The Jan 8-Ball Posse

Elvis Presley, David Bowie and Larry Storch (F Troop's Corporal Agarn) were all born on this day.

Man, those cats could have combined to make a dynamite early 70's movie franchise. Sort of a rockin', druggin', slap stick Odd Couple (the Odd Triplets). Or perhaps a less sane variant on the Three Stooges. Elvis all loaded up with fried banana sandwiches and firearms, the contents of a small pharmacy coursing through his veins; Bowie all androgynified and strung out, his Ziggy mullet flapping in the breeze; and finally Larry picking up the rear in full-out Storch-itude, hanging with Sgt. O'Rourke and the Hekawis busting on Captain Parmenter.

As Cher sang, "If I could turn back time." Indeed. The accompanying music video for her 1989 hit had Sonny's already middle aged gal dolled up in a skin-tight flesh colored outfit dancing on the USS Missouri battleship surrounded by Navy "crew members", the irony of the words seemingly lost to all. Cher attempted to turn back time in Nip/Tuck fashion and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, maybe we can turn back time for our Elvis/Bowie/Storch bonanza with some FX magic of our own.

Larry and Bowie are still with us, so maybe we dispense with the full-on CGI and can option this film series idea with the real-deal codgers themselves, targeting it at the Octogenarian demographic (and the many of us who are Octogenarians at heart). With still just a bit of help from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic crew. The Marx Brothers meets Cheech and Chong meets the cast of Cocoon. The Three Amigos in Depends (hell, Elvis was wearing Depends in his 30s, so in a way it's a tribute to his memory as much as it is to their advancing years). Grumpy Stoned Men.

We just need an Elvis replacement. Lisa Marie? Nah, too young. Elvis Costello? Perhaps Presley was about more than just a quirky first name. We need an aging, pill popping iconic rock star with a ballooning weight problem and delusions of grandeur. And an enabling posse of hangers on. That shouldn't be difficult. Oh, that's right: this rocker also needs to be alive. That might be more challenging. Christ, grab one of his contemporaries - both Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard are still breathing, kind of, and seem to meet most of the criterion. But still, they simply aren't The Pelvis. Somehow that combination of rebellious sneering rocker, Mama's boy backwoods hick, and pill-popping paranoid batshit loon is harder to find in a single persona than one might think.

Ahh! It seems R. Kelly was also born on January 8th, so let's go ahead and inject some young blood into this would-be celluloid gang. It's now becoming sort of like a cross generational Mod Squad! Though it needs that certain special Peggy Lipton-style lady to truly make it mod. Amber Benson belongs to this special fraternity of "celebs" born on Jan 8 so why not let her in on the fun? Who the hell is she, you ask? Exactly. And in the spirit of 60/70's crime dramas, I'm thinking we want to make this gang more Ironside-like. As luck would have it, guess who else was born on 01/08? No, not Raymond Burr (he's dead anyway), I'm talking about Professor Stephen Hawking.

We've got the makings of a real rock and roll Ocean's Eleven, bent on drunken acid and slap stick high drama with some commercial grade physics thrown in to satisfy the public's insatiable hunger for the hard sciences! Let's call it The Jan 8-Ball Posse featuring "Howlin' Black Hole" Hawking.

We better hurry, though. Storch is pushing 90, Hawking's been living on borrowed time for 40 some years, and timing is everything. I'll start work on a draft treatment for the inaugural romp down 8-Ball Alley and ring up Hollywood at once to start the funding round. Gotta work on my sales pitch, though: "Man, if the kids loved Twilight I can only imagine how they'll eat this up ..."

Billy Dee - The New Williams on Tiger's Bag

What could be better than Billy Dee Williams hawking Tiger Woods limited edition commemorative collectible Franklin Mint "mistress" plates?

I missed this "ad" when it first made the rounds on Jimmy Kimmel several weeks ago. As soon as I saw ol' Billy Dee, though, I knew it would be good. Any man who can connect sex with Colt 45 malt liquor and make it work the way he did back in the day is a god in my book. The sly smile and a lovely lady in waiting dressed across his back, she half in the bag soused on that putrid concoction and gripping Billy to keep from collapsing. "It works every time," he'd purr. Billy made Colt the go-to GHB of its time. But, you know ... classier.

When Billy Dee made a galactic Judas sympathetic with Lando Calrissian in Empire Strikes Back - well, that was just icing on the cake. As if to say, "Hey, the sex/Colt 45 thing wasn't just a fluke - I got mad skills, people."

And now he's got Tiger's back, helping him compensate for lost endorsement income through this new revenue stream. Making lemonade out of lemons (or perhaps the better metaphor might be "condominiums out of condoms").

These Billy Lee collectible plates are just the tip of this product line iceberg, I'm sure: t-shirts, jewelry, wall art, press-on tattoos, and so on. Billy knows what he's doing, Tiger; just follow his lead. When he gives you a wink you know it's time to do your part: go hit the swanky nightclubs and seduce a new special "plate" for the collection. Billy Dee snaps the pics, the Franklin Mint fires up its ovens, and the purchasing public is satisfied for another month. Then the dance begins again. Who has time to play golf?

2010 - Free Flowing Pipes and other Resolution Types

So here we are, it's 2010 and I'm back home in Philly after a red-eye flight from Phoenix. I'm pretty wrecked from lack of sleep, screwed up diet and jet lag.

Which is to say, just about my normal self.

I'm going to kick off my New Year's Resolutions today (no waiting for Chinese New Year for me this time - well, maybe for some of the more challenging resolutions, but not all of them). I've been batting back and forth exactly what these resolutions should be, of course. They're much harder to keep when you're not sure what they are, after all. Or much easier, depending on your perspective.

So ... ?

• Exercise. This is an easy one. In short, get more of it. Now, the most straightforward manner in which to tackle this one would be to join a gym. I'm not very straightforward though. First I need to get into good enough shape to confidently expose my body to the public ridicule a gym invites. So I'm first setting up a two month private regiment of calisthenics to get to that point.

• Diet. Bluntly, I gotta get regular. I mean Activia * Super Colon Blow * Phillips' Colon Health = Me in 2010. Last year was a world of shit on many levels but alas they were all metaphorical. I'm looking forward to a world of shit in 2010, but only in the literal sense of the term. I just need to keep to the philosophy of my new mentor, Phillips' The Colon Lady: don't ever quit / in your quest to take a shit. I'm paraphrasing, but you get the gist.
  

• Sell my house. Or at least fix it up to the point where it might possibly be sold for more than the spare change in the pockets of prospective buyers. And before it morphs from a sort-of Money Pit to a super massive Big Bucks Black Hole from which no income can escape. My idea of home repair is switching the channel to an episode of This Old House and even that doesn't hold my interest for very long. That's generally as close as I get. I was made for urban condo/townhouse living, it just took me a decade or so to realize it. Fuck it, that's a lie: I knew it almost right away. The sewer backed up and flooded the finished basement of the decapitated "animal house" a group of us had been renting prior to my purchase, making it almost instantly unlivable (that basement housed two of the four bedrooms). The drunken landlord who used to steal our beer and lined the insides of the walls with the empties attempted to shovel the shit out but he was comically incompetent and besides there was no turning back. I had convinced myself that it was time to buy and rushed the process given the sea of human waste in my rear view mirror gaining on me. One year after closing, I was ready to sell. Fast forward another nine years and I'm really ready to sell. Funny how the topics of fucked up pipes and shit keep coming up.

• Meet the gal of my dreams, go all romantic comedy crazy, and live happily ever after. This would be tops on the list but I'm fairly unlikely to achieve it and I don't want to place the bar too high only to disappoint. Baby steps. A few push-ups and sit-ups. Regular trips to the can. A job I don't feel sick to my stomach going to each day and a home I don't feel nauseated returning to each evening. Once those are in place, perhaps then I can aspire to greater heights. Besides, I've been rocking the eHarmony thing the past little while, so technically I'm working on the resolution. Thus far, no long term sparks. Perhaps they discovered this blog and then subsequently ran for the hills? :-)   I sound like Barney Miller's Fish half the time here, and I imagine that's generally not too attractive. Unless you happen to be a budding Bernice.
 

 

And now for something completely different: a non-sequitur I just had to share ...

On E!'s The Soup as part of their Clipdown '09 retrospective they were flashing an excerpt from one of the daytime judge/court shows that hit my funny bone pretty hard, though you likely have to see it to get it. One of the complainants worked as a prostitute at Nevada's Bunny Ranch and she was rattling off her life's accomplishments thus far, including an honorable discharge from the Air Force and the "Air Force's highest academic award, which I've used extensively in my 19 years in the Nevada brothel industry."

The judge inquired as to how one goes from the Air Force to the Bunny Ranch. Her response? "Well, it's only like an hour away." The Air Force must be so proud.

Well, I'll be blogging little over the next couple of weeks while I plunge into work to do the transition dance.  Thereafter, I may have quite a bit more time for blogging and such as I'll be taking at least a week off prior to moving onto the next phase of my career.  If I get lonely, perhaps I'll join the Air Force ...

Christmas Pills, New Year Thrills, and Dicking around the Holidays

I had planned on steering clear of this blog until the new year. But I've got insomnia and perhaps pounding out a bit of drivel here beats counting sheep. It's been an interesting time thus far with the family in Arizona. Lots of campfire stories haunted by ghosts of familial dysfunction past. But primarily just stuffing my pie hole and vegging. Serious vegging. Which makes up for the lack of vegetables in my diet this week (unless the coco beans from chocolate count).

My sister Lynn is good at pulling on threads of dormant memories I'd thought were lost to me forever, unraveling a tapestry of singular moments in time. An elementary school teacher's name, a neighbor's eccentricity, commercials on TV, jobs held as a kid, the kinds of candy found at our little corner shops.

Each one of these off-hand remembrances lets loose a flood of imagery, at once dated and yet timeless, uniquely local yet universal. Penny candy back when it cost one cent. The lady across the street with the one crazy eye who would peek out her shutters all day. Silly shit like this, one memory tumbling into another like a string of dominoes toppling over.

I've been focused on the personal rather than the political this week; in fact, I haven't much been paying any mind to the goings on in the US or the world.

I'm vaguely aware of a would-be terrorist managing to thwart our vaunted security, almost blowing up a plane coming into Detroit International from the Netherlands and that Jon Gosselin's apartment in NYC got ransacked (whether by evildoers or his own publicity-hungry hand). Both important topics to be sure, but uninteresting to me this particular week.

Dick Cheney continued to make an ass of himself unabated this week, but that's hardly news. I swear the guy would laugh with glee upon learning Santa's sleigh had been hijacked by terrorists, the reindeer booby-trapped with high explosives and the sled filled to overflowing with bags of mustard gas before being crashed into the side of a children's orphanage if he thought it would cause some embarrassment to the Obama Administration. I don't say this in defense of Obama, who has disappointed me in many and varied ways in 2009. Still, as they say, a bad day golfing is still better than the best day at work. Obama/Biden are my "golf" to the Bush/Cheney "work" in this analogy.

Cheney's just plain bad news, the evil ogre under the bridge. And to think I had some vaguely positive things to say about the guy as SecDef during Desert Storm. I guess back then he was still at least partly Anakin Skywalker. He's clearly embraced the dark side since then (perhaps he always had and I just didn't see it). Some might call him Richard but to me he's the ultimate Dick.

Thankfully, I needn't concern myself with things politico right now as Maureen Dowd seems to be taking care of this for me. Dowd's piece today as usual echoes my thoughts from a political perspective to a tee. Though, oddly, she neglects to mention Jon G. But that's okay. Thanks, Mo.

We're off to see some sights in Phoenix this afternoon and evening. Specifically, the Desert Botanical Gardens and then the Zoo Lights. Film at 11. As for New Year's Eve tomorrow, it'll be a low-key affair, I'm sure. Very much unlike the drunken Vegas group hug I stumbled into this decade through. Both have their charms depending on your perspective.

I'm moving on to a new phase of my professional career come the middle of January so I need to start mentally preparing myself for that now. Finally, a New Year's Resolution I can keep! I'm headed out of the safety - and madness - of corporate life back into consulting again. Both have their crisp highs and deep lows - much like the Bose Wave System, according to their commercials - but at least with consulting the lows are transient (of course, so are the highs). So I'm nervous but excited.

I will say that the Christmas pills make this time of year bearable. Just be sure you have a festive container for said pills. Said containers make fantastic gifts. What are Christmas pills? Why they're the pills you put into the Christmas Pill Containers. Little magnetic twist-in-half or head-pops-open Snowmen or Santas or other similar figurines. Containers that some might assume are meant to contain other items (candy, spice, etc.). But they are in fact meant to contain pills. Screamers. Uppers. Downers. Laughers. The pills that get you from Thanksgiving to New Year without going insane. Rush understands this. As a bonus, they double as great Christmas Tree Ornaments.

"... She goes running for the shelter / Of her Santa's Little Helper / And it helps her on her way / Helps her through her busy day ..."

In any case, "talk to you" in 2010 ...

Some Festivus Vitriol (The Airing of Grievances)

The beginning of another year is bearing down on us while most of this one sits in the rear view mirror. Large numbers of those who put pen to paper (bits to disk? words to the web?) are cranking out their lists of the best and worst (and best of the worst or worst of the best). Cliched for sure, an easy dodge. Being a cliched dodgy sort, I might be tempted to follow suit. But I'll resist the urge. This may be my last post of the year after all and if it is, I'd like to go out on a higher note than that.

Maybe just some good ol' Festivus Airing of Grievances. Who am I pissed off at this year?

• The Philadelphia Eagles leadership, for hiring a serial sadist onto their team as a role model to all the football loving children the world over and now the Eagles players too, for voting him the 2009 recipient of the Ed Block Courage Award. Isn't that what the Wizard bestowed upon the Cowardly Lion? I only wish this squad very bad things in the weeks and months ahead.
• Congress, for dessimating the healthcare legislation and then jerking themselves off in self congratulation over it. I can't stand either side of the aisle (or the aisle itself these days). I can't very well blame them - it's the system, which might be the best in the world but still blows pretty bad these days.
  
• The lunatic fringe, who ultimately twisted the admittedly already very rubbery spines of the aforementioned legislators through their flames of bombastic hysteria. I can't really be all that mad at them, though, since they're only doing what they think is right, however misguided I might believe it to be. It's the cynical, money-grubbing swine who trumpet this kind of message for the sake of publicity and profit, pretending like they actually believe it. The ones who turn their high-powered fans on the flames. They're the ones I've got a bone to pick with. Clowns like Glenn Beck. That's way too easy. I'm lazy, so easy is good.
  
• Oprah, for the imminent destruction of my beloved Discovery Health Channel. Why, oh, why OWN, Oprah? And why does its introduction mean the end of Discovery Health? What do they have to do with one another? Do you really hate discussions of incontinence that much?
  
• Barack Obama, for being way too compromising - stand up for your core beliefs, man! Intelligent compromise in matters of foreign affairs can be good, but fuck 'em when it comes to domestic matters. You're being accused of being a Kenyan-born communist dictator already so it's high time you acted more like one! You know what I mean ... talk to Oprah, will ya? Order a cease and desist on the Discovery Health dissolution. I don't want Dr. G performing an autopsy on the very network that airs her show (I think the universe would explode).
  
• Saturday Night Live, for being consistently not funny (I'm assuming this is unintentional but I could be wrong: they seem so good at it).
  
• My neighbors, for being snow blowing bullies (see My Neighbors Blow for details).
  
• Walmart. 'nuff said. Except the online caskets. I think those are pretty neat, as anyone who's slogged through this drivel knows all too well.
  

That's enough vitriol (and I'm fresh out of Geritol).

I've got an early flight tomorrow so it's off to bed soon. After catching Heathers for the umpteenth time on IFC. Gotta love such a sentimental tale during this joyous holiday season.

Happy Holidays and a Grand New Year to all. I can't wait to kick 2009 to the curb. Christ, did somebody on TV just say "Sarah Palin is the Greta Garbo of American Politics" or are my ears malfunctioning!?! Nope, I just hit rewind and there it is. Huh? Apparently because she grants so few interviews. Still, I don't see it. I guess if Garbo was a batshit loon and had a terminal case of Twitter Tourette Syndrome. Kick it to the curb indeed.

The many Faces of Kringle and Murphy

Perhaps Santa does Slay ...

One of my friends clued me into an interesting article on the variations different countries have weaved into the Santa Claus mythology over the years, particularly on Kris Kringle's dark side. It seems Santa is not nearly so benevolent in some parts abroad as he is in the states; in fact he is downright diabolical, at least in the helpers he employs and what they have in store for naughty children. Hint? Those kids'll be begging for the lump of coal that constitutes the Claus domestic capital punishment after catching a whiff of what his foreign alter ego is dishing out.

Ahh, yes - now this fills me with the spirit of the holidays!


Flu-like Symptoms

The catch-all ailment of the stars. But it's not just for the Hollywood elite: you and I have surely used it too. And technically it's not a fib. The symptoms are "flu-like" after all. Flu-like as in "man, I'm so hung over I feel like I have the flu." Or maybe "shit, thinking about going into that office today is making me nauseous - perhaps it's the flu!" Is it such a leap from there to "man, I've been strung out on uppers, downers, screamers, coke, smack, and Jack for the past week and haven't slept in four days - coincidentally, I think I feel the flu coming on!"? It's all relative.

Brittany Murphy apparently had "flu-like symptoms" this past week prior to her untimely death from cardiac arrest yesterday at 32 years of age. Sadly, I wasn't all that surprised. Maybe it was the flu, but probably not. Generally influenza doesn't bring on a heart attack. It might well be something else entirely but my spidey sense is telling me it was an illness far too prevalent in Hollywoodland. Her skeleton-thin appearance has been been particularly concerning of late and there were those rampant rumors of having recently been given the boot from The Caller for "being extremely difficult" (rumors she vehemently denied). She was one of those living dichotomies, at once so full of life and yet with a strong tinge of "fuck it all" that seemed to envelop her like a mist she couldn't escape. Maybe this last was simply a reflection of my darker inclinations off the mirror of a kindred spirit. Or perhaps just a case of too much Behind the True Hollywood TMZ Music Story for this TV pop-culture junky.

Brittany represented one of my more potent Hollywood crushes over the years, from the time I first saw her in Bongwater. Thought I was gonna say Clueless, eh? Nope, I didn't catch that until many years later. Bongwater, though, is a great little flick that sadly never found much of an audience.

Now this Murphy attraction might not have been up in my pantheon with the likes of Mary-Louise Parker, Neve Campbell and Scarlett Johansson; however, it was nonetheless worthy of being included in the discussion. The thing with Brittany was the slightly naughty glint in her eyes and a personality bursting-to-pop with goofy, giddy life. Not necessarily a "classic beauty" - though she could clean up real nice - she did it for me far more than most of those who fit that bill. She also seemed extraordinarily vulnerable and slightly emotionally disturbed in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. Perhaps that lent itself to the attraction - we shared a connection there possibly.

At the end of the day, though, Ms. Murphy's just another casualty caught in the cross hairs of the hills above Sunset. Regardless of the circumstances, 32's just too young to die of "natural causes." That strip sits in the shadow of the demise of countless stars and wannabes before her and it'll no doubt bear witness to a truckload yet to come. But it's just the tip of the iceberg next to the fade-to-black deaths of the great unwashed who never made it above street level there, never made it onto a movie set (well, not the sort with distribution to your local mall cineplex at any rate).

Tom Petty's cranked out more than his share of fatalistic hick-succumbs-to-Hollywood fare but the one that sticks in my mind whenever this sort of thing happens is a bit less obvious. It's also my personal favorite of his: Free Fallin'. The imagery of snaking around Mulholland and free falling from its heights in the hills to the valley below always struck a cord with me, especially after having driven it a few times. Whenever anyone meets an untimely demise up near its twisting and turning apex, I think of the roller coaster-like terrain and Free Fallin'.


Soon will come the E! True Hollywood Story and countless exposes from 20/20, 48 Hours, TMZ, etc. Time will tell as to the specifics surrounding her passing but it won't change the end result.

I hope the mist has cleared for you, Brittany. But you're dead, so how would you know? As Stanley Kubrick once wrote, "The dead only know one thing: It is better to be alive."

My Neighbors Blow

Now I admit I'm not the most neighborly guy.  I haven't taken the time to meet, greet and glad hand the denizens of my particular neck of the woods all that much, couldn't tell you their names or really much else about them.

When their kids were of stick ball and street hockey age I put up with their projectiles flying over the fence from the church parking lot into the side of my house, only occasionally chasing them away when they came within inches of my windows one too many times.  I never caught the fuckers in the act of breaking those windows since it always seemed to happen when I was away, but I knew well enough who they were.  Hell, I even retrieved the balls that landed up onto my second floor deck in the spirit of neighborly fun.  They've since grown up and graduated to drugs and petty crime, I'm guessing.

Still, I'll confess: I'm not a touchy-feely, chat-it-up stalwart member of the community.

Now I feel vindicated as to why: they're all vicious swine, the lot of them.

Each one apparently has a state of the art snow-blower, one fancier than the next. With all the bells and whistles. Vibrating, heated recliner seats, 20000 PSI, 12 cylinder gas-guzzling, power-mad electronic beauties that could clear a path up Everest while serving you breakfast and clipping your toenails.

I'll admit it was hard to see clearly all the way up to the end of the block this morning through the 50 foot high plumps of pressurized snow emanating from the parade of humongous blowers but I swear the particularly evil white-haired Nazi encamped at the corner had a machine that was simultaneously clearing his walk, shampooing his scalp, and giving him a reach around. I squinted a bit harder and am sure I saw Dustin Hoffman strapped to the back of the thing with some diabolical dental instrument cutting into a fresh nerve at the root of one of his teeth.  Is it Safe?

The noise was deafening this morning, sort of like pit row at the Indy 500.  My head is still exploding from the sounds and the fumes while the taste of gasoline-laced snow consumes my tongue and throat after getting sprayed in the face with it over a sustained period of time.

Yes indeed, every Who in Whoville was out with their shiny Snow Blow Job 3000s save for one poor muck - me - hunched over in pain with his $5.00 plastic shovel, friend to the environment and procrastinating masochist, making about a foot of progress for every hundred yards the spit shine push button industrial complex all around him cleared.

And not one of these shitheads offered to come to his aid.

No, quite the contrary.  They took particular delight in spraying huge mounds of icy white stuff all around this Who's property line, spilling deep into his hard-won hand-shoveled walk, erasing his back breaking handiwork and forcing him to endure the Bataan Death March Redux.  And all the while these beasts were cackling with glee high atop their gleaming weapons of snow-mass destruction, rubbing their hands together C. Montgomery Burns-style.

Motherfuckers.

I plan to break into each garage in the days ahead, filling the tanks of their Snow Suck-n-Spray 9000s with nitroglycerin. The next storm will be a real blast, my good neighbors.

A plague on all your houses!!

Oh, and Happy Holidays!