I Always Give Them My Money

On Black Friday, for an early Christmas present, my wife bought three Beatles CDs for me: Past Masters I & II, Abbey Road, and the "White Album." I'm a huge Beatles fan, plus post-Beatles Paul McCartney (you know the old joke: "Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?").

When some friends and I trekked to Ames, Iowa in 1990 for a McCartney show, one of them wondered aloud how much Macca must make on royalties. "Todd just mails him a $50 check every week," joked one of the guys. He was exaggerating only a little.

In the '70s, my sister turned me on to the Beatles. Then in 1980, a high school friend in band class came from typing every day, where he would type some John Lennon lyrics for me to read ("poems," as my friend called them). The morning of December 9, 1980, however, he had nothing.

"Who could type a poem on a day like today?," he solemnly asked. Indeed.

By then I was hooked. My friend had taped some of his Beatles albums for me, but I had to buy my own. Later that sophomore year, I recall my dad once saying, after seeing I had purchased the Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour cassettes, "They're still making money!" That was only a little over ten years after they had broken up. He may have popped a vein had he known how much more they would continue to make.

So let's get back to my weekly check to McCartney, no pun intended. ("Get Back" if you missed it, but now that I've pointed it out, you're less likely to believe it was unintended. Oh well...) That Sgt. Pepper cassette did fine for me for a few years, but every self-respecting Beatles fan has to own the LP, even today, so eventually I bought that, too.

In 1984, picture discs were appearing here and there, and although they never quite caught on, I had to buy the Sgt. Pepper version. Then in the late '80s, when the Beatles finally worked out an agreement to release their albums on CD, I of course had to buy it again in that format.

That brings us to the present, and the re-released and re-mastered collection of the Fab Four's albums, which are claimed to be superior to the '80s releases. Even though I likely will not be able to notice one iota of difference, no doubt I will soon own my fifth Sgt. Pepper album.

(Yes, you can still call them "albums." The word "album" does not necessarily mean the long-playing record format. Those are called "LPs." It is a huge pet peeve of mine when people think they have to correct even themselves when they say "album" when referring to a "CD.")

There are many albums I've purchased more than once, with most of them being to upgrade from tape or LP to CD format. Michael Jackson's Thriller comes in second with three. But Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band leads with four, soon to be five.

And Paul, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono will still be making money.

LPGA Popularity

I watched the re-run last night of Michelle Wie winning her first ever LPGA tournament, narrowly defeating, among others Paula Creamer.

The LPGA tour had 34 tournaments in 2008, 27 in 2009, and is scheduled for 23 in 2010. I don't get it. Why the LPGA tour is not more popular now than ever before is a bit puzzling to me.

Yes, I know the economy is in the dumper still. Yes, I know with the increase of non-American born players, it is possible American fans have felt a bit disconnected.

But come on. Natalie Gulbis. Michelle Wie. Paula Creamer. And those are just the famous ones. Sex sells, so they say, and the LPGA tour has never been sexier.

It may be controversial, but the new LPGA commissioner needs to use the tour's sex appeal.

As Michelle McGann once said long ago, when the aforementioned ladies were in diapers (if that yet), "I don't know why people wouldn't want to come out and see our pretty faces."

My personal golf crush? Suzann Pettersen. But that can change day-to-day.

Bobcat at Acme Comedy Company

I saw Bobcat Goldthwait at Acme Comedy Company over the weekend with my wife, two sisters, and nephew. I wasn't disappointed, although he did use more of his older material than I expected from a guy who is going out on the road for the first time in a while.

By "older material," I am not referring to his Police Academy days. More around the time he started cutting his hair and had lost a lot of weight.

Looking back on his Police Academy days, I always thought Bobcat looked like an overweight Andre Agassi. Now that he has gained back the weight he lost (and then some), chopped his ever-receding hair, he once again looks like an overweight Andre Agassi. He even sounds a bit like Andre since he has dropped the screaming lunatic bit from his act. ("After about twenty minutes of that, it gets really f***ing annoying," said Bobcat, to which the audience roared.)

His best joke of the night was (supposedly) a true story, and was very politically incorrect. Well, the story was P.I., but if you found it funny, you were too. Remember Johnny Carson's classic Carnac "sis-boom-bah" joke, and subsequent audience reaction? It was reminiscent of that.

Not everyone got the punchline immediately, but everyone eventually came around, and the more one thought of it and visualized what he described, the louder one laughed. So it was just a long drawn-out laughter from the full-house crowd. It was probably the longest I recall in my years of seeing stand-up, rivaled perhaps by Emo Philips' non-alcohol beer joke, and Steven Wright's shoreline fishing joke.

Let me know if you want to know the jokes I'm referring to. I'm refraining because I don't have enough time to post it all tonight (the Goldthwait joke was a long story), I don't want to disappoint if you don't find them funny, and I don't want anyone to know how much I enjoyed a politically incorrect joke.

I'll just tell you the Goldthwait punchline:

"Firetruck?!"

Minnesota Golf in November

My last round of golf was September 23. The way things were going, I was certain that would be my last round of the year, making it the earliest last round of the year in, well, several years.

But I have a 9:10 tee time tomorrow at Stonebrooke in Shakopee. I should be raking leaves in the back yard, but oh well. I'm not sure if the ferry across the bay on hole 8 at Stonebrooke runs this late in the year, but regardless, I'll be glad to be playing.

I know I'll stink it up, but because I don't have to post the round for handicapping purposes, as it is after October 15 here in Minnesota, and the weather is expected to be unseasonably great, who cares? Not I, although I'll surely grumble at more than a few shots.

The only month during which I have not played golf in Minnesota is February, although I did turn down an opportunity once. Several Decembers ago, it got to 60 degrees on December 3, and I not only played but actually played part of the round in a short-sleeved polo. Then, a few Januarys later, during a winter in which there had been little snow, an unseasonably warm spell in January caused one local course to open on a 55-degree day.

If you're even half-knowledgeable about golf courses in the Twin Cities, you no doubt guessed correctly that the course that January day was Parkview.

Selig Defends the Umps

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig is on Letterman tonight. He spouted out the old canard, "The umpires are right 99% of the time."

Perhaps, Bud, but at least 95% of the calls are easy enough for a fifth-grader to handle.

I really don't hate umpires...honest! I have a great deal of respect for them in fact, at least below the MLB level all the way down to Class E Co-Rec Fall Softball.

But even though I liked some of the other things he said tonight (he too hates November baseball), I'm still no fan of Bud.

Don't Judge a Pumpkin Patch by its Cover

It's a popular time of year for apple orchards, pumpkin patches, and hayrides. Some businesses combine all three, plus a few other attractions like corn mazes, and do very well. My wife and I took the kids to one such place last year.

We were in Alexandria, Minnesota this past weekend with our two boys and my three older kids from my first marriage. My wife wanted to take all the kids to an orchard/pumpkin patch again this year, and was concerned we wouldn't get a chance if we went to Alex (pronounced "Alec" by us Alex natives...one of those local things, like Lake Carlos being pronounced "Car'-luss").

So to Google I went and found a business just west of Alex that was an apple orchard, pumpkin patch, and hayride provider, just like you find in the Big City (Alex city limits population is around 10.000). Better yet, the online source said their hours were from 8am until dark through October. Jackpot!

We headed out Sunday morning with the directions I had written down, and like a Northwest Airlines pilot, I overshot the place by quite a bit before realizing it. How could we have missed it? It was right on this road!

My wife called the phone number I so smartly had also written down, and an old woman answers. Yes, they had apples/pumpkins/hayrides, but she and her husband just got back from church. They usually open around 1 PM (it was about 11 AM when we called), but if we turn around, look for the mailbox on the address, and pull in, they'll be glad to help us. Her husband would even change out of his Sunday clothes and fire up the John Deere to pull us on a hayride.

This big-city-style attraction was in fact just a lovely couple in there mid-eighties I would guess, who had been doing this for forty years, and it was all on their modest homestead. The woman pulled off the tarps to expose the pumpkins and apples, most of which were neither symmetrical or without some sort of flaws.

Her husband pulled out the tractor, an oil-burning machine that was barely bigger than an ATV. He hooked it up to a small wooden trailer/wagon equipped with home-made seats that wiggled when we sat on them. My two-year-old grabbed me tightly as I grabbed the semi-secure railing on our bumpy journey. "Daddy, I scared," he wimpered to me.

The exhaust we inhaled on the hayride (hay excluded, by the way) had to be about as damaging as if we had smoked two packs of filter-less Camels on the 10-minute trip. But the awkwardness of the whole situation at this Mom-and-Pop Orchard/Pumpkin Patch/Hayride Haven ended there.

To our surprise, their back yard was quite long, and consisted of 60 trees. The old man would stop occasionally, telling us of how this year's crop was poor, and why. A big reason was, not surprisingly, the weather, but we learned the weather affected the amount of bee pollination that occurred, which was not enough for a bumper crop. Who knew the Bee Movie was actually accurate to any degree?

We saw where the deer got into the pumpkins and squashes, and learned that barbed wire seems to work OK as a repellent. We saw all the trees, the raspberry patches, and other gardens. And at the end of the ride, we got to see how they make apple juice the old-fashioned way.

Out of the garage, they pulled out an old wood-and-steel contraption. It consisted of a motorized apple chopper, a barrel into which the apple chips flew, and a manual crank to squish the juice out. The juice would drain into a pale and they used a steel sieve to catch most of the pulp.

I had to take it on faith that the old machine, the bucket, sieve, and of course the apples had all been washed. The kids got a kick out of putting the apples in the chipper, although we kept a close eye on the two- and four-year-olds' fingers. No need to make apple juice a protein drink. After a sip of the best-tasting apple juice we'd ever had, we were sold.

We ended up with four pumpkins the kids picked out, a bag of apples, and a gallon of freshly squeezed organic apple juice, not to mention the hay-less hayride. All in little over an hour. Total bill: $16. We handed the nice woman a $20 bill and told her to keep the change.

Bargain of the year, I figured, plus we were truly helping out the local economy. Maybe they can invest in some wagon seating reinforcement.

Moron, err, More on Baseball Announcing

Throughout the MLB postseason, I have been cringing at Chip Caray's inability to distinguish between a fly ball, a soft-liner, and a flare. In the bottom of the ninth of tonight's Philadelphia win over LA, to put the Phillies up three games to one, he did it again. It was a soft liner to third, and he called it a fly.

Still, I never thought he would become his late grandfather so soon in life, until I heard his call on the game-winning hit. "Here comes the throw home," he yelled, exactly while the ball was coming in to the second baseman. There never was a throw home as the winning run crossed the plate.

Yikes. I'm guessing I would still prefer Caray for the course of a full season over the Twins' announcers.