Damn You, Dorothy Hamill

We started watching the second season of Stranger Things and it reminded me of the long-lasting evil of Dorothy Hamill’s haircut.

One of the kids in the show has that bob/shag/bowl cut/whatever hairstyle that Hamill had in the 1976 Olympics (I hope for the actor’s sake that it’s some kind of wig). This reminds me that anybody around my age had that hairstyle as a child. Go through any photos of kids in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and it’s there: that upside-down bowl with the edges turned slightly inward.

That haircut was everywhere. It must have been compulsory to parents, like a draft for follicles: You found out you were 1A and either sent your child to the barber or fled to Canada as fast as your heel spurs would permit you. It seemed like the Hamill hair lasted so much longer than it should have. She had probably moved onto French braids while a nation of toddlers was still cosplaying as her.

I bet that hair looked good to parents back then, snowed in with a pot of fondue during a few weeks in February 1976, watching Hamill on their Zenith color TV sets as she dazzled the world in Innsbruck with her “Hamill camel” move, thinking idly of their toddlers’ need for a haircut while trying to hide their disgust for President Ford’s pardon of Nixon and nursing a grasshopper cocktail in a Quaalude haze. But after the madness faded as the last of the Bicentennial fireworks fizzled out and the tall ships sailed over the horizon, who realized what they had done to their children?

Now we have to live not only with the photos of ourselves with those structurally dubious haircuts but they also creep up in every fictional period piece as a time signifier. Damn you, Dorothy Hamill. Damn you and your haircut to hell.

A defensive what class?

I’ve been dissatisfied lately to discover that the premium for my car insurance has increased by $25 a month in the last two years. It’s an industry-wide phenomenon, my insurance company tells me. We discussed some solutions and one of the things they recommended was something about a defensive driving class.

I’m sorry: a defensive what class? I’ve been driving for long enough. What will I learn from this class that could make me a better, safer driver? I should teach this class.

You know what, let me tell you something about driving (steps up to pulpit). I’ve been driving for 26 years and have had the same insurance company all that time. In that time, knock on wood, I’ve never been at fault in an accident. I haven’t even filed a claim in 11 years and that was when I was sitting at a red light and the car in front of me backed into me. I drive a lot. My commute is one hour each way, over a mix of highways and winding rural roads. I’ve put 190,000 miles on my car in 10 years, and my previous car had about 176,000 miles on it or something. I’ve driven all over the East Coast and Midwest, through cities, suburbs and country. I’m unintimidated by traffic, weather conditions, road surfaces or big scary trucks. I hate driving so much but I’m really good at it. 

My point is that I have a long enough driving history that my safe record cannot be chalked up simply to luck, as the sample size is way too big. My 26 years of driving skills and safety should speak for themselves and should entitle me to some sort of discount. Call it the “Competency Discount” or the “Knowing What You’re Doing Discount.” A lot of us should get this.

Yeah, I guess a class would just be something I can snooze through online, but that’s not the point. Is America no longer a meritocracy? Does my record entitle me to nothing? What have we as a society become?

Tell me to take a defensive driving class. Come on.

Good person?

I disagree that someone who shoots up his office is a “good person.” You hear this type of thing a lot after someone commits some awful crime: Reporters will interview a person close to the perpetrator, who will vouch (with qualifications) for the person’s character.

This happened again after that guy from Delaware killed his coworkers in Maryland. On the news, they had someone who knew the guy and she said something to the effect of “he’s a good person who did a bad thing.”

I’m sure she was in shock and trying to work her way through it, and I don’t know how I’d deal with it if someone I knew, and thought was a good person, did something like this. I just disagree. Isn’t a mass shooting enough to tell us that this guy is a bad person? He might be good in other areas, but on the scale of life, murder weighs that scale down pretty low in the direction of “bad.”

I’m not going to delve too deeply into human nature in something I dashed off during five idle minutes at work, but I don’t believe you judge people’s character by what’s in their hearts. Nobody knows what’s in their hearts. All we know is what they do, and that’s a better indicator of character. If you murder a bunch of people, you forfeit your right to be seen as a good person. I think what you do makes you a good or bad person, not the other way around.

If it’s unfair for me to think this way of this shooter, oh well. There are several families in Maryland planning funerals this week that we can talk to about fairness.

Robot

“The bag goes in the bin. The bag goes in the bin. The bag goes in the bin. The bag goes in the bin. The bag goes in the bin.”

The O’Hare TSA agent repeats it like a mantra. His eyes are weary. Obviously he’s said this so many times before and nobody listens and he’s had to repeat it rote as the only way to get through his day at the security checkpoint.

I stare dumbly at him. Bag goes in the what? I start placing the bag on the conveyor belt but they stop me. Suddenly I see that the bins are much larger than at PHL and my roller board will actually fit into it. I feel like an idiot for not knowing but it’s been awhile since I’ve been to Chicago so I didn’t realize they have a different system at ORD.

Very different. At home, I would take off my shoes, take my laptop out of the bag and take out my toiletries. Here, I can leave them all in their bags. Everything goes through the X-ray machine, quick and efficient. I am through the line at top speed and making my way to the gate.

The man keeps telling people to put the bag in the bin. On the other side of the room, another agent tells everyone to keep their shoes on and their laptops in their bags. Her voice is loud and monotone.

When will their shifts end? When can they stop repeating themselves? When will the robot tourists actually listen to what they’re saying? Maybe their answer is to become a robot themselves.

Apollo's Terrible Glare

Sometimes you hit the wall sooner than you expect to. Mornings like these, it starts miles out from where it used to. The drivers decide, as if they’d planned it ahead of time, to make the highway into a parking lot.

So you crawl toward your exit, a Sisyphean commute becoming even worse. What was the point of adding that new lane if this is what’s going to happen?

You hate to say it but it would almost be a relief to see a fender-bender up ahead because that would make this traffic a one-time deal, passed and quickly forgotten. This time it’s not. This is the new normal, at least temporarily, and the culprit is the autumnal angle of the sun.

Ahead of you, drivers slow to a numb trudge, their cars impotent as Apollo’s terrible glare moves across the sky and completely blinds them. Better safe than sorry. Better to add 10 minutes onto my daily commute than actually try for mass competence.

For there is no solution to this. If only someone would invent some sort of device we could use to shield our eyes from the sun. Slouching toward the office, I dream of this perfect future.

Pat, Vanna and Alex

I really think that someday when Pat Sajak and Vanna White retire from Wheel of Fortune, and Alex Trebek retires from Jeopardy, it will destabilize America.

These two shows have been an institution for over 30 years, the perfect shows to watch casually in that hour between finishing the dinner dishes and the start of prime time. We usually have them on unless we’re doing something else. I’m usually reading or doing something else at the same time but it’s still fun to watch both.

It’s amusing to watch Wheel of Fortune and see contestants try to guess “Thing” from “____D_L_.” It’s fun to see people win the $30,000 at the end and dream about what we’d do with it. It’s fun to see people miss solving the puzzle while getting one letter wrong. And tell me Vanna White does not have the sweetest gig in all of showbiz. (Wheel of Fortune is an institution so I don’t understand why the cable guide describes it as something like “Merv Griffin’s version of hangman.” You don’t know what Wheel of Fortune is, a show that airs in some form in dozens of countries and languages, but you get the references to Merv Griffin and hangman?)

It’s also entertaining to watch Jeopardy and feel smart when you get a question and stupid when you have no idea what they’re talking about. Both games are like a crossword puzzle; they keep your mind active. Like a lot of people, I think about auditioning for Jeopardy, just to see how much I could win. I get some of the questions at home but I’m sure it’s harder to do when you’re on that stage. I don’t have the personality for a game show and like Dorothy Zbornak, I don’t know that America would root for me.

Eventually, these shows will end and then what? They could continue with new hosts but that doesn’t always work. The Price Is Right went on without Bob Barker, Janice and Holly, but what’s the point? They were the whole show. What would the point of Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy be without the hosts? Who’s going to banter with contestants and turn those letters besides Pat and Vanna? And can you imagine anybody besides Alex Trebek quizzing people on 18^th century French literature?