Monologue | Aired Tuesday night on CBS: You remember Dick Cheney, who was the Vice President for eight years with George W. Bush? And we didn’t think much about Dick Cheney and then one day he goes hunting, boy, that changed everything. Well now it turns out that for eight years, Dick Cheney had a secret hit squad to assassinate al Qaeda leaders. And the team was unbelievable. Here’s who was on the team: Lee Marvin; Jim Brown; John Cassavetes; Telly Savales; and Trini Lopez as Pedro. Read more…

COLUMN: Monkey see, Monkey don't

Image by Jared Kelly via Flickr

By Tobin Barnes
And here I thought I knew how to open up a banana.

Nope. Didn’t.

Turns out monkeys do it better.

Open a banana, that is.

Yeah, all this time I’ve been strangling them. For 57 years, going on 58.
Monkey see, monkey do. But I didn’t.

Huh.

Makes me wonder what else I’ve been botching up along the way. Makes me think there might be a better way of doing just about anything—tricks of the trade of life and such. Just didn’t know them.

Nobody’s told me or I haven’t figured them out for myself. Maybe I’ve been living in deprived ignorance, in a fool’s paradise, when things could have been so much better.

Of course, you’ve probably been in the same banana boat as me. After all, I’ve never seen any human doing it better than I’ve been doing it.

Like me, you’ve always taken a banana by that so-called stem, that little handy-dandy, pop-top handle thingy there, thinking that’s what it was made for, and then you’ve tried to break it off.

Sometimes it broke off pretty well—if you were lucky (I don’t even know if ripeness has anything to do with it), but sometimes it was like rubber, and you ended up mooshing up the top part of the fruit inside, trying to open that thing up. It turned into a mess sometimes. You had to bite it or pry it or bang it to get it to open.

Even when the stem broke off correctly, usually only one segment of the peel stripped down. You had to go back up to two or three more times to bring down the other sides.

Turns out that method was totally inefficient.

Monkeys would have laughed at you, if there had been any monkeys around.

In my case, I thankfully have had no monkeys around when I’ve opened a banana, castigating me with monkey laughter from behind my back.

On the other hand, if I had had a monkey or two in my life, I would have seen them peeling bananas the right way. (However, there’s no guarantee that I, like the average baby monkey, would have adapted.)

To learn how to peel a banana properly, I had to stumble upon a YouTube video. That’s right. It took cutting-edge technology to teach me something simple.

So what does that say about me? Or you? Or, more abstractly, the Universe?

Anyway, this guy gets on the video there with a bunch of bananas—can’t even see his face—and he says, like you, he’s always peeled a banana the wrong way; that is, until this girl taught him how to do it like a monkey. You see, monkeys want to get to the fruit right away, not mess around with it like a human.

So instead of breaking off the stem, monkeys pinch the bottom end of the banana, and, “Voila!,” as a French monkey would say, the peel breaks into two halves that can be quickly taken apart. And immediately the monkeys have their fruit, “Tout de suite.”

No fuss, no muss. No human biting, no human mooshing.

Can it be any simpler?

Well, if you need your instructions illustrated—after all, we’re not a bunch of dumb monkeys—search YouTube for “How to Open a Banana Like a Monkey.”

Oh, and one caveat: I’m thinking that if you’re dealing with a fairly green banana, you can pinch that sucker until the cows come home and it’s not going to open up. But then, even a monkey would know that.

Open a Banana the Right Way (Really)

Good Late Night

Monologue | Aired Wednesday night on NBC: In a recent study, the United States was ranked the 114th happiest country in the world. Then Sarah Palin stepped down. Now we’re at 17.

Since resigning as governor, many say Sarah Palin is now going to spend some time working on her memoirs. Alaskans are saying they can’t wait to start reading Palin’s memoirs and then quit halfway through. Read more…

COLUMN: Would I Do That, Too?

By Tobin Barnes
I was miffed after pulling into our post office parking lot.

Of course, the parking lot itself is a construction of fiendish design, seemingly planned to make patrons feel small and—insidiously, I think—cooperative.

Considering how much traffic the lot is called upon to handle, it feels nervously constricted. If it were human, it’d be all a-jitter with apprehension.

And I’m not letting any cats out of any bags. Anyone who has driven into it, with or without trepidation, will tell you the same.

First, you have to drive down a concrete slot the width of a toboggan run and the slope of a cereal bowl. That initiation is just the beginning.

After that, everything continues to be narrow and compact, like an old school cloakroom—interdependently with other patrons, you have to kind of sidle in and sidle out to get your business done. Because of the claustrophobic lack of space, you regularly have to wait for people to come and go before you can come and go.

There’s no free-wheeling openness here that would mimic the vast stretches of the Great Plains upon which the parking lot is located. There’s no haughty bravado of spaciousness that might boisterously beller, “We possess this land and we intend to use it fully.”

No, none whatsoever.

There’s no rugged individualism of the Old West possible here. Our rightful broad-shouldered American heritage has been denied to patrons of this post office.

Here, in this parking lot, you are a social insect who must abide with the rules of the ant farm. Someone, no one will ever know who, put the farm on too small a plot, perhaps intentionally, and now we ants are left dithering with the results.

And I get it. I understand the logic.

I’ve been illustrating, not complaining.

I can do the social insect gig with the best of them. I’ve always been ready and raring to conform. I kind of feel my comfort zone in that mode—just so long as the other ants keep in line, too.

But not so.

The other day when I pulled into the lot, carefully, as I’ve learned to do, I saw that, horror of horrors, someone was abusing ant farm rules. He or she was diagonally parked across three whole spaces—there can’t be more than twenty total—right there next to the door of the post office.

The car was a snazzy, late model, silver-grey Mercedes convertible (top down) with black leather interior.

Yeah, I knew what was going on right away.

He or she—let’s go with “she” this time rather than the default lumpish self-absorbed “he,” just for variety—was protecting their pricey baby from inadvertent dings so often liberally applied by the uncaring and unwashed masses in public parking lots across America.

And can you blame her?

If I were driving a late-model Mercedes, rather than my 2002 Toyota RAV, wouldn’t I also park so as to take up three spots, including a handicapped-accessible spot, as she did?

With my RAV I take any available spot. What’s another ding?

But when my RAV was new, and I was under the illusion that it always could be, I was much more careful. I’d park far away from any potential ding predators, no matter how far I had to walk to do my business. Of course, over time and a starter collection of dings, that impulse wore off.

But how about if I, theoretically speaking, had a nice late-model Mercedes, wouldn’t I take up three spaces, including a handicapped-accessible spot to protect my beautiful baby?

I hope not.

Would I, instead, wait, if necessary, for two spaces farthest away from the door and then walk the thirty yards?

I hope so.

Michael Jackson Tribute from Nature

COLUMN: Down side of a nature walk

By Tobin Barnes
In the greater scheme of things, this incident, admittedly, is going to seem ridiculously trivial.

Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, here goes.

We live on the rim of Higgins Gulch here in the Black Hills, a nice scenic place to be with the gulch below and a good-sized mountain, Crow Peak, off in the distance. The rim is also a good place to take a walk. Although others have begun building houses in the area, enough nature is still out there to make it almost like a hike.

Sometimes we walk this together, sometimes we go alone, sometimes the neighbor dog goes with us. On this particular day in early June, my wife headed out with only the neighbor dog as companion.

This dog is a typical young pup, literally all over the place, and that, of course, is part of his charm, or any pup’s charm. He’s also one of the fastest dogs I’ve ever been around. This combination of goofiness and speed make him an entertaining walking companion.

My wife and the dog had gotten about halfway through the walk when, quick as a flash, and this is more fact than cliché, he was onto something and in attack mode.

When she came upon the scene, it wasn’t pretty. The dog had its jaws locked onto a little fawn that had been hiding in the tall grass. A couple times the fawn escaped, but the dog was too quick for it, quickly snapping it up again.

She tried to get in between the dog and the fawn when she could, but she and the fawn were no match for the dog. Finally, she decided that the only thing she could do was grab the dog by the collar and drag it away from the fawn. She was a good mile away from our house, but she knew she’d have to lead the dog by the collar the entire distance or it would go back after the fawn.

I was out in the yard when they arrived. Immediately, she wanted to drive back and do what she could for the fawn, despite the fact that she had seen blood.

We were both concerned about interfering with nature—are dogs part of the balance of nature?—but decided to at least check it out. I figured the best-case scenario would be the doe coming back for the fawn and leading it away out of our responsibility.

We put the dog temporarily in the garage to keep it from following us. My wife got some old towels, a bucket of water, and some gloves and stowed them in our pickup. She also brought her cell phone and phone book to call someone like State Game, Fish, and Parks, maybe—heck, we didn’t know. They probably get a lot of calls like that, and they probably always say the same thing.

There isn’t a direct road to the location of the attack, though, as I said, it’s only a mile or so away. We had to drive about six or seven miles to get there by road.

Once there, the fawn wasn’t where she had last seen it. We started looking around, myself hoping my doe retrieval theory had panned out.

But no, I saw something lying on this rocky outcropping and knew immediately what it was, the fawn. I called My wife over and we walked up together and immediately knew the verdict. The fawn was dead. It’s eyes were open, but the light was gone from them. They were glazed over.

I nudged it with my foot, hoping for some kind of Lazarus thing, but the fawn remained still. A little bit of blood showed on its belly, though more damage than that revealed had obviously been done.

It was smallest fawn I’d ever seen, not even any white spots yet.

All in all, it made for a scene of disturbing pathos for two people raised on Disney and not much involved with the harsher side of nature.

Of course, it wasn’t the dog’s fault. He was just doing what dogs do.

And I guess the fawn was playing its part, too. Victim. Much sooner than we would have liked.

Cool Spinning Baseball Bat Trick

Kind of amazing.

COLUMN: Bicycling on a Beach?

The lighthouse at Harbor Town. Image via Wikipedia

By Tobin Barnes
Normally, a person doesn’t think of bicycles and beaches together.

Or anyway I’d never combined those two images—different spheres of activity, really. But it turns out that was just a lack of experience on my part.

I never thought I’d be much of a beach person in the first place. Not that I’m a ball of physical fire, but beach life always seemed pretty sedentary, and frankly, a little dull. I’ve since changed my mind.

We’ve been to a lot of places now where beaches border oceans, and I’ve come to enjoy and appreciate them immensely. Yes, as good places to sit around a little while and enjoy the rolling surf and the incoming and outgoing tides--but mainly as great places to take a walk.

Something primal about beaches appeals to a lot of people, and to me.

I’ve been on beaches where the sand was so soft it was like walking on pillows. And I’ve been on beaches that were literally strewn with shells and sea-life debris. And I’ve been on beaches that were mostly pebbles, rocks, and boulders.

But I’d never been on a beach where people rode bicycles until I’d gotten to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina where we spent an early summer vacation recently. Our hotel was just off the beach, the two separated by a line of sand dunes with sea oats growing on them.

So, yes, this was a sandy beach, but a hard sandy beach, particularly on the parts where the tide had come in and gone back out. Then it was so compacted and broad, it was fit for an airplane landing strip.

And, as I’ve indicated, this surface made it a perfect place to ride bicycles.

Rentals could be taken out from all kinds of places on the island, including our hotel.

The rentals we picked up were pretty stodgy things—nothing special whatsoever, just well-used, broad-handle-barred, fat-tired, single-geared, reverse-the-pedal-to-brake-it kinda clunky things. Pretty much like everybody else’s who was riding this beach. The standard model, I guess.

Nevertheless, these bikes were more than enough to make you feel like a kid again. But then bicycles do that. They were seemingly designed for kids and for people who don’t mind feeling like a kid.

The beach was so flat and hard that pedaling was supremely effortless.

We’d go for miles and miles before even noticing the distance we’d covered. We’d swerve back and forth, down by the water and then back up toward the dunes. We’d swerve around other bicyclers and walkers and people in beach chairs and on towels. It was like a dreamy clip in a movie.

No one seemed to notice all the two-wheeled traffic winding amongst the sunbathers, no one got upset. People riding bicycles was not only condoned, but expected. All the beachcombers probably did their share of riding, too. Seemed like these fuddy-duddy bikes were parked by many, if not most, of the houses, condos, and hotels on the island.

When we had our fill of riding on the beach, we’d turn inland and ride the miles of flat bike paths amidst the subtropical, almost jungle-like growth in the interior of the island—specifically, nearly 50 miles of bike paths, if I remember the tourist literature correctly. We didn’t do all fifty, but we biked a lot of them across the island.

So, bicycling on a beach?

Sure. Some places, it’s the thing to do.

Early Muppets and Wilkins Coffee

Good Late Night

Monologue | Aired Tuesday night on CBS: Thank you very much. Welcome to the “Late Show,” ladies and gentlemen. Now, when I call your name, please come forward and pick up your apology.

I want to get through this as quickly as possible so you folks can get to the “Fire Dave” rally.

It’s nice that people hate me who are no longer just part of my immediate family.

My son, you know, he’s telling everybody at school that his father is Conan. Read more…

COLUMN: Time Takes a Holiday

By Tobin Barnes
Let me tell you a tale of woe. We were taking a trip to South Carolina a couple weeks ago when time became mushy. And let me tell you, you don’t want your time to get mushy like ours did.

It all started at the Rapid City Airport. Our last travel adventure, The Trip to Nowhere, had started at that airport, too. That one had also ended there. Matter of fact, this current South Carolina trip I’m talking about was actually the fulfillment of a South Carolina trip that had abruptly ended in the blizzards of April. Then the Rapid City Airport closed due to bad weather, despite the fact that we had snow-shoed--among other things--to get to that airport on time for our flight.

If you note a certain bitterness so far, good--that tone will continue in spades.

Anyway, it’s while we’re waiting for our second attempt to fly to South Carolina that time got mushy. We and our fellow travelers had boarded the plane in good order, stowed our baggage, and gotten settled when the captain told us to get back off the plane. Apparently, a runway construction delay in Denver made them unable to receive our flight from Rapid City. Rather than sit and wait on the plane, we would get off to sit and wait in the terminal. This would be more comfortable, and “it shouldn’t take long.”

It shouldn’t, but it did. In the mean time, a guy sitting behind us in the waiting area decided to make a totally meaningless cell phone call. Why do I call it meaningless? Because I was subjected to hearing every word of it, as was everyone else in the surrounding area, given the human propensity to talk louder into a cell phone than is necessary, particularly in public. And let me assure you--that conversation was totally meaningless. But that’s a topic for another day.

Eventually, we were told to board the plane again. And we were doing just that when we were told to stop boarding the plane. The problem in Denver evidently still hadn’t been resolved.

Well, we’re back in the terminal yet again, but “it shouldn’t take long,” and the ticket agents would reassign us new connecting flights for the connections we were going to miss in Denver.

Now “long” is a relative term. When a criminal is sentenced to life imprisonment, that’s long. But when a “not long” airport delay causes a missed connection, that can also be long, as you will soon see. Yes, time had begun to get mushy.

Once in Denver, we found our new, later connection to Dallas, the second leg of three on our trip to South Carolina, and boarded without any reboarding rigamarole. But be assured, this was not the beginning of a happier time. We were now trapped in a vortex of mushiness that would last at least six hours. I eventually became so slap-happy I’m not sure of even that figure, what with the time change and all.

Ever spent six hours sitting in a little uncomfortable airplane seat when you thought you were going to spend less than two hours in it? Don’t. It will fathom the depths of your psychological inadequacies.

Because of the reassigned connection, we weren’t even sitting next to each other, and therefore unable to carp upon our misery to a familiar ear. What’s worse, I was stuck between two burly guys named Bubba.

Things really started going to heck when the pilot told us there was a thunderstorm over Dallas so our takeoff would be delayed a few minutes. I’ve always thought of “few” meaning three or four...at the outside maybe five. His few minutes was more like a half hour. The mushiness was continuing.

After we finally took off and were flying for a while, the pilot gets on and says the storm didn’t move on as fast as expected, so we were going into a holding pattern over Wichita Falls to wait it out. But it shouldn’t take “long,” maybe 15 minutes.
Yeah, there’s that word again. We ended up holding for more than a half hour when he gets back on and says the unplanned delay was using up our fuel, so we’d have to land in Oklahoma City to refuel, but it shouldn’t take “long.” We’d be first in line.

As you have probably guessed, not only did it take long--we were evidently last in the refueling line--but after gassing up and taxiing out for take off, the pilot gets on and tells us things were still fouled up in Dallas because a big backlog of planes still had to land after the storm delay. So we’d have to sit on the tarmac there in Oklahoma City until things cleared out. “Shouldn’t be more than a half hour.” Turned into more like an hour.

He also said not to worry since all the planes coming into Dallas had been delayed, so our connecting flights would probably still be there for us once we got in. Uh huh.
Of course, as you have probably also guessed, ours wasn’t. It had been “long” gone in the mushiness of time. I hope that’s the last night I spend in Dallas.

Good Late Night

Monologue | Aired Thursday night on CBS: Here’s big news from the world of TV. And I don’t know if you guys are ready for this or not. If you have an old TV, tomorrow, it won’t work unless you digitalize it. You’ve got to get a converter thing and a lot of people are confused about this. For example, earlier today, John McCain wanted to know after the conversion, will his TV dinner still work.

You folks been following the Iranian elections? Well this guy, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he’s running for re-election. Have you seen this guy? This guy looks like the kind of guy that tries to get to you buy a cell phone you don’t need. You know what I mean?

He looks like one of those guys that would be wearing a Members Only jacket.

He looks like one of those guys they drag away every week on “Dateline”, you know what I mean?

Boy, here’s a story that won’t go away. Miss California - remember Miss California? Got herself in a lot of trouble, shooting her mouth off. Gee, I wonder what that’s like.

Well, now, Miss California’s been fired. Don’t worry. President Obama said he will announce a replacement within a week, so that will be good.

Well, it’s been a busy week here on the late show. Earlier in the week, I made some jokes that upset Sarah Palin. And I was telling jokes about her family and stuff. She got really upset. And I think everything’s fine now. I think everything’s going to be great because she called today and offered to take me hunting.

COLUMN: Let's Exchange Hundreds of Text Messages

By Tobin Barnes
IDGI.

That’s texting lingo for “I don’t get it.”

And I really don’t. Texting is totally beyond me.

Novelist William Gaddis once said, “There have never in history been so many opportunities to do so many things that aren’t worth doing.” Texting was invented to prove this statement.

Admittedly, I’m normally about as personally communicative as any given trash can. My wife asks me what I’m thinking about, and usually I say, “Nothing.” For all she knows, I could be Forrest Gump with little more than a barely audible electronic buzz active in my brain.

But still. Where does the need to constantly text other people come from? IDGI.

Okay, maybe my old fogey is emerging here. But really, I love much of the new technology. Oftentimes, I’m an early adopter—with, that is, the very notable exception of cell phone key punching. ISDGI. It’s not for me.

But evidently, it very much is for millions of others. And rabidly so. Especially amongst teenagers.

The statistics are alarming, as revealed in the recent New York Times article “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” by Katie Hafner:

“American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.”

Eighty messages a day! Holy mackerel! And that’s the average. Some kids are routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.

When do they find time to do anything else? Like, for example, school work.

“They do it (texting) late at night when their parents are asleep,” says Hafner. “They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.”

Behind their backs? Till their thumbs hurt? In my classroom?

Could be. I’m not naive enough to think my classroom would be immune from this cancer.

The explosion of texting has arisen from the typically unlimited texting allowances many cell phone plans carry.

In the article, a California chemistry teacher, Deborah Yager, said she anonymously surveyed her students to find that most of them text during class.

“Annie Wagner, 15, a ninth-grade honor student in Bethesda, Md., used to text on her tiny LG phone as fast as she typed on a regular keyboard,” the article reported. “A few months ago, she noticed a painful cramping in her thumbs.”

Annie said that like most, her school doesn’t allow cell phones to be used during class, but “she could text by putting it under her coat or desk.”

What if all this skill and energy were channeled into academics? We wouldn’t be twentieth in the world by almost every measurement. We can only hope the students in India and China and Japan also catch the texting fever to level the playing field.

I went to a text translation site. Here’s an example of text lingo our kids can crank out better than a Spanish lesson:

“luvU nt bec of hu UR , bt bec of hu Im wen I am with U”

For you text-illiterate fogies like me, that translates to this:

“I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you”

Maybe we’ve come to the point where almost every thought that pops into our mind can now be shuttled almost instantaneously to someone else’s mind.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

I doubt it.

Is this stuff Brave New World or Freak City?

I’m betting on Freak City and hoping it eventually dies a lonely death like the once ubiquitous CB radio.

"We Just Took Out Half the House"

Seinfeld on Gadgets

COLUMN: Everybody's got a gimmick

By Tobin Barnes

The last two books I’ve read have been epistolatory novels.

Uh huh, go ahead and chew on that for a while. Maybe you can figure it out.

Yeah, it’s English teacher talk. Kind that kinda drives you nuts. But that’s okay. Plumbers, doctors, and mechanics like to dazzle me with their talk, too. Here I’m just dazzling back.

Everybody’s got to have his arcane terminology, even if he’s living on the street. There’s got to be something you know that others don’t, or what’s the point of conversational slight-of-hand?

Anyway, the point is that I really like the two epistolatory novels I just read, even though I’m admittedly dragging the explanation out a little bit. It’s another thing English teachers do, especially for those who don’t like English.

An epistolatory novel is one where the story progresses through letters written by some or most of the characters. (I can imagine some people thinking, “Okay, shoot me now.” Sounds about as attractive as getting your teeth pulled while the dentist peppers you with arcane tooth jargon, and there you are with his fingers in your mouth, hoping he shuts up and gets on with it.)

Yeah, an epistolatory novel is one of those novels. Everybody’s got a gimmick.

But in these two, the gimmick works; that is, if you graciously extend literary license, which you are supposed to do anyway--if things aren’t too farfetched--even with, and maybe especially for, the greats like Shakespeare.

The two novels are “Augustus” by John Williams and “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Annie Barrows.

If the titles seem a strange juxtaposition (another English teacher word) of length and taste, so be it. But the fact that the last two books I’ve read are both told in letters is totally coincidental. I’m not that pretentious to go out seeking, like some doctoral candidate researching an obscure thesis, epistolatory novels, specifically.

“Augustus” is--you guessed it--about Caesar Augustus, or as he was known before being elevated to godhood, Octavian.

I’ve always been a freak for stories about the Romans, and Augustus is, for me, the most interesting of them all. His canny and daring rise and then hold on ultimate power is about as Machiavellian (whoops, another one) as those stories get. And the letters shooting back and forth amongst prime participants lends an official immediacy to the proceedings.

Now, of course, Roman biography isn’t for everybody, but I think most readers would like “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.” It’s an enjoyable combination of light-hearted, typically over-friendly, letter-writing banter skillfully interspersed amongst serious, heart-wrenching, but still uplifting story-telling about the Nazi occupation of the English isle of Guernsey during World War II.

Wow, what a mouthful!

But it’s also about as close as I can come to accurately describing this minor marvel of a novel, and that, strangely enough, is a great compliment.

The intricate weaving of thoughts, opinions, and narration through the characters’ letters is mesmerizing. The story of a courageous and feisty young woman confronting adversity accumulates satisfyingly along with a nice rounding-out of the letter-writing characters.

Best thing, you don’t have to be an English major to like it.

By the way, Guernsey is one of the channel islands between England and France, but closer to France, though the people are English. And by the way, a potato peel pie is doubtful confection of sweetened potatoes covered with a potato-peel crust made in Guernsey during the hardscrabble Nazi occupation years.

Like a lot of things in the book, it was the best they could do.

{Part 2} President Jokes @ White House Correspondents Dinner

{Part 1} President Jokes @ White House Correspondents Dinner

Some pretty darned good lines.