Doctor Whovey, You Were Absolutely Right

It has been Spring Break for the girls this past week, which has been kind of sub-optimal since Home Campus and its related institutions had their Spring Break the week before.  Once in a while they coincide, and my don’t we have fun then.

But we try to have fun anyway.

For example, last weekend we decided to go up to one of the Temples of Excess right up the interstate from us.  There is an entire town in Wisconsin dedicated to the proposition that water is infinite and if properly channeled into things like slides, lazy rivers and wave pools it can be insanely profitable.  Whatever one thinks of the former proposition, the truth of the latter is self-evident.

We left on Friday afternoon – the hotel rates tripled on Saturday – and spent a pleasant evening and morning in the waterpark.  I was hobbled by a spring cold of some kind, but the girls are old enough to hare off on their own now.  Lauren did convince me to go with her into the hot tub area, which actually felt good to my achy old muscles.  Plus, if you ducked through the hanging plastic curtain you could go outside and stay in the nice hot water while looking through the steam at the snow all across the ground.

But mostly we have stayed home, as one would imagine given that Kim and I were back at work all week.  There was a group sleepover Thursday night and we hit the soft-ice cream joint a couple of times during the week, and life was good.

Our main mission this past week, however, was to catch up on our viewing of classic culture, which boiled down to Monty Python’s Life of Brian and an attempt to view all 86 episodes of the most recent Doctor Who series, in order.

You have your classic culture.  We have ours.

I had never seen an episode of Doctor Who before.  I’d never felt I needed to, as – much like Monty Python’s Holy Grail – I had had friends quote it to me verbatim for much of my life and therefore I considered myself fully acquainted.  Plus, every time anyone mentions Doctor Who I get mental images of the Grinch.  But they’re all free on Netflix now, so Kim arranged some family time and we all sat down to see.

They’re not bad.  The action is entertaining, the dialogue is fairly snappy, and once in a while they sneak an idea or two worth remembering into the script, which is all you can ask for in a television show I think.  Although I do wish that the blustery chap would stop standing between Billie Piper and the camera as much as he does.  That should be a finable offense.

So far we have seen London menaced by a plastic blob, the end of the Earth (which, Douglas Adams fan that I am, I kind of wished had been viewed from a restaurant rather than a space station), Charles Dickens as a rather oddball caricature, a two-episode sequence about London being menaced by things that were rather unlike plastic blobs but which might simply have been the blobs evolved into a more talon-rich form, and an episode centered around a crass American (who knew?).

We go upstairs for bedtime reading after these episodes – a little Tiffany Aching goes a long way toward resolving the creepies left by all those Doctor Who visuals.  Doctor Who does not shy away from body counts and weirdity.

Life of Brian was kind of a disappointment, to be honest.

It had been decades since the last time I saw it, and I remembered it as being a lot better than it was – it simply has not aged as well as Holy Grail.  Oh, there’s all the classic bits that you love to quote at people: the grammarian centurion and the graffiti wall, the extended sequences with Pontius Pilate’s speech impediment, and (my personal favorite), the part where Brian tries to tell the crowd that they are individuals, and so on.  But unless you remember the endless posturing and pointless splintering of revolutionary movements in the 1970s a lot of the humor is going to pass right by you, and there is an awful lot of shouting that gets tiresome very quickly.  Not much of the dialogue is actually spoken at normal volumes in this film.

It also would help to have gone to church rather more than we’ve been doing of late.

But it was still funny – the humor is broad enough to appeal to everyone here, and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” retains its power.  There was a radio station in Philadelphia back in the 80s that would broadcast that song every day, promptly at 10am.  It is part of the soundtrack of my youth, which probably explains a lot come to think of it.

So it has been a productive break for the girls, I think.  Soon they will be fully conversant with nerd culture in all of its many manifestations, and we can congratulate ourselves on a parenting job well done.

A New Lease on Our Lives

So now apparently I’m some kind of financial genius.  Who knew?

Note that “some kind” covers a lot of ground, not all of it the sort of terrain that would inspire others to trust me with their money.  But there you have it.

When we bought our home in 1996 the best mortgage we could get was an adjustable rate that started at 7.5% and went up from there.  We locked it in at the first available opportunity – 8% - and just dealt with it.

In 2003 we refinanced.  It took the interest rate down to 5.5%, which meant that for the same payment each month we could cash out enough money to pay for a new roof and some other much needed but smaller repairs (do you know how hard it is to find flashing in just that shade of maroon?  What were the previous owners thinking?).  We felt clever.

One of the benefits of our crashing economy these days is that it seems to have driven interest rates down even further.  Every few months for the last several years we have received Fabulous New Offers of financial assistance!  Look at these rates!  Think of the money!  Think of the children! 

Mostly I ignored them.  We were doing fine with the arrangement we had, and since I am a natural rut-seeker and my general approach to finances is “try to spend less than you earn,” that seemed sufficient.

But Kim is an optimizer.  Nothing is ever “good enough.”  Things always can be better, faster, more efficient, more powerful, more … whatever.  This goes for work-related issues.  It goes for home-related issues.  I try not to think about how it applies to me personally.  And it certainly applies to finances.  At some point soon, for example, we will no doubt be switching banks to get away from our newly taken-over megabank and toward something that might conceivably be happy with handling our money without suctioning it all away in random fees.  This will no doubt be a better situation, but one that grates on my rut-seeking tendencies.

So when our mortgage company sent us a new offer – no points, no closing costs, about 1/3 less interest – we had to look into it.

Or, rather, I had to look into it. 

Because the irony of our lives is that while Kim is the optimizer and the one who has an actual clue about finances, I am the one with the more flexible schedule and the time to make those phone calls.  This general set-up often leads to a lot of asynchronous ventriloquism (“What should I say when I call?”) but this time it seemed to work.

I ended up speaking to a pleasant guy at the mortgage company who went through all of the options.  We settled on a 15-year fixed rate mortgage that would leave our current payments roughly unchanged, which meant that a) I didn’t have to rejigger any of my monthly budgeting, and b) since we usually try to chip in extra principal every month, if we continued to do that at the same rate we’ve been doing we’d be paid off in a bit under eight years, or roughly the time that our children would be hitting college and we would be needing a new mortgage.

Sigh.

From there I got shifted over to another pleasant guy somewhere in the deep South who guided me through the process.  It took me a while to figure out where they were making their money off the deal – of course they’re making money off this deal; why would they offer it otherwise? – but once that was clear I felt better about it.  I like it when people are up front about their agendas.  Eventually a thick packet arrived in the mail last week for review, notarization and signatures.  We sent it back, duly reviewed, signed and notarized.

And now we have a new mortgage.

It is a brave new world.

How to Make a Palm Cross

I like Palm Sunday because it is the only day in the liturgical calendar where you get toys to play with during the service.

Oh, they look like mere palm fronds, but really – anything you can use for arts and crafts is a toy.

One of the many useless skills I have acquired in my life (along with writing in elvish script, keeping score in Roman numerals, and the ability to run backwards at speed) is knowing how to make a cross out of palm fronds.  Back in the day we used to do that to pass the time during and after Palm Sunday services, and if we were really feeling crafty we’d carefully peel off a long fiber from another frond and turn the whole thing into a necklace.

Of course, once you have these things you’re kind of stuck with them.  They dry up and turn brown and crackly but are you just going to throw them out?  It seems sort of disrespectful.  I suppose you could burn them – that’s what they do with the other leftover palms, after all, in order to get the ashes for Ash Wednesday.  Or is that Maundy Thursday?  Or Maudlin Thursday?  Hard to keep them all straight sometimes.

No, wait, Maudlin Thursday is something completely different and involves rather more wine than your average Communion.  Never mind then.

We went to church today and duly received our fronds.  And then we went to a local bistro where we had a very nice brunch and I spent the time making crosses.

This is how you do it.

First, you need the proper materials.

Select a palm frond that is reasonably flexible and not dried out.  You may want to peel off the stiff edges if they are too rigid, but if they bend well then you don’t have to.

Cut off two more or less equal pieces.  They can be of any length depending on how dexterous you feel, but six to eight inches is a good working length for each piece, especially if you’re just starting out.

Now, you have to lock the pieces together.

Take the two pieces and form them into an “L” with the horizontal piece in front of the vertical piece – if the pieces have a noticeable taper to them, place the wide ends at the join and let them taper out from there.

Fold up from the bottom once.  The bottom piece should now be completely covered at the join by the top piece.

Fold up from the bottom a second time, just as before.

Hold the L so that the horizontal piece extends to the right.  Take the horizontal piece and fold it around to the rear so that it now extends to the left.

Take the horizontal piece and poke it through the gap in the join so that it extends to the right again.  Pull it tight so that it locks.  You should be able to wave the L around without it falling apart at this point.

From here it is just making the cross itself.

Take the horizontal piece and fold it back through the join such that you have a loop on one side and a straight piece about twice that long sticking out of the other side.

Fold the straight piece back to the join.  You have now made the crosspiece of the cross.

Take the vertical piece and fold it down through the join so that it makes a loop at the top about the same size as the other two loops.  Leave the other end straight. 

Now you’ve got your cross.

And you’ve made it nearly a quarter of the way through Palm Sunday services!  Find three more palm fronds and repeat as necessary, until crosses are complete or the service ends, whichever comes first.

It's Spring, All Evidence to the Contrary Notwithstanding

Yesterday was the first day of spring, officially.  Here in Wisconsin the high temperature was 23 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit, for those of you in, oh, everywhere in the entire world except in the United States – in Celsius that comes to ... something not very spring-like) and there is still a foot of snow on the ground.  We got several more inches of the stuff on Monday, in fact.  We’ve also had gale force winds for most of the week, enough to make driving an interesting proposition on rural roads around here and push the wind-chills down to the point where it really doesn’t matter whether you are measuring it in Fahrenheit, Celsius or sad-faced brass monkeys – it’s just cold.  But still: officially, spring.

Naturally the local walk-up soft ice cream stand is open for business.

Because people in Wisconsin don’t care about the weather, that’s why.  They want their ice cream.  One of my first impressions of this state when I moved here was the ice cream freezers at the local supermarket, which were longer and more fully equipped than some warships.  Unless there is an actual blizzard in progress, people here see no reason why they can’t just pop out for some ice cream at any point in the year.  And even then, they will often try anyway.

I’m not convinced of this – my ice cream consumption totals maybe a quart a year, which is less than the average Wisconsinite licks off their fingers each month – but then I’m not from around here, in so many, many ways, so it really doesn’t matter what I think.  What matters is what my children think.  And they were born here.

So there we were, on the first official day of spring, standing in line (in line!) at the ice cream joint for our inaugural cones and sundaes of the year.

The guy behind us didn’t even have a coat.  I’m guessing his thought process went something like, “I’m in line to buy ice cream, therefore it must be warm, therefore I can just wear a t-shirt.” 

It must be said that it was good ice cream, as soft serve goes.  We debated sitting at one of the picnic tables set up around the place for just that purpose, but that would have required shoveling and the wind might have blown our ice cream into the street, so we ate in the car. 

Spring is here in Wisconsin.

Mr. Rogers

Today would have been Mr. Rogers’ birthday, as my friends Janiece and Shawn have ably pointed out.  There has also been an avalanche of postings on the subject over on Facebook, which has taken over the function of the office bulletin board that had moved over to email in the ‘90s – it’s where jokes, cartoons and general announcements get made for all to see.  So there are a lot of people who have noticed this particular birthday, is what I’m saying.

It might seem strange that a man who made his living hosting a children’s television show forty years ago would inspire such notice here in the digital century, but not if you really pay attention.  Mr. Rogers is one of the few transcendent figures in American culture, a man whose appeal remains universal even in this most partisan and vitriolic age.  Mr. Rogers was one of the good guys.  It’s as simple as that.

I didn’t really appreciate him until I was an adult.

As a kid I found his show kind of, well, boring.  He’d come in singing his little song.  His shoes would come off and his sweater would go on.  He’d drone on in that soothing voice he had about whatever was on his mind that day, and there’d be puppets somewhere in there.  I wanted to be out doing other things, back then. 

I wanted excitement.  Excitement has edges.  Mr. Rogers had no edges, not really. 

Yet now, four decades later, of all the television shows I watched as a young child his is the one I remember most and think of most often.  Now that I am older I am not all that interested in excitement.  Excitement is good now and then, and it is a great counterpoint to the larger enterprises of life, but it isn’t life itself.  There’s more to it than that.

As I have gotten older I have come to value kindness and comfort as the two most important day to day virtues.  It is a harsh world and one designed seemingly on a different plan than most people, and things with edges serve only to cut and wound.  The ability to comfort others – the willingness to comfort others – and the kindness actually to do so are sometimes the only things that get us through the day.

We want excitement, but what we need is kindness and comfort.  And Mr. Rogers was there to give us that and to remind us that we can give that to others, that we are worthy of receiving it from others and others are worthy of receiving it from us, that there is little in this world more important than how we treat ourselves and others.

We forget that, sometimes.

There have been a lot of tributes to Mr. Rogers today, and I’ve enjoyed reading all of them.  But my favorite, oddly enough, came from a Cracked.com article entitled, “5 Moments That Prove Mr. Rogers Was the Greatest American.”  It’s worth reading, and it’s worth following the link therein to Tom Junod’s 1998 article in Esquire, entitled “Can You Say … Hero?” – a long read, but a good one.

One of the five moments simply noted his role in this world.

He didn't live in a world full of songs and puppets. He brought songs and puppets to a world that was scared and tired and vulnerable. A lot of people of a lot of faiths are waiting for the Messiah, but even if one arrives, how are you going to tell the difference between him and Fred Rogers? ...  His job wasn't only to help children grow up, but to remind adults, always, that they had been children once, and that someone, somewhere, had loved them.

How, indeed, will you tell?

Happy birthday, Mr. Rogers.  It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

And There Was Much Rejoicing (yay)

Well, there’s no going back now.  We have introduced our children to the genius of Monty Python.

We are the best parents in the world, I know.  Thank you for pointing that out.

This has been a long time coming.  Tabitha is long past the age where she might find the Python sense of humor to her taste, and Lauren is generally game for anything when it comes to movies.  And since we spent a good chunk of last summer either in England or climbing around castles or both, it was clear that the first Python movie they should see should be Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I didn’t actually see this film until I was in college.

Oh, I had been introduced to Monty Python in a number of different formats in high school, like most American teenagers in the 1980s.  The local PBS station ran the television show, so I knew most of the skits.  I had seen several of their other movies before going to college, including an opening night screening of The Meaning of Life with my friend Julia – who at that time lived in Connecticut, so several of us had to take the train up to visit her.  As I recall, we were most impressed by the skit about “the machine that goes BING!”  After the movie we all went out to the local Denny’s.  Eventually a waitress came over and asked us what we wanted, and as one we all turned to her and said, “BING!”

About half an hour later a different waitress came by to see if we wanted anything, and thus we learned a valuable lesson about not annoying the waitstaff.

As for Holy Grail, well.  I hadn’t seen it in high school, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know every single line in it by then.  I had several friends who spent much of my junior and senior years quoting it at me in almost any circumstance where it might conceivably be relevant and more than a few where it couldn’t.  In this I believe I was not alone.  I used to be surprised at how many of the friends I developed later in life either had similar friends or were those similar friends, but no longer.  It’s a kind of badge of nerd honor, I guess.

Indeed, the hardest part of Friday's screening was not reciting the script alongside the actors.  It is a relentlessly quotable film.

My freshman year of college I took an English seminar entitled, “Arthurian Romance,” or as I liked to think about it, “Books David Would Read Anyway, For Credit.”  We read Mallory.  We read Zelazny.  We read The Mabinogion.  We read a treasure trove of all sorts of great books.  It was a fun class.

The TA who was in charge of all this was one of those guys destined to do nothing else but teach English literature.  He was pleasant and articulate.  He had a bushy mop of blondish hair, an equally bushy mustache, and habitually came to class wearing round spectacles, a bow tie, and suspenders.  His name was Graham Drake.  What else could this man possibly have done but what he was doing?

I sometimes wonder whatever became of him.  I hope he went on to have a long and fruitful career teaching university-level literature courses.  It would be something of a travesty if he became a banker.

There was no final exam in that class, but he made us come to the final exam period anyway.  He got up in front of us and spent spent several minutes telling us a long shaggy dog story about how he had been in contact with a group of scholars of Arthurian literature and had hoped to have them present their research to us during the semester but time had run out and they had been gracious enough to record their thoughts on film and send us a VHS copy (this was the 80s, after all) for us instead of our final exam.  Whereupon he dimmed the lights and we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I’m not sure Lauren was all that impressed with the movie.  She liked the Killer Rabbit scene and the Trojan Rabbit scene – as you would expect from someone deeply involved in the rabbit events for the 4H Fair – but the rest of it seemed to leave her a bit cold.  Tabitha seemed to like it more – she got more of the jokes, I think – but the last several minutes of organ music over a black screen annoyed her.  Unless you understand what is being satirized, satire often fails that way. 

But now they’ve been initiated into the great cult of Monty Python – of literate satire, humor that seems slapped together and merely silly but in fact has multiple levels and makes fairly steep demands of its audience.  I once read a book jointly written by the Pythons, one of those coffee-table retrospectives that come out on round anniversaries, and the deepest impression the book made on me was just how much thought and effort went into those silly skits.

Once you know how that works, the rest of the world makes much more sense.

News and Updates

1. Am I the only one who looks at the new pope and thinks, “Konstantin Chernenko”?  Face it – he’s the safe old guy appointed by the men who run things because they didn’t know what else to do and they needed to buy another couple of years while they figure out what to do with the mess they’ve managed to create for themselves.  The next pope – the Gorbachev figure – will be interesting.

2. No, I’m not Catholic.  I just think that a new leader for a world organization that powerful and far reaching is interesting in its own right.

3. Magnum Trivium, Omnium Trivium.  If you want trivia, go to the source.  Once again, the Home Campus team ventured forth last night in a trivia contest fundraiser for a local cause, and even lacking our best player we still managed to squeak out a victory against the Local Catholic Church team (who may have been playing inspired thanks to the new pope – who knows?).  This event is a slightly different format than the last one.  Instead of five rounds of questions adding up to a winner, in this one there are two big rounds of questions and then the top two teams face off in a Family Feud sort of round – each team member going one-on-one with a counterpart on the other team up on stage in front of everyone.  They even had a little buzzer you had to push to answer first.

4. I am officially tired of snow.  I am particularly tired of the fact that it seems to arrive every Tuesday and Thursday, like clockwork, as I am driving to Not Quite So Far Away Campus, which is actually a fairly long drive. 

5. We still have our Christmas lights up.  I don’t do ladder work in the snow.  They are a pleasing shade of blue, and they go well with the snow.  So they can stay for a while.

6. Indoor plumbing is one of the great blessings of modern civilization.  You don’t fully realize that until the city comes along to do sewer work and tells you not to turn on the water for an entire day.  Fortunately, the local burger joint not only serves good food but also has nice clean bathrooms.

7. Nobody has as much fun with the English language as Nick Harkaway.  If you haven’t read his novels (The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker), do yourself a favor and correct that situation immediately.  Angelmaker is a little more of a straightforward narrative than The Gone-Away World, but they’re both wonderful.

8. I got to give my lecture on Thomas Malthus in Western Civ this week.  There are four or five lectures that I really look forward to in that class, and that’s one of them.  It’s fun to see how he manages to undermine the entire Enlightenment with just three simple observations and two graphs.

9. It’s time for the semi-annual ad-hoc scramble, wherein I make supplications to the various powers that be so that I might be employed teaching history next semester.  It’s a civilized process in many ways, but a tiring one. 

10. Next week is Spring Break, and you know what that means for us faculty!  Right!  Grading!