Just got home. Flipped on the TV. Wasn't too surprised CNN was talking about the Notre Dame Player Weirdness Drama. I thought, Oh good, I'll get the latest. And below is exactly what I saw:



I love thinking that the producers thought, Cool, we got the guy from Deadspin, and they're totally respectable and stuff now! And this is what they got. Classic.

P.S. I'll have more to say about the actual issue soon--if you've been reading this blog for a long time, you probably know it's "Kaylee"-related....

"Mr. Drummond" was like the adoptive father me and the black brother I never had never had.

The man who played him on TV's Diff'rent Strokes, Conrad Bain, has died at age 89. Sadly he outlived two of his TV kids.

That obit mentions some harsh criticisms of the show, which aired from the time I was three until I was ten, before living on in daily after-school reruns. People said it provided a "lite" version of race relations. Maybe if I'd been an adult when the show came out I would have seen right through it, but if you want to teach kids about things like that, you have to do it in a way they understand. Arnold and Willis were practically the only black kids I knew! Until the Cosbys came along anyway. For some kids in my town, who knows, maybe seeing black and white people living together as a family, albeit only for a half-hour at a time, made a big difference.

Did I ever tell you about my fifth grade class? Our lily-white school suddenly tested the free-agent waters and came back with one Indian kid, one Asian kid, one English kid, and one African-American kid whose last name, I shit you not, was "Black." It was almost like all the teachers got together and decided it'd be good to show the children of Ridgefield that non-white people did exist outside of our TV screens before sending us out into the world. A few kidnappings later, diversity! The rest of the names seemed phony, too, lending credence to the "planted outsiders" theory. See if you can figure out which kid was which: Christopher Charlesworth, Ed Zhang, Probahan Basu, and of course Duane Black, who, as an odd side-note, insisted his middle name was "Turbo."

Not that there weren't racists in my town, but I feel like the general attitude among us 10-year-olds toward our new classmates wasn't negativity, but wonder. They were exotic. We almost worshipped them. Which is better than not accepting them at all, right? And it all comes back to Diff'rent Strokes: As an adult, it seems like we were treating the "different" kids as cool new gadgets as opposed to realizing they're human like us. But as a kid, maybe that's exactly how you learn to not be a racist. They'll have their skin color, you'll have yours, and I'll have mine. And together we'll be fine.

Allan aka Joy of Sox wins the prize for finding the video I was wondering about. Thanks to Chan aka Chan for figuring out how to view the thing. Once I watched it, I noticed an ad for Stocky Dog Shirts at the end, so I Googled to see if they were still around. The first thing that came up was the video, as seen on the Blohards site. So now, without FA...

Here it is!

Turns out the maker's name was Todd R. Reily. The song, as we knew, is "Tonight, Tonight" by The Smashing Pumpkins, and the pics are all from the Boston Globe.

From former actual news site Huffington Post. Can you believe that people are paid for that?

"Boss, I've got a hot story!"

"What is it?"

"It's a picture of a cat."

"Okay, and what's the story?"

"That's the story. It's a picture. Of a cat. And it exists."

"RUN IT!" (Hands over bag with dollar sign on it.)


(I'd actually seen the pic on reddit the day before--who knew it would become headline "news"?!)

At some point during the post-2004 ecstasy, somebody released an online video about the ALCS, set to the tune "Tonight, Tonight" by The Smashing Pumpkins. It was a series of still frames from the games. The song was probably chosen due to lines like "believe, believe" and "the impossible is possible tonight," and musically it seemed to fit perfectly too. Kind of hard to believe now, but making your own video and getting it online was merely a magical dream in 2004, and getting one to play over your dial-up connection was a buffer-fest if you saw anything at all.

But this guy made it happen, and I was miraculously able to view it. I think he charged $5 or something. Then it was gone. The version I had is lost in a landfill with all the other hard drives from 2004 somewhere. And as far as I know the guy never put it anywhere else online.

Does anybody remember this? Who made the video? Can I see it anywhere? What is Ed Cossette up to? Let me know what you come up with. Thanks.

(Here's the song's actual video, which is pretty trippy. For now you'll just have to imagine the song with Red Sox highlights over it. Buffering....)