THE BELL CURVE -- joseph n. bell

I took the coward’s way out and used some accrued vacation time to avoid

adding to the litany of holiday rhetoric in which we have been inundated

for the past several weeks.

I don’t know how you feel about this, but I had reached the point where

if I saw one more list of the best, worst or whatever over the last

thousand years, I was ready to turn to TV news, which is a real act of

desperation. Even a parody of the year-end lists was more than I could

contemplate attempting.

As Jules Pfieffer said in his cartoon in the Los Angeles Times last week:

“For Christmas, editorial cartoonists and columnists are expected to

produce goody-two-shoes, touchy-feely, squishy puff balls. So how can I

work in my established mode of scathing, scabrous political and social

satire?”

Now, thank God, it’s all over, and the greatest satisfaction I’m drawing

from the new millennium is that I’ll never again in my lifetime be

subjected to those confounded lists.

The second greatest satisfaction is the knowledge that all those

neurotics who laid in a lifetime supply of canned goods, bottled water,

flashlights and portable toilets are now stuck with them.

A Kmart manager was quoted in the Pilot as saying that “paranoia is very

good business.” That is certainly prophetic and could be funny except

that a lot of the “good business” was done in guns and ammunition, in

which we were already overstocked. I hope -- but don’t really expect --

that they can be laid away with the bottled water until the next

millennium.

If nothing else, the millennium orgy has redefined overkill. I just wish

that we might learn from our history instead of using it to fill

advertising supplements every hundred years.

Having said that, I’d like to offer up a squishy puff ball. Several

months ago, the dear friends with whom we spent Christmas last year in

France called to ask a favor. A young man close to them was teaching

English to the natives of Tahiti and wanted to visit California during

his Christmas vacation. Would we join with several other friends to put

him up during his visit?

We would, of course -- especially since my stepson, Erik, would be

involved with other family until after Christmas, and his bedroom was

empty. So Fabrice Roux arrived on Dec. 20 and stayed with us for a week.

Because our neighborhood Christmas party took place on the evening he

arrived, he was plunged immediately into an orgy of food, drink, talk and

carol-singing around a piano. He handled it all with the same aplomb he

demonstrated throughout the week in our strange culture.

He poured sand into sacks for the luminaries that lit up our neighborhood

on Christmas Eve, struggled through South Coast Plaza during a heavy

shopping day, attended a UCI basketball game, ate his first bagel and

cream cheese, bundled up for a splendid boat parade party, and consumed

with apparent relish an entire box of breakfast cereal.

But best of all, he regaled us with tales of Tahiti that have never made

it into the travel folders that feed our perceptions of an island

paradise.

There are, for example, the dogs. Tahitians, he explained, rise and go to

bed with the sun. It is a mark of status to have a very large dog

guarding their property, but at sunset, the dogs are turned loose to

terrorize the countryside.

So whenever Fabrice’s work made it necessary for him to ride his

motorbike home (45 minutes outside the city) after dark, he had to evade

the dogs that attacked him.

Then there are the mosquitoes, so profuse and omnipresent that the only

way Fabrice has found to deal with them is to not scratch the bites

which, he assured us, go away in about 15 minutes. And the coral, which

lurks beneath the magnificent ocean surface and slices up unsuspecting

swimmers.

There was much more -- but after learning to deal with these unexpected

problems, he is now making friends and learning to enjoy the natural

beauty of Tahiti, along with its people and culture.

All of this made me realize -- OK, so it’s a stretch -- that we’re going

to be getting a lot of fancy brochures during this political year

describing the paradise various candidates envision for us if we elect

them. And we need to find out what coral and mosquitoes lurk under that

glossy surface before we buy a ticket.

After Fabrice moved on, our kid came home, a little miffed that we had

reconfigured his bedroom -- which he regarded as a sign of rejection --

against his imminent entrance into the real world next June.

He brought with him a splendid play he had just written and a massive

cold which he passed on to his mother. But that didn’t stop us from

laughing a lot, as we always do when he’s here.

So the world didn’t implode at 12:01 on Jan. 1. And while Steve Smith was

presumably hosing down his patio or beating his rugs, I had my beer and

popcorn and watched the Rose Bowl game.

And all was right -- at least briefly -- with my world in which no more

millenniums would be celebrated, lists of the best and the worst would

dissipate in the gauze in which they came wrapped, and we could get back

to the business of living.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a Santa Ana Heights resident. His column runs

Thursdays.