Research Says...Blame Netflix

Way back on May 26, 2013, I blogged about the fact that I just signed up for Netflix Streaming and that it would kill my productivity. I made a big joke about it at the time. “Ha, ha! I’m not going to write as much as I used to,” I said. What a knee-slapper!

Well now, not quite six months later, it turns out that big joke has become reality. I’m spending all my spare time on Netflix instead of on writing and I have the research to back it up!

Between May 26^th and today I’ve written twelve blog entries—including the one you are currently reading.  Each blog entry takes about 2 hours and 23 minutes for me to write. Using basic mathematics and a handheld calculator, I figured out that over the past six months I’ve spent about 28 hours and 36 minutes writing my blog. 

By contrast, during the same timeframe I used Netflix Streaming to watch 35 episodes of The Walking Dead, 28 episodes of Breaking Bad, 25 episodes of The IT Crowd, 15 episodes of Arrested Development, and 12 episodes of Psych. At 43 minutes, 47 minutes, 33 minutes, 24 minutes, and 43 minutes per episode respectively, that comes to a grand total of 73 hours and 52 minutes spent on Netflix. But that’s only the shows I watch regularly. If one were to factor in random episodes of The Twilight Zone, Family Guy, and Star Trek: The Next Generation (specifically the episode “Tapestry,” which I love, because we get to see what Jean-Luc Picard’s life would have been life if he were a nerdy scientist instead of a swashbuckling starship captain), as well as about 1.5 feature length movies per month, we can tack on approximately 20 more hours to my viewing total. That brings my grand total up to 93 hours and 52 minutes. This means I spend more than three times as much of my spare time streaming as I do writing. The bar graph below wonderfully illustrates this concept.

So what does all this mean?  Does it mean that I’m inherently lazy and/or easily distracted?  Does it mean that my creative muse has been hijacked by a technology company in Los Gatos, California?  Does it mean that I need to throw my laptop into the nearest ravine and start writing with pad and paper? No, no, no. I think it means I need to end this blog now so I can watch Season 3, Episode 9 of Breaking Bad so I could find out if Hank survives his gunshot wounds.

BOO! The Scariest Movie of Each Decade

About nine months ago I blogged about the funniest movie of each decade. (If you missed it and are curious, click here.) With Halloween fast approaching, I thought I would revisit that format and write about the scariest movie of each decade. But first I’m going to continue my endless preamble.

In general, people seem to either love or hate the horror movie genre. My theory is that this is a genetic trait like eye color or kneecap shape. Not sure if this gene is dominant or recessive, but certainly my dad passed this trait down to me. (My mom hates horror movies, but interestingly, her sister—a.k.a. my aunt—loves them; so geneticists need to mull that over when assessing the heritability of this trait.) In any event, I grew up loving horror movies and watching as many as I could. Every Saturday as a kid I was glued to my television to watch Chiller Theatre on New York’s Channel 11. They showed a wide array of classic horror films from the icons of the genre like “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” to the low-budget schlock flicks like “Plan 9 from Outer Space” and “Attack of the Crab Monsters.” While I recognized that some movies were clearly better than others, the truth is, I loved them all.

These days, I rarely get to see horror movies. My wife does not share my love for the genre, so for the most part, if I’m seeing a horror flick, I’m doing it on my own. And frankly, I don’t get to the movies on my own all that often. (I do have two sons who I hope have inherited this trait, but they’re only seven and four so I can’t quite test this theory yet, lest I cause them nightmares and years of expensive psychotherapy.)

So, onto the list. What follows is what I consider the scariest (not necessarily the best) horror movie of each decade. Unfortunately, because I haven’t seen many of the older films in 30-plus years, some of these decisions are based on hazy recollections. Feel free to let me know if you think I’m making some obvious omissions.

1920s

“Nosferatu” (Directed by F.W. Murnau) -1922: For whatever reason (certainly cinematic scholars must have theories that I’m too lazy to research) the horror films of the silent era were ruled by the Germans. Perhaps it was some sort of artistic omen of the horror that was to come in Germany in the next couple of decades. In any event, horror films in this era were slow-paced and atmospheric. Without sound, filmmakers relied on imagery to create their scares. And “Nosferatu” has its share of creepy images. A vampire film that predates the classic “Dracula” by nine years, the title character, played by Max Schreck, is a horrifying figure to behold, and the antithesis of the suave persona immortalized by Bela Lugosi.

1930s

“Freaks” (Directed by Tod Browning) -1932: The 1930s was the golden era of movie monsters. “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and my personal favorite, “The Invisible Man,” all had their most famous incarnations in this decade.  Yet from a scare standpoint, I have to put the lesser known “Freaks” ahead of them all. The film, which Tod Browning made a year after he directed “Dracula,” revolves around the trials and tribulations of a circus sideshow. While not particularly frightening by today’s standards, the film had a creepy vibe and an excellent payoff scene at the end.

1940s

“Phantom of the Opera” (Directed by Arthur Lubin) -1943: As I did my research for this piece, I quickly recognized that the 1940s was probably the weakest decade for horror movies. Mostly there were endless sequels of “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” and “The Mummy;” as well as endless meetings between those and other classic monsters with Abbott and Costello. As I scrolled through the titles of the horror flicks of the 40s I came across “Phantom of the Opera” and jumped in my seat just a little. As I mentioned earlier, my recollections of some of the older classics are a bit hazy and this one falls into that category. But what I do remember is that as a boy I was terrified of this movie. And I’m pretty sure that Abbott and Costello must have been too, because the Phantom of the Opera is one of the few movie monsters from this timeframe that they didn’t meet.

1950s

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Directed by Don Siegel) -1956: This is the decade in which sci-fi and horror met head on with glorious results. Whether it was science experiments gone awry (“The Fly”) or exposure to radiation (“Them!”) or unwelcome visitors from another planet (“The Thing from Another World”) the things that would scare moviegoers in this decade generally had some sort of preposterous scientific explanation. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was no exception in this regard, but what did make it different is that the monsters looked like everyone else, instead of like, say, a 50-foot, fire breathing lizard. In most horror movies you could tell who the evil ones are, but not in this one, which is what made it so intense.

1960s

“Carnival of Souls” (Directed by Herk Harvey) -1962: Creeeeeeepy! This is sort of an obscure cult classic, but I have to say that few horror movies set a mood as well as this one. The plot: A young woman gets into a horrific car accident with two friends and is the sole survivor of the crash. Soon after, in order to escape the bad memories, she moves to a small town where she accepts a job as a church organist. But things do not go well as she begins to see visions of an otherworldly man who seems to be drawing her to a nearby abandoned carnival site.  I can’t really say much else, because the hair on the back of my neck is standing up, so I’d like to move on if you don’t mind.  (And yes, while “Psycho,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Night of the Living Dead” are all great movies in their own right, I find this one scarier.)

1970s

“The Exorcist” (Directed by William Friedkin) – 1973: I’m not really sure what to say about what is arguably the most iconic horror movie of all time that has not already been said. It broke a variety of cinematic taboos and was, at the same time, an amazingly well made film, garnering ten Oscar nominations and winning two of them. (Best Screenplay and Best Sound.) But what makes this movie so very effective in the scare department is that some of the most frightening moments come not from the over-the-top sequences, but the quieter moments. For example, when Father Karras is summoned to the house while Regan MacNeil is asleep and sees that the words “help me” have raised up on the flesh of her abdomen. It’s one of many chilling sequences that help make this not only the scariest movie of the decade, but in my opinion, the scariest movie of all time.

1980s

“The Changeling” (Directed by Peter Medak) – 1980: The 1980s had several very scary blockbuster horror flicks that I thoroughly enjoyed, like “The Shining,” “Poltergeist,” and “An American Werewolf in London,” but none of those films—or any others from this decade—scared me as much as the lesser known “The Changeling.” George C. Scott plays a composer who moves into a large mansion soon after  his wife and child are killed in a car crash. (Why he would need a 30,000 square foot house when he’s living by himself isn’t entirely clear.) As you might guess with this kind of set up, the mansion has some issues.  Far and away the most effective haunted house film I have ever seen, there is a scene with an empty wheelchair that will make your hair stand straight up when you see it.

1990s

“The Blair Witch Project” (Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez) – 1999: I know this movie leaves a lot of people scratching their heads, but it left me shaking in my boots. Its effectiveness for me is a direct result of the fact that I did a lot of backwoods hiking in the early to mid-90s and the film played upon my fear of getting hopelessly lost in the wilderness and not knowing what evil might lurk in the darkness. The first 70 minutes of this film slowly filled me with a feeling of dread, and the last ten minutes flat out terrified me.

2000s

Tie: “The Others” (Directed by Alejandro Amenabar) – 2001 and “Let the Right One In” (Directed by Tomas Alfredson) – 2008: I really did not want to have any ties, because it feels like a cop out, but I simply could not choose between these two films. (And yes, these are both clearly horror films, rather than horror movies, if you get my drift.) “The Others” is an extremely effective gothic horror story about a mother who lives in a mansion (of course) with her two children who have a rare condition that prevents them from being exposed to light. So, the already gloomy mansion must be kept even darker for the kids’ sake. Throw some very creepy servants into the mix and you have the groundwork for a very scary movie. “Let the Right One In” is about a pre-teen vampire, but is as far removed from the “Twilight” series as you can possibly imagine. The film was made in Sweden (it’s subtitled) and takes place there in the winter. The director takes full advantage of the dreariness and desolation of a Swedish winter to create a very atmospheric, very creepy film that really gets inside your head. (At least it got inside my head.)

2010s

“World War Z” (Directed by Marc Forster) – 2013: Sadly, I have only seen two horror movies in our current decade. The one I picked and “Cabin in the Woods.” I thought they were both pretty good (certainly not great) but I give WWZ the edge in the scare department. Fast moving hordes of zombies can be pretty freaky. The film was not so much spooky, as panic-inducing. It made me want to take up running just in case.

I AM The Tooth Fairy

About two months ago my six-year-old son lost his first tooth.  In fact, faithful readers of this blog may recall that I described the loss of this body part in gory detail.  That initial tooth loss was a bit traumatic for my son, but since then he has lost three more and has become quite comfortable with the event. Indeed, the third time around he physically pulled out his own tooth at the dinner table, much to the amazement of the rest of us sitting there munching on our taco salad.

With the loss of teeth comes the inevitable visit from the Tooth Fairy. That would be me.  I am the Tooth Fairy.  I am the living embodiment of that mythical creature and I take my role seriously.  Each time a tooth comes out I lay in wait for two hours after my son goes to bed.  If I go in too early I risk being seen by my son and destroying his childhood innocence.  (My intent is for him to believe in the Tooth Fairy until he’s at least 18.)  When the time is right and I can detect slow, rhythmic breathing coming from his bedroom, I slowly turn his doorknob and gingerly step in on slippered-feet. 

The distance from my son’s door to his bed is probably about eight feet.  Moving ever so slowly so as not to produce even the faintest of noises, I traverse those eight feet in about 90 seconds.  Once at his bedside the operation becomes significantly trickier.  The tooth is centered directly underneath the pillow.  How my son’s head is positioned on the pillow will determine the angle my hand takes to get at the tooth and replace it with a dollar. In three of four instances so far this maneuver, although tense, was relatively easy to pull off.  In those cases his head was positioned on the side or bottom of the pillow and my hand was able to quickly and efficiently get in and out without ever coming into contact with his head. 

The last time around was not so easy.   When I opened my son’s door I saw that he was sleeping on his left side with his shoulder touching the bottom of the pillow and his head firmly resting dead center on the pillow.  The scene looked too risky so I decided not to chance it and figured if I came back in 30 minutes he may have changed to a more favorable position.

Thirty minutes later when I returned, my son’s position had not changed very much. If anything, his head had sunk deeper into the center of the pillow.  Yet something had to be done.  It was nearing midnight and I had work the next day.  I moved toward his bed with a level of stealth that would make a ninja salivate.  Slowly I knelt down next to his bed until I was eye level with the seam between his mattress and pillow.  I pressed my right hand firmly down on the mattress and began to gradually slide it beneath the pillow.  Millimeter by millimeter my fingers crept forward until it became apparent that the full weight of my son’s skull was bearing down exactly where his tooth resided.  Beads of sweat trickled down my forehead as I sensed that at any moment the boy might awaken and let out a scream that would set off car alarms.  Yet my son did not budge and soon my fingertips felt his tiny central incisor.  Ever so gently I pulled the tooth out with my right hand while my left hand began the laborious task of putting the dollar in the tooth’s place.  Something on the order of 47 minutes later my task was accomplished and I backed out of my son’s room secure in the knowledge that my secret identity was still safe.

I am the Tooth Fairy.  And I am exhausted.   

Airplane! Still Funny After All These Years

When the movie Airplane! came out in the summer of 1980, I was just shy of eleven years old. My whole family went to see it in the theater and by the end I was certain it was the funniest movie I had ever seen, despite the fact that I laughed at some of the jokes for the wrong reason. (For example, when the little boy asks the little girl if she wants cream in her coffee and she says, “No thank you; I take it black, like my men,” I laughed heartily, because I thought it was hysterical that a little girl would like black coffee.)

About two years after the release of Airplane! my family became the first on our block to get a VCR. The $900 machine, that was only slightly smaller than a Volkswagen, quickly became the focal point of my existence. To get our video library started we purchased two movies—The Graduate and Airplane! While I cited The Graduate as my favorite movie, it was Airplane! that I kept on watching over and over again. Airplane! to me was what Star Wars was to most kids of my generation. I was obsessed.

Before I knew what a spreadsheet was, I created a spreadsheet to keep track of how many times I watched each of the VHS tapes that we owned. Within a year I would see Airplane! 23 times, according to the penciled hash marks on my loose-leaf paper. I knew the movie by heart and quoted it ad nauseum. While I struggled in my junior high school Spanish class, I was fluent in jive.

As my teen years progressed, the frequency of my Airplane! viewings gradually declined. I moved on to other obsessions like classic rock bands, reruns of Taxi, and the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I would guess that sometime in my early-20s was the last time I watched the film…until yesterday.

My wife got me the DVD of Airplane! as one of my birthday gifts. (I had never bothered replacing the VHS tape when I switched to DVDs long ago.) So last night, after our kids went down to bed, we watched it—my first time in over 20 years. It was almost a surreal experience watching a film I know by heart after such a long hiatus.

One interesting phenomenon was that I kept on laughing ahead of the punch lines, since I knew exactly what was coming. (This behavior must have seemed strange to my wife who had only seen the film two times previously.) For instance, when Julie Haggerty is walking around in the plane asking if anyone is a doctor and one woman says, “Stewardess, I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor,” I already burst out laughing before they panned over to Leslie Nielsen sitting there wearing a stethoscope in his ears.

Another interesting phenomenon was that it took about 5 or 10 minutes for the movie to grow on me again. I wasn’t laughing that much in the beginning and for a brief time I was very nervous that maybe the movie wasn’t as funny as I remembered. But soon the laughter took hold and I couldn’t stop. I think the slow start wasn’t the movie’s fault, though. I think it was more akin to meeting up with an old friend after 20 years. There might be an initial period of awkwardness, but eventually you feel like everything is just like it was when you last talked.

And so I laughed. I laughed every time Robert Hays missed his mouth because of his drinking problem, and when Peter Graves asks the boy visiting the cockpit if he likes gladiator movies, and when Leslie Nielsen assures the passengers that everything is going to be fine and his nose keeps on growing a-la Pinocchio. And pretty much at everything in between.

At this point I have no idea how many times I’ve seen Airplane! I lost my loose-leaf spreadsheet decades ago. But the movie is still hysterical and now that I’ve got it on DVD I can watch it as many times as I want. And this time I can keep track in Excel.

My Labor-Intensive Labor Day Weekend

Did you know that Labor Day was established as an official holiday in 1887? I just found that out today from Wikipedia. Other facts I learned today from Wikipedia are that “Marmotinto” is the art of creating pictures using colored sand or marble dust; the Hammerheads were the champions of the Qatar International Ice Hockey League in 2008; and the motto of Yuhan College in South Korea is “Be a freeman who dedicates himself to the peace of mankind. “ But none of those last three facts are relevant to this essay.

The point of Labor Day, of course, is to celebrate the American worker, and the main mode of celebration is to not work. There may be Labor Day parades or celebrations, but they certainly don’t get the same level of attention as the festivities of other holidays. And this is at should be. The best way to say “thank you” to the American workforce is by letting them take a rest from their backbreaking work.

My work is not backbreaking; far from it. I sit and write and look stuff up and sometimes I go to meetings. The most strenuous part of my day is when I go into the office break room and have to reach up really high to get a plastic cup for my water. Sometimes I have to really stretch because the only cups left are in the very back of the cabinet. I think I once tweaked a muscle in my side doing this.

So, while I’m happy to get a three day weekend out of Labor Day, the truth is that what I do could hardly be called “labor” in the traditional sense of the word. This is why I always feel a little bit guilty on Labor Day. To compensate for this guilt I always try to do a little bit of hard labor during Labor Day weekend.

Of course, everything is relative. What I consider hard labor is likely somewhat different than what someone who works in a mineshaft would consider hard labor. Nonetheless I made sure to do some “hard” labor on each day of my three day weekend.

On Saturday we got our raw materials. Our first stop was Home Depot to buy gardening gloves for myself and my two sons. Perhaps it’s a sign that we don’t do a lot of hard labor at the Schwartzberg house when my six-year-old asked, “What is this place?” as we pulled up to the store with the distinctive orange sign. Then we went to Staples (unrelated to the hard labor) and then to Target where we purchased two shelving units—assembly required.

The identical shelving units were for my sons’ rooms. The instructions said all I needed was a Phillips-head screwdriver and a hammer. Easy! We actually own those things! I took them out and got started.

It was a slow start. I’m the kind of guy who likes to know the entire project plan before I begin my work and the instructions were not particularly detailed. There were only eight steps and it was clear that whoever wrote the instructions was from the “less is more” school of writing. A couple of words here and a lot of ambiguous diagrams with random arrows there resulted in a lot of head scratching on my part. My kids watched with bated breath as I flipped back and forth throughout the instruction manual waiting for inspiration to grab hold of me. Finally, after about ten minutes of hemming and hawing, I took the plunge and began to connect side panel “A” to top panel “B” with screw “AA”. To my utter joy they connected relatively easily.

The rest of the process was much of the same. Long periods of time spent staring at the instructions punctuated by brief periods of time screwing together various sized panels. The highlight for me was the dowels. For some reason I really like dowels and I got to use six of them. There was also some hammering of nails involved, but I let my wife pinch hit on that part, so she wouldn’t feel left out. (Okay, the real reason was that I was exhausted at that point, since the project that should have taken 30 minutes was now pushing up on two hours.)

That was Saturday. On Sunday I put together my other son’s shelving unit. That went a lot smoother, having put together the first unit the night before. The one hiccup on Sunday was that the screwdriver stopped working two screws into the process. I looked at the head of the screwdriver and it looked like mush—the head was stripped. So I scoured the house for another Phillips-head screwdriver. In my garage I found a small toolkit that contained a screwdriver that you assemble yourself. You put the correct head into a hollow socket to make the type of screwdriver you need. I did it, but the head kept on falling out. I’m sure there was a way to get it to stay in the socket, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. My wife offered to run to the hardware store to get me a real screwdriver, which she did, and about 30 minutes later the shelving unit was up and running.

That brings us to Monday and the gardening gloves. We had an unusually wet two-week stretch here in Arizona—it rained on three or maybe even four days during that stretch!—so the front yard was filled with weeds. At 7:45 A.M, before it got too brutally hot, me and my boys donned our gloves and went out to pull the weeds. We spent a good 15 to 20 minutes pulling weeds and then we saw a bee, so we stopped and went back inside the house to watch cartoons.

And that was my laborious Labor Day weekend. It was backbreaking, it was grueling, and it made me feel alive. It also gave me the confidence to reach even the highest cup at my office tomorrow…well, maybe with a stepstool. 

The Tooth is Out There

My six-year-old son lost his first tooth the other day. Well, maybe “lost” isn’t quite the right word. The tooth was yanked out with a string by his mom (a.k.a. my wife) after it had been precariously dangling in the front of his mouth for the better part of two months. Fed up with the tooth’s stubbornness in not coming out via natural causes, we decided it was high time we took action—hence the yanking.

My son was compliant with the forcible removal of his tooth, as he too was anxious to finally join the ranks of his many friends at school and have a gap-toothed smile. So when the moment of truth came, he braced himself and took the yanking like a man. He did not cry out, yelp, or even whimper during the procedure, for which we gave him no anesthetic.

I asked him if it hurt and he proudly said, “No.” Then he looked at the tooth that my wife put in a small plastic cup and noticed there was some blood on it. He looked up at me and asked, shakily, if there was blood in his mouth. I looked in his mouth and said, “Yes, there’s a little bit of blood. But that’s natural.”

Clearly this was not the response he was hoping for. He ran to the bathroom to look at his mouth in the mirror and as soon as he saw the bloody spot where his tooth used to be his eyes welled up with tears. I assured him that it was no big deal, pointed out that he told me it didn’t even hurt, and instructed him to rinse his mouth out with water.

He vigorously rinsed his mouth out with water, shaking and trying to hold back his tears. In between spits there were dramatic statements like: “I never want you to do that to me again!” and “I never want to see that much blood coming out of my body again!” Then his four-year-old brother came into the bathroom and took the hyperbole up a notch when he said, with heartfelt sorrow, “I don’t want him to die!” (Cue the violins.)

After the rinsing and spitting we moved on to the ice. We had him stick an ice cube in the space where the tooth used to be and the bleeding was considerably staunched. Still, his brow was furrowed and he looked generally ill at ease. That’s when I whipped out the Twinkies.

My kids had never had Twinkies before and for some reason, on my way home from work earlier that evening, I decided to pick some up. The effect of the Twinkies was instantaneous. As soon as I produced them and said, “Who wants dessert?” my son’s anxiety was replaced by gleeful fascination. Moments later he was biting into a piece of cream-filled sponge cake heaven, and all thoughts of his own mortality were forgotten.

That night, as my son slept, I snuck into his room, removed the tooth from under his pillow, and put a dollar in its place.  I would have put a Twinkie there, but we ate them all.

Let's Help August Live Up To Its Name

Welcome to August—the only month of the year without a major holiday. This is somewhat ironic given that the dictionary definition of the word august is “inspiring reverence or admiration; of supreme dignity or grandeur; majestic.” And yet without the ability to boast a major holiday, I say that August is the least majestic of all the months.

Of course, you’ll notice that I have to keep on modifying the word “holiday” with the word “major.” That’s because if you dig deep enough you’ll find that there are indeed some minor holiday’s in August. A quick Google search has revealed that August 19^th is National Aviation Day and a scant two days later on August 21^st it’s Senior Citizen’s Day. And if you live in Texas, you may be well aware of the fact that on August 27^th your state observes Lyndon Baines Johnson Day. (Then again you may not be well aware of that fact. Since I don’t know you personally, I really couldn’t say, could I?)

Point is it’s high time that August got a real holiday—a major one—one that will allow it to live up to its name. Nothing against senior citizens or aviators (or especially senior citizen aviators) but we need a more universal holiday in August, so that everyone has a reason to celebrate.

I have tried to come up with a few ideas. My first thought was how about a National Food Day, since everybody eats? Turns out there already is one on October 24^th. Then I thought, “What about National Pet Day?” I know not everyone has a pet, but a large percentage of people do, and even those who don’t may have interacted with a friend’s pet, seen one on television, or been viciously attacked by one on the street. Seems pretty universal to me.  Well that’s already taken, as well—April 11^th is National Pet Day. Finally I came up with National Blood Vessel Day, because you can’t deny that every single one of us has blood vessels—lots of them, in fact. And it turns out that there is no National Blood Vessel Day. (Well, there was one in Berlin in 2006, but never here in the States.)

So, what do you think? Does National Blood Vessel Day have the potential to become a major holiday in August? If not, don’t be shy about posting your ideas for a major holiday in our sad holiday-less month. Perhaps if one of these ideas garners enough interest we can start a petition on the White House website. In the meantime, I’m going to work on a catchy song for my holiday. I’ve already got the first two lines:

It’s time to snuggle; it’s time to nestle,

Let’s love each other and each blood vessel!