Happy Groundhog Day!

Imagine this kid in a conical brassiere

Madonna, 1976.

The saddest day of Mark David Chapman's life

J.D. Salinger died today of natural causes; he was 91.

Glad to see Mom's painting again

Well, see, I never TOOK calculus...

So it's human sacrifice or something. All that math stuff is just to fool us liberal arts people.

I recognize Gable, but who's that other guy?

I think it's Lon Chaney, Sr.

Mark Bazer column: Stolen iPhone

My friend Mark Bazer has just written a very funny column, which I've pasted below. Enjoy. Stolen iPhone? There's an App for That By Mark Bazer Tribune Media Services An Open Letter to the Gentleman Who Stole My Wife's iPhone out of Her Hands on the CTA: Congratulations on your new iPhone! I just know you're going to love it, as it's a fantastic device with an easy-to-use interface and photos of my relatives. Heck, they're now your relatives, too -- we're on the same family plan! That reminds me: It's your turn this year to host Thanksgiving. But back to your shiny new iPhone, because there are a number of things you should know to ensure it gives you so much enjoyment that you forget your shame. For starters, it's got plenty of room for music, but we weren't sure what kind you liked. We were hoping Simon and Garfunkel , but if not, just sync that baby up to your PC and create your own mix. (If you don't have a PC, they can be stolen from most homes.) Also, we had the foresight to buy you the AppleCare protection plan, so your iPhone is covered for two years if anything goes wrong -- with the exception of someone stealing it. Speaking of which, AT&T, I believe, has a policy that if you steal one of their phones, you're locked into their service for five years. What can I say? The cell-phone companies will beat you every time at the crime game. Now let me introduce you to the "App" store. My wife, in the one whole month she was using your phone, downloaded some great apps for you. The Facebook app, for example, works just like regular Facebook, and should allow you to easily join the Facebook Groups "iPhone Thieves" and "People Who Make Other People Cry." My wife also put a great app on there to help if you're planning to redecorate your home, another if you're looking to get into pilates, and another that helps locate the nearest pawn shop. And finally, the phone's got CTA Tracker, which will be perfect if you're thinking about bringing your line of work to the bus. Unfortunately, my wife didn't have her iPhone's headphones out when the two of you met. And while other headphones will work with the phone, you really do want the real deal. So, if you plan on being back on the CTA anytime soon, perhaps we can work out a mutually convenient time when you can steal her headphones? She'd also bring the instruction manual. Finally, just enjoy the iPhone! Use it to enhance your life, but don't let it rule your life. Because if you're too busy staring down at the iPhone, you'll miss the world around you -- a wondrous world full of loose-hanging purses, wallets stuffed in pants' back pockets . . . and people like you. You can subscribe to Mark's weekly email here.

Yet more for my reading list...

Ellen Langer is a psychology professor at Harvard. I must read this woman's books! "In 1979, Langer and her students invited two groups of eight men in their late 70s and early 80s to go on a retreat for a week and spend time reminiscing about life 20 years earlier. "When they first showed up at the office, their daughters usually brought them," remembers Langer, who was in her early 30s at the time. "They were walking down the hall to my office, and they looked like they were just about to keel over. I remember thinking, What am I getting myself into?" The researchers took each group of eight for a week at a time to an old monastery in Peterborough, N.H., which they had filled with props to make it look as it might have two decades before. The men watched Sgt. Bilko and The Ed Sullivan Show on a black-and-white television and listened to Rosemary Clooney and Nat King Cole on the radio. All the men (who were used to being taken care of) were encouraged to be active—for example, to help serve meals and clean up. The first group was instructed to behave as if it really were 1959. Ahead of time, they had written autobiographical statements that stopped in that year. During the week, they spoke in the present tense as they discussed the threat of communism, the Baltimore Colts' 31-16 defeat of the New York Giants in the NFL championship game, and recently published books. Men in the control group, which went on a separate retreat, followed a similar program but were permitted to speak of the past as the past. They spent time reflecting on their younger days, while the first group in effect tried to take themselves back in time. What happened? After just one week, both groups tested better on hearing and memory. The men gained an average of three pounds each, and their grips were stronger. "At the end of all this, I was playing touch football with some of them," says Langer. But the changes were especially striking in the first group: Their joints became more flexible and their hands more nimble. Sixty-three percent of them improved on intelligence tests, compared with 44 percent of the control group. And people unaware of the purpose of the study rated every member of the first group younger in photos taken after the retreat than in photos taken before. "When I first described the study, I was hesitant to spell out just how big the changes were," says Langer, who wrote about it in her 1989 book, Mindfulness (Addison-Wesley), but did not publish the study in a psychology journal. In a field experiment like this one, lacking the controls of the lab, many factors might have explained the results. "The most important part of the study," she says, "was that people who are only supposed to get more debilitated over time showed great improvement—regardless of the reason." More here.

Just in time for Christmas!

This is the rare type of photo that gets more disturbing the longer you look at it.

Hanukah in Santa Monica

I'm not Jewish, though for about sixteen reasons I might as well be. Even so, I do appreciate a good Tom Lehrer song, especially when it applies to my life.

Sherlock Holmes and the Underpants of Death

My esteemed colleague in parody Chris Wood has cobbled together six short stories featuring a fascinating new character completely of his own invention named "Sherlock Holmes." Apparently this Sherlock goes around solving crimes, aided by his pal, a Doctor Watson...along the way encountering many difficulties of a digestive and execratory-type nature. If bathroom humor's your thing--and let's be honest, would you be reading this blog if it wasn't?--you should check it out. I think Chris has really got something with this Sherlock character. He'd better be careful though--we all know how my series about a boy who goes to wizard school turned out. UPDATE: Incredible--literally five minutes after I finished this post, I saw an ad for a movie called "Sherlock Holmes" starring Robert Downey Jr. I can understand if the character's name was "Bob Smith" or something, but really: I have a hard time believing that they came up with it independently of Chris...It's really disgusting, the lengths some people will go to make a quick buck.

Black Labs: they only look dopey

I love dogs; they're really amazing creatures. And yet...I've had a couple of black labs in my life, and "smart" was never one of the words that sprang to mind. Charming, yes. Loyal, certainly. But also prone to eating garbage. This article suggests I may need to reconsider. In fact, after reading all the things dogs can do, I'm beginning to suspect that the writer himself is a Labradoodle.

Mike's new favorite thing

Dragonfruit. Yes, dragonfruit.

Chittyland

My friend Andrew Chittenden has just launched a webcomic, Chittyland. Definitely worth a look.

Sarah Palin's Secret Diary

My very funny friend Joey Green has a new book out: Sarah Palin's Secret Diary. He says that he loves it, and it's the funniest book he's ever written. That should make you take notice, because Joey's written 45 (I may be underestimating), and most of the time when a writer finishes a project, he the-opposite-of-loves it. So I'm thinking this book must be pretty excellent. In addition to founding Cornell's humor magazine back in 1978, Joey's a great guy and a great writer, and this book is super stocking-stuffer material for all the Palin opposite-of-lovers on your list. Click here to buy Joey's Palin spoof at Amazon.

Who thinks the JFK assassination still matters?

The CIA, that's who. Today's New York Times details Agency stonewalling over 295 documents relating to George Joannides, an agent working with anti-Castro Cubans out of JM/WAVE, their Miami station. Groups under Joannides' direction "publicly clashed with" Lee Harvey Oswald. These clashes were some of the most significant ways that Oswald's personal politics--in other words, his entire motive--were presented to the public. "The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets," writes Scott Shane. "But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance." If things happened the way the Warren Report says they did--if it was one crazy person acting alone with a mail-order rifle--that's where the trail ends, and nothing in CIA's files can change that fact. But CIA has acted guilty from the start, misleading investigations and covering stuff up--and this is in the face of almost total support from the mainstream media. The New York Times is not digging at this story now, any more than it did in 1964. Yet CIA's gameplan has remained the same: stonewall until the information is a curious historical fact. The question is why? It is completely understandable that CIA would control the flow of information to the Warren Commission, to protect ongoing operations and/or cover its ass in the wake of a huge failure. But this rationale weakens for Mr. Joannides' behavior as CIA liason to the Congressional investigation in 1976-78; and still further for its resistance to the Assassination Records Review Board in the 90s. It's completely ludicrous today. These documents are nearly 50 years old. Joannides is dead, Castro nearly so. The only reasonable conclusion is that CIA has something to hide regarding the assassination, and it relates to JM/WAVE, Oswald, and anti-Castro Cubans. I don't know what it has to hide, but it has to be damaging enough to justify an organization-wide commitment over 50 years, in the face of sustained public interest and intermittent Congressional pressure. That's the story here, not what scraps of redacted paper eventually emerge. The Times article trots out a few lone nut theorists--Gerald Posner and Max Holland--who predictably declare there's no "there" there. But CIA's behavior has already answered this question. We already know that when the documents eventually do come out, The New York Times will study them carefully, looking for Allen Dulles' handwritten scrawl, "Get Oswald to shoot Kennedy." Not finding it, the lone nut theory will be "proven" once again, and the rest of us will be treated to some more cognitive dissonance. CIA has shown itself to be liars on this topic, so sensible people should stop listening to what they say. What they do is much more instructive, and that points a big, fat finger squarely at Langley--for what I don't know, but the enormous amount of other evidence makes that less important. Five decades of imperial government and a lapdog press means that the details will be obscured, but the larger picture is resolving, and it doesn't show Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Those of us who've known that for decades thank the CIA for helping get the word out. ADDITION 10/22: Peter Dale Scott on the same NYT article.

The "Veritas" about Harvard...and Yale, and Princeton, and....

Thought-provoking article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I think it's right on the money...in every sense of that phrase.

Bill Hicks is wonderful...

...and there's a new documentary about him. It's premiering in London of course--one of the many nice things about the UK is how much they dug Bill Hicks.

White sharks in Santa Monica Bay!

I gotta say, this cheered me up no end; it's a photo snapped by a local surfer last weekend. I love me some white sharks, and to know that at least one ten-footer is cruising around (and leaping into the air!) less than a mile from where I am typing this makes me QUITE EXCITED!!!! [cue Jaws music] You can read the full story here. Oh, and by the way, if there's any other Westsiders who've wondered about those shark photos stuck up on utility boxes all over the place, here's the skinny on them, too. I didn't do it, but wish I had.

Fifi's Greatest Dream

"Hey Mike, why don't you grow a beard?"--my cat

Some British Comedy videos

Unfortunately, I can't find "The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film" anymore, but here are a couple of videos that fans of classic British Comedy might enjoy. Peter Sellers...it gets interesting about halfway through. Jonatham Miller talking about Peter Sellers and Peter Cook (nirvana, indeed) Stephen Fry's postmortem defense of Peter Cook

Funny Beatles humor from Mark Bazer

Humor columnist, interlocutor, and bon vivant Mark Bazer sent me the following. Since I'm a sucker for Beatles humor, I'm reposting it below. Meet The Piggies By Mark Bazer If you haven't heard lately from that friend of yours who is a huge Beatles fan, he's likely squirreled himself away to listen over and over again to the brand-new, incredible-sounding remastered versions of the band's albums. Or he's been in a terrible accident. Last week, along with the much-anticipated release of a Beatles version of the video game "Frogger" in which you must manuever Ringo across a busy street, the band finally issued a corrective to the shoddy Beatles CDs that have frustrated fans and Charles Manson alike for years. Most exciting is that you can now buy a $298.98 boxed set of the Beatles CDs in a "mono mix," or how the Beatles initially intended them -- which, I think, means Yoko's vocals have been removed from "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill." As one of the biggest Beatles fans and the owner of a Sanyo boom box purchased for $60 at Target in the mid-'90s, I must say the remastered albums are a revelation. You've never heard "Yesterday" or "All You Need Is Love" or "Get Back" sound so clear. On the latter, you can practically hear the band breaking up! But the true standout is the remastered version of "Piggies." The 12th song on the first disc of the "The White Album," the George Harrison-penned "Piggies" can finally be heard in its full glory. When George sings, "Have you seen the little piggies," you want to jump up and say, "Yes, I have!" The "Abbey Road" album, however, has so far been the best-selling of the remastered discs, and it's easy to see why. This was the band at perhaps its most rocking, and songs like "Come Together" and "Oh! Darling" get a nice sonic boost. But let's get back to "Piggies." The remastered "Piggies" should finally convince Beatles naysayers of the band's greatness -- and innovativeness. Indeed, when the song's pig sound effects kick in, you can, for the first time, picture swine in the studio alongside the band. Paul McCartney, in fact, says the new CDs "are more like what we heard coming out of the speakers as we made the records." That's quite an interesting assertion, and worth discussing in more detail. Unfortunately, with limited space here, more discussion of "Piggies" takes precedence. Lennon/McCartney are often hailed as the 20th century's top songwriters, but this new "Piggies" calls into question whether they were even tops in their own band! And as the two-minute-and-four-second "Piggies" reaches its crescendo, George's voice booms with an intensity heretofore never experienced by this listener. "Everywhere there's lots of piggies/Living piggy lives," George tells us -- and, in this biggest gift the newly remastered Beatles catalogue has given us, nobody can any longer doubt this assertion. Mike again. I just had a flash: Charlie Manson is walking back to his cell at Vacaville, after finishing his one hour of daily exercise. The guard escorting him asks, "Hey, Charles--you heard these new Beatles CDs?" "I'm over those guys," Charlie answers bitterly. "They've gone commercial." The guard wipes his glasses. He's a big black fella, six-three and at least 250 pounds; next to him Charlie's a bleached twig. "Well you should get 'em anyway. The sound is fantastic, totally clear. In fact they sound so good"--the guard leans closer--"I finally understand." Manson brightens; is he saying what I think he's saying? "Right in the middle of the 'Helter Skelter,' one of 'em, I think it's Ringo, says, 'Why not pop over to Hollywood for a spot of killing people?'" "Really?" Manson squeaks. "Yeah. Right into the mic, clear as day." Manson hops and claps like an excited child. "I'm so happy! I was beginning to think I was crazy." They get to Manson's cell. "By the end of the song," the guard says, "I was thinking, 'I've been putting off that race war for too long. Monday morning, first thing.'" Manson can't believe his ears. Vindication! "That's fantastic!" "Not for you, white boy." Manson falls mid-giggle as the guard snaps his neck. "Nothing personal, Charles," he says, making a tick-mark on a list. "But you know, budgets don't balance themselves."

Jack Silbert strikes againhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Read this, you'll be glad you did.

Southern Charm by Jack Silbert

Here's a really funny, really short piece by my friend Jack Silbert.

Now THAT'S something we can all agree on