Kids, “master clowns,” and one small, sweet victory. Probably.

As any parent will tell you, the benefits of raising a child are many, if for no other reason that children will occasionally confirm and reinforce your most deeply held beliefs. Mostly, of course, my kids spend much of their time inventing new ways to turn my hair grey, but still, my heart is warmed on those rare occasions that they inadvertently act as little emotional enablers.

To wit: it was on a warm autumn day not unlike this very one that my younger son announced to me, unbidden and without any hint of irony, that “clowns are bad.” He was, at the time, a mere tot of five or six and the first thought that came to mind was something along the lines of “out of the mouths of babes…”

This moment, then, was illustrative of couple of things. The first is that yes, I really am so shallow that I tend to think mostly in clichés, but second and more importantly, it was the boy’s youthful balance between innocence and an appropriately jaundiced view of the world that lent an unassailable authority to his observation about the inherent malevolence of clowns.

Bearing all that in mind, today is a day that should be celebrated. It is a day on which my suspicions have been confirmed that not only are clowns vile puppets who bow to the will of a single Clown Overlord, but more importantly that they are mortal. That’s right, after all is said and done, even clowns must slip this mortal coil and go wherever it is that they meet their Clown Maker. So to speak. In short, at the age of 84, “Master Clown” Frosty the Clown has finally left this world, and I’d say the world is just a little less creepy for it.

Sure, some may think me “insensitive” to celebrate his departure, and others may call me “loony” to go on about clowns as if they really deserve the scorn they endure. Others, like my Lovely Bride, point out that he was just a regular guy making a living doing something he loved and left behind a perfectly nice widow and a family who are probably very sorry to see him gone. Well that’s fine, and maybe it’s true, but I’m still not taking any chances. Everyone else can just wait around for the next “master clown” to be anointed, but I’ll be hiding in the basement with a bottle of seltzer and a pail of confetti, just in case.

"Really? Skating with what, now?" Or, WTF part one.

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” is just one of the countless chestnuts dropped on us by inventor, wordsmith, ladies man and world’s most devoted Benjamin Franklin enthusiast: Benjamin Franklin. Certainly the case can be made that his propensity for self promotion was as successful as it was unseemly, but if nothing else Franklin did have a way of putting none too fine a point on the obvious. In this case, “early to bed, etc.” is a good reminder that getting one’s butt up and out first thing each morning makes the rest of the day go a little better.

Unless, of course, you end up in the gym watching morning television.

Now normally I’m an afternoon gym guy, but in an effort to live a more virtuous, Franklin-esque life, I’ve been at Planet Fitness bright and early. That’s working out fine, except that all the effort I had put into immunizing myself against the mindless nonsense of afternoon programming seems to be useless against the mindless nonsense that is morning programming. In short, I spend much of my time on the elliptical wondering if I really just saw what I think I did.

This morning, for instance, I saw some promos for an upcoming show called Skating with the Stars. By this afternoon I had convinced myself that I had just imagined the whole thing until my Lovely Bride assured me that there would indeed be a collection of tired looking “stars” flopping around on a skating rink. Moreover, as best I can tell one of the “stars” is a large, middle-aged drag queen purporting to be Sean Young. Weird.

Anyway, the Skating/Stars thing is presumably just one of the mysteries of early rising that will vex me in the days and weeks to come, but with any luck I’ll eventually get the hang of it. Unlike Arthur Dent and Thursdays… but that’s a reference for another day. See ya.

Keep Circulating The Tapes! - (Fresh? Timely? Nah.)

It was nearly 20 years ago on a bright, sunny Saturday morning that I happened to be sitting in front of the TV when I inadvertently landed on the Comedy Channel. (Yes, that thing you kids call “Comedy Central” today is the result of the devastating Funny Wars between HA! and the Comedy Channel in the early 90s. Cable TV takes no prisoners, apparently.)

Anyway, it wasn’t long before I noticed that there were silhouettes blocking some of the action, such as it was, and that they were busy mocking the poor sap on the screen who happened to have a haircut so ridiculous that it could only be eclipsed by the bizarre fur Speedo hiding his junk. The silhouettes were, in short, those of Joel, Tom Servo and Crow having fun at the expense of a bit of cinematic detritus called Cave Dwellers. I was hooked.

So anyway, even though I’m sure that at some point you’ve been told that All Good Things Must Come to an End (the sort of maxim usually spouted by cranks and misanthropes who, as best I can tell, enjoy lowering children’s expectations and kicking puppies), it turns out not to be strictly true. In this case, even though MST3K has long since been sent upstate to a beautiful farm where it runs and plays with all the other cancelled shows, the fun still lives on. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett are busy peddling Rifftrax, in which they engage in exactly the same sort of behavior that made me fall in love with them in the first place. Ahhhh.

Even better, they do live shows which are, for those of you who don’t happen to live in Mike, Kevin or Bill’s basement, simulcast through Fathom Events to a theater near you. The last live Rifftrax event was a thorough dissection of the studiously incompetent House on Haunted Hill, a movie complete with marionette skeletons and a plot so stultifyingly convoluted that in the end the movie just sort of stopped, rather than reaching any sort of conclusion. (To be fair, it must be noted that Vincent Price, urbane as ever, seemed to be a good sport about the entire affair.)

So anyway, true to the Dad’s off the Couch tagline, none of this has been timely or relevant to anything, other than to note that if you A: enjoy things, and B: are a nicer person than Hitler, you’ll probably groove on the Rifftrax thing. Go on, they’re waiting for you.

Keep circulating the tapes!

Story Time: Steve and the New MacBook Air

So as best I can tell, Steve will sell me a little netbook for a thousand bucks. A beautiful, shiny netbook which would, presumably, make me the envy of every Apple nerd in Starbucks. But, as snappy an offer as that may seem, I’m going to have to decline.

Not for religious reasons, mind you; although I mostly use Windows machines, I’m certainly not immune to the lure of devices that work as effortlessly and intuitively as the iPod I’m listening to at the moment. No, it just seems to me that the 500 some-odd dollar difference between the 11 inch Air and the big-boy-sized Acer on which I’m writing this spectacular little missive could probably be better used elsewhere.

That $500 would cover, for instance, 196 of the triple espressos that I compulsively drink at Starbucks while I’m busy not impressing the resident Apple nerds. Or roughly 125 of Amazon’s daily $3.99 Album deals of which I seem to have grown inordinately fond. -(That’s a LOT of Groove Armada, people.)- Or, I suppose that same $500 would buy new shoes and clothes for my kids, but let’s not get carried away.

In short, when Steve speaks, I notice that there are a lot of people with glazed eyes and just a tiny bit of drool running down the corner of their mouths, which, if nothing else just seems a smidge unseemly. Unlike drinking 196 triple espressos, which is, obviously, perfectly reasonable. -Just saying.

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How I learned to stop worrying and love Father’s Day.

As anyone who’s known me for more than five or ten seconds can tell you, I’m not really a fan of attention. Neither am I a big fan of fuss, bother or commotion of any sort. (Which, incidentally, clearly illustrates that my early decision to quit Hermit School, get married and have kids may have been deeply flawed.)

In any case, over the years I’ve been learning to overcome some of these social deficits I’ve been so carefully cultivating and guarding; which in practical terms means that this last Father’s Day I finally decided to let go and milk the day for all it’s worth. So, when my Lovely Bride offered to fetch the necessary boatload of wings and ribs at Costco for the big day, I acquiesced. When Father’s day arrived I promptly went downstairs and, instead of lighting the grill, fired up the X-Box instead and played a full hour of Call of Duty 3.

Then, having stared slack-jawed at interwebs for a bit, I allowed myself to be ushered to the big comfy chair on the deck where I accepted an ice cold Clausthaler. (I also seem to have developed a taste for hilariously pretentious websites, but that’s a post for a different day.) And so, before I knew it, I was surrounded by family, ribs, kids with sticky fingers, Father’s Day cards and a new hammock to boot. All, I might add, while allowing myself to embrace the fuss, which, as it turns out, is pretty easy when you learn to stop worrying and love Father’s Day.

Now I just need to figure out how to make all this work for our 4th of July BBQ. And jeez while I’m at it, maybe Labor Day too.

=

World Cup? Sure, whatever. Just flip a coin, why don’t you?

Barbershops, darkened tap-rooms and the sidewalks in front of coffee shops have one thing in common: they are bastions of the testosterone-fueled male banter that inevitably centers around one thing: sports. Sure, current wives/girlfriends and politics also occasionally rear their heads as fodder for stories that are usually as pointless as they are entertaining, but really it’s about the sports.

Anyway, I must admit that that the in-utero genetic lottery in which we are all forced to participate seems to have left me short of one crucial bit of DNA: the gene that makes guys give a crap who hit the most RBIs or three-pointers or however it is that you score touchdowns. I am, quite frankly, Sports Challenged.

I guess as deficits go, my lack of interest in watching grown men run around in Lycra jerseys hasn’t hampered me too greatly; I still enjoy a dark bar, cooking over a fire, jokes I can’t tell my kids, and other ostensibly male nonsense. (Although having said all that, I must admit that I do actually watch the Yankees in the post-season when the games actually matter… at least in the sense that a season-ending elimination matters.)

But here’s the thing that’s truly inexplicable to me: Soccer and the World Cup. But mostly the soccer part. For God’s sake, the games go on forever, nobody ever scores, and even if they do, the games always end in a tie anyway. Which brings me to the most inexplicable part of soccer: the free-kick parties at the end of tied games. Really? Free kicks? You’re going to use an activity entirely unrelated to the game itself to decide who wins after having spent the better part of a day running up and down a giant field? It’s as bizarre and disappointing as if baseball games tied in the ninth were decided by flipping a coin.

Not that it really matters to me, obviously, it’s just that it’s really weird. Just saying. Um, Go USA?