HIGH CONCEPT LISTING, AGAIN

Or, if you prefer, “I’m wide awake and hungry but the rest of my family is asleep, so here we go.”

Items on Hometown Favorites.com’s “Boy, They Were Good, But . . .” list of discontinued grocery products whose non-production somehow impoverishes my life:

• Banana Beichs
• Brach’s Watermelon Sparkles
• Chex Morning Mix (I used to keep this in my desk, for those mornings when skipping breakfast seemed like a good idea at home, but lost its luster by the time I got to work)
• Chocolite Candy Bar (I’m pretty bitter about this one, too)
• General Mills Buck Wheats Cereal
• Hi-C Peach (yes, I’m still bitter)
• Hostess Chocobliss (grrr . . .)
• Hostess Pudding Pies
• Kelloggs Apple Raisin Crisp (only my favorite breakfast cereal ever)
• Kraft Bacon & Tomato Dressing
• Lifesavers - Tangerine
• Lipton Noodles ‘n Sauce Romanoff (in college, when I felt too flush for ramen noodles, this is what I ate)
• Marathon Bar
• Nice Mice Candy
• Original New York Seltzer
• Pasta Roni Romanoff (I sense an anti-Romanoff conspiracy . . . the Communists have taken over our noodle-makers, it would appear)
• Pepsin Gum
• Regal Crown Sours (especially the cherry ones . . . man, I’m getting angry)
• Seven-Up Gold Soda (like most of the items on this list, I guess I was the only person that liked it)
• Slice Lemon/Lime Soda (note to Pepsi: I may never forgive you for this)
• Willy Wonka Skrunch Bar (IT’S AN OUTRAGE!!!!)

FORD COPS A PLEA

To the delight of police departments and taxi companies everywhere, Ford has decided that the Crown Victoria will live another half-decade, at least:

DEARBORN, Mich. — Inside Line has learned that Ford Motor Co. once again has reversed course and now is planning to extend the lifespan of its long-running Crown Victoria and the Grand Marquis to 2010 and beyond.

The full-size rear-wheel-drive sedans date to the 1979 model year, and have been updated — but never fully redesigned — several times in the past 26 years.

Ford had planned to replace the Crown Vic and the Grand Marquis in 2008 with new front-wheel-drive models based on a stretched version of the Five Hundred chassis.

Having owned one of these (an ‘84) I’m happy to see them sticking around. While big Detroit iron definitely isn’t for everybody (I eventually figured out it’s not even for me), I’m at least comforted by the knowledge that there’s still one car that’s made more or less the way they all used to.

Of course, if current trends continue, by 2010, every car bigger than subcompact-size will probably be back on a rear-wheel-drive platform, as traction and stability control technologies continue to improve. The benefits of rear-wheel drive (reduced mechanical complexity, better weight balance, increased controllability) are simply too great to be ignored. Even here in snow country there’s only about a dozen days a year when the added traction of front-wheel drive is truly necessary. Most of the rest of the time, a rear-wheel drive car–particularly one with traction control–is sufficient, and rear-wheel drive is infinitely more fun to drive the other 353 days of the year.

But it’s going to be tremendous fun to see what the automotive media will have to say about the Crown Vic–already well into its dotage–in another five years.

AND DOWN THE STRETCH THEY COME!

Got an itch to get in on some red-hot College of Cardinals wagering action? John Paul II appears to be recovering from his Soviet cold, but the books are now open if you want to lay down some cash on the next Vicar of Christ:

ROME (AFP) - As Pope John Paul II recovers in a Rome hospital from surgery to alleviate severe breathing problems, Irish bookmakers Paddy Power have begun taking bets on the identity of his successor.

The company has made 70-year-old Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, the Archbishop of Milan, its firm favourite as next leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Tettamanzi, at 5-2, is ahead of 74-year-old Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, 3-1, and 68-year-old Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino of Cuba, 11-2.

Leading outsiders, according to the bookmakers, are Florence Archbishop Ennio Antonelli, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras — both 6-1 — and Cardinals Joseph Ratzinger of Germany and Claudio Hummes of Brazil, both 8-1.

Take it from me: Ratzinger at 8-1 is still a sucker’s bet. If you’d like my five-star Holy See Lock of the Week, contact me for further details. Over three and a half satisfied customers know we’ve got the picks that beat the big boards! Plus if you sign up for a full season, I’ll throw in the outcome of the Anglican “throw out the Americans” vote absolutely free. Who else can give you this kind of action?

TONIGHT’S TV LISTINGS

ABC: 8 Simple Rules For Dating Desperate Housewives (Comedy-Drama): Owen Terrell (Terrell Owens) gets a nasty lesson in double standards when he takes a bit acting job; one of the housewives uncovers a sinister secret when she audits the PTA’s bank statements.

CBS: CSI: Wausau (Drama): The investigators have just 24 hours to determine whether a giant inflatable SpongeBob found in a Dumpster is the same giant inflatable SpongeBob missing from a Burger King three blocks away.

NBC: Law & Order-Unclaimed Property Unit (Drama): When a mysterious drifter shows up to claim a Santana tape stolen from a Camaro in 1983, the UPU’s dectective attempts to link him to a 25-year-old theft of a Pure Prairie League tape from a truck stop in Idaho.

FOX: Trading Real World Maternity Survivor Apprentices By Design (”Reality”): A group of young single mothers are abandoned on a tropical island, then told that one of their babies will be adopted by Donald Trump. The winning mother will be determined by a competition in which the mothers are pitted against each other in a quest to see who can best renovate the interior of a lean-to shelter using only coconut husks, bits of string, and a golf ball. Halfway through, the mothers are forced to switch shelters.

ESPN: World Series of Slot Machines (Sports?): Live action from Walleye Bob’s Taco House and Casino in Aberdeen, SD.

ESPN2: Dream Job-Radio Edition (Reality): Contestants vie for a one-year contract reading offshore sports-book and “male enhancement” commercials for ESPN radio. Judges: Mike Golic, John Moschitta Jr., Ray J. Johnson.

FOX SPORTS: Best Dang Ol’ Sports-Like Television Program, Question Mark (News): Tom Arnold makes a bunch of Roseanne jokes, some rapper you’ve never heard of comments on the state of the NBA, a live audience interprets everything the female reporter says as a double entendre.

SPEED: NASCAR Nextel Cup Practice Session (Sports): Gear-shift linkage adjustments. Live, from Daytona Beach, FL.

E!: True Hollywood Story: That One Nerdy Guy From ‘Riptide’ (Documentary): The career of that one nerdy guy from the NBC action-adventure series ‘Riptide’ is recalled. Interviewees include Perry King, Hal Sparks, Michael Ian Black.

LIFETIME: Not Without The Perfect Deception By A Mother’s Intuition (1996, Movie *1/2): After moving to a small town in Colorado, a woman uncovers a conspiracy to overreport standardized testing results at the local school. The stress of her battle to make the truth known gives her the rare, fatal disease Murphy-Jaegermann Syndrome, which can only be cured by a transplant from the sister she hasn’t spoken to in years. Sam: Judith Light. Principal Gorman: Tom Skerritt. Brody: Bruce Boxleitner.

COURT: Cops (Reality): Cedar Rapids, IA: Officers investigate claims that a family living on the even-numbered side of the street is watering their lawn on an odd-numbered day; an elderly woman doesn’t like the looks of some teenagers.

HGTV: Emasculated by Design (Comedy): While a man is out of town at a monster truck rally, his wife (with the help of two interior designers and a suspiciously unhandy carpenter) boxes up all his worldly possessions and redecorates the garage in pastel ginghams.

FOOD: Emeril Live (Science Fiction): “Deep-Fried Garlicky Crap Tossed on a Plate”: Garlicky crap is deep-fried, tossed on a plate, then dramatically showered with a curious spice mix. Also: Chicken with Forty Catchphrases.

MTV: The Real World (Reality): After failing to show up for his $5 an hour job at a coffee shop, Drake is fired; Amanda and Evie discover that, after a weekend of partying at expensive clubs, they’ve spent this month’s rent money and have no idea what to do; Jermaine’s one-night stand steals all his credit cards.

VH1: Driven (Documentary): Scientists at VH1 Laboratories attempt to gain DNA samples from Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in an effort to create “ParisBritney,” a clone sharing genetic material from each, intended to be the perfect talent-free sex symbol/living Bratz doll to serve as the basis for all of VH1’s future programming.

TVLAND: Leave It To Beaver (Comedy): Something almost happens, but Wally is able to stop it in time.

TBS: Seinfeld (Comedy): Something almost happens, but Kramer is able to stop it in time.

CNN: Crossfire (Comedy): Something almost happens, but a special report about an Indonesian peanut shortage is able to stop it in time.

BRAVO: Queer Eye for the Straight Truck (Reality): The Fab Five are turned loose to work their magic on a 1963 GMC grain truck.

HBO: Deadwood (Drama): The characters swear twice as often, hoping you’ll forget “The Sopranos.”

CSPAN: Partisan Bickering (Public Disgrace): Members of Congress make impassioned speeches to an audience consisting of CSPAN’s cameraman and people who didn’t pay their cable bill last month.

SOUL ON ICE

The American people have spoken, and what they’ve said is that, as a sport, professional hockey is somewhere down on the importance scale below bowling or women’s golf, but just a little bit above indoor lacrosse.

I came to this conclusion after yesterday’s cancellation of the entire NHL season by commissioner Gary Bettman. You could have seen this coming months ago. It was like being in a road construction zone where it’s about to go down from two lanes to one, and there’s a guy who saw the ‘MERGE’ sign two miles back just like everybody else, but he just had to rush ahead to the front of the line, and now he’s trying to merge back in, but the guy he’s next to just will not budge, so their two cars bang into each other at 1.3 MPH in the world’s most avoidable traffic accident, and now, instead of moving very slowly, nobody’s going anywhere for a long time.

Every NHL fan–all six of us here in the States–is trying to figure out who’s most at fault in this regrettable, ridiculous situation. But blame is like fruitcake: there’s usually enough for everybody to have more than they really care for, thank you very much. You can fault the league and its owners for greedily expanding, putting a team onto every horizontal surface where water can somehow be made to freeze. They should’ve seen that, while there’s almost enough demand for 32 NHL teams, there do not exist everywhere on Earth 700 players capable of playing NHL hockey, at least not well enough that people will pass over a “Murder, She Wrote” rerun to watch it. Instead, the fans were rewarded with desperate clutch-and-grab snorefests which usually featured about the same number of shots on goal as a soccer match. And we all know how much Americans love to watch soccer.

You could also fault the players for thinking that some who-dat whose total professional experience consists of starting most of one season for the Aaooooaieaiaatiiooo Brpmliads of the Southeastern Latvian Volunteer Fire Department Hockey League deserves $5 million a year because, well, he’s playing a professional sport in America.

But truthfully, the real money problem in the NHL is more basic: there just isn’t enough money in the league to support either the players or the owners in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed. And thus, I’m reminded of a limerick:

There once were two cats of Kilkenny
Which each thought ’twas one cat too many
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
‘Til instead of two cats–there weren’t any.

BANK NOTES

OK, bear with me, anybody who’s ever lived in or near Chicago, or watched WGN a lot on cable during the 70s and 80s. “588-2300 . . .” What comes next? “EMPIIIIIIIRE!”

It’s the jingle for Empire Carpets, and it’s been on the air, essentially unaltered, since at least 1978. (It actually sounds much older than that.) You used to hear it on WGN television, you still hear it on Chicago and Milwaukee radio and TV. But after the “EMPIIIIIIRE!” comes a little “bomp.” Just a bass guitar and a bass drum, right?

Well, somebody had to play those notes, and, Chicago being Chicago, you just know they were union. So, not only did they get paid for that “bomp” in the first place, they get residuals. What I want to know is, how much has that “bomp” earned those guys over the years? If I go down to the marina, will I see a yacht with the name BOMP! painted on it?

TEN RANDOM THOUGHTS #9

1. Considering that we’ve never determined who stole the kishka, or who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder, I believe the question of who let the dogs out is bound to remain unsolved, unless somebody out there decides to become a novelty-song detective.
2. I sit here in the semi-chill of a Wisconsin winter looking at my poor knuckles, all dried out, red, and cracked, and then I remember that pretty much the instant the humidity comes back and they start healing, I’ll be starting that community-ed auto repair course I signed up for. Which, let’s face it, isn’t going to be very good for the knuckles.
3. Sometimes in the still of the night, I lie awake in bed haunted by a terrible thought, a dark, swirling, sinking miasma of despair, as I ponder anew whether I maybe am the only person in the world who hates deviled eggs.
4. But mostly I just lay there and think about how cool it would be to have an old Volvo 240. I might be a terminal case.
5. Culture changes so fast these days that, for those of us “of a certain age,” it’s getting hard to place previous events in time. I wanted to write, “Whatever happened to Ricky Martin?” because I thought it had been an eternity since he’d been in the public eye, but then I discovered that he was at his peak only a little over four years ago. If you’d asked me, I’d have placed him right around 1996–the height of the Macarena craze.
6. I have been paying almost no attention to world events since the holidays. In fact, I’ve been paying just as little attention to national events. Perhaps the one lingering effect of the 2004 elections (for me, at least), is that I’m actually tired of news. Not just bad news, and not just political news . . . I’m tired of news, period. Whether it comes from TV, newspapers (or, more likely, their websites), blogs . . . it just doesn’t matter. If you report the news, I now automatically assume you’re lying to me to further a political agenda. I think the only news source I trust anymore is AM radio. And I wonder if this is what it was like for Russians (Ukranians, Byelorussians, etc.) to read PRAVDA back in the old Soviet days.
7. I’m officially bored with Wilco. I still respect Jeff Tweedy tremendously and appreciate all the good times I’ve had listening to his music over the past decade, but man, I’m just not into to going where he’s going. Not that the new stuff isn’t great, and not that I won’t be buying it (eventually), but it just doesn’t connect with me.
8. I don’t get what Kanye West fans are so upset about. The only award more effective as a kiss of death than the Best New Artist Grammy is the Motor Trend Car of the Year. He should be thanking the Grammy people for sparing him from this career-ending blight.
9. Speaking of Grammys and Cars of the Year, if the singer in the Mercury commercials sounds familiar, that’s because she is–Paula Cole, 1998’s Best New Artist. From the Grammys to jingles in about six years.
10. Remember way back when, when I complained that they weren’t building the Arby’s by me fast enough? It’s been open about a month and I’ve been there exactly once.

SUBMITTED WITHOUT COMMENT

You know what I wish they made?

Weapons-Grade Liquid Plum’R, that’s what.

WHERE YA BEEN?

It’s not easy to be a car geek if you spend your winters in the Midwest. Snow, obviously, is a problem, since it makes all cars equal in terms of acceleration, braking, and cornering ability. But it passes, soon as the snowplows do. Then you have to worry about the salt, the great consumer of sheetmetal, leaving its icky white patina upon everything.

And it’s not like you can wash it off yourself. Your hose bibb is frozen solid. As is your hose, since, like the genius you’re not, you forgot to drain it before packing it away for the season. So you can’t even run a hose from the sink–not like there was any danger of your wife standing for that in the first place.

It’s even tough to get anything done under the hood, particularly if your garage is a one-holer like mine, where your car must share space with the recyclables, the lawn chairs, and the bike that somebody’s still a little too bwauk-bwauk to ride.

So the tundra-bound car geek is stuck indoors with little to do except look back and look ahead. The cruel powers-that-be know how to manipulate this sad turn of events. All the new-car shows in the Midwest are in the first two months of the year. Ohh, this is a cruel trick. You spend all day ogling and fondling the finest new machinery on the market, then step back out to the parking lot to fetch your years-old salt-roasted flivver, a bag full of sales brochures in your hand. An enterprising finance company should set up a booth about halfway back to your car. They’d get away with usury.

Then there’s always the great, festering blob of literature you already possessed. I’ve been picking through some of it and, well, let’s just say I now know more about the US auto market from 1974 to 1993 than any human being ought to.

But that’s not really any fun, either. Winter, for the Midwestern sheet-metal addict, is the time to engage in a little fantasy buying–not of the Barrett-Jackson variety, but rather, it’s a time to sharpen up one’s personal automotive lust list. After all, spring is coming, and soon the roadsides and classifieds will be littered with everybody’s spring garage cleaning.

For most enthusiasts, the “want list” is so long that, if you bought one car off the list every six months, you’d still have to live to 170 just to get most of them–and that’s assuming that you’ll be able to find an Audi Quattro a hundred and forty years hence. So I suppose it’s fortunate that most of our lists are filled with cars which fit one of three categories:

1. Cars we couldn’t afford if we lived to be a million years old;
2. Cars we probably could afford, but could never shoehorn into our lives; and
3. Sensible, affordable cars which we somehow inexplicably still want.

My list in category 1 is somewhat endless. Category 2 includes all the pre-safety law cars that I couldn’t justify owning, since a severe lack of parking means that I’m stuck owning only what can be driven to work every day. Also, the old van I want is out, since most pre-late-80s vans don’t have rear shoulder belts, and the Spousal Unit won’t permit such a vehicle until the kids are old enough not to need car seats.

Fortunately, my particular enthusiasms fall mostly into Category 3 anyway. You see, I have a predilection for uncool cars nobody wants. In fact, I’ve only had one car in my entire life that anybody ever gave a second look, at least in an approving fashion: a 1982 Pontiac Grand Prix, which was my first 2-door and my first rear-drive car. And it did look great. But several symptoms of imminent mechanical disaster led me to trade it on an ‘86 Grand Am, which was pretty much a chronic mechanical disaster, though I did once give a ride to an Aussie gerontologist who thought it was wonderful.

Otherwise, my driveway has traditionally been the Mark Hasty Home for Wayward Automobiles. And there are still several forgettable, regrettable cars that I can’t dis-jones myself from.

Through it all I’ve come to realize that what you drive says nothing about who you are, but it says a lot about who you think you are. Thus I’ve come to regard my enthusiasm for boring, unloved cars as an extension of my love for trash culture. Anybody can love a ‘65 Mustang; it takes a special person to tend to the needs of a ‘83 New Yorker.

But today something came to me which has changed all the rules of this game. I saw a news clipping about a small metal-fabricating factory in my home town which just got a contract to build some products they’ve never built before. I know this place well; I’ve been driving past it most of my life, since it lay almost halfway between home and my grandparents’ house. And I always knew that, when I saw that sign, the trip was half over, no matter which direction we were going.

Even today, not having lived in that town for a decade and a half, the sight of their white flourescent sign makes me feel good. And why not? It’s something I’ve been seeing my entire life. It connects adult Mark to pre-school Mark, and there are danged few things left in this world which can do that. But one of them is a ‘73 Ford LTD station wagon. I saw a picture of one the other day and instantly my “want it” meter was pegged.

Why? Even though any family can use a beast of burden to haul home things just too big or too messy to fit into the “good” car, a ‘73 Ford wagon is way more Category 2 than Category 3 for me. It comes out of that dismal time period in which Uncle Sam had smacked every car with the Ugly Stick, while tying their engines down with battleship chains. Not only does this dream wagon of mine handle like a boat, it goes through petroleum products faster than anything since the Exxon Valdez. Seriously, they were good for at most 12 miles per gallon. Highway. And that’s if you drove it like a parade float.

But it was my dad’s company car when I was 4 years old, and sometimes on Fridays he woould bring it home and we’d all pile in and go to the steakhouse out by the Target store and sometimes we’d go shopping afterwards and we wouldn’t get home until 9 dang 30, which needless to say was way past my bedtime. The Greeks call this cathexis, the process by which a mundane object begins to acquire extraordinary value to a person because they have extended their very selfhood to make a place for this object in their lives. And obviously, I’ve cathected this road yacht because it has the power to remind me of being a very small child excited about a night out with the family. What’s ordinary and regrettable to most of the world unlocks the powers of the trans-mundane for me.

That also explains why I’ve got a thing for ‘73 Gran Torinos, since one of those was the first Category 3 car in my life. Right after I got my driver’s license I found a gorgeous ‘73 Gran Torino 2-door hardtop for sale in the town where my grandmother lived. It was copper with a chocolate-brown vinyl top and a light-beige vinyl interior, mag wheels, a 351 Cleveland engine, and I probably could have bought it for $1200. If I’d had $1200. Which I didn’t. Now, 15 years later, when it should be the cars of 1990 which take me back to my senior year of high school, it’s actually the ‘73 Torino which gets me there the fastest. It was, after all, the first car in my life that I could almost afford.

I’d gladly take back the car I actually drove back then, a 1987 Chevy Nova which my dad had bent twice. (I don’t think he liked being reminded of his mistakes every time he got in the car.) That thing accepted all the abuse I threw at it–passenger overload, constant full-throttle acceleration, the flagrant use of excessive amounts of paste wax–and never complained. If the Torino reminds me of what could have been, the Nova reminds me of what was, most particularly that wonderful experience of getting in your car and driving to a distant place all by yourself just because nobody could tell you you couldn’t. You can only experience that for the first time once, but a Nova would probably help me remember what it felt like a little more clearly.

There’s still a lot of inexplicable Category 3 stuff on my list, cars I’ve never owned and have never had any significant interactions with. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a late-80s Mercury Grand Marquis, de-chromed, stripped of its vinyl top, lowered about an inch and a half, painted jet black from stem to stern. It’s beyond my technical capabilities, however, which are pretty much limited to checking the air in the tires. But I imagine that I’m not the only person who’s got this idea. As cheap as late-80s Detroit iron is right now, somebody’s working on a lowered Merc with an attitude.

And I suppose some day I’ll see a picture of one, and it’ll take me back to the winter of ‘05 when Serena was just a tiny baby who’d only recently learned how to giggle . . .

AS A MATTER OF FACT, I DO OWN THE ROAD

My latest wild idea: sell the Interstate highway system to the highest bidder.

Pluses:

• Huge influx of cash
• No more tax dollars for maintenance
• Tolls may (may) discourage suburban sprawl
• Reduced highway trips = lower emissions
• Free alternative roads do exist everyplace

Minuses:

• As usual, tolls are a regressive tax
• Roads may not be maintained to the highest standards
• Private authorities wouldn’t have the power of eminent domain, so needed expansions would be very expensive
• Increase in price of consumer goods shipped by truck
• Accelerates the creation of a two-class society

So I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or not. What do you think?