My heater's broke, and I'm sooo tired...

Actually, it works just fine since I installed my new programmable thermostat this morning, but I am indeed tired after doing some major housekeeping chores around the old abode…

PEACE SELLS, BUT WHO’S BUYING?
My conservative friends will be proud to hear me say this—Obama deserves a Nobel Peace Prize about as much as Louie DePalma deserved the Mr. Congeniality Award.  What peace are you referring to, noble Nobel folks?  Afghanistan is getting more and more unstable by the minute, Iraq is still a quagmire, Iran is still acting a fool, and North Korea is a perennial question mark.  Even I have to side with the Fox Noise Channel lynch mob (yes, I said lynch mob on purpose) on this one, unless Da Prez got the award for simply NOT invading a foreign land under false pretenses during his first seven months in office.

NOT PRETTY IN PINK
I know I’ll probably sound like a total douche here, but I could have done without the NFL players and coaches wearing the pink stuff last weekend in support of breast cancer awareness.  Yes, it’s a noble gesture and a good cause, but those pink cleats LaDainian Tomlinson wore the other night made him look like a ballet dancer.  The pink wristbands/armbands also clashed big-time with the kelly green of the New York Jets uni’s—pink and green are two colors that don't go together under ANY circumstances!  And as my cynical side has stated before, I fail to see how putting pink ribbons on everything is going to make breast cancer go away.

“IS THAT EXACTLY WHAT I THOUGHT I READ?”—P. TOWNSHEND
Memo to Major League Baseball:  You might want to alter your American League Division Series (ALDS) logo just a skosh.  Even on my 27” TV screen, it looks like it says “AIDS”…

While I'm at it, don't it seem a bit disingenuous that these ballgames are sponsored by competing insurance companies (i.e., Geico and Progressive)?

DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS…
Is anyone as sick as I am of the Weather Channel’s over-hyped “Wake Up With Al” promos?  Al Roker has to be the whitest black man in America and quite possibly the blandest one, too.  He adds nothing to the “Today Show”, so I can’t imagine what impact he has on TWC in the mornings.  What the hell do we need a national weatherman in the mornings for anyway?  The local stations hit us over the head with weather coverage every five minutes, and I really don’t need to know about the fog over Walla Walla, the humidity in Perth Amboy, or the microburst over Fond Du Loc.  As for Roker’s meteorological prowess, he has all the accuracy of Shaquille O‘Neal at the free-throw line, and is about as useful as a snow blower in Panama.

TV OBSERVATION #1
On the "Mary Tyler Moore Show", what exactly did Mr. Grant need with that moon phase chart on the wall behind his desk?  Lou never struck me as an Astronomy buff...

TV OBSERVATION #2:
Why on earth would anyone want to doink this Kate Gosselin person even once, let alone seven additional times?  She ain't all that hot to begin with, and her personality renders her nothing more than a human canker sore...

YOU CALL THIS “SALUTING THE TROOPS”?
Über-conservative Ted Nugent is always harping on his reverence for the military and supporting our U.S. fighting men and women overseas (not that one shouldn’t), but I was listening to some Terrible Ted on my iPod the other day, and noted a curious line in the song “Good And Ready” from 1982:  “We ain’t afraid of the National Guard—‘cause me and my boys, we can fight just as hard…”  Perhaps I’m nit-picking here, but Ted was essentially calling our National Guard troops a bunch of wusses, if I’m interpreting that verse correctly.  And if you’re so gung-ho about defending our country and all, dear Theodore, then where were you during the Vietnam war when you were about 19 or 20?  Oh, that’s right, touring with the Amboy Dukes.  I’m just sayin’…

IN GENE WE TRUST?
Knowing Gene, he probably drew that one himself.  I can understand blowing off a single and defacing it, but I couldn't bring myself to waste a perfectly good twenty…  Here’s the link to some more humorous defacery of American currency.  Meanwhile, I got the word today that Kiss is coming to Sprint Center on December 10th.  While I have been critical of the band continuing on without Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, it’s probably just as well neither of them are with the group at this point, given all the invective Simmons and Stanley keep hurling at them.  From what I’ve heard, Kiss is much tighter in concert now with Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer replacing them, therefore, I’ve decided to end my Kiss concert moratorium and attend my 16th Kiss concert, and it’s only fitting that Kiss be my first Sprint Center show.  I just can’t quit ‘em, as the saying goes, and I also have to give them credit for at least keeping their ticket prices reasonable.  Tix start at $18.50, and I'm going to assume those $18.50 seats aren't under the stage or in the parking lot...

I also picked up the new Kiss CD Sonic Boom at Walmart last night—geez, that place gives me the willies!  Thankfully, my trusty iPod acts as a force-field to ward off the cretins and lowlifes therein, but I sometimes wonder if these little contraptions have minds of their own—I kid you not, the second I reached over to grab my copy of the new Kiss release, a Kiss song kicked in on the iPod!  Anyway, I also picked up Ace Frehley’s new Anomaly CD yesterday, and reviews of both it and Sonic Boom are forthcoming as soon as I get a chance to give them a good listen…

LATEST SURE SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE...
D’oh, indeed!

I'd rather laugh with the bloggers than cry with the saints...

The bloggers are much more fun(nier)…

EIGHT IS MORE THAN ENOUGH
I’m normally not a violent person, but I’ve just about reached the end of my tether with these impudent Jon & Kate people, to the point where I’m this close to hiring a hitman to off both of them!  I’m so sick of the way these two overexposed inconsequential nobodies continue to monopolize the headlines and for what—just because they fucked like rabbits and had eight kids?  Every time I walk by the waiting room in my workplace or when I flip on “Larry King Live”, there’s one of them on the TV pissing and moaning about the other one, and whenever I click on MSNBC’s webpage to get the latest news, there are no less than three headlines about these two nandofucks.  What makes them so special anyway?  It ain’t as if they’re the only couple who has a big family in this country and to me they’re the biggest something-made-out-of-nothing this side of the Blue Man Group.  What kills me now is how Jon has suddenly gotten religion, so to speak, and says that this whole thing has had an adverse effect on their children.  No shit, Sherlock!  Do us, yourselves, and your kids all a big favor, Jon & Kate—stop exploiting your children for money and TV ratings and fucking disappear already!

HE WHO LIVETH BY THE SWORD SHALL BE STUCKETH
Kinda hard to feel sorry for David Letterman these days, ain’t it?  Most everything I’ve ever heard about his off-camera personality is pretty unsavory anyway, so none of this current sex-with-“Late Show”-staffers hoop-de-doo comes as any great shock to me.  Between this and the Sarah Palin daughter joke flap a couple months back, it would appear Dave keeps stepping on his winkie while wearing spiked golf shoes.  What’s funny is about half of his repertoire—jokes aimed at fellow sex fiends like John Edwards, Hugh Grant, Elliot Spitzer and Gov. Sanford—now rings pretty hollow.  It’ll be interesting to see if and how he compensates for it in his future monologues.

MUCH A-POOH ABOUT NOTHING
Seems there’s a minor stink brewing about a new sequel to A.A. Milne’s classic Winnie-The-Pooh series called Return To The Hundred Acre Wood written by one David Benedictus.  Some people are reacting like Piglet (“Oh, d-d-d-d-dear-dear!”) because DB apparently had the audacity to introduce a new character, an otter named Lottie, into Pooh-dom.  And this is a problem, why?  No one seemed to give a rip when Disney Channel bastardized the Pooh franchise a few years back with an animated version that replaced Christopher Robin with a girl (who dressed an awful lot like him) and her little dog, neither of whom were original Milne characters, so why the fuss about now?  As Pooh himself was often known to say, “Oh bother…”  Or as Col. Potter on “M*A*S*H” once said to Maj. Winchester, “Oh, Pooh-Pooh-Pa-Doo…”

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT…
Don’t mean to strip your gears, transitioning from childhood fantasy world to grown-up real-life nightmare theater, but I wanted to make mention of the passing of Manson family member Susan Atkins.  Yes, the infamous Sharon Tate stabber finally kicked the bucket in prison last week, dying of cancer after her recent final parole request failed.  She was too sick and bedridden anyway—what the hell was she gonna do if they let her out early, party like it’s 1969?  If the cancer didn’t kill her first, someone probably would’ve whacked her anyhow.  Every time I hear the name Susan Atkins, I think of a routine that comedian Gallagher did back in the ‘80s where he talked about some prison documentary that “followed her through her day…seems she’s studying secretarial skills now—as if somebody’s gonna GIVE HER A JOB!  ‘Hey, Susan, open the mail!’…‘You’re a male…’”  All I gotta say, Susan, is burn in hell, bitch!  Good riddance to human feces...

DON’T BAG THE BAGGIE JUST YET
Seems oddly ironic that the most reviled stadium in baseball history, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, got a stay of execution (as the Twins home venue, anyway), thanks to the flat-footed tie between the Twins and Detroit Tigers.  They’ll stage a one-game playoff tomorrow to decide who wins the division, thus the Kansas City Royals didn’t get to close out the Dome after all yesterday, as they did at the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington in 1981.  Even weirder, the old Met is now the site of the Mall of America, which now has lent its corporate moniker to the Metrodome for Vikings games—Mall of America Field at H.H.H. Metrodome, or some such crappola.  Confused yet?  You won’t be when the Twins move to Target Field on the other side of downtown Minneapolis, which is almost finished already—the field is actually playable now, in fact—and based on the photos I’ve seen so far, TF is shaping up to be a dandy little ballpark that should serve the good people of Minnesota well for years to come.  Looking forward to a road trip there next summer…

SPEAKING OF THE METRODOME...
As I type, one can tune in the Vikings-Packers game/Brett Favre Lovefest currently taking place there on "Monday Night Football" and play my newly-patented "Brett Favre Drinking Game".  Similar to my recently-retired "John Madden Drinking Game", the Favre game is so simple a Geico advertising executive could do it.  Whenever the announcers profusely praise Favre's career achievements, take one drink.  Whenever ESPN cuts away to a reaction shot from Favre's wife in her private suite, take two drinks.  Whenever the announcers talk about how Brett wants to exact revenge on the Packers, take three drinks.  If done properly, you'll be royally-ripped by halftime!  You won't even be able to drive a golf ball, let alone a motor vehicle...

“THEY DIED OLD”, VOL. VIII—COBO ARENAIn a scene in the classic film The Big Chill, as C.C.R.’s classic “Bad Moon Rising” cranks out on the jeep radio, Kevin Kline turns to Tom Berenger and says, “Listen to those guys—God damn!  You remember the night we saw ‘em at Cobo?”  I thought about that line when I heard they were closing down Detroit’s Cobo Arena, and wondered how many other Detroiters (Detroit-ites? Detroit-ians?) have uttered similar sentiments about the many concerts that were staged at that legendary venue—everyone from Ted Nugent to The Who to Grand Funk Railroad and then some.

A pretty fair amount of Rock history took place at Cobo—Ann Arbor, MI native Bob Seger’s Live Bullet was recorded there in ‘75, as was most of Kiss’ breakthrough album Alive! the same year, and Cobo was immortalized on the back cover of the album in this pre-concert photo.  Kiss returned to the scene of the crime to tape their 1984 Animalize Live Uncensored concert video at Cobo Arena, which is often mistakenly referred to as Cobo Hall, the name of the adjacent convention center building.  And since Kiss and Cobo history were forever linked, it seemed only fitting that the Hottest Band In World played two sold-out shows last week to close the joint down before its inevitable date with the wrecking ball.  The plan, according to Gene Simmons, was to play the tracks from Alive! in sequence and make a DVD out of it, but based on the reviews I’ve seen so far, evidently they mixed the Alive! stuff with songs from their new album which is due out tomorrow, and closed (naturally) with “Detroit Rock City”.  I never got to see a concert at Cobo, but I did attend an indoor soccer game there in 1991 between the Detroit Rockers and Buffalo Blizzard.  With a capacity of around 12,000, it was surprisingly intimate and, by all appearances, Cobo must’ve been an awesome concert venue with its open-ended stage set-up and seating alignment.

Named after former Detroit mayor Albert E. Cobo, the Cobo Center complex opened in 1960 on Detroit’s riverfront, and in addition to concerts and indoor soccer, the arena portion of it served as the home of the vagabond Detroit Pistons of the NBA during the ‘60s and early ‘70s in between their tenures at Olympia Stadium and the Pontiac Silverdome, and it also housed those dreaded Michigan Stags of the old World Hockey Association for one season in 1974-75.  Unfortunately, Cobo was the scene of the infamous Nancy Kerrigan clubbing incident at the hands of Tonya Harding’s Neolithic dipshit hired thugs prior to the 1994 Winter Olympics when Cobo served as a practice figure skating rink.  Let’s hope that isn’t what Cobo Arena is best remembered for after it’s demolished to make room for expansion of the convention hall.