First day of spring, my a-

I want blossoms, not bluster.

The weather here in northern Illinois is, excuse my crass lack of eloquent description, bullshit.

It’s 19 degrees as I write this in the afternoon. According to the talking heads on the morning news, the wind chill this morning made it feel like 4 degrees below — below! — zero (it’s much worse at my parents house in Wadena, Minn. — the air temperature was below zero by itself this morning, forget how much colder the wind made it feel).

My precious little 8-pound schnauzer who lack body fat and wanders around in bare paws is still having to contend with snow in the back yard. Poor thing.

It’s the first day of spring! I just want to grab Mother Nature by her fur-lined lapel and shake some sense into her! Where the heck is that glorious spring weather we experienced last year at this time (my Beloved was mowing the lawn a year ago!)? Is this payback?

The atrocious weather sent me seeking a prayer, and I found this one titled, “Spring” in “Graces: Prayers & Poems for Everyday Meals and Special Occasions” by June Cotner:

We give you everlasting thanks, O God,
For the marvels of your great creation.

As the flowers blossom and bloom around us
We lift our hearts in joy and celebration.
Amen.

Nice prayer? Indeed. Beautiful. But I think we need something more along the lines of a rain dance right now. I am not Native American, but here’s how a Germanic Swede born in Minnesota might perform a “spring dance”:

• Wear orange, the color of the sun. But not so much as to call attention to oneself.  An orange hair thingy is appropriate; an orange coat would be going too far. Face paint might include green eyeshadow or bronzer (again, we Minnesotans think Lady Gaga is a little “out there”).
• Stand, shifting weight from one leg to the other. Weave hands back and forth like a snake charmer as if to impose one’s will on another.
• Hum the tune from Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind or “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (Dylan was born in Duluth, Minn., dontcha know). Finish dance with a fist pump and bark, “You betcha!”

If that doesn’t scare away winter, I don’t know what will.

Stay tuned to ‘Hoarders on a Diet’ when we explore reality TV addictions

I spent several hours this afternoon watching “Hoarders: Buried Alive” on TLC.

I kept hoping to see a really impressive “after” reveal and kept being disappointed hour after hour.

I finally gave up and watched last Tuesday’s “Biggest Loser” episode.

After delving repeatedly into the psychology of compulsive hoarders and overeaters, what does this say about the subconscious motivations behind my TV habits?

Am I addicted to redemption stories or do I just have bad taste?

Let’s pare an hour from our work rather than our sleep

If you’re sick and tired of losing an hour of sleep every spring, it’s time to join a new movement: Americans For Workday DST.

Americans For Workday DST have a simple platform: Turn the clocks forward during the standard workday on Monday afternoon rather than on a weekend night.

You read it here first, folks. Why aren’t we springing ahead at 2 p.m. Monday afternoon instead of 2 a.m. Sunday morning?

Exactly. No good reason.

Daylight Saving Time is an arbitrary practice that occurs in most industrialized countries — but not all — at roughly the same time — but not exactly. No good reason exists to demand we make this change in the middle of a weekend night. Changing clocks is a pain in the neck no matter time of day it is — why not do it when most of us are wide awake?

Losing an hour of sleep wreaks havoc in Americans’ internal clocks every spring, causing more heart attacks, car accidents and workplace injuries in the two days after the time change.

Meanwhile, Americans work 77  hours a year more than the Japanese and 310 hours a year more than Europeans. Why not lop one hour off that total?

We could return to Standard Daylight Time in the middle of an autumn night — I have no problem getting an extra hour of sleep.

Instead of the little motto “fall back, spring ahead” (which, by the way, doesn’t work in Australia anyway), we could jog our memories by repeating “fall back in bed, spring out of work early.”

Whaddaya say?

Join the movement: Americans for Workday DST. The hour you save might just be your own.

Up in smoke and mirrors

Friends help friends move, so my Saturday included boxes, packing tape and a trip to the U-haul store to pick up a 17-foot truck. With a broken mirror.

When I looked into the glass and realized it was broken, I knew I had good subject matter for “distorted,” this week’s WordPress weekly photo challenge.

Actual unretouched photo

The pile in the green bag sitting in front of the house? That’s a Bagster filled with trash. The Bagster® bag is “a dumpster in a bag,” a Waste Management product designed to get rid of contained messes (and you thought there could be no innovation in the garbage industry).

Part of the distortion here is that all that stuff in the Bagster was once deemed necessary to make a home sweeter. Now it’s just a whole lot of unwanted junk.

Warning: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

The dawn of e-reading at my house

Confession: My worst habit is that I let paper accumulate.

I spent four hours on Super Bowl Sunday filing paperwork from 2011. And half my desk was still covered in detritus.

The Thanksgiving issue of Food Network magazine is still unread in my bathroom. Thanksgiving 2010.

My Beloved loves everything about me. Except my penchant for leaving newspapers everywhere (OK, maybe not everything, but the newspaper thing is definitely Pet Peeve No. 1).

I have more recipes ripped from newspapers and magazines than I could cook in a year in a pile in a cupboard in my kitchen.

I’m thinking I need more bookshelves because I have hundreds of books, dozens of scrapbooks and diaries from junior high filling the 17 shelves already in my office.

This e-reader phenomenon might help me kick this bad habit.

I downloaded a book today.

Cue the harp music and shaft of sunshine.

I downloaded the Kobo app on my iPad two weeks ago and Could. Not. Figure. Out. How. To download. A book.

I even did a search on Google. One can find the answer to anything on Google. Couldn’t find it.

For all your Google searchers, here’s how to download a book on your Kobo app on your iPad: Download it on your computer. Then refresh your iPad.

So I downloaded “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill at the suggestion of my boss. (I’m on Chapter 1. Jury’s still out.)

And I started reading it. On my iPad. Immediately. Without bringing another paperback into the house. Or the box it comes in (we have so many boxes around here, my brother-in-law teases us about our box collection). All for 99 cents. I could buy eight business e-books from 1987 for what it would cost to buy a paperback version of “Think and Grow Rich.”

I can make notes and get into a discussion with other people reading the book on Kobo. (No one else is reading it right now — probably need to choose a more popular book for to truly appreciate this function. As long as we’re taking about other books, a librarian this past weekend highly recommended I read “The Hare with Amber Eyes” by Edmund de Waal. If you’re trolling for book suggestions.)

And, get this:

I downloaded the Real Simple magazine app and started reading that. It looks very much like the magazine. Including the NYDJ ad with white jeans. (What’s NYDJ? Not Your Daughter’s Jeans. OMG, I’m counted among the mom crowd. And can you wear white jeans in March?)

If I want more information about those white jeans, I can click right on the ad and go to the NYDJ website.

Brilliant.

Now I just have to download the Chicago Tribune app, and the newspapers will be neatly tucked into my sleekly Stella & Dot-dressed iPad.

I can see doing a lot of reading on my iPad.

A new bad habit is born.

Marilyn Monroe sculpture is the talk of the town

A sculpture of Marilyn Monroe stands in Pioneer Court (400 block) of North Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

She’s a glamazon if ever there was one. Talk about legs that go on forever!

As I emerged on Michigan Avenue after a water taxi ride down the Chicago River earlier this week, I was thrilled to be confronted with the much-talked-about sculpture of Marilyn Monroe by Seward Johnson.

She was erected in July amid some hullaballoo. I guess some people thought it was sexy that the real Marilyn Monroe let a puff of air billow her skirt and reveal her legs as she stood over a subway grate in the movie “The Seven Year Itch” but it was perverse when people peered up at her panties from beneath a 26-foot replica of her shenanigans.

I think recreating her in giant form is true art: It’s making people talk.

When I first read about the sculpture, I thought the artist wasn’t being very creative by copying a popular image in 3D form. Kitsch, I thought. But upon reflection, I think this rendition allows people to interact with it. Some people are struck, all over again, by Marilyn’s beauty. Some are impressed with the sculpture’s size (she’s smaller than she appears on camera, I think). Some people walk all the way around, taking her in from all angles. And a lot of people — and by that I mean just about anyone what lingers long enough to take a picture — stand beneath her and look up. Isn’t that the point of what made the picture so evocative? She was brash enough to stand over a subway grate but coy enough to try to hold the dress down. She was hiding what she did not want to hide. With the sculpture, we can see exactly what she didn’t — or did — want us to see in the film.

Having seen it in person earlier this week, I think the sculpture itself — irrelevant of what it represents — is amazing. It’s a sturdy work of steel and aluminum depicting a pleated lightweight fabric billowing in the wind. While Marilyn’s hair doesn’t look like hair, exactly, that dress really looks as if it could move silkily in an updraft.

And frankly, I don’t find Marilyn’s aluminum underpants pornographic. She is among a select few cover girls who make granny panties look provocative.

Here's the less-often-published but often seen "underpants" view of the sculpture.

Steve Jobs changed my life … and he did it for $1 a year

The newsroom of the my college newspaper was dominated by little Apple Macintosh computers, all in a row. That's me, large and in charge with the flowing mane in the bottom right corner of the picture.

At the time, newspapers editors loved and loathed the power the cutting-edge little Mac computer held.

Instead of leaving the petty job of gluing together headlines and stories on a newspaper page like a puzzle to a union typesetter, an editor could do the job on a computer screen. It was tedious work but powerful: One could play endlessly with headline content or size and cut copy with reason and logic instead of just loping off the end of a story at the nearest period.

This power came packaged in an Apple Macintosh computer with Quark Xpress software, and “pagination” was transforming the newspaper industry when I was editor in chief of my college newspaper. For all the complaints I heap on my alma mater, St. Cloud State’s mass communications department did the right thing by investing in Macintosh computers in 1988, just four years after their introduction by little Apple Computer company created by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Apple IIc Plus = $1,100

Those little machines with the 9-inch monitors gave tremendous desktop publishing power to copy editors and made the role of the human typesetter obsolete. I might have gotten my first post-college job as a reporter without that Mac experience, but I never would have landed the job as newspaper copy editor four years later without it. Oh, how I loved those enormous G3 monitors!

Even today, I am obsessed with the total design control afforded by Quark Xpress, now loaded on my PC. My headlines are exactly 1 pica above the story, I can save a whole paragraph of copy by deleting a single word in six other paragraphs, and I can create a drop letter in two clicks.

Apple iBook = $1,599

I left newspapers in 1997 to become a marketing executive. When other non-creatives were using PCs in the late ’90s, I stubbornly hung onto my Macintosh computer. For a while, I had two computers — a PC desktop and one of those pretty blue iBook laptops — until finally I was lured in about 2002 to the cheaper, more universally compatible world built by Bill Gates.

iPod Shuffle = $79

Still, Apple was changing the world with a little novelty called the iPod. I resisted that innovation until 2007 when my parents decided their runner daughter needed an iPod shuffle as a Christmas present. Now, I rarely hit the streets without my trusty iPod and its iTunes library of Natasha Bedingfield, Queen and the soundtrack from “Mama Mia” (yeah, I probably oughta replace that Abba stuff with something else).

My Beloved just got an iPhone, and I can see one replacing my Droid any day. And we’ve already been shopping for an iPad, impressed with all it brags of doing.

Apple CEO’s value = Priceless

Apple products have been inextricably influencing my life in one way or another for 25 years. The announcement yesterday of Steve Jobs’ departure from the CEO role with Apple reminds me how his vision has affected my career, my hobbies and my relationships.

How much value can one assign to a man like Steve Jobs whose work has affected the lives of so many people?

I read the other day that federal regulators were drawing up new rules regarding CEO pay in an effort to thwart financial abuses uncovered in the 2008 economic crash. One of those rules requires the disclosure of the ratio between the average pay of all employees and that of the CEO. Some CEOs are paid 300 times as much as their average employee, and some people think that’s unfair.

To be sure, not all egomanaical CEOs deserve that kind of ridiculous salary. In fact, some greedy racketeers who climbed to a position of power because they were lucky enough to rub elbows with the right people don’t deserve to be paid twice the salary of the average employee let alone 300 times.

How much money have I earned because of Steve Jobs? How many hours of enjoyment has the work of his company brought me?

Having worked for one CEO who cashed in her company stock and sent the company into a spiral that ended in bankruptcy and for another CEO who lamented his pay cut to $80,000 a year as “not worth coming into work for” while he was paying his employees weeks late, I idolize a CEO like Steve Jobs.

You know what Steve Jobs’ CEO salary was? He probably got a salary when he was leading Apple in the ’80s, but since 1998, Steve Jobs has been paid $1 a year.

Of course, he owns billions in Apple and Disney stock (according to the Associated Press, he got the Disney stock when he sold Pixar Animation Studios to Disney in 2006), but Steve Jobs deserves every cent.

How many cans of tuna fish would be enough?

Did you see the Dilbert comic in yesterday’s Sunday paper?

Dilbert, the ever prepared engineer, says he stocking up on food and water in preparation for the complete meltdown of American’s financial system. I wonder if Scott Adams somehow intuited the failure of Congress to agree on a debt ceiling over the weekend?

Dilbert’s stockpiling effort echoes a number of conversations my Beloved and I have engaged in while he watches (and I catch bits and pieces of) reruns of “Jericho,” a 2006-2008 CBS television series available to stream on Netflix (yes, we have agreed to pay the “highway robbery” Netflix rate increases that equal about $4 a month for us to watch pretty much whatever TV wasteland stuff is available; some people can be such whiners).

“Jericho” is not bad as far as network television series go (especially when streamed without commercials and week-long cliffhangers). Sort of like a less sophisticated, less farfetched version of “Lost,” it tells the story of the residents of a small Kansas town who are isolated from most of the outside world when nuclear attacks wipe out most of America’s major cities. These residents grapple with no electricity, limited fuel, dwindling food supplies and lack of medical expertise while facing ominous threats to their personal and geographic security.

The show has made us think about what we would do in a similar situation: No electricity. Probably no indoor plumbing (unless Hampshire’s water treatment plant could somehow secure power). No food beyond what we can scavenge. Limited transportation ability.

Even if we plan ahead and, like Dilbert, stockpile six months worth of tuna, dried beans and bottled water, how do we defend it? How would you say no to starving mothers clamouring for food for their babies or scary suburban thugs demanding supplies in return for “protection”?

We’ve even discussed taking a course in handguns. While I, for the most part, support the goals of the NRA, we do not have a handgun in our house. Handguns aren’t for hunting — they’re for killing. People. I’ve asked myself, faced with protecting my home, my stockpile of food or my body, could I really pull the trigger to kill someone?

These are the dilemmas often faced by the residents of “Jericho.” With a possible deal on the federal government’s debt ceiling, I’m hoping we are spared a meltdown of the country’s financial system, so that talk of food stockpiles and handgun defense can remain comfortably part of the Sunday comics and television fantasy.

For now.

From ‘Paul’ to Sigourney to ‘Friday’

How many adults shook their heads in disgust, I wonder now, when a reference to a Frank Sinatra song or a John Wayne movie was completely lost on my naive teenage self.

A world of cultural references is lost with each new generation.

Today’s teenagers only know “Charlie’s Angels” because of Drew Barrymore, they know Charlie Sheen all too well but do not recognize his half-brother Emilio Estevez, made famous with “The Breakfast Club” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and poor Dolly Parton is just a busty joke, not a funny, talented country music crooner.

I spent the weekend alternatively entertaining and being entertained by my 16-year-old stepson who was visiting for spring break with a 16-year-old friend.

Among tactics we employed to divert their attention away from hand-held video games and their cell phones was a visit to the movie theater; fight the small screens with the big screen, I always say.  We filled them up a Chinese buffet beforehand thereby avoiding the popcorn prices and paid for four matinée tickets to see “Paul,” the funny little movie about a cross-country road trip across the American West by two Brits and an alien.

No, not illegal alien. An alien from outer space.

Yes, it was filled with stupid humor and crass language but, well, it was funny, especially if you’re as big a sci-fi fan as I am. And it features a motor home suspiciously similar to my Beloved’s 1983 Pace Arrow.

Anyway, at one point in the movie, Sigourney Weaver’s character is told, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

I laughed out loud, much to the chagrin of my 16-year-old seat mates who had no idea why that would be funny and even if they understood, certainly didn’t want me calling attention to us by laughing out loud in a movie theater, God forbid. I am so embarrassing.

Soooooooo, when we got home, we booted up Netflix and moved the best science fiction action movie ever made to the top of the instant-view queue. “Aliens,” starring Weaver and directed by James Cameron (known even to today’s generation from his work on “Titanic” and “Avatar”), is a classic horror thriller with suspense, gore and Academy Award-winning visual effects. The only thing one of these 16-year-olds knew about the movie was that a creature erupts out of human’s stomach (a scene, actually, from the first in the series, “Alien”).

The 1986 flick also features memorable dialogue including the line above and other jewels like “Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?” and ”Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!” (which are also useful in a variety of non-science-fiction situations).

It was satisfying to watch for the first time for some of us and for the 50th time for, well, me.

Meanwhile, these 16-year-old’s shared with me a cultural reference from their generation about Rebecca Black’s You Tube hit, “Friday” that was actually useful while reading today’s Chicago Tribune when I ran across the story, “‘Friday’: Annoying repeat performance, or what?”

I’m warning you, though: Do not watch the video if you don’t want the annoying lyrics running through your head for, oh, the next week.

“Maybe we could build a fire, sing a couple of songs, huh? Why don’t we try that?”

 

‘Survivor’ survives for real reasons

Ah, a new season of “Survivor” began tonight.

Reality television is like candy to me — completely unnecessary, yet irresistible.

I’ve been a “Survivor” fan since the first groundbreaking season when reality TV was still fresh and wild (and often bad). Nasty Richard managed to outsmart back-stabbing Kelly and crazy Sue and the amazingly tough Rudy.

Those “Survivor” producers know how to edit things together to make it interestingly without making the evolving plot too obvious. The videographers are top-notch, and I love the music, familiar every season with location-specific twists.

The casting from season to season has been uneven but I’m almost always amazed at some of the characters who turn up. I’ll be interested in seeing how returning Boston Rob and evil Russell fare this season. Speaking of familiar characters, I always love host Jeff Probst’s obnoxious commentary; he’s just overbearing enough to be memorable.

This season’s twist — Redemption Island — may prove to be a brilliant way to keep the attention of a viewer who’s disappointed to see a favorite voted “out” only to be given a second chance to return. We’ll see.