OK, you blew it. You were supposed to load up with whatever this year’s superduper toy was weeks ago, while it was still in stock. But you got distracted, as usually happens this time of year, and now you’re stuck. And your marriage, and your children’s permanent affections, are now at risk.

Fortunately, Wired comes to the rescue. Specifically, good old GeekDad, who reviews toys and all sorts of other stuff for Wired. And he’s got a list of the five best toys of all time. You might have a quibble here and there, but you can’t deny he’s on to something. Your only problem now is gussying them up as Christmas presents for kids who expect something either (a) glowing, (b) electronic, or (C) alive. But that’s what wrapping paper is for, isn’t it?

by Matthew Record

“In the immediate aftermath of the Twenty-sixth Amendment’s passage, nearly eleven million new voters joined the general electorate. Full story »

“He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

“Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 23:13-14)

By now, you’ve probably heard about the video of Texas judge William Adams beating his disabled, then-16 year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt. You may even have seen the video. If not, a caution: it’s every bit as disturbing as reports would lead you to believe. We’re not used to seeing this kind of domestic brutality on YouTube, especially when it’s punctuated by lines like ”lay down or I’ll spank you in your fucking face.”

I initially ignored this story. I heard the headlines, made the same assumptions as a lot of people probably did and moved along. But today the story hooked me back in when I saw that Adams, in the process of blaming the victim (she only released the tape because he was cutting her off and taking away her Mercedes, he says), suggesting that the footage looked “worse than it was.” Full story »

by Chip Ainsworth

The cold air chased me south from New York into Pennsylvania and on through Virginia into North Carolina. “We had snow here last week,” exclaimed Sarah Edwards. “We haven’t had snow in 15 years.”

Edwards was speaking from behind her desk at the Ava Gardner Museum in downtown Smithfield, a Tar Heel town of about 13,000 that’s located a few miles west of I-95. I’d pulled in once before but the museum was closed. Now I was back to get a glimpse into the life of the woman who became the flame who “taught Frank Sinatra how to sing a torch song,” as his band arranger, Nelson Riddle, once described her.

The museum attracts about 12,000 visitors a year — mostly seniors but also “a lot of younger people interested in Old Hollywood,” said Edwards. Admission is $6 and patrons can buy a variety of souvenirs from Ava Gardner post cards to five-ounce jars of regional delicacies like sweet potato butter and moonshine jelly. Full story »

My alma mater, Wake Forest University, has a “career connectors” group on LinkedIn, and there’s currently a thread where one of the university’s career dev folks asks for some input on a project she’s working. Specifically, she asks: “If you were hiring a recent graduate, what top five professional skills do you want him/her to possess to be a strong candidate in your profession?”

Great question. Since I’m all in favor of young Deacons taking the world by storm, I thought I’d try to contribute some advice. Here’s a slightly buffed out version of what I wrote.

1: Develop communications skills. Especially the ability to write clearly and flawlessly. The erosion of writing skills over the past 20 years has been dramatic, and a student who can demonstrate this ability has a huge advantage over the competition. A warning, though. Full story »

by Matt Gallagher

I slept through 9/11.

When people hear or read that statement, they tend to think I’m speaking metaphorically. “Ahh,” they say. “Weren’t we all?” While I do appreciate my words being consumed as literary insight, and there’s certainly a great deal of truth to that particular interpretation, I mean that as literally as possible. As in, I was drooling on my pillow after staying up too late playing video games during my first week of college when my roommate, a native New Yorker, woke me up in time to watch the South Tower collapse.   Full story »

I’ve come to the conclusion that the London riots are far too complicated to be described, analyzed or understood in the pithy conclusions our media and politicians are only capable of functioning with. Though they clearly started because of police/race issues that were initially approached by the people in a peaceful way … and completely ignored by the police/state nexus of power, the spread and manner of the riots have buried that in a complicated web of motives and behavior. We’re now finding out that a great many rioters are not “young” in the traditional sense; they’re like me and come from the Reagan/Thatcher generation. This information lends some credence to analysis i’ve read saying that initial loss of control by the authorities opened up the flood gates for everyone who thought they could get away with whatever they wanted to do.

Here comes the Fight Club Generation…
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It has been quite a week. When things happen that I don’t completely understand, I always go back to my childhood and look for inspiration or understanding. Yep. There it is.

When I was a kid, sports were my life. I have the scars to prove it. Hours under an endless June sky were marked by innings, and days that crept by slow in July heat are remembered as quarters in a never-ending football game. We violently imitated every competition we saw on TV, and when we had to, we invented our own contests. I’m still very proud of my brief reign as grand champion of full-contact croquet, a beautiful sport that drew mothers to our park like June bugs to watermelon rinds. Oh, how they screamed. Full story »

If you teach writing for a living, you tread that fine line between prescriptivism and descriptivism. A prescriptivist (which, sadly, I lean toward) is one who harrumphs over a misplaced apostrophe (even when meaning is quite clear) and tells people how language ought to be used according to her strict interpretations of the language’s rules of the road. Think William Safire.

A descriptivist views language as it is written, as it develops, without the harrumph, harrumph. She systematically studies linguistic change and records it without comment.

I raise the issue — to harrumph or not to harrumph — because I recently harrumphed … a lot. One of my graduates, who is distinguishing himself in his first newspaper job, is tweeting his stories at light speed to promote them.

Full story »

Two flimsy gray walls, three filing cabinets and one rarely used dry-erase board make up the landscape of my work cubicle. My mind travels often to places I have been and those I long to see, yet this is the daily scenery starving my adventurous soul.

I used to love my job. That was before it became three positions in one.

Since corporations began laying off millions during the economic crisis several years ago, there’s a phrase that’s became all-too-common. Somebody complains about work. Somebody else replies that, “At least you have a job.” Full story »

The comedian Colin Farrell has astutely observed that people always are quick to claim personal characteristics that are the exact opposite of who they actually are. Gregarious party-types often say, “But really, I’m very shy.” Lazy people talk about how hard they work. And of course, racists are forever making sure everyone knows that some of their best friends are black and they’re not prejudiced, but…

All of us do that at one time or another, claim personality traits that are 180 degrees from reality. Maybe we lie to convince ourselves. Or maybe we’re trying to deflect anticipated criticism. If I say I am an idiot before you can say it, then somehow it takes the sting out of it.  “You can’t fire me. I quit” sort of thing.

It’s no coincidence that the best-selling Christian fiction series is called Left Behind.   Full story »

I’ve never much cared for the musical genre broadly known as Americana, and lately I’ve been thinking about why this is. I suppose it’s acceptable to say hey, I’ve listened to a lot of these artists and most of them just kinda bore me, but that seems unsatisfactory for a guy who thinks about music like I do.

After some reflection, I think it comes down to a couple of issues. The first one, I admit right up front, is objectively unfair of me, but there is a part of me that associates Americana with the Baby Boomers, and in particular sees it as a late, faint attempt by the post-Reagan iteration of the cohort to recapture lost authenticity. Full story »

It’s been a big week for the USA.

First, American troops raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed al Qaeda’s leader.

And today is the 50th anniversary of America’s first manned space flight. On May 5th, 1961, Alan Shepard lifted off from  Cape Canaveral for a 15 minute flight that got America on the board against the hated Soviets, whose hero Yuri Gagarin had not only already flown in space but had orbited the earth some weeks earlier.

While Shepard’s flight was only a jog compared to Gagarin’s, it had plenty of drama. The US was trailing the Soviets in rocket technology and the previous two launches (one with a dummy astronaut) had gone off course and subsequently  had to  be destroyed.  No one at NASA could say for certain that Shepard might not go the way of his mannequin predecessor.

In fact, Shepard’s flight was delayed three days as NASA technicians tried to solve potential flight problems. Full story »

by Tom Shortell

I was scrawny, zit-faced sophomore sitting in Spanish 2 Honors when Principal Abatemarco informed my high school what had happened in Lower Manhattan the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The school is a 50-mile drive from where the towers stood, and everyone knew someone that never came home that day. My hometown of Middletown, NJ lost 37 people in the attacks, the highest amount of any city outside of New York. Full story »

Part two in a series.

Forgive me for abstracting and oversimplifying a bit, but one might argue that American politics breaks along the following 10 lines:

• Social Conservatives
• Neocons
• Business Conservatives
• Traditional Conservatives (there’s probably a better term, but I’m thinking of old-line Western land and water rights types)
• Blue Dog Democrats
• New Democrats
• Progressives Full story »

The great medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer created timeless characters in his Canterbury Tales; archetypal personalities such as the Wife of Bath and the Miller endure to this day. Through them Chaucer could readily celebrate, criticize and satirize different aspects of the society of his time. Additionally, Chaucer, as a public servant and man of the people, preserved a vernacular that may otherwise have been lost.

The late Richard Pryor, often hailed as the greatest comic to ever take the stage, is the American Chaucer. A master storyteller in the grand tradition of West African griots, fired by passion and pain, possessed of keen insight, he was also a brilliant impersonator with amazing range, an intuitive actor who never got his due, a social critic, a writer, a folklorist, a philosopher, and, most importantly, one funny motherfucker… Full story »

I talk a lot about generational dynamics and have been known to criticize the collective shortcomings of the Boomers and Millennials. I’ve also allowed that my generation (X) has some failings of its own, and one of them is that our cynicism can get the best of us. In fact, sometimes it almost seems to define us. As much as I hate it, I think we’re going to go down in the history books as the Whatever Generation.

And I admit it – I have my own cynical streak, and sometimes it threatens to take over completely. Full story »

If you’re a Boomer, particularly a Boomer male, the “space race” resonates with you as much, maybe more than JFK,  Beatlemania, or Vietnam. You spent a lot of Saturdays wishing the most recent Mercury/Gemini/Apollo mission would release its hold and that all systems would be go so the spectacle of the launch itself could flicker on your TV – and you could get back to watching cartoons.

But the astronauts themselves were rock stars – before there were rock stars. They were real, live American heroes – and while I and many of my generation found ourselves torn between widely varying (although not so different, we now know) heroic types, no one doubted the courage – sometimes tragically expressed – of our space explorers. We lost  some of our guys (including my personal favorite, Gus Grissom) – but we had to beat the Russians. If they took over space, life as we knew it would be over. Over….

And they had the first space hero – Yuri Gagarin. Full story »

Good old Owsley Stanley, purveyor of the best LSD ever, I’m assured, and designer of, among other things, the good old Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face logo, as well as much of their sound system and sound, has died. Not from an overdose, as one might expect—Stanley was pretty pristine regarding what he ingested, as the NY Times obituary attests. Rather, from an automobile accident in Australia, where he had lived much of his later life. Stanley achieved legendary status in the 1960s, that best of decades, through his skills in chemical manufacture, but as he always said, he only started manufacturing LSD because he wanted to be sure of what was in it. He only ate meat, too. He is probably best remembered by some as the supplier of acid to Ken Kesey’s trips festivals described hilariously in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which recounted Kesey’s adventures among the psychedelics, not to mention the Hell’s Angels, much like an anthropological study written entirely from the right hemisphere.
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I took my family to the aquarium in Mystic last week, because it was Presidents’ Day. I’m lying. I took them because I like the aquarium. True, the price of admission is steep, the fish all look small and terrified, and the over-priced food isn’t very good, but we enjoy the beluga whales, and I can‘t look at penguins without cracking up. A penguin is Nature’s stand-up comic. But at the end of the day, I had to balance the joy of penguins by facing the horror of the gift shop.

“Dad? Can I have this stuffed shark?” Joey asked.

“No,” I said. “How much does it cost?”

“Only $44.95,” he said.

“Oh. Then I’ll change my answer. From no to Hell No.” Full story »