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The office furniture arrived today, all ten huge heavy crates' worth. All ten huge heavy UNASSEMBLED crates' worth.

Oh, yeah, this is gonna be some week, I tell you what.

This isn't, however, going to be one of those columns where the writer claims to have been born without the Bob Vila gene, where the home improvement project ends in hilarity with pipes busting and walls crumbling. (Actually, I DO have at least one wall crumbling, but that wasn't my fault) I'm a rarity, I suppose, a Jewish guy who can fix and build stuff. (Yes, it's a stereotype, but all the adult men at the Y when I was a kid were the kind of guys who'd rather pay someone to assemble stuff than do it themselves. I kinda doubt any of them are regular Ikea shoppers) For this project, I bought myself a brand new cordless drill, got the toolbox and drill/screwdriver bit sets out, and cleared the office.

And day one went OK, with one minor problem. The hutch part of the storage credenza- sort of adjustable cubby hole shelves above the main part- resolutely would not stay in its intended shape. I couldn't move it more than an inch before it would collapse, and, finally, pieces of some of the main upright slabs cracked right off. Disaster. And then, a brainstorm- use L brackets to stabilize the uprights. Eureka! And it worked!

Only it wasn't my idea.

Thanks, Fran.

(She got the brains. I handle the tools. I suspect she got the better of the deal; after all, she's in the living room watching TV while I'm in the office struggling with furniture kits and sweating like Michael Moore waiting for his Happy Meal on a humid Summer day)

Tomorrow: a "library" (glorified bookshelves) and the desk. This should be, er, interesting. If you hear a loud blue streak of cursing coming from the Southwest, you know it didn't go as planned.

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The Los Angeles Times comics section has for the last few years become increasingly populated by political commentary, all from the left. Besides "Doonesbury," which pretty much stands alone even in its weakened, repetitive dotage, there's the politically correct but terribly unfunny "La Cucaracha," strident, angry, usually unfunny but occasionally amusing "The Boondocks," and some strips and panels ("Bizarro," for example) that take the occasional blatant shot at Bush. Okay, fine, but that can't be all there is, right? There has to be some passing attempt at balancing the humor there, doesn't there? Well, yes, the Times has decided to bring in a new strip to placate their non-left readers. Unfortunately, this week, readers were treated to a strip with static, unsightly artwork, heavy-handed writing, and a serious lack of comedy.

But enough about "The Boondocks." The new strip's worse.

That's right. The Times picked up "Mallard Fillmore."

Damn.

"Mallard Fillmore," for the uninitiated, is quite possibly the worst of a bad lot of political comic strips out there. The title character is a mallard- geddit? "Mallard Fillmore!" Ha!- who works as a TV news reporter, which you know mostly because he's always carrying a microphone and wearing a fedora with a press pass in the brim, as if this is 1938. But that's more than you need to know, because the strip generally features static sub-carnival-artist close-up caricatures of political and media figures and the most obvious and simple-minded comments about their ridiculousness. It's the kind of straw-man line-em-up-and-knock-em-down political humor that is way too easy to do and way too shallow for words.

And that's the bone the Times is offering non-liberal readers. Gee, thanks, Mr. Carroll. Please, sir, another bowl of gruel.

In fairness, they plan on introducing another strip with what they term a "conservative" outlook by Birmingham News editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis, whose other strip "The Buckets" isn't much to look at, but maybe the new one ("Prickly City") will be better. I don't know. I DO know that they could have tried this- but, you know, it's a Web comic, can't have that.

Or they could have thrown the whole political thing out the window and tried this. But too many heads would have exploded, so maybe not.

But "Mallard Fillmore"?

At least they carry "Get Fuzzy." Maybe someone should send Bucky over to kick Mallard's feathered ass.

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Today: one office bookshelf unit and three small two-shelf units for the living room. I'm on a roll, and no "incidents," either.

I might get this all done on schedule after all.

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At some point, pro basketball ceased to be a sport and instead became a financial exercise. This is quite apparent by the run-up to the NBA Draft and Charlotte expansion draft. It's no longer about making your team better or getting rid of a recalcitrant joik, it's about whether a deal works within the salary cap for both teams.

Since when did you need a CPA to follow a sport?

I don't want to lapse into Old Fart mode here, but I'm feeling really out of it right about now. I'd rather not need to utilize a specialized web site to determine whether a deal is even capable of being consummated. And it's downright weird that so many proposed deals require mor than just two teams to be involved, and even weirder that an expansion team was being offered money and players if they'd TAKE a player (and contract) off another team's hands. The Nets, for example, seemed bitterly disappointed that they couldn't pawn Kerry Kittles or Lucious Harris off on the Bobcats- the new team took Tamar Slay instead, but left the older players with bigger salaries in New Jersey to take up cap room. Why do I have to know what "cap room" is? I shouldn't HAVE to know that! I WANT MY SPORT BACK!

Um, sorry about that. But I'm just plain frustrated. (I'm a Sixers fan- it comes with the territory. And I should be used to this, going way back to Chamberlain-for-three-warmish-bodies in 1968, or Barkley-for-Hornacek-Tim Perry-Andrew Lang (yikes) in '92) A Laker fan, not that I have any real sympathy for Laker fans in general, shouldn't be worrying about whether Shaq is a goner. A Celtics fan shouldn't have to worry that Ainge might pull the trigger on a Paul Pierce trade. It's not about whether players should have the right to move- they should- or whether GMs should do what's best for their teams- they must. But "what's best for the team" no longer involves winning. It's all about cost control, salary matching, getting guys in order to release them just for salary cap implications.

A few weeks ago, the Pistons were rolling, the Lakers were reeling, and basketball was fun again. Now, I've pretty much had that memory eclipsed by who's-going-where and how-much-does-he-make and how-many-years-left-on-that-contract. If you're Arn Tellem, it's interesting. If you're me, it's maddening. Maybe the league should just be a big pickup game- show up, pick sides, shirts vs. skins every night, winner takes the gate, every night. You'd watch it.

Until then, I wish this whole thing would get done fast so we can get back to worrying about strength in the middle and shooting percentage instead of dollars and years. It'll be nice to put the calculator away.

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I get e-mail:

How are you going to spin it when it's the #1 movie in America on
Monday? That's the accepted definition of "mainstream" after all,
isn't? Better scrape together all the denial and excuses you can
muster over the weekend.

Uh, I didn't say it wouldn't be number one. I'd expect it to be huge, at least on a per-screen basis. So? "Dodgeball" was number one last week- what does that say about the nation?

Are you going to see it?

Maybe, probably, dunno. I tend to avoid popular movies, probably because I hate crowds and most movies suck, anyway. I still haven't seen "Titanic."

Besides, "F9/11" isn't playing at my closest theater, the one where I have coupons to see movies for $5.50 anytime. It IS playing down at the bottom of the hill, but a) I'm busy this weekend finishing the office furniture project (almost there- just the hutch for the computer credenza, then moving the computer there and moving a roomful of junk back in before I have to travel again), b) I hate opening-weekend crowds at theaters, and c) I can think of better ways to spend a couple of hours than watching what I already know, which is that Bush kept reading to the kids after the plane hit, he and his family have an uncomfortable relationship with the House of Saud (and some bin Ladens, but not Osama), and Moore thinks war is bad, Republicans are evil, and Ashcroft's embarrassing. I'll still probably see it at some point, but it's not at the top of my to-do list.

Although it HAS to be better than "White Chicks."

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