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Every once in a while, Halley's Comet has to go by. A longshot has to win the Kentucky Derby, a Republican has to win an election in San Francisco, Janeane Garofalo has to say something coherent or funny.

And Alex Cora has to hit a three run homer.

You can't expect it to happen very often, but it does, just like a lightning strike or a reasonably entertaining Adam Sandler movie. It happened today. I was there. It happened, I swear. I have no reason to make it up.

And I take one thing back. Janeane does NOT have to say something coherent or funny. That, I'm afraid, may truly be impossible.

While we're at it, this isn't bad for the crappy camera in my cell phone:

The resolution's not much, but you can tell what it's supposed to be, so I can't complain too much. Won't replace the Canon, but it'll do for quick 'n' dirty.

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And at the end of a long and difficult day, I found myself tugging at a sewer snake line along with two plumbers, trying desperately to free the thing from our sewer line.

This was not a good day.

I won't bore you with the details (as I usually do), but it was a long and not particularly pleasant day. And when the plumbers were gone and the line was clear and I could finally get something to eat- not that I was particularly hungry- I sat down and ate peanut butter out of the jar and I put on the TV, and there on ESPN Classic, Mookie Wilson was at the plate with Knight on first and Mitchell on third, and then there was the wild pitch and the fouls and then it was 1986 again and I was in my old house and sitting there with my dad watching the game with jaws scraping the ground, and Wilson swung and Vin Scully said "it gets through Buckner! Here comes Knight! And the Mets win it!"

What strikes me today is how Scully shut up and let the pictures do the talking from then on. Shea was bedlam, and he didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

But at the end of a trying day, there it was, proving that the impossible once indeed happened, reminding me of a very good day with dad almost 18 years ago. I'll take that as a win and move on.

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Inspired, he says, by my shining example, former WKLS (96 Rock)/Atlanta morning "Regular Guy" Larry Wachs has started semi-blogging on the show's old site. He starts with his experience espousing conservative views at the "Jimmy Kimmel Live" writers' meeting- he claims that this drove the staff a) insane, and b) to write a much funnier show for Friday than the one Larry and I witnessed from the green room on Thursday. The latter achievement couldn't have been too difficult, judging by the audience response on Thursday. Oy.

Anyway, go click here and see what Atlanta's Favorite Fired Morning Show Host is saying. If you like it, blame me.

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The guy across the street died today.

We didn't really know him. He was the father of another neighbor, and he and his wife moved into the house about a year or so ago. He and his wife were both very frail and probably in their 80s, maybe even their 90s; we'd see them when they would go to the mailbox at the end of their driveway, and, once, I tried to help him get up when he'd fallen in their yard, and he fought me and anyone else who tried to help him. He wasn't all there, and it was sad to see. I saw the couple at the mailbox last week and said hello, and a couple of days ago I saw the daughter and a nurse wheeling the father down the block. That was the last time I saw him until Fran and I watched the morticians wheel the gurney out of their house with a blue sheet pulled all the way over his head.

I'm not good with death. I didn't know the guy, really, but I felt really bad, bad for him, for his family, just bad. And I rarely saw him, but I know I'm going to feel the loss, feel the sadness from across the street, feel like there's sort of a pall on that house and on the block because he's gone.

Shocking revelation: Death Sucks.

Needless to say, this did nothing to help my mood.

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Jury duty.

F.

F F F F F.

G D it.

Of all the...

F.

Oh, well. Let's see how tomorrow goes. My luck, I get stuck on a "12 Angry Men" jury. And, to respond to your comments, no, there's practically no way to get out of it in Los Angeles anymore. You have to prove a medical impossibility or financial hardship beyond just losing hundreds of dollars a day to get off. So I'm not "such a loser that I can't get off jury duty." I gotta do it.

F.

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It's hard to write about your experiences when you have virtually none all day. I spent the whole day in a jury waiting room, reading books to pass the time. I read three books and fell asleep for about 10 minutes, then got called for a trial, then got excused, then I was done. And now, I'm way behind on work. Oh, and I don't even get any jury pay for the day- California makes you work the first day for free.

I do, actually, have some things to say, but not today. All in due course. It's a strange time- sad, surreal, stressful- and I'll explain all of it someday, but at least we got a glimmer of (very) good news from Fran's family, which I'll also get around to explaining someday. For now, I just need to stop thinking about everything and try to shake it all off.

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The police issued a warning today about possible terror attacks at a mall somewhere near the Federal Building on Wilshire near the 405 in Westwood. They didn't say which malls would be targets- indeed, they didn't give any specifics at all- but they told everyone to exercise "vigilance."

Vigilance? What's "vigilance" going to do? You get to see the face of the person who's about to kill you? Are you supposed to throw yourself on a grenade? What are you supposed to do?

Well, nothing. And the cops can't do anything, either. If a murderous bastard wants to drive into a mall garage with a carload of explosives, or someone wants to lob a grenade into a store, or whatever else someone wants to do to kill people, no cop or barricade or plan will do much more than temporarily inconvenience the attacker. There's not much anyone can do to stop it, even if you know it's coming, unless you want to make life very, very different. You can post cops at all entrances. You can inspect all cars. You can make people go through metal detectors. You can frisk people. You can make a quick trip to Macy's into an affair of several hours.

Do you want that? Does ANYBODY want that?

And that's been my point about the 9/11 hearings. Even if someone had put together all the bits of information that were floating around, even if the plot had been figured out, even if someone thought of boxcutters as something worth searching for and confiscating, how would that have played with the public? If this was 9/10/01, would you be OK with long security lines at airports, people pawing through your underwear in the guise of inspection, barricarded cockpit doors and air marshals with guns? Or would you have decried the infringement of basic liberties, complained about the slowness, and demanded to know what the specific threat was, doubting its existence all along?

You know the answer. And you also know that if they do that kind of tight-security thing at malls, you won't like it, it'll cost a fortune, and it'll kill a lot of retail businesses. Considering all that, I guess "vigilance" is all you CAN do. If you see anything suspicious, be sure to, well, um... wave. And rest assured that long after you're gone, someone will hold hearings and point fingers at the people who "should have stopped it." Maybe they'll point at you. You know they won't blame the terrorists.

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I swear, this AP photo of Michael Jackson in his new little glasses and suit make him look like Alan Colmes in a fright wig.

And here, he looks like a sock puppet.

By the way, what's with the red arm band? Did he look in the mirror at the suit his lawyers insister he wear and think, you know, this outfit really needs a touch of Nuremberg?

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Once again, events conspire to emasculate me. The sewer problem we had earlier in the week has returned, meaning that our toilets are unflushable, the showers and sinks and washers will back up into the alley alongside our home, and I can't do a damn thing about it. Can't unblock the stoppage, either- it's somewhere between the house and the street, it's probably root damage, it's not covered by insurance, and it's going to require thousands of dollars I can't afford and lots of digging and ripping and stuff that will be both extensive and time-consuming. And they can't get to it until Monday, when they can send a camera down there and see where the trouble is.

And again, as someone who prides himself on being able to fix stuff himself, this is agony. I can't just pop something open and tinker around until it works like I do with computers, or replace a few parts and get things operational again, like when I fixed the DVD player with a few replacement capacitors and a soldering iron (one of my greatest electronic triumphs). I don't have one of those 30 foot electrical snake things. I don't happen to have root cutters in the garage, ready to take on the clogs. I could probably dig up the lawn and replace the old clay pipes with PVC and a new cleanout, but it would take weeks, be exhausting, and end up looking like the surface of the moon. And I don't know where exactly the pipes run, so I could be digging up a lot of territory. Worse, the damage might be beneath the driveway or concrete, so I'm way out of my league if I have to go rent a jackhammer.

No, this is a job for professionals, which means I get to look like a typical suburban homeowner, befuddled and able only to nod and agree to everything the plumber says. And while I'm waiting to look stupid, I get to have no plumbing for a couple of days. We can use public bathrooms when we need to, or use ours and not flush (EEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWW), and we can drive 20 minutes to the Y to take showers (or jump into the pool, which today is probably at a balmy 40 degrees fahrenheit- no matter HOW hot it is around here, the water's ALWAYS Polar Bear Swim chilly). But we're going to be inconvenienced, we're going to be at the mercy of the plumbers, and we're going to be sucked dry of whatever money we may have left.

Any freelance work out there? I'm gonna need it.

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