Word to your mother tongue

When I was an eighth-grader still drinking milk out of cardboard boxes, our science teacher split us up into groups and instructed each group to come up with an “invention” that we’d like to see made. It didn’t matter how outlandish, unfeasible or outright physically impossible these inventions were. The exercise was meant to flex our imaginations, get us thinking along the lines of a better society. And to blow through 40 minutes of class time, I’m guessing.

I don’t remember most of the inventions, but we were in middle school, so I’m assuming the majority were dumb. Slap bracelets that played New Kids on the Block songs or something. And now I’m dating myself.

One of them I’ll never forget, though: A language translator. The group that came up with this idea -- and it wasn’t mine -- envisioned this as a set of headphones you would wear, and if someone spoke to you in, say, German, the headphones would translate their speech into English (or whatever your native language was). This may have been impractical from a technological perspective, especially back then, but the impetus behind this fictitious invention was pure pragmatism. Imagine how much easier this would make international travel. Business relations. Understanding rap music.

For my money, the kids who came up with this idea get the coveted gold star. Because even in the internet age, language barriers can be an issue.

Flash forward to my college years: Early 20s, naive, dandelion wisps for hair. A friend of mine was taking an intensive month-long course in French at a university in Quebec City, and when she invited me to spend the weekend up there to do a little sight-seeing, I thought nothing of printing out some vague Mapquest directions and dashing on up to Canada, alone. Never mind that the only phrase I could speak confidently in French was “Grandpa smokes his pipe.” Mapquest, I reckoned, would just dump me off right at her dorm room door and I wouldn’t have to interact with a soul. C’est facile! Which I think is French for “Please pass the jackhammer.”

If GPS technology had been more prevalent in those days, a construction detour might not have mattered. But it did. The route I needed to take to the university was blocked off due to road work, forcing me to improvise, and that meant talking to people. People who spoke French.

“Bonjour!” I said to the woman in the convenience store. “Parles Anglais?” (“Speak English?”)

The woman shrugged and pointed to a man who could put together simple words and phrases, like “meat” and “Enjoy this button.” Between his horrid English and my appalling French, we communicated effectively enough so that I was able to make some progress -- to within shouting distance of the campus, anyway. I got lost a couple more times, and the cycle repeated itself: Can you help me? No, but this person can. On and on, until eventually I met my friend at the campus center, five hours late, and collapsed in a big ball of man-that-was-horrible.

If one fewer person I’d met had been able to cobble together some rudimentary English, I’d have ended up in the middle of a wheat field in Saskatchewan. I’d still be there today, farming and wondering if my family missed me.

Now if I were a typical European, I’d have been raised speaking three languages and these barriers would be less of an issue. Our friends across the Atlantic have got it all over us when it comes to proficiency with a variety of tongues (France, I’m looking at you). But I’m not European. I’m American, and American tradition dictates that I be fluent in English and nothing else. I’m also supposed to act super annoyed and off-put when someone else can’t speak it as well as I can. This is mandated by a little-known law called the Speak ‘Merican or Go Home Act of 1896.

As a monolingual individual, language barriers can frustrate me, but maybe not for the typical reasons. I just start obsessing over the evolution of language over the centuries -- how they evolved, together yet separate, over the course of millennia.

Think about it. Language, like life, has evolved over mind-boggling spans of time, starting first as a series of glottal grunts and then developing certain characteristics: nouns, verbs, adjectives. Languages branched off into other languages -- Latin into German, German into English, French into Italian. Most of these languages share the same basic characteristics, and their speakers use them in much the same ways, conjugating verbs and asking questions and making observations and ordering soup at restaurants. Words and sentences are at the very foundation of what it means to be a human being, and yet if a Mexican came up to me and said, in Spanish, “I like your shirt,” I’d stare at him uncomprehendingly, trapped on the other side of an evolutionary divide. He could very well have said, “I eat string cheese by the gallon,” and I’d have no idea. All these languages evolving side by side, and yet these barriers persist, subdividing humanity into insulated pockets. Words bind us together and separate us at the same time. It’s quite the trick.

English has become a lot more common, and many of those multilingual Europeans feature it in their arsenal. Perhaps the next step of humankind’s linguistic evolution is to pare itself down to a single global language. Purists may bristle at the notion, claiming that it would erode certain cultures and traditions. But throughout history languages have spawned and died off like animal species; there are roughly five people left on the planet who still speak Latin. It may not be so bad if everyone all knew what everyone else was saying. Human progress is about tearing down walls, not building them. Communication is a huge part of that, and it’s a lot easier to communicate without a translator.

Unless of course your translator is an electronic device conceived by a bunch of middle schoolers. I really should start taking credit for that.

Books v Movies: The Reckoning

You’ve heard this one-million-and-one times in your life: “The movie was OK, but the book was way better.”

In all but seven of these instances, the person saying this was correct. These are official statistics provided to me by the National Security Agency’s little-known subsidiary, the Banal Conversations About Forgettable Things Division. Big Brother is watching.

It’s not like movies based on books are inherently bad, or even mediocre. In some cases, they’re flippin’ fantastic. “The Godfather,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Apollo 13” were all based on books (the last being a nonfiction account, of course), and all three are recommended viewing -- fun romps that go well with a bowl of popcorn and those well-worn slippers you keep repairing with duct tape. If you haven’t seen one of those movies, find a streaming service and watch it immediately. Also, buy new slippers.

Despite the quality of those movies, though, the book is a better experience in 99.9 percent of all cases. Part of this is due to the nature of the medium itself. When a story is presented using only words, your brain is engaged in the complex task of converting those words into images, and lemme tell you, those images are higher-def than the highest-def televisions in existence. How can they not be? The picture is being formed in your mind. It’s like experiencing a waking dream, only this time nobody’s wetting themselves in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. Or, you know, whatever your particular dream happens to be. Sometimes I think I share too much.

Books are also more immersive. They linger on details, explore characters’ thoughts. Movies can do this to a certain extent -- the best ones can, anyway -- but there are limitations to the format. You’ve got two, three hours tops to make your case. You can’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. And you can’t spend an inordinate amount of time examining a character’s thought process as they choose between the decaf cappuccino or the double-shot of espresso with cinnamon. “Caroline Picks Her Morning Beverage” doesn’t exactly make for a compelling day at the cinema. Unless it culminates in a magical cappuccino monster leaping out of Caroline’s cup and biting off her left ear. That has potential.

But hey, this is just a personal preference, surely influenced by my predilection for daydream and whimsy. Movies come with their own built-in advantages -- tightly choreographed action sequences, swelling orchestral scores -- and in some rare instances the film tops the novel.

Look at “Forrest Gump,” for example. Kind of a divisive movie; some people love it, some people hate it. No matter your opinion on the film, though, it’s an undeniable fact that it’s a massive improvement over Winston Groom’s book, which is a fetid, fly-ridden, steaming pile of hippopotamus crap. Like really, really awful.

Cinema buffs will recall that, in the movie, Forrest unwittingly finds himself at the center of some of America’s most seminal moments of the mid-to-late 20th Century: desegregation of schools in the South, the war in Vietnam, etc. Groom’s novel takes this concept to its utmost extreme. There is actually a sequence in the book -- I wish I were kidding, but I’m not -- in which Forrest flies into outer space with a chimp, then re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and crash-lands on an island populated by cannibals, who try to cook him in a giant stew. I suppose you can make this stuff up, because Groom obviously did, but why would you? The only way the whole space-chimp-cannibal section would seem like a good idea to an author is if he suffered severe head trauma at the hands of a 400-lb. hammer-wielding gorilla. A scenario, by the way, which is more realistic than anything found in this terrible novel.

Clearly, a Hollywood screenwriter picked up this literary disaster and said, “You know what? Ninety percent of this is pure trash. But the other 10 percent could be a decent film, as long as we lock down a virtuoso director and an Academy Award-winning actor for the lead role.” The result is that rare exception, a movie that trounces its source material in every way imaginable.

You could call it “the exception that proves the rule,” a phrase that’s apt if grammatically mystifying. Yet that still doesn’t answer the question of why reading a story, is most instances, is better than watching it.

As it turns out, neuroscience may have some insight here. Not to get all nerdy on you, but neurologists studying the brain have done a boatload of research on this, and what they’ve found is that reading descriptive words and phrases activates parts of the brain aside from just the language centers; words like “soap” and “coffee” triggered the smell centers, for instance, while words like “kick” and “throw” lit up the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements.

What this means is that reading a novel is like using your brain to run a simulation of real life, much like a computer can run, say, a flight simulation. Imagining something is the next best thing to actually experiencing it, at least from a neurological perspective. Which is great. Because now, instead of forking over airfare for that long-coveted trip to Europe, I can just read “A Tale of Two Cities” with a glass of chianti -- and not have to worry about how putrid the movie would have been.

Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, but if you’re watching movie trailers and see something that piques your interest, do a little internet searching to see if it’s based on a novel. In all likelihood the source material will give you a much better experience. Put your feet up and crack the book open. Just do me a favor and get a new pair of slippers, would you? The whole duct tape thing is really getting out of hand.

The con is on

Most people, at some point in their lives, have dreamt of falling into oodles of money. I have no statistics to back this up and I’m basically pulling this assertion out of a deep cave that knows no sunlight. My butt. I’m talking about my butt.

It seems like a pretty safe assumption though, because with few exceptions -- priests who take a vow of poverty, people in comas -- folks need cash. They crave it. The more of it they have, the more they can indulge in frivolous things, and frivolous things are exciting precisely because they’re so unnecessary. A gold-plated pocket watch with GPS tracking and a pre-installed app that remotely activates your pasta machine? Oh, the extravagance!

That’s where get-rich-quick schemes come in. The evil masterminds who concoct these scams know that people are greedy, and they prey on that greed because they’re bursting with greed themselves, practically exploding with it. They’re also opportunistic. You see some of these varmints on late-night infomercials, promising riches in exchange for simple actions. Signing up for their websites, buying their books, filling out some paperwork. They’d have you believe that raking in a fortune requires no more than a click of your mouse or a flick of your pen. If that were true I’d by lying on a beach right now, sipping piña coladas with the U.S. women’s Olympic volleyball team. I’d also have one of those pocket watches. Admit it, they sound pretty cool.

What strikes me is how ridiculous a lot of these schemes tend to be. Each is more outlandish than the last.

Exhibit A is the so-called “Greatest Vitamin in the World.” An annoying little hobbit named Don Lapre runs this particular scam. Lapre is about as subtle as a baseball bat to the groin, and claims that this miracle vitamin can cure all sorts of things, from heart disease to cancer. Cancer! Holy crap! Someone alert Johns Hopkins!

Too bad the pills can’t cure gullibility. Lapre invites you to pay him $35, and for that initial investment he claims you’ll have the opportunity to make millions, because that cash buys you one of his websites -- so you, too, can sell the vitamins. If 20 people buy vitamins from the website in a given month, he pays you $1,000 for that month, or so he says. In reality, you get a crummy website that no one visits, selling pills the Food and Drug Administration has publicly derided as being fraudulent. But not to worry! Lapre will sell you marketing assistance for just a few thousand dollars, and … yeah, you can see where this one is going.

It’s crafty, you have to give him that. It’s devious and deceptive and lots of other bad D-words, but it’s crafty. Not like Matthew Lesko, who’s downright lazy.

If you were watching television in the early-to-mid-2000s you probably saw Lesko bouncing across your screen in his sparkling question-mark suit, screaming about how the U.S. government is giving away free money (“And you, too, can get in on the action!”). All you had to do, he shouted, was buy his book, which contained troves of secret government programs that could be leveraged by simply filling out a few basic forms. When you’re watching basic cable at 1 a.m. I suppose a man like Lesko can be persuasive, especially when all else is quiet and he’s hollering at a volume that could crack plastic. But, as is usually the case with hucksters, the only person who stands to get rich is Lesko himself.

The book, you see, can be divided into two main categories: “This Doesn’t Apply To Me,” and “Duh.” In the “Duh” category are well-known public assistance programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps -- not exactly the sort of programs that’ll have you diving headfirst into a solid gold money bin. Not exactly secret, either. In the “This Doesn’t Apply To Me” category are a bunch of obscure programs that apply primarily to other government agencies, not individuals. And there’s a kicker. Lesko admits that he just copied and pasted a book he ordered from the government and then sold it to the unwitting masses.

It’s not surprising that his product would be a massive ripoff. Even his appearance is stolen; everyone knows that a brightly-colored suit dotted with question marks is the uniform of comic book supervillian The Riddler. At least he and The Riddler actually share something in common -- both are begging for an epic beatdown at the hands of Batman. I’d pay Lesko’s asking price for his book just to see the Dark Knight pound him into dust.

People fall for this stuff, obviously, because whenever one of these scams fades away, another crawls out of the sewer to replace it. And it’s not just greed that these con men exploit. It’s desperation. Folks are hurting, there will always be folks who are hurting, and it’s a black eye on human nature that there will always be people ready to take advantage of that. It’s fun to laugh at a Lapre or a Lesko because, let’s face it, they’re cartoon characters with schemes that would make a Bond villain blush. But they make their living by duping others. Not cool. The sparkliest suit can’t make that look good.

Luckily, there’s a way to address this -- to put an end to these evil plots once and for all. I’d tell you what it is, but the space I have here is far too limiting, so I’ll tell you what. I’ve got this book, see -- it’s called “Great Expectations,” and totally wasn’t written by some other dude -- and all of the answers are contained within. Send me a check for $100 and I’ll send you a copy of the book, and then you, too, can be free from all dishonesty and deception. It’s easy! The benefits will last you a lifetime!

While we’re at it, I’ll throw in one of those GPS pasta watches, free of charge. You’ll love it, truly. I promise.

Fly, snowbirds, fly

Well, it’s finally happened. My parents, after toughing out decades of brutal Maine winters, are considering moving to a warmer state, one in which a person can grip their steering wheel in the morning without feeling a painful chill shoot up their arms and down into their vital organs. Can’t say I blame them. Come March I’ll be thawing my knickers in front of a space heater and wondering if the glorious relief of spring is really all that worth it.

Snowbirds. That’s what they’d be called. They’ll enjoy three seasons up north in which they can check their mail without threat of hypothermic death, and then poof, gone to Arizona, or South Carolina, or wherever they end up. It sounds like a nice life, if you can swing it: maintain residency in your home state, but skip the one season that makes you wonder why humans ever settled in snowy climes to begin with. And why did people settle here? Did the Mayflower not have the legs to make it down to Myrtle Beach?

Doing the whole snowbird thing is a luxury enjoyed primarily by retired folks. Working stiffs like me have at least 30 years before we can even begin to contemplate that kind of life, which brings up the question of how long we can keep going this way. Shovel, drive, work, drive, shovel, thaw, bed. Sure, it’s only about three months out of the year when this zombie-like routine dominates our days, but it’s psychologically draining nonetheless. It’s as though nature is a gleefully sadistic drill sergeant, testing to see how far we can bend without breaking.

Nature: “You’re slacking, maggot! No hustle, no drive! Here’s another Nor’easter, and when you’re shoveling this time, bend those knees!”

Me: “But I can’t feel my hands! Or much of anything else!”

Nature: “Feelings are for maggots! Here’s some hail, maggot! Bwahahaha!”

Me: “I liked you better when you were autumn.”

It would be helpful if I were a skier or snowboarder, but alas. The only time I enjoy snowboarding is when I’m doing it in a videogame. This allows me to get the gist of the sport while avoiding some of its more wintery elements -- the chilling wind, the wetness of the snow, the slur of my speech as my facial muscles harden into a stiff gel. All snowboarding should be done on a couch with a space heater blasting on one’s feet. Call me a weenie if you want to, but dammit, I’m a warm weenie.

And I could be perpetually warm if I had the freedom to be a snowbird. Perhaps it’s the fiction-lover in me, but I’m often lost in flights of fancy, and in my wilder imaginings I’m filthy rich because I’ve invented an environmentally friendly car that runs on crocodile breath. In this scenario, I stick around Maine through the holidays -- let’s face it, moderately snowy Christmases in Maine are the best -- and then beat feet to someplace where people are wearing sandals and saying things like “Man.” It would be a different place every winter. San Diego one year, Charlotte the next, and then to heck with it, three months cruising Africa’s Serengeti in the back of a jeep. While my friends at home are slipping on their icy driveways I’m taking selfies with a pride of lions. It should be noted that, in this fantasy, lions are totally cool and never try to eat me.

While I someday aspire to this kind of freedom (or at least its realistic counterpart), a small part of me still considers the snowbird lifestyle to be a form of cheating -- a “life hack,” as the younguns like to say. According to the minority opposition in my brain, living life as a Mainer requires embracing all of its seasons, not just the ones that allow you to sip Pabst Blue Ribbon in your backyard tire swing. You put in your dues from January through March in order to “earn” the other seasons; that’s the theory, anyway.

But the reason this is relegated to the “devil’s advocate” portion of my thinking is that it smacks of youthful braggadocio. Only now, as a 30-something, am I beginning to understand the ravages that time can inflict upon one’s body. Sure, I’m relatively hale at the moment, but a couple dozen more winters and I imagine my joints will be screaming louder than Janet Leigh in “Psycho.” So what if snowbirds are cheaters? I cheat all the time. Whenever I play video games I make myself invincible so I can walk around punching bad guys in the face with total impunity. Which means I have no problem ducking out for a few months while the kids build their snowmen; go wild, children, and don’t forget the carrot.

Becoming independently wealthy would be a great way to skip straight to the snowbird era of my life, but inventing the crocodile car may not be the best way to get there. Environmentally friendly vehicles abound nowadays, crocodiles don’t, and besides, I’m sure a team of climate scientists would examine my creation and find some other damning carbon footprint attached to it -- methane emissions, swamp burps, things of that nature. If I want to pioneer a get-rich-quick product, it needs to be something Americans need but don’t know they need. A lawnmower that turns into a nose-hair clipper? No. A bicycle pump that plays Metallica’s “Don’t Tread on Me” when it senses your tire’s inflated? No. A throat lozenge with a gooey nugget of chocolate in the center? Hmmm. Maybe.

I’ll tinker in my workshop until I get some solid ideas flowing. I’ll also get a workshop. Until that time, winter’s here, I’m grounded, and the driveway isn’t going to clear itself. Grab a shovel, folks, and keep your heads down. Time to earn those other seasons.

Resolve

Resolutions bug me. The idea behind them is great: You pinpoint areas of your life that need improvement, and you dedicate the new year to making the necessary changes. You hit the gym, you eat all natural foods, you start learning a new language. The problem is that, by April, you’re sick of the gym, you’re back to eating chocolate-covered pretzels, and the only thing you’ve learned to say in French is “I have a flesh wound and need to see a doctor.”

Which makes resolutions an exercise in frivolity, at least in my case. Major props to the people who can stick with them, but they seem to be in be in the minority. The rest of us mean well, but … life. Enough said.

You’d think I’d stop making resolutions altogether, feeling the way I do about them, but no. There’s something about the end of a calendar year, arbitrary though it is, that infuses us with something fresh and vital, a yearning for more, for better. Oftentimes it also infuses us with alcohol in the form of glittery cocktails in gaudy gummy bear colors. That tends to lube the gears a bit, get us thinking along the lines of the grandiose. “I’m gonna resolve to learn the guitar and finish that novel I’m writing about colonial fur traders with speech impediments!” Sure you are. And I’m going to learn how to juggle chainsaws and fart in Morse Code.

My resolutions tend to the absurd and unrealistic, because let’s face it, whatever they are I’m probably not going to keep them. This is by turns depressing and liberating -- the former because it speaks to my character in unflattering ways, the latter because I can get downright ridiculous with the whole enterprise and not feel any guilt when my resolutions go unrealized. I can resolve to learn how to cook something fancier than pan-fried chicken breast, or I can resolve to set up a nudist colony on an uncharted island with a championship roller derby team. Neither is going to happen, so why not shoot for the moon?

It is in this spirit that I have cobbled together a rough list of non-goals for the new year. Some are attainable, most aren’t, and all of them in aggregate should make me a prime candidate for residency in a psychiatric research facility. And away we go.

I hereby resolve: to expand my wardrobe. Getting by on two pairs of jeans and a handful of aging heavy metal t-shirts is no way to go through life. If I didn’t stay on top of my laundry I’d run out of viable clothing options in about five days, forcing me to arrive at work clad in a wrap-around beach towel and my faded New Kids on the Block sweater from 1989. I own exactly one suit jacket, two pairs of dress pants, two pairs of black socks and four ties, three of which are the exact same shade of blue. “The clothes make the man,” as the old saying goes. I certainly hope not.

I hereby resolve: to travel to outer space. Hey, why not? It may not happen in 2017, but tourist excursions to the final frontier will be a reality someday. And while these trips may initially be accessible only to the rich, I’m sure I’ll be raking in mad coin once I finally invent a product America needs -- a mustache comb that’s also a can opener, maybe. Still working out the details. In any event, I’m a science fan, I love space, and I’m constantly pondering humankind’s role in the larger universe, so there’s no greater adventure to me than touring the heavens and sipping airborne globs of water in zero Gs. Plus, think of the epic selfies I could take up there. “Oh, that big blue ball behind me? Yeah, that’s Earth.” Pretty sweet, if you ask me.

I hereby resolve: to eat more vegetables. Instead of eating small veggie portions each day, like a healthy, sane person, I tend to eat vast quantities of them once or twice a week -- a whole can of sliced carrots on a Tuesday, for example, and then nothing ’til the weekend. Maybe I’m unaware of the ways in which the human body can store food, but I have a suspicion I’m not doing it correctly. I am not, after all, a camel. While I’m at it, I should probably stop eating so much Jell-O. Pretty sure food isn’t supposed to be the pristine blue of fresh toilet water.

I hereby resolve: to start a band called The Flaming Pants. The name is a blatant ripoff of The Flaming Lips, but it actually goes a bit deeper, because it suggests that everyone in the band is a huge liar (what with our pants being on fire and all). It also gives us an easy gimmick. We play our music, and about halfway through our set -- during a paint-peeling, screeching hellraiser of a song -- our trousers combust, and we rip through the crescendo with fiery tendrils lapping at our unmentionables. Of course, this is an unsafe and foolish aspiration, because even if our bodies were coated with flame-retardant material, we would risk injury to ourselves and damage to the concert venue. The whole set-piece would be a way of justifying our adoption of a moderately catchy (and derivative) band name. But hey, bands have formed for worse reasons. While I’m at it, I should probably resolve to, you know, learn an actual instrument.

Lastly, I resolve to be more optimistic. Historically speaking, optimism has never come easily to me, and attaining it may prove to be more difficult than ever, given how craptastic the past year turned out to be. It wasn’t a great year for a lot of people, truthfully. But that’s all the more reason to gather up the last shreds of our resolve and make a push for positive change. This defiant resolution may dissolve into ether come February, but darnit, making 2017 better than 2016 has to start with believing it’s possible.

To gather up momentum, I suggest we all start out small. I’ll begin by purchasing a third pair of pants.