine, but you can take anything too far.

90. The greatest invention of modern times was the mute button.

91. My favorite rock n’ roll song of all time is the Byrds’ recording of Mr. Tambourine Man.

92. My favorite rock n’ roll album of all time is Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan, who wrote Mr. Tambourine Man.

93. I read Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove while staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It kept me in my hotel room almost all weekend. I couldn’t put it down, and was sorry to see it end.

94. As big a twit as he could be when he opened his mouth about politics, I do miss Leonard Bernstein.

95. Although I love to cook, I hate to clean. I’d just as soon hire someone else to do it.

96. I like my steak extremely well-done. My wife likes hers practically raw. Believe it or not, we argue about this.

97. I can’t stand the surrealist style in art. Give me Picasso over Salvador Dali any time.

98. I generally prefer brunettes to blondes, though there have been exceptions.

99. I rather like Pope Benedict XVI. Smart guy. Good writer.

100.Generally speaking, life looks better when viewed through the bottom of a glass.

Unintended Consequences

Isn't it funny how we so often wind up achieving the opposite of what we intend?

The most spectacular example I can think of would be of course the Nazis. They tried to wipe out the entire population of Ashkenazic Jews in Europe. What was the result instead? The founding of the State of Israel.

On a less globe-shaking front, look at Major League Baseball. For nearly a century, baseball's team owners conspired to keep player salaries low by way of a dirty little form of indentured servitude known as the reserve clause. When the players finally burst this chain in the 1970s and won the right to free agency, their salaries skyrocketed to levels the owners probably never dreamed in their worst nightmares.

I was tending bar last night at my wife's company Christmas party, and no, I am not going to call it a "holiday party."

As I stood there mixing rum punch and popping the caps off bottles of Sam Adams that some joker had shaken before he put them into the refrigerator, I naturally overheard conversations. And one of the conversations I overheard was the one about how you had better plan on parking far away and taking the Metro into town if you're planning to attend the inauguration next month, because simply everyone will be wanting to come and Witness History.

Yes, Washington is all a-dither, all goosey-pimply over the big party it's getting ready to throw next month when the Anointed One steps up to be sworn in. Which, after listening to some of the breathless party-talk I heard about it last night, got me to reflecting on ... Newton's Third Law of Motion.

You all know about Newton's Third Law of Motion. That's the one that says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You know, like when you push your boat away from the dock, the 20 pounds of "push" you apply to the dock makes the boat go 20 pounds' worth of the other way.

The law applies in more areas than physics. I just mentioned two: genocide and baseball.

The election campaign that just concluded last month,(after about five years) and will result in the Big Party next month, was, I was repeatedly told, the one that would "restore civility" to American politics.

Really? Then would someone tell me why this campaign that just wrapped up has ended more friendships than any presidential campaign I can remember in my lifetime? In 2004 I had friends who voted for Bush and friends who voted for Kerry. But when the election was over, we were all still speaking to each other. Right now I have two acquaintances and one cousin who have stopped speaking to me because I didn't vote for Obama.

Let's get a grip, people! Even Spike Lee said in an interview before the election that America's black population needed to "calm down" about Obama. After all, Lee pointed out, "He isn't Jesus."

He isn't even Elvis, whose name I mention because I'm remembering the night, many years ago, when I was working the graveyard shift in a 7-11 store in California. This was shortly after Elvis died. A random member of the Church of Elvis wandered into my store during the wee small hours, and while buying cigarettes, delivered herself of a eulogy for her fallen idol. When I said candidly that I didn't understand Elvis-olatry, that after all the guy was just a singer, albeit a talented one, and not St. Francis of Assisi, she grabbed her cigarettes and stormed out of there no doubt determined to boycott the Southland Corporation forever and take her business henceforth to Circle K.

This is like that. And it gets crazier. Sometimes, when I'm really bored, I will read the adult advertisements on Craigslist for laughs. I've never answered one, I just read them and surf on. Last week I saw one inviting any -- but not quite all -- interested swingers to a swapping-and-general-whoopee session somewhere out in northern Virginia. There was just one caveat: you were only welcome at the party if you voted for The Anointed One.

Great. Having voted for Obama is now a pre-req for exchanging body fluids (and STDs.)

Just call me a heretic, but the dirty rumors are true. I'm guilty as charged, all you Barry-olaters out there. I did not vote for Obama. And and as you head for my house with torches and pitchforks, I'll tell you something else. His skin was part of the reason -- not its color, its thickness, which seemed to me about one micron.

This is a guy so used to adoration and so unused to criticism that he cries "foul," "unfair," "low blow" and "distraction" if someone is gauche enough to point out that he's eating his shrimp cocktail with the wrong fork. The usual arguments about his inexperience and thin resume aside, that in itself was enough to wave me off the bandwagon. Now, believing as I do that the office generally makes the man and not the other way around, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this score and assume that the hard knocks that come with the job of being the most powerful person in the world will give him a fast education. But I think he should grab an opportunity and enroll in the three-week fast-track course that George W. Bush could teach him on learning to simply ignore it and carry on when you're being called every filthy name in the book and a few they have to make up. Because there will be a honeymoon, but it will end. And honeymoons are all Barack Obama knows. It's not all cheering crowds and flying underwear out there, and he's about to find that out.

And you Barry-olaters who think Elvis has re-entered the building are going to find out, too, and just as quickly as he.

So come on, Rob Lawson. Come on Julie Anderson. Come on, cousin Melissa. Smile and make a funny face. Elvis aside, this isn't church, although I think I might start attending again after all these years, if only because I think at this moment prayer is one of the few options left to those of us who believe in Newton's Third Law and wonder just where the ship of state is going to be sailing after having been given such an uncritically enthusiastic send-off.

Music For A Late-Night Cigar

The rather stern-looking guy in the photo to the left is not Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of 12-tone music, but his younger disciple, composer Anton Webern. If you don't know who he is, you will in a moment. For those who have read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (all six of you) the death of Webern, shot by a trigger-happy American GI when he stepped outside to have a cigarette after dinner in the spring of 1945, is a key episode in that novel. And it happened for real.

But to understand what the heck I'm about to talk about, you have to know who Arnold Schoenberg was, and Webern too. They were partners in a particularly significant cultural enterprise.

I'm going to put up the caveat here that I usually add to my blog when I'm writing about baseball: non-baseball fans are excused. And if you have no musical training and no understanding of, or interest in, the meaning of the term, "12-tone," you are similarly excused.

I'm regularly in the habit of smoking a cigar in my library before turning in at night. And my evening smoke is almost always accompanied by music. I've found that certain kinds of music are best at certain times of day. For instance, before 9 a.m. I don't want to hear anything from the Romantic period. It's just too damn noisy. From dawn to about the time the breakfast dishes are done, all I want to hear is stuff from between about 1590 and about 1800. Monteverdi. Dowland. Telemann.

Late night is the best time for music of an intimate nature, by which I mean music for small enembles which requires you to pay attention. The kind of music that cannot be background noise. Beethoven's late string quartets never sound better to me than they do after 11 p.m.

Lately I've been listening to music of the so-called Second Viennese School over my last cigar of the day. Or I should say, the Second Viennese School and its adherents. I mean of course, atonal or 12-tone music. Now, I'm not crazy about this kind of music as a rule, and yes, there is a sort of eat-your-vegetables thing going here; 12-tone reigned supreme for most of the 20th century. To simply ignore it would be like trying to pretend that T.S. Eliot never wrote, even if Eliot isn't your cup of tea, and he's seldom mine.

So. For the past few nights I've been listening to stuff like Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto; Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6 and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite.

Now, I'm going to assume that anyone who's still reading at this point already knows what all of this music is about and doesn't need it explained. So I'm not going to go into trying to explain dodecaphony. Besides, I'm a non-musician myself and not really qualified to explain it. If you put a page of sheet music in front of me, I can point out the treble and bass clefs; the leger lines, the whole note, the half note, the quarter note and the symbols for sharp and flat. But as far as looking at it and hearing something in my head, forget it. I sang bass in the choir when I was in high school, and I once took a few guitar lessons but had to drop them when my money ran out. That's the extent of my musical training. My only qualifications for talking about music are a lifetime of listening to it and reading about it. I think I'm the only person I know who has watched Leonard Bernstein's 1973 series of lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question all the way through at least six times on VHS over the years.

But for those who would like a thumbnail explanation of what I'm talking about, 12-tone or dodecaphonic music emerged before, during and after World War I. A group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, most of them Austro-Germanic (hence, "Second Viennese School") decided to dispense with the whole idea of writing in keys. 12-tone music is constructed using "rows" instead of keys, a "tone row" being a certain arrangement and/or permutation of the 12 tones in the chromatic scale.

Atonal or 12-tone music has a distinctly weird, interplanetary sound to people who have never heard it before. Because there are no keys, there are no "tunes" as we understand them, unless like Alban Berg in his Violin Concerto, you snitch a tune from Bach or someone else and work it in there somewhere. Because 12-tone music dispenses with keys, it also pretty much dispenses with the whole idea of melody. That means you have to listen for something else when you're listening to it, which gets me back to that business about late night being best for intimate music, which I consider 12-tone to be, because it really taxes your attention. You have to pay attention if you're going to get anything out of it at all; it's not going to come and caress your ear with Che gelida manina.

To put it bluntly, to the uninitiated 12-tone sounds like so much random banging, honking and screeching. I know, because that's what it sounded like to me when I first heard it.

Serialism (so called because a 12-tone row is also called a "series")as I said, held sway in musical circles for practically the entire 20th century. For a generation or so between the 1920s and the end of World War II, there was something of a split in the classical music world between Schoenberg, Webern and Berg's followers, who were all writing atonal and serial music, and followers of Igor Stravinsky, who resisted the new style until after Schoenberg's death in 1951. Rather than abandoning tonality, e.g. the idea of writing in keys, Stravinsky kept it alive by applying one innovative twist after another to it, in works as varied as Le histoire du Soldat, Oedipus Rex and the Symphony in C.

But once Schoenberg was in his grave, Stravinsky came around to dodecaphony. Some think he was led to it by his long-time friend and amaneunsis, conductor Robert Craft, a passionate exponent of serialism. But that argument is for another day. In the 1950s and up to his death in 1971, Stravinsky was turning out works like Monumentum pro Gesualdo, The Flood, and Requiem Canticles, all of which embraced the 12-tone method.

One of the problems I have with 12-tone music is that it's so complicated and theory-driven that a composer must have a powerful personality to make any personal imprint on it. Stravinsky certainly did, and even his 12-tone pieces still sound like Stravinsky. Webern, too, is distinct in his use of the style; his music is very spare, most of his pieces fleetingly short and heavy on exploitation of various timbres. Stravinsky admired Webern, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that I think Stravinsky's late pieces, the 12-tone works, sound more like Webern than they do like Schoenberg. Stravinsky was always distinct in his use of rhythm, and like Webern he was interested in exploring different timbres. For example he described a passage in his Orchestra Variations of 1965, (which by the way, were dedicated to the memory of T.S. Eliot) as sounding like broken glass being ground up.

But Bernstein made the point in his lectures at Harvard on Schoenberg and Stravinsky respectively that the 12-tone method made it possible for almost anyone, by memorizing a few rules, to come up with a presentable piece of music. My take on that remark is that dodecaphony lends itself to mediocrity very easily, and an awful lot of it sounds like all the rest of it. Schoenberg certainly had a strong musical personality, and when I listened for the first time to the Maurizio Pollini recording of his Piano Concerto, I wrote to my pianist friend Charles Berigan back in New York that it seemed to me as if, but for the lack of a key signature, this piece could be Brahms. Charlie more or less nodded in assent. Well, Schoenberg was famous for being a "conservative radical." He gave up tonality reluctantly, developing the new 12-tone method with relentless Germanic logic in response to the problems posed by Wagner's famous "Tristan chord" and what came after it.

That problem arose from the simple fact that the Romantics, from Chopin to Wagner, had experimented so thoroughly with chromaticism, that is, making their music wander far and wide from the traditional dialogue between the tonic and dominant keys, that they had pushed it to the snapping point. Composers like Gustav Mahler, Max Reger and Hans Pfitzner had stretched chromatic expression so far that Schoenberg decided it could no longer be contained within a tonal framework, and did what seemed to him the logical thing: he threw the key signature out and started over.

Then World War II came along and he moved to America.

America has always been culturally somewhat in thrall to Europe, and American composers embraced the Schoenbergian method with both arms. Some big names resisted; Aaron Copland held out for a while, but eventually even he started experimenting with The Method.

In no time, 12-tone music was the thing to do on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe had spoken. For the entire second half of the 20th century, dodecaphony held unchallengeable sway in the university music departments of the United States. You either wrote serial music or you were a reactionary and a fuddy-duddy.

And this is where our old friend irony steps into the picture. There are certain parallels between serialism and Marxism. For one thing, as Bernstein pointed out at Harvard, according to Schoenberg's rules (which were meant to be broken of course) in the construction of a 12-tone row, no one note can be repeated until the other 11 have sounded. And if a note is especially high or low, it can't be held for a long time because its position as high or low gives it a more prominent place than the other 11 tones, just as would being repeated. In other words, the method creates a complete tonal "democracy" if you define democracy as preventing any one individual from having any more or being any more important than any other individual.

That sounds to me like the way Marxism defines democracy, or at least the way Marxist regimes traditionally described themselves when calling themselves "democratic republics."

I don't think there is any coincidence in the fact that 12-tone music took over the university music departments at the same time that the political science departments were giving themselves over to Herbert Marcuse. There is something about serialism that inspires the dogmatic approach, and of course you can say the same thing about Marx. Marxists were forever accusing each other of apostasy, and any composer right up to John Corigliano who dared to deviate from the righteous path of Schoenberg would immediately suffer the ostracism of not being taken seriously, in much the same way that poets who persist in using meter are not taken seriously in English departments today.

How ironic then, that the country which tried to lead the world down the path to Marxism for 74 years, the Soviet Union, had a strict rule against Schoenberg and his method. In the USSR, of course, the problem was that everything from chalk to cheese was dictated from the Kremlin, and of the command-givers in the Kremlin, starting with Stalin, you could charitably say that when it came to music, as with architecture and so many other things, all their taste was in their mouths. Stalin was about as musical as a hedgehog, but he told Soviet composers what kind of music they had to write, as did his successors. And they stuck to a strict rule: what they called "formalism," by which they meant music that stressed form over content, was forbidden. There were Soviet composers with enough genius to work around this rule and still create great music. Shostakovich and Prokofiev are the first two that come to mind.

But in my youth, Shostakovich was not taken seriously in the United States. 12-tone music was so firmly in the saddle in American musical circles that composers and musicians looked down their noses at Shostakovich as being at best hopelessly old-fashioned, and at worst a Kremlin toady doing the bidding of his masters. It wasn't until Solomon Volkov published Testimony, a memoir purported to have been dictated by Shostakovich himself, that his stock in the west began to rise. Testimony showed Shostakovich to have detested Stalin and everything he stood for, and to have bridled under the way the Soviet regime made him live his life as a musician.

When Shostakovich died in 1975, Testimony had not yet been published and 12-tone was still king. But a few dissenting voices were beginning to whisper by the time the 1980s rolled around. Some in the musical community began pointing out that 12-tone music, while it might have solved a problem for fin-de-siecle Vienna and Europe generally, had little if anything to do with the American experience. Some also began looking at their watches and pointing out that 12-tone had now had 75 years or so to find an audience, and had yet to do so anywhere outside of universities and at festivals of "new music" attended mainly by composers and musicians and hardly at all by the public.

The public, generally, just didn't like 12-tone, and was getting tired of being hectored about eating its vegetables. The academy, predictably, labeled the public as dunderheads and philistines who just wanted to hear the same Tchaikovsky pablum over and over, and went about its business like the cultural priesthood it saw itself to be. One thinks of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier telling the American financiers who were paying for the buildings they designed to just shut up and pay the bills. "We'll tell you when it's done. Write us a check and then leave us alone." The musical intelligentsia had a similar attitude.

But by the 1990s, (interestingly, concomitant with the collapse of the Soviet bloc) tonality began to reassert itself in ever-bolder voices, and the cries of "Philistine" from academia began to grow somewhat fainter. Composers from the former Soviet empire such as Lithuanian Arvo Paert were writing music that was shamelessly tonal, as were John Tavener in England, Corigliano in the United States and plenty of others. Aaron Jay Kernis, a New York-based composer who attended The San Francisco Conservatory in the 1970s with my friend Berigan, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1998 with a piece so tonal that Charlie told me it sounded like Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade.

What can be said for that? Well, from my standpoint it's a big plus if you can hear a piece of music and actually recognize it without having to stop and get out the book or read the jewel box notes. And that's my biggest problem during these late night vigils with Schoenberg, Webern and company. I enjoy their music, but more as sound than as music. Sure, it's interesting to try and follow what they do with orchestration, dynamics and timbre, but the music all sounds so much the same that I can only take it in helpings and then I want to go back to my set of Brandenburg Concertos. I have listened to Leon Kirschner's 1963 Piano Concerto maybe a dozen times, and every time I hear it, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. It's that forgettable. And it sounds like every other 12-tone piece I've ever heard. If I didn't know it was by Kirschner, I wouldn't know it was by Kirschner. On the other hand, I can hear a passage of Tchaikovsky, Berlioz or Bruckner and immediately know who the composer is even if I don't know the piece. I'll leave it to one of my musician friends to explain that to me, but it's the truth.

Tonight I might give Schoenberg's Pelleas and Melisande a try. It's an early work, written before he went "over the edge" tonally with the op. 11 piano pieces that proclaimed the arrival of atonality in 1908. But this is 2008, 100 years later. And I think tomorrow night I'm going back to Beethoven quartets. I ate my vegetables. Bring on dessert.