I must be in the front row

Last night, I dreamed that I was with my mother outside a baseball stadium, and we ran into Bob Uecker. I told him how much I enjoyed watching him on "Mr. Belvedere," and he said something to me (I don't remember what) about Wesley, one of the kids on the show.

I'm sure this dream has a very deep meaning, but I don't feel like trying to interpret it. (The presence of my mother is slightly troubling, for example.) And if I'm going to dream about celebrities, why can't they be attractive female celebrities?

I really did enjoy watching Bob Uecker on "Mr. Belvedere."

Breakfast television

I learned today that C-SPAN is currently airing BBC 1's morning news show "Breakfast" live, which means it's on from 10:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. here in the Pacific time zone.

I watched the first hour of tomorrow morning's show tonight (yes, I know that sounds weird, but it's true), and it was very interesting, partly because BBC does a very good job of covering news, and partly because C-SPAN's feed is technically from BBC London and includes the local newsbreaks.

First of all, I have no idea how warm it's going to be in London because I have trouble with Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion, unless the temperature in degrees C is either -40, 0, 100, or 27 (which equals 80 degrees F, a fact I have memorized for some reason). Second of all, I have no idea where the traffic jams are because they didn't show a map of the roads in the London area, just traffic camera views. On the other hand, I did know exactly what they meant when they said the Circle Line wasn't running anticlockwise.

If this is L.A., it must be a celebrity sighting

I'm horrible at recognizing celebrities by face, whether in context (seeing them on the silver screen or on TV) or out of context (seeing them on the street). So it's a good thing I was with some "All My Children" viewers last night when we spotted Sydney Penny outside a movie theater.

War is strange

Today being Thursday, my two fellow closed-captioners and I made our usual noontime pilgrimage to an eating spot in the greater San Fernando Valley region. Today's restaurant of choice was the Fuddruckers in beautiful downtown Burbank.

We seated ourselves in an area that was unoccupied, where there happened to be two television sets tuned to CBS, and watched Dan Rather use a pen to point at a map of the Middle East. ("What is this, 1974?" asked one of my co-workers.)

Gradually, a few more people gravitated toward this area to eat their hamburgers. Eventually, the manager came in and asked if we were watching the news, or if he could turn to the NCAA tournament. Getting no response because we really didn't care, he got up on a chair to manipulate the DirecTV box.

He flipped around the various CBS feeds for a minute or so, apparently perplexed by the fact that although the on-screen schedule listed the basketball games, it was nothing but news on CBS. Finally, I yelled out, "ESPN!" "Oh, yeah," he said.

Not having a remote, he flipped through all the pay-per-view movies, eventually coming back around to the bottom of the DirecTV dial, and discovered that ESPN wasn't coming up, just the "for ordering information, call Customer Service" notice. He left it on CNN, which probably has better news coverage than CBS, but which doesn't have an anchorman as crazy as Dan Rather.

In conclusion, don't go to the Fuddruckers in Burbank expecting to watch a major sporting event airing on ESPN, because their DirecTV subscription doesn't include it.

In 1987, NASA launched the last of its deep space probes

I just saw an episode of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" for the first time in at least 22 years. I can fully throw my support behind my childhood crush on Erin Gray, but everything else about the show combined to make it a big pile of cheese.

Don't proofread and drive

Two car dealer license plate frames I saw on my way home today:

1. "Excaliber Imports Inc." I assume they're making a pun on "excellent caliber" or something like that, but when I first saw it, of course, I thought, "hey, they misspelled 'Excalibname.'"

2. More egregious, "Culver City Suzuki/Suburu." Yes, they had misspelled the name of one of the car makes they sell. Makes you hope the guy who approved the license plate frames when they came back from the printer doesn't work in this dealer's service department.

But I could have just watched it on TV

I scanned it for someone else's web site, so since I have the file, you can enjoy this ticket to see "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" taped in Burbank, California, on Veterans' Day 1999. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the experience more if I hadn't had a cold that turned into laryngitis while I was waiting in line to get into the studio.

More drums of war beating

On Saturday morning, Cartoon Network aired its usual "shows from our sister network Boomerang" block. This week, the year was 1978, among the shows included was "Scooby's Laff-a-lympics," and in the episode in question, half of the competition took place in Quebec, and the other half took place in Baghdad. Surely it could not have been a coincidence that they showed that episode.

No, Saddam Hussein was not a member of the Really Rottens team.

As the drums of war beat

In 1965, Barry McGuire of the New Christy Minstrels had a number one hit with a protest song called "Eve of Destruction."

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

"Eve of Destruction" quickly spawned an "answer song," called "Dawn of Correction," recorded by a group called The Spokesmen. It entered the Billboard chart about a month after "Eve of Destruction" and eventually peaked at number 36...

So over and over again
You keep saying it's the end
But I say you're wrong
We're just on the dawn of correction

What's more interesting is that it's usually cited as a "right-wing answer song." Hmm...

There are buttons to push
In two mighty nations
But who's crazy enough
To risk annihilation?
The buttons are there
To ensure negotiations
So don't be afraid, boy
It's our only salvation

But, more interestingly, this verse...

You missed all the good in your evaluation
What about the things that deserve commendation?
Where there once was no cure, there's vaccination
Where there once was a desert, there's vegetation
Self-government's replacing colonization
What about the Peace Corps organization?
Don't forget the work of the United Nations

That's right, it's a right-wing song praising the United Nations. Shows you how much the "right wing" has changed between 1965 and 2003, huh?

Department of redundancy department

Current AP Sports headline: "Raiders Center Spent 30 Days at Center."

Yes, one would hope that the Raiders center would, in fact, spend the entire season at the center position.

Turns out what the headline meant was "Raiders Center Spent 30 Days at Rehab Center."

Saddest lost cat notice ever

"...might have crawled into a U-Haul moving truck."

Newspaper weirdness

On Saturday morning, my Los Angeles Times hadn't shown up by the time I had to leave for work. I forgot to call and have another copy delivered, but it was okay because we get the paper at work anyway, so I read it there.

This morning, it hadn't shown up by the time I finally rolled out of bed at 9:15, so this time I called. Turns out I'd mysteriously had a vacation stop entered on my account for March 1st through the 10th. It was canceled, and I got the Sunday paper at about 10:00.

Now, here's where it gets really interesting: at one point, I was planning to be out of town from March 4th through the 11th, so I would have needed a vacation stop for those dates, and there's a certain amount of overlap with the 1st-through-10th period. The plans were, in fact, concrete enough that I bought a plane ticket.

So what I'm wondering is if the L.A. Times is trying to save on newspaper delivery expenses by using some sort of mind-reading device that automatically enters vacation stops if it thinks you're going to need them, and if this device still needs to be tweaked so it will get the dates exactly right.