January 2005. It begins.

Jan. 12 – Site launched. There was even content! Wow!
Yokorama – I discuss the complexities of naming a rock band.

Book crook – I had this awesome idea for an ethics column Magnum and I were going to write together. Three years later, we’ve averaged one entry per year. Sweet, eh? At the beginning, there was an entire ethics section. About a year or so later, it got sandwiched into the Advice section. The first installment is about books, namely Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full. The ethical issue at hand? Unattended property left in a public place.

Quite Frankly column – The order is a little difficult to figure out. I think the first one (or two) were:
Babysitter blues
Paranoid psycho jealousy

It’s weird. Originally, I wasn’t going to archive anything. Just have the five or six most recent articles. That’s it. Delete everything else. I had a couple of blurby things like that in January. You might call them ‘bloggy’ or even ‘blog-esque.’ I call them crap. They are deleted. Until now…

Jan. 13 – $740 for a haunted Japanese WWII helmet on eBay. A bargain at half the price. (I hope they leave this listing up forever.) *Jan. 2008 update! The item is no longer listed. What a surprise, or as the French say, “Quel ligne Maginot!”*

Jan. 14 – Guest speaker touts stripping to 8th grade girls. Wow. I have Yahoo as my home page because the news screener who selects which AP stories to run on in their little “In the News” box does a great job (as this link attests). Don’t overlook this nugget of a quote: “He really focused on finding what you really love to do,” said Mariah Cannon, 13. Nice. Plus, she only has to add an ‘s’ to have a perfect stripper name. *Jan. 2008 update! Yahoo didn’t archive the story either! Now I don’t feel so bad. Ah, here’s the article. I’ve reposted it in the forum so we never lose it again.*

Jan. 15
Ponch – The first few months of the site were very Ponch-centric.

Not three days in and I redesigned the site.

Jan. 17
Hirsute heaven – Quite Frankly. This one covers Burt Reynolds, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (Gil Gerard). Advice for a guy who loves hairy chests.

Jan. 20
Pikachu – What if Pikachu and Squirtle had their own TV series? (This has become one of the more popular pics on the site. I’ve seen it randomly posted on people’s MySpaces. Weird.)

Jan. 22 – Here’s another non-saved item. The fully  restored content:
This is a retro-blog, a blog of thoughts I had days ago–that is, in fact, only timely days ago–and yet I blog it now, in the useless, useless present.

I call it How to be a hack…
WFAN’s (660AM New York) own Ed Coleman, part-time talk show host and full-time Mets apologist, is spending the day before the NFL Conference Championship games (the best day of football, eclipsing the disgustingly family friendly Super Bowl) on baseball. He’s pretty interested in who the Mets’ first baseman might be. Only three football games left in the NFL season? Knicks coach just resigned? Nope, Eddie’s talking Mets baseball. After all, the baseball season only stretches across nine months from March to November. Ed Coleman is my arch-enemy.

Woah, I was busy on the 22nd. Here’s another one.

Art takes one in the face
Once again, Costco plies us with sweet, sweet bargains. Often relating to jumbo, brontosaurus-sized cranapple juice bottles, this time bargainosity lowers the boom on an original Picasso. It sold for $39,999.99. I’d like to petition the good people at Costco to please not hedge on that final penny. Psychologically speaking, there is no extra incentive for snagging a Picasso at under 40 grand versus 40 even. Sure, when I’m jonesing for some Cocoa Puffs, if I see that $3.00 tag, I’m walking over to the Lucky Charms. But you knock off that penny for a $2.99 spot, I’m getting cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Y’know?

Jan. 24
X stands for stupid – A bit on my craptastic collection of comics. Really bad. Rob Liefeld X-Force bad.

Jan. 25
H&R Schlock – Knocking H&R Block and The New Yorker. That’s not hard to do, really. And unicorn reference. I loves me them unicornses.

Jan. 30
Cadaver Conundrum – Two ethics columns in one month? We haven’t come close to matching that since. Didn’t take us long to get into necrophilia, did it? And by ‘get into’ I mean talk about, not literally ‘get into.’ That’s gross. Perv. We discuss Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I threw in a ton of references: George Romero, Uma Thurman, Clerks. There’s even an American Pie reference a scant three sentences from a Bill Hicks one. That should never happen ever.

G.I. Zoo – Ah yes, the precursor to the first War on the Floor. Outstanding. A discussion of the animals of the G.I. Joe universe. Plus the first (but certainly not last) reference to Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian.”