Daft Musings

Last weekend, our family went to see a movie in a movie theatre for the first time in 2011. It also happened to be the weekend fewer people went to see a movie than had done so in the two weeks after 9/11.

So how did we get to this situation? I love entertainment, and it wasn’t all that long ago that I spent the summer of 2005 trying to take my kids out to a movie each week, only to find that there weren’t enough G and PG movies for each week of the summer! That may be part of the problem, but I could still see edgier movies on my own, and I did.

The article I linked to says “Hollywood always has insisted it offers inexpensive entertainment compared to concerts, sports events and other costlier options” but that’s no longer as much the case as it used to be.

For instance, this year, instead of going to movies, I took my son to see plays. Yes, live plays, instead of movies! Many of them were Shakespeare plays: three of them were free, with only the cost of getting there early enough to get a seat, and for two others, the ticket prices were less than movie tickets cost. We’re also blessed in this area with having a lot of small theatres that take advantage of the talent in the area. Typically, $40 will buy tickets for both me and Neil to see a 2- to 3- hour performance. This includes seeing the imaginative way the set designer and director use the space and the set, watching the actors cleverly deal with wardrobe problems and flubbed lines if they happen, and being able to talk to the actors after the show. One year, at the Pear Slices performance, I sat near the playwright for one of the sketches, who let me in on the meaning of an acronym in his speech, and the mother of one of the actors, who could give me a personal run-down of her professional career. You don’t get all that with a movie, even if you paid extra to watch it in 3D.

The same rule applies to concerts and sports events: there’s a lot of concerts and sports events that price out under the $10 movie ticket price. The summer is often full of free concerts, and you can often find free tickets for our minor league baseball team, the San Jose Giants, and if you can’t, the tickets are only $9 each.

But more than anything, what’s killing the movie theatre is the quality of home video. We have a Blu-Ray Disc player, and, frankly, most of the movies I’m interested in going to are gone from the theatres before I can find the time to see them, especially since I know I can watch them at home. If I want to watch an R-rated movie with my husband, we don’t need to hire a babysitter: we can just wait until the kids go to bed and pop it in. And last year, Peter splurged on getting us a TV with 3D, and we could all watch Despicable Me in 3D in our own home, with our own popcorn and drinks. We’d watched it before in 2D in the movie theatre, and the accumulated tickets for all of us cost us more than the DVD set of the movie, which we can now watch in 2- or 3D whenever we want.

I don’t know if movie theatres will become extinct. We did like the sense of occasion in formally going out and see the movie (the most excellent The Muppets, BTW). And the movie theatre where we saw it, Camera Cinema 12, is a fun movie theatre to go to. The manager often dresses up like one of the characters in a currently-showing film, and as I was getting more popcorn, I glimpsed him dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. If you go past the theatre on the opening night for a movie that’s gotten a lot of buzz, you may also find cosplayers dressed up as movie characters. And if you buy your tickets in bulk, it’s only $6 for a seat (but still extra for 3D). But it’s hard to beat having a much wider movie selection (any disc on hand) with the comfort of staying home; and the going-out alternatives have stayed steady in their prices, as movie tickets have gotten costlier, making the latter less of an entertainment deal.

Earlier this year, Peter was floored to get a notice from Netflix essentially informing us that if we wanted to continue having the same service they’d been giving us, we’d have to pay nearly double each month. We’ve been Netflix subscribers since 2000, and until then, we’d loved what they offered. Before then, if we wanted to watch a movie in our home, we had to traipse over to a Blockbuster, the now-defunct Hollywood Video, or a dodgy strip-mall joint typically next to a liquor store. The second you paid for your rental, a clock started ticking, and god forbid you should wait an extra day to watch that second movie, or slip it into the video return slot 5 minutes after closing, or you’d get hit with fine after fine after fine.

Netflix cured that. Not only did they have a way broader selection than any store, your rentals came to you and you could hang on to them indefinitely. Making a mistake, like losing the paper case for a DVD, or accidentally putting a wrong disc in its place only resulted in a polite e-mail, and a quick fix. More recently, they added streaming, so you could stream some movies directly without having to put them in your queue and wait for them to be delivered. We loved that, too: we went on a Western movie kick and streamed a whole bunch of classics night after night without having to wait in between. We talked about how forward-thinking the company was, and bought gift subscriptions for family members.

But then it announced a pricing and service change so extreme, it essentially forced us look at the alternatives to judge as to whether this was still a good deal. As it turns out, a lot has changed since 2000 when we started our Netflix subscription. First of all, while it was convenient, as is hopefully a future that doesn’t involve USPS, Netflix’ streaming selection is still fairly anemic compared to its DVD selection. We can get much of the same streamed content from Hulu, Amazon Prime, and iTunes, just to name a few commercial alternatives. If we want to play connectivity roulette and download video, there’s bit-torrenting, which has actually become the borrowed entertainment choice of our younger peers. As if in response to Netflix’ hamfisted business decision, Amazon Prime made much of its content available for free. We watched The Tudors and Breaking Bad that way, thanks to a Google TV Peter had won at CES this year, and Peter’s still using it to check out random TV shows and movies while he works out.

As for DVD rental, we discovered the field on that has changed considerably, too. Blockbuster still exists (with far fewer stores), but it’s seen the light. They now offer a rent-by-mail plan that competes directly with Netflix, except that they offer games as well, and let you make same-day in-store exchanges for new DVDs, all without any overdue fees. For old-school in-store-rental people, they also reformed their overdue fine structure, so while it’s still obnoxious, you can understand it. I also decided to be more pro-active in looking for the movies on my queue and seeing if they’re in the library, since we go there at least once a week. While the availability is extremely restricted, I got  Rio Bravo, Inside Job, Young Victoria, and more, and I could hold on to them for up to 3 weeks. I’ve also been seeing people using the RedBox kiosk at my local grocery store, where I understand, you can rent a movie for $1 a day. Peter and I take a walk past that grocery store almost every day, so while it’s fraught with the same hazards as Hollywood Video was, it doesn’t involve the snotty clerk and its costs far less.

In the end, Peter refused the streaming service, and downgraded us to 2 DVDs at a time, rather than 3, giving Netflix actually less revenue from us than they’d been getting before. Gauging by their financials, we were far from the only customers taking a hard look at the value Netflix was giving us in comparison to their contemporary rivals, and Netflix came up short. There’s still a place and a need for Netflix in the current economy. They still have a broader DVD selection than any of their competitors (except maybe Blockbuster) and many of those are on Blu-Ray. And they don’t have the ill will years of botched Blockbuster rentals created for us — although I just realized Blockbuster will rent games as well.

In short, Netflix screwed up by making changes and raising prices so dramatically that we were shocked enough to think of abandoning them, and to look around for alternatives. That was a bad decision, and now that we’ve looked, I’m not sure how Netflix is going to win back the many customers who found another place to go for their video rentals.

I don’t typically think of other people as stupid. I realize they may have different information or a different background than my own, or that the information they’ve been given wasn’t as clear as it should be. But every so often, like last Friday, I do run across someone who is epically stupid, to the point of endangering herself as well as others.

We had just gotten on the road to Reno when Peter suddenly had to brake hard. He’d seen a car in front of him run up the freeway divider, then speed up to pass and cut off a bunch of vehicles. When the car stopped on the side of the freeway, he (as a good Samaritan) pulled over in front of it to see if the driver was ok.

She and her elementary-school-aged daughter were fine, but there were clearly more than a few marbles missing. When Peter pointed out to her that the front right tire was flat, and that she needed to call AAA or a tow truck service to get towed and to get it fixed, she seemed unable to comprehend the statement or its consequences. She was going to be late meeting a friend, she said, who was “just a few miles” away, and that she intended to just drive the car there, as is, and deal with the problem there. Peter pointed out that doing so was not only dangerous, but it would also almost certainly destroy the tire rim and possibly the axle as well, causing repair costs in the hundreds or thousands, while a tow and tire repair would be about $50. Hmm, a $1000 repair, or a $50 one. Hmmmmmm….

Of course she didn’t have AAA: that would be the responsible thing to do. She told Peter the car wasn’t really hers, but that she’d borrowed it from a friend. You could almost see the implied message that she didn’t want to pay for a tow truck, because she’d have to actually pay that; but if she managed to get the car to lurch and wobble to her next destination, she’d be there, whereupon she could call the poor friend who’d loaned her the car and complain that it wasn’t working right, and he’d be stuck with the repair.

Peter saw no reasonable option but to put on a spare for her. He asked her to pull out the spare tire, and she seemed surprised that there was such a thing, but to her credit, found it in the trunk underneath a pile of junk. As Peter jacked up the flat tire, she exclaimed “it doesn’t look flat now!” No shit, Sherlock! Peter pulled off the flat tire and the wheel, and she took it and threw it into the bushes on the side of the freeway. Peter yelled at her to put it in the trunk. Not only was it littering, but the rim itself is worth quite a bit. Reluctantly she picked it up and put it in the trunk. Meanwhile, we watched her daughter scratch her butt in public and try to walk up the the roadway above us.

The job was done, and we pulled away, leaving her behind us, as Peter had to stop in at the office to wash his now-greasy hands and mop off grease from his pants. I complained that it was no good helping people like that, and that we just should have called the CHP, but Peter pointed out that had we done that, she probably would have driven off and caused an accident before the CHP arrived. But, really, how do you get into the mindset that destroying a borrowed car and/or throwing parts of it like trash onto the side of the road is acceptable behavior? I later speculated that the car may have been stolen, but given that the daughter’s toys were all over the back seat, Peter thought our original opinion of extraordinary stupidity and irresponsibility were more like the case.

It seemed like we drove past a myriad of accidents on the way to Reno that day, but we didn’t stop for any more of them.

As a businessperson, my relationship to the City of San Jose in which we have our offices is best described as contentious. It started when my husband moved his office to San Jose and paid the business license tax. Rather than welcoming a business to the city, the revenue department immediately assumed we’d been here for the 2 previous years and sent him a huge bill, complete with fines for non-compliance and late payment. No one at the department deigned to return his calls, so he finally had to march down to City Hall in person, and that didn’t clear the matter up either. He had to deliver an affidavit from the current landlord that we hadn’t been in the office before we actually started paying rent on it; a copy of the office lease and business licenses in Santa Clara where we’d been all that time; and copies of our former stationery with the Santa Clara address to get the fines cleared, never mind that San Jose itself had no proof for its presumption that we’d been illegally squatting in our new offices for years beforehand. The visit this summer from Guido, visibly counting heads in the office, didn’t improve my mood.

So when I found a notice in the mailbox that the City of San Jose had sent us a registered letter, my immediate assumption was one of “how did these @$%^tards #@$% up again, and how many $%#@& hoops will I have to leap through to get it fixed?” And I don’t usually curse, but this sort of thing brought forth my mental pottymouth. It’s Christmastime, and I don’t relish standing in a long post office line just to sign for a letter proving the city’s latest idiocy, so I left a message at the revenue department (sans vulgarities) asking them to call me back with information on how they screwed up this time. As it turns out, this wasn’t that department’s mess.

I had to run an errand which took me past the post office anyway, so I finally braved the lines and signed for the registered letter. It was from the Environmental Services Department: a redundant reminder to the notice they’ve already sent out that retail businesses may no longer give out thin plastic bags with handles with purchases (though thin unhandled plastic bags are ok) Being largely mail-order, we don’t use bags, period. And honestly, before the city council decided to enact this ban rather than tackle the far more serious financial problems and issues, I was a happy bag lady, bringing my totes in to each and every business, some of whom, like Trader Joe’s, Lunardi’s, and CVS, encourage the behavior with various spiffs. Since then, I’ve been grabbing as many plastic bags as I can while the getting’s good and hoarding them, because sometimes you do need a thin plastic disposable bag for stuff.

But I digress. My first thought when I opened the letter was “how much money did the city (which can’t keep its libraries open, or pay its cops) spend on this fiasco?” The final kicker was that the letter included a “self-certification” form, with all the checkboxes already conveniently checked in for me, which I should return (also at the city’s cost) to let them know I understand the requirements of the “Single Use Carryout Bag” law that goes into effect in January. I had to stand in line at the post office at Christmastime for this!!?

As it would happen, we had two of our favorite wags over for dinner that night. Bill promptly asked if there are any consequences for not returning the form, because if there aren’t, why bother doing it? There’s nothing telling you what will happen if you don’t return it, and I even called the number on the letter today to ask and reached a guy with a thick Vietnamese accent who had no idea what I was talking about (and yes, I checked — I called the same number on the form.) Peter A. pointed out that there are consequences:  the Environmental Services Department will keep sending me registered letters which I could keep ignoring, imposing even more costs on the city for its eco-posing, thoughtless initiative. Oh, and did I mention, the law is redundant with the exact same anti-plastic-bag rule imposed upon us by the county?

And yet, the politicians wonder how they keep losing money, despite all their cut-backs…..

Until recently, the Mexican Day of the Dead was something I’d only read about in old Ray Bradbury stories. More recently, it’s become an artsy event for urban Californians, and this year we went to the San Jose Art Museum for their Day of the Dead festival.

One of the highlights for us was making candy skulls, because while I’d heard about them, I’d never seen one. When we managed to find free seats at one of the tables, the docent brought us solid sugar skulls, which we were welcome to decorate as we wished with colored frosting, beads, and buttons. Here are ours:

After we’d explored some of the other events (which included making paper flowers, getting stickers from catrinas, and seeing a mariachi band), we went out to coffee. As we passed the basilica which is next to the museum, I noticed they advertised a Day of the Dead exhibit of their own. Peter and Neil weren’t into it, but Kelly and I were curious.

Inside a small hall of the basilica were 5 or 6 big shrines, each with photographs of (presumably) dead people. They were surrounded by colorful skulls, which weren’t only sugar skulls, but also ceramic or plastic. There were plates of fruit or cookies, and in one case, a bottle of tequila, set out, as well as pots of marigolds. In one case, a jaunty skeleton in a suit and hat stood next to a shrine. And all of it was an explosion of color: there were crosses, candles, shiny beads, and scattered flowers, so dense and profuse that you couldn’t focus on any one thing.

Helpfully, the basilica had also set up a plaque explaining the Day of the Dead from the Catholic perspective. It goes back to indigenous pre-Catholic traditions, when the Mexican natives believed the dead would come back to visit during a month between July and August. The Catholic church moved the festival to All Souls’ Day (November 2), and the basilica lets people set up shrines like the ones we saw, and some of the local Catholic churches will hold a special All Soul’s Day mass at a cemetery.

Not surprisingly, Kelly was inspired. I asked one of the docents at the art museum where I could get sugar skulls. He said the museum had made all the skulls for the event themselves with a special mold, but perhaps I could find them at one of our local Mexican grocery stores.

Today, I went to the Mexican grocery store closest to me, which I had nervously been avoiding on the fearful (and wrong) assumption that I needed to speak Spanish to shop there. It was great store, with otherwise hard-to-find groceries at great prices (whole Tilapia for $2/lb.; tamarind sherbert; fresh oxtail; Oaxacan cheese!) But the Day of the Dead was not what this store was about. I asked one of the grocers about them, who said they didn’t sell them, but maybe I could find them at Lucky’s (a local American grocery chain.) Hmm. I did find some pastries behind a dancing skeleton sticker which I presumed to be pastries meant to be placed on a Day of the Dead shrine, but I could be wrong:

And in the households section, among all the veladora candles, I found 3 different designs, each in honor of of “Saint Death.”

As it would happen, just on Friday, Neil and I had watched Engineering an Empire: the Aztecs, and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities. While the program reported how the Aztecs had managed to build not only large temples, but also cement causeways in a lake and on swampy land, as well as how they developed an ingenious aqueduct, it couldn’t help but note that the Aztecs were into blood. They were really, really into death and blood. And from what I know of modern Mexico, the conquistadors (who weren’t really the most pacifistic people themselves) didn’t quite manage to stamp it out.

The Day of the Dead celebrates death in a way modern Christianity really doesn’t. It ends up being beautiful and colorful and shiny, much like the Aztecs must have seen it. And the Santa Muerte candle had a prayer on it on the back (in English and Spanish) which doesn’t actually make any reference to God or Jesus, and it sounds like a nasty way to punish your enemies. Is Santa Muerte an Aztec goddess revived in faux Catholic guise? In any case, Peter told me she’s popular with the drug smugglers of Mexico, who may themselves be the modern version of the ancient Aztec race.

This gringa will never really know, but I’m glad I got to make sugar skulls this year.

A few nights ago, as Peter and I were going to bed, I looked out the window and saw two guys with hoodies and flashlights dipping in and out of a car in the dark. It looked suspicious, particularly since the video we have of my car being burgled in May featured a guy in a hoodie working with a flashlight and moving carefully so as not to set off the security lights.

We called the police, and with Peter’s powerful binoculars, kept looking at the figures in the dark. Meanwhile, a guy came out of a house closer to us and started looking through stuff in a truck bed in the driveway. He didn’t seem alarmed by the action 3 doors away, so either our call was a false alarm; he was somehow associated; or, more than likely, he couldn’t see what we were seeing from our second story vantage point.

The police arrived fairly quickly, and since we weren’t able to give them a clear address, they first drove up to talk to the guy looking through the truck. I ran out and told the police officer the activity we were calling about was actually down the street, and he walked over there, and I went back into the house.

As it turned out, the guys with the flashlights were the homeowners working on their car in the dark, but luckily for neighborhood harmony, they weren’t mad: in fact, they’d heard about the boogeyman Andrew Clark Bergman, too, so they were grateful for the nosy paranoid neighbors.

A second policeman arrived, and, to everyone’s surprise, the guy at the truck freaked out and jumped over a fence (not of the house he’d come out of.) No one was more surprised that the owner of said house, who grabbed a baseball bat and chased the guy right back out, straight into the policemen who were right on the scene.

As it turned out, the guy at the truck was a fugitive with 3 arrest warrants on him, who was hiding out at his mom’s house. The police frisked him and pulled out a wallet bulging with other people’s credit cards. He claimed he’d just found them, but that was an awful lot of credit cards to have just found, much less carry around in one’s wallet.

By this time, Peter and I were back out of the house, and we had a veritable neighborhood mini-party going on, with the fugitive as our major entertainment. The fugitive’s mom said he’d run away from rehab, which she was paying thousands of dollars for. We all agreed the fugitive was mightily lucky that he’d jumped into the backyard of a neighbor wielding a baseball bat, rather than a gun. In fact, one of the policemen informed us, there’d recently been just such an incident with a fugitive who met the wrong end of a shotgun as he ran into the wrong backyard fleeing the police.

In the end, all was well, and the fugitive got a car ride to the county jail. Now he’s well known, so maybe his mom’s place is no longer such a good hiding spot. On the other had, I fear, that like Andrew Clark Bergman, he won’t be staying in jail for long, and he’ll soon be “finding” more credit cards to fuel his addictions.

Since he was discovered driving Peter’s stolen car last year, Andrew Clark Bergman been on a multi-state crime spree. On November 25, 2010, he was arrested and booked in Las Vegas for grand larceny and burglary. On January 12, 2011, he was arrested in Kimble, Texas for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. The day after Cinco de Mayo, our security cameras recorded a guy who looks an awful lot like him riffling through my car and stealing a CD. On May 17, he was arrested for motor vehicle theft in Fresno, and arrested again in the same city in July for the possession of an illegal substance. He’s been a busy little criminal, and these are only the instances in which he was actually caught. More impressively, he has not a single conviction for any of these crimes, since he’s demonstrated to us that escaping conviction is not done by being innocent and/or having a good defense, or but rather by posting bail and skipping town. (Or alternately, going to a criminal-sanctuary town, like Fresno.)

I have no idea of his current whereabouts, but the possibility that he may be hiding out down the street, ready to pimp-roll himself into our driveway each night makes him the perfect boogeyman. Don’t leave anything valuable in the car, or Andrew Clark Bergman will smash the windows and take it. Lock the car doors, or Andrew Clark Bergman will crawl into your car and leave a layer of skeeze behind. Lock the front door or Andrew Clark Bergman will ooze in and steal your homework. And just think, Andrew Clark Bergman could be skeezing through your neighborhood, too!

To memorialize the anniversary of the theft and brief return of Peter’s PT Cruiser, we bought additional locks for the garage and back yard, purchased a laser sight for one of our pistols, and accidentally rousted a fugitive (though not, alas, Andrew Clark Bergman.)

To be fair, Andrew Clark Bergman is not our first family boogeyman. Until he came along, our family boogeyman was a former colleague-of-sorts whom I’ll call Flounder. Flounder had bad manners and a particular, peculiar enmity with the department I was working for at the time, so he constantly stymied my project. My supervisor hated him, and worst of all, every time Flounder called me, I‘d get chewed out.

I never actually met Flounder in person, and I doubt he lives up to the character we built up for him as a family. Peter attached a picture of Jabba the Hut to Flounder’s contact information in my contact list. We still have Halloween boxes which Kelly decorated with a worm like figure with eyes and mouth, with stink lines coming off, with the words “Flunder” underneath them. After all, Flounder was the scariest figure we knew.

But poor Flounder! Now he’s all but forgotten, and unlike Andrew Clark Bergman, who’s wanted in at least three states, Flounder is undoubtedly not wanted at all, anywhere. And this year’s Halloween boxes may have another set of Andrew Clark Bergman mug shots on them to properly spook them up.

As I’ve posted before, the City of San Jose has had to make major cutbacks in a lot of its services. It’s painful all around, but the state and the Feds are already trying to bleed us dry, and when it comes to forking over more out of my pocket to fund another governmental organization, even one I love as much as my own city, I’ve decided I’ll deal make do with less services, and thank the city council for accepting the reality of tough times, instead of imaging there’s some Scrooge McDuck character about who can be fleeced even further.

One of the cutbacks that’s been the toughest has been the one for the libraries. As a homeschooler with two passionate readers for children, I go to the library a lot. Last year, the library had to close on Mondays, and have only half days on Fridays, raised late fees to 50 cents/day/item, and limited reserves to 5 per card. Eventually, we got used to it. This year, they made more cuts, so each branch library is open only 4 days a week, but they also staggered the schedules, so some branches are open some days while others are not.

As with any change, there’s a transitional period when everyone adjusts. I hit the wall quickly. I had several books which were coming due, so I planned a visit to my branch on the first day it was open that week. To my surprise, I was hit with late fees for two books which had been due when my library was closed. Now, I’m not a schmuck when it comes to late fees. I’ve been hit with them when I don’t pay attention, and I’ll pay those, but with the higher late fees, I’m motivated to pay attention a lot more. But I thought it was somewhat reasonable not to expect me to return books to a closed library.

The librarian I spoke to was unsympathetic, which was unusual. I’ve come to know and love my regular librarians. They’ve admired Kelly’s drawings and helped her find books she wanted; they help Neil locate hard-to-find books from distant libraries; they put on fun and chaotic storytimes and events; they’ve even forgiven me for two books Kelly put in the bathtub, and which I would have had to pay $16 each to replace. So I figured, given the circumstances, I might get $1 waived since the library, as I said, wasn’t open.

But, no. Apparently the proper thing to do, according to the unsympathetic librarian (who I also had never seen at my branch before), was for me to have come to the closed branch and dropped it in; or to have driven across town to one of the branches open that day, never mind the inconvenience or pointlessness of that. I complained some more, and she told me I should write to my city councilman, Don Rocha.

Undoubtedly, she expected me to whine about the library cutbacks. But it’s tough all over in the city. The wonderful Fourth of July fireworks festival ended in 2008; the Cinco de Mayo parade was cancelled this year; the parks and recreation department lost most of its funding for programs for the disabled; and the San Jose police, who can find stolen cars, run down gangbangers, and chase the skeezeballs out of town, had to lay off a sizable portion of their force and reform their pension plans. What part of there is no money does not compute?

As it turned out, my problem wasn’t the city council, but rather a bad librarian. We had yet another issue when Kelly tried to check out a book which had been reserved but not yet pulled. I generally hate politicians, so I wasn’t pleased I was being goaded to write to one, and I was vocal about it. Thereupon, seeing my record, I also noticed the LINK+ book I’d given to the bad librarian to check in had never been checked in. LINK+ books are inter-library reserves, and the librarians I normally deal with advise me strongly to always turn them in in person rather than dropping them in the book slot, since the overdue fee on them is $1/day, and if there’s no proof they’re checked in and they disappear, that’s a sweet $125 you have to kiss goodbye. I suppose that’s one way an embittered librarian can earn her day’s wages off of people who are reluctant to shake down the city council, but it doesn’t really make for a positive long-term relationship like I have with the regular librarians at my branch. Luckily, this time, I was speaking to a librarian who wasn’t devoted to sucking every last possible penny out of library goers, and she bothered to go find the LINK+ book and check it in as it should have been done while I was being lectured on how I should now be driving all over town to return books, and if I didn’t like it, to go whine to the city council.

I did write to Don Rocha, but I praised him for being brave in making cuts, probably not what the bad librarian was hoping I’d do. As it turns out, she was also wrong about who my representative is, because, as I thought (and was hoping was still the case), my city council representative is the lovable Nancy Pyle, a frequent presence at community events, and one of the judges who awarded Kelly a “most beautiful” ribbon in the Memorial Day Parade. In any case, Don Rocha looks like a pretty good council member, too. I advised him that maybe the city should sell the Hayes Mansion and the Mexican Heritage Plaza if they’re not making money. As for the libraries, I see there’s just one librarian who need to be fired, because she obviously cares more about politics and her own hide than she does about the citizens of San Jose.

A few days ago, my neighbor’s grandson, who recently graduated from high school, stopped by and asked to speak to my husband. He told us he had a new job, and wondered if we’d listen to his sales presentation, for which he would get paid whether or not we bought. I asked him “what’re you selling, kid?,” and when he told me it was Cutco knives, I was beyond delighted.

Way back, when I was his age, I, too, had been offered the opportunity to sell Cutco knives, so sharp they can slice through rope, and guaranteed to last a lifetime! But my mother nixed that when I told her the first thing I was required to do was buy a set of knives. But now I could get the demo myself, and find out if Cutco’s sales division works the same as it ever did. “I’m in kid, stop by on Friday,” I told him. He asked if Peter would be there, a question I found somewhat curious, and when we told him, no, he said it would be real swell if Peter could come, too.

Well, we had some miscommunication, because I thought he would come to my house where I could test the Cutco cutlery against my own, but instead he expected me to go over his grandmother’s. So I grabbed a handful of my favorite knives and went over there.

He was really disappointed Peter didn’t come along. There was a script, undoubtedly what he’d been told he had to follow, or somehow the customer would lose the plot and not understand all the excellent features of Cutco knives and the wide variety of knives and gift sets available for me to buy, though certainly I would want the top of the line full set. I know it was a script, because I kept knocking him off it, so he had to find his place again and again. Full tang, yadda yadda, sharp serrated edges which are super cool, made in America and a trusted best-selling brand since 1949. Been there, heard that. I just wanted to see the rope trick, compare them against my favorite Global knives, and find out how much a set of steak knives cost, because I could use more steak knives, and this is after all, the neighbor’s grandson, working a job when so many teens are utter slackers.

To my dismay, he’d lost the rope, and only the official demonstration rope would do. I so wanted to cut the rope with a Cutco knife. I did get to slice through some leather with a Cutco knife, and then with my Global paring knife, though. When it came to slicing a lemon, the Cutco knife could slice as thinly as my Global knife, which was nice. I told him the delicious marketing factoid that Global knives were made by the same craftsmen who made samurai swords. He tried my Global knife and opined that it was awfully heavy, and didn’t I get fatigued with such a heavy knife, and wouldn’t a lil’ lady like me prefer the lightweight Cutco counterpart instead? I gave him the stink eye. I like some heft in my kitchen implements, and when I no longer have the strength to wield my 9.5 ounce Global butcher knife, I’ll probably be living off pureed food at the assisted living facility.

There were some things about Cutco knives I never knew or perhaps had forgotten. Though they are so excellent and sharp, you don’t have to sharpen them, after 10 0r 15 years, you may want to sharpen them, in which case Cutco will do it for you for free, give or take an $8 shipping and handling fee. But I love sharpening my samurai swords, er, Global knives, and what’s up with the knife sharpener I see in the Cutco catalog? I eventually let that die.

The kid touted the Cutco guarantee which promises me a new knife should it break, a guarantee he guaranteed me was not offered by those other high-end knife manufacturers like Wüsthof or Henckels. I looked at my Global chef’s knife which is so solidly constructed I’d have to be chopping wood with it for it to break, in which case, I don’t really deserve a new knife. Well, he pointed out, the handles are ergonomic, designed by an ergonomics scientist who tested his designs against hundreds of hands to make the perfect handle, only available on Cutco products. I asked how these dorky-looking plastic handles compared against the less-dorky -looking-but-also-touted-as-ideally -ergonomic Oxo brand handles. The kid didn’t know from Oxo, and anyway, my hands have never complained about the knives I use now, so I don’t care.

I still wanted to know what these Cutco knives cost, especially a set of steak knives, which were beginning to look less and less appealing. But, no, first I had to hear the rest of the spiel. Cutco makes a whole bunch of other kitchen tools, which have a lip so you can hang them on the edge of a pot without worrying that they might slip in when you step away. They also make hunting knives, which I’m sure has Cabela’s quaking. And an ice scream scooper that is always at room temperature, no matter how much ice cream you scoop. I have an ice cream scooper just like it, but I’d left it at home so we couldn’t do a whose-ice-cream-scooper-stays-at-room-temperature-the-longest test.

Finally, I got to see the price list. The Cutco chef’s knife cost $90, about $20 less than the Global equivalent. A set of steak knives cost $130. $130! I decided I no longer cared to get a new set of steak knives. My guests have never complained about the el cheapo steak knives I set them up with, and if I served up something so tough it required a Cutco knife (or a recently sharpened Global knife) to cut, they’d be complaining about a lot more than just inadequate cutlery.

But I still wanted to quiz the kid about the business. Had he had to buy the demo knives, as I would have had to? He said no, but if he sold $10,000 worth of Cutco goods in his first two weeks, he’d get a full set for free. $10,000?! He’d also get a ski trip, and a recommendation as an excellent salesperson from his manager. I bet he would. I don’t even think Sur La Table which sells a whole bunch of brands of high-end knives (including my Global knives) to foodies with lots of money sells $10,000 worth of knives each fortnight. What’s he getting in commission? 10%, he told me, but as soon as he sold his first $10,000 he’d be getting the same kind of commission other commission-based salespeople get when they’re just starting. Did they play the same game with him they did with me in the group “interview,” where you’re told only a few will be selected, and after a long wait, the manager pulls you aside and tells you you’re one of them? Yes, he was really excited he’d gotten the gig: with a 10% commission, unpaid training, no benefits, and having to produce each and every single one of his sales leads himself. Did he know it was a sales job when he went in for the “interview”? No.

I told him I still wanted to see the rope trick, and advised him to sell himself into a better gig. Things are tough out there in the job market, and he had no previous experience, he said. I told him with the same technique he was using to get leads for Cutco: calling on everyone he knew, and asking them to pass him on to yet more people, he could also announce he’s out of school and looking for entry-level work. Even in a tough job market like this, there’s a place for kid with moxie and gumption, not just in reading off lame scripts that were outdated 40 years ago.

He shook my hand, and made eye contact just like he’d been trained to do, and thanked me for coming. But, shucks, it was just too bad Peter couldn’t have made it, too. According to internet scuttlebutt, I soon discovered why. He wouldn’t even be paid the paltry $15 or $17 Cutco was now paying its representatives for giving a demo that didn’t result in a sale, because the demographic for such reimbursement is extremely narrow: homeowner over 30 years old, with kids and a full-time job. I find that horrendously insulting. I work part time, not full time. I am the primary culinary knife wielder and buyer of household stuff, and if Peter had been corralled into that demo, I’d still be the one deciding whether, what, and how much to buy. By Cutco’s standards, virtually none of the people on Master Chef, who are the foodiest of foodies, and thus certainly buyers of high-end knives, don’t qualify as a qualified demo.

In short, I hope the kid finds a better gig, the sooner the better.

Not many people realize that communism–at least as it was practiced in the Soviet Union, and today in North Korea–is a religion. I had scoffed at this concept until I went to the Soviet Union as an exchange student myself many years ago. Over my bed, my Ukrainian komsomol roommate had put a picture of Lenin which looked like an icon.

Listening to capitalistic rock music beneath the image of Lenin (1987)

If that wasn’t enough, I also found a children’s book in which baby Lenin faith-healed an injured lumberjack, not to mention baby Lenin pins. You could even (and probably still can) visit his corpse, kind of like venerating the bones of of dead saints.

More recently, I’ve been morbidly fascinated with North Korea, where this sort of this is even more overt, like a perverse cross between Confucianism, monarchy, and Christianity, with Kim Il-Sung and his descendants as the the divine, and the U.S. as the designated Satan. People are so mentally conditioned to his religion that they openly give thanks to Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il for anything and everything, and bow to their ubiquitous statues and pictures.

I forget who said it first, but when people don’t have a religion, they make one, even if they don’t call it that. Which brings me to the subject of a state religion. Typically, we expect state (public) schools’ purpose is to teach civics and give citizens the education they need to function and contribute to society. Fair enough: the schools we know teach children to read, and write, and do mathematics, all of which are vital skills. But as I found out between my first summer homeschooling Neil, and his last year of public school, the history being taught is fairly anemic. By fifth grade, the children could recite with confidence why Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Cesar Chavez were American heroes, but they had far less class time being taught all the rest of American history. Even worse, when Neil’s fourth grade teacher posted a provably false “fact” on her door in honor of the upcoming Earth Day, she dismissed my objections on the grounds that she believed it was true, and even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter, because telling elementary school students that their nation is the more garbage-y in the world is more important than any actual facts. Excuse me if I started getting the impression that a particular line of social justice was usurping bourgeoisie priorities in education, like history and factual investigation.

As educators indubitably discovered,religion is an effective way to keep people in line, especially when you have a diverse range of people of different backgrounds. But as the school system is increasingly devoted to a separation of church and state which is more firmly enforced that I think the founding fathers had in mind,there had to be some form of groupthink. As a result, I think we’re seeing a conflation of social justice ideals, multiculturalism, and Christian groundings. For instance, in the State religion there are clear sins, like racism, or homophobia, against which you must not transgress, lest you get socially ostracized. There are penances you pay, like recycling, and taking public transportation, and praise you must pay to teachers and other public servants. A problem (beyond the heretics who don’t agree fully with the religion) is that since this won’t admit it’s a religion, the rules aren’t clearly defined. You  may be a homophobe merely for being good friends with a Mormon; you may need to buy carbon offsets for the non-hybrid SUV you use and love, but people will always question whether that was truly enough.

It’s a lot easier dealing with the Christians, who are down with their principles, which are widely-known, even as they vary from sect to sect. For instance, I now send Kelly to a Lutheran school. One day one of the children in Kelly’s class stole an item from her backpack. The teacher found out, the class discussed it, the student repented, and they all agreed to forgive him (or her). The teacher warned me this had happened, so it wasn’t something Kelly should complain about. She never breathed a word, and there hasn’t been a theft since. That’s a Christian principle that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure I’m even cool enough to do something like that, but I’ll consider it now.

There is a fair amount of what they teach which they expect to have the children take on faith, such as Christ’s resurrection and death. (As it happens, the grown-ups may discuss the nuances, context, and archeological/historical record with the professional and amateur theologians at the church, but it is still considered fact). On the other hand, the Christians respect my bourgeoisie notions about secular education, and more than anything, Kelly’s first grade classroom seemed a lot like Charlie Brown’s in the Peanuts specials. And even though I don’t expect or desire prayer to come back to public school classrooms, I wish public schools could be more wholesome and truly tolerant than they are under the umbrella of the nebulous though recognizable State religion.