PAT'S PONDERINGS

My husband and I enjoy watching the first half hour of the “Tonight Show,” especially the “Jaywalking” feature when Jay Leno asks people walking around the streets of Los Angeles questions about current events, famous people, or whatever else might be fodder for a few laughs. I suspect the bit is popular not only because it’s hilarious but also because it gives us viewers an opportunity to feel superior to the people chosen, whose answers reveal them to be clueless about the most ordinary facts, facts that you would expect everyone to know. Shown a photo of Hillary Clinton? No idea. A photo of Kim Kardashian? No problem. True, most of the respondents are young. They know popular culture backwards and forwards, but they know little about the people who might actually make a difference in their lives.

Maybe the kids who spend all of their time playing video games have the right idea. Maybe ignorance is bliss. Wouldn’t you and I feel better if we had no idea what’s been going on in Congress or with the European Union? People who have no interest in the stock market report or who can't identify the president of Iran probably sleep a lot better than we do.

And you have to wonder if you’d remember your own name if you were suddenly stopped by a celebrity, who thrusts a microphone at you and asks a question in front of a film crew and a crowd of gawking onlookers. You might remember your name but you probably wouldn’t remember who is buried in Grant’s tomb. So maybe we shouldn’t be so critical of the “questionees.”

Some of the funniest answers are those in which the respondents are asked to complete a maxim such as “A stitch in time…” They never know the last words of sayings that we learned as a matter of course, and although their answers sometimes make sense on a certain level, they are still wrong. “What’s good for the goose is good for the chicken,” might be something to keep in mind, and it isn’t the right answer, but it is funny. And after all, we don’t know how many prospects were questioned who did know that the answer is gander, but they’d never have been chosen for the show.

On “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” a contestant, who said she had majored in English literature, was given a list of rhyming words such as shore, implore, before, adore, etc. She was asked to pick which among four poetic works is known for its many words that rhyme with those on the list. One of the choices was “The Raven,” which begins with, “Once upon a midnight dreary…” and ends with “Quoth the raven, nevermore.”

The young woman did not know the answer and jumped the question. She said she had skipped the poetry portion of English literature. Hunh?

Now I’m not much of a poetry buff, and I didn’t major in English literature, but I do know Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” Isn’t it one of those poems we were required to read in high school just as we read, “Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”?

Sometimes when a contestant doesn’t an answer it’s because the relevant event took place when they were in diapers. On a recent “Jeopardy!” one of the answers was, “This woman succeeded her late husband as a senator from Minnesota to become the state’s first woman senator.” The question? “Who was Muriel Humphrey?” Muriel Humphrey was the widow of the late senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey. She went to the senate in 1978. For my husband and me it was a no-brainer. But none of the three young contestants knew the answer.

Because it has been so long since I was in school, I don’t know much about what students are now required to learn. Are they still taught the standard works of literature that I was taught or have the classics been deemed irrelevant? Do high school graduates still recognize, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the opening phrases of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities?

We certainly can’t know everything. Einstein didn’t know everything. But there used to be standard knowledge that all high school graduates had absorbed. But times have changed, and certain kinds of “literacy” might in truth no longer be as important as they once were. Certainly there’s recent discussion about whether a college education is still necessary even as tuitions climb beyond all reason.

Educational criteria have changed, curricula have changed, standards have changed, and not always in the direction we’d like. So perhaps we should be a little patient with people who don’t know what we think they should know. There are differences between the old school and the new school.

The young woman on “Millionaire” didn’t do herself or our educational system any favors by not recognizing “The Raven.” Maybe I’m overreacting, but I think she should be disappointed with those who allowed her to earn a degree with an incomplete education.

How many classes of unwitting students will assume she is qualified to guide them through English literature – poetry excluded, of course?

I’ve always been one who feels that once I’ve begun a book I simply must finish it. Not to do so represents a kind of surrender or a character flaw. I’m trying to break myself of this habit because not everything I choose to read is worth that much of my time or what I was expecting.

Book reviews, of which there are a profusion, are my downfall. Besides reading them in magazines and newspapers, I find it difficult to resist listening to interviews with authors on the radio and on podcasts on my iPad. It would be impossible to read all of the books, but I believe that knowing something about a variety of topics is better than knowing nothing. 

Recently, after listening to interviews on NPR about the new biography of movie star Hedy Lamarr, who had an alternate career as an inventor (she held a patent on spread spectrum radio, which would eventually underlie mobile telephones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS), a new take on Pride and Prejudice, and Michelle Bachmann’s Core of Conviction, the announcer said, “Now it’s time for our children’s book feature.” I inwardly groaned. Ugh.

But as the interview proceeded I became increasingly interested in what sounded like a book worth investigating. The person being interviewed was author Norton Juster, and the book was The Phantom Tollbooth. I had never heard of The Phantom Tollbooth, but it turns out that it is considered a children’s classic, which is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.

The Phantom Tollbooth is about a little boy named Milo who is bored and listless – the way I was feeling as the December days grew shorter – and doesn’t understand why he has to learn all kinds of useless things. But an event occurs that soon has him visiting all kinds of fascinating places such as Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and riding past the Sea of Knowledge and the Mountains of Ignorance.

I downloaded a free sample and as I read I thought, Wow, this is really interesting! So I downloaded the entire book – for actual money. I don’t want to give too much away, but if you’re tired of the same old best-sellers and detective fiction, The Phantom Tollbooth might be just the ticket to get you out of the winter doldrums. The Doldrums, by the way, is one of the locations Milo visits during his adventures. It’s a place “where nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes.”

The mood of the story is a little like Alice in Wonderland because of a cast of strange and wondrous characters. It also churned up in me feelings similar to those I experienced when reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – an eerie atmosphere in a place populated by odd people.

There are those who feel that the word play in The Phantom Toll Booth is too advanced for children, that they won’t understand the puns and allusions and other word play. (It’s recommended for children nine and up.) That’s true to a point. But Juster believes that kids get what they need to get from the book while what’s left over can keep their parents entertained. When Milo meets a character named Shrift, who is the shortest person he’s ever seen, kid readers might not know the expression to give something short shrift, but the parents certainly will, and they’ll get a kick out of the inside baseball reference.

I’m telling you all of this because I think you might enjoy The Phantom Toll Booth as much as I did. In a delightful way we are reminded of principles we’ve forgotten or put aside by means of Juster's overflowing bag of tricks.

If you don’t like the idea of being seen reading a kids' book, how about embedding it in a copy of War and Peace or commandeer some neighborhood kids and read it to them. Or if you're a Kindle reader, you can secretly download the sample and take a peek under the covers.

Inspiration is a wonderful thing, and Norton Juster, who is actually an architect, was trying to get his mind off what he was supposed to be doing. The inspiration for The Phantom Tollbooth came when he was putting off writing a book on Urban Perception. Another ugh.

As luck would have it, his neighbor in Brooklyn Heights was the soon-to-become famous political cartoonist Jules Feiffer. He showed his creation to Feiffer who kept it for a few hours and delivered it back to Juster complete with the funny, whimsical drawings that have graced the book ever since.

There is an appreciation at the beginning of the book by Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, who expresses enormous admiration for Norton Juster’s “delight in glorious lunatic linguistic acrobatics” as he weaves his classic tale of Milo’s amazing adventures.

This is one book I was sorry to see come to an end. I loved my journey with Milo, his watchdog Tock, and the Humbug as they tore along on their fabulous adventures. I’ve even thought of reserving a seat for the next trip.

Would you like to come along?

In her book Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, author Sarah Ban Breathnach suggests writing down five things a day for which to be grateful or that bring us pleasure. Some of us spend so much time grumbling, focusing on everything that’s wrong in our lives, that there’s not much mental space left for thinking about the many positives that we experience each day. We take those things for granted.

Not until my mother spent her last days in a retirement home did I realize how wonderful it is simply to be able to come and go as one likes, to shop, to decide on meals, to have the capacity to be an autonomous human being. I keep that in mind when it’s time to change the sheets, a chore that I detest. I think about the many who would love to be able, physically, to change the sheets on a bed or perform any of the other odious household chores that most of us would like to avoid.

I decided to make a list of my own, some of which you might find laughable. But it is my life, and I get to choose what little things, no matter how innocuous, lift my spirits. Making my list at the end of the day is useful because I get to re-experience those momentary pleasures such as:

Accomplishing a long put-off task. Finally, washing that big sack of panty hose.

Completing my daily exercises. What a relief.

Trying a new recipe that turns out well. It goes in the “For Company” file.

Running into an old friend whom I’m genuinely happy to see.

Finding, on sale, an item that is already on my shopping list.

Getting a check in the mail along with all the junk and catalogs.

And as inconsequential as it might seem, not until I started making my little lists did I realize how important parking is in my life. There’s not much that can happen in an ordinary day that brings me more pleasure than finding a great parking space. And although I know that exercise is important, walking in particular, I climb down from my treadmill, drive to the mall, and search for the absolute closest possible parking space even if it means driving around in circles for ten minutes.

Comedian and antique car buff Jay Leno recently joked about going to an event where a fancy, vintage car was being auctioned off. He said that it was so hard to find a place to park that the sponsors would have made more money by auctioning off a few parking spaces.

All of this demonstrates that it doesn’t really take much to make us happy. Many of us think that if we win the lottery we’ll be happy. That’s a fantasy that persists despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Most lottery winners not only do not become instantly happy, their lives often fall apart, either because they have no idea how to handle a huge sum of money or because they eventually realize that their lack of personal satisfaction has nothing to do with their financial state.

Maybe the beginning of this new year is a good time to think of all the things for which we can be grateful and how it’s the simple things, not sudden wealth, that give us a lift. It is too easy, dare I say too normal, for us to take the positives for granted.

At the top of my list page I’ve written, “All the usual stuff, plus…” The "usual stuff" would certainly begin with the fact that I’m alive. Agatha Christie wrote: “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” So, if you’re alive, you’re on the winning team.

The “usual stuff” also includes good health, for however long it lasts; interesting, caring friends and family; a nice warm house to live in; plenty of nourishing food; and what I call “safe passage," that is, the good fortune to have navigated the highways and byways without running my car up a pole or backing over someone in the Giant Eagle parking lot.

It’s our gratitude for the simple things, stitched together, that helps us to view our lives as happy.

Self-help author and teacher Melody Beatty says, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

This year I’m going to try harder to be aware of the simple abundance of good things that come my way and remember that I qualify as a winner in the lottery of life.

May you have a New Year of abundant good fortune and gratitude.

I listen to Bill Handel every day. Who, you might ask, is Bill Handel? He’s the host of the morning drive show “Handel on the News,” which is broadcast from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on KFI, Los Angeles, the most listened-to AM and talk/news radio station in the country.

“Handel on the News” is not syndicated, and I don’t live in Los Angeles. So how is it that I can listen to it every day? By means of the daily podcast via Stitcher, an app on my fantastic new toy, my iPad.

In case you’re not familiar with what a podcast is, it is a program of music or talk made available in digital format for download over the Internet. You can listen via your computer, your smart phone or other Internet-friendly device such as the iPad, which is my device of choice.

When Lynn Cullen and Doug Hoerth were snatched off the local airwaves a few years back, I was bereft. I missed hearing intelligent and amusing voices on local talk radio. But with the availability of podcasts I have a choice of an amazing variety of talk (or music) programs anytime I want to listen. And if I want to listen to live radio I can do that, too, via apps such as I Heart Radio, which broadcasts live stations from all over the country.

A special benefit of listening to the Handel podcasts is that the KFI has deleted all of the commercials, news, weather, sports and traffic reports. We podcast listeners get pure, unadulterated Handel – along with his studio of regulars – as the four hours of radio shrinks by about twenty minutes per hour.

I’m telling you all of this because listening to Handel is just one of an endless list of things I can do with my new toy, my iPad.

How else do I use it? I use it to read books via the Amazon Kindle app. Remember me? I’m the person who not more than six months ago swore that I would never read a book on a screen. As of this writing I’ve read at least ten books on my iPad and, because it’s so easy, I have to guard against downloading more books than I can ever get around to reading. Amazon lets me download samples, so I don’t have to plunk down any dough until I’m fairly sure I’ll like the book. There is also an endless list of free books, classics and the like, the ones I always meant to read but forgot about or didn’t have time for.

I was recently asked to sit in for the recording secretary at a business meeting. Although the iPad has an onscreen keyboard, I took along my free-standing keyboard, which made it a breeze to take the minutes. I typed them into the memo app and emailed them – whoosh! – to my home computer, where I could polish them up before sending them out to the membership.

To find out what to wear I check The Weather Channel app. It can provide way more information than I’ll ever need, like the hour by hour weather in New Delhi or Fairbanks or any place I care to type in. If I want to listen to an audio book before drifting off to sleep I can do so by means of an app that has a sleep timer.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I think the iPad is the most amazing, entertaining and useful device I’ve ever owned and I think you should have one, too. Maybe for Christmas? Nicholson Baker writing in The New Yorker calls the iPad “a brilliant, slip-sliding rectangle of private joy.”

The iPad is a computer. It’s a media center, a communication center, a book store and library. It’s an atlas, a slide projector, a word processor. Its possibilities and potential seem limitless, not just as a handy thing to have around, but it’s being put to more serious use. It has recently been found that the ability of autistic children to communicate is being significantly aided by the use of the iPad.         

What makes the iPad unlike any of the amazing devices that have preceded it is its utter versatility. With hundreds of thousands of apps, many of them free, it can be personalized precisely to your needs, to your spouse’s needs, to you grandchildren’s – or grandmother’s needs. To be sure, smart phones can do many of the same things, but I wouldn’t want to try to take minutes on one, and who would want to spend more than five minutes watching a movie or reading a book on a smart phone?

The iPad isn’t cheap. But neither are laptop computers. Are there cheaper pad-like devices? Absolutely. And maybe they’re acceptable. But after owning an iPad for six months I wouldn’t go near any of the imitators.

The iPad does require wireless connectivity. We have a small box called a router, which allows us to access the Internet with the iPad and also to stream movies from services like Netflix directly into our TV set.  

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Would I have been able to write the foregoing if it weren’t for the genius of Steve Jobs?  He was a strange and prickly character, but his creative imagination changed our world forever.

FYI: Lynn Cullen can now be heard live and also via podcast courtesy of the Pittsburgh City Paper. Google “Lynn Cullen Live.”

A few months ago I suddenly became aware of a mysterious charge on my VISA bill. It was always for $29.95 and under a variety of names such as Weight Counselor, MD, Fit Mentor, MD, and Diet Guru. Obviously some kind of weight control plan(s) but, although I could have stood to lose a few pounds, I didn’t recall ordering any such products.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t been carefully examining my monthly statements, so it took more than a year for me to realize that something was going on that wasn’t kosher. I called the number on the statement and asked exactly what it was for which I had been paying $29.95 a month. I had received no merchandise or services that I could think of. I never did get a satisfactory answer but hammered away at the operator until she agreed to send me a three-month refund. I then tossed in a final sally that I would be calling the attorney general of the state of Texas, which was where the charges originated. That was the last I heard of it. For a while. Then one day, several months later, there came in the mail a check for $359.40, the rest of the charges I had paid. That threat to call the attorney general evidently had the desired effect.

We all know how, when we call to buy something advertised on the radio or “As Seen on TV,” the operator tries to sell us additional merchandise. And sometimes we're signed up for things without realizing it and it’s up to us to notice and put a stop to it. I am lucky that  this episode turned out the way it did, and it taught me, once and for all, to be sure I know what I’m agreeing to over the phone and, above all, not to assume that all of the charges on my credit card are legitimate. My statements will be microscopically scrutinized.

A couple of years ago, while traveling in Brazil, I was puzzled that when I tried to use my VISA card it was rejected. What was going on? I belong to an identity theft protection company called LifeLock. You’ve probably heard their ads on the radio. They really do keep an eye on your transactions and evidently, when charges from Brazil started coming in, my account was flagged. I had enclosed a note with my VISA payment telling them that we would be away and for how long, but I had neglected to notify LifeLock. I should have called, not written, to both companies and told them when we were leaving and where all we would be. Something similar happened in Hawaii last winter when they noticed Kmart charges from Hawaii. I got a call from VISA and had to verify that we indeed were in Hawaii and that I indeed had been buying toothpaste at a Kmart in Kawai.

Two days before leaving on a recent vacation outside of the U.S., on August 12, I discovered that my seldom-used Citizens Bank ATM card was missing. A check of recent statements showed that it had last been used at the Market District in Robinson on June 13. However, when I called that branch I was told that yes, they had found the card but – they only keep them for twenty-four hours and then destroy them. Woe is me. Don’t they have my phone number in their vast computer system?

There I was, about to travel to foreign countries, and no ATM card. And my husband, who is of the old, really old school, has never used an ATM card and was useless in this situation.

I had always been aware that credit cards can be used for quick cash but had never used mine for that purpose. So I set about examining all of the little slips of paper, dating back to the Stone Age, each containing a PIN number, in my file cabinet. Finally I came up with one that looked like the right one, went to Walgreen’s ATM and – praise the Lord – it worked. Now all I had to do was remember the number. I jotted it down in a safe place and voila! – it worked in the money machines in the cities we visited. Lessons learned: Not to leave my ATM card in the machine, and – keep track of my PIN numbers.

The day after we got home from our most recent trip I checked my VISA statement online and discovered a charge for $436 dollars from our hotel in Belgium. As far as I knew we had spent only around $60, for room service. I emailed them and got a reply within a few hours. (I’m transcribing it here exactly as he wrote it, because his English is rather charming. They speak French and Dutch in Belgium):

“We thank you for your mail which we have well received…I have taken a look on the invoice and indeed upon check out we have taken the payment of 41euros for the incidentals. When I look on the 30^th of August, when you have done your check in, we have asked you for a credit card to guarantee for the incidentals. This amount equals an authorization of 300 euros [$436] that we had blocked. But since it is a credit card, it is merely an authorization and not a charge. After check out this was released from our part and might take a couple of working days before your bank has processed it. If an issue would remain, please do not hesitate to contact us back.”

Well I’ll be hornswoggled. I had never heard of such a thing. I’m perfectly used to hotels asking for a credit card at check-in, but I had never had a “just in case” amount actually charged to my account as a matter of course. The cynic in me suspects that the hotel hopes that a few departed guests won’t notice the charge and just pay it.

So – caveat emptor, buyer beware, or something like that. Merchants and financial institutions have figured out plenty of ways to get money from you. Examine your statements, keep track of your ATM card, be sure there’s enough money in your account to cover unexpected charges, and make sure your credit card company (and in my case LifeLock) knows when you’re leaving and each place you’ll be visiting, especially if some of them are off the beaten track.

It’s hard enough for us to hang on to our money without letting other people, who figure we’re not paying attention, dig into our pockets and help themselves.