Handbill Handout

It is Monday night, and I am walking down 47 th street heading for the R train after another great day at the office. Broadway is an undulating mass of pedestrians and I can’t figure out why. It’s Monday, not matinee Wednesday. Then I look in Sbarro ’s and see a line of people stretching out the door and it hits me. The New Year’s tourist army has already arrived. Yes, there they were lining up for their authentic New York pizza experience at a chain joint in Times Square. Well, I suppose one person’s authentic is another person’s fraud, and in any event the pizza at that Sbarro ’s is still probably better than the local Papa John’s or Domino’s that they order from back home. Location lends a bit of credibility too; why I remember rushing to visit the Howard Johnson’s that was right across Times Square from that very Sbarro ’s when word came that it was closing. HoJos . The very symbol of the generification (and yes, I mean " generification ", not "gentrification"...

“A what?” “A ranker. A top 10 or 20 list” “You’re bereft of ideas” “I know” “You’ ve only been doing this for what, nine, ten months and you already don’t know what to do with it.” “Pretty much. And I just did the Facebook thing, so that’ll eat up my online time.” “How’s Facebook going to teach you how to write? How are you ever going to learn anything there?” “It isn ’t, but maybe I’ll learn how to raise Llamas for fun and profit. I hear they have farming courses there. If I can learn how to make money farming, I can quit the rat race and do something fulfilling so I won’t have to inflict myself on the unsuspecting internet anymore” “You moron, those are VIRTUAL farms. There’s nothing to be learned there.” “Oh. So why the hell am I doing it?” “A lot of your friends and family are there. If you communicate via that site you don’t have to call anyone in your family and when you’re at the curling club nobody has to talk to you and you can just watch the hockey games because th...

This morning I wandered into the living room and turned on the television in search of some white noise wallpaper to fill the air while I went about making coffee, tidying up from the night before. Since I recently got upgraded to free HD via my cable company, I decide to put on one of those Discovery Channel stoner -TV spectaculars, "Sunrise Earth". The episode was allegedly supposed to contain Elk wandering about a nature preserve in California. Only problem was, every time I looked over at the TV for the first 15 minutes of the show there were shrubs and cliffs and water and sunrise and no animals. The reason struck me out of the blue. Of course, I said to the Mrs, it's seasonal programming. You know: "No Elk No Elk Noooo Elk No Elk We can't find any God damned Elk" A nice touch on their part. I salute you, Discovery programming people! Oh, and I know what happened to the elk. PBS's "New Scandinavian Cooking" today is featuring...wait for...

Thanks for one of my favorite Christmas stories .

It may come as a surprise to those who know me as a middle aged skeptic (some call me “bitter”), but I was a very credulous child. A true believer. However once one gets to a certain point in kid-hood one becomes doubtful about certain things like the existence of a certain, non-Krampus Christmas figure. It seems silly not to believe nowadays now that everyone can follow the government track of the old guy without having to call a 976 number and pay a quarter a throw like I did as a kid. I mean, if you can follow him on the Web he must be real! Here in New York old St. Nick had severe flight restrictions in those days even though it was the pre-9/11 era. You see, because of the high volume of Christmas Eve air traffic and the usual weather-related delays that the airlines experienced Santa would never receive clearance to enter the airspace until around 3 am when the air traffic was light. So it was that no kid was ever awake to see the man himself dropping off the goods. Well, I don’t...

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