Happy 49th Birthday to me!

My mother never even knew I was born.

I don’t mean that in one of those whiny, mama-never-loved-me ways. She loved me. Still does. Most of the time. I think.

But she never remembered anything about my birth.

“The nurse came in and brought me this big breakfast. I said there was a mistake. I told her, ‘Nurse, I’m not allowed to eat anything. I’m here to have a baby.’ The nurse looked at me and said, ‘You can eat anything you want. You had the baby yesterday.’ She walked out of the room shaking her head.”

They’d loaded Mom up with so many thought-deadening drugs she has no recollection of my delivery. Her forgetfulness will make dandy fodder for birther conspiracy theorists should I ever run for president.

I don’t know where I was for any of this. You’d think I’d have been with her snuggling nourishment or at least brushing her cigarette ashes off my little head.

Maybe Dad took me out to the bars to show me off to his buddies.

Seems like I’ve been there ever since.

I turn 49 today. And that’s the actual age, even though I’m aware it sounds made-up like someone who’s afraid to say they’re 50.

I hope to turn 50 next year although tomorrow is promised to no one so I’m not about to get all cocky over the presumption.

Both Galileo and Simpson’s creator Matt Groening share my birthday, as do Cesar Romero (The Joker; “Batman”), Alan Arbus (Dr. Sidney Freedman; “M*A*S*H”), Kinks drummer Mick Avory and “Survivor” cutie and Pittsburgh native Jenna Morasca.

The birthday episode of the uproarious “My Name is Earl” was first broadcast on a Feb. 15 so I’ve always claimed Earl Hickey as a birthday mate.

Two more: Seattle Slew was born today in 1974 and “Ticket to Ride” recorded in 1965.

The latter suffers from confused parentage. John Lennon says Paul McCartney did none of the writing and Paul McCartney says he contributed at least 40 percent.

It’s terrible when estranged parents fight over the kids.

They also argue about the tune’s meaning. Paul says the title referred to Ryde, a small Isle of Wight town on the British Railways line; John says it referred to health cards indicating German hookers were disease-free enough to “ride,” ride being German slang for sex.

I guess the best birthday I ever had was my 19th. I was a freshman at Ohio University in Athens, then as now home to the No. 1 party school in America. My real brother came into the TV room at the old fraternity house where we both lived and wished me a happy birthday in front of all my great ceremonial brothers.

Right away, two of the older guys said they were taking me to lunch.

It had been a harsh winter in southeastern Ohio. But this day was unseasonably warm. The snows were gone and every one of the 14,000 students and most of the carefree professors were looking for an excuse to party.

We had a two-hour lunch at The Pub and stepped back out into the warm spring sunshine.

The quarter-mile walk back to the fraternity house became like a pre-social media flash mob. Every single door we passed opened and someone friendly or beautiful emerged happy to see us.

And everyone of them was carrying a six pack.

The fun lasted all night and it was one of the greatest parties I’ve ever been to and I just happened to be the cause of it.

I wish something like that could happen again today. The world needs more impromptu parties in the spring sunshine.

I mention this all today because it’s now impossible to duck our birthdays. I’ve heard from dozens of friends on Facebook who sent birthday wishes.

Thank you, one and all. I hope all the good wishes for me to have a great day come true and then boomerang right back onto you.

I don’t expect any impromptu parties to blossom on this still-wintry day. It’ll all be low-key and that’s fine with me.

I’ll be happy to spend my 49th with my wife and daughters. They’re taking me out to dinner tonight at Rizzo’s Malabar Inn, my favorite Italian restaurant. We’ll have pasta, some wine and a bunch of happy laughter.

And then, if the kids get to bed early enough, this lucky birthday boy may get a ticket to ride.

Yes, it’s always been a dream of mine to celebrate my birthday on England’s Isle of Wight.

Iranians heart Valentine's Day

It’s indicative of how dangerous and misguided the Iranian regime is in that they’re permitting the observance of a decadent Western holiday and it’s not St. Patrick’s Day.

You guessed it. It’s Valentine’s Day.

Let me go on record as saying I really love Valentine’s Day!

I think there should be at least one day every month where couples are encouraged to express their affections with candy, flowers and poetic odes to one another.

I declare that up there in the third paragraph because I’m fairly certain my darling wife never reads past the fourth.

To me, Valentine’s Day’s always been fraught with coy deception. Why can’t people just be direct?

I remember when I was younger and all the girls would give me Valentine’s Day cards saying how much they liked me.

Well, why the hell did they have to wait until Valentine’s Day to say so? Why couldn’t they just say, “Hey, you’re cute. Let’s go get drunk and rip each other’s clothes off and let the games begin.”

But maybe that was expecting too much from a bunch of fourth graders.

One of the problems with a holiday devoted to romance is that it often leads to love, marriage, and that thing about the baby carriage. Thus, if taken to its logical conclusion, the holiday meant to celebrate romance results in the responsibilities most likely to squash any chance it’ll ever happen again.

I’m surprised some marketing genius hasn’t thought up a reverse Valentine’s Day for divorcees. They could have it on August 14. Larry King could Skype host.

This sounds cynical but, really, it would be a great way for divorcees to meet and maybe plant the seeds for another spectacular break-up. I predict some savvy divorce attorney’s going to jump all over this.

Divorce and disharmony have run virus-like through my friends and family this year. Many couples who have known and loved one another for 10, 20 years have said enough’s enough.

Complacency, unrealized expectations and a primal urge to stray are just a few of the reasons for the bitter splits.

I think we’d all be better off de-emphasizing romance whether it be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, a 9th grade teacher and her 14-year-old student, etc.

“Love isn’t an emotion, it’s a decision.”

I heard that at a convention of people with an abnormally high rate of divorce: Lightning strike survivors!

It’s true. I was covering the convention for a men’s magazine about 10 years ago. It was held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. My suggested/rejected headline: “The Smoked in the Smokies.”

The woman’s point was we treat our relationships the way we do Lifetime movies. We expect one spouse or the other to always be up to something, we create a lot of unnecessary drama and we start to fidget if it’s not all over in a couple hours.

What Iran’s doing by tolerating Valentine’s Day is a mystery. I suppose you could argue it’s a case of one repressive regime nurturing another.

After all, these tyrants are very controlling. They don’t want you to do what you want when you want or with whom you want.

And I’m talking here, of course, about the Iranian clerics, not marriage or otherwise loving and monogamous relationships between people (pets don’t count).

Because the last thing I’d want to do on a day renown for tender couplings is sow seeds of discontent.

I guess what I’m trying to say is simply this:

I love Valentine’s Day!

I really, really do.

Whitney, Petty, weed & Willie

Two of my favorite artists of the 1980s are famous for being prodigious dope smokers. One of them died Saturday and the other is Tom Petty.

I didn’t realize how much I liked Whitney Houston until her death. I’m surprised how sad the news made me.

Because for about five years from 1986-91, she was perfect.

Her voice was breathtaking. She was beautiful. Today’s divas make surly seem like a job description. It wasn’t that way with Whitney. Carbonated beverages weren’t as bubbly.

I never bought any of her albums or saw any of her movies, but I remember feeling a little jolt of euphoria every time I heard her sing and back then her songs were everywhere.

I guess I sort of stopped caring when she married Bobby Brown and started making tabloid headlines for getting high. I thought, well, she’s finished.

It seemed a sort of blasphemy to expose a voice like that to something like smoke.

I was right. It just got more and more sordid and pathetic ending Saturday in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hilton -- and if I was a celebrity who was fond of drugs I’d never set foot in a bathtub.

What is it about drugs that cause some artists to wither and others to thrive?

Take Petty. When it comes to marijuana use and promotion, he’s right up there -- and I mean up there -- with Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg.

There’s his great 1994 stoner anthem, “You Don’t Know How it Feels.” Chorus: “Well, let me get to the point, let’s roll another joint!”

Even more emphatic is the obscure, “You Get Me High.” It starts out, “Let’s have another joint on me! Let’s get as gone as we can be! And we’ll float around the ceiling! Baby, you get me high!”

It’s a love song sung to a girl, but I’m confused about the real object of his lyrical affections.

There’s a segment in his outstanding “Running Down a Dream” career retrospective where he talks about how drugs ravaged the production of the 1985 album, “Southern Accents.”

Petty’s talking with evident sadness and consternation of the wreckage of drug use and saying how terrible and destructive to creativity they are. He then gets a mischievous glint in his eye and before dissolving into maniacal laughter asks the unseen interviewer, “You don’t happen to have any drugs, do you?”

The program later shows Petty mourning the death of heroin-addict bandmate Howie Epstein, 47.

I remember Mick Jagger saying something similar to “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley in 2002. Jagger said one day he woke up and realized he was sick and tired of always being wasted. Bradley asks when he came to that realization and Jagger, laughing just like Petty did, says, “After about 30 years!”

I often quote Willie Nelson when he’s asked about the effect on the crime rate if marijuana was legalized: “I know it’s kept me from killing a bunch of people.”

It’s an interesting time for me to be opining on the drug use of others because my wife and I are hooked on crystal meth.

We’re binging on “Breaking Bad,” the AMC show about the chemistry teacher (Bryan Cranston) who turns to crystal meth production after a terminal cancer diagnosis. We’re into the third season and I know when we catch up and have to go cold turkey we’ll suffer withdrawal until it airs again.

It’s the best show we’ve ever seen and it’s left me scared straight. It’s all over the headlines, too. Drugs are destroying lives.

Not everyone who smokes weed makes the narcotic jump to heroin or crystal meth, but the cops will tell you no one starts the latter without trying the former.

Conclusions:

• Drugs are very bad for some people. Whitney Houston said heavy marijuana use ruined her life.

• Some very cool people really love weed and other drugs.

• Writing about drugs is a lot more fun when you don’t have to think about dead celebrities and wasted lives.

I suppose the same goes for doing them.

Re-run Sunday: All snowmen are abominable

I've only had to shovel twice this year. There were days in February 2010 when I shoveled twice before noon. The month set all kinds of snow records and still scars my mind. Yet I survived it. Today, in homage to that fierce foe, I rerun this piece written in the teeth of the worst winter I can remember.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful and I can’t keep the Christmas ditties from sleigh riding ‘round and ‘round inside my head.

At Christmas we all sang “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” How come “Make it Stop! Make it Stop! Make it Stop!” doesn’t work half as well?

We’ve already had our White Christmas, our White New Year’s, and our White Groundhog’s Day.

For heaven’s sake, we even had a White Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And how did Al Sharpton miss the chance to protest that racial switcherroo?

I’ve heard the Eskimos have 25 different words to describe snow. I have at least that many and all of mine start with a word that sounds like “firetruck.”

The man who said no two snowflakes look exactly alike never shoveled my driveway. Let me tell you, every single firetruckin’ snowflake looks exactly alike.

I’ve spent two to three hours each day for the past two weeks walking in a winter wonderland. We’re about to set a record for total snowfall in February and we still have 12 days left in the shortest month.

I asked a fellow sufferer how we’re supposed to celebrate breaking such a record. He looked at me with what combat veterans describe as the 1,000 mile stare and said, “You just keep shoveling.”


Really, there are times when I pause, lean on my shovel and pray my heart slows to a gallop. I look around through great gusts of frozen breath. Nearly three feet of snow is a marvelous sight to behold.

But so is about anything on my 52-inch hi-def TV. If I could choose, I’d take the TV.

We live half way up a mountain in what is familiar to local weather viewers as the Laurel Highlands. It’s about an hour east of Pittsburgh. It’s the place weatherman always say is “getting really hammered with twice that amount” after they say Pittsburgh’s getting a school-closing eight inches of snow.

I hear that and conclude weather school curriculum must be too severe to allow for decent parties.

Because I spend a lot of time thinking about getting really hammered and this ain’t it. I’d love to break the tedium of constant shoveling with one of those lost weekends I vaguely remember from my days at Ohio University where the weekends used to run from Thursdays to Mondays.

But that’s not going to happen. The forecast calls for more snows and sobriety.

Schools have been closed for seven of the past nine days. The kids are sick of me and the ways I try and cheat to win at things like Jenga.

I look in the mirror and staring back I see Jack Torrance from “The Shining.” He’s been sober since the snows began to fall. His cabin fever is acute. He keeps writing the same disturbing drivel over and over and over.

The literary parallels alone are frightening.

If Scatman Carothers shows up at my door, he’d better watch out.

I told the 55-pound daughter that she could jump up and down on my aching back. She began to do so with glee and continued right up until Mommy told her that she wasn’t inflicting pain, she was relieving it.

That’s the instant she stopped.

My instinct was to drag myself off the floor and drive straight to the bar for sudsy camaraderie. But it seemed foolish to risk winding up in a ditch just to break the monotony with some beers and buddies.

So I just stayed in and challenged the girls to beat me at Jenga.

Besides, baby, it’s cold outside.

"Ich bin ein horny"

Another week, another New England icon embarrassed by public declarations of a mouthy intimate.

But enough about Tommi and Gisele.

As I see it, we need a constitutional amendment that says White House interns must be at least three years older than the presidents they serve.

I guess my first thought was I was glad Mimi wasn’t our Nana. I don’t know how I’d explain to her granddaughters why Nana was telling Meredith Vieira about the time Calvin Coolidge deflowered her virtue. My skin vicariously crawled for the whole Alford family.

As a student of history, I usually like randy declarations from old lovers that shed new light on powerful men and women.

For instance, I was thrilled to learn that Charles Kuralt, the CBS “On the Road” correspondent, had a weekend wife in Montana that no one knew about until his star-spangled death July 4, 1997. This beloved American icon had for nearly three decades kept a shadow family in Montana, which kind of made him a polygamist with frequent flyer miles.

The Mimi Alford news about John F. Kennedy doesn’t shed new light on him. It sheds new lava light on him.

Most of us were willing to overlook knowledge he was a real player. We knew he’d slept with Marilyn Monroe, the gangster babe and scores of others beehive haired honeys. Most men would forsake their sacred vows for a romp with Marilyn, something every married man and God, even, would likely salute.

Well, every man but Mitt.

But Alford’s story just makes Kennedy seem indelibly creepy. He just comes across as so entitled. And for a Kennedy that’s really saying something!

He got her drunk on daiquiris, stole her virginity an hour later, pushed drugs on her at wild parties, offered to find her an abortion doctor when she thought she was pregnant, and tried to pimp her out to his mates when he thought the boys needed relaxing.

This isn’t what we expect from the leader of the free world, circa, 1964.

This is what we expect from the leader of the Rolling Stones, circa 1964.

I’ve never been one to deify Kennedy. To me, he’s the Democrats answer to Ronald Reagan. Both are overrated because they’re inspirational communicators and Kennedy’s reputation is further elevated by national tragedy.

Admirers like to wonder what would have happened had it not all ended so tragically in Dallas.

Would he have pulled us out of Vietnam? Would he have sought common sense detente with the Soviets? What would the crucible of the Cold War White House done to this vibrant young man?

Here’s what I now think would have happened.

He would have accelerated the ‘60s. He’d have gone to Woodstock and smoked pot on stage with Jimi Hendrix. He’d have alienated the country by leaving Jackie to live communally with a harem of California runaways. We’d never have heard of Charles Manson because the acid kids would have all flocked to Kennedy instead.

The man was a hippie waiting to happen.

I’ve long contended so many men are pigs because so many women are sheep.

But 19-year-old Alford isn’t 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky in 1995 flashing her underwear at Bill Clinton, a provocation that when it comes to that man’s appetites seems tantamount to entrapment.

This reads like rape. Date rape, certainly.

I think it’s important that Alford came forward. She had essential information about one of the most revered and studied men in American history.

Historians and scholars will want to dig into these revelations and layer them onto what we already knew about Kennedy.

I’d advise them to all wear rubber gloves.

Inner earth: the true final frontier

Russian scientists have succeeded in drilling through two miles of solid Antarctic ice to reach a lake that’s been sealed from human contact for between 15 million and 34 million years, give or take an eon or two.

They are hoping to find microbial life within so-called Lake Vostok that could hint that life could exist on the frozen moons of Jupiter.

I’m hoping they find a copy of my 2003 book, “Hole in One! The Complete Book of Fact, Legend and Lore on Golf’s Luckiest Shot,” current Amazon rank: 1,845,777.

If I could script it, lead scientist Valery Lukin would say, “It was found bookmarked to the page where Arnold Palmer says he remembers his first ace with more clarity than his first kiss because it meant more to him.”

Imagine what that would do for sales. Yes, finding my 9-year-old golf book beneath miles of ancient ice would be ... hmmm ... what’s the word?

Cool?

It would certainly be better than finding Adolph Hitler.

Proving once again it’s impossible to out-crazy the crazies, Russia’s state-run news service, Ria Novosti is reviving a theory that Nazis sent a secret submarine to the lake to deliver the remains of Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun for future DNA cloning.

He’d certainly add philosophical spice to the chow hall debates at Gitmo after Seal Team 6 works their magic.

The report sounds like something you’d read in “The Weekly World News.” Favorite headline -- all together now! -- “Baby Born with Wooden Leg!!!”

I mention The News here because the diggings at Lake Vostok also remind me of another one of their great crusades: purifying the global air by simultaneously popping the tires on vintage cars from the 1950s. The logic is the gush of released air from 60 years ago would crowd all the bad air out of the atmosphere.

It is roughly 4,000 miles from the soles of your sneakers to the center of the earth. The deepest anyone’s ever drilled is 7 miles. What’s beyond that is mere speculation.

Here in Pennsylvania, thousands of my hillbilly neighbors are being enriched by Marcellus Shale natural gas deposits. What other natural wonders await down there?

These lakes are water created by pressure and warmth from below the ice. Who knows? Maybe there are perfectly pure pockets of ancient air.

Air from umpteen millions of years ago would be the respiratory equivalent of moonshine. It would be like 999 proof. One whiff and you’re 10-feet tall and bulletproof.

Because it was Capt. James T. Kirk that first told us that space was the final frontier, we’ve taken it at face value. We could have it completely backwards.

Our future may be beneath our feet. Maybe the world going to hell will lead the world to go to hell.

With climate change, extreme weather, Biblical flooding and drought, I’ve for years predicted that adventure vacations of the future will be anything above ground and out of doors.

So much of our discovery these days seems to hinge on the theory that sooner or later the surface atmosphere of Mother Earth will be too poisonous for people and plants.

Why else would Jupiter’s moons be in the mix?

All I know about Jupiter is the cruel rhyme my daughters use on me when they want to feel superior: “Girls go to college to get more knowledge! Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider!”

Poor grammar aside, I have no intentions of validating their taunt.

So I’m looking forward to a subterranean future where neither lawns will need mowing nor snow shoveling. Put up a basketball hoop, a cool stereo, a pool table and a big screen TV -- cable, not satellite -- and it would be just like home.

Think about it: Earth, the ultimate man cave.

Can you dig it?

GOP blows whistle on Clint's halftime

If it’s halftime in America, we’d all better brace ourselves for plenty of flushing and farting.

As a veteran of more than 200 Pittsburgh Steeler home games, that’s what halftime means to me. It doesn’t mean hoped for comebacks. The Steelers are usually favored and protecting a lead.

This may come as a surprise to women, but the men’s rooms in Heinz Field where the Steelers play don’t have individual porcelain urinals, but have instead those stainless steel troughs that stretch for about 50 feet of knee-high wall space. That means those standing at the low end of the slope can expect a communal splashing that ought to have them racing to the nearest laundromat the second the final whistle blows.

The lack of privacy is unsettling to some dainty men. I try and help by telling them the custom at Heinz Field is to put your arms around the strangers to your right and left and offer friendly encouragement.

Anyone who dabbles in public musings knows it’s unwise to say anything nice about President Obama or hint just maybe he made a gutsy call on things like killing bin Laden.

You can count on the conservative backlash to be fierce.

That’s what one of our greatest Americans is finding out.

I’m talking about Clint Eastwood.

Even though he’s never fought for our country, solved a national crisis or found a cure for something itchy, I do consider him one of our greatest Americans.

He’s for more than 50 years made great movies that entertain and help define America. He’s perfectly cool.

Unlike me, he’s never voted for a Democrat presidential candidate and looks at every issue from a conservative point of view.

I have many friends like that. We’d never let politics get in the way of our friendship.

They think about politics, but they aren’t political. There’s a big difference. They are tolerant of my liberal opinions and are open-minded in a political discussion.

And we all love Clint.

They saw the same now-controversial ad featuring Eastwood -- and if his voice gets any more gravelly it ought to be quarried -- saying of Detroit, “They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again.”

None of them reported thinking, “Son of a bitch! The outlaw Josie Wales is shilling for that Muslim tourist in the White House. That’s it. My next pickup is gonna be built in Japan!”

No, they thought, “Cool! Clint’s talking about American auto workers, guys who are as red neck and blue collar as me. Man, I’m glad we’re still making cars in Detroit. USA! USA!”

They saw no political intent. They discerned no pro-Obama messages.

They are not Karl Rove.

“I was, frankly, offended by it,” he told Fox News. Yes, to a conservative an American icon saying something obvious and positive about an American success that happened because of Obama is offensive.

Picking a fight with Clint Eastwood is the clearest sign the national GOP is completely unhinged. They are mired in a dismal primary season being contested by candidates who each have something disqualifying about their record or personality. And that’s disqualifying just to fellow conservatives. With the economy strengthening and adding jobs and foreign policy off the table, they fear they are facing an historic electoral debacle.

Those fears are justified.

Attacking Clint Eastwood might work on Fox News, but it won’t work in an America where anyone with any sense is happy they’re making money and better vehicles in Motor City.

Most Americans are smart enough to recognize when a good thing is a good thing.

Eastwood, who is on record as being opposed to bailouts, has already come out and said the ad is not meant to boost Obama and is intended “to be a message about job growth and the spirit of America,” something he thinks all politicians should embrace.

It’s halftime in America. What are you going to do?

For me, I’ll continue to try and avoid the partisan squabbles that so agitate the petty minds of people like Karl Rove.

Instead, I’ll put my arms around those to the left and the right of me and I will encourage them.