UNCLE ABE, YOU'RE A PAIN!!

"It doesn't make any difference, Jack...!"

I once despised those words, uttered with disdainful dismissal by the family patriarch to whatever bright new idea I came up with at the family table. Hey look, I'm going to college. I'm studying the Great Books. Just because I'm full of new ideas and passions while you're full of arthritis and cynicism, you can't brush me off like that.

But he did. Dinner after dinner. Not angrily -- you could almost welcome the attention anger would have required -- but indulgently. As if to say, "When you grow up a little, then we can talk."

Now I'm grown up [at least old] and now I wish Uncle Abe were here to hear me utter [at least think to myself] the very same words. Time can do that to you. Although with the sad wisdom these words carry comes an even sadder regret. If all the bright new ideas in life actually "don't make any difference," then what the hell are we all doing here? Running around studying, designing, writing, and speechifying?

Donald Trump has never been a hero, but he once uttered an heroic admission: "I'm busy thinking and doing all these things because, well, it's what you do till you die..." Uncle Abe would nod, reminding the table how whatever we are all busily doing-till-we-die is in the final measure a game whose rules are controlled by someone else!

Government...? Despite all the impassioned campaigning, voting, and Mr-Smith-Goes-To-Washington movies, no one in government is able to stretch any farther than the tethers of their own funds, friends and lobbyists. Food...? Regardless of all the sharp-eyed inspections, nutritional studies, and consumer alerts, we still end up consuming most of what makes the suppliers the most profit. Business....? Despite America's giddy dreams about anyone-can-make-it, a few hundred bankers in New York, Geneva and Beijing control enough global purse strings to decide whether your niche of the economy is going anywhere this year or not. Sports & entertainment...? Give me a break, because big games and big celebrities don't depend on our cheering as much as on the financing of the backers with the bankrolls.

OK, OK, sounds cynical. Just like Uncle Abe did. But when I re-check the Great Books, I can see where Uncle Abe learned his cynicism. Aha, but with one fierce exception. The song still has it right: "The best things in life are free."

THE ODDEST ODD COUPLE

Among the people I admire most are fathers and stunt men. If they seem like an odd couple, here's my reasoning. Both have complicated jobs. And yet, both are usually taken for granted. Fathers because they simply can't match the incredible role and reign of mothers in the lives of their children; stunt men because they simply can't match the dazzle and distinction of the stars in their movies.

So it is that fathers and stunt men sorta fade into the background. They're there. They're needed. But they usually don't get the family headlines or the marquee billings. Which for most of them is OK, because they should have known this coming in.

But now here's what neither of them could have known coming in. They will be casting some pretty large shadows over the lives of their children and their audiences. I mean, think about it. Kids watching their Dads looming large in their little lives as they drive cars. Carry heavy things. Repair broken stuff. And sometimes even caught kissing away Mommy's tears.

Pretty impressive stuff for a little tyke to behold. And -- unaware of Daddy's silent flaws -- to ever imagine matching. Still, how can there be anything so wrong with placing him on your own private pedestal? From where you can admire what you see and aspire to do likewise?

When it comes to those amazing stunt men -- well, here we have an upside and a downside. Upside, audiences can thrill to the bold, brave and heroic. We need people in our lives to occasionally do impossible things. Like leaping up to catch that home run shot....reaching the victim just before the villain....driving through crowded streets of enemies at impossible speeds always to succeed without ever harming a single pedestrian.

Impressive stuff. Especially for the young male animals in the audience who can't help envisioning themselves using such irrational violence to win the war and the girl in that patented happy ending. Unlike Dad, though, some of these antics might be better deferred than duplicated.

I'll never duplicate the impossible feats of improbable stunt men. And neither will you. But with a little luck and a lot of work, we might be able to duplicate the impossible feats we watched Dad perform. Funny, how I never imagined ever being older than him. And yet, in a strange way, I am. Now at 80, 50 long lonely years after he died at just 63....

THE MAGIC OF 10

Science does it again...!

A great many scientists seem unsatisfied to take seriously any old adages or proverbs until they can be statistically tested and verified. OK, no harm done. Only their testing often comes down to validating in their labs what the rest of us already knew in our world. The latest "breakthrough" comes from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center used computational and analytical methods "to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion."

The magic number is 10%. Director Boleslaw Szymanski concluded: "Once the number of convinced opinion holders grows above 10%, the idea spreads like a flame." Anyone who has celebrated the candle-flames to a few score birthdays will quickly stir with a rush of personal memories that can easily prove the professor's point. Even without his laboratory >>

* Without at least 10% of the fans being giddy, beer-soaked fanatics in the Wrigley Field bleachers, how could the city of Chicago keep enduring the 101-years of no-win Cubs baseball....?

* Without at least 10% of the national population consisting of hormone & horror crazed teens, how could Hollywood keep grinding our formulaic monster/car chase/buddy flicks year after year...?

* Without at least 10% of the TV viewers willing to keep turning on raunchy but predictable sitcoms, how could sponsors keep paying networks to impose this brain-draining plague season after season...?

* Without at least 10% of the driving public willing to buy those headlight-blinding vans, how could Detroit keep refusing to adjust the light beams for the benefit of the other 90%....?

* Without at least 10% of Congress absolutely and irrevocably dug into their opposing positions in 1861, how could a perfectly sane nation go perfectly insane for the next four years otherwise known as our bloody Civil War...?

* Today, without at least 10% of Congress consisting of true-believers in their own unshakable catechism of convictions, how could a perfectly insane nation teetering on the edge of its own history be perfectly willing to be insanely "right" even as it hurls itself off economic cliffs...? Still beckoning like the mad Ahab lashed to his great white whale...?

I have no answers. I'm hoping the gang at the Institute does. Because science just may be our last chance...

LINUS OR LOUIE -- WHOSE WORLD DO YOU LIVE IN?

Linus walks his world clutching his little blue blanket. While Lucy is a hard fisted feminist-before-her-time, her little brother Linus is more like Charlie Brown. Just plain scared at what the next turned-corner might bring. Louie Armstrong, on the other and happier hand, sings the classic WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD with a throaty juiciness that makes you feel every corner out there is going to be worth turning!

Today's helter-skelter world has a lot of Linus' in it. I mean, what's not to be afraid of...! But then you listen to Louie sing lines like, "I see trees of green/red roses too/I see em bloom/for me and for you," and how can you not feel kinda good and smiley?

Here's the point to take home.

The world is more than comic characters and jazz singers. Still, the arts do reflect life. Linus' fears are our fears; Louie's hope are what we would like to be our hopes. Fears come easily. Hopes take a little more work. Without fear we might travel life unguarded; but without hope, we could barely make the trip at all. No surprise here -- once again the world instructs us to find the proper balance.

Billions of us travelers go to bed at night scared of something. An attack...an arrest....too little food....too much government...not finding a job....not keeping the job you have...disease...death. The fears are real enough. Which is why so many tug that little blue blanket high over the head and pray a deep sleep will soon overtake them.

But even the peace of a dreamless sleep must eventually greet the dawn. That's when hope begins again. Enough at least to crawl out from under that blanket. That sleep. That escape. Now it's Louie's turn. With his kinda hope: "I hear babies cry/I watch them grow/You know they're gonna learn/A whole lot more than I'll ever know/And I think to myself/What a wonderful world."

You are permitted to laugh a little at Linus.! However, please, you are required to listen a lot to Louie!

VOILA, THE FRENCH ARE RIGHT AGAIN!

"The more things change, the more they remain the same...." An old French proverb whose words have echoed down the generations. To some, a piece of enlightened wisdom. To others of a more scientific bent, proverbs like this are often no more than untested crutches to get you through the day. Personally -- I vote for wisdom.

You may have to work your way through many a day before the words here make complete sense. Wait... let me correct that! Really all you have to do is surf your handy hundred-channel television set. The more you see out there, the more you realize that old French writer was absolutely right.

If testing is your thing, OK test it for yourself. Among others, there are five primal human emotions: Passion, Fear. Terror, Compulsion, Curiosity. Surf with me >>

* Passion ~See if you can find any programming out there without sex. Marital sex, pre-marital sex, lyrical sex, kinky sex, but somewhere somehow even in the goriest, all-guy war story, there has to be time for as the French put it: la grande passione

* Fear ~ Every age has been afraid of many things. Predators, enemies, floods, earthquakes. Notice how little has changed. Some of the names have changed, but not the fear. Which is why it's hard to find a program that doesn't feature fear. Just listen to the music and you can tell when it's coming. Heck, even game shows cue the music when the audience is tensely waiting to see which box or number or letter will be selected

* Terror ~ Terror is doubling down on fear. It's the sum of all fears as in the ever-popular monster plots. I mean, America just never gets enough ghosts, vampires, zombies, werewolves, Kongs, and Chuckys. Terror began the day Eden's gates were slammed behind us, and it's still here. Making some of us scared, others rich

* Compulsion ~ Seems as if evolution has hard-wired us to compulsively behave violently. All in the name of survival, we are advised. Still, most violence throughout most centuries and now throughout most programming is intentional and, one could argue, indulgent. Somehow bashing in faces, pummeling bodies, gunning down rivals, and firebombing cars and cities is just so damn satisfying. The means change, the violence remains the same

* Curiosity ~ From the first time we find our baby toes to stick into our mouth, we remain a curious creature. We are curious now about more than our toes, and curious we will remain to the end. But now during your surfing how many times and plots have you noticed revolve around science. Scientists are after all the most curious of all creatures. Naturally, the madder the scientist, the better the story.

Test over! Grades in! The French are right once again! "The more things change, the more they remain the same.."

HAVING A CUP OF OIL FOR BREAKFAST

After oil, coffee is the world's largest export product. Both energy sources...both born in the same regions of the world...but each with a very different history.

Modern day Ethiopia is generally considered the cradle of humanity, from where our species and eventually coffee first began to spread. Modern day Iraq is generally considered the cradle of civilization, from where oil was early discovered but did not spread. Obviously coffee can be exported; oil cannot. Oil like gold is where you find it.

There are those historians who enjoy considering the many What-Ifs in life. For instance: What if Moses, when leaving Egypt, had turned right instead of left...? Instead of the land of milk-and-honey, he would have ended up with the earth's greatest reserves of oil. A whole new twist to the ageless Jewish/Arab conflict.

Funny how both the first coffee beans and the first oil deposits were at first considered a nuisance. Some nuisance! Today, billions of lives depend on each. Coffee for pleasure; oil for power. Yet somehow their parallel histories have taken sharply different paths. Coffee -- from its exotic African origins, Middle Eastern evolution, and Latin American industries -- has been shared by the world in largely peaceful fashion. Oil -- on the other and bloodier hand -- has become a bitter source of East/West conflict [the East has it, the West wants it].

Now there are those who speculate our world would be a more harmonious place if only we could hurry up the inevitable discovery of alternative fuels. Then there's Starbucks -- who seems to have proved there's no alternatives to our morning cup of coffee.

Except maybe Starbuck's next re-packaged-and-promoted rollout that oughta be hitting your supermarkets any day now. Is there a lesson in all this? Not sure. Maybe this. Both are black, but one tastes better. So rather than follow-the-money, how about we follow-the-magic....?

AL PACINO AND ME

Never met my fellow Italian-American, Al Pacino. And yet, we have much in common. So much, I feel obliged to share some of it with you. Whether you feel obliged to read it is only a delete button away.....

We're both of Sicilian extraction. Both his father and mine were born in Sicily in the 19th C. Both fathers migrated to America in the 20th C. Both their sons grew and prospered here. [Well, Al prospered a little more than Jack]. Oh, and his grandfather, born in Corleone, married one of my cousins, also from Corleone.

For many years, Pacino was self-conscious about his Sicilian roots. [I have some family members who still are]. You see, while Sicily is arguably one of the most beautiful islands in the world, its colorful 3000 year history has very likely produced more sinners than saints. But then most Sicilians don't keep score.

Like you, I've watched the GODFATHER trilogy more than once. One episode in particular. When the young Michael Corleone goes into hiding in our family's little hillside town, which indeed does exist just above the city of Palermo. Lovingly shot on-location by another Sicilian, Francis Coppola, we can see its sun-baked cluster of stone houses, twisting cobble stone streets, craggy-faced old men fanning under the afternoon suns, wizened old women still gathering to gossip in the ancient piazzas. And, most particularly, the centuries-old town cathedral where Michael is married in the film; and where my Father was baptized in real life.

When you visit here, when you walk here, when you breathe here, you understand how not even the brightest twenty-something from Silicon Valley can actually escape his own family history. Genetically, culturally, religiously. And the older you get, the less you want to....