Semantics

In college, I took a class on Advertising. As an end-of-semester project, our class was divided into teams of six, and we were instructed to design a marketing campaign to sell grapefruit juice to college students; whichever team was voted to have the best campaign according to the students and the professor got an automatic A on the project. Some teams went crass, some teams appealed to the target audience's intelligence (mistake!). Our team gave up on white grapefruit juice entirely and focused exclusively on pink grapefruit juice, using celebrities as spokespeople and tying in a donation to the Susan G. Komen fund for every bottle sold. Whatever it says about college students or advertising or simply the fight put up from the other teams, our agency won.

Do you get the sense prune advertising was likewise developed by a bunch of college students? For a while now, I've noticed that Sunsweet and the like have shied away from selling "prunes" in favor of "dried plums." Semantics, certainly, but admit it: you associate prunes with nursing homes, scuffly slippers, and worn out bathrobes. "Dried plums" almost has a hipster-y quality to it, riding the tailcoats of dried cranberries as they rose to popularity and are now tossed in everything from cookies to salads to fancy autumn pastas. Well done, Federated Plum Growers of America, on maintaining truth in advertising while simultaneously making prunes an acceptable purchase to people not yet eligible for AARP.

Husband and I were browsing the fruit section at Costco some months back when we saw a label that made us stop in our tracks and consider for a moment. Here was a flat of plums - nicely colored, perfectly in season - that were being sold as "Fresh Prunes." Make of that what you will, America.

Dead Man

I stayed up late enough to catch the headlines just before Obama's address was aired, so I knew that it had happened and been confirmed. But I also knew I needed to get to sleep so that I could function when The Kid woke me up at 2 a.m. Husband stayed up to watch the entire speech, and had a distinctly joyful and excited tone to his voice when he came upstairs afterwards. If we were in our pre-kid days and lived somewhere urban, I suspect he would have been among the multitudes celebrating in the streets.

I can't admit to feeling the same sense of joy. Don't misunderstand - I'm not sad or disappointed. I'm absolutely glad that bin Laden is dead: one less psychopath in the world for my son to contend with. I'm just not elated. It feels somehow hollow to me. I say this with an admitted ignorance if there is in fact proof to the contrary, but bin Laden seemed, in the end, to be little more than a figurehead, a mascot, a rallying point. There were so many eyes on him, even when we couldn't see him, that it seems to me he couldn't run quite the operation he used to. In his absence, other psychopaths have taken on his mantle and are, at this moment, plotting new attacks, most of which will fail before they even get off the ground, but some of which inevitably won't.

Bin Laden's death didn't end anything, except the manhunt. The wars are still going on and will be forever, just in different places, because we're fighting a concept, a spectre. Terrorism isn't something that can be stamped out. It is and always has been. With apologies to Jeff Maguire, all it takes is someone willing to trade their life for the chance to harm whom- or whatever they view as their enemy.

So let's all take a nice, deep, cathartic breath and exhale a sigh of relief that Osama bin Laden is no longer among the living. And then let's crack our collective knuckles, rub our tired eyes, and brace ourselves for whatever may come. This is no time to lower our guard.

Charlie Sheen: Real American Asshole

To say Charlie Sheen is acting a little funny these days is like saying he has a little sinus trouble. The man has officially gone nuts, N-V-T-S, nuts. His ego has expanded past the boundaries of the known universe. In fact, there is no ego with him anymore; it's all id, all the time. The man blew a multi-million-dollar-per-episode gig in what was, I've heard, the highest rated sitcom on air, because he couldn't manage to stop sticking things up his nose and, when told to get his proverbial shit together, called his bosses meanieheads, took his toys, and went home. This from a man whose best performance was his 30-second appearance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This after he, in, what three years?, blew out two marriages with women who seemed balanced (at least in comparison to him) and gave him four children, and is now living with two barely legal overly tanned bottle blonde porn starlets "goddesses." That doesn't smell like a downward spiral at all there, Carlo.

As wacktastic as his behavior has been, however, it barely even registered on my radar except as another instance of spoiled celebs behaving badly (which sounds like a reality TV title, except that we've already seen that show). What pissed me off enough to bother writing a post was when he held the show hostage. I was unfortunate enough to catch 5 minutes of Two and a Half Men when a rerun came on after something else I was watching and I couldn't find something to switch to quickly enough. It was standard sitcom nonsense, canned laughter and all; but as I said, it was very highly rated, and employed dozens, if not hundreds, of people. By refusing to act like an adult (you know, coming to work, not snorting illicit substances, not bragging about your icky sexual proclivities), he put production on hold to the point that Warner Bros. had to 86 the rest of the season. All those grips and stagehands and assistants and wardrobers were suddenly without work until Sheen decided to put on his big boy pants. And then, because he couldn't just quietly pull himself together, he declared a war of words with the producers -- nothing is this guy's fault, after all -- which ended today in Sheen's getting the boot. What do you think is going to happen now, Charlie? This isn't a soap opera. They can't just swap actors in and out for characters and pretend no one's going to notice. It's dead in the water. You pretty much single-handedly wrecked the livelihoods of the off-screen support people. They'll find jobs again, sure, but whereas they used to have an all-but-guaranteed paycheck for as long as the writers could keep cranking out formulaic jokes (the kind the average American likes best), they have to get that resume all polished up and go out begging at the studio door again like everyone else in the Greater Los Angeles area. It's one thing if a show is cancelled in general, but this show was essentially torpedoed because you had to get into a pissing contest with Chuck Lorre.

Actually, now that I think about it, this will work well for the show's first episode or two back next season. Warner Bros. hasn't pulled the plug on the show altogether, and I'd bet any amount of money that it will be back in the fall, which would be WB's way of saying "nanny-nanny-boo-boo" to Sheen. All the old viewers and a few new ones will tune in to see what they did with Charlie's character, who the new guy is (rumor mill says John Stamos is a possibility, who I think is better than his reputation, though he's apparently on Glee - another show I don't watch, which is probably why it's still on -- and thus would be more difficult [and expensive] to woo away), and how they're going to reconcile the disaster from back in the spring. And then I would take my winnings from the previous bet and place them on the probability that, by mid-season, all those same looky-loos will have faded away once they realize that the show jumped the shark about five years back when the kid's voice dropped. I will then take my winnings from both of those bets and gamble that Sheen's future screen time will consist of a failed appearance on Dancing With the Stars, a losing season of Celebrity Apprentice, and conclude with a half-assed stint on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

That is, if anyone remembers in September that any of this happened.

The Bitch is Back

Hi kids! Sorry I've been on hiatus so long, but Thing 1 has finally gotten old enough that he can play by himself for a little bit, allowing me time enough to ooze out some of the ferocious indignation that has been building pressure in the back of my mind. Assuming work continues to be slow and the kid continues to give me small spans of time to myself, I'm very happy to let Rosie back out of her cage. Stay tuned!