Rotating Pineapple

 I have it on good authority that guinea pigs think their owners are gigantic cuddly teddy bears. Here is a picture of my friend's guinea pig: Our friends at PETA - easily the world's most joyful organization - warn us that guinea pigs do not make good starter pets and that it is cruel to use them to teach kids responsibility. Here is how PETA answers the question Are Guinea Pigs easy to care for? "The short answer is no. It requires a lot of time, energy, and money to keep guinea pigs healthy, clean, and happy." However, my friend's guinea pigs seem to be happy and this is evidenced by all the pictures she posts of the guinea pigs eating vegetables and watching movies and reading books about Sarah Palin.  Guinea pigs are rodents. So are rabbits, which I like, and rats, which I do not like. Here is a picture of me with a rabbit: Here is likely what rabbits think of their owners: - Why is this dude putting me in a hat? I hate being in hats. Why are all those people...

The circumstances surrounding my first and only viewing of The Lion King were not happy. It was February of 1995 and I had just embarrassed myself by writing, producing, directing, and starring in the worst one-act-play known to man. When my unfortunate cast and I took our final bow that terrible evening, there wasn't even polite applause. The audience was stunned that they had sat through one hour of misogynistic garbage. I did not go home. I did not want to debrief with my family - to be told that "next year would be better" or that "it might be best if you refrained from this sort of thing again." Instead, I ran away. I slept in my car one night (nearly froze to death), stayed at friends' apartments some other nights, and saw a lot of movies. The reason why I saw a lot of movies was that on my birthday, I had received a $100 gift certificate for the movie theatre. This I exhausted during that terrible three-day stretch in the mid winter of the Year of Our...

 My niece, Sasha, was born on her parents fifth anniversary. I can't tell you for sure but I wonder if - when she was younger - she felt guilty that her arrival on planet Earth negated another celebration.  A friend of mine was born on Christmas Day. He used to insist his birthday be celebrated on Boxing Day; he didn't feel worthy to share the same birthday as the Lord.* I have no idea what happened to that old friend of mine and - now that I think about it - I have no idea how my niece and her parents made those two anniversaries co-exist. My niece is 20 now, old enough to know that you don't actually have to celebrate something on the actual day. By the time you've reached the two-century mark, you've celebrated enough holidays early and late to fill up an entire month. - Like my brother and my late best friend and my daughter, I was born in early January. This meant that early winter was a stressful time in our household. No sooner had my parents dealt with the h...

In one of my old notes of the day, I wrote that I still believed the same things I believed when I was a teenager. A colleague upbraided me for this, calling it irresponsible and stifling. Yes, and even the great Dale Carnegie confessed that he was constantly re-evaluating what he believed to be true. In How to Win Friends and Influence People , he says that about the only thing he still believes from his childhood are the multiplication tables. (He joked that he even wasn’t sure of that.) - I counted myself a Christian when I was a teenager and I count myself one today. Back then, I would have signed my name to the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed and I doubt a second has passed in the ensuing time when I would have revoked that signature. We recited the Apostles’ Creed every week at church and I remember my first Mass as an altar boy (I was eight) saying those words out loud with the rest of the congregation at St. Gerard’s. At the time, I also believed the following: ...

The difference between a hardboiled egg and a softboiled egg is about one minute. Cooking websites tell me that if I want a softboiled egg, I should boil it for eight minutes (no more, no less.) Hardboiled eggs can stay in the water for a minute longer. Hardboiled eggs are also known as eggs that are inedible. No one should eat hardboiled eggs except for Lieutenant Columbo. - The adjective ‘hardboiled’ can only modify two nouns. One of them is “eggs.” The other is “detective fiction.” Nothing else can be hardboiled. You can’t have hardboiled playing cards, dining room suites, ear wax, Bangles CDs, or mummified remains. It just doesn’t work. - Here is a book of hardboiled private eye stories that I bought from my friend, Charles Prepolec, back in the early 90s.     When I bought the book from him, I complained that there were no Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer stories in there. Mr. Prepolec told me that I should expand my horizons and read P.I. stories from the real...

  It is probably not a coincidence that North America’s three most beloved superheroes – Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man – came from broken families. In what is likely the most famous origin story of all time, young Bruce Wayne watched both of his parents get gunned down by a mugger somewhere in an alley in Gotham City. The family’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, later assumed guardianship of the boy, whose trauma eventually led to his transformation into Batman. Superman, whose birth name Kal-El, is an alien from the doomed planet, Krypton. His scientist parents placed their infant son in a rocket and sent it to Earth, where he was discovered by a kind Midwestern couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent, who took the baby in and raised him as their own. Even Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker, was an orphan being raised by his aunt and uncle after his own parents died in a plane crash. His Uncle Ben was later killed by a thief, leaving poor old Aunt May to raise Peter on her own. The mor...

 I have a space between my two front teeth. My grandfather had it and I inherited it from him. When I was younger, I had an opportunity to close the gap through the magic of orthodontics. I refused. I didn't want to wear braces for two years. I felt nerdy enough already, I didn't need a bunch of steel contributing to my nerdiness. When I decided I wanted to be an actor, I was told that the gap could prove disadvantageous. Film actors tend to have perfect teeth. Film actors tend to have perfect everything. Here is a list of famous people who have spaces between their teeth: - Madonna - David Letterman - Sandra Bernhardt - Willem Dafoe - Eddie Murphy - Anna Paquin - Elijah Wood Spaces didn't mess with them much. I'm in good company. - By the way, the formal name for having spaces between your teeth is diastema. Black people are more prone to this condition (Seal also has it) but I'm not sure why. Probably something to do with evolution.