Au revoir, les enfants . . .

It's a day of goodbyes in the world. First to go: Joey Bishop. The last surviving and least famous member of the Rat Pack is no longer with us today. Anyone born before 1950 will remember him for his various jokes, which invariabley ended up with his Judaism being the punchline. I, for one, will remember him for his groundbreaking work as Harry Goldman, the elderly wise cracking Jewish man, in the cinematic classic The Delta Force, starring Chuck Norris, Lee Marvin (in his last film), and an oddly cast Robert Forster as an Arab terrorist. Now the very mention of Chuck Norris makes you immediately think that movie is a bomb, and you'd be right, but what's really funny about the movie is that some scenes look like they're straight out of a David Zucker film. Not only had he already directed Airplane!, but this movie gave him more material for the Naked Gun. Pretty sure the first scene of the Naked Gun comes right from this movie. It even has George Kennedy who plays Lt. Ed Hocken in the latter. The movie might be a little too touchy to make fun of in the current geo-political climate, but c'mon, it's a near dead Lee Marvin fighting men half his age on an airplane with wise cracks. One of the first things I want to do over Christmas break is to netflix this and give it a good riff.

Also leaving us today is the Sam Brownback presidential campaign. Apparently the American public didn't find a campaign centered solely around whether or not to teach creationism in public schools compelling as the senator perceived. Well, as he leaves the national scene for now, perhaps he could do worse than to get a lesson in evolution from Mark Mothersbraugh and his nerd rock band DEVO:

Joe Torre also said goodbye to the Yankees today. Apparently he's the greatest manager ever, because it takes a genius to write 9 billionaires down on a lineup card. Will LaGenius finally leave St. Louis for the prospects of greener pastures and a rotation that doesn't include 3 journeymen? Most likely he won't get the job. Don Mattingly looks to be the favorite, unless of course he refuses to cut his sideburns.

Following my last entry about my physical similarities to Rod Beck, I decided it was time to shave. So I did that today, and taking a look at myself in the mirror, I've realized that in ten years time I will be resembling another obscure celebrity: Spalding Gray It's approrpiate, I guess. By revolutionizing the monologue with his travellogue, one might say Spalding Gray was a forerunner to my blog. You sit down to read/listen to it and expect to hear about my experiences in a foreign country, but instead you find stories about fighting with neighbors or women in the supermarket checkout line.