It’s almost that time.  My last child is getting too old for naps and that special time I had with him, snuggling up in the afternoon is finally going to be gone.  My favorite part of parenting has always been that feeling of a child curling up on my chest or snuggling next to me and then going to sleep.  I don’t know how else to explain it except that it feels  like a perpetual hug.  At the risk of losing my “Man” card, I wish they could stay little for a lot longer.

My kids are growing so fast. The triplets will be seven in January.

Rose is already wearing some of my wife’s old clothes. She wears Shannon’s t-shirts as jammies and some of her old blouses with a belt or something around the waist. She’s starting to look long and beautiful, a real little lady.

Joseph is no longer the Thomas the Tank Engine loving kid he used to be. Now  he’s all about jet airplanes and robotics. I build electronic circuit projects with him and he actually understands what’s going on.

Michael is our little book worm. He reads very well and takes after his mother as far as smarts go. He will be the brainiac of the three.

All of this is cool. It’s amazing to watch them grow and mature. When I first saw it happening in them I comforted myself with, “Well, I still have Matthew for a while longer.”

Now that’s going away too.

He wants to be like his older siblings so badly that he tries to do everything they do. Sometimes he succeeds but mostly it just ends in frustration.  It’s very cute to watch, we comfort him and it all works out. He throws the most tantrums but I understand where it comes from.  And I see in his eyes the understanding he is acquiring about everything around him and he doesn’t want to be little anymore. At four and a half he’s done with baby toys, tricycles, training wheels and will start t-ball sooner than I can imagine.

Regularly, someone I’m talking to will say, “Hey, pretty soon your  littlest one will be going off to Kindergarten and you’ll have all of them in school full time. Wow, you’ll enjoy that!”

I just wish they’d shut up.

Christmas is coming and  I must admit that I’m starting to feel the Christmas spirit. I know that it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet but I’m a sucker for everything that has to do with the holiday. The mail is full of catalogs, the radio is already playing carols, Christmas tree lots are starting to open and my kids are bombarding me with present suggestions. The dog even came back from the groomer today with a Christmas bow tied around his neck.

We don’t get snow here but I am fortunate in that off in the distance I can see the mountains. They are already dusted with snow and soon they’ll have a lot more.  If I really need a snow fix I can load the family in the van and drive there for a day of sledding .  My wife and I grew up in the Midwest so we know how to act in the snow. We do the right thing and put chains on the tires, dress the kids warm and anything else that’s required so that we don’t have problems. But this being California it’s not always your behavior that gets you messed up, especially when it has to do with snow. There are a lot of steeyuuupid people out here who have absolutely no idea how to deal with snow, or any kind of weather for that matter. But snow is the worst.

I don’t know how many times we’ve gone up into the mountains and have seen a Mercedes, or some other expensive car,  stuck in a drift. The car has no chains, the guy driving is wearing clothes better suited for the beach and his date is in a short, short skirt and wearing stiletto heels.

You just know that earlier they were at the bottom of the mountain, bored, and one of them suddenly said, “Hey, it snowed in the mountains last night! Let’s go take a look!”

Then the two are stuck and he’s trying to get cell service on his phone for a tow and his girlfriend is freezing her over exposed ass off.

Then there are the drivers that you know are native Californians because every time there’s a little ice on the road they totally freak out. And when there’s a lot of ice they are hopeless.

My personal favorite Socal snow newbie is the guy with the big ass pickup truck that drives all the way up to the snow,  then shovels his truck bed full of the white stuff and then drives back down the mountain with it. We had some neighbors who did that so they could have snowball fights. It’s a lot of work but it just proves the magic of the white stuff. No matter how much you might hate it over a long period of time, there is still a magic grace period when it will bring out the kid in everyone. And if it’s Christmas, then that’s just an unbeatable combination.

Today feels like Autumn. Last week felt like the middle of Summer. It was ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit  on Wednesday last week. Today it’s fifty-eight and drizzling.  It won’t last though. They don’t call it “Endless Summer” out here for nothing. California is a place where time stops.

It’s really amazing when you think about it because it’s the most hectic, high strung place I know.  That “laid back California” mystique is a load of crap. Everyone and everything moves at high speed out here.  The only thing that hardly ever changes is the weather. So, you move around at breakneck speed in your daily life, but it’s always sunny and warm.

Then one day you look in the mirror and notice you’ve aged and say to yourself, “When did that happen?”

That’s the bad side of  ”Endless Summer”. When you live somewhere that really has seasons, you gage the passing of time much better.  Don’t get me wrong, California does have four seasons. We have fire season, smog season, earthquake season and rainy season (which is very short).  When people talk about weather out here it’s not uncommon to hear someone say, ” It feels like earthquake weather.” Some think that when it’s wet, then that’s earthquake weather. Others say that when it’s really dry it’s earthquake weather.

I personally think that ants are the best earthquake indicator. Sometimes out of nowhere we have a lot of ants in the house. Not because of spilled food or anything, it just happens. Then, sure enough, there will be an earthquake. It could happen in Japan but there still is an earthquake. So my theory is sound, at least to me.

We’ve heard it before. We’ve seen it in dozens of science fiction movies. Robots, replacing people, doing the job better and making humans irrelevant in the future. In Farhad Manjoo’s recent series of articles for “SLATE“, the future is now.

Robots are taking more and more jobs away from humans, but the paradigm shift isn’t happening in the way that Hollywood and many futurists and so called “experts” said it would.

In the past, robots were thought to replace the dirty work jobs and servitude positions occupied by the lower branches of the human family tree. Look at some examples in Hollywood movies. Wall-E, the little robot in the recent Pixar film of the same name, is a garbage collecting robot. Dozens of other Hollywood films traditionally show robots as servants and mechanical slaves. The higher intelligence humans ran things.

It’s 180 degrees different.

It’s much harder to create a robot to mechanically do those menial jobs, and besides, we don’t need the robots for them. We’ve got billions of humans for the cheapest paying work on the planet.

What computers are really good at is thinking. The thinking jobs are what the robots are going to replace by the millions. The first examples of this trend are taking place in what are called “middle skilled” jobs. These are the jobs that need some training, but not much.

Middle-skilled jobs consisted of secretaries, administrative workers, repairmen and manufacturing workers. The stats show that since the 1980s, across the board and across borders, these jobs have rapidly declined and won’t come back. Most job growth has been at two other extremes, either very highly skilled professions with very high pay or in the service sector requiring almost no skills and pay very little. Middle-skilled jobs traditionally made up a huge section of the middle class and as we’ve seen in recent years, that’s disappearing too.

The majority of economists disagree with this line of thinking and state that, in the past, technological advances always created new opportunities and jobs that grew economies. As an example they always point to the “Industrial Revolution”.  They state that when agriculture declined, industry took up the slack.

The difference today is the fact that the businesses being created are not labor intensive and the tech boom has streamlined business so much they don’t hire as many people. If very physical labor is required there is an unlimited pool to pull from and this also helps to suppress income.

Since robots don’t need to replace the low end and have successfully decimated the middle, the only thing left is the top and they are already making massive inroads in that area as well. In the very near future they will be using high powered algorithms to diagnose diseases and fill prescriptions. They have programs now that can write articles and legal briefs. Online tutorials now teach our children and are getting more sophisticated every minute of every day.

The most recent example I can think of to demonstrate this new reality is “LegalZoom.com”.  This website is decimating the legal profession by offering services at a fraction of the cost lawyers traditionally charged. High powered programs do legal research and business software has streamlined the work traditionally done by entry level lawyers, clerks and legal assistants.

If you are a recent law school graduate, good luck finding a law job.

Two of the superstars in American music died on the same day, August 22, 2011. Though their names might not be as immediately recognizable as the musicians they wrote for, both had an impact on American and global culture that will never truly be appreciated. They helped lay the foundation of what the world thought of as American music and how people viewed America during some of its most turbulent times. They were songwriters Jerry Leiber and Nickolas Ashford.

Jerry Leiber was half of the songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller. They set the standard for blues and jazz influenced Rock N Roll. Nickolas Ashford was part of the songwriting team of Ashford and Simpson. They were the Motown sound of the late 60′s and early 70′s. Both were responsible for so many hits in the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s, their influence on music so vast, it would take forever to properly eulogize their life achievements. Some of the more popular pieces they wrote include:

Jerry Leiber

• “There Goes My Baby” (with Ben E. King (as Benjamin Nelson), Lover Patterson, and George Treadwell)
• “Hound Dog”
• “Kansas City”
• “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”
• “Yakety Yak”
• “Poison Ivy”
• “Charlie Brown”
• “Ruby Baby”
• “Stand By Me” (with Ben E. King)
• “Jailhouse Rock”
• “Love Potion No. 9″
• “Searchin’”
• “Young Blood” (with Doc Pomus)
• “Is That All There Is?”
• “I’m a Woman”
• “Lucky Lips”
• “On Broadway” (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil)
• “Spanish Harlem” (Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector)

Nickolas Ashford

• “California Soul” (The Fifth Dimension)
• “Cry Like A Baby”(Aretha Franklin)
• “Let’s Go Get Stoned” (Ray Charles )
• “‘I Don’t Need No Doctor”(Ray Charles)
• “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”( Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell)
• “Your Precious Love”( Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell)
• “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing”( Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell)
• “You’re All I Need to Get By”( Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell)
• “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand”( Diana Ross )
• “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Diana Ross )

The true testament to their genius lies in the fact that after so many years their music still lives on and is enjoyed by so many, while music written in the past ten to twenty years had a shelf life of a few weeks and is now mostly forgotten.

We owe them so much. Gentlemen, good night, rest in peace, and thank-you.

The other day my wife was painting the boys’ room, one of her yearly summer projects while not teaching. I was working too, so we were both tired and since neither of us wanted to cook,  I went out for fast food.

When I go out for fast food it usually requires more than one stop because my kids like the kiddy meals with the prizes, my wife likes the onion rings at a certain other restaurant and I pop into another for Chinese takeout.  It’s no big deal because all of these places are in the same shopping center right next to each other. Riverside is like that, classic suburbia, every strip mall has a dry cleaners, a yogurt shop, several fast food joints and Chinese food.

So, I go there, park the car, go into each restaurant..1,2,3…I’m done. I’m on my way back to the car, laden down with fast food bags, when a guy pulls up next to me on his bicycle. He’s a very casually dressed kind of guy and strapped onto the handlebars, in front, is a big box and he says…

“Excuse me sir, but I’m trying to make extra money…Would you like to buy some antlers?”

I stop dead in my tracks, digest what he just said, look around to see if I’m on camera and then look in the box. Sure enough-  it’s full of antlers. There were deer antlers in it, what looked like a ram’s horn and other racks that I couldn’t identify.

I looked up into a face that was full of anticipation and said, “No, I’m good.”

“Well, thanks”, he said, “You have a nice day.” And he pedaled off and that was that.

This kind of thing only happens to me.

I just got done watching a couple of old episodes of the TV show “Taxi” with my wife.  I Netflixed season four.  I used to watch it all the time growing up but my wife wasn’t too familiar with it. God I loved that show. All those actors early in their careers, some broke out and others didn’t. And nobody, nobody was better on that show than Reverend Jim Ignatowski.

As we watched the show I noticed a lot of differences in TV from back then versus today. Pacing was a lot slower, the quality of the writing was different, not better just … different. I also remembered how different it was back then just watching a TV program.

To say it was a different experience to watch TV is a total understatement.  There were only three networks and one through thirteen actual VHF channels on a rotary dial channel changer.  The UHF dial actually tuned in the UHF TV stations like a radio tuning dial on our old TV set.  There was no cable, just rabbit ear antennas on top of the set and another antenna on your roof if you needed it.

There weren’t many VCRs so you actually planned your schedule around TV. If you missed an episode of your favorite TV show, you missed it; no going back. The only time you could see it again would be summer reruns. It was such a big deal!

I remember being in a different room of the house and suddenly hearing the theme song of a favorite TV show, on the only TV we had, come drifting through the air from the family room. I’d drop everything and go racing through the house and get there before the theme song ended. In those days they actually played the whole thing and the shows had totally original theme songs that had a lot to do with the style and feel of the TV show. No one borrowed famous rock songs for a show. The songs were an important part of the success of that show. Could you imagine shows like “MASH”, “The Rockford Files” or “All In The Family” with any other theme songs?

Once in the family room I had to jockey for position on the couch or find an unoccupied place on the floor. I came from a big family. Commercials actually served a purpose back then, you took care of business during the breaks;  snacks or going to the bathroom.

Television also marked the passing of time. Christmas specials, like “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” for Halloween, actually marked certain points in my yearly schedule. Summertime was full of reruns and the anticipation of the new fall TV schedule. They even had TV specials with samples of the new, upcoming shows or Saturday morning cartoon shows.

After comparing experiences as kids, my wife and I started to think about how kids watch TV now. Basically, everything is at their fingertips. If they want to see anything, they can. No build up. No anticipation. It’s all immediate gratification. My six year olds have probably seen Rudolf twenty times already. When I was six I had seen it a grand total of two times.

TV isn’t an experience anymore, it’s the equivalent of a tissue. You need one, you get one, you blow your nose and then you toss it.

My wife just brought out “The Sound of Music” DVD for the kids. She insists they are old enough to see it, understand it and enjoy it. I’m sorry but every time I watch a musical, that scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” jumps into my head. The scene where the father wants his son, Herbert, to marry a girl he doesn’t like. The son always tries to burst into song, music swells in the background and the father always freaks out and starts yelling…

“Stop that, stop that! You’re not going to do a song while I’m here!”

That’s the same way I feel about most musicals. I just don’t get the whole idea of a story going along and suddenly people burst into spontaneous song. I don’t mind Disney cartoons and movie fairytales like “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. Somehow they seem to work. But full blown musicals like “Oklahoma” and “The Sound of Music”, just make me gag. And this is coming from an ex-musician.

My wife said that I should think about the positive messages that the film expressed.

I asked, “What’s the message? That they should wear the drapes and go prancing around Salzburg singing?”

She said, “No, that true love conquers all and that they stood up to the Nazis!”

“The Nazis had ways of dealing with people that pranced around in drapes singing songs. They wouldn’t have lasted long!” I replied.

I think part of it is the whole Hollywood idea of effeminate men dancing and prancing around in scenes like the rumble between the “Jets” and the “Sharks” in “West Side Story”. These are supposed to be tough gangs? I just start chuckling every time I see it and totally piss off whoever is watching the movie.

The same goes for the entire male cast of “Oklahoma” and the frilly, fringy costumes they wear. How much more unmanly could those Hollywood or Broadway costume designers have made those outfits?

There are a few musicals I do like though. The first is “Les Miserables”. That music is just too damn good to ignore. The second is the movie “Chicago”. They made the characters very earthy and the guys are guys. The third one I really like is “Fiddler on the Roof”. Again, the story is compelling, the characters are real and the music is phenomenal.

Below is the Monty Python scene I was referring to.

My wife and I went to the Midwest a while ago to attend the wedding of a friend. What I thought was peculiar were the grocery stores. I tagged along while my wife and her friend picked up little things for the wedding reception and while they did their thing, I did mine. I walked up and down the isles comparing what we have in California and what they had in Illinois.

The most bizarre isle I found almost completely contained “Helper” products. It had Hamburger Helpers, Tuna Helpers, Chicken Helpers, Non-Meat Helpers in every sort of variety you could imagine.

When I was a kid caseroles were the in thing to make for family meals but I had completely forgotten about these products. I know we have them in our stores in California and I probably just programmed myself to ignore them. But this store had an overwhelming amount. My mother used to make them for my family when I was a kid. Mostly the Tuna Helper products. I didn’t even know they still made them! They used to make my brother and I gag!

Every Wednesday my brother would walk in the house and smell it cooking from the kitchen and let out an audible “Oh Jesus! Mom’s making PLOP.”

We called it “Plop” because when you served it, you had to flick the spoon to get it to un-stick from it and land on your plate. It looked like food from an old World War II movie served to GIs at the front.

I thought they were a by product of America in the 70s and had long vanished. What was worse was that the rest of the isle was full of other brands of the Helper variety competing for the same customers. As if one stinking brand wasn’t enough!

What self respecting mother or father would pump all that MSG ladened  processed shit into the digestive tracks of their unsuspecting children and other family members!? Mine did, but that was in the 70s when people still trusted America’s most famous brands to do right by us.

We were soooo naive back then.

I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve committed the Cardinal Sin of bloggers. I stopped blogging for a period of time. I got overwhelmed by life and business. I had a writer’s block, didn’t feel witty or anything and just stopped. I watched as my numbers went down. It’s a death spiral.

“I should write something! Anything!”, I thought. “But what? The kids aren’t funny anymore. (Damn kids) The world is going nuts. ”

Being a news junky I got sucked into everything negative that the media was spewing out. And in the last three months there has been plenty to spew. I’ll start back up again with a joke. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

So, here it goes…

A mother shark was teaching her kids how to get food.

“First”, she said, “You find someone swimming. Then you circle around them a couple of times and then you give them a good bump. Then you circle around again and eat them.”

One of her kids raised his fin and asked, “Why do we circle around and bump them? Why don’t we just eat them  right away?”

The mother replied, “They taste better once you get the shit out of em.”

There, no more writer’s block. Until next time.