The Grunge On Your Sponge

While more important folks are busy dissecting the pressing issues of our time, like Taliban movements in Pakistan, wanton rescissions by health insurers and the contents of Michael Jackson’s medicine cabinet, I’m contemplating disgusting pathogens like E.coli, salmonella and campylobacter. These tiny buggers can make you sicker than a Sarah Palin speech. And they are currently colonizing that hunk of cellulose sitting next to your kitchen sink. You know, the thing you use to wipe down your utensils, dishes, countertops and cutting boards all day long.

If you haven’t disinfected your kitchen sponge recently, or if you just thought to yourself, “What does he mean, disinfect my kitchen sponge?” consider yourself lucky if you’ve avoided hugging your toilet with trembling hands.

Your kitchen the petrie dish
While everyone assumes that bathrooms are havens for germs, kitchens tend to harbor more bacteria, according to the experts at WebMD. And these vile organisms (the bacteria, not the WebMD experts) aren’t just on your sponge. They’re currently reproducing like Hollywood sequels on cabinet knobs, refrigerator handles, cutting boards and the drain in your sink. (Here’s a stomach-turning factoid from Charles Gerba, a professor of microbiology at University of Arizona in Tucson: the average kitchen cutting board has about 200 percent more fecal bacteria than the average toilet seat. Anyone for seconds of the chopped salad?)

You think the Octomom is prolific? Consider that one single bacteria cell can have more than 8 million babies in less than 24 hours. Now, the number of bacteria it takes to make you sick can range from as few as 10 to as many as several million. You do the math. Then reach for the Pepto-Bismol.

And if you pride yourself on your pristine, shiny kitchen, the dirty little secret is kitchens that look the cleanest are often the filthiest, germ-wise. That’s because people who wipe their counters a lot tend to spread bacteria all over the place (from their infected, bio-hazard sponges). In a University of Arizona study, the “cleanest” kitchens were those of bachelors who never wiped up and just put dirty dishes in the sink. Take that, mom!

Clean up your act
Now that your face is scrunched up like you were just forced to sit through a John Tesh concert, you’re probably thinking, “How can I abort these things? Does NARAL know about this?”

Fortunately, scientists at Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Beltsville, Maryland tested several methods for getting rid of harmful microbes hiding in reused sponges. First, they soaked sponges at room temperature in a solution of ground beef and lab growth medium (I think this is the newest menu item at KFC) to reach a scientific “ewww” factor of 20 million microbes per sponge. Then they treated each sponge in one of five ways: soaked for 3 minutes in a 10 percent chlorine bleach solution, soaked for 1 minute in lemon juice or deionized water, heated in a microwave for one minute, placed in a dishwasher with a drying cycle, or just left alone on the counter to become a sci-fi special effect.

The winning treatment? Microwaving killed 99.99999 percent of bacteria. Nuking also got rid of yeast and molds. The dishwasher was a close second, killing 99.9998 percent. But who wants to run a full dishwashing cycle to clean a lonely sponge?

So throw your sponge into the microwave for a minute on high before you go to bed each night. You’ll sleep better knowing the military won’t come knocking at your door requesting your sponge for use in germ warfare research.

Do I Know You? Uhhhh, No

Unless you’re an international spy or the host of your own travelogue TV show, you likely spend most of your waking hours within the same basic geographical areas. I’m an extreme example. I work at home in idyllic Topanga Canyon, California, miles away from civilization, so my primary geographical footprint can be measured in square yards rather than square miles—sometimes for several days running.

But even people who commute to a real job tend to spend most of their time in fairly tightly contained locales. They take the same routes to and from the office. They stop at the same Starbucks for insanely overpriced caffeinated beverages. They eat at the same restaurants. They shop at the same markets.

It’s the food markets I’d like to focus on (although my spooky observation is applicable to restaurants, too). I’ve noticed that whenever I stroll through my local Trader Joes, for example, I can look at the faces around me and honestly say that I’ve never seen any of the other patrons before in my entire life. Considering that most of the other customers undoubtedly shop at this same Trader Joes on a regular basis, it strikes me as positively Shyamalanian that every one of them is a total stranger to me. “I see new people.”

Wouldn’t you think that over time, I’d run into a few of the same shoppers every so often? Particularly if I’m shopping at a specific time of day? But noooo, these reliable Trader Joes disciples, who probably fill their carts with frozen pizza and Two Buck Chuck at least as often as I do, could have been bused in from Cucamonga and I wouldn’t know the difference. They’d still be as unknown to me as the stars of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

Try the experiment yourself. Over the next week, observe each of your fellow shoppers in the local supermarket and ask, “Do I know you?” (Do this quietly in your head to avoid involving security guards.) You’ll probably find yourself thinking, “Whoa, where did all these strange people come from and am I truly safe in their presence?”

Containing The Copywhiners

You’ve got an important marketing brochure that must hit the street in three weeks. You brief the copywriter on the requirements and make a point of mentioning the drop dead delivery date. He says, “Piece of cake,” as he floats out of the room absentmindedly humming the theme from Mission: Impossible. The day before the drop dead delivery date, Copydude sends over a half-finished draft littered with inaccuracies and typos that suggests he was hearing voices in his head instead of you explaining the project.

You point out to Copydude that his copy, well, sucks. He starts whining about his sick Aunt Vivian in Florida and how his dog ate a box of crayons and an entire jar of Vaseline and proceeded to perform the Technicolor squat and scoot all over the den and how you don’t understand the nuances of the creative process and…

Meanwhile, your deadline is mocking you and your brochure text is a mess.

Getting the copy you deserve—on time
There are a lot of flaky copywriters out there who never met a deadline they couldn’t blow off or a lame excuse they couldn’t milk. Talk to anyone who buys copy and you’ll hear stories of seemingly rational writers stomping their feet and throwing Tyson-esque tantrums when one of their precious adjectives is changed, or simply pulling a no-show that would make the cable guy proud. Let’s call them copywhiners. They come in both genders: Prima donnas and prima dons.

Why are so many copywriters so, uh, what’s the word…unreliable? Theories abound. One imaginary study found that long-term exposure to the incessant clackity-clack of computer keyboards caused chemical receptors in the brain to regress, turning normal writers into Adam Sandler. Another made up theory postulates that sitting alone for extended periods causes writers to misinterpret simple verbal commands, so that, “I need this delivered next Tuesday by nine,” is actually processed as, “If you deliver any Tuesday, that’ll be fine.”

Here are four critical actions copy buyers can take to minimize the whining:

Prepare a Creative Brief. Spell out the scope of the project, the marketing and creative objectives, audience, tone and manner, legal requirements, important copy points, and anything else you can think of that’s essential to the assignment. The more detail the better. A creative brief serves several purposes: First, it forces you to define your project. Second, it gives the writer clear directions and makes it easier for him or her to stay on track. Finally, it provides the hard evidence you need to fire a writer who delivers copy that’s about as accurate as a Shaquille O’Neal free throw.

Pin down costs and deliverables, up front. Get your writer to sign a budget and deliverables agreement. Then determine how charges for additional edits will be figured before they crop up. Of course, if you can find a good writer who will make as many edits as you need without additional charges, so much the better.

Establish a clear (but reasonable) delivery date. It doesn’t help matters if you ask for War and Peace in the time it takes to whip up a Starbucks latte. Give your writer enough time to get the job done right, factoring in extra hours for the inevitable edits.

Route drafts expeditiously. If the big boss has to sign off on the copy, don’t wait until the writer has carefully refined the draft like an oyster culturing a pearl to get her blessing. Try to keep everyone in the copy approval loop from day-one so you can avoid hearing the dreaded eleventh-hour, seventh draft pronouncement, “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Put the writing rules in writing
Even if you’re fortunate enough to employ a writer who spins phrases like Gore Vidal, exhibits a Dave Barry-like sense of humor, works as hard as James Brown, and is as loyal as a golden retriever, you’ll get higher quality copy and enjoy a more pleasant and efficient working relationship if you get everything in writing before you begin the writing.

Less Is More, More Or Less

A brief and wholly insignificant (to most of us, anyway, but not, I presume, to those involved) news item caught my eye recently. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only known musical work had its world premiere in Cambridge. At four bars, it lasts less than 30 seconds and is little more than a powerful, fiery flourish.

The prominent UK-born composer Anthony Powers was among those present at the premiere and when asked about the work, he stated matter-of-factly, “There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. We haven’t found a snatch of a lost great work. But it’s like the continuation of an incomplete sentence, as if he had started to say something and hadn’t the words to finish it, and turned to music. That’s what is really interesting.”

Hmmmm. What I find really interesting is that people of some renown got dressed up and left their homes to listen to an unremarkable 30-second composition written not by a composer but by a philosopher and then had the temerity to explain themselves with a statement that makes about as much sense as a mother dropping off her teenage son at Neverland for a play date with Michael.

But in this age of three-hour movies, four-hour baseball games, and 30-hour Senate filibusters, I was intrigued by the sublime beauty of brevity in artistic expressions. I’m not talking about how long it takes an artist to create their work, but rather how long (or in this case, short) it ends up being in its intended display. So I searched out a few examples where short is not only sweet, but interesting, enlightening, and, in some cases, entertaining.

Composing
Helen, have you seen my notes…?
Not to take anything away from Wittgenstein, but a legitimate composer, John Cage, wrote what has authoritatively been recorded by those arbiters of all things inane, the Guinness World Record folks, as the musical composition with the fewest number of notes: a 1952 piece called 4’33”, written “for any instrument” and consisting of no notes at all. Instead, the performer sits quietly on stage and the “music” is the noise created by the increasingly irritated and confused audience. If you’ve ever had the dubious honor of attending one of these performances, you have no doubt been thankful that the piece lasts just four minutes and 33 seconds.

The bugle calls, emotion swells
Beethoven stirs your soul. The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah can make people see God. But the one music performance that always wells up pure, raw, tear-streaked emotion in under a minute is the solitary bugler playing Taps. This eloquent and haunting melody traditionally played at funerals and memorial services achieves unparalleled emotional power with just 24 notes.

Writing
Fifty-Five Fiction for fun
At their best, short stories are wonderful examples of language economy and ideal entertainment for people who have so little free time in their frenetic lives that it would take them a year to read a full-length novel. But how short can a story be and still be considered a good story? One of my favorite Peanuts comic strips supplied one answer when Linus pleaded with Lucy to tell him a story and she grudgingly obliged with: “A man was born. He lived and died. The end.” Short, yes, but not very satisfying.

In the late eighties, Steve Moss invented a format that called for writers to create stories using no more than 55 words. These stories had to contain four elements:

1. A setting
2. A character or characters
3. Conflict
4. Resolution

The results of this so-called Fifty-Five Fiction contest were edited into a book called The World’s Shortest Stories. As Steve explains in his introduction, “This is storytelling at its very leanest, where each word is chosen with utmost care on its way to achieving its fullest effect. It’s what O. Henry might have conjured up if he’d had only the back of a business card to write upon.”

Here’s a taste of Fifty-Five Fiction:

All At Sea
By Rosemary Manchester

Her quick footsteps overhead awakened him. Fearful of passing ships, she’d slept on deck. Her caution irritated him: they had quarreled. He heard the splash. Ignoring her screams for help, he turned his radio louder. Then he wondered what had alarmed her. The huge tanker came swiftly, on collision course with the little sloop.

Haiku, haiku, I see you
Haiku is extreme diet poetry. This short, 17-syllable form, usually written in three lines with a 5-7-5 syllable count, focuses on a single, insightful moment. A well-executed haiku is rooted in the physical world of our senses, yet suggests something deeper, often evoking the mysterious, transitory nature of our spiritual existence.

Here’s a thought provoking example penned by my Wheaten terrier on a day when he was particularly bored, yet obviously experiencing a wave of Asian-inspired reflection:

I lift my leg and
Pee on each grass blade. Come, Spot
Sniff and know my soul

Speaking
Nothing is more excruciating than being stuck in a folding chair on a football field in inclement weather listening to a long and boring commencement address. It’s generally frowned upon for a graduate wearing a choir robe and goofy hat to walk out in the middle of one of these droning orations.

The brilliant cartoonist Garry Trudeau once suggested that the purpose of commencement speeches was to ensure that “outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they had been properly sedated.” A platitudinous commencement discourse will sedate an audience of thousands more completely than all the barbiturates in Ozzy Osbourne’s medicine cabinet.

But occasionally, graduates get lucky and the invited speaker takes brevity to new heights in the interest of allowing the antsy group to get on with their lives sooner rather than later.

There have been several extremely short commencement addresses. Winston Churchill, not necessarily known as a man of few words, once proclaimed simply, “Never, never, never, give up!” The eccentric painter Salvador Dali assured his place in the record book when he stood before his captive audience of impressionable young adults and said simply, “I will be so brief, I have already finished.”

But the big (little?) prize for shortest commencement speech must go to Nels H. Smith, governor of Wyoming from 1938-1943. When his turn came to speak, Smith rose from his chair, strode to the podium, and said: “You done good.” And then sat down.

Acting
I didn’t know you were in that film
The cameo is a well-established tradition in the movie business. It can make for great sport trying to spot the well-known star in a brief but disguised role, such as Robert De Niro in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, one of the best movies most people have never seen.

But it takes a special actor indeed to receive an Oscar for what could almost pass as an extended cameo. In 1998, Judi Dench won Best Supporting Actress for her less than eight minutes of screen time as Queen Elisabeth in Shakespeare In Love. Nothing like 10 pounds of pancake makeup, an elaborate period wardrobe, and a proper English accent to seduce the Academy voters, eh?

Taking physical stature to new lows
Again using the Oscar as the test for legitimacy, I’m going to assume (perhaps incorrectly, but this isn’t a college thesis after all) that Linda Hunt was the shortest adult actor to win an Oscar for her portrayal of midget male photographer Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously.

Commercials
TV commercials have always been an irritant to everyone except those in the advertising business and their clients who pay the bills. Remember when VCRs became commonplace and people were so excited because they could now record their favorite show and fast forward through the annoying commercials? And then TIVO came along and advertisers were up in arms because they feared viewers would skip through commercials altogether.

Well, have you seen what passes for entertainment on TV these days? You’d be better off TIVOing the 15-second and 30-second commercial spots with the tricky editing and eye popping special effects and dumping the actual programming. For pure now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t creativity, TV commercials, especially foreign-produced spots, are like cinematic canapes—easy to consume and leaving you wanting more.

In conclusion…
There’s certainly nothing wrong in implanting yourself into a 1,500-page novel, or getting swept up in a call to arms by a fiery, impassioned speech, or successfully managing your bladder through a non-stop viewing of the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings. But sometimes, super short expressions of artistic brilliance can be quite satisfying, like seeing a shooting star, or witnessing the career arc of Fabio. Besides, if all concert performances ended as quickly as our friend Herr Wittgenstein’s, think of the extra time we’d have for bar hopping after the show.

I, The Jury

It’s finally happened. The Los Angeles County Court system has run out of retirees, and lonely folks with nothing better to do than sit stone faced in jury boxes throughout the county. So the judicial authorities are now recruiting doctors, lawyers, judges, and Hummer-driving neocons with a vengeance not seen since the Selective Service System went hunting for innocent young men during the Vietnam war era.

If you live in Los Angeles county, you’ve either recently been summoned or know someone who has. And every one of these otherwise upstanding, tax-paying citizens is frantically trying to figure out one thing: How the hell do I get out of this?

When you think about it, this is a job that wields great power. Who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to sit in judgment of a fellow human being? Countless people in our society claw and scrape, lie, cheat and steal to attain absolute power over others. Take politicians, for example. Or your sixth grade gym teacher. But an invitation to slam your fist on a table and shout, “He’s guilty, I say!” is about as welcome as termites and just about as hard to eliminate. Why is that?

One word: boredom. On second thought, I need a few more words: excruciating, stupefying, lobotomizing, put-a-stake-through-my-skull-and-bury-me-six-feet-under boredom. It’s not that we’re unwilling to perform our civic duty. It’s that we’re all deathly afraid of being sequestered in a windowless, airless room and forced to listen to a bunch of droning lawyers without being allowed to scream. Or even grimace.

Here’s just a taste of what I experienced after receiving my draft notice, er, Jury Summons: I show up in the Jury Assembly Room at 8:00 AM, where a United Nations-like cross section of Stepford Wives (and Husbands) are looking like they are at a funeral—their own. An hour of absolute black hole-like nothingness passes before a dour-faced guy says something, which I can’t hear probably because I’m suffering a temporary hearing loss caused by my head having slipped off my hands and hitting the table.

After another forty-five hours—wait, that can’t be right, they must have been minutes—Dour-Faced Man announces the need to separate the herd (into Guernsey and Holstein, or was it shirts and skins?—hey, now there’s an idea that might enliven the proceedings). Seems they need the Holsteins at another courthouse across town.

My Guernsey group is finally told to see what’s behind door number three which presumably is a courtroom but we aren’t sure because we have to wait outside in the bile-colored corridor for another 30 minutes. Once shuffle into the courtroom, we are given the opportunity to wait some more in chairs that make coach airline seats seem like Barcaloungers while experiencing varying degrees of deep vein thrombosis in our now useless legs.

The ensuing five hours then made what I just described seem like Mardi Gras on acid in comparison. Did I mention that the experience was, uh, melt-your-brain boring?

If the court systems across the country really want to get themselves off the “I-hate-this-more-than-Osama” list, they need to make the whole juror selection and serving process more interesting and challenging. They need a little Hollywood-style promotion. Here are my suggestions:

Competition—Inject some reality show animosity among jurors by making them compete for the right to sit in a special shiatsu massage chair in the jury box.
Better pay—$15 a day? Gimme a break. Consider each juror a consultant and pay them the same hourly rate as the defense attorney. That should make for shorter trials.
Spruce the place up—I realize we’re talking about a joint run by the government, the arbiter of architectural bad taste, and making a courtroom a pleasant place would be as easy as nailing Jello to a tree, but a few well-placed flower arrangements would do wonders.
Door prizes—Conduct a drawing at the end of each day and the winning juror gets to take home the defense table centerpiece.