Hey Midwest, had enough? Come on over and crash with us for a while.

I’ve been told, I think, that there are all sorts of reasons why the Midwest is a paradise unrivalled in modern history and that living there is just peachy. Mostly that thinking seems to revolve around how the people who live there are genuine 'mericans and that they love mom, apple pie and the flag just a little bit more than anyone else. Detractors will note that while that may or may not be true, it’s kind of hard to ignore some of the nonsense that goes on in the heartland.

But, as I live in a glass house as fragile as any other, I’m going to stop there before I singlehandedly jinx all of New York. Goodness knows we’ve been in a scrape or two. ‘Nuff said.

But anyway, if you should wake one day to find yourself living in heartland, there is one unassailable reason to pack your bags and catch the last milk train to the coast: blizzards. Or as I think of them: feet and feet of blowing misery if not outright attacks on middle-aged men prone to shoveling-induced cardiac arrest. In short: white blankets of bother.

I only bring this up, of course, because another blizzard is chugging across the Midwest as I sit here pecking out this little missive. Another frozen Sherman marching to the sea, leaving Oklahomans kinda sorry that they have to leave the warmth and comfort of those moms and apple pies to go outside and shovel yet again.

And the fix? Come on out and visit us in New York. Sure, we’ve had more than our share of snow this year, but we’re done now. And jeez, you wouldn’t want to spend your days worrying that you traded blizzards for fires and earthquakes, like some other coast I could mention.

Irony Radar.

- Communicate with parents straightforwardly and simply, avoiding educational "jargon."

This morning I came across this sentence, quotation marks included, on EducationWorld.com. Now it is true that my irony radar may be a smidge oversensitive, but I’m still pretty sure that if somebody felt the need to highlight the word jargon because it may be too confusing, it was probably a poor candidate for a bullet point about avoiding confusion.

Does any of this matter? Heck no. If nothing else it just exposes how little it takes to amuse me. Which is why the interwebs and I are so in love.

( Education World ® - Curriculum: A Dozen Activities to Promote Parent Involvement! )

The interwebs are stalking me.

Am I a guy who’s taste in popular culture is, well, unpopular? Well sure. Reason #4: there are few things I enjoy less than psychological “thrillers,” such as they are, that seem to dribble out of Hollywood at a predictable rate. And of course to me, the predictable rate of their production is matched only by the predictability of their plots. To wit: a spunky / world-weary Protagonist who is a hapless victim / detective inevitably stumbles-into / is preyed upon by a disarmingly attractive sociopath / disturbingly charismatic psychopath. Now go ahead and mix and match.

Anyway, fans of the genre will know that the above formula requires, as often as not, a scene somewhere in the movie in which Protagonist finds his or her way into the lair of the attractive sociopath / charismatic psychopath. The lair is inevitably covered in newspaper clippings, photographs and manic scribbling, all of which are a product of the aforementioned wackjob’s crazy obsession with the Protagonist, if not a general spooky madness.

So really all of this is just my characteristically long-winded way of pointing out something very simple; that there are places in the real world which are covered with clippings, pictures and scribblings… about you. Really, unless you’ve been living the life of a digital Luddite, the interwebs are full of the electronic detritus that you inadvertently leave behind. Ever hear of Pipl.com? Peekyou.com? Go on, put your name in. I’ll wait.

There. So how creepy is that? *shudders* Now I’ll grant you that I seem to have left a broader swath of digital debris in my wake than the average bear, but still, it’s something to consider the next time you think about signing up for MySquareTwitterFaceSpaceYelpBook.com, or some such similar nonsense. Or if you’re going to anyway, at least think about using protection. You know, like a fake name.

Hey, have a nice day!

Harbingers, holidays, and science. And my pants.

In case you hadn’t noticed, harbingers, not unlike celebrity deaths, tend to come in threes. Here in our little neck of the woods just outside the city that nobody calls the big apple, there are three major harbingers that Santa will be calling before you know it. The first is that the leaves have finally finished falling, the second is that the infestation of vermin called Canada geese has temporarily retreated, and the last is that the waist sizes of all my pants have also begun their annual retreat.

Despite the obvious iron-clad scientific basis for these seasonal events, my Lovely Bride never hesitates to question that last one about my pants. She has been known, for instance, to wonder aloud about how likely it is that my pants really do experience a cycle of holiday shrinkage and summer expansion. Moreover, she’ll even suggest that the Holiday Pants Effect is nothing more than me eating a lot of pumpkin pie.

Really? Does no one remember sixth grade science class? Cold makes things contract and heat makes them expand. Like pants. Sheesh, chicks and science. Anyway, happy harbingers, people!

Stating the obvious. About the holidays, this time.

As I’ve noted in the past I’m a pretty shallow guy who tends to think in clichés, and bearing that in mind, one of the upcoming New Year’s resolutions that I intend to make and then promptly ignore will be to let go of the clichés, truisms and similar rhetorical crutches on which I depend so heavily. It's also likely that I'll resolve to give up run-on sentences. Fragments too.

Anyway, before that self imposed deadline looms too near I’m going to go ahead and Beat a Dead Horse and point out something that you haven’t heard or thought about in at least five minutes: that this year the Christmas Season began in mid-October. It’s exhausting, really. One can’t, for instance, spend a few quiet moments wandering aimlessly through name-your-retailer-of-choice without dodging floor displays full of red and green socks while the appallingly fey Johnny Mathis simpers about snowmen and Parson Brown in the background. Blech.

The obvious solution, of course, is to simply give up any pretense that there’s any time of year that’s not about Christmas. In short, each and every day should be Christmas. Now some of you wide-awake boys and girls will remember that Timmy, the chronically unsupervised protagonist and perennial danger to the space-time continuum in The Fairly Odd Parents created just such a world just by wishing for it. Of course the results of his wish were, as was much of the rest of the show, predictable. The value of Christmas spirit was cheapened and the excitement necessary for Christmas magic evaporated pretty quickly. Well I say pah! That’s right, I’ll even put it in quotes: “Pah!”

That storyline suffered only from a lack of commitment. Consequences be damned, I think we really should just go ahead and make every day Christmas. What the hell, every day is already Go Out and Buy Some Crap Day, so why not just wrap everything and hand it around. Just think! Everyday at the office could be a secret Santa party. You’d never have to buy your own cologne or joke boxer shorts with painfully unfunny wordplay printed on them again! I like it. An entirely Christmas-based economy with no apologies.

So look for it on your next ballot: Prop 12-25… colloquially known as the Santa Rules. Vote yes. Your local name-your-retailer-of-choice will thank you.

Ahead of the curve with Harry. Or: An early review of the Deathly Hallows, oddly enough.

There are few, if any, moments that I can recall finding myself squarely at the bleeding edge of any sort of curve. Curves of fashion, cuisine and pop culture are normally well beyond me; I was, for instance, likely the last person in the Western hemisphere to find out that a “Bieber” is not, as I originally thought, a small rodent-like puppet in a third-tier Disney show, but rather a pop star of some note. Apparently.

All of which is to say that I was mildly surprised to find myself sitting comfortably at a private Imax screening on Wednesday evening as the penultimate screen treatment of Harry Potter’s lengthy adolescence unspooled before an audience of Potter fans. Ah, but enough about me.

The decision to break the story into two films was certainly correct; part 1 is a taught, straightforward treatment of the book that successfully conveys the adult world of dread, danger and loneliness in which Harry, Hermione and Ron find themselves. It is a world in which no-one is to be trusted and the hustle and bustle of industrious bureaucracy is opaque and menacing. Perhaps most telling, though, is that it is a world in which there is often no clear-cut path to follow. Just as in real life there are dead ends, false leads and times during which there is simply nothing to do but wait for answers to present themselves.

There is of course plenty of action as well, although it is a relief that director David Yates has a deft touch so that the sequences of running, flying and things going boom never feel forced. (Which, if nothing else, makes it all the more clear that directors like Michael Bay have done us no favors by flooding the screen with car chases that not only feel endless, but are, inexplicably, less believable than sequences involving magic wands and flying motorcycles. )

So, in short, the Deathly Hallows got well deserved upturned thumbs from everyone I saw it with last night, and perhaps most importantly, I don’t have to be behind the curve and wait on line to see it with the rest of the nerds this weekend. Ha!