Jean Shepherd wrote years ago, in “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash”, about how we see newsreel footage of tribal customs, folkways and local celebrations and rites from all over the world, and find them alternately quaint, charming, revolting or mystifying.
Shep went on to say how a turnabout might be interesting, to have villagers from some remote “backward” civilization (meaning: no Panera, no cable, limited access to all the great advances of American society) see footage depicting Western courtship rituals. You know the story - nervous young man drapes necktie around neck to Make A Good Impression On The Parents, and we're off to the dance.
I think about Shep whenever I see a story like this come across the wires:
NEW YORK -- Police say a Wal-Mart worker has died after being trampled by a throng of unruly shoppers shortly after the Long Island store opened Friday.
Nassau County police say the 34-year-old worker was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead at about 6 a.m., an hour after the store opened. The cause of death was not immediately known.
A police statement says a throng of shoppers "physically broke down the doors, knocking him to the ground." Police also say a 28-year-old pregnant woman was taken to a hospital for observation.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in Bentonville, Ark., would not confirm the reports of a stampede during the day-after-Thanksgiving bargain hunting, but said a "medical emergency" caused them to close the store.
Now I mean, really, people. Fact is, I remember when they opened the WalMart near us about a dozen years ago, and I had just gotten to work at 6 AM the day after Thanksgiving that November when the store manager called 911 to report that the mob thronging outside his store was coming close to breaking down windows and doors in an effort to lay their hands on the merchandise that they simply HAD to have that Christmas. I’m guessing they had their hearts set on Hanson CDs, VHS tapes of Rainman and Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing fish all mounted for display.
Anyway, it was rather harrowing to hear pure undiluted fear in that guy’s voice. He lowered his volume, apparently hoping that the doorbangers would then lower theirs, but the only effect was the creation of an eerie, portentous telephone sound. He said he saw the front windows actually “breathing” in and out as the crowd surged. We wound up suggesting that he simply open the doors a few minutes early, rather than let the crowd break them down.
But look at the news story. Have we really become a nation in which people are so fervid to demonstrate their love for their deity that they will trample store personnel while purchasing gifts to hand out in celebration of the deity’s arrival date?
Turn that around, as Shepherd did, and wonder if we told the story to the inhabitants of the most remote village on earth –a village so remote that their coupons expire before they ever get chance to get to Sears, a village so far away that radio signals announcing Lindbergh’s safe arrival are just getting to them, a place so distant that they don’t have a Home Depot because there was no store to go to for the building supplies to build one – and ask yourself if even those benighted denizens of Faroffia would wonder what the hell we are doing over here.
passed away last week, aged 14. Of course, since I relate to virtually event life event through a Simpsons vignette, I recall how Bart came to be the human companion for his ex-greyhound racer named Santa's Little Helper. 
SLH is not exactly Einstein in fur. But, my buddy's buddy Buddy was one of those canine companions who did more than sit around the front porch like the hound on Hee-Haw. Turns out that Buddy was a dog who would go with Jimbo to nursing homes to cheer the lame and halt, the dispirited, the lonely. Previously, Buddy had gone as a pet therapy dog, and had done a lot of good for people in need of psychotherapy. I guess that Buddy approached all these duties with dogged devotion, I dunno.
is suddenly He-Or-She-Who-Is-Not-Spoken-To. People avoid their desk, cubicle or booth like the Olsen Twins avoid mashed potatoes. Waiting for their furniture to be moved, the deposed one finds great interest in counting just how many paper clips come in a box, or working online Sudoku puzzles. It's crappy, it's unfair, but it happens.
after halftime, in order to let a second-year guy who was REALLY inept wing the old pigskin around, most often to Ravens.
and stood there working on that.
and that Adam Levine guy from Maroon 5 
. 
on the CNN early morning news has been doing for the last several days. I don't know that I want to take my news from a man on tv without a tie. Even in the days when our local news had a guy do the weather, sponsored by a chain of gas stations, he wore the complete gas station dress outfit - including a leather bow tie.
to which Bart's teacher, Ms Krabapple, says:
Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield
It happened a little early this year, and the old-timers sat and shook their shaggy heads and thought of seasons past, times remembered.
There was a time when it always came into our lives by Veterans’ Day, and we accepted our fates, trudging along back to our meager huts in the lengthening shadows. Just as back-to-school pants purchased for adolescents in August are ankle-revealers by November, we accepted the inevitable. When it came, mothers held the young ones just a little tighter, and fathers donned the extra apparel required and headed out to face the enemy, the little muscles in their jaws rippling as they girded their loins.
And heaven knows we can’t have an ungirded loin around here, can we now?
Times changed and we grew up, and it seemed as though the seasons changed with us. Oh, we had joy, and we had fun, and we had seasons in the sun, just like in the song, only not quite so carefree, because we always had one eye looking over our shoulder and the other tuned to channel 62.
The Weather Channel.
Soundgarden did that song called “Black Hole Sun.”
We are speaking of White Hell Snow, as Baltimore regards it.
We have a curious relationship with snow. Why, just the other day, I was watching a televised football match from Pittsburgh, a gritty industrial city hard by a river, and there was snow coming down on the fans and the players alike, and yet there was no sign of people leaving the stadium once the first flakes wafted earthward. Here in Charm City, why, we have our tv news reporters standing alongside all major highways and atop key bridges (bad pun alert!) the day BEFORE snow might begin falling; I guess this is to give us a baseline measurement of non-snow-clogged traffic, against which to gauge the next day.
Of course, traffic reports on television news are only good if you happen to be driving a car while watching television, and if that’s the case, you’re probably going to be ON the traffic report before too long.
Yesterday, we had some snowflakes fall on us, and one could hear the cry, the muttering, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth (is there anything else gnashable besides teeth?) that rings throughout our town all winter long: B.M.T!
BMT can mean so many things elsewhere – Behavior Management Therapy, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, Bilateral Myringotomy Tympanostomy (heaven forbid!), Big Mothereffin’ Truck (again!) –but here, it’s sort of a code, meaning "got to get down to the Try ‘N’ Save and stock up on BREAD, MILK and TOILET PAPER!"
According to local lore, back in the day, a sudden snowstorm came along and no one was able to get out to the U-Bag-It for days and days. Children were forced to eat peanut butter and jelly right out of the jar and drink Hi-C Orange, Almond Smash, NeHi Grape and other revolting soda pops, resulting in a collective sugar high that was not resolved until the good people at Boone’s Farm brought their fruit-flavored goodness along.
And as for TP – well, they had the Mongomery Wards catalog back then. I don’t know what we’d use now. I mean, Sunday and Thursday we have the Examiner, but that leaves five days a week…Better head to the Pay-No-More.
a crew member on the International Space Station, and so, they can even be female! Holy rocketships! Next they'll want to vote...drive cars...own property... It is a pleasure to welcome a new member to the inept fix-it-club. I earned my stripes for chewing up the extension cord for my hedge trimmer. I used the hedge trimmer to do it, which is sort of like biting yourself in the elbow. Ms Stefanyshyn-Piper had the lousy luck to step outside the ISS and try to use her tool kit to clean out a gummed-up joint. Once out there, tethered to the spacecraft, high above the heavens, a good twenty miles from the nearest Panera, she discovered that her grease gun, inside her tool bag, had schqueeeezed out all over the place. She tried to clean up the mess. As she did, the tool bag left her hand. Had this taken place here on terra firma, the tool bag would have landed on the kitchen floor, or wherever. But this is outer space, so the tool bag and all the tools left her to go on a weightless trip into outer space. Who knows - maybe they'll clomp some Martian right on the melon or something! But I can totally see myself doing that! In or out of outer space!
And don't even think of telling me that The Simpsons didn't foresee all this, in their 1994 episode "Deep Space Homer." 
That's the one in which Homer confuses President Zachary "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor 
with old lazy singer James "Old Lazy Singer" Taylor 
. But why couldn't they have predicted flying tools in outer space? Truth really is funnier than fiction.
had an idea when he wrote this one, didn't he? In three quatrains and a couplet, he describes a world we don't know - a world in which nature starts acting nutty - the way people do! 
CD for Peggy. She reported this morning, with no small amount of exasperation, that her car’s CD player spit the CD out every time she tried to insert it.
- Justice William O. Douglas
Got home last night and watched the local news, and there was a rally downtown against California's passage of Proposition 8, which seeks to end gay marriage. This being 3,000 miles from California, it must be that people are realizing that a threat to their freedom from far away can become much closer if action is not taken. Much as I love several people in California, we must remember that many people out there thought that sending Sonny Bono 
to the US Congress was also a good idea.
One of the rally participants was a woman I used to work with, who has been with her partner for years and years. They are as solid a couple as any I have known, and they ought to have the right to live legally as a married couple, enjoying all the rights and privileges appertaining thereunto. Lee and Michele went to Vermont and were married (or participated in a civil union, whatever the term is legally) when that state realized that people had the right to choose whom to pair up with.
I care so much about this topic that I am not even going to try to noodle out how to end the preceding sentence without a preposition at the end. Hell, I might even split an infinitive when I really get to frantically type about this.
See what I made me do?
I know that you can find in the Bible a passage about it being an abomination for a man to lie with a man. While you're thumbing through your copy to find that verse, I'll show you the one about Thou Shalt Not Kill, and ask if you supported this Iraqi genocide, and then we'll lose sight of the original argument.
There are people who believe that a woman could be president of the United States, but can't be the preacher down at the little church on the corner, because the Bible tells that men are in charge of everything, and woman shall cleave unto a man, and where does all this cleaving leave us?
because she represents that narrow-minded stoniness that has kept so many people so miserable for so many years. But she has the right to her own opinions and actions, and what's it to me where she goes to church or how she raises her kids or how many times she trots out that tired old "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" line? It's only when people wish to take their opinions and be sworn into public office with an agenda of suppression that I have to raise my hand.
You know I love that good old classic country music...like Faron Young's song from 1960 "A World So Full of Love (With Not Enough To Go Around)." It could be a world full of love for everyone who wants some love, if we could just learn to let people love whom they wish.
Oh no! cry the nay-sayers! We don't care if they're together, y'unnerstan', but they can't get married because, well, a marriage is between one man and one woman. Or, between David Duchovny and a veritable phalanx of arousal sources, or between Madonna and her next one, or Britney Spears in some Vegas Hillbilly high school boyfriend hotel weekend package marriage. How many straights hide behind marriage to cover infidelity, spousal assault and other forms of abuse, and who's calling them out on that?
Think of it this way - why should two people who commit to each other not be able to cover one another under insurance, sign for each other's surgery in a hospital, and have other family values just because they don't happen to be of opposite genders?
Think of this, too, when you watch Humphrey Bogart valiantly struggle against both juvenile crime and excess sibilance in "Knock On Any Door" - drive down the street in your neighborhood - or yours - or yours - and what do you think is going on behind closed doors? You don't know, because the people behind those doors have a right to privacy. As Oscar Wilde said it, as long as they aren't scaring the horses in the street, who cares who does what with their lover?
If you really have the time to worry about someone else's sex life, I say you have time that you could use elsewhere. Go volunteer someplace and quit worrying about others.
on Labor Day, but the little handful of cuteness that you see pictured below, greatniece Isabella, arrived here the first Monday of this past September and upstaged the great comic without so much as one "Hey Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaady!"
..how tall are you, anyway? (6' 5")
..have you really been happily married for 35 years? (as Paul Harvey would say, on our way to together forever!)
..why do you wear shorts in the winter? (my legs do not get cold.)
..what's the matter with you, you think you're such a wise guy? (mild neurosis, a smattering of OCD, an unfettered sense of humor)
...where do you come up with the stories you spin on this blog?
To that one, I can only reply that, unlike the fables of Larry King, my stories are true. It still cheeses me quite a bit to know that the stories that King used to ramble on with, on his overnight radio show, were 99% balloon oil. For instance, the Carvel ice cream story, the one that he would tell only by special request for some insomniac calling from Dubuque, features a long trip to get ice cream for some rough 'n' ready Brooklyn boys, one of whom is supposed to be Sanford "Sandy" Koufax , but is not. Maybe Larry thought that "Sonny" Koufax from "Big Daddy" was in that car with him, except that "Big Daddy" didn't come out until 1999, by which time Larry was busy hauling his 8th wife (if you're scoring at home, and you have to wonder if Larry is) off to a much nicer ice cream place. What could be sadder than claiming to be friends with someone who later says he never even met you? Next time we have the Cheneys over dinner, Dick and I will discuss this at length.
Ahem. I will now tell the absolutely true New York story, which concerns my friend named John.
Come back with me to the early 1960's, when the New York Giants football team actually played in New York. My buddy and his date and another couple went up to Fun City to see the Colts play the Giants.
After the game, they all went to "21" or some other such hoity-toity Manhattan hot spot for dinner. They went in and saw a thin guy leaning up against the maître d's station, wearing a tuxedo and smoking a cigarette in that languid fashion so popular among the ultra-cool.
(In my mind's eye, I have always seen this character being portrayed by Joseph Campanella.) 
So here they are, four Baltimore youngsters in the Big Town, looking for a Big Time, and the guys, having seen dozens of Adolphe Menjou films, know the surest way to get around a surly NY maître d' is to slip him a finsky. You know, a five-spot, a half a sawbuck. "My eyes start to blinkin' when I flash on some Lincoln," said Little Richard, and we can only pray that he was talking about the five-dollar bill, and not the 16th president.
So my buddy's buddy buddies up to the tux and backhands him a folded-up fiver.
The guy looks at the bill, sneeringly, pockets it, draws deeply on his Winston and exhales both smoke and words that, even now, echo through the ages:
"I don't work here, you stooopid baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaastid!"
And that's the way it was.
And of course, she labors under the additional handicap of having me one office away, meaning that she is often subjected to my bursts of song snippets (featuring tributes to Mario Lanza and Bob Dylan), lame jokes, arcane pop culture references*, tired limericks, oft-repeated anecdotes, half-witted rejoinders and donkey-like guffaws.
(* My former boss grew up in Philadelphia and his assistant coach in high school football was one Freddie Cocozza, who changed his name and soared to fame as Mario Lanza, the masculine form of his mother's maiden name, Maria Lanza. If Beth has heard this story once, she's heard it a thousand times! Which is how many times she has heard me sing the largo from "The Loveliest Night of the Year"!)
Among my favorite reading material, you'll find dozens of boxes of old LIFE magazines. I started collecting them maybe 20 years ago, and just like most things, I set up perimeters (such as the one forbidding me to use the word parameter except when describing an independent variable used to express the coordinates of a variable point and its functions) and so I don't collect any post-1969 copies. And, no Beatles albums past "Help!"
lived, along with their son Bart.
