The World According to Chuck

James Wolcott, from his blog, on director/producer/actor Sidney Pollack, who died yesterday at the age of 73 after a long battle with cancer:

And when it comes to pure comedy, Tootsie, sure, but let’s not forget Pollack’s recurring role as Will’s philandering father on Will & Grace, where he conveyed a sense of grounded gravitas even at his most foolish and dissembling, trying to appease both his bimbo mistress (Lesley Ann Warren) and his imperturbable wife (the great Blythe Danner). The body of work remains and the best of it will endure but his death still feels wrong–a life-force like his should have had still longer to go.

If you want more on Mr. Pollack, here’s a nice piece in Salon on him.

I always wonder about this, usually in the drive-through teller line at the bank. Should I turn off the engine? Would it save gas, or take more to start it back up? What to do? And WHERE’S THE DAMN DEPOSIT SLIP?

OK, now I have an answer (which is, turn it off, but then you probably knew that).

I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for John McCain during those five years he was a POW; can’t begin, won’t try. And over the years I’ve read a lot of stories about how that experience shaped the man he became, including the politician, all of these good and honorable things. It was a piece in The New Yorker, actually from 20 or more years ago, that first brought him to my attention and made me think he was cut from a different cloth that most people in Washington.

But politics is a strange business, just full of compromise and contradiction, and the senator now has a lot more exposure. This from an interesting, although not particularly flattering, article in The American Prospect:

When John Kerry made his Vietnam heroism a centerpiece of his 2004 presidential campaign, his colleague John McCain thought it unwise. “I said, ‘Look, you shouldn’t talk about Vietnam because everybody else will. Let everybody else do it,’” McCain told the Washington Post. “In my [2000] campaign, as you know, I didn’t talk about it because I didn’t need to.”

McCain was half right. It’s true that he didn’t need to; in that campaign, as in this one, reporters seldom forgot to mention that McCain was a POW in Vietnam. In fact, according to Lexis-Nexis, in the first three months of 2008 over a thousand newspaper articles mentioned that McCain was a prisoner of war. Journalists often use “former POW” in their stories as an identifier on par with “Arizona senator” or “Republican” — even when his years in Hanoi have nothing to do with the issue or event being discussed. But when McCain asserted that he “didn’t talk about it,” he was being either strikingly dishonest or simply delusional. The truth is that he brings it up all the time.

Watch this. Click through, take a couple of minutes, plug in the headphones, explain to the boss, hide in the bathroom, hold your breath — whatEVER. Just watch it, all the way through. Because sometimes you need to just watch.

If you have any sense of adventure in your soul, go read Larry Simoneaux’s column today in the Everett Herald. Now would be a good time.

For those of you who never had AOL get its sneaky claws into your virtual guts, here’s a little tidbit.

A default setting for your AOL address book stores the email addresses of everyone who contacts you.  Every.  One.  Including spammers and names of people who just received copies of mail from someone too lazy or ignorant to make them blind.  So, someone like me, who gets a fair amount of mail from strangers who want to compliment me or take me to task or insult my heritage regarding something I wrote once that was supposed to be a joke, anyway, accumulates a fair amount of names.

I don’t use AOL anymore, but the address books remains, conveniently stored on the ‘net in case I ever need to contact a complete stranger.

Meanwhile, after reading Meg gush about something called  Facebook for a few months now, I decided to give it a quick once-over.  Oh, I’ve heard of it; seems like my daughter mentioned it once or twice, and I assumed it was some sort of social networking for teenagers and young adults.  I assumed right, more or less.

Still, I decided to give it a shot.  Hey, I’m always up for a new experience.  And maybe I’d hook up with a long-lost friend, although it seems I’ve found a lot of those over the years, and anyone looking for me can find me pretty easily.

So, I registered, dug up a family photo 15 years old, filled in a few data blanks, and then thought, Huh.  What next?  Where is everybody?

Facebook will conveniently take a look at your address book, assuming it’s Yahoo or HotMail or AOL or a few others, and tell you which of your contacts is also on FB, so I did that.  Got quite a few names, too, many of whom I hadn’t written to in years and a few who registered a big zero on my recognition scale.  As I said, lots of strangers write me.

I checked the few names I wanted to send “friend” invitations to and sent them off, but apparently the good programmers at Facebook missed a bug or two, because apparently I sent warm and fuzzy “be my friend” messages to everybody in my book.

Including, it looks like, three of my elected representatives.

This should be interesting.  Can I do an about face?  Anyone?