The Gift That Keeps on Taking (Cigar Smoke 12-18-08)

Well, as most of you who aren’t Islamic terrorists know, we’re right in the middle of the holiday season, and Marge and I are sitting on our dueling couches trying to get into the Christmas spirit. She’s reading her Kindle and I’m on my laptop looking around E-bay for something I don’t need. Nothing says Christmas like electronics.

So I casually mention that some guy in Minnesota is selling a Sirius satellite-ready radio. Not looking up from her Kindle, Marge said, “Yeah. So?” And I said, “Well, I was just wondering if he was serious about selling his Sirius.” Marge puts her Kindle down and is about to say something just south of profound and I say, “You know, I’d kind of like to have a Sirius radio for my car.” She said, “You would?” I said, “I’m serious about getting a Sirius. Seriously.” (Humor doesn’t take a vacation just because it’s joyous right now.)

Marge asked me how much it was. I said it cost $278. She said, “Why don’t I get it for you for Christmas?” I told her that would be great, and she said go ahead and buy it on E-bay, and she would reimburse me later. So I clicked the Buy It Now button and paid for it on PayPal, and life was good.

The radio came in a few days, and it was in good shape. No problems. So I went down to Al and Ed’s over by Circuit City and I spoke to Al (I don’t like Ed) and he told me that I needed a special receiver to make the radio work. I said I thought the radio was satellite-ready. He said that was kind of like thinking the girl in the massage ad is the one who’s actually going to come over to your hotel room.

I said, “Al, you are one happening dude, man. Way more happening than Ed.” Then I told him to go ahead and put the receiver in. He told me he’d like to, but he couldn’t, because you could only get this specific receiver through the dealer. So I hopped in my Durango and went over to the Dodge dealer in Glendale. I went into the parts department and I had the radio and I asked him if they had a Sirius satellite receiver he could sell me. He said he did. I said I want it. He said he’ll have it for me in a week. I said I thought you said you had it? He said I do have it. Just not here. I said, “Are you serious?”

So a week goes by and I’m smiling at Frosty the Snowman and grabbing Santa’s Sack (which I found out later was a felony) and the Dodge guy calls me to come and pick up my Sirius receiver. I drive back to Glendale, pay the nice parts gentleman $239 and think to myself that Marge must really love me for this much money and I take the radio and the receiver over to Al and Ed’s again.

I have the radio and the receiver in my arms and I try to open the door. It is locked. Nobody is there. It’s a Tuesday around 11 a.m. So I look at the hours posted on the door and it says 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday. I knock real loud. Nothing. Then I get a fantasy that the store employees are being held hostage by punks and that I will have to sneak around back and kill them and save the hostages and I’ll be featured in the Los Angeles Times — if it is still here.

Just as I’m about to start sneaking, Al pokes his head around the corner and says, “Can I help you?” I was pretty disappointed to not carry out my hostage freedom raid, but I told Al that I now had the receiver and could he install the radio? He looked at it. Cocked his head a couple of times, and said, “Where are the cables?” I, of course, said “What cables?” He said the cables that the dealer should have given you. I said, “Are you adjective Sirius?!”

So I drove back to the dealer’s and he apologized and said they forgot to include the installation kit. “How much is that?” I asked. He said, “$189.” I said “$189 plus the $239 I already spent on the receiver?” He said, “Yup.” I said “Is there anything else?” He said “No. No more parts.” I sighed. He went on, “Except the labor for the installation will run you about $400.” He was serious. Dead serious. I was just dead Sirius.

I said, with savage disbelief, “You mean it will cost me $278 for the radio + $239 for the receiver + $189 for the installation kit and then $400 to install it? That’s over eleven hundred bucks!” I paused to whimper. Then I said, “Hell, you could hire a homeless guy to sit in your front seat for a year and hum “Yankee Doodle” for that much.
My wife could buy a new husband for that.”

He laughed. I guess he wasn’t serious. Then I told him to refund me my $239 for the receiver and I would just have to get by without any satellite radio and just keep my damn ordinary, friends-in-low-places, cheap-ass, commercial-packed AM-FM.

I went home and thanked Marge for the gift that kept on taking. She said she was sorry about the radio, but I was right in assuming I wasn’t worth over 1,100 bucks for a gift, and by the way, could I help her assemble the new fake tree she got at Home Depot. Merry Christmas!

Jim Laris is for the former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving (Cigar Smoke 12-4-08)

I’ve always enjoyed Thanksgiving. I think it’s the best holiday of the year. You gather with your family and friends and the women do all the work and you just eat and watch football and rough up the kids a little and complain about getting fat. It’s perfect.

This year it was a little more perfect than usual. We all decided to chip in and bring various dishes so the little hostess woman of the house wouldn’t break down and cry at the end of the day. Somebody brought a great salad and this nifty bean dish with nuts and sliced almonds, and somebody else brought an incredible yam dish with three — count ’em, three — different color yams. I’m not kidding. Regular orange yams, and then white yams and purple yams. Three layers of colored yams topped off with a layer of oven-toasted marshmallows. And someone else brought an eggnog/pumpkin pie. You could hear the calories. And because I am what? I am a health addict. I brought the box of See’s Candy.

All in all, we had 12 people in the house. Plus three dogs. Our good dog, Hadley, and two rat-yappy dogs. They got along pretty well. The two yappers literally did vertical jumps right onto unsuspecting laps. They were like Air Force test planes taking off with no runway. Just straight up into the wild blue lap yonder. And Hadley, the good dog, was so tired from all the damn fun that he collapsed right in the pathway from the kitchen to the family room, and he just laid there like a canine corpse and we used him as an obstacle course all day.

Because we weren’t sure if we would get enough to eat, we started out with a few appetizers. Had some greasy salt-plastered garlic potato chips for the men, and had these Whole Foods chips made out of recycled whole-grain blue-flour tortillas from some adobe hut in some village in Guatemala for the women, and we dipped those gender- specific babies into some unisex humus. Some good eatin’ there.

Nobody got stomach cramps so we had some pistachio nuts in a giant bowl where we would just throw the empty shells back into the same bowl because some unnamed member of the family thought that the search for the next pistachio nut was “more challenging and thus more rewarding” than just picking out a pistachio from a non-shelled bowl. That person may be finding out soon what the singles scene is like.

Then somebody (probably a commie from my wife’s side of the family) brought out a platter of vegetables. Carrots and broccoli and cucumbers and celery sticks all arranged around some white loser glob of congealed crud that the humus just laughed at. All the guys tried to make the kids eat this stuff. Because we were good parents and good grandparents and because healthy children were our lives — and because some of the kids had come dangerously close to reaching into our garlic chip bag.

Then it was time to carve the turkey. And as you might expect, I am the official turkey carver for the Laris-Wood clan. I have been carving the turkey for approximately 47 years now. I think I do a pretty damn good job of it, especially now that I don’t use a live turkey. Some of those turkey screams in past years were heartbreaking.

We had a great meal! It would have made the Pilgrims proud that they had lied to the Indians and stolen their land. It was that good. Just a fantastic meal. All the regular stuff — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the three-layered yam-marshmallow deal, green beans, homemade cranberry sauce, flakey-ass rolls, salad and something I’m forgetting. Oh yeah, the gravy. It was almost liquid this year. That spread could have fed Haiti for maybe a week.

So, after feeling guilty for a minute or two, we went back into the family room to watch our third lousy football game of the day. Detroit got wiped out in the morning, Dallas made fun of whatever a Seahawk is in the afternoon and Texas pretty much horn-hooked Texas A&M until they agreed not to use abbreviations for their school name. It was ugly. Three really bad football games for the men of America. If Bush was still president, I know this wouldn’t have happened.

With no more football to watch, we helped each other up from the sofas and waddled out to the kitchen counter for some pie. Because of the bad economy, we only had four kinds of pie to choose from — apple, pumpkin, pecan and eggnog/pumpkin. And I think they would have been pretty good to eat, too. If the “incident” hadn’t occurred.

OK, maybe I had a little too much to drink. It’s hazy, but I think I recall somebody giving me one of those pissy little energy drinks and maybe I added a little Johnny Walker energy of my own to it. And yes, maybe this happened more than once.

Anyway, all I can remember is one of my sons having this panicked look on his face, and loudly saying, “Dad, put down the automatic knife. You don’t carve pie!” And then everything went dark.

Can’t wait until Christmas.

Jim Laris is the former owner and publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com

Land Hunting with Jim and Lennie (Cigar Smoke 11-27-08)

For maybe the past 30 years I have had a dream of owning a little piece of land. Nothing spectacular or expensive — maybe a few acres in the country, or a spot next to a lake. Just a place of my own.

I feel like that big, thick-thinking guy Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” Lennie is always asking George, his conflicted buddy, to tell him about how they’ll find their own little piece of land someday. George always soothes Lennie with the story, but (spoiler alert) they never get there.

Oh, I have owned a regular house before, but that’s always felt more like owning a little piece of a mortgage. I want something special. Something unique. Even something funky. I’ll know it when I see it. Maybe a piece of pornography by a stream.
Everywhere I go, I’m always looking in newspapers to find just the right spot. Whenever I get to some town in Montana or Idaho or Oregon or Alaska, I immediately turn to the classifieds and start dreaming. But I never seem to find just the exact right spot — basically, because I’m cheap and don’t have the guts to act. If it weren’t for those two factors, Lennie and I would be sitting on the porch right now spitting sunflower seeds to the squirrels.

One time this real estate agent took me out to a cottage on a lake in Michigan. She asked me if I would like to make an offer. I said, “How does $40,000 sound?” She said, “It sounds like $240,000 less than the asking price.”

Another time I found this perfect, funky double-wide trailer up in some isolated town in Washington state. In the damn forest, right next to a river. And it was only $20,000. So what does your gutless land-dreaming columnist do? I’ll tell you what your favorite spineless excuse for a little-piece-of-land-dreaming, coward-ass dork does: He says he will “think it over” for a while. And he thinks it over for two weeks, and when he finally calls to buy it, the owner tells him he has sold it to a guy who didn’t think it over. For $15,000!

I would have killed myself, but luckily I had to think that over first.

I’ve been searching for something for three decades now. (Some might say I’m looking for something other than a little piece of land, like maybe a friggin’ clue.) I still search the classifieds for that idyllic place. But now, because I am what? Because I am modern, I now search the Web and have become addicted to Craigslist.

Every morning, every afternoon, every evening, I pop onto Craigslist and hunt for that perfect place. I’ve got keyboard bruises on the tips of my fingers. And I have now physically gone out on three searches that my Web-surfing fingers have pointed me to.

A couple of weeks ago, I’m on Craigslist and I hit the California button. It takes me to a screen with all the counties on it. I go to the Humboldt County button, and damned if right off the finger-searching bat I don’t find a funky place for sale out on the Samoa Peninsula, next to Arcata, where I went to school at Humboldt State.

And I mean funky. It’s a manufactured home right on the bay. The agent and I go out there, and it is so foggy we can barely read the tsunami warning area signs. I’m not making that up, dammit! My dream home was in a tsunami danger zone. Pretty cool, huh?

Because it looked so promising, we wanted to go inside, but something stopped us. The urine stench. We opened the door, and that smell rushed out like an escaped convict, baby. We took a whiff, and then we took a hike. The last thing that smelled that bad had police tape around it.

My damn dream has been jolted again. But I don’t give up. I go up the coast to Crescent City and I find this really cool house right next to the ocean at the mouth of a rushing river. It’s beautiful. Ocean waves pounding, otters and seals lounging on the sand spits and rugged rocks, and redwoods on the hills behind the house. And best of all was that my new address would be 12544 Mouth of the Smith River. Wow! Can you believe that for an address!

So did I buy my dream house? Well, the price is a little higher than I wanted, and I guess I’ll have to think it over for a while. So, I’m still getting my mail at some loser address in Altadena.

I guess you all know that in the end, George had to shoot poor Lennie. It was very sad. While he was telling Lennie the story about the little piece of land for one last time, George put a bullet in Lennie’s head.

And just before Lennie died, he turned to George and said, “Would you check Craigslist for me in the morning?”

Tuesdays With Hadley (Cigar Smoke 11-20-08)

My dog, Hadley, is getting pretty old. He’s about 12 now, and the lifespan for Airedales is between 11 and 14 years. So, because he’s a very smart dog, and because he uses a really big calculator with extra large paw buttons, he knows he’s pretty much a fellow single-digit traveler, much like his single-digit (in expectancy and IQ) owner.

Old Airedale Face has a few medical problems. He was born blind in his right eye, but except for the occasional clunking of his head on an unseen fence post to his right, it’s never really bothered him much. And he did break a hip when he was younger and it never healed right. But up until about six months ago, all in all, he was hanging in there pretty well.

Then things took a more negative turn. He’s got severe arthritis in his back legs and he can barely get up now. He just struggles and struggles and it’s painful to watch. I still take him on hobbles every morning, but he can’t walk far. His legs are unstable and he stops a lot. Reminds me of someone I know.

For the past few months he has not been able to control his bowel movements. He leaves us little “Easter eggs” every day now. He has his doggie bed in our bedroom and every morning we get up and expect to find more Easter eggs. And in keeping with the holiday spirit, Hadley usually gives us something to find.

And it’s not just at bedtime. Marge and I will be watching “Mad Men” on TV and one of us will smell something, and then we’ll look around and see Hadley over in the corner whistling and cocking his long head to the side, and we know it’s time to get out the Easter Basket.

A lot of times he doesn’t even know he’s going. He can be lying down, and almost defy the laws of physics. One time I was sitting on the couch and petting him, and he was licking my face from the front end and depositing on my toes from the back end. I think there’s a message there.

And sometimes he’ll just be walking along without a care in his canine world, and he will be leaving a trail of non-omelet eggs. Marge or I will be running right behind him, yelling tender love yells, and suggesting that he wait for another five seconds and do it outside. But Hadley is his own Peter Rabbit, and he defecates to a different drummer.

Well, after about a half a year of this, and after a number of carpet cleaning bills, and after a general exhaustion of our obscenity options, and after Hadley had laughed at the doggie diapers we got him, we made the decision to at least control him overnight. So we made a little dog segregation area in one of our bathrooms, and we put his bed in there, and we put in a metal gate thing to block him from doing his fecal fun on the carpet. We figured it would be easier to just pick up the eggs from the bathroom tile floor.

We figured wrong. Because Hadley’s legs were so bad, he couldn’t get any traction on the slick tile and he couldn’t get up, and because there was no lack of eggs on the said tile, well, many of the eggs became accessories to Hadley’s fur, paws, side, back, butt, stomach, haunches, toes, tail, and teeth. And maybe even worse, Hadley hated it in there.

So I did something a Republican has never done before — I went to a Home Depot. I had two custom pieces of outdoor carpet cut into the exact sizes I needed. And I bought a carpet cutter tool just to be manly. And, yes, as long as I was there, I ate one of those healthy Home Depot hot dogs.

I bring all the stuff home and here’s what I do: I put Hadley’s bed back in our bedroom so he will love us. I put the two sections of outdoor carpet over our good carpet in an L-shaped area going from his bed around our bed. I close the bedroom door, and I put up the metal gate thing on the other end of the L-shaped carpet section. We now have an Easter egg acceptance area that rocks with both canine consideration and fecal utility. It was Easter-egg-proof. Not a square inch of good carpet to be even aimed at, let alone targeted successfully.

The perfect solution — Hadley loves it, Marge loves it. I love it because I thought of it.

So last night was the first night we used it. Everything went great. Hadley did not whimper. Marge was not fumbling around with the divorce papers. Me and my snore machine were sleeping. It was beautiful.

And then we noticed that the closet door was slightly nudged in. And we gently pushed back the door. And there, lying on the only exposed six-inch area of beautiful, formerly fecal-free carpet was, shall we say, an egg of a different color. The only six inches in the entire room, and Hadley had butt-nudged the closet door to expose it. It was incredible.

Yes, Virginia, there is an Easter Bunny.

Taking It In The Shorts (Cigar Smoke 11-13-08)

Well, I hate to admit it, but I’m devastated by the election. I feel raw inside. And I’m sure many of you are pretty damn concerned for me. I know you feel my pain. So I’m devastated. So be it.

I congratulate Barack Obama. I salute the guy. I think he ran the greatest campaign in American history. He kicked Hillary’s butt and took the other shoe and kicked John’s tush, too. And for the record, I think Obama is head and damn shoulders above either John Kerry or Al Gore. I would take Obama over those two stiffs any day. And I am glad that a black person has been elected president. I just wish it wasn’t this one.

So I salute Obama for his win. And he won the thing fair and square. I’m not going to whine. Yes, I feel like whining. But I am not going to go there. The guy beat us like a damn drum.

I will quibble with a few things, however. I don’t think quibbling is as unseemly as out-and-out whining. First of all, this whole change thing is disturbing to me. Not just because my guy lost. Like on election night, in his acceptance speech, Obama did a rather poor imitation of Martin Luther King when he said something like even if he personally didn’t get there, we would get there as a people.

What the hell does that mean? I’m serious. What is he talking about? Literally. Where is the “there”? I’m sure a lot of you just think I am dense, but would someone tell me in real words —without using the word hope or idealism — where does he want us to go? I really don’t know. Do you? What is on the mountaintop? And why won’t he get there? Why will we get there and he won’t? Why the drama?

Probably the most disturbing thing to me in the campaign was how Obama kept saying he would “fundamentally transform America.” I, for one, do not want America fundamentally transformed. I think America is the greatest country ever conceived and has been and remains the greatest country in the world. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have built the best country ever.

America has created the greatest democratic system of government ever known. We have championed freedom (not equality) to build the best economic system ever known. Capitalism, with all its shortcomings, has proved incredibly better than socialism. Our standard of living and quality of health care for such a large population is unprecedented. Our military has saved the world from many, many scumbag dictators and tyrants. We’re the most generous people ever to inhabit the planet, dwarfing help given by any other country. You want to change all that?

The fact that we even elected a black man to be president is the most recent proof of this. Not that I personally give a shit about race. I could care less that Obama is black. Sure, there is the historical symbolism and all that, but I would never vote for a person because of his skin color. Although I didn’t vote for Obama, I would have voted for Colin Powell a while back, and I would have voted for Condoleezza Rice this year. You know, sometimes discrimination isn’t racism.

Democrats have been pounding us on how bad we are here. How racist we are. How backward we are. Yada friggin yada. Well, over 50 million people voted for a black guy for president. Without Republicans and independents joining the Democrats and voting for him, he would have lost. You wanna change that?

Maybe now we won’t have to listen to the usual Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton blather. There’s a nice change. Maybe we can now shelve all those outdated affirmative action quotas.

You know, this change thing is growing on me.

Obama has openly said that he wants to have the Supreme Court redefine how our school system should be funded to help minorities. Wow! There’s a damn change for you. Why do we even need an executive branch of government or Congress or a Constitution or local governments?

And he advocates redistribution of our wealth. What those big words mean is that if you make $80,000 a year, he would like to take $60,000 of it and give it to three guys who haven’t worked, so everyone will be equal and make $20,000. Yes, I was exaggerating a little there, but not that much. Obama wants to change from equality of opportunity to just plain old equality. That’s a change I don’t want.

One last quibble. Obama says he wants to unify all of us in one glorious united America. Democrats and Republicans holding hands and singing John Denver songs. Pro-life church members coming over to pro-abortion advocates’ houses for nice Sunday dinners. Anti-war demonstrators throwing back a few beers with Marines. Rush Limbaugh and Nancy Pelosi dating. It’s gonna be nifty.

And while Obama was giving his inspirational and unifying acceptance speech, a large throng of Georgetown and other DC college students were out in front of the White House, mocking and jeering President Bush.

I’m feeling warm and fuzzy already.

Jim Laris is for the former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Getting Clipped (Cigar Smoke 11-6-08)

By the time you read this, the election will be over. Thank God. Or, as you Democrats say, thank my secular/spiritual essence.

Because I am into self-delusion, I figure I will be happy either way. If McCain wins, I’ll just be plain old slam-dunk happy. If Obama wins, maybe I won’t have to listen to all the Bush-bashing bullshit anymore.

So, to hell with politics for now. Let’s get back to the important things in life — like deciding if you should get a pedicure. I am really having a hard time with this one. As you know, I am now in my single-digit life-expectancy period and I have a semi-serious bad back and my eyesight ain’t that good and I am as rigid and inflexible in my physical being as I am in my political thinking and, OK, maybe I’m a little lankier than I should be, so it is very hard for me to bend down to cut my toenails.
For the past year I have gone through incredible gyrations just to reach my toes and when I finally reach my toes I have to re-gyrate to cut the damn nails off. It is really tough. For a while there, I would sit down on the toilet seat (with the cover down) and reach slowly towards my feet. However, with my back problem, I know I have to keep my head straight because if I bend my neck — even just a little — as I’m reaching down, it will throw my damn back out.

So I have to kind of guess where my toenails are. With my head straight, I just glance down with my eyes to try to see where to cut. This is not easy. I usually clip a few of ’em fine. But I almost always cut into the quick on a couple of others, and it hurts and it bleeds — I know you feel my pain. Even you Democrats are probably pretty upset right now.

And I’ve tried other solutions. I’ve lain down on my back and tried to bring my feet up to my hands. I’ve put my foot up on higher solid pieces of furniture to get a better angle. I’ve asked Marge if she would mind cutting the toenails of her beloved wonderful husband who still makes her heart sing and she mentioned something about something freezing over. Oh yeah, it was hell. Hell freezing over. That was it.

So then I saw this ad in Geezer Life magazine in the “You’re Not Quite Dead Yet” section. The ad was for a long-handled pair of toenail clippers. A long-handled pair of nail clippers. Oh my secular/spiritual essence, my prayers had been answered. I could not believe there was such a product. I would have had an orgasm if I could remember what that was.

I sent for this life-saving gadget immediately because my toenails were out of my socks and heading for my shoes. When the long-handled babies finally came in the mail, I ran to the bathroom and shut the door. It kind of reminded me of when I used to read the articles in Playboy and not look at the pictures a long time ago. Anyway, I rip open the package and take these long-handled suckers out, and am expecting to get some major-league toenail-cutting relief.

But, I did not. With the long handle, you can get down to your toes easy enough, but the damn things don’t have enough leverage to actually cut the toenails. Man, it was so disappointing. I was devastated. Really. I felt hopeless. And I know Obama won’t do anything about this if he gets in. The bastard.

So now I’m deciding if I should be a girly geezerman and get a pedicure. I have never had a pedicure in my life. Hell, I have never even had a manicure. I don’t know. Is it legal to get a pedicure before you’ve had a manicure? Or, in this economy, is it even moral to get a pedicure when poor people are getting by without high definition TVs? I just don’t know.

But most of all, it’s just scary. I’m filled with anxiety and insecurity about going in for a pedicure. What do you do? Do you just sit there like in a barber’s chair? Does someone come up to you, and you say, “Just a trim, please.” Or do you say, “I’ll have the Brad Pitt cut.” What if the pedicure person has a foot fetish and finds my feet irresistible? What if she says, “From the ankles down, you’re not bad looking, gramps.”

Do they take off your shoes and socks, or do you? Do they wash your feet first? Or do they just keel over backwards when they take your socks off? Do they buff your newly cut toenails? Do they tie you to the chair and put clear toenail polish on them? Do they laugh at you? Do they point at you? Do they make toenail jokes? “This toenail walked into a bar …”

And how much does it cost for a pedicure? I have no doubledamn idea how much it should cost. I could be ripped off by a fraudulent, unlicensed, unscrupulous pedicurist. And what about tipping? Do you tip by the toe? Is that how they came up with the expression tippy-toe?

This is all too much for me. I’m going back to politics.

Jim Laris is the former owner/publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Barack Bizaro Obama (Cigar Smoke 10-30-08)

Well, it looks like Barack Hussein Obama has a pretty good shot at winning this thing. And if he does, more power to him. He’s run a great campaign. He beat the pants suit off of Hillary. He played the Internet like Slick Willie played the sax. I have to give the guy credit.

However, I was just wondering if a Republican candidate, who had the same qualifications and had the same questionable associations that Obama had, would have done quite as well. Why don’t we just make up a candidate and let’s call him Tommy Adolf Obama.

Tommy just came on the political scene about three years ago at the Republican National Convention. He gave an inspirational nominating speech and he was damn good looking, too. Kind of looked like a young Harry Belafonte. More charismatic than JFK on steroids. Women swooned. So did gay men. Heterosexual men considered it.

And Tommy was, of course, half black and half white. His father was black and had abandoned him, and his mother was white and had raised him and sacrificed for him and encouraged him to reach for the sky. So, it was an easy choice. He decided to call himself white.

And what qualifications for the presidency did Tommy have? He was an attorney. He used to be a community organizer in Chicago. He was a senator from Illinois with a few years experience in the US Senate. He didn’t know much about foreign affairs or the economy or running a large entity like a state or a government department or even a company. He pretty much relied on his eloquence and his coolness.

So Tommy decided to go for it. He put his name in the hat and started running for president. And damned if he didn’t do pretty well at it. The press was behind him and he was never challenged too much and nobody ever asked him any tough questions and the press pretty much trashed his primary opponents. And damned if old Tommy didn’t get the Republican nomination to lead his party against the Democrats.

The Democrats were running an experienced man who had been in the Senate for about 30 years and had served his country well in the military and this guy was well versed in foreign affairs and had actual dealings with some of the bad guys of the world. So he was pretty formidable, but Tommy never faltered.

Tommy said, “I’m younger than he is. I’m better looking than he is. And I’m more eloquent than he is. I’m even taller than he is. I’ve organized way more communities than he has. And I don’t have jaw cancer, either. What’s the problem?”

So Tommy kept running his campaign. And all the young Republican girls swooned at his campaign appearances and all the movie stars thought Tommy was cool, too, and they fought the young girls to see who could get closer to him to swoon. Tommy laughed at the pushing and shoving, and he put his arm around the shoulders of the neutral press and kept that train on the track, baby. It was truly a beautiful thing to see. Kind of like a manger with neon lights. It made his Republican religious-right base quiver with a kind of spiritual delight. Hallelujah.

Everything was going great until the Democrats started to question some of Tommy’s old associations. He had been going to a church for the past 20 years and his minister had railed against blacks and Jews and those Muslim “bastards.” And his minister, Billy Graham, who by the way, had married Tommy and his wife (who said she never really liked the country all that much), screamed out “God damned America!” It was pretty ugly. But Tommy said he never heard any of that stuff. That’s good enough for us, huh?

And then some crazy fool had the nerve to ask old Tommy about someone else in his past. A guy named Tony something who had helped him buy his house in shall we say, a non-sunny deal. Tommy had bought an expensive house in a very nice area, and Tommy had only paid one-third the fair market price that his neighbors had paid. Tommy said he made a good deal and that people should just back off. Wouldn’t be right to challenge that.

And finally Tommy had to deal with another person in his past. This guy was a former Ku Klux Klan member and when the press asked this Klan jerk-off about what he’d done, he said, “I only wish I could have done more against those people. We didn’t do enough. If only we’d had more rope.”

When they brought this up to Tommy, he said, “I was only 8 when this happened.” When the press mentioned that Tommy was in his 30s when he launched his political career in Mr. KKK’s house, Tommy was speechless. He eloquently said nothing.

The press pushed and asked Tommy why he worked on the same board that Mr. KKK worked on when Tommy was in his 40s. And Tommy Adolf Obama said, “I think I was still eight, wasn’t I?”

Just sayin.

The Big Lug (Cigar Smoke 10-23-08)

I rarely think about schlepping, unless I am the one doing the schlepping. For those of you who don’t know what schlepping is, come on over to my house. I have a few very meaningful tasks I need help with.

Like most of you, I have done a lot of schlepping in my life. I remember a long time ago when I was about 17 and my family and friends all went to the beach for a big old beach bash and weenie roast and sand in your butt-crack event.

We had three cars full of people and beach crap and we get to the beach and everyone piles out of the cars and runs to the beach to frolic. I’m a little late in getting out of the car and I am a little late in the intelligence department and I’m standing there and pitifully pleading to a bunch of deaf people, “What about the ice chest and all this stuff? I need help. Please!” They don’t even look back. They just frolic their guiltless asses down to the seashore.

So I take the ice chest out of the trunk. It’s full of, well, ice. And cans of soda. It is heavy. It is heavier than Rosie O’Donnell after eating her second KFC bucket. I wrestle the ice chest out of the trunk and then I start carrying it toward the shoreline of death, four miles away. This, of course, would be bad enough, but I am also trying to carry a handful of beach towels and two folding chairs and some swim fins and a bag of sandwiches, so I won’t have to make two trips.

I can’t finish this story. All I remember is that about a fifth of the way there, I started to sweat, and the sweat was getting on my hands and I couldn’t grip the ice chest and it kept slipping, and all the other beach crap was falling everywhere, and I felt unappreciated and ignored and I wanted to cry, but the sand in my eyes soaked up the tears so all I could do was attempt to make this pathetic little crying sound, but no sound would come out and I went blind from sweaty-sand-in-the-eye-syndrome and I hated life and hated my family and hated my frigging friends and I purposely stepped right into the middle of a little kid’s sand castle just to hear what the sound of crying was like. It was my introduction to schlepping. “Hello, schlepping.”

Schlepping replied, “Bite me, loser.”

Through the years, I have had many moments of schlepping. When my darling children were both toddlers, I schlepped all their playpens and cribs and strollers and jammies and teddy bears and toys and rockets and food jars full of squished peas and diapers full of squished pea results. I have done it all. I have schlepped where no man has ever schlepped before. If I had a nickname it would be “Schleppy.” And if I was a folk-singer and if I had a hammer I would kill Schleppy. Yes, I would keep hitting Schleppy over and over while a nice, lilting folksong melody lingered in the background.

I guess you can see I’m a little sensitive to schlepping. I thought most of my schlepping days were behind me. I was wrong. Marge, The Schlepping Master, asked me last fall if I would mind helping her Soroptimist Club at its annual auction. I said, “It’s not on a Sunday, is it?” She said, “Why, yes, it is? Why do you ask?” I started to say “NFL football” but I couldn’t get it out and just sobbed to myself and started looking for a hammer.

So I helped her at the auction. I schlepped some stuff into the house where they were holding the auction. It was pretty minor-league schlepping. Not too much crud. Nothing too heavy. And the auction went off smoothly and they made money to help out humanity and I was getting ready to go home and I noticed something strange. I was one of the only men left there. (The other men were what? They were smarter than me.)

I schlepped our stuff back to the car. And then I looked over at Marge and she had this pre-schlepping authorization expression on her face. I said, “What is it?” She said something about all the folding chairs had to be taken out to the back and there weren’t any men around except one guy who was faking a leg injury and would I be a wonderful husband and help them out. I said, “Can I be back to the house by 5:15 for the Sunday night game?”

Anyway, I schlepped for about an hour, back and forth, taking the folding chairs somewhere they weren’t, and the guy with the fake leg injury wouldn’t look directly at me, and I got all sweaty from my schlepping and on my final trip back to get my last folding chair. I was so sweaty that — and I am not making this up — my pants fell down. Just slipped right off my sweaty hips. (Calm down, ladies.)

Yup, I was standing there sweating my schlep sweat and my pants were draped around my ankles and I looked up and the fake leg guy was looking at my pants and he looked up at me and said, “What are you doing after the auction?”
I said, “I’m gonna get a hammer and kill a folk-singer. Wanna come along?”

Fist-Fighting Fun (Cigar Smoke 10-16-08)

I was just sitting around the house the other day, just feeling better than other people because I owned an iPhone, and I got to thinking about fighting. Not gang fighting or road rage fighting or shooting- each-other-with-guns fighting, just regular old fist-fighting.

Fighting for me started pretty young. When I was 5 I would go around my neighborhood and I would ask my pint-sized friends to smell my knuckles. And when they did, I would pop ‘em. Gave out a lot of bloody noses and my parents had a lot of other parents coming over to the house to find out what kind of monster they had raised.

My favorite fight as a 5-year old was with a guy named Gary Skeen. Gary and I got into it for some reason, and we exchanged a few toddler blows, and then he started to run away. Well, I chased him and he ran into his house. He thought he was safe. He was wrong. I opened the front door and ran in after him and tracked him down in his bedroom and started whaling on him.

His old man was a cop, and he just kept looking at me. He didn't stop the fight - just let me beat up his kid. And when I was leaving, our eyes met and there was a look of admiration in his eyes. Some kid had busted into his house, the house of a cop, and beat up his kid, right in front of him. I'll always remember that look.

My next memorable fist-fight was with Dale Cooper at 98th Street Elementary School. We were in the sixth grade. Dale and I were each the leaders of our own little band of peewee tough guys. Kind of like a gang, but not really. You were either with Dale, or you were with me. We ruled the sixth grade!

Anyway, one fateful day, Dale and I were playing tetherball, and it got pretty heated and down and dirty. Both of our packs of buddies were watching, and then it turned from tetherball to fistball. I don't know how it escalated, but we just started banging on each other, and as I recall, it was a pretty cool fight. About 30 kids cheering us on on the asphalt. Just throwing punches and rolling around. Both of us got bloodied up pretty good, and when some teacher broke it up, everybody booed. It doesn't get much better than that. (Note: after the fight Dale and I became best of friends. There's a message there somewhere.)

The best fight I ever got into was on high school graduation night. At our school we had a Grad Night Party at some fancy hotel in Santa Monica and we stayed out all night. So we're at this party and everybody is dancing, and this guy, Kent Smith, cuts in on somebody who was dancing with a girl I had a crush on. Kent was pretty wasted and he kind of flicked this other guy away from her and started dancing with my crush-babe who didn't know who the hell I was.

Well, being the delusional male that I've always been, I thought I could come to her rescue and take Kent's roaming paws off her (hopefully) virginal shoulders and maybe someday put my own roaming paws on those grateful shoulders. Well, I went up behind Kent, and put my right hand on his left shoulder, and started to pull him off her. He did not take too kindly to this. How do I know? Well, as I was pulling his left shoulder, he was turning and throwing his right fist at my only nose.

He clocked me, baby. Just unloaded a big right hand. Bam! And the funny thing was he didn't even know who he was hitting. He just turned and threw. My damsel-saving face just happened to be right there to be hit. Hell, it could have been Mother Teresa - he wouldn't have cared. He just put my fist-fighting ass right on the floor, baby.

Well, I cleared my head a little and I went after him. It was a great fight. Like we were in a movie. We're in this ritzy hotel and we're fighting a good even fight, trading punch for punch, and I knock him over some couch in the lobby and then I leap over the couch to jump on him and get him again. (Errol Flynn, eat your heart out.) And damned if he doesn't knock me back over the couch and everybody is making a ring around us and lamps are breaking and we're falling onto coffee tables and there was blood on our white tuxedo shirts and our cummerbunds were not covering what cummerbunds were supposed to be covering and there were spilled drinks and scared girls shrieking and drunk guys yelling and damn it was fun.

And the girl I saved was so beholden to me that she got married a few months later to a guy named Trent - because he had gotten her pregnant in a 1957 Chevy at Grad Night while Kent and I were fighting.

I Hate Sports and the Horse it Rode in On (Cigar Smoke 10-9-08)

Nope, it is not easy being a sports fan. And I’m not just talking about being an LA Kings fan. (That’s being masochistic.) I’m talking about regular teams that are good and have legitimate chances of winning and they break your damn heart and you want to kill yourself and cry after you’re dead.

Like, let’s take Sept. 25. Just a couple of weeks ago. A regular Thursday. I was feeling pretty damn happy and was walking around with my head held high and my stomach held out and my arrogance was really working for me, and most of the people I know hated me even more than usual because the Dodgers had clinched their division and SC was ranked No. 1 in the country and I was more insufferable than succotash.

And then within a span of six hours SC got beat by a midget up at Oregon State and my sports joy was wiped out and I wanted to hurt panda bears and break things and cry and whine and blame and become a Beaver fan and burn the house and die. The sports gods had turned on me. In one day. In one-fourth of a day. They just couldn’t let me bask in my arrogance for a freaking full day.

I know you’re feeling my pain. Especially you UCLA fans. All I can say is thanks and, Brigham Young 59-0. I think I’m starting to recover.

The misery of being a sports fan can rear its ugly noggin in a lot of ways. Just before the Dodgers got into the playoffs I went to a game at Dodger Stadium, and I was watching Manny be Manny, and choking on a corned beef sandwich (me, not Manny) with no condiments on it, and it’s the seventh inning so we’re all standing up and stretching and singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” and this German guy behind me is talking real loud in a German accent and he’s saying, “You know, you Americans are kind of crazy. Just vat is Crackerjacks, anyway?” I am not making this up. He actually inquired as to what Crackerjacks is.

So I turned around to him and I said, “You don’t know what Crackerjacks is? You Third Reich goose-stepping swine maggot, how would you feel if I came over to one of your boot-stomping Nazi cities and saw some long stubby round brown things being grilled and I said “Just what is sausages, anyway? What would you say to that, Bratwurst Face?!”

He didn’t respond, so I said, “What if I went to one of your October gardens and watched a bunch of you suspender-sporting gazuntites all polka-ing your industrial-weight butts off and I inquired as to what you were drinking? Is zat beer?” Ah, sauerkraut this!

OK, I’m calming down.

I’m not sure how much longer I can keep being a sports fan. My blood pressure is now measured by how far blood spurts out my nose and hits the sidewalk. I’m up to being able to spurt over a hopscotch chalk outline now.

Another example of sports fan torture: I decide to go to an NFL game. It’s the first pro football game I’ve been to since the Rams left LA. So I buy three pretty pricy tickets for a Chargers game. The home opener. These tickets are not cheap. They’re on the 30-yard line, about 18 rows up. Damn good seats. So I invite my son Casey and his girlfriend Jessie to go with me.

We take the Metro down to Qualcom Stadium and go inside and sit down at our wonderful (expensive) seats, and I am smiling like I’m a pretty cool parent and Casey and Jessie should be grateful and always somehow owe me. So the game starts and we all stand up to cheer on the Chargers. Go Chargers! Kill those guys in different colored uniforms! We don’t care if they are other people’s husbands and sons. Kill them!

And then we sit down. But the fans in front of us do not sit down. I think, OK, maybe it’s some San Diego tradition to stand for the first series of plays. So we stand up and cheer. Go Chargers! Maim those brothers and uncles of other families! Make their sisters and aunts cry!

Well, those rat-bastard fans stood up for the whole game. Yes, the first 17 rows of fans all stood up for the entire game. We, being in the 18th row, had to stand up, too, and I, being a person who has been old enough to drink now for 46 years, had to stand too. I did not like this. My legs did not like this. My bones did not like this. My diabetes and hypertension were arguing. I did not like traveling for two hours and paying a lot of money to stand up for three-and-a-half hours in 90-degree heat. I did not like this. I was an angry sports fan. My cheers changed. Go Chargers! Kill the fans in front of us! After you kill them, Chargers, make their lifeless bodies be horizontal so we can see over them and see you kill Carolina Panther players like we paid for! Go Chargers!

I hate sports. I hate the horse that sports rode in on. I hate horses without riders. I hate riders without horses, who are sometimes referred to as pedestrians. I hate pedestrians. I hate pedestrians who like sports. I’m just giving up on sports and going back to what I do best.

Complaining.

Jim Laris is the former owner/publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

180 Degrees from Somewhere (Cigar Smoke 10-2-08)

You know what I like about life? You just never know what the hey-hey is going to happen. That’s what I like. Like the other day I get up and I go to my computer and I have this little reminder that pops up that I have to send a photo I took on my iPhone to my old friend, Jim Ludwig. He’s 20 days older than me, dammit!

I hadn’t been able to figure out how to do this until my son, Casey, showed me, and lovingly added on, “You dummy.” Anyway, I actually transferred the photo from my iPhone to my Mac and then I emailed it to Jim the Elder as an attachment. I’ll wait until the applause dies down.

Jim gets the photo and emails back to me, “Thanks, I didn’t think you’d be able to figure that out. You just learned how to use the on/off switch last year.” Jim and I have had a great friendship for about 60 years. The only other thing I have ever had for about 60 years is bowel movements.

Anyway, Jim asked me if I would like to have lunch, so I email back to him that I have a wild hair and I would like to go to an old favorite of mine from high school called Kelbo’s in Culver City. It’s a Hawaiian barbecue kind of place that had great appetizers and rum drinks and all that bullshit. I like that in a restaurant.

So Jim says he’ll check it out first and get back to me. Well, he does. And he breaks my heart and tells me that Kelbo’s is gone —it is now a gentlemen’s club. My heart comes back to life a little and I ask Jim if he thinks they offer barbecue sauce with the lap dances. Jim says, “Why don’t you let me pick out the lunch spot this time, dummy.” He and Casey must have talked.

So he finds some place in Azusa that he found on something called Yelp online. He said he tried to find a Hawaiian-type barbecue place and all he could come up with was a Thai place that specialized in barbequed country food. I told him he was the perfect guy to fix the sub-prime fiasco. So instead of going to Kelbo’s in Culver City we went to Thai Piglets in Azusa. Holy barbecue sauce. Now that’s pretty damn life, isn’t it? If that ain’t 180 degrees from somewhere, then I don’t know my compass, baby.

He comes over to pick me up in his new Prius hutmobile and I help him wind the rubber band and we start off to Azusa. Actually, I was impressed. The Prius is pretty cool. It’s part electric, part gasoline, and part sewing machine. It has this little indicator gizmo that shows you how many miles per gallon you’re getting while you’re driving. (Most of us just have our wives.) Like sometimes he’d be getting 50 miles per gallon and then he’d go down a hill and he’d literally be getting 100 miles per gallon. He averages over 40 miles per gallon. My Dodge Durango uses the Ross Perot method of fuel-use measurement. You just hear the sucking sound.

So we get to the Thai barbecue place and I ask him why he picked this fine eating establishment, and he said because somebody on Yelp said it had sticky tables. Now that’s why Jim and I have been friends for so long. Sticky tables! Yes! It’s a lot harder to knock over your iced tea.

Anyway, we’re eating our giant globs of health food and adding our own BBQ sauce to the stickiness build-up, and I look over behind Jim and there is this guy in the next booth and he has a giant plate of lettuce only. Nothing else. No tomatoes, no cucumbers, no salad dressing, just lettuce. A huge pile of lettuce on a plate. And then he just pinches up a bunch of lettuce with his fingers and starts munching. Doesn’t use a fork. Just gets his fingers full of lettuce and eats it. Ate the whole plate of lettuce. Peter Cottontail would have had an orgasm.

After we’ve eaten our giant globs of health food and added our own barbecue sauce to the stickiness build-up, we leave the restaurant and I secretly wipe my fingers on the Prius seat covers. Maybe that will knock that MPG average down a little. And then Jim suggests that we take a little ride up into the San Gabriel Mountains. I think maybe he’s going to whack me, but he’s not the Sopranos type, so I say, “Sure, nothing I’d rather do on a 95-degree day than see some dried-up parched mountains. I guess the Sahara was closed, huh?”

So we head up to the mountains behind Azusa and among other things we see a pistol range, a couple of dams, an off-road-vehicle park, an RV village and two suspicious looking guys in a Datsun. And those were the high points. Then we stop by the side of the road and Jim gets out his telescope and mounts it on a tripod and focuses it for 10 minutes and then says, “Hey look at this.” I put my eye to the scope, and I see a mound of trash in a riverbed. Jim says, “Pretty cool, huh?” I say, “Check, please.”

And then as we head back to the car, Jim finds a roll of bills on the ground. Really — 13 bucks. All ones. Just lying there in the dirt, in the middle of nowhere, wrapped in a rubber band. I thought maybe we should split it. I suggested that he give me the money and he could keep the rubber band in case his main Prius power-supply rubber band broke.

I was just about to tell him about life and philosophy and 180 degrees and not knowing what was going to happen when you got up in the morning, but he interrupted me, and I hate to say this, but he used a little stronger language than “dummy.” All I caught was something about a rubber-band-this related to my heritage and something with a mother-something in there with an anatomical reference. It would have made a rap group blush.

Jim Laris is the former owner/publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Not Falling Down Funny (Cigar Smoke 9-25-08)

First of all, I want you to know that I don’t think falling down is falling-down funny. No, I’m not like “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” They wouldn’t have a show if people didn’t fall down. Kids fall down, brides fall down at the altar, people fall off stages, babies fall out of cribs, seeing-eye dogs fall down. Hey, it’s falling-down funny. You might even say it’s a trip. That may be funny.

And no, I definitely don’t think old people falling down is too damn funny. You always hear about the old guy who takes a tumble and breaks a hip — and then it’s memorial service time. I think Forest Lawn sponsors broken hips. You break a hip, baby, and it’s time to cancel the subscriptions.

But because I am a what? I am a journalist. I have to report the truth. I am getting semi-old and I am starting to fall down with something my bowels aren’t familiar with — regularity. I’ve probably fallen down seven or eight times in the last year or so. I’m just here to show you what you’re in store for when you start reading Modern Maturity.

There are many different types of falls. I would classify all of them for you, but sadly I fell and hit my head and I can’t remember diddly. I think his first name is Bo, but that’s all I can recall.

It seems to me that I fall basically because I can’t stop from falling. Now, I know that sounds simple. But here’s the thing. You step on a rock or you step in a small hole, and in your younger years you just compensate for it, and your upper body muscles help you hold yourself up. But now they don’t. They’re in a rest home in Florida.

I was walking across the damn street the other day at Allen and New York, and as I got to the middle of the street, I stumbled over a little uneven section of asphalt. Just a little rise. And damned if I didn’t go down like a sack of wet rice. My upper body compensation muscles were nowhere to be seen. Bastards. I never did like them, even when I was younger.

A while back I was just walking out to get my newspapers in the morning, and I walked out of the house and got to the top of my driveway and I took a step off the walkway and misjudged where the end of the step was and I stumbled. I immediately lost my balance and was starting down the driveway completely out of control. At first I didn’t fall down, I just staggered for about 20 feet and gained some momentum, and I was gathering some serious moss, baby. I was really moving.

Finally, as I got near the street, I decided I better just go ahead and fall or I might get nailed by a trash truck.

So I did my old football roll and ate the pavement.

Didn’t really get hurt, but I skinned my knees and had to spit out some pebbly gnarly stuff. But there is a bright side: While I was on the ground, I crawled over a few feet and picked up the papers. At least I didn’t have to bend over and throw my back out and fall down again. I felt very efficient. My hips applauded.

About six months ago I was in a casino in Reno and was walking down some stairs to get some lunch. When I got down to the last three steps or so, I tripped and took a nasty spill. I fell hard on some cement floor and I was kind of stunned. As I was looking around, dazed, I saw about 50 guys watching a football game on TV and not one of those bad Samaritans came to my aid. To be fair to mankind, I was wearing an SC shirt, and I did look into the eyes of one guy who was sipping a beer, and he just looked at me, and slowly mouthed the letters “U-C-L-A.” I thought that was pretty cold.

And I don’t only fall down. I fall up, too. I am an equal opportunity faller. I was walking out to my backyard deck — and it was at night and it was dark out (who would have thought) — and I had a cigar and a lighter in one hand and two fudgicles in the other hand and an iPod and earphones clutched to my chest, and Hadley was somewhere between my feet, and damned if I didn’t miss the first step. I fell pretty hard up into other steps and landed on some ornamental damn rock.

But I was lucky. I was OK, but everything was scattered all over hell, and as I struggled to get up, I noticed Hadley was eating my fudgicles, including the wrappers and the sticks. Man’s best friend, this!

I also slipped in the kitchen last month and did the splits and my thighs split open and my tendons and ligaments fell onto the tile. Felt like it. And it’s just a matter of time before I slip in the bathtub. I know it’s going to happen. Yup, I think I’m going to buy it in the shower. I can see it. I’m going to break a hip and probably a head. And I know the paramedics (who will still have their pissy compensatory holding upper body muscles) are going to come out and I know they will say to Marge, “We can’t get the rubber ducky out of his cold dead hand.”

Have a nice day, whippersnappers.

Jim Laris is the former owner/publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

It Ain't Me Babe (Cigar Smoke 9-18-08)

I went out to the Pechanga Indian Reservation on Sept. 4 to see what they were up to at the Pechanga Resort, and damned if Bob Dylan wasn’t there for a one-nighter. So, excuse the expression, I found a scalper and I got a ticket.

I go up to the entrance and I show my ticket to the usher and he looks me over and says, “There’s an age limit. Nobody over 80.”

I said, “I’m the same age as Bobby Boy Dylan, assface.”

Then he said, “You look like a Republican to me. Why should I let you in?”

I said, “Because would a Republican use obscenity and call you assface, assface?”

I walk into the theater and I am immediately hit with an overwhelming smell of marijuana. I thought I was at a Humboldt County pot-growers convention. I said to the guy next to me, “If I wasn’t a Republican, I’d probably take a hit of ole Mary Jane, of some of that wacky weed, a little grass, maybe toke a little smoke.” He traded seats with his wife.

I’ve got a pretty good seat. I’m in the third row in the center orchestra section on the aisle. I was almost as happy as if I had taken a few drags. Then Bob and the boys come out on stage. Bob is wearing this black gaucho outfit with a flat-brimmed gaucho cowboy hat and I am expecting him to say, “Hello Pechanga.” Something like that. He doesn’t. He just starts singing. And the beat goes on.

For two-plus hours. No intermission. No segues. No patter.

I know this doesn’t mean much in hard-rock circles, but he never said one damn word to the audience the whole night! He never acknowledged that we were even there. Oh, once he smiled, but I’m pretty sure that was just pulled-pork sandwich gas.

I didn’t want much. Just an insincere greeting. Tell us about his show in Santa Monica last night. Make a drug joke. Bash Bush. Something. Anything. But nope. Bob was just too damn cool for that. For a 67-year old guy, he’s pretty damn cool. I’ll give him that. I’m 67 too, and I would have offered an insincere greeting.

So he starts singing and, yes, it’s great to hear him live. That damn mumbly voice is something. And his band was incredible, too. That place was rocking. That steady Dylan kind of driving-rhythm thing. It made me want to get stoned and have sex with two younger women at the same time, maybe a 63- and a 65-year old.

But, as incredible as the music was, I have to say that I didn’t understand many of the words. I know it’s a cliché about how he mumbles and, hell, I have five or six of his albums, and I pretty much know a lot of the words, but, hey, outside of a “Highway 61” here and “Just Like a Woman” there, I didn’t understand jack. Maybe if a guy named Jack was singing I wouldn’t have understood dylan. I don’t know.

So as I watch other people in the audience, I think they do understand the words, and it’s probably because they are using the aforementioned medicinal-use products. So I decide to go get a Margarita. I go out to the lobby, go up to the bartender, and I notice that there is a little plate of olives, so I ask the guy if he would put an olive in my Margarita. He says “No. Can’t do that.” I say, “Why?” He says “I can only give you an olive in a Martini.” I say, “OK, I’d like a Martini, but use Margarita ingredients.” He says “No.” I say “OK, I would like to buy an olive.” He says “We don’t sell olives.” I say “I’m a diabetic.” He says “I don’t care if you’re Jewish.”

So I snatched an olive off the plate and just ate it. Just damn ate it. And then I went back into the theater knowing I was now a true Dylan fan because I was a rebel and I was going to get drunk and I would be able to understand the lyrics and I would have olive breath. Life was good.

But life didn’t turn out to be that good. Dylan just stood at the keyboard all night. His black gaucho boots may have been nailed to the gaucho floor. A couple of times he did bend over, but I think his back just gave out. He stayed in that same spot all night. Never moved. All I saw of him was the left side of his face. Maybe he was trying to hide a gaucho tattoo on his right cheek. I don’t know.

And people were yelling for him to play the guitar. Pleading with him to play the guitar. But he never did, and he never acknowledged our pleading either, because I guess that would have meant he would have had to say an actual word to us. Why couldn’t he have just answered, “No!” Would one “No!” have killed his cool ass? I say “No.”

As I was driving home, I picked a little chunk of my leftover olive out of my teeth and spit it out the window. That night it was the only thing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Or as Bob would have said, “Blohhhwhen nn thaa wwwiinn.”

Jim Laris is the former owner/publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

No Time to Hate (Cigar Smoke 9-17-08)

I don’t quite know what it is, but I relate to insects and inanimate objects pretty well. I wish I had that skill with people. But I guess people don’t have enough legs or they move around too much for me. Give me a bug or something made out of metal any day. All in all, they’re pretty good companions. And, I think I have a better vocabulary than most of them.

I know I’ve written about spiders and ants and ladybugs and crickets and those balling-up sow bugs before, but this is kind of different. Let me ’splain what I mean. Every morning just before I get into the shower, it seems I have to rescue some creepy crawly or lowly creature. And, to be honest, as wonderfully humane as I am, these acts of kindness are kind of driving me a little nutso.

This morning was a perfect example. I strip down naked, look at myself in the mirror, wink like Errol Flynn, and start to get into the shower. But my eye catches this little moving object. It’s so small I don’t even think you could classify it as a bug. It was just some little creature trying to get out of the tub. The walls were too steep and too slippery, and he just kept falling back.

So I got a piece of toilet paper, and bent down and made this escape ramp. I put one end of the toilet paper right in front of the place where he should have had eyes, and I nudged his mini-butt onto the paper and guided him up the toilet paper of life.

He scurried his little ass off and disappeared into my bathroom rug. And dammit, I did feel a little better. But I don’t know why. Hey, let’s face it; this guy probably had a life expectancy of, maybe, 16 hours. They say flies only live for 24 hours, so I’m just extrapolating a little. I saved something that was going to buy the farm by the end of the day anyway.

I save five or six of these itty-bitty characters every week. I have never been thanked once. They don’t even know they’ve been saved. They truly are dumber than doornails, which, by the way, I have a relationship with, too. I often wonder what it feels like to be hammered into something. Just waiting there for the, well, for the hammer to drop, and then it does.

Sorry, I got distracted from my bug friends. Why do I save something that doesn’t know it’s being saved and will die within hours even if I do save it? I do not know the answer. Please, will some philosopher help me out? Come on, Aristotle, enlighten me. Plato, ask me a probing question. Immanuel, help me, I Kant figure it out.

And it’s not just bathtubs. The other death venue for spiders and their buddies is the sink. I go to wash my hands, and damned if there isn’t some spider trying to walk up the side of the sink. He can’t do it. He just keeps slipping. Tries again. Slips again. I thought spiders were supposed to spin webs and walk out, proud and loud. But no. They’re even dumber than the scurriers in my shower, who as we’ve learned, are dumber than doornails. (By the way, are doornails dumber than posts? I’d pay to see that fight.)

So, does spider dumbness stop me. No, Mr. Insect Rescue Man jumps right in to help them. Yes, I get another piece of toilet paper, and lead the spider to his freedom. I put him gently down on the floor, lean down even closer to him, and listen closely, hoping for a sign of recognition. Just some kind of salute of gratitude. I know they don’t speak English. Just thank me in Spiderese. Just grunt. Or spit. Would it kill you to weave a little web thank you?

Oh, I kid the insect world. But my relationship with inanimate objects is also starting to worry me a bit. I now talk to objects almost every day. Like, I am now using my iPhone all the time, and my poor little Palm Pilot is just sitting there on the counter in its little metal case and leather jacket. It literally is gathering dust. Some no-good family member wrote “Wash Me” on it the other day.

I’m putting everything on my iPhone now. I have a calendar and an address book and a bunch of other utilities and applications that I used to use my Palm for. All of them are now on the iPhone. Hell, I even have my Scrabble dictionaries on there. And I can just tell my loyal Palm TX is hurt. I can feel it every time I walk by. Maybe, it’s just me, but I think I hear this little metallic cough sometimes, and I look down, and the Palm Pilot is just a fraction of an inch from where I left it, and I think I see a little teardrop there, too. And I don’t know if I can say this without choking up, the teardrop is, well, it’s rusty. Oh, God!

It’s starting to get to me. Now, before I go to bed, I apologize to my Palm Pilot. I say stuff like, “You know, Palm Face, it’s not really you. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s me. I’ve changed.”

And Palm Face just lies there on the kitchen counter, and I feel this pain, this guilt, and then she says, “You don’t even charge me anymore.”

Oh, God, it just hurts so much. Maybe I’ll reconsider having relationships with people again. No, I can’t do that. I think I’ll just dump inanimate objects, and stick with spiders. They don’t hold a grudge. They die before they remember to hate you.

I Would Procrastinate if I Had the Time (Cigar Smoke 9-11-08)

I was going to write this column a long time ago, but, well, I put it off. And why did I do that? Because I am a procrastinator. And why am I a procrastinator? Because I am a no-good piece of useless human waste-material garbage. I think that’s pretty much what Sigmund would have said. And I think it has to do with sex and a cigar, too. Him, not me.

Oh, I kid us procrastinators. The reason this all came to the forefront of my consciousness (Let’s see Obama be more erudite than that) is because I had a slow leak in my left front tire. My tire kept getting lower and lower and I looked for a nail or something obvious, but I couldn’t find anything. So I just kept putting air in the damn thing every week.

Every day I would go out to my car and look at my left front tire and, sure enough, it would be slowly going down. I knew it would be, but I just wouldn’t get it fixed, because I am a lowly piece of procrastinating …you know what. Sometimes I would even sneak up on my tire and not look at it directly, and then turn real fast and look at it, and it was still going flat. I really did this. I think the liberals made me do it.

So every week I would have to take it to a gas station and put three damn quarters in the little air machine slot and the air machine would go on, and I would bend down and put the nozzle thing over the valve stem and I would pump air into that sucker. And it was not easy. I have a bad back (and my front ain’t that great either) and have trouble bending over. So I would have to get on my knee and get my pants all dirty and scraped and ripped. Took the chic quality right out of my polyester.
And I don’t know if you’ve put air in your tires lately, but it’s kind of a pain. You’re bent over, your pants are ruined, you’re trying to keep the nozzle on the valve stem, and it won’t quite fit right, and you’re cussing and spitting and scaring your dog. And you keep giving the air gun bursts of power and you can’t keep your fingers on the stem. And that little indicator comes up and it says you have 28 pounds in there. And somewhere deep in the back of your pre-historic mind you think there should be 32 pounds of pressure.

It is tough. I mean it. I hated it. But I did it. Every damn week. For four damn months. (I would have been the president of the Procrastinators of America Society, but they never got around to holding any meetings.) And every time I would do it, I would hate myself more. I would say to myself, “Jim, you useless piece of piss garbage, why don’t you have this tire fixed, you useless piece of crusted crud?” I would say that to myself, and my self would answer, “Because I am a useless piece of moron guts, that’s why.”

And some days when it was 100 degrees or hotter I would bend down and put air in that damn tire, and the little air machine would cut off before I could get my 32 pounds of pressure in there. So I would hang my useless sweaty head down in my hands and because my useless head was slippery with sweat my face would go through my hands and hit the pavement and I’d hit my nose on asphalt in July in Pasadena at a gas station. And then I’d go the cashier guy because I ran out of quarters to restart the air machine and he would say, “Uh, excuse me, but you have black tire smudges on your face and your nose is bleeding.”

I don’t know what kept me from getting the tire fixed. I guess I thought it would be too expensive. I didn’t want to spend more than $100 for a tire and I didn’t think they could put in an inner tube like in the old days and I could cheat the tire cost and be happy. And I didn’t want to take the time out of my busy retirement schedule. Would I have to cut back on my loafing or my idleness? Could I really afford to lose an hour of couch potato time? Would I have to answer the question, “Did you do anything today, Honey?” with a “Yes, I had my tire fixed, dear.” And then, of course, I would have wasted more time picking my wife up off the floor and taking her to the emergency room. That’s why I didn’t do it.

But last Saturday I was just driving by Just Tires over on Walnut Street and Sierra Madre Boulevard and decided to just drop in and just ask them if they could just fix it. I tell the guy I have a slow leak and he says, “Yeah, I know, but what’s wrong with your tire?” After we stop laughing, he comes out to my car, looks at my left front tire and immediately finds a nail in it. I couldn’t believe it. I had been looking for four months and couldn’t find it and he finds it instantly. He looks at me and I said, “Did you have one of your people put that nail in there?”

We go inside and I said, “I guess I need a new tire, huh?” He said, “No. We’ll just do a flat repair for $17.88 and you’ll be out of here in less than 30 minutes.”

And I was out of there in 30 minutes. It took me less than half an hour and it cost me only 17 bucks to fix a four-month-old killer problem that was destroying both my life and my pants. I never get actually happy, but I was damn close then.

So the moral of this tale is that I am no longer a useless piece of gut garbage. I am now a useful piece of gut garbage who is very, very smart and wears clean polyester pants, and if I ever have another problem I will say that I will fix it immediately — but will probably fall back on my old premise that if you ignore a problem for long enough, and if you go into full denial, the problem you are procrastinating about will probably work out somehow, and maybe the guy you owe money to will even die.

Rebel Without a Rap Sheet (Cigar Smoke 8-28-08)

I bet you didn’t know your little old columnist here was a serial criminal. I can’t quite believe it either, but here is what happened. I committed six crimes. Yes, six. And the whole crime spree took less than a half an hour.

I took my dog, Hadley, over to the Santa Fe Dam recreational area and, because it was early in the morning, and because nobody was there yet, and because I am a what? I am a rebel, I let Hadley off the leash, and he raised his long head in freedom and appreciation and then he raised his left leg in urination. And he peed on objects, plants, and himself. That was Crime No. 1.

Then I lit a cigar and was walking along with my freedom-loving urinating dog, and I was smoking and throwing my non-long head back in freedom, and I thought to myself, I think smoking in a park is now illegal. Crime No. 2.

Then I look back and Hadley had progressed from urination to poopation, and yes, I didn’t pick it up. I really apologize for this one. I almost always pick up after my dog. But this time I didn’t because I had just had a really severe episode of my back going out and I couldn’t bend down. I know, that’s kind of a weenie excuse, but I had visions of falling down in this deserted park and not being able to get up and having Hadley licking my face and peeing on my stomach. OK, that was Crime No. 3.

So then, as I’m walking along feeling guilty about not picking up after Hadley the Wonder Pooper, I decided to call my son, Mike, in Washington DC to wish him a happy birthday. So I whipped out my iPhone and I called him. I am what? I am modern. We were having a great talk and maybe the highlight of it was that I couldn’t believe he held his cell phone in his right hand and he couldn’t believe I held my cell phone in my left hand. Anyway, the conversation got a little animated. Not nasty, but you could see it from there. So, as we’re arguing I’m finishing up my walk with Hadley, the Excrement Warrior, and I get back into the car, and I’m still talking to Mike on my cell phone. We’re just chattering along like magpies with iPhones. And all of a sudden, it hits me: I am driving with a cell phone in California and I don’t have the damn earplug thing plugged in and I am committing yet another crime. Crime No. 4.

Now I’m feeling like I may be close to being out of control. I have committed four crimes without even blinking a damn eye. I am a bad seed, and I know I will never be close to being a good seed, and I know if I am not stopped soon I will commit another crime. And it doesn’t take long for this to actually happen.

I look down at my speedometer and I am screaming along at 30 miles an hour. I am in a California state park and the speed limit is 15 miles per hour, and I am going twice the speed limit. What can I say? Crime No. 5.

I finally get out of the park and I look over my shoulder to see if the park ranger guy is trailing my butt, but he’s out helping coyotes or something and I am free — I have fought the sheriff and I have won. Change the lyrics. I’m feeling good. Bad seed good. But my crime spree has one more crime to go to make it a serial six-pack.

I’m still talking to Mike on the phone and my cigar has burned down to the nub and the cigar label is starting to burn and so I slip off the cigar band and I’m holding it in my fingers and Hadley is jerking around with me in the front seat and Mike is still on my ass about me holding the cell phone in my left hand, and I was frustrated, and the cigar was burning into my thumb, and I acted rashly and selfishly, and yes, I tossed the cigar band out of the window. I littered. No excuse for it. Crime No. 6.
Gary Gilmore, eat your heart out.

But you’re not going to believe what happened next. I knocked over a liquor store. I told you I was a bad seed. However, I didn’t rob the liquor store. I actually drove into the liquor store and, well, knocked it over.

Hey, I was on my cell phone and Mike said only dummies and losers and old people would use their left hands to hold their cell phones, and Hadley had jumped onto my lap and I was trying to keep his left leg from going into action and I could smell my thumb burning now and, well, the steering wheel just did its own thing. Liquor store went down like Monica, baby.

Stop me before I misdemean again!

Shut Up and Dig (Cigar Smoke 8-14-08)

I’m just sitting here at my desk trying to get over being ridiculed by my son-in-law for putting my cell phone number on my cell phone. Yes, I made a little label from my little label-maker and I put the phone number right there on the damn cell phone. What can I tell you, I’m a bad seed. (At least I don’t have my computer password pasted onto my computer like a lot of you clueless bad seed readers out there. Admit it. You do it.)

OK, let’s talk about energy and oil. Hey, don’t you dare run away. We’ve got to talk about this. Let’s be different. Let’s be adults.

I just cannot believe that we are in the predicament we are in with gas prices and other energy issues. Though the Republicans have had their share of dopey energy policies, I just have to lay most of the blame on the Democrats. For the past 40 years or so, Democrats have stopped almost every plan to drill for new oil and build much-needed new refineries and take advantage of nuclear power.

Of course, they mask this foot-dragging strategy with environmental red herrings. Whenever they talk about not drilling in ANWAR up in Alaska, I just want to hurl. Have you ever been to ANWAR? No, I know you haven’t. Well, I have. Well, to be honest, I haven’t been actually on the ground there. I’m not that stupid. But I have flown over it. And let me tell you, there is nothing there.

Unless you count snow and frozen tundra and ice and a few very cold-ass caribou as something, there is basically nothing at ANWAR. Hell, if you made this a national park, you wouldn’t get 1,000 visitors in 100 years. I am telling you you can fly for hours (yes, hours) around ANWAR in any direction and you will see nothing but frozen stuff. Alaska is a big damn place. It’s half as big as the whole US. We can use a couple thousand acres to get oil. And the caribou will probably nestle up to a new ANWAR pipeline like they do near the Alaskan Pipeline now to get a little warmth. Come on, I’m not saying we should tear out Old Faithful and drill in Yellowstone. But ANWAR? It’s a no-brainer.

And dammit, let’s build some new oil refineries. We haven’t built a new refinery for something like 30 years now. That’s literally crazy. I guess the Democrats and environmentalists just think we’re going to get all our energy from solar panels and windmills and riding bicycles. Give me a break. I’m not against those things. But they shouldn’t be the only things we do for energy. The next time you pay $4.89 for a gallon of gas, say thanks to your friendly neighborhood Democrat, and pedal off on your bike to go home to your windmill. Oh, did you just hear that? Listen. It’s the Arabs laughing at us.

And nuclear power plants. It is unbelievable that we haven’t built any new nuclear power plants for decades. The environmentalists have us so scared that there will be another Three Mile Island meltdown that we’re just paralyzed. Of course, that was horrible, but technology has improved. Hell, countries like France get most of their energy from nuclear power. And you would think that Democrats would follow in France’s esteemed footsteps because Democrats shove France in our face every other second when it comes to foreign policy or Bush hating. Democrats love France except when it comes to nuclear power. I’m just the opposite. I don’t care much for France, but I think these commie pinkos are dead-on right about using nuclear power.

Aren’t you all just getting a tad bit tired of hearing the Democrats whining about big oil companies? It’s just so bizarre to me. Democrats just ignore obvious economic realities like that little old supply and demand problem. Do they even know that China and India and Russia and Korea etc. etc. are using incredible amounts of oil, which increases the demand for oil, and what do you know, the prices go up. Wow. Who would have thunk it?

And do they know that big oil companies are made up of little people in the stock market? Sure, a lot of oil execs are getting rich, but most of the oil money is being made by little old ladies who have mutual funds with oil stocks in their portfolios. And schools and universities and unions all have substantial amounts of their investments in oil. Something like 60 percent of Americans have an interest in oil. Doesn’t that matter?

And did you hear that mental giant from Nevada, Harry Reid, a few weeks ago? He said that oil is making us sick. How does that little roach (sorry, I don’t mean to give roaches a bad name) come up with stuff like that? If it wasn’t just so god-awful damn lame stupid I would laugh.

Has good ole Harry thought about this? Oil and coal have probably been the biggest contributors to health and well-being in our lifetime. OK, maybe electricity is first. I’ll give you that. But big bad oil and dirty old coal have been huge. Without gas for our trucks we would not have been able to carry lumber to the entire country to build homes. We would not have been able to get food to everyone. We couldn’t have gotten clothes to people. We would not have been able to get medical supplies to hospitals. There are thousands of things we are better off for because we have oil. Hell, even the environmentalists who go to their protest meetings to save the trees usually drive.

Well, I’m tired of ranting. I think I’ll go do what Democrats hate even more than oil. I think I’ll go have a smoke.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com

Stay-Cation Alternative (Cigar Smoke 8-7-08)

Well, I guess you guys have all heard about this new thing they call the stay-cation. You know, like a vacation only you stay at home. With gas prices going through the roof and spending money getting hard to find, I have decided to provide a travel service to you, my columnar friends.

Here’ s what I think you should do to put a little zip back in your zipless life. And all the while keeping your wallet more zipped, too.

I suggest you take a 90-minute, 90-mile cation. No, it doesn’ t quite slip off the tongue like a vacation or even a stay-cation, but I can assure you it works because I just damn did it, baby. Me and my credit card had a ball. Yes, I went alone — you don’ t have to do what the other person wants and, of course, it costs roughly half as much.

I went to the Pechanga Indian Resort and Casino in Temecula. It’ s only 90 miles away and takes 90 minutes to get there. So, assuming gas costs, say, $4.75 a gallon and your miserable car gets 20 miles per gallon, that means you’ ll use four and half gallons of gas, which will run you about $21. So that will be a total of $42 for gas. Big deal. Even you can afford that.

So why did I go to Pechanga? Well, I like the words Pechanga and Temecula. They sound like places in a foreign country and look weird on a map. By the way, have you ever heard of the Pechanga Indians? Who the hell are those guys? Why couldn’ t we have major league Indians out here like the Apache or the Sioux or the Cherokee. The Pechangas? Can you imagine John Wayne being incensed by an Indian named Sitting Pechanga?

I kid the Pechangas. They have a pretty cool resort out there. I went there to see a boxing match and play blackjack and video poker and sit at a table where it said Moo Goo Gai Pan Poker or something. I asked the dealer what it meant and he said, “In Chinese it means an efficient way for us to take your money without you knowing what the rules are and not understanding the language enough to complain.”

I’ m getting ahead of myself again. Actually, the first thing I did when I got there was eat a late lunch/early dinner at their café. I ordered a pulled pork sandwich, this big pile of pulled pork sitting on a giant bun covered in barbecue sauce one inch high. That scared me a little. And then it had lettuce, onion and tomato on the other huge bun. Plus French fries and cole slaw that looked like it had died a slow, gasping mayonnaise death.

Well, I ate that whole damn meal. Let me just say, it did not taste all that great. The only thing I can remember in my life that tasted worse was something I had at a fraternity initiation. Something raw where two guys were holding me down. Hey, it was not good. I kid the pulled pork.

I only mention this culinary experience to help you save money. Yes, the sandwich cost me $9.95, but it stopped me from eating for the rest of the trip — and two more days after I got home. I’ m telling you, you eat that sucker and you and your stomach are taking separate flights, baby.

After the sandwich, I went to see some boxing. I love to go to these semi-hokey boxing matches where you can get ringside seats pretty cheap and have a chance of getting a little fighter blood splashed on you. But say you don’ t like boxing. On Wednesday nights they have a comedy club. Three unknown comics tell three people three bad jokes for the price of three drinks. So that’ s only another nine bucks. And knowing you guys, there’ s not too much leftover.

And maybe you play a little video poker or maybe you go to the lounge and listen to oldies but goodies sung by people who are younger but not so good. And you stay there until your pulled pork pulls off a rebellion in your colon or wherever the hell it has invaded. And the important point is all this enjoyment and all this fun is what? It is cheap.

So you have now had one full day of incredible 90-minute 90-mile Cation Fun. And it’ s only gonna cost you about 60 damn dollars! That’ s pretty dang cheap. Comes out to about five bucks an hour for 12 hours of Pechangian fun.

One disclaimer. You’ re probably tired after all that fun, and you’ ve had, maybe six drinks, and you’ re too damn cheap to stop at a Motel 6, so coming home you might rear-end a Chevy Blazer just north of Lake Elsinore on the 15, and OK, maybe when the cop comes over to see if you are alive you might hurl some pulled pork chunks onto his badge and say, “Sorry, officer. Code 7.” And yes, maybe the cost to fix your car and make bail and have stomach surgery could add up to more than the aforementioned $60.

But you did have fun didn’ t you? Cheap fun. You ingrate.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com

Unfair and Unbalanced (Cigar Smoke 7-24-08)

A couple weeks ago, my fellow ink-stained wretch Larry Wilson tweaked my tweaker when he wrote in his Star-News column that he would “never” watch FOX news. Wow. Even though I know most liberals don’t like Fox (OK, they hate Fox), Larry kind of ratcheted it up a notch when he used the N word — never.

To me that’s pretty strong. Over-the-top. Misguided. And wrong. I guess Larry and the libs don’t want to see any other point of view. They’ve already got all the national mainstream broadcast stations — NBC, ABC and CBS. And they’ve got the cable guys CNN and MSNBC. And they have 99 percent of the major market newspapers in the country — The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, etc. etc. And, of course, they have Time and Newsweek to kind of put that finishing left-leaning flair on their non-assailable viewpoints.

Have you ever noticed that people of the liberal persuasion never (there’s that word again) say anything negative about any other TV station or newspaper or magazine. It’s always FOX. And not only is it FOX, it is only FOX. If, every once in a while, liberals would say, “Did you hear that crock on CNN?” I could maybe give them some deserved slack. But that never happens. Nope. Never happens.

Hell, I don’t think FOX is perfect. (I’m the only one I have ever found who is perfect.) FOX has their share of bias and bullshit. And yes, they lean to the right. And yes, sometimes Bill O’Reilly can be an arrogant jerk. And that Shepard Smith guy makes me puke. If he were any more insufferable he’d have to be speaking directly out of Ted Baxter’s butt.

However, in my humble opinion, they do not spout the Republican agenda, as is so often blindly claimed by the left. As we know, the libsters don’t even watch the damn station. I guess they don’t want pesky old reality to interfere with their opinions.

What about these pesky little non-agenda facts: Bill O’Reilly is a big tree-hugging environmentalist and he’s against the death penalty. And O’Reilly bashes Bush quite often about Iraq, and Sean Hannity and O’Reilly crucify Bush on immigration. There are many, many other points that FOX disagrees with the Republicans on.

But the thing that I really like most about the station is that they allow opinions from the other side all the time. Nightly, in fact. There’s a continual tension of opposing viewpoints on FOX. Really heated arguments between top Democratic people and FOX guys. You can say what you want about FOX, but “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Hannity and Colmes” are on the cutting edge of opinion journalism. They have the guts to say things the mainstream media have ignored for decades. They broke news stories like the Jeremiah Wright story and the Jesse Jackson wanting to cut Obama’s nuts off story.

Liberals appear on FOX all the time. The only thing that is different is that finally some of their liberal opinions are being challenged. And that’s probably why they don’t like FOX. Hell, they’ve had a monopoly on ideas in this country for 30 years or more. Finally, one damn station comes along and has the guts to stand up to them and the libbies start pissing all over themselves.

What the liberals ought to be asking is how did FOX get to be so important? How did they come to dominate cable television news? They have something like four times the viewers of CNN and MSNBC — combined! It’s not even close.

I think the mainstream media missed one of the biggest stories of the last 40 years. And what is that story, Virginia? Basically, they didn’t recognize why Rush Limbaugh became so popular. They were too busy laughing at Al Franken “Big Fat Liar” book titles to see what was really happening.

What was really happening was that a huge part of America was getting fed up with the liberal media and their influence on the country. They just couldn’t take all the sexual craziness and anything-goes abortion policies and the nonsensical immigration ideas, and the downright hostile positions of the left on our military, and the constant tone-deaf roar of the left to eliminate any religious or moral standards. And the deterioration of our schools and the incessant whining of victims and the whole socialism trend. It was just too much.

And many Americans — generally half the country — had nowhere to turn for their information. So what happened? Rush Limbaugh happened. He, almost singlehandedly, turned AM radio into a right-wing medium where people on the right could be heard. Limbaugh saw that there was a big damn hole in information and he filled it.

And FOX saw what Rush had done and more importantly, saw that there was, and is, a huge audience out there for people who do not want to toe the damn party line.

So FOX had the guts to give people another viewpoint, another take on things. And they succeeded and now all the liberals are crying. As Don Henley would say, “Get over it.”

Oh, and also, FOX has all those cool blonde babes, too.

Jim Laris is the former owner/publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Jim (Cigar Smoke 7-16-08)

You feel like a little nostalgia? You don’t look like a little nostalgia. You look meaner and older and nastier and, yes, uglier. You might consider having those warts removed, huh?

I was just sitting in my home office trying to figure out how to take a tax deduction for sitting here and writing — and I’m going to try it this year. Don’t rat me out, OK? I’ll come to your house. Kick a little ratting-out butt if I have to.

I was just thinking back to when I was six years old. Damn dinosaurs everywhere and saber-tooth tigers. It was rough. OK, I’m not quite that old. Yes, I feel that old. And yes I look that old. And yes, I have clothes that look like they’re made out of tyrannosaurus hides. But I am not that old, dammit.

OK, ready for some geezer talk? Well, Sonny and Sonnyette, I was 6 years old back in 1947. No, that’s not a typo. I guess you enjoy laughing at old people. I’d kick your butts if I could find my damn cane. Anyway, I lived out in San Pedro in this pretty cool place. There was a bunch of these three-unit Army barrack kind of places. They’d build two of these units and there would be a big dirt yard in between. Must have been 30 of these damn little complexes all over.

And there was a shitload of kids out there. There were kids everywhere. I mean, there must have been some serious after-war intercourse being enjoyed after kicking some Nazi butt, baby. Kids everywhere. We loved it, too. Back then parents were completely unevolved and tried (and succeeded) to ignore us, and we liked it like that. In the summertime, we would eat breakfast, get our Sky King rings out of the cereal boxes, and head out into life in Rolling Hills in Lomita, near San Pedro, next to heaven.

The first thing we would always do was meet near the top of this hill. We’d all have our wagons. Mine was the coolest, of course. It had a damn steering wheel! Really. My dad built the thing himself. I was the envy of the neighborhood. I used to fly down that damn hill, steering with my steering wheel, and then, just when I was at top speed, I’d jump off into the ice plant. Man, I can still smell that squished ice plant smell mixed with my bloody knees. Ah, it was so good.

And then after the wagon racing, maybe a bunch of us guys, no girls (we weren’t commies), would go down to our secret raft that we had built out of secret crap. It was like a damn Huck Finn raft, and I didn’t even know who Huck was back then. And we’d float around for hours in this muddy pond and steer with big poles and go around old tires and junk cars that were dumped there.

Couldn’t have been better.

And then maybe we’d go over to the cliffs and we’d have our club initiations. And you’d have to jump off, say, a 12-foot cliff, into some sand, and when you were in mid-air, you’d be pelted by dirt clods and apple cores and half-eaten sandwiches, and boogers, and life was good. One time a guy broke his arm jumping off the cliff, but we made him tell his parents he fell down on the playground, and the parents bought it. Parents were pretty dumb back then. Of course, not as dumb as they are now, but pretty dumb.

Then, after fending for ourselves for lunch, we’d maybe play some marbles in between the houses. God, we had some great marble games. Big-ass circles in the dirt, filled with aggies and steelies and puries and other marble names I’ve forgotten. I still remember nailing some shots and just seeing my shooter sting that sucker out of the circle. And then you’d get down on your knee in the middle of the circle and keep shooting until you missed or your shooter went out of the circle. And you’d turn to your buddy and say, “OK, Fuzz Nuts, it’s your turn.” And Fuzz Nuts would say, “Don’t mind if I do, Butt Brains.”

And then we’d have to go home to eat dinner. And we’d escape as soon as we could and meet up by Sandra Holt’s house. I always liked Sandra Holt. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know what sex was back then. And now that I do know what it is, I’m sure Sandra would never have been involved in something so dirty and icky. I think I liked Sandra because she was a good wagon driver and she didn’t have any teeth. I still find these traits attractive in a woman.

And all of us would just be lying down on the grass in the evening waiting for the trucks to come by. We’d just be eating cherries or something and spitting the pits at each other’s crotches, and then the pickle truck would come by. I’m not making this up. We’d all buy a pickle for a nickel. Big juicy dill suckers. Came in a sheet of wax paper. And man, those were sour. Just made you pucker like you meant it, baby. I’m sure that’s why I grew hair on my chest. Hell, I had hair on my teeth.

And then a bit later a tamale truck would come by. (Even then there were illegal aliens.) I usually wouldn’t buy the tamales but I loved the smell. Just didn’t have the money. I would always save my money for the ice cream truck, which came by right after the tamale truck. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I would sneak a ride on the running boards of the tamale truck. I still remember the smell.

And then the ice cream truck would come by. Had this funky little horn thing going for it. And the driver would open up the back door/hatch of the truck and the dry-ice steam would waft out and he’d fan it out a little more so he could see the ice cream bars inside. And we’d all buy our ice cream bars and Eskimo Pies and go flop on the cool grass on a summer evening and life was good.

Very very good.

Contact former Pasadena Weekly Publisher Jim Laris at jim.laris@mac.com.