140Story - Day 31

  I'm writing a story 140 words at a time and posting the results here daily.  Can I sustain interest?  Will I lose the narrative thread?  Find out in this next installment of Bullets Ain't Cheap

shooter was either finished or very, very disciplined.
    I had to make myself scarce.  No telling how many people had seen me and Theda together, and I didn’t feel like answering to the police.  A kid with a skateboard joined the man in the suit, and then a woman walking a dog.
    “Oh my GOD!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.  Within seconds curious spectators rushed in from every direction, each of them asking the others what had happened and how they could help.  In the distance sirens wailed.
    I took a deep breath and left the cover of the delivery van, walking quickly and quietly away from the scene.  I scanned the rooftops and windows for a flash or a silhouette, but there was nothing.
    My legs trembling, I made it back to my car, positive no

Big Man

I have ants in my shower. And only in my shower. And only, like, one ant at a time. I know it's not the exact same ant because I've killed a few of them. But then I've let a few of them live too, because I'm beneficent.
   I wonder what they think of me. Assuming they can register the concept of me, since I'm so much larger than they are. It would be like me trying to conceive of a two-mile-tall person, a concept I can't even begin to get my head around. And I wonder what they think of the shower with its expanses of white tiles like acres of porcelain Heaven. I also wonder how they're getting in there, since I don't see ants anywhere else in the house. If you see one or two or three you know there are many more somewhere else. Ants don't go it alone.
   I also feel guilty for subjecting them to what must be the worst hurricane they've ever experienced. There's almost always one ant in the shower no matter when I get in, and they're gone when I'm done. Which means they must be - whoosh! - down the drain.
   Does that ant's best friend miss it when it doesn't come back from foraging? Do the others organize search parties? Have I unwittingly become the ant Bermuda Triangle? Do ant conspiracy theorists believe aliens are spiriting their brethren away when in fact it's just me trying to wash off the day's grime? These are the thoughts that keep me awake sometimes.
   Mostly, though I wonder what ants must think of my junk. I mean, really, my wiener has to be immense to them. Truly gargantuan on a scale that's like nothing they've ever seen. Maybe that's it... they've come to pay their respects. Like a cargo cult. For my penis. Sure, let's go with that.

Judgement Day

This my 666th post to this blog. Really. I don't feel particularly evil but I must be since this is my 666th post. There you are, some nice circular logic to start off with.
   You know we just had a judgement day come and go with nary a person raptured up into the sky. But there's another one coming - they assure us it's for reals this time - in October, just a few months away. Which got me to thinking: do I really want to chance going to meet my maker without being absolved of my sins? I've got a skeleton or two in my closet that might just keep me from being raptured, assuming they check that sort of thing. I better come clean. I'm not Catholic but I do approve of the sacrament of confession, it keeps you honest.

So in honor of my 666th post, here are my confessions, in no particular order.

I'm not big-boned, I really am fat.
   I'm the one who threw the spit wad
I bought beer for minors in college. I actually made some decent walking-around money too.
   You know that thing, that one time, that you thought someone else did? I did it.
I never thought Gore Vidal's articles in Playboy were very good.
   I used to pee off the balcony of my apartment when it rained at night.
I don't care about the Spurs or the Cowboys. The latest plot twists of 90210 concern me more, and I don't even know what channel that show's on.
   I didn't take complete advantage of the opportunities that were presented to me in college. Like Mary Ellen - her real name - I could have totally hit that and I never did.*
I stole the office chair I'm sitting in right now.
   I think most newborns are ugly. Except my nieces and nephew, of course.
I was cruel to Dave when he needed kindness. But he was a real dick so it's actually not that bad.
   I didn't like M*A*S*H without Frank Burns. Just didn't work.
As a font, Garamond doesn't do it for me.
   Pussy Galore? Who names their kid... oooohhh... I just got it...


* words of advice given to me by a wise Okie friend of mine: 'Every piece of tail you turn down puts you one behind for the rest of your life.'

Tales From My Past - What's French For Asshole?

There was this guy in my college, I don't want to use his real name but if you want to call him Zach then that would be fine by me. He was rich, privileged, clueless and rude. Plus he thought he was funny but actually wasn't, which in a college full of smarty-pants overachievers isn't something you want to aspire to. He was also loud, and had that young-man's habit of bellowing the first thing that popped into his tiny brain, especially if that thing was unkind or abusive.
   Zach was not well-liked, is what I'm trying to convey here.
   Sure, he had a few people who tolerated him and allowed him to hang out, but as the semester wore on you could see people avoiding him in the lunch room, having somewhere else to be on Friday when he showed up at a party, conveniently remembering missed study opportunities when he wanted to get a hack going.* It almost made me sad for him, but then he was a total dick so I didn't mind him being left out of stuff.
   My friend Ben spent a calendar year in Paris, so when he came back for his last two semesters one of his friends from Paris came to visit. And she was a girl. Yup, a young, attractive, Parisian nurse came to Sherman, Texas to visit Ben. Way to go, man.
   Anyhoo, Zach decided he like Claudette - really her name, I swear - and tried to talk to her. She spoke English better than he did, but he tried to be clever with French-ifying English words, which Claudette did not find endearing in the least. She endured him with a polite nod and pretended not to understand him so he would go away. Which he did.
   My friend Rene asked her 'What's French for redneck?'
   And I asked 'What's French for asshole?'
   Claudette mentioned that he seemed like a very lonely, sad person, an insight that hadn't escaped me, but when she said it I felt like I should at least pretend to care. And Zach continued to be a colossal tool.
   Fast forward to Spring semester. Zach had started binge drinking - as many college students did and still do - but, because he was such a conflicted mess he binged like he was trying to set a record. Even had a minor intervention that did no good.
   One Friday his frat and a sorority started having a water balloon war. This action escalated and moved off the frat house grounds to the local convenience store then to the local highway, 75.
   I was with my roommate in his truck waiting for a stoplight to change when Zach and his buddies pulled up and started lobbing balloons at sorority chicks in another car. The light changed, we drove on, and Mark said, prophetically, 'someone's gonna get creamed if they keep that up.'
   Not five minutes later Mark and I were long gone, he blew the yellow to get away from them and Mark never disobeyed traffic laws, but the water balloon fight continued at the next stop light. Zach, three sheets to the wind, ran out into traffic and got creamed but good. Really. He ran from the left-turn lane into Southbound traffic, where some poor young mother plowed into him at sixty miles an hour. He got busted up bad, his pelvis was crushed, both legs with multiple compound fractures, broken ribs and vertebrae, the whole nine yards. We were guessing that if he hadn't been completely drunk he'd probably have been killed.
   Fast forward to the next semester. Zach had been out of school and recovering for something like seven months. He came back to school with a cane and a limp and a slightly lopsided smile. We were thinking that perhaps his waltz with the Grim Reaper would have taught him some grace and humility.
   He was still a dick, the only difference was the cane.
   The moral of this story? People aren't going to change unless they're good and ready. And an asshole is always going to be an asshole.



* kids, I'm talking about hacky sack, which ranks up there with drum circle on the stoner hit parade of time wasters whilst coming down from the buzz of some righteous bud

Analyze This

I woke up from a dream last night and I wrote it down, which I used to do a lot but got out of the habit of. This one was odd enough that I think I need some help. I don't know if the imagery means anything or if it means nothing.
   I wrote this in the dark, half-asleep, so there is a section where I couldn't decipher my handwriting. Make up your own words to go in there, like a Mad Lib.

I was in Monument Valley, where Krazy Kat was set, and where John Ford did a lot of his westerns, with all the sandstone bluffs and wind-carved rock formations. Everything was red and ochre, like the sun was setting. I sat alone by a campfire, roasting marshmallows.
   Pretty tame so far. Could be right out of a Travel Channel show. Then the kangaroo showed up. He was a normal kangaroo except for the boxing gloves and monocle. Well, he talked too. For some reason he wanted my marshmallow and I wouldn't give it to him or share the rest of the bag. So he threatened me and said he'd be back with friends.
   So I packed up what little I had and got into my Volkswagen Microbus and made my escape. The bus was littered with fast food wrappers, piled feet deep from front to back, which whipped out the windows as I fled the kangaroo.
   Then I was in a city, for some reason I thought it was Philadelphia even though I've never been to Philadelphia. I parked the Microbus in front of a ballet studio and ran inside, convinced the kangaroo was in hot pursuit.
   I gave a little kid my marshmallow on a stick, but then realized the kangaroo would probably hurt him so I took it back. Which made the little kid cry. His mother came out of ballet class and started yelling at me. So I ran from her.
   Then it gets weird. Instead of Philadephia I was in Rome, where I have been before, except this was future-Rome, with moving sidewalks and Jetsons cars. I ran through St. Peter's Square where people were playing soccer. I interrupted the game and deflated the soccer ball somehow, which made them all run after me.
   An old man hid me from the mob, which included the ballet mom and the kangaroo. He told me he was Leonardo and that he was immortal (this I probably got from Star Trek) and needed my help to...
   [this is the part I can't read, I think it says 'steal' scribble scribble scribble, although 'steal' could be 'strike' or 'stomp' or something. All I know is the word starts with an 's']
   He said his secret lab was in Monument Valley, and I told him I was just there. He asked if I was the one who left the campfire going and burned everything down.
   Then I woke up.

Not the most surreal dream I've ever had, but I didn't much care for the threatening kangaroo for some reason. And, being an Eagle Scout the part where I left the campfire going doesn't please me either. The most disturbing part, though, was the Volkswagen Microbus; I'm no hippy, dammit, I would never drive one of those, and I don't eat in my cars, let alone leave fast food wrappers everywhere like a big fat slob.
   What does it all mean? I need some help here.

Conversation With No Words

I was out on the road today, in a residential area with speed bumps and lots of lights. Which meant we were going slowly, even though there wasn't a whole lot of traffic. I was coming down a really long, straight street - Lake Avenue, if you must know - and I glanced in my rear-view where I saw a woman, probably my age or a little younger, gesturing and talking. She had a determined look on her face, like she was really trying to get her point across but wasn't sure it was working. On the passenger side sat a kid, no more than fourteen I'm guessing, who had his chin to his chest and was glaring sullenly out the window, away from his mother. He didn't say a word the entire time they were behind me, he just stared out the window as his mother talked and lectured and pleaded and threatened.
   It was like watching Spanish language TV with the sound turned off. I might not have gotten the specifics, but the broad strokes of the conversation came through loud and clear. The poor kid was screwing up, probably in the same way over and over and over, and his poor mother was at the end of her rope with him. It could have been anything, schoolwork, drugs, maybe even not picking up his socks from the living room floor, but his mother had enough and was putting a stop to it.
   Been there. I recall enduring a twenty minute car ride with my mother lecturing me non-stop the whole way. I don't remember what I did - probably something stupid and dangerous that would likely have gotten me injured or killed if I wasn't so clueless - but the ride back was absolutely not worth whatever I'd done to get in trouble. Agony.
   Funny thing is, not only have I been on the receiving end of this talking-to, I have witnessed the same scene played out many times, in many countries. I've seen it with little kids in Japan, with uniformed schoolboys in England, with tour groups in the Vatican, in the market in Germany, and in Rundle Mall in Adelaide. It's universal. The mother talks, making her point with gestures and a firm declaration that she's not going to tolerate that behavior any longer, and the mortified child looks anywhere but at her, though usually at the ground or out a window.
   It's amazing to me how universal this is. I'm certain little Roman children got the same talking-to from their matres, and little ancient Greek kids who got a dressing down in the agora stared at the boundary stones wondering when she was ever going to stop talking.
   So ladies, don't worry about turning into your mothers, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. It's gonna happen, it happens to everyone.
   And, if it's any consolation, you're not turning into your mother, you're turning into your mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother.

The Spirit Of LA

Midway through life's journey I found myself in a dark alley, for I had forgotten which parking lot held my vehicle.
   In Hollywood was I, after midnight, when the freaks emerge to do their freakish things and honest citizens flee to their homes. Certain that I had parked down a side street I ventured thence, only to discover by my twistings and turnings that the clear path eluded me. Vile odors of body fluids assailed mine nose as the alley I traversed had clearly been used as toilet, vomitorium, and bordello. Perhaps all at the same time.
   I spied a junkie, strung out as was his wont, bracing himself against the wall, his clothes and demeanor two weeks unwashed. Hard upon that a pimp did swagger forth, ostrich-plumed cap large and emerald, and behind him staggered his soiled dove, no doubt looking to sell her favors for the promise of silver.
   Turning to make my escape I encountered a shadow, the odd form of a person where I had just passed, though I had seen him not before. 'O apparition,' said I, 'if you be friend aid me now, and if you be foe please show mercy.'
   He(?) emerged into the street light, slender to the point of emaciation, clad in patent leather rainment that in other circumstances might have been part of a gimp outfit. Work boots he(?) wore, scuffed and worn, and a Raiders jacket, with a cap turned sideways. His(?) face might have been from the Orient, or perhaps a swarthy inhabitant from below the equator, but had been so extensively altered by surgeons that his(?) origin could not be determined, nor could his gender. He(?) gestured behind himself to a food truck I had not seen before.
   'I have come to guide you through this inferno,' he(?) said, and even his voice sounded genderless, 'though too late I cannot tarry, for I have an audition in the morning.'
   Behind me the pimp approached, smacking his bitch upside the head. Behind them the junkie stood upright, his eyes now full of chemical fury. I turned to the genderless abomination before me, choosing the lesser of two evils.
   'Let us be gone to yon food truck,' said I, hurrying towards him(?). 'Of many questions I have let this be the first: what manner of being are you?'
   'The Spirit of Los Angeles am I,' he(?) said, bowing as if he were on stage. 'It is appointed to me that I be your guide out of this abyss. Mine own reality show shall be my reward.'
   'Let us make haste, then,' said I, leaping into the food truck. 'Does this conveyance vend tacos?'

Teddy Roosevelt Walks Into A Bar

Hey, there, pal, what'll it be?
   I would prefer, my good man, something with a bit of vigor to it. Something strong yet uplifting.
Hmm… I'm thinking vodka and Red Bull.
   Bully?
No, Red Bull. Mix it with vodka and it'll get you coming and going.
   Then set one up, my friend, post haste.
Coming right up. Nice smile, by the way. Not a whole lot of grinning going on here usually.
   I've just had a constitutional, I'm feeling strong and vital.
I'm Harvey.
   Well met, Harvey, I'm Theodore.
Good to meet you. You look familiar, where have I seen you before?
   I've had many jobs indeed, held many positions. I was New York Police Commissioner.
That's not it.
   Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
Nope.
   Well, I was President.
I don't pay much attention to politics.
   I'm on Mt. Rushmore. The one on the far right.
There you go. I knew you looked familiar.
   Always with the Mt. Rushmore. I accomplished so much in my life, and to be remembered for that...
Well, that ain't bad.
    I established the first national parks, my good man. Surely that bears remembering. I led the charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American War. I boxed and fought and hunted and read voraciously and tried to be the best man I knew how.
I am impressed.
   I busted trusts, dear sir. I took on the giants of corporate greed and brought them low with only a big stick.
We could use a little of that now. Lots of corporate greed these days.
   Indeed. One wonders why the politicians of this day do not use the tools of my day to combat these 'too big to fail' behemoths. We called it the 'Sherman Anti-Trust Act.'
You don't say.
   I do, I do. Using that law I busted trusts right and left. You ever hear of Standard Oil?
Can't say as I have.
   Of course you haven't. I broke them up. Too big to fail my Knickerbocker ass...
So this law is still on the books?
   Absolutely.
Why don't we use it against these huge banks and financial institutions?
   Your guess is as good as mine, friend. How about that drink?
Here you go. On the house.
   Bully!

It's The Little Things

In case you haven't heard, I'm working now. It's a three-month gig, which if you're new explains the countdown at the bottom of this post. Now that I have money coming in again I'm starting to loosen the purse strings just the tiniest bit. No big extravagances ('cept maybe the book case, but that's an investment), I'm mostly just paying more on my regular bills. But there is one thing I'm looking forward to spending some hard-earned dough on.
   I'm gettin' me some new undies.
   My trusty old ones have been getting me by for a year now, and while they're holding up, I can't fight entropy forever. Underwear is a depreciating asset, after all.
   If you've been following me since the beginning you may remember that underwear is the deciding factor on when I do laundry, so I do keep track of my stockpile pretty closely. And, sure as a Wall Street Broker is cheating on his taxes, they're wearing out. My 'good' ones are becoming 'acceptable' and more of my 'acceptable' are edging towards 'workout.' And several in the 'workout' category are one good skid mark away from 'emergency.'
   So the next time Macy's has a sale - like, what? every weekend? - I'm going to walk in with my head held high, my credit card in hand, and say "A three-pack of your finest Jockey, my good man. I'm in the mood for a splurge."


COMMUTE - there - 35 minutes      back - 50 minutes to get to Burbank. You read that right, traffic was insane in the membrane today. I blame the Lakers.
CONTRACT COUNTDOWN: 20-something days, I'm losing track...

Just In Case Something Happens...

It's getting weird around here. Okay, fine, weirder.
   Last night I had a terrible night's sleep, really miserable, and I even tried to go to bed early. Couldn't get to sleep, tossed and turned, watched the clock slowly tick over the minutes hour after hour. I haven't had a night this bad since... since I had a regular job, I suppose.
   So this morning I went to the gym, only to find it empty. Literally. There were three people in a space where usually there are at least fifteen or twenty, with more coming in all the time. It was a ghost town. I talked to one of the trainers who said that three of his clients this morning all had a terrible night last night, couldn't get to sleep just like me. When I left the gym there were still fewer than half the people there who usually are.
   Now the absenteeism could be explained by St. Patrick's Day yesterday - possibly. It could be that every single person who usually gets to the gym at 7 AM was sleeping off too many green beers. Could be. But to have so many people who had trouble sleeping? We're moving beyond coincidence.
    Now I've put it out there, something weird is going on in Pasadena. If you don't hear from me, send in the rescue dogs.

Am I Being Punk'd?

I know that I complain about my impending old-man-ness, what with my attendance at local city district meetings and my worry about water quality and Pasadena's revision of its General Plan. But I thought I was delicately treading the path, not charging towards cranky old man status like a little kid running for the ice cream truck. (They still have ice cream trucks, right?) I got a piece of news today that makes me realize I am now officially The Man.
   One of my friends is running for US Congress.
   Seriously, one of the guys I worked with at the OG, a guy I played basketball with, a guy whose bachelor party and subsequent wedding I attended - a couple of good stories there, trust me - has tossed his hat into the ring to become a Congressman. The primary is tomorrow, March 2nd.
   It's good for him, he's one of the few people who decide to try to make a difference instead of just complaining about things like some nimrod with a blog. But it's bad for me, because now I realize I should be part of the solution, rather than just pointing out the problems. And that's kind of a drag, honestly. It's much easier to be like Statler and Waldorf, sitting up in the balcony heckling than being like Fozzie, down on stage tap-dancing to save my life.
   I'll keep you posted on what happens. With my luck this will be just the first step and Chuck will be running for office come November.

A Few Suggestions

I was carrying groceries in the other day, climbing the stairs because the elevator STILL isn't fixed yet, and I realized that two hands is sometimes not enough to get the job done. I thought it would be pretty useful to have either another set of arms - four total - or a prehensile tail. I couldn't decide between the two, because two more arms would be really handy in a fight, but with a prehensile tail I could hang from things like a monkey. Or a possum, whatever.
   That got me thinking about what I would do to improve the function of the human body. It's great the way it is, but, really, it could stand an upgrade.

Another opposable thumb on each hand. This would make sure you didn't drop a hammer onto your toe, for instance, and would make for some really interesting musical instruments.

Removable skin. I know, it sloughs off and renews itself now, but every so often don't you just want to tear it off and start over again?

Directional ears, like a cat's. When commercials on the TV are too loud and you can't find the remote, you could just flip your ears back and reduce the volume.

Elbows that could bend the other way. Right now our elbows are limited to less than 180 degrees of movement. Think of the torque you could get on a baseball if your elbows bent down a few more degrees.

Eyes that can see in the dark. Think about it, no more stumbling over shoes and clothes on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. You'd need another eyelid or something to make it dark enough to sleep.

Half your brain turns off at a time. Like dolphins, who let half their brains sleep while the other half keeps on going. Think of what you could get done if you were mostly awake all the time. Of course this would be bad for the mattress companies.

Bent Time

Here's something that's bothered me for a while, not in the 'keep you up at night' kind of way, but in the 'stub your toe' kind of way. That's the kind of bothered where you don't really notice it until you think about it, and then it bothers you constantly for a little while then goes away. And then you'll think about it again and it'll get you stirred up all over again.
   Why hasn't anyone explained to me the 'bent time' part of bent spacetime?
   Spacetime is the prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that gravity is a byproduct of massive objects bending spacetime. All of the examples I've ever read about or seen on TV discuss gravitational lensing, either from galaxies or our own sun, and as far as I can tell these examples only show bent space. That is, you can see multiples of the same star appearing multiple times around a distant galaxy (lensing), or you can see how our sun bends the light from stars behind it, making them appear to change positions in the sky. On TV shows they always roll a ball across a net to show the reticulated distortions in the square grid, using that as an analogy of the sun making a dent in spacetime that the earth has fallen into. Space.
   But what about bent time? I never hear explanations of how time is also bent.
   If massive objects can bend light in space, and if spacetime is the combination of 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, then shouldn't a bend in spacetime not only affect position (x, y, and z axes), but shouldn't it also affect time? And what does that mean? If our sun distorts the apparent position of a star behind it, then does that mean we see that light before or after we otherwise would if the sun weren't there? And what are the implications for that? We already know using atomic clocks that relativistic effects are measurable for human beings, how does bent time affect us?
   I don't have any answers on this one, only questions. I think physicists are short-changing us when they explain general relativity if they leave bent time out of 'bent spacetime.'
   This is the long way around to saying 'I want my time machine, you bastards.'

Where's My Giant Pineapple?

When I moved out to Pasadena a few years ago, I expected several things. Warmer winters, for one, which I got. A few celebrity sightings, which I got. An earthquake or two, which I got. And I expected to see lots of buildings in the shape of food. This one I did not get, and I'm still kind of miffed.
   When you think about Los Angeles you think about buildings shaped like food. You also think about rampant police corruption, plastic surgery, and Ponch from CHiPs, but mostly you think of gargantuan food-shaped buildings. At least I did. But Los Angeles has lost its only cultural roots, the food-shaped buildings aren't here any more. They're all gone, the Brown Derby, Tail O' The Pup, that one shaped like a hamburger. The only one left is Randy's Donuts, and that's waaaay down by LAX, not a drive I'm willing to make, even for doughnuts.
   Without a big hat, or a huge milkshake, or a colossal apple every few blocks or so, Los Angeles lounges in the California sun like what it is, mile after mile of urban blight. Just like the allure of 'Hollywood' disguises the terrible truth of the entertainment business, LA needs the architectural distraction provided by a hot-dog-shaped building to keep people from noticing how desperately ugly the rest of the city actually is.
   And even though I'm picking on LA, most cities in the US are ugly too. Especially with the highway-adjacent sameness you find everywhere, Wal-Mart and Target and TGIFridays with Borders and Home Depot and vacant shells of Circuit City. Our highways are sad, homely conduits leading us to buy more things at an outlet mall just like the one thirty miles away. It's depressing. But we can fix it.
   We should all tell President Obama that even though he's working hard on other stuff, he needs to put forward the Food-Shaped Building Act of 2009. We need more buildings shaped like something else, and it's time we started demanding them.

The Hoff

I cannot believe I have let so much time go by - months, for God's sake - without paying tribute to the greatest actor/singer/sidekick to a talking car/entrepreneur of this or any century. I am speaking, of course, of David Hasselhoff.
   "But Don," you might say, "he's no Billy Mays." And indeed he isn't. But Billy, rest his soul, was no David Hasselhoff. Tall, dark, and almost handsome enough to turn a straight man gay, David Hasselhoff has, if nothing else, proved the American dream. If you work hard enough and fight long enough, you too can earn the right to ogle chicks in bikinis and call it 'Executive Producing.'

Mr. Hasselhoff's Opus:
   The Young and the Restless - David appeared as Dr. Snapper Foster, in the mid 70's. He was stuck in soap opera hell (though it is a hell with regular paychecks for an actor) until 1982. That was when young Mr. Hasselhoff had his brush with destiny in the form of a black TransAm.
   Knight Rider - forget the silly secret-agency premise, if you boil this show down to its Aristotelian essence, it's cool. In order to fight crime, a guy gets a super-car that talks. It doesn't get cooler than that. Oh, wait a minute, it does get cooler. Much cooler. Read on.
   Baywatch - when I was sixteen, I could not have imagined a better premise on which to base a show. David Hasselhoff, as Mitch the lifeguard, leads a group of scantily-clad, large-breasted women in flotation exercises. It's great, and you only have to learn one plot:
   First Act - beach walking and girl-watching. Maybe some minor personal development.
Second Act - some kind of emergency which requires lady lifeguards to get wet. And it's usually cold.
   Third Act - this is the make-a-sandwich portion of the show. There's usually some kind of minor plot/personal crisis for the featured actor of the week to deal with. Minimal bikini time.
   Fourth Act - more bikini time, and another crisis resolution.
    America's Got Talent - yeah, it pretty much doesn't, and this show proves it. The Hoff is a great cheerleader, and he actually does know what he's doing. He was executive producer of Baywatch, remember.
   Greeting Cards - The Hoff has a line of greeting cards now. I know this because I bought one at Target a while back. I just can't find a good link to them.
   Drunk Eating a Burger - evidently The Hoff has a bit of a problem with The Liquor. His daughter videotaped him drunk off his ass trying to eat a burger.

Interesting Hoff Facts:
   - Germans actually do love David Hasselhoff, it's not just an urban legend. He has a huge career in Germany as a recording star.
   - most of the Baywatch ladies have appeared nude in Playboy. There's some kind of odd symbiosis going on between Hef and Hoff. One notable and regrettable exception: Jasmine Bleeth has not appeared nude anywhere.
   - because of its worldwide distribution, what many foreigners think of America comes from Baywatch. I suppose it could be worse, they could think it's like 'Facts of Life.'
   - The Hoff tweets. You can follow him, if you like: 'A caffeinated Hoff is a happy Hoff'