 How can an obituary cheer you up?
Well, for starters, the person who died is not you. That's a good thing. I know someone who
reads them every day to make sure she's not included. So far, so good.
But one recent obit in The New York Times really gave me a
lift.
It was for Bobby Thompson, you know, the guy who fired "the
shot heard round the world" — the homer that won the pennant for the Giants in
1951. It was a really big deal at the time, before our minds were occupied with
the Three G's: Lady Gaga, Google, and Glenn Beck.
Back then, it was a real Casey At The Bat moment: Bottom of
the ninth, third game of a three-game playoff, Giants down by two, one strike
against Thompson.
Actually, he had a lot of strikes against him, in a
metaphorical sense, not that anyone was getting all metaphorical at the moment.
But in retrospect, a person could be really inspired by this story.
Up until the ninth inning, Thomson's game was in the toilet.
He had a hit in the second, but tried to stretch it to a double even though
someone was already on second base. Whoops. Don't you just hate those
embarrassing rundowns? Then he let the Dodgers get a 4-1 lead by missing two
ground balls in the eighth inning. Ouch.
If he had lived in our current snarky age, someone (not me,
course) would have dubbed him
"Booby"Thompson.
But of course, all was forgiven when he hit
the historic homer, then sailed around the bases as the crowd went, predictably,
wild. All that anyone remembers about him is the hit, not any of the misses.
So unless everything is going perfectly for you, and
you're on the cover of Time this week, or People at the very least, and you
haven't screwed up royally at least a few times in your life, there's something
really important here for you to think about. . .
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OMG, last night DVR stopped being
my BFF and had me saying WTF!
 After watching the Emmys for an hour, we decided to record the rest and switch to Masterpiece Theatre, because
Inspector Lewis is rather cool in his own curmudgeonly way, and there are no
commercials on PBS.
Okay, no problem. Lewis first, Emmys later. We'd skip the commercials and cut off the (mostly) boring speeches.
And then it got complicated. That damned notice came up
saying that we were recording two shows: the Emmys and Boston Legal, and would have
to get rid of one recording to change channels. At 10, we were recording Mad Men and at
10:30, Entourage, so the same thing would happen then.
Panic! We could record Masterpiece and watch it any old
time. But Mad Men? Gotta see it Sunday night. Entourage is a close second.
We could watch The Emmys until 11, commercials, speeches and
all — or, switch to Entourage at 10:30, meanwhile recording Mad Men at 11. But
that would take us to midnight, and we'd have to watch all those commercials,
although, mercifully, no speeches.
We are used to seeing MM On Demand: 45 uninterrupted minutes
of brilliant material plus eye candy for both of us. John! Marsha! Don!
Joannie. . . . Watching it in real time is like getting a series of phone calls
during a delicious dinner.
We were so confused.
 Emmys? Could live without them. But what if
something dramatic happened? You want to see that sort of thing in real time.
Today's Times notes that a lot of the winners were the same as last year, and that
Edie Falco called her victory "ridiculous." On the other hand, Hugh Laurie, always nominated but
never quite winning, "couldn't suppress a look of dismay — or dyspepsia," wrote
Alessandra Stanley. Funny. But doesn't he always look a little dyspeptic?
On
the other hand, Jane Lynch looked, well, gleeful . . .
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 There are some things I will not discuss in this blog:
religion, politics, chin hairs. But there is something I must talk to you about today: poop.
There are, of course, words describing this substance that
are far less cute, but I'm taking my cue from Oprah (a girl could do worse) and
sticking with the P word. For now.
For years, filmmakers have found it necessary to show
men at urinals, and many, many scenes in movies and even on TV take place in rest
rooms, sometimes involving men checking each other out.
This is supposed to
be daring? Funny? Original? Maybe the first 4000 times, not any more.
So some genius in LaLa Land has decided that it's time
to kick it up a notch and show people sitting on toilets.
Example: The otherwise dignified and very stylish A Single
Man has a scene where Colin Firth stares pensively out the window from the
privacy of his privy. In the words of Mel Brooks, was this really nessa?
Wouldn't his bedroom window have done just as well?
Death At A Funeral, which has its funny moments, not only
showed the grouchy uncle played by Danny Glover on the can, but had Tracy Morgan picking him up
and getting covered with you-know-what. The potty plot was so contrived that
we are to believe that Tracy couldn't wash it all off, thus involving lots of jokes about the
smell of poo. Hysterical.
On Bethanny Getting Married? (Talk about a guilty
pleasure!), the not-exactly-blushing bride had to pee real bad when she was in
her wedding dress and the ceremony was about to begin. Oh, and she was
pregnant. So she had her assistant, that lucky man, get a pail for her to pee
in, then lifted her voluminous skirts and went at it. Okay, I get it. I might have
done the same thing in that situation. But on camera?
One only wonders what would have happened if the sudden urge
to do a Number Two came upon her. . . .
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Do you get those emails whose main function is to remind you how old you're getting – and how young the rest of the world
is? The latest one, at least, had interesting information to process,
assuming that any of us above the Age of Consent are still able to process
information.
It was about Freshmen — the kids who are starting
college this Fall.
That means they were born in 1992, and that means, among other things:
 •They cannot imagine not having a remote control.
•Popcorn has always been made in the microwave.
•Jay Leno has always been on the Tonight Show.
•They don't know who Mork was or where he was from. This explains why none of the kids at the
family beach outing laughed when I said "Na-nu Na-Nu." They looked at me as if
I were from Ork or something.
•They've also never heard the saying "Where's the
beef," which is a shame. And they totally wouldn't get "I'd walk a mile for a
Camel," which is just as well. Luckily, Mad Men features Lucky Strikes.
•They don't know who JR is, and therefore couldn't care less
who shot him.
And so it goes.
This list was put together by staff members of Benoit
College in Wisconsin to "give the faculty a sense of the mindset of this
year's incoming freshmen."
I'd like to add a little something to their impressionable young mindsets.
For starters, would any of you Freshmen have put quotes around the sentence about the faculty —let alone italicize it or attribute a source? Having always used the Internet for research (Library? What's a library?) it's natural to just
paste and copy whole chunks of material into your work.
Note to the Benoit staff: add Plagiarism 101 to the curriculum.
Note to freshmen: sign up.
Other advice (both friendly and free) I'd like to give to Freshmen . . .
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 This is the kind of story
that makes you feel good to be alive. Or slit your wrists.
A family in the south had fallen on
hard times. They were out of work, out of money, but — hold on to your
Kryptonite — not out of luck.
As they were cleaning out the
attic, because the house they had owned for 60 years was now in foreclosure,
they came across a pile of old comics. And, yes, you guessed it! They found a
copy of Action Comics #1. Holy Phonebooth! That's the first, and very valuable,
comic featuring The Man of Steel.
One of these babies
sold for $1.5 million, although the copy in question isn't in pristine condition, and will probably fetch "only" about a quarter to a half million.
No one is complaining!
Superman literally saved the day, just as you always dreamed he would.
So cool.
And yet so cruel.
Because you just know that sometime, somewhere, you had something you didn't realize was valuable and threw it away in a fit of feng shui gone terribly wrong. Or maybe, like
someone I know, your mother tossed out an actual copy of Action Comics #1 just
to tidy things up. Ouch!
And what about The Antiques Road Show? Sure, most of the stuff people bring in turn out
to be just that, stuff: fakes, frauds or just plain old junk. But the items they
show on TV tend to be real, and are worth real money.
You could have something like
that hiding somewhere at this very moment . . .
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