In a Truth Social post, President Trump criticized the Smithsonian for what he saw as the institution’s overemphasis on the evils of slavery in the antebellum American South.
One of the biggest problems of the culture wars is that they drive our culture to perverse extremes.
For a long time, under the influence of leftwing political correctness, every mention of a white historical figure had to be qualified. “He did not believe in the equality of the races,” (Woodrow Wilson). “She had bad things to say about Native Americans.” (Laura Ingalls Wilder). Et cetera.
And then there was the foolish sobriquet, “dead white males”. Yes, much of western civilization is built on the deeds and writings of “dead white males”. So what? I’ve noticed that few of the people making this complaint seem eager to move to Nigeria or Bangladesh. Even the American liberals who threaten to flee America in the wake of the 2024 election want to go to Canada, or some European destination.
Yes, political correctness has reached some idiotic nadirs in the last twenty years or so. And we haven’t even talked about pronoun rules.
But speech codes and ideological orthodoxy aren’t limited to pasty American liberals with blue hair. Political correctness is, at the end of the day, merely a desire to see complex truths in simplistic terms, a refusal to acknowledge any fact that contradicts a particular narrative.
The history of every major civilization and nation is a mixture of good and bad. Islamic civilization preserved the knowledge of the ancient Greeks during the Middle Ages…Islamic civilization also practiced slavery into the 20th century, and Muslim nations oppress women to this day.
The British Empire discouraged the barbaric practice of sati on the Indian subcontinent. The British Empire also extracted the wealth of many of the nations it occupied. But…the British must have been doing something right, or there would not be so much Indian and Pakistani immigration to the UK.
The same contradictions exist within tribal cultures. If you think that Native Americans were peace-loving environmentalists (another simplistic, politically correct narrative), you need to learn more about the history of the Comanches.
The United States, likewise, is neither a pure “City on a Hill”, nor an oppressive hellhole. (Oppressive hellholes need fences to keep people in. We need fences to keep people out.)
American history is a mixture of good and bad, idealism and cynicism. We are welcoming of strangers…to a point. Just like people in Latin America. (Read this post.)
Slavery, with all of its evils, is a part of our history. Slavery should be included in the displays of the Smithsonian.
Yes, slavery was a contradiction of America’s explicit foundational commitment to freedom and equality. Americans should learn about it anyway. I do not want to see the political correctness of the left (which has annoyed me for decades now) be replaced by a political correctness of the right.
I discovered the music of Kansas in the early 1980s, as I was entering high school. By that time, Kansas already had eight studio albums, including the new one at the time, Vinyl Confessions. I eventually purchased their entire back catalog.
I knew immediately that Kansas’s musicwas “different”. Whereas Van Halen was singing about beer and women, the typical Kansas song dealt with spiritual and philosophical themes.
Some Kansas songs are so intellectual that I didn’t connect the dots until years later.For example: “Journey from Mariabronn” on the band’s 1974 debut album, takes its inspiration from Narcissus and Goldmund, a 1930 Herman Hesse novel set in medieval Germany.
I happened to read this novel just a few years ago, when I was already well into my fifties. I had a classic “ah-hah” moment when I made the connection between the Hesse novel and the Kansas song—which I’d enjoyed in partial ignorance for all those years.
Kansas songs are full of Easter eggs like that.
The above documentary covers Kansas from its foundation, through the height of the band’s commercial and critical success in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, Kansas suffered a decline, as the group’s members disagreed on their creative direction. (I’ve written a post about that here.)
All musical acts have their ups and downs, though, and none stays at the top of the heap forever. Kansas remains one of my favorite bands, more than 40 years after I first discovered them.
Fox News reports that some young women (or, more likely, their parents) now spend up to $20,000 for membership in a sorority.
Sorority rush has become a business. And I’m not just talking about the dance routines you see on TikTok. There is now a market for “sorority rush coaches”. Yes, that is exactly what it sounds like.
I attended college in the late 1980s and graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1991. I never even thought about joining a fraternity. I wouldn’t have joined had I been begged to join. But that’s because I’ve never been a joiner.
This isn’t to say that I think less of people who seek group affiliation in a fraternity or sorority. We’re all wired up differently.
One of my friends, whom I ran track with, was in a sorority at Ohio University for four years. More than thirty years later, she speaks positively of the experience. She still attends annual reunions at OU. Her best girlfriends are women she met during her sorority years.
But sorority life did not limit or define her. My friend has also had a long, happy marriage. She and her husband raised three well-adjusted children, who are all young adults now. Her eldest daughter recently became engaged.
And I’m sure she spent some money on her sorority membership back in the late 1980s. But nothing like $20K just to join (even when you factor in inflation).
In the years since my youth, the sorority rush has undergone a process I might call ridiculization. What was once measured and moderate has become overblown, excessive…and downright ridiculous.
The sorority rush is not the only aspect of American life that has been ridiculized, of course. Pet culture, political correctness, and youth sports have been ridiculized, too. They have been carried to excess, to the point where a person my age cannot even measure them against the yardstick of what they used to be.
The Internet is at least partly to blame. Online spaces create echo chambers, where people dedicated to a particular passion—dogs, social justice, or select soccer—can run wild without any moderating influences.
The result is the dog owner who expects to take his German Shepard into restaurants for people. Or the social justice warrior demanding that you specify your pronouns on your social media accounts. Or youth sports that become unaffordable for working-class families. Such are the results of Internet-driven ridiculization.
Or, in yet another case, the sorority membership that comes with a $20K, upfront investment.
I’ve been reading more short stories of late. I find that I often enjoy them more than novels. A good short story contains no fluff, no filler. Short stories, moreover, are well-suited to this era of cell phones and short attention spans.
Short stories used to be almost as popular as novels, back when Americans read middlebrow, general interest magazines. (F. Scott Fitzgerald earned most of his income from short story sales.)
But that was in the distant past. For as long as anyone can remember, every fiction writer has dreamed of being a bestselling novelist. Publishers have been wary of short fiction collections, unless every story in the collection was authored by Stephen King.
I recently picked up The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Amor Towles and Jenny Minton Quigley. I bought the audiobook edition, so I listened to these stories as I mowed my lawn and did my bench press sets in the gym.
This collection contains a strong mix of stories. This isn’t to say that every story is a gem. As is always the case with multi-author anthologies, the reader’s mileage may vary. There were a few stories in this collection that left me cold. But most of them are good, and a handful of the stories are very good.
My favorites were:
“Hiding Spot” by Caroline Kim
“The Paper Artist” by E. K. Ota
“The Dark” by Jess Walter
Recommended reading…especially if you’ve been waiting for the right time to jump back into short-story reading.
Since the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, I’ve been reading the empty-headed media assessments of the meeting. The journalistic class is mostly upset that President Trump was unable to undo all the grievances between Ukraine and Russia, which literally go back to the Middle Ages.
There was, however, a time when summit meetings between Washington and Moscow mostly concerned Moscow’s relationship with us—and not its satellite countries. At this 1987 meeting to discuss the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged jokes before the cameras and the press corps.
Guess what was not on the agenda here? Ukraine. In 1987, Moscow’s domination of Ukraine was taken for granted in the West. No one over here was thinking about Ukrainian independence in 1987. No one cared which flag flew over the Crimean Peninsula. (It was the Soviet flag, in those days.)
This 1987 summit was about reducing the nuclear arms that threatened the entire planet. Nuclear arms still threaten the entire planet, by the way; but nuclear war has ceased to be a fashionable concern. (Ukraine’s 1991 borders are deemed far more important.)
Ronald Reagan did not speak Russian in any meaningful sense, but he learned to pronounce a specific Russian proverb with reasonable accuracy:
Доверяй, но проверяй
Pronounced, Doveryai, no proveryai, this translates into English as “Trust, but verify.”
Reagan was very pleased with himself for having learned this Russian proverb, and perhaps he overused the line a bit. But Gorbachev was a good sport about it; and exchanges like the one above marked improving superpower relations during the late Cold War era.
The culture wars bring some odd contrasts, especially at the level of local government.
Here in Cincinnati, the Mogadishu of the Midwest, at least one member of the city’s Democrat-dominated government openly sided with a mob of criminals who beat a man and a woman senseless last month. Officials in Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago clearly cannot control the crime in their midst. Yet they resist the Trump administration’s attempts to bring about law and order.
And then there is Virginia Beach. A Republican lawmaker in the conservative enclave has sponsored a resolution which reads, in part:
“Along Atlantic Avenue, there has been a proliferation of indecent and/or vulgar T-shirts and displays in storefronts….The proliferation of such displays creates an unwelcoming environment for the very families to whom the city markets itself and the city’s residents.”
Officials said the "vulgar merchandise" is tarnishing the area’s family-friendly image. https://t.co/BBTAHIvqxv
What is meant by “vulgar”? Is a beachside shop peddling porn DVDs and sex toys to the family-friendly beachgoers of Virginia Beach?
No, it seems that we’re mostly talking about women’s shorts with naughty slogans printed on the rear. The slogans “All You Can Eat” and “It Ain’t Going to Spank Itself” have particularly offended the morally righteous.
I’m going to return to my usual yardstick, when assessing the cultural madness of the twenty-first century: the saner era of the late 20th century, when Americans of all political, racial, and religious persuasions managed to get along so much better. The era of live-and-let-live.
During the conservative Reagan years, I’m sure I saw attire with slogans of a similar bent. Back in those days, someone was marketing women’s shorts and halter tops with the words “Hot Stuff” boldly emblazoned for all to see.
Women’s shorts with the slogan “It Ain’t Going to Spank Itself” is not the sort of thing that the average woman is ever going to wear, regardless of how much you market it at her. This is especially true of the younger generation of women, who have been trained to see microaggressions and toxic masculinity in every flirtatious tone and lingering glance.
Such merchandise mostly gets purchased as gag gifts. Like those 50th birthday shirts that read, “WTF: Who’s Turning Fifty?”
When was the last time you actually saw a person where a shirt with such a slogan in public? Such items spend most of their lives in the left-hand bottom drawers of bureaus. They turn up, years later, when you’re cleaning out the closet.
Unless, of course, Republicans—having transformed themselves into humorless, prudish scolds—provoke the law of reverse psychology. Under ordinary circumstances, approximately zero percent of the female American population is going to wear a pair of shorts inviting random male passersby to smack her on the rump. That could change if finger-wagging Republicans transform such shorts into statements of rebellion.
Although some writers are athletic, writers as a group are not known for their rock-hard physiques. There is something about the writing bug that rarely overlaps with athletic ambitions, and a yen for physical excellence.
I occasionally lurk in writers’ forums on Facebook. Recently a number of gravitationally challenged writers have been touting their Ozempic-driven weight losses.
I’ve admittedly never been female, LGBTQ, or black, so I tend to exercise caution when commenting publicly on issues unique to those demographics.
I have, however, been fat.
When I was in my early teens, I put on about 50 lbs of unnecessary weight. The reasons were not difficult to discern: I ate too much and moved too little.
Fortunately, there was a happy ending. I developed a love for distance running and weightlifting. I also began to eat a healthy diet.
I’m no Calvin Klein underwear model; but at the age of 57, I weigh roughly what I did when I graduated high school (post-weight loss). I still run and lift weights. I have a low heart rate and low blood pressure.
When I hear fellow writers talk about how much weight they’ve lost with Ozempic, I often want to suggest that my approach is the better and the healthier one. (It is also the approach that avoids giving more of my money to Big Pharma.)
But writers are a notoriously sensitive bunch. Nor do I want to be accused of the dreaded “mansplaining” (which is basically a synonym for pointing out any inconvenient or unwelcome fact or opinion to a female interlocutor).
But we are rapidly learning that Ozempic is not the “wonder drug” we thought it was. The drug has recently been linked to muscle loss. Now it is also believed to cause “rare but serious eye problems”.
We each need to make individual decisions about our health. I have never lost sight of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is as money-driven and capitalist as any other industry. I therefore approach all the pharmaceutical industry’s sales pitches with extreme caution. Big Pharma CEOs may have their bonuses and stock options on the line, but you are the one who is risking your health and wellbeing when you submit to yet another overhyped injection or pill.
If you can manage it, good old-fashioned dieting and exercise are still the best methods for losing weight, and maintaining weight. And you might get the additional psychological benefits of runner’s high.
-ET
Fitness expert Jillian Michaels is sounding the alarm on Ozempic's dangerous side effects that the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want you to know about.
Tomorrow President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska. The ongoing war in Ukraine will be the primary topic—and the thorny question of whether the Kyiv government will agree to swap land for peace, as President Trump proposes.
As an American—as a human being—I want the war and the bloodshed to end.
Do I honestly care about the reestablishment of Ukraine’s 1991 borders? I would love to wax self-righteous, and say that this is of paramount importance to me.
But it is not. In my lifetime, no fewer than three flags—the Soviet flag, the Ukrainian flag, and the Russian flag—have flown over the Crimean Peninsula. For the first 23 years of my life, Russia and Ukraine were part of the same country—as they had been since 1791.
I really don’t care where they draw the borders, I just want the war to end. (Study the history of that region: the borders have been in a constant state of flux since the Middle Ages.)
The year before Ukraine effectively became our 51st state, the US bugged out of Afghanistan, a country where we had spent $2.313 trillion and lost 2,459 American lives. In doing so, we subjected a nation of 42 million to the Islamic dictatorship of the Taliban. I will get worked up about Ukraine’s 1991 borders when you agree that we should go back and “finish the job” in Afghanistan.
Americans who want to support the Kyiv government “no matter what” are really saying that they want to “fight until the last Ukrainian”. No American wants to die over where they draw the final line in the Donbas. (Be honest: did you even know that the Donbas existed in 2021?)
And then there is the matter of nuclear brinkmanship. The US and Russia are both armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles. In the current atmosphere of tensions, all it takes is one mistake, and the world ends.
In recent decades, the risk of nuclear war has ceased to be a fashionable concern. People would rather listen to that moppet from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, scold suburbanites about their gasoline consumption. I’m not unsympathetic to climate change concerns. But a nuclear war would destroy the entire ecosystem, and make our planet unlivable, in a matter of hours. Which is the greater threat? Nuclear war…or your neighbor’s SUV?
Nation-building, and going abroad looking for dragons to slay, are the preoccupations of an empire. The United States is a republic, and we have plenty of problems here at home to occupy our time, energy, and resources. We have no “side” in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, other than that of peacemaker.
Do we need to talk more about Sidney Sweeney, that jeans ad, and the beauty battlefield of the culture wars? (And why didn’t I buy stock in American Eagle a few months ago?)
With this being rush season, sororities have now been enlisted as combatants, too: perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not. (Watch the video above.)
I dislike the idea that everything—including dancing college coeds—has to become a lever in the culture wars.
I also wondered aloud a few weeks ago how significant all that liberal “outrage” really was. Yes, Democrats are outraged about Trump, ICE, forceful crimefighting in our big cities…and Trump. How many are really all that worked up about jeans ads and sorority dance routines? I honestly wonder.
What we are seeing now is a conservative backlash. For roughly the past decade, media and advertising companies have tried to redefine beauty.
And no—this was never primarily about race. Naomi Campbell took off in the 1980s, Tyra Banks in the 1990s.
Beauty is not egalitarian, for either women or men. As I pointed out before, I’m not holding my breath for any offers to be a Men’s Health cover model. I don’t consider myself chopped liver, exactly, but I’m realistic. I’m 57 years old, bald, and ordinary-looking. I lack the physical characteristics to be a model. I wouldn’t have been much of a candidate when I was 19, either. Where modeling is concerned, many are called, but few are chosen.
That all said, I welcome the day when the normal can just be normal again, without being prefaced by the words, “Liberals are losing their minds over…” or something similar.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, that quintessential teen movie of the first half of the 1980s, hit the theaters 43 years ago today, on August 13, 1982.
On that date I had just turned fourteen. I did not see Fast Times in the cinema. (I could not even drive yet.) I did catch the movie a few months later, on cable. By that time, it had become a must-see movie for anyone among the teenage set.
I liked the movie then, and not just because of the iconic scene in which Phoebe Cates emerges from the pool. Even at that age, I could tell that Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a thoughtful teen movie, as oxymoronic as that sounds.
The movie does contain explicit sex scenes, especially by today’s less tolerant cinematic standards. Fast Times originally received an X rating. The film was reedited to receive an R rating. Primarily because of the sex, all of the “teens” in this film were already adult actors by the time production began. (Jennifer Jason Leigh was almost twenty years old when she portrayed the 15-year-old Stacy Hamilton.)
And yes, that Phoebe Cates pool scene was unnecessary and tawdry, much as it delighted the 14-year-old version of me.
#OnThisDay American coming-of-age comedy film Fast Times at Ridgemont High released . August 13, #1982 Directed by Amy Heckerling in her feature directorial debut. it starred Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Brian Backer, Robert Romanus, and …. pic.twitter.com/AL2RH9sWiI
But underneath all the raunch and bawdy comedy, there is a message about hubris-driven teenage risk-taking, and the consequences that result. I would go so far as to call Fast Times at Ridgemont High a teensploitation film with a conservative message.
I watched this movie for a second time a few years ago. I was an adult in my fifties. The 1980s and high school were long behind me.
I thought the movie was even better the second time around.
I’m not the only one who believes that Fast Times at Ridgemont High stands the test of time. In 2005, the National Film Preservation Board recognized the movie as “culturally and historically significant”. This is one time when I agree with the consensus view.
Released August 13, 1982, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is an American coming-of-age teen comedy-drama film directed by Amy Heckerling and starring Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Brian Backer, Robert Romanus, and Ray Walston. pic.twitter.com/7TClCGleHH
A few years ago, a young woman I know was thinking about starting a business: she was going to breed cats for sale to potential pet owners.
No special angle or breed. Just cats.
She asked my opinion, and I talked her out of the idea.
I cited the basic law of supply and demand. The problem is too many cats that need homes—not too few.
I speak from experience here. I once had to find a home for a cat that I could no longer care for. I didn’t want to place the cat in a shelter, most of which euthanize the animals after a set number of weeks. (Yes, there are no-kill shelters. But these are notoriously full.)
This was a difficult task, even for an adorable cat, and an owner who knew many cat-lovers. The story ended happily. I found a very nice home for the cat. But it took some time and a lot of networking.
AI Writing Has Gotten To A Point It Can Emulate Famous Authors Like John Scalzi And Larry Corriea, And It's Pretty Crazy pic.twitter.com/6uIvRs2eAN
Can AI writing really emulate well-known science fiction writers like Larry Correia and John Scalzi, as the above article suggests?
Color me skeptical. All of the AI writing I’ve seen—without exception—is pretty lame.
Just like AI music and AI art, AI writing can produce superficial imitations that will fool the observer in limited samples. But the sham inevitably falls apart upon close inspection. We’ve all seen the AI “art” that contains human hands with six fingers, and human limbs that merge into inanimate objects. AI text is a lot like that, too.
The whole AI thing is very underwhelming, considering all the hype surrounding it.
But let’s look more specifically at AI fiction.The big problem with AI-written fiction isn’t merely its obvious quality problem (though this is a huge problem). Like the kitten-breeding business my friend was contemplating, AI-written fiction is a solution in search of a problem—like the vast majority of AI applications at the consumer level.
We have inadequate supplies of many commodities at the moment: life-saving drugs, clean energy sources, and affordable housing. For these things, demand exceeds supply.
But the world isn’t suffering from a lack of short stories, novels, or other long-form texts. As much as I would like to think otherwise.
In fact, for 99 percent of writers and publishers, the big challenge is marketing.
No—make that one hundred percent of writers and publishers. Millions of dollars go into the promotion of new titles from household names like Stephen King and John Grisham.
***
Who, then, is clamoring to read fiction written by software (even if software is theoretically able to come up with something resembling fiction)?
The answer is: no one.
Who is excited about AI-generated fiction? Lazy writers, and hucksters who are looking to sell pie-in-the sky promises like this:
“DRAFT A FULL BOOK IN AS LITTLE AS 30 MINUTES – YOUR NEW WRITING PARTNER IS HERE”
This is an actual sales pitch I received from an active player in the indie author-guru sphere. The title of the course was: AI Bestsellers for Authors.
Somehow, I had gotten on this author-course peddler’s mailing list. I had occasionally skimmed his newsletters. I had put off removing myself from his email list, because there was the occasional grain of wheat among the sales pitch chaff.
But when I saw this particular sales pitch in my email inbox, I was like: Aw, hell no. I removed myself from his list that very moment.
The enshitification of the Internet, driven by AI, is already becoming a hot topic. Sadly, some people are eager to bring AI-driven enshitification to indie publishing, too.
If you’re a writer, don’t fall for it. And don’t become part of the problem, either.
The Wedding Singer (1998), starring Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, is an early example of 1980s nostalgia in film. The tagline of the movie is “He’s gonna party like it’s 1985.”
Tagline: “He’s gonna party like it’s 1985.”
I came across the Internet video below, in which a group of teens from 1985 time-travel to 2025, and return with tales of how dismal the future is, four decades hence. More 80s nostalgia centered on the year 1985.
And from a humorous angle, there is Bowling for Soup’s satirical song, “1985”.
I notice a trend here. When 1980s nostalgia is the topic, 1985 is often cited as the year that people would most want to return to.
From a macro perspective, there are ample reasons for this. In 1985, the US economic recovery was well underway. Ronald Reagan was beginning his second term in office.
In Moscow, a youthful reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev would be named Premier of the Soviet Union. A thaw in east-west relations began.
The year 1985 was a great year in music, too. There was so much good music in the mid-1980s, I’m not even going to attempt to list it all here.
In 1985 there was no social media, no culture wars (at least compared to nowadays), and no AI.
Don’t like Donald Trump? Well, in 1985 Donald Trump was a billionaire real estate developer in New York City. He was already famous, but apolitical and largely uncontroversial.
For me, 1985 was my junior and senior years of high school.
I was running track and cross country. I made it to the Ohio State High School Cross Country Championships that November.
Not everything was perfect for me, of course. I was a teenager, and I had my share of slings and arrows. But overall, I was content, and all seemed right with the wider world.
Perhaps a return to 1985 wouldn’t be such a bad thing, after all. Is anyone out there working on a time machine?
The early 1980s gave us a famous song named after a phone number: “867-5309”. Even if you do not remember the early 1980s, you are probably familiar with the song.
The song was alternatively known as “Jenny”. Often the song was identified with both names: 867-5309/Jenny.
In the song, a male narrator describes his obsession with a woman named “Jenny”, whose phone number (867-5309) was written on a wall, presumably in a men’s room. (That was a common prank back in the 1970s and early 1980s—writing random women’s names and phone numbers on the walls of men’s rooms. Don’t ask me why.)
Tommy Tutone is the name of the musical act that performed 867-5309.
Tommy Tutone is not a single artist, but a California-based group. The original lineup of Tommy Tutone was formed in 1978. The band still exists today. Tommy Tutone released six studio albums between 1980 and 2019. But the band owes most of its name recognition to 867-5309.
867-5309/Jenny was released on November 16, 1981. By the end of the following year, everyone with an FM radio had heard it.
867-5309 was, and remains, a cultural phenomenon. Not everyone was pleased about the song’s fame, however. After the song became popular, homeowners who happened to have been assigned the number began receiving prank phone calls. Many changed their numbers. Some even unplugged their phones in desperation.
Still others went out of their way to acquire the suddenly famous seven digits. Now that the initial fervor over the song has long since died down, this is the more common trend. It would probably be difficult—if not impossible—for you to obtain 867-5309 as your personal phone number. But your odds will increase in less populated areas, and as the time between the heyday of the song and the present year continues to grow.
In late 1981, I was in the eighth grade in Cincinnati, Ohio. One morning—it must have been a few weeks before the Christmas holidays—I heard a girl in my homeroom say my name. When I turned around, she had a smile on her face. I sensed good things ahead.
I’ll call her Denise. This is not her real name—but Denise is not too far from her real name, either. Denise is, moreover, a very typical name for a 13-year-old Gen X girl in 1981.
“There’s a girl who’s noticed you,” Denise informed me. “She wants to go out with you. She wants you to call her.”
This was not exactly what I had been expecting, but I was game.
“Who?” I said. “What’s her name?”
“Jenny,” Denise said.
I should have been suspicious at this point—or at least skeptical. In the junior high microcosm in which Denise and I both lived, there weren’t many strangers. It would have been difficult to imagine a scenario in which an unknown girl would have noticed me, and sought out Denise as an intermediary.
But I was a 13-year-old boy in the full flush of puberty. When you are a young male in that state, hope springs eternal.
At this point Denise produced a slip of paper. I unfolded the paper. In Denise’s feminine cursive was the name “Jenny” and the phone number 867-5309.
Did I start laughing aloud at the joke? Did I rage at this Lucy-pulling-away-the-football, Charlie Brown moment?
Not exactly. Had nothing else been explained to me, I probably would have called the number and asked for “Jenny”.
But Denise was unable to control her laughter any longer. She burst into giggles.
“Jenny!” she prompted. “Eight-six-seven, five-three-oh-nine! Don’t you get it?”
***
But I didn’t get it, as you may have gathered. In late November or early December of 1981, I hadn’t yet heard the song.
I can be forgiven for this oversight, given that it was still late 1981. The song didn’t really hit its stride in the US market until early 1982.
In the meantime, I had ruined Denise’s joke. She explained to me that there was no Jenny, that the name and the phone number were based on a pop song.
“Oh,” I said.
I was mildly disappointed. But something had told me at the outset, perhaps, that something was up.
Which brings us to the next question: What did I learn from this?
Lessons Learned
Two things.
The first lesson I learned was that if a proposition sounds too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.
Fast-forward 40-plus years. I often read news reports about men falling prey to romance scams. This usually happens when a relatively plain man is approached on the Internet by an improbably beautiful young woman from Azerbaijan, Serbia, China, or some other faraway location.
She gradually gains his trust, and eventually convinces him to invest in cryptocurrency—always through a “special” website, that only she knows about. Then his money disappears, along with the beautiful woman on the Internet.
Similar versions of this scam have been targeted at women. In this case, an improbably attractive man is used as the “bait”.
Many of the people who fall for the online romance scams are well-educated. But for whatever reason, they never acquired a healthy sense of skepticism.
I learned about the need for skepticism in 1981, in my 8th-grade homeroom. I am occasionally approached on Facebook by unknown individuals representing themselves as attractive young women. When this happens, I always block them, and I think about “Jenny” in 1981.
Oh, my! A beautiful young woman on X who wants to befriend me! Note my response. (I blocked the person shortly afterward.)
The second lesson I learned is: don’t take yourself too seriously. At some time or another, each of us is going to find ourselves the object of someone’s practical joke. Or we may be deceived when the motive is something other than humor. This will happen to you. When it does, dust yourself off, learn the appropriate lessons, and move on.
The goal is simply to avoid playing that role too often. A healthy sense of skepticism is one of the primary tools you can employ, to avoid playing the dupe.
Postscript: What about Denise?
Denise and I are still loosely in contact via Facebook. A few years ago, when we were both already in our fifties, I mentioned this incident to her and asked if she remembered it. She claimed not to recall the conversation or her joke, and I believe her.
Nor do I bear any ill will for that long-ago prank between two 13-year-olds, disappointed though I was at the time. In the many years since then, I’ve amply benefited from the lessons learned.
Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
A new piece of artwork for 12 Hours of Halloween. (This was made for the “A + content” section of the Amazon listing, so the book cover is deliberately excluded from the graphic.)
As suggested in the graphic, most of the action in 12 Hours of Halloween takes place on October 31, 1980.
This is a coming-of-age supernatural horror story, about three young friends who endure a 12-hour, supernatural curse on the first Halloween night of the 1980s.
I don’t do graphic violence, for the most part. (There is no explicit sex in my books, either.) Think: a spooky version of a Ray Bradbury story, with a few nods to some of the classic horror films from the 1980s.
