When I was a little kid, I loved those spinning platforms in the park, the kind with the railings on the side that your friends would keep slapping at to make the platform turn faster and faster. The goal was to get so dizzy so you puked, fell down or both when you staggered off. Good times, good times. These days, I get my kicks fantasizing about having a less boring job. When 2:30 p.m. creeps around and the ennui really sets in, I start to fantasize about my ultimate dream job – Television show producer.

I would be totally amazing at this, especially nowadays when no idea is too stupid, too repellent, too sick, too humiliating or too asinine to get on cable. Flip This Outhouse, for example, a show wherein handy amateurs fix up second-hand shitters which they then re-sell to rubes for twice the original value, could be a thundering success. So would Eat Bugs for Money, in which contestants secretly set their minimum price for eating, say, a mason jar full of de-venomed scorpions, and the lowest bidder has to munch down to get paid.

At the very least, my ideas certainly aren’t any more misguided or ridiculous than The Moment of Truth (busted via polygraph in front of a live studio audience, your family and your soon-to-be-former fiancé), Kid Nation (a post-millennium Lord of the Flies), or Big Brother (semi-imprisoned roomies whose every movement – including bowel – is captured for broadcast).

After reading an article on ABC News online today, I think my ideas will be a hit because there’s a new show coming to on-line broadcaster G4 that’s so simple and so basic that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. The show is called Hurl!. After gorging on food and drink, contestants are strapped into some sort of spinning device. The last one to bring up their lunch is the winner, the same rules we played by at the park! Also, on June 24 at 8 p.m. ET ABC launched Wipeout, in which contestants race over giant, dirt-covered balls and a 40-ft long treadmill set at warp-speed etc: basically, Takeski’s Castle meets Jackass, or any given weekend that husband and his many, many brothers’ played in their father’s scrap yard as tots and teens.

Now that I know that the crazy-ass shit we did as kids is broadcast gold, I’m going to start fucking the dog in earnest and spend my office hours write a pilot for Two For Flinching, featuring contestants who take turns hitting, nut-kicking or hair-yanking until one wusses out. The good times are back!

The formative years of my childhood were essentially one long “Donnie Don’t“.

Don’t fart in public (still working on that one)
Don’t string fishing line across the alley at neck height so that when your friend comes over on his bike he gets his throat slit
Don’t put Lego bricks in your mouth

Then I find this:

It’s all been fucking lies! Had I known they’d taste like strawberries I would have been the Lego Eating Monster!!!

Hell, what’s next? After all these years I bet throwing salt in your eyes unveils the fact that you can see through clothes!!! Gonna go test that “Donny Don’t” out…..

Remember that cult from a few years back that believed that the end of the world was coming and aliens that were following in the trail of whatever comet it was, were coming to spirit them away? Well, I think they were right at least about the end of the world part!

Enter Oprah; the living your best life, self-made conscience of the world, every cause is a good cause, I’m richer than god, do-gooder extraordinaire! And what was the title of this show that caught my interest? “The Pregnant Man”. Now, I’m not a regular watcher of Oprah, (not only because I work during the day but also because she can be annoying), but I had to find out, as a medical professional, what this pregnant man could be all about. All sorts of genetic anomalies and possibilities popped into my head. Perhaps he/she was a true hermaphrodite, or maybe some strange double chromosome thing? Where oddities of the human body are concerned, the sky’s the limit!

The show starts and out walks this dark haired man with a beard and an enormous belly that he’s so cleverly stretched a buttoned cardigan over so as to accentuate its size. The crowd sits in stunned silence and then the murmurs of disbelief start in the background. Surely this must be a joke! Oprah has him sit down, introduces him (we’ll call him Bob because I’ve forgotten his name and don’t care anyways), and in an almost perfectly timed response to the murmurs, Oprah says the one thing that turned the whole show into a farce. “Bob,” she says, “was once a woman”. The crowed heaved a giant sigh of relief like all the air had been let out of a zeppelin at once. Of course…only females can have babies. Everyone knows that.

Yes it’s a sad but very true fact that in the mammalian world, females are the ones to have babies. Indeed, there are few exceptions in the animal kingdom to contest this fact (male seahorses carry the babies, and some male bats can lactate). If one looks at the definition of male, you must have a Y chromosome and of course the bits and pieces.

Then the plot gets even more bizarre. “Bob” did have a lesbian relationship before becoming a “man” and indeed married “his” partner. Still unhappy, the female “Bob” decided to take testosterone and have “his” breasts removed. But in some strange twist that nobody saw coming, “he” admitted that although “he” wanted to become a male (i.e. having his breasts removed) “he” decided that “he” might want to have a baby sometime so “he” didn’t have “his” uterus removed nor male genitalia created. Wait…what? Did I just say that? That’s right boys and girls, “he” wanted to keep the girly bits because “he” thought that “he” might want a baby, but he still wants to be a called man! What the f@#k!

Every time I heard Oprah call “him” a man I wanted to scream at the television “’He’s’ not a guy. ‘He’s’ genetically a female and kept the female reproductive parts (therefore is phenotypically female). Furthermore, how messed up is the wife who’s a lesbian but is now with a ‘man’, who’s half a woman! And did they think about the kid when it’s born? I can picture it now, “No, my mommy didn’t have me, my daddy did, but my daddy was really a woman before…where does it end? What if I decided to become an elephant or a tiger? All I have to do is get an enormous trunk or permanent orange and black stripes and as long as I got the law to say I was that animal, everyone would have to call me that and thus it’s true? Maybe all I’d have to do is get Oprah to call me an elephant because what she says is gospel truth!

It’s official, the world is coming to an end. How long until that comet gets here? I’d like to catch a ride!

When the project that dad and I were working on hit a snag due to a lack of electrical components, my dad told me to jump into the truck and he would drive us to the hardware store. It should be noted that I am keenly aware of my elderly father’s failing ability to maintain the speed limit on the highway, much less navigate the mazes that we know as “city streets”. I cringed and seat belted myself in, but the trip was uneventful until my dad tried to park.

While it was by no means my father’s worst effort at parking, he was a bit to one side of his yellow line and a tad crooked. As we exited the vehicle, who should stroll up, but the owner of the car next to us. This punk was wearing his pants so low I thought he was a flasher. Of course his underwear was sticking out, and he had a ball cap precariously balanced mostly backwards on his multi-colored hair. His enormous gold chain gleamed in the sunlight so as to make it difficult for us to see the oversize T-shirt he was drowning in. I sensed a confrontation but like a lot of predicaments my dad gets himself into, his generation gap came to his rescue.

The mini gangster saw how my dad had parked and stopped to look at him. Throwing his hands in the air while flashing gang signs he asked my dad, “Are you trippin’ ?”

My dad appeared only slightly puzzled but said in an amazingly calm tone, “Maybe I stumbled getting out of my truck but I’m okay.”

Of course this some what upset junior G-man (or should I say G-boy) and once again he looked at my dad and shouted, “No man! Are you trippin’ ?”

Thinking that he finally caught on, my dad replied, “Oh,.. no, we’re not going anywhere special, just going to the hardware store.”

Punky punk squeezed himself into his drivers seat and shouted out the window as he drove away, “Dude be trippin’ !”

At that point my dad turned to me and said, “That guy needs to go on a vacation if he wants to travel so bad.”

All I could do was wipe back my tears of laughter and pat my dad on the back.

I often mix characters up in my head to make poor movies better.

My latest concept: Samuel L. Jackson’s character “Jules Winnfield” from Pulp Fiction replaces Richard Gere’s “Edward Lewis” in Pretty Woman…”I think we both know she’s not my m*ther-f#@king neice…“.

Priceless…