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Month: October 2008

Why Halloween Sucks

Why do I hate Hallowe’en? It’s because of the Electronic Light-up Scary Yo-yo from Gealex Toys. It’s because of the Ma & Pa Bones Permaplastic Glow-in-the-Dark Skeletons. It’s because of the Sound-Activated Pumpkin Novelty from Hallmark: “It Lights Up — It Laughs!”

It’s because of the Spooky Vampire: “Light-sensor activated! Lifelike animation! Talks in a spooky voice!” Wave your hand and the plastic vampire’s eyes light up. He opens a coffin, revealing a plastic skeleton. Its eyes are blinking on and off. “Welllllllcome…” A tinny voice emanates from a hidden speaker. “We’ve been waiting for you!” Demoniacal laughter. A crash of organ chords.

That’s why I hate Hallowe’en.

Shopping at the grocery store, I immediately notice the salad bar, decked out in seasonal display. Stuffed dolls sit on all four corners: two witches, a scarecrow, a pumpkin-man. They’re made in China from “polyester and synthetic fibers.”

An inflatable ghost is suspended from the ceiling, half purple and half transparent, the word “Boo!” on its belly.

Anatomically correct skeletons swing from the orange-and-black crepe-paper entwined columns. Hanging inside the salad bar, white ghost-baggies with twist-tied necks trail ectoplasm over the lettuce. Plastic jack-o-lantern buckets contain bacon bits, croutons, napkins, and packets of House Italian Dressing (by Kraft).

The produce section is festooned with fifty-odd pumpkins. My wife swears she saw a Kroger employee commended by his superior for painting them all with happy, goofy faces. One pumpkin has a blue nose and is slobbering like a rabid idiot. Caught up in the wonder of it all, my wife puts her produce in the wrong cart. A ruckus ensues.

At the deli I spot a witch with googly eyes and flourescent green skin, wearing a fluorescent orange robe and fluorescent yellow shoes. According to the speech balloon over her head, she is saying “Eeek!” Why?

Perhaps she was frightened by that evil owl eying her from across the aisle. But wait — that owl is no Hallowe’en gimmick. It’s the Hooters Owl, gazing lecherously from a packet of Hooter’s Wing Breading.

A chill runs down my spine and between my legs. I know about Hooters. These are the people who offered to pay for my sister’s breast augmentation surgery. All she had to do was take a job waiting tables at their bar in Union Station. In the Hooter’s uniform, of course: very short shorts and a cut-away tanktop.

Scary, huh? I guess you gotta get a boob job to work a boob job. My sister turned them down. But we still tell the story on spooky autumn evenings.

And now, at last, you can do up chicken wings at home just like they make ’em at Hooters. And if you’re lucky, you can get a girlfriend to dress up like a Hooters waitress for you. Or just rent the “Girls of Hooters” video. (Better save that cooking grease.)


A hapless 6th-grader finds a phosphorescent “Jason” hockey mask in the dairy freezer. His mom makes him put it back. He tells us that his home is decorated with strings of skeleton-lights that flash on and off. “It’s really annoying, actually.”

I wonder: what’s happened to Hallowe’en? Was it always this cheesy? Does anyone really think that day-glo witches are frightening?

I wander into the potato chip aisle. The Ruffles package sports a green- skinned witch with six warts (count ’em — six!) on her split nose and tufts of purple facial hair sprouting on her fat chin. She’s wearing not one but two conical hats: a traditional black witch hat with belt and buckle, atop which is perched a tiny party hat, polka-dotted orange and purple.

A poster hangs from above: an ancient mummy confronting a barrel in his Egyptian tomb. Who has violated the sanctity of his sacred resting place? Grave robbers? No! Candy manufacturers! The barrel springs open to reveal a cache of glowing “fun size” Snicker bars.

The “Back To School” candy-kiosk depicts a hallucinatory panorama: a freckle-face kid peering out from behind a huge pile of books stacked with Milky Ways, giant pencils marching toward a playground where one boy hands a small packet to to another — is it a drug deal? Sure enough. M&M’s.

A lovable ghost bobs up beside me, hugging a load of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey’s Kisses, and York Peppermint Patties in his transparent arms.

“Don’t be scared,” he says. “I’m a friendly ghost.”

I can’t help snorting: “Scared? You couldn’t scare my six-year-old niece. You couldn’t scare anybody, except maybe Ray Bradbury.”

The silly specter cocks an eyebrow. “Ray Bradbury? Who’s he?”

“A writer. He predicted a sanitized future, a time when people are no longer afraid of the dark, because all the tales of horrible wraiths and flesh-eating goblins have been suppressed, forgotten, censored.” I stare right through the amiable apparition, lost in thought. “It looks as though Ray was right. But it’s not the censors. It’s the vendors.”

“The who?”

“You know, the sugar-peddlers. They’re cashing in on a Hallowe’en for kids. That’s why everything’s so cute. That’s why you look so goofy.”

“Well, you look pretty goofy yourself, mister!” He floats off in a snit.

I can’t help but feel that something has been lost.

Truncated Scale

A friend recently commented on how our country is politically polarized. Yes, I feel that — but I also feel that many of us are apathetic and alienated from the political process.

How could these both be true? It seems contradictory, paradoxical.

Perhaps the answer, or part of it, has to do with our narrowly circumscribed political dialog. I’ve been puzzling over how to better express the idea.

Say you’re looking at two marks on a wall. If you’re standing very close, with your nose practically touching the plaster, you will see the two marks as rather far apart. But if you stand back and look at the whole wall, you might say that that the marks are quite close together.

Or take a bar graph. It’s a well-known fact that if you chop off the bottom of a bar graph you can exaggerate differences and make them seem bigger. There’s a whole chapter on this in How to Lie with Statistics.

Or say you listened to nothing but grandpa’s record collection. You might think dixieland and bebop represented the absolute opposite ends of the musical spectrum. And you’d be right, insofar as 1940s jazz was concerned.

All of these seem like variations on the same phenomenon. This has surely been observed and documented by those who study human cognition. What’s vexing me is I can’t think of the name for it. The only term I’ve encountered that seems to make sense is “truncated scale,” but that’s hardly ubiquitous.

Anyway, my theory is that some of us are “zoomed in” on two marks on the wall.

Tightly Circumscribed

From this close view, the differences are vast and passions run high. There is a sense of polarization between these two diametrically opposed points.

Biaxial

“All two-valued systems are false.” — Gene Wolfe

Consider the left-right continuum of political thought. It often strikes me as tired and played-out. Yet at other times it seems quite relevant. It certainly is one-dimensional, by definition, and thus it can’t begin to reflect the rich variation and nuances of political philosophy. For example, Nazis and Bolsheviks would be at opposite ends of this spectrum, but don’t they have a lot in common? Something important is missing.

At some point during my undergraduate years, a professor introduced me to a dual-axis model of politics. It doesn’t abandon the well-known left-right continuum. It simply adds another dimension, call it an up-down continuum. Up represents a more authoritarian tendency; down represents the opposite inclination, which might be called libertarian. (Note the small “l” to avoid confusion with the Libertarian Party.) I’m not sure, but I think this model may have first been articulated by the famous psychologist Hans Eysenck.

The result looks something like this:

Political Chart

This clears up some things. Hitler and Stalin would both be at the top of the chart, but in opposite corners.

Of course you could get even more complex. You could add an urban-rural axis or a pacifist-militant axis, to name just a couple. But that quickly gets cumbersome. This dual-axis model seems to work pretty well for me. I’ve carried this mental construct around for the last twenty years, and I find it helpful. I just wish more people knew about it.

Well, turns out there’s a website that allows you to take a short quiz and plot yourself on this model. No, I’m not talking about The World’s Smallest Political Quiz. I’m referring to The Political Compass.

If you haven’t already done so, hie thee to their website and take the test. See where they map you. Does it correspond with where you’d have plotted yourself?

Debatable

Since I didn’t get to sound off on these issues on the radio, maybe I’ll just give vent here.

I watched all four of the so-called debates. Mostly they were pretty boring. I thought the last one was the most interesting, but all in all they were disappointing.

The debates frustrate me. Once upon a time they were run by a non-partisan group, the League of Women Voters. But for the last twenty-odd years they’ve been put on (and we’ve all been put on) by a bipartisan commission. The debates are controlled by the two major parties — two of the most powerful political entities in the world — and as one might expect, they are constructed to serve the interests of those parties.

And, face it, those parties are old and entrenched. Yet they’re both trying to sell a message of change. The mind boggles. But I digress.

What frustrates me in the debates is what frustrates me in our national political dialog: The scope is too narrow. The dialog is so tightly circumscribed that we have come to examine and contrast minute differences of policy between Democrats and Republicans, magnifying these differences so greatly that it’s easy to forget that there is a much wider range of possibilities.

To some extent this magnification is justified. The Presidency of the United States is perhaps the most powerful office in the world. I acknowledge that even the smallest differences can have huge effects on all of us.

But surely we are impoverished by not allowing a broader range of political dialog.

Frustrated with Bebo

I’ve been researching social network sites for a presentation I’m making at the end of the month. There’s quite a few of them out there. As part of my research I’ve been signing up for all the major ones and exploring them a bit. I already had accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut and LinkedIn, but now I’m also on Hi5, Cyworld and Bebo.

Most of these sites allow you to connect to your online address book. This is for two distinct purposes: 1) to see who else amongst your contacts may already be using the site, and/or 2) to invite contacts who aren’t using the site to join up. I’m not interested in flogging any of these social network sites, so I restrict my explorations to the first purpose.

Which brings me to Bebo.