It’s time for another guest column from my old and dear friend (he’s more old than dear), Dave B. Also known as “Mookie” for reasons that shall remain unnamed (because I can’t remember). Dave and I are of the same vintage, and he has some Jack Handey style “deep thoughts” about the aging process, and what happens when the balloon of big dreams meets the thumbtack of reality.
Without further ado, Mookie:
Everyone has goals in life. Some are super lofty, and in retrospect you might look back and say “WTF was I thinking? I had neither the ambition nor the life tools to achieve that!”
As we get older, we scale back a bit. Followed by even more concessions and re-calibrations as you sense your ultimate timeline winding down.
Where did I start and where did I end up? Let’s take a look and later you can play the home game version with your own goals.
Age 5: Be a garbage man. Should have stuck with this one. I could have done this. Really. I had the U.S. public education and the physical and mental tools. By now I’d be retired with a nice city pension, instead of still toiling away for “The Man.” I think about this every time I throw away the plastic wrapper on yet another bottle of Advil.
Age 12: Own a Ferrari. Hoo-boy, I was way off on this one. Those damn posters at Spencer’s Gifts and Alex P. Keaton-era Republican rhetoric led me to believe that anything was possible if you worked hard. I settled for a Prius later.
Age 16: Have a supermodel wife. Hey, I’m no Tom Brady but I didn’t fail in this department. I punch WAYYYY outta my weight class, as anyone who has met my lovely bride will tell you. She’s never been on the Victoria Secret holiday special but she’s a little bit ‘o alright.
Fast forward to Age 30: Hey maybe a I can get a Porsche 911. I know how to work on cars and have restored one. I can get a 911 at the bottom of its depreciation curve and retire it. Nope. Life and family squished that.
The car I restored
The car I’ll never have
Age 40: Retire and be able to travel at will. Be a traveling ambassador. Enjoy the world and try to make it a better place. Nope. Thanks Wall Street! You greedy bastards single-handedly tanked the world economy and my 401K. I hope you all die lonely and in a lot of pain… but you won’t. Everyone loves money and you rodents squirreled away enough with your golden parachutes to ensure the highest quality healthcare and enough hangers-on to not die alone. So unfair.
Age 50: Sadly my only achievable goal left is to finish an entire tube of ChapStick before I leave it in my pocket and it goes through the wash and coats everything in a lovely-smelling waxy film.
Keep reaching for the stars! Hope your swan song looks a hell of a lot cooler than mine!
Didn’t think so. Imagine how difficult it would be to read it if you were driving past at 40 m.p.h. Back when I worked at ad agencies (I believe it was the Iron Age), the rule of thumb for billboard copy was “7 words or less.” And the goal was to have one key image with words and logo in a large font, so that drivers could get the message with a quick glance as they were whizzing by. Clearly no one at Erie Insurance’s ad agency got that memo. That text up top would be difficult to read if it were a foot from your face, much less from 40 yards away in a moving vehicle.
So basically they’ve wasted whatever money they spent on this billboard. That’s OK, they’ll probably make it up by jacking up premiums.
Thank goodness “Cyber Monday” is over. I don’t think my email inbox could handle another day of overload like this:
(This is just an unedited, screen-grab sample of the email I received, there’s plenty more where that came from.)
Until a few years ago, I thought “Sweetest Day” was the worst retailer ruse that could be foisted upon us, the smartest scam manufactured by marketers in a ceaseless effort to separate unsuspecting customers from their hard-earned cash (or credit). But Cyber Monday has taken it to a whole new level… or an all-time low.
Kudos to the 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation for creating #GivingTuesday:
You don’t really need that new gizmo. But 42 million Americans are food insecure. 564,708 people in the U.S. are homeless on any given night. 783 million people around the globe do not have access to clean water and almost 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. Please find a charity that speaks to you, and open up your heart and your wallet. Not just today, but all year long.
This is Buffalo Tom. One of my all-time favorite bands.
They first caught my ears in 1992, when I was the overnight DJ at 97X in Oxford, Ohio and played their song “Velvet Roof.”
I soon listened to the rest of that brand-new album, Let Me Come Over, and thought every tune was a gem. They won my heart and we’re still together.
The intriguing cover of the Let Me Come Over album
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Buffalo Tom is still rocking. Oh sure, they’re all married with kids, and have real jobs now (lead singer Bill Janovitz sells real estate near Boston). But they have continued to put out albums that sound great.
Never thought I’d see the day when new episodes of Gilmore Girls were available. My wife and I loved watching the show when it was on the WB (remember that wacky network?)and later the CW back in the early aughts. It always had a reputation as a “chick flick” type of show, but that was lazy pigeonholing, probably because the cast featured very strong female characters. In my humble opinion, it was one of the best written shows going, and show creator/producer/writer Amy Sherman-Palladino and her writing partner husband Daniel are true geniuses.
The show never made much of a dent in the ratings during its seven seasons on the air. But the episodes hold up very well (due to the strong writing, naturally), so it gained a new generation of fans thanks to the magic of Netflix. So much so that they “got the band back together” and created four new 90-minute episodes which debuted on Netflix yesterday.
My wife and I watched the first one last night, and after nearly a decade away, they haven’t missed a beat. All the things that made me love Gilmore Girls were present and accounted for:
rapid-fire dialogue
witty pop culture references – no one else could pull off lines like these:
“you Spinal Tapped the painting”
“Ööö-ber”
“Brett Ratner gave him the keys to his pool house”
quirky characters
fantastic music
The characters and the dialogue make the show, but for a music-head like me, the songs are a great big cherry on top. As soon as I saw Grant-Lee Phillips reprising his role as the town troubadour, I knew all was well in Stars Hollow. (And the woefully underappreciated Sam Phillips – no relation to Grant-Lee – is still featured in transitional “la-la” music too!). Later in the show, we got to hear snippets of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”, and Kirk singing The Carpenters segueing right into the Shonen Knife version of “Top of the World.”
The Tom Waits song “Time” was a perfect choice for the scene at Richard’s funeral.
And Lane’s band (featuring Sebastian Bach from Skid Row!) rocked out a great version of Joe Jackson’s “I’m the Man.” Joe could rock it too:
Grant-Lee also chased off a competing town troubadour (his sister), played by Louise Goffin (Carole King’s daughter, who duets with her mom on the show’s theme song). But my favorite moment was when Grant-Lee was featured later in the show, doing a Fountains of Wayne tune, “Valley Winter Song.” It was probably only 10 seconds of screen time, but it truly made my day.
Here’s the original from Fountains of Wayne, it first appeared on their fantastic album Welcome Interstate Managers.
Being on Gilmore Girls has been a boon to Grant-Lee Phillips’ career too, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Here’s a quote from a recent interview:
“It’s wild. When I first started appearing on that show, I couldn’t really get a sense of how it would impact my notoriety, my profile. But what I have experienced is there’s a younger crowd especially—and this exists all over the world where I tour—they have discovered me through the ‘Gilmore Girls.’ They show up to my gig in Hamburg with their ‘Gilmore’ DVDs. I think it’s quite amazing,” he explained. “I’m very grateful for ‘Gilmore Girls,’ and the fact it’s turned on a whole new generation to my stuff.”
Here’s a clip of all of Grant-Lee’s tunes on the original run of GG:
Thank you Amy Sherman-Palladino for a wonderful Black Friday gift for every member of your cult audience: more heaping helpings of greatness. And thank you Netflix for giving Gilmore Girls a new home.
On the Forbes list of the highest paid comedians for this year, there are a few surprises… head-scratchers, even.
It’s not surprising at all that Kevin Hart tops the list. Seinfeld is a no-brainer as well. But I actually had to Google “Terry Fator” because I’d never heard of him before… and I consider myself a comedy aficionado. Turns out he is a ventriloquist/impressionist who won Season 2 of America’s Got Talent and parlayed that into a standing gig at the Mirage in Vegas. Who knew that having puppets in your act could be so lucrative?
Another dude that plays with dummies, Jeff Dunham, was also in the top 5, raking in a cool $13.5 mill. And I threw away my sock puppets when I was a kid. Who’s the dummy now?
Names 9 and 10 were unknown to me as well, but maybe that’s because I’m xenophobic (it’s OK, so is the president-elect). Russell Peters is Canadian and John Bishop is a Brit. Forbes even wrote about Russell Peters’ lack of name recognition.
I suppose Terry Fator, Russell Peters and John Bishop have millions of reasons to not care about whether I’ve heard of them or not.
A few things I’ve read recently have really rung true, and I think they’re worth pondering before we share food and fellowship with family and friends today.
“What I say to them is that people are complicated,” Obama told me. “Societies and cultures are really complicated. . . . This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop. . . . You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”
Here’s Pope Francis addressing the newly installed cardinals this past Sunday:
Ours is an age of grave global problems and issues. We live at a time in which polarization and exclusion are burgeoning and considered the only way to resolve conflicts. We see, for example, how quickly those among us with the status of a stranger, an immigrant, or a refugee, become a threat, take on the status of an enemy. An enemy because they come from a distant country or have different customs. An enemy because of the color of their skin, their language or their social class. An enemy because they think differently or even have a different faith. An enemy because… And, without our realizing it, this way of thinking becomes part of the way we live and act. Everything and everyone then begins to savor of animosity. Little by little, our differences turn into symptoms of hostility, threats and violence. How many wounds grow deeper due to this epidemic of animosity and violence, which leaves its mark on the flesh of many of the defenseless, because their voice is weak and silenced by this pathology of indifference! How many situations of uncertainty and suffering are sown by this growing animosity between peoples, between us! Yes, between us, within our communities, our priests, our meetings. The virus of polarization and animosity permeates our way of thinking, feeling and acting. We are not immune from this and we need to take care lest such attitudes find a place in our hearts, because this would be contrary to the richness and universality of the Church, which is tangibly evident in the College of Cardinals. We come from distant lands; we have different traditions, skin color, languages and social backgrounds; we think differently and we celebrate our faith in a variety of rites. None of this makes us enemies; instead, it is one of our greatest riches.”
And now for something completely different (but not really), here’s a quote from writer/director/actor Harold Ramis in a Judd Apatow book called Sick in the Head that features interviews with famous comedy folks:
“Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?”
And for dessert, there’s this classic from the Dalai Lama:
So yes, today is a day to be thankful. But every day is a day to be kind. Happy Thanksgiving!
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
You done said…