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Ever have a song gurgle up from the swamp of memory, no apparent impetus other than the joy of saying to yourself, “Oh god, I haven’t heard that song in forever”?

That happened to me just now with the theme song to the 1982 movie “MegaForce,” by the band 707. I have no idea what made me think of it.

No lie, I owned this movie on Betamax and thought it was the most bad-ass thing I’d ever seen, and I remembered every word to the song upon finding it on YouTube just now. I shudder to think how much of an influence it may have had on my sense of taste. Seriously, though, I must also admit getting goosebumps from it, and not because it’s bad. My inner child just got a phone call from the ether, and that doesn’t happen every day.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the “flying motorcycle lands in the back of the airplane” scene, complete with theme song. YOU ARE WELCOME.

I have been told that I have a dry sense of humor. People who are less concerned with being diplomatic have told me that I have a weird sense of humor. What I think I have is a British sense of humor, one that takes great delight in the silly and the absurd. Blame it on/credit it to a youth spent consuming Monty Python and Danger Mouse (no, not the DJ, the world’s greatest secret agent mouse).

One of the things I love the most is the “broken joke,” a joke that begins in typical fashion but ends with things being somehow not right, or incomplete, or more of a straightforward narrative than a joke. And this, to me, is absolutely hilarious, for some reason. It is intellectual silliness at its finest.

John Hodgman, he of The Daily Show and Mac commercial fame, is a genius at this. He has a chapter in his book “The Areas of My Expertise” called “Jokes that have never produced laughter.” Here’s one: read more…

Man, this is unexpected: The Insane Clown Posse is winning me over.

First, there is this great recent appearance on Nightline, in which the guys demonstrate that they are about five times more level-headed and logical and thoughtful than the interviewer. No lie, at about 22 minutes in, he takes them to task for making products and selling them in order to make a profit – also known as What Everybody In The World Is Trying To Do Every Single Day. And when Shaggy, accosted over violent imagery in their songs, simply asks “How come nobody ever sits Stephen King down to talk about this?”, you’ve gotta admit that he’s absolutely right. Plus, they come off as pleasant, nice, hard-working guys. read more…

Susan was an amazing woman, a quiet and tough-as-nails lady that ran a massive family farm in Upton for years.

Alongside her husband Claude, she did everything – butchered the animals, took care of the crops, nurtured the children and grandchildren for whom her place was a refuge and a sanctuary, a place those grandchildren still talk about with a gleam in their eyes. When Claude died, she continued to take care of that wonderful place on her own.

Then, roughly 20 years ago, as I was getting to know her equally amazing granddaughter, two little punks from the neighborhood decided to rob her. She had a stroke on the spot, and those two worthless pieces of shit left her there. Several days later, her brain and body had fundamentally changed, and this amazing woman spent the next 20 years of her life in a wheelchair in a nursing home, unable to move one of her arms and one of her legs.

She died last night, and I have no doubt that if it weren’t for those two worthless punks, she would have worked that farm well into her 90s.

The bottom line is this: People need to quit being so fucking mean to one another. We are not animals, goddammit, and we need to quit acting like we are. We might not rob older ladies who are alone in their farmhouses, but we do other things, things that are smaller but add up over time, that turn into that giant pile in the bottom half of the hourglass. Every little cruelty, every little indiscretion, every little act of selfishness … it has to stop.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” – Kurt Vonnegut, from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”

The picture attached to this post is of a wooden gate that I made nearly seven years ago. I am good at a few things and average at many others, and one of the things at which I am average is woodworking.

But when my first child got old enough that the stairs in our house were suddenly dangerous, I called upon those average woodworking skills to fashion a gate that could seal them off. It was a project that I loved – nothing makes you feel more like a MAN! than wielding a saw to protect your child – and after one afternoon spent at Home Depot and in the shed, I had a very nice (if I do say so myself) gate, white spray-painted dowels ensconced in a sanded square frame.

And then I brought it into the house and tried to mount it to the wall with the metal hinges I had lovingly selected, only to find that the house was uneven enough for the square frame to not swing properly.

At this point, you do what any man does: You IMPROVISE. With this particular gate (and I was using this gate, because there was no way I was going to forfeit the afternoon and the $50 spent only to buy a pre-fab model) and this particular set of stairs, there was only one way to get it all to work, and that involved getting the saw out again. So I took off one side of the thing, evened it out as best I could, and made it work.

A few hours later, it was mounted on the wall, and the metal latch worked just fine against the banister (thanks to a ham-fisted retrofit job involving pliers and a piece of metal that didn’t want to be bent but ended up being bent, dammit).

And you know what? It was a perfectly fine gate, and it did the job, and over the days and weeks and years, it became a part of our home. When the rapidly growing kids would run downstairs, we would holler at them to “close the gate behind you!” We took the gate into account when getting ready to take out the garbage. We fussed at neighbor kids who tried to push the gate the wrong way (it only swings THAT WAY, don’t you know, and if you try to swing it THE OTHER WAY you might break it, so don’t do that!).

At any rate, this winter we had to have the entire banister replaced, and when the old one went away, so too did the gate. We thought about finding a way to replace it, but realized that for the most part, we don’t need it – our youngest is now able to go up and down the stairs with relative ease, and the odds are pretty good that we’re not going to have any more children.

So the gate sits outside, waiting for the garbage man to pick it up and crush it into splinters and shards of paint and pieces of jagged metal at the bottom of an infinitely large pile. I am the kind of man who takes a picture of this gate before it goes away. I am the kind of man who cries over “little” things like this.