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She won't leave me alone.

Every day, every time I start to work, within minutes, she's there. She lets me know she's there. I'll feel it on my left arm, an insistent tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP-TAP-TAP-PAY-ATTENTION-TO-ME! until I stop what I'm doing and look down and she's there, looking up at me with a little sponge-rubber soccer ball next to her, waiting until I drop what I'm doing and play ball with her. I throw it out the door and across the living room, and she runs, grabs it in her mouth, and waddles back to me, spits it out, and the cycle begins afresh.

It doesn't matter what time it is. If it's 5 am or 10 pm, she's there with the ball. She's a cat, but she wants to play fetch, just like an eager, slobbering dog, happiest when scampering off to grab what you've thrown and bringing it back, proudly carrying it in her mouth and dropping it at your feet, then stepping back towards the door, ready to bolt after it, sometimes not even waiting for you to throw it.

Now, how am I supposed to ignore THAT?

So I don't. I can't. I need to work, need to write to make money to pay for the Fancy Feast and the Whisker Lickins and the Science Diet and the Fresh Step, for the roof over her head, for the little sponge balls, but she doesn't, can't know that. For all she knows, I'm playing or something. She doesn't know WHAT I do. Or what I am, for that matter- I imagine cats think we're all, well, big things that bring her food, or weirdly mutated cats who make weird noises. We look like aliens and sound like Charlie Brown's principal to her. And the concept of "work," well, that isn't among the things with which she's familiar. So I indulge her, throw the ball, type a few words, throw the ball again, type a few words, pet her, throw the ball again. You wanna know why my stuff's sometimes disjointed? There ya go.

She's around her second birthday now- we don't know what day she was born, but it was around November 2001, somewhere in Long Beach. They found her on a school playground. That might explain things. And since February 2002, she's been in our house, demanding, needy, inscrutable, infuriating.

We wouldn't have it any other way. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a ball to throw.

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She won't leave me alone.

Every day, every time I start to work, within minutes, she's there. She lets me know she's there. I'll feel it on my left arm, an insistent tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP-TAP-TAP-PAY-ATTENTION-TO-ME! until I stop what I'm doing and look down and she's there, looking up at me with a little sponge-rubber soccer ball next to her, waiting until I drop what I'm doing and play ball with her. I throw it out the door and across the living room, and she runs, grabs it in her mouth, and waddles back to me, spits it out, and the cycle begins afresh.

It doesn't matter what time it is. If it's 5 am or 10 pm, she's there with the ball. She's a cat, but she wants to play fetch, just like an eager, slobbering dog, happiest when scampering off to grab what you've thrown and bringing it back, proudly carrying it in her mouth and dropping it at your feet, then stepping back towards the door, ready to bolt after it, sometimes not even waiting for you to throw it.

Now, how am I supposed to ignore THAT?

So I don't. I can't. I need to work, need to write to make money to pay for the Fancy Feast and the Whisker Lickins and the Science Diet and the Fresh Step, for the roof over her head, for the little sponge balls, but she doesn't, can't know that. For all she knows, I'm playing or something. She doesn't know WHAT I do. Or what I am, for that matter- I imagine cats think we're all, well, big things that bring her food, or weirdly mutated cats who make weird noises. We look like aliens and sound like Charlie Brown's principal to her. And the concept of "work," well, that isn't among the things with which she's familiar. So I indulge her, throw the ball, type a few words, throw the ball again, type a few words, pet her, throw the ball again. You wanna know why my stuff's sometimes disjointed? There ya go.

She's around her second birthday now- we don't know what day she was born, but it was around November 2001, somewhere in Long Beach. They found her on a school playground. That might explain things. And since February 2002, she's been in our house, demanding, needy, inscrutable, infuriating.

We wouldn't have it any other way. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a ball to throw.

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Irv Kupcinet died today, and the obituaries all mention, almost in passing, that the man known for his long-running gossip column in the Chicago Sun-Times used to have a TV show, too. That's what I remember about him, and thinking about that show reminded me of something else.

"Kup's Show," truth be told, was pretty plain- just people sitting on a dark set talking. No studio audience, no production values, just people talking, cigarette smoke curling up from their fingers. Conversation. And it wasn't the only show like it, either, what with David Susskind doing the same thing. When I was a kid, those shows were a window into the mysterious world of adulthood. Adults, I thought, don't goof around and laugh and have fun. No, they sit in dark rooms, talking about serious issues with lots of pauses and a gray haze of smoke hovering above them. They were sophisticated, those adults were, glasses of chardonnay and shots of Glenlivet on the tables in front of them, a pack of L&Ms at the ready, witticisms and incisive comments slicing into the air from the corner of their omnipresent sneer. They only came out at night, after 11, when us kids were sure to be asleep. And they were all in black and white. (Note: a good example for those who don't remember can be found in, of all places, the "Simpsons" episode in which Krusty the Klown goes on vacation and throws on a "best of" rerun instead- a 1961 interview of AFL-CIO Chairman George Meany about collective bargaining agreements in vintage Susskind style, a gag hilarious only to those who remember. It's episode 1F22, "Bart of Darkness," in case you want to check)

Turns out that adults aren't like that at all. At least, not anymore. Kup's gone, Susskind left long ago. Adults nowadays don't wear dark suits on dimly lit sets and banter about the Cold War and civil rights and the Great Society. They act like, well, kids. Everything's done at a fever pitch, at top volume, in color. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. I always suspected that the adult world of "Kup's Show" and "Open End" was kinda boring. They never talked about REAL stuff like baseball and cool movies and rock 'n' roll, just about Big Issues. My parents didn't sit around talking about Big Issues, but I didn't know for sure- maybe they did, after 11, when all the parents in the neighborhood would sneak off to some dark room to discuss civil rights and the Social Security program.

If they did, those days are long gone. There's no "Kup's Show," no "Open End." (Charlie Rose doesn't count- not quite the same, and if nobody's watching it, does it even exist?) The chardonnay's gone, the cigarettes banned, the sets struck, the conversation's over, and so is the mystery. I'm an adult now, I know what adults do, and it doesn't resemble what I thought was going on back then, late at night, when adults seemed more, I don't know, adult. I thought it was kinda cool, sitting around conversing like the Algonquin Round Table in a dark room amidst the test patterns. Nobody does that anymore. Maybe somebody should.

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This one's for those of you in radio, a little tip you can use to make your show just a little bit better. Ready? Here goes:

Yelling and laughing are not the same thing as "funny."

I'm telling you this because I've been listening to a lot of shows lately that involve someone, generally a sidekick/co-host, usually female, dissolving into laughter while shrieking something, and the whole crew breaks into laughter, and the frivolity gets cut into promos that run all day, and it's not funny. Not even a little bit. Oh, some of the audience gets fooled- one of the worst offenders is a show hosted by a guy who inexplicably got several high profile TV gigs from it- but make no mistake, it's not funny. (No, I don't mean Howard and Robin. Even at their worst, they're funnier than these people)

Then again, I can list several shows with long track records of success that I just don't get at all, so maybe I'm wrong. But I don't think so. Whatever, just save the yocks for something that's actually funny. Funny. You know, comedy. You remember... ah, forget it.

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Art Carney's dead.

Great actor, but, more importantly, he WAS Ed Norton, and Ed Norton ruled.

"Can it core a apple?"

Why, yes, Ed. Yes, it can.

Somewhere, someone's hearing "Swanee River" and laughing, and it's because of Art Carney. I'd call that a nice legacy.

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What are the five most difficult questions for a man to answer?

Click here for Mark Pierce's take on the issue.

It made me laugh. You'll like it, too.

Incidentally, I never answer any of them right, which is to say that my first impulse is honesty, and that ain't the best policy if you want to live past the top of the hour.

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It rained in Los Angeles tonight, and hysteria naturally reigned on top of it all, which you'd expect. After all, it's an accepted comedic device to note the reaction of Southern Californians to even the slightest drizzle, to note that a light mist is treated the same way that the east coast treats a 24 inch snowstorm. Yeah, ha ha, joke's on us. Whatever.

But this one was bizarre, even by L.A. standards. There wasn't the usual sweep of storms across the region. Tonight, storms just, you know, sort of happened, hitting specific areas hard, flooding the streets and homes in a flash and then just as suddenly disappearing, not heading to another town or moving at all, just... gone. Like that. There was thunder everywhere, and fearsome, cartoon-like lightning, but the rain just materiaized for about 20 minutes and dematerialized and that was it.

We were eating dinner when the storm hit the South Bay, finishing up turkey dinners at Marie Callender's when Fran looked at the windows behind me and observed that the sky had apparently sprung a substantial leak directly over us. We did the only thing an experienced thunderstorm survivor could do. We ordered pie. If you're not going anywhere for a while, you might as well have pie.

And it worked- we had our pie and the rain let up. I began to think pie has some sort of magical properties, acting as garlic to the storm's vampire, like DEET to mosquitoes. The lightning was still around, and the thunder, but the rain stopped and we went home.

On the way back down the hill, hearing John and Ken talk to the TV weatherman about the storm, the AM radio crackled with static the way it used to back east, when I was growing up, sitting on a wooden folding chair in the open garage watching the storms roll in and hearing the thunder and the electrical crackling interrupting Lindsey Nelson being interrupted by a rain delay on the Mets broadcast- let's send it back to the studio and Bob Brown- and dialing over to 1210 to see if the Phillies had resumed yet but getting more static. I don't know why, but that feeling, watching the rain come down while the static sizzled on the transistor radio, it's still a treasured memory for me. I guess it might be because the rain drives everyone off the streets. It clears the neighborhood, and, for a few moments, the usual drone of traffic and lawn mowers and conversation goes away and peace comes over the valley.

I think it's raining again. I'm going to go out on the porch now. I'll bring the radio.

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There I was, next in line at the Costco gas pumps, waiting patiently for my turn, and I noticed that the Cadillac in front of me was sitting at the pump but the driver was just sitting in the car, door propped open, pump inactive, pump handle in the pump, fuel door closed. A minute went by, then two, then another, and I was about to have someone check to make sure the guy hadn't died right there in the driver's seat when...

...he yanked the cell phone ear piece out of his ear and slowly rose to start the whole gas-pumping process.

Dja ever notice that people talking on cell phones have no consideration for anyone else on earth while they're on the phone?

I swear, it was one of those aggravating little irritations that make any reasonable person whine like Andy Rooney when the Glucosamine-Chondroitin-MSM pills run out. GET OFF THE PHONE, JACKASS! I CAN'T WAIT ALL DAY WHILE YOU CHAT ON YOUR CELL PHONE! EITHER HANG UP OR DRIVE AWAY! I could have yelled. I could have gotten out, walked over, and calmly pointed out that he was being inconsiderate, as boorishly self-centered as the fat tattooed moron who was shaving in the communal men's shower at the Y a few inches from the "For health and safety considerations DO NOT SHAVE IN SHOWER use sink" sign.

I said nothing.

It's not worth it. You can confront these people all day and not one will change, because they don't care to change. They don't have to. They can go along in life, make enough money to pay for the Caddy and the rent, they find someone with no taste to love them, they just float along and do whatever they want and even if someone says something, hell, if it isn't a cop, who cares? And you and I play by the rules, consider others in everything we do, we do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and...

Suckers.

We're suckers.

Can't help myself, though. I can't get that cutthroat attitude, the callousness that allows some people to run roughshod over the rest of us. It's not programmed into my personality. So I'll be the guy sitting patiently in the gas queue, blood pressure rising while the jackass in front of me takes his sweet old time and ignores the aggravation he's causing. I figure that, eventually, we're all headed towards the same conclusion, and if there's anything after that, I hope I've been good enough here not to be behind him on the next line. His escalator's going down.

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So there's a story over on foxnews.com about guys taking their wives' surnames upon marriage, either hyphenating or changing it altogether, and it reminded me of a guy with whom I went to college. Shortly after college, he and his girlfriend got married, and, suddenly, they both sported hyphenated surnames, hers-his. I thought about that guy and that situation and it struck me that it takes a certain kind of guy to do that, the kind of guy who's sensitive, caring, willing to compromise or even surrender at all times.

No, not just French guys. Passive guys. Guys who will "yes, dear" at the twitch of a shaped eyebrow. Guys who don't watch football because they're taking Ms. Passive-Aggressive to the noon showing of "Under the Tuscan Sun," and, yes, by the end, that's a tear welling up in the corner of their eyes. Those of earlier, less enlightened eras would call them "whipped." In this progressive society, they're not called that. They're not called anything. But they're not new. In fact, this "sensitive male" stuff was huge in the 70's and 80's, and do you remember what became of that? Women complained. They MISSED the kind of strong, take-charge guy that had been pushed out of favor. Remember? "Where have all the cowboys gone?" The cowboys came back, but the holdouts take their wives' names.

And this is all quite sexist, I know. Why shouldn't men take their wives' surnames when women have always been subjected to name changes? And to that, I say, you're right, women shouldn't have to change their names, either. But that doesn't mean men SHOULD. Some traditions don't need to be destroyed.

Which brings us back to that guy in my college class. The last time I saw him was in a picture in the alumni magazine. He and his wife were posed reclining in one of those forced-casual scenes, laughing at some nonexistent joke- okay, I need you to smile a little, move together a little closer, smile some more, you're really having fun, laugh, and... okay, got it, now we need one more, let me check the light. I felt sorry for the dude. I saw his life as one big attempt at avoiding an argument. You want us to hyphenate? Okay. You want me to stay at home with the kids? Okay. You want me to walk three strides behind you at all times? Okay. It's only fair, what with the horrors inflicted on women over the... sorry, dear, I'll keep it down. Oh, and I'd like to stay home and watch the Redskins game this... no, that's okay, I'll take you to the crafts fair instead. Maybe he likes that. I'd rather argue. And I'd rather keep my name, too.

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My LORD, this was a slow week.

Did it seem like that to you? Every morning, I awoke hoping that it was Friday already, because each day seemed like it was working in slow motion. Time flies when you're having fun, but I wasn't having fun. It was a succession of little things, some of which I've already told you. Today's event: the sewer backed up, the alley was briefly filled with raw sewage, the home warranty people set up a plumber who couldn't come for at least 36 hours, I called back for an emergency call and nobody ever called back. And I finally washed the ash from the fires off my car. Oh, and the fish oil capsule I just took had a leak, giving me a face full of fish oil.

As I said, little things, lots of little things. And I'll bet the weekend'll go REAL fast.

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It's Saturday.

It's the weekend.

What are you doing on the computer?

(This is my subtle way of saying that I was out all day and ain't no way I'm gonna sit here writing a column today, not on a Saturday night. Maybe tomorrow, when I'm back to work. Not now. Go do whatever it is you do.)

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