The Zapruder Film: or, How I Got Over "Al Capone's Vault" and Learned to Love Geraldo Rivera

So, I do think I'm a little weird in one respect: I'm mildly obsessed with the assassination of President John Kennedy. I'm not crazy weird about it, but I do happen to know a lot about it.

Two weekends ago my lovely wife Sarah participated in, along with her mother, aunt, and cousin, a three-day, 60-mile walk to generate a fairly large chunk of money for the fight against breast cancer. It was pretty danged awesome, and it also happened to take place in and around Dallas, where I had never been. I was kinda stoked. I was finally able to visit the scene of what has seemed to me for a very long time to be the shadiest of all shady shit gone down. There in Dealey Plaza, manning a table of pamphlets, books, photo albums, and DVDs, was Robert Groden, the man who had written the book that first intrigued me and got me into reading about all the gnarly crap surrounding that moment. We chatted for a bit and I bought a DVD of his and he signed a glossy little photo-album book he throws in. In the DVD extras you can watch Groden introduce the first public airing of the Zapruder film on the show Good Night America.

All this to tell you that Geraldo Rivera, March 6 of 1975, was a total badass.



For starters, check out that dude's hair. It reminds me a lot of my buddy Ted Kamp's. Ted's is certainly more luxuriant and full than Geraldo's, but Gerry's is pretty dope. He's also got a pretty sweet stash and a bitchin' suit, and he's very poised. I like poise. Ted Kamp's pretty poised. But I digress. The above photo isn't from the particular episode of Rivera's Good Night America I'm referring to, but it's around the same era and gives you an idea of the badassness Mr. Rivera was exuding at the time. Maybe without the same amount of poise as on March 6 of 1975, but hey.

Now let me be clear: I say "March 6 of 1975" specifically because I don't want to get into Geraldo's politics, or motivation, or controversies. And even though I have always been pretty pumped on things like his ability to take a chair to the face and still tell a skinhead to sit down and shut up, I'm not presently prepared to endorse the man as a great figure of journalism. But if you watch the clip of his show on which he airs the Zapruder film for the first time, you see a young journalist who seems very sensitive to his audience, guests, and the subject matter, and who has no qualms about saying things like "That's the most disturbing thing I've ever seen," and using hip words like "heavy" to describe what's going to be shown. He just looks like someone who would have been extremely cool to rap with at the time. Besides, he hung out with this guy:



Wait, let's try that again without the creepy barnacle lady attached to John's back:



Much better! That reminds me... Am I the only one who thinks Double Fantasy would have been infinitely better had it been Single Fantasy instead? If you don't know what I'm talking about, go buy the album and get back to me after a good listen to the songs by both sides of that terribly unbalanced union of "talent."

But again, I digress.

I remember quite clearly sitting in front of the TV with my entire family for hours waiting for Geraldo to bust into Al Capone's vault. The entirety of my life since that night has been colored on some level by Geraldo's colossal failure. We all grew up believing in the monolithic and enduring buffoonery of a man whom we all thought "got his" in the end when the wall came down to reveal nothing more than an old stop sign and a couple of gin bottles.

But having watched the end of that show again, I've got to give it to him: he owns up and takes it like a man worthy of that warehouse-broom of a mustache. Geraldo, twenty-three years later, has proved to be pretty danged okay in my book. And as the world's most famous Puerto Rican Jew, I think we would all do well to acknowledge him as the inspiration for this guy:


"Hey, Charles Manson, I got a note!" Okay, so maybe I made that inspiration thing up, but you never know.

Man, who remembers Dynamite magazine? I used to order that through the Scholastic book club! Sweet! Thanks, Geraldo, for helping me relive my past. Capone and I are both feeling pretty warm and fuzzy right about now.

Amstel Light

I love it.

I really do love Amstel Light. I find more often than not that when hit in the face with an inordinately large selection of beers, Amstel Light is the go-to beer. Typically my troubles when it comes to ordering beer are a result of not knowing what type of beer I feel like drinking, not what brand.

It's interesting the common visibility level of the typical beer which enjoys a very loyal following. This beer is usually young enough to be considered still a scholarly insider's secret, but high-profile and rakish enough to let everyone know you were in on the scholarly insider's secret. Think Fat Tire. Think about it, frat boy. But I digress.

Amstel Light is a lager brewed in Holland and imported in White Plains, NY, one of those places that seem so romantically bleak and oddly rich in characters, as in Rodney Dangerfield and crew in Easy Money. Men who drink High Life out of the gold cans while driving their plumbing vans to the track and smoking cigarette after cigarette. These are men, men. Again, I digress. Amstel Light tastes great! Light beer or not, this is just one of my favorite beers to taste. It's crisp and refreshing, but not flavorless and thin like some bad Mexican beers or light American beers. It's got just the right amount of fizz and hoppiness. It's a Pilsner, so it's got a good amount of hops for me (it's no TAIX Pale Ale, but I could drink many more Amstels in a sitting than those—the TAIX PA is a pretty engaging experience), but, being Dutch, it's a little sweeter than a German Pils. Speaking of hops, I did try one of those too-good-to-be-this-unknown-and-I'm-gonna-make-sure-everybody-knows-it-beers, Dogfish Head or somesuch. It was mighty good. Very hoppy, as I like them. Something about how the beer is hopped for 90 minutes or so, which I thought was just an unnecessarily dramatic way of labeling your different brews by simple terms like mild, hoppy, the hoppiest! I also read that they use some starter yeast that's 1,000 years old or so. That would be odd. What do I know?

At any rate, I've been to Amsterdam, where they originally brewed this stuff. That town was groovy. Clean as hell, beautiful, interesting. Yeah, they're gonna make a good beer. Bier.

Anyway, it's a good beer. It's no Chimay, but hey, that's another post, right?

I'm eating pickles and drinking a Pilsner right now. It must be the Graff in me.

P.S. Can anyone in the Austin area tell me if I can find Amstel Lager (not Light) anywhere?

Masquerade, or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Fact that I Would Never Find the Jewel-Encrusted Rabbit Buried in England

Ever read this book?

Masquerade, by Englishman Kit Williams, was as much a source of pain and frustration around my house when I was a kid as it was a wealth of entertainment and hours of escape into a truly weird, lush, awe-inspiring, and often nightmarish place.

I say pain and frustration because this book is actually a very intricately designed treasure map that led to an ornately jeweled golden rabbit buried somewhere on public land in Great Britain, and although my family was rich with some of the highest levels of intelligence ever assembled under one suburban roof, we just couldn't crack the code of the great lost treasure of Jack Hare.

Okay, so here's the gist: in the book, the Moon Chick falls in love with the Sun Dude (articulate gender delineation mine), and crafts a beautiful gold pendant for him, sending her trusted subject Hare to deliver the amulet to her Apollonian crush. Jack Hare braves many wild and woolly adventures to fulfill his quest, only to find upon his arrival that he has lost the trinket del amor, leaving it to the reader to decipher the clues strewn throughout the magical and befuddling illustrations.

The Treasure

This riddle proved impossible for my family, and I'm pretty sure we had given up on solving it long before it was announced that someone had deciphered the puzzle and found the treasure. Of course, it turned out that the X marking the spot had been located through devious and cunning methods involving the former lover of Williams or somesuch. I'm not sure anyone would have figured it out in a reasonable time frame, considering the solution rested in discovering that clues were revealed by drawing lines from the eyes of animals in the illustrations through the longest digit of the animal to letters on the borders. Or something.

At least it was pretty to look at.

The Most Absurd Brownie

Last night I ate the most absurd brownie. It came from a coffee bar at which I played a gig. I was a little unsure of this gig, considering that it was a coffee bar, not a bar bar, but they sell way more beer and have a much larger variety of beers than they either sell or have a variety of coffees, so I couldn't figure out why, when they had a totally cool building at their disposal, they didn't open a totally bitchin' bar. BAR bar. They'd save a lot of money on lighting.

Anyway, I saw this fat, solitary, obviously-small-business-that-totally-deserves-my-respect-and-uses-such-a-delicious-amount-of-real-butter brownie in the case and asked the price, and the guy working said something like, "aw, go ahead and take it; you played tonight." I kinda still get off a little bit at the even minuscule amount of privilege that being a musician gets me. I also got two free Dogfish frosties (great über-hoppy beer that reminds me a lot of the TAIX Pale Ale back home) and all the Lone Star I wanted for free. Fortunately for them, I only ever want two of the "national beers of Texas" a night at the most. Now, I'm no beer snob, but that is a terrible beer. But... it is a beer I will drink when I really want a beer.

I'm going to briefly and adequately describe this brownie to you. No nuts, no chocolate chips, just an insane brownie. Imagine that a magical baker had fashioned a delightfully delicate box out of seven layers of the crust of a chocolate creme brulee, then filled it with fudge that had been softly and seductively aerated with a golden, diamond-encrusted whisk, wielded by hundreds of the cutest little floating fat people. That was this brownie. Man, was I glad I had picked up some milk a couple days ago.

All that to say, yes, I do still love playing rock 'n' roll, no matter how much money I lose on it, how sore my body is getting, and how few people care about what I'm doing. Because every once in a while, I still get a free brownie.

This bit of baked heaven brought to you by Quack's Neighborhood Bakery, Austin.

Ten-Whenever B.C. Or Something.

Okay, so if you haven't seen the movie 10,000 B.C., you must, you must, you must check out this movie. Well, you must check it out if you are the kind of person who finds great hilarity in the Brad-Pitt-Plays-Achilles-Ha-Ha-Are-You-Effing-Kidding gift to cinema and all it stands for, Troy. Trust me, if you own Troy just so you can get all chill and laugh your face off, you would most likely dig 10,000 B.C.

Okay, so let's start with the title. Most people probably know enough to know that Jesus and the mammoths did not live very near to each other in time (there's a '60s bad-boys-but-not-really band name, "Jesus and the Mammoths"), but I think once you get past, say, 300 B.C., you could probably tell most people anything and they would buy it. So, calling the movie 10,000 B.C. basically knocks most people out of the running for thinking things like, "do you think that it's accurate that this tribe looks like it's made up of two people from each of the people groups of the world?" or, "Why on earth would there be woolie mammoths being used to build the friggin' pyramids?" Why? Because I don't think most of us would know what was going on at that point in time anyway.

Moving on. There's a scene fairly close to the beginning of the movie in which the hunter tribe from whom we draw our protagonist chases a mammoth herd. A herd of mammoths stampeding over rough and treacherous terrain until one of them becomes ensnared in the nets. Seriously. You get to see this. So try to wrap your head around just how insane it would have been to actually witness a stampede of mammoths. It would be like Mr. Snuffleupagus meets I, Robot or Attack of the Clones. Imagine the wind that would have come off of that. Intense.

I have this real obsession with the concept of historical speculation. For instance, ever since we were fortunate enough to receive the great movie that is Braveheart, every movie involving ancient survival is filled with rugged yet beautiful people with weird hairdos that seem to be a mixture of Ren-faire and rasta.* Much of the speculation comes down to ceremonial devices and clothing choices, such as in the HBO series Rome—killer show—in which there features regularly a town-crier type, whom I think is called the "Newsreader", who accompanies his reading of the news with these outrageous hand movements which we are to take, unquestioningly, as an early version of Italian sign language, the vulgar-Latin precursor of Bronx gesticulations. But don't get me wrong—Rome is a very cool show. More 'bout that later.

All that to say that 10,000 B.C. loves indulging in this type of speculation. The hunters carry these absurd spears crafted from what looks like mammoth vertebrae and tusks or something. I wonder what they used to spear the animals they got those bones from. Maybe they found a mammoth graveyard, but their primitive nature-god superstitious religion prevent them from disturbing it (speculation!). They have varying styles of hair with one thing in common: mud and dreads. The dread is brilliant, because it shows itself to be the ancestor to the graceful braid, and it makes the dim-witted viewer feel smart when he can blurt out to his drunk frat bros, "It makes perfect sense! Without access to water and modern toiletries, the hair of the caveman would totally dread up! They were totally the first rastamon! I bet they had some kind herb just growing in all the cracks of the caves and shit! Of course, this was unrelevant before the invention of fire." Yeah, I said "unrelevant" and "invention". Bro.

Then there are the battle scenes. Don't even get me going on the battle scenes. All war movies ended up using the same battle shots after Braveheart. Similar battle scenes are just one thing that made Mel Gibson's Patriot a new Braveheart for the Founding Fathers set. Every battle has a speech (well, at least either the climactic battle in a movie or the catalyst battle) that usually involves some sort of discourse on what "they" can and cannot take away from you (i.e. land/freedom, women/glory), and the choreography is usually pretty similar. There's always chaos, and super slo-mo, and there's ALWAYS some crazy warrior chopping off someone's head with TWO swords or cleavers or whatever (okay, geeks, Claymores and battle axes, you happy?) One recent movie (five years?) that includes many of these devices but is pretty groovy enough to still end up being cool is Oliver Stone's Alexander, but I would like to write a whole spiel on that. So later on that. Or in the words of Keenen Ivory Wayans, "Yo, later to you, Bathead. Your show sucks anyway!" Name that movie.

I'm realizing that I don't remember as much about Ten Grand Bee to the Cee as I thought, yo, so I'm gonna watch some of it right now. Happy hunting. Of woolie effing mammoths. Anyone know how to actually spell "wooly"? I keep getting redlined here. But here's the hilariously meatheaded kind of philosophy that finds itself as the first line of the movie:

"Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend." Hahaha!

* If you ever get the chance to go to the Commonwealth of Dominica, I highly suggest it. It is one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean, but it has, per capita, the largest Rastafarian population in the world. Bitchin' place. It's hard to believe that the scenery is real. And I ate dolphin there. Not dolphin fish, but Flipper dolphin. It was okay, though, because it was tuna-safe.

In Defence of Over-the-Top-Television Action/Crime Shows. From 2002.

So, Sarah Baby turned me on to this short-lived (22 episodes—is that "short-lived"?) Action | Crime | Thriller TV series titled Fastlane. It's a seriously cool, honestly thought-out, and downright sexy show about a couple of hot young undercover cops who pose as criminals to infiltrate and bust the toughest rings out there. At their disposal is God-only-knows-how-much-money's worth of cars, weapons, clothes, and technology to assume any legitimate persona, but at the end of the day, they solve the crime, restore their honor, and get the girl, using good old-fashioned street smarts and left hooks. And even though personalities rub wrong and emotions run high, again, at the end of the day, they are still best (reluctant) friends. Don't forget, one of them's out for vengeance for the death of his cop brother, while the other is constanly dealing with his fucked-up childhood.

It's like 21 Jump Street grew up, wanted to start shit and look good doing it. You know why? Because that's what we did. I was a kid when Jump Street came out and I was a man when Fastlane appeared. And I grew up, and I wanted to start shit and look good doing it. Sadly, I ended up looking a lot like Peter Deluise.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a man, think like a man, reason like a man; when I became a man, I did away with mannish things. A mannish boy. Spelled B...

A twist on the familiar. I hope that's ok to do. Anyway, Fastlane. It's great. There are bitchin' cars, hot girls, dreamy dudes, all dangerous, most of them (girls and dudes), fistfights, gunfights, and chase scenes resplendent with spin-outs, flips, rollovers, sinkings into the ocean after a pier dive, and most final, explosions. There's emotional warfare, physical warfare, and demonic warfare (the in-the-head kind), and there's usually some small but significant trial by fire in which one or both or all three of our main players learns they have yet another level in them they can handle.

Exactly what you always pictured the Jump Street crew graduating to after they got sick of sitting in history class. The last thing I saw Peter Facinelli in was Can't Hardly Wait, a high-school party movie, in which he plays the handsome-and-stupid dickhead ex-boyfriend of the Perfect Girl, Jennifer Love Hewitt. Bill Belamy's cousin is none other than Shaquille O'Neal for eff's sake (that is not germain to my point, but still), and Tiffany Thiessen even dropped the "Amber" 'cause she was all growds up.

Enough of this; I'm gonna watch an episode.

Broken Lizard

If you haven't had the luck to watch the movies created by the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, please take the time to do so. I was turned on to these talents by good friend McInfly, who told me I seriously needed to sit down and watch the nouveau-keystone cops comedy Super Troopers. This wasn't the first time McInfly had initiated a new and hilarious experience for me, so I trusted his suggestion and watched it. I laughed harder than I had since the last time I had watched Tom Hanks and Jim Belushi in The Man With One Red Shoe (trust me). I followed this with their next movie Club Dread and then Beerfest, the last feature film they have released.

"Man, you must of eaten like, 100 bucks worth of pot, and like, 30 bucks worth of shrooms, man... So I'm-I'm gonna need that 130 bucks... as soon as you get a chance..."

I think that's what College Kid #2 says to College Kid #3 in the opening scene of Super Troopers. This is great writing, as it's sounds and feels just like something we all heard from that one dude we all knew in high school who was kind of a dick. What follows is total fantasy.

Or so it might seem, but how many of us can recall stories, though maybe not quite as intense as the ensuing scene, of crazy happenings when we were in high school and college? The time you almost flipped your car because you took a turn too tight? The time you were followed out of the local miniature golf course by what seemed like all the gang members in town, the time you actually did flip your car... Anyway, in the midst of all their hilarious and sometimes cheap jokes and their healthy use of sex and boobies and drug references, the Broken Lizard crew really knows how to tell a story. These are not necessarily the most complex of plots, but the concepts are ones that utilize to great effect the old technique of asking "what if?" as in, "What if there were a department of highway patrolmen who really knew how to party?" or "What if a Jimmy Buffet-type of has-been musician owned a resort and the employees started getting killed?" or "What if there were a super-secret, global underground beer-drinking competition that considered even the idea of an American team a huge joke?"

These "what ifs" all produce stories that, in turn, produce moments you will never forget once you have watched them. You will never forget them because you and whichever buddy of yours has also seen the movie will constantly quote lines to each other, send lines as text messages to each other, and post them on each other's Facebook walls on a regular basis.

I am especially impressed by Lizard member Kevin Heffernan. Heffernan co-wrote all Broken Lizard films and delivers, IMHO, the most ridiculously funny, dry, and well-acted performances of the entire (extremely talented) crew. Also keep a close eye on auxiliary performances by seriously funny goofy guy Michael Weaver, particularly in Club Dread, and an actor whose mystery and charm lure me and entrance me in every movie he's in-Philippe Brenninkmeyer. Wow.

There are several projects in the works with these guys. Heffernan is starring in some promising-looking comedies. One, Strange Wilderness, a non-Lizard production, puts him together with another comedy great, Steve Zahn. I don't, however, believe that semi-hack Jonah Hill deserves screen time with him, but hey, maybe Hill can continue to rebuild the funny he promised us in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and started to reclaim in his hilarious, albeit brief, encounter with Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (yes, I have a four-year-old). It's just too bad that Hill gets higher billing. Oh well, welcome to how it is. I'll have to watch it and report back.

Anyway, back to Broken Lizard. They are poised to release Super Troopers 2 in 2010 (directed, as were the other Lizard productions, by Jay Chandrasekhar), and The Slammin' Salmon (directed by Heffernan-eep!) this year (is it out yet?) Watch them, learn them, take some of what they put on screen with a grain of salt (a couple of these guys can ham it up a bit much), and forever find yourself asking "Who's Barry Badrinath? Who's Barry Badrinath? Who's Barry Badrinath?"

Thanks again, McInfly.

The Thrifty Reader

Being married to a vintage fashionista has its advantages. One, she always looks pretty damn awesome. Two, I spend a lot more time in thrift stores and, subsequently, walk out of said thrift stores with some fairly wonderful book finds. The downside is that I spend money I should be using to pay off my now ten-year-old school loans and continue to add to the stacks and stacks of pulp in the house.

But those downsides are nothing compared to the joy I receive from getting myself nice and mellow and paging through something like this:

Yes, it's an elementary school book, but hey, it's just the kind of book I would have found in the library of Sierra Vista Elementary in lovely Upland, California, and yes, I have an insanely nostalgic streak in me that makes the characters in Springsteen's Glory Days look like serious "live-in-the-now" kind of folks.

Just listen to the music of the book's opening paragraph:

"Mexico, our sister republic on the south, is an enchanting land of mountains and deserts, golden sunshine and purple shadows, dense evergreen forests and tropical jungles."

Ahh... Such lush pictures do enter my head! I feel like I'm floating in a wee boat, lost in the cool air, hypnotic song, and dazzling bedazzledry of It's a Small World. Any moment now we'll pass through Polynesia, into the brilliant sunlight, and back on our treck toward the Storybook Land ride, soon to be swallowed whole by Monstro the whale.








Enchantment of America
Mexico
By Frances E. Wood
Illustrations by Katherine Grace
Copyright 1964 CHILDRENS PRESS, CHICAGO

Page 13

Do yourself a favor and find some old picture books about ancient Rome, Greece, Capri, India... anywhere, really, that has retained its ruined past and has grown up around the remains. I say "old" picture books, because there is something about the outmoded film, cameras, developing, etc. that produced photos of such a rich and saturated quality that the colors burn right into your head, forcing you to wonder what kinds of adventures the previous owners of the books had been inspired to undertake.

I have acquired several of these books at Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc. I've found each one at different shops, yet I've somehow amassed a collection that seems to come mostly from the same foreign publisher. When I'm laying in bed, looking at the gigantic edifice of say, the Porta Maggiori in Rome, or the Parthenon in Greece, Hindu temples in India, Mayan pyramids, or even the Taj Mahal, which, while not exactly ancient, is really brilliant to look at, I go away in my head. I think I'll go there now. Maybe I'll teach my kid to surf in the shadow of some Zoorastrionist holy shrine while my lovely wife drinks mai tais from hollowed-out pineapples. Doesn't that sound grand?

Page 12. Right?

the Family Effing Feud.

Couldn't retrieve chat history

10:48pmDave

dude, you totally have the DVDs of the Midnight Special, don't you?

10:50pmCraig

no - but i want to order the set

10:51pmDave

both Neil Sedaka and Blackfoot are featured on that show (this is in response to Craig's use of both of those acts in his bio for a phony MySpace character he has created and maintains.)

I feel like it's the same disc

maybe you saw an ad for it

ha

it got in your sub

Sedaka is a total dork trying to be hip in this white suit and red fedora

and Blackfoot is all in warpaint and paramilitary-native american type clothes

10:53pmCraig

that's smart dressing

10:54pmDave

the guitarist dances onto stage to heavy drums before strapping on his axe, er, tomahawk

and he has a full feather bustle and shit

I love it

but f*%# Sedaka

hahah

10:55pmCraig

i remember my mom went to see sedaka when i was a kid

my mom has always been 65

10:55pmDave

yuck

I think my mom story might just blow all others away

In 1980, my family somehow ended up appearing on "Family Fued".

So my Mom, Dad, aunt and uncle, and my Grandmother went on the show

and Richard Dawson was all creepy and shit, and we got free tootsie pops in the live studio audience

10:58pmCraig

wow

10:59pmDave

(incidently, we almost didn't make it, because my older brother Dan was in the record shop instead of the arcade, where he was supposed to be picked up on the way to the taping).

so, my family beats the other family by a hair and goes on to the $10,000 round

11:00pmCraig

good so far

11:01pmDave

my dad goes first, and he does pretty well. When asked, "Name a famous drummer," my dad says, "Ringo Starr". Turns out to be the number one answer in a survey of 100.

"Survey Says!" I can still hear it.

11:01pmCraig

awesome

11:02pmDave

So Joan, my Mom, comes out. She's doing okay, but she needs to do well on this drummer question.

11:02pmCraig

buddy rich

11:03pmDave

Richard, flirtatious and soft, asks my mother, "Name a famous drummer."

*beat*

"Cubby!"

11:03pmCraig

from the mickey mouse club?

11:04pmDave

Cubby, the f#%*ing drummer from the g*#%amn Mickey Mouse Club.

Richard Dawson is perplexed.

"Who?"

Hahaha!

11:04pmCraig

awesome

11:05pmDave

They split twelve-hundred dollars between three families.

But hey, that was $400 in 1980

11:05pmCraig

not quite bass boat money, but still pretty good

a house payment

11:06pmDave

(I say that like I'm some sort of expert on the financial climate of 1980 America)

yeah, house payment

a week's supply of crystal meth

11:07pmCraig

on a slow week

like easter

11:12pmDave

man, I had something profound to tell you, and then *poof* it went away

11:12pmCraig

that'll happen

it will come back around

11:13pmDave

yeah, I guess.

After we failed to win the big prize, someone shoved my brother and sister and me to the stage and we ran down and hugged our family, which was typically a celebration reserved strictly for the victorious team. I felt like such a dipshit.

Page Eleven

Do yourself a favor and watch some movie from the late '80s that you know you've seen, but you don't really remember much about. My choice for tonight is Throw Momma From the Train. The risky part of telling you this is that I haven't actually tested this notion. I'm about to, and the cool part is that I think it might actually be pretty fun and funny, still.

There was that weird bunch of comedies that were neither too heavy nor too light; they featured great acting by solid actors, fairly good writing, and always at least one hilarious scene that most people my age (almost 36—eep) will recall with great enthusiasm. Picture Danny DeVito shouting "You lied to me!" and clocking Billy Crystal in the face with a frying pan, or Jim Belushi descending into madness after some fairly outrageous moments in The Man with One Red Shoe, a lesser-known Tom Hanks gem.

When I revisit something that I haven't seen in a while, I am amazed and delighted by how much I have forgotten. I suppose that's one upside to the impending memory loss of old age.

"What's this called? Toothpaste? This shit is AWESOME!"

Page Ten

Do yourself a favor and listen to more hip-hop. Start with the basic big names right now: Li'l Wayne, Akon, T-Pain, Plies, Kanye, and of course, Ludacris.

Beyonce gets her own line. Right here. She's owning things right now.

Here's what's badass about hip-hop. Collaboration. We crackers get so caught up in thinking that this is the music of selfish, materialistic gangsters that we completely overlook the fact that these artists are so committed to putting out the best music possible that they will work together in what seem like endless combinations to constantly keep the listener happy.

The other aspect of this genre that just blows my mind is its unwavering demand for quality. You music "fans" out there who are so proud of the fact that you will listen to "anything but new country and rap" consider these exclusions to be proof of how discriminating you are, but if your favorite hipster band were to put out a Shit Sandwich, you would be terrified of being the one person out there who admitted that the record sucked. You live in fear of someone, twenty years from now, saying, "You! You were the one person who didn't like that sixth Fleet Foxes record that is now hailed as a visionary masterpiece by the kids in Silverlake (or whatever part of town will be the hip part of town in twenty years.)!"

The point is this: a few months ago, VIBE magazine named, after an in-depth, reader-driven competition, Eminem as the Rapper of the Year. A lot of people took issue with this, but no one could deny that he was surely a valid candidate for the title. So, Eminem is riding high on most everybody's happy list, but if Eminem were to put out a crappy single or, even worse, a whole album of poop, HIS ASS WOULD HEAR ABOUT IT. The fans and the critics would demand more. Apologies would be called for, and his version of that apology would be another album that schooled everybody off the court. The fans would have spoken, and the artist would have upped his game, knowing that a bad single doesn't get played at the club, doesn't get played on the radio, and doesn't make him the shitload of cash he was hoping to make this year.

So quit worrying about whether or not your friends will no longer view you as a pure Gram Parsons fan if you suddenly dive into Snoop, or if you will be asked to step down from the presidency of the Ray LaMontagne fan club for bumpin' Luda out of your vintage Volvo.

And as a bonus favor to yourself: Watch Beyonce videos over and over and over...

Page Nine

Do yourself a favor and watch Star Wars with a four-year-old.

This little exercise in patience will teach you a lot about the proper way to explain situations the first time you encounter them.

Let me explain. No, let me sum up: Five minutes after I told my daughter that yes, in fact, the guys in white armor and helmets are always bad, two of them took off said white helmets to reveal that they were Luke and Han, whom I had already told her are always good. I had some summing up to do.

That's all. I'll have another page later tonight, Lord willin' and if the creek don't rise.