I enter the bedroom, where my girlfriend is already fast asleep in anticipation of another day teaching kindergarten students.
Asleep girlfriend: Congratulations.
Me: Thanks. For what?
Asleep girlfriend: For having the numbers.
Me: What numbers?
Asleep girlfriend: Zero to twenty.
Me: Thanks. [girlfriend rolls over and hits me in face as I climb into bed] Oof. Congratulations on hitting me in the face.
Asleep girlfriend: Thanks. I hope you liked it.
Me: I didn’t. Why are you congratulating me for zero to twenty?
Asleep girlfriend: For learning the numbers zero to twenty.
Me: Oh. Well, I learned those a long time ago.
Asleep girlfriend: Well, it’s still hard.
Me: You’re right. I guess I forget that sometimes.
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Dollarama decor of the damned
If you’re like me, your house is already full of cobwebs, so you’ve been all set in terms of Halloween decorations for months. If not, you still have time to run down to the dollar store and pick up a few things. Here’s some of what’s available:
With the number of monsters on tricycles out there these days, someone was bound to start exploiting the trend commercially. It’s not clear, though, whether this candy is meant for monsters on tricycles or if anyone can eat it.
Right between the Halloween bibs and baby sweaters: Halloween thongs, for this year’s slutty baby.
This isn’t a one-off — every sword in the place was labeled “Battle Axe”. Either they’ve been grossly mislabeled or axes are getting way swordier this days.
The tattoo is temporary — the damage to your child’s understanding of apostrophe usage is permanent.
This is supposed to be a terrifying hellhound costume, though it handily doubles as a Viking dog outfit.
Now that’s good marketing — they just doubled their sales right there.
(Warning: Not for use by ferrets.)
Frighten your visitors this Halloween with the ghastly sight of a ghost puking up a doorknob.
Remember, when you greet the kiddies at the door this Halloween, hang one of these off your knob.
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Miscellaneous improvements
Annoying Chad Kroeger: First off, insist on calling him “Chad Nickelback”. I mean, he is the main creative force behind the band (even though all their songs sound the same), so the band should be named after him. Later, call him late at night, purporting to be telephoning from the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, and say, “Chad! It’s your cousin Marvin … Marvin Nickelback … You know that new sound you’ve been looking for? Well, listen to this!” Then play him any existing Nickelback song.
Saving time: We all could have saved a lot of time back in the 1980s by referring to Miami Vice star Philip Michael Thomas as simply “Phil Mike Tom”. On a similar note, 19th century newspaper editors could have saved headline space by abbreviating US President Chester Alan Arthur’s name to “Chet Al Art”.
Odd couples: What a missed opportunity I thought it was that Penn Gillette’s silent sidekick Teller never did a film with the late Henry Gibson in which they played father and son — only to find out that they did just that in 1987’s Long Gone. But you know what hasn’t happened and should? A sitcom starring Penn Jillette and Lewis Black as brothers. Not only are they both ugly and shouty, but they’re ugly and shouty in the exact same way. It’s not that it’d be particularly funny so much as it would be riveting television to see which would be first to suffer a rage-induced aneurysm and drop dead on the set.
Jon & Kate Plus Eight: As the Gosselin divorce gets messier and the fallout for their children grows even more potentially damaging, it starts to look more like the Ontario government actually got it right with the Dionne Quintuplets back in the 1930s. Would it really be any worse for the Gosselin sextuplets if they were to be taken away and put in a state-run nursery/museum as a tourist attraction? They could hardly be exploited any worse than they already are, and at least the funds raised could go into the public coffers — preferably to be spent on abstinence education — rather than being blown on sports cars, hair plugs, and twentysomething girlfriends for their deadbeat dad.
Celebrity GPS voices: The best celebrity voice available for your car’s GPS is that of William Daniels, who voiced the sentient Trans Am KITT on the TV show Knight Rider. (The worst is Gary Busey, who is qualified to tell you how to go over your motorcycle’s handlebars without a helmet, but whose directions should be otherwise distrusted.) What would be even better, though, is a GPS with the voice of the late Sir Alec Guinness (or a credible impersonator). As you approach your home, it should deactivate itself, saying, “Use the Force … let go. Trust me.” After you’ve parked without computer guidance, it should come back on long enough to say, “Remember, the Force will be with you — always.” And if it ever gives you poor directions, it should insist, “What I told you was true … from a certain point of view.”
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Caller: Hi! This is Frank from Lifestyle Vacations! How are you?
Me: From what vacations?
Caller: … Hi! This is Frank from Lifestyle Vacations! How are you?
Me: Lifestyle Vacations? What is that — some kind of nudist colony?
Caller: Uh, no, sir.
Me: Well, exactly what kind of lifestyles do you cater to?
Caller: [click]
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It’d be downright refreshing that international playboy and Jon & Kate Plus Eight paterfamilias Jon Gosselin is stepping in to end The Learning Channel’s exploitation of his children, if it didn’t have something to do with his estrangement from his wife, the subsequent truncation of the reality show’s name to Kate Plus Eight, and the possibility of his own spin-off, Jon Minus Income. The fact is, we don’t need Jon anymore. Lately, there seems to be a new story every day about a male celebrity exploiting the young people under his care.
First, actress Mackenzie Phillips came forward with claims of a decade-long incestuous relationship with her father, Mamas and the Papas bandleader John Phillips, thus casting his credentials as a papa into question. While naming her “Mackenzie” was bad enough, drugging and raping his own daughter on the eve of her wedding has got to be one of the very worst things he did, right up there with co-writing the lamented Beach Boys hit single “Kokomo”. Of course, he’s unlikely to be brought to justice for these crimes, since he’s dead.
Not so for director Roman Polanski, who was busted by Swiss police after decades of living on the lam after his conviction in the U.S. for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, and now faces an extradition process that, though complicated, will nevertheless be easier than that of Phillips. To many, Polanski is a sympathetic figure. He’s suffered enough, they say; his mother died at the hands of the Nazis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, died at the hands of the followers of Charles Manson (who is, oddly enough, also a Beach Boys collaborator, having co-written “Never Learn Not to Love” with Dennis Wilson). Besides, say Polanski’s fans, look at the love poetry of Martial, Juvenal, and Catullus, which prove pederasty to be an accepted part of Roman culture. It’s been thirty years, they say. Drop the charges. Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown. Of course, accused child-molester Michael Jackson had to wait until he was dead to receive this kind of public forgiveness, even though he was never actually convicted of any crime, unlike Polanski.
And of course, let’s not even talk about the rumours that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. After all, even discussing the rumours that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 only lends credence to the rumours that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. There is, after all, no evidence to support these vile allegations, although this only makes it all the more baffling that Glenn Beck doesn’t deny raping and murdering a young girl in 1990.
In light of these unsavory stories, the David Letterman sex scandal would seem almost wholesome, if the words “David Letterman sex scandal” didn’t immediately conjure up cases of the heebie-jeebies. Though the show’s skits had always pointed to announcer Alan Kalter as the Late Show’s resident sexual predator, this may have been deliberate misdirection, as the story broke yesterday that Dave had been the victim of attempted blackmail over his sexual involvement with members of his staff. Between this and the foiled plot to kidnap and ransom Letterman’s son, Harry, there’s potential for a list of the Top Ten Extortionists Targeting Dave.
An embarrassed-looking Letterman spoke frankly about the experience on last night’s episode, acknowledging the “creepy things” he’d been accused of doing. (Without getting into specifics, it’s pretty obvious that he likes to have Paul Shaffer watch. The question is, does Paul play that “No, no! NO! No, no, no-no-no-no!” song while it happens, or does he leave it to the girl?)
On the one hand, of course Letterman has had sex with women on his staff. He dated Late Night head writer Merrill Markoe for most of the 1980s, after all. On the other hand, his ‘fessing up on last night’s program to nailing other female staffers means he now has about a decade’s worth of intern jokes to take back.
Still, even without considering the horrifying rumours of a Jimmy Kimmel/Sarah Silverman sex tape, this is better than what’s been going on lately with the competition. (Conan: Hits head on set of late-night talk show. Letterman: Gets head on set of late-night talk show. Advantage: Dave.)
The astonishing revelation was that Dave’s blackmailer was deceased Nixon White House Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman. At least, it seemed at first that Letterman had been the victim of the dirty tricks often used against members of Nixon’s enemies list. The culprit was actually the similarly named Robert Halderman, a producer on 48 Hours, the CBS documentary/news program co-anchored by gruff, loose-cannon cop Nick Nolte and wisecracking convict Eddie Murphy.
Haldeman had lived with one of the women with whom Letterman had had a relationship, his assistant, Stephanie Birkitt. “He’s the best boss I’ve ever had,” says Birkitt in an old Entertainment Weekly story in which she talks about the time that he paid her $20 a slice to eat nine pieces of pizza. Of course, that’s not all Dave paid her to swallow.
For example, he also often paid her to swallow her pride and make stilted-but-entertaining appearances on the show. On the air, Letterman called Birkitt “Smitty”, and she called him “Mr. Carney”. In bed, that would be very strange pillow talk. While interviewing exiled Survivor contestants, she used to ask, “Did you see or touch any monkeys?” Now the grand jury is going to be asking her the same thing.
In the end, while it might be tough on his marriage, it’s hard to see how Haldeman thought that this gossip could have possibly damaged Letterman’s career. For one thing, it comes mostly as a relief to Dave’s fans that a man who’s had a quintuple bypass can still enjoy an active, vigorous sex life. If anything, it humanizes a performer who, in some moments, can come off cold, aloof, and even nasty — though this is what many like best about Dave.
And the candid, honest way that Dave addressed this personal situation last night recalls the time that his hero, Johnny Carson, looked straight into television cameras and called the National Enquirer a bunch of liars when the tabloid was reporting that his marriage was on the rocks. Of course, Johnny’s marriage actually was on the rocks, which is no surprise, since he was reputed to be a bit of a cold fish himself. But he would have been proud of Dave last night.
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Drawing flies
Since we moved in, we’ve had a chilly relationship with our upstairs neighbors. They once snubbed me at the corner store while we were both buying bags of ice. It doesn’t get chillier than that.
It’s probably our fault. And when I say “our fault”, I mean that it’s my girlfriend’s fault. My neighbors may be lowlifes, but I get along with lowlifes. Just last weekend, when I was in the public washroom in Wal-Mart, some guy proudly showed off his stab wound to me. So, it’s not me. It’s her, and I know why.
When we first found this apartment, it was the girl living upstairs who showed it to us, rather than the landlord. Although I could immediately see the potential of the place, with its high ceilings and big windows, we were aghast at the condition of the place. The carpets reeked of cat urine. The walls were so stained that I suspected someone had been conducting science experiments with Mentos and bottles of Diet Coke. And the ceiling fan was furry.
“What were the people like who lived here?” asked my horrified girlfriend.
“Um,” said the girl from upstairs. “… they were nice.”
“But did they hate the landlord or something?” asked my girlfriend, indicating the squalor.
“Uh … no,” said the neighbor. “He’s nice.”
Later, after meeting with the landlord and securing a commitment from him to undertake extensive renovations in return for our taking the place, we learned from him that our upstairs neighbor and her husband had previously inhabited our apartment before financial difficulties forced them to take the smaller one upstairs. So, my girlfriend had inadvertently insulted our neighbor to her face. Whoops.
But squalor and potential feud notwithstanding, we took the place and spent a month scrubbing floors, repainting walls, and shaving the ceiling fan. And we’ve kept the place in nearly immaculate condition since then.
This is what made our recent fly infestation all the more inexplicable.
A couple of weeks ago, our house was suddenly full of fat, slow, greenish flies. We’d gone through a garbage strike this summer and suffered our share of fruit flies and hornets, but there was no reason for fat, slow, greenish flies. And the air was thick with them. We were spending a half hour to an hour each day chasing them down, and after we’d thinned out their population, the air was now thick with an unhealthy and probably carcinogenic amount of bug spray. And we were questioning what kind of filthy, depraved lowlifes we must be to have let things get this way.
But it became evident that either we were so filthy that we’d infested the entire house or the house was infested for reasons other than us. The front foyer was at least as bad as our apartment, with dozens of flies buzzing behind the curtain on the front door. And when we went out back to the garbage cans to see if the problem was there, we noticed that our ground-floor neighbor’s window was swarmed by flies as well.
Determined to get to the bottom of this, we Googled “fat, slow, greenish flies”. That’s when we got even more worried. These weren’t common houseflies. These were blowflies, otherwise known as cluster flies. Otherwise known as carrion flies.
Carrion flies. We were dead meat. Or had some somewhere.
Had a mouse died in one of our walls? There were too many flies for that. A couple of weeks before, we had seen what looked like a dead raccoon lodged between the slope of the roof of the house across the street and its chimney. When it got up and strolled away, we realized it had only been napping, but now we wondered: Had a raccoon or some other animal fallen down our chimney?
Just to make sure we weren’t the problem, we undertook a top-to-bottom cleansing of our house on the weekend. In the middle of this, I noticed our neighbor from the basement apartment taking out her garbage. We’ve been on good terms with her since the time I broke into her place for her after she locked herself out of her apartment without purse, keys, or cell phone while on the way to a wedding. So I hailed her, asking if she’d had any fat, slow, greenish flies. (And if so, could we borrow some?)
She was relieved to be asked. She’d thought her own infestation was her own fault, which is why she was cleaning her place from top to bottom too. I assured her that this was a building-wide situation. In fact, I’d already called the landlord about it, asking him to check things out with the apartment upstairs.
My theory was that the source of the problem was probably up there. The good news was that I’d heard our filthy neighbors were moving out, and, after having occasionally seen them taking things out of their place (unfortunately not including their chronic cat pee stench), I hadn’t seen nor heard them for days. The bad news, potentially, was whatever they had left behind that was causing our blowfly infestation.
I’d read that blowflies, not being choosy, liked either rotting meat or manure. Judging by the state our place had been in when we’d moved in, I could imagine the space above us being filled with either. In fact, I said with a wink, maybe the reason I hadn’t gotten through to the landlord or heard back from him was that our upstairs neighbors had murdered him and left him to rot upstairs.
A few days later, we were seeing fewer flies. We still hadn’t seen our upstairs neighbors, who were probably all moved out, or our landlord, who was possibly but probably not dead upstairs. But now that the buzzing of flies had died down a little, I heard murmuring outside my window. I pulled the curtain aside and saw two policemen standing on the sidewalk in front of the house talking to our upstairs neighbors, who were sitting on the front step.
I immediately upgraded my landlord’s condition to “probably dead upstairs”.
This was going to make it difficult to get the new leak in our ceiling repaired, if true. Fortunately, it wasn’t. My landlord himself eventually appeared on the scene, which, I grudgingly admitted, made my upstairs neighbors probably innocent of his murder. It turned out that, as I’d requested, he’d gone up to investigate the apparently vacated apartment, and as he left, locked both the deadbolt and the lock in the doorknob. The upstairs neighbors, coming back to collect more of their belongings, had apparently lacked the keys for one of these and, rather than calling the landlord or a locksmith, had testily called the police to put out an all-points-bulletin for our landlord and drag him to the property to let them in.
When I spoke to him a couple of days later, he was still ticked off about this — but not as ticked off as he was about the state of the apartment upstairs, which was going to be the second one he’d had to renovate after those particular tenants had vacated. They’d left piles of rotting garbage all over the place. There were hundreds of fat, green flies buzzing around, and thousands more dead on the carpet. Normally, if you saw that many flies in an apartment, the CSI team would be calling in a forensic entomologist from the Body Farm to try to establish the number of days or weeks since time of death.
The landlord was furious. I was relieved. I was relieved that the infestation was indeed not our fault, but that of the upstairs neighbors. I was further relieved that it was just because they were filthy slobs and not murderers. And I was even more relieved that, after leaving the landlord’s corpse to rot, they wouldn’t be coming after the snooty downstairs neighbors who’d not only taken their apartment but also insulted their housekeeping.
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Miscellaneous improvements
The MTV Video Music Awards: While the most popular thing Russell Crowe’s rock band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts ever released might have been a press release about the band’s breakup, Crowe should not only remain involved with music but in fact receive awards recognizing his work. I just want to see what happens when Kanye West inevitably has the temerity to interrupt the notoriously ill-tempered actor during his acceptance speech. My bet: Kanye gets bludgeoned to death with a spaceman statuette in the worst orgy of violence involving a miniature astronaut since aged-but-feisty Buzz Aldrin punched out that guy who accused him of faking the moon landing.
SNL announcer Don Pardo: I don’t want recently retired nonagenarian Saturday Night Live announcer Don Pardo to die any time soon. (After all, he’s one of the few celebrity impersonations I do.) But it is fun to imagine how even more quavery the voice of Ghost Don Pardo will be. Plus he’ll get to work with a Saturday Night Afterlive cast that includes Ghost John Belushi, Ghost Gilda Radner, Ghost Chris Farley, and Ghost Phil Hartman, not to mention head writer Ghost Michael O’Donoghue.
Vegetarian vampires: I don’t buy this bit about the so-called vegetarian vampires in Twilight who subsist by feeding only on animals. I feed on animals, and this makes me not a vegetarian pretty much by definition. Besides, as Count Chocula has demonstrated for years, vampires can subsist entirely on chocolate-flavored corn cereal bits and marshmallows. If you really want the moral high ground here, Edward Cullen, it comes with a sugar high.
Paralegals: A paramedic may not be qualified to perform your quadruple bypass, but when you have a heart attack, you’re pretty happy to have one rush to your house in an ambulance and give you CPR until you can get to the hospital. Why don’t paralegals have this kind of emergency response capability? Paralegals should be to lawyers what paramedics are to doctors. If you’re up on charges of first-degree murder, of course you want a defense attorney, but until you can actually get one, when you’re caught with a bloody knife in your hand, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to call 911 and have a team of paralegals rush to the crime scene in some kind of Lawmobile and remind you to keep your fat mouth shut in front of the cops?
Gary Glitter’s career: How come Senator John McCain is seen as a hero for doing time in a Vietnamese prison, but Gary Glitter isn’t? It might be because Glitter was convicted for molesting children, but it’s not like he napalmed them. Certainly, he should be allowed to get his career back on track now that he’s paid his debt to society. Here’s how Gary Glitter ought to kick off his comeback: a tribute album to the late Michael Jackson. It might end up being the least-selling album of the year, but if the FBI were to track everyone who bought it as a possible sex offender, it could furnish a year’s worth of To Catch a Predator episodes.
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The Banter Report
Location
At the Toronto Blue Jays game, after the umpire has been beaned by a baseball and knocked out.
Banter
Little girl behind us: Is the vampire okay?
Little girl’s sister: He’s not the vampire. He’s the emperor.
Little girl: Oh. [clapping hands] Let’s go, Bluebirds!
Outcome
The vampire regains his feet and leaves the field under his own power, to the applause of the crowd. Another emperor replaces him to preside over a thrilling come-from-behind Bluebirds victory.
* * *
Location
Toronto—Danforth, home riding of NDP national leader Jack Layton.
Banter
Girlfriend: Who was that at the door?
Me: Someone canvassing for the Green Party, asking if we’d consider voting for their candidate.
Girlfriend: Did you tell him we were conservatives and get rid of him?
Me: No, I said that the good news was that we were socialists. The bad news was that we were National Socialists.
Predicted outcome
Neither the Green candidate nor the National Socialist candidate will score an upset victory over the incumbent Jack Layton in the upcoming election.
* * *
Location
At home, watching the Toronto Maple Leafs rookie tournament while my bored girlfriend reads her laptop.
Banter
Me: If the game gets boring, we can play “How many Maple Leafs rookies have two first names?” I’ll start: Joe Ryan … Todd Perry … Greg Scott …
My girlfriend: The game is always boring to me, and when I try to pay attention to something else, you won’t stop talking.
Me: … Dale Mitchell … honorable mention to Alex Berry … I think “Juraj Mikus” translates to “George Nicholas” in Slovakian …
My girlfriend: [death glare]
Outcome
The Maple Leafs lose 7–1 as my girlfriend faces the prospect of another long hockey season with Peter Lynn.
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“Hey, want to hear Bill Cosby talk about the dentist?”
“Not really.”
“I’ve got a YouTube video, but it’s way over there on the computer. So, instead, I’ll just do my impression of what I think Bill Cosby sounds like when he’s talking about the dentist:
‘I would like to talk to you about the dentist. Now, my son Ennis went to the dentist. The dentist said, Ennis, you have a cavity in your head from eating all of the candy and the candy-cane ice cream and the ice cream and the jazz. Now, I told my son Ennis not to eat all of the candy and the candy-cane ice cream and the ice cream and the jazz. But my son thinks he knows better than his father, and that’s why now he has a hole in his head, just like the time he got carjacked and shot in the head while he was changing a tire at the side of the highway.’”
“You know you’re going to hell, right?”
“Just like Ennis Cosby. Jell-O Pudding Pops. Kodak Colorwatch System.”
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