Yuck!

Bedbugs? Really? These things were supposed to have been eradicated during World War II.

What the crap?

And at the movies, no less. And in office buildings. And, by the way, not just here in New Bug City. They've even gone international.

I haven't seen them in my building yet (although I've heard rumors of them being dangerously close). But just thinking about it is making me itchy.

No matter what you think you've done, you just cannot eliminate something that's been around for 40 million years. They were here long before us and they'll be here long after we're gone.

Gross.

What's the (Squirrel) Poop?

I was in Prospect Park today here in Brooklyn and noted that this is indeed the busy season if you happen to be a squirrel.

The furry little guys were out in full force digging through the leaves for acorns to bring back to the homestead for the winter. They were scrambling around madly and occasionally fighting with their fellow bushy-tailed rodents over the best nuts. A similar scene was playing out in malls all across America.

I'm not sure what path my brain took to get there, but the whole thing got me to thinking about squirrel poop. Nobody ever mentions squirrel poop. Dog poop, bird poop, cat poop, horse poop...they're all part of city life. Squirrel poop? Not so much, apparently. But squirrels must poop, right? They're animals, and mammals at that. They eat, they scamper about, they have butts. Ergo, they poop. So where is it? It must be there, right?

But nobody ever says, "Aw, fuck, I just stepped in squirrel poop!" And you never hear anyone holler, "I looked up and a goddamn squirrel pooped right on my head!" Are the poops just too small to see? Birds that are much smaller than squirrels manage to make their poop known. And I've seen some dogs running around that shouldn't be picking any fights with your garden variety squirrel.

Any scatologists out there that can enlighten me on squirrel poop? Google isn't exactly doing it on this topic. And I wanna know.

Ken Ober

Well, here's another one who dropped off before his time.

Ken Ober was known to many as the host of MTV's "Remote Control". It was the first, and probably best, of many game shows on the channel that subverted the format with jokey categories and gimmicks like a chair that sent contestants flipping over backwards when they lost and a spinning wheel from which contestants were supposed to identify music video "artists".

I had my shot on that wheel in the show's final season. The episode I was in aired on St. Patrick's Day 1990 but it was taped on a freaking freezing Manhattan day the prior December. I remember I had planned to wear my NYU sweatshirt on the show but they changed us all into green shirts and stupid hats for the occasion.

Ober didn't come backstage to greet the contestants. He just showed up on set. But he did show me some personal grace. There was a question about which four characters besides Barney and Fred could see the Great Gazoo. Deductive reasoning got it for me. Dino was one, of course. And the other characters must be the ones who weren't going to blab to anyone about it. Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, who didn't talk. And Dino's counterpart in the Rubble house, Hoppy the Hopasaurus, of course.

Ober, and everyone else on the show, seemed awfully surprised that I actually answered the question. I think it may have been intended as a stumper. (They often put in questions for which they didn't expect an answer.) After the question, an interruption from "Ken's mother" took place. Ken said "Wow, Mom, I'm just dusted that that kid got that one." Then he looked at me and gave me the thumbs-up while Mom said something stupid.

I ended up winning the day, even though I did something really stupid and almost lost because of it. (I won't go into it here. Ask me about it some time.) And I correctly identified all but one video in the Grand Prize round, missing out on a trip to, where else, Ireland. The video I missed was by Bobby Brown. My response upon learning what I missed? "I hate Bobby Brown!" I said this on national television at the height of the man's popularity. I really heard it from the studio audience, who had been totally with me up to that point.

The whole thing was totally fun and I went home with a bunch of prizes, including a motorcycle that I never rode, all of which I had to pay taxes on. Boo.

Thanks, Ken, for giving me my first and only (so far; I'll get on "Jeopardy" if it kills me) game show experience. You'll be fondly remembered.

Columbus Day

One of the joys of living in New York City is that, although we have fantastic libraries here, the city itself is a primary source. Book report on Ellis Island? Get on the boat. Back by lunchtime. "Starry Night"? Yeah, we've got that.

On this fine day which somehow isn't quite a holiday anymore (which seems to get a lot of the local Eye-talian contingent in a bit of a knicker twist), let's talk about what we've got here in the Apple to commemorate the man.

We've got a big parade. It doesn't really celebrate Columbus per se. It's just another one of our endless stream of ethnic pride parades. You know, the ones that are so gauche and unseemly when they're being participated in by folks of other ethnic persuasions (you know, the ones who got here after your group, whenever that was) but are wholesome and wonderful when your particular group (you know, the ones who came here for the right reasons) is whooping it up, waving at the city council member or athlete that happens to belong to the tribe and, if that's part of your heritage, vomiting.

We've also got some streets. Columbus Avenue is a biggie, although it becomes 9th Avenue as it gets further downtown. Closer to Little Italy, oddly enough.

The top of the line, though, is Columbus Circle. It was a big horrifying mess of a traffic circle for a long time. Until its recent renovation, to navigate it on foot from one side to another was to take your life into your own hands, or at least the hands of a passel of NYC cabbies, and you know how good and caring those hands are. To navigate it now is to be late for wherever it is you're going. With order comes inconvenience, folks.

I recently got bored trying to get from the Whole Foods in the fresh new Time Warner Center to my usual lunchtime perch in Central Park, which requires crossing three separate rights-of-way, and just crossed one street into the center of the circle. There's a mammoth Columbus memorial thing there (umm, duh), which I've seen a milllion times, but never up close until now.

A revelation.

Here's what the inscription on the side reads.

"To the world he gave a world." Yep. I think you know where we're going with this.

We've been revising the book on Columbus for years now. He's gone from a heroic explorer to basically a genocidal creep and lives probably somewhere in between for most people. Where that in-between is depends largely on your political persuasion and possibly whether you belong to a particular one of the above-mentioned ethnic groups. (Guess which one!)

We always hear these people screaming whenever some of their cherished orthodoxies are challenged. It's no wonder they cling to religion and reject science. If you build your world on universal immutable truths, and something you thought you knew turns out to be not quite true, your whole world falls apart. ("Hey, what are all these dead bodies doing in this closet?" "Shh! Never mind that. The history books have already gone to the printers!") Of course, they would never ever try to re-write the history books themselves.

But did we always feel so straightforward about Columbus and his legacy before liberalism run rampant and insufferable political correctness? Here's a picture I snapped of a high relief on the side of the monument showing Columbus and his crew upon arrival in The New World.

It's downright inspiring! They're so full of wonder. So full of awe and appreciation for the golden land they've found and for the deity made flesh that led them there.

But wait, while they're all fawning over the captain, there's one dude with something else on his mind. There he is on the right. What's he pointing at? Must be some gold. Or lots and lots of food. "Um, chief? Chee-eef. CHIEF!"

Aw, crap on a stick. There's Indians here. Somebody call Terminix.

So, it doesn't seem that it was ever as cut and dry as we thought. Even in a monument to the guy, it acknowledges that even though he "discovered" the place there were still kinda some people here already. And not exactly very dangerous ones, from the looks of it. Which group in the above picture do you think is going to keep the land?

Happy Columbus Day!

Trauma

Well, this makes perfect sense. A giant Times Square-sized advertisement for an undoubtedly entertaining television program. Fire up the Tivo!

Here in New York City we enjoy seeing larger-than-life-size images of things on fire and people in states of panic (trauma, one might say), particularly on a lovely mid-September morning.

Thanks, NBC. Nice work.