Look-A-Likes, Part 1

One of my greatest talents - Nee, my greatest talent - is having the ability to see people and recognize features in them that famous celebrities have. Now, this is actually a mysterious and cryptic talent, whose workings I myself am not fully able to understand. For example, whenever I have seen a baby, I have never once thought in my head or muttered aloud that said baby has the features of mommy or daddy or grandparent X, or whatever. My talent apparently doesn't go that far. I can't spot actual genetic relation, I can only detect further, more distant similarities. I should probably be working on a police force, now that I think about it...So anyways, I am now starting a series of posts intended on highlighting people I know who have famous look-a-likes. Some people might be displeased. Others will be flattered. But don't dispute my abilities. I can see things others can't see. The first entry is obvious. This is publicist to the stars, Jon Gosselin!

Baby Rocky Poem - Wisdom Stew Mix

First name Benjamin, second name Rocky
Some call me confident, others call me cocky
with such a name, I might turn out brawny,
Ain't no way I'll end up scrawny.
You don't mess with the Rock, do you smell what he's cookin'?
I can catch up to you, even if you're bookin'
But my parents won't let me be no bully,
They'll ensure that I blossom fully

From the first time I laid eyes on my daddy, I thought he was a hunter-gatherer,
and maybe possibly also not much of a latherer
But I know he will love me, and I'll do my best to behave, man
even as I suppress the urge to call you "Captain Caveman!"
When I laid eyes on my mommy, I knew I had been smiled upon by fate,
but I did start to wonder if it was because of her I was born two weeks late
I know she'll love me and give me all her attention;
and if need be, I'll let her win in Settlers in order to relieve a little tension.
Mommy, I'm already looking forward to when you drive Daddy around in a motorbike,
I hope you guys join a gang that you like
When I'm old enough, I might want to join, too
Although I might need a special-sized helmet, according to you.

Daddy hopes I'll be a biker, or maybe a runner, or maybe a hiker.
Together one day we can do the Appalachians,
or maybe we can climb the highest mountain in the nation.
What's it called? - oh yeah, Mt. McKinley
After all, my daddy looks like Arctic man, William Penly
Paps wants me to be a big leaguer like Bob Brenly,
while Mommy just wants me to be fun and friendly.

I know my family will take great interest in my development,
by the time I start school, I will be in my element.
For such a great family, I need to thank my lucky stars,
even if Daddy is overdoing already by teaching me how to roll my R's
All I wanna do is get some Z's
drink a little milk, and then poop and pee.
Daddy, I don't mean to be a hater, but there's time enough for those rolled R's later.
I mean, I want to learn all about life, love, and the Cupid's arrow,
So why are you so interested in getting me to say "Perrrrro"?
Please stop trying to get me to perform these odd tasks,
why don't you listen to a few more Bill Simmons podcasts...
No, Daddy, I'm just playin' - I want to be wise like you.
So tell me, can you combine your wisdom and serve it up in a stew?

Mommy and Daddy, I am excited to be here on earth,
I'm glad God chose you for my birth
I don't know how it all works, but He wanted you both to be my Daddy and Mommy,
if I had other parents, my name might have been Kwame
I might have been born in Italy, eating salami...
But I wouldn't have had it any other ways,
God has blessed me in these few days.
Here's to hoping the Tigers see playoff action against the Tampa Bay Rays.
Dad, grow your hair out till I graduate-let's vote as a family - 1 no, 2 yea's

Wait just a minute - Dad, what happened to your hair?
Looks like Mommy's vote carries twice the weight, but that seems fair.
What? - you did it for a snickers bar?
I hope it really satisfied, and the energy took you far
Because Guinness Records ain't callin' if you ain't got the locks
But it's a small sacrifice to pay if it means being with Baby Rock.

What I emailed to Bill Simmons

My good friend, who got me onto listening to your podcasts a few years ago, and I have a healthy competition to see who can keep up to date with your podcasts more. He generally has more on his plate than I do right now, so I usually am at least one ahead of him at any given time. Last weekend, I was excited to download the 2-part NBA podcast with Bucher and Steiny Mo, but since my friend's wife was in the hospital giving birth to their first child, I figured I could get my podcast listening in at a leisurely pace. When I went to the hospital to visit the 4-hour old boy, imagine my surprise when my buddy asks me if I have listened to the NBA special yet! The labor was long and arduous. It took all night. I couldn't picture an scenario of how my friend could have had heard your podcast while simultaneously being all there for the birthing process. Apparently after the whole birthing thing was over, the new mother and the mother-in-law tried to get a bit of rest, and that's when my friend saw his opportunity. He quietly fished out his earbuds and stuck them in his ears, and while the others were sleeping in the dark hospital room, my friend was quietly in his own NBA fantasy world! I think it's safe to say that his wife detests professional sports, so this entire action would have been performed with a CIA-like stealth, to be sure.

Newspapers

Lately there have been a lot of media types discussing the impending doom of the newspaper industry, bla, bla, bla. I hear radio shows about it, books are being written about it, you name it. What really gets on my nerves is that the young consumer is constantly being blamed for the newspapers' predicament. This young consumer is, as they put it, hugely interested in getting the news, but he/she is getting it from online sources now. Well, sorry, but you can't be blaming me for your business model. Make a better product. something. I mean, I look at my local paper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, and I can hardly find one reason for reading it. Sorry, but I could care less about the local sports scores, and that is probably the only thing the paper does better than a bigger, more internationally-known paper. You're not going to be seeing who won the Hanover Horton vs. Grass Lake basketball game in the New York Times. But, then again, who cares about that stuff outside a small number of coaches and players, and maybe friends and family?
The fact of the matter is, the economy determines what is and isn't a viable product, and some industries end up dying off. Sometimes, it seems tragic, but in the end, we're all better off. Look at Kodak. They were the camera behemoths, until new, better technology came along and rendered these old-school cameras virtually obsolete. Little kids know instinctively that, if you take a picture, they want to look at it and see how it looks. We didn't have that when I was a kid. Look at the Detroit automakers. They've been making crappy, expensive models for some time now, and now they have done major, major downsizing. But in the end, if we get off our gas guzzlers, maybe our children won't have to be constantly fighting oil wars in the Middle East and Asia for the next 100 years.
So too with the newspapers. They will need to adapt, or collapse. The strong will survive, and the crappy ones will die, probably. As of right now, it's only old people who read most local newspapers, and once they die out, you can say bye to your local rag, pointless high school sports scores, and the crazy guy who writes letters to the editor twice a week.

Title Tracks for my New Album

Yes, I 've been working on some songs for my next studio album. It's semi-autobiographical. Here are the titles:
1. Take a Ride on the Rodney Rollercoaster
2. That Dr. Pepper is not for you
3. You're more than just a Beautiful Body, Torie
4. Floating on Lake Michigan
5. Are you in charge of the drinks?
6. There's a difference between f***ing and making love
7. Joe D has lost the Midas Touch
8. Ohhhhhhhh, Johnnnnnny!
9. All Good Latinos Dance to Reggaeton
10. Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
11. I'll be Picking Up the Hippy Milk
12. $100, Walmart
13. Stop picking at your scab, Gorbi

A Bad Time To Be A Celeb

As I sit around, pondering the recent spate of celebrity deaths, I find myself wondering if this was in fact the most prolific fortnight of celebrity deaths ever. We've got Michael Jackson, Steve McNair, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays, Robert MacNamara, and Academy Award-winning Karl Malden. Of course, the first thing I notice is that this was a bad time for people with "Mc" or "Mac" in their last names. So if you have are a "Mac", best beware. But, anyhoo, there may be only one other time in history that rivals this fortnight, and that would be the period from March to April, 1994, in which John Candy, Eugene Ionesco, Kurt Cobain, Richard Nixon, and writer Ralph Ellison all passed away. If you extend that period to the last week of February to the first week of May 1994, you will also have comedian Bill Hicks, George Peppard, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, and race car driver Ayrton Senna. Quite a collection of people indeed. I would like to think that they all faked their deaths in order to get away from the celebrity spotlight, and that they are all now living together in an underground lair, along with Tupac, Princess Diana, and Elvis. Of course, Elvis seems to be the only person who is occasionally willing to go above ground and get the groceries for everyone, but sometimes he has a hankering for fast food, so he'll stop in at a Burger King now and again, and most of the time, it's in Kalamazoo. So, if I had to guess on the whereabouts of this underground lair, I would suspect it's somewhere in the western Michigan region.

July 4th, Nutstyle

I have spent the last three days holed up in a conference room with 50 of my closest friends. We wanted to commemorate American Independance the right way, so we re-created the hammering out of the language used in the Declaration of Independance. I don't know if I was being exactly true to history, because I got shot down pretty quickly when I suggested that the document be written in German, and also when I tried to get the voting age down to 6. Also, nobody seemed to like it when I suggested that insects be considered 1/34 of a human.
Today, now that we have the document exactly the way we want it, we will spend the rest of the day by dressing up in our time-period costumes (I am John Adams, by the way), and we will sign the Declaration, declaring ourselves free from the British.