Webster's EXTREMELY Abridged Dictionary

Growing up, I kept a Random House dictionary next to my bed. It called itself a “pocket” dictionary, but unless you had a pocket the size of a kangaroo’s pouch, you would not be able to carry it around in your clothing. It was a paperback, true, but it was an extremely thick volume. From elementary school through college, I used it whenever I came across a new word in whatever book I was reading at the time. Sometimes, when I was bored, I would just flip through it to learn new words. I, of course, looked up naughty words, but this dictionary didn’t have the really bad ones. The naughtiest word I found in there was “gamete.”

These days, hard copies of dictionaries are very uncommon. With that new-fangled thing called the internet, definitions can be looked up instantly via computer or one’s handheld telephonic device. Actual paperbound dictionaries are somewhat of a novelty now, but recently my 9-year-old son decided he wanted one.

He, like his older brother, is an avid reader, but despite having a robust vocabulary for a tot of his age, there are certainly still words he comes across, for which he does not know the definition. And, since he has terribly mean parents who have not given him his own computer or handheld telephonic device, he cannot always find out word meanings instantly whilst reading. So a dictionary seemed the perfect solution.

When my son mentioned his interest in purchasing a dictionary with his own money, my wife pointed out that she had seen one at the dollar store, so perhaps he could get one the next time we go. As fortune would have it, I had occasion to go the very next day to purchase some paper goods, so I brought the lad with me. It took some searching, but sure enough, tucked away in the party supplies aisle was “Webster’s Large Print Dictionary.” (Not sure what kind of celebration would constitute using dictionaries as party favors, but is sounds like a wild one.) In any event, my son happily purchased his very first dictionary.

As we drove home I heard my son flipping through the pages of his new book in the back seat. A few moments later he said, “Dad, there’s something wrong with this dictionary.”

“What do you mean? What’s wrong with it?” I asked, bemused.

“It doesn’t have the word FORMAT in here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, on the cover it says, ‘Easy to read format,’ so I decided to look up the word FORMAT and it’s not in here.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. That’s a pretty basic word. I’m sure it’s in there,” I said, pulling over. “Hand me that book.”

My son handed me the dictionary and I feverishly paged through it. I ran my finger down the “F-O-R” entries and sure enough, it went from FORLORN to FORMER.

“I’ll be darned,” I said. “It doesn’t have the word FORMAT, or the word FORM, for that matter,” I said, handing the book back to him.

“I wonder what other words it doesn’t have,” he said, laughing. I was glad to see he found this more amusing than disappointing.

“Look up MUFFIN,” I said, which is the name of one of our cats.

“Nope, it’s not in here,” he chuckled, a few seconds later.

“How about CAT?” I suggested, as he excitedly turned pages.

“No, that’s not in here either. This is a horrible dictionary!” He was becoming giddy with laughter.

“Maybe they just don’t like nouns,” I said. “Look up the word NOUN,” I said.

“No, not here!” he shouted.

“Give me the book back. I want to look up some words,” I said, getting into the complete and utter failure of a dictionary we had in our possession.

“Okay, what word do you want me to look up?” I asked.

“HORSEPOWER,” he said, for reasons known only to him. I quickly turned to the corresponding page.

“Well, they don’t have the word HORSEPOWER or even HORSE, but, oddly, they do have the word HORSEMAN. And while I’m on this page, I can’t help but notice they have the word HORRIBLE, but not HORROR, which is really funny since they use the word HORROR in the definition of HORRIBLE,” I said.

At this point we were both laughing hysterically. We drove home and when we got there, went to my son’s room and spent the next half hour randomly looking up words in this monstrosity of a dictionary. Lest we think it was just nouns that were omitted from this volume, we looked up lots of adjectives and verbs, with intermittent success. For example, while the word WALK was in there, the word JUMP was not. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to which words appeared in this mystery book. (Note: Neither RHYME nor REASON appears in this dictionary, but MYSTERY does.)

Ultimately, while “Webster’s Large Print Dictionary” turned out to be a bust as a reference source, it’s worth every penny of the dollar my son spent on it as a humor volume, and now makes it perfectly clear why they had this book in the party favors section of the store. Next time he’s looking to purchase a dictionary, though, I’ll advise him to spend at least twice as much and perhaps he’ll get twice as many words.

50 Looms on the Horizon

Tonight I will attend the third different 50^th birthday party for a good friend of mine in just about a year. These are not only friends, but also “peers.” Yes, I am faced with the reality that some of my peers are starting to hit the half century mark, which makes it crystal clear that the big 5-0 is starting to come into view for me, too. Granted, I am still one year, two months and 17 days away from that daunting number, but its place on the horizon is definitely in my sights.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that 50 is old (despite the fact that AARP membership starts at age 50, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering I know literally no one who has managed to retire at that age), but there is something about that number, when it comes to age, that carries a higher level of seriousness with it. There is no question that by age 50 you are supposed to be an adult, but considering that a couple months shy of 49, I’m not quite there yet, I think I have my work cut out for me.

The good news is, I have already accomplished some of the things that are expected by age 50, like taking daily blood pressure medication, having toenail fungus, and sporting more white hair than black. (Actually that last one I accomplished by age 40, ‘cause I’m a go-getter!) On the flipside, there are still a wide variety of things one would expect someone to have accomplished by age 50 that I have yet to get to, including: maintaining a diverse portfolio of long term investments to ensure my post-retirement financial stability, learning how to poach an egg, and seeing the movie Shane. Hopefully, over the next year or so, I will at least get to Shane and the egg.

Fortunately, the intimidation factor of 50 is diminished a bit when I think about the party I am going to tonight. It is for a friend who is one of the most youthful, fun-loving, and silly people that I know; “old” is probably the last word I would use to describe her. She reminds me of the fact that 50 is really just an arbitrary number and approaching it should not make me feel old.

No, the thing that makes me feel old is that a longtime friend became a grandfather last week and he is one month YOUNGER than me! Yup, one of my high school buddies is now a grand pappy. Quick, someone get me a shawl and a walker!

Blogger Still Able To Use A Pen

This blog post was originally written by hand. I know it sounds barbaric in 2018 to write anything longer than a shopping list without the aid of a computer, but I did it, just to see if I was even capable of such a thing anymore.

Well, really I did out of necessity. My computer was occupied by my 11-year-old son, who was playing an online game called Wizards 101, which is essentially Harry Potter minus the copy-written characters; and my television was occupied by my 9-year-old son, who was watching “Garfield” on Netflix, which is essentially a cartoon minus any wit. My wife was asleep in the bedroom and I didn’t want to disturb her by going in there to get the book I’m reading (okay, really I was just too lazy to walk the 17 steps to that part of the house) so I needed to find something to do in the front part of the house.

I could have emptied the dishwasher, but that would have required a level of responsibility I wasn’t quite feeling yet.

I could have played with the cats, but one of them was quietly snoozing in her cat bed and the other was…well I don’t know where he was and frankly, I didn’t have the ambition to find out.

Of course, there was always my phone—that dreaded modern, mindless time suck of a tool that I could spend hours staring at while scrolling through Twitter feeds, sports scores, and previously Shazammed songs. But I felt like I’d done enough of that in the previous…you know, seven years, so I thought it was high time I moved on.

I saw an unused notebook sitting on my desk and I thought, “Hmmm…I wonder if I can still write complete sentences by hand. I picked up the notebook and a pen and sat at the dining room table.

But what should I write? My first thought was that I would write a letter to someone. But who? I tried to think of someone close to me who I don’t currently communicate with via email, text or Facebook. I pondered this for a bit and suddenly realized that there is literally no one I know who I don’t communicate with using one of those three methods. That’s not to say I couldn’t write a letter to one of those folks anyway, but I wondered if someone receiving a letter from me in the mail would think I’d gone insane for having undertaken such an antiquated form of communication.

So, if I wasn’t going to write a letter, what should I write? A novel? I didn’t think I’d have the stamina. A poem? I stopped writing those back in the 90s.

Then it occurred to me—why not write a blog post? Everyone always writes their blog posts via computer, but I could be the first person in the history of the world to write one with pen and paper.

Of course, this presented a bit of a logistics problem. If I blogged by hand, how would it be seen? These days, my blog is read by about 150 people. I figured I could rewrite the blog post by hand 150 times, find out the addresses of my readers, go to their homes and tape the paper to their computer screens. But then I thought there was the possibility that someone might think that was more insane than getting a letter in the mail from me.

It occurred to me that the reality was that after taking the time to handwrite this post (about two hours) I was going to have to retype it anyway in order for it to be seen. And that is exactly what I’ve done. (Retyping this took about 20 minutes.)

So, while I’m proud I proved to myself that I still have the requisite hand-eye coordination and attention span to handwrite something more than a personal check, I have to admit that word processing programs are horribly convenient and infinitely less tedious than writing by hand. Of course, if it weren’t for writing by hand, I wouldn’t have had a blog topic for today. Take that, modern technology!

The Elusive Arctic Turd

My 9-year-old son is an endless font of knowledge. He loves soaking up information and spitting it back out randomly throughout the day. You just never know when you’re going to hear about the world’s longest worm, or how many pyramids there are in Egypt, or the hottest recorded temperatures on earth.

You also never know when you’re going to be corrected by the boy due to your own incorrect information. Last week, on May 5^th, I boldly declared, “Cinco de Mayo isn’t actually a holiday that celebrates anything specific. It’s just a cool reason to party at Mexican restaurants.”

My son promptly looked up from his plate and said, “Actually it celebrates Mexico winning its first battle against France.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, much less confident in the face of my son’s assuredness. I quickly whipped out my phone and looked up the origins of the holiday, only to find that the boy was, more or less, correct.

“Guess you’re right. I must have heard my information from a bad source,” I said, meekly going back to my French fries.

But while I have come to accept the fact that the boy is infinitely smarter than me, I have to keep in mind that he’s still a 9-year-old boy and there are times that he gets one of his unique factoids a bit jumbled. This morning, for example, he made a declaration that caused his 11-year-old brother to laugh out loud and gave me a moment of pause.

“Did you know there’s a bird called an Arctic turd,” he said, confidently.

“What is it called?” I asked, not quite sure if I heard him correctly.

“It’s called an Arctic turd,” he said chuckling. “It’s true. It flies back and forth from the Arctic to the Antarctic.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s called an Arctic tern,” I said.

“No, really—it’s a turd,” he said.

“Did you read this or hear someone say it?” I asked.

“My teacher said it, yesterday,” he said.

I immediately realized what was going on here. Perhaps the only thing my son loves more than soaking up knowledge is talking about bodily waste in crude terms. I’m sure that as soon as his teacher said the word “tern,” his 9-year-old boy ears registered the word “turd,” because deep, deep down he wants to believe that there is a creature out there called an Arctic turd. Amusing though this was, I felt compelled to correct him on this point.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, son, but the word you’re looking for here is definitely ‘tern,’ which is a type of bird. The only Arctic turds are the ones that come out of polar bears.”

My sons got a big kick out of my last statement, and proceeded to discuss what that would look like, with the phrase “corroded snowball” making an appearance. While my boys got a good laugh, I got a minor boost in confidence, knowing that there are still times when I don’t get outsmarted by a 3^rd grader. I felt pretty good about that, but suddenly got nervous about what would happen if someone teaching him about breeds of dogs mentioned the Shih Tzu.

Tomb With a View

This past Monday I took the day off from work to do something fun with my boys who were on Spring Break. But what to do? Given that we live in a suburb of Phoenix, which is the fifth largest city in the United States, the possibilities were endless. Amusement park? Zoo? Museum? Movies? Bowling? You name the activity and we could have done it. We ended up settling on doing an hour’s worth of strenuous physical activity culminating in visiting a tomb in the middle of nowhere. Trust me, it’s more fun than it sounds.

The tomb in question was that of George W.P. Hunt, Arizona’s first governor, and six other members of his family; and when I piled the kids in the car on Monday morning, visiting this relatively obscure landmark was the furthest thing from my mind—largely because I did not know it existed. Our goal was to hike in Papago Park, which we did—the tomb was an unexpected bonus.

Papago Park is a hilly desert park with lots of hiking trails. The most popular trail by far, though, is the one that leads up to Hole in the Rock, a local Phoenix landmark that is…well…basically a giant hole in a giant rock. It is distinct for two reasons: 1) when you stand in the giant whole and look west, you have an amazing view of the city; and 2) it holds the Guinness World Record for least creatively named landmark. (I’m guessing if The Grand Canyon was named Hole in the Ground, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular.)

When we got to the Papago Park area and I looked up at Hole in the Rock, I realized that we were not the only ones who had this idea on the first day of Spring Break. Dozens of people were standing in the hole, so I knew this would not be a very solitary hike for three of us. I parked and we hiked up to the giant hole, dodging a plethora of other hikers along the way. It felt less like communing with nature than it did going to the mall on Black Friday.

After spending ten minutes in the hole taking pictures from various angles, we started to trek back down, at which point my nine-year-old son asked a question that was seemingly out of left field.

“Can we go see the illuminati?”

Now I should mention here that this particular son is obsessed with the illuminati symbol—that bizarre pyramid-shaped eye on the back left side of a dollar bill. He thinks the symbol is the funniest thing ever and he will often position his fingers in the shape of a pyramid, hold it in front of his navel, say “the illuminati,” and laugh hysterically. So when he asked if we could go see the illuminati, my first reaction was to look down at this belly, as I fully expected him to be making the symbol. But instead of making the symbol, he was pointing in a southward direction.

I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw, off in the distance, a white pyramid on the top of a hill. I had certainly seen this structure from a distance before, having hiked in Papago Park many times, but I never had any idea what it was and never ventured in that direction to find out.

“Well, it’s not the illuminati, but I don’t know what it is or if we’re allowed to go over there,” I said.

“There are dead bodies in there,” my eleven-year-old said ominously.

“What? Give me a break, there are not. Don’t try to scare your brother,” I said.

“No, really, there are. I saw it at Boy Scout Day Camp last week.”

It was true that my older son had gone to Papago Park for Boy Scout Day Camp the previous week, but the only activities he mentioned were cooking, whittling, and learning how to use a compass; he said nothing about seeing dead bodies. Frankly, I’m not sure that the Boy Scouts offers a merit badge for that.

“So what—are you telling me there are zombies in that thing?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything about zombies. It’s a tomb. People are buried in it,” my son said, soberly.

“Oh, that makes much more sense. Should we go check it out?”

Both boys were gung-ho to make the trek to the tomb, and now that I knew we wouldn’t be greeted by the undead, I was happy to hike over there, as well. The good part about this unplanned excursion is that we were now putting Hole in the Rock—and by extension, the crowds—behind us. The bad part was that the extra uphill climb made me realize how horribly out of shape I am. I huffed and puffed the entire way up there, while my sons steadily marched away. Fortunately, they were nice enough to wait for me whenever I lagged behind, and eventually the three of us made it to our destination without having to dodge one person along the way.

Once I caught my breath and took a couple of pictures of the boys in front of the illuminati, I started reading the plaques, which is when I discovered this was Hunt’s Tomb, honoring Arizona’s first governor. But I also learned by reading the plaques that Hunt was also our state’s second, third, sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth governor! This guy was clearly dedicated to public service. (Either that or he really liked the free mustache waxings the governor’s office afforded him.) He was also really dedicated to sharing his tomb, as his wife, sister, daughter, son-in-law, father-in-law, and mother-in-law are all buried in there with him. Yes, the illuminati is spacious.

Our quest complete, we started heading back toward the car, which although a good distance away, was mercifully mostly downhill. Although I was exhausted by the time I sat in the driver’s seat taking a long swig from my bottle of water, I was pleased with how our morning went. We got to see Hole in the Rock with a throng of fellow Phoenicians and Hunt’s Tomb, totally by ourselves. It was only an hour-long adventure, but it was a memorable one and was thankfully not marred once by any encounters with the undead.

To Watch Or Not To Watch...

A week from today I have a very important life decision to make. Do I miss the “Big Game” for the first time in my entire life because it features two teams that I do NOT want to win, or do I watch it anyway, simply for the cultural significance? (Note: By “Big Game” I actually mean “Super Bowl,” but I’ve noticed that apparently nobody is legally allowed to refer to it as the Super Bowl except for the NFL, so every advertiser, radio station, supermarket, and car wash refers to it as the “Big Game,” so as not to risk the wrath of Roger Goodell and his legal hounds of hell. Of course, I already mentioned the phrase “Super Bowl” twice in the last sentence, so I guess the cat’s out of the bag and I’ll keep on referring to it that way for the rest of this blog post, despite the fact that my arrest is now imminent.)

There have been occasions when I have rooted for Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in the past, but those days are long gone. At this point I have grown sick of him and his winning ways, and his smug smile, and his Hollywood good looks, and his avocado ice cream. Fine, I’ll admit that he’s the GOAT, but I want that GOAT sacrificed already! I have no interest in seeing him and his merry band of Patriots win yet another Super Bowl.

Then there’s their opponent, the Philadelphia Eagles, who at first glance might seem like the obvious choice to root for, as they are big underdogs with their backup quarterback, Nick Foles, having to make the start for the injured Carson Wentz. But here’s the problem—I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan and thus the sworn enemy of the Philadelphia Eagles and the other teams in the NFC East Division that do not have a star on their helmets. I have been conditioned since birth to despise the Eagles with every fiber of my being, and at times have even borrowed fibers from other people’s beings so I can hate them some more. There is simply no way I can root for them to win.

Yet watching the Super Bowl is a tradition for me and the idea of completely missing it for the first time feels just plain wrong.  So what am I to do? Do I just watch the commercials and turn it off during the actual game? Do I slide in a video of Super Bowl XXX, when the Cowboys gloriously beat the Steelers 27-17 and watch that instead? Do I watch the game anyway, despite despising both teams, and root for the Goodyear Blimp to crash onto the field and end the game early? Or do I just watch a Three Stooges marathon instead, so I get to see an entirely different brand of violence for four straight hours?

These are the options I will be pondering for the next seven days. In the meantime, I’ll start stocking up on junk food just to play it safe.

A Cool MAD Moment

Like most dads, I want my sons to think I’m cool. And like most dads, my sons think I’m about as cool as a convection oven. When I try to act cool in their presence, they mostly think I’m goofy and embarrassing. But I’ve never minded this, because I have always had an ace up my sleeve that I was waiting to play. Finally, after eleven years of fatherhood, I was able to play that ace.

From age 20 to 25, I worked on the editorial staff at MAD Magazine, and for about fifteen years after that, I continued to write for them on a freelance basis. (To read a previous blog entry about the incredibly true tales of my time at MAD, click this link here: this link here.) Very few people are impressed by this information—nor do I try to use it to impress folks—but the majority of those who are impressed are the ones who read the magazine faithfully many years ago and have fond memories of secretly flipping through its pages under their bed covers when they were supposed to be asleep. These folks usually ask me if I ever met Al Jaffee (yes) or Don Martin (no) and wax nostalgic about the magazine.

But every once in a while I have had occasion to meet a preteen who is an active reader of the magazine. These are generally children of friends who I meet at a social gathering. The parent usually introduces me to their child with this line: “This is my friend, Andrew. He used to write for MAD Magazine.” The kid inevitably reacts like they were just introduced to a rock star—their jaw drops, they swoon, and they get tongue-tied. The parent then bales them out and tells them to go play in their room. These brief episodes, awkward as they are, inevitably give me an ego boost. Being reacted to like you’re a rock star (even when you’re the furthest thing from one) tends to do that.

My association with MAD is something that I have never gone out of my way to mention to my own kids. It is not exactly something that they would have cared about when they were younger, and with all of the MAD books and magazines on our shelves, I figured they would eventually discover this information on their own, anyway. Secretly, I looked forward to the day that my kids would look at me the same way that my friends’ kids did, and for a brief moment they might think, “Holy cow, dad is a rock star!”

About a month ago, my long range plan finally came to fruition.

My sons, who are now 11 and 8, are both voracious readers. Chapter books, graphic novels, young adult fiction, and the occasional non-fiction books on topics of interest are all in their wheelhouse. The challenge is, our house can only fit so many books. They have hundreds of paperbacks on their shelves and are often in possession of library books, but even so, there are times when they have simply run out of reading material and start wandering around the house looking for new words to read. On one such occasion my 11-year-old found himself looking up at a high shelf on our bookcase in the den that was loaded with MAD paperbacks.

“Could I read one of those?” he asked, pointing to the MADs.

“Hmmm. I guess so,” I said, looking at the titles.

I wondered how to start him off on this journey. The books he was pointing to were mostly from the 60s and 70s and I knew that the vast majority of references, to things like Watergate and flower power, would go completely over his head. I saw a “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” book and figured those gags were pretty timeless. I pulled it off the shelf and handed it to him. Back he went to his room.

A couple of hours later he came out and asked if he could have another one.

“Did you like it?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was pretty funny,” he said; so I grabbed another off the shelf and away he went.

In short order my older son was devouring the MAD paperbacks and sharing them with his younger brother. Soon, they had gone through all of the paperbacks (Nixon references and all) and asked about the magazines. Again, I decided to be strategic about how to start them out.

For a short period of time (2005 – 2009) MAD produced another magazine called MAD Kids, which was geared toward a slightly younger audience. I figured that showing them those magazines first would be a good way to segue them into the parent publication. I gave them each an issue of the mag and sent them on their way. They read them. They exchanged them. They enjoyed them.

What they didn’t know about the magazines I had handed them was that they each contained an article I had written. I was waiting to see if either of them would stumble across this fact on their own, but alas, they never seemed to pay attention to the bylines. Apparently I would have to nudge them in the right direction.

I sat myself down near my younger son as he read one of the magazines. After a few minutes he got to the article I had written in that issue. He read through it (sadly, with no particular reaction) and was about to turn the page when I asked, “Did you notice who wrote that article?”

He started looking around for the byline (they put it in really tiny print) and eventually said, “Bob Staake.”

“Well, that’s the artist,” I said. “The writer’s name is next to it.”

My son looked at the name next to it and his eyes practically bulged out of his head. He looked up at me with a gigantic grin plastered on his face, then looked back down at the mag and proceeded to reread the article—this time laughing at all the gags. When his older brother walked into the room moments later he ran over to him and said, “Look, look! Dad wrote this!” pointing frantically to the byline.

My older son looked quizzically at the magazine for a moment before he could focus on what his little brother was showing him. Once he focused on the byline his reaction was almost identical to that of his brother’s—eyes bulging, grin taking over his face and a quick double take, as he looked from the magazine, to me, and back at the magazine. He also reread the article, but then went on to something else.

And that was pretty much it. There was no extended adulation, no makeshift parades and no asking for my autograph. But what there was, were a few moments when both my sons thought I was cool. Fleeting, yes—but worth the eleven year wait.