Wrecking Crew wrejects.

Comic book fans fondly recall the Wrecking Crew, a gang of superpowered criminals whose plans usually involve wrecking things. Created by Len Wein and Sal Buscema, the Wrecking Crew are often thwarted by Thor, although the thwarting rights have also gone to the Defenders, Captain America, and others.

Despite all this thwartation, the Wrecking Crew is pretty cool. Great group name, great individual names: the Wrecker (the leader), Piledriver, Bulldozer, and Thunderball. With names like that, you know however the wrecking is accomplished, it won't be subtle. 

"Wreck softly, lads!" -- something never said by the Wrecker

In addition to these main four, there was also the Excavator, who lasted one stupid adventure before breaking his magic shovel. (Really.) But the big super-secret of the Crew is that the Wrecker, tired of being thwarted, tried to increase the membership of the Wrecking Crew and advertised for new supervillains. Here's a few who submitted resumes via Indeed.com:

FINALISTS

Chopper: Big broad with a superpowered ax and a motorbike; turned down the group's offer to join when the OWN network offered her a reality show.

Rotary Hammer: Fit in well with the Crew, but they really hated his supervillain name. Efforts by R.H. to convince them that the rotary hammer is a powerful tool of destruction led to embarrassing titters. He ultimately withdrew from contention, but turned up in Ecuador, committing crimes under the name El Martillo Perforador.

Mover: His impressive strength at first masked the fact that he only moved things from place to place; the wrecking was incidental. It seemed to go against the group's zeitgeist. An argument was made by Piledriver that plundering, raiding, and theft involved moving things, so that was still important, but he was voted down since the thing being moved was what the Mover usually wrecked.

CALLBACKS FROM FIRST INTERVIEW

Drill: Good at knocking holes in things, and was in excellent physical shape, but kept losing his bits.

Circular Saw: A vicious killer at heart but equipped with a lower and upper guard that rendered her too safe to do some good quality wrecking.

Podger Spanner: Cheery, chubby British man with a long-handled, superpowered wrench. Everyone liked him, but he politely refused to try to meet the fitness requirements. 

FIRST INTERVIEW FAILURES

Router: Group was excited to meet someone who would rout the good guys, having been routed themselves so often, but the Router could only carve wood.

Nail Gun: Sounded pretty awesome, but on further review appeared better suited for the Construction Crew.

Chisel: Failed the skills test when it took half an hour for his "Asgardian chisel" to bust a cinder block.

Sister Sledge: Expecting a woman with a magic hammer, disappointment set in when the disco supergroup came into the conference room. 

Keyhole Saw: Cool costume and an enchanted saw, but he admitted that it can only make teeny holes.

DID NOT GET CALLED

Air Compressor: Could only blow things up. Like, blowing them up with air. Didn't seem like he could add much to the team.

Pressure Washer: Work history revealed his history as a do-gooder, using his superpowers to clean things. The Crew then reexamined its ad on Indeed.com to see if they had unclear wording. 

Staple Gun: Nail Gun's weaker kid brother.

Floor Scraper: To quote Thunderball, "We may always lose, but we still have some standards."

Needlenose Pliers: Just a doof with a pointy nose.

Sandy the Sander: The "sanding belt" he wore supposedly gave him the power to make things super smooth. 

Emergency Lighting: Some guy who wandered over from the electrical department. 

Freelancing from home.

Death to kale!

Wednesday was National Kale Day, and I missed it!

But it raises the crucial question: Who gives rat's pitoot?

Except for kale farmers, of course. But they are known to keep National Kale Day in their hearts all the year 'round.

Oh, yay, a toolkit to help me celebrate kale.

Kale is everywhere, kale is everything. We need a day to celebrate it?

Kale is okay. I think it's edible. My wife cares for it less. We might accept it as a passable side dish. But that's what it is. It is not a religion.

I'm not sure when the kalevalanche began, but it was more than a year ago Epicurious thought that the phenomenon had already peaked, and then had to correct itself. Snooty chef to the 1% Alice Waters said in an interview last year that she'd gotten into kale "20 years ago," long before the plebes -- but it's not like she's jumping out in front and taking all the credit. She says that she was "a little late." So don't you dare say she's high-falutin.

You know who does high-falute? The annoying kale braggarts. I have sat in an office while trendy young urbanites nearby traded dining tips; as the "conversation" went on, each had to be kalier than thou. You may have been there yourself, listening to bright young creatures recommend restaurants, and as the world's most precious pissing contest continues the restaurants must to get smaller, healthier, more obscure, harder to reach, and more utterly imbued with kale.

We have been down this road with other things. Arugula, avocado, cilantro, pesto. Some study pops up calling some food the new freaking ambrosia of the gods, which will essentially render you so healthy you can heal small injuries like E.T., and all the weenies flock to it like---well, like flocks. Another article last year pondered what the next kale would be... and yet a year passes and we're still up to our butts in kale. How long, O Lord?

I am almost at the point of praying that something horrible will be revealed about kale---its nutrients are blocked from absorption, like oxalic acid does to the iron in spinach (kale does contain oxalic acid---just saying), or it invalidates your vaccinations, or it gives you diagonal blue stripes, or that after a few years of steady consumption it causes catastrophic failure of the genitalia. Anything, just to shut the kaleiens down, please!

The dogs of war.

It's hugely irritating to find that someone has let their dog crap on your lawn and just left it there. It's utterly infuriating when you happen to own a dog yourself and never, ever do that to anyone else.

Having reared Tralfaz for some time, I have become something of an expert in dog poop. At a guess, and without getting all Forensic Files on it, I'd just the mystery crap to have been left by a medium size fellow with a healthy diet. I've seen a few of that description wander by. Whoever it was also tagged the neighbor a couple of weeks ago, and I cleaned it up so my own dog wouldn't get blamed.

What do you do about this?

Here are some options that occurred to me.

1) The Sign: We've had some luck with warning signs in other places in the neighborhood, or at least they seemed to me to work. Some I've seen are pretty large and serious:

Others are small but to the point:

But since there are signs liked these around, you would think that it would not be necessary to educate someone on this nice point of civilized behavior. The perp is most likely someone who thinks he's getting away with something, if indeed he thinks at all. So a sign alone doesn't seem to do the job, except he may think that he can let the dog crap with impunity anywhere there isn't a sign, in which case he's a moron anyway.

2) The Ambush: I sit in the house, peeking out the window, until they come by and the dog drops a brick; the moment they start to move off, BAM! I burst out of the front door and scream like a maniac.

Of course, that means I can do nothing else all day but sit by the window. And since this is (as far as I know) the first time they've ever done a dump-and-dash on my own lawn, I could be waiting there for days, even weeks, until my number comes up again. It might have come in the dead of night, which starts around seven at this time of year. This just isn't going to work. Then there's....

3) Technology: Buy some of those cheap security cameras and train them on the front lawn. When a puppy plop appears, review the recording. Get a screen grab of the irresponsible person and the dog in action; print up flyers and posters and put them on every lamppost and utility pole, and in every mailbox, in this part of town. The shame offensive!

I think this could be very effective. The main problem is the investment. Night-vision security cameras (for it would require that) are not cheap, and the way the property is laid out, for the cameras to get a good solid picture all the way from the secret camera hiding place, they would have to have excellent range. I have many expenses that take precedence over a poop project like this.

4) The Sign II: Maybe something a little more personalized:

Dear Inconsiderate Neighbor:
                I couldn't help notice that your medium-size dog has been allowed to crap on others' property at will, and that your dog's foolish owners have made no attempt to clean it up. Please be advised that I am actively seeking your identity and address---first, to complain about you to the local dog license office and the police, but mainly because my dog is about three times the size of yours. You had better believe it when I say his poop looks like an earth mover just deposited a load of fertilizer. I shall make it my main mission to deliver his droppings to your property every day until you apologize for your lack of consideration; afterward, if any dog, even one that is not yours, should defecate on my lawn again, I will hold you responsible and once again begin the storm. Thank you for your time.
                                Sincerely, Frederick Key

Nah -- that's no good. Who has time to read anymore?

Little orange balls.

In the yogurt, no less. 

The new NBA season kicks off October 27, so to gin up excitement among the yogurt-slurping children who are or could become basketball fans, there's this:

I got it on deep discount last month because the expiration date was coming up quick. These little cups of vanilla yogurt come in a four-pack for eating by children (or overgrown children) on the go. What's so basketbally about yogurt? Glad you asked:

Little orange balls!

We've seen this kind of thing before, of course; yogurt, the once-healthy ideal hippie dairy treat, now comes with everything from Froot Loops to Snickers in the plastic cap for mixing in to the sugared yogurt. I know, I know, I say like it's a bad thing. The iron rule of food drift is: Everything healthy that can be made less healthy will be.

In this case, the little orange balls are not flavored orange, but are actually little round bits of white chocolate. The taste is almost indiscernible, even on their own. Mixed in to the yogurt, you essentially just taste the yogurt.

This Alpina yogurt, of which I had never heard, may be healthy as far as its non-chocolate section goes; it's not very sweet, and is in fact quite tart, like a traditional yogurt. Alpina is actually huge in South America. They have, however, struggled some in the US market. On the other hand, they claim to have cracked the code in combining real coffee with yogurt ("This has been a challenge for food companies because of high acidity levels in both coffee and yogurt" says Buffalo Business First), so there's that.

Meanwhile, they have little orange balls, which come with stickers in the four-pack:

Collect 'em all, kids! Stick them on your school textbooks! Stick them on the side of Daddy's car on the way to school! Stick them to your baby brother's fontanelle! And get ready for tip-off!

Badass Fred.

Yeah, we used to get into some trouble when we were kids.

We were badasses.

Still am. 

Everyone nowadays says he's a badass. They consider themselves badasses by nature, engaged in badassery, badassing their way through life. Look, sister, you may be the most badass junior benefits administrator in the HR department, but that don't make you a badass in the world at large. Not like Fred.

Yeah. Fred Badass.

Of course, no one who's really a badass calls himself that. It's like being tough. You have to let other people call you tough. Usually after you just nailgunned your forearm to a plank, ripped it off, rubbed a little dirt onto it, and got back to work. "Wow! Lucy's tough!" they'd say. Sure. Badassishness works the same way.

"But wait!" you say. (That's just like you.) "You're calling yourself a badass, which you just said disqualifies you from badassdom."

That's right---unless you've been at it as long as I have. Then you've gone all the way through and out the other side. Even the rules of badass appellation designation no longer apply.

How long have I been at it? Long time. Me and the boys, we used to go downtown. Me even go alone sometimes. Then us boys would talk about chicks, about fights, about how we were too badass to care about using personal subject pronouns when we should be using personal object pronouns and vice versa. Then we'd get some smokes and a couple of bottles, and raise some badass-flavored hell.

Then we'd hop on our Big Wheels and ride.

'Cause we were badasses.

Over time I got badasser and badasser, until I was the baddest badass of them all.

How bad?

A proctologist once said he'd never seen an ass as bad as me.

Or as bad as I.

Yeah, man. And when this badass shows up, you better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout.

And I ain't even telling you why.

Badass Fred. Yeah.

Baseball playoff outlook.

Well, now we've gotten past the regular season, and it's on to the Major League Baseball playoffs. Baseball fans worldwide may be waiting on my predictions for each series. Feh---let 'em wait.

Of course, the fact is I have no idea who's going to get to, let alone win, the World Series. Nobody knows anything, as William Goldman said about the movie business, and countless others have said about sports. ("Nothing" is also quoted as being something about which nobody knows, but the meaning is the same.)

The question of who I'd like to see win, however, is different.

What we have now is:

Astros at Yankees (Wild Card game)

Cubs at Pirates (Wild Card game)

Astros/Yankees winner vs. Royals

Cubs/Pirates winner vs. Cardinals

Rangers vs. Blue Jays

Mets (hooray!) vs. Dodgers

FACT: Shea Stadium was perfectly round, and surrounded by dark blue shag parking lots.

So rather than doing power rankings or anything, I'm basing predictions on which teams I like and dislike. In the order in which I want to see them win:

#1. THE METS

I've loved the Mets since I was a little kid and they made it to the 1973 World Series. The 1986 team was awesome, winning 108 games in the regular season and clinching in August, but they came soooooo close to losing the NLCS to the Astros and the World Series to the Red Sox. Yet they were so good that they should have repeated in 1987 and 1988 (as Mookie Wilson predicted), but A) the Cardinals were an awesome team in the 80's, B) the Dodgers were an awesome team in the 80's, and C) New York was shin-deep in cocaine at the time, including (it would appear) the Mets locker room. Soon we were wallowing in the mediocrity of the 90's, the momentary thrills of the late 90's to mid 00's, and then crapsville. Now we have a chance, although this team either hits all at once or not at all, and it looks like everyone is so hurt that someone's arm may actually fall right off in the middle of an inning.

#2. THE CUBS

No World Series championship since 1908. No National League pennant since 1945. Although W.P. Kinsella once wrote a story in which the Cubs winning the pennant was believed (by the Cubs' coach) to be the sign of the impending Armageddon, it's almost worth it if these guys can get finally get it done. When there's no other rooting interest I have to root for the guys who have waited the longest, and no one has waited longer than these guys. Then again, the Mets went 0-7 against the Cubs this year, which makes me less sympathetic than I could be.

#3. THE ASTROS

True, that the Astros almost beat the Mets in that 1986 NLCS, when the Astros were in the NL, But then again, they did not. The franchise is as old as the Mets, and while we have a 2-2 record in World Series championships, Houston's got a 0-1 record. Maybe it's time.

#4. THE ROYALS

Small-market team with a storied history, but little to show for it since 1985. I was rooting for them in the Series last year, but maybe not hard enough.

#5. THE RANGERS

Another team with a long history of not winning the World Series. going back to 1961 and its roots as a Washington Senators franchise.

#6. THE PIRATES

Pittsburgh fans have much to be proud of with one of the great old franchises, but not in a long time. Until recently they sported a record 20 losing seasons in a row. Even the Cubs, with their ridiculously long drought in postseason play, never achieved a length of suffering like that.

#7. THE BLUE JAYS

The Jays have a pitcher I really like, former Met R. A. Dickey, and they kept the Yankees from winning the AL East. And Canadians are nice about sports, except hockey.

#8. THE DODGERS

There are STILL guys around here who are heartbroken about these traitors leaving Brooklyn. Not so many about the Giants going to San Francisco. Maybe because the Dodgers that left Brooklyn were on a huge upswing, and the Giants not. Anyway, did I mention 1988 and the NLCS? Uh-huh. My boss at the time and I sat shiva after Orel Hershiser slayed us. And if they advance this year it will be over the Mets' hopes and dreams. Boo. But because they are a once-beloved Brooklyn franchise, they edge out the Cards in my rankings.

#9. THE CARDINALS

Did I mention that the Cardinals knocked the Mets out of contention in 1987? And since then the Cards won two championships to our none? Bleh.

#10. THE YANKEES

Twenty-seven championships. And being a Mets fan, I have to hear about them all the freaking time. It's like being the little brother who always gets beaten up. Twenty-seven championships is enough for, say, the next 75 years. Lose to Houston and go home, you greedy slobs. Thank you.

Even at Citi Field, you are not safe from schmucks with Yankees jackets.