It's Little Oscar's birthday!

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Here's a Happy Birthday Doke for Little Oscar, The Prettiest Girl In Candyland.



Those are merely rumblings of mutiny even though they may sound like the feisty chitterlings of my big sister. I always thought it was sort of special that her birthday fell on Columbus Day, until much later when I found out what a shitheel and doofus Columbo reportedly was. Anyway, Terrill Maureen, please enjoy some alternative universe history with your doke tonight.

Columbus Day, Stan Freberg (1961, from "The United States of America: The Early Years," Capitol W/SW-1573), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Happy Beer-D to you!

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Yes, it's that time of the year again---the 140th day of the year, to be precise. On this day in history, a green morsel of life emerged into the world, both bilious and blue. The folded ears made me think I'd spawned a Vulcan Emissary (details not clear). The little fellow took to the soil quickly, though, and honors us with his presence for the 27th year in a row, excluding gestation.

As befits a gentleman whose breakthrough appearance into the world was fraught with thrills and peril, like being the 10 cm peg wrenched from a 9 centimeter... well, you understand... May 20 throughout history has exuded a certain black-metal miasma.

Who among you wouldn't want to have been born on the same day as the Cambodian National Day of Hatred, I ask you? Not brutal enough? Then how about the 1940 Grand Opening of a certain unspeakable enterprise in Poland? (Too metal?) Something more slapstick, maybe, like that time in 1896 when a six-ton chandelier at the Paris Opera fell on a crowd below, the bad news being that one person died and the good news being that only one person died. (Had it been an Acme safe, no lives would have been lost.)

But would a bunch of lightweight entertainers really be preferable to the commemoration of evil and mayhem, if it were you who was born on this day in history? Well, pick your poison: David Hedison, 1927 (Captain Crane on the Seaview); Ron Reagan, 1958 (son of That Guy); or Bronson Pinchot, 1959 (nuff said).

No, that can't be nuff said: there are Jimmy Stewart, 1908; and Honore de Balzac, 1799 (badass French realist author).

Now, the boy has only himself to blame for these birth date historical associations. He insisted on prying his way out 3 weeks early. Had he waited until June 10, as expected he'd have less ignoble birthday mates, such as Gustave Courbet, The Howlin' Wolf, Saul Bellow, Maurice Sendak, E.O. Wilson, and Judy Garland (as opposed to Cher). But Beer-D has a highly developed sense of the unjust and the absurd, so I think it's likely that he planned it this way and he likes it just fine. Happy Birthday, Little Man.

Happy birthday to "Politey"!

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...Politey being the antonymous designation for Rudy, the cartoonlike gentleman who spends much of his life in this apartment window, which is located 7 feet east of a Joe Pye Weed and dwarf coreopsis growing between my driveway and my fence, on West Healey Street in Champaign, Ill. Rudy has inhabited this planet for a full 67 years as of today. Coincidentally, also on this date in 1959, the first episode of The Twilight Zone aired on CBS. Also appropriately, he shares a birthday with Richard III (1452), the allegedly deformed, hunchback English king who served as the objective correlative in the children's nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," and was probably seriously slandered by Shakespeare on behalf of the Tudor monarchy a century after he died; Groucho Marx (1890), who was somewhat less funny than Rudy during his career; George McFarland (1928), the runt called "Spanky" in the Depression-era Our Gang/Little Rascals film shorts; and Maury Wills (1932), a National League base-stealing speed demon during mid-century previous.

Rudy's favorite expression is "What're you doing?!?" His favorite pastimes are lurking in his window waiting for Billy Goat Gruffs to carelessly trespass, reporting hallucinatory sightings of nonexistent species of birds patrolling our feeders, and making shit up as he goes along. He coins at least four neologisms every week, and believes that each and every one of them have been part of The King's English since Humpty Dumpty roamed the earth.

I offer all of the above observations in complete earnest, but without so much as a microgram of disrespect. He is an sweety-pie American Original, and by far the least generic neighbor I've ever had. Happy birthday, Fatso!