I Don't Get It

Some things make no sense to me, like thong underwear or Donald Trump. Isn't it the purpose of underwear to serve as a barrier between your butt and your pants and not as crack floss every time you take a step? Doesn't seem to me like a very comfortable way to make it through your day. As for Donald Trump, the only difference between him and Charlie Sheen is it took decades of alcohol and drug abuse to make Charlie Sheen incoherently delusional. Trump comes by it naturally.

I don't understand my son walking across the house flashing cash like a pimp and telling us he's paying us back for games he ordered on his Nintendo DS. He's fourteen. When I was fourteen I was scraping together quarters so I could ride my bike a mile to the local video arcade next to Pathmark to play a few rounds of Centipede or MACH3. Maybe there'd be enough left for a slice of pizza from the storefront around the corner before heading home for dinner.

I'm confused by what's happened to cable television. Fifteen years ago, back when TLC still considered itself The Learning Channel and the Discovery Channel actually cared about science, it was possible to find a fair amount of proper programming to balance out the crap. These days we're accosted twenty-four-seven by inbred rejects and talentless celebutants presenting poorly scripted scenarios so cartoonishly ridiculous they make Gilligan's Island appear Shakespearean by comparison. Somewhere along the way society stopped laughing at these implausible idiots and started celebrating them. No offense, but if your vote in the upcoming presidential election will in any way be swayed by Duck Dynasty or the Duggars, then I'm not sure we're swimming in the same gene pool.

I don't understand why Chick-Fil-A -- probably the most uber-religiously homophobic restaurant chain in the United States -- installed outrageously phallic door handles in its public bathrooms. I can only imagine what Freud would have to say about that. It's as though a set designer from "Will & Grace" went through conversion therapy and found employment in Chick-Fil-A's design & construction department where he unsuccessfully tries to quell his latent-homosexually-inspired design sense. (That actually sounds like a pretty good premise for a television show.) No matter how thoroughly I wash my hands, or how clean the handle appears to be, I can't help feeling dirty every time I open the door. If only their sandwiches weren't so sanctimoniously delicious. 

I'm frequently bewildered by ear and nostril hair. When I was a young man, I had a considerably thick mane of blonde hair atop my head and practically no visible hair in either my ears or nostrils. These days I could braid my nose hair and mousse back the stuff growing out of my ears to cover the ever-thinning areas above my eyebrows. Speaking of which, the eyebrows are getting out of control, as well. Apparently, as traditional top-of-the-head hair abandons us, the ancillary hair areas kick into high gear. I can't wait to see what my armpits and lower back produce as I enter my fifties. 

I don't understand German. Nothing more to say there, really.

I'm bewildered by what's happened to the Republican Party. It sold its soul to the ultra-right-wing lunatic fringe back when the Tea Party movement rose to prominence and has never been able to buy it back. Rather than saying, "Thank you, Tea Partiers, but you'll need to run along and do your own thing somewhere else," Republican Party establishment embraced the upstarts and allowed them to corrupt what it means to be Republican. They even misrepresent the party's patron saint Ronald Reagan, misquoting him at every turn. In 1981 Regan wrote: "Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive members of our society and are a basic part of our work force. Those who have established equities in the United States should be recognized and accorded legal status." That sure doesn't sound the Republican message I've been hearing lately. I wasn't sure I would live long enough to witness a major political party being torn to tatters, but now I feel certain the Republican Party has only an ugly, lingering death in store. That's okay, though. Our country wasn't always divided into Republicans and Democrats. Some of our past Presidents belonged to the Whig Party, some to the Democrat-Republican Party, one to the Federalist Party, and George Washington didn't belong to any party.

I don't understand why, when only four people presently live in our house, there always are at least seventeen filled water sippers chilling in the refrigerator. I'm all for hydration, but it's gotten a little out of hand. To drink that much water on a daily basis would require mandatory catheterization. And, they leave precious little room for leftovers and other food items, which are the reasons we own the refrigerator in the first place.

Mostly, I don't understand where the years have gone. With one child in college and two preparing to take driver's ed this spring break, I'm having to come to terms with the fact that fart jokes and cartoon voices no longer make me a cool Dad. Our kids are turning into adults before our eyes and they're doing it without my permission. As their father, shouldn't I have some say in this matter?

© 2016 Mark Feggeler

Shoot the Messenger

In the last week, ever since the Boston bombing suspects were identified, I've noticed several lengthy messages being shared and liked on Facebook and Twitter. The gist of these messages goes something like this:

I don't want to hear anything about the suspects! I don't want to know who they are, or why they did what they did, or how they planned the bombings, or how the aftermath affects their families! Execute the one that survived the Watertown shoot out and bury their remains in unmarked graves somewhere no one will ever find them!

I understand the emotions and frustrations behind these kinds of comments. In a free society, we should be safe from terrorists, be they homegrown or trained on foreign lands. Our government should protect us from potential threats. Innocent children, women and men should not be blown up, gunned down or cut through by malcontents, zealots, psychopaths or sociopaths.

Yet no matter how hard we might try to wish away irrational behavior and hate, the reality is they will always exist. Society and culture can, at times when the collective will is strong enough, turn away from them or push them to the side. Unfortunately, in the land of the truly free we must allow space for individuals who believe what we find unfathomable and groups that practice what we detest, providing those practices do not bring harm to others.

The crime isn't allowing these people to exist. They already exist, whether or not we want them to. The crime would be closing our ears and shouting like children to drown them out. A wish and a prayer are sweet sentiments, but they aren't practical choices in the face of ignorance. Just take a look at that couple facing criminal charges for the death of a second child because they chose to pray for God's healing instead of bringing their children to a doctor. You think any amount of wishing away their irrationality will change their belief structure?

The way I see it, the real problem is not that the world is a more violent place than ever before. Go back just 70 years and you'll find that World War II was responsible for the death of approximately 2.5% of the world's population at that time, or roughly 60 million people. According to the CDC, in 2010 homicides accounted for a total of 16,000 deaths, or 0.005% of the nation's population that year. Tragic, but a far cry from the worst this world has seen.

Don't get me wrong. In the case of the Boston bombings, I want justice served. I believe in the death penalty and firmly believe it would be appropriately handed down to someone who can come across a young boy eating ice cream with his family and calmly murder him. There are depths of hell not deep enough for some of the twisted souls allowed to crawl the surface of this earth. But I also want to know who they are, why they did what they did, and how they did it, because it's the best way to understand what went wrong with these two men and, hopefully, prevent others from following in their footsteps. All of us need to understand, so we can carry a measure of that understanding and awareness into the communities in which we live. If it takes a village to raise a child, then surely it must also take a village to maintain civility, rationality and order.

What I don't want, or need, is twenty-four-hour media coverage from people with no immediate knowledge of the events. I don't want talking heads on television, enhanced by animated graphics and dramatic musical intros, talking endlessly despite the fact they have no new information to offer. I don't want newspapers so desperate for a scoop to prove their validity in a digital age that they disregard traditional sourcing of information, ruining lives in the process. And I certainly don't want online would-be news sources replacing static informative articles with meaningless Twitter feeds just so some schmuck in Abilene with PhotoShop can pretend he's an extra in "All the President's Men."

In the rush to be first and loudest to scream the latest developments of a disaster from the rooftops, the news media belittle the gravity and meaning of such a situation by turning it into a relentless audio-visual circus that offers plenty of noise and practically no content.

On the other hand, the media is only giving us what we've proven by our viewing habits we want. Maybe if we stop tuning in, the message would change and we'd feel less inclined to shoot the messenger.


© 2013 Mark Feggeler

A Lesson In Anatomy

Teaching your children about the birds and the bees can be a terrifying ordeal. Many parents avoid the subject like a venereal disease at a Kiss concert. Not us.

Not that we've sat any of our kids down with diagrams, or handed them a stack of dirty magazines, but we have kept ourselves abrest of our need to provide nuggets of information and guidance when and as necessary.

As our 13-year-old daughter advances farther along through her teen years, the opportunities to impart bits of wisdom arise with greater frequency. The movies she watches, the magazines she reads, the websites she browses -- all media at her disposal is rife with sexual content. It is our responsibility to ensure she and her brothers are prepared to process it in healthy ways.

Unfortunately, some of life's most important lessons do not present themselves in scripted Hallmark Moment splendour. More often than not, we stumble through, desperately hoping not to screw things up too badly. The very first discussion I had with Our Daughter on the subject of male anatomy is a perfect example.

Some years ago, when Our Daughter was a mere toddler, we stayed at a hotel at which my Lovely Wife attended a work-related educational training. My role during the event was to watch over Our Daughter during the day. We swam in the indoor pool, played fun little games, read a few board books, and watched an episode or two of SpongeBob and Blues Clues.

One afternoon, following our final round of swimming, we were back in the room getting cleaned up for dinner. I showered while Our Daughter watched a little television. When I came out, I found her jumping up and down on the king-size bed. The warning to stop had barely escaped my lips when I watched her fly backwards off the bed and land flat on her back, knocking her head on the thinly carpeted concrete floor with a sickening thud.

I picked her up and held her until her crying subsided. Determining no serious damage had been done, yet still with heart racing from the scare, I placed her in the bathtub and continued to distract her with silly jokes from my perch atop the closed toilet. Suddenly, staring at what I thought were my knees, her face went dead serious. She pointed and said, with some noticeable measure of disgust, "What is that?!"

In my panic, I had completely forgotten I was still only barely wrapped in the towel from my shower. Unbeknownst to me, while I sat there on the edge of the toilet entertaining her, my nether region was hanging loose and free for all to see. A quick shift of the towel and a summary dismissal of the subject were not going to be enough to undo the damage, so I decided to face the challenge fate had placed before me.

In language familiar to her, I explained, "It's my peepee." The shock of disbelief showed in her widening eyes. She looked down between her legs, back up at me, and said: "Well, wash it off!"

I laughed so hard, I ended up using the towel to dry my eyes. Not only had I traumatized Our Daughter by flashing her, my follow up only served to convince her I was horrendously unhygienic. Between that, and her having to endure years of watching her brothers streak through the house as only little boys can, it'll be a miracle if she ever gives us a grandchild.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

HB Oh Forget It

I am old enough to remember when there was only one HBO.

Who am I kidding?

I'm old enough to remember when "remote control" meant my brothers telling me to get up and change the channel for them. I'm old enough to remember not having a color television. I'm old enough to remember the Brady Bunch going off the air, the introduction of the Big Wheel, banana seat bikes, Romper Room, and one-foot tall GI Joe action figures who always stole Barbie's heart away from that pretty boy Ken.

Back to the point, we got our first taste of HBO when our family joined the great Cable-TV Nation in the early 1980s. Almost immediately, I was disappointed. I took the name Home Box Office literally.

When did you ever go to the movie theater to see a boxing match? When did you go to the movie theater to see original made-for-TV movies? When did you go to the movie theater to watch back-to-back episodes of Fraggle Rock?

When they finally did clear their programming of all their homemade piffle, the movies they did show were mostly crap. And, Lord help us if they actually got the rights to a decent film, it would be featured every other night for the entire month in which it premiered, sandwiched between the 400th showings of "Beastmaster" and "Zapped!"

But that was thirty years ago. Surely HBO has changed for the better since then. Right? There are, like, one-hundred-eighty-seven different HBO channels now. I find myself thinking, every now and then, that maybe I should break down and give it another try. Then I stay in a hotel.

Doesn't matter what hotel, either, since most of them offer the same limited selection of channels that always seems to include HBO1 and HBO2. You'd think these channels would vary their programming a little to offer some variety and get people interested in purchasing HBO for their home systems. You'd be wrong.

Every time I travel, no matter what city I find myself in, HBO1 and HBO2 are broadcasting the same shows, usually an hour apart from each other. First HBO1 shows Real Time With Bill Maher, then HBO2. First HBO1 shows a sports talk show about boxing, then HBO2. First HBO1 shows Deadwood, or Big Love, or True Blood, or any of its other simplistically awful soap operas that everybody but me seems to go crazy over, then HBO2.

I'm wondering how many more decades it will take before HBO decides to show a movie during primetime.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Just Ask Your Gyneopthacologist

The best thing about modern television service is the ability to excessively watch, record, and replay the five channels I like out of the hundreds we pay for.

When I was a kid, we had even fewer than the "13 channels of sh-t" to choose from that Pink Floyd so famously bemoaned. Channels 3, 6, 8, 10 & 12 were nothing but snow storms between (hopefully) clear major networks, local channels, and PBS. You could add a few more viewing options if your set picked up UHF and you spoke Spanish.

On the days when I could convince my Mom I was sick (cough, cough, puppy eyes, sniffle) enough to stay home from school, the lameness of TV was painfully apparent. By 11:00am, shows like The Magic Garden and Mr. Rogers vanished. I had to find some way of surviving the barren programming wasteland until 3:00pm, when the Joe Franklin Show and Midday With Bill Boggs would finally give way to high quality reruns of Looney Toons, Tom & Jerry, and Gilligan's Island on Channels 5, 9 & 11.

I was reminded of those old times recently while sitting patiently in the waiting room at a nearby medical clinic. The television hanging in the corner of the room was on display to entertain and distract all of us from the amount of time spent waiting. In theory, I can see how someone might think this is a good idea. In practice, however, the remote often is controlled by some sedentary secretary who obviously is in dire need of passionate romance, since these "community" televisions always seem to land on either a network soap opera or a female panel talk show knock-off of The View. In this case, the wait was long enough to capture both the the talk show and the soap opera.

As awful as it might seem, what really made the biggest impression was neither the pathetic acting and silly dialogue of the soap, nor the shrill infomercial-like pandering to guests on the talk show. By the time the wait was over, it was the commercials that really attracted my attention.

It began innocently enough with my being told exactly how white my teeth ought to be. Apparently, shiny white simply isn't white enough. I need a prescription-strength whitener, or at the very least I need to discuss the potential benefits of said prescription-strength whitener with my dentist.

Next, I learned I might need a stool softener, although I'm not 100 percent certain. The product being pitched merely talked about the benefits of exceptionally soft stool, so I guess I need to start keeping a log (no pun intended) in which I note the rigidity of my stool so I can properly assess my need for the prescription-strength stool softener when I discuss it with my gastroenterologist.

The next two went hand in hand, so to speak, since one product held out the hope of lowered cholesterol while the other promised immediate and guaranteed weight loss without the need to change my diet or exercise routine. Perhaps it would work best if I crack open both pills and sprinkle the contents like garlic salt over my next slice of pepperoni pizza. But I suppose I better check with my personal nutritionist before I make any drastic changes.

I doubt any of the products mentioned so far would have any impact on my chronic dry eyes or irritating feminine itch, so it's a good thing I kept paying attention during the commercial breaks. With any luck, my gyneopthacologist will know all about the products needed to address these problems when I go in for my annual cervical refractory exam.

And, finally, we end up with constipation. According to the product being touted by the pretend doctor in the borrowed lab coat, I should talk to my family practitioner to make sure I'm not unnecessarily suffering from uncomfortable blockages. It sure does give me a sense of relief, although perhaps not the kind I need, to know there is a relative stranger in my community who is qualified to tell me whether or not I'm having trouble pooping, and what I can do about it.

Whatever the final prognosis about my medical condition, I'm just happy to be home, where I can go back to watching my recorded Food Network and Discovery Channel shows while fast forwarding through all the commercials. I'm not entirely certain, but I think eating a handful of dark chocolate and drinking a Diet Sunkist while watching an uninterrupted episode of MythBusters has already done wonders for my colon.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

What About the Cooking?

Um... Hey, Food Network.

I've been wondering how you're feeling lately. You seem a little, well, "off" these days.

There was a time when you were always on, when I counted on picking up some helpful tips and new recipes from you on a daily basis. It didn't matter what time of day, either. Whenever I turned to you, you were there with a cooking demonstration led by someone seemingly well-qualified to handle their ingredients.

You presented yourself with a simple eloquence I could understand and appreciate. Sure, maybe you gave us five different chefs offering similar takes on the same dish, but your homey lack of pretentiousness made it all the more endearing. Besides, it gave us the ability to choose whether we wanted to learn from Tyler Florence, Alton Brown, Giada de Laurentis, Bobby Flay or Rachel Ray how to make the perfect chicken parmesan.

When you did reach outside the traditional cooking show format, we enjoyed the distractions of such fare as "Iron Chef America," "Unwrapped," "$40 a Day," and "Good Eats." You were the underdog, the little cable network that could, and we were all pulling for you.

Those days, sad to say, are gone.

Like a parent doling out too much candy to hungry children, you're settling for immediate gratification over long-term sustenance.

You seem to have forgotten that while we might like the sugary delights of your flashier offerings, we don't need a steady stream of them. Every now and then, like it or not, and for our own good, you need to make us eat our Brussels sprouts. They might not be sexy, but when you cut them in half, drizzle them with olive oil, season them with salt and pepper, and roast them on a baking sheet in the oven for 20 or 30 minutes, they really aren't half bad. Trouble is, I never would have learned that from your current programming.

Just look what you've done to poor Tyler Florence. His "Tyler's Ultimate" cooking show was our favorite. The recipes we took away from his first few seasons inspired us to try new recipes, purchase proper pots & pans and even a high-quality knife set. I even shaved off part of my little finger on a mandolin trying to master one of his recipes. The only complaint we ever had about him was his unrealistic cooking times for chicken. Apparently, his oven runs a few hundred degrees hotter than ours.

But in the past month or two, the only place we've seen our former favorite is hosting the pathetically contrived "Great Food Truck Race." This show, like so many others you have vomited out lately, provides the most meager amount of entertainment combined with almost no culinary information. Half the people on the show looked as if they hadn't showered in a month, so I can't imagine how you'd think we would look at them and say "I gotta eat summa what they're dishing out!"

While we thoroughly enjoy "Next Iron Chef" and "Next Food Network Star," we have to wonder if you've established some outrageously high quota on how many new celebrities you intend to spawn each year. You're already squeezing out your cooking shows to the point of having to establish a second channel just to carry them all. Where will you put all these new people?

And for being a channel based on food and how to prepare it, you're doing a great job of cannibalizing yourself. Most of the shows you rolled out this year are variations of shows you already had. "Food Feuds" is a barely tweaked variation of "Throwdown," except it promises the kind of staged strutting and posing one might expect to find on Bravo's many "Housewives" shows. "Meat & Potatoes" is an even less tweaked variation of "Diners, Drive Ins & Dives," but with a fraction of Guy Fieri's charisma.

Please, I'm begging you, don't go the route of MTV or Bravo. Don't forsake the format that brought you to where you are. Let your new channel take on the gameshows and reality programming you hope will bring you untold riches and leave your flagship channel alone.

And for goodness sake, somebody tell Alton Brown to take a vacation and eat a cheeseburger.



© 2010 Mark Feggeler