The Best Olsen Twin

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The Best Saint

There’s a lot of frivolity about TBOE, for a lot of reasons.

Life is very serious, and we should have some fun when we can. But there’s a time to sit back and reflect, too, and this is one of those entries. So I will be serious and straightforward here and I will risk alienating some of you readers who want only lists of ranch pop ingredients and nothing more thoughtful than Snoopy’s travails in World War I.

I will also risk putting off those people who do not care to think about religion, and that’s because of the debt I owe which prompted this entry.

“Do not be afraid to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said to me when I happened to meet him after writing a letter asking if I could. And I’m not, especially when it comes to matters like this.

When I was young, I thought everyone must be a Catholic. It surprised me the first time I learned that there were other religions and that in fact my next-door neighbor was one of those other religions (which should not have surprised me since he did not go to our church.) And I still act mostly as though everyone understands my religion, but I don’t think that you have to understand Catholicism to understand this post. You do have to understand saints, I guess, so maybe I should explain a little.

In the Catholic Church, and maybe others, saints have causes, or reasons. They are patron saints of things. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, is the patron saint of scholars. St. Jude is the patron saint of the impossible. And each saint has many causes.




So when Catholics make a request of God, they invoke the saints. This was claimed, by the mother of that next-door neighbor long ago, to be idolatry, praying to a saint rather than God. It’s not, though, when properly understood. The supplicants are asking the saint to intercede for them – to get God to listen to them. Like a heavenly attorney helping you with your petition.

When Sweetie and I were trying to have a baby, and it looked like we were not going to be able to have one, I became more prayerful than usual. I do pray, all the time, but not always in an organized way. But I was getting desperate. And I remembered something my mom told me, a long time ago. When she was giving birth to my brother, she’s thought she and he were going to die. She’d said a prayer to Saint Jude and promised that if they both lived, she would name the baby after Saint Jude, and so my brother’s middle name is Jude.

So I looked up patron saints, which you can do here , and came to Saint Anthony of Padua.

Saint Anthony is primarily known as the patron saint of lost articles—people pray to find glasses, rings, and the like. But like other saints, he has other causes, too, and one of them is that he is the patron saint of expectant mothers.

So I went to one of the websites devoted to Saint Anthony, and learned some prayers, and everyday during Sweetie’s pregnancy with A & B, I would say this prayer:

Prayer to the “Wonder Worker”
After you died, St. Anthony, God chose to make your holiness known to the world and to draw people by working miracles in answer to prayers made in your name. Since then, people have asked God to continue to honor you by working wonders through your intercession. Those who have experienced the power of prayers offered in your name have told how God has answered them. God has healed the sick, restored peace of mind, relieved poverty and granted favors of all kinds.
Now in this time of need, I ask you, St. Anthony, to pray with me for the things I desire. I pray that God may again give me a sign of loving care and providence, and that through you, God may draw us all to the fullness of life and love in eternity. Amen.

And I promised, like my mom had, that our baby would have his name if born.

And it worked, worked better than I could have imagined, since we had not one but two, and as a result, the older of the two (Twin A) has Anthony as a middle name.

And I’ve continued every day going to that site and now saying this prayer,

Prayer of Thanksgiving
St. Anthony, God has helped me abundantly through your prayer and has strengthened me in my need. I thank God and I thank you. Accept this prayer and my serious resolve which I now renew, to live always in the love of Jesus and of my neighbor. Continue to shield me by your protection and pray to God for the final grace of one day entering the kingdom of heaven to sing with you the everlasting mercies of God. Amen.

And I also check into the prayer requests that others post, and add my prayers to theirs, too.

All of the saints are, of course, great men and women. They would not be saints otherwise. And we have other saint names for the rest of the kids. I’m not trying to denigrate any of them.

This is also not the first time I’ve had prayers answered, either. But it was among the most important of prayers I’ve ever made, and Saint Anthony came through for me, getting God to help me and Sweetie out.

So I decided that I’d post this as part of thanking Saint Anthony, and to let others out there know that prayer works. While I hope it doesn’t offend anyone or turn anyone off of this site, it was important to me that my babies be born, and it’s important to me that God and Saint Anthony know that I recognize that they were instrumental in helping me and Sweetie achieve that desire. It’s important to me, too, that I not worry about what others will think of my beliefs.

Saint Anthony of Padua, thank you for being The Best Saint.




For more about Saint Anthony of Padua, read about him here.

The Best Time Waster

Sand Game.

I don’t know what else to say about this nominee, really. I don’t know what to say about Sand Game in the first place, let alone what else to say. All I can say is Sand Game. When it comes to wasting time, that’s the only two words that are needed.

If you know about Sand Game, then you probably agree with me. If you’re wondering what Sand Game is, read this article first: I’ve provided links to Sand Game at the end of it but if you go there now you’ll likely never come back and read this and I’m not spending all this time not playing Sand Game to have you not read the article.

I don’t know how Sand Game came about or who invented it. I know that when you start doing searches for it, you wind up on websites like this, and then you click the links and get this:

And what the heck is that all about?

So I have no idea what the real story of Sand Game is, and, frankly, I don’t care because I know that Sand Game exists and so I don’t need to know anything more about it.

Sand Game’s place at the top of the list of time wasters is remarkable, too. I am not short of things to kill time with at work – beyond work, that is. Those times that I don’t spend a little bit of time writing on one of my blogs, I have my “Favorites” folder featuring no less than five celebrity gossip websites where I can keep up with the latest antics from Britney, Paris, Lindsay, and all those people I don’t know. Beyond that, I’ve got ready access to the great articles on Slate, The Hater over at the Onion (and The Onion’s videocracy, telling me what to watch), the now-closed “Not Proud” site with its glimpse into people’s confessions, I can go check out Toothpaste for Dinner, Natalie Dee, the other comic strips I read daily, check in on my first fan’s blog, find out how my fantasy baseball team is doing (I’m in second, thanks very much!), check my two web-based emails, find out how my friends on Gather are, go to PostSecret each Monday, read what Dwight’s been writing, and even spend time on the more obscure but really really funny websites.

Let me add that those are all rare, rare occurrences. I’m really very, very busy at work.

Oh, who am I kidding? None of us are busy at work anymore, not those of us with computers.

There are probably people with real jobs who are doing real work – my carpenter brother-in-law, say – and who are responsible for keeping the economy running, and then there are those of us who mostly sit in front of a computer all day and because of that spend most of our day on the Internet doing one of those many things I’ve outlined and slowly bogging down our offices and becoming albatrosses around the neck of society, and among them I’m probably the worst case.

And I was that worse case before I found out about Sand Game. Sand Game could replace all of those time-wasters singlehandedly.

I didn’t know, the day I found it, what it was about. I still don’t know what it’s about. It’s mystifying to me. But it’s mystifying in a hypnotic way that I am powerless to resist. The first day I found this Sand game, I literally got NOTHING done the rest of the afternoon, from 3:00 on. I pretended to be doing actual work, true. But nothing got done and I kept going back and surreptitiously checking in on it, modifying my little sand sculpture picture, messing around with the buttons, creating patterns, freeing the zombies, you name it.

Since then, I’ve had to ignore, as much as possible, that link on my Favorites list because if I start up with it, like I did today, then I’m helplessly lost in Sand Game world. (Here’s an example. These usually take me about 30 minutes to write. But because I’m writing about Sand Game, I had to play Sand Game, and because of that this has been written over the course of 1 ½ hours.) It is an amazing feat of willpower each day that I go and actually bill some work to clients with all the while Sand Game sitting there just a click away.

Here’s how I can best explain the addictive qualities of this game:



Sand Game is like being God if God had subcontracted the job to Picasso.

That’s not just the best way to explain the way Sand Game sucks me in, it’s also the best way I can explain what it’s like to play it. You get to make these little abstract designs that then turn into a world and shape-shift and modify it, and so you’ve created art that keeps changing itself and getting better, worse, more full, less full.

In my life, I have accomplished (I think) some amazing things. I’ve gotten married, raised a family, bought a house, graduated from law school, established a thriving law practice, written professional articles, won jury trials, traveled to foreign countries, published short stories. I’ve made friends, had some adventures, met some famous people, and generally had a great time. I honestly think that almost none of that would have happened had Sand Game been in my life years ago.

So now, here’s your link to Sand Game. Go play Sand Game and then, when you emerge, blinking, into your real life years from now, come back here and tell me that you agree with me.

The Best Basketball Shoe

If you came here looking for the essay The Best Basketball Shoe, I'm sorry to disappoint you; that's been taken down and will appear in my upcoming collection.

You've got some other options, though. You can browse around the other topics here (click this link to see an alphabetical list of everything I've ever discussed), or you could browse the books I've published already, including a great sci-fi/horror novel and two different essay collections.

Visit my bookstore by clicking this link.

And you can still enjoy the video that was here:

The Best Female Singer

The digital age of music has been a boon to me. I love music. Love it more than most people could know. I love music so much that I wish I could have my own soundtrack and score to my life.

I mean that, too. I watch movies and get jealous that the characters in movies get to have music accompany their every move. It doesn’t matter if they’re restoring an old psychiatric hospital to make a fake school, or papering the town with fliers to help Demi Moore save her uncle’s house, or simply walking through the streets of New York in an opening credits scene while a kid plays some homemade drums, they get music and it enlivens their life. They are living in color, sonically speaking, while for the most part we have to go through our days in black-and-white, with simple conversation and footsteps and people dropping the jar of jelly and whatnot.

Or maybe the difference is between 2-D and 3-D. Most of our lives are lives in 2-D, a blur of images and colors and lines, and when we (or at least I) put music on, it resolves itself into a spaceship or ostrich and we smile in appreciation for the new depths we have found.





I’m writing this while I listen to music right now, in fact. I’m sitting at our kitchen table while Sweetie gets A ready for bed, while Middle Daughter works on World War II worksheets and The Boy struggles with math, and because the kids are not supposed to have music playing while they study – they got iPods for Christmas and were allowed to use them while studying, with the results being that grades took a precipitous fall—so bad that it’s unlikely we’ll have to deal with Ivy League tuitions; we may not even have to deal with any tuitions – and so we remedied that by banning music during homework. But while I have to be at the kitchen table to be ready to answer questions (I’ve fielded, tonight, assistance with what D-Day was, helping point out that it differed significantly from Pearl Harbor, and also a series of vocabulary words that I didn’t do too badly on. I was even right on bivouac), while I have to be ready to answer questions, I also can work on my writing, like this, only I need music (enjoyed via headphones, right now) to really set the mood (right now, it’s “The Fish That Played The Ponies,” by King Missile, a song that I got on the CD that Sweetie gave me for Christmas the year we got married, a CD she located solely for the purpose of getting me the song “Cheesecake Truck,” which I’d heard a snippet of five years before when I played the District Attorney in the play “Brother Truckers.”)

There, see that? See what music does? It evokes a string of emotions and memories. From this one song, I got a bit of reminiscing that took me all the way back to that summer when I got bored and decided to take up acting, memorized a Shakespeare soliloquy, went on auditions, and appeared in an actual live play that ran four nights before live audiences at a real theater, all in the span of two months. (And the fact that I did that on the spur of the moment, much as I decided to go to Washington, live in Morocco, sing lead in a band, and go to law school, should show you just what an interesting person I am. If I wasn’t me, I’d kill just to get to know me.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, music setting the mood. The right song helps set a mood and can sink in and fix a moment in your mind.

And the right song can also cement a person in your mind as the greatest female singer ever. I’m talking about Fiona Apple.



Sweetie thinks that I like Fiona Apple because she thinks I think Fiona Apple is pretty. That is only partially true; Fiona Apple is, in fact, pretty. She’s also pretty interesting, but that’s beside the point. I like Fiona Apple because of her voice. And I got to know Fiona Apple’s voice through the song “Like A Drug.”

The song was on a mix tape that a friend who was a college DJ gave me years and years back. She didn’t label the singer of the song on the card that came with mix tapes. (Remember mix tapes? I have a zillion mix tapes. I’ve had some for so long and listened to them so much that certain songs, to me, will always make me wait for the song I expect to come next, because that’s the way they were on the tape. Like how I expect to hear “Don’t Ask Me Why” by Billy Joel right after “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd.)(I had pretty eclectic mix tapes.)

The song wasn’t labeled, and it was right at the end of the tape. I was listening to it the next day while I cleaned up my little L-shaped studio apartment, and it was getting dark, and I was getting tired. And that song came on. I stopped what I was doing and I just listened.

I was transported by the singing. People say, in old Jane Austen novels mostly, that they were “transported” but they don’t really know what they’re talking about until it’s happened. In this case, the singing was so strong and so pure and so on-key and yet had the tiniest little quaver, the smallest hesitation, like there was just a little part that was being held back and as you listened, you didn’t want the singer to hold back but you understood why she did and the fact that she did that made you ache for her.

That’s being transported.

I’ve since lost that tape, or it got eaten by a tape player, or someone stole it from me. All those things used to happen to mix tapes. But I never lost my love for Fiona Apple’s voice, and have gone on to enjoy other albums of hers and always because of her singing. If Fiona Apple were to chant the local phone book, I’d probably buy that.

And all because of that song.

And now you’ll be glad you read to the end, because it turns out that song was probably not sung by Fiona Apple at all. When I sat down to write this, I decided to once again search for that song to see if I could download it, since I could find plenty of websites that listed the lyrics and the title of the song, but could not find it on iTunes and could not find the album it was on to purchase it, and tonight I went to try again – I’ve been searching for that song, off and on, for years—but when I went to search tonight, to see if someone could point me in the direction of the album or where to download (legally! Back off, RIAA!) that song, I found, instead, a listing for the CD that the song may or may not appear on, and I say “may or may not” because I found, also, another site that claims that the version I heard was by that band but was a demo version – so I might never ever get that version back again?

So this, I guess, marks a first: The first ever nomination for The Best that was, in fact, based on a mistaken (or potentially mistaken) assumption. And yet, even being founded on a mistake does not make my opinion any less right. So let’s just agree that the song was beautiful, Fiona Apple has a phenomenal voice, and I’m always right.

And let’s go out listening to her sing:





Oh, and if you know the answer to who really sang the mostly a cappella version that I heard, and where I can get it, please let me know.

The Best Fictional Detective

The year was 1981. I was in 8th grade. In science class, I noticed the girl that sat next to me.

No, that’s not a partial sentence.

I noticed the girl that sat next to me. She was cute; she was my first crush, I’d say. She was enough to take my mind off the fact that my 8th-grade-science teacher had a glass eye and would not look directly at the person he was addressing, which meant that you were never sure you were being called on.

As a way of talking to the girl, I struck up a conversation that seemed to me to be a sure bet. There was not much in the way of sure bets for a geeky overweight 8th grader who wore glasses and wore pretty much the same sweatshirt almost every day of the week. But this was close, since my conversational opener was “What are you reading?”

That seemed a sure thing because I, too, liked to read. Loved to read. Always had and since then still do. And here was a cute girl who also read. That was a rarity in my world, since cute girls mostly did not read and mostly did not respond to me when I asked them questions, as this girl did.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” she said.

We actually had a conversation or two about that book, and she convinced me to read it. It helped that the book sounded interesting – a funny sci-fi book – but I’d have read anything she told me to do.

That girl has long since faded into obscurity. But the book she told me to read led me to read the sequels, and ultimately onto another book written by its author, Douglas Adams. Which finally – finally – brings me around to the topic this time, which has, to quote Mr. Adams, a Scottish dagger feel to it. Because the book I ultimately read contained the best fictional detective, Dirk Gently.



If you have not read Doug Adams’ books, or if you have but didn’t like them, you won’t understand this article and you won’t understand what makes Dirk Gently such a great fictional detective. What makes him great, in brief, is he’s not only a fictional character, as a fictional character, his detecting also appears to be fictional, as well.

Dirk Gently, born Svlad Cjelli in the books, is a private investigator who works, he says, in a holistic manner. That leads him to investigate the interconnectedness of all things, and to solve mysteries in the most unorthodox ways possible: setting policement to guard a jammed-up sofa with a hammer. Hypnotizing his client into going for a swim. Confusing little old ladies with stories of Schrodinger’s cat.

None of that seems to make sense, and on the first read through, the book starring Dirk Gently did not seem to, either, telling Dirk’s investigation of a ghost, a murder, a horse getting into a house, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, and his client (Richard) trying to keep things going with his girlfriend, all of which Dirk manages with aplomb, and aplomb appears to be the right word.

Dirk Gently might be one of the most fascinating characters ever created for a book. He has great lines:

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all”

He has great methods. Struggling with the problem at one point, he scribbles some gibberish on a piece of paper, and then points out to his client that he’s reduced an intractable, insoluble mystery to a mere language problem. An intractable, insoluble language problem, he admits, but still…

And, he has had more than one adventure. Although Douglas Adams’ unfortunate passing left us with a shortage of Dirk Gently Adventures, Dirk did have one more case beyond the first book, as in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul he grappled with the problem of what to do with Norse gods who have long since become redundant, while also grappling with the problem of what to do about his cleaning lady and her refusal to clean his refrigerator. And a calculator which answers most problems with the phrase “A suffusion of yellow.”


Keep your Sherlock Holmes, your Hercule Poirot, your… who else is a fictional detective? My love for Doug Adams’ creation may have been started by a crush in 8th grade, but it would not have lasted all these years just based on that. Instead, it was kept going by this kind of logic:

“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!" [Says Dirk].

"The what?" said Richard.

"That catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."

"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."

"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." [Drops a pencil, watches it fall to the floor.]"You see?" he said, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention."

The Best Number

You're probably looking for the article "The Best Number," but that article has been pulled and will appear in my upcoming book Do Pizza Samples Really Exist? (featuring all-new material, too). Watch this blog for news of the book, and in the meantime,Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!


Children tormented by demons. An old man accidentally killing people. Witches who live hundreds of years and escape from Hell repeatedly. An astronaut drifting through space... these and other great stories can be found only on AfterDark: The scariest things, you CAN'T imagine.

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The Best Concept Album

I’m not even going to mess around with this nomination. It's "The Wall" by Pink Floyd.

Sure, I could briefly discuss other concept albums – Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Tommy. Or, more recently, American Idiot by Green Day. I could even suggest other albums that seem to be concept albums but are not acknowledged as such, like Abbey Road, or, again, more recently, Get Behind Me, Satan by The White Stripes. (True story: My horror story “Astrid Forever” was inspired by the album Get Behind Me, Satan. I listened to that album straight through and then again, and as I listened the second time, I began to have this story shape up in my mind and then I went and wrote Astrid Forever, so thank you, White Stripes, and you, my readers, should buy that album and then put it on and read Astrid Forever while you listen to it and see what I’m talking about.

I could do that, but there’s really no contest, is there? There’s really no two ways about this. The only possible Best Concept Album ever is The Wall, by Pink Floyd.



I won’t even get into the statistics about The Wall (because I don’t want to take the time to go look them up; you can do it if you’re interested.) The Wall is The Best Concept Album not just because of sales, not just because of great music, not just because of the storyline (which you can read summarized here, and which I somewhat disagree with because I didn’t think that The Trial was in Pink’s head, and I’m not sure how much I trust Wikipedia, but it’s as good a summary as any) but because it casts its shadow even today. Schoolkids for dozens of years now have hooked onto the “We don’t need no education,” (an ungrammatical phrase which in its uttering probably proves itself false) and scared their parents, and then, lured in by that (as The Boy was, when he got into Floyd recently and so I bought him this album, which is why I’m writing this today) go on to check out the rest of The Wall and become hooked, too.

So I could go on and on about The Wall and I have, already, gone on and on about The Wall, but I’d like to try a little something different here. My reference to maybe-concept albums got me to thinking, as I wrote, about how we each bring something different to music, and therefore the artist sets out a plan for us, a scheme, but we interpret that through our own lenses, our own experience, which means that everyone experiences a concept album differently – and does so in a more dramatic way than we experience a book or movie or television show, because music is both more emotional and less literal. Music hits a deep primal feeling in us, right at the core of our essence, and so it drags more to the forefront and the surface than other art forms. And, music has no images or words and requires very little of us. With TV and movies, you’re told what to think: the image and music and all are presented to you. With books, you’ve got to do the work of reading to get to the imagination. With music, it’s force-fed to you like TV, but you’ve got to make the images and feelings link up yourself with your own experience and imagination.

So, to celebrate that, and to experience that, and to change things up a little, I’ve decided that this entry is an experiment, the experiment being:

What if I listen to The Wall in reverse? Not backwards, this isn’t a “Paul is dead” experience. No, it’s: create a playlist on my iPod, reversing the track order, and then listen to The Wall that way. Will it hold up? Will it relate to my life? Will I be able to draw some nostalgia out of it? Let’s find out as I blog my experience listening to The Wall in Reverse:

Esrever ni Llaw Eht:

(^^^Read it backwards^^^)

10:56 a.m. I’m at my desk, it’s Saturday, I’m getting caught up from yesterday when I stayed home with A & B because they had ear infections, and I’ve just started the Grand Experiment. “Outside the Wall” is first. Listening the right way, this is the sad, quiet, ending to Pink’s story. Leading off? “The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand… when they’ve given you their all, some stagger and fall…” It’s a preface, a warning that something bad’s going to happen.

10:58. “The Trial.” This was always my favorite track on the album. It’s what I think Dresden Dolls are trying for. I like to sing along with this and act the parts. I also frequently think of “The Worm Your Honor” when I’m confronted with judges I don’t like. So far, so good, though. The first track ominously presaged The Trial, which is a dramatic way to start a story: The protagonist on trial – but for what? Showing feelings?




11:03: “Stop.” The first words after “The Trial” finishes with the Wall coming down start with Pink saying “I wanna go home… have I been guilty all this time?” Nice. The album is working backwards. That then goes right into “Waiting for the Worms” with its stirring chords: “Goodbye cruel world, it’s over, walk on by.” I’ve got goosebumps, really. I’m not making that up. This is an excellent song, the music is grand and solemn and portends even more. Here’s a question for discussion: “In perfect isolation, here behind my wall.” Is The Wall more relevant NOW, with our reliance on the Internet and its impersonal ways to relate, including this blog? Discuss.

11:08: “Run Like Hell.” I saw Pink Floyd in concert back in my concert-going days. We saw them at Camp Randall, and although it was years and years ago and the statute of limitations is probably passed, I’m not going to discuss anything that happened before or during the concert in any detail, except to say that during “Dogs of War” it did seem like there were giant dogs going around the stadium, and during the part where the lasers made it seem like we were under water, my friend threw up. He’s a lawyer, now, too. I bring that up because I think Floyd played this song. When I went to the concert, the only song I knew by them was “Learning to Fly.” I just went to be cool.

“Keep your dirty feelings, deep inside.” That’s a lyric I just caught, followed by some threats to send the protagonist somewhere. So he’s served his time after The Trial that began this backward album, and now he’s on the outside, worried about going back.

11:13: “In The Flesh.” The first version of this starts The Wall when you listen to it the regular way, and this comes pretty early on in the Backwards Wall. And it follows on my last observation/memory: “So ya thought ya might like to go to the show, to feel the warm thrill of confusion, that space-cadet glow.” (Again, I’m not commenting on anything in particular, including whether there ever was a ‘space cadet glow.’).

But as the Backwards Wall goes on, our protagonist has gone from The Trial to trying to keep his feelings inside, but here he is onstage, letting them all out: "If I had my way I’d have all of ya shot!” This can’t be good.

11:17: It’s not good. “The Show Must Go On,” and apparently our hero – let’s call him Knip – is regretting his actions at the Show. “There must be some mistake… the show must go on.” We go right into “Comfortably Numb,” which can be seen as Knip wanting to lock up his feelings so that the show can go on. “I hear you’re feeling down, well I can ease your pain, get you on your feet again.”

I used to listen to “Comfortably Numb” when I was laid up healing up from a broken neck suffered in a car accident. The painkillers they gave me gave new meaning to this song. And, another true story: When I was a child, I too had a fever and “my hands felt just like two balloons.” I had to come home from school and everything.

Here we go though: Knip tells us “I have become comfortably numb,” and is warned that he “may feel a little sick,” but this will “keep him going for the show.”

11:25. After a lot of talk about childhood in “Comfortably Numb,” including “the child has gone,” we get “Bring The Boys Back Home.” Nostalgia? Missing the innocence of childhood? Or, in keeping with our themes, “Comfortably Numb” talked about the fleeting glimpse Knip had of something in childhood, but now that’s gone. Maybe by bringing the boys back home, he could recapture… his feelings? He does mention Vera, the next song -- his mother?

11:31: Some melancholy thoughts on “Nobody Home” segue into “Is There Anybody Out There?” with its slowly building ominous chords. It’s spooky. Knip has had his feelings numbed, and now is missing his childhood and his mother and is worried that there’s nobody out there at all…

11:34: This is really weird. I know the album is supposed to be circular in nature, but it does tell a story backwards, too, as “Hey You” starts, and the story is easy to see: “Hey you . . . can you feel me?” Knip repeats that line as he talks to the anonymous people around him. “Don’t help them to bury the love/Don’t give in without a fight.” He’s warning the others around him: Don’t end up like me… “Together we stand, divided we fall.” He's clearly regretting re-locking up his feelings. Remember, he was earlier "caught red-handed showing feelings" and punished. But now he's not sure anyone can even relate to him.

11:40: “Goodbye, Cruel World.” Well, that says it all, after the despair of the foregoing. “There’s nothing you can say to make me change my mind, goodbye.” That’s followed by pounding and crashing and Knip yells out “I don’t need no arms around me,” as “Another Brick in the Wall Part 3” starts.

11:46 a.m. “One of My Turns,” and a girl visiting Knip’s apartment. So he didn’t end it all. “Don’t Leave Me Now” preceded this song and suggests that the girl is the one who saved him. Now, she’s back home with him. And he feels but maybe not the right way– “I feel cold as a razor blade.” Or maybe he feels too much: He loses her, and asks “Why are you running away,” and that song ends and we go right into “Young Lust,” with Knip telling us “I am just a little boy.”

11:56 a.m.: Knip is really sinking: “What shall we use to fill the empty spaces where we used to live?” he asks. He’s cut off from the world and regretting his life.

12:02 p.m. “Mother,” which I know how to play on guitar – aside from the solo, because I only play acoustic guitar and don’t do that exceptionally well – is on. Knip has retreated home to his mom, and seeks help from her. Her solution? “Of course momma’s gonna help build the wall.” So we’re heading back to where Knip started. He began by being put on trial for showing feelings, then the wall was torn down but he couldn’t feel, or felt too much in a world that didn’t value personal interaction. Now he’s home worrying about what’ll happen, and Mother tells him not to cry. Where Knip a few songs ago told us he “need[ed] a dirty woman,” (“Young Lust”), Mother tells him “Momma won’t let anyone dirty get through.” A commentary on how to survive in today’s world? Don’t go looking for feelings?




12:07 p.m. “Mother” ends with Mother telling Knip “You’ll always be baby to me,” and Knip associates childhood with feeling. From there, it’s into “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),” about schooling and education, finishing with a teacher yelling at the children. And then the repeated sound of a phone’s busy signal – something most kids these days don’t hear, I bet – symbolizing the lack of connection that existed even when Knip was a kid.

Remember busy signals? Growing up, we had one phone, with that ultra-long chord that would stretch almost to the couch but you mostly stood in the back hall talking, when you talked on the phone at all. We weren’t much for the phone, since all of our friends lived in the neighborhood and we’d just go call for them or they’d call for us or we’d just meet at the park. Nowadays, The Middle Daughter and Oldest Daughter text message each other on their cell phones. While inside the house.

But we’re already into “Days of Our Lives,” which begins with an attack: helicopters and pulsating guitars. Knip is reminiscing about his childhood – and remembering that even then he’d try to hide his weaknesses. The swelling chords that show up at the end of that song, chords that gave a glimpse of hope that things were okay, abruptly end in this version and it goes into/

12:11 p.m.: “Daddy’s gone across the ocean, leaving just a memory… Daddy, what else did you leave for me?” And the music is threatening again.

12:14 p.m.: “The Thin Ice.” A baby crying, and someone telling Knip “Mama loves you, baby, and Daddy loves you, too.” Maybe I was wrong a while back. Maybe Knip didn’t make it through that suicide attempt all that well. Maybe he’s in the hospital, and his family’s gathering around. And he’s talking to them, warning them: “If you should go skating on the thin ice of my life… don’t be surprised when a crack in the ice appears under your feet.”

In other words: Don’t do what he did. Or you’ll end up with “your fear flowing out behind you as you crawl on the thin ice.”

12:16 p.m.: “In the Flesh?” Note the question mark in the title. The song begins with a voice saying quietly: “Where we came in.”

The same quiet music we began with. Then bombastic guitars kick in. And Knip says to us:

“So you thought you might like to go to the show,
To feel the warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow.
Tell me, is something eluding you sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you want to find out what’s behind these cold eyes,
You’ll just have to claw your way through this disguise.”

Then he yells “Lights.”

Then: “Where are all the sound effects?’

Then: “Action!”

Then he howls, the drums and guitars and instruments soar, and there’s the sound of a plane falling, falling falling falling, and then crashing.

And a baby cries.

And it’s over. Knip’s gone. He’s got cold eyes, he can’t hear, he sees lights. And
he’s dying – dead – unexpectedly.




So there: That’s Pink Floyd’s genius. Forwards or backwards, The Wall works equally well as a story.

The Best Football Team: The Indianapolis Colts

A new nomination for The Best Football Team, this one a little more current than my last one.

I recently posted The Best Football Team as a recap article over on my Gather spot (and you should really go there to see my pictures; it’s the only place I put some of them.) And, not unexpectedly, I got some feedback on that. Feedback that I personally disagree with, for a couple of reasons.

1. The feedback did not wholeheartedly endorse the Bills as The Best Football Team, and I believe I’ve made my feelings clear on this subject, and

2. The feedback, in this case, chose a team that cost me two t-shirts this year in my annual Superbowl bet with The Boy and Sweetie. You can read more about that here.

Nonetheless, this is a democracy. Well, not a democracy because there’s no voting.
It’a a demo- something.



Thanks to: toothpastefordinner.com


One of you smart readers tell me what type of demo- this column is. In the meantime, I’ll get to the actual nomination.

The nomination is from Carol Lloyd, a friend on Gather. The first thing you see when you look at Carol’s profile is that she’s a Pink Floyd fan, so she ought to enjoy the companion article I’m posting today about The Best Concept Album. Carol also enjoys a good cheeseburger deluxe, and is lucky enough to live in Florida, so she’s not going around trying to convince herself that it’s a “good day” when it’s 35 degrees on March 10, like I am. And, Carol has posted a recipe for cupcakes that makes me think both that I have to try it and that if I do it’s unlikely I’ll ever get back into my favorite pair of jeans.

Carol nominates the Indianapolis Colts as The Best Football team, and when asked for her reasons, this is what Carol told me:

One word: "Mature" leadership. In the Superbowl, I knew that if the Bears got behind their quarterback would lack patience and that comes with maturity.

And that, in fact, is what happened. That, to my dismay, is what happened. So Carol,

you may have a point about the mature

leadership.

Because Peyton Manning is nothing if not mature, something I learned when I read an article in Sports Illustrated after the Superbowl that told how the Colts prepared for the game, and one of the preparations was that at Peyton’s request, friends and family were banned from the player’s hotel rooms the week before the game. That request did not sit well with most of the players (who are probably happy now that they won) but it was taken okay by one person who was significantly affected by it, that being Peyton’s wife.

And my reaction to that article was just what you’d expect: Peyton has a wife?

The Best Comic Book Villain

When I extolled the praises of heroes a while back, I inadvertently neglected the other side of the coin, the yin to heroes' yangs. In my celebration of the heroic (and the wild, and the just plain weird, because Ambush Bug is not necessarily a hero even though, I guess later in his career, he tried.)

I didn't mean to do that, of course, but I was focused on The Best Comic Book Superhero, not on their counterparts, and so I didn't mention anything about villains at all.

Then, the other day, I posted a reprint of The Best Superhero on Editred.Com, where I now have a space, also.

And that reprinted article drew a comment, a comment that made a good point, a point I'd overlooked.




Heroes stand not just for truth, justice, and the American Way (or the way of whatever country you happen to live in or support), but they stand for something else: order.

Not "Order" as in ve must have order. But "order" in the sense that they are the opposite of entropy, the opposite of chaos. (And I'll make a confession here: I know what 'chaos' is and have known for a long time because I used to -- long ago-- play Dungeons & Dragons, and you could make characters be "chaotic" and either "evil" or "good," and I always wondered how "chaotic" could also be good, but I later learned that chaos is the absence of order.)

Now, I've got to add a little joke here: "Chaotic good" would be the very definition of my life since A and B were born. Want to find out the meaning of chaos? Add twin boys to a house of teenagers.

Anyway, I also wondered why you'd bother describing your character's orientation that way because it didn't seem to matter in the game itself. So you Dungeonmasters out there, tell me why I should have cared that my Cavalier, (Duran Greyhawk!) was Chaotic Good or Lawful Good or any of that. And I promise not to snicker too much about you still playing D&D, since, after all, I still own my Ambush Bug comics.






That, my friends, is exactly what it was like!

But, now knowing what chaos is, and why it would be bad, I also know that heroes stand for the opposite of chaos. And I might have come up with that on my own, but I didn't. Instead, I came up with it after reading a new nomination in an entirely new category (this category, for those of you who are not so quick on the uptake. THIS category: Best Comic Book Villain.)

The nomination comes from Jim Dodge Jr., who you can find on Edit Red, too, and who can already boast of having a book published, Skullfarm Raindance, available here. Jim, like all good contrarians, read my entry on superheroes and immediately went to the dark side, nominating a villain and creating this category.

Jim has nominated "Carnage,"

and I know comics have passed me by because I didn't even know who "Carnage" was. So I asked him, and here's what Jim told me:

Carnage is really Cletus Kasady, a serial killer who was inprisoned with Eddie Brock, a/k/a Venom. The symbiote and Eddie had been forcibly separated and Eddie was put in a normal jail. His cellmate, the aforementioned Kasady, was a lunatic of epic proportions. The symbiote came and broke Eddie Brock out by rejoining with him. They left behind an egg-like baby symbiote who joined with Kasady. Cletus's inborn psychosis and the symbiote's hatred of Spiderman give him even more strangth than Venom and powers never before imagined.

Jim can't just tell us who Carnage is, though, he also has to tell us WHY Carnage is the Best Comic Book Villain. And he did, using an economy of words:

Carnage kills randomly and brings a huge piece of chaos to the Marvel Universe. I don't like his killer tendencies so much, just his lack of concern for rules and order.

So it's okay to be friends with Jim, just make sure that you don't put him in charge of organizing the company picnic or anything else requiring rules and order.

And there you have it, the first nomination for The Best Comic Book Villain.

The Best Drum Section In A Song

You’re driving along, or jogging, or working out on that thing that swings your feet and arms for you and doesn’t look like working out at all, or you’re me and you’re washing the one hundred million bottles per day that your baby twin boys go through, and you’re listening to music, and on comes a song with a great drumbeat, and whatever you’re doing, you tap out that drumbeat, right?

You tap your hands on the steering wheel. Or you pump your fists, or you take two of those bottles and actually play an infant-bottle-plastic-kitchen-sink version of that drum solo.

You do that because drum solos tear right into your gut. They grab your spine and shake it and make you dance, make you clap your hands, make you move move move.

You know that’s right. It’s the beat that makes most great songs, and what’s the beat? The drums. The most neglected, the least-glected part of the band is the one that really makes the band go. It’s a cliché: it’s got a good beat. We say it all the time.

And if an average drum beat can get you up on the dance floor, a great drum beat, a great drum line, a great drum solo, can make you shake, can make you sweat, can make you—heck, can even make me—groove.

Okay, I got a little carried away. Nothing I do, especially on a dance floor, can be considered to “groove.” But great drums make me feel like I groove, and that’s half the battle.

So I am celebrating the great drum sections, drum lines, solos, call them what you want. (I’m a musician of sorts, but not that kind of musician.)

And in doing so, you have to consider them all, and I have. All the ones I know about anyway, and all the ones that spring to mind as I pondered this article over several days. And you know what? If they didn’t spring to mind when I thought “drums,” then they probably weren’t that great.

I narrowed it, then, down to three. First, there is the classic drum solo from the “Carry That Weight/Golden Slumbers” medley on Abbey Road by The Beatles. This one is great because it has that great middle part where Ringo’s just pounding on the drums, great because Ringo did it and he gets even less credit than most drummers, and great because, well, it’s The Beatles.



Then there’s more modern contender, and the one The Boy would no doubt go for; he’s getting into classic rock, and so he would most likely back this horse: the drums for “Rock & Roll” by Led Zeppelin. Great drummer, who actually got credit for the work he did. Great band. Great song (which, by the way, is about sex, you people who listened to it in that Cadillac commercial and thought yeah, it has been a long time since the rock & roll and bought Caddies. The ‘rock and roll’ is sex.) And the drums capture that, and its a propulsive beat and it really spurs you on; “Rock & Roll” is on my “running” playlist.



But it’s topped. They’re all topped, and by a near-hair-band. They are all topped by the drumming in Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher.”



I don’t know how you can listen to this song and refrain from tapping your feet, your leg, your hands, your head, anything that you can tap, and ultimately begin moving to that beat. Moving somewhere, anywhere, just moving because the beat in “Hot for Teacher” picks you up and carries you on its shoulders.

The Best Romantic Song, New Nominee!

A while back-- almost six months ago, actually -- I posted two options and chose between one for The Best Romantic Song.

Then this week I re-posted that to my Gather spot (look for the link off to the side here) and, who knows, maybe love is in the air because it's almost Valentine's Day (and I've already taken care of part of my present for Sweetie because I ordered flowers for her and they'll be delivered, so I just have to come up with a second present now because I'm pretty sure she'll get something great for me and I have to outdo her. For Christmas, I got her a diamond heart necklace with birthstones for each of the kids' birthdays, so for my birthday she got me a Buffalo Bills' watch, a suit, and remote control inflatable sumo wrestlers. Which you don't think are a real thing, but they are!)

Forgive me for getting off the track, but maybe I wasn't. Because while most of you are thinking "How will The Trouble With Roy ever come up with a present that's better, and more romantic than, inflatable sumo wrestlers?" (Hint: more jewelry) there is a small minority of you that's thinking "Sumo wrestlers, no matter how easily controlled, are NOT romantic."

For that group of people, I give you a more traditional romance, as brought to my, and your, attention by Bradley Bodeker. Bradley has lots of good qualities, and I'm sure one of them is an ability to explain how you could be born in Hawaii and live in Minnesota. But he does have the great sense and taste to like classic INXS, something I spent time last week trying to get The Boy to appreciate. (It was lost on him.)

Bradley also likes Van Morrison, and nominates as The Best Romantic Song "Tupelo Honey." In his words:

"Tupelo Honey" is the best love song because it honors his love, I picture him in total thrall of this woman, and putting nothing before her. I think it's the emotion he puts behind the song that gets me. "She's as sweet...as Tupelo Honey, just like honey, baby, from the bee (she's an angel)."

You can help judge by listening to Van Morrison singing the song live here:





And if you go back to that link at the top you'll find the others.

And, just because after that song, love is truly in the air, here are the remote control sumos:

The Best Horror Movie, New Nominee

I'm still getting the hang of the comments, and learned this morning that over on The Best Of Everything and on Thinking The Lions that there were comments from readers, so PLEASE don't think I'm not paying attention. I pay attention; I'm just very bad at what my nephew and now I call "'Puting."

Anyway, here's another comment I discovered today from Allex Spires, disputing Susan's nomination of Hostel for The Best Horror Movie, and putting in his own:

(I've inserted the pictures; Allex did the writing.)
__________

What the hell was that?? How is that even considerable as horror? It's just special effect snuff. Horror is putting a man in front of a mirror, removing his eyelids, cutting of his nose, his ears, cutting out his lips and cheeks, removing an eye, letting him vomit into his wounds... BURNING! And then, sending him home to see if he is still loved.

Cutting off an artist's hands. And letting her live.

Chewing on a spoonful from a bowl of teeth... THAT's horror. This is just extravagant murder.

Horror is torturing a person and then letting killing them slowly. A slit throat, what a waste of time, the character didn't even have time to reflect on his failure.

Sin City. That is HORROR.



Allex Spires
_____________

What Allex sets out is, in fact, horrifying. I take a more traditional view of horror myself, dividing horror into genres such as "horror" (like Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror) and "slasher" (think Halloween or Friday the 13th) and "torture" (Hostel, Saw.) But people seem to want to group them all together.

Sin City, now, is a new type of entry altogether. I would have lumped Sin City into Modern Crime, like Pulp Fiction, Go, or Snatch (all great movies), but if Allex wants to nominate it for horror, horror it is.

This category is bulking up. Keep it going, everyone!


And, for your bonus viewing pleasure, a parody of Sin City's trailer:

The Best Movie Line, New New Nominee

In a The Best Of Everything demonstration of Newton's third law of motion, and hot on the heels of my posting Allex Spires' nomination for The Best Movie Line, we've got our third submission.

And, it's from an Alex. Weird coincidence? Or cosmic conspiracy. We'll probably never know.

The new Alex is Alex M, and you can find out more about him here. Alex has some background in this, working in a production company, so his nomination might carry some weight even if it wasn't a good one on its own.

And Alex M's. nomination has the benefit (like mine) of being the actual quote, not the one that people (mis)remember.

Alex M.'s nomination:

"My fave, always, is "Play it Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By'""

Alex M. didn't explain why, and I won't purport to. But it's a good quote anyway, even if most people will tell you (erroneously) that the quote is "Play it again, Sam." (It's not, as you can see:



and that's a first for me: A parenthetical insertion of Youtube!)

Go here for what looks to be a good explanation of the actual sequence of the quotes. (Go here for a humorous reason why you might not want to trust Wikipedia all the time.)

The Best Movie Line, New Nominee

So I'm going through some stuff today, thinking I'll post a new article over on my new Gather site (check it out for the pictures; the articles are reposts of my blogs) and I realized that I had comments on here, comments that were unfortunately years old.

And my first thought was "You like me, you really like me."

My second thought was "Not anymore after waiting months to be acknowledged."

My third thought was "Yeah, but you still
liked me."

Then I read Allex Spires' nomination for The Best Movie Line. Here it is:

________________________
I am your father... that's crap from a crap maker to the crap lovers. CRAP!!!

"I am your father" is not particularly catchy and most people, outside of movie characters using it in good attempts at bad comedy, don't say it.

Thus, your nomination fails on that point.

It's not iconic, it was an utterly out of left field surprise and the closest thing I can think of that might be pop and fits in with it is Joseph telling his brothers who he was after they'd dumped him in a ditch and he became Pharoh of Egypt... hardly iconic.

It doesn't sum up the plot twist either, that happens when Luke holds his dying father in his arms at the end of the sixth chapter and they reconcile showing that evil and good can work together and be more powerful than either side alone.

It doesn't sum up the movie, either. Lando being forced by the wookie to turn the Millenium Falcoln around and pick up Luke just because Leia has a funny feeling, demonstrating that Luke is held up and simultaneously crushed by his family.

It doesn't sum up an entire Generation, either... "May the force be with you", the line that built an empire of New Age, did that.

"Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"

Is iconic, it holds and builds upon tradition going back beyond Sparticus and Metropolis and up into Roots, Indiana Jones, The Matrix, and "V" for Vendetta.

It is catchy and is used frequently in the most sensible and ridiculous of contexts all over the world.

It sums up the plot twist: though shot in the neck, Taylor heals and finds that he is able to speak again, which he and several people the first time they saw it thought would not happen, and not only does he speak but the first thing he does say is amazing, it shows the ragged slave garbed beast as a being, perhaps more powerful than his masters. It sums up the movie, All he wants to do is get away from the apes for the entire film and the apes are always trying get back on top of him.

It sums up three generations and all generations yet to come, the oppressed will always be there and at some time or other all people feel oppressed. The movie transcends racial barriers and gender barriers and class barriers. When the movie originally played in theaters, the producers were astounded that black and brown audiences and feminists loved it. People everywhere were able to so easily and clearly identify with Taylor.

Your quote does nothing you claim one should, mine does them all.

"Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"

-Allex Spires
__________________
Whew! I didn't think it was possible to get that upset over a movie line. I'm not going to rebut his arguments because my own original entry does that already. But I'd like to comment on his assertion that "May The Force Be With You" is more iconic and a better line.

I disagree.

"May The Force Be With You" is a good line, but not The Best because it doesn't carry the impact. It's more a catchphrase than anything else. It didn't hit you with a whipsaw like "I am your father" did. It might have been used a lot and paraphrased a lot, but in my mind The Best Movie Line is one that did more than stuck in your memory, it had to define the movie and hit home personally. It had to go beyond Dirty Dancing's kitsch value and mean something on many, many different levels. (In which respect I and Allex are not so far apart in how we choose our Best Movie Lines.)

Like I pointed out before, "I am your father" makes the cut because of how it affected all the kids who heard it; we'd all spent years pretending to be Luke Skywalker (and identifying with his need to go out there and be more than a water farmer) and suddenly you had to ask yourself: Do I want to be Luke? "I am your father" made the simple world of Star Wars morph into the complex world of The Empire Strikes Back. Now, things were not so straightforward. We weren't just going to get the Princess and destroy the Death Star. We were training for something bigger than us, and having to choose whether to listen to our teachers or our father-figures Obi Wan Kenobi, and had to wonder about whether the Landos in our lives would carbon freeze us. In "I am your father," George Lucas ushered a generation of Tweens into Young Adulthood. We would need The Force, because the universe had really become scary and the scariness was part of us.

But I like Allex's nomination, too. If you want to check in on Allex, go here. His nomination deserves some scrutiny. In fact, I liked it even better when Troy McClure used it in "Planet of the Ape The Musical" on The Simpsons:



Correction posted on 1/25/07:
From Allex Spires:

Okay, I went back and read it. Rather than put another longwinded response into the blog, I'll say that I didn't say that "May the force be with you" was Iconic, or even a good line, it just sums up the Star Wars/New Age generation.

The Best Kind Of Joke

I enjoy a good joke as much as the next guy. More than that, I enjoy a bad joke. I am all about really, really stupid jokes, the kind that make you say things like "Oh, Jesus, what did I marry?"

Okay, you don't say things like that. Sweetie does, though, when I break out the bad jokes. Bad jokes like this:

Q: What did the hat say to the coat on the rack?
A: You hang around here, I'll go on ahead.

Get it? Ahead. A head. Go on a head.

Priceless.

And there are plenty of classic jokes out there, so many that they can be broken into categories. The knock-knock joke:

Knock knock...
Who's there?
I eat mop.
I eat mop who?

(Say that out loud.)(Thanks to the Middle Daughter for that one, which she got me with.)
Or this one:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Interrupting Cow.
Interrupting Cow -- MOO!

(When you tell that one, you have to interrupt the listener's last line [interrupting cow who?] with a loud MOOO!

Beyond knock-knocks, there are the puns, in stories, like the one about Eric the Red's son, Rudolph, cancelling a trip because he feared bad weather. When one man's wife protested to him that the trip should go on , he tells her that they should not go and should listen to the boss. Why? Because Rudolph The Red Knows Rain, Dear.

I love it.

Or the pun can be in a simple short joke. What type of breakfast do ships eat? Boatmeal. Breakfast lends itself to that type of joke: What type of cereal is popular in the afterlife? Ghost Toasties.

There are also the word combination jokes: What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhino? Elephino!

Again, probably best to say it out loud.

And I know, elephant jokes themselves are their own category: The elephant in the refrigerator (Tracks in the butter), how do you get an elephant into a tree (have it sit on an acorn and wait).

But the best type of joke of all (not the Best Joke; I've already nominated that one-- The Monk Joke ) is one that's so simple, it lends itself to almost any premise:

The Walking Into A Bar Premise.

The Walking Into A Bar joke is perfect. It can be job specific:

An proton walks into a bar. The bartender says "Hey, no atoms in here." The proton says, "I'm not an atom." The bartender says "Are you sure?" The proton says, "I'm positive."

It can be geared towards little kids and puns:

A snowman walks into a bar. The bartender says "Hey, you can't come in here." The snowman says, "Why not? I'm an ice guy."

Say it fast, and out loud. You'll get it.

Or it can be a slightly-older skewing anthropomorphized pun:

Three strings want to go out for drinks. The first string walks into the bar and the bartender says "We don't serve strings here." So the string leaves, dejected, and the second string says, "I'll talk him into it," and goes inside, but again the bartender says "We don't serve strings here." The second string leaves. The third string says, "I've got it," and messes up its ends a little until they're all loose. Then he twists himself into a loop and goes in. The bartender says, "Hey, aren't you a string?" And the string says, "No, I'm afraid not."

And if you don't get that one, I won't explain it.

And the bartender doesn't always have to try to kick them out:

A man walks into a bar carrying an alligator. He says, "Bartender, do you serve lawyers here?" The bartender says, "Sure, I guess so." The man says "Fine, I'll have a beer, and a lawyer for my alligator."

But I think beyond its versatility, what I truly love about the Walking Into The Bar joke is that it can go beyond the simple into the metaphysical. It can become a metajoke, something more than a mere punch line. The first time I heard the best of these type of jokes, it took a second, and then I got it, and it was hilarious in a somewhat strange way. So I'll leave you with the best of the Best Type of Joke, the ultimate best Walking Into a Bar joke:

A man walked into a bar. And said "Ouch."

Perfect.


How do you illustrate this column? You don't. The pictures have nothing to do with the topic. They're just pictures I took and liked. Enjoy! 

The Best Snack Food

Corn meal, vegetable oil, (partially hydrogenated Soybean or Corn Oil), reduced lactose whey, whey, cheese [cheddar and bleu (milk, salt, cheese cultures, enzymes)], Salt, Maltodextrin, Disodium Phosphate, Artificial Color (including FD&C Yellow #5 and #6) Citric Acid, Buttermilk Powder, Corn Syrup Solids, Tomato Powder, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Spice, Monosodium Glutamate, Corn Flour, Sugar, Sodium Caseinate, Malic Acid, Natural Flavors, Food Starch Modified, Disodium Guanylate Sodium Insinate, Non Fat Dry Milk, Partially Hydrogenated Soy/Cottonseeed Oil, Vinegar, Lecithin (soy), Artificial Flavor, Red Alura #40, Lake and Blue #1 Lake.

All otherwise known as Vitner’s Big Bag Cool Ranch Baked Corn Pops.

You’ll recall that I a while back decided that the more artificial something is, the more I like it. And the Best Snack Food is about as artificial as things can get. Not one, but two kinds of partially hydrogenated oil. “Artificial” is used twice in the ingredients. And it contains something called “Food Starch Modified.” (Into what, I have to wonder.) They have phosphates and something called “Red Alura #40” to go along with that “Blue #1 Lake.”

And that combination, which looks as though it might be for mustard gas or a new hybrid fuel, creates the greatest possible flavor of the greatest possible snack food. These Pops are light, airy, crunchy before and melty after you bite them, and ranch-and-salty enough that you’d better have something to drink with them. They can clog your arteries from across the room and once I start eating them I have to leave the room or I won’t stop. It’s insane.

Not as insane as they guy who thought this was worthy of putting on the Internet, but to each his own:


And they create the best Fallout – you know fallout, that powdery stuff that great snack foods leave on your fingers when eating it? If you ever get a chance to see me after a long ride, note that I’m always stretching my fingers away from each other and flexing them. That’s because of the fallout. I eat snack foods – especially Ranch Pops—on the road and never remember to bring along some sort of washcloth. As a result, I’ve appeared in court with orange-stained fingertips secretly being thankful it wasn’t a jury trial. And the Ranch Pops Fallout is the best. It coats your fingertips and gets all greasy until you scrape it off with your teeth and create a miniature Ranch Pop in your mouth, sucking it to the back of your tongue.

(As an aside, I only realized after reading an article on Slate where the “ranch” flavor comes from. It turns out there was, in fact, a “Hidden Valley Ranch” that created its own salad dressing, and from that we have the flavor known as Ranch.)

(As another aside, I once noted that we were running out of new flavors to entice people into eating chips, and mentioned to Sweetie that I thought it was about time to get a new one. I predicted that the next big chip flavor would be… Caesar. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, judging from what they're doing overseas.)

As another aside, I should note that I had the bag of Ranch Pops sitting here while I was writing this, but didn’t eat even one of them because of my rule, sometimes observed, that I don’t eat after 8 p.m. But it was tough. And maybe that’s not even an aside, but an on-point comment, since that’s what this nomination is all about anyway: how great the Ranch Pops are.

I found Ranch Pops entirely by accident, when they were rearranging our grocery store to (as it turns out) make a few new aisles primarily to hold more foreign food, and particularly really really weird or scary foreign food, like “Spotted Dick.” Which is a real food. I was wandering around the store in a daze, trying to make heads or tails of things. We’ve been shopping at that store for something like six years, and I knew it like the back of my hand. In writing out the grocery list each week (I do the shopping because I’m less impulse-prone than Sweetie, and because if I go alone I can listen to my iPod while I shop, or even watch an episode of “Lost” while I wait in the inordinately long lines) I could make it out in the exact order of the aisles in the order I would go down them.

Then they moved things around and began construction and I was spending too much time there, wandering around looking for the Diet Mountain Dew and Febreze spray, and I turned the corner to a section of chips in a new order, and there they were . They had all the things I look for in a snack food. They were fake, of course. They were orange. And they were cheap.

I bought them, and never looked back. I could eat them every day, and I do; they’ve become a regular staple of lunch along with my bologna sandwich and Ramen noodles and diet soda. Check them out. Once you go Red Alura #40, you never go back.

I couldn't figure out what else to add to spice up this entry, so here' s a song. It's hard to find a song related to Ranch Pops. I gave up trying. Instead, listen to this because it's good.

Do Not Feed The Oysters -- Stephen Malkmus

The Best Talk Radio Host

I work at a desk and I don't like silence. I like something on in the background to break the monotony, and sometimes I'm just not in the mood for music.

So I turn to talk radio, and my talk radio tastes have changed over time -- as has talk radio. No longer is it a bastion of right wingers knocking liberals around and taking calls that ultimately bore you off the airwaves ("Hello? Dittoes! Couldn't agree with you more.") That kind of stuff started to turn me off of talk radio a long time ago; frankly, I don't care much to listen to the opinions of the callers, most of whom have nothing new to add and no interesting way to say it.

This is not meant to bash callers to talk radio. This is meant to celebrate The Best, so I'll move along to tell you that I currently have only two realistic talk radio options in my area. There are, technically, more than that what with the internet and all, but I can't be bothered always finding internet radio stations. And in my area there are three talk radio options that come in clearly. There's station 1, which features Rush at midday and a local conservative host in the afternoon, and, despite being quite conservative myself, I can't stand -- CANNOT STAND to listen to conservative talk radio hosts anymore. Even if they did not take callers, I couldn't handle it. They're snotty, to put it bluntly. They're annoyingly snotty and smarmy. And I can't handle the contrast.

I'll put it this way: I don't like annoying people. Take Tina Fey. She annoys me, and annoys me on a genetic level because just writing her name has made me angry. And I think it's because every fiber of her being, every iota of the mass that is Tina Fey, radiates self-important smugness, a general air of superiority, and somehow she not only radiates that but manages to seem like she's directing it personally at me. So I can't stand Tina Fey because of that, and her level of annoyingness manages to deprive every single thing she does of humor or fun or enjoyment for me. (That's why I won't be watching her new show.) I remember once watching Saturday Night Live, and I forget the exact joke but she told a joke on Weekend Update, and it was a joke I'd ordinarily find funny, but because she told it, it was not only not funny but it actually made me want to take the opposite point of view.

Let me hasten to add, it's not that I disagree with what I presume to be Tina Fey's politics (a presumption I base partly on her jokes and partly on her glasses), because I also disagree with Jon Stewart's politics but I would happily spend hours hanging out with him anyway and love The Daily Show. It's that I disagree with (as I said) Tina Fey's annoying smugness, something Jon Stewart does not have, so I can watch him and enjoy it even when he's in effect laughing at me.


Bad.

Good.
All of which is a long way of saying that the first talk radio station is out due to the level of annoying smugness demonstrated by not just Rush Limbaugh, but by the local host who manages to make me want to open an abortion clinic just to spite her.

Then there's the second talk radio station, which has at least one interesting character on it (another one I typically don't agree with but will listen to and enjoy) but which suffers from being... how can I put this? Oh, yeah, mostly boring. They tend to drone on and on about things that are boring-but-important (unions, living wages, Halloween parties) or boring-but-also-not-important (Humane Society board of directors infighting.) Since I've long since ceded that I no longer pay much attention to boring-but-important things, you can see where I can't spend the day listening to that station, either.

Which leaves station three, which is an ESPN/sports talk station. And while I like some sports, there are other sports (basketball) which I don't care about one way or the other, and some sports (baseball) that I kind of like but not really, and some sports (hockey, everything that's not football including soccer and NASCAR) that aren't really sports at all and so shouldn't take up any of my time.

But sports radio stations need to cater to fans who like those "sports," and a sports station that spent its time only on football would have not much to do for big chunks of the year. So I'd be lost in talk radio land most of the time, when they're talking about all those other so-called sports, I'd have no choice but to listen to union-busting discussions or music (because I'd somehow chew my ears off before listening to the conservative station, which could only be less appealing if they hired Tina Fey) if it wasn't for one guy, who gets me through two hours (he's on for three but my station only carries two) of the day:

Colin Cowherd.

Here's a link to his Wikipedia bio. I'm not here to write a biography of the guy. I'm here to praise his radio skills, which are second-to-none and which keep me listening even when the topics turn away from football to those less-appealing "sports," because Colin Cowherd does what other hosts should do but rarely do: He entertains.

I can only demonstrate the level of entertainment by paraphrasing an example. He was talking on one recent show about whether you'd want Randy Moss or Terrell Owens on your team, and he compared the choice to a guy choosing between two "smoking hot" girls with drug problems. I know that my relating it to you does not do justice to how great his discussion was, but that's why he's the radio host and I'm writing about him being a radio host.

Here are some actual quotes that give you an idea what he's like:

"UVA football is the softest bunch of cream-puff bow-tie wearing bree-cheese-eating, Nascar-wearing wussies I've ever seen in my life. There's not a softer bunch of cookie dough eatin weenies than the UVA football program. Those guys wear make-up to games. That is the biggest bunch of fru fru dacari drinking non-alcoholic beer chuggin weenies I've ever seen in my life. Dude, you want to know the most popular drink at tailgating at UVA football...? Zima!"

UVA Fan: "I'd rather be a softie from UVA than a redneck from Virginia Tech"

Colin: "I wouldn't. I'd rather win football games and that's why you're not committed. They'd rather win football games, you'd rather be sophisticated. Go like baseball loser. [Mockingly: 'I'd rather be a sophisticate than a redneck.'] I'd rather win football games weenie! That's why you're no threat in big college football. Cause you'll wanna watch Anderson Cooper on CNN. Congratulations, you're very sophisticated. Good luck with that Chardonnay. But Virginia Tech would walk right up and punch you in the neck."

(Click that link for the source.)

Colin Cowherd manages to cover a wide variety of sports and do so in a way that makes me listen even when talks about stuff I don't care about. He's a good interviewer, he's got a great way with an analogy, and he will never, ever, ever let you down if you listen to him. I can honestly say I've never turned off his show, never stopped listening if I didn't have to, never turned away from that station. For someone with my attention span and lack of patience, that's probably the highest praise I can give him.

So go listen to him -- find your ESPN sports radio and when he's on, and tune in. Even if you don't like sports. You'll not be disappointed by Colin Cowherd, The Best Talk Radio Host.


Very Good.

Here's another longer transcript that shows the genius that is Colin Cowherd. Click here for the source. What I like about this is not just the straight talk, not just the use of "ain't" but the random insertion of a pop culture reference to really tie it all together...


Great high school players who play offense go to Florida State to die. Then they go to the NFL and get better. Why? Because the coaching is better. Chris Rix, Drew Weatherford, never got one bit better. It's called coaching. Florida State is the worst-coached offensive team in college football, and it ain't close. Their offense is loaded with premier high school All-Americans - at the very least, all-state ... They have the No. 1 high school running back in the nation five years ago, Lorenzo Booker. He had two carries last week.

If you can't see what's going on, you're not paying attention.

Jeff Bowden should resign because that's what a good kid would do when he's hurting his dad.
Florida State football, folks, has become the movie, 'Tommy Boy'. The incompetent son is hurting the program. All you have to do is look at the quarterbacks, Chris Rix and Drew Weatherford. Both really talented, neither got better. It's coaching. That's coaching.