Tales of a 4th String Nothing

Dear friends,

The Hard Taco song for December is called, "Suds." As a good meal is matched with the right wine, music should be paired with concordant activities. This song is best enjoyed when bathing, drinking, or drowning.

The Hustler Award

I always tried to avoid sports that involved touching people. Most of the physical contact I had with my schoolmates went like this: One of them would punch me, and in return I would bite his arm and pull his hair.  As my penchant for biting and hair-pulling became widely-known, the punching tapered off. I had finally achieved this happy state of equilibrium when I received the calamitous news that I had to try out for the 8th grade basketball team or forfeit my allowance. My parents wanted me to be "well-rounded." More specifically, they wanted to enrich me with the opportunity to fail at lots of different things.

Failure was inevitable. I had skipped kindergarten, and was a late-bloomer anyway. At 4'10", the only person on the court who was shorter than me was the littlest cheerleader (the one who got thrown). As my classmates were quick to remind me, she, at least, could jump. To the chagrin of both the coach and me, he wasn't allowed to cut anyone from the basketball team. Instead, we were divided into castes, or "strings." The 1st stringers played most of the game, and the rest of us would split their leavings.  Unfortunately for me, one's "string" level was inversely related to one's Tanner stage. 

1st string (Tanner Stage 5):  Mr. Conforti, the coach, buys you a Bayside Bulls warm-up jacket with his own money. 

2nd string (Tanner Stage 4):  You only play for 15 minutes per game, but you still get your own locker during away games.

3rd string (Tanner Stage 2-3): You only play during the cheerleaders' cigarette break. The coach calls your parents and talks to them about better property taxes in other school districts. 

I was on the 4th string, a classification invented to describe myself and my friend Jason. Jason had congenitally small fingers on his dribbling hand, and he was ahead of me on the depth chart. For me to see any playing time, two criteria had to be met. 1) Our team had to be ahead by more than 15 points by the closing minutes of the third period and 2) a player ahead of me had to be "injured." In eighth grade basketball, no one ever really got hurt, but sometimes a boy would suddenly throw up during play. As peculiar as this seems, this happened regularly and without warning. When it did, the "injured" player would be escorted to the locker room, and everyone would get to sub up to the next level. If the right combination of people was vomiting, my number might be called. 

When I did come in off the bench, I always gave it everything I had. I never made a basket, but if I got to play for two minutes, I would spend that two minutes biting the arms and pulling the hair of every opposing player on the court. I was a competitor.

At the end of the season, Mr. Conforti brought us all back to his classroom and thanked us for a great year. He announced that Lamont Brown was the winner of the MVP Award, and we all cheered.  

Then Mr. Conforti surprised everyone in the room by singling me out for the "Hustler Award." I can't remember the exact words he used, but essentially, the Hustler Award was granted to the player who kept showing up for practice despite obvious futility. He said that sometimes he would look down to the far end of the bench and see my hopeful eyes looking back at him as if to say, "Are you gonna put me in, Coach?" When I looked at him like that, he said to a roomful of my peers, he would get a little choked up.

So Lamont Brown and I both left that classroom holding shiny plastic basketball players. His was a portent of future success in high school hoops. Mine was a charity trophy, achieved through a scrappy ineptitude that evoked a baffling emotional incontinence in my coach. Paradoxically, it was both one of the proudest and most embarrassing moments of my life, and incidentally, it would be the only sports trophy I would ever get.

Someday, when I'm forcing my own children to participate in activities they hate, I will show them the trophy. "Your dad was a hustler," I'll tell them with quavering voice, "a well-rounded hustler. So if you don't practice your clarinet right now, I will bite your arm."

With warmest regards,

Zach 

Tough as Boots

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for November is called "Alpha Mom." A parody of this song will one day be featured in "Guitar Hero - Al Yankovic North American Tour." I'm hoping for either "Alfalfa Mom" or "Balfour Aplomb," the latter being a reference to the great composure of the Englishman who facilitated Israel becoming a Jewish state. I'm just throwing those out there. The ball is in your court now, Weird Al.

Anti-Semitism in the Upper Peninsula and Why It's My Fault

Like most small towns, Houghton, Michigan didn't have a particularly robust Jewish community in the early 1980s. When you're the only Jewish kid in school, you have to be tough as boots. I learned early on that if a classmate said something hurtful like, "You killed Jesus," the correct response was to gnash my teeth and scream, "That's right I killed him! That's right I killed the son of God! Who's next?!" As the saying goes, a lamb has to grow claws to survive among rams.

When we lived in Houghton I had a neighborhood friend named Wilhelm Greuer, and I absolutely idolized him. He was a year older than me, and by the age of 8 he was printing and distributing a home made newspaper, The Houghton Bugle. The Bugle featured Wilhelm's opinion pieces ("Walter Mondale is Way Rad") and my own guerilla journalism ("School Closes on Certain Days When There's Lots of Snowing Sometimes Sometimes.") Wilhelm was also responsible for the comics section, but since we didn't know how to print anything other than text, they were more like miniature screenplays:

(Charlie Brown and Lucy are standing. In the background there is a straight line, representing the horizon.)

CHARLIE BROWN: Lucy, how old are you?

LUCY: A woman never reveals her age.

CHARLIE BROWN: What year were you born?

LUCY: 1979.

CHARLIE BROWN: Then you must be five.

LUCY: You blockhead!

I liked to spend as much time as I could at Wilhelm's house. When I wasn't scouring the Wall Street Journal for headlines that we could plagiarize, I would run my hands over their furniture, hoping to pick up loose pieces of his sister Frederika's straight blonde hair, which I had an inexplicable desire to touch.

Wilhelm and Frederika were first generation German-Americans, and based on our limited discussions about World War II, it was clear that their family didn't really buy in to the whole blame game thing. Wilhelm once told me that the Holocaust, while regrettable, happened because the Jews kind of got in Hitler's way.

Okay, I guess that makes sense. Wilhelm was older than me and smarter than me, after all, and I didn't see any reason to doubt his logic. Why point fingers? Hitler was inconvenienced, one thing led to another, some unfortunate stuff happened, and now everything is fine, here we are, and isn't that Frederika's hairbrush over there?

Really, the only thing that came between myself and the Greuer family was my own gluttony. Mrs. Greuer kept a silver canister of fancy German Gummi candy out on their living room table. I asked about it politely, and she told me that it was imported and that I was not allowed to have any.

The phrase "not allowed to have any" needed further clarification. At my house, leaving candy anywhere it could be seen, smelled, or reached by stacking chairs and climbing on top of the refrigerator was an open invitation to eat it. If my parents had candy that wanted to live to see the sun go down, they would place it in a safe deposit box and hide the key in a bee hive. 

Meanwhile, the Greuer's weren't just displaying a 3-pack of SweeTARTS. This was luscious, multicolored imported Gummi candy, in a silver canister no less. I knew it was off limits. I knew that if I stole the candy, I would be reinforcing whatever stereotypes I assumed they had about me, but in the end, it didn't matter. I pinched those German Gummis, twice in fact, and Mrs. Greuer caught me both times. So yes, dear EVERY JEWISH PERSON NORTH OF THE MACKINAC BRIDGE, I am the reason none of your neighbors like you.

The next year we moved to Milwaukee, presumably so my family could escape the stigma of my sticky fingers. There were plenty of Jewish kids in my new school, but we lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood. The closest thing to anti-Semitism that I experienced was when one of the McDevitt boys would drive by me and yell "Read the Torah!" out the window of his car. Then he would turn around in a cul-de-sac, and drive past me the other way, yelling, "Read the Torah!" just to reinforce his point. I wasn't really sure if that was intended to be an insult or paternal advise, akin to "Stay in school! Get a library card!" But read the Torah? Didn't he know I wasn't old enough? Maybe because I was so tough as boots he assumed that I was 13 instead of 9.

Too Dirty for Apple

When the newest Hard Taco album became available on iTunes about a month ago, I was startled to discover that the iTunes Store had slapped the "Parental Advisory" sticker on the album and deemed 18 of the 19 songs to be Explicit. Boo! (As in "Boo, I'm scary!" Not as in "Boo, I'm crying!" It was just Halloween, after all, not Valentine's Day.) What makes these songs explicit? The leading theory, dear EVERYONE WHOSE EMAIL ADDRESS I KNOW, is that they are too sincere and charmingly personal for anyone under 40.

With warmest regards,

Zach

Fiestaware-Induced Superpowers

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for October is called, "Muscle Memory." I strongly encourage you to use this as your audition song on "So You Think You Can Dance." Rest assured, none of the other contestants will be dancing to my father's trombone playing, and that itself should be enough to get you to the final 8.

Infertility: The Consequence of Unavoidable Actions

Mr. Feltyberger asked our AP Physics class to break up into pairs and stand with our partner at one of the lab benches. At each station was an object; a rubber duck, the mantle from a camping lantern, a rusty thermometer, a shapeless lump of metal. Ethan and I chose a station and inspected what appeared to be a piece of a broken plate with a glossy orange finish. Mr Feltyberger announced, "One of the objects in this room is radioactive. I will go from station to station with a Geiger counter and we will use it to find out which one."

I was immediately disappointed. There was no way that my broken orange plate was radioactive. I was 100% sure. Jyothi Vinnakota had laid claim to the shapeless lump of metal, and she was already smiling, because everyone knew she had chosen the radioactive object, and the rest of us were wasting our time. Stupid radio-inert plate shard.

So I did what any 16-year-old boy would do with fragment of dinnerware that was decidedly not radioactive.

I put it down my pants.

This was quickly followed by a loud announcement to my lab partner, "Oh no! I accidentally put the radioactive plate down my pants!" I placed my hands on my cheeks and shook my head from side to side with mouth agape in feigned terror. I was confident that this was a pretty accurate impersonation of a man with an object in his pants that was emitting dangerous doses of radiation. Did Ethan find this hilarious? Yes he did.

Meanwhile, Mr. Feltyberger held the Geiger counter up to the box of fertilizer. No sound. Mr. Feltyberger held the Geiger counter up to the shapeless lump. No sound. "Huh," I said, and removed the plate from my pants.

The rusty thermometer? No sound. The Geiger counter continued its voiceless journey from station to station. At each object, the tension heightened, as if Mr. Feltyberger were saying, "Duck..... duck...... duck....." The old coffee tin? No sound. When I looked down at my station I no longer saw a broken plate, but a shiny orange shard of doubt. Radioactive things are supposed to glow or at least make a subtle humming sound, right?

If you've never heard a Geiger counter, it sounds vaguely reminiscent of a DJ scratching out a beat on vinyl. When Mr. Feltyberger pointed it at my shard, the DJ went to town. I felt strangely itchy. I closed my eyes and imagined that the scratching was the sound of Run DMC bursting through the classroom door. As the beat started, the rappers stood back-to-back with their hands on their shoulders and started laying down rhymes...

DJ Run: Well they call me Run

DMC: And my name's Darryl

DJ Run: And your 501's are filled with... peril!

DMC: Cuz Sucka MC's gonna end up... sterile!

DJ Run: For dropping that nuke down your... apparel!

DMC: The orange glaze was uranium... laced!

DJ Run: So now you got ill with a nuclear...

Both: Waist!

Jam-Master Jay and Geiger Counter: Wik-wik-wik wikky wikky woo!

Mr. Feltyberger than explained that the reddish-orange Fiestaware got its distinctive color from depleted uranium. Obviously, it was not safe to eat off these plates, so the line had been discontinued in the early 70's.  

And so I spent the next 12 years of my life convinced that I would never sire a child, or at least one with an even number of nipples. Happily, this turned out to be a baseless fear, and when my kids were born with the traditional allotment of limbs and organs, I quickly blocked out the Fiestaware Incident.

Then yesterday, I was watching my children play. Scarlett was sitting on the floor and Malcolm walked over and sat in her lap. It was if they were stacking on top of each other, and they fit together almost too perfectly. I began to wonder, could it be that these children have… unusual aptitudes? Then I realized that all of those years I had been worried about the wrong thing. My children are not normal. They will never be like the other kids, because they are endowed with special, unnatural... plate powers.

With warmest regards,

Zach

It Doesn't Take a Genie

Dear Friends,

    I am pleased to announce that a large box of new Hard Taco CDs is sitting in my kitchen, and like all things on God's brown Earth, it has a name. The box is called "box," and the album is called, “and then the training takes over…” The new disc is truly a sensual massage of all four of your senses.

(I warned you to stop using Zicam, but did you listen to me?)

   This CD features a handful of previously unreleased songs about GREAT AMERICAN WARS which will direct a relentless blitzkrieg on your remaining three senses.

(Seriously, why would you keep liquid nitrogen right next to your mouthwash and in an identical bottle?) 

   However, even without these exciting military-themed tunes, this CD is nothing less than a merciless steamrolling frenzied onslaught/assault on both of your senses.

(Just to clarify... you're wearing that blindfold just in case you happen upon a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey?)

Scarlett's Recording Debut

The Hard Taco song for September is called, "Roughhousing Robots." This is a milestone for us, because it is the first song in our oeuvre to feature vocals by a local up-'n'-comer, Scarlett London. You will be moved, touched, softened, disconcerted, placated, ruffled, and completely melted by her performance. Then you will hear her second line, and you will experience an entirely different set of emotions.

And now I will throw a bone to the majority of readers who scan the HT Digest looking for content that has nothing to do with music by presenting an fragment entitled:

The Startling Origins of Common Expressions

Common phrase: "Children are like sponges."

Original phrase: "Sponges are like children."

In 1849, the Lynchburg General Store began to market huggable sponges to young women who had been rendered infertile by malnutrition and weevils. The phrase "sponges are like children" became so engrained into to the vernacular that when child labor laws were ratified a decade later, it became illegal to mop up a spill with a sponge that was less than 16 years old. 

Common phrase: "It doesn't take a genius to know..."

Original phrase: "It doesn't take a genie to know..."

This expression became ubiquitous after a rash of magic lamp-finders squandered all three wishes by asking the genie to verify the following:

1. Inhaling poisonous fumes isn't the most healthy thing to do.

2. There is a problem when the "Check Engine" light comes on.

3. Meg Ryan might have had plastic surgery.

Common phrase: "Starve a fever, feed a cold."

Original phrase: "Starve a beaver, feed a toad."

The odds of surviving an illness in the 17th century were greatly increased by having ample firewood to keep warm. This expression built on the common misconception that beavers ate wood, and that toads ate beavers.

Common phrase: "No Skin off My Nose."

Original phrase: "No Skin on My Nose."

This is said to be an observation made by Joan of Arc shortly before her death, in reference to one of the more noticeable effects of being burned at the stake. For unclear reasons, the expression has taken on exactly the opposite meaning over time. Another example of this phenomenon is the phrase "Don't let the cat out of the bag," which originally was, "Don't! Let the cat out of the bag!"

Next month: the startling origin of the phrase, "When life gives you ovals, make Ovaltine."  

   

Sincerely,

Zach

Postcards from Panama, Part 1

The new Hard Taco Song for August: "Backup Torch Song" is ready to be enjoyed and feared. 

8/1/09

Dear Karen,

   Remember when you made me promise that if neither of us were married by August 2009, we should just give up looking for someone else and marry each other? I just happened to be near a calendar last night (at midnight) and realized that it is August 2009! I’ve been travelling all summer, but I will be back in the U.S. in a few weeks, and I thought maybe we could get together to laugh about that silly little promise we made in eighth grade, and how funny it is that we both remember it. I hope all is well.

With warmest regards,

Michael

8/4/09

Dear Karen,

   Have you seen that YouTube video with the 4-year-old who plays the gong? She plays very fast, with a great deal of confidence. The fact that she’s so young makes it even more amazing. I know it has been a long time since we’ve talked, but I think I still know the kind of thing that you would find amazing.

With warmest regards,

Michael

8/15/09

Dear Karen,

   I haven’t heard from you yet. What are you up to?! This is a picture of passenger ship I rode down the infamous Panama Canal today. The Captain told me that A) The average toll to take a ship through the Panama Canal is $54,000, and B) The lane with the attendant is actually quicker than the lane where you throw change in the basket. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been sending these postcards to your parents’ house, because I’m not 100% sure I know where you live right now.

With warmest regards,

Michael

8/16/09

Dear Karen,

  Did you know there is a psychiatric disease that is unique to Panamanians? They call it Almejaldulterio. (It is a masculine word even when a woman has the disease.) The afflicted person becomes convinced, despite reasonable evidence to the contrary, that a clam is wearing their clothes and aiming to replace them in the workplace and the wedding bed. Pilar told me about a movie (a thriller) in which a clam really is wearing this woman’s clothes, and nobody believes her because they think she has Almejalduterio. In case you were wondering, Pilar is a friend who I know because she works at the place I go to rent inner tubes.

With warmest regards,

Michael

8/17/09

Dear Karen,

   The natural beauty here is amazing. I have never seen so many trees packed in so tightly. Pilar drives a Toyota pickup truck with flames painted on the back half of it. The flames make it look like the truck is backing up really fast. She needs a pickup truck for her job because she has to carry stacks of inner tubes upstream after people are done riding them. I am not telling you this to make you jealous. Interestingly, many people have commented to each other that she is quite attractive, but I just see her as a close friend.  Please write me back and acknowledge that you received the ocarina I sent you. It is nothing special, except that it was very expensive because it was made out of something called vegetable ivory. Hope you’re doing well!!! Please write back.

With warmest regards,

Michael

8/17/09

Dear Karen,

   I still haven’t heard from you, and I’m wondering if it is because you’ve had second thoughts about keeping that promise you made on the evening of August 1, 1989. I’m positive that we promised each other that we would get married exactly twenty years later, because I wrote it down at the time. I’ve been thinking about how much you’d love Panama, especially because the people here are so vigilant about defending the rain forests. The objective is to minimize the impact on wildlife and their habitats. With that in mind, do you think we should just go ahead and have the wedding down here? I don’t care either way.

With warmest regards,

Michael

P.S. If you are already married to someone else, please let me know, because that would be totally fine with me. Just let me know.

Dystopia: [dis-toh-pi-a], n. a future in which loafers have no pennies

Dear Friends,

   I spent most of my early years in the icy shadow of the magnificent Quincy Mine, a defunct copper mine outside of Hancock, Michigan. The Quincy Mine closed its doors in 1945, but trust me, Honey, there are still plenty of copper deposits left in "Old Reliable." All it would take is someone, someone like you who already has a flashlight taped to his or her head, to ride the Quincy hoist elevator to the floor of the deepest shaft and pluck the loose copper nuggets off its sweet, fertile ore bed. 

   Wait…did you hear that? If I am not mistaken, that is the sound of coppertunity knocking.

   The Hard Taco song for July is called "The Quincy Steam Hoist." This song celebrates the Yooper’s dream, in which there are two saunas in every basement and the streets are once again paved with amygdaloid lower-grade strataform copper orebodies.*

  

Getting Down to Brass Tacks

   Rather, get down to this alarming fact: Without copper, there would be no brass tacks, which are a 70/30 copper/zinc alloy. Like fossil fuels or Vitamin Water, copper is a finite resource. We now have synthetic copper substitutes for most electrical applications, but musical science has not yet found a way to make a timpani without native copper. The popularity of the timpani is increasing at unsustainable rates in both India and China. Within 25 years, the earth's copper supply will be all but depleted, and within two generations there will be no more songs that go BAHM BOHM BAHM BOHM bubbita bubbita bubbita bubbita BOHM!

   If you think that a future without timpani music is grim/chilling, try to visualize a world without pennies. The U.S. one cent piece is only 2.5% copper, but this modest proportion is crucial to maintain the weight and the yaw of the coin. Those of us who wear penny loafers depend on a perfectly balanced penny with consistent yaw, parity, and drag. A penny with less than 2.5% copper, when inserted into the slit of one's Weejuns, disrupts the equilibrium, causing one to tumble about on the deck of one's pleasure boat.

   I pray every night that, before our copper surplus is gone, a hero will arise with a system of counterweighted argyles, chinos, and tennis sweaters that can compensate for penniless loafers. If they don't, I fear that our grandchildren will inherit a bleak tomorrow in which dreary closets are stocked with miserable brogues and tassel loafers.

With warmest regards,

Zach

*  Most Yoopers just dream of having roads that are paved, period.   

Smackdown: Natural Childbirth vs. Reality

 Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for June 2009 is called, "Denmark Needs Rock Stars." If you don't love this song instantly, check your control panel to make sure that the speakers aren't on mute.

Our Childbirth Class

The brochure uses a restaurant analogy to highlight the difference between the two Lamaze courses. There is a six day course, for couples "who want and need a tablecloth, real napkins, and real silverware." Then there is the half-day "drive-through" version of childbirth classes. We agree, drive-through sounds good.

When we arrive, we sit in a circle with about ten other couples and our instructor, Gretchen. The first thing Gretchen does is apprise us of her credentials. She is a mother of three who spent over 10 years as a lactation consultant. She is also a registered doula, which I'm pretty sure means she knows how to lead explorers around the Himalayas and carry their camping gear for them. I miss the rest of her introduction, because I'm imagining Gretchen explaining to a team of British adventurers that the mules refuse to go down that pass, because they sense a great evil there.

When I start paying attention again, it is only because I note an inkling of hostility between Gretchen and my wife.

Gretchen: The Lamaze method is about promoting wellness. Many women find interventions like painkillers and epidurals to be superfluous and really invasive. Doctors may try to pressure you into a troubling intervention when you're at your most vulnerable. I will teach you how to make informed choices and be politely assertive.

Lauren: I want to have an epidural.

Gretchen: And that's perfectly... I mean, that's certainly a choice some women make. But you should know that it's your right as a mother to empower yourself to avoid the routine use of unnecessary interventions as part of your transition to parenthood if that's what your inner wisdom guides you to do.

Lauren: I'm definitely getting an epidural. Like, as soon as I possibly can.

Gretchen: (gritting her teeth) Fine.

We are then handed a workbook. There are five chapters, which I would summarize as follows:

Chapter 1: In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Chapter 2: Pain medication during labor preemptively annuls any natural bond between mother and baby.

Chapter 3: If your inner wisdom is trying to tell you to give birth while squatting on a large rubber ball in your bathtub at home, listen to it! If your inner wisdom sounds like it's telling you it prefers a sterile hospital bed, you're not listening close enough.
Chapter 4: The health benefits of breast-feeding are doubled when it is done in public.
Chapter 5:  Commercial baby formula has been linked to autism and pediatric gambling problems.

Gretchen then tells us that the next activity is called, "The Alphabet of Support." The men go to one side of the room and the women to the other. I am handed a blank sheet of paper and a Sharpie and asked to scribe for our team. Our charge is to come up with a list of things that the husbands or boyfriends can do to show support during labor. We need one item starting with each letter of the alphabet, and we have 45 minutes to do this. It went like this:

A. Let's see. Affection. Answer her questions - questions she might have.

Applicators. Do women use applicators when they're in labor?

For B we can do Be Nice or Be Supportive.

I like Be Nice. Put that down. And let's put Massage for M.

C. Considerate. Show consideration,  or Consider her feelings. Or just be there for her Considerably.

C could also be talk about Church. 

Let's put Lamaze for L!

No, L should be Love. 

How about Labor, comma, help with?

Labor... help with.... got it. But we're still at D.

Seriously, I've done this before when my sister had her son. The best right answer for L is Love. Are you going to change it?

Okay.

D... Dahhh... Dehhh....

Druhhhh...Drum... Darm... Denmark. Danish! Bring her a Danish! 

As the morning winds down, we hear from a woman in our class named Meredith, who I can only describe as huffy. Her husband is a heavy, balding man with swatches of thick black neck hair bursting out around his collar, narrowly set eyes, and a look of learned helplessness on his face. "Isn't it true," Meredith says, "That people should just leave you alone after you have the baby? That new parents shouldn't have any visitors at all, even family, for a good 8-10 weeks?" 

Gretchen pauses and then says something about every woman making the choices that are right for her.

I glance at Meredith's sad puppy staring-at-the-floor husband and imagine the two of them taking swimming lessons. "Isn't it true," she would say, "that it's best for a wife to hold her husband's head underwater for a good 2-3 minutes after he stops struggling? That she should, at the very least, throw away his personal mail without letting him read it?"

And I'm thinking, I am so grateful for the woman I married. When our big day comes, I will make sure that she gets her pain medicines. I will definitely Be Nice, and I will definitely bring her a Danish.

With warmest regards,

Zach