Homogenized justice

You’re in a recliner trying to figure out the precise body angle to successfully throw popcorn into your mouth when all of a sudden you hear sirens.

You think for a moment they’re coming from the TV, but then realize you’re watching “Sunrise Earth” and there are no chase scenes on that program, not even during ratings sweeps.

So you determine that they’re coming from outside, a supposition confirmed moments later when a blaring police car stops on the street outside your house. Strange, you think, where’s the car that it stopped?

Then a second ear-piercing police car stops in an unusual spot outside your home — your driveway. The third noisy police car picks an even more interesting location — your front yard. Before you can gather your wits enough to brush the missed popcorn kernels off your T-shirt, the front door is pounded on and there is a yell.

“This is the police. Open up!”

You eject yourself from the recliner, stumble over to the door in your T-shirt and sweats, and open the door, not at all concerned about your appearance. Which turns out to be a moot point since in the next blink of an eye your face is smooshed into the carpet while your arms are behind your back in handcuffs. As you’re led away, the sound of the Miranda rights is interspersed with crickets chirping their morning welcome on “Sunrise Earth.” A police officer abruptly turns off the TV set, muttering to himself about the lack of violence on TV nowadays.

At the police station, the facts surrounding your arrest begin to be made clear. Someone bearing more than a passing resemblance to you has robbed the city’s largest bank, making off with a king’s ransom. Just to be sure that he got that much money, he also held several bank employees and customers hostage, including famous writer Stephen King, who always knew that “king’s ransom” phrase would get him in trouble someday.

When hostage negotiations broke down, the bank robber fled in a vehicle remarkably similar to the one parked in your garage. The one person who said he saw the license plate quoted the plate number from your car. When you question the eyesight of the witness, you learn that it’s a fellow who eats carrot cake three times a day. Your driver’s license, which disappeared a few days earlier, turned up inside the bank that was robbed. You then figure out how you lost it. In filling out an application for a checking account that earns a remarkable 0.25 percent interest, you pulled out your driver’s license to copy down some info, then made this unfortunate remark to a stranger filling out a form next to you: “I wish I had been robbing a bank while they were taking my driver’s license photo. Nylon stockings over my face would have been an improvement.” By the way, the stranger is giving a statement to detectives in the next room.

You know you’re in serious trouble. Circumstantial evidence has you committing a heinous crime that could lock you away for quite a while in a place that doesn’t get “Sunrise Earth,” just HBO shows that give the prisoners even more dastardly ideas than they already have. You need a lawyer, and somehow you don’t think your cousin who got his degree from experimental classes at the community college will do the trick this time out. You need the most persuasive legal representative available. Do you get Alan Dershowitz, Roy Black or Thomas Mesereau? Do you get Nancy Grace, Catherine Crier or Jack Ford? Do you get Judge Judy, Judge Larry Joe, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Alex, Judge Cristina, Judge Mathis or Piers Morgan?

No, the legal representative you employ in this life-and-death situation is the person who originated the “Got Milk?” advertising campaign. Because if this person can persuade some of the most beautiful, image-conscious celebrities on the planet to be photographed with hideous milk mustaches, surely this person can persuade a jury of 12 of your peers that you are innocent of any and all charges against you.

Capital offense

Maybe we should just get rid of capital letters. People don’t seem to know how to use them anyway.

Companies are especially bad at this. A company name is a proper noun, a name for a particular person, place or thing. As such, a proper noun has the distinction of getting the first letter of each word capitalized — King Kong, Empire State Building, New York City. But companies are making a monkey of themselves by abusing the privilege.

Take the Fox broadcasters, for instance. They keep insisting on capitalizing every letter in their name — FOX. They feel this psychological need to call undue attention to themselves, as if denouncing Democrats every chance they get doesn’t get enough people to stare at them. Well, if the Fox folks insist on capitalizing their name thusly, FOX, I’m going to insist on pronouncing it as individual letters, F-O-X, just as you pronounce the CIA espionage agency C-I-A and not “see-a.” And if you don’t like it, F-O-X, well, T-F-B.

Then there’s the other extreme, the companies that want to be cutesy-poo by spelling their names in all lowercase letters, like the Adidas shoe marketers, which spell the company name adidas. Sorry, Adidas, but I already have a common noun that I use to describe what I’m wearing on my feet — shoes. You want the image of a proper noun slumming with the common nouns, like Donald Trump dining at a Denny’s, a big man mingling with the little people. Fine. Let’s take away the capital letters from you and your friends and see how long it takes for you to start begging for caviar to be a side dish with the Grand Slam breakfast.

And don’t get me started with people who don’t want to capitalize their names. E.E. Cummings was a poet whose biggest distinction was that he spelled his name e.e. cummings and that he chose to suddenly in the middle of a poem capitalize words such as Life and Death. Apparently, e.e. was having a Life-and-Death struggle with grammar.

And there’s no way if you sing like K.D. Lang does that you should pretend like you’re no big deal by spelling your name k.d. lang. It’s pretentiousness by subtraction.

OK, e.e. and k.d., we’ll eliminate everybody’s capital letters along with yours and see how you like fading into the background permanently. And we’ll also take away the periods in your names, so you can be ee and kd. Congratulations, you’re now a typo.

Speaking of pretentiousness, how snobbish is it when a company capitalizes the “The” in front of its name? Somebody in the city of Mission starts a bank and doesn’t just call it Mission Bank, but The Mission Bank. As if you’re the only bank in Mission, which you’re not. Any bank that capitalizes the “The” in front of its name but turns out not to be the only one of its kind deserves to lose not only all its capital letters but also its city name, and for the rest of time be referred to merely as “the bank.”

Likewise, I always find myself rooting against the sports teams of The Ohio State University. It’s not the only state university in Ohio. And even if it were, it’s bombastic with an H-bomb to capitalize the “The” in front of your name.

Here’s what would be cool: The next time Ohio State is playing a game, the TV people running the on-screen scoreboard shouldn’t abbreviate the school as Ohio St. or OSU. The school name should appear thusly: Mich 35, The 14.

So let’s remove all capital letters and let all these big-time institutions swim in a sea of mediocrity. Serves them right. And while we’re at it, let’s take away from them those annoying punctuation marks they sometimes like to use, like Yahoo! Although it does make me chuckle every time I see a headline like this: Yahoo! Employees Lose Their Jobs.

The agony and the estimate

“How would you rate your pain?” the nurse asked.

“I would say it’s first-rate, except that sounds as if I like it. So maybe it’s second-rate.”

“What I meant was…”

“Or does it go the other way? Like a first-degree burn isn’t as bad as a second-degree burn and isn’t nearly as awful as a third-degree burn. Then again, if we’re going to measure burns by degree, since they involve heat, why don’t we just use the Fahrenheit scale? Louise has a 135-degree burn, while Ed has a 220-degree burn.”

“What I should have said was, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?”

“Is a low number less painful than a high number?”

“Yes,” the nurse said.

“So zero would be no pain whatsoever.”

“That’s right.”

“Do numb people and people in comas have their own scale?”

“That doesn’t apply to you right now. Give me a number.”

“Can you give me some sort of guide as to which number I should select?”

“Well, 2 is a mild pain, when you’re only aware of the pain when you focus on it.”

“For instance, when someone asks me to rate my pain.”

“If your pain is a 4, then it’s tolerable. You can sometimes ignore it.”

“What would make me sometimes ignore it? Having friends over at my house?”

“Sure,” the nurse said.

“So a 2 pain is ignored if I have two friends over and a 4 pain is ignored if four friends are over?”

“Not quite. If your pain is a 6, for instance, you’re in some distress, and six friends probably wouldn’t change that.”

“Even if they were six masseuses in bikinis?”

“A pain that’s an 8 is severe. You can only concentrate on simple things.”

“Like counting to 8?”

“And if your pain is a 10, it’s disabling and you must deal with it immediately.”

“Are all pains supposed to be even numbers? If I said my pain was a 7, would you find me odd? Would I get written up in a medical journal?”

“No,” the nurse said. “Pick a number.”

“OK. I would split the difference and say I’m a 5, but I bet most people do that, and I want to stand out so you take my pain seriously.”

“We take all pain seriously.”

“I say ‘Ow’ a few times a day. I would say three times a day. So if I said my pain was a 3, you would interpret that to mean it’s more than a 2, so I think about it even when somebody doesn’t ask me about it, but it’s not quite a 4, so I can ignore it even when I’m by myself. Let’s call it a 3.”

“Thank you. Oh, before you see the doctor, I have to ask you to fill out a short survey about your medical care here.”

“I’m sorry, answering surveys is against my religion.”

“What religion is that?”

“Swiss Unorthodox Skeptic.”

“This will only take a second. How would you rate the caregivers at this facility, on a scale of 1 to 10?”

“Gee, just like the pain scale. In that case, definitely a 3.”

Golf the announcers’ way

In trying to become a better golfer, I watch a lot of television for advice. Not advice from golfers, though. Oh, I suppose you might get lucky every once in a while and learn something from how they swing or what club they use in a certain situation. But for rapid improvement in my game, I think it’s much better to listen to golf announcers and follow their advice.

For starters, announcers are always saying that a golf course should fit a player’s eye. Now the first 20,000 times I heard that I thought to myself, “Doesn’t every course fit every golfer’s eye? Every time I’ve ever looked a course, everything seemed to fit inside my eye — all the fairways and the greens and the trees and the sand traps and the water hazards — all of them managed to slip inside my field of vision. The only way a golf course wouldn’t fit my eye is if my eyes were barely open and I’d miss an overhanging tree.” Which is of course what announcers mean. Don’t let yourself get hit by a flying golf ball or the backswing of a club so that your eye swells shut and doesn’t allow you to fit the entire course inside it.

Golf can be an intimidating game, so it’s important to learn from announcers what’s an easy shot and what’s a difficult shot. If a golfer is preparing to swing and the announcer says, “I don’t see any way he can advance the ball 50 yards, let alone get it to the green,” that means the ball will undoubtedly end up three feet from the hole. On the other hand, if the announcer says, “This is a piece of cake. He might even make this,” expect the ball to go way off line and the next shot to be even more easy — I mean difficult.

Here’s why if you really want to learn the game you should pay far more attention to golf announcers than golfers. You watch a golf tournament on TV and you see in a five-minute stretch golfer after golfer holing out from all sorts of places: a 220-yard hole-in-one, a 170-yard eagle from the fairway, a 75-foot snaking putt on a treacherous green. And you think to yourself: “I could never make any of those shots more than once in a lifetime, and yet these guys are doing it one after the other. I might as well give up.” Ah, but listen closely to the announcer. Just before the shot he’ll subtly slip in a phrase such as “While we were away” or “A moment ago” or “While so-and-so was putting, here’s what was happening on 16.” That means the stupendous golf shots you were watching one after the other were all recorded, stored up so they could be showed in a montage. Considering how many golf shots are shown this way in what’s supposed to be a live event, I’ve often wondered why the PGA Tour isn’t fully sponsored by TiVo.

People often make fun of golfers for the outrageous way they dress, but what you wear is important on the course. Announcers are always mentioning how a great golfer must “play within himself,” which means he’d better be wearing an awful lot of padding, especially around the groin.

While you must “play within yourself,” you also have to come out “firing on all cylinders.” In other words, be aggressive, but not so aggressive that someone watching thinks you’re playing aggressively.

Everything you do and everything you are has to be “solid.” You need to get off to a solid start, be a solid ball-striker, hit your irons solidly, have a solid stroke with the putter and, above all, hope that the people rooting for you in the gallery are solid so that when you hit a wayward ball, it will bounce solidly off them and end up in the short grass.

Finally, keep in mind that golf is a game of “course management.” Announcers constantly lavish praise on players who “think their way around the golf course.” You can always tell the guys who don’t think on the golf course because they’re the ones who go straight from the first hole to the 16th hole, shoot a 15 and end up being disqualified.

Semi-curious

The next time you’re watching an interview with somebody famous and he says that he has no regrets, that he wouldn’t change one darn thing in his life, remember this: Of course, he wouldn’t. He’s a celebrity. A rich, pampered, babe-magnet celebrity. Why in the wide, wide world of sports would you regret anything that got you to this point in your life?

Myself, I have loads of regrets. Truckloads of regrets. And one of them is that after watching all those late-night commercials for truck driving schools while growing up, I never bothered to enroll. It’s not that I pine for a life where my arms are locked onto a steering wheel for dear life while I’m whizzing down the road looking desperately for a place to whizz that doesn’t resemble a bottle. It’s just that I’m curious about a bunch of things involving trucks.

I’d like to know why trucks seemingly have only two speeds: 20 miles an hour when the truck is directly in front of your vehicle, and 200 miles an hour when the truck is directly behind your vehicle.

I’d like to know if truck drivers sitting together in a diner ever have this conversation: “Funny, you never hear of a Honda Civic jackknifing. Or a Toyota Camry jackknifing. The only vehicles that ever jackknife are tractor-trailers. Gee, maybe we ought to be more careful.”

I’d like to know who came up with that fascinating piece of truck logic that states, “If you can’t see my mirrors, then I can’t see you.” For your information, I can always see your mirrors. It’s real easy to see something several feet higher than me that’s attached to a multi-ton monster. If you want people to stay far away from your truck as you’re cruising down the highway, wouldn’t it be better to say, “My truck is so much bigger than what you’re driving, why would I bother looking for you?”

I’d like to know why the back door of the trailer the truck is pulling is always slightly ajar, and I’d like to know why little rocks are always flying out the opening and heading for my car. The side of the truck says it’s hauling bread, but no whole wheat buns ever fly my way. Are truck drivers making extra money between hauls of merchandise transporting pebbles from one rock quarry to another?

I’d like to know what law of physics tells drivers of trucks with open beds that an unsecured item being hauled by them will magically stay put as the truck is flying down the freeway. Do these nitwits reach their destination, look at the empty truck bed and say to themselves, “Uh-oh, I must have taken the wrong truck”? Do these nincompoops ever look in their rearview window and wonder why there’s a dining room furniture set stuck in the grill of the car right behind them?

I’d like to know what famed acting instructor is responsible for teaching truck drivers that half-maniacal, half-petrified look when their truck is making a right turn on a city street and appears headed directly at your vehicle in the other lane. You’re scribbling a will and testament in the dust on your dashboard when you look up again and see the truck driver chortling as he suddenly steers his elephantine vehicle out of your path and goes on his merry way.

I’d like to know about that bumper sticker on trucks that says, “How’s my driving? Call 800-555-FUSS.” Why do I get the feeling that if you call the number, the person answering the phone is the truck driver right in front of you?

And I’d like to know why you no longer see truck driving school commercials on television. Did all these places go bankrupt and close? The lack of truck driving schools would explain a lot of the things I see on the road. And what are former instructors at truck driving schools doing nowadays? I mean, besides teaching people how to drive SUVs.

Thereon and on

If you’re as tired of legalese and the not-so-fine fine print as I am, then do what I do every time someone presents a lengthy document for me to sign.

Read the entire thing.

I don’t mean skim through it and flip pages as if you’re Evelyn Wood on a caffeine high needing a bathroom break in the worst way. I mean sit down, get comfy and, in a leisurely, unhurried fashion, carefully read every word of the document before you sign it.

Carry a cheap pair of reading glasses with you to make sure you can make out even the tiniest words. Adjust them after every sentence, because the blasted things never hug your ears and nose just right. Oh, and ask the people who are waiting for you to sign their papers if they have Windex — insist on streak-free — and a towel — insist on microfiber — so that you can keep your glasses clean after smudging them with all your various adjustments.

Question the random capitalization of letters in the document. At an auto dealership, ask why the first letter of “Car” is capitalized but the first letter of “vehicle” is not. Ask the people tapping their feet in eager anticipation of your signature if they would be so good as to get you a dictionary, not one of those cheap paperbacks, but a hardbound one with at least 200,000 entries. If any words in your document are misspelled or capitalized incorrectly, ask if the document can be retyped with the corrections, or at least changed with a notary public present.

Be sure to say aloud any strange phrase such as “Article First” and then say in as supercilious a voice as you can muster: “Article First? Shouldn’t that be Article 1? I hope you didn’t pay the printer by the letter.” Then laugh in a haughty way and keep laughing until the people waiting for you to sign the papers decide it’s in their best interests to laugh with you. When their laughter joins your, stop and icily say to them: “Oh, you think this is funny?”

Even though you have a dictionary with you, which you should take home with you or else the deal is off, ask the other people in the room the definition of words such as “thereon.” When they grab your dictionary for assistance, tell them to get their own dictionary, that you don’t want yours to get any folded pages. When they have run out to buy their own dictionary and returned, they will tell you “thereon” means “on or upon that or it.” Nod your head as if you understand for just a second, then ask: “Please use it in a sentence,” as if you’re competing in the National Spelling Bee. They will then say: “This includes any interest and penalties thereon.” Again nod your head in apparent understanding, then suddenly stop and ask: “How does ‘thereon’ differ from ‘thereupon’?” When they struggle for an answer, throw your hands in the air and exclaim: “Well, if you don’t understand what I’m supposed to be signing, how am I supposed to put my name on it?”

If you are told to initial certain sections of the document, ask if they want the letters cursive or noncursive. Initial parts of the document that don’t require your initials. When the now desperate people whose deal you are holding up get huffy at you about your unnecessary initials, make a long, sad face, whimper a bit, and say in a voice just short of tears that you thought the subsections were just as important as the main sections. Before your tears can roll off your face and stain the document, they will bring you a soothing soda, pat you on the back and assure you that you’re right and they’re wrong.

Finally, after several hours, sign the document and conclude the transaction with the words: “What, no bubbly?” As the people you’re dealing with scramble to find the rare champagne you seek, know that this is the last time these folks will ever present to you a document of such wordiness.

Making a name for yourself

I’d like to spend a couple of moments directly addressing the organizations that keep sending address labels to me in the mail in the hope that I will contribute to keeping their little groups from going under and asunder.

Please stop with the silly address labels. I won’t use them — ever. If I did ever use them, the calligraphy is so antiquated that the post office would think that the mail it’s on has been lost for the last 200 years.

But if you insist on mailing these awful things to me, there’s something you should know.

My official first name is William. But nobody who knows me calls me William. One look at my putrid romantic record and you can see why I long ago abandoned hope of keeping William in use for the “Conqueror” references.

My checkbook says William because a while back I did the living will and trust legal gobbledegook, so now each check I write says it’s courtesy of the “William Kempin Trust, From William Kempin, Trustee of the William Kempin Trust. Trust me.” That’s a darn good reason I use my credit card all the time. Except that I figured the credit card folks wanted my official name, too. At least on the credit card William is only mentioned once.

I prefer to be known as Bill. Not Billy. Billy is for evangelists and Tae Bo hawkers and managers whose idea of a persuasive argument is noticing there’s not enough dirt on an umpire’s shoes and immediately doing something about it with his own shoes. I’m a Bill.

My last name is Kempin. Not Klempin. Not Kemptin. Not Klemptin. Look, I’ve heard my own voice on voice mail, and while I don’t sound as authoritative as the person on TV who announces the underwriters for “Teletubbies,” I don’t mutter my name in such a way that it sounds as if 12 extra consonants have climbed aboard.

I’m a big believer in the concept that you pick a name and stick with it. I don’t like people who call themselves Randolph when they’re pretending to be important and Randy when they’re chilling. When Randolph/Randy tries to pull that two-timing name game with me, I choose to call him by a default third name: Claude, which can easily mistaken for Clod, which is OK by me.

People do amazingly strange things with their names. When I was in first grade, there were these twins named Lorrie and Dorrie. For some family reason, they weren’t around for second grade, but they returned for third grade. Except now their names were Darlene and Marlene. Glad they kept the rhymes so their classmates could recognize them.

I had a friend growing up named Dennis. Then when we got to high school and started having involved conversations with the opposite sex, he suddenly started calling himself Rick. Which was fine. I have no problem with people trying to improve themselves, be it plastic surgery or a better name. But we had a mutual friend named Robert who, even when everybody else was calling my friend Rick, insisted on calling him Dennis. The change to a cooler name only works when all your pals get the memo.

So if you absolutely must send me mailing labels I absolutely won’t use, please make all of them say Bill Kempin, which in calligraphy looks like Tibb Rembir. Which is fine, so when I send you a letter back asking for a thousand more labels, some guy named Tibb can be the beneficiary.

And for those of you not in the address label biz who nonetheless like to label people, one more thing about names. Drop the cutesy-poo one name for a famous couple. No Brangelina, no Bennifer, no Tomkat. I call all couples, famous or not, by the same name: “Them.” Unless we’re talking about a hookup of two people named Thor and Emma.

The searchers

I’m not at all concerned about finding someone special to share my life with.

Why should I be? After all, I have lots of help in my search.

Dating services aren’t the ones helping me. They’re all over the joint anyway. On one extreme, a service offers Great Expectations. On the other extreme, another service says It’s Just Lunch.

Then there’s the service called Book of Matches. That means there’s an entire book of people who are looking for someone like me. Or it means that once I try out the online service I’ll want to set my computer on fire.

Some services even offer a guarantee: If I haven’t met a special someone within six months, I get the next six months free. In other words, I won’t have to pay for 26 more weeks of not finding someone special among the second-tier candidates. What a deal.

Match.com at one point featured know-it-all Dr. Phil and his no-nonsense approach to dating. He called his program “Mind, Find, Bind.” Why do I get the feeling that most of the people who participated in his program ended up calling it “Blind, Behind, Confined”?

No, dating services aren’t for me. And I don’t need them. I have something better than a dating service. I have a network of people who know me through and through. And they’re searching far and wide for my someone special.

Who’s in this network? All the women I’ve ever been interested in.

How do I know they’re out there looking? Because they’ve told me so.

The conversation usually goes like this:

“So, Bill, why aren’t you seeing anyone?”

“I thought I was seeing you.”

“I don’t see that happening.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“I’ll have to see if I can find somebody just right for you.”

“Don’t you see that it’s you that I want?”

“See you later.”

And so this woman joins the legions of women I’ve longed for in the search for my special someone. I’m sure it’s a difficult exploration, filled with exchanges like this:

“I’m looking for someone who will go out with a guy I know.”

“What kind of guy is he?”

“He’s the kind of guy who makes you feel like doing wonderful things for him.”

“Especially something that keeps you from having to spend time with him.”

“Precisely.”

“I know a guy just like that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. In fact, I told him the same thing you told your guy — that I would go find someone special for him. Interested in meeting him?”

“I don’t know. What’s your guy’s name?”

“Bill.”

“Hey, the guy I’m conducting a search for is named Bill, too.”

“It’s probably the same guy.”

“Want to go with me and search together for someone special for Bill?”

“Great.”

“But before that, let’s search for some clothes and some lunch.”

Mission statement

My mission is to be a humorist on my good days, a philosopher on my average days and a writer on my bad days.

I won’t have a strategic plan, because all plans involve strategy. Show me a nonstrategic plan and I’ll show you an unsafe haven.

As for my action plan, there isn’t any, because the only action I get these days is moving my fingers along a computer keyboard. This is why movies and television shows about writers are so dull — typing isn’t exactly the heart-pounding equivalent of a car chase. A car chase involving writers isn’t any better. The writers usually get so lost in thought that they get lost on the roads.

However, I will come up with a stationary plan, as long as you promise not to throw anything at me.

That’s not to say that my work won’t incorporate lots of energy and enthusiasm, not counting the stuff I write before 9 a.m. after taking a muscle relaxant the night before. Excuse me for a moment while I yawn.

This will be a progressive enterprise, unless I delete a file because it stinks. But while that won’t count as progress for me, it will be progress for you, dear reader, since I won’t have wasted your precious time boring you with such drivel.

I will take total responsibility for all of my actions, unless someone points a finger at me and tries to force me into doing so. Responsibility is mine to take, not yours to give me. Unless you plan to give me the responsibility of running a modeling agency.

When you read my writing, I guarantee that at times you will feel compelled to actually laugh, not just smile and say to someone else in the room, “That’s funny.” Laughter is much more greatly appreciated, you see. Merely saying to a humorist “That’s funny” means as much as a mom’s compliment the first time you wear new clothes.

But the guarantee won’t be a money back guarantee, because no reputable store that sells stuff you can read will give you a refund for something unless you can prove you haven’t read it. And the only way I know that you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you haven’t read something is to be a contestant on “The Bachelor.”

A mission statement often has what is known as a vision statement, so here’s mine: I used to have great vision in my right eye and be nearsighted in my left eye. Then I decided to have Lasik surgery. I was told that since my left eye is my dominant eye, I would get distance vision in that eye and close-up vision in my right eye. Two surgeries later, my left eye is great, but I have trouble seeing things both far away and close up in my right eye. Actually I can’t see things that great close up in my left eye either, so I now have to wear cheapo reading glasses. This vision statement is starting to read as if I just had my eyes dilated.

A mission statement also often has what is known as a values statement, so here goes: I’m committed to the highest standards of honesty, ethics and integrity, not counting this values statement, which I stole off the Internet from some other company. In that regard, I refuse to take shortcuts to success. Writers really can’t take shortcuts anyway, because if we start leaving out words, our sentences become difficult to read.

Companies in their mission statements often say that their employees are their most valued assets, which always gets a laugh when the mission statement is passed out to them because the company didn’t ask for the employees’ input in putting together the statement. Since I don’t have any employees, my fingers are my most valued assets, so I won’t be poking them down into the garbage disposal to see why it’s not working properly.

In conclusion, I seek to utilize my core competencies to my competitive advantage in every situational analysis, keeping in perspective functionalistic versus interpretionistic approaches to the internal and external aspects of every facet of my performance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for another muscle relaxant.

Fitness for the prosecution

I’m either the world’s fattest skinny person or the skinniest fat person.

It doesn’t help that I have thin arms, thin legs and a thin butt. That leaves only two places for my fat to show: my stomach and my face. I guess the fat sentries at those two places of my body got their training at the Minerals Management Service, BP Division.

I’ve tried exercising, but it’s boring and unnatural, which is odd because boredom is usually such a natural thing for me.

There’s the skiing machine, where you balance yourself on two boards that roll back and forth, simulating cross country skiing. In other words, you’re simulating something that nobody does unless they’re competing in the Winter Olympics. Even the people in the cross country skiing event don’t do this between Olympics — they just show up every four years and say to themselves, “Boy, I hope I remember how to do this.” To keep your balance on the skiing machine, you hold two cords as wide and as strong as the things you use to tighten your sweat pants around your waist. It’s hard to build up any speed knowing that the only thing separating you from a broken ankle is something that snaps off your sweat pants while you’re standing still.

There’s the elliptical, which is a mix of skiing cross country, riding a tricycle and using the navigation system of a supersonic jet. A high-tech screen monitors the progress of your workout and offers encouraging words such as “keep going,” “faster” and “keep going faster.”

There’s the exercise bike. My favorite is the recumbent, which is like a recliner in which you can pedal to the kitchen and get a drink without leaving the chair. Come to think of it, they should just invent a recliner that you can pedal to the kitchen and back.

There’s the treadmill, which lets you run on a cushiony surface that’s zipping backward much faster than you’re trudging forward. Again, there’s a high-tech monitor that tells you everything except how much it’s going to hurt when you fly off the machine backward while trying to interpret what the monitor is saying in front of you.

And then there are strength training machines. Some use real weights as resistance, some use elastic cables as resistance, while some use electronic resistance. I save myself a couple thousand dollars by resisting these machines naturally, although I’m tempted to try them for one reason — if you believe the ads, these machines eliminate all body hair in no time flat.

Since exercising seems so weird, I feel I’m better off getting fit by watching what I eat.

I researched several diets, including the one where you can eat all the protein you want, the one where you can eat all the carbs you want and the one where you can eat all the fat you want. Wanting to get quick results, I decided to utilize all the diets at once. For some reason, that didn’t work out so great.

So I simplified things and resorted to good, old-fashioned portion control. I read that at every meal you should never eat a portion of a food that exceeds the size of your palm. So I started showing up at the dinner table wearing a first baseman’s mitt.

But I’m not sure portion control is the secret, either. Look at the guys who are getting the trophies in all these eating contests. They don’t appear to be carrying a vat of fat in their gut and butt. Yet every time they compete, they’re setting yet another world record for the mass consumption of hot dogs.

The next time a world-class eater competes, it would be interesting if someone entered a lion against him. Even if the guy opens a big lead — let’s say 50 hot dogs versus 30 — the lion is still in good shape. All it has to do at that point is to eat the guy. Not only has the lion eliminated the leader, but I think the lion gets credit for consuming the guy’s 50 hot dogs.

Abbott and Costello and Palin

Abbott: Did you hear about Sarah Palin’s legal defense fund?

Costello: No. What about it?

Abbott: It’s illegal.

Costello: Wait a minute. I thought you said it’s legal.

Abbott: Yeah, it’s a legal defense fund.

Costello: So it’s legal.

Abbott: No, it’s illegal.

Costello: I’m getting VERY confused!

Abbott: It’s very simple. The legal defense fund is illegal.

Costello: Let me get this straight. This lady’s defense fund: Legal or illegal?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Who decided this?

Abbott: Who’s on first.

Costello: What?

Abbott: What’s on second.

Costello: And where’s Sarah Palin?

Abbott: Way out in left field.

My apology to BP

Dear BP:

I see that many Republicans are apologizing to you because the mean old president insists that you help clean up the Gulf of Texaco — I mean, Mexico.

That made me realize that I probably owe you an apology, too. So here goes…

BP, I’m sorry that our birds and sea life weren’t already acclimated to being covered with toxic goo before you spilled oil in the gulf. Whenever I got new oil put in my car, I foolishly paid an additional fee to have the old oil disposed of in an environmentally safe fashion. But from now on, I’ll ask the people servicing my car to give me the old oil so I can dump it down by the riverbank or on top of the chicken dish at your favorite restaurant. Be sure to ask for the chicken a la Quaker State.

BP, I’m sorry I laugh every time I hear a Republican say that the oil drilling moratorium in the gulf is worse than the oil spill. I guess it never dawned on me that if I were a fish and I had oil all over me, I’d feel much better knowing that another wave of oil was about to hit me. Cars do better with oil changes. Fish probably do, too.

BP, I’m sorry I drive a Toyota Prius that gets 50 miles to the gallon, meaning I don’t use as much gasoline as you’d like me to. Because of my selfishness, your executives last year were able to afford to buy only one new yacht each. That makes yacht races so much less exciting. To show you how sorry I am for driving a Prius, I’d like to invite all of BP’s top executives to my house to demolish my Prius. I’ll open up the hood and you can each yank out any orange electrical cable you want.

BP, I’m sorry I keep making fun of you because it never occurred to you that oil could leak. Look at all our pristine roadways and driveways and garages and tell me when you’ve ever seen oil on any of them. It practically never happens. It’s more rare than Lady Gaga keeping her clothes on at a baseball game.

BP, I’m sorry I watch those daily news programs that show wildlife getting sludged and cleanup workers getting sick. I’m only encouraging those intrepid journalists to take more photos and videos of this ghastly sight, and you’ve been trying so hard to shoo away the cameras and keep this all a secret. And now I realize why you so desperately wanted to keep this all hush-hush. This was going to be your Christmas surprise, wasn’t it? You were going to wake all of us up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning and make us put on our winter coats and take us to the gulf coast so we could see our surprise Christmas gift from you: America’s own version of the Black Sea. And a matching set of black lungs. Oh, BP, you shouldn’t have.

No, really, you shouldn’t have.

Insincerely yours,

Bill Kempin

50 percent off-putting

When it comes to coupons, you probably have the same system I have.

I meticulously go through each newspaper, magazine and piece of mail for any coupon for any product that I might ever contemplate buying. I carefully cut the coupons out and put them in a special drawer in the kitchen. After some time has passed, I attempt to put new coupons in the drawer but find that there’s no more room. So I meticulously go through the drawer and check all the coupons, throwing out all of those whose expiration dates have passed and making room for the new coupons.

Notice that at no point do I ever take any of the coupons out of the drawer for the purpose of actually using them to save money.

I would take advantage of coupons more often if they were a bit easier to understand.

For starters, almost every coupon states that it’s “good at all participating stores.” Which is fine, except that there’s never any sign in a store that announces whether it’s participating or not. It’s all a big mystery until you take the item you’re purchasing to the cash register and hand the store employee the coupon. If she tells you, sorry, her store isn’t participating, you either buy the merchandise anyway or put the item back. Either way, you’re embarrassed and all the other customers look at you as if you’re a vagrant trying to buy a bottle of Night Train with money you borrowed from the person behind you in the checkout line.

Almost as bad is when you bring the item and the coupon to the cash register and discover that you neglected reading the coupon’s fine print. Turns out your 50 percent off coupon at the home furnishings store isn’t valid for the purchase of knives, cookware, bedding, ladders, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners and any product whose brand name starts in a consonant.

The rest of the fine print is equally mystifying. For instance, there’s the part of the coupon that says, “Cash value 1/100 cent.” Have you ever seen somebody present 100,000 of these coupons to a store employee and get $10 back?

Of course not, one reason being that the coupon goes on to say, “One coupon per customer per visit.” At least once in your life, I bet you’ve gone to a store with more than one coupon, bought one item using one coupon, took the product out to your car, put it in the car, locked the car, went back into the store with another coupon and bought another of the same item. My favorite part of this rigmarole is that the parking lot is always crowded and some driver is intent on taking your spot as you walk out of the store and get into your vehicle, but instead you turn around and go back into the store, giving the exasperated driver a fake expression not unlike that of a twit in a Monty Python sketch — the “oops, forgot something” look.

These days a lot of stores put coupons on the Internet. You go to a Web site and print out the coupon. But let’s face it, you’re ill at ease taking this piece of paper to the cash register. You feel like a counterfeiter who’s trying out the first $5 bill he’s printed on his basement press. The clerk scrunches up her face as she looks at you, trying to recall your face from the wanted posters she glanced at the last time she was at the post office. You keep looking behind you to see if a couple of Secret Service agents are about to handcuff you and read you your rights.

The clerk then speaks up: “I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t accept this.”

And you say: “No, really, it’s an Internet coupon. I printed it legitimately. I know the yellow looks wacky. I promise to replace my color cartridge right away.”

“Sir, I can’t accept this coupon because it expired last week.”

Suddenly, you feel like asking the woman behind you for a dollar, because several glugs of Night Train would taste mighty good right now.

The HDTV s-s-sensation

High-definition television has changed my life.

It certainly has changed my TV viewing habits. I used to watch television for laughs, for tears, for thrills, for chills. Now I watch television because it makes the grass look so good. Which is interesting because I won’t spend five minutes sitting outside admiring my yard, gazing deeply at the blades of grass. But I’ll do that if the grass is on HDTV.

And that means I’ve started watching soccer on television. Well, to be precise, I don’t watch people playing soccer. I watch the grass between the people playing soccer. And occasionally I’ll take a look at the ball to see if I can make out the brand name. But even this unusual way of viewing soccer has made me realize the difference between kids soccer and adult soccer, and why kids soccer is much more appealing.

When adults play soccer, each adult seems to have his own area of the soccer field that nobody else on his team wants to violate. Player A kicks the ball to Player B, who moves the ball a few yards in his personal space before kicking it to Player C in his own territory. And on and on it goes until Player J gets the ball, makes a couple of moves, then kicks the ball 20 feet wide of the net at the other end.

Likewise, the defensive players each have areas. Defender A goes one on one with Player A, Defender B hangs with Player B, and by this point I’m back to seeing if that’s dew, sweat or blood on the blade of grass where the indirect kick is about to take place.

But when kids play soccer, they haven’t been clued in to this protocol. Wherever the ball happens to be, there also happen to be 22 kids. Even the goalies, despite parents screaming: “Get back to the net, Jimmy! Get back to the net!” But this is what makes soccer fun. It’s the only thing that makes soccer fun — watching 22 kids climb over one another trying to get the ball. That and the blades of grass.

HDTV has changed my basement. What once was a simple, uncluttered area for television viewing is now a high-tech, state-of-the-art entertainment center with a large-screen plasma television, a digital cable box, a digital video recorder, a DVD-CD player, a receiver and surround-sound speakers, so if I miss hearing something in front of me I can hear it again behind me.

Each one of these devices comes with its own array of black cords that eventually come together behind the high-definition television. In fact, the area behind my TV looks like the Well of Souls in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” where Indiana Jones reluctantly confronted every snake that ever crawled.

For a while I would look behind my TV from time to time, staring at all of those black cords and wondering if there wasn’t some way to organize them in a better fashion. But now I dare not look back there, not only because the plethora of cords bothers me, but also because I fear that a family of snakes has slithered into my house at some point and taken up residence amid the cords, believing in their astigmatic way that they are among friends. Or perhaps they don’t think of the cords as friends, and the reason I’m getting such crystal-clear reception on my HDTV is because the snakes have swallowed my original set of cords and the things attached to the back of my receiver are fangs.

The snakes have chosen not to come out from behind the high-definition television and attack me. They realize that I have an unwritten pact with the snake community.

I promise never to eat snakes, never to wear snake boots or any other snake apparel, never to go mushroom hunting with those giant forked sticks designed to strangle snakes, and always to root for the snakes against any snake charmers.

In turn, the snakes promise never to bite me and to peek out from behind the HDTV only when a soccer game is on. They’re big fans of the grass, too.

About the author

Favorite movies: “Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” “The Godfather,” “Annie Hall,” “Vertigo,” “My Fair Lady,” “The Apartment,” “The Sting,” “Amadeus” and the best Meryl Streep movie ever, “Defending Your Life.” But if you asked me to pick my absolute favorite film of all time most of the time, I would choose “The Court Jester” with Danny Kaye. And remember, the pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true. Unless of course you break the chalice from the palace. Then the pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true. Got it? Good.

Favorite books: I gravitate toward literature inspired by a higher power, so any baseball analysis by Bill James suits me just fine.

Favorite groups: The organizations that fascinate me the most are the ones that come up with a catchy acronym, then scramble their brains like crazy to come up with words to fit the acronym. Like DARE, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. The whole point of DARE is getting people not to accept a dare to take drugs, so the group should have called itself HELLNO, which would have stood for Hey Everybody, Little Less Narcotics, OK? Then there’s the group ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Only the big words are represented in the acronym. The organization shouldn’t be able to choose which words go into the acronym. All of them should belong there. ACORN actually should be calling itself AOCOFRN, which I believe is pronounced AOCOFRN.

Interests: Boredom, lethargy and apathy.

Status: Symbol.

Orientation: Disoriented.

Body type: Easily ignorable, yet easily rejectable.

Ethnicity: German and Swiss on my dad’s side, English and Irish on my mom’s side. But I feel about ethnicities the same way I feel about quarterbacks in football: If you have four ethnicities, you actually have none.

Religion: If I have to pick one, it has to be Catholicism. What other religion features nonstop talk about sex from leaders who aren’t supposed to have had any? What other religion is more fascinating to watch on Sunday mornings than one in which altar boys are keeping a nervous eye on priests at all times? And what other religion would call “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, pray for us” an ejaculation and keep a straight face?

Zodiac sign: Libra, the sign of the zodiac associated with justice, fair play, balance and kidney functions.

Education: Too much of the wrong kind. And I will never forgive myself for taking Spanish in high school when all the cute girls were taking Latin. Instead I got a teacher who made me say each day when taking roll, “Como no, estoy aqui,” and who never noticed when we unplugged the headphones from the tape recorder in the back of class or showed in our notebook the homework assignment from the week before. If I had taken Latin, I could have learned more cool sayings like my favorite from altar boy days, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” which means “And also with you” or, if someone is flipping you the bird, “Same to you, buddy.”

Occupation: Sadly, at the moment I am occupying no one.

Animal that best suits my personality: The sponge. Especially the kind with an abrasive side.

Mood: Subjunctive.

Pretension

“Let’s talk about how you as an actor build a role. How do you get inside a character’s skin? How do you sneak into his soul and inhabit his being? How do you wrap yourself around the brain of the person you portray until your thoughts are his and his thoughts are yours and the two of you are mirror images of the same consciousness?”

“Well, to put it in the simplest of terms, I pretend.”

“I’m guessing it’s a long process. Months of preparation. Months of research. Months of observation. Months of enveloping yourself in an environment that establishes the rhythm of the performance. Months of steeping in the hot water of your character’s psyche until you have flavored his perspective with your insights.”

“No. I just show up on the set and pretend.”

“Do you believe that a physical resemblance creates a psychological resemblance? Do you gain weight or lose weight? Do you undergo surgery to become shorter or taller? Do you change the color of your hair? Do you change the color of your eyes? Do you change your blood type? If the person you portray has six toes, do you get a prosthetic or do you have a doctor alter your genetic makeup so a sixth toe grows naturally?”

“I don’t do any of that nutty stuff. I just pretend.”

“An actor once told me that to get into the right frame of mind to play a giant in a children’s movie, he moved into a dollhouse for the entire length of the film. A well-known actress, sitting where you’re sitting right now, confided to me that to play a smoky-voiced nightclub singer, she had all her belongings sent to a giant smoker in the back of a barbecue restaurant, where she hung out with the briskets and the pork shoulders until the melodies oozing from her throat packed a murky, smoldering, crusty sweetness all its own. Surely you have a story or two to tell about just such an experience.”

“I don’t know how else to put this. I come to work when I’m supposed to and then I pretend to be somebody else. It’s just that simple.”

“Judging from your body of work, nothing could ever be that simple. Let’s take as an example one of the most basic of acting tools — tears. When you’re required to cry for a scene, what do you do to make tears well up in your eyes? Do you have the prop master slice an onion next to your face just before the director yells, ‘Action’? Do you have your co-star grab a delicate part of your body out of camera range and twist it until a waterworks display goes off in those baby blues of yours? Do you bring your daughter to the set and just before the tearful scene have her threaten to leave you and join a circus because the thought of being shot out of a cannon thrills her to no end?”

“None of that! I think of something sad and I cry.”

“Aha!”

“Aha?”

“I noticed just then not so much what you said…”

“I’m not surprised. You haven’t noticed anything I’ve said so far…”

“…as what you didn’t say. You didn’t say that you pretend to cry.”

“How in the holy heck do you pretend to cry?”

“An actress once told me that every time she had to do a crying scene she went to the nearest ocean and submerged her face. Then she had the prop master dab off her face every drop of water save the ones directly under her tear ducts.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

The senselessness of smell

Odor is such a mystery.

You know those magazine inserts that try to sell a particular fragrance? The ones you tear open and get a whiff of? These ads were probably put together weeks ago, maybe months ago. And yet they still have a powerful smell. Then you buy the same fragrance and put some on and half an hour later the fragrance is gone. Maybe instead of spritzing liquid on yourself, you would be better off attaching tiny magazine inserts to your body in strategic locations and then opening them up when someone beautiful walks by.

I’m not sure fragrances make that big of a difference in the sex appeal department anyway. When I come across something with a pleasant smell, I’m likely to stay around it for a while longer than I originally planned. But I can’t remember a time when I smelled something wonderful and immediately began kissing and caressing it and plotting to carry it in my arms to the nearest incognito motel.

Some people say that fragrances in a bottle don’t convey sexiness. Instead, it’s the body’s own natural odors that attract others. Pheromones, I believe they’re called. But the pheromones that make others moan the loudest always seem to emanate from the best-looking people. Just like fragrances in a bottle, it’s all a matter of packaging.

For one thing, nobody gets close enough to mediocre-looking people to sample their pheromones.

Even when you do, if an ugly person gives off a natural smell, it’s considered “dirty.” But if an attractive person gives off the very same smell, it’s considered “earthy.”

And when an ugly person standing next to you smells bad, you tell that person to go home and take a shower. But when an attractive person standing next to you smells bad, you tell that person to go home and take a shower — with you.

I’ve read many a report stating that perspiration — the noble term for sweat — in and of itself has no odor. Only when it mixes with bacteria does perspiration begin to smell bad. The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t explain why when you spend a week in a hospital, the nurses make you hop out of bed with staples running up and down your stomach and take a shower every day until your tummy rusts.

Then there’s the odor coming from inside your mouth. This makes much more sense to me. Pieces of food get lodged between your teeth and rot in your warm mouth until it smells like a garbage can six days after a summertime barbecue. This is why at an early age I became addicted to dental floss. After every meal, after every snack, even after watching a cooking show, I insist on flossing immediately to get rid of any food particles in my mouth. I hate to pick on a toothpick, but once you’ve flossed, scraping a sliver of wood against your teeth doesn’t feel the same.

Yet after stringing along my teeth, I still sense odor coming from my mouth. So I swig and gargle mouthwash to clean out my throat. But there’s still odor. It must be originating in my stomach. Yet my mouthwash has strict instructions not to swallow it. So I run to the cabinet and get out the fabric refresher and notice no such warning on its label, so I spray it a few times in my mouth and gulp, hoping that my insides will soon smell as good as my couch does.

I use the fabric refresher that smells like spring rain, a fragrance so fresh in my damp yard and yet so pungent in my flooded basement. Which gets me back to the mystery of odor. Because my fabric refresher promises to freshen by eliminating odor. So if it gets rid of all odors, why does my fabric refresher smell like anything at all?

Too good to be true

There once was a really, really good guy.

He went out with a gorgeous woman and treated her better than she had ever been treated before. When she talked, he looked at her face, not her breasts. When she talked about her breasts, he looked at her face, not her breasts. He spent the evening constantly letting her know how beautiful she was without constantly letting her know how aroused he was.

At the end of the evening, the really, really good guy asked the woman if they could go out again sometime.

“I don’t think so,” said the woman with more than a hint of sadness. “You’re too good to be true. And you know the old saying: If something’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”

The next day, the really, really good guy happened upon a guy talking on his cell phone. He couldn’t help overhearing that the man was trying to answer a trivia question.

“What’s the question?” the really, really good guy asked.

“They want to know the first name of Dr. House on the TV show,” the man said.

“Gregory.”

The man gave the answer, listened for a second, then howled in euphoria.

“They said I won $5,000. I’m supposed to go to the radio station now and pick up the money,” the man told the really, really good guy.

“Congratulations.”

“You should come along. You deserve half the money.”

“No. It’s all yours,” the really, really good guy said. “But I’ll come along if you want.”

Suddenly the man got a suspicious look in his eyes.

“Yeah, you’ll come along, and then when we reach the address they told me on the phone, you and your accomplices will steal everything I have,” he said.

“No, no. You’ve got it all wrong,” said the really, really good guy.

“I don’t think so. You would have had me fooled had you said you’d take part of the winnings. But when you turned me down, I knew you were too good to be true. And this whole thing is too good to be true. And if something’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”

A few days later, while reading an article in a health magazine, the really, really good guy got a brainstorm. He quickly drove over to the top research center in town and asked to talk to the lead scientist.

“And you say that if we add these two simple things together, two substances that are part of our everyday lives, we could wipe out the common cold tomorrow,” the scientist said.

“Maybe even today,” the really, really good guy said.

“Nice try,” said the scientist, squinting in skepticism. “The minute I put those two substances together, I’ll probably create some deadly toxin that will terrorize the world. To think that some layman could walk in off the street and suggest the cure for a cold. That’s too good to be true. And you know the old saying: If something’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”

Later that day, the really, really good guy, after doing some research on his computer, went to the address of an elderly man in a modest home.

“Can I help you?” the elderly man asked.

“Yes,” said the really, really good guy. “Are you the person who coined the phrase, ‘If something’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t’?”

“Why, yes I am,” said the elderly man with a smile.

Then the really, really good guy splashed the elderly man with a big bucket of ice water.

The late late-night snack

When fast-food restaurants go on and on about how they’re open until midnight or 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. or even how they’re open all night, I wish they would tack on this addendum:

“Of course, we stop cooking at 10 p.m.”

At least it seems that way. The hamburgers that I get late at night have spent more time under heating lamps than George Hamilton. The french fries that I get late at night are droopier than a weeping willow fertilized with NyQuil. Even the shakes taste dead, and they’re cryogenically preserved.

Now these fast-food places will try to tell you that this isn’t true, that all their food is cooked fresh upon your order. Oh please. This isn’t even true in the middle of the day. We’ve all cooked a hamburger or two in our lives. How long does it take — 10 minutes or so, right? Now ask yourself when’s the last time you ordered a hamburger at a fast-food restaurant and waited 10 minutes for it. The correct answer is never. Because we don’t go to a fast-food restaurant for fresh food. We go there for fast food. Hence the name.

But in the middle of the day, because of all the people ordering food, a non-fresh hamburger has been non-fresh for only 10 minutes tops. That’s acceptable to us. Many is the time when somebody announces dinner is ready that we stall 10 minutes before coming to the table because we have to go to the bathroom or because we want to see the last 10 minutes of the “CBS Evening News” so that after the closing story about mating season for walruses near the Arctic Circle we can watch Katie Couric’s puckish grin as she sighs, “How can they do that when it’s so cold?”

But late at night, you’re not getting a hamburger that’s only 10 minutes off the griddle. You’re getting a burger whose moisture content after sitting under a heating lamp for several hours is the same as Lawrence of Arabia’s psoriasis patch. You’re getting a burger less juicy than gossip about a Hollywood couple who have been faithful to each other for 30 years.

Here’s another thing about getting fast food late at night. Pay no attention to the menu board in the drive-through lane near the microphone where you place your order. Half the food on that menu isn’t available. It’s so stale that even the minimum-wage minions working the graveyard shift at a dead-end job don’t have the heart to sell it to you. Either that or they didn’t feel like making any more after selling the last batch.

So you order a grilled chicken sandwich, and the distorted voice sputtering out of the speaker tells you they don’t have any. So you order a fried chicken sandwich, and the distorted voice tells you they don’t have any. So you ask if they have any chicken fingers, and the distorted voice says yes. So you ask for an order of chicken fingers and a bun. Panicked silence. Finally the voice crackles, “We’ve only got half of a bun. Do you still want it?” And then you have a Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” moment, replying in a wry, nasal tone: “I want it between your knees.”

Sometimes you order food late at night in the drive-through lane and you don’t find out until you get to the window that the fast-food restaurant doesn’t have what you want. You ask for a mini-pizza and three breadsticks, you drive up to the window, you pay the $5.38, you wait a minute, and only then are you told that they’re out of breadsticks. Why did it take so long for them to find this out? Are the breadsticks kept in a vault with a combination lock that takes five minutes to open? The fast-food workers tell you they’re sorry dozens of times, then offer to give you three mini-pizzas to replace the three breadsticks.

Which is why I still go to fast-food restaurants late at night.

Clean up your act

Where I live, there is a maid service that offers to clean people’s homes.

Being a small business, the maid service tries to cut costs wherever it can, but it still needs to advertise. But it’s too expensive to buy television commercials. It’s too expensive to be on a billboard. It’s too expensive to put an ad in the Yellow Pages. And, alas and alack, it’s even too expensive to send fliers in the mail. So the maid service decides that the only way it can advertise in a cost-conscious way is to go door to door in neighborhoods and let people know about the business.

So the maid service drives around the neighborhood. Someone gets out of the car, goes up to the door of a house and attaches a circular to the handle of the front door with a rubber band. The maid service assumes that the next time a person goes out the front door and comes back in again, that person will see the circular, delight in its news and immediately contact the maid service to enlist its business.

The maid service doesn’t for a moment ponder that people might not be home at the time the circular is attached to the front door. Nor does the maid service ponder that the people in the home might be out of town on vacation. Nor does the maid service ponder that some people go in and out of their home through the garage door and rarely look at their own front door for days on end. Nor does the maid service ponder that because of these things the circular stays attached to the front door for a long time and that passing thieves see the circular remain on the door and think that nobody is at home, tempting the thieves mightily.

Then the maid service decides to advertise in a different fashion. It rolls up its fliers in plastic bags and throws the bags onto the driveway of every home. To make sure the bags won’t blow away in the wind and not be seen by the occupants of the home to which the driveway is attached, the maid service puts something in the bags besides the fliers. Each bag is weighted down with pebbles, or popcorn kernels, or ball bearings. And they do the trick. The bag never leaves the driveway, never moves. It stays directly in the path of any car pulling out of the garage into the street, or going up the driveway into the garage.

The maid service finds these methods of advertising cheap and easy, so the circulars are distributed many, many times — sometimes on the door, sometimes on the driveway. After all, persistence is one of the things business gurus always talk about when telling potential entrepreneurs how to start and expand a company. Yes, the maid service is persistent indeed.

The constant barrage of advertisements angers practically all of the homeowners who get them. Practically all, but not all.

I never utter an unkind word as I take the circulars off my front door or as I bend down and pick up the circulars in my driveway. I never complain about all the weighted little items inside the bags on the driveway. I just pick up each bag and carry it into my home.

Because one day I will call the maid service and ask if someone from the service can come over and clean my home. Why of course, the maid service will say. The service will go on to ask: How did you find out about us? Through all the fliers and circulars you put on my door and threw in my driveway, I will say.

So a woman from the maid service will come to my home. There will be a note on the front door saying to come in, so she will open the door.

Upon doing so, she will see an absolute mess. For strewn all over the floors of each room will be pebbles, popcorn kernels and ball bearings, along with fliers and circulars advertising a particular maid service.

Infomercial disclaimer

The following is a paid announcement. It may not represent the views of this station.

We have nothing to do with the smirk on the face of the fake talk show guest, and it in no way resembles the smirk on our faces when we get his checks for putting on his shows. And we have nothing to do with playing an old infomercial of the fake guest ballyhooing for some odd health supplement followed by a new infomercial of the fake guest ballyhooing for a book on drug-free cures where he repeats over and over again that he doesn’t sell health supplements.

If you’re sick of any nutjob who claims he can cure anything, we haven’t got the cure.

We are not responsible for the fat guy who gains 20 pounds every time you see him hawking a new product. If he would spend more time playing with his power tool and less time cooking filet mignon in a glorified waffle maker with a fat gal, he wouldn’t be as disgusting. But that’s what happens when you use a drill that does the work twice as fast — it gives you oodles of time to hang around another round mound of chowhound, the fat chef, and sample goods baked at twice the speed of a normal oven. If it’s any consolation, some of that fast-cooked stuff couldn’t possibly be fully cooked, and the microorganisms still alive inside will cause the fat guy to lose weight remarkably fast. At that point he can hawk a toilet cleaner in his next infomercial.

We feel compelled to state that we are not responsible for the fellow who egomaniacally claims he is the greatest inventor of all time. Much as it pains us to let you down, egomaniac, you didn’t invent the knife. Nor did you invent the rotisserie oven. Nor did you invent the hypodermic needle that puts yummies inside a chicken. The next thing you know, he’ll be touting a tanning product he invented called the sun. Or the Sun-O-Matic, as he would call it.

If those cooking spots drive you toward watching 30-minute paid announcements for products to reduce your girth, let us remind you that we are also not responsible for the fitness kook. We can only hope that this person is high on some chemical substance and not high on life — otherwise, there’s no hope for this raving loon. We find it ironic that the fitness kook went from attempting to sell exercise equipment to trying to sell pillows, since it’s obvious this psycho has never slept five minutes in his life.

We absolutely insist we are not responsible for the ever-growing family of products that clean with oxygen. We also admit that we are at a loss to answer this question many of you have posed: If all of these products are cleaners and they all use the same main ingredient, oxygen, why isn’t there just one all-purpose product?

And we acknowledge we can’t answer this question either: If oxygen is supposed to be this amazing cleaning product, why is there such as thing as air pollution?

Nor do we understand why every guy with a British accent is a cleaning whiz.

Furthermore, we are not in the least bit responsible for the ladder system — not just a ladder, but a ladder system. We know that a ladder is important to many of you, ever since some homebuilder got the bright idea that every ceiling in every home needs to be 13 feet high and some safety whiz got the bright idea that smoke detectors need to be on the 13-foot-high ceiling no more than 10 feet apart from one another. But we also know that means you don’t need 24 ladders in one. For most of you, one ladder in one will do quite nicely, thank you. But isn’t it cool to know that if you buy a ladder system, the most expensive thing in your garage won’t be your car but something you climb on to change light bulbs?

And now, finally, here is the paid announcement you’ve all been waiting to switch channels away from. And in case you haven’t already grasped the notion, this is not our fault.

Don’t blame us. And please, please don’t sue us.

Hold the mayo or I’ll need a clinic

Mayonnaise? Ick. No, make that yuck. Better yet, make that phooey. Even better yet, get that stuff as far away from me as humanly possible.

I despise mayonnaise. Now I like eggs. I like oil. But I don’t like the combination of eggs and oil.

I have the same problem with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I like peanut butter. I like jelly. But please don’t put them together. And if you’re making a PB&J sandwich ahead of my effort to get some peanut butter and crackers, use two knives — one for the peanut butter jar and one for the jelly jar — and don’t cross-contaminate. I don’t want speckles of jelly in my peanut butter, or the vice of vice versa.

Yeah, a lot of you are looking at me funny right now. You’re thinking: If you like A and you like B, then you must like the combination of A and B. OK, following that profound logic, go make yourself a salami and oatmeal sandwich.

Back to mayonnaise, although, to be honest, I’d just as soon keep thinking about salami and oatmeal. Why do I hate mayonnaise so much?

First, it’s the way mayonnaise looks. More than any other food, mayonnaise looks like calories. Picture calories lounging about inside your body and you’ll conjure up a vision of a white blob. A white eggy, oily blob. See, that’s mayonnaise. It looks like something stopping up a liposuction device attached to a sucker being a suckee. Mayonnaise looks just like lipo.

Now, I know what you’re saying: Doesn’t whipped cream look like calories, too? Doesn’t whipped cream look like something that collects in the bag during liposuction? I see your point. But if there’s a hole in the liposuction bag and the stuff sprays all over the room, which would you rather clean up: mayonnaise or whipped cream?

And don’t for a minute try to convince me that something that has been sitting idly by in your pockets of body fat for that long a time would come out as sweet as whipped cream and as stiffly peaked as whipped cream. No, it would be as sour and oozy as mayonnaise. Oh, by the way, if a salami and oatmeal sandwich doesn’t sicken you, how about mayonnaise on strawberry shortcake? Still think that “I like A, I like B, therefore I must like A plus B” argument sounds persuasive?

Second, it’s the way mayonnaise smells. Chefs have a positive way of describing this type of odor. They call it savory. I have a different way of describing the odor. I call it odor.

And here’s another crucial difference between whipped cream and mayonnaise. Leave whipped cream out of the refrigerator for a few hours and give it a sniff. Nothing disagreeable there. Now do the same thing with mayonnaise. Well, it’s hard to give it a sniff because all the bacteria have climbed out of the mayonnaise jar by then and carried it to parts unknown.

Which bring me to the most important reason I want nothing to do with mayonnaise. It’s a potentially toxic substance. It’s a breeding ground for salmonella. Then again, what’s the big deal about getting salmonella poisoning from mayonnaise? You’ll just end up upchucking something that smells bad, but, unlike most upchuck, it won’t smell any worse than the stuff you put into your body in the first place.

And mayonnaise is so totally unnecessary. Why do so many fast-food joints put it on their hamburgers? To hold the lettuce, pickles and tomatoes in place, I’m told. Yeah, those two big slices of bun clamped between my hands don’t provide enough pressure. I’d better add the adhesive qualities of smelly, bacteria-ridden ooze to my burger so I don’t experience the heartbreak of a pickle slice sliding out.

Besides, if you need adhesion, why not PB&J? If you like A and you like B…

Run-down rundown

I feel sort of sorry for local sports anchors.

Anybody really and truly interested in the world of sports is watching ESPN, not the local sportscast. So TV stations have reduced the length of sportscasts to just a couple of minutes and dictated they must use that diminished bit of time to emphasize the local sports scene. No highlights of important games going on elsewhere. And the highlights of the local baseball game have a decidedly one-sided tone:

“A big afternoon of baseball at the Mousetrap as our Scampering Mice took on the Tigers in the first of a three-game series.

“First inning. Left fielder Slap Breakneck hits one down the right field line and is off to the races. Without a moment’s hesitation, he rounds first and heads for second. The fastest of the Scampering Mice doesn’t even look up as he digs for third. With a tremendous hook slide, he reaches third without a throw. That’s because the pitcher has the ball after Slap’s hit was declared a foul ball.

“Second inning. Mice first baseman Lou Minari sets a major league record by dropping one, two, three, four, then five straight pickoff throws to first. On the fifth throw, the umpire calls a balk. I guess the ump figured that if Minari couldn’t catch five straight throws to first, it must have been an overly deceptive move by the pitcher.

“Third inning. Mice center fielder Eddie Bailout loses control of his bat and it flies into the seats behind the home team dugout. A young girl is grazed. After her father gives the bat back to the dugout, the Mice as a goodwill gesture give him and the girl several autographed bats. Unfortunately, they are thrown into the stands, injuring both the dad and the girl.

“Fourth inning. Mice catcher Stubby Knob isn’t pleased when this borderline pitch is called strike three. As Knob walks back to the dugout, he has words with home plate ump Moe Spleen. More on that later.

“Fifth inning. Shortstop Enrique Gonzales goes deep into the hole to field this ground ball, then pivots beautifully and throws to second for a force-out. Well, it would have been a force-out had there been a runner already at first heading for second. Recognizing the beauty of Gonzales’ play, the official scorer calls it a hit.

“Sixth inning, which is the Drab Paint ‘Painting the Corners’ inning. And since Mice pitcher Bob Clench struck out the side, we had a winner. Louella Farmington of Woeful, Mo., gets 20 gallons of Drab Paint. We can’t wait to hear what her nursing home says about that.”

“Seventh inning. Remember how catcher Stubby Knob was called out on strikes back in the fourth. Well, this time he’s called out again, on a pitch seemingly outside, and here come the fireworks. Knob and home plate ump Moe Spleen really go at it, screaming and spitting at each other until Knob is tossed from the game. When Stubby reaches the dugout, everything flies out on the field — bats, balls, helmets, Gatorade, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes trophy that Knob got before the game.

“Eighth inning. Here’s something you don’t see every day. This foul pop-up bounces off the glove of Mice second baseman Nate Bungle, then off the glove of right fielder Steve Flub, then off the glove of first baseman Lou Minari and hits the ground. The official scorer, not wanting any of the Mice players mad at him, scores it a hit, even though the ball was foul.

“And in the ninth, Mice third baseman Carl Clavicle sums up a frustrating evening at the plate by catching his own pop-up and handing it to the catcher.

“The Scampering Mice lose 17-0 on a perfect game by Tiger pitcher Ron Highcheese. But enough about the Tigers. We’ll have more Mice highlights tonight at 10.”

Warning: Graphic content

With thunder, lightning and rain in the air, I came home on the night before Easter and turned on my television just in time to see the climactic scene of the 1956 film “The Ten Commandments.”

The scene I’m referring to is the parting of the Red Sea, the scene where dark clouds gather in the sky and a powerful wind swirls, pulling the sea apart like me pulling apart a hamburger to see if the sandwich assemblers obeyed my commandments about what to put on it.

As the weather raged on my television screen, it similarly raged outside my window. Which explains why in the next minute a graphic appeared on the lower right quadrant of my TV. As the wind opened the Red Sea in thunderous majesty, the graphic read: “Severe storm warning.”

At first, the juxtaposition of the biblical classic and the large weather advisory seemed out of place, but as I listened more closely to the dialogue, the two began to make sense together.

A boy and a old, blind man are among the multitude of Jews escaping Egypt:

“The wind opens the sea, grandfather.”

“God opens the sea with a blast of his nostrils.”

“Good thing the pollen count is high.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s on the bottom of the weather watch graphic, grandfather.”

As the Jews escape, the pharaoh and his men are helpless:

“He opens the water before them, and he bars our way.”

“With a pillar of fire.”

“No, the fire went out. What’s blocking us now is that huge severe storm warning graphic.”

“Why is it so large?”

“Because the station insists on using a map showing all the counties in the warning area.”

“What counties are threatened?”

“Heck if I know, great pharaoh. I have a hard enough time naming countries on a blank map, let alone counties.”

“Good point.”

“Let us go from this place. Men cannot fight against both a god and storm track radar.”

“Better to die in battle than live in shame. Besides, the graphic now is showing a safety tip that says it’s dangerous to try to run from a storm.”

“Great pharaoh, the severe storm warning graphic, it’s gone.”

“It’s a commercial break. Advertisers go nuts if you block what they’re trying to sell.”

“Sound the pursuit.”

“Destroy them all, but bring Moses to me alive. Then he can explain why some counties are green, some are yellow and some are red.”

So the Egyptians resume their chase through the dry bed of the Red Sea:

“Grandfather, look! The horses are coming.”

“Don’t forget, I’m blind, grandson. But I heard the annoying beeping on the TV, so I figured something was coming our way.”

“Hey, grandfather, that guy who looks like Edward G. Robinson says it’s better to serve the Egyptians than to die here.”

“I bet he wouldn’t be saying that if he had a machine gun in his hands.”

“Grandfather, God didst blow with his winds and the sea has covered the Egyptians.”

“First time I can remember a storm hitting after a TV show was interrupted with a weather warning.”

Wash and weary

This guy has more quarters than Fort Leavenworth. How did he get so many quarters? Did he knock off a bunch of lemonade stands on the way here? Did he infiltrate a coin collector convention and make off with a carful of state quarter sets?

And now he’s stacking those quarters as high and as straight at the Leaning Tower of Pisa on top of the control box as he gets ready to use this car wash.

In goes quarter after quarter. He’s ready to wash his vehicle. Nope, he’s chosen to pre-soak. He apparently feels the need to apply a preliminary layer of soap to loosen the crud on his car before he applies another layer of soap to wash the crud away. This could take a while.

After a couple of revolutions in the pre-soak mode, he’s ready to soap. Yeah, good thing you wasted a half dozen quarters pre-soaking that vehicle — that high-pressure soap shooting out of your wand at 500 miles per hour wouldn’t have had any effect otherwise. We’ll know in a second if your bumpers were attached firmly on the assembly line.

Oh no. He’s putting down the wand and picking up the hot foam brush. There’s no IQ test that’s better at distinguishing geniuses from nitwits than the hot foam brush. And this guy is in the Dunderhead Hall of Fame. Not only is he touching this device to his car, he’s rubbing it into the metal. There won’t be an ounce of dirt left when he’s through. Nor an ounce of paint.

Here go more quarters. Must be nice to be independently wealthy so you can devote half your day to a manual car wash. I wonder if this fellow ever washed his vehicle at an automatic car wash and said to himself, “Gee, that thing got done with my car in two minutes. Maybe that’s all the time I need to spend when I wash the vehicle myself.” Guess not.

That’s right, by all means don’t forget to hang those floor mats on those filthy hooks and wash them off. Not only will you “squish” in your car for weeks, but the aroma of mold will completely overtake what’s emanating from the pine tree hanging off your rearview mirror.

It’s time for the rinse. The changeover from soapy water to clear water takes about a minute, but what’s a few more 25-cent coins among friends? Finally, here comes the clear stuff — more high-pressure water. I especially love it when he holds the wand so the tip is one inch away from the car. I was worried for a moment that he might have missed knocking off that little bit of paint remaining above his front right tire.

It’s amazing how many people wash their cars and don’t realize that if you aim the water at the top of the car, gravity will bring the water down over the rest of the vehicle. Note to the GOP: This is the only instance when the term “trickle down” is actually applicable.

NASA would be thrilled to tears to have one of their spacecraft do as many orbits in one mission as this guy is doing during one car wash.

Time for the wax. First comes the hot spray wax. Yeah, be sure to get just as much of it on your windows as your metal. That waxy buildup of your windows will really help you nail down that Safe Driver of the Year award. Now comes the triple-foam wax, although for the life of me I can’t tell one layer of foam from the others.

And just when you thought you couldn’t spend any more quarters, you switch to the spot-free rinse. From a stream of water rivaling Niagara Falls, you go to a gurgle less powerful than the water fountain at a preschool. No wonder it’s spot-free. It’s practically water-free.

A half hour and 40 quarters later, you’re done. Your vehicle is immaculate and shining. And after the longest of waits, I finally have a chance to do my job.

Forgive me for not introducing myself sooner. I’m the mud puddle just outside the car wash bay.

A piece of my criminal mind

The only thing that separates me, a law-abiding citizen, from a life of sordid crime is my belief that I wouldn’t get away with it.

Here is one of many reasons that confidence is highly overrated. If I were more confident, I’d be a hooligan, a desperado, a scofflaw. But because I have little confidence in myself, I’m an upstanding goody two-shoes like that police detective in a wheelchair, Ironside, except that he doesn’t stand up and he really doesn’t need to wear shoes.

There’s no doubt I have a criminal mind. Subconsciously I think about stealing something from every store I’m in. Before I go out the door without buying anything, I rub my hands together just to make sure the criminal within me isn’t shoplifting something. I don’t have to search my pockets because when the store employee who watches the door sees me rubbing my hands together, he assumes the worst and calls the police, who frisk me at my car.

In every crime drama, I root for the criminals. Much like a sports fan who yells at the TV for his baseball team not to steal second with a slugger at the plate and for his football team to throw deep on second down and short yardage, I scream instructions to the television criminals. I tell them things such as “hide the loot under the underwear, not under the socks” and “the good underwear, not the ones with holes in them.”

Because I’ve thought so much about crime on both a conscious and subconscious basis, I think I’m especially qualified to help the righteous among you protect yourselves from the criminal element in society by passing along a few tips:

If you run a bank or a store or anyplace else where money is kept, always disclose how much cash you have on hand. Put the amount on big signs both outside and inside the establishment. This may sound strange, but it’s absolutely a crime deterrent. Whenever a crime story appears in the newspaper or on TV or radio, the robber is always said to have taken “an undisclosed amount of money.” By disclosing your amount of money, criminals will apparently think twice about stealing it.

Neighborhood crime watches do not work. Think about it. How does every neighborhood crime watch begin? A neighborhood is victimized by crime, you say. Yes, but how do we know that? Because neighbors of the person victimized by the evildoers are sitting in lawn chairs in the front yard watching as a strange van pulls into the neighbor’s driveway, a couple of masked guys try the door and then go in through a window conveniently opened by a big rock, and a few minutes later the masked guys fill the van with furniture, appliances and jewelry. The people in the lawn chairs mistakenly think at the time that the masked men are carpet cleaners who don’t wish to inhale fumes as they clear stuff from the carpet. So neighbors watching criminals results in a neighborhood watch. It all seems like a colossal waste of time, doesn’t it?

If you’re a really, really nice person, beware of someone doing you in. After somebody dies unexpectedly, there’s always a tribute to this person. “She was so wonderful,” someone will say. “I never knew a better person,” someone else will say. You never hear this after someone dies suddenly: “The creep got what was coming to her. I’m glad she’s gone.”

You should also worry about the possibility of foul play if you are the oldest person alive. Four of five times a year we see reports about the oldest living person passing away. Surprisingly, the leading murder suspect is never the second-oldest living person.

Summing up, to avoid crime, disclose your money but not your age, and be as obnoxious as possible. And if you get arrested on allegations that you committed a crime, don’t plead insanity until the cops prove you broke the law.

Intentional-sounding

I used to get quite emotional following my favorite sports teams. I’d scream at the TV, jump around when there was a bad call, shake my fist triumphantly when the good guys scored.

But the more I listened to the announcers, the less fanatical I became:

“The quarterback goes back to pass. He looks around. Still looking. Now he throws … and he has his pass intercepted.”

“The shortstop throws the ball over the first baseman’s head to give the opposition their first lead of the night.”

“The point guard is being double-teamed. He tries to dribble out of trouble, but he has the ball stolen for an easy layup on the other end.”

“The goalie lets a slapshot go between his legs to give the other team a 3-2 victory.”

After hearing all this, I realized how silly it was for me to get in a frenzy over sports — since all the games are fixed.

When a sportscaster says a quarterback “has his pass intercepted,” he’s saying that the football player meant for the other team to catch the ball.

It’s like saying, “He’s having the attractive neighbor over for some nooky while his wife’s having her hair done.”

Note the subtle difference in the meaning of these two sentences:

“A couple of goons rearranged my vertebrae with the help of a grizzly bear.”

“I’m having a couple of goons rearrange my vertebrae with the help of a grizzly bear.”

In the first sentence, I’m a victim. In the second sentence, I’m a willing accomplice. In both sentences, the bear isn’t the least bit helpful.

And when a sportscaster says the goalie did something wrong “to give” his opponents the victory, he’s saying the goalie wanted the other team to win.

Again, note the difference in tone:

“I spilled gasoline next to my neighbor’s barbecue grill to give his home some dramatic renovations.”

“I spilled gasoline next to my neighbor’s barbecue grill, giving his home some dramatic renovations.”

In the first sentence, I’m an arsonist. In the second sentence, I’m probably just a klutz. In both sentences, my neighbor will be having a couple of goons rearrange my vertebrae with the help of a grizzly bear.

Now I suppose it’s possible that the announcers are committing the grammatical faux pas of “false purpose.” But so many of them say this so often. They all couldn’t have slept through English class the day infinitives of intent were discussed, could they?

So I’ve decided to assume that the announcers are grammatically correct and that all sports are fixed. Well, except for professional wrestling. For some reason, wrestling announcers never get infinitives of intent wrong. It’s hard to screw up grammar when your vocabulary consists mainly of words such as “slobberknocker” and “buttwhooping.”

Besides, it’s more fun to watch sports when you think all the games are predetermined. It takes the pressure off and makes the games less stressful to watch when you know that no matter who does what, the result is mere destiny.

Think of the person at every sporting event who says, “Those referees don’t want our team to win.” That person has the lowest blood pressure in the stadium. It’s much more reassuring to go through life thinking people are crooked than incompetent. It’s also a better reason to hire a couple of goons and a grizzly bear.

The credits crunch

There has never been a better time to say you’re in show business.

No, not because of the proliferation of cable networks. It’s true that there are now a billion cable channels, from the Speed channel to the Slow Motion Replay channel. And all of these cable channels offer programs that are live, or at least that’s what the titles say. There’s “Live With Regis and Kelly,” “Emeril Live,” “London Live,” “Golf Talk Live,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Sunday Night Live With Father Benedict Groeschel,” to name a few. But remarkably, almost all of these shows aren’t live. Well, there were live when there were taped, but you’re not seeing them live. And even more remarkably, a lot of live shows feature people who are now dead. There are more live people on an episode of “Ghost Whisperer” than there are on a lot of “live” shows. And as long as “live” shows can get away with using a bunch of dead people, it’s going to be tough to find work in show business.

And yet there never has been a better time to say you’re in show business.

No, not because of reality TV. It’s true that there are fewer shows that seem to require “actors” and more shows that seem to require “real people.” And because of that, you might be seriously considering leaving your dead-end job in Kalamazoo and heading to one of these reality programs. But be warned. You have to audition to be a real person, just like you have to audition to be a fake person. It’s not enough to be real. You have to pretend to be the kind of real person that reality show producers want. And ask yourself this question: If reality shows just want people who are acting like their normal, regular selves, why do these shows all have a director? Yes, all of these reality shows have someone directing you how to act sort of real. At this rate, I expect that sometime soon someone will open up an acting school for reality shows. It will take years of intensive training for you to be real enough to be on one of these programs. You’ll have to learn such important things as asking the director, “What was my motivation for sneezing just then?” And so there will be actors in fake shows and actors in real shows, and it will be as tough as ever to find work in show business.

And yet there has never been a better time to say you’re in show business.

It’s not because of all the channels and not because of all the reality shows. It’s because of the credits at the end of all the movies and other programs you see on TV.

There used to be a time when a show would spend a couple of minutes rolling the credits over the full television screen so you could see the names of all the people in front of the camera and behind the camera. And Aunt Martha back in Tonganoxie could see the name of her nephew Jimmy and be proud of the fact that he had a job on “Different Strokes.”

But for Aunt Martha to feel that same kind of pride these days, she needs to be a speed reader with 20-5 vision. That’s because what once were full-screen credits that lasted a couple of minutes have been smooshed into a tiny corner of the screen and sped up so they take all of five seconds. Television networks use the rest of the screen to tell you what the next show will be, trying to hook you into that program. They’re deathly afraid that if they end a show properly with a decent listing of credits, you’ll get deathly bored, grab your remote control and search elsewhere for amusement.

Aunt Martha in Tonganoxie be damned.

So Jimmy could quit his dead-end job in Kalamazoo, go out to Hollywood, hit a bunch of show business dead ends and finally get a job running rides at Disneyland, but still tell Aunt Martha to look for him in the five-second credits at the end of “CSI: Dubuque.”

And that’s why there has never been a better time to say you’re in show business.

My favorite card trick

The trick:

I show the audience the four kings and explain as I put the cards face down on top of the deck that the kings are spending the night together in a castle.

One king decides to sleep in the basement, I say as I move the top card to the bottom of the deck. Another king will rest on the first floor, I tell the audience as I move the next card to the lower middle of the deck. Another king wants to sleep on the second floor, I explain as I shift the next card to the upper middle of the deck. And the final king will spend the night on the top floor, I declare as I leave the next card on top of the deck.

In the middle of the night, I announce to the audience, a rebel force approaches the castle. The king sleeping on the top floor hears the insurgents coming and alerts the other kings to join him atop the castle, where they can use a catapult to launch stones and spears at the rebels. I tap the deck to summon the monarchs. I proceed to turn over the top four cards in the deck, which happen to be the four kings.

How I perform the trick:

Before appearing in the living room, I hide in the kitchen and arrange the deck so that there are three cards hidden behind the four kings I will show to the audience. A woman wanting a drink walks in on me while I’m doing this, so I fix her a beverage with five times the usual amount of alcohol. Then when I perform the trick and she comes out of the kitchen declaring that I’ve stacked the deck, I cry out, “Oh dear, she’s drunk again,” and no one takes her seriously.

When explaining that the four kings are spending the night together in a castle, some wise guy makes the wisecrack, “Are you sure they aren’t four queens?” I ask the wiseass how his son is enjoying summer camp, especially sleeping in a cabin with seven other guys. The wisenheimer doesn’t interrupt again.

As I move the first card to the bottom of the deck, a woman in front crouches down so she can get a look at the card. To prevent her from seeing that it’s not a king, I angle the deck so the bottom is away from the audience and I remark to the woman that her position reminds me of a scene from the film “Boogie Nights.”

While declaring that the first king is sleeping in the basement, a professorial type interrupts to say, “You mean ‘dungeon,’ don’t you?” To which I reply: “Actually, ‘dungeon’ comes from the word ‘donjon,’ which means a tower.” The professorial type says, “I’m sorry.” To which I reply, “You mean ‘deplorable,’ don’t you?”

After moving the four cards to different parts of the deck, a woman asks to shuffle the cards, which would ruin the trick. But I have planned for this by doing the prestidigitation right after the audience has eaten barbecued chicken wings — and by hiding the napkins. “I wouldn’t want you to mark the cards with barbecue sauce and make my job easier,” I tell her.

By the time moist towelettes are passed around, I’m ready to tap the deck and reveal the four kings. Someone whose hands are now clean volunteers to tap the deck, but I tell him he can’t because he isn’t a member of the magicians union. When he wonders if I’m a member of the union, I say that I’m not, but that the local has granted me a temporary waiver.

Once the four kings are revealed and the applause has died down, several members of the audience ask me to do the magic trick again. I tell them I can’t, because my magicians union waiver only applies if I do the trick once and just once. I remind those that boo how pathetic worker conditions would have been in this country had it not been for the labor movement. An argument ensues between pro-union and anti-union enthusiasts, giving this magician enough of a diversion to pull a disappearing act.