andymcelfresh.com Blog

What you’ll see on the show

In addition to my writing and shooting duties on the show, I also do the occasional graphic. Most of the time, that means an animated title for one of the bits, as you may know from past blog entries. But once in a while, I do special effects.

These effects can be planned ahead, like the blowdarts I used on children in my “Blownadril” antihistamine commercial parody. There’s just no way we’re going to dart a kid in real life, so a computer-generated dart is the only way to make the joke happen.

Sometimes, I create effects to fix mistakes, or to more clearly demonstrate where the joke is in a bit. Like today. In the above photo, the joke is that it’s been so hot, the illegal immigrants are using a Slip ‘n Slide to come through the border. However, the way it was shot, the time of day, the color of the fence – all of these factors made it hard to see that there was a fence there at all.

Here’s the original shot:

The chain link fence is too dark. While it might do, it could also be confusing to viewers. The idea of sliding under the fence needs to be more obvious.

I took a reference shot and put it on my digital camera. It’s just a Nikon Coolpix, but when the zoom is all the way out, it has nearly the same distortion characteristics as the lens we shoot with on the show’s ENG camera. Also, the color depth is good, so I can dial up the contrast and hue to really come close to our video.

Then I went across the street to the construction site, parked the Vespa on the sidewalk and stood on the seat. I took this photo of the construction fence there:

You can see it’s pretty close in angle to the reference shot, and the shadows are all going in the right direction. I took it back to my office.

In Photoshop, I did an overlay, copying the new fence shot over the reference shot. After a little scaling and positioning, I created a mask and painted out all the areas that I wanted to see through. This included the hole in the fence, but not the fence on the left and the bush on the lower left.

I had to make the pavement look like dirt, so I sampled the color of the leaves in the original, and using another overlay layer, colorized it to match. I didn’t try to make it perfect, instead choosing to make it look like a shadow.

Next, I made a fake border sign and distorted it to look like it was hanging on the fence. I painted on a few shadows, and blurred it to look like the video, which has a lot of pixels, but the resolution isn’t quite HDTV.

Here’s the new overlay, ready to composite onto the video:

I saved the file and opened it in After Effects, along with the original video shot. Since the camera was handheld (extremely well, by the way – there was very little movement) the background video needed to be tracked so the overlay would move with it. Easy enough with all those crossing wires on the fence.

I applied the motion of the camera to the overlay and made a few positioning adjustments. Since the fence is backlit, I made it just a tiny bit transparent, which also allows you to see the action before the Mexicans make it through the fence.

When you’re doing a visual payoff like this one, the idea is not to be seen. It should look real, but be obvious enough so the audience gets it. The last thing you want viewers to do is math — connecting the dots from the premise to the punchline.

We do the math, so you don’t have to.

Click here to see the video clip.

Lighted green warehouse windows attract and repel

You know how your brain brings up the same stuff, over and over? Maybe you don’t, but mine does, and there’s no way to control it.

My mother calls these little memory flashes “my old routines,” and many of them are. For example, I can’t drive down certain streets without hearing in my head the song that was on the radio the first time I drove it. It’s irritating. Or, the tiniest jokes that get repeated forever and ever when the situation arises:

(Driving past Madison Square Garden) “Hey, I lost my glasses in there once. You know how I found them? I Felt Forum.”

See, these things are little demons in my head, and I hope to exorcise them by writing about them, but I’m not hopeful. Nothing helps.

But to finally get to the point, a more significant, recurring thought dates back to 11th grade English class with Dr. Dewsnap. A slight woman, she was famous for being a tough grader, and for unconsciously fondling a small purple statue of a panther when she was lecturing us on American Literature. Most boys could forgive her grading policy, just to watch her work that panther over. Whew!

Anyhow, she was the one who taught me Fitzgerald, including “The Great Gatsby.” This was not a book to be enjoyed, God forbid, this was a book to be examined, worshipped, even envied if you had the idiotic desire to become a writer. And on the last day of Gatsby, as we slouched our ache-free teenage bodies into the classroom, she stood writing on the blackboard.

Since the blackboard was so far from the purple panther, the guys couldn’t care less what she was writing, and the usual harrumph of a murmur went around the room. Then, quietly and intensely, she spoke.

“The Green Light. What does it mean?”

The room murmured on. She turned on us, furious. We shouldn’t be talking about our own little lives, we should be talking about how our lives were changed sometime last night, when we read that last chapter, in which Gatsby stands on his lawn and looks across the water at the green light in the distance.

“The Green Light! THE GREEN LIGHT! IT’S EVERYTHING!” she exploded, clawing upward with pipecleaner fingers, circling the room in long strides like a Barrymore laying down some Bard.

This got our attention. Frantically, I scanned back to the night before, sometime after swim practice, “Wonder Woman” and a couple of Who album sides, but it wasn’t coming to me.

“It’s the central image! It’s the future! It’s Daisy and hope and… everything!”

We sat there, ashamed that we had missed it. All except for Joel Myers, who knew everything and therefore was a pain in the balls. He just nodded smugly, and looked like he might join her up there at the board any minute.

So now whenever I see a green light, it all comes back. Usually I can banish it by whispering a quick “green light,” as if I’m playing a private game of “red light, green light.” But last week in New York, as we returned to the hotel on our last night of eating and drinking and walking and visiting old friends, I looked up at a renovated warehouse and saw the wall of green lights, shown in the photo above.

My mental GPS froze me to the spot for a second, putting that view/memory/location permanently into the archives. And it made me think about the green light, and New York, and everything that has happened since then, and my own Daisy, and Dash, and life out west. Maybe this is the future, back in a New York that’s changed so much. Could we really go back?

And looking at those green windows, formerly a squatter’s warehouse and now the worldwide headquarters of some absurd designer or something, I found myself drawing a profound conclusion to the entire trip:

Maybe L.A. doesn’t suck so much after all! Yippee!

A welcome sign

On my last day of hiatus, I can finally say that I have finished my CNC router mill. Why the hell I would WANT to say that, well, that’s another story.

First, what it is. “CNC” stands for “Computer Numeric Control,” which at this point is an old-fashioned way of saying that it’s a machine that your computer controls.

Another word for this would be “robot.”

While it doesn’t wave its arms around and warn Will Robinson that Dr. Smith is feeling frisky, it still qualifies. There are special motors called “stepper motors,” one for each of the x, y, and z axes. Once you calibrate the table and tell the software just where everything is and how thick it is, you can convert your drawings and designs and the thing makes them for you. As far as I could tell, all the robot on “Lost in Space” ever did for the Robinson family was Jack and Shit, so I consider my robotic mill to be vastly superior.

There are other robotic similarities. When the stepper motors go to work, they move in very small, very precise increments, so it’s not a smooth motor action but a vibratory one. Thus, as the router is whirring at 3,000 RPM, the motors give out with an eerie, atonal song. As the thing cuts a circle and the speeds on both motors continue to change, they make a song not unlike the music from “Forbidden Planet.” Get it? Robby the Robot?

Okay, that was a stretch, but you have to admit this thing is pretty cool. I can download a Google Sketchup drawing of a desk, decompose it in EasyCad, turn it into g-code and the mill will make all the parts for me. It’s like an earsplitting, 10-hour-long, dusty trip to IKEA, all within the confines of my garage workshop.

There are still refinements to be made to the mill. First, I have to make a dustcatcher to which I can hook my shop vac. Next, I’m going to drill holes in the stage and attach another vacuum to that, to keep the stock lumber in place while it’s being cut. Think of it as a reverse air hockey table. That works at 140 decibels.

And finally, after I have used my precision machine to make built-in shelves for my wife’s home office, I will start learning the carving software, that will allow me to make 3-d representations of stuff I’ve designed on the computer.

But for now, I’ve basically worked my way up to cutting out complex letters. And while that puts me on a technological par with a sign making shop circa 1978, back in 1978 I used to think that sign making shops were awesome. Or maybe groovy, I don’t know, I don’t retain contextualized adjectives well.

So here it is, the debut project:

Sign Pro of Media, Pennsylvania, eat your heart out

I like beautiful design. I like whimsy. I like it when someone comes in and cleans my room every day. So why don’t I love the Hotel Gansevoort?

First up, it’s got that whole Sanitized Manhattan thing going on. It’s in the center of the meat packing district, which used to be a desolate no-man’s-land with nothing but Florent and puddles of meat runoff. Now Florent is going out of business because they raised the rent.

And the neighborhood is populated with extremely high-end designer shops, like Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, and places with names like this:

Did “Sex and the City” destroy the world?

Next, there’s a view of the Empire State Building (which I love), but it’s only from the roof and this is all you get:

The view, such as there is, of the Empire State Building

Okay, so, there’s plenty of other stuff to see. It’s right by the river, so the sunset must be fantastic. Guess what: there’s another building, right in the way:

Excuse me, would you mind removing your top 11 floors?

Now we get into the really annoying details. The purple elevator buttons:

Somebody made this decision

And the incredibly annoying video monitors in the elevators, depicting nerdy guys performing comical dances:

Damn, have some self respect, man!

This gets us to our final criticism, one that will not be true for everyone, but this is my own personal blog, after all. There is a rooftop pool, and in it, there are hotel guests. And those guests underline what I could never love about this place: it attracts mostly people who are much more attractive than me.

I ain’t getting my suit on, that’s for damned sure

I mean, come on! I work in an airless, windowless office all day! When I come to New York, I want to spend my time with pale, unattractive people! It’s bad enough going out to dinner in Los Angeles! Even my wife is taller than me! I work with the Wayans Brothers, and nothing makes you feel shorter, fatter, or whiter than working with the Wayans Brothers! So for God’s sakes, couldn’t there be just one Ernest Borgnine-looking jerkoff checked into this place?

Plus, those dancing guys in the elevators. I mean, really.

One of the manmade waterfalls in New York Harbor

My wife and I are visiting New York for a few days, and are lucky enough to be here when the waterfall art project by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in New York Harbor. It consists of four, 8- to 10-story scaffolds with high-powered pumps that take their water from the East River, raise it, only to drop it from thundering heights.

For an Icelandic artist named Olafur, I thought the installation was surprisingly accessible. After all, Bjork is Icelandic, and she’s ready to throw on a dead swan wherever people are handing out statues.

The artist’s motivation was this: The harbor used to be busy; it’s not busy anymore; the waterfalls are meant to make the harbor look busy. And isn’t it every artist’s secret motto, whenever the people with the grant money are watching, to “look busy?”

It’s not the easiest exhibit to figure out how to see. The Circle Line is having a mini-boom over it (note the crowd of boats in the above photo), but their twist is to give you a rain slicker and actually get you drenched by that art, a sort-of homage to the “Maid of the Mist” in Niagara Falls. I carry way too many bits of electronics on my person for that to be a possibility.

Another way would be to take a taxi to Brooklyn so you could see all four falls (the prominent one is located under the Brooklyn Bridge, and can only otherwise be seen from about forty blocks north on the Manhattan side). But come on, this is the Brooklyn Bridge here, you just gotta walk it.

And so we did. One of the members of our party decided to wear flip-flops for the trip, which wasn’t a great idea. She was also immensely satisfied when we came to the spot where Miranda gets together with some guy in the “Sex and the City” movie. So there wasn’t a lot motivating all of us to the other side. We would settle for seeing three of the four waterfalls.

Then, on the way back, the Band-Aid fell off her chafed, poorly-clad feet, and when she bent down to fix it, she spotted the last scaffold directly beneath us. I managed to reach my camera under the walkway and snap this photo through the bridge infrastructure:

Waterfall #4

And so we did it. Like the waterfalls themselves, I felt that the level of artistic accomplishment was fleeting. But it was cool and big and made a lovely roar to drown out the taxis on the bridge.

And it gave us an excuse to walk the Brooklyn Bridge, an artistic achievement of a somewhat greater permanence.

It’s easy to get a picture when they hover over your house

Were I to write an essay entitled “How I Spent My June Hiatus,” I would definitely have to put “Didn’t Get Killed In My Own Home” on the checklist.

“But,” you ask, “couldn’t most people who were able to write the essay also be able to say that?”

That’s true, but the difference here is that, yesterday, I had such a wonderful opportunity to be killed and I missed it.

I have been working on a router table in the garage for a few days, a very noisy pastime, and when I shut the machine down at around 11:30, I noticed that there was a helicopter circling overhead. And by overhead, I mean just overhead, while a half-dozen American-made cars raced around the block.

Being a Los Angelino these ten or more years, I decided to get my camera.

I shot some great video in HD – I’ve been looking for a shot of a helicopter to use in a graphic for work – and after about ten minutes, I realized I probably didn’t have to run to get it. The helicopter kept circling, and now there were squad cars blocking off all the streets. The helicopter began to announced that the police had the block surrounded and that, if I had any weapons, I should probably put them down.

I went inside. Locked the doors.

I was finding it hard to concentrate on the television with that chopper mercilessly beating the air overhead, making loose change dance across the counter and the screws start to work their way out of the hinges. So I went upstairs and peeked out the window at the cops on the corner: there were now about twenty, and every time one of them spoke into his or her walkie-talkie, you could hear it on everyone else’s, feeding back like the warmup guy at an outdoor concert.

Things seemed under control, and I couldn’t find anything on the radio or TV news about it, so I thought I’d pop out there and get the story.

I walked out of my front gate, and everybody put their hands on their pistol butts, squared their shoulders, and pointed their chins at me. When the closest guy, who was just a few feet from the gate, gave me a suspicious and surprisingly tenor “what can I do for you?” – from where I stood, “shoot me” was the only answer they could have acted on with any kind of speed.

“I live here,” I said, “just want to know what’s up.”

“Two suspects, both male, African-American, probably shirtless, fled through your next door neighbor’s driveway to the rear of his residence,” he replied, very fast. I thought, at that level of excitement, it showed great obedience to his training that he chose “African-American” over “black,” but who wants a lawsuit, I guess.

“Am I in any danger?” I asked (meaning from the suspects, not the fifteen young men and women with unsnapped holsters).

“Yes.”

Hmm.

“Go back into your house. Lock the doors and windows. If you see someone, do not attempt to alert the officers outside. Call 911 and report a prowler.”

You mean, after they put me on “hold.”

And so, with my trusty Louisville Slugger Junior Tee Ball Edition baseball bat in one hand, my house phone in the other and led by my stalwart miniature poodle, I checked out every nook and cranny of the house. I didn’t find any criminals, but I DID find my Blackberry charger I lost last week.

I ended up sitting on the edge of my bed, watching the cops out the window, listening to their walkie chatter and hoping they’d catch these guys as fast as possible. I must not have been that worried because I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the cops were gone and I didn’t have any bullet holes in me, so far as I could tell.

My neighbor came by and told me the suspects were caught. They had split up, and were hiding two blocks over. I went back into the workshop and started up the routing mill again.

And as I ran some test g-code to the stepper motors, I thought back on my day. I had spoken to a man who put his hand on his gun and asked me what he could do for me. Kind of a mixed message, if you asked me.

But then I thought, now what, that’s perfect. That’s the L.A. cops all over. Swat teams, Emergency Services, dozens of cars laying siege to a quiet neighborhood, ready to shoot the first chubby white guy in an Izod that makes a false move. They should make that their new recruitment poster. Forget the ethnically mixed, friendly faces fresh from the academy in the current poster: give me a nervous 30-year-old on Human Growth Hormone, twenty miles away from his sense of humor with a hand on his gun butt, and the caption, “What can I do for you.

All on a nice, breezy, carefree summertime day.

Big pod of Saddleback Dolphins, about a mile off Santa Monica Pier

I’ve been out in the Pacific in my little Boston Whaler dozens of times, and at every time of the year, but I’ve never seen it as deserted of boats as today.

It’s no surprise, since the average member of the Mosquito Fleet goes out in something at least 20 feet long, with twin whatevers that suck down the gas. Or diesel. Plus, gas in the marina costs almost 7 bucks a gallon (they pay all sorts of fees to be able to spill gas into the harbor) and you’ve got an industry suffering from the gas crunch.

I’m glad I bought the 4-stroke Mercury 60 for the Whaler. I did it for the environmentally friendly side first, but now that gas is so expensive, it’s cheap to run. Where my old 2-stroke Evinrude took down 18 gallons in about 3 hours, this thing can go at least 10 without getting down to a quarter tank. I took it to Catalina with Dash 2 years ago, we fished, then cruised around the whole island before returning to the Marina, and we hadn’t quite used a third of a tank.

There’s a drawback to not having any boaters out there: you can’t get in their chumline, look for bent poles, or otherwise cheat at finding the fish by finding the happy fishermen. Oh sure, there are the party boats, but they always go to the same spots, and the likelihood of being blown into their lines or getting crapped on by the army of seagulls (would that be “Airforce of Seagulls?”) is way too high. Plus, you get your own boat to get away from the party boats.

Today was my shakedown cruise for the start of the summer. The kids are at camp, the wife is visiting her girlfriends — what better time for a man to face off against the elements by going 40 miles per hour in the wide Pacific? I dropped the wife off at the airport, drove to the Marina, put the battery in the boat and backed it down the ramp.

Leave it to Mercury — everything started up and worked perfectly. I put up the canopy, raised the antenna, fired up the fishfinder (a gift from my pal Sam) and the ship-to-shore and steamed out through the no-wake zone. I just wanted to make sure everything was working before bringing kids and fishing poles and the like.

But once I got out to open water, I had to fire it up. It was pretty choppy this morning, and I got airborne more than once, but I won’t be feeling those injuries to my neck and spine for a few days. And as I was out there, all alone, I noticed a big commotion of birds, maybe two miles off the Santa Monica Pier.

So I went. I was hoping it wasn’t harbor seals gnawing at something under a kelp island. I used to love seeing them, but they are so brazen, and have eaten so many anchovies off my line, I don’t need to burn any gas just to get snorted at. Plus they’re always easy to find lolling on the buoys. The homeless people of the sea.

But I was in luck. The birds weren’t just dropping in from high up like they do with a few seals. They were hovering just above the water, picking up scrap after scrap. And there were thousands.

I raced around the big pack of birds to the head of the line, and there in the splashes I could see hundreds of saddleback dolphins, racing and hunting all in a north to northwest direction. At this point in the bay, the warmer water from inshore forms a line that washes out and south with the current — you can see it just as you take off from LAX, especially if there is any rain runoff — and the dolphins hunt in giant packs, pushing the baitfish in the warm water up against the colder current further out to sea.

The baitfish don’t like this — a small but sudden temperature change can shock them and cause temporary paralysis, so the first ones to hit that line double back against the feeding dolphins, making a hell of a mess. As I sat there idling, cursing the fact that I had lent my wife my camera and trying to figure out the zoom on my Blackberry, a huge school of anchovies boiled to the surface around my boat, and I was surrounded by furiously feeding dolphins, jumping, diving, snorting air, making impossible moves on their backs and going fast, fast, fast — I could feel a vibration under my feet like a rope singing in a stiff breeze — and I couldn’t help thinking of these little guys (the saddlebacks are about half the length of a bottle-nose) as lovable, friendly piranhas.

Then Crap Force One caught up, and I got out of there, taking the above photo as I went.

As I left, a number of dolphins escorted the boat, leaping out of the water and having a good look at me. I can’t help think that they are more curious than most people I’ve met in my work. Especially the Jaywalkers.

If you want to bring a neighborhood down a peg in terms of attractiveness, livability and property values, nothing beats a run-down Winnebago.

It is like a giant billboard for shabbiness. The sides are high, blocking the view when it is parked in front of your house. The engine is loud, and throws off some intense, oily smoke. And because of the street cleaners, it moves around in the middle of the night, seemingly on its own, a quantum distribution pattern that, over time, resembles a fly buzzing around a turd. Or in this case, the turd is the one buzzing around.

And no matter how rusted, pitted and stained the outside is, you have to imagine the interior is worse. One imagines it to be like a bookmobile, a traveling lending library of mildew and seething biphenyl emissions that combine with fluorocarbons from its ancient rooftop air conditioner, rising into the atmosphere and jabbing holes in the ozone layer, while ruining the view down here.

The view, by the way, right in front of my house.

When it first showed up, my next door neighbor Mike and I met up by his driveway and gave the beast the once-over. The scratches on the bumper seemed to come from a troupe of baboons from a safari park, who, after they brutally humped the poor RV, were themselves attacked by some kind of large, predatory cat. The rear window was frosted out by hand, no longer clear but deeply scratched by steel wool or a wire brush, making visibility to the rear impossible. Then again, why would you want to see behind you when driving this thing? All you’d get would be a 16 by 9 view of angry homeowners, running into the street and shaking their fists, chasing you a short distance to be sure you weren’t going to try and park.

But parked it was, so Mike and I decided some homeless guy had moved in, and the bottle-and-can trade in our neighborhood would be slim pickings for a while.

Then we found out it belonged to our neighbor.

This is the same neighbor with the mean dog. The picket fence that’s loosely roped into position. The one who leaves an old toilet on the curb every six or eight months, that nobody picks up for at least three weeks. What the hell are they doing in the bathroom that they go through toilets like that?

I don’t want to name any names for fear of lawsuits (even though this article is completely factually accurate and any litigation would be thrown out of court), so for now, we’ll just call this neighbor S___. If the Winnebago is still here by Christmas, then I’ll tell everybody it’s Stuart and take my chances, but until then, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

Soon, S___ could be seen briskly walking to the Winnie and moving it. He does it often enough that the oil leak never creates a stain larger than, say, the vehicle’s shadow. My wish is that these gallons of sludge will find their way down into the La Brea oil yield before they hit the groundwater or drain into the ocean. Here’s hoping.

And so we adapted. Our jaw muscles developed nicely as we gritted our teeth every time we walked the dog. Worn things have the tendency to blend in after a while, and in the right light, sometimes it hardly resembled a crystal meth lab at all. And it was fun waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of the beast’s explosive backfire, imagining that it was really a gunshot and S___’s brains were slowly dripping down the insides of that frosted back window. Did I mention that it takes about ten minutes to warm up? On a hot summer evening, with the windows open, it’s a 96 decibel white noise generator, akin to trying to get to sleep with an idling chainsaw under your pillow.

Then, mysteriously, bit by bit, the Winnebago began to change. A rusty-looking color bookwormed up the sides, uneven, strange. One day it was up to the door handles, then next it was overhead. Could this be? Were our prayers being answered? Was this hideous blot on the Miracle Mile disintegrating before our eyes?

Of course not, dammit, it was only getting worse: S___ had painted it gold.

Gilt-y as charged

Some of the spraycans contained shiny paint, some matte. None of it makes sense. Maybe he did it so he could inhale the paint fumes. Maybe he thought it would increase the thing’s resale value to, I don’t know, fifteen dollars. Theories abound, but no one has thought to ask him why. The answer has a very good chance of being incredibly stupid.

So the next time your neighbor sculpts a topiary of Angelina Jolie as Laura Crofft, or paints their house chartreuse, or puts a John McCain yard sign at eye level outside your kitchen window, take a breath. Get into your car and drive down to the Miracle Mile. And worship at the Temple of the Golden Eyesore.

If you do an inventory of my semi-suburban life, you might think that I was meant to be a redneck.

I own most of the things a redneck wants: a trampoline, a speedboat, a motorcycle, a dog. My favorite pastime is fishing. I drive a Diesel. I have two trailers.

We recently got rid of our old washing machine, and as the men were taking it away then put it down in front of the house. Though it only rested on the front lawn for a moment, it felt to me like it belonged there forever.

A closer examination of my collection of Redneckiana reveals that I am a redneck gone wrong. No self-respecting redneck (not a contradiction in terms, so get over it) would be caught dead with this crap. In fact, if a real redneck spotted me, he would spit out his Kool, close his fist around his Confederate Flag Zippo and punch my lights out.

My trampoline has a safety net. My speedboat is a Boston Whaler with an environmentally-correct 4-stroke outboard. My Diesel is a 25-year-old Mercedes that runs on soybean oil. My motorcycle is a Vespa. And this, this is my dog:

Jessie, my “dog.”

I repeat myself, because it seems impossible, but yes, that is a fully-grown dog. At five pounds, I realize she looks more like the Puppy of Doctor Moreau, a genetic experiment done for our amusement but gone horribly wrong, a Blade Runner-style genetic toy, living proof that mankind has indeed turned its back on the Creator.

And the weirdest thing about her, Jessie acts like a dog.

She has none of the droopy affectations of those handbag dogs made popular by Paris Hilton and her ilk (I suspect their dogs get into the loose pills in those celebutantes’ bags, and I’m not referring to the massive amounts of antibiotics they must take). She just acts like a dog.

In some ways, a tiny dog like this is pretty convenient. She is too short to get her nose into your crotch, for instance. If she has an accident, you only need half a paper towel to clean it up. One pig ear will last her lifetime. She can quench her thirst by drinking the dew off a few leaves. And even the largest meal she can eat comes out the other end no bigger than a Tootsie Roll.

But while she’s pretty low-impact (haven’t lost a couch yet), having a micropoodle is not without its drawbacks. When she plays rough, part of you can’t help but think that the batteries are going to fall out. Since I wear bifocals, I can’t see her if she’s within a two-foot circle of me. And, in addition to being the source of a future redneck beating, like most small dogs, she has no idea how small she is. She will go after a dog twenty times her size. Next to her, a cocker spaniel looks like a horse.

We had a good reason for getting her: she’s completely non-allergenic. Poodle mixes have hair, not fur, so they don’t excrete all of the allergens of a real, I mean regular dog. However, that same poodle hair is the source of her biggest problem: mats in her fur.

Which is why she looks like a plucked chicken wearing a white wool slumbersuit. Every now and again, just as she’s starting to look cute, she develops mats in her fur, and the tangles are so painful, she won’t eat. It only takes a day for a 5-pound dog to get sick from not eating, so, with great reluctance, we take her in and have her shaved.

But worry not, dear reader, for six months hence she will be cute again, if only for a few weeks. And to give you hope, I will show you a photo of Jessie, taken the day before she was shaved last month:

Almost seems like a dog, doesn’t she?

Hoss, like me

Okay, yesterday’s blog ended up offending a lot of people. My observations about the growing girth of Americans, as evidenced at Disneyland, was taken as mean-spirited. Sorry about that.

Hey, I’m no prize myself. We were watching “Bonanza” in Texas last year, and when I stood next to the big-screen television to turn up the volume we all noticed that I was about the same size as Hoss. Hoss! He’s the fat one! Worse, they were right! If Hoss had been wearing a black Izod shirt, we could’ve been brothers!

So who am I to talk?

It’s true that the average weight of Americans has increased by 30% over the past 20 years. Some people put it down to the price you pay as an industrialized nation – Germany having had taken the strudel until 1998.

But even Germany never had Fried Snickers Bars. I have.

It was at the Mall of America last year, the largest contiguous indoor mall in the country (smaller than the mighty King of Prussia Mall, near my hometown, which is broken up into 2 indoor spaces). I was there to shoot the Farm Show and Inventors’ Conference for a Pitch to America segment (fans of the show may recall the Kissing Shield as a standout from that piece), and we were on our way back to the airport with three hours to kill.

We had to go to the Mall of America. After all, it’s the biggest. I once flew nine people (including a famous Hollywood Director) 2,800 miles to see the second largest ball of twine – I was not about to pass up a record-holding shopping mecca that was right on the way.

The first thing we saw was the huge fleet of Rascal Scooters. Our guide told us they were specially modified to hold trays in the front, so shoppers could enjoy a snack while they cruised the millions of square feet of shopping paradise. We declined the offer for our own personal scooters.

Then, wandering through the indoor amusement park, we came across a food court of a very different kind. All of the restaurants were based on food stands from State Fairs across the nation. Our guide explained that, where they were once made up of corn-on-the-cob and fruit stands, all of that went by the boards for the stuff that really sells. And if it’s going to sell, it’s going to have to be fried.

We browsed the turkey leg stand. There were so many for sale, it seemed like there must be thousands of turkeys out there, flying around legless, unable to land. But you can get a turkey leg at Six Flags, so we moved on.

Then we came across all things fried. And I mean deep, deep fried. Fried bananas. Fried funnel cake (served on a tray with no plate, as the portion would overwhelm any standard sized piece of Chinette). Apple pie and ice cream, mashed together into a lump, frozen, battered, then fried. And fried Snickers Bars.

It’s the same theory as frozen ice cream at a Chinese restaurant. A Snickers Bar is frozen, then unwrapped. It is dipped in a batter made of Krusteaz Pancake Batter and Rice Krispies, and thrown into boiling fat. The batter browns, the batter crisps and becomes a hard shell within which the candy bar becomes a Vesuvial mass of melted Americana.

My first bite had what I would imagine to be the same effect as catching a glob of Napalm in my mouth. It just burned and burned. And yet, even though my molars felt like Johnny Tremain’s hand, I could tell this was something special. The alchemists at Mall of America had taken ordinary high-fructose corn syrup and transmuted it into pure gold.

It was not without its costs, however, and I’m not talking about the oral scarring. I could feel my metabolism slowing down. I knew I belonged behind the handlebars of a Rascal, cruising from one Orange Julius to the next. This was my Batism by Nougat. I went in a sceptic and emerged a True Believer.

So here I sit, Hoss-like, apologetic for my last blog entry. I had forgotten all about the fried Snickers Bar, and all of the Earthly Delights that must temp so many before they make their way to Disneyland. It may no longer be exactly the place old Walt had envisioned: Disneyland had changed, but I can’t say for the worse.

Could it be better? I can think of one way:

Start serving some goddam fried Snickers Bars, and pronto. I’ll be back on Friday. Start warming up the Crisco.