Where do I begin?

Here’s the story of the bizarre events of last evening:

I was driving home from work last night and was getting off the Parkway East onto 22 when I was confronted by the carcass of a dead animal (I think it was a deer, but could have been a large dog). It looked small enough to straddle with no problem, so I ran across it and heard a thump.

I thought nothing more of it and continued on my way home, and became wrapped up in this interesting news story on “All Things Considered” about how Robert B. Parker and Erich Segal both died over the weekend and how they were both from Cambridge, Mass., but were very different and how they reflected two different social classes in Cambridge and so forth. And I got to thinking about how my mom has always liked the “Spenser for Hire” books and how she once told me that Spenser has this Red Sox all-star team that he recites in his head whenever he’s in a tough situation. And how Erich Segal sounded like a pretty interesting guy even though he inflicted “Love Story” on the world, and how “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” has to be the dumbest line in cinematic history. And I wind up with the theme to “Love Story” stuck in my head. If only that were the worst part of the evening.

So I got home and looked under the car in the dark and saw a few small pieces of animal detritus hanging from the muffler but figured it was no big deal. And I told Jamie what happened and she said I should go wash the undercarriage of the car right away so that nothing sticks to the bottom of the car.

So I went to the nearest car wash and tried to rinse the car off in the hand-wash bay. Then, in better light, I saw not only the pieces on the muffler, but also a large piece that I had apparently been dragging for several miles. I was able to dislodge that with the high-pressure hose, but the job still wasn’t complete. I pulled the car forward and thought, “I can’t just leave animal guts lying in a car wash bay.” So I looked in my car for a bag—no luck. (Which wouldn’t have mattered because the car wash’s dumpster was padlocked, lest anybody put garbage in it.)

Luckily, there was a shovel propped against the dumpster, so I scooped up the random animal parts and chucked them in the field behind the car wash, making it a glorious night for the vultures.

So then I ran the car through the cheapest automatic car wash that offered an undercarriage wash. Bear in mind that I had already washed the car last week. When this is all over, I thought, I’m going to have the cleanest car in Allegheny County.

So I went through the car wash and found there will still those few hanging strings from the beginning. I spent 15 minutes on the ground, in near freezing temperatures, lying next to a wet car, vainly hitting venison piñatas with my ice scraper. Then it occurred to me—why not use the brush end instead of the scraper? Knocked them right off.

So now, as far as I know, my car is free of any random animal parts—although my dogs still find my car a little too interesting for total comfort.

Getting the theme from “Love Story” out of my head will be about as easy.

P.S. About a week after this incident, the weather grew colder and my car began to rattle behind the dash. I took it in to the dealer and was told that one of the exhaust hangers had been knocked out of position. What caused this? "Well...it was caused by deer." So that took care of the last deer remains. I think.

New Year's mondegreens, or who in the hell is Danny Heidelman?

Well, it's a new year with lots of new challenges and lots of lyrics to mishear. I haven't posted any mondegreens lately, so here's another round.

I have been accused of making up these mondegreens after the fact. But I did mishear all these lyrics at one point in my life. You'll notice that most of these mondegreens are of older songs (I think the newest song in this entry came out in 1981), which is no accident, as I misheard most of these lyrics when I was younger.

WRONG: I am Danny Heidelman
RIGHT: I'm the dandy highwayman
"Stand and Deliver," Adam and the Ants

WRONG: When my finger goes east and lights
RIGHT: When I think of those East End nights
"Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Elton John

WRONG: Sh-boom and automobile again
RIGHT: Sh-boom and hopin' we'll meet again
"Sh-Boom," The Crew Cuts

WRONG: Doctors fill my room
RIGHT: Darkness fills my room
"Nice to Be With You," Gallery

WRONG: Nel blu, a yucky boy blue
RIGHT: Nel blu degli occhi tuoi blu
"Volare," Domenico Modugno

WRONG: I like this kind of Hawkeye music
RIGHT: I like this kind of hot kind of music
"Honey Pie," The Beatles

WRONG: I don't believe in cinnamon
RIGHT: I don't believe in Zimmerman
"God," John Lennon

WRONG: Never goose me any other way
RIGHT: Never could see any other way
The repeating loop at the end of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

Here's to the Uh-ohs

New Year’s Eve. A time to think about the past year and all the things that happened, and all your plans for the next year, and Ohio State’s chances of winning the Rose Bowl, and why New Year’s Eve TV programming has sucked ever since Guy Lombardo’s orchestra disbanded, and….

Enough. Why do we even celebrate the New Year when we do? It’s of no astronomical significance (the winter solstice is already past). My research indicates that it marks the installation of two Roman consuls in 153 B.C. Such is the reason why millions of people get plastered. Let’s hear it for those Roman consuls!

Still, I guess we have to mark the time somehow and why not now? This year is special because it marks (at least in the public eye) the end of a decade. (And, yes, I know it’s technically not a new decade until next year. Spare me your pedantry.) A decade with no name. Nobody came up with a really good name for this decade, a la “the ‘50s, the ‘60s,” etc. “The Aughts” isn’t bad. I hate “The Noughties.” It sounds like something they sell at Victoria’s Secret. And besides, the decade wasn’t especially naughty. Remember that an exposed breast nearly caused the Apocalypse at the Super Bowl not so long ago.

This decade’s lack of a name is appropriate, because there’s not much about this decade that’s memorable, except 9/11 and the election of President Obama. Seriously. Every other decade had some things that defined it. The ‘50s gave us rock ‘n roll. The ‘60s gave us antiwar protests. The ‘70s gave us really ugly clothes. The ‘00s (would you say that “uh-ohs”?) gave us…what? An increase in blogs and social networking. That’s about all you can say for it. “Seinfeld” was a ‘90s TV show, but you could call the Uh-ohs “The Seinfeld Decade”—because it was a decade about nothing.

Not that it was bad for me on a personal level. During the Uh-ohs (I like that name better already), I made a lot of new friends through Mensa, met my wonderful wife, moved to a new city and found a great new life. The Uh-ohs left me far better than they found me. Maybe that’s why it seems like a decade about nothing to me. Maybe I’m just too busy to immerse myself in pop culture as much as I used to.

Perhaps the decade is just too recent for us to step back and define it. At the end of the ‘80s, I couldn’t find anything that stood out in my mind about the decade except Reagan, greed, and the ubiquitous presence of Phil Collins on the radio. But in retrospect, it has its own nostalgic niche—mainly among people who are too young to actually remember it.

So maybe it will be up to the pop culture historians 10 or 20 years hence to look back at the Uh-ohs and name the things that will give it a name. In the meantime, let’s have the best 2010 we can and give ourselves something that we can feel truly nostalgic about someday.

When the bad guy wins

In our culture, it is accepted as an article of faith that good triumphs in the end. It may take years, but good always wins.

It is this meme, mantra, or whatever you want to call it, that keeps us getting out of bed day after day, working meaningless jobs, dealing with idiots, and experiencing sporadic happiness—the idea that, no matter how badly you’ve been screwed, you’ll be on top someday.

Then there are those times when it becomes apparent that the good guy’s not going to win this time around.

This entry is about one of those times.

When I was in high school, an English teacher took a great interest in my writing, and I became infected with the idea that I could make a living as a writer. Several years later, I found myself writing for a community newspaper. The editor of that paper seemed like a decent guy. He was a strong writer and appeared to know the ins and outs of journalism. I saw him as a mentor, even a friend.

After about a year at the paper, it became clear to me that he was neither. On several occasions, suggestions he made to me got me in trouble with co-workers, and this appeared to be a pattern with other people at the paper, too. Things got worse when the paper was purchased by a chain and he was named managing editor. The paper’s format was tightened, and anything that deviated from that format was severely punished. I learned the hard way that the press is only truly free if you own it.

One day, I had a performance review, where I was confronted with every article I’d written over the past three years that this guy didn’t like. Soon after that, he fired me.

That should be the end of the story. I had grown to hate the job anyway. Sometimes I think I should thank him for taking away my right to take shit off of soccer moms for 15 grand a year. I’m in a different line of work now, and my life has gotten better. But I never completely gave up the dream of being a writer.

One day, I Googled his name and couldn’t believe what I found. He has become a fairly well respected, award winning writer of mysteries. He hasn’t made the best-seller list, to my knowledge, but I can’t seem to find anything bad about his writing online, either. My blood boils with every five-star review of his novels I read on Amazon.com.

It wasn’t enough for him to kill one of my dreams. He had to kill—or at least beat me to—another.

Our culture tells us that the way I feel is somehow evil—that it’s bad to feel bitter about someone else’s success.

Then again, our culture also tells us that good always wins.

An Obama presidency post-mortem

You read that right. This entry is a post-mortem of the Obama presidency.

He will still be in office for at least three more years and could be re-elected, but in an important way, his presidency ended earlier this week when he announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.

What has ended is any idea that his presidency will lead to radical change. Many people have hoped—or feared—that Obama’s election would lead to some sort of revolution, although the substance of that revolution differed with each person you asked.

I voted for him. My wife and I cried at 11 p.m. on election night when he was declared the winner. But looking back, I think that all the people who thought that his election would lead to truly drastic changes in this country weren’t looking at his resume close enough. Revolutionaries aren’t given the opportunity to edit the Harvard Law Review. Hell, revolutionaries aren’t allowed within 300 feet of the Harvard campus!

Obama may be sincere about change, but he is also a political careerist, like many others in Washington. He has spent most of his life being schooled in, among other things, the art of compromise, and he knows that alienating too many people would be damaging to the career that he has devoted his life to developing.

In the (allegedly good) old days, politics was a sideline for most of the people involved in it. Look at this list of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Do you see anyone whose occupation is listed as “politician”? Many lawyers, but, as in our time, most lawyers are not politicians. People got into politics because they cared about the way the government was being run, but they did not see politics as the primary way to feed themselves.

Somewhere along the way, the laws became more sophisticated and harder for the average person to understand. The complexity required that public office become a full time job.

Lincoln’s proverbial one-room schoolhouse became no longer adequate to train a President. Neither were the public schools and state universities that do all right by most people. College programs became devoted to public policy and began to turn out a new breed of student princes, such as Obama, as skilled at the political game as a brain surgeon. While most of them are attorneys, few have any experience in an area of law that is not related to politics.

What does this have to do with sending troops to Afghanistan? Obama has made this decision after careful consulting with his military advisers. He is not about to make a decision that will step on the wrong toes. If he alienates too many important people, the career that has become his life will be over. Seriously—if he weren’t a politician, what would he do? Write people’s wills? Work for Edgar Snyder?

It is not a partisan problem. There are just as many political careerists on the Republican side. While it’s good that politicians have been well trained in the nuances of creating laws, something has also been lost. There is a certain hesitancy to be decisive if it means being unpopular.

When President Truman fired the popular General MacArthur at the height of the Korean War, it was political suicide. While Truman has been resurrected as a folk hero, people forget that he left office with some of the lowest approval ratings in history. Similarly, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legend has it that he told an aide, “We [the Democratic Party] have lost the South for a generation.” And they did. In both cases, Presidents weren’t afraid to stick their necks out to do something that they thought was right, even if they knew it would hurt their careers. It’s hard to see anybody in Washington being that brave today.

Barring the faux-Mayan apocalypse that some people believe in (which wouldn’t happen until after Election Day, anyhow), I will vote for Obama again in 2012, mainly because I think the balance on the Supreme Court is too precarious to allow a right-wing President to appoint conservative judges to that body. But that’s another blog entry.

Meet the new boss. Not quite the same as the old boss, but maybe not different enough to really matter. It may not be change we can believe in, but it may be the only type of change that’s believable.

The most worthless list on the web

The web is a hotbed of useless information, but I've found one common "news" item that is actually more useless than any blog. Even this one.

Everyday you will see a common news item on the Yahoo! home page, and many other well-known home pages. The link will be in your face the moment you log on, along with the latest pretty, rich white girl who went missing and the latest stupid thing Sarah Palin said.

The title is always the same. It will be something like "The 10 Hottest Jobs in America." Sometimes there will be a different spin on it, such as "The 10 Hottest Jobs That Don't Require a College Degree." I really sleep better at night knowing that air traffic controllers don't have to go to college.

The list will have jobs that are in demand, well paid, or both, during the hour the list was written. The list is also worthless to anyone who's really serious about a career.

These lists are all the same, so here's a Reader's Digest condensed version of them:

*Four of these careers will be in health care--nursing, medical technology, maybe some sub-specialty that requires an M.D. Which is just fine, if you don't mind having people's lives in your hands. Those of us who can barely handle our own lives need to look elsewhere.

*Three will be in finance. They will be hot because of the economic conditions, whatever they may be--investment banking when times are good, bankruptcy experts when times are, well, now. Since the demand for these jobs varies with the times--and anybody who's been out in the real world for a few years knows how fast the economy changes--it makes little sense to hitch your wagon to one of these stars.

*Two will be in IT, but they will be so specialized that only a handful of supergeeks will qualify for them. That MIS degree from your local business school won't help you here.

*Then there's the "cute" career--one that's on the list for a laugh. Pet psychologist, blackjack dealer, the funnier the better. They might even get a quote from the one person who makes six figures in such a field. They don't tell you that these careers aren't as fun, or as lucrative, as this one person's experience suggests. That would ruin the joke.

Why are these lists useless? Simple. Everybody is reading them. People read this stuff, rush headlong into these "hot" jobs and create a glut on the market. Then, when the economy takes a turn, they're stuck in a career with no opportunities for advancement--if they have a job at all.

You could argue that anybody who goes into one of these "hot" careers looking for a shortcut to easy money gets what they deserve--and you'd be right. But isn't it also irresponsible for the media to encourage such thinking?

Haunted by the "S from Hell"

Jamie and I were walking through Storybook Forest at Idlewild recently when we started talking about how some people were really freaked out by clowns when they were little. I never understood this fear. I always found clowns to be mildly amusing, nothing more.

But then I started thinking about some of the irrational things that scared me as a child. While clowns may not have scared me, I had more than my share of irrational childhood fears—the most absurd of which was a fear of certain TV production logos.

My mom would tell you that I didn’t watch much TV as a kid. It would be more accurate to say that I didn’t actively watch much TV. I remember the TV being on quite a bit, mainly as background noise while I was reading, writing or playing games.

Most TV shows have production logos on their closing credits, which are designed to draw attention to a company’s handiwork at a moment when many viewers might be headed for the bathroom or drifting off to sleep. These logos tend to be friendlier today, but in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they often featured stark imagery and loud fanfares that had the side effect of scaring small children.

Why I found these logos scary, I don’t know. I think it had more to do with their sound than their images. When I watch them with the sound off, the emotional impact is nil. My mind tends to remember sounds, though. I always seem to have a song stuck in my head. Now imagine that you’re five and the sound that’s stuck in your head as you’re trying to sleep is the Mark VII Limited hammer. You’re in for a long night.

But I wasn’t alone. Google “Scary TV logos” and you’ll find websites dedicated to this phenomenon. Certain logos have become so infamous that they have earned nicknames. There’s the “S from Hell,” the “V of Doom,” and “Closet Killer,” just to name a few.

So for my Halloween blog entry, I’d like to revisit some of my...uh...favorites.

An honorable mention should go to the Rankin Bass logo.



Rankin Bass was the company responsible for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and many other holiday claymation specials. The graphics on this logo are not especially scary, but the music is what makes it creepy. It throws a chord at you that is obviously leading up to something more, but it TAKES SO DAMN LONG TO RESOLVE! My definition of musical hell is having that chord hanging in your head forever.

Third place goes to the early ‘70s Paramount logo.



The fanfare was written by soundtrack legend Lalo Schifrin, best known for the theme from “Mission: Impossible.” He named it “Closet Killer,” which is appropriate. I once scared the crap out of myself when I was little by jumping in front of a full-length mirror in time with the climactic note (the one where they zoom in on the blue mountain). And what’s with the graphics here? I always thought that rectangle looked like a toothpaste box. (You’ll always get the yellow out when you brush your teeth with Paramount?)

In second place—the whole Mark VII Limited/Universal conglomeration.

Jack Webb must have really hated little kids. I had a strange fascination with his no-nonsense action dramas as a child (“Adam-12,” “Dragnet” and “Emergency!”). I especially remember watching reruns of “Dragnet” at my grandma’s house during the early days of cable—and being treated to this double whammy just before I went to bed.

The Mark VII Limited hammer is one of the few logos which is visually scary, in addition to the sound (does anything say “Something scary’s about to happen” like a tympani?). I remember looking at those big, dirty hands (which, according to some sources, are Webb’s) and wondering what they were going to do to me. And it was followed by a Universal fanfare that sounded like the soundtrack for the end of the world.

Is that the scariest possible end to a TV show? Hell, it isn’t even Mark VII Limited’s scariest logo! In 1971, Webb was taken over by the same demon that made everything in America either avocado green or sunset gold around that time. So out went the hammer, and in came this:



Not only is it one of the ugliest logos in history (flat gold lettering on burnt orange?), but the background music could have been titled “The House Is on Fire!” After three years of picturing flames consuming my house whenever this monstrosity came on, Webb went back to the hammer, and I was actually relieved.

And then there’s number one—the one, the only, “S from Hell.”



The Screen Gems logo was an early attempt at electronic music, which may be the reason why it’s so scary. There’s just something about that opening drone that still sends a chill up my spine, even today. Perhaps it was the contrast with the show I just watched (I always remembered this logo from lightweight fare—“I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Monkees” and “Bewitched”), but this logo just about defines late ’60-early ‘70s TV creepiness.

At least as far as TV logos go, that is. I could also write a blog entry on scary TV public service announcements, but fewer of them are available on YouTube. Maybe next Halloween.

Until then, have a blessed Samhain. And watch out for the “S from Hell.”