Teaching Kids to Leapfrog a Jackass
I've been ending each day by reading a chapter of The Great Brain to my sons, the first book in a series by John D. Fitzgerald that I devoured as a child.The books, which detail life for three Catholic brothers in a Mormon town in 1890s Utah, describe a time when children weren't raised like bubble boys (my preferred technique). They explore caves, test their mettle with fistfights under rough and tumble lumberjack rules, and do demented things like this:
"We are playing Jackass Leapfrog," Sammy said as he led the immigrant boy to the center of the lot. He pushed the Greek boy's head down in position to play leapfrog. "You are the jackass," Sammy said as if the new kid understood English. "Now stay that way."
The rest of us kids lined up with Sammy in the lead.
"Whack the jackass on the rump!" Sammy shouted as he ran and leapfrogged over Vassillios with one hand while he whacked the Greek boy on the rump with the other hand.
The rest of us followed, whacking the jackass on the rump.
As it turns out, the term "jackass" is comedy gold to kids.
The protagonist, the narrator's brother who calls himself the Great Brain, discovers that Vassillios has formidable wrestling skills, solving his troubles with Sammy -- a dreadful child whose father derides immigrants for taking American jobs.
Reading this chapter, I wondered if Fitzgerald's 1969 book could survive the ideological cleansing that conservatives are waging in schools and overprotective liberal do-gooding that would purge fights and Jackass Leapfrog.
Cruise Passengers Lost at Sea
My wife M.C. Moewe, a reporter for the Jacksonville Business Journal, has been chasing an elusive story over the oceans of the world for several months: Cruise ship passengers who vanish while their vessels are at sea.At least 12 passengers have gone overboard or disappeared since 2000, including five on Carnival Cruise Lines ships within the past 12 months. Some are suicides, others accidents, and at least one incident suggests the possibility of foul play. One was lost coming into Jacksonville last Thanksgiving, a new port for cruise embarkation.
Many incidents are completely unexplained, including one man who survived by swimming 17 hours until being spotted by a cargo ship. He awoke in pitch-black sea with no shoes, no pants, no ship, and no explanation for how he ended up in the water during a voyage to Cozumel, Mexico.
Because these people often go missing in open ocean, they may be the most difficult to resolve missing persons cases in the world. When your endangered missing adult report has a locale of "Int. Waters, San Juan, Puerto Rico," the futility of the case is pretty clear. The cruise industry does not track incidents.
Some victims even receive marketing mail after the cruise:
Crystal Tinder's 37-year-old fiance, Christopher Caldwell, went missing off the Carnival Fascination during a July sailing. A contact from Carnival came shortly after the cruise.
"Chris got an e-mail from the Carnival booking agent asking him if he enjoyed his cruise," Tinder said.
It's a Gay World After All
My family visited Disney World this weekend, the last before our yearly passes are blocked for the summer. Riding to the Magic Kingdom, I saw a young man wearing a T-shirt tight enough to reveal that Disney keeps the monorails pretty cold. The shirt read "I only hang with pretties."Entering the park, we were greeted by an unusually large number of people in red shirts, mostly clustered in groups of the same gender. We had unsuspectingly visited during Gay Days 2005.
This week, many an unsuspecting American family will travel to Walt Disney World, where they will find themselves at the epicenter of a recurring cultural earthquake.
Every year religious conservatives like Mark Alexander write about the horror of families faced with the shocking realization that gay people attend theme parks. What will I tell the children?
I recalled the warning from the Christian Action Network to expect an orgy of depravity, and asked my mother to get the camera out.
Though we spotted several hundred people (and Winnie the Pooh) wearing red, there wasn't a single shirtless homosexual, nipple twist, or groin fondle to be seen. Apparently, the insidious gay agenda requires that they pass among us by feigning interest in riding rides, gorging on meals, and buying overpriced memorabilia. Most of them didn't even have smart haircuts.
The only public display of affection any of us witnessed was a middle-aged woman squeezing her husband's Charmin after Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin. Those seats inhibit circulation.
Perhaps the orgy of depravity was cancelled because the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, which my wife assessed at age 14 as the best make-out ride in the park, was broken down that day.
The only troubling moment that could be blamed on gays was getting stuck behind a sleuth of bears from Jacksonville headed to Tomorrowland. Getting a stroller around them in a hurry was like trying to score on a goal-line defense.
Looking Deeper into Joan Felt
The press has encamped itself outside the Santa Rosa, Calif., home where Mark Felt lives with his daughter Joan, waiting for the next move from Family Deep Throat.Joan Felt, who has said she'd like to "pay some bills" from their notoriety, is described in today's Washington Post as a Sonoma State University Spanish lecturer and former Fulbright scholar.
Reporters have yet to discover her association with a spiritual group called Adidam, brought to light by members of an online discussion group about the movement.
Joan Felt's phone number, which has been publicly listed, turned up on three official Adidam sites as the contact for a study group in Santa Rosa. The pages have recently been deleted or edited to remove her name and phone number, but could still be found Friday morning in Google's cache. I was unsuccessful contacting her by e-mail or phone.
Adidam has 1,000 to 3,000 adherents, according to a Religious Movements project published by the University of Virginia.
Santa Rosa lies around 45 miles from the Mountain of Attention, a 1,000-acre "meditation retreat" in Lake County that was for many years the headquarters of the movement and founder Adi Da Samraj's residence.
Some members have resided communally and devoted their lives to Adidam, as described in a member's book about joining in the '70s:
Friday evenings were yours, every other moment was filled. We took up the disciplines of meditation, service, study, meeting and consideration, a purifying vegetarian diet, confinement of sexuality to twice a month, right livelihood, and maximizing our tithe or financial support.
Another member account from a few years later describes it differently:
I have gotten along well in the Adidam organization ... never got badly burned by anyone because of doing something I really didn't want to do. I read accounts about people being "forced" to eat a certain way, or "forced" to give money ... certainly hasn't been my experience.
A lawsuit filed by three former Adidam members in 1985 alleged that adherents impoverished themselves while the group's founder lived opulently with nine wives and 30 followers on a Fiji island bought for $2.1 million from the actor Raymond Burr.
In 2002, J. Todd Foster was in discussions with the Felt family while preparing a magazine story on Deep Throat's identity. The former freelance journalist wrote about it this week for The News Virginian in Waynesboro, Va., where he serves as managing editor:
Ultimately the story died because of money. The Felt family and their attorney wanted a lot of money, and People magazine -- with my blessing -- backed away in what would have been a case of "checkbook journalism." Reputable news organizations don't pay a penny for news.
In an e-mail this morning, Foster told me the subject of Adidam never came up with the Felts: "My partner dealt with Joan, and she didn't mention it to him either. Money was a prime motivator, but mostly for her son's law school bills."
May Divorce Be With You
This weblog now has a second marriage to debate: the four-year union of the writers Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron.
I love the movie Heartburn, which Ephron wrote as fictionalized revenge after she and Bernstein crashed and burned. They had two sons, the second born prematurely after Carl was caught convening a rump parliament with the future Baroness Jay of Paddington, a member of Britain's House of Lords.
In novel and film, Ephron lampooned Bernstein so hilariously that I'd be amazed if he ever dated another woman without first making her sign a non-disclosure agreement. James Wolcott believes she scared an entire class of famous men from bedding female writers, calling it the Nora Ephron factor:
Now here's Maureen Dowd, attractive, witty, bitchy, a woman who likes to share bon-bons of her personal life with readers. Ephron, the daughter of screenwriters, was brought up to believe "everything is copy," and I suspect that's Modo's philosophy too. But men with a lot to protect don't want to be turned into copy. Any bigshot in a public position of power and accountability is going to have to consider, "If our relationship [or marriage] hits the rocks, am I going to get ripped in print as revenge?"
At risk of my own matrimonial bliss, I often quote fictional Bernstein from Heartburn when asked whether I enjoyed a home-cooked meal: "I never want my roast beef cooked any other way." The line's delivered in such an insincere manner you wonder how fictional Ephron resisted the urge to gut him like a fish.
Master of Their Domain
Internet pornographers got lucky with ICANN and will receive their own top-level domain.A Florida domain registry and the International Foundation for Internet Responsibility, the groups that requested the domain, will devote .xxx explicitly to sexual content, making it easier for Internet users to avoid such sites entirely or dive headfirst into the fleshy sea of sin:
ICM and IFFOR selected .xxx as the sole string for this application based upon its high ranking in the aforementioned criteria.
Although other potential strings were considered such as .sex, .adult and .porn, the research demonstrated that these strings lacked broad geographic recognition and were perceived to be primarily Anglo-Saxon.
When this registry opens for business, I will try to acquire benedictxvi.xxx to keep it out of the hands of pornographers.
I bought a text ad on Google yesterday for the search term Mark Felt, wondering how many people would hit the search engine for more information on the deep-throated stool pigeon:Chasing Mark Felt
How a 19-Year-Old College Student
Unmasked Watergate Source in 1999
cadenhead.org/workbench
The result: 525 clicks on 14,260 impressions, which cost me $26.22 (5 cents per click). Though at first my ad had no competition, by the end of the day, it was joined by ads from NPR, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, and the Washington Post, which you'd think has all the publicity it needs for this particular story.
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