ENDLESS SUPPER

I DREAM OF BARACK WITH THE LIGHT GREEN HAIR

2010-11-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

It's not bad enough that our president must endure scurrilous allegations about his birth, nationality and religion. It's not enough that he is constantly barraged by the spittle-flecked ranting of the lunatic Right or that he is demonized by his opponents both inside and outside of the government as if he were Lucifer's community organizer. It's not even enough that he was called a liar during his first State of the Union address. For more than a year, President Obama has faced a grievous insult to his person and office that has made these other affronts seem like pleasantries. I refer, of course, to the Chia Obama.

How is it that I never saw this travesty until a late-night commercial knocked me off my chair on Sunday? The "product" was released in April of 2009 by Joseph Enterprises, Inc., which, besides the Chia Empire, has marketed the Clapper and the "Ove" glove. The company's founder, 77 year-old Joseph Pedott, denied any racism in creating the novelty and said he even voted for Obana in '08 despite being a life-long Republican. The item was quickly pulled off the shelves of many Walgreen's stores, but is still readily available at CVS, Target, and multiple online venues for the upcoming holiday season.

Personally, I don't believe Mr. Pedott had any racist intentions with Chia Obama. The concept is simply too wacky to be a deliberate slur. What I find amazing is that an entire commercial concern, staffed, I assume, by sane and savvy businessmen could come to believe that a proper and patriotic way to honor the leader of the free world was to crown him with a sod toupee.

I also dismiss the accusations of slander because Chia has recently seen fit to endow other symbols of America's greatness with green Afros. Presidents Washington and Lincoln now sport the emerald 'do as does the Statue of Liberty, the latter requiring a rewrite of Emma Lazarus's famous poem:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore beset by cranial pastures,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost with turf-topt noggins,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Most astonishing of all is that this enterprise has come about without a nation-wide onslaught of derision. Where are SNL, The Daily Show, Colbert, Letterman, Leno, and Conan regarding what would seem to be the comic bonanza of the century? I'm a sporadic viewer to be sure, but weeks and months of monologues should have been sparked by this phenomenon. It was said after 9/11 that the US had lost its sense of irony, but this isn't some arch witticism aimed at intellectual snobs - it's the proverbial barn door whose sole purpose is to be peppered with rocks. I'm less afraid that the president is being disparaged than that the entire country is losing its sense of humor along with its sense of perspective.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN, BUT NOT AS GOOD

2010-10-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

While watching TV this week, I stumbled across a combination of shows which brought on a severe fit of geezer pique. The first was a quick dip in the new Hawaii Five-O which struck me as nothing special. Then again, I was never a big fan of the original, so I didn't stay with it long enough to form an honest opinion. Still, I couldn't understand why they bothered to remake it. I then changed channels to HBO and landed in the middle of the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still with the effervescent Keanu Reeves as Klatu, the alien judge of mankind's foibles. Not that Michael Rennie gave a nuanced performance in the 1951 original, but if Reeves were any stiffer, they would have had to wheel him around the set on a hand truck.

This movie was so moralistic and eco-dogmatic that I was surprised Al Gore wasn't hired to play Gort, the robot arm of extraterrestrial law. A joyless mess, it wasted the talents of everyone involved, but especially John Cleese who played a humorless scientist sympathetic to the invaders. Just writing "John Cleese" and "humorless" in the same sentence makes my blood pressure soar. The original was also burdened by a "mankind better watch out" message, but it was secondary to the '50s B-movie sci-fi milieu of flying saucers and Theremin riffs. Apparently, Keanu Klatu was too virtuous to buzz around the universe in a gas-guzzling spaceship; he traveled in a biosphere, no doubt fueled by pixie dust.

However, this is not a rant about how much better all film and TV originals are compared to their later incarnations, although in this case it's beyond question. In other cases, the remake is better than the original. An Open Salon debate last year argued about the greatest film version of A Christmas Carol with almost everyone agreeing that the 1935 adaptation with Reginald Owen was eclipsed by later versions (although many dunderheads didn't agree with me on the supremacy of the 1951 remake with Alastair Sim.) There is also the odd example of the two John Wayne Westerns, Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966) which are essentially the same film with different supporting casts, but nearly equal quality.

No, my quarrel with remakes deals with a particular category of revisionism, specifically those movies and shows where the main character is so connected to the original actor that any change is disorienting and usually disastrous. In the case of Lt. Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O, I don't think it matters whether Jack Lord or Alex O'Laughlin plays the role except for reasons of nostalgia. In other cases, the update is a travesty.

People's exhibit A and B are the film remakes of two 1950's TV staples, The Phil Silvers Show, also known as Sgt. Bilko, and The Honeymooners. These were both shows created and written for their stars (Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason respectively), and reflected the unique gifts of the actor involved. Unlike a theatrical role such as Hamlet which was meant to be played and reinterpreted by generations of performers, Silvers' hustling peacetime army sergeant and Gleason's bombastic Brooklyn bus driver were perfect admixtures of actor and role. Over the course of episodes and seasons, it became impossible to separate one from the other.

So what was the incentive to revise and recast Bilko in a full-length movie in 1996? Simply that the character already existed? Was Hollywood so lame that it couldn't come up with a similar character and parallel plot without ripping off a classic? Did they think that the name would draw older viewers of the show? I have nothing against Steve Martin, but he worked mightily at channeling Silvers without coming close. For one thing, he didn't have the gifted and driven Nat Hiken, the TV show's creator and principle writer, literally killing himself to make the show shine. This film was a dud that probably destroyed any chance a young viewer might hunt down the original.

The 2005 Honeymooners attempt at reprising Ralph Kramden as a black man is even more incomprehensible. I confess that I didn't see this film, so it's possible that Cedric the Entertainer was brilliant. If so, wouldn't he have been just as brilliant in a comparable situation without the touchstones so laboriously created and inhabited by Gleason and company? Given the time differential, it's even more unlikely that old viewers of the show would run to see the movie, so there seems even less incentive to invoke the source.

It is in film, however, that the most egregious rip-off has been perpetrated. Anyone who ever saw The Pink Panther or A Shot in the Dark knows that Peter Sellers is Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Even in the weaker sequels, Sellers takes threadbare plots and elevates them with comic genius. Why then have several other actors, including Alan Arkin and Steve Martin, donned mustaches and trench coats in order to make pale imitations? Well, for the money, obviously, but is a bumbling police detective such a hard character to create that studios felt the need to cannibalize and degrade the master franchise? Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers did pretty well with Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebbin in the Naked Gun series.

I hope that my dyspepsia is based on more that my age and general crankiness. I had the good fortune to grow up with TV in the 1950's when stations and networks, desperate for programming, would throw nearly anything on the air to fill time. Movies and cartoons from the 30's and 40's and industrial and military PR films such as Industry on Parade, and The Big Picture were mixed with live theater and variety shows as well as the low-budget 50's horror movie oeuvre. It probably warped me in ways I can't imagine, but by its sheer volume and diversity, it also made me a discerning viewer and critic. The majority of programming was terrible, but it pains me to see the best of it hacked up for lack of imagination and inspiration.

To those of you too young to remember those days, I suggest that you hunt down the DVD's and watch the originals. I know that they're in black and white, the plots are dated and the pacing laborious by current standards, but watch them anyway. You won't regret it.

MERCHANDISE FROM CLASSIC FOREIGN FILMS

2010-06-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

With the nationwide release of Toy Story 3 last weekend, a whole new generation of kids will be emptying their parent's wallets for Woody and Buzz Lightyear action figures, lunch boxes, underwear, can openers, and whatever other junk Disney-Pixar can plaster their pictures on. And the producers are only too happy to add this windfall to a strong opening box office for a synergistic marketing-palooza.

What few people realize is that this is hardly a new phenomenon, nor is it restricted to mainstream films. Our company, Jules et Jim et Ronco Novelties, Inc., is proud to offer you these selected items from our extensive catalog of classic foreign film merchandise.

THE SEVENTH SEAL CHESS SET

Whether you're playing chess with Death or worse, your mother-in-law, you'll love this finely crafted set with hand-carved pieces based on characters from Dante's Inferno and a board made from the shards of a discarded tombstone. Carrying shroud is optional.

GRAND ILLUSION NECK BRACE AND MONOCLE

So you think you're an anti-war protester just because you've waved a sign at a few rallies? Show your true feelings by sporting these snazzy accessories worn by Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) in Jean Renoir's powerful WW I fable. They're sure to catch the eye and win the heart of like-minded pacifists of the opposite sex.

Un Chien Andalou eyeball razor trick

C'mon, nobody really believes that Luis Buñuel slashed an eyeball in the opening sequence, but the illusion is highly disturbing. This gag is the perfect icebreaker for your next party and is guaranteed to make your friends spill their drinks and toss their lunches. It comes with three prosthetic contact lenses and a 6 oz. bottle of vitreous humor. Razor not included.

LA DOLCE VITA MODEL HELICOPTER WITH STATUE OF CHRIST

Taking your kids to a Fellini movie is like taking them to the dentist - it's wise to bring along a distraction. This beautiful scale model will provide hours of fun for your children while you ponder the cinematic mix of religious cynicism and cultivated decadence. The statue is detachable and has a magnetic base for dashboard mounting.

THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN BABY CARRAIGE

The Odessa steps are no match for this sturdy conveyance designed for our company by Inglesina™ and based on its popular Classica Pram Carriage w/ Diaper Bag Marina ($1,100). Add armor plating for an extra $500 to put your mind at ease about those Tsarist troops.

THRONE OF BLOOD ARCHERY SET

If you've ever spent any time on an archery range, you know how boring it is to shoot at a circular bullseye target. Our set includes a 30 pound fiberglass bow, 2 dozen arrows, and a life-size straw figure of Toshiro Mifune as Lord Washizu in full samurai armor. Macbeth was never this much fun!

METROPOLIS TOY ARMY OF DRONES

While the rich live in luxury and ease, your set of 200 identical drones perform slave labor deep underground. You lead the rebellion that brings them to the surface to destroy the existing order. Hopefully, this will work out better for you than it did for Germany.

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD SLEEP AID

Just pop this DVD into your deck and hit play for hours of restful sleep.

REMEMBERING DA

2010-06-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Felix and Shirley Brawer circa 1942

There is an old saying that no child understands his parents until he has children of his own. This is complete bunk - no child ever understands his parents. You may have a brood that puts Old Mother Hubbard to shame and possess the combined wisdom of Freud, Dr. Spock and Oprah; your parents will still remain a mystery. It's best to forget comprehension and settle for appreciation mixed with gratitude for those who brought you into the world, no matter how screwy you turned out. It's in this spirit that I salute my father in advance of his and my phony Hallmark holiday a week from Sunday.

Felix Edward Brawer was born in Paterson, New Jersey on St. Patrick's Day of 1912. Every March 17, waggish cronies would refer to him as "Felix O'Brawer," yet another irony for this man of Latvian-Jewish descent whose mother named him "Felix" in honor of Mendelssohn. Da was profoundly tone-deaf.

My brother and I started calling him Da after hearing the expression in a South African Western. The title of the film is long forgotten, but the name stuck to my father for the rest of his life. My children would refer to him as Papa Da to differentiate him from their other grandfather.

He was the second of five children born to Abe and Lily Oberman Brawer and grew up surrounded by a huge extended family on both sides. Da claimed he had thirty first cousins, but even he had trouble remembering them all. This was an age when parents didn't hover over their children like social directors, but more or less shoved them out the door to fend for themselves. My father and his cousins learned to take care of themselves amid the harsh ethnic rivalries of Paterson, and they developed into a tough, if not criminal bunch. My father-in-law, who knew Da as a kid, claimed his own father wouldn't let him hang out with "those wild Brawer boys."

Idiot that I am, I never documented the stories he told about his early years. I'm sure some were apocryphal and most were enhanced in the telling, but all were the stuff of legend. Mark Twain himself might have written these tales if he'd been Jewish and had grown up in urban New Jersey instead of rural Missouri.

My father, like most Jewish boys then and since, attended Hebrew School for a couple of afternoons each week. Once, one of his gang was caught misbehaving, and the teacher made the mistake of striking the culprit in front of the class. The mistake wasn't the corporal punishment - that was an accepted practice of the day - but doing it with the victim's pals in attendance. Posterity doesn't reveal whether Da was the first to charge the teacher, but a full-scale brawl broke out, the only recorded riot of pre-Bar Mitzvah boys in the school's history.

Da had an ambivalent attitude towards the faith of his fathers. He was not a particularly religious man but always maintained a fierce pride in being a Jew. Years later when local kids scrawled Jewish stars and graffiti on our front walk, he refused my mother's pleas to erase them and defiantly left them there for days until embarrassed and chastened neighbors washed them off.

He was a gifted athlete, excelling at sand lot baseball and swimming in his youth and later, skiing, bowling, and golf. He maintained a life-long passion for the links that try as he might, he could not pass on to his sons. He played his last round three weeks before he died.

But it was fishing that gave him the most pleasure. As a young man, he and his friends would fly fish for salmon in Canada or go after tarpon in the Everglades. When my brother and I were old enough, he would take us striper fishing on a charter boat out of Provincetown. My most vivid memories have him standing triumphantly in the stern of the Flora K while Captain Gray unloaded our catch at the end of the day. Unfortunately, his victory was our hardship as it fell to my brother and me to gut the dozen or so fish we caught and could never give away. Since my mother hated the taste, they remained in our freezer for six months and were then thrown out.

Unlike his children who were beset with enough fears and neuroses to make Hamlet seem sunny and bold in comparison, Da was an outgoing and charismatic man who was always up for an adventure. At one time, he had a private pilot's license and would fly himself to business appointments up and down the East Coast. He claimed that he gave it up at my mother's request, but eventually confessed that surviving a flight through a thunderstorm in a Piper Cub convinced him to stop. He always respected the odds.

It was in his later years that I came to appreciate the true caliber of the man. During most of his life, my father 's domestic needs were taken care of by others. When he was in his early seventies, my mother, nine years younger, started to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Beset with heart and lung problems of his own, Da did everything within his power to grant her the care she needed and the dignity she deserved at home. On their fiftieth anniversary, he made a large party for her and their friends, celebrating their life together even as she was failing. It was only when his own health was in jeopardy that he agreed to move my mother into a facility nearby where he visited her every day until her death.

Da was diagnosed with lung cancer in the fall of 1997, which came as no surprise. He started smoking cigarettes in his teens and didn't stop until his sixties. It also didn't help that he was a textile manufacturer who worked in an environment filled with all kinds of floating fibers. Gambler that he was, he thought he had a shot to survive with surgery, but the disease had spread too extensively by then. When I gave him the bad news, he swore once, let out a deep breath, and accepted his fate with equanimity. On the morning of July 1, 1998, he called all his grandchildren to say goodbye and left this world in the late afternoon. He was eighty-six.

I often say that the world is a poorer place without men like Da, and I mean it in a sense beyond my own personal loss. Men of his time who went through the depression and World War II had a much different outlook on life than the self-absorbed generation that followed. Beyond the self-sacrifice expressed in Brokaw's Greatest Generation, there was an exuberant vitality in these men, a willingness to live life on its own terms, to overcome obstacles where they could, to laugh when they couldn't, and to accept the inevitable with grace.

Towards the end of his life, I would speak to Da every day, and each conversation would end with one of us saying, "my dime tomorrow." I would give every cent I own for one more call.

THE MOST DANGEROUS STREET SIGN IN AMERICA

2010-05-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Drake Passage around Cape Horn, the direct North Face route up Everest, El Camino del Muerte (the Death Road) in Bolivia - all of these legendary paths are fraught with peril and require consummate skills and iron nerves to navigate. But none has ever aroused the level of sheer dread or demanded the degree of reckless bravado as this crosswalk in Brookline, Mass.

Don't let the benign residential surroundings fool you. Hardened explorers and fortune hunters alike would rather circumnavigate the globe eastward than risk their lives in a foolhardy attempt to reach the west side of St. Paul Street directly. Even the riches of Coolidge Corner with its multiple cell phone dealers and chain drugstores would not be worth the danger involved.

It wasn't always this way. There was a time when young children were not afraid to approach this intersection, when the elderly and infirm made their way to the opposite sidewalk without a care. What insidious transformation turned an innocuous crosswalk into a horrifying gauntlet of doom?

It was, my friends, the well-intentioned addition of this sign.

Prior to its installation, there was a tacit understanding between drivers and pedestrians" "I won't stop, so don't cross if you're within range." Even if a vehicle could only intercept you by travelling at Mach one, stay put. "All clear" meant all clear a mile or so in either direction. I'm told that in Canada, cars are required to stop for anyone in a crosswalk regardless of circumstances or signage. Such a person wouldn't last a half-hour in Massachusetts.

Boston drivers are reputed to be the worst in the world and I'm inclined to agree. New York City drivers are more cutthroat, but at least they're predictable in their ferocity. Italian drivers are lunatic daredevils with no regard for traffic legality, but are skilled enough to get away with it. Boston drivers are both feral and capricious; there is no method, only madness. From the time a child in these parts can tie his own shoe, he understands this instinctively, and acts accordingly.

The addition of these signs in local crosswalks has ruptured this delicate equilibrium. No longer is crossing the street a strictly Darwinian skirmish, but an odd experiment in Newton's laws of mass and acceleration as modified by local legislative and judicial fiat and open to interpretation by every jerk in a Subaru Outback who's yakking on his Blackberry.

Where once there was certainty, there is now paralyzing indecision and not only on the part of the pedestrian. This sign is less a traffic directive than a reject puzzle from the old quiz show, Concentration. The last thing a person piloting a quarter-ton of metal should have to worry about is solving a rebus.

The first challenge facing the approaching vehicle is to actually see the word "YIELD" embedded in the inverse red triangle of its corresponding highway sign. The Traffic department has apparently gone to great lengths to make the word as small and indistinct as possible. And as hard as it is to read, it is equally hard to define. Technically, "yield" means giving the right of way to other traffic. If you can avoid the crosser by cutting harmlessly behind him by a few microns, you've technically "yielded." Wouldn't "STOP" be more appropriate?

And the walker icon is even more ambiguous. It's either a plump elderly man with osteoporosis and his pants pulled too high or a mime in a beret doing that "walking against the wind" routine they're so fond of. He (or she) does seem to be in motion which means anyone just standing tentatively off the curb is not covered by the "YIELD" order, so feel free to hit the gas and continue on your way.

As for the "within crosswalk" addendum, does that imply that if you step beyond the actual dotted lines, you're toast?

My anecdotal experience is that the majority of drivers pay no attention to the sign unless annihilation is a certainty. If you can bob and weave your way around a crosser, the onus is on him to get out of your way. In other words, there's little difference between traffic behavior before or after the sign's deployment.

The crosser, however, is now always in doubt as to whether a driver will respect or even understand the sign. Occasionally, a car will slow down to read it, giving the pedestrian the false impression that it's safe to cross. Having disdained the sign as another unwarranted governmental intrusion into the life of its citizens, the driver speeds up, forcing the crosser to fly across the street in blind panic. In response, the driver slams on the brakes to avoid a potential collision and spills his four-dollar Venti Caramel Macchiato all over his pants. What usually follow is a vehicular Alphonse and Gaston routine with upraised fingers and horns taking the place of exaggerated courtesy.

Please, Brookline Traffic Department, get rid of these signs before someone gets hurt.

SENATE REPUBLICANS BALK AT LARCENY REFORM BILL

2010-04-27T21:20:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - GOP senators emerged today in nearly unanimous opposition to the larceny reform bill passed in the House earlier this week by a margin of three votes. The thirteen-hundred-page piece of legislation would place severe restrictions and oversight on the unlawful or fraudulent removal of another's property without the owner's consent.

"This is just another grandstanding effort on the part of Democrats to make us seem out of touch with Main Street," said Sen. Ron Furcover (R) of Texas. "The truth is that our colleagues across the aisle are trying to stifle free enterprise under the self-serving premise that theft is somehow 'wrong.'"

"It's independent operators and small businesses who will suffer the most under the provisions of this bill. If you impose too many restrictions on car thieves, they'll quit the business and swell already bloated welfare rolls. This would cause additional hardship on chop shops which would be forced to purchase their 'raw materials' at higher prices on foreign markets. And hasn't the Slim Jim industry suffered enough from those new OSHA regulations?"

Other senators objected to the speed with which the measure was being brought to a vote. “This bill needs further debate,” stated one opponent. "There has simply not been ample opportunity to dither and dither until the whole matter collapses in a heap of bipartisan ennui."

The most controversial provision calls for an HGOB, or Hot Goods Oversight Bureau to monitor the fencing of stolen property. Democrats claim that this will allow for greater transparency of these transactions, although in deference to Republican criticism, they stopped short of insisting on a regulated exchange.

According to Sen. William T. Overture (D) of Wisconsin, "This will insure more equitable taxation and relieve the burden on the average citizen...well, I mean unless it was his stuff that was 'relieved' in the first place."

But even this compromise is unacceptable to critics. "The liberal establishment and the Washington insiders are hell-bent on increasing the size of government," said Harry "The Shiv" Barlow of the Canarsie Institute and Social Club, a conservative think tank. "Why do we need a costly bureaucracy when Big Louis and Tommy Four Fingers can cut their own deal much more cheaply?"

There is much speculation about the influence of well-funded lobbying groups on the debate. Supporters of the bill point to large campaign contributions and gifts made to opposition senators by QAPAC, the Questionable Acquisition Political Action Committee, including late model Cadillacs and junkets to Sicily.

"There was absolutely no quid pro quo involved. These are scurrilous charges meant to distract the public from the real issue which is governmental interference in the unlawful practices of its citizens," said Sen. Phil McCoffers (R) of Nebraska, who was awarded QAPAC's coveted Charles Luciano Medal at their convention in Jersey City last Month.

Despite the best efforts of opponents, a vote is expected in early June or as soon as Senate officials can locate the missing rostrum and several green "Aye" voting buttons.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF VAMPIRES

2010-04-04T23:41:00.000-07:00

Nostalgia, like arthritis and constipation, is a curse of the elderly. Some get teary about the house they grew up in or the joys of their high school years. Others yearn for their first car or the songs that accompanied their courtship. Personally, I pine for the days when vampires didn't look like J Crew models.

It's hardly news that the undead have returned as a major force in popular entertainment. The Twilight series of books and movies and the HBO series True Blood have captivated a new generation of gore-addled youth. But compared to their predecessors, this crop of vampires is a pretty anemic lot. I've only seen a few episodes of the TV series and a couple of trailers for the movies, but what I have seen is about as scary as a Clearasil ad. The "children of the night" have devolved from Dracula to Dawson's Creek of the Damned.

My love of the bloodsucking genre dates back to my childhood when Chiller Theater on Channel 40 in Springfield would show horror double features on Saturday nights. The movies were the classic 1930's films about the unholy trinity - Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman - along with their sequels, "Return of...", "House of...", and "Bride of..." My first vampire role model was the great Bela Lugosi, who played Bram Stoker's Count with a debonair malevolence yet to be matched.

But for sheer terror, you cannot beat F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922.) I first saw it in a college course on German Expressionism and nearly ripped the writing board off my lecture hall seat from fright. While the film is technically primitive, the brilliant Max Schreck endowed his vampire with a repulsive exterior that perfectly matched his soulless interior and evil inclination.

Which brings me to problem number one with contemporary vampires; the notion that they can be good as well as evil. A good vampire is as ridiculous a concept as a helpful tornado or beneficial dose of the clap. Once you allow them moral ambiguity, you effectively neuter the species and turn their gruesome behavior into nothing more than an alternative lifestyle. Where's the conflict? A vampire saga used to be a battle where heroic but fragile mortals fought against more powerful and thoroughly depraved creatures bent on enslavement and exsanguination. Today, it's just a cross-cultural teen romance with some supernatural arm wrestling thrown in.

Not only are today's hemoholics well intentioned, they are sometimes cast as the sympathetic victims of anti-vampire prejudice. Aren't there enough real issues of bigotry and hatred to be dealt with in the world? Can't we have one fictional realm apart from Santa's list where there's a general consensus on who's good and who's bad?

Once you allow a vampire to be just like you and me except for an unusual eating disorder, you drain the genre of its primal terror and diminish its ability to be cathartic. I also think you lose the fun, but that's likely a factor of my age as are my other preferences for how the undead should be portrayed.

• Vampires don't have gooey romances with mortals. Even during the censorship-heavy thirties, it was all about sex and blood, not dinner and dancing. Vampires don't have "relationships" and never discuss their feelings. They don't have any.

• Vampires don't shop at Urban Outfitters. Draining blood requires a more formal look than a trip to Starbucks. A frock coat with black pants a la Schreck is acceptable, but the full Lugosi monkey suit and cape is preferable.

• Vampires come from Eastern Europe. I know it's the era of globalization, but what else has Romania to boast about? The rec room of a split-level in Dayton is no place to stow a coffin. Home should be a castle in the Carpathians with a weekend retreat in Berlin or London to stock up on fresh provisions.

• Similarly, Vampires speak with an accent. Lugosi's Budapest-flavored speech and drawn-out cadence were the result of never learning English properly, but the effect is unsettling. No one is afraid of a vampire who sounds like a GAP clerk or Delta Airlines pilot.

• Vampires don't drink artificial blood. You might as well have them swig Red Bull. I'm not a natural food fanatic, but the organic stuff right from the source is the only way to go. Which would you prefer, biting a beautiful woman's neck or dropping by 7-Eleven for a six-pack? "Try new Plasma Lite® - more taste, less clotting."

Immortal though they may be, I don't expect the vampires of yore to make a comeback soon. Kids today won't even watch a black-and-white movie much less a seventy-five minute parlor drama starring a tuxedoed Hungarian with halting English. But back when visual effects were in their infancy, there was a greater reliance on mood and character to make the audience shriek, and I doubt any of today's blood-sucking millenials have that power. You don't need garlic or wolfbane to scare them off; just threaten to block their Facebook pages.

TUFTS UNIVERSITY'S "TAKE AN UNDERGRAD FOR COFFEE" APPEAL

2010-03-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, I received a letter from Lawrence Bacow, president of my alma mater, Tufts University. He asked me to become a participant in the school's Student Ambassador Program - well, me and 93,000 other alumni, but I'm still honored and humbled by the offer.

According to the letter, "Our graduates provide valuable models for Tufts' current students and faculty, who look to them for guidance and inspiration." How do they know I can guide and inspire? Are they tailing me? I thought I saw some guy duck into an alley when I turned around suddenly the other day. He could have some incriminating shots of me spilling mustard on myself at the deli - there's some fine inspiration for the students.

I wish I had known about this sooner; I would have dressed better and shaved more often.

The letter goes on to say, "The Student Ambassador Program connects some of the university's most thoughtful and engaged students with graduates who can share unique perspectives on Tufts." I do recall some unique perspectives from my college days. There's the view of the third-floor bathroom ceiling in Carmichael Hall that I experienced while sprawled on the floor from too much cheap bourbon. And up on the library roof, there was that spectacular scene of Boston at night as it was being stomped into rubble by a giant Richard Nixon (1969 was a bad year for lefties but a great year for acid.)

"In the next few weeks a student ambassador will contact you with an invitation to meet for an hour to hear your thoughts on Tufts...The conversations this program fosters will help us learn how we can best support our alumni on their lifelong professional and personal journeys." Regular cash stipends would be nice, or maybe they could just cover my cable bill.

I think I'll accept the invitation when my student ambassador calls. It might prove useful for him or her to hear about my time on the Medford Campus, and I'm all for the university being more responsive to the needs of its graduates.

I'll start off by imparting all the life lessons I learned at Tufts to my young colleague:

• Don't take girls to Paul Newman or Warren Beatty movies.
• If you mislabel the page numbers in the middle of a ten-page paper, it becomes a fifteen-page paper and professors are none the wiser.
• Dark beer is the perfect complement to a Reuben Sandwich.
• Theater majors are easy.
• A fifteen-page paper becomes a twenty-page paper if you gradually expand the margins and triple-space around quotations.
• Mutton chops are seldom a good look.
• "Adult Entertainment" has nothing to do with age or maturity.
• You can make a pipe out of anything.
• Choose some old disgruntled professor who's being forced into retirement to be your advisor. He'll sign your degree sheet without looking too closely.
• Don't drink cheap bourbon.

For the most part, these precepts hold up well today. It's true that Paul Newman is dead and thus not the box office draw he once was, and Warren Beatty now looks like the villains he played against in Dick Tracy, but you can swap in some new pretty boy and the rule still applies.

When we get around to discussing ways the university might better prepare its graduates for the real world, I'll make a suggestion. No student should be granted a degree of any kind without first becoming a licensed plumber or electrician. Drains will always clog and light fixtures will always short out, but your comprehensive knowledge of Melville won't fix either. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the pipe wrench clobbers them both.

As for improving alumni relations, having collected the equivalent of Latvia's GNP from us for four years, Tufts might show more personal interest in our wellbeing. I'm not asking for much - an occasional phone call or letter, a nice card around the holidays - just a sentimental little something that says, "I'm thinking about you beyond your capacity to fuel our endowment."

And the Student Ambassador Program is a step in the right direction. I have no doubt that it's an altruistic endeavor on the part of the school and not simply another sleazy ploy to bleed the last possible cent out of its former students and sharpen the scythe for the current crop. In our hour together, I'm sure my ambassador and I can cover all the issues raised by the president's letter in a lively give-and-take over lattes at Starbucks...provided, of course, that Bacow picks up the tab.

Selling Coals to Newcastle; Adventures in Pointless Marketing

2010-03-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

In recent years, the most popular concept in the advertising world has been viral marketing, the use of social networks and word-of-mouth to increase brand awareness and sales. Lately, I've been besieged by a different form of advertising that I like to call sterile marketing, the targeted promotion of products or services to consumers who haven't the slightest interest in or use for said goods, or the necessary funds to purchase them. I can't understand why companies spend years and fortunes analyzing demographic patterns, economic trends, and sales data to pinpoint their most likely customers, and then decide, "Nah, forget about them. Let's go after this bozo instead."

About a month ago, I received a fancy invitation from Ferrari of New England to test drive the latest model of their California series (see my earlier post "Dear Ferrari of New England...") I had never made inquiries about the car or contacted the local dealership about taking one out for a spin. Furthermore, I'm currently unemployed and as likely to buy a Ferrari as a timeshare at Windsor Castle. Yet not to be outdone, Maserati of New England has recently sent me a similar offer.

Why me? Even when gainfully employed, I was never in the financial stratosphere where such purchases occur, and I've never owned one of those Beryllium or Manganese American Express Cards which entice their holders with high-end promotions. Perhaps these firms discovered my fondness for all things Italian, although in practical terms, it's now limited to Louis Prima and Chef Boyardee. I do like small European cars, but the only way they could know that was if they traced the burned-out clutches from my '85 Rabbit. Whatever the reason, I'm just waiting to hear from Lamborghini and Bugatti before I rate the world's best performing sports cars that I can't afford.

People's exhibit #2 is a catalogue that was sent to my wife by The Pondguy, purveyor of supplies for ponds, lakes, decorative pools, and water gardens. In this one comprehensive volume can be found such useful items as "Faux Boulders", "Cascading Waterfall Kits", and the indispensable MuckAway™ pellets which release "natural bacteria designed to...convert muck into an odorless gas." It's too bad they don't work on the human digestive system.

However aesthetically pleasing or effective these products may be, they are of limited interest to city dwellers. It's the rare condominium apartment that has its own cascading waterfall, and the only "pond" we have to deal with is the sewer overflow during winter storms. There's Jamaica Pond, a small body of water about three miles from our home, but it's cared for by the Boston Department of Parks and Recreation, and I assume they've got their own catalogue.

Across this vast country though, there must be thousands of people who own property with ponds. There are plenty of wealthy folk with fountain-ringed palazzos and golf course grounds keepers who would surely find these products helpful. What breech of commercial sanity drove The Pondguy to hawk his wares to a women's clothing retailer and an out-of-work television editor?

But at least we're alive. My favorite sterile marketing scheme was from the Easter Seals 2010 fundraising drive. Last week, two large identical envelopes came to our house addressed to Mr. Felix Brawer and Mr. Morey Hunter, asking for donations to this worthy cause. The gentlemen in question, my father and father-in-law, passed away several years ago and were thus disinclined to contribute.

Don't think it's so easy to rectify this situation. I have tried for years to get their names off various mailing lists with only limited success. Apparently, companies and charitable organizations don't like to lose potential customers and donors, whether they're breathing or not. I once had the following phone conversation with a certain charity which will remain nameless.

Solicitor: "Could I please speak with Felix Brawer?"

Me: "May I ask what this is in reference to?"

"I'm sorry, but I'm only authorized to speak with him. Is he at home?"

"He's not, but..."

"I'll call back at another time. When would be convenient?"

"There's really no good time because..."

"Is there some other way we can contact him?"

"Possibly. Do you know a good medium?"

"Excuse me?"

"Or perhaps a necromancer?"

"I don't understand."

"Mr. Brawer is deceased. I'd appreciate it if you would take his name off your mailing and phone lists."

"I can't do that without proper documentation."

"I have to provide you with documentation, or you'll keep calling and sending him mail?"

"That's our policy."

"Good luck with the campaign."

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the final frontier of advertising - pitching the dead.

A Geezer Manifesto

2010-02-24T22:59:00.001-08:00

Having reached the milestone of three score years, I find myself faced with the challenge of how best to spend my remaining time on Earth. My first task will be to drag out this period for as long as possible, wringing every last nanosecond out of my potential lifetime. I will do this with a positive outlook, improved diet and exercise, and plain white envelopes stuffed with twenties for the Grim Reaper.

Of course, the simple pursuit of longevity isn't enough for a fulfilling existence. A life must have purpose and direction; there must always be meaningful goals, self-sacrifice, and higher aspirations than one's own selfish desires. I guess that rules out just waiting around for the Bruins to win the Stanley Cup.

But the pitfalls are many in our dotage. Old age has a habit of making us ornery, entitled, and, um...indiscreetly loquacious. The inevitable aches and pains of senescence can cause even the most stoic soul to become whiny and irritable, and I was already there at eighteen. The increase in irrational and offensive speech may also have a physical basis, but I think it's mostly that oldsters don't give a damn what other people think. Entitlement is a thornier philosophical issue.

Many subscribe to the belief that wisdom comes with age. Sorry, but only wrinkles, cataracts, and memory loss come with age, so you better have some wisdom before you get here. Many also believe that experience is the best teacher. If so, how do you explain old guys in whale pants? In fact, hanging around the planet a long time does not rightfully confer upon you anything other than the nickname "Pops."

And yet, we expect deference as we get older. We demand blind acceptance of our opinions, inflated praise for our accomplishments, and complete tolerance of our foibles. In return, we'll take your seat on the subway and complain if our soup isn't hot. Forgive me, my fellow geezers and geezettes, but this is neither becoming nor fair. I hereby pledge that I will not fall victim to this syndrome, and I swear to uphold the following ten principles of proper geriatric behavior.

1) There is no age-related immunity for the "ten items or less" restriction.

2) All grandchildren are created equal. Your Kenny is not superior because he can sculpt an airplane from his boogers.

3) Eyebrows should be trimmed before they resemble furry welcome mats.

4) Success or failure in the bathroom does not have global implications. It is not necessary to have daily briefings or issue press releases.

5) Automobile turn signals were not installed as holiday decorations nor is their use optional.

6) "When I was your age" is not the opening clause of every sentence in the English language.

7) No whale pants. Ever.

8) A thermostat is a device with settings below eighty-five degrees.

9) Once whiskers turn gray, clean-shaven or full beard are the only acceptable looks. The two-day growth is allowed if you're in a back alley sucking down Thunderbird.

10) There is no such thing as "The Divine Right of Codgers."

"DEAR FERRARI OF NEW ENGLAND..."

2010-01-28T18:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Ferrari of New England,

I can't tell you what a thrill it was to receive your invitation for a test drive of the new Ferrari California. At first, I thought there must be some mistake, but since you've seen fit to send me a reminder, I can only assume you're serious.

It has been my lifelong dream to pilot one of your legendary sports cars, and the California would more than fit the bill. I yearn to hear the low growl of its 4.3 liter 460 horsepower direct injection V8 engine, to climb through its 7-speed dual clutch gearbox, to accelerate from 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds, and to cruise the highway at its top speed of 193 mph with the wind whipping through my hair. Of course, given the traffic on Rte. 1, I'll have to settle for stop-and-go at 15 mph with my hair drooping on my forehead. No matter.

I feel it's only fair to apprise you of some misgivings. My eyesight is a tad compromised, and I was only granted my license (daylight restricted) after presenting the Registry with a medical file the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. Also, the last car I drove with a standard transmission was a 1985 VW Rabbit whose top speed could be seriously challenged by an Amish buggy. My heart may be a Ferrari, but my driving skills are strictly Ford Pinto and my reaction times best suited for a Schwinn Cruiser. If you're OK with this, I'm ready to roll.

I don't wish to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, but I wonder what I did to deserve this opportunity. I have never been to your Norwood showroom, nor have I ever made inquiries about purchasing one of your automobiles. I'm neither wealthy nor the heir to a fortune, and I don't travel in the circles of those who are. Frankly, I've always thought my chances of owning a Ferrari were about the same as owning a space shuttle.

Not to belabor the point, but I've been unemployed for over a year, and I've read that the California sells for just under $200,000. Unless it sells for $195,000 under $200,000, it's unlikely I can drum up the cash. Further, while looking for work, I have survived on the largesse of the Mass. Dept. of Workforce Development. I can only imagine how the taxpayers of Massachusetts might feel about my wheeling around town in a nicer car than the Governor's.

But obviously you know all this, or you would have never courted me in the first place. And unless you have a sudden change of heart, I'll be down on the Automile as quickly as my ten-year-old Camry will get me there.

Gratefully yours,

Jeff Brawer.

THE HUNK OF TIN

2010-01-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

It was a 1960 Bonneville coupe, robin's-egg blue where it wasn't rusted and only slightly bigger than the QE2. You could ram it into a telephone pole at sixty and not feel a thing for fifteen minutes. It had a 389 V8 engine, a Hydra-Matic transmission, and upholstery of the finest Corinthian plastic. The power steering was so sensitive that the slightest adjustment would send you careening over three lanes of traffic, and the brakes needed only the lightest tap to throw you into the windshield and bring the car to a raucous halt. There were no seatbelts. The radio was strictly AM and owed its reception to a bent wire hanger stuck in the hood.

It cost seventy-five dollars and was ugly as sin. I loved it.

It had no speedometer needle, so I painted one on at sixty-five. I figured if I were ever pulled over, I could show it to the cop to prove I hadn't been speeding. It only occurred to me later that once the car stopped, the speedometer should read zero. This didn't augur well for my future as an engineering student.

I dubbed it the "Hunk of Tin" after a popular car commercial of the late '60s in which two stereotypical Mexicans in serapes and sombreros made fun of a gringo asking directions to Baja. "You loco? You goin' to drive thees hunk of teen through de Baja? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" The gringo survived, and I had the perfect name for my car.

In the summer of '67, just before my freshman year of college, I used the Hunk to go back and forth to my job. I worked at my father's textile plant, something I had done off and on for several years. In order to show there was no preferential treatment for his children, my father gave my brother and me the lowliest jobs at the lowest possible pay. My specialty was stripping bobbins, pulling the last bits of tangled thread off the spools that were placed in shuttles on the looms. When the bobbins were almost empty, they would be dumped into large wood bins where they formed an enormous multicolored Gordian knot. It was my job to disentangle this mess and remove the empty bobbins for reuse, a process that caused extreme strain on the back and multiple splinters under the fingernails. My brother had the more glamorous job of crawling under the looms and, with oil dripping in his face, vacuuming lint off the machinery.

But the Hunk's raison d'etre wasn't the daily commute nor its true home the backstreets of Holyoke. Like its owner, it lived and breathed on the Mass. Turnpike.

I had a long history with the Pike. I first traveled the road a month after it opened in 1957 to see an eye doctor in Boston. During my childhood, I rode the Pike west to summer camp and east to the Cape. By the time I could drive and long before James Taylor immortalized it, Interstate 90 from Stockbridge to Boston was embedded in my genome.

Every weekend that summer, the Hunk and I would traverse the state in search of knowledge, thrills, and love. With a death grip on the huge blue steering wheel and shrieking the lyrics to Sgt. Pepper over the noise of the wind, I would be jumping in anticipation of the next adventure or savoring the one I'd just had.

Most of the knowledge came in the form of cultural enlightenment and involved bombing around Boston with my friend, Dave. Club 47 in Harvard Square was in its final years but still drew top talent. At that tiny but fabled venue, I heard Patrick Sky, Tom Rush, Spider John Koerner, Mose Allison, Buddy Guy, and other folk, jazz, and blues legends of the day. At the Brattle Theater, I saw Humphrey Bogart and Marx Brothers movies on the big screen for the first time. It's one thing to watch Casablanca on a small TV and another to sing the Marseillaise at the top of your lungs with two hundred other film buffs in proud defiance of Major Strasser. It was as close to fighting the Nazis as a post-WW II kid could get.

For thrills, I took my first baby steps into intoxication and altered consciousness. One night when my parents were out, Dave and I raided my father's supply of Colt 45 and learned first-hand the joys of oblivion and the price you pay for it, the freedom from inhibition and the enslavement to the toilet. I also had my first taste of weed that summer, smoking a few bowls with a certain family member who shall remain nameless to protect the not-so-innocent. As you might expect, the colors were vivid, the music transcendent, the food incomparably delicious, and the revelations earth-shattering. And like all novices, I learned two hours later that the colors were ordinary, the food unexceptional, and the revelations nutty. Only the music remained profound.

As for love, it may be a stretch to call my night at the Berkshire Theatre Festival romantic. It was more an exercise in teenage hormonal madness, and she was to blame. "She" was a stunning blond girl who sat next to me in the first row of the balcony during The Skin of our Teeth with Anne Bancroft. In the middle of the first act, she started pressing her leg against mine - the girl, not Anne Bancroft. At first, I thought it was an accident, but when I moved my leg slightly, she moved hers right back. Since the play was in progress and her parents were sitting on her other side, my options were limited to sweating profusely. This agonizing flirtation went on for three acts and two curtain calls, and I left the theater bent over, clutching my program judiciously. During the drive home, a friend explained what happened on stage while I was in the silent and unfulfilled throes of passion.

The Hunk survived into the following summer, but it had lost its mystique and only provided transportation in the geographical sense. I had spent the year in Boston and had acquired that strange combination of arrogant sophistication and disdain which typifies the newly-emancipated college student. I was a seasoned drinker and smoker and had won and lost my first girlfriend. And jaded fool that I was, I cared less about new experiences than the pleasurable repetition of the ones I knew. The Hunk was just a car and a rapidly deteriorating one at that.

It's only in the reveries of my later years that it returns as the magic carpet of my youth.

I WAS A GRAMMAR SCHOOL KLEPTO

2009-12-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

It's hard to know why a man turns to a life of crime. A broken family? Grinding poverty? Hanging out with the wrong crowd? Or maybe he's just a rotten seed, destined from birth to be a blight on humanity.

I have no excuse. My family was stable and loving, we were solidly middle class, and my friends were harmless dorks. The biggest hardship of my youth was hay fever. The mean streets of Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Murder Incorporated were a world away from my idyllic New England home. So I must have been born bad; nothing else can explain the reign of terror I visited on my second grade class.

It started innocently enough. In the spring of 1957, my class set up a beautiful miniature farm. It had a farmhouse, barn, and silo made from construction paper, and a large population of plastic poultry and livestock. Within a few days, that population started to dwindle.

Why cattle rustling? Because like most fledgling criminals, I was burdened with a first-class set of model trains. My layout included a farm which was not nearly as well stocked as the one at school. I figured that I would borrow a couple of cows and return them the next day. Even though I forgot to bring them back, nobody seemed to notice. That afternoon, I lifted three chickens and a goat. I just lingered a while before heading out to recess, and when the classroom was empty, I stuffed them in my pocket. As before, there were no repercussions. Even my parents seemed oblivious to my farm's sudden productivity and my remarkable success at animal husbandry.

I grew headier with each heist. I soon left the farm behind and started moving small school supplies - rulers, scissors, and the like. But even the thrill of unlimited paste wasn't enough. I got greedy.

As part of a science unit on weather, our teacher, Mrs. Pierce, constructed a milk carton anemometer. We took it outside one windy day, and she timed the blade rotations with a gleaming silver stopwatch. It was love at first sight. I had to have it.

I spent that night in feverish preparation, devising a scheme so diabolical that Sherlock Holmes himself would be baffled. At exactly 2:55 the next afternoon, as school was letting out, I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could see the watch. When she left the room for a moment, I bolted.

Ingenious, no?

For the next few hours, I went into a timing frenzy. How far could I run in a minute? How long could I hold my breath? What I should have been timing was how long before the jig was up, because soon after, I dropped the watch on the sidewalk and broke the crystal. I could no longer tell Mrs. Pierce that I simply forgot to give her back the watch before I left school - the linchpin of my scam. Despite this setback, I was determined not to crack, to play it cool as long as I could.

Which turned out to be not that long. When my father came home from work, he found me banging my head against the side of our porch. He asked what I was doing, and I said, "Trying to kill myself." Keen observer of human nature that he was, he got suspicious.

After a call from the school, he had the facts but decided to sweat it out of me anyway. When my father got seriously angry, he would speak softly and slowly, but with menacing intensity and volatile sarcasm. He also possessed an extremely potent version of the hairy eyeball which could extract a confession faster than the Spanish Inquisition.

"I understand you got a stopwatch at school today."

Deny everything.

"A stopwatch? What stopwatch?"

"How about the broken one we found in your jacket."

Oops.

"Where did you get it?"

"My teacher gave it to me."

That was true.

"Why did she give it to you?"

Uh oh.

"She gave it to me for being a good student."

Even at seven, I knew I was in it deep.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Deeper and deeper.

"Well, we'll just have to call her up and thank her for giving you such a wonderful gift."

He reached for the phone. I folded like an origami crane.

"Wait a minute! Let's talk."

Game. Set. Match.

Justice followed swiftly. I received a thorough spanking, lost a few month's allowance to pay for the watch, and was forced to apologize to Mrs. Pierce. I'm convinced that only part of the punishment was for the theft; the rest was for the dimwitted way I'd committed it. My father, who'd led a fairly wild youth on the streets of Paterson, NJ, was likely more embarrassed by my ineptitude than my criminality.

And so with chastened heart and sore behind, my career as an evil mastermind came to an end.

NOW THAT YOU'VE LOST WEIGHT, WHO ARE YOU?

2009-12-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

Congratulations! You've made it! There is no more glorious moment in life than getting on a scale after months of dieting and seeing your target weight in the window. It's winning the Nobel Prize and heavyweight crown on the same day the Sox take the Series and Juliette Binoche invites you to bed (assuming you're a prizefighting physicist from Boston who's smitten with Juliette Binoche.) Now that you've reached the pinnacle, what's next?

Start by soaking up some adoration - you've earned it. Let words of tribute and laudatory speeches fill your head until it bursts from the pressure. Glory in the discomfort of naysaying colleagues who once ridiculed your efforts and now betray their hypocrisy with oily praise. Treat compliments from overweight friends with a shrug and assure them that they could do the same if they wanted to. It's utter malarkey, but it provides them with a reprieve and earns you a merit badge in humility.

Given your accomplishment, you are allowed to do some bragging without tarnishing your halo. This can be subtle and non-verbal, such as wearing tight clothes to your final Weight Watchers meeting, or more overt:

"Really, Officer, I was doing forty-five in a school zone? Because that's how much weight I've lost."

Yes, revel in this moment because it's over in a heartbeat, and once it's gone, it ain't comin' back.

People will quickly accommodate themselves to the new slimmer you. Their praise will fade, and as long as you stay at your current weight, it will no longer be discussed. But there will always be an undercurrent of jealousy and a lethal lode of suppressed schadenfreude waiting to erupt the minute your self-discipline shrinks and your waist expands

After all, you're expected to keep the weight off. All the effort you put into reaching your new size is now required just to keep you there. The term used by the diet community is "maintenance," which is like referring to Marine boot camp as an invigorating spa treatment. Maintenance is going to the dentist twice a year and changing the oil in your Camry. What's demanded of you is a life of constant denial and perpetual vigilance, all without the benefit of friendly encouragement or positive reinforcement. You're already trim; nobody cares.

Further, you've lost the support of your diet plan, that rigidly defined program that got you here, and you've reawakened those demons who were previously soothed by your overeating. The temptations of the world didn't disappear because you were losing weight and righteously avoiding them. Burger King flourishes, potato chips are as popular as ever, and Hostess hasn't gone out of business. That sound you hear? It's the footsteps of your old weight hunting you down. Don't look back.

In short time, the joy of the new you is replaced by the fear of becoming the old you, and it's not idle paranoia. You should be very afraid; the statistical rate of recidivism among dieters is somewhere near 90%. And even if you beat the odds and remain steadfast, your anxieties will quickly spread from the physical to the existential. For once the blush is off the rose, it's not so easy to figure out who the rose is.

At the same time you were losing part of yourself, you were also losing part of your self. If you were heavy for an extended period of time, it's likely that your personality and behavior were informed by your shape. Maybe you were defensive or withdrawn in response to your weight, or you possessed an oversized persona to match your oversized bulk - the Chris Farley Syndrome. As you became thinner, your need for these character traits also diminished, confusing your emotions and blurring your identity. By the end of your diet, you might not know who you are anymore.

An old friend who lost over a hundred pounds a few years back, said of his transformation:

"Everything changes along with your shape, how you move, sit, get in and out of a car, and ultimately how you perceive yourself. You're a different person, but that person is an alien, someone you're not totally comfortable with."

He eventually regained the weight.

If you're unsure of who you are, your friends and family are even more bewildered and often resentful. You've changed the comforting role you played in their lives and taken away whatever superiority they felt because of your former girth. If you were boisterous before, they miss your constant antics and bonhomie. If you were introverted, they now dislike your good humor and optimism. They've remained the same; who are you to rattle their world by becoming someone else, even if you don't know who that someone is?

Congratulations. You've made it.

IN HONOR OF MY FATHER-IN-LAW ON VETERANS DAY

2009-11-11T14:43:00.000-08:00

It's been just over two years since my father-in-law, Morey Hunter, passed away at the age of ninety. During the thirty-five years that I knew him, he never once spoke voluntarily about his service during World War II.

For Morey not to speak about a subject was unusual. He was a garrulous and highly opinionated man, operatic in tone and sentimental by nature. Where family and close friends were concerned, he didn't just wear his heart on his sleeve, he gave it to you wholesale. He was a tireless worker, a dapper dresser, a fastidious cleaner, and a rabid Yankees fan which led to some truly hilarious banter with his New England transplant daughter. He loved to argue, waxing both poetic and crude about politics, movies, sports, and the quality of the fruit at various local markets about which he was more fanatic than he was about the Yankees. But about the war, he would say almost nothing.

Because of his reticence, the details of his service are sketchy. He was sent overseas in 1944 as a radar specialist with an artillery battalion. He saw service in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany where, being a natural if untutored linguist, he became a German translator despite only knowing Yiddish. He arrived in Dachau the day after the camp was liberated.

If pressed, he would tell us some of the more humorous incidents that befell him in Europe - the time his rifle split during guard duty in a rain storm or the time his precious supply of canned tuna from home was destroyed by German artillery. But even in these stories, there was always an undercurrent of the fear and brutality he'd experienced, the sense of isolation he'd felt as a young man far from family and home and in constant peril.

Only twice did I fully see the psychological scars the war had left on him. The first was in the summer of 1999 during a family vacation in Italy. We were driving from Tuscany down to Naples, the car ringing with laughter over some forgotten travel mishap, when Morey suddenly became quiet and withdrawn. I asked him if he was okay, and he simply said that he'd been there before. I looked up at an approaching road sign: Monte Cassino. He had been present at one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war.

The second time was in the spring of 2003 when Morey received a cryptic phone call from France to his Florida home. Given the bad connection and his partial deafness, he couldn't understand much of what was being said but managed to get enough information for me to follow up. The call was from a French family, the Merciers, who had befriended him and a GI buddy while they were stationed in Épinal after the liberation of France. The father, Marcel, was a young boy at the time but had very clear recollections of the time he spent with the Americans. In broken English, he wrote Morey the following:

"The last time I saw [you] was some weeks before Christmas and [you] should have come to dinner but [your] unit moved some days before...and we were very sad."

"Please [know] the friends who are dead for the France are not dead for nothing. French people love their American friends...I wish to your family a good health and I address you my good and faithful memory."

When we asked Morey what he would write in return, he looked at us sadly and said, "I can't. You write him back." We were stunned and pressed the issue. This family had gone through a tremendous effort to make contact; how could he not reply personally? He got mad and told us again that he couldn't and wouldn't. The pain of remembering was clearly much deeper than we imagined. We never brought up the subject again.

Morey was among the fortunate who returned from the war. He married, raised a family, prospered in business, and lived a full, rich life. But it would be thoughtless of me not to remember him today for his service to this country and for the sacrifices he and countless others made for the freedom of the world.

GOOD BYE MR. CHIPS AND GOOD RIDDANCE

2009-11-03T21:48:00.000-08:00

At the tender age of fourteen, I abandoned hearth, home, tube, and fridge and went off to boarding school for three years. When I arrived at Williston Academy in the fall of 1964, I was a chubby lad of 160 lbs., but after three months, I was twenty pounds lighter and three inches taller. The inches were a consequence of puberty; the pounds were victims of circumstance.

Before I wallow in the Dickensian details, it's only fair to note the benefits I received at Williston. I was given a solid general education with a strong emphasis on writing and literature. With no TV available, I discovered that there just might be something to this book-reading thing. I also developed a keen interest of theater since the Drama Club was one of the few places a sports-challenged dweeb could meet girls.

For Williston, like most New England prep schools of that era, was strictly single gender. Apart from plays, the only contact we had with women came during the occasional Saturday night dance. These two-hour affairs were more tightly chaperoned than Sicilian mob trials and afforded all the intimacy of a subway platform at rush hour. Your escorts were chosen by the sole criterion of height, and more often than not, this was bungled. Many was the night I found myself dancing cheek-to-sternum with some mortified amazon from our sister school. Prep school may have sharpened my mental skills, but socially, I was one evolutionary step shy of Neanderthal. As a result, I spent most of my first semester at college gawking at female classmates like a randy village idiot.

The lack of women was only one of many rigors at Williston. Boarding schools in the 60's came fully equipped with an exhausting and rigidly maintained schedule of studies, athletics, and vicious hazings. There were daily room inspections, a mandatory dress code, and a dearth of fellow Jews. Because the school was founded by a dour Congregationalist minister, attending chapel was mandatory six days a week. To this day, I'm one of the select few of my tribe who knows the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers."

But those hardships were like a week on the Riviera compared to what passed for food at Williston, and I use the word "food" in the broadest possible sense allowed by the English language.

Meals were taken in a large communal dining hall tastefully decorated in Early American Penitentiary. It could have easily been mistaken for Leavenworth except that the inmates wore blazers and sported more pimples than tattoos. The room held fifty long rectangular tables, each seating nine students and one faculty member. Food and drink were served in bulk from indestructible stainless steel platters and pitchers - clearly a time before Martha Stewart had any influence on "institutional" decor.

Like classes, meals at Williston were for instruction, not pleasure. Apart from providing basic sustenance (dubious at best), the partaking of food was seen as a means to manners, civility, and restraint. Since the actual food was merely an adjunct to these lessons, it was treated with the same joyless severity as logarithms and gerunds.

However fresh and savory provisions may have been when they arrived at the Williston kitchen, they were soon taken to task by the school's culinary Marine Corps. Under the stern leadership of head chef Albert Boudreau, the staff didn't so much prepare food as beat it into submission. Chicken was shaken down and bullied by these gastronomic goons until nothing remained but grease and bones. Crisp string beans were strong-armed into limp, colorless straw, and potatoes were clubbed into mush right out of the sack. Serving this stuff wasn't merely an affront to the palette; it was a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Our biweekly "treat" of roast beef was cooked so far beyond well done that science has yet to find a name for it. It's as if the recipe came from The Solar Core Cook Book: "Place meat in preheated oven at 15,000,000° F and roast until nuclei are sufficiently fused." The remains were then stored in steam chambers until the texture became indistinguishable from an all-weather radial. Once it was certain no vestige of flavor remained, the meat was cut into thin grayish-white slices and stacked on cold metal trays. It was served with a brown sludge-like gravy consisting of equal parts beef drippings, butter, flour, flour, flour, flour, and flour.

Another feature of the Williston dining experience was the requirement to wait tables for a three-meal rotation every nine days. Apparently, it wasn't enough to be nauseated by the culinary horrors tableside, you had to witness first hand how meat and produce could be cruelly transformed into hardened criminal fare. You also learned the brutal lessons of natural selection as you and forty-nine other crazed students fought with Darwinian fierceness for the clean dishes and silverware needed to reset the tables before you were late for class.

In such a place at such a time, weight loss wasn't a sign of deprivation, but a blessing.

OF GHOULS AND MR. GOODBARS

2009-10-15T05:55:00.000-07:00

Autumn has arrived, and with it, crisp apples, fresh cider, and clogged gutters. New Englanders are nailing Indian corn to their doors while the sound of metal rakes on sidewalks drives psychopaths to serial murder. With winter on the way, squirrels scurry about, collecting acorns and storing them in secret caches. For they know instinctively that in a few short months, these precious morsels can be sold on the black market at predatory prices.

The transformation of summer to fall has been a literary inspiration through the ages. It is the basis for Aesop's best-known fable, "The Ant and The Grasshopper," which extols the virtues of hard work and decries indolence. Nowadays, of course, the industrious ant would be laid off his job of thirty years and end up an alcoholic, while the lazy grasshopper would stash the take from his Ponzi scheme in an offshore account and flee the country before the idiots at the SEC catch on.

The joys of the season are many, warming the heart and delighting the eye. Some revel in the excitement of old college football rivalries. Others flock to harvest balls or take hayrides on moonlit nights. For me, it's the sublime weather that puts a smile on my face, the chill, bracing air which prevents people who weigh more than lawn tractors from parading around in sleeveless Celtics jerseys.

But the true highlight of autumn is that time in late October when the wind turns bitter, and gloom settles over the city like a burial shroud. No, I'm not talking about the Red Sox being eliminated from the playoffs, but Halloween, Christian holy day, commercialized celebration of the spooky, and pagan festival of high blood glucose levels.

Halloween is distinguished by the confluence of two powerful and mysterious forces - the supernatural and candy. What is this cosmic connection, and why, on this one day of the year, does it cause a heightened awareness of the otherworldly as well as rampant tooth decay?

Few people know this, but the spirit world is crazy about candy. Parapsychologists now theorize that ghosts are actually the souls of the dead who refuse to leave for higher realms because Junior Mints aren't available. They wander the earth ceaselessly, craving the sweet tastes and gooey textures they adored in life but can no longer experience in death. Dickens was wrong. Ghosts aren't tormented by good deeds not done, but Snickers not eaten.

Once a year on All Hallows Eve, the spirit world attains the power to influence the living. After invading the minds and bodies of well-meaning homeowners, these pudgy phantoms from beyond ply eager youngsters with enough refined sugar to make a black forest cake the size of the actual Black Forest. The children then grow up to be candy-addicted adults, and after their passing, new soldiers in this portly legion of darkness. And what weapons have we mere mortals to combat this evil? Toilet paper, shaving cream, and eggs.

There are those who believe that jack-o'lanterns provide some protection. Right, because nothing terrifies disembodied beings who exist beyond time and space like a rotting squash with a goofy smile. Unless it's made of

chocolate, they couldn't care less.

There are, however, certain precautions which vigilant parents can take to minimize the dangers and insure that the holiday affords their children a bit of carefree fun instead of an eternity of despair.

• Limit the amount of sweets your kid can collect. Don't let them go trick-or-treating with military issue duffel bags.

• Don't let them eat gummy candy with chocolate candy. Apart from providing a windfall for your dentist, this combination causes a heartburn that can bring down a bull moose.

• Once they've finished their treats, tether them securely to prevent interference with incoming air traffic.

While I do counsel caution and moderation, I despise those health nuts who drop toothbrushes into treat bags instead of candy. Back off, killjoys. This is the one night a year when adults have no say in what children stick in their mouths and regurgitate three hours later. Happy Halloween, everybody!

THE TEN MOST INFURIATING CLICHÉS ABOUT DIETING

2009-09-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't love a good list? Thanks mostly to David Letterman's "Top Ten," the list is fast replacing the expository essay as the literary form of choice for periodicals. Everyone benefits. The reader is spared long-winded explanations, grandstanding commentary, and pointless flourishes of style. The writer doesn't spend untold hours worrying about structure, progression, or transition. A short intro, ten zingers - badda bing, badda boom - you're done.

So I couldn't have been more delighted to find "Ten Secrets of the Effortlessly Thin" on the MSN Health & Fitness website.[i] For contained in this one list of supposedly helpful hints are the most irritating and noxious platitudes ever uttered or written about dieting. Even the use of "effortlessly" in the title is an affront to anyone who has struggled with weight loss. If it's really effortless for you, you should thank God every day and keep your precious suggestions to yourself. But since you feel that our lives would be so vastly improved by your keen insights, let's tackle them one by one.

They don't diet. Well, "they" don't need to diet because they're already thin. The explanation for this banality emphasizes the despicable, "permanent lifestyle change," i.e., eat better regularly and make more sensible food choices. Yeah, and you'll live a lot longer if you don't get hit by a bus.

THEY KEEP TRACK OF THEIR WEIGHT. That's because the scale is their friend, not an instrument of abject terror. It gives them positive reinforcement. It gives us nightmares.

THEY EXERCISE REGULARLY. They don't look like the Hindenburg in sweatpants.

THEY DON'T SOLVE PROBLEMS WITH FOOD. They don't have problems with food. In fact, the effortlessly thin have fewer problems in general. Since "the food won't fix what's bothering you," they suggest "going for a walk, watching a movie,...or taking a bubble bath." I can't speak for everyone, but when I'm ravenously hungry, food works a lot better than lukewarm suds.

THEY STOP EATING WHEN THEY'RE FULL. They're full when they've consumed enough to satisfy their biological hunger. I'm full when it would take an air compressor to drive so much as a single Cheerio into my body, and my pants are so tight I sound like Al Green on helium.

They don't surround themselves with temptation. They're so pure that nothing tempts them. For the rest of us, seeing a Snickers wrapper in the gutter is enough to trigger a binge.

THEY ALLOW THEMSELVES TREATS. "A small but really delicious chocolate bar" may "put the craving to rest" for the saintly slender, but it incites me to clear out the snack inventory of Seven-Eleven.

THEY EAT BREAKFAST. Not Denny's Lumberjack Slam.

THEY MOVE, STAND, AND FIDGET MORE. If nervous energy provides such a great weight loss benefit, how do they explain the late Rodney Dangerfield?

THEY DON'T SKIP MEALS. "Thin people keep their gas tanks [i.e., their stomachs] between one-quarter and three-quarters full all the time." How thoughtful of them to clarify the gas tank-stomach conundrum; I was halfway out the door to fuel up the car. But keeping with the metaphor, it takes a lot more gas to fill up my Lincoln Navigator than their MINI Cooper.

Please, just go back to living your naturally skinny lives in silence and leave us to our efforts in peace.

[i] http://health.msn.com/weight-loss/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=100218116

VIDEO ERGO DEVORO (I WATCH, THEREFORE I EAT)

2009-09-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

The recent return of NBC's The Biggest Loser has generated some interesting criticism. Amanda Vogel, a certified fitness professional, has provided a thorough analysis of the show's training methods on the IDEA Health & Fitness Association website.1 Among the concerns of her sources:

“There seems to be no rationale for exercise program design. Clients are pushed to their limits, which places them at risk of injury and overtraining."

“Making a person feel badly about his or her effort, mental/emotional status or progress is not a strong motivator..."

“I believe [the show] sets unrealistic expectations for many people who have a large amount of weight to lose.”

However valid these complaints might be, they ignore one crucial but obvious detail; it's a TV show. The categorizing of such shows as "reality programming" only confuses the issue. Jean Shepherd, the late humorist, broadcaster, and social critic, had the most profound answer for those who complained that television didn't reflect reality. He simply pointed out that it isn't reality, it's television.

Look no further than the show's use of the "cliffhanger" scale. When you step on your bathroom scale in the morning, does the indicator swing wildly for twenty seconds while dramatic music plays? I didn't think so.

The fact that weight loss is a serious concern for so many people only adds to the confusion. I don't imagine viewers of The Bachelor really feel that withholding a rose is the proper way to dump a potential mate or consider the bungee jumping on The Great Race a normal component of foreign travel. These shows are clearly contrived competitions manipulated for maximum thrills and with no long-range consequences for the contestants beyond winning a prize. But the very real health risks of the contenders on The Biggest Loser resonate with viewers who then look to the show for personal guidance. Caveat emptor.

And while you debate the merits of dieting as seen on TV, it's also wise to remember that watching TV itself can be major factor in needing a diet in the first place.

This issue is far more complex than mere couch potato syndrome. In my case, the conjunction of food and television has not only affected my girth, it has influenced my personality, my cultural tastes, and my choice of profession. It also explains why I whistle "Howdy Doody Time" when I'm hungry.

There is a strong elemental synergy between the tube and the fridge. For one thing, they are both purveyors of the limited yet precious freedom afforded modern man. Your TV may provide you with five hundred channels of absolute swill, but at least you control which swill to watch. And during commercial breaks, you can run to the fridge and choose which swill to swill. There's more personal autonomy for the average American in an hour of TV viewing than exists for the entire population of Albania in a year.

My own blurring of show business with chow business began in infancy. When restless at night, I would be rocked and fed, but not to some old-world lullaby. No, I was soothed by the gentle sounds of Jerry Lester and Morey Amsterdam on Broadway Open House. The bottle-and-Borsht Belt combo was my first TV dinner.

During my grade school years, my bond with television and Twinkies grew stronger. This came about as a byproduct of my early bedtime. I knew that while I languished in bed, something was going on that was exciting, something denied to me by rigid and autocratic adults. Through the bedroom door, I could hear the muffled sound of the TV along with my parent's laughter, and I seethed with revolutionary fervor.

My parent's absorption in their program allowed me to sneak downstairs and stock up on goodies. Since I was a chubby kid, they severely restricted my intake of snacks but inexplicably, kept the house loaded with them. I'd creep back to my room with enough provisions to last the siege of Leningrad, and except for an occasional telltale crumb, they were none the wiser. Not much of a rebellion to be sure, but I was ten, and Holyoke wasn't Havana.

Eventually, unable to monitor my hours due to their own fatigue, my folks sensed defeat and eased the restrictions. During school nights, I could only stay up until 9:30, but on weekends, I had carte blanche. With this last concession, they opened up Pandora's (and Admiral's) 21" black-and-white box, and out blew the strange cultural winds that shaped my character.

Unencumbered by parental oversight, I watched TV until comatose, and consumed mountains of junk food with impunity. The link was forever forged. Happiness is a warm puppy, said Charles Schultz, but for me, you couldn't beat Steve Allen and Cheez Doodles.

1 http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/weighing-in-on-the-biggest-loser

BRUSHES WITH FAME: I BUMMED A CIGARETTE FROM A NOBEL LAUREATE

2009-09-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

I've been fortunate in my life to have had several encounters with the rich, famous, and infamous. I've eaten Chinese food with Joseph Heller, bumped into Abe Vigoda on 3rd Avenue, and was running camera on a late-night Boston TV show when the late Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics pulled her top down on air. None of these, however, has had the lasting impact of my encounters with Professor Allan Cormack.

I was a student at Tufts University School of Engineering in the late sixties, and I use the term "student" in the loosest way possible. I was convinced that my youthful fascination with tinkering and taking objects apart made me well-suited for the program. Given my inability to ever reassemble said objects, this was perhaps a bit presumptuous. The curriculum for all freshman engineering students included an introductory physics course in Newtonian mechanics which was taught by Dr. Cormack in the fall of 1967.

Almost immediately, I ran into problems - linguistic, ophthalmic, and sociological - none of which were the fault of the professor. I was assigned to a lab group where the instructor had an accent so thick and indecipherable, he might as well have been speaking Romulan. Maybe he was. All I know is that it took most of the first session to figure out that an "offapackle" was an alpha particle, and by then, I had already bungled the experiment.

In those halcyon pre-Hewlett-Packard days, all experimental data and statistical evaluation was calculated using a slide rule, an ingenious but complicated device as common today as a chariot on the interstate. For those of you too young to remember, it was an adjustable ruler with multiple scales and a cursor that you manipulated to perform various math functions. Given the infinitesimal size of the scale markings and my abysmal eyesight, it was as useful to me for computation as a chainsaw for embroidery.

In spite of my empirical ineptitude, I enjoyed the lectures and had a good grasp of the theory, until the moment a girl with great legs and a penchant for short skirts started sitting next to me. I spent the rest of the semester in a R-rated reverie while the voice of one of the century's great minds drifted like faint Muzak in the background. Before Tufts, I had attended an all-male boarding school, and my social graces weren't fit for a Tijuana Bordello.

After three torturous semesters, it was obvious that I wasn't cut out for engineering, but in my clueless egomania, I blamed the subject. The problem was that I was clearly too abstract a thinker for such a practical field. Despite mediocre grades, I decided to become a theoretical physicist. I met with Dr. Cormack who was the department chairman, and switched my major. In retrospect, that was the task I really excelled at.

I don't remember much from that first meeting, except that he was a kind, down-to-earth man who didn't laugh in my face outright as he might have considering my qualifications. We talked about the curriculum, and he suggested I enroll in his course on advanced electricity and magnetism for the next semester. It was at this point that my tobacco jones got the best of me. I asked for one of his cigarettes which he graciously provided and lit. For anyone correlating Nobel laureates with their preferred cigarette brands, Dr. Cormack smoked Parliaments.

Advanced E and M turned out to be the most difficult course of my academic career. It was only through his superhuman patience that I wasn't KO'ed by Maxwell's equations, and could get up off the canvas to earn a respectable B. But I had stretched my science brain as far as it would go, and I knew I would never make it to my degree that way. I swallowed my pride and told him I was switching my major to English. As before, he was understanding and non-judgmental, and he wished me well. He also let me bum another smoke.

Dr. Allan Cormack was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979 for the theoretical work behind CT scanning. He died in 1998. It was my honor and privilege to know him.

THE UNBALANCED DIET

2009-09-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

The principle of moderation has been espoused by nearly every religion and philosophy, but it's most often associated with the ancient Greeks. The temple at Delphi was adorned with the inscription, "Nothing in Excess," and I doubt many people would disagree with that sentiment today. It makes sense, right? Yet in the convoluted world of food and dieting, this simple concept has been overshadowed by theories of fanatical abstinence as well as their polar opposite, the embrace of gross indulgence.

On the "less is more" side is the CRON or Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition diet. Based on scientific studies, this theory holds that a reduction of caloric intake by as much as 30% from the average western diet can lead to longer life and minimize the effects of aging. According to various CRON websites, the studies that support this contention were carried out on monkeys, cows, rats, mice, fish, worms, and various insects. One website (www.cron-web.org/) provides a colorful chart that lists the extended lifespan of various species on restricted intake. White rats top the list with up to 14 months extra life, guppies get an additional 13 months, bowl and doily spiders pick up 49 days, and protozoa, 12 days.

This is wonderful news for anyone who has ever felt the pain of reduced rat longevity or lamented how badly bowl and doily spiders were aging. Another article1 gushes about test results showing that mice "retain a youthful appearance much longer." I'm sure this is a great comfort to my wife whose blood-curdling screams last winter might have been mitigated if only our rodent intruder had looked more youthful. And remember, all you kids out there: Withholding a few extra grains from the top of the fish tank might keep your beloved pets a few precious days further from their Viking funeral in the family commode.

Most importantly, we all laud the tremendous strides made in solving the protozoan obesity crisis. What exactly scientists withheld to keep them svelte remains a mystery.

So much for creatures small and microscopic, what about humans? The optimal.org website lists the following potential drawbacks to CRON:

- Feeling cold

- Having difficulty sitting comfortably

- Reduced libido

- Hating it

So not only does this diet severely restrict the amount and type of food you can eat, it also makes you cold, uncomfortable, sexless, and angry. You've got to wonder why it isn't more popular.

On the "more is more" side, one need only consider the oft-reported expansion of the national waistline to realize that the world's largest consumer society is largely consuming too much. Clues to the blubbering of America are not hard to find.

7-Eleven has done its part with its "Gulp" line of soft drinks. These are fountain drinks served in cups with straws, not bottles meant for storage and consumption over time. The Big Gulp holds a mere quart, the Super Big Gulp, 44 oz., and the Double Gulp, a full half-gallon. A Double Gulp of Coca Cola has 744 calories and 186 grams of sugar - enough, I imagine, to bring on diabetes in a blue whale. It's only a matter of time before 7-Eleven markets the Super Double Big Gulp, 44 gallons of your favorite soda served in a standard oil barrel. It'll come with a straw, but you'll have to bring your own forklift.

McDonald's is also in an inflationary mood, moving beyond the Quarter Pounder to the new Angus Third Pounder. I'm guessing we're about two years away from the Five Pounder which will be packaged in a disposable bowling bag.

Not only are we not ashamed of this excess, we exalt it. Eating competitions, such as Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, continue to proliferate and attract media attention. There is even a governing body for the "sport," the IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating) which supervises and regulates contests, and also awards the coveted Mustard Yellow Belt to the Nathan's winner. I can think of nothing that would make a parent more proud.

The apotheosis of this trend is the Travel Channel's remarkable show, Man v. Food. A burly New York food maven, Adam Richman, travels the country and takes on insane eating challenges, including a twelve egg omelet, a thirteen pound pizza, and a seventy-two ounce steak. The show website refers to him as an "ambassador to all things delicious," but this hardly describes his noble stature. He is a lone warrior in the tradition of the Homeric heroes, knights-errant and samurai, an Achilles for our gluttonous times who battles burritos and chicken wings instead of Trojans. I love this guy and I love the show, but it may not present the best blueprint for rational diet and nutrition.

Can someone tell me how I get to Delphi?

1www.brighthub.com/health/dietnutrition/articles/23680.aspx#ixzz0PsApxdSz

THE GIFT OF SHARING

2009-08-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

In my opinion, the three most unpleasant expressions in the English language are, "There's smoke pouring out of your hood", "Somebody from the IRS called", and "Oh, that looks great. Can I have a bite?" And frankly, I'm far more tolerant of greedy auto mechanics and rapacious tax auditors than of dinner companions who want samples. I'm eating here, folks, not selling carpet.

The first time I took my wife to a restaurant, she innocently asked for a taste of my Beef Teriyaki. It required every ounce of restraint I possessed to smile politely and offer her a bite instead of stabbing her hand with a fork. My suppressed rage eventually subsided, but I made sure my steak knife was close by in case she came back for more. Over the years, I've taken fewer pains to hide my hostility

What's ironic is that trading food with my wife is a bargain. She always returns more than she gets and sometimes offers a taste without demanding compensation. I, on the other hand, require a notarized affidavit before I'll ante up, a pre-victual agreement with a penalty clause assuring forfeiture of the entire entree if the return portion is too small or not immediately forthcoming.

Now I'm no Sigmund Freud (I'm no Fred Astaire either, but that's another story), yet even I realize this paranoia didn't arise in a vacuum. It arose at 45 Yale St. in Holyoke, Massachusetts where I grew up surrounded by my parents and older brother, the villain of this saga.

Western Mass. in the '50s wasn't exactly a culinary hotbed. It wasn't even a culinary sleeping bag except for Mel's. Mel's is a small Italian restaurant in Holyoke whose specialties include spaghetti in a spicy red sauce, meatballs, roast chicken, and...French fries. Now I know that by today's health-obsessed standards, a dinner that includes both spaghetti and French fries is as unthinkable as a meal of poached salmon and motor oil, but back then, the greasy starch was a basic food group, as important to growing young bodies as red meat, butter, and Twinkies.

We would take out from Mel's about once a week. I can recall few more joyous moments of my childhood than contemplating those two enormous meatballs floating on a sea of glistening pasta, with a hefty portion of my beloved fries on the side, steaming under a squirt of ketchup. Then it would happen.

"Hey, Jeff! Look at that huge dog in the driveway!"

Alas, I was the perennial sucker. I'd automatically turn to stare out the window, and by the time I looked back, most of my stash had disappeared. My brother would be in convulsions - half with laughter, HALF FROM CHOKING ON MY FRIES!

But even the biggest sap catches on eventually. One night when I was nine, I feigned distraction and bashed him solidly across the hand with a serving spoon as he went in for the kill. I didn't inflict any real damage, but the dynamics of our dining relationship changed dramatically. Mealtime evolved from a cordial family gathering into a tense battle of will, no quarter asked, none given. It must have been a remarkable sight - the two of us sitting there in stony silence, eyes locked in a steely glare, left arm curled protectively around the plate, right hand clutching the fork like a shiv, just a couple of lifers in Alcatraz. This standoff continued until he went off to boarding school, and I could again eat in peace.

But once you're accustomed to dining in full combat readiness, you can never fully relax again. This is why I still regard every request for my food, no matter how innocuous, with suspicion and fear. I'd like to think, however, that I've mellowed over the years and become a more genial fellow to break bread with. I've learned to curb my more violent tendencies and conceal my outrage, save for a telltale blink or two. As for my brother, we've since become very close and can now enjoy a meal together provided nobody makes any sudden moves.

MISSPENT YOUTH

2009-08-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

Like all true Bostonians, I'm a loyal Red Sox fan. I take pride in their successes, suffer grievously over their failures, and detest anyone who wears pinstripes. So virulent is my hatred of that pattern that it extends beyond Yankee players to anyone sporting parallel lines on their clothing including train engineers and candy stripers. If Mother Teresa had worn a pinstripe sari, I'd have booed her too.

I love going to Fenway and rooting for the team. I jump up and down and scream with the best of them, cheering on our boys and excoriating the opposition or any official who dares rule against us. In begrudging deference to Yogi Berra, I never leave a game until it's over.

And yet, I possess a certain animus towards the sport that I just can't shake. Through deep introspection and extensive analysis, I've uncovered two possible explanations.

Ken Burns and my childhood.

My gripe with Burns is professional. I've spent most of my working life as a television editor, and in my many years of cutting and watching documentaries, I have never been subjected to anything as stupifyingly dull as Burns' twenty-three hour snorefest, Baseball. Employing a reverential tone normally reserved for Papal investitures, he smeared his Civil War paintbrush over the national pastime, obliterating every last bit of genuine excitement and color from the sport. I mean, really, how many different ways can you play "Take me out to the Ball Game" in a minor key? A complete hack could have generated more fun out of a ten-part series on crescent wrenches.

But this is a minor insult compared to the trauma that baseball inflicted on my youth.

There were other sports and activities while I was growing up, but none held the exalted boyhood status of baseball. In addition to playing the game, there was the endless discussion of players, teams, and stats, as well as the constant buying, selling and trading of cards. It wasn't the high-stakes memorabilia racket it is today, but many a tooth became cavity-ridden in a vain search for a Stan Musial or Moose Skowron. From April through October, baseball was all that mattered. Proficiency made you popular, ineptitude branded you an outcast.

I couldn't hit the damn ball. It didn't matter how slowly it was pitched or how many swings I was allowed, my time in the batter's box was spent in utter futility and embarrassment.

I really tried. I would hold my breath, tense my body, and glare wide-eyed and unblinking at the pitcher - more Marty Feldman than Mighty Casey, but no less determined. It didn't matter. As soon as the ball was thrown, it would disappear into some multi-dimensional wormhole until it smacked against the catcher's mitt. On the rare occasion that I did connect, it was courtesy of the same dumb luck that allows a roomful of monkeys to type a word or two of Macbeth.

My problem? Congenital Nystagmus, which, for all you Ophthalmology buffs, is a neuromuscular condition that causes the eyes to jitter uncontrollably. Objects don't appear out of focus; they just dance around the visual field like blood-crazed mosquitoes. As a result, my depth perception is on a par with a medium-sized plum. I was diagnosed shortly after birth and began wearing glasses at the age of two. During the "50s, it was the misguided belief of opticians and frame manufacturers that children’s glasses should simply be scaled-down versions of hideously ugly adult models. In an era that worshipped DiMaggio, Williams, and Mantle, I could have been mistaken for Bennett Cerf.

My fielding was worse than my batting. When grammar school teams were forced to include me, I was stuck deep - and I mean WAY deep - in center field. The second baseman or shortstop would run miles to grab any fly headed my way. My field of dreams was more like the Sea of Tranquility.

Finally, I gave up, reluctantly accepting the fact that this avenue to fame, fortune, and popularity would forever be closed to me. My father made a valiant effort to keep me competitive, but when a simple game of catch resembles a medieval stoning, it's unlikely that pro scouts will come knocking at your door. I put away my glove and became the youngest embittered cynic in the history of Western Massachusetts.

Forging an identity apart from sports was daunting. I wasn't a gifted student, and my miserable eyesight meant that I always sat in the front row of class, a sitting duck for teachers' questions and classmates' spitballs. I didn't have the smarts to be teacher's pet, and was too shy to be class clown. My age and social background ruled out delinquency and petty crime. And while alienation and angst were hot topics in North Beach and Greenwich Village, they were seldom discussed by the ten-year-olds who hung around the Coke machine at Lincoln St. Texaco. The only beatnik we knew was Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis, and he was no more a viable role model than Nikita Khrushchev.

Ironically, while desperately seeking an identity, I was growing one. My lack of baseball skills along with the attendant derision led me to disdain physical activity of any kind. Spurred on by a twenty-three hour-a-day TV habit and voracious sweet tooth, I began to gain in girth what I lacked in self-esteem. In sixth grade, I claimed the heavyweight crown of my class.

From then on, I was "The Fat Kid," a role I coveted about as much as "Pariah Outfielder." But a certain prestige did come with the pounds. How many other boys my age had the stature to play William Howard Taft in historical dramas? And while I was still shunned during ball games, I was in great demand for "Johnny-on-a-pony." I couldn't lick any man in the place as John L. Sullivan had boasted, but I could do some real damage if I sat on him.

Still, the perks were few, and the bullies many. Because of my size, I stood out from the other losers on the playground like Joseph Stalin at a DAR picnic. And with the first stirrings of adolescence, I discovered that sheer bulk is not highly prized in romance (at least not in the Western Hemisphere.) Today, unable to earn millions by playing a game eight months a year, I spend my time sifting through the detritus of a misspent youth trying to explain my dietary fluctuations and adult eccentricities - all because of that son of a bitch, Abner Doubleday.

COLONIAL THEME PARKS

2009-07-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

[This piece has nothing to do with the purported theme of the blog, but it's summer and Massachusetts is awash in colonial tourism. JB]

We Americans love our mythic history more than our actual history. This is understandable since real history is ambiguous and unpleasant while national myths are reassuring and optimistic. They are feel-good fantasies promulgated to boost civic pride and, like all myths ancient and modern, give insight into the national character without necessarily being true.. I have nothing against these myths provided that they are not passed off as actual history and more importantly, are not incarnated in "historical" recreation villages.

Perhaps it's insecurity about our country's short lifespan that makes us yearn for some theatrical embodiment of an idealized past. Neapolitans have yet to set up Ye Olde Volcano Village amid the Vesuvian ruins to reenact the natural disasters of first-century Rome. They take pride in the actual Pompeii and Herculaneum and constantly debate the trade-offs of restoration, conservation, and tourism. They prefer displaying the rock-encased bodies of the original inhabitants to having toga-clad actors run from imaginary showers of ash. Americans, in contrast, will travel hundreds of miles to watch a bonneted high school girl churn butter just off Exit 9 of the Mass. Turnpike.

Old Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation are two very big attractions on the East Coast colonial circuit. To be fair, these sites do have historical roots, and Sturbridge Village does have many buildings and artifacts that date back to the time frame they try to reanimate. The activities, crafts, and costumes are said to be accurate, and I don't question their scholarship. It's what isn't shown that bothers me.

Where, for example, are the recreations of 17th century surgery? As a grade school student, I went on several field trips to these places, and I don't recall a single exhibit where a leg was amputated without anesthesia and cauterized with a hot iron. I don't remember hearing the blood-curdling screams that must have been common while undergoing the dentistry of yore. The staff may dress appropriately, but I bet they bathe more often than their colonial counterparts did. The smell of Mennen Speed Stick gives lie to the reality of Puritan-era hygiene.

If the goal is to give the visitor a real feel for colonial life, forget about candle-making and weaving classes. Hook them up to an ox-drawn plow and let them break up rocky fields for twelve hours.

By ignoring the more distasteful elements, these sites minimize the actual hardships undergone by our American ancestors - well, perhaps your American ancestors as mine didn't arrive from Latvia until 1904. That they survived and prospered is a testament to their strength and resolve, and it is a disservice to their difficult and dangerous lives to pretend they can be encapsulated in theatrical displays, 9 AM to 5 PM, March through November. What about winter? My understanding is that winters were particularly hard on these folks. Perhaps a group of actors wearing insufficient period garb could demonstrate starving and freezing to death using a walk-in refrigerator.

I don't want to be overly disingenuous about these places - they are first and foremost tourist sites with their own hardships, primarily economic. I know that they have to provide all the modern amenities to attract visitors and must balance authenticity with user-friendliness. This might explain the "Plimoth Cinema," an indie art house on the Plimoth Plantation site. Because when I think of colonial America, the first thing that pops into my mind is Jean-Luc Godard.

MOTIVATION II

2009-07-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

About three or four weeks into a diet, the early withdrawal symptoms diminish or disappear. This means I no longer have a handy excuse for my innate irritability.

At this stage, if you are a confident, well-balanced person, you’re well on your way to happiness and better health. I don’t know who you are, but Godspeed. For the rest of us, there is a shift from physical to psychological hunger. Nutritional piety has lost its power, and the reinforcement of others, the “Gee, you’ve lost weight” effect hasn’t yet arrived. We are in a whole new phase of the conflict.

The cause is simple. You can accustom your body to smaller quantities of better food, use your brain to justify it, and canonize yourself for the effort, but as you do, your id will grow more insistent in its primal mantra: “Eat as much as you want, of whatever you want, whenever you want it.”

The id, or as I like to call him, “The Little Chazzer1,” is the loudest and most belligerent of Freud’s mental triumvirate. Until you decided to diet, he was in control of your eating. Now he’s engaged in ruthless combat with your rational self-interest (the ego) and the demands and expectations of our weight-crazed society (the superego, or as I like to call her, “The Stern Governess.”)

The Chazzer may be trouble, but he also makes life exciting. And what do we do? We spend our lives beating him down him. Everything from toilet training to obeying traffic lights is an effort to suppress his madcap sense of fun. I’m not opposed to restraint, mind you; society can’t function if its citizens are governed solely by their unbridled desires. But loading another set of restrictions onto our already over-regulated and and over-scheduled lives seems criminally repressive. It also infuriates the Chazzer and makes his demands more insistent. This conflict is the root of our angst.

Not bad for a guy who barely passed Psych 1, eh?

To maintain any diet, a way must be found to mollify the Chazzer. If he can’t eat whatever he wants, he must be offered something else to divert his single-mindedness and harness his boundless energy. In short, you’ve got to find him a hobby.

That used to be easy. Cigarettes.

Please understand that I am not endorsing the use of tobacco. I myself have not smoked a cigarette since January of 1972, when a bout of bronchitis broke its magic spell. But in college, I smoked, and while I smoked, I was fanatic. After a shaky start learning the basics, mainly how not to puke, I embraced cigarettes with utter zeal, accelerating from 0 to 40 faster than a top-fuel dragster. And it wasn’t just for show; I inhaled…deeply, all the way to my toes.

Not that I was immune to their stylish allure. During the ‘60s, many of us who reveled in the social freedom, political tumult, and “mind expansion,” of hippiedom, were put off by its treacly, feel-good philosophy. For us, there was the iconic Bogey, world-weary and cynical, with Ingrid Bergman or Lauren Bacall on his arm and a cigarette dangling from his lips. Never mind that we looked ridiculous in snap-brim fedoras and bell-bottoms, our eyes burning from Camel smoke; we were, at least in our own minds, cool.

And thin. Bolstered by faux-panache and nicotine, I smoked more and ate less. Gradually, cigarettes surpassed, and then replaced food as my emotional tranquilizer. I puffed for serenity and ate for sustenance. The pounds came off. It was the perfect balance - provided, of course, you ignored the bit about diseased lungs.

I'm not bitter that I gave up smoking and with it, my last neutral relationship with eating. Had I kept going, I wouldn't be able to tie my shoe without a two-week stay at Mass. General. But not a year has gone by since I quit that I haven't had two or three guilt-ridden dreams about smoking. And if the Surgeon General were to reverse himself tomorrow and announce that smoking isn't bad for your health, I'd be up to two packs by noon.

So, no id-appeasement from RJ Reynolds. Then what?

Some diet experts advise a system of rewards as weight loss goals are met. Among the most common suggestions are mini-vacations, such as a weekend in New York, and new clothes for your increasingly svelte physique. While sensible on the surface, this approach is fraught with potential disaster.

A weekend in New York? In case the proponents of this approach hadn’t noticed, NYC is not only known for its theater and museums, but for its restaurants as well. There are thousands of them serving an unimaginable variety of food, and they are located prominently on every block beckoning the unwary with their siren charms. There are also battalions of food carts, the street whores of food desire. Once, in one of my more depraved moments, I ate a Sabrett hot dog at every ten-block interval up 5th Avenue. There is simply no way to avoid temptation in this city. Do you really want to test your resolve against the best hand-cut pastrami in the world?

More insidious but equally disastrous is the idea of new clothes as a reward. Initial joy at fitting into slimmer duds can turn quickly to despair when they bulge from even slight fluctuations in weight. If perchance you have a small lapse in your diet, they become an uncomfortable and very public reminder of your pitiful weakness. Living under the tyranny of the scale is bad enough, but at least you don’t have to wear the damned thing.

As your diet progresses, more, and bigger rewards will be needed to achieve the same level of motivation. What started with small vacations and clothes can quickly become sports cars and yachts. Basically, you’re soothing your food addiction by becoming a reward junkie. As your waistline shrinks, so will your wallet, and though you may be thin, you might also be on welfare.

There is a deeper problem with this system. If you’re going to reward yourself when you’re successful, it follows that you should punish yourself when you’re not. The logic is simple; ten pounds down gets you a weekend in New York, ten pounds up earns the same in solitary.

“C’mon warden, give a guy a break. I was starvin’.”

“I’m sorry, Louie, you know the rules. That piece of danish just cost you a deuce in the hole.”

What’s next? Law & Order: Weight Watchers Unit?

The simple fact is that diets are not fun, and any strategy designed to hide that fact is doomed to fail. If you are the stoic sort, you’ll be able to live with this. If not, you can whine, complain, swear, make yourself and everyone around you miserable, but don’t pretend that this process is anything but an unpleasant system of denial.

1 Yiddish for pig or glutton.

LISTEN TO YOUR BODY

2009-06-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

It all began with podcasts.

I'm not crazy about many technical innovations of the last 20 years. The passion many share to impart every waking thought on TWITTER or FACEBOOK defies my understanding. Even less comprehensible are those who follow these dispatches with the obsessiveness of meth addicts. Today's lunch order from Arby's or your deep insight into last night's Gossip Girls are subjects best discussed in person or by phone with the very select few who share your love of the inconsequential. Please don't proclaim them to the e-world at large like they're proverbs from Ecclesiastes.. The web has more important uses - like the self-promotion of blogs.

But podcasts are another story. My iPod is bursting with more spoken-word programming than I could listen to in a century. And iTunes generates new batches every week like some electronic sorcerer's apprentice. Since most podcasts are free, I am constantly adding new and increasingly arcane series into the mix. I'm not sure how I came upon The Chopra Center offerings, but the titles of their episodes intrigued me: "Finding Balance In Your Life...," "Intention Setting," and the source for today's sermon, "Move Beyond Your Emotional Pain."

The session begins with a drawn-out Om-like tone followed by the deep, soothing voice of a narrator who makes Hal the computer from 2001 sound like Jackie Mason.

"The body is our subconscious mind containing all of our memories...Tune into your body. See if there's an area that is calling for your attention. Bring your awareness to this place. Now, in your mind, ask your body what it is trying to tell you."1

Whoa. My body is going to tell me how to overcome my emotional pain? It's never helped me with the capital of North Dakota or the definition of "recondite," but apparently it's got the goods on my hang-ups.

Despite my skepticism, I figured I could use some help with a mental quirk or two, and talking to myself was bound to be cheaper than going to a shrink. My attempts at intra-corporeal communication ran into problems from the start.

What is the proper protocol for addressing the parts of one's body? It seems to me that having shared the same space for almost sixty years, we should be on a first-name basis.

"I say, my dear hamstring, what seems to be the problem?"

However, since I've never actually conversed with them before, more formality might be proper. Maybe I should use the third person.

"Would the esteemed ascending colon be so kind as to inform me of its grievances?"

This seems courteous enough, but what happens if the respective organ, muscle, or joint doesn't understand English? If my innards speak French, Italian, or Yiddish, I might muddle along, but anything else is dicey. Given Dr. Chopra's fluency in these matters, perhaps my body speaks Hindi. There's also the possibility that it uses its own languages in which case Rosetta Stone better come up with programs for Bowelish and Scapulese.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that language isn't a barrier. Why should I believe that my various parts want to help me? Given my disregard for their well-being over the years, I think it's likely they have more complaints about my behavior than concern for my psychological health. Am I truly prepared to be called on the carpet by my guts?

How about this from my upper GI tract:

"You got some nerve asking me what's wrong. 'Oh, what ever could cause this distress?' you plead pitifully and expect some reassuring psychobabble in return. Try shutting your gob once and awhile. It's unbelievable - you stuff your face with every imaginable junk food in quantities that would stagger an elephant and need me to explain your heartburn. That hot sauce you love so much is strong enough for spot-welding. It's not childhood trauma, you idiot, it's gluttony."

Or this from my right rotator cuff:

"Oh, so now Mr. Big Shot wants muscles. For sixty years, he barely lifts his butt off the couch, and now he's pumping iron like a defensive tackle in training. You're sore? You're old. Try removing 10 lbs. on your fly reps, and don't hock me about your psychic pain."

What really scares me is that opening this Pandora's box won't lead to healing but provoke labor unrest instead. Once my aggrieved viscera learn of their common suffering, they'll want to organize. I've always suspected my left ankle of unionist sympathies. If I give him the opportunity, I bet that Commie bastard will incite my entire body to join in anti-me solidarity. Any accusation of mistreatment - an anchovy pizza at midnight for example - could no longer be settled with antacids, but would require a visit from the NLRB. A strike would be life-threatening, and I doubt local hospitals will let me raid their organ banks for scabs.

I have a better idea. Let my insides do their jobs as best they can, and I won't ask them for psychotherapy.

1 davidji, lead educator, The Chopra Center for Wellbeing.

VIRTUE

2009-06-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Dance around the issue all you want - the core principle of all diets is denial. Sooner or later you're going to crave something your diet doesn't allow. Welcome to the moral crises of the portly.

In the early stages of weight loss, these acts of abstinence become a form of Primal Therapy. They strip away emotional armor and phony sociability faster than a six-year old opening birthday presents. The idealistic goals of better health and longer life disappear. Even vanity, that ever-stalwart defense, loses its sway. The battle has moved from the war room to the trenches and it isn’t pretty.

Dieting, to paraphrase Bette Davis, is not for sissies.

Shame is now a stronger impetus than a thousand cardiac studies. Often, when I failed early on during diets, the humiliation was so great that I kept the fact hidden for as long as possible, living a double life of outward respectability and clandestine gluttony. This would last until my waistline ratted me out.

DELUSIONAL EATING PRINCIPLE #1: ANY FOOD EATEN IN SECRET WILL NOT CAUSE YOU TO GAIN WEIGHT. This is a variation of the “tree falling in the forest with no one to hear” paradox. If no one catches you, the food has no caloric reality, but if you’re discovered, the weight goes on. Observation is the linchpin in this digestive version of “Schrödinger’s Cat.”1

My wife, who has often confronted me with this fallacy, has an interesting myth of her own:

DELUSIONAL EATING PRINCIPLE #2: ANY FOOD WHICH IS PROVIDED FREE OF CHARGE WILL NOT CAUSE YOU TO GAIN WEIGHT (Also known as the Supermarket Sample Syndrome.)

Anyway…

As civility disintegrates and inner demons emerge, it becomes increasingly hard to remain disciplined. Most diets solve this problem by relieving the practitioner of choice. Once you’ve pledged allegiance, you can shut down your higher brain functions and activate your cruise control. Newton's first law states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Having adopted a pattern of behavior, it requires minimal energy and no brains to keep going in the same direction.

To achieve this state, all directives must be followed without question, even if they seem beyond the realm of diet. If your program says, "Wear lederhosen to work," off you go in jacket, tie, and leather shorts.

Personally, I’d rather not sacrifice my free will. According to Sartre, we are all ultimately responsible for our choices anyway, and he was one trim Existentialist.

Besides embarrassment, there is another powerful incentive for staying the course, self-righteousness. Overcoming the siren call of your stomach even for an hour entitles you to instant sainthood, and the longer you maintain your diet, the more virtuous you become. Pretty soon, piety is just leaking out your ears, and compared to your ascetic sensibilities, Gandhi was a bon vivant. If you have to give up chili dogs, the theory goes, you might as well be smug about it.

There is, however, a drawback to consider while polishing your halo. You’ve transformed eating from a biological need wrapped in ritual pleasure into an indicator of moral rectitude. Straying from your program now has consequences more grave than a few extra pounds and the derision of your neighbors. Having once dazzled the world with your self-control and having condemned lesser souls for their lack thereof, it's a long humiliating trip back to fallibility. You've shown yourself weak, unworthy, no longer fit to dwell in civilized society. Try bouncing back from that in a couple of days.

Once you embrace the “weight equals virtue” principle, people are only too happy to hold you to that standard. No longer will you be judged simply as healthy or unhealthy, attractive or ungainly. Your size is now a benchmark of good and evil. The world may have made some limited progress in its tolerance of physical diversity, but it remains medieval about moral and ideological transgression. Is your dietary hubris strong enough for this kind of scrutiny? Remember The Crusades? The Inquisition? The Cultural Revolution? Look how well they turned out.

More is at stake than your waistline when you travel the path to sveltehood. Your confidence, mood, identity, even your standing in the community may become hostage to the continual shedding of pounds. The more successful you are and the more noticeable the improvement, the higher the stakes become and the greater your insecurity and dependence on the process for reinforcement. Break this cycle at your peril. For if you fail, it's not a misdemeanor but a fall from grace.

1 Thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) in which the fate of a cat is determined by the observation of an atom’s state of excitation.

EXERCISE

2009-06-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been in a coma for the last fifty years, you've been subjected to some discussion of the value of exercise in dieting. Almost all the experts agree that it's a good idea - unlike other issues surrounding weight loss which are disputed constantly, lengthily, and with the acrimony normally reserved for ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. Occasionally, entire forests are clear-cut in order to publish the papers of dueling nutritionists. In November of 2007, the media ballyhooed two seemingly contradictory studies claiming that being overweight was either a risk factor for, or protection against certain forms of cancer1. Consensus is rare and discord the norm.

But there are apparently no diets for layabouts and idlers, or more specifically, diets that suggest they remain layabouts and idlers. I’ve yet to find a program that didn’t advise or even demand an exercise regimen as part of its system. And just as it was necessary to find the right motivation to diet, it is equally important to find the right impetus to exercise.

Dieting only requires that you don’t do certain things - in theory, you can diet while sitting on your couch watching TV - but exercise requires you to get off your ass and actually do something. This seems an obvious point until you try it and realize just how unpleasant that can be. Having worked out once, it’s hard to justify doing it again.

Many of the psychological hurdles surrounding fitness are exacerbated by having to expose your lack thereof in public. For those of us who drag around the baggage of unathletic youths like Jacob Marley’s chains, it is doubly hard to dwell openly in the land of the buff. To do so in shorts and t-shirt borders on the masochistic.

There is a degree of paranoia here. I suspect that among the fit, we flawed mortals are more often ignored than derided. I know that as we get older, we become increasingly transparent to younger generations until in late middle age, we achieve total invisibility in a feat that would astound H. G. Wells. You might think there would be some solace in this phenomenon, yet paradoxically, it too is a problem. We may not want our failings on open display or to have others judge us by them, but we certainly don’t want our efforts toward betterment to go unobserved. If we’re going to risk humiliation in order to pant and wheeze our way to better health, then, damn it, the world better notice!

If dieting at its core is a system of abstinence, exercise, minus the trappings, is physical drudgery. I like the feeling after a work out, when all those endorphins and encephalins are swimming around my brain, but I struggle to make the process itself tolerable much less pleasurable. It’s no coincidence that invention of the walkman occurred during the exercise boom of the seventies and eighties; people were desperate for distraction from their aching muscles and labored breathing. Ultimately, exercise is another burden in life whose benefits I appreciate after the fact, like getting a flu shot or reading Henry James.

Those benefits, however, are too well documented to be ignored, especially by the inertia-prone. It would be comforting to think that health concerns alone would be sufficient motivation, but sadly, this is rare. In all other aspects of human endeavor, one should prize thoughtfulness and reserve, but when it comes to exercise, it’s permissible, even desirable to be as shallow as a stool pigeon's grave.

In other words, embrace the trappings and brag freely about your efforts. The clothing, the shoes, the books and magazines, the endless prattle about technique, the obsessive recording and trumpeting of minuscule improvements in time, distance or endurance - these are the rewards. If working out also prevents a massive coronary, well, that's nice too.

I walk for exercise. I also walk to buy lottery tickets at the local convenience store. Therein lies my dilemma.

The virtues of walking are extolled by most every health and fitness guru; it can provide a good aerobic workout with minimal stress to bones, joints, and muscles, it doesn't require expensive equipment, and it is safe for those even woefully out of condition. There are no complicated skills to be learned; you don't need pricey lessons from overbearing pros. Walking is sensible…and that's the problem.

Using the superficial frame of reference, it's easy to see the limitations of walking. How much cachet can there be in a skill mastered by one's first birthday and practiced by many into their nineties and beyond? What arrogance can be derived from knowing that walking is not only exercise, but the planet's oldest and most widely utilized form of transportation. Who wants to think that their strenuous aerobic workout could be mistaken for an errand?

Walking is deficient in all matters valued by the fitness dilettante, but most notably in equipment and clothing. Bicyclists wear helmets and logo-covered jerseys. Rollerbladers need knee and elbow pads. Runners and joggers can choose from entire designer wardrobes made from the latest high-tech materials. Basketball players use footwear more complicated than the space shuttle, larger too. And walkers?

Sneakers, sweatpants, and optionally, radio headphones tuned to NPR. The major athletic suppliers do market walking shoes, but they mostly resemble the orthopedic oxfords your school nurse wore in the '50s. For a man with my frivolous criteria, could there be a bigger curse?

There are more vigorous modes of the "sport;" power walking, race walking, and the burgeoning fad of pole walking. While the gear for these mutations is significantly more stylish, the overall presentation leaves much to be desired. The power walker, with forceful stride, pumping arms, and determined glare, suggests nothing more than a demented drum major, while the race walker more closely resembles someone desperate to find a bathroom. As for pole walkers, they seem like delusional or perhaps just scatterbrained cross-country skiers who forget they needed skis and snow. These forms may be more strenuous, but they're infinitely dorkier.

There is also hiking, walking’s backcountry cousin. You can pretty much get away with anything in hiking - Compass, maps, GPS, crampons, snowshoes, goose down, Gore-tex®, just the coolest gear your can think of. Dress up like Edmund Hillary, and no one will even blink. Hiking also provides the distraction of mind-blowing scenery. This is a wonderful alternative assuming you live in Colorado or Switzerland. If you live in Boston or New York, it’s not an option unless you’re Bill Gates and can jet off to the Alps for thirty minutes a day.

The practical and low-key nature of walking doesn’t seem to bother women as much as men whose vanity about things physical is staggering. If walking is ever to appeal to them in a major way, radical changes must be made in the marketing.

There definitely needs to be more gadgetry including multi-function watches that measure everything from blood pressure to the ambient temperature on Mars. Aerodynamic sunglasses are also a must too since the effects of wind resistance are fierce when you’re moving at 4 MPH. Cutting edge, graphics-heavy magazines abound for surfers and skateboarders – why not walkers? The last attempt at a periodical was Walking, a lame effort nearly devoid of men. The cover models were attractive, fit, non-threatening women in their thirties and forties who exemplified the wholesome nature of the sport. Those few of my gender interspersed between articles on menopause and skin care were born-again health types who were very in touch with their emotional side. It should have been called Neutered Monthly.

Less emphasis should be placed on aerobic efficiency, and more on attitude. What's missing is a dark side, a dangerous side. Not a really dangerous side, mind you, just the aura. There should be T-shirts with flaming skulls that say "AMBLIN' MAN" and "BORN TO STROLL." Instead of cheery, supportive walking groups, we should form tough-looking gangs with names like, THE JOHNNIE WALKERS, THE HOT FEET, and STEPS OUTTA LINE. Essentially, we're looking for the kind of threatening image which makes adoring women murmur, "Wow! Look at that guy walk!"

I firmly believe in the health value of walking, but I also believe there is a huge financial incentive for athletic companies to reorient this bland form of exercise to better reflect and inflate the vacuous male ego. In short, let's make walking less pedestrian

1 World Cancer Research Fund / American Institute for Cancer Research, “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective.” Washington DC: AICR, 2007 and “Cause-Specific Excess Deaths Associated With Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity,” Katherine M. Flegal, PhD; Barry I. Graubard, PhD; David F. Williamson, PhD; Mitchell H. Gail, MD, PhD, JAMA. 2007;298(17):2028-2037.

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

2009-06-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this blog to bring you a special message of parental pride.

Congratulations, Lexi.

Love,

Dad

BEGINNINGS

2009-06-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

Having found the motivation to diet, one would think that the next logical step is to start dieting. One would be delusional.

It is a rare person who walks out of the Doctor’s office and onto a weight-loss program. For most of us, the transition requires weeks of research followed by a cabinet-level decision-making process, and then a series of arcane rituals more elaborate than the coronation of a British Monarch.

While several of these stages are regarded as mere delaying tactics, the first part of the process is unavoidable – you have to figure out what diet to use. For the neophyte, this is a process based on practical considerations. He will look through the available literature, discuss the options with his doctor and family, and make a choice. Most of us look back at this stage with fond if distant memories.

For the cynical, hard-bitten loser, the existential angst generated by this decision would put Hamlet to shame. In fact, it’s too bad the whole concept of dieting wasn’t bigger in Elizabethan England – it would have made a great Shakespearean tragedy.

“Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the base deprivations of Ornish, or to follow Atkins and fore’er forsake carbs…carbs, aye there’s the rub.”

Variety may be the spice of life, but it’s the death of dietary momentum.

First, you consider all the methods you’ve tried before. This is an eerily similar process to revisiting past romances. It’s impossible to look back in total honesty, since the facts have faded with time and memories are distorted by bitterness and regret. You are confronted by feelings and failings you would just as soon leave buried. It didn’t work out and yet…

Was it “her” or “me?” That is, was the ultimate failure due to some inherent weakness in the plan or some inherent weakness in you? During one diet, you gave up when only a few pounds from your goal and binged your way back quickly. It sounds like you were the cad, but maybe the system led to unreal expectations. Another time, you lost the weight easily, kept it off for a while but regained it over time. Perhaps the relationship became too confining or you were commitment-phobic. The spark was there for a while though; maybe you could rekindle the passion.

In general, I’ve found it’s wiser to start fresh with a new partner. The less emotional baggage you drag along with your physical baggage, the better.

But at least we have some personal basis for judgment with the routines that have failed us; finding a new diet is often a trek through the jungle armed with a butter knife. Unless you hold a degree in nutrition, it’s often hard to tell the real from the bunk, the sincere and informed practitioners from the hucksters and charlatans. For those of us easily blinded by technical and academic patinas, a string of degrees, a bunch of incomprehensible charts and graphs, and a blizzard of footnotes will catch our eye. For others, a glitzy cover and celebrity endorsement are the lures. And although we are loath to admit it, we are all susceptible to the promise of quick results with minimal effort and discomfort.

As an example of the sheer weirdness that confronts the potential dieter, let us examine one of the more interesting hooks of recent years; the appeal to the eating habits of our prehistoric forebears, Og and Jane Doe.

"From that time [700,000 years ago] until the beginnings of agriculture (about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago), man lived on a diet composed predominantly of meat of one sort or another...The fossil remains tell us that in preagricultural times, human health was excellent. People were lean, tall...[and had] little evidence of disease.

Pp. 16-17, Protein Power, Michael R. Eades, M.D. and Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

"Paleolithic people were fit, slender, and active, and free from heart disease, cancer, and many other modern diseases. Our ancestors were genetically programmed to live on the lean meats...and so are you."

Front cover, The Paleo Diet, Loren Cordain

Let us begin with some minor quibbles. Exactly how many fossil folks are these conclusions based on? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? That's a pretty small sample for such weeping generalizations. Isn't it possible that these specific specimens were found precisely because they were the healthiest and most active among their peers? How do we know that the majority of cave people didn't die in anonymity because, instead of hunting and gathering, they spent their days eating Paleo-doodles® and leering at racy cave drawings? And for those lucky enough to have their bones unearthed, why is it assumed that diet was the main factor in keeping them healthy? Maybe it was the countless hours engaged in their favorite sport, “Run like hell for your life!”

More to the point, why would anyone in his or her right mind make any decision based on how those brainless oafs behaved? TV cartoons notwithstanding, we're not exactly talking about Nobel laureates and Oxford Dons. These are creatures for whom cleanliness was an unknown and unimagined luxury. What they ate was pretty much what they found, and I mean lying dead on the ground, not stacked on the shelves of the Olduvai Gorge Piggly Wiggly. In the absence of the Emeril Legasse, cooking was at best rudimentary, depending on the intermittent availability of fire. Let us also remember there was no FDA back then; they ate…well, more than food with their food. Do you really want to use these dunderheads as nutritional role models?

I can’t imagine that “diet” as such had any meaning for them whatsoever. They lived in an age prior to Elle and GQ, and thus were too ignorant to realize that plague-like emaciation was a "look" to be painstakingly achieved rather than merely a harbinger of hideous death.

We live in odd times indeed when Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of California and Madonna is a spokeswoman for Jewish mysticism. Now I’m supposed to delegate my health decisions to Fred Flintstone.

I seem to have digressed. Sorry.

For the sake of argument and brevity, let's say that for whatever reasons and criteria we hold dear, we have decided on a diet. We have the motivation and the plan, so it's time to begin, yes? No.

For myself and I suspect numerous others, it isn’t enough to simply throw away the cookies and start following the righteous path. Throughout history, humans have marked all the major and minor milestones of life with ritual and ceremony, and I see no reason why a diet should be any different.

Alas, I have yet to find a culture with a “Start Your Diet” festival or holiday. In the Western tradition, we have Passover and Lent, but the forbidden foods associated with these times are not proscribed for the purpose of slimming down. There is our pathetic New Years Day when well-meaning but hungover penitents make resolutions of abstinence that are abandoned by halftime of the Rose Bowl, but this day lacks the solemnity and pomposity to be an effective touchstone. You are therefore free to determine a start date in consultation with any lunatic superstition you wish short of the Delphi Oracle which closed down a few years back. Since there is no shortage of these, you may end up choosing the first day of the week, the first day of the calendar month, the first day of the Summarian month, Columbus Day, Guy Fawkes Day, Tet, Halloween, or Herbert Hoover’s birthday.

The rites observed on “Start Your Diet” day vary from person to person. I prefer something on the order of the May Day celebrations in the old Soviet Union but without the Politburo and ICBM’s on parade. There is, however, one ceremony that seems common to all – “The Last Supper.”

On the eve of your start date, an elaborate feast is eaten consisting primarily of those foods that will be verboten during your diet. These over-abundant meals, tending toward the fatty and the fried, the rich and the sweet, typically result in world-class nausea and heartburn strong enough for spot welding. The “Last Supper” is less a celebratory repast than a mini-morality play, which allows the penitential dieter to begin his odyssey in the proper frame of mind and stomach.

One problem with this ritual is the near impossibility of satisfying every craving in a single meal. As a result, “Last Suppers” often evolve into “Farewell Tours” involving month-long treks to every beloved pizza joint, hot dog stand, clam shack, and barbecue pit along the Eastern Seaboard. It is wise to factor this into your schedule.

Finally, on the appointed day at the appointed hour, with the stars and our fridge in proper alignment, we can begin.

MOTIVATION

2009-05-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Generally, you know you need to diet before hearing it from your doctor. Some signs are obvious - a ballooning gut, increasingly tight clothes, and the inability to climb a flight of stairs without sounding like both partners in an X-rated movie. Yet people are remarkably resourceful at disguising the obvious, both to others and themselves. New clothes and good tailoring will hide a multitude of Twinkies, and elevators have long ago eliminated the necessity of stairs. You can also escape unpleasant facts by reacting to mirrors in the Lugosian manner – simply sweep your cape over your eyes.

Even scales are no hindrance to self-deception. It’s amazing to listen to people who have been math and science phobic all their lives, become physicists and engineers when it comes to measuring their weight. “I don’t trust my scale because…”

“It’s on a carpet. The floor sags. Our house is built on soft clay. It’s so delicate that it’s affected by the tidal pull of the moon. It doesn’t account for variations in gravity due to General Relativity.”

At this rate, you might as well ask some carnival low-life to guess your weight. He also may be wrong, but at least you’ll get a stuffed animal.

There is, however, a day of reckoning when all the techniques of self-delusion falter - the yearly physical. You may be able to fool yourself, but without clothes, it’s unlikely you can slip your bulk unnoticed past your doctor. He or she might be kind or blunt, sensitive or cruel, but rest assured your weight will be discussed. Size-wise, the jig is up.

Good sense would seem to dictate the immediate initiation of a weight-loss and/or exercise program, and if you are new to the game, this might be sufficient motivation. But as a man who has been down this road more often than a long-haul trucker, I know that good sense alone isn’t enough to overcome years of short-lived success followed by long-term failure. According to one source, 95% of dieters put back all the weight they’ve lost¹; who wants to bet against those odds? Diets by definition are restrictive, and most folks don’t see the sense in denying themselves when failure is the most likely outcome. In short, why bother?

There is one school of thought that says, "Don't bother. Accept yourself and your body regardless of weight or shape, and societal pressures be damned." To maintain this attitude requires a strong sense of self and immense emotional reserves. Myopia doesn't hurt either. For most of us, however, this approach lasts only as long as it takes someone to yell, "Hey, Tubby! You're blocking the aisle!" This is particularly demoralizing at your wedding.

Which brings us to the first and perhaps strongest motivation to diet - to attain culturally accepted standards of attractiveness. These criteria are simply known as "What 'they' are saying." "They" can be any subset of the general population (parents, friends, coworkers, the fashion industry, the Federal Reserve Board), but given human nature and the predilections of our society, "they" are frequently some actual, potential, or mythical significant other. Of course, seldom if ever do we actually know what "they" are saying. It's often a matter of conjecture based on People magazine…which, of course, I would never buy but only read at the dentist’s office.

Although the desire to look good in the eyes of others is generally thought to be a female trait, I assure you that it drives men just as strongly. We are simply less adept at comprehending and fulfilling this need. We are also more sensitive to being thought conformist or vain, which are, paradoxically, merely other things "they" might say. Luckily, we can hide our insecurity and narcissism behind the facade of health concerns. More on this in a moment.

When viewed rationally, it must seem odd that mature, educated adults are prey to such silliness. Such a perspective, however, falsely presumes that we've actually grown up, whereas in reality, most of us are just inner-children who drive minivans. The taunts, insults and indignities of childhood and adolescence continue to haunt us and govern our destiny as if we still hung out at the playground. It matters not that we pay taxes, attend PTA meetings, or endure gum surgery. The fifth grade bully, brainless high school jock, and sadistic Lolita wield more power in our lives than the combined influence of the President, Congress and Oprah…which, of course, I would never watch except when I’m too sick to work.

Fortunately, there is a general consensus that being overweight is unhealthy which gets us off the hook. It's far easier to say "I have to lose weight because my family has a long history of heart problems, and since research has established a strong genetic link in cardiac pathologies, I must reduce risk factors wherever possible." than "I have to lose weight because that slut Cindy shot me down when I asked her to that dance senior year and went with that jerk Richie instead, so if I look really good, she'll know she made this totally stupid mistake and feel lousy." This doesn't mean that the first statement is false (in my case, it's quite accurate) or irrelevant, only that the latter is more compelling.

How, I am often asked by an incredulous family and disbelieving friends, can anything be more compelling than your own mortality? Isn't being deprived of the joys of life, wife and children or depriving them of you enough to shock you to your senses? Well, yes and no. Obviously, the thought of losing my family is unbearable and the idea of facing the great beyond terrifying, but I'm never going to die so there's no problem. Lest you think I'm kidding, consider this: When we're young, we truly don't believe we'll ever die, and when we get older, we realize that we are going to die someday, but the person who's going to die isn't me now, but some future me. It's a whole different person, so why worry? Besides, I'm hungry.

Hence, the key to dietary motivation lies not in the medical research of 2009, but at the Prom of 1967. The logical mind may have scads of good reasons to lose weight and the heart, figurative and literal, likewise, but if you can't persuade the jilted teenager that it's in his best interest, the whole thing will collapse. Convince him and the rest of the brain and body will come along for the ride.

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1. G. K. Goodrick and J. P. Foreyt, "Why Treatments for Obesity Don't last, " Journal of the American Dietetic Association 91(Oct 1991):1243-47.