TAKE A STATISTIC TO LUNCH

Statistics are king in today's era of scientific exactitude. They have the instruments with which to quantify virtually everything down to its smallest particle. Hence the professional statistician's crown. They are quoted most every day when it comes to our weather and climate, health and wealth, viewing and buying.

But take a statistic to lunch some day and watch. While it can perfectly dissect the food on your plate, it will have trouble predicting dessert. You see, even the best statistician will admit predicting is a very iffy game. And yet, today's climatologists and sociologists are being asked to spin their numbers like swords slicing open the curtains to our future.

Lets see how they're doing...

With climate, the National Weather Service has a bazillion stats on the new heat, drought and tornado records. But here's the funny thing, fans, they can't agree any more than the pols in D.C. on whether our climate is on the brink of an epoch pneumonia or just another bad sneeze.

With sociology, the halls of academia are a scholarly fury of disagreements right now. A passel of professors have recently dissected us into warring classes, castes and cultures. The more grim predict "America is shredding at the seams." Listening to the current election season it's easy to see why some sociologists say our times are the most divided since the Civil War.

But back to our lunch date...

I have no expertize in either climate or sociology. However, I'd share my dessert with my statistic with this advice: Straight-line projections into the future can be terrible wrong. Two classic examples: (1) in 1899 the US Patent Office predicted they would go out of business because every invention had by now been developed (2) in that same year, New York City predicted the streets by 1950 would be 3 inches deep in horse manure.

Tales to humble the haughtiest of predictions!

WHICH MAYBERRY DO YOU MISS MOST - OAK PARK OR EVANSTON?

Actually there probably are no 20th C Mayberry's left in our 21st C. But at one time, inhabited by good and gentle folks like Andy Griffith, there were thousands. I know because I lived in one. Lately I've discovered on Facebook literally thousands of wistful adults who grew up in similar Mayberry's.

But something ugly has happened right before our mistful eyes. Wannabe Andy's -- like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Tea Partiers -- have kidnapped our lovely green town, and are holding its gentle folks hostage. Yep, hostage to their mis-informed take on the town.

Seems like they're using the soft rhythms of that older America to tout something they're calling the "real America." As I hear them using that name, I hear them mocking communities like today's Oak Park and Evanston who've been busy saving not just touting Mayberry. Not by deep-freezing it in their angry speeches, but by keeping its soul alive by adding to its population....!

Stroll their streets and stores today and I promise you this. You'll find some of the very same verdant lawns and gardens and Victorians of old. And populated with some of the very same kids selling lemonade, dads trimming bushes, moms making dinner, neighbors sharing over backyard fences, and walk-to stores and churches. Just like I remember.

Only...!

Only Oak Park and Evanston have thoughtfully added to their Wonder Bread populations. Populations of all kinds, colors, and faiths. Honestly, when I look back to my Mayberry, its glory still shines. Only looking around Oak Park and Evanston's population, now I know what was missing.

SUMMER -- A FINE TIME TO SHED SOME CLOTHESE AND CLICHES

As for summertime clothes-shedding, people do so in inverse proportion to their proportions. Anytime, though, is a good time for shedding a few clingy cliches. Like the ones that presume we are the superior of all the animal kingdom. Ask any bomb or disease sniffing dog about that one...!

Maybe humanity shouldn't be so quick to consider our animal instincts so inferior to our rational thinking. If you tally the number of times your instincts saved your life versus your thinking, well you might be surprised. So lets hear it for those sensory skills of ours:

* Smell is so often overlooked. And yet how often does a passing aroma instantly trigger powerfully subtle emotions in us? Fresh cut grass -- the distant days of summer childhood. Chalk -- those almost forgotten years in the classroom. Gardenias -- perhaps an eternity-ago prom night. A pancake house -- oh my god, I'm back in Mom's kitchen.

Not too different from our pets, we can pick up body scents. Close your eyes in a car and can't you quickly tell who you're sitting next to? In restaurants and at parties too. Usually thinking comes only after smelling. Which might tell you to sharpen that gift, because properly used it can open remarkable sensory worlds in your brain too long neglected.

* Sound too is taken for granted. Watch your pets' ears as we now understand they can distinguish sounds and their meanings with astonishing accuracy. Hearing is one thing; listening is something quite more. When you listen to the roar of a jet -- why not allow yourself a quick reprise of that last trip you took to Italy? The strains of Bach or Mozart -- let their experience remind your very being of the majesty or order in your world. The giggle of a baby -- no harm in recalling the joy you both felt in that delivery room.

Here's the point. Like every other animal, we house a galaxy of emotions that have been stored awaiting just the right smell or sound to be released. Give them permission to take over your mind every lovely once and awhile.

IT'S TRUE -- YOU'LL BE IN SOMEONE'S DREAMS THIS VERY NIGHT

Our world of dreams is a fiercely strange landscape of facts, fictions, and faces. But as we all know, they splash across our nighttime shores mixed and muddled. The ancients translated them as messages from the future. Moderns understand them as impressions from the past. Either way -- someone somewhere will dream about you tonight.

This is because somehow your life crossed theirs. As a fellow student, a fellow worker, a fellow member of an important event. Or just as likely you were simply a blip on their screen. Perhaps a face in the crowd, a nurse passing your room, a child looking up at you.

Here's the Freudian-Jungian-Hitchcockian point.

Donne was right. No one is an island. Our little ripples wash into their little ripples on this ocean of life with both small and large consequences. We're just too self-absorbed to always absorb these daily facts. Yet deep in the sanctums of our consciousness we record them like the exquisite computer network of memories that we are.

There's not enough time in our waking hours to quarry and quantify these memories. After all we're busy living and paying forward. And yet, nothing we [or those countless they's] have ever done is ever lost. Very often they simply ripple in when we're not busy living but busy dreaming.

In case I pop up this evening, do say hello. I promise to do the same.....

WHY OH WHY SO MANY COLORS? WHY OR WHY SO MANY COMMERCIALS?

                                             WHY OH WHY SO MANY COLORS...?        
In a simpler time, women were simply known as mysteries. Men and song writers rather liked it that way. But somewhere along the trail, women decided they'd make other things mysteries as well. Like their colors. Men and even song writers managed nicely with basics like red, yellow, blue and green. Now...! well, now take green. We are now told there is: Apple, lime, asparagus. Moss, myrtle, jungle. Lawn, fern, forest. Not to mention Paris, Persian, Phthalo!

Those of us from Mars suspect those of you from Venus have an unspoken raison d'etre for this and other such delicious feminine obscurities. In simpler times, men held unfair advantage with the use of muscle. In response, women today take advantage with the use of mystery.

Watch any dazed man accompanying any woman through any Michigan Avenue dress salon. The mystery of everything from her colors to her cadences can neutralize him at any moment. And why not. Ever since Eden, we seem to to enjoy being neutralized...!

                                    WHY OH WHY SO MANY COMMERCIALS?Do you know what happens in America at precisely 12, 24, 36, 48 and 60 minutes after each hour of prime-time programming? These are the trigger-points for network engineers across the nation to interrupt whatever you may [or may not be] enjoying with capitalism's gift to the people: a commercial.

At one time we could switch channels, but now the national conspiracy of commercialdom has ordained  all channels go to commercials all at the same time. Thereby igniting a new national mystery. What does America do when commercials come on? One piece of documentable evidence. Water levels from toilet use plummets. Meanwhile others are exploring other rooms for answers. Stand by...

EXCLUSIVE FIRST INTERVIEW WITH DAPPER HIGGS BOSON

In an exclusive Skype interview, the now-famous Higgs Boson took time away from the glass-clinking physicists in Geneva to share his secret:

ADMIRER ~ Why are you smiling?

BOSON     ~  Because everyone is so amazed when actually I've been around all along.

ADMIRER ~  Reminds me of my parents when I finally found the hidden eggs on Easter.

BOSON      ~ They hid them WANTING you to find them. When you did, they were pleased.

ADMIRER ~  For a long time I thought it was the Easter Bunny.

BOSON ~     They let you think so til it was time to realize the eggs were MEANT to be found.

ADMIRER ~  Funny how some kids react after they find there's no Easter Bunny.

BOSON     ~  Deciding if there's no Bunny hiding them, maybe there's no Parent either.

ADMIRER ~  Sorta sad.

BOSON     ~  No, sorta silly. Silly enough for them to calculate I hid myself.

ADMIRER  ~ But these guys are our best-and-brightest.

BOSON      ~ [SMALL COSMIC SIGH]] Oh dear. This hunt is going to take longer than I thought!

ANN ROMNEY -- RICH BITCH OR NEW ROLE MODEL?

Mustn't take silly political flaps too seriously. But seriously, is richy-bitchy Ann actually a re-constituted role-model? She may be from Fundamentalists to Latin-Catholics to Orthodox-Jews to guys whose beefy dads always advised: "Keep her home, barefoot and pregnant!"

Those mid-20th C days when stay-at-home moms all looked like Donna Reed in the Donna Reed Show have been systematically gagged by a flurry of articulate Feminism. So as a happy kid with just such a stay-at-home mom, I'm not the one to pass judgment. However, let me take you into that cobwebby tomb known as "the way we were." Before that remarkable species of American womanhood is discarded and discredited forever by freedom-toasting Boomers and Millennials. 

Picture moms in the Mad Men era of the 50s & 60. But on their own terms. Not ours.

Average education...average looks...average husbands...in average apartments...with above-average hopes in the American Dream...by partnering with their ambitious husbands out there in the world of work. Raised by the Greatest Generation who had just survived the Depression and the War, these brides were not unaware of other careers. Yet most felt something long un-felt today. That orchestrating home, husband, and kids could be a symphony very well worth conducting. 

No, they didn't wear heels & earrings for dinner. But neither did they wear their roles like yokes of yearning to escape at the first chance. Most believed with sturdy mothers and grandmothers as their role-model that their role may not yield wonderful paychecks; far more. it yielded wonderful people.

Imagine that...! No, I don't think you can.