What I Learned From Richard Simmons

Many of you consider Richard Simmons the Clown Prince of Weight Loss, and you're right. He'll tell you you're right. ABC News' Nightline saw something more, and they gave Simmons a sizable segment back in 2009. I never forgot it, simply because Simmons has a few lessons for life, slim or otherwise.

Have a mission. GOD gives us tools and gifts, but HE leaves it to us to find and use them. Richard found his gift in motivation. He told Nightline: "I don't have to work anymore. I don't have to make a phone call anymore, I don't have to do one more leg lift. This is my passion and this is my mission. And I've never deterred from it. And people have watched me over the years do what I do and you can't fake this. Either you really care about what you do or you don't. ... I eat, breathe, sleep, do everything for this, and it makes me happy." On the surface, it sounds hedonistic, until you see what he actually does.

Simmons starts his day on the phone, making calls to people with mass quantities of poundage to shed and convincing them they can do it. His eyes fix upon a photo of the other person on the line, as if he's talking to him or her in person. At 60+ years, he's still looking younger and buffer than a man his age should expect. He's still making TV appearances, going on the road, and making weight-loss videos.

Know where you've been. Simmons has been there and done that. ABC reported that he "grew up large but not in charge in New Orleans, surrounded by the caloricly colossal Creole restaurants of the French Quarter. Before a nurse's intervention got him healthy and looking trim, he'd put away enough to become a 250-pound teen."

He got it off. He kept it off. He's become a star at helping others keep it off. But for all his success, he's still teaching fitness classes at the Beverly Hills studio he founded back in 1974. And he only charges $12 for the chance to sweat off the pounds with him. That's $12 in Beverly Hills.

Don't waste time on those who aren't plugged into your mission. I've seen Simmons on The Late Show with David Letterman take more than a few cheap shots. It would be one thing if success had spoiled the fitness guru, but in the context of everything else, the jokes bomb. Simmons just brushes it off and gets on.

He even took ribbing for donning a suit and tie, instead of his trademark tank top, when he went before Congress to testify on childhood obesity. "I have to tell you I was a bit afraid that they would laugh at me," Simmons told ABC News. "'Cause they see me on television and they see me crazy and silly, and I wanted to make sure that they knew the other side of Richard Simmons and I put a suit on when I went to Washington and people told me I looked good. And I sounded good and I made sense. And that is going to be my legacy for the rest of my life."

Know that GOD will help you, if you help others. "I will hang it up when everyone is healthy, when everyone is a perfect ideal weight," he told Nightline. "And then I'll open up restaurants. Huge Italian feasts. ... When people don't need me anymore and GOD has asked me to come back. That's when I will stop."

Hebrews 6:10 (NIV) puts it another way: "GOD is not unjust; HE will not forget your work and the love you have shown HIM as you have helped HIS people and continue to help them."

No, Guys, That's Not For Sharing

Last week on 30/30, I reiterated my advice to young ladies about why they should leave their clothes on anytime a camera is around, no matter how much they trust the person behind the lens. I soon heard reaction pro and con on this post.

The con: Where do I, as a man, get off lecturing ladies on modesty? And secondly, what did I do to stop the up-the-skirt picture at school that was going around when I heard about it? (That picture was going around at a different school, where I would not have been able to stop it.)

The pro: Why should it matter if a man lectures a woman on modesty? The gender of the lecturer isn't the point -- the point is that it's good advice.

The con: Why am I not speaking to the men on this topic instead of the ladies, since men are the chief source of the problem?

It's a fair argument. My thoughts going into the writing of the piece was a belief that not enough men are standing up and telling women we don't want you engaging in this kind of behavior, given the mixed messages floating around them in our society. But guys aren't off the hook. They never were -- it's just the focus of that column wasn't on them.

So guys, I'm going to deal with you now. Notice I'm not calling you gentlemen at this point, because real gentlemen don't even think about engaging about this kind of behavior. (I find it ironic that "Gentlemen's Clubs" are called such when true gentlemen would never be seen there.) Real gentlemen, you may leave the page. Everybody else, read and heed.

Guys, you may think it's studly to score and share a few naked pictures of some girl. And I can't understand why you think that, because your worth as a guy drops with each press of the shutter and the Send button. Let's think this out: how many girls want to be with a guy who could potentially subject them to humiliation?

But you're not thinking about that. Your testosterone is controlling your brain cells, and unfortunately, some of you are still getting dates because of the paradox of some girls wanting to be around bad boys. When you're young and invincible and don't have to strike out into the world to start building your life, you think character flaws are mere pockmarks on your armor.

Then you get into the world at large, the one outside of high school and college, and you learn you don't have a free ride anymore. Your equivalent of the Amish rumspringge is over and you need to plant a stake. I'll give you one guess at where employers are getting a chunk of information about your life. It's the "f" word, not the one you probably casually drop as "a meaningless intensive" -- as Webster's politely calls it -- but the one that just turned into the paper trail for your scoundrel youth.

Maybe you're moderately smart enough not to be so brazen with social media. You say you're not dumb enough to get caught doing that. You say, hey, it's just a "guy thing," just like going to those aforementioned clubs. I've got a response for that: Numbers 32:23, which says, (NIV) "You may be sure that your sin will find you out." The context of this verse is Moses telling the nation of Israel that they can't follow GOD half-way. And a lack of decency falls under that category, as mentioned in 2 Corinthians 6 (NIV): "Come out from them and be separate, says the LORD. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you."

This is where some of you say you don't believe in GOD. To which I say, what about believing in your wife, the one you said you would honor and cherish when you married her? This is either your current one, or the one you wish to have, but you will end up alienating either of them because you just can't practice self-control. Maybe those girls who loved bad boys thought it was cool in school, but now they're also planting stakes and don't have time for juvenile delinquency. They've matured; you haven't.

GOD is right about sin finding you out. Lightning may not come out of the sky to strike you down, but sooner or later, you will deal with the consequences whether you believe in HIM or not. You will deal with the anger of the ladies whose lives you messed up with nude pictures. You will deal with their blame. You may even deal with their lawsuits. And they will not want to deal with your excuses saying, "I was just having fun," or "She didn't mind."

It's not fun. It's not fair. It's not edifying. It's dirty pictures. Delete them.

Are We There Yet?

One bright October day a few years ago, while I was visiting my parents in California, Dad had this bright idea of taking a day trip from Upland to Edwards Air Force Base, then the spaceport in Mojave, and coming back down through Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear. It looked good on paper.

We get to Edwards AFB and find that there's no public tour, which I could've guessed, since it is a military installation. About the only thing you can see is a B-1 on display just outside the main gate. We get to the spaceport and find a tiny park for a visitors' center. I find out there through a kiosk that you can tour Edwards, but it has to be arranged in advance. Perhaps another time. As for the spaceport, about the only thing on display is the X-plane. Dad gets plenty of pictures of that and we go on our merry way. We stop at the Burger King to relieve ourselves, one of several bathroom stops we'll make throughout the day. Too much coffee.

During the break, Dad snaps a few pictures of a desolate, depressing, sad old second-hand store across the street. It's lousy business but good art. I snap a few Blackberry photos of him taking pictures along with the house on the corner with Bible verses and a model of JESUS carrying a cross on the roof. I can't tell if it's a church, a mission, or a house of an extremely fervent Believer.

The road to lake Arrowhead winds up into the mountains and into the clouds. At a certain point on California 18, it grows foggier and foggier with no clue if you're still on the right road. Thus it is when we get to Crestline and get lost. We can't tell if we're on 18 anymore. Dad goes around and doubles back.

We stop and ask a woman chopping wood on the side of the road how to get to Lake Arrowhead. She barely speaks English. One moment, she says, and she calls forth another man who barely speaks English. He tells us to turn around and go down and back and up again. I'm not sure we trust him.

Thus we venture up the hill and into a real estate office. A lonesome old solitary man sits there, the kind who looks like he should be the grandfatherly security guard standing inside a bank.

“How do we get to Lake Arrowhead?” Mom asks.

“Which way did you come from?” the old man answers.

He spells it out for mom while I poke around the dark, cobwebbed, western-themed office with wood paneling and empty desks everywhere. Stuff sits on shelves that probably hasn't been moved since the 1970's or longer. I find a gigantic Bible sitting underneath a mirror on a shelf stashed up against a wall. It is dusty, untouched. Dad and I both need to use the restroom. This is no country for old men or full bladders.

The kindly gent continues explaining after he directs us upstairs into the attic where the necessary lies. It is a graveyard of holiday decorations and Halloween knick-knacks, curiously not on display yet.

We thank him and proceed to carry out the directions, which are still unclear. We go down the hill and up it again, just like he says. And we're still lost. No signs to point us to Lake Arrowhead, no signs to tell us if we're still on California 18. Nothing but road and cars and fog. Too much fog.

Coming to a fork in the road -- and there are many -- we flag down the driver of a white pick-up.

“You lost?” she asks.

We're confused, actually. But this time, we get better directions. Two lefts and a right, and we're finally out of Crestline and on the way to Lake Arrowhead.

Oktoberfest is going when we get there, but there's no brats or beer. We have lunch at the Golden Arches and spend about an hour rubbernecking and visiting the shops. It's a little nippy and getting late. The trip to Big Bear will have to take place another time, and I'm all right with that. I'm tired and feeling icky from too much coffee. We find the 210 without a problem and are back home by 7. It's not a day wasted, but it is a day prolonged.

Women often complain men don't ask for directions. Often that's not the problem. The problem arises when you try to do too much and find one complication leading to another. Fortunately, my Royal Father knows when to get out of the way and let the Royal Mother get us out of the swamp. I prefer to sit in the back seat, just like I did as a child on family vacation, and let the grown-ups hash it out.

Bert And Ernie Aren't Gay*

*and shame on the adult who told you they were
One evening, when I was at work in the newsroom, and a Charlie Brown special was running on TV, a colleague of mine asked: "When you were a kid, didn't you think Peppermint Patty and Marcie were, you know?"

"No, I didn't think that."

Her face fell. "You didn't?"

"No, I didn't."

"But they were always together!"

"Look," I explained, incredulous. "Charles Schulz would've never gone for that. He was a Rockefeller Republican."

"What about Bert and Erie?"

"Never. They were best friends. I never thought anybody was gay. Look, when you're a kid, you don't worry about adult issues."

And if you're an adult, you don't saddle with your children with them. Childhood is the place to learn, grow, and enjoy the morning of life, not get caught up in the evening rush of concerns above young comprehension. When the ruckus erupted a few years ago about childrens' books in the vein of "Heather Has Two Mommies," I bristled not merely because of the subject matter, but because kids don't deserve to have an issue like this dumped into their laps publicly.

I get just as angry when people bring young children to political protests -- left-wing, right-wing, anti-war, anti-abortion, anti-deportation, anti-gun, anti-anything. It's no different than when politicians use kids as political pawns, as Arizona congressman John Shaedegg did so obnoxiously in 2009. It's disturbing to watch adults take advantage of children who aren't old enough to vote, let alone understand the issues.

I'm bold enough to say it: I consider political manipulation of a child a form of abuse. It may not hurt or sting, but robs the child of childhood time. It's a cheap attempt to play with our emotions. It's a psychological low blow.

Some kids are precocious enough to want to become politically active ahead of time. Fine then, but it's up to the adults to guide them in the journey, making sure they learn to evaluate opinions against facts. And please don't let them listen to partisan talk radio, left or right.

Today's youngsters are tomorrow's leaders. But that's tomorrow. Today they're kids, and they deserve to be kids for as long as their innocence clocks will allow. When they discover the real world, they can ask you about Bert and Ernie and Patty and Marcie. And you can tell them the truth, that Charles Schulz never showed parents in any "Peanuts" strip, and Bert and Ernie were best friends.

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Guy In Body Armor!

Reel To Reel: Man Of Steel

Going Rate: Worth full price admission (3D adds little)
Starring: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane, Russell Crowe
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Mild language, fantasy violence

For me, Christopher Reeve will always be Superman. He played the role with poetry, humanity and charisma. So it's hard for your humble reviewer to be objective about the ambitious reboot from producer Christopher Nolan, who successfully reimagined the Batman franchise and gave us the highly intelligent thriller Inception. Team him up with director Zach Snyder, and maybe we've got something -- but only if the film is more like Snyder's 300 and less like the fanboy-tainted Watchmen.

Man of Steel seeks to change our image of Superman from the squeaky-clean American hero embodied by Reeve and George Reeves and morph him into a vulnerable, conflicted figure while amping up the messianic themes of the Superman story that got watered down from the 1978 film. It ditches the bright blue-and-red tights for something resembling chain-mail armor, with a similarly-clad supporting cast who inhabit elongated spaceships that look like something I should bait with a No-Pest Strip.

Left intact is the crux of the backstory: The planet Krypton is about to blow up, and it also faces a military coup that pits leading scientist Jor-El (Crowe) against the ruthless General Zod (Shannon). Jor-El must send his son away to Earth as both a gift to humanity and a way of preserving the Kryptonian race. The new film adds more dimension to this premise with themes of free will versus state authority, not to mention a new perspective on natural childbirth.

We see flashbacks of Kal-El (Cavill) growing up as Clark Kent in Smallville, Kansas, struggling to understand why he's got super powers the other kids don't. His Earth father Jonathan (Costner) warns him to keep his abilities secret because he's the kind of person that will end up changing the world once word gets out. Still, young Clark can't help but come to the rescue, saving his school bus from disaster as one of many miracles. It's important to note Clark is anything but the mild-mannered reporter in the horned-rimmed glasses we've become accustomed to. Here he's a drifter, floating from one job to the next as he tries to figure out his purpose.

Enter Lois Lane (Adams), star reporter for the Daily Planet, who is more the belabored beat writer than the pretty print princess of Margot Kidder's interpretation. While Lane is chasing a lead on a military expedition in the Arctic, she runs across Kent who is about to discover his true identity. I like how this picture disposes of the whole secret-identity device, replacing it with a joint pursuit of the truth. Indeed, Lane becomes central to Superman's mission as he is forced to confront Zod when he tries to conquer Earth.

Any Superman reboot had better have good villains. Forget about Lex Luthor, even though Gene Hackman played him with such smarmy charm. Michael Shannon's Zod has depth and grit, unlike Terence Stamp, who rolled like a Shakespeare-company reject. Is it any wonder that guy was sentenced to eternity in a flying mirror? Crowe's Jor-El seems to channel Obi-Wan Kenobe more than anything else. I keep expecting him to tell his son to use The Force.

The new Superman doesn't waste time plucking cats out of trees or busting petty criminals. He gets right to the epic battle with Zod, something we originally had to wait for in Superman II. The remake puts the original showdown to shame. In westerns, brawls will usually trash a bar. Here the hero and villain trash most of downtown Smallville and much of Metropolis in running, flying fisticuffs of such freewheeling, over-the-top mayhem they risk becoming self-parody.

Yeah, this isn't the Superman of my youth, where Clark Kent had to change into the suit by flying around in a revolving door. It's darker, more violent, more apocalyptic than the superhero movies I grew up with. I won't forget those old movies, but Nolan and Snyder's version isn't forgettable either, which is more than I can say for 2006's Superman Returns.

Hola, Mi Amiga!

Out of the dozen computers I or my family have owned, my favorite remains the Commodore Amiga. The system still stands out from the pack, although the rest of the computing world will still see it as a glorified game machine.

I actually owned two models. My first was an Amiga 500, a Motorola 68000 machine bought off a young student in Kansas who had loaded it up with lots of extras, including the monitor, a digitizing camera, an audio sampling device, a modem, an extra floppy drive, a printer and stacks of software -- some of which he'd copied from a friend in the computer business. The system cost me about $1000. It could've easily sold for twice that.

The 500, as did all the Amiga systems, came with built-in multitasking. To switch programs, you clicked a box in the corner of the screen, or grabbed it with your mouse and pulled it down to reveal what else was running. Neat. But what was neater, for me, was its graphics and video capabilities. The previous owner threw in a genlock, a device that overlaid the Amiga's graphics onto a television signal. Instantly, I had a $5000 television CG system on my desk. This was 1989, more than a decade before digital video production became cheap and ubiquitous on PC's. I used the Amiga's graphics to help Dad produce a couple of training videos for his job.

A lot of the games went unplayed, but I had gobs of them: Chessmaster 3000, Universal Military Simulator, The Three Stooges, to name a meager few. I bought the original SimCity for Amiga. Through the modem, I improved the software line-up with oodles of freebies and utilities. At college, I was able to grab some hard-to-find freeware through networks linked to the mainframe when grabbing files from the Internet was nearly unheard of among most people.

A few years later, I added a hard drive from Great Valley Products. It snapped onto the left side of the 500 and also included slots for memory. Dad happened to have a couple of DRAM sticks he wasn't using, and they worked flawlessly.

I wished the rest of the system did. The external floppy choked from time to time. The mouse cord had a short in it, and it needed to be replaced. WordPerfect on the Amiga was less than perfect; it nearly ate one of my college term papers. I later replaced that software with much-stabler ProWrite. But I never seemed to find a stable power supply. They kept going bad, putting out enough power to turn the machine on but not to run the disk drives. Replacing them cost a chunk of change.

The external hard drive's power supply started flaking out as well, prompting a curious diagnosis from a technician with Great Valley Products in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania: "Maybe you have bad power in your house."

How could that be? The house was barely two years old at the time, and the power wasn't damaging any other electronics.

"I've had that problem in my house," he added. I faintly recall him saying I needed to get some sort of line conditioner, another expensive proposition.

The point was moot, because I was moving up to an Amiga 3000, the 68030 flavor. It ran without any headaches, although I had to give up the 500's awesome monitor, which doubled as a razor-sharp TV display. This system followed me through the remainder of college all the way to my first real-world job.

Through the years, Commodore faded into the sunset, and finding support for machine got harder. At the University of Missouri, I found a small but dedicated users group and a Commodore dealer -- which I fortunately never needed. In McAllen, Texas, the most I had was one guy in a messy, second-floor computer shop. I saw him to ask about a RAM upgrade, but I feared I was walking into the shade-tree computer shop.

With sadness, I kissed the 3000 goodbye in December of 1994 and prepared to move to a first-generation Pentium 90 PC, which I would purchase a few months later. It cost $2300 without a monitor, printer, modem, or extra drive. I was now in the IBM ranks... but it wasn't as much fun.

What I Learned From Gordon Ramsay

Right now, I only consider two programs as appointment television: Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, both helmed by the colorfully foul superstar chef Gordon Ramsay. I believe in negative reinforcement. Repulsion is as powerful a motivator as inspiration. I've only regularly watched Ramsay at work for about a year, but it's enough for a few takeaways.

You can be honest, but you don't have to be brutal. I've seen Ramsay compare at least half a dozen dishes to various forms of excrement. Even if they did look or taste like that, somebody will one day ask the Michelin chef if he actually has tasted excrement. (Maybe they already have and I just haven't seen it.) Say it's dry, it's bland, it's runny, it's overcooked, it's raw, it's disgusting. Don't tell me I should be scooping it up with a shovel.

Leading a kitchen is like leading an battalion. Before I started watching Kitchen Nightmares, I never know about restaurant expediters -- those who bark out dishes to the cooks and prod them to get plates out. They are the drill sergeants of the kitchen, and though annoying, they get the job done. Ramsey demands the restaurant owners he works with learn to lead. Most of all, they need to communicate. I've had my own troubles with communicating to reporters. I pray for GOD to help me with that. But somewhere in my mind, I hear Gordon, pointing at me and saying, "There's your battalion!"

You have to provide an experience, not just a meal. Gordon has told restaurant owners they have to have serve what people can't make themselves. Simple dishes won't do, unless they're simply "stunning." The service, the presentation and the flavor all has to come together. Right now in broadcast news, we are learning to compete with so-called distracted viewers who text and surf the 'net on their smartphones while watching TV. Holding their attention is not easy. My colleagues and myself are learning new ways of thinking and presentation.

If you lose your passion, what's the point? Gordon can see who's cooking to win and who's just simmering. My friend and colleague Kris Pickel once told me about the news business, "When you stop caring, it's time to get out." This is perhaps my biggest challenge. During 2011, I nearly quit the business. The mass shooting that injured Gabby Giffords, a deadly crash involving a Sheriff's helicopter, a pipe-busting deep freeze, and a devastating wildfire all happened within in the first six months of the year, and I couldn't turn it off like people outside the business. Fortunately, I got the chance to move off the night shift and onto the day shift before I threw in the towel. It was the best thing I could've done short of quitting. I'm confident the people who know me see renewal.

I have never sampled any of Gordon Ramsay's dishes. Maybe if I get back to Las Vegas and one of his restaurants, I'll try one. But it's not about the food, it's about the chef. Ramsay told a CBS reporter who asked him about his cursing that people don't understand his passion. I wished somebody would've asked, "Do you eat with that mouth?"

Lens Cap Off, Clothes On

Young Ladies, I've written before about why you should never ever allow yourself to appear nude in front of a camera. But some of you forget, and I keep seeing stories about sexting, as naked pictures keep flying back and forth via phones and Facebook. I know modesty went out with petticoats, but let's push character issues aside for a moment and focus on the real-world issues you probably haven't played out.

First, once these pictures are out on the 'net, they might as well be public. Anything that can be passed from phone to phone can be shared with other phones and other people. Even if you swear your boyfriend will never ever share those photos, the odds aren't in your favor when you break up. If your father gets a look at your Blackberry, you're done. If your boyfriend's mother checks out his Galaxy, he's toast. Parents do look, even when you think they don't, thanks to software called StealthGenie or good-ol'-fashioned nosiness. Ladies, the pictures will get out, and they're gonna find out.

Second, once those pictures are out, it is impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube. This was true in the analog world of my high-school youth, when one girl -- whom I suspect was inebriated -- decided to stick a pocket camera up her dress at a party.

"The photo has been going around school for a couple of weeks," a friend said. He pointed to another friend. "I put your name on the waiting list."

If she was a willing yet intoxicated participant in the beginning, she had to be frustrated in the end if she chased that photo down. She couldn't take back the looks.

Get nude in front of the camera once, maybe twice, maybe in a lovesick fog, and you can write it off as a mistake. We all make them. But you can't change how people think about you. You can't undo your parents' shock and anger. You can't undo your friends' floozy jokes. You can only hope your judgment will be better.

That's why it needs to be better before the shutter clicks. The pain does not equal the mirth or the thrill of adventure. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Joshua 17:9 (NIV): "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Love, friendship, ego, arrogance -- they all deceive.

So resist, ladies, not merely because it weakens your character, but because you can't hit Control-Z on the effects.

A Penny For Your Door

A simple, low-cost prank or revenge tactic in my college dorm was know as "pennying." Without getting into the specifics on a somewhat family-friendly blog, I will simply tell you it's a maneuver involving one-cent coins that leaves your target trapped inside his or her room with no way to get the door open short of a sledgehammer.

I first learned of the tactic one night of my freshman year, when I sat in 7th floor lounge of Hatch Hall at the University of Missouri, reading a true-crime book when the usual gang of jokesters ran in.

"Phase One is complete," their leader said, removing a woolen scarf from around his face. "Now we move on to Phase Two."

He looked around the room at his floormates. "I pennied that door harder than I ever had in my life." He was talking about the Resident Assistant's room on the all-girl floor above us. She had a rotten reputation, rightly or wrongly. Fearless Leader was beginning the first of what was to be several covert operations involving people doors, property or both.

"I oughta be in the Marines!" he bragged.

As his team reassembled, they decided they needed to go back in and stir up more trouble. So they slipped back under their scarves and masking, shuffling up the stairs. From the lounge I heard screaming, shouting and pounding as they hammered the R.A.'s door at 11pm. Within half an hour, my own covert surveillance revealed the girls had gathered around the door, trying to see if they could get it open without calling the Fire Department.

She never knew Fearless Leader was behind it. He even anonymously called her room, just to ruffle her feathers. Her boyfriend went on the prowl looking for the culprit but never found him.

Next year, a friend of mine across the hall got pennied in twice and somehow managed to escape. I somehow dodged the copper curse.

The flip side: these pranks could've been far worse. Some dorms are not that much different than frat houses. Get a bunch of boys together in a small place, and testosterone rules, even in a so-called "honors" dorm. Besides the pennies, I observed furniture capers, domestic disturbances, casual drug use, copious smoking, liberal drinking and freestyle flatulence.

A group of Physics students would sit at one of the lounge tables after dinner and do their homework together. As X approached Y, air approached the exhaust system and vented with no comment from the dutifully assembled.

Later, the cigarette gang would take over, filling half the room with a cloud of grey smoke descending from the ceiling like a cancerous fog.

"I think the smoke's getting a little thick in here," one said, yet nobody bothered to open a window.

Not that I really cared. Welcome to college. Check the door.

The Hustler Of Pomme de Terre

I learned the game politely called pocket billiards from my best friend Brad while we were both in elementary school. He had a table in the basement, and we gave those clay balls a workout. I had to keep one eye on Brad while the other was on the cue ball. He had a habit of giggling and shoving balls into the side pockets.

His family invited me down to their home at Pomme de Terre Lake, located about 50 miles north of Springfield, Missouri. I learned to cast a fishing line for the trip using a Tinkertoy practice lure, but we never got around to the real thing. We preferred water-skiing on his dad's speedboat rather than angling for a few bass, and I didn't eat fish anyway.

As this was the early 1980's, video game arcades were popping up all over the place. The lake had one such establishment: The Blue Moon Arcade. Brad and I went there between the boating and an ice cream social at a friend's house down the street. It housed mostly second-tier games like Kickman, but the main attraction was the pool room, with its red-felted deluxe table, and a local shark eager to take on all comers.

He wasn't that much older than me. But he'd been around: he carried a two-piece Busch beer pool cue and a sly grin. I carried a baby face and the naivety of a fifth-grader who didn't know a bank shot from a bank loan. Given the lameness of the video-game selection and his friendly persona, I was game.

What happened next had faded over the course of many years, but I recall the house hustler had no problem sinking shots. Your humble billiard novice, however, had trouble merely driving two balls to a cushion on the break. Brad's Mom didn't seem to mind. She sat there, entertained, probably making sure we weren't going to make side bets.

Busch Cue Man played a workable game of eight-ball. But if you have a rudimentary knowledge of eight-ball, you know the floor can drop out from under you with one errant pocket of the wrong ball at the right time. It happened. To him.

The eight ball went right in, just as he was beginning to savor another easy victory.

"You beat me," he gasped, color draining from his face as he clenched his Busch cue like a security blanket.

I should've bet something -- maybe not his cue, but something more fun like making him cast a fishing line with a cue ball lure.

The Blue Moon Arcade didn't last much longer, crashing with the end of the video game craze. My pool exploits moved to our house playroom, when we acquired a table from Grandpa Francis. Those balls took a beating. I took more losses than I can remember, and played many solo games to forget. But the legend of beating the Blue Moon Hustler is whispered among the trees of Pomme de Terre, if only in my dreams.

Trouble With The Curve

You've probably heard schools are phasing out cursive writing, and it's about time. Apart from my signature, I've barely written in cursive for years.

In the first grade, I underwent rigorous penmanship practice, one letter at a time. I never understood why a cursive "Q" looked more like a "2", or why some cursive "P's" were puffy and others slender, with a small tab at the top. Lowercase "z" also looked too much like a "2," but I didn't get to complain about any of it.

Our teacher set a date for us to begin writing everything in cursive, only it came earlier than I thought.

"We start writing in cursive today, young man," Mrs. Wilson scolded me, right in the face.

When my peers and I went to church school, somebody would ask, "Do we have to write this in cursive?"

"Write it any way you want!" our church teachers would reassure us. Not only were they loving and reasonable people, I gather they also knew the ugly truth: college would destroy their handwriting, anyway.

It's hard to write quickly and legibly when taking notes from a motor-mouth professor. Some people can pull it off, but I can't. I had already reverted back to my sans-serif font in high school. Cursive came out only when I needed the handwriting equivalent of italics.

"Be particular about your handwriting," my third-grade teacher once told the entire class. I was, and I sure as shootin' wasn't adding any more unnecessary loops and flourishes.

"How are we supposed to learn how to sign our names?" one teacher asks. Well, we won't. We'll print our names neatly and legibly, just like we did at the top of our homework, allowing some verifier of our identities know it's really us in letters we can read rather than scribbles we can't. A printed signature is still handwritten, and it still has distinguishing characteristics that can match up with the rest of our markings. A "Q" will be a "Q" and a "Z" a "Z." And we'll hopefully re-allocate cursive teaching time towards forming complete, coherent sentences that read as beautiful as they used to look.

Where Are The Young Princes?

Try this experiment: go to Google and type in "girls who want to be princesses." Wait, I'll do it for you. Notice the plethora of links devoted to princess culture among the young ladies.

Now, try this search: "boys who want to be princes."

I'll pause while you either lament the dearth of relevant links or pick your jaw up off the floor. Near the top of the search results is a site called "My Princess Boy," run by a Seattle family whose 5-year-old son likes to dress up in frilly pink outfits and bling.

I hoped to see a few pictures of little boys dressed up like Prince William, Prince Charles, or at least Prince Charming. I didn't even get Prince Valiant. I'm glad I didn't see any dressed up as just Prince.

Parents of America, we have a serious problem. We have neglected to nurture the male equivalent in the royal hierarchy to the point where some young boys would rather wear dresses to get in on the culture of royal beauty and pampering. Don't blame it on Disney -- the studio has given us plenty of princes, including The Prince Of Egypt, Moses.

I've heard the explanation that young boys are more interested in superheroes than sword-carrying nobility. Perhaps, but it leaves few options for the young aspiring gent. Last Halloween, how many princess dresses did you see at the local costume place compared to tunics and wooden shields? We can't honestly make the comparison if we're not putting forth effort to give kids a choice.

I did another search: "boys who want to be knights." Again, disappointment. I found links related to the psychology of saving modern-day damsels in distress, but nothing to encourage the youth. The irony is that knights began their training at age 7, learning both chivalry and swordsmanship under the tutoring of a lord or knight. I found online classes for how to be a princess. Zilch for being a prince.

As a historical re-enactor who loves to dress up in knee breeches, stockings and a tricorn hat, I fully realize I am speaking to you from a biased perspective. I know my love of historical dress and manners are outside the norm. But that doesn't make it any less unfair for young boys who don't see themselves as Superman, Batman or Spider-Man.

I have this sinking gut feeling we don't see our media pushing a male equivalent to princess culture because it's too sissy. Take a look at so-called "meterosexuals," those men who take on characteristics that make people think they're gay when they're not. The way our culture is trending, it's acceptable to be perceived as gay. But woe to those seen as straight and sissy.

I'm not letting young princesses off the hook either. So much of the culture is material and self-serving. One mother told me about how she and others work to educate their daughters about the differences between Disney princesses and GOD's princesses -- GOD's princesses work to serve THEIR KING.

The homeschooling and historical groups I've been blessed to participate in are breaking this stereotype with a vengeance. They are fostering the development of young ladies and gentlemen without giving a toss about what the world thinks. The parents who make up these groups have instilled within their children that manners, kindness and respect are not archaic or sissy, they're what GOD asks of us.

I did one more Google search: "manners classes for kids." At last, sweet chivalry.

But I still want to see more kids in prince costumes.

"Wanna Go Looking For Cigarette Butts?"

I have some advice for new parents. If you one day catch your child smoking a cigarette, force them to roll their own using discarded butts left on the ground. It will quickly break the developing habit.

I speak with confidence after an experience from my scoundrel youth. One of my best friends in the fourth grade -- whom I am calling "Leon" -- and I were at his house, fooling around on a summer day while his parents were at work. His older sister entered the room.

"Leon, you wanna go looking for cigarette butts?"

They had developed this new ritual to obtain a forbidden smoke, but they needed to do some footwork. I followed them as they walked up the street, looking for every butt they could find with any tobacco left in it.

"Get those Marlboros," his sister directed. "Those are supposed to be the good ones."

In reality, the brand didn't matter. Kool, True, Maraboro, More, Carlton -- they'd all do. Leon and his sister picked up about two dozen spent smokes and headed back home to harvest the tobacco.

They carefully unwrapped the butts and squeezed out the tobacco one a piece of notepad, which they proceeded to roll up. Outside, Leon and his sister -- fourth grader and high schooler -- passed it back and forth. They offered me a drag; I passed. The putrid blue smoke coming out the other end turned me off. The potent smell made it into their basement, and Leon's sister tried covering it up with air freshener. I don't know what they did about their breaths. As far as I know, they never got caught.

Unfortunately, that experience wasn't enough to keep me away from a couple of drags later on, after I got out of college. When cigars became fashionable among the younger set, someone kindly donated a Baccarat stogie to me at a club while I was enjoying a beer. Alcohol and tobacco combined to leave me half-delirious on the dance floor. I don't remember how I made it home sober. That ended the cigar experiment.

Several years later, I experimented with a few Camels. I marveled at how I could get so much smoke out of one small puff without inhaling or coughing to death. At a friend's party, I stole off into a corner of the yard to work a cig all the way down to the tip before somebody called me back to the frivolity.

Picture this: a silhouetted lone figure emerges from a cloud of grey smoke, illuminated from behind by a floodlight. His hair is frizzy and sticking out all over the place, not from the cigarette, but it really doesn't matter. Another light eventually illuminates his face, revealing a grin of satisfaction, something those long-banned tobacco ads might have deemed "pure smoking satisfaction."

I can count the number of smokes I've taken on one hand, meaning I didn't develop a habit. Some people have told me they are "social smokers," meaning they only light up when they're at a party or some gathering where they would feel naked without a cancer stick. I don't understand how people think it calms the nerves. If anything, I would be afraid of hacking smoke all over the place.

Smoking killed Johnny Carson, Peter Jennings, Morton Downey Jr., Edward R. Murrow, Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey. So I marvel at how many of my broadcast TV colleagues continue to smoke, even if it's a quick puff or two in the parking lot every so often. I've seen people who didn't smoke get started, presumably to help them calm their nerves. I've seen news anchors and reporters smoke at parties, inevitably thinking they won't end up sounding like Marge Simpson in a few years.

A year ago, a new anti-smoking TV ad emerged starring a haggard woman with a hole in her throat to enable her to speak. If that doesn't gross you out, then go smoke up the entire tobacco stock of your nearest mini-mart and talk to me later -- if you can.

Night Rider

I used to call it "The Drive at Five." When driving to visit my parents in Upland, California, I'd get up before the crack of dawn to get on the road by 5am, rolling into the Inland Empire around 10am, depending on traffic and time changes. The journey works pretty well, and I have it down to a two-tank trip.

Then my work hours changed to dayside, and I started making those getaways right after I got done with the 5:00 news. It's the same game, just played a little different.

5:45 Hopefully be out the door. Hopefully not have a grumbling tummy, but that can be appeased with a quick run through the drive-through window. Otherwise, dinner is three hours off, at least.

7:15 If rush hour traffic is done, and some fool hasn't jack-knifed his semi along I-10, I'm rolling into Phoenix. To give you an idea of the size of this metro area, one of the biggest in the nation, realize that it takes at least one hour to drive from one edge of the area to the other.

8:00 Be out of Phoenix, driving into the West Valley, and my first large stretch of darkness. In the summer, the sun is setting. In the winter, the sun was down hours ago.

8:45 Debate whether to get gas at the Zip station 20 miles east of Quartzite or keep rolling. Given my new car's fuel efficiency, I prefer to keep going.

9:00 Debate whether to gas up at the Pilot in Quartzite and grab something from the Golden Arches right next door. If this were daytime, I might also sniff around at one of the swap meets in town. (Here's where I pause so you can make your "Sid" jokes.) Depending on my timing, I might catch the news on the radio from KJMB, one of the few family-owned FM radio stations still running network news at the top of the hour.

9:15 If passing on both above options, gas up at the Flying J on top of the hill in Ehrenberg. It's still my favorite truck stop on the Arizona-California line: clean restrooms, large drink selection, and a Wendy's. Grab grub after a 10-100 and roll on.

9:30 Roll into California and pass through the U.S.D.A. checkpoint. They're looking for fruit flies. They always wave me through. They wave everybody in a car through. Why even stop sedans?

9:35 Out of Blythe and into another dark stretch. It's spooky. It's late. I have a big soda.

10:30 Signs of life reappear around Twenty-Nine Palms. The town glistens along with the lights of the Spotlight 29 Casino. No time to stop and play.

11:00 More spookiness. Dozens of red lights flash in the distance atop the numerous wind turbines. It looks like a UFO invasion. This is the time to keep my head. In the past, I've had visions of people darting across the road. Or maybe those weren't visions. No, the soda isn't spiked.

11:45 In the home stretch. Upland is about half an hour away. The lights of L.A. are on the horizon.

12:30am Hopefully we're home now. Kiss the Queen Mother and Royal Father. Gawk a little about the trip. Collapse into bed.

You gotta have a system...

Yes, You Have The Right Number -- No, You Have The Wrong Person

I recall changing my phone number only half a dozen times in my life. Yet only in the last decade or so has that number been subjected to what I call "phone spam:" those automatic recorded calls that occupy space on my answering machine because I'm not going to pick up to listen to them. Thank goodness for Caller ID. If I don't know the number on the display, the call goes to the machine, and the other end hears this:

"You have reached [redacted]. For quality assurance purposes, this call may be monitored before it is answered. Otherwise, please leave your name and number after the beep."

That "quality assurance" bit usually dissuades a lot of sales calls. But it's those robo-calls that irk me. The "Do Not Call" list does nothing to stop campaign calls. I'll let you guess who put that exception in. Next campaign season, I'm thinking of changing the message:

"You have reached [redacted]. For quality assurance purposes, all political campaigns that automatically call this number with voice spam will be disqualified from my vote, with all potential votes going automatically to the Libertarian party, which doesn't waste people's time..."

My favorites are the bill collectors. They're not looking for me; they're looking for somebody else who had my phone number five, ten, or maybe fifteen years ago. These people also have a love for the magic machine, as I find out when I play back one of their messages:

"This calls is for [redacted]. If you are not [redacted], please hang up now." (Which can't happen if a machine is talking to a machine.) "This is an attempt to collect a debt. Please call as soon as possible to speak with a customer service representative at..." (After this, the machine usually clicks off -- mine, not theirs.)

I let companies like this call maybe ten or twenty times before they finally figure they're not going to get the person, or their money.

Once in a while, I get a live debt collector on the line. I once ended up in a conversation with one who was trying to stick me with somebody else's bill.

"Don't you think you should settle this account?"

"I'm sorry, I don't have an account with you."

"Is your Social Security number [redacted]?"

"No, that's not my number. You're two digits off."

He looked it up again.

"Oh, sorry."

"Why didn't you double check the name and the number before you called?"

"Uh, well, these things happen."

And they happen to me. One lady called, looking for a certain other lady with a lingering debt.

"Is [redacted] here?"

"No, she doesn't live at this number. She hasn't lived here for at least five years."

"And you don't know her?"

"No, I don't."

"And she doesn't live with you?"

"No."

A few seconds of silence cross the wires.

"Are you sure you don't know her?"

It took all of my stamina to avoid launching into a Judge Judy impression, in which I would have bellowed into the receiver: "Madam, WHAT DID I JUST SAY? REPEAT TO ME WHAT I JUST SAID!" She would've wished she'd gotten the machine.

To be fair, the errant bill collectors who leave messages usually get the point after I call them back and correct them. That makes me wonder if the right person could lie through their teeth and achieve the same result with one call-back. In that case, they'd probably send Rocko to pay a house call. In that case, I'd be searching for my front incisors by the time he figures it out.

Toby, What Are You Eating?

As I have told you here previously, dogs can eat death like it's a Milk-Bone. While I consider my grandparents' Dalmatian Sparky as the all-time champ, my Dad's dog Toby comes in a close second.

From nearly the time we brought him home, the Springer Spaniel puppy showed he would eat any unsecured article, starting with my shoelaces. On his first morning after his first night, I heard growing and knocking in the kitchen all the way into my upstairs bedroom.

"That was the dog throwing things around," Mom explained, probably because Toby couldn't eat what he was throwing.

A few mornings later, floating up to the sanctity of my bed...

"Get back, getback, GETBACK, GET BACK!!!"

That would be the dog trying to lick the kitchenware as Mom opened the dishwasher -- not the second rinse she had in mind.

A few days later, a neighbor came to the door.

"You know your dog's eating your tree?"

"Huh?"

"Yeah, he was shaking it pretty hard!"

The young tree had already lost one of two thin branches to Toby's appetite. I reluctantly told Mom, and she grumbled something about killing "that dog," as she headed down to the basement. She brought up a tree pruner, and I figured I better follow along to prevent a possible dogicide.

"The vet says Toby's his favorite Springer," Dad gushed. "He says the other ones bite."

"So does Toby!" I corrected.

"Well, he's just cutting teeth."

Boy, did those teeth get cut. When he wasn't howling in the dark of the basement, he was going to work on the clutter. His preferred meal: my dad's magazine collection, something Mom had been politely nagging him to do something about -- "I can't believe your father is a magazine saver!" Toby shredded whatever he got his paws on, and chewed the rest. For dessert, he ate one of Dad's golf shoes. We should've just let him have the other.

"Toby, if you eat that wasp, you're going to be in a world of hurt," Mom chided as the puppy eyed a flying insect that had just crawled into a crack in our deck. He didn't care. He would snap at moths fluttering around his nose, thinking he could catch one. I think he did, once.

The dog's appetite subsided as he grew up, but he still had a penchant for teething. We got him a large, supposedly indestructible bone for Christmas, and he took to it after shaking all over the front room.

"I tell you, those bones are too big for him," I said.

"No, he just likes to play with his food," Mom observed.

When my brother Michael got a pet rabbit, I feared hasenpfeffer might be on the menu. When we let the bunny out of his cage to hop around, Toby chased after it like he was on the hunt. Then the bunny would growl at him -- yes, I said GROWL -- and Toby would turn and run until he worked up the nerve to corner the rabbit again, and the cycle continued. Toby went gourmet in his twilight years, feasting on boiled beef and rice to ease his stomach. He would whine as the dish sat in the oven, not waiting for it to cool down. More than once, Mother just let him eat it steaming hot.

Out of all of this, we never had to take him to the vet for something he ate. The dog had a cast-iron stomach like so many others. I can't explain why dogs have such a high tolerance for junk diets. Just put everything out of reach. And if you have a cat in the house... well, let's not go there.

The State Of Boys -- Part III: Command Performances

My June 1989 week of Missouri Boys' State is winding down. Content to spend my days in the TV studio, learning everything I can about TV news production, I find I can also pull a fast one...

C.A., mayor of Coontz City, sits in the most enviable position of Boys' State -- on television, surrounded by a gaggle of shapely girls wearing tight Boys' State t-shirts as he plugs our city trying to pick up awards points. The diminutive young mayor projects both humility and sex appeal onto the screen under a pork-pie hat.

Towards the end of Boys' State week, the commercials on the TV newscasts go from talking heads to pep rallies featuring many of those young college ladies serving us three meals a day.

"I can find you some girls," says James as we kick around ideas for a commercial.

"Good looking girls?" someone asks.

"Yeah, great looking."

The cafeteria ladies pick up on the raving testosterone. "They're supposed to be learning about government," one of them tells a Boys' State newspaper reporter, "not picking up girls." But many of them happily play along, starring in our spots and stoking our hormones.

I watch in the VTR room as Matthew cues the crew to roll tape for the Coontz spot. Mayor C.A. and his harem fade onto the screen, and he gives his pitch for the town. Then a young curvy brunette with long hair steps into the frame.

"Coontz does it better," she says with a sultry pout.

Matthew nearly leaps out of his chair. "That [expletive] [expletive] has been in every commercial on this station." he mumbled.

He turns on his intercom button. "That [expletive] [expletive] has been in every commercial on this station!" he growls into the mic.

As hot as it was, it doesn't get Coontz into the winners' circle. That honor goes to another town that devises its own scat-chant, led by the mayor and repeated by the citizenry:

"Ex-a-meenie, eenie-meeny, oo-bop-a-beasta!" "Ex-a-meenie, eenie-meeny, oo-bop-a-beasta!"
"Oh, no, no, no, not the neesta!" "Oh, no, no, no, not the neesta!"
"Boo-bop, biddy-bop, boo-bappa beasta!" "Boo-bop, biddy-bop, boo-bappa beasta!"
"A whop-bop, biddy-bop, boo-bap, boo bah!" "A whop-bop, biddy-bop, boo-bap, boo bah!"
"Shhhh!" "Shhhh!"

They call it "Elvis." (I recently googled the lyrics and found out it's a variation on an old Boy Scout song called "Flea.")

Victory is theirs, but we have pizza for our final night of the session.

"Just think of what you did," James reminds us as we bite into the slices and sip cans of soda taken from a dorm bathtub converted into a cooler. "You built a city government, a county government and a state government in a week."

He digs up a boom box and a covert cassette. "These are actual phone pranks!" he says as he pushes the play button.

We revel in the glory and the fun. Some of the guys are going on to Boys' Nation as delegates, where they will do it all over again on a bigger scale. The rest of us are going back to our homes and the rest of summer.

I went back for seconds and thirds and fourths of pizza. "You wouldn't think a little guy could eat so much!" James observes.

And yet I do, slinking down into a chair and kicking back. Somebody thinks I looked sick... and I hatch a prank of my own. Recognizing most of my fellow citizens had seen me lunging into a trash barrel on Sunday, I decide the time is right for an encore.

I prop myself up and drag myself over to the big grey bin, perching at the rim. Heads turn as boys steel themselves for what is about to happen.

"Are you sick?" somebody asks.

I say nothing but let my face droop into the barrel. Almost instantly, boys with the weaker constitutions flee the room in fright, leaving a few to gather next to me as I play up the moment.

"You all right?" Matthew asks. I wink at him.

"Was that a wink?" he asks.

I let my head drop all the way into the barrel before I snap it back up.

"PSYCH!" The smile on my face is as wide as the Missouri River.

The acting job draws applause and cheers from my peers, and a trophy.

"That was worthy of an Oscar," another boy says, "and on behalf of the Academy I would like to present this to Chris!" He hands me a fresh can of Mountain Dew. I lifted up in toast and victory.

We end it all in the same gym where I'd said goodbye to the outside world a week before. The floor is filled with exhibits from our exercises in democracy like a science fair. Parents wander around, geeking out at our accomplishments. Mom and Dad catch up to me and we head home.

Mother can't take her eyes off of me. I'd been gone before, out of her eyesight for a week at a time, but this time dug deeper. I'd had absolutely no contact with her or Dad. She was waking up to the realization her first-born is going off to college in about a year or so.

I come home to find problems with the summer job I had lined up, but Mom doesn't want to hear me griping about it. "The important thing is that you're home and you're here."

About a month or so later, the Raytown Rotary Club asks me to speak about my experience at one of their luncheons, and I do. I encourage them to keep sponsoring students, playing up the benefits. I don't talk about my lack of a clear focus on what I want, or my lack of legislative role. I made TV, while other boys made laws. I had my role as they had theirs.

The teenage years are supposed to be a defining period, but some people take longer. In June of 1999, I was in a transition phase, about to move from the Kansas City area to St. Louis and change my career focus from computer science to journalism. So much ahead was uncertain, undefined and scary. I didn't feel completely assured of my change in direction, and the ambiguity bled over into what should have been a molding and shaping experience.

It probably was, in ways I don't understand. But if I had the chance to go back and catch up to myself in that gym, on that first hot Saturday, I would've told myself to forget about journalism school. "You are a patriot in training," I would've said. "Trust me. You have more in common with Patrick Henry than Walter Cronkite. I want you to put it on the line. Speak from your heart what you believe about leadership. Run for office. Go be a lawmaker. Maybe you won't win, but don't stop running. Help others where you can. Build the foundation. Your tricorn hat awaits you. Put it on, and go forth into this world!"

The State Of Boys -- Part II: "You're Trying Your Best"

I'm sharing my experiences of attending the 1989 Missouri Boys' State session. Our last episode found me playing cub reporter to cub lawmakers. Detached from the action, and still trying to figure out how to be a journalist while learning how to be a citizen, I badly need to land somewhere...

Gradually the pieces of the mock state come together in meetings as the week rolls on. The parties pick their county leaders and hold a state convention. With the pols in place, the nominations and appointments follow for the legislature, as well as the Mayor, City Manager, Councilmembers, City Attorney, Police Chief, Fire Chief, Health Commissioner, Treasurers, Sheriff, and Municipal Judge, working our way up to the state offices including the Governor's post.

The parties develop platforms, sometimes out of nothing more than competitive advantage. "The other party says they're for abortion. Well, we're going to be against it!"

My roommate Paul, with his quiet charisma, winds up as the chief justice of the Boys' State Supreme Court. He even reminds me of Thurgood Marshall, then heading into his twilight years on the bench. (Clarence Thomas is still two years away from picking up a Supreme Court nomination.)

All of this should be nice fodder for a few insider political stories, but I don't have my news sense yet, and my reservedness holds me back. The citizenship manual doesn't do much to encourage me:

"Writing interesting stories about events that have occurred at Missouri Boys' State probably is more difficult than anywhere else, because the writer's audience usually had attended the event on which he is reporting. Therefore, for a reporter simply to write what happened at the event is not 'news.'"

Neither is dishy political gossip. We are Missouri's best young leaders, not backstabbing, power-hungry pols in training. What in the heck am I supposed to write about?

Perhaps I should try the sports beat, volunteering to observe and report. Surely I can write about the games better than I can play them. My baseball skills have me hitting nothing but air and catching nothing but sunshine. But I can't opt out; everybody is expected to play, scrub or not.

Coming up to the plate, I know I'm doomed as that white ball zings past me. Oh for YMCA tee-ball, where you could just smack it and run.

"It's all right," a fellow citizen reassures. "You're trying your best."

Several tell me that, and I am blessed to be surrounded by young leaders who knew some boys don't fit into the athlete mold. Many of us are tomorrow's geeks, on our way to owning half the world at a time when nerds represent the heights of uncoolness.

I fill the days out serving on mock juries in the court system, watching mock judges and mock lawyers adjudicate mock criminal cases as the student lawmakers wheel and deal and pass bills. After lunch, I headed over to TV station to help Matthew and the crew produce news and commercials as an ad-hoc crew member.

The commercials keep us busy. Everyone in Boys' State earns "Boys State Bucks," a token economy to be spent for campaigning and adverts in the newspaper, radio and TV outlets. Cities pool their dough to buy rah-rah spots, a constant headache to Caleb, our news director, who's trying to get the rest of the content taped before dinner.

"After this, no more commercials!" he grumbles one day, walking out of the control room. He takes on some of the qualities of his real-life broadcast counterparts, griping at the staff because the scripts aren't in-depth enough. He snipes at a few city leaders who turn a news interview into a plug.

Matthew and I sit on the stairs outside the VTR suite and sort through all the money dumped into our laps for ad time. "Man, you can be my accountant!" he proclaims.

A few KMOS staffers hastily edit what we crank out, and we see the results after dinner, before the evening's speaker as part of "KMBS News." With no field video cameras, we are constrained to a series of talking heads against a blue backdrop, except for the Boys' State sports reports. They featured honest-to-goodness full-screen scoreboards from that nifty Dubner, which draws an audible gasp from the audience as the text rolls and twirls.

Then we hear from the night's speaker, usually a high-ranking lawmaker at the state and federal level or a retired pol, at least one of whome is not too far from the scandal sheet. He -- and occasionally a she -- speaks to us about the joys and challenges of service, after which the floor opens for questions.

"All the tension between Republicans and Democrats," I query one legislator from my young, idealistic mind. "Is it really necessary?"

He replies that both sides are trying to serve the public, but that the Dems "want to make all the rules." Cheers burst out from the Republicans in the crowd, amazingly evenly divided between real-world party loyalties.

Candidates for Boys' State Governor come to the stage and give us their best campaign speeches. One of them, "Famous Amos," becomes the stand-out hit for the way he turns around a snarky question from the audience.

"Sir, I believe that is uncalled for!"

He gets a rousing cheer, and the snarker later buys a TV ad to apologize. While it runs during the newscast, various boys in the crowd smack their lips, the adopted symbol for "kissing up."

Some presentations during the daytime have us talking at the dinner table. "Goober" shows us how not to make a campaign speech. I also hear about a certain "Pastor Fuzz" who is part of a demonstration for the mock lawmen detailing arrest procedure. "Big 'ol Budweiser suspenders," one boy says, recounting either the suspect or the session leader. "He held up this porno mag he found."

It's not supposed to be offensive; it's supposed to be a goad to us, our counselors explain. If we are offended, it's time to debate the matter and write bills and discuss the Constitution, just like the real-life lawmakers are doing. If an adult leader takes a libelous shot at another city, we can sue them, and we do. In both challenge and jest, one leader openly snarks a city government, and we haul him into court. He almost doesn't show up for his trial date.

"What are you doing?" a counselor asks as we sit around the courtroom, telling mildly dirty jokes.

"We're waiting," the Boys' State judge explains, briefly outlining the case.

"These guys go into a bar..." the counselor chimes in, helping us kill time.

We have issues. We have principles. We have challenges. We have a process. We have this newly-minted government created from nothing but an outline. Now we can make the process work, and under a disturbing shadow. Just days earlier, the Chinese government had swept Tiananmen Square of pro-democracy protests in a massacre that shocked the world and gave us the iconic image of a lone man standing in front of a line of tanks. We are enjoying a blessing of liberty people died for halfway around the world.

As their first order of business, the Boys' State Legislature unanimously passes a resolution supporting the protesters.

NEXT: The fruits of our labor, beautiful girls, and how I cleaned out a room in 5 seconds flat!

It's All Done With Mirrors And Lights

Reel To Reel: Now You See Me

Going Rate: Worth matinee price
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Mélanie Laurent, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Language, moderate violence, one brief sexually suggestive scene

Now You See Me is Ocean's Eleven mashed up with The Prestige, using superstar magicians to pull off huge robberies. However, the film plays like one gigantic illusion because it keeps its most compelling characters and story elements hidden behind the curtain.

The opening minutes show promise as we are introduced to street magician J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg), hustler mentalist Merritt McKinney (Harrelson), pickpocket illusionist Jack Wilder (Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Fisher). We learn their craft and their quirks more efficiently than Danny Ocean can put together the big con. But after this, the picture starts yanking our chains. All four illusionists are summoned to meet at a dingy New York City apartment rigged up to be the magical equivalent of Indiana Jones' opening quest for a golden idol. Here they discover a blueprint for -- ta-da! -- "a show!"

The film jumps to their first performance as "The Four Horsemen," a magical supergroup who pulls off a real show-stopper: robbing a bank live on a Vegas stage. Only they don't actually rob it, they teleport a Frenchman into the vault of a bank in his home country to do it for them in an impossible fashion, but it's magic, and it works. Euros rain down upon a stunned audience while befuddled bankers wonder how all that money got away from under their noses.

Now the film jumps again, away from the illusionists and into a cops-and-robbers chase. FBI agent Dylan Rhodes (Ruffalo) is your standard-issue no-nonsense cop straight from Central Casting paired with an appropriately sexy French Interpol agent, Alma Dray (Laurent). He can't get anything out of the four in the interrogation room, so he is resigned to tailing them as they move on to other shows -- and other heists -- in New Orleans and the Big Apple.

Giving him some pointers and mocking reality checks, is ex-magician Thaddeus Bradley (Freeman), who now works as a professional skeptic. He exposes tricks for a living and he knows all the secrets. We're not sure who he's really serving, which becomes clearer as he spars with Arthur Tressler (Caine), a financial mogul who's bankrolling the Four's shows.

Ocean's Eleven works because you're in both on the con and the con men. Ditto for The Prestige and its stronger companion film, The Illusionist. They let their stars breathe and develop some chemistry. Now You See Me goes through a few token scenes of interaction, but we still don't care enough about the principals. It's as if the writers threw the four magicians together, wrote a few script pages, and then realized they couldn't make it work from their perspective -- even with Atlas and Reeves sharing an on-stage history. So they punted the film into an action procedural with a lot of special effects and illusion. The film also makes the oh-too-obvious ploy of throwing a romantic curve into Rhodes' and Dray's working relationship.

I wanted to see more inside the plotting and scheming, not giving it all away, but just enough to make us think we're seeing it all, not something loosely recycled from TV cop shows. Even so, it still builds interest if only to figure out how the film will try to top one impossible heist after the next. Director Louis Leterrier made The Transporter a slick, smart, action thriller. Here he trades off some of the smart for more slickness, and while it doesn't always work, it works just enough.

The State Of Boys -- Part I: We Built This City

Welcome to another month of the "30/30 Challenge," or just "30/30." The goal is the same: 30 original stories in 30 days. Some will be memoirs, some commentary, some satiric, some dramatic. But for starters, I delve into memories I have not shared for more than two decades.

American Legion Missouri Boys' State is a hybrid of Scout camp, leadership retreat, civics class and Spring Break. It takes promising young men and tells them they can help plot the course of this nation.

"The Missouri Boys State Program has trained Missouri's finest youth leaders for over 50 years," touts the Citizens' Manual. "Your response to the challenge before you will prove that our founders were correct in giving to people the power to determine their own destiny. Take the torch which is being passed to you and run with it to the best of your ability."

I attended in June of 1988, accepting a sponsorship from the Raytown Rotary Club. I made the short list of people with high GPA's, bolstered by some moderate success on the speech and debate team. The experience didn't change my life, but it did give me a taste of college one year before I headed for the University of Missouri.

Mom and Dad dropped me off with my bags and said their goodbyes on a Saturday afternoon, and a bus trucked me to the Garrison Gym at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg.

From my journal, June 17, 1988:

Already I estimate that I've hauled my luggage around at least 4 times -- and I don't know yet where I'm going to be staying. Everything's so quiet here ... I'm hot and sweaty. I bet my suit's all wrinkled up because of all that hauling. I can see my suitcase from here in the bleachers -- just a little speck in the sea of luggage.

First thing that happened to us in the gym was that they made us take a survey -- mostly geography and (ugh) distance estimation. Guess they're trying to find out how many geographic illiterates they have here. I will close -- something's gonna happen.

With that part done, we begin our journeys into young congressmen, lawyers, lawmen, judges and journalists.

Taking over an unused dorm in the building heat of June, I meet my roommate, "Paul" (so named because I can't remember his actual name). He's here from Steele, Missouri, a small town in the Missouri bootheel. Paul has his sites set on the legal track. I'm just trying to figure out what track I want. Becoming part of the government beast isn't on my list of career possibilities, leaving me defaulting to still-evolving journalism aspirations.

"Stand up," says James, our City Counselor in our first meeting. "Raise your hands."

We reach for the sky.

"Now stand on your chairs."

Fumble. Climb. Stand.

"Here's where you are right now. You are about to build a party structure, a city, a county, and a state government in a week. You're going to be blowing the roof off by the end."

Out of place as I feel, and still the shy one, I manage to hit it off with a few people besides Paul. Matthew is also on the J-track, and we will later end up as part of the Boys' State television operations. I also gravitate to the characters of the floor, one whose last name is Moran, but who affectionately takes on the name "Moron." We are a frat, but we don't start turning into one until we pick up on the name of our mock city: Coontz.

The name pays tribute to notable Missourian and Navy Admiral Robert Coontz, but in the hands of hormonally-charged teenagers, it takes on a sub-definition that hits below the belt. "Coontz! Coontz! Coontz!" the guys would chant as a rallying cry at various assemblies, forming a gesture with their hands to reinforce the subtext. We get a few mild warnings about it from the leadership, but what do we care? Girls aren't around.

Except during meals. A staff of young college ladies in blue kerchiefs, white blouses and dark skirts bring us our food and drink like peasant women imported from Minsk.

"I know that girl looked at me!" one of the guys at my table pants during our first meal. "You see that wink?" I don't see anything but testosterone. "I'm gonna leave her my room number!" He writes it on the tablecloth.

When party elections come around that evening, I stayed out. I'm not a partisan (and I'm still not), and the conflict-of-interest would be a screaming problem for somebody in the journalism school. Moron instantly stands out as somebody with enough goofy charm to be a likable leader, and he wins the ward committeeman nod. We pick a few other nuts-and-bolts jobs for the Nationalists and Federalists, our mock two-party system which wasn't supposed to have anything to do with the real-world Republicans and Democrats. I end up with the job of elections clerk, where I can be useful without setting off tripwires.

I take it seriously. Way too seriously. A group of guys back in Raytown is footing the bill for a week, for something I know wasn't right for me. I didn't dare turn down the opportunity; it's a point of honor. When somebody spends a lot of money to develop me, and I feel clueless as to what I'm doing, surrounded by the best and brightest strangers, it weighs me down like a boat anchor. After breakfast, on the way to Sunday church service, my head ends up inside a trash barrel -- sick, homesick or some combination of the two.

I make it through church. I make it through lunch. I make it to Boys' State Journalism school, where we get a crash course in the basics we didn't know and a trip to KMOS-TV, the CMSU station graciously donating studio time and space for our Boys' State TV newscasts -- to be shown at the evening assemblies along with commercials touting one city or another.

"These are $150,000 cameras," a production head softly pleads with us. "Please don't get wide with the shots and burn the tubes."

They let us try out the production switcher and Betacam SP tape machines. I drool over the Dubner CG and the way it can make text flip around and fly off in every direction. We appoint a news director and get two anchors. We pass them some scripts and tape our first newscasts. They come complete with public service announcements, as we dump a few blades of turf onto a table next to a chair, cheekily urging the guys to "Keep Off The Grass."

If only my reporting skills match my enthusiasm. Shy people make poor journalists because they can't pry information out of people. They're not dogged enough. I learn how much I lack when I file a story about a Sunday evening power blip that knocks out the lights to half the Coontz dorm. I have the basics with a lot of unknowns. Others fill in the gaps, but how? Where are they getting this information alongside all the meetings and meals and assemblies?

My governmental-track peers have their own hefty workload. The would-be attorneys, prosecutors and judges are cramming for Monday's bar exam, staying up past curfew with the counselors' blessing. Prospective legislators are already schmoozing alliances.

Still we find time to have fun. Moron and some of the guys hatch an idea to turn Sunday dinner into a toga party as a show of city unity. It would score points for us as cities competed for end-of-week bragging rights alongside the softball games. All of us march in wearing bed sheets around our t-shirts and shorts with pillowcase headwraps and sunglasses making us look like Roman Sheiks.

"Coontz! Coontz! Coontz!"

TOMORROW: How I find my way, and "kissing up" in politics!