Day 1 of the Republican National Convention...or should I say FUNvention!!!

My thoughts on Day 1 of the Republican National Convention:

The pacing of the convention thus far has been bizarre. Is it absolutely necessary to periodically shift the action from the stage to a gaggle of ditzy female in-house "sideline reporters"? Couldn't they just give the people they're interviewing (mostly veterans) speaking slots onstage and cut down on the cheesiness? And when I say "cheesy", I really mean "cheesy": "reporting" done in a breathless, "how about that, folks!" tone of voice with the occasional fratboy-style "Whoooooooo!" thrown in for good measure.

Apart from that, it's just been clunky. Speaker Dennis Hastert announces a Dick Cheney cameo, and we get six momentum-killing minutes of him waving to various convention-goers before the producers move on to the Gerald Ford salute. Ten minutes later, the George H.W. Bush tribute video comes on, but without any sort of introduction it just sits there, and the soundman makes matters worse by missing the background music cue by fifteen seconds. They opened the primetime session with a nifty Saturday Night Live-style credits sequence, but these guys are having all sorts of problems getting ready for primetime.

Oh, and what's with the hammy singers belting out showtunes? Are they going to kick off every session of the convention? Please let this not be the case.

Some other observations:

1) Dennis Hastert looks like an elderly version of comedian/King Of Queens co-star Patton Oswalt.

2) I never thought I'd say this, but thank goodness for actor Joel Silver. His passionate 9/11-themed speech was the only thing the first hour of the primetime session had going for it.

3) The house band is apparently only going to perform songs by black artists (Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, etc.) who would never in a million years vote for George W. Bush.

4) I'm sure it seemed like a cute idea in the planning stages, but having a computer-animated elephant swing his trunk up and down on the giant TV screen behind Ed Gillespie as he was speaking was very distracting.

5) John McCain & Rudy Guiliani were brilliant. Brilliant enough to make up for the lackluster first few hours, I think. McCain's slam of Michael Moore---sorry, I mean "a disingenuous filmmaker"---was priceless. I didn't see it coming. Guiliani had a tough act to follow, but his speech might have topped McCain's----I loved hearing him take Europe to the mat for their lackadaiscal attitude towards terorism in general, whether it be now or decades ago. I would vote for either of the two for President in 2008 without a second thought.

6) Not a lot of talk about the economy. Like Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, I'm not so sure that any President can do a whole lot about the economy, but he can do something, and I'd like for the Republicans to reasure me that they're actually thinking about the subject. Humor me a little.

So far, so good...and bad. Maybe they can smooth out the edges for Tuesday's all-primetime show.

-Dave O'Connell

I give up, here's some old stuff (part 2)

Another oldie-but-sort-of-goodie from my writing career. The only problem with the conceit used below is that you can only get away with it once per editor. Also, I should note that this, by far my most gimmicky piece, emerged from the editing process completely unscathed. It was also the shortest piece (in relation to expected word count) that I submitted. Maybe I should err on the side of brevity more often. Anyway, here's the article:

CURSE YOU, DAVE BINDER AND YOUR VERY BRIEF DEADLINE-SURFING ANSWERS TO MY E-MAILED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS!

A heavily researched panic attack by David O’Connell

(published September 18, 2003 in The York Dispatch under a shorter, less self-referential title)

What do you get when you type the name “Dave Binder” into an Internet search engine? Among other things, you wind up with links to the many Dave Binders of the world. A few of them are athletic minded individuals: Dave Binder of Decatur, Georgia recently took home a first place trophy in a local “golf gala”, while another Dave Binder tends to the walking wounded as the University of New Mexico’s head athletics trainer. Some of them should probably get out a bit more often; for instance, Dave Binder of the Illinois Dave Binders Local 151 recently “dungeonmastered” a Star Wars role-playing game that, in the words of a fellow player, was “unique” and “really neat.” To ignore other Dave Binders might cost you your life: Dave Binder’s work as a member of the Emergency Film Group of Edgartown, Mass. has taught us important lessons on how to handle anhydrous ammonia, a dangerous gas that can severely burn the eyes, lungs and throat. Perhaps the strangest Dave Binder of them all is Dave Binder of Coupeville, Washington, who for $20 will teach interested persons the obscure art of “napkin folding”, in which ordinary napkins can be transformed into candlesticks, bagpipes, or elf’s shoes.

Though all of these Dave Binders play important roles in American society, one Dave Binder stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of popularity (or number of Internet mentions, anyway) and that is folk singer Dave Binder. Oddly enough, this Dave Binder is somewhat at odds with the Internet. Yes, he does have his own website, http://www.davebinder.com, and uses it to promote upcoming concerts such as the “1969: The Year That Rocked The World” extravaganza taking place Thursday night on the Penn State York campus.

And yet the whole purpose of a show like “1969” is to take us back to a simpler time when the Internet didn’t exist, a time when putting together a list of America’s many Dave Binders was not the easy task that it is today. An age when the CD format on which Binder’s six albums are available was merely a gleam in a Dutch physicist’s eye. Why, back in 1969, Binder was ten years away from playing his first show, and more than two decades away from receiving the first of ten consecutive Campus Entertainer of the Year Award nominations. Life’s been very good to him since 1969, in fact, so why the look back?

“It started in 1989 when I realized that no one was doing a twenty-year Woodstock tribute,” explains Binder, a 47-year old Massachusetts native. “It grew from there as I realized all the other events of that year.”

Binder’s show takes the big hits of the “Summer of ‘69” and places them into context alongside the landmark events of the day. For instance, a discussion of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon segues into a solo acoustic rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” From the Beatles to Richard Nixon, no important musical or historical figures are left out of this unique tribute, just one of several theme shows Binder puts on for college audiences across the country.

Catch Binder one night and you might see him in full James Taylor drag, leading a sing-along of “You’ve Got A Friend” as he strums his way through “Fire and Rain: An Evening of James Taylor.” See him on a college campus, and you might get to witness Dave whipping a group of incoming freshman into shape through his “Orientation” program of songs and sketches. (Perhaps something like that is in the cards for his Saturday morning show at York College of Pennsylvania.) On other occasions, you might get to watch him squirm as he takes “Any Reasonable Request”, an improvisational show where the audience dictates the set list and dares Dave to “play it or fake it.” Regardless of which Dave Binder show you take in, you can rest assured that at no time will you be asked to fold a napkin into the shape of a duck. Dave “Folk Singer” Binder himself guarantees it.

Dave Binder’s "1969: The Year That Rocked The World" takes place Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Main Classroom Building on the lower level of Penn State York’s Conference Center. Parking is available at the Irving Road entrance to campus, off of Albemarle Street. Parking for the disabled is available off Edgecomb Avenue. A Saturday show is scheduled for 11 a.m. at the York College of Pennsylvania’s Tennis Court Parking Lot. Admission to both events is free. For more information, please visit http://www.davebinder.com.

-Dave O'Connell

P.S. Now that I think about it, I don't believe the Thursday show ever took place. Hurricane Isabel probably took care of those plans. So the whole thing was kind of a waste.

I give up, here's some old stuff (part 1)

I don't know what to write about, so instead I'm going to let out a few things that have been gathering dust in the cyber-attic. First up is the very first article I ever submitted for publication in a newspaper, which also contains the very first interview the subject of the piece had ever done for a newspaper. So without further adieu, our mutual deflowering...

THE NOMADIC PROFESSOR AND HER FRIENDS THE HONDURAN CURLY TARANTULA, THE HAMMER-SHAPED CHECK CANCELLER, AND THE PIECE OF TILE FROM EVA BRAUN’S BATHROOM

By David O’Connell

(originally appeared under a more mundane title in The York Dispatch on May 22, 2003)

Have you ever wanted to view a collection of Iranian ram heads? Brush up on 6,000 years of grain-related history? Delve into the fine art of Moravian pottery and tile craft? If so, then you are a mighty strange beast and just the sort of kindred spirit Therese Boyd is looking for. Her excellent new book, "The Best You've Never Seen: Pennsylvania's Small Museums--A Traveler's Guide" (Penn State University Press, 224 pp. $18.95), rounds up 42 of the more bizarre and obscure tourist traps to be found in the Keystone State, including the Toy Robot Museum in Adamstown and Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum in Ortanna. Some are located along major thoroughfares, others accessible only by gravel roads. One thing they all have in common, however, is a mission to preserve the arcane elements of our culture overlooked by the larger, better endowed historical landmarks.

Over a two-year period, Boyd visited hundreds of museums, including a few uncovered purely by chance. In the process, she petted a Honduran curly tarantula, submitted to a theological interrogation at the hands of a Bible-thumping curator, and played with an old-fashioned hammer-shaped check canceller, all while jotting down notes for what would become her first published book.

A notable (if reluctant) co-star in this travelogue is Annie, Boyd’s 11-year old niece. Poor Annie’s life is turned upside down by her wicked aunt, who tries to indoctrinate her into the anachronistic world of doo-wop music by subjecting her to brutal four-part harmony torture at the National Vocal Groups Hall of Fame & Museum. Bravely, she resists this onslaught of good-time oldies, but Boyd exacts revenge on the plucky Platters-proof preadolescent with her backup plan: a trip to the dreaded Insectarium, forcing the arachnophobic Annie to confront her eight-legged archenemies. At a stop at the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, Annie sidles up to a Norfolk Southern freight train, no doubt preparing to signal the engineers and workmen for assistance in fleeing her bookwormish captor, but Boyd’s watchful eye ensures that no rail-riding escape is made. The book leaves Annie’s ultimate fate up in the air, but one thing’s for sure: those barbershop quartet scars will never heal.

Part diary, part history lesson, part coolest travel brochure you’ll ever come across, this book does what a good travel guide is supposed to do: make you forget that you’re reading a travel guide. Therese Boyd has succeeded in assembling a volume that could very well make more than a few readers want to cast aside their domestic chores and embark on that road trip they’ve been planning in their minds for years. I, for one, am looking forward to being raked over the ecumenical coals, frontier-style, at the Tom Mix Museum, a shrine to the great Hollywood cowboy of the ‘50s.

And yet the question remains: how did a mild-mannered book reviewer (and one-time Dispatch contributor) wind up leading a double life as an Americana-seeking part-time nomad? A reawakened sense of wanderlust, perhaps? Maybe a profound disillusionment with traditional museum culture?

The truth is far more mundane. “The idea came from a friend of mine,” explains Boyd, 45. “She works for Penn State Press and thinks up ideas for good regional-themed books. One day she came to me and said, ‘Hey, you know what would be good for you to write about?’ and suggested a guidebook of small museums. She was right. It was a good idea. It was little me, a little my publisher, a little discussion with my friends and family--totally a cooperative effort of many people.”

And so began this odyssey that would take her through 28 different counties and introduce to her such unlikely historical figures as Christian Sanderson, a packrat of world-class proportions.

“He’s just got the most unbelievable collection of stuff that is supposed to be connected to history, whether his or somebody else’s”, she says of the deceased schoolteacher whose namesake museum showcases, among other obscurities, a piece of tile from Eva Braun’s bathroom and the shoestrings Sanderson wore to Harry Truman’s inauguration.

A love of the obscure is indeed helpful, though not a prerequisite for those interested in these peripheral landmarks. Boyd separated the book-worthy museums from the also-rans not according the hipster notion of ‘the more esoteric, the better’, but by a far simpler barometer.

“I had to like it,” she explains. “There had to be something that grabbed me personally. I was totally selfish. If there was something there that I thought was interesting, or something I thought people weren’t going to know about without reading my book, then I put it in.”

One museum in particular that grabbed Boyd’s attention was the Music Box Museum in Ephrata. “That one really surprised me. I expected a bunch of little music boxes, and what I got instead were these enormous, gorgeous pieces of art that just happened to be music boxes,” she marvels.

Along the way, Boyd also learned a few things about the proprietors of these unorthodox tourist stops. “People feel very strongly about the places they’ve built,” she explains. “Every single one of these museums is a labor of love, whether it’s just one person who started it or a whole group of people.”

Although Boyd currently has a full plate of activities on her itinerary, ranging from various book and magazine editing duties to a regular gig teaching elderly Penn State students how to write their memoirs, she still hasn’t quite shed those off-the-beaten path road trip inclinations.

“Since I wrote the book, I’ve been ‘collecting’ other little museums,” she admits. “I’ll find out about them and think, ‘Oh, you know, I have to go in that one and that one’ or say to someone, ‘What do you think is in there?’ In fact, I have a similarly themed book under consideration for Maryland.”

The ultimate goal, both with this book and any future spin-offs, is to encourage people to cast off their doubts and explore the unknown.

“When I was looking for one of the museums, I stopped somewhere, and asked this stranger for directions,” recalls Boyd. He said ‘Oh, I drive past that place every day’, so I asked him if he had ever been inside. He replied, ‘No, you don’t want to go in there.’ He had never set foot inside, but kept insisting it was nothing.

“So here was this guy judging this place and he had never been inside, didn’t what it was, and yet he was telling me it wasn’t any good. I’m hoping my book makes fewer people say that.”

Boyd’s book, due out in May, will be available in local bookstores, including Border’s Books & Music, where she will be signing books on June 13th. It can also be ordered online at Amazon.com or through the publisher at http://www.psupress.org/.

-Dave O'Connell

A story that is mostly not about robots

The Story of Clam Rickshaw & Fallow's Gorge

Clam Rickshaw was a plum-hunter, surfing the Asian firepeaks for tasty plums...and ADVENTURE!!! (also tasty) Fallow's Gorge was his natural enemy, foiling him at every turn with its transmittable back acne, or "backne".

Clam swore revenge, as the giraffes wailed and the loping were-pigeons stalked their robot seaweed prey.

The five suns of Nextel shone on in the tungsten sky, and the toemaidens of Aynsley Dunsbar sang haunting Tullabies to their prog-rock babies.

Clam heard a noise. He turned around. A gasp was heard. Shots rang out. A furnace was repaired. A scuffle ensued. Sheena Easton wept.

And somewhere off in the distance, a jukebox was reunited with its long-lost mother.

The End

Wrapping up the Kerr-vention

Well, John Kerry certainly seemed fired up in this speech, and that alone made it a big improvement over his previous drowse-a-thons. And using Abraham Lincoln's words against the current incarnation of his Republican party was a clever touch. But there definitely were some problems.

First of all, John Kerry has got to let the crowd cheer and applaud. I cannot emphasize this enough. Genuine excitement at the venue filters through to us folks watching at home, so let it happen! Wait for the adulation to die down a little, and THEN proceed. And if you tell a joke, let the crowd laugh at it before plowing into the next section of your speech. These are very basic rules of public speaking. It shows that you're actually paying attention to your audience. Kerry should know this by now.

Secondly....enough nonsense about how we're the "can do people" and a "country of the future". Of course we're a country of the future. Time goes forward, not backward, doesn't it? Now if Bush were maniacally plotting to alter the laws of time, this might have some relevance. (Perhaps he's saving such transgressions for a second term.) But that obviously isn't the case, so it just comes across as meaningless. And the more meaningless stuff you frontload a speech with, the greater risk you run of losing your TV audience in the first five minutes.

Third, who is he trying to fool with this statement?

You don't value families by kicking kids out of after school programs and taking cops off our streets, so that Enron can get another tax break.

Fair enough, but does this really implicate the man you want it to? According to Citizens for Tax Justice , Enron paid no income taxes at all in four of the last five years of the Clinton Administration. Their corporate tax welfare benefits in that timespan totaled $1 billion dollars. Exactly which party is Kerry is railing against here?

I liked the talk of lessening our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And I have no quarrel with putting American ingenuity to the task of harnessing alternate renewable sources to such purposes in the future. However, this line gave me pause:

And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future -- so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Now try to imagine Michael Moore saying the same thing. Not that hard, is it? By linking our dependence on oil to our armed forces, Kerry seems to be saying that the war in Iraq was indeed all about oil. It's nice that the loony left got a shout-out in this pseudo-hawkish speech, but that's exactly what this statment is: loony. If our interests in Iraq were truly centered around oil, we never would have invaded the place and spent billions of dollars on reconstruction and democratization efforts. We simply would have dropped sanctions against Saddam and resumed the purchase of his oil. It would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper (not to mention far more immoral.) And I think our high gasoline prices bear testament to that position.

Aside from that, I think his speech was successful in that it wasn't a failure (damning with faint praise, perhaps?) He didn't drop the ball, which is all he needed to do at this point. And he didn't look or sound too French, which is always a good thing. But he's still got a lot of work ahead of him, because speeches like that aren't going to be enough to get him in the White House.

-Dave O'Connell

P.S. I'd like to amend my earlier remarks about how only one convention speech impressed me. C-SPAN re-aired 8 hours of speeches over the weekend and I caught a few that I had missed the first time around, including Ron Reagan's classy speech on stem-cell research.

However, I wouldn't add Gore's, Carter's, or Clinton's to that list. Gore's was split in half between joking comments and bitter comments about the 2000 election, leaving me to wonder if he should just get over the damn thing already. For his own mental health, I mean. Carter delivered his speech competently, but why is the guy who helped feed North Korea's nucelar ambitions through his dealmaking as a Clinton envoy even bringing up the subject of North Korea in the first place? Clinton's speech dragged at the beginning, but perked up near the end when he employed a clever rhetorical device in which he criticized himself as he was criticizing Bush. Score him points for that one, and I don't think Clinton has a bad speech in him, but it was a merely okay outing.

And who let Little Orphan Annie on stage?