Simply '70s: So very '73

This appearance by Marc Bolan and T Rex on the British Top of the Pops show was soooooo very 1973.


On the other hand, so was Sammy Davis Jr.

It was an interesting time to grow up.

Thank God we're not Charlie Sheen. Right?

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Here I am, watching Charlie Sheen's psychotic break -- live on tape on Ustream -- and I can't turn away, which would be decent. No, instead, I'm sitting here transfixed as he rants and raves to a sycophantic Baba Booey, the Howard Stern sidekick and executive producer, resplendent in his bed hair, 12 o'clock-the-next-day shadow and snorting a cigarette like it's a line of Colombia's finest.

What I seem to be doing is watching a suicide for my own amusement. I -- we -- may be sicker than the man ranting for the camera about his "tiger blood."

In my defense, feeble as that might be, this is the cultural moment you can't ignore. I'm not entirely sure what that moment is yet, but I know Charlie Sheen is a metaphor for the rest of us -- for our Western society -- in some important manner.

HE'LL END UP blowing his own brains out live for the camera . . . on Ustream. We'll think it's "epic."

Because we're "winners."

Of course, this presupposes that "winner" has been defined down to "Someone who congratulates himself on how clever he is while thinking of ways to leverage a drug-damaged madman's prolonged public suicide into higher brand visibility and a significant profit-making opportunity."

Hey, Charlie! Lookin' good! Dead yet? No?

Duh . . . winning! Let me tweet that. Get the latest update up on my website.

Make sure to make fun of the screwing-a-porn-star thing. That's safe enough. Not that we object to that, necessarily. It's just we know we won't get the chance, so what the hell, you know?

Because we're winners. And Charlie Sheen is a deluded . . . loo-serrrr!


YEAH, Sheen is a loser. But that doesn't make us "winners." We just don't have the fame and the cash to be an "epic" loser.

Unless, of course, you step back and look at us on a societal level. Together, we're "epic." And Charlie Sheen, when you look at it that way, isn't just a train wreck, he's a metaphor. For us.

When you look at all the stats and all the trends and all the crime reports and all the lives of quiet desperation . . . when you look at all the undone husbands and Real Housewives of Exurbia . . . when you look at stressed-out, sexed-out, maxed-out teenagers who decide to check out in alarming numbers . . . when you look at bling and "haters" and paranoiac commentators . . . when you look at all that, Charlie Sheen starts to look a lot more normal.

This is not a good thing.

Carlos Estevez is us. All the immaturity of us, all the lust of us, all the superficiality of us, all the drinking and drugging and bacchanal of us, all the self-importance of us and all the pettiness and madness of us, writ small enough for some voyeur sitting in front of his computer screen to get his little mind around.

Charlie Sheen is a metaphor.

Charlie Sheen is a symptom.

The problem is us.

Duh . . . winning!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This just in: Charlie Sheen wins again!

Here's what we have so far, posted on MSNBC.com:

"After careful consideration, Warner Bros. Television has terminated Charlie Sheen’s services on "Two and a Half Men" effective immediately," the company announced in a statement.

A source familiar with the decision to terminate Sheen’s contract said that Sheen was informed of the news, “shortly before” the statement was released, at approximately 4:30 p.m. ET. At approximately 4 ET, Sheen tweeted, “#winning.”

"This is very good news," TMZ.com quoted the actor as saying. "They continue to be in breach, like so many whales. It is a big day of gladness at the Sober Valley Lodge because now I can take all of the bazillions, never have to look at whatshisc**k again and I never have to put on those silly shirts for as long as this warlock exists in the terrestrial dimension."

SEE . . . I told you he was winning!

Like, this means they totally will be paying him that $3 million an episode he was demanding to come back. Right? Right?

Oh . . . you mean in the TERRESTRIAL dimension. Well, no, then. In the terrestrial dimension, the warlock isn't doing so well.

Good thing it's not important. If it were, we'd have to define "winning" down to nothing at all.

The cold, hard facts of Monday

There's nothing like starting off a new workweek in the correct frame of mind. In getting up on the wrong side of bed.

In reminding people not to !#&# with me.

After my neighbors read this, there will be real estate bargains to be had in Omaha's desirable Westside school district. Tell me, punk. Are you feeling lucky?

Simply '70s: It started with a bread commercial

Little did I know, back in 1975, that in eight years, I would end up exactly one degree of separation from the biggest thing going . . . and a whole genre of popular music.

A whole 1970s cultural moment, as it were.

C'mon, c'mon, good buddy, put your ears on and I'm gonna tell you a story.

Remember CB radios? I think everybody had one in the mid-1970s . . . I know we did. Mama's handle was the Black Cat. I can't remember what mine was. I think I got on there once trying to pick up girls.

Come to think of it, now I can't think of a worse place to pick up girls. Stupidity, your name is 15-Year-Old Male.


BE THAT as it may, there was a moment in the mid-'70s, around 1975-76, where the whole CB/trucker craze met the entertainment industry. It started when the whole CB/trucker thing met the Metz Baking Co., purveyor of Old Home Bread.

It was a match made in advertising heaven. The matchmaker, in this case, was the Bozell & Jacobs advertising agency in Omaha. My late father-in-law was an account executive there, and a colleague there named Bill Fries came up with a campaign revolving around the fictitious Old Home Fill-er Up an' Keep on A-Truckin' Cafe.

Fries, Bozell's creative director, gave life to C.W. McCall, who drove the Old Home Bread truck. And then he gave him his voice.

The ads were astoundingly popular across the Midwest. The Des Moines Register even printed a schedule of when and on what channel they were to air.

And when the ads became a whole musical genre, Bill Fries, ad man, became C.W. McCall, superstar.


BREAKER, BREAKER one-nine, it looks like we got us a new fad, c'mon.

That's a big 10-4, good buddy! This thing might even end up in Tinseltown. Cement ponds . . . movie stars.

Roger that, Rubber Duck. You mean like Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds, c'mon?

Negatory, good buddy! I mean like Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw. You copy?


I GOTCHA, there, good buddy . . . read that five by five. Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw, roger that. I think you might have somethin' there on that . . . back at 'ya.

That's a big 10-4, roger that. Catch 'ya on the flip side . . . I'm out.

It's a dirty job (snicker). . . .

While you're sound asleep in the wee hours of Sunday morning, your humble Working Boy is slaving over a hot turntable, listening to the grooviest sounds of '68 . . . all for the sake of a little thing we call 3 Chords & the Truth.

I am but your meek servant, toiling away in the middle of the night.

Or, as The American Breed might say:

Yeah, bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me
Long as you love me
It's all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me
You got the power
To turn on the light

Simply '70s: Sucks to be them

1978: Orlando, Fla. -- home of Mickey Mouse and Disney World.

And also the home of the most unfortunately monikered radio station in the history of the world, BJ-105.

3 Chords & the Truth: Winning is a way of life

Click it, listen and win!

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. For the win! Aloha.

Culture shock, demonstrated

I guess word takes a while to reach Massachusetts.

This sometimes results in good-government consultants not having heard, and then in people being shocked. Which, given the reputation of New Orleans and Louisiana, is itself just a little bit shocking.

Anyway, this "turnaround consultant" came to the Crescent City to advise Mayor Mitch Landrieu on how to slide the city an inch or two toward the good side of the "government generally works, people generally care" continuum, and he didn't quite run screaming into the humid night . . . but it was pretty close there for a while.

Really, the guy hadn't seen anything like it. And it's not like he just fell off the proverbial turnip truck or something equally clichéd.

AFTER EVERYTHING had been studied, his recommendations drawn up and his report tendered to Landrieu -- and after he presumably had cried into a few stiff hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's -- David Osborne talked to the Times-Picayune:

Osborne, who has advised dozens of cities on streamlining efforts, said Thursday that New Orleans faces myriad, deep-seated problems, the likes of which he has never encountered.

"I was kind of shocked," said Osborne, who served as a senior adviser to then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review initiative. "I think they inherited the least competent city government I'd ever seen in this country and the most corrupt -- a really tough experience. I just haven't run into this level of dysfunction before, and I've been doing this work for almost 25 years."

(snip)

Other observations about city operations included poor customer service, a focus on relationships rather than results, centralized authority that gives little power to rank-and-file employees, contracting and internal workforce systems that lack rewards and penalties, unnecessarily complex purchasing procedures, a fragmentation of city services among independent boards, and poor working conditions and equipment.

"These people, they feel hopeless," Osborne said of morale among city employees. "It's drinking from a fire hydrant. There's so much work coming at them, and they can't keep up with it, and a lot of it is paper rather than automated. And then there's skill issues: secretaries that can't type. I mean, stuff that you just don't see other places."

NO, you don't.

I have written about this. A lot.

Maybe it could have been fixed if the victorious Union hadn't bailed on Reconstruction after only a decade and a half or so. Nation building, after all, always is a long and messy process, and the Yankees didn't occupy the Gret Stet long enough to even make a dent in the cultural underpinnings of a whole heapin helpin' of dysfunction and non-American thinking.

So there you go. As we in the expatriate community like to say about Louisiana (and this goes double for New Orleans), it's a great place to be from.

Simply '70s: Cult of the spectacular crash

This spectacular wreck at the 1975 Indianapolis 500 explains a) why people watch auto racing, and b) why Charlie Sheen got a million Twitter followers in one day.

Any questions?

When similes attack

When someone tells you someone is as batty as a bed bug, you'll now have some small frame of reference.

Is what I'm telling you.

Naturally, the following story from The Associated Press comes from the great, yet strangely odd, state of Iowa:

An Iowa hospital working to stop the spread of a bed bug infestation was forced to limit access to care in its psychiatric unit for three days after the insects were discovered in two patients’ rooms, hospital officials said.

Officials at Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines, a public hospital that serves Polk County, said workers discovered bed bugs in a room during a routine cleaning in early February.

The hospital hired Ecolab, a pest control company, to eradicate the room of the tiny parasites that feed on human blood and spray two adjacent rooms as a precaution.

More bed bugs were later discovered in another room, and the hospital decided to shut down that hallway and several rooms for spraying and cleaning to stop the spread, said Vincent Mandracchia, Broadlawns’ chief medical officer.

“Bed bugs noted during treatment,” reads an invoice from Ecolab, one of four the hospital paid between Feb. 8 and Feb. 28 totaling $550 and released to the Associated Press. “All activity that was found was treated and inspected.”

The three-day process meant the hospital’s mental health and psychiatric center, which normally houses 26, was forced to stop admitting patients. On Feb. 21 and Feb. 22, the patient count dropped to a low of 16, rose to 18 on Feb. 23 and then went back up to capacity after all rooms were reopened, Mandracchia said.

REMEMBER, FOLKS, I don't make this stuff up. I just find it, have a good chuckle and pass it along.

Good night, sleep tight and don't . . . well, you know.

Reporter would've been 'libel' to flunk

Libel law: Love it, learn it, live it.

I realize I am a middle-aged fossil who doesn't know anything. About anything. Anymore. But I do remember -- back when dinosaurs roamed the earth alongside my good friends Adam and Eve (YHWH rest their souls) -- taking Journalism 2151 at Louisiana State.

And I do know that some young whippersnappers today at my old college newspaper would have flunked.

I guess the word never filtered down to The Daily Reveille this semester that we have, in this country, something called "the right to a fair trial" and "the presumption of innocence." That's because -- based just on what campus cops say was a victim ID and a "tip" -- a Reveille reporter and headline writer just convicted some student of simple robbery.

THEY'D BETTER hope the guy gets convicted in a court of law . . . in addition to the pages of the campus daily.

Basically, a suspect can be arrested "in the attack of a student," "in connection with the attack of a student," "for the alleged attack of a student," "on suspicion of robbery in the attack of a student," "on counts of simple robbery in the attack of a student" . . . or he merely might now call jail his new home, "suspected in an attack on" the 18-year-old female student.

But never is someone who still presumably possesses the presumption of innocence "arrested for the attack of a student near the Parade Ground on Saturday."

That's just wrong.

And Bob Sheldon, long-ago drill sergeant of the J 2151 army, would have kicked certain news-writing and copy-editing scofflaws' asses to Kingdom Come. And back. Before flunking them.

Simply '70s: Good night, HBO

Life was different in 1977.

For one thing, I had lots of hair (I mean LOTS of hair) and a 29-inch waist. For another, television went to bed at night in 1977, expecting that you did, too.

In 1977, HBO (which folks still knew stood for Home Box Office) wasn't a 24-hour affair. Like many of your local TV stations back then, HBO signed off overnight.

Good night, sleep tight. And don't let the cable box bite.

Hey! What's cookin'?

I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that the kitchen of la maison Favog sports the friendliest stove in Omaha.

Every 1's a winner

Duh, WINNING!

Busted. Trapped. In their sights. Over. Out.

It had to happen. I turn 50 this month, and the AARP has caught up to me.

AARP is the American Association of Retired Persons. You get this mailing -- kind of like a draft notice back in the day, only worse, because the military only wants young people -- just before you turn 50.

That's when this bunch of old-fart, bloodsucking bastards starts chasing you down like a crazed redneck with a 12-gauge and a spotlight on his head chases down a scared, helpless raccoon in the dead of the night. Only worse.

They try to trap you, using senior-citizen discounts and cheap auto insurance as bait. Then, when you open the envelope, thinking "Gee, that's interesting. What could it hurt?" . . . WHAM!

You got your head deep in an open jar of peanut butter when you hear the click of the metaphorical hammer being pulled back on the proverbial shotgun, and it's too late for you, podna.

BLAMMO.

Next thing you know, you're heading out to the Old Country Buffet for a 5:15 supper, dressed to the nines in your "Old Fart" T-shirt, garish Bermuda shorts, calf-high black dress socks and K-mart store-brand tennis shoes. Kill me now.

I didn't take 40 well, and I suspect I'll take 50 even less well. If you want to do me a favor, send booze.

Lots of it.

Sigh.

'Tolerance' is a one-way street

When certain activists and "progressives" prattle on and on about how "compassionate" they are, and how committed to "justice" they are, and how ever-so-tolerant they are . . . you know bigotry and hatred lie just around the corner.

A few years ago, a guy from Miami decided to volunteer in India for the Missionaries of Charity -- the order founded by the late Mother Teresa, now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and just a step away from sainthood in the Catholic Church. Apparently, Cuban emigré Hemley Gonzalez didn't like what he saw of the sisters' operations there; he founded a group he calls "STOP The Missionaries of Charity."

From what I can gather at the group's Facebook page, Gonzalez thinks the Missionaries don't do enough for the poor and sick. He thinks destitute Indians who could be saved are, instead, dying in the sisters' care.

He and like-minded advocates of "tolerance" think the poor of India must be saved from "proselytizing fanatics" who believe in redemptive suffering.

IT'S FAIR ENOUGH to raise questions about the dealings and practices of the Missionaries of Charity after Mother Teresa's death almost 14 years ago. But that's not what this bunch of bigots is about.

When you're posting pictures of a beloved Catholic nun -- one who may yet become a recognized saint in the church -- with a Hitler mustache drawn on her face, that's not "compassion." That's not "concern for the poor." That's not "tolerance."

And that certainly is not about love of anyone.

What it is . . . is hate. Bigotry. Defamation.

Hemley Gonzalez and his fellow travelers aren't about love of the poor. They're about hatred of the Catholic Church, religious charities in general and perhaps God Himself.

It's not like he's shy about it:

The idea that religious charities are doing amazing work is a fallacy. They often care for others to convert them to their dogma first and their compassion comes second if ever at all.

YOU CERTAINLY can't say that Gonzalez isn't all about unencumbered tenderness (unless, of course, you happen to have a dogma he and his find offensive -- then you get done up as Hitler or get nasty slogans thrown at you). And you certainly can't say he and his aren't all about talking about alleviating suffering.

According to his Facebook profile, Gonzalez' "personal interests" involve "Achieving the end of suffering for all sentient beings." With a smiley emoticon for good measure.

Well, there's one sure way to end suffering -- one secular, utopian fanatics have been seizing upon for ages. Walker Percy nailed it in his final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. Speaking is an old Catholic priest -- and a recovering drunk and part-time firewatcher -- Father Simon Rinaldo Smith:

"But they, the doctors, were good fellows and they had their reasons.

"The reasons were quite plausible.

"I observed some of you.

"But do you know what you are doing?

"I observe a benevolent feeling here.

"There is also tenderness.

"At the bedside of some children this morning I observed you shed tears. On television.

"Do you know where tenderness leads?"

Pause.

"Tenderness leads to the gas chamber." . . .

"Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century.

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.

"More people have been killed in this century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together."

Pause.

"My brothers, let me tell you where tenderness leads."

A longer pause.

"To the gas chambers! On with the jets!"

Simply '70s: Defund public broadcasting

Broadcasting magazine, Oct. 25, 1971, Page 14

If you hadn't noticed, there was a hell of a fierce debate going on about federal funding of public broadcasting. In 1971.

Why, we could have the specter of taxpayers funding a fourth network! Both on television and on the radio. We hear they're very liberal. Not friendly at all to conservative values.

And what about localism?

Tsk, tsk. There's something very un-American about this whole pointy-headed enterprise, I tell you.

Obeying the voices in our heads

Video streaming by Ustream
It's a fact that popular culture -- the boob tube, music, movies, celebrity worship -- drive and shape our larger Western culture.

TV gets into our brains -- puts ideas in there -- and our brains begin to think different things.

Movies tell us stories, and we respond to them, and our beliefs shift.

Music goes to our minds and our hearts, and it affects what we think and what we believe.

One way or the other.

Video streaming by Ustream
WHAT COULD go wrong?

What could go wrong with a culture that takes its cues from popular entertainment -- from Hollywood, from the music industry, from the celebrity biz -- when lots of those faces on the screen and voices in your iPod belong to people who are out of their f***ing minds?

Really, what could happen?

All right, let me take this tack . . . what can we learn from this?

I'll start. I'll tell you what I've learned from Charlie Sheen today.

I've learned that this is 42:38 of my life that I can never, ever get back. If you want to waste nearly 43 minutes of yours, that's your own affair. You've been warned.

And the Oscar for Best Presenter goes to . . .

. . . Kirk Douglas.

Let me just say this: I want to live to be 94 years old. And at age 94, I want to be screwing with the minds of a bunch of people half my age.

I also want to be funnier by half than all the people half my age (or a third my age) trying in vain to follow my act.

And I want to be flirting with all the young gals.


AND I'D LIKE to think I had some small role in causing one of them to drop the F-bomb on live, worldwide television.

Just like Kirk Douglas.