Whenever people in LA tell me they’re going home, I say, “You go home every night.” Because, in Los Angeles, by “home” they usually mean that place they grew up, and it’s usually either on the East Coast (New York or New Jersey, most probably), or smack-dab in the middle of the country (Kansas, and so forth). I think that “home” is where you are now, and it’s best to get used to that notion as soon as you start living there.

Today someone texted me, relevant to a discussion we’d had earlier, to ask “What city did you grow up in?” I texted back:  “There wasn’t any city.” Which is true. While my wife grew up in “the city” — as I used to think of it as a boy, as in “please drive me into the city!”, that city being Egg Harbor City, population at the time 3200 — I grew up in a township. We had no city. I just checked, and Mullica Township has a population of 5,912 people scattered throughout its 56 acres. Which means it’s grown enormously since I left. For comparison, Burbank, California, my home since 1988, has 108,000 residents in 17.4 acres. Burbank has 6207 people per acre; when I was a boy, Mullica Township has about 53 people per acre. This is one reason why almost all my childhood friends were comic-book characters.

I didn’t text much more of that back. It seems beside the point. I grew up there; now I’m here. Recently I’ve been in San Francisco, Miami, and Las Vegas, and I’m soon to visit Washington DC and Baltimore. Two things that have been a constant in my life:  I’m still magnetically attracted to cities and to comic books. Anything to escape the woods.

I wonder what happens if you’re a Florida churchgoer and your only copy of the Koran is on your iPad.

The song “Two Reelers”  by Frank Black (aka Black Francis of The Pixies) features these lyrics, about The Three Stooges:

Most important was brother Moe
He was the one who made it so
He got a Joe and another Joe
He would not quit, he would not quit

When you listen  to the song, Black shouts this part with enthusiasm and wonderment:  “He would not quit — he WOULD NOT QUIT!” He sounds incredulous and admiring, which may be why it’s stuck in my head for almost 20 years.

I thought of that today when I read that Roger Ebert has found yet another way to keep his movie-review show on TV. Against all the odds — the failings of syndication, lackluster ratings, the death of his original co-host and a revolving door of hosts ever since, Disney pulling the plug, and his own inability to ever speak again — Mr. Ebert has resurrected this show yet again. Given everything he has battled and overcome, we should all sound incredulous and admiring.

The residents of Whisper Glen Court, Florida can sleep soundly again, now that local police have blown up a stuffed 5″ My Little Pony toy horse that somebody was just pretty darned sure had been rigged by terrorists to explode. Evidently someone saw things “hanging” from the horse, and that sparked the panic. The less alert among us might have wondered if they were toy stirrups, but in the age of all-fear, all-the-time, it’s best to assume that such things are wires leading to explosives.

The video is below. (If you can’t see it, click here to watch it directly on YouTube.)

I think the town council should make this book required reading.

How bad (and badly managed) is the California economy? So bad that the UCLA Anderson School of Management is preparing to give back about $18 million in state funding because they’d rather take their chances getting more donations and raising tuition than counting on the state to actually supply the money budgeted to them. Any time any institution says it would rather give back $18 million, you have to figure they’ve done the calculation and figured it just wasn’t worth taking.

As somebody who has sat on the local school district’s budget committee for two years, I get it. What the state promises to pay the schools is a guess at best and a crime at worst. It’s the equivalent of the classic parental response to a child’s request:  “maybe later.” I used to think that the schools in my state were over-funded. (And actually, that’s a suspicion I still harbor.) But one thing I’ve learned for sure:  they are erratically funded. Money promised in September arrives in, say, February, and it’s never the full amount. Once I got an up-close look at our district’s financials I discovered two things, the first being that the financial model made absolutely no sense. The second thing I learned was this:  that every year, for at least the past 13 years, our budget had been cut. Why do we suffer teacher layoffs,  class-size increases, broken playground pavement, reduced programs (a music teacher who comes in only once every two weeks; a gravely reduced Gifted and Talented Education program; fewer field trips; fewer counselors; and so forth) and more, when theoretically the schools are allocated 40% of the state’s revenues and the state had several very healthy years in that time frame? Partly it’s because the state “borrows” this money, with promises to pay it back later. Partly it’s because… I just don’t know.

A few of us around here have come up with our own solution, and it somewhat mirrors what the Anderson School is proposing. Although we have no intention of suggesting giving back $18 million in funding (if we could even get it), we proposed some ideas to bring in our own funding for our schools, funding that each school could control and allocate on its own.  Is that an ideal solution? No — imagine the impact on schools in poor neighborhoods if every school across the U.S. counted on local funding. But for Burbank it’s a good start, and it’s better than hoping that the state will get its act together. Because, as they say, hope is not a plan.

Whether or not it is one of the most difficult languages to learn, English is certainly complicated, even for native speakers. Case in point:  Today’s Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day, “cleave.” Your first thought may be that this word has to do with splitting things apart, as in “cleaver,” or as in split-toed, or “cloven,” hooves. When I hear the word “cleave,” I always think of the Bible, which is forever noting that wives should “cleave” to their husbands, or join with them. Yes, both are right:  to cleave is to split… or to join.

Before you revolt against the notion that the same word can have two opposite meanings, now would be a good time to recall what F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.“

I spent part of my day of doing essentially nothing (thank you, Grover Cleveland) rearranging the reading pile next to my bed. Why haven’t I yet bought Jonathan Franzen’s new novel even though I hunger and thirst for it? Because I’ve got this enormous reading pile to get through. I’m trying to read through it, not add to it. Which means that before I get to Franzen I should finish:

Non-fiction:

•  “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan
• “Poor People” by William T. Vollmann
• “The Third Reich in Power” by Richard J. Evans
• “The Fall of the Roman Empire” by Peter Heather
• “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” by Haruki Murakami (I’m almost finished with this one)
• “The Element” by Sir Ken Robinson (and with this one as well)

Business:

• “The Advertising Agency Business” by Eugene J. Hameroff (I’ve read this; I’m now rereading it)
• “Pricing with Confidence” by Reed K. Holden and Mark R. Burton (read this one too; now rereading it)
• “Priceless” by William Poundstone (almost finished)
• “Trust Agents” by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Comics and graphic novels:

• “Death: The Time of Your Life” by Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo, and Mark Buckingham
• “The New Jack Kirby Collector,” volume 31
• “Concrete: Depths,” by Paul Chadwick
• “The Playwright” by Eddie Campbell and Darren White
• a stack of about three dozen recent comics (S.H.I.E.L.D., Doc Savage, Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow, Jonah Hex, B.P.R.D., Secret Warriors, Hercules, Hellblazer, Unknown Soldier, Hulk, Doctor Strange, and a few other things)

Unsolicited plays

• In other words, plays given to me unrequested by friends who wrote them. (And no, please do not send me any.) I’ll read the top two because they’re friends I work with creatively and because fair is fair.

What’s missing? Two things:  magazines and novels. (Or short-story collections.) My rule of thumb with magazines is this:  Be devastatingly quick about it. Get it, read it, recycle it. It’s the only way to get through them. Why no novels? Because I’ve read all the ones that were in my queue. (Not my long-term queue — which consists of one book I think about often but haven’t gotten to yet:  “The Brothers Karamazov.”) I go through binges of reading either a lot of biographies/histories or a lot of novels; I recently ended one of those novel-reading binges. Hence my desire for the new Franzen, “Freedom.” No, I don’t plan to get it right now. But I am leaving for Las Vegas on Thursday…. Watch me pick it up at the airport.

It’s Labor Day weekend — and unfortunately, I’m here at my office laboring. It’s not what I planned on, but in the cosmic scheme of things (or at least the scheme of my life for probably the next year), it’s important. So my plan of “write, play, shop” is temporarily on hold.

Oh, I did shop, though. I just bought an online registration to traffic school to void a ticket I got in central California when I was pulled over because my car didn’t have a front license plate on it. Why didn’t I have a front license plate? Because BMWs don’t come with front license plate brackets or holes. You have to take the car to the dealer to get them drilled in.  Which seems like an oversight. Now I have a mounted front license plate — and eight hours of online traffic school.

And tonight I am doing some playing — of poker. My wife and I are having a group of what she calls “marks” over to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Tomorrow I hope to actually be writing my play. And playing “Oblivion” on the xBox; my character has sat idle for nine months and I’m starting to worry that the little towns and villages are getting overrun by demons unleashed from the other side.

Two last quick notes:

On Thursday night my friends Mark and Richard and I saw a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Last Exorcism.” It’s done in that cinema verite / documentary style that we’d all better become more accustomed to (because in the age of User Generated Content, and interactive content, that’s the look and feel that Millennials will  come to expect because everything must, somehow, adopt features of Facebook and/or YouTube). It’s cleverly written, acted, and directed; the lead reminded me very much of my good friend and favored actor Keith Sellon-Wright ten or 15 years ago, who, like this actor, is somehow able to be sincere and phony simultaneously; and the deceptively simple plot reveals itself, in retrospect, to be devilishly well contrived. And, somehow, it’s both scary and funny. I highly recommend it.

Coming out soon:  a movie somebody gave his right arm to see.

I’ve never liked Blockbuster, starting with their placing a ban on “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which caused me to place a ban on giving them any of my business for years. But then a few years ago I desperately wanted to see any one of three films — “Das Boot,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” or “Fitzcarraldo.” I called every Blockbuster around and not only did none of them stock any of these films, none of the clerks had heard of them. This was in Los Angeles, the movie capital of the world. So that night I signed up for Netflix. Netflix, and Red Box, and online streaming, and iTunes and piracy have all been killing Blockbuster and I have to admit to feeling a little frisson of schadenfreude about it.

But the advent of better technology (immediate delivery at a lower price) isn’t the only reason that Blockbuster is going out of business.

The other night I wanted to introduce my kids to the joys of “Alien,” that wonderful science fiction horror movie. This being a last-minute decision, and discovering that it wasn’t available as a “Watch It Now” via Netflix streaming, I impulsively swung into Blockbuster while driving by. Sure enough, they had the movie. Although there was absolutely no easy way to find it on the shelf (it seemed to be stocked between microwave popcorn and spiderwebs, and by the way, who would buy their microwave popcorn at Blockbuster, anyway?), the clerk located it and led me to the checkout. Whereupon I was staggered to learn that this rental was $5.49.

“$5.49?” I asked. It seemed to me that I could probably buy it for about $5.49. Did they think this was still 1990? I told him that it seemed pricey.

“Yeah,” he answered. “But it’s not due back until Thursday.” This was on Saturday night.

“Why would I need it until Thursday? I want to watch it, not worship it. Do you have one I can just buy?” Because now I thought, kids being kids, they’ll probably watch it over and over for years to come. And my wife, being similarly disposed, has repeatedly watched four movies, and only those four movies, in the past twenty years (and two of them were “Dune”). So it would get lots of viewing.

No, they didn’t have a sale copy. Just the rental. I figured what the heck, and rented it.

Half an hour later, my two kids and I were ready to watch it. Emma had her blanket all ready to cover her eyes during the scary parts, while Dietrich was  ready with his mask of grim defiance. (“It’s not going to scare me.”)  An hour into the movie — precisely when the little extraterrestrial bugger is bursting out of John Hurt’s chest — the movie froze. No matter what I tried — including slow fast forward, slow rewind, playing the director’s cut version, even blowing on the disk — it wouldn’t play. We were stuck with the turgid image of a bloody sharp-toothed alien phallus directed straight at our living room.

I called Blockbuster to ask if they had another copy. “No,” said the same guy who’d rented this one, “that’s our only copy.” Now I took a closer look at the case. It was so old and worn it looked like Abe Vigoda.

The next day I took the disk and the receipt back to Blockbuster. I told this clerk, a different one than the previous night, what had happened, including the salient fact that “we were an hour into the movie — right in the middle of the chest-bursting scene — and it froze. Which ruined the experience of watching the movie.” To which he replied:

“It’s an old disk. It happens.”

I know: I’m sentimental. I’m a relic of a bygone era, an era of the milkman and the 15-cent comic book and “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” Because here’s what I honestly thought I was going to get, at some point:  “Sorry.” Any variation of that would have sufficed. I didn’t want anything additional — not a special offer or a make-good or anything. Just a simple “sorry.” But he didn’t seem sorry. In fact, he barely seemed cognizant, like he’d spent too much time scoffing their supply of Milk Duds in the back room when no one was watching and was now weighed down physically and emotionally by all the plasticky chocolate he’d consumed.

He asked if I wanted store credit — guess what my response was — and then gave me back my money. Usually when a cashier hands me change, I say thank you. This time I waited to see if at any point this person was going to say “sorry” or “thank you” or anything at all that sounded customer-service-like. But no. Nothing.

So here’s the Blockbuster experience:

• high prices
• limited selection
• bad service
• products that don’t work

Wonder why they’re failing.

And by the way? We drove over to Best Buy and bought the “Alien” trilogy. All three disks, brand-spanking-new, for $19.99, or $6.66 each. The price may have been demonic, but the disk works and we get to own it for $1.17 more than Blockbuster wanted.

What I’m looking forward to when I’m on the east coast briefly next month:  Poker. Clams. Shooting. Cigars. Pinochle.

I have written to my brother-in-law to this effect so that he can plan accordingly.