no shit

I remember being in the “talented-and-gifted” program, it was called TAG, at Rockbrook elementary school back in my day. I’m not sure how it happened, but it primarily involved being able to go on field trips throughout the year with the other TAG kids: ice cream plants and potato chip factories – nothing Earth-shattering or academic. I vaguely suspect it was like being on fire patrol (red belts) or safety patrol (white belts): if you raised your hand, you were in. As far as I know, there wasn’t any testing involved and it certainly couldn’t have been based on academic achievement. I think the grading rubric (how did that word become so popular?) at my elementary school involved Pass, Fail, Tried, Trouble. There’s your No Child Left Behind testing spectrum from the early to mid-1970s.

What brings this up is an Andrew Sullivan post on the T-and-G crowd which I suspect is much larger these days, but still based roughly on the same hand-raising or self-selecting process. Clearly, there was no improvement in my academic future because I got little gift bags of potato chips at the end of my tour at Lay’s. Of course, this whole talent-and-gifted idea is wholly separate from actual academic achievement (Honors, AP, and etc.) I’m pretty amazed that anything like this still even exists in elementary and middle school – did I need a survey to tell me that a year-and-a-half of exposure to mindless field trips doesn’t equate to a student being better off?

I don’t even want to consider Megan McCardle’s issue with talented-and-gifted programs – which she has somehow conflated into a public v. private v. voucher school discussion. I will tip my hand on that issue and say that I think vouchers are a horrible idea. Details? To come. (Full disclosure: my high schooler is in private school, but not via a voucher program.)

p.s. While digging for a picture, I came up an Amazon review for potato chips. Who writes a review for potato chips?

rock n' roll youth

Back in my youth, my wild youth, I was the rhythm guitar player in the greatest air guitar band of all time: The Tubes. I know what you're asking yourself, "Aren't The Tubes a real band?" - yes, they were. They were a theatrical rock band of epic proportions led by the great (Omaha native) Fee Waybill. We (Todd, Skip, Jeff, and I - yes, two Todds) were enthralled with The Completion Backward Principle album and ended up translating our Quarters-playing, skirt-chasing, air-guitar rocking ideals into a band that, simply put, rocked. And rocked hard. We did air guitar festivals around the Omaha area, we did entire band sets with props and crew, we scored...plenty. After our first outing, we moved to full-on jumpsuits, punk-slit glasses, necklaces, and killer equipment. Back in 19-and-82 (or so...) you couldn't air guitar with actually equipment - you had to fabricate your gear and rock like a star simply based on your moves and your thrash. As you can see above, when thrashing was required, thrashing happened - that shot was me at the Howard St. Tavern (RIP) in Omaha in about 1983 or 1984 - rock n' roll can be fuzzy. This was no doubt during a rousing version of Talk to Ya Later...lordy, lordy, lordy.

What's brought this all on is a package of stuff that Melissa sent back from Omaha with L.: including, most importantly, three VHS tapes (how to play) of live performances from festivals, Skip's basement, and the environs of his foosball-equipped basement. I do believe that every piece of tape was from our pre-drinking days that were made up nothing by (original) Mt. Dew, foosball, ping-pong, and the original Atari game station.

I. am. old.

t

p.s. I believe on VHS tape includes the band in the guise of The Cars, The Romantics, my stunning turn as Rick Springfield, and a (should be censored) version of Steve Wonder and Paul McCartney doing Ebony and Ivory. Skip and I will NEVER be appointed to the bench with that video.

Wha'chu talking about, Willis?

When you grow up visiting Chicago, and in a time when tall buildings ruled the World and boys were interested in these sorts of details, you have a laundry list of buildings: Empire State Building, John Hancock, Standard Oil, and the Willis Tower. Granted, the last three are all Chicago landmarks since the Windy City seemed to rule in the tall building derby back then – I think that at one point they were the three tallest in the World. Oh, maybe I need to go back and check that list…right, the Willis Tower. I remember in my youth when I’d ride the massive, high-speed elevators to the observation deck of the tallest building on the globe. Looking out far to the east-northeast I could see Wisconsin on a clear day; I could see my favorite Chicago landmark, the John Hancock building over on Michigan Ave. As I stood there, in awe, I thought “Wow, the Willis Tower is just way cool…” (remember, I was in my teens). I’ve often thought back on my journeys to the Willis Tower, my bus rides down Sheridan Ave, my walks around downtown and all these passed along to my children; the greatness, and trivial details, of theWillis Tower. Everyone who goes the city wants to see the Willis Tower. Even though it’s been bumped down some random list of “tallest structure/tower/blah blah blah”, it is still considered the tallest of the skyscrapers. SKYSCAPER! What a great term apparently from a nautical history and first applied to the Home Insurance Building (1885) in, of all places, Chicago. Long live the Willis Tower

and the dressing on the side

I remember scanning newspaper ads and looking for jobs back in the early 1980s – I was most interested in working as a waiter. What you find out pretty quickly in the waiter otherworld is that every single ad – or posted sign – includes “experience required”. I never ended up being a waiter, crushed dreams and all, because I could never get either myself or the employer beyond the “experience required” roadblock. I’ve been a host, a busboy, and short-order cook but never a waiter. The reason this comes up is because I find the political idea of “experience” to be almost comical; I’ll get to it in a minute. Wouldn’t it be nice to own a restaurant and have the World’s most experienced and successful waiter walk in my door one day? No doubt. The flip side of that equation is that you hired an “experienced” waiter he turns out to be a fool, experience or not. In fact, aren’t you simply eliminating a massive pool of possibly very good workers – maybe even the future ‘greatest’ – by demanding completely pointless qualifications? Based on my dining out history, I’d say that about 30% of waiters are completely useless, 60% manage to not be useless, and about 10% are very good. If you accept my math, and you should, then what we have in our required hiring pool is that 90% of the bad and mediocre ‘experienced’ waiters running around applying for jobs that only they can possibly manage. You won’t often get a shot at the great 10% because they probably write their own tickets. I don’t want everyone to get all hot-and-bothered if you’ve been, or are, a waiter: it’s grueling work, the pay is for shit, and I don’t know if I would have been any good at it. I understand that…I’m making an analogy. I also know some pretty put together people who failed miserably at the job. If I’m the boss and I’m hiring waiters then I’m going to give just about everyone a good look. You’re always best to remember that everyone started somewhere – even the experienced waiters.

Politics. Are we so completely lost that we’ll just sit on the couch and pick-and-choose our representatives based on something called experience? At what? Being a Governor with no foreign-policy background? Being a Senator for some number of years? An actor and Governor? Experience at being President? What exactly is the issue, and why are we suddenly so selective? Somebody said on the talking radio box the other day that they didn’t need a President with experience they needed a President to lead. Lead. Simple concept, isn’t it? Let me carry over some math from the previous word problem: 30% of experience politicians are completely useless, 60% avoided being useless, 10% are pretty damn good. I feel that the further someone moves into the political otherworld the worse they get. I’d certainly love for one of those 10% to walk into my living room and tell me he wants to work for me. Even if they don’t walk through the door, I’m certainly going to give everyone a good, long look and I’m not adding something stupid like “experience required” to my ballot.

It’s a ramble, it’s probably not worth much, but it woke me up last night.

t

meatloaf, not Meat Loaf

I don’t want you to turn away from this timeless entry because you’re not a fan of rock opera. I happen to own both the Bat Out Of Hell entries from the Meat Loaf catalog so neither title would have thrown me off the scent.

I bring up meatloaf because, for some ungodly reason, the other night I asked X if she’d ever had the legendary middle-American dish known as “green bean casserole with crunchy onions on top.” (Meatloaf and the casserole go hand-in-hand.) She was clearly perplexed by the lowbrow title because she’s simply not well-versed in Midwestern, nine-year old naming conventions. I described the royal dish to her in the simplest terms possible: can of beans, can of cream of onion soup, can of crunchy onions, and baking. That is the recipe. Those aren’t terms passed along in an attempt to make it easy for discussion purposes with the unknowing, that’s it – three cans and an oven. The memory of the ‘dish’ made me think about meatloaf and Minnesota, and they need to be addressed separately. First, the meatloaf. Anyone raised east of California and west of Cincinnati, in the area known to coastal liberals as ‘the large square-ish states region’, will swear that their mother’s meatloaf is the best meatloaf in the world. The World. They’ll swear on their mother’s meatloaf…it’s deathly serious business. I’ve had meatloaf "made" by other kids’ mothers and it isn’t any good, none of it. What I was thinking while I eating at their house, picking away at something dry and brick-like is, “Hey Brock, you need to come over to my house and get some really good meatloaf.” Of course, if he ended up staying for dinner the evening we happened to have meatloaf, he’s probably thinking, “Hey! This is the best meatloaf in the world.” I rest my case, your witness. About that Minnesota part. As I’m pontificating on my mother’s cooking I’m adding in little swaths of color and passing along witty anecdotes about my youth in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. I’m building a scene, directing a movie, giving my girlfriend some background on why I am the way I am. You see, I lived in Minnesota between the ages of 5 and 7, in a colonial-like house on Fondell Drive in Edina (if you click on the blue tacks you can see some of the sights!). The thing about neighborhoods in those days (the opening of the 1970s) was that the backyards on abutting blocks didn’t have fences…it was like open range. All the kids ran rampant through yards and streets playing kick-the-can and capture the flag. One of the families on the block behind us even had an early-70s, free-standing ‘tree’ house that we used to play on all the time. Late one fall afternoon I fell off the top of that son-of-a-bitch, broke my right forearm, and ended up waiting for the emergency room doctor to get back from dinner…just so he could re-break it over his knee before setting it. Wait, I digress, as is often pointed out. I was in the middle of this same idyllic background story, building to a crescendo, wending my way towards an anecdote about Mrs. Mary’s day care/nursery school, when X stops me, looks across the table, gets a goofy look on her face, and asks “how old were you?”; and “what street did you live on?”; and “the kid’s name was Rink?”; and “there were green beans in it?”. Yeah, I get it. She’s not much for details.

I’m going to give the green bean casserole with crunchy onions on top a shot this weekend. I sense the boys will move slowly around the pan, wag their tails, and sniff at it like it’s a new dog in the neighborhood. I’ll wait for my mother to forward the meatloaf recipe to me before I give that a go.

Love.

T.