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Cheez-Its are the world's best snack food. It's been proven by science. You may have a different opinion about this, but your opinion is wrong.

Not those blasphemous alternate flavors, though, like ranch and barbecue. Please, don't insult the Cheez-Its legacy by even mentioning those in the same breath with real, original Cheez-Its. Those "improvements" are like hanging a velvet clown painting in the Taj Mahal, or sticking truck nutz onto the back of a Lamborghini. Perfection needs no enhancements, and Cheez-Its are perfection.

Like most deeply held beliefs, this conviction was bequeathed to me by my forefathers. My grampa wasa Cheez-Its fanatic. He liked nothing better on a lazy Sunday than to sit in his recliner, eat Cheez-Its, and watch golf. He always had an ENORMOUS box of Cheez-Its that seemed like it was half my size.

Since he lived next door to me, I was provided ample opportunities to invite myself over and partake of this bounty. My mom didn't really have snacks in the house (for either nutritional or economic reasons, I'm not sure), so Grampa's house was like an island of snacking anarchy. All I had to do was ask once, and I had carte blanche to dip into his Cheez-Its supply any time I wanted.

And if there was a family party at his house, which there often was, forget it. The Cheez-Its would just be out there in huge Tupperware bowls. I didn't even have to ask permission to gorge myself! It was an orgy of unnaturally orange indulgence.

I even dipped Cheez-Its in Coke once, just to see how they would taste. The verdict: slightly sweet and soggy. I could fill a book with the crimes against food I committed at these family get-togethers, once all the pretzels and chips and soda and dips were laid out. Don't judge me. It was an experimental era, a time of tumultuous change...

You know how awesome Cheez-Its are? They barely advertise. Once in a blue moon, you will see a commercial for Cheez-Its, or a page in a magazine. Why? They don't need to advertise. Why would you need to run a 30-second spot for HEAVEN ITSELF?!

That may be why the Cheez-It box has remained virtually unchanged all these years. The color scheme is the same, the font is the same, even the little Cheez-It mosaic in the background is the same. If ain't broke, don't fix it, and there's nothing broken about Cheez-Its.

One item has been altered since I was a kid, however. The back of the box used to have several delightful suggestions about how you could spice up an ordinary meal with Cheez-Its. Drop them in your tomato soup! Place them lovingly next to a sandwich, or maybe even put them in your sandwich!

But the most intriguing suggestion called for using Cheez-Its to bread chicken cutlets. They even showed a picture of a chicken cutlet, radioactive orange, with jagged peaks of ex-crackers protruding from its surface.

This seemed like a no-brainer to me. I loved chicken cutlets and I loved Cheez-Its. Deductive reasoning dictates that I would double-plus love Cheez-Its-covered chicken cutlets. Unfortunately, my mother was not keen on the idea, and lacking any cooking ability of my own, the experiment went unconsummated.

Then, last week, The Wife texted me at work to say we were having chicken cutlets for dinner. This is a common item in the Meal Rotation (mainly because we can cut them up and tell The Baby they're chicken nuggets), but for whatever reason, the mention of "cutlets" brought back Proustian memories of the back of the Cheez-Its box.

ME: OOOH! Can you make chicken cutlets with Cheez-Its, like you used to see on the back of the box?

WIFE: ....Why?

ME: Because I always wanted to try it.

WIFE: If you can find me a recipe, sure.

This inspired a wild google chase, trying to find said recipe. But the internets gave me nothing. Nothing! A lot of people apparently make fried chicken with Cheez-Its, but that's not what I was looking for. Fried chicken?! You people must be mad! Your quest is crazy and mine is not for many complicated reasons I can't get into just now!

So I emailed The Wife and told her to just forget this crazy scheme, but when I got home, she had actually done it! She'd made chicken cutlets with Cheez-Its breading, and there they sat, glowing on the kitchen countertop, finally ready to be eaten. It was a moment that, subconsciously, I'd been waiting for my entire life.

But when I took that first bite, I realized that this was a dream that was best left unfulfilled. The food wasn't bad, just weird. The Cheez-Its and the chicken did not mix. They were not united as one meal, but remained two separate food items. I tasted the Cheez-Its and the meat separately, as if they were two opposite charged magnets that could not touch one another.

And the Cheez-Its half of the equation didn't come through the cooking process too well. Some of the crust was soggy, other parts slightly charred. It reminded me of The Simpsons where Lisa attempts to make fish sticks. ("They're burnt on the outside, but still frozen on the inside, so it evens out!") Since my wife is normally an amazing cook, I knew the blame lay squarely on the ingredients. This was a union that was never meant to be.

I thanked The Wife for giving it a shot and promised I would never make her cook this again. She in turn thanked me for promising that.

The lesson here is that pursuing things you really wanted as a kid is kinda stupid and will inevitably lead to disappointment. Except for that palace of Cheez-Its I plan on building, because that will totally happen and make me happy forever and ever.

This weekend, while visiting relatives in New Jersey, I spotted something in the wild I have not seen in many a year. In a supermarket parking lot, I saw a boy about 10 or 11 years old, and he had a rattail. Not a little one either, but a HUGE rattail that extended past his shoulder blades.

I was overcome by a precocious douche-chill.

I had very few deeply held convictions as a child--at least when it came to important stuff. Most kids don't. Despite how children are portrayed in the media, very, very few of them have strong beliefs about Big Issues. You know those kids you see in TV shows who are committed to saving the environment or organize bake sales to rebuild an historical landmark? They don't exist.

However, kids do feel strongly about dumb things, like the superiority of one line of toys over a nearly identical one. Or they can be 100 percent convinced that kids from a certain town, or part of a town, or even the other side of the street, are dumber than them. As for Kid-Me, there were a few things I firmly, unequivocally believed in, and one of them was this: If you had a rattail, you were a dirtbag.

One of many reasons why I've never understood 80s nostalgia (other than the fact that it was a terrifying time to be a kid) is that the fashions were horrendous. It amazes me that, when confronted by these trends, most people didn't throw up their hands and say, Are you fucking kidding me? Shoulder pads. Pastel blazers with rolled-up sleeves. Acid-washed jeans. Any one of these items should brand a decade beyond redemption, and yet within a ten-year span, we got all of these things (and worse).

Even among this haystack of horror, the rattail stands out as the fetid pin it is. Because while those other fashion statements were simply awful, the rattail told the whole world that the wearer himself was awful. To me, even as a kid, I thought having a rattail meant you were a bad person liable to do bad things to other people. Because in order to have a rattail, you'd have to want your hair to look like that. And Jesus God Almighty, what normal person would want that?

I've held childish biases about certain things and places in my life, as I'm sure we all have. But in my journey through life, I've come across actual humans possessing characteristics I formerly mocked. I've realized that just because someone comes from Place X or looks like Thing Y, they're still human. I've relinquished the unfair prejudices of my youth.

All but one: The rattail. Because as a kid, I interacted with kids with rattails on a far-too-often basis, and they were invariably dirtbags. The kinda kids who would try to force you to do their homework under threat of violence, or dump a bag of pencil shavings on your head, or key the teacher's car. Every kid I ever met who had a rattail was a rotten kid, and I will guarantee every single one of them right now is either having lunch at a strip club buffet or doing time for some meth-related offense.

I'll say the same for the kid I saw in the parking lot in New Jersey. So help me god, he had beady eyes. He looked like he was scanning the ground for rocks, so he could chuck one through someone's back windshield. He walked like a dirtbag, with his arms bent slightly, Popeye-style, just so he could be ready to punch something at a moment's notice. He looked like the kind of kid who's a little too jazzed to dissect frogs in science class.

My question is, Is this just me? Am I just a rattail-ophobe, or is my prejudice justified?

Who can say what forces shape us? We are the often the prisoners of our times. One's future could be shaped by simply being at the right place at the right time--or the wrong place at the wrong time. Have you ever thought about what might have influenced your life if you were born during a different age? The Renaissance? The Civil War? The Great Depression? Who can say what heights you may have climbed, or to what depths you may have sunk?

Me, I haven't thought about this conundrum much, because I was born during the Age of Advertising, and thus have a miniscule attention span. I've said this many, many times here at Scratchbomb, but I have been immensely influenced by commercials. I feel like they've rattled in my brain my entire life. Anyone who says they are not influenced in any way by ads is deluded or lying.

When you're a kid, you find many things funny that you don't as an adult. Specifically, other people. Adults won't just laugh in random people's faces, but kids will. They can laugh for hours about somebody they see in the street with a weird haircut or dumb hat on. And if the same person also says something weird, in a weird voice, forget it.

I was reminded of this cruel fact of kid-hood when Joe Randazzo of the Onion tweeted a link to this commercial for Polly-O string cheese (the most needless and unasked for food innovation of all time until pancakes and sausage on a stick). This ad ran for roughly 8 billion years during my childhood, but despite its ubiquity, me and my brothers always found it funny. Always.

Why? Because of the wizened old man who says NUTHIN? The way he said this, combined with his wrinkly face--he looks like a slightly melted candle, or a shar pei--was comedy gold to us.



If you're seeing this for the first time, or were not as struck by it as I was as a kid, I don't expect you to think it's funny. I wouldn't either, if I hadn't spent my entire childhood laughing at it.

Watching this ad an adult, I am struck by a few things.

• Check out the odd posters hanging from the wall, that almost give it a Sedelmaier feel. I particularly like the one that bizarrely reads NO SCREAMING.
• The guy behind the counter who yells at the old wrinkly man calls him "Shimmy". Obviously, he was trying to say "Jimmy" and failed. But Polly-O wasn't gonna shell out for more than one take or overdubbing in post. So there it sits, "Shimmy". My brothers and I found this quite hysterical. HIS NAME IS SHIMMY! WHOSE NAME IS SHIMMY?!
  
• Is cheese really the best part of the pizza, as this ad insists? That's a matter of opinion, of course. But I think I'd rather have a whole slice of pizza than any one individual part of it. I like pizza, but I never get the craving to drink a cup of a tomato sauce on its own. In fact, cheese is probably the worst part of the pizza, nutritionally speaking.
  
• I now realize that all Polly-O string cheese really did was make it acceptable for you to chomp down on a huge chunk of fattening mozzarella at lunchtime. It's like having individually wrapped pudding cups filled with foie gras.
• At the end of the ad, the kids taste the string cheese and give it glowing praise in foreign languages. But only the first kid says something in Italian ("Bellissimo!"). The last two say French expressions. ("Magnifique!" and "C'est si bon!") C'mon, Polly-O, you're making mozzarella and you don't know the difference between Italian and French? Your handlebar-mustachioed ancestors are spinning in their graves.
  

My father was not a Sports Guy. He had almost no interest in athletic endeavors. In high school, he ran track, and he had a self-made mosaic of medals to prove it, the trophies glued to a field of black felt and hemmed in by a wooden frame. Once in a blue moon, he'd demand to watch some running event on The Wide World of Sports, as that sport still held a grip on him long after he was able to actually run, or even jog. But he could care less about the big, all-American team sports (my mom, a huge Mets fan, is solely responsible for that sickness).

But he did make an effort to get involved with his kids' sporting endeavors. He told me his father--who was a legendary soccer player back in his hometown in Ireland, or so I was told--never went to any of his track meets, and that always bugged him. He rarely expressed any resentment about his father, so it was remarkable to hear him express something close to hurt about his upbringing.

He went along with family trips to far-flung outposts of the tri-state area and beyond, as my brothers played in an endless series of soccer tournaments, outdoor and indoor. Parsippany. Binghamton. Katonah. Danbury. We even went to Montreal once. Dad was delighted by the Quebecois translations in the local McDonalds.

He was willing to pitch in, especially when it impacted our pocketbooks. We could all get discounts on joining the CYO basketball league if a parent volunteered to work Bingo Night at St. Mary's, so dad took one for the team. I don't think it was a hardship for him, because he'd come home with harrowing tales of the sad sacks he encountered there. Like most comedians, he found other people's misery almost as hilarious as his own.

At some point, he thought it might be fun to be a little league umpire. The reduced membership fee for three kids was a factor, too, but I think he honestly believed it would be enjoyable. Which was off because, as with most sports, baseball's charms eluded him, and he'd grown up with immigrant parents who had a similar lack of interest in the Great American Pastime.

He told me he actually went to a game at Ebbets Field, not long after he first came to New York from Dublin. To Little Kid Me, that was like saying you'd been to Heaven itself. I was obsessed with old-timey, sepia-tone, classic Subway Series baseball. I was fascinated by the fact that Brooklyn--Brooklyn! our Ancestral Home!--once had its very own major league team. I was a ten-year-old Ken Burns.

What was it like? I asked.

Dirty, he said. Smelly. Loud. Full of drunks. Full of puking drunks. People screaming the most horrendous things at the top of their lungs. I had no idea people would go out in public and do things like that.

That wasn't the answer I was looking for.

When my dad decided to do something, he did it. He studied the rules of the game. He went to the mandatory umpiring class. He brought home a handheld pitch counter, and often clicked through it with one hand while completing a crossword in the other, as if the balls and strikes were each another bead on a rosary.

Dad's umpiring career started out fine. At first, he only had to man the amorphous middle infield position. Every now and then, he had to call a close slide at second base. Otherwise, it was as easy as summer work out in the sun could get.

The little league wouldn't let parents umpire their own games, because, duh. So he would often be umpiring some other game, and mine would finish, and I'd have to wander over his field and wait for his shift to end before we could go home. It was very strange to sit in the bleachers and listen to him declare OUT and SAFE with extreme authority, in stark contrast to the backseat he took in most family affairs.

He certainly sounded like an umpire. He was an excellent mimic, and he knew having the right voice is half the battle. Sounding authoritative is 75 percent of being so.

Things began to change when he started umpiring behind home plate. Because that's when he had to call balls and strikes, and as anyone who's been to a baseball game can tell you, everyone in the stands thinks they can call a strike zone better than the man in blue behind the plate.

He started to get hassled by angry parents, which he did not enjoy. He was still adjusting to sobriety. He couldn't handle simple annoyances like getting stuck in traffic or jostled in a crowd, and he certainly couldn't handle being yelled at by angry parents who disagreed with the strike zone he called for their Precious Babies.

After each game, he became less and less enthusiastic, until he began to dread his work behind the plate. What happened was inevitable, really, but it was still horrible/awesome when it happened.

It was already a bad day in the household. Though I had played catcher for the vast majority of my little league career, I got it in my head that I wanted to pitch. I still don't know why I thought I could do this. I still don't know why I wanted to do this. I really enjoyed being a catcher. It didn't matter to me that it was an unglamorous position. In fact, I liked doing a necessary but hard job no one else wanted. It made feel tougher than everybody else.

Whether it was a desire for the spotlight or the general delusion of Little Kid-Dom, I begged to take the mound, and my coach let me do it. My first start, I did okay, good enough to earn another shot. My second time out was disastrous. Several hits, several runs, and then walk after walk after walk. It was as if the ball was afraid to go near the strike zone, because it knew it would be smacked around.

The league had rules in place: each pitcher could only issue so many walks. After that point, he could run up an endless full count if the batter wasn't willing to swing. It was supposed to save the poor pitcher some shame, but all it did was emphasize how terrible I was. I could feel my team becoming silently furious behind me. The coach finally, mercifully yanked me. I stalked back to the dugout, humiliated. The rest of my baseball life would be spent on the other side of the battery.

By the time my game ended, my dad had begun umpiring another one. I sat in the bleachers, not far from a ragged looking man who decided to make his life a living hell. Every single pitch, this guy bitched about it. His voice was high-pitched and ruined, either from years of smoking or drinking or both. No matter what decision my dad made, this man hated it. I was still ambivalent in my feelings towards my father, but I still didn't want to see him slandered by this jerk. But I said nothing. I sat and seethed about my hideous pitching performance, and this loudmouth.

Finally, after a few innings, my father had had it. He pulled off his mask, dropped his chest protector to the ground, and stalked off to the fence that separated the field from the stands.

You think you can do better?! he yelled at his tormentor. The man was stunned. He hadn't expected to be directly confronted, and he had no answer. I've always had it in my head that maybe dad knew this man, that perhaps he was a member of his Other Family. It was odd that the man would stop being such a jerk just because my dad, not an intimidating man in any sense, took of his umpire's mask.

You think you can do better?! my dad repeated. The jerk looked around, as if my dad might be addressing someone else.

My father began walking up the foul line, and he kept on walking. Past third base. Past left field. All the way out into the gravel parking lot. You can't leave! screamed one of the coaches, but my dad strenuously disagreed.

I ran after him because he was my ride. We didn't say a word all the way home. My father never umpired again and, as far as I know, never willingly watched a baseball again for the rest of his life.

When I was a kid, my father had friends everywhere. No matter where we went--the mall, little league games, soccer tournaments--he was sure to run into someone he knew. They'd shake hands and trade energetic small talk I couldn't understand. These friends covered a wide range of humanity, from well-dressed professionals to tattooed biker types.

This democratic taste in companions did not gel with his personality, as I knew it. To me, he was a master of sarcasm with snobbish pretensions. He did the New York Times Sunday crossword religiously, tracing block letters with a black pen, then filling in the interiors in red like panes of stained glass. He wouldn't listen to any radio station but WQXR, the Times' classical music outpost. He owned one musical album, a doo-wop compilation. Everything else in his LP collection was comedy: George Carlin and Tom Lehrer, mostly.



He recoiled at his boys' typically kid-like table manners. He'd storm away from the kitchen table muttering "Savages!" to himself when he could take it no more. (To this day, I find the word "savages" to be extremely funny.) If he came home from work and we were watching He-Man or G.I. Joe, he'd demand we "turn that drivel off", in a silly voice that made it clear he was both joking and deadly serious. He preferred to watch PBS, which I found crushingly boring. I called every show he liked "Great Rocks of Our Time".

And yet, in public I'd see him hanging out with total slobs, people I thought he wouldn't be caught dead with. And not just talk with them, but joke and laugh like they were the best of buddies. My dad was a gifted storyteller, someone who could command a room with equal parts rhetorical skill and bullshit. But even so, it didn't seem likely that he'd be swapping stories with many of the "friends" he ran into.

His friends had two things in common: (1) they were all men; (2) I had no idea who any of them were. They weren't people he worked with, and he had no social life to speak of. If asked where he knew these people from, he'd say "around". If pressed further, he'd change the subject.

My mother found this particularly infuriating. For the life of her, she couldn't figure out the identities of these mystery people. After all, the man barely left the house, except to go to AA meetings...

I have touchstones all over New York that immediately bring back incidents in my life. All it takes is an awning or a doorway to bring memories flooding back. That's that theater I used to go to all the time. There's that bar where my friend pissed all over the window late one night. That's the corner where I pushed a huge metal cog into oncoming traffic.

Right now, I'm working near Wall Street, right in the shadow of Ground Zero. I've never worked in this neighborhood before, which is somewhat unusual in my family (between finance, insurance, and the courts, most of my relatives have worked downtown at some point or another). But I used to go down there every now and then, because my father worked here for most of his adult life (when he was working).

When I was in college, we started to meet up for lunch, and it continued as I entered the workforce myself. We didn't eat downtown too often--as I've quickly found out, the meal options down there are slim pickins. More often, we'd get lunch in the Village--my dad was a huge fan of the Waverly Diner on Sixth Avenue, for reasons that escape me.

But before my current gig, my only ventures into the Financial District area were to visit my dad, and so when I walk around those narrow, sloping streets, I feel haunted by him. Particularly since he used to work in the World Trade Center. I visited him a few times there, when he worked in an office on the 102nd floor, where you could actually feel the building yaw slightly to each side. I can't pretend to know what it's like to have lost someone on 9/11, but I think I know something like it when I look out my new office's windows and see workers below laying foundations, paving things over, removing all evidence that anyone was once there.

I called his death years before it happened, at least in broad terms. I declared to my mother that he'd already put us through too much grief to go easily. It would not be a quick heart attack or car accident. It would be something prolonged and painful and probably crippling to all our wallets. I said these things as jokes, but I was 100 percent convinced they would come true, and I was right.

My cousin recently embarked on a trip to Germany, and regaled me with pics of the streamlined opulence of a Lufthansa flight. I told him I'd always heard that Lufthansa was highly esteemed by all kinds of travelers, both business and pleasure. But I couldn't remember how I knew that, until a past employment memory came flooding back to me in one terrifying swoop.

About 10 years ago, I was laid off from the first full time job I'd held, post-college. Between that and losing a girlfriend to Jesus (another long story), it was not a happy time. I was simultaneously terrified and woefully naive about my prospects.

Eventually, I spent about 15 months without a regular job, although I wasn't idle for most of that time. In fact, I probably worked harder at that time than I ever have before or since, because I had to hustle desperately and snatch at the vaguest hint of meal money. I lost a ton of weight, due to a deadly combination of running around like a maniac and serious drinking.

I did temp jobs, mostly at ad agencies, but occasional one-day gigs at odd locales like the UN. I did a lot online writing that earned me no money but I figured would help me gain some exposure, and some that actually did pay, like penning commentaries for NPR2, a very early satellite radio version of NPR that passed into the ether. I taught at a shady test prep school in Chinatown that paid me in cash, which enabled me to buy Christmas presents that year.

In one especially fallow period, a friend of mine suggested I work for her company. This firm did market research in airports. All I had to do was wear a shirt and tie, go to the international terminal at JFK or LaGuardia, and get people to take a survey about their airline experiences and preferences. 

Simple enough, except for one inconvenient fact: It was the worst job in the world for me. I've had worse jobs--much worse--but I've never had one that was worse for me, personally.

I'm not the kind of person who can just walk up to a complete stranger and bully them into answering questions. I don't enjoy asking other people to help me. I don't even like to ask people to move out of my way; I'll find any way to go around someone before I resort to saying "excuse me". If you asked me to craft my idea of a perfect hell, it would involve me having to confront random people.

However, I was not in the position to turn down any kind of work. So I said yes, knowing full well it would be torture.

Every time I went to the airport, I had to check in with security. This was pre-9/11, so all I really had to do was say who I was and who I was working for. I also had to trade my driver's license for a security pass, which always made me feel uneasy. I was then waved into the gate area, where the real fun began.

Airports are weird places, and they become exponentially more weird the more time you spend in them. After a while, it all looks like an old timey Western back lot set, where all the shops are just facades held up by flimsy pieces of plywood. When you walk past the departure gates over and over, and all you can see are runways and swampland, you think you might be trapped in some post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland.

The food doesn't taste like real food. You don't notice or care about this if you just need to grab a bite on your way to catch a plane. But if you eat your lunch in an airport every day, you start to suspect you're being poisoned. I'm sure eating this food so often shaved years off my life. And keep in mind that the international terminal at JFK, where I spent the bulk of my time, has the best food in the whole airport by a huge margin. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had to work, say, the Delta terminal.

The air tastes strange in an airport. I have no idea why. It just does.

The strangeness of my surroundings, coupled with my complete unsuitability for the position, made for an anxious work environment. My friend came with me to do her own surveys, but I was more or less unsupervised, and so I would do anything to avoid doing my real job. Anything. I'd go to the newsstand and read entire chapters of books I had zero interest in. I'd buy The New York Times and do the crossword. I'd buy a criminally overpriced cup of coffee and drink it as slowly as humanly possible.

But I was also paid by the survey, not by the hour, and so eventually I had to get to work. Since many of the survey questions were geared toward business travel, I tried to zero in on folks who looked like business travelers. I always kept my clipboard visible, so my subjects would not feel ambushed. I would make eye contact, smile, and try to make it as obvious as possible, as soon as possible, exactly what my intentions were. If someone didn't return my gaze, I passed them over. If they did, I'd move in and make my pitch.

None of my worst fears were ever realized. I was never abused or mistreated in the slightest. People would refuse to participate, but would always do so as politely as possible. I found that many business travelers welcomed the chance to talk to another human being who wasn't a stewardess, even if our "conversation" was transparently venal.

And yet, I was always extremely nervous every time I approached someone. I felt as if my insides were shrinking away from my skin. Every fiber of my being rebelled against it, and the voice in my head kept screaming WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU SHOULDN'T BE DOING THIS!

It didn't get any easier as I went along. My fears only plateaued, and then rose again as I considered this horrifying prospect: What if I never get another job? What if I have to do this the rest of my life? This feeling was ridiculous, of course, and I knew it was ridiculous. But knowing a fear is ridiculous and being able to shake it are two very different things.

The fact that no one else shared my anxiety or panic, or ever acted discourteous to me, actually made things worse. Like I was the one guy in the thriller movie that knows THE TRUTH and is desperately trying to make everyone else realize it, to no avail.

Of course, I did eventually find a new job that was more suited to my temperament and phobias. I barely think about that time in my life anymore, for many reasons. But if I ever get a call from a survey firm, or approached in the street by someone with a clipboard, I give them a few minutes of my time. Because I always imagine that the poor bastard doing the surveying is just as terrified as I was during my airport days. It's the least I can do. I mean, it is literally the absolute least thing I can do.

It's been a brutal July thus far, on pace to be the hottest one in history. (Strangely enough, all those Brave Truth-Tellers who screamed about global warming being fake when it was sort-of cold in April are nowhere to be found.) I'm trying my best to beat the heat by thinking cold thoughts. This is a psychological technique known as Self Delusion.

While trying to find some Cold Thought Fodder, I ran across this video, and I'm so glad I did. This is an excerpt from an episode of Jean Shepherd's America about Alaska.



Jean Shepherd, radio host, author, and raconteur (who I've written about here before), had a PBS program that ran for two widely separated seasons: 1971 and 1985. The later season was decent, and is readily available on DVD via eBay and similar outlets. The earlier season, which predated the VCR, is not in general circulation, except for a few episodes that were rerun in 1985. That's is a shame, because I've seen many of these episodes and they are AMAZING.

The reason I've seen them is because I did some research for Excelsior, You Fathead!, the Jean Shepherd biography penned by Eugene Bergmann. Part of this research included a trip up to WGBH in Boston, which produced this series and a few other once-off programs starring Shep (including a bizarre show from 1961 in which Shep stood on a wharf in Boston Harbor and just riffed for a half hour, much like he did on his nightly radio show). I had the privilege of delving into their vast video archives, and came back truly stunned by what I saw.

The original series of Jean Shepherd's America is a wonderful, vibrant time capsule. It was shot on video, which was still in its infancy back then (the producer, Fred Barzyk, told me the poor cameramen were weighed down by bulky nigh-prototypes). But because it wasn't shot on film, which can age poorly, the footage appears as if it was shot yesterday. The episodes are all pretty much like the excerpt above: Simple shots of quiet, everyday occurrences, with Shepherd's inimitable narration.

There's a mind-blowing episode ("It Won't Always Be This Way...") about new planned communities and mobile homes. It ends with chilling footage of ghost town on the site of an old mining boom town, as Shep talks about how mankind always moves on, looking for bigger and better things, and how one day this whole planet may be similarly abandoned as we seek greener pastures out among the cosmos.

My description is not doing it justice. If there is a just god, he will make sure everyone gets to see this in some format, some day.

I also can't think of Shep and The Cold without thinking of the poems of Robert Service. In the winter months, Shep would devote parts of shows, and sometimes entire shows, to reading this now-obscure but once ubiquitous verse. Service's poems all depict depraved goldpanners trying to make a buck or start trouble in the frozen Yukon wasteland, who all find death in some gruesome manner or another.

My father was a huge Jean Shepherd fan, and this was one of his favorite features of the show. He loved to recite the first line of Service's poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" in a deep, Shep-like vibrato: A bunch of the boys were whoopin' it up in the Malamute Saloon...

Ironically, my father died five years ago this summer in snowy, faraway land (very long story). So I think he would take perverse pleasure in hearing this Shep rendition of another Service poem, "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill", which comes from his program on January 15, 1965.



And just for good measure, here's Shep doing another one of his favorite routines: singing loudly (and badly) along to a ragtime piano rendition of an old timey tune.

I've been ramping up my Comedy Podcast Listenership lately, and one show I've been digging a lot is Comedy and Everything Else. Hosts Jimmy Dore and Stefane Zamorano interview funny people at length (often as long as two hours) about, well, comedy and everything else. I got turned on to it thanks to a two-part episode where they grill Paul F. Tompkins and Tom Scharpling. The total running time clocked in at close to four hours, and yet it still left me wanting more. I highly recommend checking it out, unless you hate hilarity.

So like everything else I discover, I'm trying to burn myself out on it as soon as possible by listening to as many episodes in as short a time as I can. Last week, I was listening to an installment with guest Jen Kirkman, and the conversation turned to the heady subject of 9-11 conspiracy theories. It then drifted briefly into the somewhat related territory of Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories. (If you're not familiar with them, long story short: some folks believe FDR knew the attack on Pearl Harbor would happen, but allowed it to occur because it would pull America into the war as an victim rather than an aggressor and pull the country out of the Depression.)

As this was discussed, my mind traveled, as it often does, to a terrible show I used to watch as a kid. In this case, Charles in Charge. Because I have a very vivid memory of seeing an episode of this show in which Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories are discussed in a class Charles is teaching. The reason I remembered this is because it was effing Charles in Charge, which had as much business broaching such a subject as Kim Kardashian does discussing the Goldman Sachs scandal.

Why did I see this show in the first place? Because it used to be on WPIX. If any show was run or rerun on WPIX or WNEW from roughly 1987 to 1994, I watched it. It didn't matter if it was terrible. It was on. That's why I have seen the entire series run of Charles in Charge. And Benson. And Good Times. And Small Wonder. And 21 Jump Street and What's Happening and The Brady Bunch and a dozen other shows. And I haven't even mentioned any of the hideous cartoons I slavishly watched as a kid.

So I asked online friends (via Facebook) if they remembered this. No one did, with several folks implying that I may have just imagined this. NO, NO, I insisted, THIS IS A THING THAT HAPPENED AND I CAN PROVE IT.

Luckily for me, the entire run of Charles in Charge is available via Netflix Instant. So I scanned episode descriptions on Wikipedia and found one that seemed to fit the bill: "Teacher's Pest", from the show's fifth and final season.

Netflix Instant (mostly) validated my memory. I originally thought Charles was teaching a high school class, but the episode in question had him substitute teaching a college history class (because colleges totally have substitute teachers). He convinces Mr. Powell, grandfather of the kids he watches and a World War II vet, to take his class for some reason. Of course, Grampa's new preoccupation with college life makes him "neglect" the grandkids, who are supposed to be teenagers and yet resent not being able to hang out with their elderly grandfather. So they beg Charles to fix this mess (despite the fact that they're all pushing 30 years old by this point in the series).

But the bigger issue is the class's textbook, which insists (in a way no textbook would) that FDR knew all about Pearl Harbor and let it happen. Mr. Powell is bothered by this assertion, and writes his paper for the class insisting otherwise. Charles--who seems neutral on the issue--asks that he rewrite the paper to reflect the textbook; otherwise, he has to give him a failing grade. Mr. Powell refuses to do so, as it would violate his principles.

The episode ends with Charles telling his class that the guy who wrote the book "needed glasses", and that it should have stuck to facts rather than "crackpot theories". Mr. Powell returns in full naval uniform to school the students on what really happened in World War II. Then Buddy Lembeck does something stupid. And, scene.

So I was more or less right, and briefly felt vindicated. But then I realized I was more or less right about a terrible syndicated TV show in which arch-conservative/reputed arsonist Scott Baio acted out some grudge against egghead professors. I don't think I can call this a victory any more than the nerds on Deadliest Warrior can can declare real victory over anything, except getting laid.

It reminds me of an old Foghorn Leghorn cartoon, where the old maid hen can't get Foghorn to give her the time of day. So the nameless dog who hates him offers to help the hen by dressing up as a rooster vying for her affection. Driven to jealousy, Foghorn bests his imaginary rival. The cartoon ends with Foghorn and the hen getting married, after which Foghorn leaps triumphantly in the air screaming, "I won! I won!"

Then he stops, rubs his chin and wonders, "There musta been some way I coulda lost..."

When I was in fourth grade, I was in something called Olympics of the Mind, a competition for future nerds and theatre people. This organization still exists, but at some point, it was forced to change the first word in its name to "Odyssey", because the International Olympic Committee, in the spirit of brotherhood and good sportsmanship, sued them.

Each year, OM has a bunch of different "problems" you can choose from. They require you to develop a skit around a certain theme, usually historical (certain "problems" also involved some kind of engineering, like building a structure that could withstand a certain amount of weight). There's also a segment called "spontaneous", which is basically a word association game. Teams receive points for the skit, spontaneous, and "style" (a concept I have no better grasp of now than I did then).

I'm still not sure why my school participated in these shenanigans. As an adult, it strikes me as the kind of wonderful thing they do at super artsy private schools where kids discover their desks and learn ancient Greek in the third grade. I did not go to such a place of learning. Mine was a thoroughly middle of the road public school. But I was in a gifted students program that met twice a week outside my regular class, and the the school thought enough of us to draft us for an OM team (though they didn't think enough of us to allow us to meet anywhere but a large closet used to store old textbooks).

The first year I did it, the problem involved prehistoric man. I named our skit "Cro-Magnon P.I." (still my proudest creative contribution to the world). We painted a drop cloth set and put together a few props and rehearsed for months, but even though I was a ridiculously optimistic/delusional kid (I was convinced that somehow I'd be world famous by age 12), I hadn't the slightest expectation of winning anything. It never even crossed my mind.

So said mind was blown when my team actually won our "problem", and we all ran up on the stage in the auditorium of the local BOCES and jumped up and down like kids who have just won something surrounded by other kids who didn't. It meant we were going to the state OM championships in Syracuse!

It also meant I'd be going far away from home, on a bus, and staying over a few nights in a hotel, something I'd never done before in my life. My family had zero money, so we never went on vacation. I'd been to The City many times to visit family, but I'd never been outside of a 50 mile radius of my home. So Syracuse might as well have been Disneyland to me. After all, it was a college town. It was full of smart people, just like me!

The bus ride up was a combination of abject terror and delicious anarchy. My district crammed all of the kids who'd won their OM competitions into one rickety school bus. So that included kids as young as me (and younger), all the way up to high school seniors. I vividly remember one Big Kid blasting "Brass Monkey" over and over from a large, chunky, silver boom box. I remember kids shuttling from one end of the bus to the other as it scooted up the Thruway (this was in the pre-seatbelt school bus era).

I don't remember seeing a single parent or teacher intercede to prevent any of the madness (though I'm sure adults were present). I was simultaneously terrified and giddy. I was seriously worried that something terrible would result from all this freedom, but I was also swept up in the insanity. I was on a flaming Viking ship headed straight for a rocky shore, so I might as well have enjoyed it.

At this point, it's necessary to mention that we were heading to Syracuse a few short days after the Orangemen fell to Indiana in a hotly contested NCAA basketball final. So as we sped toward the town in our Crazy Yellow Fun-Bus, Syracuse was still a smoking ruin of rage and resentment. Got the scene?


And as we drove through this frat boy Beirut, we spotted one house that looked slightly better than the rest. But this was only because most of its exterior was covered by a large sheet. One of the house's occupants had hung an enormous bedsheet from a second story window. And on this sheet, they had written, in black shoe polish in 10-foot high letters:


Word spread through the bus by wildfire, and pretty soon the entire kid population of the bus ran to one side to witness this majestic obscenity. I'm surprised the whole thing didn't tip over. A huge cheer rang through the bus, with much hooting and hollering. It was easily the greatest thing any kid on the bus had ever seen. I BARELY KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS BUT I KNOW IT'S AWESOME AND I'VE NEVER EVEN SEEN IT WRITTEN DOWN BEFORE IN MY LIFE LET ALONE IN LETTERS THAT HUGE!

As for the OM state championships, I stayed at a Holiday Inn and thought it was the greatest thing ever because I swam in a pool and stayed up late watching cable TV (another luxury I was not used to). We did our skit again and I was convinced we were the best and were destined for stardom.

We finished next to last. The trip back home was not as much fun. However,I did take away something from my trip. I'm not all that into college sports in any form. I did not attend a "sports' college. But whenever I find myself forced to choose sides in a collegiate game, I say I'm a fan of Syracuse, and that banner is why.

This last Saturday, The Wife and I volunteered at WFMU for their annual pledge marathon. (You may have seen me write about it a few thousand times.) I did some phone answering and assisted her as she cooked dinner for the DJs and volunteers. It was great and fun and rewarding and I got to hang out with lots of amazing people. But earlier in the day, I saw something that made the day even more special.

We needed a few more items for dinner prep, so we drove to a nearby Shop Rite. If you live in the NYC area, you may remember that on Saturday, we were basically hit by a hurricane. I could literally feel my tiny little car getting pushed by the wind as we chugged along to the store. About a block away from the Shop Rite's entrance, as we waited at a red light, I saw a rogue shopping cart bolt from the confines of the parking lot and make a run at freedom, straight across an extremely busy, four-lane street.

Unfortunately, this shopping cart jailbreak coincided with the light turning green. As the traffic began to move again, most of the cars managed to avoid it with some judicious swerving and braking, except for one completely oblivious Mercedes SUV. There's no way the driver of this car could have missed the thing, unless they were facing backwards with their eyes closed. Still, they drove on, making no attempt at evasive action, and so hit the shopping cart head on with a big, rattly WHAM.

Not only was this awesome and hilarious, but it also brought back a fantastic memory. This blast from the past also involved cars, and shopping carts, and the best thing I've ever seen.

I was about 11 or 12 years old. My mom had to make a quick run to the Grand Union in town. So my two younger brothers, my cousin, and I piled into her car and went along for the trip, probably so we could finagle a trip to the local video store and rent a Nintendo game right after the groceries were done. I only note the headcount to prove this story can be verified by other sources. What I'm about to tell you actually happened.

As my mom went inside the Grand Union, we stayed in the car and probably listened to a Weird Al tape or something. But we were about to witness something far more mind-blowing than "Like a Surgeon" (no offense, Al). My mom's car was parked at the edge of the parking lot, facing a small hill that led down to a creek. There was no guardrail or fence or anything else to separate this hill from the parking lot.

Suddenly, we heard an engine racing off in the distance. An angry, growling engine. As the sound got closer, we saw it was attached to an avocado green American car of 70s vintage. Something low and sloped, almost El Camino like. And it was going very fast down the main drag of our small town, in an area where 30 mph speed limits were generally adhered to.

As he neared the Grand Union, he suddenly swerved toward the parking lot without slowing down much, if at all. He peeled into the lot with a horrifying screech, burning rubber and making a dangerously wide arc on his way in. Once he regained control of his vehicle, he aimed it at a parking spot a few slots to our left. The fact that this parking spot had two idle shopping carts in it did not concern him. Or, more likely, he had no time to worry about it, as he spent most of his concentration on driving like a maniac.

The two shopping carts each took a different approach to this assault. One of them was defiant and flipped up in the air, landing upside down on his hood. The other one was more submissive. It launched off of the car's grill, as if it had been drop kicked, and tumbled down the hill into the creek below.

Somehow, the driver managed to stop his car before it too careened down the ravine. With rubber mist hanging in the air and a shopping cart still clinging to the hood of his car, the driver got out. And this is the craziest part of the story: he walked over to the Grand Union as calmly as I've ever seen anyone do anything. Whatever sense of urgency compelled him to drive like a maniac and defy common sense, the self preservation instinct, and the well-being of his vehicle had completely vanished.

It was like something out of the best action movie ever made, but not even the craziest, Jason Statham-iest thriller would have a scene like this in it, because it would stretch the bounds of suspension of disbelief far beyond their limits.

The only bad thing about witnessing this? Even at age 11-or-12, I knew I would NEVER see anything better.

Yesterday, The Wife and I were debating where to seek out a certain piece of electronic equipment for the house (if you must know, we want to get one of those jacuzzi tanning beds--we work hard, we deserve it!). I jokingly said she should look for it at Consumers, which I thought would be a sure-fire laugh getter, but I was only greeted with silence. It dawned on me that there must be some people out there unfamiliar with the infuriating world of Consumers.

In case you are one of those blighted few, I'll fill you in. Consumers was a big, boxy store that inexplicably sprang up all over the northeast corridor in the 1980s, despite having one of the counterintuitive business models ever.

The idea behind Consumers: the store could save overhead by not having a big showroom for all its wares, and pass those savings along to you. The stores were extremely minimalist, with only a few items on display, and sometimes a jewelry counter.



But if they had no showroom, how did you get your stuff? I'm glad you asked! Consumers had huge catalogs full of all the items they sold. It was sort of a Sears Wish Book, except it contained more than kids stuff. VCRs, jewelry, lawnmowers, you name it.

The catalog was enormous, and enticing. I remember being very impressed by them as a kid, especially the toy/video game section. They even had a teaser for Super Mario Brother 2 several months before it was released. Of course, it was just a screenshot of Super Mario Brothers 1 blown up really big, a ruse even eight-year-old me was able to suss out. But I appreciated the effort they went through to trick me.

If you wanted something at Consumers, you filled out a slip with the item's info, then got on a Space Mountain-sized line that snaked through rows of metal corrals. Eventually, you came face to face with an actual clerk manning one of the many counter stations that lined the length of the store. You handed your slip to a clerk and waited for them to retrieve your item from the warehouse. And waited. And waited. And waited. And also waited.

And after all of this waiting, there was no guarantee the store would actually have the item in question. Consumers lacked either the ability or the willingness to implement a computerized database to track such things (even though this technology existed by the mid-80s), so the only way to determine if the store had something in stock was to actually go in the back and check.

Disappointment can happen to you at any store, of course. You go to the mall, hoping to find a certain thing, and it turns out no one has it. But there is something especially exasperating about jumping through all these bureaucratic steps, and waiting on line, and waiting for a clerk to emerge from the back, and then finding out you're screwed. Kafka himself could not have designed a more Kafka-esque shopping experience.

This was torturous when I was a kid. We didn't get toys too often, but when we did, it was often at Consumers, because it was cheap and we didn't have a Toys R Us nearby. Children have no patience to begin with, but asking them to endure this rigamarole is impossible. I would hear other kids cry and scream and throw fits as they found out the toys they wanted were out of stock, and just pray they didn't want the same thing I wanted.

This shows just how far things have advanced in the last 25 years. The modern shopping experience is all pitched toward empowering the consumer, giving them as many choices as possible and extensive previews of the product they're considering buying. Can you imagine a store that not only required such waiting, but didn't guarantee they'd have what you wanted? There'd be riots in the streets.

What's even more amazing is that Consumers was simply the most austere of the catalog stores of the 80s. There were a few others, like Service Merchandise, but these other stores also had a lot of goods on display. You could actually buy things off the rack at Service Merchandise. You could not do that at Consumers.

In a weird way, Consumers was a predecessor of sites like Amazon, which also have no physical displays, which cuts down on costs. And you can think of a catalog as a low-tech site showcasing a store's wares. The big difference, of course, is that you don't have to leave your house to window-shop at Amazon. And if what they have is out of stock, you go to another site, or shrug your shoulders, rather than leave a store completely defeated and hating life.

Continuing my pointless quest to digitize every 80s ad I possess, I present this latest collection of commercials from The Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives. The latest batch comes from a tape with material recorded right around Halloween, 1985. Why am I presenting Halloween materials when we're so close to Christmas? Because many of these ads have holiday relevance. And because I lump Halloween into that Drive To XMas Season. And because SHUT UP IT'S MY STUPID SITE OKAY?!

This first ad definitely has Christmas significance. In it, Alex Karras (aka Webster's dad) informs parents that they better rush down to their local toy store NOW if they want to get some decent Transformers for the kiddies come December 25. This ad aired very close to Halloween, meaning there were at least seven weeks left until The Big Day. Just in case you thought retailers jumping the gun was a recent phenomenon.

It also features Webster's dad lip syncing to "robots in disguise", thus putting it in my top 10 favoritest ads ever.

The first thing I think of when I think of Thanksgiving is the annual Macy's Parade, that weird marriage of huge balloons, showtunes, and Willard Scott. In the magical world of the Macy's Parade, there is nothing so bizarre that it can't be shoehorned into something else.

The greatest thing, in retrospect, is that "artists" who appear in it are only rarely well known. They've been placed into the festivities either because they're on a new NBC show, starring in a new Broadway musical, or have an agent who knows a guy who knows a guy. When viewed through the lens of time, it makes for a great review of has-beens and never-wases.

Sadly, I don't have any old parades in the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives. But we're all in luck, because the site X-Entertainment.com has a veritable cornucopia of video from many years, ranging from the mid 80s to the early 90s. Just go there, search for "thanksgiving", and you can't go wrong.

I'm partial to the 1989 entry, which is heavy on ALF content and features a truly horrifying Marvel Comics float/musical sequence, among other atrocities. The 1985/1986 page has a terrifying appearance by Phyllis Diller as an inebriated Mother Goose. Both pages have addenda with many classic ads, as do most of the other Thanksgiving reviews. Go there and get lost for hours. It's a lot better than talking to your family!

The second thing that Thanksgiving invokes in my mind is the Turkey Day Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Marathon that used to air each year on Comedy Central (back when they invested in non-racist puppet shows). MST3K used to air 'round midnight most evenings, so it was great to get a chance to watch it in the middle of a lazy holiday. Or attempt to sneak a few viewings of it while not alienating the rest of the family.

Almost as good as the endless string of episodes: The special Turkey Day bumpers produced for it, which were always hysterical. Here's a collection of some of the better ones, although I personally would have included the turkey fact given by Crow "Turkeys have enough tryptophan to knock you on your sorry turkey-eating ass."

As I explained in a recent, similar post, I love commercials. There, I said it. Oh, that felt so liberating.

This latest bout of Pointless Ad Nostalgia comes courtesy of the episode of 120 Minutes from 1991 that contained a lengthy, uncomfortable interview with The Pixies. What's different about these ads vis a vis the Steampipe Alley-era ads I just posted? Well, there's the three years difference, a small eternity in ad-time.

More importantly, since these ads aired on MTV late at night, they're pitched at a much older audience. A fashion-conscious audience that would be receptive to a commercial like this one for Cavaricci. That brand has all but disappeared, but when I was in junior high, everyone had to wear Cavaricci. If you had enough money to buy it, that is. If you were me, you wore generic jeans and whatever was on sale at Caldor's that season.

Why was Cavaricci so popular? Why is anything so popular at any give time? But if this ad is to be believed, they made you very limber and a snazzy dancer.

As I eluded to last week, when I found the bounty of Steampipe Alley tapes, I was looking for something else. That something else was an episode of MTV's 120 Minutes from 1991 that featured an episode-long appearance by The Pixies, mere months before they broke up.

When this show aired, I did not actually have cable in my house. But my grandparents, who lived next door, did. So I would monopolize their VCR in the wee hours, taping either Mystery Science Theater 3000 or 120 Minutes. Despite being an MTV product, 120 Minutes was a pretty decent window into the amorphous world of "alternative" music back then, and also the only way that I could hear about new-ish stuff in the pre-internet days, since I lived nowhere near a cool records store.

This particular episode is an odd time capsule piece, because it comes from one of those in between periods of music. The indie music scene that launched The Pixies was largely dead. The Nirvana phenomenon had yet to begin, although it was just about to (the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" aired during this episode, and had just debuted a few weeks previous). So in most cases, alternative = British. By my rough estimate, 75 percent of all the videos that air in this episode come from English bands, most of them being shoegazer types like Ride, Curve, Lush, etc.

But my main reason in presenting these clips to you is not to highlight this very brief era. I've digitized them because they're some of the most uncomfortable video you'll ever see.

For one thing, The Pixies were already well immersed in the tensions that would doom the band. But rather than exercise that misery on each other, they aim it squarely at the show's host, Dave Kendall. The poor man has to dig and scrape to get the most mundane answers out of them.

This first clip is benign enough. The band is introduced, and Frank Black talks briefly about the inspiration behind the "Here Come Your Man" video. But the fact that he's wearing a panama hat and sunglasses for this interview should have thrown up some huge red flags. As should have Joey Santiago's weird fuzzy hat.

One fringe benefit of discovering the Steampipe Alley tapes (other than being able to expose the world to the genius of Mario Cantone): they were also full of some "classic" ads from yesteryear. Anyone who reads this site with any regularity will know that I have a thing for old commercials. Because I think commercials say a lot more about their respective eras than other media do. After all, art wants to be timeless, but ads are aimed at The Now.

These ads are even more special to me. Why? Because they ran on WWOR, an independent station. So the spots are a little cheaper and a little more home grown.

I realize that many of the ads you'll see below only resonate with me because I remember them from being a kid. I'll cop to that. Because if you can't indulge yourself once in a while, you can you indulge, really?

For instance, this spot for Young People's Day Camp. This ad ran, virtually unchanged, for my entire childhood. The narration, music, and footage stayed the same for at least ten years. I imagine their PR/marketing department was run by one tyrannical, crusty, cigar-chomping veteran who refused to acknowledge that times change. "Look, the ad worked in 1979, it'll work in 1995. Why shouldn't it?!"

While searching through the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives, looking for something I hope to digitize and post to the site very soon (shh! it's a secret!), I ran across not one, not two, but three full episodes of Steampipe Alley. They're like the Dead Sea Scrolls of kids' show camp!

Once I made this discovery, I did a quick tour of the interwebs and discovered--TO MY HORROR--that there is virtually no online record of Steampipe Alley's existence. THIS ENDS HERE!

If you didn't grow up in the Tri-State Area and/or you aren't of a certain age, you may have never heard of Steampipe Alley. It aired on WWOR, channel 9. Nowadays, it's a "My" station whatever the hell that means, but back then, it was an independent station with Superstation aspirations that broadcast out of Seacaucus, NJ.

Once upon a time, every local TV channel had its own self-produced kids' show with a goofy host, contests, sketches, and cartoons. By the 1980s, almost none of them did. In fact, by that time, there were very few independent stations left at all. Channel 9 was a rare outpost for ultra-local programming (and a budget to match), wedged in between Cosby Show reruns, old movies, and other syndicated fare.

In 1988, for some anachronistic reason, WWOR decided to produce its own kids' show called Steampipe Alley. Info on the interwebs about the program's origins (or anything else about it) is spotty at best. Here's all you really need to know: it was hosted by Mario Cantone.

You may know Mr. Cantone from Sex and the City, or you may have seen him on a Comedy Central Roast or two, or you may have seen him do his standup act. But if you've seen him in any form, you know that he's high energy, to say the least. And he loves campy, old timey references that he's way too young to namecheck. He's equal parts Robin Williams, Rip Taylor, and Charles Nelson Reilly.

Did he tone it down a bit when he hosted a kids' show? I think you know the answer to that question already.

I spent a good chunk of my youth as a Jehovah's Witness. I don't talk or write about very often, because I don't get into personal stuff on the site, at least not anymore (mocking sportswriters leaves me little time for navel gazing). I honestly don't think about it too often, until I have to tell someone that I didn't "do" certain things as a kid, and explain why. Only in those moments does it occur to me, "Oh yeah, that was really weird, wasn't it?" Like I'm remembering that one year I was really into INXS.

But this time of year, it's nearly impossible to not think of my more pious youth. Because Witnesses really do believe in ghosts and demons and pure, Satanic evil in a way that few other people do outside of the Black Metal community. I wrote all about this in a Halloween post from way back in 2006, which you can peep after the jump. Original post here.

For several years in my feckless post-collegiate youth, I had the same plans every Fourth of July. Two friends of mine shared an East Village apartment with roof access. So every Independence Day, we'd go up there, grill up some grub, drink some beers, and watch the fireworks. The festivities were occasionally enhanced by a live band, or a roving hitman with a squirt gun full of vodka. It was like something out of a Smirnoff Ice commercial, but with more body fat and fewer douchebags.

The fireworks were the highlight of the evening. Partly this was because the roof gave us an awesome vantage point to view them. But mostly, it was because of a weird, dorky tradition amongst my friends. I have no idea how this started, but before long it became just as much a part of the holiday as blowing off your pinky with an M-80.

Basically the game was, as each rocket's red glare burst in the air, at the exact moment when a normal person would say 'oooh', you had to yell out an obscure American history reference. Preferably, one with negative connotations. And you had to scream it out in the same kind of voice heard in that timeless patriotic anthem "America! Fuck Yeah!"

Obscure scandals of yesteryear were the most popular choices. Nothing can make a whole bunch of dorks laugh harder than suddenly screaming out TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL! or XYZ AFFAIR!

Presidents were okay, but not the really big ones, obviously. Thomas Jefferson? No. But Franklin Pierce? Solid!

And since the Fourth of July is about America, anything American was fair game. Whether it be YELLOW NUMBER 5! or RIP TAYLOR! or CASSINGLES! These were initially frowned upon, but permitted once we'd burned through more strictly-history-oriented references like GEORGE WALLACE! and THE BULL MOOSE PARTY!

So what would you yell out during the fireworks this Fourth of July? Let's hear some suggestions, fellow patriots.

Since I spent several hours yesterday writing totally insensitive tweets about Michael Jackson's death (like this one), I thought it would be a good idea if I spent five minutes not speaking ill of the dead.

I "liked" Michael Jackson when I was a little kid. I put "liked" in quotation marks because in the early 80s, saying you liked Michael Jackson was equivalent to saying you liked food and water. It wasn't an expression of taste so much as an admission of being alive.

One Christmas, I received my first non-kiddie albums ever: Thriller, Off the Wall, and a Jackson 5 greatest hits collection. This last one contained several infuriating "medley" tracks that compressed four or five classic tunes into one ungodly super-mix, thus introducing me to the effed-up world of endless album repackaging. This might have also been the Christmas when I got both Atari and the Castle Grayskull playset, thus making it The Greatest Christmas Ever.

It's hard to comprehend now just how big Michael Jackson was back then. And there probably will never be anyone that huge again, because the media has grown so enormous and ghettoized. Michael Jackson conquered pretty much Everything in the 80s, but nowadays there's a lot more Everything to conquer, and all of it is so compartmentalized. During the height of his fame, there was one music-related channel. Now there's dozens, and the one that made him famous spread itself so thin with reality nonsense and game shows that it doesn't even feature music anymore.

When I heard Michael Jackson died, I felt a vague sadness, if for no other reason than it made me feel horribly old. But I also felt something else that I couldn't really articulate, until The Wife said it for me: "I'm kinda glad he's dead."

She didn't mean it like "good riddance!" She meant that this was possibly the best thing that could have happened to him. Because let's face it: Was anything good going to ever happen to Michael Jackson ever again?

He'd become a walking punchline long ago, so much so that Neverland Ranch Sleepover jokes became the touchstone of cheap hack comics (as Tom Scharpling and Drew Magary tweeted separately, Jay Leno just lost a huge amount of material for his new show). Once joking about you has become cliche, you really only have one choice: Go along with the gag. Poke fun at yourself. You might as well, because no one will ever take you seriously ever again. This is called The William Shatner Principle (or the Gary Coleman Corollary, if you prefer).

The problem with Michael Jackson is, he wasn't a joke because he was a bad actor or because he pissed away all his money. He was a joke because he was a suspected pedophile. What could he do? Guest-host Saturday Night Live and play Father O'Hallihan, the Boy-Touching Priest? Appear in a fake viral video for NAMBLA? Get a sitcom role as the elementary school principal with the wandering eye? That would've been horrifying.

Everyone loves a comeback story. America is the birthplace of the comeback story. We love to tear down heroes just so they can rise again and make us feel warm and fuzzy. But you don't come back from something that awful. You just don't. Even if Michael Jackson was somehow "cured". Even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he never molested any child ever, how could that stain ever go away? How could you ever feel good about him ever again?

As horrible as Michael Jackson's alleged crimes might be, the man never stood a chance. The poor guy was doomed the minute his crazy father forced his brood into show business. He had to sing insanely passionate love songs at age eight. Even the kids on Toddlers and Tiaras aren't destined to be warped the way he was.

Listen to this Jackson 5 cover of Stevie Wonder's "I Don't Know Why I Love You". It's great and creeptacular all at the same time. The kid singing this song is throwing his whole heart and soul into it--but what kind of heart and soul do you have when you're ten years old? How did he have any idea of the heartbreak and longing contained in this song when he sang it?

Of course someone who grew up like this would regress into a twisted, Peter Pan-esque perpetual childhood full of llamas and caroussels and Elephant Man bones. As nuts as he was, we're probably all lucky he didn't grab a sniper rifle, climb a bell tower, and start picking people off (while moonwalking).

The way it ended for Michael Jackson is the only good way it could have ended. He dies young. We remember that he had some great songs. We forget the bad stuff for a while. Hopefully, he's at peace now, free of whatever demons plagued him in life.

Plus, a million lousy standups have to retire their lazy, unfunny, outdated material. All in all, a win-win proposition for the human race.

Oh, and Off the Wall was the best Michael Jackson album. I will not debate this.

A tweet by mr_met alerted me to this post over at the No Mas Scorecard--which I should have alerted myself to much sooner, as I'm a big fan of No Mas, their t-shirts, and their general outlook on The Sporting World. No matter; I shall endeavor to make up for lost time.

No Mas, Paul Lukas (Uniwatch guru), and The Reverend Vince Anderson have teamed to campaign the Mets to rename their new ballpark after their old one. Or, more importantly, to name it after the man without whom the Mets wouldn't exist: Bill Shea.

I am totally on board with this movement. For one thing, it would remove the association with corporate cockfucks Citibank, which will continue to dog the team until they change the ballpark's name. For another, it acknowledges that yes, the Mets do indeed have some history they should be proud of and celebrate.

I have very few complaints about CitiField as a place to watch a ballgame--and as noted elswhere, I think a lot of the criticism of the place is nitpicky and way out of line--but the Wilpons' lack of acknowledgment of this history within it really bugs me. Supposedly, they're working on some sort of Mets Museum, but quite tellingly, they didn't make any formal announcements about it until fan outcry about the lack of Mets material in the stadium.

I get the impression that, in the absence of such an outcry, management would be totally happy with the current memorabilia-free state, which is a real shame. Go to any new ballpark, and it has some kind of feature on either the team, or the town, or both. The Nationals have been in DC all of 5 seasons and their new stadium has such a display. If they can do it, the Mets sure as hell can.

The Calling It Shea Project's platform is a little murky, but part of it involves the sale of the t-shirt pictured here. Ten percent of the proceeds go to Food Bank NYC. Your dough could go to far worse places, so if you think Shea should be celebrated for his efforts in perpetuity, express it in t-shirt form.

I just read Nathan Rabin's Year of Flops retrospective on Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall film. Reading it brought back a whole slew of memories of a movie I used to quote on a nigh-daily basis. I actually saw the movie in the theatres, making me one of several dozen people to do so. It's not a perfect flick by any means, but I think Rabin draws an apt comparison between it and far-reaching Monty Python features like The Life of Brian.

Rabin's article also reminded me that there was a period in which I watched Kids in the Hall constantly. When I was in high school, CBS showed a late night hour-long block of KITH on Fridays (two episodes stitched together with extremely weird bumpers). CBS knew their audience: late Friday nights were perfect for the comedy dorks like yours truly who were right in the KITH wheelhouse, and unlikely to be doing anything else with their weekend.

I first heard about Kids in the Hall from a high school friend, back when the show first aired in the States on HBO. I didn't have cable, so he paid me back for years of reciting Monty Python by singing the "These Are the Daves I Know" and imitating The Head Crusher Guy.

The first time I got to actually see the show was during a trip across the border. My two younger brothers were on traveling soccer teams and playing in some weekend tournament in Montreal. One of my goals for this trip was to try and see Kids in the Hall, since I'd heard so much about it (I vaguely remember reading of its hilarity in several music magazines I read) and I realized this would be my only real chance to see it, unless my mom finally caved and got cable (which she wouldn't until I was away at college; cable was the last luxury to fall in our house, left over from the days when we was Dirt Poor).

Needless to say, it was love at first sight. It was a direct descendant of Monty Python, with all its non-sequiturs, envelope-pushing, and cross dressing. They did sketches that would be virtually impossible in America (for instance, suggesting that gay people actually exist while also not making them the butt of every joke), in accents I could understand. Plus, KITH was being made right then, not 30 years earlier, so I didn't need to ask my dad to explain jokes about Edward Heath and decimalization.

When KITH wound up on CBS, I taped it religiously and watched it after school pretty much every day. I remember it being The Hotness among dork circles in the early 90s. A college friend of mine told me he even dressed up as the Head Crusher guy for Halloween one year (complete with folding chair), despite the fact that not a single candy dispenser knew who he was. I laughed, but only because it was exactly the weird/obsessive kind of thing that I would have done.

So my question is, How come nobody talks about them anymore? Granted, it's hard to talk about something that doesn't exist. But you will still hear lotsa love extended to other 90s comedy pioneers like The Simpsons, Mr. Show, or even the ultimate Dork-Fest, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (I say that as a fellow dork). But references to these shows are far more likely to elicit knowing chuckles than, say, The Chicken Lady, even among Dork Circles.

Somehow Kids in the Hall slipped under the cult radar, even for me. By all rights, I should own all of the shows, which trickled out on DVD a few years ago. And yet I don't. Shame on me!

As punishment, I shall watch this video of what might be my favorite sketch from the show. This bit is a lot funnier if you had a daddy who drank. Or is it sadder? I get those two confused a lot.

First off, kudos to those who joined Scratchbomb's official fantasy baseball league, The League of Calamitous Intent, and drafted with us this past weekend. I thank you for choosing The League of Calamitous Intent as the instrument of your demise.

Round this time of year, I always read two books: the newest edition of Baseball Prospectus, and the 1994 edition of The Official Rule Book and Draft-Day Guide for Rotisserie League Baseball.

I was not into fantasy baseball in 1994. Back then, it was still referred to as "rotisserie baseball" and it seemed to be fading as a pop culture relic of the 80s, like Family Ties and the omnipresent threat of nuclear holocaust. Even at its height, rotisserie baseball was a niche hobby amongst dedicated nerds, sort of a slightly more athletic Dungeons and Dragons. But it's virtually indistinguishable with the brand of fantasy baseball that went mainstream with the rise of the intertubes in the late 90s.

I found this book at my in-laws' house, which is weird because they're not really into baseball. But I don't look gift horses like these in the mouth. It's an awesome time capsule of the waning days of the first fantasy baseball explosion. It also has a bittersweet tone if you remember that the 1994 baseball season didn't end with a World Series, but with a strike.

This book is clearly a spiritual godfather to Baseball Prospectus.  it doesn't have any predictive stats like PECOTA, merely hunches as to what various players will do and what you should pay for them in keeper leagues. But its pithy descriptions of players will ring familiar to any BP reader.

The Guide gives praise where praise is due, of course, but its most entertaining assessment are its bitchiest.

WALT WEISS: Eureka! He played a full season without spending a minute on the DL! Alert the media!

SAMMY SOSA: Ninety percent of Sosa's production came in spectacular but brief bursts followed by long, yawning chasms of nothing. His outfield play can charitably be described as inconsistent. He is constitutionally incapable of hitting  cutoff man. And his teammates consider him a selfish, mindless player. Hey, nobody's perfect.

MARK WHITEN: He had a big season one night last September.

KEVIN McREYNOLDS: Someone wake him up and tell him his career is over.

HAROLD BAINES: Your grandmother has nimbler knees, but as long as he can stand, the man will be able to hit

PAUL O'NEILL: Watch him enough and you realize sitting him against the tough left-handers makes sense. O'Neill gives new meaning to the word intensity. When he runs into a bad streak, the look on his face causes small children in the stands to burst into tears.

FRANK TANANA: About one of every four outings, this master craftsman gives a clinic on pitching. The other three, watch out.

But some of their funniest assessments are extremely brief dismissals:

DAN PASQUA: Pass.

KEVIN MAAS: No Maas.

JOE HESHKETH: Smeshketh

And there are also some prescient reviews of up-and-coming prospects:

CHIPPER JONES: Long regarded as the best minor league prospect in baseball....The early line has him sticking with the big team this spring, playing a little backup infield, then moving over to third if Pendleton continues to show signs of slowing down. Another scenario has Jones pushing Blauser  over to second. Still another has the Chipster going straight to Cooperstown without bothering to play major league ball.

MANNY RAMIREZ: Not a bad major league debut in his hometown, was it? Kid from New York shows up in a Cleveland uniform to play in Yankee Stadium for the first time, packs the stands with friends from the old neighborhood, and proceeds to hit two home runs and a double and drive in five runs. That's the way we want to break in. At the plate, he resembles Juan Gonzalez, with his front-leg kick and solid 190-pound frame. His numbers also remind us of Gonzalez. We're pretty excited.

CARLOS DELGADO: Not just a powerful bat, but a powerful left-handed bat. The only thing holding him back is his defense, and he's learning.

JIM THOME: The old Indians never would have let this guy languish long enough to lead the International League in batting average and RBI. Come to think of it, the Indians didn't leave him down in 1992. Now AL pitchers will be suffering from (dare we say it?) Thomaine.

Okay, St. Patrick's Day, I call a truce. I've spent way too much time being angry at you for reasons I don't even fully understand. So I'm not going to write any more angry anti-St. Patty's Day screeds. In return, if you could make sure that my stoop doesn't have puke on it when I get home from work, then we're cool.

I inherited my resentment against the holiday from my father, who had wildly schizophrenic views on his homeland. He lived the first 10 years of his life in an Ireland that was extremely poor, extremely repressive, and just overall depressing. I think he blamed Ireland for the misery of his early years, and the issues of his later ones.

Mind you, he had a healthy amount of pride about being Irish. But he also couldn't stand a lot of phonus balonus that goes along with Oirish-American celebrations. He loved to cite historical instances of the Irish getting the shaft from world, but he also hated when Irish people would insist on the MOPE Syndrome (that they, and only they, were the Most Oppressed People Ever).

He loved to point out famous/accomplished Irishmen, and also loved to point out that a large number of them had leave Ireland to get any measure of success (or at least not be stoned to death). Conversely, he was a huge fan of English comedy in general, but when he was offered a job at Reuters, he scoffed, "I can't work for them--they're an English company." This statement was notable for its lack of sarcasm, as my father rarely said anything not sarcastic.

I've spent much of my life mimicking his stances on Ireland, St. Patty's Day, etc. But I now realize it's more of a burden than anything else. I've been to Ireland a few times, and it's nothing like what it was in his youth. In other words, I've been carrying around his resentments so they can live on somehow, even though they're resentments for a place that doesn't exist anymore.

So you wanna get shitfaced on St. Patrick's Day even if your last name is Lewandowski? Knock yourself out. I shan't take part, but who am I to keep you from destroying your liver?

I should be grateful that I'm part of an ethnic group that is so assimilated into American culture that it can totally revel in all of its unsavory stereotypes. When people joke about how the Irish are drunks and fight all the time, what do Irish people do? Laugh, usually. They know it's true, and they don't have to waste any time defending themselves, because they no longer have to fight true, institutionalized discrimination.

That's my wish for every ethnic group: That one day you shall be able to freely give vent to the worst aspects of your character, and everyone will think it's hilarious.

If you're in the mood for some green-tinted Haterade, peep these two posts from years past:

The Calvinball of the Emerald Isle, 03.16.07

The Quare Fellows, 03.17.06

Meanwhile, as part of my peace offering to St. Patrick's Day, I offer some tunes from Hibernophile rocker Ted Leo.

"Biomusicology", The Tyrrany of Distance

"Dirty Old Town", Tell Balgeary Balgury Is Dead EP

"A Bottle of Buckie", Living for the Living

"Fairytale of New York", live on WFMU, 2007

Hello, Americans. This is Paul Harvey. Stand by for news from the hoary nether-regions of the afterlife!

Did you know: many of the best Americans are dead Americans? It's true! George Washington, Henry Ford, Van Johnson--all dead! Sure, most of them weren't dead their whole lives. In fact, most spent the vast majority of their existences being not dead! They only turned out dead at the very end of their lives. Food for thought, isn't it?

Speaking of food, are you not as regular as used to be regular? Try Old Grandpa's Fiber Tablets. One a day and your colon will be whistlin' "Dixie" once again! And now, back to the show.

It's been pretty busy in the afterlife. I was one of several thousand new arrivals when I got here, and it seems like every minute there's another several thousand shuffling through the gates. At first, I had to fill out a lot of paperwork and so forth. I thought I'd died and gone to the DMV!

But after that, things cooled down a bit. When you have until the end of time to do things, you tend not to rush anymore. Things are nice and simple here, like in the old days.

I'm up in cloud 7.657.34-09, in between a former insurance salesman from Missoula and a former housewife from Topeka. Right across the hall, though, I have a bona fide celebrity. None other than Aldo Ray, co-star of a little film you may remember called The Green Berets. So if you're in the neighborhood and you're dead, stop in and say hi! We'd be glad to see you!

Dateline, the far side of eternity: Apparently there are more clouds over there. Big, fluffy clouds.

Dateline, a piece of eternity slightly closer, although the word 'closer' has little meaning within the context of something endless like 'eternity': More clouds.

Once, there was a little boy who dreamed of being on the radio. He loved to hear announcers on his favorite shows like Jack Armstrong and Little Orphan Annie, and he said to himself, "I want to do that when I grow up!" And so he grew up, and he worked his way onto the radio. And then one day he died.

And that little boy who grew up and died was...Scott Muni. Let that be a lesson to you!

This is Dead Paul Harvey, bidding you...good day!

A few weeks back, I relayed the sad news about the passing of Stefan Lutak, the proprietor of The Holiday Cocktail Lounge, one of my favorite joints of all time. Now another one has been taken away from us--Antoinette K Doe, proprietress of The Mother-in-Law Lounge in New Orleans.

Antoinette was the widow of Ernie K Doe, who had a big R&B hit back in the 1960s called (wait for it) "Mother-in-Law". She rescued Ernie from a decades-long alcoholic funk and helped him open the aforementioned bar on Claiborne Avenue, where Ernie entertained into the wee hours and performed with himself (via jukebox).

The Mother-in-Law Lounge was a little like the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, in that its operating hours were determined by the whims of its owners, and it seemed to exist for the enjoyment of its patrons and its proprietors, rather than to make money. But it was even more of a cottage business because The Lounge was literally Ernie's living room. And when you were there, you totally felt like you were just having some drinks in a friend's living room.

I never got to see Ernie there, sadly, but I did go a few times in the years after his death, when Antoinette carried on his legacy via The Lounge. The ceiling hung with cardboard cutouts of stars, each containing the name of a star who'd passed into the great beyond--everyone from Buddy Holly to Frank Zappa.

One time I went to The Lounge, I was completely beat from a combination of lingering jet lag and New Orleans-induced party exhaustion. I didn't want to chump out on hanging out with pals, but another drink would've totally leveled me. Antoinette--who always manned the bar--seemed to sense this without me saying a word (maybe it was the enormous bags under my eyes).

So she offered me some coffee, then refused to let me pay for it. "I got it on anyway," she said. I left a generous tip on the bar.

I hope someone keeps The Lounge open, but even if they do, it won't be the same without her.

Pour some criminally overpriced Bud Lite on the curb tonight for Shea Stadium, which officially ceased to exist earlier this morning.

I'll miss the dump, don't get me wrong. I saw my first baseball game there, and saw some incredible games there (both in the good and bad senses of the word), but I am more than ready to see games at Bernie Madoff Field.

My only fear is that the fan experience won't be enhanced at all. Because the aesthetic deficiencies of Shea were only part of the reason why it was not a great place to watch a game. You judged your game-going experience by how few things went wrong. It was a successful day if your beer wasn't 90% foam, or if you didn't watch a vendor sigh and huff because you asked them for a pretzel.

Sure, the new ballpark is supposed to have spiffy restaurants, games for the kiddies, and other neat amenities. But that won't mean much if said amenities are run by the same incompetent, apathetic morons who ran Shea's concessions.

It's not that I need extra bells and whistles to enjoy a game. I'd watch the Mets in the middle of an active volcano if that's where they played. However, I don't think it's too much to ask that, when you pay a lot of money to enter a ballpark, your customer service experience should never be described by words like "insane," "frustrating," and "ordeal."

If you want a glimpse as to how the Mets treat their fans, look no further than Jason of Faith and Fear and Flushing, and the condition of the genuine Shea seats he ordered. That's how the team treats treasured memorabilia bought by loyal fans at $869 a pop. You can extrapolate from there how they treat folks who spend a mere $15-20 dollars for a hot dog and a beer.

I love people who go on insane quests. I'm not talking quite at the Don Quixote level. More like completely pointless obsessions whose realization won't accomplish anything for the dreamer. They just wanna see if they can do it. After a while, they don't really know why they're doing it anymore. But to stop doing it would mean that all that work they've done already would be totally wasted.

Want an example? How about a man whose goal is to acquire an autographed version of every single 1983 Fleer baseball card? Omar the Scrivener's twittering alerted me to the presence of this monomaniacal blog, which I find completely fascinating.

For those who never collected baseball cards, Fleer was the line that ran a distant third in popularity behind Topps and Donruss. And as a cursory view of this site will indicate, their 1983 set was designed with an aggressive lack of imagination, even by the standards of the day. (Compare Topps' snazzier look from the same year.)

On top of all of this, the pictures on the cards don't exactly give Ansel Adams a run for his money. Like this card, where Reds pitcher Eddie Milner is caught mid-grimace. Or this one, where the Astros' Harry Spillman looks kinda President George H.W. Bush. Or this one, where Seattle's Bryan Clark flashes a nice smile but forgot to push his cap down on his head. Or this one, where Yankee John Mayberry looks like he just awoke from a pleasant nap.

So why has this man settled on Fleer 1983, of all brands/years?

Growing up, I collected baseball cards. For whatever reason, I ended up with many 1983 Fleer cards. Now I'm writing to players asking to autograph their card.

That's it. Then again, do you need any more reason than this? I think not.

As of this writing, he's gotten 458 signed cards out of a total of 674., just a little over 2/3 of the way home. Godspeed, good sir. May your quest conclude happily.

Understand: I am not mocking this man in any way. I completely understand where he's coming from, because I have done things just as complicated and pointless in my life. And am probably doing some now. And will undoubtedly continue to do them in the future.

Like when I was a kid, I wanted to get a complete set of Topps baseball cards from the year I was born. But since I didn't have enough dough to buy the set outright, I would by them individually. Or in those terrible sets that guys at card shows put together that are completely full of garbage, hoping that gullible idiots like 10-year-old-me will blow 5-10 bucks on. Which we always do, of course, because we are morons.

This is how now I have a baseball card album with 17 Oscar Gambles, 23 Kent Tukulves, and too many Jose Cardenals to count.

I don't get tunes stuck in my head. They burrow into my brain like ticks, and it takes some serious countermeasures to lodge them loose, like extreme zen-like concentration, or dynamite.

But even worse is when I get a tune stuck in my head that I associate with a particular visual memory. 99 percent of the time, that visual memory is an old TV show or commercial. It's a bizarre sensory memory, almost Proustian--in that it makes me want to lock myself in a cork-lined room and never come out again.

Since I seem to be the only idiot who remembers the bygone TV fare of yesteryear, there's usually no point in explaining the whole Madison Avenue spectacle going on in my head. All it does is make me appear more insane than usual, like I'm starring in my own private version of Gaslight. Except I'm not being tortured by a sadistic husband, but my own steel-trap memory (if steel traps only clamped down on pointless garbage).

Why, for instance, can't I simply get "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang stuck in my head? No, it has to be accompanied by an endless loop of Kool and the Gang dancing with Wendy's Chicken Nuggets.

Regardless, I want to give you a glimpse of the hell that has been my brain for the last few days. Over the holidays, I heard "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" more than once. So it got stuck in my head, right? Oh, if only t'were so simple!

* Dock Ellis, 63, of cirrhosis of the liver. Twelve-year veteran of the major leagues, with most of those seasons spent as a starting pitcher for Pittsburgh. Went 19-9 for the 1971 world champion Pirates. Went to the Yankees in the same deal that brought Willie Randolph to NY, and notched a 17-8 record for the 1976 AL pennant winners. Also pitched for the Rangers, A's, and Mets.

Oh, and he pitched a no-hitter while out of his gourd on LSD.

Or so he claimed 14 years after the fact. I tend to be suspicious of people who add sexy backstory a decade-and-half later, especially when that backstory involves narcotics. Ex-drug users don't have the most reliable memories. But Ellis' story is so good that I want it to be true.

The story goes that during a West Coast trip in 1970, Ellis thought the Pirates had an off day. So he decided to spend it relaxing in his hometown of LA. And what could be more relaxing than mimicking the effects of schizophrenia with lysergic assitance?

Unfortunately, about an hour into his trip, Ellis' female companion read the newspaper and discovered that the Pirates didn't have a day off. In fact, they were playing a doubleheader. In San Diego. Oh, and he was supposed to start game 1. Oops! I wonder what on earth could have made Ellis so forgetful?

You will warp your children. It's an inevitable byproduct of the parenting process, just like how you can't make a hot dog without two or three rat turds finding their way into the mix.

Some warping is a good thing, in the long run. A completely unwarped, innocent child would grow up to be one of those scary, infantile grown ups who's way too into Harry Potter. If you're lucky, you warp your child so that they have a healthy skepticism about The Ways of the World. If you're unlucky, they grow up to collect other people's skin. But in all likelihood, you won't know how you've warped your child for good.

I can trace my own warping--positive and negative--to a lot of things. But I know that parental TV viewing played a major part. Particularly, my dad's fondness for Monty Python. He never forced me to watch it, but it was on in the house often, back in the days when Python was a PBS staple.

I remember liking it a lot when I was way too young to know what I was watching. I had to ask my dad to translate certain Britishisms like pram and lorry and explain allusions to historic events I hadn't learned about yet. But I liked the really weird cartoons, and the fact that in any given episode you'd probably see some boobs (PBS was the best friend to a kid without cable in the 80s).

Was I destined to be a nerd anyway, and annoy the shit out of my friends by repeating sketches they'd never see? Yeah, probably. But the fact that I could recite "The Lumberjack Song" at age 7 definitely sped up the process. Was it my father's intention to bruise my fragile psyche with anagrams and cross dressing? I doubt it. Still, it happened.

New Site Update: Them YouTube clips below will totally not work. Not sure who's to blame, MLB or the Rocket. In either case, this post is provided for historical purposes only.

When I was an MFA student, one of my workshop leaders, a writer of some renown (brag), told me that villains must be understood. Our class was wondering out loud if there could ever be a Great Bush Era Novel. He said that if such a novel were ever written, it couldn't be an angry screed or political tract.

Even if you were no fan of George W. Bush (which I doubt anyone in the room was), your book couldn't succeed on blind hatred. You could not portray Bush as a mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-type, or an incurious dolt. For such a book to work, he said, you would have to find some way to sympathize with him. Anything less would both fail as fiction and trivialize an entire administration.

That doesn't mean pardoning or condoning The Evil That Men Do. But villains in black hats are boring. Gray is much better, if scarier, because it makes us realize that given the right circumstances, virtually anyone can find themselves doing unspeakable things.

I dredge this up in the wake of the Roger Clemens debacle. Anyone who reads this site should know my feelings on the Rocket. I've poked him with a stick once or twice. Several times, in fact. In my mental Hall of Infamy, he's one of a very select group of people I'd like to go away and never see again. If he became a hermit and lived out the rest of his days in a cave somewhere, I wouldn't shed a tear.

I find it very troubling that Senator Obama would heap praise on Ronald Reagan, considering how devastating his policies were for our country's neediest citizens.
Senator Clinton, that accusation is patently untrue. If you look at my remarks in their full context, you'll see that I did not praise Ronald Reagan. I merely said that I'd had a layover at Ronald Reagan Airport on my way to North Carolina.
Well, I find it disturbing that you would fly into Ronald Reagan Airport when Dulles is still a more than serviceable alternative.
The record will show that I purchased a direct flight from Detroit to Raleigh, but excessive turbulence forced the pilot to make an unscheduled stopover in Washington. I admit that I purchased a copy of Fantasy Baseball Preview at a newsstand to pass the time while we waited for the weather to clear up. I have been considering taking Joba Chamberlain as high as the third round this year, a decision that I'm sure many of my fellow Americans are wrestling with at this time.
I believe you've displayed a tacit approval for his presidency by your unwillingness to parachute out of the plane before it touched down.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I assure the American people that if I'm elected president, I will constantly refer to Ronald Reagan as history's greatest monster.

Thanks to The Interweb and roughly eight billion cable channels, even the niche-iest of shows has a chance to find its audience. This was not the case even 10 years ago, when there was very little hope for an offbeat show, unless you expand your definition of "offbeat" to include "Bill Cosby verbally torturing his children". If a show couldn't succeed in the strictly middlebrow world of network TV, it had no future.

Every now and then, a show with a cockeyed view of the world and a bold spirit would sneak onto a network lineup. Such a show would inevitably be either retooled or shuttled around the schedule until it suffered death by underexposure. These kinds of shows were, inevitably, the kinds of shows that I loved as a kid. I was attracted to complete lost causes--the television equivalent of a dog at the pound with one eye, half a tail, and the mange.

Some of the shows I've loved and lost were later lamented, rediscovered, and given a proper DVD release. Thanks in part to the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin , Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks has received the belated acclaim it deserves. There was a great series on the now-defunct Trio network, Brilliant But Cancelled, that highlighted awesome shows like EZ Streets (aka The Sopranos Before The Sopranos ).

There is one show I loved as a kid that has yet to get its day in the sun. I mean, I absolutely worshipped this show. This show should never have been made in the first place, because it had every odd stacked against it from day one. But if it had been come out more recently, I'm convinced that it could have run for 15 seasons or more.

The show was a The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley , a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for only one season (1988-89). It starred an animated version of the titular character, voiced by Martin Short. It also featured the voice talents of a few of his fellow SCTV alums Joe Flaherty, Catherine O'Hara, and Andrea Martin. And for an extra dollop of crazy on top, it also featured Jonathan Winters.

The use of popular songs in commercials has been much maligned, and rightly so. I don't mean when a relatively new tune by a relatively unknown band is used in an ad. The landscape of the music industry has changed so dramatically that I realize an up-and-coming group has to find new ways to get exposure. This would have once raised the hackles of my Punk Rock Sensibilities, but I've mellowed with age. I still wanna strangle whichever Chevy exec greenlighted the "This Is Our Country" ads, though.

What I'm really referring to is commercials that use very popular songs of the past. Songs that were huge hits, are still played constantly on the radio, but are nonetheless co-opted for ad campaigns. There's a whole generation of kids who probably think Who's Next was penned as an album-length homage to Nissan. But hey, I'm sure Pete Townshend really needed the cash.

However, at the same time that I hate Robert Plant transforming into a Cadillac spokesman, I'm not 100 percent sure this is any worse than the commercials of my youth. Back then, music was generally used in commercials in one of three ways:

1) A new, snazzy jingle about your wonderful product. Usually sung by a full-throated man or woman, or in the most hateful example, a chorus of screaming kids. *shudder*
2) An old standard that commented on the action in the commercial, however vaguely. This would almost never be the original version of the song, but performed by a Generic Commercial Crooner, invariably off screen.
3) A popular song with rewritten lyrics.

And this last example haunts me to this day. Because I watched a bajillion hours of TV as a kid, I have tattooed on my brain alternate versions of famous songs. And when I hear these particular songs, I immediately think of the ad-altered versions.

My favorite example was by Wendy's. This commercial features Kool and the Gang reworking their hit "Celebration" to laud the arrival of Crispy Chicken Nuggets. I have no idea what it was about this commercial that made such a huge subliminal impression on me. As you'll see below, there's nothing particular outstanding about it. Unless you consider a guy juggling chicken nugget boxes outstanding.

Regardless, this commercial became imprinted on my psyche. It's inexplicably famous in my household. To this day, whenever me or any of my brothers hear this song, we sing along There's a party goin on right here/Crispy Chicken Nuggets are new and here this year...

I am equal parts delighted and disappointed that I was able to find this ad on YouTube. Because in my memory, this ad was like one of those borderline racist McDonalds commercials, with lots of black folk shufflin' and jivin', double dutchin' and eatin' fast food. Which is pretty much what The Media told us all black people did in the 1980s. That, and live in beautiful Brooklyn brownstones with broods of preternaturally witty children.

This video will prove that my memory was inaccurate. In fact, you'll see it's mostly white people dancing like idiots. You will, however, see some preteen popping and locking, because it was impossible to show a black kid in a commercial in the 1980s and have him not breakdance.

I don't expect you, the reader, to see anything special in this ad. But if for some reason you do, please let me know what it is so I can finally find out why it haunts my dreams.

Around this time last year,I wrote a more compact version of this tale for MSN Sports Filter. But since that site has passed into the Interweb Graveyard, I hope you'll indulge me in recycling seasonal material.

My grandfather--my father's father--died when I was 8 years old. So my memories of him are vague and littered with the weird, stupid things that little kids think are important. It takes a lot of mental power to pull out what I actually remember of him after I sift through all the Transformers and Thundercats and Mad Magazines.

I remember that I thought my grandfather had a funny voice, which I now realize was an Irish accent lathered with tar from decades of smoking Winstons. I remember that he always smiled, a smile with his teeth half-parted, as if he was about ready to laugh, though I don't remember ever hearing him laugh. I remember that he had glasses with thick, gauzy lenses that made it hard to see even the faintest traces of his eyes. I probably couldn't have seen his eyes anyway, because he seemed about 10 feet tall to me.

I remember that his fridge was always stocked with this strange slightly carbonated red lemonade that he brought back with him from his frequent trips to Ireland. I searched in vain for it both times I was in Dublin, but I couldn't find it because I didn't quite know what I was looking for. No one else in my family remembers it, leading me to believe it was just some weird beverage my mind concocted while I was puzzling out adventures for Optimus Prime.

He was born just before Ireland gained its independence, became an adult just as the Depression hit, and fled to America on his own after World War II. So he didn't have the good fortune of living in easy times. Post-war Ireland was a pretty brutal time and place, even by the low standards that Ireland had for an acceptable economy. He left his wife and children behind and worked in New York for three years before he had enough money to send for them. He was a baggage handler at JFK's TWA terminal for almost thirty years. My mom still has his retirement gift in our basement: a wooden plaque with a barometer and thermometer mounted on it, neither of which ever worked.

New Site Update: Don't bother clicking on any of them YouTube links below, 'cuz they ain't gonna work. This post is here for historic purposes only. I'm hoping to get the non-baseball stuff reposted at some point, but there's so much stuff to do here that I would not hold my breath.

Update 02.16.07: Deadspin gave a shoutout to this post, which was quite awesome of them. Unfortunately, I think that attention attracted the decidedly unawesome attention of MLB Advanced Media, who sent me a copyright infringement notice via YouTube. I totally understand that we have to respect MLB's intellectual rights. After all, I wouldn't want to interfere with the inevitable theatrical release and DVD transfer of a spring training preview from 19-friggin-88. *sigh*

The Wife wants it on record that she said MLB would crack the whip on me. I doubted her. "Why the eff would MLB give two shits about a spring training preview from 19 years ago?" She is less naïve than I, I suppose. Mea culpa.

Long story short, I'm afraid I had to remove said video clips. I've left the rest of the post as is so you can imagine the anachronistic hilarity. Also, the old ads are still viewable, as long as no one rats on me to the Gibraltar singer with the White Afro.

* * *

I find the days following a big snowstorm to be worse than the actually event. The roads are a mess and they're filled with angry, dirty piles of plowed snow. You need a canoe to cross most intersections thanks to the enormous lakes of smashed melted snow that ebb at every street corner. And everyone in the city is really pissed off. Usually, you think a sweaty day is the kind that gets folks all hot and bothered. But climes like this can be just as bad for the collective mood. After you've been smashed against a thousand other dripping, angry commuters on the bus and/or train, you're just as ready to start a fistfight as you'd be during an August heat wave.

No matter. My thoughts are warm, because pitchers and catchers have started to report to Florida. I'm also told that there are some insane teams that train in Arizona. I can neither confirm nor deny this.

On Friday, the Mets will be in Port St. Lucie (at least the ones that pitch and catch) and we will be that much closer to Opening Day. An Opening Day when the team will have to watch the 83-win Cardinals get their World Series rings. Hopefully, that will get their blood boiling to set up an '86-like rampage through the National League. I don't ask for much from the universe, but can Jose Reyes' first hit of the year be a line drive off of Albert Pujols' knee? Or at least Scott Spiezio's chin-snatch? I thank you in advance, unseen powers.

Before I was a parent, I always wanted to call bullshit on those fretful moms and dads whose reactions to upsetting World News always boils down to "What will we tell the children?!" It seemed such a narcissistic and narrow view of the universe, that all human endeavors should be slotted into one of two categories: Good/Bad For The Stupid Fruit Of My Loins.

F'rinstance, during the Great Clinton Blowjob Scandal, supposedly the biggest problem our nation faced was how to explain the whole sordid episode to the kiddies. Of less importance, apparently, was the fact that the nation was thrown into a Constitutional crisis because our Commander-in-Chief wanted a hummer. Or that the same Guardians of Decency who wanted to punish him for said "offense" had no problem discussing the intimate details of The Presidential Schlong on TV.

But I also used to think that, as a non-parent, it wasn't really my place to tell folks with children how to feel. Maybe I would become just as prudish as Helen Lovejoy once I reproduced.

Now, I have reproduced. And I return to call bullshit on those fretful moms and dads.

Paul Schrader (director/screenwriter, mastermind behind Taxi Driver and buncha other awesome movies) grew up in an extremely strict Calvinist household, one in which any form of idleness was an expressway to damnation. He wrote about going to see a film in a theatre, sweating, panicked, absolutely convinced that this simple act would send him to hell. But he was so transfixed by the experience--obviously realizing that this was his calling--that he couldn't tear himself out of his seat.

I still get that doomed but defiant feeling whenever Halloween comes around, at once resisting its trappings and wanting to dive head first into it. Growing up, my mother was a Jehovah's Witness. As I'm sure you know, they celebrate very few holidays for various reasons. In the case of Halloween, the reason is: They think it's evil.

Ironically, I bet very few people who "celebrate" Halloween truly believe in demons and witches and whatnot. Witnesses do. This is odd, because they don't believe in Hell, and they don't have same idea of the Soul that you find in most Christian sects (it's due to their unique interpretation of the Bible, which would take way too much time to get into). But they do believe in Satan, that he has minions at his beck and call, and that he could sic his cronies on you if you took him too lightly. "Taking him too lightly" includes dressing up as a sexy nurse, somehow.

The Return of the Son of the Creature's Ghost

Wow, I knew I hadn't update this space for quite some time, but I hadn't the slightest idea it was six months' worth of neglect. Shameful, considering, you know, I pay for the real estate.

I'll be writing a lot more on this space in the future, as my other paid gig is coming to a halt. I'll probably continue to do snotty sports-related writing here, particularly when the baseball season returns, and proceed to make highly unreliable NFL picks. But there will be my usual complaints about Life and The Human Condition. And of course, there will be lots of potty mouth.

But now, because Halloween is almost upon us, I share with you a terrifying artifact from my youth (although I think the majority of childhood is terrifying, but that's a topic for a different post):

The Phantom Diner.