Remember When You Didn’t Have to Swerve Around People on Bicycles?

I was coming home from the gym and hoping I didn’t get pulled over for driving while wheezing. As I was coming around a bend and searching with one blind hand for my “coming home triumphant” mix compact disc, there on the right side of the road, yellow shirt aglow in the late summer twilight, was a man on a bicycle. This guy had the whole get-up. The helmet. The shirt. The shorts. The shoes with the metal cleats. The little dentist’s mirror shooting out the left side of his helmet. The water bottle lashed against the powerful crossbar of the bicycle’s finely tuned structure.

I’ve always prided myself on being a friend to cyclists everywhere. So it was not a problem for me to drive 15 miles per hour behind the cyclist for the next few legs of our journey to give him plenty of road to enjoy his ride. I didn’t care about the line of cars behind me. Sharing the road means making sacrifices.

After a few miles I noticed through the honking that the cyclist was waving his hand at me in a circular motion, almost as if he wanted me to pass him. I thought he was just commending my respect for his bike riding, and I went on thinking this until the cyclist side-armed his water bottle at my car, and turned off into the adjacent wood. While I was in the body shop getting an estimate on the damage caused by the impact of a hurtling polyethylene projectile holding 24 oz. of water, I meditated upon the natural end of the war of the roads.

The cyclists, with their pro-environment image and greater amounts of sweat, will gain a greater and greater portion of the road. Eventually they will win their own stage of the traffic light-changing. At four-way intersections, the traffic signals will go through a whole cycle of green/yellow/red for the cyclists, while the cars must all stay at a complete stop, their operators presumably spending the time wisely by searching around for something in their cars.

The car owners, relegated to a smaller and smaller portion of the road, will become agitated and allow the interiors of their cars to become even more cluttered. The car owners organize, and begin a series of attacks on the well-being of cyclists. They publish reports of favorable biking weather when the report is really for a hurricane. They go to sporting goods stores and mix up all the water bottles, so that bottles without BPA intermingle with bottles that have questionable amounts of BPA. They follow cyclists at a slow pace when there is plenty of passing room.

The cyclists do not take this treatment sitting down. They organize as well, and begin attacking the well-being of the car owners. They start giving misleading hand signals. They start wearing more biking accessories. They start riding really slowly on narrow roads.

At some point the tension boils over and the two groups meet at a battlefield, like Gettysburg, or the Somme, or the parking lot at Best Buy. The cyclists and car owners line up at opposite ends of the field, and their leaders meet in the middle. The leaders of the cyclists cycle up, take a sip of water from their polyethylene bottles, and remove their helmets. The leaders of the car owners drive up, do a few three-point turns so that they’re all parked at the same angle, and stare ahead at the leaders of the cyclists, while a blind hand goes looking around for things inside their cars.

The leaders agree that it is in everyone’s best interest to resolve the dispute peacefully. The solution is the carcycle. The carcycle has the body of a car but instead of an engine, there are pedals connected to the axles. So you drive the carcycle just by pedaling. The jokes about the Flintstones go away after a few months, and both cyclists and car owners adopt the carcycle as the preferred mode of travel.

And there is peace throughout the land, until the people who ride on those stand-up scooters start clamoring for their share of the road.

Posted on 31 August 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 9

Remember the Olympics?

I want to thank the people at WordPress who were responsible for promoting my post, “Remember When There Was Only One Kind of Post-It Note,” to the Freshly Pressed page on July 25–26. It was great being able to connect with so many new readers.

Two Sundays ago I was watching diving. I had seen 70 or 80 dives that day—quite a bit above average for me—and I was being lulled by the narration of the newscasters.

“There she goes,” the sportscaster says in a whisper. “A triple somersault. Toes pointed. Oh—look at that line of sight. Splendid. Just splendid.”

After a few weeks of Olympics and Olympic-themed Google doodles, I find it hard to just return to normal civilian life where hundredths of a second do not count unless you are trying to get a seat on the Long Island Rail Road. Just this morning, as I greeted the large bear-like cat that comes to my stoop every day looking for chicken, I found that I could not snap out of Olympic-style sportscasting.

“Look at Mr. Jay-Jay,” I say in a whisper. “Look at that fluffy neck. He’s going to take the gold and…yes, the Judges have signaled that this is a new world record for fluffiness in the neck category. Splendid. Just splendid.”

I started seeing life through multicolored glasses of five interlocking rings. The convenience store became a triathlon where the athletes competed in coffee pouring, doughnut selection, and scratch-off purchase.

“Grey suit has an edge over Yankees hat in getting the coffee top on, but Yankees hat is known to make up time in the doughnut category. Of course, we all remember when he won the world championship by taking the unorthodox move of grabbing an apple fritter that was further away but better-wrapped than the closer cheese danish. Absolutely magnificent.”

At the diner, I did a play-by-play for the proprietor spearing the checks through the metal spike.

“Her hand pivots gracefully, elbow down, careful approach…and…SHE NAILS IT! Beautiful execution! And the medal count continues.”

Even at home, my life-casting continued apace. I was competing in my own event, the 400 meter setting the dinner table, and had no trouble narrating my own performance.

“He has always excelled at setting the table. But last year some bone fragments were removed from his elbow and the recovery has added seconds to his time.”

“You know,” my wife says, “you really have to stop that.”

“You know, Greg, it is astonishing how these Olympic athletes are able to train amidst the many domestic responsibilities. Family members have to make sacrifices as well.”

“Why do you keep talking like that? You didn’t even watch the Olympics.”

And I realize that she is right, that I had just watched the diving that one day and pretended like that entitled me to bask in the Olympic-spirit with everyone else who had watched far more commercials and heart-warming stories than I had. So with that I stopped my whispered narration, and started looking ahead to Sochi, Russia, where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held under the motto, “Gateway to the future.”

Posted on 13 August 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 13

Remember When There Was Only One Type of Post-It Note?

In the beginning there was paper, and there was tape. And if you wanted to leave a note on a page of a book, you had to tape a piece of paper bearing the note, and when you removed the note it would not come off easily, but would damage the page with its stickiness.[1] And to tape the note to another page would take more tape, for the original tape would be unfit[2] to carry out its duties.

And the 3M Corporation said, “Let there be Post-it notes,” and there were Post-it notes. And the 3M Corporation saw that the Post-it notes were good, and trademarked the name “Post-it.” The Post-it notes were canary yellow, and the 3M Corporation saw that the canary yellow was good, and trademarked that, too.

And the world was filled with Post-it notes, all of the same size, and the same color. And the 3M Corporation said, “Look, the Post-it notes are all the same, and everyone buys them. Who knows how much more we can sell if the Post-it notes were different?”

And the 3M Corporation said, “Let there be Post-it notes of not only 3 inches by 3 inches, but also of 3 inches by 5 inches, and of 4 inches by 6 inches, and of 1 ½ inches by 2 inches, and of 1 3/8 inches by 1 7/8 inches.” And the 3M Corporation said, “Let there be Post-it notes of not only canary yellow®, but also of blue, and green, and orange, and pink, and of neon colors and pastel colors.” And the world was filled with Post-it notes of every size, and every color, although the 3M Corporation was unable to trademark the colors blue, green, orange, and pink.

And the 3M Corporation created Post-it notes with lines on them for people who needed to write on lines, and Post-it notes arranged in an accordian-style for people who needed to pull notes out of dispensers. And world was now filled with Post-it notes of every size and color, and every design and arrangement.

And the 3M Corporation said, “It is not good for the Post-it notes to be alone. We shall make helpmeets for them, so that they shall not be alone in the office supply storeroom, or mail room, or closet for companies that are too small or cheap to dedicate an entire room to office supplies as I have commanded. And so that we shall make a greater return for our shareholders.” And the 3M Corporation put the Post-it notes under a deep sleep, and took a piece of the patented low-stick adhesive, and formed around it Post-it tabs that could mark books of learning and pages of deposition transcripts that contained incriminating testimony so that lawyers could easily indicate which pages they wanted photocopied.

And the 3M Corporation created Post-it tabs of the same material, but that were much smaller, and some were loaded into a pen, and some were loaded into a highlighter. And the 3M Corporation created Post-it tabs that were more durable, that would not wrinkle or crease or tear with normal use. And the 3M Corporation created Post-it tabs that were narrower, and called “flags,” some with arrows, and some without arrows, and some that came in pop-up dispensers, and some that did not come in pop-up dispensers. And the 3M Corporation saw that it was good.

And the 3M Corporation said, “The low-stick adhesive is not sticky enough for some people.” And the 3M Corporation created a Post-it note with a super sticky adhesive, and called these notes “Post-it® Super Sticky Full Adhesive Notes.” And these Post-it® Super-Sticky Full Adhesive Notes were truly the stickiest notes that the world had ever seen, and did not drop off pages easily, and gave people the confidence that their notes would stay put, but which sometimes damaged the page or ink when removed, as the 3M Corporation warned on the package.

[1] Older versions had “holiness.”

[2] Others “unclean.”

Posted on 24 July 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 132

Remember When There Were No Interactive Graphics?

You may recall that about a year ago we ran a post here titled, “Remember When There Were No “TIPS” Jars?” It was a pretty terrible piece and I forgot about it almost as soon as I published it. Well, about a month ago I received an email from someone who had prepared an interactive graphic on tipping for an organization known as the Hospitality Management Schools. She had come across the tipping post, and wondered if I could take a look at the interactive graphic on tipping, and see if perhaps it would be of use to my readers.

My first thought was that I was not sure if anything posted here is of use to my readers. But after a month of procrastination, two follow up emails, and a very bad dream in which I found myself inside an interactive graphic that showed my recurring dreams by subject in high school, I finally checked out the tipping site. And if you check it out, I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: the graphic is much more valuable than the static text you find here.

What did we do before we had these nifty interactive graphics? We had to imagine the characters and figures moving. Back during the oil embargo of the early 1970s, people had to imagine the reduction in the production of oil and the corresponding increase in gas prices and pants bottoms. Back during the Plague, people had to imagine the increase in rainfall and corresponding graphic of corpses piled atop a wooden cart being pushed by Eric Idle, yelling, “Bring out yer dead!” Back during the Roman Empire, the emperors would have had to imagine a little arrow along a timeline that could be pushed with a corresponding red splotch growing all around the Mediterranean Sea.

I wish there had been an interactive graphics website when I was taking chemistry. There would have been a red stick figure for the acid and a blue stick figure for the base, and they would join hands and become salt and water and a polypropylene bottle to hold the water.

An interactive graphic would have become really handy when we were reading Hamlet in English class. The landing page would have stick figures of all the main characters—Hamlet, Ophelia, the joking friend who always comes in through the kitchen door—and clicking on each one would start an animation of their gruesome death without the effort of parsing through the lines of “What ho, Sirrah?” and “S’blood” and “Methinks this play hath much movie logik.”

If you search for interactive graphics, you are likely to find graphics on topics in economics or history or something else that isn’t going to make you the life of any party on this planet. What they need are more interactive graphics about the practical side of life. Like an interactive graphic on mowing the lawn. There would be buttons showing different sizes of lawn, and a corresponding meter showing the day in the week in which the mower of the household would start being asked if he was going to mow the lawn that weekend.

Or an interactive graphic showing the Nielsen rating of Keeping Up With the Kardashians on the X-axis, and the number of people who can place the Civil War in the correct half-century on the Y-axis. Or demonstrating how to politely take a seat in the middle of row at a crowded movie that has already started. Or on how to keep an open syrup bottle from making all the adjacent containers sticky.

But I guess tipping is as important a practical activity as there can be. Few things in life cause me more stress than how much to tip the various folks who through conscious effort make my life more pleasant. The interactive graphic dispelled every question I could ever have. In fact, I was so engrossed in the educational animation that I forgot to go out to a restaurant, get a pedicure, or have a café au lait sculpted by my town’s most celebrated barista.

Posted on 9 July 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 5

Remembering My Aunt Helen

When I was born and brought home from the hospital in a Volkswagen Bug that had no baby seat but was otherwise very reliable, my parents had no bassinet in which to place me. My father suggested the floor, which he had recently refinished and was very proud of. But Aunt Helen, my mother’s older sister and sole sibling, had a wiser suggestion. “Put him in my laundry basket,” she said. And so I was placed in the laundry basket, with perhaps a pair of socks supporting my fuzzy little head.

When I started forming words, my name for her was “Aunt Hen,” and Aunt Hen was always a part of my life. She and my Uncle Joe lived in the next town over, and it to was their house that we went for those kinds of special occasions that require chips and dip. At Christmas, there was an ornament of a man in a boot that Aunt Helen would hide in the tree, and the first of my brother and I to find it got an extra helping of candy canes. At Easter, she filled her house with jellybeans, and I would stuff my pockets as if I had discovered an ancient treasure. Whatever confusion I might have experienced as the child of an interfaith marriage, such confusion was swept away by large servings of pie.

I particularly remember the Fourth of July. We would all sit in Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe’s backyard, and when their black Labrador retriever—first Max, and then Abercrombie—came by with a tail swishing this way and that, we would all hold on to our drinks and hamburgers lest they be swept to the deck where all dogs have a right of first refusal.

Aunt Helen had a funny way of putting things. She was quick with the one-liners. Whenever we attended a Jewish funeral, Aunt Helen used to say, “Okay everybody, let’s take a bet. Meat or dairy?” And when my mother was doing Christmas shopping and needed some gift ideas for Uncle Joe, Aunt Helen famously said, “Don’t buy him any more clothes. He wears the same shit every day.”

Yes, Aunt Helen’s defining trait was her sense of humor. When my mother was in middle school, Aunt Helen helped her study for an exam in American history that was going to test the various acts—the Navigation Acts, the Molasses Act, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act—that led to America declaring that it had a right to pass its own oppressive acts. My mother was wearing ski pajamas during this study session, so Aunt Helen asked, “And when was the Ski Pajama Act enacted?” Decades later, when yours truly was studying those same acts, my mother would ask me about the Ski Pajama Act, even though I had never heard of ski pajamas.

Aunt Helen was at her funniest when talking about the family. She knew all the family gossip. If this cousin wasn’t talking to that cousin, Aunt Helen always knew the gory details and we would all gather ‘round her like our ancestors once gathered around storytellers in the days before the E! channel.

Just because she was funny, however, did not mean Aunt Helen was a pushover. She taught elementary school, and even outside the classroom there were still only two ways of doing things: her way, and her way without being told. She liked to moderate the speed at which my Uncle Joe drove the car, saying, through clenched teeth, “SLOW…DOWN…JOE.” Averaging about 35 m.p.h. on the Long Island Expressway, we knew we had to tell them to be places 3 hours ahead of time.

But they always made it. Aunt Helen and Uncle Joe went to everything.

Even after diabetes confined her to a wheelchair, Aunt Helen was determined to attend every major event in everyone’s life, no matter how much she had to travel in a van or yell at my uncle. She went to my college graduation. She went to my law school graduation. Even the morning of my wedding, in a hotel some 300 miles from her home in eastern Long Island, she passed out and had to be revived. I knew nothing of this until months later, for at my wedding she was dressed up, and alert, and happy.

When she went on dialysis, I was worried that she wouldn’t be as funny as she had been. But the moment I saw her those worries went away. She didn’t talk about her illness at all, and instead would talk about the latest politician to momentarily forget about the existence of video cameras. Of all the limitations her illness placed on her, it did not touch her mind, her voice, or her personality. She was at all times—healthy, sick, standing, seated, lying in a hospital bed—a mixture of unconditional love and sharp wit. She never let anything get in the way of seeing her family and friends. And she never let anything get in the way of a laugh.

I remember visiting her in the hospital after she had both legs amputated. She was sitting up in bed and asking me about how I was enjoying work. When I told her about how the hours were long and that the partners were driving me crazy, she said to me, “Well, don’t let it get to you too much. Make sure you have fun, too.” And then she sent Uncle Joe and I out for some food in blatant violation of hospital rules.

Three weeks before my wedding anniversary this past May, my wife and I received a card from Aunt Helen, congratulating us on making it through yet another year without killing each other. She was always very thoughtful like that, and I laughed at the time because I figured that she had just forgotten the exact date of our anniversary. Why else would she be sending me a card that early? I made a mental note to call her.

As it turned out, a few days later it was my Uncle Joe who was calling me, to tell me that Aunt Helen had passed away the night before. My first thought was that I should have called her. I guess I was too busy downloading the latest version of iTunes to find 10 minutes to talk to my aunt. The guilt was terrible and I didn’t feel like eating that day.

But then I thought about what Aunt Helen would say. “Don’t worry about me. Enjoy yourself. And eat.” And I smiled, and knew that Aunt Hen would never really leave me. And then I went and got a sandwich.

Posted on 4 July 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 25

Remember When Playgrounds Were Dangerous?

The playgrounds of today do not look like the playgrounds that I played on, when I ran around with my jacket unzipped and in blissful ignorance of the fact that I would one day have more conversations with Time Warner Cable than with my parents. Gone are the monkey bars, the jungle gyms, the pieces of metal welded together in the shape of something that was at the same time a slide and a medieval torture device. No longer can children test their courage and their parents’ coronary strength by climbing to the summit of iron structures, where one slip would send a child pinballing down to an unforgiving concrete surface in an indifferent universe.

Playgrounds today are made of single pieces of plastic, their summits so low that children can eat on them without having to sit on telephone books—not that there are any telephone books left to sit on. The concrete ground has been supplanted by rubber foam, and the swings are allowed a maximum swing of five degrees in either direction, and even that much requires clearance from air traffic control.

Look hard and you will see the city of wood and metal that once was there. See the tiered wooden maze with splinters and exposed nails. Run your hand over the rubber ground, and you will feel the sea of pebbles that once washed over Velcro sneakers, and drove little rocks into the soles of little feet as those feet dropped from the monkey bars. Sniff the air, and you will smell the charred pieces of wood that littered the playground, with which the children would draw pictures of bison and of teachers they despised, just like their ancestors did on cave walls some 40,000 years ago.

And along the perimeter of the southeastern quadrant lay a line of giant rubber tires, each one the width of three children, or one and a half of the children we have today. The tires had been implanted into the pebbled earth on their sides, forming a tunnel that the children could crawl through, and catch their Champion sweatshirts and scratch their rosy cheeks on the wires that protruded from the tires as a testament to the thousands of miles that those tires had traveled before being retired to the playground where they could bring joy to all children.

Crawl through that tunnel of tires. You are led to a three-story rusty metal cylinder in the shape of rocket. Children climb up to the top of it with only cold metal rungs to keep them from falling to death or paralysis. At the top of the rocket there is the opening to another tunnel. This tunnel is horizontal and is made of the same wooden planks as the charred and splintery maze. In that tunnel three stories above the world, a boy can meditate on what it means to be young, and dream of one day having a television in his room.

Listen! Hear the cries of a child who slipped off a giant metal sea horse placed on a spring. The child split his lip when he hit the pebbles, and he leaves a trail of blood as he is led to the nurse’s office. The other children observe a moment of silence out of respect for their fallen comrade, and after that moment go back to their wanton cruelty.

Here, in this playground whose spirit will not leave, is where blood was spilled and teeth were lost, knees scraped and ankles sprained, skin pierced and lockjaw contracted. And where heroes were born.

Posted on 25 June 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 23

Remember Life Before Greek Yogurt?

When I was a kid, I remember that there were two kinds of yogurt. There was the kind with the fruit at the bottom, and the kind where the fruit was already mixed up with the white yogurt. I liked the kind with the fruit at the bottom, so that I could eat small spoonfuls of the white yogurt until I saw the deep colors of the fruit, and pretend that I was an archeologist dairy.

Today it seems like the yogurt of those days is out of style, and has been supplanted by Greek yogurt. I admit that the containers of Chobani have taken over so much of my own refrigerator that I hardly have enough room for the 5.0 liter box of wine. And with good reason—the yogurt is delicious, and I can feel the active cultures improving my digestion and reading comprehension. One website (www.greekgodsyogurt.com) even touts its products as containing the qualities of the gods. But how did Greek yogurt come to be?

According to legend, Epimetheus, who was a Titan until he was traded to the Jets as a third-string quarterback, was entrusted with equipping all of the creatures, including humans, with whatever they would need to survive in a very dangerous and expensive world. To birds he gave beaks, to rabbits he gave speed, to elephants he gave size, to house cats he gave cute faces and arrogance. He was satisfied with the job he had done, and planned to reward himself with a whole season of Dawson’s Creek on DVD.

His twin brother, Prometheus, came up behind Epimetheus, flicked his ear, and said, “What are you up to, Epilady?”

“Don’t call me that, Prometheus.”

“Oh, and what are you going to do about it? Tell Dad?”

Epimetheus didn’t reply. Prometheus seemed to always know what to say, whereas Epimetheus never thought of a good retort until days later.

“So these are the celebrated humans?” he asked Epimetheus.

“Yes,” Epimetheus said, and smiled, proud that finally he had done something that Prometheus had not. Let’s see him criticize me now, Epimetheus thought.

Then Prometheus said, “The humans have no yogurt.”

“What do you mean? They have yogurt right there. See that man scraping the inside of the container, trying to get the last bit of fruit? It’s an annoying sound, I know, but—”

“What I meant is that they don’t have Greek yogurt,” Prometheus said.

“Greek yogurt? But that’s just for the gods. Dad said that Zeus keeps it…”

“Who cares what Dad said? What are we, little kids? Little Titanettes? Remember when I called you a Titanette, and made you dress up like a little ballerina?”

“Yes, Prometheus. I do.”

“And then you cried in front of all the gods? Oh, how I miss that Golden Age. But listen, I think these humans could use Greek yogurt.”

Greek yogurt was indeed reserved for deities, which, along with incest and turning themselves into aquatic birds, ranked among the gods’ favorite pastimes until Dancing With the Stars came around. Zeus, the king of all the gods and keeper of the remote control, had deemed Greek yogurt too tangy and creamy for mere mortals, so he kept it locked up in his safe with his thunderbolts and auto insurance policy.

One afternoon, Prometheus crept into Zeus’ room while the safe was open. Zeus was trying to decipher the supplemental coverage clause in his policy and reached over to his telephone to call his carrier, and had his back turned to the open safe. So Prometheus crept in, grabbed the Greek yogurt from the safe, and gave it to the humans while Zeus was still listening to all the choices on the menu. The humans were then able to enjoy the tangy and creamy food, but with greater nourishment and active cultures. Equipped with numerous and diverse bacteria, humans became the masters of the planet, and soon filled the Earth with their offspring and their offspring’s music.

As punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, and every day a bird would come by, eat his liver, and chastise Prometheus for not getting enough Omega-3 fatty acids. This went on until Heracles persuaded Zeus to replace Prometheus with Charlie Sheen.

Posted on 15 June 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 23

Remember Being 13 and Drunk?

My wife and I were dining at a popular Italian restaurant the other night. As I worked through my third bowl of salad, I learned from my wife, who in college had minored in eavesdropping, that the girl in the booth next to us was 13 years old, and had accidentally been served an alcoholic beverage. She was with her mother, who was standing up and looking around as if waiting for an ambulance to arrive. The girl was fanning herself and looking like she wished she hadn’t said anything.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be 13 years old and consume an alcoholic beverage. I became Bar Mitzvah at 13, and after the ceremony one my peers became inebriated by consuming several of the plastic thimbles that the congregation used to sanctify the Sabbath. He spent the next few hours pretending he was a helicopter. I think he does something with computers now.

The mother at the Italian restaurant, however, was clearly not at any Bar Mitzvah. Eventually someone came and talked to her, a manager-type dressed in plainclothes and who looked like she was in the position to authorize free meals. She looked to be about 25 years old. She spoke to the mother while the teenage daughter fanned herself and tried to piece her life back together after a few sips of a weak strawberry mojito. After a few minutes the manager left, and I figured that the woman would probably get a free meal out of the deal. Good for her, I thought, as I signaled for another strawberry mojito.

Then another manager came and talked to the woman and her drunk daughter. “Probably trying to get a dessert to go out of this, too,” I mused as the front-end loader lowered my entrée onto the table.

I was absorbed in stuffing my face for a few minutes, and forgot about the underage drinking at the adjacent booth. But when I came up for air from my lasagna-cum-linguine alfredo-cum-chicken parmigiana, I saw that the mother and her daughter were still there, and that the mother had moved over to her daughter’s side of the booth, so that both were facing in my direction. I was a little surprised they were still there, since at this point the girl must have been sober enough to drive.

Then the first manager came back and spoke with the mother for some time, and then the mother and her daughter got up and I figured, “Okay, that’s really it then. The manager was just making sure the girl was sober and did not sustain the kind of damages that would lead to diminution in future earning capacity.”

Then a police offer walked through the front door. And then another police officer. I couldn’t see what the officers were doing, but I imagined it was not choosing two of the four listed sides on the menu.

I didn’t see the ambulance pull up in front of the restaurant, but we passed it on our way to the parking lot. As we walked by, the back doors of the ambulance opened and the mother, her daughter, and a man with a button down shirt and a clipboard alighted. I took the man to be a doctor or perhaps an adjuster from the insurance company.

My eyes locked with the mother’s eyes for a moment. In that moment I tried to communicate all my respect for a parent who was so concerned about her child that for even a few sips of alcohol arranged for two sheriffs and an ambulance. I tried to tell her that she was the embodiment of the rugged individualism that made this country great.

And in return, her look said to me, “Go eat your salad.” Only not in those words.

Posted on 4 June 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 22

Remember When There Weren’t All These Crasher Shows?

The other night I was hoping to catch Civil Servants From Outer Space on the Science Channel, but instead my wife had already asserted dominion over the television with a program called Yard Crashers. Have you ever seen this show? The host of the show, Ahmed Hassan, is a licensed contractor, who loiters, along with a camera crew, at a giant home improvement megastore in search of someone with a pathetic yard. Usually there is a multitude of customers begging Ahmed to crash their yards, and he chooses a winner by selecting the yard with the most unreturned propane tanks.

The first time I saw Ahmed accost a potential yard crashee, I thought that he was just going to mow their lawn for them, perhaps mowing it in a cool checkerboard design instead of the swirling splotches that have become my voice in the neighborhood landscape. But I was wrong, as I spent the next half-hour of my life watching Ahmed and his crew help these poor homeowners turn their dump with a swing set into Six Flags Great Adventure, complete with turnstiles and rotating racks of signs that say things like “Jennifer’s Room.”

I soon learned that Yard Crashers was only one of several members of the crasher genre of home improvement shows. House Crashers, where Josh Temple shows homeowners that the secret to having the house of your dreams is a liberal use of the sledgehammer. Bath Crashers, where Matt Muenster trains homeowners to hang up wet towels instead of leaving them crumpled up on the bathroom floor. And, of course, Kitchen Crashers, where Alison Victoria proves that there is a God, and that His name is Granite Countertops.

The current slate of crasher shows might only be the beginning. There could be crasher crossovers, the Yard Crashers and the House Crashers unwittingly crash the same house, and everyone’s embarrassed because there’s not enough pizza to go around.

Or a reverse crash, where the crew chooses a home with a perfect, modern kitchen and after three days the kitchen has warped cabinets with peeling paint, a cracked white sink, and the same gold-flecked Formica countertops that belonged to the homeowner’s mother.

There could even be a crasher show where someone literally crashes a truck through the front of a house, as a way of demonstrating that a home improvement project can always be found.

But why limit ourselves to home improvement? There are other areas of human endeavor that could use some crashing. For example, there could be a show on the Learning Channel called Book Crashers, where people who are behind on their Chaucer are invaded by a literature professor who stays with them for three days, and then sends them a bill for $40,000.

A personal favorite of mine would be a show called Crasher Crashers, were a husband who doesn’t like his wife’s crasher shows is visited by a home channel producer executive who teaches the husband to appreciate crasher shows, and to form an independent opinion of proper home décor that just happens to be identical to his wife’s tastes. And the show would air on ESPN.

The ultimate crasher show, however, would be called Human Crashers. A house inhabited with humans with antiquated ideas, habits, and looks, is crashed by a crew of other houses who help to renovate the humans, giving them new ears and mouths, updating them on the latest trends in fashion and music, and getting them to stop saying things like “a knock is a boost” and “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” and from refusing to see the Christopher Nolan Batman movies because “nothing compares” to the 1989 Tim Burton film.

Posted on 30 May 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 11

Remember When There Weren’t a Million Types of Water Bottles?

When I was a kid the only water bottles were simple white plastic with a ribbed bendy-straw that came out like the proboscis of a giant insect. And the only people who used these water bottles were the other kindergartners who were also forced to play soccer, and needed something to wash down the orange slices and cracker jacks. These water bottles—more cylindrical containers than bottles—beared the emblem of our soccer club, were not airtight, and most definitely were not brought to school, where things that made students more likely to need to go to the restroom were not welcomed.

The other night I was in the supermarket, and while looking for the most up-to-date version of the Oreo cookie, I came upon the water bottle aisle. Water bottles have their own aisle now. The bottles were in many different colors, and showed a history of technological innovation. Adjustable nozzles. Rubber grips. Filters in case the bottled water that gets poured into the water bottle has too much—I don’t know—water in it.

And no longer is the basic white plastic of my soccer-playing youth the only choice. In fact, it’s probably not a choice at all. Today’s water bottles come in stainless steel, aluminum, high-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, polypropylene, and something called “copolyester,” which I had thought went out with the 1970s. If this seems as clear as polypropylene, below is a bottle comparison chart that I pulled, for your convenience, showing the different water bottles that are sold by a company named REI so that you can tailor your purchase decision to your plastic-resistance preferences. A 5-star rating means that the material offers the greatest resistance.

Bottle Material	Impact Resistance	Odor Resistance	Visual Clarity	Bottle Feel	Resin Code
Tritan copolyester	***	****	Clear	Rigid	7
Polyethylene (HDPE)	****	***	Cloudy	Semi-rigid	2
Polyethylene (LDPE)	****	***	Semi-opaque	Squeezable	4
Polypropylene	****	***	Semi-opaque	Rigid	5
Stainless steel	****	*****	Opaque	Rigid	N/A
Aluminum	**	*****	Opaque	Rigid	N/A

As you can see from the table above, all of the plastic bottles come with a resin code. I don’t know the resin code for the water bottle I used back when I was standing out on a soccer field and pretending to care where the ball was kicked. I’m sure it was chock-full of the dreaded bisphenol A (BPA), something equaled in terror by only the bubonic plague.

But selecting a material with the perfect opacity and resistance is barely half the work! Now you must settle on a design for the mouth opening. Here are your choices: wide mouth, narrow mouth, push-pull valve, and bite valve. And if anyone wants my opinion, I think there should be a “fountain valve” that looks just like the spouts on the metal water fountains we all remember from school, one that you have to hunch over and really press so that your back is left vulnerable to attacks from bears or kick-me signs.

As I stood in the aisle, I thought about the kind of water bottle I would choose. Was I a polyethylene person or more of a stainless steel person? Did I like a water bottle that dented easily or not so easily? What were my thoughts on resin? Did I even know what resin was? The Existentialists thought that free will and the purpose of life were the most difficult questions and the ones most worthy of extended study. They would have been surprised to learn that choosing a water bottle requires far more introspection.

But if choosing a water bottle requires more work, it is because the water bottle delivers more meaning to our lives. Our bodies are roughly 60% water—or, if you’re like me, 40% water and 20% hazelnut creamer. And if the body is indeed a temple, then it needs a proper chalice—a chalice made of stainless steel. Or aluminum. Or low-density polyethylene.

Posted on 14 May 2012 by Mark Kaplowitz 9