Phutatorius

I got the "Park Place" game piece in McDonald's Monopoly yesterday. If you get "Boardwalk," don't pay this guy without writing me first. I'm willing to go as low as a hundred grand.

A good, brow-ridge grabbing monocle can be hell for the first week or so. That is, until you achieve the required skin-thickening atop the cheekbone, your monocle can really dig into your face. You can expect wear and tear during the first couple of days — cuts, blistering — and, if you're not careful placing and removing that little devil, you can give yourself a wicked laceration.

You just need to stick it out.

A lot of would-be monocle wearers will call their optometrist after that first, long day; they'll complain of the gouge and demand a looser fit. But believe me, people, go with the gauge your doctor gives you. He's the professional, and he knows — like I do — that unless you really wedge that lens in there, you're going to spend your days contorting your face trying to hold that monster in place. The result? Muscular overgrowth and visible skin-stretching on one side of your face. And in a society that places an aesthetic premium on anatomical symmetry, you do yourself a grand disservice with all that unnecessary perk and droop.

So hang tough, people. Go with your doctor's recommendation — you might even consider going up a half-size — I promise you that in ten days, you will have the slotted callus that you need to stabilize and support that monocle even through strenuous, bouncy, sweaty exercise. It's well worth the wait and the pain to get there: with this retro-stylish and eminently functional prosthetic, you'll be the talk of your social circle!

Today's Game Six edition of Haiku Sports Recap:

What Yankee bullpen?
Joe dialed: twenty-six rings,
but nobody home.

The two sentences your Phutatorius added to the Novel today:

"The feeling receded from Jerry's fingers and toes, the pain drained from his ankle as sleep's centrifugal powers spun his ideas out of the Realm of the Practicable: visions of pit traps covered in palm leaves gave way to giant sand saguaros pricked with the tips of tranquilizer darts. Bring it on, Mother Pumpkin, bring it on . . ."

What, did you think I just rode the elliptical and ate Wendy's all day?

You know you've finally found your way to the club when you see the headline act wandering around in the street.

The Wife was a bit queasy as we turned the corner onto Elbow Street last night in Providence. She didn't want to park the car on the street — not with that wild-eyed dude in the jean jacket lurking around. I looked the guy over, just to see what he was up to.

"Wife," I concluded, "that's Jonathan Richman."

And so it was. Ten minutes later he would fish his guitar out of the trunk of his beat-up diesel Mercedes Benz (California plates), walk inside, climb the stage, and plug in. It took some coaxing to bring the assembled crowd of about fifty off its barstools toward the stage: "So I saw on the Nature Channel this special about a monitor lizard or Komodo dragon or something, and its mouth is so filthy that if it bites you, you get sick and die. Well, if I bite you," said Jonathan, "you'll just get sick. So why don't you come up here a little closer?"

Backed by drummer Tommy Larkins, Jonathan eschewed all his old Modern Lovers material in favor of newer compositions, most notably "Let Her Go into the Darkness," "Nineteen in Naples," "Springtime in New York," "Her Mystery Not of High Heels or Eye Shadow," and "Con el Merengue." We've seen Jonathan perform about five times now. The schtick remains the same, which is why we keep going: the frenetic guitar-strumming, the mid-lyric asides, the sheer joy with which he plays — never more apparent than when, so overcome by himself, he takes the guitar off his shoulder and begins to dance.

I can't say our man was in peak form last night; more than anything, the intimacy of the club made this show memorable. Crowds gathered around outside and watched through the windows. Larkins cracked a smile once or twice as fans chanted his name during drum solos. After the show ended with "Surrender" — every time she hears this song, the Wife pulls me aside and says, "Every lyric in that song is right" — Jonathan packed up his guitar, took a seat on the stage, and exchanged greetings with the crowd.

Within the hour, presumably, he had his guitar back in the car and was on the road, to Washington, Youngstown, Oberlin, Indy, Dayton, and on into the Great Plains. That's Jonathan Richman at age 52: an itinerant musician who plays $10 gigs and is too easily mistaken as a car thief. Oh, and a brilliant, ebullient songwriter who delivers pure joy wherever he goes. Who wouldn't want to be him?

Let this post serve as notice to the world that I have Hank Williams, Jr. in a safe house at an undetermined location and am holding him for ransom. That's right, people — your "irreverent, rambunctious, fun, boisterous, rowdy, reckless, exuberant" country rocker has been singing the blues in my custody since last Friday. And he'll stay in his cage until his friends, family, fan clubs, and the good people with ABC's Monday Night Football can muster a sum sufficiently large to warrant his release.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, I love you, Phutatorius, but you're full of crap. Hank just played a stock-car and tobacco tribute show tonight in North Carolina. I saw him there. Well, look closer, good reader: that wasn't the Real Hank. That was nothing but a body double — a creation of the plastic surgeons on my staff, sent out into the field to make Hank's public appearances. I do it to remind you what you've been missing this past week, while the Real Hank languishes inside my designer replica of the Hanoi Hilton on a meager diet of kippers and cottage cheese.

Oh, you should hear your great swaggering honky-tonker wail and moan, now that the tide has turned against him. Did you think your streak of good fortune would last forever, Mr. Hank? Bluto! Jackal! Get the hose! What goes up must come down, Williams . . .

So pony up, folks. The more generous the donation, the quicker you will have your beloved American icon restored to you. I am accepting contributions via Paypal or personal check (please make a "for Hank" notation on the Memo line, as your Phutatorius has a number of irons in the fire these days).

Last night I was asked, for the 100th time in two years, by a waiter at a chain restaurant, "Have you eaten at any of our restaurants before?" Like there's something new and important I need to know before I can order a meal at Ruby Tuesday's.

Please, oh please, sir — I beg you — clue me in to the mysteries of your occult institution. I am lost and wandering and confused; reel me in and bring me Home.

The other day I was cooking dinner (believe it!), when the Wife without warning threw open the back door to the apartment, which opens into our kitchen. I say "without warning" because I had not heard the neighbors' knock, and I was in the process of dropping my salad dressing-stained trousers to throw into the wash.

By the grace of God I was not standing pantless in the kitchen when the door opened on the neighbors, who were themselves dressed for a night on the town. The purpose of their drop-in was to report that there was an unfamiliar man seated in a car in our back parking lot. He had been there for at least two hours; he had his car backed into a parking space and was sitting quietly in the dark, looking down our driveway and into the street. By this time it was about 7 p.m., and the neighbors were not thrilled about the idea of leaving their apartment empty with this guy hanging around.

We huddled and discussed what to do about the situation, ultimately concluding that the neighbors should bravely approach the car and ask the man to explain himself, while the Wife and I watched from the upstairs window in relative safety, with telephones in hand to call for help, if necessary. The neighbors had a brief discussion with the man in the car and came back upstairs. Apparently the guy had produced a badge, said he was a detective with the Cambridge Police Department staking out a house across the street, but — he assured us — it was "nothing to worry about."

Never mind whether the criminal activity on Putnam Avenue is "anything to worry about" (it certainly was significant enough to warrant a stakeout) — what I want to know why the cops think they can park in our driveway whenever the hell they want. I'm no lawyer (well, not a good or committed one, anyway), but I am convinced that I have a lawsuit here under the Third Amendment, which forbids the involuntary quartering of soldiers in people's homes. Sure, there are a few additional layers of complexity — the guy was a cop, not a soldier, and if you want to get technical about it, he was not in my house. But what if he had pitched a tent over in the shrubbery, climbed the roof to get a better vantage point, or knocked on the door demanding coffee? I did some preliminary legal research into the Third Amendment today; a Findlaw commentary says that, except for one federal case, the courts have essentially blown this Amendment off for years. One case I read online confirmed that "[j]udicial interpretation of the Third Amendment is nearly nonexistent."

I think the courts need to get off their butts and start enforcing this Amendment in a meaningful way. On Thursday night I was about to drop my pants in a well-windowed kitchen while a cop sat in my driveway with a pair of binoculars in one hand (and who knows what in the other?). I am pretty sure that if our great nation's Founding Fathers were on hand to see this, they would have had something to say about it.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of people in this world — the good Americans who understand and appreciate the peanut and its many derivative products (oil, brittle, butter, &c.) and the bastard communists who are tearing down the Lovely Legume's good name with their made-up allergies.

When I was a young pup, there was none of the throat-closing, seizing-up, and carting-off that you hear about today. The kids brought PB&J to school for lunch every day, and they liked it. It certainly wasn't the case that children were dropping off every afternoon of some mysterious yet-to-be-identified illness. So what happened in the meantime to set off this crisis?

Here's one theory: way back in the early days of television there used to be an institution called the "Peanut Gallery". As my link will tell you, the Peanut Gallery was the studio audience for the Howdy Doody show. It is the informed belief of medical linguists at the University of Iowa that the cancellation of that program rendered the term Peanut Gallery largely useless, so triggering a migration of the capital G deeper into the word gallery. Much like the Great Vowel Shift that marked the evolution of Middle English into the modern vernacular, this migration occurred imperceptibly over time. It took, in fact, more than thirty years before the g, now of necessity lower case, lodged itself permanently between the letters r and y and gave life to the term Peanut Allergy in the early 1990s.

While I find this view imaginative and compelling, I refuse to give it my credit, because it legitimizes a phenomenon that is at best trumped-up and at worst psychosomatic. Nut allergies, I'll grant you. They've been around for years, my father-in-law has one, and it's no joke. But the peanut, ladies and gentlemen, is not a nut. Nonetheless, America still buys into this nonsense. Anti-peanut militias have successfully lobbied to withdraw the peanut from our school cafeterias. And they've taken their fight to the skies: where once I could expect a foil-wrapped bag of honey roasted lovelies in transit, the airlines now foist pretzel snacks on me that taste like shellacked sawdust. What's next? "Buy me some wasabi peas and Cracker Jacks" during the seventh-inning stretch? Don't rule it out, people: the message these peanut-haters seem to be sending is that there is no longer a place in America for the peanut. George Washington Carver, that lovable fanatic, is no doubt rolling in his grave. Use #519 for a peanut: off the brat/make it look like an accident.

The peanut lobby needs to fight back, I tell you. This battle will not be won with charming hat-and-cane animatronics and a Never-Neverland attitude. They need a slogan, a legume's equivalent of "The Other White Meat" or "It's What's For Dinner."

For my part, I propose "For crying out loud, have a Peanut already — it won't kill you."