Pumping It Up, and Up

Alright, this is getting ridiculous.  On Sunday morning two weeks ago I filled the tank in my truck before driving down to visit our son in San Diego. I was more than a bit peeved that the lowest price I could find along Foothill was $3.79 a gallon. Silly me. Only four days later, I filled my tank again. The same station was now charging $3.89 for the same gas. I was not happy. Again, silly me.

As it turns out, those were the good old days. Because the very next morning I drove by the station and the price had gone up another ten cents overnight to $3.99. Seriously? Once again I drove past the same station later on that afternoon and – you guessed it – the price of a gallon of unleaded gas had jumped another 5 cents. A nickel higher in just a few hours.  

Only two weeks ago, the media was abuzz with reports that gas would “likely” rise to $4 a gallon by Memorial Day. Good call, people. We’re already there. They must be using the same imperfect prognosticators who come up with the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine-stick-a-finger-in-the-air weather forecasts. (Unlike CV Weekly’s own dependably accurate and reliable Sue Kilpatrick, of course.) When these same folks now tell us that we could see $5-per-gallon prices by summer we should be worried. Or petrified. I won’t be surprised if we roar past the $5/gallon milestone by Memorial Day.

So why is the price of gasoline soaring when there is an acknowledged glut of oil on the world market? There are many reasons; some we can’t do a thing about, but several we can. I won’t travel down that road this week, however. There will be plenty of time for that discussion as the cost continues to climb and the pain at the pump metastasizes throughout our dangerously fragile economy.

The cost of a gallon of gas is as much a factor of life in Southern California today as our frequent drought conditions, traffic jams, overcrowded schools and immigration issues.

It wasn’t always this way. I’ve lived in the Crescenta Valley long enough to remember many intersections along Foothill Blvd. with a gas station on all four corners. Station attendants (yes, they really had such a thing) would not only “check under the hood” while your tank was being filled, but also clean your parent’s front windshield with a spray bottle of glass cleaner and the rag in their pocket.

As if that level of customer service wasn’t enough to entice you to fill up at one station over another, stations gave away freebies with every tank of gas. At our house, we had full sets of drinking glasses, dishes and lots of other goodies given to us simply for filling the tank in our family car. Sigh.

If you wanted to get out of your car (you certainly didn’t have to) you could run into the service station office and get a free roadmap of the area. Although I realize that with smart phones and GPS apps, few drivers would even know how to read a printed map (much less fold one back up) today.

Obviously, a lot has changed over the years. Even though our cars are more efficient than ever before, on the whole we drive farther and more often for work and pleasure. There are more of us on the road than ever before. And the cost and availability of energy has become a political tool (or weapon, if you will) more than ever before. 

As I was wrapping up this column to make deadline, a news item came across about a major oil refinery “blowing up” near the U.S./Canada border several days ago. Apparently, it’s still burning and the newsreader said that the crippled refinery supplies much of the gasoline used in Southern California. Buckle up, folks. This is gonna get even uglier real fast.

If I can still afford the gas, I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 2.23.12, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2012 WordChaser, Inc.

Shared Shock and Sorrow

It was around 12:45 last Friday afternoon when I returned to my office from a physical therapy session on my bum knee. The familiar ping from my phone alerted me that a new text message was waiting. It was from my son at college down near San Diego asking me if I knew what had just happened at Crescenta Valley High – the high school in our small bedroom community on the fringes of sprawling Los Angeles. I had no idea what his text was asking.

At almost the exact same moment I was reading my son’s message, my sister called on our house phone (yes, we still have one of those and no, it isn’t a pay phone) asking if I had heard anything from the staff at the CV Weekly newspaper (the newspaper that runs my weekly column) about the big breaking news. My sister has a son who’s a senior at CV High who had been texting her with what he knew was happening. I think she – like many of my regular readers – assumed that because I write a column for the paper each week I have the inside scoop on any buzz going on in the newsroom on any given day. Not hardly.

As my sister relayed the hard-to-believe news about a possible suicide at CVHS, I suddenly noticed the drone of multiple helicopters hovering somewhere high above the 210 freeway. That sound is always the first indicator that something big is happening up here in our normally calm and quiet valley.

Sure enough, as the minutes ticked by last Friday afternoon, we all quickly learned more about the tragic suicide of the sophomore student. As sketchy and often wrong as the rapidly passed-along details of the event may have been, it reminded me again that we are all connected to each other’s lives like never before in the history of humanity.

With the increasing saturation of smart phones (do you know a single teenager or pre-teen without his/her own mobile phone?), iPads, laptops and near universal access to the Internet, along with apps like Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging and others – our ability to share news or events within literally seconds of it happening is stunning. Much of the time the shared information is trivial and inane at best. But sometimes, like last Friday, the news can stun.

Then, in one of those oddly connected, not-so-random bookends that the universe throws at us every so often, the very next day after the horrific event at CV High, information channels all over the world were ablaze with tragic (yet not entirely unexpected for anyone familiar with her struggles and addictions) news of another untimely death – pop superstar and once-gifted singer, Whitney Houston.

Although one could certainly argue that Ms. Houston’s death was also the result of a suicide – albeit a long-term and not nearly as deliberate an effort – it’s safe to say that both of these sad souls must have been terribly troubled individuals. I can’t help but wonder, with so many available ways to connect with other people, how is it possible that anyone today could live with such loneliness and despair that they ultimately disconnect from life itself?

Our family did not know the young man who died last week. And yet, we are connected. My wife and I are both proud alums of Crescenta Valley High. Three of our four kids graduated from there. My own two brothers and one sister graduated from CV as did one of my sisters-in-law. And as I noted above, I have a nephew who will graduate from CV this coming June. To say the least, we are a Falcon family to the core.

As such, we all grieve the loss of one of our own and send our prayers and condolences to all of those directly affected by this unfathomable tragedy. The school, this community, will forever be a different place because of what happened at the start of the lunch period on an otherwise typical February day in the Foothills.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 2.16.12, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2012 WordChaser, Inc.

Sews Your Mother!

This past weekend my wife dragged me – um, I mean – I willingly accompanied her to a local fabric store while she shopped for material to sew a birthday gift. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that spending precious hours of the weekend meandering through row upon row of fabrics and notions (what exactly is a “notion” anyway?) is not exactly my idea of time well spent. My wife, however, seems to derive as much enjoyment from the experience as I do wandering the canyons of lumber-laden shelves and towering walls of bright, shiny, wondrous power tools at a home improvement store. Go figure.

She, like many other women of her generation, learned to sew both from her mother and from now-extinct Home Economic classes once routinely offered in junior and senior high schools. My own mom was/is a seamstress par excellence. When I was a kid, Mom’s porcelain-colored Singer sewing machine was an appliance at least as important to our household as the refrigerator, stovetop, washing machine or our family television. Okay, maybe not the TV.  

In fact, long before the expression, “There’s an app for that!” became part of the vernacular, I remember another common phrase used around our house as I was growing up. If any of us kids needed a cheerleading outfit, a hip and trendy vest, Halloween costume, pair of warm, snuggly pajamas, Paisley/Carnaby Street shirt or even a Neru jacket like the ones the Beatles wore stepping off of the BOAC airliner on the tarmac at JFK – my mom would pull the cover off her sewing machine and say, “I’m sure there’s a pattern for that!” Then she’d paw through her overstuffed boxes of sewing patterns searching for something remotely close to the article of clothing we were asking for. 

If she didn’t already have a pattern or one that could be altered to come close (trust me on this, fashion standards were a lot more tolerant and forgiving in the 60s), she would load us kids into the family station wagon – a candy apple green Plymouth number with fake, wood grain ‘paneling’ on its sides – and haul us down to one several sewing/notions/fabric stores on Honolulu Avenue.

I would sit as quietly as a kid could sit amongst a cavernous room full of other moms looking through thick, oversized catalogs of patterns from companies like Butterick, Simplicity, McCalls and Vogue. (My wife says that Vogue patterns were the most difficult to master. I wonder if Madonna sews. My wife and I live in different worlds.)  

Anyway, I remember one article of clothing in particular my Mom made for yours truly that – in retrospect – probably seemed like a righteously cool idea at the time. But the reality of the finished product was embarrassing at best. It was a one-piece pair of overalls made of dark chocolate brown, wide-wale corduroy. I’m talkin’ WIDE, wide wale. Like drive a MatchBox car between those bad boys.

What on God’s green earth was I thinking? In my defense, I was the drummer in one garage band or another from sixth grade through senior high, so I did have a proclivity to push the fashion envelope – at least as much as my short-sleeve-white-shirt-polyester-tie wearing, tapered haircut-loving Dad would allow. Apparently, however, a corduroy nerd suit was permissible. Either that or my Dad’s in heaven snickering at me even now.

Last weekend as I caught up on emails, texted and absentmindedly shuffled after my wife while she picked her way through bolts of wildly colored material and “fat quarter” packs (don’t ask), I half-wondered if sewing as a hobby was quickly becoming a lost art. Wide wale corduroy overalls notwithstanding, that would be a shame.

Then again, my talented and oh-so-crafty wife reminds me that there is an ongoing resurgence of young, upwardly mobile girls and women taking up old-school arts like knitting, quilting and needlepoint. Me? I’m holding out for macramé to make a comeback.  

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 2.9.12, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2012 WordChaser, Inc.

Bowled Over By Commercials

I’m glad it’s finally February. For one thing, I can’t remember a January before this last one that I had to turn on the ceiling fan just to be able to sleep comfortably at night.

With any luck, this month will at last bring some more seasonally cold temps and rainfall. But I’ll leave the official weather prognostication and precipitation prestidigitation to my columnist colleague at the CV Weekly newspaper, Sue Kilpatrick.

Mostly, I’m thankful it’s February because those awful, terrible, annoyingly vapid JCP commercials with all the screaming people are supposed to be replaced by, well, something else. It seems like only yesterday that we were subjected to months of that screaming guy in the commercials for Universal Studios’ King Kong attraction.

But back to JCP, which, in case you haven’t caught on to their marketing sleight of hand, is what JC Penny is now calling itself. You know, like Kentucky Fried Chicken tried to become relevant and cool by calling itself KFC. Or like California Pizza Kitchen suddenly became CPK. It’s marketing gimmicks like this – along with obnoxiously loud and uncreative commercials like the current JCP teaser campaign – that make me cringe with embarrassment at my own profession.

Thankfully, this weekend has the potential to redeem my faith in the creative process.

As someone who has spent the last thirty years or so writing advertising copy (not “verbage,” please!) including literally thousands of TV and radio commercials or “spots” as we call them in the biz, the annual NFL Super Bowl broadcast is Christmas, the World Series and Olympics all rolled into one event.

To get an idea how important and prestigious the Super Bowl is to advertisers, the going rate for a mere thirty seconds of airtime on this Sunday’s broadcast is a reported $3.5 million. For thirty seconds! That’s over $116,000 a second. Even the Federal Government doesn’t spend money that fast. Oh wait, yes it does.

This year’s Super Bowl advertisers include Volkswagon, Acura, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Career Builder, Anheuser-Busch, Audi and others with deep marketing budgets. I really couldn’t care less whether the Patriots or the Giants win on Sunday, since the Dodgers didn’t even make it into the playoffs (and that right there should tell you how much of a football fan I am.)  No, I’m more interested to see whether the agency creative teams have come up with winners or wieners to debut during the broadcast. If I have to go to the bathroom or the kitchen, I’ll be going during the game itself so I can be sure not to miss any of the commercials. I’m not kidding.

At some point in the early 80s, the Super Bowl became the place for advertisers and the agencies who produce their commercials to showcase new, hopefully breakthrough work – spots that were created to be talked about at office water coolers all across the country the following Monday. The advent of online streaming video channels has only increased the importance of having a hit commercial air during the Super Bowl.

Apple’s “1984” commercial to launch the Macintosh computer was one of the first TV spots to use a “big idea” concept along with feature-film production values (the ground-breaking spot was directed by newcomer Ridley Scott, who went on to direct Aliens, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and other mega-hits). It also enjoyed the highly unusual status of airing only once – during the game itself – and never again. At least, Apple never paid to have the commercial run again.

This Sunday I’ll be glued to the set, watching to see if another water-cooler-worthy commercial is aired. I’m certain of one thing, however. If the ad agency creative teams have done their jobs, the only screaming heard during Sunday’s game will be from unhappy Patriots or Giants fans.

Then again, it could also be me screaming at the summer-like weather that continues to torture my very soul. I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 2.2.12, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2012 WordChaser, Inc.