And on the 7th day, he blogged

Today marks the 14th straight day I’ve blogged something original (well, mostly original). That swamps the old record by 11 days.

The Bible teaches God created the world and the heavens in six days and then rested on the seventh.

I can only conclude God didn’t blog. Had He, He certainly would have taken to the internet and done a little divine boasting.

I sure would have, but that’s just the difference between God and me.

Well, one of them.

Heck, I posted about 700 words the day after I did what I thought was a bang-up job on the annual Duct Tape Festival in Avon, Ohio (it’ll be running this week; stay tuned!). 

But is there inherent insanity in blogging so frequently?

I don’t think so.

As stated on the blog’s third birthday, I’m seizing what I sense is opportunity. I think the more I post the more enthusiastic the readership, and the more people will, I hope, refer worthy items to friends.

I’m hoping every avid reader will link my blog to at least two other readers and that those two will refer to two more and so on and so on.

If that optimistic extrapolation proves correct then my blog followers will by Independence Day surpass the population of China; by Halloween the blog will rule the earth and I’ll need start scanning the Cosmos to find new readers.

My theory has so far proven correct, but on a much smaller scale.

In 14 days, the sun has yet to set on www.EightDaysToAmish.com. For the entire time I’ve been blogging for every minute of every day someone, somewhere in the world has been checking in.

It’s happening in more than 93 countries.

I find that very cool.

I do this ungodly bit of boasting because I’m probably going to float in a couple of re-runs this week. I’m not certain. With my antenna up, blogging once a day hasn’t been difficult. I try and have a suitable idea the night before, roll around in bed with it for about six hours, get up and knock out 600- to 700-words before breakfast.

But this week I’m going to be off schedule.

See, this week -- and this week only -- this blog is “Four Days To Amish.”

I’m taking the wife and kids to have a good long look at Intercourse.

Don’t summon the child welfare department. Remember, Virginia is for lovers, but Pennsylvania has Intercourse.

We’re taking a run at Amish country later this week.

This will be the first time I’ve been to Amish country since I started a blog that pays humble homage to their backward ways.

How do we differ? They grow apples; I write a blog on one.

They make many different types of bread; I make no bread, yeast-based or otherwise.

They get together with good friends to raise barns; I get together with good friends to raise hell.

But I’m going to try and keep up the pace of including something fresh each and every day. People seem to be responding.

I hope so.

I truly enjoy the blog and the reaction it earns.

It keeps my mind sharp. It keeps me involved in the news and keeps me engaged in  critical thought.

Daily blogging keeps me from having to think about tedious ways to earn money.

Four Days To Amish?

Hell, it’s always just right around the bend.

Why Father's Day always makes me blue

I’m not sure why Father’s Day always makes me blue.

A writer’s website asked me to compose a short piece about Father’s Day. I know I’m destined to disappoint them.

I think they’d like me to write a literary cheerleader about how much I love the day when I can bask in the affections of my daughters and how that one day keystones the central role of my existence.

I just can’t do it.

It’s odd, I know, because I egotistically believe I am the world’s most exuberant father. As evidentiary proof, I offer my sorry bank account.

It’s impossible to calculate how far behind I am professionally because of the two tiny time bandits for whom I am responsible.

I’ve written about it often and will continue to do so because I can’t forget the time when our oldest was 4 and I overheard her and her little buddies reporting what their daddies did for a living.

One said hers fixed cars. Another said her daddy built homes. The little red-haired neighbor said her dad was a dentist.

What did Josie’s daddy do?

“He plays with me.”

I remember thinking, man, that’s not going to look good on the loan applications.

That’s just what she thought I did. She never saw me doing any work and any time she’d march into my old basement office with her Barbies and her imagination I’d slam the lid on the laptop and the two of us would sail off to Fantasyland.

But I’ll have lived a life fulfilled if the aforementioned anecdote winds up in the first paragraph of my obituary.

I’m always broke, but my daughters know they are my priority. My euphoric love for them dominates my entire existence 364 days a year.

But on Father’s Day I’d rather they go with their mother to visit her father so I can be left alone.

On Father’s Day I like to think about my father.

His 2004 obituary said he was an optician. To reduce a man’s life to a petty occupation is pathetic tribute.

What did he do with his life?

He played with me.

He taught me how to play catch, ride a bicycle and swing a golf club. It was on his lap where I learned my enduring love for simple pleasures like watching a good movie or any baseball game.

He taught me the importance of family and that being a good father was more important than being a good optician, which he, indeed was.

He taught me no man is better than any other merely because of what’s in his wallet. 

It was because of watching him that I learned just how much shoestring fun this world can be and what a difference it makes if when you ask someone, “Hey, how you doing?” you actually care about the answer.

Here’s what we’d do this Father’s Day if he were still around: we’d be sitting in our homes about 50 miles apart watching the U.S. Open -- no hugs, no cakes, no cards.

We’d be calling each other every 20 minutes or so to talk about the golfers, the course and how much we were looking forward to the next time we could golf together.

Golfing with Dad was to me like church is to other people only with beer and fart jokes.

He very well might have been the most fun man who ever lived. I’ll always remember his funeral as his last and best party. It was a carnival of love. He is much missed by many.

Having him for a father is a prevailing blessing of my life.

I didn’t need Father’s Day to remind me of that. We’d didn’t need to make an appointment to see each other for just one day a year when the people who make greeting cards say we should.

So please excuse me if my smile seems forced on Sunday when I unwrap the inevitable “World’s Best Dad” coffee mug. I’ll patiently listen to the girls read the cheerful crayon notes telling me just what makes me so special but, honestly, my heart won’t be in it.

My mind will be elsewhere

Father’s Day is maybe the only day of the entire calendar year when I don’t feel like being a dad.

I guess I just wish I could still be a son.




Interested in reading more about Paul Rodell? Check out the Pittsburgh Magazine story I wrote about him in 2004. They flattered me by headlining it, "The Life and Death of Joe Pittsburgher."

Newt, the alien & me

I’m rooting for Newt Gingrich to overcome his myriad stumbles and do well in his run for the GOP nomination.

Gingrich and I share a natural affinity.

We both grew up in Pennsylvania. We both enjoy history. He loves zoos and I’m a party animal.

The Gingrich campaign is in the news today because a whole bunch of people I don’t know and certainly wouldn’t like have abandoned Newt.

Gingrich has vowed to press on. I hope he does.

The race for the GOP nomination promises to be one of the most odd, shrill and self-defeating political events any of us has ever witnessed and a bombastic gasbag like Gingrich only adds to the folly.

Really, in this race with no clear favorite, absolutely anything could happen.

An unknown might emerge. Strange alliances may be fostered. An alien endorsement could vault an underdog straight to the nomination.

And when I say alien, I’m not talking Sarah Palin.

Many people have forgotten the pivotal role a politically motivated extra-terrestrial named P’lod used to play in American politics.

That was back in the 1990s when the Weekly World News was still a supermarket staple setting brilliant new standards in news gathering.

“When a woman calls and tells me her toaster is talking to her, I don’t diagnose a mental health disorder. I tell her to put the toaster on the phone.”

To me, that may be the most succinct statement of journalistic purity ever uttered.

I heard it from an actual Weekly World News reporter in a tavern in Lantana, Florida, where both the Enquirer and the Weekly World News shared a building (it was the building that was poisoned in the surreal first anthrax attack in 2001).

I was an Enquirer correspondent from 1992-2000. It couldn’t have been more fun and every six months or so they’d fly me to Florida for two weeks. There may have been some practical reason for the junkets, but it wound up being purely social.

Each and every day reporters from all the various tabloids would gather at the same divey bar and try and outdo each other with stories from the world’s most raucous outlaw publications.

Hands down, the winners were always guys from the Weekly World News (sample headline: “Baby Born With Wooden Leg!”).

There was BatBoy, Bigfoot, and the alien P’lod and his uncanny ashtray-sized eye for picking presidential winners. For years, I had a WWN t-shirt featuring the 1992 cover of the one where P’lod correctly picked Bill Clinton who exalted, “I’m glad he saw through Bush and Perot!”

I always think of that wise alien anytime Gingrich’s name pops up.

It was 1995, just after Gingrich’s late mother Kathleen made headlines for whispering to Connie Chung that Newt thought Hillary Clinton was -- shhh! -- a “bitch.”

It ignited a huge controversy.

It was into this hornet’s nest I was thrust. The Enquirer had a tip that a family housekeeper was seducing Momma Gingrich with a wacky religion as a way to steal thousands of dollars.

It was one of the most hostile interview situations I’ve ever endured.

Not because of Kathleen, who was perfectly pleasant. No, it was because of Gingrich’s step-father, Robert, who’d become an impromptu media critic.

He kept glaring at me and asking insinuating questions about my background, my politics and who the utterly apolitical Enquirer’d endorsed the previous election.

I began to believe he’d never read a single newspaper when he asked if The Enquirer was the paper that had run the picture of Newt with an alien.

“No, sir,” I said. “That was The New York Times.”

The tip we had turned out to be untrue. We never wrote anything about the rumor.

Kathleen Gingrich died in 2007. I don’t know what happened to Robert, but Newt everyday does something to, well, alienate conservatives who for more than 25 years have been assuring us that Gingrich is a genius exemplar of the whole movement.

As for P’lod, who knows?

I hope he still has something to say. I hope he has guidance to offer. I hope there’s at least one journalist out there who’s not so cynical as to disregard the insights of a savvy old alien.

And I hope the talking toaster lets him get a word in edgewise.

Roof! Roof! Roof!

It sounds wildly contradictory, but it’s entirely possible to die peacefully in your sleep of multiple gun shot wounds.

It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, although endorsing it in a place where my wife might see it could come back to haunt me.

I’ll bet I entertain the idea of how I’m going to die at least once a day.

I can’t read a news story about a gruesome death without putting myself in now vacant shoes of the dearly departed. Homicides, runaway trucks and a host of nasty airborne killers fill the skies.

It’s all in play any time you step out the front door of your house -- no safe haven there either with all the faulty wiring, latent asbestos linings and children who’re just beginning to toy with matches and knives.

I have no fear of death as long as it doesn’t have to hurt.

That’s why I was alarmed being back up on my gently sloping roof was again in my future.

Falling off my roof is not the way I want to go.

It’s impossible to drive down the street in Latrobe where I live and not see some crew of likely illegals scampering across the roofs like so many grimy tanned Santas.

A violent hail storm struck town a couple of months ago and it was like the roof fairy sprinkled magic dust on every insurance agent in town.

Renown for stinginess, they suddenly turned into Mother Teresa bestowing hundreds of homes with entirely new roofs.

I saw these heartwarming acts of corporate generosity and thought, “How can I get me some?”

I don’t have a fear of heights, which I find unreasonable. I have a fear of falling from heights, which makes perfect sense.

I’m friends with a man who fell off his roof. He’s a newspaper man and a fine storyteller.

When he told me the tale of his two-story tumble and the agonizing year-long recovery, it was like a Steven Spielberg production.

It was vivid. There were sound effects. He showed me R-rated scars.

Really, if he’d have told a story about getting his toe run over by a shopping cart with such dramatic virtuosity, I’d be ordering all my groceries on-line.

So the fear of falling off my own roof lodged deep in my still intact skull. Because we live in the woods, I’m up there about four times a year to clean the gutters.

I thought this hail storm was the perfect opportunity to get a snazzy new roof and some self-cleaning gutters.

Now, I have no idea if there’s even such a thing as self-cleaning gutters, but we live in an age when our phones can do so much I’ve convinced myself there’s some kind of gutter app I can download for 99-cents that’ll spare me from fearsome roof duty.

And I’m friends with one of the best roofers in Pennsylvania. He’s worked on some of the area’s most high-profile projects. He’s handsome, has refined tastes in wines, cigars and music and has a scintillating intellect that towers above the most monumental roofs in the entire region.

He gave me a free and very professional quote to present to the insurance company.

See, that’s how the world works. If you’re friends with a competent roofer, you get valuable service potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars.

If you’re friends with an inconsequential blogger, you get a slim paragraph of internet flattery that will strike any impartial reader as gassy and insincere.

Anyhoo, a friendly insurance adjustor stopped by Saturday to give the roof a look.

He said the roof was in perfect condition and denied our claim.

Rats.

I told him about my fears and he burst out laughing.

“I’ve putted golf balls on greens with more severe slopes than your roof,” he said. “You could wear church shoes on that roof and not slip off.”

He basically called me a sissy.

And he’s right. So I’ll not mention it again and will work to overcome this unfounded fear.

I don’t want another professional to ever talk to me like that again.

I’ll die of embarrassment.

Not the way I want to go.

Trump's no jackass; he's under-qualified

Hearing Katie Couric tell Jay Leno that Donald Trump’s been “acting like a jackass” made me wonder if the female counterpart to stupid behavior is “jillass.”

Of course it is, according to Urban Dictionary.com, that reliable bastion of ribald and filthy street definitions.

But the term’s never caught on. I wondered about why to a friend and he suggested  there’s already a perfectly suitable word for that kind of behavior.

“The word is blonde,” he said.

Now, there’s no more politically correct observer than I so I immediately reprimanded him for the gratuitous insult.

To jackasses.

It was unfair to compare fair-haired women to these noble and much-maligned beasts of burden. It was the jackass -- not its equine cousin the horse -- that helped win the West.

As Hampton Sides related in “Blood and Thunder,” his outstanding 2006 biography of legendary Western scout Kit Carson, the donkey, not the steed, was his mount of choice.

It got him over jagged mountains, across deserts and was a steady companion through both blizzard and drought.

With all due deference to blonde women who certainly had a hand in providing order and entertainment in frontier homesteads, schools and brothels, they’re no match for the donkey.

How did this trusty creature become synonymous with behavior of the kind exhibited by the idiot Trump?

And just what is a true non-human jackass? Is it a mule? Donkey? Burro? Ass?

Only the performer/producer/entrepreneur once known as P. Diddy has more handles.

Well, the jackass is a male donkey; a female, a jenny.

(I told this to my blonde-bashing friend and he felt vindicated: “Yes, like Jenny McCarthy!”)

In Latin, it is Equus africanus asinus. The name donkey didn’t come into use until 1785 and may stem from its dun color or that one was once owned by a man named -- get this -- Duncan.

Gotta love that scholarly Wikipedia research!

The online en-pseudo-pedia goes on to say the donkey’s keen -- I would say wise -- sense of self-preservation led to its enduring reputation for stubbornness.

Is it stubborn or wise for a donkey to resist being pulled along the cliff edge of some steep mountain pass?

No more stubborn or less wise than it is for me to spend endless days on my couch watching “Bonanza” marathons rather than risking going out to work in a world rife with stray bullets, e-coli and heart-attack inducing 9-to-5 jobs.

“Donkeys appear to be quite intelligent, cautious, friendly, playful and eager to learn.”

None of those words apply to Trump.

“They are often pastured or stabled with horses or ponies and are thought to have a calming effect on nervous horses. If a donkey is introduced to a mare and foal, the foal will often turn to the donkey for support after it has been weaned from its mother.”

So I misinterpreted all those many times people have called me a horse’s ass. It was really a compliment on my steadfastness.

Jesus rode to Jerusalem and eventual glory on the back of a humble ass.

More than 2,000 years later, a man we can all agree is an egotistical ass rides around in a custom chopper with his gaudy name on the side.

And it isn’t Duncan.

That one word can used to describe two beings of such vastly different temperaments is just, well, I hate to say it, asinine.

The word’s another sly slam on an animal that’s never self-aggrandized, corrupted the public discourse or strolled about in public with a preposterously coiffed mane.

Enough’s enough.

Let the rehabilitation of the true jackass begin right here.

To do otherwise would be trumpinine.

My truths/Weiner's lies

Anthony Weiner’s been in free fall for nearly seven days now and we’re still not sure if he’s hit bottom.

But you can bet a squad of reporters are pursuing spanking allegations. And, yes, they’re bound to be crack reporters.

He’s now in big trouble for all the lying. He must not be able to help himself because here are three consecutive lies he told while apologizing for lying:


• “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Well, take it from me. He was thinking, “Gee, this might get me laid.” That’s a powerful motivation even for men who haven’t spent long stretches in prison. Guys think about this all the time and we know exactly what we’re thinking when we think it.


• “This was a destructive thing to do.”

Actually, it was more creative than destructive. I never would have thought of taking those kinds of pictures and sending them to any of the 85 people who follow my Twitter account -- and I consider myself a creative sort. Plus, if nature and social media would have taken their logical course he might have taken part in creating a brand new constituent. That’s what Schwarzenegger did.


• “I’m apologetic for doing it.”

A huge whopper. He’s apologetic he got caught and finally had to fess up to his wife.

When does a rich and powerful man ever have enough? 

This is a guy who is on a first name basis with Wolf Blitzer.

Me, I’m not even sure I’ve ever even seen a wolf in the wild, let alone one prowling the CNN set of The Situation Room.

I felt cheesy doing it, but I did track down the twitter pictures he sent when I heard he was a fitness fanatic.

I’m as competitive as the next guy.

My body’s in an odd place right now -- and I’m not talking about being located 10-feet above and not seated in my favorite bar stool.

Parts of my body are in the best shape they’ve ever been while parts of it are in the worst.

My upper body is ripped and it’s mostly been due to boredom. The guy that used to live here left a pull-up bar.

I remember seeing it and thinking, man, I haven’t done a pull-up since the 8th grade.

So I started doing them. Now I can do 10, mostly in a row.

Yet while this is going on my stomach has gone flabby and is popping the gut buttons off heirloom lawn mowing shorts.

I can’t tell whether I’m buff or a beer-bellied slob. It’s very confusing.

So I thought I’d let you, my readers, decide.

That’s my torso pictured above.

If you find it sexy, feel free to tweet it around the world with all your provocative endorsements.

And let me say this: I know exactly what I’m doing. It makes perfect sense. And I’m proud to have thought of it.

At least until my wife busts me. 

Taking pregnant women to the ol' ballgame

I wish I had a great, big pregnant woman to take to Pirate games. Understand, I don’t want anything to do with causing her pregnancy or, gadzooks, for being responsible for the ensuing squaller.

Who needs that?

But the Pittsburgh Pirates are just coming off a great homestand that saw them take two of three from the Major League best Philadelphia Phillies. PNC Park was packed. It was a great baseball atmosphere.

I wish I could have been there. But I haven’t been to a baseball game all year. I still resent the cheapskate owners, the high prices, and the year’s been a tumult of family obligations that have vacuumed up all my time and income.

The weekend had me missing the summers when I was at a ballgame at least once a week.

Prior to all the eventual mayhem resulting from my own pregnant wife, I used to attend as many as 30 games a year with my buddies. And what fun we had.

We’d sit there in the stands guzzling beer, profanely jeering the opposition and spouting just enough real baseball insight to confuse the crowd into thinking we were idiot scouts.

In fact, we might as well have been. My peak baseball attending years coincided with the 18-year span involving some of the worst baseball in Pirate history.

Real Pirate idiot scouts were probably just a few sections over acting exactly like we were and confusing fans into thinking they were just drunken fans.

So we had a lot of giddy guy fun.

But I also loved for different reasons going with my wife, none more so than when she was great with child.

To many people, professional baseball is boring. I guess to them life is, too.

I find it impossible to mix more than 20,000 people, an interesting athletic spectacle and $7 domestic beers and not be entertained. It’s all theatre.

That’s why Val was such a great, big asset when she had a really great, big, uh, profile.

It always happened on Sundays when the team was giving away crappy souvenirs to kids 10 and under.

There were cheap jerseys, batting helmets, team clocks -- stuff nobody wants.

Unless it’s free.

I remember on this bright Sunday they were giving away tiny Giant Eagle-sponsored Kevin Young souvenir bats. They were miniature foot-long versions of the game-used bats Young swung, but for practical purposes they might as well have been the real thing.

Young couldn’t hit a curve ball with a Giant Eagle souvenir bass fiddle.

Still, I felt a craving. I’d see the ticket takers distributing the cheesy novelties to the line of dopey kids and think, “How can I get my hands on one?”

That’s when it struck me: I already had a dopey kid of my own. It was just that neither my wife and I had met her yet.

The ticket taker scanned our tickets and gave a friendly, “Enjoy the game!”

I asked him if I could have a bat.

“Sorry, pal, those are for only kids 10 and under.”

That’s when I pointed at the audacious belly of my 8-month pregnant wife.

“C’mon! The kid’s gotta be with you!”

He’d fallen right into my trap.

“Are you telling me life doesn’t begin at conception?” I shouted. “This isn’t some senseless mass of tissue. It is a child! In fact, it’s possible we will enter this game as a couple, but leave before the seventh inning stretch as a family. She’s due any minute!

“Now, I’ll be happy to stand here and argue Roe v. Wade with you all day, but I’m not leaving until you give me a lousy bat!”

I felt sort of bad for the guy because he never thought when he’d taken what is generally a happy minimum wage job that he’d be asked to litigate third trimester legalities.

But, hey, I wanted that bat.

He gave it to me -- and I was careful to ensure he gave it to me and not my humiliated wife who later said she would have used it to beat me senseless to the cheers of the exasperated crowd.

I still have that bat. The kid, too.

Sometimes I still pick it up, squeeze it, and think of all the carefree times I had down at the ol’ ball game.

It brings back a lot of really great memories. It still means a lot to me.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether I’m referring here to the kid or the bat.