John and Elizabeth Edwards

If my wife came home tomorrow with a diagnosis of breast cancer, I know exactly what I would do.

I would support her.

How? I don’t know. The only way I could, I guess. Be with her.

An old pal of mine has been through it, and he says it’s like the two of you, after hearing the news, being escorted into an unfurnished, featureless room with a wide window overlooking the world outside. Behind you, he says, the door closes, no knob on the inside, and the room becomes hermetically sealed. In this room the two of you live, until death do you part, looking out at a life you will never again be a part of.

He told me he read that many husbands in that situation cut and run, refuse to go with her into the room, leave the marriage. I can’t imagine that. On that, John Edwards and I agree. Three years ago, when his wife Elizabeth received her diagnosis, he walked with her into the room that my pal describes. That is the coolest thing I could ever say about John Edwards, even if he were elected president, Pope, ruler for life, entertainer of the year, Oscar winner, Nobel Prize recipient, all on the same day.

You learn things, so I’m told, inside this room. At first, the man has two great needs: knowing what to say, and knowing what to do. And there’s this sudden distance between him and his wife. She is different. Outside, time was elastic. In here, it is not. Early detection, promising treatments, etc., but the statistics are still cold: a woman alive five years after diagnosis is considered a “survivor.” Sidebars to the Edwards story say that breast cancer kills around 44,000 women a year, and attacks more than 180,000 new victims annually.

“If breast cancer were a foreign nation,” my pal says, “Congress would have declared war a long time ago.”

He said after almost three years in the room, John and Elizabeth Edwards have established a whole new life together. Apparently the husband learns fairly quickly what to say, and what not to say. He also, once the treatment begins, suddenly has a lot to do and a willingness to do it. He must learn more about breast cancer than he ever wanted to know. I have another old friend, who escaped Russia in the 1970s and became a success as a restaurateur in this country. But in his existence was so much terrible reality. One afternoon I watched him lean his elbows on the bar, rest his face in his hands, and say, “I know too much for a man my age.”

Reading about John Edwards, I think that is how he must feel. In one story, Elizabeth told about some kind of needle procedure, a nurse trying to get a needle into a vein. She said John was squeamish and had to leave the room. My pal had read the story too, and he laughed. “I wasn’t squeamish,” he said, “but every time I was there, it took the nurse two or three times to find a vein. I figured it was me, hexing it. So I’d go for a cup of coffee, and every time, the nurse would hit it on the first try.”

Now Elizabeth Edwards has had a recurrence, and the cancer is in her bones. Obviously, with his presidential candidacy, they had to go public with it. This week, John Edwards is under attack by many for choosing to continue his candidacy “for the duration,” he says, instead of devoting himself to his wife and her condition. Katie Couric challenged him on it in an interview: “How can you say that, Senator Edwards, with such certainty? If, God forbid, Elizabeth doesn’t respond to whatever treatment is recommended, if her health deteriorates, would you really say that?”

It makes you wonder: what would I do?

“You know exactly what you would do,” my pal said. “Read the stories. Think about it.”

Reading the stories again, it seems obvious that John Edwards knows what he is doing. Both of them say she is going to live for years. John would certainly not do or say anything to throw doubt on that. In fact, it dawns on me, he can’t. Love won’t let him. Suddenly I know exactly what I would do. I would support her. I would no more quit the campaign than tell my wife anything else than she was going to live forever. Elizabeth Edwards will never in her lifetime hear John Edwards waver. It’s the one thing she knows she can always, always, count on. She knows it, and he knows it. The value of that should be obvious to all.

Money Madness

The CBS Evening News (with Katie Couric) showed an interesting piece on March Madness one night this week. It made good business sense. The N.C.A.A. national championship basketball tournament is broadcast over the CBS network.

The theme of the Evening News spot was, “March Madness means big business.” The tournament came to be called “March Madness,” because the nation goes mad, apparently over the prospect of watching the tournament, and businesses and advertisers can make big bucks off the fervor.

The madness hasn’t quite kicked in yet, though it’s already March 21. The new Nielsen ratings, published today, don’t show a sign of March Madness anywhere in its top 10 ratings, either in broadcast or cable television categories. In broadcast, citizens are much more mad about “American Idol,” with its No. 1 rating of 17.2 for the week of March 12.
In cable, the leading frenzy is over World Wrestling (Raw), with a rating of 3.7. In fact, the nation’s viewers showed themselves to be much more crazed about SpongeBob, last week, than they did basketball.

Well, then, shouldn’t the Evening News be guilty of false advertising, with its spot about March Madness and big business? Not at all. March Madness is a big business, because it is a media business, and the Second Law of Media states: “The media is an exercise in the power of small numbers.”

Oprah Winfrey is maybe the best example of this power. Oprah is an international entertainment celebrity, among the wealthiest of these celebrities, and she does it in an unusual way: she earns it. She is among the most-admired women in the country. This fame is based on a television program that in the Nielsen syndicated program ratings ranked third in the latest ratings behind “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.” Her rating was 6.1, roughly 7,900,000 viewers, meaning 93.9 percent of the television universe and its millions of viewers were doing something else.

But a 6.1 is enough to make a person rich and famous. Advertisers drool at the propect of getting their product before 7.9 million sets of eyeballs at the same time. It took an 8.8 to crack the broadcast top 10 last week, so let’s say that March Madness captured a Nielsen rating of 5. Is it possible, in a nation crazed by college basketball, that 95 percent of Americans chose to do something else last week?

Yes, but 5 was enough for the advertisers and the network. Here’s a formula for the Second Law of Media:

NRP X 1,102,000 X 2 X Response X Price minus Ad Cost (Time + Production) = Revenue.

A Nielsen Rating Point is one percent of all U.S. television households, which at last count numbered 110.2 million. The 2 represents an average of people watching the set. Response is the percentage of the viewership that might actually go out and buy the product. Price is the price of the product. Ad cost is the cost to produce the commercial (which is a one-time cost), plus the cost of advertising time on television.

Let’s say a 30-second commercial for Bud Lite, the favored beverage of the basketball-watching demographic, had a production cost of $1 million. Bud paid CBS $150,000 for 30 seconds of time. The game has a Nielsen Rating of 5, and the commercial achieved a response of 3 percent (which is an excellent response percentage). A 12-pack of Bud Lite is $11.05. For the 30-second commercial, revenue is $2,503,130. The second time, and thereafter, that the commercial is shown, take out the one-time production cost.

College basketball may not be the true March Madness for most Americans, but it sure is for Bud Light, CBS and the N.C.A.A. This weekend and next, as we get into the rounds of “Sweet 16” and “Elite 8,” ratings will soar into the teens. Go figure that impact.

A "B _ _ _ _ e B _ _ _ _ _ _ _ l"

Fifty years ago, depending on the newspaper’s target audience, she would have been a “blonde bombshell,” or a “glamorous blonde,” or a “striking blonde,” or a woman “whose beauty was inescapable.”

Today, newspapers – the respectable ones, anyway – can’t say things like that. So they had to write around it. In the newspaper business, “writing around” means figuring out how to say something you don’t know for certain, or how to say something it is no longer politically correct to say.

They did a good job, and it was fun to read. The New York Times said: “As she talked more, her soft voice seemed to gain force, volume and velocity – a confident bearing to match her appearance.”

The reporter was describing the appearance before a Senate committee of Valerie Plame, or Valerie Wilson, her married name, the former C.I.A. agent whose cover was blown in a series of 2003 events related to Iraq, the White House, and the media.

Plainly put, Valerie Plame is a blonde knockout. And an ex-spy! At a Senate hearing, putting the finger on the White House for blowing her cover! How glamorous can it get? With a soft voice gaining force, and a confident bearing to match her appearance, Ms. Plame testified: “It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover.” Good heavens, a 1940s film noir classic, wasted on 2007 reality and its painful political correctness.

Still, if you’ve ever had to write around something, you have to admire the professionalism. Talk about classic, read this, from The Times: “The audience sat rapt, all eyes fixed on Ms. Wilson, even when congressmen were talking, as if she could vanish at any moment.”

Said The Washington Post: “Yesterday’s hearing underscored the intense interest in Plame, who drew autograph-seekers and camera-toting congressional aides to a hearing on an otherwise quiet morning.”

The Times described “the cinematographic aura that pervaded the room. Representative Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia, declared himself nervous. ‘I’ve never questioned a spy before,’ he said, either star-struck or sarcastic but drawing laughs either way.”

Those laughs came from men, as one comes from me now, remembering some former Valerie Plame in their lives, at a high school dance or a college library, to whom it was quite impossible to speak directly, or to suggest in any way that you and she occupied equal footing, such as sticking out your hand and saying, “Hi, I’m Michael Grant.”

Yes, a movie is to be made of her story, by Warner Bros. In the 1940s, a young Janet Leigh would have played her. Now? It may be a few years too late for Cybill Shepherd, who would have been perfect. My guess is Reese Witherspoon. Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” is due out soon and you know exactly what is going to be on the dust jacket.

Laugh of a lifetime

The social scientists are right, I laugh mainly as a signal to others that I am not going to suddenly reach out and grab them by the throat.

I had never actually realized laughter’s main role. I have known about hand waving for a long time, as not so much a symbol of saying “Hello,” as showing me their hand is empty, no concealed dagger there with which to bring me low. But I thought laughter, or what passes for laughter at cocktail parties, was just a way to fill time between the weather chat and the sports chat. Now I know it is a tool I can use to gain acceptance.

And I appreciate others doing the same for me. Sometimes I wish their laughter didn’t sound so phony, but that’s probably not so much a bare masking of their real intent than it is the simple absence of anything really worth laughing at. I bet I could count on less than both hands the things I have encountered, spontaneously or programmed, in the last year, that were worth laughing at. And Robin Williams was probably involved in half of them.

I don’t laugh much, actually. I take after my late Uncle Clyde, who was not dour in any way, but remained all of his life, at least by appearances, on the serious side of reserved. An older acquaintance of mine, a witty man who was a contemporary of my Uncle Clyde, said the appearance was not the reality, that Clyde inside was a mirthful man, actually, and when he chortled – he had this low, rumbling chortle – it was the same as any other person jumping up and down on the coffee table.

I am like that. I loved the man, looked up to him, and maybe I took after him. He was a cavalry officer, in the last years when cavalrymen actually rode horses, and my first memory of him relates to the saddles and tack stored on our front porch while Clyde was in the South Pacific. When he came back after the war, bigger than life, he took me every Saturday morning to the Dixie Pig for pancakes, and I imagine at the table I tried to sit like him and look like him. I would like to have a picture of that.

I hope he had one really good, helpless, laugh in his life. I hope that for everybody. There’s a downside; all laughter after a helpless laugh is compared to it, like the second hole-in-one is just not the same. A good laugh is very much of a unique moment, not anticipated, not possible to anticipate. Surprise must be part of the magic. Who could have known how funny Michael Palin would be, as the “Woman” scene started, in “Life of Brian.” My son was there, and he will tell you he had never seen me that way before. We have watched that scene again, and laughed again, but it was not the same.

I was alone when I had the helpless laugh. I was sitting in the living room, tossing a tennis ball for Barkeley, a most personable Sheltie, to fetch. I threw it from a chair by the television, across the living room so it bounced through a wide entry into the kitchen, and then through a doorway into the hall. Barkeley would disappear into the dark hallway and then emerge again, prancing with the ball.

But then I threw it and missed the hallway door to the left. The ball bounced in the corner between the kitchen wall and the hallway doorjamb. Barkeley slammed on the brakes, dropped her tail down, set her feet wide, but couldn’t stop on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. Her eyes never left the ball as she slid past it, ears up and tail down, at a decent velocity through the hallway door and into the darkness.

It was as if someone had yanked a plug on my ability to control myself in any way. In my brain was a pure circuit, put there to be used just once, to sustain the body chaos of the next several minutes, and my ability to survive it. I was meant to miss the doorway just once, Barkeley was born to come into my life and slide at speed through the hallway door into the darkness just once, that circuit was placed to accommodate the result, just once, and now it is spent, vestigial, its purpose realized, to keep me alive through the one time I could have died laughing.

Accepting Sex

Just once, I would like to experience sex the way a woman experiences sex.

What a lesson that would be. It would also be hugely informative for a woman to have the opportunity, just once, to experience sex the way a man experiences sex. I have a feeling about what would happen. The woman would run full-speed back to the pleasures of the woman’s experience, while the man, after his one sample, would feel reluctance about returning to his gender’s ways.

I introduce the idea as one whose time has come. Last week, New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley wrote a piece about ABC’s growing success with programming she described as “the television version of chick lit.” The shows include “Desperate Housewives,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Brothers and Sisters,” and a new one, “October Road.” They are all about sex, and women, Stanley writes, prefer to watch shows “about sex: couples who talk about sex, then have sex, lots of it, and then talk about sex some more to each other and to their best friends.”

Men, she writes, “click off in droves.” The average man wants to watch “sports, politics, strippers, car chases and crashes, have sex and go to sleep.”

There is some truth about me in that. I once saw about 20 minutes of a “Desperate Housewives” episode, which is my total exposure to the shows Stanley mentions. I do like to watch sports, and having sex and going to sleep seems like a reasonable activity to me. I don’t like to watch sports that much, though, because sports are now too much about money, as are politics, car chases, and crashes, and I didn’t know you could watch strippers on TV.

Maybe I am not an average man. Yet I feel tarred. Reading Alessandra’s piece, I developed the impression that sex, for a man, is a picture. For a woman, it’s an experience. That would explain why “Playboy” is a man’s magazine, and “Sex and the City” was a woman’s show. I want to know if I’m missing something that maybe I would really like.

I have no way of knowing, without experiencing sex as a woman, just once. I would have to know the experience of slipping out of a Chanel suit and into something short and silky, of running a brush through my hair, of joining him in the bed, of receiving him in stages of relaxation, first with my eyes, and my lips, and my skin quivering under his touch, and my arms, my hips, acceptance slipping deeper into me until finally I feel my legs, parting for him.

I guarantee that the man, meanwhile, is having a good time, but it’s all about drive. Men provide the piano; women are all about the music. Men are compensated with a huge payback, but still the damn piano gets heavy. No wonder we want to go to sleep.

What would an experience of sex as acceptance, instead of moving a piano, do to my life’s experience? I imagine it would be a discovery like the physicists sometimes announce, so profound it will force us to change the way we think about the universe. What would receiving sex be like? Would living the woman’s experience, just once, get the piano off a man’s back? Would the man even want to go back?

I’ll never know, but wondering about it is one of the most intimate things I’ve ever done. That is a man's view. Alessandra, from the woman's side, says, "It's not so complicated. Like Ben & Jerry's, which includes Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream among its most popular flavors, these shows dish out exactly what women want in lavish quantities that they cannot quite believe anyone would allow them to have." So the man is also the complicated one. I do think that I have known that, all along.

DST

This morning, the sun rose here at 6:15. Tomorrow morning, it will rise at 7:15. Too late, this early in the year.

That is the opinion of a family of early risers: Karen, me, two dogs, and a cat. The dogs and cat have timers in their heads that say, “Time to wake up,” at 5:30 a.m., no matter the conditions outside. This morning, we had some first light at 5:30. Tomorrow morning at that time, first light will be an hour away. Tomorrow, we can just lie in bed, tune out the screechings from puppies and kitties, and wait for first light to guide our morning steps. Monday morning, though, is going to be rough, and I object to that. If the sun is going to come up an hour later, shouldn’t work start an hour later?

Easy to blame George W. Bush, who signed the law changing DST debut from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. He and his people have screwed up so much, why not try for the clocks that animals have in their heads? But he signed the document months ago. The news now is how the early start is going to result in another Y2K situation, where computers, not to mention puppies and kitties, want to stay on the old time until a more reasonable date in spring. Why has the scientific community not taken the appropriate actions to get humanity and animality through this mess?

Re-setting all the clocks will be easy, as it always is when you spring forward. If my recent history holds, I will remember to do that next Wednesday. Last week I looked at my watch and it said March 4. My birthday, March 6, had already passed. Something was wrong. I remembered that February has 28 days, but my wristwatch doesn’t know that. I had to move my wristwatch date four dates forward. Tomorrow, I have to turn around again and re-set it an hour forward for DST. This is not pleasant for a man who just turned 64, and very aware of the finiteness of days and hours, after all those carefree decades of believing I would live forever.

I was born in March, and on DST, or War Time as they called it then. Anyone born between 1941 and 1946 was born an hour earlier than they think. President Roosevelt placed the nation on year-round DST for a very good strategic reason that at the moment completely slips my mind. If I die on DST, I will have lost an hour off my life totally because of the whim, strategic or otherwise, of a President of the United States. Mr. Bush has added four weeks of my year to that possibility, and I have to say I resent it. As long as I die on the same day I was born, March 6, then all will be well. Though the puppies and kitties will wonder why in the hell, at 5:30 a.m., they haven’t been fed.

The NFL's MVHB

Here is a nomination for Kris Dielman as the National Football League’s Most Valuable Human Being.

Dielman is the starting left guard for the San Diego Chargers, so he will never be the NFL’s Most Valuable Player, like his teammate LaDanian Tomlinson. But that’s okay. There’s an MVP named once a year. In professional sports, Most Valuable Human Beings come along once in a lifetime.

On Friday, Dielman was what the NFL calls a “free agent.” His contract with the Chargers had expired, and because of his tenure he was free to negotiate with any team in the NFL. It is incredible, I know, when measured against everyday values of what any job is worth, but Dielman was in a position to negotiate a contract that would pay him $50 million or more, to play left guard on a football team.

Two free agents, described as the top two, in terms of their worth as football players, had already come to terms with new teams, one, a defensive back, signing with San Francisco for $80 million, the other, an offensive lineman, signing with Cleveland for $50 million.

Dielman was in Seattle, negotiating with the Seahawks, who were preparing to pay him $50 million, the current, no less bizarre, top dollar for offensive linemen. The Seahawks front office had the contract ready to sign, when Dielman turned it down. He decided to stay in San Diego, remain a Charger, for roughly $40 million.

When a man is signing a contract worth $40 million, it’s hard for the average worker to feel warm and fuzzy about the millionaire leaving $10 million on the table, to do what he thought would make him happy. Thirty years from now – heck, five years from now - though, none of us will be able to remember how much Dielman signed for. Quick: how much did Joe Willie Namath sign for, in 1969?

What we will try harder to remember is how much Dielman didn’t get to spend, just because he wanted to play for his old team.

“I’m glad to be with my linemates again,” he said. “That would have been hard to leave that group of guys in that O-line room, and LT and Philip Rivers and Lorenzo Neal and all those guys.”

How many millions of dollars do you think that makes his linemates, and LT and Rivers and Neal, feel worth?

Kris Dielman didn’t start out a star. He played at Indiana University and came to the Chargers as an undrafted defensive lineman in 2003, signing a contract worth $7,500.
He was cut after the pre-season camp but stayed on with the practice squad, where he was switched from defensive to offensive guard. Early in 2005, he got a chance to start when the first-stringer, Toniu Fonoti, was injured. Dielman has been the starting left guard ever since.

Now he has one nomination for the NFL’s Most Valuable Human Being. It’s the only most-valuable nomination I know of, that cost the player money. “Money is nice,” he said, “but if you’re not happy, you’re miserable. It’s not really worth it, in my opinion.” In professional sports today, that is a really valuable opinion.

Prius Time

Yesterday morning driving to work I passed my regular Chevron station, which is near the campus. Premium was $3.09.9.

At lunch, I came back to fill up. Premium was $3.15.9. I drive a Mercedes SUV and I love it. It burns premium. I slid in my Chevron card, spun off the filler cap, took the nozzle, selected Premium, started to fuel, and made a decision.

My next car is going to be a Prius.

The price of gasoline is going to keep going up. The consumer, who is totally captive to the industry, is going to keep paying the price, whatever it is. The industry is going to keep raising the price of gasoline, without regard to supply and demand. The industry will insist to the media that price is set by supply and demand, and added factors like converting from winter to summer “mix.”

Conversion from winter to summer mix is the industry’s explanation for the current spiking prices, which in San Diego have driven the price up 14 cents a gallon in the past week. I don’t believe that explanation. I don’t believe it because the United States lives on an ocean of gasoline. No external force is powerful enough to raise or lower the level of an ocean by 14 cents in one week. I believe gasoline prices will continue to go up, year by year, according to a formula agreed upon by accounting and marketing, that will always leave the lowest price per gallon a few cents higher than it was a year ago. You see the same formula at work in supermarkets.

I believe the formula is based on how long it takes to condition the consumer to paying the new, higher, base price. Consumers will be pleased to see gas prices drop in April or May and may not even notice that the base price is a penny or two a gallon more than it was in November. It may take three or four years of this steady ratcheting to get the price up to $4 a gallon. But it will get there.

I decided, standing there at the Chevron pump yesterday, as a driver, who must drive, to be as small a part of the ratcheting as possible. It is the consumer’s only weapon against industry greed, and government indifference to such greed. I love that truck, and I would much rather drive it than a Prius. But not in the oil industry and governmental environment of the near and intermediate future.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been writing about cutting back the nation’s oil dependence for years. Many times he has argued for smaller engines using new technology. I appreciated the argument but laughed at it at the same time, because it was never going to happen. Certainly not the Bush administration, but no doubt no other presidential administration, is going to author and enforce new engine technology mandates that would negatively impact the oil industry. Auto makers might eventually be voluntarily agreeable to it, but only when such an engine became a good business deal, and gas may hit $7 a gallon before that starts to happen.

For me, the last straw was Chevron premium at $3.15.9 a gallon on March 1, 2006. I am the only one who can do anything about this, and I can’t wait to see the beloved Mercedes go. Anybody want to pick up the last 11 months of a lease?