This Could've Been Costanza's Chance at "Fatherhood"

THIS PARAGRAPH IS BURIED in the instructions for every American's favorite government publication, for Form 1040:

Kidnapped child. If your child is presumed by law enforcement authorities to have been kidnapped by someone who is not a family, you may be able to take the child into account in determining your eligibility for head of household or qualifying widow(er) filing status, the deduction for dependents, child tax credit, and the earned income credit (EIC). For details, see Pub. 501 (Pub. 596 for the EIC).

One imagines master liar George Costanza, scheming somehow to ameliorate a hideous tax burden, stumbling across this paragraph, then crafting a plan so untouchable by anyone with an even partially functioning morality gland that even Newman is horrified (though tempted to resort to blackmail).

Whether this would require one of the previously seen children on the show — from the morbidly ugly baby that nauseates Jerry out in the Hamptons, to the hyperactive kid Elaine found herself roped into sitting, or even Mickey the Midget reprising his role as a stand-in — would be a matter for the writers to craft into some sort of tidy, self-referential knot.

You Have Died of Dysentery Author Alterations

WHILE BURNING THROUGH SEASON ONE of HBO's mighty fine cowboys 'n' profanity epic Deadwood, I ran into a couple of sequences (mild spoilers ahead) that would bring a laugh to any editor who has had to deal with too many anxious cooks eager to season the broth—or a typesetter whose constituents have to tinker when you're straining at the bit to go to press.

Smallpox has come to the gold-rush camp of Deadwood, and the town's leading business interests —including saloon owner and whoremaster, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane); his rival in the whiskey and flesh trades, Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe); and hotel manager/Swearengen underling E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) — have pooled their funds to send out missions for vaccine and establish a quarantine tent. The next bullet point on their plan is to place a story in the camp's daily broadsheet to forestall panic by portraying them as being one step ahead of the outbreak.

This brings the three suddenly civic-minded rogues to the office of the Deadwood Pioneer, helping its reporter, editor, and publisher, A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) write the feel-good piece that will keep the booze-, tail-, and gamble-happy prospectors who line their pockets from dropping their sieves and vamoosing.

Merrick, his fingers glossy with ink, reads back the last sentence: "'Thanks also to the aforementioned merchants, the vaccine will be distributed gratis.'"

Al: "'Free gratis.'"

Merrick: "'Free gratis' is a redundancy."

[Al looks askance at Sy and E.B.]

E.B.: "Does that mean, 'repeats itself'?"

[Merrick nods.]

Al: "Then leave 'gratis' out."

Merrick [writing]: "What luck for me, Al, that you have such a keen editorial sense. 'Free.' 'Distributed free.' Period. It will take me some time to reset the type—"

Al: "Yeah, hurry up!"

You just can't move fast enough for some clients.

Later that day, as Merrick prints the first proof, Sy, Al, and E.B. are there to greet it. They look on expectantly and a bit mystified as Merrick peels a page off the type.

Merrick [inspects the first page]; "Gentlemen—"

Al: "Come on, let's see it!" [snatches it away]


Merrick: "Or should I say, my fellow authors?"

[Said authors zero in on the article as Merrick watches.]

Al: "I think maybe it should have a question mark: 'The Plague in Deadwood?'"

Merrick: "The type is set. You're reading the definitive edition."

Al [looks at other two, shrugs]: "Let's run it."


Of course, not all audiences are appreciative of the careful choices an editorial team makes in selecting the mot juste:

Al [that night, reading the paper in his saloon while his flunky, Dan Dority, looks on]: "Merrick! Merrick wanted to put here, 'Gratis.' Now is the idea to inform your readers, or to make them feel like a fucking dunce? Huh? I had to put in 'free.'"

Dan: "I don't see why the fuck he doesn't have news of the baseball."

Guys. Always with the sports pages.

All images © Home Box Office, Inc.

Why I'm So Alone in This World

SIMPLE REASON. I'm reading Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001, by Steve Coll. It's said to be on President-elect Barack Obama's nightstand these days, so I thought it worth checking out. Thus far it very much has been. Charlie Wilson, titular character of the recent book and film, is mentioned in the upcoming pages, according to the index, and I look forward to seeing whether my impression of him as an exacerbating cause of increased Islamist radicalism is based in any reality.

But here's the explanation for the header. The first chapter of the book recounts the 1979 siege of the American embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, by a huge mob of locals, inflamed by the same jihadist spirit that had just possessed students in Tehran to storm our embassy there and take both its staff, and the Carter presidency, hostage. The chapter begins when one American embassy worker is smoked out of his office by the mob when they torch the building. The revolutionaries rough him up, then drive him out of the embassy for a drumhead trial for crimes against the Prophet.

Am I the only one who finds irony in the captive American's last name: Putscher?

This Explains a Lot

ONE OF THE MAFIA SPECIALTIES I find most fascinating is loansharking. Wildly lucrative, damn near ubiquitous, yet nearly invisible, the art and science of the vig hold a peculiar intrigue for me. I could never make it in that business. Aside from its being grossly illegal, and my being physically and mentally less imposing than the job description requires, my math skills are so shite that to calculate what anybody owed me at a given point, I'd use up so much scrap paper, that the Feds could survey my crimes from orbit with a View-Master.

While Googling the term juice loan, however, this came up as the top paid search result. I hope it's because of the word loan, but it's tough not to connect this with the orgy of cheap subprime credit that got us into our current mess:

The Mouth on Me!

I'M APPARENTLY BECOMING A CARD in my old age. The key to humor? Know your audience. Witness this exchange last night at the local supermarket.

I was using the self-checkout station, which in this store abuts the customer service desk. The 20-something female desk clerk watched me scan and bag my two items, the second of which evoked an error message when I bagged it — the weight and the item's UPC didn't match.

I rebagged it, only to get the same message. The clerk said, "Sometimes it needs to adjust itself."

After 20 seconds of waiting, I smirked and said in a Paulie Walnuts tone, "I gotta adjust myself sometimes, too, but I don't take this long!" To which she laughed loudly.

I won't be opening for Carlin anytime soon, but it's nice to get a 100% positive audience response now and again.

ATTN Mozilla: We need Adblock IRL

DESPITE THE AIR OF LUDDISM I may have expressed in my last post, I do actually use the Web. I browse in Firefox near-exclusively. At work I sometimes view Web pages on which I'm working in other browsers to make sure they function across platforms, and there are still a few atavistic islands of Firefox incompatibility in the Netiverse that force me into Safari. The Firefox feature that made me an instant convert is the Adblock plug-in. No words can express the liberation that simple clump of code has represented in my Web access. Coworkers have gasped when I've shown them the difference between blocked and unblocked commercial and informational sites. Net ads damage my Slack—that ability, according to SubGenius guru "Bob" Dobbs, not merely to not give a shit, but to give a shit freely.

I find myself wishing for a version for real life to remove annoyances. I might need a version of the reveal-o-sunglasses Rowdy Roddy Piper was given in the documentary They Live, which exposed to him the alien invaders among us and their insidious propaganda. Or I might go the cyberpunk route and get custom optics. Better yet — like adding Flashblock to Firefox along with Adblock to screen out memory-wasting animations and sounds — a full rig would eliminate useless sounds as well.

Imagine being able to look at a cellphone user and have both him and his useless chatter disappear, not only then but every time you run into him on the train. Contemplate how awesome not hearing your cube-neighbor choke like a tubercular chain-smoker every three minutes would be. Ex-boyfriend still haunting your old favorite bookstore, coffeeshop, or bar after you've given him the boot? Gone.

Given the enduring legal hassles of homicide, and the leaden pace of the bird flu's advance, we ought to fund a cyberimplant wing of Mozilla pronto and get this gear on the street where it's needed.

Sidestepping the Ravages of Dementia

OH, AND JUST IN CASE you think I don't have myself figured out: With the knowledge that a utility bill will arrive within the week, I have written "1/ /08" on the next check in my book. I'm not writing a second one for the rent, though. My eyes aren't too old to perceive the monomolecular dividing line between life-hacking and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Not Spending It All in One Place

MY SEVERANCE PAYMENTS FROM the salt mine ended some time ago. Or so I thought. When I checked my mailbox this Saturday, I was surprised to find a check mailer from my former employer.

Still mostly convinced the previous check to this one had been my last, I nonetheless shredded it open, never averse to free money in any amount . . .

. . . no matter how small.

That's right, folks. They couldn't have tacked this onto my last severance check. Instead, they had to run this through their payroll drones, stick a 41¢ stamp on it, and mail it out.

With this mentality, now you can see why the layoff didn't exactly cripple me with grief.

My (Almost) Life as a Pornographer

IN HUNTING FOR A new job this spring and summer (though, I hope, not this fall), I have thought about the two previous job hunts of mine. The most recent was in the spring of 1999, beginning in about March and ending in early May. I recall riding to the interview and seeing the headlines about the Columbine shooting on everyone's newspapers.

It was my first job hunt, the one most folks face right after college, that crossed my mind today. This one was an extended, half-hearted affair beginning in June 1991 . . . the Great Bush (40) Recession . . . and was made longer when I sought refuge in a part-time job at a healthcare marketing-research firm. Phone interviews with medical professionals, combined with clerical work and eating the leftovers from focus groups, formed half of each weekday from that July through mid-September 1992. Between the scarcity of local publishing jobs, my deficient internship experience, and a general lack of interest in my future, my actual job-seeking activity was sporadic at best.

Before I took this stopgap job, however, I did get a callback for an interview from one of my resume mailings to the publishing field . . . or at least, one niche of it. I forget the precise name of the position as it appeared in The New York Times, but the first sentence will never leave my memory — "Hot opportunity on a hot title" — because the job was with High Society magazine.

Those of you who were never teenage boys, or single, middle-age guys who haunted 42nd Street before it was Disneyfied, may not be familiar with this rag. Go about one and a half steps downward from the porn level of Playboy — none of the occasional investigative reporting and Quagmire-level class of Penthouse, but none of the truly disgusting layouts and abhorrent attitudes toward women rampant in the various Larry Flynt titles. Not that women were all that positively depicted in any of these magazines, but at least Playboy would run an interview with Tom Wolfe or an excerpt of his work, and a review of the newest BMW coupe, alongside some airbrushed bim. High Society by contrast might carry a pseudonymously penned pulp story, and maybe some lurid exposé of a Third World death squad or a gory shark hunt, but the pictorials lacked all pretension of art.

Still, all magazines need to be both written and produced by someone, and High Society needed a writer and editor. As a lark, I sent them the laughable document with my name on it that fit the description of resume. If they had the gumption to advertise in the Times, why not give it a spin?

To my surprise, I got a call a week or so later from a guy with a heavy New Yawk accent to set up an interview! It seemed I would be editing the letters column of the magazine, in addition to office work and possibly layout, depending on qualifications. I wondered, as he described the job, how much of that would merely be writing said letters from whole cloth. I envisioned myself at a wheezing Selectric, light filtering feebly through a window layered with Eisenhower-era grime, in some sinus of an office in the Thirties, clacking out page after page of "I never thought I would be writing High Society . . ." mini-essays about forbidden lusts run amok. I told him I would come in for the interview. Why not? This job had high comedy written all over it.

The question of telling my parents opened up the first sliver of doubt over this job. This was a far cry from the usual postcollegiate English major jobs of proofreader, editorial assistant, or manuscript reader in the bowels of some obscure press or magazine . . . and certainly was not the gateway to graduate studies in my field should I decide to continue my schooling. The workplace itself was also a dubious factor. I imagined stumbling into "fashion" shoots in the office, rubbing elbows (and probably little else) with porn stars pushing their latest projects, and cologne-reeking sleaze merchants oozing out like balding Weebles at eleven for a steak and cocaine binge at Delmonico's. Not the best mentor for a sprout seeking a fast track in publishing.

I also wondered what sort of samples I would acquire to show future employers. It's one thing for me to pass a copy of the accounting newsletter across a desk to show a prospective employer how much table typesetting I can cram into 8 hours. It's quite another for me to read to a group of hiring managers a sampler of my finest letters to the editor, or worse, to fan out a grotesquely splayed — if meticulously color-corrected and retouched — centerfold.

And I had a genuine concern over the exact source of my paychecks. What sort of an organization was "Drake Publishing," the parent corporation that produced High Society, Playgirl, and other skin books? Who owned it? I assumed that Drake, like most pornography companies in New York, both legit and clandestine, was at least partly Mob affiliated. This hunch would prove correct; years later, the then-current cugines behind the scenes would plead guilty to using phone-sex numbers in High Society to rack up hundreds of millions in credit card and phone charges. At the time, however, I imagined the Boys would be using this legitimate business as a shell for some manner of dirty dealings, and I didn't want to end up running numbers or taking football bets while grinding out my torrid narratives of two nymphets getting locked overnight in a pudding factory, or whatnot.

With all this to ponder, and the offer to work at the marketing-research firm also on the table, I called the High Society guy back and canceled our interview appointment. He sounded genuinely surprised and asked me to reconsider, but I offered my regrets and stood firm. I was working on a phone survey with pain-management professionals for the Duragesic patch not two days later.

I don't have any regrets about passing on the opportunity to become a 21-year-old pornographer, though I do sometimes regret not at least going on the interview, just to see how the degenerate half lives. I still managed to find my way into publishing, by the more honest route of an independent producer of psychology, social science, and human factors books and journals. I got to strip down art with white tape instead of placing black bars across incriminating eyes and erogenous zones. The only reason to have taken this route, I feel, would be to have the most potentially riveting tale to tell at my high school reunion . . . or its career fair. Especially because I attended an all-male Catholic school.

Now there? There, my samples would have been most welcome.

Taking It Up the Verizon Highway

NEW JERSEY'S BEACH SEASON begins this weekend, as the northern and western populations of the state pack their cars and boom south for three days of surf and sand. State officials always lust for a strong Memorial Day showing to set a lucrative tone for the summer tourist trade. Should we get rain or $4/gallon gas for a couple of weekends, however, legislators and budget drones in Trenton will wring their hands and glance nervously at the yawning $15 billion debt-hole they have dug over the past decade and a half. "However shall we fill it?" they will wail, as sales projections for salt-water taffy plunge to new lows.

Privatization to the rescue! New Jersey officials have been stroking their figurative beards at the course Indiana has taken in leasing roads and other public works to private companies. Sale of naming rights is no alien practice, especially not in Jersey, what with names like "Continental Airlines Arena" and "PNC Arts Center." tripping gaily off the tongue. Auctioning off rights not merely to rename, but to manage, an entire highway raises the profile — and the possible revenue — by an order of magnitude. Tops among our thoroughfares for shopping out to corporate interest is the New Jersey Turnpike, and pols are said to be eyeing its sister road, the shore-hugging Garden State Parkway, for the same treatment.

Clapping a dotty moniker on a stadium or arena is one matter. Ceding maintenance of some of our most important transit arteries is quite another. Consider what Tri-State Area businesses might take a financial interest in these roads, and your support for this method of funding might change.

• The Verizon Turnpike, now featuring VZPass: Segments of the elevated Turnpike will suffer from "dropouts," resulting in cars falling through gaps in the rebar. You can get a billing adjustment by dialing #HOLE as your car sinks into the Meadowlands. In addition, credits for tolls will be available like cell minutes for your VZPass box. Overage and roaming charges apply, so don't leave the state without a second mortgage.
• The Cablevision Parkway: You will receive a basic suite of exits you can take for a flat fee. More popular exits, such as Belmar, Point Pleasant, and Atlantic City, will be available at higher tiers. Slowdowns are blamed on "network traffic," but help will arrive soon, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays only; please listen to all options, as our menu items have changed. Speaking of change, every six months, the numbering of the exits will be rescrambled. Your shore getaway could become a trip to Newark Liberty because of a numerical glitch.
  
• PSE&G Bridge: Former Governor Thomas Driscoll gets the Brendan Byrne treatment, courtesy of our beloved local power authority. Tolls will spike during temperature extremes, based on a formula that would leave Einstein curled in a ball under his desk. The landscape will be spiced up when PSE&G builds a nuclear reactor station on the site of the Amboy Cinema, so keep your windows closed.
  
• The Merck Expressway: The South Jersey Transportation Authority decides to boot Atlantic City off the signs and cash in on Big Pharma's largesse. You will need a referral from your primary-care physician to get onto the highway. Tolls are 50¢ if you have in-plan drug coverage, $60 without. Side effects include dizziness, blurred vision, and getting rear-ended by a Chinatown gambling bus.

No word yet on interest on the 495 helix or the Warner Bros. bowtie of asphalt that links Routes 4 and 17. Should the first sale close, and if hurricanes and $5/gallon gas ravage the land this summer, soon you might be able to say hi to Lucy the Fox News Channel Elephant.

Unconsciously Influential Priest Album

WHILE SCANNING THE PORTFOLIO part of design firm Pentagram's site, I came across this signage example. This is an entry to the Minnesota Children's Museum:


The design immediately called to mind the cover of Judas Priest's British Steel:

With any luck, the kids entering this museum will do their best Beavis and Butt-head imitations while singing, "Breakin' the law! Breakin' the law!"

Hopefully without doing that thing with their shoulders like Halford.

Al Leong, aka the False Yaphet Kotto

IN THE DAYS BEFORE the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia, when "Internet" was somewhere that Ted Kennedy whacked tennis balls while drunk, it took more legwork for a movie fan to trace the career of his or her favorite actors. This was especially true for character actors. True, you might remember a person's face from one film or TV show to the next, but picking his or her name out of the credits, especially when that character merely appeared as "Guard" or "Henchman," was difficult without some fast taping and freeze-framing. (Did I mention we also lacked TiVo? Oh, the indignity.)

My friends and I reached adolescence in the 1980s, the Golden Age of the Action Film. We spent our nights playing Dungeons & Dragons or a host of other roleplaying games, and our audiovisual backdrop for this mayhem was a festival of endlessly rerun bullet operas on HBO, TNT, and the USA Network. By this method did we memorize such epics as Aliens, Lethal Weapon, and Big Trouble in Little China, as well as dozens of B-grade offerings at the unlikely hands (and sometimes feet) of the era's gun-wielding, roundhouse-kicking steroid abusers.

Casting agents for these films invariably turned to a regular cadre of action-film utility players for stuntwork and bit parts that usually ended in on-screen death. Working both ends of this equation was Al Leong. If your movie-watching history matches mine, you know of whom I speak. Asian gent, bald crown, long fringe of hair, bushy handlebar mustache. His characters were dynamic and generally doomed. You saw him electrocute Mel Gibson, watched him lead a gang of Tongs into battle, and laughed as he snarfed a candy bar amid the burglary in Die Hard.

My friends and I naturally picked up on the fact that Leong was typecast. We never actually got his name, though. For a while, he was "that guy from [insert film here]." Somehow, one of us — possibly me — got it into his head that this actor's name was Yaphet Kotto.

Now, we had seen Yaphet Kotto in a few things as well. He was an ill-fated crewmember of the Nostromo in Alien. He challenged Britain's greatest secret agent in Live and Let Die. And he was the FBI nemesis of bounty hunter Robert DeNiro in Midnight Run. Somehow, like a virus jumping species, Al Leong became, in name, Yaphet Kotto. It sounded exotic, had great "mouthfeel," and gave our geeky teenage minds a feeling of smug insider knowledge.

To be clear: This is Al Leong.


And this is Yaphet Kotto.


Why yes, my friends and I function quite well for Mongoloids.

It wasn't until the release of the aforementioned Midnight Run in 1988 that we learned our mistake. Whoever that nimble Asian mook who died in every film was, he wasn't named Yaphet Kotto.

With no swift or convenient way to find out his true name, said actor was dubbed "the false Yaphet Kotto."

People, we called him this for the better part of the next decade. Even after we saw him in more films, even when we could have stayed during the credits to settle, finally, the mystery of who this diehard from Die Hard really was, whenever we saw him, my friends and I would squeal with delight and say, "It's the false Yaphet Kotto!"

It wasn't until the Internet had wormed its way into every home that the resources finally sank to our level of laziness, and one of us learned that this guy was actually named Al Leong. I'd like to think that, on the other side of the country, Al felt a shiver of relief go through him, temporarily displacing the aches and pains from a hundred hyperkinetic stunts and a thousand explosive squibs detonating across his career and anatomy.

Then Steven Seagal probably broke his neck.

Burning Down the Apartment

THIS DAY WENT TO HELL early, but this evening I came close to bringing the flames right to my kitchen. Nothing like a visit from the town emergency crews to wake a body up, to say nothing of the rest of the building's residents.

I bailed early on work, having no work to do and not needing to stick around either to monitor the outsourcing gang or to search for a job. I was looking forward to dinner — not just the eatin', but the makin'. As part of my plan to eat more wisely, I had purchased some beautiful Empire chicken breasts at my local Trader Joe's. My plan was to grill these on my cast-iron stovetop grill, making at least four meals' worth of protein for my accelerated gym schedule.

For those who have never visited my apartment, its major flaw is a lack of ventilation. My apartment building is a hotel-style structure, in that I have one wall of windows, the other being contiguous with the central hallway. I have a floor fan and an air conditioner, but they only blow air around and into the apartment. The fan over my stove only filters fumes, and has no port to the outside. On those few occasions when I cook anything smoky, I have to be quick about it, lest I set off my apartment's smoke alarm.

Being aware of this, I halved the breasts lengthwise to make them thinner. I then brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with McCormick Lemon Pepper & Herb Grill Mates rub. I brushed the grill with oil as well, let it heat up, and dropped on the chicken. At their thickness, I figured 6 minutes on one side, 5 on the other, and they'd be done.

I got through the first 6 minutes with minimal fumes. The smoke began collecting during the second stretch, mostly from particles of the Grill Mates shake that were carbonizing rapidly. Although I had my floor fan aimed at the stove to carry any smoke away from my main hallway, I still got a complaint from my smoke alarm. I turned the chicken, then aimed the fan directly at the screaming disc on the ceiling. It quieted down. I turned back to the kitchen to find it billowing with smoke . . . which promptly sparked the smoke alarm again.

I dragged my stepladder under the box and pulled it down from the ceiling, hoping to disconnect it. No dice; even as I did so, I remembered it was wired into building current. I had a black wire going one way and a white wire going another and it was still BEEP BEEP BEEPing in my hand with my other hand clutching my ear which didn't do squat. . . . and by this time I could barely think straight from the alarm, which I would like to say explains the inscrutable burst of logic that motivated me to open my apartment door, after turning off the stove, to let the smoke vent into the hall. . . .

. . . where the building fire system began shrieking.

The building fire system, which is wired straight to the town fire department.

I ran back to the stove, double-checked the OFF status of the burners, tonged the chicken (which looked quite nice, actually) onto a plate, and dumped the still-smoldering grill into my oven. Then I called the list of local resident managers (ours just got canned, so we have a trio of backups from other, nearby buildings) to let someone know the company wasn't in imminent danger of losing an apartment building. By this point, the town fire alarm, sounding like an air-raid siren, was echoing across the landscape. I knew I'd have guests soon. I decided to go downstairs to let them know there was no danger — and then a knock came at my door.

It was one of our local policemen. I quickly assured him there was no fire and no damage, that it was just a cooking mishap. (I also thanked my lucky stars I hadn't hosted poker the previous night, and have a table full of professional plastic cards and high-denomination chips in great lovely incriminating stacks to explain.) He seemed relieved. I told him I was going to meet the firemen downstairs to let them know there was no emergency.

Outside, the chaos I had inadvertently wrought was in full swing. The average age of the residents here is about 66. My dear elderly neighbors, bent over canes, trunding along with walkers, were slowly making their way out of their respective lairs, shuffling in pairs as though they had chosen fire buddies upon moving in, making their pained way down the stairs . . . I felt so awful. I tried to say to them it was under control, that there was no danger, that it was just an idiot bachelor overreaching the limits of his cooking abilities, but they just dutifully kept descending the stairs.

Around 15 of my co-residents had already gathered in the lobby, and were milling about trying to decide whether it was a real fire or a false alarm. I told some of the more attentive ones the facts, relying on them to spread the news. At that moment, two firemen came in, casually dressed rather than fully garbed for an inferno, and I quickly told them the basics. I led them up to my pad, now slightly less smoky but at least getting no worse, while the strobes and sirens screamed in the halls and still more stunned residents poked their heads out to see what the ruckus was. I felt like crawling under the rug.

Two more firemen, these guys actually in the traditional suits, arrived on my floor from the opposite direction, and their cohorts confirmed there was no need to escalate matters to ladder-and-hose work. They checked out the area, made sure my windows were open and the air conditioner was on, and deemed the place under control. One guy went down to check if the stairwells were vented, which — if they were — would enable them to shut down the alarm. Fortunately, they were, and in a couple of minutes, as one guy advised the team on the truck to stand down, the mind-shattering shriek from the halls fell silent.

I should add that each time I encountered another fireman, I apologized profusely for being such an idiot and dragging them out for nothing. In turn, they all told me not to worry about it, that it was no problem, and that it happened all the time. (Not to me!) I assume they were just relieved to find no full-fledged fire in progress and no lives in jeopardy.

The cop who had arrived first took my name and number, just for reporting purposes; I hadn't committed a crime, though I joked I was guilty of aggravated crappy cooking. I also went downstairs to thank the rest of the firemen for arriving so swiftly and, one last time, apologize. As before, they shrugged it off. Considering we just lost nine children from the same family in the city to a horrific fire this weekend, a simple stove mishap on the part of a solitary retard must have been a joy to find. I wandered back up to my place, telling any neighbors I ran into that I was sorry. If only to spare my enduring embarrassment for the rest of my stay here, I hope some of them lose the details of today's events to senility.

Alone at last, I steamed some broccoli, dropped two pieces of chicken onto a plate with it, and ate.

And for all of the tsuris its creation evoked, that chicken was pretty damn good.

Chips, Cards, and the Flat Tax

LAST NIGHT, OUR POKER game was the touchstone for a varied range of conversational topics. Some may make certain presuppositions about the tenor or content of the gab at the traditional Thursday night poker game. See if any of these match your stereotype of what 11 men crouched around a swatch of green felt, chips vying with beers for space, might discuss:

• Whether the progressive tax system favors the rich and/or unfairly burdens the poor
• The virtues of a flat tax
• The budget deficit vs. the national debt, and how we briefly ran a surplus before 9/11
• General consensus that elimination of wasteful government spending must precede any worthwhile revision of the tax code
• The cost of the Iraq war
• The recent hangings in Iraq and the practice of execution by hanging, in particular whether death is instant
  

Amid this, quite a lot of poker was played, including some dramatic all-ins. With time, however, the New York Giants returned to the table as a talking point, along with what the draft might bring, and from there, we did eventually debate the merits of such female luminaries as Rachel McAdams, the Jessicas Biel and Alba, and Scarlett Johansson.

I Am the Key Master

SOME TIME AGO, I detailed how I stumbled upon a handbag at Whole Foods and, via the store's customer service desk, returned it.

Evidently, this began an unwitting streak of being a roving lost-and-found. Two recent incidents, both involving keys, point to this trend.

The first one occurred about two weeks ago. While entering the lobby of my building, I spotted a car key. It was one of the more recent ones, with the functional fob forming the base of the key, which was more of a long metal probe than a traditional key-shaped implement. A tag indicated the car was purchased at a Bergen County car dealer.

I went back out to the lot and pressed the panic button. (This feature, a Nobel Prize–level innovation if you ask me, is the only way I could find my various rental cars in the anonymous sprawls of the many Vegas parking garages in which I have wandered. Until I learned to write down the level and section, that is.) A white sedan in the parking lot across the street began honking and flashing its lights.

I took a look at the car, inside and out, to see if I could determine the owner. No clue. Based on its location, though, I figured that this person had bought something in the strip mall to which the parking lot catered, then had visited someone in my building. I went back upstairs to make two simple signs with my phone number, which I planned to hang on the two most likely exits this person would take.

I found the owner of the car while posting the signs. It turned out to be a regular visitor, whose elderly father had, until recently, lived directly across the hall from me. (He suffered a fall some weeks ago, and has been recuperating under close care in a rehab facility.) She left the key out front when she switched hands between her father's mail and her house keys, and when I found her in the entryway, she was digging through her handbag with the unmistakable air of someone who knows he or she came in with something and now, for the life of him or her, cannot put a hand on it. I asked her if she was looking for something, and she accepted her car key with gratitude and relief.

So upon returning home tonight, I had cause to think about that incident when what do I see sitting in a jagged brass jumble next to the mailboxes but a hefty set of keys. This was a little more serious. Anyone with half a brain and a larcenous heart could spend a little time figuring which key opens the front door, then do a few things: enter the complex at will, copy it and allow confederates to do the same, go door to door with what they suspect might be an inside key and try to break in, or sell the whole lot to someone with the time and inclination to do any of the above. Plus they'd potentially have a free car, as there was a key for some vehicle among the bunch.

As with the last car, I had only a fleeting moment of the risk–reward equation of grand theft auto, and scooped up the keys to at least get them away from thieving hands. Once upstairs, I had dinner, and while finishing, I made up another sign, this one with my cell number, because my plan was to write for a while at the library (my current location). I cleaned up, bagged my Mac, and headed out, affixing the sign to the front door before leaving.

Just as I was checking out a book that, fortuitously, had arrived today via interlibrary loan, my cellphone vibrated. I missed that call, but it immediately began vibrating again. Definitely the panicked repeat dialing of someone down a couple of dozen keys. It actually turned out to be that person's employer. The owner was a domestic or a home health aide (I didn't inquire which), and the caller was ringing me to see if she could head over to my apartment to pick up the keys. I explained that I would be there in about 5 minutes, as I was at the library, and the caller said the person would be downstairs to meet me. I also got her name — Maria — so they could ID themselves.

I drove back to the apartment quickly enough (despite a traffic backup from the train passing through town), and found a Latin American woman waiting in the front hall. She walked up to my car, said her name was Maria, and gratefully received her keys with several thank-yous and God-bless-yous. I briefly told her about the previous key incident, and she pronounced me a good person. Well, let's not get hasty, I thought, but I thanked her for it and let her head on out as I returned to the library.

So it seems like I'm on a streak! If you should happen to misplace something over the next few weeks, you might call me first before panicking. At this rate, I just may have found it.

How I Missed a Giant Steel Toadstool

WHEN YOU THINK OF a fire hydrant, you probably envision one of two designs:

1. A black pillar with a silver-painted top, or
2. An entirely red pillar.

You probably don't imagine a squat, yellow structure that looks like it might host a clutch of Smurfs, however. Neither do I.

This is how I managed to do the unthinkable and park next to a fire hydrant Saturday evening.

I was heading down the street of the mighty Ratatosk and Amy for a night of pizza, boardgaming, and whimsy. The street was fairly full, the hazy morning having given way to a decent afternoon that probably helped fill several of the neighborhood backyards with barbecues and beer fests. When I noticed a spot just outside my destination, I pulled in eagerly and headed on up to the apartment.

What I did not notice was the dinky-ass yellow fireplug next to my car, which explained why this spot was mysteriously available.

Hours later, after a ton of fun getting to know Warrior Knights, I exited into the humid summer morning (it was pretty damn late by then!), only to spot a familiar oblong shape on the windshield of my car.

I pulled the ticket off and scrutinized it, wondering if I had violated the time limit for street parking. Instead, it indicated that I had parked within 10 feet of a hydrant. To which I replied, out loud, "What hydrant?!" I walked around the car only to see this stunted iron pipe, painted yellow, of all colors, hiding behind my vehicle.

I felt so stupid. Thankfully, there had been no need to access the hydrant in my time there. Still, I think the fine folks at the fire department or DPW of the offended town might do its visitors a favor and render their hydrants in the same traditional color scheme as the rest of the country. If I didn't see it in broad daylight, how the hell are the firefighters supposed to locate it in a rush of stress?

Fighting for Every Square Inch of This Kitchen

IN WARFARE, TERRITORY IS critical. Control the right stretch of land or sea, and you will increase your chances of victory. Anyone who rents an apartment will recognize this dictum. Encroaching clutter along the borders of an otherwise secured, clean room can quickly flare up in multiple salients, pinning down your efforts and encouraging rubbish to gather along other fronts. Soon you've got open rebellion: stacks of paperbacks tumbling from unstable IKEA shelves, towers of pint soup containers massing for a mad dash to the kitchen floor, dark muttering among the previously docile socks in the laundry basket.

So when you have the chance to secure permanently a slice of turf long thought unassailable, you take it.

Such an opportunity appeared this afternoon in my kitchen. I had removed a wire dish rack temporarily to scour the Rubbermaid drip guard beneath. While this piece rested in the tub with a cap-full of Pine Sol dissolving the built-up scum, I went shopping. Upon my return, I stacked some bagged fresh vegetables between the sink and the wooden rack holding my dinner plates —

— when I noticed that the space wherein said veggies were resting had not existed mere hours before.

I then made the final, crucial connection. The only reason I have the drying rack is because, as one resident, I rarely build up such a huge mound of dirty dishes that I need to resort to the energy and water hog that is my dishwasher. However, the dishwasher is, in essence, a two-tier dish rack. All I would need to do is wash a dish, throw it in there to dry, and luxuriate in the extra space that the old rack had occupied.

Yes, this sounds like a microscopic victory in the vast world of trouble in which we strive. But one of the two problems I have with my current apartment is the layout of the kitchen. The cabinets do not admit boxes over a certain height, and what counterspace there is, one tends to cast into shadow while working because the light is above but behind the main prep space. To liberate another couple of square feet, even with the shameful fact that it took me almost 7 years to realize my mistake, is a wonderful pre-birthday gift. The next one I'd like to unwrap in something considerably less than a near-decade.

Purgatory's Extreme Makeover

EVEN AFTER THE ROMAN Catholic Church moved to decommission the concept of Limbo some time ago, most people of driving age know that its less desirable relative, Purgatory, is still open for business, if only in its earthly representation. For no force mundane or magical could conceivably banish the flatline-inducing stasis of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Except, perhaps, the DMV itself.

I don't know how things are in your state, but here in New Jersey, we are undergoing a switch to digital licenses. What with the national pubococcygeus muscle clenching over identity theft and crazed terrorists teeming across our borders, New Jersey has mandated that anyone with a conventional license due for renewal had to come in for a new, digitally shot photo license. Gone are the days where enterprising college students, like one guy I eventually roomed with in junior year, could hang a blue cloth, get some vinyl stick-on letters and poster board, and shoot New Jersey "licenses" for their booze-jonesing buddies. Applicants also have to bring a sheaf of identifying documents that prove that they are legitimately themselves. In principle, this provides confirmation in depth. In practice, with the recent scandal over false Hudson County documents being apparently available to anyone with folding green, and before that, the discovery of a document forgery ring operating out of the Wayne, NJ DMV parking lot, whether this actually works in the age of Photoshop is dubious at best.

So I, along with thousands of my fellow Garden Staters, waited until this, the last weekend of the month, to patronize our neighborhood DMV office. I motored up to the Wyckoff office, because I've had fairly painless experiences there in the past, as trips to the DMV go. I got up early for a Saturday, shaved (ordinarily something I neglect over a weekend, but I didn't want to look like I'd been rousted from the drunk tank on my license for the next 4 years), and trekked out. In a plastic folder next to me rested what a Gestapo agent might call my "papers." I probably overplanned: passport, SS card, birth certificate, and a recent power bill to prove address. A fat stack of hundreds and a Browning Hi-Power and I could've been a CIA drug courier cooling his heels between runs and identities.

Wyckoff's DMV is a storefront in a short strip mall just off one of the town's main streets, bordering a dead shopping center. The view from the office is therefore bleak, offering only asphalt, an abandoned Walgreen's and the shell of a grocery store. Nevertheless, the surrounding area is pure suburbs, unlike some of the grittier offices in the state. By the time I arrived, three guys had already lined up outside the door. I became number 4, put on my iPod, and waited. As I listened to music and watched the line grow steadily longer, I was amused to see late-arriving employees of the DMV tapping on the glass to be admitted by those who had gotten in earlier. I guess New Jersey doesn't trust all of its personnel to have access to the machinery necessary to produce state documents.

The wait itself was as pleasant as this sort of experience can get. We were all under the awning of the strip mall, and therefore safe from the threatening rain clouds gathering overhead. Even those in line who lit up cigarettes walked well away from the rest of us to smoke. Evidently they knew the law well: 25 feet from the entrance of a public establishment.

At 8:00, an employee opened up and directed us into two lines: registrations/plates and licenses. This made me first! Wyckoff has a concierge up front to help folks ensure they have all of the proper documentation. This is where the operation began to distinguish itself from the stereotype. I showed the woman up front my materials, and she routed me right up to the window.

There, I was actually greeted pleasantly by a guy just finishing the setup of his station. I surrendered my old license and my documentation, and when I asked to what organization I needed to address the check, he told me right up front, no "I've gotta do this a million times a day" attitude or anything.

One humorous snag to the process came when he tried to ring open the register to stash the check. First, it wouldn't open. He quickly fetched a tiny key, manipulated it awkwardly with his meaty hand, then couldn't get the register to stop beeping in protest when he tried to start it up. He carefully removed the cover, called over one of his mates to determine which setting a hidden switch had to occupy, found it, and then realized the drawer was locked! Apologizing through this as he had through the whole preceding tapdance, he once again fiddled with the key, got the drawer open, and finally dropped my check beneath the completely empty cash rack. "There's not even anything in here to steal!" he said in exasperation.

This comedy done, he had me sit down for my official state portrait. (Having seen a photo on the wall of our plutocrat in chief, Jon Corzine, I amused myself by imagining this, or an office like it, is where he had to have the shot taken.) The picture was displayed on a small LCD screen next to the camera, and the first snap was the keeper. He then stamped my application and began working on the next one while the machine finished the card. Unlike the old days, when someone deft with the ways of a laminating gadget would have to compose the Polaroid, signature card, and everything else over the course of what felt like an hour, my license was ready in 3 minutes tops. Total time in the joint: 15 minutes. All in all, far better than some of the standing-still deathmarches at the Bergenfield or Lodi offices.

What surprised me is that they returned my old license, with a cancellation hole punched in it, along with the new one. So now I can look at them both and compare the stretch of 4 years on my visage. I had gotten the 2002 license in a whirlwind of document-acquisition: From the DMV, I went with my new license and support papers to the county seat, where I applied for a passport — an ID exacta, you might say. I have both licenses in front of me now. The smile on the 2006 license is better, not quite as phony. My temples are still white, as in the 2002 model, but the top is more salt-and-pepper in today's. In both, I am wearing a black Russell T-shirt. Some things never change. The '06 also has a smaller, watermark-like version of the main portrait in the bottom right corner, like my very own Mini-Me.

So now I'm legal as hell for all manner of road mayhem. The days when I had to produce a license for liquor-store patronage are long since past, and I don't go to the sorts of bars or clubs where the management has to be vigilant about underage drinkers. I let the sideburns — in hue, partway between those of Reed Richards and Paulie Walnuts — do the age-checking for me. Other than verifying a financial transaction or signing up for a casino comp card, my two digital doppelgängers — or maybe one doppelgänger and one homonculus – will rest in their dark leather prison, freezing me in time for another 4 years.

How I Boosted My SAT(Swearword Acquisition Total)

NOBODY IS BORN WITH their vocabulary, just the potential for one. We begin learning it at birth. Whether through listening to one's elders, reading, taking in audio or visual media, or eventually, in school, word by word our storehouse of text fills. I have not gotten so old and feebleminded that I can't remember exactly where I picked up certain words. I have been batting around a post on that topic, which would also give you some insight into what sort of stimuli influenced me early on. The story behind one word, however, is funny . . . and a bit perilous.

I believe in freedom of expression, but I also have a sense of tact. Merely because one can use a given word or phrase, it doesn't mean one should. This applies most strongly to profanity. Expletives are a seasoning, not the main dish, and one has to prepare the menu with the diners in mind. Fan I may be of such curse-laden fare as Scarface or The Sopranos, it doesn't mean that I am going to quote these works in every context. People look at you a little strange if you get your Deadwood on and, say, greet the father of the bride with a hearty, "Congratulations, cocksucker!"

Among grownups of reason, with whom the ground has been prepared carefully, I nevertheless believe one can broach any topic and discuss it rationally. It is in this spirit, then, that we proceed.

I am going to tell you how I first heard, and learned the meaning of, the word cunt.

Ah, the C-bomb. I do not use this word. I barely even use the word tits, not even in the expressions "tits up" or "ripped to the tits." I can think of no more demeaning objectification of women than to use cunt, even if it does, like fuck or shit, originate centuries ago when the mincemeat pie that is English was still cooling on the great green windowsill of Britain. Believe me, I'll use the shit out of fuck a million times before I enter the launch code on the C-bomb. On those very few occasions when I have become infuriated enough to utter it — even among men — I have regretted it. Even in my private journal it does not appear. I have never heard it at my poker game, which is a sausage-fest and does get its share of earthy guy talk. As wide as my reading has been lo these many years, when I ran across it several times in the first 20 pages of Tropic of Cancer, I had to force myself to continue. It is never used in the South Park movie, which otherwise rode its R-rating straight through the Seven Dirty Words.

But I had to learn it somewhere.

This is how.

The year was 1981. I was in sixth grade. As a way of allowing students to decide what language they would take, my junior high school had kids take a sampler quarter each of French and Spanish. The second semester was devoted to Communicative Arts, which we had in addition to Art class, and which could best be described as applied art, versus the general art teaching we got in Art class (e.g., two weeks in clay sculpture, two weeks making a giant version of some common item with cardboard, two weeks of stamping inked potatoes on oak tag, etc.).

One day in this class, two of my classmates began snickering among themselves. By this time, I was known as a "good" kid, someone who wouldn't get into trouble, who was not only smart but fairly geeky (this was right after the summer of The Empire Strikes Back, and I still hadn't calmed down). So the more rowdy kids liked to try and tempt me into trouble. I therefore recognized this sort of snicker when it emanated my way.

This time, they tried to gauge how many swears I knew. The class was poorly supervised, so you could talk at leisure and whisper "bad words" without being caught. I did know fuck (which, as a young child, I thought I had coined) and shit (which, around the same time, I employed on an even younger kid one day at the park, which got me a stern talking-to and what today we would call a "time out"). I also knew a range of euphimisms and double entendres, a phrase that, unlike most of my classmates, I could actually spell even before the sampler of French earlier that year.

I had much to learn, however. "James," asked one of them with a leer, "do you know what a cunt is?"

I had no idea, but from the way the kid asked, and the reaction from the kid next to him, I knew it wasn't clean.

"No, what is it?"

"Maybe you should ask Miss [whatever the teacher's name was]," the second one said. I knew that was a bad idea.

"I don't think so. What is it?"

"It's a unit of electricity," said the first kid, joining the second one in a fit of snickers.

Now, as foul as this word is, that is a pretty funny line for a sixth grader, I have to give him that. Replace the underscored terms in the following sentences with our mot du jour:

"The sockets in Europe are all screwed up. All my plugs are for 110 volts, and they need 220 volts to work."

"The new hydroelectric plant is expected to bring 6 megawatts of power to over 120,000 homes in the Valley."

"Remember, it's not the volts that kill you, it's the amps!"

No way was I asking Teach the definition of this word. So what was my brilliant idea for researching this lexicographic dilemma, in the days before Merriam-Webster online and Wikipedia?

Simple. I asked my mother.

I never had a sit-down with my parents to get the scoop on "the birds and the bees," but neither had I made any mention to that point that I knew the basics. (A surprisingly frank book on the topic was on the anatomy shelf in the children's stacks of my town library, which described the entire process.) However, they had not raised me with any extreme prudery, aside from sending me to bed before the more adult fare came on WHT. I was even allowed to listen to the soundtrack of Hair, which if you recall, is by no means all as radio friendly as "Age of Aquarius" or "Good Morning Starshine." In fact, when the term fellatio was used in the song "Sodomy," I asked my mom what both of those words meant, and she said it was something that happened during the act of love. (The latter one might say a bit much about my parents.) So I had had blue language defined for me in the past. Just . . . nothing this explosive.

So I walked into the kitchen that afternoon after school and asked, "Mom, what is a cunt?"

She paused in her preparation of dinner, and to her credit didn't instantly feed me a hunk of Ivory Soap or drive me to church for penance, as some of my friends' parents would have. "Where did you hear that?" she asked evenly.

"Some kids at school asked me if I knew what it was, and that I should ask the teacher."

"It's a term for a woman's sex organs. If anyone else at school asks you if you know any other words like this, ask me first and I'll tell you, okay?"

"Okay."

Now, see what she did here. She didn't threaten me with dire consequences if she ever heard me say it again. She didn't ask me to squeal on whoever said it at school, or for the name of the teacher in whose class I heard it, so she could call the principal and demand some sort of redress. She defined it calmly, and in asking me to direct future inquiries along these lines to her, expressed her desire not to hear that I've been using this language myself.

After this initial exposure, I'm fairly certain that I didn't hear the word again until high school, when I saw one of George Carlin's cable specials. I guarantee you that I laughed, as did my parents, who watched along with me.

How might my approach to the word have been different had I been punished on the spot? Would I have reacted against this by placing it in heavier rotation? Would I have objectified women with other terms, in my actions, in my relationships with them? It's tough to say if that might have been a turning point in my development. All I can say is, even as other curse words slowly made it into my rotation as needed among friends and even with my parents, this one has stayed pretty firmly locked up.

At least until Ann Coulter becomes secretary of state.

This Program Was Brought to You By Lung Cancer

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN you first learned that The Flintstones used to be sponsored by Winston cigarettes? In the middle of Fred's get-rich-quick schemes and Wilma's concomitant exasperation over same, viewers during the show's initial airing could watch various Bedrock residents extol the virtues of Winstons. Fred even sang the Winston jingle to help hammer it into the viewer's mind. Naturally, with the ban on TV cigarette advertising and the move of The Flintstones into kiddie-rerun timeslots across the country, my generation of cartoon viewers never knew what sort of an earner Fred and Barney were for the tobacco industry. So when I eventually found out about this old campaign, it was not unlike watching the Easter Bunny shill for crack.

Naturally, those in my cohort remember how widespread print and billboard ads for smokes were even after the TV ban consigned the tapdancing packs of Old Gold and stop-action, square-dancing Luckies to the dark dungeons of the Internets. For our parents, however, especially when they were still kids, cig ads were ubiquitous. It was just another product. And even if sneaking reports linking emphysema and lung cancer to smoking were beginning to lead manufacturers to claim their products were "easier on the throat" or "endorsed by doctors," they also recruited actors and sports figures to stump for their "favorite" cigarettes.

Thanks to the robed acolytes tending the helium-cooled vaults at The Internet Archive, this era of freewheeling death-dealing has been preserved for latter-day eyes not reddened by a roomful of smoke. Let's take a look at one such example of a brand's ads, in this case, Camels. Yes, a manly, unfiltered smoke that hits the lungs like a carcinogenic brick. Would you walk a mile for a Camel? Or just collapse, gasping, after 40 yards? Let's ask the following satchel of whores pitchfolks. Note that the audio cuts out and then desynchronizes after we move into the sports figures' ads, so my identification of the various wheezing luminaries is handicapped by my gaping ignorance of long-gone baseballers. That said, I give you the following filmstrip of Camel clips, rendered — like a chest X-ray — in glorious black and white.

(Have the A/V kid open a new browser window here, give him a wedgie, then view the first commercial. Pause it and come on back when it's over for my observations; there are many of them. Commercials and observations. Oh, you know what I mean!)

Who better to endorse the mildness of a cigarette than an opera singer? Marguerite Piazza, a featured vocalist on Sid Caesar's pioneering Your Show of Shows, takes some time from the tomfoolery to warble about their "rich flavor" and a "mildness that agrees with [her] throat." You'll hear a lot about cigarettes' flavor in the upcoming pieces. Do individual brands really taste differently? As someone who has only ever smoked one or two cigars in a good year, I merely assumed that all cigarettes tasted like they smelled, except perhaps for menthol ones, which I always assumed were steeped in vats with those Christmas tree auto de-stinkers.

IMDB lists Piazza as still alive, though the Jungle Room details a late-life battle with aggressive facial skin cancer. Hmmmmmm.

Next up, "Mister Versatility," Buddy Rogers, whose many talents are caricatured in hydrocephilac cartoons before we speak to him, "backstage," butt in hand, about his undying (har) loyalty to Camel cigarettes. "I like a cigarette that agrees with my throat," he intones, as a monolithic pack of Camels, cigs arrayed like titan organ pipes, is shown arising from the Arctic Circle, like a tobacco-based palace for Santa Claus. The viewer is exhorted to try Camels for 30 days (I can hear the zero coughing from the smoldering Camel), and then — if this month of mainlining unfiltered nicotine isn't enough to sink the hook in — is introduced to a siren I've come to call "Tina T-Zone." Undetected for millennia by medical luminaries from Galen to Leonard McCoy, the T-Zone serves the role of "telling you how mild and good-tasting Camels are." This sexy shorthair blows an inviting plume of smoke that all but has a cartoon hand at the end gesturing the viewer in for a better look at her T, if not her A.


I do admit, though, that I am a sucker for the practical stop-motion special effects used at the end of the ad.

"What cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?" You only have to walk outside a hospital these days to be reminded of how many otherwise responsible, learned medical professionals smoke. But it's still shocking to see print or, worse, TV ads in which people representing the medical profession are extolling the virtues of any cigarette, to say nothing of a single brand. Charming images of physicians in an operating theater, or walking toward their Godfather–looking sedans with the traditional black bag for a housecall, are blown away by the sight of some Kildare lighting up in his fucking office! Imagine going in for a sitdown with your doc and having him fire up a smoke while telling you to lose weight. Any doctors who actually earned money representing or defending the tobacco industry for these ads should get the same treatment the Syndicate did in The X-Files, just get dry-gulched in an abandoned hangar by a ring of flamethrower-wielding cancer victims.

The next two ads feature baseball players. The message here is that if a strapping 6-foot-2 war hero or a star pitcher can play a whole game and still suck down a nail or ten afterwards, so can Mister and Missus Cold War. Why, these players have even stopped chewing tobacco! These aren't the 1870s! Only Stalin spits on floors! Wake up to the smoke that rules the world: Camel!

We're back to Hollywood for the next shill, actor and singer Dick Haymes, who spontaneously vents to a hapless D-girl about his busy schedule. While this five-time divorcee and drunk is griping about the scarce free time his records, movies, and other sources of alimony dough are leaving him, he whips out — from a pocket of possibly the ugliest vest in human history — a pack of Camels. He, too, is followed by the exhortation to take the 30-Day Camel Challenge, and a reappearance of toothsome smoke-kitten Tina T-Zone.

(Fun fact: Dick died of lung cancer in 1980. Hmmmmmmm.)

Would television reruns be complete without an appearance by a Gabor sister? Hell no! What does Eva Gabor do after hamming it up in a chintzy costume drama? Flunkies flock in to whisk away her tiara, proffer a sheaf of smokes, and light 'er up. Heaven forfend Mrs. Green Acres has to spend an erg digging out her own pack of Camels. I guarantee you, those billions of Camels the ads keep claiming are being smoked — these guys are digging them out of a rolled-up shirt sleeve or a plaid flannel pocket, and they could lay out the crewcutted pencilneck who fires one up for Eva with one shot.

"Led'z go zomevere vhere ve gan be gomvtable," she beckons, as she changes into a bustier and eases onto a fainting couch in the only funeral home in America with a full-length mirror. Like the others, she blathers about how easy Camels are on her throat. Then it's back to the Dirty 30 taking a drag on a Camel, and Tina T-Zone giving you the nicotine eye.

Marguerite Piazza is back for more after Eva's husky parting plea to try Camels. Unlike Gabor, Piazza actually does her own work around the place, indulging in a little ikebana before lighting up. Behavioralist psychology at work: Complete a household task, smoke a butt. Unlike those bonbons, ladies, Camels will keep you thin, as thin as an opera singer, so when the time comes, you can just slip right into that iron lung. And once again, Tina T-Zone blows you a toxic hello. (Conveniently, after the "pack after pack, week after week" adds up to "decade after decade," the T-Zone also indicates the tissue an oncologist will eventually excise.)

We now arrive at the prestigious Camel Autograph series, a parade of addicted actors pressed into service for their drug of choice. A nighttime skyline transforms, as it might in a tobacco executive's acid trip, into a balustrade of cigarettes, and the Pack of Destiny rotates to reveal . . . Robert Young. That's right, the future Marcus goddamned Welby, MD and Father Knows Best title patriarch. Unlike our other smoky Joes and Josies, Bob can't be troubled to pitch in person for his longtime favorite smoke, letting an 8 x 10" glossy and a catchy jingle do his work. Despite playing a doctor on TV, respiratory failure would eventually call him to the big ER in the sky. (Hmmmmmmm.)

Richard Carlson is the next on the block, attending the screening of one of his many workmanlike productions before the awe-inspiring totem of a tumescent pack of Camels. Smoking in a movie theater. If you did that today, even mid-film cellphone users would help beat you to death.

Scrumpy smoke sorceress Tina T-Zone exhales her lethal love at the end of this one, too. Did you know that some folks sexually fetishize cigarette smoking, and that some websites actually sell access to videos of actresses langourously blowing smoke? It is entirely possible that some lone pervert uses a loop of Tina T-Zone as his, erm, "finishing move."

People, the collection of clips goes on like this. I will leave it to you to explore the remainder and learn for yourselves the degree to which Hollywood and the dukes of sport lent their names out to the merchants of death. Of the remaining pieces, these highlights stand out:

• Guys packing cartons of Camels in their luggage before a trip (where are they going in 1940s America that doesn't sell cigarettes? Christian Science meeting?).
• A sport fisherman revealing his lunchbox to be about half full of Camel packs. It's the fifth food group!
  
• Someone who is so goddamn addicted to smokes that he has a whole CARTON of butts in his car's glovebox.

• A guy dropping another whole carton of Camels in a picnic basket! Is he visiting his wife in jail?
• Another opera singer announcing, "Once a Camel smoker, always a Camel smoker." That would look great on a headstone.
  

Is it any wonder that my parents were both hooked in their teens??

Thirty years from now, the sort of aggressive cinema smoking shown in films like Casino and Fight Club will seem as taboo as the Flintsones ads do today. I don't possess any moralistic prognosticative powers, and certainly, even at just one or two cigars a year, I'm not immune from the title of hypocrite. Still, with state after state outlawing indoor smoking, and with cigarette advertising in the retreat, one might envision a future in which those few remaining addicts, sheltered together for support in Las Vegas or an Indian casino, unlit butts drooping from their lips, dig frantically through their pockets for a Zippo or a book of matches to get their fix.

If it's Snagglepuss who finally hooks them up with a flame, I don't want to know.