The Search for a Missing Boner

I think we can all agree that when a man who delighted millions with his science fiction portrayal of a Cold War-era Russian stereotype living on a spaceship commanded by a dude from Iowa begets another man who delights millions with his portrayal of a Spiccoli-esque D+ high school student on Long Island in a seminal '80s sitcom, and the second man goes missing in Vancouver on Valentine's Day, then we as a culture have really let ourselves down.

Thankfully, that has never happened.

No, I'm just kidding, it totally has. Where have you disappeared to, Andrew Koenig? Alyssa Milano is sick with worry. As are a surprising amount of people on the facebag.

Frankly, I say all those people are hypocrites. Why is it only when Dustin Diamond is getting airbrushed out of "Saved By the Bell" cast photos, or when the miniature black kid who played Willis's younger brother on "Diff'rent Strokes" is getting arrested in Utah, or when the dude who played Boner on "Growing Pains" goes missing in Vancouver that we, as a society, wake up and take notice? Maybe if any of us (meaning all of you who are the only ones not reading this blog) had bothered to check in with Boner Koenig before he disappeared, then none of this would have happened. We (again, I mean you) have nobody but (y)ourselves to blame.

But here's what I really don't understand: he went missing in Vancouver during the Olympics? How this is possible, Kiptin? Vancouver is covered all over in cameras! (Side note: how much better would that sentence have been if it was "Vancouver is covered all over in clover?") Anybody thought of checking all that HD footage of everything except hockey to see if Boenig is visible in the crowd? 'Cause tell me a guy with this hairstyle wouldn't stand out, even in a crowd of weirdo figure skating fans:


You picked the wrong part of the world to go missing in, Boenig. We're gonna find you, and then as soon as we know you're okay, we're gonna go right back to forgetting about you, just like we forgot about Boner after he left "Growing Pains" for the army. I guess we'll be seeing you in Sochi in 2014...

What We Know About the Future

It is a well documented fact that Jesus's first act after graduating from Hogwarts, changing his name to Santa Claus, and moving to North Pole, Alaska was to start the original Frozen Olympics right here in the good old U. S. of A. Here we are 4,000 years later, and the FroLympics have moved to the icy wasteland of Vancouver, Canada, all because of stupid Al Gore, who just had to come along and invent global warming, didn't he? Why couldn't that jerk have been born in Antarctica? That place is freezing! (At least, until he gets his grubby, climate-changey hands on it...)

But as upsetting as that is, that's all in the past now. And the FroLympics, in spite of the fact that NBC's coverage is pretty heavily grounded in the present (and that the coverage itself is tape-delayed), are all about the future. News flash, everybuzzy: the future is very gay, and very Canadian.

Meet Adam Rippon (also known as "Laser Batman"). At this year's U.S. men's figure skating championships (or, "Homopallooza"), Laser Batman was touted by none other than Scott "I'm At Least As Gay As Boitano" Hamilton as the future of American men's figure skating. Sadly, Laser Batman didn't qualify to represent America in the FroLympics this year, because the future of American figure skating is evidently only the fifth or sixth best skater in the country. If I were Laser Batman's parents, I would pretty much stop loving him for that.

I don't think Laser Batman is even a third as gay as Johnny Weird (or whatever his name is) either, which is pretty shocking considering just how gay Laser Batman is. How gay is he? Let's put it this way: Laser Batman is gayer than Adam Lambert and Albus Dumbledore and boys who read Twilight combined! But Johnny Weird has a show on the Sundance Channel, meaning that Laser Batman's only real chance to out-gay him is to land a multi-season deal with Bravo.

Something to shoot for if you ever want your parents to love you again, Laser Batman.

The future is far less bleak in Canada, however, not just because they have the FroLympics and no global warming, but because of Marianne St-Gelais, who actually managed to win a silver medal in women's 500-meter short track speed skating yesterday, on her 20th birthday - a performance that far outdistances Laser Batman in terms of competitive success, but falls miles short in homo-sin-uality. Here's a picture of Marianne St-Gelais at a competition last October, and you can tell just by looking how gay she ISN'T:


My guess is that Laser Batman watched her victory at home yesterday, consoling himself with a pastel-colored cocktail while taking refuge in the arms of some big, burly-chested lumberjack who thinks he's actually a girl. There could the makings of Laser Batman's Bravo show based on that relationship, but for the life of me, I would NEVER EVER WATCH THAT EVER.

If you're concerned about the lack of silver and gold in America's future, however, there is a lawmaker in South Carolina who might have you covered.

Meet Mike Pitts, a retired police officer turned State Representative with an idea so crazy that it just might work. Pitts is ready to turn back the clock on financial sanity with a bill that would outlaw money - or, as Pitts refers to it, "paper with ink on it." Pitts uses words like "collapse" (the verb, not the noun) and "collapsing" and "collapse" (the noun this time) to describe the potential dangers to the U.S. economy if we keep trying to use money to pay for goods and services. His wise and researched alternative: load up your pockets with precious metals, like gold and silver - commodities whose fluctuating values could leave you feeling like you just won (or lost) the lottery every day!

I think Pitts is onto something here. Because we may never be able to bring snow or winter or the FroLympics back to America, but if Pitts has his way, at least we'll have gold and silver (assuming we don't get robbed by people who aren't weighted down by pockets full of gold and silver, that is). And I know from my long correspondence with Him that that is exactly what Jesus Claus would have wanted - that, and for Laser Batman to get that show on Bravo.

I'm-a back!

Well, that was easy!

It turns out that all I had to do to get resurrected was agree to appear at jury duty. Naturally, I assumed jury duty would be like Purgatory, where people sit around bored all day, waiting to get called into small rooms with lawyers. But real jury duty is actually SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT.

The first person who came to speak with us Monday morning was a wizard, as in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Class of '88 - that kind of wizard. Of course, he didn't do any majick tricks - he was just there to tell us how to fill out our jury questionnaires. But he did sign majick autographs afterward: his name morphs into the great seal of the state of New York, and back again! That alone was worth the price of admission.

Speaking of which, was jury duty always that expensive to get into? $70, and I didn't even get a good seat. If that happened at a Knicks game, I'd be pretty mad. (Although unlike jury duty, a Knicks game is an unbelievably boring place to spend two days.)

Anyway, jury duty was great. I'm still full from the hummus and vegetable platters. But now that I've been dead for like a month, I have an absolute shit-ton of paperwork to take care of. Not to mention the many issues I keep having with my reassembled body, but I really don't think this is the forum to talk about those things. Does anyone know a good doctor who specializes in zombies and/or reanimated tissue, though? I'm thinking whoever works on Joan Rivers would probably be good.

Hello from Beyond

Hey, everybuzzy. Please forgive me for the frowny-facedness of this here blurg post here, but the thing is that I, Smokey Robinson, am now dead.

I'm kind of ashamed to admit it. It's not the kind of thing you proudly show up at home one day and you're like, "hey, guys, guess what? I'm dead! Hello? Guys?" It's mostly like in the movies, where you're either a zombie and some "vigilante hero" is trying to hack you to bits with a chainsaw, or else you're invisible and inaudible to everybuzzy who isn't Whoopi Goldberg (who, by the by, makes really amazing oatmeal raisin cookies.)

The actual dying part is kind of a gruesome story. I was sitting in the Cannery one day at Dole Fruit, reading The Loving Bones, which is this book by Alex Sebold about a teenage kid who is actually dead for the entire book, which they tell you on page 1 without even writing SPOILER ALERT. (Speaking of which, spoiler alert: I die at the end of this paragraph. See how easy it is?) Anyway, Rebecca Goodman (our token Jew) must have overheard me saying "I wish I could know what it was like to be dead," because when I stood up, my shoelaces had been tied together, but in a very Jewish way. Next thing I knew, I fell over the railing and then tumbled ass-over-elbows into a very inconveniently placed pineapple slicer.

Those pineapple slicers are a real bitch to clean, especially when the guy who regularly cleans them is beginning to ooze out of one of them. Rex "The Supervisor" Hymen kept yelling and yelling, "Smokey! Where the [censored] is Smokey [censored] Robinson, god[censored]?!" I would gladly have told him where I was, except that one of my lips was, at that very moment, about to drip onto his right shoe. Also, the living can't hear the dead without the aid of the aforementioned Ms. Goldberg. But at the time, I didn't know that.

Anyway, hi!

This whole dead thing really isn't that bad. Did you know that in heaven, Bill Clinton is still president, and the Democrats enjoy sizeable majorities in both the House and Senate? And that ALL the bears are named Lollipop the Bear and drive around on Vespa Scooters with skull-and-crossbone stickers and holsters for their AK-47s? Also, the only meal is Kraft Cheese and Macaroni too, because it's the cheesiest. This place is gratest. It really is!

(Psych! It isn't really. This place is the worst - not "the wurst," like a hot dog, which would really go great with all the mac-and-cheese, but the WORST, as in the most miserable place I've ever been. Every time someone calls up Dole to complain about finding one of my eyeballs or a tooth or a fingernail fragment, I have to sit there while Patrick Swayze and the guy who originally played Dumbledore laugh at me for like three hours, which feels like eternity. Also, it takes like four minutes to press a single key. I have been writing this blog post since December 30!)

By the way, I was wrong: there is a God. He wears a turban and He doesn't speak English, so nobody up here understands what He's saying, and most people think He's a Terrorist. He is also in no way affiliated with My Buddy (and Friend of the blog) Jesus Christ. God is actually the Assistant Night Manager at a convenience store called Seventh Heaven, which is supposed to be a clever reference to "Seven Eleven," but nobody gets that without having it explained to them. Some say He really is all-powerful. I say He pours a mean cherry Icee - easily the third-best I've ever tasted.

Anyway.

I recently met Dan Fogelberg, who was quite touched by the flattering obituary I wrote him. We were sipping cherry Icees around Christmas with Carol Channing, and the two of them told me that there's actually a way for me to come back. Are you ready to learn what it is? All that has to happen is that a single cell from my former body has to be ingested by a human male, get metabolized, undergo meiosis, get broken down into amino acids (they're the building blocks of protein!), and finally, be converted into a sperm cell. Assuming I don't then end up in a sock or a drainpipe, it's a simple matter of racing the other sperm cells to an egg cell, become a zygote, then an embryo, then a fetus, then get born in Detroit, have a successful career as an R&B singer, and move to New York City at 68 years old to work for a middling fruit concern.

Piece of cake.

So here's what I need from you, dear readers: eat Dole Fruit Factory brand pineapple.

I'm sure the slicer where I met my end was probably very thoroughly scrubbed before the next batch of pineapple went in. Dole Fruit Factory has very exacting standards of hygiene, after all. But even the most exacting standards must have left a cell or two of mine behind, right? (Don't think about that too long, or else you won't want to eat the pineapple anymore.) Presto. We're halfway home already.

This, obviously, only applies to my male readers. Ladies, for once, this isn't about you. (Until I get back to the top of the charts, that is!) Let's get eatin', dudes! We're just 70 short years from being able to start this whole bloggerizing operation up again!

And just to be on the safe side:

Dear Jesus,

A little halp, (Son of) Man?

Thanx,
Smokey

P.S. Can You catch me up on what I missed on YouTube?