Eat your hearts out, my friends.  I have arrived.  My credentials have finally been recognized.  I am among the leftest of the Left.

I came home today to find an envelope addressed to me and bearing the return address of…get this…The Council on Foreign Relations.

God, I’ll bet my late father-in-law, a charter member of the John Birch Society, is spinning in his grave.  The Council on Foreign Relations, understand, is a secret society bent on world domination.  Right up there with the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Elders of Zion.

I almost didn’t want to open it, thinking it would be so much more valuable in the future if its seal were unbroken.  I could frame it, perhaps.  I could use it to run for office.  I could slip it into the breast pocket of my finest suit coat and casually flash it at the Secret Service guards when I requested an audience with the President.

Ultimately, my curiosity got the better of me and I steamed it open.  And it turned out that the return address wasn’t the best part.

Remember in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” when the young George Bailey is showing the young Mary a coveted copy of National Geographic?  Gee, I’ve never seen that magazine before, says Mary.  Of course you haven’t, replies George.  Only us Scouts can get it.  I’ve been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society.

Well, that’s me.  I’ve been offered the chance to subscribe to Foreign Affairs, the magazine touted as “the bible [notice the curious use of the lower case] of foreign policy thinking” (The Washington Post.)  With jacket blurbs by Tom Brokaw and Madeleine Albright.  And get this:  “The most comprehensive and authoritative periodical on international affairs in the United States.”  (Newt Gingrich.)  [Say, what?]

And because of my sterling credentials, it’s all mine at an incredible 67% off (sounds suspiciously like 666 to me, but what do I know?) of the cover price.

If you guys are nice to me, I can put in a good word.  But I’m not stopping here.  Today:  The Council on Foreign Relations.  Tomorrow:  The Tri-Lateral Commission.  Thursday:  The United Nations.  Friday:  WORLD DOMINATION!

You teabaggers don’t stand a chance.

Modestly,

scd

You just gotta love Caller ID.

The University of Oklahoma, between which and self there is little love lost, calls me at least twice a week and has for years.  I know they’re going to be asking for money, so I never answer the call, just like I don’t answer any call identified as “Toll Free Number.”

But tonight I had had enough.  I decided to answer and have a little fun.

– Hello…could I speak to Ste – ven Dim – ick?

– This is he.  (It was the last sentence I spoke in proper English instead of Okie.)

– Mr. Dim – ick, I’m a student at the University of Oklahoma and I’m calling you on behalf of the President’s Council –

– Ya’ll are callin’ me on behalf of the president o’ that-there Univarsity?

– Yes, sir, I’m –

– Now ya’ll lissen here.  Ya’ll got a li’l ol’ “Do Not Call” leeist?

– Yes, sir, we do, but –

– I tell ya’ll whut: Ya’ll just put me on that li’l ol’ leeist and don’ch’all be a-callin’ me agin s’long as David Boren is the president o’ that-there Univarsity.

– Can I ask why?

– I ain’t a-givin’ ya’ll any money s’long as David Boren is president.  Just put me on that-there leeist.  Y’heah?

– Yes, sir, but –

– Thank ya’ll fer callin’.

Precious moments like these are too few.  I haven’t had so much fun since, as the fellow once said, the pigs ate my little brother.  I just can’t wait for the next “Toll Free Call.”

Three capsule reviews and a lecture

I make it a firm rule to try to see at least two movies in a theater every calendar year.  That is, of course, only a goal and I don’t always make it.  My living room, with an HD plasma TV, Blu-Ray player and pretty nifty sound system generally suits me just fine.

(If for no other reason, I don’t miss a few minutes of the movie if I have to visit the facilities.)

The last three movies I have watched – two at home and one in a theater – led me to think about plots, because it was pretty obvious where each movie was going after watching only a small part of it.

The movies were “District 9,” “Avatar” and “The Invention of Lying.”

*

Many people have attempted to categorize the number of possible plots in fiction.  These categories – depending on who is doing the counting – range from three to seven to 20 to 36.

And that’s not counting Faulkner’s definition of fiction as “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about.”

Very true, but that’s a reason for telling the story, and Faulkner didn’t mean it as a plot summary.

Personally, I tend to like the “seven plots” school of thought:

1. Tragedy. Hero with a fatal flaw meets tragic end. “Macbeth” or “Madame Bovary.”

2. Comedy. Not necessary laugh-out-loud, but always with a happy ending, typically of romantic fulfilment, as in Jane Austen.  Not always, but usually, the guy and gal start off at odds with each other and only gradually come to realize the blah-blah-blah.  Classic example: “It Happened One Night.”

3. Overcoming the Monster. “Frankenstein,” “Jaws,” “Alien,” “Silence of the Lambs.”

4. Voyage and Return. The archetypal structure of personal development through leaving, then returning home.  “The Odyssey,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Time Machine,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

5. Quest. A holy grail, a whale, or a kidnapped child.  “Lord of the Rings,” “The Road,”  Moby Dick. (“Moby Dick” could also fit under “Tragedy.”)

6. Rags to Riches. The riches can be literal or metaphoric. “Cinderella,” “David Copperfield,” “Pygmalion.”

7. Rebirth. The central character finds a new reason for living.  To my mind, the most fulfilling of all plots and the closest to Faulkner’s observation that “only that is worth writing about.”  “A Christmas Carol,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Crime and Punishment,” “Peer Gynt.”

*

Once you have these plots down, it’s not a difficult task to figure out where a given movie may be going.

Case in point: “The Invention of Lying.”

A really neat conceit that ends as a miserable failure because the director couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do with the plot.  The plot, of course, is a romantic comedy in which boy meets girl, through confusion boy loses girl and then boy finally gets girl in the last scene.

But that’s only the plot.  You saw that coming within ten minutes, didn’t you?  The elements of the plot, however, don’t hang together.  Is being unable to tell a lie the same as being an idiot?  Seems so.  The only alleged difference between that world and our own is that in that world everybody tells the truth about everything.   But the female’s only reason for rejecting our hero is that she doesn’t approve of his genetic material, which has little to do with truth or lying.  (Not to mention that she’s a freaking twit and we never get a clue as to why Ricky Gervais wants to marry her, let alone bang her.)  And everybody else in that alternative universe is equally clueless.

Hey, Mr. Director: Do you want to make a movie about a world in which people can’t lie or do you want to make a movie about a world in which people are all twits?  Either one might be funny, but you’re linking the two.  Doesn’t work after the first 20 minutes or so.

*

Case in point: “District 9.”

I should have known where it was going after the first ten minutes, but I’m a little slow sometimes.  It wasn’t until the hero grew a claw that I figured out the rest of the plot.

The plot elements don’t hold together at all.  How did the captive “prawns” get hold of their species-specific weaponry?  If the prawn hero could manage to make their space ship fly, why were the aliens stranded hovering over Johannesburg for months in the movie’s backstory?  And on and on.  Best not to think about it.  But it was a great, and disturbing commentary on race relations and the darkness of the human heart.

This one and “Avatar” fall into a sub-genre of “Rebirth:” The hero is introduced to an alien culture and adopts it as better than his own.  See also “Little Big Man,” “Dances With Wolves” and “A Man Called Horse,” among others.

*

Case in point: “Avatar.”

It’s difficult to separate the cinematography from the special effects, but either way, they’re luscious.

Ten minutes into it, you know that Jake Sully will have a rebirth.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  It’s how he gets there that makes for a rollicking good ride.  The central conceit is consistent (unlike “Lying”) and we root for the non-white tribe because the white guys are what we know humans are capable of being.

The 3-D version isn’t necessary.  It just makes the viewing experience more immediate.

Subplot: “Heart of Darkness” slash “Apocalypse Now.”

(To the tune of “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette”)

Like the feller in the Merle Travis/Tex Williams song about cigarettes, if I ever met the guy that invented the computer, “I’d murder that son-of-a-gun in the first degree.”

Now it ain’t ‘cause I don’t use one myself

And my carpel tunnel is still in good health,

But that devil machine has me flyin’ into a rage.

‘Cause electronic addicts are all the same

At a romantic dinner or a football game

Everything’s gotta stop while they check their Facebook page.

I still remember my excitement when I bought my first computer for my office, all set now to join the electronic age in which documents would be produced with lightening speed and paper would soon become obsolete.  I was almost as excited when I bought the second one.  Now, not only would my secretary have a computer but I would, too.

I was slightly less excited when I bought the first computer for home, but it was still a pretty big deal, sitting there in the dining room for the whole family’s use.  And then came another home computer all my very own and then another for my daughter.  Eventually, I just had to have a color monitor and then my wife had to have a color monitor, and then my daughter, and then it was the second telephone line to connect to the internet and then the DSL line and then the wireless home network and then I had to have a laptop and then my wife had to have her own laptop and then…

*

Was it just overnight when the business world went from the question, “Do you have a fax number?” to “What is your fax number?” to “Will you scan that and e-mail it to me?”  Or does it only seem that way?

Was it really just last week when “car phones” were practically the size of an attache case?  When the salesperson called me at work to try to sell me one and I said, “Lady, I sometimes go get into my car just to get away from the telephone”?

And last week everybody in the family had to have a pager and six days ago there was our “family” cell phone, which became my wife’s cell phone, and then I had to have one of my own and then so did my daughter, and five days ago all the antique analog phones had to be replaced by digital ones, and four days ago the cell phone merged with the PDA so we no longer had to carry two devices (but everybody had to get a new phone), and three days ago the phones were obsolete again because they couldn’t take pictures, and two days ago they all had to be replaced because the old ones couldn’t surf the web and check e-mail and yesterday they were all replaced yet again because they couldn’t hold the entire ASCAP and BMI music catalogs in their memory and today I’m afraid to read the morning paper for fear technological advances since I went to bed will cost me yet another thousand dollars.

*

Now, I’m no Luddite.  I used to be quite a forward-looking kind of guy.  More than thirty years ago, when I was still in law school and some years away from my first computer, I predicted the digitalization of law libraries, with 0’s and 1’s replacing miles of sagging bookshelves lined with code books and appellate court reports.  And I was right: today, legal research is blazingly fast compared to that quaint era.

And when hand-held scanners with optical character resolution (OCR) software first appeared, I bought an early one, convinced it would eliminate hours of secretarial typing – only to discover that a good secretary could type a document in half the time it took for a scanner to scan it and the software to turn it into words.  But I was right: today, scanners and their software are also blazingly fast, leaving the secretaries with much less typing to do and more time to spend surfing the web, fiddling with their MySpace page and e-mailing their friends.

In fact, it seems that everything is blazingly fast today except me.  Life and business spin around so rapidly that I’m afraid I’ll be injured if I try to hop off, even if only to catch my breath for a moment.  It’s not that I’m no longer forward-looking; it’s just that I’m so dizzy I don’t know which way to look.

*

There was a time when a letter or contract had to be roughed out, typed, edited and polished, retyped, polished again and typed once again, leaving time for a bit of reflection in between drafts.  “I’ll get that in the mail to you as soon as I can,” I might say.  “You should have it within a week.”  Today, as often as not, I get the question, “And can I have that this afternoon?”

Time was when I might drop a note to a friend, maybe handwritten or maybe typed.  Either way, I would generally read it over when I was finished and then had to fold the paper, find and address an envelope, lick a stamp and put the letter out for the postman.  There was plenty of time for reflection and the messages were seldom flaming or ranting.

Today I punch that “send” button smugly and only later stop to think that calling my best friend an “idiot” or ranting extensively about his religious or political preferences was probably not a great idea.

Time was when I could take out-of-town guests for a drive along California’s beautiful Big Sur coastline and they would be awestruck by the view.  Today they spend the trip texting their friends back home.

Time was when I could go into San Francisco to meet my daughter for a leisurely lunch at a nice restaurant and both of us could enjoy being away from our respective offices for a while.  Today she brings the office with her, popping outdoors every five minutes to take yet another phone call or receiving and replying to yet another text message between every bite of salad.

I can no longer get into a good barroom discussion over the English word with the longest string of consecutive consonants or who fixed the 1919 World Series without somebody whipping out his Blackberry and calling up Google or Wikipedia.  I can’t go to a nightclub without seeing half the fools there snapping pictures on their cell phones and shooting them off to their friends to prove they were really in the same room with a famous jazz singer.  I can’t even check my own e-mail without finding a dozen messages saying somebody has just “tagged” me or “poked” me on Facebook or has just taken yet another idiot quiz asking them what kind of vegetable they think they should be.

I’d murder that son-of-a-gun, I swear I would.  And if I really drew a jury of my peers, I’d never be convicted.

Now the other night my wife and I

Were havin’ a little wine and feelin’ a little high.

The dishes were done and I’d put on an Ella CD.

The candles were lit and the lights were low

And we started dancin’ close and slow;

It was one of those nights just made for her and me.

Now the wife was hot and I was hotter –

She was wearin’ that low-cut top I’d bought her –

And my favorite perfume in just the right amount.

I said “Let’s pretend it’s our honeymoon.”

She said “Steve, get ready; I’ll be there soon,

But first I just gotta check my Facebook mail account.”

.

Search, search, search those Google hits.

Click, click, click and when it’s time to call it quits

Tell St. Peter when you go upstairs

You can’t leave this world’s affairs

You just gotta have your dose of bytes and bits.

*

_____________________________________________________________________

If you’d like to hear Tex Williams’ original version, you can find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbKQklwNScA

_____________________________________________________________________

I’m not sure who is the strangest: dogs or dog people.  Dogs do things we’ll never understand, but dog people speak to their pets in baby talk, share their beds with them and refer to themselves as “mommy” and “daddy.”

So Kaleigh is no worse than your average human, even if she was a reluctant mother and is a deceptively friendly brood bitch.

Mostly Labrador (I believe she is 7/8 Lab and 1/8 golden retriever), she gave birth to three litters of pups for Canine Companions for Independence (CCI), about which I will write more eventually.  And while the success rate for CCI puppies is only about 33 percent, more than half of Kaleigh’s pups went on to graduate and be placed as service dogs with paraplegics, quadraplegics, hearing-impaired persons and the like.

But Kaleigh didn’t take well to the mothering thing.  She had little interest in the birthing process (her third litter had to be delivered by C-section)  and even less interest in nursing her pups.  She seemed happy when each of her litters were turned in to CCI at eight weeks.

The program works like this: Some people become “breeder caretakers,” which means that they care for the bitch, take her back to CCI’s Santa Rosa, California, campus to be bred when she is in heat, bring her back home, whelp the puppies, raise the pups for eight weeks and then turn them in.  Another stable of dog lovers is lined up to be “puppy raisers” for about 14 to 16 months, during which time they socialize the dog, take it to puppy classes and teach it all of the basic commands.

After puppy raising, the dogs are again turned back in to CCI where those who haven’t washed out go through a rigorous training program before finally being placed with a handicapped person.

A couple of times a year, CCI hosts a gathering of its volunteers and their dogs – usually as a fund-raiser.  (It’s not enough that we raise their dogs, buy the food and pay most of the vet bills, but they hope we’ll pay for the privilege.)  We were at one such gathering when Marianne spotted the puppy raisers for one of Kaleigh’s pups and wanted the two dogs to get together again to relive old times, or some such thing.

Kaleigh dutifully sniffed at her son, feigned disinterest and then lunged.  When they were separated, we found that the poor son had suffered a ripped eyelid.  So his raisers set off for the 24-hour vet clinic just a few miles away.  Marianne and I followed about ten minutes later to find out if the dog was OK and to offer to pay the vet bill.

When we got to the clinic, everybody was in high spirits.  The dog’s injury wasn’t serious, but that would not have accounted for all the jollity.

It seems that when the veterinary technician was checking them in, the puppy raisers explained that the dog’s mother had bitten it.  They were shown into an examination room and when the vet came in, his first words to the wife were “You bit your dog???”

I’m a little guy and a pacifist.  To the best of my memory, I’ve only been in two fistfights in my life.  I don’t believe in force or violence…except that, sometimes I wish I were considerably larger so I could assert myself a bit more strongly.

In this case, however, I wouldn’t have cared how big the fellow was.  I’d have done it anyway.  I just probably wouldn’t have been quite so successful.

Fellow calls up to make an appointment with me because he says his sister wants to make a will.  My secretary made an appointment for the sister, but she showed up with her brother and his wife in tow.  The brother insisted – over my objections, but with the consent of his sister – on coming into my office with the client.

During the interview, it turned out that my client was widowed with three children, none of whom met the approval of the brother.

“Ma’am, may I assume that you want your estate to go equally to your three children?” I asked.

“No, she doesn’t,” the brother answered for her.  “She wants it to go to me.  And if I’m dead, to my kids.”

“Is that true, ma’am?”  She nodded.

“I told you that.  Now write it up,” the brother said.

“Sir, I really have to have the answers from Mrs. _____, and not from you.”

“I know what she wants.  Just ask her.”

For about ten minutes, as I tried to explore the reasons for leaving her own children out of her will, the client said almost nothing.  Brother answered every question I asked.  Sister sat there meekly agreeing with him, but it was obvious that she was afraid of him.

Finally I had enough.  “Mr. ____, I’m going to have to ask you to go wait outside while I talk to your sister alone.”

“She said it was OK for me to be here.  Ask her again if you don’t believe me.”

“Sir, I want to talk…I intend to talk to your sister in private.  Now please have a seat outside.”

“You can’t make me leave!” he yelled.  “I have a right to be here!  She’s my sister!”

“Sir, I’m not going to tell you again.  Now go out to the waiting room and wait!”

Luckily for me, the fellow was slightly smaller even than I am and probably about as old as I am now, which is to say old.  When he refused to leave, I came around from behind my desk, placed a hand under his armpit and another on his elbow, lifted him out of the chair and guided him out of the office.  But as I was closing the door behind him, he started pushing the door the other way, bulling his way back in, screaming all the while.

Pacifist that I am, I’ve always wanted to do this: I grabbed a handful of his jacket and shirt collar from the back and hustled him out of the office like tossing a drunk out of a saloon.  Then I locked the door.  He stood there screaming and pounding on the door for a while before he finally realized that he wasn’t coming back in.

When the noise subsided, I gently pried out of the woman that she loved her kids and didn’t want to leave them out of her will, but that she couldn’t stand up to her brother.  Their parents had been first-generation Portuguese and they were brought up in the old school in which the eldest male is the patriarch of the entire extended family.

I got the information I needed and told the client I would write the will the way she wanted it and that her brother had no right to read her will or ask her what was in it.

When I opened the door to my office, brother was instantly in my face demanding to know what we talked about.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that is a private matter between your sister and me.  You’ll be able to find out what’s in her will after she dies.”

They left, I wrote the will and my secretary left a message on the client’s answering machine to say it was ready to be reviewed and signed.

Not surprisingly, the client never returned the call and never returned to my office.