Report: Nation’s Wealthy Cruelly Deprived Of True Meaning Of Christmas

My friend Mike Folie notified me that this is going on:

Clever Scam – taking advantage of older men, or any other men, as well

Women often receive warnings about protecting themselves at the mall and in dark parking lots, etc. This is the first warning I have seen for men. I wanted to pass it on in case you haven’t heard about it. This will only become more commonplace as the weather warms.

A ‘heads up’ for those men who may be regular Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Costco customers. This one caught me by surprise.

Over the last month I became a victim of a clever scam while out shopping. Simply going out to get supplies has turned out to be quite traumatic. Don’t be naive enough to think it couldn’t happen to you or your friends.

Here’s how the scam works:

Two seriously good-looking 20-something girls come over to your car as you are packing your shopping into the trunk. They both start wiping your windshield with a rag and Windex, with very suggestive, skimpy T-shirts. It is impossible not to look. When you thank them and offer them a tip, they say ‘No’ and instead ask you for a ride to McDonalds.

You agree and they get into the back seat. On the way, they start playfully undressing. Then one of them climbs over into the front seat and starts crawling all over you, while the other one steals your wallet. I had my wallet stolen October 4th, 9th, 10th, twice on the 15th, 17th, 20th and 29th. Also November 1st and 2nd, twice on the 3rd, three times last Monday and very likely again this upcoming weekend.

So tell your friends to be careful. What a horrible way to take advantage of older men.

Please Warn your friends to be vigilant.

Wal-Mart has wallets on sale for $2.99 each. I found cheaper ones for $1.99 at K- Mart and bought them out. Also, you never will get to eat at McDonalds. I’m looking into bulk orders at CostCo and will let you know what I find.

I  have looked everywhere for these girls so that I can admonish them in person, but no luck so far.

Still, I will be on the lookout and I appreciate being made aware of this scam.

In addition to being a place where one famous person who is the son of another famous person coincidentally attends the holiday party of a third famous person you admire, LA is also a place where everyone is a filmmaker, artist, comedian, weirdo, or combination of all four.

Some years ago  I was in London and trying to take the Tube from Piccadilly Circus to Kings Cross, where I was heading to see a play (my own) and was afraid I was going to be late.  The problem was the sudden crush of people trying to get on the underground right there. Even though each elevator car was capable of carrying dozens of people, I was still a good three-to-four elevator carloads back in the crowd. And then I would still have to take the train. So I decided to take the stairs down to the underground platform. Giddy with decisiveness, I threw open the door and skipped down the steps, other people pulling away from the crowd to follow me down.

An eternity later, still making my way down the steps, the giddiness had worn off long before. I now knew why this was one of what are called “deep line” stations. I don’t know how deep this stairwell went, but one area of descent on the Northern line is about 20 stories. Imagine yourself descending down an airless narrow circular passageway deep into the bowels of the earth with the crush of humanity behind you, in front of you, and to your left as a steady stream of people also tried to squeeze by on the way up, and then imagine winding down that path in such circumstances for about 45 minutes. When I wasn’t thinking of turning around, I was thinking of passing out. Ever since then, I’ve thought about how far we’ve dug into the earth, and what might happen in tunnels, especially under water.

And so, I have on occasion thought about the Chunnel — the underground byway that connects London with Paris.

Yesterday, 2000 passengers were stuck in trains in that tunnel beneath the channel with no water, no light, no power, no air conditioning, no food, and no escape — for 16 hours. The only thing missing from this scenario was sprinting zombies, as in “28 Days Later.” Here’s a horror story that will stay with me for a while.

Nineteen awful Nativity scenes.

Here’s another story of an innocent man, long-imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, now freed after DNA evidence has proved he couldn’t have committed. The man in question spent 35 years behind bars. At age 54, he finally is able to begin a normal adult life.

Imagine how much worse it would have been had the victim of the crime  been murdered — and this convicted innocent man had been executed. (As may have happened in Texas.)

It’s circumstances like these that over the years turned me from someone who favored the death penalty into someone who strenuously opposes it.

Today I was delighted to have lunch with the well-known photographer Harry Langdon. Go to his website and you’ll see that Harry has a long and legendary career as a celebrity photographer. He’s done sessions for people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Ronald Reagan, Stevie Nicks, B.B. King, and so forth. But when a mutual friend told me some months ago that her photographer was Harry Langdon, I said:

“Is he related to the Harry Langdon?”

She thought he was “the” Harry Langdon. But I was thinking of the great silent-film comedian often ranked with Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd:  Harry Langdon, the gifted clown who had run away to join the circus as a boy, became (briefly) one of the highest-paid stars of his era, wound down his career writing jokes for Laurel and Hardy (and, once, substituted for Laurel in an “& Hardy” film), and made a total of 96 films. That Harry Langdon.

She didn’t know. She’d never heard of that Harry Langdon.

A  few days later she emailed to say that yes, he was the son of that Harry Langdon, and would I like to have lunch with Harry Langdon, Jr?  So, today, there I was in Beverly Hills pulling mussels from their shells while discussing senior with Harry Langdon, Jr.   Lunch today was on a near par with the evening 15 years ago I spent in the company of Eleanor Keaton.   I may not care about what Tiger Woods or Lady Gaga are up to, but summoning the distant celebrity past of the silent comedy era is something I can get into.

We talked for a bit and Harry Langdon, Jr. said, “You do seem very well informed about my father.” I told him how much I love silent film comedy; how it represents a specific style of comedy that cannot be done since the introduction of sound; how I grew to love it when watching it as a small boy with my own father; how thrilled I was in college to learn of the connection between silent film comedy, vaudeville, theatre of the absurd, and existentialism (Beckett, who grew up admiring vaudevillians and clowns, based Didi and Gogo on Laurel & Hardy; Keaton’s deadpan comedy of menace is purely existential; Beckett made just one film — and it was with Keaton as the star); and how wonderful and funny an actor I thought his father was. Finally I let the subject wind down because I was afraid I was starting to come across as an obsessive. But then Harry told me where he was last night:

“I was a holiday party. At Stan Lee’s.”

“You were at Stan Lee’s holiday party?” I asked.

“You know him? He made a lot of money in comic books.”

Trying not to do a spit take, and worried again about how I was going to come off, I said, “Um… the other thing you should know about me is that I’m a huge, huge comic-book fan.”

And then that topic went on for at least several minutes.

I’m happy to report that my beloved dog Gem is not on her last legs.

The past couple of days, I’ve noticed her limping around the house. My wife and kids have noticed too. No one has been happy to see it. I called the vet all day yesterday  and despite an answering machine that said their hours on Friday were 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., no one ever answered, leaving me with a trembling dog and the worst imagined fears. The dog has been a part of the family since February 2000 and, in these parts, is famous for being my favorite member of the family. I like my whole family, but the opinion is that I like her even more.

This morning the vet’s office finally called my  cellphone and I sprang out of bed to answer, quickly dressed, and hurried the dog over. She was noticeably happy when I got her harness and leash, and delighted when I encouraged her to spring into the back of our van with my two younger kids: Generally, this means we’re going to an hours-long hike. You can imagine her canine response when I opened the back of the van a couple of miles distant and she found herself outside the building where many dogs go to die. She tried to run cowering in all four directions at once.

The vet looked her over and then decided to keep her for a while and run x-rays, and at 2:30 he reported that the x-rays showed nothing, but she had a small gouge on one paw. He gave her some shots and a painkiller and said that if the limping didn’t go away in 10 days, then it wasn’t the little gouge, it was early arthritis. All things considered, that didn’t seem so bad for a 12-year-old dog, especially when I had already envisioned all sorts of canine medical horrors. I drove back home, relieved, and I guess visibly so, because my wife gave me a hug and then decided to personally bathe the dog, which is not her forte.

Meanwhile, I ruminated on what the vet had said when I dropped off the dog as she stood there shaking and trembling and as I told him that she had been so eager to cavort around town the past two days but that I couldn’t bear the sight of her limping. His comment applied to her and seemed to presage my own future as well:  “The legs are weak,” he said, “but the head still wants to run.”

I just stumbled across the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, which offers a salute of sorts to my old stomping grounds. My Jersey Shore name comes up as:  The Sausage Party. How did they know?