Catching up with the column train

Some self-promoter I am. I've fallen shamefully behind in posting my recent columns, so my apologies to those of you who have been waiting for them (primarily relatives and shut-ins). Let's catch up now:

Life lessons from Charlie Brown? Good grief!:

There’s a particular type of person who relates to Charlie Brown. And if you’ve ever seen me try to kick a football, you know why I’m that type of person.

That’s not the only reason, of course. I’ve also suffered from an inability to talk to more than my share of little red-haired girls. And while I was never knocked flat on my back on a pitcher’s mound in my underwear, there certainly have been times when it felt like I was — like, say, my entire freshman year of high school.

Plus, my latest from GOODlife magazine, "Dad doesn't feel like a tool":

It’s always a slippery slope when one of your young children asks you what you want for Father’s Day. You can’t tell them what you really want, because it would probably deviate from the pre-approved list of fatherly gift items, made up almost entirely of things that will enable you to better fulfill your duties as man of the house. All that 72-inch wall-mounted television would do is make you into even more of a slacker than you are right now.

There you go, so you can stop sending me those letters of complaint. I'm talking to you, shut-ins.

I saw Cowboy Dan. I didn't like the look on his face. So I killed him.

Happy Fathers Day to all, and to all a good night.

Column: Things in space are getting ugly

There are certain things we simply do not yet know about interstellar space travel. For instance, once scientists finally invent warp drive, will it really look like the lasers in a Pink Floyd planetarium show? It’s just too soon to tell, although if it doesn’t turn out to look like that, somebody will have not earned his grant money.

But one thing we’ve always been able to say with relative certainty is that most space travelers will be — and I mean this in a completely dispassionate, scientific way — better looking than you. No offense intended, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that it’s very difficult to be taken seriously in space unless you look like Harrison Ford or Sigourney Weaver, especially in your underwear.

This is why new information from astrobiologist Dr. Lewis Dartnell is so shocking. According to the Telegraph of London, Dartnell says the effects of long-term interstellar space travel will actually leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald. No word on what Dr. Dartnell looks like, but I can’t help but wonder if he’s just jealous of the better-looking space travelers who got to make time with Leeta, the sexy Bajoran woman from episode 131 of “Star Trek: DS9.” Um … you, know, generally.

[Read the rest of AT LARGE by Peter Chianca here.]

At Large Wednesday Night Link Roundup

• This just in: Baboons love "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me." And what's not to love?
• Fozzie Bear made a surprise appearance in the opening of the The Late Late Show on CBS. I didn't know Muppets stayed up that late.
• I want to party with these people.
• Loved "UP" and agreed with the review at Entertaiment Weekly, but I found this reader comment troubling: "This movie and Drag Me To Hell are both AWESOME!"
• From Funny or Die: The Blue Man Group weren't always just Blue Men. Check them out before they were stars.
• You know who you are: "Concert Crowds Go Silent As Twittering Runs Rampant."

And finally, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Literal Videos may be the best pop culture trend since .... well, ever:

Column: Psst ... What does a yellow light mean?

I recently got an e-mail from someone at GMAC Insurance who asked the question, “If licensed Massachusetts residents had to take a written drivers test today, would they pass?” According to the e-mail, “that answer is up for debate,” by which I presume they mean, “not in a million, trillion years.”

Not because people from Massachusetts never really learn how to drive — it’s because the circumstances of driving here actually force you to forget. If you wind up being the only driver on the road who knows when not to pass, who has the right of way in a rotary and how to drive in the snow without panicking, the other drivers will all talk about you. Usually at the top of their lungs, with their middle fingers bobbing in the air like little flesh-colored danger buoys.

According to GMAC, Massachusetts placed 45th out of 50 states when re-taking the written test. Of course, the results might be slightly skewed, given that its primary respondents were probably shut-ins who found it on the Internet — had more actual drivers taken the exam, the National Guard would already be here forcibly shutting down our roads.

[For the rest of this week's AT LARGE by Peter Chianca, click here.]

At Large Tuesday Night Link Roundup

It's been a while, so here's an extra-long list of satire stories and real news stories you're going to wish were satire. See if you can tell them apart.

• I want one! "New iPhone App Lets Users Talk To Each Other"

• "Spanish study shows cocaine in the air in 2 cities." Hmm ... Has anyone tested Miami lately?

• This is why I love Joe Biden: "Biden Reveals Location of Secret VP Bunker." "Come on in and get me, I dare ya!"

• It was bound to happen eventually: "America's 6-Year-Olds Denounce The Wiggles."

• More to the Iran Facebook story than meets the eye: "Iran Bans Facebook After No One Friends Prez." Poor Mahmoud.

• Well, if this doesn't make the price increase worth it, nothing will: "Newsweek To Go All-Obama, All The Time."

• Exhibit A as to why you should never eat something that's a color that doesn't occur in nature.

• At least he was selling them, not assembling them in his basement: "Mortician sentenced to 5 years for stealing body parts."

• Was Joe Biden somehow involved? "U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally."

Column: What's in a name? Sometimes not much

My sister and her husband recently welcomed a new baby, a blessed event that was of course preceded by the usual litany of name suggestions from the rest of the family. For instance, my brother suggested “Bubba,” and I wish I could tell you he was kidding.

Naming a baby is always a challenge — I know when my kids (Jacqueline and Timothy) were born, our main goal was to not pick a name that sounded like it was invented in the last 20 minutes. I only say this because of the number of kids named after artificial sweeteners or a type of scarf, a figure that, if the names parents scream at the mall are any indication, I’d put at about 85 percent. (“Splenda! Aspartame! Stop making fun of little Pashmina!” etc.)

Case in point is the annual list of most popular baby names, which came out recently and which confirmed, among other things, that there is nothing that can’t be turned into a name with just a little creativity and a complete disregard for the child’s future mental health.

[Read the rest of this week's AT LARGE by Peter Chianca here.]

In their defense, Ludacris was the musical act, so maybe he drove them to it

Back when I was at Tufts -- let's just say it was post-Bee Gees but before college kids all had cell phones stapled to the sides of their heads -- the annual Spring Fling concert usually ended with authorities having to call an ambulance for some idiot freshman who'd ingested enough alcohol to power a twin-engine Cessna. Ah, those were the days.

Because now, apparently, the stupidity isn't limited to that one freshman. According to Wicked Local Medford, 30 (that's 3-0) Tufts students fell ill from drinking at the school’s Spring Fling concert last month -- enough to cause the Medford Police to declare a "Mass Casualty Incident."

Tufts implemented a new policy for the Spring Fling this year where any bags brought to the concert needed to be transparent. Not to be thwarted, many students reportedly drank their fill of alcohol before the show. The unseasonably hot temperatures of the day took care of the rest.

What's scary is ... these people were smart enough to get into Tufts.

Column: Making the most of your edu-vacation

There comes a time in every parent’s life when you realize that you want the family vacation to be about more than riding roller coasters or sitting on a beach. You want it to be educational and enriching, and to foster an appreciation for the importance of our heritage. This is of course a huge error, right up there with suggesting your kids exercise “independent thought.”

Because if you’ve already been to Disney World, finding yourself on vacation in, say, a huge (albeit historical) cemetery can be a hard sell for the under-10 set. And it turns out that telling them how much %$&#! money you spent to get them there carries way less weight with kids than it ought to.

With that, I thought it could be useful if I shared what I learned on our recent family vacation to our nation’s capitol, Washington D.C., a destination whose dearth of roller coasters is more than mitigated by its statues of dead guys. At least, that’s what we were banking on.

[Read the rest of AT LARGE by Peter Chianca here.]

At Large Wednesday Night Link Roundup

☛ Scientists engineer a glow-in-the-dark dog. Finally, a solution to the dire tripping-over-dogs-in-the-dark problem.

☛ New reports indicate that Yes-Asia tour promises to be this summer's most annoying.

☛ OK, I take back everything I ever said about "Footloose" being a bunch of baloney.

☛ I knew it! "Report: Cosmo Has Run Same Article Every Month For 27 Years."

☛ And finally, Thanks to my daughter's spot-on Jonas Brothers impersonation, I now have "(I Fell in Love With the) Pizza Girl" stuck in my head. The only thing would be worse would be if I had the video in there with it.



Darn it. There it is.

Column: Have you thanked your mother today?

It’s Mother’s Day, the time of year when children honor their mothers by taking them out to brunch. This way Mom can have a nice, relaxing meal, and still be back home early enough to do all the laundry, shop for groceries and vacuum up all the crumbs from the brunch doggie bags.

Of course, as a child you just take for granted that your mother will do all these things happily in exchange for that one meal a year and a construction paper sunflower you made in art class. It’s not until you have kids of your own that you realize being a mother can be a pretty thankless job, sort of like being Joe Biden’s press secretary.

With that in mind, I thought I would take this opportunity to thank my own mother for some of the things she had to put up with when I was a kid. Granted, I never came home with a tattoo on my neck or set the house on fire (the latter mostly just out of sheer luck), but I figure it still couldn’t have been easy putting up with the following:

[For the rest of this week's AT LARGE by Peter Chianca, click here.]

How reading newspapers can keep you from getting rabies

Amid the whole kerfuffle over the Boston Globe and its possible (and now apparently averted) shutdown, some people have wondered aloud why it is that we need newspapers. Is it because they are guardians of the public trust? Watchdogs of government malfeasance? The place where you can read “Wizard of Id”? Well, yes, all those things … But mostly it’s because newspapers save lives.

When Megan Kulikoski picked up her Saugus Advertiser on the morning of Thursday, April 30, she immediately panicked. A front-page story about a rabid cat that had attacked three other Saugus residents grabbed her attention. At that moment she realized she had been attacked by the same black cat on the morning of April 22.

Thanks to that newspaper report (which she noticed because it was on the top of the front page, not because she happened to click on a link somewhere), Kulikoski was able to get potentially life-saving rabies treatment — just a few more days and it would have been too late.

So the moral of this story is, all of you people who say that we don’t need newspapers will be singing another tune when newspapers are gone and you all have rabies.

My trip, Tweeted

I've been back for a week, but feel like I'm still catching up from our family vacation to Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Penn State. I thought going back to work would help me to relax, but people keep asking me to do stuff, even though my head is down on my desk and I'm making grunting noises.

Hence my lack of posts, but until I get back in the swing of things, you can relive my trip here if you missed these on Twitter while I was away:

11:52 AM Apr 21st: At the Vince Lombardi Rest Area - it's everything I dreamed it would be!

I had a $7 turkey sandwich there about which Mr. Lombardi might have said, "This turkey sandwich isn't everything ... It's the only thing!"

3:58 PM Apr 21st: Rainy Boston to NY - sun came out in NJ + now it's sunny and 70 in Baltimore. God bless Jersey.

Unfortunately the sun only lasted until right before the Orioles game started, at which point I was sure the entire grounds crew was going to be struck by lightning. I'm pretty sure we could have somehow credited Jersey with that too.

8:13 PM Apr 21st: Rain delay at Camden Yards - guy just came around selling hot chocolate. They're no fools.

In retrospect, it was more like warm chocolate.

7:14 AM Apr 22nd: Made it for the 7:15 a.m. White House tour! Later: a nap.

If you're doing the math, you'll realize that we had to make it to that 7:15 tour from Baltimore, meaning we left at about 5:15 a.m. But it was worth it, because my kids got to see a secret service agent walking Bo, the First Dog. He (the agent, not the dog) had a look on his face that seemed to say nobody had mentioned anything about this in secret service school.

11:07 PM Apr 22nd: Night tour of the monuments was fantastic! My camera picked up many interesting blurs.

It would help if they let us open the windows on the trolley.

9:08 AM Apr 24th: Museum of Natural History -- a little obsessed with the dinosaurs. I'm just saying.

I'm pretty sure the place is designed so that every time you turn a corner, there's the skeletal remains of something. It's like being in a Grateful Dead video.

8:16 AM Apr 25th: What I learned at Mt. Vernon: George Washington was DREAMY! At least according to the little movie.

It's true -- the movie was good, but I got a little uncomfortable when George started giving Martha the goo-goo eyes. Some guy in the back shouted "Get a room!"

9:10 PM Apr 25th: At Penn State ... When did they pass the law that college girls had to dress like Julia Roberts at the start of Pretty Woman?

This was what we got for going out after 9 p.m. on a day when it was above 60 degrees. If their shorts had gotten any shorter, they would have been halter tops. Luckily, I thought quickly and told my daughter they must all be going to a ginormous costume party, dressed as hookers.

10:37 PM Apr 26th: I go away for a few days and suddenly the whole world is swine flu crazy. And here I thought I had run out of things to worry about.

Did somebody just cough???

D.C. or bust!

Top 5 things I hope to see on our family vacation to Washington DC this week:

1. Michelle Obama's arms.
2. Fonzie's jacket, so my kids can say, "Who's Fonzie?" and I can launch into a 45-minute dissertation on "Happy Days" and its various spin-offs.
   
3. The Washington Nationals literally implode, so that they're just nine little piles of dust scattered around the diamond.
4. Nancy Pelosi freeze John Boehner into a solid mass of ice with her frosty glare, like Arnold Schwarzenegger did to to the T-1000 in "Terminator 2."
5. That Wonkette lady. I know she's there somewhere.

I'll try to live-Tweet my touristy travels around our nation's capitol -- follow me (@pchianca) on Twitter so you'll be the first to know when I meet Bo the dog, or Joe Biden.