Mel Gibson & other random thoughts

Some days I wake up fired with a passion to blog. I know, I know. That’s like waking up with a passion to farm worms -- and I do farm worms too, but rarely with passion, something the amiable worms never seem to mind.

Then some days I just don’t have any focus. Yet, I have friends who nag me if I write fewer than three times a week. Why, I don’t know.

It’s not like anyone today is lacking in entertainment options. And you’d think they’d encourage me to pursue actual wage-earning options as I uniformly owe them about $50 each.

So on days when I don’t have one really good idea there’s only one option riding to the rescue . . .

The random item post!

• Sad, but true. My 9-year-old daughter has earned more from the Tooth Fairy in the past four days than I’ve earned from anybody in the past six weeks.

• I’m toying with the idea of cleaning my second-floor office, something I do about once every four or five months. My experiences here 14 seconds from my favorite bar stool convinces me every guy should have a place like this. I put what I want on the walls. I kill time juggling, hitting balls on a mini-golf driving range and filling a wall-mounted waste paper basket with crumpled scrap. When my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas one year, I told her to get me a Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio poster. “What are you, in eighth grade?” she mocked. “Nope, but my office is,” I told her. When the girls come in they wrinkle their noses and shake their heads at the splendid filth, which is as it should be. If my office had a motto it would be: “Welcome guys! My door is always open and my toilet seat is always up!”

• I was wondering what kind of trouser fashion adjustments a person needs when walking around in government-sanctioned no-fly zone.

• You have to fly into Arnold Palmer Airport to land in Mister Rogers Neighborhood. This is Latrobe, Pennsylvania, my home since 1992 and the birthplace of professional football, the banana split and Rolling Rock beer. Fred Rogers was born here and modeled his show and its characters after the old steel town of 7,600, mostly famous for being the birthplace of favorite son Arnold Palmer. Now’s the height of the tourist season. About 10,000 people from all over the country are every day crowding our streets and taverns. You see license plates from all over. This is where Borscht Belt comic Jackie Mason served our Jewish community as rabbi for three years after his ordination. I read that and thought, “There are Jews in Latrobe?” It’s a very homogenized population. But not during August when our African-American population swells by nearly 200 percent. Latrobe’s St. Vincent College is also the summer training camp of the Pittsburgh Steelers. That means I’ll be updating friends from around the country with news that Hines Ward is shopping in the Giant Eagle or that Mike Tomlin is sipping beers at Dino’s. I’m not sure who I’ll call if I see Ben Roethlisberger heading into in a bathroom stall with a drunken 20-year-old.

• Anytime you hear of someone dying suddenly it should reinforce the need to ensure you're always living suddenly.

• Spent an afternoon last week listening to all the Mel Gibson tapes. I know I shouldn’t take so much soulful joy out of another person’s misery, but hearing Messianic Mel go haywire felt somehow uplifting. Remember, just a few years ago he was such a family values conservative he was saying the pope, a man who thinks AIDS-reducing condoms are the devil’s plaything, was too liberal. The best part were the YouTube mashups where pranksters got creative with the tapes. There’s a good one where they splice together Mel arguing with the tape of Christian Bale going bale-istic. But my favorite is when they take Mel and have him unleash his most vicious and profane insults at tapes of Betty White sounding all innocent and wounded.

• We are born free and spend the rest of our lives constructing prisons around ourselves. Mine has no walls, no security, just lots and lots of bars.

• I don’t understand the impediment to the lifestyle they’re trying change by releasing Lindsay Lohan out of jail after just 14 days. If I’d been on a year-long bender, 14 days seems just about right. Note she was released at 1:35 a.m. Just in time for last call!

•  Daughter, 9, asked what I'd be doing today. Me: "Sitting all alone in a small quiet room screaming for attention." That's writing.

• Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve caught enough of two popular shows to make snap judgements. First “Mad Men.” Val and I tried to get into it early, but it didn’t take. But I can see the appeal now and might try and wedge it into the rotation. Then there’s “Jersey Shore.” I’m all for cheesy, voyeuristic shows about hapless idiots, but I could feel individual brain cells detonating en masse as I watched this. With “Jersey Shore,” we may have crossed a frightening threshold. Bad TV may no longer be a guilty pleasure. It may have become unwatchable.

• I can’t think of a summer with fewer must-see movies. “Inception” looks compelling, but friends tell me watching it made their heads hurt. Does anyone out there know of anything recent that’ll make me laugh?

• Despite my efforts to appear adult, I still without fail shout, "Gesundheit!" anytime I hear someone use the word "eschew.”

• Six of the above items were ripped directly from http://twitter.com/8Days2Amish. Guess which ones and I’ll have the Tooth Fairy deliver to you the cash equivalent of how much I’ve earned over the past six weeks!

• That’s that. Now it’s, “Worm farm, here I come!”

Lit cars for lit drivers

For the sake of society sanity, it’s time we had cars that got lit anytime our drivers did.

Because if one thing is clear after 30 years of high-profile wars on drugs and earnest mad mothers it is that people everywhere really adore drugs and drinking.

You can threaten people with public shame, enormous fines and even jail time and -- cheers! -- they’re still going to get drunk and drive.

And it happens in all walks of life, not just with scum of the earth lowlifes that I call my friends. It happens with powerful politicians, soccer moms, choir directors, school teachers and successful men and women with much to lose.

At some point in many otherwise productive and law-abiding lives, scores of people fail to find solace in religion, family or even hundreds of channels of hi-def diversion and say, to heck with it, “I’m going to Dizzyland!”

And more often than not, they drive to get there. Chances are better than even that you’ll be at a party in the next two weeks when someone you love or admire is going to have too much to drink and risk highway mayhem on the way home.

So far the inertia to curbing this kind of recklessness rests solely on the misguided “impairment starts with the first drink” crowd. They’re the ones who keep the pressure on our often hypocritically tipsy legislators to keep reducing the legal blood alcohol limits to miniscule levels.

Lower it from .08 to .04, or about two beers an evening, and it’s not going to make any difference. All it’s going to do is enrich scores of hack lawyers and make lives miserable for many of our friends and neighbors who are guilty of nothing more than driving while giddy.

So what we need is an alternative that will allow police officers and the public to recognize the problem drinkers and either arrest them or just get the hell out of their way.

Lit cars would do just that. Cars would need to be fitted with sensors that automatically detect just how much alcohol a driver has consumed. If a driver is being responsible, the car would appear normal.

But if the driver, say, has just lost a long beer chugging game of quarters, then the entire car would glow in an alarming shade of red.

This would be helpful on so many levels because the police can’t be everywhere at once. But if I were driving my family to church (see, I’m one of the good guys -- plus I never lose at quarters) and saw a glowing red Mustang barreling down the highway, I’d know to pull over to a safe distance and let the driver pass.

People who are comfortable with narcing on strangers could even call 911. But the roving alert would be sufficient to clear the road when a drunk approached. It would reduce to near zero the sad collateral damage inflicted by drunks who then may be in for a hard lesson when things like trees and telephone polls fail to take sensible precautions upon their approach.

Future technological tweaks could include other angry shades, say purple, that indicate when the driver was in a crabby mood and prone to road rage.

Because we cannot change human nature. People are still going to get angry and they’re still going to get drunk and drive.

We’ve done all we can to try and keep people from getting too drunk. Once we clear this up we can turn our attention to saving the many people who go through life way too sober.