Posted on

Take Home an Amusement Park

Santa’s Village Amusement Park in Dundee, Ill., is a staple of the childhood memories of local Baby Boomers that closed last year. While nothing can take the place of those memories, those with the yard space can bring home big souvenirs tomorrow as they auction off the equipment and rides like The Dragonfly, the Fire Chief Crazy Bus, and the Tubs-O-Fun. The auction catalog can be found here. They’re even selling off their Zamboni machines. Come on, you always wanted a Zamboni, right? Probably cheaper than a Hummer.

All I want is one of their Skee-Ball alleys. With enough practice, maybe I could finally beat it.

Via Gaper’s Block.

Posted on

Scraps

* This morning, at 7:46 Eastern time, America welcomed its 300,000,000th citizen, according to the Census Bureau. He then managed to pimp me out of the last parking space in the lot.

* Speaking of pimps, the gentlemen with the bling are one of the biggest Halloween costumes this year, at least from what I can see at the transient stores that pop up in empty storefronts. Pimps and pirates this year. Hmmmm. Is there a political joke in there?

* But considering how slutty the other costumes are getting, it’s hard NOT to imagine having pimps around.

* Hey, Dr. Frankenstein: Re-Animation is Murder Backwards!

* I’m trying to figure out a way to keep our pumpkins safe from the hordes of ravenous squirrels in the hood. Thinking of spraying them with oil mixed with Thai hot sauce, but I’m afraid they’ll start to like that little endorphin rush and keep coming back for more, looking for jalapeno poppers or something.

* I was all set to make a stand this fall, and not bother to watch any football at all on TV. I had plenty of reasons–the main one being that, if a guy follows more than one sport, he’s got too much time on his hands. And what do I get for my resolve? A Chicago Bears team that apparently employs witchcraft to win games (see last night’s failed field goal by Arizona) and a Michigan team that might make it to #2 by the time the Ohio State game rolls around. Great. Just great.

Posted on

No Music, No Chicken, Just Guts

Just got through watching Kenny Rogers’ PHENOMENAL pitching job for the Tigers against the Yankees. I’ve never seen someone so in control of his curveball. He could be with Tom Cruise and the Impossible Mission squad, and throw round things with great accuracy, like into melting nuclear cores past a bad guy with a smacker of some kind. And eventually he’d snap Cruise into little pieces, so it would be entertaining AND a public service.

And he got to do it against the Yankees. Christmas in October. It’s so nice to see Joe Torre give his best Frankenstein face in the dugout, and watch Jeter and Damon and the rest of them just give up. After every strike toward the end, Rogers shouted at Rodriguez, “Come on! Gimme the Ball!” I expected him to take a bite out of it like a big Granny Smith. He’s never had any luck against the Yankees, and maybe they got lax, but he was so fired up I thought he’d have an aneurysm. It’s just so cool to see a man set a goal and rise to the occasion against all the stats. Dare I say it, I live for this.

I didn’t want to sit and watch a ballgame all night, have other important things to take care of. But that game was one for the ages, and if the Tigers are going to advance in the playoffs (a big if–I expect the Yankees to score about 15 runs tomorrow, just out of blue-ball frustration), I needed to see this one. Hoo Dog. I’m going to go strap some ice on my thumb, cuz I kept rewinding the Tivo to replay the pitches.

Posted on

Old Flame vs. New Love

Iconic imageThroughout the summer, my affections have been pulled in two directions. I’ve been faced with the decision of whether to root for my current hometown White Sox or my former hometown Dee-troit Tigers.

Old loyalties die hard; I was 8 years old when the Tigers won in ’68, and without that, I might never be a baseball fan. But this summer, I was more inclined to the Sox, because if they were to falter, impatient GM Kenny Williams would start to dismantle the team, swapping a player here and a player there, until what was so powerfully delicious last season begins to resemble a college sophomore’s attempt at Sunday cooking. (Now his job involves which of his five starting pitchers to trade to make room on the roster for rookie phenoms coming up, as well as bullpen help. Good luck with that.) Besides, even with today’s communications, it’s hard rooting for a team from a distance. Even though I saw the Tigers beat up the Cubs in June here at Wrigley Field, they’re still strangers to me.

This week, the Sox made the decision for me by finishing with the fifth best record in baseball. Hardly sputtering, but not enough to move into October. Now I can cheer for the Tigers until the Yankees come up and clean their fridges out.

After that, it’s easy. Just cheer for whoever’s playing the Yankees.

Posted on

Front-Line Fishies

Hail the beloved bluegill. This summertime staple, this amiable bream, this scintillating sunfish is now being used to fight terrorism in several major cities. This article explains how this patriotic panfish is being used to detect whether any type of toxins or contaminants have been dumped into our water supplies.

Small numbers of the fish are kept in tanks constantly replenished with water from the municipal supply, and sensors in each tank work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and swimming patterns of the bluegills that occur in the presence of toxins.

“Nature’s given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there,” said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the bluegill monitoring system. “There’s no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill.”

And here, I’ve been cursing them for stealing my bait. So put that bluegill back in the lake, little lady. He’s got to grow a little bigger so he can do his civic duty.

Posted on

A Fraternal Shout-out

Wanted to alert the world (and especially that part of it in NY that supports the theater biz) that the showcase starring my brother Patrick Garner has had two performances added in the coming week.

“Desperate Measures” is the musical, an update of “Measure for Measure” set it in the Wild West. It’s playing as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival. There’s more info and photos at the link for Broadway World dot com.

So get out there and support live theater, unless you’re one a them lowlifes who hates both Shakespeare, musical theater AND cowboys. And if you are, I don’t know how you can live with yourself.

Posted on

A Disconcerting Irony

For all of Dubya’s faults—all of em, he thought wearily, all of them—there are two things that people say about him through crisis after crisis. One is that of all the human virtues, he holds loyalty in the highest regard. The other is that once he decides on a path, he cannot be turned from it. He doggedly hangs on to what he considers his mission, regardless of anything else at all.

So, I started thinking: There must be a job somewhere in which these two traits would spell success. Dubya’s gotta be suited for some job somewhere, right?

Loyalty to his fellows, dogged tenacity toward a goal.

Loyalty, tenacity.

Then it hit me: Dubya’s talents would’ve made him a first-rate soldier!

What a shame those pesky National Guard types in Texas and Alabama kept him from truly shining in Viet Nam, making him complete training missions and stay sober, then went and lost his papers and everything.

What a shame.

Posted on

Makin’ with the Funny

There’s so many things I want to write in this blog…

...and that sentence makes me sound just so diligent about things, doesn’t it?…

But they are going to have to wait for a while. Shock on shock, I have a new book deal. Well, six weeks old, but new enough, and the publisher wants it as of yesterday. So my apologies to those of you who want my salient opinions on circuses and CIA secret prisons, but my nose must be affixed to the handy grindstone for the foreseeable future.

Don’t want to say here what the book is about, but in researching it, I came across this movie quote that I’d never heard before. Clifton Webb delivers it in “The Razor’s Edge”:

You know, I’ve never been able to understand why, when there’s so much space in the world, people should deliberately choose to live in the Middle West.

Ha!

PS:THere was a crazy thing on the Huffington Post this morning about a strange sea beastie that washed ashore in Siberia. It’s probably a hoax, but there are some cool pictures. Looks kind of like one of the Muppets used during the early years of SNL.

Posted on

For My Birthday…

here’s my present to you. A picture of the birthday cake that my ever-lovin’ wife and kids made for me on Sunday.

It even tastes better than it looks, if you can believe it.

You may not be able to tell, but this cake depicts a beach scene with a bunch of little Teddy Grahams running around. The Beach is the brown crumbly area on the left, and the water is on the right. The teddies are playing with tubes and such, and up in the right hand corner, the orange thing that looks like an arrow is actually a boat pulling two teddies on tubes. (The long bumpy things are some candy called Crunchy Gummi Worms. Go get a big tubful of them, even if you’re not decorating an elegant dessert like this one.)

At the right end of the cake, my son spelled out my age in Roman numerals, in Crunchy Gummi Worms. That eases the pain of getting older–the more years you chalk up, the more worms it takes to make your cake.

Posted on

Welcoming Myself Back

He's just askin' for it...Why, yes, indeed. Thank you to me for welcoming me back into my bosom. I just can’t thank me enough for my warmth and generosity.

So I go off to Deutschland with the Frau and Kindern, and what do you think happens? The whole world goes to Hammond in a handbasket. And I’m not talking about Israel and Hezbollah, even though we vacationers missed that conflict entirely, I’m not talking about the looming threat of Iran as a nuclear power, although today’s NYTimes points out that no one in the intelligence community (the ones who do the spying and the number-cruching) thinks that the danger is imminent. I’m not talking about heat waves, gas prices, or any of that stuff.

No. Here’s what I’m talking about: I come back to the bosom of the States and see that Chicago has indeed, as they have threatened to do for some months now, instituted a ban on foie gras. Can you believe it? What will I have with my biscotti in the morning now?

That Chicago, the erstwhile hog-butcher to the world, the place that legendarily learned to use everything in the pig but the squeal, would suddenly get all soft on us and knuckle under to the goose lobby just makes the mind reel. Do those alderman realize that by enlarging the livers of geese to 10 times the normal size, we actually have to kill 90% fewer birds for the same amount of liver (which is loaded with vitamins, BTW)? No, they don’t bother themselves with little details like that.

But it’s heartening to realize that human nature is still the same, and this city’s up-yours attitude is still strong. Many restaurants and diners who ordinarily wouldn’t touch foie gras now feel the urge–the compulsion–to eat it, on everything from pizza to cornbread. Yeseterday’s Tribune has an article about it.

And the best hot dog restaurant in the city–fabulous Hot Doug’s–is leading the fight for foie gras-furters.

A less publicized but long-standing protest continued at Hot Doug’s, where proprietor Doug Sohn offered three variations of a foie gras-laced sausage despite the prohibition. In April he named the foie gras and sauternes duck sausage (with green apple mustard and goat cheese) “The Joe Moore” in honor of the proposal’s sponsor.

As the joint’s slogan goes, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘Encased Meats’, my friend.”

Yes, me, welcome back.

Posted on

A Meeting of Great Minds

As a homebound basement scrivener, I take any and all opportunities to get out with people in the neighborhood. Being self-employed is great—no bosses, no shaving, I can watch “The Office” and laugh instead of cry—but it has many downsides, one of which is the isolation and the voices it tends to breed in your head. The voices that say that everyone you meet on the street is a robot except one, and that person must be eliminated with extreme prejudice.

Fortunately, I’m surrounded by people in like circumstance (except for the voices, I think), and also by people who love to drink. So just about every Wednesday, a group of neighborhood dads jump on their bikes after the kids are in bed and hit a local gin mill for a couple hours. (Actually, now that everyone’s kids are basketball-playing preteens instead of toddlers, it’s harder for most of us to get out.) I’m fortunate because it’s just like being a member of the Dad’s Club at the local parish without actually being Catholic and everything that entails.

Last night was a smallish group. A professor of Middle Eastern history, a trust specialist, an importer of car parts, and a basement scrivener (me). Here’s what we talked about, in rough order:

• heating bills, including a $12K bill for the church this month
• insurance, with horrible medical stories accompanying
• Olympic sex scandals and figure skating (one guy knew WAY too much about this for anyone’s comfort)
• Foreign toilets
• The word dickshine

I must take credit for the last topic, since that was how I described a local TV reporter showing all us dopes about the ins and outs of curling. To my surprise, no one at the table had ever heard of it. Is this truly some regionalism from southern Michigan, or a dated term that expired after I got out of high school?

An incredibly useful perjorative, dickshine refers to a useless yet self-important stooge of some kind, too insecure to be mean (unless in imitation of someone meaner) and too inconsequential to worry about. By this definition, just about every television journalist you’d ever meet would be a dickshine.

Comparing it to a Chicago regionalism, a dickshine is similar to a jagoff in many respects, except that a jagoff has enough initiative to make your life miserable if necessary, while a dickshine can only succeed in bringing annoyance.

I’m not sure that dickshine is related to the term dickweed. It might just be a city/country variation.

Dickshine definitely does not have any connection to fellatio, either giving or receiving. In fact, since one of the qualifying factors of being a dickshine is annoyingness, this might preclude sexual success altogether.

Closest synonym: piss boy. See Brooks, Mel, History of the World, Part II.

Etymological insights from readers are welcome.

Posted on

Hot Fun(dies) in the Sun

Andrew Sullivan had a couple of great links since yesterday. Since it’s the middle of winter and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue hasn’t hit the stands yet, a little taste of HOT summer fun is just what the doctor ordered.

So if you like your red hot mamas of the Christian variety, check out the latest pix from the swimwear maker WholesomeWear.

Or, if you go for something a little more exotic, check out the latest from Down Under with Ahiida Swimwear!!

Who says we can’t all get along?