God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen In Peace

When I set out for a brief walk on that unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon just before Christmas, I had no idea I was about to discover a disturbing new trend in yard decorations.

I strolled through a small park just down the street from my office building in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco, and found myself in a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. On nearly every lawn lay the crumpled forms of Santas, snowmen, teddy bears and elves. It took me a while to realize that these sad tableaux, which resembled some holiday version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre that had mown down the season's favorite icons with machine gun fire, were simply inflatable decorations, their compressors shut off during the daylight hours.

The company I work for does a healthy business in what it calls inflatable decor items, selling giant blow-up haunted houses in October and giant Easter Bunnies in April. But it had never occurred to me before that for most of the day these pressurized plastic figures would have so opposite an effect, lying unfestively together on the grass like victims of the Manson family.

Springtime for Transvestites

Many years ago there was a highly improbable television sitcom called Bosom Buddies. The premise was that two best friends vie for the same job at an advertising agency and decide, because women are paid half as much, they'll try to pass as women and split the position and its salary. 

Like the much more entertaining Some Like It Hot, you never really bought the idea of the cross-dressing actors as women and had to suspend disbelief that the female co-stars didn't see the five o'clock shadows and Adam's apples under the pancake makeup. But the show had an appealing young cast and ran long enough to launch Tom Hanks' career, despite the fact that Peter Scolari was the better actor. While his former bosom buddy went on to a prestigious film career that included numerous Oscar wins, Scolari stumbled along in sitcom runs like Newhart and currently hawks an erectile dysfunction medication on radio spots. The poor guy was even cast as the dad in the short-lived television version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.


As if to prove that network television executives are never too ashamed to resuscitate a tired idea that was lucky to succeed the first time around, ABC has green-lighted a sitcom called Work It. So low-brow and mouth-breathing an effort it makes Bosom Buddies seem like an Ingmar Bergman film, this reboot of the cross-dressing buddies in the workplace concept has angered transgender groups and makes me wonder if there isn't some bottom-line Springtime for Hitler principle at play here, where the producers make a fortune if they attempt a series that is certain to fail. The promo poster says it all, I guess, but can the gay porno version be far behind?

Elf Orgy

First, I can't be the only one who hears -- more than once! -- "Orgy Wonderland" being sung by the elves in this Samsung Galaxy commercial, instead of "4G." Is it just an aural trick, or a deliberate subconscious subversion? You decide.

Second, it might have seemed fresh back in 1939 to cast dwarves as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, but hasn't the practice of outfitting them as Santa's elves gone on a bit too long? Or are there union halls somewhere in the porny depths of the San Fernando Valley filled with smoking, poker-playing Little People waiting for their annual casting calls? The Will Farrell movie Elf was innovative enough to employ children as elves and that's just one of the things that contributed to its freshness ("These toilets are ginormous!"). Let's start casting dwarves as doctors, cops and sit-com stars, shall we?

Let Your Bundles Do the Walking

If I have to live in a world where every third person on the freeway is making love to his cell phone and Kardashians tweet, do I still have to also receive new phone books every year?

It's a long-standing annual ritual, the delivery of the white and yellow pages. And if you live in an apartment building, every December a stack of plastic bags containing those fat books is dumped at your doorstep -- a stack that pretty much remains there all month, because when's the last time you looked something up in a phone book? It couldn't be more anachronistic if every year a truck backed up to my lobby door and unloaded a pile of sun dials. 


Could we end the madness? And while we're at it, let's do something about those Kardashians.

Oh, Little Town of Hollywood

The suspension of disbelief is integral to many entertaining film classics. To fully enjoy them, you have to relinquish your logical mind and accept that a tornado can transport a farmhouse over the rainbow, a department store Santa could be the real Kris Kringle, or a myopic wizard could win a school championship riding a broom. 


But there are certain story lines that no unhinging of reason can account for, and one of them is Ice Age, a Mammoth Christmas Special. The Ice Age franchise of animated films, starring Ray Romano as a wooly mammoth grieving for his family and Denis Leary as his sabor-toothed sidekick, is an enjoyable series of films with a bold visual style depicting ancient landscapes and the flora and fauna found within them. The overriding premise, however, is that the action takes place in the last ice age, ten thousand years ago at the very least. Even the most ardent creationists agree that Christ, if he existed at all, was born 2,000 years ago -- meaning there could be no Christmas for our nomadic late-Pleistocene animal friends. None. Forget it. End of Christmas special. 

Taking One for the Gipper

There's a chilling scene in the 2008 film Doubt in which Meryl Streep's terrifying Sister Alonysius, who may or may not have evidence of the parish priest's pedastery, confronts the mother of the boy in question. Surprisingly the woman, played with a world-weary resignation by the amazing actress Viola Davis, responds that at least a white person of influence is paying attention to her child -- and maybe that will somehow lead to a way out of the ghetto.

Somehow I think there's a similar attitude at play in the snowballing Penn State "abuse" scandal. ("Abuse" itself is a carefully measured word in the context of so horrific a revelation -- it's really an ongoing culture of child rape that was sustained for decades.) Obviously sexual predators like Jerry Sandusky select their victims for their extreme vulnerability -- in his case, he actually created a "charity" that would supply him with a pool of likely victims for years, and what could be more calculating than that? And while head coach Joe Paterno could have put a stop to Sandusky's preying decades ago, he was more concerned about preserving Penn State's football standing than the dignity and sanity of the dozens of boys whose rapes he could have prevented.

Though the boys concerned very likely lacked traditional families or parental guidance, there are so many involved that some of them must have had somewhat intact families with older siblings, grandparents, or at least relationships with teachers and clergy. How many of those adults knew what was happening, and chose not to jeopardize the sacrosanct culture of college football?

Paterno, who is as culpable here as the rapist himself, has been forced out after six decades of who knows how much damage he's inflicted through his incompetence, and that's a very good thing. But a raped ten-year-old is a pretty hard thing to miss. Who else kept quiet for the preservation of a meaningless ball game?

"Threesomes for $600, Alex?"

People have often suggested I try out for Jeopardy! but believe me, I'm not that smart. I basically know a little about everything and nothing, really, about anything. In fact, one of my biggest fears is to find myself up against some intellectual powerhouse with a quick trigger finger and have to slink home without even making it to Final Jeopardy.


So last night when I was watching Jeopardy! and saw this response, I felt a shudder of recognition that, if I ever found myself under the bright lights of the Jeopardy! set, something very similar would happen to me.