The current issue of Reason interviews Craigslist founder Craig Newmark who says, among other things, that 13 years in customer service taught him that people are basically trustworthy. (You can read it here.) I think that’s probably true. I also think that most people have noble intentions and wish the best for their fellow human being.

Which brings me to a special year-end thank you.

This time last year when I looked ahead to 2008, I noted a couple of things I wanted to do. One was to spend more time with friends. Another was to do something big and new that was utterly un-work-or-writing-related, and have it benefit someone else. When a brochure arrived in the mail from the AIDS Marathon, it seemed to fit the bill for everything. So I signed up and I trained for 6 months and by way of doing that made some terrific new friends (to add to the pre-existing terrific friends) and then I went off and ran the marathon, and in the process of doing that my sponsors and I raised $4400 for AIDS Project LA, to pay for medical and dental care for uninsured people living with HIV and AIDS.

So I’d like to thank the following people who sponsored me to do this. (And by the way, some of these folks are people I’ve never met, who clicked to donate via the links on the blog.)

A big thank you to:

Kim Glann (who also gave me great running tips)
Mark Chaet
Michelle Mierz (who, as a marathoner herself, set a great example)
Isabel Storey
David Dobson
Anonymous
Darla Balling
Jeannine Fairchild
Ross T. Kendall
Dorinne Kondo
Ed Levitt
Gerald I. Locklin
Christopher Meeks
Durrell Nelson
Thomas W. Boyle
Janet Reynolds
Alan Ziter
Paula Brancato
Marcie Blumberg
Sidney Stebel
Maria Graf
Jeanne-Andree Nelson
Heather Leikin
Chris Lane
Larry Eisenberg
Jon Rivera
Wenzel Jones
Jalondra Davis
Ernest Burger
Congressman Adam Schiff
Madelyn Inglese
Jean Hobart
Michael Wochner (my dear brother, who also enlisted some friends to donate)
W James Gosline Jr
Dan Beck
Johnna Adams
Douglas Hackney
Pamela Johnson
Mark Niu
Kathryn Whitaker
Michael Folie
Stefan Doomanis
Trey Nichols
Peter Kuo
Barry Rowell
Jon Amirkhan
Lacie Harmon
Michaela Morgan
Richard Hamner
Jan Elliott
Jackie Baghdassarian
Kitty Felde
Janice Littlejohn
Lisa Wochner
Rich And Ruth Roesberg
Brian Kite
Mark Stephenson
Rodney Hobbs
Amy Kramer
Steve Ginsberg
Douglas Hackney
Susan Kamei Leung
Brett Fisher
Rebecca Davis
Joe McClain
Roy Vongtama
Michael Shutt
Paul Crist
Ray Wochner
Jan Williamson
Richard Ruyle

Your donations went to help some people who really need some help. And they proved, again, that while the news is filled with deceit and disasters, there are always untold millions of people around the world doing what they can for others, with nothing personal to gain.

Thank you.

The other day at a Chinese restaurant, my son opened his fortune cookie and this is what he found:  A fortune that read “A SURPRISE WILL COME FROM AN UNEXPECTED SOURCE.” And then right behind that fortune, he found the surprise:  The same fortune, again.

Below is a new TV commercial for a project called “One Laptop per Child,” which hopes to provide… well, you get it. This new commercial features John Lennon, who died in 1980 and, last I checked, was still dead. In the commercial, the lamentably late Mr. Lennon looks fit, and is garbed in a style most of his more knowledgeable fans associate with the period ” ‘lost in Los Angeles’ to ‘early New York,’ ” also known as 1973-1975. He also sounds rather well, especially after having been dead for 28 years. And I’m guessing that this reappearance from beyond the grave has given him extraordinary powers, because he says, “You can give a child a laptop and more than imagine, you can change the world.” Which is a visionary sentiment, given that Lennon perished before the commercial availability of laptops.

Just as I didn’t like it when an advertising agency dug up Fred Astaire to hawk vacuum cleaners, I don’t like this. This may be for a better cause — although that is debatable, given that the vacuum-cleaner company no doubt was helping to feed employees’ families — but I question whether the cause (donating laptops) merits putting words into the mouth of a dead man who always had a strong opinion about what he was for, and what he was against, and in this case could not be consulted.

“This sounds like Tiny Tim, Monty Python, and some horrible bubblegum pop band got into an accident and spewed this out.”

Her older brother having taught her the art, my 10-year-old daughter is now texting people. I have it on good authority that she exchanged several texts the other day with a 44-year-old man. (Who turned out to be her godfather.) Obviously, I’m going to be getting a little more involved in this.

Today she started texting me, and if these texts are any indication, I can see the run-up into adolescence and then womanhood. Because while she may start out by saying hi, essentially she just wants things, and quickly gets around to asking for them. This is not unknown to me from my dating days.

One text read, “Yeah kid castle”. I had offered to take her and her little brother — he of the hair — to the indoor gaming center Kids Castle, and this was her epigrammatic way of agreeing. But by now I was onto her and texted back, “Okay. Are you paying?” Her reply: “What um no”. And that’s where I’d like to spend a moment.

“What um no” at first sounds like bad Indian dialogue from an early John Wayne movie, or perhaps the name of a sinister Asian in a 1930’s pulp thriller. But it strikes a further chord with me. Look how simple but expressive the phrasing is! “What um no” conveys tone and timing in a way that would thrill Harold Pinter, but goes even further by eliding the punctuation and calling up comparison to Cormac McCarthy. And in the subtle wordplay, where “What um no” may be purposely conjuring up our forebears’ unfortunate racial misconceptions, this text brings to mind the wordplay of later James Joyce, but with the added bonus of being intelligible.

When Samuel Beckett finally boiled his writing down to two-or-three-word phrases with lots of space in the margins, critics decided he was at a dead end — and then Beckett proved them right by dying. Looking at “Yeah kid castle” and, especially, its sequel “What um no,” I’m left to wonder sadly how much more work Beckett might’ve produced if only he’d had a cellphone.

My 6-year-old son has an unfortunate cowlick that leaves his hair looking like Eddie Munster’s. You know:

My kid has other fine qualities, but today I couldn’t take any more of looking at that downward dagger of hair, so I took him to Supercuts, where I pointed out the problematic fibers to what I naturally assumed was a hair-cutting professional. She promised she could help, but then asked the question I always find impossible to understand: “What number should I use?” As in, which numbered attachment should she slip onto the electric trimmer. To which I always reply: “I don’t know. You’re the hair-cutting professional.” If I knew how to do this, I wouldn’t need her, and could save $13 and having to make some elaborate bargain with my 6-year-old to get his hair cut. (Today it involved my buying extra darts for his Nerf gun.) She told me she would do her best to make it look nice and I sat down to play poker on my iPhone, looking up intermittently to see that the kid was, indeed, shedding hair but not blood.

Several minutes later, the woman called me over to consult. She fingered the offending hair pattern, lifting it to display whorls on each side that result in the defiant inverted pyramid. There is no way to eliminate it, she told me, without shaving that section of his forehead. Imagining how badly this could go for me back at home, where my bedridden wife wasn’t cheery to begin with, I demurred. The Supercuts woman finished off the rest of the haircut, I gave the kid a glance over, paid, collected his two siblings, and off we were to buy spongy darts to be shot at me.

It was at Toys ‘r’ Us that I really took a look at the haircut. I thought I was hallucinating. The entire head of hair was cut across in uneven straight lines of varying depths. I couldn’t decide if my son’s hair looked more like a display of carpet samples, or a textbook example of crop rotation.

I told the kids not to say anything to my wife. “Let’s see if she notices,” I said. Later at home when I heard her shriek from the bedroom, I called in response, “I’m taking him back tomorrow!”

But here’s where I learned two things — and this ultimately is the point of this story.

First, my wife’s insight: “You can’t just drop in to Supercuts. You have to know who’s working that day.” If this is true, then either my wife or I or Supercuts has a real misunderstanding about their business. Because when my wife is saying that, for example, Julie is good at cutting hair at Supercuts but Magda isn’t, she’s saying that Supercuts has specialists. But I believe Supercuts to be in a commodities business, one where there are only so many different shapes of heads, and only a few basic models of haircuts, and everything can be standardized into the equivalent of the black rotary telephone. Hence the customary demand for the customer to name the numbered attachment. Hence the ability to render a haircut in only the time it takes most of us to go to the refrigerator. If Supercuts is not the tonsorial equivalent of Jiffy Lube, and it is also clearly not the chic gay salon I pass on the way to the theatre, then it is somewhere in the middle — and I don’t think that’s where they want to be. And yet I cannot deny that just last week I myself got a haircut at this same Supercuts, performed by Julie, and it has worked out just fine. So based upon the evidence, it does help to get the right person, and one shouldn’t just drop in and let the sausage-maker wield the scissors. Lesson learned.

Second, my own insight: This episode provided me with another reminder that just because one person says something can’t be done, that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t do it. (And, relatedly, we should never confuse elevated status with actual expertise. Case in point: Any number of world leaders throughout history.) Just because Magda, as I’ve named her, couldn’t fashionably level the pyramid, that doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t have.

The haircut is a disaster of 7.0 on the Richter scale, and while taking my son to get it provided a mild diversion, taking him back for correction (or full head-shaving) is an infuriating time suck. But it may have been worth that, plus the purchase price, to be reminded that respect for expertise must be earned.

I think most of us know what “no taste” means: a preference for paneling in the rec room and Kenny Rogers on the stereo.

“Poor taste” is somehow more licentious than “bad taste,” and often implies something sexual that is misaimed. It shows poor taste to make double entendres to middle-schoolers.

“Bad taste” is summed up by Rush Limbaugh’s song “Obama the Magic Negro.”

I’m not sure what to call a candidate for Republic National Committee chair having sent that record out as campaign collateral for himself. It’s surely a combination of all above, and more: poor taste, no taste, bad taste, and sheer stupidity.

Most people know the John Lennon song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” What’s less well-known is that in 1974 George Harrison put out his own Christmas song, “Ding Dong Ding Dong.” This isn’t quite it.

That’s what we hope for President-elect Obama and for the rest of us. The sooner the better.

There was a time that being a pop-culture fan was frowned upon. I remember when as a senior in Stephen Dunn’s fiction class I wandered into class early and found a largish student reading a magazine. “What are you reading?” I asked, because it looked familiar. None-too-pleased but caught in the headlights, he lifted it up for me to see, and it was indeed the Comics Journal. “Oh, I write for that,” I said. I watched the strain of being seen in flagrante delicto drain away and a friendship was born. In the 1970’s and 80’s, being a comic-book or fantasy or science-fiction or horror fan meant exchanging secret signals like the early Christians.

All this has drained away as the pop cult has grown from clandestine conclaves into the megachurches of Comic Con and the global multiplex. And being of this generation that did that, Barack Obama is revealed, unsurprisingly, as a “Star Trek” fan. This will delight my friend Larry Nemecek to no end, and rightly so: Like Obama’s election, “Star Trek” has always represented hope. Jesus had it almost right: It’s the geek who shall inherit the earth.

Now it’s the elitists I feel sorry for. This results partly from my usual siding with an underdog, and largely from my deep gratitude to great artists with small fan bases. Increasingly, we live in a post-text age. (As I often tell corporate writing clients when reviewing their existing efforts, “This is too texty. Nobody’s reading Great Russian Novels any more.”) As Wallace Shawn noted in “The Designated Mourner,” soon no one will grieve for the loss of John Donne.

As liberating as it is to publicly carry around a “graphic novel” (really just an overpriced and beautifully printed comic book, one that won’t decay into brittle but beautifully aromatic pulp), I continue to hope for a dialectical synthesis, one where a discussion of Tony Stark’s roiling inner conflict can glide effortlessly into references to “Hamlet” and onto Jung, and necessarily back to Joseph Campbell on Darth Vader, an unformed man hiding in an encasement of his own making. Mr. Obama holds hope for us in that arena as well, because while “Star Trek” inspired him, it’s a lifetime of heady reading that’s driving his policy efforts. So maybe that’s it:  High culture rules the head, while pop culture holds our heart.

Nothing much to say.

Yet.

(Pause.)