It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

— Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

Haven’t seen it. Might see it . . . not sure yet. I’ve seen the trailer though and I’ll tell you something: Heath Ledger is TERRIBLE!

That’s not acting! Put the same makeup on somebody else, give ‘em a script, let ‘em read the same lines . . . there’s a million people who could do the same thing.

You don’t think so? You don’t think Heath Ledger knew that? Why do you think he’s dead of an overdose?

Outer-space sex carries complications

— msnbc.com

Hey NASA, I’m no aeronautical engineer but what I’d do is to tether the woman to a stationary object so she can’t move, just like I do here on Earth.

Uh . . . with her consent, of course . . .

Simplify, simplify, simplify!

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Thoreau’s Walden had a profound impact on my thinking. It’s hard to achieve the kind of transcendent simplicity he describes when you live with other people, as I do, but if your family is out of town for a week, as mine is, here are some things you might want to try.

Don’t Recycle

When my wife is here, we have to sort and bag bottles, cans and plastic separately. Later on that noise! Everything goes straight into the garbage! Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Don’t Wash Dishes

Drink liquids from the container and eat food straight out of whatever you cooked it in. If you have to clean an eating utensil, put it in your mouth, press your lips together, and pull it back out.

Bloom Where You’re Planted

Why walk all the way to the bathroom if there’s a bottle, can or sink close at hand? A real time-saver!

People who back into parking spaces

Look, toolbox — you can either back into the spot when you arrive or back out of the spot when you leave. Backing in is harder because you’ve got less room to work with and you don’t want to bang into a neighboring vehicle. If you back out, you’re backing into open space.

But the worst thing is that by backing in, you put your driver’s side door right next to my driver’s side door, so we have to wait for each other to get in and out of the cars . . .

A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . .

In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000.

Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much.

Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings.

Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students.

ROME - Italian railway police say an American tourist was hit and killed by a train at a Rome station as he was walking on the tracks in a daze after being drugged and robbed.

Police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said Monday that 74-year-old Frank Phel from California died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station.

— Associated Press

Arrivederci Roma!

A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom.

“Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up an Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.”

“There are Asian gangs in Irvine.”

“Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .”

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Paul Davis, a singer and songwriter whose soft rock hit “I Go Crazy” stayed on the charts for months after its release in 1977, died Tuesday. He was 60.

— CNN.com

That’s disappointing.

Not the fact that he died, because who cares, really, but the fact that he didn’t actually go crazy and kill himself in some bizarre fashion . . .

I’m definitely not a morning person. I used to be a night person, but now I’m more of a nothing person. There’s no hour of the day or night that I wouldn’t rather close my eyes and sleep . . . and sleep . . .

According to a billboard I saw today, a child is diagnosed with autism every 20 minutes!

That goes to show how little I know about it. I would have thought that once would be enough.

Is he still autistic, doctor?

I’m afraid so, but I’ll check him again in 20 minutes . . .

• Charlie Callas - comedian
• Robert Clary - actor, “Hogan’s Heroes”
• Mike Connors - actor, “Mannix”
• Jackie Cooper - actor
• Ann B. Davis - actress, “The Brady Bunch”
• Joan Fontaine - actress
• Shecky Greene - comedian
• Ray Harryhausen - film producer, “Jason and the Argonauts”
• Tom Kennedy - game show host
• Gina Lollobrigida - actress
• Peter Marshall - game show host, “The Hollywood Squares”
• Jack Narz - game show host
• Joyce Randolph - actress, “The Honeymooners”
• Ravi Shankar - sitar player
• Gale Storm - actress
• Mort Walker - cartoonist, “Beetle Bailey”

Welcome to EppsNet, where the writers are not on strike!

Striking writers are stupid. Pretend you’re a TV executive and your writers are on strike.

Oh dear! What will I do? I’ll have to show reruns and only get 90 percent of the dimbulb audience I’d get showing new episodes. Boo hoo hoo!

Television is the opiate of the masses, man! People will watch it no matter what’s on. They can’t live without it.

We’ve got TVs in restaurants, health clubs, cars, you name it. They’re ubiquitous!

The number of people like me — who think that if you want to eat dinner in front of a TV set you should stay the hell at home — is very small compared to the number of people who will not leave their homes if it means being separated from a television.

Hey scribes! People are going to turn off their flat-panel LCD high-def TVs — and do what? Read a book? Interact with their families?

Fat fucking chance!

Writers can stay on strike forever for all anybody cares.

That’s why TV shows are so stupid. They’re written by stupid people.

This just in

Stars Won’t Attend Golden Globe Awards

Golden Globe-nominated actors and presenters won’t attend the televised award show Jan. 13 because of the writers’ strike, the Screen Actors Guild announced Friday.

— People

Well then . . . that casts things in a whole new light! Actors will not attend the Golden Globes because they’d have to cross a picket line of angry wordsmiths and ink slingers.

OMG! I hope the earth doesn’t stop revolving on its axis and fling us all into space because actors are boycotting the Golden Globes telecast!

What are the Golden Globes anyway? Another excuse for actors to get together and suck each other’s dicks?

Rot in hell, thespians!

A fat woman at the office, sitting at her desk finger-fondling a frosted gingerbread man, whether because it was “male” or because it was edible, I’m not sure. It’s no less disturbing either way.

Parenthetically: I don’t think she knew anyone could see her . . .

The rising tide of the mortgage industry lifted some pretty spurious boats here in Orange County, so it’s fun now to watch the subprime sinkhole laying them low.

Example: John Lynch, the “surfing banker,” executive VP of Secured Funding Corp., specialists in home equity loans and second mortgages to people with bad credit.

I had this guy pegged as a moron years ago, around the same time OC Metro ran a fawning blowjob of a profile on him:

For the foreseeable future, he will continue as a master of both the surfboard and the boardroom — plus anything else that he decides to do.

— OC Metro, Jan. 8, 2004

Well, that was then and this is now:

The party is over in Orange County. These days, Secured Funding’s once-buzzing office building in Costa Mesa, near John Wayne Airport, is gutted.

The imprint of “Secured Funding” is all that remains of the corporate logo that once graced the outside of the two-story building. Above it is a “For Lease” sign advertising the 82,333-square-foot (7,649-square-meter) building.

— “Subprime Fiasco Exposes Manipulation by Mortgage Brokerages,” Bloomberg.com

Lynch was so, so chatty with the press in 2004. What does he have to say now?

Neither [Lorne] Lahodny nor his partner in Secured, John Lynch, responded to messages left by phone and in person at their offices.

I’ve got here an email from the Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF), soliciting online donations at the IPSF website.

Also on the website is a page listing the names of the IPSF board members, along with their corporate affiliation. Seven of the board members have no corporate affiliation and instead are given the tagline of “Community Leader.”

Question: What in the world is a Community Leader?!

How does one acquire such a designation, other than not having a real job?

Couldn’t we just identify them as Volunteers or Parents or Parent Volunteers, instead of making them out to be some sort of tribal chieftains?

Based on the one Community Leader that I actually know personally, I’d say a more appropriate label would be Community Nuisance or Gadfly.

• Earl Butz - U.S. secretary of agriculture
• Oral Roberts - preacher

Updates

• Earl Butz - died 2/2/2008, age 98

My son’s playing freshman football, pursuant to which I received the following email (names changed):

Fellow Freshman parents,

Zelda and I are disappointed with the poor quality of the duffle bags the boys purchased at the start of the season. Rocko’s bag is already ripping and the zippers are becoming non-functional. As a result, we intend to buy him a much higher quality, replacement bag made out of extra heavy duty material from a Montana vendor. My firm has purchased customized travel bags from this vendor before, and our clients/employees love them. We also intend to have the bag (which will be slightly larger to accommodate a football helmet) embroidered with the T-Wolf logo and his name. This is what the bag looks like, sans logo:

If ten or more families decide to buy such replacement bags, the cost will be $285 each plus tax and the cost of name embroidery (I don’t think the latter will amount to much, but I’m looking into it). If the order is for less than ten units, then there will be a modest charge for logo. Two families in addition to our has already asked to be included them in this order. You can visit the vendor’s website at http://www.redoxx.com/.

Please let me know as soon as conveniently possible (i.e., by the game this Saturday) if you would like to be included in the order. If so, kindly also respond back with the spelling of your son’s name to be embroidered on his bag.

Thanks.

Go Wolves, Beat University!

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

In short, if you are experiencing similar problems, this would be a high quality replacement that should last for some time.

Yeah sure, I’m definitely up for spending $300 for a bag my son can stuff his football uniform into, particularly if your “firm” has a track record with the company.

I sent the following response:

I’ve never seen a decent bag for only $285. I’ve been looking at this one from On the Fly:

It’s a little pricey (around $12,000) but it’s made of black alligator leather and if you’re concerned about durability, it will withstand a charging rhino.

Don’t ask me how I know that.

Best regards,

Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding

I didn’t hear back from the original emailer, but I did get a response from a philanthropic but somewhat dim individual:

I hope that was a joke. If not I think you are getting carried away about a bag that the boys are going to drag around through the mud. If you have that much money to throw away maybe you should donate it to children who can’t afford equipment to even play sports.

Just a thought…

Oh dear, I guess I was a little too subtle . . .

My friend PE was laid off recently. He’s leasing out his house and renting a smaller place in an effort to keep his finances under control.

This should be a good lesson for that boy of his: Work hard all your life, try to do the right things, and you too can wind up with no house, no job and a wife who hates you . . .

Doctor Links a Man’s Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit

— New York Times, Sept. 5, 2007

If you actually read the story, you see that the man’s doctor says that there “is not a definitive causal link” between popcorn and the man’s health problems.

You’ve gotta love the total overreaction to one case where popcorn may have caused a lung problem.

The Bush administration had better crack down on this pronto!!!

Frankly, I’d rather get a lung disease and die than live in a country where the government tells me I can’t eat popcorn! You can take my popcorn when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!

I’m going to go pop up a batch right now in protest!

Have a nice day . . .

I’ve come to think of marriage less as a way to spend your life with someone you love, and more as a way to have someone to blame for your life turning out the way it did . . .