So last week I found that awesome site stripgenerator.com.  And of course I immediately made my own strip, rife with obscenities, as were a good 75% of all the other anonymous strips posted there.  And then, because I thought it would be fun, I sent the site link to my daughter (no, not my strip), who promptly wrote her first comic, chock-full of what must seem like obscenities to other 9-years old.  So I ask you…what is it that drives Man to this base level?  I remember reading an interview with Robert Crumb, who said he spent years just pouring out all his deepes, most wraped feelings into comvs just to clear out space in his brain.  Maybe that’s it! Anyway, I guess it’s what the say…like father, like daughter…

I have never really cared much about “the weather.” My involvement with the weather begins and ends when I look at the bottom front page of the Free Press and go “Hmm–85 and sunny.” I don’t watch TV much, and never watch the local news or any of that stuff, so unless giant electric eels are falling out of the sky, I am pretty much oblivious. And since the two places I spent the most at — work and home — are climate controlled, it doesn’t really matter what I wear, except that I do take out the down jacket when I see snow.

But this week, after a summer of very dry, lawn-killing weather, we have suddenly been struck with torrential rainstorms. And me, being the genius I am, have been soaked to the skin not once, not twice, but six times this week. Now the first four times, that’s my fault — I drove to work Monday without realizing the kids had taken my umbrella inside. So those four times – going into work, leaving work to pay that ticket I got over my silly interpretation of “No Right Turn On Red Light” ($125!), walking back to my car from the courthouse, and getting back into work (after actually sitting in my car for 15 minutes waiting, praying, hoping against hope that the atmospheric deluge would slacken, which it never did, so I took my medicine), I blame me. And then on Thursday, when I was jogging at 5:15 AM and Oreo the dog and I saw the pitch-black sky light up and the distant rumble of thunder– that was no big deal. We are all sweaty anyway. But then, LAST NIGHT, for no good reason, we’re at the mall, and it doesn’t even look like rain, and on the way out we walk to the exit doors and–it’s Noah’s wrath all over again! So, being a good husband and Dad and not wanting my family to suffer, I walk out and bring the car from the lot to the curb, and bring an umbrella to walk everyone out. Man, I was soaked to the skin! Maybe beyond the skin. To the corpuscles!

And don’t let those romantic movies fool you… Once day years ago the Wife and I were coming back from an after dinner walk, when the sky darkened,a nd we said “Hey! Let’s walk home in the rain! It’ll be romantic! Like in the movies!” Well you know what? Rain is cold. Surprisingly cold. And when your clothes get wet, they start drag down on you, and get very heavy. And your shoes gets quishy. And walking home with your loved one in the rain–well, it’s a lot of things, but romantic is not one of them.

So my advice–carry an rucksack with you wherever you go. Rain gear, winter gear, tent, shotgun, water and iodine tablets. Because you never know! Things change like, like…the weather!

Make your own comic strips.  Post them on your own comic strip blog.  Let your imagination run wild.  Check out Strip Generator.  Here’s an example (and believe me, this is one of the clean ones!)

Without a doubt the best dramatic show on TV show right (since RESCUE ME, while still an excellent show, is going on some weird and not completely satisfying tangents) is MAD MEN on AMC.  For those of you who don’t know about, it’s about Madison Avenue advertising executives in 1960, and the world they live in.  It’s written by one of the producers of THE SOPRANOS, and has a number of things in common with that program, such as:

• A group of adult men doing very well for themselves but not realizing that their business model is starting to show its age, and not ready to acknowledge that the world is changing and they better change with it if they want to stay in business.  (One episode featured them mocking the Volkswagen “Lemon” advertising campaign, and the lead character had a disdain for any professional market research).
• A world where it’s a given that you have a wife and home life but also have a gal on the side
• An unwritten set of rules and standards that the characters supposedly hold as sacrosanct and yet violate all the time.
• Tons of internal politics and gossip mongering, only instead of mobsters and mobster’s wives, it’s business executives, businessmen’s wives, and secretaries
• People who ridicule psychiatry and therapy and yet are obviously in complete denial about their own psychological issues
• A view of the “American dream” that exposes the corruption and deception beneath it

But for my money, the best thing about the show is how it’s different from the Sopranos.   Our hero Don Draper is not, like Tony Soprano, trying to reconcile the old and the new and find some some of redemption, but instead, is full of hatred and self-loathing and thinks everything is a crock and really could give a sh*t.  You can’t help but get behind a guy like that!

And did I mention the constant smoking, the constant drinking, the awesomely cool suits and the super-hot secretarial outfits?  Honestly, how can you not love this show?  Like the lady from the New Yorker says:

Have any states yet legalized marriage between human beings and TV shows? If so, I’m going to throw a few things in a bag and run off with “Mad Men,” the new drama on AMC set in the world of advertising at the dawn of the sixties—and encompassing New York life, and marriage, and sex, and repression, and what America was and was not. It is gorgeous in every way. As it should be—it’s the spawn of all those handsome, stylish office movies that were made in the fifties. Like those movies, “Mad Men” is smart and tremendously attractive, and it stirs you more than it probably should. It may not be deep, but if you’re a certain age and have a certain sensibility and certain fantasies of what New York used to be like (thanks to those movies) it hits a deep place in you, like a straight-up Martini made of memory and desire.

Quite a lot of people have no idea that their favorite mobile or cell phone brand has components that are not made in-house. In fact some brands, t mobile phones for instance, don’t even make a single component. Well made sony ericsson mobile phones or any other eminent brands have many components made by unknown companies. So next time you brag about how sound quality of your samsung mobile phone is, think again.

Here’s what I’m weaing today:  Black sports short (it’s humid out!), black and white houndstooth trousers, black socks, black shoes.  White boxers, since you asked.  Black belt, black wallet.  Just about all my work clothes are from Land’s End, just because it’s easy and quick when you’ve got a busy family life to pick out a few button down shirts and some trousers and be done with it.  Plus you can return anything that doesn’t fit.  We’re all about casual convenience here at FASTANDBAD.  What are you wearing?

 I gotta tell ya, I’ve got a soft spot for any of those non-singer type singers who mostly talk over sophisticated backing tracks, like Lilly Allen and now Kate Nash.  It especially helps if they have cool accent, like British or Jamaican.  One of my absolute favorites was the band Touch and Go, who did the unbelievably cool “I Find You Very Attractive.”  The majority of these singers are usually the front person for a sophisticated producer type who does all the music, and the music is usually pretty awesome, like Lily Allen’s quasi-ska-pop-dub, and Kate Nash uses this plinky piano and sometimes sounds like vintage Brian Eno.  This harkens me back to other uber-cool talk-singers of the masculine persuasion, such as John Cooper Clarke, who talked his poems over backing of Martin Hannet’s’ excellent Invisible Girls.  The biggest criticism I read of this kind of stuff is something obvious like “They’re not good singers” which isreally kind of beside the point–they are excellent communicators, and the new kitchen-sink topics of stuff by Allen and Nash give you a Bird’s eye view of what it’s like to be twenty something in England today.  Plus a lot of it’s funny, and a lot of its catchy, and honestly, what more do you want from pop muisc, anyway?

Bonus:  A JCC video!

Last night was the first of two Synchronized Swimming performances at the P.R. pool, and Maddy was there front and center.  The theme was “A Tour of Detroit”, and she was in the part about baseball, having to perform to one of my least favorite songs of all time, “Eye Of The Tiger.”  It was a lot of fun.  The tough thing about synchronized swimming is that, while it certainly is hard to do (can you swim with one leg suspended out of the water while your other leg keeps you afloat, in coreography with 4 other people?), it’s  hard to really appreciate what is happening, especially from your pool-eye view.  It’s not quite like those old Esther Williams movies where the camera is suspended from above.  But it’s still fun and teaches kids to work together as a team and it’s great exercise.  So viva la synchronizacion!

You can see more pix here, and a thrilling video below!

Maddy had her 9th BD party this weekend, a week early due to the thrilling-but-now-getting-to-be-rather-tedious-Woodward Dream Cruise this weekend.  The theme was Paris, which for Maddy meant this Eiffel Tower birthday cake she saw at the Holiday, and berets and minature Eiffel towers for all her guests.  We had pizza, we played games, I took the girls to HAIRSPRAY (which they considered the best musical in recorded human history), and somewhere around 2 AM everyone got to sleep.  Remind me to do this again in a few decades.  More pix are here.

I subscribe to four magazines — two cooking magazines, The Week, and Esquire. This month Esquire had a new edition of my favorite section, “What It Feels Like.” You can find more here.

As told to Penny Wrenn

I was driving to the drugstore on an April afternoon. About a half mile from my house, I saw two barricades up ahead, but it didn’t look like the road was actually closed. I saw water on the other side, but I couldn’t judge how deep it was. It had been raining off and on for about three days — a nor’easter. I just slowed down to about five miles per hour and kept driving through what looked like a puddle.

I didn’t even get two car lengths past the barricades when my car stopped. Just shut off. I tried restarting it — nothing. I couldn’t open my doors or windows. The doors were unlocked, but when I pulled the handle, it was like the door was jammed. Then water started coming in through the bottom of the front doors.

The car began drifting sideways, as if a current were pulling it, and began sinking nose first. Imagine a silver Chrysler Sebring convertible going down like the Titanic, tilted. Inside, the water kept rising — up and up and up. It felt fast, like filling a glass with water, but it was probably fifteen minutes from empty to full. I don’t remember it making a sound.

I saw a man standing near the barricades. I pounded on the glass, pressing my face against it, and yelled, “Help me! Help me!” I pushed back on my butt on the seat, put my legs up, and kicked both feet at the passenger window. Nothing. When the man reached my car, he was neck high in water, and so was I.

The front of my car was completely submerged. The man told me to move to the backseat where the water was only up to my chest. I gasped for air in the backseat with water nearly up to my nose. The water was cold, maybe 45 degrees.

The water was over my head. I felt within five seconds of my life. No more air. No more bubbles. No more anything. I thought of my son and my husband. I thought about how I’d never see them again.

I could hear the man stabbing at the convertible top with a sharp object trying to puncture the fabric. He managed to make a hole large enough for me to pop my head through. I put my feet on the backseat and lifted myself out. I was probably underwater for ten or fifteen seconds.

Find this article at: http://www.esquire.com/dont-miss/wifl/drownincar0807

For those of you not living in the Western Hemisphere, the final HARRY POTTER book came out last month at midnight, and a few days before the official release date, intrepid hacker-types took digital photos of each page and posted them on the Internet.  This is just the latest in a whole host of “spoiler” related activity in movies, music and television, whereby persons take great joy in telling the world what is going to be happening in popular media before it actually happens, “spoiling” things for people who want to be surprised.  I’ve been doing some thinking about what drives people to do this, and have broken it down into following types:

• The first and most obvious group are the “cool” people who want to show the world that they have the connections and the chops to get to new media before other people (test screenings, reviewers, Internet download, etc.) and want to tell you what happens to prove that they actually know.  These people then break down down into “It is so cool, you will love it, and I am cool for seeing it first” group and the “this sucks you will hate it and I’m here first to tell you it sucks” group.  But both groups want props for being a) first (witness all the ain’t-it-cool-newsposts that say “FIRST!”) and for b) re-setting your expectations for the upcoming media onslaught (which they actually have done on a number of occasions, such as the remake of ROLLERBALL, etc.)
• The second group is a bit more deluded — these are the people who have seen new stuff first and want to offer their “professional” opinion — you should lose this section of the movie, change the music here, etc.  Correct me if I am wrong, but (with the exception of the SNAKES ON A PLANE phenomenon [which, coincidentally, was  box-office disappointment]) I have never in my life read any instance of a major motion picture company changing film content based on the “notes” of  few early viewers.  But is sure is easier criticizing someone else’s film then getting up off your butt and making your own..

Now we get to the bigger question of “Why?”  Why can’t people wait?  And if they can’t wait, and they can get to it before the rest of the world, why can’t they keep things to themselves?  And I believe this breaks down into the following groups:

•  The “Stickin’ It To The Man” Group.  These people would argue that since the media “controls” so much of our life (by scheduling what entertainment product is coming out at what times and there-bye what the newspapers talk about for a given week), that they are “fighting back” by deflating some of the hype and excitement (even though you could argue that piracy and spoilers just help to increase the hype, because the press inevitably starts covering thatas well…)  These people could just, as my buddy KW has discussed with me, just turn their heads and ignore the hub-bub if they really cared so much. (Though you could argue in today’s media-saturated environment, this is hard for anyone but the Unabomber to do…)
• The Reductive group, who seem to believe that the “magic” of a book/movie/”artistic” experience can be boiled down into a few words.  “Harry Potter will die,” “Tony Soprano is in the diner when..”, etc., as if the “plot” of a book or movie is the entire point of the artistic experience.  And the sad thing is that, once they have “spoiled” the first thing, well then, it’s mission accomplished, and time to move on to spoiling and reducing the next thing, as if the artistic experience were just a series of merit badges to be accumulated until…what, exactly?

Now look.  I’m just like everybody else:  I wonder what will be in my presents on Christmas morning.  I may even pick them up and shake them.  However, that suspense, that excitement of “not knowing”  – that’s part of the fun!  That IS the fun!  I’m listening to the last Harry Potter book on CD right now, and I am very anxious about it, and bad things have happened to characters in the book, and I am genuinely worried — but I don’t just want to know.  I want to experience it.

All this spoiler mentality just cheapens and demeans what is, in the best of times, a very unique, very powerful relationship between artist and audience.  Most disturbingly, it illustrates a fundamental lack of respect for all involved, bringing everything down to a base level of “this happened” or “that happened”, with little or no discussion of what these things happening means, to the characters and to us.  It is symbolic of deeper problems in our society, and our current black and white political discourse.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Harry is on his way back to Hogwart’s to get the horcrux…