'Bred Crumbs

It Might Be True in Neverland

The San Francisco Chronicle tells us that outside Michael Jackson's arraignment, a sympathizer held up this sign:

When You Handcuff Michael Jackson, You Handcuff Humanity

Activists and religious loons, you can stay home now. Even you will never come up with something that stupid.

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The Mark of the Beast of (Minimal) Burden

On the way to work this morning, I looked down at the odometer and saw this:

If you find the numbers alarming in a one-more-than-Satan kind of way, consider this: the make of the car is a name that sounds a little like "Satan" but is one longer.

I don't mean to associate the particular American car manufacturer and the prince of darkness, necessarily. Ever since I bought the car, I've loved it as much as it is possible for me to love a car. To me, a car is merely a vehicle for, um, people. I've owned only three cars in my life. The last two I bought new and paid off as quickly as I could. I drove the previous one to its death after nine years, and the current one is nearly twelve and counting. It's treated me well and more than lived up to my expectations, despite my far less than meticulous maintenance. It has survived being hit in the side twice (three times?) while parked, and a front-end cruncher on a too-congested Cincinnati freeway. It still gets 30 mpg city and passes California emissions tests easily. And it's well short of 100,000 miles.

Would I get another Sat__n after this one's finally done? Not automatically. While my buying experience was everything it was fabled to be, I have to wonder if the company is its old self. In the last few years, the customer-service experience at the dealership for me and other people I know has been not so great. The service department has been especially fond of finding hundreds of dollars worth of extra "necessary" work when all you need is an oil change game.

The dealership's retention efforts have begun to reek, too. I got this letter last month:

Sat__n of Colma DID NOT meet their goal on specific certified Sat__ns, therefore, the dealer has authorized the sales staff to conduct this special event!

Why, it must be special if there are exclamation points!

This unique opportunity may allow you to exchange you 1992 SAT__N for any new 2003 or 2004 Saturn. Due to high trade-in values

Yeah, I bet they'll pay me thousands for my '92.

     and generous factory incentives, it is quite possible for you to make this exchange with little or no out of pocket expense and with a monthly payment that fits your budget.

Really? Is the monthly payment zero? Because that's what fits my budget.

So much for the no-hassle buying experience; it's a form letter full of salesman slime, via the mail. But maybe we on the Peninsula are just unlucky to have the bad egg in the Sat__n basket.

Or, maybe not.

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Match Game Fans Are Blank Out of Luck

Sometimes, it's good to get out of the house. Therefore, you can read my thoughts on the inevitable decline of the rechristened Game Show Network elsewhere, at TeeVee. And thanks to TeeVee for the compliment of working me into its bandwidth.

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MST3K Minus 996

Given the timing, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 "symposium" yesterday at Cobb's Club Comedy (hey, that's how the logo reads) could easily have been sadly wistful. Thankfully, it was way too funny for that.

The men who played Crow, Mike, and Servo (left to right in the only clear photo I managed at the flash-banned event) talked at hilarious length about the state of bad movies today, and took lots of questions about MST, with plenty of devoted audience members ready to fill in any gaps in their memories of specific episodes. Fun was had.

As it happens, the contract under which the SciFi Channel is running (a very few) reruns from its three seasons of the 10-season series ends this very month. Meaning that, for the first time in a long time, the show won't be on TV anymore after Jan. 31. Also meaning that you will have no reason whatsoever anymore to tune your television to SciFi. Unless of course you enjoy having four-year-old, Franco-Canadian, barely-ever-even-syndicated series passed off as "SciFi original series" by the bottom-feeders that run this sewage pit of a network.

But as everyone at the event yesterday noted, past MST episodes will keep coming out on DVD. (And for the ones that don't, there's the ingenious Digital Archive Project, the Aughts' equivalent of circulating the tapes.) And then there's the whole absence-fonder thing: the show's going missing for a while, the panelists said, will probably hasten its return in some form, some time, somewhere.

·  ·  ·

Much as I worship the MST overlords, I have to disagree with one of them, the wise Kevin Murphy, on one point. During his assessment of modern bad movies – many of which, as we know, star Ben Affleck – Murphy advised Affleck to begin acting in his movies. But I would give Ben nearly the opposite counsel: be yourself.

Ben, quit picking movies that require you to be some stone-faced superhero, which nobody buys. When you're on talk shows or being harassed by another Kevin, your steady employer and occasional landlord K. Smith, you're hilarious. But the closest we've come to seeing that side of you in a non-Kevin-related movie was way back in Shakespeare in Love, where you so adroitly mocked the kind of celebrity everyone thinks you are. More of that, Ben, even if it doesn't pay as much. Hell, Kevin will cut you slack on the rent.

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Blow Me

In the year 2074, when our alien conquerors put our species on trial to decide whether it deserves to remain free, the final, damning piece of evidence that consigns mankind to perpetual servitude will be: the leafblower.

The other morning, I was awakened ten minutes prematurely by what sounded like the whirr of a chainsaw. It took a few seconds of foggy cognition to realize that, even though construction is being done on my building, it probably doesn't require the cutting of raw lumber. I gave it no more thought than that.

Later, from the kitchen, I saw the real culprit. In the parking lot of the seniors' housing next door, a lone human was using a leafblower to chase one leaf around the concrete. Once he/she (the worker's gender was hidden by distance, a bandanna, and a soft face) has deemed the offending leaf's new location acceptable for some reason, he would move to persecute another one, and I guess she was either wearing earplugs or just didn't care about life anymore, because he wouldn't bother to shut the damn thing off between her pursuits.

When I went back to the window a few minutes later, the worker had pushed a grand total of seven leaves out of the parking lot entirely, driving them loudly and gas-wastingly into the street, where they would become some other leafblowing jerk's responsibility.

Of course, this is a building full of the elderly, so it's possible someone actually complained about these few dead leaves marring the pristine gray concrete. And that may have been the only complaint in a given collection that the facility could do anything about (the other offenders being, say, the persistence of hair in growing, or the rotation of the earth). But, more likely, it was just a familiar combination of laziness and absurdity – rather than rake the leaves or, more sensibly, leave them alone, a loud, resource-squandering machine was employed.

Thus dooming us all.

(The submission to the tribunal of the leafblower, by a bright young alien attorney named Gj'lrk, will render unnecessary the judges' consideration of advertising as the last nail in mankind's coffin. Had this debate ensued, man's fate would probably have been sealed anyway by commercials for the movie Cheaper by the Dozen, which lays bare how stupid the species is assumed by its own kind to be. Fudging the fact that the movie was a distant second to The Return of the King at the box office, the ads proclaimed the movie "the Number One Comedy of the Year!" – less than two weeks into January.)

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