Clown and country

My parents used to take me to the circus when I was a kid, which probably explains many things, from my love of elephants to my near-crippling cotton candy addiction. (If it had any nutritional value at all, I’d eat nothing but.) I used to love these experiences. A few of my friends? Not so much. They were afraid of the clowns.

Clowns never bothered me on any profound level. They weren’t necessarily my favorite part of the circus -- that honor was reserved for the big metal ball with the speeding motorcyclists -- but I thought they were generally fine. Sure, some of them could be mildly irritating, especially when they approached me out of nowhere and started making nonsensical hand gestures and clomping around in their surfboard-sized shoes. You sort of felt like giving them a sedative and letting them zonk out in front of a TV documentary about the history of bread. But they didn’t seem very frightening. Not like poisonous snakes, for instance. Or Lady Gaga.

Yet chances are good that you know at least one person who is deeply, skin-crawlingly afraid of clowns. When I first became aware of this phenomenon, I said to myself, “Well, this can’t be too common a thing. It’s probably rare, like gluten allergies or membership in the Pauly Shore fan club.” Then I discovered that I was wrong. And that I talk to myself too much.

It’s so common a fear that it’s been given its own unofficial “phobia” name, coulrophobia. According to the website WiseGeek Health, it’s the third leading phobia in Great Britain, trailing only spiders and needles, and ranking higher than the fear of flying. Which is surprising. Flying involves strapping yourself into a 75-ton metal tube and speeding over the earth at altitudes around 39,000 feet. Equipment malfunction means plummeting toward the ground in a claustrophobic arrangement with justifiably panicked passengers screaming and clasping their hands in prayer. Yet, if the statistics are accurate, most of those passengers would rather be in that plane than see a man with a rubber nose making balloon animals. Go figure.

Everyone who fears clowns has their own personal reasons, and while I haven’t been able to locate any in-depth data on this, it’s a pretty safe assumption that a lot of this fear has to do with how clowns have been represented in popular culture. Books and films are too often dismissed as trivial entertainments; how they portray things actually matters. If movies depicted werewolves as furry, lovable creatures with cute little button noses who like cuddling, they wouldn’t make for very popular Halloween fodder. They’d star in their own Saturday morning cartoon show and have their likenesses reproduced on lunch boxes.

Poor clowns. They don’t stand a chance -- not when they have to go up against two very unflattering pop culture depictions. The first “scary clown” depiction that comes to people’s minds is probably Pennywise, the evil clown from the Stephen King novel “It.” Pennywise is a fang-dripping, bloodthirsty monstrosity that lives in the sewers and terrorizes children, and while he’s obviously pure fantasy, fiction has a way of sticking in one’s head. Especially when that fiction entails a pasty, bloated gasbag of a face speckled with the blood of his victims. Jeff the horror-lover thinks that image is totally rad. Jeff the bleeding-heart feels sorry for the clowns who drive those tiny cars in every parade. Here they are just trying to entertain people, and they have to contend with a character who’s wrecked more lives than John Wayne Gacy. Brutal.

Pennywise, however, isn’t actually a clown. He manifests himself differently to different children, and the main character of “It” sees him as a clown, as I believe a few others do as well. But there’s no ambiguity about the second “scary clown” in pop culture mythology. Though fictional, there’s nothing supernatural about him, which makes him even scarier.

I’m assuming you’ve heard of The Joker.

This menacing dude first appeared in 1940 as an antagonist in the Batman comic books, and since then he’s been portrayed by hordes of different actors in both animated and live-action adaptations. (The most notable is Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight.” Simply put, he’s fantastic in the role.) In most of these depictions, The Joker is presented as an unstable, violent, murderous psychopath, which is set at odds with his colorful appearance: pale face, green hair, red lips. It’s the juxtaposition that’s truly frightening. It’s like if the Easter Bunny was a serial killer. If Batman’s primary foe was a giant pink rabbit who hid explosive eggs around Gotham City, you’d see children ducking for cover when they pass the bunny display at the petting zoo.

(Also, note to self: Develop killer bunny character for comic books, make fortune.)

The Joker and Pennywise have conspired to propagate an image of clowns as evil, twisted creatures. Part of me -- the part that should probably be institutionalized -- loves the whole motif. A flower on a lapel that squirts toxic chemicals? Poisoned playing cards and lethal laughing gas? I’m in. Sign me up. And throw in one of those creepy, maniacal laughs while you’re at it, just to get my hackles a-twitchin’. I live for that kind of stuff.

I just feel sorry for all the coulrophobes out there, not to mention the clowns themselves, who are just trying to be silly and entertain. Perhaps one of these days the cultural winds will shift and their image and reputation will be vindicated; an all-clown rock band will top the music charts, Bozo will discover a cure for cancer, and all will be right once more in Clown Town. It could happen.

In all likelihood I won’t be awake to see it, though. I’ll have gorged on cotton candy and slipped into a semi-lucid sugar coma. I always miss these things.

One-man hobby lobby

Reading has been a hobby of mine for as long as I can remember. It was a hobby before i could even technically read; my father would sit me on his lap with a Dr. Suess book in hand and regale me with tales about green eggs and ham, which in children’s books apparently have nothing to do with mold.

Decades later I’m devouring the classics (if you can consider “The Shining” a classic), thankful that I’ve picked up on reading as a lifelong hobby. Because not only is it rewarding, but it has a distinct advantage over certain other hobbies: You can do it indoors.

Around these parts that’s kind of important.

I’ve never spent much time in the southwest -- a 10-hour layover in Los Angeles was the closest I came -- so I wonder what life is like for Southern Californians in particular. The reality is probably nothing like I envision it, but I picture tanned youths in undershirts and cargo shorts riding skateboards from dusk ’till dawn. Middle-aged movie executives sipping mai tais on beaches reading Variety on their cell phones. Elderly couples strolling under palm trees, comfortably silent beneath a cactus-dry sky. Outdoor hobbies. Things you do when rain and snow are things you see on television.

Mainers don’t have these kinds of luxuries, at least not in February. Sure, you’ve got the skiers and the snowmobilers, but every once in awhile you get choke-slammed by a Nor’easter so thick and nasty the only thing you can do is hunker down and ride it out. Right now I’m sitting in my living room, glancing out the window at a storm so relentless I don’t even dare poke my head out the door. If I craned my neck out for even a second I’d come back inside with a snow-beard and a pair of inch-long icicles dangling precariously from each nostril, both comprised of about 60 percent booger. Ice boogers were fun when I was 7. Now I’ve got a mustache. Do the math.

So I crack open my books and read for a while. Good clean indoor fun. But it occurred to me, as I was enjoying a novel about a serial killer who drives an ice cream truck, that not everyone reads for pleasure. They read strictly out of necessity, because otherwise they wouldn’t know that the fajitas at Applebee’s come with a side of coleslaw. Surely they must have different hobbies, things they do to combat the cabin fever. But what could they possibly be? Television? Amateur taxidermy? Bagpipe practice?

The internet is a blessing and a curse. Turns out people are even weirder than I imagined.

If you’re Chuck Lamb, for example, your indoor hobby is to play dead. Nothing fancy here. He essentially lies around and does nothing, only he does it with his eyes open and sometimes a couple of props at his disposal, like a streak of fake blood trickling down his forehead or a rubber knife sticking through his shirt. What’s scarier is that Lamb has an audience. He takes pictures and videos of his fake deadness and posts them online, with his website scoring about 32 million hits in the course of a year. That’s 32 million people who have sat at their computers or phones and watched a grown man with six kids literally doing nothing at all. This is what you would call a minimalist hobby. In fact it takes minimalism to a creepy, metaphysical level. At least his videos don’t have any weird sex stuff in them. I’d have to shower for a week to still my crawling skin.

Audrey Horncastle -- I swear that is an actual name -- takes things to a whole new level of strangeness. Her indoor hobby is knitting woolen breasts. Now in her case there’s actually a good reason for doing this: She gives them to her daughter, a community nurse, who uses them to teach new mothers how to breastfeed. It’s a good and noble purpose for what is still, let’s face it, a rather bizarre way to pass the time. What’s slightly unnerving is how … um, anatomically accurate she makes these faux body parts. I’m glad they serve a somewhat medical purpose, because if they were meant as gifts for family and friends, that would make for some super awkward moments at little Timmy’s birthday party. Although Timmy could always tell his grandma, “Thanks for the mammaries.” Zing! Rim shot! High five! OK, I’m done now.

These hobbies are not normal. In fact they’re borderline disturbing. But they’re also creative, and if these weirdos can come up with inventive ways to pass the time without leaving the house, that means there’s a chance for the rest of us. I mean, we don’t have to spend an entire blizzard reading about murderous psycho clowns, do we?

I’m tempted to do something that will land me on one of these internet “weird hobbies” lists. To invent an activity, essentially. Off the top of my head: take the black tape out of an old cassette and make a funny hat; paint my face with all my leftover Halloween makeup and do a Facebook photo shoot that’ll leave friends scared for my sanity; see if I can suspend a stapler in a gallon of Jell-O; and make a drum kit out of pillows and sofa cushions and try to keep time with the beat of “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution.” If I digitally track my progress, at least one of these inane pastimes is bound to land me some dubious, fleeting Buzzfeed fame.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. And lately it’s been pretty desperate. Maybe once I’m done painting myself to look like a Zebra I’ll whip out the food coloring and try to make some actual green eggs and ham. As long as I’ve got the time, I might as well see what the fuss is all about.

You are what you eat

Almost everyone I know hates grocery shopping. And when I say “hate,” I don’t mean they find it sort of annoying, or a minor inconvenience. I mean they loathe it with the kind of fiery passion that could melt the grille off a Studebaker.

Granted, it’s not exactly a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl. For many of us it falls under the category of “dull necessity,” a chore we tolerate because avoiding said chore would result in us dying, or at the very least being too out-of-our-minds with hunger that we can’t concentrate on the dentist’s old copy of “Entertainment Weekly.” We run low on food, we buy some. Simple. Nobody walks into the bread aisle shouting “Yippee!” Well, almost nobody.

When I ask people why the thought of grocery shopping fills them with such vitriol, the most common response I get it that it sucks up a lot of time. Picture it: Harry’s just put in a full day at the office. It was a bad one. People screamed at him over the phone relentlessly, his boss told him his work was sloppy, and when everyone gathered in the breakroom to celebrate Janet’s retirement he got the cake with the least amount of frosting. Plus his last name is Butts. That’s more of a life issue, but still, it didn’t help.

Then, after all that, Harry’s got to run down to the local supermarket to grab the items on his shopping list. They’re big items. He walks up to the cashier with a 10-lb. turkey, a gallon of 2 percent milk, 18 eggs (his wife loves omelettes), a loaf of pumpernickel, 14 boxes of Fig Newtons and two large jugs of Jim Beam, because yes, his day was all kinds of horrible. And since his wife is at her book club discussing “37 Shades of Off-White,” he has to lug this haul up to their third-floor apartment on his own. Did I mention Harry has a bad back? Yeah, Harry has a bad back.

The whole ordeal eats up about an hour and a half of a perfectly fine evening, and now he no longer has time to finish his oil painting of Patrick Duffy’s wristwatch. I can see why he doesn’t like grocery shopping. I mean, c’mon.

Call me a contrarian, but unlike Harry I’ve come to rather enjoy groceries. Despite the fact that, yes, it can be a massive time-suck, it doesn’t have to be an all-out grueling experience. As with many things, it’s all about mindset -- the attitude you bring into it.

For one thing, most people love food. (Most, in fact, love it a little too much, which is what keeps fitness clubs and Weight Watchers in such swingin’ business.) Can’t say I blame them; food is amazing. You get to stick something tasty in your mouth and in exchange you receive nutrition, a full and satisfied stomach, and in some cases a bout of hiccups so severe you end up slobbering seltzer water all over the living room rug. Of course, if you overdo things or make the wrong decisions you can also end up with diabetes and heart disease, but that’s not the point. The point is that food is great, and when you walk into the store and you’re surrounded by it, there’s a transcendent experience to be had. Think of the possibilities.

I mean, you can eat anything in the store. Anything. Assuming you’re lucky enough to have the financial means, walking through the aisles is like a choose-your-own-adventure book. Two people can walk into the same store, and one can load up on cookies and gummy bears while the other strolls out with oozy beef slabs and 14 cans of asparagus. Neither of those schmoes has got what it takes to put together a healthful meal, but they’re both exercising the unique freedom to choose. They’re deciding, in this outsized cornucopia, on the edible items that will keep them walking and breathing and playing slap bass in their funk bands.

Because as the saying goes, “You are what you eat,” and what many people don’t think about is how true that is in a literal sense. The cells in your body are continually dying and regenerating -- you’re made up of completely different cells than you were 20 years ago -- and they regenerate using the nutrients from the food you eat. So if you were to eat, say, nothing but peanut butter and cabbage for the next couple of decades, your body would be made primarily out of peanut butter and cabbage (and potentially Botox, depending on whether or not you live on the West Coast). You’d be extremely unhealthy and smell like a plastic bag filled with old seaweed, but hey, it’s your own fault for only shopping from the aisles closest to the register.

While most people walk into that store with slumped shoulders and an agonized groan, I’m thinking, “OK, what would I like to be made of this week?” This is, in all likelihood, an insane thing to think, and if one of you people reading this is a psychiatrist, maybe you can give me an armchair diagnosis and hook me up with some rad meds. But that’s my method of avoiding the dejectedness of hauling around gargantuan piles of stuff for long stretches. I imagine I’m picking out my constituent ingredients, selecting myself from amidst colorful aisles of multitudes.

It’s weird, but it helps.

As for Harry, things have gotten worse, I’m afraid. That three-flight haul with armloads of groceries is now more difficult following an ankle injury sustained while kicking a dying Maytag washer. It’s going to be a while before the cast comes off, and even then things will be touch-and-go for a little while. And did I mention his last name was Butts?

Not to worry, though. He’s made up mostly of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli and Campbell’s Chunky Jammin’ Jerk Chicken. That’s some pretty hardy stuff right there.

Keepin' it real

Unless you’ve spent the past several days floating aimlessly through the heavens in a malfunctioning space pod, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about so-called “alternative facts.” For all you wayward interstellar travelers out there, here’s a quick refresher on how this became an actual term.

Kellyanne Conway, who is perhaps President Trump’s top advisor, was on “Meet the Press” recently talking to host Chuck Todd -- the “Chuckmeister,” as I like to call him. He was asking Conway why the new administration keeps insisting that Trump’s swearing-in ceremony drew the largest inaugural crowd ever, when aerial photos clearly showed evidence to the contrary.

“Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts,” said Conway.

“Alternative facts aren’t facts,” Todd responded. “They are falsehoods.”

Way to go, Chuckmeister.

It was a rare example of a television news host actually calling BS on a flat-out lie. Certainly laudable, considering how most TV pundits have become enabling and sycophantic. But Conway’s comments are a demarcation point of sorts. The term “alternative facts” gives weight and heft to a new era, one in which the truth is irrelevant, evidence is to be dismissed, inaccuracies are tolerated and reality is in the eye of the beholder. Civic life has become like “Let’s Make a Deal”: If people don’t like the facts that are tucked away behind door number one, they can swap them for whatever’s behind door number two. If the truth doesn’t comport with their particular worldview, they now have an alternative, and with the White House endorsing this philosophy, one no longer need be ashamed of one’s tinfoil hat.

My inclination is to rail against this trend, to stand on a high rooftop and beat my chest and proclaim, in my deepest Tarzan bellow, that there can be only one objective reality. You know what, though? Let’s roll with this for a second. Let’s adopt Conway’s premise that “alternative facts” are an acceptable form of information. That means I can make any number of outlandish claims about myself, and people have to accept it because it’s simply an alternative to what’s true. There are some deep creative opportunities here. A chance at reinvention. Here are a few alternative facts about myself:

While leading a scientific expedition across the Yukon, I was attacked by a bear the size of a small office building. Using only rudimentary jiu jitsu training and the butter knife on a Swiss Army keychain, I subdued the bear and became the de facto ruler of the northwestern Canadian forests. Now all I have do is snap my fingers and an army of badgers appears, dropping nuts and berries at my feet and genuflecting to their new golden god. True story!

I was the original choice to play CIA analyst and ex-marine Jack Ryan in the 1990 film adaptation of “The Hunt For Red October,” but I had to drop out of the project because I was in third grade and had a book report due. Luckily, after getting an “A” on the report, I was considered a top-shelf genius and was hired as a consultant by NASA. There, I led the team that developed a robot which automatically folds astronauts’ underwear while they’re out making repairs to the International Space Station. Believe me!

When I was in high school I was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained the ability to climb walls and lift objects several times my own body weight. I was going to parlay these newfound superpowers into a side career as a crime-fighting vigilante, but there wasn’t enough money in it, so I entered the world of professional boxing, dominating the sport for a brief period using the alias “Evander Holyfield.” No, really!

See, now I’m conflicted. I can almost see -- almost -- how blatantly making things up would be a fun exercise, a way to test the bounds of what people will consider feasible. Only here’s the difference: Sean Spicer is the spokesperson for the executive branch of the most powerful government in the world. People will believe what he says. If what he says is untrue, then you have legions of American citizens judging the new administration, and making future decisions in the voting booth, based on what the Chuckmeister correctly referred to as falsehoods.

It’s become fashionable these days to label politicians we don’t like as Hitler-esque, but the way the current administration is handling information is more reminiscent of Hitler’s right-hand man, Joseph Goebbels. A master of propaganda, Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” And you know what? He was right.

I hate making the analogy, because pointing the finger at politicians and public officials we don’t like and calling them a Nazi has become a tired cliché, and an overreaction in most cases. Only this isn’t most cases. Truth, and the public’s respect for it, is at stake.

Did I tell you I knew Kellyanne Conway once? Yup. Sean Spicer, too. We were all starring in an off-Broadway production of the 1959 film classic “Some Like It Hot” -- Conway played the Marilyn Monroe part, I was Jack Lemmon’s character and Spicer was in the Tony Curtis role. I had to learn how to play an acoustic floor bass, so for months I took lessons from a jazz maestro named Bubba Love, who was also a 12-foot-tall orangutan. I ripped on that bass until my fingers broke out in blisters, achieving veritable virtuoso status, and after the play’s run ended, the three of us toured the country as a power trio, thrilling audiences with instrumental arrangements of old hip-hop classics. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Run DMC’s “You Be Illin’” on a French horn.

It all happened. Cross my heart. But if you don’t believe those facts, I’ve got some alternative ones for you.

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.