"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64," is the hook of one of Paul McCartney's contributions to The Beatles' masterwork, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." McCartney is just ten years shy of that age, and at 54 shows no signs of slowing down.After working on the massive Anthology video/album retrospective of The Beatles' career Paul felt newly inspired. In the liner notes of his just released studio album, "Flaming Pie" he remarks, "Watching the Anthology also reminded me of the time that we DIDN'T take to make an album and the fun we had when we did one. The Beatles were not a serious group. . ."
My young twentysomething friends, who are just now discovering The Beatles catalog, generally write Paul off as a lightweight. I suggest that they watch the feature documentary "Let It Be." That film makes it pretty obvious who was the driving force behind the Fabs. (I was a George fan until I saw that movie--I thought Paulie was simply the pretty boy.)
The bite of cynical wit that Lennon used to lend to the Lennon/McCartney collaborations are history, and Paul still relies on John's edginess, even after death, to be the yang to his yin. The album's title, "Flaming Pie" comes from a Lennonism about how The Beatles got their name. (A man came unto us out of the sky on a flaming pie and said, "You are Beatles with an A," and so we were.)
Freshly knighted by The Queen ("Sir Paul" to you) McCartney has kept his head screwed on pretty tight throughout his career (apart from a few marijuana busts) in a business that sees regular flameouts both personal and professional. Paul withstood widespread ridicule when he insisted his wife Linda perform with him on albums and on stage. Their marriage has lasted 28 years and counting--with no scandals, thank you. (Somebody found saturated fats in Linda's line of frozen health food, but she fixed that.) Linda might not be able to sing very well, but she's a great cook, an okay photographer, a perfunctory keyboard player and the best part: she isn't Yoko.
Paul's son James makes his debut on "Flaming Pie," playing some ham-handed electric guitar fills on one of Dad's compositions. (Being a Beatle's son must be hell.) According to the liner notes, Paul suggested James take formal guitar lessons to which James replied, "Well you didn't Dad. . ." End of discussion.
The first I heard of Tibet's problems was when Richard Gere got in trouble talking about it at the Academy Awards. I was more interested in trying to figure out whether Gere was gay or not to listen to a lot of bellyaching about some tiny foreign land.
Last week the Dalai Lama brought word of Tibet directly to Boulder, Colorado. He came to speak to the thriving Buddhist community here and in nearby Denver. For a small town of under 100,000 residents, it was a rare treat to have His Holiness visit our little 'om sweet 'om.
Someone in one of his audiences here in Boulder asked him his thoughts on the best way to raise a child in the 21st century. "You know better than I," the unmarried monk replied to the parent. I can respect that kind of honesty.
The Dalai Lama smiles all the time and wears cool red and gold colored bed sheets. Right off the bat, my kind of guy. He decries materialism and pronounces himself, "half Buddhist, half Marxist." (So much for separation of church and state.) I can't figure out whether the Dalai Lama is a politician or cleric as he delightfully blurs the distinction in his appearances around the world. It begs the question, can or should churchmen and statesmen be separated at all?
Then I thought about Pat Robertson running for president, and remembered the kind of guys I saw wearing bed sheets in Kentucky in the Sixties and got all confused.
The Dalai Lama seems pretty moderate on both fronts. He says that as a religion Buddhism works for him, but may not be right for everyone. Politically, even though China is responsible for a lot of misery in Tibet, the Dalai Lama sees "constructive engagement" as the means toward rectifying the two countries' differences.
But if Mr. Lama wants to call attention to the terrible plight of his homeland Tibet, he may want to stop smiling so much.
Sometimes I felt like I was the only one truly annoyed by email spam, and I risk tiring you, gentle reader, with my repeated tirades. Then I hear a story which puts things in perspective.
A Boulder, Colorado businessman felt the brunt of the spam wars a while back when an unscrupulous "internet advertiser" forged his business' email address as the return address of a mass ad spamming of 25,000 pieces.
The Boulder businessman had received over 7000 angry responses before his ISP shut him and his web-based business down. This got the businessman angry enough to investigate. He is bringing suit against the company responsible (who blames it on an outside consultant). Interestingly enough, out of 25,000 uninvited messages sent, only about 15 people were actually interested in the product offered. 15 out of 25,000! The problem of spam stems from the fact that 15 positive responses, if they represent paying business, will probably more than cover the expense of bothering the 24,985 others. This must change.
Apparently a sufficient number of people are irritated by this electronic intrusion that Congress, surprisingly enough, is turning its lumbering attention toward possible solutions. There are laws already on the books making it illegal to send unsolicited business faxes, so tweaking the legal language to include uninvited advertising email shouldn't be that difficult. The Federal Trade Commission will address the problem soon and let's hope they act swiftly.
United States Representative Chris Smith is my hero. He maintains that having to download unsolicited junk email turns the principles of free trade upside down by having the end user actually pay for the advertising. Rep. Smith wants strict controls in place that would penalize the perpetrator up to $500 per violation.
Senator Frank Murkowski has a kinder, gentler approach to spammers (a guy with his own web page should know better) suggesting only that "real" return addresses be used, an advertisement flag present in the header (so ISPs could filter out spam waves) and if requested, a person could have his/her name removed from the spammer's addresses list within 48 hours. (And put on another list in seconds no doubt. . .)
I prefer Rep. Smith's approach. So does the Internet Service Provider Consortium. The devious creeps that re-route their posts and forge return addresses should not only be put out of business, but put out of business and behind bars as well.
There are some things I would prefer to not think about. What follows is one of them. Picture a young couple, deeply in love, just starting life, and they suffer a horrible accident in which the new husband dies. Tragedy. But wait!
The wife has 48 hours to decide whether she would like to have a little remembrance in the form of her former husband's sperm to keep around just in case. (That's love I guess. . . "I'll have his wallet, his keys and, um. . .") University of Pennsylvania researchers have discovered that more and more women are asking to be artificially inseminated with their dead spouse's sperm. (Many other women probably think they have been anyway. . . but that's off topic.)
It could eliminate a lot of arguments when you think about it. The technology exists today, in fact, to create a child from two deceased parents. Cuts down on Mother's and Father's Day gifts too.
Call me old fashioned, call me a romantic, but I still think a man and a woman should, at the very least, be in the same room when a new life is conceived. The way things are going, the mail order jiz biz may be a growth industry in more ways than one.
Hey men! You may want to put a little bit of yourself in the deep freezer and then get snipped. That way you can go about your business knowing you're shooting blanks, but you've got a live one on ice in the bank! (I shudder to think.)
Hey women! Maybe your lifestyle isn't conducive to a big smelly sloppy male guy in it. No problem. There are plenty of understanding operations that will help you fulfill your dreams of rearing a family without the inconvenience of a man around the house.
I find this kind of technology dehumanizing. I've cooked with fresh green beans and I've cooked with frozen green beans. I rest my case. The thought of going through life with a father who was part Frigidaire leaves me cold.
While the cost of educating America's children has continued to rise, the quality of that education has steadily declined. One of the best examples of the new approach gone wrong is called "Whole Language." Check out how the proponents of this bizarre approach try to explain it. I swear, this is their way to make it clear to you--I couldn't make this up:
Whole Language has as its foundation current knowledge about language development as a constructive, meaning-oriented process in which language is viewed as an authentic, natural, real-world experience, and language learning is perceived as taking place through functional reading and writing situations.Right. Grant Language if you ask me.
For one thing, the Whole Language approach apparently doesn't like to dwell on the notion of a "right" way or "wrong" way to spell a word. Conveying a concept is what's important--the spelling thing will follow. I think this is insane. But you can go too far the other way too.
I was flipping through the teevee channels the other night and happened across a National Spelling Bee. A big one, being held in Washington a couple of weeks ago. It was down to two kids, a little boy and a thirteen year old girl.
Not that this sounds any more exciting than televised baseball or golf, but it was. In fact, it was kind of terrifying. The girl exhibited some very serious psychological ticks as she raked her mind through the possibilities of a word's construction. (Would it be "ie" or "y.") The camera was close--invading her personal space. It's the most uncomfortable television has made me feel since the Roswell autopsy.
The children in the contest were able to ask certain qualifying questions of the judges about the word at stake. What was its language of origin, whether or not a part of it meant one thing or another, hearing it in a sentence, etc. Most of these questions were asked in order to buy time while their young minds churned. You could see the strain on their faces. In extreme closeup.
The girl, Rebecca Sealfon who would go on to win, was literally twisted with angst as she would spit out a letter, turn her head, place both hands over her mouth, say the next letter to herself in silence, pause, then turn to the microphone and repeat it for the record. There was terror in her eyes. They would intercut this horrible sight with shots of her worried and adoring parents sitting in the audience. (May they all seek counseling together.)
Contrast this with the crop of numskulls we're gradutating frum hi skools akross thuh nayshun this yeer. Sumtime derring the Sefentees therr wuz a see change in thuh way acadumdemics viewd the educational processimization.
(Under the Whole Language approach, the preceding paragraph would be perfectly acceptable.)
(Editor's note: Don used a spell-checker in the writing of this article.)