2008 Democratic Convention: The Drinking Game

What you'll need:

• Several bottles of your favorite beer, wine, or spirit.


• A stack of dollar bills (you can get these from Elliot Spitzer or any U.S. Bank).


• Four days off work.

How to play:

Generally, any sort of pandering or reliance on catchphrases or soundbites is worth one drink each. Meanwhile, genuine human moments or excellent campaign strategy (read: pandering, but really GOOD pandering) should merit a one dollar donation to the party's general campaign fund. Gaffes (or reminders of gaffes) merit the removal of one dollar from the donation fund, or its reallocation towards booze.

Important note: Each day of the convention will have a particular theme, as noted below. Any overt reference to that day's theme, regardless of speaker, should result in one drink.

Scoring:

Monday (“One Nation:”):

Jimmy Carter:
• Mentions God, farming, or Rosyln: 1 drink
• Filled with righteous fury: donate 1 dollar
• Mentions Reagan, rabbits, or malaise: remove 1 dollar

Michelle Obama:
• Calls candidate “Barry”: 1 drink
• Performs a fist bump: donate 1 dollar
• Says that this is the first time she’s felt pride in her country: remove 1 dollar

Tribute to Ted Kennedy:
• Footage of John, Bobby, or John Jr: 1 drink
• Genuine testimonials from the Massachusetts working class: donate 1 dollar
• Mentions Chappaquiddick: remove 1 dollar

Tuesday (“Renewing America’s Promise”):

Hillary Clinton:
• Says the words journey, road, fight, unity, or women: 1 drink
• Whole-hearted and warm endorsement of candidate: donate 1 dollar
• Fails to endorse Obama: remove 1 dollar

Mark Warner, Keynote:
• Mentions unity, red/blue, the economy, or jobs: 1 drink
• Makes absolutely no reference to terrorism: donate 1 dollar
• Mentions John Edwards: remove 1 dollar

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle:
• Mentions choice, public schools, or Milwaukee: 1 drink
• Mentions the failure of No Child Left Behind: donate 1 dollar
• Mentions state pension fund in relation to state debt: remove 1 dollar

Wednesday (“Securing America’s Future”):

Bill Clinton
• Mentions Hillary, the economy under his administration, taxes, or fair trade: 1 drink
• Slyly suggests that we need to restore dignity to the office of the President: donate 1 dollar
• Suggests current economic situation may have something to do with his policies on NAFTA or free trade with China: remove 1 dollar

John Kerry
• Mentions swift boating: 1 drink
• Makes audience laugh: donate 1 dollar
• Mentions duck hunting, wind surfing, or latte drinking: remove 1 dollar

Bill Richardson
• Speaks in Spanish: 1 drink
• Has shaved his beard: donate 1 dollar
• Discusses amnesty for illegal immigrants: remove 1 dollar

Vice Presidential Candidate TBD
• Mentions honor, work, economy, or specific policy: 1 drink
• Is from a swing state: donate 1 dollar
• Reveals history of shock treatments, an embezzling husband, or an inability to spell “potato”: remove 1 dollar

Thursday (“Change You Can Believe In”):

Al Gore:
• Mentions environment, emissions, Earth, or the year 2025: 1 drink
• Find yourself wishing he was like this in 2000: donate 1 dollar
• Uses PowerPoint: remove 1 dollar

Barrack Obama:
• Mentions Hope, Change, America, Kansas, the economy, war: 1 drink
• Mentions an inhabitant of Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia: donate 1 dollar
• Mentions Hawaii, Indonesia, Muslim/Islam: Remove 1 dollar

These Days Are Ours

Let it never again be said that there is no culture in Milwaukee, because now we have this totally sweet statue of Christopher Walken.

As a bonus, that is Potsie, and he's singing our national anthem. Good thing you can't hear pictures, am I right?

Word Problem:

Happy Days, though set in Milwaukee in the 1950's, was produced in Los Angeles, CA, and appeared on television between 1974 and 1984. A statue of the show's breakout character, the Fonz, was erected in downtown Milwaukee in 2008. Given the above, estimate both the date of placement (within six months) and the physical location (within one square mile) of the following statues:

A -- Lenny & Squiggy, of Laverne & Shirley, 1976-1983

B -- Bear, of BJ& The Bear, 1979-1981

C -- Whatever character was played by Ashton Kutcher, of That 70's Show, 1998-2006

Challenge:

I will refund the cost of the spray paint to whomever is the first person to put the words "SIT ON IT" on that particular statue. (Any legal fees or municipal fines incurred are your own.)

The Boys Are Back In Town

Thank God, someone has a camera. Here are some pictures sent by Cate, taken in the Otjen compound on Wednesday afternoon.

Amelia Otjen in the swing.


Taking after Grandma Glenda, flautist for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

Seems like it's always Caleb steering, Sam pushing. I don't know what to make of that.

Dirty Water (Part Three)

Some last notes on our trip east. I've decided to not call it a vacation, which to my mind involves sleeping in, a little shopping, some leisurely dinners at nice restaurants... Travelling with twin 2.5 year olds did not allow for much vacationing.

If you are considering taking a cab from Revere to the far edge of Cambridge, it may be cheaper to rent a car. While I remember cab rides from my Sommerville/Cambridge/Charlestown apartments being both fast and relatively cheap, the Airport-to-Alewife route apparently falls into the realm of "Cahnt get theare from heare."

Despite liking pudding, rice, and raisins, the boys did not care for the kheer -- rice pudding with raisins -- at the Bombay Club.

We received so many books and toys -- from Elissa, from Suzanne, from Courtney and Deb, from an unguarded stroll through the cart vendors in Fanueil Hall -- that we worried about incurring a fee for overweight luggage on the way home. Our largest bag weighed in at 50.5 lbs, avoiding the fee only by the sour grace of the airline staff. (Subject for another post: this trend of offloading fees and "penalties" such as this one, as if it actually requires extra fuel to transport a bag that exceeds 50 lbs. Should we then get rebates if a trips passengers come in underweight? Or will air travellers soon have to pay by the pound?)

At Cheryl and Tom's Shindig, Caleb picked up a hotdog as if it were a cob of corn, took one bite out of its middle, and returned it to the platter. As Cheryl said, "I've never seen anyone eat a hot dog like that before!"

That cookout was a perfect bookend. Other than Jason, who'd left earlier in the week, and a couple of other notable exceptions, it involved almost everyone I was friends with in graduate school who are still in the Boston area. Ted and Geeta and their kids, who were quite small when last I'd seen them and are now capable babysitters, were fun to see, as were Andrew, Clare, Chris and Lisa, Tim and Suzanne, Cheryl and Tom. We went to a nearby park, with a sprinkler pad for the kids, built -- according to either Ted or Tim, atop a former Cambridge town dump. You miss these things about Cambridge. We all sat on the rocks there and watched the kids, all of us ten years older than when we last would have reasonably all sat together, and the sky was a certain amount blue and a certain amount cloudy, and all of our kids mingled together and with other kids there, African-American and Latin American and Chinese-American and Indian-American all combining together within and without these kids, all creating the kind of moment that you want to bottle somehow, to capture, and yet the camera has disappeared somewhere and so you make a concerted effort to live in the moment, and then someone's dressing the children again, and Chris and Lisa are leaving to play a show in Western Mass, and already the moment is breaking up, separating into little particles that drift outward and away from each other like the water jetting from a sprinkler...

Sam, once fully dried and dressed, made broke away -- maybe just as eager as I to reclaim the lost time above -- and drenched himself. Cheryl loaned him a nice powder-blue pattern-printed blouce with the most darling pinched-up sleeves, and Sam wore that in the cab on the way back to the hotel.

And now we are home again, where the boys have pointed to the sky and said, plaintively, "choo-choo?"

Dirty Water (Part Two)

Navigating the Boston subway system with a double stroller was not always easy. Most of the downtown stations are not wheelchair accessible -- which essentially means they had no elevators -- and the ones that were (like Park Street) had such narrow elevators that we couldn't fit the stroller through the doors. Several times we had to hoist the stroller, with the boys strapped in, and take them up or down a set of steps in order to get to where we needed to go. (Getting from the blue line to the red line was always precarious.) Once, a samaritan waited at the top of the stairs to help me carry the stroller down, which would instill some small faith in ones fellow man were it not for the countless dozens who willfully ingnored us or impeded us.

Tim and Suzanne gave the boys some model cars (and tickets for the Children's Museum), but in true Sam and Caleb fashion, they were more interested in the beer bottles, bottlecaps, and the church key.

In my previous life in Boston, I never had any call to visit the New England Aquarium or the Children's Museum, and it was great fun to discover what lay inside both buildings. The Aquarium's giant central tank -- complete with tiger sharks and giant sea turtles -- was really impressive, as was the open community of penguins that surrounds that tank. A couple years ago, penguins seemed poised to be the posterbirds for conservative family values, until it turned out that penguin love is no more bound by supposed natural order than are we humans. Certainly, the very public penguin sex we observed at the Aquarium suggests that some arctic birds march to a different beat. (Thanks to Elissa for the heads up on the gay penguin kid's book, linked above.)

A side trip to Northampton took us into Look Park (on half-price Wednesday!), where the kids rode a steam train and visited a very small zoo. We watched the gang of goats butt heads, and Caleb chased chipmonks while squealing in pure delight. (Sam, here and with the pigeons and swallows outside the Children's Museum, roars his fearsome T-Rex roar.) For some reason, we all shopped for candy in the city itself, and then Chris and Lisa successfully prosletyzed for Harrell's ice cream. (Northampton was quite a cozy little place to live, and who knows what role it may play in our far distant future, particularly given that it has a Henshaw Street and a Lathrop Retirement Community.)

Sam picked up the notion that any particular point could be pointed to and perhaps accessed, leading to the signifier "right there," which in turn led to this sort of request: "Mama, can I go stand over there right there?" Which is so syntactically Milwaukean I could plotz.

We got caught in a downpour while trying to get to Courtney's apartment in the North End. We waited for a cab for a long time under a hotel canopy; the hotel staff were nice enough to give lollipops to our impatient kids. The lollipops were soon thrown to the pavement -- their paper sticks were still there the next morning, with all the candy washed away.

Courtney and Deb, former coworkers from Harvard, shared wine and pizza and gossip and kid's books. The boys were equally enticed and repulsed by Courtney's stuffed friend Monk, and the boys made thorough rambunctious exploration of all of the aparment's 440 square feet. Sadly, the rain kept us from a North End street fair -- always culturally worth it -- and, more's the pity, cannoli.

...To Be Concluded

Love That Dirty Water (Part One)

Some highlights from our trip east:

As a general rule, getting to places was wonderfully easy. Getting back was more challenging. (On the plane ride home, with Caleb next to me crying in his uniquely shrill way, I had the opportunity to say to a fellow passenger, "Glaring doesn't help, lady." Which was surprisingly fun for me.)

I could have stayed in Vermont for another week. The kids had a blast out in nature, playing with other kids, wonderdog Dude from Tennessee, rolling bocci balls down the wheelchair ramp, and eating their weight in pancakes. Dad read The Audacity of Hope by flashlight while they slept, or while sitting in an Adriondrack chair (want one!) while they played barefoot in the dewey grass. We were high enough up Gove Hill that we could see thunderstorms pass over the Connecticut River in the valley below.

Cathy's excellent observation that while some people might see a vision of Jesus in a banana peel, Caleb sees a vision of bananas in a stained-glass picture of Jesus.

The first hotel in Boston would not work for us, partially because the suite we were promised was not exactly a suite, and partially because it was a swirling vortex of chaos and purgatory. At 9:45pm, I went to the front desk to ask again for the two cribs we'd asked for in our reservation, at the time of our check-in, and twice by phone from the room. The woman at the desk said she was trying to raise the housekeeping staff by radio. "Do you know how to say 'crib' in Spanish?" she asked me. All of this made the second (and hastily arranged) hotel seem all the better by comparison. (The late night margarita, however, was unexpectedly terrific.)

Jason Cabassi arrived on Monday to volunteer as our Manny throughout the week, and did a great job of toddler-hoisting, pram-pushing, and patience-displaying. His ability to calmly eat a spicy chicken dish at The Bombay Club while the boys threw rice, juice cups, and tantrums shows a natural ability to child-rear. Jason was quickly and permanantly adopted by Sam as a BFF, and has earned the honorific of "Uncle" in our family.

After a long walk from Harvard with Jason and Ken, we arrived at Redbones in Davis Square -- the best barbecue restaurant in the mapped universe. Texas beef ribs were probably not the dish to get with two toddler's on one's hands, as there was a bit too much going on to really savor the Redbones experience. Two awesome moments: I changed Caleb in the Women's restroom, a feat probably rarely done in the history of humankind. The pull-out baby changer platform was directly below the automatic paper towel dispensor's sensor, so as I attempted to change Caleb's diaper, a scroll of paper towels was continually unfurling over us. Then, when we left the restaurant, we walked right out into an impromptu street parade and a bedraggled brass marching band playing "Kansas City, Here I Come." To introduce one's children to the twin miracles of smoked barbecue and syncopated Dixieland jazz in one go-round? This is the kind of thing that can happen only in Davis Square, Somerville, MA. (Or, you know, New Orleans.)

Caleb, on the platform of the Airport T station: "Choo-choo, where are you?"

(To Be Continued...)

Holiday Road

Townblog is off on a much-needed vacation. We'll be back sometime in the second week of August.

In the meantime, feel free to read stuff from last August, picking from the following categories of Townblog content:

• Attempted Humor: a sneek peak at Keith Richards' autobiography
• Whiney-Pants Liberal Screeds: our failing infrastructure
• Cute and Dangerous Pictures of the Kids: Sam's first beer
• Pop Culture Fascination Disguised as Thoughtfulness: When Bad Things Happen to Good Celebrities

Peoples of the Northeast: shutter your windows, bar your doors, for summer is icumen in.

(Oh, and if you feel like I'm avoiding The Savage Detectives, I am. This was due to an unexpected need to watch absolutely all of the first season of Mad Men in the shortest time possible, which meant little reading in the past couple weeks. Barrack Obama and Naomi Klein are going on vacation with me, but I'll return to the second half of The Savage Detectives and another Bolano book, Nazi Literature in the Americas, once home again. It's a paperbacks vs. hardcovers thing...)

Got a Time Bomb In My Mind, Mom

Things I would totally have posted pictures of if our camera weren't missing:

1. Sam and Caleb rolling down the hill at Chill on the Hill.
   
2. Sam and Caleb on the stage of the Little Theatre in Rufus King High School.
   
3. Sam and Caleb holding hands in their car seats on the way to Grandma Glenda's house.

Things I would totally post video of if I we ever had the video camera on hand when something interesting happened:

1. Caleb's evolution of dance. Sam dances by tilting his head side to side, like a metronome, letting his body follow. Caleb held off on dancing for awhile, but a couple of weeks ago he started just slightly moving his head and -- by watching his back muscles -- tensing his butt cheeks. He's just lately started to add raised legs and arm swings to his dancing, and -- by God! -- he's doing the George Jefferson!
   
2. Sam chasing young girls on the playground in Lincoln Park, as the girls shouted "Get away from that baby!"

Alas, until Kodak makes a machine that prints color photos of memories, you'll have to imagine all of the above.

The Act You've Known For All These Years

Back from a three-day, three-event high school reunion. A fun weekend, but I wish that more of the Rufus King class of 1988 had made an effort to attend. We were a cohesive class, and it felt like significant portions -- the south siders, the soccer team, the valedictorians -- were entirely absent. Neither my junior nor my senior prom dates appeared, depriving them of the opportunity to validate their decisions to no longer have anything to do with me. Maybe at the 25th, gals...

Above, Sam is pictured with absolutely all of the balloons from the 1988 AlumFest. (We're missing our camera at the moment, so this was taken by cellphone.)

Molotov Cocktails and Rocks Behind Every Curtain

I don’t see many movies in the theater anymore, partly because parenthood precludes that sort of free time and partly because I typically prefer seeing movies in my own home. Even so, certain movies – for me, movies with explosions and/or super heroes -- demand the largest screen possible, with the best sound available, and with a bag of popcorn topped with butter and brewer’s yeast. So I shirked my work- and parental- duties to take in The Dark Knight, the latest Batman movie, at a matinee at the Oriental Theatre.

Despite trying to avoid reviews, I’d heard that the movie was “dark,” that Heath Ledger’s Joker was a masterful performance, and that it had made an insanely huge amount of money in its first weekend. All of these things are true, and it is certainly an edge-of-the-seat experience, and yet: I did not like it, Sam-I-Am. I did not like this new Batman.

It’s an incredibly violent movie, and not in the Biff-Bam-Pow style of classic comics. Christopher Nolan and his fellow filmmakers clearly want to create a “realistic” comic-book world, and do so by putting real bodies in the explosions, real menace in the villains, and real angst in the heroes. Things have been tilting this way since superhero movies returned into vogue with the first X-men film (if not the first modern Batman, staring Michael Keaton, back in 1988): replacing the four-color cloth and polyester costumes (which don’t translate from 2-D drawings to full-color film) with leather and black plastic, eliminating the more fantastical elements of comics for something closer to real life. In some ways, this is a losing battle, as psycho killers, billionaire playboys, and vigilantism are only slightly more “real” than, say, a super-powered man from the dead planet of Krypton. How many hired killers work the streets of your city? How many serial bank robbers or undercover spies were in your subway car this morning? It’s a bit bizarre that we somewhat unconsciously put the ingeniously-designed bomb-on-the-bus Keanu Reeves scenario in the realm of the possible and the boarding-school-for-young-wizards scenario in the realm of totally made-up (with James Bond somewhere in the middle). We’re no more likely to ride a Speed-trapped bus than we are a Nimbus 3000 Quidditch-ready broomstick.

Batman can become more plausible, more possible, but not “real,” so it’s highly unsettling to me to have Batman placed within a movie that fairly blatantly deals with contemporary ideas about terrorism and the response to terrorism. James Bond or Keanu Reeves or the actor Christian Bale might belong in that movie, and do so very well, but Batman doesn’t fit that world. (I recognize that this new incarnation of Batman is highly influenced by the late 1980s comics of Frank Miller, which I read and enjoyed at the time, but while dark and gritty, those comics made few attempts at “realism.” The two most recent movies may be based on “The Dark Knight Returns” or “Year One,” but they avoid the villains who can’t be strictly constructed. Even this movie’s batcave has been recast as a minimalist loft apartment.)

In presenting Ledger’s Joker as the embodiment of terrorism, the filmmakers offer three distinct but interrelated possible responses to terrorism in the form of attorney Harvey Dent (Gotham’s “White Knight”), Major Crimes captain Jim Gordon, and the vigilante Batman. Dent might be said to be an analogue for the Bush Administration, in that he puts up a lot of bravura and claims to adhere to the moral high ground, while becoming increasingly immoral and compromised in his response to terrorism. Gordon takes the form of the idea that terrorism is a law enforcement problem, but at least in Gotham City, law enforcement can react to terrorism but not prevent it, as the Gotham police are just as susceptible to bombs as the people they serve and protect. So ultimately it’s Batman, the unsanctioned and privately funded one-man army who is able to curtail terrorism, once he utilizes a sonar-based device that subverts civil liberties (and destroys the liberal innocence of Morgan Freeman) as the by-product of destroying terror. An interesting article on CityStates suggests that the movie demonstrates that the only possible response to terrorism is a willed refusal to fear.

(It’s kind of interesting to think of where Batman must lie on the political spectrum. As much as I’d like for Batman to be a liberal – we need more way awesome butt-kicking liberals – I’m not sure that fits, exactly. I mean, Batman does not leave the streets of Gotham to market forces, but on the other hand his manner of protectionism is not exactly unflawed. If I’ve read my comics correctly, Gotham has a high recidivism rate and relatively few mental health services.)

Maybe because of its roots in two-dimensional comics or maybe because of the 11-year-old boy sitting with his mother in the row in front of me, but The Dark Knight struck me as way too spookily violent. Actually, it isn’t the violence that bothers me so much as the menace – there are several in-movie references to a body count, we watch hospitals and skyscrapers explode, there’s a cell-phone suicide-bomb that goes off in a crowded room, and the Joker offers a few different stories about how his face was cut into the shape of an obscenely wide smile as he threatens to do the same to other characters, tracing the intended pattern on the victim’s faces with his tiny knife. The viral internet campaign for this movie asked “Why so serious?,” a question directly tied to these scenes that – in a very “real” way – threaten mutilation and gore. The Joker here is less the Clown Prince of Crime than a twigged-out junkie sadist.

In short (he says after all that text), if this weren't a Batman movie, I would love it. The conflation of real-world concerns makes it somewhat more problematic for me. Because of the realistic approach to violence and menace, the movie should probably be rated R rather than PG-13. One also has to wonder about the action figures, outfits, toys, and so forth, all of which are clearly directed at children at or under the age of 13. The yogurt I buy for my 2-year-olds currently features Batman on its labels, and this is a yogurt that I wouldn’t imagine is palatable to anyone over 8 years old, just as The Dark Knight may not be palatable for anyone under a modern American neoconservative foreign policy.