I’m Tgreen and this is Happy Friday, your weekly sign that you can stop holding out hope that things are gonna get better before the weekend. Because they’re not.

This week it was revealed that Yahoo scanned emails in cooperation with US intelligence officials. I sure hope they scanned mine, because it would mean at least one person read all the spam that gets sent there.

Facebook Marketplace, a new section of the app that allows users to buy and sell items, got off to a rocky start this week when Facebook was forced to apologize after illegal drugs, guns, sexual services and baby hedgehogs were listed for sale. And that was all just in the first posting.

Scientists declared this week that humanity’s impact on the earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch needs to be named. And so now we live in the Anthropocene Era. It’s just like Jurassic Park, but with less T-Rex and more Trump.

According to a new study, the ceiling to how old human beings can live is 115 years. “Amateurs,” said Larry King.

And in a related story, this week The Rolling Stones announced they’ll be releasing their new album, Blue and Lonesome, on December 2.

This week scientists announced that the first baby conceived by a controversial new “3 parent” technique was born. Apparently this 3 parent conception is very different from, but no less controversial than, the 3 parent conception method first developed at 1970s swinger parties.

This week SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced plans to have people going to Mars in the next 40–100 years. Or not nearly soon enough, in the case of some people.

Researchers in North Carolina concluded that men are more likely to believe in God after having sex. Which makes sense, since for a lot of men the existence of a kind and merciful God is the only believable reason they ever got to have sex in the first place.

This week the 2016 Vice Presidential debate was held in FarmVille, Virginia. Because apparently SimCity was already booked.

Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump was roundly criticized for not preparing enough for his own debate, but he really dropped the ball this time. He was so unprepared for the VP debate he went on a 10-minute Twitter rant about Mike Pence before someone explained that Pence was his guy.

The GOP caused an awkward moment when it posted articles claiming victory at the debate before the debate had even started. And in related news, the New York Jets just posted an article about how they just won Super Bowl LI.

Hurricane Matthew hit Florida this week, causing Walt Disney World to close for only the 4th time in its 45-year history. But the good news is the wait time to ride Space Mountain is now down to only 90 minutes.

If Florida wants to get rid of Hurricane Matthew quickly, all they have to do is show it some Marco Rubio campaign commercials. That was more than enough to get me moving.

A Pennsylvania man was given 30 days to catch a wild rooster on his property before being penalized by his city. But on the plus side, if he catches the rooster not only does he avoid the penalty, but he’ll be ready for his rematch with Apollo Creed.

A 68-year-old Florida millionaire discovered this week that his 24-year-old wife was actually his biological granddaughter. He said that despite this incident, he still promises to make America great again if elected.

The New York Mets have assigned former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to the same Arizona Fall League team that Michael Jordan once played on. And we all remember how well Michael Jordan’s baseball career went.

The MLB playoffs started this week, with many experts picking the Chicago Cubs to win their first World Series since 1908. The very idea of the Cubs winning it all has rarely seemed possible in the modern era, so if it does actually happen, it may open the door to some other things you never thought you’d see. As you’ll find out when you take a look at…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Other Impossible Things a Cubs World Series Victory Could Usher In:

10. First Lady named Melania

9. BJ and the Bear Deluxe Blu-ray set

8. New issue of the Poison Pen (still working on it, I promise)

7. Spinoff Star Wars movie featuring a Jar Jar/Ewoks team up

6. Super Bowl Champion New York Jets (sorry, that’s one of Tgreen’s Top Ten Things You’ll Only Ever See Again In A Science Fiction Movie)

5. President Rubio

4. New Jello pudding commercials starring Bill Cosby

3. NJTransit trains that run on schedule more than 1 day in a row

2. Top Ten lists with 10 decent items

1. Supreme Court Justice Bill Clinton

And that’s all we have time for this week. Tune in next time for the funniest jokes you’re ever gonna find on the internet. I’m not sure where to tune in for that, since obviously you won’t find them here, but you’ve got a week to get Google working for you. Until then, steer clear of the hurricane, heckle this weekend’s debate, beware the creepy clown who’s standing on your lawn right now peeking through your window to watch you read this, buy your federally-mandated amount of memorabilia for the upcoming Star Wars movie, find some less racist ways to make America great, place your bets on which new TV show will be cancelled first and, as always, have a Happy Friday!

T “it’s a small world after all” green

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, Happy Friday everybody! Any big news this week? Anything going on? Anything? Oh yeah, that’s right. This week the city of Cleveland hosted the 2016 Republican National Convention, or as it’s more commonly known, Scared & Angry Lives Matter.

Actually, with Trump running the show this week, this convention was less typical politics and more like the worst episode of The Apprentice. It’s tied for that honor with every other episode of The Apprentice. Though to be fair, any random episode of Celebrity Apprentice had more famous people than all 4 nights of this convention.

And that was an issue. The Republicans did have some problems with their guest list this week. Tim Tebow was invited to speak, but he turned them down. Tim Tebow, who played for the New York Jets, finally found a group too lame even for him.

Apparently Trump wanted Don King to speak but the Republicans said no. No one’s sure if he wanted King there to prove he actually does have a black friend, or to prove that there are worse haircuts out there than his.

The big story from the start of the convention was Melania Trump’s speech, which included passages borrowed from a speech given by First Lady Michelle Obama in 2008. After a couple of days of denials, a Trump speechwriter finally claimed responsibility for the plagiarized parts of the speech and offered to resign, but Trump rejected her offer. He also rejected resignations from Hillary Clinton, My Little Pony, the words “a”, “and” and “the”, and the English language itself, all of whom were blamed at one point or another for this nonsense by the Trump campaign.

After the flare-up over Melania Trump’s speech, Donald Trump Jr’s speech also came under fire for being plagiarized. However, in this case the Conservative writer who wrote the speech explained that he also wrote the article Trump Jr allegedly cribbed from, so there was no plagiarism involved. Now if only he hadn’t copied the speech’s themes from 1954.

And in honor of Melania Trump’s speech, I promise that this week’s Happy Friday will only be 7% plagiarized, because Chris Christie says that’s an appropriate amount. Though I only ever steal from my own stuff and Trump Jr’s speechwriter says that’s okay, so look out! There’s gotta be an OJ joke in this mess somewhere.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie used his speaking time at the RNC to roast Hillary Clinton over numerous offenses for which she has never been legally punished. Because if there’s anyone who knows anything about committing numerous offenses and not getting punished for them, it’s Chris Christie.

Christie also said that if elected, Donald Trump will immediately seek to purge the government of officials appointed by Barack Obama. That should take all of two seconds. It’s not like Congress ever let any of them get appointed in the first place.

Many photos of row upon row of empty seats at the convention have appeared online this week, but the situation is even worse than the pictures suggest, since the arena was even emptier before someone set it up as a Pokemon Go stadium.

And there were problems even when they found people to aim a camera at. I don’t want to say that some of the Republican politicians in attendance weren’t happy to be there, but I’ve seen more enthusiastic smiles in a hostage tape.

You know, I don’t think Rudy Giuliani yelled quite so much back when he still had the combover. Just saying.

During his acceptance speech, Trump talked about how he’s going to create jobs in this country, and he’s probably telling the truth about that. The man knows how to create jobs. I mean, he managed to get all his kids on the payroll and a couple of them don’t appear to be overly employable, if you know what I’m saying.

Actually, Trump isn’t even President yet and he’s already created a ton of new jobs. Every major media outlet in the country has been forced to triple its fact-checking department just to try to keep up with him.

I kid, of course. Everyone knows Trump is immune to fact checking like he got the vaccine for it. Really, he created all those jobs when Canada put a second and then a third shift on the construction of their border wall.

In his acceptance speech Trump also promised that at his convention, there would be no more lies. Then he wrapped things up five seconds later to give himself a fighting chance at keeping that promise.

Probably the worst thing to come out of this convention, besides the fact that we weren’t allowed to actually watch Chris Christie get the news that he wasn’t going to be the Vice President nominee, is the idea that Scott Baio has opinions about politics that rate interviews on legitimate news programs. Because he does not.

Though the sad thing is, Scott Baio actually lifted the fame level of the convention guests to a solid D+.

Senator Ted Cruz caused a big uproar when he chose not to endorse Donald Trump during his RNC speech. Instead, Cruz urged voters to vote with their consciences. Or, alternatively, to not vote at all until 2020, when maybe a dashing, youngish, Canadian-born candidate might catch their eye and rate a second look, maybe.

Chris Christie called Cruz’s decision pass on an endorsement “totally selfish,” and if there’s anyone who knows anything about being totally selfish, it’s Chris Christie.

Even worse than the snub from Cruz, the Trump campaign was dealt a huge setback when only 3 Horsemen of the Apocalypse endorsed the candidate.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable moment in the convention was when the representatives from WomenTrumpCheatedOnHisWivesWithsylvania were refused the chance to speak. This despite the fact that they had more delegates than, say, New Hampshire.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got booed during his time on stage this week. Said McConnell, “If I wanted to get treated like this I could’ve just stayed at home.”

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker had an awkward moment on stage when he used part of his speaking time to say, “It’s just sad in America that we have such poor choices right now.” Oh, wait, sorry, that’s what he said before he got the invitation to speak at the convention.

When the state delegates announced their votes for Trump, Chris Christie allowed his son to announce for New Jersey. Which is appropriate, because if there’s anyone who knows anything about letting someone else do his job while he’s busy holding Trump’s jockstrap, it’s Chris Christie.

Newt Gingrich left Cleveland without being the worst thing about the convention. In a statement released after he left town, Gingrich explained that he was as surprised as you are by this turn of events, and he will just have to try harder next time.

The convention ended rather suddenly when, immediately after his acceptance speech, Donald Trump shook hands with car accident survivor Johnny Smith, who seemed visibly upset by the encounter and ran from the stage with an intense look in his eyes.

Not every speech in Cleveland was at the RNC. In a speech given outside the convention, Caitlyn Jenner said this week that it was harder for her to come out as a Republican than as transgender. In large part this was because it’s so hard to figure out which bathroom to use during an anti-LGBT rights rally.

While not at the convention or even in Cleveland, former New York governor George Pataki was also busy this week, announcing his four-point plan for building the perfect burrito bowl at Chipotle.

In media news, Fox News founder Roger Ailes resigned from the network this week in the wake of a sexual harassment suit filed by former correspondent Gretchen Carlson. While battling for his job over the past two weeks, Ailes expressed surprise at the problem, claiming that Bill O’Reilly never complained even once at any of the sexual advances, and actually claimed to enjoy them.

The theme to this week’s RNC was “Scare America Shitless Again,” because the GOP always goes with what works. But after a week of piling on the fear, in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump offered himself as the one man who could save us from such horrible ends. It took him a little over an hour, but he managed to list every threat he stands ready to defeat, as you’ll see when you take a look at…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Things Donald Trump Promised to Protect Us From:

10. Return of the Burger King from those old commercials

9. Creepy clowns in sewers

8. Man buns

7. Sharknados

6. Reboot of Star Trek: Voyager

5. Billy Ray Cyrus comeback tour

4. Any more pictures of him grabbing at Ivanka’s ass

3. Facts

2. Opportunities to discuss legitimate problems in anything longer than a shouted slogan that blames immigrants

1. Secretary of State Gary Busey (wait, sorry, that’s one of Tgreen’s Top Ten Things Trump’s Totally Gonna Try To Make Happen If He Gets Elected)

And that’s all we have time for this week. Until next time, stock up on orange spray tanner, build that wall, try not to let work ruin a perfectly good Friday, don’t waste too much time worrying if his $80 million payout is enough to get Roger Ailes through his golden years, win Powerball, stay out of the heat, try to figure out if Reince Priebus is a politician’s name or a rare Pokemon, go see that new Star Trek movie and stand up in the middle of it and shout “where the hell is Scotty?!?”, try and figure out how many times I’ve made that same “joke” in the last 20 years, don’t fuck with Leslie Jones on Twitter, bust out your DVDs of The Apprentice and wax nostalgic over the good old days, don’t lay a finger on Chris Christie’s Butterfinger, and, as always, have a Happy Friday!

T “wait a second, I have to watch another week of this shit? Goddammit” green

  
Recently I updated the music on my iPod Shuffle for the first time in a couple of months. I’ve got a long playlist named “Commute” that I add songs to every now and then, and when I think of it I hook up the Shuffle and sync it and see what I end up with. The other morning while walking from the train to the office I got “Child of the Wild Blue Yonder,” an old one from John Hiatt that I haven’t heard in awhile, and it took me back.
It’s a good song. Not my favorite from Mr. Hiatt but the first one I ever heard. And I realized I could remember the first time I heard it. I was in my old office in the library at school, some time in 1990, and WNEW played it. And something about the song registered enough for me to pay attention at the end to find out whose song it was. And then, since these were definitely pre-Internet days, I had to look the song up the only way I knew how — walk over to the Wiz on Fulton St. and see if they had the cassette. Yes, I heard a new song on a radio station in NYC and walked to a store to purchase the song as part of an entire album on a cassette tape. The only thing that story is missing to make me feel completely ancient is a reference to a pet dinosaur.
But after the Shuffle had moved on and I’d made it to work, it was that old office that kept coming back to me. I was going to an engineering school at the time. Back then it was called Polytechnic University, but it’s something else now. Part of NYU in fact, based on the alumni donation solicitations I get. They want my donation they can send me a diploma that says NYU on it. Otherwise, no dice. 
In 1990 I was working for the school library as a technical writer. The Dean had scored a contract with IBM where we had to write a user manual for some electronic library database system. The system and the original documentation came from Germany, so we were starting from scratch as far as English instructions went. I helped put together a team of 3 other writers, which was easy since by then there were only 3 other writing students in the whole program who I could stand. And they took a room in the back of the main library and gave it to us as an office to write in.
The office was tiny and crowded and, during the months when they were building a campus outside, it was actually dangerous. So much dirt and dust got kicked up by the construction that every couple of weeks we had to get our printers serviced to clear out all the gunk. I’m not sure we ever considered what that gunk was doing to us. More likely we figured we were made of stronger stuff than those IBM behemoths.
We had a mini fridge because I stole it from the upstairs library and wouldn’t return it when they caught me. It was stocked with sodas and a nice collection of beers hidden behind them. We had filing cabinets stocked with liquor, all filed under “L”, I’m sure. Or maybe B for booze or R for Rotgut, because I could not afford anything one would call the Good Stuff back then. We had a professional-grade dart board to ensure we always had an excuse to blow off work. Some days a picture of the Dean was tacked to it for added incentive, and I got caught red-handed in the middle of that kind of game at least once. We had three or four desktop PCs that nearly always had some virus or other thanks to the pirated video games installed on them. They also rocked Windows 3.0 because we were on the cutting edge of technology.
There were knives, stun guns, nunchucks and a couple of items I probably still shouldn’t talk about stashed along with the booze. We had a giant white board that existed mainly for us to draw nasty pictures and write nonsense and, most importantly, to provide a steady supply of dry erase markers for sniffing. There was a fight to get that board budgeted and I doubt we ever used it for even one of the long list of reasons we provided for why it was vital to the project. Unless we somehow convinced someone that the project required us to use it to mark people’s heights for fake mug shots, because we did that a lot. And also, that board held the original Defcon settings that ultimately turned up on my cubicle walls at Smith Barney and one day got adapted to the Treetop Lounge Security Advisory and then the QA Classic Alert System. Thank you, library budget, for the tools I could abuse for comedic purposes.
This was the office where one night, out of sheer desperation and more than a little laziness I invented the Vodka and Gatorade and then immediately regretted it. And then we debated whether it was bad because it was really cheap vodka or because it was just a horrible idea. Spoiler alert: it was both. This was also the office where I mixed enough kamikazes and Long Island Iced Teas to at the very least qualify to play Isaac’s second cousin on any Love Boat revival.
We had a phone so the upstairs office could keep tabs on us, but all that did was give us free access to the outside world, since this was years before the cell phone and I never carried around more than one quarter to use in a pay phone. That semester the phone number got printed in the campus phone directory as the library’s main number. I told them they would regret it if it wasn’t fixed. They said if I made them regret it they would fire me, which in theory I would regret because I was supporting a very large bar tab at the time. And so we waited to see what would happen. And what happened was no one with access to the directory ever bothered to call the library for anything, because I don’t think that phone rang more than once.
And the one time it did ring? It wasn’t library business. It was one of my professors calling to bust me for skipping a final. Now, I did not intentionally skip a final. What happened was, they changed the exam room at the last minute and didn’t post the new room. So half the class showed up in the wrong place and half showed up in the right place and to this day over a quarter of a century later I don’t know how that one half found out about the change and got to the right room. But the professor, who never had much use for me, called to bust me and tell me I was likely to fail because I’d skipped the final. I explained what happened and she was not impressed. She repeated several times that half the class found the right room and so it was my own fault for missing out. When I finally got a chance to speak, I pointed out that if half the class could find the new room, that meant half the class could not. This argument ultimately got us a second chance to take the test.
It was a good room to hide out in for several reasons. For one, most of my friends didn’t know exactly where I worked so if I needed to sneak off for awhile after torching someone in the old Coverup Report, this was the safest place I could go while still staying on campus. Also, the upstairs bosses didn’t come down too often because of all the stairs. We had a boss right next door to us but he was barely out of school himself and mostly all he wanted to do was play video games and pretend he was a burgeoning cyber criminal, so he was usually preoccupied. The best reason to go there, though, was the fact that any time I was in the office I could, in theory, be working and therefore could, in theory, be billing, and I liked the fact that it was so easy, in theory, to earn money.
It was also easy to find amusing diversions on the days we were legitimately working. That boss who had the office next to ours had his own coffee maker. He also had a door with a lock that we could crack open with a large paperclip, so you could say we also had our own coffee maker. This meant nothing to me, because I don’t drink coffee, but the people I worked with appreciated the convenience. And so one day, I’ll call them coworkers A & B to protect the guilty, decided they wanted a coffee, so I popped the door for them to go to it.
Now, I don’t know anything abut the history of the fancy flavored coffee we have now, but back in 1990 it must not have been too common because the one thing they all talked about was mixing some fancy chocolate milk mix into the coffee while it was brewing. The thought was that this combination would produce something delicious. And so this one morning while the boss was upstairs and A & B were looking for coffee, it was decided that this would be the day to finally create this wonderful concoction.
It did not go well. For some unexplained reason, the combined chocolate and coffee didn’t produce a pot of chocolately goodness. What it did was clog the filter and cause hot water, coffee and chocolate to explode all over the small office, including the boss’ desk, chair, and computer. Needless to say, it was going to take awhile to clean this up, so I was sent upstairs to create a diversion. I found our boss and the Dean in the Dean’s office and I walked in and announced that the project was way behind schedule and we needed to fix it right now. Was this true? Probably, because we were always behind schedule, but no one ever wanted to fix it because everyone wanted a taste of that sweet, sweet IBM money.
But I put on a good act and told my two bosses how much of the problem was due to their screwups and we hashed out a plan of attack that we probably all forgot about ten minutes later, but I kept them both busy long enough to get the call that the office was cleaned of all evidence that there had been a coffee mishap.
I went back downstairs with my boss and he called the three of us into his office to discuss the day’s schedule. When he was done, he asked if anyone wanted some coffee and of course A & B said they did. And as the boss set about preparing to make a pot, I suggested that maybe this would be a good time to try adding the chocolate to the coffee, because everyone had been talking about it for so long and we should at least find out if it even tasted any good. And the boss agreed. And A & B both gave me looks that by rights should have killed me right then and there.
We three cleared out of the office while the coffee brewed and we went to our room to wait for the inevitable. It didn’t take long before we heard the boss screaming, so we ran in to see the same destruction that A & B had just finished cleaning up. The boss was swearing up and down as he tried to wipe coffee residue from his keyboard and his desk and his lap. And I watched him try to deal with this mess and all I had to say was, “Yeah, this is the same thing that happened when A & B tried it.” And then I went back next door to continue whatever story I was writing.
Because yes, I did use the computers to write my own stuff. I couldn’t help that. I didn’t have a computer of my own so this was the best place to get a lot of writing done at once. I could crank the radio, do some work, play darts, write whatever story I was writing, and then cycle through the sequence a couple of times a day. To this day it’s still one of the better writing setups I’ve ever fallen into. It’s second to living a block off the beach and walking out to the boardwalk to write during my work breaks, but it’s streets ahead of scratching out a couple of paragraphs during NJ Transit delays.
As it turned out, that office was a good place to go on those nights where you just didn’t want to go home right after class but money was too tight to go anywhere else to drink. When I think back now I realize there were more of those nights than I remembered. It was a tough school to go to. On the first day one of my professors said that half the people we were sitting with wouldn’t be back for a second year. It took me into the third year myself before I had to switch majors to avoid starting over more or less from scratch anywhere else. And once I made the switch, I mostly slipped into survival mode. I was there to get a degree and stay sane, in no particular order.
The Coverup Report was born in that office, and written more or less exclusively in there. The Coverup Report begat The Poison Pen which begat Happy Friday which begat the Treetop Lounge which begat Greetings from Shokanaw which begat all these shitty Trump jokes I post on Facebook which, I assume, will begat something else somewhere down the line. But that cramped room, which was kind of like the bunker for those of us who had the keys to it, was the one good place to go when you needed some time to figure out how you were going to survive today’s bullshit and prepare for tomorrow’s. We were a commuter campus so we didn’t have dorm rooms. This was as good as it got.
We didn’t have dorm rooms and we didn’t have decent lab equipment and the library’s collection was generously considered out of date and if you got right down to it we didn’t have any facilities that were worth a damn. We had crack houses around the corner and a high school across the street whose students seemed to major in mugging students from my school. The main building was a former razor factory that still strongly resembled its original form, though without the same charm. Few professors appeared to care about the students and the administration was so actively useless that it might as well have run for Congress. I have gone on record for years saying I was miserable almost every waking moment I spent in the place.
But there were good people there. Good friends. I may have hated the place but I have to admit that I found a way to have about as much fun as one could have there. It just took some work. And that office, which they never should have given us and where they never should have allowed us such free rein on a daily basis, was the luckiest thing any of us could have stumbled into in the middle of that hell hole.
It was bad. Very bad in a lot of very basic ways. But it was good too, if that makes sense. It probably doesn’t. If you went to school and had a blast and look back fondly on most of it, I cannot relate, and I cannot explain what I had. We’re speaking two different languages. I know this is true because I’ve had this conversation before. I met good people there. People who walked away with the same lesson I did — that life was nothing but problems and no one was going to solve yours for you, so you’d better get to work. This might not have been the lesson any of us set out to learn, but you don’t get to choose. We learned that too.
I’m only speaking for myself, of course. I mean, I know the majority of my friends hated the place too because we’ve talked about it, but it’s likely we all hated it in our own ways. And we all found our own way to stay a little sane too. One of mine was music, and since my musical taste ran more to the redneck than anyone I knew, I was pretty much on my own with that one.
And yet one day a combination of things had me at my desk with the radio tuned to the right station at the right time to hear that song that I still listen to today. And 19 John Hiatt albums in my iTunes library later, there’s still a connection to that one song and that one day and that office where work occasionally got done when there was absolutely nothing better to do. So here’s to all the shitty offices in shitty situations that grind us down while we hold on to live another day, and all the crazy people who made surviving it a little easier, even if they all had worse taste in music than you.

I posted this link to the song but it doesn’t seem to work consistently, so if you really want to listen, and you should, go look it up on YouTube.

Hello and welcome to Happy Friday!, the weekly blog post that actually appears on a schedule so random that the odds of it actually appearing on a Friday are somehow even worse than 1 in 7.

This week Apple CEO announced record profits for the last quarter, saw the price of Apple shares go above $300, unveiled 2 new MacBook Air models, gave a sneak peek at the next version of the Mac OS, and then met with President Obama to discuss the economy and technology. And he did it all while maintaining one of the top 5 best farms in Farmville.

About the only thing Jobs didn’t do was head on up to his secret base on the moon. Or did he?

This week the Vatican announced that Homer Simpson is, in fact, Catholic, which makes sense because why wouldn’t Homer belong to a religion where they give out free wine every week? Though mostly I think the Vatican announced this just to fuck with the next Dan Brown novel.

It’s good the Vatican cleared this up, because this is exactly the kind of important issue Catholics the world over want the Church to spend time on.

Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione died this week. To honor his memory, men of a certain age will be flying at half mast this weekend.

Former President George W Bush indicated this week that he sees not privatizing Social Security as the biggest failure of his eight years in office. This is a surprising choice, since it doesn’t even make most people’s Top 100 list of his biggest failures.

I guess maybe he considers his second biggest failure to be not finding enough reasons to give speeches while wearing a flight suit. And his third not being awesome enough.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh this week spent some time talking about pictures of President Obama that made the President, in Limbaugh’s words, look “demonic”. Left unsaid was whether the demonic Obama in any way resembled whatever demon Limbaugh signed his soul away to in exchange for the big radio ratings and the gigantic bad of Oxycontin he used to have delivered to the house every month.

New research shows that the popular story of the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world on December 12, 2012 may actually be based on a miscalculation. According to the latest calculations, the world won’t end on December 12, 2012 but will actually end on whatever day the New York Jets appear closest to winning a Super Bowl game.

It was announced this week that President Obama will be appearing on the cable show Mythbusters. Given the way things have gone for him since he got elected, the only way he could appear on a more unfortunately-titled show would be if he was a guest on something like Hooray For The Bestest President Ever Who Has Saved The World And Made The Universe Better For Us All, Yay!, and for better or worse, FOX News canceled that show as soon as Bush left office.

This week Sony announced it’s finally stopping production of the cassette Walkman, once someone realized the calendar hanging in the production factory was left over from 1987.

In a new memoir by a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was revealed this week that during the Clinton presidency, the codes required to launch a nuclear strike were actually misplaced for several months. Though the most logical conclusion to draw is that Hillary was holding on to them in case Bill got out of line again after the whole Monica fiasco.

Scientists revealed this week that they’ve observed the oldest object in the universe. To do this, they tuned their television to CNN at 9PM Eastern time and there it was, conducting an interview with Snooki.

In other science news, NASA recently unveiled the results of last year’s experiment to find water on the moon, and it turns out there’s a lot more ice and water up there than previously believed. Almost enough, in fact, to serve up cocktails to any aliens drawn here by this…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOVc4TMjHpk

Millions of TV viewers in the NYC area have been missing out on entertainment and sports programming since FOX pulled its channels from Cablevision due to a payment dispute. Picking a side in a conflict like this is kind of like trying to decide who to root for in a fight between the guy who raped you in the prison shower and the guy who shanked you in the prison cafeteria. In other words, you’re screwed no matter who wins.

Fast food mecca McDonald’s recently announce that it’s bringing back the McRib to most of its locations for a limited time starting in November. They’re so excited they’re working on a huge advertising push to make sure everyone has a chance to sample the processed pork sandwich. Of course, when you’re trying so hard to advertise, there’s always a chance you’re gonna burn through some bad ideas before you get to the winning one, as you can see here in…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Rejected McDonald’s McRib slogans:
10. McRib: Those rumors that it tastes just like Soylent Green are totally untrue and slanderous!
9. McRib: We devised a whole Man vs Food challenge around it that got rejected because it didn’t meet the “Food” criteria!
8. McRib: Now at least 87% mouse-carcass-free, give or take a couple of percentage points!
7. McRib: Each McRib grown organically in a lab in Brazil’s rainforest!
6. McRib: Buy one today or we bring back the Shamrock Shake!
5. McRib: The McRib’s special meat is even more special than the special sauce in the Big Mac!
4. McRib: Have It Your Way, as long as your way involves throwing a whole pig into a blender!
3. McRib: Buy two; it’s the tastiest murder/suicide method around!
2. McRib: You can’t handle the truth!
1. McRib: Guess who’s cornered the market on pig anus again!

And that’s all we have time for this week. Until next time, stop eating all the candy you bought to hand out to trick-or-treaters, put the finishing touches on that “The Situation” costume you’re planning to wear, accept the fact that just because you want a scary Halloween lawn doesn’t mean you can bury grandpa out there, and, most importantly, have a Happy Friday!

Star Wars was a great movie, but it was The Empire Strikes Back that turned the franchise into a religion. Think about it. The original Star Wars was cool, it told a story, and it had a nice, neat ending where the good guys won and the bad guys got their asses kicked. You can have a lot of fun with that, but you don’t make a bazillion dollars and create a nerd army ready to kill for you. No, to do that, you need a sequel. And not just any sequel. If the first Star Wars sequel had been less Godfather II and more Caddyshack 2, I would not be sitting here writing this and you would not be wearing your Ewok Underoos while reading it. So a sequel. A good sequel. And that’s what we got with The Empire Strikes Back.

Though not right away. The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t actually the first Star Wars sequel. Not really. Before we got that, we got this:

Okay, maybe not strictly a sequel, but it was the first time our characters appeared on film since the movie, so I think we have to count it. Even if George Lucas would probably trade all the money he made off of those boxes of C3PO cereal he sold in the 80s to get us to forget the sight of Bea Arthur singing in the cantina, this thing happened and so we’re counting it.

In fact, The Empire Strikes Back isn’t even the second sequel. That honor goes to this book:

I remember seeing this book in the library in 1978 or 1979, reading it dozens of times, and eventually buying my own copy, which I also read dozens of times. Still probably have it in storage somewhere. But this book was an honest to goodness continuation of the Star Wars story, with Luke and Leia and Darth Vader and a lightsaber duel. Couldn’t ask for much more than that if you were a prepubescent Star Wars geek whose only other contact with Star Wars at the time was the Marvel Comics series, which occasionally featured a 6′-tall green rabbit (see previous Star Wars post for more of the gory details).

No, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was a real sequel, and only recently did I find out how true that is. Apparently, when George Lucas was making Star Wars, he had no idea if it would be a hit or a flop so he commissioned 2 sequels in book form that, if necessary, could be turned into low-budget movies if there was no big money to make sequels. Obviously, the first movie was a hit, big budget sequels were a given, and so Splinter was released as a book that pretty much was contradicted by everything filmed afterwards (uh, yeah, Luke and Leia really seemed to have the hots for each other in this one and as we know, that would turn out to be really inappropriate). It was fun, but it was doomed to be a tiny footnote in the overall Star Wars saga. Which brings us to the first real, big deal, not a Golden Girl in sight Star Wars sequel, which I first saw in theaters some time in June, 1980, and which I then spent a whole summer reliving with this:

I think I may have bought the book before seeing the movie, but I’m not sure. I know for sure the book cover was the first time I ever saw the poster for the movie in color. And I know I didn’t read the book until seeing the movie and I doubt I had the self-control to own the book and not take a peek, so maybe I just missed the poster entirely while at the theater to see the movie. I know for sure I loved the book. I interacted with these movies so much more with the books back in these pre-VCR or -DVD years. And so after seeing the movie in the theaters twice, the book let me go back to the story whenever I wanted. The book, and this:

Yes, the movie in all its big glossy comic book glory. I read the hell out of this thing. Copied that picture of Darth Vader many times as it turned out to be the only thing I could do as a kid that could impress girls. Sad, but a Star Wars geek will take what he can get, and for me it was Darth Vader pictures. It’s facts like this that make me wonder how I ever got a girl to let me see her naked.

Odd little side note to that Marvel comics adaptation. It came out in 3 versions. The big magazine whose cover I copied, as monthly installments of the regular comics series, and a small paperback with the same cover as the magazine. Marvel did the adaptation while the movie was being made, so it worked with early drafts of the script and concept art, without being able to see the actual movie. So given how things change during a movie’s production, and how the paperback version of the adaptation went to press earlier than the other 2 versions, the paperback version has Luke being trained by a Yoda you might not recognize:

They managed to redraw Yoda in time for the magazine and comic books, to save our childhood heads from exploding. I didn’t own the paperback book, but I did own all 6 issues of the comic book in addition to the magazine, because even at that young age I needed to find as many ways as possible to throw my money at George Lucas. Another way I found was by getting this:

Star Wars music on cassette tape. That was the way to go back in 1980. I think I had to get it twice, because the first one was defective. Ever get a cassette tape that played to the end and the tape came loose so you could never play it again? This was one of those. I’ve owned a couple of versions of the music from all of these movies over the years, but I think The Empire Strikes Back had my favorite soundtrack of them all. Not sure why, but I think it’s the best one. Sounds way better on CD than it did on cassette tape, too. But crack open one of the comics, crank the cassette player, and you could pretty much guarantee someone bigger than you would want to kick your ass before the afternoon was over. Good thing I knew how to fight back.

There was one other way to keep up with a Star Wars movie back in the day, and it’s a way that’s pretty much disappeared by now. I’m talking about the official satire of the movie, as you might find here:

Mad Magazine still exists, barely, as a quarterly magazine, so if you really want to catch a spoof of a movie you liked, you might be able to even a decade deep into the 21st Century. But back in 1980, there was actually competition for such things, and if you really wanted to, you could drop a couple of bucks to compare and contrast:

Crazy Magazine was done by the same people who ran Marvel Comics, so not only were they first to the newsstand, but they had the wrong Yoda in their spoof. In the 30 years since I’ve forgotten if any of these were any good, but I’m sure I laughed my 12-year-old butt off at the time.

So, there it is, The Empire Strikes Back, named by some one of the better sequels in movie history, and often considered the best of the Star Wars movies. And I can understand why. It was bigger, faster, and louder than the first movie. It introduced a bunch of new stuff to the saga and threw in a twist and a downer ending that almost anyone knows even if they don’t care about these movies.

But what it also did was take the first step into a larger saga that, if you really look at it, doesn’t have a whole lot of room for the original movie. Five sequels later and the movies all more or less fit together into one neat story, except for the original Star Wars. There’s stuff in there that doesn’t quite match the layers of extra story George Lucas ladled onto it over the years. So while The Empire Strikes Back is easily the best Star Wars sequel, it loses many points because of what it did to the original. Though if I could dig out a copy of the comics adaptation tonight, I’d probably read it.

See you back here, or somewhere, in 3 years as we celebrate 30 years of The Return of the Jedi. Might take me that long to come up with enough positive things to write about it.

Okay, so against my better judgement I did in fact start up my script for Script Frenzy. It was not a trouble-free process. If you recall back in November when I started up Nanowrimo, my main point, other than the fact that it was a bad idea, was that I went in with nothing. No idea as to what I was going to write. No characters, no setting, no plot, no nothing. And this did not worry me, because I’ve been writing fiction for years and feel that if nothing else, I know how to work my way into a story even when I’m starting on fumes.

Turns out script writing is different, at least for me. Probably because I’m not used to the format, when I sat down on the night of April 1st to write, it was awkward. Maybe not quite “oh crap, I think I’m accidentally writing an episode of According to Jim” awkward, but it was pretty awkward. I dutifully banged out my 4 pages of script, powered down the computer for the night, and went to sleep. The thing is, though, I wasn’t itching to start working on page 5, and one thing I’ve learned from my several attempts at Nanowrimo, once I get started I can usually at least keep myself interested for the first few days or longer. If my script was boring me on day 1, how was I going to get through something like day 20, when no doubt I’d be several pages behind with a half dozen work deadlines kicking my ass?

Now, if you’ll hang on for just a second — a side trip. I mentioned the other day that I knew going into this thing that there was no way I’d be able to write 100 script pages in April. This is because I’ll be headed down to Disney World for a week, and I don’t expect to get a whole lot of writing done while I’m down there. But since I wasn’t going to let 4 lame script pages sink my month before it had even started, I looked for a way to get some writing done while on vacation. Since I wrote some of my Nanowrimo story on my iPhone, I went looking for a script-writing app and sure enough, I found several. One of them offered a free trial version, so on Friday I downloaded it and gave it a try. I didn’t pick up on page 5 of the script I was working on. Instead, I just started a second script and wrote about a page or so. It was no better than the other 4 pages, with no big prospects to get better.

If you’re keeping score at home, by day 2 of Script Frenzy I had 2 different scripts that I didn’t like, with barely a plot between them. What could I do? Would I have to give up on the 2nd day? I thought about it, sure. But then while I was at work another idea came to me. I did have one particular story kicking around the back of my head the last 2 years or so. It’s heavily music-based and most of the climax involves a singing performance, and from back when I first thought of it I knew that if the story were ever going to survive outside the confines of my brain, it would only work if people could hear the song, watch it being sung, and experience what the characters experience as it happens. This meant screenplay, which explains why the story got exiled to the back of my brain, called forward only when I played a particular sequence of songs on my iPod.

But I was thinking, maybe I’m not good enough to try and crank out a script by starting from zero. Maybe if I’m writing a script, I need the comfort of some pre-considered ideas to get me over the unfamiliar terrain of script writing. So I went home the second day of Script Frenzy, planted ass in seat, and instead of picking up the script from the night before, or the script on my iPhone, I decided to start my 3rd script in less than 48 hours and I wrote this:

INT. HOLLY’S WORLD STORE #8, NIGHT
BRIAN JONES, late 20s and dressed in business casual attire gone wrinkled and sloppy after a 12+ hour day, walks the empty floor of the store one last time, scanning up and down aisles for any activity as he heads for the bank of light switches past the checkout counters near the front door. NEIL, mid-20s and dressed in shabby jeans and a Holly’s World smock, slouches by the front door waiting for Brian. Brian hits switches in sequence as he passes, and a click is audible as a bank of lights goes out each time. When no light remains but the emergency lights pooled near the front door, he shoos Neil out the door and follows him.

CUT TO:

EXT. HOLLY’S WORLD PARKING LOT, SECONDS LATER
Brian and Neil walk to opposite sides of the wide entrance area and wrestle down the metal security grating. Brian closes the padlock on his end, then walks to Neil’s end and closes the padlock there as well. He blows a small cloud of steam into the cool night air as he and Neil survey the parking lot, empty except for Brian’s car and a minivan that just finished pulling up several spots away from them.

NEIL:
Oh Jesus, this isn’t a customer, is it? It’s like 2 in the morning.

BRIAN:
This is what happens when you cut back from 24 hours. People forget but they still need stuff.

NEIL:
It’s not our problem this dumb bastard showed up after the store closed. C’mon, let’s go.

BRIAN:
Let’s at least wait until we find out what he wants. We can point him toward the 24-hour store by the Interstate.

NEIL:
If we don’t freeze to death first.

Nothing Oscar-worthy, to be sure. But all of a sudden, I was writing a script for a story I’d thought up maybe 2 years ago. I’m on page 14 or 15 right now, and while I’m not even up to the first scene I’d imagined for this story, I’ve already introduced a character I never imagined lived in this story and who turns out to be pretty cool. And I’m looking forward to sitting down and writing this one every day, to see if I can make it to that last scene with that last song. I’m going all in on this one, and I hope it pays off.

Expect to see more script excerpts throughout the month, and also soundtrack listings, since for once I’ll be completely justified in making a soundtrack for a story. Thanks to my vacation I doubt I’ll make it to page 100 before April 30. But if it all works out, I’ll find a way to get this whole story down. Thanks for stopping by and indulging a more-than-slightly-burned-out writer wannabe.

Things are getting weird as the month rolls on. Weird, or just worse? Let’s go with weird for now, with the option to change later if need be.

So traditionally, Friday is a rough day at work because by the time I show up I’ve already worked close to 40 hours for the week and my energy and motivation are quite low. As it turns out, dropping 2 or more hours of writing per day into that schedule doesn’t make things better. It makes them, what did we agree on again? Oh yes, weird. Like how last Friday I started the day getting called up to see my boss. And how, totally unprovoked, he tried to explain how the company’s default setting is not “Screw Tgreen”. And how later that day the company did, in fact, screw Tgreen once again.

Friday basically helped me discover the exact amount of sleep deprivation that takes away my creativity and replaces it with exhaustion. I banged out maybe 1,000 words that night, half of what I schedule myself to write every day, and I passed out. Not to worry, though, because it’s the weekend now and there’s always extra time over the weekend to catch up. Except not when I’m taking a long-overdue trip up to my dad’s and I don’t want to spend the entire day being an antisocial writing prick. So Saturday I bang out zero words, which is considerably less than the 2,000 words I schedule myself to write every day, and go to sleep wondering if I was too tired to even enjoy the beers I was drinking, because I didn’t enjoy them very much.

Which brings us to Sunday. I was back home that evening with plenty of time to write. Except I still hadn’t slept enough the past two nights and there was stuff to watch on TV and maybe the idea of writing 50,000 words in a month is as stupid as it sounds. Quitting sounds like so much fun. Sleep, TV, reading, relaxing, no stumbling around like a zombie — just some of the things open to anyone smart enough to quit this contest. But I decided I wasn’t ready for that and my excuses were lame.

The thing is, that mind-fuck I mentioned last week? It taught me a quick and hard lesson. If you’re gonna try to pull a fast one on your audience, you’d better be ready to follow through on it. I wasn’t, and so after busting ass to get to that point, I had no idea what to do next. It was almost like Day 1 all over again, but worse because for several days I’d been craning away without any problems, and then suddenly I was at a dead stop. That’s why quitting seemed so attractive. Sure, I was tired and stressed out and the idea of some relaxing sounded so nice. But the truth was I was scared that I’d written myself into a corner and wouldn’t be able to get out of it. That’s why quitting seemed so attractive. And yet that night I stumbled to the keyboard, banged out another 1,000 words, and then stopped when I realized I was falling asleep sitting up, and also continually referring to one of my characters as “Ray,” which was weird since there’s no Ray in this story. Not yet, but maybe there should be. But I digress.

So the final score after the second full weekend of NaNoWriMo was that I was officially 4,000 words off schedule. Still at the halfway point for the contest and still technically ahead of a schedule that would get me to exactly 50,000 words in 30 days, but behind the schedule I’d set for myself. This sure felt like the Lost Weekend I was worried about last week. I needed to make a comeback and I wasn’t sure how that could happen.

Cut to Monday. Monday’s are hard to predict in my job. Sometimes there’s such a mad rush to get things out the door after a weekend that the day starts of like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, and sometimes I could almost slip into a boredom coma due to lack of projects. Today, despite the fact that my official schedule said I’d be busy as hell, turned out to be a boredom coma day. This could be the comeback I was looking for.

Small problem — I’ve never found a way to write much while at this job. Our desks are all out in the open and a piece of fiction doesn’t resemble the work I do at all. Plus, I didn’t even know if I could write any extended amount while sitting at that desk waiting for a project to appear. But I figured I had to at least try. And 4,000+ words later, I have to say I succeeded. By writing more than twice my scheduled word count, I made up half the Lost Weekend. And even better, I managed to write myself out of the corner, pull a second mind-fuck out of the hat, and set myself up for at least a couple of days of writing where I know more or less what I should be doing. Not bad for a Monday.

Things took an ugly turn at the end of the day. The “Screw Tgreen” policy was once again in full effect, and I ended the day on a bad note that may come back to bite me in the ass. I’m sure I’ll find out early Tuesday if that’s the case. For now, I’ll bask in the glory of a word count that’s only 1 day off schedule, not two.

Coming next, another excerpt. Probably no less crappy, but hope springs eternal.

Hello and welcome to Happy Friday, the weekly blog post that’s just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit.

This week Bob Dylan announced that he’ll be releasing a Christmas album this holiday season. It’s possible that this will be Dylan’s first album of Christmas songs in his long career, but given the murky vocals on many of his recordings, no one can know for sure.

A recent survey claims that women who drink two glasses of wine a day have better sex lives than women who don’t drink anything. The same survey revealed that women who drink six glasses of wine a day are more likely to have their sex lives turn up on YouTube than women who don’t drink anything.

And as always, the survey said that women who drink two six-packs of Schlitz a day can’t even give it away.

The NYPD is investigating a police officer who told a subway passenger trying to report a man masturbating on the train that it was not a police matter. The officer instead told the passenger to call the city’s information hotline and either report the incident as performing in the subway system without a proper license if the man didn’t complete the act, or littering if he did.

This week Best Buy’s website accidentally listed a $1,799 52-inch flatscreen TV for $9.99. The error was discovered quickly, but not before thousands of people had placed orders. Best Buy said it will honor the price on the website, but only if buyers also purchase a 2-year extended warranty for $1790.

Which is actually only about 20 bucks more than those warranties usually go for, so it’s still not a bad deal at all.

According to a recent study, 70% of American’s think that women should take their husband’s name when they marry. Hanging strong in the other 30%? The future Mrs. Dixon Cox, the future Mrs. Buster Cherry and the future Mrs. Nescobar Aloplop.

Reports are leaking out this week that in an upcoming memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney will express his disappointment with George W. Bush’s behavior over the last couple of years of his Presidency. This makes it unanimous now, right?

Scientists said this week that based on the results of a study of rats, 10 days of eating a high fat diet can lead to laziness and stupidity. And in a relattnkqelnnflqe….oh, screw it, these keys are sooooo heavy and I don’t remember what I was going 2 say anyway.

Secret White House memos revealed an $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical lobby designed to move President Obama’s health care reform plan forward. The bad news? Drug prices will continue to be high no matter what kind of health care deal ultimately passes. The good news? Free Flintstones vitamins for every American citizen. But there won’t be any Dinos, because the President was traumatized as a child when he saw the episode where Dino spoke.

In sports news, the Philadelphia Eagles this week signed quarterback Michael Vick to a 2-year contract. Vick has missed the last 2 seasons because he was in jail for several charges related to dogfighting. Vick had originally hoped to be signed by the Cleveland Browns, but everyone involved thought that might be a little inappropriate.

Because their fans are called The Dawg Pound.

See what I did there?

Wal-Mart is taking some heat for releasing cookies that people say are a direct copy of a couple of popular Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints and Tagalongs. A spokesperson for Wal-Mart said the cookies are not copies and are completely original creations, just like their Walritos Cool Ranch Tortilla Chips, their Wal Whip dessert topping, and the new Big Mart burger available for purchase at their new McMart’s fast food chain.

Former Presidential candidate John Edwards is expected to admit that the daughter born to his former mistress is in fact his child. He’s apparently been ready to admit this for awhile, but he’s just waiting for a really busy news day to do it on so that maybe it gets lost in the shuffle. He’s also considering doing it on his wife’s birthday. He hasn’t decided yet.

There have been reports this week that the Spider-Man musical has run out of money and will not, in fact, be premiering on Broadway next February as planned. This is actually good news, as it will allow the producers plenty of time to mount a production of something from…

Tgreen’s Top Ten Musicals Even Lamer Than A Spider-Man Musical:
10. TV Guide, The Musical
9. Imus!
8. Tiptoe Through The Tulips, The Tiny Tim Story
7. Twitterpalooza
6. My Fair Biz Markie
5. Jersey Boys II, Bon Jovi Boogaloo
4. Celebrity Rehab: Jeff Conaway v Gary Busey
3. Metallica Mia
2. MacGruber!
1. The Phantom of the Top Ten List

And that’s all we have time for this week. Until next time, put your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the remote, because Mad Men season 3 premieres this weekend.

T “green label” green