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.

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.