In soap operas, the nadir of storytelling

Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra once observed that there is nothing so bad that you can't find something good in it.

The worst Cervantes had to contend with was an abundance of trashy stories about knight-errantry. Cervantes never once had to read "Jane Eyre" or, worse, watch a soap opera.

I have. Although "Jane Eyre" thankfully is in my past, for two weeks while I was on vacation, I was subjected twice daily to the modern-day horror called soap operas. Two weeks later, I still am suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from what I endured. I'll refer to these soaps as "Puerto Carlos" and "Major Hospital."

It's not as though I wanted to watch soap operas on vacation. I tried to do some writing, and I tried to do some reading, but just being in the same room as the TV set was enough to be sullied. It's like the time I played rugby in my school uniform, only I don't know of any laundry detergent that can remove these ugly marks from my psyche, no matter how hard I scrub.

The dreary flicker of the TV, the bad acting, the worse directing and the really terrible writing combined to drag me into the show with the same horrified fascination I feel driving past a car wreck. I couldn't look away no matter how hard I tried.

I was so appalled by what I was watching, I decided to call ABC from a morbid curiosity to know where they get their soap opera writer.. Apparently all the major networks, not just ABC, use a special test to find the right people for major soap-writing jobs. Anyone who has read books for pleasure and not just for a book report, who can name three presidents of the United States in any order, or who knows how to use the word "obviate" in a sentence, is disqualified.

Every now and then, someone with talent does slip through the cracks. When that happens, the networks neutralize them with specially trained directors who pick the most melodramatic facial expressions and postures the actors can assume and let the camera linger painfully for three or four seconds on them at the end of every scene.

Nothing worthwhile of the plot survives.

Did I say there's a plot? My mistake. Plots have a clear beginning, middle and end. Academicians claim there are three basic plots in all literature: man against man, man against himself, and man against God, although in each case the writer has tremendous freedom to define what man is, what God is, and what it means to work against something.

Soap operas lack plots; instead, they have storylines, which also happen to come in a set of three: sleeping with someone, planning to commit murder, and manipulating people. Sometimes the writers will try to get creative by combining the three.

On "Puerto Carlos," one of the storylines I saw involved the disappearance of Luke Stephan, who like everyone else on the show is manipulative and controlling.

As the story unfolds, about 12 minutes after Luke Stephan disappears, the city prosecutor decides he was murdered and immediately arrests Luke Stephan's neighbor Rufus for the crime, judging that the complete lack of evidence is merely proof of Rufus' criminal genius.

As viewers, we of course know that Rufus is innocent of foul play, because he was having an affair with the prosecutor's wife, teen-age daughter and their dog, a German shepherd named Muffie, when the alleged murder occurred. He can't use this as an alibi, because of the harm it would cause Muffie.

About a week later, those clever writers reveal that Luke Stephan simply ran off to use the bathroom when no one was looking.

When he finally finishes using the bathroom, he discovers that the toilet he used is in Paris, France. On his person are 40,000 Mexican pesos and a passport that identifies him as a German shepherd named Muffie.

But in order to lose viewers interested in Rufus' efforts to defend himself from charges of murder and stay free of Muffie's canine machinations, the writers also develop a number of other storylines, none especially relevant to his situation.

At the same time Rufus escapes from jail, Lucille's adopted 1-year-old daughter is kidnapped by her biological mother and taken to Kzakhastan, a woman named Charlie tries to kill the man she blames for her recent miscarriage, and 33 other people plot to take over the world, or at least the board of directors of Major Hospital.

Confusing? That's not even half of it. By the time our vacation ended, Luke Stephan had been thrown into the pound because he didn't have a dog license, Rufus had disappeared to escape being framed, Muffie had bitten the prosecutor on the leg, the kidnapped little girl was found at Walmart in a different set of clothes and with a new haircut, and the entire board of directors of Major Hospital quit when the hospital's snack machine ran out of yellow Zingers.

Now I'm not saying these things don't happen in real life -- although I honestly can't say I know of anyone they've happened to -- but if they happened as regularly in real life as they did on soap operas, Jerry Springer would be out of business.

Face to face with Tombstone's obsession

Vacations are a special event for a family. Done properly, they can create memories for the entire family to share with one another for years to come. Done poorly, they can create memories the family will be sharing with a therapist.

Planning a vacation therefore is an important process. Among the considerations are where to go, how to get there, and whether there is anyone you can stay with to avoid the cost of a hotel. Natasha, Evangeline and I just a week ago returned from our first major vacation as a family. Our answers to those questions, in order, were Arizona, flying and Natasha's mother.

Now many people think of Arizona as a desert state with a lot of sand and a lot of cacti. While that has some truth to it, Arizona also is home to the only pothole in the Union -- The Grand Canyon -- bigger than the one at the corner of Sandford Street and Commercial Avenue in New Brunswick, N.J.

The Grand Canyon is a truly inspiring site, carved through solid rock so we are told over millennia by the Colorado River, which in turn has the most dangerous and exciting rapids to go rafting on.

The colors at the Grand Canyon at sunset defy description. It is as though God creates a new master painting each evening, and when he calls the stars forth one by one, you are humbled to see how amazingly small and finite you really are.

I would go on, but I've never been to the Grand Canyon. Instead, we visited another site Arizona is famous for, the OK Corral. (Not to be confused with that famous church hymn, "The OK Chorale.")

The gunfight at the OK Corral probably is history's best-known and best-loved shoot-out. It's got all the elements of a crowd-pleaser. It's got guns. It's got bullets. It's got dead bodies piled up sky-high. It's got the law fighting the bad guys, and winning. Best of all, it's (relatively) true.

So it's no surprise that the gunfight has appeared in movies like the 1993 film "Tombstone" and the imaginatively named 1957 film "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," and in episodes of "Star Trek," "Dr. Who" and "Mr. Peabody."

If you believe Hollywood's rendition of Wyatt Earp, the late federal marshal was a hero who fought the cowboy gang and ended the reign of the lawless wealth-makes-right in the Old West.

This is a lie. That was not accomplished until 1985 in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider."

Wyatt Earp actually was little different from the Clantons and McLaurys, whom he, his brothers and Doc Holliday, fought at the OK Corral. The chief difference was that the Earps and Doc Holliday had badges. Otherwise, they pretty much were the same kind of thugs as the Clantons, except that Doc Holliday may have been even meaner.

Of course, it's hardly surprising that Hollywood would treat Wyatt Earp less than accurately. After all, "Tombstone" showed Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday firing a 12-gauge shotgun no fewer than three times without reloading, a task only slightly more believable than Gene Kelly getting 30 shots from a six-shooter, Roy Rogers shooting the guns from the desperadoes' hands, or a certain other cowboy actor being elected president.

Ironically, nearly every movie about the OK Corral was filmed, not at Tombstone, but more than an hour away in Old Tucson Studios. Still, Tombstone draws enough tourists that the city government has made it illegal to ask, "What would you like on your Tombstone?" when you are standing in the frozen pizza aisle.

Tombstone has other history outside the Earps, including a haunted mine and two fires that nearly destroyed the town, but everything seems to run back to Wyatt Earp in the end. The ghost story is tied to the basement of Big Nose Kate's Saloon, where "The Legend of the Swamper" is the subject of a free pamphlet. A 17-page booklet about Wyatt Earp (there he is again) and Doc Holliday costs $5.

One clothing store boasts it used to be the saloon where Wyatt Earp (there he is again) ran a gambling table for playing faro. Other places are identified as the office Doc Holliday used while he still practiced medicine, the room where Big Nose Kate lived (the prostitute who also was Doc Holliday's girlfriend), where the Clanton brothers were buried, where Morgan Earp (there's his brother) was killed, and on and on.

Over by the OK Corral is the a photo gallery of work by C.S. Fly, the photographer of the Old West who took the famous pictures we have of Geronimo, the Apache Indians, Tombstone after the fires, other parts of the Old West and Wyatt Earp. (There he is again.)

It got to the point that when I used the bathroom at Big Nose Kate's Saloon (built on the site of the Grand Hotel, where the Clantons and McLaurys stayed the night before the gunfight), I half-expected to see a sign identifying the urinal that Wyatt Earp used when he'd had too much to drink.

It gets overwhelming after a while.

Natasha, her mother, Evangeline and I were in Tombstone for less than a day, but I can't help it. I've developed an obsession with Wyatt Earp. I've told everyone I could about my trip to Tombstone and what I learned about him.

It's not enough. I have an overwhelming compulsion to run out and buy copies of "Tombstone," "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" and "My Darling Clementine" on video and watch all three of them sequentially and concurrently. I want to buy the movie posters and decorate my living room with them.

This never would have happened if we had gone to Moose Lake, Minn., like I had suggested. The only thing Moose Lake has going for it that I know of is a gratuitous reference in a VeggieTales video.

Our Arizona vacation was supposed to help me unwind from work and keep my sanity. Instead, my mind is slipping faster and faster into an Earpocentric dementia. Instead of beginning to assemble timeless memories, I've begun to assemble psychoses to unload to a licensed therapist.

Next time we go on vacation, we're going someplace without a history, even if it means I have to carry Natasha all the way to Moose Lake myself.

Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Identifying the real Lucers among us

I used to think that if you wanted to offend someone, you had to do something, well, offensive. Something like feeding them soup made with Puppy Chow, playing "Elton John's Greatest Hits" over and over again, or e-mailing them copies of a column you write.

I've been set straight on that score. Apparently, all you have to do is make a movie that satirizes them, their favorite TV show and the actors from that TV show, and they'll get offended. They get even more offended if you do it well.

In this case, my friend told me how offended he was by "Galaxy Quest," a movie that does all those things for Star Trek, when I casually remarked that I had seen it had been released on videotape and was hoping to buy a used copy when one became available.

My friend, who regularly reminds me that "Trekkies" are the really far-out fans and that "Trekkers" is the preferred term for fans who don't require medication, wasn't amused by the movie. In fact, he was a little put off.

"Why does everyone like to pick on Star Trek fans?" he demanded angrily. "We're not freaks. We just like good sci-fi."

I avoided the obvious cheap shot -- that people make fun of us because it's so easy -- and conceded that he had a point. Trekkies -- excuse me, Trekkers -- love lots of good science fiction, including the novels of Larry Niven, shows like "Babylon 5," and other great epics, like "Zombies of the Stratosphere."

My friend was absolutely right. Trekkies -- sorry, I mean Trekkers -- clearly have been the victims of a media smear campaign.

But if Star Trek fans aren't the geeks we've always thought, then who is? Because there are a lot of geeks in the world, and they have to belong to some easily identifiable group. That's how it works, and a TV show is a good a basis for the designation as anything else.

After giving the matter a lot of thought, I finally realized the truth. The TV show that has inspired unthinkable levels of zaniness and belief-defying antics from its fans is "I Love Lucy." Those are the real freaks among us, not the Save our Sesame Street militia, not the politicians, not the newspaper editors and columnists, and certainly not the Trekkies. (Trekkers. Sorry.)

In its time, "I Love Lucy" has spawned no fewer than three sequels -- "Lucy and Ricky," "The Lucy Show" and "Here's Lucy" -- that continued in the same tried-and-true formula as the original, with little fresh creative spark to make them stand out.

Star Trek can't ever compare to that.

The Lucy phenomenon is the driving force behind massive conventions within Lucy fandom. These events happen regularly, and draw attendees from hundreds of miles away, who come dressed as their favorite characters. They even have contests among redheads to see who looks the most like Lucy. Sick, sick, sick!

And then there's the real whacked-out fans who know unhealthy amounts of trivia about "I Love Lucy," including the names of bit characters, other shows those actors appeared in, original episode air dates, entire runs of dialogue and the backstage quarrels of the actors.

While we're at it, let's not forget Barbara Adams, the woman dismissed from jury duty on the Whitewater trial in Little Rock, Ark., because she kept coming to court dressed like Little Ricky, complete with a miniature bongo drum. Reports even have it that her co-workers call her "Junior."

Actually, I'm surprised it took me so long to finger the Lucy fans as such oddballs. The Lucy phenomenon has been documented quite thoroughly in the media. Pop culturalists have written books about the zany antics of "Lucy" fans and the strong political themes the show addressed.

For a show from the early days of television, fans say, "I Love Lucy" confronted several major issues of its day. There was an episode about U.S.-Cuba relations, dealt with through a clever parallel built around uranium mining, another episode about McCarthyism, and a third about the rising price of toilet paper.

And then there's the infamous honor's thesis, written in college by someone whose name I have forgotten, about the religious themes of "I Love Lucy," including the death of God, the return to Paradise and the failure of traditional religion.

It should be clear by now who the real losers are.

Trekkies -- I mean Trekkers -- you stand absolved of all charges of geekiness of which you formerly have been accused. The real geeks, clearly, are the Lucies.

Sorry. I mean the Lucers.

Copyright © 2000 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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When customer service breaks down at the local restaurant

There are three things I hate about eating out. Not having a baby changing station in the men's room is one of them. Needing to wear long pants and a sweater in the middle of the summer is a second.

But the worst one has to be the way waiters like to take my food away before I've finished eating. You would think that since the waiter is the one who took my order, he should be aware that I probably have designs on those last eight ounces of my 10-ounce New York strip steak. But somewhere between taking my order and asking if everything is all right, most waiters' brains short-circuit.

Part of this might stem from a misguided attempt waiters make to spare their customers the embarrassment of waiting around for five hours, twiddling their thumbs and whistling along to old Tiffany or Rick Astley tunes as they try to get the waiter's attention, while the food slowly turns green and hairy.

The truth of the matter is that restaurants specially train their waiters to snatch food away from hungry customers. These commando waiters watch from a safe vantage point where the customers cannot see them, and study their customers' body temperature, posture and conversational habits.

At the critical moment when the customer is distracted, the waiters strike and make off with the uneaten portion of the meal, which they carry to the kitchen and -- in great deference to the starving billions worldwide, including the customer who is now staring, fork in hand, at an empty table -- toss it into the garbage.

This might seem like a clever ploy to speed customers through their relaxed and enjoyable night out so the restaurant can serve more customers, but that's only the beginning of the plot. The truth is that restaurants count on customers not to be confrontational and to ask for an overpriced dessert menu item instead of trying to keep their food.

"Why yes," waiters imagine their customers -- especially those who skip off to the bathroom for five minutes partway through a meal -- I realize I paid $11.95 for this ridiculously small portion and have had only two bites, but I'd love it if you would throw it out for me. While you're at it, could you starve some Ethiopians too?"

One time it really annoyed me, Natasha and I were eating at TGI Friday's in North Brunswick, N.J., with her uncle. I left the table for two minutes. When I came back, my plate was gone, and with it half my order.

And I don't mean Natasha helped hersel, although she has been known to do that.

"Can I get you anything else?" our waitress asked about five minutes later.

"Yes," I wanted to snap. "I'd like you to give me back my food that you threw away."

Two things constrained me: first, the manners I learned as a child and the desire to make a good impression on my uncle-in-law, whom I just had met; and second, I really didn't want her to dig the food out of the trash. God only knows what would have been on it.

So I bit my tongue and said nothing, and tightened my belt that night when I went home, to cover the hunger pains.

No more. I'm tired of being pushed around by high-schoolers and college students. I've decided to fight back. My inspiration for this, as in much else, is my beloved wife.

Back when she was pregnant with our daughter, Natasha was unstoppably ravenous. A waitress at some restaurant we were visiting noticed Natasha had paused eating for five seconds in order to respond to a comment I had made about a movie we had seen recently. The commando waitress swooped down on our table from wherever she had been hiding when I had wanted a refill on my Coke, and snatched up Niki's plate.

"Let me get rid of that for you," the waitress said pleasantly.

I never had seen Natasha move so quickly. Before I could say, "Halla banana o'wickle sticks," Natasha was out of the booth and running across the floor. She slammed into the poor woman, grabbed the plate with both hands and growled, "I'm not done with my potato yet!"

The rest of dinner passed without incident, but I noticed an animal-control van circling the restaurant when we left half an hour later.

On a recent Saturday, Natasha and I were having dinner at Jonathan's Cork in Tucson, Ariz. I won't explain why we were eating at such an upscale restaurant because that would unduly embarrass Ted and Michelle Kaseler, whose wedding rehearsal we just had come from.

I was about three-quarters of the way through my salad when my wife reported that our daughter had received and answered nature's call, and that I had to take the baby back to the men's room and change her diaper. (Now you understand my opening remark that restaurants should have changing stations in the men's rooms.)

As I stood up, baby in tow, I told my table companions, "Don't let him take my salad. I'm not done yet."

You can guess what was missing when I came back five minutes later.

I was annoyed, not just because "I'm not finished with my salad" had been translated into "He can take it away," but because I really am trying to eat healthier, and this commando waiter hadn't even checked with me first before he throw out what was left of my food. To add insult to injury, he didn't even refill my water.

So when he came back to deliver the main course, I told him about the mistake he had made and that I'd like it set to rights.

"Dave, just drop it," one dining partner urged me.

I didn't. I couldn't. It was the principle of the thing. If he had said my haircut makes me look like Jim Carrey, I could have ignored it. If he had crossed his eyes at me, pulled at the corners of his mouth with his index fingers, stuck out his tongue and said, "This is you," I could have ignored it.

But he hadn't done those things. He had thrown out perfectly good food that he had served to me, without speaking to me first. It was an honest mistake, but it still was a mistake.

I didn't grab the waiter and put him in a choke hold or force him to apologize. I didn't raise my voice or use inappropriate language. But I made my point, and I got a new salad.

And maybe if they see the dirty diaper in the wastebasket in the men's room, they'll realize how fortunate they were that we had taken a changing pad to the restaurant with us, and they'll decide they need a better changing station than the sink counter.

nothing saps the spirits like a summer cold

The worst part of having facial hair is all the mucus that gets caught in my mustache when I'm sick.

One hairy fellow I met back in 1992 complained that catching food there was the worst part of having a beard. With all due respect to Cookie and his greater number of years of experience with facial hair, I have to disagree. Aside from the slice of watermelon that was stuck there for three weeks after a picnic last summer, I've never once had food caught in my beard.

I wish it were the same for other items as well. But every time I've blown my nose the past three days, there have been not-so-subtle trails left behind, and when I've woken up in the morning, the hairs under my nose have been painfully stiff, like the spears of a tiny army on my upper lip, poised to strike the first enemy they encounter.

All that's stopped me from shaving it all off and being rid of the nuisance is the prospect of having to clean my electric razor afterward.

For the past few days I have been as sick as the proverbial dog. It's not as debilitating as the time I had amoebic dysentery, nor as painful as when I had dengue fever, but in the past three days I've coughed so much that my head feels like a tree that's gone two rounds with a lumberjack. My joints ache, my muscles are sore and even my toenails feel too tight.

Nothing saps the spirits like a summer cold. This one has left me ill-tempered, out of sorts and delirious. I've slept later and for longer hours, and even when I'm not asleep, I just lie around and generally am unproductive. (Once I figure out how all this differs from when I'm healthy, I'll let you know.)

And yet, despite the incongruity, I find that colds actually bring back some nice memories. When I was a child, my mother had a special knack for taking care of us when we were sick. Aside from the usual benefits of being sick - staying home from school, sleeping on the sofa and watching TV all day, and getting out of delivering our paper routes - my mother would say at least once a cold, "You know, you would feel a lot better if you could throw up that big glob of mucus in your stomach."

Something about those words gave them a measure of healing power. Mom would trot out her magic phrase, and in no time the sick person would rush to follow the prescribed treatment, along with anyone else who had been within earshot. To this day, whenever I get sick, I can still hear her saying those magic words.

Natasha of course has extended her wifely sympathies to me the past few days. Earlier today, after I had taken a shower, dressed and changed the baby's diaper, I announced I was going back to bed for a nap.

"What?" she said. "But you just woke up!"

It was less than an hour later that I saw how much she truly cared. The bowl of cereal I ate for breakfast proved to be too solid for my stomach to handle, and I found myself rushing to the bathroom to follow my mother's timeless advice.

I could read Natasha's thoughts like a book. "Poor Dave," she thought. "I can't stand to hear him suffer." And with that she closed the bathroom door and played a Steve Taylor CD as loudly as she could.

Of course, now I seem to be on the mend from my cold, while Natasha is just beginning her turn. Since I've had what she is getting, she has my full sympathies.

But at least she doesn't have a mustache.


Copyright 2000 by David Learn. Used with permission.

The ghost of Manville

Lovella Paradiso believes in ghosts.

In the six years she has lived in her Manville residence, Ms. Paradiso believes she has witnessed several manifestations of supernatural presence. Three ghosts in particular dominated our talk about the appearances: a Civil War soldier, a voyeur and a ghost cat.

"I don't like saying the house is haunted," she said. "It has things we haven't been able to explain with a rational answer. A lot of things."

I've always been a sucker for ghost stories, so when a search for Web sites related to Manville turned up a paranormal-themed site with a 2-year-old post about Ms. Paradiso's house, my curiosity was piqued.

Ms. Paradiso works as a Web graphics designer for a Bridgewater firm. During our meeting, she kept stressing that she sought a naturalist explanation before falling back on the supernatural, and more than once expressed concern about how she would appear for talking about ghosts. To corroborate her story was Sal DiBernado of East Brunswick, who lived in the house from 1996-1999.

The first ghost Ms. Paradiso encountered at the house was Charlie, whom she pictures as blond, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven and more than 6 feet tall. She believes Charlie was a soldier in the Civil War.

"I had a dream of him walking through the hallway and just walking down the flight of stairs," said Ms. Paradiso.

Her landlady, who used to live in the house, had a similar dream, said Ms. Paradiso. They discovered the coincidence by accident.

Charlie left in 1996, after Ms. Paradiso and her roommates performed a cleansing ritual that tried to direct him to the afterlife. The ritual involves burning white sage and visualizing the ghost entering the next world.

"After you go and bless the rooms, you're supposed to go and sit and relax," said Ms. Paradiso. "I said something to the effect of, 'May you be free and go to the Light, and be with your loved ones."

During this time, she said, a housemate named Eric — not available for the interview — entered a trance and told Charlie to go be with his "wife and child," she said. Eric has no recollection of the experience, said Ms. Paradiso.

"It sounds like something flaky, but I was there, and he was white-faced," she said.

The second ghost, called The Watcher, is less benign than Charlie, although its activities have been limited to the basement, which had been converted into an apartment until Hurricane Floyd.

"When this closet door was open, you would always feel that you were being watched," she said.
Ms. Paradiso and Mr. DiBenardo said that no one they knew who rented the basement apartment was able to sleep down there because of The Watcher's oppressiveness. Nor was anyone able to stay there longer than six months.

A videotape Ms. Paradiso and her friends tried to take of the Watcher revealed nothing unusual except an odd light they later duplicated by driving past the house with headlights on. A second attempt captured a scream none of them had heard while the tape was recording.

"All of a sudden it was a loud but faint high-pitched scream," said Ms. Paradiso. "We all heard it and have never watched it since."

Ms. Paradiso was unable to locate the tape for me.

A third appeared in the basement in 1998 as a shadowy catlike specter. By April 1999 it had become a solid-looking black cat close to twice the size of Ms. Paradiso's black cat, Toby.

The similarity in appearance is enough that in the summer of 1998, the housemate Eric mistook the cat for Toby. When he called it, the ghost cat swatted at him, spat and jumped away.

"Toby doesn't do that," said Ms. Paradiso. "All my cats and dogs are friendly, people-friendly."

Toby, in fact, was inside the house in a room with a closed door all the time, Ms. Paradiso said.
Another time Ms. Paradiso followed the ghost cat down the hallway and watched it enter the bathroom. When she followed it in, the ghost cat disappeared.

"It's occurred to me The Watcher and the cat could be one and the same because The Watcher has not been seen since the cat appeared," said Ms. Paradiso.

Looking at the ghost cat also creates the same feeling of disquiet as being studied by The Watcher, said Ms. Paradiso.

Ms. Paradiso is reluctant to try the same cleansing ritual with the ghost cat that she performed with Charlie.

"If it's that powerful that it's manifested itself as a large feline creature, I'd rather have an expert," she said.

The house has had several other incidents Ms. Paradiso has been unable to explain: whistling in an empty shower when the only person in the house is in another room, music and lights that come on spontaneously, parts of the house that always are cold, unusual animal behavior — the pets frequently act disturbed by the supernatural presences — and heightened personal conflicts.

"To be honest, it's the house," said Mr. DiBenardo. "I hate being here. It's just something about the house, I could never just relax here."

Ms. Paradiso posted a brief description of the events in her house to the Web site I found. In addition to my interest, the post has attracted former residents of the house.

"The last response to me was, 'Thank God, because I know I'm not nuts,'" she said. "She only lived here six months. She saw and heard things here, and she thought she was going nuts."

So where did the ghosts come from? In most ghost stories, the haunting resulted from a violent death or unsolved crime. Ms. Paradiso's house is about 50 years old, and she is unaware of any such history to it.

"I have three theories. The first and probably most logical is that someone died on the land the house is built on," she said. "There might also be a portal into the world here, for whatever reason."

The last possibility Ms. Paradiso mentions is that she herself is a magnet for the spirit world. Spirits might sense that she is sensitive to the spiritual world, and seek her out.

"Spirits — ones that are trapped, are looking for a way out, a way in, a loved one — will gather around someone they think can help them," she said.

While I was there, I saw nothing suggestive of the occult or the supernatural, even around the Ouija board in the basement. If there are ghosts in Ms. Paradiso's house, I didn't see any.

But while I'm able to maintain my journalistic skepticism, Mr. DiBenardo doesn't need more evidence. After living in the house for three years, he's convinced.

"I've always believed in spirits and ghosts, but I was very skeptical," he said. "I moved into this house and let me tell you, I believe 100 percent."

'Coulda Been a Contender': My near break-in to community theatre

When John Steinbeck penned The Grapes of Wrath, he wrote a resounding critique of the social inequities of his day. Considered his masterpiece, the novel follows a family of Oklahoma farmers as they travel to California in the midst of the Dust Bowl.

To say the book was controversial would be an understatement. A 1940 movie version of the book had to be filmed under a different title, and in his personal life Steinbeck became aware of plans to frame him for rape. Despite its controversy, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's best-known book, and a theatrical adaptation of the play opened on Broadway under the direction of Frank Galati, who adapted the book to the stage.

Skip forward another 10 years, more than 60 years after Steinbeck first wrote his novel, to Neshanic Station. Out at their converted-schoolhouse theater, Somerset Valley Players is readying for a production of the play, which opens April 28. A few months ago, the company's audition notice caught my eye.

I don't have much stage experience. Aside from a few church dramas I've acted in, and a class play when I was in second grade, my acting resume is restricted solely to being rejected from Tom Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound" when I was in college.

I head west on Amwell Road to the theater for auditions at 7 p.m. March 5, just when Somerset Valley Players was getting ready to begin its production of "Mr. Roberts." In the theater's basement, I meet Tony Adase, director of the upcoming production. Also ready to audition is Phil Hochman, a 72-year-old Plainfield resident.

Unlike me, Mr. Hochman has some actual experience. An amateur actor since the mid-1960s, he has performed in community theater productions throughout New Jersey, but also in New York. He also appeared as a movie extra in "The Mirror Has Two Faces," during Jeff Bridges' aborted speech.

"I'm at an age where there aren't many roles you can find," Mr. Hochman says.

He came out to audition for anything that might be available, including the roles of Pa Joad, the Rev. Jim Casey and Uncle John.

There are a few preliminaries to take care of, such as listing my contact information, experience (none) and my availability. My schedule makes impossible any rehearsal Tuesday, Wednesday or early Sunday afternoon, and my wife's schedule makes Thursday rehearsal impossible since one of us has to watch the baby.

Mr. Adase is friendly, and even though I'm sure he can tell I'm out of my element — this is a little more advanced than playing a Martian in second grade, you know — he immediately starts talking about the roles he can see me in.

First there's Connie, husband of Rosasharn Joad, who abandons his pregnant wife before the Joads even reach California. Then there's Al Joad, Tom's younger brother, a womanizer who loves to work with the insides of a car engine. Lastly, there's Floyd, one of the other migrant workers the Joads meet on their journey west.

Tonight, though, I'm not going to be any of those. Adase wants to get a feel for my ability, so he directs Hochman and myself toward Page 10 of the script, where the play begins.

As the opening scene, this exchange establishes the character of Tom Joad, freshly released on parole from jail where he has served four years for killing a man in a fight, and the Rev. Jim Casy, a revival preacher Tom knew when he was still a boy. It does more than that, though; it also sets the tone for the rest of the play as Tom starts to find his whole world uprooted because of the hard times the Dust Bowl has brought.

"I'd like you to read Tom, which is a role that's cast already, but it's a role that lets you read for a page or so," Mr. Adase tells me.

The Joads are from Oklahoma. In his novel, Steinbeck reflected their dialect with phonetic spellings like "Injun" and grammar an English teacher would flunk his students for. Galati maintains this with contractions like "hotter'n hell" and "goin'," but to speak the line properly, I have to use an accent. Stupid me, I forget, and Mr. Adase starts us over again after a moment.

As we get going again, I try to get the accent right. I (probably undeservedly) like to pride myself on doing respectable accents and voice imitations. The Oklahoma accent I'm imagining is slower than we speak in New Jersey, like in the South, but instead of a drawl, it has a twang.

"You seem to have a good cadence for this," Mr. Adase tells me after I've read a bit further. So apparently I'm doing all right at my Oklahoma accent, even though I've never been there. I make a mental note to thank my father, who grew up in Appalachia and thus can be said to have come from hillbilly territory.

Mr. Hochman and I do some more reading, then Mr. Adase has us skip to Page 55, where the Joads have arrived in Hooverville, one of the shanty towns that moves every few days as the dispossessed workers move about to avoid trouble with the law. Here Mr. Hochman reads Al and I read Floyd, and then we switch. Just for fun, I read Al's lines differently each time, in order to show that I can imagine different readings

"Okay, that's fine," Mr. Adase said after our third read.

Not long after comes the moment I hadn't been expecting. After Mr. Adase hears auditions from a few women hoping for parts in the play, and tells them he'll let them know in a few days if he has any speaking parts for them — there nearly always are roles without lines for crowd scenes, and The Grapes of Wrath has a few of those — he hands me a copy of the play.

"I'd like you take this home and look at the part of Floyd," he says. "I think you'd be good at Al, but I'm concerned about your schedule."

Without even knowing how it happened, suddenly I'm in.

Panic sets in about five seconds later. This is the real thing, and I don't mean Coca-Cola. This is an honest-to-goodness play. It has lines. Lots of them. When I was in second grade, I screwed up my big line and said, "And to think I was the cat who suggested we put the mouse on the bell!"

Mr. Hochman is reassuring on that score. "What I have found is you fill the time allotted to be off-book," he says. "If they tell you you have to be off-book the end of next week, you bust your ass and you get off-book."

I took Mr. Adase up on the role, took the book home, and started studying the role. Fate played me a foul turn, though, and I had to drop the play before rehearsals started because of several other large-level commitments that life sprang on me. But I know I can do this. My wife has played in "Antigone: The Riot Act," and in "Othello", and I want to take my turn at it.

There's an Academy Award waiting somewhere in my future, I can tell. I just need another break.

crackerjack toys

Got a good imagination for names? This is  your chance to use it to win a shopping spree.

Crackerjacks, which sells toys aimed at stimulating children's imagination from its location in Belle Mead, N.J., is looking for a new name. If you come up with the winner, you could win a $500 shopping spree.

The quest for a new name comes after crackerjacks, the toy store, received a letter from Pepsico, which owns Frito Lay, which owns Cracker Jack, a brand of caramel-coated popcorn that gets stuck between your teeth when you eat it.

"They actually sent us a cease-and-desist," said Joanne Farrugia, who owns the chain, which also has stores in Skillman, N.J., and in Pennington, N.J.

I was a little surprised to hear the news myself. The store and the popcorn admittedly have similar names, but that's about where the similarity ends. The two target completely different markets, and the toy store is hardly so big that it poses a threat to a candy manufacturer.

If anything, Cracker Jack poses a bigger threat to the toy store because of it at least puts a free toy in every box. I've never received a single kernel of popcorn whenever I've visited the toy store.

"We don't think that there is an issue," said Ms. Farrugia. "The likelihood of winning a case is pretty good, but they're a multinational company. They're huge."

And that, as they say, is that. Pepsico, which employs 150,000 people and produces the entire line of Pepsi products and several other soft drinks to boot. Compared to a small operation like crackerjacks, its pockets are bottomless -- about $46 billion deep.

"I did agree to change it pretty quickly because it's just not that important," said Ms. Farrugia. "It's not even why we picked that name at all."

The name, in fact, came to Ms. Farrugia in mid-1996 from a thesaurus of all places, just before the store was due to open in Skillman.

"Crackerjack" is a synonym for "intelligent," and can refer to "a person or thing of marked excellence," according to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition.

"We have since found out that there are several stores called 'Crackerjacks,'" said Ms. Farrugia. "It never even occurred to me, the caramel-coated candy."

By turning the name change into a contest, crackerjacks -- the company writes its current name without a capital C and as one word -- has converted what could have been a setback into a windfall of publicity. Ms. Farrugia told me stories of parents who have run into the store just to enter a suggestion.

The contest will run until April 1, and the store will pick a new name by April 15, 2000. Suggestions are being taken at all three stores, although Ms. Farrugia said they will not use as a name an existing word from the English language such as "Toy chest."

Extant store names such as "Toys 'R' Us" also would be a bad idea.

The address for mail-in suggestions is crackerjacks, 601 Route 206, Belle Mead, N.J. 08876. Of course, given the bulk of my readers live nowhere near Belle Mead, I don't know why I felt obliged to mention that, but there you are.

Now that I have a 4-month-old daughter, I'm tempted to enter something into the contest myself since she would like the toys. My best idea so far might have a little too much panache for the contest, though.

I want them to change their name to "So Sue Us."

Cooking dinner, and other unnatural acts

I frequently claim to be a liberated man of the 1990s, even though it is now the 21st century. I think my work around the house will support my claim to be progressive.

I'm not saying that I do a lot of housecleaning. Actually, I think my mother-in-law did more housecleaning in the week she was here than I have done the entire seven months I've lived in this house.

But I do a fair share of the domestic chores. My father once observed that I run the house. I run the dishwasher, the washing machine, the clothes dryer, the lawnmower and the errands. I also run at the mouth, but that's a specialty of mine in a different field.

Lately, I've discovered that I also enjoy doing the cooking. Wherever I learned that trait, it wasn't from my father, who only helps in the kitchen at holiday time, until my mother finally chases him screaming from the kitchen with the electric carving knife, threatening to give him extensive plastic surgery if he ever comes near the roast again.

No wait, that's what my sister-in-law Tammy does to her husband. My father helps with meals by watching CNN on the television in the family room, then coming out at dinner time and proudly serving the meal as though he has been slaving over the kitchen stove for hours.

Anyway, I only recently have started to come into my own with cooked meals. At the beginning of our marriage, Natasha and I prepared fairly simple meals: baked chicken, tacos, pizza or some pork product; a canned vegetable like corn or peas; and some form of potato, usually french fries. Whenever the food became too routine, Natasha and I went out to eat.

We went out to eat a lot.

Toward the end of the summer, as Natasha's due date steadily approached, we were searching for ways to reduce our living expenses. One of the big ones was to eat out less, which meant someone would have to start preparing meals at home more frequently, which meant one of us would have to start learning some new ways to prepare meals so we wouldn't feel a need to go out as much.

One of the most useful gifts Natasha and I received at our wedding has turned out to be "The Good Housekeeping Step-by-Step Cookbook." For someone who nearly failed Home Economics back in middle school, the book has been a godsend. In its pages I found directions for carving poultry, how to identify slices and parts of meat and even how to slice bread.

Best of all, it has recipes, oodles and oodles of them. I haven't verified it by counting, but the cookbook claims to have more than 1,000 recipes. Slowly but surely, I'm working my way through them, but I have to admit my experiences cooking have been a little unpredictable at times.

This past Monday, I decided to try a new chicken dish and leafed through the cookbook, hoping something would catch my eye. As luck had it, my eyes fell upon a picture on Page 155 of a sumptuous chicken dish coated with a mushroom sauce.

"Country french chicken," I said thoughtfully. "Hm. Country french chicken..." My mouth started to water, and I made up mind. Without another word, I set myself to making dinner.

My troubles began as soon as I opened the package of chicken, which I had transferred to the refrigerator that morning. To say the chicken had not yet thawed would be an understatement. Even Frosty the Snowman would have found this cold.

Things just went downhill from there. The recipe said I had to pound the chicken breast to a thickness of about an eighth of an inch. I tried thawing it with hot water, and began pounding the chicken breast as hard as I could once I felt the cold meat start to warm.

I'm afraid I desecrated the chicken's remains so thoroughly that if the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ever learns of it, they'll want my head for such acts of unnatural barbarity.

The chicken now pounded thin -- mangled might be a better word -- I turned to the cookbook for the next step in the directions. It claimed I was suppose to coat my victim in a mixture of flour, salt and something I had never heard of before.

"Honey, what's a 'tarragon?'" I asked Natasha in the next room. It sounded to me like something from a cheap fantasy novel. (But look! Here comes mighty Tarragon, his bright sword gleaming in the morning light. Had he come to save the beauteous Paprika from the evil nutmeg horde?)

"It's a spice," she said, "but I don't think we have it."

We didn't. We also didn't have a shallot, a pound of assorted mushrooms or a quarter-cup of white dry wine. I decided to make some substitutions, because we did have a third-pound of miniature Portabella mushrooms, a bell pepper and half an onion. On the bright side, I was able to muster the two tablespoons of olive oil. Natasha convinced me not to substitute orange juice for the white wine.

Whatever we had that night, it was good. But I'm sure it wasn't country french chicken.

jane eyrehead

It probably is not politically correct to admit to this, but I like to read classic literature.

No, strike that. I like to read -- period. It's one of the few things my first-grade teacher did for me that I appreciate.

When I have a book in my hands, it's impossible to get my complete attention. Even as I express annoyance at being disturbed, half my mind is wondering about the book's deeper meanings and the other half is wondering what will happen next. Only the smallest portion handles the occasional nodding and grunting to convince whoever's speaking to me that they have my rapt attention.

I've loved literature ever since I learned to appreciate the differences between "Crime and Punishment" and "Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disgusting Sneakers." My bookshelf is lined end-to-end with volumes with tongue-twister titles like "The Brothers Karamazov," "The Nibelungenlied" and "The Orkneyinga Saga." (Plus "Dr. Who and the Loch Ness Monster.")

Fortunately, I am married to someone who shares my bibliophilia. Although Natasha does not read as quickly as I do -- I once read Gaston Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera" in two evenings, something it would take her more than a week to finish -- she enjoys the chance to curl up with a good book and lose herself in another world for a while.

Shortly after we married, we made it our custom to read a book together each night before we go to sleep. Traditions like Thanksgiving dinner, family reunions and spilling a glass of milk on the Easter dinner are all very important, but we wanted to add our own tradition to the mix. So we threw out the television (how I wish that were literally true) as the locus of our family evenings, and replaced it with reading.

Since we married in 1998, my wife and I have read more than a dozen books in this way, but as much as I enjoy recent books like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens," I can't deny my love of classic Western literature. We now are enjoying Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre."

No, that's not quite right. My wife is enjoying it. She's dragged me kicking and screaming through every page so far.

How on earth this book came to be regarded as a classic of Western literature, I don't know. Shakespeare's plays -- those are classics. The Bible -- that's a classic. "Le Morte d'Arthur" -- not especially well-written in parts or entirely original, but a classic nonetheless.

"Jane Eyre." I'm not even sure why this book is still in print.

"Jane Eyre" does fit the definition I had for classic literature back during high school: It's so boring I've fallen asleep reading it. The key distinction between "Jane Eyre" and other, great works of literature is that "Jane Eyre" hasn't required an English teacher to make it boring. It's had that effect all on its own.

"Jane Eyre" is a book that in the 80-plus pages we have read has gone absolutely nowhere. The author makes her point that life as a 12-year-old orphan girl in 19th-century England is awful and grim so well that I've taken to spicing up the writing with comments like, "Oh! Horror! Woe! Life stinks!"

"Jane Eyre" tells the story of a girl named, appropriately enough, Jane Eyre. The book begins at her aunt's house, called Goatshead or something similarly silly, where she has no friends and is routinely mistreated by her cousins and her aunt. (Woe, horror, alas!) Her mother, father and uncle all have died, apparently, because life is unfair. (Woe, horror, apocalypse.)

From there it just goes downhill. After 40 pages of cheap melodrama worse than anything I've seen on television, it looks like Jane's life is about to improve when she gets packed off to school. Unfortunately, the school she attends is run by someone named Broccoliburst who hates the world because he has such an ugly name, and he embarrasses her early in her stay at the school.

The only consolation Jane has is her friend, a little urchin named Helen Ragamuffin. During their first real conversation as friends, Helen starts waxing poetic about the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection, only to end her impassioned speech with a cough.

"Oh woe! Horror!" I cried, when Natasha read that part. "Helen Ragamuffin has tuberculosis and is going to die! Horror! She's Jane's only friend and she's about to die! Oh, alack the day!"

Natasha burst out laughing. I had predicted Helen's fate accurately at the first clue we were given of it.

Natasha read the book back in high school and insists it's good. If it's such a good book, I want to know, why do the deaths of half the girls at the school get a one-paragraph summary? "Oh, and by the way, during that summer, half the girls died from typhoid fever." Um, yeah. Sure. Albert Camus' "The Plague" chronicles the course of disease in a much more interesting manner, and it sucked.

My younger brother read "Jane Eyre" back in college for an English literature class he took as a requirement for all prospective veterinary medicine students. I guess the thinking is, if you can survive reading boring books like these, you can survive the textbooks at vet school too.

Like my wife, he insists the book is good, and said that when Jane gets her job as a governess -- the part we're about to start -- it really takes off as some sort of mystery.

Gee, I don't know. Isn't 85 pages a little long to introduce the hook for the plot? Encyclopedia Brown not only reaches the mystery in the first two paragraphs, he solves it in five pages.

Now the English-speaking world is replete with intellectual achievement, if for no other reason than it includes so many people. In the United States alone, we have schools ranging from community colleges to state universities to Ivy League institutions. Moreover, there are at least thousands of talented, aspiring writers. With all this knowledge and talent available, it shouldn't be that hard to improve the book.

I've made a number of critiques so far, so I won't repeat them, but I will make one final comment: By the time Jane Eyre reaches her new school, most readers are desperate for some action.

I have found in my own creative writing that the best action sequences involve large tractor trailers, out-of-control school buses and crash-landing 747s. If Charlotte Bronte had thought to throw one of these at Jane's school, her book would have become a lot more interesting and would belong to a superior genre of literature.

an ill wind blows snow good

After trying for several hours, I am convinced there is nothing profound to say about the first major blizzard of the 21st century, and I should have stuck with what I had written before Old Man Winter struck, about Charlotte Bronte and her boring books.

When I began to write this, it was just past 2 a.m. Wednesday, and I was sitting at my desk in front of the computer. It is now nearing 10 a.m., and I'm still here. I was stranded at the office by a storm that dropped about 8 inches of snow in less than 24 hours.

All told, it hasn't been as bad as it sounds. The heat and the power worked all night, the phone and e-mail kept me in touch with the outside world, and my collection of cool toys -- including a three-eyed alien from "Toy Story 2," a talking "Batman Beyond" figurine and Cookie Monster -- have kept me occupied.

Old Man Winter and I have never gotten on especially well. We did reach a mutal understanding of a sorts for about two years: I moved to the tropics, and he never lowered the temperature below the 70s. When I returned to the United States, though, it was back to our old love-hate relationship.

When I was a child, there was a certain zing in the brisk winter air when the mercury dipped low, especially when there was snow. I loved to go tobogganing, and I shared with every other child the thrill of creating a snowman and waiting for it to burst into hideous life in a twisted version of "Frankenstein" meets "Winter Wonder Land."

But winter had a dark side too. It was wet, and that gave the cold temperatures a sinister gloss I never quite overcame. I still remember making a snow angel when I was 6 years old. The snow went down the back of my blue coat, where it became trapped and melted, leaving me shaking and shivering in the cold for however long it took me to risk my brothers' ridicule and go inside.

It's been about 23 years, and the world is still awaiting my second snow angel.

Then there were the snowball fights. Everyone loves snowball fights, it's true, and I suppose I've thrown my share of those missiles too. But with three brothers, it wasn't hard to discover that snowballs also could be unpleasant when they hit me.

In the political alliances of the four Learn boys, two parties usually surfaced: Herbert and Ward, and Brian and me. Free-for-all snowball fights were the exception. In these as with nothing else, I tried to assert a neutrality that would keep me safe from all harm, and billed myself as the "snow fort repairman."

I thought it was a good arrangement. I got to enjoy seeing all three of my brothers get pounded with snow balls at one point or another, while I stayed safe from aggression (so I thought) because, after all, you need a fort to protect yourself from the snowballs.

Herb's fort especially took a beating, not because the snowballs were made of ice -- although that was known to happen - but because he used to stand on top of it and sing "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner" and try to provoke Brian into hitting him.

The taunting invariably angered Brian -- we all were good at provoking him -- and he would step out from behind his protective wall, straight into one of Brian's piledrivers.

The combined toll of Brian's high-powered vengeance and Bill's own impromptu song-and-dance routines took their toll on his forts. They usually began the day as 4 feet high and ended as 2-foot walls of solid ice. I kept myself busy packing more and more snow on top of them, and screaming loudly whenever a snowball came too close.

As I recall, my neutral repairman strategy worked exactly once. The second time I tried it, I became the universally accepted target, and was sent screaming back inside, followed by a steady barrage of snowballs.

(Don't feel too bad for me. I eventually came out on top, since I landed a job at a newspaper that lets me make fun of them in print whenever I want.)

More than 20 years have passed since my job as a snow-fort repairman, and things have not changed much for me as far as the snow goes. I still enjoy the nip of the cold air, I still enjoy building snowmen and throwing snowballs, and I still hate being hit with them.

After sleeping at my desk Tuesday night - a novel experience in that I wasn't supposed to be working this time - I stepped outside to warm up the car and go find some breakfast. For the fourth time in two days, I retrieved my ice scraper and set to clearing the windows, keeping my hands well inside my sleeves.

One of the men who was clearing the parking lot of our office complex saw me scraping away and came to offer his assistance. Apparently, I still cut a pathetic figure in the snowy weather.

Face to face with my Coke addiction

I realized earlier this week that I have missed out on the single largest gravy train to come through the country in recent years. I haven't made millions by suing anyone.

Forget the minor personal-injury lawsuits for a paltry million dollars or so. The biggest money-maker is the class action lawsuit against an entire industry. Guns- and tobacco-related lawsuits were the big winners in the past few years; with the support of a few thousand other consumers, I want to go straight to the top and hit the soft-drink manufacturers.

The big soda makers are just crying out to be sued. For starters, they have lots of money to pay huge out-of-court settlements. Actually, that's the only reason I need, but my favorite fizzy beverage also has caused me several health problems, including cavities, increased urination and a brown tongue.

And emotional suffering. No, really.

I'm addicted to The Real Thing. I've been known to have three 20-ounce bottles in a single day. By the time I finish, I have reached hypertension Nirvana with a caffeine-and-sugar buzz that has me pacing the floor at 90 mph, completely unable to sit down and concern myself with earthly affairs, like work.

I have all the classic signs of an addict. If I go without my dose, my face takes on a drawn, strung-out look. I can't sleep late at night, even when I'm suffering from extreme fatigue.

Plain old water and other, healthier drinks just don't cut it for me; I even poured the cold fizzy on my breakfast cereal this morning to give Snap, Crackle and Pop a little more zing.

My performance at work is impaired because I can't stop craving the flavored brown acid, and I continually make excuses to cover up my addiction and the unexplained expenses at the supermarket.

"Why are there 23 trips to the Hillsborough ShopRite on our VISA bill?" my wife asked me as she held up the bill. "We didn't need that many groceries."

"Oh, well, you know how it is," I said, relieved she doesn't know about the trips to the soda machine at Kmart. "I bought a few things to share with people at the office."

I'm a victim of marketing strategies. When I was a child growing up outside Pittsburgh, Coke ran commercials in 1980 at the height of the Super Bowl XIV hysteria, featuring "Mean Joe" Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

I've been duped by celebrity endorsements from people like Max Headroom and Bill Cosby. I mean, come on! If Bill Cosby thought Coke was "The Real Thing" and talked about how it often won the Pepsi Challenge, who was I to argue?

If Remington or Colt had run commercials on prime-time TV of Joe Greene shooting people on the other football team, or if Bill Cosby smoked a pack of Marlboros in the Huxtable family residence, parents groups would have thrown a fit. Why should Coke or the other soft drink giants be any different?

Worse, the soda pop industry is taking full advantage of my addiction. It looks like the old 50-cent cans are going the way of the dodo. They now cost 80 cents most places, and even the vending machines sell 20-ounce bottles, usually for $1. Luckily the one by the office charges only 75 cents.

And now apparently even that might change. An article I saw last year on CNN Financial News said Coca-Cola was considering investing in a device that would let individual machines change the price to match the temperature.

That way, when a really crippling heat wave hits like we had this past summer, the machine will anticipate the increased demand and raise the price to match. The hotter the day, the more expensive the drink. (Somehow I doubt they'll give it away during cold snaps, though.)

It's only reasonable to file a lawsuit. At the very least, any money I collect can help support my habit.

gold for glurge

I finally have found a use for stupid e-mail. With just a little effort, I recently earned a few hundred dollars on it.

I classify stupid e-mail into three distinct categories. First is the senseless petition for a nonexistent cause, like saving "Sesame Street" from Chechnyan rebels who want to sell Big Bird for $4.99 a pound on the open market to buy munitions.

Second are bogus alerts about viruses that will cause planet Earth to wobble uncontrollably if you open an e-mail titled "Help a poor dog win a free vacation!"

Third are warm, fuzzy inspirational vignettes. These are the worst, and surely originate in the very pits of hell, where Bill Gates -- numerologically identified as the Antichrist in several e-mails I have received and on many Web sites I have visited -- has assigned a mail-daemon, third class, to fill the Internet with inane messages about God, the meaning of life and e-mail tracking giveaway offers.

These pieces of inspiration typically go something like this: A boy is walking down the street, when he is crushed flat by a falling piano dropped out of the cargo hold of a Boeing 747.

It's very sad of course, and the boy can't figure out why no one else notices the bright shining "birdies" who keep flying around him and playing Don McLean's "American Pie" on their harps.

Anyway, as the boy stands there, listening to the "birdies" sing about Bob Dylan and the Scopes Monkey trial, a dog comes by and licks the face of the boy, who comes back to life and begins his divinely appointed task of telling everyone all about those beautiful "birdies."

After this heartwarming tale comes the kicker. We discover at the end of the story that the dog was actually God, who was walking backward for some reason, thus reversing the spelling of his name and effecting a disguise.

We're also asked to forward the letter to everyone we know. (If you've been deeply moved by this tale, I won't mind if you dry your tears before you read on.)

These e-mails usually are preceded by personal messages from 23 people you never heard of before, all of whom claim to be deeply touched by the inspirational message. "I hat [sic] to send frowards [sic], but this was so beautifull [sic] I just cried and had to pass it on to you!" is one common motif.

Another is, "I never liked dogs before, but after I read this e-mail, I bought a black Lab. The next day, I went to the hospital for a checkup and my tumor was gone!"

I'm sure these people have been touched by something, but I don't think it was the story.

I tried to stop getting these forwards, and sent several messages telling the senders how much I really didn't want to get them. "Mom," I wrote, "I've seen these things a million times before and they annoy me. Please stop sending them to me." It never worked, though.

So a while ago, I decided I had had enough. It was time to fight back. If I couldn't stop them, I was going to perpetuate them, but I was going to do it my way. I took these pieces of inspiration and began to rewrite them, making what I think of as "improvements."

One of the first I personally hit was a touching (there's that word again) vignette called "The Cracked Pot," a title I probably should use for this column.

In this story, a water-bearer has two pots, one of which miraculously has developed intelligence through a trip to Rhode Island in the trunk of a 1992 Buick Century with a rubber band and a can of mushroom soup. The pot feels guilty because it spills water through a huge crack in its side.

In the original, the servant uses that leak to water flowers along the path, and then the writer goes into a touching (there's that word again) homily that God uses our imperfections just like that blah blah blah blah and so everyone should be a crackpot.

In my version, among other things the servant smashes the pot for its impertinence, and then slips in the spilled water and breaks his neck. It's much more satisfying than the original.

Something clicked deep inside when I finished this rewrite. I had found a voice. In the months since then, my best friend and I have rewritten literally dozens of forwarded e-mails, including urban legends, poetry and more than a few inspirational stories.

Some people find them hilarious, but others are concerned they aren't entirely appropriate.

"Aw, you can't make fun of 'Footprints!'" a friend of mine objected. I suspect he is the inspiration for that particular story since he frequently dreams about walking along the beach with God.

"No I will not send you any more devotionals," my brother Ward wrote me when I asked for more fodder. "To be honest, I find some of your 'spoofs' quite blasphemous and anti-God." (Ward backed down from that stance once I explained my satirical intent, and now just says I have no social skills. Well, duh.)

I found the perfect vehicle for expression in "The Door," a magazine of religious-themed satire I subscribe to. A few months ago, I mailed "The Door" my renditions of three classic pieces of inspiration, including the ubiquitous "Footprints" poem.

Last week, my copy of the magazine came, vignettes on the center pages, along with a check for $300.

It's a nice feeling, especially since most of the writing already had been done for me. Now I just need to find a way to cash in on those stupid petitions and virus alerts.

mildew prognostications

Some people, when they want to know the future, consult the stars. Others shuffle a deck of Tarot cards, and still others have their palms read.

Not me. When my curiosity about the new millennium got the better of me recently, I turned to the mildew that has started to grow on the walls of our shower at home, and studied it to divine the course the future will take.

Among my discoveries were the winning numbers to New Jersey's Powerball lottery, a remarkable likeness of Andy Kaufman, the results of the upcoming presidential election, and much more.

So, without further ado, here is what the next century holds for us all. Remember, you read it here first.

2000. Yosemite Sam wins the presidency on Nov. 7 as the result of a protest vote by Americans who want real candidates for a change. The U.S. Supreme Court orders all votes for "President Horny Toads" stricken, and gives the office to runner-up Tinky Winky.

2001. The Society for Anal Retentive Behavior celebrates the start of the new millennium, carefully explaining that 2000 wasn't really the start of the millennium because there was no Year 0. No one else cares.

2003. Religious activist-turned-politician Gary Bauer has a brain aneurysm when several gay- and women's-rights groups straightfacedly endorse his latest bid for presidency, calling him "a man of vision -- just what America needs for the 21st century."

2008. Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement to The NY Journal News, angrily declares, "I did not have an affair with that cleaning lady."

2012. The Titanic II, designed to replicate the original ocean liner in every aspect, disappoints everyone by not striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage. In order to keep his book deal, however, the captain of the boat arranges for a submarine from Finland to torpedo the liner just before it reaches New York.

2016. When some enterprising business owners begin shuttle runs to a new Hilton hotel on the moon for tourist vacations, national Republican and Democratic leaders alike rush to the nearest travel agency to buy each other one-way tickets. Voter turnout quadruples within three years.

2019. Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement delivered from his room at the Happy Acres Retirement Home, angrily declares, "I did not have an affair with the nurse who changes my bedpan."

2021. Somerset Valley Players, a theater based in Neshanic Station, N.J., becomes the third New Jersey theater to win the coveted Tony Award, for its innovative production of the little-known "Batman" musical.

2026. A group of animal-rights activists seize control of an entire barn for 53 tension-filled days. The confrontation finally resolves when government troops burst through one of the walls, knocking down a Coleman lantern and starting a fire that barbecues all the cows.

2032. Developers pave over the last available square inch in New Jersey and set their eyes on New England and rural Pennsylvania.

2037. The Packet Group of newspapers in Princeton, N.J., buys The New York Times, and makes the Hillsborough Beacon and The Manville News its new flagship papers.

2038. Disappointed survivalists abandon their bomb shelters and return to society after the Year 2038 arrives with only minor complications arising from the Y2038 computer bug. Ironically, the next day there is a nuclear attack and none of them reach their shelters in time.

2040. Developer U.S. Home scales back its controversial development The Greenbriar at Mill Lane to include only 2,000 living units. Elected officials promise a resolution to the 50-year-old controversy will be accomplished "soon."

2044. The smallest country in the world splits into two smaller countries when leaders in the reigning military junta disagree over whether the potatoes have enough salt.

2057. Hurricane Archibald hits the East Coast, and causes floods that decimate every municipality from Long Island, N.Y., down to Raleigh, N.C. Developers deny that flooding was exacerbated by excessive building, and instead blame the disaster on an unusually high tide.

2061. A particularly nasty flu virus wipes out all the chickens in the world. Yum Foods abandons its entire KFC chain, but not until after the chain jacks prices to $30 a piece because of the bird's new status as a delicacy.

2063. A cult forms in Hillsborough, N.J., worshipping the embalmed head of legendary freelance journalist Minx McCloud.

2065. Developer U.S. Home denies stonewalling the Hillsborough Planning Board as it submits a new application for 3,104 living units. Elected officials assure voters that a resolution is "in the works."

2070. An experiment with tachyons at Brookhaven National Laboratory accidentally causes time to run backward, with the unforeseen consequence that disco becomes popular again. An angry mob storms the lab and, unable to find the responsible scientists, eats all the yellow Zingers in the snack machines.

2075. Humanity's first colony on Mars comes to an unfortunate and untimely end when someone opens a window "to get a little fresh air."

2092. Experts in the computer industry, concerned about falling profits, start to make noise about the "Y2.1K bug."

2097. Hillsborough, N.J., planners finally approve the controversial Greenbriar development, allowing developer U.S. Home to build 2,876 units in ten 23-story buildings and calling it "a victory for open space in Hillsborough."

2098. James Cameron III wins 43 Academy Awards for his movie "Titanic II," which fortunately does not star either Kate Winslet or Leonardo DiCaprio, or anyone who looks remotely like them.

2099. A spry Dick Clark is one of dozens killed during a New Year's Eve party in Times Square when the dropping ball breaks off the pole and plows through the crowds.

2100. Every one of these predictions having come true, there is a renewed interest in the writings of David Learn and in the science of divination through reading mildew. The so-called Wall of Futures, however, is destroyed through an unfortunate accident involving a sponge and a bottle of bathroom cleaner.

true confessions (more or less) of a survivalist

If this is the last thing you ever read that I wrote, blame it on my brother Brian.

I say to blame it on him because we have a 29-year-old policy of passing the buck to each other, and so history and tradition support my decision to make him a scapegoat. Besides, Brian is a computer programmer and therefore, it stands to reason, the responsibility for the end of the world lies entirely on his shoulders.

I'm writing of course, about Y2K, that programming bug in human nature that will cause people to lose control and go into a full-scale panic at midnight New Year's Eve when some smart aleck -- that would be me -- turns off all the lights in the building just to see how people react.

I've always had a morbid fascination with Doomsday scenarios. There's something especially appealing about human civilization ending because of a stupid error like a programming shortcut that considers only the last two digits of the year.

Given the chance of global collapse from an extinction-level meteor hit, a virulent plague or Y2K, I would pick Y2K every day because of the delightful irony in being done in by our own stupidity.

It would be even more appropriate if the problem is fixed -- which it supposedly is -- but the world ends anyway because people overreact to the millennial rollover.

A colleague of mine recently told me about the water and food supplies he had stockpiled in his cellar-turned-bomb shelter, along with enough firepower to hold off an invasion.

"Ooh, can I come by and borrow some bullets if I run out?" I asked him.

My colleague looked straight at me, and deadpanned, "Yes. Stop by any time after New Year's, and I personally will give you an entire clip of bullets. I'll give you all the bullets you can take."

I've decided not to visit him on New Year's after all.

Somebody -- I forget who -- once observed that no society is ever more than 30 years from barbarism. Personally, I think this person was an optimist.

Given the comments I've heard and read from several people who really do think Armageddon is around the corner, I would give civilization 20 minutes before it starts to unravel on New Year's if the power fails for any reason, including a downed electric pole.

If I worked at Public Service Electric and Gas Co., I would have a field day on New Year's Day playing Tic Tac Toe on the power grid with my co-workers.

The real fun with Y2K is going to start when everyone realizes the world still exists. I figure it's going to work like this:

First, the goofballs who actually wanted the world to end either will try to make it end, or, more amusingly, will claim that it actually did end, but the government is covering it up to avoid a panic.

Secondly, experts in the computer industry will give those of us in the media something else to write about by drawing attention to the "Y2038" bug, which will cause all sorts of problems with computers in another 38 years.

(Honest, that's a real problem, though I still don't understand it after having it explained to me three times. Apparently the current thinking is that the problem will have been fixed by the time the Year 2038 arrives. Sound familiar?)

Thirdly, supermarkets and other businesses that have made a killing the last few months selling supplies to worry-prone shoppers are going to see their sales bottom out.

After weeks of record-breaking sales -- I myself spent $160 in two trips to the supermarket this past month, more than twice what I normally would spend -- they're suddenly going to be short on income.

The last bit of fallout will be more personal. After I spent all that money stockpiling food in case there was a run on the supermarket or a disruption in distribution, it dawned on me that I would have no way to cook if the gas goes out.

Hmm. Maybe if you don't see anything else with my byline you should start the investigation with my wife.

What dreams may come

People sometimes ask me where I find things to write about. In this case, it's a dream.

This particular dream I had was a nightmare that struck about 5 a.m. Dec. 14. It was the first real nightmare I recall having since I was 14 years old and dreamed our basement was being invaded by the Sleestak from "Land of the Lost."

That particular nightmare turned out well, because my brothers also were in the dream, and although the Sleestak grabbed Herb, the other three of us got out just fine.

I never found out what happened to Herb in the dream, since Sleestak never do more than walk around with their arms outstretched, and hiss. Whatever it is, I'm sure it couldn't have been too pleasant, since Herb hasn't had a cameo in a single dream of mine since.

In this more recent, Herb-free dream, I was outside, talking with my wife in the parking lot behind our house.

There are three things rather odd about this. To begin with, our house was a church I attended while I lived in Easton, Pa. Secondly, the parking lot doubled as a runway for a private airport we ran out of our house. Thirdly, my wife in the dream is not my wife in the waking world.

I suppose that's not too unusual, since, as everyone knows, dreams are a strange phantom world where people change identities fairly easily and reality is never stable.

In the Sleestak dream, for example, my oldest brother Brian at one point suddenly became my younger brother Herb, and this went unremarked-upon by everyone. If this happened in reality, several of us would at least raise our eyebrows in consternation.

In any event, my wife -- who looked suspiciously like a member of the board of education of the last school I taught at -- and I ran a private airport out of the house, and at the start of the dream, she was saying goodbye because she had to fly somewhere in our only plane.

Once my wife left, I entered the church-turned-house/airport-combination and met Scott, a friend of mine who probably will be as surprised as I was to discover that he was in my dream as an employee of mine.

Scott and I went to the kitchen and walked over to the stove, where -- this is very important to remember -- there were six beings of infinite evil confined, one in each burner.

Scott for some reason decided it would be a good idea to free these creatures, and persuaded me to do so by writing their names on the burners in the same code I use for formatting the newspaper.

In other words, I wrote "" on one burner, and then lit the burner. Somehow this arcane form of black magic freed the Devil from his prison. One wonders what would have happened if I had tried to boil an egg instead.

I don't remember the identities of all six evil people. One of them was Satan, and another was Doctor Doom, the arch-enemy of The Fantastic Four in Marvel Comics. It could be that a third was Herb, now long-since corrupted by the Sleestak, but I honestly don't recall.

It was when Doctor Doom and Satan started to burst free from the stove that I woke up, breathing fast, sweating, and horrified that I had unleashed such tremendous evil on an unsuspecting world.

Only inches away, my daughter Evangeline stirred in her sleep, disturbed either by my sudden movement or more likely by the malevolent Doctor Doom himself, who had been freed at last by my intervention from the stove where he had been trapped for untold years.

So there you have it. You are now privy to one of my dreams, and like my wife (my real wife, not the one I had in my nightmare), you're probably laughing at me and at the terror I felt. If you're a psychologist, you're probably having a field day with this one.

I mentioned my daughter earlier, and thinking about dreams makes me wonder what she sees when she sleeps. I expect that in another three years or so, Evangeline will wake me late at night with screams brought on by her own nightmares.

I just hope they make more sense than mine do.


Copyright © 1999 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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the unacknowledged elephant

Have you ever felt like there's an elephant in the living room, and you're the only one who notices it?


It's an odd feeling. You watch in disbelief as the rest of your family and all your guests walk around or under the elephant. You expect at any minute for someone to chase the elephant away, or at least to say, "Why is there an elephant in the living room?"


Oddly enough, no one ever does, and after a while you wonder if there's a problem with you for even noticing the stupid thing.


That's the way I've felt for the past week or so. Well, all right, that's not true -- I've felt that way all my life, but that's beside the point.


During the past week, I've watched in profound mystification as first regional media and then national news media began to give air time to a dispute between Lorraine Zdeb and the Borough Council in Millstone, N.J.


Back in September, when Hurricane Floyd struck New Jersey, Ms. Zdeb went into neighboring Manville and Bound Brook, and saved nearly a hundred pets from drowning. Dogs, cats, snakes, you name it -- probably even an elephant or two -- she saved them.


It was a touching story, and when someone wrote a lengthy letter to the newspaper describing Ms. Zdeb's efforts, I was moved enough to recast it as a guest column, giving it a little more attention than it would have received as a letter.


Still, it's worth noting that earlier in 1999 Ms. Zdeb had applied to the Millstone Planning Board to build a permanent-standing animal shelter on her five-acre property, but the Planning Board denied her request. So it should come as a surprise to no one that Millstone slapped Ms. Zdeb with a fine when she sheltered the animals on her property in September, since she was doing what the Planning Board had told her she couldn't.


In the ensuing weeks, I have watched from my editorial desk as Ms. Zdeb's star has risen higher and higher into the stratosphere. Some area newspapers took an interest in her plight, and then one of the New Jersey 101.5 talk show hosts focused on her for an hour or so. It was when the Associated Press ran a story on her that things really got going.


Toward the end of November, my curiosity got the better of me, and I punched Ms. Zdeb's name into a few search engines on the Web. I found hits on CNN.com, on FOXNews.com, and a few others. On Nov. 30, ABC News called one of my reporters and asked him to fax them the stories he's written about Ms. Zdeb.


Celebrities like actress Mary Tyler Moore and model Rachel Hunter have taken an interest in her case. Ms. Zdeb has -- unwittingly, she claims -- become an overnight celebrity of sorts herself.


Not surprisingly, with all this attention, the Millstone Borough Council agreed to drop the case, which would have gone to trial Dec. 1.


Maybe I'm stupid, or maybe my brother hit me in the head with that log harder than I thought at the playground when I was 6, but I just don't get it. All I see is an elephant.


I'm not unsympathetic to Ms. Zdeb or her love of animals. If my dog Hamlet had been caught in flood waters, I would have been in the thick of things too. But I can't help feeling my colleagues in the national news media really missed the mark on this one.


When Hurricane Floyd hit Manville back on Sept. 16, it put more than a third of the borough under water, according to some estimates I've heard. About 200 people have asked the state to buy their homes because the flood damage was so severe.


Visit, if you can, Manville's Lost Valley section. There are people whose homes remain uninhabitable, putting them in trailers while they try to rebuild and find a way to pay for it all.


I was on the phone earlier today with a woman whose house has been hit four times in as many floods. She's hoping the government will buy her house from her so she can leave. Is her story worth less than the story of a couple parrots?


Then there's Main Street. A number of businesses have reopened, but there are many that haven't, and some that may never again, including businesses that have been part of the community for decades. Should they be ignored in favor of dogs and cats?


And don't forget the children whose homes were hit, and who probably won't have as big a Christmas this year as they have in years past. There's real tragedy in their stories, as well as real joy. Their stories are worth hearing.


When Hurricane Floyd hit Manville, it appeared as though the local news media were the only ones to give a rip; the national media were more concerned with the drama of fires in Bound Brook and the tragedy of the two deaths there.


A little more than two months after the flood has passed, and now the spotlight is turned back to Central Jersey, not to highlight the people who are digging out and deciding what to do with their lives, nor on the real fiscal problems Manville and Bound Brook will face if state buyouts proceed and they can't make up their lost population somewhere else.


It's a shame that Millstone wanted to prosecute Ms. Zdeb for giving animals temporary lodging on her property, and I'm glad the Borough Council dropped their case, but that's not where the real story is.


The real news about the flood is found in places like Manville, amid the continuing heartache of the losses and in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.


To pretend otherwise is an insult.