The Oppenheimer Report - 11/28/11

I watched the Macys Day Parade on TV for the first time in a long time. Behind the annual and world famous Buffalo Turkey Trot, that parade ranks highly on my list of Thanksgiving traditions. In the past ten years, we usually missed it because we’d arrived in Buffalo at 3AM Thanksgiving morning and were still asleep, or because we were scrambling to get out of Toronto in gridlock traffic. The one good thing about no more Thanksgivings at my parents’ house is that we also missed the frenetic scramble to travel on a major holiday. When I turned on the TV Thanksgiving morning, cup ‘o joe in my hand, the first thing I saw was a giant Sponge Bob Squarepants floating by Macy’s department store. Now that’s entertainment! Did you know Sponge Bob has a Facebook page and 28 Million followers? I have about 120 Facebook “friends,” about 114 more than I have in the real world. Here’s a Helium filled balloon fun fact: one half mile of fabric was used to make the Kung Fu Panda balloon. Snoopy as the WWI Ace is still my favorite balloon. I love that parade. How often do you see giant floating cartoon characters parading through Times Square?

Since police have forced the evacuation of the various makeshift Occupy Wall Street Hoovervilles throughout North America, I have decided to pick up the torch and form an Occupy Katrine protest. Granted, our little town of Katrine ranks low on the corporate greed scale, but I feel honor bound to make my symbolic gesture in support of the plight of the countless victims of Big Money. I’m having a little trouble because, other than one church and the marina, there isn’t really a business district here. We own a piece of land near the marina; maybe I’ll occupy that. Honey, where’d you store my 40 Below sleeping bag? One of my friends made me laugh the other day when he referred to this ubiquitous protest as “Occupy Everywhere and Bitch About Everything While Tweeting on the $400 Drone That Mom Gave Me” movement. A bit cynical perhaps, but  containing a kernel of truth as well.

At present, we’re involved in two small building projects which, if all goes as planned, should be completed before the big snow flies. As of Friday, we have an almost-completed garden shed in which to put all the essential landscaping tools which have for the past three or four years accumulated on our front porch. The next project is the demolition and reconstruction of our pump house, which at present, looks somewhat like a wood-framed parallelogram. That project begins this week, and I am looking forward to getting out my holiday aggressions with a crow bar and a sledge hammer. Ho friggin’ ho.

Last week, for no particular reason, I found myself craving some retro TV, and I PVR’d (new verb) two old shows I remember from my early youth. The first show I recorded was The Rifleman starring Chuck Connors. Some of you are old enough to remember him playing the tough-but-fair-single-father vigilante Lucas McCain, whose wife probably died in a gun-related accident and whose family later went on to found a French fried potato empire in Canada. We used to call him “Mucous” McCain, and my favorite part of the show is, hands down, the opening credits. You know from the get go that Mucous is one “bad ass mo-fo” simply by the way he glares at the camera as he indiscriminately fires off his rifle walking down the main street of town. I can sum up the plot of every episode of The Rifleman this way: Bad guys ride into town, Lucas struggles with the dichotomy of his good and evil selves, but ultimately ends up vastly outnumbered in a gunfight wherein he shoots all the villains to death (and probably a few stray town folk) with his wild west version of an automatic weapon. The whole show is a send up to Mucous pureeing a bunch of bad guys with his lightning fast, repeat action Winchester rifle. The filler in the middle is ludicrous. The second show I recorded was the uber-wholesome Father Knows Best starring Robert Young (Marcus Welby) and Jane Wyatt, who later went on to play Mr. Spock‘s mother. It’s interesting to me how deeply television was in the morality business back in the 60s. Kind of a departure from today’s prime time TV shows like Jersey Shore, where skanks and hos rule. I find it interesting that there are now two contemporary retro shows on TV, Mad Men and Pan Am which attempt to paint a more realistic picture of life back in the 60s. Now that “Black Friday” has come and gone, the starting pistol for the holiday retail madness, I eschew the holiday craziness, instead immersing myself in the narcosis of must-see Christmas TV. Two vastly different holiday scenes stick in my mind: Jimmy Stewart coming to the epiphany that his really IS a wonderful life as he stands on the bridge overlooking snowy Bedford Falls, and Dan Akroyd in Trading Places, disheveled and drunk on a bus, wearing a ratty Santa suit, ravenously tearing the flesh off a whole salmon with his teeth.

I’m bracing myself emotionally for the season of artificially induced good cheer. Remember when parents got into fist fights to grab the last Tickle-Me Elmo doll on the shelves? Ah, those were the days! I can’t wait to learn what holiday atrocity will present itself this year. I hope nobody beats up Santa again.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED