Babies, the Comatose and Kim Jong Il

What’s nicer than a list for America the illiterate?  Top Ten This, Top Ten That, we love ‘em. Time magazine made this week’s whole issue a list, the World’s 100 Most Influential People. Then they made their funnyman columnist Joel Stein think up 100 of the least influential people for the magazine’s web edition – aside, as he says,  from babies, people in comas and everyone in North Korea besides that Dear and Crazy Leader.Under LOSERS for example he proposes Tom Tom, category Car GPS device: “Six years ago, these were from the future. Now they come with your phone.” Under SLIMY BASTARDS, John Edwards, category Former Presidential Candidate: “He already was irrelevant, then he allowed news of an affair and love child to come out so slowly, we forgot he was already irrelevant.” Under MORONS,  Our girl Heidi Montag, category Star of MTV's The Hills: "You used to be famous for being famous. Then you were famous for getting lots of plastic surgery and selling only 658 copies of your album in its first week. Now you're not famous. That was fast.”And under FLAMEOUTS, three that I really loved: Grover, category Muppet, “Elmo is taking all your airtime, yo”. Any mother of any eighth grade girl, category Parent: “You'll regain influence in a few years, moms.” And Mayor McCheese, category Mayor; ‘Hey, 100 is a lot of people.”It sure is. Who among us could think up 100 of anything except maybe reasons not to clean out the garage? I tried doing that just once and  stumbled upon a whole raccoon family using their delicate fingers to sort through our cans and bottles. I shut the door quick and  never tried that again I can tell you.

Reload or Shrug It Off

Looks like I was in Tucson just a tad too early to see Sarah Palin manifest like the Virgin Mary but tell ya what: even the BVM herself would look awesome zipped up in a tight-fitting leather jacket like Sarah's. It would give her that same Wild One outlaw look that old Six-Gun Sarah likes to cultivate these days.My family had its our brush with lawlessness a year ago right now when we rented a place that we now realize had to belong to some kind of drug lord - or worse. It had vast rooms with busted cherub sculptures; no lamps or bedside tables of any kind; no door on the master bathroom; and a big old bullet hole in the wall of the foyer. And also a thing we didn’t see until we really went looking in the immense basement: dug out of desert rock a room that was inside a room that was inside another room; a chamber capable of holding a good 80 people with, chillingly enough, a single king size bed in the middle. I wrote about it back then.We guessed something was wrong when no one responded to our calls to fix the busted AC or repair the supposedly heated pool that was so icy you couldn't dip so much as a toe in without seeing your whole foot go eggplant purple; we knew it for sure when the two individuals we had dealt with in renting turned out to have disconnected their cell phones. Oh and when we never did get that outlandishly huge $500 security deposit back.It was a week ago today when, back in Tucson to visit family, we gathered our courage and drove up into the hills to see this Brokedown Palace. We climbed the front stairs, which were in even worse repair than they had been. Then we peeked in at the rooms: empty. Every stick of furniture gone and only the wind howling in the brown palm tree by the pool and a dead bird lying beside it. I guess the joke was on us back then and everyone knew it, even this cactus that looked like it was ducking its hatted head and slapping its knee in mirth. Kinda makes ya want to be like Sarah and say "Reload!" yourself.