The Tempest is One year old....Thanks!

One year ago today I began The Tempest. I have offered up 112 opinionated rants on everything from parenthood to politics, from college football to religion, which in some parts of the country are the same thing. Amazingly, this space has generated over 8,500 page views. In the great blogosphere, I’m sure that amounts to a pimple on the backside of Jabba the Hutt, but to me it’s amazing. What’s even more amazing is the number of those page views that have originated in places like Russia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. Really? I would think that my brand of humor would get lost in the cultural mileau of the Balkans, but what do I know. There is no accounting for taste.

Anyway, Just thought I would make note of this literary anniversary, and thank those of you who have bothered to read what I have written. It has been therapeutic for me to publish abroad a small fraction of the chaotic thoughts ricocheting back and forth inside my head. Perhaps some of them should have been left up there, but this format comes without the one thing it surely needs the most…an editor. I will continue writing in 2012, hopefully about the many happy surprises to come. If 2012 proves that the Incans were right and it IS the end of the world, you can read about it here first since I won’t be participating in any end time scenarios that don’t involve Jesus.

Thanks again for reading and have a nice day.

Top Ten Movies of All Time

Today I’m taking the family, along with a bunch of other great people to see the War Horse. I am so pumped. Expectations are high because it’s Spielberg, and because I’ve read so many great reviews..etc. Anyway, it’s gotten me to thinking about the answer to this question…”What’s the greatest movie of all time?”

It is an entirely unfair question, on par with…”which of your children do you like best?” Movies come in all shapes and sizes, comedies, action films, historical dramas, so it’s an almost impossible question to get to the bottom of. However, it’s also a question that involves opinion, and I’m loaded with opinion. So, for your reading pleasure, I have compiled my list of the top ten movies of all times. I’m cheating in one respect since they will appear in random order. The best I can do is the ten best, picking one of these as the best of all time would cause me severe intestinal distress. Feel free to rip my picks and think that I am a total idiot for leaving out one of your favorites. And yes, a list of one’s favorite movies does reflect well on one’s intellectual and personality bearings, so feel free to judge me.

Again, in no particular order…

Casablanca 1942 Humphrey Bogart

12 Angry Men 1957 Henry Fonda

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 1969 Paul Newman, Robert Redford

The Godfather 1972 Marlon Brando

Rear Window 1954 James Stewart, Grace Kelly

Saving Private Ryan 1998 Tom Hanks

The Searchers 1956 John Wayne

Vertigo 1958 James Stewart

Patton 1970 George C. Scott

The Godfather Part II 1974 Al Pacino

Honorable mention: Sleepless in Seattle, The Sound of Music, 3:10 to Yuma, Schindlers List, The Shawshank Redemption, and A Beautiful Mind

Cynicism is no fun

I just finished reading a 5000 word article about the inbreeding going on between Washington and Wall Street. It details the ugly relationships that first led to the financial crisis of 2008, and now continues in the Presidential race of 2012. Why, you might ask, would I read such a long and depressing story of political corruption? Primarily, as an investment advisor, it’s my job to gather as much information as possible in order to make sense of it for my clients. But on a deeper level, I suppose I just can’t help myself. I feel inexorably drawn to this sort of story. It validates what I intuitively know to be true, that is that the “system” is broken, and that a small group of people at the top who pay $25,000 for a bottle of wine have rigged the game.

So, you might also ask, does that make you an Occupy Wall Street believer? Hardly. The kids in New York want the politicians to fix things, to level the playing field with some redistributive scheme. What they don’t get is, the people at the top sipping $25,000 cabernet sauvignon ARE politicians. It’s like flipping the keys to your brand new Bentley to your drunk teenage son and saying, “be careful.” The election of 2012 will present America with a choice between probably Mitt Romney, he of Bain Capital and a Wall Street contact list a mile long, against the incumbent President Obama, whose 2008 campaign was financed heavily by Goldman Sachs, and whose entire administration is populated by Wall street veterans from William Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and Michael Froman, to Tim Geithner. We have to decide between the guy who is already bought and paid for, and the guy who is about to be.

So, what does this belief make me? At the moment it has succeeded only in making me a cynic. I realize that cynicism has no logical future as a belief system. I also know that nobody likes a cynic. But right now it’s all I’ve got. I survey the political landscape of our country and see little cause for optimism. The Tea Party’s heart was in the right place, but it got taken over by too many weirdos, the sort of people who think that the John Birch society was on to something, the sort of people who confuse the gift of gab with eloquence, the sort of people who think Glen Beck should run for office. The Occupy people are just plain creepy, with their public defecation, silly sloganeering about being the 99%, and personal hygiene issues, it’s hard to take them seriously. And any political movement which has as it’s preferred solution a further and more radical empowerment of government, has badly judged the historical moment.

I believe that everyone in Washington has been corrupted, everyone in Congress, everyone in the White House and everyone on K Street. At this point we couldn’t possibly do any worse if we sent all of them home , stripped them of their pensions, and replaced them randomly from the phone books of each congressional district. I now quote from William F. Buckley..” I would rather be governed by the first 500 names from the Boston phone book, than by the entire faculty of Harvard University.” How’s this for a campaign slogan…” I have no government experience and I promise to leave Washington forever once my term expires. But I’ll work as hard as I can to figure out what’s wrong with our Country and fix it if I can. If I can’t at least I’ll do no harm.”

He’s got my vote.

My Walmart Experience

My Dad just turned 87. He has gotten to the point where tying a tie is problematic. Recently, he has resorted to wearing mock turtlenecks with a sports coat to church on Sunday, and that’s fine. But for a man born in 1924, going to church in a turtleneck doesn’t feel quite right. It’s kind of like going to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt. So yesterday I set out to find my father a couple of clip-on bowties. First stop, Men’s Warehouse.

My go-to place for clothes had a very limited selection of clip-on bowties, that is, they had one color…black.. and shiny tuxedo black at that. The sales guy pointed out their tremendous selection of regular bowties, all the latest designs and colors. But each of them came with a 5 page instruction manual in three languages explaining how to actually tie the thing. If I couldn’t figure it out, an 87 year old man with arthritic fingers had no chance. From there I drove to Khols and then Dillard's with no luck. A perky sales girl in Dillard's pointed out that she was sure that Walmart would have plenty of clip-on bowties. “They’re a clip-on sort of place,” she explained. I thanked her and headed out to the parking lot vowing that there wasn’t enough money in the world to make me go to Walmart on December the 22nd. My Dad was just going to have to get over his Turtleneck issues. But, as is always the case with everything concerning my parents, guilt soon attacked me with rude menace. For the first time since the great Christmas light emergency of 1996, I would shop at….Walmart.

At the front door I was greeted by a kindly old man who called me “Champ” and asked if I needed any help. I nodded nervously and asked where the men’s clothing section might be. “ Easy..walk ‘bout two football fields down this aisle and when you get to the Snuggie display turn right. You can’t miss it.” Walking down the aisle was like being transported to the mail room at the United Nations. There was an adorable Thai family, an angry looking Mexican woman with two screaming children in tow, a stunningly beautiful Russian girl with fingernails longer than my fingers. Mixed in were an eclectic collection of white people, the kind that you see in the funnel cake line at the state fair. It was as if Bob Geldof decided to reshoot the “We Are The World” video using all living members of the Blue Grass hall of fame.

The men’s clothing section featured a staggering display of camouflage jackets, and blaze orange baseball caps. After I plowed my way through the blue jean racks I finally found a small display of ties. The clip-on bowties were all in a grab bag box marked with the everyday low price of $9.99. Unfortunately there were only three colors, velvet pink, uranium yellow, and toxic waste green. About the time I had decided that the bowtie thing just wasn’t meant to be, I felt the presence of a large man who smelled of bacon and had no regard for the American concept of personal space. “ $9.99!! Can you believe that?? One of the many reasons I hate this store. No wonder Bob’s Bowtie Emporium had to shut down. This place is sucking the very life blood out of America!!”

There’s a reason that the kids up in New York decided to Occupy Wall Street instead of Walmart. In New York all they had to worry about were a few over anxious cops. At Walmart, you get between a shopper and the $5.99 clearance box, you better be wearing shoulder pads and a protective cup. You can get cussed out in three languages before you make it out of the parking lot. Walmart in America is that crazy place where commerce meets the melting pot. They have dinner, go dancing, then commerce picks up the tab. But then, just before they head back to his place they have a raging knock down drag out right there in the 15 items or less line. I made my way slowly and cautiously back to the front door, and out through the parking lot, glancing right and left for stray felons. No bowtie, but I did survive to shop another day.

Two Christmas Memories

Every Christmas, I always recall the memories of Christmas past. I can’t help myself. For me, Christmas is nothing if not for the retelling. Maybe it’s because my memories are so hazy and so few. I remember nothing specific about Christmas, other than special presents I received, like my first bike and the genuine Colt45 cap-guns with leather holsters. But other than the occasional transcendent boyhood dream-gift, Christmas is all a blur. Except for two memories that remain bright and alive in my mind.

The first one happened around the time that I was 10. There was a family that had recently moved in down the road from us. I believe they were from St. Louis. They had three kids who I had never met. Actually I had never seen any of them. My Dad was the pastor of the local Baptist church and he talked about them at dinner one night. He told us that the father had lost his job back in St. Louis and had moved to Virginia to go to work someplace in Ashland but had soon lost that job as well. Now he was broke and looking for work, and didn’t have enough money to head back to St. Louis. Someone observed that they wouldn’t be having much of a Christmas.  I can’t remember who came up with the idea, probably my Mom, but we all decided that we would do Christmas for them.

  These people didn’t go to our church. Dad had just visited them and found out about their story. Before long my Mom somehow had gotten all of the kids’ clothes sizes and other important information like what kind of toys they would like. There has never lived a woman who was better at finding out important and secret stuff than my Mom. The CIA could learn a thing or two from Betty Dunnevant. Next thing you know we drove into Ashland on a shopping spree with our own money and some from a couple of other families who had gotten in on it. While we were in town we stopped by Western Auto and picked up a big cardboard box that had once held a washing machine. When we all gathered to wrap the presents,  I remember being so incredibly happy with it all, the joy of it, the feeling that I was in on something grand and holy.

  Once we wrapped everything, we then wrapped the huge box, stuffed all the other presents inside and then sealed up this miracle Christmas with a big tacky red ribbon. Then it gets hazy. I remember talking about how we should give this to them. Someone said that we shouldn’t present it to them in person, that we wouldn’t want to hurt the man’s pride, something about not letting the left hand know what the right hand was doing. I didn’t really understand it very well at the time. All I knew was, the plan that we came up with was the stuff of which dreams are made. At 10 years old on a bitterly cold Christmas Eve, I found myself in Fred Schwartz’s pickup truck backing down a dirt driveway with the lights off right around midnight. We quietly carried the box to their front porch and left it there with a note that said..”Jesus Loves You….Merry Christmas”. We never heard from them as far as I know. But that Christmas day was unlike any other for me. We spent all day with smiles on our faces, wondering what it must have been like when that poor, homesick family opened their front door.

The second memory was from a couple of years later. My Mom had stumbled upon a family that lived in a shockingly poor community called “sawdust lane”. I knew that the people unlucky enough to live there were the poorest of the poor in our county, but I had never actually met anyone from sawdust lane, let alone visited anyone there. But one December day my Mother took me with her to visit this family. I remember nothing about the visit other than the most disturbing thing I had ever seen up to that point in my life. The house had a dirt floor and the two little boys who lived there were barefoot outside in the middle of winter with feet that looked as dirty as rusted iron. My Mom and some other lady from church gathered the boys up, put them in the back seat with me and drove into Ashland. There we bought each of them a winter coat and two pairs of shoes. When the boys tried the shoes on they stumbled around awkwardly, falling and giggling until we realized that they had never worn shoes before. I remember the looks on their faces and the strange lump in my throat as I watched them delight in a package of three pairs of socks. In my world, I knew no one who was rich. We didn’t have much at home, but I had never seen poverty before in all of its ugliness until that moment. Mom never told me what she was thinking by taking me with her that day and she never asked me about it. But it made an impression that changed how I viewed the world and especially Christmas. I don’t ever think I’ve been as grateful as I was that year.

I enjoy Christmas every year. My first Christmas as a husband, the first Christmas with my children, they were all magical and glorious. But nothing has stayed with me like the two years over 40 years ago when I learned the joy and wonder of giving.

“ O, lay aside each earthly thing,
And with thy heart as offering,
Come worship now the infant King.
‘Tis love that’s born tonight.”

Alfred Burt

NEWS FLASH!! This just in.....

Browsing through the Wall Street Journal the other day I ran across a headline that caught my eye. "Study finds risky sexual behavior tied to heavy alcohol use." An institution of higher learning somewhere in the United States had just completed an exhaustive study of the sexual practices of males and females who drink alot. Shockingly, they found that increasing levels of inebriation led to increasingly bad decisons like "leaving the bar with someone who they normally wouldn't" and even "a greater likelihood of unprotected sex"................(crickets chirping).


What would we do without institutions of higher learning? The less enlightened among us might think that there was already a consensus going back, oh I don't know,...4 thousand years, that heavy drinking leads to bad decision making. Even those not well versed in human history have probably noticed that the theme of alcohol-fueled nitwittery has been a major plot device in movies and televisions shows since each of these mediums have been around. But sometimes it takes scientific studies to reveal these truths to the modern mind.

So, if I remember enough about the scientific method, I suppose there was a "control group" in this study. These were the 50 or so couples who were put in a bar and served water or ginger ale. I can also assume that the physical makeup of this control group was equal to the study group, ie..there were equal numbers of hot chicks and dogs, equal numbers of GQ guys and nerds. Then I suppose their behavior was closely monitored. When the study group got good and hammered I suppose that the scientists began to notice surprising couplings. Reasonably attractive men choosing decidedly ugly women for instance, providing confirmation of that country song lyric.."all the girls get prettier at closing time". Imagine the lyrics that could have been penned by Hank Williams had he had access to the findings of this study!


I did a google search of other ground breaking studies to come out of academia and found an impressive list:


"Study finds alarming connection between bike riding and skinned knees among elementary school students"


" New study finds connection between eye-rolling and heavy ironic sighing and teenagers."


"Study discovers that politicians do not actually deliver on many campaign promises"


" Study finds that men who tell their wives, when asked, that the dress does actually make them look fat, reported a marked decline in sexual activity."


......Oh, and this just in..."Women get really pissed when their husbands cheat, a new study suggests."

Blink

Heading to Nashville in the morning to see Patrick graduate. After this weekend I will no longer have kids in college. Kaitlin is in grad school and Patrick will be in 8 months or so, but their undergraduate days are over. For the past 6 years I have been writing large checks made payable to either Cedarville or Belmont and counting the days until the financial hardship would be over. Well, now its over and I'm relieved, but a little sad. One more stage of life comes to a close. Time to move on to the next thing. The pace of change has grown steadily faster recently, it seems. Just yesterday, we drove Kaitlin to Ohio and dropped her off in a cornfield to attend school 475 miles from home. Then a few days later we drove 600 miles away in a different direction to leave Patrick in Nashville and returned to an empty house. Now they're both all grown up and smart as whips. I blinked and it was over.


Pam and I will drive down with Vi and Jessica. Then we will meet Kaitlin and Jon down there, who are driving straight from Winston-Salem. Looks like its going to be rainy and cold. But it will be fun. Pam will cry. I will feel like crying but hold it together because, thats what I do. Then we'll head home and get ready for Christmas and more changes that I'm sure await us in 2012. Molly will be waiting for us when we come home. She will jump up and lick us and bring us a ball and act like she hasn't seen us in 10 years, just like she always does. Then I'll blink and there will be weddings and then grandkids someday. It's all good and right. Except the blinking.