Has "Walking Dead" jumped the zombie shark?

(877 words)

The show had been gut-wrenching — and I don’t mean that as a dramatic critique.

No, in “Walking Dead” you can see people use things like wrenches to remove guts. It’s a weekly disgust.

My wife, a devoted fan, was eager to talk about it. She wanted to pick my brain.

“Are you done with it?” she asked.

I told her, no. I still feel invested in the characters and the prepper in me is still compiling survival tips on what to do in the event zombie apocalypse becomes a reality and I’ll need to be alert for a more literal kind of brain picking.

But last night’s season 7 premier crossed a line with me.

I won’t say the show jumped the shark. “Walking Dead” producers would never let that happen, opting, I’m sure, to work a zombie shark plot line into the series.

The wanton gruesomeness of last night’s de rigeur violence left me feeling diminished. Is this really how I want to spend an hour? Does this qualify as entertainment?

The presidential debates are more uplifting.

At least with those — and they’re every bit as gruesome as “Walking Dead” — I know I’ll get to see Alec Baldwin ridiculing Trump.

Anytime televised violence becomes stomach turning because characters are getting their stomachs turned (or chewed), it’s time to re-think how I’m spending my time. So I’ll, for now, continue watching “Walking Dead,” but all the while my mind will be drifting to what I’d rather be watching. The list includes:

• Porn — I’ve never been a big porn guy, but something raunchy would be a nice palette cleanser after watching Michonne lop the heads off 30 zombies intent on dining on more than finger sandwiches. If you’re looking for Christmas stocking stuffers, I like ones involving things like the saucy divorcee and her cheerleader roommate surprising the pizza delivery boy with the kind of tip he can’t claim on his tax forms.

• “Cheers” — It’s on one of the retro channels and we DVR about 20 of them at a time. I hadn’t seen the show in about 15 years and I wondered if it still held up. Boy, does it. It remains uproarious with each character deftly acted and right on the money. I love to laugh so, ergo, I’ll always love “Cheers.” It sounds heretical, but it’s right up there with “Seinfeld” and “Seinfeld” is right at the top.

• “The Fugitive” — It was about 20 years ago, before kids, and I was seeking a good show to watch with lunch. Val at the time had a full-time job in Pittsburgh. I vaguely remember my father telling me to check out David Janssen and “The Fugitive” reruns. I watched one and was blown away. Each episode was a dramatic gem. I remember Val coming home and me saying, “We’re going to have to start taping these shows to watch with dinner. They’re that good.” She responded with some version of, yeah, right, we’re going to tape shows that first appeared in 1963. Today, it remains one of our all-time favorite shows. We even have an episode guide!

• “Breaking Bad” — The show went off the air three years ago last month and I’ve ever since been itching to start it all over. It’s that good, in my opinion the best show ever. I’d watch “Mad Men” and “Sopranos” from the start again, too.

• The World Series — Now’s the time of year when every pitch becomes so precious because I know baseball’s about to be cruelly ripped from my life. In the summer, baseball is my televised security blanket. Personal calm is elusive when it isn’t near. Barring a zombie apocalypse, I’ll be writing about the World Series tomorrow in advance of Game 1.

• “The Larry Sanders Show” — Brilliant Garry Shandling comedy with equally brilliant cast led by Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn. Again, I just love to laugh and this one makes me very happy. HBO ran 89 episodes from 1992-98. I have a compilation disc with about 20 of them on there. Each is golden. You know what else is still really, really funny? “Third Rock from the Sun,” starring the peerless John Lithgow. Sitcom trivia: The career-making Frasier Crane “Cheers” role that went to Kelsey Grammar was offered first to Lithgow. 

• A roaring fire — Hallelujah! The weather has finally turned. I welcome the fall chill. I love fall days cooking soups and warming the house with a nice fire. And if I’m in front of a fire, naturally, I’ll have a good book with me. I’m right now in the middle of Tom Wolfe’s excellent “Bonfire of the Vanities” from 1986. It’s particularly timely with so many egos and ambitions dominating our news.

• “Walking Dead” — It’ll never be one of my all-time favorite shows — I doubt I’ll ever re-watch more than an episodic scene or two — but this show was once great.

I think it’s too infatuated with devastating its audience with increasingly graphic violence. Last night’s brutal killings of two main and beloved characters couldn’t have been more disgusting.

Plus, I don’t foresee a “Walking Dead” happy ending and that turns me off.

See, I love happy endings.

Like the kind awaiting that lucky pizza delivery boy!

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Yukkin' it up over laugh track history (from '15)

(647 words)

I plan to spend tomorrow commemorating the 2003 death of Charles Douglass by laughing my merry ass off.

I’ll chortle, giggle, titter, guffaw, hoot, howl, cackle and generally spend the day behaving like I’m being tickled by invisible feathers. 

Douglass died 12 years ago tomorrow at the age of 93. If his funeral was a sad one, I think Douglass would have disapproved. His funeral above all others should have been a laugh riot.

Douglass was the father of the modern laugh track.

From the late 1950s through well into the ‘80s, Douglass was responsible for  mechanically producing nearly all the laughter for America’s golden age sitcoms. TV Guide profiled him and said in 1966 he’d built a monopolistic empire on canned laughs.

Douglass’s recorded laughs are the uncredited co-stars of “Bewitched,” “The Munsters,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Lucy,” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

It was very expensive, but apparently less costly than producing anything that was genuinely funny on its own.

“Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience.”

Except when it wasn’t.

Every episode of  “Cheers,” one of my all-time favorites, kicked off with those words, a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that verified the laughs you were about to hear were authentic.

The problem is Douglass’s tickling fingerprints are all over “Cheers,” too. Same goes for “Frazier,” “Barney Miller,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Taxi,” and a host of others.

Many of the supposedly “taped live” shows were artificially sweetened by what was known in Hollywood as Douglass’s “mysterious laff box.”

Want to hear something funny?

The laughs over the years are all the same. Many of the laughs you still hear on today’s shows were harvested from shows from decades ago and simply replayed.

So a truly discerning listener could conceivably go back and detect the same precise laugh from the same man or woman who laughed one time at a show that today is 40-years old.

The humor changes. The laughs do not.

I became hyper-sensitive to laugh tracks, I guess, when I started being bludgeoned by the ones Disney Channel uses on shows designed to appeal to girls like our young daughters.

Each punchline produced the uproarious kind of laughter you’d hear down at the old Bada Bing after Tony Soprano told a knock-knock joke.

The only ones not laughing were the intended target audience right there in the room.

The blatant manipulation was infuriating. They were watching something because they thought it was funny even when they reflexively understood what they were watching wasn’t funny at all.

As a father, it was upsetting. It was upsetting, too, as a hockey fan because I wanted to throw their asses the hell out of the room so I could watch the Penguin game.

But, no, they kept staring at the mysterious laff box like it was bestowing the gift of spontaneous hilarity.

Does the laugh track make something funny even when it is not?

“Seinfeld,” maybe the funniest show ever, uses a heavy, but deft laugh track. 

Would it be as funny without? I think so.

“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” its sort of alter-ego uses none and it’s every bit as funny.

Would this blog be funnier if I had a chorus of gigglers to prompt you where you’re supposed to chuckle?

Maybe it’d be worth a try.

I guess I feel the same way about laugh tracks as Milton Berle did. He was at first reportedly miffed his humor needed any sweetening. He didn’t become a believer until one of his favorite jokes failed to click with the actual audience.

“Well, as long as we’re here doing this, that joke didn’t get the response we wanted,” Berle said, directing laughter be added. First some, then more and then until finally his ego was satisfied.

“See,” he said, “I told you it was funny.”

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Goin' postal over USPS decline

I find myself seeking odd reasons to run to the post office to spend money, as if my meager purchase of $8.80 worth of Homer Simpson stamps is going to save the 236-year-old institution that is hemorrhaging $10 billion a year.

That’s how on August 19 I found myself in the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, post office filling out forms and paying big postal bucks to send a 2-pound, 5-ounce, pile of Arnold Palmer Kingdom golf magazines and a book to Brazil.

It’s probably been 10 years since anyone over the age of 10 raced to the mailbox for anything.

My postal heyday was about 15 years ago. I was working for an array of publications and every day would bring fresh reason to rush to the post office in hopes of finding treasure. Paychecks? Magazines featuring my work? Reader letters?

Our PO Box was a five-minute walk from our home. I’d make that stroll everyday at precisely 10:15 a.m. Nothing -- neither rain, nor sleet, etc. -- could keep me away.

In those pre-e days, snail mail brought daily delight.

It is the same post office where the great Palmer himself receives his mail. Palmer, 82, still gets about 20 to 30 autograph requests each and every day. He personalizes and autographs pictures and even pays the postage to return the keepsakes to every corner of the globe.

I wonder: if Palmer had been a typical jerk athlete, would the USPS have gone belly up in 1999? The man’s been a swingin’ postal stimulus package.

I grew up knowing a string of friendly and fit postmen. They’d spring up the steps and offer the mail and an always hearty greeting.

They were so pleasant and cheerful I was shocked to find in the early 1990s that a surprising number of postal employees harbored a homicidal bent and “going postal” became shorthand for work place rage.

Then the inept mailman as stereotype came along with Cliff Claven from “Cheers,” and Newman from “Seinfeld.”

Even those indelible boobs couldn’t diminish my postal affections, especially after I realized the USPS could be an unwitting foil in lucrative pranks.

I was in Florida for a winter frolic in 1994 and, as always, picked up a handful of postcards to taunt my snow-bound friends. To my sweetheart, I mailed one with an idyllic picture of a sunset over the Everglades. She got it in three days.

To my buddies, I sent ones like the alligator nipping at the babe’s bikini bottom. Those took 7 to 10 days and most arrived with little pin holes in the pictures.

Clearly, under-sexed postal employees were lifting the sexy postcards from the flow and posting them for daily ogling.

So I turned in a lead to National Enquirer about how sexy postcards take longer to get delivered than scenic ones. They paid me $1,000 to conduct the research, which involved mailing two postcards -- one sexy, one scenic -- to 20 buddies around the country.

On average, the sexy ones took seven days longer to be delivered.

Thus inspired, I began thinking of other ways the USPS could work for me, a tabloid reporter eager to tweak institutional authority.

I was assigned a story that eventually ran under the headline: “The Post Office REALLY Delivers!” It involved stamping and addressing unusual items to see if the post office would treat it with the same efficiency as a business letter.

Of course, it did. It’s always been very professional, even when confronted with mailing things like coconuts, rubber snakes and big bags of goo.

Understand, those items were not in boxes. We addressed and stamped the actual items. I still fondly recall the non-plussed look on the businesslike post mistress’s face when I handed her a set of false teeth with my grandfather’s DuBois, Pa., address on them.

Money, medicine, legal documents and illicit love letters -- you could always count on the post office.

That’s why I spent a good part of the late summer stewing.

It all started when straight out of the blue I got a call from a blog reader from Brazil. His name’s Bob McCarthy, an ex-pat American.

The fact I have a regular reader in Brazil delights me. The fact that he called to announce his existence delights me even more. We had a great friendly chat.

Turns out Bob’s a golfer and a big Arnold Palmer fan. So I decided to do a good deed.

I do more of these than I let on. I help old ladies cross busy streets, retrieve cats from trees and advise Republican presidential candidates on how best to dispense with unseemly news firestorms.

Lately it’s been Herman Cain.

But for Bob I decided to send him some copies of the posh Palmer magazine, Kingdom, for whom I write, and a copy of my 2004 golf ace book.

I filled out all the forms, swore in writing the package didn’t contain anthrax or stink bugs and pushed it across the counter. The lady asked if I wanted insurance.

I gulped. It was already going to cost $21.39. Another $11.50 stretched my generosity to beyond its limit.

So I rolled the dice and said nope. She said it would take about 12 days to get to Brazil.

Well, two weeks passed and I didn’t hear from Bob. Then a month. Then two months.

And it gnawed at me. Was it stolen? Did it get destroyed? Could Bob be as rude as the writers of blogs he enjoys?

None of the above.

Bob called about a week ago to thank me.

“Yeah, the Brazilian postal workers are in a labor dispute and they always go on a big slowdown before they strike.”

So I’d like to salute the USPS and all their foreign brethren. You helped me make Bob’s day for just $21.39, a intercontinental bargain.

Despite its funding woes that seem destined to doom it, the USPS came through for me again.

I couldn’t be any happier than if I’d raced to the mailbox and reached inside to find somebody’d mailed me a great big bag of goo.

ZIPpity-do-duh: A postal money maker (from 2008)

I've vowed to blog nearly every day unless I don't feel like it. I feel like it every day, really. I enjoy it. But today a friend's in town and we've scheduled an afternoon of South Side Pittsburgh debauchery and I have my priorities.

Still, I can't help but fret the day I do not blog will be the day President Obama or any of the congressional big shots read my blog for ideas on how to straighten out the messes routinely addressed here.

In case that happens today, here's a really good idea of mine from 2008.

I'm confident it could earn the federal government billions in revenues.

Too bad it hasn't earned me even a dime.

For the sake of mental convenience, I’m thinking of packing up the family, all our stuff and moving the whole shebang to Newton Falls, Ohio.

That way I could age into eventual muddle-mindedness in the town that has perhaps the easiest zip code to remember in the entire United States.

Yep, welcome to Newton Falls, pop. 4,892, zip 44444. I don’t think the town, about about 30 minutes west of the dormant smokestacks of Youngstown, gets the acclaim it deserves.

I’m in the midst of a comprehensive study about zip codes for pin heads. It’ll be four years ago in February we moved one mile from near Latrobe, Pa. 15696, to postally proper Latrobe, Pa. 15650, and I still occasionally find my password-cluttered mind stumbling over the difference. It has me wishing I lived someplace where my zip had some zing.

Some place like, say, Schenectady, N.Y. 12345. Of course then I’d forever have to be spelling Schenectady and that would never do.

We are a numerically obsessed nation that shells out precious dollars for vanity license plates and fret whenever the fickle phone company threatens to bump us from our familiar urban area codes to something less comforting.

For the good of the nation, it’s time we extend that obsession to the humble zip code. I think it’s time the government begin selling zip codes to communities that stand to profit from the postal panache.

Why, for instance, is Las Vegas 89123 -- a lousy hand of a fold ‘em number if ever there ever was one -- when it could contribute $1 million to the national cause by paying for the unused 77777? Just think how much publicity it would get from the news if it paid for those lucky numbers, instead of having the ones randomly assigned by faceless bureaucrats at the U.S.P.O.

(Trivial Aside: The father of the zip code is a postal employee named Robert Moon, who submitted the proposal for a “Zone Improvement Plan” back in 1944.)

It’s a sure money maker and many cities and towns could have contests trying to claim one of the many unused numbers still available. And there are plenty of them. The post office only uses 43,000 out of the 100,000 possible 5-digit combinations.

Many of the good and obvious ones are still gathering dust on the postal shelf. For instance, 44444 in Newton Falls is the only five-of-a-kind zipper in circulation.

According to my research, the lowest number in the system is Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, with 00601, which begs the questions: What happened to the first 600? Did someone think we’d someday annex Cuba and might need 00001 through 00600? The nosebleed award goes to Yukutat, Alaska, with 99589.

Bond, Colorado, appears to be perfectly insignificant to the rest of the world, but how much publicity could it gain if someone with a puckish sense of humor bestowed them the perfectly obvious 00007? Reporters from all over the country would descend on Bond with each new Bond movie to write reviews that would appear under headlines like “Bond on Bond,” or “Licensed to Deliver, Bond 00007.”

Same goes for Salem, Massachusetts, which labors under the clumsy postal designation 01970. Why not cash in on their witch-hunting history and brand the local post office with the mark of the postal beast, 00666?

My wife Val speculates stratospheric bidding between Houston and Cape Kennedy would launch over who most deserves the available countdown zip of 54321?

Little Rest, Massachusetts looks like a line of binary code with 01010 and is the lowest aggregate total of any zip code because there is no reverse 10101 in the system and nothing with four zeros and a single 1.

I could retire to Sunrise, Florida, with its full house zip code of 33322. That’d be easy to remember.

(Trivial Aside #2: Sunrise is a planned retirement community that was originally named Sunset. But developers quickly found out that creaky retirees don’t like being reminded that the sun is setting on their lives so they nominally swapped the astronomical actions and sales grew robust. Sometimes perception is everything).

How much would Philadelphia pay to liberate 01776 from North Sudbury, Mass? Philly is the birthplace of the greatest nation in the world. 01776 would be a constant mail reminder of that proud history. Why surrender it to North Sudbury which gave the nation what? Geographic balance to South Sudbury?

For as long as I live, I’ll never forget the phone number of a man who left a thriving dentistry practice to become a shepherd (long live National Enquirer!). I asked him the best way to get in touch for a story and he told me, “Just dial GOD-PISS.” That’s what his number, 463-7477, spelled. I would think something similar could be done with zip codes.

New York could claim the unused 27753 (APPLE), coffee mecca Seattle could splurge on BEANS (23267) and the beer makers in Milwaukee would doubtless bubble with enthusiasm at the opportunity to snatch SUDSY (78379) from Riviera, Texas.

(Trivial Aside #3: Trivial Aside would be a dandy name for this blog if I ever get tired of 8Days2Amish. In fact, it practically nails the sum accomplishments of what I’ve been doing my entire life).

These kinds of trivial matters fascinate and distract me. Apparently, it is a zip code of enthusiasm I share with few others. I’ve pitched this story to numerous magazines over the past year or so. Would you like to know how much interest I’ve gotten from discerning editors?

You guessed it.

Zip.