The Writer's Poke

I first became a fan of KISS in 1987. I was 14, and Paul Stanley was 35. That year, KISS actually received a fair amount of video airplay on MTV, but I have to admit that Stanley seemed old . Mariah Carey released her first record in 1990 at the age of 20; she is a few years older than I am, but I never viewed her as “old” in the same way that I viewed Stanley as old. Not until I viewed her new video with Justin Bieber. The “All I Want for Christmas” duet with Bieber is a remake of Carey’s 1994 Christmas release. It’s not unusual for artists to pair-up, and the song has some respectability as a contemporary Christmas classic. But why does the now 41 year-old Mariah Carey want to sing a duet with 17 year-old Justin Bieber? Bieber is the butt of many jokes, but somebody is listening to his music; and somebody is helping to make him rich. Carey may suffer from Peter Pan Syndrome (I will never grow old), or perhaps she recognizes that Millennials view her much like I view...

If I had the means to visit the ends of the Earth, here are the ten places I would visit. What ten "ends of the Earth" places would you like to visit? Leave me a comment.  Destination #8: Vladivostok, Russia Something attracts me to the idea of visiting places where nobody else goes. I’m sure many Americans go to the places I’m mentioning on my Ends of the Earth Top 10 list, but I don’t personally know anyone that has visited Barrow, Alaska, for instance; and I only know three people that have visited South Africa. These places aren’t impossible to visit, but people generally need a very specific reason – or a very passionate drive – to visit them. Just to name a specific place, I’ve selected Vladivostok, but more generally, I could simply say “Siberia.” When I read Colin Thubron’s In Siberia , I become fascinated with the idea of visiting what I had always imagined to be a vast snow-covered wasteland. Siberia is not a wasteland, of course. Well, not com...

Gary Ruskin and Juliet Schor’s “Every Nook and Cranny: The Dangerous Spread of Commercialized Culture” points out an interesting survey result. “In 2003,” they write, “the annual UCLA survey of incoming college freshman found that the number of students who said it was a very important or essential life goal to ‘develop a meaningful philosophy of life’ fell to an all-time low of 39 percent, while succeeding financially has increased to a 13-year high, at 74 percent.” Why the disconnect here? Couldn’t “succeeding financially” be a “meaningful” reason for being? Apparently not, or at least UCLA students don’t recognize it as such. So, we live to make money. Money itself has no value except for what it can buy. And what do we want to buy? Cars? Clothes? Electronics and Toys? A nice house? In other words, stuff. I like stuff, you like stuff, and we’ll work long and hard to earn enough money to buy the stuff we want. The secret “they” never tell you is this: Buying stuff is a no-win...

If I had the means to visit the ends of the Earth, here are the ten places I would visit. What ten "ends of the Earth" places would you like to visit? Leave me a comment.  Destination #9 -- Barrow, Alaska All I know about Barrow, Alaska, I learned from watching the zombie flick 30 Days of Night . In other words, I know nothing about Barrow, Alaska. Barrow is the northern-most city in North America, and its main claim-to-fame may be that it’s the biggest city in the National Petroleum Reserve.  As far as I can tell, the city has never been attacked by zombies, but polar bears have been known to drop by for unexpected visits. Current population is 4,000, and apparently folks have been calling Barrow and the immediate area home for the past 1,000 years. This amazes me, as there were probably countless other places that people could have homesteaded back then, and yet out of all the places in the world, they selected Barrow? Amazing. Did these people cross...

The Earth is more or less a big, blue ball, and balls don't have ends. Nevertheless, we speak of the "ends of the Earth," and when we in the West speak of the "center," we're usually not referring to the Earth's core. The United States, after all, is "the most important country on Earth." Everywhere else is only important in terms of its "distance" (physically and otherwise) away from us. (I don't actually think the U.S. is the center of the world.) I have a special love for the ends of the Earth; in my imagination at least, I picture worlds much different from the one I live in; sometimes I hope I never have the chance to visit any of them, because I don't want to be disappointed to find out that "there" is very much like "here." If I had the means to visit the ends of the Earth, here are the ten places I would visit. What ten "ends of the Earth" places would you like to visit? Leav...

Kids learn incredibly annoying songs, and some of these songs stay with us for the rest of our lives. One such song for me is “This Land Is Your Land,” which according to wikipedia “is one of the United States’ most famous folk songs.” Why did my grade school decide to teach us this song? Was it for the geography lesson, so that we could learn about “the Redwood Forest” and “the Gulf Stream waters”? I don’t know, but I do know that most of us thought the world began and ended at the county line. That is to say, most of us didn’t travel much further than Terre Haute, Indiana, which was the “big city” located less than 30 miles away from our hometown of Casey, Illinois (population 3000). Every summer, Chad talked about how his family spent their summer vacation in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. This was a big deal for him, and for us, too, really, as most of us didn’t have the opportunity to travel even that far. Kids made do by playing little league baseball and swimming at the ci...

The world’s human population is now over 7 billion. From time-to-time some suggest that perhaps this is just too many people for one little planet to bear. Most people don’t have any idea, really, how many resources it takes to support one human life, let alone seven billion. We can say, “Everything is fine; the Earth can handle us.” But on what do we base this rather frivolous statement? The phrase of the day, boys and girls, is “The Sixth Extinction.” Kind of catches your attention, doesn’t it? According to our friends in the white lab coats, the last mass-extinction occurred 65 million years ago with the fall of the dinosaurs. From a human-centered point of view, I suppose the last mass-extinction wasn’t such a bad thing. After all, while having a dinosaur as a pet might have worked in The Flintstones , I very much doubt that our ancestors would ever have secured a toe-hold on world domination with these big fellas still roaming the Earth. So who cares if bees and fr...

“Is it the end of the world, Daddy?” My daughter, Tavi, is 4, and she has been asking me a lot lately about the end of the world. I’m not sure where she picked up this question, but she’s my little gothic girl, and she’s quite interested in death. “When we’re dead, we’re skeletons. Right?” Death isn’t something she fears, and she’s certainly too young to fully comprehend what death is, but it’s a topic that she’s clearly working on. Last week, she started talking to me about Mars. I’m glad that she’s interested in space, but the link back to death and the end of the world was still on her mind. “Daddy,” she said, “when we need a fresh new planet, let’s go to Mars. We can kill all the aliens and make it our home.” I used this conversation as a “teachable moment,” explaining to her that most aliens are probably friendly, and if any live on Mars, we would need to be gracious guests, and gracious guests don’t commit genocide. It just isn’t the neighborly thing to do. Life...

A.J. Jacobs is a humorous gimmick writer that tackles absurd topics and takes them to their logical extreme conclusions. The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Be the Smartest Person in the World was the first book of his that I discovered. To accomplish his task, Jacobs spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. His book captures the experience of reading entry after entry, and he shares some of the more unusual items of interest he picked up while reading, as the blurb on Amazon.com notes, “33,000 pages, 44 million words, 10 billion years of history.” He also describes the attitudes and reactions of friends and family. Seems as though a lot of people thought Jacobs was a bit nuts attempting to accomplish this task. After all, who sits down to read an entire encyclopedia? Jacobs continues to crank out rather silly “life experience” books; they all seem rather artificial, because he assigns himself some weird task, and then he writes about it. In one book, he ...

Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang served as South Africa’s Minster of Health from 1999 to 2008; she was rather notorious for her views on AIDS, arguing that a diet of lemons, beetroots, and garlic was a fine way to delay the development of HIV. As far as I know, this woman wasn’t stupid. She was a real doctor, having received medical training in South Africa, the Soviet Union, Tanzania, and Belgium. So why did she support a nutritional approach as the best way to combat HIV as opposed, say, to using a more conventional (and scientifically-based) approach, such as treating the disease with anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs)? Politics. Apparently South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, didn’t believe that HIV caused AIDS, and so, until his cabinet finally overruled him and voted that it did in 2002, ARVs weren’t available to the general population. Africa was, and still is, trying to find itself. Tshabalala-Msimang supported the idea that Western medicine didn’t always know best, and th...

At this week's Republican Presidential Candidates' debate, one candidate suggested that all government regulations that cost businesses money should be reviewed; those regulations that are found to cost businesses significant cash, and therefore, force businesses to layoff employees, should be immediately repealed. This idea received a healthy amount of applause. It is easy to understand what regulations "cost," but it's more difficult to perceive what the "benefits" to regulations are. Sometimes it might seem as though government makes laws and passes regulations just for the fun of it, but in all seriousness, when government passes legislation, does it do so with the primary purpose of forcing businesses to layoff employees? If not, what are the purposes behind the legislation, and does the legislation successfully help ensure that businesses meet these purposes in a way that they would not otherwise? One example might be something like the gov...

I suppose the charm of using “the three-legged stool” analogy is that it helps readers visualize your argument, because let’s face it: trying to keep three different concepts in your mind at the same time can be so taxing. So, writes Arthur Allen, HPV vaccination is a good thing, but that’s only one leg of the stool. According to Arthur’s 2007 piece in the Washington Post, two other stool legs necessary for a successful vaccination program are positive public perception and appropriate government funding. Without those two “legs,” the stool won’t stand. When creating a three-legged stool, though, don’t chair builders make one leg at a time? And don’t they attach each leg individually? In other words, even if all legs are “equally” important, one leg must be installed first. Think about it for a second: Does it really make sense to secure funding first? Why would the government secure funding for a stool leg that hadn’t yet been built? Why would the public be more likely to su...

Rick Perry has taken some heat for mandating the HPV vaccine in Texas. Why? Apparently because he had the audacity to use an Executive Order, because the Pharmaceutical Company that stood to directly benefit from the order will make a profit, and because this same Pharmaceutical Company contributed “thousands of dollars” to the governor’s campaign. To me, critics of Perry don’t have a very strong argument. First, Executive Orders are legal and part of the governor’s power. Those who complain that the governor used his power should instead be working to amend or eliminate a governor’s ability to issue Executive Orders. Second, Texas has checks and balances like any other state. So, if the governor’s Executive Order was unconstitutional, then the issue could be settled in a court of law. Or, if the people really didn’t like the governor’s mandate, then their elected officials could certainly pass legislation to overturn it. The governor, in other words, is not a dictator, and...

The number of scientists (or those with a strong science background) in Congress is very small, and yet it is Congress that has the power to decide how to regulate stem cell research. Does this make sense? Most individuals in Congress may be relatively intelligent, but how many use their intelligence to make informed decisions? Probably fewer than have strong science backgrounds. In other words, politicians make their decisions based on politics. When it comes to stem cell research, my assumption is that most in Congress know about as much as I do about the topic, which is to say, not all that much. And yet, many of those in power have an open distrust for scientists. Why this distrust exists, I’m not sure, unless it’s because most scientists do not subscribe to the political views of a particular party. Perhaps some politicians do not view scientists as being “true Americans.” After all, scientists are more likely not to believe in God, and scientists also have this weird fa...

“I have a copy of Malcolm X,” I said, “can we do a public screening at the college for Black History Month.” Sure, the librarian told me, but she reminded me that the DVD I had was licensed solely for my own personal viewing. If I wanted to screen the movie in public, the college would need to purchase a public-viewing license from the production company. And how much will that cost? I wondered. She emailed the company, and they told her the cost would be $500. Even though I had the DVD in my possession, we weren’t allowed to use that copy. Instead, when we paid the $500 fee, the company sent another copy of the movie. To the naked eye, it looked exactly the same as my copy, but knowing that it cost $500 made it special. I should point out, too, that the licensing agreement was for a one-time public viewing. Just because we paid $500 didn’t mean we had the right to show it over and over and over again. So we promoted the event around campus. We promised popcorn and soda. We e...

Some people call it “paying it forward.” The idea is simple: just be nice to others. This sounds suspiciously like the Golden Rule, but how many of us actually like rules, golden or otherwise? Rules are, after all, so limiting, and nobody enjoys being told what to do, even if it’s for our own benefit. Next time you’re at the McDonald’s drive-thru, consider telling the cashier that you’d like to pay for the person’s order behind you. Have you ever done this? It’s a small act of anonymous giving. You will never see the person’s reaction to this unexpected gift, and you’ll never even know if the person “deserved” the gift or not, but isn’t it silly to consider whether or not a person “deserves” a gift? Santa Claus might ponder whether a person’s been naughty or nice, but that’s not our role. True gift-giving requires us to provide the gift without attaching any sort of judgment. Otherwise, it is not a gift freely given, and a gift with strings attached is no gift at all, really. ...

When I woke up, I discovered I was in my bathtub, but instead of with warm water, it was filled with ice. How long had I been asleep, and who had filled my bathtub with ice? As I stood up, I noticed that some of the ice was red, and that’s when I felt the sharp pain in my back. I stumbled over to the bathroom mirror, and as I turned to examine my back, what I saw reminded me of my stupidity and greed. College had left me saddled with thousands of dollars in student loans. I would be paying off my four years of non-stop partying for the next 30 years. So, yes, I was desperate. The girl I planned to marry told me that she didn’t want to start our lives together in debt. Basically, she told me that she loved me, but she didn’t love me enough to marry me – not until I had my financial situation fixed to her satisfaction. It didn’t take me long to find John. He called himself a “problem solver,” and he told me that I had my own personal savings account. At first I had no idea wh...

A little girl escaped the watchful eyes of her mother, and ended up on the narrow streets of a big city. In the distance, a white van approached. The driver wasn’t going very fast – maybe just 20 miles an hour, but he apparently didn’t see the toddler, and the toddler definitely never noticed the van. And then in a moment, it happened. The van ran over the little girl. The driver knew that something was wrong. Maybe he noticed at the moment of impact that he was running over a small child. But after pausing for two seconds, he decided to drive on. This decision required that the back tires of the van would run over the girl, and as the van drove off, a smear of blood trailed off into the distance. Although no one saw this event happen, a security camera captured it on video for the world to see. And, it captured the aftermath. Within seconds a man walked down the street. When he came across the girl, he didn’t even bother to look down. He simply altered his path, walked aroun...

A friend of mine does this "Devil You Know" webshow. He's easily the second most funny guy in the Mattoon, Illinois, class of 1991. This is Episode 9, but you might want to start at the beginning. Otherwise, you'll be lost

(Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses ) Students of Marilyn Monroe recognize that she was much more than a pretty face. Monroe created herself. She started from nothing, and she used her natural beauty and charisma to transform her image into one of the world’s most recognized. Even though she played the “dumb blonde,” it was all an act. She was constantly reading, and always learning. She wanted to be a respected actress, and instead of getting by on her looks, she cared about landing meaningful roles worthy of her profession. Her tragedy, perhaps, is that she became trapped in her own manufactured image. But in this she wasn’t unique, as it is the trap in which most famous people find themselves. What was truly tragic about her life was her inability to find lasting love, although she did experience it, to a degree, with her second husband, Joe DiMaggio. What she was never able to experience was motherhood, and this is what may have caused her to end her own lif...