I’ve long wondered if the ending would involve a big reveal that much of what we’ve seen is not what we have thought it was — that there is some bigger, overarching plot or some individual or group that has been driving all of the events we’ve seen as part of some bigger conspiracy. I’ve wondered if such an ending could be setup in the series without our noticing the hints, but, after its revelation, would have us running back through the episodes and connecting the dots. It would also lend itself to moving the series off television and into a movie franchise. However, I suspect the series finale will merely wrap up the existing plots and character threads.

Bear in mind, we have yet to find out why the Russians opposed the peace deal with Kamistan to the point of feeling it necessary to assassinate President Hasan. Nor do we know what information President Logan has or how he came by it. Perhaps the finale will reveal some legitimate reason why the peace initiative should fail and we will see that Bauer’s battle to do what he thought was right has merely served to benefit the wrong side.

Alternatively, given 24‘s history of moles and betrayers, maybe we will find out that President Taylor is not as noble or honorable as she seems. It has seemed to me, out of character for her to be going along with Charles Logan’s actions. Previously, she seemed perceptive enough to recognize and avoid manipulation.

Or, for that matter, Chloe O’Brien may turn out to have an agenda that doesn’t involve saving Jack, but stopping him for her own reasons. Or we may see the return of any number of characters with something to reveal. If the finale does reveal some long-running concealed plot, we could also see the return of any from a list of the few characters who have survived. I’m partial to seeing Mandy return to confront Jack and trace it all the way back to the first episode.

No matter how it ends, I do think the series needs to tie the ending to the beginning.

In the very first episode, two lines of dialogue strike me as the most significant for Jack Bauer’s character. The first is the very first thing said to him when the show introduces his character. He is playing a game of chess with his daughter, Kim. Kim says to him, “You’re in trouble, Dad.” For the finale, I think this is an even more significant line. Kim and her daughter are now the only family Jack has left. Everyone else he has ever loved or been close to has been killed. Moreover, the recent death of his latest lover has now sent him spiraling out of control on an emotional vendetta that has him defying the government he once served. Jack is now in trouble again. One obvious possible ending for 24 is that Jack may live, but Kim and his granddaughter may be killed, leaving him truly alone in the world.

Later in the first episode, after we’ve gotten to know Jack just a little, he gives a short speech to a co-worker. It’s the first time he says anything philosophical about himself, the work he does, and the people and situations he has to deal with.

“You can look the other way once and it’s no big deal. Except it makes it easier to compromise the next time and pretty soon that’s all you’re doing is compromising because that’s how you think things are done.” Jack pauses, then continues. “You know those guys I blew the whistle on? You think they were the bad guys? Cause they weren’t. They weren’t bad guys. They were just like you and me, except they compromised once.”

After Jack says that, there is a long pause, lending significance to the speech. I would like to see the finale of 24 come back to that speech, bring the series full circle thematically, and weigh whether Jack has compromised.

My biggest hope for the end of 24 is that the talk of a movie is a ruse to conceal a surprise ending in which Jack Bauer does die. For eight seasons over nine years, the show has prided itself on anything can happen plots in which no character is safe from the bullets. Having Jack die fighting for justice would bring us to the ultimate “silent clock” ending of the series.

The one solace that I take with the end of 24 — or the end of anything — is that a story has its highest meaning at its end. If anything lasted forever, where is the meaning in that? I hope that by tomorrow night we will see a proper ending to the best action/suspense/thriller on television. As with Life, let us cherish every ticking minute of it.

Yes, it is a cliché, but when I walked in it was like stepping back in time. They had a wall of scale models and racks of paints and glues. When I was a kid, I loved assembling models both for the pride of doing a meticulous job in the assembly and for the funny way the glue fumes made my head feel. They had an entire aisle of HO and N gauge trains. In my youth, I probably had a hundred feet of track and scores of train engines and cars, as well as buildings, many of them passed down through several generations. I still have them in boxes in my basement. The store had Star Trek action figures exactly like the ones I had when I was a kid — and even the play set of the Starship Enterprise, which features a small booth that simulates a transporter by spinning. They also had model rockets — the kind with actual incendiary rocket engines that would launch the rocket high up into the sky, usually with it coming down well beyond the field where we launched them.

When I was a kid, every town in upstate New York (and probably in America) had at least one hobby shop. There were classical older ones on main streets, rich with the smell of balsa wood. There were middle-aged ones in roadside strip malls or bright, youthful ones in the newer indoor malls. During my lifetime, as our economy has shifted from urban and small-town living to suburban, I watched as the stores moved from Main Street to strip mall to indoor mall. However, eventually many started to go out of business. It was only just over a year ago that K-B Toys closed out. While it had started out as Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby, by the time it folded, it had shifted over to mostly toys. Other stores either became or lost out to mail-order catalogs. More recently, computers and the Internet have killed off the remaining hobby shops – in more ways than one.

Even before the Internet, video and computer games took a bite out of the hobby business. It wasn’t just that kids began spending more time playing electronic games than they did scale models. It was also that computer games like SimCity allowed them to build intricate, highly interactive virtual worlds for less money and in less space than a real train set would require. Why build and race RC cars when you can play Grand Theft Auto? Or RC planes when you can get the virtual flying experience of Microsoft Flight Simulator? Why buy an ant colony when you can buy SimAnt and avoid the risk of real ants escaping in your bedroom? In addition, sites like Club Penguin, SecondLife, and World of War Craft have replaced the old board or card-based role-playing games.

The best of the hobby shops were the size of small or medium sized department stores and featured not only aisles dedicated to specific product categories, but entire quadrants of the store’s floor space divided into sectors for art and craft hobbies, science hobbies, collector hobbies, and game hobbies.

For science-based hobbies, the ultimate hobby “shop” was Edmund Scientifics’ catalog and for the lucky few in the mid-Atlantic or Northeast states, a trip to the Edmund Scientific store in Barrington, NJ, was a pilgrimage that brought impressive bragging rights. I made that journey many times while visiting my paternal grandmother, who lived near there. I still remember the genuine submarine periscope in the entrance.

These are just a few of the things I, and our culture, will miss with the demise of the local hobby shop:

Magic kits and books of tricks

When I was very young, I fell in love with a short-lived television show called The Magician, starring Bill Bixby, and I loved reading biographies about Harry Houdini. The first career I ever remember saying I wanted to pursue was to be a magician. When my family got me a magic kit, I learned every trick it could do. The local hobby shop had even more gear and books for magic tricks.

Model Trains

Kids today don’t want the time-consuming assembly. Moreover, most of them lack the imagination to see how to keep going with the hobby once their set is completed — at which point all you can do is watch the train just going around repeatedly.

Chemistry Sets

My chemistry set had real glass test tubes., brass weights and a scale, a real glass thermometer, an alcohol burner, Litmus paper, pipettes, a beaker, rubber stoppers, and about 25 to 30 chemicals. Our local hobby shop stocked an additional array of chemicals in a variety of sizes. The rack more than rivaled the spice aisle at a grocery store. My one complaint was that I felt constrained by the book of experiments that came with the kit. If all I ever did was to follow the step-by-step directions, I was just learning by rote. I wanted to learn enough to be able to apply that knowledge to combinations that weren’t in the experiment booklet. With the advent of terrorism concerns and methamphetamine labs, many of those chemicals would now require a permit to purchase.

Telescopes

Today’s kids probably think of astronomy the same ways as I felt about the chemistry experiment book – like they are just following along behind the real astronomers. The odds of discovering a new asteroid or ever being able to see Jupiter better than Pioneer and Voyager have are low even with the best telescope. But I loved mine for the fact that, with your own eye, you could directly see some amazing sights. For some reason, no photo of the Pleiades has ever pleased me as much as seeing it through my telescope.

Photography

I remember on one of my first photography jobs was at a company that did line art for toy catalogs. They asked me to photograph, process, and print pictures of a collection of toys for them to trace for the artwork. The owner said he had a lab I could use — then he handed me an amateur photo developing kit that he bought at a hobby shop. The thermometer was no more than two inches long. The film tank could only hold one roll. The trays were just barely 5X6, and there were only enough chemicals for a first-time trial of about 24 photos. I loved the smell of D-76 — and even the feel of it. I worked barehanded so that I could tell by feel just how fresh the chemicals were and how far along the emulsion was in processing. The chemicals would penetrate my skin, leaving them smelling like a darkroom for days afterward.

Trading cards

I wasn’t one for sports cards; I know nothing about sports. Moreover, the way one used to get introduced to trading cards was through chewing gum. The cards used to come in a pack that included a card-sized plank of bubble gum. The first time I got trading cards, I was really just looking to get some chewing gum. I had cards for Star Wars and Close Encounters. I used to love the television and movie cards.

The best part about the hobby shop was that it catered to your interest and love of the hobby, so it spoke to something within you. You felt connected to the experience. The grocery store? Well, I have to eat, even if I don’t always want to. The clothing store? Unless your hobby is fashion, you are probably buying based on practical reasons. The hardware store? Well, damn it, half the stuff in my house needs fixing and it’s cheaper for me to do it myself, even though I am getting well beyond the point of really wanting to fix anything. But scale models, telescopes, chemistry sets, magic, photography, model trains, those were things for which I enjoyed spending time and money. Sadly, the way our economy and culture are going, I may have a hard time sharing those beloved interests with my sons.

My first real telescope was from Montgomery Ward. I am sure even moderately experienced amateur astronomers would scoff at the quality of such an inexpensive, store bought scope. Nevertheless, from ages 12 to 22, it was certainly better than owning no scope at all and I always enjoyed using it. I have since seen better telescopes and would very much love to own one, but that in no way renders my cherished memories of my first telescope worthless. I often think of it this way: For whatever an astronomy purist might say to deride my first telescope or any department store telescope, it was certainly manufactured with better specifications and quality than Galileo’s handmade telescope that he used 400 years earlier to discover four of Jupiter’s moons.

It was a 60mm refractor, meaning it had a 60mm diameter lens at the front of the tube and the viewing lens at the other end of the tube. I don’t recall the tube focal length, but I think it was about 600mm. It came with a very heavy and stable tripod mounting — with the outer tube of the legs made from heavy steel and two inner extensions made with lighter aluminum. Everything moved smoothly and tightened down securely.

Unlike most beginner scopes today, which are actually better than what I had, it had a single viewing lens mounted in an extendable tube. With the viewing lens pushed all the way in, it offered a default 15X magnification. That was great for spotting objects and getting them centered in the scope. You could then slowly pull the viewing lens out to three additional positions that it would stop at with an audible click. Each click doubled the magnification. You could go from 15X to 30X to 60X to 120X. Of course, you would have to fine-tune the focus of the image each time, but the convenience of just incrementing through the stops was worth it. It saved time over swapping eyepieces and kept moisture and dust out of the tube. I haven’t seen a similar design in over 25 years.

My first telescope died when the focusing rack-and-pinion broke. The “rack” gear — the long, straight one — cracked one night in cold weather, about ten years after I got the scope. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fix it, nor could I replace it. I went as far as trying to find a replacement for the entire eyepiece assembly, but whoever made the Montgomery Ward telescopes in the 1970s had used parts that matched neither the metric nor the English sizes.

For nearly 20 years, I have longed to own another telescope. Now having two sons, I am eager to introduce them to the wonders they could see. I know what a high quality and expensive telescope would offer and it would be fantastic to own one. However, I keep reminding myself that they will likely be just as amazed as I was to look through any telescope and see mountains on the moon, moons orbiting Jupiter, rings around Saturn, the stunningly beautiful Pleiades, and the amazing colors in the Orion nebula.

I would love to find a great quality telescope at a cheap garage sale, but I am not averse to buying a “low” quality telescope at a department store. My advice to anyone thinking of getting their kids a telescope is this: Do not go overboard, just make sure it is from a known brand name (Celestron, Meade, Bushnell, or Tasco); even a modest one will give your kids a glimpse of the beauty and wonder of our universe. And that is certainly a great start from which they can grow.

Late last week, a facebook friend posted a link to this article: “Another One Bites The Dust” among the odder funeral request songs – Huddersfield Examiner. Reading it, I thought about what songs I would want played at my funeral and realized I finally had a meme I could start and spread.

The rules:

• Tag some people who you would like to see participate.
• List 10 to 20 songs that you would want played at your funeral.
• Try to be both genuine and original. I.e., don’t list “Stairway to Heaven” or “Another One Bites the Dust” just to be cute here, unless you would really want it played at your funeral.
• List them in the order you want them played — 1 is the first song to open your service
• The last song you list would be played at graveside or cremation.
• Have fun! Make a statement. It’s your funeral.

Here is my list (I had a hard time limiting to 20!):

1. Mahna Mahna by Mahna Mahna & The Two Snowths (Muppets)
2. Tomorrow Never Knows (Anthology 2 version) by The Beatles
3. Imagine by John Lennon
4. Joy by Apollo 100
5. Cat’s In The Cradle by Harry Chapin
6. I Believe in Father Christmas by Greg Lake
7. Mr. Blue Sky by ELO
8. Elephant Stone (Mint Royale remix) by The Stone Roses
9. One Love (full-length version) by The Stone Roses
10. No Man’s Land by Billy Joel
11. Dear God by XTC
12. Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve
13. Lilah by Don Henley
14. My Love by Paul McCartney & Wings
15. I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Deathcab for Cutie
16. The Scientist by Coldplay
17. Mad World by Gary Jules
18. Choose Life by PF Project
19. Shut Your Eyes by Snow Patrol
20. There’s a New Sound by Scooter (Muppets)

I have just posted the above list to facebook and tagged ten of my friends. I am eager to see whether it takes on a life of its own — or faces its own funeral in silence.

As a bonus to readers of my blog, I am going to include a list of some of the songs that did not make it into the list above:

• Paperback Writer by The Beatles
• All You Need is Love by The Beatles
• Golden Slumbers by The Beatles
• Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney
• Last Resort by Eagles
• Songbird by Fleetwood Mac
• Life in a Northern Town by The Dream Academy
• She Bangs the Drums by The Stone Roses
• Here’s Where the Story Ends by The Sundays
• Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now) by Cracker
• Live Forever by Oasis
• I’m a Little Snowflake by Laurie Berkner

Mind you, before I saw 24 Hour Party People, the only Joy Division song I had heard was “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” I liked the song, but didn’t know enough of their oeuvre to prompt me to buy a CD or otherwise seek out more. The movie, changed that. I was so impressed with “Transmission,” “Atmosphere,” “Digital,” and “She’s Lost Control” that I added a couple of Joy Division CDs to my wish list.

Tonight I had to return some DVDs to my local library, a couple of miles from my house. While I was there, I remembered they have a CD collection, so I decided to look for some Joy Division there. I found their second, posthumous album, Closer, and checked it out just before the library closed at 9:00 p.m.

Out in the car, I put in the disc and turned it up. About a quarter of a mile from the library, I felt a frisson ripple through me. The first track, “Atrocity Exhibition,” is about an insane asylum as entertainment and that then as metaphor for the human condition. It has a prominent drum and bass line, as well as injections of rattling, scratching noises. The rhythm is relentless, the imagery disturbing, and there is a constant invitation, “This is the way, step inside…”

My shudder of creepy piloerection, however, came from more than the song. It was the collusion of the song and the drive. My home is a left and a right and a left and a right and a left and a right expedition ending at a tree-circled cul-de-sac. Under heavy cloud cover, there was no moonlight. My headlights were the only light on winding, hilly, and heavily wooded suburban streets. Strong, gusty wind was ripping leaves from the trees, showering them down in shifting jerks and often driving them laterally across the road in front of me, as if they were running from some force approaching from the west. The car swayed with the road and with the wind. Then, in dark homage to American Beauty, I saw a plastic bag swirling and rolling in fits around a front lawn, like some trash-embodied ghost come early for Samhainn. And all the while, Ian Curtis invited me. “This is the way, step inside…”

Since I considered myself different from a Republican Conservative Yuppie, I decided to try to bridge my inner and outer images. I don’t look good in T-shirts, so I decided to bring a hippie tie-dye aesthetic to what was already in my closet. I found a white Ralph Lauren Polo shirt as my canvas.

I thought this would be very cool and individual. Moreover, I thought it would win me points with her because it was not just cool and individual, but that it would put an ironic hippie twist to an icon of yuppie affluence. I thought she would see it as defacing the Ralph Lauren Polo. I thought she would be so into the idea, in fact, that I asked for her help. It was supposed to be a bonding experience for us to do together. In addition to thinking of the shirt as an expression of myself, I also thought of it as a merger of us.

I was both surprised and disappointed when her reaction was that she wanted nothing to do with it. Worse still, she showed a thorough lack of a sense of humor in not only not seeing it as defacing a Polo shirt, but that she saw the Polo shirt as an insult to tie-dye. As the creative originator and artistic executor of the idea, I lost points as if I had committed a felony.

Nevertheless, independent of her, I did love the idea and was determined to pursue it, with or without her. Once she realized that, she did soften, but only just a very little. Since she knew more about tie-dye than I did, she agreed to go with me to buy the dyes and we did work together on some test T-shirts so that I could learn. She didn’t know how to do the swirl I wanted, but showed me some other patterns, including what I called a “bulls-eye.” When it came to doing the work on the Ralph Lauren Polo, however, she said she would not touch it – and, in fact, she spent most of that time out of the room.

After the dye had a day or two to soak into the fabric, she watched as I unwrapped it. I have to emphasize right now that the original result was stunning. The colors were rich, vibrant, saturated, and deep. Where they overlapped, the primary colors had blended perfectly to produce rings of green and orange. No browns, no grays, nothing but a beautiful rainbow spectrum. Unfortunately, however, I missed something in the process of rinsing out the excess dye – and I accidentally washed out too much dye before it could be fixed. The shirt dropped to pastel hues that made it look like it was already aged and faded. Still, it was mine. It was me.

Even when she saw it on me, she still didn’t like it. She still maintained it was offensive. I maintained it was me and that it had my sense of irony, dichotomous duality, and humor. I realized that, if she couldn’t appreciate that, then so be it.

I wore the shirt through my senior year. I got a lot of compliments and questions about it. Some people wanted to know where I bought it. Others recognized that I made it. If they thought it, no one else said it was offensive either way. I did, however, get many people who understood the intent behind it and who, regardless of their politics, smiled at seeing it. After college, I think I may have worn it once or twice on “Casual Fridays” at my corporate job during the dot-boom. Yes, I know it pushes beyond the bounds of “business casual,” but testing that boundary is part of who I am, too.

Before 2000, the shirt went into long-term storage. Last week, I was going through some old clothes and found my beloved tie-dyed Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. Realizing it may not last forever, even in sealed storage, I decided to photograph it. When I saw the result, I felt sad that I could not wear the shirt more often. Then I realized I could use it as my profile picture on facebook, MSN Messenger, AIM, and other social networking applications. The photo of the shirt has taken the place of my face as my avatar to the world. I am my tie-dyed Ralph Lauren Polo shirt.

I bought a new white Ralph Lauren Polo and some dye. I also have instructions for a tri-color spiral. I hope to get the rinsing process right this time and have the spectacularly vibrant shirt I first saw all those years ago.

In the meantime, the original shirt is back in storage. I have told family and friends to get it out for my funeral when the time comes – no ties for me! My original tie-dyed Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, a pair of Levi’s jeans, and my Teva sandals will be my eternal suit.

Christian Stuart Lee - Tie-Dyed Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt

The first thing that struck me, however, was how abrupt the movie is. It just starts. No pre-title sequence. Hell, no title sequence at all. Michael Mann must’ve figured that you saw the teasers, trailers, Colin Farrell on Leno, the marquee on your way in, asked for the ticket by name, and you know what you are coming to see. Or perhaps Mann wanted to just get the audience right into the characters and plot without interruption, so as to avoid giving the audience time during the title sequence to judge the film based on an opening teaser or based on comparing the classic Miami Vice television title sequence to the film, which would be a superficial way of judging it. Either way, the film doesn’t announce itself, it just starts.

The abruptness of the film, however, merely begins there. We meet Crockett, Tubbs, and Trudy many minutes before their names are ever used. We see Zito probably 90 minutes before he is ever referenced by name. There is a guy who is apparently Switek, but I don’t recall them using his name at all. The dialogue of the secondary characters is also terse. Trudy, Gina, Switek, and Zito speak rarely and only a sentence or two at a time. The result is that we learn very little about them.

Overall, the characters, including Crockett and Tubbs, are all very stripped-down-to-the-core and seriously professional compared to the original television characters. You won’t see Tubbs dancing and singing along to a song while watching a stripper gyrate. Nor will Crockett smile charmingly as he calls some girl “darlin’” or make a sarcastic comment while pushing an informant to fess-up. Imagine if you took all of the original characters, washed away everything you knew about their childhoods or their failed marriages and everything you remember them doing during the five years that the series aired. Then start with their must fundamental internal struggles – Tubbs’ temptation to cross the line of due-process when the situation becomes personal and consider revenge, and Crockett’s identity crisis when it comes to keeping work and love separate. Then add the kind of serious, cold, brutally professional edge that we see in 24‘s Jack Bauer. It’s this refinement that pushes the film Miami Vice closer to Michael Mann’s Heat or Collateral. This is film. This is cinema. This is not the television Miami Vice. Nor is this a mere movie spun-off of the television Miami Vice. Major props to Mann for not delivery another insipid Charlie’s Angels or Starsky and Hutch.

Similar to Heat and Collateral, Mann’s cinematography here shows his skill with using unfiltered existing light – or at least the appearance of it being unaltered. While you won’t see any of the television series’ beautiful pastel palette, the beauty of the lighting, especially at night, still gives the film a distinctive look. Gone, too, however, are many of the MTV-inspired music-video-like effects. The original series would sometimes use slow motion, time-lapse, or other trendy music video effects. I only recall the film using slow motion once. Much of the rest of the film gets its look from the existing light, the composition of the frame, and from some quick cuts. A character early in the film makes a decision in traffic that will remind you of some of the abrupt and startling endings from the original series (similar to the episode that featured Bruce Willis – you may recall that one ended very abruptly.)

The Tubbs-and-Trudy sub-plot (and despite being central for a few minutes of the film, it is, indeed a very brief sub-plot) is the barest outline. It’s established to already exist with a brief life-at-home scene. By the way, Michael Mann must think sex in the shower is the sexiest sex there is. I don’t disagree, but he seems to dwell on it at least twice. The film does have an R rating, but I attribute that more to violence and language. The sex here is very brief and the nudity is not full-frontal – it’s all intertwined curves of skin, relatively tame compared to many other R-rated movies.

The vast majority of the screen time is given to Crockett — his straddling the undercover line, his romance with the villain’s accountant. Tubbs is really just along for the ride — the partner so dedicated to his partner that he only rarely voices concern over how deep they are getting. This is the one point where I felt something had been wrongly lost from the TV series. The interplay, tensions, arguments, and independent-thinking of the original Crockett and Tubbs had more depth — or at least a few more lines of dialogue. Here, Tubbs seems a bit too much like a tag-along sidekick.

My only other gripe is that, at night, Miami is always experiencing a thunderstorm. Alright, alright, I get it — the macrocosm and microcosm — a storm is brewing, etc., etc. I might tolerate such a move, if subtly handled, toward the end of a film, but it recurs here too often. It becomes less moody and more distracting, to the point that it seems a touch amateur.

Plot-wise, those who remember details of the original series will recognize some situations taken from it and given new twists. A television episode featured Trudy tied to a chair in a trailer. Several television episodes ended with nighttime shoot-outs at the docks. One episode had Crockett delivering a line about doing an abstract expressionist painting using his gun as a brush and a villain’s brains as the paint. All of those and several more echo here.

If you loved the original Miami Vice for its pastel colors, witty banter, and characters like Izzy or Noogie, you may not appreciate this film. If, however, you loved the original Miami Vice for the themes of undercover identity-confusion and the characters’ inner struggles, as well as being a fan of Heat‘s pacing and action, you will walk away with a deeper appreciation for those core elements.

It is true that I do not say a prayer to a theoretical God at Thanksgiving, but that doesn’t mean that the day is just about eating a gluttonous meal for me. I am very thankful for an uncountable long list of people, places, things, events, and other good fortunes (both given by others, accomplished by myself and my family, and the result of random chance) in my life. Rather than thank God, however, I thank the people in my life directly and, for the things, events, and other good fortunes, state my thanks for them publicly before celebrating.

For example, this year, I am thankful to my family for their traveling for many, many hours to spend the holiday with my wife, my son, and myself. Moreover, I am thankful that they also made the trip here when my son was born.

I am thankful to the doctor and nurses that my son arrived safe and healthy. I am also thankful that he is proving to be an adorable, sweet baby.

I am thankful to my closest co-worker for all the work she did while I was out on six weeks leave after my son was born.

Even the very fact that I can enjoy a large feast at Thanksgiving is something for which I am grateful. I am thankful to myself and my family for all that we have done to make sure we can earn enough to afford such a feast. I am thankful to my employer for hiring me and paying me so well. I am thankful to my family for their contributions in preparing the meal. And I am grateful that I am part of this family, this prosperous place and time, and have not suffered any ill-fortune to deprive me of it. I can be grateful, even without religion, because I know that I have so much and, sadly, know that many others do not. For all that I have, I am also humbled by both the fact that others are not so fortunate and the knowledge that my fortunes could quickly change.

If others feel the need to express their thanks to their God, that is fine for them. However, my lack of faith in no way diminishes my gratitude both to those around me and for all that I have in this world.

Where do you come from?*

I am from Saratoga Springs, New York, going back at least four generations. While I am currently living away from there, I would love to return there someday. I only left because there weren’t enough career opportunities there involving writing or editing — and, at the time, I needed to make sure I could earn enough money to pay off my college loans and establish myself.

How much is your life worth?*

Well, hm, to me it’s priceless, of course. However, I can imagine several other formulas for answering this question. For example, you could compute the cost of my ideal life, the life I would choose to lead, versus the life I actually am leading. In that equation, my ideal life would be to write novels and get them published, but I have not yet done that because of both debt and the need to build up enough money to ensure my family can live comfortably when I do take the plunge and risk not having an income for a while during the time I am writing. So figure my current annual income multiplied by however many years I earn it, minus my debts, plus my assets. That is tens of thousands, or maybe even a few hundred thousand dollars. Or you could just look at what I would want/need to live my ideal life starting tomorrow — i.e., assuming a fiction publishing house were to offer me a contract to complete my novel and write my next novel, etc., as if it were an annual salary. That would eliminate considerations of debt and assets, since I could handle those from the continued income. So that would just mean I need a fiction publisher to match my current salary. Unfortunately, not something they would likely do for a first-time novelist; even many well-established novelist don’t get long-term contracts or earn what I am currently earning as a corporate Web-site geek.

What are your ten favorite fiction novels?

Well, this list is far too short — I love a lot of novels, so this was a hard question to answer and limit to just ten. Also, with the exception of the first five, this list isn’t really in ranked order.

1. Sleep Till Noon by Mac Schulman
2. Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff
3. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
4. Candide by Voltaire
5. Most of the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming
6. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
7. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
8. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
9. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
10. Alice In Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

How did you and Lila meet?

We met online, at a time when that was something unique. In 1995, we were members of AOL at the time (as Web professionals, we’ve since outgrown it.) Lila saw in my Profile that I lived in Saratoga Springs, New York and had attended Skidmore College. She wondered if I knew a particular professor and, as it turns out, I had worked for a professor next to his office. We corresponded via e-mail, then Instant Messaging. After a couple of months, Lila headed off for a vacation, saying she would write me when she got back. I didn’t hear from her until a year later, but we quickly picked up our rapport, soon moving it to telephone, as well as Internet. She invited me to Brooklyn for her New Year’s Eve party. When I found a job partway between Saratoga and the City, she moved north and I moved south, getting an apartment together. Finances were tough early on, but we were finally able to have a wonderful wedding this year.

Don’t you feel bad making fun of that First Night belly dancer?

Do I respect her for putting herself out there and trying to entertain people? Of course; I know how risky that can be and how painful it is when you fail. However, she did put herself out there knowing those risks. When my turn comes, I know there may be some critics who may skewer me and my writing. Heck, for all I know…

*Questions from my nephew, Joseph Wagner. Thank you, Joe.

It requires at least two cameras. We quickly discovered that having to swap lenses and change film in one camera body was our biggest technical obstacle. Had my cousin asked for a mix of black-and-white, color, and/or infrared, we would have had to make some hard choices about when to shoot each type of roll and would have missed getting some good color shots whenever the camera had black-and-white, or vice versa. Even if digital photography makes this easier, I can still see where two cameras would make it faster than switching lenses.

It takes two people. While we didn’t have two cameras, thankfully we had two photographers, myself and Lila. I think we worked extremely well together. Our skills complemented one another perfectly. Lila is the people person and did a great job arranging people and giving them directions. She also has an extremely good eye for details. I am a camera whiz and know things that Lila still needs to learn about controlling exposure, depth of field, and some of the tricks, like capturing a balance of blurred motion and recognizable faces on people dancing. While I am generally good at overall composition and I do note a lot of details, Lila’s detail skills filled in some things that I had overlooked.

Would I do this again? Yeah, I might, especially if I had a second camera and if Lila and I worked as a team. The only drawback I could ever see would be having to work weekends, which would be hard if we had children.

Welcome. We are here to witness and celebrate the love and marriage of Lila and Christian. We, their family and friends, form a community of love so that we may nurture them in their lives together.

Opening Address, Officiant

When Lila and Christian were writing the words for this ceremony, they encountered some challenges to finding just the right words that best expressed how they feel for one another and how they feel about their marriage to one another. As with everything else they have done to prepare for their wedding and their future together, they collaborated — writing, reading, and talking through several drafts.

They wanted to make sure that you, their family and friends, were acknowledged as participants in the ceremony. They sought words that emphasized not just what they are doing today, but what they will be doing together for the rest of their lives. They wanted to emphasize that they have chosen to make a permanent commitment to their love for one another.

So, when it came to this opening address, Lila and Christian worked together to find a theme they could establish. Words that came to mind included trust, respect, and, of course, love. However, one word that stood out to them was cooperation. For, in addition to love, that is what marriage is to them.

Many others would describe marriage in terms of compromise, but Lila and Christian felt that cooperation reflects a fuller model for their relationship and their marriage. To compromise means to concede something of one’s own for the sake of settling a difference with another — and both will certainly do that as part of their marriage. But the word cooperate comes from Latin roots that mean “to work with” and Lila and Christian felt that signified something more meaningful to their marriage. For, by cooperating, they will both be contributing something of themselves to their relationship. They will help one another, comfort one another, and allow their different interests and abilities to complement one another, so that, together, they will form a more complete union.

Declarations of Consent/Intent

Officiant: Lila and Christian, I ask you now in the presence of your family and friends to declare your intent.

Officiant: Christian, will you take Lila to be your wife, to live together in marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, to be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?

Christian: I will.

Officiant: Lila, will you take Christian to be your husband, to live together in marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, to be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?

Lila: I will.

Officiant to family and friends: Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold Lila and Christian in their marriage?

Family and friends: We will.

Vows (Lila and Christian prompted by Officiant)

Bride: Christian, I vow to love you and honor you as long as we both live. I vow to respect you, listen to you, and grow with you, through good times and bad. Without hesitation and with full confidence in the step I am taking, I offer myself to you as your wife.

Groom: Lila, I vow to love you and honor you as long as we both live. I vow to respect you, listen to you, and grow with you, through good times and bad. Without hesitation and with full confidence in the step I am taking, I offer myself to you as your husband.

Ring Exchange (Lila and Christian prompted by Officiant)

Bride: Christian, you are the one with whom I can share all that I am. With free and unconstrained soul, I give you all I am and all I am to become. Take this ring as a token of my love, and with it my promise of faith, patience, and love, for the rest of my life.

Groom: Lila, you are the one with whom I can share all that I am. With free and unconstrained soul, I give you all I am and all I am to become. Take this ring as a token of my love, and with it my promise of faith, patience, and love, for the rest of my life.

Supplementary Reading by Joel Herbert

Officiant: And now, Lila and Christian have asked their friend, Joel Herbert, to read an Apache Marriage Blessing.

Joel: Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be the shelter for each other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be the warmth for the other. Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before. Go now to your dwelling place to enter into the days of your life together. And may your days be good and long upon the earth.

Treat yourselves and each other with respect, and remind yourselves often of what brought you together. Give the highest priority to the tenderness, gentleness, and kindness that your connection deserves. When frustration, difficulty and fear assail your relationship – as they threaten all relationships at one time or another – remember to focus on what is right between you, not only the part which seems wrong. In this way, you can ride out the storms when clouds hide the face of the sun in your lives – remembering that even if you lose sight of it for a moment, the sun is still there. And if each of you takes responsibility for the quality of your life together, it will be marked by abundance and delight.

Pronouncement of Marriage

Officiant: Today you begin a new life together united by a love that has transcended distance, a love that will see you through the great journey of a lifetime. May love and laughter light your days, and warm your heart and home. May good and faithful friends be yours. May peace and plenty bless your world with joy. May all life’s passing seasons bring the best to you. May what love has united never be divided.

Officiant: I now pronounce you husband and wife.

(Lila and Christian kiss.)

Presentation of Married Couple to Guests

Officiant: Family, friends, I present Mr. Christian Lee and Ms. Lila Thabit Lee.

A few months after the Summer Writer’s Institute, I was talking with a friend and something he said prompted me to respond with, “I saw a play in which . . .” and went on for a minute or more describing the play I thought I had seen. When I was done, I stopped and thought about what I had said, because something didn’t seem right.

You see, I really hadn’t seen the play I had described. What I had done was to attend a reading of a passage from Susan Sontag’s play “Alice In Bed,” about Alice James, the sister of Henry and William James. Susan Sontag herself read it one night in a large college auditorium. My memory, however, was not of her standing at the podium, but an image of what she described.

The irony here is that Alice was bed-ridden and never traveled. Alice’s only way of “seeing” the world was by reading books. Susan’s play about Alice was about the power of words and writing to transport us to other times and places and to give us virtual experiences. My mis-memory was evidence of just that very power.

Arbor Day celebrates trees by encouraging people to plant trees. Given the number of trees lost in the last century or two to land being cleared for colonization, for farming, for cities, for highways, and for single-story housing developments and sprawling malls, planet Earth has lost billions of acres of trees and the lush plants that live under them. The impact of this is that, while the human and livestock population are growing, the density of oxygen-giving foliage is decreasing. That only compounds the problem with all the carbon dioxide that we, our animals, our cars, our furnaces, and our factories produce.

Moreover, trees lend shade to homes and roadways.

Some people may complain that trees get tangled up with electrical lines, can fall on houses or cars during storms, and leave a mess of leaves in yards and, worse still, swimming pools, providing more work to watch after them. Oddly enough, however, many of the same people have kids, dogs, cats, or other pets, all of which require even more attentive care, feeding, protection, and, sometimes, pose just as much risk to life and limb. To see only the bad side of children, pets, or trees, however, is short-sighted. Just as a well-tended child or pet can provide many redeeming moments of happiness and pride, so too, a well-tended tree can provide the same. When you’re sitting under a tree in a sun-dappled yard, tell me that is not the height of Zen contentment and relaxation. When you’ve planted an apple tree and finally get your first harvest of fresh apples for eating au natural, in pies, or as cider, tell me a tree is a burden.

So do yourself, and all of humanity, the enormous favor of observing Arbor Day by planting a tree. Your children and grandchildren will thank you for it, when they can breath oxygen-rich, cool air.

Working on the Internet, I use a lot of software that has Easter eggs. Most are merely credits, listing the developers who wrote the application. Some are funny sounds or pictures. Others are extra features for the application. A few are full-fledged mini-applications or games.

Strangely, despite the seeming abundance of Easter eggs within the software used to build Web sites, I haven’t encountered or heard of many Easter eggs on Web sites. You would think that, buried somewhere on amazon.com, there would be some amusing page hidden by the site’s developers. If there is, I have yet to find any reference to it anywhere on the Internet.

In 1998, however, when I was working for Prentice Hall’s Business Publishing division, my biggest project was a site for Prentice Hall’s Federal Taxation 1998 edition. I did most of the design of the site, formatted the content, and even wrote some programs to process forms that were designed to look like actual tax forms. Taxation is an interesting and challenging body of content, but it didn’t really tickle my funny bone and I doubt very many other people would find it entertaining. So, for fun — and possibly to entertain some instructor or student out there — I decided to hide an Easter egg on the site.

On April 15, 1998, on my drive to work, I was listening to 1010 WINS news as they reported about some of the events occurring in New York City to make tax day less stressful. I made note of some of the items. One post office was offering massages, while another was hosting a pet adoption to provide some soothing comfort (and perhaps a shady “dependent” tax deduction for next year?) When I flipped over to an FM music station, they were playing The Beatles “Tax Man” every half-hour throughout the day. When I got to work, I wrote up a page about what I’d heard. I looked up some tax trivia online and listed out links to what I’d found. I also created hyperlinks out to offbeat tax news pages at various news sites.

The only effective way that I could think of to hide my Easter egg, but still give at least some reasonable chance that a visitor could stumble upon it was to create a decent sized transparent image and park it in the lower right corner of one page. I then hyperlinked the transparent image to the Easter egg page. I figured that, if someone happened to roll their mouse around, they might spot the arrow cursor turning into a hand over that area. In case someone did find the page, I added my e-mail address and a note encouraging him or her to e-mail me.

Sadly, it seems no one ever found it. If they did, they never e-mailed me. Sadder still, I haven’t had many chances since then to create another Easter egg on a Web site. Time just hasn’t allowed me to get that creative and we no longer build the kind of freely designed sites that we used to. Committees design everything these days, making it harder to slip in a hidden feature.

If I did do another Easter egg, I’d probably do something that would be a little more assertive, something that would make sure it got someone’s attention at some point. Perhaps a JavaScript that triggers on a certain day. Or maybe something that pops up when a visitor happens to visit a certain sequence of pages. Who knows, maybe by the time you are reading this, I’ll have finally gotten around to hiding an Easter egg on this site.

The model I have been using up until last week was, in fact, the very first model in the Palm Pilot line. It’s probably five or six years old. Compared to the current line, it had far less memory, a slow processor, wouldn’t run some newer software, was not expandable, ate batteries at a pair of AAAs per month, and, due to its age, would sometimes wipe itself out on me every few months. Despite that, I discovered it was surprisingly useful within a few weeks of getting it.

I had loaded it with some business related phone numbers, and added some appointments to the calendar application (called Date Book.) I didn’t know when, or even if, it would be necessary. In fact, it seemed to me like my paper and pen Day Planner was more reliable. The Day Planner didn’t require batteries or synchronizing with a desktop application and I suspected it would be faster to get a phone number by flipping to an alphabetical tab and skimming down a page.

On a business trip to Toronto, I tossed my Day Planner in my bookbag and the Palm in my jacket pocket. Even the smallest Day Planner would not fit in my pocket, but I didn’t, at first, consider that the best measure of a PDA’s usefulness. On arrival at the taxi stand at the Toronto airport, however, I soon realized two things:

1. That the PDA fit in a pocket made it far faster and easier to pull out and put back.
2. That turning it on, choosing the Address Book, and looking up the address I was going to was not only tempting, but a helluva lot faster and easier than dragging and fumbling with out my Day Planner.

The PDA operates easily with maybe six buttons — most of which you may never use — and a little stylus. In fact, I can generally get by on the power button, stylus, and the two scroll buttons. Within seconds, I had told the driver where I was going and had dropped the Palm right back into my pocket. Checking the schedule of events in Toronto was also just as fast and easy.

All I needed was to find the PDA useful once and I was hooked enough to dump all of my information into it. I quickly found that getting my information in through the desktop application was relatively easy, especially when I exported my e-mail program’s contact information into a format that I could then import into the PDA’s software.

What’s more, I set the Palm to give an alarm ten minutes before any meetings or other events I scheduled (this can be set as a default, by the way, which make it even easier to rely on the Palm as your personal secretary to remind you of upcoming events.) Since then, I’ve been on-time for more than 90% of the things in my Date Book. Without it, I might have been too deeply focused on a project to otherwise remember I had to stop the project and rush off to a meeting. In addition, the ten minute advanced warning generally gives me plenty of time to properly complete what I am doing so that I can come back to it and pick up where I left off.

As I mentioned, though, the old Palm wasn’t always reliable. Sometime it would just wipe out what I had in it; I suspect the previous owner had tossed it around a bit too much. I am thankful, however, that most of the time it didn’t lose data while I was traveling. So I simply swapped in fresh batteries and synced it to my desktop again. The desktop software acted not only as a convenient way of entering or converting data into the PDA, but also as an excellent backup for it.

For my most recent birthday, my fiancée bought me a brand new PDA, a Handspring Visor Prism. Handspring is the Mercedes of Palm OS based PDAs, even better, in my not so humble opinion, than the Palm Pilot handhelds made by Palm. My fiancée did have one bad experience with the Handspring Visor Edge, which has a very slippery stylus and a clumsy way of attaching it. But when I evaluated all of the Palm-based PDAs in December to buy her one she might like better, I found that the other Handspring Visor models all felt much better than the Edge and the Palm Pilots. They pack just slightly more heft in the hand like the original Palm Pilot, have some ribbing along the sides for a better grip, and because they have offered expansion through the Springboard modules longer than Palm Pilot has offered expansion, there are more and better developed expansion options with the Handspring, which can still run all the same software as the Palm Pilots.

The Handspring Visor Prism is the color model. When I did a side-by-side comparison of the Visor Prism and the Palm m505, the color display on the Prism was clearer, brighter, and sharper than the Palm. Moreover, the Prism can be viewed across a much wider angle than the m505.

Aside from the Palm OS, there are PocketPC lines available from a myriad of companies. I have not had direct experience with them, but what I am advocating here is getting a PDA, so I will say this for the PocketPCs: Because they are running on a Microsoft OS and have handheld versions of Microsoft Office applications on them, they can read and write many of the common document file formats you might want to be able to take with you. For the Palm OS handhelds, there is additional software available to read and write MS Office files. I have yet to need to use any Office files on my PDA, but I am sure this is a big selling point for many people.

So, if you find you have enough money to buy one, I would recommend buying a Palm OS or PocketPC PDA. You will likely find that it will help keep all of your information, and you life, better organized. It’s not just a cool gadget for geeks.

Before seeing this movie, I would strongly advocate reading the novel. Well’s Time Machine was written in 1895 and featured an un-named Time Traveler with an academic fascination with proving that there is a fourth dimension and we can travel in it just as we do in the other three. Already knowing the past, he is fascinated by the future and what will become of the Victorian era’s bi-polar class society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Well’s foresees that leading to a future where humans would evolve into two entirely different species. The bourgeoisie become frail, simple-minded, generally happy-go-lucky (to the point of sometimes indifference) and child-like Eloi living above-ground in the glistening, garden-like remnants of a world that is free from most of the strife that has plagued humanity since we got kicked out of Eden. The proletariat becomes very pale, big-eyed, hairy Morlocks, equally as simple-minded, but with the twist that, in addition to providing clothing and otherwise maintaining the Eloi’s world, they also prey upon the Eloi the way a livestock farmer tends to a sheep and then slaughters it.

I would also recommend seeing the first production of this story into a movie. Directed by special effects wizard George Pal, the 1960 movie starred Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler. Thematically evolved to the Cold War era, Pal’s version adds some intervening stops along the journey to the future, so that we can see how nuclear warfare leads to the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, with the Eloi conditioned to wander into underground bunkers anytime they hear a siren — and be eaten by the Morlocks. (One can almost hear Grandma Morlock ringing the dinner bell and yelling, “Come and be gotten!”) In addition, there is some hint that the evolutionary changes are radiation-related.

Before saying whether or not I recommend the Simon Wells (yes, he is related; he is H. G. Wells’ great grandson) version, allow me to cover the usual facets of a review, with particular emphasis on the further thematic evolution of the story to update it to 2002′s political concerns about the future.

Simon Wells has added yet more stops for the time machine. The first is a trip backwards. Simon’s Time Traveler is Alexander, an absent-minded professor who fumbles awkwardly to propose to his girlfriend. His fiancée is a generic blond-haired, blue-eyed girl-next-door who wants little more out of a relationship than some flowers and a romantic stroll. Alas, without giving too much away, she dies. We get to know little else about her, which makes her death a little difficult to feel much for, especially so early on in the film.

Simon uses this event to provide Alexander with something more meaningful than an academic interest in time travel. Alexander sets out to change his past and save his fiancée. He soon discovers, however, that, again without giving too much away, he cannot change the past. Notably, we do not get to see much of what reverse time travel looks like. And, even more notably, he only ventures back to try to save her once (Keen observation from my fiancee: “Why doesn’t he just travel back, get her and bring her forward, well past any threat to her life?”). Therefore, he sets off for the future to find out why he can’t change the past.

The special effects are what one would expect of any decently budgeted movie in the year 2002. The voyage of the time machine is fast, yet smooth, with none of the blinking, jerky stop-motion effects of the Pal version. In fact, the special effects are the biggest reason to see this movie. Alexander, however, seldom looks joyful, even before his fiancée dies, and that undercuts some of the thrill of seeing him travel through time. In the novel and in the George Pal original starring Rod Taylor, the Time Traveler was portrayed as eager to explore and his fascination with time travel buoyed the audience’s fascination, adding emotion above where special effects leave-off.

His next stop is the year 2030 (sorry, no chance for ironic reaction shots to anything we’ve seen during the last century), where the future is an intersection, jumbo-trons advertise moon colonies, and all New Yorkers have to ride bikes. There he meets a holographic librarian (Orlando Jones) who has the most personality of any character in the movie. When the year 2030 turns out not to have any insight into the question of why one can’t change the past, Alexander decides to go further forward until humans, or holograms, do know the answer. A human-induced disaster, however, intervenes and propels him 800,000 years into the future, a journey that is displayed convincingly with start-of-the-art computer graphics of mountains eroding.

This brings us up to my opening paragraph and the very different theme that Simon Wells has constructed. Simon’s future is all about natural living versus technological living. His Eloi do not live work-free in a world of the Morlocks’ making. Instead, they have hand-crafted wooden nests against cliff, cultivate crops nearby (note that’s crops, not livestock), and wear the aforementioned clothes woven from beads and shells, which are not the machine-crafted clothes of the book or Pal movie. They are a tribe of back-to-nature hippies living communally off the land. Unlike H. G.’s weakling Eloi, Simon’s Eloi are athletic, though still weak compared to the genetically buffed-up Morlocks. (Still, I have to add, Simon’s Eloi are athletic and I would love to look like them, unlike H. G.’s vision of the future where one would envy neither the Eloi nor the Morlocks.) Most prominent among the Eloi is Mara, played by the cute and sexy Samantha Mumba. Those familiar with the novel and Pal movie will know the character as Weena. Mara’s character plays mostly on sex appeal (aforementioned see-thru beaded top), some innocent charm, and the fact that she is the one Eloi who speaks relatively clear English. Yes, the Eloi speak in movies, where H. G. more properly recognized that any language spoken 800,000 years from now would bear no resemblance to any current tongue.

For their part, the Morlocks world is completely un-natural, with touches of mid-20th century German architectural aesthetics — exposed iron structural members, angular construction, and slaughtering tools suspended from the ceiling. View it in comparison to the radar installation in Saving Private Ryan. The makeup and digitally edited special effects for the Morlocks resembles that of the apes in the recent remake of Planet of the Apes. The Morlocks are divided into castes, or so their leader, played by Jeremy Irons, tells us. The Morlock leader has the second most amount of personality of any character in the movie. And, yes, at least this one Morlock speaks, which can be said of neither the H. G. nor the George Pal Morlocks. The Morlock leader tells Alexander that they use genetic technology to breed and that he uses telepathy to control both the Morlocks and the Eloi.

I will not spoil the ending, though, because, well, despite stereotyped characters, an updated theme for the new millennium, and some clunky plot-work, I do recommend this movie. Moreover, I recommend it based on more than just the special effects. H. G.’s original story does still hold together just well enough to make his parts of the plot interesting. In addition, some decent action-adventure sequences help the film build to a decent climax. On a scale of 10 stars, I would give this Time Machine 8 stars.

Footnote: I strongly encourage you to visit the Official Time Machine Web site. Explore around; it’s a very robust site. I especially like what they’ve done with Vox’s character on the site.

The issue first came to my attention when I was around eight or nine years old. After using my grandparents’ bathroom, I happened to notice that their toilet tissue was set so that it would unroll from the front, over the top. My parents’ toilet tissue unrolled from behind, underneath. As I thought about it, I also remembered that my grandparents’ toilet tissue did not always unroll from the front — it sometimes matched my parents’ way and unrolled from behind. So I asked my grandfather, who I revered as the most intelligent man I knew, why their toilet tissue was unrolling from the front. He answered, matter-of-factly, that that was the Irish way. His answer puzzled me. I couldn’t fathom why Irish people would prefer that method, but then again, I was old enough to know that some people did things for no more meaningful reason than that it was the way their ethnic ancestors did things. “And what’s the other way?” I asked. “Oh, that’s the German way.” The answer made no more sense to me than that the Irish preferred their toilet tissue to unspool from the top front, but, again, I accepted that it might be yet another meaningless cultural difference.

Several years later, as a teenager, after my grandfather had passed away, it occurred to me as I was setting a toilet tissue roll to unspool from behind that my grandmother was Irish and my grandfather was German. I suddenly saw his joke, so flatly delivered, and had a good chuckle at my own naïveté. From that point onward, in his honor, I always set the toilet tissue to unspool from behind and underneath, the German way.

When Lila and I moved in together a few years ago, we quickly discovered that one of our differences was that she always set the toilet tissue roll to unfurl from the top front. Moreover, it annoyed her immensely that I did the opposite. After explaining the joke that my grandfather had made, I chalked up the difference to mere preference and said that I saw no logic behind either method being more correct than the other was. Lila, however, believes very strongly that most things have a right, logical way of doing them, and a wrong, illogical way of doing them. As time passed and the toilet tissue flipped orientation depending upon which of us had the honor of changing the roll, her annoyance with my method grew and she sought to find a reason to explain why one method, hers, would be better than another, mine.

Her first attempt was to argue that it was the way that hotels and fine restaurants do it and that it must be based on some principle of etiquette. I, however, do not buy any argument based on the principle of “one or more people do it that way, therefore it must be right.” Emily Post could do it that way; it would not matter to me. Ten million hotel rooms could have it that way; it would not matter to me. I will only buy an argument based on the merits of the thing itself, independent of other people.

We tangented through a debate on etiquette. I also happen to firmly believe that etiquette is nothing more than taking what comes naturally and making it prohibited. We all get gas and we all need to expel it, yet belching and flatulence are socially taboo. Our arms get tired and we feel the need to rest our elbows, but doing so at the dinner table is considered vulgar. Deny everything natural about humans and our comfort and you have etiquette.

Finally, Lila got to the root of things and made this irrefutable logical argument: The toilet tissue should unspool from the top front because that puts it closer at reach, even if only by a few inches. That argument, I could not deny. Yes, if seated on a toilet where the tissue was just at arm’s length, it would be preferable to have it unspool off the top front to keep it in reach. Lila was right — the Irish/Arabic way of setting toilet tissue was the logical way.

Nevertheless, I still sometimes set it the German way, just to tease Lila and to honor of my grandfather.

The key word is “direct.” Yes, television, movies, radio, computers, these are all forms of communications and many have immediacy, but few of them can achieve the directness of communication that writing and reading can. Let me illustrate:

Right now, I am thinking: “Right now, I am thinking…” and as you read those words, you are “hearing” them in your head or, rather, you are thinking them. Your brain is likely firing many of the same neurons that my brain was firing when I was writing this. This is about as close as we can come to direct thought-transfer.

Yes, a television can show you want a reporter is looking at, but you may have a different reaction to seeing it than the reporter does. Yes, the reporter can also tell you what she is thinking about what you are seeing on the screen. Another example would be having someone standing in front of you, talking with you about something they are thinking. However, it’s quite likely that in addition to hearing their communication, you are also picking up on peripheral information. You may notice that the reporter has a nasally voice or you may notice that the person standing in front of you is wearing an “I’m with stupid –>” T-shirt. That peripheral information may, if it does not wholly distract you from what the reporter or person are saying, unduly influence your perception of the message. You might, for example, be turned off by the nasally reporter or be wondering if the person in the T-shirt is qualified to be giving you stock market advice.

Or take the example of a film. A film is certainly faster and easier to consume than a novel. A typical novel takes me a weekend or two to get through. A movie takes, on average, a couple of hours. A novel requires me to envision what a character looks like — and I may not get the exact same image as the author had. A movie shows me an actor who embodies the character. It requires me to take voices of people I know or accents I have heard and ascribe them to the characters’ dialogue — and I may not have the same pitch and pacing to it that the author imagined. A movie has a specific actor’s voice, presumably chosen for his or her ability to capture what the screenwriter and director intend. What the movie will struggle to convey, however, is exactly what the character is thinking. In a novel, the author can show us the world through the character’s point of view, complete with the characters innermost thoughts and feelings. The actor will have to do his or her best to convey this through voice, gesture, and facial expression, but short of blurting out every thought as a line of dialogue for all to hear, we can never know exactly what the movie character is thinking.

With the written word, what you get is what the person thinks, free of most of the other information that might distract you from their message. When you read what I am writing, you are judging me on the quality of my mind, my thoughts, my ability to express myself, and not on my skin color, ethnic background, clothes, facial expressions (which in my case are often misleading anyway!), or any other factors about me that aren’t relevant to what I am trying to communicate to you. This is just my mind communicating thoughts and ideas to your mind. You may disagree with me and you may have other thoughts of your own in response to me, but, for the time being, you are following along with my thoughts.

1. If you want to type your name on your fingers, you must use a typewriter, since it’s easier to get your finger in a typewriter than in a laser printer (it doesn’t burn as much, either) or an inkjet (which is far messier).
2. If you want to type “TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT!” on your tie, you need a typewriter. I have yet to see any printer that can take a tie through the sheet feeder. (Warning: Remove tie first.)
3. If you want to understand the visual metaphor of Donald Duck eating corn-on-the-cob, you need to use a typewriter at least once, preferably a manual one.
4. If you want to drive your noisy cube-mates battier than they are driving you, a rattling, clacking typewriter is a good start. Turning up the volume on your phone ringer also helps, as well as having prolonged phone conversations with your doctor about your severe gastrointestinal distress — be sure you mention that it is caused by the stress of your noisy working environment and see if you can slip
   in the phrase “going postal.”
5. You need a typewriter for added effect when mailing the following:

   Technolujy sux! All you stupid people with your dot-de-dot dot calms are reely getting on my nerves. Oh, look at me, ain’t I all special on the inturnette with more mega-hurts and giga-bites than you. Driving in your fancy cars with your fancy pajers and sell phones! You make me sick! I will kill you all. As soon as I throw out this danged typewriter. Ya know, all of our problems today started with the frustration of making typos. Now we need thousands of dollars worth of computers and software just to speil chuck.
   -Ted Kazinski

In all seriousness, I’ll nominate “I love you” as the most effective or influential words ever. They never fail to produce either positive or negative results. They can bond two people together forever or blow apart an otherwise perfectly blissful relationship. And, of course, there’s all that religious stuff about God loving people and that we should love our neighbor, though in today’s world those things are becoming less effective.

Still, try this test: tell someone you love them. Guaranteed it will produce an immediate result, ranging from the excited “You do!”, to the mundane “Yeah, I love you, too,” to the offended “Buzz off, turkey.”