“A long time,” I said.

“How long?” she asked.

“Years, actually.”

“How many years?”

“Oh I don’t remember,” I lied.

“Like five years? Or ten years?”

“Probably between five and ten years,” I lied again.

Like I said, these aren’t words that come easily. Let me put it this way: “between five and ten years” isn’t a lie because it’s been less than five years.

It’s not my fault that I let the moss gather on my teeth. My Dad never goes to the dentist, so I learned from him (I learned it from watching you, Dad!). Of course, he augments his tooth brushing with tooth picking, the real kind, with a snazzy dental-grade steel tooth picker/scraper, which I once, famously in my family, used to clean out my toenails, assuming that’s what it was for (like I said, I don’t go to the dentist much).

Whenever I told people I was considering getting back in the chair, people thought that was a good time to tell the orthodontic horror story they’d been saving up (“Once I didn’t go for three years . . . then they had to sew my gums back on with a railroad spike.”)

When I finally got there, the hygienist poked around in my mouth, scraping here, probing there, frowning all the while.

“Hmm,” she said, frowning.

“Wrghu?” I asked.

“Wow.”

“Ygher?”

“That’s . . . just . . . not . . . coming off . . .”

(This reminded me of a very similar experience I just had with the electrician and the 25-year old wiring in the basement where I live, which included [I swear to God] a fuse box mounted at a 38-degree angle that had been cut in half with a chain saw, and a bare metal fuse that someone had been nice enough to write next to, in pencil, “danger — do not touch!!!!!” The electrician: “This is just . . . I mean . . . I’ve seen a lot of . . . that’s not even grounded, is it?” And maniacal laughter.)

Back at the dentist, turns out they couldn’t clean my teeth. Well, I’ll just go home then, I thought. No harm no foul. What they actually asked me do was come back for two 90-minute special cleaning sessions that would involve something called “root scaling.”

The first of these sessions also involved, at my request, copious amounts of Novocaine, so it felt like my roots were being scaled somewhere far, far away from my mouth. But they cleaned only the right half of my teeth, which is something my tongue cannot wrap its little tongue brain around. I’ll be sitting there, listening to someone talk, and my tongue will wander freely around the back of my teeth. “Hey,” it thinks, sliding along the backside of my teeth, “this feels different. And this doesn’t.” Then it checks again.

Let this serve as a warning to you: not going to the dentist for an unspecified-ly long time is like living in a house with an ungrounded bare metal fuse box with chainsaw scars. Try not to do both at once.

I’m going with D.  When John McCain asked her to be Vice President, she boasts, “I didn’t blink.”

Watching Palin in the VP debate with Joe Biden, I had a strong gut reaction I couldn’t explain: sheer terror at what might happen if this person were President — if McCain (AKA “Other foot on a banana peel”) were elected and anything happened to him.  Today, however, I understand why I was and am so frightened.

I would expect a person who understood the seriousness of the job to “blink” indeed — to pause to think about it, and to ask herself, “Could I be ready in Jan 2009 to potentially serve as the leader of the free world?”  Palin seems proud of the fact that she did not pause to think, even for a moment, and to wonder if she were indeed up to the enormous responsibility being VP would entail.  Her naive pride makes me quake in my shoes.

Here’s why I’m so scared.  In 1999, researchers at Cornell experimentally confirmed what I had long suspected — that the worse people perform at a task, the more likely they are to overestimate their competence.  It gets worse: not only do incompetent people overestimate their level of skills, but also the worse someone is at a skill, the more grossly she overestimates her own ability at it.

The New York Times reported the on this experiment shortly after it was published [link below].  It used two complex tasks: a test of recognizing grammatically correct standard English, and a test of recognizing what was funny, for which subjects rated the humorousness of thirty jokes on a scale of one to eleven.  (The jokes had been rated by a panel of comedians which included Al Franken).

Then subjects estimated by percentile how competent they thought they were at each skill.

The researchers found that people whose competence was below the 60th percentile would overestimate their performance  — and the further their scores below the 60th percentile, the more grossly they would overestimate their skills, to the point where “bottom-quartile participants were nearly 4 times more miscalibrated than their top-quartile counterparts” (page 1131).

Why?  Because, unsurprisingly, the skills necessary for competence are also necessary to recognize and rate competence.  (The researchers also list many previous studies that also suggest this conclusion).
People whose performance rated at above  the 70th percentile, however, would err in the opposite direction: they would tend to underestimate their own performance, and the higher they ranked, the more severely they would underestimate it.

Both these findings matched what I have observed in my years of teaching writing: While strong performers are uniformly  modest in their self-assessments — I can’t count the number of really talented writers I’ve met who have told me, “I know I need to work on my writing” — the ones with the lowest scores are the ones most willing to tramp into my office demanding to know why their essays were awarded a D [a question whose only truly honest answer would be, "Because I was feeling generous that day."]

So no wonder the fact that Palin would so blithely offer that she “didn’t blink,” as if that somehow qualified her for the leadership of the free world, scares me to death.  Her apparently baseless confidence signals to me that she doesn’t understand what a huge task being Vice President would be — and is clueless that intellectually she simply may not be up to it.

The NYTimes covered this experiment.

Original article: Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning.  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own
Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999), Vol. 77, No. 6. pages 1121-1134.  <http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf>

When I typed this last Wednesday night, it was 9 below zero outside. 9 below zero? Big deal, you say, if you are one of the one 12apostrophes reader/contributers who lives in Finland, or are someone’s grandparent, and have reached the age of scoffing hyperbole (“9 below? We used to walk to school when it was 9 below, on our hands. With paper bags for mittens. And we were grateful.”).

OK, 9 below zero, big deal — but with windchill, it felt like 25 below zero, if anyone’s exposed skin could have stay attached to their body long enough to feel it.

We had a week or so of this in the Twin Cities, and it’s starting all over again tomorrow. A week or so, give or take every winter in Minneapolis since the earth’s crust cooled. So when I went to shovel snow last week in the frigidness, I wasn’t stupid. I waited until the 3 p.m. tropical doldrums, when the mercury bubbled up to 7 above zero.

After a half hour of shoveling, my fingers hurt. I was wearing “Thinsulate” gloves, so I figured I was good. Frostbite is that shit in Jack London stories, it can’t happen to me, I thought. Another five minutes though, and I decided I preferred my fingers sans ice crystals.

I came inside and placed my fingertips directly on the radiator in my office. The ring finger on each hand was the worst off. Reddish-purple, swelled like a sausage, and throbbing like a bass drum.

Oh crap, they’ll have to amputate, I thought. But after a little harried research online, I found that my symptoms best match a condition called “chilblaines,” which is a kind of a bo-bo frostbite, from the latin, “really cold fingers, just get over it already.”

I learned my lesson — if God wanted us to remove snow from sidewalks, He would have given us shovels for hands. Knowing me and my proclivity for dumbassedness, it’s kind of hard to believe I haven’t had some sort of run-in with the cold sooner. The only thing protecting me until now has been my aversion to actually going outside.

I cried because I had chilblaines, until I saw this video of Dennis Wounded Shield, resident Minneapolis homeless guy, talking about how his cheeks turned black.

Pulao, Dingusx, and I were really cold the other night, walking the 14 drunken steps from the CC Club to the car in sub-zero temps, and we wondered: “What about the homeless folk in the Twin Cities? When it gets cold like this?”

Well, turns out, of course, that sometimes the homeless sleep outside, even when it’s really, really cold. Go figure.

(This from a story in the Star Tribune about an outreach program in downtown Minneapolis to help cut down on homeless arrests — cool article. Watch the full video, 3 minutes.)

Now that Veronica Mars is off the air, I have to rebuild my TV-viewing slate from scratch. What better way to do that than sampling all of this fall’s new series? And what better way to alleviate my pain—because, come on, most of those shows are going to suck—than by warning other hapless viewers away from the networks’ lesser offerings?

First up is K-Ville. Premiering September 17 on Fox, this procedural (strike one! Like we need to see any more from that genre) concerns the efforts of the New Orleans police to maintain law and order post-Katrina. Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson) saw his partner Charlie Pratt (Derek Webster) run off amid rescue efforts, and his wife and daughter decamp to Atlanta in the midst of rebuilding. Boulet is out to clean up his city, he’s determined to win his wife back, and he won’t let his new, attitudinal partner Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser) or overbearing supervisor (John Carroll Lynch) slow him down.

If I could select one police procedural to represent that television genre to aliens from another galaxy…K-Ville would not be it. New Orleans circa 2007 is a topic that could carry a show on its own—no he’s-a-cop-on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-who-doesn’t-play-by-the-rules bullshit required—but the pilot is so packed with information that the city’s history, culture, and current state of devastation are relegated to references of comic-book depth. (Boulet really likes gumbo.) Jonathan Lisco, the show’s writer-creator, must have taken the crash-and-burn of last year’s serialized dramas to heart; he refuses to defer any information beyond hour’s end. This makes it hard to get invested in the characters. From the start, Boulet suspects Cobb of lying about his past; by episode’s end, Cobb’s past is revealed, and while I won’t spoil the surprise, I’ll bet we can count on him to deliver cynical one-liners and self-lacerating judgments, which I’d rather just supply myself. Anderson and Hauser are okay actors (probably), but the writing is so flat (and the direction so ADHD) that they can’t invest these guys with any depth; they’re reduced to marks-and-cue-cards acting, which is probably all that K-Ville wants of them anyway.

Really, K-Ville (it’s short for “Katrina-ville”) is less a procedural than a shoot-em-up, but the action is awful. In the first of two car chases, the show cuts directly from Boulet and Cobb, roaring down the street after the guy who shot Boulet’s neighbor, to the scene where they find the shooter’s vehicle crashed and overturned. The whole point of a car chase is to see the vehicles crash and overturn; if you don’t have the budget to do your crash right, spend it elsewhere. Like, try pretending you’re serious about your New Orleans setting and investing some script dollars accordingly. This isn’t a keeper.

1. Writing.  William Monahan won an Oscar for writing the departed.  He sure didn’t earn it here; Kingdom of Heaven has one of those rare scripts that dares to show and tell.  Like when Balian (Orlando Bloom), accused of killing a priest, helpfully informs his just-found father (Liam Neeson) that the charges are true.  We know, Balian.  We saw you set him on fire.  And how about the clichés?  Surrendering Jerusalem to Saladin—after lots of period battle scenes, after lots of speeches that are stirring only in that they sound like other speeches that actually are stirring—Balian asks his erstwhile opponent what the city is worth.  “Nothing,” says Saladin.  He paces away, then turns back.  Guess his next line.  There’s also the fact that the screenplay grants its characters as much depth and humanity as a crime blotter, and probably ended every line of dialogue with “[Significant pause].”  Hell, that’s probably why this thing runs 150 bloated minutes.

2. Directing.  Kingdom of Heaven had a budget of $130 million.  Ridley Scott puts every dollar on screen in the least efficient way.  Okay, he couldn’t really film character development, since the script gave him nothing to work with, but instead of trying to tell a story Scott loads up every frame with stuff.  During the siege, Saladin’s forces storm the walls of Jerusalem with wheeled assault towers.  Balian’s defenders attach ropes to spears, skewer the towers, and topple them.  We get it the first time, but apparently Scott had some CGI budget to spend, because he shows another tower falling, then another, then another, and then pans across the wall to show them toppling in sequence.  The movie is so rich in visual detail that it ends up being as redundant as the script.

3. Acting.  Why is Orlando Bloom here?  His biggest hits were CGI-heavy series where thespianism got bumped from the marketing strategy in favor of Burger King cups.  Don’t make him do the heavy lifting in a “philosophical” historical epic, because the result is 150 minutes of his must-not-fart face.  The script gives Balian one note—grim but noble determination—so it’s hard to blame Orlando for milking it dry, but no one else gets more than one note and they somehow work around it.  David Thewlis owns the movie in the filler role of the priest, Liam Neeson manages to enliven Balian’s Crusader father, Kevin McKidd does the work as a doomed exposition mouthpiece—fuck, Martin Csokas shifts himself to enliven a villain whose main task is to wind up naked and dunce-capped on the back of an ass.  It’s Balian’s story, so it’s Bloom’s movie, and in it Bloom reveals that his only talent is making teen girls squeal.  If he starred in a romantic comedy with his fellow grooming-salon graduate Jennifer Aniston, the charisma vacuum they’d generate would turn the universe inside out.

Somewhere in Kingdom of Heaven, there’s a point about Christianity and Islam, West and (Middle) East, coexisting in piece—about the value of religious belief when weighed against human life.  Someone else can talk about that.  I’m more interested in the movie’s point about Hollywood.  The witless script, the clueless direction, the somnambulant acting—these were all mistakes that Pearl Harbor made.  That movie still stands as a cinematic nadir.  Not for nothing did the puppet in Team America sing, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor—and that’s an awful lot, girl.”  But since PH made $450 million worldwide on a $140-million budget, the crappiness of the thing was forgotten and the parasitic lifeform flourished.  Here it is again, and the only good thing I can say about it is that this incarnation is (slightly) better than King Arthur.

I stayed under the covers and waited to hear the answering machine pick up. I don’t know if it was the relative quiet in the middle of the night or something else, but the machine filled the apartment. It wasn’t my parents, as I said, but this instead:

I understand that it’s not exactly heavy breathing, or someone asking me what my favorite scary movie is. But when the loud, random beeping started sounding like Mary Had a Little Lamb (it’s about 35 seconds in), I admit I was scared shitless. By then, I had woken up Kris, who had slept right through the ringing phone.

“Hon,” he asked softly, “Where is that noise coming from?”

I realized, of course, that as scary as it had been for me, it must be even more nerve wracking for Kris to wake up to a strange, computerized version of a nursery rhyme booming through the house. The message ended and Kris got up to check the caller ID (there was a name and a local number) and make sure all the doors were locked. I thought about calling the number back, but I realized that either drunk kids were fooling around and were hardly likely to sound apologetic, or (what seemed more likely) the evil monsters that were calling me in a horror movie-like way might be less likely to kill me during the day.

We both slept fitfully. At dawn this morning, Kris (who usually can sleep through anything) woke up, rattled that the phone was ringing again. I told him he was just hearing birds chirp, because I had been awake for a while and knew what woke him.

The number turned out to belong to a residential address just a few blocks from us, and after work today, we tried calling it back. Ironically, the machine always picked up– it had voice of an old man cheerfully announcing his name. There’s no chance that the old man died, and his ghost was trying to call us, is there?

I hate Annette Bening. Part of me thinks she keeps choosing to play brittle, needy types who snap in hopes of capturing the Oscar that Hilary Swank denied her the first time; another part of me remembers her staticky, Lifetime-movie “complexity” way back in The American President; neither part of me likes to see her on screen. Mrs. Harris has to accomplish a lot of heavy lifting to get me past that. That it does is due to some strong direction and an interesting script, both by Phyllis Nagy. Was it murder? The movie presents two scenarios: in the opening, the gun goes off as Tarnower tries to wrest it from Harris (the real-life Harris’s story); at the end, Harris arrives at Tarnower’s in a near-fugue state and shoots him in the back out of anger. (In both scenes, after the shooting Bening puts an acquiescent Tarnower to bed. I’d want a ride to the hospital, but the good doctor and I differ on many points.) Thus the movie manages to avoid passing judgment (in real life, she was convicted) without glossing over the details of the case.

The fact is, the Jean Harris of the movie—borderline under a façade of patrician competence—is exactly the kind of role that suits Bening, and the fact that I don’t like that role doesn’t mean she inhabits it poorly. She captures the way emptiness can erode the foundations of a personality until the whole edifice collapses. The sequence where Harris, having been dumped, sends Tarnower a letter by registered mail and then calls him, near tears, to request that he destroy it is exemplary. She knows he’ll have to sign for the letter and, thus, still have some marginal contact with her; by the time she realizes how pathetic and desperate this plan is, it’s too late for her to extricate herself without another flaky gesture. She sees what she is but can’t change it. As Tarnower, Kingsley is both sane and plausibly blind to Harris’s precarious emotional state, and manages to infuriate me even though Harris generally deserves his callous treatment. The movie is packed with familiar faces (Michael Gross has a basically silent role as a society husband; there are also Mary McDonnell, Brett Butler, Lee Garlington, Cloris Leachman, Frances Fisher, Chloe Sevigny, and Philip Baker Hall), but Nagy has the sense to clear the dance floor and let Kingsley and Bening destroy each other unimpeded.

It’s a true story, but I find Mrs. Harris odd in that Tarnower never seems to like Harris all that much. Maybe it’s just that Kingsley applies his smarmy charm equally to Bening and to any other woman Tarnower wants to get naked with. When Tarnower proposes to Harris, it’s like he couldn’t find anything else to do that week; when he backpedals, swearing he loves her but doesn’t want to be married, why doesn’t he back out all the way? My best interpretation is that he liked having a long string of ladies on his line too much to let her go completely. If that’s the case, then frankly, they both got what they deserved.

I went down due to vertigo, which I don’t usually suffer from, but my inner ear was all wonky from a cold. I’d had a cold for about a week and a half, and I was so tired of having a stuffed head, I’d become kind of liberal about my nose-blowing. None of this polite sniffling demurely into a tissue. I was trumpeting like an elephant, in the desperate hope that I could breathe though my nose for 3 or 4 seconds before it filled up with snot again.

This nose-blowing is some dangerous stuff. Apparently I upset the delicate pressure balance between inner and outer ear because, after hearing a pop and a crackle, the bathroom spun like I was back in my college dormroom.

I was fine after a couple of minutes, but the lasting damage was that, between flinging my hands to my ears and going down on one knee, I managed to knock my glasses into the toilet. If falling down in my tiny bathroom was an accomplishment, this was the coup de grace.

I didn’t have a lot of options. My hand would have to go into the toilet. That was obvious. I could have looked around for some kind of stick. Or claw. If I had a claw. But I wasn’t thinking straight (a claw?!) and it seemed like the longer my glasses stayed in the toilet, the worse they became. Like they were melting in there — or getting dirtier, some kind of clause in the 2-second rule.

I got them out and put ‘em in the sink. I washed my hands, a lot. I looked at my glasses. I washed my hands again. My glasses just sat there. One more hand wash. My eyesight seemed to improve by the minute. Did I really even need glasses? I mean, really?

I ran them under scalding water for a long time. Then I steadied my nerves with a stiff drink, closed my eyes, and stuffed them back onto my face.

There’ll be dire consequences, I’m sure. I’ll let you know.

10.  Mission of Burma, The Obliterati, 2006
It has its flaws, like the too-sludgy sound throughout and the fact that they let their drummer, Peter Prescott, write a few of the songs when they shouldn’t.  But I’ve been missing guitar breaks for a while, and there’s an amazing one in Roger Miller’s “Careening with Conviction.”  Plus they’re haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan’s head.  I can get behind that.

9.  Sons and Daughters, Love the Cup EP, 2004
I already had The Repulsion Box, so I knew what to expect:  punk set to a Scottish-folk beat.  (Or Scottish folk with punk vocals.)  Nonetheless, “Broken Bones” has some of the most restrained guitar I’ve heard this year, and “Johnny Cash” rumbles along quite nicely.

8.  Michael Gordon (composer), Decasia, 2002
Decasia the movie is a compilation of decaying filmstrips that flicker in and out of resolution for an hour.  Decasia the symphony is the best haunted-house music I’ve heard since Mocket’s Pro Forma.  The even-numbered movements are the spookiest—think Sonic Youth with a full orchestra.

7.  Gorillaz, Demon Days, 2005
A party album about the apocalypse.  “November Has Come” is my favorite song.

6.  Wilderness, Vessel States, 2006
I think every review of this album that I read compared Wilderness to Public Image, Ltd.  Fortunately, I’ve never heard Public Image, Ltd.  Whichever guy is the vocalist, he doesn’t sing so much as declaim, and the guitars sound pretty piddly to my PJ-Harvey-trained ears, but not in a bad way.

5.  The Timeout Drawer, Nowonmai, 2005
In the same post-rock (so:  instrumental-rock) vein as Sigur Ros and Mono, but without the adscititious sense of grandeur.  They wield keyboards, flutes, and cellos when necessary, but the whole album still sounds like it was recorded in a garage.  That’s the charm.

4.  Maximo Park, A Certain Trigger, 2005
I probably listened to this more than any other album I bought this year.  I finally figured out where they got their guitar sound:  Tommy Tutone.  “The Coast Is Always Changing” has the best chorus I’ve heard in a while.  Pure radio pop, or at least it would be if Clear Channel had any sense.

3.  Carla Bozulich, Evangelista, 2006
Carla Bozulich could fart on tape and I’d buy it and praise it.  The Geraldine Fibbers were just that good.  Evangelista is a little disappointing, though, mainly because I was hoping for an album that would sound like “Blue Boys” from the Kill Rock Stars compilation Fields and Streams:  all children’s instruments and toys, shaped into song.  Instead, she borrows Godspeed You! Black Emperor to make an album that sounds a lot like ‘30s blues, only with more screaming.  The cover of Low’s “Pissing” is too faithful, but “Evangelista I”…dude.

2.  Thomas Stronen, Pohlitz, 2006
Basically, he pulled out all his pots and pans, plinked away on them for half an hour, and added some keyboard squiggles to flesh out the sound.  But it works.  With its weird triangle pings, “Dispatches” is my favorite track.

1.  P.O.S., Audition, 2006
Local.  Genius.  At first I thought P.O.S. wasn’t as good as Atmosphere.  Then I noticed that I listed to this album every day, whereas I listened to Atmosphere about twice a month.  It’s like the crapitization of mainstream hip-hop never happened—there’s cello on “De La Souls,” punk screaming on “Half-Cocked Concepts,” self-deprecation on “Living Slightly Larger,” and P.O.S. acts like it all belongs there.  Best line is the first one.