Why don't they bring back Scrabble?

One of the joys of staying home from school was watching game shows in the morning instead of avoiding mockery courtesy of some classmates.

One that never failed to keep me watching was Scrabble, hosted by the man himself, Chuck Woolery.

Why?

Well, the players would pick tiles, which would give them two letters to choose from to put into the particular word they were trying to guess. And every so often there was an exchange like this:

"OK, you've got a D and a P."

"I'll take the P, Chuck."

Potty jokes are always funny. Here's a clip from the first episode so you can see how it worked.

Songs that should be used for commercials, but aren't

Yes, it's that time once again. Time to ruin another handful of songs by pairing them up with unlikely products in the name of advertising campaigns.

And again, I hope I never see any of these on TV. For a number of reasons.

ELO - Turn to Stone: Viagra

The Seeds - Pushin' Too Hard: Preparation H

ABBA - Waterloo: Kohler toilets

Zero Seven - In the Waiting Line: The Department of Motor Vehicles

Little River Band - Lonesome Loser: World of Warcraft (I kid, I kid)

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole: suppositories

Rolling Stones - Paint It Black: Sherwin-Williams

Doobie Brothers - It Keeps You Runnin': Ex-Lax

The Who - I Can See For Miles: LASIK surgery

Johnny Otis - Willie and the Hand Jive: Adult pay-per-view movies

The Bar-Kays - Soul Finger: See your proctologist public service announcement

Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall In Love: eHarmony.com

Steve Lawrence - Go Away, Little Girl: Girl Scout cookies

The Isley Brothers - It's Your Thing: Sex education public service announcement

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Don't Do Me Like That: The Kama Sutra

Men at Work - Who Can It Be Now?: Caller ID

Air Supply - Making Love Out of Nothing At All: Herbal male enhancement pills

Taco - Puttin' On The Ritz: Ritz crackers (no-brainer)

and finally...

America - A Horse With No Name: Ann Coulter's next show


HEY-OOOOOOOOOO!

Day of discovery

Some days, you just learn things whether you're trying or not. Today, for example, I learned:

It's "Take a load off, Fanny," not "Take a load off, Annie."

Guinness really is pretty filling; two even moreso.

I'm glad there was finally a new episode of The Office.

And I must be a giant dork, because I laughed way too hard at this picture, which I found on this blog:



What did you learn today?

"I shall triumph over human lethargy!"

I know, I know.

So many of you keep asking for my fitness secrets that I had to break down and spill the beans.

There is one book I consult when considering doing actual exercise:


The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book.

Before I hit puberty and discovered that exercise shows were populated by girls in skimpy leotards, this was the coolest may to learn about exercising.

I used to check this book out of the library from time to time as a lad. Of course, the library's copy had additional artwork in it; some artist wannabe had seen fit to add explosive fart clouds to the figures where he thought necessary, which, from the look of it, was just about everywhere.

But fortunately, the copy I procured from eBay (eBay: Buy all the crap your parents wouldn't let you have as a kid!) suffered only from mild water damage.

I look at it now and am a bit skeptical as to the benefit of some of these exercises. I mean, look:



Leaping up and down may look cool when the Silver Surfer does it (if I were a bigger nerd, I might say he looked Radd, but I'm not, so I didn't), but I must have been doing something wrong, because I never got buffed doing it.

I worried that I might look like a moron doing these exercises, and they must have realized that, because look at Spider-Man performing The Little Miss Muffet.



Poor Spidey. This is almost as embarrassing as Spider-Man 3. Still, I guess you burn some calories doing this. So like if you ate three Fritos and did this for an hour or so, you'd probably have burned off a third of those calories.

At a certain point it seemed like they ran out of ideas. Granted, this was written in 1976 before Olivia Newton-John invented aerobics or whatever, but what the hell is this supposed to accomplish?



WTF?

Coincidentally, many of you may be rolling your eyes right now, too. Medusa (of the Inhumans) also showed how to do jaw exercises (insert your own Lindsey Lohan joke here), chin-ups (where you press against your thumbs with your chin muscles--to prevent double chins), scalp pulls (I clearly did that one wrong), and the ever-so-difficult lying on a mildly inclined plane.

No, really.

So I don't know how beneficial the book is, but you wanted to know my beauty secrets, and here they are, revealed just for you, true believers!

Excelsior!

Oh jeez, not another LOLcat...

moar funny pictures

This is one of those things that's probably funnier to me than to others, but that's okay.

More pudding pie news!

The nice person at Hostess who responded to my missive informed me that right now, the vanilla pudding pies are still discontinued.

Bah.

I can only hope that if the chocolate pies do really well, they'll bring back vanilla.

In times like these, you can rely on Siftin' to bring you the news that really matters.

Carry on...

Wicked garden

April, 1979.

In a few more weeks, I'd officially be a big brother. For now, I just wanted to help where possible. I was practically a man at that point -- 4 1/2 -- and I knew that I needed to help around around the house.

Aside from cleaning my room. That just was not going to happen. Once, lured with the promise of cinnamon rolls, I managed a blitzkrieg on the clutter in my room. But as I neared my deadline, I ended up shoving half the stuff under my bed, feigning surprise when my mom pointed it out during the pre-cinnamon roll inspection.

But this day was one of those blue sky California days; not too hot, not too cold. And being 4 1/2, I wanted to get out of the house. It was after noon, so The Monkees was already over. It was a bunch of boring junk until the afternoon, and I had time to kill.

So I asked my mom if I could water the garden in the back yard. I had a feeling what the answer would be; after what happened the first time I watered the lawn, I was not asked to return to that job.

In my defense, I was a little fuzzy on homonyms as a 3-year-old, so when my mom asked if I could be a dear and water the lawn while she pulled some weeds, I thought she meant "deer" and peed on the grass.

Perfectly honest mistake.

But if I couched this latest request in the guise of being helpful, I thought it would improve my chances.

"Mommy," I said, putting on my best doe-eyed face, "Can I go water the garden?" She was about to say something when her face changed suddenly, like someone had just kicked her or something.

"All right," she said.

I jumped up and down in excitement and ran to the back door.

"Jeffrey?"

"Huh?"

"This time, if you have to go pee-pee, come in the house, okay?"

"I know, Mom," I said, rolling my eyes before heading out the door.

Suddenly, I was a cowboy in the Old West, heading to a showdown. I imagined my spurs clanging as I hiked up my Toughskins (a size too big so I'd grow into them) and prepared to face off with some no-account villain.

I'd seen lots of John Wayne movies by that time, so I had the walk down pat. It was sort of the same walk I did when I got a wedgie. Just more dignified.

I saw my "gun" lying near the shed. Our garden hose had a pistol grip on it that made it easy to target certain plants (or any stray cats on fences). If you wanted the continuous stream, a little ring flipped down to hold the trigger in place, sort of like on gas nozzles.

I turned the faucet, and watched the hose seem to spring to life like an angry snake. Tiny jets of water streamed out where the hose connected to the faucet. Everything was ready.

I grabbed the hose in my right hand and clasped my left over it to steady it as I unleashed the fury of botanical badassery.

I was now in control of nature and my own destiny. I was watering the garden -- all by myself! John Wayne would be proud.

And after I'd made my first sweep of the garden, I got a little cocky. Surely I didn't need both hands to steady the hose. In fact, I could do a quick draw, just like The Duke himself.

I slung my shooting iron in my imaginary holster and got ready to draw, legs akimbo like any good gunfighter. My pants hung low; better to imitate chaps.

I drew.

I won.

All the plants in the garden were victims of my shooting spree. It took all the strength I had in my right hand to keep the hose from getting away from me, but I was doing it.

Just when I felt uberconfident, my pants slipped even lower. Beyond chaps territory. If I didn't grab them, anyone walking into our back yard would have a good chance at seeing me in my skivvies. What if it was a -- gulp -- girl?

Well, that just wouldn't do.

I let go of the trigger so I could set the hose down and fix my pants, but that's when I found that during my superfast quick draw, I knocked the ring over, keeping the stream going whether I held the trigger or not.

I tried to hitch up my pants in one hand while holding onto the hose with the other, but by that point, the trigger was wet and slippery, and I lost grip of the handle.

As the first jet of extremely cold water hit me in the face, I must have screamed. Something got my mom's attention. Luckily she had the camera nearby so she could capture for posterity what she saw when she went to see what I was screaming about.



Thus ended my desire to do any gardening-related chores.