Here’s a note that came in early this morning from 10th grader Bubby Spamden.

Hey Mr. C.,

Your friend Bubby here, just wondering if you or any of your blog people could think of a way for me to get beyond this terrible routine I’m in of always being held back.

I know you already know that I’m Wendell Wilkie High School’s “perennial sophomore” and that I’ve been in 10th grade for about 25 years now. I think it’s turned into kind of a tradition here to not let me become a junior. Every day I’m used as a scary example for the younger kids (work hard or you’ll wind up like Bubby) and as a point of pride by the older kids (sure I got a D, but I’m better off than Spamden). I don’t think the teachers even look at my homework anymore.

And my parents are in on it! This is their way to keep themselves young – they prevent me from growing up! As long as I’m still a sophomore in high school, they can belong to the PTA, hang out with the parents who are still good looking, and dodge the high cost of college.

I admit that I’m not crazy about moving on myself, but what I’m wondering is this – is it possible to regress? It kills me to find out that in some elementary schools, little kids are being given iPads! I want to go back to the 4th grade! Pleeeeeease? I wanna!

Really, why can’t I start over and have a cool education like that?

Your friend,

Bubby Spamden

I told Bubby you get the education you seek, and he should not attack his school district to fight his own failings, real or imagined. And going backwards isn’t an option. Wilkie High School has already courted disaster by keeping him in the 10th grade for so long. “No Child Left Behind” is an act designed specifically to prevent Bubby Spamdens from happening everywhere! At the very least he should threaten to take his case to state education authorities. That possibility might be enough of a lever to make something good happen for him this spring. That’s what I told him.

As far as being given an iPad is concerned – there is nowhere in the wide world of education where that particular gift is going to be given to you, Bubby. Sorry, but any librarian will tell you – as soon as you learn how to turn off the family filter, handing you a computer becomes a very risky business.

What’s the coolest thing you were allowed to use while you were in school?

There’s some good news in the headlines for car manufacturers. Although not all models have rebounded, there are signs of hope on the sales floors. As evidence, I submit an e-mail that came in late last night!

Hi everybody! Wally here, from Wally’s Intimida where you can get a great deal on a 2011 Sherpa – still the largest passenger car on the road and even moreso since so many of the other cars have gone tiny! And now is the perfect time to buy, because other people are buying too! Sales numbers for December 2010 are up and enthusiasm is contagious, so throw caution to the wind and plunk down some cash to start the New Year in a car big enough to make its own weather! That’s right, each Intimida Sherpa is like a geographical feature that affects air currents and cloud formation. We’re not kidding when we say the newest model is a butte! Park one in front of your house and see what happens! I’m betting your Sherpa can’t cause weather that’s any worse, and it might make things better!

People are also saying the minivan is cool again. That’s great for minivan lovers, but why try to jump on that bandwagon when it may have already left the soccer field? You know how trends are – by the time you catch on, it’s usually over. Remember – the SUV humiliated the minivan, and the Sherpa emasculated the SUV. So if you want to stay ahead of this curve of resurgence, go straight for the Sherpa right now! You can take it home this afternoon and by the time you have it broken in, it’ll be hip again!

Not that I ever thought the Sherpa had lost its hipness. But there was a time when a car as big as a mountain range struck some people as a bit over the top. And getting over the top of a Sherpa requires a lot, even for very tall people. But I know they’re being purchased and driven – all you need for evidence is to read those reports of birds being knocked out of the sky in Arkansas and Louisiana. What could possibly make that happen? Loud noises? Disease? What if those birds were hit by a car while they were still up in the trees? What kind of car could do that? Not a Mini Cooper, I can tell you that!

Americans are buying cars again! That new car smell is filling our noses with pride! Do your part and tower over the pack with a new Sherpa from Intimida – it’s a mighty big car!

Wally is always optimistic about the Sherpa, but it may be too big to catch on again. Though how many have lost money by assuming Americans desperately want whatever they’re looking at, but one size bigger?

What kind of product do you tend to buy on impulse?

Dear Dr. Babooner,

Last night we took the Christmas tree down and dragged it out to the curb to wait in a snow bank for the truck that will cart it off to some dreary compost site. I know that I shouldn’t anthropomorphize an evergreen tree, but I’ve seen too many stop action holiday cartoons and Disney movies to completely banish the thought that my Christmas tree has feelings and enjoyed being decorated and kept in the cozy bosom of our home for all those weeks! How could any living thing (it was still drinking water!) NOT sense the togetherness and joy of our holiday celebration, and feel included? If a family gathered around YOU and sang pretty songs and opened delightful gifts, wouldn’t you feel like an important member of the group? And wouldn’t you be shocked when those same people suddenly stripped you of all your bright baubles and tossed you out the door?
I can’t sleep. The truck will be here soon and I’m thinking of going back out to get the tree. I could bring it back in and put it in the basement. Nobody ever goes down there but me. But what will I do in the springtime?

Tormented Over the Tannenbaum

I told TOTT it is perfectly natural to have separation issues regarding the Christmas tree, but perhaps it is the end of the holiday season being mourned, not the tree’s possible feelings of rejection. If you must endow the tree with human emotions and attitudes, consider how it would feel to be chopped down and carted away from the only home you have ever known, then forced into a smelly container (your house), humiliated by being made to wear all those garish lights and heavy ornaments, all while being fed chlorinated water and forced to stand just feet away from a fire – your mortal enemy. Being put out on the curb, nude, was probably a Godsend for your tree. Which is not to suggest that the tree believes in God.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

That’s one way to write the date today, though some prefer 01/01/11, which I think is a bit fussy. Why go out of your way to tell people there’s nothing there? Let the nothingness speak for itself.

Apparently some feel 1/1/11 is a lucky alignment of numbers, and some couples have chosen to get married today to increase the likelihood that they will have a happy life together. And if both parties happen to think this wacky notion is a good idea, they probably will be happy together.

Some expect the year itself, 2011, to be about “getting things in order”, all because 2+0+1+1=4, and orderly, “universal” number. (1/1/11 ALSO equals 4!) Nice try “Universal 4” fans, but clearly you haven’t thought about the political imbalance in the 112th Congress, which will strive with all its might towards universal disorder if all the preliminary indications are correct. Did I say 112th Congress? 1+1+2+4! Egads!

People who are superstitious about numbers can become adamant about the importance of days like this. Later this year we’re bound to get some hand wringing over 11/11/11 – a preview perhaps of the hysteria surrounding 12/12/12.

The great thing about numbers is that they’re open to interpretation by people who want to prove something without any real facts to rely on. You know the famous line – “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” You can use numbers to say whatever you like, or infer what you can’t even bring yourself to say.

For instance, the world should have been extremely wary about my birthday, though everyone but the closest observers completely missed the cosmic significance of 10/4/1955.

How was it important? Let me count the ways.

If you add all those numbers up as single digits (1+0+4+1+9+5+5), you get 25. Twenty five is the number of players that can be carried by a professional baseball team, and 10/4/55 is also the date that the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first (and only) World Series. Ebbets Field was 25 miles away from the hospital where I was born!

That’s not all. If you add them as 10, 4 and 55, you get 69. 15 plus 69 is 84, which is the atomic number of Polonium, a very radioactive substance. It was also my jersey number for that one season I was on the high school football team, getting pummeled by a series big guys who outweighed my by an average of 84 pounds each. Polonium poisoning is very bad and can gradually, but quite certainly, kill you. What happened to me on the football field also felt like slow death. Coincidence? I think not

Finally, if you add the numbers of my birth date as 10, 4, and 1955, you get 1969, which is a year nobody wants to re-live. There you have it. Bad omens all around.

See? Numbers can illuminate the important relationships between things that scientific, fact-driven minds might see as totally unrelated!

Are you superstitious about numbers?

It’s New Year’s Eve!

I’m sure there are some who had a wonderful 2010. God bless them.

Many more will be happy to see it go. I will not carry fond memories of this year, though perhaps I should. It wasn’t all misery and disappointment – it just seems that way. And while each year can be said to have a distinct character, when you review it day by day it’s clear that on each trip around the sun you get a little bit of everything along the way, good and bad. The question is, what will you choose to dwell on?

There is a great temptation to slide over to the dark side. Here’s a pessimistic rhyme about the changing of the guard and the relentless, unpredictable variety of daily life, regardless of what year we say it is.

The Old Year’s toast. We’ll watch him hang.
The New Year’s here. And so’s the gang.

So Hail, Hail, Hail and hip hooray.
We’re glad the old one’s going away.

This new one owes us hopeful news.
Unending love and meager blues.

Though we’ll get both before it’s done.
From the year Two Aught One and One.

And one year hence as the sun goes down
We’ll run this fresh year out of town.

And find a new one to embrace.
Who’ll promise joy. And wreck the place.

Banish gloom and debunk defeatist bloggers!
Make an optimistic prediction for 2011.

I think of Jazz players as royalty in the world of musicians. They are a breed apart – not the best known and far from being the wealthiest, but there is an openness and a level of competence that is developed through playing jazz that doesn’t automatically come with your mastery of a different style of music. In other words, you can be a great rock and roll musician and still be kind of a dope. No news there.
To play well, jazz musicians have to be able to listen well. That discipline may be the thing that makes them, universally, the most pleasant and interesting people I’ve met in various radio studios through the years.

We lost one of our most scholarly jazzmen this week with the death of Dr. Billy Taylor. He embraced all those things that make the music great – knowledge, freedom and a love of collaboration. He also wore very large eyeglasses – possibly the biggest spectacles to be seen anywhere in public since the end of the 1970’s. But that’s another thing you automatically get when you become a jazz player – a level of comfort with the idea of being out of the mainstream.

Billy Taylor was a broadcaster too, and he was one of the rare ones who actually knew something. It case you haven’t figured it out yet, it is quite possible for a person to be on radio and/or TV a lot, like every day, without possessing any substantial knowledge or marketable talent. Dr. Taylor was an exception. He knew what he was talking about, and he had a passion for sharing it.

If you just want to her him play, here’s a short clip:

If you’d like to hear him discuss the music he loved, this is worth the time.

If you were going to be a Billy Taylor-like presence, introducing lay people to important concepts that guide something you love on an educational TV show, what would the show be about?

Here’s a late dispatch from enterprising freelance journalist Bud Buck, who in the best developing tradition of online media, makes his living re-reporting the work of other people. Bud’s note with this piece says he’s “trying a new, ground-breaking, personal style of reporting” that will make it necessary for me to double his usual fee.

When news broke that cave excavating scientists in Israel have identified 400 thousand year old remains from homo sapiens, I recognized the importance of the find right away. Previous research placed the earliest version of modern man in Africa just 200 thousand years ago. This find, if it bears up under further scrutiny, would double the length of known human history and might move the origins of man off the African continent completely. Amazing!

I rushed to find a reputable scientist who was also talkative enough to give me all the quotes I needed to write something that looked like a complete story. Alas, it’s a holiday week in the USA and even the archaeologists are at home with their families, or else stuck at the mall returning shirts that are too nice to wear in the field and not boring enough for use in the lab.

Reviewing the initial story from the Jerusalem Post, I noticed that the remains in question amounted to just eight teeth. Teeth! My dentist, Dr. Jim Jevitas, has an on-call “meet you anywhere” service designed for times just like this. I phoned him and he was pleased to rendezvous at a local coffee shop as long as I paid his standard holiday rates for a check up and light cleaning.

While he was setting up his dental tools and a very, very bright light that ran off a car battery he tucked underneath our table, I told Dr. Jevitas about the remarkable find in Qesem Cave, just 12 miles from Tel Aviv. The Doctor shocked me with the pronouncement that this sounded like the scientists had actually uncovered the site of one of the first suburban dentist offices.

“Patients always like it when you can give them free parking,” Dr. Jevitas said. “That’s human nature, don’t you think? Especially during a difficult procedure like getting a root canal, you don’t want to have to go plug a meter. I’m guessing that’s why they didn’t find this office right in the city. Open!”

I opened my mouth and the Doctor poked around my molars with a very, very sharp thing I couldn’t see. He muttered some things I didn’t hear clearly about my gums and flossing. My mind was reeling with images of a 400 thousand year old suburban dentist’s office. How did they numb the patients? What were the waiting-room magazines like? As soon as I had a chance I told him everything I knew about the remains. He was intrigued.

“Hmm. Interesting. The teeth were just lying there on the ground? That’s unusual. We put ours in a little drawer, but I suppose after 400 thousand years a lot of the furnishings in the office have worn out and even turned to dust. I’m guessing this ancient dentist didn’t work with many children, since the kiddies always want to take their teeth home to leave for the tooth fairy. I’ve heard of adults-only practices, but it’s no way to make money. Grown-ups are scaredy-cats and a lot of them won’t make an appointment. Open!”

I opened my mouth and the Doctor did some scraping and digging that made me almost as uncomfortable as the people at the table next to us. I had nearly enough material to make an article – all I needed was something possibly controversial – a quote casting a bit of doubt on the whole thing. After rinsing and spitting into the Doctor’s now-empty coffee cup, I told him the lead archaeologist on the project, Dr. Avi Gopher, was quoted saying “Further research is needed to solidify the claim.”

“Hmmm,” said Dr. Jevitas. “Dr. Avi Gopher sounds like a made-up name for an archaeologist. He is either a totally fictitious character, or a very patient man. Are you sure you didn’t read about this in The Onion?”

And then he shocked me again when two of the metal clasps on my boot contacted the posts of the car battery under our table. The very, very bright light went out, the coffee shop manager came over, and our meet-you-anywhere dental appointment was over.

Good news! I don’t have any cavities! This is Bud Buck!

I’m not sure I’ll pay Bud the extra money he wants for this story, though it does sound like the interview was a very expensive one to get. Still, it makes me wonder.

What interesting artifacts would a future archeologist find in the remains of your home?