Rock of ages.

You know, you don't have to hit Social Security age to realize you just don't bounce back the way you used to. A couple of weeks ago I was putting down some nice store-bought rocks around the front-yard bushes to make the place look nicer, hoping to entire a buyer for the house. I had already distributed mulch and dug up weeds, and so far all was well. 

Then the irony. 

Because while it's called egg rock, it was I that broke.

Well, not broken eggactly (har!). I lifted properly, showed good form, but then I turned in a funny way, and my body took a funny turn. It was one of those muscle pulls that you feel as it happens, and it happens that I felt it. 

It didn't seem that bad at first, but it was pretty painful. When I was a strapping young lad (well, not that strapping) I could bounce back in a couple of days from this kind of thing. But it took me most of a week to stop groaning every time I bent over or stood up. Worse, my ability to twist to the right was severely impacted -- there, the pain was so bad it was almost impossible to force myself to do it. You never know how often you make a particular motion until it hurts every time you do it. 

I'm glad to have recovered now, and the place does look a bit better with the new rocks. 

All this got me thinking about getting older, and thus about an elderly friend of mine who retired to The Villages in Florida. If you are not familiar with that particular patch of real estate, it is a community for people 55 and up about 20 miles south of Ocala, Florida. In the year 2000 it had about eight thousand people, but now almost EIGHTY THOUSAND people live there. 

My friend tells me that on Friday nights the widow women still doll themselves up and go to the bars (people get around by trolley and golf cart, I hear). A couple of years ago the place was labeled "The STD Capital of America," although that turned out to be a myth. However, I'm willing to bet there's a lot of shenanigans afoot all the same. It may be a foot that needs podiatric care, but afoot all the same. 

My question is: Why is there no reality show about The Villages? It's a natural! And it would appeal to the people who still use cable for most of their TV watching -- that is, the 55+ folks. 

I think it would be huge. People would get caught up in the drama. Who's sleeping with whom? Whose kids are visiting and likely to cause trouble? Which guys are doing drunk wheelchair races in the middle of the night? Which black widow is looking to land a rich dude with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel? 

It'd be a regular Polident Place. The Old and the Restless. Medicare Hospital. All My Great Grandchildren. Dwindling Days of Our Lives. Insert your own jokes in the comments. 

I can only assume that the governing body of the tri-county Villages frowns on such coverage. Well, more's the pity. Not that I'd watch the show -- at least, not until I'm riding a wheelchair myself. Which, if I keep fooling around with these sacks of rocks, could happen sooner than I think. 

Comedy and shame.

So what does this 1984 film have to do with our current moment?

Eh, I don't know. 

No, seriously, hold on. First, I want to say that I have never seen any of the Police Academy movies, which is strange because when I was a teenager it was exactly the kind of movie that I would have been coerced into seeing, most certainly on video, on some random summer day when none of my friends had any better ideas. But somehow I dodged that bullet. Not to pick on the movie -- some actors and comics I respect were in it -- but I had always heard it was about a lowbrow as you could get. 

Here I am, writing about it all the same. What happened was, I was reading through some cinema history and found out -- which I don't think I knew -- that Alan Ladd's son, Alan Ladd Jr., was a movie producer. He produced Police Academy. Then he won an Oscar as a producer on Braveheart. He also produced The Brady Bunch Movie. Cinema is the weirdest business on earth.

That made me curious enough about the original Police Academy to go to Wikipedia and the entry on the movie. I also discovered that in 2016, Bill Clinton copped to loving the series, saying of his marriage: 

“We rarely disagreed on parenting, although she did believe that I had gone a little over the top when I took a couple days off with Chelsea to watch all six Police Academy movies back-to-back.”

I don't know how I missed this quote in 2016, but it might have gone over my head because I hadn't seen the movies. I just figured they were dumb fun. 

But it was Bill, so I should have known better. 

I knew full well that it was movie law in the early 1980s that every comedy had to have a hooker in it. So of course Bill Clinton would love those movies. In the first picture the Mandatory Hooker commits fellatio from inside a lectern on a man giving a speech before a large crowd. Twice.

And he watched this with his daughter? 

Picturing the heartfelt lesson there: "Remember, sweetheart, this is how a woman gets ahead. And the man she loves, too, come to think of it." 

Do you think those scenes were ever on Bill Clinton's mind when he was doing one of his heartfelt addresses to the American public? 

This was the man who turned the Oval Office into the Oral Office, let us not forget.

Which brings us to the present moment. 

First, I learned that the inspiration for the film came from an actual event in San Francisco, where a motley crew of academy cadets were trying and failing to secure a film site. Producer Paul Maslansky was told that the police academy had to accept all applicants, however ludicrous, and keep them until they quit or officially washed out. And that made me think of the current lawlessness in San Francisco and the desperation of our cities to get anyone to join the police force after so many experienced cops quit or retired during the Defund Police nonsense of recent memory. 

Also in San Francisco, although not as mayor until 1996, was Willie Brown, without whose help and guidance none of us would have ever heard the name Kamala Harris. And indeed, Ms. Harris seemed to take the role of Mandatory Hooker in this little comedy, using her wiles to advance her career as a prosecutor in the state of California. Ferocious ambition and courtesan skills are an odd but not unheard of combination. But even Willie thinks she's out of her depth. I say she's in so far over her head she'll need a bathysphere to speak at the convention next month. 

Anyway, there it is -- sex, politicians, hookers, poor parenting choices, bad police recruiting, and comedy. Many people have been saying that the 80's movie that we should be scared of seeing in real life is The Terminator, with all the AI stuff around. But it actually turned out to be Police Academy. 

AFABs and AMABs.

Five years ago, this blog joshed about California outlawing gender-reveal parties as part of a "Gender Prenatal Nonassumption Act." Well, we're not there yet, but we're getting closer. 

No less a popular authority on medicine than the Cleveland Clinic is tying itself in knots over having to use terms like "man" or "woman," lest they offend women who think they are men and vice versa. The problem is, they're trying to write about health concerns that may only affect one gender or the other, and it's making them crazy. Pity them: Here they are trying to educate the public for its own good about, say, prostate cancer, but they can't say this affects men (although women have no prostates) because men who call themselves women will be offended and -- I'm not sure what. Ignore the advice? Be angry because it applies to them (they, having prostates)? 

One way out of this inability to tell the truth is the "assigned" gambit. Instead of calling human beings men and women, which has worked pretty darn well through history, we now can say "assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth." As if the obstetrician just made some arbitrary decision when yanking the baby from the mother (or "birthing person"). Even the baby has to be covered by gender newspeak. As the Cleveland Clinic writes: 

"The fetus gets its assigned sex around nine weeks of pregnancy, although your healthcare provider can’t detect it on ultrasound yet."

In other words, the growing baby's sex organs are showing at nine weeks of pregnancy, but they cannot be seen yet on ultrasound. Does the Clinic have any idea how weird their phrasing sounds?

If these geniuses have their way, we'll all be known as AFABs and AMABs -- Assigned Female At Birth and Assigned Male At Birth. Of course, it won't stay there -- it never does. Remember, terms like "handicapped" and "colored person" were once the polite terms, but once they became common they became insulting, and new terms had to be put into use. I suspect AF/MAB's days are numbered already.  

In the meanwhile, though, we can still celebrate true love in a modern way. Instead of Boy Meets Girl, of course, we will have:

"AMAB Meets AFAB"

 A Poem

An AMAB a-wandering near the windmills by the bay
Distressed by the eagles, chopped up below them lay
Was suddenly, like chance, taken at the flood
By a lovely young AFAB, xer eyes as dark as mud.

"That's my kinda AFAB," the youthful AMAB cried
"I must go and meet xer; I'll not be denied!"
The AFAB, quite lightly, trotted down the road
Xer coveralls, quite tightly, xer tuchus they showed.

"Hello there!" said AMAB, "And please pardon me!
I hope you have interest in an A. M. A. B."
"Why, yes," said the AFAB, "and you seem okay.
It's just about lunchtime; what do you say?"

AMAB and xe went to dine at McKlaus's
On hot roasted mealworms and crickets with louses
They toasted each other with beetle juice soda
And strolled to the lake by the People's Pagoda.

"You're just right for me," said the AMAB with heat
"What a great fortune we happened to meet!
What a great future we'd have! Can you see?
You, me, and unassigned baby makes three!"

"Cool your electrons," the AFAB said ruthlessly.
"I like you, but thus far I have acted truthlessly.
In fact, I'm an AMAB, but wished to be other,
So my assignment was changed by birth parent (mother)."

"Worry no more," said AMAB with a cry,
"For no more truthless has one been than I!
For I am an AFAB but lied on the form.
I'd say I was anything for your love so warm!"

They were bonded together in ceremony
No one was sure who was he or was she
But they vowed to be one if their hearts still were in it
And truth never entered their lives for a minute. 

Snowman pickup lines.

☃ "Wanna rub our sticks together, baby?"

☃ "Frosty? He's my dad. Very connected."

☃ "I'd stop the world and melt with you."

☃ "I got two eyes made outta coal and they are burning for you."

☃ "So, er, you like snow cones?"

☃ "Come on over to my Frigidaire."

☃ "Wanna make snow angels on my face?"

☃ "Yeah, you've probably seen these guns on Tinder."

☃ "There may be snow all over, but there's fire in the furnace."

☃ "You ain't seen snowballs until you've seen my snowballs."

Blood-sucking freaks.

I saw a story about an astrologer recommending Halloween costumes based on Zodiacal signs. I was disappointed to hear that I should be going as a vampire. 

I hate vampires. I liked the original Dracula novel by Bram Stoker, because I found it to be thrilling and chilling, but I didn't find Drak or his undead brides to be anything but repulsive and terrifying. As they were meant to be. 

Maybe it's me, but I've never bought the Sexy Vampire stuff. It's blamed on Lord Byron, but I wouldn't know; with apologies to my former English professors, I could never stand Byron. Maybe that's not a coincidence. 

Here are some reasons not to buy into the pro-vampire lobby's nonsense. I may have covered this ground before, but it bears repeating:

1) They're dead.

Undead means dead but moving around. We're talking about animated corpses here, really just well-dressed zombies. And the clothes only come if there's a title involved, like "count" or "baron." The rest are probably just slobs.

2) They're soulless. 

As animated corpses, the bodies may be moving but the soul is gone. So things we associate with the soul, like depth of feeling, ability to love, spiritual connection, and appreciation of James Brown are impossible for the vampire. 

3) They cheat.

Don't be swayed by the Eastern European countenance; they have no honor. They'll hypnotize you if you give them a chance. If you start beating them in a fair fight, they'll turn into a bat and fly off. You need a soul to have ethics and a healthy rule of honor.

4) They're limited in what they can do.

That sunlight thing is a bummer. They'd need SPF 1 billion to counter it. Women who like hikes in the forest and long walks on the beach would be better off with a werewolf. Add also the aversion to crosses, the allergy to holy water, the weakness to silver, the mirror thing -- when the vampire is asking how he looks, he really has no idea. 

5) But they still can whup your ass at will.

They're really strong and cunning, and they are great at psychological warfare. And, as noted above, if you get the upper hand, they'll just run away and sneak-attack later.

6) They don't love you; they see you as cattle.

You think they're all into you, but they only love you for your blood. When they say you're their type, they mean O neg.

7) There's something weird about the dentistry.

With a human shaped mouth, to get the canines to make two neat puncture wounds of the jugular, it seems to me that either the upper jaw must protrude like an orthodontist's freak show or the lower jaw must retract, making this demon lover look like Beaky Buzzard. 

8) They probably stink and decay.

Dead, remember? There's not enough Orbit and Axe to cover up death.

I hope that puts paid at last to the sexy vampire thing, because really there's nothing sexy about th--

Uh... We may need to examine this new evidence, reassess these data...

Ah, Walmart! Ah, humanity!

I have to say, during this Chinese corona crisis, the world has turned upside down. By that I mean I actually preferred shopping for groceries at Walmart last week to the local supermarket.

The reason has nothing to do with selection (Walmart's better with some things and worse with others) or even price (Walmart's generally cheaper but the quality is lower, especially in produce). Nor is Walmart known to be more hygienic than other stores. No, the reason I preferred Walmart is that it's easier to get around without someone sneering at you from behind the mask.

I'm okay with the mask thing and the latex gloves, and I can do my best with the six-foot social distancing space, but I am driven crazy by the one-way streets. This goes against a lifetime of training in supermarket etiquette. Now suddenly I have to follow arrows taped to the floors that indicate which aisle is east (or north) and which is west (or south or whatever). This becomes an issue mainly when I skip an aisle. "I don't need paper products today," I say, and skip that aisle, and suddenly I'm in Dairy with oncoming traffic all mad at me. I also have a bad habit of missing something on my list, abandoning my cart, and running back to a previous aisle to get it (but not if I'm already on checkout). This inevitably requires contravening the one-way rules.

This is better in Walmart than in the supermarket for three reasons:

1) The aisles are wider in Walmart. So you have more room to pass the large lady trying to find the can of low-sodium peas.

2) The ceiling is high, too. This gives the illusion of space, even though it doesn't really matter, as if the COVID-19 virus was lighter than air and would cluster far above us harmlessly. But it feels better.

3) People don't care as much in Walmart. The people in Walmart are -- by and large -- less concerned about personal space, even in a pandemic. Let's face it -- some of them are less concerned about their own personal pants. So they are not as inclined to give you a dirty look.

Walmart also always has the advantage over supermarkets that in addition to buying steak, milk, and Cheerios, you can buy tires, dandelion killer, and neckties.

Also the only store I know where you can meet at the corner of Child Care and Child Prevention.

So two cheers to Walmart for being a place that you can shop without getting dirty looks, regardless of your compliance and maybe even the state of your trousers.

Of course, my own trousers are fine. I can't believe you'd even ask such a question.

Looming scandal.

A priest says to a rabbi: "I hear you're not allowed to eat bacon." 

And the rabbi says: "Yes, that's right." 

"Just between ourselves though," says the priest, "have you ever tried it?" 

"Well, I must admit," says the rabbi, "many years ago, I did taste bacon." 

"It's pretty good, isn't it?" says the priest. 

"Yes," says the rabbi, "I have to agree, it's pretty good. But tell me, priests are not allowed to have sex." 

"Yes, that's right," agrees the priest. "We're not allowed to have sex." 

"Between ourselves though," says the rabbi, "have you ever tried it?" 

"No," says the priest, "I never have." 

"That's a shame," says the rabbi, "because it's a lot better than bacon!"

Seems like a lot of our priests and bishops are doing more than eating bacon.

The other day I got sore at a friend (although she didn't know it) who seemed to be poking fun at the Catholic scandal involving active gay priests and bishops, which also includes pressuring others (including minors) into sex. On reflection I don't think she meant it as a joke on this scandal, and I was glad I kept my mouth shut. But I knew it had hit a nerve, good and hard.

I love my church and I hate to see her suffer at the hands of men whose behavior they had to know was awful. The nation has heard about Pennsylvania and now maybe New York getting legally ready to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators, justly, and one assumes that if they can take our whole church structure down with it they will consider it a job well done. I can hardly blame them for feeling that way. The Church in America has not covered itself in glory in the last 20 years.

Of course, no one ever hears about the wonderful things the Church does for others. Partly because that's expected, so it's not news; partly because of anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, or just anti-God bias among our betters in the media departments. But how can I or any of us be mad when they had a juicy scandal with real live victims who deserve justice? Whatever happens to us over this, we will have to take it.

Staunch friends tell us we will get through; that God knew all the wickedness that would follow in the Church founded on Peter, and everything is part of the plan. The Church, some say, will have to get smaller but will get better. Some would make it seem that, because God can bring good out of bad, that bad is therefore good.

I don't know if my staunch friends know what this kind of scandal does to Catholics whose faith is already shaky, to those who find the Catholic obligations onerous and would love a good reason to walk away. Smaller and better is good, but smaller to the vanishing point is gone.

Jesus promised that the gates of the Netherworld would not prevail against the Church, and surely everything from the Manicheans to the Gnostics to Islam to the Reformation to the Enlightenment to Communism to the worship of Science has tried to bring her down over the centuries. But can she survive such repeated, pervasive attacks from within? Catholic corruption is how we got Protestants in the first place.

It's so bad right now that there are conspiracy theories to explain how it happened, a popular one being how Communist Bella Dodd encouraged sexually active homosexuals (not just radicals, as she told Congress) to be planted in the U.S. Catholic church in the 1930s to purposely destroy it from within. Supposedly this was so successful that it accounts for what we're seeing now. I never buy conspiracy theories, but they always tell us something about the people who promote them.

So I have nothing good to say today, I'm afraid. I will go to church, I will support her, I will hope and pray for real faith to come forth from all this darkness and reinvigorate the Church all over the world. But I won't be happy.

As for those who caused all this, those who defied their vows of chastity -- Jesus said in Matthew 18, "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." This is also seen in Luke 17: "Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin."

Looks like we may need to get millstones in bulk.

The Right Choice Now.

I'm sure you are all broken up about the bizarre decision of the Nobel Prize Committee to not award a 2018 prize in the field of Literature. I first heard a newsflash about it, that the problem had its roots in the ongoing worldwide Weinstein-sparked sex abuse cases, and it stunned me. I mean, I know authors are despicable creatures by and large, but surely we can't all be creepy Lotharios. Seriously, I can barely talk to female type persons any better now than I could when I was 13. Good thing that one of them decided to put me out of my misery and marry me.

As it turns out, the problem was not that the writers are sexual felons, but the Nobel guys are. Or as UPI put it, "In November, divisions began to emerge when Jean-Claire Arnault, who ran a cultural project with funding from the Swedish Academy, was accused of sexual assault by 18 women.... The Academy said Friday it agrees group practices need to 'evolve,' and it intends to modernize the interpretation of statutes and refresh internal work arrangements and external communication." Or, in other words, we don't want to admit that we had a Harvey Weinstein of our own, but things may have happened, and we want the things to not have happened anymore. So the world's authors are getting hosed.

"Yumpin' Yimminy, is my face red."

I think we all know what the answer to this problem is, and it's not that the Committee award two people the big $900,000 prize in 2019, as has been promised. After all, they and their compadres will be the same sleazebags next year as they are this year, so the underlying corruption won't change. Furthermore, they'll have to be excruciatingly careful not to present an award to an author who is a sexual predator or someone with a history of female abuse---no Norman Mailer types, and for God's sake no more musicians.

So whom does that leave?

You guessed it. Frederick Key: The Right Choice Now.

Certainly I qualify. I'm a human being and I write books. That actually qualifies me more than the non-book-writing Mr. Dylan, who is reported to be human but whose books are just jumbles of his song lyrics. And no one has ever accused ol' Fred of being a predator of any kind. I'm just a lovable chap in so many ways. And a chap that certainly could use 900 large right now, not to mention the boost my books would get from having a major Swedish award bestowed on them. Plus, the Nobel people would get the benefit of having awarded the Literature prize to an actual writer, and double plus, a writer who is less likely than the judges themselves to be accused of any kind of assault.

I'll write two words for you now, Swedish people: Win. Win.

Let's face it: Award-giving people are not very good at giving awards. Nobel Prizes for peace have gone to butchers and liars. Prizes don't go to nice people. Bill Cosby got half a dozen Emmys. Hell, Harvey Weinstein got every award the movie business could dish out, and everyone knew he was a sick and dangerous freak.

Yes, people who give out awards are very bad at doing exactly the thing they are supposed to be good at doing. Just look at this chart:

Nobel people, I'm saying you can change. You can do the right thing. The Fred thing. Fred Key: Nobel Laureate. Take that step, Nobel people. It's the first step on the road to good awards-giving. You'll be glad you did. And so will I.

Don't fear the canned asparagus.

One of the advantages of working from home is that you usually can set your own hours, which means that instead of grocery shopping on Saturday with everybody else, you can go, like, early on Thursday morning. The only people in the store at that hour are a few moms with toddlers and the elderly.

Which is why I'm surprised that my local store likes running Late 70's / Big 80's music on the PA at that time. The moms of preschoolers were preschoolers themselves when the 80's ended; the elderly stopped buying records around the time Captain Beefheart stopped being a name to conjure with in the music business.

I don't mind shopping with the old-timers. God bless them, I hope I'm that spry when I'm 112. But it's kind of embarrassing even now for me to hear something a little raunchy on the loudspeaker (like "Love in an Elevator") while standing next to someone old enough to be my mom. My own mom has passed on, but those teen feelings of embarrassment when your parents caught you watching a sex scene on TV never go away.

The age problem also leads to other awkward moments. It was especially striking when I was in the aisle with about five senior citizens (total age: 627) and Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) the Reaper" came on.

Uhh... hmm.

Personally, I'd be just as happy if they used the kind of pablum music that was actually used in the supermarket around the time the BOC recorded "Reaper":

Stupid, soothing, and didn't interfere with the mission: Find and buy food. Since when did the grocery store have to be cool?

TV was going to kill us all.

I remember when television was the enemy of civilization and was going to destroy us. What happened?

"I'm going to eat you!"

From the 1960s through the 1980s, while television dominated American media, we were constantly warned that television spread violence, poisoned civilized discourse, encouraged stupidity and ignorance, and cheapened human relations. It was like global warming, in that you could blame anything on it.

There was a time, children, when TV Guide used to run serious think pieces on TV and violence, TV and sexual misbehavior, TV and the breakup of the family. And it was the most popular magazine in America.

Jean-Claude Van Itallie and other counterculture types in the 1960s were always bashing TV. Van Itallie's one-act play "TV" was so hard-core that it makes the actors take their curtain call frozen in place in mid-laugh, silent, to make you feel creeped out about TV.

Congress got involved many times in addressing the miserable content of television. Congressional hearings always led to big fat reports confirming that TV was decadent and dangerous, and then it just continued getting worse.

We have PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, and its predecessor, National Educational Television, because we wanted to use TV to make people better and smarter. How's that working out?

And then something happened, and TV was no longer killing America. I don't know what it was. It was during the 1990s, and I was busy. A level of irony sank into the culture, separating us from our concerns, telling us, "Yeah, it's crap, let's enjoy." Or maybe our intelligensia got lazy. They got much more interested in money. We suffered the rise of the Bourgeois Bohemian. Van Itallie lives on a farm and eats dirt; TV writers live in Hollywood and get girls. Which would you rather be?

Of course, in the 1990s we got the Internet to start blaming for everything, which was great for TV. Took the pressure off, anyway.

Some groups still complain about violence and immorality on TV, but violence and immorality get worse and are now broadcast at all hours of the day (ever hear of "Family Viewing Hour"?). Those voices seem to get more and more faint, fading under the noise.

As for me, I grew up watching much too much TV, but was not immune from the criticisms in the culture about how bad it was for you, how it turned your mind into a turnip, etc. And I resolved never to be a slave to the box again.

It's easy enough now that I have a phone to stare at instead.

Jerks.

The third human being with whom I spoke on Thanksgiving morning promised to sic the police on me.

I don't want to dwell on it. It was a lovely morning, and no one else in the house was up, so I took Tralfaz for a walk in a neighborhood with which I wasn't familiar. (We both enjoy trying new paths on our walks sometimes.) Turned out we wandered into a small, crummy, run-down apartment complex with a "no trespassing" rule. Suddenly I heard someone pretending to growl like a dog; then we were getting yelled at by some bald guy with a ponytail---always an appealing look---who threatened to call the cops if he saw us there again.

I wished him a happy Thanksgiving. Although clearly, with his attitude, that was not going to be possible.

Maybe he's the maintenance guy and he is always having to clean up dog poop. Hey, I can relate, mister. No need to be a complete jackass right out of the gate, though.

I know that as you get older you begin to appreciate the pillars of civil society in a way you don't when you're younger, you come to see that civil society is more fragile than you thought, and you tend to see rudeness as a threat. People that care about civil society do, anyway, unlike Ponytail Joe.

Jackassery is all over, and creeps in everywhere. Like the bus I saw a couple of months ago that was in the right lane that pulled out into the center of the street while I was passing him. He'd had the flashers on, showing he was picking up passengers, and it was perfectly legal to pass. But suddenly he wanted to go, and he wanted to get around some construction at the curb. He didn't look to see if someone was going by on the left, or if he did, he didn't care. I had to make an instant choice to slam on the brakes, swing into oncoming traffic, or let the bus he didn't own smash the car I do own. What choice did I have?

When you're not the lead dog, the view never changes,

Jerks are running the media, of course, and we're to blame for letting them do it. When I was a kid, daytime TV was pretty anodyne, even the soaps; now it's a swirling cesspool of broken lives and miserable people who make bad choices. I see that the ABC Family channel is changing its name to Freeform in 2016, the better to reflect the fact that it has not for a long time been a place you could rely on for something that won't shock Grandma or confuse Little Jackie or embarrass Teen Queen (who canNOT believe that she has to WATCH all this SEX STUFF with her PARENTS in the room). The name ABC Family conveyed---falsely, for a long while---that it contained what we used to call family entertainment.

Freeform promises nothing, hints at almost exactly the opposite of that. The executives at the network literally danced with joy when they announced the name change, freed from the shackles of having to pretend they cared about families.

Thanks, Disney!

So the whole world feels like it's going to worse than the dogs---it's going to the jackasses.

Or is it?

As I mentioned at the top, Ponytail Joe was the third person I spoke with on Thanksgiving morning. Persons 1 and 2 were two lovely young ladies out walking their tiny dogs when I came across them with my humongous dog. We chatted happily for a bit while their little dogs sniffed and jumped around my big fellow, and everyone complimented one another's pup, and it was a delightful way to start the day. It's sad that my pessimistic mind is more geared to focus on one asswipe than two polite and cheerful young people, but you always notice the tooth that hurts, not the 31 that don't.

Which is why it's easy to think that everything is going to hell, all the time.

But this weekend I'm going to try to focus on the 31 that don't hurt. On the two that are nice rather than the one that is naughty. I'm going to try to be grateful, and hope for the best.

And drive carefully around buses. Those drivers are nuts.

Feeling squirrelly.

We city slickers tend to think of spring as mating season, but of course that's silly; the reason we see baby critters in the spring is because the mating went on when the weather was getting cold.

I'm told the deer are getting frisky, and they certainly are acting weird. One buck started stalking my dog, until my dog noticed and chased him away. Despite the largeness of my pup, this was no weight class mismatch like a heavyweight vs. a welterweight; this was like a heavyweight vs. the baby child of a flyweight. But the huge deer was quickly vanquished nonetheless.

According to one fellow who sounds like he should know, squirrel mating season does not begin again until December. But when I spotted this ex-squirrel in the street, gone to join the Choir Invisible, my first thought was: He had to be chasing a dame.

We know what it's like, right boys? You're humming along on the telephone wire, doing fine; next thing you know there's some dame, and you rush out into danger like a moron, and---

Maybe I'm projecting.

What made it so on-target, though, was that I found this poor critter on the street outside a funeral home. I would have liked to have gotten a picture of the squirrel in the foreground and the funeral home in the background, offering undergraduate-level picture art expressing Irony and Juxtaposition and Deep Thoughts. But I didn't because:

A) I would have had to stand in traffic;

B) To get the squirrel and the funeral home in the same shot would have rendered the squirrel an unrecognizable speck at the bottom of the shot;

C) In these litigious times, the funeral home might have sued me for making them look sloppy about their space. (If you see a lovely, well-kept home in any American town it is probably the funeral home.)

I'll leave you with the classic song "Three Squirrels" by Joe Williams (not this one) (no, not this one either) (or him) (don't even think about him) (this is the one), courtesy of YouTube, in memory of all our nutty little gray friends. Stay safe out there, boys!

Coke, what the hell?

A manly man goes to grab himself a manly can of Coke Zero from the fridge, and what happens?

Excuse me? "Sis"?

Look, I don't want to get into any kind of Bruce/Caitlyn thing here, or be accused of being sexist, but come on. This can was clearly meant for someone's sister. Well, suppose my sister isn't here. Okay, now what, smart guy? Am I supposed to go thirsty while the can earmarked for my sister gets warm? Maybe she likes Pepsi. Maybe she likes Pepsi One! I suppose someone did.

That's not the point. The point is, Coke, you have forced me, a manly type of man, to drink from a girly type of can, or use a glass, which is also girly. Putting identifiers on cans makes them useless to certain populations. Are you trying to be divisive, Coke? Trying to set Bro vs. Sis here?

What if you buy a 12-pack, and by chance there are seven Sis cans and five Bros. Someone's getting hosed, bro.

Yeah, this won't cause any fights.

Even dumber are the individual bottles with the names on them. Who wants to buy someone else's bottle? This is the second summer you've done it, so I suppose someone likes it, but I don't know why. And I'm not just saying that because I have yet to see a Fred. In fact, it turns out there IS no Fred. You have Quin AND Quinn, but no Fred. Is the idea that I'm supposed to see a bottle for my friends Felix or Perla (made the list) (unlike Fred) and be overwhelmed with the desire to buy him or her a Coke? What if Perla's my ex, and now I'm plunged into misery? What the hell is going on down there in Atlanta?

I'm very disappointed in you.

I guess I can settle for one of the more lame-o cans, and leave the Sis can to stew until she shows up. Here's one.

Wingman. Which means, basically, sidekick. Probably the comic relief. The one whose job it is to occupy the unattractive girl.

Who's being sexist now, Coke?

This whole situation saddens me. Do they still make RC Cola?

Brr.

Okay, so it's cold. Big deal. It's the first week of February; of course it's cold. We can deal with this.

Blarg.

Last night was the coldest we've had so far this winter, with a temperature below 0 F and a cold wind to make it worse. I was out with an injured relative who had to navigate a poorly cleared path on an orthopedic walking boot---the tractionless cam boot---which required gripping my coat to get over an icy patch. We proceeded like a very short, cold, and miserable conga line.

As I write this, AccuWeather reports that we've warmed up to 2, with a "RealFeel" of -3. So the wind has basically stopped.

On that note: RealFeel is a trademark of AccuWeather, used to replace wind chill and heat index and things like that, I guess. Unfortunately, the term "RealFeel" has been so popular that it has also been trademarked by manufacturers of drum practice pads, cell phone covers, flight simulator software, and---inevitably---condoms and related lubricants. Which is an appropriate pairing, as Old Man Winter is hosing us right now.

Winter used to not bother me so much, because, like heat in the south, you could avoid it by running from the house to the car and the car to the office and the office to the car and the car to the store and the store to the car and the car to the house. But once you have a dog, you are at the mercy of the elements. And the elements keep coming---even with no place left to stash the snow, more is coming this weekend. Old Man W don't care.

I keep reminding myself that next month is March, and although most of March falls in winter, it is the beginning of spring, damn it all. We can get through this. Probably.

Family friendly Thanksgiving Day parade.

After last year's preposterously awkward appearance by the cast of the musical Kinky Boots in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, parents are concerned about what garbage is going to come down the pike next. Sorry, prudes! You'll just have to accept the fact that there's no such thing as family-friendly anything anymore. Oh, sure, you got the Lena Dunham-inspired incest scene in Frozen cut from the DVD release*, but that's a rearguard action. You bluenoses had just better get used to having to explain things about sex to the kiddies before they're ready.

Really, people, relax. Your man Fred is on the scene to make sure everything will be family friendly this year. I mean, yes, I did go down to Macy's in Herald Square last year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to check things out, as seen in this photo.

And yet somehow this Kinky Boots thing escaped my notice. But I'll be more vigilant this time.

You're wondering if this year's telecast will feature the bloody torture song from the stage production of Criminal Minds, the naked sex scene from Hair: The Darker, Grittier Reboot, or the head-hacking scene from ISIS: The Musical Review**.

Well, relax. No way. For one thing, the forecast for Thursday is 43F, and SAG-AFTRA rules prohibit naked performance copulation in public when the temperature is below 60.

Also, NBC was embarrassed by the coverage last year, and this year has insisted that musical acts with explicit lyrics tailor their numbers for the home audience, maybe using a holiday twist***. So Meghan Trainor will be doing a cooking number called "All About That Baste"; Izzy Azalea will be crooning about dining with "Fork Love"; and there'll be a classic post-turkey lament from rap star Eminem called "Gas Like That." So we have a lot to look forward to this year.

After all, we spend a lot of time teaching the children the difference between "appropriate" and "inappropriate," so this Thanksgiving we're going to demonstrate that adults know the difference too****.


* Kidding.

** Still kidding.

 ***Yeah, that too.

****Nah. It'll be more inappropriate trash, probably worse than last year.