What is Happening to Me???

Regular readers of this blog know of my opinions about television. You know that in my house it’s Pam who does most of the watching. She sits downstairs on the sofa, busy on her laptop, while simultaneously watching everything from cooking shows to CSI. In her defense, most of the time the television provides nothing more than background noise while she is busy doing something else. But my uses for the thing are more targeted and less frequent…sports and old movies.

However, since the kids left we have developed a nice routine whereby the two of us sit down together during and after dinner and watch a show from Netflix. Almost exclusively these shows have one thing in common, they are all British.

Our latest discovery is a delightful mystery series called Foyle’s War. But before that there was Sherlock, Mr. Selfridge and The Paradise. So, what’s going on here?

For most of my life I have been decidedly snobbish about “foreign” things. My kids will attest to this with universal eye-rolling. “Dad, you’re so provincial! It’s OK to like Honda Dad…the war’s been over for 70 years!!” Generally, my taste for foreign things was limited to the dead…Beethoven, Churchill, etc. But I guess I’m having a mid-life crisis or something because not only have I developed a love of Indian cuisine, now I’ve become enamored with British television. What’s happening to me??

Take Foyle’s War for instance. Here we have a rather straight forward mystery series that takes place at the outbreak of WWII in the sleepy coastal town of Hastings. Foyle is a police detective who is too old to fight so must stay at home and investigate murders during war time. He has a son in the RAF. He is a widower. He has a spunky 20 year old girl for a driver and a recent amputee as an assistant. They go about the business of bringing murderers to justice amidst the backdrop of total war. Many of the crimes are related to the war effort and therefore present ethical conundrums to our team such as, should our top ace pilot be sent to prison for a circumstance-drenched murder depriving the country of perhaps it’s best aerial fighter?

Aside from the thought provoking story lines, there’s Foyle himself. Calm, unflappable, polite and measured, with kind eyes and a soft heart, he always seems in control of himself no matter how horrific a scene he encounters. He happens to be a dead ringer for my long dead Uncle, John Dixon. Watching him think things through, slowly, with methodical calm is fascinating.

The one thing that all of these British shows seem to have in common is something that is sadly missing in many American offerings…intelligence. The storytelling pulls you along, makes you think without the need for the profane or salacious. There is a certain sweetness to some of the characters that makes you care about what happens to them. Even though each episode of these shows is generally 15 minutes too long, afterwards, you don’t feel as if you’ve just wasted 90 minutes, in fact you come away thinking you just might be a bit smarter for the experience.

Try saying THAT after an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. For sure American television does have its share of triumphs (Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Parenthood come to mind), but lately, it has been the Brits who have drawn me back to television.

How many days until Downton Abbey??

How Do I Know That My Wife Loves Me?

Pam and I are going up to Charlottesville today for the UVA vs. UR football game. We have friends, Rob and Dodie Whitt, who have season tickets. It will be hot and muggy with a strong chance of thunderstorms by game time (3:00) and Pam hates football about as much as ISIS hates infidels.

That’s not entirely true since she doesn’t actually want all football fans beheaded, but she can only maintain interest in any sporting event for about five minutes, bless her heart. Now that I think about it, that isn’t entirely true either. She loves figure skating. That’s a sport, right? Yes, we have spent many a winter evening together marveling at the grace and beauty of all those triple toe loops and Sal chows. Oh, and she does watch the Little League World Series because the boys are “so adorable.”

But that’s about it on the sports front. About the only thing she hates more than football is being hot. I speak here of the temperature, not her drop dead beauty. Being from Maine has instilled in my wife a thermostat that is permanently set on 70. Add sauna room humidity to the heat and she feels as if she is in Hell.

So, today she gets to look forward to her two least favorite things in the entire world! On a positive note, Dodie is one of her favorite people and always a blast to be around. There’s the tailgating part which gives her some food to prepare and organize. Who knows, by the time the kickoff comes around she might find that she has gotten swept up in the buzz, thrill and excitement of big time college football. No, wait…this is UVA we’re talking about, where the fans enter the stadium midway through the first period, leave at halftime and don’t return until the fourth quarter, it at all. These are fans who instead of tearing down the goalpost in a fury of exultation, sing songs after each score.

My University of Richmond Spiders, of Division 1-AA fame will do our best to compete, and if the past is any teacher, will give the Cavaliers a battle. I’ll be wearing my Spiders gear, while Pam will be in denim shorts and a sleeveless orange top, not because she is a Cavalier fan but because all of her red things are “just too hot!”

I will thoroughly enjoy myself. Rob and I will talk sports all afternoon. Rumor has it that he has a Cuban cigar waiting for me.

After this day I will owe my wife BIG TIME.

Bob and Maureen. A Love Story.

I have refrained from comment on the Bob and Maureen McDonnell trial largely for two reasons. First, I wanted to wait until a verdict was reached, and second, it was just too depressing. Here we had for the first time in history the very real possibility that a Virginia governor would be convicted of a felony and sent to jail. For a state who boasts of having had the likes of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Tyler in its governor’s mansion, this was a severe blow to our reputation for good governance. But now that a rather emphatic guilty verdict has been reached, a few observations are in order.

Let me here confess that I have not followed the trial very closely. I basically relied upon summaries of testimony in the online version of the paper every two or three days. So I’m sure someone will feel the need to enlighten me about some aspect of the whole ordeal of which I am unaware that may help me to understand the proceedings in a new light. Having said that, as a husband and father I find it inconceivable that the governor chose a legal strategy that involved kicking his wife of 38 years to the curb and baring every sad detail of their twisted relationship for all the world to hear, including his five children.

Mr. McDonnell could have pled guilty to one felony corruption charge, which would have spared his family and us the spectacle of this trial. He would have been sentenced to a perfunctory prison term of two or three years in a minimum security prison and probably have served six months. Upon leaving jail he would have still had some measure of dignity left.

But something happens to men and women whom we exalt to positions of power in our system of government. They begin a slow withdrawal from the very people they are elected to serve. Before long they are surrounded by a coterie of yes men and career government people. They begin to live an estranged life where their day to day existence starts to reflect their “specialness.”  Suddenly, men and women of better than average ethics and values have their judgment clouded by privilege. In the case of the McDonnells, they became convinced that having a “family friend” who provides them with lavish gifts to the tune of $150,000 is perfectly acceptable. The appearance of evil becomes invisible to them. Amazingly, behavior which would be pounced upon if discovered in a political rival becomes routine, to the point where Bob McDonnell, once the scourge of big-government malfeasance, can convince himself that accepting large financial favors from a hustling businessman was perfectly fine for a sitting governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Such is the debilitating seductiveness of power.

Poor judgment aside, Bob McDonnell’s legal strategy makes his financial misconduct seem like child’s play. Apparently, he thought it appropriate to sacrifice his family’s privacy and reputation upon the altar of his own vindication. Anything to avoid a day in prison, we are told. The idea was to convince the jury that the governor’s marriage was so irretrievably broken and dysfunctional that conspiracy was impossible. By revealing Maureen’s volatility and nastiness, perhaps jurors would feel sympathy for the heart broken governor. The jury was having none of it.

I watched his children marching into the courthouse, a beautiful legacy for any father, and I can’t even imagine what this has done to them. Their lives have been laid bare, and their wounds will never heal. Their father will serve his time. He will no doubt be a model inmate. After a few years he will get out. He will write a book, finally getting that big payday he has always coveted. Some high powered law firm on K Street will eventually hire him. He will survive this. His children will not.

When my wife and I brought two children into this world, we inherited a lifelong obligation to protect them from harm in so far as it was in our power to do so. Obviously there are many things we can’t protect them from. Skinned knees and broken hearts are unavoidable consequences of life, over which parents are powerless. But we can protect them from the big stuff, from having their family’s dirty laundry paraded in front of the world. That much we can do, even if it means doing time, even if it means our own humiliation.

For a man who made a political career on family values, who advertised his beautiful family like so many trophies in his commercials, and for a man who, if he is to be believed, still views Maureen as the “love of his life,” didn’t hesitate to throw her under the bus to save his own skin.

Like I said, depressing.

STEP ONE: Borrow the fingers of a five year old!!

I actually did some work on Labor Day. My job was to replace the burner elements of my gas grill. My grill is probably 6 or 7 years old, and I’m one of those guys who is grilling something all year long. I’ve worn the thing out.
 

So, there I was wearing yellow dish washing gloves, no shirt and plaid shorts, with sweat pouring off the end of my nose, peering under the hood of my Commercial Series 2000. There was a half of an inch of black sludge lining the walls. In the catch pan underneath was a two inch glob of meat drippings that had to be scraped off with a hard metal spatula. The actual cooking grate had its own greasy lining, mostly on the underside, the residue of a thousand chicken breasts, jumbo shrimp, New York strips, hamburgers, hotdogs, pork chops and the occasional pork tenderloin. I had bought some sort of environmentally agreeable citrus-based natural cleaner to spray on all of this mess and was skeptical of its value. There’s a reason that old fashioned oven cleaners were “environmentally disagreeable.” Because they could strip the chrome off of a trailer hitch in two seconds! You either wore gloves when you used that stuff or you lost fingers.

I was pleasantly surprised. I sprayed the stuff all over everything and waited two minutes like the directions suggested. The smell was an unholy mixture of rotten oranges and ammonia. But after two minutes and a little elbow grease, the black sludge started melting away like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.

After all of this cleaning it was time to install the “universal elements” which were advertised as “easy to install.” Like most advertising, this claim proved to be bogus. Actually they would have been easy to install if my hands were the size of a five year old child’s. There was a crucially important step in the process that required you to line up the tiny holes on the two telescoping tubes. These tiny holes must be aligned because if not there would be no holes through which the gas flames could travel, turning your gas grill into a giant metal eunuch. To accomplish this vitally important step in the installation, I was provided with a single screw so ridiculously small, so agonizingly tiny that to merely pick it up required the fine motor skills of a concert pianist. I’m not kidding. Here are some pictures as proof:

Needless to say, this procedure took half of the morning. Luckily, I have some of those tiny screwdrivers, the ones you use to repair eye-glasses. I felt like I was diffusing a bomb. There I was, hands shaking, reading glasses trying not to slip off the end of my sweating nose, struggling mightily to thread a quarter of an inch screw into a sixteenth of an inch hole without completely losing my religion. The first one took twenty minutes. Each of the next two took only slightly less time.

Finally it was all done and working like a charm. Time to take it for a test drive.

I grilled up some brats, tomatoes and fried bread and it was a magnificent triumph.

Totally worth it! 

Autumn Possibilities

Partly cloudy, 94/72. That’s our forecast here in Short Pump for the next few days. Not that we can really complain since this has been the best summer ever. Still, mid-nineties and humid is unpleasant whenever it shows up, especially over a holiday weekend.

This Labor Day has been a bit of a bust in the Dunnevant house, which is my fault. It snuck up on me and I made no plans. As a result, Pam and I have been knocking around the house resting and eating and whatnot. Whenever we thought about going somewhere, we would walk outside, get blanketed by the warm embrace of humidity and think better of it. You know it’s bad when it only takes ten seconds for your sunglasses to fog up and you’re only in the garage!

We are ready for Autumn in the worst way. When the leaves start to change and the temperature drops 25 degrees, I intend to make up for my lack of a Labor Day plan, by taking some weekend trips. There’s apple picking and the Shenandoah Valley. There’s Patrick in Nashville, Kaitlin and Jon in Columbia. There’s even the beach, an underrated October destination. There’s also the Smokey Mountains, a sort of mid-point between us and our scattered adult children. A cabin rental over a long weekend might be very nice. Then there’s also that most elusive of trips…the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown, New York. It’s quite a drive because it’s essentially in the middle of nowhere, but I’m told that the best time to go is in October. The leaves are stunning.

So, I have my work cut out for me. So many destinations, so little money.

Better fix that.

Something You Can Count On

On this last day of August, it’s reassuring to be confronted with a few unchangeable truths of life. In a world filled to the brim with doubts and shifting narratives, it is quite comforting to be reminded that some things actually never change.

1.     The SEC remains dominant.

2.     Al Gore remains a bloviating idiot.

In the four marque match ups between SEC teams and top out of conference opponents, the conference once again proved its medal, Alabama beating West Virginia by 10, Georgia annihilating Clemson by 24, Ole Miss whipping Boise State by 22, and LSU spotting Wisconsin a 24-7 lead before storming back in the second half to win by 4. Just like death and taxes…

On the seventh anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize(?) acceptance speech in which he famously declared, “The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff.” The former Vice-President, doing his best imitation of a scientist continued, “It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven ears…seven years from now.” For those of you doing the math at home, that would be the summer of 2014. Fortunately for the planet, Al was spectacularly wrong. Satellite photographs just released by the University of Illinois’ Cryosphere project, show that the North Polar ice cap sits at a whopping 5.2 million square kilometers, its largest mass since 2006 and an increase of 43%, or an area the size of the state of Alaska, in just the last two years. An actual scientist, Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology deadpanned, “It would appear that the Arctic sea ice death spiral seems to have been reversed.”

I’m not expecting any comment coming from the 10,000 square foot, 9 million dollar, Gore family compound. I’m sure that Al is flying somewhere in his private Gulfstream to make a $250,000 speech decrying the defilement of the planet by other people’s 10,000 square foot homes and private Gulfstreams. The only thing that has consistently been greened by Al Gore over the past ten years is his bank account. But God bless him, now that he is safely removed from the levers of power, he has finally discovered the wonders of capitalism.

Better late than never.

Offended? Move to Vermont.

I’m sure that by now, most of you have heard about the great bacon kerfuffle up in Vermont. It’s been all over the Internet, but just in case you missed it, I’ll recap:

The proprietors of Sneakers Bistro posted a sign outside their establishment that read, “Yield for Sneakers Bacon!”  

Soon, an Internet chat room called the “Winnoski Front Porch Forum” was visited by one single solitary complainer who stated her case that as a vegan who lived in a Muslim household, the sign personally offended her. Almost immediately, the owners of the Sneakers Bistro removed the sign. The City Manager of Winnoski practically broke her arm  patting herself on the back over this beautiful display of “inclusiveness” thusly,  “Winnoski is a diverse community and that’s the way we like it. It’s uncomfortable, but discomfort can be a source of growth, not just a source of anger and frustration.”

Ahh yes, growth. The fine folks in Vermont have now defined for the rest of us what it means to be a part of a “diverse community.” Apparently it means assuring the God-given right of every citizen to never be offended.

I’m not exactly sure what matrix the City Manager uses to measure Winnoski’s diversity since the town’s population is 87% white, but I will take her word for it. Regardless, it sounds like a great place to live since if you don’t like something, all you have to do is complain about it once and it will go away. Imagine the possibilities…

1.     As a well dressed Christian man, I find the sight of teenage boys with their pants hanging down below their asses personally offensive.

2.     As someone who is lactose-intolerant I find the presence of the ice cream truck in my neighborhood every day during the summer highly provocative and personally offensive.

3.     As a devotee of classical music I find the ear-blasting sound of rap music coming from the car next to me at the stop light personally offensive.

4.     As a faithful Catholic I find the Ruth's Chris Steakhouse particularly offensive on Fridays

5.     As a proud Arab I find the smell of bagels wafting out of Eintein’s every morning personally offensive.

6.     As a man who struggles with his weight I find the ripped abs on the bathing suit mannequins at Macy’s personally offensive.

7.     As an Irish-American I find the mascot of the Notre Dame football team personally offensive with it’s suggestion of drunken brawling and it’s stereotypical term, Fighting Irish, an affront against my ethnicity.

See how easy that was? Let’s all move to Vermont!