SPECIAL

Santa Monica's Pacific Park really knows how to make a kid feel special on his birthday.

IT'S A STEAL

Listen, Ross — if you're not cool with shoplifting, then you do not love bargains as much as I do.

MIKE AND IKE AND YIPES!

When I first saw this giant box of Mike and Ike, I thought it was a board game based on the candy.

LA SPORTS FANS

PHONING IT IN

I recently worked on a cooking show where all the staffers spent most of their time on their cell phones — usually while taping was in progress.

I think this girl was a PA. She's sitting in the special chair designated for the pregnant host of the show.

Same girl. This time she's texting while sitting in the Teleprompter operator's chair. The prompter guy is in front of her trying to work while standing up.

I wondered if the PA on the left and the other culinary staffer on the right were texting each other.

And, of course, the talent.
It begs the question: is anyone interested in this show?

COVER ME

This is the tag that was on my old electric blanket. I wonder if there's still a "Blanket Service Station" — and will they check my oil too?

YAKETY DAX

SPAM I AM

From my email's Spam Folder. 
Oddly, I'm more interested in the second one.

SLOW BURN

Here's a delightful Yelp Review of Stella Barra Pizza. The reviewer is pissed that she literally burned the roof of her mouth eating some pizza. She didn't figuratively or metaphorically burn herself, mind you — she literally burned herself.

And the fact that she put hot food in her mouth before it had cooled enough to chew it "really bothered" her about the restaurant.

It's almost as if the pizza was in an oven or something.

CAULK OF THE WALK

So I was re-grouting and re-caulking my shower when my caulking gun broke. What to do?

It's MacGyver time.

I slit open the tube of caulk and fed it into a plastic bag. Then I snipped a hole in one corner and squeezed out a bead of caulk into all the joints in the shower.

Completing a home improvement project — but doing it in the manner of a pastry chef — is simultaneously the most masculine and feminine thing I've ever done.

LATHER, EAT, REPEAT

Amazon would like you to know that they sell many flavors of this shampoo. You know, in case you're planning a Shampoo Brunch.

DRAWING A BLANK

Anthem Blue Cross sent me a booklet with many dozens of pages attempting to explain why my premiums were being raised. The booklet contained many empty pages — some "intentionally left blank" and some... not? Either way, perhaps Anthem could cut costs by not mailing thousands of blank pages to people.

YOU KNOW IT'S A LONG MENU WHEN...

BALD-FACED LIE

I took this photo off the TV. It's from an ad for a hair restoration company. This hair pattern is not believable even by Charlie Brown standards.

PAPER TRAIL

At a job I had recently, the janitor stored the extra toilet paper on top of the paper towel dispenser. One day, I rearranged the rolls more entertainingly. A few days later, I found it had been rearranged again. He totally got it.

We went back and forth like this for a while. It was like having a delightful conversation with someone I never met.

I didn't take pictures of all of the configurations, but here are some of my favorites:

I'LL SEE YOU IN HEALTH

Just finished a cooking show for CBS. The premise: professional chefs transform unhealthy home recipes of normal folks into nutritious & delicious meals.

Here's a photo of our craft service table:

THE HANGOVER

I paid a visit to the Irish bar from my college days. The drink menu has undergone quite a transformation. With vodka flavors like "Birthday Cake" and "Salted Karamel," these days the place seems to cater to alcoholic babies.

LOCKED & LOADED

In order to keep ne'er-do-wells out of their storage locker, my neighbors have cleverly employed the use of a paper bag handle.

PASSING THE BAR

Stanley's Restaurant has an interesting drink special: The F. Lee Basil.

OH, CANADA!

Jeez, Netflix, that's a pretty specific category.

SHE'S GOT LEGS?

If I could choose one word to describe a sexy female leg, undoubtedly it would be "Toothpick."

By the way, J Crew's mannequin is too skinny even for Toothpick Jeans, so the store had to pin them.

SHOOTS AND LADDERS

What comes in the box for the Walking Dead board game… 
Dice? A spinner? A Colt Python .357 Magnum?

TO DIE FOR

For Christmas, who wouldn't want to slip into a Sudden Death Jacket?"

NOT A CREATURE WAS STIRRING…

Due to the ear placement on this Christmas ornament from Cost Plus World Market, what was supposed to be a bear looks like a "polar mouse."

PECAN'T

Pecan Pie-flavored Pringles taste like dehydrated McGriddles.

COPY THAT

Shia LaBeouf has been accused of plagiarism... but no one can say he stole his new idea for a dried meat product:

MOONRAKE

Hm... I'm not familiar with that last film in 
the SyFy Channel's James Bond marathon.

AN ARMS RACE FOR FEET

Saw these in a Nordstrom. 
Are tassels status symbols now or something? 
'Cause them's a lotta tassels.

COLORS, COLORS

When I was a little boy, I imagined — assumed, really — that in the 21st Century, automobiles would come in all the colors of the rainbow.

You'd be able to go to a car dealership, pick out your car and choose any color you could think of. And then in a week or a few days (hell, maybe a few hours!) your customized vehicle would be ready.

Well, it's 2013, and if you're interested in purchasing the new Acura ILX hybrid car, here are your choices:

BLANKET OF SNOW?

This sheet set is labeled "Weatherproof" but if there are 
meteorological conditions occurring in your bedroom, 
wet linens are probably the least of your problems. 

HOW RANDOM

I work on a game show, and prior to each tape day, we randomize the material.
The meeting for today's randomization was at 9:15.

"Siri — create an event called Randomization."

"THIS IS 9-1-1 — ARE YOU ON THE LIST?"

The name of this emergency vehicle sums up 
everything that's wrong with the American healthcare system.

GREAT AMERICAN LYRICS

One of my favorite song lyrics is from Salt-N-Pepa's "Whatta Man."

"From 7 to 7, he's got me open like 7-Eleven."

Seems to me those hours are a bit off.

WHEN I WENT TO SLEEP, IT WAS A JOHN TRAVOLTA PILLOWCASE; WHEN I WOKE UP...

BUCKET LIST

Should I be concerned that the folks at the 2013 Citrus Classic Balloon Festival seem to think that me and my whole family are going to die imminently?

FRO-ROE

They've got lots of toppings at my local frozen yogurt place. 
The one in the upper right appears to be salmon roe.

DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DRIVE

This driver wants all of us to know that he is a proud American Union supporter. 

But he's driving a car that wasn't built by a single American UAW union member.
The Honda Insight is manufactured in Suzuka. 

The flag on his bumper sticker should be Japanese, not American.

LIQUOR? I HARDLY KNOW HER!

I tore this liquor ad (for Grand Marnier or Dewar's) out of a magazine in 1994.
I was fascinated by the Photoshopping of the model's fingers on her left hand.

NICE RACK

Another great Scrabble rack

SLIGHTLY IRREGULAR

Here's a page from a catalogue I got in the mail once.
This page caught my eye because of the woman in the upper left box.

At the bottom of the page, it says "Slightly Irregular" — this look implies that maybe the phrase is meant to describe the model, not the bra. 

BED, BETH & BEYOND

Whenever I'm out apartment hunting, I think of this sign I once saw:

I'd hate to see one of their 1 1/2 Beth units.

BRANDEIS STORIES

Thirteen years ago today, I began the most rewarding job I ever had — I helped my friend David Milch teach a month-long theater course to high school students visiting Brandeis University.

Mara, David, Julia, Dave, Rachel, Josh,
Deborah, Emily, Naomi, Allie, Jesse, Sharon, Andi, Michal, Erielle, Gillian

David did all of the heavy lifting education-wise, but I enjoyed every minute I got to work with the students.

In addition to theater history and technique, the kids received a few life lessons that summer too. They got their first taste of self-indulgent, shitty absurdist theater thanks to the Gloucester Stage's idiotic play called Pipe. 

In Cambridge, they saw the brilliant Marcel Marceau. And in Boston, we enjoyed a delightful outdoor performance of The Tempest — that was enhanced by the brief interruption of an actual thunderstorm.

For the most part, I had weekends off and used them to run around New England.

I saw the movie Hamlet with a Dane (a teacher named Sara), and I got to see the Big Dig in progress. (I believe they're really close to finishing that project.)

David and I took a trip to Foxwoods where I won $500 from a Betty Boop slot machine. I stood there while the speakers blared "I wanna be loved by you... you and nobody else but you!" over and over again for 10 minutes until a casino employee finally shut it off and paid me. 

During a weekend in Manhattan, we scarfed down some coal-fired pizza at John's, and I ran into my buddy Frank Nicotero in Washington Square Park (he was shooting remotes for the show that would make him famous, Street Smarts).

As a baseball fan, it was a thrill to finally visit Fenway Park. The ballpark itself is a wreck, and they serve the worst hot dogs I've ever eaten, but far and away the best baseball fans I've ever sat with were at Fenway. They were the perfect combination of being very knowledgable and very salty. Fans would scream at the top of their lungs at the manager about dumb trades made decades ago.

I also enjoyed that around Fenway only two t-shirts were available for purchase: "Red Sox Nation" and "Yankees Suck." As a lifelong Yankees fan, I found Boston's specifically-directed sartorial anger fascinating and hilarious. You wouldn't be able to find a "Red Sox Sucks" shirt anywhere in New York; it wouldn't even occur to us to make one.

And that summer I achieved a lifelong dream: visiting Bourne, Massachusetts — named for a famous whaler named Jonathan Bourne (imagine a time when you could gain naming-a-town-after-you notoriety through fishing). 

I visited the Jonathan Bourne Historical Society and Bourne High School.

When I excitedly told the librarian "I AM Jonathan Bourne!" she couldn't have seemed less impressed. Guess I should've learned to catch a whale.

I still think about those Brandeis kids from time to time. We did a class exercise in  storytelling where each student had a limited amount of time to tell a personal story until a bell went off. Every time the bell would ring, we'd all feel disappointed that we wouldn't get to hear the end of the story.

On the last day we were all together, I told them that I was sad to see them go because to me, they were all stories, and now it was if a bell was going off, and I'd never get to find out how all those wonderful stories turned out.

But thanks to the internet, I've gotten to see a little more of those stories.

Mara got her doctorate in epidemiology from Harvard and is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Sharon went to Yale and became an attorney in Chicago.

After getting her Masters in Diplomacy and Conflict Studies, Erielle became an anchor on Israel's IBA News, then returned to her native Oklahoma to become the weekend anchor at KOCO.

Those are some good stories.