Canthook

They've been advertising Select Comfort Sleep Number^TM beds a lot lately. I've been paying some attention, because we bought a 10-year-guarantee mattress at Sears 11 years ago. Within 3 years, it was lumpy and misshapen, but they declined to honor the warranty.

It seems they wanted a sales receipt; we had figured that paying for it with Sears card meant we wouldn't have to bother with that, because they could look up our card records, but they decided it wasn't worth their while to do that. We cut up our Sears card that day, and when Sears went bankrupt a few years later, we went out for a steak dinner to celebrate.

But after 8 more years on that terrible mattress, it's no longer in the "lumpy and misshapen" category. It's more in the "you could lose a subcompact in some of those holes" category. Or, if not a subcompact, a wife. Blondie has decided she'd rather sleep on the sofa.

Sometimes, my redheaded girlfriend, Marie, will share the bed with me, but not always. Marie is a pedigreed long-haired German Shepard. She's big enough to avoid the smaller holes, and she has a nice fur coat, so the broken springs don't poke her too bad, but she's not always willing to put up with the discomfort. Frequently, she prefers to sleep at the bottom of the stairs, just by the front door.

That's a strategic location. I can't go down to the refrigerator without her knowing it, Blondie can't go upstairs to the bathroom without her realizing it, and there's no way anyone could possibly open the front door unless she moves. It would be a tragedy if someone were to leave, and she didn't get to go for a ride.

I remember well the era between my first wife and my second one. I didn't sleep well at all. In fact, I haven't slept well since I was a kid.

Mom told me that she'd come into my room at night, and I would sit up in bed and talk to her, making lucid conversation. Come morning, I had no idea she was ever there. I'm told that kids who experience trauma, that is, develop PTSD, become hypervigilant, which affects their sleep patterns.

I was ritually, sexually, abused about a month before my fifth birthday. You could say it was strangers that did it, except that it was a small town, where nobody is a stranger. From that time on, I had recurring nightmares, and it wasn't until I was about 40 that I figured out that it wasn't a fantasy at all, but a memory. How did I reach that conclusion? Well, for one thing, I had physical scars that matched those nightmares, and no other explanation for how I got them. I can identify 3 of my attackers - a deputy sheriff, a leading member of the bar, a merchant who was president of the Lions club - but they were just spectators. I couldn't see the pudgy woman holding me on her lap, and I averted my eye from the active attacker(s).

Ever since I moved away from home in my 20s, I've slept very light. I used to wake up in Janesville, Wisconsin, every morning at 3:17. Turns out a factory whistle was blowing, about three miles away. I would wake up in Cincinnati to what sounded like fog horns. Turns out that's exactly what it was. I was seven miles from the river, but there's more traffic on the Ohio River past Cincinnati than passes through the Panama Canal. When I was first married to my first wife, she worked nights, and I'd wake up at 5:30, although Em didn't get home until two hours later. Turns out that the lights in the chickenhouse automatically came on at 5:30.

I don't have that recurring nightmare very often any more, but I still sleep lightly - unless I'm not alone. Supposedly nobody sleeps well when they're not in their own bed - except that I did. I found that I rested well when I slept with someone I was dating, even if I didn't know them very well. I initially thought it had something to do with sex, until I found I slept well even when there wasn't any sex involved. (Yeah, I did some kinky things when I was dating, like sleeping together without having sex.)

Eventually, I realized that I even slept better when my baby son was in the house. Yes, sometimes he slept in bed with me while Em was at work - but I want to keep him sleep in his own bed, so it wouldn't be a problem that Em and I wanted to exclude him from our bed on weekends.

Em laughed about our "dancing cheek-to-cheek", her term for body contact during sleep while facing opposite directions. I laughed, too, but that intimate contact brought us closer together than our sex life - and we had a very good sex life.

It's obvious that I'm hardly the only one who attaches great importance to sleeping together. There are many articles, many web pages, about people trying to deal with snoring or restless leg syndrome disturbing their partner's sleep. Bed manufacturers are bouncing bowling balls, showing that a glass of champagne doesn't spill, or creating mattresses that allow partners to select different firmness levels, or they're making mattresses out of special foams instead of springs.

In the last episode of House, one of the best-written series on the air, Wilson has a bad back; he and Amber decide it's due to Amber's mattress. They shop; he wants a pillow-top mattress and she wants a firm mattress. Pick whichever one you want, she proclaims, and disappears. He decides to get the mattress she wants - and it turns out to make Amber mad when he does. In his previous relationships, she proclaims, he's acted like a wimp, and that destroyed those relationships. When she said to get the mattress he wants, she wanted him to get the mattress he wants.

Women. Can't live mumble-mumble. Wilson takes her at her word - and realizes that he has always wanted to float off to sleep literally. He buys a waterbed. In the middle of the night, she wakes up alone, and finds him sleeping on the living room floor. I hate it, he says. Suppose they will take it back? She assures him that they will.

Everybody has a gimmick. Maybe it's not your bed that's causing your bad back, maybe you just need some chiropractic care. Last week, when walking through Costco, a chiropractor had a table set up. I'm not sure if it was a lottery to win a free back massage or if it was a free back massage with an intake examination. Either way, a great back massage sounds wonderful - except that therapeutic back massages always seem rough and painful. I've had great massages from girlfriends, but in my experience, experts seem to do more harm than good with back massages. Obviously, since I don't know exactly how they were giving away free back massages, I didn't bite on their offer.

Until several months ago, I found myself often "working" at night. I was keeping five servers running, and I found it much easier to do that when I babied the machines in the middle of the night; after all, that's when there is less traffic online.

That often left me playing with puters while Blondie slept, and sleeping - or trying to - while Blondie was engaged in her career. She didn't like it, and neither did my body. My blood pressure was going wild, my digestion was crazy, my blood sugar was wildly out of control, and I wondered how much longer I would be alive. I got someone else to take over the servers, and since then, my blood pressure has dropped, my digestion is a little less crazy, my blood sugar is mildly out of control, and I wonder how much long I will be alive. But I'm sleeping upstairs while Blondie is sleeping downstairs, and if I supplement that with sleeping half the day, I may be able to survive another month or three.

So I really need to buy a new mattress.

I keep thinking about that "thera" foam. It looks like it would trap a lot of heat and moisture. When blood sugars are running high, one's body tries to get rid of the sugar, not just by frequent urination, but by night sweats. Sounds like a bad idea.

Our current mattress has a pillow on top, and none underneath, which means we can't plop it over every few months. We didn't realize that when we bought the mattress. It's pretty expensive to buy a mattress with pillow top and pillow bottom, and I'm thinking, well, you can't launder the pillow anyway. Maybe it'd be smart to buy a mattress with NO pillow at all, and use a separate waffle under the sheet. You can buy 20 waffles for the price of a mattress, meaning that it could be replaced every six to twelve months.

Or there's that sleep number mattress. I went to their website, and plugged in all sorts of information that I didn't really know the answers to. It seems to think that I should have a 95 sleep number and Blondie should have an 85 number. But if my number is higher than hers, wouldn't that mean I would keep rolling over onto her side of the bed all the time?

When I was young, living on the farm, we raised longrace hogs. That's the most common pigs you think of, with a really long body, all white. Longrace is one of the more profitable breeds to raise, because they tend to be fairly lean, and they get better prices at auction. Longrace also have big litters, and that's the key to profitability. If you get litters of five or six, it's hard to break even. If you get litters of ten or twelve, it's pretty easy to pay the mortgage.

The thing is, though, sows tend to roll over and suffocate their baby piglets without realizing it. Because of that, farmers put mother sows in farrowing crates, which keep the piglets from getting squooshed. I always thought it couldn't be comfortable for mama sows, and I'd talk to the mama sows, telling them that they could be much more comfortable if they'd just be more careful of the little ones, but mama sows don't pay much attention to little boys. Unless they walk between mama and her piglets. You don't get between a sow and her piglets. Ever. That can be a lethal mistake.

I've had a few other rules I've tried to enforce in the households I've lived in. One is that anyone who wakes someone unnecessarily is automatically in the wrong. If the house is on fire, or there's a tornado bearing down on the house, it's OK to wake someone up. If you cook something that has an extremely enticing odor, and it wakes someone up, that's not considered waking someone up unnecessarily. If they can roll over and go back to sleep, they needed the sleep, and if they have to get up and eat, it certainly wasn't unnecessary.

And if your bedpartner is extremely horny, she can lie in spoon formation with her arm around you, and that is also permissible. There's a difference between encouraging your partner to awaken and forcing your partner to wake up.

In an old episode of "Welcome Back, Kotter", Gabe Kaplan is telling the story of finding himself in a cabin at night. I seem to recall that he's chaperoning something, and due to an emergency, everyone else has gone; there's just Kotter in one cot, and a female high school student in the other one. She's complaining that the cot is unfamiliar and lumpy, and she's right underneath the open window, and she's very cold.

Kotter asks her, would you like to pretend like you're Mrs. Kotter, just for the night? She thinks, well, we're all alone, it sounds interesting, nobody will ever know. She says, well, sure, she'd like that. Kotter says, in that case, get up and shut the window yourself.

Marital geometry seems to be a problem for everyone, and there are more people trying to build a better mattress than trying to build a better mousetrap. What's your Sleep Number^TM? For me, and for most people, it seems to be TWO.

A pseudo-Christian group self-styled as "The Resistance", claiming to have 3,000 members is calling for the boycotting of Starbucks because they don't like the new logo. It seems the woman on the cup has hooters, and they say she has her legs spread like a prostitute.

Legs? On a mermaid? The group leader (is there really a group?), Mark Dice (formerly known as John Conner) says it's not really a mermaid, it's a siren. Do sirens have scaly legs?

In any case, Starbucks is basically just going back to their original logo.

Terry Heckler, one of Starbucks' founders, pored over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.

We might note here that Starbucks didn't originally serve beverages. They originally roasted coffee and sold dry coffee, tea, and spices, and didn't start selling liquid coffee until they had five stores.

Howard Schultz fought with the other two founders about this, and opened up an expresso shop in 1986, called Il Giornale. They had a green logo, compared to Starbucks's green logo. The Il Giornale name was inscribed in a green circle that surrounded a head of Mercury, the swift messenger god, because the emphasis was on speed.

In 1987 the other two sold Starbucks to Schultz, and he merged the two companies, using a green logo with a slicked-up, Bowdlerized mermaid. In 1992, they asked Terry Heckler to revise our logo. She stayed mostly the same but lost her navel.

Now that Schultz is back in charge, and Starbucks is fighting to regain recent market losses, the emphasis is on seductive coffee once again, and you have what "Mark Dice" is calling the "Slutbucks" logo.

Dice has made a fool of himself in the past by ridiculing Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, 50 Cent, Tom Cruise and Duke University. (He wants the Blue Devils sports team renamed to something less offensive to Christians. Duke, being a Methodist University, says that Methodists are Christians, and the Blue Devils were French soldiers of WWI, well known for their courage, daring, and flamboyant style.) His website reveals that Dice (or is it Conner?) is a conspiracy theorist to make all other conspiracy theorists blush.

We're not sure if John Conner needs more caffeine or less - but we're pretty sure that he needs to get laid, frequently and well. Most guys will agree that women will drive you crazy - but lack of women will drive you even crazier, even faster, and this guy shows all the symptoms....

You won't hear this speech from Senator Obama - but maybe you should.

"You know, in 1964, Barry Goldwater, who held the same seat in the Senate that Mr. McCain now holds, ran for President, and there were a lot of people who voted against him, for a variety of different reasons.

"They voted against Goldwater because he was considered a war-monger. Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, told voters he wasn't going to send American boys 9-10,000 miles to fight a war that Asians ought to be fighting for themselves. Well, as we all know, shortly after Lyndon was re-elected, we were waist-deep in VietNam.

"They voted against Goldwater because he was considered a racist. He voted against federal civil rights legislation - but you know, he supported the Arizona NAACP, and he fought to desegregate the Arizona National Guard.

"And some people voted against him because of his last name. He described himself as half-jewish.

"Now, I've said some nice things in the past about President Reagan, and I'm going to tell you now that Barry Goldwater was a good Senator, that he was honest, that he was smart, that he gave great thought to the bills he voted on, and when he spoke in the Senate, people listened to his ideas. Some of them were good ideas. And I've never hesitated to listen to good ideas from Republicans. Democrats aren't the only ones who have good ideas, and a good idea is a good idea, no matter who comes up with it.

"Now, I can know there are going to be people who vote against me because I'm muslim, even though I'm not, and there are going to be people who vote against me because I hate America, although I don't, and there are going to be white people who vote against me because I'm half-black, and there are going to be black people who vote against me because I'm half-white. I can't help that.

"And I'm not going to cry and tell you it hurts my feelings. It does hurt my feelings when someone who doesn't know me calls me a nigger. A Senator's job is to vote on issues, and if I have voted for on something you oppose, or I've voted against against something you're for, you have a right to object to that. But almost everyone gets treated poorly at times for reasons beyone their control, and for a lot of us, we never experience anything else.

"There's a reason why the United Coal Workers is a strong union, a reason why the Steelworkers is a strong union, why the Teamsters is a strong union, when the United Food and Commercial Workers is a strong union. It's because their members don't get treated with respect by their employers. It wasn't Walter Reuther who made the United Auto Workers strong, it was Henry Ford.

"You know, there are companies out there who have bad relations with their unions, and companies out there who have good relations. There are a lot of small companies who have no union at all, because the owner knows every employee, and when Jenny in Receiving has a baby, he feels almost like he has a new granddaughter. When you get a little bigger, unions make sense, because you can't deal individually with 400 or 4,000 or 40,000 workers, and because unions make it easier for management to know what workers want, they help. A good union makes good management look even better. And if you have bad relations between management and the union, it's going to cripple the company's performance.

"So I know where you're coming from. I cut my teeth helping workers who were out of jobs when the steel mills of Chicago shut down. At that point, you can't renegotiate with the steel mills; there's nobody to negotiate with. It's too late. A situation that was bad enough in the first place gets much worse, overnight.

"So I want to tell you, you may be for me, and you may be against me. It may be for reasons I can't help, or it might be because I'm doing things you disapprove of. They say you can't please all the people, all the time, and I'm not sure you can please even one person all the time, not if you're honest. Sometimes I've had to choose between two bad options, and I've voted for bills that I really wasn't very happy with.

"But then I look at Senator Clinton, who's been fighting for universal health care. She says she has 35 years of experience, and for at least half of those years, she's been trying to get universal health care passed, and she's a formidable fighter, but she hasn't gotten anywhere. Sometimes, it pays to remember that half a loaf is better than none.

"So I will promise you this: I will be the president of ALL the united states, not just the president of those who voted for me. That's why I've been very selective about who I accept political contributions from. I won't be bought. I won't even be rented.

"And after four years, maybe you'll change your mind, and you'll vote to re-elect me. And maybe after eight years, you'll decide that maybe I wasn't so bad after all. And maybe along the way, you'll decide to vote for Senators and Representatives who will help me get this country working again.

"This election isn't about me. It's about you. That's why the signs say "Yes, WE can", not "Yes, He can". Because, you know, a president can't do a lot all by himself. And whether you are one of my supporters, or you are the loyal opposition, I need you to take an active role in helping turn this country around.

"I won't ask you to vote for me because I'm half-black. I won't ask you to vote for me because I'm half-white. I won't ask you to vote for me because I'm a democrat. I'll ask you to vote for me because I'm an American, and because we need to stop the bickering in Washington in order to turn things around and get this country back on the right track.

"Senator Clinton, she went on Bill O'Reilly's show and said, "Rich People, God Bless Us". I'm here, with you, and I'm telling you, "America, God Bless Us". Because we need God's blessing now more than ever before."

When Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Ain't nobody happy at this house.

My wife, Blondie, is a Clinton fan. She thought it was OK when Bill Clinton was screwing around on Hillary; and she told me that if I ever get elected President, she would expect and permit the same behavior on my behalf. She couldn't imagine why Bill was impeached and disbarred for lying under oath. She thought nothing of Travelgate, couldn't imagine why anyone was distressed over Vince Foster, figured the lost-then-found Rose billing records was "just one of those things", figured that a smart cookie like Hillary could have made money honestly on cattle futures even if she'd had to predict price moves before they actually happened.

I'm from the midwest, not from Philadelphia. While I have a vision that says fundamentally dishonest politicians should go to prison, she has a vision of the world in which everyone is fundamentally dishonest. When she moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster a quarter-century ago, she was flabberghasted to find how naive and innocent Lancaster was; when I moved from Ohio to Lancaster a decade ago, I was flabberghasted to find how corrupt Lancaster was.

So we've had different opinions on the Democratic race. Both of us initially thought John Edwards was a great candidate for the Democrats to run, and we were both intrigued by the idea that a high-yellow Chicago pol won the Iowa caucus.

The tide turned when Obama said, "You're likeable enough, Hillary." I still haven't figured out why; maybe that's a guy thing. Maybe it was because it was a lie; Hillary's biggest problem at that time was that she was the only politician in the race with a kneejerk dislike quotient similar to Dubya's. Since then, she's replaced the kneejerk reaction with a reasoned one, with attacks perceived as unfair, and campaigning perceived as dishonest.

According to the exit polls in Indiana, 67% of the electorate believes Barack Obama is honest and trustworthy; of those voters, 66% went for Obama and 34% went for Clinton. Of the 31% who believes Barack Obama is dishonest, 89% were Clinton voters, and 11% were Obama voters. That's the category that Blondie fits into. She can't point to anything specific. Maybe he's really a Muslim. Maybe he's a drug dealer. Maybe he eats scrambled eggs with fried babies for breakfast. She doesn't know what he's lying about, but she's sure he's crooked as a dog's hind leg; that's how you know he's incredibly dirty, is that she can't catch him in a lie.

And in a way, that makes sense. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know - but she was comfortable with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton at this point in the race. Like Obama, both of them appeared out of nowhere, nobody having heard of either one before the Iowa primary. The difference is that nobody's really found any skeletons in Obama's closet.

She talks about his inexperience. "He wasn't supposed to be the candidate this time around," she says; maybe eight years from now. But he has more experience than Senator Clinton, I point out. She shakes that off, and decides that the real problem is that Obama is "flat".

I think that may be the real problem. Obama seems to be suffering from "personality deficit disorder" if you don't listen to his speeches, but only listen to Hardball and News8 at 11. In many ways, personality is based on one's shortcomings. Dubya was a draft-dodging druggie. Clinton was a saxophone-playing philanderer. Bush41 was a CIA paper-passer. Reagan was a cowboy. Carter was a Jesus freak with a drunkard for a brother and a mother from hell. Jerry Ford played football a few too many times without a helmet. Nixon was a crook who probably stole "Checkers" and that cloth coat Pat wore.

If Barack Obama were to play Texas Hold-em with Daniel Negreanu and Jennifer Tilly, smoke cigars openly instead of trying to quit cigarettes, and were to drink heavily, she'd find him more acceptable. Those are sins that make him seem real, instead of simply a paper doll with large ears. If it were to turn out that he secretly owned a chain of pawnshops, that'd make him dirty enough to believe in.

Instead, he's another Dan Quayle, whose wife said she wasn't worried about him fooling around with whores if he had the opportunity to play golf instead.

Rogers and Hammerstein figured it out with the lyrics from Carousel:

My mother used to say to me
When you grow up, my son
I hope you're a bum like your father was
'Cause a good man ain't no fun!

Stonecutters cut it on stone
Woodpeckers peck it on wood
There's nothin' so bad for a woman
As a man who thinks he's good!

And to win "Big States", it might be best if Obama were to develop a vice. He needs to choose carefully, to find one that won't kill him in small states.

Ronnie Campbell wasn't very smart when he chose his. He's a Member of Parliament in the UK. He announced that he would wear purple to honor National Fetish Day last January. When the local newspaper called him up to ask about his support, he said, "I have no problem with it and I am happy to show my support. I have a purple tie and a purple shirt so I will be able to wear their colors."

"I must have a thousand [fetishes] but," he added, "hand on my heart, I couldn't tell which is the most important one. Probably the horses."

When they told him the kinky meaning of fetish, he said, "Oh my God almighty! I thought a fetish was a worry, like worrying about backing the right horse."

So I wouldn't recommend that Senator Obama develop a horse fetish. Maybe he could develop a thing for barbecuing ribs. Ribs are messy, there's the meat thing, there's the cholesterol thing, and yet it's consistant with his background in Chicago, his background in Hawaii, a mother from Kansas. Barbecue sauce is a deep dark secret, with nobody sharing their recipe with anyone else. He could explain that he has tried to keep it a secret because he didn't want anyone to think he was black, and vote against him for that reason.

Dark, smoky, mysterious barbecue sauce. When they ask him his recipe for ribs - and some reporter is *sure* to ask - he can simply say, "Did you see 'Fried Green Tomatoes'? The secret... is in the sauce. You knew my father was from Africa, didn't you?" There'd be lots of nervous tittering. Someone would joke that you have to be careful what you write about Obama, because if he doesn't like it, he might have you for supper on Saturday night. More nervous tittering. You think Hillary seems tough?