A friend of mine and I were talking about the state of the world today. Like me, she’s the mother of a preschooler, and she has been convinced by everyone around her that her children are in constant danger from germs, child molesters, drug dealers and murderers. Her dentist warns her against the dental dangers of sippy cups and raisins. Her son’s teacher tells her about the perils of magnets. And of course, her television and internet connection provides all sorts of other terrors to keep her awake at night.

Is the world really worse off when than when we were children? Or is it just that nowadays we are inundated with bad news and warnings about how dangerous things are? Every day, I can turn on one of a dozen 24-hour news stations to hear about the latest serial killer, natural disaster or devastating war. I can walk through the grocery store checkout and see ten tabloid headlines screaming at me about the end of the world. But my personal favorite source of impending doom updates is e-mail.

At least three times a week, one of my very well-meaning e-mail correspondents forwards me an urgent safety notice: Don’t sniff perfume samples because serial rapists put chloroform in them to drug unsuspecting women. Don’t drink soda pop directly from the can because rat urine on the can will give you a deadly disease. Don’t flash your headlights at cars without their lights on because gang members use that as a signal to kill you.

The other day, I received an e-mail that listed 10 safety guidelines to remember when you’re getting in your car in a public parking lot. 10 THINGS?!? I can barely remember where I parked and which key goes to my car, let alone another 10 points of safety!

In a world far too eager to provide anxious parents with worrisome advice, I have found two means of saving my relative sanity. The first is to simply turn off the news and avoid the headlines whenever you start feeling overwhelmed.

The second, and most practical piece of advice I can give any nervous parent, is to check www.snopes.com , one of the best sites on the web! Edited by Barbara and David Mikkelson, the site delves into the origins of urban legends, myths and viral e-mails. It is thoroughly researched and well-written and helps me sleep just a little bit better.

So the next time you get one of those scary e-mail warnings or a well-meaning friend tells you that his cousin’s ex-husband’s sister’s uncle told him that using your cell phone in a hospital can kill a person on life support, take a deep breath and check out snopes.com.

First it was Tom Cruise. Now it’s Mel Gibson. Some of Hollywood’s best and brightest just can’t seem to keep their facades together these days. What’s going on out there in LA-LA-Land?

Tom Cruise fired his publicist, hired his sister, started spouting Scientology and jumping on couches, and began berating everyone from a squirtgun-toting fan to Matt Lauer. Mel Gibson got smashed, messed around with a bunch of women who weren’t his wife, drove drunk and showed his chauvinist/racist side. Suddenly, the usually forgiving folks in Hollywood are avoiding Cruise like yesterday’s fashion and calling for boycotts of Gibson’s movies. Is this the same town that forgave Roman Polanski and Robert Downey Jr.?

Now don’t get me wrong. I am absolutely not defending Cruise or Gibson (or Polanski or Downey, for that matter!) As a liberal, I find intolerance abhorrent. Cruise’s tirade against anyone who takes anti-depressants or seeks psychiatric help revealed his intolerance and arrogance. Severely depressed or mentally ill people must do whatever they can to improve their lives; Cruise is not a doctor, and he has no right to flaunt his celebrity in order to forward his own warped opinions. Gibson’s anti-Semitic and misogynistic comments to the officers who arrested him for DUI confirm the rumors that have circulated around him for some time. Like his father, Gibson has an inherent dislike for Jewish people and a lack of respect for women.

Personally, I have never been a huge fan or either actor. I probably won’t go to any more of their movies. The overall Hollywood response to their behavior, though, still surprises and baffles me.

There seems to be little consistency in Hollywood’s reactions to celebrity snafus. Let’s look at some of the highlights and see if we can identify some kind of pattern. In 1921, Fatty Arbuckle was charged with the rape and subsequent death of a young startlet; although he was eventually acquitted, he became an outcast in Hollywood, socially shunned and professionally ruined. In 1952, Elia Kazan went to Senator Andrew McCarthy’s anti-Communist committee and “outed” many of his friends; when he was given a lifetime achievement award in 1999, Hollywood was still split about whether or not to forgive him. In 1977, Roman Polanski pled guilty to sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl then promptly fled the country; Hollywood has turned him into a martyr, setting him up as the innocent victim of an unjust system. Then there’s Robert Downey, Jr. who has been in and out of rehab for a decade and has been arrested on weapons charges as well; Hollywood gives him a standing ovation every time he shows up. Yeah, I just don’t understand.

And there’s another wrinkle in this sticky situation: Paris Hilton. Okay, I just used her name as shorthand for what I like to called the “Hollywood stupids.” But just think about all the idiots out there who are doing ridiculous crap ALL THE TIME: Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Tara Reid, Colin Farrell. They are constantly getting drunk, getting high, getting divorced, getting arrested, getting naked. Constantly. And no one in Hollywood calls for boycotts of their work.

Why do some folks get away with really bad behavior all the time and Cruise and Gibson are instantly vilified for one or two unusual episodes? Is it because Hilton, Spears and company are younger? Well, Russell Crowe, who is older than these others and should know better, was quickly forgiven for his phone-throwing incident. Does Hollywood expect the best behavior only out of its truly talented? No, Robert Downey, Jr. contradicts that theory; he’s a Golden Globe winner, Academy Award nominee who’s been pardoned many times for his bad behavior. Does liberal Hollywood forgive only liberals? Well, Kazan was a renowned liberal who had once been a Communist party member himself, and he was thoroughly vilified. Does Hollywood reserve its disdain for misogynists only? I have two words for that idea - Jack Nicholson. Maybe it gets upset only with religious intolerance? Not quite: Leni Riefenstahl, a woman who produced documentaries and propaganda for Hitler, was honored at the 2004 Academy Awards.

I can’t make any sense of it. But I don’t have time to think about it much. I don’t even have time to go the movies more than three or four times a year! If I start making decisions about which shows I’m going to watch based on the morality, politics or values of the performers, I probably will just read a book instead. But then, there are those rumors about Mark Twain being an atheist…

If there are two words that could describe the United States today, they are “too much.” Too much food, too much fat, too much stuff, too much money, too much expense, too much need, too much to do, too much worry. We are an extreme nation; everything we have, everything we do is to excess. Our rich are excessively rich; and I would venture to say our poor feel their poverty more than the poor in other nations because here they see the excess all around them. And what about the people in the middle? Well, our family income qualifying us a middle-class, I’ll serve as representative of that demographic.

We certainly have too much stuff. My husband and I recently inherited an antique sideboard, so I was cleaning out our linen cabinet to make way for it. Amongst my things, I found a lovely tablecloth I didn’t even know I owned! As a PC technician at a local company, my husband gets to bring home outdated computer equipment that has been sent to the “graveyard” in his department. At one point, we had more computers in our house than we had people living in it. I made him start giving them away. Last night, my son fell asleep on our couch, and I picked him up to put him in his own bed. I had to pick my way through the minefield that is his bedroom floor, strewn with a ridiculous number of toys.

Right now, we are also dealing with too much expense. We just found out our health insurance (don’t get me started – that’ll have to be a whole ‘nother blog entry!) is no longer going to cover the Nexium my husband takes for gastroesophageal reflux. As of next month, it will cost us about $160 a month. So he’ll have to go back to the doctor (more money) and try a bunch of new medications (more money) until he can find one that works and is covered by insurance. Gas prices are killing us too. I keep hearing in the local news that the high gas prices aren’t changing the way most Hoosiers drive (“Hoosiers Stomach $3 Gas,” Indianapolis Star, 7/7/06), but they sure have affected our family. I try to get all my errands done in one trip and minimize the number of places I have to go.

And speaking of errands brings me to too much to do. We were looking at our calendar for the rest of this month. It’s alarming. We have dentist appointments, doctor appointments, family birthday dinners, a college reunion, and swim lessons. My son is starting kindergarten on the 16th, so we have to add school and an open house and a teacher conference to the mix. And my university starts the fall semester on the 23^rd, so I have syllabi and lesson plans to prepare, organizational workshops and seminars to attend. My husband and his best friend were hoping to go biking one weekend this month, but there is not a single weekend without at least one event already planned.

Which brings us to our “too much need.” We need time. Time to relax, time to think, time to plan, time to be a family. If we had enough time, maybe we could look around and identify the stuff we have too much of and give it to people who need it. (I have a box of old toys and a case of diapers that I’ve been meaning to donate to the church homeless shelter for a month now.) We need sleep! We’ve been blessed with two children who are champion sleepers, but unfortunately, my hubby and I worry too much which keeps us from sleeping enough.

We’re having a garage sale next week. It’s another event we have to prepare for and set time aside for, but it’ll help us get rid of some of the stuff we have too much of and maybe raise a little money to get us some of the stuff we require. Isn’t it funny that in a country with too much of everything, we rarely have enough of the things we need? Maybe that’s why we have too much worry.

This morning, a very nice and well-meaning friend e-mailed me a dreadful “article” masquerading as history, and I couldn’t resist ripping it to shreds. I guess I’ve just gotten tired of everyone in Indiana assuming I’m a conservative Republican and forwarding me this kind of stuff. I hope I didn’t make my friend mad - I really like him- but it is just such drivel, I couldn’t handle it. If you feel the need to see it first-hand, here’s a link:

http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2006/03/historical_revi.html

It is an essay that tries to justify the war in Iraq by comparing it to World War II with Saddam Hussein playing the part of Hitler and various other groups (”militant Muslims,” “Jihadists,” al-Qaeda” - the author doesn’t seem quite sure and uses these terms interchangeably) playing the part of the Nazis. Like most pieces of far-right propaganda, it has many serious problems. As a professional writer and a composition teacher who teaches a class focusing on research, purpose, and audience, I feel qualified to explain some of these.

First, we have problems with research; the article is full of big leaps in logic, many of which build on one another with no research to support any of them. For example, “Had Hitler… invaded England in 1940 or 1941, there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe. England would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today would be very different and much worse.” That’s quite a lot to assume in just two sentences! Especially with no support from a credible source. I suppose all these conjectures might have turned out to be true, but they are just as likely not to have.

Then there are problems with purpose. The author seems to be trying to justify the war in Iraq; however, he keeps undermining his own argument by quoting staggering statistics and frightening figures: “The US has taken more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq in 3 years. The US took more than 4,000 Killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.” So we’re supposed to feel better about the thousands of young Americans killed in Iraq because it’s less than the 4,000 we lost in 1944? At some point, the numbers get so high as to be meaningless to most readers. The casualties all terrifying.

He also seems to be trying to convince his audience that they are foolish not to support the war in Iraq. Well, as a professional writer, I can tell you that most audiences are not really keen on being told repeatedly that they have “short attention spans.” Readers have a tendency not to listen to authors who insult them.

Then there are problems with audience. I cannot really decide who this author wants to reach. If he’s trying to convince liberals, he probably shouldn’t call them names. As a matter of fact, if he wants to reach any Americans, who he says watch too much TV and have such “short attention spans,” he should probably make his essay quite a bit shorter. He says our students need to be better educated in history so their perspective will be “clear,” but then he bandies about terms such as “Inquisition” and “Reformation” without explaining their origins or ramifications. If his intended audience is poorly educated young people, he should do them the service of explaining these terms. To label the two current sides with this kind of shorthand smacks of stereotypical propaganda, which uses vague references to famous events or figures in history to rationalize a point to an audience that has insufficient background to debate the point on an informed basis. The entire thing relies on its audience’s complicity and/or ignorance to prove its point.

Finally, since I teach a course on analyzing your sources for authenticity, authority and currency, I checked this “article” out. There’s nothing on this guy Raymond S. Kraft except an entry in the California Bar Association’s site saying that his license is inactive. I checked the Yahoo Yellow Pages for Loomis, California, and he doesn’t appear to be a practicing attorney there. And as far as I can tell, this was never actually published anywhere significant. *Sigh* Why are people so willing to believe everything they see in print? And for God’s sake, why do they turn it into a viral e-mail?!

A lot of people have been complaining about movie theaters these past few years. Movie makers are upset that fewer people are going to the theater; customers are complaining that it’s too expensive and inconvenient. Critics whine that the public has no taste; the public replies that Hollywood has forgotten how to entertain us. Good points all.

Here’s an idea. Instead of talking about why we don’t go to the theater, let’s talk a little about why we do.

I’ve been to the cinema four times in 2006. That’s four times as many as in 2005 when the only film I saw was “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” This summer I’ve seen “The Da Vinci Code,” “Cars,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean II” twice. Okay, so what about these movies compelled me to spend the $10 a pop, find child care, burn my gas money, endure the lines, the crowds, and the interminable commercials and previews?

Both “Harry Potter” and “The Da Vinci Code” were film versions of good books that I had read. Plus, they were, for me, opportunities to go out and bond with my girl friends. My sister and I have a tradition of going to the midnight showings of all the HP movies. And another friend and I had both really enjoyed “Da Vinci” and wanted to see how the film compared.

“Cars” had the benefit of being from Disney/Pixar. My family has loved all of the Pixar movies. The marketing was cute and effective, and the reviews were good. Bottom line, though, my son wanted to see it and didn’t want to wait for it to come out on DVD.

Then there’s “Pirates.” I plunked down a total of $30 on this picture, so I think this one’s worth looking into. I saw the midnight showing with my sister the night it came out. I’ve been a longtime fan of Johnny Depp; my sister and I both used to work for Disney, and we love the ride which inspired the films. We were big fans of the first movie and were eagerly awaiting the sequel. It’s kinda goofy, but it’s sexy and funny and truly entertaining. I took my husband the very next day. We’ve been talking about going again with another couple we pal around with.

In the end, then, it’s more about the moviegoer than the movies. I attended these films more to be with the people I love than to see the movies themselves. The movies I chose had a personal connection to me and the people I went with: we’d read the book or ridden the ride that inspired them, enjoyed previous films from the series or the studio or the actor, worked for the company that produced them. We could have waited for the DVD as I did with “Wedding Crashers” or “40-Year-Old Virgin.” For certain movies, though, going to the theater is an event. I go to share a special experience with special people.

A few of my friends and I may go see Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights.” The previews are really funny, and we could all use a laugh. And we do live in Indy - if we don’t go see a movie about racing, who will?