Yesterday morning, three schools in Cave Creek, Arizona were locked-down when a student reported seeing Batman rush across the school's lawn and leap over a fence. The eyewitness described Batman as 6' 3" tall and probably male. I wonder if that height description included the bat-ears?

I'm sure that the lock-down was an appropriate response, because Batman has some terribly psychotic and lethal foes that could do some real harm to children. Though, to be fair, I think the Joker would probably take a lock-down situation as a challenge rather than a deterrent.

This situation was reported by the Associated Press and was spread widely throughout international news media, especially on the internet, which is populated 24 hours a day by the sort of geeks who think that is a great story. (AZfamily.com used the headline "Joker Pulls Batman Stunt," by far the most clever of all competition.) Now people who have no idea where Cave Creek is know that Batman was nearby on Valentine's Day. And where there's a Batman sighting, there's a mystery to be solved!

Cave Creek, by the way, is just north of Scottsdale/Phoenix and immediately west of Carefree, home of both the world's largest sundial and the world's largest kachina doll. (Calendar Man or Maxie Zeus on the loose, perhaps?) Giant props? Those are right up Batman's alley. Dick Sprang, legendary artist on the Batman comics in the 1940s and 1950s whose trademark illustrations commonly included giant props, retired to Prescott, Arizona in the 1970s. Prescott is less than two hours north of Carefree. Coincidence? Batman doesn't believe in them.

I hope that the Metropolitan Phoenix area police appreciated the help that they received from the Dark Knight Detective in whatever crime he was in town to prevent or solve. Clearly they are towing the same official line as the Gotham police, denying that Batman was even present. According to the AP, Scottsdale Police Sergeant Mark Clark (if that is his real name!) said, "it's just one of those interesting little stories that we looked into, but we couldn't find anyone." Of course they couldn't find anyone: it's the Batman!

It is worth noting that the school district involved has issued a statement in which they proclaim that the sighting was "the result of a false reporting by a student." The student remains unnamed, and the police decline to comment on whether the student will be disciplined. The perfect cover for a stray Batman sighting!

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So this is Christmas? I must say that this Christmas was probably more enjoyable than recent years past. No one argued. No one threw punches or food. No one stormed out and drove home. (Though my father is sleeping in his car tonight. But it's just out of appreciation for tradition.)

The lack of friction around the table this year made me realize that I often hear people talk about their dysfunctional families' holidays, but I never hear anyone talk about their functional families' holidays. I think it's about time that the June Cleavers and Donna Reeds of the world speak up. Is Nixon's "silent majority" too busy enjoying the holiday season with their sweater vests and sober relatives to tell the rest of us that we're screwed up? Or are they just smart enough to lay low, lest they find themselves co-starring on a very special holiday edition of Cops with my father?

I even enjoyed a better than average gifting this year. The only thing I asked for was socks, but in addition to the socks, I also received 12 pairs of underwear and a fog machine. Wowee! I'd say it was "like Christmas," except for the fact that it actually was Christmas. In this case, my extensive mental inventory of useful sarcastic cliches has let me down, leaving me grasping for words with which to describe the event. (Sarcasm just can't be used to describe satisfaction.)

The 12 pairs of underwear made me wonder about why we call them "pairs" of underwear. A quick internet search reveals that back in the day, only nobility wore anything over the coverings of their genitals, so there was technically no such thing as "underwear" until the last few centuries. (Unless, of course, you were hanging out in a royal court wearing a codpiece or tunic.) Modern legged outerwear evolved from two, unattached leggings (a pair of hose, to be precise) to become the single garment that we now call "a pair of pants." As I understand it, the word "pants" evolved from the word "pantaloons," a type of legged, female underskirt garment designed to cover their highly coveted naughty bits. This would make "pairs of underwear" a vestigial etymological remnant of a bygone wardrobe in our lexicon.

Note that since "pants" originated as a type of underwear, modern outerwear "pants" should properly be referred to as "trousers" since "pants" is specifically derivative of a type of undergarment and "trousers" are outerwear for the legs. This appears to be yet another difference in American and British English languages. They get it right, whereas we American's don't care what you call it so long as you can't see our legs.

It turns out that "men's cotton briefs," such as I received for Christmas, weren't even invented until the 1930s in Chicago, Illinois. Named for the 20th century male undergarment called a "jockstrap," they were designed and sold by a company which would later adopt their brand name as the company name: Jockey.

Now, all this thinking of underwear has reminded me of an editorial that I once wrote to the University of Georgia's student newspaper, The Red and Black. I took the opportunity to satirize the University community's overreaction to one editorial cartoon by criticizing another by my classmate Mack Williams (now an accomplished animator for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim program Frisky Dingo). What does this have to do with underwear, you ask? Simple: "culottes," a French underwear that appears to be a cross between a skirt and shorts. I quote from one of the many, many responses to my letter:

First we had someone decrying Williams' Feb. 26 cartoon as an insult to the soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima, when it should have been plainly obvious such an insult was not the cartoonist's intent. Now we've got someone with his culottes in a bunch over Williams' portrayal of poodles in a subsequent cartoon ("Poodles not often angry or mean dogs," Feb. 28). Poodles! Come down off the ledge, Stephens, and understand that the poodle in that cartoon was a symbol for something else -- the cartoon was not about poodles any more than it was about bulldogs or people with facial hair.

The full text can be read from the archives of The Red and Black online. The event played out in the editorial pages' "Mailbox" from February 28 through March 3, 2003. The highlight of the affair for me was this dialogue exchanged in the online feedback section:

I am stunned at how many people have been writing in about the initial poodle letter. I know Americans are supposed to be irony-free, but this is ridiculous. The letter was satirizing the Iwo Jima complaints. Come on, people, show that you deserve to be at college.

Which received the following response:

He wasn't satirizing anything, it was written by a mixed up old secretary who has his priorities all mixed up. Not everyone is as clever as you think they are.

Now THAT is satisfying journalism.

Hmm. I seem to be rambling. It must be the effects of too much cranberry sauce, Hershey's Christmas Kisses, sweet tea, pound cake, Coca-Cola, and Klondike Bars. I suppose the point of all of this rambling is that I associate 17th century women's underwear with poodles. (But I don't endorse putting poodles into women's underwear. That's just weird.)

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This weekend I was thinking about how pleased I am that baseball season is over because it means that after several months of self-imposed exile, I can listen to Atlanta's 96 Rock radio station again. During the season, 96 Rock - Atlanta's oldest FM station, number 96.1 on your analog radio dial - forgoes classic rock 'n roll for Atlanta Braves coverage. It sucks to tune the radio in hoping for AC/DC or Tom Petty and hearing Skip Caray lamenting weak batting instead.

I suppose it's a trade-off for the Clear Voice >shudder< owned radio station: losing the listening audience like me that tunes out because we're not hearing music versus the increase in listeners due to the broadcast of a baseball game. But who even pays attention to baseball anymore?

Television ratings for baseball games have been gradually declining for decades. Major League Baseball frequently points out that revenue is up and allowing for inflation, ticket prices have remained relatively consistent over the past half-century. This really means that revenues aren't so much up, they're just much larger numbers thanks to that same inflation. So baseball revenue has been largely stagnant for years, indicating an overall decrease in interest among a growing American population. America's Pastime? More like America's Past Time.

I'm pretty sure that radio ratings are falling across the board as people are given more options in the home, office, and car. (I looked at the internet in an attempt to verify this, but all I could find were sites maintained by radio advertisers such as the Radio Advertising Bureau, and they are the last group of people who would willingly confirm this.) I'm not surprised that broadcasting baseball games may provide a shot in the arm for declining ratings in an industry besieged by the variety of popular entertainment. However, I would think that weakening your listening base by bisecting your listenership into summer sports fans and winter rockers would only damage your all-too-important brand loyalty.

So give it up, 96 Rock, and give me America's other dying amusement: rock and roll.

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Everything that I've thought about posting to the blog in the past few days has essentially amounted to little more than me whining about nothing important. (Not football or comic books; those ARE important.)

But I didn't want to do that. I don't want this blog to be nothing but me bitching about the same old things. (My brother has already chastized me for that once. I'm not giving him a second opportunity, that bastard.) So instead of a pointless blog entry about how much I hate something, I present to you, my adoring public, the most enjoyable game I've ever found on the internet: Whizzball.

Sure, it's at Discovery Kids, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. And just because it's been there for years doesn't mean that it's any less enjoyable. It's a good, simple time-waster; the sort of game that consoles used to provide but have abandoned in search of the next over-produced, under-developed, button-mashing, blockbuster movie-length presentation of T&A and boring-ass gameplay. >shakes fist at sky, yelling "Khaaan!"<

And for those of you who like your games a little deeper, I'll give you a bonus: The Battle for Wesnoth. This open-source, turn-based strategy fantasy game. You can't go wrong with that. It's fund to play, and it's a real challenge as well.

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Football season approaches rapidly. One of the best parts of the NFL season (and there are many, many highlights of the NFL season every season) is the Tuesday Morning Quarterback (TMQ for short) column written by Gregg Easterbrook. I was caught by surprise this week when I discovered that TMQ was returning to Page 2 on ESPN.com this year after several years at NFL.com. Apparently this switch was announced way back in April and I didn't notice it. The season hasn't even started yet and I've already almost fumbled the ball!

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I just realized that I've wasted my entire afternoon (the last few hours, anyway) looking at pics of abandoned amusement parks on the internet. I can't help it. I know I've mentioned it before, but I'm just fascinated by scenes of manmade structures overcome by nature. Best of all are the fallen amusement parks: titans of technology devoted to staving off mankind's worst enemy -- boredom -- left fallow and destroyed by sun, wind, water, and time. If these haunted steel and concrete skeletons are discovered by future archaeologists, what conclusions will they draw about their ancestors?

See the ruins of Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio. Wander through abandoned Dogpatch USA in Arkansas. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, visit the orient to see the remains of "waste recreational area T" or "Nominal Koka family land" in Japan, the home of the decaying theme park.

>sigh< It's like poetry for the eye.

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I was complaining the other day about the preponderance of Crime Investigation shows on television. It seems that every other primetime TV show is about how to solve a crime or how to get into the mind of a killer. CSI (pick a city), Law and Order (pick a subject), Criminal Minds, Navy NCIS, Bones, Numb3rs, Without a Trace... Clearly, America really craves this sort of show.

Despite my irritation, the "police drama" is nothing new to television. Dragnet is the grandfather of the genre on TV and deserves its accolades. However, Jack Webb was obsessed with realism and truth at the expense of entertainment value. Webb's Dragnet has more in common with today's "reality television" Cops than with any of the shows that I listed above.

Today's police dramas are more T. J. Hooker than Joe Friday. They play fast and loose with technology and procedure in order to craft a more dramatic storyline. Computers can run DNA tests in just under an hour, digital images can be focused to provide a crystal clear magnification, and putting yourself in the figurative shoes of a deranged killer, while stressful, always achieves a tidy solution. (So, turning our police into a group of coordinated, sadistic serial killers is a good thing, then?)

Granted, television is now and always has been about formula. People watch TV to relax and be entertained. Television shows with successful formulas are always predictable and therefore lucrative. (In time, even the innovative, creative shows like Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue, both very similar to begin with, probably because they had the same creators, develop predictable plot patterns.) And police cases are very formulaic by nature: a crime is committed, the police investigate, suspects are identified then culled, and the guilty party is finally determined based on evidence gathered. Anyone who can't turn that process into an hour long drama doesn't even need to be writing for USA Today.

My concern is not so much with the fact that modern TV has turned to so many make believe crime dramas. (TV has always been rife with fantasy police detectives on shows ranging from Burke's Law to Miami Vice.) What bothers me is that there are now so many of them on the air at once. Every night of the week there are hours of television devoted purely to police stories. In recent years, a police drama -- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation -- has ranked in Nielson as the #1 rated show of the year, something that a police drama has never done before in television history. Why does America suddenly want to see so much crime get solved? Is this another, prolonged reaction to 9/11? If we can't win the war in Iraq, at least we get to see some schlub go to jail on TV based on pubic hair evidence? >Ick.< Or is it something closer to home? As a generation grows up addicted to the internet and traditional socital mores are failing to take root in an impersonal environment, could our neighbors in fact be the very beasts that we see on the evening news raping our children and killing our grandparents? Quick, everyone, grab a pirchfork and bolt your doors! Save us, TV!

America, I propose a change. If it's escapism that you want, I say it is escapism that you should get. Let's abandon all of this pretend crime and turn back to the absurdist fiction of Fantasy Island of The Gong Show. Wait, I see that you're ahead of me. Thank you, television, for giving us Lost and American Idol (which actually suplanted CSI as the number one rated show last year). Now we can forget about all that crime and turn back to the things that are really important: celebrity couples.

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In the past few days I've spent many hours learning to solve a Rubik's Cube. (Don't have your own? Play with a virtual cube online. Thank you internet!) I'm not interested in solving for speed, but I would like to be able to pick a scrambled Cube up and solve it. I'm not quite there yet.

Will this make me any money? No. Will this make me a better person? No. Will this impress the ladies? Hell no. But it has certainly been more entertaining than watching the Olympics.

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I have to admit that I just don't understand America's fascination with midgets and monkeys.

Both are staples of comedy bits on TV from commercials to the Man Show. On the big screen Austin Power's Mini-Me became a cultural phenomenon not too far removed from Clyde in Any Which Way But Loose. (And yes, I know that Clyde, an orangutan which is a member of the ape family, is not actually a monkey. This is really a rant against dressing up primates in human clothing, so maybe I should have said "pygmies and primates" instead of "midgets and monkeys," but you get the general idea here.)

I believe that the reason that these two things are commonly considered humorous is because they are both (to different extents) miniature versions of the human form. Midgets are humans, small humans. Monkeys are hairy, small humanoids with tails. Notice that in both descriptions, the only common word is "small." That's right, to America, small equals fascinating. (Perhaps because we as a culture are now all so ridiculously large ourselves.)

Look at our obsession with iPods, Chihuahuas, cell phones, babies, and Tom Cruise. If a monkey reminds you of a small version of your office companions (which is exactly the point of a recent commercial for a internet job site), then you are likely to find the antics of the monkey funny as you project your office companions' activities and motivations onto the monkey's diminutive form. When Curious George falls into hijinks, we laugh. When Billy Bob Thornton gets into a shootout with Tony Cox in Bad Santa, we laugh. When Homer Simpson skips out on a robbery to watch the drive-in movie Hail to the Chimp, we laugh. (Though when Dunston Checks In comes on cable, we change the channel. We Americans are a fickle bunch.)

Perhaps it is because I don't much like people in the first place that I also don't much care for miniature versions of people. (Note to the Little People lobby: it's not that I'm a midget hater, I just don't find you particularly funny simply because you've got really stubby fingers.) I'm sure that I'm in the minority here, but I'm just damn tired of monkey jokes.

Oh, and happy thanksgiving. Can you guess what we talked about over our ham and potatoes this year? (That's right: a midget football league.)

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I was just searching Amazon.com for the movie Side Out (with C. Thomas Howell), and my search returned a listing for crotchless panties. (God bless the internet.) Which, naturally, got me thinking about crotchless panties. What exactly is the point of these things? It has all of the bulk of underwear and none of the function. (But what a breeze!) I like easy access, but why wear panties at all if they are simply going to have a big hole in them? When my underwear develops holes, I throw it away. I've always said that I think people look more appealing with some clothing on, but this is not at all what I had in mind.

Amusingly, under "Features," Amazon lists the following for the "String of Bubbles" crotchless panty:

• Surprise someone special
• Allows you to wear jewelry in places you never though about
• It feels amazing
• Fun to wear
• Adds spice to your life

Certainly, none of these "Features" answers any of my questions. But ladies, so long as you can have an excuse to wear more jewelry ("Ooh! Shiny!"), why not crotchless panties?

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