Washing my hands of blog requests

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I’m thinking of asking Buck to install one of those medical scrub sinks up here on the Tin Lizzy’s third floor to bestow my blog composition with some gravity.

I always love watching M*A*S*H doctors at the 4077th scrubbing up before they head into another 14-hour session of meatball surgery. They appear so confident, so assured what they’re doing really matters.

Blogging is to writing what meatball surgery is to medicine.

It’s gritty, mistakes happen and it’s bound to leave a scar.

Unfortunately, most of those scars wind up on my darling wife who I’m sure reads the blog and wishes I’d instead devote the time to something — anything — that pays even minimum wage. 

I’m thinking of this today because last night a reader/friend asked me to perform a sort of operation.

Two of her loved ones are in need of urgent care. That both are of precious ages  only adds cruel poignancy to her family plight.

Could I, she asked, write something uplifting today? Something that’ll give her some momentary hope in the midst of so much painful uncertainty.

Sorry, but nope. Can’t do it.

I wish I could. Honest. I wish I could write something that inspires faith, cheer and instantly transforms her situation.

This happens once in a while and I know I always let down a core reader when I refuse to turn jukebox.

I just don’t take requests. I’m too innately contrarian.

Ask me to write something funny and I’ll say, “Funny? What’s funny? Haven’t you been reading the fake news? How can anybody even attempt to be funny in a world so rife with injustice, deprivation and the understanding the Patriots could win another Super Bowl.”

Ask me to write something about the sorry shape the world’s in and I’ll respond, “Don’t be such a Gloomy Gus! Things aren’t that bad. Gas prices remain stable, “La La Land” is nominated for 12 Oscars and you can bet the geniuses at Apple are feverishly working to make your 6-month-old iPhone seem uselessly quaint.”

Know my favorite type of blog to write?

The easy kind.

I try not to be controversial, but if I wake up with a controversial idea that seems easy to write, then controversy rules.

Many readers tell me they like my light-hearted approach to the news, but if something that seems cerebral seems easy I try to turn channel Einstein.

So the topic and reaction are secondary to degree of difficulty with easy being key.

Can you imagine the pressure real doctors or clergy feel when someone distraught asks them for hopeful solace?

How do they deal with it? I mean how do the sober ones deal with it?

What do you say when a struggling friend asks you to give them reason to hope?

Do you say you’ll pray? A lot of people really believe that works. I have my doubts, but I pray I’m wrong.

I think one of my most hopeful lines I’ve ever written — it’s one I use in all my talks — is No. 498 from “Use All The Crayons!”

“Enjoy being human and enjoy human beings.”

It’s so simple, yet so elusive. It means in essence to embrace life and all its flaws.

These days we’re all too hard on ourselves and one another. Everyone’s looking to fight. We forget how precious life is and go through our days in one long mope.

I can’t help my friend, but maybe I can help someone struggling stranger.

It’s why I try and extend the benefit of doubt to antagonists knowing they may be feeling some hidden stress over a job, a failing marriage or the sickness of an innocent.

Encourage when you can, pray when you’re asked and cheer if you’re able.

It’s really kind of easy.

And easy does it.

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Happy 73nd B-Day Frank Burns! A holiday tradition

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This one is becoming my, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” Every year on this day -- well, mostly -- I commemorate the birthday of the late Larry Linville by re-running this story about why I believe Frank Burns is one of the most indelible characters in TV history.

Please excuse any dated references from back in 2009. Like Burns, the piece is timeless.

Take the day off and do something incompetent and mean-spirited today: It’s the 73rd birthday of Maj. Frank Burns.

Larry Linville, the man who crafted perhaps the most indelible character in American pop culture, was born on this day in 1939. The five-times married Linville, whose only other claim to fame was, coincidentally, a series of ill-fated romances aboard the fictional “Love Boat,” died April 10, 2000, at the age of 60.

But, to me, at least, ferret-faced Frank Burns will live forever.

It’s a measure of the esteem I hold Burns in that when Matt Lauer saluted former Today Show colleague Bryant Gumbel on their shared birthday, I thought of calling up and demanding equal time for Burns. 

M*A*S*H remains one of the most endlessly fascinating TV shows in history because no other show has ever ranged the gamut from fall down funny to train wreck terrible. From 1972 through 1983, the show was compelling, sometimes for all the wrong reasons.

Many argue on www.jumptheshark.com about when the show leaped the great white maneater.

Was it when Klinger stopped wearing dresses? When B.J. took over for the incomparable Trapper John? When the insufferable Sidney Friedman became a fixture? Or was it when Col. Blake’s plane nose-dived into the South China Sea, a riveting episode that to this day lands like a punch to the solar plexus.

The show took hits with all those dramatic transformations.

But nothing caused the essence of the original hilarious premise to leak out of the storied series like when they lost Frank Burns.

He was the moralizing prig who cheated on his wife. He was the flag-waving patriot who stole purple hearts from wounded soldiers for his own self-glorification. He was a bumbling doctor who kept getting promoted over worthier physicians.

I’ll never forget the episode when Radar was a budding writer doing an assignment about amusing anecdotes. Burns told a story about growing up in Indiana next door  to a little wheel-chair bound boy named Timmy.

With evident glee, Frank tells of how Timmy was happily waving at the Burns family when he lost control of the chair. It plunged down the stairs, across the lawn and crashed the flailing invalid into the Burns family sedan.

He cackles witch-like through out the storytelling as B.J., Hawks and Radar listen in horror. When he concludes, B.J., the designated voice of conscience says, “That must have been awful!”

Frank says: “No, he just scratched the paint a little.”

Then he gets furious when the cheerful buddy-buddy reaction he’d sought results in scorn.

It’s brilliant. It combines a kind of malevolence and mean-spirited pettiness that used to unite the nation.

Today, all our bad guys divide us. You either love Barack Obama or hate him. Same goes for Sarah Palin.

Even deliberately cast evil doers like Montgomery Burns and Tony Soprano have their rooting sections.

That’s why we need more men like Frank Burns in our lives. We need people so bumbling and loathsome that the whole world can point our children to and say, “See that man in the white smock with the stethoscope. He’s pure evil. You don’t want to be grow up to be like him. He’s a mean, cheap and selfish stooge from whom no goodness results.”

So today, in honor of the great Frank Burns, I’m going to try and do something incompetent and mean-spirited.

Looking back over this incoherent blog post, I can surmise the incompetent part’s already taken care of.

Now, the hard part. Can I go against my gentle nature and do something deliberately mean-spirited?

I suppose while I’m thinking about it, I could call up Matt Lauer and demand he salute Frank Burns, too, instead of his suck-up buddy Gumbel, the egotisical poser who’s been on the fast track to Nowheresville since leaving the Today Show and whose head is becoming so big he ought to be called Giant Gumball.

Hmmm . . .

Maybe this mean-spirited bit won’t be so difficult after all.

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Re-run Sunday: Of mice and mice

I saw fresh mice evidence in the attic the other day. That means I might have to re-deploy the ol' TomCat 2000. Either way, it's a good excuse to redeploy this post from August 2009.

The hardware store exterminator showed me an array of medieval killing devices. I could poison the little beasties. I could lure to them to glue traps where they’d be frozen in place until their tiny hearts burst, or I could sever their spines with one frantic blast of sprung steel.

“Have you got any thing that can maybe sedate them first or, better still, reason with them and convince them to just leave our home of their own free will?”

See, we have mice.

He looked at me like he knew he was dealing with a bleeding heart liberal. I looked at him like he had an uncanny perception for a grown man who still wears a “Burt” name tag on his little blue vest.

“A little squeamish, are you?” he asked.

I suppose I could have told him I oppose any sort of animal cruelty, the unfairly applied death penalty, rude behavior at town hall meetings and those garish posters that make Barack Obama look like The Joker.

Instead, I just said, “Yup.”

“You seem like a TomCat 2000 man to me,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he’d just insulted me or not, but I liked the sound of it.

Maybe I am a TomCat 2000 man!

The TomCat 2000 is a no-kill mouse trap that works by gravity. The mice, lured by aromatic peanut butter dabs in the darkened end of the four-inch tunnel trap, march in through a door that’s cunningly rigged to close shut when the mouse’s weight shift triggers the door.

The mice trap themselves.

Somebody’s built a better mousetrap!

What appeals to the samurai in me is that we’re only catching stupid mice. The smart ones sense menace and escape to resume the grand battle of wits.

Hawkeye and Trapper John belittled him for it, but the TomCat 2000’s similar to the rat trap Major Frank Burns developed when 4077th was in the midst of their own infestation (mark your calendars: Larry Linville’s birthday is September 29!).

It’s given my life a purpose. Without the TomCat 2000, I suppose I’d have to find something else productive to do with my waking hours, like maybe, gadzooks, find a job.

Just this morning, I caught and released my eighth mouse. Each release ceremony has enlivened the breakfast hour.

I assemble the family and give a little speech explaining to the mouse that we’re doing this for its own good. The woods will offer many more recreational opportunities for mice, not to mention a healthier diet -- they are natural herbivores -- than the nutritionally desolate Pop Tarts, Lucky Charms and other crap we feed our children.

Then I pull open the door. You see the whiskered nose first. The mouse seems terrified and slick with sweat. This saddens me. I’m trying to invent a tiny air conditioning unit and maybe set the iPod to something soothing to ease the incarceration.

As it scampers away, I say a small prayer that it will thrive and bother us no more.

I don’t warn it about the numerous hawks, snakes and other natural predators that abound in the woods. No sense scaring it any more than I’ve already done and, hey, those creatures have to eat, too. Circle of life, baby.

Then I announce the tally to the family I’m charged to protect.

“Well, that’s number eight,” I said this morning.

“How do you know that?” asked my wife, ever the skeptic. “That might be the same mouse over and over again. It sure looks exactly mice one through seven. Perhaps you should begin to brand the the ones you catch before freeing them.”

She, of course, was needling me, as is her matrimonial wont. But she has a point.

Maybe I should brand them. I could set up a little pen, wrangle the rascals and put the CR brand on their hind quarters.

Then once I got a sufficient herd I could run a drive like the way I’ve seen them do in all the great cowboy movies I’ve loved since I was boy. I could take them across the Red River to some mouse sanctuary.

It sounds like a great adventure.

In fact, that’s the one childhood fantasy I’ve never been able to shake.

Yup, I’ve always wanted to be a cowboy.

Who knew I’d grow up to be a mouseboy!

But Burt back at the hardware store probably could have already told you that.