That bickering could be witty repartee or simply passive aggressive needling. Some marriages thrive on both.

What I posted earlier—about Bogart in real life—I shoulda waited and posted it here.

You could always tell when I was posting in my cups not by the typos but by the increased rate of cursing.

This is where I tell my Bogart story. I don't remember where I heard this, but apparently Humphrey Bogart was a textbook functional alcoholic in that he would never take a drink before 6:00 O'clock but after that was never seen without one—and he would have an assistant stand by with a highball at quitting time.…

'Cheers' is a great show—Thing is though, Norm was never apparently drunk. That's how you know he had a real problem.

I get migraines. I went to a doctor at one point and he gave me a list of food items that are thought to be connected to migraines and wines with sulfites and clear hard liquors were both specifically on the list. The list was ridiculous though—and so comprehensive as to be meaningless—Anything cured, anything…

My grandmother on my father's side was Irish—which makes me at least a quarter. But my grandfather on my father's side was a Latvian Jew—and since I take after him and that side of the family was much more influential on us growing up, and since my mother was adopted and nobody knows what she's got going on I never…

I more or less stopped drinking around the middle of last summer. Before that I used to wonder if I was a functional alcoholic because I drank a lot and pretty much daily and almost always to incapacitation—although it never interfered with work, I never drove drunk, and I'm guessing few people would have known. It…

Mary Spalding
Along the same lines as Tennison in 'Prime Suspect' I'd list Mary Spalding from the CBC series 'Intelligence' (which is on Netflix streaming and which I recommend to anyone who liked 'The Wire'—Vancouver is nowhere near as dire as Baltimore, and the drug lord in question is kind of a good guy who only…

The thing about 'Don't Worry Baby' is as some have alluded—it has a narrative immediacy. Here's this guy who's bragged too much about his car and he's gotten himself in over his head—about to race and maybe lose or even wreck and die but he's got this girl who believes in him and that everything will be…

Are those Smurfs in Central Park?
So does that mean the Smurf Village is actually just the Village? Is that why Gargamel could never find them—not because he was looking in the medieval Black Forest of Central Europe but because he couldn't find parking?

And because it's another of the greatest cheezeball songs you never hear anymore:

AKA the wikki wikki song. That was on an anthology tape of "HipHop Classics" I picked up in around 1988. It had that, 'Egyptian Lover', 'Funk You Up' by Sequence (i.e. "ring ding dong—ringa ding ding ding dong") and a couple Sugar Hill and Kurtis Blow tracks. All of them worthwhile.

I was putting off grad school. Those better not be baseball cleats on my manicured lawn.

I was in junior high and my friend Tumu and I were attending a YMCA lock-in with our suburban church youth group and a number of other regional youth groups in downtown Dayton. There was an announcement that pizza would be served in this one particular hall and when we got there it was the just the two of us (Tumu was…

So, anyway, why are there so many songs about rainbows?

'The Gambler' was also one of the best and most poignant Muppets sequences:

Kudos to you and I'm not being sarcastic. I'm not keen on the concept but Men W/o Hats practically define "one hit wonder" and that weren't it.

I think Simon and Garfunkel was what my parents played on the reel to reel when I was in the crib. I remember the album 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' like the smell of baby formula. It makes that Honda Accord commercial a sweetly unsettling experience.

Playing with 'The Queen of Hearts'? Now, Penguin, you know that ain't really smart.