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I’m writing this to make a plea to Americans everywhere. Give just five minutes of your time. Not for the homeless or the hungry, not for the children or for any charity. For all of us.

We all know those things our parents and teachers told us: Do it right the first time. Go the extra mile. But a lot of us don’t. And the issue is this – that extra mile, that ‘getting it right’ is often only about five extra minutes of time.

Think about the words to Kanye West’s “Stronger”. This song was immensely popular and spawned several covers. Though Kanye is often great with the words, he owes us that extra five. Did he really think it was okay to leave us with rhymes like “since OJ wore isotoners” and “Klondike”? They appear to be the only rhyming words within his reach at the time. But an extra five minutes could have resulted in so much more. Clearly he’s capable, but no, we get left with what could have been a truly great song had he put in the extra five.

While we’re on the topic of music, think about what it would have meant if Alanis Morrisette had taken an extra five minutes and made friends with a dictionary. It wouldn’t even have to be a big one. Even a small, elementary, pocket dictionary would have contained all she needed to know that not one thing in that stupid song was actually ‘Ironic’. “Isn’t it ironic?” No, Alanis, it wasn’t.

Music is really one of the best places to find examples of everyday American speech. We could look to the politicians and the sound bites we hear from them, but think back and count how many political phrases you listened to today versus how many songs. Even if you are one of the smug who did listen to the words of our leaders, rather than the words of those with pretty voices, can you quotes those words? Can you go up to a person on the street and ask him what our president said today? Will he know the answer? Chances are much better that he can quote all the lyrics to the latest Brittney Spears song. (Don’t get me started on her. When “Three” came out I was delighted to know she could count that high.) And, to top it off, far too many American-isms come from music, rather than anything intelligent that was said. *sigh*

At this point, I have to switch topics and talk about cows for a moment. Bear with me, this will make sense in a minute.

When most Americans think about cows, we think “mmm, tasty, tasty”. We think hamburgers and steaks, not ‘wow, I would love to talk to that cow.’ Even those vegetarians who defend those who can’t speak but are cute and furry, don’t go around saying their best friend is a cow or ‘did you hear what that brown cow said last week? He didn’t think the new healthcare plan was extensive enough.’ That’s just not gonna happen.

We don’t think cows are very bright, and so most of us eat them.

Do you see where this is headed?

When the aliens land, they are going to come to America first (probably New York – as we know from movies of every decade). And when they try to talk to us, what are they going to hear? “Isotoners” and “Klondike”. This is going to sound like “Moo, moooooo” to them.

If they learn the language – which I wouldn’t put past a culture that could get here from however far away they are – they are going to hear tons of misuse. Things like Alanis asking us all, ‘isn’t it ironic?’ What can the aliens possibly think about a culture that doesn’t even speak its own language correctly?

Exactly – the same thing we think about cows.

So I beg you, take the extra five minutes. Do it right. Help someone who needs it. Boycott Kanye (you might already be doing this, Thank you.) You just might save us all from becoming the base food of whatever the aliens call their McDonald’s!

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Though the rooms on board a ship aren’t what anyone would call ‘large’, they beat the hell out of the servants’ quarters. In the days of the Titanic, there was a steerage class. But that was cruise for transport rather than vacationing. These days, our rooms all have plush carpeting, made beds and towels folded into animal shapes. Every now and then you catch a glimpse into the service stairwell or such. The hallways the attendants use have no carpet, only that tread-like plastic flooring that says they want to just hose the whole place down rather than actually clean it.

There’s more to the underbelly of a cruise than just the actual service areas. Like on most ships, our attendants came from any number of different countries but almost none from the USA. We heard rumors that ships won’t hire more than fifteen percent of the staff from any one nationality, for fear that they’ll stage some kind of coup and mutiny on the guests.

What this means to the traveler is that you can’t understand your captain very well until the word ‘diarrhea’ comes over the speakers. And are they serious about that! If you are ill they will quarantine you. Apparently, they only hire germophobes to work on cruise lines. Though they smile at you, they won’t hesitate to squirt you with a near-pure-alcohol substance they refer to as ‘hand sanitizer’. Then they smile and say “Welcome” with a smile and an accent, while you discover cuts you didn’t know you had on your hands.

Though rumors abound about employee hookups and orgies among the crew, there are specific warnings in the daily events calendar. Guests are reminded not to mistake the crew’s friendliness as anything other than an enjoyment of their work. Yes, apparently putting the moves on your cabin boy will get you involuntarily debarked in Mazatlan. Too bad, so sad. No sex for you, find your own way home.

Yes, the crew cleans, takes out the trash and scrapes away the leftover food into a chute that takes it away from the eyes of the paying customers. Apparently, they are dealing with more than this. On day five our Environmental Tip said this: “Remember, do not put any items into the toilet that you could not eat.” They made an exception for the specially formulated, flushable toilet paper, but nothing else.

This was concerning. There were thirty-five of us in our group and we agreed that a pizza could therefore go down the commode. As could a turkey – if we de-boned it first. But we all agreed that what we had been putting down the toilet did NOT fall into the category of ‘items we could eat’.

Of the thirty-five of us, thirty-three have a really sick sense of humor. Still, no one took me up on my offer of a reward for the first person who took their poo (in a baggie – dog-park style) to the front desk and cited the Day Five Environmental Tip.

Sadly, I only saw glimpses into the underbelly I had all these imaginings about. I enjoyed the rumors and did my best to perpetuate them. But it seems that I am far more likely to get myself involuntarily debarked in a third-world city than I am to get the special treatment tour of the whole ship.

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Whether or not you are aware of it, you know about pity sax. You hear it all over – sometimes in expected places and sometimes when you were sure you’d be listening to something else. It’s any pop song, from any era, turned into a mellow sax version for your enjoyment. Or not.

This is the reason Kenny G is so incredible wealthy. It’s not because anyone is going to his concerts. And the crowd that does attend his events is that one that thinks tipping a server thirty-five cents shows how appreciative they truly were. So you know he’s not raking it in from shows. He could be selling CDs, and I bet he does. Right along with Yanni, Kenny G is your go-to gift for the grandma or great-uncle that you don’t know well enough to choose something thoughtful for. Even so, there’s more at play here. Both these guys can afford palatial estates on multiple continents without resorting to Hasselhoff-like drunken declarations that ‘they love me in Germany!’

It’s not just them, there’s enough of this crap to keep a lot of fantastic-but-not-quite-Yo Yo Ma musicians in the green for a long time. It seems as soon as a song hits the top forty there’s some company out there recording it in a partially orchestrated, horn-heavy mosh.

Let’s be honest here: nothing is safe. Both Britney Spears and Lady Ga-Ga have turned up in sax. Those old Kenny Loggins songs are prime fodder – come on, I bet you already had “Danger Zone” going in the back of your head, in sax right now, just from me mentioning this. If not, then you sure are being haunted by it now. Things you would think just couldn’t be converted are. Think about that old Blue (Da boo bee, da boo dai) song or even the more obnoxious, super techno “Fireflies”. Yup, I’ve heard them both. But it doesn’t end there. Lots of musicians record songs, or even whole albums, with orchestras. But this doesn’t keep them from getting ‘orchestrated’ at all. Even Metallica turns up this way. I heard “Enter Sandman” just the other day.

Muzak – the biggest purveyor of pity sax – is ubiquitous. You know it from elevators and cheesy restaurants everywhere. (I’m sitting in one of those restaurants right now listening to “The Long and Winding Road” in sax. That song is a personal favorite, but not like this. Excuse me for a moment while I yak . . . . okay. I’m back.) But there’s a lot more to Muzak than I bet you knew.

You probably understood that Muzak is an empire unto itself. You hear it so many places, how could it not be. But did you know that it’s a science, too? Yes, my friends. Muzak is an early attempt at mind control. I kid you not.

The science behind the sax is this: humans have natural output cycles. You are more productive at the top of the hour, and low at the forty-five minute mark. If you think about it, you already understood that humans are sluggish in the afternoons. Hence, the Snickers run, or the Red Bull shot. Whole cultures have designed their day around the concept of an afternoon lull, most notably with the practice of the siesta.

Anyone who is aware of this downswing in energy – that happens to 95% of us around 2pm – won’t plan a test or big presentation at this time of day. You just aren’t at your best. Any elementary school teacher is aware of this, too. And whole school systems are banning their most “important” (input) subjects from the just-after-lunch time slot and instead putting in hands-on or active (output) classes there, like Gym and Art and Music.

Muzak not only knows all this, they are in cahoots with the scientists and even fund some of the research. Their music choice is specifically crafted to pump you up just a bit in the upswing of the hour when you are petering out, and give you a little extra boost mid-afternoon. No, the fact that you heard My Chemical Romance over your office’s speakers at 3:15 wasn’t coincidental. Aside from the fact that you stopped and asked yourself “what is that!?” and then followed that thought with “That’s not My Chemical Romance, is it?” – the music had a profound effect. It was chosen just to make you more productive.

That’s a little creepy isn’t it? Makes you wonder what they want you to do when you get assaulted with the sax version of “Play That Funky Music White Boy” in the elevator. Think about it the next time you are listening to a winding sax sound and asking yourself “Is that (insert totally inappropriate band name here)?”

I’m with you. All this is disturbing. Even more disturbing is that companies report that it works: Muzak increases productivity. It makes me feel just a little dirty. I’m through with pity sax. I think I’ll download some Kenny G CDs and have some sax just for the sake of having sax.

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Right now, I am sitting in the breakfast bar of a cruise ship. I’m looking out over the waves and not seeing the whales. The captain swears there were several spotted right off the bow just a little while ago. And science agrees – this particular place and season is both the birthing and mating spot for scores of whales. Instead the only whales I have seen are those who seem to think all common courtesy about speedos no longer applies once you have hit international waters.

We are headed back to LA after a week in the Mexican Riviera. We have seen Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta. We rode Zip Lines in the canopy and ATVs on the beach. We did see actual whales on a sailboat where they plied us with margaritas and fresh guacamole. And we learned not to reply when we heard the word “Touristas”. We also learned that we might as well have a target on our backs – my good Spanish accent does not make up for the fact that many words I learned so long ago are out of my grasp now. I find myself with a reasonably well-crafted sentence that stops dead while I think “now what’s the word for ‘cheap’?”

The ship itself provides a lot of interesting things, too. It really is a floating city with a promenade, restaurants, theaters and even an ice skating rink. Yes, I have gone ice skating on the Pacific.

I have cruised before this – I’m not a virgin. This ship is a different cruise line than the last time and it’s noticeably bigger. Given this, we assured everyone that we were not going to get sea-sick. Big ships don’t roll the way little ones do, and our last cruise was rock solid. If you hadn’t seen the sea just beyond the plexiglass you wouldn’t have known you were on it.

Ahem. My friend, Lou, spent the first three days sick to her stomach – because this baby rolls! Big rocks back and forth. Maybe because, at eleven stories above sea level, we are so high up? Maybe the seas are rougher? I don’t know, but there’s an unmistakable pitch here. Being the geek that I am, I tried measuring it by sighting the horizon off my handrail on my balcony. Best I can guesstimate (sorry, didn’t bring instruments) we are rolling a good 4 degrees each way.

This means a marble would easily roll back and forth, even on the plush carpet we have. It means that the mini-golf on board is a bit of a challenge and an even playing field for all. It also means my alcohol tab (which is separate and can kill your bank account) has remained remarkably low. Who needs liquor when I stumble like a drunk just walking down the hallway? That spinning sensation when I try to go to sleep while drunk is an all-the-time occurrence. The only thing missing is the inflated sense of self-esteem. But at about ten bucks a pop for alcohol, the self esteem wasn’t going to get too high anyway.

One night, in the name of science, I did have three tequilas. Just to see if that might even out the rocking of the boat. The answer is: no, it didn’t.

Just in case the rocking wasn’t enough to make you sick, they stuff you with food every moment you are on board. There’s at least a buffet open all twenty-four hours of the day – for lunch and dinner it sports no less than three different nationalities of food choices. And for long hours there are three full meals served in courses in the formal dining room. As we don’t usually eat a full breakfast, three-course lunch and four-course dinner as a routine, we are all packing on the pounds. We can tell because the doors to the cabins are slim enough that I bet a lot of my fellow passengers didn’t fit through on day one, let alone day seven.

While there is a gym and also a spa, there are more wonderfully sedentary pursuits for our days at sea. There are shows: Movies in the theater, an Ice-skating show (no surprise), and tons of games. The “Love and Marriage” game show yielded a young couple on their honeymoon with both his and her whole families in tow. After they gave different and equally embarrassing answers to the ‘most unusual place you’ve made whoopee’ question, we were pretty certain that her father was going to leave his new son-in-law’s body in Puerto Vallarta. Going on stage with both families watching didn’t strike me as too bright. Then again, bringing them all on your honeymoon kinda says it all.

My group managed to win both “Scene It” Movie trivia and “TV Show Name That Tune” with perfect scores. In one case we won hats and in the second we got Medallions with the cruise logo. To be honest, they look like Transformer faces. We joked that we could summon Autobots at will. But as we were commenting that it was really nothing to be proud of, a cranky old man came up and told us we were watching too much TV and should be having more sex. So we told him we liked to do both at the same time and that TV theme songs turned us on.

In spite of the major pitch and roll, it’s been a lot of fun. Or maybe because of it. We can’t tell who’s been drinking and who hasn’t – everyone’s walking like a bloated idiot. People have been really nice, there are six hot tubs on board and with the rocking it’s like a hot wave pool. And, once you accept the cheesiness, the games have been fun.

I have to go now. There’s 80’s trivia right after lunch. I’m hoping to win a cruise logo bathing suit to show off my new figure.

Cruisin’ Along – the seedy underbelly

Though the rooms on board a ship aren’t what anyone would call ‘large’, they beat the hell out of the servants’ quarters. In the days of the Titanic, there was a steerage class. But that was cruise for transport rather than vacationing. These days, our rooms all have plush carpeting, made beds and towels folded into animal shapes. Every now and then you catch a glimpse into the service stairwell or such. The hallways the attendants use have no carpet, only that tread-like plastic flooring that says they want to just hose the whole place down rather than actually clean it.

There’s more to the underbelly of a cruise than just the actual service areas. Like on most ships, our attendants came from any number of different countries but almost none from the USA. We heard rumors that ships won’t hire more than fifteen percent of the staff from any one nationality, for fear that they’ll stage some kind of coup and mutiny on the guests.

What this means to the traveler is that you can’t understand your captain very well until the word ‘diarrhea’ comes over the speakers. And are they serious about that! If you are ill they will quarantine you. Apparently, they only hire germophobes to work on cruise lines. Though they smile at you, they won’t hesitate to squirt you with a near-pure-alcohol substance they refer to as ‘hand sanitizer’. Then they smile and say “Welcome” with a smile and an accent, while you discover cuts you didn’t know you had on your hands.

Though rumors abound about employee hookups and orgies among the crew, there are specific warnings in the daily events calendar. Guests are reminded not to mistake the crew’s friendliness as anything other than an enjoyment of their work. Yes, apparently putting the moves on your cabin boy will get you involuntarily debarked in Mazatlan. Too bad, so sad. No sex for you, find your own way home.

Yes, the crew cleans, takes out the trash and scrapes away the leftover food into a chute that takes it away from the eyes of the paying customers. Apparently, they are dealing with more than this. On day five our Environmental Tip said this: “Remember, do not put any items into the toilet that you could not eat.” They made an exception for the specially formulated, flushable toilet paper, but nothing else.

This was concerning. There were thirty-five of us in our group and we agreed that a pizza could therefore go down the commode. As could a turkey – if we de-boned it first. But we all agreed that what we had been putting down the toilet did NOT fall into the category of ‘items we could eat’.

Of the thirty-five of us, thirty-three have a really sick sense of humor. Still, no one took me up on my offer of a reward for the first person who took their poo (in a baggie – dog-park style) to the front desk and cited the Day Five Environmental Tip.

Sadly, I only saw glimpses into the underbelly I had all these imaginings about. I enjoyed the rumors and did my best to perpetuate them. But it seems that I am far more likely to get myself involuntarily debarked in a third-world city than I am to get the special treatment tour of the whole ship.

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I’ve been traveling a little bit lately, and I’m disturbed by a trend I am seeing: Oxygen Bars. Yes, you can pay good money to sit at a ‘bar’ or lay on an ergonomic table and have a canula put up your nose to deliver a hit of good old O2. This used to be reserved for those on their last legs and was intended to be accompanied by a good amount of wheezing. But, no, now it’s trendy.

These little oxygen bars are popping up a lot in airports, so you can suck down some overpriced air between flights. I’ve noticed, too, that it seems to be overwhelmingly professional men using these bars. This surprises me, since when you sit at the bar with the prongs up your nose you can’t help but look like a pussy.

But there they are, men in expensive suits watching their oxygen bubble through their choice of two out of four colored liquids that should add something extra to the oxygen they paid for.

While I understand that the bubbles are mesmerizing, you can certainly find better things to stare at for twenty minutes. Trust me, many stores carry these Lucite cubes with colored goo in them. They have a hole between two compartments and function like a liquid hourglass. Trust me, these can keep a whole roomful of people in thrall for far longer than a mere twenty minutes and you don’t have to pay an upcharge or anything, just turn it over.

But I guess the bar has its advantages. You can get a back massage, too. But since most of these that I have seen involve two of those vibrating handheld water-bug looking things that you can buy in the check-out lane at WalMart, and you are sitting on a barstool while you get this really limited back rub, I don’t see where you really come out ahead.

The physiological effects of increased oxygen through your nose are negligible, too. Only a mild portion of the oxygen your blood carries is used on each trip around the body – yes, that blue blood coming into your heart still has a lot of oxygen on it. This is why you can hold your breath for a while and not pass out – there’s still oxygen going around even when you aren’t sucking it down. Also, in normal healthy lungs, oxygen gets into the bloodstream quite easily. This is because blood cells really like oxygen and even our regular air has so much more oxygen than the blood can carry that it saturates the hemoglobin (that attaches directly to the oxygen) in relatively huge quantities. Since this process is designed to keep us breathing well, even in low O2 scenarios like higher elevations, then why do we need an oxygen bar? Yeah, I had nothing.

The sign at the bar says otherwise. It suggests that O2 can help with headaches, hangovers (yay!?), jet lag and memory among a handful of other things this super-element does. (It’s so wonderful, Earth gives it to you for free! But don’t let that stop you from paying for it!) Seriously, the best thing to improve your memory is Nicotine. Sad, but true, and totally not worth the side effects of the painful cancerous or emphysemic death. You could get a bit light-headed – but that’s it. The light-headedness might jolt you out of your hangover or jet lag, but I would guess this works much the same way smashing your thumb with a hammer would help ease that tension headache you had.

The one thing I noticed was this: the bigger the city, the more likely there was an oxygen bar in the terminal. And I have always wondered if pollutants in the air stuck to the insides of your lungs like cigarette smoke. Would a hit of extra O2 help clean this out? Hmmm, maybe. And I’ll even go one step further and try to be open-minded.

Maybe there is something to this Oxygen Bar trend. Maybe you guys at the airports are onto something. But you still look like pussies!

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Well, it’s a brand new year, and that means it’s time for the same old resolutions. Yup, most years, me and mine resolve to become healthier / lose weight / get ripped. And most years nothing comes of it except that long about March we get a niggling sensation that we forgot to do something important.

Last year, we decided that if we were really going to stick to it, it would have to be fun. And hey, if we got Wii Fit, well that would be fun, right? We could get the kids on the healthy track early and yada yada yada.

As the first household in our immediate family circle to get the Wii fit, we became the place to come to play on the balance board.

First, if you have a Wii, then you are familiar with the concept of a Mii. This is a little avatar that you get to make, and like the name suggests, most of us go all narcissistic and spend several hours trying to get these little cartoon blobs to look as much like us as possible. After coming to grips with the fact that, yes, our eyes really are spaced like that and the square chin does best match our own faces, we get freaked out by how much this little conglomeration of features does look just like us! Creepy!

So when you first get on the Wii Fit, you dial up your Mii and try to get him to work out. But the good folks at Wii realized this isn’t right! What incentive do you have to trim up if your digi-alter-ego is already you but sleek? So the first time you hop on the board you’re in for a surprise.

For starters, the Fit has an adorable little voice that says ‘oh!’ when you climb on the board that serves a joystick and scale. Then it says ‘measuring, measuring’ in that same cute little voice. It occasionally hiccups a little, and we were afraid that as our heavier folks climbed on it might just let out a horrified little ‘ouch!’ or maybe even a full protestation – ‘you’re hurting me!’ But no, what it does is really far worse.

It takes a number of measures such as balance and reaction times and assigns you a ‘physical age’ that is often in the ‘senior’ category for people we would term young and relatively fit. It’s also remarkably easy to shave years off of this age just by trying again, so I’m not sure what it’s worth. But, that isn’t the worst of it.

No, it uses data you input (height & age) to calculate your BMI. If you are in the normal range this is all fine. But the normal range seemed a bit low to us. It didn’t capture some of the people we really thought would fall into it. And the ‘mildly overweight’ level seems impossible to get into. Too many family members jumped right into the mid numbers of the ‘obese’ category. And while we all like to lie to ourselves (it’s just an extra ten pounds and I can shed it if I put my mind to it!) I really wouldn’t label anyone in my family as obese – and not just because they are going to read this. After three family members earned this unsavory title, my sister yelled at it: “Obese! We’re in America! Stupid Asian BMI!”

If the label wasn’t bad enough, the next part is! Your Mii suddenly frowns. Bad things are coming your way. Yes, your Mii bloats right before your eyes – gaining all the extra baggage your “obese” real self has. Then, just to rub it in, the little Mii grabs its big, jiggly belly and gives it a shake while looking just about depressed enough to ask you to hit the ‘delete’ button and end his sad little existence.

Though your little Mii will lose the weight right along with you – shedding it in happy bits as you weigh in – the initial phase where his digital self gets surprised by all the weight you have gained for him is a bit too much to bear.

So, no. Sad to say, the Wii Fit didn’t really get us to our goal. My Mii hasn’t been exercised in months. And when I get back on, I know he’s gonna point that out to me, with recrimination in his sad little digital voice.

This year, instead, I am resolving not to resolve anything. I want to say that this is a resolution I can keep, but I do realize that it creates a completely circular conundrum and that I have broken this resolution just by having it. Oh, well, at least my record of breaking resolutions stands intact. And this year, my Mii will race Mario Karts and keep his little opinions about my weight to himself!

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