Back in my day...

I dread the day I start referring to my younger years as the Good Ol' Days, but there are times it starts to feel inevitable.
I get that feeling when I read about parents attacking referees at their son's little league games. Or when I hear about someone suing McDonald's for making them fat. And I get that feeling when I read stories like the ones I've seen recently about schools around the country banning tag and other so-called "chase games."
I only have one specific tag-related memory. I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I was a student at Afton-Lakeland Elementary School, which put it somewhere between second and fourth grades. We were playing tag on the playground during recess and one of my classmates, Bob Zajac, got away from a tag -- I might have been it, but I'm not sure -- by diving headfirst down a tube-shaped metal slide. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen another person do (it's since been surpassed by that Japanese dude who eats all the hot dogs) and knowing that if I ever tried it myself I would brain myself on the slide's edge or twist my arm under my body maybe just miss altogether. Naturally graceful I was not.
Now, the game is disappearing from playgrounds nationwide. According to a Los Angeles Times story reprinted in Tuesday's St. Paul Pioneer Press, some parents are worried about their children getting hurt when a playground game turns rough and administrators are worried about the chance the parent of a child injured running either toward or away from a classmate might turn around and sue the school.
There was a time that idea would have seemed ridiculous (the early 1980s, say, when I was playing tag with Bobby Zajac) but times have changed. According to the group Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, a Montana man who legally changed his name to Jack Ass sued the people behind the MTV television show Jackass in 2002 for "giving him a bad name." Mr. Ass, who apparently changed his name in an effort to raise awareness about the dangers of drunk driving (I don't understand it either) asked for $10 million for defamation of character.
So, maybe the schools have a little bit of a point. If a person who voluntarily calls himself Jack Ass can blame someone else for giving him a bad name, nobody's safe. Still, other justifications for the bans make me want to cry.
In Santa Monica, an elementary school principal worried about the "emotional injuries" children suffered while playing tag.
"Little kids were coming in and saying 'I don't like it,'" principal Pat Samarge told Fox News. "[The] children weren't feeling good about it."
Somehow, and I'm still not clear exactly how, the next logical step became canceling tag for everyone, not just telling the kids who didn't like the game to go play on the swings.
Covering schools, I encounter this kind of attitude from time to time. Students don't get to win as often as they used to, because that would mean someone would have to lose. And that might make them sad. I once had a group of kindergarten teachers ask me if every kindergarten student in their building could be chosen Student of the Week because they didn't want to single one student out as "better" than the others. On one hand, I'm glad people are taking our Student of the Week designations so seriously. On the other hand, it made me want to go into those kindergarten classes and give the students the kind of speech I got from famous heart surgeon Michael Debakey when I graduated from college. Essentially, he told the entire graduating class they shouldn't set their goals too high because they'll only be disappointed.
True story.
These bans are taking their toll on kids. According to an October story in the Washington Times students at one Massachusetts school have created code words for banned games like tag. One parent declined to give the Times those names for fear students would face repercussions. Although it is far from clear how using code words would hide the fact kids were chasing after each on the playground.
"Hey, you kids running around after each other. Are you playing tag?"
"No, teacher. We're playing agt."
"Oh. OK, then."
This is what it's come to. We've turned an innocent kids' game into a taboo. We've told our children there is no such thing as a winner or a loser. And in an age when McDonald's and Burger King are making kids fatter by the minute we've discouraged them from playing a game that requires them to run as fast as they can.
Things just weren't like that in the good ol' days.

Camping for geeks

Last week nerds by the thousands nationwide dedicated days of their lives to the Playstation 3, the newest and most powerful video game system to hit the market. According to the multitude of news stories that accompanied the occasion these brave geeks suffered cold weather and muggers and ridicule from friends and family all for the chance Friday to spend upwards of $600 on what is essentially the latest evolution of Pong.
Apparently at this level of evolution there is a lot more cleavage and wanton destruction than there was in the old days. If Ms.Pac Man were created today she'd have silicone implants and carry an Uzi.
The release two days later of Nintendo's Wii, the next-generation game system voted most likely to inspire sophomoric jokes, did not receive quite as much attention. When I stopped by a Best Buy store in Woodbury on Saturday, the day before the Wii was unveiled to the public, only a couple of people were camped out. Although one of them was dressed as the Super Mario Bros. character Luigi, so that ratcheted the dork factor up quite a bit.
My own history with video game consoles goes back to Christmas of 1983, when my brother and I received as gifts both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the competing Sega Master System. We continued to own systems from both companies through several subsequent generations, and when I got to college in 1993 I started to add more computer gaming to the mix. On at least two occasions I played online games with my friends for more than 12 consecutive hours, a fact women almost never find impressive when I bring it up in bars.
I once paid to take part in a video game competition. That's when I realized there were many people either more dedicated to gaming than I was or less dedicated to spending time outside. That was pretty much the end of my dreams of becoming a professional gamer.
What I'm trying to say is I've got some experience with this whole video gaming thing. I still own a Dreamcast, Sega's last attempt at making a game console before the company decided it could no longer keep up with Nintendo in the ridiculous-name department, and the just-replaced Playstation 2. I haven't turned either one on in more than a month, but they're there and both have logged their share of use.
I understand the appeal of the new systems. The Playstation 3 can produce graphics that border on photorealistic, and Nintendo's system has an innovative controller and a name that provides the opportunity for endless jokes about playing with your Wii.
Still, I have trouble understanding people willing to camp outside an electronics store to buy either system on the day it's released. The list of products I'm willing to camp out for begins and ends with Knight Rider DVD box sets.
Then again, many of the people who camped out for first-day Playstations turned around and sold them on ebay for $2,000 or more. I saw a couple that had bids above $30,000 on launch day and on Monday night Playstations were still going for more than $2,000 each and Wiis for more than $1,000. You can buy a whole lot of David Hasseloff posters for that kind of money.
These days, of course, people find reasons to be down on video games. Video games get blamed for everything from kids being out of shape to teenagers shooting up their schools. For the record, I don't believe Grand Theft Auto is responsible for Columbine any more than Lolita was responsible for deviant behavior, Ozzy Osbourne was responsible for devil worship, or Martha Stewart's television show is responsible for a growth in insider trading among housewives.
I'll admit I'm intrigued by this next generation of video gaming, including Microsoft's XBox 360, which has been available for a year already and has a name that isn't remotely funny. There may come a time when I'll buy one or the other of them. But I can guarantee you if I do there will not be tents involved.

Nap? Nope

I'm not a nap person. Never have been. I just don't like the idea of sleeping in the middle of a perfectly good weekend day when there are other, more valuable things I could be doing. Things like watching Hudson Hawk on Comedy Central or televised poker on any of the 73 channels that show it every weekend. Important stuff that shouldn't be slept through.
I had all of this reinforced Saturday afternoon when, for the first time in years, I decided there was little enough else going on I could lie back on the couch and close my eyes for a while. I'm not sure why. It could be I was tired from the biking I'd done that morning. Or it could have been the fact Comedy Central really was showing Hudson Hawk, the terrible Bruce Willis vehicle from 1991. And it was the best thing on TV. Couldn't anybody get the rights to Ishtar?
But nothing about this nap went right. I closed my eyes at 1 p.m. and when I got up a few hours later I felt more tired than when I started. I had pillow marks on my face and I felt like I'd wasted most of an afternoon. I wasn't relaxed or refreshed at all. I might as well have spent three hours cleaning my bedroom or going for a walk or even writing this column. I don't know if the column would have made any more sense if I'd done it then, but on the bright side I'd probably be writing about something more interesting than naps.
Oh well. Live and learn, I guess.
I'm not sure what the problem was. Maybe I'm just not a very good napper. Presumably there was a time -- during pre-school, probably, or maybe even as recently as kindergarten -- when I was as good as anybody else at dozing during the afternoon. Maybe I'm just out of practice. I probably had flaws in my napping technique a more experienced napper never would have made.
Take my choice of nap location, for example. This particular couch was not especially long. I, on the other hand, am. My head was on one armrest but my legs stuck well beyond another. If I angled them right I could rest them on another couch set up nearby. Otherwise, my only choice was to curl up into a kind of fetal ball, a position that probably hasn't been great for getting rest since I actually was a fetus. I'm sure none of that was conducive to a restful afternoon.
Maybe I made other mistakes, too. The kind of errors only a true rookie napper would commit. Maybe I chose the wrong time of day. Would early afternoon have been better? Would I have had more success if I'd been sleeping through the late college football games rather than Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello mugging at the camera? Should I have closed the blinds? Turned off the lights? Turned more lights on?
Did I sleep too long? Did I doze beyond the boundaries of a true nap and into the realm of the too-short night's sleep?
I could ask someone, I suppose. I could find myself a nap guru and sit at his feet while he explains the finer points of catching 40 winks on a Saturday afternoon. My nephew will be five next month. I bet he knows a thing or two about this.
Or maybe I should just let it go. Maybe I'm just not ready to handle that kind of break in my day. Maybe, like I said at the start of this column, I'm just not a nap person.
Whatever the case, I need to do something to put all this behind me. All these questions are enough to keep a guy awake at night.

Please don't shoot; I'm not a deer

Riding a bike through northern Minnesota woods can be a very pleasant experience. It can also be a little nerve-wracking. It’s all about the timing.
For example: riding through the woods during the peak of the fall color season is beautiful. Riding through the same woods on the first day of deer hunting season, though? That’s enough to make a guy a little apprehensive.
I can picture the hunter now, fingers and other important extremities numb from sitting in a tree stand since before dawn and eager to shoot something so he can go home and take a hot shower, seeing me, my dad and my brother riding by.
“Well,” he might think, “they’re about the right size to be a deer. They’re moving fast like a deer, even if they’re not quite so bouncy as a deer usually is. They appears to be wearing yellow jackets, though.Hmmm. Could be a trick.”
In retrospect, we might have been pushing our luck when we stuck those twigs in our helmets.
We saw several hunters along the path as we pedaled north, each dressed in blaze orange. A couple of times we saw deer standing along the path. Both times we waited for the gunshot, not entirely clear whether the bullet would be coming for us or for the deer. Or, for that matter, how we would feel about seeing Bambi get offed right in front of us.
It's scary enough just being in the woods during hunting season. But on the first day? When everybody's a little twitchy and eager to shoot at something? Well, maybe it wasn't the best idea. So far as I could tell blaze orange was the color of choice in the north woods last weekend for everything from walking the dog to mowing the lawn to showering. Fortunately, our bright yellow jackets seemed to be close enough.
Poor timing aside, there was a reason for this particular bike ride. Or, if not a reason, at least a goal. The three of us set out a little before 7 a.m. from Hugo and biked north to Duluth. Like I said, "reason" might be a little strong for this particular situation. Our reason for biking to Duluth is a lot like a mountain climber's reason for going up Everest: because it's there, and it's a challenge and we can tell attractive women we did it and make them think we're manly and want to buy us drinks. At least that's what I'm hoping.
In any case, our bike trip involved significantly less chance of falling off a cliff or dying of frostbite. And we didn't need to hire asherpa.
The ride is a long one, about 140 miles in all. But it's almost all on flat bike trails. The nice thing about biking 140 miles on trails that used to be railroad tracks is that there are no big hills to go up. The unfortunate thing is that there are no hills to go down. That's a whole lot of pedal strokes without a lot of chance for a break.
It can be mildly depressing to look ahead of you and see nothing but a perfectly straight trail disappearing somewhere over the horizon. This was the perfect ride for someone who has yet to master the art of turning a bicycle.
And scenery? Northern Minnesota is beautiful early in the fall, when the leaves are changing. Once they're all gone, though, that's a whole lot of naked trees and empty fields to stare at. It doesn't exactly stir the soul.
All told the trip took us about seven hours and 40 minutes of riding time. That's a lot of opportunity to think about hunters or how uncomfortable your bike seat has gotten in the past 20 miles or how warm you'd be if you were still in bed. Or how maybe attractive women aren't as turned on as we might hope by stories of long, flat, non-scenic bike rides. At least outside of Belgium.
It was hard. The last six miles, riding into a stiff wind from the end of the trail to our hotel, was the worst. We were tired at the end, but not exhausted. Overall we averaged just over 18.2 miles per hour. We felt like we had accomplished something.
And best of all, we didn't get shot.

Watch out for the cursed carrots

I don't get the haunted hayride concept. Every year around this time businesses and civic groups in the Twin Cities around the country who have an interest in scaring a population primed by Halloween (and possibly campaign ads) to be frightened. Presumably this is because they lack ready access to an appropriately spooky old house.
These groups assemble scary scenes, hire local teenagers to dress in masks and face paint and load wagons with bales of hay to haul people through the woods late at night.
But a hayride is not inherently scary. Hayrides are about harvests and full moons and the bounty of the earth. Sometimes they are about moonshine, I think. They are not about demons and witches and trying to make people wet their pants with fear.
I can't imagine someone ever saying, while being pulled on a haywagon under a harvest moon, "I sure wish I could enjoy myself, but I can't shake the feeling a serial killer might come lurching out of that thicket." Sitting in hay just makes a person feel safe. And nobody makes horror movies about cursed soybean fields.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just not a haunted hayride kind of guy. Maybe the fact I haven't done much to acknowledge Halloween's existence since I was about 15 plays into the equation.
Or, maybe I just got a bum hayride. Admittedly, while the people behind this particular hayride put some work into the scenes on display -- the giant, animated demon-thing that appeared to have been inspired by the computer game Doom clearly either took a whole lot of work or cost a whole lot of money -- the hearts of the hayride haunters themselves did not seem to be into the activity.
There's nothing frightening about a teenager in a gorilla mask and a jean jacket. Not even a little. And if the costume didn't make it clear enough this particular employee was thinking more about the next day's English test or the girl he has a crush on or Deal or No Deal host Howie Mandel's disturbing shaved-head look, the quiet "rawr" he gave while ambling alongside the wagon was a pretty good sign. (I'm honestly not sure what the best way is to write out a half-hearted roar. I did the best I could).
Granted, this particular hayride had some other factors working against it. It was really cold Monday night. And it was windy. And since attending was a last-minute decision the only jacket I had was a windbreaker. So it was a little uncomfortable at times.
And that doesn't even take into account the drunk girls. They seemed less bothered by the cold. Or, for that matter, by just about anything else going on around them outside of taking pictures of each other and nearly falling into my lap a few times.
Or, there was the girl who asked nearly every hayride monster for his phone number. Actually, that's not true. She only asked the ones who had face paint, not the ones with masks. She wanted to be able to see their bone structure, she said. A girl's gotta have standards.
There were distractions, is what I'm saying. So maybe under other circumstances I would have been terrified. Maybe if it had been warmer or if it had been earlier of if I had been 9 I would be afraid to go to sleep tonight because I knew I would have nightmares about the guy dressed up like Halloween serial killer Michael Meyers. Instead, I was confused why I was supposed to be scared by a character that hasn't been in a decent horror movie for about 20 years. Do kids today know who Michael Meyers is? Do they confuse him with the Austin Powers guy? I'm confused about this hayride's target market, I guess.
Like I said, though, I could be wrong. Some people on this particular hayride seemed genuinely frightened from time to time. Although the fact they were just as frightened by the same thing over and over might mean they're not entirely credible.
The only chills I got, though, were from the wind.

Look me in the eye -- it's really clean

Apparently, I have poor eyelid hygiene.
I didn't even realize there was such a thing.
Granted, it's been a while since I covered this topic. I was a student at Oak-Land Junior High School when I tool home economics. This was back in the days before it was called family and consumer science. Although, if I'm honest, there was nothing either economical or scientific about anything I did there. Mostly I baked cakes nobody would actually want to eat and sewed felt pillows that were too small to be functional and too ugly to be decorative. I think there was a crude cutout of a dolphin on it.
One of the other things we covered in home ec had to do with personal hygiene, a topic of particular importance in a school filed with students all hitting puberty at roughly the same time. I remember learning about the importance of daily showers. And of washing all parts of the body thoroughly. And of paying particular attention to often-neglected areas like armpits and bottoms of feet. But I swear nobody ever told me my eyelids deserved any special attention. As far as I was concerned, they were just another part of my face, remarkable only for their ability to block out the light when I needed to sleep and to provide some degree of protection in the event of a Three Stooges-style eye-poking. That's all.
Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently eyelids are sensitive instruments requiring the same kind of specialized attention given to teeth or high-end swiss timepieces.
Last week, I got my eyes checked. In part I did this because it has been something like five years since the last time I'd seen an optometrist. In perhaps larger part, though, it was because the Nicollet County Attorney's office said I had to if I wanted them to dismiss a ticket I got last month for driving without the glasses my license said I needed.
I thought the fact I'd passed the driver's license eye exam again since then would be enough, but apparently those don't actually measure what you can see.
Actually, when you consider the way some people drive, they might have a point there.
Anyway, during the exam I complained to the optometrist about having a sensation best described as the corners of my eyelids had been sticking to my eyes. I'd been dealing with the problem by frequently either blinking or opening my eyes wide. This provided temporary relief and had the added benefit of driving my mom crazy. But it wasn't really a long-term solution.
According to the optometrist, my problems were the result of clogged glands in my eyelids. Apparently, the oils the glands were producing were not getting either onto or around my eye -- I didn't ask for details; for all I know it's the oil's responsibility to contract out eye-unsticking duties -- and the result is something called Blepharitis, which sounds kind of like the title of a Judy Blume book.
According to the information I was given Blepharitis is very common. Actually, it sounds like I've gotten off pretty easy. At their worst my symptoms included sticky and maybe occasionally tired eyes. Other symptoms include excessive tearing; red, swollen eyelids, crusting and scaling around the eyelashes and frothy tears.
In other words, ew. I mean, frothy tears? In other words, this is a condition that can make people look like the world's creepiest liquid soap dispensers?
The optometrist gave me something called eyelid scrub to take care of the problem. I'm not sure how it's different than ordinary soap, except it costs $13.50 per bottle. Getting diagnosed meant my insurance covered the visit, though, and saved me more than $100 so I didn't ask too many questions. The bottle claims the stuff is pre-lathered, which is nice because it saves me seconds of difficult work.
I'm a little worried the fact I have specialized eyelid scrub means I've become one of those metrosexuals everyone was talking about so much a few months ago. But I can't complain too much. My eyes feel less sticky. And there are hardly any eyelid scales.