I have an extra special treat for you this holiday week. I was recently asked to do an interview on TruckStar Radio - a show for people who drive for a living and do a lot of listening to the radio. They LOVE audiobooks and they really wanted to know all about the AudioMovie of RESONANCE.

I had a great time talking with them. Be warned, this 30 minute scheduled interview went for almost 2 and half hours, and it’s all here for you. Happy listening!

AJ

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The Chipmunks aren’t the only ones who have crossed the line. Many, many venues are feeding kids adult material in glossy kid tones. KidzBop ads feature one adult song after another and then have karaoke sing-a-long tracks to be sure your kids know the words.

It’s not just music either! For years, movies have been making unsavory stories into kid-fare, too. (I’m talkin’ to you, Disney!) The story of Pocahontas isn’t for kids – she didn’t paint with all the colors of the wind. She was likely the lover of a much older, married man. And many state that her knowledge gave the English the information they needed to wipe out the native people. So get your daughter a costume and pretend that Pocahontas helped eradicate racism!

There was an Anastasia movie as well. The only thing in its favor is that this movie was poorly executed and very few kids saw it. While there is new recent evidence suggesting that the real Anastasia died with the rest of the Romanovs, the stories about her escape were harrowing at best. The cleanest versions had her sheltered by kindly country folk in a Nazi-Germany-like culture. Others had her trading with soldiers - sex for shelter. Some say she yanked her own teeth to destroy a dental record match and most had her ending up in a mental hospital. But apparently if we give her a talking bat for a friend (or some crap like that) it’s all good for kids.

The Chipmunks may have been among the pioneers in this realm. (I don’t know, did Mickey Mouse have some molestation charges that he bought off? Is everything just peachy after he dies, because no one will remember the damning evidence and the need to pay to make the charges go away? A nice glossy movie and we are all soothed.)

I listened to the Chipmunks as a kid. My sister and I sang along to all the songs and to this day I have friends who can pipe up in squeaky voices to “You got to know when to hold’em (when to hold’em!)” (Yes, I hear some of you laughing).

I don’t think any of us would be surprised that the original version of “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” didn’t actually include that squeaky “chipmunks!” at the end of that line. Nor did it have that verse about liking roasted acorns and not doing homework. “On the road again” was another song that had clearly been taken over by the little nut-crunchers. And I wasn’t shocked to learn that the Gambler hadn’t actually bummed a “twinkie and offered me a bite”.

A little buff and shine isn’t that big a deal. I had a sheltered life, but not that sheltered, and neither do my kids. I am firmly in the camp that believes if we protect our children from everything, we protect them from nothing. By the same token I’m stomping on that KidzBop CD when I find my daughter with the mic in hand singing the Milkshake song.

It’s the bad stories gussied up as good that get me. If we make Disney Princesses out of real people with unsavory pasts, where do we stop? Are we headed for “Monica Lewinsky, the musical”? Do we send our daughters out for Halloween in blue collared dresses with stains? Do we send our boys out as Hitler: misunderstood underdog?

We can’t just change a few words and make it okay. The other day I was in a store and through the speaker system I heard “The Coward of the County”, another old Chipmunk classic. In my head, I sang along. (If you know this song already, you may be asking yourself “who the hell fed that to kids!?!?!”) As I wandered the store, I heard squeaky voices in my head, right along with Kenny Rogers, up until the part where the “Gatlin boys were bullies and they beat up Tommy’s best friend.”

No. I stood, gape-mouthed, in the center of the store blocking traffic as my mind absorbed the real words. The Gatlin boys didn’t beat up Tommy’s friend, they gang raped the love of his life.

Aside from having my brain blown by what horror I had been fed in a candy shell, I thought, “Who plays this song in public?” Then I realized that was a stupid question. Of course people play it in public. A whole lot of people were involved in making that Chipmunks album and playing a version for kids. Hell, my own parents bought it for me. (And they didn’t allow me to see PG-13 movies until I was 15!) Did people think we’d never find out? That we’d never hear the original and be appalled?

I’m having to resign myself to the fact that I am mostly alone in this battle. No one else seems to care. The movie makers aren’t concerned what kids might find out later, or what the real story is. And why should they be? Too many parents seem to think that if it’s shiny it’s okay.

So I – like many of you – am left playing gatekeeper by myself. Excuse me, apparently I’m going to have to go research the next Disney movie before we can go this weekend. I want to be sure the Princess’s Daddy wasn’t funding that castle with mafia dealings, and that the nasty “little scuffle” marking our heroine as “misunderstood” wasn’t over drug money.

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Whether or not it’s easy being green, there are a handful of celebs out there who want us go greener. It used to be hippies and commune families who lived green. Now it’s Brad and Angelina (remember she used to carry blood in a vial around her neck to help save . . . Billy Bob Thornton. Never mind, I don’t think we want that resource conserved.)

This just points out that there’s confusion out there about who to follow. Many celebs will tell you they are green, because it’s hip to be green these days, but that doesn’t mean they are. My money says that Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey aren’t green in the ‘earth conservation’ way. “Going Green” and “Smoking Green” are two entirely separate things.

But there are celebs really making the effort to save mother earth. Bands big and small are trying to make a difference. Thirty Seconds to Mars devoted their “Beautiful Lie” video to educating the watchers about global damage and inviting them to a website to learn how to conserve. Ironically, they shot the video in pristine wilderness north of the arctic circle. Because nothing says conservation like drum kits, amps and helicopters for those overhead camera angles.

Rock concerts are huge polluters, causing massive emissions from road trips by both ticket holders and tour busses. They also produce huge quantities of unrecycled trash and put amazing strain on local electric power. The Dave Matthews Band makes an effort to offset this and their CO2 emissions by planting trees and building wind turbines. They also dump their human waste from the tour busses over rivers. And onto unsuspecting river-boat riders. But apparently that wasn’t an act of conservation – just a bus driver error.

Ed Begley Jr has gone so far as to get his show “Living with Ed” on HGTV. In the show he promotes all the things his family has done to cut emissions and be greener. In the old days pedaling a wheel to produce enough power for toast was considered, at best, a job for the family hamster. But, no, it seems Ed does this just about every morning. Toast takes about ten minutes apparently, but what about oatmeal? I don’t think I’ve ever wanted breakfast that badly. In the old days we would have referred to Ed as ‘off the reservation’. Now, he is simply ‘off the grid’ and somehow, that’s cool.

For many of the rest of us, conservation is in the little things – no toaster bike for me! We can give our kids printed on paper to draw on, re-purpose gift tins and such, and just make certain we fix what we can rather than tossing it and buying new. We can re-use all kinds of things. My dad swears that my grandmother (who came to help when I was born) rinsed out the dirty paper towels then hung them out to dry and use again. He thought she’d taken frugal to a whole new level, but maybe she was just green before the rest of us.

Celebs are on the ‘Reduce’ bandwagon, too. It’s a lot simpler than building wind turbines and solar panels. And it’s less painful than skipping the concert by your favorite band because of the trash. My father mentioned that my daughter had clogged his toilet with too much paper. We are trying to get her out of this habit. Luckily, there’s a celebrity spokesperson for this, too. Sheryl Crow says we only need to use one square of toilet paper to wipe. And while I do applaud her conservationism you won’t find me shaking her hand.

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While I have both dogs (3) and cats (2), I have to say the dog team hasn’t been out winning points lately. Start with the fact that dogs can kill their feline competition, and their red-headed step-brother the coyote often does it for them. A friend of mine says this about having open land “It’s all fun and games until something eats the cat.” But I guess that wasn’t enough. Dogs are getting press for doing their own dirty work lately. Packs of feral dogs are coming after people. Though this isn’t a new problem at all, it’s happening more often lately and with bad, bad consequences.

So I have to ask: Man’s best friend? Really, close your eyes and picture this: You are out on your bike on a neighborhood street in the suburb of a big city. It’s a sunny day and all is well until you hear a rustling behind you. Then you hear the patting of paws on the pavement. Your blood spikes. You bike a little faster, but the noises keep up. When you hear it you know you’re done for: “Mmmmrrrow”

Exactly. There are no packs of feral cats out killing people. And the dog issue isn’t limited to America where we have such a love affair with puppies and kittens that we still can’t convince the general population to spay and neuter. Mexico has a wild dog problem, too. Only their dogs are Chihuahuas.

You might think a pack of Chihuahuas is as scary as the feral cat story two paragraphs ago, but laugh not, my friends. The tiny canines can work in concert and take down a bull. The good people of Mexico are afraid. And rightly so.

There are two competing problems at issue here with the wild dogs. The first is the spaying/neutering problem already mentioned. It’s like the ‘cute animals poster company’ is afraid they’ll run out of models and are undermining the SPCAs efforts.

The other problem is breeding. Dogs are bred for function or looks, but not for behavior. A lot of this breeding leads to health problems in the dogs. Daschunds are a great example: they’re too long which gives them back issues. That is, if they don’t wear sores on their bellies first from dragging them on the ground. And those are just the obvious problems. You might not know this unless you’re a weenie-dog owner because why else would anyone know this? But Daschunds development also interferes with their anal glands. Yes, they get . . . Okay, nevermind, I’ll stop. But it’s really disgusting and no you don’t have anal glands of your own to worry about.

Yes, there are a lot of nasty side effects when we breed for looks and function. We breed for jaw strength, we breed for size, we breed for agility and sense of smell. And all too often we breed for looks. Gnaw on this before you choose a registered dog over a shelter mutt: purebreds have more problems. Breeding in those cute ears and fuzzy little body have side effects (anal glands not withstanding). These dogs die faster, have more health problems and are noticeably stupider. This isn’t surprising when you hear some breeders brag about how they got those perfect ears by breeding one dog with her brother then one of the babies to the grandfather and so on. My only question is who’s dumber, the dog or the person who made it?

We should be breeding dogs for personality, because I’d like you to name me one American who has gone out fox hunting with his daschund. No, you’re more likely to find these small dogs in the mall, shoe-hunting. And don’t even get me started on the total uselessness of mini-daschsunds (in case you are hunting really tiny foxes from the back of a Shetland pony?). And mini Dobermans are like a living oxy moron. The Doberman is for protection. The mini won’t protect you from anything, even a roving band of robber midgets.

If we bred for personality, we’d make a dog that hates the taste of leather and doesn’t really feel the need to chew much of anything. It would be highly loyal. It would abhor peeing and pooping on the carpet and would hold it for hours until it could go outside. In fact, this uber dog would ideally not pee or poop at all.

Yes, I’d like to see a dog bred for personality. Or wait . . . if we did that . . . bred it just for personality and not for looks then . . .

On second thought, maybe I don’t want to see this creature, because that’s gonna be one ugly dog.

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Maybe the grocery store isn’t the best place for us to pick our veggies.

I’ve already copped to having a problem getting the cloth bags into the store. I have them, I want to use them, but when I’m getting out of the car it doesn’t pop readily to mind that I should grab those cloth bags. I know those bags are the major method by which us ordinary folks get to exhibit some mild superhero tendencies and save the earth. But I’m just not good at it.

I’ve lately been pleased to find that I’m not the only one. Although this does make me sad for the future of earth. I thought you were remembering your cloth bags! How do I know you haven’t remembered your bags either? Because the supermarkets have sprouted signs that say “Did you remember to get your cloth bags from the car?” Yup, they didn’t put that up at three different Krogers just for me. They aren’t the only ones doing this, either. (I think Publix has the best sign: “Reduce, Reuse, Remember”.)

Also sadly, two of my bags have had to be retired already – one for a hole in the bottom and another for a broken strap. Unfortunately, both these conditions are fatal. If I were the kind to think about the money, I would say that I’m pretty sure I didn’t earn back my buck-oh-nine before they broke, but knock-on-new-growth-sustainable-wood, I think the others are holding up well.

These bags all have a future traveling back and forth to the grocery, and Bravo for them. Unfortunately, just getting them in supermarket the door isn’t enough.

I have this other problem with the bags. I not only have to get them into the store with me, I have to have them at the ready before the checker starts ringing my purchases. Because it’s really hit or miss as to whether they’ll ask if you brought your own bag. And if they don’t ask and you aren’t watching like a hawk, you’ve got three plastic bags with an average of two items in each in your cart before you can say, “But I brought my own!”

I know this because it happened to me just the other day. I took the bags into the store. Then I shopped. Naturally, the food went on top of the bags (they were at the bottom and I didn’t need them . . . yet.) It was a good day, the line moved quickly, there was a checker and two baggers. And before I could say “But I brought my own!” I had five plastic bags in my cart.

I blurted it out anyway. Bagging stopped. I have to take an aside here and say this is my fault. I’ve made this mistake before and stood gape-mouthed as baggers took my food out of plastic bags, placed it into cloth bags then wadded the plastic and threw it in the trash. What the hell? At least if the plastic had gone home with me I would have reused it for . . . for . . . something!

This time my hapless baggers didn’t chuck the plastic. Nope, they set the plastic bags into the cloth bags and put those into the cart. I sighed. I would have said something, but I was distracted by the checker bouncing the apples on the scale/scanner.

What?! I spent time picking out un-bruised fruit and the checker bounced them! Then, (because, yes, it gets worse) she rolled them to the baggers, who dropped them into bags. Then she asked one of the baggers for an apple that didn’t scan and the poor green orb went rolling back to the checker then to the bagger again in a sick version of Red-Rover.

But it wasn’t over yet. No, my milk was in a cloth bag (around a plastic bag) and my apples (bruised like my little heart) were in the insulated bag. I tried to be polite when I pointed out that the insulated bag was for the cold things, please. After a blank stare I added, ‘like the milk and the frozen veggies.’ But the baggers looked at me and the bag as though I had asked them to do all this while reciting the alphabet, backward.

All I could think was . . . well I won’t repeat what I was actually thinking, but I did also think this: that bag says “Kroger” on it in big letters, so it’s not like they’ve never seen an insulated bag before. They sold it to me. And it’s not like it’s a discontinued item or something that the newbies wouldn’t have seen before. Not ten feet away was a display that had a sign on the top saying the insulated bags were for cold things! So why were the baggers acting like monkeys who’d been handed a computer? No, that’s a bad analogy. The monkeys would have figured out something cool to do with the computer. These two had no clue.

Well, crap. I should have just bagged it myself.

I’m apologizing to you now. I’m the one responsible for the clog at self-check. I’m the one with the full cart and long line behind me. But I want you to know why, before you and your one item get mad at me. I would gladly go to the checkers if I could trust them not to bounce my apples – and no, that’s not a metaphor for anything dirty. Me and my apples are going home un-abused this time. And I’m sitting down for a tall glass of cold milk when I get there. I thank you in advance.

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Weirder still, I was at the Coffee Bean one day and upon walking out to my car I saw a chicken. Just a random chicken out clucking in a nice neighborhood. Maybe the chicken truck driver had stopped at the strip mall for a Baja Burrito? Or maybe those sweet folks in the yellow house weren’t able to afford market food given what they were paying for their mortgage? Maybe the eight foot tall fence concealed a working farm. Who knows? After I stood there, mouth open for about five minutes, the chicken just wandered off and I never saw another.

There was also a red macaw one day, flying in my neighborhood. And later the news reported a tiger walking the streets of Burbank. That one’s bad. Someone owned an illegal tiger and it got away. Well, you can’t just come out and say, ‘oops! Did Fluffy get out?’ ‘cause they are going to haul you to jail for that one. You and Fluffy are never getting back together after he has been out terrorizing the kiddies.

Yes, there’s all kinds of wildlife in LA and a lot of it ends up at the Humane Society. (No, it’s not the ‘pound’, and it’s not even an ‘animal shelter’ – the good folks balk at those terms!) I have two dogs from the LA system and my sister has had three.

As our mother is deathly allergic to fur, at the first moment of adulthood I went out and got myself a fuzzy pet. When my sister finally liberated herself, she moved in with my family in LA and we said she, too, could get a puppy. What the hey! We had hard wood floors! Bring it on.

Being a black belt, she picked the tiniest, cutest shepard mix and named her “Kiai.” It’s a karate term – the loud yell you use to startle your opponent. I am a firm believer that God loves irony, and true to form Kiai never developed a bark. Most dogs do, somewhere in that first year they lose the puppy yipping and a loud bark emerges from their own throat. Usually it’s the dog himself who is the first one scared by it, and it’s fun to watch.

With my two big dogs in the house, Kiai was quickly relegated to Omega Dog – last in line, last to eat, the lowest ranked creature in the house (even the toddler had been taught how to stare down the dogs.) And Kiai’s personality lent itself to the Omega Dog stature. She rolled over for everyone. Even the wimpy mail lady who was afraid of Chihuahuas was not perturbed by Kiai. We would go outside and tell her, “Bark! That’s the mail lady. You’re supposed to do something here!” But nothing.

The dog was afraid of all men. Not just submissive, but run-and-hide-in-the-closet afraid. I laughed that my sister had gotten the dog for protection, but – given that dog and her own black belt – the dog probably felt safer out walking with her at night.

Though Kiai grew up, she never expanded sideways. When she turned head on, she practically disappeared and we were afraid the neighbors would turn us in for not feeding our dog. If you’re a vet, you may be putting two and two together by now, but we sure didn’t.

Sadly, Kiai died at age two of some congenital heart problem. My sister was out of town and I was helping the dog sitter when this happened. Maybe it’s a good thing my sister wasn’t there when the vet first said, “Well, these heart conditions happen a lot in those coyote mixes.”

Yup, how did we not see that? All the pieces were there. But even her regular vet never said anything. Either he didn’t know or just didn’t think we were stupid enough to not know. But it was all there, in the way Kiai walked (loped actually), the fact that she never barked but could howl with the best of them. And – wow – we had a half-coyote under our roof for two years.

This could happen anywhere. Out here in the Tennessee country I bet we have just as many dogs crossed with coyotes. And there’s more than just coyotes out there too! While I doubt there’s any real risk of mistakenly adopting any half-parrots or chicken crosses or anything like that, I think the shelter should warn you about that big orange and black striped house cat you were about to take home.

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In case you were unaware, a qualifier lessens a meaning. For example: Sylvia can be a redhead or (qualified) sortof a redhead. In the second instance we know that Sylvia’s hair might be disputed as ‘red’.

I’d also like to point out that Word gives that nasty red underline to ‘kindof’ and ‘sortof’ as these aren’t real words. And I know that some of you may be cringing at the very use of them. But I’m okay with new words. I like words, legit or not. I am a firm believer that if you don’t know of a word for the situation, you should use existing words to cobble a new one together. But you don’t abuse the grammar. The rules are what allow us to know what’s going on. A smart man is quite different from a smarting one.

My little brother once said that bad milk had a foresmell. You know this, that very faint odor that tells you something is wrong with the milk (even though you often ignore it and take that first, sputtering sip anyway.) There’s no word for ‘an indicative odor that prefaces a fermented food’. ‘Foresmell’ follows the rules using a common word and a known prefix. I think we should adopt it and kudos to my brother for making it up.

So while we can accept ‘kindof’ and ‘sortof’ into the lexicon, the real issue is all the over-qualification folks are doing today. I had to break my friend Alex of a perennial favorite: kinda sorta. This one shames me as an English speaker for so many reasons. ‘Kind of’ and ‘Sort of’ are slang to begin with, though enough folks use them to give them meaning. But while I can clearly abide writing each of them as one word, dropping that last letter is cheap and lazy. (And that goes for any last-letter dropping. “Darlin’” is one of the worst! If you are fond enough of someone to use this term, don’t they deserve the ‘g’???)

Stacking two qualifiers is ridiculous. He kinda sorta doesn’t like ice cream. Really? By the time you get to the end of that one, I’m gone. I’ve never met anyone who needed even a single qualifier to tell about their preference for ice cream. You either like it or you don’t. But two such words? Is that like a double negative? I declare it so. The next time someone tells you they kinda sorta don’t like something, give them an extra serving!

In the South, we have “might could”. Yup, you might could make it to the semifinals of the Qualifier Crackdown with this one. Ack! I know a bunch of you out there right now should put your fingers to your foreheads, where you might could feel the knot you get just above your nose when you are sortof making that face.

In the end, we need qualifiers. In many cases, something doesn’t quite make the grade and we need way to say so. We also need a way to be nice. “I kindof don’t like it” is the acceptable alternative to “Wow, that’s fugly!” And the person we said it to can walk away with hurt feelings, but maybe without being openly insulted.

Unfortunately, qualifiers have spread like a virus, needlessly getting sloughed off on person after person until their use is rampant. We have to wash our hands of this plague so that future generations don’t think it’s fine to needlessly qualify things.

If we undertake this eradication now, we might possibly defeat it sooner than we may think. Yes, I bet you we probably could!

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I’m not talking about the kind of misdemeanor that results from the slightly off adjective. Though that’s often a bad thing, we can all live through “the grisly trees” or “a Curacao sky”. In fact, from the right author we just might call it poetic.

Adjective Abuse occurs when the word either changes the meaning to something you know wasn’t the intent or obscures the idea to the point of bad advertising.

Here’s the most recent one I encountered . . . Perhaps you have seen one of the wand-waving, rune-gathering games that are popping up throughout the nation these days. The one we played this week involved “The Ancient Book of Wisdom”. Um, right. The pages were printed on paper commonly referred to in business as ‘slicks’. It was folded in the middle and stapled. And a fresh clean copy was handed to each participant. There was nothing ancient about this book. (In fact, even the term ‘book’ is a misnomer, it was really nothing more than a pamphlet.) I’m pretty sure they intended this thing to be “The Book of Ancient Wisdom.” Though, since the company is quite new, I doubt there’s anything ancient about it, wisdom included. Though I guess they don’t really care about accuracy if you consider the way they are making money hand over fist – some of it mine!

It’s not just the odd place where this pops up. I know English teachers everywhere feel they are fighting an uphill battle, and the truth is: they are. Poor word choice is everywhere. Why would anyone want to do things right when wrong is so acceptable? I could fill a book rather than just an entry here, but I’ll refrain and keep it limited.

Another good one was at a convention where I was sitting in a booth selling my books. Some of the good folks coming by were quite excellent, while others asked questions along the line of: “So what you are saying is that the markings on the pages are ‘words’ and they tell a ‘story’?” Thus, it was no surprise that the glossy brochure had advertised a “fun, family-filled weekend”. I guess they were right. There were families there. But it seems they really meant a ‘fun-filled, family weekend’ or a ‘family-fun filled weekend’. In the end I am still hard pressed to figure out how to stuff a weekend with people instead of activities . . .

Most of my personal favorites come on food. These companies may not be using poor phrasing so much out of bad form, but in an effort to obscure ingredients. The FDA is really strict about names, Kraft cannot change their mac’n’cheese to “Cheese and macaroni” because there isn’t enough cheese in the product to carry that name first. While this practice has led to a handful of alternate spellings (we said there was cheeeez in it, not actual cheese!) my favorite word is ‘chocolatey’. The addition of the ‘y’ makes it an adjective and excuses the company from inserting any actual chocolate into the product. (I’m not sure how many folks must agree that a food tastes ‘chocolatey’ in order to get this moniker . . . . but maybe we don’t care if there’s actual chocolate as long as the combination of chemicals we are eating tastes a lot like cocoa. )

Still, Charleston Chew candy bars take this one step further.
“Chewy flavored nougat with a chocolatey coating”

Mmmmm, fun-filled tastiness.

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Within the past five days I have attended an NHL game, a college soccer game, and a JV high school football game. I am seriously played out. But doing so many games in such a short period has left some lasting impressions. Though everything one does at a game seems to be a mental regression, maybe there’s a good point to it. You know, even besides backing a winning team.

Where else can you stand up and yell “That’s it!” at the top of your lungs and not be looked at like you had a very sudden bout of Mad Cow Disease? Try yelling anything in the boardroom, or giving a good “Hell, yeah!” after a particularly interesting bit of info from your college professor.

Because of this, there’s a social ‘pass’, so to speak, at a game. Others won’t call you on behavior that would usually get you kicked out of your circle – say a good hard slap on the back because something great occurred, chest-butting a stranger, or ogling a series of girls in short skirts.

We make decisions we would think foul in other scenarios: Like eating pasty hotdogs with off-brand catsup or drinking hot chocolate made with boiling water and an oddly sweet brown food coloring. On top of that we say things like ‘huh, that’s not bad’ when we are charged $4.50 for the pasty hot dog. And we say ‘thank you’ when we don’t see any change from our twenty and all we got was three twelve ounce cups with four ounces of beer sloshed out of them by the time they get to our hands.

We do have to remember, though, that there’s a different level of what you can get away with at each type of game. At the JV game there’s a social element. You probably wouldn’t go unless you know someone who’s playing. But this actually diminishes the game quality. You can’t be completely nuts because you have to face these people the next day. And though you may have a social ‘pass’ with the people you attend the game with, it doesn’t exist with those you didn’t arrive with. So the JV game means no free reign stupidity like at a good pro game, the kind stocked with hundreds of other people who will never see you again.

There you basically have a ‘get out of jail free’ card for completely stupid behavior. You’ll likely never have to face a coworker who knows that you painted something on your gut then lifted your shirt like a drunk girl at Mardi Gras just to get your face (um, gut) on the jumbotron. And if you do, well then his gut was painted with the other half of the team logo you were sporting. Just make sure your gut isn’t the one bearing the butt end.

It isn’t just behavior that falls to the side when we’re at a game. There’s a huge market of paraphernalia –sit-on cushions and too-big fleece hoodies and logo blankets. Normally, if we bundled up this way and proudly displayed our butt pads we’d be ridiculed: called ‘granny’ or asked if we had hemorrhoids.

There are also logo tees and big foam hands, wigs and crazy head gear. Seriously, where else would otherwise respectable men and women be able to wear huge polyurethane cheese on their heads?

To think that all this started as a survival technique. People played games to stay in shape for when the raiders came. But those days are gone. The raiders aren’t a threat anymore. It’s really the Raiders fans that are scary. (I hear the police squads run drills – play games? – to practice for when these guys invade.)

Its clear that self-defense is no longer the point, but it seems even the game is no longer the point. It’s all about the fans – the crazy people who have a chance once a week for a whole season to yell like there’s a Heisman for it. For otherwise sane folks to holler at the coach (often on TV) as though this man might at anytime turn around and say, “Wow, that’s an amazing play, Bob, I think we’ll try that.” (I have to point out here that half the idea of a play is that it’s a surprise to the other team. And therefore anything you yell out is useless just by the sheer fact that you yelled it. But what the hell! It was worth a try.)

In the end, we all suffer varying degrees of stupidity at games. And really, who should complain? I like the bucketheads – a group of five dancing kids with painted KFC buckets upside down on their heads (that part shouldn’t have surprised you). These guys have been regulars at one team’s games for so long that they’ve had to phase out the kids when they get too big. It’s like a really creepy, cracked out boy-band kind of thing.

Recently my kids asked if they could join the bucketheads. And, well, it was a game. So I didn’t holler at the top of my lungs “What the hell are you smoking?” Instead I seriously said I’d consider it, then I asked them to pass the nachos.

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Today I learned something new: I learned that my state is dumb. Sorry, Tennessee, the rankings don’t put us very high up . . . in fact we hit the bottom ten. At least we weren’t dead last. That would be Louisiana and that probably wouldn’t be a surprise.

The creators of this study, Martek, show the top ten states as having a high likelihood of being near the oceans and cite fish consumption as a possible reason for higher brain health. Excuse me? Then how did Louisiana come in dead last? There’s a humongous quantity of fish being consumed there. Now, I believe almost all of that fish is fried, but California is getting a lot of its fish in Wahoo’s fish tacos, and that’s not going to rank too high on the old Omega-3 list either.

The low ten is heavily weighted into the south. Tennessee didn’t make the bottom on their own. Aside from a Dakota, there’s: a Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Loo-si-ana and yours truly, Tennessee. Raise your hand if you are surprised.

What gets me is that the researchers speculated about the aforementioned fish consumption, amount of sleep, fruit and veggie sales, breast feeding and use of ‘poor mental health’ days. Where is the examination of the fact that if you pull the education system rankings you find the same states languishing on the bottom? I really think that if you are going to rank things on smartness, you need to be smarter than that. Maybe our states are stupid because we don’t teach smarts in our schools the way those hoity-toity coastal states do.

One interesting tidbit caught my eye – that Louisiana ranked low in the use of ‘poor mental health days’. Really? Maybe this just means that Louisianans just don’t use their poor mental health days. Can I pipe up and guess that the highest uses of such days occurred in the west coast states, where consumption of tofu, bean sprouts and BS is incredibly high?

I’m also speculating that there are a lot of factors in the low ‘poor mental health days’ in Louisiana. Because I’ve been to Louisiana and they don’t seem all that mentally healthier than anywhere else. Maybe they don’t know these things exist and therefore don’t claim them. Maybe they need their jobs and don’t do stupid things like take ‘mental health days’. Maybe they realize that by calling their boss and suggesting this they’ll get laughed out of town. It seems to be only on the west coast where we say, ‘Oh yes, take a mental health day! I’ll hold down the crowd at the Oxygen Bar without you! Come back refreshed!”

In an effort to clear some of this up, I pulled old rankings, too. It seems in 2006-2007 Tennessee was at a respectable #30. I understand it isn’t great, but it’s spitting distance to the average. Unfortunately, it seems to mean that we aren’t just dumb, we are getting dumber.

Damn, I’m feeling my neurons shrivel as I sit here. Do I move back to California? Where my kids won’t get a better education (Cali ranks low forties on public schools!) Or do I sit here in my stupidity, getting dumber as the days go by, but enjoying my clean air sunset, grateful that I can buy cereal for less than five dollars a box, and conversing with my neighbors who seem to be smart enough not to call in ‘poor mental health days’ at work?

Oh, wait, I think I just answered my own question!

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