Bumper. Car.

With cars, as with life, sometimes you're the bumper and sometimes you're the bumpee. In this picture, my car is the bumpee.

While I was stopped in a strip mall parking lot near where I live, questioning what this beat up Chevy Tahoe angled in front of me was going to do, the Tahoe gave me the answer. It backed up into me. No one was hurt, my car was still drivable, and the Tahoe driver was insured. All good right?

Not so fast.

As we were exchanging information, the woman's husband who apparently worked at one of the businesses in the mall - and didn't see the accident - came out and joined us. They were both just as apologetic as could be. They had a short conversation between themselves, and I happened to overhear him say to her, "You're going to lose your license over this."

Clearly there were implications and incidents I wasn't privy to. By the way, Implications & Incidents - great band. Saw them at the Roxy in '98 (Note to Rich: you're welcome).

After apologizing again for hitting me, the husband asked me how I wanted to handle it. I said I wanted to go through my insurance company, but he had another idea. He said, "If you're open to it, I'd like to pay out of pocket for it. I have the cash, and I know a body shop you can go to."

Sounds perfectly legit - I know, right?

You know what body shops are like in California? I'll give you a clue: everyone has one.

Even though every instinct I had was screaming not to do it, I told him I was willing to get an estimate on the repair and bring it back to him. He could look it over and give me an answer that night. If he agreed, he'd have to meet me at the bank in the morning to get a cashier's check made out to the body shop.

Here's what I learned: in my next life I want to own an auto body shop. The estimate for this seemingly minor damage was $1703.00. After I brought it back and he saw the total he grumbled a bit, then said he'd talk to his wife and call me that evening.

When the phone rang at 8:30, I was frankly a little surprised since I figured I'd never hear from them again and wind up going through insurance anyway.

It was all very civil, she apologized again for hitting me, and said she'd called her insurance company and I'd hear from them. I said fine, I'll call my company and we'll go from there.

I'm with Mercury. Have been for almost as long as I've been driving. They've never been anything but amazing in past dealings, and they were just as awesome in this one. They took the information down and had a claims adjustor call me this morning.

After going over a few things with the adjustor, we got into a discussion about how they might change their story. She said she'd call the woman who hit me and find out.

You'll never guess what happened next? No, really, you'll never guess.

Apparently her new and improved version is that we collided. I told the adjustor that if by collided she meant she backed her big fat SUV into the side of my stopped car, then yes.

So it's going in the body shop tomorrow, I'll have some awesome rental for about a week, and the insurance companies will duke it out. But I'm pretty sure mine will win. The thing is to get the kind of damage my car sustained, I would've had to have driven sideways into her. The Lexus comes with a lot of options, but not that one.

Frustrated, I told my adjustor that you'd just hope people would do the right thing.

In that world weary voice only insurance adjustors who've heard it all have, she replied "I hope that every day."

Rock and roll

There's an exhibit coming to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) called Levitated Mass. At first I thought it was about me on a ladder. Come to find out, it's actually a display with a giant 340-ton boulder as it's centerpiece.

That's how I knew it wasn't about me. That boulder weighs at least twice as much as I do.

I had an advance viewing of the rock yesterday as I was coming home. Turns out they're transporting it, slowly, right through my very own city on it's journey to the museum. There was a huge line of traffic moving slower than the rock just so they could get a look at it.

Logistically it's like a presidential visit. Since the bed of the truck it's on is 32 feet wide, it can only move on specific streets wide enough for it. Roads have to be closed as it passes, and traffic signals have to be coordinated since it doesn't exactly blow through the intersection.

I know what you're thinking: it's a rock. Technically, true. But it's also one of the single largest items ever moved since ancient times. Maybe that's because they didn't have flatbed trucks back then.

As the video shows, the engineering behind moving it is mighty impressive.

I know what you're thinking. He's reached the end of the post, and here comes some quasi-attempt at a funny wrap up line involving the words "getting stoned" or "rocks in his head" or "sticks and stones."

You're way ahead of me.

Piercing observation

Picking up a prescription at CVS the other day, this woman was ahead of me in line. And, like you, I couldn't help noticing her neck piercing. In fact I was so focused on it, I almost overlooked the one in the cartilage of her left ear.

My first thought was how much it must've hurt getting it. The two reddish dots on each side of the piercing didn't look like the daily alcohol swabbings were going particularly well.

My second thought was why her neck?

As a rule, I don't have any problem with piercings. In fact I wear two earrings in my left ear (it used to be three, but the third hole never healed - let's leave it at that). I got them years ago while I was working at Tracy Locke, and I asked this cute girl I worked with if she liked guys with earrings.

After she said yes, I broke a land speed record getting to a store on Melrose called Maya and had my ear pierced by yet another cute young girl.

Just for the record, that was the last thing I did that either of them liked.

To me, the secret of a great piercing is like buying a house: location, location, location. Why squander a perfectly good one in a location no one is going to see it? Or at least not enough people to make it worth the effort.

But I suppose that's better than going completely overboard like Pinhead over here with so many that absolutely everyone can't help but noticing.

Moderation, so I'm told, is the trick.

The issue occasionally comes up with my own kids. When my daughter was 9, we were on a trip to San Francisco and walking through the Emporium Mall on Market Street. She asked me if she could get her ears pierced while we were there. And, you know, thinking I actually had a say in the matter, I told her sure. She was ecstatic, right up until she saw the horrified look on my wife's face. The one that says to her "You're too young for earrings." And says to me "Maybe you should've discussed this with me before you just blurted out she could have them."

I get that a lot.

The deal we struck was that when we got home she could get them pierced. The plane hadn't even touched down before we were at a Claire's in some mall getting her ears pierced. I would've bet her allowance she was going to cry. She didn't. That was her mother.

My 15-year old son has started rumblings about getting his ear pierced. And I'm well aware that I don't have a lot of ground - as far as setting examples go - when I tell him no.

But he's mighty involved in acting, and nothing looks worse than a piercing hole in a close up shot. So far that's keeping the discussion at bay.

That and the fact I keep telling him if he gets me a potato, an ice cube and a pin I'll do it for him.

Al Franken called it

It was true then and it's true now.

I've always been a fan of Al Franken. Beginning when he was half of a comedy team called Franken & Davis, through the years he was head writer for Saturday Night Live (to me, it'll always be the Al Franken decade) and today as Senator from Minnesota.

Sorry about the ad in front of the clip. Curse you Hulu!

Hysterically funny, wildly entertaining and, the part I like best, vicious in the way it exposes not just the glaring hypocrisy and inaccuracies of almost everything Limbaugh says, the book also calls out the entire conservative party for the lies they shamelessly continue to peddle.

An easy example of the hypocrisy: Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh both taking a righteous stand about family values as they're on their third and fourth wives respectively.

The amazing thing is the book's title - which Franken gave it because he knew it would be controversial and get noticed - has proven even more true in the last week than it was when it came out.

I think it's only fitting that we take a moment and enjoy some of Limbaugh's more entertaining and insightful quotes:

''Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"

''She comes to me when she wants to be fed. And after I feed her -- guess what -- she's off to wherever she wants to be in the house, until the next time she gets hungry. She's smart enough to know she can't feed herself. She's actually a very smart cat. She gets loved. She gets adoration. She gets petted. She gets fed. And she doesn't have to do anything for it, which is why I say this cat's taught me more about women, than anything my whole life."

You're forgiven if you thought that one was from Rick Santorum.

And of course, it wouldn't be complete without this past week's words of wisdom:

''A Georgetown coed told Nancy Pelosi's hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex they're going broke, so you and I should have to pay for their birth control. So what would you call that? I called it what it is. So, I'm offering a compromise today: I will buy all of the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want. ... So Miss Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch."

I hope Al Franken is working on a Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot 2.

God knows there's enough material to work with.

No sir Sirhan

If you've had even the most remedial course in recent history, you know the initials RFK are shorthand for Robert Francis Kennedy.

Of course after reading Sirhan Sirhan's latest attempt at a get-out-of-jail free card, no one could blame you for thinking they stand for R u F#@%ing Kidding me?

After 44 years, his attorney's are pushing their "second gunman" theory. Again.

Let me know how that works out for you.

As I've posted about before, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist. But even if I was going to subscribe to this one, it wouldn't be easy what with the smoking gun - literally smoking gun - in his hand as a crowd of onlookers watched him kill Robert Kennedy.

Here are a few of the more - oh, let's call them convincing facts - we know about Sirhan Sirhan.

On January 31 1968 his diary entry was "RFK must die."

He decided to elaborate on that on May 16, 1968 with "My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more of an unshakable obsession."

Then on June 1, 1968 he decided he needed to pick up a few things, so he went shopping for two boxes of .22 hollow point ammunition.

And of course, on June 4, 1968, Sirhan waited for Robert Kennedy in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. When Kennedy was leaving through the kitchen after his California primary victory speech, Sirhan repeatedly fired his gun at the Senator, fatally injuring him.

He died the next day.

Apparently though killing one Kennedy wasn't enough to satisfy his "unshakable obsession." In 1977 he offered a fellow prisoner a million dollars and a car to kill Edward Kennedy.

I'm not easily offended, but reading the article about his lawyer's new strategy - and how unjustly his client has been imprisoned - comes pretty close.

Sirhan has been denied parole 14 times since shooting Kennedy. Some guys just can't take a hint. The truth is he's never getting out no matter what theories his media-whore attorneys decide to bring forward.

Unfortunately California ruled the death penalty unconstitutional at the time he was convicted, so Sirhan will get to spend the rest of his life behind bars, at taxpayer expense, where I imagine he'll die of old age.

Which if there were any real justice, is the way Robert Kennedy would have gone.

Siren song

My friend Rich at Round Seventeen has a series of posts called Things Jews Don't Do. I'm pretty sure this would qualify.

Nevertheless, the mean streets of south central Los Angeles are calling to me. Again. And just like last year, I'm answering. At least for one night.

Remember when I posted about winning an LAPD ride-along at my kid's school fundraiser auction? Well, this year's auction was last night, and I did it again.

Because it was such an andrenaline-rushing, eye-opening, amazing experience the first time, I've been waiting a year to get back on the streets.

And last night was my chance.

I'm sure I was very inconspicuous hovering over the silent auction table with the ride-along bid sheet. But the truth of the matter is I wasn't going to let this opportunity get away (see what I did there?). I was prepared to take down parents, grandparents, students or whoever else I had to to have my chance riding shotgun in the cruiser again.

Last year it was a domestic violence call, a guy waving a gun around and an AIDS patient threatening to commit suicide. I have no idea what it'll be this year, but I'm sure it'll be just as memorable.

So I'll set a date, sign the release, and I'll be ready to go.

I texted the officer giving the ride-along, and who I was with last year, and let him know I won it again.

His text back was, "Great! Looking forward to rocking and rolling."

My sentiments exactly.

Remembering the best actor in the world

As I was intermittently paying attention to this year's Academy Awards (Billy, the Borscht Belt called - they want their jokes back), I did happen to catch the segment of the show they do each year honoring people in the business, mostly actors, who've passed away.

I call it the Cavalcade Of Dead Stars. The Academy calls it In Memoriam.

Watching the familiar names and faces go by, I was waiting for one actor's name in particular who died last year: Pete Postlethwaite. Come to find out since he passed away on January 2, 2011, he was actually honored in last year's on-air cavalcade.

Postlethwaite was one of my favorite actors of all time. Apparently I was in good company - Spielberg called him "the best actor in the world."

His craggy face and nose that'd been broken several times in bar brawls all but insured he was never going to compete with more classically good looking actors for lead roles.

But as he proved time after time, role after role, you don't have to be the lead to be unforgettable.

Most people remember him from his Oscar-winning performance along with Daniel Day Lewis In The Name Of The Father.

Hard to believe it was his only Oscar.

He lent an air of credibility and realism to popcorn fare like The Lost World. And he riveted my attention with his unshakable confidence mixed with just a hint of threat as conduit to Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects.

My favorite performance though was one of his last - Irish mobster, and florist, Fergie Colm in the Ben Affleck directed film The Town. Menacing, fearless, understated and terrifying, the scene where he's pruning roses while he tells Affleck how he got his mother hooked on drugs before she killed herself is a master class in acting.

I'm glad the Academy didn't inadvertently leave him out of the cavalcade this year. It would've been almost as criminal as nominating him for just one Oscar after a lifetime of Oscar-worthy performances.