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I guess absence makes the heart grow fonder, because my little sojourn to medical hell prompted quite a few e-mails wondering where in blazes I'd gone off to and why the columns weren't updated and why there wasn't any notice. When 911 is involved, there's no notice, and the note on the All Access columns didn't appear until the same day I got sprung, so I'm sure my absence confused everyone, but it was indeed nice to see that my absence was noticed.

Of course, no matter how many e-mails you get lamenting your unexplained absence, you get- okay, I got- a thought popping up in your head: how come there aren't more? I know they're out there- did they not miss me? Did they not care? Did they all pack up and just go look at Fark or something and forget about me? Will they be back?

Look, I never said I was stable or well-adjusted.

The paranoia subsided soon enough, and the support and prayers and well-wishes I received obliterated the resentful, sullen thoughts in short order. It's nice to know you're out there, whether or not I receive e-mails or cards or completely unsolicited, lavish gifts from every single reader. Although the gifts are nice, too.

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Running through some of my recent consumer transactions:

1. Remember the Sports Chalet thing, the one where the manager of the store blew me off to help someone who walked in after me? Remember how I wrote a detailed, polite letter to the president of the company? Here's the response I got so far:

(crickets)

Until I hear from them, I would not recommend that you buy from Sports Chalet. My opinion is that they do not want your business.

2. The NBA League Pass is now sort-of-emulating the baseball online streaming thing. You have to be a subscriber to the cable/satellite package, but I am, so I dutifully signed up and entered my Dish Network information as required. The response was that the account number doesn't match with the provider. Apparently, the NBA doesn't want my business, either.

(UPDATE: I got an e-mail back asking for the information so they could fix it. Apparently, they DO want my business.)

3. A NOD32 update: so far, I'm happy. Updates frequently, sometimes more than once a day, unlike how Norton changed its policy and left most users with weekly updates, if it works. NOD32 also seems to slow the system down less than Norton, and occupies a lot less of a footprint. I may replace the Norton on Fran's computer and the McAfee on the laptop with this thing. Thumbs up so far.

4. Good deal on TDK DVD-Rs at Costco this week, if you got one of those coupon passport booklets a few weeks back: with the coupon, it's two 100-dics spindles of print-on white +Rs or -Rs for about $42. Not bad.

Enough for now- Jack Bauer's on in four minutes. Gotta go.

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We get "The Week" magazine here, but Fran usually reads it, not me. It's a compendium of digested news items, meant for someone who doesn't have time to read the papers every day or plow through a zillion websites or bother with Time and Newsweek. It's not bad, actually, and they do carry opinion briefs from both sides of the aisle. I may not read it much, but I'm the guy who picks it up at the P.O. box, and I've noticed that every cover- maybe 9 out of 10- features a cartoon of President Bush looking ridiculous, a confused, moronic look on his face, struggling and weak. Today, I opened the box and found this cover:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad there. Not looking weak or confused, is he? No, he's strong, confident, a small smile on his lips, business casual, arms folded in a resolute pose, a nuclear plant under construction in the background. Unlike the Bush covers, there's no broad caricature, just a portrait that the subject could conceivably have commissioned himself.

Imagine this being 1939 and Time Magazine commissioning not the familiar scary Hitler pictures but a flattering portrait of a confident, youthful Hitler, smiling and relaxed, the Berlin skyline behind him. Or printing a good-looking, modern portrait of Osama bin Laden smiling and sporting a healthy glow in October 2001. If they use the cover to lampoon the President, as is their right, why would they depart from their standard procedure to make Ahmadinejad look not like the enemy, not like an anti-Semitic jackass and Holocaust denier, not as someone who poses a major threat to everyone, but as a confident, capable leader?

Oh, sure, I doubt Felix Dennis is an Ahmadinejad fan. But when the editors were deciding how to portray Ahmadinejad on the cover, someone decided to play it straight for once. Strange.

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If you want to feel really old, take a look at your alma mater's alumni magazine. I got the Villanova Law magazine in the mail today, and while I have not had any interest in anything about that place since I escap... er, graduated, for some reason- maybe because it was slickly packaged and shrinkwrapped- I opened the magazine and turned to my class' page in the alumni notes section. It's silly for me to do that, since I only stayed in touch with a few people from law school, but I went ahead and looked. And there were two people with pictures, and they'd... um... they'd gotten a few years older. Quite a few years. Not prematurely gray or prematurely bald, just gray or bald, because it's not premature anymore.

Old guys in suits.

My age.

I'm OLD!

OH, NO!!!!

Okay, that's unfair- they're lawyers, after all, in typical official lawyerly poses. They're going to have lawyer haircuts, lawyer ties, lawyer expressions, and that'll put a few years on your photo right there. I work in unlawyerly t-shirts, my blond hair sticks up in cowlicks more appropriate for Dennis the Menace than Perry Mason, and my photo- you can go to AllAccess.com and see it there, because I'm too lazy to post it now- is generally taken in one of those pseudo-casual hey!-you-just-caught-me-in-the-middle-of-a-hearty-laugh poses, which connotes "youthful" in a way that the photos they took of us when we WERE young didn't. But my classmates look like successful gentlemen, senior partners, adults. And I still have a hard time accepting that I'm an adult, too.

"Oh, you don't have to call me MR. Simon. Mr. Simon is my father."

No, it isn't, not anymore. It's me.

Adult.

No do-overs.

Damn.

And that's the last alumni magazine I'm ever opening.

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My recovery slowed a little today, maybe not related to the whole torn esophagus thing, but I was a little off this afternoon, a little achy and a little queasy. I'm OK, but I think I need some rest this evening. Sorry.

Besides, I simply MUST find out what caused Simon to stalk out of the "Idol" auditions last night.

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Coming soon to pmsimon.com:

Bill Walton and a whale!

The fantastic new game show "Porn Star Or Athlete?"

And the exclusive pmsimon.com feature "Skip Caray Through the Years":

All coming as part of the new 2006 Cavalcade of Nostalgia at pmsimon.com! Don't miss a single embarrassing moment!

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I'm going to take some time and scan some stuff I find interesting from my collection of sports yearbooks, programs, media guides, and magazines from the 60s and 70s. Why? I don't know, it's just interesting to me. Plus this: when I Google certin stuff I remember, there never seems to be much about it on the Net. Some things are being lost because nobody's taken the time to put them on the Web- you can't find pictures or information or anything about them. Take the ABL, the first stab at a league to compete with the NBA. It's remembered, if at all, for being the refuge for Connie Hawkins when he got booted from Iowa and the NBA refused to take him (read the book "Foul" for more on that). But it was also where Bill Sharman got his coaching start, where Dick Barnett and Bill Bridges played before better-known NBA careers, and where a young rich kid and heir to a shipbuilding company in Cleveland first interfered with a coach- yes, the Cleveland Pipers were owned by a very young George Steinbrenner.

Try and find something on the ABL on the Web. There's this, and this, and that's about it.

Let's add to that. Here, from the 1962 Converse Basketball Yearbook, are six team photos from the American Basketball League:

Notable: Connie Hawkins is the lower right guy in the Pittsburgh Rens shot in the lower left, that's Harlem Globetrotters owner and ABL commissioner Abe Saperstein in the upper left of the Chicago Majors photo, and coach Sharman, Barnett, and Connie Dierking are in the Cleveland picture.

The Cleveland Pipers were the ABL champs in that 1961-62 season, but the L.A. Jets folded in January and the Washington franchise moved to Commack, Long Island in mid-season. They didn't make it through the 1962-63 season. Hawkins, of course, moved on to set the ABA on fire before finally being let into the NBA with Phoenix in '69.

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Today, he's a veteran NBA GM. Back then, he was not only the coach of the ABA's Spirits of St. Louis, but a fashion plate:

It's not just the suit, it's the collar.

(From the 1975-76 Spirits of St, Louis game program)

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I love this CKAC/Montreal ad from the 1974 Expos game program because it offers a ground-level view of Parc Jarry that you can't find anywhere on the Web these days. You can see exactly how small the place was- look how low the press box sat, and there was no upper deck. I remain convinced that had the team played in a larger but similar version of a little ballpark- not that semi-domed monstrosity the Big Owe, but a Parc Jarry on steroids- there might still be a Montreal Expos.

And where's Claude today? Here he is:

It's been a long time- 32 years will do that. He's been doing sports commentary for the RDS cable network and last year became Deputy Minister for Education, Leisure and Sport for the Charest administration in Quebec.

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Calista Flockhart dressed as Burt Reynolds or Kip from "Napoleon Dynamite" ready for a night on the town? You be the judge:

$43. for the jacket and pants.

1975 is real to me. I was there. This NEVER looked good.

(From the August 30, 1975 San Antonio Wings World Football League game program)

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Today, I thought I'd continue with scanning stuff that you just don't see on the Net, with a concentration on radio and TV print ads from back in the day. This may be unbelievably irrelevant and stupid to you, but I love this kind of ephemera. And it's my site, so here it is.

What I like about this ad isn't the cigar-chomping tech or the big 2-inch reels or the Phillies' 1971 schedule. No, it's all about the stop sign logo. You don't see too many examples of the stop sign logo for WPHL-TV Philadelphia, which it had, in a couple of iterations, from sign-on in 1965 to sometime in the early 70's. This was in the Phillies' game program in 1971:

WPHL has been Philadelphia's WB affiliate for years, and will be back to an independent when The CW (or whatever it ends up being called) launches in the Fall.

WOR-TV New York was a terrible independent- ancient movies and brand X syndication- except for one thing: sports. It had the Mets, Knicks, and Rangers for many years, and later the Nets and Islanders as well. When cable took the sports and the station was forced to move to New Jersey (as WWOR-TV), the programming improved and the station developed an actual news product instead of an announcer rip-and-reading headlines over a slide at the station's sign-on. In the New Jersey Nets' 1981 program, they were all about the sports:

Like WPHL, it's losing its network affiliation, in this case UPN, when The CW launches on its rival, WPIX.

While we're on New York sports, the Mets were on WNEW in 1976, when this appeared in the game program:

The Mets were all over the dial through the years, on WABC, WNBC, WJRZ, WNBC-FM, WNEW, WHN, and eventually WFAN, where they remain the station's cash cow. WNEW is now Bloomberg all-news WBBR.

In 1977, WYSP Philadelphia couldn't spell "congratulations" in the Main Point club's 14th anniversary program:

I lived literally doen the street from the Main Point, which was a somewhat twee folk club that made tentative steps into rock before it closed and became a branch of the old-style Mapes Five and Ten store. Dunno what it is now. WIOQ, then a rock station, took the occasion to advertise its folk show:

Gene Shay is still on the air at WXPN- He'll be 71 on March 4.

WMMR used the program to congrtulate itself on 9 years in the rock format:

And they're still in the format 29 years later.

Here's the WFL's Portland Storm in 1974 on KEX Portland, which is still around and a big Clear Channel talker:

...and on KPTV 12, which was then an independent and is now Portland's Fox affiliate:

More tomorrow.

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