Jesus probably would have taken the football

"Wine is a mocker and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise."

That was the bible verse that put me over the top. The funny part was that it took more than thirty years pounding down booze for that one to register with me. I no longer remember the book, chapter, or number of the verse but it was the one that made me the sixth grade Sunday school champion at the First Congregational Church in Leslie, Michigan back in 1960.

I hated Sunday school and I really couldn't stand this dweeby guy named Paul who was our teacher, but memorizing came easy and each week I would come prepared to regurgitate the bible verses that would make me THE WINNER of the promised Sunday school prize. Every Sunday old Paul would drone on about how we were all going to hell. "Hopeless sinners" is what we all were according to him. It always made me mad because I thought that, if he was correct, why were we even bothering with this b.s.? I could be home in my pajamas watching cartoons and tormenting my little brother instead of listening to how worthless I was in the eyes of God.

But....then again---there was THE PRIZE.

Paul was offering a really cool football to the winner of the bible verse memorization contest that he was using to inspire his pupils that year. Whoever got all the weekly verses would walk away with the coveted pigskin at the end of the Sunday school year. (Paul was such an idiot that he never seemed able to grasp the lack of interest on the part of the girls in the class. His wife didn't seem to like him much either.)

Maybe Paul was deliberately trying to motivate only the guys because women are more naturally drawn to religion. When you stop to think about it, of course they are. The Christian religion gives women everything that they want. Work with me here.....

It provides them with a good looking, okay PERFECT, man who loves them completely--no matter what. I mean, let's face it my brothers. Jesus is the guy that women want us all to be.

If you don't believe me try getting your head around a religion where Bridget Bardot, or Bridget Fonda was the deity. I think it's safe to say that I wouldn't have been absent from church more than a couple of times for the past forty years of Sundays. (I'm just sayin'.)

"You're perfect Ken."

"Grrrrrr."




Where was I??

Oh yeah, so anyway....I totally killed in the bible verse contest and at the end of the class I was ready to claim my football. (This was really important to me at the time because as a tubby kid I thought I might have a future in professional football. I didn't consider that talent might be involved.)

Then it happened...

Paul announces that I am the winner of the contest and since I have demonstrated such a marvelous love of the bible he is giving me a BRAND NEW BIBLE instead of the football. The football was to be the prize for Gary who came in second.

And my wife wonders why I never want to go to church.

If Paul is still alive I want him to know that in radio we called crap like that "Bait and Switch". It's illegal!

If Paul has gone to his reward, I have some ice water for him. Oh wait....NO I DON'T.

How about some marshmallows, MORON?!!

Who are these guys???!!!

"Tell me who you're with--and I'll tell you who you are."
----Old Spanish proverb


This week, unless you were blissfully able to miss it, we were surrounded by a veritable plethora of lunatics cavorting on our dime in the Big Apple. Ain't the UN just the cat's nuts? Where else can you observe the most magnificent collection of piss pot banana republic dictators and morons all telling us that WE are the reason that their counties are hell holes?
"Welcome to America, please feel free to piss on the carpet. Don't worry-our president pretty much agrees with you."


My favorite despot, Mohammar Qaddafi, provided some extra special comic relief for his visit to the UN this year. He tried to pitch one of his homemade tents in Donald Trump's backyard. (The tent, by the way, looked an awful lot like the kind of contraption my brother and I used to cobble together using a card table.)
Libya must be so proud to have a retarded goat herder as its head of state.

Then there is our old pal Hugo Chavez....
Didn't he used to be with the Three Stooges? Curly, I think.
Is there a larger pocket of natural gas anywhere in our hemisphere?
Old Hugo is a piping hot talking pile of pig flop; flies swarm at the mention of his name.



It is time to take the choke chain off Israel. Bombs Away Iran!
And, while you're at it, how about lobbing some Hiroshima Hot Sauce down the chimney at the UN. I'm sure that "The Donald" is itching to put some condos on that pricey piece of real estate.

Dr. Summer Sausage, Phd

My brother, Steve, was a really fat baby. He looked like the love child of Winston Churchill and Sophie Tucker.
Maybe it was the cake. He did love his angel food with chocolate icing.
Genes are mysterious things because somewhere around age four or five Steve got skinny, and stayed that way.
On the other hand, I was a skinny child until around age nine. After noticing that my cousin got constant praise from adults for cleaning his plate I decided to do the same. Soon I found that food was actually GOOD and packed it away accordingly. Basking in the compliments I got from the BIG people earned me proud membership in the Big Eaters Club and all was right with the world...for awhile.

My training regime from age nine to fourteen was comprised of eating, goofing off, and reading comic books. Soon I was, as mom would put it, "big boned". (Shouldn't that be "big intestined"?) My old man didn't believe in euphemisms; he called me FAT. "Geez, look at that gut on you!" and "How old are you fatso? You look fifty!" were often offered as observations. I just blew it off and went for another sandwich. Sorry dad.

No, the one that got me occured at school on picture day in the Autumn of my thirteenth year. Picture day, that day where the local photographer who submitted the lowest bid comes to your school to snap some really horrible shots of your visage to sell to your mom. You know....the ones where your hair is all messed up, your face riven with acne and, oh yeah, YOU BLINKED. THAT picture day.
At our school the local picture yokel would try to make you smile by teasing you with a nickname or two. It never worked, but it was his "act". When my turn before the camera came he got me to smile by referring to me as "Mr. Summer Sausage" which I found amusing. (I don't know, it just sounded funny.) It wasn't until I had returned to my desk that I realized that the dude had basically called me FAT. The son of a bitch!
I worried about being "Mr. Summer Sausage" for days. At first I sought solace in food, but soon came to think that maybe playing a little more ball and eating a lot less food might do wonders for my corpulent physique. It did. A year later I was looking better, you know, NORMAL. Best of all, the girls in my class were now speaking to me. AMAZING!
I have kept the weight off ever since.

Last Monday I picked-up the paper to discover that I have wasted my life in denial. San Diego State University , SDSU, now has a major in FAT STUDIES. According to the university fat studies is an emerging academic field that explores the social and political consequences of being overweight. The fact that 67 percent of American adults are overweight or obese has prompted the university to take up their cause.
Here is an excerpt from "The Fat Studies Reader": "Overweight is inherently anti-fat. It implies an extreme goal: Instead of a bell curve distribution of human weights, it calls for a lone, towering, unlikely bar graph with everyone occupying the same (thin) weights."

San Diego State professor Esther Rothblum, who is considered a leading scholar in the field says, " It's a field that believes all people should be treated with respect, regardless of body size."

Does this remind anybody else of the old "My mother, drunk or sober" argument we heard so much of during the conflict in Vietnam?

The good professor notes that she may be considered fat but that she is healthy. She went on to say that she has been playing racquetball for 30 years and recently placed third in her division at the Gay Games. She is 5 feet 4 and weighs 230 pounds. I'll leave you to speculate on where she may have finished if she'd trimmed down to a mere 180 pounds.

Now that I've thought about it....WHO CARES??!!! I'M GOING BACK TO COLLEGE!

It's the new FAT STUDIES major for me.

Pass the pie and the PHD. Mr. Summer Sausage is HUNGRY!

An evening with Ed

Most trips to New York find me taking time to wander down to the financial district to check on the progress at the World Trade Center site. Anger is still the overwhelming reaction I feel each time I'm there. The hate and stupidity required to perpetrate this heinous act is so pervasive that it makes my stomach hurt. I want to take a sledge hammer to something every time. Not only do I want revenge for more than two-thousand American lives taken on 9/11, I also want to kick somebody's ass for not immediately rebuilding the twin towers just to stick it in the face of the morons who did it. Wouldn't that have been better?! After all, in the depths of the Depression this country built the Empire State Building in a little over a year. Why couldn't we cut through all the crap and show the world that America could get off the mat and was ready to dish some justice? We used to do things like that.

In the Summer of 2003 I got a call from an old Army buddy of mine. Ed and his wife were in San Diego for a day or two and he wanted to get together for dinner. He and I had met in officer's training at Fort Gordon, Georgia back in 1971 and have stayed in touch through the years. We were only in Georgia for a few weeks but, like it is with some people, had enough in common that the friendship has endured long distance. He's a good guy.

Ed made the Army his career. I thought he was nuts, but he was made of sterner stuff than I. He retired as a Colonel after thirty years and has continued to work as a civilian employee at the Pentagon since then. He became an expert in satellite communications and, though he would modestly deny this, is a "go to" guy in that arena.

Linda had a school function that she needed to attend; so I met Ed and his wife, Ilse, at their hotel and we headed for dinner at a quiet little place on the water on Shelter Island. It was going to be fun catching up with them. Somewhere between the main course and dessert it suddenly dawned on me that Ed was most likely at the Pentagon when the plane hit on 9/11.

I asked him.

He was.

For the next hour or so I hardly said a word. (Rare for me.) Ed looked out over San Diego bay and slowly began to tell me of that horrible afternoon at the Pentagon.

"First of all", he said. "The best place to be that day was in the smoker's area." "There is a courtyard type place deep inside the 'puzzle palace' where smoking is allowed." "That day, it was the safest location in the building."

He went on to tell me of the jolt and noise everybody felt when the plane struck the building and the shock and disbelief of walking through the smoke and chaos to get outside. It was a nightmare from which it was impossible to awake. When he got out of the structure there were emergency vehicles and personnel everywhere. His first thought was to call his wife who worked in the area to see if she was alright. She was.

For the rest of the day he volunteered to help the rescue workers. He spent all day holding plasma bags for the wounded and lending a hand with stretchers while he tried to make sense of it all. He did what he could.

Unlike me, Ed has seen war and yet I could tell that this day had left a profound impression on him. It was an evening I will never forget....nor, should I.

This story has been on my mind of late for obvious reasons. It seems, and I hope I'm wrong here, that it's eight years on and we are already starting to forget about what happened to this country on September 11, 2001. If we do, we're in real trouble.

That's the problem with having the best country in the history of mankind. It is so easy to just relax and take it easy. As a people who have it so very good, it's tempting to think that the rest of the world likes us and shares our values. Mostly, they don't. This may come as a surprise...they don't care about who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl. Hell, they don't even have high def!

The mentality in Washington these days is "Let's be nice to everybody and they'll be nice to us."

Realists know that it doesn't work that way.

Most of the world would back the car over us for a ham sandwich.

September 11 and an evening with Ed should make that clear.

Never forget.

Face it, technology gets me HOT!

I have had several cell phones.

I never answer them. I do, however, find them fun to carry in my pants. Always set on VIBRATE, it is clearly a thrill when someone does attempt to reach me via one of these babies. I refer to this feature as "pants waiting".

Outside of this "pants waiting" thing I find absolutely nothing to be gained by toting one of these electronic slave bracelets. What the hell could be so important that it couldn't be dealt with when I return home? Answer: Absolutely Nothing!

The biggest bitch I have regarding cell phones is their shape. Most are shaped like candy bars or mini TVs and answering them is like slamming a Snickers bar into your mush. Fun --until you realize that instead of eating something made of chocolate goodness , you are required to speak. A major letdown every time.

Then there is that pesky delay. You know...that slight pause that you experience when having a conversation on a cell. It's understandable, but I hate it. The call must be relayed on various cell towers and it is impossible for a conversation to transpire in "right now" real time. This is where I get into trouble. Too many years of blabbing on the radio has made me sorely afraid of what broadcasters call "dead air". That means it is nearly impossible for me to tolerate even a second of silence in anything aural and I will fill said silence with radio blather to ward off angry program directors.

If you have ever called my "chump line", ( my cell phone number which I ONLY give to people I really don't want to talk to), and I accidentally answer the damn thing, the conversation will go something like this:

Me: "Hello Hello (you see, there is that slight pause)

You: " Hey Ken"...(slight pause)

Me: (scrambling to fill the pause) "Sixty-six degrees under fair skies in San Diego, just ahead of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs."

You: :Wha.."

Me: "I like 'em and use them myself...you will too."

You: "%&^%ing moron!!! (click)

Cell phones, can't use 'em.

Then there is Facebook.

In his new book, "Socialnomics--how social media transforms the way we live and do business", Erik Qualman tells us that today, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world's fourth largest right between the U.S. and Indonesia. Also noteworthy is the fact that the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is 55-65 year-old females.

I find both of these facts absolutely amazing. I also just don't get it!

What the hell compels people to spend hours on-line "friending" people they never cared enough to stay friends with in the first place?

Nearly every day I get an e-mail from someone I barely remember wanting to "friend" me or me to "friend" them. (I can never keep this straight.) Let me just say this, where the hell were you old high school and college girl friends when I wanted to "friend" your brains out??!! I want answers!

I will NOT be boarding the Facebook train anytime soon.

Oops! There goes my cell phone.

LOVE that "pants waiting".

This one feels like L O N G D I S T A N C E.