Most mornings of the week, I drive my daughter and younger son to school. During that drive, I’m privy to the inner workings of childhood dynamics. For me, it’s like fieldwork in cultural anthropology. Here’s a verbatim transcript of an exchange between 6-year-old Dietrich and 10-year-old Emma. And no, I don’t know why this was such an important and compelling topic of discussion.

Dietrich:  You know what’s really gross?  Boys that sit down to pee. Girls sit down to pee.

Emma: I know.

Dietrich:  Boys pee standing up. Girls sit down. Girls pee out of their butt.

Emma: No, they don’t.

Dietrich:  Yes they do.

Emma: No, they don’t.

Dietrich: How do you know?

Emma: Because I’m a girl, dumbhead!

Silence ensued.

More on this later as the situation develops.

Four baby pythons escaped the plastic foam box they were being transported in on a Qantas flight. Two subsequent flights were canceled and the plane searched repeatedly, but the snakes still haven’t been found. Maybe one slipped into an old lady’s handbag, and one into the pocket of someone’s trenchcoat, and so forth, and were carried off the plane. After their disappearance created havoc for Qantas.

So much for my friend Richard, who didn’t like the movie version of this story when we saw it together. He said it was “unrealistic.”  I said it was the best movie ever made.

Given the verdict, I’m guessing I won’t be running into Phil Spector again soon.

Here’s another reason it’s never good for any one concern to aggregate too much power. Amazon, bookseller to the world and inventor of print-slayer The Kindle, is censoring the “adult” books by removing their sales rankings. Without defining what “adult” means. And without copping to doing it. And while still selling sex toys online.

Please tell me this is accidental.

Several months ago I was over at 18th Street Arts Center knocking around ideas with my friends there. This year is the center’s 20th anniversary, and clearly a celebration is in order, and preferably one that raises money as well. At one point, one of them volunteered that he knew Sir Ken Robinson, and perhaps Sir Ken would agree to speak at a fundraising dinner.

“You know Sir Ken Robinson?” I sputtered. I’m not given to sputtering, but in this case I did.

Sir Ken Robinson is one of the world’s foremost authorities on creativity and innovation; his principle bailiwick is creativity in education, a field in which his endeavors resulted in a knighthood. (Don’t take my word for it; consult Wikipedia.) Here in the U.S., he is an ardent foe of No Child Left Behind, a pernicious system that has further regimented lower education and has served to hamstring even the best of teachers. And he’s a witty speaker, as demonstrated by this video I posted a year ago this month. Did I want to meet him? You bet.

Then yesterday 18th Street’s executive director (and longtime friend and comrade-in-arms) Jan Williamson was kind enough to call me on my cellphone to tell me that she was seating me next to Sir Ken Robinson at the dinner. Being the first to buy a ticket ($250) was good, but I think sputtering was even more helpful. Never forget:  Enthusiasm always gets you far.

I was also eager to speak with him because  education has been much on my mind lately. I agreed several months ago to serve on the budget  committee for the Burbank Unified School District. As I’m sure you can imagine, this year any recommendations we make are going to be in the form of budget cuts. I didn’t expect this particular community service to be easy or fun, but I felt that I owed something to the system. All three of my kids are in Burbank schools, and they are receiving fine educations. We always hear the negative — about bad public schools — but my experience with my kids is precisely the opposite. The teachers they’ve had and the education they’ve received far outstrips anything I got when I was a kid. Every kid should be so lucky.

Sir Ken was absolutely delightful to dine with last night, and in his remarks after dinner. A Liverpool native who moved to Los Angeles shortly after September 11, 2001, he noted ruefully that until recently his entire time living in the U.S. has been under the Bush Administration, and he was just sure we weren’t really like that. He mocked the idea of testing kids to get into elite preschools (“They’re three years old!”) and the lockstep notion that one has to set a life plan from Day One. He quoted Erma Bombeck, who didn’t start to write until she was in her 50’s. Throughout life, people should be encouraged to go where they’re interested, he said, and that’s where they’ll flourish. It’s always important to encourage creativity.

(Most of us reading this know this. But it always bears reinforcing.)

Over dinner, I shared a story with him.

Last month, it was Back to School night for my two elementary-school children. When I went into my 10-year-old daughter’s science classroom, I did a doubletake. There was some sort of Andy Warhol project all over the room. All different sorts of pictures done in Warhol’s pop-art style. Wasn’t this a science class? Then I noticed that every project looked at first glance like an art project. (The other major theme was comic-book heroes.)

“Isn’t this the science class?” I asked my wife.

“Ask the teacher about how he teaches,” she said.

What I got from the teacher was what I thought was a very smart answer about whole learning, the scientific underpinnings of all these projects, how best to teach analysis and synthesis, and keeping kids interested. “I’m meeting all the state guidelines for science instruction,” he said. “But if I did it the way the state wanted, I’d need 30 sleeping bags.” And sure enough, to my daughter it seems like a great art class, but I see the science she’s learning.

Yesterday when she learned whom I was having dinner with, my wife added the kicker to this story:  the next day, the principal had received complaints from parents that that didn’t look like a science class. I shared this with Sir Ken.

“Yes,” he said. “You see the depth of the problem.”

Oh, if only every movie had zombies and Muppets.

As your Friend, I thought I’d take the time to tell you why solicitations like this aren’t good:

Hey There,
Hope you’re doing wonderfully.  Only a week left before [insert name of show here]. I haven’t heard from you yet and I’d love to see you at the show. There’s a half price preview on [date].

Here’s the thing. I don’t know you. I know we’re Friends, but I don’t know how we became Friends. I just checked my Address Book, and you’re not in it. I looked at your Facebook photo and I don’t recognize you. So it’s little surprise that you haven’t heard from me yet — you aren’t going to. I don’t know you. And I don’t owe you. Deep down, I think you know that, because you addressed me as “Hey There.”

Sending me a message through Facebook? That’s okay. No harm, no foul. We’re Friends, but not every Friend knows everyone else. I’m not on Facebook often, but I’ve got 624 Friends, probably a good 10% of whom elicit a “Who?” from me when I see their picture. You’re one of them. “Who?” But the other “Who?” Friends aren’t berating me for not responding to an invitation I don’t remember getting, to an event I’m being asked to buy a ticket for (even at half price). That’s kinda rude. I know you’d “love to see me at the show” — with my twenty bucks or so — but not everything’s about you. I know it didn’t occur to you, but maybe I wouldn’t love to see the show. You’re just presumptuous.

No, I haven’t heard of you, or your show, and even though we’re Friends we aren’t friends (my real friends don’t need the “f” capitalized; those to whom this applies know who they are). You don’t know it, but your tone is demanding and insincere and insulting.

As a Friend, I thought you should know.

Your Friend

p.s. I am doing wonderfully. Thank you.

Frank Zappa is dead, but judging from some news coverage this week his legacy is doing nicely.

That’s despite (or because of?) his widow’s propensity for suing people who play his music live without authorization. (So, Zappa Plays Zappa, featuring son Dweezil, is sanctioned. Others? Not so much.) Problem is, the law does not seem to be on her side.

This controversy and more is covered in an NPR piece from yesterday. Here’s the link, where you can read the transcript or, better yet — listen to the story complete with Zappa music.  You have no idea my thrill at hearing sections of “Lumpy Gravy” and “We’re Only in it For the Money” coming from the radio in my car and not a CD. Dropped as it was on me in such a surprising way, I was struck again my Zappa’s inventive genius. As Rolling Stone’s David Fricke is quoted in this piece, “It’s almost as if Frank Zappa was writing avant-garde classical music in Top 40 segments.” I think that’s about right. Forty years later, it’s still astonishing.

The other bit of Zappa news is this: Forget Nostradamus, who couldn’t predict his way back to wherever he left his car. It’s Frank Zappa who laid out the fundamentals and business model for filesharing and iTunes — back in 1989. And now he’s getting some credit for it.

Bill O’Reilly recently added the Chicago Sun-Times to his “Hall of Shame.” No, that’s not the corridor that all the Bush apologists have disappeared into; it’s a place for “media operations [that] have regularly helped distribute defamatory, false or non-newsworthy information supplied by far left websites.” (In other words, the sort of thing that Fox News does for far-right nut jobs.)

Getting slandered by Bill O’Reilly is high praise for most of us. Roger Ebert thanks O’Reilly for the compliment (and reduces his manhood in the process).

Thanks to Paul Crist for alerting me to this fun piece of writing.

Three simple rules that will always save you money:

1. Always double-check your receipts
2. Always reconcile your credit-card statement
3. Never sign a credit-card slip without reading and tallying the bill first.

Three times I’ve caught charges on my credit-card statement that are ten bucks higher than the receipt I still had on hand to cross-check. Why? Because those restaurants have people who are adding that money onto the charge and pocketing the cash. (I shared this with an actor friend who told me that at one restaurant the manager would coach new servers in this scam and split the proceeds with them. For reasons you can gather, actors know a great deal about the inner workings of restaurants. My friend declined to participate, and eventually the manager was caught.) In all three cases, I reported the charges to the bank issuing the card and the customer-service rep on the other end of the line removed the charges — after sighing knowingly. It’s not a new scam.

Why do I bring this up now? Because I just picked up my car from the dealer, where I had dropped it off this morning for a routine oil change and 25,000 miles inspection. On my desk I have the estimate from this morning:   oil change, multi-point inspection, some other checking and topping off, $74.95. Later, while I was in a meeting, my assistant texted me that the dealer wanted to swap out the air filter too (which I had expected), and I okayed that. But imagine my surprise when I picked up the car 45 minutes ago and was presented with a bill of… $179-something.

“$179-something for an oil change and an air filter?” I said to the cashier.

“That’s what it says here.” (As though I couldn’t read it.)

“What did you change the oil with? Weapons-grade plutonium?”

She called back to the service department, they conferred briefly over the phone, and one minute later the same woman presented me with a new invoice — for $107.74.  So I was saving 40% basically just for asking. But I have a rule of thumb when it comes to money:  Off by a penny, off by a pound. It either balances or it doesn’t. Wrong is wrong.

“Let me see the other invoice,” I said.

“I already threw it away.”

“Then please get it out of there so I can see it.”

She handed it over and I compared the old one with the new one line by line. I couldn’t find any difference until I came to the line itemizing the oil change. The first time around, the labor was $72. Now it was $12. Through the wonders of a customer asking what this was about, it had now taken less time to change the oil. I like to ask questions, but until now I didn’t realize the full extent of my power to affect the space-time continuum by doing so. Now I have a greater empathy for the characters on “Lost.”

Will I go back to this dealer? Maybe, for a warranty operation where there’s no charge. Because I certainly don’t trust them with my money any more.