A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

One question loomed large over the heads of every child of the ’60s: Dick York or Dick Sergeant?
Found going through the detritus of my parent’s lives after my father passed a couple weeks back. On my sixth birthday– I don’t remember ever looking like that, or having such a toothy grin. My mom had saved not only all these old photos, of course, but old birthday cards and papers from grade school. I had no idea. Sadly, most of it just had to be thrown out; I can’t archive this stuff forever, and it’ll be hard enough for someone to catalog the old pictures for posterity. I’ll have more on this whole depressing issue if I keep blogging…

See what I mean? There’s no market for jarred tamales, but somebody’s buying this? See more at The Museum of Snack Foods, along with other great things like the canned whole chicken.

I couldn’t help but be thrilled by the recent story of the woman who tried to sue Cap’n Crunch because after 4 years of eating Crunchberries she realized they weren’t real fruit. A judge was forced to write a non-condescending opinion in dismissing the case that sounds like something from The Onion. My favorite line, from the Consumerist write up: “This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a ‘crunchberry.’”
Simply classic. But what could the mentality of the person who brought the lawsuit be? And how could any being who’s supposedly smart enough to pass a bar exam represent them? There’s apparently a legal precedent from another nutball who tried to sue Toucan Sam because Froot Loops don’t contain any real fruit. You’d think “Froot” would’ve nipped complaints like that in the bud, but you can’t be sure anymore. In a world where most people can’t spell “fruit” they must’ve seen it coming eventually. I knew a guy who didn’t learn how it was spelled until sometime in his forties, and went around pronouncing in “froo-itt” like everybody else in the world was an idiot.
It’s a personal favorite, the naive moron tale. The best may be the story of the numerous people who complained about one of those animatronic dinosaur exhibits at a zoo because the dinosaurs weren’t real. I’m pretty sure that was in Tennessee, but still. And Texas was beset by reports of giant flying pteradactyls after a famous find of a pteradon fossil in the 1970s. Bible belt anti-evolutionists thought they were under siege and mistook every small aircraft they saw for a monster chasing their car.
Anyway, the good Cap’n survived another hit. They took away his Jay Ward commercials, cool little plastic toys in the box, and made him look bad by making every other cereal on the planet “healthier.” They’re even adding fiber to Apple Jacks, the quintessential sugary emptiness for Saturday mornings. But Cap’n Crunch hasn’t given in, and the legal system and America’s morons won’t be the ones to take him down.

It’s a Scrabble tournament weekend again, this time the 2-day affair that I did a logo for. Because of a low turnout, I’m lumped in a group that spans ratings near mine to some about 500 points higher. I’m “expected to win,” according to the system, about 5 games of 13, which is fine if I do (I’ve won 4 of 8 so far) but a little disheartening. I could fairly easily be at 6-8 right now, though, even after playing opponents all rated above me, if I had a little more courage to challenge words that sound like nonsense. Two close losses would’ve been easy wins if I didn’t chicken out, but between semi-word words that are allowable (haulier? viewy?) and being burned in the past, I rarely challenge unless it’s a last-ditch effort or I’m pretty certain it’s a phony.
The only challenges I did make today were FAM (I’ve got all the 3-letter-words down pretty solidly now) and NOONISH (I only know it’s no good because I got away with it in a club game a few weeks back). I never play phonies for the same reasons– you can’t fool these people anymore. Nobody blinks when you lay down ANESTRI or ETESIAN, common words to Scrabble sharps. I’ve just got to bone up on what’s plausible and what isn’t.
Tomorrow: I may win a cookie, or something.

Being born in a generation taught that if the Bomb didn’t kill us all, Killer Bees would do it (if a Black Hole didn’t swallow us all first) left anyone my age pretty much numb to forecasts of the End Times. That isn’t to say they aren’t upon us though, in this age of upheaval. And what portents have made it clear to anyone who’s paying attention? The Stock Market collapsing? Our recent political upheaval? Global Warming? North Korean missiles? The Large Hadron Collider booting up again?

No, it was a few weeks ago when, on national major network television, a dozen fat people were locked in a darkened room with 3-foot-high piles of junk food while some model/actress watched them with night vision goggles. In all seriousness, with no laugh-track. Actually, tears were shed. And the scariest part, of course, is that you probably didn’t even hear about it.

I remember the same sense of fear and anger after seeing that Peter Jackson remake of King Kong and wondering why every newspaper headline and nightly news lead story didn’t warn me that the world had gone insane and somebody had spent hundreds of millions of dollars producing and promoting a movie in which the girl runs back to the giant gorilla and goes ice skating with it in Central Park. That’s a Saturday Night Live skit or a Mad Magazine parody, not a major motion picture.

Nobody cared then, and they don’t care now. Is it a by-product of our post-ironic culture that either of these things can be taken seriously? Or that all of our modern absurdities can be taken seriously? I have ESPN on as I write this, and I have never seen as stern-looking a group of grown men as this bunch of blowhards covering football. Football! You’d think they’d be the most light-hearted of broadcasters, but more grins were cracked during the live 9/11 coverage on CNN than on any Sunday of these schmucks. What has happened to football, anyway? It’s all gone touchy-feely; any time a player goes out of bounds on the opposing team’s side, it’s like a game of grab-ass broke out in Boy’s Town with every towel-boy and assistant trainer reaching out to get their hands on something. Remember a couple of Super Bowls past, when the rejoins from commercials featured artsy black-and-white photos of players cuddling the Lombardi Trophy that looked like out-takes from that benefit coffee-table book with Celine Dion and Morgan Freeman cradling premature babies? Not a mention on the sports pages, either story. I do hear Mike Ditka complaining about the butt-patting every now and then but he doesn’t count.

It’s not the end of the world, I know. We’ll get by, somehow. I don’t really buy into any of that apocalyptic stuff after all the broken promises. In my last crackpot book review, one of the loony conclusions was the nonsense about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, and “Maybe they knew something” as one smug friend put it. Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2012, but I know what’s going to happen on New Years Day 2013: there’d better be a line waiting to kiss my ass with every moron who’s ever insisted to me that there’s an ounce of relevance in an ancient mythology that they don’t even understand. There won’t be, of course; they’ll hem and haw and say “It could have happened!” or pull out some numerology that shows the Pope is the Antichrist so the Mayans were right. But I prefer happier predictions about the future these days.