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.

COLUMN: Send Out a Search Party

By Tobin Barnes
I’ll admit it, I’m lost.

I’ve been trying to watch the TV show “Lost,” and I don’t know what the heck’s going on. How about you?

That doesn’t mean I don’ like the show; I kind of do. Many of the situations are interesting, sometimes even thrilling.

And I really enjoy a lot of the characters, like the feisty Kate, the inscrutable Locke, the weaselly Benjamin Linus, and the epithet-tossing Sawyer: “Hey, Dim Bulb, pay attention to the show, and it’ll all come clear.”

Okay, Sawyer, I do, but the show is maddeningly frustrating, nonetheless.

Granted, mysteries, by design, are supposed to circumvent tantalizing details to keep the audience guessing. After all, what’s behind the closed door is often what drives the plot. Matter of fact, keeping the door closed as long as possible is what a good mystery is all about.

However, with “Lost,” there’s like hundreds of closed doors with a few more new ones closed every episode. Only once in a while does a door ever open.

Not only that, but anything can and does happen:

People are killed, dead in their caskets (supposedly embalmed, to boot), and then, whizz-bang, there they are again. Even the characters are wondering what’s up and what’s down.

People are flying along in an airplane, and next thing you know, they’re waking up in a jungle next to a tropical waterfall. Were they delivered down a vacuum tube?

Or an island is sitting there in the ocean when somebody cranks a big clock mechanism, and then there’s nothing but ocean and a few vanishing concentric circles like someone dropped a pebble in a pond. Even God would be puzzled.

The situations, action, characters, and settings are so complicated, you need to take notes, and even that wouldn’t do you much good.

What you really need is a corporate management flow chart. But it would have to be so big you’d need to put it on your living room wall, and who needs that.

Of course, you can go to the Internet and all kinds of websites will try to explain things to you, but who wants to turn into a geek over a lousy TV show.

Heck, all hell could break loose on a typical episode of “Bonanza,” with horses rustled, banks robbed, and numerous shooting deaths (each of the brothers probably killed a couple hundred bad guys during the course of the series—not to mention the fatherly Ben’s ample notches), and still the whole thing would be wrapped up by the end of the hour.

The biggest mystery left unsolved on a “Bonanza” episode was what Hop Sing had been complaining about this time in his scatter-shot Chinese.

But with “Lost” and all its flash backs and flash forwards and Flash Gordons, the producers feel they need to schedule regular recap shows with explanatory subtitles to keep the audience glued together. They even have shows where a couple of the writers are featured to condescendingly spoon feed audience members plot points.

And I still don’t get it.

All those literature classes I took in college and I can’t follow a boob tube TV show. Maybe it’s because “Lost” isn’t literature. Maybe it’s abstract art instead. Or maybe it’s quantum physics disguising itself as a story. Who knows?

Nevertheless, for some strange reason, I keep watching it.

So what does that say about me?

Late Night

Monologue | Aired Thursday night on CBS: General Motors has reported a $6 billion loss. But once they get through bankruptcy they hope to go back making cars that nobody wants. So that will be nice.

Six billion dollar loss. You know what that means? Somebody is in line for a pretty good looking bonus.

Everybody is excited about the economy getting better and you kind of feel it everywhere you go. People have a smile on their face and a spring in their step. Here’s how you know the economy is actually starting to turn around a little bit. I saw Donald trump earlier today, and that thing on his head was wagging.

Pongers at Olivet Nazarene University

The parents who pay the tuition would be proud.

COLUMN: Good Dog Gone

By Tobin Barnes
Well, Matty’s gone now.

She was a good old dog. We couldn’t have asked for a better one. A real sweetheart. She fit the bill in every respect of the description, “good old dog.”

We had to make the tough decision to put her down. She had kidney disease and had lost a lot of weight in the last weeks. In many ways, the decision had been made for us. It was our final realization that had held us back.

You know a dog’s in tough shape when it won’t gobble down the things it used to enjoy or even kind of enjoy. My wife tried everything, including cooking things for her, to get her to eat. Some things would work for a while, but gradually, or sometimes quickly, she’d lose a taste even for them.

Not wanting her to continue in a sickly lethargic state, we thought we had no choice but to let her go. Even at that, with all the best intentions, it’s tough, as many of you well know. We had hoped that something would change for the better, but it didn’t.

In addition to the kidney problems, Matty had obsessively begun licking and chewing at her paws to the point that the hairs came off, all in trying to alleviate symptoms of what we were told was arthritis.

Yeah, it’s hell getting old. And it happens so fast for dogs.

It was just the other day that she was a romping goofy puppy, young and dumb, chewing on everything including the front door frame, for crying out loud.

But the dumb stage didn’t last long before she started becoming our good old dog. It doesn’t seem like we taught her very much, but she quickly learned on her own how best to live with us and, especially, what we could do for her.

However, no matter how much she manipulated us, she was always gentle and considerate.

She hardly ever barked, which is a godsend with any dog, unless maybe you’re training up a coon hound, which we most definitely weren’t.

Rather than barking at a door to get into the house like some dogs will, she instead—right from the start—came to a window or the sliding glass patio door and tapped on it with her claws. How thoughtful, if it’s possible for a dog to have thoughtful thoughts, and how much appreciated by us.

In this and many other things, she instinctively knew what we liked and didn’t like and tried to accommodate what she, in her dog mind, must have thought were our quirks.

But that didn’t mean she was a pushover.

After some years of spending her nights in the garage, she decided to unilaterally upgrade her amenities by heading over to the neighbors for better accommodations. Kindly people that they are, they began bringing her in to their home at night and allowing her to nestle by the stove or wherever was amenable.

We comfort ourselves in thinking that Matty had led a pretty good dog life. We know for sure that she contributed much to ours.

Yup, Matty was a good old dog.

Late Night

Monologue | Aired Thursday night on NBC: I’m glad you’re all in a good mood, but I’m a little bummed out today because I made a bad investment. So stupid! I opened a Chrysler dealership in Mexico City.

That’s the big story. Chrysler filed for bankruptcy today. But, actually, President Obama said Chrysler was forced to file for bankruptcy because even though the unions and the banks had agreed to make sacrifices, a small group of hedge fund managers refused to help out. Boy, where is that waterboarding when you really need it?

And during his speech to the nation last night, Obama told the American people they should cover their mouths when they cough to prevent the spread of swine flu. And today, he told Joe Biden to cover his mouth whenever he talks.
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