Snap Judgments and Bad Decisions

OK, I GUESS "BLUE VALENTINE" IS A REALISTIC PORTRAIT OF ROMANTIC DISASTER AFTER ALL

2011-10-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

Way back at the start of January, I wrote a column (http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/ckozlowski/2010/12/28/blue-valentine-review-another-depressing-anti-marriage-offering-from-hollywood/) for Breitbart.com’s Big Hollywood that tore a new one into the movie “Blue Valentine,” which critics were basically treating as the Second Coming of Jesus in the form of cinema. The story of a couple from the moment they meet, through their marriage and all the way to their breakup six or seven years later, it was well-acted and had some interesting moments, but overall was one of the nastiest portraits of a relationship I’d ever seen committed to celluloid.

I mean, really – by the end of the film, the wife (Michelle Williams) is screaming at her husband (Ryan Gosling) that “I have nothing left for you! NOTHING!!!!” And what was Ryan’s big offense that led to that kind of treatment? He was a simple dude, rather than a rich or smart power figure; he was a doting father to a kid that wasn’t even his, as she got preggers by an ex prior to their marriage; and he was a little immature in his ability to fully relate to his young child. She had been a brilliant student prior to hooking up with him and knew that he was just a working-class Joe who broke a sweat for a living – and so I said it was clearly her fault that she picked a guy she couldn’t really love and gave up her dreams for too-early marriage.

I also said that no one in Middle America – or, hell, ANYwhere – other than critics and hipster knee-jerk liberals would wanna see a movie like that. I mean, who would, after a hard week at work, choose to grab the wife or girlfriend and say “Hey baby, I hear there’s a movie where a couple fall apart over the course of two hours and wind up screaming how much they hate each other, and the guy even questionably date-rapes her. Think that’s worth 20 bucks and two hours of our lives on a Friday?” I predicted that, barring a Best Picture nomination or an Oscar acting win, this movie would never break $10 million at the box office.

Guess what? It was only nominated for Best Actress, didn’t win, and topped out at less than $10 million. Yet along the way, film columnist Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times saw fit to mock me as just not “Getting it”, that it was ridiculous to ask Hollywood for a happy portrait of a stable marriage for once. At the time, I came off looking like I had my idealistic head in the clouds.

Well, I guess in some ways, maybe he was right.

I recently went through a relationship in which everything started off with as great a meet-cute as one could ever find in a classic movie, and banter worthy of “His Girl Friday.” It blazed quickly into what seemed like love. All was great with the universe – until my apparent love suddenly decided without warning that we were through and it was “time to work on our friendship.” ‘

I felt blindsided – just like the guy in “Blue Valentine.” And I was getting whacked romantically after just six weeks, not six years. I had to give my props to Ryan’s character for managing to last that long in the movie – a far cry from my initial musings that that or any couple should be able to live happily ever after.

Now, having been dumped after being out of the dating game for quite a while beforehand, I suddenly remembered that YES, it CAN get that bad as in “Blue Valentine” – well, minus the question of whether a rape was involved. The final night out involved her crazed drunkenness, leading to her attempt to videotape an arrest and nearly getting us both arrested as well, her collapsing completely on both an escalator and passing out on the floor of a Red Line subway train, and then her screaming at me that she was fine and that I had to get off the train rather than make sure she made it home alive. In other words, the equivalent of “I have NOTHING left for you! Nothing!!!”

Ah yes, it was a handy lesson in the fact that the faster, hotter and artificially better a relationship appears to take off, the more likely it is to crash and burn just as quickly.

But then again, movies also err on the side of being too sunny and perfect about love, as well. I had a terrific date last night with a great woman who appears to be incapable of turning into the Medusa my recent ex became. But yet my recent relationship – my first foray into the dating pool in at least 3 to 4 years, due to battling a chronic medical condition along the way – should also teach me not to assume that the great start to my new hopeful relationship means that things will be perfect at all times for ever.

Just as the movies can sometimes overstate how bad relationships can get or not offer enough ideal portrayals of happy intact families, they also commit the crime of building hope that Mr. or Miss Right is just around the corner, that if you’re lonely today, there’ll be love tomorrow. It’s a nice thought, but not often enough a reality.

Do movies therefore cause more damage by offering false hope, or soothe the psyche and spirit, giving us the state of mind we need in order to feel vibrantly alive and happy enough to give love a try? That’s a question that’s been considered since the days of “why did the chicken cross the road?”

But until I find the answer, would you grab me some Milk Duds and a medium Coke?

NEWS JOKES FOR THE WEEK OF 5/17

2010-05-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

Did you folks hear about the dad who cattle-branded his teenage sons because he wanted to bring his family closer together? Hey, why not try what everyone else does: a nice family game of Monopoly?

Kevin Costner says he can save the Gulf of Mexico oil problem with a machine that can remove oil from water. Now if he'd invent something to remove "Waterworld" from my memory, I'll be happy.

The Gulf of Mexico is getting nasty from all that oil. They just renamed Red Lobster to Black Lobster. And you thought you had to worry about eating peanut oil.

Hey, you know that really gay musical show "Glee"? Fox just announced they're airing a special episode after the Super Bowl next year. So I guess the game won't just be SUPER (SAY IT GAY), but it'll also be FABULOUS! (SAY THAT GAY TOO) And that should be interesting - finally, whether youre a football fan or just really really gay - a party for everyone who likes tight ends.

Nurses at an LA Children's Hospital just got busted for running a hair salon in infant intensive care ward. In their defense, the nurses said "Neglect? Do you KNOW how hard it is to give a baby a weave?! That shit's expensive!"

An Arab-American woman just won MIss USA. The other contestants are protesting. They said how could she win if no one could see her face?

Donald Trump runs the Miss USA pageant, and he said "Fine, she showed no face, but did you see her ankles? Sexy!"

That woman also swept the talent competition with a beautiful rendition of that "Lulululululululululu"

Heard about that movie "The Prince of Persia"? It looks pretty cool but does anyone really wanna pay money to see a guy running around for two hours, going "My Friend!"?

You know what staycations are, folks? THat's when you decide to stay home for your vacation. They say less people are doing that this year. Man, I bet the people in Detroit are happy about that.

A 16 year old Australian girl just became the youngest person ever to sail around the world solo. Australia's president called her a national hero, but her parents were pissed. Yeah, they're grounding her. The girl said "Good luck! I just sailed around the WORLD. Don't think I don't know how to sneak the car down to the mall."

HOLLYWOOD NEEDS TO VISIT "FLY-INTO' COUNTRY

2010-05-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

Flyover State of Mind: Hollywood’s Red State Prejudice
by Carl Kozlowski

I grew up in the fairly small city of Little Rock, Arkansas, and from as early as I can remember, I wanted to escape to Los Angeles or New York City and enter the world of showbiz. I watched and read about movies with a passion, viewed David Letterman every night with a mix of jealousy and wonderment (this was ’80s, pre-jaded Letterman), and wrote short stories that I hoped could be turned into movies someday.

Now in my late 30s, I’ve been pursuing those dreams for a long time as an adult. I’ve had some successes but nothing that would make me famous (yet! There’s always a “yet,” right?! Riiiiight). Yet in March, I was able to take back-to-back trips to Hawaii and Alabama that gave me a whole new perspective on showbiz and politics.

I was first flown by Sony Pictures to Hawaii to join several other Christian film journalists on the set of a 2011 film called “Soul Surfer.” (Yes, despite those of you who would like to think I’m a Communist infiltrator to BH because I admitted liking George Clooney’s “Up in the Air,” I am in fact a Catholic Christian who also writes about film for a national Christian magazine.)

Sony’s goal for the trip was to have us take notice of this film, which stars Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt and “American Idol” champ Carrie Underwood along with rising young actress Anna Sophia Robb in the true story of devoutly Christian surfing champion Bethany Hamilton, who used her faith as the impetus to come back to championship quality after losing her arm in a vicious shark attack in 2003. The four days visiting Hamilton, her family and all the actors except Hunt were relaxing, to be sure, and it was refreshing to see major stars taking on such a profoundly faith-based story for a major studio.

Combine the massive Christian population thirsting for clean, quality entertainment with the excitement of surfing, the tragic-then-triumphant tale of Bethany, exotic locations, and quality actors working from a script by Oscar-winning Ron Bass of “Rainman” fame, and “Soul Surfer” could prove to be “The Blind Side” of 2011. The highlight reel shown to us from mid-production alone proved to be jaw-dropping; this film could really keep the momentum going in showing Hollywood that if you respect Christians, they will respond with by taking their wallets to the theaters.

It escaped my mind that this film was, sadly, still an anomaly amid the great tide of films that don’t respect or represent solid moral values.

Yet, even so I felt a bit awash in the ‘glamour” of Hollywood, of feeling that the cushy on-set atmosphere was “the way” to live, and I couldn’t help thinking that this was the life I wanted so badly to have: on an exotic movie set, with millions of dollars on the line around me. It was already so cool to just be there, meeting the actors, just like I was enthralled regularly back in LA as a film critic and entertainment-profile writer to rub elbows with the biggest stars in the world.

It was when I went to Alabama to see my sister, her husband and their five kids a day after my Hawaiian sojourn, however, that I was reminded that what happens in Hollywood really doesn’t matter in the outside, truly real, world. Ironically, I had missed this year’s Oscar ceremony because it was during my flight to Hawaii. I hadn’t missed one Oscar show since I was 9 or 10 years old and so I was really rattled about it.

When I got to Alabama, however, and told my sister how frustrated I was, she was surprised to hear the Oscars had been on in the first place. As she noted, when you’ve got five kids and your job has nothing to do with Hollywood, you kind of forget to notice those things.

I realized that I was living in a bubble, even though I was on the low end of the ladder out in La La Land. Almost every other entertainment-related friend of mine was caught up in chasing the dream or maintaining it, and had “forgotten” to do such ‘”ordinary” things as having families and buying houses.

As I drifted through six days in the southern Red State of Alabama, I went through withdrawal for a day or from showbiz news and thoughts of box office grosses. I came to realize that it didn’t matter that I’ve met famous actors, directors, writers and comedians. What DID matter were the supposedly average folks who truly make this country run, and who don’t give a damn about the names of actors, instead relating to many of them as “that guy in that sitcom, who does that thing.”

This was still during the amazing box office run of “Avatar,” and I realized that sure, that movie is the highest-grossing film of all time (though I hated it). It’s made well over $700 million in the US alone. But let’s assume that every one who’s seen it has seen it once and that the average price was $11.

Both assumptions are likely way below reality. Yet even so, those assumptions would mean 60 million people had seen it in the U.S. Yes, that’s a staggering 20 percent of our population, but let’s put it in perspective, people. 80 percent have not seen it, and could really give a crap if they ever do.

We think we’re so important in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, that we regard much of the rest of the nation as “flyover country.” Well, maybe we’d understand how to truly connect and be meaningful to people if we regarded those areas as “fly-INTO country.”

These are people who don’t care if they make it to Hawaii for vacation or work. Instead, we went camping in a state park surrounded by thousands of other RV’s and campers, filled with people who loved just hanging out, barbecuing, fishing, and playing some basketball. They found pleasure and enjoyment just meeting each other, or developing long-held bonds. And on the one night we escaped to a movie theater, we found a second-run dollar house that was still selling out “Blind Side” on a Monday night, 16 weeks after its release.

For years, Democrats have tried to win the presidency with an 18-state Blue State-only strategy – until Barack Obama came along. But as we are only climbing out of the recession now, well more than a year into his presidency, it’s fair to ask what Sarah Palin does at the Tea Party rallies: How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff working out for ya?

Yes, I quote Palin at the risk of mockery from my Left Coast peers. But it is Palin whom the people in the other 32 states, and large pockets of even the 18 Blue ones, relate to. She’s even winning on the Left’s terms and on their turf: The New York Times best seller list. Hollywood wants you to think she still doesn’t matter, but that makes me wonder if THEY’RE even reading the same magazines that Katie Couric pestered her about? Those magazines that are so influential in their world but which only reach a half-million people, if they’re lucky?!

Like it or not, there IS a REAL America out there. They’re in the middle and south of the country, and it’s not fair to spin that idea as one of racial or gender-related animosity or superiority. The people there are of all races anyway, all more concerned with their real families than the false imagery of Hollywood. It’s the fact that as much as I love “American Idol,” it’s allegedly massive audience of 30 million viewers represent only 10 percent of Americans. Again, 90 percent could care less about who wins.

That’s not to say they don’t want to be entertained or uplifted by a movie sometimes. If Hollywood could just take off its collective blinders and try to see the world through the regular people’s eyes, instead of mocking them, they’d be surprised at just how many people will return the favor and pay to be entertained again.

TONS OF NEWS JOKES - HAVE SOME LAUGHS ON ME!

2010-03-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

Governor Schwarzenegger has declared No Cussing Week in California. So, I guess that's the end of tonight's show! Just kidding! Fuck that shit!

Dick Cheney just had his fifth heart attack. He's going for his hospital's special: Have 5 heart surgeries, and the sixth one's free!

And gee, who knew Cheney had a heart?

Man, how about that earthquake that destroyed Chile? Now where the hell am i supposed to go for my baby back ribs?

All these earthquakes - it's hard to keep up! Most people just think Chile's a rerun of Haiti.

We already remade "We Are The World" for Haiti - and now Chile's earthquake's even bigger. Where do you go from here? Bring in the aliens from "Avatar" to sing "We Are the Universe"

The Oscars are coming up this weekend. It's exciting - Monique's up for Best Supporting Actress. And her girdle's up for Best Supporting Undergarment.

The Olympics are over. So where do all the curlers go now? Either they'll take their brooms and be the world's slowest janitors, or our nation's beauty salons are about to be overrun with job applicants.

They just announced that San Bernardino will get the next Winter Olympics. Don't be surprised - everyone knows they've got more snow/powder than Vancouver.

John Mayer says sex with Jessica Simpson was like sexual napalm. Uh, John, that burning sensation you're now feeling isn't something to brag about. You need Valtrex.

Did you hear a man got pistol whipped at Chuck E. Cheese? Most guys just get diarrhea. (OR most guys just get heartburn).

It's not safe anymore: pistol whippings at Chuck E. Cheese and sharks eating trainers at Sea World. What's next, a killer bee swarm at Knott's Berry Farm? A shuttle explosion at Space Mountain?

Man, how about that tsunami warning at Long Beach? Dudes were out there by the thousands: Surf's up!

The tsunami was so bad even Snoop Dogg was helping out. He was sandbagging with giant bags of weed.

How about that Tiger Woods apology? It was longer than the State of the Union address! I was afraid he was gonna wind up apologizing for the Iraq war and the economy too.

Some strip clubs are offering lapdances for Haiti - talk about a bad idea. Solving one natural disaster by creating another one in my pants.

Did you guys see on Facebook that they have a page to see if a pickle is more popular than Nickleback. Hell, K-Fed is more popular than Nickleback these days. And a steaming pile of turd is more popular than K-Fed.

Charlie Sheen's back in rehab again. I know what you're thinking: For sex, or for drugs? I think even HE"S confused about that these days. If he doesn't watch out, CBS is gonna punish him by renaming his show "2 1/2 Inches."

Dick Cheney's in the hospital 'cause he had a heart attack. Gee, who knew he even had a heart?

Obama's got it rough after his first year in office. There's billboards popping up all over with Bush smiling and asking "Miss me yet?" (PAUSE) Um, no. That's like a drunk uncle asking if he can sleep on the couch after peeing on the Thanksgiving turkey.

There was a big NASCAR race in Fontana last week. Who knew Toyota would have the fastest car there? The winning car wasn't a Porsche - it was a Prius. Hell, it's STILL going out there. Someone saw it roaring past Vegas this morning.

The US beat Canada at hockey. That's like beating Mexico at drinking tequila shots.

The US beat Canada at hockey. That's like beating Germany at beer drinking.

They've already made a movie about the Canadian team's loss. It's called "Cop Out."

The Oscars are coming up, and they say "The Hurt Locker" is the favorite for Best Picture. Not MY favorite. I didn't realize it was an Iraq war movie. I thought it was a documentary about the locker bullies shoved me into in junior high.

That movie "Valentine's Day' is a big hit. It's the story of 19 good looking peopel looking for the perfect partner. We just had National Pancake Day, so i predict the next big movie is "Pancake Day": the story of 19 morbidly obese people searching for the perfect pancake.

What else do the Canadians have after losing at hockey? Their bacon is really ham, and their favorite beer is called Moosehead. I'm not sure I wanna know how they brew that - but i have a feeling it violates a few of our animal protection laws.

Tiger Woods just issued another apology to the parents at his daughter's preschool. He promises not to hit on their girls anymore.

Some of these Olympic games are getting violent - like the rive-by-athlon. Sure you win a medal but you also get five to ten.

What is it with all the tight rides anyway in the Olympics? Bobsled, luge..any closer and they'd be calling it the Lube event

These Winter Olympics are getting scary. A guy died on the luge the first day. Used to be, the worst that would happen was you'd get poked in the butt unexpectedly.

The Winter Olympics are so gay Im getting confused. I thought the curling competition took place in a beauty salon between RuPaul and Dolly Parton.

I dont' know if curling should count as an Olympic sport. It looks like something my janitor does on his normal cleaning routine.

Had a rough Valentine's Day. Got stuck watching 'Tyrannosaurus Sex' on the Discovery Channel. ANd you thought YOU had a hard time fitting into a Magnum?

Had a rough Valentine's Day. Got stuck watching 'Tyrannosaurus Sex' on the discovery channel. And I thought I felt inadequate standing next to a donkey.

See the NBA All-star game this weekend? No defense at all. Even Tiger Woods doesn't score that much.

It just keeps getting worse for Tiger Woods. Rumor is he's about to declare bankruptcy. With all his ho's, Valentine's Day was hella expensive.

Could the winter olympics BE any gayer? Seriously, skip the bidding process among cities from now on and just give them to San Francisco from now on.

Are we SURE the Winter OLympics are actual sports? Seriously, i keep waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and yell, "YOu've been PUNK"D!!" to the worldwide TV audience.

Great subway ride home tonight: a crackhead told me i could make good money playing the "Family Guy" dad on Hollywood Boulevard.

I always hate the round the clock Olympic coverage. Almost enough to make me wish they'd bring back The Jay Leno Show. Almost...

The Who played the Super Bowl halftime show. They were so old, all I could think was, “the WHY?” And they're so deaf onstage that they kept asking each other, “The WHAT?” It was like Abbott and Costello all over again: Who's on first...

Pete Townshend's known for breaking his guitar. THis time he had to worry about his breaking his hip.

I couldn't tell if Roger Daltrey was singing, or yelling at people to get off his lawn.

They were moving slower than the Colts defense.

They sang “My Generation”. Which one are they talking about? The first time when they sang it at 20, or now when they sang it at 80?

And even more ridiculous was them singing “Teenage Wasteland.” How about something more relevant, like a song about Alzheimers? That'll leave you pretty wasted.

It's gonna be a crazy time in New Orleans these next few weeks. Go from winning the Super Bowl straight into Mardi Gras. That's great for San Bernardino too: they're sending in even more meth for the parties than usual.

How about those Super Bowl ads? The last couple years they've had some ads in 3D. To which I ask, why didn't they have 3D the year Janet Jackson's boobs fell out?! Gimme 3D boobies and I don't care what you're selling – I'm a customer for life!

I do thank God that that Betty White ad wasn't in 3D. I don't want to take any chances with HER rack.

And then there was Abe Vigoda in that ad. Who even knew he was alive? Looking at him, I thought he was starring in the next mummy movie.

Charlie Sheen's wife wants to drop domestic abuse charges against him, but Gary Coleman just got convicted of beating his wife. It's like they say, they've always got to stick it to the little man.

Howard Stern's stirring up controversy because he's saying he might want to take Simon's place on 'American Idol.” What's the big deal? They've already got Ellen over there, and everyone KNOWS Howard loves lesbians.

How about that global warming? 20 inches of snow are hitting the East Coast. Funny how you don't see Al Gore running his mouth off anymore. I guess he's in hibernation/guess he's hibernating.

First Al told us the world was too hot, now he and his people are saying it's too cold. Why don't they just leave us alone and start their own line of Goldilocks Oatmeal: it's too hot, it's too cold, but it'll never be “just right.”

How about the problems with the toyota Prius? Their new slogan is 80 miles per gallon at 800 miles per hour.

It's Valentine's Day – you know what that means. Time to buy a box of 12 Fantasy brand condoms from the 99 cents store. They always put them right next to the home pregnancy tests. I say, if you're relying on the 99 cents store for your birth control needs, skip the condoms and go directly to the pregnancy test. Then again, if you're shopping at the 99 cents store, it's probably a fantasy that you have a sex life in the first place.

Instead of "Christmas," say "Valentines Day" on this joke - about the sex robot: "Now i know what to get Tiger for Valentine's Day!!"

And "Boy, John Edwards just doesn't get it - he said he was making the sex tape as a Valentine's

Obama’s got us over $3 trillion dollars in debt. Suddenly I don’t feel so ashamed about my Visa bill.

Obama’s got us over $3 trillion dollars in debt. Now I think I can tell Visa to fuck off about the $4000 I owe them.

Obama’s declaring war on childhood obesity. This is one war we can win – after all, fat kids are slow and make easy targets.

Kobe Bryant just became the highest-scoring Laker ever. Gee, who knew it was possible to sleep with more women than Wilt Chamberlain?

We just had Groundhog Day. This year, it was Dr. Phil who showed up to see his shadow. Six more weeks of family therapy. OR Six more years of his shitty show.

Toyota’s recalling 8 million cars because the gas pedal sticks and they go too fast. Funny how that’s a problem for Toyota, but it’d be perfect for Nissan’s slogan: Zoom zoom!

Obama wants to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” and let gays serve in the military. Opponents call gays a security risk, but that’s stupid – what group in the history of the world has proven BETTER able to keep a secret?

Didja hear about the new movie "Dear John"? I thought it was a Valentine's chick flick, but it's really a documentary about the John Edwards divorce proceedings.

Did you hear there's a new $7,000, fully operational sex robot now? I finally know what to get Tiger Woods for Christmas!

That $7,000 sex robot will do anything you want, no complaining. Hell, you could get Snooki from The Jersey Shore to do the same thing for $20 and a couple shots of tequila.

A $7,000, fully operational sex robot? Finally, some high technology I can really get behind!

Today was Groundhog Day. Tiger Woods stuck his head out from hiding and saw his shadow. You know what that means: six more weeks of rehab!

Did you hear about that new movie "Cop Out"? Turns out it's not a buddy cop movie - it's the documentary about Obama's first year in office. OR Turns out it's not a buddy cop movie - it's the story of the Democratic health care plan.

Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen teamed up for a new sitcom: Two and a Half Inches. They just announced they're working with John Edwards too: the remake of the Three Stooges.

How about that John Edwards sex tape? he's getting it on with his eight months' pregnant mistress. Finally, a sex tape we'll all pay NOT to see!

Did you hear about the new IPad that's coming out from Apple? What are its special features: that it's extra absorbent and has wings?

Everyone’s pissed at Brett Favre for not winning the playoff game. He’s 40 years old. When I was 40, the only thing I could throw was my back out.

President Obama’s had a rough first year in office. If his poll ratings don’t improve, they’re bringing in Leno.

Octomom’s eight kids just celebrated their first birthday this week. One more kid and she wouldn’t have a womb - she’d have a housing project.

Osama bin Laden has come out with a new tape. If he’s the world’s scariest, richest terrorist, why can’t he send us an MP3? Can’t he have Al-Qaeda steal him an IPod?

Osama hasn’t done anything really scary since 9/11. That’s been over 8 years man! Osama bin Laden? More like Osama Been Lazy.

In all his videos, Bin Laden’s wandering around the mountains carrying a giant stick in his hand. I don’t know if he really looks terrifying, or just looks like Gandalf.

Scott Brown shocked everyone by winning the senate seat in Massachusetts. He also once posed nude for Cosmo – Finally! A politician who gets his sex scandal out of the way BEFORE he takes office!

When Brown offered to give the voters naked honesty, they didn’t realize he’d go THAT far!

That movie “Up in the Air” isn’t doing so hot. It’s a sweet romantic comedy with George Clooney, but people keep thinking it’s a movie about the Undie Bomber.

Mel Gibson’s back with something called “Edge of Darkness.” He spends the whole time beating people up all over Los Angeles. I couldn’t tell if it was an action movie or a reality series.

Boy, people in San Bernardino are really excited about the Super Bowl! Of course, that could just be the meth.

A new study reveals that teenage boys and young adult men lie about how often they have sex. That’s in the new issue of “Duh!” magazine.

What's the Rock doing as "The Tooth Fairy"? Looks like he needs to make a wish - for better scripts. a few seconds ago • Comment •LikeUnlike

Carl Kozlowski Anyone see the commercials for the new "Wolfman" movie yet? They've got Benicio del Toro screaming "I will kill ALL of you!" It really looks like "Scarface" with facial hair.

Carl Kozlowski Tiger Woods is in treatment for sex addiction. Man, even his problems are better than mine.

That show “24” just started up again. Kiefer Sutherland’s getting old – he’s less excited about saving the world than he is about saving 15 percent on his car insurance.

They’re trying a lot of new things on “24” since everyone thinks Kiefer’s getting old. This year, he actually takes a nap. And a crap. That guy’s gone eight seasons without using the toilet once – he’s got bowels of steel!

Things are crazy these days – Tiger Woods is in sex rehab and Arenas got busted for bringing a gun to a basketball game. Remember when rehab was for a knee injury and athletes shot baskets instead of their teammates?

Boy, this NBC late night mess is getting ugly. Jay Leno’s coming back to take over “The Tonight Show.” That’s like coming back to fuck your ex-wife after she’s already got a new husband.

Boy, it’s raining like crazy out there. I got tired of driving halfway over here and swam the rest of the way.

There’s some advantages to all the rain falling. Jesus the bartender washed his beard for the first time in six months.

The rain’s so bad that the bar’s throwing a special tonight: all mudslide drinks come with flood insurance. OR come with house insurance.

It’s raining so much out that when a hooker puts on your rubbers she’s covering your feet.

That rain is like giving the city a shower. Now if it would only work on the guy sitting next to be on the bus over here…

That rain’s making Los Angeles unrecognizable. I can’t even smell the urine on the sidewalks anymore.

See the Golden Globes? Monique won Best Supporting Actress for “Precious.” That movie confused me – I thought it was another “Lord of the Rings” movie, not the story of a 500-pound black girl on welfare.

The founder of Taco Bell just died. He ate 7 layer burritos until he went 6 feet under.

The founder of Taco Bell just died. Imagine his surprise when he learned the Supreme Being isn’t just made out of 89 cents worth of refried beans and sour cream. He’ll be running for the border - of heaven.

The creator of the Quarter Pounder died – though at his final weigh-in, he was more like a quarter ton.

First the Taco Bell guy, then the Quarter Pounder dude died – all I’m saying is Burger King better watch his ass. Who needs a coup to take him out when you’ve got cholesterol?

Pope Benedict met with the woman who tackled him at the Christmas Eve Mass. He figures if she wants to jump his bones, who’s he to stop her?

Charlie Sheen lost his gig selling Hanes underwear. The underwear bomber said "Hey, I'm available."

Charlie Sheen lost his gig selling Hanes underwear. They're hiring the underwear bomber instead. Their new slogan is "I wear Hanes, 'cause it's the bomb."

Charlie lost his gig appearing with Michael Jordan 'cause he beat his wife. He's got a new ad, though: selling Ginsu knives with OJ.

I'm tired of hearing everyone mangle that Muslim bomber's name. Can't we just call him the Undiebomber?

They're coming out with a porn version of "Avatar." I dunno, though - it's just two hours of blue balls. Bet you didn't see that coming!

MTV's come up with a new show for Jay and Conan: "Celebrity Deathmatch."

Mel Gibson's defending Tiger Woods. That's like Pee Wee Herman defending Michael Jackson. That's like Mariah Carey speaking to an Alcoholics Anonymous group. That's like Chris Dodd hosting a financial advice show.

The Obama administration is considering an array of national security measures. The President said "I'm all ears!"

The president said "the buck stops here" on national security. It should. His ears are a personal radar system.

Hear about Gilbert Arenas bringing guns to the locker room? What's everyone worried about? He's only shooting 28 percent!

His coach doesn't mind the guns though. He said "Anything that gets him shooting practice."

Arenas is part of the NBA's new players' program: "If you don't have a gun, we'll give you one."

Mark McGwire admitted he's using steroids. He said, "What's the big deal? I shot steroids, not my teammates."

Tourism is dropping in Jersey - who knew the people were nastier than the water on the Jersey shore?

Did you hear Nicole Richie's new movie? "The Lovely Bones."

There's a new book out saying Warren Beatty slept with 13,000 women. And you know there's some skank out there going "Hey, I was 13,001!"

California has just banned trans fats from all restaurants. Now if they'd just ban fat trannies too.

Jennifer Lopez says she apprecaiates the deep, meaningful love Marc Anthony gives her. He says he appreciates her deep, meaningful tush.

It’s getting scary at the airports. You have to show your underwear to everyone. America’s moms have released a statement saying “I told you so.”

Did you hear about the guy who passed out in his car for an hour and the cops found a meth lab in his back seat? Doesn’t the mayor of San Bernardino have anything better to do?

A new book says that Warren Beatty slept with nearly 13,000 women. Even Tiger’s impressed. He gets tired after 18 holes.

ESPN just announced its launching a 3D sports network this summer. I don’t know – if I wanted to get hit in the face with balls for two hours at a time, I’d just go over to West Hollywood.

3D ESPN is scary: You’d REALLY have to ask tiger to keep his pants zipped.

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich – that guy with the crazy hair – is going to be on the next “Celebrity Apprentice”. He’ll be competing with Donald Trump in a fight to the death for his barber.

Pee Wee Herman’s coming back with a new stage show. Remember when he got caught whacking off in a porno theater? I say keep him onstage and away from the seat next to me.

That new movie "Avatar" is out. I don't know about it though - why pay $10.50 just to watch two hours of Facebook photos?

Tiger Woods has quit golfing indefinitely. That's a wise decision - he's gotta conserve his energy for the ladies. Besides, where's he got the time?

Tiger's quit golfing for a while, but he's got a new gig - VH1's "Celebrity Sex Rehab."

We're sure far out here in the Inland Empire. Even Santa's saying "Fuck it" this year. No, just kidding. Santa will always come out to San Bernardino. He needs the meth to get around the rest of the planet quick.

Steven Seagal's got that new show "Lawman" out where he claims to be a real-life cop.

a) I know where I'd be moving if I was a criminal. Have you SEEN Seagal lately? Not like he can chase anyone.

b) He's one cop who's eating all the donuts.

c) I'm sweating like Steven Seagal eating donuts.

Seagal's so big now i'm looking at his movies in a whole new way...

d) He's Marked for Death - by his physician!

e) He's not Marked for Death - He's Marked for Diet

f) He's gone from "hard to Kill" to Hard to Breathe.

g) He's gone from "Hard to Kill" to "Hard to Run"

h) He's gone from "Above the Law" to "Above the Scale Limit"

WHY I HATE THE OLYMPICS

2010-02-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

Odds of winning an Olympic medal: 662,000 to 1.

Odds of winning an Academy Awards: 11,500 to 1.

I'm going for the Oscar. Clearly, it's the path of least resistance.

I'm living a nightmare right now. It's called the Winter Olympics.

Imagine hating sports – nearly every single form of them – and yet having to watch them 24 hours a day for 14 days on end.

Al-Qaeda might consider waterboarding a worse form of torture. But not for me – for me, torture is seeing snowboarding, luge riders, curlers, and oh- worst of all! - figure skaters. All playing their hearts out to win medals and endorsement deals.

Why do I hate sports so? Look at me! Do I look like a competitor, a svelte athlete ready to stun the world with my feats of speed and grace?!

No, but I've tried.

I first imagined myself as a sports car driver while riding a tricycle at the age of 4. But as my best friend Joey egged me on with the best Howard Cosell impersonation a 4-year-old could offer, I pedaled too fast to take a turn in my circular parking lot safely and careened on 2 of my 3 wheels into the back of a 1974 Buick, getting my nose stuck in the tiny crevice of space between the bumper and its chrome cover. I fireman had to get me free in front of 50 of my laughing neighborhood peers, and I'm still a legend – for all the wrong reasons – on the streets of the Chicago suburb of Broadview, Illinois.

Cut to 4th grade and playing soccer. Soccer was a game my dad – an immigrant from Poland – could relate to. I, on the other hand, wanted to play baseball. Instead, I was stuck playing fullback each week in YMCA soccer. It was already lame playing Y ball – in fact, I think the Y really referred to saying “Why bother?” They never really pused competition, and no matter how crappy your team was, it got a trophy. How does that prepare you for the non-stop, inevitable asskicking rat race the real-life adult world has to offer? It took me years before I realized you don't get a trophy for screwing up on the job, and that a boss might tell me I'm the weakest link and throw a folder at my head rather than hand me an award the next time I missed a deadline.

And so it went, on and on: my spiral of sports-related shame!

Next came YMCA basketball, where I was so hopeless and my team so pathetic that I remember a Y ref secretly tapping a ball I was chasing back in-bounds to me.

“Don't worry,” he whispered with a smile. “You can shoot it again.”

Sure, he was trying to be nice, but all I could think was, every kid on that court and their parents – not to mention MY parents – had to see the ref help me.

It was like having my dad buy me a presidential election by stacking the Supreme Court and having me declared the winner. No one would ever respect me again – so I let the basketball just sit there anyway.

I had my pride.

Flash forward to baseball – again at the damn Y – and I'm 10 going on 111 with another crappy team on its way to an 0-7 record. EVERY team I played on, from soccer to basketball to baseball, was 0-7. But we still got trophies!

The memories I have from that baseball season are good and bad. I got 1 hit in 11 at-bats, after cowering from fast pitches on my other 10 attempts. That hit was a fast grounder that slipped by a 2nd baseman, but IT WAS GLORIOUS! It ensured that at least one of my lifetime stats didn't have a 0 attached to it.

The other was in my last game, playing right field of course – the no man's land that balls were never hit to and where the lamest players went to die. In my final game, though, a player hit a rocket line drive out to right, and in a completely uncharacteristic – and some say, miraculous – display of ability, I caught that sucker!

I ran in to my team, screaming for joy, highfiving, a hero for cone in my Godforsaken life. And then, as I grabbed a bat, knowing my turn was next and that for once I had the confidence to pound a homer...the ump called “Time!”

Not time out. Time! As in “out of time, game over” - in the one sport devised by mankind that wasn't supposed to have a clock! There was no “time” in baseball! It was supposed to last 9 non-timed innings, period – that was its hidden magic! You never knew WHAT you were getting into with baseball, a 2 hour boredom-inducing low-scorer or an action-paced, seemingly unending 4 hour barnstormer. To this day, that's what I love about baseball – the fact that the game and its details rarely matter as much as the loose vibe of a drunken afternoon in which the universe and everything in it can be discussed, debated and evaluated in 9 glorious innings.

All these memories flood my mind, but the thing that broke my Olympic spirit most was the summer of 1992 – when my brother Lud won the Olympic Triplecast from a morning radio show.

Now, the Olympic Triplecast was designed for those human beings who felt around the clock coverage of the Olympics on just ONE network wasn't enough. Rather, it was THREE satellite networks of Olympic coverage – making sure you didn't miss a damn minute of any sport known to man, from soccer to the shot put.

And my brother reveled in the fact he'd won it, taking over our kitchen TV to watch as much as humanly possible because he couldn't let this alleged $199 “value” go to waste.

While he drove my mom's blood pressure sky high and forced the rest of my family into eating out for nearly every meal of the Olympics' two weeks rather than watch another second, he and I DID bond over one thing: Snickering awkwardly at Greco-Roman wrestling.

Yes, I came running anytime he yelled to tell me it was on. The chance to watch two guys in tights hold each other in place on the floor in a variety of positions that were too close for comfort was a hilarious pasttime when he was 16 and I was 21 and we were too young and dumb to realize we were being homophobic and un-PC.

For my brother was an uncoordinated klutz too. And in those 1992 Summer Olympic games, fueled by Triplecast and too much wrestling, we finallly laughed our athletic frustrations out of our system. We snickered as if were superior even though these wrestlers could have kicked our asses 6 ways to Sunday.

You could point out that I don't NEED to watch the Olympics these days – that rather than just the 5 channels of my youth there's 500 available now.

But I say that some things – even things you hate – are too compelling to turn away from. Like rubbernecking a traffic accident or staring at a transvestite on a subway train, some things in the universe esxert an unbreakable tractor beam on our psyches.

For me, the Olympics are one of those things. I've hated them too long to stop bitching about them now.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE...FICTION WRITER

2010-01-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

"Time" heals all
With “Angel Time,” Anne Rice continues her quest for truths hidden amid eternal mysteries

By Carl Kozlowski

Anne Rice has spent her entire life caught up in a spiritual quest for truth. Yet she has carried on that search in a highly public and creative fashion, creating novels rooted in indelible portraits of evil and lost souls throughout her 11-novel series about the Vampire Lestat before tossing that vastly lucrative path aside to write novels in which Jesus and holy angels are the heroes.

Rice will be signing her latest novel, “Angel Time,” in a free 1 p.m. Saturday event at Vroman’s Bookstore. Following the story of Toby O’Dare, a contract killer assigned to yet another murder who is visited by a mysterious stranger – an angel who offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. When he agrees to take that chance, he is whisked back to 13th-Century England, amid an era in which children suddenly die or disappear and accusations of ritual murder have been made against Jews – a dark world in which he is determined to bring light.

“Both vampires and angels challenge the imagination. You have to live up to a classic concept, with angels they’re a creature who’s a messenger of God who comes from Heaven ,” explains Rice. “So you think: ‘what’s he going to sound like when he talks, what’s he going to say?’ It’s exciting to me, to write about angel Malchiah and make him believable to my audience.

“We have to respect what they are. Angels are messengers of God and live in the presence of God, but over and over in Hollywood movies, they’re made into sad figures who want to be on earth instead of Heaven. My angels want to be in Heaven. It’s kind of thrilling and very similar to writing about vampires.”

It’s been a rather unique full-circle journey for Rice, who grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family in New Orleans before questioning her beliefs upon attending college out of state in Texas. Yet Anne didn’t rebel in the conventional sense of those around her in the heyday of hippiedom; she was a few years older than that generation and decided to question things on an intellectual and philosophical level rather than through the use of drugs.

She reached her professional breakthrough in 1976 with the release of her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, a full three years after she finished writing it. Following the illicit deeds of an immortal vampire, the book was an extremely dark exploration of the very questions Rice was harboring in her real life. While writing the remaining ten books in the vampire series, which went on to sell tens of millions of copies worldwide, she also wrote three erotic novels under the pen name of A.N. Roquelaure.

But even as she eventually came to describe herself as an atheist and had great wealth and adulation surrounding her, Rice wasn’t truly happy. In 1998, she started to rediscover her strong faith in the Catholic Church, and by 2004, she announced that she would no longer write about vampires. Instead, she was devoting herself to “what the Lord wanted” in her writing.

“The answer to why I switched is my personal conversion. I didn’t really have the same worldview after that conversion,” Rice explained in an exclusive interview from her home in Rancho Mirage. “I didn’t have any more tales to tell with Lestat because I now saw the world through different eyes and the vampires didn’t make a connection for me.

“Vampires were people groping for faith, living through darkness, and I personally found the change those characters were looking for,” Rice adds. “I came to the end of my quest. The last two [Lestat books] reflected the split in me and were written after I’d been writing in faith.”

Rice’s shift away from faith was one that is common on the nation’s college campuses, even though she now feels it was “tragic” for her life. For despite her vast wealth and a happy 41-year marriage to Stan Rice, a lifelong atheist who died in 2002, she wishes she had never walked away from her beloved mother church.

“I went through a crisis at 18. I was at a secular college campus in Texas, away from my Catholic roots and had a whole host of new influences,” recalls Rice. “I rejected the faith of my childhood as too limited. I wanted to learn what the modern world was about. I ended up styling myself as an atheist, but was really agnostic. As Catholics we encounter a whole lot of new information, and we don’t know how to incorporate that into our faith.”

Rice particularly recalls her first readings of existentialist writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as leading her astray, but with the wisdom of time now says “it isn’t necessary to leave your church in order to read Sartre or Camus, but when I was 18 it didn’t seem that way and that I had to leave and seek knowledge a different way. It was a tragedy.”

Rice ultimately decided to return to the Catholic Church but also came back with a strong sense that she was supposed to write about Jesus Christ now and devote all her future work to Him. She feels that even her vampire novels were reflections of the search for the great truths of existence, just from the dark flipside of the path she walks now.

“There was not a specific incident that sparked my return to the church. I’d been thinking a long time and one day I made decision to go back, and realized I didn’t need answers to all the sociological questions I had,” explains Rice. “God had the answers for what was the meaning of the Holocaust or why was there a Second World War? – and that was enough. That burden was not for us. It was a release to let it go but it was also intellectual. Americans tend to believe in that story that you turn towards or against faith due to tragic loss, but that never happened for me. They’re always casting my story in those terms but it didn’t fit.”

Ultimately, Rice has been pleased that some of her old fans have followed her new direction and tries not to concern herself too much with those who haven’t been as kind about it. She drew particular ire from some fans on Amazon.com for her Christ-centered novel Blood Canticle, and wound up attempting to defend herself in writing – only to find Amazon pull her response down without explanation.

“I don’t disavow my past books at all. I have communication with my followers everyday, and love their feedback and comments,” says Rice. “I hear a lot from fans who are curious and searching for faith. I get a lot of emails about my conversion – how did you do it, what do you believe in? I spoke at a synagogue about “Christ the Lord” outside of Birmingham, and people asked how did faith get back to you? Sometimes it’s hard to express how complicated it is.”

A DARKLY FUNNY PIECE OF CHRISTMAS FICTION

2009-12-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

“O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL"

BY CARL KOZLOWSKI
Copyright (and that's no bull- it IS copyrighted, DO NOT reprint or steal this!) 2009
Christmas. That's one word that seems to make everybody light up with a smile. At least if they live in the Western world and don't worship Buddha or something - but even then, you know they'd dig on Santa since both those dudes have got bellies full of jelly.

But me? I've always hated Christmas.

Why, you ask? Spend five minutes with me in a bar on Christmas Day, and you'll be asking why NOT.

Take the fact that I was one of 17 kids. That's right, my mom was a regular baby factory, and I had to be 16th off the assembly line. So I didn't get the honor of being first, or the last, or even really being part of the middle. I was almost an afterthought.

But I try to put it in perspective. After all, I was only 16th out of 17. That jerk Osama bin Laden was like one of 55 kids. No wonder he grew up to be so angry. You never get any good presents when you're way down the list like us.

Then again, I'm not sayin' I don't miss those guys. I think about 'em every Christmas. It's hard not to, considering Momma and Daddy drove the family van over that cliff in the snowstorm when 15 of 'em were on board. They were going to sing in our town's Christmas pageant, and I happened to have a cold that day. So they left me with Grandma, and I survived. Just me and my baby sister.

So it's hard to get cheery over the Big Day. In fact, I don't even believe in it anymore. Not in Christmas, or Christ, or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Passover, Eid, or anything the Hindus might be into. If there was a Big Man out there watching over us all, why would he let so much crap happen to one little guy like me?

And that's why it was so weird that I was called in for this job interview. I was about to be hired to play 36 straight hours of Christmas carols, from noon on Christmas Eve clear through Christmas Day, on a station called KCHR - otherwise known as "K-Christ," Chicago's number one Christian music station.

In other words, I'm hardly the perfect candidate for the job. But do you know anyone else who would do it? Working Christmas in radio is the ultimate sign that your career is in the toilet. It means you've got no one to spend it with, no one who cares, and an infinite amount of patience for songs about jing-jing-jingling and taking sleigh rides. Not to mention, trudging to work in Chicago, where it's always a white Christmas, whether Bing Crosby dreams of it or not.

But hey, I'm Travis Koback, and I'm a commodity. I used to be somebody. In fact, I was the #1 morning DJ in the city until that unfortunate incident involving the mayor's wife, a hotel suite and some unexpected news photographers. I never realized the mayor could have the power to get a guy like me fired, but hey, you learn something new every day.

I learned a few other things after that. Like if you're gonna rob a bank while dressed as Santa, make sure you have his shirt on right, so you don't have a bunch of witnesses describing you to the police as "a guy in a Santa suit, but his shirt was on backwards." That made it hard to claim they had the wrong guy when they caught me three blocks away.

I learned that even though we pay a lot of lip service in this country to getting second chances, making comebacks, and being "born again," most people really do hold grudges. No station would touch me with a ten-foot pole once everyone found out I was a convicted felon. But didn't they realize if they'd just give me a job again, I wouldn't have to steal?

But somehow I lucked out with the fine folks at K-Christ. The word was out on the street that nobody would take their Christmas gig, 'cause not only would you have to be cooped up in a glass booth for 36 hours, but you also would have to play their idea of traditional Christmas carols. No rock. No country, amazingly. Definitely no rap versions of "Away in a Manger." Nope, you were stuck with glorified elevator music that would put the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sleep.

But hey, I needed the dough. They were actually paying pretty good - $5000 for it. I mean, DJing on Christmas is about as much fun as kissing your sister, so they've gotta pay. And since they were paying, I decided to make the most of my interview and info session. I actually dressed up.

I suppose, getting "dressed up" is relative. The chick at the K-Christ reception desk didn't seem that impressed with my black pleather suit jacket, shirt and pants combo.

"Um.So you're the DJ?" she asked, her eyes wide open with wonder. Or, maybe it was a combination of fear and disgust. You never can really tell these days.

But nonetheless, she had a nameplate on her desk, and I scored points by calling her Maria before she could realize I was just reading it off the sign in front of her.

"Wow, you know my name? Cool. How'd you do that?" she asked, smiling like a sorority girl who just landed the perfect homecoming date.

"I'm, uh..psychic. It's a gift." I was kidding, of course, but she bought it hook, line and sinker. Within seconds, I was sent through to the manager's office.

The guy in charge at the station was typical management: suit, tie, perfect hair, and way uptight. I could tell he wasn't thrilled to meet me, and especially to hire me at this holiest of times.

"Do we need to refresh you on, um, FCC decency rules?" he asked, staring me straight in the eyes.

"I know, I know, there's seven words I can't say, like…" I replied, trying to appear confident. Instead, he almost jumped out of his seat while waving his hands at me.

"Stop, stop, no need to recite them," he said, looking like he was afraid of losing his job if he even heard a single one of those words even off the air.

He stood up and paced to his window, trying to impress me with his view of the Sears Tower. It was kinda strange, considering we and the station were in the JC Penney Building, which was only half the Sears Tower's size. It was like staring at success, right in our faces, and realizing we were only halfway there. Story of my life.

"Look, just to be safe, why don't you not say much of anything at all? Just say the time and who the song is by occasionally, maybe read the weather off, and say a Merry Christmas at the top of the hour," said the bossman. "Think you can be a good boy and handle that? We're paying you a lot of money to just play by the rules."

"Sure." I'm not stupid. I knew when to keep my mouth shut. Or at least I learned after the first million bucks in FCC fines. This guy had good reason to be scared based on my track record, but this was going to be two months of living money for a day and a half of work. My intentions, at least, were the best.

But as somebody smart once said, or wrote, or something, the best laid plans of mice and men often…um….well, they get smashed in a mousetrap.

The station's booth was a lot more advanced than I ever expected. I thought I'd be dealing with a station with a budget determined by bake sales and a lame-o turntable with a bunch of scratchy records that were one inch away from being dumped forever into a Salvation Army thrift store. But instead, it had a big ol' touchscreen computer that gave DJ's the chance to pick up to the next ten songs just by pushing a bunch of buttons on a screen.

Other than the fact I hated the music with my very existence, this would be a piece of cake. I hit the station's promo button the second I took my seat.

"K!C!H!R! K-Christ!"

The funny thing was, those plastic radio chorus voices actually sounded good, even if I didn't particularly care for the call letters or what they stood for. The important thing was that I was back on the air, even if they didn't promote it in any way. I was still in the heart of Chicago, and I knew that if I decided to give a damn, building an audience would be no sweat.

I gave myself a second to clear my throat and suck in my breath. Had to get rid of the rasp in my voice, and put my cigarette throat on their precious, wholesome wavelength. And I was gonna try and make it through this without relying on my good friends Jack Daniels and Johnnie Walker.

Besides, I could afford to take a few moments - who the hell would be listening to a Christian station nowadays, besides a few hundred old ladies who couldn't hear well enough to notice whether I talked or was silent anyway?

But then again, it was Christmas Eve. If anyone with a pulse was ever going to tune in, it would be today.

"Good afternoon to ya, Chicago. It's that holiest of holidays, Christmas! And with Christmas comes Christmas Eve, and you know what that means."

Yeah, I knew they knew what that meant. It meant that some shmuck was gonna have to lock himself in a radio station and play every Christmas song known to man for the next 36 hours. But I couldn't actually SAY that.

"IT means we'll be playing those most precious of songs, Christmas carols! And OHHH, we've got lots of 'em, folks, so call in your requests now!"

Yeah, right. Piece of cake. No one was gonna call in. I mean, don't you forget how to use the phone after age 73?

"Here we go now, with a personal favorite of mine, 'Silent Night,' in that ever-popular Muzak format." I looked at the computer screen for a moment and finally hit the song's button. Whadaya know? It worked. Let there be crap!

God, I remembered when stations actually used records on the air. I mean, I'm only 45, but I've been on the air for 22 years. The mayor threw me a congratulations dinner party even. If only I hadn't tried to make his wife my dessert, I wouldn't be sitting here.

But I hadn't seen records in over a decade, except at Christmastime. Everyone used records for carols during the holiday season, 'cause it somehow made you feel a downhome warmth even if were an old Grinch like me. All things considered, though, this was gonna be kinda nice. I coulda been listening to my own record collection back home, but without this gig I woulda been living outdoors by New Year's.

Just then, a phone line had to light up.

Damn! I couldn't kick back for a second, could I? It was only 12:02 p.m. But I now realized my eight listeners wouldn't be hitting the sack just yet, and picked up the receiver.

"K-Christ. This is Travis. Merry Christmas," I droned.

'Yes, could you play 'Christmas in Killarney' by Bing Crosby for me?" Bingo. Some old bag over age 75. What a nightmare.

"I don't know, lady. Why do you wanna hear that? It's Christmas in Chicago, for cryin' out loud."

I really didn't wanna deal with this. But as the old lady released a startled gasp, I thought maybe I was being too harsh on her. It was Christmas, after all, and she believed in it even if I didn't.

"Awright, awright," I said. "At least it's not religious."

Another gasp from her. Then, a question.

"Who are you?"

"I told ya, lady. My name is Travis."

"Last name, I mean. I'm reporting you!"

"Good. I won't be here. I got this stupid, stinkin' shift as a one-shot deal. Ya think anyone else would work 36 hours straight on the most precious holiday of the year? Song's ending. I gotta run. Call's over."

Time to stare at the computer again and find a song that wouldn't make me want to kill myself. What a stupid frickin' life.

5:23 p.m. Over five hours of carols, carols, carols, CAROLS. Carols sung, carols spoken , carols in Muzak. It would've killed a lesser man by now. I knew I had to do something to protect my sanity.

When I signed the contract for this gig, I knew they wanted me to play every Christmas carol known to man. Problem was, the man who made the songlist didn't know too many carols.

It was time to hit the vaults, or at least dig through my own Superbox O'Christmas. Despite my aversion to all things Christmas on a personal level, I had built quite a collection of holiday tunes on vinyl over my years of having to play nice on the radio. And being the city's craziest DJ, a lot of 'em were WAY off from normal. I brought a big box of 'em over to the station with me just in case. After all, anything that would keep me from drinking had to be seen as helpful.

I slipped on "O Come All Ye Faithful" for the 23rd time. It was the perfect long song to go searching to.

But just that moment, I saw that the keychain they gave me had an extra key besides the one for the front door. It was one of those antique keys you see in haunted house movies, and it didn't seem to match any of the doors in the place - except for this one closet behind the booth.

I headed for that door and rattled that key like crazy. I also gave the door a good solid kick but we don't have to mention that, do we? Oops, just did.

Anywho, that door opened into a huge closet that.voila.was packed with tons of records, stacked high as the eye could see. Even higher, man, 'cause I had to climb up on a chair to see them all. Turns out they were left over from the previous station, which actually played good tunes.

Suddenly, my 36 hours wouldn't feel like another night in the drunk tank downtown. I couldn't take my eyes off the records, or keep my hands off them - until I realized that the last song had ended and I had accidentally left the station silent for over a minute now. Not that I had to worry, since everyone was probably sitting down to dinner right then.

I couldn't help cackling, though, as I realized one thing while running back into the booth with my hands full of vinyl: tonight, this city was gonna be dancing.

"OK, folks. Enough with the dead people's music. Screw the Perry Como, the Frank Sinatra and the Johnny Mathis Christmas albums. Forget about 'Sing Along with Mitch Miller.' It's time to dance along with Travis. We'll start slow and ease into a full night of frenzy. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for CHA-CHA CHRISTMAS !!!"

I plunked down the needle, spun out of my chair and burst into a dancing frenzy as the switchboard lit up again.

"GOOOOOOOD evening. Or should I say God evening? You're feelin' nice with K-Christ."

"What do you think you're doing?" Another old woman, complaining because her heart was just jump-started by some Latin American carols.

"Spreading Christmas cheer. That's what I'm here for."

"Well, Perry Como was cheery enough for me. And I want to sing along with Mitch.'

"Well, too bad, you dried-up old…" Click on the other end. Conversation over.

Call on line two.

"Feliz Navidad!" I cried into the receiver.

"Yeah, right.You sound a lot nerdier on the air tha n a guy who would play cha-cha music during Christmas dinner."

Whoa. This was another lady, but at least she sounded like she might have a pulse and a heartbeat that wasn't regulated by medication. Stay cool, I thought, we could be onto something. Like a mattress, sometime soon.

"YOU sound alive." Cover up the surprise, man, I realized. "..with the Christmas spirit. What's going on at your place?"

"Let's just say I've never had my family dancing at the dinner table - especially not at Christmas." She sounded tentative, afraid of how to express her surprise, and most likely her thanks.

"So, is that good? Your parents are dancing?" I asked, leadingly.

"No, my kids!..And me," she said, embarrassed.

Hmmm. Could she be divorced, or singlle?

"And your husband?"

"He wants to know if you have 'Cumbia Christmas."

OK, what did I expect anyway? Even if she were single, she was most likely Christian. And that didn't fit with my game plan.

"I'll have to hunt for that one," I teased. "Are you regular, ardent supporters of K-Christ?"

"No, actually. It was the weirdest thing. My kids were flipping the dial, and they just thought it was the goofiest music they'd ever heard. We love it!"

Take a Valium, lady. Apparently, you don't listen to the Ramones.

"Well, I'll see what I can do, if you just do me a favor."

"Oh, sure. Anything, for bringing some life to Christmas."

Anything? Watch what you say, man.

"Call all of your friends for just a second and tell them to tune me in. Get your kids to call their friends, too. I wanna have more than just eight listeners out there. I wanna throw a party for Chicago. Got it?"

She laughed goofily. "OK, I guess so."

"I mean it now. Call them."

"OK, you got it."

"Whoa. 'Cha-Cha Christmas' is ending. You got your request too, then. Catch ya later."

I flipped smoothly through the records before making a perfect switch of the albums.

"It's Cumbia Christmas time, Chicago!"

8:54 p.m.

That lady must have a lot of friends. I hadn't been able to rest from answering the switchboard for hours. In fact, it was almost like the old days in the morning, when I was riding at KKOZ, #1 in the city. Those bastards. I was beginning to feel that maybe the city's radio fans - the true judges of talent - hadn't forgotten me. But then again, eighteen months without a job had been a mighty long time.

Trouble was brewing again. I'd already gone through all of the cha-cha stuff, and the mambo, samba and tango carols as well."Polka Christmas" was one album I really dreaded playing, but even that nightmare had come true. You can't avoid polka in Chicago. They might as well have a 24-hour polka station on the dial. Maybe a polka video channel, too.

All that was left to play were Christmas opera tunes. I leaned back in my chair as Jose Feliciano wailed "Feliz Navidad" for what must have been the 52nd time.

No way, man. I'd rather kill myself than play opera carols. Time to rock'n'roll. Time to reach into the old Christmas collection from KKOZ.

The needle was rising. OK, it was now or never. I reached down under the table and fumbled through the records. ANYTHING would do to get the party started. Switch!

"OK." Oh no, not that" I realized, but plowed forward with my next selection. "Here's somethin' for all you metalheads out there. ‘Back Door Santa’ by Bon Jovi. Rock on!” I switched off my mike for a second. I was about to gag.

***********************************************************************

10:07 p.m. Well, who woulda thought? Rock’n’roll carols were a success! The bluehairs were fast asleep after seven, and everyone else was ready for something to break the monotony. Sure, the station owners were upset about it, but what could they do? Skip church to come and remove me?

The first call after “Back Door Santa” had set off a tidal wave.

“K-Christ! How are ya?”

“Hey, man! This is like, fucking awesome!” Oh great, just the kind of call I was praying for all night – one that could get me thrown off the air. It was Attack of the Teenage Metalheads time.

“I’m your back door Santa, guaranteed to satisfy’??? Now you know why I’m an atheist, kid.” I couldn’t believe how that stupid song could get such wild popularity every Christmas. Why didn’t the band members’ moms break their instruments when they were kids?

“So, what are you doing listening to K-Christ, man? Shouldn’t you be listening to K-Metal?”

“Yeah, but they started getting a little mushy for my tastes, man. Playin’ “White Christmas” by a band like The Skinheads adds a whole new meaning to the song, ya know? I had to change the channel or wind up crying.”

“I know what you mean, man.” What the hell is wrong with America now? I knew every generation says that about the next one, but dammit -= I meant it.

“Tell all your friends, man. I’ll start taking requests no. I used to be at KKOZ. We had everything there, man.”

“Awesome! You got ‘Safety Pin Santa’, man? It’s off the ‘Punk Rock Christmas’ collection. It should complement the Bon Jovi quit nicely, don’tcha think?!”

“Lovely, my man. You got it.”

Christmas in Chicago would never be the same.

“Safety Pin Santa” might have gone too far, I realized, as I stared at the switchboard. The calls were running two-to-one against the tune. It seemed harmless enough. Who ever actually sees Santa anyway? How would they know he’s not into puncture wounds? But that was beside the point- the ones in favor were the kids, lots of them. Of course, not the little ones – they were traumatized. But the teens, the ones who really counted in the ratings, were back. They were mine again.

The problem was, I also was starting to catch some attention I didn’t want. From the mayor, for one. How was I supposed to know he listened to K-Christ every Christmas while hosting a major fundraising dinner? And how did I know his guests would get so damn upset over a song like “Elves in Bondage”?

Of course, I guess I could’ve put myself in the mayor’s shoes. Think about it – you’re opening your house on the most sacred day of the year to a houseful of donors, you set up what you think is gonna be some nice background music on the most Christian station in town, and then suddenly everyone notices that the songs are making thinly veiled references to Santa being quite naughty himself. .

Of course the guests are going to get upset. And of course, the mayor’s gonna want to know who the hell is on the radio, playing those songs in the first place. And then, when he figures out it’s the guy who was responsible for a front-page scandal involving his wife, he’s going to want to exact some revenge.

After all, he had the police department at his disposal. And as he dialed up the chief, he was ready to declare war.

“Travis Koback is back on the air. And I want you to take him off,” he told the chief. “Forever.”

Of course I knew i was crossing the line when I played “Elves in Bondage,” and obliterated it when I played “Santa Wants A Spanking,” but it was such an adrenaline rush that I just couldn’t stop! This was life on the edge, even more so since it wasn’t KKOZ with its high-priced ad campaigns. Here, I was really making people listen. A couple more hours, and it would be time for me to try my ultimate experiment. But for now, I told folks who were complaining that I would back off, and even played “White Christmas” for them. As an extra gesture of goodwill, I dug out the Bing Crosby version, instead of going for The Skinheads’ rendition.

I still couldn’t resist a dig, though.

”This is for all the folks who are dreaming of a white Christmas. What planet are you on, guys? I’ve lived in Chicago all 45 years of my life! When have we ever gone without snow on Christmas in this friggin’ city?”

That sealed it. Even crooks don’t work on Christmas Eve, so for lack of anything better to do, the city’s cops were tuned to that dial. And when their chief put out the call to take me down, they sprang into action. The playlist had truly strayed too far for the flock long ago, but now I’d angered the boys in blue.

It is often said that Christmas is the loneliest time of the year, that if you don’t have family or friends to share it with you really can feel like a loser. Well, I was supposed to abandon my friends Jack Daniels and Johnnie Walker a few years ago, before I went into AA, but this night I knew I’d be facing a long dark time of the soul – and I sought out their company at a liquor store on the way into the station.

I had started to share my troubles with them slowly, with shots around 9 p.m. That wasn’t so bad – I had waited through 9 full hours of musical horrors before I finally succumbed to temptation. The problem was, they kept calling my name and asking me to join them for another glass, to pour another drink and then another and another...

And as I started to play wilder and wilder songs, and started to slur my words on air, i had unexpectedly drawn the attention of another “friend” besides the mayor. I didn’t know it, but Maria the station receptionist had decided it was time to help keep me under control – and, by extension, make sure I didn’t destroy the station.

“So, having a good time, Mr. Koback?”

I spun around so fast in my chair that I almost fell out of my seat. I still managed to throw up inside my mouth. I don’t recommend trying it.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, after somehow managing to swallow.

“You sound like you could use a friend. Or at least a supervisor.” She was leaning against the side of the booth door – wearing a checkered skirt that looked like a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform. Since it was Christmas, I refrained from making a pass. But still – she just radiated with confidence, something I never noticed when I assumed she was a dumb peon the other day.

I was impressed.

“Don’t you have someone you’re leaving really, really lonely right now?” I asked.

“Nope. Christmas kinda sucks for me.”

“Join the club. What’s your story? Dead family?”

She flinched in shock.

“No!”

I realized I better explain, or she’d think I was laughing at the saddest thing imaginable.

“I’ve got dead family. Fifteen siblings. All died on Christmas when i was a kid.”

She was stunned. I guess anyone would be.

“But...I know you have a sister.”

“Come on, Maria. I can call you Maria, right?”

She nodded. “That’s still my name.”

“Well, my sister and I might as well be dead to each other. We don’t talk. She thinks I’m the worst possible influence imaginable for her kids,” I said, taking another deep swig of Johnnie Walker. “I don’t know what gave her that impression. A real bug up her butt. I think it’s her husband, actually.”

“Come on. Surely you can find something to blame yourself for.”

“My whole life is a blame game, sister. I’m 45 with no kids, I’ve been banned from radio, the one thing I love doing, for years, I’m stuck playing holiday tunes for a holiday I don’t even believe in, and I just can’t seem to get a handle on how to stop drinking.” I took another swig. “I’m a real catch, babydoll.”

“You used to be. I heard about you. Nothing says you can’t be again.”

“You hittin’ on me, sugar?”

“Ewww, no!” I think she was serious, not just covering up for truly having an interest in me. You don’t yell “Ewwww” that loudly without meaning it.

“Well, it’s up to you if you wanna change,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah. I can do anything I set my mind to. I went to the meetings for years, so spare me the advice portion of today’s little talk.”

“I can make it happen right now.”

“Yeah, so can I. Watch me.”

If Maria had really wanted to avoid all the trouble that followed, she could have stopped me from what I said next. But looking back now, all these years later, I realize she was secretly getting a thrill from the moment.

It was 12:54 a.m. by then, as I leaned into the mic and really started to stir up some trouble.

“That was the incomparable ‘Christmas in Hollis’ by my absolute favorite holiday artist ever, Run-DMC.”

The needle lifted out of the groove. I hunched forward and stared at it as it slid back into its resting position. I started to talk, actually trying to sound quiet and subtle.

“Folks, fellow Chicagoans, this is your good buddy Travis. I’ve been here almost 13 hours, working very hard to bring some spice, some originality to your Christmas festivities. You’ve allowed me to enter your homes and your hearts, but in turn, you’ve made me suffer a lot of things – Madonna squealing her way through ‘Santa Baby,’ the Ramones’ ‘I Killed Santa Claus Because He Screwed My Girlfriend’....Don’t make me go on listing the atrocities to the Christmas spirit.

“Now ‘Punk Rock Christmas’ is finished, ‘Christmas Rap’ is tapped out, and I’ve even played all the way through ‘Tiny Tim’s Christmas Surprise.’ Folks, I’m OUT. My collection is finished, the station’s vaults have been emptied, and I am done. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel for your Christmas caroling pleasure.

“That why I need you,” I implored, my voice plumbing the depths of false emotion. “I know you all have some special record of carols that’s dear to your heart, that maybe no one else remembers.”

Or cares about.

“But in your special way, I want you to show that you care for my efforts, my spent energy. I want you to stand up for once and show New York City that they don’t have a thing on us! If they can throw a part in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, why can’t we rock on Christmas Eve? Let’s start our own tradition! Come on down to the J.C. Penney Building and we’ll party!”

The switchboard lit up again. I had known in my gut that people were still listening. A metalhead was on the line.

“Hey man, like where IS the JC Penney Building? I’ve never even heard of it!”

Figures, I thought. KKOZ was on top of the Sears Tower, and everyone knew where that was. But not K-Christ. It had to be on top of a building less than half as tall and which no one even knew existed.

“OK folks, it’s really quite simple. You had downtown on Addison Street and turn off onto Hayes Boulevard.”

“How do we know which building it is, man?”

“it says JC Penney on it, butthead. Merry Christmas.”

Click. The studio was silent. Maria was just staring at me like I was crazy for inviting the whole city down. Maybe I was. It was the last quiet moment of my shift, but then, i always hated silence.

********************************************************************************************

Speaking of crazy, I knew there was one other person I had to get involved in this mess. It was pure instinct that led me to make my next move. Hell, I’d been accepting calls for thirteen hours, so why couldn’t I make one?

It was time to call my best buddy “Crazy Larry” Waterston. He’d been my partner for eight years at KKOZ, flying a helicopter over Chicago’s streets and highways to give a verbal picture of the traffic jams each morning. But working together always involved more than that. Everything was ratings, listeners, teens, power.

Almost every morning required another publicity stunt – another low swoop to virtually scrape the paint off some car roofs, or pulling zig-zag, side-to-side maneuvers through the sky. He lived for the excitement, and he had the cojones to actually fly, while I locked myself away – king of a switchboard, master of the radio dial.

So when I got canned after that whole incident with the mayor’s wife (sorry, I still can’t explain it to you. Court orders!!!) Larry lost his gig too. He would’ve quit to show his solidarity with me anyway, ‘cause if he learned one thing in ‘Nam, it was the essence of teamwork. And as my phone call throttled his eardrums and shook him awake in the wee hours of Christmas, he was ready to act on the few principles he had left.

“What?!” he groaned into the receiver. I could hear a crowd in the background. Damn, even on Christmas morning, he had gone to the Off-Track Betting parlor to drink himself to sleep. Well, I told you he was asleep – I didn’t say where.

“This is Travis, man. How’s it going?”

“For God’s sake! Whaddaya think you’re doing, calling me at this hour?”

“What?! You? Asleep? At any hour? Much less before dawn on Christmas morning? I know you’re at the OTB, man. Probably wearing the same Santa suit you’ve been bumming money with the last few years.”

There was a pause on the line. I knew he was staring at his clothes, wondering how I always knew how to guess right. He indeed was in his Santa suit, although it was one decorated in Technicolor hurl. Not his Technicolor, mind you – but that of one of the 500 kids he’d seen that day as they sat on his lap outside Marshall Fields, where he was able to spare parents the hourlong wait for the “real” Santa inside the store and talk to their rugrats for a buck apiece.

“I’m gonna hafta get you back in fighting shape,” I said. “I’ve got a mission for ya.”

“Christ, man.” Larry’s head was rocked by the gelatinous mass within.

“No, K-Christ!”

“K-Christ?” Larry rolled his seat round and managed somehow to stand on his own two feet. “Have ya lost all your principles? Man, you’re in the JC Penney Building!”

“It’s a job, which is more than you can say for yourself. Just listen to me. I’ve got just a LEETLE favor for you.”

Watch out, Larry thought. Think, man.

“What?” I recognized his tone; it was the height of skepticism.

“Steal the KKOZ copter from the top of the Sears Tower.”

The words tumbled out of my mouth, quietly, so that Maria couldn’t hear me as she stepped outside the booth and disappeared into some file cabinets. I also was hoping to win him over by confusing him. No dice.

“Are you crazy?!”

“No, but you are, Larry. Remember how it felt? Crazy Larry! Crazy Larry! Crazy Larry!” I chanted, beating out a rhythm with my hands on the countertop.

Larry sat quietly. I could tell he was thinking, adding it all up. He didn’t have a woman around to piss off if he left on the spur of the moment. In fact, he hadn’t had a woman in his life since the day he was fired and his wife left him after the stunt with the mayor’s wife almost eight years ago.

Now the thought shook him even further awake. It would be great for him to get that old adrenaline rush back, the thrill of flying coursing through his veins. Not only flying, but breaking into the Sears Tower on Christmas Eve, of all nights, and stealing his old copter back. Whoa. Back on the airwaves?

“You betcha,” he cackled.

********************************************************************************************

The second I hung up, I realized Maria had been standing behind me and listening. She just wouldn’t stop pushing my buttons. Couldn’t she see that my entire goal right then was to get plastered and be left alone with the sound of music and the low buzz of the phones?

Instead, she picked that moment to surprise me.

“I think I found you something you’ll like for Christmas.”

“Umm, I really don’t think I should be messing around with you while I’m still having to play the music…”

She rolled her eyes again.

“Take a look behind me, Travis. If that doesn’t make you feel better, then, well.. I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do.”

And just then, I saw what she was talking about. My sister Jenny came walking into the booth. She looked a little sad, but more importantly she looked like she was ready to just see me. Me. No one had come by to visit me at work, home, or anywhere in...well, just so long.

“How’d you…? You know…?” I asked.

Maria waved a folder she had in her hands.

“I checked out your personnel records before I walked in here tonight. You listed your sister as your next of kin on your contract.”

“You’re crafty. But…That’s good.”

“Just shut up and hug each other,” she winked, looking at both of us.

A dance remix of Lou Rawls singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” echoed through the booth. He had just died a few days before, and he sounded like he was singing from the beyond – and right just then, he may as well have been. I had grown up hearing that song without the creepy dance beats over it, and just then it was the perfect song to take me back to the perfect Christmases before that damn van accident ruined everything.

Jenny looked good, though she did have a bit of middle-aged-mom pudge and she had turned into one of those PTA ladies I used to laugh at when i was about twelve. But hey, we all get older, and I wasn’t so easy to look at myself. It was instinct to wanna hug each other, and so I stood up and threw my arms open.

She came towards me, ready to return the hug, but I could tell the moment she flinched and decided just to shake my hand instead. She got a little too close to the bad-breath residue i had from almost yakking a few minutes before, and besides I had the whiskey breath and hadn’t showered yesterday, and my coat, well, it smelled what you could charitably describe as “ripe.”

“That’s OK, Jenny, i understand I’m a bit, well, ripe. Kinda like old Swiss cheese I guess,” i said as i took a quick whiff.

“Um, yeah...Don’t worry about it. It’s just nice to see you, Trav.” She smiled. It was sincere. And it was just what i needed. We both looked over at Maria to show her our thanks for hooking this up. It wasn’t necessary to say anything, she was a smart gal and could tell by looking us in the eyes that this meant something. A lot, actually.

“So, where are the kids?” I asked. She had five of ‘em, like I told ya, and damned if I wasn’t going to see them too.

That made her a little bit nervous, but hey.

“They’re outside, in the SUV. With Jack.”

Oh boy, her husband. We never really got along, ever since I poked fun at the fact he made a living marketing tampons. He didn’t think it was appropriate humor at a Thanksgiving dinner in front of his children. But then again, we all have our opinions.

“At least he’s here, I guess. Even the Cold War ended, I guess it’s our turn.”

“So, call ‘em in?”

”Sure.” We smiled at each other again. I hadn’t really smiled, i mean genuinely smiled, in so long.

“Hey, why not? He’s already got the whole rest of the city coming,” Maria said, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah...I noticed a crowd out there...Didn’t really know why,” said Jenny as she dialed her cell. “Yeah, bring ‘em up....Um, yeah. Kinda ripe.”

Great. I could tell she was describing my condition to Jack. Then again, it would have to be up to me to make a better impression tonight.

But I still didn’t really believe I’d convinced anyone to show up downtown. I was just talking out of my ass, lonely, speculating, wondering if i had any DJ superpowers left.

“So, you say there’s a crowd out there?” I asked Jenny, my disbelief coating every syllable.

She grabbed ahold of the cords that controlled the window blinds, and told me to look outside. Maria came up to the glass with me, and we both had the same reaction.

“Holy crap!”

I looked at her like we had a magic psychic moment between us. She just looked at me like “Dude, you better control this situation.”

The situation had indeed occurred. There were at least 2000 people down below, waiting outside to see what I’d do next. And there were thousands more driving in on the streets, as far as the eye could see. The police were NOT going to be happy with me.

But I’d gone too far to head back now.

********************************************************************************************

1:42 a.m. The streets below were filling up as I looked down from the rooftop of the JC Penney Building. I had held the city’s attention before, but never quite like this. Before, it had been calls on the switchboard, letters after my firing. Supportive letters, mostly. The kids usually saw anything unusual as cool, regardless of the politics behind it. The whole world had been altered for them by Jon Stewart and David Letterman; every experience was filtered through his sarcastic vision.; All of America was a friggin’ TV show to them.

But hell, this would make a heck of a gag on the Dave show, though I was sure this would be even bigger. All the local channels would cover it, then maybe feed it to the networks. Not just a Letterman skit, but a joke on the opening monologue, maybe even a guest spot on there – and with Jay, Craig and Conan too.

“Yeah, baby, you’ve got ‘em. Bigger than ever,” I told myself. But it was time to get back in the studio. God only knows what Jenny’s little rugrats were doing in there. And besides, I still didn’t trust Jack not to sabotage every piece of equipment he could get his hands on.

********************************************************************************************”Hey, hey, hey! Merry Christmas, Chicago! Looks like you’re really giving a damn about your city for once. Screw New York! Here come the headlines!”

And the KKOZ copter. I recognized the sounds of its blades, slicing the air over the horizon. Too long, baby! It had been too long since I’d heard that helicopter getting set to land and touching down on a rooftop above me. And even better, I now knew that Crazy Larry could still come through.

With a floor-shaking thud, Larry had landed. The wind from the propellers always whipped his hair into a frenzy, making him look like a white guy with Don King’s hair, as he made the dash from the copter to my studio. As he pounded on the studio door, I almost choked up. And this time, without any puke. It was just pure emotion I was feeling.

It almost made me forget the fact that Jenny, Jack and their kids were running helter skelter through the station offices, playing the most destructive game of tag I’d ever seen. But what did I care? It wasn’t my workplace past midnight on Christmas, so I let Maria hopelessly attempt to play sheriff.

I had more important things to deal with – like getting Larry into the studio.

“Tada! Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages!” I boomed into my hand-held mic, throwing my hands out and feeling for all the world like a Ringling Bros. ringmaster as everyone froze and stared at me like I’d just gone loco. “We’ve got an extra special treat for you now – the return of Crazy Larry!”

He burst through the door, further stunning Maria and my entire remaining family.

“Why yes, folks! The crowd below was just going wild!” Larry screamed into the mic, back in his element. “I’m going to be here to help direct traffic for all of you as you race through the city to come see us. So come on down!”

Little did we realize, even more of Chicago’s finest boys in blue were about to take Larry up on that offer. KKOZ’s DJ had just regained consciousness and called to report a stolen copter.

********************************************************************************************

2:18 a.m. Back on the rooftop, hop hop hopping – to fight off the brutal cold. Looking down, the crowd just kept getting bigger and bigger, and it was now turning into a lightning rod for every bizarre group of people in the city. There were clusters of teens out there – ones who wouldn’t stay home on even this most allegedly holy of nights. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

There were other groups, too – pro and antiwar protesters pushing up against each other, fighting for room and slogan-shouting attention against civil rights groups and neo-Nazi skinheads, and even whole families bringing their kids to see a spectacle of activity unseen in Chicago since the police busted down the Democratic Convention of 1968.

This could get ugly, I realized. I didn’t expect this to actually HAPPEN. I didn’t really think anyone would come down to the station and expect to get in, especially early Christmas morning. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one surprised by it all – because just then the K-Christ Listeners Board showed up to have their own protest. A protest against me !

But frankly, that’s what thrilled me most of all. If old folks were rousing themselves from sleep and onto the streets with a collective battlecry, I knew I was onto something.

And Crazy Larry was out trying to rev up the escapade, flying over the city and directing the miles of traffic that were forming on the expressways. This was turning into the biggest mess of his career. But he was also helping me create a little diversionary tactic to fend off the police and a takeover of the studio by their own copter patrols.

“This is Crazy Larry Waterston on K-Christ 103! This city’s a madhouse! Who woulda thunk it? I’m flying over Lake Michigan now, and holy cow! Some idio’ts pulled a ‘Risky Business’ move with his car and drove it right into the lake!. It’s sinking, and he’s going down with it. Good Lord! There’s a baby there too! Get some choppers down here, now!”

Larry pulled away into the night sky so the cops wouldn’t be able to catch him too quickly for lying, while I had to act quickly myself to keep people moving towards the JC Penney Building instead of towards the fake accident. I ran back inside to the control booth.

“Kinda rough about the family there, huh? Nothing you can do ‘bout it, though. But we got some incredible door prizes here!”

2:31 a.m. The first wave of squad cars had arrived. I could hear the sirens below as Larry zoomed in just over them for a closeup sound check.

“Whoa! You should see the officers duck! I wouldn’t be too sure of their confidence in a crisis situation, folks. Heh, heh, heh!” Larry cackled. For him, it was almost like doing a treetop run over the Vietnamese jungle again.

Maria and Jenny weren’t being too helpful, though. This wasn’t the time I needed to hear doubting, but they were freaking out – to put it kindly.

“Travis Koback, you’d better leave this station in one piece, or it’s my head that’s rolling on Monday!” I always liked to see a woman get tough, and right now Maria was putting the “grrrr” in aggressive. It was kinda hot, to tell you the truth. But with Jenny, her kids and her tool of a husband there, it was impossible to do anything with the moment.

“Calm down!” was the only thing I could think of blurting out.

“She’s right, Trav. I’ve got kids here to worry about!” Jenny was yelling, and that was the last thing I wanted to hear. Not that I blamed her at that moment. I imagine I would’ve been protective if I had kids in a situation like this. But then, that’s a big hypothetical – because how many people ever find themselves in a situation like this?!

But I did feel bad about her being worried. I grabbed Jenny’s shoulders firmly and looked her right in the eyes.

“We’re going to get through this,” I said.

She started to calm down, and I looked around for her kids. Turns out they were fine little troopers, just sitting in swivel chairs and spinning each other around. They didn’t even know what was going on. All they cared about was seeing who would wind up puking first from all the motion sickness they were giving themselves.

Jenny’s husband Jack, on the other hand, was cowering in a corner in the fetal position. I couldn’t deal with that. I knew the officers would be storming the building the second they recovered from the shock of Crazy Larry’s flyover. So I put the Sex Pistols’ rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful” on the turntable and ran for the elevators.

Well, first I kicked him a little to get him up.

“Come on, man! Grow some stones!”

“Eeyow!” he squealed.

“Dude, I don’t have time for pussyfootin’ around! You’re an electrician, right?”

“Um…yeah?” He sounded REALLY worried.

“Then you’re coming with me!”

“Jenny?!” He squealed again.

She actually crossed her arms and stood her ground while towering over Jack as he lay on the floor.

“He’s right, Jack. Go with him. What could he possibly do that could hurt you?”.

I looked at her funny. “Oh, gee, thanks, sis.”

“Hey, don’t forget who gave you a wedgie anytime you tried to snag the TV remote.”

“Touche,” I replied.

It didn’t take me too long to find a way. Jack did actually get up and followed me as I handed the booth controls over to Maria. We were heading for the elevators.

But we weren’t going for a ride. In fact, we were about to stop the cops from taking one either.

‘We could get arrested for this,” said Jack, as he fidgeted with the wires.

“Like they’re not gonna take us in to the county jail already,” I scoffed.

It didn’t take Jack long to disconnect the elevators. He was one of those guys you see in the movies who actually know what each color of wire means, meaning he could defuse or disconnect anything from a bomb to a car ignition. And the second I saw the cars’ power go out, I cackled.

I could just picture a hundred of our fine city’s overweight donut jockeys going into shock at the realization they might have to break a sweat by climbing the stairwells to the top. Now that was a feeling of control.

I thought I could get used to this. How little I knew it would all (well, mostly) go away before sunrise> But for that short time, I knew the Chicago police force was in for more exercise than a triathlon could provide. I walked back into the sound booth cocky as hell. Everything was in place.

3:18 a.m. I had given up on playing records half an hour ago. I had to focus on my in-person audience of my adoring fans now, not to mention catching up with my sister, her kids, Jack and all the while laying the groundwork to hit on Maria when all this was over. Who has time for music?!

So we threw an on-the-spot studio party for everyone, standing on the JC Penney Building rooftop with a helluva mic in my hand and my sis, nieces and nephews bundled up around me as I led the crowd down below in a live, on-air singalong.

I took my cues from tradition, and began by copying the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert and led the crowd through rockin’ renditions of “I Get By With A Little Help from My Friends” and “Ob La Di, Ob La Da.” Then on top of it all, was “Hey Jude” – there’s nothing like hearing the “Na Na Na Na” chorus sung by 100,000 Chicagoans. It would have brought a tear to my eye, if I believed in tears. But seeing all these groups that usually hated each other together was pretty amazing.

I then leaped into U2 mode, ripping off their ripoff of the Beatles by howling my way through “Where The Streets Have No Name” while the crowd contributed a riveting “OW OH UH” at the chorus. Pure magic. It was time to get to the point. The officers might be halfway up the stairs by now, and the helicopter squad probably already had figured out the Lake Michigan disaster report for the scam that it was.

“OK, folks. You’ve been great so far. I never thought I’d see the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP members locked arm in arm, swaying side-by-side singing ‘Kumbaya,’ and the same for all you war mongering soldiers hugging your peacenik brothers while grunting “OW OH UH.” Even you, the K-Christ board members, singing along to ‘Let It Be.’ You might wanna remember those three words when ya leave here, though. It’ll save you a lot of grief and the money from your ulcer medications.

“But what we’re going to do here may seem silly. I want you to join in, though. When I yell out something, I want you to call it back to me and maybe act it out a little. OK?”

One hundred thousand people screamed out their agreement as one. Whatta city.

“Run!” I yelled, trotting along the edge of the building.

“RUN!” The crowd yelled back in a thundering roar. They ran, too. It was like seeing a cattle stampede. Problem was, they kept running, even after I stopped.

For a moment, I thought about just letting them run. This was incredible. But letting 100,000 people hurtle through ice-covered streets with no clear direction, goal or end point could have resulted in more sheer carnage than running the bulls at Pamplona. Not a good idea, in other words.

“Come back!” I yelled, and they just stopped and stared up at me for a second. I realized I was actually going to have to lead them every step of the way. This was getting scary, but I ran back a few feet the other way along the roof’s edge.

“COME BACK!” the crowd finally replied, and ran back to their original positions.

What morons, I thought to myself in stunned silence. I had just wanted them to come back, not yell the command back to me.

“Your fans are the stupidest people I’ve ever seen!” Maria blurted.

Frankly, at that moment, I agreed with her. But to admit they were stupid was to admit that I was, too. I had to defend their honor.

“Hey, they’re your station’s fans too.”

Good one, Travis. Now I had just taken things all the way down to a 7-year-old, I’m rubber and you’re glue, level of namecalling. But I couldn’t keep it up.

Maria was bundled up in her coat, her face bright red from freezing, and she was still adorable as hell. I liked women who spoke their minds. I wanted to go over and hug her tight. But then my sister had to pile it on too.

“She’s right, you know,” said Jenny.

“Yeah…thanks, sis.” I looked back at her rugrats. They had the biggest grins I’d ever seen, and were jumping up and down waiting to see what my next command was gonna be. Jack was just wheezing for air and had a look on his face like he was pleading for me to stop – meaning he was following me too. I felt justified.

“Look, your kids are following me too…” I said, daring my sister to challenge me.

“They’re all under ten years old, Travis! God!” She had a point. But then, there WAS the matter of Jack, her own husband, following me.

“He’s a sheep, Travis. Like the rest of them,” said Jenny, frustration in every note of her voice.

Jack and I blurted out a reply at the same time. “What are you talking about?” We had never thought on anywhere NEAR the same wavelength before. So now we were stared at each other and did what two guys had to do in that situation: we slapped hands and cackled, “Jinx! Buy me a Coke!”

Jenny just headed for the studio and a break from the madness around her. If I’d really thought about things, I probably would have realized how screwed up things were when I was getting along with Jack better than Jenny, but hey, I had 100,000 people to look out for. And maybe I could cut the guy a break after all. It was Christmas, after all. It may not have meant much to me, but it did seem to be a pretty good time to make peace. We stuck out our arms and pumped fists again while his kids just laughed.

I looked back down at the crowd, and saw that they were staring back up at me too, like I was a god. Just because of the stupid microphone and a radio tower to broadcast what I had to say. I could say anything now, but I decided to have a little more fun.

“Sit!” They dropped in place like boulders. Too good to be believed.

“Stand!” They jumped up at once. I oughta tell them to bark like a dog, I thought.

There wasn’t time for that, though. I could hear the police SWAT team breaking through the rooftop door now.

Larry was also veering back in over the horizon. Maybe he could figure out how to save me.

Another ten seconds or so and the cops would be across the rooftop, next to me, grabbing me and dragging my body down 55 flights of stairs. And this time, I knew they wouldn’t just let me go. Truly speaking your mind and using it to lead 100,000 people in any time or place was too dangerous for them. Free speech was longer free.

I didn’t want them to take me, but I certainly didn’t expect what happened next. As the lead officer threw open the rooftop door, I ordered everyone on the roof to get away from me. This was gonna have to be my standoff, my fight.

“FREEZE!” yelled the lead officer.

“No problem, man! I’m frozen already!” I snapped back.

So it had come to this. I had gotten the whole city riled up again, broke through decades of bad blood with my sister and especially with Jack, and felt like I was The MAN again…All to be told to calm down and go inside, where they wouldn’t just calm me down, but would take me to jail for 7 to 10 years.

The cops would have to come get me if they wanted me. I didn’t budge an inch. But as I shared one last glance at the crowd and then looked at the faces of my sister’s kids, my sister and her husband, with a final stolen glance at Maria, the officers eased ever closer across the ice towards me.

And then, just before they tried to cuff me, Maria jumped out and gave me a hug.

She didn’t even flinch at my ripeness.

“You did good,” she said.

“Whadaya mean? I made a mess of this city.”

“No, you showed 100,000 people that they weren’t alone on Christmas Eve. They might’ve been stuck on their own, or families might’ve been miserable even if they were together, but you gave them a place to go and be part of something bigger.”

“Oh, don’t go all deep on me now.”

“Fine. You did it for me, then. I had nowhere else to go either.”

She pulled back and looked at me then, and I realized I could really dig this girl. Maybe even get to know her better and wind up having rugrats of my own with her someday.

But before I could get all drippy with visions of happily ever after, the craziest, most amazing thing of all happened: the lead officer was just about to split us up and arrest me, but he slipped. And as he slid towards us, he knocked Maria and me clear off the rooftop and out into the night sky.

I could only imagine the shock waves that were running through Crazy Larry’s mind at that moment. I was pretty shocked myself. And Maria, well, she wasn’t exactly talking. More like shrieking, while grabbing me so tight her fingers were practically tearing straight through my coat.

I must say, Larry tried his best to help us. He had seen plenty of dangerous things happen back in his ‘Nam days, and he’d saved plenty of guys from plenty of dangerous situations. But no matter how fast he tried to speed his chopper towards us, in the hopes of us catching onto his landing gear, he just couldn’t get close enough. Too many damn skyscrapers in the way.

Besides, he’d heard me talk plenty the last few years about wishing I could just jump off a roof somewhere and go out with one last blast of publicity. He figured there was no stopping me from doing that, but he really wasn’t thinking straight – I would never take a beautiful woman like Maria down with me.

Even so, Larry opted not to watch. He turned the chopper away from me after offering one last wave goodbye, and flew off into the night, crying. He had never even cried in ‘Nam.

Meanwhile, the entire group of police officers had run up to the edge of the rooftop, looking down at us as if we were just floating gracefully through the Windy City’s night sky.

“Look at ‘em go,” said a young officer in awe – well at least according to the lawsuit transcripts. And I must admit, even as we seemed to be hurtling towards certain death, Maria and I were a rather spectacular sight.

And for a few moments, there did seem to be gusts of wind strong enough to almost hold us in place mid-air or even lifting us back up a little bit at a time. It gave me more of a chance to notice things, that’s for sure.. Like the fact that my sister was on the rooftop also, waving while her husband tried to take one last picture of us.

“Cheese!” he yelled, and I did my best to crack a smile. But I was really smiling at Jenny. She had made me so happy by showing up. And her kids…Well, they were there too, and I had to give ‘em some advice to remember me with.

“Listen to your mom and dad, brush your teeth twice a day…and….don’t be afraid to take chances in life!” I yelled. That last part made Maria speak up. She had finally stopped shrieking and had fallen into stunned silence, but apparently she still had an opinion.

“Take chances?! Are you KIDDING?! That’s how we wound up here!”

Well, that was true. But I felt if I was gonna die early, at least I was going out with a bang.

As the wind tossed us around and made me face the sidewalk below, I decided to just accept my fate. Spinning through the Christmas morning air was magical, in a way. I was finally flying. Now I knew I shoulda taken up Larry’s offers of flight lessons.

But people were so stupid, though. Nowadays they seemed to listen to anything you said, whether in politics or the news or the media. If your face was on a screen or your voice was on the airwaves, you were nothing less than a god.

Ooh, I noticed Channel 4’s cameras now! Should I wave, or just do the “4-is-#1” sign with my fingers like the rest of the city does at the end of each night’s newscast? Wow! I realized we were sure to make the 6 o’clock news now.

But it was kinda sad, though. I could have changed “Seig, heil!” up there and they woulda listened. A Nazi rally in downtown Chicago, and they wouldn’t have even noticed.

“I hate you!” Maria yelled, just to get in one last dig.

And then I said it: the seemingly Craziest Thought Ever, at least coming from an atheist like me. But then they always say there are no atheists in foxholes. And I suppose that applies to when you’re falling 55 stories down onto concrete.

“Let go and let God, sugar,” I replied. And she tucked her head in my chest even tighter.

And that’s when I realized I had thousands of people down there, willing to do whatever I said. And if there were really enough of them, maybe we could all save each other.

“Raise your hands!” I screamed.

The crowd below each shot up one arm, as if I was calling on them to answer a question in the world’s largest third grade classroom. Morons.

“BOTH HANDS!”

And they did it. And we hurtled towards them, the world’s biggest mosh pit. And thanks to a couple of miraculously placed fat people, we suddenly had cushioning in place.

“HALLELUJAH!” I shrieked. Then I closed my eyes and just let it happen.

It’s funny how different things can turn out from what you expect. I expected to slowly lose my sanity while playing those Christmas songs, and at some point either that night or a night soon after to pop a few pills or a shotgun in my mouth and end it all. And I assumed my sister had no interest in ever speaking to me again, that her kids wouldn’t either, and her husband…well, I didn’t care about him speaking to me either.

And that night, that moment as I shrieked to the heavens in what I thought was my last moment of pure, unbridled joy, I thought I was making a last kamikaze dive into a next world I hadn’t believed existed a mere 18 hours before.

And because I believed, God suddenly decided to really show me a sign.

We didn’t die. OF course, you might’ve figured that out by now considering I’m telling you the story, but it was still a surprise to me, Channel 4, 100,000 Chicagoans, the Chicago PD and especially, the mayor. All those people raising their hands caught us, and any resistance from all the people sharing the brunt of it was absorbed by them falling into the fatties.

They still put Maria and me into the hospital for observation. Ya know, to prove I wasn’t crazy and she hadn’t broken any bones. But cooped up next to each other, divided only by a curtain for four days, me and Maria got to know each other pretty well. And she did turn out to be everything I thought of that night as I got to know her: funny, sophisticated, innocent yet sexy all at the same time. And she came to dig me too: enough to marry me, even.

The wedding made plenty of news too, but the totally good kind this time. It was a nice one, but what do you expect when the City of Chicago was paying for it through the settlement I negotiated with them for knocking me and Maria off the roof? We made enough bank off the whole thing and from all the talk-show appearances to never have to work again. It drove the mayor crazy, but then he was forced to resign once it came out he was responsible for the city’s overheated response, and that it was all part of an attempt at revenge.

But work we did. If there was one thing that night taught me – other than the existence of God and miracles – it was that people still loved me out there in Chicago. And that lesson rubbed off on the folks at K-CHRist, who just happened to be looking for a morning man who could make people under 80 listen.

And miracle of miracles: they do.

And now, so do I. .

GET THE COOLEST, EARLIEST, FUNNIEST STOCKING STUFFER OF THE SEASON RIGHT HERE!

2009-11-20T12:22:00.000-08:00

Big Hollywood writer Carl Kozlowski is also the winner of the America's Funniest Reporter contest at the Laugh Factory and is the co-author of the self-help advice book satire "Seize the Day Job: The Humor Book Al-Qaeda Kept You From Reading" with Tim Joyce, a Chicago comic whose views are the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of Kozlowski's - but that clash makes a fun dynamic in their writing.

The book is just $14 and makes a perfect stocking-stuffer for the Christmas season. It's also the perfect "bathroom reading," if you catch their drift, It is not available in stores, but can be ordered from Kozlowski's website, www.americasfunniestreporter.com, and Kozlowski will personally sign all orders.

BUT THIS WEEK ONLY, through Black Friday (Nov. 27), you can check out two hilarious excerpts from the book and see for yourself why it's such a great buy!

SO ORDER TODAY VIA THE BOOK LINK ON THE HOME PAGE OF WWW. AMERICASFUNNIESTREPORTER.COM!!!

EXCERPT ONE - ON TRAVEL ETIQUETTE

GET MY BOOK "SEIZE THE DAY JOB" AT AN UNBELIEVABLY LOW PRICE FOR ONE WEEK ONLY - AND PERSONALLY SIGNED!!!

Big Hollywood writer Carl Kozlowski is also the winner of the America's Funniest Reporter contest at the Laugh Factory and is the co-author of the self-help advice book satire "Seize the Day Job: The Humor Book Al-Qaeda Kept You From Reading" with Tim Joyce, a Chicago comic whose views are the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of Kozlowski's - but that Cclash makes a fun dynamic in their writing. The book is normally just $14 and makes a perfect stocking-stuffer for the Christmas season. It's also the perfect "bathroom reading," if you catch their drift, It is not available in stores, but can be ordered from Kozlowski's website, www.americasfunniestreporter.com, and Kozlowski will personally sign all orders. BUT THIS WEEK ONLY, through Black Friday, ALL copies are just $10 (30 percent off!) and are still custom-signed by Kozlowski.

Here's an EXCERPT from a chapter about modern etiquette:

Living in America means that we have some fundamental freedoms, and one of the biggest is the freedom to travel. We're Americans – so we have the right (or at least the ability) to go anywhere we want on the planet (except Osama bin Laden's hiding place, and Al Qaeda's HQ).

But just because you CAN fly when,how or where you want, doesn't mean you SHOULD. In fact, there's tons of people who should never set foot on a plane or in an airport or, well, just about anywhere in public. And therein lies the need for a few basic rules.

FLIGHT ETIQUETTE– or WANNA GET INSIDE A GIANT METAL TUBE 30,000 FEET ABOVE THE EARTH?

You've gotta love air travel. It's one of the great inventions in human history, and can take us from one end of the planet to another within a matter of hours. Flying used to be a grand concept, something to look forward to, the glamorous way to go anywhere,

But nowadays, that sense of excitement is replaced by fear and dread: of terrorists, plain old crashes, endless waits in airport security, and a general reduction in service that now leaves you paying for your damn peanuts.

Seriously, tack a dollar on to my ticket price and I won't mind, but DON'T tell me you're charging me for a half-ounce pack of unsalted snack treats. I can perhaps think of no better example of just how friggin' cheap big business has become.

Sure, there's the first class section on a plane to allegedly make your life better. But is it really worth double the ticket price just to feel a little more comfy for the 90-minute flight from Milwaukee to Cleveland? It's the only section you can still get served a meal in while flying, but come on: you should be paying them NOT to force airplane food on you, rather than REQUESTING a meal.

Forget about “Snakes on a Plane,” it's space on a plane that's truly terrifying. There's not enough room for me to even stretch my legs, but I have to wear a seatbelt so I don't fly down the aisle if we crash. Right. Seat belts are supposed to keep you from flying out the window of your car. So what the hell's the point of having them on a plane? Do they really think a 300 pound guy like me is going to be thrust 200 feet down the narrow center aisle, slammed through the steel-reinforced cockpit door, crashed through the front windows, and then launched forevermore into the ether?

And don't ever fly into or out of Florida, unless you're willing to spend an extra three days getting on and of f the plane. There's so many old people in wheelchairs, it's like a flying hospital in the sky. And I love how planes are the one form of transportation that needs to tell you 20 ways to survive a crash before you even take off.

At least there's not as many ex-cons and felons as on Greyhound – unless you're on Southwest, which is so cheap, I call it Greyhound in the Sky. If you can't afford to fly Southwest, save your money, buy a gun and kill yourself. At least you won't be spending three days going cross-country with a guy who just got out of the clink for being a child molester.

GOIN' GREYHOUND – or THE SUREST SIGN YOUR LIFE ISN'T GOING SO WELL

Riding a bus across town is scary and embarrassing enough, but riding a cross-country just to save 56 bucks that you're going to spend on the crappy food at rest stops anyway is ridiculous. But hell, even I've ridden Greyhound a few times (including to Vegas – ah, the glamorous life!) so here's some tips to alleviate your trauma:

First, beware of everyone around you. Possibly even the driver. You never expected to see the other riders outside of a carnival midway or a racist '70s cop show. There's two types of people who ride Greyhound: convicts and grandmas. Both are likely to sport tattoos, and sometimes you can't tell the groups apart. Let's just say there's some scary grandmas on Greyhound.

There was a dude once onboard who had tattoos above his eyebrows. Then, just as I was thinking, “He never cares if he gets a job again,” he admits openly and loudly that he just got out of prison. Trust me, there's nothing you can say to a guy like that that can lead to a more productive or healthy situation, so don't say anything.

In addition, almost everyone who rides on Greyhound looks like they've stepped out of a Diane Arbus photo. But hey, this is life on the edge. Who cares if the most normal-looking person on the bus is an Irishman with one eye? The conversation is straight out of a David Lynch movie, but the travelers are genuine Americans. The experience will leave you praying for our nation's future.

A full day of fun for all, to be certain. In any case, pack a camera. You can use the photos in court later when you sue Greyhound, and your grandkids will cherish photos of freaks at the turn of the millennium for decades to come.

With all the human tragedy buses and trains have to offer, not to mention the unique friendships one can forge there, how could you ever consider riding a plane again?

AND ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM A CHAPTER ON BASIC AUTO MAINTENANCE!

BASIC AUTO MAINTENANCE (OR: WHY YOUR MECHANIC MAKES MORE THAN YOU DO)

Have you ever driven your car away from the auto shop and had the uneasy feeling that the entire staff there was laughing like hyenas at you behind your back? That is a common feeling, and there is a simple reason why you think that.

They are.

“But why?” you may ask, “Why are they having a laugh at my expense?” The explanation for that is pretty easy, my friend, and deep down inside you probably already know it. Let us set the time machine back a few years and look at things as they were when you were in high school.

Chances are you thought you were pretty darned smart back in high school. Remember? You were on the debate team, the yearbook staff, you may even have been the valedictorian of your senior class. Your parents were so proud they gave you a car. They helped you take care of it. Then you went to college and really wowed 'em.

Wow.

But before we move on, let's go back to high school. Remember that guy who took all the shop classes? Remember his friends? What was it you called them, Motor Heads? Grease Monkeys? Wrench Jockeys?

Boy did you ever look down on them! Ha Ha Ha! Look at the shop guys! Losers!

Admit it – that's what you thought. But now you're fresh out of school. On your own. With your own car. Your own used car, that is. Funny how life works.

See, Mom and Dad aren't going to pay for the repairs now that you've struck out on your own. So guess who's laughing now? That's right, Smartypants...all those guys you looked down on in high school.

Admit it – when you take that car into the shop you feel as dumb as a brine shrimp. When the man in the coveralls looks at you and gestures back at your disabled transportation, you haven't got the vaguest idea what he is talking about, do you?

Be honest.

If you are the average person you wouldn't know a catalytic converter if there was one floating in your soup. That's why you'll happily pay the “dumbest kid” in your high school class to fix it. See, he would know the catalytic converter if it was floating in your soup.

So who's the dumb kid now, Mr. Philosophy Major?

While you wait in the repair shop for the former dumb kid to tell you what's causing your 11-year-old dorkmobile to spew black smoke and sputter like a Cub Scout at a nude beach, perhaps you might want to check out the walls of the repair shop. Go ahead, look at the sign that lists their labor rate...Look at it!

No, no, you didn't read it wrong, Einstein. It says $75 an hour. Seventy-five dollars!

Even your psychiatrist doesn't charge that. And without your car, you can't even go see your psychiatrist. In fact, it's not unlikely that you will see your psychiatrist in the waiting room of the repair shop as well. See, he doesn't know what a catalytic converter is either.

The hour and a half you wait for the mechanic to return from the bay and tell you what's wrong with your car is the longest ninety minutes you will ever spend. You'll try to distract yourself by reading the three-year-old copies of Sports Illustrated they've thoughtfully left for you. Maybe you'll buy a can of pop. Perhaps you'll treat yourself to a nice gumball. If the repair shop is nice they'll even have free coffee for the patrons. Go head! Have a cup of java on the boys in the bay! At $75 an hour, they can afford it.

Finally, after half a pot of the strongest coffee this side of Istanbul, the mechanic will come out and call your name, If you're smart you won't answer. You'll run for your life.

He's about to start telling you why you have to give him five hundred dollars.

He'll start with the phrase, “Well, we checked the engine on the computer and this is what the problem is...” That's the last thing he'll say that you will understand at all.

Except the five hundred dollar part.

He will ramble on about the alternator fan belt or the fuel injectors or the overhead cams. All the while your eyes will glaze over. You will have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

He will know that you have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. But he'll keep on talking about parts that he is about to replace in your car....and you'll nod. He will take an eternity to get to the only part of the conversation you really care about anyway.

The part about the five hundred dollars.

All along you will both know that you are giving him the money. But he'll make you wait.

Why does he make you wait? Why does he torture you like this?

Because you asked for it, buster. You deserve every second of torture he dishes out. You owe him that five hundred bucks, even if all that's wrong with your car is that it's out of gas.

Why do you owe him? Because you wated all that time in high school and college learning philosophy. And mocking him.

He knew you thought he was dumber than you. He wasn't. All along he was plotting this day of sweet revenge in his grease monkey mind. You will gladly pay restitution to him for your arrogance, restitution in the form of five hundred bucks. Your psychiatrist will pay him the same restitution as well.

It's a good lesson in humility when you think about it... guess that's why “kar” is the first syllable in “karma.”

Thus endeth the lesson, but since you will inevitably face a mechanic who knows you know nothing at all about your car, here's a short list of parts that your car does not have. Hopefully, this will save you embarrassment, if not money.

Your car does not have a :

Defibrillator

Maypole

Blinker Fluid Reservoir

Crisper

Carbuncle

Mine Sweeper

Ionic Transmographer

Semiautomatic transmission

Time Portal

Solar Interferometer

Martin Landau Roof

Starter Pistol

Cheese Filter

Irradiator

Electric Slide

Clown Vent

Serling Rod

Catatonic Converter

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Aorta

Jimmy Hat

Snooze Alarm

Iambic Pentameter

Proton Torpedo Valve

Picnic Gasket

Litter Box

COMEDY WILL MAKE YOU CRAZY or does that mean crazy people make great comedy?

2009-10-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

Funny Hurts

Laughing away life’s aches and pains at Kyle Cease’s Comedy Boot Camp

By Carl Kozlowski

“I’m 19, unemployed and pregnant. My ex-boyfriend’s not happy about the baby — but the guy who got me pregnant was.”

Those words come from the mouth of a 20-year-old woman named Katie Wood. She’s standing before a room of strangers, revealing dark truths about herself — including the fact that up until she learned of her pregnancy, she had been casually using marijuana and cocaine for the past couple years.

She then evokes gasps by admitting she still takes “a few puffs on about five cigarettes a day. If my baby’s craving it, who am I to deny it?”

You might think that Katie is speaking to a support group before a circle of fellow single moms and drug users. Actually, she’s standing, microphone in hand, on the elaborately decorated, beach-themed stage of the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club at Universal CityWalk, learning how to turn her personal pain into big laughs as part of the Kyle Cease Comedy Boot Camp.

Cease is one of comedy’s fastest-rising stars, having beaten out even mega-selling monolith Dane Cook last year to win the “Comedy Central Standup Showdown,” in which fans voted for their favorite comic. He’s parlayed that into becoming a frequent presence on the network — his special, “Weirder. Blacker. Dimpler,” has become the channel’s most-played standup performance and led to the taping of a second one-hour special this week in his hometown of Seattle.

I have also come here, both as a reporter and as a 13-year part-time professional comic, to hone my skills and see what all the hype was about.

In Katie’s case, Cease isn’t trying to exploit her by prodding her to reveal her innermost self. He’s trying to get her (and everyone else he teaches in his intensive five-day, 60-hour camp) to break down their personal walls and reveal who they really are — in a (hopefully) funny way.

The idea is not just that it will it make their own comedy more unique, but will also build a movement in which Cease hopes comedy will become more of a part of American culture again in a way that brings positive change to both individuals and society.

It may sound like pie-in-the-sky ambition. But as Katie finally opens up, her thoughts spill out rapidly and — most importantly — humorously, leading Cease to say Katie could be the next Roseanne if she continues building on this breakthrough. It’s clear that a transformation has occurred, as this young woman who took the stage nervous and fearful just 20 minutes prior runs offstage to a wave of applause from Cease and her classmates.

“When he was asking me why I had walls up, I felt I should tell him and he made me feel really good about it,” Katie says. “Everything I said was true, and to get that response from people was amazing. It gave me the courage to run out and finally tell my mom about my pregnancy … It made me see how powerful standup comedy is as an art — not just about making people laugh, but as living art.”

Thought control

At the ripe old age of 32, Cease is already a 17-year veteran of professional comedy, performing at age 15 in Seattle, where performance venues were all-ages and his parents were supportive enough to drive him to Los Angeles for occasional auditions soon after he told them comedy was the only thing he wanted to do with his life.

That support paid off early. Cease scored a role as Bogey Lowenstein in the 1999 teen hit film “10 Things I Hate About You.” After his short but attention-getting part as the Slow Clapper in 2001’s “Not Another Teen Movie,” he fast became a college audience favorite and upped his appearances to over 200 shows a year. Young, level-headed enough to steer clear of drugs and with a seemingly never-ending supply of fans, Cease looked to be soaring into the stratosphere. But he instead collapsed with a combination of illness and severe stage fright that nearly derailed his promising career.

“I learned about the psychology of all this in 2004, when I got exhausted and was getting dizzy and worrying onstage and worried I’d make myself faint,” Cease recalls. “Then I started learning how we have control of our thoughts, but most people think their thoughts control them. Once I learned that, I took control of my act.”

The key, however, came when Cease began following the principles of self-help kingpin Tony Robbins. While Robbins is often derided as a late-night TV pitchman hawking an endless array of conferences, motivational books and tapes, Cease has become a firm believer in his teachings. He credits them not only with helping him regain his confidence as a performer, but also giving him the insights needed to build healthy relationships that led to his current engagement to fellow comic Jules Kline. It also helped him lose 50 pounds within two months.

“Live as if you’re already a master of what you do, and it will happen,” Cease says.

Sharing the pain

It’s become a cliché that comedians are often the saddest people around, but as veteran actor and comic Thomas Wilson takes the stage, he reads off a litany of zany entertainers who ultimately died way before their time from alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.

“John Belushi, Chris Farley, Sam Kinison …,” Wilson intones solemnly, with many more names following. He achieved his own greatest fame between 1985 and 1990 as the villainous Biff in the “Back to the Future” movies, but has maintained a thriving standup career and gets steady work as a supporting actor in films like “The Informant!” and TV series like “Freaks and Geeks.”

The ability to hang in when others have flamed out is paramount to his lesson to boot campers: don’t let your career and desire for laughs become your entire identity. Stay grounded with good things outside of the treacheries of show business.

“Comedy is my passion, but it’s not my life,” says Wilson. “If you don’t find balance and grounding and self-worth in real family, friends and other interests, this will eat you up.”

That sobering warning is but one topic from just one of the 13 star comics who drop in to give talks and evaluate performances throughout the five days of Cease’s camp. The appearances are well-regulated but nonstop, giving the neophyte performers the chance to ask questions of and rub elbows with some of the biggest names in the business: “Last Comic Standing” champions Alonzo Bodden and Iliza Schlesinger, veteran star comic Louie Anderson, “Hangover” co-star Bryan Callen and “SNL” superstar Jon Lovitz are just a few.

The students hang on every word as they hear Lovitz — a star many grew up watching on “Saturday Night Live” — talk about the struggles of his early days while urging them to find balance in life. They hear Anderson explain how he poured the pain from his bad relationship with his father into a career that earned him millions but left him bereft of true happiness until he was able to forgive his dad.

And most powerfully of all, they hear Ant tell the story of his longtime relationship with his partner, and of the mix of funny and sad moments that seasoned his last year, before dying last November of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

“I’m sharing the pain of my true experiences with you not only to honor him, but also to show that I’m willing to put it all up on the stage, just like I’m asking you to,” says Ant. “If you bring real truth to the stage about who you are, it will be unique and funny and heartfelt and memorable.”

Add in talks by Cease’s agent and manager as well as constant feedback from the Lovitz club’s co-owner Frank Kelley, who spent many years running the top Improv comedy clubs in the country, and the admittedly steep tuition of $599, $799 and $999 for various levels of interaction with the pros make a bit more sense. Still, the program has drawn some sniping on online message boards.

“Everything that anyone does that’s new and different is criticized,” Cease says in response to the naysayers. “They get hated until it really starts proving itself. I want to make things better for comedy; I want to get clubs full again, get a passion for comedy revived that’s been lacking.

“The work you get instantly and near-instantly, like me taking the best students to open shows for me, or Louie offering five minutes opening for him in Vegas to anyone who asks, or Frank Kelley offering spots right here at the club, and the long-term connections you get like meeting and exchanging numbers with 13 headlining comics — that’s priceless. You make way more back than you spent. I taught technique after technique on learning how to end nerves, market yourself — and anyone who chooses to can take action anytime. And we have a big crew filming it all so you get an amazing reel to use at the end.”

After each guest lecture, students indeed get to take direct action. Breaking into rotating groups or intermittently taking the stage for solo spotlight attention, attendees get to work out big chunks of material within the small group or receive one-on-one guidance from each star who visits. Within minutes, each person involved goes from being a face in the crowd of nearly 40 students to a readily identifiable, unique individual.

Among them was Myke Dehu, a 44-year-old Phoenix resident who spent the years from ages 16 to 32 bouncing in and out of jail before deciding to fly straight and narrow, only to develop and survive testicular cancer at the expense of a testicle. “Some of you are looking at me like you’ve seen me somewhere before. I have to admit, I was on one of the first ‘Star Search’-style reality shows. You might have seen me. It was ‘America’s Most Wanted.’”

Then there’s Lukas Seely, a 27-year-old who’s the youngest and only American-born member of a Laotian refugee family that got plunked down into the middle of Montana. “When we first got to Montana, we took a look around and realized there were no Asian people. So we opened a nail salon, a restaurant and a Laundromat.”

The Big Moment

Throughout the camp experience, I had seen people prompted into opening their personal closets and letting out their darkest secrets, confessions often accompanied by tears, before ultimately scoring a triumphant breakthrough to deeper, richer comedy than they had ever thought possible.

As I took the stage, I wondered what psychological Jedi mind trick they were going to use to make me break down and cry like a baby. I had no way to get pregnant and had never abused drugs or been abused, but I do suffer from narcolepsy and had made it my goal to write a killer routine about it that week. But the goal was for it to make people laugh, not cry.

So I grabbed the mic and started running through my new jokes professionally, timed just right, moving the way I planned — all to a deafening silence. It looked like I was about to be crying after all.

“It’s just not working for me,” says Kelley, as I feel a thousand daggers stabbing at my insides, certain that 15 years of performing was going down the drain. But then Kyle comes up with a solution that led to my own personal breakthrough.

“Carl, you tell more one-liners than almost anyone these days, and they’re mostly about your life,” says Cease. “It’s a really ‘50s style, or like vaudeville, one after another. Why don’t you try doing your material way over the top, but filtered through that general style?”

Within moments, I was completely out of control, acting like a ’50s Catskills comic, punctuating every joke with a “Zing!” a “Badabing!” or a “Zowie!” while punching or kicking wildly at the air. Kelley loved it, my classmates cheered it on. And with the addition of Cease backing me up with rim-shot sound effects during the night’s official showcase, I scored the wildest response of my entire career.

I now have a shot that I never had before at better quality stage time, and meetings with agents and managers who came to see the show. But most of all — like the dozens of other students at this and Cease’s prior boot camp in May — I had discovered new possibilities within myself.

“What I’ve learned from camp is that people who come here are not just numbers to make money or help the camp grow,” says Cease. “Each person has a story; even the quiet ones who seem boring have great stories. The second they learn that and that that story is their strength, their life changes. That’s great.”

HOW I GOT VERBALLY BITCH-SLAPPED BY JOHN CLEESE

2009-10-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

His Royal Silliness

John Cleese fish-slaps Pasadena and Glendale with ‘A Final Wave at the World’

By Carl Kozlowski

“Of all the questions I’ve ever been asked, that’s got to be the stupidest!”

I never imagined hearing those words being spat at me in a raging fit of comic apoplexy by John Cleese, the British comedy mastermind who has made a career out of playing flustered upper-crust twits who are constantly enraged by the stupid behavior of everyone in the world around them. I must admit though, I’ve spent much of my life laughing at Cleese venting his frustrations at others onscreen.

Yet there I was last Thursday morning, surreally injected into a moment that could be found in any one of his hundreds of film and TV appearances. At the behest of my esteemed editor, I had just asked Cleese if he still engaged in the occasional bit of Silly Walking — an utterly ridiculous form of strolling that formed the centerpiece of one of his most famous skits with the legendary comic troupe Monty Python. His response made me want to duck for cover as I stammered an apology.

“Wait, I’m having a go at your editor!” Cleese explained, in a half-conciliatory tone. “I lead a very entertaining but not a high-key life seeking attention. When I was younger I used to do eccentric things to amuse myself. But now, no Silly Walks! Why would I do that? Good heavens!”

Cleese was on the phone from a luxury hotel in New York City, where he was staying while promoting “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” the new six-hour Independent Film Channel miniseries about the troupe.

He was speaking with PW in connection with his upcoming Nov. 14 live performance at Glendale’s Alex Theatre of “John Cleese in A Final Wave at the World (or the Alimony Tour, Year One),” in which Cleese will ruminate on his life and work for a 100-minute, two-act stretch before engaging in a question and answer session with the audience. He archly noted that the “utterly shambolic” Q&A seems to be attendees’ favorite portion of the show, despite the fact that he poured months of effort into creating the show’s scripted portion.

Cleese is strikingly candid about his motivations for the tour. “I still need money, especially with having to pay alimony of $1 million a year until I’m 76,” the 69-year-old Cleese explained with much the same sense of joy he had just employed in scolding my editor. “She got $13 million up front and a million a year more until I’m 76. That’s a lot for having no children, but that’s California law, which I consider a bit mad.

“I was actually told to fix the back steps of my home because a burglar could fall and get hurt trying to get in!” Cleese continued, switching the conversation to his bucolic Santa Barbara estate. “The American legal system is a complete failure, except for making money for lawyers. There’s a little bit about that at the start of the show, and believe me, the Norwegians loved it.”

It’s not just the Norwegians who are loving Cleese’s show. While he played 10 cities there, he launched the show in another unlikely corner of the world: New Zealand. Cleese got the idea four years ago, after “a couple of irritating experiences” with Hollywood studios and executives “who didn’t know they didn’t know what to do, telling me how to make changes to scripts.

“If there’s a good idea given by someone, I pounce on it with a snarl,” Cleese says. “I got an Oscar nomination for writing ‘A Fish Called Wanda,’ but 13 people contributed ideas to it. I pinch any ideas that are good. But when the people at Disney told me my script was all wrong after I’d invested three months in it, and I got a call from someone who wanted me to take a stage tour of New Zealand, I thought that’ll be fun since no one will be able to tell me what to do.”

This will be a rare stateside performance for the current show, played only a few times in California back in 2006. He digs deep in his history for material, tracing how he got into comedy; about people he worked with like Marty Feldman, Peter Sellers and the Python guys; his years in the hilarious “Fawlty Towers,” and his richly diverse escapades as writer and actor since then.

“And then of course, there is the divorce to talk about,” he notes with a perfectly icy tone that could put a deep freeze on a desert.

Cleese was torn between the funny and the serious from birth, as the son of an acrobat and an insurance salesman. Similarly, he spent his student years mixing good grades with pranks, such as painting footsteps on a school’s grounds to make it look like a statue had come off its pedestal and gone to the toilet. But he was almost lost to the legal world — he was attending law school at Cambridge when he joined a comic troupe called the Cambridge Footlights Revue.

That decision to join the revue, then meeting fellow future Python Graham Chapman, saved him from a dreary life of briefs and court appearances. The breakthrough came when the 1963 Footlights highlight show became so popular that it toured the world, including stops on Broadway and in Cleese’s now-beloved New Zealand.

Cleese then dove into a career as a humor writer for British TV and radio, gradually forming the friendships that became the unstoppable force known as Monty Python. Earning worldwide stardom through their five-year TV series and a string of classic films that include “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and the controversial Messiah-centric “Life of Brian,” the group earned lasting respect and untold riches before unofficially dissolving after “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” in 1983.

While group members have worked on each other’s solo projects since then, Chapman’s death in 1989 meant the group could never be fully revived. Yet Cleese and the other surviving members re-teamed in a rare collective appearance Oct. 15 on NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” to help promote the miniseries — belying Cleese’s jocular claims earlier in the day we talked that “we all hate each other too much” to work together.

“My favorite silly bit from Python was the fish-slapping dance, and my favorite sketch was the cheese shop,” Cleese recalls. “It was a little bit like the parrot in format, with me and [Michael] Palin. My favorite film within an episode was a spoof of a natural history program, a parody that was really really funny about a pantomime horse. My favorite Python movie was ‘Life of Brian’ but Americans prefer ‘Holy Grail.’”

It’s here that I tell Cleese that he might very well be in part responsible for my eternal damnation, since my hometown’s Catholic bishop warned his followers they would be banned from the Church for watching “Brian,” a wicked satire on the life of Christ. While I was only 8 years old when the controversial film was released, a decade later I almost literally ran for the video store during my first weekend away from home at college to rent “Brian” and see what the fuss was about.

“Very well,” he chuckles. “It’s always amazed me how big church authority finds the most incredible things to meddle with. A movie?! I think spirituality is alive and well, but I just think organized religion has always mashed it up.”

While he has kept a strong presence in the public consciousness through his colorful supporting roles in countless films and TV series (including Emmy-winning guest spots on “Cheers” and “Will and Grace”), Cleese has maintained a lucrative sideline by starring in, producing and co-writing a series of videos designed to teach business principles in a humorous way. Though the videos were only viewable by those lucky enough to work for a corporation that purchased the special video sets, and weren’t mass-marketed for consumption by individual fans, Cleese earned a mint on them.

“Businesses bought them as a business expense, and I did it for 19 years, from 1972 to 1991,” says Cleese. “We started out making films about selling, but we found what everyone wanted was how to interview, make decisions, how to run a meeting, all those kinds of things that happen everywhere — from charities, in the army, and even town halls. We made over 100 of them. I wrote the first 15 and then hired the best British TV writers. I liked the sense of continuity to it, because in show biz you often never see people again, even after you’ve made friends or a sort of family on the set. Here I saw the people all the time for 19 years. Then the directors wanted to sell up and retire.”

For now, Cleese is content to traverse the planet as a comic colossus, touring with the show and prepping two new major co-writing projects — a Broadway musical version of “A Fish Called Wanda” with his daughter, Camilla, and a film he won’t spill the details on with his friend Lisa Hogan that he feels has “an extremely good [outline].”

He also has long settled into Santa Barbara, both because he felt a desire to dissociate from his English upbringing and because he finds the town to be a cultural Mecca attracting the best musicians and authors imaginable amid their journeys between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In coming to the Alex, he’ll no doubt also make a point of visiting Pasadena.

“My two favorite places in LA are Pasadena and Santa Monica, but I haven’t been to all the areas of the city,” says Cleese. “In Pasadena, there are so many beautiful buildings, great shops and great bookshops, plus some wonderful restaurants.”

Yet in typical curmudgeonly fashion, Cleese found a cloud in even that silver lining.

“Apart from the air, Pasadena’s great,” he harrumphs. “The air doesn’t seem to be the cleanest.”

THE MAGIC OF NEVER HAVING ENOUGH SLEEP (aka my adventures with narcolepsy)

2009-10-30T02:19:00.000-07:00

My narcolepsy scares the crap out of me. But you should SEE how it scares everyone else around me!

Narcolepsy is one of those medical conditions that make no damn sense. You can fall asleep anytime, and often do, no matter where you're at, but yet you're always tired. And it's utterly amazing both to the victim and anyone around them just how easy it is to just conk out at any second's notice.

Anyone can fall asleep in church. I”VE fallen asleep while standing in the middle of a crowded museum. I've added my own special sound effects of snoring to countless movies, often provoking more laughter out of the audience around me than the alleged comedies we're watching. On occasion, i've been told I was scaring children too – which is not what you want to happen during a showing of “Toy Story.” However, I drew some admiring comments for the stereo magic I added to a showing of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Let's keep going, shall we? I've fallen asleep at numerous jobs, which hasn't helped my employment history. I'm probably the only person in the history of Hollywood to sleep my way OUT of a job. Then of course I fell asleep at the unemployment office too, and on the bus ride over there. I fall asleep on all buses and trains to anywhere, which both protects me from seeing some of the scary people onboard but more distressingly makes me unaware of countless bad scenarios I really should be conscious for.

Tied in with the heavylidded wonderworld of narcolepsy is the even more bizarre practice of sleepwalking. I don't know what causes sleepwalking for most people, but for me it's the fact that I don't sleep right for nights on end when I WANT to crash, and then fighting to stay awake when I truly DO need to stay up. Eventually I think my brain reaches a sort of neurological traffic jam caused by the mixed signals finally jamming up so tight I decide to sleep and run errands both at the same time. Eventually it gets so bad some nights that I wind up freezing in place while standing and by the grace of God manage to reawaken while still upright, which makes me wonder how I wound up with a magazine in one hand and a glass of OJ in the other while standing two inches in front of my TV screen.

That's one upside of narcolepsy: it keeps life unpredictable and exciting! Each time I fall asleep unexpectedly or wake up suddenly in a new location thanks to the magic of conking out on the bus, it's like i've drugged, kidnapped and abandoned myself! One night last week, I was so tired I kept oversleeping and missing my train station on three different runs of the Gold Line! Woke up two stops too far one way, got off to catch the train coming back to my stop, and then woke up THREE stops too far on that one before finally managing to climb off at the right stop.

So what's the most embarrassing place I've fallen asleep, you ask? It has to be anytime I fall asleep while on the toilet. It's bad enough when my pissed-off roommates have had to pound on the door for hours to gain entry for their own desperate usage needs, but it's a particularly ghastly situation when a security guard has to pound the hell out of a stall door and assumes that i've nodded off after shooting too much heroin. I get to live the life of William S. Burroughs without the expense of actually buying the drugs.

So you might guess I don't drive. You're right – fell asleep at the wheel six years ago and crashed! Thats forced me to learn the bus and train system in LA, which is also scary but that's a WHOLE other essay. Thankfully my job as an entertainment reporter enables me to land tickets to a lot of cool events so my friends don't mind driving me around, but my job as an entertainment reporter means I've also fallen asleep while listening to some of the world's most glamorous and allegedly interesting people. Imagine the shock that coursed through OSCAR-winning actress Hilary Swank's veins when she was prattling on last week about her new movie “Amelia” - a real snoozer by the way, no pun intended – and I nearly fell forward out of my chair by an unexpected snooze attack. In front of a roomful of my journalistic brethren who all gasped in horror, she gamely offered the fact that she knew the Heimlich maneuver in case I was dying on her. If she had offered CPR, I might have faked my way through a worse situation, but I pulled it together and said I'd simply taken the wrong allergy meds.

On Saturday night, I went to see filmmaker Kevin Smith offer an audience Q&A and got a little too comfortable, sprawling my feet up on an empty seat or two in front of me until he saw me and, over the microphone and in front of a thousand people, screamed “Hey you! Sleepy guy! Wake the fuck up!” THAT scared me. I sprung awake and wound up nearly hitting the floor as my legs and arms splayed out in every direction.

You might wonder if i'm ever gonna do something about it. My mom's figured a way to scare me into it now. I just inherited some money from my beloved grandma, and she just told me I need to visit a neurologist and figure out just what the hell is going on before she'll let me see a dime of it. So next week I'm getting looked at and possibly even cured – which means i'll have to look at this scary world head-on for the first time in a long long while.

2000 ICONS AND A FLUFFY WHITE CAT

2009-10-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

2000 Icons and a Fluffy White Cat

By Carl Kozlowski

Try as I might, I'll never be able to block out the image of my father standing with a shovel, digging furiously through the rose garden in front of my grandma's house, hoping to act fast enough to keep us from stopping him. He was a man on a mission on that gloriously sunny yet sad morning in January 2004, as family members bustled in and out of the house that my grandma had shared with her brother and housemate for the past 54 years in the San Diego suburb of Santee, California. Her husband, my mom's father, was killed in the Battle of Normandy in WWII and so she packed up with my mom and her brother to start anew in the promised land of California back in 1950.

Meanwhile, inside, my brothers and I scoured under the house's carpeting for yet another mound of money – wrapped clusters of Benjamins stuffed into long-forgotten corners of the house by these two sibling survivors of the Great Depression, in a seemingly foolish (yet presciently sharp, considering the state of the economy these days) attempt to hide it from both the banks and the tax man. We had come across pile after pile of them so far, yet as tempting as it was to take just one little roll of $20s from its hidden perch in a coffee cup that hadn't been used since 1973, we knew in our hearts that that was still stealing.

And worse, it would have been stealing from our beloved grandma and been compounded by being swiped under the now-omniscient eyes of my deceased, beloved uncle. I've always really believed that the moment someone dies, they take on the God-like power to see everything we're doing. Talk about Catholic guilt.

And yet indeed, it was Catholic guilt that not only kept me from grabbing enough greenbacks to look like I'd just won a game show, but also Catholic guilt that was compelling my father to dig away in the front yard just six years after having quintuple-bypass open-heart surgery. For dad was trying to fulfill his cosmic Catholic duty to bury any religious trinkets he had discovered and couldn't find a new home for.

Strangely, we are told to burn American flags when we try to dispose of them, despite the fact most of us would fight to the death to prevent them from being set alight in any other situation. And just as strangely (likely more so), my dad was now attempting to bury the deitized detritus my uncle had somehow secretly acquired throughout his 84 years on God's green earth, traveling coast to coast by car and across the planet to Japan by a troop transport plane in WWII.

Funny thing was, Uncle John didn't seem particularly religious during his time on earth. I remember he would at best drive us grumpily to church on Sunday mornings during our childhood summer visits and sit grousing throughout the hour-long ordeal we called the Mass. And at worst, he'd just keep popping open beers at home on holy days and then tell us to figure out our own way to church if we really felt the need to celebrate Jesus' Ascension on a Tuesday.

My dad, meanwhile, seemed to be Uncle John's polar opposite. Raised amid the draconian, all-powerful influence of the church in Poland – which also spawned the most powerful Pope in the modern age – he had even joined a seminary himself for six months as a young man before his sister Jola stormed the barricades and helped him face down their father and the priests in charge and let them know he really didn't feel the calling to be a priest. But even though he never completed his priestly studies, he often acted like he did – with crucifixes and iconic statues discreetly placed in nearly every room of our house and a daily required Rosary session each night.

So imagine my dad's shock – and frankly, all our shock – when my dad started cleaning out Uncle John's drawers after his death and found a collection of religious statues, pictures, prayer booklets, and crucifixes that could put Pope Benedict's collection to shame. The Legion of Mary could stock up for eternal battle here, and if he really wanted to, my Dad could have called in the Vatican Exorcist team and given them enough good-luck goodies to spare them even a taste of Satan's presence for the next 20 years.

It just went to show that you can't judge a person's spiritual status – their most private internal feelings - by their outward appearance and sometimes even their personality. Uncle John had earned the right to be a crusty, sometimes angry, sometimes hilariously boisterous old man – earned it on the battle fields he fought on in Japan, while working on the post-atomic-bombing cleaning crews that did their best to minimize the damage wrought by the worst bombs ever used by mankind.

He had a severe hip injury that prevented his ability to work throughout the last 54 years of his life, an injury that was always there even as he managed to hide the pain it caused by gritting his teeth while telling a story or by popping another beer open (sometimes doing both), and most of all by disappearing into his camper each day to block out the world for a few hours of rest while listening to the latest baseball games on the radio. Uncle John chose to keep that camper and live in it nearly all year round, perched out on the driveway or on the street in front of his house – as if always ready to roll, hit the road and move on at a moment's notice. Yet he never would move, except on his solitary drives into the desert “for a few days' rest” or to the sleepy and forgotten C-grade gambling town of Laughlin, Nevada, and then every couple years on a long-ass drive across the country to see us in Arkansas while on the way back to visiting the town he was raised in: Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

A man gets to know himself on trips like those, facing only himself and his God, with only his angels and demons to keep him company along the way. So who were we to wonder and judge his relationship with the Lord, to assume it was distant or nonexistent just because he didn't thrust his views and practice of faith out into the world with as much zest as our father? Even as it was odd and embarrassing to see my father turning the dirt and dropping in Ziploc baggie after Ziploc baggie of religious figurines (they were baggied because even though they were to be buried, they also needed to be pristine), it was also strangely satisfying to know that my Uncle John had taught him a lesson from beyond the grave.

But the clearing out of religious nuggets and discoveries of O.G.-quality money stashes were just part of the larger, deeper process of helping – nay, making – my grandma move out of the home she'd lived in for nearly five and a half decades. It was the house where she and her brother, Uncle John, had raised my mom the best they could after grandma's husband and my mom's father was cut down far far short of his time while heroically fighting in the Battle of Normandy. And in summer after summer of nation-spanning treks from Little Rock, Arkansas, to visit them as a child, that house had taken on a life of its own, embodying its own share of the forces of nature that were my grandma and Uncle John.

And now we were picking it apart, readying it for the next family to come along, a family we didn't know and had never met yet which had come into the picture and were ready to move along, move along my grandma in the hopes of launching their own 50 years of dreams and memories there. It wasn't personal, it just was the way things happen. One owner dies, others take over eventually.

My mother was heartbroken over her decision to move her own mom out of her house and tell her she couldn't handle life on her own. Grandma was the kind of tough yet loving woman who had chosen to never remarry after her husband was killed, even though she was beautiful and might have had dozens of suitors lined up at her door. She had known he was her soulmate, and it was enough to have had him even for a short while.

But perhaps in response to having lost that which was most precious to her, Grandma had turned her home into a de facto museum dedicated to every aspect of her daughter, my mom's,life. In her attic, my folks found dozens if not hundreds of boxes, filled with the graded tests and homework papers of seemingly my mom's entire school career. The garage , meanwhile, was Uncle Johnny's turf – and there my dad found thousands of little things, down to screws and nuts and nails , all meticulously organized into drawers . In the backyard was an ugly pile of scrap metal that Uncle Johnny had insisted for years would be worth hundreds of dollars whenever he got around to selling it – he was just letting it “grow in value” even though we warned him it was just an eyesore. Sure enough, it got cleared out and was worth almost nothing.

But that was the thing I learned, time and time again, in the countless little moments that week – and at the times like this when I look back as well. I learned that there is more than one way of determining value in this world, that what might seem to most is junk might be one particular person's stored treasure. That might be sad or eccentric to an outside eye, but if it doesn't hurt anyone else, we should learn to just let the “treasure” be theirs. While they might see some things that are eyesores as beautiful, so too do they often find beauty in the forgotten things that really SHOULD be seen as beautiful: like the school papers and projects and report cards of a child.

One of the things that most concerned my mom about my grandma's mental state at that time, after six weeks of displaced living away from her grown-up home and back in her childhood's, was that grandma kept mentioning seeing a big white cat – on the front windowsill, meowing at the back door, dashing through the garden out back. My mom never saw the cat herself, and kept wondering if my grandma had fully lost it and and was now seeing things that weren't there. Combining that concern with the fact her mom was over 85 and now living on her own with numerous other bad habits including an unbelievable coffee addiction, which doctors eventually figured out was a staggering 17 cups a day.

But as we packed up the last of the moving trucks to move Grandma back to the Deep South with us, I took one last look around the house for my mom – kind of like checking under the beds to make sure you don't leave anything behind in a hotel room, but also for my own emotional closure.

As I wandered under the trees in grandma's backyard, and through the tomato and grape plants lined up in neat rows, I found that it can be easy to see things that others might not – to see memories drift in and out of sight, of days past planting with my grandma or picking the resulting fruit with my uncle, of running through that yard. But I saw one last thing that I cannot ever forget.

I saw a big, fluffy white cat sitting on the back doorstep, meowing and scratching to come in. It seems my grandma really saw that cat after all. That's not to say she could have handled life on her own on any real level; she was getting frail with age regardless. But it did make me realize more than ever that our reality isn't just what we see, and our fantasies sometimes are more real than we could ever imagine.

That cat, like me, wished it could get back into that house.. And like me, it never would again.

Another One Bites the Dust (another roommate that is)

2009-09-07T15:39:00.001-07:00

I don't think I've ever made a smart choice of roommates.

Of course, the very idea of having a roommate in the first place is one that reeks of desperation to begin with. Sharing a room is something that's FORCED upon you in childhood when your parents pop out too many kids for the space they have. It's bad enought when 2 kids are fighting for space - i can't even IMAGINE the overcrowded-prison conditions suffered by the children of Octomom, Jon & Kate or worst of all, the human breeeding farm run by the Duggars, who just announced the impending arrival of their 19TH spawn!

Really?! Are they living in pre-18th century conditions, when you had to fear the CROPS wouldn't get picked in time ahead of th. e big tornado? Are you having to have 19 kids because 15 of them are gonna get scurvy? My sister has 5 kids under 14 and most people think SHE"S crazy. I just want to have ONE kid so i drive in the carpool lane for the next 18 years.

So here I am as an adult, and you'd think if i hated sharing rooms with my brothers so much, I'd certainly steer clear of living with a STRANGER. But no, not only have i done so, but I've picked some of the worst human beings imaginable.

First i lived wiht Jack, a 55 year old guy who looked and talked like late-era, bloated Dan Aykroyd. he shared a house with his mother, which I should have realized was disquietingly like the film "Psycho" since she supposedly lived in the attic and yet i never actually SAW her.

I, meanwhile, rented a room in his basement that i should have realized was disquietingly like ANOTHER movie, "Alien," - because in a basement, just like in space, no one can har you scream.

And so for the sickening allure of cheap rent - $340 a month to be exact - I moved in and stayed in Jack's house for a year, even after I stumbled across his bizarre porn collection -which he offered to let me keep when i was in actuality hoping he would MOVE it. Who wants to know what gets their creepy old landlord off?

He also let me know that if his dog ever got a little TOO old and weak, he'd be dragging it down just outside my room and shooting it there since, and I quote! - "no one could hear the gun go off in here." Before assuring me, of course, that he'd only commit the hideous act while i was at work and that he wouldn't ask me to help clean up - that is, unless I wanted to work a little off the rent next month.

Let's just say I never prayed so hard for a dog's health in my life. I managed to make it out ahead of the dog, but the friends who helped me move back out said they were surprised i was leaving in the pickup instead of the back an ambulance or a hearse.

And so since then, I've spent a year accidentally living in the gayest neighborhood in Chicago - I was from Arkansas, so how was I to know that Boy's Town wasn't another branch of the famed Catholic boys' orphanage?

I've also lived with a friend named Pedro who was kind of a fundamentalist Christian. He frequently picked random moments to whip out his Bible and rail against homsexuality, even as my GIRLFRIEND was sitting on my LAP. Yet I can't count the number of times I came home early to find him watching a sweaty Russell Crowe or Mel gibson grappling with OTHER sweaty guys in shorts, sandals and skirts in "Gladiator" and "Braveheart." Let's just say that when I moved on, Pedro wound up finding a new male roommate - his workout partner from his favorite gym - Bally's in Boys Town. They've been "roomies" for 7 years now and have a couple of poodles they like to dress in cute outfits. I'm not sure if Pedro's still whipping out his Bible as often.

And here in LA, I've harbored an illegal-alien Brit who wound up deported, and a 26 year old Long Island guy named Bobby who looked and acted like Joey from "Friends," complete with a different girl every weekend. And then of cours, there was the guy named Bill who I knew as a "regular" from the Barnes & Noble I worked at and needed a place to stay for a day, then two days, then a week while awaitng assignment to a new halfway house and who revealed on his 4th night that he'd killed a man once. It was just manslaughter - hell, involuntary even! And he'd done all his time, so don't worry!

Most people would have stopped by then, but I'm a weekly newspaper reporter and a standup comic, so I'm always too broke to be discriminating. But this time I've finally learned my lesson. I walked in my apartment earlier than usual one night six weeks ago to hear a whacking noise that sounded like something David Carradine would be involved with. I kept hearing this the next three nights out of the dark and out of my rooommate Sal's closed room. Sal was another fundamentalist - a friend told me he was "cool" and that was the extent of my reference check -
so I kept telling myself he COULDN"T be a perv - completely ignoring the fact that often the biggest weirdos are the biggest judgers. Jimmy Swaggart or Ted Haggard, anyone?

So finally I had a chance to see what happened on that Saturdy morning, when his door drifted open. I tiptoed into the kitchen through the corner of his room, only to find him...clothed, thankfully, but furiously, rapidly whacking his shaved head with the open palm of his hand!

I snuck back out and it kept going: WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! And on the one hand I thought, what do I DO?! And on the other remembered he didn't ever officially sign onto the lease. I had just turned 38 and decided if I wanted to live to 39, or ever convince a girl to come upstairs to my place again, it was time for him to go and for me to live on my own.

So I hid all hte knives, sharp objects, meat mallets, hammers and other tools in the place and asked him to move. And amazingly, he did. Sure it sucks to be paying another $300 a month until my lease runs out, but as Mastercard commercials like to say, Some things - like privacy and peace of mind - are priceless.

"EXTRACT"ing Laughs Is Easy

2009-09-04T18:08:00.001-07:00

“Extract”-ing laughs is easy
Mike Judge’s new comedy takes a sharp satirical look at middle-class America
By Carl Kozlowski

Joel is just an average guy, a quiet yet well-to-do American living in a small town who happens to own a flavor-extract company. He’d like to sell the plant, retire early and get back to a healthier sex life with his bored, put-upon wife.

But just as he seems prepared to make a deal with food giant General Mills to sell the plant for good, a freak accident occurs inside his plant that lops off one of a long-time employee’s testicles. The other is hanging by a thread, a metaphor that is apt for Joel’s life as it suddenly spirals out of control via a surreal round-robin of relationships that come unhinged and turn his life upside-down in the new comedy film “Extract.”

Written and directed by Mike Judge, who has chronicled the modern everyman’s life in the long-running and brilliant Fox cartoon “King of the Hill” as well as in the short-running yet brilliant 1999 film “Office Space,” “Extract” takes a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued look at middle-class values in Middle America. But once again, Judge proves that he possesses a true love for the common, working-class Joe that translates into comedy that uplifts rather than demeans the lives of its characters.

And what characters they are, with Jason Bateman and Kristin Wiig as the lead couple; the gorgeous Mila Kunis playing Cindy, a con-artist whose ever-shifting false love interests enable her to sleep her way to the top of the bottom of the American ladder of success; Ben Affleck, in a hilarious turn as a mullet-sporting bartender named Dean, who can find a way to make any of his incredibly sleazy schemes sound perfectly moral; and Clifton Collins, Jr. as Step, the slow-witted warehouse worker whose twisted testicular travails drive the plot forward. Add in Dustin Milligan in a star-making performance as an incredibly dense aspiring gigolo named Brad, and you’ve got a cast of fresh faces and actors reinventing their personas, with the resulting effect being that Judge’s best lines aren’t just quotable, but rooted in a strong sense of realism turned askew.

“Extract” marks a welcome return to form for Judge, who spent the decade following “Office Space” immersed in television work and writing-directing the ambitious but highly uneven film satire “Idiocracy” in 2006. After seeing that passion project - in which an average American soldier wakes up 500 years in the future after an experiment goes awry and discovers he’s now the smartest man in the country – trapped on the Fox studio shelf for more than two years before getting literally dumped into a handful of theaters with no ad campaign to support it, Judge has clearly decided to return to the working-class characters that have made him a zillionaire already.

This time, though, Judge has improved his storytelling from the often-sketchy plotting of “Office Space,” making every scene an essential piece in an ever-more-complicated puzzle of riotous shenanigans. The overall effect matches the powerhouse effect of my favorite comedy of 2008, the Coen Brothers’ “Burn After Reading,” due to its whiplash pacing, utterly amoral and unpredictable characters and twisted dialogue.
Usually a film’s release on Labor Day weekend suggests that it’s a forgettable failure, with a merciful death assured amid the fading glow of summer box office expectations. Thankfully, that isn’t the case with “Extract,” which deserves a long life in the theaters before its inevitable union with Judge’s other works as comedy staples to be quoted by generations to come.

HANGIN' WITH MR. CLAYTON

2009-09-04T18:06:00.001-07:00

Summer’s ‘Greatest’ movie?
With “World’s Greatest Dad,” Robin Williams turns in one of his career best
By Carl Kozlowski

Some guys never seem to catch a break in life. Lance Clayton is one of them.

In “World’s Greatest Dad,” the recently-released, extremely dark and sometimes perverse new comedy from writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (we know, we’re just as surprised as you), Clayton is the epitome of the put-upon, browbeaten modern middle-class American man. He’s a high-school poetry teacher with hardly any students, a girlfriend who’s afraid to be seen in public with him, and a son named Kyle (played with an amazing level of scorn by Daryl Sabara) who surely must rank as the foulest, most awful teenager in the history of movies.

Lance does have dreams of greatness, however. In fact, he’s in the middle of sending off his fifth novel for agent consideration, even though he’s never been published before. But ** SPOILER ALERT ** one night, after finding his son dead from a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation that occurred while watching porn on this computer, Lance suddenly feels a unique burst of inspiration: in order to cover up the shame of his son’s actual cause of death, he moves Kyle’s body, re-hangs him in his closet and writes the perfect suicide note so that the policeman who finds him will think that it was just another, normal teenage suicide.

But when the note is leaked to his high school newspaper, Kyle is quickly embraced as a misunderstood saint rather than the most misanthropic monster in the building. And with a newfound discovery of his writing’s potential for power, Lance quickly builds lie upon lie, creating an entire book of Kyle’s faux “journals” and watching his words take flight among all of Kyle’s newfound “fans.” ** END SPOILER **

With “Dad,” which caused a sensation last January at the Sundance Film Festival, Goldthwait accomplishes several remarkable feats. He manages to take a detestable subject, death by autoerotic asphyxiation, and still deal with it in a way that won’t drive people from the theater.

He also pulls out a stunning performance from Williams that easily ranks among the Oscar-winner’s career best. Conveying everything from drudgery to wild-eyed glee with a dollop of perfectly placed tragedy in between, Williams shows that when he wants to apply himself, he’s still one of the most daring and unpredictable actors in the business.

Goldthwait manages not only to completely reinvent his image from its prior heyday as a B-grade, one-note comedic weirdo with a screechy voice and claim a spot as an astute observer of modern American life whose best qualities easily fit in the canon of the character-based classic comedies of the late, great writer-director Hal Ashby.

But most important of all, Goldthwait has created a film comedy that offers plenty of fodder for deeper consideration. For even as Lance Clayton manages to deify his son through the falsely glowing tribute of a suicide note, the movie quietly yet firmly points the finger at each and every audience member as well – asking them if they want to laugh or cry, believe or disbelieve in Kyle’s sudden appearance of saintliness.

While “World’s Greatest Dad” was shot last year in Seattle and debuted in January, its amazingly prescient script addresses a question that all of America should be asking in a summer overshadowed by the deaths of two controversial American icons, Michael Jackson and Teddy Kennedy: Just because someone with a vile or highly questionable past dies, does that suddenly mean we have to make them a saint?
Like any great film, “World’s Greatest Dad” doesn’t have all the answers, but at least it’s asking the right questions.

BARACK OBAMA'S SECRET SPEECH TO AMERICA'S SCHOOLKIDS

2009-09-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

On Sept. 8, President Barack Obama will attempt to address all the nation’s schoolchildren with an unprecedented address delivered live over CSPAN and on the White House website. No doubt, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN will all carry it as well. The speech has drawn controversy because concerned parents have noted that no one has explained what the president intends to say to the children.

Yet here, in an exclusive advance coup of epic proportions, Big Hollywood has received an internal, top-secret copy of that speech. It reads as follows:

Hey kids,

What’s up.

I’m speaking to you, the nation’s children, today because nobody else will listen to me anymore. I also have come to realize that you are my only hope, as those of you in kindergarten through the third grades are the only Americans left lacking in the cognitive skills necessary to see through my lies, deceit and trickery.

And don’t complain about having to watch me, either. I know how much you hate turning on the television at home and seeing me on 24/7 with my friends Brian Williams, Keith Olbermann, and especially Chris Matthews, who kinda freaks me out a bit because he says I send chills up his legs whenever I talk. I’m sure some of you in high school know what it’s like to be weirded out by the creepy guy who likes you a little bit more than you like him back. But we’ll save that for my upcoming mandatory sex-ed, contraceptive fitting and free abortions program next month. Right now, just be glad you’re getting to watch me instead of your chemistry teacher. You’re not gonna have to learn a damn thing from me.

You see, I want to talk to you today about hard work and the need to use it in order to achieve your dreams. It’s important to have dreams – I’ve come to realize that in these last few weeks as I found no one believes a word I say and I started losing sleep, wondering what the hell I’m going to do now. So I’m not sleeping enough, my REM counts are low and some people tell me I’m starting to hallucinate – such as when I still claim that I’m going to be able to pass significant health care legislation before Christmas.

A milder form of my delusion comes in the idea that I’m going to accomplish anything at all, now that my approval rating is the lowest of any first-year president we’ve ever had in this country. Wait, that’s a history lesson, but one I want you to forget. (Pause) Who’s running this teleprompter anyway?!

Moving on, I want to share with each of you the lessons I’ve learned in the past eight months as your president.

First, you really can only fool some of the people some of the time. I have no business being your president, or hell, even a senator. But my craven need for ambition meant that I believed -- with my glowing smile, smooth complexion and adorably big ears --that it didn’t matter that I wanted to be leader of the free world while having less relevant job experience than it takes to manage a Circuit City store. And now, Americans have put down the colorful pictures of me – you like colorful pictures, don’t you?! I do!! Just wait for my national coloring contest to help me get the shiny new posters to fool your mommies and daddies with.

Second, you break it, you buy it. I had no idea that after I bought my way into the presidency, I’d actually be expected to accomplish anything of relevance. I thought everything would be a cakewalk, like when you have two weeks’ notice on the next really big test and took the time to prepare. Well, I didn’t prepare. I just came out of nowhere, got elected in Illinois, then jumped into the US Senate when no one was looking, skipped more than 100 votes while I was senator and then said hey look at me! I wanna be president!” even before I finished one-third of my term. It might be fun to soar like an eagle, but it’s not fun when people learn you’re really a turkey.

And finally, I want to say that you should be careful what you want, because you just might get it. I said I wanted to be president, and thanks to GE and NBC and CBS and ABC and CNN – all those friendly-sounding letter combinations from our alphabet! – I got just what I wanted. But now that I see that there’s actual pressure in the job and people don’t like me anymore, I wish I had just wanted to be a cowboy. Or a fireman.

Instead of just a clown.

Thanks for listening, boys and girls. Now let’s all say the new Pledge of Allegiance!

I pledge Allegiance to Barack Obama
Even more than my daddy and momma
And to the earth on which we stand
And to give our enemies whatever concessions we can
One world
Under Barack
Incompetent
With welfare and health care for all

Very good, boys and girls!
Until the next time I have an insecure need for attention, bye-bye!

DOUBLE DISASTERS PLEASE!!!

2009-08-16T06:09:00.001-07:00

In 1978, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John teamed up to make one of the most popular movie musicals of all time, "Grease." Sure, the story was hokey and the film has remained wildly, perpetually popular due to its ridiculously over-the-top performances and dance numbers, but it still at its core at a rambunctious energy that audiences have enjoyed watching for more than three decades.
Seeing how they achieved such great success with that film, Travolta and Newton-John surely thought another trip to the musical well would produce equally great results and sustain their red-hot career momentum. Little did they know that their respective decisions for Newton-John to star in 1980's "Xanadu" and Travolta in 1983's "Saturday Night Fever" sequel "Staying Alive" would instead prove to nearly kill their careers (OK, in Olivia's case it DID). And leave it to the American Cinematheque to preserve these long-lost cinematic lumps of coal for our modern viewing pleasure, long after the stars wished we would just forget the films ever existed.

Friday night, as part of the Cinematheque's "So Bad They're Brilliant" series (a concept that is itself brilliant!), these two films were paired together to provide three hours of toxically, unintentionally funny entertainment. Film journalists Stephen Rebello and Alonzo Duralde were on hand to kick off the evening with a brief history of both troubled films' productions, particularly noting that the decision to fund the big-budget rollerskating musical "Xanadu" was stunning in light of the utter box-office failure of "Roller Boogie" and "Skatetown USA," two prior films that attempted to exploit the late-'70s craze. But these films spoke for themselves!

From ridiculous plots to embarrassing performances, from atrocious dance numbers to godawful tunes that sound like they could have been written by tone-deaf monkeys rather than professional human composers, "Xanadu" and "Staying Alive" (which had a slightly better plot and much better performances, but songs that were far greater offenses against humanity) offered up campy entertainment at its finest. And the rather large crowd of more than 100 didn't disappoint either, loudly guffawing and shrieking throughout both films at the most hilariously inappropriate moments as well as catcalling the screen and even taking over singing en masse when the sound went out briefly during a romantic musical number in "Xanadu."

Saturday marked the fabulous Miss Diana Ross in her landmark epic of egotism, "Mahogany" and Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward acting like they have zero chemistry in "A New Kind of Love". Sunday brings the musical version of "Lost Horizon" (trust us, it's BAAAAAAAAAAD!) and next Wednesday brings the series of bad films to a thunderous conclusion with two of the Internet Movie Database's 100 worst movies of ALL TIME: Mariah Carey's 2001 epic misfire "Glitter" and the so-bad-you'll-wanna-burn-the-print "American Idol" spinoff "From Justin to Kelly." I'll be there hosting that night, so come on out for some outrageous and unintentional laughs!

MAYBE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I"VE EVER WRITTEN - PLEASE READ

2009-07-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

I'm a reporter for a living and I know for a fact that some of the most incendiary stories I've come across have been flat-out BURIED by editors over the years. Not at my current job thank God (not just saying that!) but at the Chicago Tribune and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in particular, there's been VERY severe abuse of the journalistic process.
I got the following info in an email from a friend I trust. Yes, he's forwarding info from a conservative group. But it spells out the pages in the Obama health-care bill and I urge you if you disagree with this or don't believe it, to check it out for yourself. I promise I will try to find the bill - if they even let us read it!!! Rep. John Conyers feels there's no need to do so, God forbid it takes him two whole days and two lawyers to understand it, he says, but he'll vote for it blindly - and verify this all myself and if i'm wrong i'll loudly and gladly eat crow.

Please take this seriously. This shouldn't be a partisan issue and it's certainly too important to blindly accept such a bill without knowing what's in it.

Obama Health Care Plan DetailsHR 3200 currently under consideration in the House of Representatives
Pg 22 of the HC Bill MANDATES the Govt will audit the books of ALL EMPLOYERS that self insure!!
Pg 30 Sec 123 of HC bill - THERE WILL BE A GOVT COMMITTEE that decides what treatments/benefits you get
Pg 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill - YOUR HEALTHCARE IS RATIONED!!!
Pg 42 of HC Bill - The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your benefits for you. You have no choice!
Pg 50 Section 152 in HC bill - HC will be provided to ALL non US citizens, illegal or otherwise
Pg 58HC Bill – Gov’t will have real-time access to individual’s finances & a National ID Health care card will be issued!
Pg 59 HC Bill lines 21-24 Govt will have direct access to your banks accts for electronic funds transfer.
Pg 65 Sec 164 is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in Unions & community orgs (ACORN).
Pg 72 Lines 8-14 Govt is creating an HC Exchange to bring priv HC plans under Govt control.
Pg 84 Sec 203 HC bill - Govt mandates ALL benefit packages for private Health Care plans in the Exchange
Pg 85 Line 7 HC Bill - Specs for of Benefit Levels for Plans = The Govt will ration your Healthcare!
Pg 91 Lines 4-7 HC Bill - Govt mandates linguistic appropriate services. Example - Translation for illegal aliens.
Pg 95 HC Bill Lines 8-18 The Govt will use groups i.e., ACORN & Americorps to sign up individuals for Govt HC plan
Pg 85 Line 7 HC Bill - Specs of Ben Levels 4 Plans. #AARP members - Your Health Care WILL be rationed
Pg 102 Lines 12-18 HC Bill - Medicaid Eligible Individual will be automat.enrolled in Medicaid. No choice.
Pg 124 lines 24-25 HC No company can sue Govt on price fixing. No “judicial review” against Govt Monopoly.
Pg 127 Lines 1-16 HC Bill - Doctors/ #AMA - The Govt will tell YOU what you can make.
Pg 145 Line 15-17 An Employer MUST auto enroll employees into public opt plan. NO CHOICE
Pg 126 Lines 22-25 Employers MUST pay for HC for part time employees AND their families.
Pg 149 Lines 16-24 ANY Employer w/ payroll 400k & above who does not prov. pub opt. pays 8% tax on all payroll
Pg 150 Lines 9-13 Biz w payroll btw 251k & 400k who doesnt provide public opt pays 2-6% tax on all payroll
Pg 167 Lines 18-23 ANY individual who doesnt have acceptable HC according to Govt will be taxed 2.5% of income.
Pg 170 Lines 1-3 Any NONRESIDENT Alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay).
Pg 195 Officers & employees of HC Admin (GOVT) will have access to ALL Americans financial and personal records.
Pg 203 Line 14-15 HC - “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax” Yes, it says that.
Pg 239 Line 14-24 HC Bill Govt will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors, low income, poor affected.
Pg 241 Line 6-8 HC Bill - Doctors, it does not matter what specialty you have, you’ll all be paid the same.
Pg 253 Line 10-18 Govt sets value of Dr’s time, prof judg, etc. Literally value of humans.
Pg 265 Sec 1131Govt mandates & controls productivity for private HC industries.
Pg 268 Sec 1141 Fed Govt regulates rental & purchase of power driven wheelchairs.
Pg 272 SEC. 1145. Treatment of certain cancer hospitals – Cancer patients - welcome to rationing!
Page 280 Sec 1151 The Govt will penalize hospitals for what Govt deems preventable readmissions. (Incentives for hospital to not treat and release.)
Pg 298 Lines 9-11 Drs, treat a patient during initial admission that results in a readmission-Govt will penalize you.
Pg 317 L 13-20 PROHIBITION on ownership/investment. Govt tells Drs. what/how much they can own.
Pg 317-318 lines 21-25,1-3 PROHIBITION on expansion- Govt is mandating hospitals cannot expand.
pg 321 2-13 Hospitals have opportunity to apply for exception BUT community input required. Can you say ACORN?!!
Pg335 L 16-25 Pg 336-339 - Govt mandates established of outcome based measures. HC the way they want. Rationing.
Pg 341 Lines 3-9 Govt has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans (Part B), HMOs, etc. Forcing people into Govt plan.
Pg 354 Sec 1177 - Govt will RESTRICT enrollment of Special needs people!
Pg 379 Sec 1191 Govt creates more bureaucracy - Telehealth Advisory Committee. HC by phone/Internet?
Pg 425 Lines 4-12 Govt mandates Advance [Death] Care Planning Consult. Think Senior Citizens end of life.
Pg 425 Lines 17-19 Govt will instruct & consult regarding living wills, durable powers of atty. Mandatory!
Pg 425 Lines 22-25, 426 Lines 1-3 Gov’t provides approved list of end of life resources, guiding you in death.
Pg 427 Lines 15-24 Govt mandates program for orders for end of life. The Gov’t has a say in how your life ends.
Pg 429 Lines 1-9 An “adv. care planning consult” will be used frequently as patients health deteriorates.
Pg 429 Lines 10-12 “adv. care consultation” may incl an ORDER for end of life plans. AN ORDER from GOV
Pg 429 Lines 13-25 - The govt will specify which Doctors can write an end of life order.
PG 430 Lines 11-15 The Govt will decide what level of treatment you will have at end of life
(NOTE FROM RJ: The above really does give the government the authority to determine who lives and dies, and when. A government bureaucrat really will be making this decision for you and your loved ones.)
Pg 469 - Community Based Home Medical Services=Non profit orgs. Hello, ACORN Medical Svcs here!!?
Pg 472 Lines 14-17 PAYMENT TO COMMUNITY-BASED ORG. 1 monthly payment to a community-based org. Like ACORN?
Pg 489 Sec 1308 The Govt will cover Marriage & Family therapy. They will insert Government into your marriage.
Pg 494-498 Govt will cover Mental Health Svcs including defining, creating, rationing those svcs
PG 502 Sec 1181 Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research Established. – Hello Big Brother – Literally.
Pg 503 Lines 13-19 Gov’t will build registries and data networks from YOUR electronic med records.
Pg 503 lines 21-25 Gov’t may secure data directly from any depart or agency of the US including your data.
Pg 504 Lines 6-10 The “Center” will collect data both published & unpublished (that means public & your private info)
PG 506 Lines 19-21 The Center will recommend policies that would allow for public access of data.
PG 518 Lines 21-25 The Commission will have input from HC consumer reps – Can you say unions & ACORN?
PG 524 18-22 Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund set up. More taxes for ALL.
PG 621 Lines 20-25 Gov’t will define what Quality means in HC. Since when does Gov’t know about quality?
Pg 622 Lines 2-9 To pay for the Quality Standards, Govt will transfer $$ from to other Govt Trust Funds. More Taxes.
PG 624 “Quality” measures shall be designed to assess outcomes & functional status of patients.
PG 624 “Quality” measures shall be designed to profile you including race, age, gender, place of residence, etc
Pg 628 Sec 1443 Gov’t will give “Multi-Stake Holders” Pre-Rule Making input into Selection of “Quality” Measures.
Pg 630 9-24/631 1-9 Those Multi-stake holder groups incl. Unions & groups like ACORN deciding HC quality.
Pg 632 Lines 14-25 The Gov’t may implement any “Quality measure” of HC Services as they see fit.
PG 633 14-25/ 634 1-9 The Secretary may issue non-endorsed “Quality Measures” for Physician Services & Dialysis Services.
Pg 635 to 653 Physicians Payments Sunshine Provision – Gov’t wants to shine sunlight on Docs but not Govt.
Pg 654-659 Public Reporting on Health Care-Associated Infections – Looks okay.
PG 660-671 Doctors in Residency – Gov’t will tell you where your residency will be, thus where you’ll live.
Pg 676-686 Gov’t will regulate hospitals in EVERY aspect of residency programs, incl. teaching hospitals.
Pg 686-700 Increased Funding to Fight Waste, Fraud, and Abuse. You mean like the Gov’t with an $18 million website?
PGs 701-704 Sec 1619 If your part of HC plan isn’t in Gov’t HC Exchange but you qualify for Fed aid, no payment.
PG 705-709 SEC. 1128 If Secr gets complaints (ACORN) on HC provider or supplier, Gov’t can do background check.
PG 711 Lines 8-14 The Secretary has broad powers to deny HC providers/ suppliers admittance into HC Exchange. Your doctor could be thrown out of business.
Pg 719-720 Sec 1637 ANY Doctor who orders durable med equip or home med services MUST be enrolled in Medicare.
PG 722 Sec 1639 Gov’t MANDATES Doctors must have face to face with patient to certify patient for Home Health Svcs.
PG 724 23-25 PG 725 1-5 The same Gov’t certifications will apply to Medicaid & CHIP (your kids)
PG 724 Lines 16-22 Gov’t reserves rt to apply face to face certification for patient to ANY other HC service.
Pg 735 lines 16-25 For law enforce. proposes the Secretary-HHS will give Atty General access to ALL data.
PG 740-757 Gov’t sets guidelines for subsidizing the uninsured (Thats your tax dollars people)Pg 757-762 Fed gov’t will shift burden of payments to Disproportionate Share Hospitals (DSH) to States. (Taxes)
Pg 763 1-8 No DS/EA hospitals will be paid unless they provide services without regard to national origin
Pg 765 Sec 1711 Gov’t will require Preventative Services including vaccines. (Choice?)
Pg 768 Sec 1713 Gov’t – Nurse Home Visitation Svcs (Hello union paybacks)Pg 769 11-14 Nurse Home Visit Svcs include-economic self-sufficiency, employ adv, school-readiness.
Pg 769 3-5 Nurse Home Visit Services - “increasing birth intervals between pregnancies.” Govt ABORTIONS anyone
Pg 770 SEC 1714 Fed Gov’t mandates eligibility for State Family Planning Services. Abortion & State Sovereign.
Pg 789-797 Gov’t will set, mandate drug prices, controlling which drugs brought to market. Bye innovation.
Pgs 797-800 SEC. 1744 PAYMENTS for graduate medical education. The government will now control Drs’ education.
PG 801 Sec 1751 The Govt will decide which Health care conditions will be paid. Say RATION!
Pg 810 SEC. 1759. Billing Agents, clearinghouses, etc req. to register. Gov’t takes over private payment sys.
Pg 820-824 Sec 1801 Govt will identify individ. ineligible for subsidies. Will access all personal financial information.
Pg 824-829 SEC. 1802. Govt Sets up Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund. Another tax black hole.
PG 829-833 Gov’t will impose a fee on ALL private health ins. plans incl. self insured to pay for Trust Fund!
PG 835 11-13 fees imposed by Gov’t for Trust Fund shall be treated as if they were taxes.
Pg 838-840 Gov’t will design & implement Home Visitation Program for families with young kids & families expect kids.
PG 844-845 This Home Visitation Prog. includes Gov’t coming into your house & telling you how to parent!!!
Pg 859 Gov’t will establish a Public Health Fund at a cost of $88,800,000,000. Yes that’s Billion.
Pg 865 The Gov’t will MANDATE the establishment of a National Health Service Corps.
PG 865 to 876 The NHS Corps is a program where Drs. perform mandatory HC for 2yrs for part loan repayment.
PG 876-892 The govt takes over the education of our Med students and Drs.
PG 898 The Govt will establish a Public Health Workforce Corps to ensure supply of public health prof.
PG 898 The Public health workforce corps shall consist of civilian employees of the U.S. as Secretary deems.
PG 898 The Public health workforce corps shall consist of officers of Regular & Reserve Corps of Service.
PG 900 The Public Health Workforce Corps includes veterinarians.
PG 901 The Public Health Workforce Corps WILL include commissioned Regular & Reserve Officers. HC Draft?
PG 910 The Govt will develop, build & run Public Health Training Centers.
PG 913-914 Govt starts a HC affirmative action program thru guise of diversity scholarships.
PG 915 SEC. 2251. Govt MANDDATES Cultural & linguistic competency training for HC professionals.
Pg 932 The Govt will estab Preventative & Wellness Trust fund- initial cost of $30,800,000,000-Billion.
PG 935 21-22 Govt will identify specific goals & objectives for prevention & wellness activities. Control YOU!!
PG 936 Govt will develop “Healthy People & National Public Health Perform. Standards” Tell me what to eat?
PG 942 Lines 22-25 More Gov’t? Offices of Surgeon General -Public Health Svc, Minority Health, Women’s Health
PG 950- 980 BIG GOV’T core pub health infrastructure including workforce capacity, lab systems; health info sys, etc
PG 993 Gov’t will establish school based health clinics. Your kids won’t have a chance.
PG 994 School Based Health Clinic will be integrated into the school environment. Say GOVT Brainwash!
PG 1001 The Govt will establish a National Medical Device Registry. Will you be tracked?

I FINALLY HAD MY OWN CHEESY '80S MOVIE MOMENT

2009-07-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

BY CARL KOZLOWSKI

I’ve always loved ‘80s high school movies, and I’ll even admit that I was hooked on the original “Beverly Hills, 90210.” They all depicted the world’s coolest proms, the most exciting football games, and offered up characters like Brandon Walsh or Ferris Bueller who were able to get away with anything they wanted, and most of all, they offered up dramatic moments of utterly cheesy uplift - like when the school geek finally gets his moment to shine as the rest of the class gives him a slow-building and stirring round of applause.

Those movies made my teenage existence in the small city of Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was a hardworking but mostly quiet kid, feel like there was hope out there somewhere to have my own moment of glory someday. But I never imagined that that moment would come this year, right back where I came from, in Little Rock at my high school’s 20–year reunion.

I went to Little Rock Catholic High for Boys, which was about two miles away from the Mt. Saint Mary’s Academy for girls. You can only imagine the sheer social delight to be had from the fact that we were in gender-segregated schools while raging with hormones. If I wanted to have the same cool social life as Ferris Bueller or Brandon, I’d have to make the trek up to the Mount after a grueling eight hours of girl-free schools - and even then it was hopeless because I didn’t get to drive ‘til my senior year and was trapped having my Mom behind the wheel for a full ¾ of my high school experience.
Not exactly the kind of thing that lends itself to living a life as cool as the ones I watched in the movies. Add in the fact that my year-older sister Krys went to the Mount, and imagine my agony knowing that the only girl I’d be picking up each day from that school was related to me. Krys tried to be good sibling, going out of her way to help my nearly-nonexistent social life, but she went about it in entirely the wrong way: by pimping me as a prom or homecoming dance date for the strangest foreign-exchange student in her class each year.

There’s really no way to describe the joy I felt twice a year when told that I would be taking yet another girl who barely spoke English - or whose culture didn’t even allow them to dance anyway - to the big dance. I relished sitting on the sidelines, unable to communicate with my date as everyone else cut a rug and wondered why I didn’t shake my tailfeathers along with them, assuming that I must not know how to even hold a conversation. And even better, I got to pay for dinner and throw down $50 on a tux rental!

Perhaps now you’ll understand why, by the time graduation rolled around, I and my two best friends – the one open atheist, and the one all-but-openly gay guy – vowed to leave the grounds and never return. I treated college like a federal witness-protection program and completely reinvented myself into my present adult status: as a stand-up comic and entertainment reporter in Hollywood getting to do whatever I want just like Ferris Bueller, with a big, brash personality and unfortunately a big fat gut to go along with it. But I kept my personal promise to live my life the way I wanted it and make up for the 18 years in which I felt bottled up by going through Catholic schools in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

So I skipped my 10-year reunion. I was in Chicago at the time, still skinny as in high school and working at my dream newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. I was head writer of a local TV comedy show and was the show’s host for “Weekend Update”-style fake news, complete with a memorable night in which I got to “co-anchor” with future “Today Show” substitute host Lester Holt! Why would I possibly want to go back?

Well, the subsequent decade taught me a little bit of humility. I developed a sleep disorder that cost me jobs, forced me to stop driving for years and screwed my metabolism up to the point where I topped (or should I say popped?) scales at over 300 pounds. I had to back out of an engagement when my fiancé developed severe bipolar disorder and her doctor said the emotional rollercoaster of relationships often prove impossible for manic-depressive people to deal with healthily.

And I had a profound reconciliation with my dad, who had often been repressive in my childhood but was now not only my friend but an artist himself, creating a successful second career as a painter in his retirement. I’d been coming home happily for the past seven years, so when the word came this time about the 20-year reunion, I realized it was time to confront and reclaim my past.

One big part of that decision came thanks to Facebook, where a few of the guys I thought never gave me a moment of thought in their lives tracked me down, saw my avatar picture in which I’m hanging with Jay Leno, and started asking about my standup career. Then some of the guys started buying a humor book I wrote. And finally, my senior class president – a real-life Ferris Bueller who had become a major-city TV anchor while maintaining his staggeringly funny sense of humor – wrote me a note two weeks before the two-night reunion in which he ordered me to come, assuring me that high school was “o.v.e.r.” and that rather than being a loser for not having a wife and kids, I’d be seen as a hero still living the single-guy dream.

So I went, plunking down a fat $500 for a plane ticket with the awareness that that same president had ordered me to “entertain the troops” and perform standup at the big party. All I can say is, if you’ve ever wondered if it’s worth going back for a reunion, you’ve simply GOT to do it.

It was fascinating to see which people looked older and which ones stayed the same. Most of the guys had either gained weight or lost hair, providing a much-appreciated shot of self-esteem as I realized I wasn’t the only person who’d grown up to resemble the Michelin Tire Man. On the other hand, the women had either stayed the same or gotten even better looking with age. The only problem was, we had a live ‘80s band cranking out the hits of our youth, but I couldn’t tell who was married and who was single and wound up talking on the sidelines for fear that I’d wind up getting hit by the husband of someone I tried to hit on.

Our class president was a rising-star TV anchor, and another guy is in the Secret Service protecting former President George W. Bush. Another is a cop in New Orleans who slogged through the pandemonium of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, while yet another guy is now the doctor keeping my parents alive. But whether they were computer techs, concrete-truck repairmen or grocery-store managers, it was cool to see that all the old social barriers – the walls that separated freaks from geeks, and jocks from nerds – were gone.

We were just people now, happy to see how each other survived and changed and moved forward in life – while also sad to think back on the four classmates who had died over the intervening years. And all those people – nearly 200 guys and women whom I had hidden my comedic interests from in high school, secretly wishing I could “show them” someday – wound up being the coolest audience I’ve had in 12 years as a professional comic.

As the night’s official party wound to a close, the band having said its goodbyes and venue officials ordering us to clear out, my class treasurer jumped onstage, waving my humor book and announcing that it’s a rare thing for a class to have an actual comedian in their ranks. And just as I gave him the “cut” sign and thought I’d better not risk a failure onstage, one classmate whispered from behind me that if I didn’t take that moment, I’d regret it the rest of my life. With that, women I thought were far beyond my wildest dreams started whooping for me and both classes burst into chanting my name: “Carl! Carl! Carl!”

The only thing missing was the slow-building applause that greeted the misfit title character in “Lucas” or helped the nerds finally feel welcome in “Revenge of the Nerds.” But as everyone laughed and clapped, I felt the weight of 20 years of bitterness, fear and bad memories fall off my shoulders like an unwanted coat. I’d made peace with my parents years before, but now I felt loved and accepted by everyone else I’d felt ignored by so long before.

I’m not gonna lie and say the night remained as noble as that moment. I wound up at an after-party in which I finally danced off all the horrible memories of those lame dances with foreign exchange students, busting moves with one of the prettiest girls at the Mount and posing for pictures that will probably prevent me from ever seeking office.

But in the end, my $500 planet ticket wasn’t just a chance to fly home. It became a chance to fly, period, in my life, knowing finally that I can go home again – anytime I want. And that you can take any bad or tough situation in your life and reclaim and reinvent it. That’s a good lesson to have even if you’re not heading for a reunion.

I'M MUCH TOO YOUNG TO BE FEELIN' THIS DAMN OLD (or Part One of a sick-funny look at one of America's most notorious hospitals from the inside)

2009-05-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

There are certain things you wouldn't mind hearing when you go to a doctor: "Your AIDS test was negative," "No, you're not pregnant," or "Just head on home. Today's Patient Appreciation Day, and your new heart is on us." Conversely, there are things you don't want to hear: "You need to head down to the county hospital's emergency room. Now."

Just my luck, on Sept. 13 I was told just that - along with, "We're calling you a cab to take you to the emergency room. Either take it for free now or pay for your own ambulance a few hours later."

Worry, cry, scream - I apparently didn't even have time for that. I had come in because my calves were swollen and discolored and had a wound that hadn't quite healed despite being visible for a month. I was utterly terrified, and I was caught between the cracks since my insurance eligibility at PW wasn’t until Nov. 1st. As the cab's horn honked outside, I leaped up, grabbed my backpack and bolted out of the office like I was starring in "The Fugitive."

Now I was living a movie cliché: I was literally racing against time to save my life, for the doctor had also told me if I had waited five more days to see her on my scheduled appointment, .I would have wound up in the Intensive Care Unit or dead.

Even more terrifying, at that moment, was the fact that I was hurtling towards LA County/USC General Hospital – the iconic building that served as the image and inspiration for ABC’s perennial daytime soap opera, and therefore the most famous hospital in America. Anytime someone mentions they're "going to County", people assume they're either headed to prison or to a medical experience that would make them wish they were behind bars instead.

“Oh my God! Why are you there?!” was the number one reaction I received even after clarifying I was headed to be healed rather than arrested.

Well, there’s any number of reasons a person can wind up there: a) they’re uninsured, b) they’re broke, or c) they’re batshit crazy. In my case I was neither broke nor crazy, but had slipped through the cracks as my new employer was about to rant me insurance in just two more weeks. My body always has the worst timing.

I’ve never been too scared of hospitals. I grew up living at one, since my dad was a VA doctor who was a rehab specialist, picking and prescribing which prosthetic arms and legs our veteran patient needed after they’d had their limbs blown off in battle.

We lived for our first two years of his job in a rented mansion-style house on a street of homes set aside for doctors new to the area. We kids adapted easily, only wondering on occasion why we had to cover our eyes in the morning as a mental patient peed on our lawn, or wondering why none of our friends’ parents let THEM come visit us, instead insisting we come play in their bland suburban neighborhoods.

Sure, you could say it was strange to ride my bike to my dad’s office after school and hang out with old soldiers missing parts of their mind or body. But I was friends with them, especially because of the hospital chapel’s Sunday Mass, which is what my dad dragged us to because he was too lazy to drive down the mountain from the hospital into town. I was glad we were at the hospital’s Mass, because where else could I meet a man like James Keever, who was in charge of the Scripture readings but would forget to wear a belt and his pants would fall to the floor in the middle of reading Jesus parables. He’d freeze as if wondering whether the throng before him noticed – of course we had! – and then kept reading, finished, hiked his pants back up from his ankles and sat down as if nothing had happened. Or Russell Houda, a polite little man in a suit who constantly drove my dad nuts by insisting he had to let me watch “The Beverly Hillbillies,” which my dad had declared off limits to me due to Elly Mae’s ample charms.

But my adult visit to LA County Hospital was a whole other world.

During my 14-hour wait to enter the County ER, I encountered a tattooed, mohawked Nine Inch Nails fan who was awaiting emergency dental surgery to remove a stray incisor which had somehow grown in upside down, rendered the left side of his face immobile by pinching the nerves within, and was now about a half-inch away from affecting the blood vessels leading to his eyeball. At least he was nonchalant about it, noting, "I'm used to pain."

Among the dozens of oddball examples of humanity I experienced there was an ancient Asian man who looked like he was about to drop dead in his plastic chair before anyone noticed him. And an angry African-American man who said he'd been waiting 10 hours just to pick up a refill on his blood pressure medication and now felt his heart beating so hard he thought it would burst right out of his chest.

Worst of all was the young Hispanic guy in a wheelchair, who had what appeared to be a gaping split in his skin along the top of his foot. When I asked him what happened, he replied, "Lawnmower accident." As I nearly retched, he further explained that he had originally cut the foot clean off, but the doctors at LAC/USC had miraculously reattached it and tried to make it work over six months of inpatient therapy. He went home, and even without having stood on it, had managed to reopen one of the major fault lines in his flesh.

The cost of his bill was $1 million and growing by the day. But all he could do was laugh in frustrated amazement: "Hey, at least I don't have to pay for it! Thank God for ATP!"

I didn't know it yet, but ATP stands for "Ability To Pay," and it is the program that makes care for all possible, yet puts the county health system's financial stability at risk.
The idea is that, after returning home, patients are asked to set an appointment with a billing department worker in which they are to bring in proof of income and bank statement for the month in which they were hospitalized. The ultimate bill is rendered as a percentage of the funds they had available in that particular month.

For instance, my official bill for a five-day, four-night stay was an "all-inclusive" $20,828. After looking at my less than Trump-worthy financial information, my ATP payment was declared around $1600.

And if my description of my stay as a "five-day, four-night, all-inclusive" experience makes LAC/USC sound suspiciously like a resort, consider the following. While I had a severe leg infection, it did not give me pain and wasn't contagious, so I was free to walk around the hospital at will anytime I wasn't strapped to an IV or sleeping. The food was actually pretty good, and the smart guys in my wing quickly caught on to the fact they could stash extra sandwiches, snacks and sodas to use anytime they wanted.

The hospital really was like a combination of resort and "Hogan's Heroes"-style prison - lights out at 11, TV off from 1030 p.m. to 6 a.m. If you're gone from the wing more than four hours, you start over in the hell of the ER waiting room. The patio for smoking was like a prison yard for a downtown max penitentiary, on a high floor and all fenced in, but the shower was described by Paul, the guy in the next bed over, as a "monsoon" and its warm mist was indeed the best I'd ever experienced. And I don't know whether I was just easily impressed after expecting less than nothing, but the ice water was pretty damn good too.

For the four of us men who shared a big room in the orthopedics ward, it indeed seemed a shelter from the storm. Paul was a Caucasian, 50-year-old gay personal chef who had months of therapy awaiting him, since the hospital had to replace a shattered shoulder with one made of plastic. He spoke like the wizened veteran of the place, able to define another patient within seconds.

"I can always tell the ones who just did time," he'd chuckle. "It's an ultra-masculine thing going on in their air."

The other two guys were Latinos, one who had simply broken his leg in a normal fashion, the other one recovering from the agonizing removal of a leg brace that had been held in place via a seemingly endless series of screws that left his leg looking like pummeled ground beef while gasping, seemingly 24 hours a day: “Oh, Dios mio! Aye Maria!”

And then there was me: the guy with a mysterious infection the doctors never quite defined, but who was able to wander with aplomb except for the four times a day IV drips sent medicine to save my legs.
TO BE CONTINUED

BEHIND THE BOOKS AT BARNES & NOBLE (Yes, we hate you all. All of you customers asking where the Da Vinci Code is - or the bathroom...argh)

2009-05-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

I started reading books way beyond my age level when I was 4 years old, so I’ve had a nearly lifelong love-hate relationship with them. My mom says I started reading sixth-grade science books because I watched “Sesame Street” three times a day and picked up all the phonics in them.

Other kids thought I was weird, I wound up getting glasses at an insanely early age because I strained them from sneaking books under my covers with a flashlight, and I eventually got more hooked on writing my own stories than reading those of others. So that’s why it was kind of ironic that when I was desperate five years ago and really needed a job, I got hired by a giant Barnes & Noble store.

You might think that if you’re gonna work retail, a bookstore would be a pretty cool dignified place to do it. After all, you’re not constantly having to tell people they’re not fat in clothing stores, or insisting they Supersize their fries. Instead, you’re opening their eyes and minds to great literature – or so you’d think.

Probably because I’m 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds and hard to miss in a lineup, my managers forced me to work as the Information Guy for the store. At my branch, the manager took it way too literally and had me really wear signs around my neck saying shit like “Information,” or “How Can I Help You?” What I really should have worn was a sign saying “Down the aisle and to the left,” because that’s where the bathrooms were and because we were the only place in Old Pasadena’s shopping district dumb enough to have public bathrooms, I had to repeat that phrase about 500 times a day. I got so used to doing it that the moment someone made that “uncomfortable” or “embarrassed” face people always use when seeking a bathroom, I’d just save them the hot air from their mouths, point and say “Down and to the left.”

What was more annoying is when these same people returned from the bathroom with a horrified look on their faces, asking if there was going to be any “janitorial services rendered” on the premises anytime soon. Look, you want 5000 people to be able to use the bathroom, you’re gonna get a mess – and my job title ain’t janitor. I fantasized about losing it and spewing those very same words to someone, but never got the chance. And though I led an employee-wide push to seal off the toilets from the public, the bosses refused – until they put up the Berlin Wall of Bathrooms two weeks after I left.

Instead, I came to hate people so much through that job that I played other tricks on them. Like if I knew I was about to leave for the night or had a break coming up, and there was no way anyone could have a chance to complain about me, I’d tell them the bathrooms were in the back part of the store and up the staircase. We had a single-story store, but that didn’t stop about 18 people a day from looking for the spiral steps to Bathroomland.
I also liked to wear other employee’s name tags for an hour or two per shift and give the surliest customer service imaginable, so that they’d get yelled at or have a report written up and not even know what hit them.

My favorite questions came from people who clearly didn’t know what they were looking for: people looking for “The Adventures of Don Quixote” came up as a frequent request from people who just couldn’t’ find it – because they were looking in the biography section. Yeah, for a story about an old man who fights windmills while riding a horse around the country – find his true-life autobiography. Parents who didn’t know they just bought the sluttiest teen fiction imaginable for their daughters were also fun to serve. But my favorite was an old lady in her 80s who came in on multiple occasions seeking my advice on which book about S&M or bondage was the best one to buy. Come on! I thought grandmas are supposed to spank you, not GET spanked!! My co-workers would just stand and laugh, saying that I was the only info guy – unless a hot girl walked in with a question, of course.

In fact, it was the fact that I wanted to kill customers – fantasizing about the funniest ways to perform a massacre – that drove me to quit the store. But before I got to that point, I encountered the truly crazy people in the store – whom we called “The Regulars” yet were anything BUT regular people. It was as if our store had been taken over by Skid Row as an additional day shelter for the homeless. Some of the grossest people in LA – make that ANYwhere – thought nothing of blocking our customers by lying in the aisles and conducting their personal hygiene rituals – which were time-consuming yet, judging by the results, extremely limited at BEST – in our bathrooms. One guy had the gracious timing to have a heroin overdose on the toilet during a Christmas season rush hour, yelling out as he was pushed out on a stretcher that he had hepatitis, causing everyone in sight to run for the doors.

You might ask, Where was security in this store? Well, we didn’t have even hidden security cameras like EVRY OTHER STORE ON THE PLANET because our managers said customer surveys showed they made people “uncomfortable.” Meanwhile, we lost 8 percent of our inventory each year – 1000s of books! – to theft and then were asked why it was happening.

My final straw with the world of retail books came when one of the regulars talked me into letting him stay on my couch because he was between homes. He seemed decent and cleancut, just a regular guy with some hard luck. He didn’t fully explain that he was between HALFWAY homes for his coke addiction, and waited until the fourth night on my couch he decided to tell me the story of how he did some time in prison for the time he accidentally killed a man. I realized this was his my way of telling me I’d better not EVER ask him to leave. But thankfully, I convinced someone to MOVE IN three days later and Mr. Regular was on his way out of my apartment.

On then rare occasions I set foot in that Barnes & Noble again, my former co-workers ask why I don’t drop by and visit more often. To which I say, do you think to o many Guantanamo Bay prisoners are gonna visit again for the sun and the ocean view? It’s against human nature to go anywhere NEAR where you’ve been traumatized.

IN THE BLOOD - the story a reformed Blood gangbanger caught between the cops and the streets

2009-05-10T14:42:00.001-07:00

There are some stories you do because you have to, not because of an assignment but a burning need to help someone get their story out to the world. This was one of those stories. I'm likely going to be doing more about and with Shaka in the near future. Stay tuned. And see the great movie "Crips & Bloods: Made in America," when it's out on DVD (soon).

In the blood
Staying straight in a crooked world

Shaka walks up to the security guard’s table at Fremont High School in South Los Angeles and signs in as a visitor. He then flows smoothly through the halls of his alma mater and enters a small room that serves as a campus police center, complete with three LAPD officers — one white, one Latino, one African-American — who spend each day trying to ensure that the school’s tinderbox mix of races and ethnicities doesn’t erupt into gang violence.
On the wall behind the Latino officer is a crisply hung poster of the 1993 cult classic Western, “Tombstone,” with several badass actors sporting shotguns and pistols under the tagline “Justice Is Coming.” And with the arrival of Shaka, a tall and trim 29-year-old African American who’s also a reformed member of the Family Swans Bloods, an affiliate group of the notorious Bloods gang, that statement has just been bolstered. He comes in daily to help the cops reach the kids who are seemingly unreachable, and to talk them into one last shot at avoiding the court system and prison by doing the right thing in a world where they’re surrounded by wrong.
Shaka is the man’s street name — he prefers not to divulge his legal name, due partly to the street cred he’s established with his adopted moniker, and partly out of concern that harm could come if people know too much about his “real” self. Elaborately decorated Ed Hardy jeans and a navy-blue camouflage-style dress shirt mask an array of tattoos not quite faded into his complexion, the contrast revealing the dual worlds he’s trapped between — his gangbanging past, which earned him three trips to the pen for slinging dope before he went straight five years ago, and his present as a voluntary gang interventionist seeking to atone for his past evils as a violent drug hustler.
In his old life, the money flowed fast and easy; in his new one, he is unpaid by the LAPD or the schools, despite the fact they can’t operate nearly as well without the dozens like him throughout LA County who have seen the light and are trying to light a path for others to follow.
With the recent release of the incisive new documentary “Crips & Bloods: Made in America,” which recently played for a week at the Laemmele Playhouse 7 and will soon be released on DVD, Shaka has found validation as one of the primary interview subjects in the film, taking pride in showing that there’s a better way to live than thugging while also inspiring his own dreams of publishing a memoir of life on the streets, creating hip-hop CDs and designing his own clothing line.
Some might scoff at those ambitions as shallow and stereotypical of young people whose lives in the ’hoods of LA and other cities expose them to few examples of growing up to be doctors or engineers. But whether displaying his surprisingly striking shirt designs or pouring his soul out while gently reading the opening passage of his eloquently written memoir, Shaka shows he’s a man of surprises who just needs a chance to succeed — and he says there are countless more young African Americans just like him. For now, he’s blessed with the funds to survive and pursue his interests by also working with his childhood friend, Los Angeles Clippers star Baron Davis, who initiated the funding for “Crips & Bloods.”
“It feels like we’re not even American citizens, we’re just ‘blacks’ to most of America,” he says, while pointing out that the very same white cop who just consulted with him inside the school was now detaining a group of black male students after school for the apparent offense of talking in numbers. “People don’t think of us in the same way, that we have the same rights. Yes, having the police around does make us safer sometimes, but how are you supposed to stay positive when you’re afraid to walk anywhere alone because someone may attack you, yet you get questioned or detained when you walk anywhere with a group? That’s the whole cycle of gangs — you join for safety, to make friends and have some male companionship when most fathers are out of the picture. The officers don’t really know us, they don’t rest their heads in our neighborhoods at night or know what our dreams and concerns and families are like.” Side by sideThe words spill out from Shaka in a torrent, his eyes riveted on his listener, but, as he himself notes, he is just one man attempting to fight an epidemic of violence that has plagued Los Angeles for the past 60 years and seems to grow worse each decade. According to Father Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a series of businesses that train ex-gang members to develop skills that will pay their bills legitimately, there are more than 86,000 ’bangers in more than 1,100 gangs in Los Angeles County alone.
“We’re the largest gang intervention program in the USA, with members of nearly 600 gangs walking through our doors here,” says Boyle, who started his ministry in 1988. “We locate jobs for them, and we have five businesses where enemies work side by side with each other: a bakery, restaurants, a silk-screening plant, maintenance and landscaping. It just sort of evolved over the years, with first a school and then a jobs program, opened a bakery, and now we also offer tattoo removal with two machines and ten rotating doctors.”
Boyle started Homeboy while stationed as a pastor at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights from 1986 to 1992. His parish, one of the poorest the city, had eight gangs and LA’s highest level of gang activity.
“You could either keep your head in the sand or do something about it. There were mostly Latinos and only one African-American gang in the area,” says Boyle. “It’s still primarily Latinos that come here, merely because I hand out my card at masses and only Catholics come to the masses.”
Boyle recalls that his parishioners were skeptical and unhappy in the beginning of his gang efforts, when ex-members started attending church and receiving other services there. But, he notes, “The gang members were never the problem. They never are. It’s more the people demonizing them from the outside.”
Operating on a $3.5 million annual budget, raised not from church funds but from foundations, fundraising and the profits of the Homeboy businesses themselves, Boyle has been able to help thousands of ex-bangers over the years. Far from depending on charity from the diocese, Boyle and his young staffers are proud that parishes are now frequent customers, comprising a large portion of their 1,900-strong customer base.
“There’s no defined period of time that folks stay here, but it helps them when they get out of prison or when they immediately decide to redirect their lives,” says Boyle. “I don’t know many people that do all the stuff we do. It’s a rehab center for people who wanna redirect themselves.” Don’t disappearShaka decided to redirect himself while undergoing a harrowing crisis of conscience that nearly drove him mad five years ago. While he grew up in a stable home with both parents in which he said he acted perfect inside the house but “turned into an animal on the streets, changing every day like a chameleon,” Shaka went deep into the dealing lifestyle once he finished high school.
“There was so much violence I got caught up in, and it never seemed to go away, whether I was doing it or being around it and seeing it everywhere,” he says, his wide eyes welling with pain from the memories. “I finally started going crazy because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and for like five days I was having my life flash before me without physically being in danger of dying.”
He finally emerged from the darkness, due to turning to God and his girlfriend Chrystal, a vibrant presence who has been with Shaka for six years and shares with him two young sons — Jaiden, 4, and Jaison, five months — and a small but well-kept pink stucco house.
“Jaiden was a result of that madness, because my girl kept calming me down by telling me she loved me and making love,” he recalls. “We’ve been together a long time. I want to set a good example to younger guys in the neighborhood that you stick with your kids and be there for them. When I came out of that madness, I started going to church, when I’d never been religious before.”
As he works tirelessly to quell tensions and set standards for the younger black men coming up through Fremont and other area schools, Shaka has to be fluid in his interactions. As a Latino student sits forlornly in the school police room after being busted for actually rolling marijuana in class, the LAPD officers are threatening the juvenile joint-maker with a trip through the courts, probation and community service — or, if he’s lucky, settling the incident with just a hefty dose of community service without marks on his criminal record.
The student plays nonchalant, but worry is clearly etched in his eyes. Shaka steps in, describing the terms of the deal with a little more slang and the forceful concern of an older brother.
“I know what I’d do if I was you,” he says, as the kid looks at him inquisitively. “I’d take the community service, no strings attached.”
The kid complies; negotiations have ended, problem solved. Stepping outside afterward, Shaka says he makes that kind of quick impact on youths because they know he’s been down the long road to prison over and over. Before he leaves for the day, the LAPD officers ask him to negotiate a meeting between them and a particularly troubled young man and his mother because the school had just pulled his file for a last-chance expulsion warning.
When he sees Michael, the student in jeopardy, smoking with friends outside after school, Shaka pulls Michael out of the pack and warns him how close he has come to expulsion and the courts, saying “It doesn’t have to be something specific. It’s a ton of little things adding up, and they don’t want you there anymore unless you shape up.”
Michael agrees to a meeting with his mom and the officials, and Shaka’s back rolling in his cousin’s car. It’s a stark drive through the neighborhood. He points out a house where a young man on a college basketball scholarship just got shot in the legs nine times by a gang simply for sitting outside in his car. These are the things that never seem to get better.
And yet the only way they can get better is if the residents of neighborhoods like this can be treated like everyone else, and seen as everyday people. Shaka pulls up on another block to introduce a reporter to “other hard-working honest people, and the moms that look out for the kids of the neighborhood.” One man is hooking up an elaborate stereo system for a client’s car, two moms come by and shake hands with a visitor, surprised and glad to see a white face taking the time to listen and meet folks in the area. “Don’t forget about us” is a refrain heard repeatedly as people say their goodbyes.
That unexpected warmth and friendliness flies in the face of the violent and dangerous image South LA neighborhoods are often saddled with. “Crips & Bloods” director Stacy Peralta, who first achieved notoriety as a pro skateboarder and director of the skateboarding documentary “Dogtown & Z-Boys,” says he was shaken by the same positive feelings.“It’s not what I had expected. I never had anybody give me a bad time and always had people being forthright and say thanks for making the film,” recalls Peralta. “Then they’d say ‘Don’t just disappear, come back to our community, be a part of it.’ They’re hungry for connection, hungry to be a part of the world, because in a sense they’re not.” An everyday thingEven more striking for Peralta was the effect he had on interviewees when he took them from their neighborhoods to a calm studio for in-depth questioning.
“People who struck me strongly, I’d bring them to another location where they could really sit down in a secure location and have a long talk without having to look over their shoulder,” Peralta explains. “They commented on being somewhere safe, saying ‘it’s nice to be somewhere I don’t have to think about something happening or someone giving me a hard time for being in the wrong place.’
“It’s really a tragedy that’s going on in this country and that, in a sense, it’s going on in secret. People always say after seeing the movie ‘I didn’t know this was still going on’ or ‘that it’s going on so close to us,’ and so it just goes on and on every day.”
Surprisingly, even the election of America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, hasn’t created a groundswell of hope in the very place where it’s needed most.
“Some people were happy and I was excited on election day and then at the inauguration,” says Shaka, his face lighting up. “But I saw lots of other people just say ‘what the fuck’s this going to change for us? The same shit is still everywhere.’”
Pasadena’s got plenty of gang problems of its own, a fact that local gang interventionist Tim Rhambo has seen for more than 20 years — first as a member of the Pasadena Denver Lane Bloods and later as an activist with the local youth organization Day One. Like Shaka, he tries to spend as much time as possible mixing it up with gang members and those likely to join them, all in the hope of convincing them to break or remain free of the groups’ insidious influences.
Rhambo himself turned from gang life when he was 18, realizing that if he kept his wicked ways up he’d be heading to the harsh world of the state penitentiary rather than the simpler lockdowns of juvenile halls. The 40-year-old credits police officers and other community members for keeping on him to stay on a productive path, and is dedicating himself to give others the same influence — although the current economic crisis has forced Day One to cut him loose and he now struggles while working part-time with kids at the Asian Youth Center and as a boxing instructor at the Villa Parke Community Center in Pasadena.
“I do a lot of volunteer work down at Villa Parke, as a boxing instructor. And at my job now at the Asian Youth Center, I go out into the streets even after I’m off the clock,” says Rhambo. “This is real to me, and I think every generation it gets worse. When I was out gangbanging, the generation before me said you guys are doing stupid stuff, and said ‘we only was fighting, sometimes stabbings, but not with gunplay.’ Now there’s no respect for the old guys who been through it, and they don’t want to talk to [the young ones] because they’re afraid they’ll get shot.
“You gotta be out there on them every day for bangers to get it. I can’t see them two days, or one day and expect them to do what I expect. It’s hard. It’s a constant battle.”

I"LL NEVER FORGET THE MOMENT MY BOSS THREW A FOLDER AT MY HEAD

2009-03-12T10:32:00.001-07:00

Growing up Catholic, I was taught two major things in life: Guilt and forgiveness. They’re two sides of the same coin, actually.
The whole feeling guilty about getting into so-called “Trouble” never really registered with me. But on the other hand, I’m often way too forgiving for my own good. And it was because of that, that I’ve had some of the meanest, shittiest bosses one could ever imagine, and put up with them for way too long a time.
The first crappy boss I had was named Glenn. I should have known not to work with him, for I sold my soul the moment I walked in the door to interview to be his assistant. See, Glenn was the head of the Engine Manufacturers Association, the lobbying organization that tried to convince people that SUVs and Hummers were environmentally friendly and fuel-efficient.
Glenn flew all over the world spreading the organization’s questionable science and spreading lies that no doubt resulted in pollution you could choke on in half the cities on the planet. I handled his travel schedule, faxing and copying. And then one day, he got the bright idea to have me – a guy who might be verbally skilled but has tested as “functionally retarded” in science and math – to have me redesign the association’s entire filing system.
We’re talking 40 years, four FULL DECADES, of files covering every engine and environmental regulation known to man. And he explained to me over a lengthy lunch the scientifically complex way he wanted them rearranged. The problem was a) I’m functionally retarded at science and math, and b) I’m 300 pounds and way more interested in the steak on my plate than I was in his formulas.
So I rearranged the files, alright – in a strict alphabetical system. It took forever, nearly his entire two-week business trip, but I got done in time to present to him my…well, my colossal fuckup.
When he came back, chipper and happy from two weeks of destroying the planet while nestled at a conference in the Alps of Sweden, it appeared nothing could destroy his good mood.
Then he checked out the filing system.
“So did you finish redoing the filing, Carl?”
“Yes, sir!” I beamed with glowing pride.
But then I suddenly noticed he was gradually less happy. In fact, he looked gradually more and more concerned, and then pissed off.
“Where’s the TC70 report, Carl?”
“In the T section,” I replied, not aware that there was never supposed to BE a T Section. I had taken the work of men with PhD’s in engineering and combined them in the same fashion that the writers of “Sesame Street” would. It seemed simple, but in reality, my boss was due to face Congress in Washington the next day and the TC70 report was now a needle in a haystack of 20,000 folders to him.
And then it happened, in front of God, myself and thankfully about 50 witnesses since we were part of a giant corporation where the hundreds of Dilbert-style employees were assembled in grids of cubicles: Glenn lost it. I mean, really lost it.
His eyes squinted shut, and his face turned so red I thought he was gonna have a stroke. And then, as I cowered for my life, he picked up a giant red folder filled with a pile of documents the size of the Chicago phone book and THREW IT AT MY HEAD!!!!
I’ll never forget the next two seconds: the way the folder spun through the air, spinning like a helicopter blade as it shot out papers pell-mell in every direction, the shrieks of the female employees around me and the yell of another boss screaming at Glenn, “What are you doing?!” And then I ducked fast, leaving the folder and its remaining contents to smash into the glass of the window behind me before dropping to the floor. That moment gave me an even greater appreciation than most for President Bush’s shoe-dodging skills.
Then, as all hell was breaking loose in reaction to Glenn’s throw, he panicked, ran into his office and locked the door. He refused to come out for the next two hours.They had to bring in HR, then building security and finally the Chicago police in before Glenn came out. But I had the ULTIMATE revenge satisfaction, because he was forced to go on a two-week "Vacation" at an anger-management clinic in the Arizona desert, and when he came back I got a raise and he had to kiss my ass for the next 3 years.
The ridiculous point is, I stayed. And I forgave him. In fact, we became friends and he took me to dinner last summer when I visited Chicago, and I didn’t even have to duck once to avoid having silverware, dishes or a glass thrown at me.But even Glenn wasn't the worst boss I had. That was a woman named Ruth Ratny- you know she's evil just by hearing her name. RATny. She was actually featured on "Oprah" as one of the 4 meanest bosses in America. I will love Oprah FOREVER - and would even vote for her as President - because everyone on staff was able to tape that episode and send copies to their friends and families as ultimate proof that we really were working for a megabitch.But she got her just rewards a month or two later – ironically, after she drove me to a mental breakdown and wouldn’t even give me the day off to recover. So I had quit that job and went on the road performing standup with my best friend Tim for two weeks. And it was when I was checking my messages from Eau Claire, WI that I heard the shocking news from about 50 friends on my answering machine:
Ruth had actually fallen down an elevator shaft and LIVED. She fell two stories onto the roof of the car, which she used to get around the building she owned, and then it careened another five floors SMACK into the basement. She actually SURVIVED. That's when I KNEW she truly had a pact with the devil. Eventually I was desperate enough to come back to work for her and she talked me into a pay cut in exchange for my not having to see the hematoma on her leg. The lowest I've ever sunk though was the time I applied for work at Easter season. The interview consisted of two questions I never thought I'd be answering after getting a college degree: "Are you looking for full, or part-time, work as a bunny?" And, "What shopping mall do you see yourself at in 5 years?"I also applied for a job cutting trees in the Christmas tree lot at Target. They warned me I'd be covered in sap at the end of the night, and I told them I've had worse things happen to me at college parties. But they didn't give me the job, so that means either I failed a drug test without taking drugs, or my credit's so bad they wouldn't trust me with a chainsaw.

GET THEE TO THE MOVIE THEATER! (a rare serious post)

2009-01-07T11:39:00.000-08:00

BY CARL KOZLOWSKI

It’s not often that Hollywood deals with any Christian themes in an intelligent or respectful way. In fact, it seems that often the only times that the mainstream movie industry deals with Christianity at all is to portray its believers as either hypocrites, simpletons or buffoons. On the rare occasions that they actually show a character in a church, it’s usually for a wedding or a funeral – despite the fact that even the most limited estimates have shown that at least half of America’s 300 million citizens attend church services fairly regularly.

As a Catholic, I’ve found that my church is portrayed both better and worse than other Christian faiths. Yes, we are spared the pain of seeing our spiritual leaders portrayed as sweaty, quaking, self-righteous, pulpit-pounding televangelists, but on the other hand the last few years have shown that Hollywood has no problem seizing the headlines and showing priests as either pedophiles or at least questionable. Either that, or priests are forever in question of their vows of celibacy and are standing on the brink of having a torrid affair with a woman.

So, imagine my surprise to find that this holiday movie season has offered up not one, but two Oscar-worthy, thoughtful films that deal with matters of faith in an intelligent and exciting way: “Gran Torino” and “Doubt.” While these films tackle their issues from different angles, the results are grandly entertaining and provide plenty to talk about after viewing them. So get thee to their theaters!

“Gran Torino” has been seen by many critics as a response by its star and director, Clint Eastwood, to his own lengthy career of playing hyper-violent urban vigilantes like Dirty Harry Callahan. In five “Dirty Harry” films, he chased, beat and shot up seemingly dozens if not hundreds of the worst criminal perps in San Francisco, but in “Gran Torino,” Eastwood is a 78-year-old Korean War vet named Walt who has watched his working-class Detroit neighborhood change to the point where he’s virtually a lone Caucasian surrounded by Asians.

And Walt hates them all, as well as any other ethnic group that isn’t his own – Polish. It’s here that the film walks a fine and fascinating line, addressing racial tensions in a way that few manage to pull off. The 2005 Best Picture winner “Crash” managed to show race relations in a similarly brutal, bracing and ultimately redemptive fashion, but “Gran Torino” reminded me more of Jack Nicholson’s iconic and Oscar-winning performance as Melvin in 1997’s classic “As Good As It Gets.” Both Nicholson and Eastwood get away with saying thing that would get most of us either beaten or arrested, but manage to have audiences laughing because we expect them to be grizzled, uncensored and outrageous – and because they are poking serious fun at their characters along the way as well.

In “Torino,” the Catholic element comes into play right from the beginning, as Walt is seen at his wife’s funeral. He quickly makes it clear that he doesn’t respect his parish priest, whom he derides face-to-face as “a 27-year-old virgin” who doesn’t know anything about the real world’s problems and suffering. But that priest, played by Christopher Carley, refuses to back down because he promised Walt’s wife on her deathbed that he would persuade Walt to make a confession for the first time in decades.

As the story crystallizes around Walt’s determination to change by protecting his next-door neighbors’ kids from a street gang of their Asian peers, the priest keeps popping up, gradually winning Walt’s respect and forcing him to consider the moral implications of his urge to be a vigilante and perhaps go too far for his own legal and moral good. By the time the film is resolved through a series of clever, unforeseen twists, it is clear that Walt has been transformed by the wisdom of this man whom he once saw as naïve. And Walt’s response is an affecting parallel to the audience’s own initially derisive perception of the priest, taking us along on his faith journey as well.

Meanwhile, “Doubt” – as its title might indicate – heads in the opposite direction while still giving viewers plenty to consider about matters of faith and trust. Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, shortly after the massive changes ushered in by the modernizing Vatican II conference in Rome, the story quickly sets up a conflict between the old-school nun who serves as principal and runs the school like a prison (played by Meryl Streep) and the young, new priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who wants to shake things up by treating the students as fully rounded young people who deserve doses of freedom and respect as well.

Streep and Hoffman wind up in battle over a much more thorny subject, however: she comes to believe, through the tips of a naïve young nun played by Amy Adams, that Hoffman is engaged in an inappropriate relationship with the school’s first admitted black male student. While she has no direct evidence to support her belief, she rigidly sets out to destroy the priest anyway because she refuses to harbor doubt, considering it a weakness. Hanging in the balance are each of their reputations, as well as the well-being of the young boy, whom Hoffman claims he’s merely paying extra attention to in order to help him overcome the ill behavior shown him by his racist classmates.

“Doubt” cannily sets its dramatic fireworks – it’s written and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck”) as an adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play – up in the early ‘60s, removing the film’s questions of inappropriate priestly behavior from the context of this decade’s earlier pedophilic scandals so that its larger questions of faith, morality, and yes, doubt can be dealt with without the distractions of wondering how close a fact-based film was hewing to reality.

A priest friend of mine dismissed “Doubt” without having seen it, saying that he felt the filmmakers caused damage to the public’s perception of the church merely by portraying the film’s three leads in their clerical outfits next to the title word. But I believe that as much as we’d like to think all of life’s questions can be answered with black and white statements by our pastors or solely through interpreting the Scriptures, a stronger faith can be achieved through occasionally questioning things for ourselves.

And films like “Gran Torino” and “Doubt” give us a great place to start.

MY BATTLE WITH A GIANT CRAB (minds out of the gutter, we're talking seafood! )

2009-01-06T19:42:00.000-08:00

So I was in San Francisco, which you can read more about in the post after this, and was looking for the best damn meals i could find in the city. I had already had clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl at Boudin's (Yummmm) and the best Chinese in the city at House of Nanking (where there's always a line, but SO worth it! When i figure out the photo thing, you'll see pictures of the weird stuff they gave me to eat!)

But I was determined to have a hearty plateful of seafood, and the tour guide on Mr. Toad's Wild Tour said that Crab Ciappino was the way to go. I found a joint on Fisherman's Wharf and settled in at a table and ordered away.

What i wound up with (I had no idea what i was getting into) was a giant bowl of tomato broth (delicious, by the way) but it was filled with giant crab pieces , all in their shells. I've only tried to eat this kind of thing one other time in my life and it wasn't pretty. Add in the red soup aspect and i was destined to look more blood-spattered than Sweeney Todd.

And like Todd, you have to brutalize your quarry when eating a crab. Who ever came up with the idea of catching this giant monstrosity that looks like it starred in "Alien," and decided that it was worth the effort of cracking it open repeatedly and fishing out the meat with a dainty fork? On the one hand, it's a decidedly macho process; on the other, decidedly effete.

And I'm sorry, but I'm with the folks of PETA on this one. They think foie gras is bad, but how about this?! At least we're ripping it to pieces once it's already dead. But as I contort my fingers to wrest slivers of crabmeat, I realize my hands keep going numb from the no-doubt-permanent nerve damage I subjected them to on the GoCar, from numbing cold and attempting to navigate the world's craziest streets with only handbrakes to save me.

This is too much work, i quickly decide - I don't want to fight my dinner, i just want to eat it! I shouldn't need the technical skills of a surgeon to complete my meal. But then, maybe this level of frustration is why the Old Testament book of Leviticus frowned on eating shellfish in the first place.

But as I finally get the hang of it, a rush of adrenaline kicks in and I start ripping and tearing it, limb from limb, eventually staring into its gaping maw. I feel like I'm wrestling this beast more than the old guy in "The Old Man and the Sea."

Best of all, they rward you with a hot towel at the end. I also have a photo of the heaping mess that resulted, but that will have to be posted when i learn the technological wonders of uploading photos!

WHAT I DID ON MY CHRISTMAS VACATION (A very bizarre report by me!)

2009-01-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

WHAT I DID ON MY CHRISTMAS VACATION (a very bizarre report by me!)
San Francisco: It's long been known as the city of Rice A Roni, cable cars and really really gay people. But because it also is the world's cheapest plane ticket from LA and never gets covered in snow, I decided to make it my Christmas mini-vacation destination.

For four days, from Dec. 26-30, I jetted up to the city to see just what a "San Francisco treat" really entails. Thanks to the wonderful folks at http://www.cheaptickets.com/ (yes, this is a shameless plug hoping for even better future deals!) I wound up getting a round-trip ticket, three nights in the historic-status Hotel Whitcomb, and round trip Super Shuttle from the San Fran airport, all for just $401. I decided to make it a Christmas gift to me (awwwww.)

Well, my Christmas Eve really sucked. I spent it alone because my family is in another state, except for the aunt in Sherman Oaks who had begged me to stick around and spend it with her. Then she decided to have me come over Christmas Day, not Eve, and Christmas Eve is like the one night a year when you absolutely, positively can't call people to ask to come over. They're already miserable enough with their own families without the extra grief of allowing you to come over. So i did some pre-trip research and went to see "Milk."

Contrary to what you might think, it's not a documentary about cows or the dairy industry. Rather, it's the biopic of a guy named Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay man ever to be elected to office in America, before getting shot down in cold blood by a Christian fellow councilman who got off for the killing without a sentence because he claimed he had eaten too many Twinkies and went insane on a sugar high. (If that isn't reason to watch what you let your kids eat, I don't know what is! Moms, hide your Ho Hos!) I always thought that "the Twinkie defense" meant that that guy had testified he killed Milk after yelling out "Take that, you Twinkie!" So the movie was pretty educational. Sean Penn was terrific in it, except the whole time his voice sounded like an even more effeminate Mr. Rogers of "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" (if that's even possible). No matter how angry he got, or seductive, or whatever, Penn sounded like he was offering chocolate chip cookies to 2nd graders. He also kissed guys a lot, so if that bugs you, watch out. I still say Mickey Rourke deserves the Oscar for "The Wrestler," though.

At any rate, my hotel was indeed classic in style, with huge chandeliers in the lobby and a fancy doorman and bellman in full uniform, but the room was a little small and the bathroom was riDONKulous! Sitting on the toilet required yoga positioning that nearly exceeded my physical capabilities, and there was no tub - just a shower so tiny I had to fold into even further pretzel positions to scrub down.

On the plus side - for me, anyway - was that while the hotel was on the major thoroughfare of Market Street, which includes all the most glamorous stores in the city, the Hotel Whitcomb is about four long blocks AWAY from those glamorous stores. In fact, it's precariously close to the most skanky and questionable part of the city, called The Tenderloin, not due to its great steaks but due to the fact that young hookers of both sexes offer up their tender vittles to customers near there. THAT'S not the fun part; the fun part for me, since I'm a magnet for daily-life danger, was that one night when i woke up starving at 3 a.m., the front desk told me no one would deliver food that late but that i could "make a run for Carl's Jr. a block or so away." Sounded innocent enough. But i quickly came to realize when the guy said "Make a run for it," he meant it! The two-block journey to hamburger-land involved what i like to call a Human Video Game: having to run, jump, dodge, bob and weave my way around sleeping bums and incredibly aggressive panhandlers like I was playing a real-life game of "Frogger."

When I finally made it to Carl's Jr., I was treated to what apparently was the first night ever on the register for the male Filipino running it, as he kept swiping the debit card of the guy in front of me so many times that the guy finally said, "Dammit, if this burger combo winds up costing me $350 instead of $7.50, it's gonna be on YOUR ass!" I tried hard not to laugh, but that was quality comedy for 3 a.m. on a Friday. Meanwhile, some other badass came in, looking like Huggy Bear from "Starsky and Hutch" in a beanie cap, black leather jacket and pimp-daddy shoes from 1973. He apparently thought he WAS Carl's Jr. because he acted like he owned the place, belligerently asking other bums who were there long before him what they were doing and when they ignored him or gave unsatisfactory answers, he'd yell "Suck my d***!"

He kept ranting angrily about how much of that activity was going on, apparently "everyone" is doing it to him because he's so badass. I just put on my hoodie and prayed he wouldn't start talking to me. It was a lot of stress to go through just to eat a Guacamole Burger, is all I'm saying.

On a more pleasant note, the rest of my stay in San Fran was absolutely fantastic, amazing, and yes, even FABULOUS!!! I got to my hotel at about 11 a.m. on Friday and hit the streets in search of a good tour a couple hours later. Now, you might think i'd take a bay tour on a boat, or hop a bus tour, but instead of a city bus tour i decided on literally spur of the moment (15 minutes before departure) to plunk down 50 bucks to be taken to the Muir Woods an hour out of town. Why there? Because they're one of the prime homes of the redwoods, trees so mindbogglingly tall, beautiful and old that they literally should serve as a case-closed argument for a Divine Creator of Earth and the Universe. It was cold, foggy and half the bus was composed of a tour group of Mexican fourth graders (literally from Mexico) but it was still one of the most amazing sights of my life. (I'm trying to upload my pix, but don't know how here. Anyone who can help advise, please write me at Carlk@pasadenaweekly.com. )

The next day, I engaged in the highlight of my trip: renting a GoCar. Now, i haven't driven in 5 1/2 years, and San Francisco is pretty much a suicidal place to start trying. It's home to 47 hills, and we're talking HILLS. Lance Armstrong probably couldn't bike these babies! Not to mention twists, turns and fast-paced traffic. So this could have been scary. Yet surprisingly, it wasn't.

The GoCar is a new technology only available in San Diego, San Fran and Miami so far - in which the three-wheeled vehicle (two in front, one in back) operates like a motorcycle, with hand brakes and acceleration and no use of feet - which was just as well because the thing is smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle and my legs kept going numb from being jammed inside. It goes up to 35 mph and has a GPS system in which a hot-sounding chick not only tells you where to go, but also narrates explanations of everything.

The downsides - which are quickly forgotten due to the amazing upsides of the thing, which looks like a modernized version of the motorcycle sidecars that Nazis used to drive in WWII movies - are that I felt I dislocated my left hip getting in and out and was almost certain a tore a ligament in my right knee (thankfully, neither actually happened). My hands were practically frostbitten from the fact I had no gloves on amid cold December air and no roof - the lack of roof also meaning i had to wear a ridiculous helmet the whole time that made me look like a very portly Speed Racer. (Again, there are photos, but i need someone to help me figure out how!) But it was exciting and liberating to drive, especially on Lombard Street - the world's windiest with eight immediate sharp turns in one block.

Sure, I'll admit I was shrieking the whole way down, but people were laughing and it helped distract me from the fact that my arms felt they were about to be ripped clean out of their sockets from holding the brakes so hard. Despite all that (or maybe because of the sheer thrill of it) I recommend it wholeheartedly!!

That night, I packed my night with two more "Yes Man"-style decisions. I'd learned that the incomparable '60s soul singer Darlene Love (who worked with Phil Spector on many songs, including the ultimate pop Christmas song, "Baby Please Come Home". I've grown up watching her on the Letterman show nearly every year since she started singing that song on his show the night before Christmas Eve each year since 1986, and there she has a gospel choir, a small orchestra, the house band and Paul Shaffer impeccably performing the song's vital piano riffs. I remembered Letterman saying "if you're in San Francisco, see her through Jan. 7 at the Rrazz Room," so bam - he told me to go and i went.

Darlene was performing without a choir and orchestra, but had '70s/'80s soul singer Melba Moore (I know, who??) open for her and Melba was surprisingly good - plus they both shared a TIGHT five piece band with drums, two horns, a guitarist and bassist that blasted right through countless covers from the era when women could really truly sing their guts out in a song. I was easily the youngest person in the room, as i was surrounded by middle-aged and older married couples and countless ecstatic gay guys (who run like Pavlov's dogs to any show featuring a diva like Love).

The show kicked off with a Love-Moore duet on "Heat Wave," which reminded me of the late great Sweeney Sisters lounge-act sketches on "SNL" in the '80s because these ladies came ready to WORK it! Love then left Moore to her own devices for awhile, which was mostly mediocre stuff, except Moore did a brassy interpretation of "The Long and Winding Road" in which she held the final note, Whitney-style, for at least 20 seconds at the end, leading to thunderous applause and yet another standing ovation from the gays in the crowd.

But that was nothing compared to the rapturous response Love got when she took the stage again. As she burst through a succession of '60s songs, I felt like I was in the super-cheesy audience of one of those PBS pledge-drive specials where a bunch of '60s acts are shown singing their ancient one or two-hit wonders. She tore through "He's a Rebel," "Da Doo Ron Ron," and "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" before finally doing Tina Turner's "River Deep Mountain High" with such earth-shaking intensity I didn't even realize she didn't sing any Christmas songs the entire time. How heartbreaking. But still a masterful display of vocal power!

I then hopped a cab for yet another destination: Cobb's Comedy Club, a huge and respected venue where my current favorite comic on earth, Patton Oswalt, was headlining. The line literally wrapped around the block, which was perfect for the sharpest comic mind in the country - who went on to deconstruct both the Christmas holidays and religion itself in such a funny fashion that I couldn't help laughing, even though I'm Catholic and Oswalt's an atheist. That's a strong show!

Sunday, I hopped into an old '20s jalopy to take Mr. Toad's Wild Tour, which had a very funny tour guide named Patrick taking us around the city in a classic car that had had its engine converted to biodiesel. The driver let me be his sidekick, which basically covered for the fact i was the only solo traveler, but that was still preferable to the multitude of restaurants and other tours whose initial response to my "party of one" requests was "WHAT?! Really?!" Ah, nothing like being made to feel comfortable on vacation, eh?
So among the things I learned from the Mr. Toad tour are:
The city's Washington Square is actually a triangle of land, and features a statue of Ben Franklin rather than George Washington. But then again, this city's so gay, why should they bother to even get their FACTS straight, right?

Many houses with garages were built in the '20s, with the garages added in the '50s.

Steve McQueen's "Bullitt" character lived in an apartment at Clay and Taylor, directly across from the VJ Market.

Grace Cathedral has a labyrinth inside for no reason that our driver could figure out. You can take a free tour of it, though, and I suppose ask the guide yourself.

To be a member of the city's lavish Pacific Union Club, you must be male and Republican. And I bet, in denial. (Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, baby!)

Chinatown is home to 180,000 Chinese. They have no front yards there. So kids play in parks in other neighborhoods.

The Fairmont Hotel was where Kim Novak's residence was in my all-time choice for greatest movie ever: "Vertigo."

The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory (I have a photo, which will be posted soon!) is the one place that makes ALL the fortune cookies for the many Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. It's a tiny space that looks like a sweatshop, with 4 old women constantly stuffing fortunes into cookies coming off an assembly line apparatus as an old Chinese guy yells at them. I took a picture of that too, will be up soon i hope!

The third weekend in May, the Beta Breakers race is a 7 mile race through town which people can choose to run nude. (Look out Frisco, here i come! Don't worry i'm personal training first.)

Panhandle Park is an actual city park that had such a staggering concentration of bums, that that's where the word "panhandler" came from. The worldwide word for bums - amazing! (Don't you feel mentally enriched now?!)

SF city law says a house can't be painted more than 5 colors on the outside. (That actually USED to be a problem!)

The Grateful Dead used to live at 810 Ashbury.

Golden Gate Park is 3 1/2 miles long, which makes it bigger than NYC's Central Park even though SF is a mile smaller (7 miles rather than 8 miles).

The Presidio - former military base - rents its houses nowadays for $8,000 a month. But hey - you get 5 BR, 2 1/2 BA and an actual yard - a great rarity in SF! You're also paying for actual easy parking, and for having trees around.

SF only has 3 cemeteries inside it, at least one of which is ancient and defunct and another one which is for pets. But a small town called Coma (pop. 1,400) 10 miles south of SF has mor than 1.5 million people buried there so far from the city, prompting its city slogan "It's good to be alive in Coma."

The Golden Gate Bridge takes 4 years to paint. It's painted International Orange, not Gold. It got its name by being named "the gateway to gold" during the Gold Rush.

There are great white sharks swimming off Baker Beach, which is clothing optional. I guess people go nude there if they want to make dinner a little easier for the sharks. ************************************************************************************Enough Enough about the city, though...Well, actually, one last thing before i detail my epic battle with a bowlful of crab cioppino. Despite taking 4 or 5 different tours there (I also went to Alcatraz at NIGHT - scary!), I realized at 4 p.m. my last day there - 4 hours before my ride to the SF airport! - that no tour had shown even a sliver of the gay part of town. How can you go to SF and not see the gay part? Unless it's ALL the gay part and you just don't know it?!

So i asked a tour driver why and he said everyone's still scared of freaking out midwestern tourists who might freak out if their kid sees two guys holding hands or kissing. But as a grown man who had already survived a screening of "Milk" just the other day, I was prepared for it! I decided to hop a cab and simply ask the driver "Take me to the gayest part of town!" Which i did, and the driver said "you mean the Castro, right?" I didn't know if that was a code word so i said "Just the gayest part. I only have four hours."

Which made it sound like i was looking for one last miracle lovefest, even though i'm straight. So the driver took me down the world's most convoluted collection of backstreets and wound up dropping me off right across the street from the Castro Theater! And guess what they were showing that night? No, not "Brokeback Mountain" or a porno, but "The Sing Along Sound of Music." Complete with a costume contest!!! If THAT wasn't the gayest thing to do on a Monday night in SF, i don't know what was! And applying my "yes man" principle, i slapped down $15 to go watch it! I've never seen so many guys dressed as nuns or Maria Von Trapp in one place in my life! And others dressed in lederhosen! More than 1400 people singing as if it was their one shot on the "American Idol" auditions - LOUD being the operative word here- to some of the catchiest songs in movie history. With events like that, it's no wonder I would love to move there.

NEW YEAR THOUGHTS

2009-01-04T10:12:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's Jan. 4, which means i'm four days behind, but anyone who knows me isn't surprised.

So, 2008 was pretty good for me. I met Mickey Rourke, Kevin Smith and Jay Leno - all personal favorites of mine (You can read the stories about Rourke and Smith at other places in these blogs, but Leno swore me to secrecy...Ooo!)
I had nasal surgery that enables me to breathe normally and sleep decently for the first time in at least a decade. I went through hypnotherapy and had great results. I learned to do a radio show and launched one on America's #1 talk station (off right now, back in March at the latest). I published one book (co-authored), and just finished another, a book of Sedaris-style essays about to go out to agents. I dove into the LA spoken word scene and got a better reponse than my standup ever did (though that's kicking butt too now!). I got promoted at my job and lined up some exciting opportunities for '09 that i can't mention yet. And i started my first novel ever!

But I also drove away my best friend, which i will eternally regret. I also had the lamest New Year's Eve ever, because I came back from San Francisco the day before and everyone had already either left town or settled on their own plans because I was gone and they forgot me during my trip. So despite having one of the best years of my life, I wound up at home by 10 on NYE and fighting sleep by 1130. I finally, like an 83 year old man, was about to fall asleep at 1130 and so i set my alarm clock to wake up at 1155 in order to see the ball drop and then shoot myself in a ceremonial suicide. :P

Well, i was so clouded with sleepiness that i mis-set my alarm, and wound up waking up at 1225 a.m. instead. I missed the damn balloon drop, and i'm only 37 years old!!! This, combined with a series of mishaps that resulted in me seeing "Milk" alone at 730 on Christmas Eve due to another set of bad circumstances, has made me resolve to finally kick my life further into gear and not be in thiis position next year. I want to have a real girlfriend (or by some miracle, a wife) by my side by next holiday season.

And so I'm opening up the process for that quest. My life's an open book and maybe i can draw tips from you guys and inspire some folks as well through humor...

But these past three days, i've made some big moves...

I finally signed up with a real therapist to help break through my mental walls that keep me back from submitting my movie scripts and comedy material to agents despite people who've read them thinking they're hilarious. I also am going to figure out the walls blocking me in relationships. Gotta take care of the mind if you're gonna use it right. I start next Friday, Jan. 9!

I just signed up for 15 sessions with a personal trainer for just $300! ($20/hr. vs. most people paying at least $60/hr.)

And i'm going to continue my writing class and start an improv class at Upright Citizens Brigade, so i should finally meet some more comedy folks and I'm also going up at least Mondays and Wednesdays at the Ha Ha Cafe in North Hollywood becuase my friend Lisa Mesa runs it and is willing to take me!

So body and mind are gonna get pummeled into shape this year, as well as my spirit as I'm also going to be getting some spiritual guidance monthly from a super-cool priest friend...

Time to get real about my life. A sadly former best friend often asked me, "Hows that working for ya?" about each aspect of my life that i was fine but really wasn't. Now I realize it needs to change, improve, upgrade.

And now's the time. How about yourselves?

THE WEEKLY KOZ (All the news that you might have missed, for damn good reason)

2009-01-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

Today - Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009 - is the first Sunday of the new year, and as such I'm launching my new feature "The Weekly Koz," in which I post a few of the most bizarre and outrageous stories of the week, some with commentary from me. Just hoping to spread a few laughs amid all the bad news out there - what else should you expect from "America's Funniest Reporter," right? From time to time, i'll be updating daily or midweek, so keep coming back!!!

AND NOW, ALL THE NEWS THAT DOESN"T MATTER....

(A MOMENT OF GREAT PRIDE IN MY ANCESTRAL HOMELAND. IT DOES MAKE ONE WONDER, THOUGH, WHY GAYS ARE SO EAGER TO GET MARRIED, IF IT PRODUCES JOYFUL MOMENTS LIKE THIS...BUT HEY I SAY, FINE, SHARE THE MAGIC!)
"What are you doing here?": man asks wife at brothel
Wed Jan 9, 2008 10:23am EST

WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment's employees.
Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.
"I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming," the husband told the newspaper on Wednesday.
The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.

(THE FOLLOWING IS REALLY NO BIG DEAL. MY FAMILY ONCE HAD A FLYING CARLOAD OF DRUNK TEENS PLOW INTO OUR HOUSE AT 2 AM THE NIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS, 1991!)
Police: Car damaged by flying Christmas tree
By Elizabeth Dinan
January 02, 2009 1:48 PM
NORTH HAMPTON — A perfect storm of high winds against a disposed Christmas tree, launched the tree into the front grill of a passing Ford, say police.
On Dec. 30, police were called to the area of 122 Post Road at 12:48 p.m., for a report of a "single car accident involving a Christmas tree," according to the town's public police log.
When officers arrived, the driver of a 1998 Escort said he was motoring along the road when a Christmas tree that was left on a curb for recycling, became airborne and "blew into the grill of the car," said the police department's administrative assistant, Jessica Miehle.
"The Christmas tree flew out and attacked him," joked Miehle, who did not know the extent of damage to the Ford.

(GOOD LORD, CHARLES! REMEMBER, PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE! BUT AS FAR AS HIS MAKING STUPID, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE AND INAPPROPRIATE COMMENTS, HE DOES SEEM READY TO CARRY ON SEN. JOE BIDEN'S LEGACY IN THE SENATE.)
Charles Barkley DUI Update: Quest for Oral Sex Allegedly the Cause
Most of the time when people get a DUI, the drunkenness and police blotter is the full extent of the spectacle. Leave it to Charles Barkley, though, to really make media waves after reportedly getting busted on suspicion of DUI.In a story that was custom built for some old-school sports blogging, Barkley reportedly told police that he was driving drunk because he was seeking to score some fellatio from a young lady.

According to the officer who wrote the report, "He told me that he ran the stop sign because he was in a hurry to pick up the girl I saw get in the passenger seat." The officer continues: "He asked me to admit that she was 'hot.' He asked me, 'You want the truth?' When I told him I did he said, 'I was gonna drive around the corner and get a b**w job. He then explained that she had given him a 'b**w job' one week earlier and said it was the best one he had ever had in his life."
But wait! There's more! According to the report, Barkley not only was looking for oral sex, but he also had a handgun, which has somehow become the least discussed portion of this story.And, in simply amazing Tommy Boy fashion, Barkley allegedly extended the offer to "tattoo my name on your ass" towards a civilian police employee at the police station if he could sneak out of the DUI, which he quickly (I suppose) corrected. In other words, yes, this should do wonders for his 2014 gubernatorial run.

(AH, CAN YOU IMAGINE THE JOY OF HAVING THIS FAMILY RUNNING AROUND THE WHITE HOUSE? I admit i was briefly brainwashed by Sarah's beauty and spunk, until she used the same "surprise" lines in countless speeches and couldn't admit what magazines she reads. Now I'm just glad we're not going to have a shotgun wedding with these two at the White House.)
Palin's Daughter Gives Birth to Son

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Dec. 30) - The daughter of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has given birth to a son, a magazine reported Monday.

Bristol Palin, daughter of former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, is now a mom. The 18-year-old gave birth Saturday to a baby boy named Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston, People magazine reported Monday. The baby's father is Levi Johnston, shown with Bristol on Sept. 3 at the Republican National Convention.
Bristol Palin, 18, gave birth to Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston on Saturday, People magazine reported online. He weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces. Colleen Jones, the sister of Bristol's grandmother, told the magazine that "the baby is fine and Bristol is doing well."
The governor's office said it would not release information because it considers the baby's birth a private, family matter. Palin family members, hospital employees and spokespeople for the governor's former running mate, John McCain, either would not confirm the birth or did not return messages from The Associated Press.
The father is Levi Johnston, a former hockey player at Alaska's Wasilla High School.
Palin announced on Sept. 1, the first day of the Republican National Convention, that her unwed daughter was pregnant. The campaign issued a statement saying Bristol "and the young man" would get married.
Levi Johnston's mother eventually disclosed that her 18-year-old son was the father. The following week, the young man attended the convention in St. Paul, Minn., when Palin accepted the vice presidential nomination.
The announcement that the unmarried Bristol Palin, 17 at the time, was pregnant immediately drew concerns that it could damage Palin's credibility as a religious conservative. But many observers noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palins and showcase the candidate's rejection of abortion.
Sherry Johnston, Levi's mother, said in October that Bristol and her son were considering a summer wedding.
Levi Johnston told The Associated Press that month that he and Bristol loved each other and wanted to get married. Johnston, who dropped out of high school to take a job on the North Slope oil fields as an apprentice electrician, said he was a little shocked to learn that Bristol was pregnant but quickly warmed to the idea of being a father.
He said the two had planned to get married even before Bristol became pregnant.
Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing.
Johnston's mother was arrested on felony drug charges this month after state troopers served a search warrant at her Wasilla home. According to authorities, she sent text messages to two police informants in which she discusses making drug transactions involving OxyContin, a strong prescription painkiller.
Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, have five children ranging in age from Trig, 7 months, to Track, 19. In between are Willow, 14; Piper, 7; and Bristol.

(AND IN TYPICAL, HEY LOOK AT WHAT WE DID, WE"RE LIBERAL, FASHION...)
Charity homes built by Hollywood start to crumble
John Harlow in Los Angeles
RESIDENTS of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.
Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day “blitz” organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.
Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.
A forthcoming legal battle over Fairway Oaks threatens the reputation of a charity envied for the calibre of its celebrity supporters, who range from Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to Colin Firth, Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter.
The case could challenge the bedrock philosophy behind Habitat for Humanity, claiming that using volunteers, rather than professional builders, is causing as many problems as it solves.
April Charney, a lawyer representing many of the 85 homeowners in Fairway Oaks, said she had no problems taking on Habitat for Humanity, despite its status as a “darling of liberal social activists”. She said the charity should have told people that part of the estate had been built on a rubbish dump.
One man pulled up his floorboards to find rubbish 5ft deep under his kitchen. Other complaints include cracking walls and rotting door frames that let in rats and ants. Many residents have complained of mildew and mysterious skin rashes.
One resident said her children were suffering from skin complaints. “The intentions are good, but when the politicians and big-shot stars have left we’re stuck with the consequences. This house looks pretty but inside it either stinks or sweats,” she said.
Judy Hall, the charity’s local development director, said recently that it had been dealing with about 30 complaints. She added that skilled work was carried out by professionals.
Some residents dismiss their neighbours’ worries. Diennal Fields, 51, said people did not know how to look after their homes: “It’s simple stuff: if there is mildew, don’t get a lawyer, get a bottle of bleach.”

SAINT MICK (aka the redemption and rebirth of bad-boy acting legend Mickey Rourke)

2008-12-19T11:09:00.000-08:00

Grappling with the past
‘The Wrestler’ Mickey Rourke gets another shot at the big time
By Carl Kozlowski 12/18/2008
Mickey Rourke’s Randy “Ram” Robinson is a washed-up pro wrestler whose greatest glory days were 20 years ago. His once-handsome face has been ravaged by the poundings he’s taken in the ring. Along with that, he’s lost his home — living in a decrepit trailer — and his wife and daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) due to his neglect.
After doctors order him to end his career following a match-induced heart attack, he struggles to enter the daily grind of “real life” with a job at a deli — an attempt to finally be a good father and establish a relationship with a stripper (Marisa Tomei), who wants out of her own racket.
Yet, hovering on Robinson’s limited horizon is one last chance to have a great match that might land him back in the big time, wrestling at Madison Square Garden.
While Robinson is a fictional character in the new film “The Wrestler,” his storyline — and the gritty way in which director Darren Aronofsky (“Requiem for a Dream”) and debuting screenwriter Robert Siegel depict Robinson’s existence — are disquietingly true to life for Rourke, who in real “real life” is making his own dramatic comeback after years of poverty, drug and alcohol abuse and near-homelessness.
So far, “The Wrestler” has earned Rourke a coveted Golden Globe nomination for the first time in his career. And an Oscar nod is now considered a foregone conclusion by many critics.
“Darren probably knew things. I don’t read anything that’s written about me, but the way Darren works, he knew more about me than I wanted him to,” says Rourke, while tucked into a booth at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills last Friday night. “He said it was gonna be tough to make the movie with me since I screwed my career up for 15 years, but he still fought hard to make it with me and battled for the budget. I’ve been working on getting back in the game for 10 years and I had changed for the better. I knew I had to give him all of me, but if he said I would make the effort again, he’d get me an Oscar nomination.”
The process involved in portraying a wrestler included packing on 43 pounds of muscle and practicing flips and scissor-kicks for four months prior to shooting. Aronofsky kept the training intense, all the while keeping Rourke away from Tomei and Wood on the set. That way the actresses could maintain a sense of emotional discovery in their respective parts.“It was the hardest fucking movie I’ve ever made — physically and emotionally. It was the first time in 20 years I wanted to go to a wrap party, but I couldn’t get off the couch for four days,” says Rourke. “Darren wants all of you, like a football coach like Vince Lombardi — he’d push your buttons all week until you’re over-ready when game time hits.”
“You rarely if ever see a connection between a role and an actor that’s so perfect, and we had to get that,” says Aronofsky in a separate interview. “There was literally no one else in Hollywood whom I could see playing this role, and he dug deep to nail it.”
On this Friday evening, Rourke is calm and collected, his soft-spoken growl a far cry from his wild-man days of the 1980s and ’90s. With a rakish goatee that makes him look like a real-life Captain Morgan, it’s hard to tell if he’s managed to recover the once-striking good looks that added much to his bad-boy charmer appeal in cult classics like “Diner,” “9 ½ Weeks” and “Angel Heart” — looks pounded out of him during a several-year sojourn as a boxer fighting low-grade bouts in far-flung locales; from Argentina to Thailand, Georgia to Oklahoma.
What is clear is that he’s regained his movie-star swagger, as evidenced earlier last week when he entered a roundtable question and answer session with reporters wearing an outrageous fashion combination that only a supremely confident dude could pull off: a black suit with thick white stripes, key lime-green shirt with navy-blue stripes and a goldfish-colored vest to go with a sharp pair of boots. In the moments before his entrance, reporters nervously speculated about how he would look in person, since the film’s depiction of Robinson placed him under unusually harsh lighting that spotlighted every rough patch and scar on his body.
When he finally strolled in and eased his way into taking an immediate smoking break on a hotel patio, the room breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was clear that the man still “had it”: the inscrutable air of star quality that leaves strangers trying not to stare at his every move. And when he came back in the room, he held court like a seasoned raconteur, recalling his hardscrabble days of a youth spent on the streets of New York and Miami.
To the roomful of reporters on a Wednesday afternoon, Rourke depicted a tough childhood in which his parents split when he was 6 and his mother got remarried to a man who was abusive to her children. Rourke fell in with a rough crowd, studied self-defense training and eventually boxed his way to an amateur record of 20-7, including a string of 12 straight first-round knockouts. He also shared an unusual glimpse of what his life might have become if he had never considered acting.
“I was helping some bad characters collect money from gambling debts and one day I was sent in to rough up a particular customer,” he recalls. “Turns out it was a dwarf who happened to have a degenerate gambling habit. I tried pushing him a couple times, but then I just couldn’t bring myself to do beat up a dwarf. I quit and started acting.”
But speaking one-on-one Friday night, he also recalled the happier moments of his childhood and the significant role his Catholic faith played in his life.
“I grew up going to Catechism classes, and the early part of my life was in the Catholic Church. My father was very devout. He left us when I was 6, but I looked forward to Sundays as the days I got to see my dad,” Rourke recalls, happy memories lighting up his eyes. “I loved going to church with him, and we had our ritual where after church we’d get a bag of donuts, a quart of milk and sit on a stoop. You know it’s like you see somebody you know and respect, my father on his knees praying, I wanted to be just like him.”
When his mother got divorced, she joined the Episcopal Church and it was a decade before Mickey turned 17 and decided to return to Catholicism on his own. Despite his past battles with drugs and alcohol, and his still-ongoing predilections for pretty women, he’s rarely stopped praying since.
“If I wasn’t going to church, I always made sure I said my prayers. My younger brother got very sick at 17 and was given a short time to live, so I was told about St. Jude the miracle priest,” says Rourke. “My brother lasted 20 more years and I owe a lot of it to my faith and believing that my prayers helped my brother live as long as he was able to stay here. I used to go jogging 4 or 5 miles, and I’d continuously say my prayers over and over as I jogged.”
But just because Rourke was talking the talk with his prayers didn’t mean he was walking the walk of a holy man. Even at his peak, he purposely built an image as an outrageous outlaw prone to creating scenes, like the time he attended a meeting with studio execs with an entourage of Hells Angels in full regalia beside him.
He was also filled with self-loathing from his childhood abuse, with that being the prime factor in his decision to drop out of acting and get into boxing. The combination of bad behavior in Hollywood, bad film choices after his early string of classics, and newly bad looks from boxing and poor plastic surgery left him virtually unemployable.
The defining moment of his life came in 1994, amid a turbulent six-year marriage to former supermodel Carre Otis, with whom he had starred in the notorious soft-core film “Wild Orchid” in 1990. During their union, she got hooked on heroin, an addiction so fierce it resulted in her getting raped while disoriented from the drug.
When Rourke learned who the rapist was, he decided to take matters in his own hands and headed out with a gun in one pocket and a note in the other to explain his motivations in committing murder/suicide as a last act on behalf of his now-twisted sense of honor. He wanted to kill the rapist and then kill himself, figuring he had nothing left to live for and that his murdering the rapist would be an act of vengeance in Otis’ name.
Yet, instead of going through with it, Rourke felt compelled to enter one of New York City’s most famous churches — the Church of the Holy Cross near Times Square. There, racked with sorrow and doubt, he started to cry — and the parish pastor, Father Peter Colapietro, took notice.
“I reached a place in my life where living was living hard. I was at a crossroads. Because I was raised Catholic, I had issues with the dark side of life I was drifting in,” says Rourke. “I didn’t know this man, Father Peter. I just walked in his church one day, walked in the right door and met the right priest.
“I was ready to take care of business in a rather severe way and Father Peter talked me out of it. It was gonna be more than a punch in the mouth, and the guy deserved more, but Father Peter gave me the rap about where in the Bible does it say ‘Vengeance is mine, says Mickey Rourke?’ He really helped me because with this issue I wouldn’t have had a bad conscience. I’ve always had a conscience, I think that’s probably kept me out of prison by keeping me in line a little bit. But he took away my gun and had me leave the note with St. Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes. And he said that part of my life could be over now and I still had the opportunity to do things over again.”
Over the 14 years since then, Rourke and Father Colapietro have cemented their friendship, with Rourke saying his confessions in Colapietro’s kitchen over smokes and a bottle of red wine. Rourke has Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner at the church rectory, a tradition that will continue this year.
“He definitely is a man of faith and believes in God’s presence in the world,” says Father Colapietro, when reached by phone at the Holy Cross rectory. “He often wonders why he’s having this success right now and I say you’ve got the talent, and talent is a gift from God.”
For his part, Rourke is trying to ride the wave of new success that “The Wrestler” is bringing him while keeping a level head about it all.
“Father Peter called me to say congratulations about the Golden Globes and said he wanted to pray for me. But I asked him to pray for my dogs [he has six in lieu of children] because I’m a wreck thinking about them when I travel and have to leave them behind,” says Rourke, who admits women are still a vice for him. “You can’t pray to get an acting job or a nomination or an award, because other actors need those things too and you can’t expect God to play favorites. What you do pray for are the important things, like the health and safety of your loved ones, or for God to intervene in some of the really awful things going on in this world.
“You know, you can have fame, success and all the money in the world, but you can never take it with you. I believe God can reward you, but I don’t think he punishes you really. And those rough spots are the lessons in life. I wish I went with God’s plan 15 years ago, instead of mine. I’d be in a lot different place — but I’m glad to be where I am right now.”

FAME'S A BITCH (or the night I Roger Ebert ordered me out of a movie theater)

2008-11-25T17:15:00.000-08:00

FAME’S A BITCH

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be famous. Actually, it all goes back to the day when I was four years old and broke my nose by getting it stuck in the back bumper of a car.

I’d been riding my tricycle on a circular track behind my apartment building in suburban Chicago on a November 1975 afternoon, with my best friend Joey Paretti (who grew up to be diagnosed as a psychotic sociopath) yelling out his best Howard Cosell impersonation from the top of the adjoining playground’s slide: “Kozlowski’s coming around the turn! Go faster, FASTER, FASTER!!!” until I pedaled so fast I careened onto two wheels and spun out of control towards my fateful meeting with the trunk of a car.

I smacked into it, falling off my now-crushed tricycle as my face slid down the trunk and locked my nose into the crevice between the back bumper and chrome that most ‘70s cars had back then. I was trapped, crying, squealing for Joey to get my mom (like SHE would know how to calmly handle this!) and watching him run away through the tear-stained reflection of the chrome.

15 minutes later, Joey was back, alright – but instead of bringing my mom, he brought every kid in the neighborhood. And it was only thanks to the commotion caused by their laughing uproariously at me that my mom noticed something was wrong and came down to save me. Actually, she called the fire department to save me, by unscrewing the chrome from the bumper, and then made sure Joey’s mom gave his butt the pounding of a lifetime.

Sure, it hurt. And because I didn’t understand what the doctor meant when he asked if I wanted plastic surgery and I thought it meant he’d remove my nose and replace it with a plastic nose and mustache that looked like Groucho Marx, I shrieked, “NO!!!! No plastic surgery!” So I still breathe like Darth Vader and talk as nasally as Woody Allen more than 30 years later.

But I was famous! Every kid knew me! I was the talk of the neighborhood!

And on one writing day in third grade, now living down South in Arkansas, I reached deep into my eight years of living experience, and wrote the story of the incident and got to read it on what became my first standup tour – in which my teacher Sister Barbara let me read the story all the way from the first grade through the fourth grade classroom of St. Edward’s Catholic grade school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

You might think that my brush with celebrity status would have prepared me for my future life mixing it up with real celebrities as a performer and an entertainment reporter out here in Hollywood. But no, sadly, it has not. I’ve gotten caught following Hugh Hefner into the bathroom at the Comedy Store (I was just trying to shake his hand, I swear!). When guitarist John Mayer asked for my name when we met on the street, all I could reply was, “I’mareallybigfan!” and when I ran smack into Vince Vaughn at the Bicycle Casino, I said “Oh! God!!!” and he snidely replied, “Nope. Just Vince,” and kept walking. Modesty – how refreshing!

I also have narcolepsy, so I’ve fallen asleep in close-up in the studio audience on live national television during an episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” I also fell asleep while listening to star comic Carlos Mencia reveal the most tragic moments of his life while riding around East L.A. in his Mercedes for an interview. To complete the trifecta, I snored so loud at a live performance of “Death and the Maiden” starring “Frasier’s” TV dad, John Mahoney, that Mahoney actually stopped cold on stage and stared me down until I was removed from the 10th row – and then refused to be interviewed by me later! The nerve!

But nothing can match my encounter with Roger Ebert, America’s most beloved – and rotund – movie critic. The year was 1999, and I was back in Chicago and got an early screening ticket to see the modern cinematic classic (okay, atrocity) “Forces of Nature,” starring Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock.

I though that there would be just regular folk in the audience that night, that critics normally saw films in a secret screening room that kept them away from the hoi polloi as they rendered their judgments. But as I took my seat, stuffing my backpack under my chair that evening, I settled in for the film and immediately noticed a nice touch in the film’s sound design: See, in the film’s opening moment, Ben Affleck is visiting his dying granddad in the hospital and they manage to make peace as the song “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” wafts softly, spookily in the background – or so I thought.

But then the scene changed, and the music didn’t. I thought this was odd, because now Sandra Bullock’s character had the same song playing softly in the background, at the same level – and she was outdoors and all the way across America. But it wasn’t until the Sinatra tune was wafting under its third straight, unrelated scene that I and my fellow moviegoers realized something was wrong.

As the Chairman of the Board continued to sing and swing with a big band crashing loudly behind him, people started turning around and asking each other if they were playing the song. I turned and scowled at others, still unaware of my culpability. But as the song continued into its fifth scene and people are shooting me looks that are now twice as dirty in return, I feel a tap on my shoulder from behind.

It was Roger Ebert. And he was asking me one mortifying question: “Are you sure It’s not you?”

At that moment, my jaw dropped and I leaped from my seat – only to hear the Sinatra song CRANKing at full volume! I realized now that the music WAS in fact, coming out from under my ass – and my backpack!

I picked up the backpack like I was Bruce Willis attempting to hoist a bomb out of a skyscraper and started running at full speed up the aisle, people now turning and watching my every step as the song continued to blast away.

I burst out the theater doors, threw the bag on the floor of the lobby and emptied its contents at once, in a mass of papers, books, magazines and electronic equipment that made the Unabomber look rational. The music kept playing, louder than ever, while theater employees ran up and yelled out, “What are you DOING?!” and a studio PR person for the film practically started crying, “Are you TRYING to ruin my movie?!”

I yelled out “No!” as I finally grasped the tape player in my hands and managed to stop the recording. And as silence set in, I realized it was a tape I made earlier in the middle of an acting class, as background music for a scene study. I took the tape out and removed the batteries and then asked the crying studio guy if I could go back in now. He demanded to hold onto my tape recorder but let me in from there. As I shuffled shamefully back to my seat, I looked back over my shoulder at Ebert. He looked right back at me with a look that shot through my soul, and muttered ‘Thank you.”

The rest of the movie seemed uneventful by comparison; critics savaged it and the audience sat fitfully bored as it came to its turgid conclusion. That week, I waited eagerly for the Friday paper to come out, as I imagined I’d have to be an integral part of Monsieur Ebert’s review – that surely he’d have to open by writing, “The most entertaining part of ‘Forces of Nature’ didn’t happen on the screen. It was right in my theater…

But he never wrote that. And I still await my first glowing notice from Ebert.

Is he just a bum? Or a woman's beloved father? A Thanksgiving tale

2008-11-25T11:11:00.003-08:00

It was just after 9 p.m. last Thursday night, and I was walking past the L.A. Farmer’s Market on my way out from The Grove. I noticed a young woman, in her early 20s, standing in the doorway of a darkened optometry shop and calling out to someone who appeared to be just another homeless man in L.A.

“Come on! It’s Ok! Come inside!” She was calling out to the man, who sat in tattered clothes with a matted beard and a blank stare that seemed to indicate his mind had long since drifted away from there. She waved her hands insistently towards herself, as extra encouragement for him to get up and move towards her. But he kept sitting and staring.

I finally paused and asked if everything was OK. I’ve stumbled across plenty of strange and disturbing incidents in my lifetime, and have tried to help when I can. But instead of looking concerned, the young woman smiled readily and said “I’m OK. That’s my dad.”

I reflexively looked back at the man, who seemed to register a bit of embarrassment. The woman, though, could not have seemed happier and prouder of her old man.

“Really, it’s OK.”

I moved on, looking back over my shoulder as she gave up and went back inside to close her shop and the man stayed sitting outside, his gaze now locked in my direction. I felt like I had just intruded on an ineffably private moment.

And yet that moment nearly moved me to tears on the bus ride home. And it has stayed on my mind in the five days since.

The reason for that is that I feel what I came across was an amazing and pure example of human love and bonding at its finest. If that was really a young woman smiling through the difficulty of dealing with her sadly disabled father, her upbeat sense of dignity offered a lesson to not just myself but to anyone taking a moment to think about family.

Normally, it’s the parent who holds the door open in life for their children, welcoming them no matter what choices their kids make and how much they suffer the consequences. The parent raises the child and then steps in when there’s a real emergency, as the truest safety net a society has to offer.

But these days, as our society ages and the economy weakens, we see and hear about more and more families in which the reverse is happening: the children are taking in and caring for their parents. We hear about the strain of it all, both emotionally and financially. But what we need to remember is that in much of the world, generations caring for each other in both directions is the norm rather than the exception or the result of a dire circumstance.

And it is in moments like that which I saw between a young woman and her seemingly homeless but still loving father that we are reminded of the true power of family. We choose our friends in life, especially as we grow up and move out on our own. We can say that our friends are a second family to us, especially when we’re single. But friends move away and drift out of our lives, or can walk away for good when the heat of an argument becomes seemingly too much to deal with.

On the other hand, we don’t choose our families and who’s in them. We may not even have that much in common with them. But outside of the most horrifically dysfunctional situations in which one must part with one’s family in order to simply survive, we are bound together by a mysterious and inextricable link that lets us know we always have someone watching our back and someone waiting with a hug or a loan to get us through our worst of crises.

So this Thanksgiving, try not to hate on each other too much. Hold your cool, pass the potatoes, carve the turkey and remember that the people in your family surrounding you are gonna be there for you for the rest of your life.

TOLD YOU SO (Time and Washington Post admit they had a "disgusting" bias for Obama)

2008-11-24T09:09:00.001-08:00

FROM NEWSMAX, BUT QUOTING STRAIGHT-UP MAINSTREAM MEDIA SOURCES...

'Disgusting' Bias for Obama, Time Writer Admits
Sunday, November 23, 2008 5:40 PM

The mainstream media's support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign was so biased that even major insiders are now admitting they were shocked by its depth and depravity.
Last week, Time magazine's Mark Halperin called the media's performance during the campaign simply "disgusting."
Halperin told a panel of media analysts at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election, "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war."
He added, "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."
According to the Web site Politico, Halperin, who edits Time's political site "The Page," zeroed in on two New York Times articles near the end of the campaign that profiled both Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama.
"The story about Cindy McCain was vicious," Halperin said. "It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."
But the Times gave Michelle Obama red carpet treatment, "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is."
Halperin, a former ABC News political director, allowed that some of the press coverage simply reflected the extreme efficiency of Obama's presidential campaign.
"You do have to take into account the fact that this was a remarkable candidacy," Halperin said. "There were a lot of good stories. He was new."
Obama also had a lot of money and outspent Republican John McCain by more than 2 to 1.
The press never bothered to hold Obama accountable for reneging on his promise to use public financing. McCain kept his promise to do so.
During the campaign, conservatives criticized the pro-Obama coverage, but it had little effect.
Columnist David Limbaugh noted: "Never has that been clearer than in the 2008 presidential election, during which they are covering up rather than covering Barack Obama's shady past and alliances, his knee-deep involvement in corrupt practices threatening the very core of our democratic system, and his many policy misrepresentations."
Limbaugh noted that the press went into a tizzy over Sarah Palin's wardrobe, but ignored extravagances like Obama's "obscenely idolatrous million-dollar Greek coliseum mirage."
Now that the election is over, Halperin is not alone in admitting the bias. The Washington Post's ombudsman recently conceded that the paper’s coverage was skewed strongly in favor of Obama and against the McCain-Palin ticket.

DON'T GO (my history with the military)

2008-11-21T15:06:00.000-08:00

DON”T GO
By Carl Kozlowski

When I was growing up, my grandma always used to ask me “Are you gonna be a soldier like your grandpa? Or your uncle?”

Even when I was little the question was loaded with a strange sense of fear.

I had never met my grandfather, her husband, because he was killed at the Battle of Normandy in 1944, a few months after my mom was born. And the concept of a grandpa was almost utterly foreign to me because my father’s dad had also died, a few years before I was born.

My grandma and mother rarely talked about the man who had been taken far too early from both their lives. They proudly posted photos of him, grandma hanging a smiling portrait of him in his uniform on the hallway wall of her house, my mom with a smaller picture of her dad holding her as a baby, unaware of the loss that would soon alter her life forever.

Their silence about him was probably a side effect of time wiping away a painful history. My grandma would occasionally speak with pride of what a good man he was, how he loved to read the paper every Sunday and that I must have gotten my love of the news from him. But aside from that and asking if I’d be a soldier too, I’d rarely hear anything about him from her, and nothing from my mom. Obviously she hadn’t known him either, so what was there to say?

Instead, Mom was raised by her mom’s brother, a man known to her and us as Uncle George. He was a tall, skinny man with a sly grin on his face at all times, an average Joe from small-town Pennsylvania who loved to drive to the desert or on cross-country trips between California, his adopted home, and his native state. He had a joyful laugh and a surprised way of saying “What the heck is that?!” whenever he was presented with information he didn’t know before, his voice filling any room he was in and as a kid I loved to keep surprising him with the things I learned in school or on the latest National Geographic special. Yet under the surface bluster, there was sadness. He had found some purpose as a de facto dad and grandfather, but yet no work he could call his own.

He didn’t seem to smile enough on his own. He packed his garage with the detritus of decades gone by, especially auto parts and clothes, but he also had a camper he’d stay in despite having plenty of room in my grandma’s house, locking himself away from the world, his radio always fuzzily carrying a ballgame. He said he liked to sleep out in the camper, because it made him feel like he had more space and could always “get up and go.”

While I didn’t really know what he kept in there because he never let me see inside, my grandma’s adjoining house was an always fascinating mishmash of ’50s-era furniture, old paintings, older magazines and an attic that remained filled and unexplored by us until the days after Uncle George died in 2004. My dad, who was a Polish Catholic so devout he nearly became a priest – and never let us forget it – wondered if Uncle George was devout “enough” after he passed away, or if he was a Catholic by name only.

He got his answer in cleaning out Uncle George’s drawers in my grandma’s house – and found literally hundreds of statues, rosaries and other Catholic artifacts buried in every corner of every drawer, attic corner and closet shelf in the house. My dad was so overwhelmed with the sheer scope of the collection that he seemed ready to call in the Vatican to cart everything off. But instead, he did the traditional thing for religious icons and tried to bury them in my grandma’s front yard under her rose bushes – as people stopped to stare at the enormous ditch he was creating just to throw in religious figures and pins. I can only imagine the bizarre terror the next owners felt the first time they flooded their gardens and 20 giant crucifixes came bobbing up through the mud.

And it was in that camper that my uncle kept his rifle from WWII.

He only took it out once, when I was about six, and he wouldn’t let me play with it even. He held it with a sense of sadness and reverence that I didn’t quite understand. I just wanted to play “Let’s Blow Shit Up.”

My uncle was especially mysterious about another item he kept from his time in the War – hidden deep in his garage, he had a giant Japanese sword that he had either plundered from a site during his tour of duty over there or managed to wrest from a soldier he’d killed. I vaguely remember him showing it to me, just once.
“Now that’s not for playing,” he said sadly. “Run along.” Then it disappeared again, seemingly forever.

Of course we’re told that all soldiers are heroes, but we also used to be forcefed images of GI Joe the perfect American soldier who never got hurt and never could die. There was a world of difference between the toys I had and the GI Joe cartoons I watched and the heroic John Wayne movies that were in reruns on Saturday afternoon TV, and the sad life of my uncle who injured his hip so badly that he never was able to work after 1950 and spent the next 54 years searching for purpose outside of his key role in raising my mother.

He had enlisted in WWII and was sent to Japan. I’m not sure if he was on the firing line or how many people he killed, if any. I do know that he was part of the cleanup crew at Nagasaki after the US bombed them into the Stone Age with a nuke. He was sent in wearing only a gas mask over his uniform, and nearly 40 years later in the early ‘80s, the radiation he absorbed nearly killed him via internal tumors before a miracle killed them off and gave him a second chance at life for 20 more years.

But in knowing, even with no one willing to explain, that my Uncle George had been affected for more than just an injured hip by his time in battle, I always grew up with not only a sense of respect for soldiers but also a simmering loathing for those who send them to die.

What made him special to me and my siblings was that Uncle George was our de facto grandpa, since neither of our actual ones had survived to see us even be born. My dad’s father died a few years before our arrival, in 1967. But my mom’s dad died way before that, just after she was even born. He had died at the Battle of Normandy.

And so it was that I had this tradition to uphold when I was a kid, everyone expecting me to continue a family tradition of…well, of what I wasn’t sure. There was a world of difference between the adventure of war movies and the sad results of actual battle, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of it. But two or three other things entered into play that gave me a perspective that I suppose most young men don’t have.

First, my dad got a job as a doctor for a VA hospital because it was the best and easiest way to get re-trained as a doctor in English after emigrating here from Poland, helping veterans get the right physical therapy and prosthetics for their missing arms and legs. It was 1977, a couple years after the Vietnam War had ended, so he missed the brunt of the brutality visited upon the nation’s soldiers. He had been training in Chicago at another VA, and saw more horrors there, no doubt – horrors that also went unspoken. Instead, in Little Rock where I grew up, he dealt with the soldiers who came back from the “good” wars like WWII and Korea – wars which nonetheless shook men to their mental cores and just ripped them limb from limb.

At the same time, during his first two years on the job, we lived in a house on a row of 100-year-old homes that were set aside for doctors to rent if they chose to live on the hospital’s grounds. We were new to Little Rock, and my dad was so happy to finally be retrained in English and working again as a doctor after years of struggle that he just grabbed a rental house rather than spend another three months looking for our own place.

I couldn’t figure out at the time, in first and second grade, why even though I was welcome to go over to any of my classmates’ homes to play or for parties, no one else’s parents would let them come over to our house. Was it the fact that the house looked like the Addams Family lived there, or that it and the hospital were located atop a foreboding mountain just outside the city limits?
Or could it be they were scared of the mental patients who inevitably wandered onto our lawn from the main hospital grounds, in a daily real-life display of the Zombie Walk from “Night of the Living Dead”? Gee, I wonder. Hell, my mom even made us turn away from the window and we LIVED there! It seemed like a weekly occurrence that she’d have to tell us not to look outside during breakfast because someone was, and I quote, “watering the lawn” – and not using a pitcher to do so.

At least this kinda thing made life memorable. Our family would jaunt across the VA campus to the chapel building, where we attended Sunday Mass with the most colorful and boisterous congregation you could ever imagine. Joyous voices sang unto the Lord in incredibly off-key fashion. Sometimes the men in attendance – even when they were in the CHOIR! – burst into decidedly non-church songs as a joke on the priest and everyone in attendance. I’ll never forget the time I had to hear “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Baby” by Barry White during a particularly exuberant Communion line.

Best of all was James Keever, a man whom I was told was manic but who also clearly suffered from the flipside of depression. He was “just” a mental patient and therefore it was OK for him to go outside a lot or to get a weekend pass to stay downtown. Yet almost every time he spent the weekend elsewhere, the poor guy would come back depressed and explaining that he’d lost or been robbed of all his disability money and still had three weeks to go til his next check.

I was only seven when I met him, but I was instantly curious: where did he go every time he headed downtown? And how did he always manage to have such shitty luck? Did he keep retracing his steps every time, going to the same dumpy pool halls and the YMCA, where he was easy to roll?

I wanted to ask but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Instead, I harbored giddy dreams of adventure where I’d follow him around like “Harriet the Spy” and come back with a full report that would explain it all each time he returned to the VA with a missing wallet and a punched eye socket.

I was always grateful that my parents allowed me to consider men like James my friends, for it surely provided a more colorful living experience than the upper-crust suburban upbringings of my private Catholic-school peers. Living in a century-old mansion on top of a mountain surrounded by mental patients provided me with a perspective on life that I couldn’t and wouldn’t ever trade with anybody. I was alone at times compared to my classmates in normal neighborhoods, but I had my imagination and got to know some of the more coherent patients and learned stories of adventure and far-flung exotic women at age 8 that no kid should probably hear ‘til they’re 18.

I’m not laughing at James Keever’s forgetfulness or being robbed when I say he was my best VA memory “of all.” No, I’m referring to one very special Sunday morning when he took his usual position as the out-loud reader of the scripture readings, stepped up to the podium, opened his missal to read, and….had his pants fall straight down around his ankles. Thank God his underwear didn’t fall with it or I might’ve been scarred for life too. But nope his undies stayed on, and were the focus of attention for the next five minutes as he decided to finish reading the Scripture he was assigned to read, and THEN bent over and hiked his pants up after proclaiming, “THIS is the Gospel of the Lord.”

Eventually though, time moved on and my folks decided to move into a supposedly regular neighborhood, which was filled with its own assortment of odd ducks and odder behavior that I’ll share with you yet another time.

What really turned my heart and gut away from wanting to do anything involving the military was my high school’s JROTC program. It was basically an early propaganda and indoctrination program to make high school age guys think being a soldier was the greatest thing imaginable, in the hopes of either getting us to sign up as cannon fodder when we turned 18 or to continue training as officers in a cushy college program. Training to be officers who never had to actually be in the heart of battle, risking their lives and taking the chance that their little girl and her eventual children would never get a chance to know them. No, at least in JROTC and ROTC, being an officer was the greatest thing in the world – you got to dress up and learn how to order other people into battle to risk their asses for you.

Bitter much? You might ask. Well, yeah, actually. I got conned into joining my JROTC program because our student body president – the funniest guy I’d ever known, a real-life Ferris Bueller named Ramon Escobar – came into my classroom one day to give a sales pitch on the program and said it taught him lots of things about leadership. I should have known he seemed totally different in that moment, and not in a way I thought was good. There was not one shred of his humor or humanity on display, just this robot with his face, standing in a uniform and telling us that only the best students can enter the program.

I wanted to join despite my ambivalence towards the military and its effects on its soldiers. I mainly wanted to fit in with the so-called “best” students, to make up for my years in the social wilderness while living on the VA grounds. I wanted to be cool like Ramon Escobar after a childhood as an oddball outsider who lived in the strangest neighborhood imaginable. And besides, “Top Gun” was the hottest movie going back then – and in 1986, before everyone knew he was a Scientologist douchebag, who didn’t want to be like Tom Cruise? And besides, it fit in solidly with my reputation as a diehard Young Republican.

My parents were supportive but not gung ho about my decision. Maybe they could tell that I, their oddball creative son, would fit into ROTC like the proverbial square peg in a round hole. My dad was proud to work with and treat our American soldiers, but having grown up in Communist Poland, he didn’t exactly have the redneck passion for all things military that the other JROTC guys were raised with.

So I signed up, despite the fact I have two left feet and no coordination and an almost dyslexic sense of direction. Every time we were taught a new march I royally fucked it up. Even worse, though, was my ability to get my uniform ready for inspection. No matter how hard I tried, I didn’t see this little loose thread or that tiny piece of yarn breaking loose from a medal. And I had never polished my own shoes before the inspection – I was 15, and I’d only worn dress shoes to funerals and weddings before and my dad had gone ahead and done them for me. So I rubbed the polish into my shoes the night before inspection, but was so stupid I didn’t’ wipe it back out to a shine. Instead I showed up for school in shoes cloudy with polish and had dozens of my fellow “soldiers” (FINGERS!) laugh at me and purposely scuff my shoes with their heels.

Add in the fact I didn’t know how to perfectly polish the gold metal on my belt buckle, and the man in charge – Sergeant Shaffer, a stout and sarcastic fiftysomething man with a voice like a duck call, who took pride in saying the Marine Corps was the “world’s biggest cult and it’s my duty now to induct you” – found me immediately in the crowd of desperate first-timers and singled me out for humiliation.

“Kozlowski! What the hell are you thinkin’? Did you polish that buckle with steel wool?”

“Um, no sir.”

“And these threads? And… And..” Everyone was snickering around me a second at a time, until the sergeant shot them 1000-yard stares that said “You’re next.”

But the damage was done to my fragile psyche and even more fragile personality and self-confidence. I was starting off my first grade of the year in ROTC with the full disciplinary load of two demerits. My name was posted on the board at the bottom of all my fellow soldier classmates as if I bore the scarlet letter on a wall of shame. I empathized with all the names on there – guys who tried but just couldn’t be perfectly robotic enough. I hated parent assembly nights, where we had to march into the gym and stand at attention for 45 minutes to an hour , while awards were handed out to the best robot cadets.

I despised this, all the more when a large cadet named Robert Gibson couldn’t take the strain on his knees anymore and one night passed out backwards, hitting his head on the floor before a crowd of 500 as his officer cadet lifted him back off the floor and made him stand again rather than showing him an inkling of mercy.

It couldn’t get worse, I thought. But then came the day that my mom scheduled an eye doctor’s appointment on the same day as our first marching class.

Now, this was back in the late ‘80s, when eye doctors were still using the equivalent of leeches by dropping in horrible eye drops into your socket anytime they wanted to test something. Your pupils would be dilated like a drug addict on a three-day binge for the next five hours, leaving you blind if you stepped in front of any thing brighter than a nightlight. And this was the day that I was subjected to my first marching class.

Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. EVERY step, every move, every freeze, was off. I didn’t feel like I had two left feet, but rather 2000! And soon, the good sergeant was calling me off the blacktop to give me another display of abject humiliation in front of my peers.

“Kozlowski, what kind of student are you?” he barked.

“Um, A’s and B’s, sir.”

“Then why are you marching like a damn F student?”

I was afraid to tell him about the eye drops, not knowing if he’d tell me I was irresponsible in my timing for having had them that day. It was one of the few times in my life where I was really, truly stumped and lacking for words.

But at that moment, something clicked in me and I was determined to really show him up. My goal was that I would find SOME WAY to beat the point system, to overcome the negative demerits I’d racked up so far and get so many points totaled up that they’d HAVE to promote me anyway. Let’s say you needed 100 points for a promotion, and I was starting with -20.

I was determined to kick their ass on my terms.

For the next six weeks, I came in early every morning to work on my weapon. Yes, they gave everyone – even me – a weapon. Thank God it was decommissioned, but nonetheless, I had to oil it up, flip it around and smack it hard into my hands as I learned all my drills. Imagine getting a callous on your fingers when you’re learning to play guitar. Here you’re getting a callous on your entire hand.

I took remedial marching, asking older student “officers” to put me through my paces over and over again before and after school, and during lunch breaks as Shaffer stared from behind his sunglasses but never uttered a word of encouragement.

I scoured my uniform to make it perfect, learned how to polish my damn shoes, took remedial marching….but somehow I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

My ace in the hole was the clothing and canned-good drive.

For each canned good or piece of used clothing we brought in to the program for redistribution to the poor through the Salvation Army, l’d gain points towards promotion. I’ve always had an amazing knack to “sell” things, so I went crazy visiting door-to-door every single house in my neighborhood – my bright smile and cloying personality bringing home the goods from nearly every home I hit. .

I’m not kidding. I probably hit about 2000 homes over the course of a month, spending 6 to 8 hours a day on the weekends asking people if they would donate and arranging times to come pick up their unwanted crap. Sure, I could have spent my weekends playing pick-up games of basketball, watching MTV while downing Jolt Colas and Cheez Whiz, or learning to smoke like any other red-blooded American kid, but dammit, this actually meant something to me!

My mom was cool enough to back me up on this insane enterprise, helping me pick up all the goods in our station wagon and then to seal the stuff up in trash bags and letting me stack them in our garage until the day came for me to metaphorically shove it all up Sergeant Shaffer’s ass. I think she and my dad always wanted me to learn for myself that the military isn’t just a cool club to be a part of, but a sometimes necessary evil designed to break the individual will into a common spirit. Like Sgt. Shaffer said, it was a cult, and he was out to make us as miserable a poor fuck as he was.

And so I finally did, lowering the station wagon’s midsection to create one giant, stuffed-to-the-brim storage space stretching from the front seat to the back door and jamming in as many bags as I could. Then we drove it over to Catholic High, found Sergeant Shaffer smoking a stogie outside with his shit-eating grin (can you feel how much I hated this guy by now??!) and parked it right where we could kick some car exhaust up in his face.

As I popped open the back seat and took out the first bag, he slyly mocked my efforts: “Oh, so you brought a few goodies in for the poor, Kozlowski?”

I marched silently past him and dumped the bags inside. Then I came back for more. My mom sat in front, wearing sunglasses. You couldn’t beat her level of coolness that day.

Two more bags, stuffed to the brim, in hand and I was marching past that old bastard again. This time he just exhaled some smoke and coolly appraised my take.

Back again, and again, and again, bag after bag after bag, until Shaffer finally wasn’t smoking at all. He was just staring, and starting to look worried. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. (Hey, I was 15 then, and lived in Little Rock, what else did I have to be proud of?!)

Finally I gave my mom the all-clear to roll out and she thankfully didn’t call me over to kiss her goodbye and ruin the moment. I could stand tall as a man, savoring my triumph of good over evil.

I knew I had staved off my once-inevitable execution and garnered by promotion.

Maybe you can sit back and laugh at me, saying “Hey dumbass! That’s what Shaffer WANTED you to do! He made you work harder than you ever would have otherwise just to stay part of the military-industrial complex!”

But I know what was in my heart, and my soul, and my gut. I did that for every schlumpy guy who couldn’t get their uniform perfect, every klutz who couldn’t march right, and every cadet who couldn’t take standing at attention for an hour on end at some stupid performance night and wound up passing out and banging their head on the school’s gym floor (Hats off to you, Robert Gibson!)

I had not given Shaffer the pleasure of marking me as a loser.

And by the end of that year, I had been promoted two more times, making it 3 out of 4 quarters. I was assigned a position of relevance for the following fall, where I’d be in charge of others.

And therein was my real goal, and my real revenge.

For all that summer, I savored walking in the first day of school with my uniform folded up (in total regulation style of course!), marching up to Shaffer and handing it off to him, telling him that I was no longer interested in being part of his organization.

And come the first day of school, I did it. Just seeing that look on his face as he realized he’d been had was worth all the endless effort. I know I didn’t stop anything really, or shut the program down. In fact, I was just severely disappointed to learn on Wikipedia that school JROTC programs for teenagers nearly doubled in number back in 1992, just four years after I waged my crusade.

As the saying goes, someone would eventually do their dirty work. But this time it wasn’t gonna be me.

I suppose I could look back and realize I learned a few things from the whole escapade. I could say I took pride in my uniform, or the chicks were hotter for ROTC guys and came running, but none of that is true – at least in my case. Maybe they saw me march. I could have said I learned character, but I think I learned more by standing up to Sgt. Shaffer and refusing to be stepped on by him or anyone else in the program.

Two years after I graduated, the Gulf War started. I reflexively didn’t trust its motivations or President Bush’s claim that “this will not stand.” And as I was now 20 and eligible should a draft ever occur, my grandma was filled with worry as she asked that question again from my childhood: “Are you gonna be a soldier, like your grandpa and uncle?”

I didn’t know what to say. But now that the chips were down and was at least a vague possibility on the horizon of my life, she answered for me.

“Don’t go, Carl. Don’t go.”

PUBLIC NUDITY AND CLUNKER CARS (aka my most embarrassing baseball moments)

2008-11-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

I’ll never forget the night. It was May 7, 1991. . and it should have been spectacular.

I was at a Texas Rangers baseball game, with a group of 20 guys from my college dorm (I went to TCU). Our dorm manager had purchased group seats in the family section, which was the dumbest place to put a bunch of college-age guys because we couldn't drink or swear there, thus banning the two things that are most essential to having a great night out at a ballpark.

So, I'm in the second row behind the outfield wall. The rest of my dorm crowd is behind me. In front of me, is a group of boys celebrating a tenth birthday. To their right, still a row in front of me, is a group of hot sorority girls from our college. The night sky was a crisp black, the temperature a perfectly mild spring.

Now, this turned out to be a historic game, aside from what happened to me. In fact, it turned out to be legendary Rangers pitcher Nolan Ryan's record-setting 7th no-hitter, and the Rangers were playing the Toronto Blue Jays. When the 7th inning stretch hit, instead of singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," Rangers fans get up and dance a thoroughly ignorant redneck jig to a loud recording of a fiddle-based country song.

So I’m up and shaking my ass country-style, when all of a sudden...I feel a cool breeze coming from below and I look down to see that I've been pantsed!. Not just my shorts, but also my tighty-whitey briefs, all down around my ankles. I'm in the family section, with four ten year old boys and an entire sorority in front of me...When a virtual miracle occurs.

The boys are watching something on the field, intensely. The sorority girls are looking back but in another direction, along with most of the guys from my dorm. They're all watching a loud drunk guy getting arrested way behind us all.

So I make the fastest move of my life, and manage to grab my shorts and hike them up fast. I figure nobody saw me. Well, nobody but...First, one guy from my dorm, who yelled out, "Oh GOD, Kozlowski just stuck his ass in my face!"
That was the guy who, it turned out, pulled my pants down and was trying to get everyone to notice. And, another groaning guy from another direction, who it turns out is...
A cameraman from Canadian television. He's been filming, live, us wacky Texans dancing the jig and when I bent down to pick up my shorts, I MOONED CANADA. Yep.
Guess who's never been back to Arlington Stadium?

Now, for most guys growing up in America, baseball is a big part of their childhood. After all, it’s known as “America’s pastime,” Little League games are practically a rite of passage, and there are few bonding moments so powerful between a father and son as a game of catch or teaching your kid how to hit a ball.

I was another one of those millions of kids who loved the game, but like most things in my childhood, I didn’t get to experience baseball in any way approaching normal.

My dad was from Poland, a country half a world over and seemingly from the culture of a different galaxy far, far away. Growing up Polish in the ‘70s, amid a non-stop barrage of Polack jokes and ethnic slurs, was a nightmare – especially considering we were trapped in the illiterate, redneck South. So I took a look around me and figured that baseball seemed to be the great leveler, the one sport everyone watched in America. And it was because of that that I became a rabid fan.

We were living in Little Rock, a city perpetually stuck at about 170,000 population but nonetheless the biggest city in our state of Arkansas. Because the city was so small, we weren’t able to have a major-league baseball team, but instead had a AA ball club – meaning that our Arkansas Travelers were perpetually halfway up the ladder to the bigtime. We were middling and mediocre – and this was a fitting metaphor for our city.

But I have to give my dad credit. Even though he didn’t understand a thing about baseball, he took me to the games each year without complaint anyway. We made quite a pair, as I spent two years with a metallic leg brace as a kid due to the fact I had an insane growth spurt that my knees couldn’t handle and my dad would show up with his gigantic, 700-page medical texts and Physicians Desk References to read. Let’s just say that we not only drew stares but outright catcalls from the uncouth minions around us.

But we didn’t care. Especially not me. I knew that my dad was truly giving me the gift of time all those summer nights, and it was all the more precious because I knew that given a choice, he would’ve been ANYWHERE else than watching this slow-moving game he didn’t understand for three hours at a stretch.

Dad was both protective of me and yet open-minded as well. When I lucked out and won concert tickets to see the cheesy ‘80s rock band Foreigner when I was just 11, every kid in my school seemed to call and beg me to go. My dad was smart enough to realize that a couple of 11-year-olds had no business hanging out amid a sea of pot smoke and shitty music (this IS the band that sang “Feels Like the First Time,” folks), but instead of making me let the tickets go to waste, he popped in some cotton balls to his ears and drove me to the concert himself. There’s nothing quite like seeing the opening act lead the crowd in flipping off their bosses while my utterly unaware dad munched popcorn and asked what all the racket was about. The only thing he related to the whole night was cheering for the gospel choir that came out to sing “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” but at least he didn’t make me leave by taking offense to the band singing “Hot Blooded.” Come to think of it, why was I even WANTING to be there?

I’d try to explain baseball to my dad, but it was pretty futile trying to retrain a mind whose entire capacity for sporting events was wired to getting excited about soccer. I should have just explained to him that baseball and soccer actually have a lot in common: Scoring hardly ever happens, and people get WAY too excited over watching a 0-0 game. The only thing less fun in my personal history of baseball was the one pathetic season I played on a YMCA team and only got one hit in seven games, all of which we lost. There’s nothing like playing on an 0-7 team to shatter one’s major league dreams forever.

But we, like all too many of our fellow Travelers fans, had to find our pleasures in the rest of the ballgame experience. First, there was the drive over to the ballpark on a warm summer night, a jaunt through some of the most idyllic neighborhoods in the city as the sun began to make its way down and over the horizon for the night, shooting out colorful streaks of light in every direction as my dad would crank up the Oldies station and sing Beatles songs with me in an extremely heavy accent.

Sure, that cracked me up at the time, but it’s nothing compared to watching him now in his retirement – as he sports an oversized 10-gallon black cowboy hat, jeans, boots and a checkered shirt while driving with my mom up to America’s Midwestern, white trash equivalent of Vegas: Branson, Missouri. Singing along to country radio, Dad is known as The Polish Cowboy whenever he hits a honkytonk dance floor, with my mom in a long skirt as they hit the floor two-steppin’ and line-dancing. Only now, after more than 35 years in America, citizenship, a quarter-century as a VA doctor and the fact that the collapse of European Communism started in his homeland have all combined to give him a genuine swagger when he hits a club.

Back in the Arkansas Travelers’ Ray Winder Field, however, making a game special often required a ridiculous gimmick. There was Clunker Car Night, in which a local used car dealership would bring in its absolute worst pieces of junk and give away a car to an unlucky attendee between every inning. If you “won” and could drive the car off the ballfield and onto the street, it was yours for free, and for life. One woman’s car broke down at the first stoplight she hit and she came running back into the stadium, weeping, shrieking and looking for the head of promotions. Other nights, clouds of exhaust would fill the air as the engines everywhere seemed to burst into flames.

Another favorite was Captain Dynamite. This was an apparently insane, and likely shell-shocked, old man who would don an American-flag-styled cape, drag a wooden coffin out to the pitcher’s mound between games of a doubleheader with two blond bimbos, fill it with dynamite sticks while tying a detonator to himself, and then climb in and commence a countdown that would lead to his blowing himself out of the coffin. It was quite an impressive feat to all of us Arkansas kids, and always somewhat instructive to find that when he signed autographs, Captain Dynamite would always hear our names wrong and inevitably sign over to the wrong kid’s name. My dad, meanwhile, would try to hustle me along, fearing that I would be unduly influenced by the Captain and his crazy ways.

But eventually, I was old enough to go to games with my friends, and my dad gladly dropped me at Jamie or Steve’s house and switched to seeing movies with me instead.

The most impressive display of Captain Dynamite’s prowess came on what might stand – next to July 4, 1988, when Bon Jovi and Motley Crue both showed up in town to co-headline the Greatest Heavy Metal Show We Had Ever Seen – as the greatest night in Little Rock history. It was July 1989 when LA Dodgers’ pitching legend Fernando Valenzuela came through town while stuck in the California Angels minor league system while rehabbing from an injury.

When word got out that Valenzuela was hitting our fair city, Fernandomania struck in a way that hadn’t been seen even in LA in half a decade. Ray Winder Field legally held 5,600 people, but that night, the crowd swelled to 12,500 before the authorities finally got involved. Every seat was filled, every inch of the spillover grass behind the bullpen was mashed down by the butts of families sharing the Most Magical Night in the History of Arkansas Baseball, and then, yet, it still wasn’t enough!

They had to open up the warning track – the sacred dirt track that lies just in front of the outfield fences to warn outfielders that they’re about to hit the wall – for seating. This development was singlehandedly the most stunning thing I had ever encountered in a ballpark, because it enabled fans to sit ON the field, as close to the action as anyone in history could ever imagine. My friends and I immediately jumped the fence from our bleacher seats and ran across the grass to be part of history.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account that this meant rock-hard baseballs would be flying, bouncing and rolling directly at us all night. Having to duck and cover, roll and jump out of the way while having players cuss at us for blocking their path to the ball added a level of excitement and danger that were worth far more than the mere $5 we had spent on tickets.

And then, at the 7th inning stretch, in a stunning display of showmanship, the Arkansas Travelers general manager announced a special surprise appearance by…drum roll please…Captain Dynamite!

All I could say was “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!” I was 14 now, and thoroughly excited by this turn of events. I leaped up off the grass and started a rampage of fans headed directly for the pitcher’s mound. I wanted to get as close as possible to the Captain and check out his techniques from up front. It was like getting to see how Houdini escaped his straitjackets.

As the countdown began and I kept running towards Ground Zero, the ballpark announcers started warning us kids to “Stay away from the mound! Do not go near the pitcher’s mound! 5…4…3…” BLAMMO! I got knocked off my feet by the force of the blast and nearly felt my eardrums explode. The bodies of 500 other kids were strewn across the field around me, dazed but laughing.

“That…was…awesome!” I said, along with about 500 other easily amused 12 to 14 year olds.

That may have seemed the greatest moment ever, at age 14. I still go to games 10 or 15 times a year, wherever I’m living or visiting, picking the nights like Free Calendar Night when I know the odds are good that I can join in crowd pandemonium, making paper airplanes and shooting them through the air in defiance of ballpark regulations.

I sneak in beach balls and bounce them through crowds, leap up faster and higher than the rest of my row on The Wave, and sing the National Anthem as dramatically as Pavarotti. I sill drink a couple of brews no matter how expensive they are, kick my legs up and solve the world’s problems with my friends for hours, barely even noticing the game itself.

For I learned long ago with my dad that it ain’t about the runs that score or the double play. It’s about all the fun, crazy random stuff that happens on the perimeter.

And moments like that are why I will always love baseball. Even if the Rangers have banned me from their ballpark for life.

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY (It doesn't just happen to me!)

2008-11-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

FROM Americans for Limited Government (ALG)

Entering the Age of O-ppression?
By William Warren
“I certainly feel like they were trying to make me be quiet and trying to intimidate me and take away my free speech…That’s what really enraged me is that I thought ‘there’s a lot of people out there that if [the secret service] showed up on their porch, that’s exactly what they’d do—they’d be quiet’…I wasn’t going to be the one.”—Jessica Hughes, in an exclusive interview with ALG News, November 20th, 2008.
In the face of insurmountable intimidation and bullying from armed Obama lieutenants, Jessica Hughes of Lufkin Texas has remained defiant—like any good American who values free speech and views dissent as a patriotic duty.
Upon receiving a call from a local Obama campaign staffer, Mrs. Hughes unashamedly exercised her 1st Amendment right and voiced her disapproval of the Democrat candidate’s views. After promptly hanging up the phone, she was proud of her candor, never expecting to be punished for what she said:
“On Wednesday, the 1st of October, I received a call on my cell while in the car with my husband. It was a woman who identified herself as calling from the Obama Campaign. The phone # she called from was 903-798-6020 which I later discovered lists as ‘Obama Volunteers of Texarkana’ (Texas).
“She did not give her name that I can recall but identified herself as calling on behalf of the campaign and questioned ‘Will you be supporting Senator Obama on November fourth?’
“I had just spent several hours in the Emergency Room with my son who had a mild concussion and the call was on my cell phone so I was doubly annoyed. I know for a fact that I have never given out my cell number to any organization that could remotely be construed as supporting Barack Obama’s campaign. As those who know me can testify I am quick with my words and I responded curtly:
“‘No, I don't support him, your guy is a socialist who voted four times in the State Senate to let little babies die in hospital closets; I think you should find something better to do with your time.’ I hung up. There was no argument or exchange of words. I simply stated my two biggest problems with the candidate this stranger was asking me to support and ended the call. Both my sons who are 6 and 9 and my husband heard the call.”
The very next day, however, Secret Service agents came to Mrs. Hughes’ house to question her regarding alleged “death threats” she made about Mr. Obama during the previous day’s phone conversation.
Offended, Mrs. Hughes denied such remarks and cited her original comments which had nothing to do with any kind of death threats. Nevertheless, the agents continued to probe—this time even into her thoughts and feelings. In her personal account of the event taken from her blog, Mrs. Hughes explained it as follows:
“I told the Agent in no uncertain terms, “My thoughts are not pertinent to your investigation. This is America and the last time I checked I am allowed to think whatever I want without being questioned by the Secret Service.
“I asked the agents, ‘Where is the tape of this call?’ … They told me that there is no tape…I said, "So on the word of a ticked off Obama supporter you are on my porch with no other evidence and you want to question me about my thoughts!?’”
After hearing of her story, ALG News directly contacted the courageous Lufkin resident. In ALG’s exclusive interview, Mrs. Hughes delved into further detail explaining how the Secret Service agents’ main intention, she believes, was to bully her:
“I felt that the purpose of the visit was to intimidate me…to silence me and make me not voice my opinion. But really it just made me so furious I resolved to voice my opinion all over the country. I felt that’s exactly what their purpose was…to intimidate me and make me be quiet.”
Moreover, Mrs. Hughes notes that even after it was clear she never threatened Mr. Obama’s life, the agents went so far as to belittle her telephone manners and question her demeanor. Mr. Hughes said, “When I gave them the actual quote, the female agent sad ‘Oh, really…well, why would she make that up? What would she have to gain?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess she wasn’t happy about what I had to say about her candidate,’ and she said, ‘that’s right, you were rude.’…I was just shocked…she’s accusing me of being rude.”
Apparently politeness is now within the jurisdiction of Mr. Obama’s thought police, or thinkpol as Orwellian Newspeak called it.
And now, weeks after being intimidated by federal agents in the sanctity of her own home, Mrs. Hughes still has no answers as to why she was accosted, much less vindication. She does, however, carry an enduring Big Government stain. As she explained to us:
“The FBI was kind of enough to tell me the file the Secret Service has opened on me will follow me the rest of my life…
“I really find it disturbing that someone could make an unsolicited call to me on my cell phone that I pay for and have the power to send government federal force to bear on a private citizen at their home as a result of that call with no evidence whatsoever.”
Disturbing is putting it lightly.
ALG News also spoke with Jessica Savage, the reporter who broke the story in the Lufkin Daily News early in October. As Savage confirms, the Secret Service agents with Mrs. Hughes spoke—Special Agent Ricardo Zuniga Jr. and his partner D. Morris—have been identified and have not returned any phone calls. Moreover, both the Obama campaign and the Secret Service have refused to make any statement regarding the incident.
It is unclear if the Obama volunteer has been reprimanded or sanctioned for essentially filing a false report.
It seems as if the Obama campaign and the Secret Service would prefer this issue to just go away. But in the intrinsically defiant spirit of the first Amendment, Jessica Hughes—and ALG News—would prefer otherwise.
Unfortunately, punishing anti-Obama dissidence seems to be a growing trend in Lufkin, Texas. As the Lufkin Daily News reported Wednesday, a local school teacher has been placed on administrative leave over “inappropriate comments” allegedly made regarding Mr. Obama. The comments, which were supposedly overheard by a student in a school hallway, were reported to a parent who then passed it along to school authorities. Apparently it is acceptable for teachers to wear blue in support of Obama inside the classroom, but voicing a negative opinion about Obama outside of the classroom is grounds for indictment.
When informed about this latest incident, Mrs. Hughes was not surprised.
Lufkin, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The thinkpol has been on the march in other areas of the country as well. Missouri made headlines earlier in the campaign regarding “truth squads” the Obama campaign had assembled in the Show-Me State to “target anyone who lies or runs a misleading TV ad during the presidential campaign.” Prosecutors, attorneys, sheriffs and other Missouri law enforcement were all recruited to target these “liars” and essentially intimidate citizens from expressing any form of anti-Obama public discourse.
So much for free and unfettered speech.
If the Obama campaign’s utter disdain for any dissent—however legitimate—was not already evident enough, one needs to look no further than Mr. Obama’s very own campaign plane for some more convincing news. As ALG News covered in a cartoon, during the weekend before the election, reporters from the Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News were all abruptly kicked off Mr. Obama’s plane and denied any further media access to the Democrat candidate.
Curiously enough, the three newspapers have one peculiar thing in common—they all endorsed John McCain for president. It seems Mr. Obama jettisoned his pledge for “unity” along with the three reporters.
Nevertheless, if verbal threats, “truth squads”, and punishment weren’t sufficiently intimidating to Obama dissidents, then perhaps a night stick-wielding Black Panther clad in combat boots, a black beret and military fatigues might do the trick. That’s exactly what some Obama advocates did on Election Day while standing outside of polling places defiantly claiming to be “security.” And if Obama advocates, campaigners and supporters simply couldn’t do the job, Obama-critics should expect nothing less than the full force of unbridled government wrath brought down upon them.
Nothing bears testament to this better than Joe the Plumber—perhaps the biggest victim in the 2008 presidential campaign (although Sarah, Todd, and Bristol Palin would fit that bill as well). As previously reported, Joe Wurzelbacher, once an average American who dared ask Mr. Obama a tough question, unknowingly became a target in not only a personal smear campaign, but also in a Big Brother style government-backed investigation.
When he first made headlines in a McCain-Obama debate for exposing Mr. Obama’s affinity for spreading the wealth around, the left’s anti-Joe offensive began as a series of public mockeries and belittling. From there, however, it crossed the threshold from merely offensive to downright sinister.
In a piece written shortly before the election, ALG News detailed how Helen-Jones Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, had sanctioned a government-backed investigation of Joe Wurzelbacher’s private records in an attempt to dig up all kinds of dirt on the plumber. The Ohio Inspector General has since found that she acted improperly and has been suspended from her job. This is in addition to Joe’s tax and employment information already trumped up in the media.
Although Jones-Kelley claimed her investigation is mere routine, both her timing and campaign contributions say otherwise. The investigation was launched immediately following Mr. Wurzelbacher’s campaign debate debut and online records have shown that Jones-Kelley had donated the maximum allowed amount to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
As Mrs. Hughes duly noted in her interview with ALG News, “I think that the people who set this country up with a government that was supposed to stay out of our way and stay out of our business…would be revolted by [Government agents] coming to my porch and taking a collection of my thoughts on paper.”
Likewise, the Founding Fathers would undoubtedly be outraged over the great lengths to which the Obama campaign and his advocates in the government went in destroying an average American citizen who simply questioned a political candidate. Americans ought to be up in arms over this Big Government violation of personal privacy—although perhaps they fear “Joe the Plumber” treatment being subsequently wrought on themselves in return.
All in all, the 2008 campaign has been woefully defined by these insidious acts of citizen intimidation, dissent suppression, and privacy invasions.
And although Mr. Obama has not personally carried out these heinous acts, he has the responsibility to rein in his supporters—and his defenders—who, in his name, seek to exert wrath upon “rude” thought criminals like Jessica Hughes and Joe the Plumber.
If Mr. Obama refuses to acknowledge and condemn this anti-American and unconstitutional behavior, one should expect the culture of intimidation to not only carry into his first presidential term, but to thrive as well. If Mr. Obama by his silence sanctions this kind of behavior as a presidential candidate, imagine the role it will play when he is President.
As this culture of intimidation and suppression is allowed to proliferate, honest citizens like Jessica Hughes and Joe Wurzelbacher will be choked out.
And they will only be the first of many.
William Warren is a contributing editor of ALG News Bureau.

THIS ELECTION IS A JOKE (So have a few laughs)

2008-11-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

Jokes and raw comedic ideas...For the election. Then get off your butt and vote after reading this! I'm not endorsing by name, but initials: JM/SP.

I don't really have anything against Obama personally, but he wants to be leader of the free world with just two years' experience. You need five years' experience to manage a Circuit City.

Fine, McCain ruined the expereince argument in picking Sarah Palin. But rumor has it she's so hot she might do a porno if she loses. The slogan for it? "She'll do bipartisan, but not bisexual."

Joe The Plumber is gonna run for office when this is all over. His slogan? "This country's in deep shit. Isn't it time we called in the plumber?"

Bush needs a job now. I heard he's gonna try to be an English as a Second Language Teacher. But the school turned him down, telling he needed to speak English as a language, period, first.

I wouldn't even hire Bush as a Wal-Mart greeter. He'd just confuse all the customers: "What'd he say?"

Bush's autobiography is going to be called "Nothing But the Truth." It's two pages long.

That movie "W." came out and boy am I glad it's not rated X. Who'd wanna see Bush getting it on? Besides, he's fucked whole world already.

The $700 Billion bailout is ridiculous. We should just give up and start over wiht Monopoly money.

Come to think of it, we shouldn't vote for either McCain OR Obama. We should just elect the banker dude from Monopoly and let him twirl his giant mustache for the next eight years.

GOODBYE FREEDOM OF SPEECH (aka in the immortal words of Ice-T: freedom of speech, just watch what you say)

2008-11-04T13:37:00.001-08:00

Funny how Democrats get the credit for being the freedom of speech party because they're supposedly more Liberal and they have to be, right?
Yet it was during conservative Republican icon Ronald Reagan who had the Fairness Doctrine repealed during his presidency, in 1984. The Doctrine had said any time a conservative view was on the nation's airwaves, then a liberal one had to be offered - and vice versa. What it amounted to was a PC clusterf*** years before PC ever really became an issue, and forcing the airwaves to be blanded out "you said this, so I'll say this" level of programming.
REpealing the Fairness Doctrine opened the airwaves to much more free speech for everyone, liberals and conservatives. But it was the conservatives who managed to succeed, with Rush Limbaugh leading the way to become the #1 radio host in America. Meanwhile, the liberal network Air America, despite the star power of Al Franken (whom i love by the way) and Janeane Garofalo (also love her!), went bankrupt, restructured and barely survives if at all.

All this comes down to the pathetic fact that if Democrats can't compete economically, they'd rather just shut everyone down. Despite owning coverage of every TV news department outside of Fox News, they need to also dominate the radio. And they can't do it by playing fair and making their own money the way the conservatives do.

Nope, they have to mandate opposing viewpoints until the whole sound spectrum gets muddied down into bland nothingness. Have they ever thought that the reason Rush succeeds is because he's telling Americans waht they want to hear, rather than the anti-American crap so often spewed from the left? Have they ever thought the reason the New York Times is in danger of being sold to stay alive might be because people don't really want to read an anti-American paper?

Could the reason Sarah Palin and JOhn McCain drew record ratings on "SNL" mean that a lot more people like the two of them than the media would ever acknowledge?

Could it be there might be a surprise tomorrow morning? Could the media wake up shocked at the fact a different pair got into office than they wanted?

Maybe not. But for now, I dream of laughing at those who want to take free speech and laughter away from our nation in the so-called name of "Fairness."

THE ARTICLE I"M REFERRING TO:

Schumer Compares Talk Radio to 'Pornography'
Tuesday, November 4, 2008 1:27 PMBy: Jim Meyers
Article Font Size
Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer defended the so-called Fairness Doctrine regarding talk radio, telling Fox News: “I think we should all be fair and balanced, don’t you?”
The Fairness Doctrine, repealed during the Ronald Reagan administration, would require radio stations to balance conservative talk hosts with liberal ones.
In a Fox interview Tuesday morning, the Senator from New York was asked if he supported telling radio station what their content should be.
“The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air,” Schumer said.
“I am for that … But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.”
In 2007, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a close ally of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, told The Hill newspaper: “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”
Conservatives fear that forcing stations to give liberal hosts equal time on the air would cut into profits so significantly that radio executives would scale back on conservative radio programming to avoid escalating costs and interference from the FCC, according to The Hill.
They also note that conservative radio shows have been far more successful than liberal ones.
A recent Zogby poll disclosed that those who said they would vote for Barack Obama support reinstating the Fairness Doctrine by a margin of 53 percent to 37 percent, with 10 percent not sure.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

KEVIN SMITH MAKES A "PORNO" (aka My meeting with Kevin Smith!)

2008-10-31T16:01:00.001-07:00

The latest film from one of comedy's raunchiest filmmakers could be his breakout from cult status
By Carl Kozlowski 10/30/2008
Zach and Miri are two people in their late 20s who suddenly realize they've accomplished nothing since finishing high school. Coming up on their 10-year reunion, their lives consist of dead-end jobs and an apartment where the hot water and electricity just got cut off. Even worse, they're about to be evicted amid a harsh Pittsburgh winter and, after all these years of living together, they've never hooked up.
These are dire circumstances calling for unusual and immediate action. After encountering a classmate at the reunion who appears to be rolling in dough and admits to being a gay porn star in his own highly successful string of self-produced films, Zach takes it as a sign that his and Miri's way out of poverty might be to gather up their other impoverished friends, hold some auditions and create and market their own porno.
What could go wrong?
That's the premise of "Zach and Miri Make a Porno," the eighth and latest film by writer-director Kevin Smith. While the film is undeniably raunchy, it retains the central sweetness and emotional truth at its core that has been the trademark of Smith's fiercely observant comedies over the past 14 years since his debut indie-film sensation, "Clerks." More importantly, the film marks Smith's first true cinematic foray outside of the "Askewniverse," his term for the fictional city in New Jersey populated by many of the same recurring characters in most of his films.
In fact, by picking stars Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks and Craig Robinson from the talent stable of fellow raunch-comedy auteur Judd Apatow ("The 40 Year Old Virgin," "Knocked Up"), he's aiming to create a major comedy event that could be his first breakout beyond hipster cult status.
In an interview with the Pasadena Weekly at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Smith explained his decision to head to Pittsburgh and take some comedic and cinematic chances.
"When we finished with ‘Clerks 2' [in 2006], it felt like we're done with the Askewniverse, that I said as much as I can with this world. Now that that was done, I felt we were free to go anywhere and tell any story and I wanted to step out of Jersey -otherwise people are gonna say ‘he made another Jersey film,'" says Smith. "I also wanted to find the last place in the world where people would think to make porn, and Jersey didn't seem like it. I thought you can conceive of people making porn in Jersey, but western Pennsylvania in the dead of winter doesn't seem like a place where people would make porn at all."
Smith noted that he has been seeking to do a comedy set in the porn world ever since he finished the film "Chasing Amy" in 1997, but was inhibited by thinking that fellow writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson had made the "perfect" porn-world film the same year with "Boogie Nights," and he "didn't want to step on his turf."
Ultimately, Smith found his inspiration when he saw Rogen's supporting performance in "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and decided his solution was to "make a movie on the periphery of porn, where porn wasn't the main function but just color and background dressing."
As a bonus, Rogen's appeal as a "chubby," average-guy leading man gave Smith the sense he had finally found an onscreen stand-in for himself and helped him write the screenplay from a more personal standpoint.
"He didn't even know I wrote it for him until I was finished with it. I thought he might have gotten too big to do it, but five minutes after I emailed him to ask if he was interested in reading the script, he wrote back," Smith recalls. "He said, ‘When I first got to LA, my agent asked me what I wanted to do, and I said star in a Kevin Smith movie.' So he read the script immediately and got onboard."
While most of the film is straightforward, highly verbal and very funny, the actual dilemma of how to handle the central sex scene between Zach and Miri hung over the set throughout the shoot.
"It's always gonna be dicey, but shooting fake porn was easy because you've got naked people flopping around on each other, and in terms of shooting that sex scene between [supporting actors Katie Morgan and Jason Mewes], she does porn for a living and he's been pretending to do it since he came from the womb. Those two were totally game for it," says Smith.
"We put Seth and Elizabeth's scene in the last week of production so they spent a lot of time together and in case they had to take their clothes off, it wouldn't be as uncomfortable. It also gave me lots of time to think about how I wanted to shoot it.
"On the day of the shoot, I'm driving to the set to shoot that scene and I thought it's not about sex, it's in the connection they make and you read it in the eyes, not about the body. I told them, ‘You guys can wear all your clothes and I'm just gonna shoot your faces,'" Smith continues. "Before the moment of relief kicked in for them there was a moment of outrage. She was like why the fuck - she worked out six months to get ready for the big scene, and he was like, why the fuck did I shave my back? But then they were relieved they didn't have to do it nude."
Ever since his first film, "Clerks," in 1994, Smith has faced battles with the movie-ratings board, which often threatens him with a dreaded NC-17. The issues usually center on his raunchy dialogue rather than any onscreen sex or violence. With "Zach and Miri," he won an R rating through the ratings appeal process, without making any cuts. He attempted a detour into cleaner family fare with 2004's extremely underrated "Jersey Girl," about a widowed father learning to raise his daughter and find new love again, but he believes it will be a long while before he steps out of the R-rated zone of comedy again.
"No person or movie is ever one thing totally, so you want to make it multi-faceted as much as you can while still maintaining a balance of genres," Smith explains. "If they're looking for the romantic comedy that they heard this movie is, and they see a bunch of dicks and boobs in their face, they're gonna be like ‘Where the hell is the romance I heard about?' It takes its time getting there, and I can't say I know the exact equation, but I know it for myself. But as far as language, I want to write films that are real to the way people talk, and this ain't a PG-13 world."
A surprising twist in the battles over "Zach and Miri" came over its ad campaign, which the ratings board also oversees for all movies. In Philadelphia, the city refused to allow the billboards to be carried at all, while in Boston a child studies expert argued publicly that the posters should be taken down. After having several run-ins with the board over any depiction of the stars' actual faces or bodies, Smith and his team ultimately decided to put out posters of stick figures intended to represent Rogen and Banks.
"I find it disconcerting people have such a hard time with a word like ‘porno.' It's not like we actually slapped pornographic images on bus stops - you've seen the poster with stick figures. The poster is actually more text than graphics," says Smith. "But the point of the child studies expert was the stick figures get their attention and they read it and next thing out of their mouth is ‘what's a porno?' I got a 9-year-old. Who can't answer that question for that kid? They ask me, and I say it's a grown-up movie, not for you, you'd be bored anyway. Someday you may like it, but there's no Hannah Montana, Jonas Brothers, or any of the ‘High School Musical' cast, so you're not gonna give a fuck about it anyway."

THANK GOD FOR JOE BIDEN

2008-10-22T07:02:00.000-07:00

Every night i watch David Letterman run a clip of President Bush screwing up a speech. But what's worse? Stammering a little, or the types of things Joe Biden has done on the campaign trail?

Most of the following are funny, but I doubt Letterman will ever spend one evening spotlighting Biden's screwups the same way he has Bush.

One thing that isn't funny is Biden's insane lapse of judgment on Oct. 19 in Seattle, where he said if Obama is elected president, he will almost immediately be challenged with an international crisis that will test his strength and character.

"We're going to face a major international challenge," Biden said. "They're going to want to test him, just like they did John Kennedy. They're going to want to test him. ANd they're going to find out this guy's got steel in his spine," Biden said. He then asked the crowd to "gird your loins."

First of all, who says "Gird your loins" anymore?! What the hell does that even mean?! Are you running to be leader of the Spartans, or 21st century Americans?

And what kind of dumbass says that "if you elect my partner, the world's gonna jack s*** up"? As a very funny editorial cartoon says, John McCain should air that footage and say "I'm John McCain and i approve this message."

So, Obama fans, get ready, set and go gird your loins! You asked for an international crisis and shortsighted leadership, so you'll get it!

Meanwhile, other Biden gems include:

His history lesson how to handle economic crisis:
"When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed," Biden told the CBS Evening News on Sept. 22.

But Herbert Hoover was president in October 1929 when the stock market crashed. FDR wasn't elected until 1932, and television made its debut a decade later, in 1939.

He doesn't even trust himself in the job:
At a campaign stop in Nashua, N.H., on Sept. 10, Biden said Obama may have been better off had he picked Hillary Clinton to be his running mate.

"Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let's get that straight," he said. "She's easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me."

Arise, and walk! Heal thyself!
On the campaign trail in Columbia, Mo., on Sept. 9, Biden asked State Sen. Chuck Graham to stand up for the crowd. "Stand up Chuck let me see you!" Biden said to Graham - who is in a wheelchair. "Oh, God love you, what am I talking about. You're making everyone else stand up though, aren't you pal." Biden then asked everyone in the room to stand up for Graham.

Hey, nice gesture. But if I was in a wheelchair I think the last thing I'd wanna see is a roomful of hundreds or thousands of people doing exactly what i can't - stand- and call it an honor.

If a Republican said either of these, they'd be run out of America. A Democrat says them, and it's cute and gets rewarded with the job of VP.
When talking about his eventual running mate when they were still competing for the Democratic presidential nomination in January 2007, Biden said this about Obama to the New York Observer:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African American man who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."

He quickly retracted the statement, explaining, "Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I've been around," he said in a conference call a few days later. "And he's fresh. He's new. He's smart. He's insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the word 'clean.'"

And I LOOOOOOVE donuts, especially when served by Hindus:

In June 2006, at the outset of a run for the presidency, Biden joked on camera, "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

When the video hit YouTube the next month, Biden's office defended him, saying, "The point Senator Biden was making is that there has abeen a vibrant Indian-American community in Delaware for decades."

Yeah, right. Indians. In Delaware. Is ANYONE from Delaware???

The funny thing is, a completely unrelated story from England noted that Biden, who had 2 brain aneurysms in the past, doesn't ever reveal his current brainscan results when he has a physical (every other candidate gives out the info fully.) Makes you wonder if he's trying to hide the fact his brain isn't functioning at all.

RADIO IS A SOUND SENSATION (or how i stumbled into a show on the #1 talk radio station in America)

2008-10-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

This Friday night at 1 a.m. I am finally accomplishing the first step in a dream and launching a radio show that I'm cohosting with the two funniest mofos I know, Jake Belcher and Brant Thoman.
We've been working on demos for our show, "Grand Theft Audio," since December and have developed what the head of programming at KRLA AM (major LA radio station) said was "one of the funniest shows I've ever heard" and also praised as "I've never heard a trio of hosts work before, but that was fantastic." It's a funny talk show bagging on the news of the week from a NObama/largely libertarian perspective.
KRLA was our first choice for a show, and we were referred to them and were thrilled to share a station with Dennis Miller (not so thrilled about Bill "YOU follow traditional values, while I gamble away millions" Bennett, or Dennis Prager, Laura Ingraham and some other TOO-right people). But six weeks after meeting with the head of programming and getting our rave comments from him, and selling ads to get on, we got the rug pulled out from under us because a different station exec listened in and heard me describe Sarah Palin as "the hottest politician in America" and "she looks like a naughty librarian." Apparently the Christian audience of their Christian-owned station couldn't handle hearing such things. (I'm a Catholic and am stunned by this).
So we not only called a lawyer; we also called KABC, America's #1 talk radio station and wound up with an all-around better situation: way less censorship, cheaper airtime and SEVEN TIMES THE AUDIENCE!
So we record tonight and launch Friday at 1 a.m. with plans to be at midnight by January and onward and upward from there! Tune in to KABC 790 AM Friday at 1 a.m.!!!

MY TALK WITH SARAH VOWELL, NPR SUPERSTAR

2008-10-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

Sarah Vowell is one of the funniest writers in America and is also the voice of the "The Incredibles" character Violet and a star on NPR's "This American Life."

Check out my interview with her, about her new book "The Wordy Shipmates" here: http://famousfunnypeople.blogspot.com/2008/10/feeling-kinda-wordy-with-npr-superstar.html