Island Packet — Despite what I’m sure it looks like to people with real jobs, it is not easy to come up with funny ideas these days, especially in a writing landscape where anyone with an inside-joke phrase and a working knowledge of the Bloggers can more or less become a published columnist, circumventing the old methods of getting published, which was either getting someone in management super-drunk or waiting until everyone else on the copy desk had gone home, and surreptitiously swapping out some other loser story with your column, and then, the next morning, acting all like, “That could have been anyone who put my extremely handsome mug shot on there, I AM NOT GOING TO STAND FOR THIS INTERROGATION!”
But in what may be a historic first for this column space, I’m going to be perfectly honest (although I’m pretty sure Farrell was honest in her piece about screaming at the checkout dude at Publix, which, by the way, shame on her): It has become more and more difficult to think of Funny Column Ideas with the soothing regularity to which my readers have become accustomed, and by “readers” I mean my Mom and the folks who scour each line looking for anti-Rush Limbaugh jokes looking to write blog comments about, such as this one: Rush Limbaugh sweats canola oil, rocks 38 lbs. of neck fat and bleats feeding-trough noises like the Walrus Man who mouth-snorts at Luke in the “Star Wars” cantina scene. No, Rush, I don’t like you either.
This is the flag of Slovakia. Get nice and familiar with it, Medal Podium.
GateHouse — I don’t write about sports very often, which is too bad, since we as a nation are running pretty low on providers of completely superfluous sports commentary (maybe we can get some of you guys on a cable TV show or something), but nevertheless I am here to report the SPORTS SHOCKER OF THE WEEK, one which will melt your face, light your mustache on fire and make it seem like you’re being punched in the tongue by Terry Bradshaw. Before you read further you may wish to sit on something concrete and put on a welding mask. (You should probably do that anyway, as swine flu is caused by the radiation that comes out of computer screens, obvs.)
Here we go: Last Saturday, the U.S. men’s national “soccer team,” which according to my research and the Internet computer machine has been around for like totally a bunch of years, lost to the nation of Slovakia in soccer, or as they call it overseas, “football, the wildly popular sport that many Americans believe to be totally boring although many of them watch baseball, things Charlie Sheen is in and movies about vampires in high school.”
The final score of the U.S./Slovakia throwdown: 1-0. ONE TO NOTHING, because when the U.S. takes on Slovakia in anything it’s always a shootout. As per Slovak custom, the afterparty was held at the White Castle in Whiting, Ind. Needless to say, the Knights of Columbus served as the hotel lobby.
This image contains information about the apocalypse, or something.
Island Packet — ‘What do you think about this 2012 madness?” Paul Mitchell asks me via the newsroom’s instant-message system earlier this week. Paul Mitchell is a line of high-end hair care products, but he also is an actual human person who works in the newsroom. At one time Paul, being of a considerably younger vintage, failed to correctly identify Bruce Springsteen on the television. Illogically, we’re friends anyway.
The movie looks like silliness, I reply, but on the other hand, “Independence Day” was a pretty great movie in which many objects were indiscriminately exploded, such as the White House and Lone Star from “Spaceballs,” so it might be fun.
“Not the movie,” Paul says, an icy fear creeping noticeably into his online voice. “All I gotta say is I’m panicking if that mess comes my way in three years.”
Paul was, I surmised, referring to the Mayan prophecy that says the end of times will take place in the year 2012. It’s also the hook of “2012,” a new movie by destroyed-landmark fetishist and director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow”) that stars John Cusack, both of whom, it turns out, appear in a strong percentage of Mayan prophecies. In their lore, Cusack is actually immortal.
This sort of satisfying and blurry resolution will never take place at my house.
GateHouse — All I wanted was cable. Silly, empty cable. All I wanted was to establish a new service, to have the cable company ship over a guy named Ray in an aging van to plug the one wire into that box thing and have that be that.
This is what I desired and believed possible, having completed this quest successfully many times over the years. Time was, this was not a terrifically difficult proposition, because cable was not a terrifically difficult thing. You called, the van rolled up, and before too long you were granted glorious ESPN and magnificent Comedy Central, and with any luck the guy neglected to flick the “Scramble Up The Cinemax” switch, which totally happened to us a couple times in college, and I don’t need to tell you made us feel basically like we were Charlie Brown and we had just kicked the living hell out of the football.
Well I hope it's a long wedding, because it's going to be a short honeymoon.
Island Packet — Have you ever actually sat down and read the instruction manual to a Black and Decker 12-cup coffee maker? I mean, ever really taken it in, absorbed it deeply? Because it’s phenomenal, and not just because it apparently wields the power to score you one hundred thousand dollars. AMERICAN dollars! Which I know is worth about $3,550 now, but it’s still cool.
I don’t think I’d ever truly considered the possibility of receiving buckets of cash because of an appliance until last week, when I broke the carafe on my old coffee maker by placing it in the dishwasher in a manner that apparently caused several hundred pounds of force to be applied to it mid-rinse cycle, because when I pulled the thing out of the dishwasher there was a giant angry-looking crack in the side of it, staring at me, judging me, mocking me.
No, it is not often that I believe I am being personally made fun of by beverage containers, with the exception of the time that 24-pack of Dr. Pepper made fun of my popped collar, but this particular carafe and I had a very close, intimate relationship, as we were basically the first item the other greeted in the morning for many, many years. Frankly, I think it got tired of having to serve me every day, and killed itself in the dishwasher, probably with a wet fork.
GateHouse — As is generally the case with most critical holidays, the important negotiations regarding my Halloween took place in a Target — specifically, in the throughway between the G.I. Joe toy aisle and, if I am not mistaken, Dish Soap, categories that pretty well illustrate my own journey through life thus far, come to think of it.
Over the previous weeks, the Little Man had whittled his list of costume ideas from approximately 3 million down to two: Spider-Man, which had been his costume for the previous two years (one that allowed him to save a great many neighborhood children from harm, despite bumping into all manner of wagons and mailboxes due to an unfortunate incompatibility between mask size and his face), and Train Engineer, which, as anyone who knows the Little Man will attest, is a costume of crucial importance, because the Little Man has very literally not discussed anything other than trains since April 2006.
Jake "The Snake" Roberts, who could put an end to this whole thing in about two minutes.
Island Packet — Well, everything seems to be under control around here. Swine flu is getting good and vaccinated, at least among you chirpy, vivacious Younger People. Windows 7 is out, giving us Mac people another great many reasons to direct smug, self-important smirks at each other (try it, it’s fun). The Balloon Boy’s weird parents will soon be given over to torture, as they should be. Yep, everything would be pretty much as solid as could be expected, were it not for the small flotilla of behemoth Burmese pythons slithering their way from Florida to the Lowcountry to devour us all.
Now, unless you are aficionado of Celtic music or belts, there’s really no upside to learning that many thousands of snakes are en route to your town, and yet this may be the case, according to a story last week that has inexplicably not caused residents to scamper chaotically into the streets with curlers in their hair, slippers on their feet and mad rictus grins of horror frozen on their faces. Because, and I want to be absolutely clear on this, SNAKES ARE COMING TO KILL US ALL. You guys have your little slap-fights on the blogs about health care or whatever, I’ll be moving all my essential documents, potable water and slow, chewy smaller dogs to the top floor.
Island Packet – I am not a very good-looking woman, which I think is the primary reason I’m having trouble coming up with a decent Halloween costume this year. (It’s also the main reason I kept getting turned down for sororities, not that I’m still bitter about that, stupid Zeta Tau Alpha, I hate you so much.)
Indeed, if you have visited any costume stores lately, you might have noticed that they look less like costume stores and more like places that Britney Spears might shop, if she could stay sober long enough to park the car. Costume stores these days feature an irrationally large percentage of rack space devoted entirely to Sexy versions of average things: Sexy Nurse, Sexy Doctor, Sexy Soccer Player, Naughty Navigator, Sexy Mountie, Support Our Troops Sexy Adult (really), Sexy Wilma Flintstone (I can send you the link to these if you want). One newsroom staffer reported stumbling across a costume for a Sexy Cab Driver, which is, of course, something that has never happened in the history of the human experience. (However, if it does happen, I suggest immediately that we cancel Halloween and institute National I Found A Sexy Cab Driver Day, which we could commemorate by briefly increasing the national speed limit to 200 mph and growing splendid beards.)
How is it possible that I am in the positive of decrying people who hate the Bee Gees? Effing Cheney.
GateHouse — So it turns out that using music as a means of torture – which is an idea that all music fans have entertained, if not implemented, many thousands of times, mostly depending on how long they’ve been in high school and how many Color Me Badd tapes they currently own – is considerably less funny when you learn that music has actually been used to, what’s the word, torture people.
Like Will Ferrell movies and the third “Ghostbusters” sequel, music torture is funny only when it’s theoretical. Or it’s funny when you’re maybe in the seventh grade and your cousin has this Debbie Gibson cassette that she’s preposterously obsessed with and will not remove from her candy-pink Service Merchandise-model jam box, no matter how many times you beg and plead with her to play something different for a change, something awesome, like the Fat Boys.
But when it’s used as torture torture, not just torture – that reads funny but is actually exactly how the Bush administration described it in memos — the wacky aspect sort of evaporates. Yet that’s what happened in the early part of the century, part of what were previously dubbed with barely contained giddiness Enhanced Interrogation Techniques(TM) at Guantanamo Bay. (The word “enhanced” there always bothered me, because it always connoted to me some sort of progress was being hinted at, like, “Look, we’re using much more conductive wiring now.”)
Island Packet — For a number of extremely appropriate reasons, the music of Social Distortion serves as a particularly effective antidote — or at least an accompaniment — to adolescent-era small-town near-panicky Friday night restlessness, which is why theirs was generally the first cassette Aaron Bradshaw would snap into his tape deck on our regular, mostly pointless semi-excursions into northwest Indiana nights (usually the one with “Ball and Chain,” the band’s definitive kiss-off to a tortured relationship that either of us would have sold the other out for without a second thought).
Mixing Springsteen’s factory-overalls ethic with Southern California punk energy and outerwear, Social Distortion boiled all the wordiness and loftier ideals out of “Born to Run” and redrew the map so the highways all ended basically in the same town they just left. And they did it with a metaphorically impeccable chain of iconic dusty punk images, ideas and inventions: the albums had names like “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell,” they cooked Johnny Cash songs into fiery punk rave-ups and they starred singer Mike Ness, a mess of tattoos and broken-down proclamations whose voice sounds like he’s dragging it behind the truck on a chain. (“I’m a Cadillac tramp at the end of the road/I’m a guitar gangster without a tune” — damn right you are!)
But in the 30th year of their career, Ness and Social Distortion have managed to do one of the most un-punk things you can do these days: They failed to burn out. They’ve never become obsolete, never released a single featuring a rapper and never transmogrified into some sort of Frankenstein monster riding the rails powered by scrap parts and nostalgia T-shirt sales. This year alone has seen Ness turn up at a Springsteen concert in California to do one of his own songs (“Bad Luck,” see below); the band leaves Hilton Head Island to open for Pearl Jam for two nights in Philadelphia alongside fellow enduring punk godfathers Bad Religion.
“It’s still a rush, no matter what, when you’re walking out there,” Ness said by phone last week from New York City. “You spend the whole day sometimes toiling, and you walk out there and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah. This is why I’m here.’ ”
Stumble It!