Monday Morning Video Laugh - January 7, 2019

It's tough to be a reporter in the winter.

Dinner last night:  Pork and sauerkraut.

The Sunday Memory Drawer - Braving Winter

It's been really cold the past two weeks in Los Angeles.   There have been frost advisories in the morning.  You can wake up to temps in the 30s.  I have put the heat on in my apartment.   And the leather bomber jacket has made more than one appearance.

This is what life is like when you endure winter in Southern California.  Luckily, my past life has toughened me up for such dire weather conditions.  After all, I grew up in Westchester, NY.

You may have seen the photo above before.  But, nevertheless, here I am again.  Enjoying the snow several decades ago.  With a friend that was undoubtedly built by my dad.  Even then, I had no patience when it came to artistic moments.  I certainly couldn't have crafted a snowman.

Ah, how refreshing.  How homespun.  How cute.

And, then, a bunch of years later...

Here I am again.  Having a lot less fun.  A snapshot from the 80s.  My very first solo apartment on North Broadway in Yonkers.  And, whoa, there's my very first car.  A 1980 Toyota Corolla.  I loved that little brown peanut.  It gave me ten solid years of reliable transportation.  Despite the fact that it was always parked outside amongst the elements.  And took the brunt of snowfalls like this.

It's amazing how your perspective changes when you grow up in an area that endures snowflakes during the winter months. 

When you're a kid, you live through the delight of the Christmas season just as winter sets in.  Then, on January 2, you are likely headed back to jail AKA elementary school.  And the prospect of time off, prior to the regularly scheduled Presidential birthdays in February, is totally dependent upon some low pressure systems meshing with some Canadian cold front.  You'd anxiously await the weather report on the nightly news.  You'd gladly switch over from the Three Stooges on WPIX Channel 11 to hear WCBS weatherlady Carol Reed tell you to "have a happy" and then announce the prospects of a blizzard within the next five days. 

"70% chance of snow."

Hmmm, that's more than 50-50.  I'll take it.  I would immediately start to make plans about how late I would sleep in the morning.

Of course, school had to be officially cancelled first.  And, in Mount Vernon, New York, which was just north of the Bronx/NYC line, that wasn't so easy.    The New York City public school system was notoriously famous for not cancelling classes.  It really had to be a dire emergency.

"Due to the plague of locusts, New York City public schools will open at 10AM this morning."

Mount Vernon didn't like to cancel if New York City stayed open.  So, frequently, as the drifts piled up, we were screwed.  Still, we had hope.  If you knew that snow had fallen overnight, you would get up and prod your mother to tune to Westchester's official "school closing" radio station, WFAS-AM.  I don't think anybody ever really listens to WFAS unless it's snowing.  And you'd listen hopefully as the roll call of Westchester County school systems checking in.

"Mahopac schools closed."

Of course, they are.  Mahopac is right next to Alaska, correct?

"Rye Country Day School closed."

That sounds like such a nice place to be educated.  The Rye Country Day School.  Mom, can we move please?  Because they're closed today.

"White Plains schools closed."

Okay, gang, we're getting closer.

"Mount Vernon public schools............open."

F Me.

We never got a break. 

Now there was a back-up alert system that we always hoped would prove those WFAS frauds wrong.  The city of Mount Vernon had a set of loud fire whistles.  If there was no school, the siren would go off at 7AM and 8AM.  I would wait with baited breath.  Nobody make a sound, please.

Most of the time...nothing.

But, there were those days where the whistle went off and I felt glorious.  I also think they were going to use the same warning in the event of a nuclear attack so the last laugh could have been on me as I shimmied my way into my snow suit and/or a radioactive haze.

Not that my day was going to be completely full of leisure.  Invariably, I would be invited outside to help my father shovel out the driveway.  With the usual winter threat.

"Go help your father.  Do you want him to die of a heart attack?"

Okay, got it.

I'd amble outside and then perform my usual snowstorm chore.  I'd pretend to shovel.  If it was windy, the white stuff would blow back into my face.  Eventually, I had more snow on me than I had moved into a neat pile.  Within fifteen minutes, the potential coronary victim that was my dad had seen enough.

"Go inside.  You're just making a mess out here."

Okay, got it.

And that's how, every winter as a child, I managed to get out of shoveling snow.  A wonderful system.   And my father never did have that heart attack.

But, in retrospect, I probably could have used the practice.  Because as glorious as snow days were when you're a youngster, your viewpoints changes when you're an adult.

You don't listen to the school closings on WFAS-AM.

You don't get to wait for a fire whistle.

Unless, it's fifteen inches or more, you don't get to stay home.  You are expected to work.

So, you wake up in the AM and shovel out your car as you see in the photo above. 

It all sucked.

At my very first solo apartment on North Broadway in Yonkers, just leaving the premises in the snow was an ordeal.  First, you had to clean off the car.  If I was smart the night before, I had already taken the brush, shovel, and ice scraper out of the trunk.  Then you begin the process.  If it was really early and nobody was outside yet, I would simply push the crap onto the car in the next space.  Hell, he was a dirtbag anyway.

Now I had a real problem if there was a sheet of ice on the windshield.  Those of you not familiar with frozen tundra-like conditions have no idea how you defrost your car window.  To do it correctly, you ideally need to go out about a half-hour before you really want to leave.  You sit in the car and turn on the defroster.  And simply sit and wait.

Me?  I had little patience.  So I would try to help it along by spraying on the windshield washing liquid.  That would help speed up the process momentarily. 

Until that froze over even more.  Before I knew it, my car window could have served as the arena for the Stanley Cup playoffs.  And I never ever learned my lesson.

Of course, once you could see out your car window, you had to figure out a way to get up the huge slope of a driveway.  On lots of winter mornings, there were cars literally lined up waiting to take their turn up Mount Kilimanjaro.   People would rev their engines to get some momentum going and then start to speed up the driveway which had been barely cleaned.

Halfway up, you'd start to slide down.

Again.

Halfway up.  Slide back down.

Again.

Halfway up.  Slide back down.

Okay, if you failed the climb on the third attempt, common courtesy would be to step aside and let the next bozo try.

Halfway up.  Slide back down.

Again.

Halfway up.  Slide back down.

If somebody managed to keep going, everybody else would stand there perplexed trying to figure out how they did it.  That and, also, cursing the bastard for his success.

Once I got up to the main thoroughfare of North Broadway, I wasn't nearly finished.  I had to somehow maneuver my way gingerly down the mountains of Yonkers to the Metro North train station in Getty Square.  Driving behind other idiots trying to do the same thing but with tires that had not been rotated or replaced in a decade.

The usual ten-minute drive to the train often took an hour on those mornings.  And then, of course, you had no guarantee of transportation into Manhattan.  You'd arrive triumphantly on the train platform only to hear the scratchy announcement over the public address system.

"The 7:55AM to Grand Central...has been cancelled...due to equipment trouble."

Okay, there was another one in ten minutes.

"The 8:05AM to Grand Central...has been cancelled...due to equipment trouble."

And fifteen minutes later...

"The 8:05AM to Grand Central...is running...fifteen minutes later."

Duh.

Admittedly, the Metro North railroad has gotten their act together in the past three decades.   But, back in the 80s, you had a better chance of getting into the city if you waited for a sleigh to come by with Doctor Zhivago at the reins.

When you finally crawled into your office by 9:30AM or 10AM, you'd look around at complete emptiness.  And wonder in amazement how you managed to get to work from Westchester County but the person who lives ten blocks away on 57th Street hadn't arrived yet.

Yeah, writing this piece has given me an epiphany.

I don't miss that weather at all.  I am happy to spend the winter months in Los Angeles.  Where a 20 percent chance of showers prompts a "storm watch" on local TV stations.

Good news.  It's going to warm up to the 60s tomorrow.  But we're on storm watch.   Rain!

Dinner last night:  Grilled knockwurst.

Classic TV Commercial of the Month - January 2019

Predictably, one of these in the house would be really, really annoying.

Dinner last night:  Leftover sausage, peppers, and onions.

Happy New Mug 2019 - All-Star Edition

 Heather Locklear...sans make-up.

 Artie Lange...sans barber.

 Heather Locklear...Jail Revisited.

 Artie Lange...Back by popular demand.

 Bill Cosby.  Hey, what did you put in those Jell-o Pudding Pops?

Al Michaels...Personal foul, 15 yards, community service.

 Manny Ramirez.  It ain't just steroids that are illegal.

 Tiger Woods.   Fore!

 Vince Vaughn.  This ain't no head shot.

 Daryl Hannah.  Probably stole some Botox.

Wesley Snipes.  Just because you're wearing a suit doesn't mean you're innocent.

A dark and Stormy Daniels night.

Dinner last night:  Grilled bratwurst, pickled beets, and potato salad.

Trust Your Plot

Well, here's a movie I never thought I would be reviewing.  But it was New Year's Eve and I wanted to keep things simple and quiet.   A trip to the iPic in Westwood and then a quick meal at their embedded restaurant.  Of the movies playing there, this was the only likely suspect.   So, yes, I concluded 2018 by seeing a Jennifer Lopez movie.  

Oh, the shame.

That said, the first half-hour of this poor man's version of "Working Girl" had me engrossed.  JLo is a high school graduate living in Queens with her boyfriend who is the baseball coach at Fordham.  (Scenes shot at my alma mater...yay!)   She works as a manager in some food emporium and is getting nowhere in her career.  Plus Boyfriend wants to settle down and have kids with her.   Not her cup of tea.   She already got pregnant at 16 and gave up the kid for adoption.  As soon as I heard this plot point, I knew it would come back in place.  Oh, boy, did it?

But I'm still a little interested.   When her friend's son sets up some fraudulent information on her background via social media, she winds up getting a huge gig at a major cosmetic company in Manhattan.  Okay, totally unlikely that her resume wouldn't have been vetted more thoroughly, but I allow for the creative license.  And I'm enjoying some of the corporate humor.

Almost immediately at the job, JLo winds up in a competition against a millennial executive who is the daughter of the company head.  Okay, that has possibilities.

And then the script adds an additional layer of intrigue that is totally unnecessary but completely takes the rest of the movie in a completely unwelcome direction.  You see the young millennial is also...well, I kind of prefaced it above.   Duh.  

The result of this "plot twist" is a very uneven movie that lost my interest almost immediately.  I would assume this was done by original design, but I wonder if the screenwriter looked at the first forty pages and thought "hey, this needs more."  Trust me.  It didn't.   You had me semi-engrossed.   When the alleged "unexpected turn" took over, I put the comfy iPic seat into recline mode and was happy to have a nice nap take over.   Unfortunately, it didn't and I was sadly wide awake through the rest of this.

Don't get me wrong.   I knew what I was getting when I walked in.  This was supposed to be a messy hamburger, not a succulent beef tenderloin.  But, still, they lost me in a way that I didn't expect.  By the end of the movie, I was still waiting for the messy hamburger.   Instead, they gave me nothing but a Slim Jim.

The post-movie meal was tasty, though.

LEN'S RATING:  One-and-a-half stars.

Dinner last night:   Grilled steak salad.

This Date in History - January 2

Happy birthday in heaven, Julius La Rosa.  And the world still asks a collective question.  "Who?"

366:  THE ALAMANNI CROSS THE FROZEN RHINE RIVER IN LARGE NUMBERS, INVADING THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

That ice won't hold up.  Somebody get a Zamboni machine...also Italian.

533:  MERCURIUS BECOMES POPE JOHN II, THE FIRST POPE TO ADOPT A NEW NAME UPON ELEVATION TO THE PAPACY.

By 1963, Pope John XXIII died.  Which means there were 21 others in between these two guys.

1788:  GEORGIA BECOMES THE FOURTH STATE TO RATIFY THE UNITED STATE CONSTITUTION.

The Constitution.  Remember that?  Yeah, I didn't think so.

1860:  THE DISCOVERY OF THE PLANET VULCAN IS ANNOUNCED AT A MEETING OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES IN PARIS, FRANCE.

Leonard Nimoy thanked you.

1871:  AMADEUS I BECOMES KING OF SPAIN.

And later wins an Oscar.

1900:  JOHN HAY ANNOUNCES THE OPEN DOOR POLICY POLICY TO PROMOTE TRADE WITH CHINA.

In 2019, we need to close it.

1909:  POLITICIAN BARRY GOLDWATER IS BORN.

And immediately is accused of starting a war in his crib.

1920:  THE SECOND PALMER RAID TAKES PLACE WITH ANOTHER 6,000 SUSPECTED COMMUNISTS AND ANARCHISTS ARRESTED AND HELD WITHOUT TRIAL.

A movement I can get behind in the new year.

1925:  TV PRODUCER LARRY HARMON IS BORN.

And, in a way, so is Bozo the Clown.

1930:  SINGER JULIUS LA ROSA IS BORN.

Later on, he was fired by Arthur Godfrey.  My grandmother hated both of them.

1935:  BRUNO HAUPTMANN GOES ON TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF INFANT CHARLES LINDBERGH JR. 

Either the jury will be hung or the convict will.

1940:  EVANGELIST JIM BAKKER IS BORN.

When he was married to Tammy Faye, how often did they have to launder their pillow cases?

1942:  MANILA, PHILIPPINES IS CAPTURED BY JAPAN.

One month after Pearl Harbor, these guys are still acting a little cocky, aren't they?

1945:  DURING WORLD WAR II, NUREMBERG, GERMANY IS SEVERELY BOMBED BY ALLIED FORCES.

Pay attention, Japan.  What goes around comes around.

1963:  ACTOR DICK POWELL DIES.

Cigarettes kill.

1974:  PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON SIGNS A BILL LOWERING THE MAXIMUM US SPEED LIMIT TO 55 MPH IN ORDER TO CONSERVE GAS DURING AN OPEC EMBARGO.

As if any driver paid attention.

1974:  COUNTRY SINGER TEX RITTER DIES.

And, about 26 years later, so does his son John.

1986:  BASEBALL EXECUTIVE BILL VEECK DIES.

Veeck as in dead.

1990:  ACTOR ALAN HALE JR. DIES.

And the three hour tour finally comes to an end.

1999:  A BRUTAL SNOWSTORM SMASHES INTO THE MIDWEST.  68 DEATHS ARE REPORTED.

Another 200 deaths went unnoticed.  After all, it is the Midwest.

2011:  ACTRESS ANNE FRANCIS DIES.

Honey goes North.  Or South depending upon your viewpoint.

Dinner last night:  Beef teriyaki stir fry.

The First Blog Post of 2019

May you continue to find laughs and insight here all throughout 2019.

Dinner last night:  Wagyu Burger at The Tuck Room.