Handbill Handout

People of Earth, I need your help. I am a cultural illiterate. There, I said it. More specifically, I am television illiterate. It's not that I don't watch countless hours of TV a week. I do. The problem is it's almost all sports, food shows, travel shows or music programming. Here in America, we just had two happenings of epic cultural significance about which I was clueless. The first was the final episode of that show about the desert island and I was asking people questions about whether or not the Harlem Globetrotters came by or if the Professor finally built a boat because God knows he could build anything else out of freakin' palm trees. Apparently, this was a different show. Then the next night I heard some big spy show was going off the air and I started asking about whether they ever figured out the Cone of Silence and what happened to Hymie the Robot. Again, it was the wrong show. So tonight I have the Yankees game on and they go to rain delay and what ...

It was a chill grey morning, the kind of morning the guys on the morning news console you about by saying “Sure it’s below the seasonal average but we’ll warm up for the weekend!” as though that makes you any less prone to miserable shivering when you walk out the door today. The bus rolled onto the bridge and I noticed for possibly the first time a sign that said “You Are Not Alone! 24 hour phone booth 50 feet ahead!” That’s cool, I thought, they put in a phone line so you could talk to aliens. Space aliens that is, not the Earth-dwelling kind they hate in Arizona. Weird place for it but hey, if they opened that sort of thing up to the general public who knows what kind of panic might ensue. Then I realized we were getting on a bridge so what the sign was really saying was “Don’t Jump and Screw Up Everyone Else’s Commute, As Soon As You Pull Over To The Phone Booth A Cop Car Will Race Onto The Bridge and Scoop You Up As A Suspected Terrorist”. Honestly friends, do you think ther...

You would've been 80 today. Sometime today, I don't know when but you always were one to note the exact time of birth on top of the date. Mine was 1:25pm, or 1:27pm or something like that. Been a long time since I bothered to check. You're the only other person who would know or care anyway. Instead of 80 you're minus ten in my reckoning, ten years gone that is. Ten years ago today your body lay in a rehab center a short walk from a SIR stop and you were oddly surrounded by silver balloons and stuffed animals and gifts that you would never see because, well, your brain had gone without oxygen for too long the January before but your body being a stubborn kind decided to hang around for a while digging its heels in figuratively and literally on the bed until you wore the skin off the back of your heels right before you finally did give up the ghost as we were trying to decide if we should let the doctors start hacking off pieces of you to act as heralds to the next world...

I'm stealing a transcription from another website just in case that site ever goes away because I think it's worth keeping around. Below is Vin Scully eulogizing Ernie Harwell while doing play by play. Vin probably knows he's the last of the old breed now, the last of the baseball broadcasters who aren't self-promoting hairdos trying to show off their big voices or the overly analytical analysts who turn baseball into an exercise in algebra. He is the last of a generation that tried to tell stories because one of the great joys of the slow pace of baseball is (or rather should be) the time to breathe and enjoy the weather and tell stories in between play. Those old school guys are (were) the sort of people you (or I, anyway) would want next to you in some minor league park somewhere shooting the breeze on a lazy afternoon. Anyway, thanks to whoever runs this site for transcribing this. "I have a problem and I hope you will understand and bear with me. One of ...

When it gets hot like it does at this time of year you know what I’m talking about, that first blast of heat that surprises you because a week ago you were by the water feeling the final exhalations of winter as that season dug its fingernails into the shore as it was slowly pulled out and under and away to the Southern hemisphere to go bother the Argentineans or whoever it makes me feel like a bug caught in the glare when you first turn the kitchen light on completely exposed and vulnerable to that horrible wearing heat that is to come. It also makes for a good day (or actually hour) for driving around to old haunts so you can stare and go “that wasn’t there, that wasn’t there, where did that go? And that? Oh yeah I knew that was gone. Oh right that too. Holy crap there’s nothing there at all now!” Maybe there is something to that idea of leaving the place you grew up to go elsewhere. That way when you go back home to visit (if you ever even bother) and everything’s radically differen...