A while back, our notorious Jack Russell, Rudy (http://twitter.com/Rudythejack), was injured and laid up in bad shape for several weeks. Here he is, back to his snarly self on Christmas Eve, with one of the many gifts from his friends. Rudy’s recovery is the best gift we could get.

Think about the gifts you got this year that will not fit in a box and came with no ribbon. Ours has four legs and is carrying around a rawhide bone the size of a “Shake Weight.”

Merry Christmas.

Saturday shoppers strut through Tyson’s Corner mall. Christmas is in two weeks. You can see the building stress in their faces. The line for Santa is long and coughing and features a juggling elf amid a gauntlet of snotty sleeves and yawning parents. On Santa’s knee, a full-grown man and woman straddle the jolly old codger as he pretends they don’t weight 230 pounds each. His cheeks are rosy more from hypertension than joy.

At the food court, across from the Cinnabon, sushi rides a conveyor belt beside people who can’t use chopsticks. Sushi and cinnamon rolls probably should not be for sale this close, but that’s just me.

Playing cards spin in the air between the magic hands of a guy who not only can spin a dime in mid air, he can throw down some spin that almost makes me want to buy the $50 magic trick in the cool box. Then I remember that I don’t really like magic all that much.

About 3 P.M., I am tired and thirsty and buy a strawberry lemonade chiller from a fast food joint across from a row of massage chairs. “$1 for 3 minutes.” That’s a cheap massage. I inspect the chair. Seems legit, very sturdy, nice leather, solid construction. I go with it. Besides, I could use 3 minutes of even cheap rubbing after walking for three hours, so I settle in and feed my buck through the slot. The chair comes to life, rollers gouging and prodding my aching back and shoulders. Pressure pads constrict around my calves. Just when I am caught in the chair’s full grasp, another movement starts up, and not in a place I want massaged while sitting in the middle of thousands of people as Taylor Swift’s “Santa Baby” echoes past L’Occitane en Provence, Build-A-Bear Workshop and Godiva.

At this point, let me say that I have sat in my share of massage chairs (mostly at Sharper Image and Brookstone). I have had several serious massages over the years by experts, some using their feet. So I have the massage thing down. I get it. This is not it.

As the rollers drop down into a relaxing lumbar motion, what feels like a pool ball attached to the end of a broom handle begins to ascend from the middle of the seat. It is a bit weird at first. When it does not stop rising, I get concerned. When it gets to full-on prostate exam mode, I panic. My strawberry lemonade ends up on the floor. But my legs are trapped. The pool ball digs in like Hell Boy is head-butting me in the ass.

Is this a joke? Is there a camera videoing this for MTV? I am on my elbows, up off the seat trying to wiggle out of the thing’s way. Finally it eases off and drops back into the seat and I jump up. What the hell? I look around and another guy is sitting down in the chair beside me. He shakes his head and feed in $10 for 30 minutes.

“Man, I could use this,” he grunts to no one in particular.

I back away from him and the chair, un-tucking my massage wedgie. If a dollar gets you 3 minutes of the pool-ball-in-the-back-pocket treatment, what will $10 get you for 30 minutes? I refuse to imagine it. Walking through the crowd I glance back. The man is gone. It hasn’t been two minutes. The chair is rocking and rolling like the sick machine George Clooney constructed in the movie “Burn After Reading.”

And I always thought the Christmas goose was served on a plate.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETSWLFWPhqQ

I do not own a suit, having left my last one in a restroom outside a Washington Post conference room. Long story. Bottom line: suits suck. That’s my point here. And I’ll prove it.

No man wears a suit because it makes him feel good. He wears it because he has to. No banker, no politician, no CEO wears a suit when they are at home, watching a football game. Suites are expensive, forced wardrobe, except for the one I bought for $100 up there in the first sentence, but it lasted less than a day and ended up crumpled in a toilet stall corner. Pizzas last longer.

You ever seen a man wear a tie to play golf? How about a family outing? You know why? No one ever had fun in a tie. And if you say you did, you are just lying to yourself.

Suits and ties are ridiculous holdovers from a past that required formality over competency. I’m not saying that you aren’t competent if you wear a suit. I’m saying that a suit won’t make you competent. And yet, many companies still require this ancient apparel, like Wall Street. And look where that got us.

Does Steve Jobs wear a suit? Does Zuckerberg wear one? Did Bill Gates wear one when he was building Microsoft into the biggest bankroll in the world? If given a choice, the president would not wear one either. His favorability ratings would rise if he just stopped wearing the damned thing.

Take all of those Republicans and Democrats out of those suits and suddenly they would be hanging out at B Dubs or playing beer pong and solving some real problems. They cannot get together and make anything good happen because those suits are choking off their intelligence.

I guarantee that Abe Lincoln did his best work wearing long johns with his feet propped up in the bedroom named after him in the White House. Remember what Nixon was wearing when he lied to us? Google it if you are too young. Look how much Clinton got done without a suit on, or pants for that matter. Almost every time George Bush said something stupid, he was wearing a suit, same for Joe Biden. Okay, there are exceptions. Even so, I would be willing to bet that 95% of the bad things that happen to people happen when they are wearing a suit – marriage, divorce, opera. Why do you think it is called a lawsuit, anyway? When a man dies, what do they make him wear? See what I mean? Suits are trouble.

People love casual Friday. When we want to get something done, we say, “Let’s loosen the tie and roll up our sleeves.” The inference is clear. Let’s lose the suit and tie. It might help us uncork the sticks from our collective and corporate asses and free us to be more productive. May as well get it started now. In the future, there will be no suits or ties. The one guy from both Star Wars and Star Trek that came close to wearing a suit was Darth Vader. And if that doesn’t convince you, this will:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbBs2OcR8a8

Every Saturday in the fall, we feel the need to identify with a football team and we’re either deliriously happy or ridiculously depressed, depending on the play of our team. The outcome changes our lives in no way, win or lose, but we still get all balled up about which mascot head Lee Corso will choose to wear. That is possibly the best definition of stupidity I have ever seen. And I am the worst offender. I act like the weekly performance of a bunch of kids in a state I haven’t lived in for 28 years really matters.

It’s not cheap either. Some Southerners buy giant RV’s and spend half of their paychecks following their school. At least I don’t do that, so I guess I still have a few rungs to go on the dumb ass ladder. I do, however, get all stressed out watching the Crimson Tide stink up a 100,000-seat stadium like they are doing today.

Does it really matter if my team wins or loses? No. Does it affect my job? No. Will it affect my income or our family’s lives? No. Does it affect my health? Probably.

Southerners give religious meaning to a game. A damned game played by kids. Besides fighting for the worst cause in human history, you really want to know why the South lost the Civil War? Turn on ESPN. It’s playing in HD.

Our neighbors have a yard sale every month. On the same Saturday every thirty days, at ass-crack dawn, the guy next door opens his garage and pulls out the old chairs, a rack of odd clothes, boxes of mismatched what-nots and assorted mangled toys. This has gone on since the 1990’s.

I’ve seen the same nicked-up dining room chair out there since Bill Clinton did not smoke that cigar with Monica Lewinsky. A plastic dollhouse has become a permanent fixture in the monthly sale. The same people always come to see if the prices are lower. Since nothing ever gets carried away, I assume the prices have not budged in ten or twelve years.

Sitting in my reading chair watching cul-de-sac capitalism unfold in the driveway, I mark another sale off the calendar – January, July, September, whatever. They dragged it all out on Thanksgiving a while back; I forget the year. One customer always shows up early. Since the endless yard sale began, I’ve watched him go from a full head of hair to bald while haggling over the same sweater. He’s been through two marriages, a bypass and liposuction. I’ve had five jobs since the neighbor first placed the rubber shower elephant on the market. It’s still there. I am comforted by the consistency of it. The whole world has changed. Not this.

Come to think of it, I cannot remember the last time someone bought anything. I have never been a customer. I have enough junk in my trunk.

The neighbor sits stoically in a lawn chair staring into the street with a sullen face that screams, “I’m pissed and I have a dickey for $5.” His children are now nearing the end of high school. Stacked on a folding table are baby clothes that are old enough to get a drivers license. Still, once a month, rain or shine, the garage that has never held a car creaks open and disgorges its contents for six or seven people to fondle. By noon, it is finished; all tucked back in the garage.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that, from all indications, these people have hated us since one of our trees fell across their backyard during Hurricane Isabel. The guy’s wife has disliked us longer than that. I will say it again; I did not steal their cat.

We’ve gone for years without speaking to each other; just a surly wave now and then if one of us is in the mood, which is about every four years.

I am not angry because the dude’s few customers park in front of my house and walk across my yard to inspect his worthless merchandise. But my urging of Rudy to take copious dumps along that path is probably not lost on him. I see him arching his hatred over the bushes toward my window now and then.

The guy should be grateful I haven’t decided to compete with him, putting him out of business altogether with more advanced junk. And I have some seriously desirable items: a couple of the first Mac’s and an Arcus II scanner and at least four George Foreman grills that we got free from a bank. You know what a Herb Albert “Whipped Cream” album is worth these days? I’m talking good stuff here. I may even have a classic leisure suit from the seventies that would attract a crowd of aging Boomers looking to relive the days of “Afternoon Delight.” The Boone’s Farm stain on the leg is hardly noticeable, either.

One day, I will pull out some poster board and a marker and end this thing once and for all – just overload his piddly sale for good with my awesome collection of pre-owned crap. Or I may let it go. I hate to end such a losing streak.

So what happens when a Jack Russell takes on a giant like Verizon? This:

http://rudydog.posterous.com

http://twitter.com/Rudythejack

If you recall, there was a time when schools taught home ec and there was this odd activity called physical education, or at least recess where somebody threw a dodge ball at your head and you had to run and sweat to escape that dusty smack. During such a time when kids were taught to cook and exercise daily, the childhood obesity rate was far below the outrageous numbers we tally up today. Of course, the bullshit notion that teaching a useful subject is secondary to standards-based testing for things we will never need to know did away with recess and physical education. The concept that teaching kids how to cook a healthy meal was the territory of girls who couldn’t get a date has turned us into a society where health care costs chew up our income to a degree that people and companies go bankrupt over it. And those girls did get dates with boys. And we didn’t teach much about that either.

Being able to pass a politically-mandated standards test has trumped being able to walk a mile without passing out. Algebra, a subject I have never used in my entire working life, is given more credence than the skill of being able to cook a simple meal that will keep you and your family below 46% body fat or having diabetes or worse.

We talk about education and we piss and moan about both sides of the health care debate, but in the end, knowing how to prepare our own food and teaching kids to exercise before they are buying XXL is just as much a part of education as memorizing dates in history. 

Here is some history:  If we cooked our meals at home, we would save money and eat healthier. If we played outside for an hour a day, we would lose weight and feel better and live more productive lives. How many questions about those things are on one of these multiple-choice tests? None.

Instead, we teach to a test that has no bearing on anything beyond making the system feel better about scores that mean nothing in real, human lives.

What if we taught every child how to cook? What if physical education was mandatory again. What if our children actually learned something that went far beyond academics?

Like it or not, Nick Saban at Alabama is doing a better job of teaching his subject (football) than most teachers and professors in any subject in the country. I’ve seen some of his practices. If we taught English like he teaches defensive schemes, our 5^th graders would be writing like the authors they study. And if we taught life skills like cooking healthy food and exercising daily, we might not be bankrupting the country one bite at a time.  

I’m not going to write about this Steven Slater character, the flight attendant who lost his shit last week and bolted a Jet Blue plane on the tarmac by grabbing a couple of beers and sliding down the inflatable exit. Okay, I just did write about him, so let’s talk about that event for a moment.

Anyone who flies has felt the rage to scream, “Screw it! I’m outta here!” But Steve did it. He freaking did it. And now he’s a damned hero. I knew this was coming.

How many time have you sat in your too-small seat on an overbooked flight as the overly-cheerful attendant smiled like a snake pretending to like you when you just knew they wanted to rip off your head and shit down your neck? Sorry, I’ve used “shit” three times, but this is a post about airlines.

The boy snapped. Good for him. Now Steve is the John Dillinger of popular culture with close to 210,000 instant Facebook fans. He’s both Bonnie and Clyde and Jesse James and Cool Hand Luke (except unlike Luke, he didn’t have to eat one, single boiled egg to gain respect and notoriety). All he did was the very thing you and I have thought about doing a million times. He’s a hero because he did it, even if his story may be a little different than the truth. Who cares? We live in a country that doesn’t want the truth as much as we want a hero. From Captain Sully to Sliding Steven all inside 12 months.

Next thing you know, a pissed-off DMV employee will jump the counter, bitch-slap the first 23 customers in line, snap a self pic with their hand sporting a tall man finger and do a nose-dive through the plate glass window into the cheering arms of the last 41 people in line. 

We call Steven a hero while turning our backs on veterans who come back from Afghanistan and Iraq to a world that could give a shit less. And I’ve just given your four “shits” since I started typing this. It doesn’t take much to be a hero these days.

So Steven will have his day in court and more than his fifteen minutes of fame for doing something that would have more TSA officers on your ass than if you had tried to sneak a bottle of Head ‘N Shoulders onboard in your overnight bag. If Hollywood is smart, they’ll pay for his lawyers because Kevin Spacey will be playing Steven on the big screen inside of a year. Guaranteed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704388504575419263519517820.html

After reading this, I don’t think I need to remind anyone that, eventually, a cemetery gets everyone’s business. Such a deadly reality doesn’t keep Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, CT from holding scavenger hunts.

“Okay, let’s find Uncle Frank! Go!”

Hell, I know times are tough, but everyone does not have to buy a Samsung 3D HDTV or Francis Ford Copolla’s wine, but everyone dies. Not everyone needs a plot and headstone, however. Why? More people are opting for cremation. You do not need a scavenger hunt to find Uncle Frank if he’s in an urn in the closet, where he may have spent much of his life anyway. That’s another story.

Industry leaders say cemeteries must lighten their images. Excuse me? First, the joint is full of dead people. Second, calling cemeteries an industry scares me worse than eating ribs next to grandma’s headstone.

Most cemeteries hold the events at night so as not to disturb a funeral. Disturb a funeral? Thankfully those people are dead. I will say that there are few things in life more disturbing than a damned clown. God forbid some poor bastard has to deal with them handing out balloons six feet above his $9,000 casket. If you read the article, you probably still remember the fair at Davis Cemetery in Davis California. It is hard to miss the In-N-Out Burgers part. Shouldn’t that be just (lame joke approaching) Out Burgers?

From the article: “These are sacred grounds—they’re consecrated,” says Rob Visconti, who runs the Catholic Cemetery Association for the Boston Archdiocese. “We understand the need to market…but we certainly wouldn’t have a party” in a graveyard.

Really? I have a lot of Catholic friends and of all people they love a good party.

There is precedent. A century ago, cemeteries were popular gathering places for entertainment. That was before sex toys.

The Allman Brothers used to hang out in Rose Jill Cemetery in Macon, Georgia. Two still do, Duane and Berry Oakley. The band practiced many of their songs among the stones. Dickey Betts wrote “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” after noticing a tombstone with that name there. Now that Duane and Berry are there forever, it is a little creepy listening to that song.

I was planning to bust on the subject a bit more, but I have to get to the funeral home. It is improv comedy night.