Supercar?

When some old-timers here the name Supercar, they think of Gerry Anderson's British Supermarionation TV series:

But some of us may think that Superman's driving for Uber.

Hey, wait a second! Why does Superman have to drive around? And why does he get to have such a cool Supermobile? We assume he's driving because he suddenly can't fly or something, but why isn't he, like, stuck in a Honda Civic?

The reason the Supermobile above is so cool is that it was from 1955, when cars still looked cool, instead of the homogeneous lumps we drive around in now. In that issue of World's Finest, Superman loses his powers through the machinations of a villain and Batman accidentally gets them. So, for the duration of Superman's powerlessness, Batman makes him a Supermobile to use for his heroics. Probably the first time Clark Kent ever had to worry about parking.

But that wouldn't be the only time Superman had to deal with a vehicle. During a multi-issue run of Action Comics in 1978, red sun radiation bathes the Earth and causes him to lose his powers, just as the evil android Amazo is running amok. What's a Kryptonian to do but build a Supermobile that can mimic his own powers of flight, superstrength, and so on?

The goofiest thing about this is, of course, the fists. I have no evidence to support this but I am pretty sure the whole reason DC ran this story was because Corgi had come out with a line of superhero car toys, including....

I wondered what the connection was -- did Corgi bribe DC with a suitcase full of British pounds? -- and so had a look on the Wikipedia page for the Supermobile, because of course Wikipedia has a page for the Supermobile. No mention of bribery. I remain suspicious.

Hot Wheels and Matchbox have also had Superman-themed cars, but as far as I know they did not manage to get a multi-issue storyline based on them.

More cars should have capes.

Various Metropolis vehicles. Don't know what the gray van is for.
Luthor's creepy kidnapping van?

I give props to Cary Bates, who wrote the Supermobile series, for working it into the plot. Writers have always liked stories where a powerless Superman has to be heroic, and Amazo was one tough hombre, with the powers of all the members of the original Justice League of America. Bates managed to make the Supermobile a logical part of Superman's plan.

Still, when Spider-Man had to have a car -- the Spiderbuggy -- possibly as part of another Corgi underhanded deal, he hated the idea.

I joked about Clark Kent, but for Spidey, parking would really be an ordeal. He winds up using the car because he needs the money that the creators of the car will pay him, which is why we all loved Spider-Man back in those days. He was the first flat-broke hero.

Spider-Man lost the car in the river; it was later fished out by Deadpool, who turned it into the Dead-buggy. But that's another story.

Anyway, here is the Corgi version.

Looks more like an army jeep than a dune buggy, doesn't it? Maybe there was another version I haven't seen. There are newer versions.

Anyway, guys, as much as I would have loved to play with those Corgi toys when I was a kid, I think you heroes ought to leave the -mobile stuff to Batman. He's the only superhero who really knows how to use a vehicle effectively as part of his crime-fighting mission (although he did once almost have his tires stolen). And I think we can all be glad that no one was dumb enough to come up with the Hulkmobile, right?

Uh-oh.

Advantages of time.

Big production number.

Yesterday I jokingly joshed in a jocular way about the useless of dogs. But there was something to the topic. A friend of ours does not understand the idea of pets, and asked why we would even have one. That was before we got the second one, so I guess we're twice as confusing now.

Weeks like this make me wonder, too.

Not that the dogs were getting into trouble. For the most part they have been very good. Little dog has been his usual fun-loving self. The problem was that the big dog, Tralfaz, hurt himself by accident last week and had to be rushed to the vet. (Pro tip: Call the vet's office and tell them you're coming. I had read that tip just the week before and it was a lifesaver.) He was bleeding like crazy. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the path to the car, in the car, on a trail to the office and into the exam room and all over the exam room floor. I was surprised he hadn't passed out.

It reminded me of the scene in Twenty Years After, Alexandre Dumas's sequel to The Three Musketeers, in which Mordaunt executes Charles I while Athos is concealed under the scaffold. When the royal head is severed, Athos is deluged by a "crimson cataract" (some translations are more vivid). There was a lot of blood.

Fazzy will recover, I trust, but our return visit had the vet go "Ick!" when looking at the wound -- never a good sign -- and prescribe a huge bottle of big-capsuled antibiotics for him. Three pills, twice a day with food. It is very hard to give a dog a medication that he can't chew. Fazzy behaved poorly at the vet on this follow-up, and even worse with his first dose of pills. This is going to be another long week.

So the question emerged: Why the dogs? They offer protection, sure, but we have an alarm system for that, plus we don't have a whole lot of valuables anyway. And the dogs really have no other purpose.

What it comes down to are the things I heard so often growing up. "I can't be bothered" was a common one from the older members of my tribe, when asked why they didn't do something, or why we didn't do things other families did. "I can't be bothered." "Too much trouble." "You know how much work that is?" "Everything with that is a big production number."

Do people still know what that phrase means? Members of my family who grew up during Hollywood's golden age knew a big production number as a large set piece in musical films where a cast of thousands danced and sung their hearts out on elaborate sets. A big production number was a lot of trouble to film and cost a huge amount of money.

Dogs are not a big production number, but they are a continual source of duty. Are they worth the trouble? For that matter, are children? Some will grow up to support their parents, but will most of them do that these days? It seems the goal of children now is to run as far and fast from home as they can, spurning their folks' beliefs and values, or, on the opposite end, to stay in the cellar like a mushroom and continue to be a drain on the family forever.

Everything is a pain in the ass. Fish? Gotta clean the tank. Pool? Gotta clean the pool. Car? Don't get me started. House? Kill me now. What isn't a load of trouble in life? Is the only path to happiness that of a monk? Or of Diogenes, who was thrilled when he threw away his cup because he realized he could cup his hands, and so didn't even need that sole possession?

This is one of those thread questions, a little thing that you tug on and next thing you know everything starts to unravel. But I think I can snip it, at least to my own satisfaction.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is popular because it makes sense to us, as many things in psychology don't. When we get above the bottom two categories, for basic necessities and security, we enter into those needs that have to do with love. And that's the answer. 

I don't mean "love" in the two senses that it's often bandied about these days -- political love, which is a flag meant to express hate for others, or love solely related to the disposition of one's genitalia. I mean love from the highest (agape) to the lowest (sub-human), as C. S. Lewis discusses at length in his brief and wonderful book The Four Loves. Note that the sub-human love here doesn't refer to Cro-Magnon man love, but love for that which is not itself human -- which would include trivial things like model trains or movies, or great things like one's country. He addresses this love in his book but it is not one of the four, those being affection, friendship, romantic love, and love of God. But for the sake of my point today, it's all love, and it all takes us out of our purely selfish state.

Love is worth a big production number. Love is worth going through trouble that you don't have to go through. Even in my family, which seemed dedicated to the idea of not being bothered with stuff, you'd hear plenty of things like "It's different when it's blood" and "Charity begins at home" and "You do things for your children." Not the noblest, most Christian sentiments, but they express the point that when you love, you do. You accept the responsibility. You go to the trouble.

And that means even on days when it's no fun, and they do nothing that makes me happy, the dogs are worth the trouble. If I threw them out when they stopped being cute, or started costing me more money that I'd expected, then it was never love. And that's one of two dangers that pop out right away, that I may misjudge my motives, and that I may be led captive by my possessions. I may think I love fish until I get so tired of cleaning the tank that I let it stay until the little punks are floating upside down. I may love my big house but spend all my time slaving to pay for it and keep it up, ignoring more important things.

I like to say that if it can't drive you nuts, it isn't love. But not everything that makes me nuts is love. I must know what I love and not abandon it. Then I might be happy.

Limitations of dogs.

You all know that I love my dogs. Well, if this is your first visit to this page, you may not. Let me explain: I love my dogs. There, that's settled.

But -- and with dogs, there's always a but, usually being sniffed -- dogs have some serious limitations. For example: People may not be aware of this, but a dog license does not actually empower your dog to drive a motor vehicle! I know, right? Crazy!

SMDH.

Embarrassed.

Here are some other limitations of dogs that I have had to learn the hard way.

🐕 Dogs can't do their own nails. You always have to take them out to get a pedi-pedi. And guess who pays? You!

🐕 On that point, dogs never have any money. Go ahead, ask your dog if you can borrow a few bucks and get ready for his lame excuses. They never even carry wallets! If a dog asks you to lunch, I guarantee he'll claim he lost his wallet when the check comes.

🐕 No matter how hard it's raining or how much you have to hold, you can't get the dog to carry the umbrella.

🐕 If your dog volunteers to clean the toilet, don't let him. He'll just lick it. Which doesn't actually clean it to exacting specifications.

🐕 Dogs make lousy dental hygienists.

🐕 Dogs are also terrible cooks.

🐕 And don't ask them to do the dishes. They do dishes the same way they clean the toilet. Sometimes right afterward.

🐕 You may get excited when your dog says he has a gift for you. Calm down. It's either something dead, something almost dead, or something previously digested. Dogs don't order from catalogs.

🐕 Dogs cannot read. This is one reason they are lousy co-pilots. They cannot read maps and they're useless with smartphones. You may think that lending your dog a pair of reading glasses will enable him to read. A common mistake.

🐕 Dogs interview well, and yet almost never have jobs. Why is that? They just hang around all the time.

🐕 Dogs never clean up after themselves. After band practice, or the game? Frito bags everywhere.

So those are, like, the top limitations of dogs. It's clear their reputation for being helpful comes from their comparison to other, less helpful pets like cats.

It's a darn good thing for our canine freeloaders that they're so cute and pettable. Otherwise we might as well just get hamsters or iguanas.

My web page.

Last night was misty and cool, an evening that reminded me of how much I enjoy the fall. 

But I'm not that crazy about spiders. 

Sure, some of them make beautiful webs.

Others just make a mess on the ground and call it a day.

When I was quite small I guess I had a dream with a daddy longlegs that had a body as big as a baseball. I really thought they were that big for a long time. Thank God they aren't, not even in Florida. They're bad anyway.

Creep.

My main issue about spiders is that in autumn they come into the house. I wondered about that -- it's not like we fill up with flies or something after the equinox. As it turns out, the increase in the indoor spider population is caused by the same thing that causes a lot of misery in this world -- guys looking for dames. And, as in the human world, it causes a lot of the guys to get smushed.

One October afternoon a few years ago I had a long drive on back roads in Rockland and Orange counties through the most glorious colors of foliage. It was fantastic, a true feast for the eyes. I got home in a wonderful mood. Then the most gigantic spider I ever saw in person popped up by my favorite chair. I shrieked like a toddler and smashed it so hard I might have caused structural damage to the floor.

That spider was sent by the devil to ruin my happiness.

All these thoughts reminded me of Spider-Man in Marvels, a 1994 limited comic book series by Kurt Busiek, with the incomparable art of Alex Ross. It was a brilliant re-telling of famous moments in the Marvel canon, told from the point of view of a common man. There are a lot of things I loved about the series, but this one page I have never forgotten:

"So creepy..." It had never occurred to me that people would find Spider-Man creepy. But of course they would. A mystery man who can crawl up walls like a spider is scary.

We readers know him as good ol' Spidey. The Defenders might defend you, the Avengers might avenge you, but Spidey would hang with you. Literally! But in the real world: creepy.

Same for his archnemesis, Dr. Octopus; it wasn't until Spider-Man 2 that I realized how weird and frightening he would be in real life. Octopuses are too, but at least we can eat them. In the comics, Doc Ock was menacing, but also a chubby guy with glasses. On the screen his tentacles propelled him with inhuman strength. When the common New Yorkers on the elevated train try to protect Spider-Man, he throws them all to the side like dolls.

Some people like spiders, and octopuses, and I don't want either crawling in my house. If that's the only downside to fall, though, I'll go with it.

You are special.

Last week Google ran an animated doodle in honor of Fred Rogers and his PBS show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.  Rogers, who passed away 15 years ago, would have like it, I think. By all accounts he was a genuinely good and pleasant man. 

Everyone is over the moon about Fred Rogers these days, and why not? There's not enough great Freds in this world. And while everyone else is running around with their collective dress over their collective head, he was a very calm man who never got upset. What a breath of fresh air!

Reviving interest in Mr. Rogers was the recent documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, which premiered in June. The conservative and deep-thinking critic James Bowman loved it -- it got his coveted two-star rating, the highest he gives out -- but has some interesting thoughts about Mr. Rogers's TV show and the perils of Generation Snowflake that seem to want to tear up the joint:

The problem with teaching children that they deserve to be loved, even by strangers, the way God loves them — "The way you are right now,/The way down deep inside you" — is that they are being set up for huge disappointment when they find out that the world outside their family and the comforting parental figure on TV isn’t at all like that. I don’t believe, as I have said, that the Mr Rogers generation are all narcissists, but I do believe that they must live their lives shadowed by that disappointment and obscurely conscious that, if life is not what their childish selves, unwittingly encouraged by Mr Rogers, expected it to be, it must be somebody’s fault.
And might it not be that belief, even if unconscious, which is responsible for the enormous intellectual effort invested today in finding out new and new kinds of evil-doers to blame and thus to hate? Thieves and murderers may only be people who didn’t get enough of the Mr Rogers kind of love as children, but there are now whole classes of "deplorable" people — people supposed, out of hatred, to be "haters" and anathematized with the labels racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or even fascist for no better reason than that they don’t believe the things that we feel sure must be believed in that ideal "community" whose non-existence is no barrier to our sense of belonging to it? Our universities are in fact well on the way to becoming just such communities only in real life. But they are communities built on hate, rather than love. I can’t believe that Mr Rogers would have approved.

It does seem a paradox that children raised in a generation as never before with the idea of unconditional love could be so full of rage and hate. Something seems to have gone off the rails. I grew up with Mr. Rogers, and as fond of his show as I was, I never quite believed it when he told me that I was okay just as is. I'm not sure I would have believed that from anybody. Which I guess is sad, but it didn't surprise me when the world often rendered its verdict and found me wanting.

On a related topic, I was flipping through the ol' CDs and came across my Barenaked Ladies albums. The Ladies, among Canada's greatest exports, are one of my favorite bands of the 1990s. They gave us some excellent pop music and showed really top-rate musicianship on their albums. "If I Had $1,000,000" is universally loved, and even Yoko Ono liked "Be My Yoko Ono" (although she too preferred "$1,000,000"). Many of their songs exemplified the snarky attitude of the era, like "The King of Bedside Manor" and "Never Is Enough" and the difficult to sing "Intermittently" (it sounds easy but it is not). But these pair poorly with the gooey self-pity of songs like "What a Good Boy":

When I was born, they looked at me and said
"What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy"
And when you were born, they looked at you and said
"What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl"
We've got these chains hanging around our necks
People want to strangle us with them
Before we take our first breath...

Oh, come on. I know it can be difficult to live up to high parental expectations, but -- seriously? Did these guys have any idea that there were kids growing up being told that they were useless, stupid, ugly, fat, clumsy, and weak? Those remarks are chains. It makes me want to reach into the CD and slap the band. But these Gen-Xers were prototypical Millennials in that regard, and being oh-so-sensitive to their own precious selves and so very nasty toward others is very much the key to today's crybullies, the ones that are destroying human rights to save humanity. And it's too bad, because "What a Good Boy" is a pretty song and very singable.

Fred Rogers knew there were an awful lot of kids who had truly bad environments, and he wanted to reassure them that they were not to blame, that they were okay and he liked them. As Bowman writes, "...Mr Rogers was teaching children to feel by teaching them the vital lesson that the 'love' enjoined upon us by Jesus [Rogers was a Presbyterian minister] wasn’t about feeling but about respecting people no matter how you felt about them. This stranger could not possibly have 'liked' all those millions of children in his audience as he claimed to do — not in the sense that we like (or dislike) those we know. But he could like them well enough to be able to reassure them that he had no designs upon them, that the things about them which they fear, which everybody fears, will make people not like them made no difference to him."

So did Fred Rogers inadvertently cause today's idiot children rampaging hither and yon? I have my doubts, as does Bowman. First of all, his show was about a lot more than reassuring children -- he would talk to adults about the things they did for a living, he would send the trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, he would feed the fish and do other domestic chores. But I think his reassurance of children was misconstrued by less-gifted (shall we say) educators, who took his lessons to mean that you can't keep score in soccer games and you can't fail children who won't study because they might feel bad and nothing is worse for kids than feeling bad. We may have built up self-esteem, but that is no way to build self-respect, because kids knows the difference between a trophy for participation and a trophy for achievement regardless of what the dopey adults around them think. I suspect that our loss of respect for families and a culture that celebrates immaturity are both the cause and result of many of our ills. Mr. Rogers cannot be blamed for these things.

In fact, I wish we had more Mr. Rogerses in the world. I can't imagine he would pass a child in class who didn't deserve it, but I'm sure he would help that child understand the work.

Now, I must confess, as much as I liked Rogers's show, I preferred Sesame Street. Especially that cranky green creep in the garbage can and the blue cookie-sucking lunatic with the crazy eyes. Maybe that's why I turned out the way I did.

Meanwhile, in cartoon land...

After surviving the shipwreck and the shark-infested waters just to step
directly into the quicksand, Dave remembered that it was Monday. 

Visions of autumn.

Yeah, yeah, visions of autumn. Sounds like bargain bin vinyl from the Miscellaneous 60's Chorus box. 

But that's all I have for you today, because of what we had yesterday, which was a rather unpleasant emergency. It's better today, thanks, and you can bet I'll be complaining about it in this spot when the rest of the storm blows out to sea. 

Meanwhile, autumn is indeed here. The temperature was 15 degrees cooler this morning than Saturday morning. It's like Nature put on the AC. So here's some mums for you.

Chrysanthemums don't bloom like other flowers, which burst open like fireworks. Mums move with the speed of an old man with two canes crossing a road covered in marmalade. But they have more staying power than other flowers. Maybe more than old men, too.

And yes, pumpkin spice season is upon us. You know, pumpkin pie is not something I eat more than once a year, although I do like it. The Yoplait Whips! shown above not only has the flavor of pumpkin pie but also the fluffy consistency. It snapped me back to Thanksgiving at the first spoonful.

Finally, although you may miss summer, you can always look forward to the beautiful autumn leaves....

Yick. 

Fall guy.

What's a good way to celebrate the first day of fall?

Well, I don't know, but I got ready for it yesterday by taking one.

AUGHtumn

The little dog, Nipper, and I were playing in the backyard, or mostly he was while I stood around like a dork, throwing balls for him to ignore. I usually have him on the tether when we're playing, as we have no fence; this keeps him from following the scent of miscellaneous critters into the woods. Suddenly my little dog -- and when I say "little" I mean "relative to the big dog but still about 100 pounds of muscle" -- shot across to the other side of the lawn, his Puppy Sense clearly tingling like crazy. The tether caught me in the back of the leg while I was off balance, leading to the embarrassing scene above. Classic butt-first pratfall.

HOW DOES HE GET THAT STRONG? It's not like he goes to the gym. Sometimes we'll play tug, or he'll pull against me on his leash, but I'm not exactly turning into Young Ahnold here. He doesn't do doggie kettlebells. I just don't know.

Fortunately for me, the ground was soft after the 8,000 days of rain we've had this summer, so no injury. But that ground won't stay soft forever. We know what follows fall. And there's just 94 shopping days till Christmas.

The Boy of Paper.

Do any actual boys deliver actual newspapers anymore?

Never mind the fact that hardly anyone seems to get the paper anymore. Neither do I. When we first fled the city and moved here to fabulous Hudson Valley suburbia, I insisted on subscribing. I wanted to get to know the place. I figured reading the paper on my way to work would give me a feel, some "local color" as it were. And to an extent it helped. Eventually I got annoyed with their slanted coverage and sometimes amateurish reporting, so I dropped it.

Plus, I never got the box.

I guess the promotion had ended a while before I arrived. It seemed like at one time, every new subscriber would get a box he could attach to the mailbox post, a box in which his newspaper would be placed, as gently as one would a newborn babe, every morning.

Guess the age of that promotion.

In all the years here, I do not think I have seen a newspaper delivery person use one. They throw the papers out the car windows like they hate them. Most boxes have fallen off the poles, or have been removed by disgruntled homeowners.

And they are adult delivery persons, not paperboys or papergirls. Or newspaper has been delivered by an array of grown-ups who are willing to get up very early and drive around in their own (often elderly and infirm) automobiles to deliver the news, God bless them. There's a lot of turnover in the business. Are any newspapers delivered by kids anymore?

I think it's great when teenagers have jobs -- they learn a lot about responsibility, duty, and if the job has a legit payroll, how the government screws over a paycheck. These are important lessons. But I must confess my jobs before college were never on the books, and usually involved shoveling or hauling or mowing.

The one time I delivered newspapers, I was filling in for a friend while the family was on vacation. It was easy, but it didn't seem that way at the time. It was in one of the Outer Boroughs, not Manhattan, but it was a route that covered a couple of apartment buildings -- very little walking, no exposure to rain or that hot summer sun. I think the thing that made it hard, or that I used to make it hard on myself, was terror of screwing up. I knew that if I didn't deliver to the right apartments that my friend would get heat for it, and I didn't want to let him down. I also hated the idea of an adult being mad at me. But I managed to get through the week without incident.

It did not, however, make me want to run out and get a route of my own. Most of the paper deliveries I did after that were courtesy of Atari.

New job opportunities.

The economy is buzzing along and unemployment has plummeted. People who told us we were supposed to be thrilled with never, ever having a robust economy again have now had to find other things to scold us over. While it's true that there are some jobs that are not as much in demand as they once were, like buggy-whip manufacturer, hamster wrangler, and creme-filling injector, there are still plenty of sensational opportunities for people with drive and energy. Here are five on the hot list.

Fruit Dot Whacker

Be the guy who puts the little pricing code stickers on each little piece of fruit in the supermarket. Great opportunities for those who have an instinctive eye for the location of bruises that can be covered. Future technology shows promise; it may be possible before long to put a pricing dot on individual blueberries. Start training now and harvest the rewards!

Seasonal Pop Rocks Developer

Pop Rocks aren't just for breakfast anymore--an insatiable public, showing the daring that made bungee-cord jumping a thrilling pursuit for .000000001% of the population, will always want to test its mettle against the deadly Pop Rock. And it's even better in season-appropriate flavors! Join the team that's working to create varieties like Love Explosion (Valentine's Day), Krazy Fireworks (4th of July), Spooky Boom (Halloween), Treez a-poppin' (Arbor Day), Flip Your Whig (Presidents Day), and more! Great openings for young folks with strong teeth.

Strange Hair Cultivator

The Baby Boomers have been the cultural machines of our society, and that's still the case even as they hobble into dotage. Watch as those rockin' geezers take on the challenge of ear hair, nose hair, mole hair, back hair, and hair sprouting in other weird places as we age! Yes sir, the generation that's putting the Hip in Hip Fracture is looking for ways to make strange hair fashionable--that's where you come in! Curl! Bob! Weave! Perm! See your designs come to life in this growth industry!

Fat Guy Lifter

Hey, you muscular young types! More than a third of us ages twenty and up are obese, and those stairs aren't getting any flatter! Lifting fat people up onto things is likely to be a goldmine in the years ahead. There are many, many things that fat people need to get up onto--the SUV seat, the spike heels, the second-floor landing, the buffet line--and you can help! Fat Guy Lifters can make all kinds of cash, and best of all, when you get the inevitable hernia, you can go on disability for the rest of your life! So start shoving your fat friends around now and get in shape to boost your fortunes!

Hit Victim

Want to make a change in society? Want to get half the nation to call you a hero for doing nothing? It's so easy! Crybullies have never been in so much demand. Just think of someone you knew twenty, thirty, forty years ago, someone who has risen to a place of prominence, and weepingly tell a tale of some horrible sexual misconduct by this person in the past. Watch as the Twitter mobs take up your banner to destroy this person's career, home, and family! "But Fred, lying is wrong, isn't it?" you ask. I say, if the person has risen to a place of prominence he must have screwed someone over; why not you? "But Fred, how do I monetize slander?" you ask. Are you kidding? I smell book deal just thinking about it! (Straight white males need not apply; all other eligible.) 

Woah is me.

A quota of woe

Was fated for Noah

Because he meant "whoa"

But misspelled it "woah"

(I see this error a lot these days.)

Have Pirates peaked?

I'm a little ambivalent about tomorrow's celebration of International Talk Like a Pirate Day. There are a few reasons, some personal, most not. Here are my thoughts:

1) Right off the top, I confess that I am still a little hurt by the utter failure of Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day (June 2). I know I made many errors in the concept -- the Bowery Boys and Slip himself, the late Leo Gorcey, are hardly remembered anymore. Plus, even for those who remember the many Bowery Boys movies fondly, talking like Slip Mahoney is not simple. Slip's hard-knocks New York accent is easy enough to imitate, but his constant stream of malapropisms is difficult to replicate off the cuff. Malapropisms are hard! You have be to clever to sound that dumb. As I wrote before, any fool can go ARRR and Avast ye, but it's tricky to come up with lines like "You're not holding me here as an accomplishment to the crime because I never accomplished anything in my life, so what's the charge?" I blame myself for thinking we were up to the challenge.

2) The failure of Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day (January 24) to catch on should have taught me that the "Talk Like" holiday concept is not infinitely expandable. I don't even hear much about International Talk Like William Shatner Day (March 22) anymore.

3) And I don't think that Talk Like a Pirate Day is even what it used to be. The founders don't update the Webpage very often. Krispy Kreme used to give out free doughnuts on the big day, but there's no mention of it on the company site now. Dunkin' Donuts hasn't done anything for it, I believe, in five years. The day's biggest supporter, humor writer Dave Barry, has been missing for weeks, dealing with a serious family medical issue. (Maybe he'll make an appearance tomorrow.) Childhood Cancer Support in Australia does use the day as a fund-raising opportunity, so I hope for their sake it is not disappearing.

I don't know if any offices are doing employee fun events based on the day, but in the current sensitivity-to-the-point-of-explosion atmosphere, it would seem reckless to celebrate anything relating to a people known for intemperance, violence, thievery, and sexual incontinence. Hey, I'm glad I'm not working in an office anymore!

4) Finally, are pirates what they had been? The main tent pole for the pirate popularity is the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. The first movie came out in 2003, and they've been getting stupider ever since. While there was a lot of smarts in the first film, it got progressive sacrificed for looks and set-pieces as it went. I bailed after #3. They've all made money, but no one knows if there will be a #6 at this point. It may be stuck in Development Hell. If it actually is made, it may be dumber than the dumbest Bowery Boys movie -- so dumb that it will cause a explosion of stupid that will make the Kraken look like a Chiweenie puppy, taking all the fun of piracy with it.

Plus, the Pittsburgh Pirates are in fourth place in the NL Central as of this morning.

So all this is rather distressing. But, of course, I will be ready tomorrow all the same.

What the hey -- Dunkin' Donuts might change its mind and hand out doughnuts. Doughnuts ahoy!

Laundry room. Come in, laundry room.

When my wife's phone pings, alerting her to a text, I feel the need to say "It's not me," even though I'm in the same room. Unless it is me, and I'm texting her in secret for some reason, like not wanting to wake the dog(s) at her feet.

We text each other within the house a lot more than I would have ever expected. Mainly it's because my office is upstairs and hers is down, so vital messages like "What's for lunch?" and "Whatever you're making!" need to be transmitted in an efficient manner.

All this got me thinking about that wave of the future that I remember from childhood -- the in-home intercom. Many of my friends' homes had them. You kids may not have seen them, or perhaps you have, because they were built right into the walls and thus their removal would leave a huge hole.

They all looked like this, right down to the paneling.

These tended to be in houses built in the early- to mid-1960s. The house I grew up in was older than that, so we didn't have them. They seemed to me like real science fiction technology -- the idea that you could call Dad in the basement or your big sister in her room without getting up was amazing. "Sis! Your stupid boyfriend is on the stupid phone again!" Mom could call from wherever she was (the kitchen) to wherever you were (in front of the TV) without screaming. Some of them even had radios, so you could tune in the ball game or some groovy music at will. So futuristic.

In every house I knew of where these things were installed, though, they had ceased to function. I don't recall ever seeing one used, but I do recall people telling me they didn't work. These things were, of course, hardwired, so there's no reason I can tell you why they would malfunction anymore than the electrical socket would suddenly stop working. I guess the units just broke. But their importance in daily family life is demonstrated to me by the fact that no ever bothered to have the system fixed.

What the hell, Mom can always scream, right? She could shatter glass with that voice.

NuTone was the company that made most of these. Invisible Themepark has a nice summary of the history of the home intercom, although I think they're mistaken in saying this was only a feature of rich people's homes. I remember some developments that had been chucked up in the 1960s, the kind of home Rodney Dangerfield lived in in Easy Money, that had intercoms. Tiny backyards, but intercoms. The moms yelled anyway.

What absolutely stunned me is that NuTone is not only still with us, but they still make home intercoms. And not only that, but they're still wired into the wall. In fact, if you have the old wiring from an old system, they can have new units attached to it. I might have thought they'd do the system wirelessly now, but I guess that'd be just another phone. Or a non-walkie talkie.

As appealing as the idea is, I think I'll pass. After all, if I wanted to alert my wife, I'd have to get off the sofa, walk to the unit, call for her, wait for her to get away from the desk (disturbing Nipper and Tralfaz, sleeping on her feet), and answer the call. Easier to text.

Or yell. Yelling works.

Alternate names.

We love our dogs Tralfaz and Nipper. As I've explained before, Tralfaz's name came from The Jetsons, from the episode where J.P. Gottrockets, the original owner of family's dog Astro, comes to reclaim him -- we discover that Astro's original name was Tralfaz, which he hated. (The name has deeper roots than that episode, as explained by Yowp here.) We mostly call him Fazzy. And Nipper, of course, got his name from the RCA Victor dog Nipper, the one who could recognize "his master's voice" on the ol' Victrola because it was so lifelike. Plus, as a puppy, Nipper nipped. 

But we have thought of other names through the years that might have suited them as well or better. You want to name a puppy early, so he gets used to the sound of it being associated with him, but you don't get a sense of his eventual personality that young. Same with kids. Thumper Lunks could become a famous brain surgeon; Hortense Gertrude Splenndorfus could turn into a rap artist. Although she'd probably call herself Furiouz H.

Naming after a short time would have been a problem too, or Nipper would have gone through life as Hungry Hungry Zippo. He was so very hungry as a puppy, and no surprise, as he was almost fully grown at seven months. Now he's the dog that is more likely to give me a hassle at mealtimes. That's when I want to call him Randy, after the kid brother in A Christmas Story: "Every family has a kid who won't eat. My kid brother had not eaten voluntarily in over three years." That would make Tralfaz Ralphie, and he's not much of a Ralphie. He probably would think a football was a good Christmas present. 

Hoover would have been a good name for Tralfaz, but we only knew that after we got Nipper. Nipper loves treats, but doesn't always police up the crumbs. Tralfaz will go around and get everything. Hoover would be a good name for a dog that does that, or Dyson if you're being more modern. Although hoover is still a verb in England. 

For a while, Crash seemed to be an excellent name for Nipper. The puppy energy was way bigger than his puppy muscular control. If he chased a ball downhill he'd go butt over ears; if he charged down the hall he could stop on a dime about as well as an F-15 Super Eagle. 

This looked like it would be his autobiography.

But he calmed down over time, learned to adjust his speed to conditions, and he slams into stuff and people a lot less than he used to. He still pulls like an ox, so Ox could have been his name (not Bull, because he had his little surgery).

Bear would have been a good name for both these dogs, but it would have to have been Tralfaz. When you have two dogs and one is bigger than the other, that one has to be Bear. If the little one is Bear, the big one has to be Elephant, and that's silly. Collectively, considering all their shedding, they could be the Hair Bear Bunch.

Galoot might have been a good name for Tralfaz. He is a big goof, as a galoot might be. But he's also much more sensitive than one would expect a large dog to be, which is not that galoot-like.

It's a tough thing, names. I think we did a good enough job with them. We used the recommended two syllables. At the very least we didn't give them Irish surnames, like Bailey or Riley. There's a lot of that kind of thing about.

Keep reaching for the stars.

The lurking shed.

You ever see a shed that looks larger than its house?

I couldn't get the whole house in this iPhone photo, but trust me, there is precious little more to it than what you see. And lurking behind: Shed.

It is not the largest shed I have ever seen, but the house really is a cottage. There's no one in it just now; the people are gone, the for-sale sign is out front. I'd guess it's just a four-room home, big enough for one, maybe a little tight for more. And if it gets too crowded, someone can always sleep in the shed.

Not that I think anyone has ever done it, though, although I suppose you can if the weather isn't too cold. But assuming that's not the purpose of the shed, why did this tiny home have such a large shed?

Lately I've been hearing about the "she shed," supposedly the counterpart to the "man cave." I don't think this really works. I don't know any sheds that have large sofas, cable for a wide-screen TV, WiFi, fan posters, pool tables, card tables, refrigerators, and chip bowls. If you have such a thing, it is no longer a shed, it is a clubhouse. It's no more a shed than the man cave is an actual cave. And if you have a she shed. then you need a real shed, because you still need a place to put the tools and flower pots and lawn mower. Then they start calling you "Two Sheds," and that's just silly.

I personally wound up with no shed at all, as living in the Outer Boroughs convinced my wife that if we had a shed we would wind up with strange teenagers drinking and smoking pot in it. I suppose that's possible wherever you live, but we left the city years ago. I could be Fred "No Sheds" Key, I suppose.

But if I did have a shed, I wouldn't get one the same size of my house, in a gloomy color, and park it in the backyard so it looked like it was sneaking up on my house to eat it.

Beware of dog.

People have used dogs for security for millennia. Here's a famous mosaic from Pompeii, telling people to Cave Canem, or Beware of Dog. 

Perhaps a more useful one would have been Cave Mons Igneus, or Beware of Volcano.

As the owner of two large dogs, I have considered using such a sign. It would be useful to deter burglars. But there's really no need for a sign, because the dogs go crazy if someone comes up on the porch uninvited.

Don't get me wrong: My fuzzy baby lumpkins are as friendly as you might want. I've even composed a song about how friendly the bigger one, Tralfaz, is, because his size sometimes alarms people. Both the dogs love to meet people and other dogs. Tralfaz is such a peace-lover that he doesn't even play-fight with dogs. The smaller one, Nipper, will still do that with some dogs he thinks will be up for it. They've never acted aggressively toward a human being when away from the house, although sometimes they've regarded people with a little suspicion, and sometimes the odd bark. My wife thinks these people may be cat owners. We can't discern any other similarities, and we don't know if they own cats, but the dogs would be able to tell.

But really, our guys are very fond of human beings. So I can't say for sure they would be good watchdogs if push came to shove. They act a good game -- Nipper is totally ready to tell the FedEx man or the UPS guy off in spades. But if someone broke in, especially if we humans were out, would the guys just lick them and show them where the jewelry is?

I think probably not. Although friendly by nature and by nurture, these dogs do understand what constitutes our zone, and violators get a warning. If it was late at night, or if they were here alone, and someone came in without being accompanied by us, I do think there would be hell to pay. They say that dogs like to have a job, and absent an assigned one they will find one. Since we have no sheep to herd, no voles to hunt, I believe they see their job as Guardians of the Den, even though we did not get them for that purpose. And I believe if the chips were down, they'd carry out that job well.

In fact, a couple of weeks ago we had the driveway fixed while I was out, so when I returned I couldn't park in the garage as I normally do. So Nipper heard me coming in the front door rather than the garage door -- and as I opened the door he came running and barking like he was going to murder me. (Tralfaz sat tight -- I think he knew it was me on the porch, or maybe he was delegating to the junior staff.) Nipper has what it takes.

Anyway, we have a really, really loud security system too, so I think if the Wet Bandits broke in it would be complete pandemonium in here. I am not entirely sure any of us would survive. The police could come into a house with a blaring alarm and a bunch of dead humans and dogs. It would just be too terrifying all around. The cops might think we were hit by a volcano.

Got your tongue?

A cat-loving friend of mine likes to say, "If cats could talk, they would lie to you."

Here we are again.

Patriot Day, and it's hard to believe it's been 17 years. A child born on 9/11/01 is almost an adult. Everyone in high school and most people in college have no memories of the actual day.

But I do.

Sometimes I feel like a guy who was hanging out in Kepuhi Beach while the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor -- in Hawaii, but not there. I was in Manhattan, but in Midtown. I never got farther south than Canal Street that day. I didn't go downtown to have a look until October. I'll never forget the walled-up blocks around the area, the gray dust that covered everything. I went to the Raccoon Lodge for a drink afterward. It was still hard to believe.

So many Americans have died in the War on Terror -- Wikipedia says just over ten thousand, but we've dealt our enemies death an order of magnitude beyond that. Maybe more. Hard to tell; they lie, and figures are wildly disparate. I wish the number of American deaths had been 0 in this, America's longest shooting war, but if we're going to play numbers games, the Union lost almost a third of that number just at Gettysburg. George W. Bush warned us that this fight was going to take decades, and he wasn't kidding. Norman Podhoretz called it World War IV, World War III being the Cold War (and as he pointed out, that war against Communism did have some hot battles -- Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, etc.). Under his reckoning, World War III lasted more than 40 years, so the War on Terror has a ways to go to tie that.

So much has changed since that day in our culture, in Europe, in Asia, all over. I have to say I think our country's gotten dumber; as our phones got smarter, we got stupider. Certainly ruder, probably crazier. A lot of people nowadays like to play-act at being brave, with what P.J. O'Rourke called "that happy sense of purpose people have when they are standing up for a principle they haven't really been knocked down for yet." Our ruling class has gotten more arrogant, more threatening, but not to those useful nitwits. People who were the salt of the earth in 2001 are suddenly the enemy of all that is good and right. Social media has exploded, and is literally taking casualties. Our media is just as bad as it ever was, so nothing new there. Maybe broker. Dumber. (They "literally know nothing.")

I suppose all of this would have happened anyway, the seeds of our creeping asininity having been planted long ago. Did the war accelerate it, or wake people up who might reverse it? I don't know.

I pray a lot for this country, that its sick culture become well, that it may be worthy of the blood sacrifice of those who fight to defend it. There's just so very little I can do beyond that. Joseph Bottum wrote it that long ago:

We meet our griefs again when work is through.
We do with words what little words can do.

The shoe is on the other football?

A friend asks if I'm continuing my boycott of the National Football League, begun last year. It went all year. I did not watch the Super Bowl for the first time since 1984. So would I do it again this season?

Hmm. Well, I guess I should consult my decision tree.

I am reminded of the lines from Benjamin Franklin in the play and film 1776 (not from the actual Benjamin Franklin, I imagine, but he wrote so much, who knows?): "Never was such a valuable possession so stupidly and so recklessly managed than this entire continent by the British Crown."

It's not hard to find some examples of stupid management ruining valuable properties -- Coke in the 1980s, the Big Three car manufacturers in the 1970s, Kodak in the 1980s and 1990s, Kmart/Sears now -- and these were only examples of things that were not quite brought to complete destruction. I suspect Roger Goodell could have destroyed any of these companies to the point where they'd be sad memories at this point, like A&P, Enron, Trans World Corporation, Wedtech, and so on. Hell, I think the man could destroy an entire continent if he wore the British Crown.

Roger Goodell kicking football
(artist's interpretation)

So what's been going on since my blog entry on this topic last year? Well, under Goodell's crack leadership, the NFL instituted a namby-pamby policy to deal with the knee issue, a policy unlike that of any company on the planet (which is: Protest On Your Own Time, Stupid), a policy that was rescinded at the first sign of pushback. NFL sponsor and notorious sweatshop runner and sexual harassment playground Nike decided to name washed-up crybully Colin Kaepernick its man of the year or something, a thumb in the eye to football fans.

At least Hank Hill went on to sell propane
and propane accessories.

That's the thing I want to point out here: NFL fans who love their country and respect law enforcement have done nothing wrong and are the only ones being punished. No one seems to understand this.

And the NFL continues to hope we'll keep talking about all this instead of its function as a brain-injury machine.

Throughout all this, Roger Goodell has shown the guts, the leadership, and the keen intellect normally associated with a headless chicken, so the NFL voted to extend his contract for five years, another thumb in the eye to football fans.

So I'm sorry, NFL; there's no way I can watch football with all these thumbs in my eye. You may gain my support again when you throw this clueless moron Goodell into the pit of shame where he belongs, deal with your concussion issue, and stop acting like terrified sheep with employees who bring disgrace onto the your product. Until then, I have much better things to do with my time and money. Like, anything else.