More self-promotion

I was profiled in the November-December issue of the Carolina Alumni Review, which is published by the University of North Carolina Alumni Association. The story is by CAR writer Susan Simone. You can read the story by clicking on the picture above.

Barry Bonds: An enigma wrapped in an ego

Every time I see Barry Bonds on TV I’m amazed – not by what he’s done during his Major League baseball career, but by the remarkable personality and gigantic ego that are on display.

Bonds is one of the oddest – and saddest – professional sports celebrities of our era. He’s a man who has reached the top of his profession and attained great fame and wealth in the process. But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying his successes.

During the 2007 baseball season, he surpassed Hank Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs and ended the season with 762, making him the most prolific slugger in the game’s history. His accomplishment should have been the crowning achievement of his life and a cause for baseball fans to celebrate his career.

Instead, that record that Bonds devoted himself to achieving with such single-minded focus might be wiped off the books. On November 15, Bonds was charged with five counts of lying to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. The charges resulted from Bonds’s December 2003 testimony to a federal attorney investigating allegations of steroid use by some Major League players.

Bonds denied using steroids. But if the feds prove that he did, that could void his home run record. More about that in a moment.

The perjury charges weren’t exactly greeted with shock and indignation by the press and fans. When fashion designer Marc Ecko, who paid more than $700,000 for the ball Bonds hit to set the record, asked fans to vote online to determine what to do with the ball, they voted to mark it with a big asterisk and give it to the Hall of Fame.

Ecko said he’d comply with the vote. That infuriated Bonds, who complained about the asterisk during a recent interview on MSNBC.

Bonds’s public behavior hasn’t helped his image. He has shown unrestrained contempt for anyone who questions his behavior or the legitimacy of the home run records he’s established. (He also set the single season record for home runs in 2001 when he hit 73.)

Bonds has made it clear that he sincerely believes that he is the most important person in the universe and no one has the right to interfere with his personal quest for glory and riches.

Now, I know that Barry Bonds is not unique among human beings who think they're pretty important people. Self-effacement doesn’t come easily for anyone. But I don’t think there are many people out there who take their self-aggrandizement as seriously as Bonds does.

Other accomplished athletes managed to project a likeable public persona despite the fact that they obviously were quite impressed with their own abilities. During his prime, boxer Muhammad Ali didn’t pass up any opportunities to tell the world how great he was. But Ali also made the world laugh and turned his boasting into poetry. And there were never any rumors that he’d done anything illegal to enhance his accomplishments in the ring.

Bonds, by comparison, is sullen and angry at the world when he’s in public. There’s no law that says he has to be pleasant and agreeable, but for Bonds, his surliness seems to be a matter of personal pride.

Bonds also apparently has only contempt for the federal justice system. As I mentioned earlier, he recently was charged with lying under oath and obstruction of justice by a federal attorney investigating the alleged illegal use of steroids among some Major League Baseball players.

Here’s the astonishing part: Bonds was told before his statements that he would be immune from prosecution – that is, even if he admitted taking steroids, he wouldn’t be charged with anything. All he had to do was tell the truth.

But apparently Bonds couldn’t bear to admit that his records are tainted.

So now the public may get a glimpse of this man’s inner workings when he and his giant ego have to respond to whatever evidence federal prosecutors have that he cheated.

Practical uses for a tail

If you've ever wondered why cats have tails, well, here's one reason. If you're trying to take a nap during the day, you can use your tail as a sort of sleep mask.

Or if someone with a camera catches you in an embarrassing moment, you can use your tail to disguise your identity, like they do in those old black-and-white photos where they put a black bar across people's eyes so you supposedly can't tell who they are.

These practical uses of the tail are demonstrated by Beaucat, our 14-year-old tomcat.

The dark side of Darrin and Samantha

A couple of months ago I got hooked on “Mad Men,” the highly hyped drama on American Movie Classics that meticulously recreates the Madison Avenue of 1960.

I didn’t find out about the show until it was about halfway through its first season, but I’ve gone out of my way to see all of the remaining episodes.

 

“Mad Men” centers on Don and Betty Draper (above). Don is a hotshot advertising executive at the peak of his career with the firm of Sterling Cooper. Betty is a former model who gave up her career to marry Don and raise a family.

On the surface, the darkly handsome Draper seems to have everything you were supposed to want 47 years ago. He has the high-powered and high paying job, the chic, gorgeous blonde wife, the comfortable home in suburban Westchester County, and the two adorable kids.

He’s also a man’s man who can drink his office pals under the table after work -- or during work, for that matter -- and the following day deliver an irresistible proposal for an ad campaign to land a lucrative account for the firm.

From the moment I started watching the show, however, I realized that there was something very familiar about Don Draper and “Mad Men.” It reminded me of another young TV couple on a hit show of the early 1960s. The husband – dark haired, hard working, very creative – had a gorgeous blonde wife and worked for the high-powered advertising firm of McMahon and Tate. He and his wife lived in a pricey, comfortable suburb and were raising a family. They drank quite a bit and had quirky neighbors named Gladys and Abner Kravitz.

 

That couple was Darrin and Samantha Stevens (above), the central characters of “Bewitched,” the romantic sitcom that premiered in 1964. The more I watched “Mad Men,” the more it seemed to be a show about the darker side of Darrin and Samantha.

Like Samantha, Betty Draper is blonde and beautiful, compassionate and caring, a loving wife and trusted friend. But where Samantha can solve problems with a twitch of her nose, Betty is struggling with the ugly realities of her life.
 

Samantha (above) gave up witchcraft to marry Darrin and raise a family. Her sunny disposition never deserts her. She tolerates the constant meddling of her mother Endora and the incessant snooping of Gladys Kravitz.

The biggest challenge to Samantha’s relationship with her husband is Endora’s continuing effort to break up their marriage by constantly provoking Darrin.

By comparison, Betty Draper (above) is seeing a psychiatrist because she feels overwhelmed and inadequate. Beneath her sunny blonde beauty is a simmering anger. She slaps a neighbor who provokes her, and she uses her son’s BB gun to shoot at another neighbor’s pigeons when that neighbor threatens her children’s dog.

Her neighbor Francine Hanson confesses to Betty that she wants to poison her husband because he’s having an affair.

Like Don Draper, Darrin Stevens (below left) is the creative force at his firm, McMahon and Tate. He’s as devoted to Samantha as she is to him, and he believes firmly in honesty and following the rules.



Don Draper (right), on the other hand, is having affairs with two women. And his entire life is a lie. His real name is Dick Whitman, and during the Korean War he stole the identity of Lieutenant Don Draper, who was killed in the same explosion that put Whitman in the hospital.

Samantha Stevens also is trying to hide her true identity from the world. Samantha’s secret is that she’s a witch. But she’s not hiding it because she’s ashamed. She’s hiding it because her husband has an over-developed sense of fair play and doesn’t want the advantages of his wife’s witchcraft.

I haven’t seen any acknowledgement by the creators of “Mad Men” that they had Darrin and Samantha Stevens in mind when they came up with the characters of Don and Betty Draper. But it’s hard to believe that the similarities between the Stevens and the Drapers – and the darker juxtaposed comparisons between them – are purely coincidental.