Sure, I was amazed at the accomplishment and briefly had my cynicism interrupted with something resembling hope for the future of mankind, but the production value left a lot to be desired.

How is an organization that repeatedly invents the universe’s most sophisticated technology unable to get even one of their staff to dish some dirt into a confessional cam?

It’s almost like they paid no attention to the needs of us viewers at home.

NASA really missed the mark by focusing their coverage on science. They need to focus a little less on interstellar stars and a little more on reality stars.

Instead they kept involving children in the coverage to encourage their natural curiosity and treat their questions with dignity and respect. What an insult to reality TV.

Was it inspiring to see a diverse group of public servants tie their life stories into the Rover’s Perseverance theme? Sure, but not as inspiring as watching them flip a table over on the haters who tried to stand in their way.

I had a mix of emotions as I watched the scaled down (for Covid) crew “spontaneously” celebrate their inter-planetary accomplishment when the Rover successfully landed.

There was an admitted twinge of national pride and small flare of existential wonder, but mostly I found myself looking for the human element scanning the faces and body language of each person trying to figure out which ones were truly experiencing euphoria and which ones were secretly hoping for the mission to fail.

I’m not talking about a deep state conspiracy or a private sector saboteur sent to funnel more space pioneering success towards Elon Musk. Just a grumpy employee who’s near enough the top of his profession to be in the mission control room when a Mars Rover lands, but not quite empowered in the way he feels entitled to be.

This malcontent is most likely not hoping for a spectacular failure but rather for an extremely specific failure perhaps down to the millisecond-calibrated timing of a thruster push or simply to spite one person in charge of one aspect of the mission.

He probably wants the overall mission to succeed but if at least one of his superiors comes away looking foolish, he’ll be happy.

I knew there had to be at least one person like this in the room because I recently watched several episodes of The Right Stuff, National Geographic’s dramatization of the first Americans sent into space.

According to that show, NASA is full of hot shot egos, petty workplace dramas, and long-simmering hostilities. That’s what I wanted to see on the live feed.

NASA’s really softened it’s image in the past 60 years. I definitely appreciated the addition of women and minorities (kudos to the casting director) but it would be nice to still see a nicely ironed white shirt every once in a while.

Instead, everyone at NASA was wearing matching polo shirts as if they were all on break from their shifts at Best Buy.

What kind of American hero wears khakis?

For an organization that spends so much time focusing on stars they sure could use one to clean up the mess. Clearly, the season one finale was a bust.

But with over 19 million views on YouTube alone (plus likely millions more on social media and the NASA website), they’ve still got room to fix it.

I’ll look forward to seeing the Perseverance Rover sit down with Andy Cohen next week for a tell all interview. If they’re smart, they’ll patch in the Curiosity Rover and jumpstart a feud to spin off into a new show: The Real Housebots of Mars.

That’s reality television we can really enjoy!

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A beefalo (I’ve since learned) is a cross between a buffalo and a cow that is raised to produce larger and leaner quantities of meat per animal slaughtered. Google it; they’re pretty badass.

My second reaction upon hearing that a beefalo was on the loose in Plymouth, Connecticut was to wonder, “Where the heck is Plymouth, Connecticut?” though I never found out because I spent an hour looking at pictures and videos of beefalo.

My third reaction upon hearing that a Beefalo was on the loose in Plymouth, Connecticut was to wonder how he got there (he escaped from a meat processing plant avoiding certain slaughter) and my fourth reaction was to wonder why that was the police department’s problem.

The Plymouth Police Department reveled in being out front of the story perhaps hoping a good collar would benefit their brand. Instead, it made the Beefalo a vigilante and greatly increased his following.

The escape garnered enough attention to give him a nickname. Buddy the Beefalo’s continued success at evading capture made him a legend.

This was in early August.

After his first month without capture, the police union pivoted the high-profile story to their favor by organizing a Go-Fund-Me campaign to buy Buddy’s freedom and to arrange for his post-capture care at Critter Creek Farm Sanctuary in “sunny Florida.”

They always describe it as “sunny Florida,” even in the months where Florida seems to have gotten one hurricane after another.

The police union has raised $8,536 from 289 donors.

Not to be deterred, the people responding printing t-shirts saying, “Run Buddy Run;” pranksters put inflatable bulls by the roadside to throw the police off his trail.

The police claim to be doing their best to catch him, but it’s now been over three months and counting and they seem to have run out of gas.

At first they got all police-y describing Buddy as “highly aggressive” and a security concern at nearly 2,000 pounds. Reports of the initial encounter say that, “police on the midnight shift saw the animal Wednesday near Route 72 and tried to capture it, but the beefalo puts its head down and scratched at the ground as if it was going to charge, so officers moved away and the animal went into the woods.”

Things quickly escalated as state environmental conservation officers swarmed the area with drones tracking him down to a swampy area in the woods.

It was determined that tranquilizing Buddy in that area and trying to remove him would likely hurt him so after briefly considering using female cow scents to lure him out, the police then adopted a wait-and-see approach with a “trap” that would make Wile E. Coyote jealous.

The Plymouth Police Department’s trap consists entirely of a horse trailer, two gates, and a bucket full of grain. They haven’t caught Buddy yet but they’ve gotten some beautiful pictures of local deer.

They posted an officer near the trap at night, since beefalo have nocturnal tendencies, but the officer couldn’t see anything because it was dark.

So they added a spotlight.

But then Buddy stopped coming by their trap so they worried the spotlight was too bright and switched to night vision.

Around this point they rebranded their stakeouts as “steakouts” and began live tweeting. Beefalos may not like spotlights but the Plymouth Police Department loves them.

The more attention they got, the less of a threat Buddy became. Residents called for changing the school mascot to a beefalo.

The police captain appeared on morning radio. Local TV news crews created graphics.

There are even dueling Twitter accounts.

Buddy is an out-and-out star.

It hit critical mass last week when the police department debuted a mascot-like Buddy the Beefalo to join Batman at the police department’s trunk-or-treat Halloween party.

My cynical impulses are to mock the attention or belittle the police for taking such a soft-handed approach to solving a seemingly easy problem. Even frontier kids who grew up with a cast iron skillet for a school house knew how to wrangle a cow.

Plus, my legal training kicked in wondering how fortunate a trial lawyer would be if he could play all of this publicity back on the town like a gold-plated fiddle should Buddy ever maul anyone or cause a life-altering accident to an unlucky motorist.

Especially after reading sentences like this in the Hartford Courant, “Beefalo are mostly active at night, which makes the effort to catch him more urgent. He’s been seen crossing Route 72, and police say they want to avoid any traffic accidents.”

But all of that was when Buddy was just a feel-good story from a distant town out in the middle of nowhere Connecticut.

While driving around recently (having just moved two towns over from my previous home, I sometimes take random turns to see what’s where), I was shocked to pass a sign for Plymouth, Connecticut.

Turns out, I moved just outside of nowhere. How close? Let’s just say it’s within grazing distance.

Suddenly the rustle of leaves sound ominous bringing to mind the initial police description of a 2,000 pound animal “scratching at the ground as if he were going to charge.”

Vigilantes are cool until they might be hiding out in your backyard.

My eyes now instinctively go to the horizon wondering if a beefalo will burst through the tree line at a mad gallop seeking vindication for the months-long hunt he can’t shake.

We live next to a reservoir and I imagine 2,000 pound beefalos get awfully thirsty. Every tree limb outside my window at night is suddenly shaped like a beefalo horn.

Complicating matters is that I keep getting mail for the old owners from Heifer International. Is that a coincidence or is Buddy taunting me?

Yesterday, I took my 21-month-old daughter Senita for a walk through the neighborhood and she joyfully pointed out every pumpkin that we passed, which made me look at them all a little closer. In doing so I noticed that several along the road behind us had been partially eaten.

Almost as if an animal had grazed by eating just a little here and a little there. I’m sure it was Buddy.

Then, this morning, just outside my front door, my own pumpkin had a beefalo-sized bite taken out. Even though we’re still not finished unpacking, it might already be time to moove again.

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Mom liked watching so she could talk about it with her mom, who liked to see the stars.

After Grandma died, Mom kept watching to honor her memory. And now that they’re both dead, I find myself taking up the family claim.

My mother didn’t hand down any family recipes or heirlooms, but at least once a year I perk up in my seat and say, “there’s Jack Nicholson!”

I used to think I liked watching the Oscars for the host’s monologue, then just sort of kept it on.

But after last year had no host, I realized that even though I haven’t seen the movies and can’t name most of the stars, I watch the Oscars every year because I like seeing other people thanked.

How great is it that our most highly-publicized awards, like the Oscars, feature individuals giving thanks to all of the people who helped them accomplish their once-in-a-lifetime goal?

We could all learn something from these self-effacing moments. If only we were as quick to assign credit as we were blame, life would be so much better.

So many of us strive to be the person who gets the award, but what if you strived to be one of the people behind the award recipient?

Collaboration seems lost in society today because we focus on winners and losers. But focusing on the teamwork that got people to where they are is such a better way of looking at life.

I recently had a child. It felt great to have my own likeness recreated into a new living entity. But it is also a signature accomplishment for all of my ancestors who came before me, whether they watched the Oscars or not.

I’ll be a major influence on my daughter’s life, but I won’t be the only one. We’re already lucky to have so many friends and family members who care for her, but I know there is a gathering storm of future teachers, friends, co-workers and coaches waiting to help sculpt her into the person she’ll become.

Influences will come and go. Right now she thinks I’m pretty much the greatest (only my wife Jenny might have a stronger claim), but it’s only a matter of time before some friend, probably named Harper (why is every girl suddenly named Harper?), becomes equally if not more important to her life.

Then Harper will lead to Sophia, Olivia and Emma (the actual most popular names of her birth year), and I don’t even want to think about what happens when Liam gets in the mix.

My hope is that as each of these people enter my daughter’s life (and she enters theirs), they’ll be the sort of people worth thanking at an awards ceremony.

The sort of people who believe in her, challenge her to do her best work, step up to help her when she needs it, and stand back to let her shine when she doesn’t.

Neither of us may ever walk the red carpet. Or, we may someday walk it together arm in arm. Either way, I strive to be the sort of dad worthy of a shout out if she wins.

Next Sunday we’ll be watching the Oscars together for the first time, though hopefully she’s in bed for most of it.

You can bet I’ll be pointing out the pageantry of gratitude, every time a winner thanks her parents, and, of course, Jack Nicholson.

It might not be my grandmother’s recipe for spaetzle, but it’s worth passing down nonetheless.

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Before I set my shovel to the ground, however, I enjoy taking in my home and neighborhood through its new veneer.

Everything’s different. Snow weighs down trees, bending their branches and pulling down the sightlines of my horizon.

Light bounces off the whiteness in new and unexpected ways filling in places where shadows normally go. The wind comes alive sending fine powdery drifts off the roof and trees.

The air smells different – like the inside of a plastic cooler mixed with faint traces of a neighbor’s wood-burning stove.

Sounds are familiar but intensified by their overall scarcity. Birds chirp differently, sounding an all-clear coupled with distress that their food sources have unimaginably disappeared.

The few passing vehicles proceed tentatively, their coasting engines silenced by a restraint more reminiscent of a trotting horse than a gas-powered innovation until the town plow roars through scraping us back into modern times.

Mechanical beeps echo on the horizon. Plow trucks backing up. Snowblowers sputtering a few doors down like little engines that could. Shovels scraping concrete walkways and driveway blacktops before the freeze sets in.

The experience has been the same in every winter-weather location I’ve lived. And I’ve lived in many ranging from my suburban childhood home to college town shanties and now my own home tucked into the middle of a tiny mountain where wind squalls can turn five inches of snow into a foot swept into the alcove between my house and garage.

Each location allowed me to peacefully take in the world before methodically plotting a path out and proceeding with care. Except for one: a free-standing house I rented with a shared driveway in Norwalk, Connecticut.

There was no time for contemplation because my competitive spirit compelled me to get my half of the driveway clear before my neighbor did. This task was daunting because I only had a cracked shovel and he had a thousand-dollar snowblower.

I wasn’t going to invest money in snow-removal technology for a rental property so I instead imagined myself as Rocky Balboa training in the frigid Russian winter to defeat the Soviet imperialist.

This fantasy was fueled by my evil neighbor using his roided-up snowblower to make a clear line between where his nest-egg investment ended and my rental agreement began.

Snow would seem to be democratic in that it falls on everyone equally, but after the first time he beat me to clearing out his half, I bemoaned it as one more example of the rich turning their privilege into an unfair advantage.

While I loathe the lazy snow-remover who fails to clear the top of their car sending projectiles flying on the highway, I more-so resent the luxury car flashing it’s untouched wax job in the first hours after everyone else digs out.

At least have the decency to keep the last storm’s corrosive salt stains on your car to show some solidarity with the rest of us.

On our second winter in Norwalk, a weekend storm hit hard dumping nearly a foot of snow overnight. I sleep in on weekends.

I listened to my neighbor’s snowblower effortlessly churning his half away and drifted back to sleep imagining myself as Rocky bloodied and bruised, leaning on the ropes.

I dreaded lifting up my window shade that afternoon expecting to see my neighbor gleefully dancing on his freshly-cleared driveway. To my surprise, he had proven himself a true comrade and cleared both halves.

Rocky’s closing speech immediately jumped to mind: “During this fight, I’ve seen a lot of changing, the way you felt about me, and in the way I felt about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that’s better than 20 million. I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!”

It’s true that fresh snow storms temporarily change the way I perceive the world, but one time, that change lasted a whole lot longer. My neighbor quickly gave me further reasons for complaint, but after moving into a home of our own, a snowblower was one of the first things we bought.

Which brings to mind one final Rocky quote: “Every champion was once a contender who refused to give up.”

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“Impossible,” I thought while clicking through to verify my mastery of simple machinery.

I was shocked – floored, really – when the video proved itself correct. I looked back at my life with a profound sense of shame.

Here’s what I learned:

Instead of holding an opener to the side of a can (and cutting a jagged circle through the top), you should hold the dial above the can cutting the entire top (smooth edges and all) off from the base.

This makes a pop-top lid similar to the cardboard tubes Mike Brady used to hold his architectural blueprints on The Brady Bunch, or to Minute Maid frozen juice concentrate cans sold around 1991.

The next time I took my opener to a can, I was shocked how easy it was to use correctly. My new method meant no longer worrying about prying the jagged lid up from the can of tomatoes.

This solved a real problem in my life. Nearly every lid of every can I’ve ever opened has fallen into the contents below leaving me to pick a jagged edge out of my food at great risk to my personal safety.

My go-to-method was using either a fork’s prawn or a barbecue skewer to pry the lid back up without cutting my finger.

Seeing the top of the can fall into my food had long grossed me out. I know my kitchen pantry is clean, but I also know that this can was previously at a canning factory, then placed on a pallet and put into transit where it rumbled about for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles until settling into the back of a supermarket, and eventually on a shelf.

I also know that rats leave a trail of urine everywhere they walk and that they’re commonly found in warehouses. Therefore, I assume that the top of every can in my pantry has, at some point in the chain of custody, picked up a trace amount of rat urine.

I don’t clean the tops of my canned goods because I’m not insane, but I do silently worry for a microsecond before shrugging it off. This life hack removed my microsecond of rat-bladder-leakage anxiety.

I’m drawn into these life hack videos the same way I used to get suckered into infomercials as a kid. There isn’t that much difference between learning how to MacGyver a little extra toothpaste out of a tube and being convinced that a quality haircut is just a Flowbee away.

But like an As-Seen-On-TV product, once the novelty wore off, the life hack got moved to a dusty shelf in the back of my brain.

Just a few weeks later I realized halfway through opening a can that I was using my old method. And I couldn’t have cared less.

I paused before opening a second can and (with rat bladders still in the back of my mind) decided to use the new method. But this time the mystique was gone.

Additionally, my newly critical eye noticed fibers from the cut label had fallen into my can of no-salt-added petite diced tomatoes.

I wondered, which is worse to ingest: trace amounts of imaginary rat urine or actual bits of can-label ink and glue?

It’s the last time I opened a can from the outside.

Life hacks aren’t about creating lasting solutions to everyday problems. They’re about seeing something familiar in a new and unexpected way.

Opening a can is generally a rather tedious and unremarkable task. But, for a short period of time, it mesmerized me providing unexpected delight. Until I almost ate label glue.

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The Super Bowl is more like a low-budget office party that takes place during normal business hours so that it seems like leisure time, but you really aren’t free to leave.

Instead, everyone stands around the conference room table avoiding eye contact and stabbing room-temperature cheese dip with Tostitos Multigrain scoops.

I’m talking about one of those eye-rollingly-themed parties where the paper plates are shaped like footballs and the napkins are patterned like referee shirts.

Even though only two metropolitan fan bases have an emotional stake in the outcome, Super Bowl Sunday has taken on national significance.

Watching the Super Bowl when your team isn’t in it feels like being forced to sing Happy Birthday to a co-worker while watching them blow out candles on a cake. Sure, you still get to eat cake, but it’s so much more fun when you’re the one spitting on everyone else’s piece.

Watching the Super Bowl no longer feels optional. It is a mandatory part of active citizenship, like registering to vote or lying to get out of jury duty. We all participate, but it isn’t always fun.

At best, the average viewer has a tenuous connection to the teams, the broadcast always goes on for far too long, and it always takes place on a school night.

Like office parties, a Super Bowl party can also reveal painful differences between generations as neither can relate to each other. Why do old people always bring the conversation back to Johnny Unitas? And since I stopped playing video games years ago, I can’t name a single player on any team.

My football knowledge is stuck in the 1990s generational middle where Dan Marino endorses Isotoner Gloves, Steve Young is a Mormon hero in a very un-Mormon town, and the most important thing about kicking field goals is to keep the laces out.

Even with my dated football knowledge and lack of pop culture awareness, there’s always something I can find to relate to during the Super Bowl.

Perhaps what I’m most grateful for is that it will dominate our conversations throughout the week giving us a break from things like politics and the weather. Even our pleasantries will change to make way for the Super Bowl. Somewhere around Wednesday, “How’s it going?” will be replaced with “Planning to watch the game?”, which itself will be replaced by “Did you see the game?” first thing Monday morning.

Super Bowl mania will also dominate social media from kickoff on Twitter through Tuesday on Facebook. It amuses me how many of my friends haven’t yet figured out the Facebook algorithm and still post real-time comments. “Nice tackle!” doesn’t pack quite the same punch when I finally see it in my feed on Monday afternoon.

Like an office, the Super Bowl brings people of all stripes together. I won’t be going to any Super Bowl parties this year, which suits me fine.

I like the idea of parties far more than the reality. Like most people, my favorite parts of a conversation are the ones when I’m talking.

But I struggle with social timing at sports-related parties. Watching sports is one of the last remaining excuses for mentally-balanced individuals to scream spontaneous utterances in a social setting. It can be very distracting.

Say, for example, that you’re asking a friend how he is adjusting to life since his mother passed away. If he answers with something like, “We’re taking it one day a time. Dad can’t figure out the stove and almost set the house on fire and the kids keep asking when they’ll next see Nana,” it’s very hard to pick the conversation back up after the guy next to you screams “let’s see some defense on the field!?”

In fairness, a Super Bowl party might not be the best time to talk about the impacts of grief, but that is really the host’s fault for planning a social gathering based around a televised event. Especially one where everyone gets shushed during the commercial breaks.

When is a guy supposed to catch up with the friend-of-a-friend you sort of once knew if you’re not allowed to talk during the game or the commercials? Maybe next Tuesday on Facebook.

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If there’s one thing that show has taught me it’s that when you ask a hundred people the same question you’re going to get some stupid answers. It’s infuriating that each opinion counts equally towards the final total.

The opinions themselves are worthless on their own. It is the show’s producers who give them value. While contestants may argue and complain, it all comes down to what the survey says and what the gameshow pays.

Sometimes surveys are just inherently wrong.

I’ve tried to give deference to surveys in my personal life with disastrous effect.

One of the most serious disagreements my wife Jenny and I have ever had was over whether the “top” of a slice of pizza is the crust or the point. It developed naturally as a point of confusion and frustrated me a great deal.

That anyone would say the top is anything but the tip was utterly ludicrous and offensive to me. I’ve never heard anyone say “crust-top” but can point to countless examples of the well-used phrase “tip top.”

We were clearly at an impasse so I took the question to Facebook and was horrified when my friends agreed with Jenny at a 3-to-1 ratio. It was one of the darkest chapters in our relationship.

As passionate beings, we’re wired to find meaning but we’re more unified by zealotry than by denomination. A sports fan applying his team’s color with face paint has far more in common with a face-painting fan of a rival team than he does with the average fan of his own team.

Because our culture teaches that it’s important to have an opinion, we get really weird about presenting and defending ours, as if its an extension of ourselves.

But it’s not. It’s just an opinion and should be susceptible to change.

I used to think that Michelangelo was the coolest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I’m embarrassed to admit it now. He had such high energy and looked like he really enjoyed those nunchucks. I was young and easily got sucked in by the fun catchphrases.

It’s clear now that the Leonardo is the coolest because he demonstrates leadership and uses an awesome sword. But truthfully, I don’t think much about ninja turtles anymore – at least not the teenage mutant kind.

And yet I’m stuck with these worthless opinions and will probably have them for the rest of my life.

Oftentimes the impulse to have strong opinions is stronger than the opinions themselves.

I had a viscerally negative reaction to my local minor league baseball franchise’s debut of the team name “Hartford Yard Goats,” and so did most people in the community. But we’ve all since embraced the name as a quirky and fun identity that brings joy to scores of families.

I can’t help having these opinions, but I’m getting better at letting them have less of an impact on my life. It’s important to recognize that opinions evolve even if the impulse to have them forever remains.

The activists who were trying to keep big box stores out of their town twenty years ago are the same ones now who are mourning the shuttering of Toys R Us as deeply as they once mourned the closing of a mildew-stained toy store on Main Street. They’re just like frogs hopping to a different lily pad while floating in the same drainage pond called “change is scary.”

Our culture is right in teaching that opinions are important, but they’re the end product of the qualities that we should actually be celebrating.

We should expand our focus to recognize the elements that lead to that impulse: situational awareness, social responsibility, and civic engagement.

These elements may be harder to recognize but they’re worth a whole lot more. No matter what the survey says.

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By putting superheroes in every summer blockbuster, Hollywood is presenting us with the NBA Jams version of entertainment: all slam dunks with no focus on the fundamentals.

It is a cautionary tale of what happens when creativity chases the path of least resistance.

It seems like we’ve been here once before – with westerns – when every movie studio bought a ranch and tried to squeeze out every last drop of value. There’s something charming about a nursing home common room absorbed in watching an old western, but I doubt our children will be as charmed to find that same common room showing replays of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

While it may be time for LEGO Batman to ride into the sunset, I don’t see it happening any time soon. And since Hollywood is dead set on putting superheroes in every major movie, I hope they really lean in and start making the sort of superhero movies I want.

For example, Peter Parker’s Day Off, where he teaches his hypochondriac friend to enjoy life and never once uses his superpowers because it will only make him more likely to be caught by his parents (too soon?) or by his oddly obsessed principal.

I’d also love to see a survivalist story of doomsday truthers settling internal power struggles inside the bunker they’ve set up immediately after Superman reveals himself to the world. Because let’s face it, Kal-El sounds kind of Muslim and truthers don’t have the best track record of following leaders with Muslim-sounding names who’ve been raised by a white family in Kansas.

A murder mystery at the X-Men mansion would be amazing – especially with mind readers and shapeshifters like the Professor and Mystique throwing shade at the likes of Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum.

I recognize the silliness of these desires but cast the blame on superhero movies themselves for unrealistically raising expectations. Their action scenes are fast-paced and compelling. I don’t see how teens could ever go back to enjoying the sort of movies I did at their age, where an action scene consisted of watching Paul Newman struggle to eat fifty hard-boiled eggs.

Star Wars has gotten just as bad. Star Wars is the new SNL – it’ll be around forever and the best cast will always be the one you first saw in Middle School. I’d like to shake that galaxy up with a legal thriller where a working-class lawyer named Erin Bobba Fett exposes the toxic manufacturing byproducts of the big lightsaber industry’s radioactive products.

It’s easy to blame this superhero-first mentality on audiences by dismissing them as “the entitled generation” where everyone is special and always wins a trophy, but that is a cop-out of the sorriest kind. I hear that criticism all the time from my generation, who themselves create the leagues where each of their children gets a trophy and then simultaneously complain as if an outsider forced their league commissioner’s hand.

It’s also just as easy to cynically speculate that so many superhero movies are getting greenlit because they’re guaranteed revenue generators that overperform in non-English-speaking markets like India and China. But if I’m going to be cynical, I’m going to go big.

Who really stands to profit from mutant-power obsessed culture? The cell phone companies pumping data signals through hand-held receptors 24/7!

No genetically-altered patient’s first stop is a trial lawyer’s office if they’ve always wanted to be an X-Man. In that context, hearing colors isn’t considered a symptom of radiation, it’s seen as the first sign of a long-expected mutant evolution: a welcome relief to the fear that you might die with no more physical senses than when you first were born.

“Can you hear me now?”

“Yes, but it’s a little muffled. Please speak directly into my elbow!”

My biggest concern about idolizing superheroes is that it’s focusing on the wrong set of skills to celebrate in our culture. While they’re great for taking on our larger, militaristic threats like supervillains and alien invasions, superheroes aren’t that good at handling the threats that attack us every day.

Instead of Batman taking on the bank robbers, I’d love to see him perform a stealth audit of the bank’s internal files. I’ll bet his fancy bat-cave technology could find some shocking disparities in what they do compared to what they say.

I’d rather see boy genius Peter Parker patrol the sticky corners of the world-wide-web than cast his own webs around our relatively safe New York City streets.

Or maybe, one day, the alter ego will reign supreme and slow, methodical, investigative journalism will win the day.

For all the different remakes, cinematic universes and director’s takes – there ought to be a version where the audience bursts into cheers when Superman goes into a booth and Clark Kent steps out. That’s the kind of superhero I could get behind.

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I also can’t wear headphones while driving, a lesson I first learned at Avon Driving School but was later reinforced when the iPod came out and my car still just had a CD player. It is too all-consuming of an experience, but I have no problem piping the same program or song in through the radio.

It’s more about control than sensory experience. I have no misgivings about wearing headphones while using a lawn mower, weed whacker, or even chainsaw because that’s on my own property outside of the flow of traffic and disruption from other people.

I can handle being startled by a chipmunk much better than being startled by a mack truck.

It’s very easy to startle someone who’s wearing headphones; they’ve become the universal “do not disturb” sign – a prominent indicator that a person is consciously shutting themself off from the outside world.

The mere act of speaking to someone with earbuds in is this generation’s equivalent of calling a house phone after 11 PM, it must only be done in the event of an emergency and the entire household will come running to see what the fuss is about.

Headphones reflect how intensely personal and varied each of our realities are at any given moment, even when sharing the same common space.

Sit on a park bench on a beautiful day and watch the people going by: all of them have headphones in and all of them have different realities. It is impossible to tell the anxiety-riddled person listening to a self-help guru from the still-crushing-on-a-boy-band groupie, or the secretly-listening-to-death-metal businessman. We’re all living with our own customized soundtracks.

We each march to the beat of our own drummer, even if it’s just a digitally enhanced version of the same drummer that our parents listened to when they wanted to rebel from theirs.

Sounds heard through headphones almost resemble thoughts radiated directly into our consciousness. That may explain the popularity of confessional-style podcasts, which work much better when piped directly into the listener’s head. I’ve never stepped into an elevator and heard the faint background noise of Marc Maron blaming his mother for his trouble finding love. Every piece of content has its medium.

Headphones were best in childhood when using them included a touch of rebellion. I used mine to create my own alternative programming as soon as I got into the back of a family car. Silently saying either, “screw this sports radio nonsense, Dad, I’m listening to Weird Al,” or “Take your Peppermint Twist and shove it, Mom, I’m gonna Do the Bartman.”

I started with foam-padded walkman headphones that absorbed the stickiness of childhood and suffered heavily from a household full of animals and cigarette smoke. My discman followed suit with the same spongy material but stretched wider and thinner making them less obtrusive and less likely to absorb collateral dust and dirt.

In high school, I experimented with radio recording and bought a nice pair of large, leather-padded headphones. They lasted well into college and brought my “do not disturb” game to the angsty level that every teen deserves.

The earbud years were dark and seemed they would never end. Moving from the outer ear to inner ear was irritating; my sensitive ear canals still haven’t fully adjusted to the intrusion.

The surging popularity of personal speakerphones combined with a lack of self-awareness has completely caught me off guard. Every aisle at Walmart has at least two people blissfully interacting with their bedazzled phones on speaker.

Happily, my wireless headphones are untangling me from the mess. I’ve come full circle, back to the giant leather-padded type. This time with bluetooth cordless. I mostly wear them doing yard work, with just enough volume to hear over a lawn mower or weed whacker.

They’re battery powered so they get alarmingly hot at times and the bluetooth waves may be drastically increasing my risk of brain cancer, but the privacy is worth it.

Escaping from the world.

Thoughts and sounds encased as one telling the world, “Do Not Disturb.”

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The Flintstones was a prime-time TV show from the 1950s that got shoved into 1980s Saturday morning time slots as awkwardly as a parrot forced into a rock-carved intercom. Bugs Bunny was a beloved childhood icon, but I’m just old enough to remember him regularly drinking and smoking.

Roger Rabbit was the last true cartoon character; his movie itself was a throwback to nostalgia I wasn’t old enough to have. Cartoons were heavily revisited after that and most of the classics that air today have been scrubbed of the more provocative moments.

Hollywood trends have reversed themselves in recent years so that many new shows are now largely repurposed from my childhood to be marketed at adults. These revisions generally track my childhood’s timeline.

It started years ago with computerized versions of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny then moved into the 1980s with Ghostbusters and Full House. Now we’ve got remakes of Boy Meets World, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne (at least until recently). It’s enough to make a person think he’s stepped into the Twilight Zone (also coming back soon, produced by Jordan Peele).

I imagine we’re only days away from the release of Sabrina the Middle-Aged Witch. Star Wars is being remade so consistently that you’ll soon be able to tell a child’s age by how many of the movies they’ve seen, like splitting open a tree to count the rings.

Even 60 Minutes has gotten into the craze ending each show with a segment from their past fifty years instead of the more typical Andy Rooney-style lecture about how jars are better than cans.

The off-air shows I enjoyed as a child had the decency to stay off: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gilligan’s Island, and I Love Lucy. Being exposed to entertainment from different decades broadened my sense of American culture and made me appreciate humor that stands the test of time.

Each successive revisit expands the internalization of these lessons. The value of re-reading a book or rewatching a show is seeing new layers, bringing your changed perspective to the medium, and taking away deeper or changed messages. When the medium is locked in time, you’re the only variable and both the originator and recipient of any changed perspectives.

Today’s world of constant remakes robs us of that experience as once iconic characters age beyond their natural story arcs and patterns. But who’s to say the difference won’t be better?

I’m skeptically enthusiastic about ‘Cobra Kai,’ the Karate Kid spinoff series on YouTube Red. That brilliantly selected jolt of nostalgia cut through the clutter to catch my interest, but so far hasn’t compelled me to watch. I’m a bit hesitant because the movie remake with Will Smith’s kid proved the formula doesn’t always work.

Seeing tiny Mr. Miyagi protect Daniel-san from fully-grown California teenagers was far different than watching Jackie Chan beat up Chinese twelve-year-olds. How the producers didn’t see that is beyond me – I wanted to call child protective services.

Remakes often get things wrong. Some shows aren’t meant to have more depth, like Ducktales. That relaunch brands Huey, Dewey and Louie with individual personalities, like they’re Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

While I understand the decision from both a merchandising and storytelling point of view, it substantially alters the dynamic between characters. It surprised me how violated I felt. I couldn’t even watch a full episode.

It’s like visiting your childhood home after another family has moved in and being outraged that the furniture is facing the wrong direction. It’s absurd to think things should stay the way they were, but the feeling is there even though you haven’t thought about the place in years and never had any ownership of yourself; it just always felt like yours.

I’d like to think Hollywood is bringing everything back because they’re expertly curating and building smarter, more meaningful forms of culture and entertainment. But looking at all the problems we still face today, I’m not confident that the past holds many answers.

There’s only one conclusion I can come to since Hollywood has doomed us to our history, and that’s the reason they must try, try again.

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