Hokum

Twenty years ago, one of the first people I met in Washington introduced me to a folk singer named David Wilcox. He wrote this song in the late 1980s, called “It’s Almost Time.” With two feet of snow on the ground and probably at least another foot on the way, it might be a good time to remember the lyrics.

Just across the sea on this world so round
The sun’s shinin’ hot right now
And even though the winter still surrounds this town
I can still feel that sun somehow
But I know that my sun will shine
Just as sure as the world can spin
I can hold on fine, ’cause it’s almost time
For that sun to come ’round again.

Tomorrow, my dog gets kenneled and my wife and me move into hotel rooms. I fear for the structural integrity of my house and the safety of the many beautiful evergreens that initially attracted us to our home. But I can hold on fine.

It’s only appropriate that at an event known as halftime, half of The Who would show up to play. That’s exactly what happened at this year’s Super Bowl, when Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend and some tomato cans performed at the world’s most-watched gig.

The other half of the band — Keith Moon and John Entwistle — couldn’t make it due to their current state of deadness. Moon choked to death on his vomit more than 30 years ago, leading indirectly to the Spinal Tap franchise, while Entiwstle died in bed with a stripper in Vegas a few years back in one very fine rock-n-roll demise. The fact that they made up the best rock backline in history seems lost to memory now.  Sunday’s drummer, whoever he was, covered “Won’t Be Fooled Again” by hitting about a third as many beats as Moon laid down in the original, while the band didn’t even attempt “My Generation,” in which Entwistle put down the best R-n-R bass solo of all time.

The Who’s performance was made tolerable in part by a fantastic light show, but Daltry looked like he was wearing a wig and he can’t hit some of those high notes any more. Meanwhile, Townsend covered up his gray skull with a little I’m-bringing-sexy-back fedora (actually not a bad look for him). But perhaps next year we can have halftime entertainment with musicians who have something to say to anyone under 40.

Not to mention: Shirt, Tie and Hair FAIL (and Contact Lens FAIL, although that is not visually obvious — I had to give ‘em up after a couple of years). This is from the newsroom of the Arkansas Democrat, circa 1988, when I was an assistant city editor. A former Dem photo editor posted it on Facebook the other day:

This looks like it’s been around for a while, but I don’t care: The Beyonce/Andy Griffith Mashup:

I didn’t watch The Show at all last year — not even the final episode. I was kind of burned out, one year after watching my fellow Fighting Mule and his Les Paul make it all the way through. I couldn’t even tell you who won last year — we’ve all heard the No. 2 guy sing, but you could perp-walk the winner past me and I’d never know it.

And I thought that would be it for me, but I caught the first show of the season this year and I’ve been yanked right back in.

First, I’ve really enjoyed the absence of The Cheerleader. She was always good for comic relief but her act played thin and I kind of felt sorry for her after a while. Her replacement isn’t showing up until after the next round of Darwinian antics, and I’m not sure I can stomach week after week of her perkiness, but the current main players work just fine for me.

Second, in the early weeks of The Show, they’ve cut down the freak factor that always made me squirm. Humiliation is not entertainment to me, and although I did enjoy watching one contestant get cuffed and carried out this year, the cruel edge was always the thing I liked least about the early shows. There still has been a parade of the clueless, but it’s been noticeably more measured.

So it looks like I could be back on board for another year, unless the Replacement Cheerleader sends me into insulin shock and I am forced to withdraw. It’s always possible.

I gave up my iPhone last week. It was loaned to me several months ago, and I got an extension off the initial time period, but the IT guys finally came around and collected it back. They did provide me with an iPod Touch in return, giving me 80 percent of what I used the iPhone for.

The interesting news: I don’t think I’m going to miss it much.

This comes after my initial raves over the device, and many of those raves still hold true. The iPhone opened my eyes to the possibilities of portable devices, but as time went on, I found myself turning more and more often to my trusty old BlackBerry.

Why is that? Simple: The iPhone is a terrible phone and a mediocre-at-best business e-mail device. Those are the primary things I do with a smart phone, and the iPhone was not capable of handling the things I most needed to do.

Now, the apps remain wonderful and of course, the iPhone is a very good media player. But in the end, it was easy to give it back — especially when I usually can run iPhone apps on the iPod Touch that’s been lent to me indefinitely. The iPhone is the closest thing yet to a true electronic Swiss Army Knife, but it basically needs a better corkscrew.

When I returned from my AARP eligibility celebration Saturday, this little beauty was sitting on my back deck. It’s a Big Green Egg, which I really wanted but always felt guilty about buying because I already own four grills and smokers and this sucker is expensive. But my wife and friends pitched in together and bought it for me, and now they will reap the benefits.

The Egg is heavy, it’s made out of high-temperature ceramics, it’ll char steaks in sub-zero temperatures and howling winds (really), it’ll work in the rain (again, really), it uses real charcoal (not briquettes), it has the most precise temperature control of any smoker or grill period, it will do almost anything an oven can do, it will run at smoker temperatures for 20 hours straight with almost no assistance and it’s got a fanatical online following (owners call themselves EggHeads and hold rallies around the country).

I fired it up for the first time Sunday and watched as the temperature gauge climbed to an incredible 650 degrees. I then tossed in a couple of steaks with great results, although I have to get a little better at controlling the unit. The dampers work so well that you can extinguish and re-use the charcoal chunks again and again, so I won’t have to burn up a chimney of fuel every time I do a little grilling. I went through more than 250 pounds of briquettes last year, but I estimate I can keep my charcoal use down to 50 pounds or so this year (and Wal-Mart sells the very good Royal Oak chunk charcoal for $6 per 10 pound bag).

I have the medium-size unit, and it doesn’t have the smoking capacity of my still-much-loved Weber Smoky Mountain bullet smoker, but it will work just fine for many BBQ days. More importantly, if I feel the need for January blizzard brisket, this unit will make it (the Weber will work with the temperatures in the 20s but it won’t if it’s windy or raining). It also looks surprisingly nice.

Coming soon: A smoking experiment. I’m thinking a little 16-hour pulled pork might be in order.

Fifty years is a long time. Don’t let anyone tell you anything else — although to be accurate, it’s felt more like this: The first 18 years took about 45 years, and the subsequent 32 years have taken about five.

And here I am at an AARP-eligible 50. I am more freaked out about 50 than I was about 40, so I’m in Vegas right now, living in denial and pretending I can still rage deep into the night. This entry is being posted automagically because God knows I don’t plan on having the time and mental acuity to write something like this while I’m in Vegas.

Here’s some highlights of what I can remember so far:

• Riding the tricycle off the wall in front of the house and breaking my nose.
• Going to kindergarten and being puzzled about why so many kids were crying.
• Heading to I.C. for what genuinely seemed like a life sentence — it never, ever ended, until it did.
• Miss Braun in third grade, a great teacher.
• Terrible teachers in seventh and (especially) eighth grade. I blame most of my struggles with abstract math on them to this day.
• Helias High School, a fantastic place to learn and grow up. I am so grateful I went there. Coach Jeffries: I still use your note-taking method and there are some scoundrels out there who wish you hadn’t taught me that.
• Karen, my first real high school girlfriend. This is the last you’ll read about relationships here except for the one involving my wife. She reads this blog and insists I never dated anyone else.
• Central Missouri State University, a good school to attend if you want to be a commercial pilot or a police officer.
• Hard summer job: Highway crew.
• Fantastic summer job: Camp counselor.
• The Jefferson City News Tribune, where I learned that you can’t be a civilian and a journalist at the same time, even in your home town.
• The Southeast Missourian, a decent little paper with a good group of folks working there.
• The Arkansas Democrat, filled with loonies (in a good way).
• Nun of The Above. Nobody hears from Paco any more.
• Mom passes too soon and I learned that mortality isn’t an abstract concept.
• Memphis, for too short a time.
• The Neighbors section of the Commercial Appeal, where I learned that even good newspapers have bad jobs.
• Moving to Washington, listening to the sirens from my Capitol Hill stoop on my first night and wondering what I had gotten myself into.
• Winning the Journalism Lottery and taking a four-year journey that included hundreds of days on the road covering one of the best presidential campaigns ever, followed by two years of covering the White House for the president’s home town newspaper.
• The Confabulators, followed by the Tone Popes and the Joe Chiocca Band.
• Meeting Kristi-Sue, to whom I was immediately attracted even as every warning klaxon in my body blared ‘STAY AWAY!’ It took a few years to get past that. She’s been the love of my life for nearly 16 years now.
• “You know something about computers, don’t you? We need somebody…”
• CQ, a place that made me proud to be a journalist.
• A wedding that was about as far from the Washington standard as you can get.
• CNN.com and my politics section co-workers. You were spectacular and I had to lay you off anyway. I haven’t forgotten any of you. I occasionally still run into Mike at the Safeway.
• AOL. A mistake.
• USA TODAY, a place I still miss but a company run by executives who are ignoring the Spider-Man Creed.
• Dad passes at about the right time and I learned that you can be sad and proud all at once.
• NPR, which might yet restore my faith in journalism.
• Fifty trips around the sun, to quote a phrase I picked up from my friend Bill. I don’t know what is coming next but it sure hasn’t been dull so far.

Here’s my dog. You will enjoy this. Trust me.

The Christmas tree and the decorations came down Sunday and I realized that, although I have hundreds of memories of putting up Christmas decorations, I have almost none of taking them down.

Perhaps that’s because the post-Christmas time frame is kind of a bummer. All of that holiday joy gets packed away and shoved into the attic,  and now there’s nothing but three months of winter in front of you until baseball season arrives and makes everything right again (unless, of course, you are a fan of the Nationals, in which case stale old winter pain is merely replaced by fresh new springtime pain).

This year was a little different. My wife put on Christmas music as we denuded the tree, put away the Hippie Santa and removed most of the lights (the ones wrapped around the trees in the driveway, which take a lot of work to remove, will remain in place until we get better weather or are overwhelmed by guilt). The music definitely helped make this task a little cheerier. To wrap things up, I dragged out the tree and tossed it on the curb, then vacuumed about 2.3 million fir needles out of the living room. Three days later, the room still smells like Pine-Sol.

Perhaps Un-Christmas Day should be a holiday. It could have its own festive music (“You’d better not shout/you’d better not cry/you’d better not pout/I’m telling you why/Throw away that box or else!”) and its own traditional dinner of, oh, Chinese takeout leftovers and mismatched, bottom-of-the-bottle wines. Neighborhoods could compete to see who’s willing to leave the Christmas lights not merely up, but on, the longest. Children could have toy-breaking competitions.

Everything would be merry and bright again, or at least amusing and somewhat less bleak. That can’t be a bad thing.