Nope. Bleatwise, it ain’t happening.

Lest you think I’m thumb-twiddling, I did two videos today, two radio interviews, one interview with some guy named “Steve King,” and then I had to work the transcript into a 32 inch story with a seven-inch sidebar. Apparently he’s written some books. He’s coming to town at the behest of the paper, and I got stuck with talking to him. Jeez: like we have to pimp every struggling author?

My colleague Neil Justin did the interview with the first person in the paper’s “Talking Volumes” series, James Ellroy. I told King I was disappointed to draw him: aw crap, I got the normal guy.

If you’re wondering: he’s a cool guy. Gracious, funny, affable, effortlessly conversational. Spent the evening on the interview piece, which is due in the morning. Friday I have four videos to shoot and a column to write. That said:

There will be 100 Mysteries at the end of the day.

Until I return, a question for the comments: you are given a check for a million dollars, tax free. You have to spend it. You cannot use it on bills, or invest it, or just give it away. What would you do with it?

Me, I’d make a movie. And you?

Flotsam and jetsam today; big work night and even more to come tomorrow. I’d feel guilty about this if I was running a pay site, AND there wasn’t an enormous update over in Black and White World that features some of the wildest, most striking sets in any movie, ever – let alone a small B-picture. But patience.

Speaking of paysites – new piece on the pleasures of small-town boneyards up at theqor.com – but more on that as the week goes on.

Link: Rather old site – at least I hope so – but has some heartbreaking postwar California postcards. Lots of architecture that will appeal to Mad Men fans, even though MM’s period was the start of the age of diseased, confused modernism. (One of the many things the show gets right is the cluttered, fussy domestic interiors; all you have to do is look at the faux-rococo Frenchy infestations in the early 60s hotel brochures, and you know it’s spot-on. For some reason lamps were particularly hit hard. The period between 1962 and 19 . . .oh, I don’t know, 1988? was a nadir of lamp style. Big ceramic monsters with puffy shades, crappy plastic inverted bowls – ugh. It took the rise of the drafting-table lamp, with its utilitarian industrial design, to bring some clarity back to the Lamp Genre. But I don’t know what I’m talking about. I just know I bought a lamp in 1989, and I’d buy it again today, and build an entire room around it – if I went modern, which I won’t.)

Driving to work this morning I heard “Crazy on You” by Heart for the 493,934th time, but this time I listened to it, having previously just thought “Oh, right, change the station.” Wasn’t like I had my hands full; there’s a button on the steering wheel for jumping off to the next well-chewed piece of pop cud. Perhaps because I came in on something other than the chorus, which is the most pedestrian part of the song. The rest is rather good. The chord progressions have the knack of sounding new and inevitable, which is no small trick, and it has the sheen and canny mix 70s songs often did quite well.

That always reminds me of a guy I worked with in a Pizza Hut, who loved “Smoke From a Distant Fire” for its production, not its actual musical quality. I hated that song – eyes have a mist! From a smoke from a dist! Yes your eyes have a mist! From a smoke from a dist! But listen to how the instruments are seperated, he’d say. Stuff like this was invariably described as “tasty,” and invariably played by thin California studio musicians with close-cropped beards, aviator glasses – smoked, of course, perhaps by a fire in closer proximity – and stupid Chuck Mangione hats. Oh, the twaddle that filled the jukeboxes then. The banality of the radio. It was lamp-bad.

Don’t get me started on TV of the era. But do get me started on TV today: I forgot to record “V” the other night, and if I’d had a TiVo it might have realized I wanted to see it. My new DVR couldn’t care less what I want. I don’t ask it to record, it doesn’t. Hey, I just work here, don’t ask me. I found myself looking for it on iTunes – nope – or Hulu – not yet – and this almost brought back the era of childhood TV, where you got one shot, and there wasn’t any pausing it for a phone call or a bathroom break or to get another shot of salt for the popcorn. Records you could play over right away; a movie you could see if you sat in your chair and waited for the next showing. TV happened in real time. No cliffhangers, either; no “story arcs.” Each ep was a self-contained tale to which few other episodes would ever refer. Exceptions: Star Trek, which may explain why it was so popular and seemed so different. Characters didn’t return, except for Harcourt Fenton Etcetera, but entire species did, bringing with them backstories and characteristics around which the fanboy could build all sorts of giddy nerdy speculation. Some of the shows had recurring villains – Dr. Loveless, on the great “Wild Wild West,” and the best heavy of them all, Wo Fat, in “Hawaii 5-0.” Courtly, merciless, worldly: perfect ChiCom foil. By then the Russian agents were either Commubots without emotion, or a fanciful projection of our own hopes: they were Russians in the classic Romantic, soulful sense, in Europe but not of it. They always loved to quote poetry. Take away the liquor and the lit, and the longing to be regarded as the inheritors of the Enlightment, and you had the Chinese Communists – the real Red Menace, because those dudes were cold.

I’d love to see a study of the way Russian Communists were portrayed after, oh, 1963, 64. At the height of the Peril they were hard, hard mofos – listen to some old radio shows like “I Was a Communist for the FBI,” and you’ll hear what I mean. It’s not quite Borees and Natasha territory, but close; anyone allied with the cause was a heartless SOB, ruled by fear and cruelty. The shows seem quaint now, but of course we’re not living an era where half of Europe is occupied by an illiberal claque of oligarchical collectivists. Anyway: somewhere in the 60s we invented the concept of the Cuddly Commie, someone who was either amusingly harmless, a blowhard with a bagful of reheated cliches, or the world-weary literate fellow who was really just as free as us, in a way, and thus an argument for the fatuity of a bipolar world. This idea took a long time to expire, and was last seen in a Star Trek: Next Gen episode, where Picard says “can you believe that people once went to war for different economic systems.” As if that was the small sticking point.

They never quite explain how Roddenberry’s vision of a future without money or religion evolved, or worked, or managed to fill the needs in the human spirit that find manifestation in, oh, things like money, or religion. Trek characters were allowed religion if was based on a non-divine dead guy, be he Surak or Ka’less, but eventually they got old-time religion X 10 with the Bajorans – who started out as sorta-kinda Palestinian stand-ins, but turned into your basic New-Age guys with a priest class and a doctrine built around omniscient, distant god-types who lived in a wormhole and could make anything happen, except granting Avery Brooks the power of personal warmth. And I say that as someone who loved, loved “Deep Space Nine,” and consider it the best of the post original-series shows. Better characters, better plots, better battles. Ronald D. Moore FTW, as the kids say.

So anyway. That’s it. Now: Black and White World. Enjoy!

Newspaper routes: that’s what J. Edgar was promoting. The character-building impact of having a newspaper route.

One word. One man. One image. Ah, but what is this an ad for? Yes, it’s an ad, not a public service announcement.

This was a stem-to-stern, rock ‘em / sock ‘em day. Here’s an example, ripped from the breathless annals of daily life: I’m tweeting something terribly important on my iPhone, standing outside, enjoying a tiny stub of a post-lunch cigar, and no matter how many times I backspace, I cannot delete a period. I figure something is wonky. I shake the phone to undo. This is the modern version of pounding a fist on the top of the TV, except that it’s supposed to work. Nothing. I close the text-entry field. I close the program. I restart the program. I hit the “add tweet” button. The period is still there. Waiting for me.

Unless . . . no, it’s too crazy. But maybe, just maybe, it’s something on the screen.

And so it was! The whole day was like that. Crisis after crisis.

Well, no. As the military vet described war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by terriers. I managed to end up at the animal hospital with my dog, who was not at all happy to be here, and expected needles. How many treats does it take to get a dog’s mind off needles? The world may never know, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say 17.

Back up: after this morning’s news show, for which I performed only TeLeProMpTeR duty, I headed off to shoot a video about the discounts stores in the neighborhood gave you for wearing the “I Voted” sticker. I have this argument every year with people, and always manage to sound like a churlish killjoy, but I don’t like those stickers. They seem a bit smug and self-contented, but that’s just me being smug and self-contented for different reasons. Of course, no one had any discounts this year. Last year Ben & Jerry’s gave you ice cream; this year, nada. The problem with these shoots is getting permission, since most store employees have a natural freak-out when cameras come into the store. No one ever got fired for not letting camera people film something in their store, after all, and given the cinched-shut rectal apertures of many managers, fearful that a camera crew might DESTROY THE BRAND FOREVER, go into lock-down mode. So.

At the video store, I asked for the usual manager. I’ve had fine dealings with her before; she’s a great film fan, and we always have great conversations.

“She was fired,” said the clerk. Oh. Well. Crap. She gave me a sheet with the District Managers’ phone numbers – but I had to give it back before I left, lest it fall into enemy hands. Sigh. Shot the Off to a dry cleaners; I’d cleared it before, but now they were having Second Thoughts. What is this for? What’s this about? Where will it be? What is the velocity of a fully-laden Tuskan Swallow? Again, I understand their trepidation, and it goes against my Nature to foist myself into these situations. But duty, etc. So we did that, ran across the street, and tried to do it at a liquor store. The managers were in a meeting. Could they be interrupted? I know one of them. Say it’s James from around the way.

No: the door was locked.

Locked? What are they doing in there, coordinating a liquor delivery for SPECTRE?

The sub-manager grinned and said “I’m going to make an executive decision here. Because there’s no publicity like free publicity.” Bless you. We did a bit, and I bought a bottle. Next: the coffee shop. No manager.

Said the clerk, a good guy, with very large holes in his ears: we’re like all kind of managers.

Perfect. How about it? Sure. So we shot another sequence. Then I got Natalie from the bus stop, and had an idea: see if I can get a discount at the vet for the dog, by putting an “I Voted” sticker on Jasper. Loaded the dog and child into the car, returned to the neighborhood where we were shooting, and dealt with a very unsure and nervous canine. This is the Place of Poking, after all, the house that smells like fellow-dog-fear. Usually he gets out of the car, but this time he planted. I had to stand on the street with my arse hanging into traffic, in the rain, pushing him out while daughter pulled the leash.

This is my job, and I do it well.

Once inside we plied him with enough treats to take his mind off the sticking he wasn’t going to get. I even ate one. Not bad. If you marketed them as whole-grain multivitamins with a saucy beef top-note and sold them at hunting goods stores, you could make a million. Bond with your dog. Eat the same treat.

Done.

HERE IS THE VIDEO. Click HERE for all the doggy joy.

Home. Out again. Drop off kid at choir. Home. Twenty-seven minutes of concentrated nap – it was so dense I was in REM within 5 seconds of opening the box of pre-nap happy glide-path thoughts – then up for the second shift. Wrote three pieces for various places tonight; took a break and tweaked the site while I listened to a “Gunsmoke.” Matt Dillon had to kill a man, but he needed killing. Shot a woman in the face. He did not, however, kill the man’s son, who rode into town looking for vengeance. Also, Chester said “My goodness, Mister Dillon” and Doc was cynical. It amazes me that they got seven seasons of radio out of the most elemental Western concepts in the book, and each show is different.

So that’s it: stem to stern. More of the same tomorrow, then an interview with some author named “Steve King” – we have half an hour, and Lord knows what we’ll talk about. It will all culminate in a glorious Friday, as they always do.

For now: The Day of the Hump. Out of Context Ad Challenge en route around 10:30 or so. See you soon.

The Guardian’s Odd Entrances, Con’t. Go HERE.

Interesting evening with our financial advisor. He dropped by for the annual chat. He’s also family, so it’s a social occasion. Somehow he had ginned the books to make it look like we didn’t lose everything in the Crash, which is nice. Had some interesting recommendations for investment strategies, and I was a bit surprised when he said “precious metals.” But I realized I’d misunderstood when he got out an attractive mahogany case, and showed us these lovely medals – not the real thing, but collectibles struck by the Franklin Mint, with certificates of authenticity that said they were authentic reproductions. I guess they’re only making 500,000 of them, and then the molds will be destroyed. We need to act soon.

I said I’d think about it. Otherwise, it was the usual tweaking and rejiggering, shifting money from one blobby bucket to another. Fie to this sector! We are reducing our position in Emerging Markets by 1.2%, and shifting it to Moonwalking Markets (they look like they’re going forward but they’re actually retreating; it’s a short-sell position) and we are moving cash into something called “fire,” which promises to consume 100% of our contributions. Usually you need to be in a bear market for a long time to achieve that rate, but he knows a guy.

In all seriousness – hah, I’ve been kidding, in my inimitable way – we got the Reassuring Brochure, which they give you when things have really headed into the crapper at Mach 2. It reassures you that stocks, like shingles and Elton John, always come back over time, and you can’t time the market. Correction: you shouldn’t time the market. Because it might be just a correction. Actually, I think I can time the market. I have an internal Froth Detector that aahh-oooh-gaaah when I sense the peak of the boom. When someone somewhere builds the world’s tallest building, it’s time to cash out. (This does not include proposed buildings – if you’d quit the market when they announced the Larkin Tower, you would have missed half the boom of the 20s.) When retail hits the point where 80% of the stores are operating on the assumption that you have hundreds of dollars to spend on things like organic dog food treats and saffron-scented candles, you might want to eye the exits.

It helps to be contrary, I guess. Things are never as bad as they seem. Things are never as good as they seem. Except for the times when they are – but those are either wonderful moments in your own life or horrible macro-scale moments. Even so: someone fell in love on 9/11. Maybe even more than usual.

I’ve been watching “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” over the last few nights. Stupid title for a movie. I don’t know, do they? How should I emphasize the words? There are several possibilities:

THEY shoot horses, which suggests there are evil anti-horse forces abroad in the land

They SHOOT horses, which means horses really get the business, unlike other animals, which are slapped or kicked or given a Dutch rub

They shoot HORSES, which would either reassure you, because you’re not a horse or have a horse or exist anyplace in that “first they came for the X demographic, but I said nothing” moral construction

THEY SHOOT HORSES, which suggests you’re a soldier in an army that has been attacked by forces wielding enormous cannons that hurl dead horses vast distances

And then there’s the Don’t They? It’s either flat and sarcastic, or nervous and questioning. It only takes about half an hour to realize that the title will probably end up in the mouth of the hard-headed, bitter, cynical, nasty, unfriendly biatch played by Jane Fonda; if someone says something nice about horses, she will respond, well, they shoot horses, don’t they. Because she’s just that kind of gal. The Depression did it to her.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a dance marathon: couples drag each other around the floor for days, hoping to be the last ones standing. I’m half-way through the movie, and since it’s a product of the late sixties – a period that would stretch well into the seventies, really – it drapes the tale with the heavy musty caul of Metaphor. Not sure you could do it differently, really; Pollack was an excellent director, and it’s an almost faultless film. You just suspect that the same story told straight would be just as good. Perhaps even better in its own way.

Later today: Comic Sins. Busy-as-hellacious-hell today. But whaddyagonna do. Sit home? Polish your medals?

A fine old name replaced with a meaningless new one. Go HERE.

This is as good as it will get for a while:

The wind took half the scenery away that afternoon, and the scythe of fall will harvest the rest. It’s like watching the Hand of God move the Saturation slider to the left. But even while the leaves expire, there’s odd late-comers to the party:

Big juicy berries, ready to ferment and endrunkenate the squirrels.

Took down the Halloween decorations Sunday. Of course. Nothing is deader than Halloween the day after. No “Twelve Days of Halloween” with another holiday a week later – just bleak November, implacable and enormous. When I was a kid “taking down the Halloween decorations” meant removing the jointed cardboard Ben Franklin skeleton from the window; now it’s like striking the set of an Andrew Lloyd Webber play.

It was a nice night, though. Not as raw as advertised, so the outdoor party wasn’t a trial. Everyone huddled around the fire, trying to strike the balance between bone-warming heat and flesh-singing flames. Took daughter and friend up and down the streets, and the houses looked magnificent in the twilight. The leaves, the bare limbs – most trees are empty, but a quarter still have their costumes – the pumpkins and spooky Target animatronic decorations, the shouts and whoops from kids up and down the block: magic. We even had an escaped puppy to bring drama to the night. A peppy Pekinese bolted out of someone’s door and shot down the street like black mercury, delighted with itself and the world. For a while it seemed it would never be caught, but eventually I heard a YIPE that indicated someone had gotten a handful of fur or flesh.

Over the fire I chatted with a neighbor who’s working on the “Red Dawn” remake. Get this: in the new version, China and Russia invade the US – to put a stop to our greed. There are times you wish you had a mouthful of kerosene so you could do a flaming spit take. If this is how the film turns out, it’ll be hilarious; it’s as if the filmmakers were a bit ambivalent about all the horrible jingoism that such a film might unleash, so they had to temper it with a bit of theoretical altruism that could be true, you know, in a sense. I almost expect the Russians and Chinese to invade to enforce Copenhagen protocols, and the brave Americans fight back for a modified rollout of carbon emission standards that will allow domestic industry to perfect the new HydroWind Energy System, which the Chinese don’t want because they just signed a UN agreement to respect patents of other countries.

Well, it can’t be worse than Transformers, unless it includes transforming Russian soldiers that turn into liquor bottles. I did watch Transformers 2: the Fall of the Revenging or something; I expected kinetic nonsense, and got it, but I really missed the heartfelt contemplative tone of the first one. Really. Sort of. Compared to the sequel, the first one was a Merchant-Ivory version of a Turgenev short story. I know, I know, it’s a stupid movie about robots, and you’re just supposed to sit back and let it pummel you bloody, but I still have trouble with the concept: these robot-creatures have rockets for feet and can travel great distances by walking or running or flying. So naturally, when they want to go somewhere, they turn into cars. Interesting to see the great ruins of Egypt destroyed; interesting also to note that no modern scientist ever noticed the presence of a giant dense machine in the center of the pyramids. Amosbot and Andybot were as appalling as advertised; John Turtorro acted like a man who got repetitive stress injuries from flushing his thespian credentials down the toilet, but hey: it’s a living, and can’t begrudge him that.

Put up some Christmas lights Sunday afternoon. In response to a tweet announcing that fact, someone responded “oh, you’re one of THOSE people.” No, I am married to one of those people. She pointed out that the weather was fine and it would only get colder; did I want to stand outside with numb digits trying to fit cold stiff plastic around dead trees? No. So I got out the survivors from last year, made sure they worked (Chinese factories embed strands with nanotermites that eat away the wires over time), then wound them around a hedgerow. Problem: they have multiple twinkle settings, or MTS. Each strand has a controller box with 12 settings, and I remembered straight away that last year’s strands were uncoordinated. One was Steady Flash, the other was Flashing Chasing, or Twinkle Glow, or Burning Stream, or whatever. So I clicked the controller switch until I got both strands reading from the same script, and considered calling it a day.

No: the red lights could go up on the tree. The one with the berries above. The big ripe berries. The big red prone-to-burst berries. More than twice I managed to get whipped in the head by a branch, which not only scraped my cheek but smushed blood-berries in my face. Language of an impolite and uncivil nature was deployed. With gusto.

Enthused by my newfound initiative, I drove to the hardware store for more lights. One look at the early-season prices told me I was an idiot, and should stand down immediately. But I was here! At the discount store! Can’t waste a trip, so . . . okay, batteries. Peanuts. Feed for the new bird feeder. (Bought some “Cracked corn,” thinking, I am, in a sense, Jimmy, and I do care.) Handwarmers for the emergency kit. While I was considering some windshield de-icer, a man spoke up in a loud voice in an Indian accent:

“They have plenty of bird feed but not enough fertilizer.”

I turned around, and noted that they did, indeed, have lots of bird feed, and hardly any fertilizer.

He waved at a clerk, and asked where it would be that he could find the fertilizer.

“That’s it,” said the clerk.”

“That is it? And all this bird feed?”

The clerk said he was sorry but it was a seasonal thing.

The customer scoffed and gave off a great cloud of huff over the idiocy of a store not carrying sufficient quantities of fertilizer.

I examined the bird feed display, and the fellow had a point: it was enormous. I realized I could buy a lot of bird feed in a bulk bag for the price of my Cracked Corn. Suddenly Jimmy cared. On the other hand, the price included a mail-in rebate, which for me is like saying “Thirteen dollars off with coupon, and a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls (subject to verification.)” I never mail in rebates. I know myself.

It’s just not going to happen.

So that was the weekend. It was good. I spent little time on the Internet, but I did slap together a nice batch of updates for this week. Natalie said she missed watching the Rolie Polie Olie Halloween special with me – she had a sleepover that night – and I sad I did too. She wants to watch it tomorrow, which is fine; part of childhood is the ability to draw out holidays a day or two beyond their legal conclusion. Why, Halloween had passed, and I went outside around 1 AM to put out the pumpkin light, and heard a disco-trickle from down the street: the party was still going on. Well, let’s go join it, then. Fire, beer, companionship. I opened the gate to head out, and the music cut off. Party was over.

I blew out the pumpkins, saluted the moon, and went to bed. A good Halloween is a small thing, but if the day that follows is sunny and mild, it gives a man some spine. If there’s ever a month that needed to be punched in the nose just to show it who’s boss, it’s November.

Nothing to write home about, alas: an EXTREMELY colorful addition to Sears 1934, here, and 100 Mysteries, a rather visually static and looong movie, here. Only dedication to the 100 Mysteries project makes me do anything about it. Some weeks are like that, you know.