"Surrender, surrender but don't give yourself away."

When a pop/rock song is good, a pop/rock song is good. For me, the band Cheap Trick has a few of the best pop/rock tunes of all time. But, it's pop/rock. It ain't no musical revelation. Still, the other day...

[insert wiggly sit-com memory transition]

...I was driving, trying to figure out why in the name of Zeus's elbow I had just sat through an entire Judas Priest song (conclusion: same thing that drives us to "rubberneck" at car accidents) when the "Surrender" by Cheap Trick came on. I have always liked that song, so I cranked it.

Like, Einstein Cool

A local radio station has been running a contest for area schools: "The Coolest Teacher." Each morning, they randomly select an area high school and the kids are asked to text the station with their vote for the "coolest teacher" in the school.

What would have been your guess, say, twenty years ago, for the most-often selected type of teacher? What departments do you  think would have yielded the most "cool teachers"? My bets would have been on English, history, art, music -- the classes in which kids could be inspired to think and create.

I know the first thing people might say in objection to my conjecture is that I am an arts person, so, naturally I would see it that way. But, in the past, don't you agree that no one would have made a movie about an inspiring calculus teacher? The inspiring teacher was always someone in the humanities. Think: Dead Poets Society.

Well, who do you  think the overwhelming number of "coolest teachers" are in this contest? You guessed it: math and science.

Zombie Girl and the Shopping Cart Serpent

Some time ago, I wrote about my de-evolutionary fears -- the fear that kids and teens are losing their capacity for "fight or flight" reaction as a result of exposure to too much daily neurological stimulation. I think I was right. I also think this phenomenon could be the reason for the current pop-cultural obsession with zombie stories.

Think about it. In the early fifties, with the growing national obsession with nuclear energy (and the constant afterimage of mushroom clouds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) science fiction writers and movies makers spewed forth a cavalcade of radiation-mutated monsters, like giant spiders and giant women. Fear of the power of nuclear energy and the knowledge of its possible destructive (and mutative) powers yielded tales of science-gone-wrong. Movies and stories were a means to vent the writers' horrors that we might lose control of the very powers we had become able to release in great flashes of destruction or in seeping, silent, invisible rays that morphed the things with which we were familiar into three-headed deformities.

I think it is happening today with zombies.The explosion of movies and books on the subject of zombies is a reaction to the ghastly, plodding, unresponsive, foot-dragging lifelessness of our young people. Metaphorically, the zombies are coming, to swarm over us and to consume our brains.

From the original Night of the Living Dead

How do I know? Well, I don't, really. But I do know that, the other day, I stood in a crowded supermarket, in line, waiting, waiting...waiting. And, when I got up to the checkout, I was faced with the undead.

Why We're Doomed (Unless We Learn to Find our Inner Teenager)

Some have accused me of being pessimistic when it comes to evaluating humankind's potential to fix its historically persistent problems. They're right. I am.

This morning, I heard a news report from one of Mitt Romney's speaking engagements. A (Republican) woman being interviewed criticized Governor Chris Christie (a Republican) of New Jersey of being "too effusive" in his praise of President Obama's help with the storm crisis in New Jersey. She feared it would go against Mitt Romney's chances of being elected.

Am I going insane, or is this as absurd as it sounds?

Hold on, my fine Democrat readers. Before you clap me on the back for exposing Republican stupidity (a stupidity that does apply to a lot of Republicans, for sure, just as it applies to people in general) let's consider this little meme posted by a friend of mine on Facebook -- from a site that proclaims itself to be "Sick of the Slant" -- because there is no slant in the chosen pictures, of course (you can click to enlarge the picture):

Pull Up Your Pants! or Why I Chose Not to Become a Proctologist

Nobody wants to become a curmudgeon: "Mah! Kids today...with their clothes and their hair..." We are, however, here in America, in a place that makes it difficult.

I don't know how it is in other countries, but, here, there is a trend related to the wearing of pants. Young men (and, sometimes, young women, I'm told) wear their pants around the hips or lower, exposing some or all of their underwear. It used to be only a select group of the younger set, but, lately, it seems more common to see a young man with his pants slung either lowishly or even below his buttocks, his underwear completely exposed.

Where'd this come from?

When I was a kid, there were a lot of musical, playground sing-songy teasings of: "Hee, hee -- I can see your underwear." One lived in fear if one sat in rows in front of others. One pulled down the back of one's shirt compulsively. I don't know. Maybe, one day, someone said: "I'm not gonna take any more," and yanked those babies down in the lunchroom to do a defiant table-top dance among the plastic trays. If so, kudos to the brave fourth grader -- the Thomas Paine of pants.

Nah -- alas, it ain't so. It did begin in prisons --  not, according to Snopes, as an invitation for casual sex with other inmates, but as a result of ill-fitting prison garb and the lack of belts therein. (The lack of belts, of course, is a result of the ban on interior decorating in cells. Wardens hate when prisoners hang things from the ceilings and bars, especially themselves. I can see why. It's really quite gauche.)