I don’t have a damn to write about. I think I might have writer’s block. Perhaps something sufficiently entertaining/horrifying will occur over the weekend. Until then, here’s a beach post from summer that’s been languishing in drafts for a few months.

Here’s the giant, Plexiglas Alfred E. Neuman statue that’s mounted on the roof of a carnival game. He use to have something in his hand—I think a shovel or an ax—but it’s long gone. I grew up on a steady diet of Mad Magazine and when I saw this for the first time I almost wept. Some little animals have thrown mud balls on his face. Bastards. It’s like spitting on the Mona Lisa.

This game causes a TONS of controversy every summer. Shoot the Guido. You rent a paintball rifle and shoot at some guy who runs around dressed like a Mafia don. There’s a large segment of the Italian/American community who deeply resent the term “Guido.” They feel it’s a derogatory racial term. Their argument is that this is no different than if the game was called Shoot the Kike or Shoot the Coon. I hate to sound like I don’t have a sense of humor but I see their point. I’m Italian and am not bothered by the term Guido, but they make a pretty convincing case, don’t you think?

Midway Steak is one of my favorite food kiosks. It’s got all the major beach food groups: cheese steaks, Italian sausages, burgers, cheese fries, etc., etc. Urp.

That afternoon, we were lucky enough to stumble across a performance by the fabulous rock-a-billy hellcats, The Razorbacks. Good Christ almighty, they’re great musicians. The guitarist/vocalist is astonishing. I honestly have no idea how anyone could NOT like rock-a-billy. They were playing one of the sports bars on the boardwalk. The music poured out onto the beach and I had to wander in for a listen.

Geeze, this post is making me miss summer a little bit. And it’s only October! I’m screwed!

This is my little corner of the medicine cabinet. If you share a bathroom with a wife + two daughters, it’s all you’re allocated. Take a look at the two bottles in the center. Can you tell which is the Murine ear drops and which is the Bausch & Lomb Advanced Eye Relief?

Of course you can’t. They’re identical. I suppose if you were to grab the eye drops and put them in your ear, it would only result in a squishy, ineffective cleaning. But if you were to accidentally grab the ear drops and put them in your eyes, as I did, you’d have a real problem on your hands.

We were in a hurry leaving for the neighborhood Halloween party. The kids were downstairs in their costumes, ready to go. I finished getting dressed and quickly—because starring at monitors day and night is starting to make my eyes throb constantly—I grabbed the eye drops, walked to the bedroom (I, being a multi-tasker) and popped a few in my eyes. Except it wasn’t the eye drops. It was the ear drops.

It burned. And burned. And burned. Tears started streaming down my face. I rushed to the sink and feverishly started to flush my eyes out with water. Meanwhile, everyone is getting quite impatient with me because they don’t want to be late to the festivities and I’m taking so long. I tried calling out for Mrs. Wife but the words were choked in my throat.

Eventually the burning subsided. I straightened up and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was soaked and where my eyes are normally white, it was red. I looked like a vampire after a good meal. Everything looked kind of wavy.

Why in God’s name would they make the bottles so similar? Obviously, I’m at fault, but manufactures should protect people like me from myself. When my vision cleared I read the warnings and, sure enough, it said to avoid contact with eyes and flush with water if you can’t manage to do that. At least I got the remedy part right.

Guess what, everyone? The October issue of the Undie Press, featuring my monthly column, Books You Cannot Read, just posted. This month, I give the business to Charles Bukowski.

And I’ll bet you thought it was going to be just another dull Saturday night, didn’t you?

Here are a few odds and ends that can’t stand on their own as a proper post but are too good to trash.

If you’re out for a lunchtime walkabout on a sunny day (as I was) and you head west on Spring Street, right where Soho blends into Chinatown, you might (as I did) be drawn to the sound of a table saw intermittently being turned on and off in short bursts. “A table saw outdoors in the middle of fashionable Soho?” you’ll ask yourself.

Follow the sound, and you’ll come across a Chinaman standing on the sidewalk next to some large canvas bags filled with coconuts and a table saw perched precariously on top of a metal garbage can. He’ll take a coconut out of the bag, saw the top off, drain the milk into a pail and stack the coconuts in a nice, neat pyramid.

I think I saw this in a dream sequence of a David Lynch film once except the coconuts were being decapitated by a midget. Walk around New York long enough and sooner or later you’ll stumble across something of this ilk.

I finally succumbed to worldwide societal pressure and read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 250 pages of back story and droll finance and then, out of nowhere, a terrible rape. I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I feel like I missed something. I have no plans to read the other two books.

I saw this in my grocer’s freezer:

That’s disgusting, right? I don’t want to see the words “chocolate” and “taco” in such close proximity to one another. True, you can’t beat a good mole sauce, but not on tacos for chrissakes!

Q: What do you call a man who wears a Bluetooth and takes calls while at the gym bench pressing about 175 pounds?

A: Nothing. You bite your tongue and keep your fucking mouth shut.

Tim and Nina Zagat are New York’s premier pretentious idiots. New Yorkers who are pretentious asswipes are so devoid of any self awareness that they don’t realize they sound like pretentious asswipes.

Every Sunday, the New York Times runs a short feature called Sunday Routine. In it, someone tells how they spend their Sunday. The subjects are always fabulously successful and their day usually involves a summer house or a tony restaurant where brunches are preceded by a long wait in line unless you know the owner, which they usually do.

Today’s Sunday Routine featured Tim and Nina Zagat, founders of the wildly successful Zagat restaurant and leisure guides. Basically, they get other people to rate restaurants for them and then publish the results without compensating any of the contributors. Clever. They were interviewed at their weekend getaway home.

It starts off innocently enough. Up at 7:00 to check e-mails and the weather. Then they begin to speak that special language that you only hear in certain segments of New York society.

She: “We have local farms that have eggs, and I like to get these just wonderful local eggs.”

He: “They taste better than any of the ones you get in a big store.”

Don’t you wish you didn’t have to buy your eggs in a big store?

He: “If she does breakfast for friends…there will be wonderful eggs. Wonderful muffins, local muffins.”

Her: “It’s lovely to be at home…to prepare things that are fresh and exciting.”

Are they for real with that wonderful crap? Have you ever eaten a wonderful muffin? Are you a shiny, happy person?* This is why some people hate New Yorkers and I can’t say I blame them. How would you like to be cornered in a party by these two? Given the choice, I’d rather listen to an ex-convict tell me his life story. It’d be a hell of a lot more interesting than these two wonderful dullards.

* I use to like REM’s Shiny Happy People until I heard Alice Cooper make fun of it in an interview. He said, “Are you a shiny, happy person? I’m not.” And he’s right! It sucks!

Best zinger from this past weekend’s batch of movie reviews. This, in reference to the preposterous sudden change from cad to caring father by the character played by Josh Duhamel in the apparently awful Life as We Know It starring the apparently insane Katherine Heigl.

Mr. Duhamel is so good-looking that female viewers may give his character the benefit of the doubt, simply out of wishful thinking.

Stephen Holden

Best zinger EVER from a move review. This, from A.O. Scott’s review of Mike Myers’ The Love Guru:

“The Love Guru” is downright anti-funny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.