Archive for July, 2011

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I Like People Magazine

July 22, 2011

Why do intelligent, educated people feel they have to explain away their love of People magazine — or worse, deny its awesomeness?

My friend Kathleen informed me that she once belonged to a book group composed of lawyers who made their book choices exclusively from  recommendations in The Economist. They read things like a biography of Potemkin.

Google tells me that this could be a) a Russian nobleman, b) a Russian myth similar to Puss in Boots that has resulted in the phrase “Potemkin village,” a group of facades made to fool visitors into thinking a large town exists, or c) a Russian battleship. Which Potemkin they read seems both irrelevant to the point and boring besides. (Actually, choice B seems kind of cool, but I digress.)

When she suggested, flippantly, to the group that her choice would be to pick a book recommended in People, they were disgusted. Thus, her cue to leave the group. And I applaud her choice. People who don’t like People are insufferable.

I keep The Economist as a bathroom reader, by the way. I have a subscription because I got one free with airline miles and I find it amusing to read what the Brits have to say about us. But it’s dry, dry stuff, to be absorbed one tiny article at a time and tossed out well before I’ve finished it. The only thing it has going for it is clever headlines, and those don’t even apply to all of the articles.

The Euro crisis? *Yawn* I want to know the latest on Brangelina.

People magazine, on the other hand, is absorbing from start to finish. Besides Wired, it’s the only magazine I’ll read cover to cover. Is it the photos? The gossipy nature of celebrity life? The 9th-grade level writing? The heartwarming stories that show up midway through an issue?

I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t have to deconstruct People. I just like it, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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We’re the Phone Company

July 18, 2011

I recently discovered that Netflix offers instant streaming of one of my favorite childhood movies: The Incredible Shrinking Woman. So of course I had to watch it with my kids. The boy was deeply skeptical; he had recently watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and complained that he was tired of movies where people shrink. I explained to him that this “new” movie was an entirely different animal.

It does not suck.

If you’re not familiar with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, it is a 1981 comedy starring Lily Tomlin, a suburban housewife whose exposure to the unfortunately-named Sexpot perfume causes her to shrink slowly until the point of disappearance. Charles Grodin plays straight-man as her advertiser husband. (I mean straight-man in the classic comedy sense — the setup for the comic in a duo, like Martin was to Lewis.) Ned Beatty also stars, providing comic relief that is far more reined-in than his hilarious role as Otis in Superman three years earlier. And it needed to be subtle because Lily Tomlin rules this movie, playing not only the shrinking woman but her nosy neighbor, and, in a tiny cameo, reprises her role as Ernestine the telephone operator.

This cameo provoked great curiosity from my children. “What is she doing?” they asked, as Ernestine sat in front of a telephone switchboard and unplugged a line. “Why is that funny?”

We waited until the end of the movie to talk with them about the ancient history that had a) telephone switchboards, b) telephones with cords and dials on them, c) something called “long distance”, and d) a telephone monopoly that resulted in high expense, a low-quality product, and poor customer service.

After the history lesson we proceeded to YouTube (something they’ll no doubt have to explain to their own children as ancient history) and found some old Laugh In sketches of Ernestine. We loved this one:

But Tomlin delivered the coup de grâce to The Telephone Company with her hysterically funny ad on Saturday Night Live. “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re The Phone Company.” You can catch it on Hulu at:

The technology has changed, but the humor still translates. My kids and I laughed until our sides hurt. I’m glad to have the internet because I never could have shown them the movie or the sketches without it.

And the best part is: now they sing the lyrics to “Galaxy Glue” with me! Life would go to pieces without Galaxy Glue.

Posted in History, The Kids | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

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Call Me Ishmael

July 4, 2011

Slowly (so very, very slowly) I’ve been reading my way through the classics of Western civilization. I purchased a couple of book collections to that end a few years ago. One is the Great Books of the Western World, published by Encyclopedia Britannica (bought on eBay for roughly 1/6th the retail price) and another is called the Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge, or officially, the Harvard Classics. This set is one that Charles Eliot, then-president of Harvard University, put together in 1909. The premise was that by reading for 15 minutes a day from the collection, anyone could obtain a thorough liberal arts education.

2011 fancy leather version: $70 per volume. 1909 first-edition: $40 per foot on eBay.

Every now and then my five-foot shelf of knowledge will catch my eye. It actually takes exactly five feet, by the way. Ambrose, my incredible library carpenter, made each shelf 30 inches wide, and the 50 volumes take two shelves. (There’s an extra volume, an index, that moves to a third shelf, but I don’t think that one counts.)

One book called to me today, and I’ll quote from the introduction:

The merit of [this book] was recognized in both America and England immediately after its appearance, and it at once took rank as the most vivid and accurate picture in literature of the side of life it sought to portray. W. Clark Russell, himself one of the best writers of sea-stories in English, called it “the greatest sea-book that was ever written in any language,” and the convincing detail of its narrative led to comparisons with the masterpiece of Defoe.

It’s the greatest sea-book written in any language. And it’s called Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana.

Wait, what?

If you’ve never heard of this book, you may count me in your company. I only paused before it today because I’m reading Moby Dick with my online book club. Melville published Moby Dick in 1851. Dana published his fictionalized memoir in 1846. He was a Harvard College student who took a couple of years off from school to sail the wild seas before returning “the hero of his fellow students.” (I quote Pres. Eliot.) Even with the Harvard bias in place, it’s difficult to understand how Dana’s work found itself in the essential five feet some 63 years later but Melville’s did not.

No matter. I’m enjoying Moby Dick anyway. Here’s a quote that will appeal to many people I know:

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, –what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

The two orchard thieves would be Adam and Eve. This is good stuff.

Posted in Brain Workouts | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

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