A New Deal

According to the Texas Transportation Institute, there are over 6 million drivers on LA County roads on any given day. That includes your commuters, your errand-runners, your commercial vehicles--the whole shmear.

This morning I had a chance to observe several hundred of them on my way to work and based on this representative sample, I can assure you that every single one of these drivers is talking on a fucking cell phone. Right this second. 100% of them, without exception.

No one is using a headset, because that would defeat the purpose of having to take at least one hand off the wheel. Or they're not using their hands at all--they have their tiny phone crammed into the smallest wedge they can possibly make between their chin and their shoulder. It's like having 6 million people out there playing Twister in a 30mph obstacle course.

And these are the good drivers. The rest are applying makeup without waiting for stop lights, or reading the newspaper, or smoking and tossing their butts out the window onto someone else's hood. Or some combination of all of these.

The bottom line is that as time goes on, I become more and more convinced that no one should be allowed to drive except me.

So, in that spirit, I hereby claim the roads of Los Angeles County as my own. They belong to me now. I've privatized them as part of a unique, reverse eminent domain. It's clear that the public cannot be trusted with this resource, so I'm taking it away from them until such time as they prove to me that they can use it wisely.

I know, I know. You're the exception. You don't do any of this stuff. You drive aggresively but attentively, you don't dawdle with open road in front of you, and you signal appropriately but not obsessively.

Good for you--you're welcome to send me your application to drive on my roads. I will evaluate each one on a case-by-case basis before handing out new licenses. I promise you that I will be strict, with no promise of being fair.

You'll notice a few changes to the driver's test. For example, the parallel parking test will be timed--with a gun to your head. You get fifteen seconds blocking a lane of traffic to park. That's it.

Also, you will be clocked to see how long it takes after the light in front of you turns green for you to put your foot on the accelerator. 1.5 seconds. Any more than that? Say hello to my little friend.

One last change--the maximum amount of time to make a left turn is now NOW. Any slower than NOW, you lose points. And your head.

This is just the test. Of course, many new traffic violations will also carry the death penalty, but those are still being worked out.

I understand that this may be a difficult adjustment for many of you, but you really brought it on yourselves by being such incredibly bad drivers. Plus, it's much better for the environment to have you off the streets. The air will be so much cleaner, and won't you appreciate that every morning when you walk to work?

Besides, I've made one important concession to all you new pedestrians--jaywalking is now completely, beautifully legal. Mandatory, in fact. Just watch out for that one driver left out there on the roads--he's a fucking maniac.

Must See TV

I know I don't post much these days, but you have got to see this.

Pistol Pete was unreal. I know, his father was the original Sports Dad and a lot of guys think he is only considered good because he was white. I don't care. Watch the video.

And just imagine if the video quality didn't suck...

We Have A New Winner...

...in the World's Worst Way To Die Contest.

A 330 foot deep sinkhole in Guatemala City, caused by rains and a broken sewer main underneath a densely-populated neighborhood, sucked in a dozen houses and at least two people.

How do they know about the people? They were seen floating in a pool of raw sewage. Two people, probably just sitting at home, and then the earth literally opened up beneath their feet and drowned them in a 330 foot pit of human waste.



Not quite how I'd want to go, but that's just me.

A Unique Moment

I just got a fortune cookie that told me:

SEIZE FROM EVERY MOMENT ITS UNIQUENESS

Seems like great advice. Here's my first seizure.

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This guy I know just loves to tell stories about his kids.

(That fact alone is usually enough to send me looking for somebody else to hang out with. I'm guessing you feel the same way, because nobody wants to hear how cute anyone else's kids are. We don't want to see pictures, hear about sick they were last night, or buy chocolate at a obscene markup for the school music program. It's not really our problem.

Of course, this is no secret to anyone who's ever read a week's worth of "Dilbert" or, you know, met another human being in their life, but apparently as soon as you have a kid you forget all of that. You forget how much you hated parents like you are now, and instead you tell anything that's stationary for more than three seconds the story of how Johnny pulled down his pants in the restaurant last Sunday.)

Anyway, this particular story is about his seven year old girl. I won't bore you with the details, but the gist is that it turns out she's a racist. She doesn't like brown or black people, she doesn't like being in a building with too many of them, and she's happy that she's white and not like them.

Just to remind you...seven years old.

Huh. Your first question is naturally, "What is he going to do about this?" And the answer is...nothing. Dad doesn't feel like he wants to "brainwash" the kid. He doesn't want to indoctrinate her. She's going to find her own way.

And now you're sick. You're sick because this is an extremely nice guy with no racism in his heart that you've ever seen, and you are watching him mentally kneecap his kid. He might as well take her in to be lobotomized--at least then she'd have a good excuse for being stupid. Instead, she's going to go through life in the most multi-cultural city of a society that is supposed to idealize equality and she's going to be mentally retarded. On purpose.

Now, as everyone knows, the ugly flip side of the "Parent-Who-Can't-Stop-Talking-About-Their-Kid" coin is the "Acquaintence-Who-Knows-How-To-Parent-Your-Kid." No parent is going to take your advice on child rearing as anything other than an insult. Especially when your advice IS an insult, which mine was.

So the world has one more racist. I've met her, and her father is right--she's REALLY cute.

Now That's More Like It

Pitchers and catchers are reporting. All is right with the world.

Or at least Ft. Myers, Florida.

OK, City of Palms Park.

Sorry In Advance

My brother has suggested another "Top 5" list: the Clock Tower Five. These are the songs that bury themselves in your brain so insidiously that, given enough time, they will send you to the top of the Clock Tower with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, three boxes of ammunition, and no intention of being taken alive.

No consensus number one, but here we go...

5. "Don't You Want Me" by Human League
This is one for my brother. Since the song first came out, he could stop me in my tracks merely by humming the first few bars. It would routinely take an average of four days to remove from my brain, usually with an icepick. And it's awful.

4. "Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer
I know that this is really "Superfreak" by Rick James, but for some reason only this version qualifies. It is a fact that I have never deliberately listened to "Can't Touch This" for any reason, yet I know every word. There is no earthly explanation why, so I am left to seriously consider the the possibility of alien abduction and experimentation. It's the only logical way this could have happened.

3. "Manamenah" by ???
I swear to God I have no idea who created this. You know, "Manamenah! Doo Doo Dee Dee Doo... Manamenah! Doo Dee Dee Doo..." It's a bioweapon sent to destroy us, one by one. Congratulations--it's your turn.

2. "Tequila" by the Champs
Horrible. Just horrible. Even thinking about it is turning the blood in my veins to ice. All I can say is that in the history of the world, nothing good ever happened to anybody while this song was playing.

And with the ignominious Number 1 slot....

"El Paso" by Marty Robbins
Just because the Grateful Dead covered it a lot doesn't make this any less evil. It's like a musical venereal disease. Herpes is easier to get rid of. Play it once and it simply will...not...go...away.

"Out in the west Texas town of El Paso..." Usually by the second line I've started self-inflicting pain to try and distract myself. The fact that this song is featured on every infomercial for every Time-Life music collection is the single reason that I don't own a gun.

So there you go. Feel free to add your own choices to the comments section. I hope you all appreciate the suffering that I've willingly undergone to bring you this list. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go brush my teeth with a cheese grater.

Born With A Weak Heart

Since I've been thinking a lot about music lately, I thought I'd steal from LAist and post this for Valentine's Day.

Q: Seriously, how amazing is this song?

A: It's so amazing that it's more than a song. It's a feeling. Total perfection minus zero, no limit. When he dies, David Byrne gets to go to straight to heaven because of this song, all his earthly sins forgiven.

If Gary Glitter had written "Naive Melody," the Vietnamese government would have had no choice but to grant him Musical Clemency. Fortunately, he only wrote "Rock N' Roll Part II" and will rot in a Vietnamese prison for it. Oh, and molesting children, too. But mostly for his crappy music.

Random Post

Just in case you've been wondering, the best song of the Rock Era is "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys. This is an absolute scientific certainty in a chaotic world and, like gravity or evolution, there is no room for debate on the subject.

However, the other four of the top five songs can be discussed among reasonable people. (You know how people argue about whether it would be right to go back in time to kill Hitler? Okay, now instead of "Hitler," substitute "The Eagles." Whoever's volunteering to get in the time machine is a reasonable person.)

For those of you playing at home, the correct answers are:

2. Tracks of My Tears, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
3. Visions of Johanna, Bob Dylan
4. Still Be Around, Uncle Tupelo
5. Ticket to Ride, The Beatles

At least, those are the correct answers this week.

Our Crazy New Right Fielder

This may be old news for a couple of you, but J.D. Drew--the newest Red Sox right fielder--is a lunatic. Whatever, right? Any Dodger fan could have told you that. The scary part is, though, that he's not alone. Frighteningly not alone.

According to the article, he owes his dramatic turnaround in health (one that allowed him to play a career high 144 games last year...out of 162) to the Maker's Diet. It's a diet based on, yes, the Bible. Jesus was not just a carpenter, it seems. He was also a nutritionist.

Part of the diet is a specially branded energy drink called "Living Fuel." Drew drinks this before every game. You'd think the Sox medical staff would care what's in the stuff, but apparently if it's okay with Jesus it's okay with the Boston Red Sox.

Drew is also undergoing all sorts of treatments to "detoxify" his body. Any doctor will tell you that when a product claims to "detoxify" you in any way, it means you're about to be lied to. Nobody has defined what a body toxin is. Nobody can tell you what "releasing" them is supposed to do. You have as many toxins in your body as Scientologists have "thetans." They're imaginary. J.D. Drew spends a lot of time worrying about them.

Now, all of this is at the direction of a trainer who Drew met because he was looking for evidence connecting childhood vaccinations to autism. Drew was about to have a kid and, naturally, didn't want him to be autistic. Except that he was willing to withhold proven treatments to prevent disease on the basis of shaky, if nonexistent, medical evidence. Autism, bad. Rubella, fine.

She also has Drew in a hyperbaric chamber. The only way in which this wouldn't be absolutely crazy is if he missed 25 games in 2004 with the bends. And they have some sort of European electrical stimulation thing that might work...we'd know if anyone had ever bothered to clinically test it, which no one has.

So who cares, right? It's just another freaky ballplayer in a sea of them. I mean, is Drew any weirder than Wade Boggs and his fried chicken fetish? Probably not. The problem, though, is that Drew's trainers have other high profile athletes as clients. And they're all getting their medical advice filtered through religion.

There is no aspect of sports in this era that is not dominated by evangelical religion and NOBODY is talking about it. The vast majority of any Major League clubhouse is born again, and they band together to proselytize the minority and ostracize those who won't come along. Football, same thing.

Every interview is a shout-out to Jesus, every victory is his, every defeat a test of faith from him. I'm tired of it. Jesus doesn't give a low-flying fuck about who wins the NL West. (Neither, for that matter, does anyone else) He's not there to help Curt Schilling strike out another unbeliever, and he sure as shit isn't interested in J.D. Drew's shoulder problems.

You know who is, though? The team that pays him. The team that should be concerned that the person treating their $70 million investment is using a 2000 year old medical book. The team that should be telling these players that religion is a wonderful, comforting, useful thing that is uniquely personal for every human being--including the guys paying eight bucks for a beer in the fifty dollar bleacher seats. That while they may be born-again and view it as a spiritual imperative to spread the Word, nobody else wants to hear it. So shut up.

The Sox should do these things. So should every other team. It's long past time.

Stop Me Now

From time to time, everyone develops certain verbal tics that quickly turn into crutches. Sometimes, they come from movies or TV--the next guy I meet who gives me a "Very nice!" like Borat gets a double tap to the brain stem. Sometimes they come from a friend or (if you're not in Los Angeles) a book.

For years, I worked on a job where the executive producer demanded that every story have "an unbelievable." Unbelievable as a noun. As in, "That's great, but what's the unbelievable?" The name of the show itself contained a challenge to believe...or not, and he wanted to live up to it.

Sooner or later the word "unbelievable" began to grate on my nerves, despite the fact that I used it on a constant almost-blinking-rate basis. The phrase from the title was like nails on a chalkboard. When I left after almost three years, both had to be surgically excised from my vocabulary. It was not easy--more like verbal shock aversion, where every time I accidentally said the words it was accompanied by a torrent of self-loathing that was so severe that it often emptied nearby restaurant tables. I've picked up a couple since--the word "Aces" comes to mind over and over again--but only one has risen from the level of "Annoyance" to one of "War Crime."

For whatever reason, and I don't know where it came from, the phrase "shit sandwich" has lodged itself firmly into my vocabulary and won't leave no matter what I do. You know, like if someone has undergone a genuine tragedy in their life, I now come back immediately with the tender:

"Wow...that's a real shit sandwich, pal..."

It's horrible. It's profane and dismissive and it's at the point now where I fear it may replace any real emotion on my part. It's like someone programmed my brain in BASIC:

IF TRAGEDY, THEN "SHIT SANDWICH"

It's not only unhelpful, it's practically the worst thing you can say to someone who is in true pain. You don't have any answers or any response that you know will help. You're stalling for time until you do, but you know you have to say something...but not that! Christ!

It has to stop now. This simply cannot be allowed to continue. So--it's back to shock aversion. If anyone hears me using this phrase in their presence, I owe you a drink.

And you can hit me. Twice. But not in the face.

Grab a Tissue...

Last September, I saw this online somewhere--it's (obviously) a mockup of an ideal LA transit system by Damien Goodmon.
























It made me (and many others--read the comments) want to cry. Today, after I spent an hour getting increasingly psychotic on the drive from my home in the Miracle Mile to Sherman Oaks, I thought I would share this with you.

UPDATE!

5:00 am. Still not asleep. Colts still Super Bowl Champions. Baseball season still 3 months away.

This sucks.

Calvin Loved Alice

OK, so it's almost 2 in the morning, my stomach is killing me, and I have to get up in six hours to start a new job. Oh, and the team I spent 700 words excoriating on Friday just won the Super Bowl.

Two weeks until pitchers and catchers report. As Calvin Trillin would say, everything else is just commentary.

Speaking of which, I finished his most recent book tonight, which is to say I read the whole thing tonight. About Alice is 90 pages long. Double spaced. With chapter breaks and a lengthy indented quote at the beginning of each one. It's a pamphlet, basically. God, but what a pamphlet.

It's a barely expanded version of an essay that Trillin wrote for The New Yorker about his late wife, who died of complications from lung cancer on September 11, 2001. In a nutshell, it's a love story about a beautiful shiksa and the nice Jewish guy who kept trying to impress her for their entire 35 year marriage. And cancer.

I don't want to ruin it for anyone--that paragraph above is half the length of the first chapter--but it's a terrific read. Funny, of course, because it's Trillin, but also sweet and light and sad at the same time. It would have to be at the same time, because if I haven't mentioned it, this is a very short book.

Buy it here. Give it to someone else. Repeat.

Sunday Ticket

The Super Bowl is this weekend, and I am backing Chicago--even if I hadn't lived on its northern border for four years, it would be an easy call. Why?

--The city of Indianapolis. Who cares? Yeah, you heard me. I'd root for Little Rock over Indy. There's absolutely nothing special about the place except for a big circle near the airport that's semi-important for one day a year. They gave us Letterman, but what have you done for me lately?

--Tony Dungy and Peyton Manning. OK, I know everyone in sports is ready to anoint St. Tony the Nice, and I know you're not supposed to hate a guy whose son killed himself last year, but you know what? I can. Not a huge surprise, a professional sports figure shilling his name out for a conservative, anti-gay group--the sports industry is just slightly less right-leaning than the Marines. But, Tony...you're supposed to be such a Nice Guy. Stand up with these guys and you're one of them. Period.

As for Manning, never mind the incessant advertising and the years of "Aw, shucks" failure. The fucker single-handedly dismantled Northwestern 48-28 in the 1997 Citrus Bowl, a game I drove 3200 miles to watch. Some people forget. Not me. I never forget, Peyton. Never.

--The Irsay family. First cousins to Adolf Hitler. It's true--you can look it up. They packed up the proudest franchise in football in the middle of the night and ran away like an scared john in a prostitution raid. And I quote Baltimore son Barry Levinson, whose movie Diner is one of the best things in God's Whole Creation:

"I root against the Indianapolis Colts every time they play. … I want nothing good to happen to that team."

And if you think the fact that the NFL gave Baltimore the Ravens makes up for it, then either the concept of loyalty means nothing to you or you're Jim Irsay. Same thing, basically.

--The RCA Dome. I realize that the city screwed up the renovation of Soldier Field, but it's still on the lakefront and it's still outdoors in Chicago. And you know what? Chicago wouldn't have it any other way. Green Bay plays outside. Buffalo plays outside. Not Indy. Even though they're almost 200 miles south of Chicago, they play in a dome. They want football, but not Football. They deserve to lose.

--Marvin Harrison and Dwight Freeney. Two Syracuse Orangemen turned Indianapolis Colts. Nothing bad to say about them. They're both supposed to be true class acts and I hope they get Super Bowl rings soon. Just not with this team.

It's not like I am a Bears fan, though. The Bills are my team, and my brother constantly reminds me that I can't name five of their players. It doesn't help that the team seems perpetually stuck at 7-9. Even when they're 2-1, you know they're just another 7-9 waiting to happen. Still, if it were Bills-Bears on Sunday, I wouldn't be living or dying with the result.

It just seems that, despite this surprising-even-to-me amount of anger about the Colts, I don't even really care that much about professional football. It's fun to watch on the weekends, but it doesn't sustain you.

No, the only two sports that matter--the only two teams that matter--are Boston Red Sox baseball and Syracuse basketball, and in that respect 2006 has been a profound disappointment. The Sox took a swan dive before turning over half of their roster in the offseason, while the 'Cuse are underperforming in ways that my father claims he has never seen from a Boeheim team. And yes, technically the amazing SU run in the Big East Tournament was in 2006, so it wasn't all bad. Still...

Whenever the Red Sox season ends...or is about to end, or looks like it's about to end, or they have a three game losing streak, my father says the same thing.

"Boys," he says, "SU basketball is right around the corner."

And whenever the SU season ends, etc., he says, "Opening Day is right around the corner."

I am so ready for baseball season. Play ball already.