Listen to Sugar, Sugar on my Songs page.

Songwriting

• Words and Music: Jeff Barry and Andy Kim.

Performance

• Vocals: Scott Woodman, Ttïmm Roy, Dale Emery, and John Gagne.
• Guitar: Dale.
• Keyboard: John.
• Bass: Ttïmm.
• Drums: Scott.

The Story. One day in 1982 or so, John Gagne came to Ttïmm’s house (where I was also living) for a visit. Ttïmm popped a tape of our latest recording, ”King of Time,” into the stereo. John burst out laughing every time he heard “If you want to be the king, then you’ll have to bash me right out of time.”

That inspired John, so we retired to the music room to play some tunes. Though John is a damned good guitar player, he was fatally attracted to this cheesy keyboard that Ttïmm or I had bought. He turned it on and started playing what I suspect is one of the only songs he knows how to play on keyboards: “Sugar, Sugar,” by the 1960s supergroup The Archies.

I grabbed my guitar and Ttïmm grabbed a bass, and we started playing along. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Scott dropped by and joined in on drums. Someone said, “Hey, we oughtta record this.”

John, realizing just a little too slowly the implications of what had just been said, turned for the door. “Gotta go!” Not so fast, fella! We bound his feet with baling wire, duct taped him to a chair in front of the cheesy keyboard, and rolled tape. John struggled to get free, but we’d used nasty kidnapper knots so that the more he struggled, the tighter the knots tightened. He found to his horror that the only way he could relax the knots was by playing “Sugar, Sugar.”

We recorded the instruments all at once. Then we added two passes of vocals, with the four of us singing together on each.

We didn’t remember all of the words, or all of the parts of the song. One key omission was the “I’m gonna make your life so sweet” part. But then again, we weren’t copycats, dammit, we were song stylists! I’m sure you will agree that we made the song our own.

I fumbled the (three-chord!) guitar part a few times, playing a G chord where the careful listener would prefer an F, but John and Ttïmm more than made up for that with their bizarrely charming, charmingly bizzare keyboard and bass noodlings. I’m especially tickled by Ttïmm’s descending bass riff right at the end of the song. Priceless!

We eventually let John go. And now, after 22 years, I’m immortalizing his magical, reluctant performance on my web site. John, you will never truly be free of that night.

Recording. Recorded circa 1982 on a TEAC four-track stereo reel-to-reel.

I woke up on July 4 and, as I often do, shuffled to my computer to read my e-mail. Then I read some blogs and wandered around the Internet. Then I shuffled to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and spit. Black. Wait, I thought, Black isn’t right. I checked my teeth. The usual color. Tongue? Black. Black isn’t right.

Plague? I haven’t been swimming in the sewers lately. I haven’t been bitten by any rats. Or any fleas (that I know of). Oh, yeah, I did dream something about The Name of the Rose last night. Great book about black tongues. Great movie, too. Hmmm.

Off to the emergency room, where I go every time parts of my body turn black. Lots of waiting in the waiting room, watching Michael repeatedly ask for a place to lay down before he passes out from the dizziness and pain of an ear infection. Or wugs. More waiting while Michael decides to sprawl on the floor. More waiting while the security guards help Michael to sit up all nice and uncomfy.

Invited through a door to a hallway, I sit on a gurney, waiting for some sort of medical professional and listening to Michael (who has also been invited through the door, where he promptly fell down) as he complains to anyone who will listen (and some who won’t, such as the hospital staff) about the shabby treatment he’s gotten so far.

Still I have a black tongue.

Nurse Rick walks up. “How’s the tongue?”

“Aaaah,” I say.

“When’s the last time you had Pepto Bismol?”

“Four a.m.”

The Mystery of the Black Tongue: solved.

Later, at home, reading the Pepto Bismol box: “Drug Facts: May cause a temporary and harmless darkening of the tongue or stool.” One end or the other, I guess. Coming or going. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed that drug fact at 4 a.m.

I hope Michael’s feeling better.

After viewing photographs of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell said, “I don’t know how the hell these people got into our army.”

While I appreciate Senator Campbell’s outrage, I worry about an assumption that I see underlying his statement, the assumption that these were bad people before they got into our army. If we attribute the abuse of Iraqi prisoners primarily to the character of “these people,” we will fail to prevent future abuses.

In 1971, Phil Zimbardo ran an experiment, now infamous, at Stanford University. He recruited 24 psychologically healthy men, divided them randomly into “guards” and “prisoners,” and placed them in a simulated prison environment.

Zimbardo’s intention was to observe for 10 days, but long before the 10 days were up, the experiment went horribly wrong. The guards began treating the prisoners in brutal ways, including “stripping them, hooding them and ultimately forcing them to simulate sodomizing one another.” Zimbardo himself got caught up in the action, not by partaking in it personally, but by seeing it only as psychologically fascinating.

On the sixth day of the experiment, Zimbardo’s girlfriend Christina Maslach visited the mock prison. She was horrified at what she saw, both in the experiment itself and in Zimbardo’s fascination. She angrily confronted him, tearfully shouting “What you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing!” Only then did Zimbardo recognize the meaning of what was happening and terminate the experiment.

The key lesson from this experiment is that social situations can induce even good people to act in horrible ways. Zimbardo advocates against attributing horrible acts entirely to the bad character of the perpetrators. He suggests that we instead take a ”situationist approach” to understanding “unthinkable” behaviors:

The situationist approach should, in my view, encourage us all to share a profound sense of personal humility when trying to understand “unthinkable,” “unimaginable,” “senseless” acts of evil. Instead of immediately embracing the moral high ground that distances us good folks from those bad ones, and gives short shrift to analyses of causal factors in that situation, the situational approach gives all others the benefit of “attributional charity” in knowing that any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do — given the same situational forces. If so, it becomes imperative to constrain our immediate moral outrage that seeks vengeance against wrong doers; instead to uncover the causal factors that could have led them in that aberrant direction.

(There is much more information about this experiment and its lessons on the Stanford Prison Experiment web page, especially the related links page, which includes many articles about how the experiment parallels what happened in Iraq.)

The American MPs did horrible things. My intention in describing the situationist approach is not to excuse that. My hope is that we can prevent future abuses like the ones committed by the American MPs. The situationist approach suggests that attributing the abuses primarily to the character of the MPs will not prevent this from happening again.

If we are to prevent future abuses, we must remain keenly aware of the kinds of social forces that can induce good people to commit abusive acts. We must train prison personnel to be aware of those social forces, to watch for them, and to introduce compensating forces into the social situation to counteract the ones that nudge people toward these horrible acts.

I suspect that Senator Campbell was reacting in the heat of the moment, out of disgust and outrage at the photographs and videos he’d seen moments before. I understand his outrage. I feel it, too. I hope that even in our outrage we can find the presence of mind to heed the deeper lessons.

A song I’m writing about Brita the dog.

She likes to eat her dinner
She eats til it’s all in her
She used to be much thinner
She’s Brita the Brita the dog

She likes to drink her water
She drinks it like she oughter
‘Cause she’s some bitch’s daughter
She’s Brita the Brita the dog

(Bridge)
She likes to eat the feline feces
The tasty poop of another species

(Chorus)
She’s the dog
With the face
Of a dog-faced dog

About a year ago I was watching a DVD of a Steve Earle concert. He introduced one song by explaining his objection to the death penalty: “I object to the government killing people because I object to me killing people, and the government is acting in my name.”

As the presidential campaign goes into full sling, I find myself thinking about Earle’s statement — not just with respect to the death penalty, but as a general principle: In my name. What if I were to accept that the President of the United States acts in my name? And what if I were to accept personal responsibility for that?

The “in my name” principle lends clarity, meaning, and significance as I decide who to vote for: What would this person do in my name? How well would those actions reflect my values?

I discovered blogs about two years ago. The few that I visited seemed to be teenagers’ diaries. I didn’t see the appeal, and forgot about the concept for a while.

Then last March I noticed that my friends Laurent, Johanna, and Esther were writing blogs, and that they weren’t writing teenage drivel. Esther writes about management and process improvement. Johanna writes about management and hiring. Laurent writes about all kinds of topics that I can categorize only as “Laurentia.” Suddenly I had a whole new idea of what blogs could do, and I caught the bug.

I decided to test the waters by starting with a personal blog, Twelfth Root of Two, which consists mostly of middle aged drivel. I wrote my first entry, a brain-cramping piece about how a common question becomes a strange question when it’s offered as a strange question in strange circumstances. And I was off (read that however you like).

Several days later I created Conversations with Dale , my business blog in which I write short articles about how we can create joy, value, and meaning in our work.

Blogging has been a great way for me to ease into the writing habit, to clarify my ideas as I struggle to make them presentable, and to present myself more fully to the world.

The word hippopotamus is derived from the Greek words hippos (horse) and potamos (river). River horse. Hippopotamus.

Here’s a new noun I just made up: hippobottomus. From the Greek hippos (horse) and the common English bottom (buttocks). Hippobottomus. Horse’s ass.

I also made up the verb hippopotamize, but I don’t yet know what it means. To transform something into a hippopotamus? To dunk a horse in the river? To turn a river into a horse, the way Liv Tyler did in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring?

And the winner of the 2004 Dale H. Emery Humility Award is…

Dale H. Emery, of course.

The Dale H. Emery Humility Award is awarded only by me, because I’m the only person qualified to assess people’s humility. And it’s named after me in order to give it the prestige its receipients deserve. So far, I am the only person who has received the award — I am, in fact, the only person ever to be nominated — because I’m so much more humble than everyone else.

On February 19, 1999 I was carjacked. Here’s how I described the story several days later in an e-mail letter to my friends and family.

Hi folks,

Something very scary happened to me Friday night.

Some of you may know that I recently took a job at Sun Microsystems. (No, that’s not the scary part.) I just moved to the San Francisco bay area.

At 5:00 or so Friday evening, I arrived in Sunnyvale CA from Portland OR with a car load of stuff. I stopped at the temporary apartment that Sun rented for me (my permanent apartment was not yet available), and took a bunch of stuff up to the apartment. Then I went to Cupertino to eat.

When I got back, about 9:00, I parked, got out of my car, opened the trunk, and grabbed a small crate of stuff to carry into the apartment. A guy approached me and said, “Are you in apartment 612?” I said no.

Then he pulled a gun out of his jacket, and said, “Get in the car.” I got in the car. (At this point, I think I’ll save you some suspense and tell you that I was not harmed in this incident.)

He told me to get into the passenger seat, which I did. Then he got into the driver’s seat and asked for the keys, which I gave him. He had a partner, who got in the back seat. I felt the gun touch the back of my head, and the guy in back said, “Don’t make a sound.” (I had noticed the two guys as I drove into the parking lot, but because this was a big apartment complex, I didn’t make anything of it.)

We drove out of the apartment parking lot. The driver asked if I had any money. I said I did. He told me to give him my wallet, which I did. (You may be seeing a pattern here!) He flipped through it, and gave it to the guy in the back seat. The back seat guy asked if I had an ATM card. I said, “Yes, it’s the one with my picture on it.” He asked for my PIN number, which I told him.

The driver said something about putting me in the trunk. He and the other guy spoke some language I don’t know for a while (after talking later with the police, we think it was Vietnamese). Then the driver said, “No, let’s not. He might not be able to breathe back there.” I didn’t dispute him.

The driver said (several times during the incident), “We don’t want to hurt you. We just want the money.” He asked if I had anything that might be easy to sell. I gave him my cell phone. He didn’t want my watch.

The driver asked my PIN number again. They both asked for it a couple of times. I wasn’t sure whether they were trying to memorize it, or maybe checking to see if I was giving them the same number each time. I decided to be extra helpful. I said, “I think I can help you remember it. It’s 7476. It’s July 4, ‘76, the date the US Declaration of Independence was signed.” I was just about finished saying this when the absurdity of my “helping” hit me. How likely were these guys to know that date? I don’t know whether I laughed out loud.

The guy in the back kept saying stuff like, “Don’t make a sound,” and, “Don’t move.” At least once he followed up with, “or I’ll blow your head off.” In between each of these commands, he would say, “Relax.” If that isn’t surreal enough, about the third time he told me to relax, I decided I might as well, and I did. I certainly couldn’t think of anything better to do.

We were driving all over Sunnyvale (a city with the 7th lowest crime rate in the country). I remembered most of the street names from when I’d visited a week earlier to find an apartment, but I have no idea what route we took. The driver kept making turns and U-turns. Once he said he wanted to find an ATM.

Several times, we pulled behind small apartment buildings or offices into dimly lit parking lots. Now THAT was truly frightening. I didn’t know what intentions they had in a parking lot, but I figured it couldn’t be good. There were certainly no ATMs there.

About the third time we pulled into a parking lot, we stopped. The driver got out of the car and went to the back, where (by the sounds) he tried to open the trunk. The ignition key didn’t open the trunk, so he came back to the driver’s door and asked how to open it. I said there was a button on the dash. He looked and looked but couldn’t find it. He kept asking where it was, and I kept trying to explain, but he still couldn’t find it. I told him I could point to it if I could lean over. He said okay. The guy in back said, “Very slowly.” I pointed out the button, the driver pushed it, and I heard the trunk release.

The driver went to the back of the car. He came around to my door and either opened it or asked me to open it. He said, “Get out.” Then he said, “No, don’t get out.” He said to get out and not to get out a few more times.

I’m not sure what changed his mind about putting me in the trunk (because I couldn’t breathe? because the trunk was mostly full?), but he finally said, “We have to find a place to let you out.” That was one hell of a relief.

The driver got back into my car, and we drove off again. We pulled over to the side of the road a few times, then started off again. Finally we got onto 101 (a major bay area highway) and headed south. After a few miles, we pulled to the side of the highway, just after an overpass in San Jose. The driver said, “Get out… No, don’t get out.” We played that game for few more rounds, then he said, “Get out… very slowly.” So I did… and they drove away.

The whole thing lasted about 20 minutes.

I scrambled down the embankment, across a street, and into a Hyatt hotel where I called the police.

The four or more San Jose police kept telling me, “This kind of thing never happens in Sunnyvale.” A Sunnyvale officer came (that’s where the thing started, so the Sunnyvale police would take over), and he said the same thing. He drove me back to Sunnyvale. On the way, he said he’d like to take me to the apartment before we went to the station.

When we got to the apartment, he stopped and got out of the car. That was more terrifying to me than the 20 minutes when I had a gun pressed into the back of my head. I was thinking, “These guys know what I look like, and I’m sitting alone in this car.” A few cars drove by slowly, and I ducked behind the dash each time.

A few other cruisers arrived, and I got out of the car. The crate of stuff I had taken out of the trunk was still sitting by my parking space. I pointed to my apartment and said, “I left those lights on, but I think I locked the door.” Two officers went to take a look. When they got back, one of the officers said, “Yeah, you locked the door, but it looks like they tried to kick it in.” I started to shake, and he said, “Just kidding!” Gahhhh! What a dink!

The next few days were pretty interesting, but not so dramatic. My friend Mark Brunelle came down from San Francisco, and we went to the apartment to retrieve my stuff. Thinking about going back there was absolutely terrifying… the most terrifying part of the whole thing. It doesn’t seem all that logical that the bad guys would be there, but I didnt’ care all that much about being logical. We called the Sunnyvale PD, and they sent an officer to stand by with us. We were in and out in just a few minutes. It was a big relief to be out of there, and a tremendous relief to me to have the officer with us.

The bad guys used my ATM card a few minutes after they dropped me off, a block or two from where they had picked me up. The bank says they got a good picture of the guy at the ATM, and they’ve mailed it to the Sunnyvale PD. No sign of my car yet. The detective tells me this is a capital crime – armed robbery, kidnapping, a few other things mixed in.

I’m mostly feeling okay. (Maybe too okay? I dunno.) I’ve found out that I’m very jumpy about sudden noises. And I get an adrenaline rush sometimes when I’m stopped in traffic and there are cars all around me – a kind of “trapped” feeling. I have a hunch I’ll freak out the first time a dark green Diamante (like my car) pulls up beside me. And who knows how I’ll react the next time I pull into a parking lot and see two guys standing there.

I’m fortunate to have some good friends in the area, and Sun has gone WAY beyond the call of duty to help. And I’m fortunate to have all of you who care about me.

I will call some of you eventually. For now, I’m trying to conserve my limited supply of cash until my replacement credit cards and ATM card arrive (just another few days, I think).

So… how was your day?

Love,
Dale

Here’s another fun tune from Ttïmm and me, called “Brainwave Surfin’.” I’ve posted an mp3 version on my Songs page for your listening pleasure.

Songwriting

• Words and Music: Ttïmm Roy and Dale Emery.

Performance

• Vocals: Dale Emery (generally the higher parts) and Ttïmm Roy (generally the lower parts).
• Guitar, Keyboards, Bass: Dale.
• Drums: Ttïmm.

The Story. Ttïmm had been talking for years about writing a song called “Brainwave Surfin’.” One afternoon we decided to write it, and it came out very quickly once we got started. It took about a half hour to write, and we spent the rest of the day recording.

I don’t know what Ttïmm knew about surfing at the time (or even now, come to think of it), and everything I knew came from Beach Boys songs. At one point in the song we needed to refer to some popular surfing site. In “Surfin’ USA” the Beach Boys mention Doheny Way, and we made up a rhyme for that. If you listen carefully (and of course you’re listening carefully!) you can hear that I mispronounce it “Toheny”.

Adam Sherman’s Strat-o-caster was lying around — Private Lightning had broken up, and Scott Woodman and Adam Sherman were considering starting a new band, and were rehearsing on weekends in Ttïmm’s house — so we used that rather than my Ibanez Musician.

Ttïmm played like a madman on drums. He’d recently bought an old reverb unit. It had a very funky sound and had one of those green eye tubes that old radios and tape recorders used to have. We ran the drums through that, and liked the “empty high school gymnasium” sound.

We did our best to emulate the Beach Boys, but… well… they’re the Beach Boys and we’re us.

Instruments

• Guitar: Adam Sherman’s Fender Strat-o-caster.

• Bass: Ttïmm’s Fender Squire.

• Keyboards: Probably Ttïmm’s Casio.

• Drums: Scott’s Slingerlands.

Recording. Recorded in 1982 on a TEAC four-track stereo reel-to-reel.