Michael Bloomberg hospitalized after assault by Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins landed in NYC today to put the hurt on Michael Bloomberg
 as she believes the pro-business-deregulation mayor's proposal
to regulate citizen's soda pop intake to be something quite atrocious. 

"How dare you make such a mockery of the nanny state!" the famed childcare professional was heard to cry, as she felled the diminutive mayor with repeated blows of her umbrella.  Poppins is irate that the billionaire mayor, who believes that big business and big banks should be deregulated, is now cutting off Big Gulps for the masses of Gotham, insisting that individual citizens not be allowed to regulate their own sugar intake. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/31/nyregion/bloomberg-plans-a-ban-on-large-sugared-drinks.html?_r=1&hp



"They can have a spoonful of sugar until the unemployment goes down," the mayor moaned.  "But only one teaspoon."  

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg
noted that community leaders
were already expressing support.
"The Soup Nazi has called
to offer his congratulations."

This could end up being the most romantic movie of the year.



 Too bad the romance is between 12-year-olds.  Cry into your (root)beer tonight in honor of writer/director/cinema savant Howard Hawks, who, on this day in 1896, was born into a wealthy industrialist family in Indiana.  Hawks  used his family money to get in with Jack Warner (with a loan) but the rest, as they say, Hollywood history.  Hawks directed "guy" stuff, like gangster movies (the first Scarface), war movies (Sargeant York and Only Angels Have Wings), westerns (Red River and Rio Bravo), but he was also a genius in men/women pairings:  Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To Have and To Have Not, The Big Sleep and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  Maybe if he were around today, he'd be begging to sign on for Avengers 2.  Or maybe not.

Walter Burns:  There's been a lamp burning in the window for ya, honey...here.
Hildy Johnson:  Oh, I jumped out that window a long time ago. 

Hawks and Lauren Bacall.



Bafflingly, Washington Post expresses bafflement at reptilian behavior

Photo of Mr. Wolford from Washington Post, where despite their locale,
writers and editors reveal surprise at reptilian behavior.

This is the actual blurb from the front page of the web version of the Washington Post today, describing the death of a Pentacostal preacher from snakebite: 

A day after his 44th birthday, Mack Wolford of West Virginia was bitten by a rattler he had known for years.

Known for years?  So I guess they had palled around, watched episodes of Man vs. Wild together?  So I suppose the takeway is how shocking it is that a rattle snake would bite the hand that fed it?  (Metaphorically speaking, the snake bit him in the thigh.)

And here's the lede: 

Mack Wolford, a flamboyant Pentecostal pastor from West Virginia whose serpent-handling talents were profiled last November in The Washington Post Magazine, hoped the outdoor service he had planned for Sunday at an isolated state park would be a “homecoming like the old days,” full of folks speaking in tongues, handling snakes and having a “great time.” But it was not the sort of homecoming he foresaw.

Instead, Wolford, who turned 44 the previous day, was bitten by a rattlesnake he owned for years. He died late Sunday.

Maybe the Washington Post has such a puckish sense of humor they are actually mocking the unfortunate Mr. Wolford.  Because you'd think in a town like Washington, they'd have some basic understanding of reptilian behavior....Here's the link to the rest of the article:  http://tinyurl.com/6n7tqm5

Drones-R-Us: Tech billionaire announces start-up for manufacturing personal drones.

The drone:  Barack Obama is luvin' it, to wage his un-ending war of terror. http://tinyurl.com/78o5wnj Bob McDonnell is wantin' it, for Virginia law enforcement.  http://tinyurl.com/89qxvln  Soon all of us may be gettin' it, now that an internet billionaire has announced plans to manufacture a drone for personal use, called The Stinger.

This surgical strike
has medical approval--
Dr. Strangelove
has announced his
unqualified support.

"With tech costs dropping, we feel that this will be ideal consumer product for the 21st century," said a Drones-R-Us spokesman.  "Got a cheating spouse?  Not sure what your teen is doing after school?  Think your neighbor may be up to no good?  The Stinger keeps you in the know."  Data collected from The Stinger may be used in court actions or downloaded directly to Facebook for public shaming.  A weaponized version of The Stinger will also be available.  Asked about the potential for vigilante actions a la George Zimmerman, the spokesman insisted the opposite was true.  "Zimmerman panicked after Trayvon Martin confronted him.  Using The Stinger will eliminate that kind of human error.  After all, look at the CIA's phenomenal record.  That's why they're called surgical strikes."

Playcation.

Sam Waterston and Meryl Streep in 1976's "Measure for Measure"
( photo from the New York Times)

Now is our winter of discontent made

glorious summer by the stage of New York.

Not headed for NYC this summer for Shakespeare at the Delacorte?  Then at least take a little side trip through time with the NYTimes slideshow of the stars when they had not yet those silver hairs which purchase our good opinion--in other words, younger, thinner and besotted with the Bard.   http://tinyurl.com/7lg5ylf

Here's the link to the accompanying article: http://tinyurl.com/7jyvvgd

Anatomy of a War on Terror: Bush's gut vs. Obama's "lawyer brain."

Turns out there's not much difference.  Which is the reason a lot of people have lost heart.  Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/78o5wnj

Yee-ha! Happy birthday Wister's Western!



"If you want to call me that--smile," said Gary Cooper
in the 1929 movie made from Wister's novel.

 On this day in 1902, MacMillan published Owen Wister's The Virginian, bestowing literary cred to what had previously been the province of pulp.  The next year the first "prestige" picture of the emerging motion picture industry would be Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery.  (And that was six years before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reportedly killed in Bolivia--I say reportedly because, well, that's another story or two). 110 years, a lot of great movies and some really crappy fashions, political and otherwise.  On this Memorial Day, where might we be if a certain past president hadn't thought he was cowboy/gunslinger?   

Westerns are great, but on occasion, they've led
to unfortunate headgear and childish thinking.





"The Bachelor" TV Show asks columnist Tom Friedman to join their next cast.

Who will get Tom's rose?



It was hardly more than a week ago that Mike Bloomberg left New York Times columnist Tom Friedman at the altar (and Match.com took over Americans Elect http://tinyurl.com/7zsad64), but now that Friedman has made the pivot to Obama, dangling, ahem, his potential approval with such who's-Mike-Bloomberg elan, producers at "The Bachelor" are eager to see him in their next series.  "He's got just the attitude we look for." http://tinyurl.com/d588t8f 

Dreams can come true--it can happen to you!

Knock back a stiff drink today, or better yet belly up to the fine fiction of Samuel Dashiell Hammett, born on a Maryland farm on this day in 1894.  Hammett left school at 13, became a Pinkerton at 19.  (He said later he quit them because of their strike-breaking.)  Although he joined the Army in WWI, he spent most of his time in the hospital with Spanish flu and later tuberculosis.  He started writing in San Francisco in the twenties when he was in his thirties, and he wrote his five great novels over a five-year period. 

A disabled vet with TB, he still pulled strings to join up in WWII.  After the war, he refused to reveal the names of the bail funders for the Civil Rights Congress and went to jail for six months, then refused to name names to HUAC and was blacklisted.  He died in 1961 and was buried in Arlington.

In his Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler said of him:

He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

The eyes have it--unless they don't.

In the Allenwood Penitentiary in Allenwood, PA,  Aldrich Ames turns 71 today.  He turned Soviet mole in 1985, and for over a decade, he sold information from his desk at CIA counter-intelligence, making millions, and sending 10 agents to their death in the process.  And here's the thing about this mole:  he didn't burrow down.  Nope, he was right out in the open.  The CIA didn't see anything funny about his heavy drinking, his questionable polygraph scores, and mind-bogglingly lavish spending that included a Jaguar, tailored suits and more than a half a million dollars in home and home improvements, paid for in cash, all on a $60,000 annual salary, Ames wasn't investigated until months before his arrest.  Here's a news report from the time:   http://tinyurl.com/ctnukzz 

But that was in the old Cold War.  Now we're in the endless War on Terror.  This week a federal judge ruled against the rights groups suing under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to see government cables relating to waterboarding and a photo of a "high value" detainee during the time he was waterboarded.  In objecting to the ruling, the New York Times noted:

The only thing that's hidden here
are those memos.

The court found that FOIA’s exemption for “intelligence methods” applied even though the brutal conduct illuminated by these records is considered illegal by President Obama and a host of laws and treaties and is not covered by the C.I.A.’s charter. The court also said the C.I.A. was justified in withholding two passages in Justice Department memos that appear to concern the origins of the Bush torture program.

And remember, it's the Obama Justice Department that's "winning" this case, and while Obama has exempted the torturers from prosecution, he's gone after the whistleblowers with ruthless zeal.  He really couldn't be more open about his love for government secrecy.  Yet liberals keep seeing him as one of their own. Funny how that works.   Here's the link to the NYT editorial http://tinyurl.com/cx67byh

I vant to read yore novil.

On this day in 1897 London bookshops began selling Irish novelist Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Stoker wrote drama reviews for the Dublin Mail, served as a manager for the actor Sir Henry Irving and along the way wrote 17 novels.  None of his 1912 obits even mentioned Dracula by name, but then in the twenties the novel was adapted for the stage, and in 1931 for the film starring Bela Lugosi.  The rest, of course, is heestory.

National Weather Service assumes responsibility for issuing spoiler alerts.

She's a he.

"Somebody had to do it," said an unnamed official at the agency.  "You've got people out there innocently scrolling the web, somebody forgets to add the spoiler alert, and bam! the movie, book, whatever, is completely ruined for unwarned."

Seriously, the New York Times Resident Per-fesser Stanley Fish recently wrote a column about "The Hunger Games" which included plot details without the requisite "spoiler alert" and was so roundly condemned by spoilees that he wrote a column in defense of spoiling.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/stanley-fish/ Why Stanley Fish is writing about "The Hunger Games" or the people who bother to read Stanley Fish would also be disturbed by a plot revelation, well, that is a mystery that...SPOILER ALERT...I can't solve.

But what I can do is ruin somebody else's day by offering a few spoilers of my own.

She's a he.

1.  Norman Bates' mother is really Norman Bates in a dress and wig.  Yeah, I know.  He sure looked like an old lady.

2.  Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker's dad, and Luke is really Princess Leia's brother.  Yeah, I know.  He sure seemed evil.

3.  The chick in Crying Game?  She is really a dude.  Yeah, I know.  She sure rocked those earrings.

4.  You know that guy in the Oval Office?  Barack Obama?  He was born in the United States.  Yeah, I know I fooled you, cause it's a different kind of plot spoiler altogether.  And I'm ruining it for the dozen other states that wanted to get in line behind Arizona and go through this stupid story one more time.  But they'll get over it.  Or maybe they won't.  http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/birthers-real/story?id=16425991

On this day in 1975, the grizzly bear was classified as an "endangered species." The problem is worse now.

Sean Connery was recognizably human--and hairy.
No wonder Daniel Craig is always scowling:  so many steroids, so few carbs, so little fun.

I suppose I should point out that the grizzly population still numbers fewer than 1,000 in the lower 48 states, but that's for another day.  Today I speak of the steroidal action star with a fear of fur.





When even the
brilliant Sherlock
has more brawn
than brains,
that's a clue.

It's a dirty job to defend male body hair, but somebody has to do it before we completely forget what actual humanity looks like.  Actual women, for example, do not look like skinny little boys with store-bought boobs.  Forty years ago females on film were objectified--now they're marginalized.  And as women have waned on the screen, men have waxed and buffed themselves so that they are nothing but gleaming curves.  Maybe it's a good turnabout:  Men are the brainless chesty ones today. 

I blame this man.

But off my soapbox for now.  I have an appointment for my Brazilian bikini wax.

Roar-schach, Part II: Sshhhh.

So it seems departing employees of the New York Public Library can earn an additional paycheck for signing a "non-disparagement agreement," which is exactly what it sounds like.  Some have refused to sign, and are now free to criticize the controversial library overhaul.  According to the New York Times:

The nondisparagement agreements have come to the fore partly because many employees have recently left the library after buyouts were offered to cut costs. Those who left under this “voluntary separation incentive program,” introduced in 2009, could elect to receive severance in exchange for several conditions, including the nondisparagement agreement. Several former employees who accepted the severance said they would like to comment on the Central Library Plan, a much debated proposal to overhaul the main branch by selling off other branches and moving some of the stacks to New Jersey, but could not because they had signed the agreement.

Censorship?  Buying silence?  Depends on how you look at it.  Quiet in the library--there's more than one way to shush.
Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/d7tyroh

Senator says Secret Service prostitution scandal wider than thought; John Travolta may be involved.

Okay, part of that headline is true.   http://tinyurl.com/c5vlz6p  Susan Collins and other senators express disbelief at Director Mark Sullivan's rogue agent theory, and this morning Dana Milbank expresses disbelief that Sullivan will keep his job if he doesn't make a bigger display of alarm or contrition.  http://tinyurl.com/bvvc25q  Everyone is disturbed that agents haven't been polygraphed, and that the bunga bunga party rooms weren't swept for bugs.  Prudence or prurience?

I say from Russia with love, let's bring in Agent Rosa Klebb and let her kick ass with those deadly ortho shoes of hers.

Roar-schach.

While today marks the 101st anniverary of the dedication of the New York Public Library, last night marked another sign of the times as library officials entered the lion's den, defending plans for a $300 million renovation that will close two branches and remove a million and a half books from the flagship Fifth Avenue branch, exiling those volumes to storage in New Jersey.  http://tinyurl.com/7s94fbc  More than 1,000 writers, scholars and artists have petitioned the library to jettison the plan; Pulitzer-winning biographer Edmund Morris took to the NY Times op-ed pages to protest it http://tinyurl.com/7n93jur, and others have joined in the fray.  http://tinyurl.com/6qpvcf3

The nicknames of those lions, by the way, are Patience and Fortitude.  Qualities not much prized in today's wired world, where we must be "connected" to everywhere, everyone, all the time.  Making it easy for one person to unplug and connect, deeply, slowly, with one book--how old fashioned!  Or not.  Call it our on-going roar-schach test.

Ruth Marcus in today's WaPo pleads for less techno-immersion.  Sounds good, but when she cites a recent survey that 12% of "Millenial Moms" have used their smartphones during sex, and I don't mean creatively, it seems to me that books and reading, unless shaded in gray, are probably screwed--and I don't mean in a good way.   http://tinyurl.com/c9hqzjh 

Wall Street to implement a moment of silence in honor of forebearers.

On this day in 1934, notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died in the proverbial "hail of bullets" as they were driving a stolen car near Saile, Louisiana.  This morning, just before the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, there will be a moment of silence on Wall Street to honor the pair.

"Those poor brave suckers," said one banker of the duo.  "They were forced to use guns and resort to violence to snatch deposits.  Thanks to deregulation and all our banking 'innovations' the inside job is now a safe and lucrative career path."  The banker added, "We also get a lot of praise from Congressional Republicans for it."  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/senators-put-federal-regulators-not-jpmorgan-on-the-hot-seat/2012/05/22/gIQAPmv8iU_story.html

Chewbacca relieved to hear affordable housing on the way.

Chewbacca has grown increasingly desperate in his business schemes,
at one point unsuccessfully entreating Cookie Monster
to join him in a cable porn show, "Wookie Wants a Cookie." 

The last two decades have been rough going for Chewbaccca as his unsuccessful dabbling in business--franchise hair salons, for example--ate away at his Star Wars earnings.  True, some have fared worse:  R2D2 who became a slot machine and ended face-up in a dumpster for shorting a Vegas loanshark.  On the other hand, other alumni have moved on to successful careers:  C-3PO as a personal assistant to liberal Hollywood moguls who enjoyed that the robot's extreme deference came without racial guilt.  

And then of course, there's Darth Vader who went on to high level participation in politics.

For Chewbacca, it's been less glamour and more grind, making personal appearances at low pay.  "We don't have regular conventions like the Trekkies," he said recently, with some bitterness.  "And I'm a nobody at ComicCon with all those stupid superheroes.  And we're the ones with the real myth."  He generally averages about $75,000 annually from his appearances--a figure that will qualify him for the low-income housing George Lucas is now building on his Marin County property.

The real story:  A long time ago--that would be back in 1978 when he was flush with Star Wars cash--in a galaxy far, far away--that would be Marin, CA, one of America's richest counties--George Lucus built a ranch where he made movies and special effects for the movies.  That operation got bigger and then bigger until Marin neighbors complained.  So now Lucas strikes back with a plan to instead use the land to build affordable housing for low-income families.  However, "low-income" is a relative state--er, county--as the New York Times article points out:

In a telling fact, a family of four with an annual income of $88,800 can qualify for housing assistance in Marin, which has about 6,500 income-restricted housing units, according to the county.

Here's the link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/us/george-lucas-retreats-from-battle-with-neighbors.html?src=me&ref=general

It's a great day to be horny.

Forget the coffee, brew up a little Brunnhilde.  It's Richard Wagner's birthday!  May 22, 1813--Feb. 13, 1883

Taken for a ride: Movies in the age of the theme park ride.

So the movie Battleship if not sank at least listed severely in the wake of the megamonster Avengers this weekend.  John Carter suffered an even more ignominious fate two months ago.  So it's no wonder that Universal and Disney are duking it out in the theme park arena--apparently it's the most profitable slice of the multimedia biz, not only only more dependable in delivery--families just keep spending to go to the parks regardless of the economy--but also a dependably larger source of cash flow.  The Harry Potter theme park is mopping up faster than a quidditch broom on steroids.   http://tinyurl.com/d3t97pw 

But then again, when movies, regardless of the source material, are designed to feel like theme park rides--fast, loud, with obvious twists and turns and zero emotional investment--then why not go directly to the park ride itself for the real authentic experience? 

As Jeffrey Eugenides' novel "The Marriage Plot" heads for the big screen perhaps we should ponder: 

Partly cloudy, with a good chance of mystery.

Maybe it's just the old-fashioned photography, but to modern eyes, the two most famous aviators in the world could almost have been siblings.  And the similarities go beyond the physical:  On this day in 1927, Charles Lindbergh touched down in Paris to complete the world's first transatlantic flight; five years later to the day, Amelia Earhart became the first pilot to replicate the achievement.

Earhart vanished into thin air;
Lindbergh lived a secret double life
in plain sight.

Five years after that, Earhart disappeared, famously, over the Pacific.  Lindbergh lived on for nearly a half century, living very publicly--sometimes publicly and tragically as in the kidnapping of his infant son, and sometimes publicly and controversially in his involvement in the isolationist "America First" movement and his anti-Semitic comments.  Yet despite all the media attention--and a long marriage to the enthusiastic memoirist,  Anne Morrow Lindbergh--it wasn't until decades after his death that it was discovered that "Lucky Lindy" maintained not one, not two, but three secret families in Europe that included seven children in addition to the six children he and Morrow had.  Very friendly skies.

There's a new push on the locate the remains of  Earhart's wreckage http://tinyurl.com/cdybtc8 which may or may not come to anything, but the likelihood of understanding the private mystery of the very public Lindbergh seems small.  A German biographer attempts to here http://www.atlantic-times.com/archive_detail.php?recordID=236  and here's a link to a New York Times article about Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest American child, published when she was promoting her own third memoir in 2008 in which she discusses meeting all those other siblings. http://tinyurl.com/7tow5to

The gang at "Community" enrolled in (short) course in Diogenes (the cynic).

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The fabric of our lies.

Obama strikes out in bad mom jeans.



Romney's 501(c)(4) jeans:
He buys them by the PAC.

In honor of the patent Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received on this day in 1873 for their riveted workpants, let us now ban this patently fake symbol of authenticity from political campaigns.  All jeans must go.  To prove his bona fides as a man of the people, the first Bush ate pork rinds, and this, I propose, is the appropriate gesture for the notoriously persnickety arugula-loving Obama and for Romney, with his well-documented horror of 7-11 cookies.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/24/cookiegate-romney-cookie_n_1449848.html 

No more wearing the blues until after the two pols have snacked sufficient quantities to ask, worriedly, Do I look fat in these jeans? And that may be a while, given Levi's size deflation (very male vanity-enhancing!) that  Gene Weingarten writes about in WaPo http://tinyurl.com/cch4ptj  Ah, denim--the fabric of our lies.

Top of the charts.

Before there was McDreamy, Dr. Kildare was top of the charts in 1965.
Today, Dr. House is a real pill--and we're addicted.

People try to put us d-down (Talkin' bout my generation)

Just because we g-g-get around. (Talkin' bout my generation)

Things they do look awful c-c-cold. (Talkin' bout my generation)

I hope I die before  I get old.  (Talkin' bout my generation)

Townsend in '76.

On this day in 1965, Pete Townsend, on the occasion of his 20th birthday, wrote a song about his generation.  (Daltry added the stutter in the recording.)  Obviously, Townsend's youthful hope was not realized.  He has indeed gotten old--67 today. 

Back in 1965, Richard Chamberlain's kindly cutie pie was teevee's top doc.  Today, the New York Times gives us the bon voyage wrap-up on House, which finishes its run with a two-hour episode this week.  http://tinyurl.com/d6e8wcy  The show's creator claims Sherlock Holmes was the inspiration (House--get it?) for the obnoxious Vicodin-addicted doc locked perpetually in medical mystery battles. 

It's a dirty job, but
somebody has to
do it.

But isn't House really just like your average cop/detective since the late 60s and 70s?  The guy who has to break the rules and go rogue by the third act because the criminal/disease is just too insidious for ordinary, agreed-upon rules to apply?  The guy who has to be a loner, cause by golly it's lonely at the top where he and only he knows who/what is responsible for the crime/disease and he and only he has the will to see the real truth and get the job done.

Liberals love rule-breakers because they say rules on civil rights have often been wrong; conservatives love rule-breakers because rules they say are just regulations that hinder freedom.  But every rule-breaker is in essence applying his own rule, and maybe the truth is we love us some authoritarian leadership--we love the doc who plays god, we love the cop who plays judge and jury-- as long as he's packaged in the guise of the rebel.

Just talkin' bout your generation, Mr. Townsend.  Happy birthday!

Exorbitant the Greek.

Zorba:  "You think too much.  That's your trouble.  Clever people and grocers--they weigh everything."

"Greeks shrug off dire warnings," sez the headline in the NYTimes, in an article about Communist supporters who believe they can stay in the Euro but with reduced debt.  An excerpt: 

The May 6 election results were “national suicide,” said Theodoros Pangalos, a Socialist Party veteran and former deputy prime minister. He said that Greece had revealed its tendency for self-harm in 1922, in bloody conflicts as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and again in a civil war after World War II.  

“This is a country where Eros is very powerful and Thanatos is very tempting,” Mr. Pangalos added, referring to the ancient Greek concepts of love and death, the life instinct and the self-destructive one.

Here's the link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/world/europe/with-little-to-lose-many-greeks-shrug-off-dire-warnings.html?hp

Whatever happened to Don Draper?

This week in advertising news:

* At the network "upfronts," it was obvious that Dish TV's new ad eraser was giving network execs heartburn and longing for the days of Speedy Alkaseltzer. http://tinyurl.com/c6wowwc

* GM changed its relationship status with Facebook, becoming a non-advertiser.  Though the $10 million it pulled is a drop in the bucket all the way around, from what it spends to what Facebook earns, there are lots of people who think Facebook may have a tough time keeping shareholders happy (to justify the IPO price, the company will have to squeeze a lot more revenue from customers and that inevitably means more ads) while keeping the user experience the same. 

* In the meantime, Twitter, like Google, is tracking users across the web to bundle the informations for advertisers who can add to the ways they can reach you beyond paid ads, paid bloggers and paid tweeters.  It's the brave new world of surround sell--like surround sound only just a touch more insidious!

And in related news, Don Draper has finally been located after being missing for more than a decade.  After checking out of rehab post-divorce (his fifth), Draper, now paunchy and bald, moved to Nevada to set up a refuge for old advertising icons where the group now enjoys a relatively serene life off the grid.  It's true that Don occasionally slips up, taunting the Pillsbury Doughboy about his weight or demanding that Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima cook his meals, and he did take Speedy Alkaseltzer to Nevada's famed Chicken Ranch, where Speedy lost his virginity (in 1.25 seconds), but all of Peggy Olsen's entreaties to "get the old gang together" for an appearance on her blog "Flacking to the Oldies" have so far had no effect.

"The magic is gone," Don says.  "Also so is my hair."