Airplane! Still Funny After All These Years

When the movie Airplane! came out in the summer of 1980, I was just shy of eleven years old. My whole family went to see it in the theater and by the end I was certain it was the funniest movie I had ever seen, despite the fact that I laughed at some of the jokes for the wrong reason. (For example, when the little boy asks the little girl if she wants cream in her coffee and she says, “No thank you; I take it black, like my men,” I laughed heartily, because I thought it was hysterical that a little girl would like black coffee.)

About two years after the release of Airplane! my family became the first on our block to get a VCR. The $900 machine, that was only slightly smaller than a Volkswagen, quickly became the focal point of my existence. To get our video library started we purchased two movies—The Graduate and Airplane! While I cited The Graduate as my favorite movie, it was Airplane! that I kept on watching over and over again. Airplane! to me was what Star Wars was to most kids of my generation. I was obsessed.

Before I knew what a spreadsheet was, I created a spreadsheet to keep track of how many times I watched each of the VHS tapes that we owned. Within a year I would see Airplane! 23 times, according to the penciled hash marks on my loose-leaf paper. I knew the movie by heart and quoted it ad nauseum. While I struggled in my junior high school Spanish class, I was fluent in jive.

As my teen years progressed, the frequency of my Airplane! viewings gradually declined. I moved on to other obsessions like classic rock bands, reruns of Taxi, and the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I would guess that sometime in my early-20s was the last time I watched the film…until yesterday.

My wife got me the DVD of Airplane! as one of my birthday gifts. (I had never bothered replacing the VHS tape when I switched to DVDs long ago.) So last night, after our kids went down to bed, we watched it—my first time in over 20 years. It was almost a surreal experience watching a film I know by heart after such a long hiatus.

One interesting phenomenon was that I kept on laughing ahead of the punch lines, since I knew exactly what was coming. (This behavior must have seemed strange to my wife who had only seen the film two times previously.) For instance, when Julie Haggerty is walking around in the plane asking if anyone is a doctor and one woman says, “Stewardess, I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor,” I already burst out laughing before they panned over to Leslie Nielsen sitting there wearing a stethoscope in his ears.

Another interesting phenomenon was that it took about 5 or 10 minutes for the movie to grow on me again. I wasn’t laughing that much in the beginning and for a brief time I was very nervous that maybe the movie wasn’t as funny as I remembered. But soon the laughter took hold and I couldn’t stop. I think the slow start wasn’t the movie’s fault, though. I think it was more akin to meeting up with an old friend after 20 years. There might be an initial period of awkwardness, but eventually you feel like everything is just like it was when you last talked.

And so I laughed. I laughed every time Robert Hays missed his mouth because of his drinking problem, and when Peter Graves asks the boy visiting the cockpit if he likes gladiator movies, and when Leslie Nielsen assures the passengers that everything is going to be fine and his nose keeps on growing a-la Pinocchio. And pretty much at everything in between.

At this point I have no idea how many times I’ve seen Airplane! I lost my loose-leaf spreadsheet decades ago. But the movie is still hysterical and now that I’ve got it on DVD I can watch it as many times as I want. And this time I can keep track in Excel.

My Labor-Intensive Labor Day Weekend

Did you know that Labor Day was established as an official holiday in 1887? I just found that out today from Wikipedia. Other facts I learned today from Wikipedia are that “Marmotinto” is the art of creating pictures using colored sand or marble dust; the Hammerheads were the champions of the Qatar International Ice Hockey League in 2008; and the motto of Yuhan College in South Korea is “Be a freeman who dedicates himself to the peace of mankind. “ But none of those last three facts are relevant to this essay.

The point of Labor Day, of course, is to celebrate the American worker, and the main mode of celebration is to not work. There may be Labor Day parades or celebrations, but they certainly don’t get the same level of attention as the festivities of other holidays. And this is at should be. The best way to say “thank you” to the American workforce is by letting them take a rest from their backbreaking work.

My work is not backbreaking; far from it. I sit and write and look stuff up and sometimes I go to meetings. The most strenuous part of my day is when I go into the office break room and have to reach up really high to get a plastic cup for my water. Sometimes I have to really stretch because the only cups left are in the very back of the cabinet. I think I once tweaked a muscle in my side doing this.

So, while I’m happy to get a three day weekend out of Labor Day, the truth is that what I do could hardly be called “labor” in the traditional sense of the word. This is why I always feel a little bit guilty on Labor Day. To compensate for this guilt I always try to do a little bit of hard labor during Labor Day weekend.

Of course, everything is relative. What I consider hard labor is likely somewhat different than what someone who works in a mineshaft would consider hard labor. Nonetheless I made sure to do some “hard” labor on each day of my three day weekend.

On Saturday we got our raw materials. Our first stop was Home Depot to buy gardening gloves for myself and my two sons. Perhaps it’s a sign that we don’t do a lot of hard labor at the Schwartzberg house when my six-year-old asked, “What is this place?” as we pulled up to the store with the distinctive orange sign. Then we went to Staples (unrelated to the hard labor) and then to Target where we purchased two shelving units—assembly required.

The identical shelving units were for my sons’ rooms. The instructions said all I needed was a Phillips-head screwdriver and a hammer. Easy! We actually own those things! I took them out and got started.

It was a slow start. I’m the kind of guy who likes to know the entire project plan before I begin my work and the instructions were not particularly detailed. There were only eight steps and it was clear that whoever wrote the instructions was from the “less is more” school of writing. A couple of words here and a lot of ambiguous diagrams with random arrows there resulted in a lot of head scratching on my part. My kids watched with bated breath as I flipped back and forth throughout the instruction manual waiting for inspiration to grab hold of me. Finally, after about ten minutes of hemming and hawing, I took the plunge and began to connect side panel “A” to top panel “B” with screw “AA”. To my utter joy they connected relatively easily.

The rest of the process was much of the same. Long periods of time spent staring at the instructions punctuated by brief periods of time screwing together various sized panels. The highlight for me was the dowels. For some reason I really like dowels and I got to use six of them. There was also some hammering of nails involved, but I let my wife pinch hit on that part, so she wouldn’t feel left out. (Okay, the real reason was that I was exhausted at that point, since the project that should have taken 30 minutes was now pushing up on two hours.)

That was Saturday. On Sunday I put together my other son’s shelving unit. That went a lot smoother, having put together the first unit the night before. The one hiccup on Sunday was that the screwdriver stopped working two screws into the process. I looked at the head of the screwdriver and it looked like mush—the head was stripped. So I scoured the house for another Phillips-head screwdriver. In my garage I found a small toolkit that contained a screwdriver that you assemble yourself. You put the correct head into a hollow socket to make the type of screwdriver you need. I did it, but the head kept on falling out. I’m sure there was a way to get it to stay in the socket, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. My wife offered to run to the hardware store to get me a real screwdriver, which she did, and about 30 minutes later the shelving unit was up and running.

That brings us to Monday and the gardening gloves. We had an unusually wet two-week stretch here in Arizona—it rained on three or maybe even four days during that stretch!—so the front yard was filled with weeds. At 7:45 A.M, before it got too brutally hot, me and my boys donned our gloves and went out to pull the weeds. We spent a good 15 to 20 minutes pulling weeds and then we saw a bee, so we stopped and went back inside the house to watch cartoons.

And that was my laborious Labor Day weekend. It was backbreaking, it was grueling, and it made me feel alive. It also gave me the confidence to reach even the highest cup at my office tomorrow…well, maybe with a stepstool. 

The Tooth is Out There

My six-year-old son lost his first tooth the other day. Well, maybe “lost” isn’t quite the right word. The tooth was yanked out with a string by his mom (a.k.a. my wife) after it had been precariously dangling in the front of his mouth for the better part of two months. Fed up with the tooth’s stubbornness in not coming out via natural causes, we decided it was high time we took action—hence the yanking.

My son was compliant with the forcible removal of his tooth, as he too was anxious to finally join the ranks of his many friends at school and have a gap-toothed smile. So when the moment of truth came, he braced himself and took the yanking like a man. He did not cry out, yelp, or even whimper during the procedure, for which we gave him no anesthetic.

I asked him if it hurt and he proudly said, “No.” Then he looked at the tooth that my wife put in a small plastic cup and noticed there was some blood on it. He looked up at me and asked, shakily, if there was blood in his mouth. I looked in his mouth and said, “Yes, there’s a little bit of blood. But that’s natural.”

Clearly this was not the response he was hoping for. He ran to the bathroom to look at his mouth in the mirror and as soon as he saw the bloody spot where his tooth used to be his eyes welled up with tears. I assured him that it was no big deal, pointed out that he told me it didn’t even hurt, and instructed him to rinse his mouth out with water.

He vigorously rinsed his mouth out with water, shaking and trying to hold back his tears. In between spits there were dramatic statements like: “I never want you to do that to me again!” and “I never want to see that much blood coming out of my body again!” Then his four-year-old brother came into the bathroom and took the hyperbole up a notch when he said, with heartfelt sorrow, “I don’t want him to die!” (Cue the violins.)

After the rinsing and spitting we moved on to the ice. We had him stick an ice cube in the space where the tooth used to be and the bleeding was considerably staunched. Still, his brow was furrowed and he looked generally ill at ease. That’s when I whipped out the Twinkies.

My kids had never had Twinkies before and for some reason, on my way home from work earlier that evening, I decided to pick some up. The effect of the Twinkies was instantaneous. As soon as I produced them and said, “Who wants dessert?” my son’s anxiety was replaced by gleeful fascination. Moments later he was biting into a piece of cream-filled sponge cake heaven, and all thoughts of his own mortality were forgotten.

That night, as my son slept, I snuck into his room, removed the tooth from under his pillow, and put a dollar in its place.  I would have put a Twinkie there, but we ate them all.

Let's Help August Live Up To Its Name

Welcome to August—the only month of the year without a major holiday. This is somewhat ironic given that the dictionary definition of the word august is “inspiring reverence or admiration; of supreme dignity or grandeur; majestic.” And yet without the ability to boast a major holiday, I say that August is the least majestic of all the months.

Of course, you’ll notice that I have to keep on modifying the word “holiday” with the word “major.” That’s because if you dig deep enough you’ll find that there are indeed some minor holiday’s in August. A quick Google search has revealed that August 19^th is National Aviation Day and a scant two days later on August 21^st it’s Senior Citizen’s Day. And if you live in Texas, you may be well aware of the fact that on August 27^th your state observes Lyndon Baines Johnson Day. (Then again you may not be well aware of that fact. Since I don’t know you personally, I really couldn’t say, could I?)

Point is it’s high time that August got a real holiday—a major one—one that will allow it to live up to its name. Nothing against senior citizens or aviators (or especially senior citizen aviators) but we need a more universal holiday in August, so that everyone has a reason to celebrate.

I have tried to come up with a few ideas. My first thought was how about a National Food Day, since everybody eats? Turns out there already is one on October 24^th. Then I thought, “What about National Pet Day?” I know not everyone has a pet, but a large percentage of people do, and even those who don’t may have interacted with a friend’s pet, seen one on television, or been viciously attacked by one on the street. Seems pretty universal to me.  Well that’s already taken, as well—April 11^th is National Pet Day. Finally I came up with National Blood Vessel Day, because you can’t deny that every single one of us has blood vessels—lots of them, in fact. And it turns out that there is no National Blood Vessel Day. (Well, there was one in Berlin in 2006, but never here in the States.)

So, what do you think? Does National Blood Vessel Day have the potential to become a major holiday in August? If not, don’t be shy about posting your ideas for a major holiday in our sad holiday-less month. Perhaps if one of these ideas garners enough interest we can start a petition on the White House website. In the meantime, I’m going to work on a catchy song for my holiday. I’ve already got the first two lines:

It’s time to snuggle; it’s time to nestle,

Let’s love each other and each blood vessel!

Organ Stop Pizza: Come for the Organ, Stay for the...um...Organ

Many readers of this blog are likely aware of the fact that I am a pizza snob. It’s a hat I wear proudly, hailing as I do from Brooklyn, the pizza capital of the world. Fortunately, in my 18 years living in the desert I’ve managed to locate a few pizzerias that pass the Brooklyn sniff test, but they are clearly the exception. The average slice of pizza in Arizona is…well…average at best.

There are times, however, when I will get pizza at a place whose quality I know going in will not be up to snuff. Generally I end up at a place like this for a reason other than the pizza. Peter Piper Pizza is the perfect example. No person with functioning taste buds would ever go to PPP for the high quality eats. No sane person, at least. Indeed the only reason to go is because you have children between the ages of two and twelve, who want to play games, win prizes and generally wreak havoc in a place that happens to sell pizza. 

All of this is preamble to the rather unique pizza place I found myself in on Saturday night—Organ Stop Pizza in sunny Mesa, Arizona. I went with my four-year-old son after I took him bowling. Earlier that day I asked him if he wanted to go to La Famiglia (our Brooklyn-approved pizzeria of choice) or a pizza place we had never been to before that plays music. To his credit he went with the new option, which was a step forward since he is very much a creature of habit when it comes to food.

What makes Organ Stop Pizza unique is not the pizza—indeed, the pizza’s taste is subpar even for the frozen section of your local supermarket—but rather, the fact that it is home to the world’s largest Wurlitzer pipe organ. This gargantuan instrument is played nightly by one of the restaurant’s three resident organists. On Saturday, Charlie Balogh (no clue how you would pronounce that) was at the helm. According to Mr. Balogh’s online bio he was named “Organist of the Year” by the American Theatre Organ Society in 2000. (Yet another society to which I will never belong.)

When we first arrived at Organ Stop I noticed a man dressed as Santa sitting in the lobby. I then quickly noticed signage indicating they were having a “Christmas in July” celebration/fundraiser. I became alarmed that my son would notice and either start battering me with questions about why Santa would be this far south this time of year or, even worse, become deluded into thinking that he would be showered with gifts sometime in the next few weeks. Fortunately, he never seemed to notice Old Saint Nick, so I managed to dodge that bullet.

What my son did notice, however, was that the music was loud—too loud apparently for his taste. The restaurant has a unique set up in which you order at a counter when you first come in and then seat yourself in the auditorium, which has cafeteria style seating. When we entered, right around 6PM, the place was jam-packed and the only seats I saw open were two rows away from the pipe organ. As we came in, Mr. Balogh was playing a rousing version of “Happy Birthday” and as soon as we sat I saw that my son had his hands over his ears. I asked him what was wrong and he said that the music was too loud. I reminded him that he had said that he wanted to go to the place with the music and he said, “But I didn’t know it was going to be so noisy.”

While we waited for our food to be ready, we heard the theme from “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and “Sleigh Ride” (remember, it was Christmas in July.) As we sat there I noticed that there was a second floor balcony looking down on the stage. I asked my son if he wanted to move up there once we got our food, to see if it was less noisy. He did. So, while listening to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” we picked up our food from the counter and went upstairs.

Once on the second floor we sat down in a spot that my son agreed was slightly less noisy, but was instead too dark. So we got up and moved again, this time to a spot that was better lit, but still noisy, although not quite as noisy as it was downstairs. Less than a minute later Mr. Balogh signed off for intermission and the house lights were turned on. This was by far my son’s favorite part of the show.

During intermission we ate our pizza, which I noticed was strangely cut into ten slices. In an effort to make the pizza vaguely edible I looked around the table for parmesan cheese or garlic powder, but only saw salt and pepper. If I ever go back again I’ll make sure to wear a jacket with lots of pockets so I can bring my own seasonings.

My son was halfway through his second slice when the lights went down and the music started back up. This prompted my son to immediately put down his pizza and announce, “I’m done!” And with that, we abruptly left. As we walked back to the car my son said, “I knew I should have picked La Famiglia.” It was as though he was reading my mind.

And yet, I can’t say I regret having gone there. The whole thing was pleasantly surreal—akin to driving 70 miles out of your way to see the world’s largest ball of twine, or watching an early John Waters movie. Indeed, under the right circumstances I could even see myself going there again…the right circumstances would be that I wasn’t with my kids and I had already eaten a full meal.

Meet the Creatures...At Your Own Risk

A guinea pig urinated on my hand yesterday. Well, not directly on my hand. I was holding it inside a cloth sack to avoid the possibility of getting scratched or bitten and it urinated inside the sack. Since the sack was about the thickness of a pillow case, this was tantamount to getting urinated on directly.

No, we did not purchase a guinea pig as a pet. (We have a large, marginally unhinged cat in our house, which would probably try to swallow a guinea pig whole and end up hacking up the world’s largest hairball.) I took my six-year-old and four-year-old sons to a “Meet the Creatures” class offered by the City of Chandler at their Environmental Education Center at Veteran’s Oasis Park. And by “meet” I mean hold and possibly get urinated upon.

The class, offered weekly throughout the summer, is run by a couple who are animal rescue experts. During the first five to ten minutes of the class participants learn about the various animals in the room and how to handle them. The “how to handle them” portion of the lecture is of particular importance, so that one might learn which pets are okay with being picked up (like the urinating guinea pig) and which ones can be petted but not picked up (like the bunny the size of a warthog, which we were told would kick you in the chest with the force of an MMA contestant if you tried to lift if off the ground.)

The animals featured at the class ran the gamut from common things such as the aforementioned guinea pig and rabbit, to more exotic animals like a wallaby and a paca. I got to hold the wallaby (also in a sack, but thankfully non-urinating) which was kind of cool. I mean, short of hopping a quick 20-hour flight to Australia and bushwhacking my way into the outback, when else will I get a chance to get up close and personal with a wallaby?

While I had the pleasure of holding the urinating guinea pig and the dry wallaby, my sons were a bit more skittish about handling the animals. They seemed much more content letting me hold the animals while they gingerly pet or brushed them. My six-year-old did, however, hold a small turtle about the size of a drink coaster. When the turtle tucked its head into the shell my son commented that it looked like a sandwich, but he passed on my suggestion that he take a bite out of it.

One animal that both I, and my sons, kept at a healthy distance was the flying gecko. I don’t know if “flying gecko” is what it’s actually called—it probably has a slightly fancier name that I didn’t quite catch—but the point is that it was a gecko much larger and more exotic than your garden variety gecko, and more importantly, we were told during the orientation that it sometimes jumps on people’s faces. Yup, we were told by the woman running the class that we could hold the gecko, but it may—without any provocation—jump on your face. She said—and I quote—“if you’re not comfortable with it jumping on your face, you may not want to hold it.” I would have thought that the majority of people (at least sane people) would not have been comfortable with an eight-inch lizard launching itself toward their eyes/nose/mouth, but apparently I was mistaken on that count. Most of the people in the class—both children and adults—seemed perfectly fine handling the kamikaze reptile (and interestingly, it didn’t face-plant anyone the entire time) but the Schwartzberg men kept a safe distance at all times.

At the end of the class we thanked the instructors, lathered ourselves in several quarts worth of hand sanitizer, and went on our merry way. The memories of this class may last a lifetime, but, thankfully, the scent of guinea pig piss goes away in a couple of hours.

My Undying Love (And Sometimes Hatred) For Baseball Stats

There is a website called Baseball-Reference.com, which is to baseball statistics what the Sahara Desert is to sand. The information contained on this site is pretty much endless. Want to find out who led the American League in triples in 1958? No problem. Who came in fifth place in the National League Cy Young Award voting in 1993? Easy.  What was Rickey Henderson’s career batting average with one out and runners on first and third? It’s a cinch. (Oh, and for those interested, the answers to those questions are Richie Ashburn, Jose Rijo, and .319, respectively.)

When I first stumbled across this site six or seven years ago, I had to throw my shirt into the dryer about ten minutes later due to the several pints of drool that poured out of my mouth like a mini Niagara Falls. For baseball stat geeks like me, there can be no bigger time suck. In a world without adult responsibilities I can see myself looking at this site for 18 hours at a stretch. (If such a thing existed when I was in high school, I would surely not have a diploma today.)

In general I try to keep this addiction in check. For the most part I don’t look at this website more than once or twice a week, or as current baseball events necessitate. For example, when Torii Hunter hit his 300^th career home run a couple of weeks ago, I felt compelled to race over to Baseball-Reference.com to find out how many current major leaguers have 300 or more homers. (FYI—17.)

But as much as I love combing through the statistical minutiae on this website, there is one factoid kept on this site that as of this year, I no longer enjoy looking at. That would be the yearly list of the oldest player in each league. This year the oldest player in baseball is Mariano Rivera, who will turn 44 on November 29, 2013…a little more than two months after I turn 44. Yup, that means for the first time in my life I’m older than every single player in major league baseball. How’s that for freakin’ sobering?

Yeah, I get it—it’s not that big of a deal. People age. Big whoop. But somehow, even though I never played baseball competitively, have absolutely no athletic ability, and haven’t swung a wooden bat in more than a decade, in the back of my mind I always thought that maybe one day I could be a professional baseball player.

Was I being overly optimistic? Perhaps. Delusional? No question. But now that toxic combination of optimism and delusions has been dashed away forever by raw statistics. I have to face reality—if Mariano Rivera, the oldest player in baseball and two months my junior, is retiring at the end of this season, it’s probably unlikely that my baseball career will ever begin.

And so, nobody will ever find information about me on Baseball-Reference.com; but whatever information they do find on that website, there is an excellent chance that I will have looked at it first.