Phthursday Musings: Squeezing Nonsense from a Sugarcube

Some time when I was 10 or whatever, I found / was given / absconded with a book which in my memory was called The World’s Worst Decisions but which tonight I find was actually called David Frost’s Book of the World’s Worst Decisions, so verified by finding this familiar book cover online:

Turns out that this was David Frost himself, British TV host, he of Frost / Nixon, etc. Alas, I had forgotten all of this.

What I remembered from the book, mostly, was the telling of how Pepsodent made an aggressive play for the Indonesian market in the 1960s, flopped miserably, and only after launching realized that the people they were marketing to considered black teeth a sign of affluence, black teeth being caused by chewing something called betel gum. Exactly how accurate this all was is not the point. Neither is the reality that apparently betel gum is some most nasty shite.

The point is that people seem to make some most terrible decisions at times. It may be because they lack facts. It may be because they refuse to gather facts. It may be that they have no interest in facts. It may be, as David Byrne put it, that facts don’t do what I want them to:

Yeah… you didn’t know that video existed until now either.

Anyway.

Where was I going with this?

Right.

Sometimes there just needs to be someone in the room whose job is to say: That is a terrible damn idea. That idea is bullshit.

And while at age 10 I was probably not sufficiently qualified, I submit that, today, you should hire me as your Bullshit Evaluator.

Now this week’s installment here is not where I am going to make a case for myself being in your employ. In fact I have no idea where else any of this is going to go. I just know that Pepsodent could have used someone like me. For that matter, David Byrne could have used someone like me. David, the dancing is great, but what the hell is going on here?

The need for a Bullshit Evaluator came to mind again last night when I took my boy to a Chicago Fire match for his birthday. The Fire are a Major League Soccer team, and while MLS is not the biggest soccer league in the world - not even close - it is still competitive and entertaining and draws strong crowds in a lot of places, like Portland and Seattle and especially Atlanta.

The attendance last night was officially 7,052, and I’m pretty sure that’s high. And the venue was Soldier Field, which holds 61,500 people. It looked ridiculous.

Now, if the Fire would have had the sense to hire me, I would have told them not to change their crest to something out of a rejected Galaga clone, or to move out of their soccer specific stadium in the admittedly pointless locale of Bridgeview. Soldier Field provides some great sight lines and definitely history, but they charge you $38 to park there and public transportation is a non-starter. Unless you’ve already got a hot product, you’re going to deplete fan interest even further. And that’s exactly what’s happened.

But I am not here to rant about decisions that professional sports teams make!

Now, Substack, look, I’m here trying to write an entry of Phthursday Musings, and I’ve got to say, I feel like the gaps above and below that line there are just too much. Who were your vetters? Those gaps weren’t so large last time around. What gives?

By the way, why don’t people say “What gives?” anymore?

Oh, friends, this nonsense is not what this week was supposed to be about. I was going to write about running. But when the time came to finally try and write about running, my knee hurt, my brain hurt, and I just went off into something else.

I thought about skipping another week, but over the weekend, my father texted me, to make sure I was okay, since there had been no Phthursday Musings entry, and the reason had a lot to do with my having gone to the White Sox game last Thursday, and when I explained all this, he suggested that I needed a Joan Rivers to my Johnny Carson, and I tried to imagine what on earth would happen if I had a week of “Phthursday Musings with guest writer Big Daddy” and the thing is that it’s not that I’m terrified by any particular idea of what it might be, it’s that I’m terrified that I have absolutely no idea what it might be, and sometimes Johnny’s just got to get out there and swing that golf club.

I wrote a song involving Johnny Carson when I was six or so. I could listen to it right now, but instead, just going off of memory, I’m thinking that it was embedded in one of the suite of songs named “It’s About 5:30”, “It’s About 6:30”, or “It’s About 8:30”, and the lyric, if it was even being sung and not just - recited? - anyway the words I remember seem to go like this:

But if he was a hyena

If Johnny was a hyena

He would laugh and laugh and LAUGH

In this collection of poppin’ tunes there was also an ode to Officer Andy Renko from Hill Street Blues, with the aptly titled named “We Love You, Renko”.

I’m not really sure what’s going on in this scene, or if it is in fact even a scene, as it may just be Charles Haid trying to remember his lines, I mean, how should I know?

At this point I’m getting Stephen Cannell and Stephen Bochco confused, all because that typewriter thing came to mind:

But Stephen Bochco was the guy behind Hill Street Blues. Stephen Cannell was the guy behind, among others, The Rockford Files and… The Commish! Avid META-SPIEL readers will remember why that is so exciting to me.

What do you call those little things after the credits anyway? Cannell’s typewriter thing? And, uh, “Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!” Is that just part of the credits or is there a specific name for that?

So my dad at one point was finishing up an electronics degree and he had this weird computer thing, I don’t know what exactly it was, but you could program it to play what was essentially a MIDI-like song, and I got my hands on it, and as part of an actual assignment or something, he programmed it to play something, and then I programmed it to play the Rice-a-Roni song.

I had the sheet music, if indeed sheet music is not too grandiose a term, for the Rice-a-Roni song, thanks to a book of TV theme music we had. I don’t remember what else was in there except some commercials including Rice-a-Roni, the theme to M*A*S*H, and the theme to Hogan’s Heroes.

Heroes, heroes, husky men of war

Sons of all the heroes of the war before

We’re all heroes up to our ear-os

You ask the questions

We give suggestions

That’s what we’re heroes for

Now of course if you ever watched Hogan’s Heroes there were no lyrics when the theme song played, but that clearly didn’t stop me.

And hey, you know who really could have used some Bullshit Evaluator services? Bob Crane.

Whilst writing this I was distracted by learning of the existence of a 7th Day Adventist grocery three towns over, where they might or might not have vegan franks in a can.

It is a little hard to draw a through line from the boy signing songs about Officer Renko to the man typing “Loma Linda Big Franks” into the Google search box.

This is good though. Because it means that these fucking terrible Imagine Dragons songs are not going to be especially predictive of anything my boy will grow up to think about. My god, since the last time I wrote and mentioned “Radioactive”, I have now heard “Thunder” several times. When it comes to popular music, I have mellowed out A WHOLE VERY LOT over time, but when wretchedness rears its ugly head, it must be called out…. here, of course, not in a place where a child’s feelings could be hurt needlessly.

As we used to say on air: If you’re offended… call now!

Truly though I am mentally exhausted. I have mostly stopped paying attention to the news the last couple of weeks. When I finally do write about running I will write about how difficult these 2 5Ks the last two weekends were and trying to imagine what it might be like to super-prioritize being in shape.

So this has all been ridiculous and I should leave you with something wonderful. I’ve found myself a couple times recently listening to Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One and it is really such a fabulous creation, in no need of any sort of Bullshit Evaluator. Do yourself a favor and enjoy the video for “Sugarcube”: