The (Love) Life of Brian - Part V

The saga continues.  Again, this is pretty lengthy, and reading this is totally optional.  Please excuse my self-indulgence...

Following my break-up with Lisa #2, another dry spell ensued for me in the dating/relationship milieu, but I wasn’t totally bereft of activity with women-folk in the mid/late ‘90s.  Two new co-worker ladies came along in the intervening years after Lisa and although I didn’t have a hope in hell of dating either one of them, I became friends with both and I quickly discovered the benefit of having more female friends because I’d been told that women just love to fix up their single friends with single guys.  That never quite happened with these two particular women, but “networking” with them, so to speak, did open up some new social avenues for me and it was fun to just enjoy each other’s company without being under pressure to try to impress them.

About the time I was dating Lisa, I met a girl with the unusual first name of Sharum.  No, she’s not Middle Eastern, but a very pretty all-American piano-playing girl who worked in the Trust Dept. at the bank I was employed at back then.  She was already engaged to be married when I met her, and she was a church-goer too, so I had zero chance of romance with her, but we hit it off and did lunch together from time to time.  I’ve been friends with lots of engaged/married women who were afraid of doing lunch with another guy for fear of jealousy from their mates, but that was never a problem with Sharum, and she knew I wouldn’t be stupid enough to try anything uncouth with her.  We didn’t even really have all that much in common, but we still connected on a friendship level, and she is a real sweet person.  She got married in the fall of ’94 and from what I hear, the marriage is still intact today—15 years is a minor miracle these days!

My co-worker friend and inspiration Susan—whom I spoke of in Part II—died in a house fire with her two children in January of ’95, which pretty much set the tone for that year, which was a dreadful one for me personally.  My dad suffered some serious neurological problems and had to be hospitalized and my mom suffered a mini-stroke later in the year (thankfully, they both fully recovered eventually), my personal life was in the doldrums, and then after spending most of the year in a frustrating search for a place to live on my own for the first time, in October I found myself dealing the with Landlord from Hell at the house I briefly rented (a torrid tale I will share in a future blog post).  If it hadn’t been for the Chiefs going 13-3 that season and the Kiss reunion on MTV’s “Unplugged”, the fall of ’95 would’ve been a complete washout.  That, and a ray of sunshine came to me all the way from Iowa in the form of a cute brunette divorcee named Rose, who started working at the bank in late ’95.  We hit it off almost instantly at the company Christmas party and I don’t mind telling you, I was smitten.  Rose was bright, intelligent, well-dressed, pretty enough to take to Chinatown (using Fred Sanford’s beauty yardstick) and an all-around fun person to boot.  Even cooler, Rose was a big football fan and liked hockey too, and I later learned that she’s even into racing cars and such.

Rose and I quickly became friends and she was one of my first-ever houseguests at my new abode during my Super Bowl (Cowboys-Steelers) get-together in January of ’96 and even brought me a nice housewarming gift.  Pretty soon, we did lunch dates and attended hockey games and such on a regular basis.  While I was hopeful early on of being more than just friends with Rose, she made it clear that she was looking for marriage again and especially motherhood, and I told her, “I won’t lie to you—that disappoints me, but I still want to be friends,” and I’m proud to say we’ve remained so to this day.  Rose found what she was looking for too, and is happily married again to a really good guy and they have a young son now and are currently living half a world away in Saipan, where her husband works for the U.S. government.  Between Sharum and Rose, it’s so ironic that some of the better outings I ever had were lunch dates with these women that I had absolutely no chance of dating, not to mention that they both were quite possibly the prettiest women I’ve ever had dates of any kind with.

Beyond that, I don’t recall going out with any other women during that period, apart from a couple of ill-fated set-ups along the way.  My good friend (and boss man at the time) Phil and I had gotten to know a gal named Ruth Ann who worked in our mail room, and she liked to get out and party on the weekends (even though she had like four kids, I think) and had a friend she thought I might be interested in.  I was skeptical, but I played along and we all went out drinking at a hole-in-the-wall bar one Saturday night.  Good thing I didn’t get my hopes up, because her friend was nothing to write home about—not my type at all, and borderline white trash, for lack of a better term.  It wasn’t even a case of “Lookin’ better every beer” with this gal, who as almost as wide as she was tall.  Phil’s girlfriend at the time also had a single friend she tried to set me up with, but this woman would’ve given “Whole Lotta Rosie” a run for her money, size-wise.  I’m 5’8” and stocky, yet I actually felt like Mini-Me or Herve Villachaize standing next to her.  I’m fairly flexible when it comes to weight on women (I’m no lightweight myself, after all), but if she’s built like a linebacker or Shaquille O’Neal, chances are good I’m not interested.  This gal seemed nice, but didn’t have much personality, let alone much self-esteem, so I politely passed on her too.

I also remember attending various and sundry “singles” events during this time and not enjoying them very much.  I even attended a few at a church that welcomed all faiths (or non-faiths in my case), but as I’ve mentioned before, I totally suck at socializing with strangers.  I just don’t have the gift of gab in social situations and like I say, I’m a cut-to-the-chase kind of person, thus I hate small-talk.  The other problem with singles events is everyone tries too hard to impress the other person and they don’t act naturally.  I even found some events downright demeaning, like the one I attended at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand nightclub that was comprised of nothing but Johnson County (KS) yuppies and high-maintenance women that I wouldn’t stand a chance with—I felt like an ’87 T-Bird in a BMW/Porsche world, so I walked out after only ten minutes.  Anyway, by that time, I actually found myself rather burned-out on the whole “Gotta find a woman” quest, so I put it on the back-burner and concentrated on fixing up my newly-acquired house for a while.  Besides, I was often told that when you’re not looking is usually the time you find someone, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give that a try.

By the summer of ’96, I finally caught up with the rest of the world and joined the Internet generation.  Oddly enough, the very night I signed on to AOL was when the Olympic bombing took place in Atlanta, so I started off with a bang, so to speak, but I digress.  It occurred to me that I could make use of my AOL profile as a drawing card for potential mates, and before long I got an e-mail from a girl named Tracy.  She said she was more or less looking for the same kind of relationship that I was and that she lived near 74th & Lewis. Well, there’s a 74th & Lewis just a few blocks from my house, so I was initially intrigued, until I realized she meant 74th & Lewis in Tulsa!  D’oh!!  We had precious little in common—Tracy is conservative Southern Baptist and I’m radical moderate Midwestern Agnostic—but we wound up being e-mail pen pals, so to speak, for several years.  We even met in person a few times, as I later attended a ballgame with Tracy and her boyfriend in Tulsa, and vice-versa when they came up here after they got married and did a Royals game.  It was nice to have a female friend and sounding board, but after a while, our correspondence became very stale and boring (mundane stuff like, “Oh, that’s too bad your washer broke down”, “sorry to hear you had a flat tire”, etc.) and I lost interest in it.  I also felt stifled because I had to water myself down for fear of offending Tracy and her conservative church-goer sensibilities, thus I couldn’t be my true self with her.  I more or less blew her off and quit writing to her a few years ago and I’ve felt bad about that, but she just didn’t challenge me like the next woman I was about to encounter did.  If you’re reading this, Tracy, it was nothing personal and I’m sorry.  But, if you’ve read my blog at all these last couple years, you’ve no doubt discovered that I’m a little earthier than I seemed to be…

Sometime in early, 1998, I received another e-mail from a fellow AOL-er named Stacy in Seattle who said she liked my hobbies and interests that I had listed on my profile and would I like to chat sometime?  After being on-line for a couple years, I’d encountered quite a few phonies and posers, so I was actually skeptical at first if she was legit or just playing me, even though she was two time zones away and wasn’t really looking for a relationship (she was already living with a guy anyway).  Hell, Stacy is a guy’s name too, so for all I knew, this could’ve been a dude messing with me!  I kept a journal back then, and often referred to her as “this Stacy person” or “that Stacy girl” until I got to know her better and was convinced she was the real deal.  Soon we were chatting live with each other on AOL on a regular basis, and unlike Tracy, I had far more in common with Stacy.  Since I was working second-shift at my new hospital gig at the time, I was already a night owl, so we’d often chat into the wee hours of the morning after I got home from work.  It was so nice to finally connect with someone on a very cerebral level, and we got to know each other very well over the next year or so.  She was very unhappy with her live-in boyfriend at the time, so I was often a sympathetic ear for her when she needed to vent.  Other times, we just shot the shit and enjoyed visiting with each other.

One of Stacy’s unique features is she has little-to-no hair.  She has the medical condition called Alopecia Areata, which causes hair loss in both men and women.  Obviously, Alopecia can be devastating for some people, especially women, but Stacy was able to cope and has a great attitude about it, usually choosing to wear bandanas in public or wigs for more formal occasions.  She was a real cutie in her photos, too, and as things turned out, the National Alopecia Areata Foundation was holding their annual conference in Denver in July of ’99, which Stacy was planning to attend.  I hadn’t been on a decent vacation in quite a while myself, so I came up with the bright idea of driving to Elway Country and meeting Stacy in-person for the first time.  I figured I could tool around do some sightseeing on my own while she attended the conference and we could meet up at various times throughout the weekend and have dinner or just hang out, and I could play tour guide for her since I’d been there before.  She loved the idea, and was even able to swing me a free ticket to a Colorado Rockies game at Coors Field (which I was planning to attend anyway) via the Alopecia Foundation, which was recognized during in a pre-game ceremony.

In an effort to save a little hotel money and since I just love to drive at night on road trips, I decided to leave K.C. at 10PM on Wednesday, drive all night and get into town early in the morning just as the sun was rising on the Rocky Mountains, which is a really cool sight.  Two problems with that plan:  A) I was unable to get a good nap in during the day on Wednesday, as planned, and B) it was cloudy and rainy when I pulled into town Thursday morning anyway!  I was okay driving until I got about 2/3 of the way across Kansas and the caffeine wore off, so I pulled off at a rest area and napped in the car for an hour-and-a-half or so.  That helped a little, but by the time I got to the Mile High City around 8AM, I was very tired.  No biggie—I figured I’d check in to my room and nap for a few hours, then head out for the ballgame, which started at 1:00.  Problem was, I couldn’t check in to my hotel until well after 10:00, so I had to kill two more hours.  Once I did get checked in, I got all of an hour’s nap in before it was time to leave for the game, which was looking rather iffy because of rain in the Denver area.

Luckily, some Mountain Dew-induced adrenaline kicked in, and I was able to enjoy the Rockies/Dodgers game as well as the dandy new ballpark in downtown Denver, which is one of the best in baseball—too bad it’s named after such a decrepit beer!  Even though the Alopecians were honorees at the game, the team chose to stick them in the cheap seats in the right field bleachers, but it was kinda fun sitting amongst them and visiting.  I found many of the bald chicks there to be far prettier than some of the women with hair in the crowd, too. I started wearing down near the end of the game though, and by the time I got to my car, I was running on fumes.  Unfortunately, I was due to meet Stacy at her hotel downtown at 6:00, and I wasn’t sure if I would last five minutes with her.  It was too late to postpone, but I figured I’d just meet with her and visit for a bit, then go back to my hotel to crash, and re-connect with her sometime on Friday when I was fresh.  Little did I know what this evening held in store…

To be continued…

Life ain't easy for a blog named Sue...

DON’T JUST STAND THERE—PANIC!!!
Leave it to our wonderful mass media—TV news in particular—and public officials to create mass hysteria and paranoia about this swine flu thing coming out of Mexico.  Call me cynical all you want, but I see this as nothing but media-generated panic over nothing.  I work with physicians, and one of them told me yesterday that it’s not that big of a deal and these kinds of outbreaks (of any virus) aren’t uncommon every day.  But by gosh, the media will have you believe that this latest swine flu crisis will bring down the U.S. economy, and tell you to lock your house and keep the kids inside.  By dingies, this might even drive down the price of oil.  Really?  I hope to hell it does!  And I fail to see how walking around in public with a mask on is going to make a lick of difference, no more so than duct-taping your windows shut wouldn't have protected you from dirty bombs like the Bushies were advising us to do about four years back.  Mark my words, this’ll all be forgotten in a week or two.

REST (RUST?) IN PEACE, PONTIAC
As expected, General Motors is doing away with its Pontiac brand name as part of its restructuring plan.  As a co-worker of mine pointed out, why not drop GMC instead?  After all, GMC trucks are basically Chevy trucks with a different badge on them anyway, so why do we need both?  I’ve always thought that was a bit redundant...

THE SPECTRE OF SPECTER
In his typical grandstanding style, Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter announced he’s switching parties.  The Democrats should be less-than-thrilled.  They’d be better off with Phil Spector…

FEELING DRAFTY?
The annual exercise in overkill known as the NFL Draft took place over the weekend.  I know this sounds odd coming from a mondo football fan such as myself, but ESPN’s overblown coverage of the draft is laughable, particularly the "experts" they trot out every year like Mel Kiper, Jr. and Todd McShay, whose mock drafts are a mockery and have all the accuracy of the 10-day forecast on the Weather Channel.  Kiper contradicts himself constantly, like when a player was picked sooner than expected in the first round (I forget which one) and ol’ Mel proclaimed something like, "I really like this pick—he has great potential," yet he had that same player graded at only a C+ in his pre-draft analysis.  If you liked him so much, Mel, then why only an average grade?  The rest of the ESPN talking heads made my head spin with all their jibber-jabber and prognostications that I finally turned off the TV and waited for the results in the morning paper instead.  I could only take so much of ex-Chefs head coach Herm Edwards’ insightful comments like, "He’s a player!" and "He can play!"  No shit?  Even more laughable were the local bars staging these Draft Day "watch parties" all around town.  As the Almighty Carlin once said, "It’s like watching flies fuck!"

As for the Chefs, I was mildly underwhelmed by Scott Pioli’s shakedown cruise as GM and head drafter, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because after years of Carl Peterson’s ineptitude at judging football talent,  I think we have someone who knows what he’s doing.  I’d like to think that, anyway…

D’OH!
"I say watch for a San Jose Sharks-New Jersey Devils Stanley Cup finals in late May."—B. Holland, April 14, 2009

Well, so much for that prognostication, as both San Jose and New Jersey are out of the Stanley Cup playoffs already.  The Sharks’ first-round flameout is becoming an annual rite of passage, and it makes no sense that the #1 team for the entire season can’t get past a #8 seed (the Mighty Quacks of Anaheim) that just barely made the playoffs on the final day of the regular season.  As for my Devils, their departure from the postseason is a bit more mysterious, not to mention heartbreaking.  They had Carolina by the balls with two minutes left to go last night and let them get away with two goals in the span of 48 seconds.  Guess I’ll root for the Chicago Blackhawks now, since they haven’t won the Cup since the Kennedy Administration…

THE FLATULENT ONE STRIKES AGAIN!
K.C. Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock once again proved what a moron he is by recommending that the fledgling Kansas City Royals acquire Barry Bonds to bolster their anemic offense:   "He’s been railroaded by the commissioner, a publicity-seeking federal prosecutor and the hypocritically self-righteous segment of the baseball media…While virtually every other steroid cheater continues to play the game without incident or much backlash, America’s home-run king is being treated like a heavyweight champion with the audacity to conscientiously object to the Vietnam war."

First off, how crass it is to compare ol’ Bare with Muhammad Ali, and second off, at the risk of sounding like the race-baiter Whitlock is, I bet ol’ Jason wouldn’t be campaigning so vociferously for Bonds if he was white.  Third off, I’d much rather lose with the current Royals squad than win with a bitter 45-year-old clubhouse cancer like Bonds.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?  WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Much hoop-de-doo was made last week about Perez Hilton ripping on Miss California’s opinions about gay marriage.  Did I miss a memo—why is this so important?  Are the political opinions of some blonde airhead in a bathing suit trying to impress the judges suddenly worthy of serious scrutiny?  And now for the really tough question—who the hell is Perez Hilton anyway?  It sure don’t take much to be famous these days…

CLASSIC MISHEARD LYRIC #112
"Do You Know What I Mean?"—LEE MICHAELS (1971)  "She just left me yesterday…"  Or try it my way:  "She just slapped me yesterday…"  No doubt, this was Ernest P. Worrell’s favorite song.  Ain’t that right, Vern?

MOVIE REVIEW: THE READER
I finally got to see Kate Winslet in The Reader this week on DVD.  This one’s kinda hard to describe without giving away the plot twists, so I’ll refrain from doing so, but suffice it to say it was not a bad film.  Not one that I would want to watch over and over again, mind you, but one which definitely held my interest throughout.  Kate gave a great performance, although I wasn’t too keen on her unconvincing German accent, which reminded me of Meryl Streep’s equally-unconvincing Italian accent in Bridges Of Madison County, which in turn was as unconvincing as Mr. Tudball’s toupee on "Carol Burnett Show".  And I was enjoying the sex scenes immensely until Winslet raised her left arm and revealed what amounted to a mini-Z.Z. Top beard in her armpit!  While I’m well aware that German women generally don’t shave their underarms, and I do give the producers points for realism here, I’m still compelled to say this anyway:  Ewww!  This turned me off every bit as much as the tattoos and nipple piercings on Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler last week.  All in all, I give the film about a 6.

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER AT THE BOX OFFICE?
I’ll be real interested to see how the new Star Trek flick fares when it hits the theaters next week.  I’m kind of an odd breed of Trekkie, as I never have much cared that much for the original TV series, but I do like the theatrical releases (Wrath Of Khan, Search For Spock, et al).  My older sister was a big fan of the original show, but I was more of a "Lost In Space" kid at the time, and "Star Trek" always seemed rather bland to me.  I’m warming up to the old show now as I track through it on DVD, but it still comes off to me as rather dry at times, but then again, they could only do so much with ‘60s TV special effects and sets.  William Shatner’s over-emoting never helped any, either.  Personally, I think there should’ve been more regular female characters on ST besides just Lt. Uhura, and I don’t understand why they gave up on the Yeoman Rand character, for instance—she was a hottie.

One thing I’ve never gotten about any of the space-based Sci-Fi franchises ("Star Trek", "Lost In Space", Star Wars, etc.):  how come humans are impervious to the laws of gravity while on board their spaceships?  Why don’t they ever float around weightless like the Space Shuttle crew does when they aren’t strapped in?  And ain’t it amazing how almost every single alien life form they encounter speaks English?  And how every planet they land on has an atmosphere suitable for humans to breath in, too?  Yes, I know, suspend your disbelief and shut the hell up already!

As for the new ST flick, I’ll wait until it comes out on DVD—I refuse to pay 10 bucks to listen to rude people, ill-mannered children and cell phones going off at the overcrowded clusterfuck movie theaters.  I much prefer my comfy sofa for watching big-time flicks…

Overstaying their welcome

I was watching a bad "M*A*S*H" rerun the other day and it put me in mind of how reviled some of the episodes from the last three seasons of the show were.  Here's a little compilation (in no particular order) of some TV favorites that hung around too long...

"M*A*S*H" (1972-83)
Fans are divided into different camps (M*A*S*H units?) about when this classic show should’ve called it quits.  Some say it should’ve happened when Henry Blake was killed and Trapper John went home, while others think they should’ve pulled the plug after Frank Burns left.  Me, personally, I think the show was toast after Radar O’Reilly went back to Ottumwa and Alan Alda took over as the show's creative czar.  The plots got really stupid after that, with storylines like the 4077th staff pouring a concrete floor for the O.R. (never mind that one already existed in previous episodes) or Klinger running a camp newspaper (hell, he could barely even handle being company clerk, where would he find the time to play editor?) or when they went to the Col. Flagg well once too often, not to mention way too much Hawkeye-this and Hawkeye-that.  You knew they were running out of ideas when the whiny chubby Hawaiian nurse and Cpl. Rizzo started getting more lines every week and some storylines got recycled too, like when one of Col. Potter’s cronies does something inept in the heat of battle, resulting in unnecessary casualties.  And if the name Thad Mumford is in the closing credits, chances are it was a bad episode filled with cutesy dialogue like "You’re the toast of the coast, Jost" and "The newspaper isn’t the issue…", etc.

"HAPPY DAYS" (1974-84)
The show that gave rise to the phrase "Jumping the Shark" is the poster child for successful TV series that just don’t know when to quit.  The first five seasons of HD were classic, but as soon as Scott Baio and his insufferable Chachi character came on board, things went to hell in a handbag.  "Happy Days" was supposed to be set in the ‘50s, yet along comes this douche with ‘70s hair and a bandana around his thigh (what the hell was that, a macho garter?) going "Wah-Wah-Wah" all the time, and then the crap-weasel burned Arnold’s down to boot!  The addition of Ted McGinley and the ever-annoying Jenny Piccalo character to the cast—not to mention all the singing and dancing that took place in every other episode—rendered the last five seasons of "Happy Days" virtually unwatchable.  The least they could’ve done was tell Tom Bosley to remove his digital watch before he got on camera!

"LAVERNE & SHIRLEY" (1976-83)
L&S was a really funny show for its first 4-5 seasons, but when the entire cast moved en mass from Milwaukee to California around 1980, the laughs didn’t accompany them.  It got even lamer when Cindy Williams got pregnant and left the show in a contract dispute, so it was just Laverne taking on Lenny & Squiggy, et al.  And in the last season, there were a couple episodes that even Laverne didn’t appear in.  They should never have left Wisconsin.

"SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH" (1996-2003)
Melissa Joan Hart was already 20 years old when this show debuted in 1996, so it seemed rather disingenuous that she played a teenager to begin with.  By the last couple seasons, it seemed rather silly to continue calling the show’s title character a teenager when she was well into college.  Adding the untalented Soleil Moon Frye to the cast at the end was an act of utter desperation too.

"FRASIER" (1993-2004)
Surprisingly, "Frasier" was able to consistently maintain its fine quality for most of its run, but even the best of shows run out of steam eventually.  I find it harder to watch the last season or two of "Frasier" in reruns than the early years of the show, especially the episode arc involving Daphne’s insufferable mother and brother visiting from England and when Daphne got pregnant during the last season.  By that time, the show had long since lost its spark.

"FRIENDS" (1994-2004)
Like "Happy Days", the first four seasons of "Friends" were pure gold, but it all went downhill after Ross uttered "I, take thee Rachel" in the last episode of Season 4.  The stories gradually became stupid and contrived (like the Phoebe-hates-Pottery Barn ep or when Monica’s overpriced fancy boots hurt her feet, or when Rachel took up smoking cigarettes to impress her co-workers, etc.).  Even worse, Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox became so anorexic and gaunt that they started resembling matchsticks with long, stringy hair toward the end.  They were so much cuter and likeable in the early seasons.

"SANFORD & SON" (1972-77)
True, five years is about the average run for a successful sitcom, but even in this case, the show ran about a year too long.  In its final season, S&S suffered from poor writing, over-reliance on hackneyed put-downs (aimed mostly at Aunt Esther) and indifference from Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson.  Foxx basically didn’t give a shit anymore and phoned it in, and Wilson often wore dark glasses (to mask his cocaine problem) and passively delivered his lines standing with one hand in his vest pocket.  Asinine storylines like where Fred Sanford thought he might be Jewish were the death knell for my favorite TV sitcom ever on earth in this hemisphere (as Fred would say).

"CHICO AND THE MAN" (1974-78)
This show should've ceased production the nanosecond Freddie Prinze blew his brains out, but producer James Komack insisted on continuing.  He replaced Prinze with cheeky kid Gabriel Melgar, who was disrespectfully dubbed "Chico" too, and although it obviously wasn't Melgar's fault, the result was downright pathetic.  Having that great thespian Charo making frequent guest appearances didn't help things either.

"THE COSBY SHOW" (1984-92)
This show had its moments early on, but got way too preachy and idealistic for its own good as time wore on.  The additions of gnome-like child actress Raven-Symone and Cousin Pam to the Huxtable household only made things worse, not to mention the expanded role of Elvin, who practically made Richard Simmons seem almost manly by comparison.  He was quite possibly the wussiest married man on network TV.

"GILLIGAN’S ISLAND" (1964-67)
Should’ve been cancelled after the first episode.  Nah, I take that back—BEFORE the first episode!  Yes, this is a TV icon, but could there be a more implausible idea for a TV series this side of "The Flying Nun"?  How it lasted three seasons is beyond me.  And don’t get me started on those excremental TV reunion movies they made in the ‘70s and ‘80s like "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island"…

"THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW" (1960-68)
Should’ve shut it down as soon as Barney Fife left Mayberry in '65.  Don Knotts was what made that show tick.

"ACCORDING TO JIM" (2001-09)
This mediocre show has lasted how long?  I do realize that Jim Belushi is often unfairly compared to his late brother, but honestly, he’s really not that funny.  Nice guy, to be sure, but hardly a laugh riot.

"BEVERLY HILLS, 90210" (1990-2000)
Ten years is a nice round number for a series, but this one should’ve hung it up by the time all the principle characters (Brandon, Kelly, Dylan, Donna, Steve, Valerie, David, et al) had doinked each other at least once.  Jason Priestley’s departure didn’t help things any, either.  Good rule of thumb:  if you’re watching an episode in which Tori Spelling has red hair, there's half a chance it might suck.

"ALL IN THE FAMILY" (1971-79)
When Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers left the show after the eighth season, it was probably a hint that Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton should've stifled themselves too, but they soldiered on anyway, adding Danielle Brisebois as Archie and Edith’s niece Stephanie for season nine.  There were a handful of funny episodes that year, but the show was running on fumes by then.  How they managed to milk three more years out of A. Bunker on "Archie Bunker’s Place" is unfathomable.

"SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE" (1975-Present)
I rarely watch SNL anymore, but evidently there is still some relevancy here and there, as last fall’s resurgence in popularity during the Presidential campaign showed.  Still, I can’t help but think this show has long outlived its usefulness, and should’ve died after the Dana Carvey/Mike Myers era.

Feel free to put your .02-worth in and add to this list. I'm sure there are other shows I left out here...

Who let the blog(s) out?!?

TEN YEARS ALREADY?
The tenth anniversary of the Columbine tragedy kinda snuck up on me this week—it just doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.  I visited the Denver area just a couple months after it happened, and drove by the school and it was surreal seeing the yellow police tape blocking access to parts of the campus.  It also struck me how similar Littleton, CO was to suburban Kansas City, especially on the Kansas side in Overland Park where I work, which just goes to show that unthinkable tragedies can occur anywhere, no matter how insulated the area might be from "the Hood".

I read an interesting write-up in last week’s Newsleak, er uh, Newsweek about new book called (cleverly-enough) Columbine by author Dave Cullen, which is apparently a very-detailed play-by-play account of that horrible day.  I thought about picking up a copy of it in hopes of understanding what went on in Kleibold and Harris’s twisted little brains, but my man Leonard Pitts, Jr. made a great point in his column this week, saying "…but as for me, I will give them not an hour of my one and only life trying to comprehend their incomprehensible deed."  To wit, spending hours and hours reading this book only gives those little bastards what they so craved in the first place—attention and fame—so I think I’ll pass on it after all.  It’s a similar dynamic to trying to figure out what possessed that Chapman wanker to kill John Lennon—no matter how hard you try, you’ll never get the answer you’re looking for.  And even if you do, it won’t bring Lennon back anyway, so why waste the time?

Pitts also pointed out all the finger-pointing that went on in the aftermath of Columbine—it was video games or years of being bullied and ostracized or lax gun control or violent movies or bad parenting that drove the two turds to do it.  While I won’t cop out and blame bad parenting or poor gun control totally for this senseless tragedy, you can’t tell me that someone (i.e., their parents, gun shop owners, etc.) wasn’t sleeping at the wheel while Kleibold and Harris were able to amass a weapons arsenal that most third-world countries would be envious of.  Even the most astute NRA members (that’s a contradiction in terms, I know) can’t justify teenage kids packing the kind of heat those two did.

W.W.J.D.?
Interesting stuff in this week’s Newsweek too, about an English major from Brown Univ. named Kevin Roose, who infiltrated Liberty Univ. (aka "Jerry Falwell U.") in Lynchburg, VA, posing as a Super-Christian student to see what campus life is like in Moron Majority country.  Evidently, the kids there aren’t quite as anal-retentive as I would imagine, and some of them even do dare to doubt their faith after all and they "aren’t a bunch of Beaver Cleavers", according to Roose.  My older sister lived in Lynchburg for a time back in the late ‘70s, and even though she’s a fairly faithful Presbyterian church-goer, she said she found the place to total squares-ville.  To successfully pull off his ruse, Roose had to re-train his secular self to follow the LU code of conduct, which stipulates things like "no drinking, no cursing, no hugs lasting longer than three seconds."  Okay, I understand the no drinking and cursing stuff, but I find it hard to believe that Jesus himself would’ve put time limits on hugs, if He really existed.  Yet another example of why I have no use for the (very wrong) Religious Right…

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES
Private Gump’s drill sergeant was right—Forrest was indeed "a Goddamn genius" compared to those who partake in this whole Twitter phenomenon.  Apart from maybe Pauly Shore's film career, is there anything on earth more pointless than this self-indulgent folderol?  Why would anyone care what latte you drank at breakfast or what activity you’re currently engaged in at any given moment?  There’s already a communication device in existence if you just have to tell someone what you’re doing—it’s called the telephone!  Then again, you can’t spell Twitter without ‘twit’, can ya?  I realize we’re in a recession and lots of people are out of work, but America has WAY too much time on its collective hands.  And that's all I have to say about that…

MOVIE REVIEW: THE WRESTLER

I watched Mickey Rourke’s comeback vehicle The Wrestler last night, and the critics were right for once—this wasn’t a bad movie at all.  Darn good, actually.  It’s the story of a small-time has-been pro wrestler who still thinks it’s the ‘80s and has trouble coming to terms with middle age and the facts of life therein.  It also has a couple good subplots involving his estranged lesbian daughter and his pursuit of a local stripper/lap dancer, played by Marisa Tomei in her Supporting Actress Oscar nominated role.  While I loved to see my girl Marisa buck nekkid in this flick, I really coulda done without the nipple piercings and tattoos all over her beautiful body.  PLEASE tell me those were fake—I hate that shit!!  This is one of the rare areas where I’m as conservative as Reagan—"body art" and piercings on women are a major turn-off for me, especially on an attractive woman like Ms. Tomei.  It’s akin to spray-painting a swastika on the Gateway Arch or something.

Rourke, meantime, was quite impressive and believable as Ram the wrestler, and he reminded me of a bulked-up muscle-bound modern-day Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas, who ironically also thinks he’s still living in a bygone era.  My favorite part of the movie was when Ram lamented the downfall of ‘80s Heavy Metal, saying "Then that Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it all.”  Amen to that!  To which Marisa Tomei concurred, "The ‘90s fuckin’ sucked!"  Truer words have never been spoken.  Apart from the music of John Hiatt and a few others, the ‘90s were a total wasteland for Rock music in my view.  This currently decade hasn’t been any better, either.

Anyway, the film is a bit graphic and gory in places, so I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint of heart, especially those who don’t like the sight of blood, and I give it about a 7.

"LADY LOOKS LIKE A DUDE"?

Looks aren’t everything, I know, and this "Britain’s Got Talent" contestant Susan Boyle may well be a talented singer, but I can’t get past how she looks look like a cross between Julia Child and Benny Hill in drag!  You can gussie her up all you want, and she’ll still make k.d. Lang look downright girlish in comparison.  Then again, she is prettier than Amy Winehouse!  For her next appearance on the show, I dare Boyle to sing Roy Orbison’s "(Oh) Pretty Woman"…

Related question: In legal circles, could crossdressing be considered a form of "male fraud"? [Place rim shot here]

THE HIGH PRICE OF MEDIOCRITY, CONTINUED

I do hope the Kansas City Royals will soon be Kyle Farnsworth-less, because this douche is Farns-worthless in my book.  The Fredo Corleone of relief pitchers has already blown three games this season that the Royals could’ve/should’ve won, including his latest gem Sunday when he gave up the game-winning HR on the second pitch he threw against the Texas Rangers.  $4 million a year buys this?!?  This so reminds me of the days of the great steroid jockey Jason Grimsley and his nightly blow-jobs with the Royals not so long ago.

EARTH DAY, SCHMEARTH DAY
I was almost tempted to burn some leaves in my back yard to celebrate the great Earth Day today.  I’ll be brutally honest here—I don’t give a rip about future generations and the planet we leave them with because I ain’t gonna be here anyway.  Did prior generations give a rip about what they left us?  I think not.  I’m pretty cynical about stuff like this, because I know deep-down it’s nothing but media-generated hype with no substance whatsoever.  Do all these dreamy-eyed tree-hugging hippie simpletons truly believe all this "going green" stuff is going to make a lick of difference in the long run?  By the time earth implodes upon itself, humans will be living on other planets anyway…

ONLY ON MY IPOD...
...would you hear these four songs in succession:

"One Piece At A Time"--JOHNNY CASH

"The Last In Line"--DIO

"Calypso"--JOHN DENVER

"Rebel"--BLACK OAK ARKANSAS

I believe the word for this mix is 'eclectic'.  Or 'deranged', I'm not sure which...

IN PRAISE OF THE MIGHTY 8-TRACK!

We got into a discussion at work recently about the long-gone musical format known as the 8-track tape and it brought back some memories (good and bad) of this ‘70s phenomenon for yours truly, so I thought I’d share a few…

• Ever notice how your favorite song on the album always seemed to be the one they had to split in two because of the space limitations on each "program"?  For you youngins, think of "programs" as sides on a cassette tape, only there were four instead of two (usually lasting 10-15 minutes and containing three or four songs each), thus some songs were interrupted by the inevitable "clunk" when it switched programs in the middle of them.
• Unlike cassette tapes, you couldn’t fast-forward or rewind 8-tracks—thus you either had to sit through the shitty songs to get to the good ones, or push the button to move on to the next program, but it always seemed like the good songs were in the latter half of the program, so you still had to wait.
• Often times, the track sequence of an album would be altered to accommodate the space limitations of the programs, so if you had a vinyl or cassette copy of a particular album, the songs played in a different order.  I remember listening to Elton John’s masterpiece Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on 8-track first, and got quite used to "Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting" being the last song instead of the "official" closing track "Harmony".
• When shopping for 8-tracks at the record store, one often had to inspect them in an incubator-like clear plastic display case through these circular holes big enough for your hands, but too small for the tapes to fit through.  When you decided which tapes you wanted, the sales clerk would unlock the case and open it for you to retrieve, or some cases had a conveyor belt you dropped the tape on, which transported it to a little box with a lock on it for retrieval.  Either that, or 8-tracks were sold on racks in those over-sized cardboard cartons or were mounted in plastic security devices to keep folks from shoplifting them.
• The biggest draw of the 8-track tape (and later the cassette) was they afforded a portability that vinyl records couldn’t match—i.e., you could play them most anywhere, especially in your car. The big drawback was the typical poor sound quality and how quickly they wore out.
• Another disadvantage of 8-tracks was you lost most, if not all, the album cover artwork (esp. the back covers) and booklets, inner sleeves, lyric sheets, etc., that came with vinyl records.  Sadly, compact discs have diminished the once-proud medium of album cover art as well.

Still and all, the thought of inserting one of those big clunky tape cartridges into a car stereo like in that pic takes me back to a better vanished time.  For even more fun 8-track memories, I highly recommend this here tribute site.

The (Love) Life of Brian--Part IV

After nine years of frustration, I finally got somewhere with a woman...

Toward late summer/fall 1993—against my better judgment—I decided to give the Great Expectations dating service a try.  Even though I had long resisted such institutions, I took a chance this time because I figured any woman out there who was willing to pay that kind of money would be pretty serious about finding a partner too, and I was able to get a fairly good deal on a six-month membership.  After a month or two of being turned-down by numerous women I’d chosen from their photo/video library and feeling very frustrated, I was tabbed by a girl I’d passed on previously named Lisa who wanted to meet me.  I would’ve preferred someone with a different first name to be my second girlfriend, but I couldn’t be a choosy beggar, so I gave her a shot. 

Lisa #2 originally hailed from West Plymouth, MA, and I found her Nor’easter accent rather cute and charming when we first spoke on the phone.  Lisa was about 5’6”, a bit Rubenesque (which I don’t mind at all) with cute curly brown hair, and I really liked the way she dressed—in dresses and skirts most of the time.  The girl seemed stable enough, since she owned her own house and had a good job in the telecommunications field, plus she had a lively personality and we had a lot more in common than I did with Lisa #1—this one even liked hockey!  I also liked how she referred to herself as a “bad Catholic”, thus religion was never an issue with us. We hit it off really well in our first encounter—a very pleasant downtown dinner date after work—so we decided to meet again, and I took her to a comedy club and once again, things went swimmingly. BTW, I found that comedy clubs are excellent ice-breaker type dates—there’s no pressure, and you can learn a lot about the other person by observing what makes them laugh.

For our third encounter, Lisa suggested I join her and some of her girl friends from work on a Friday night at a dance club up near where she lived.  I wasn’t anticipating anything spectacular, really—I just figured on having a few drinks and visiting with her friends, maybe dancing a bit, and just playing things by ear.  We did indeed have a fun time, and as the night wore on, our non-verbal communication kinda took over and her friends took notice of it, because they started leaving one-by-one and before we knew it, it was just me and Lisa sitting at the table next to the dance floor.  Finally, the little dude inside my brain said, “Go for it, Dummy—kiss her!”  My instincts served me well, because Lisa offered no resistance and in fact, kissed me back even harder! I think she said something like, “I was hoping you would do that,” and the little dude in my brain went, “SCOOOORE!”  We kissed some more and then Lisa gave me my first-ever genuine French kiss, which was more like a tonsillectomy!  Since the dance club was getting a little crowded and loud, Lisa invited me back to her place just a few blocks away where we could continue our little rendezvous in private, and we wound up entangled on her sofa for hours.  I have no earthly idea what time I got home that night, and I don’t mind telling you, folks, after a nine-year dry spell, it felt damn good to have a girlfriend again!

Cuddling up on Lisa’s sofa became a regular habit during the fall of ’93.  Lisa told me that her previous boyfriend was an “ice cube” in terms of affection, so I was like a windfall to her because I was so touchy-feely.  Actually, my big 7’ sofa was infinitely more comfortable than hers, but I was still living with my parents at the time, so we spent the majority of our kiss-and-fondle time at her place.  Unlike with Lisa #1, I was in no hurry whatsoever to do the dirty deed this time, because I found it to be a total hoot just doing the simple stuff with Lisa #2, like holding her in my arms throughout an entire movie in a theater (Sleepless In Seattle, I think it was), which was a first for me.  There was even a time about three weeks into our relationship when Lisa got real quiet on me one night while we were making out on the sofa when my adventurous right hand found its way up her skirt.  She said she was apprehensive about my expectations and that she was a virgin and wasn’t quite ready to go all the way yet.  I also thought it was too soon for that, so I reassured her by saying, “Relax—I’m enjoying the hell out of what we’re doing right here,” and that perked her right back up.  Ironically, we wound up in her bed that night after all—her futon-esque sofa was giving both our spines a hard time, so we relocated to her bedroom and got naked from the waist-up and continued making out while her two cats kept pouncing on us.  First time I’d ever been in bed with three pussies before! Ohhhhh, that was soooo bad…

Meantime, we enjoyed each other’s company and had fun together.  Lisa seemed to really enjoy introducing me to her friends, and it was nice to get some badly-needed socializing experience.  Sometimes we’d stay in and she would fix a nice dinner for the two of us (her lasagna rocked, as I recall) and on other occasions I finally had an opportunity to show someone a good time at eating establishments that were a slight cut above Denny’s, like when we celebrated Lisa’s birthday at the Golden Ox, the Cadillac of K.C. steakhouses.  We even went a little high-brow one night and did the Broadway version of The Who's Tommy at the Music Hall downtown (thank you, Chairman Townshend!).  It was also nice to have a few things in common and be able to have long talks about stuff and actually relate to each other, unlike with Lisa #1, where it always seemed like a one-way conversation.  I was mildly frustrated that we weren’t able to spend Christmas together because she had already made plans to visit her family back East long before we’d met, but we made up for it over New Year’s by “playing house” (as she liked to call it) at her place that weekend.  Oddly enough, Lisa #2 was the first woman I ever slept with, but I can honestly pull a Bill Clinton here and proclaim, “I never had sexual relations with that woman.”  We “played house” a few other times on weekends after New Year’s where I’d spend the night and we’d sleep together, and we did everything but have actual intercourse.  We were real close to having sex one night at my place when she was especially amorous with me, but she was still apprehensive and I didn’t push it.  I figured when the time was right, we’d know it anyway, so I wasn’t too upset.  Besides, I was perfectly content having a half-naked woman in bed with me, and the kiss-and-fondle thing was working real good for us.

Things began to unravel in our relationship by late February of ’94, though. I think the beginning of the end was the night Lisa talked me into attending this folk dance event that she was really into with some friends of hers.  It was a sort of hybrid of folky square dancing and the Country line-dancing thing that was all the rage at the time, and was rather intricate and hard to follow.  I had my reservations about it going in, because I’m not much of a hoofer to begin with, and when I realized what I’d let myself in for, I chose to merely watch from the sidelines.  I’d have sooner done the “Poop-Scoopin’ Boogie” (or whatever that stupid hick song is called) than be remembered as the idiot out there on the dance floor who mangled up the whole dance for everyone else, but Lisa was highly-pissed that I chose not to participate.  Even if we were having sex at the time, I sure’s hell wasn’t gettin’ any that night, and that was the first time we went home mad at each other.  The other nail in the coffin was the time Lisa and I spent the evening with one of my best friends and his family at their house.  As I’ve stated before, I’m not very good with children, and his two little girls were being fussy as all get-out that night, and Lisa could sense my irritation.  She knew early on in our relationship that I had no desire to have kids, and she was okay with my feelings about it, although she did eventually want to have marriage and a family herself.  My guess is she was holding out hope that I might change my attitude about it (or that she could sway me that way), but when she saw firsthand how poorly I interacted with kids, she realized that I wasn’t kidding [Pun partially intended] and knew that I probably wasn’t a “keeper”.  I felt badly, but I am what I am.

Then in early March, we attended a Friday night birthday bash for a co-worker of mine at a big nightclub, but Lisa wanted to drive separately, for some reason.  She was late arriving, and once she got there, she was a total wet blanket the whole time.  We got out on the dance floor and it was like she was in another time zone, and I knew something wasn’t right when she didn’t want to slow-dance at all.  Coincidentally, long about this time I was beginning to re-evaluate how attracted I was to Lisa, so I stewed about it over the rest of that weekend and after seeking my good friend Phil’s advice about what to do, I confronted her after we ate dinner out a couple nights later and she acted distant again.  I kinda caught her off-guard, but Lisa told me she was “having a reality check” about her feelings for me, and that she wasn’t sure where we were headed, so we decided to break things off.  It was weird to me because there we were three weeks earlier sending each other flowers on Valentine’s Day (and lawd, she was lovey-dovey!), then it was all suddenly over just like that.  I was disappointed, sure, but kinda relieved in a way since we had more less mutually lost interest in one another at the same time and we certainly were looking for different things in life.  I never imagined we were destined for anything long-term, so it’s probably just as well we ended things before we got too attached to each other.  I was also mildly miffed that we never had sex, and it would’ve been an honor to be her first, if indeed she really was a virgin, but oh well…

But wait—there’s more!  Even though we broke off the romantic relationship, there was still the little matter of the big vacation I was planning for the Northeast later in March—my “The Puck Stops Everywhere Tour” hockey trip, as I called it—and Lisa was going to be a part of it.  After visiting Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Toronto and Cooperstown by car during my little 5,000-mile excursion, the plan was for Lisa to fly to Boston and I would meet her there and we’d stay with her folks for a couple days while she showed me around the city, etc.  Lisa said she still wanted to do the trip as planned, and oddly enough, when we met for dinner the week before I left town to finalize our plans back East, she was suddenly warm and friendly again, as opposed to the cool and distant wet blanket she’d been earlier in the month.  She was really affectionate and touchy-feely that night, not to mention excited about showing me around her home turf, and I kinda got the impression she was regretting breaking up with me in the first place.  I didn’t let on either way that I was interested in getting back together, though—I had no interest in playing head games with her.

Anyway, I called her long-distance from Toronto to make sure we were still on for Boston, and she seemed fine on the phone, but when I met up with her at Logan Airport, she was cool and distant with me again—didn’t even hug me.  She wasn’t ice-cold, mind you, but just very business-like (“turn right here“, “go up this street“, etc.) in New England and we didn’t talk at all about us the entire time we were together, not even during a potential Kodak moment on the beach in Kennebunkport, Maine at sundown.  She was a bit more chatty when she’d talk about her past or about famous places in Boston, etc., and especially when we were around her family, but it was still rather awkward for me most of the time.  I was also very taken aback by the drill-sergeant manner in which she ordered her 11-year-old little brother around at home.  He didn’t seem like a bad kid at all, and I’d never witnessed this control-freak side of Lisa before.  It made me wonder if this was part of the reason she broke up with me—there’s no need to order me around, since I’m already house-broken, thus with me she knew she couldn’t fulfill that need to be in charge.  Just as well, because constant nagging will get you nowhere with me!  Anyway, the New England excursion was all a rather surreal postscript to a fun relationship.

When we originally broke up, Lisa told me “Oh, but I still want to be friends and go out and do things together now and then…” and I truly think we could have remained the best of friends for the long haul, but her words didn’t ring true.  We kept in touch for a while afterward, trading Christmas cards for a couple years or so, but she’s basically blown me off since about 1996, for reasons I’ve never fully understood.  That’s when I learned when an ex-girlfriend tells you she still wants to remain friends, it’s a load of bullshit and she‘s merely being nice.  Even so, I don’t mean to paint Lisa #2 in a bad light here because she’s a good person.  I’m forever grateful for the time I spent with her—it was fun while it lasted and I gained some valuable experience in the process.  While writing this piece, just for shits and hoots, I Googled her name and sure enough, I found her Facebook page.  Seems Lisa is now married and has a son, so I guess she found what she was looking for and I’m happy for her.  She still lives here in town too, so maybe our paths will cross again someday (platonically, of course).

Meanwhile, I still had a month or two left on my Great Expectations membership after Lisa and I dissolved our relationship, but I never went back there again—being with her gave me some confidence that I could meet someone new on my own without artificial intervention, hopefully soon.  Didn’t quite work out that way, as yet another lengthy dry spell ensued…

Beware the Pop-Bottle Blogger!

TEA BAG THIS!
If I didn’t know any better, if this whole Tea Party protest thing that took place this week had been staged by Democrats/liberals, Fox News Channel would’ve been labeling the demonstrators as “unpatriotic” because they were protesting paying taxes.  Instead, FNC was basically egging the protesters on, although they claimed “We don’t promote this—we merely report on it.”  Yeah right, and the Holocaust never happened, either…

GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD--WHAT THE FUCK?!?
The late Edward R. Murrow surely must be somersaulting in his grave since K.C. television station KCTV-5 was recently given regional awards named after him for Best Newscast and Best Investigation for their sleazy tabloid-y nightly crapfests that pass as TV news.  Granted, all TV news outlets are pretty much caca anymore, but Channel 5 is easily the worst of the lot in this town.  There was a time when this station produced a newscast they could be proud of, but that was before they fired all their long-time anchors and reporters and replaced them with a bunch of hacks who do nothing but tease-tease-tease and sensationalize everything.  What an insult to Edward R.’s memory!  Have I mentioned before how much I loathe TV news?  No?  I coulda swore I did…

BOOM!  IT’S OVER
John Madden abruptly announced his retirement from broadcasting this week after 30 years in the booth.  I have mixed feelings about it—it’s hard imaging NFL Sundays back in the ‘80s and ‘90 without Madden teaming up with my man Pat Summerall, and later on Monday nights and Sunday nights with Al Michaels, but just as with Chris Berman at ESPN, Big John’s act has gotten kinda stale over the years.  Still, I’d much rather see Madden continue on as color analyst than endure his replacement, the ever-smarmy Cris Collinsworth.  And sadly, this brings an end to my patented John Madden Drinking Game (i.e. take a drink every time he utters "those types of things", etc.), but like late Oakland Raiders announcer Bill King once said of Madden, “Get yer big butt outta here!”  Apparently he will…

Funny story I’m reminded of about Madden:  A dude I used to work with about ten years ago wasn’t even aware that John Madden was a highly-successful AFL/NFL head coach.  He only knew of him via the broadcast booth and his video games!

MERLE HARMON, 1926-2009
For the second straight week, we lost another sportscasting legend as play-by-play man Merle Harmon passed away on Wednesday.  Merle had K.C. connections as he worked with the Kansas City A’s and Chiefs in the ‘60s.  I was too young to remember that, but I do remember him doing some games for NBC’s baseball coverage in the ‘70s.  I also bought a jersey or two at his chain of Merle Harmon’s Fan Fare stores.

HOW ‘BOUT DEM YANKEES!
Let’s hear it for the high price of mediocrity as those dreaded Bronx Bummers lost to the lowly Cleveland Indians 22-4 today at new Yankee Stadium.  Even funnier, they gave up two touchdowns in the second inning to the Tribe.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer team…

SMILES, EVERYONE, SMILES!
I started in on Season 1 of “Fantasy Island” on DVD last week. Unlike it’s sister show “The Love Boat”, it took a little while for “Island” to attract big-name celebrities to appear, thus the first season featured such G-listers as John Schuck, Mary Jo Catlett (Mary Jo Catshit?), Mabel King, Jane Powell, Robert Clary and Bert Convy.  Then again, it wasn’t totally wretched, as seeing Marcia Brady (Maureen McCormick) in a tube-top was totally worth the rental!

MORE CLASSIC DUMB LYRICS
It’s been a while since I did any of these, but here’s a couple more I dug up:

“Chevy Van”—SAMMY JOHNS (1975)  “I put her out in a town that was so small…”  Put her out?!?  Sounds like something you’d do with a rabid dog or a cat in heat, not some chick you had sex with in your van the night before!  He could’ve easily substituted “I dropped her off” instead.  Dumb song, anyway...

“In The Mood”—RUSH (1974)  “Hey, baby, it’s a-quarter-to-eight--I feel I’m in the mood/Hey baby, the hour is late--I feel I‘ve got to move…”  Uhhh, Geddy, you hoser, how can the hour be late when it’s only 7:45?!?  Or was it a school night for you?  This lyric is a classic illustration of why Rush would surely have been “victims of venomous fate” if drummer Neal Peart and his slightly more advanced lyrics hadn’t come along to save the day after their first album came out.

CLASSIC MISHEARD LYRIC #111
“Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”—CHER (1971)  “Picked up a boy just south of Mobile/Gave him a ride, filled him with a hot meal…”  Or as my six-year-old ears inferred, they “...filled him with a rotten meal.”  I must’ve concluded since they were indeed tramps and thieves, the chow would be substandard…

REEEELY BAD CINEMA
Back in the halcyon days of “Saturday Night Live”, Dan Aykroyd’s Leonard Plinth Garnell could’ve easily done a bit on that 1976 cinematic classic Two-Minute Warning, which I watched on AMC last weekend.  You had a sniper perched high atop the L.A. Coliseum during a Super Bowl-type football game between two teams who looked suspiciously like USC and Stanford and charmin’ Chuck Heston doing all his gun-toting macho-man histrionics as the police chief out to get the miscreant.  This thing was a total waste of an all-star cast that included Jack Klugman, David Janssen, Beau Bridges, John Cassavettes and Howard Cosell as his humble self.  A good example of the lameness of this thing are the scenes on the concourses of the stadium where there are absolutely no fans milling around or waiting in line at the concession stands while the main characters chat with each other.  Heston and his boys finally nab the scumbag, but not after he kills and maims numerous people and causes a riot in the stadium.  A better storyline might’ve had something to do with the sniper picking off ol’ Howie Cosell—he’d have been a hero instead!

REEEELY MEDIOCRE CINEMA
I rented Cadillac Records—the story of the legendary Chess Records label—last week as well, and was fairly underwhelmed by it.  While I was rather impressed with Mos Def’s Chuck Berry impression as well as Beyoncé’s turn as the overrated Etta James, I was disappointed how the film seemed to play fast-and-loose with the facts.  Then again, if you love the word “motherfucker”, this movie is for you, as they set a record for usage of it in a single film.  Not that I’m offended by that kind of language, but it seems to me that the writers could come up with more imaginative dialogue than that.  As for Beyoncé, she was great here, but I’d really like to see her play something else in a movie besides a singer like she did in the Austin Powers flick.

REEEELY GOOD CINEMA
I also threw in my special edition Fast Times At Ridgemont High DVD this week.  Fast Times was the American Graffiti of the ‘80s, and it was of its time (1982) as opposed to looking back 10-12 years later like Graffiti did.  I can’t think of any other film that ignited the careers of so many actors like this one did—Sean Penn, Judge Rinehold, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason-Leigh, and Forrest Whittaker, as well as (to a lesser extent) Eric Stoltz and Nicholas Cage.  If you blinked, you missed Cage, as he was in the film for all of two seconds during the scene where Rinehold threatens the asshole customer with physical violence at All-American Burger.  And what heterosexual male didn’t get a stiffy watching the divine Ms. Cates removing her bikini top during the infamous masturbation scene?  I know I had one!

A little trivia for you:  the producers originally wanted the late Fred Gwynne (aka, TV’s Herman Munster) to play hard-ass teacher Mr. Hand, but he thought the film was a bit too risqué, so they gave it to the late Ray Walston, who as freakin’ brilliant in the role…The famed Galleria shopping mall, where much of Fast Times was filmed, was heavily damaged by the big earthquake in ’94, and eventually torn down altogether.  However, the mall that was shown as its exterior still exists in Santa Monica…In the scene where Judge Rinehold gets embarrassed trying to impress the chick in the Corvette at the traffic light (while wearing his pseudo-Captain D’s get-up), that’s Heart’s Nancy Wilson in the Corvette.  She’s married to author Cameron Crowe, who wrote the whole thing…According to Crowe’s commentary on the DVD, the inclusion of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in the film was semi-intentional, given Mike Damone’s advice to Mark Ratner about playing Side 1 of Led Zeppelin IV, when of course, “Kashmir” was on Zep’s Physical Graffiti album.  Evidently, they weren’t able to secure licensing from Zep for anything from the famed Zoso album, but somehow got the rights for “Kashmir”, and given Ratner’s penchant for ineptitude, it seemed kind of appropriate anyway that he’d put the wrong Zep tape in while trying to score with his girl…

The (Love) Life of Brian--Part III

If you're just joining me, this is a chronicle of my checkered past when it comes to relationships with women of the female sex.  While totally self-indulgent and a bit lengthy on my part, it's been very cathartic to take out this mental garbage I've been dragging around for years.  And again, it's not intended as a pity-party for yours truly, and it's not all gloom-and-doom, either, so if you choose to read on, I thank you, and if you choose to pass, that's fine too...

The best analogy I can think of to describe my relationship history is the excellent 1990 film Awakenings, starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.  Just as with Dr. Sayer’s encephalitis patients, my love life has only “awakened” from its dormancy for brief intermittent stretches (none lasting more than six months) over the past 25 years.  I had my first girlfriend when I was 20, the next one nine years later, and the most recent one nearly ten years ago, with only a handful of scattered dates with other women the rest of the time.  I realize that’s still better than nothing at all, but rather pathetic in my eyes, because I don’t think I’m such a bad guy.  Admittedly, I’m no leading man like Tom Hanks or Burt Reynolds, but you can do a lot worse than me—I ain’t no Quasimodo or Peter Griffin either…

My first real girlfriend was a co-worker at my old restaurant gig named Lisa in the fall of 1984.  Lisa and I probably would never have actually dated at all if it hadn’t been for my little personal mandate (or a MAN-date, if you will) to lose my virginity before I turned 21 the following June.  It seems so silly now, but I think it had a lot to do with me watching one too many teen sex farce movies like Porky’s and Private School, et al, on Cinemax and Showtime during that era, thus it seemed like an appropriate rite of passage to me at the time.  Anyway, I resisted Lisa for the longest time because I wasn’t all that attracted to her—she was semi-cute at best, with short curly brown hair and freckles, but her height and weight were in nice proportion and she did have nice legs and a cute tush.  I eventually relented and asked her out when a couple meddling co-worker gals kept trying to play matchmaker for us, even though we had precious little in common.  A nice enough person, Lisa was, but not exactly the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree of life and not terribly ambitious, either.  Sadly, something tells me to this day she’s still waiting tables somewhere at an IHOP or a Denny’s.  In spite of all that, we had a few enjoyable—if not slightly awkward—dates, and within a month or two, we got pretty good at kissing and fondling and fondling and kissing.  More succinctly, to use the traditional baseball analogy, by Thanksgiving of ’84, I had a HUGE lead off second base…

Lisa’s 21st birthday was in early December, as was my last final exam at UMKC, so we went out to “celebrate” with some college classmates at a UMKC bar hangout (when underage drinking wasn‘t policed very well), and she offered to help me lose my virginity later that night.  Unfortunately, the beer I’d consumed earlier (which wasn’t a whole lot, by my standards) rendered me—how shall I put it?—sluggish, therefore it was a no-go.  As checkered as my love-life is, it seems only fitting that I couldn’t get it up the first time and had to take a rain check.  I waited an additional three weeks to finally “pop my cherry” on Christmas Eve, 1984, and even then, the whole experience wasn’t all that earth-shattering to me.  What’s worse, I was scared shitless for about a month afterward that I’d gotten Lisa pregnant, even though at the time she was taking birth patrol pills (as A. Bunker would call them).  My paranoia about fatherhood aside, I knew deep down inside that something was missing—I just wasn’t all that attracted to this girl!  Lisa was a good person, to be sure, but we shared no cerebral connection at all and had very few common interests.  A good analogy is I was Hard Rock and she was Country (i.e., a bad mix), which made the Kiss concert I took Lisa to a fairly miserable experience for her, and I felt badly afterwards.  Anyway, the whole relationship felt really hollow to me—what good was the physical relationship without some sort of emotional connection?  What’s worse, it had gotten to the point where the meddling matchmaker gals at work (Hilda and Zelda, if you will) were more interested in our torrid little affair than either Lisa or I was, and it had become a sideshow.

Now here’s the REAL kick in the head:  during that time, Lisa was in the process of moving out of her parents’ house into her own apartment not far from our workplace, so I could’ve pretty much had sex with her just about any night of the week if I wanted to, but by the time she got settled in, I was already backing away from her and I never even set foot in her new place.  The thing I’m least proud of is that I never actually had the balls to officially break up with Lisa—I just kinda became distant and drifted away and avoided her for a few weeks and was pretty relieved when she changed jobs a couple months later.  To be brutally honest, I was like a drunk at the wheel of a stolen car with Lisa—I didn’t have a freakin’ clue what I doing with her from start-to-finish.  Like the Bob Seger lyric goes, “I used her, she used me—neither one cared.”  Lisa, if you’re out there reading this, what can I say?  I should’ve been more of a man and handled things better than I did, and I apologize—you at least deserved better than to just be blown off like that.

And little did I know on that Christmas Eve of ‘84 that I would have to wait another 14-and-a-half years before having true sexual intercourse with another woman.  In some strange way, it was kinda worth the wait, though…

The remainder of the ‘80s was mostly dead-ends and disappointments for me with women.  I at least took a stab or two at asking girls out at school as well as an office girl at the first radio station I worked at, but met with the usual indifference I’d so often encountered with women.  To my chagrin, even having front-row Kansas City Comets season tickets at Kemper Arena and my connection to the radio station weren’t sufficient-enough calling cards/chick magnet assets.  By the time my radio career crapped out in 1989 and I was forced to get a real job at a major downtown KC bank, I’d pretty much given up trying to find a woman and didn’t really care anymore.  I actually started buying into the lyric in the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer”:  “I thought love was only true in fairy tales—meant for someone else and not for me.”

I finally hit bottom one day circa. late 1990 while attending an optional class sponsored by my employer about stress in and out of the workplace and how to relieve it during which we had to answer a questionnaire.  I could only respond to “Do you feel anxiety in your sex life?” with “WHAT sex life?!?”  Instead of relieving my stress, the bloody class only added to my misery, because I walked away feeling so depressed at being left-out of the whole dating/mating game milieu.  Thankfully, long about that time, a savior of sorts came into my life—a beautiful co-worker named Susan.  She was a transplant from the Springfield, MO area in her mid-‘20s with the prettiest big blue eyes I’d ever seen, the cutest curly brown hair and a warm, friendly smile and sweet, nurturing personality.  Astoundingly, she even loved Hard Rock music just like me!  She had two children from a previous marriage and was spoken-for again with a new boyfriend (who was kind of a schmuck), so I never tried to pursue her romantically (believe me, I wanted to!), but I credit Susan as much as anyone for inspiring me to get off my duff to do something about my flat-lining love/social life because she was very sympathetic and supportive of me.  If nothing else, she gave me something to shoot for again, because apart from having kids and disliking sports, she was the template in so many ways of my ideal significant other in terms of looks, personality and intellect.  Sadly, Susan is no longer with us, as she and her two children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a freak house fire in early, 1995 (on her 30th birthday, no less).  I still think about her a lot to this day, and ironically, the first and only time Susan and I ever hugged each other turned out to be one of the last times I ever saw her alive.

Somewhere along the line while getting to know Susan, a voice inside my feeble brain said, “Hey, dumbass—why NOT you?  You see all these assholes out there who date nice women like Susan, doncha?  Surely, a decent guy like you could score with SOMEONE out there…”  At that point, I ratcheted up my efforts to get out of the penalty box of love and back on the ice and went into “Gotta find a woman!  Gotta find a woman!  Gotta find a woman!” mode—with very mixed results for the first couple years, anyway.  However, one positive right off the bat was when I finally woke up and realized that my outward appearance needed a major overhaul.  One of the first things I did was get my hair cut by a professional barber chick after decades (not years) of avoiding haircuts like Ricky Martin CDs because of the hatchet-jobs my old man used to do on me when I was a kid.  That act alone got people’s attention, esp. women folk! I got a much-needed confidence boost in the elevator lobby at work one day when one of the pretty (married) teller gals started chatting with me and said, “You got your hair cut—I love it!”  Then I set about to lose a few pounds, and by the summer of ’92, I got on a major roll and went from 260-plus pounds down to 190! With this weight loss came a major improvement in my wardrobe as well.  It also helped immensely when I transferred departments and began working for my good friend Phil, who was sympathetic to my cause and took me under his wing and taught me a few things about how to deal with women of the opposite sex, not unlike how Hawkeye counseled Radar on “MASH”.  As I mentioned in Part II, small-talk has always been a stumbling block for me, so one thing I learned from Phil early on was how to actually carry on a conversation with a woman about just plain “stuff” like the weather and such instead of going straight to “Ya wanna date?”  Okay, bad analogy, but you get the idea.  It was still far from smooth-sailing yet, though—I figured I’d just wave my magic wand and the women would come a-runnin’, but I quickly learned it didn’t quite work that way.

I did get fairly chummy with a kinda plain-Jane co-worker girl named Judy who I thought was pretty nice and seemed date-able at the time.  I lowered my “standards” a bit since she was a smoker (one of my big no-no’s).  She was a transplant from New Yawk, but was devoid of any Big Apple accent (or attitude), so at least we had a conversation piece there.  We had a few nice lunch dates and I even got a little touchy-feely with her (hug-wise), but for whatever reason, she failed to interpret my overtures that I was interested in dating her, even though as Phil advised me at the time, “Women sense that very easily and it usually scares them off—most women can read that shit from a mile away.”  How Judy failed to read my rather obvious signals is beyond me, and she also neglected to tell me that she was seeing some other guy at the time.  It was very awkward when I confronted her about that, and she was all apologetic, but the damage was done and I was very distant with her for the longest time afterwards—whether I had the right to be or not.  Judy did admit to me a couple years later that she regretted not going out with me at that time, as it turned out the other guy was a real creep (which I confirmed the one time I met him), so that was some consolation, anyway.  I fully admit I didn’t handle that situation very well—attribute it to sheer inexperience on my part—and I learned a valuable lesson about what a dicey proposition dating a co-worker can be, and I’ve made it my policy not to pursue any since—with one exception.

When I changed departments at the bank in 1992 and started working with Phil, it opened a new world for me in terms of meeting women, not only because he knew practically everyone in the company (single gals in particular) but also because he played in a band (he’s a drummer), which lent itself to having lots of contact with women, and we got out quite a bit on weekends back then.  Long about that time, a cute singer girl from another band named Holly started working as a temp. on the floor right above us, and we came in contact with each other quite a bit.  She had a voice similar to Natalie Merchant’s, and Phil and I attended a few of her band’s gigs and I took quite a shine to her.  After a while, I finally was able to get her all to myself for an evening when I took her to a Blades hockey game—not really a date, per se, but as friends—and the evening went better than I could’ve imagined.  After the game, we stopped off at one of those beatnik-type coffee houses that were all the rage at the time in the pre-Starbuck’s era, even though I can’t stand coffee.  I still had a wonderful time as Holly and I sat and just talked for the longest time—well over three hours—about our lives, work stuff and life in general.  I had never connected with a woman so thoroughly like that before, and this turned out to be one of the better dates I ever had with a woman, albeit with hardly any physical contact apart from a goodnight hug and kiss.  I really thought I was onto something here, but even though we’d really gotten to know each other, I was never able to get past the friendship stage with Holly.  It took me a while to figure out that even if she liked you, she tended to keep everyone at arm’s length and wouldn’t let anyone get real close to her.  She’s the kind of person who has lots of acquaintances, but very few people who you’d call really close friends, so that was as far as I got with her.  Too bad, because she was a really sweet person, and if you’re out there reading this, Holly, I hope you’re doing alright now.  Phil thought you and I would make a really cute couple.  So did I…

In the early ‘90s/pre-Internet era, personals ads were very much en vogue, so I took my best shot at finding a woman via that avenue.  It didn’t dawn on me right away that the majority of personals ads are fake, or that the respondents to them are merely shills for the publication they’re listed in, but I did manage to get a few nibbles here and there.  One big mistake I made was once I established contact with someone, I would write these long-ass letters detailing everything I was looking for in a relationship and my turn-offs, turn-ons, et al—i.e., too much information.  I mean I specified height, weight, hair and eye color, stopping just short of bra size and tax bracket!  Anyway, one respondent whom I politely passed on was apparently desperate to get knocked-up, and offered to let me impregnate her with no strings attached—yikes!  Another respondent seemed a lot more promising, a redheaded school teacher named Teresa who wasn’t unattractive—sort of a plainer Sarah Ferguson (I don’t mean that in a bad way)—and our correspondence resulted in two actual dates.  We did a comedy club on the first outing, which was fun, and for the second date, I took her to a Blades game, during which I got the impression that I was boring her to death.  But when we stopped after the game for a bite, it suddenly dawned on me that she wasn’t exactly the most scintillating company either.  I thought to myself, “Who’s boring WHO here?”, and I realized we really weren’t hitting it off.  Too bad, because she wasn’t bad-looking, and even as hungry as I was for a girlfriend then (not to mention my attraction to redheads), I had sense enough to know we just weren’t a good fit, and we never saw each other again.

There was one other gal I met via a personals ad, but we only went out once.  She was a hairdresser about 25-ish, and we seemed to hit it off rather well, liked the same kind of music and TV shows, etc., and it didn’t even faze me that she had a deformity on her right hand (a birth defect, she explained).  Hell, I even got to meet her mother on our one and only date!  But I guess I got a little over-anxious about seeing her again when I broached the subject of a second date, and she more or less blew me off by saying she wanted to “keep her options open” and wasn’t looking to seriously date anyone then.  I soooo wanted to reply “Then why did you place a personals ad in the first place and why are you wasting my time here?” but I remained a gentleman.  Thanks for nothing, sweetheart!  That experience soured me enough that I gave up on personals ads for good after that.

In a heroic attempt to help re-ignite my Mojo, my good friend/boss man Phil even took me to a gentleman’s club or two during 1992-93.  We once hopped in my car with a couple other guys and drove to the new Million Dollar Fantasy Ranch 40 miles away in Warrensburg, which was a juice bar where you could actually touch the merchandise.  During my $20 lap dance, I got lucky with a really cute brunette named Lori who was hotter than a snake’s ass in a wagon rut, and Phil told me later he was impressed with my handling of the female torso, so that gave me some confidence.  I really appreciated the effort on Phil’s part, and I do realize it ain’t every day that one’s boss takes his employee to titty bars, but it was only semi-satisfying for me, at best.  Yes, the girls were very hot and sexy and all, but you don’t feed a starving dog a rubber bone!  I even toyed with the idea of frequenting an escort service several times, especially during my 1994 vacation to Toronto (where prostitution is legal), but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Not to criticize anyone who frequents juice/topless bars or patronizes prostitutes—if that’s your scene, who am I to judge?—but, what does it say about me if the only way I can have sex with someone is to have to pay (lots of) money for it?  I guess I’m a little old-fashioned here—I’ve always felt that sex is more meaningful when you earn it instead of buying it.

Fortunately, my long dry spell was about to end...

(Don't Fear) The Blogger

Nothing certain but death and taxes, you say?  Well, there's plenty of both to go around this week...

HARRY KALAS, 1936-2009
Very sad day in baseball yesterday with two major passings.  Veteran Philadelphia Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas died in Washington as he was preparing for the Phils’ game at the Nationals’ home park.  Kalas was to Philadelphia what Jack Buck was to St. Louis and Ernie Harwell was to Detroit, and was also known nationally as one of the narrators for NFL Films (more or less succeeding the late John “Voice of God” Facenda) and HBO’s “Inside The NFL” program, as well as the voice of numerous Chunky Soup TV ads.  He had a rather slow, deliberate play-by-play delivery style and was known for his trademark “outta here” home run call.  Unfortunately, “outta here” has a sadder connotation for Harry now…

MARK FIDRYCH, 1954-2009
Long about the same time that Harry Kalas left us, former Major League pheenom pitching sensation Mark “The Bird” Fidrych flew on as well in Massachusetts, evidently the result of some sort of accident involving a dump truck he was working on.  The Bird was the Word in the summer of ’76 with his quirky behavior on and around the pitcher’s mound as he earned American League Rookie Of The Year honors with his 19-9 record and even started the All-Star game for the A.L.  This was back in the days when ABC aired “Monday Night Baseball”, and their ratings went through the roof on the nights when The Bird was on the mound.  Injuries to his knee and shoulder derailed what was a promising career, and although Fidrych’s goofy antics gave the impression that he was a couple fries shy of a Happy Meal, everything I’ve heard and read about him indicates that he was a really down-to-earth guy.  Done too soon, both in his career and his life.

MARILYN CHAMBERS, 1952-2009
The Grim Reaper was busy this week, as semi-infamous porn star Marilyn Chambers died over the weekend of unknown causes.  Don’t mean to speak poorly of the dead, but I never quite got why she was so popular.  I remember seeing several of her more soft-core stuff on Skinemax back in the ‘80s and found her to be awfully plain-Jane for a porn star.  Whatever worked, I guess…

ROCKY HILL, 1946-2009
Here’s one more recent passing worth mentioning, although you may not know the name.  You probably know Rocky Hill’s younger brother Joe, better known as Dusty Hill of Z.Z. Top.  Rocky was a guitarist and singer in a band with Dusty and drummer Frank Beard called American Blues before the latter two hooked up with Rev. Billy Gibbons and formed that Little Ol’ Band From Texas.  R.I.P. one and all…

DANCIN’ TO THE JAILHOUSE ROCK?
Speaking of someone a few fries shy of a Happy Meal, legendary producer Phil/Phyllis Spector appears on his way “outta here” after being convicted yesterday in his re-trial for the murder of singer Lana Clarkson in 2003.  This man was once a brilliant music producer—just one listen to the Righteous Bros.’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” or “For Once In My Life” bears that out—but he’s always been a strange duck.  He basically imprisoned his ex-wife, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, in her own home for years because of his raging paranoia that she would cheat on him with someone else.  Who woulda blamed her if she did?

One thing I’ll never get about legal-eze, though:  in addition to the murder charge, they also convicted Spector for “using a firearm to commit a crime”.  Uhhh, isn’t that kinda redundant?  Who gives a rip about the firearm?  Seems like the murder charge would render that part irrelevant.  As A. Bunker once said, “Let’s hear it for the legal profession, Little Girl…[Bronx cheer].”

D.V.D. ON DVD
As part of my ongoing effort to mine the past for good TV viewing in light of the putrid offerings on the networks and cable today, I started in last week on the “Dick Van Dyke Show” on DVD.  I’m fairly impressed with the care and effort that went into the first season set, which includes numerous bonus features, including trivia questions and recollections from D.V.D. himself, along with Mary Tyler Moore.  The plots and situations are a bit dated nearly 50 years hence, but this show is considered by many as the “perfect” TV sitcom.  I tend to disagree with that assessment to a degree, but it is indeed a classic, and it was a pretty good template for subsequent shows to follow.  Here are just a few observations on what I’ve seen so far:

• It seems odd that in the early episodes, the producers couldn’t decide whether to call MTM’s character “Laura” or “Laurie”.  They eventually settled on “Laura”, of course.
• Not trying to be mean here, but did Rose Marie ever NOT look old to you?  She was in her late ‘30s when the show debuted, but she could’ve easily passed for 55 even then…
• It took me a minute or two to recognize a young Jamie Farr, in his recurring role as a smart-alecky deli delivery boy on several episodes.  The voice registered at first, but it wasn't until he turned his head sideways and I saw his famous schnozz that I realized who it was!
• I coulda done without the kid that played Richie, the Petrie’s only son.  He wasn’t much of an actor—just a little kid reciting lines like it was a school assembly or something.

BE AFRAID—BE VERY AFRAID!
Just to show how little I’ve been paying attention lately, I was unaware that TV pundit Glenn “Chicken Little” Beck had jumped ship from CNN to Fox News Channel, which seems to be a much more appropriate home for all his The-Sky-Is-Falling histrionics.  My good friend Tom, a staunch Republican, once urged me to watch the Big G, but I’m sorry, dude—you got to do better than some wanker who has all the credibility of Jerry Springer.  There was a write-up on Beck in last week’s Slime—er uh, Time—magazine by James Poniewozik in which he opined, “Some TV observers (like me) wondered if Fox’s commentators could thrive in an Obama era.  The answer is yes, and how…”  That may be true, JP, but that doesn’t make it right when some fear-mongering ratings whore like Beck starts crying like Johnny Fontane in front of Vito Corleone in The Godfather, proclaiming, “I’m sorry.  I just love my country.  And I fear for it.”  Well, Glen, as Vito said to Johnny, “You can ACT LIKE A MAN!”  Beck’s hackneyed effort to tug at our collective heartstrings and prey upon ignorant viewer’s irrational fears and hang-ups with all his doomsday prophecies almost makes Pat Robertson look legitimate by way of comparison.  I was so pleased to see our good friend Steven Colbert do a mighty fine job a few weeks back on Comedy Central of slaying this faux dragon…

Then again, I long ago gave up wasting my time on the prime-time crap (Beck, O’Reilly, Nancy Grace, Hannity, Van Susterererereren, et al) these networks try to pass off as “news” because it’s nothing but Sensationalism, 101.  In the words of Phil Collins, "I got better things to do with my time—I don't care anymore…"

PUCKIN’ A!
Here we are again on the eve of the Stanley Cup playoffs and now’s when the fun really begins.  I like the field of teams this year, especially in the Western Conference with the first postseason appearance by the expansion Columbus Blue Jackets, as well as the return of a couple teams who’ve been missing from the Big Dance for a few years, the St. Louis Blues and Chicago Blackhawks.  I say watch for a San Jose Sharks-New Jersey Devils Stanley Cup finals in late, May.

Meantime, word came down yesterday that the proposed Central Hockey League franchise for the new 5,800-seat arena going up in nearby Independence is a done-deal and will begin play in November.  I still have my doubts whether this little arena will fly or not, success-wise, but it’s not far from where I live and supposedly, one won’t have to pay more than $20 a ticket for the as-yet unnamed team.  I presume they won’t pay tribute to Blazing Saddles and name them the Kansas City “Faggots”…