Handbill Handout

So Bernie Madoff is getting his own trading card . Have I mentioned how difficult is it to try to be satirical or humorous about the modern world? You really can’t beat the truth. I mean if I came up with some short story or even a novel about a guy named Shyster or McFraud or something else obvious like “Made-off” who defrauded huge amounts of money from supposedly smart people and then wound up on a trading card everyone would think I was some kind of a hack of a complete jackass. And yet, there you have it: real life in all its glory. When I was a kid in the 1970’s card collecting as an investment tool was still in its infancy. I was a bit too young to be part of the generation that put cards in their bike wheels or anything like that although we did enter the world of gambling through baseball cards. Oh, and on Staten Island in the ‘70s it was always baseball cards. Sure you might occasionally buy a pack of football cards or hockey cards but the serious card aficionado specialize...

Every six to nine months or so I order a few new dress shirts from J.C. Penny to replace ones that are worn, stained or otherwise no longer fit for daily use. Each time I order I marvel at the amount of packaging that goes into a single dress shirt. I have a routine down to de -package the shirts but it still takes about 3-4 minutes of work per shirt to liberate the garment and try it on. The routine goes something like this. I set up three of our four garbage cans (there's no compostable material I'm aware of in the packing material). I remove the shirts from their plastic bags, those go in the regular garbage. Then I take the plastic thing that goes around the top button and toss that in the regular trash as well. Next out, all those pins which go into the metal/plastics recycling can (we have enough pins to open a tailor shop as it is). Finally out comes the cardboard under the collar and the larger piece of cardboard and tissue paper supporting the torso of the shir...

“Hey. Yeah I couldn’t hear you. Sounded like you were in a wind tunnel. So, how was your day?” Sigh. That’s when you know it’s not going to be a short conversation between the guy behind you on the bus and whoever is on the other end of the line. The weird thing about those conversations is they often seem to be between a married or at least otherwise involved couple. What will they have left to talk about when they see each other at home? My late father used to say “The telephone is an instrument of communication, not conversation.” He enforced his beliefs by limiting his children to 5 minute phone calls and refusing to pay for call waiting. There were two ways I would end-run around these regulations. One was to use the basement phone since he often wouldn’t notice I was on for a while. The other was that when I wanted to talk to the future Mrs. for any extended period of time I would call from a pay phone a few blocks from the house and have her call me back. We would tie...

(Picture lifted from 880 CBS’s website). I wonder if the new one will have all those terrible dank warrens smelling vaguely of stale beer and worse. The warrens that were stabbed at regular intervals by shafts of light and marked by numbers, odd toward one field, even toward the other always carefully arranged so that the number you needed was furthest from the entrance you used. I wonder if the green and blue explosion that hit you when you finally found that numbered tunnel and reached the end of it will still hit as hard. I wonder if some kid will see some pitcher like Nolan Ryan shut down the Yankees in the first ballgame he ever attends and have to wait a whole year, that whole terrible year between 9 and 10 years of age before he gets to go again and finally see them win. I wonder if during some lost season when the team is terrible some twenty something idiot and his best friend will get thrown out for being drunk and sitting in the first row behind the right field foul pole bec...

Looks like Britney Spears is ripping off James Joyce , among others including WFMU's own R. Stevie Moore . Or at least her songwriters are. Childish. Unquestionably not terribly original. Sort of funny though, in that Beavis and Butthead junior high school kind of way. Where did you learn how to swear? Did you have that Christmas Story moment? You know, the scene where Ralphie is helping his dad change the tire and the lug nuts get knocked all over the roadway and Ralphie lets loose with an “Oh Fudge”, except (naturally) the narrator notes “I didn ’t say fudge!” I don’t recall any particular moment like that with my parents. I do recall one bright early summer afternoon toward the end of 6 th grade when a kid came on the bus after school and announced to the teeming masses “Hey, you wanna know what fuck means?” Think anyone said “no”? Of course not. So our linguistics major continued with “It means…” and he proceeded to describe in some detail the act of insertion involved u...

(Photo ganked from SM. Thanks) The above is a picture from a hotel in Montreal. Over there on the right is the late, great Kaos , still young and healthy though I believe this is less than a year from his initial diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Where am I? Giving the full nelson to the guy in the vintage 1987 team Canada sweater, of course. (You didn't think I would put a recognizable photo of myself here, did you dear readers?) Today is, or would have been, Pete K's 42nd birthday. He only got to use 34 of his birthdays, so I try to have a good time for both of us when his birthday or my birthday come around on the calendar. Unused birthdays are terrible things to waste. They should be noted, remembered, celebrated and then put away in a safe place. The picture up top is from a road trip we took to see one last game at the Montreal Forum before it closed. The Rangers were playing the Canadiens and while I was trying to soak in all the history in the bu...