Me, or the New York Times?

For the borderline snark I’ve brought to Funky Winkerbean of late, I can’t really fault him too much. The comics pages are a risk-free zone most days, and for whatever Tom Batiuk has done to change that, even down to bumping off his characters, well, hats off. (And luckless Lisa was certainly a candidate for early death.) I come today to draw your attention to a small detail of this week’s strips:

The afghan of death, seen here on Lisa’s penultimate resting place. (UPDATE: Link doesn’t appear to want to load. Might be a traffic issue, as millions of comics fans check out the end, the end, the bitter end. Maybe try back later. It sort of looks like this.)

For you knitters out there, that is what this pattern is called, isn’t it? Because I don’t think I’ve been in a nursing home or hospice that didn’t have one in every room. Always the zigzag pattern, always those colors, always acrylic yarn. It’s like that cat that knows when you’re going to die — get the afghan of death, get your affairs in order.

Actually, you could say that about most afghans, although I have one on every couch and wouldn’t live without any of them. It gives Alan’s knitty family something to give us, and they’re all in shades of cream. Thank God.

I’ll give up my HBO when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers, but so far the cable channel’s executives have already pushed back seven or eight digits, and I don’t know how much longer I can hang on. When “The Wire” wraps next year, there had better be a new David Simon project in the pipeline, or I am so gone.

Never mind the hugely disappointing “John From Cincinnati,” which flopped in a season, but not before it took raunchy dialogue to a new level, and no, I’m not talking about f-bombs, or even the quasi-Victorian chop-chop salad of “Deadwood” profanity. I have never heard bowel movements (“dumping out”) discussed with such frequency, and I am a woman who has toilet-trained a child. It’s “Tell Me You Love Me” that I come to bury today, although I may not have the energy. This show, about the intimate travails of four different couples, takes it out of me.

Every so often you’ll hear water-cooler criticism of this or that popular entertainment, and someone will complain, “it’s just that there are no likable characters,” as though without a rooting interest, we have no reason to watch. I disagree. Is there a single character on “The Sopranos” that any person here would like to live next door to? (And don’t say Tony; for all the thrills he gives his square neighbors by his very presence, they think he’s guinea white trash. And they’re right.) Likable is what kills TV shows, as bored writers cave in to the demands of fan websites and network executives. All a good continuing character has to be is interesting. That’s the problem with “Tell Me You Love Me” — the characters are so boring they kill houseplants with their very presence.

HBO must know this. That’s why the show’s pre-premiere buzz was all about the sex, which is explicit but not plentiful enough to hold your interest, although my e-mail is funny enough: “Were my eyes playing tricks on me, or was that some guy’s ball sack on HBO last night?” Yes, yes it was. For the record, there were also erect wangers and one money shot, although it was done with egg whites and prosthetics. And you know how people say porn is, ultimately, boring? This is worse. At least in porn the actors say oh yeah oh yeah do me baby that’s so hot; these folks barely even breathe hard.

But that’s the point! the four or so fans of this show are saying. The sex is bad, because the couples are having problems! No, the sex is bad because the people are horrible. Also, incredibly dull. Actual line of dialogue, during a fight between the engaged couple: “This was like in Austin, when you bought a beer and you didn’t even ask if I wanted one, and then you flirted with that girl with the long arms!” This is what you hear when your neighbors are fighting. I remember once when my nursery monitor began picking up a cordless-phone conversation somewhere in the neighborhood. I leaned close, prepared to hear news of an upcoming drug deal, or maybe some phone sex. But no: “Are you getting the oil changed today?” “I don’t care; what do you want for dinner?”

The things that make people interesting — their enthusiasms, their secret fears, their sense of humor, how they choose to spend an idle Saturday — have been stripped away. I read an interview with the show’s creator, where she said this was deliberate, that she kept taking furniture and props off the sets until they were the upscale waiting-for-Godot moonscapes they are now, so that we’d concentrate on the actors, and their issues. But this isn’t theater, and the ShakyCam photography is telling us “documentary.” So, where are the unguarded moments? Does anyone ever tell a joke, bitch about a boss, fart while cuddling on the couch, study a box score? No.

Although I will confess this: Even in these minimalist settings, I couldn’t help but notice the therapist has a Noguchi table in her office. You know what I’d like to hear? Someone say, “Is that a Noguchi table?” I read an introductory text on playwrighting where authors were advised not to write “I’m so tired” if they could write “Has anyone seen my magazine?” and let the actor say it in a tired voice. What volumes could be spoken in a lively discussion of mid-century furniture.

Meanwhile, the sex is dwindling. There was only one boning scene this week, and it was done standing up in a restaurant kitchen, and needless it say, it wasn’t the chicken being boned, but the semi-nympho twentysomething character, Jaime. On the prep table! Which no one wiped down afterward! Check your salad carefully before you tuck in. I tell you this as a friend.

What was HBO thinking? They let Matthew Weiner go to AMC, where “Mad Men” is mopping the floor with them on basic cable, with commercials. While the people who are paying $10 a month get scrotums, and Showtime subscribers have “Weeds” and “Dexter.” Where is the next “Six Feet Under?” How soon can we get another season of “Big Love” on the air? “Entourage,” my friends, is not enough.

Bloggage:

Funky Winkerbean deathwatch: Don’t fear the reaper! Or is that the phantom of the opera? UPDATE: The Comics Curmudgeon takes note of Lisa’s imminent passing, as well as that of one of Lynn Johnston’s characters. What is it, seasonal depression week in the funnies?

I haven’t written much lately about Britney Spears, because…well, “I haven’t written much about Britney Spears” just says it all, doesn’t it? It seems fashionable now to say one isn’t writing about Britney because she’s obviously a young woman in great pain, and blah blah blah, wish her well, blah blah blah rehab blah counseling blah to the blah. If I’m taking a keener interest in her this week, it’s because of this: She’s lost her kids, and she seemingly doesn’t care. The judge says turn them over by Wednesday, and she turns them over on Monday, then goes tanning, then gets a big hotel suite. Yee-haw, freedom! We all know, intellectually, there are mothers like this in the world, but it’s still sort of shocking to see one up close. I wonder if the hotel suite was a “Leaving Las Vegas” kind of deal.

Newsday’s Pulitzer prizes are sold at auction, but no one knows how they got there. Psst, whoever bought them: Melting them down in the only possible ending to this story.

So I guess a new Mr. Olympia was crowned over the weekend. LA Mary sent me a picture, impishly noting that her governor is a former title-holder. I don’t know this guy’s name; it might be Jay Cutler, the 2007 winner, but the official website hasn’t been updated yet, and I’m too lazy to do a full Google. Anyway, here’s a 2007 contestant:

His head looks Photoshopped, doesn’t it? And yet, if you were going to digitally manipulate any part of that picture, wouldn’t it be the guy’s basket? Have you ever seen anything more pathetic? Oh, well — life is a series of choices, and I’d say he gave up one thing in return for another. Nice lats.

As things do so often these days, it send me into a [swimmy screen effects and harp glissandos] reverie of my salad days. I covered a Mr. Olympia contest once; for many years it was held in Columbus, Ohio. From Wikipedia’s table of results, I guess that would have been 1979. Sounds about right. Although nowadays the contest is held in, where else, Vegas, at the time bodybuilding was still pretty obscure, and having it in Columbus was solely the doing of one man, who worked at Nationwide Insurance, and his good friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was as green as a greenhorn could be, working in what was then still called the Columbus Dispatch women’s department. How did the department that handled weddings, engagements, ladies’ club news and “society” end up with Mr. Olympia? Through a time-honored practice at American newspapers — dumping an undesirable assignment on another department.

It was Sports, of course, that did the dumping. Sports departments are famous for jettisoning coverage of any non-traditional sport, of which sports editors are deeply suspicious. They’re the most conservative journalists in any newsroom, believing anything not played with a ball or puck isn’t really a sport at all. They only cover the Olympics because it involves international travel and pictures of women’s beach volleyball victory celebrations. I exaggerate, but not much.

Anyway, they shopped the Mr. Olympia assignment around until they found a sap (my editor), who found her own sap (me). Because this was the women’s department, and because my editor had no imagination at all, the original assignment was to write about defending champion Frank Zane’s wife, who was advocating the then-shocking idea that women should work out with weights, too. I went to their suite at the Sheraton for the interview. Frank popped a bicep for me to squeeze; it was, quite literally, like a rock. But they weren’t the story, not the whole story. The story was that my hometown was hosting an event that brought in dozens of competitors and thousands of spectators from all over the world, truly an international event, and it was doing so with virtually no local media attention, except my little inside-page women’s-department lameness.

After the story ran, I went to the competition. I was young and fairly naive at the time, but at the first posedown, it became clear why Sports didn’t want it and Metro was just embarrassed by it and only a sap like me would even think of wandering into Vet’s Memorial to watch: The body builders stood and flexed, and thousands of muscle queens howled with approval. I mean: Howled. I don’t know what I was expecting — maybe enthusiastic applause with a few woo-hoos thrown in. But this was like being stuck in the bonobo exhibit. If strip clubs tend to be dour, downbeat places, all those men sitting quietly at their tables for one, nursing Cokes and distributing their salaries in $1 and $5 denominations, this was its polar opposite — raw man-lust, foot-stomping, seat-pounding gimme-gimme-some-o’-that carrying on. It turned out that the Village People didn’t have all the gay erotic archetypes covered.

It occurred to me that now would be a good time to interview Frank Zane’s wife, but she was somewhere else.

The next day, the photo editor approached me in a panic; the AP was desperate for a picture, any picture; clients around the world were clamoring and the paper had nothin’. I turned over a roll of film I’d shot with my own camera, and suddenly we had somethin’, my first and only photo contribution to the Associated Press.

This was the very dawning of the fitness boom; “Pumping Iron” was still a cult documentary. Within a few years, “Conan the Barbarian” and “Terminator” would make the future governor of California a star, and the roots of Mr. Olympia in Columbus would become the Arnold Sports Festival — my goodness, but that man has had some work done, and not on his biceps, no? — and it gets a great deal of respectful media coverage.

I bet not by the Sports department, though.

Before we leave bodybuilding entirely, however, here is a terrifying picture. What’s in his wallet?

Okily-dokily, bloggage:

Ever since Lynn Johnston started letting daily life — the funny and unfunny — affect her comic strip, “For Better or For Worse,” everyone is getting in the game. If Johnston was an original, Tom Batiuk and “Funky Winkerbean” is an imitator. He tries pretty hard, though, and I was willing to forgive him as long as he didn’t get too…unfunny.

That lasted until this morning, when Lisa, dying of breast cancer, apparently went blind. Jeez, what’s next? Coughing up blood? Her death is timed to coincide with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but this is too much.

The MGM Grand invested $800 million in their new Motown casino, opening today. For some reason, no one likes my slogan: “What happens in Detroit, stays in Detroit.” I think it brings a note of menace the wussy Vegas original doesn’t have, but what do I know?

Have a great day. I’ll be workin’.

OK, I said I’d be back, and I’m back, with goodies this time. Not tasty baked goods, but something I stole from somebody else.

WashPost humor columnist Gene Weingarten frequently starts his Tuesday chats with polls. Today he had two — one very serious (on a child-sex-abuse case), the other considerably not (on rating 15 guy-walks-into-a-bar jokes). I recommend the second.

For some stupid reason, he separates the polled into men and women, so choose your poison. And if there’s some reason the links don’t work, because of cookie issues or whatever, go back to the main page and enter that way — it’s near the top.

I was pleased to see I agreed with Master Judge Dave Barry on the three funniest, but we differed sharply on the three lamest. If nothing else, you’ll pick up more than a dozen new guy-walks-in-a-bar jokes.

George Clinton is not the hardest-working man in showbiz. He just has the best time. Now 67, touring House of Blues-size venues and no longer landing on stage in a spaceship, he doesn’t really need to anymore. Last night in Detroit, he ambled onto stage about an hour into the show, after “Funkentelechy” and “Bop Gun” and still tore the roof off the sucker.

After all, he invented this music — the long, freeform, improvisational funk/rock/blues/whatEVuh party jam that never quite stops. P-Funk went for three hours last night, and that was taking it easy; the Boston show last week went for four. At one point I counted four guitarists, two drummers, two bassists, two keyboards, about six chick singers (although they kept changing), four or five soloists of various genres — rappers, R&B, a Tina Turner clone — along with a horn section and the dancing-pimp guy, Carlos McMurray, and some people from the audience. Clinton doesn’t really sing, and doesn’t play any instruments; he just ambles around the stage like a psychedelic Santa Claus, directing the band and asking for applause and being his funktastic self. The show concluded with a bassist’s father, a skinny old white guy from Flint, singing a hillbilly a capella version of “A Change is Gonna Come.” And it felt entirely in keeping with the spirit of the evening.

The crowd was just as amusing. The woman standing next to me for much of the evening was either a stripper, or just looked like one — D-cup implants, rhinestone grillz, just your average Detroit girl. A woman in front looked like a grandmother, gray hair in a comfy tracksuit. The guys behind us were smoking dope with a vengeance (“Does this offend you in any way?” one politely asked Alan) through much of the “I Got a Thang” singalong.

(The stripper is writing on her blog right now: “Since when did they start letting all these soccer moms in?”)

The rest of the night? Magic. For a while the bouncers had the outside doors open, to cool the place off, I guess. I can only imagine what the neighbors in Royal Oak must have thought

Anyway, this is why I’m late getting started today. I was supercalifunkitastic last night, and my ears are still ringing.

I’m so mellow today I don’t even care who the new attorney general is. Someone do some research and tell me what I need to know.

More links coming later. After I rehydrate with coffee.

OK, one link: They tore down Slumpy on Saturday. Another Detroit tragedy.

OK, one more: George Clinton, interviewed by UBM.

If you watch only one Luciano Pavarotti YouTube post today, make it this one, via Lance.

The headline for today’s post has been running through my head all weekend, since I heard it in the mix on Old-School Saturday, my favorite radio show in the whole wide etcetera. Remember the rest of the line? …and then she goes back. Bye bye bye bye there. Sly & the Family Stone, taking you all the way back to the summer of 1969. I was 11. Let us speak no more of time’s terrible swift sword. Labor Day has that effect on me.

But it was a wonderful summer, all things considered. I spent the last two weekends reconnecting with old friends, last weekend in Wisconsin and this weekend in Ohio. My old demi-roomie Jeff Borden was invited to a big nuptial throwdown in the state capital, so I brunched with him and his wife Joanna and dinnered with ol’ pals Cindy and Mark. All concerned knew me back in the day, so the whole weekend had the taste of fine old wine, along with plenty of the newer variety.

Jeff reminded me of a Christmas party we had once. It lasted past 3 a.m., and on a weeknight. At one point, Jeff said, “I came out of the bathroom, and of the nine people in my living room, every single one was talking.” Ah, the ’80s. It was a talkative time. It was also a time when you could stay up until 3 or so, rise at 8 and head on in to work without requiring hospitalization afterward or IV fluids beforehand. Time’s terrible swift sword, chapter 2.

But now buckle-down season arrives, and frankly, I’m ready. At some point this week, Kate will go back to school. Tomorrow, I believe, but they don’t want the little darlings to stress too much, so it’s a half day. Schools are required by state law to begin no earlier than the day after Labor Day, but the GP throws in a travel day. I love my little girl so much it makes my teeth ache, but to say I am ready for school to begin again is an understatement so vast it cannot be overstated. (Wha’?)

So how was your weekend? Also, has anyone ever made a cardboard boat in one of those team-building exercises? What’s the secret of a winning cardboard boat? Some readers of this blog want to know, but don’t want to be revealed, because it would reveal that they know the cardboard-boat team-building exercise is coming, and that would be cheating. Which may be Lesson 1 in successful cardboard boating: Whenever possible, cheat.

LA Mary mentioned in the comments yesterday that she watched a “Mad Men” marathon to stay out of the SoCal heat wave this weekend. Back then, they built teams the old-fashioned way — with alcohol. No more. Time’s terrible swift sword, etc.

I forgot to mention the weekend’s capper: John and Sam are planning a last-minute fly-by visit tonight, so I can’t tarry. They’re old friends, too, old enough that when I said, “Sure, come visit, but the dryer’s broken, so I can’t give you clean sheets. That OK with you?” John said, “No problem.” Now those are old friends worth having, I’d say.

So, bloggage:

“The Wire” wrapped production on its fifth and final season. As one of the 1.6 million Americans who watch and love this show, I can only strangle a sob and lift a virtual glass with the other 1.599999. If you’re not watching, go to your library and find a previous season on DVD. Just so we have something to talk about after the last season starts to air. (There’s also a video, if you’re interested, but it reveals nothing about the upcoming season and nothing a dedicated Wire fan doesn’t already know, so be advised.)

I’ll say one thing for the current Bush administration, it sure is giving the world better books than the last one. And it’s so fun to see Karl Rove shanking his fellow travelers, isn’t it?

And just to round out our trio with yet another WashPost link, how about some postcoital Diana remorse? Gush, gush, gush! Funny.

I don’t know about you, but this happens to me all the time — I’m going out, I think I look to-tally hawt, I open the door, photographers raise their cameras to capture the moment, and dang, I forgot my pants, AND my panties, yet again.

The best part of that story? Where it describes Britney’s “ample bottom.” I just like to say that phrase for fun. Our friends across the pond speak the same language, but so much more skillfully.

Sorry for launching today with a Britney Spears ample-bottom item. The Committee started at 7 a.m., directly across from my bedroom window. Today is the day the teacher assignments arrive by mail, which means the phone will ring nonstop from 10 a.m. until mid-afternoon, as the entire incoming fifth-grade class calls to triangulate their first-day outfits. (Last year we were out when they arrived. Came home to find the phone blinking: “You have…seven…new messages.”) I have to work my special kind of magic on four separate stories today, and none of this is helping. Why Nance, you’re saying, it sounds like you’re setting us up for another four-paragraph link dump. Not exactly. I’m just grumpy.

Actually, I was thinking about Larry Craig again, as much as I’d like to put him from my mind. I was thinking back a few years, when conservatives were simmering with anger over where Bill Clinton was putting his dousing stick, and claiming that, because of him, they had to explain oral sex to their children, who then went right out and practiced on one another. Well. Because of Larry Craig, I now know more about foot-tapping signals and wide stances than I ever, ever wanted to know, and I’m a gay-friendly sort of gal. Can I blame this on Craig? Because I want to.

Best rejoinder to the Clinton-made-my-kid-do-it line, from Roy: If he really is responsible for a rise in oral sex, I vote we put him on Mount Rushmore. Of course, this was after a conservative tried to blame Clinton for an increase in mouth cancer. Please.

Final word on the subject: A clip from Little Britain, which I’ve never heard of but perhaps should have. Via TPM.

So now, bloggage:

Who says Republicans can’t smile in this difficult time: Karl Rove’s ride, pimped. It’s a little juvenile — i.e., entirely in keeping with the White-House-as-frat-house culture of the capital these days — but at least no nations were invaded.

Jeez, let’s cut this mudbath short, eh? The clanking outside is making me INSANE. Better to go run bike errands and get it out of my system.

Two years ago, Hurricane Katrina did her best to destroy a great American city. (I know I’m going to get a raft of shit from Ashley for that, because he contends that what did New Orleans in wasn’t the storm, but the crappy levees, but let’s at least agree that the storm had something to do with it, OK?)

In the time since, I’ve had a variety of reactions to the rebuilding effort, but ultimately I come down with Ashley and his profane cri de coeur, FYYFF. It might not make sense to rebuild a city below sea level, but lots of cities flood — Fort Wayne, Indiana, to name but one — and when those places go underwater all we hear about is improving the dikes and giving the Army Corps of Engineers another chance with the riprap and bulldozers. Anyone could argue New Orleans has been more important to the country than the Fort — first night baseball game notwithstanding — and deserves better than the endless incompetence at all levels of government they’ve had to suffer since.

It’s complicated, I know. But since we’ve decided to shit rather than get off the pot, let’s get the shit built.

David Mills at Undercover Black Man marked today with a link to the Dixie Cups’ version of “Iko Iko.” My version of the song is called “Jockomo,” by James Sugarboy Crawford; I think I burned it off a disc that passed through my life, something called “The New Orleans Sound.” (iTunes tells me I also toasted “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday” and “A Certain Girl,” by Bobby Mitchell and Ernie K-Doe, respectively, from the same record. If you’re taking notes.) I don’t generally share music here; I believe in copyrights (most days). Sugarboy Crawford claimed to never have seen a dime from Jockomo/Iko Iko. I can’t even tell if he’s still alive. Maybe Ashley knows. If so, I’d be happy to Paypal him $20. The link will be deleted after 24 hours, anyway. If you get here late, well, that’s the fate of New Orleans if we don’t get moving.

The title of this post comes from a piece of art Ashley’s displaying on his site today.

Enjoy Sugarboy. He played with a group called His Cane Cutters. Clever.

UPDATE: John points, in comments, to this excellent 2002 interview with Crawford. Amazing what could end a career back then:

Sugar Boy and his band were on their way to a job in North Louisiana in 1963, when state troopers pulled him over for the then-crime of being a black man in a flashy brand-new automobile. One of Louisiana’s “finest” took exception to Sugar Boy’s attitude and proceeded to pistol-whip him on the side of the road. Sugar Boy spent three weeks in the hospital and was incapacitated for two years. He attempted a comeback, but after 1969, he confined his singing to church. He then went to trade school and learned to become a building engineer.