But Does He Want Fries With That?

Uhhh …

FOND DU LAC, Wis.—A 54-year-old man says his obsessive-compulsive disorder drove him to eat 23,000 Big Macs in 36 years. Fifty-four-year-old Don Gorske says he hit the milestone last month, continuing a pleasurable obsession that began May 17, 1972 when he got his first car.

Gorske has kept every burger receipt in a box. He says he was always fascinated with numbers, and watching McDonald’s track its number of customers motivated him to track his own consumption.

The only day he skipped a Big Mac was the day his mother died, to respect her request.

The correctional-institution employee says he doesn’t care when people call his Big Mac obsession crazy. He says he’s in love with the burgers, which are the highlights of his days.

Some of you may have heard me make mention of my colleague here, who I call Charlie Brown. He’s the guy who changes his pants every day but wears the same shirt for a week at a time.

Anyway, he eats McD’s every day. Every day. I do not kid. We work nights, and each night he comes in with his bag of McD’s and his sodie pop. Sometimes I’ll see his car parked there at lunch, too. And once I took the kids there for breakfast and there he was, Egg McMuffining over a newspaper.

Reading about Mr. Gorske here has given me new insight into Charlie Brown. It also might explain the twitching, and why he walks around the receptionist’s desk three times every time he has to go down the hall for something.

I also kind of want a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. God, I’m sick.

Blaming the Beer

I am going to share this with you because it’s an example of weapons-grade stupidity.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A man with four previous drunken driving convictions who was stopped for weaving in and out of traffic on Interstate 40 was ready with an excuse for his poor driving: his passenger spilled his beer.

Not surprisingly, the man was arrested just before midnight Saturday, said state police officer Kurtis Ward, who said he initially thought the driver was joking. “He was so matter of fact about it, like it wasn’t a big deal,” Ward said.

The 31-year-old man was allegedly too drunk to perform field sobriety tests and was arrested on aggravated drunken driving charges, court records said. Ward found four opened bottles of beer in the car, court records showed.

It was the man’s sixth DWI arrest. He had been found guilty of four of five previous drunken driving charges and has paid $1,750 in fines, the DWI Resource Center said.

So far, this guy is leading my Stupidest Crook of the Year poll. But it’s only September.

But check out that last sentence: six arrests, four convictions, $1,750 in fines. That’s it. No wonder people keep doing it. This guy pays his fine, gets back behind the wheel and does it again.

Contrast that with the costs here in Ontario (Canadian dollars are roughly at par with US greenbacks right now):

For a first offence, the minimum fine is $600 plus a one year driving prohibition and a criminal record. Then comes mandatory enrolment in the Back on Track Program ($475), mandatory installation of an ignition interlock system (which won’t start the car until you breathe a sober breath into a tube on the dash) once the suspension expires ($1,300) and a licence reinstatement fee of $150.

Then there’s the legal fees, which can hit $10,000, higher insurance rates (as much as $5,000 extra a year) and the cost of a year’s worth of cabs. All in all, as much as $20,000 for a DUI arrest.

No Fear

I used to live on the water, on the ground floor of an old lake house. This was about 1992 or so. It was a quiet year – writing, swimming, canoeing … We liked it. Until the Bad Boys Club moved in next door.

These were three guys with those spiky mullet haircuts, wraparound shades, fake tans, jet-skis, Mustangs and Jeep Renegades. All their vehicles had ‘Bad Boy Club’ decals on the rear windows, and they liked to roar in and peel out, all together, to drive to the tavern down the road. We could actually watch them drive, in convoy, the 300 yards to get plastered. You remember guys like this. There were a lot of high-fives.

We moved away before they did, but I remembered them – they took the concept of ‘dude’ to a whole new level. So I was not surprised when, a year or two later, they turned up in the next town over, like I had. They opened a store in our city’s decaying, half-empty downtown shopping mall. I was able to watch this all because it was just down the aisle from the coffee shop where, as a reporter, I spent most of my time.

Basically, what the Bad Boys’ Club did was this: they put five used Sea-Doos in an old clothing store, set up a rack of wetsuits and waterskis, put skateboards on the wall and played rap music at full crank.

They called the place No Fear Sports. A big sign was hung outside the store, a gleaming, gorgeous laser-carved wooden replica of the No Fear logo, about six feet across. That sign was a work of art. Based on the sparse decor inside the store, this was where the Bad Boys spent all their startup funds,

The problem with the No Fear Sports store was a simple one: No Fear is a brand name. It belongs to someone else (a clothing manufacturer). So within a few weeks, the Bad Boys Club had to change the name of their store. I suspect a letter was sent. I remember a day when the music seemed quieter and the Bad Boys were just kind of milling around, looking confused.

One of them took down the sign and, for a day, the sound of power saws could be heard from the back of the store. And then, just in time for weekend shopping, the new sign was up, with the letters carved up and rearranged: No Fish Sports.

The store vanished for good about a month later.

I was reminded of this recently when Skottie Young and Casey McCauley, who host The Devil & Me podcast, sent out a solicitation for listeners to photograph remaining No Fear stickers. Casey and Skottie basically linked the No Fear brand to a certain kind of dumb macho mentality, which they call ‘bro,’ and they were right. I didn’t see any No Fear that week, but lately I’ve been seeing it again.

Also, I saw a guy high-five another guy last night as they pulled up alongside each other at a red light. One had a jeep, one had a motorcycle. The one on the bike said ‘Hey, bro!’ as they slapped hands.

I think I have to move.

Signs

There was a sign on the wall in the production department where I used to work that said this:

NOTICE: Unplanned safety checks will now be carried out on the first Tuesday of every month

Of course, this is the same place that once had a note taped to the vending machine that said this:

We like Bits & Bites, can you put more in the machine?

On which the vending machine person wrote:

We would except you people keep eating them all

Abandon Ship

Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. Coming soon to a theatre near you. Well no, it won’t. But it might have.

Planet of the Titans was to be the first Star Trek motion picture. Several years after The Original Series was cancelled, Paramount began to take note of the series’ growing fan base. As syndication spread the word, a new generation of fans was joining existing Trekkies. Conventions sprung up. The Mego toys were selling well. Kirk and Spock were more popular than ever – and, aside from the short-lived animated series, they hadn’t been on TV in years.

Things got started when Gene Roddenberry wrote a screenplay called The God Thing, a Trek revival that bore elements of what would later become TMP and The Final Frontier. But Roddenberry’s script wasn’t even seriously considered, and he wasn’t part of the team that started putting together the planned movie.

By 1976 there was a script. It would see the original crew, perhaps with a few new characters, led by Capt. Gregory Westlake in the search for a long-missing lunatic renegade named Jim Kirk. This would lead the Enterprise into an adventure involving Klingons, a super-planet and the titans of old – the original Greek gods – culminating in a time-travel expedition to Earth’s distant past, where the crew would play a pivotal, and paradoxical, role in advancing the rise of man, becoming said titans themselves.

Even now, this sounds like it could have been pretty good. If handled well, it may have jump-started Trek’s resurgence a few years earlier. There were even plans for a new Enterprise, design models for which later showed up as background wreckage at Wolf 359.

I remember this movie very, very vaguely. Without any kind of Internet, we 70s kids got our geekery where we could; there were occasional mentions of Planet of the Titans in newspapers and magazines, but nothing like we have today.

Still, the buzz built among my little tribe of Spocks and Kirks. We were right stoked for new Trek.

But it never happened. Director Philip Kaufman, producer Jerry Isenburg and writers Chris Bryant and Allan Scott were told the film wasn’t going to happen. Ralph McQuarrie’s Enterprise redesigns were dumped. The rebirth of Star Trek was over before it began. ‘Science fiction is dead,’ some Paramount honcho told Isenburg.

And then came Star Wars.

That kick in the ass jolted Paramount so hard that plans for a new Trek series were underway probably before Obi-Wan Kenobi’s empty cloak hit the floor. You’ve likely heard of Star Trek: Phase II, the aborted series that somehow became The Motion Picture and set Trek back on its flightpath to the future. All of that happened in the couple of years after Star Wars changed the landscape.

These days, as we fans wait for the new movie with a mix of excitement (that Trek is back) and concern (that it will be a revisionist piece of prequel shit), it’s nice to know that whatever J.J. Abrams does, he can’t possibly top the stupidity of the Paramount exec who said sci-fi was dead in 1976.

Here’s a link to some more Trek history…