The show is cheesier than the aggregate of all of Wisconsin, it is corporate and sponsored out the wazoo, and it is heavily edited and storyline-manipulated within an inch of its life. But I love it very much because, as a parent, it has facilitated some amazing conversations between my children and I that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

For several years now, it has been the Sunday night routine at my house that we sit down to watch “the build-a-house show” as we call it, myself and my nine-year-old son and my six-year-old daughter.  We “oooh” and “aahh” at all the moments everybody else does once the (Diamond Coach, yes, branding) bus has been moved. We talk about the things that would go into our dream house, and would you look how pretty that bedroom is, and oh my gosh, are you kidding me, that kid has got a climbing wall in his room now?

But leading up to that is something more important. The show, for us, has been an opportunity to talk about and explore empathy. It’s been an entry point for my kids and I to discuss the many ways we are fortunate, to talk about the struggles that lots of people have that we are fortunate not to have.

We have talked about our good health when the show chronicles a child with some debilitating illness that makes their current house a deathtrap. We talk about how grateful we are to be together when the show focuses on a family that has been split apart for one reason or another. We talk about how blessed we are to have a home that is a blessing rather than a curse.

You can try to explain to kids that they are better off than many other people and therefore should be grateful – just ask any parent who has attempted that “starving kids in China” routine. You can tell them just how lucky they are, and you will exhaust yourself, because only a tiny bit of what you are telling them will get through. (They’re not that different from us adults, in that they’re much more likely to focus on what they don’t have rather than what they do. It appears to be the default position on the switch of human emotion.)

But despite its relentless ad placement and goofball tone, this show has for years given us a real-world barometer for those conversations. It has humanized pain, suffering, guilt, regret – and along with those, compassion, hope, love and kindness – in a simple way that child and parent alike can understand. And talk about.

For all those reasons, I will miss it dearly.

]]> http://www.jamesbickers.com/2011/07/22/send-down-a-bucket-of-girls/feed/ 0 http://www.jamesbickers.com/2011/07/19/its-his-own-cheating-heart-that-makes-him-cry/ http://www.jamesbickers.com/2011/07/19/its-his-own-cheating-heart-that-makes-him-cry/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:00:23 +0000 James http://www.jamesbickers.com/?p=313 This is one of my favorite songs from one of my very favorite bands, the amazing Glasvegas. Dumb-lucked upon this just now – I did not realize how many videos the band has made. Compelling stuff.

(There is some profanity in this song – and most of their songs, for that matter – but to be honest the guy’s accent is so thick you probably won’t even notice.)

For those of you who don’t know, this is God’s second novel after the Old Testament. It’s a marked improvement, in my opinion. He got rid of a lot of his previous angst and scorn, and has really begun to show some of the maturity present in his later works. He’s become a much more loving and kind God, and, noticeably, he doesn’t throw nearly as many tantrums as he did in the first book.

That said, there is still vast room for improvement. Plot wise, there isn’t really much suspense, and the story can be incredibly repetitive. In like four chapters, he just rewords the same basic story over and over again. To top that off, he puts those chapters one right after the other. Like we wouldn’t notice! I like the whole Jesus character, but let’s face it, the whole good guy martyr thing has been done before. There was no need to devote so much of the book to that guy.

Salient takeaway for hardcore Manilow fans: He tells me his next record will likely be a sequel to his first jazz album, the great “2 AM: Paradise Cafe.”

Tacos might just be nature’s most perfect food – a swirling confluence of corn, flour, protein, fat, cheese, some requisite vegetable and all of it tied together by the fact that you have to pick it up and eat it with your hand. It’s primal and sophisticated and carnal and, if you’ve done your job right when seasoning the filling, it tastes damn good.

But allowing myself to plummet down the Totally Taco Tuesday rabbit hole also caused me to come face to face with a hard reality: I thought I had tasted a great crunchy taco, but I hadn’t.

Soft tacos? That’s easy. Anybody can make a soft taco. You warm the tortilla just a little, you fill it, you fold it, you eat it. Relatively idiot-proof.

But what about the crunchy taco? If you’re like me, you’ve only ever had the pre-formed crispy shells, the kind you find at Taco Bell or the grocery aisle or even at the “authentic” Mexican restaurant up the road whose name starts with “El” or “Los.” You thought that was what a crispy taco tastes like.

I was wrong to think that, and so are you. But enlightenment is delicious, my brothers and sisters. This, you see, is what we think a crispy taco shell looks like:

This is what a real one looks like:

It’s uneven, it’s imperfect, it is darker in some areas than others because it touched the griddle longer there, it has air bubbles and each one is different. It tastes unspeakably good.

What you do is this. You go to the grocery store and buy the big bag of corn tortillas – usually three or four dollars for a hundred of them. You prepare your fillings the way you always would, you set the table just the same, you get the chips and the cheese and the lettuce and the tomato and you proceed the way you have every previous Tuesday night.

But tonight, once the fillings are cooked and in the bowls and on the table, you take the big bag of corn tortillas and adjourn to the stove. You put a little bit of oil in a frying pan, let it get hot, then put a single tortilla, flat, in the pan. You give it about 15 seconds so that it gets soft, then you use a pair of tongs to fold it in half. You let it fry, medium-high, until that first half is crispy. You then flip it over and fry the other side, using the tongs to hold it open just about an inch or so. Holding the tongs there, you let the second side fry to crispiness. At that point you flip it up on the seam, searing the “joint” for just a few seconds – you will be able to see the bubbling of the oil coming up on the inside of the corn.

You put that on a plate to cool and rest – the whole process takes no more than a minute or so – then you repeat until you have enough to sate everyone at your table. These shells are both more substantial and more flavorful than you are accustomed to, so you will probably need fewer shells than you think.

You know that awful feeling you get when you’re using store-bought taco shells, when you crunch into the first bite and the whole thing shatters and all of your carefully seasoned filling falls to the plate like so much unwanted detritus, and you’re holding two sorry-ass pieces of overpriced corn chips and the taco experience is ruined and your children are crying and wondering why daddy and mommy are so angry? Yeah, who doesn’t know that feeling? It’s the universal experience. But it’s a thing of the past if you fry your own taco shells, because freshly fried shells are crunchy but chewy at the same time, just pliable enough to not fall apart when you bite into them.

This is what tacos are supposed to taste like. This is how they are supposed to act when you bite into them. This, my friend, is what Tuesday nights are supposed to taste like.

(Seen here filled with grilled pork, spinach and bell peppers.)

I love almost everything about Target, but there is one thing this company consistently does that pisses me off. It is this:

What’s that on the very bottom row of the DVD shelf? Only some of the most graphically violent movies in recent years. Movies like “Saw” and “Hostel” not only took the in-movie savagery to new extremes, they upped the ante on their box art, too.

This is not an isolated incident, but something I’ve seen on virtually every Target visit in dozens of different locations in different states: Deeply disturbing, violent imagery, right down at toddler level. In this particular case, if you’re looking at these DVDs and make a 180-degree turn, you’re just a handful of steps away from the Legos.

I’m not a prude. I watch horror movies as much as anybody else. But please, Target, at least put them on the top shelf so little kids don’t have to mentally process the severed heads and feet and god knows what else.

Most people, if they are being honest, spend at least a little bit of time wondering how they will be remembered. Be honest now, and raise your hand if you’ve never imagined what people might say at your funeral. (No hands up? Didn’t think so.) We all want to believe that we will be remembered with fondness, and there is nothing wrong with that.

But for every Edison or Jefferson or Paine, individuals whose lives and actions influence millions, there are millions more who influence only those few around them, and by proxy, those few influenced by their immediate inner circle. We are, most of us, like the pebble that hits the water and creates a small ripple, one that cascades out into ever-slightly-larger circles.

This thought of ripples is on my mind, and I think it is worthy of a deeper consideration.

“Sail away, away. Ripples never come back.” – Genesis, “Ripples”

So it is easy to focus on the people that make big splashes, the people that patent a hundred different inventions or create blockbuster movies or find the cures to cancers. But those people are so few and far between, relative to the size of the overall population, that they are almost statistically irrelevant.

Much more important are the people doing small things but doing them everyday, small things that add up little by little, action by action – good or bad. Hopefully, good.

This is where my mind turns lately. The ripples that I am creating with each thing that I do. This is what is on my mind.

There are people who create positive ripples. They get up and take care of themselves, they take care of their families, they are kind, they extend gratitude and generosity and genuineness wherever they are able. These are each small things, but they ripple outward, and a generation later, they will spawn similar actions by an untold number of people – some family, some friends, some strangers touched in an impossible-to-predict way.

Then there are the people who create negative ripples. The twenty-something asshole who gets a girl pregnant, then is never heard from again. The thirty-something monster who raises a hand (or, god forbid, some other part of himself) to his children. The forty-something who just gives up. These things are ripples, too, and they too spawn similar unpleasantness down the line: the abandoned child who believes this is how fathers are supposed to act, the abused child who turns around and does the same, the brother or sister or friend or lover who says “This is all too much, and none of it is worth it.”

And so it cascades out, until it (again, hopefully) collides with an equal and opposite force.

This is life, then. It’s not any one great heroic act, the kind you’d see in the movies. It’s not any triumphant gesture that will make the crowd go wild and the president pin a medal on your chest.

It’s the cumulative effect of all of the positive ripples, fighting it out with all of the negative ripples, trying to make the world a place that doesn’t suck to live in.

What did you do today?

Fortunately for me, music director Kyle Meredith sucks at math, because we ended up with two spare hours once the 100 were spread out. Kyle being the good guy he is, came to me and said, “Here’s my gift to you – do whatever you want with those two hours. No rules.”

So here’s how I used those hours, which were two of the funnest hours (for me, at least) in my 15-odd years of broadcasting:

6:00 am – Death Cab for Cutie: The New Year
6:03 am – Johnny Cash: I Never Picked Cotton
6:07 am – The 5.6.7.8?s: Woo Hoo
6:09 am – Parry Gripp: The Girl at the Videogame Store
6:12 am – Carpe Diem: Naissance
6:15 am – The Carpenters: Superstar
6:20 am – Utopia: Singring and the Glass Guitar
6:40 am – Josh Ritter: Lantern
6:45 am – Bob Newhart: The Nude Police Line-Up
6:49 am – Paul Revere and the Raiders: Kicks
6:51 am – Sex Bob-Omb: We Are Sex Bob-Omb
6:53 am – The Bavarian Radio Orchestra: Requiem for Soprano, 2 Mixed Choirs and Orchestra (from “2001: A Space Odyssey” soundtrack)
6:58 am – Spock’s Beard: The Good Don’t Last
7:01 am – 38 Special: Fantasy Girl
7:06 am – George Gershwin: Just Snap Your Fingers At Care
7:09 am – Dan Hartman: I Can Dream About You
7:12 am – Eric Johnson: My Back Pages
7:22 am – Camel: Drafted
7:27 am – White Lion: Wait
7:31 am – Mahalia Jackson: Move On Up a Little Higher
7:36 am – Dan Fogelberg: Netherlands
7:43 am – Poets of the Fall: War
7:48 am – Bill Cosby: Old Weird Harold
7:55 am – Kurt Elling: Not While I’m Around