Daniel-San Politics

Pat Morita once told me the following sage bit of advice:
"Man walk on road. Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk down middle, sooner or later, get squished... just like grape."
The crazies on either end of the spectrum get louder every day...
On the extreme right, we're being told today that Spongebob Squarepants is gay and will damnably burn forever, at least as soon as he leaves that Pinnapple Under the Sea which Satan is finding not very combustible at all.
From the extreme left, it's a nationwide strike for France, where unions can't stand the idea of work weeks longer than 35 hours.
And I'm not even going to touch the real, scary news. At least not until Pat teaches me how to punch.

News Flash

As you may or may not be aware, there is a fast-circulating rumor that Fitness-Celebrity John Basedow, of 2 min. spot TV commercial fame, has met an untimely end while vacationing in Phuket during the recent geological tumult. (See press releases.)



However, for the last two weeks, his well-oiled body and too-large head (see Alexander post re: bad dye jobs) have continued to terrorize broad swaths of basic cable programming. The huckster appeared on television in October more than either presidential candidate, and the campaign has not wavered in the slightest despite his purported demise. I began to grow suspicious; was his final wish really to have twin legacies, one targeting a double threats to our fat reserves and another as a target for the acrimony of 20something humor for the rest of non-Tivo history? Or were the purported internet news stories perhaps more Jayson Blair than New York Times...

Seeking answers straight from the chiseled jaw of the horse's mouth, I braved the www.fitnessmadesimple.com website. Between inspirational Basedow quotes and convincing pitches for nutritional/workout videos, I found the following IMPORTANT NOTICE:


Tom Friedman frequently describes how people are fooled into believing what they read "on the internet," because it comes with the rubric of credibility and science. I would always think "oh, you silly little Indonesian children." But now I understand what he means. When it's something you want to believe anyway...

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.

Love That Dirty Water...

The dry air of the Northeast winter has killed my tan. The skin is going to all peel off, and I'm a little upset about it. So I made the rational choice-- booked a ticket to Miami for the long weekend in February. Only to keep things true to my style, I first made sure to get the weekend wrong, and actually book my ticket for the week before the long weekend. Thanks to that little clerical error, I now get 3 long weekends in 4 weeks, or as the rest of the world would call it, a french calendar. I've never been to Miami (phonetics: mee-ah-mee), but my friend Hugh stopped there during his drive from Texas to Boston, apparently because it was on the way, and said I will love it and to bring lots of pastels. Right now I think my only pastel accessories are in my bottom drawer at home in Massachusetts-- a little plastic bag filled with colored elastic bands I would use to decorate my braces from grades 6-8. And they say the early teen years can be awkward. Ha!

Spent the weekend in Boston to catch a show of some high school friends and then play designated driver for my brother and pals out of Cambridge, the official host city of the DUI Olympics. On the iditerod back to the car from the club, we were accosted by a man who accused us of stealing his pizza, passed by three 50something women and a black guy who was either gay or a very low-rent pimp all arm in arm and badly singing Jackson 5 "ABC", and a man who had managed to open his car door but got no further before needing to lean against the frame and relieve himself on the inside of his own door, keys still in the lock.

And the football was everything I expected it to be. Pats-Steelers party this Sunday will be the one-year anniversary of the drunkest I've ever been in New York: the all-night sloshfest at Zum Schnider after the Colts win last AFC championship that found me in on the LES frozen stuck to the sidewalk by the beer that had been poured down the front of my pants. I remember throwing up on a red car and landing in a trash can with my pants off, but not much else. Go, Pats!