Jokes I write

I've been into writing jokes for a while. (You'd think practice would make perfect, but...)

I'm going to start posting them here, for lack of a contract with the Late Show.

"Britney Spears held a concert in Australia last week. The crowd was chanting 'One more song.' Unfortunately, it was during the opening number."

Greatness

Ashes to ashes...dust to....DUST!

I had a Bar Mitzvah, which involved a full year of practice and memorization, but damn. This is just creepy.

Master, master

You have to hand it to Metallica -- even firmly stuck in middle age, they're still the fastest, loudest and overall best act in hard rock.

I found that out last night at my first Metallica experience. At one point, frontman (really an all-over man, considering that the concert was in the round and the guys hustled from end to end, singing into any one of about 20 microphones) James Hetfield welcomed all newcomers to the Metallica family.

There was a healthy mix of the old stuff, like show-closer "Seek and Destroy," which dates back to 1983, and "Sad But True," "Master of Puppets," and others, new stuff from Death Magnetic, such as the frenetic "Cyanide," sped up for live play, and radio-friendly anthems like "Nothing Else Matters," 'Enter Sandman," and "The Memory Remains."

I think there's a portrait aging somewhere on Kirk Hammett's wall, because the guy still moved and shredded like he always has. Lars Ulrich was show-offy as usual behind the rotating drum kit, often rising to pound his cymbals and thank the crowd after every song.

New bassist Robert Trujillo was easily the most reserved of the group, a change from the Jason Newsted era, but his playing was up to the task.

Hetfield, of course, had the crowd in his palm, singing along and pumping fists in rhythm.

Sure, there were lasers and fire and giant coffins suspended from the ceiling, but it was the music that stood out. You can criticize much of Metallica's backstory -- the drinking, the in-fighting, the way they treated Dave Mustaine, the Napster snit -- but you have to admit this:

Those guys can play.

You can dance, dance

Sesame Street is 40 years old, meaning this blog post is brought to you by cultural resonance and the letters O, L and D.

Not everyone is happy about it.

Ah, good old culture wars, alive and well, just in time for the annual Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays madness.

Let's just do a link dump for the first time in months, eh?

This lady got wasted, apparently, and then fell in front of a subway, where she touched the third rail without dying and was nearly crushed by a locomotive without dying. Luck be a lady.

I wish Nickelback could be next.

Touchy issue: Disgusting, but public, park space.

Britain's Supreme Court is trying to decide who gets to be a Jew. Jews make up less than one percent of the world's population, and they've spent their history traveling from continent to continent searching for freedom. The diet is bad, you can't ride go-karts on Saturday, and Yom Kippur services from last year are still going on. Anyone who wants in should be allowed in.

Unreal: Texas-sized garbage dumps floating in the Pacific.

NASA is trying to dispel 2012 rumors, but it is missing the point: People who believe the world is ending based on overlapping predictions by the Mayans and Nostradamus will never be called off by NASA, a governmental organization that has been accused of faking the moon landing for as long as Sesame Street has been on the air.

Thumbs up

What matters most about the New York Yankees' 27th World Series is not the quarter-billion in payroll they spent to secure the right players to win it, nor is it the fact that it took place in a shining new stadium built with unscrupulously secured public funds.

We're talking pure baseball here -- 27 outs, one win, one memory at a time, a 4-2 World Series win over the defending champion Phillies. The Yankees were the best team in the sport, a team that won 103 games in the regular season and then made them stand up under autumn's mountains of pressure. Over the past decade, they have often spent the most of all 30 teams and ended up watching the World Series on TV along with the rest of us.

This time, defying age and the erasing the memory of recent failure, they christened a new stadium with a title, just the same way they did for the first of 27 times in 1923 when the big name was Ruth.

They did it because they had to. Nine years since the 2000 Subway Series title is no curse, not when the Cubs and Indians play in the league. But to suggest this dominant era -- they have missed the postseason once since 1993, totaling seven pennants and five titles in that time -- isn't waning is wrong.

What makes this team so memorable is that it is unusually old -- but someone forgot to tell the veterans.

We're talking Johnny Damon (just now 36) stealing two bases on one pitch, Hideki Matsui (35) having a terrific month of baseball on one night, winning the MVP with a three-hit, six RBI performance, Andy Pettitte (37) reminding everyone that he has been one of the premier big-game pitchers in history on three days' rest, throwing to Jorge Posada (38), just like they always have.

We're talking about the great Derek Jeter, the kid now somehow 35, hitting .407 in the World Series, .344 for the playoffs. How about this stat? Jeter is now the third player all-time to average .300 in five different World Series. Detractors say he's overrated; anyone with seven trips to the Series and five rings in 14 years is anything but.

And he plays in an era when you need two rounds just to get to the Series.

We're talking about the great Mariano Rivera, now weeks shy of 40, still the greatest closer of all time, the greatest reliever of all-time, a game-changer like no other in baseball, closing out yet another World Series -- his mind-boggling fourth time on the mound for the final out of the baseball season. He saved two of the Yanks' four wins in this series and got crucial outs in a third.

Rivera joked during the celebration about pitching another five years. The Yanks can only hope he keeps that promise. Here's why: One day, the list of the greatest Yankees ever will look like this:

Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, DiMaggio, Berra, Ford, Rivera, Jeter.

They are active Hall of Famers, still somehow turning in typically great years with most of their careers behind them. It is unusual and it is tenuous, but most of all it is remarkable.

This is about the players you've been watching for a generation, still performing the way they did two baseball lifetimes ago. The newer players who were the first batch of free agents in a decade to really take to New York. The enigmatic but fascinating third baseman, the greatest talent in maybe 50 years to take to the diamond, finally taking his foot out of his mouth and just winning.

Quite simply, we're talking one of the very best Yankee teams in history -- and when you've played in 40 of the 105 World Series ever played, that's a fancy list to be on.

This may very well go down as the A-Rod October (and November, thank you very much World Baseball Classic/Bud Selig), when the third baseman shed his past playoff failures, folded into the fabric as a pure team player, finally accepted by the rest of the clubhouse, and stopped showing up on the back pages shirtless, whether tanning or kissing a mirror.

And it is true that the Yanks never win the pennant without Alex the Great's great postseason performance, his clutch homers and clogging of the basepaths. That they got this type of a performance after six seasons, a 2004 choke, and three first-round exits was cathartic; that it came while No. 3 hitter Mark Teixeira struggled was a necessity.

But this should also be remembered as the postseason of vindication and valediction.

It was vindication for the core four, who looked like they might win every year of their careers at one point until the champagne abruptly stopped flowing, as if someone had flicked a cruel switch. It was vindication for GM Brian Cashman, who almost walked from the organization he'd been with for 20 years, but decided to stay after the bitter playoff-less 2008 season. For Joe Girardi, the maligned manager who became the first to miss the playoffs in the post-strike era and whose playoff bullpen machinations confounded even his own players.

And yes, for the Steinbrenners, who willingly dug deep in their wallets to snare Teixeira, and the unflappable CC Sabathia, and the solid AJ Burnett, and the productive goof Nick Swisher, in another attempt to give their ailing father another taste of glory.

And it was a valedictory moment for one of the great, clutch Yankees, Matsui, who doesn't have a contract for next year and was in danger of leaving ringless since coming over from Japan with a continent's expectations on his shoulder. But he never wavered. The Yankees want to get younger in 2010, but they should never let Matsui walk, creaky knees be damned.

Forget the 25 homers and 90 RBIs he notches every year and just say this about Matsui: He has a whole lot of Jeter in him. All the evidence you need is his 9-for-19 lifetime postseason performance against Yankee foe Pedro Martinez, a matchup that led to the 2003 epic pennant and the 2009 title.

The Yankees and their fans are already looking at the hot stove, and Girardi says he's changing his uniform number to 28 to focus on the next championship.

They should slow down and enjoy this one, though, for what it is:

One of the most satisfying championships they'll ever have.

Flashback

I am quite bad at coming to terms with passing time. There are times when I read that a certain movie came out in 1996, and I think it was just a year or two ago. The same is true with sports -- where do the seasons go? How come Barkley and Jordan and Hakeem and Ewing are all old and retired? When did that happen?

But music is the worst. Is Dookie really 15 years old? When I listen to some songs, I'm instantly transported back to that time and place when I first heard it. Tenacious D's debut album takes me back to junior year of high school, and it still seems new to me. My first Pearl Jam concert was a decade ago, but throw on the bootleg and I'm standing on the rail at SPAC, unable to move in the sea of people. I even remember the shorts I was wearing.

So somehow today this Saves The Day song popped in my head from 10 years ago, and all I could picture was walking my dog in my old neighborhood a year or two after that.