Being a Mets fan is akin to watching a Warner Brothers Looney Tune Cartoon.

The reason I say this is because of this man:

 

Who constantly reminds me of this man: 

Even though the way he speaks reminds me of this man:

If you watch any of the Mets post game press conferences of the last few years there is no denying consistencies in mannerisms and vocal patterns.

The fact that Elmer Fudd is often befuddled and that Terry Collins many times too comes across the same way (with his mystifying in game pitching changes and the determination in structuring lineups featuring some of the most lackluster players on his roster) just ramps up the similarities on a myriad of levels.

There’s been noise this year about the Mets winning 90 games which I find just laughable.

And really that isn’t an appealing thought as a Mets fan but I have to say with the sampled data iof the last three years I simply don’t have much optimism.

Collins as a Mets manager has compiled records of 77/85 (’11), 74/88 (’12) and 74/88 (’13). And while apologists would point to a lack of talent on the teams that compiled those records, they would be overlooking that one team had the NL batting champ (’11 Jose Reyes), another had the CY Young winner (’12 RA Dickey) and the third had the NL steals leader (’13 Eric Young).

Nope, no seems to think there’s been talent on the Mets of late.

And for all the talk of the man as a great communicator... there has been one instance after another of players hiding injuries from the manager and coaches (I’m thinking about David Wright who has done it twice on Collins watch, Jeremy Hefner last year, Ike Davis and a couple of others whose specific details escape me at the moment).

Then there is playing Ike Davis over Josh Satin for much of last season. Or using Scott Rice until the guys arm practically fell off - 73 appearances!. Johan Santana stays in to pitch 134 pitches in a game to get a no-hitter and only pitches into the 8th inning once thereafter for the rest of the season.

90 wins?

I’m of the belief that Collins is not the manager to take this team to the playoffs and I was admittedly dumbfounded that he would be rewarded with an extension after such a lackluster performance over the last three years.

And really, I don’t want him managing this young pitching.

I don’t understand a lot of things that the Mets are doing these days... how Dave Hudgens still has a job after last season is amazing and then I wonder the same about Ricky Bones too seeing as how whatever was being relayed from the bullpen to the dugout showed some serious disconnect.

But what do I know?

I’m just a fan but if you’re going to make another season a Looney Tune at least close games out with That’s All Folks.

You obviously have a larger sense of yourself.

I’m always amazed by people’s behavior... or rather what I mean to say is that I am perpetually surprised by the ways that people can disappoint me.

Disappointment is a funny thing...

You put your trust in people and you try to keep an open mind and when things go off the rails it makes you want to shut yourself away (or at least that’s what it does to me). I think in some ways many of us are susceptible to this malady especially as the years rack up.

People come into and out of your orbit and the funny thing is once they pass out of your orbit they remain fixed in time, in your mind’s eye. This kind of picture perfect memory of them as people, their personalities both good and bad are frozen in place.

Memory though is a funny thing in that, it always paints a rosier picture of the world on a personal level. There is that nostalgia that can color the world of the past, that makes that place a prettier, nicer and more ideal locale than what it was.


Awhile back someone asked me to provide advice to their kid going into the graphics field. I hadn’t seen these people in over ten years either and over the last year or so I did what I could to help out and show interest. I did these things as much as you can do from a distance (which could be considered minimal at best).

But damned if it wasn’t placed in a weird light and something came to my attention recently that I found so reprehensible, so far over the top it put me in that place again where I want nothing to do with anyone.

And that’s the immediate thing but like any bad meal you just have to let your system process something and then sh*t it out and flush it away. And when I do think about it, I think of how incredibly immature the whole thing I saw was, I realize there really is no point in being drawn in any further into that crazy orbit. As much as you want people to stay fixed in that ideal place, that’s not the way the world works.

And as the days pass I find I have little tolerance for this kind of childish nonsense, it only serves as a cautionary tale not so much to avoid trying to help others but to be more selective about those you deem worthy of giving a crap about.

Found this on the dating site I frequent.

No matter what you hear about men… this sums it up:

My self-summary
I will NOT have sex with you until:

A. At least ten dates have passed.
B. You have spent at least $10,000 on me.

Whichever comes first.

I’m looking for
    • Guys who like girls
    • Ages 22–48
    • Near me
    • Who are single
    • For new friends

If you put a price on it what does that make you?

Denial.

“If I’m gonna suck a dick, I’m gonna swallow or what’s the point of all the work” - Camas

Somewhere along the way in the last 20 or so years kids became perfect. I’m not a parent and so I wasn’t at the meeting that day but it was decided that children (at least in these United States) are simply incapable of doing anything wrong.

I experienced this myself in my own family much to my chagrin but it is something I have seen exhibit itself repeatedly over the last few years with alarming frequency. It has less to do with the children themselves and more to do with parents who cannot recognize the simple reality that they in fact may well and truly suck at their job (parenting).

I came across this article:

Disturbing Twitter account for Wash. state school district is alleged student confessional
 
Among the hundreds of Tweets showcased by ‘Clark County Fession’ are alleged admissions of drug use, on- and off-campus sex and sexual relations between high school students and teachers. The account has grown to more than 5,200 followers and more than 1,660 disturbing and extremely graphic tweets.

Is it surprising?

No, not really. Can any of us think back to our youth and not recognize how much we were in fact up to without out parents knowledge? Or maybe what we were up to with their tacit denial?

So, this kind of thing is not really news per se. What is interesting is the shock and outrage over something that indeed is emblematic of youth.

Maybe the lesson here is for today’s set of parents.

I was always more of a Bob Murphy fan myself.

I can’t say I’m really upset by this week’s new regarding the passing of Ralph Kiner. Even though I am very much a Mets fan, I never really loved what Kiner bought to broadcasting the game.

Bob Murphy?

Bob Murphy I miss more than you could know! The warm tones of Murphy’s voice along with little touches like ‘the happy recap’ made him one of those very much beloved voices I have listened to through the years:

Murphy’s broadcasts were known for his optimistic outlook. He would rarely be critical of players and would always strive to emphasize the positive. According to Gary Thorne, who was his partner in the Mets radio booth from 1985 to 1988, Murphy felt that, “the game was to be enjoyed and he sought out the joy in that day’s game to bring to the fans.”

Murphy, despite his long association with the Mets, never openly rooted for the team from the booth. Listeners knew that he was happier when the Mets won, as evidenced by his mention of a “happy recap” after a Mets win and a “recap” after a Mets loss, but he never referred to the Mets as “we” and, reflecting his love of the game, he would sound equally excited when a good play was made against the Mets as he would when the Mets made a similar play.

Kiner though does very much have a place in New York baseball lore and I can see that he very well could have given Phil Rizzuto (another personal favorite) a run for his money...

But along with his unparalleled in-game storytelling ability, Kiner’s broadcasting career will also be remembered for his numerous unintentionally comical malaprops. Among them:

• “All his saves have come in relief appearances.”
• “On Father’s Day, we again wish you all a Happy Birthday.”
• “The Mets have gotten their leadoff hitter on only once this inning.”
• “There’s a lot of heredity in that family.”
• “Now coming to bat for the Mets, Gary Cooper.”
• “We’ll be back after this word from Manufacturers Hangover.”
• “That's the great thing about baseball, you never know what’s going on.”

His most famous line, which was not a malaprop, regarded Philadelphia Phillies’ defensively gifted center fielder, Garry Maddox in which he said:

• “Two-thirds of the earth is covered by water. The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.”

Hilarious.

 

“(It) has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for many,” reads a Change.org petition asking for the artwork to vanish. 

“While it may appear humorous, or thought-provoking to some, the ‘Sleepwalker’ has already become a source of undue stress for many Wellesley College students,” the petition, started by junior Zoe Magid, adds.

 Yes, it is funny. It is only a statue but then again it can’t beat what someone brings to the table. And some of the comments on the story are very telling.

Follow up on the Mac post.

Just saw these two ads Apple produced.

While I have less of the emotional attachment I had to earlier hardware, I still milk every last drop out of any hardware I own (spoken while I am waiting for delivery of a new DVD drive I will install in my iMac and with my iPod waiting for me to put a new battery and hard drive in it), the first spot actual got me a little choked up because it underscored the innovation and wonder that I felt when I got my first computer.



In this second spot below at (8 seconds in) is a shot of the first Mac I ever touched, which I fooled around with while I was waiting for them to deliver my own machine (at the newspaper I was working at).

This is so very sad.

The cynic in me was reluctant in the days after 9-11 to buy much into the whole safer America thing. As a matter of fact I found a lot of the actions that were taken in terms of security a bit off-putting and ludicrous. To think that because of one idiot, millions have to remove their shoes before boarding an airplane just underscores the idiocy of these measures.

You know there was one guy who had explosives smuggled in his underwear but I imagine that the government realized people would have scoffed at having to strip off completely prior to boarding but when you think about the whole logic of having to take your shoes off you have to ask yourself given the reason why the TSA hasn’t taken that additional step.

The latest uproar is regarding the millions of requests the government has made to look into the account details of many online computer users. If there ever was an expectation of online anonymity this should well and truly dispel that notion.

Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google on Monday began publishing details about the number of secret government requests for data they receive, hoping to show limited involvement in controversial surveillance efforts.

The tech industry has pushed for greater transparency on government data requests, seeking to shake off concerns about their involvement in vast, surreptitious surveillance programs revealed last summer by former spy contractor Edward Snowden.

This is all bought to you under the auspices of living in a “safer” and “more secure” world but the sad truth is that individual freedoms are being surrendered up without so much as a peep.

And during the first half of last year, the U.S. government appeared to have a particular hunger for content from Yahoo accounts. The company fielded national security requests for content from 30,000 to 30,999 accounts between January and June of last year. That’s about twice as many as Microsoft, which came in at No. 2.

The question is whether or not there will be some kind of blowback in regard to this? I hardly envision myself as a government conspiracy nut or some kind of anarchist but I can’t help but think about that old saw about turning up the heat of the water in the pot when making a lobster – the shock to the system is less noticeable.

“This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario,” wrote the late William Safire of The New York Times in 2002, in the panicky aftermath of 9/11. “Here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive… will go into what the Defense Department describes as ‘a virtual, centralized grand database.’ ”

And the irony of course is that all of this stems from an administration that billed itself as a polar opposite from the previous administration.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The tool wothout which I would not have had a career.

You can divide the world in AC and BC. BC as in before (desktop) computers and then after (desktop) computers. While there are times I look at the computer warily, I cannot describe today to the attachment I felt for those first few computers I owned or used. They were more than machines and they opened up a world. So thank you Apple and thank you Bill (my old boss and good friend) who one day many years ago told me, “Peej, we’re going to get you a mac with a scanner and you’ll never have to go downstairs again to get them to set type for an ad.”

Coca Cola’s Secret Recipe!

 

I came across this today and thought it was too good not to share:

The public radio program This American Life has revealed what it believes is the original recipe for Coca-Cola.  The show found what appeared to be a copy of the famously guarded trade secret in a newspaper column published in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution on February 18, 1979.

Then they spoke with historian Mark Pendergrast, who had discovered what he believed was a version of Coca-Cola’s original formula decades before while doing research in the company’s own archives.  (He published that version of the recipe in his 1993 book on Coke.) The two recipes were essentially identical.  “This was an amazing discovery,” said host Ira Glass when he revealed the recipe on the weekly radio broadcast, “I got into this wondering if it might be possible that this super-secret recipe had been hiding in plain sight, in an old newspaper clipping, but once I learned it matched this recipe in Coke's own archives, written by the creator of Coke – it was hard not to get very excited.”

Hard to believe but if you want to take a shot at making it yourself, look here:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/427/original-recipe/recipe

But, don’t do it before listening to the show:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/427/original-recipe

Meanwhile!

Over in Peter’s neck of the woods, he has put up a set of posters with the header Wild, Wild Life.

Of course they look incredible - as does all of Pete’s work, check it out!

But seeing that title made me think of this:

To a Little Girl at Christmas

I didn’t get around to putting this up but I was doing some reading at the time and came across Westbrook Pegler. I think it was because of being annoyed at one particular Fox News commentator...

(How a famous question might be answered if it were asked today and Mr. Westbrook Pegler
happened to be writing editorials for the “Sun”)

You’re damn right there is a Santa Claus, Virginia. He lives down the road a piece from me, and my name for him is Comrade Jelly Belly, after a poem composed about him once by an admiring fellow-traveler now happily under the sod.

In a manner of speaking, this Jelly Belly is in the distributing end of the toy business, and I guess the story of how that came about has its points for the social historian. Mr. Claus is understandably a reticent man, but the facts would seem to be that he was born quite a while back in the Red Hook section under the appetizing monicker of Sammy Klein. His mother was employed in a celebrated bucket of blood known as the Haymarket, also in what you might call the distributing end, and his father was any one of a number of slick operators, though the weight of evidence would seem to point to Police Lieutenant Becker of fragrant memory. How his mother happened to name him Sammy Klein is not known to this deponent, but there is a suspicion that she got it off the front of a clothing store she was in the habit of looting. It is not my way to speak ill of the dead, Virginia, but you’d have to go a long way to find a scurvier pair than the two who spawned the tot we're discussing.

In his youth, Jelly Belly did a short stretch of military service with the Hudson Dusters and the Dead Rabbits, two pinko front organizations of the period, and then passed on to the less perilous profession of rolling lushes in the subway. According to surviving court records, an operative in this classification, variously known as Sid Kline, Saul (“Fingers”) Klem, and K. Stein, was arrested no less than thirty-seven times between 1908 and 1916, and stored in the poky for periods ranging from ninety days up. This was presumably Santa Claus.

So much, Virginia, for our hero’s boyhood. In 1917, as you probably remember, a sick college professor in the White House [you can click on it to enlarge the photo of President Woodrow Wilson at right—Ed.] ranted us into what he called a war to make the world safe for democracy, and Jelly Belly had one of the first numbers they pulled out of the bowl. This, however, was one rap he knew how to beat, and young Klein sat out World War I in a hospital for the criminally insane, having prudently assaulted a six-year-old girl on the very day his draft board invited him to call. He was pardoned in 1919 at the special request of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, whose name happened to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and who even then displayed a strong affinity for the unbalanced.

It was at this time that Jelly Belly changed his name to Santa Claus, partly to escape from his too vivacious past and partly because he had just become a full member of the Communist Party and needed an alias with a sanctimonious flavor. His affiliation with the toy business began soon after that. When F.D.R. sprung Jelly Belly, or Santa Claus, from the loonybin, he went to work for the New York Times as a bushwhacker in the circulation department, his job being to mess up delivery boys from the rival Herald. This was naturally an employment highly to his taste, but when one boy died as the result of his attentions, it seemed sagacious to move on. It was in this manner that he came to F. A. O. Schwarz, where they made him first a shipping clerk and then the driver of a truck. The rest of the story—the prearranged hijackings that proved profitable enough to set Santa Claus up in the toy business for himself, the deals with Henry Agard Wallace, Felix Frankfurter, and his old friend Roosevelt that permitted him to pick the taxpayer's pocket to the tune of about eighty million dollars a year—is too complicated and dirty for a lady of your tender years. The important fact is that there is a Santa Claus, Virginia—a fat old party, with nasty habits and a dirty white beard, who, for reasons best known to himself, likes to go around either wholly undressed or else in an ill-fitting red suit.


Today, Jelly Belly enjoys what is sometimes called the odor of sanctity, being generally regarded as a hell of a fellow by little children, soft-headed women, and the kind of deep thinkers who openly profess their opposition to the sterilization of all Communists. My own information is somewhat different. Jelly Belly gets around even more than Eleanor the Great, and I can't speak for his activities in other parts of the country. In my neighborhood, however, it is a matter of common knowledge that the burglary rate never fails to hit its peak at Christmas. No one has ever been caught for any of these misdemeanors, but the evidence in each case is always the same—a few shoddy toys in a stocking on the mantelpiece, and a mink coat or a pearl necklace missing from the hostess’s effects. One victim I know said she wouldn’t mind so much if the toys were any good, but they are just the cheap, tasteless junk that crooked labor unions have been turning out ever since the Great Brain decided to sell out his country to the lazy and incompetent.

I could go on for a long time telling you about Jelly Belly, Virginia. I could tell you, for instance, how the gross old slattern who passes herself off as his housekeeper would be described in less respectable pages than these by quite another word. Or I could tell you how he is a member of the Westchester Commuters Association, the National Association of Dahlia Growers, the Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and any number of other thinly disguised Communist organizations. Or I could even tell you with what drooling pleasure he beats his eight undersized reindeer, whose cruel whip sores I have seen with my own eyes. But these are probably not good things for a little girl to know. Youth is a time for innocent dreams and illusions, Virginia, and I don’t believe I could live comfortably with myself if I destroyed yours. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. There is old Jelly Belly.

And this...

Top 10 Most Shocking Music Myths

You’ll enjoy this...

Top 10 mondegreens in pop music...

127158!

Hits!

Amazing isn’t it? This year, I got a total as of today of 127,158 views on something(s) I wrote. I can’t go into detail about the wheres or the when of it but I have to admit I am simply amazed by that number. And if I told you it was effortless, that I did it without any work other than the writing itself I would imagine it would be hard to believe but it’s true.

Now, to translate those kinds of numbers into other work... there’s the rub.

At some point over the next few days, if I can motivate myself to do it, I ’ll try to get around to some kind of annual overview on my very neglected blog.

I can say I am glad to see 2013 moving to the point of being in the mirror because there is no doubt it has truly ranked up there as one of the top ten in suck all years.

But that’s for the round up... right now I’m eagerly looking forward to 2014 and better days ahead!

The next big Marvel Comics Crossover Event for 2014

News scoop!

Through discrete back avenues and sources I can’t share, someone has leaked to me the next major event in the Marvel Universe.

Although I stopped trekking down to the comics store for the weekly fix a bunch of years gone now, I manage to still satisfy my Comics Jones thanks to my local library and I have to profess by being just gobsmacked by what has been going on in comics since I pushed back from the table.

Anyway, I was talking to someone involved in the industry about it and he clued me in to the next big Marvel Crossover about to hit the stands in the coming year.

You know there are a couple of big events on the horizon... Marvel Comics Infinity is one and Marvel Comics Inhumanity is another this event is the one scheduled to follow those two.

Ready?

Scroll down to see it:

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V

Marvel’s Next big event is going to be:

Marvel Comics

STUPIDITY!

Named such because Marvel has come to realize there are a slew of you idiots in fandom who are only to anxious to be separated from your money and not to worry because after they’ve made a complete and utter mess of those characters you’ve grown to love they’ll simply reboot everything with a story that says everything that has gone before was a dream.

The art of title design.

One of the things I pay attention to (and believe me when I say it is an odd scattershot amalgam of things that draw my attention) is title design. Whether it is a TV show or a movie, good title design can go a long way towards success or failure.

I always think of the opening to North by Northwest as an example of what it is when it is good (of course the fact that it was Saul Bass who was responsible for the film’s title sequence helped quite a bit).

The thing that has caught my eye of late is the opening to Showtime’s Masters of Sex (which has become a favorite). What is amazing is the marriage of a jaunty tune playing underneath a slew of images depicting sexual metaphors.

Take a look for yourself and see how many terms you can name!

To all you Brooklyn hipster doofuses.

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends...

I wanted to make a comment today directed specifically at all the hipster a-holes I keep running across who want to extol all the coolness that is Brooklyn.

This is done primarily because the aforementioned doofus a-holes have taken up residence there, arriving in the NYC metro area from some other place or being a recent Manhattan refugee and wanting to assign themselves some kind of status to assuage the fact they are living in one of the boroughs.

NEWSFLASH - I remember a phrase we applied to everyone from the outer boroughs that is still valid today. No matter how cool you imagine yourself to be be, you will ever be:

BRIDGE AND TUNNEL PEOPLE!

Having assigned you your true derogatory designation comes another startling revelation that just confirms my own experience of dealing with any of these Brooklyn DAs. I call them that because for as much as they say they embrace Brooklyn the truth of the matter is that their experience of the borough is in and around a few select yuppie enclaves. You live in the most racially segregated borough of the city!


 


The New York City area's  black-white dissimilarity score is 79.1, according to a study of 2010 Census data by professors John Logan and Brian Stults of Brown and Florida State University. A score above 60 on the dissimilarity index is considered very high segregation.

The red dots show white people, blue is black, orange is Hispanic, green is Asian, and yellow is other, according to maps of 2010 Census data by Eric Fischer.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-segregated-cities-census-maps-2013-4?op=1#ixzz2lV1cexYh

So much to do.

So little time to do it. I imagine that is why the blog gets neglected nowadays. And then blogging too seems so passé.

Not writing just blogging.

The only traffic that seemed to come through here of late was from spiders (web crawlers) and honestly I can’t see writing for crawlers, they’re just not the audience I seek.

Take heart though because I have been writing. Just not here and not for general consumption. The funny thing is that the several things I have completed are up and have gotten a ton of views (in the neighborhood of 40k plus in one case), which if I could convert to traffic here would make me very, very happy.

That’s a bit of a conudrum though.

Life has been getting in the way of the blog though... earlier this year I had some pretty serious medical issues I had to deal with and they have recently reappeared but fortunately I have managed things better this time around. Knowledge is power when you get right down to it.

The one thing I am more and more sure of as I get older, is the simple fact that any Godlike powers a person might imbue any doctor is a mistake of the 11th order. You would think we would come with some kind of manual for repair but we don’t and unfortunately doctors have to play detective more often than we (or they) would like. It’s a bad deal for both parties.

I can’t tell you the importance of writing things down...

You go to the doctor for something? WRITE IT DOWN! Write down what pushed you to go see the doctor to begin with, how frequently you experienced symptoms, ALL of the symptoms! If you can’t do it and you’re lucky enough to live with family have them do it! Nothing is worse than coming in halfway through the movie and trying to figure out the ending.

I’ve been writing things down now and it has helped enormously! Even though there are people who think I’m dropping the ball on this.

It’s almost Halloween and I am ready for 2014! 2012 kinda sucked. 2013 majorly sucked! I’m ready for happy days again!

You still here?!?!?

It’s funny, maybe not so much, how much one of the great loves of my life has fallen by the wayside.

So much so, that an eventful day passed a few months back and I was far too caught up in the terror of what I was dealing with at the moment that it anniversary passed totally unnoticed.

Way, way back on March 15 2003, I wrote this:

Well, this feels somewhat akin to walking into a new house: a big open space, empty rooms and bare walls. You look around and try to figure out what you're going to put in the house and what you're going to hang on the walls. And like a new house, there are no shades or blinds covering the windows so, you wind up feeling a little exposed.

Admittedly, there is a certain amount of exhibitionism implied by the act of writing down your thoughts and posting them onto the web for the world to see. I don't know what I'll put up here or how bold I'll be. I hope to exercise muscles that aren't used as much as I would like to keep them from atrophying. If anything, I'll wind up showing the world just how horribly I spell and how badly I can mangle the English language.

I spend so much god awful time sitting in front of a computer, you'd think it should wind up being a little productive. Time will tell and I guess we'll just have to see.

 As with any journey, you can’t even begin to imagine what the world will be like when you come to the end of that journey.

Now, here I am a decade later and all I can think is where did the time go?

Some things are better, some things are worse. I am of course 10 years older now so that effects a lot of my day to day outlook. Ten years gone by in the blink of an eye and when I think about how rapidly that time went by I could get very, very scared if I were to contemplate just how quickly time does pass and what that means.

I have been writing lately... just not so much here. And the funny thing is while I am not inclined to publicly share what I have written, it has seen a wider audience than anything I ever wrote here on the blog and it has elicited very strong reactions which is even more amazing. I would have to say it is even a bit encouraging because it indicates to me I can do this, this writing thing and I can spin a yarn well enough that people will walk away entertained.

So, after a decade of training... the real work begins.

I have an abundance of things that are still awaiting birth, conceived but yet to be pushed forth, birthed into the cold harsh world but the time is right.

Lots has been going on and little has been going on. If that makes some kind of strange logic at all to you.

People come and go into one’s life and crisis are endured and there are quiet days too. All in all it isn’t all that bad, it could be better but it could be a lot worse.

Anyway, I haven’t forgotten my beloved blog. And when I think on it, I really do love my blog even if I have let it languish. I love that I can always go back and use it as a marker not just for myself but for what was going on and what occupied my attention at the time.

I won’t use the Schwarzenegger line but I think there will be some big things happening very, very soon.

Why people don't like going to the movies.

I'm sitting in a theater now waiting for the show to start and with what they charge for a movie ticket nowadays, I don't see why I should sit through 20 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.

This is not previews were talking about either... no, those start at the time that the movie is listed to start.

So before you actually see the movie you've paid 14 dollars (or whatever it is) to see, you've got to suffer through a mountain of s@!t.

And at the time the movie is supposed to start, now you get a different set of commercials.

Oh, and since the shooting in Colorado, now there is a safety message too.

Literally 25 minutes of crap... thanks Hollywood.

It wasn’t always so easy.

Today, people don’t think twice when they see something animated.

Think about that for a second if you will... animation has become so ubiquitous that we don’t find it at all unique or even give much thought into the labor behind making something into an animated short.

But there was a time when that was not the case, when animation was a long and tedious process that required hours upon hours of painstaking work.

This was the world that I grew up in and the circles I ran in. And the irony of it is that I’ve never taken the time to sit down and learn actionscripting or flash even though all the concepts the programs are based around are second nature to me.

Before I run off on a tangent though, I wanted to share this commercial I vividly remember from my youth. And it combines a bunch of things: really great art, animation and terrific music. I wonder if there isn’t something here, the germ of an idea that today would be worth drawing out into long form.

Maybe though the material is dated and its time has passed. I give you Captain Fantastic:

More flights of nostalgia.

So, what have I been up to?

Well, I did see this great documentary recently about The Cowsills, it’s called Family Band The Cowsills Story

Who are The Cowsills?

Well, let’s face facts... unless you’re like me and about as old as dirt, chances are you don’t know who it is I’m talking about but The Cowsills like a bunch of other bands hold a special place in my heart because they are reminders of my days as a kid when it was a big deal to have a transistor radio and AM radio was the bastion of pop music.

Oh, and The Cowsills who had a bunch of hits also were the basis for the TV show The Partridge Family.

Anyway, the documentary was really great and I recommend it highly. If anything I was once again surprised by how small the music business was (who knew The Cowsills had a connection to Tommy James of Tommy James and the Shondells?).

So, if you get a chance you should really catch it - Bear in mind though that The Cowsills also had a bunch of pop hits but they also had a hit that was a signature song of the period. If you’re not familiar with it, take a listen, it holds up very, very well...

You can see a little bit of the story behind the song, an interesting story in and of itself for a band that preceded The Osmonds in promoting that squeaky clean kind of image.

What is wrong with our society.

Bernie Madoff and a host of other robber barons get relatively easy treatment – sure they may wind up in prison but they still retain in many cases the ill gotten gains, assets garnered through years of plundering.

Contrast that against this story... a 63 year old woman working for Wal-Mart takes food (to eat) while working and doesn’t pay for it because she can’t afford it but then read for yourself:

A Walmart employe in Indiana has been charged with felony theft after she was caught munching Oreos filched from the store's shelves, police said.

The detachable penis!

Years ago, a band called King Missile made a song called Detachable Penis:

Now comes the following news:

A bizarre, hermaphrodite sea slug may give new meaning to the word “quickie.” The nudibranch uses a disposable penis to have sex more frequently, according to a new study.

The animal, described today (Feb. 12) in the journal Biology Letters, is the first discovered to use an easily regenerated, disposable penis.

LIFE MIRRORS ART!