Blogs

It is only due to the unfair rigors of print-media deadlines that we had to wait until today to make our comeback series of Alvin Greene jokes — Jon Stewart had about 10 minutes on this Monday, for Pete’s sake, but he has TV cameras and also 40 
writers.

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

Just throwing this out there, just spitballing, just doing a little brainstorming — because that’s what I do when it gets humid and heavy enough to make the birds literally bang on my window with their beaks and plead for death — but if we here in Beaufort County have rules, guidelines, codes, covenants, unspoken laws, unbreakable vows and sternly worded press releases regarding things that can and cannot besmirch our greenosphere, is there some reason we allow official-sounding political types to acne up our landscape with cheap-looking red-and-white-block-lettering campaigny signs?

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

Not to sound like a jerk, but I am better than you at Scrabble. And I can prove it with shocking mathematics: In March, I played a single word for 117 points, 117 nasal passage-melting points, a startling, Bob Huggins’ head-sized accomplishment that is difficult to process with your mortal human brain, so I will pause here to let you absorb it with reverent silence.

Go on. It’s OK. I’ll cool myself with foliage while being hand-fed cheeses and star fruit while you stand slack-jawed with wonder.

OK, now that your heart rate has relaxed and most of the major sweating has slowed, I will tell you that the 117-point monster I conjured with my brain-wand was DOOZIES, a word which is much too cartoonish for the firepower and childish gloating it unleashed. If you are not a Scrabble player, this is the equivalent of Albert Pujols hitting a home run that counted for 30.

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

So they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaufort. I know they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in Beaufort because I have been pleading for it, because I have bothered the business reporter about it for months with the fierce relentlessness of the tiger, because I lived for a short while at the work site, having built a lean-to out of whatever discarded items I could scrounge up — tires, playground equipment, THANK YOU VERIZON FOR YOUR ROCK-SOLID SPONSORSHIP signs — and waited patiently, living there for months, like the “Into The Wild” guy except less in search of pure personal revelation and more of things filled with jelly that leave your face a swamp of icing.

I did this not necessarily just for the donuts, but also for the majestic moment when I could walk through that door, into that breathtaking wonderland of dough and sprinkles and future heart concerns, and order a Large Coffee With Cream And Sugar, which represents the pinnacle of human achievement as it pertains to coffee and, as a bonus, arrives in a cup the approximate size of a container ship (with a Large Coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, one could, very easily, caffeinate a horse).

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

We have had, it can be argued by most good people, a fairly colorful few months here in the swamps of Carolina. Our governor vanished for a week, another guy lost track of his Red Bull allowance and yelled something at President Kenya O’Islam on the TV, another dude and his grandma called poor people farm animals and then whined about being made fun of, some hilarious representative person introduced pointless nuisance legislation about banning paper money to make a point about small government and it’s still legal to marry your first cousin. There is also a story about a horse my editor won’t let me write about.

But even these many terrible people are mere hors d’oeuvres when compared with the greatest problem facing residents of South Carolina, which is that we are all going to be eaten and probably killed by feral wild pigs, which are running wild throughout the state and cannot be stopped at all, by anything, except maybe feral wild dragons, and I’m pretty sure we exported most of those already.

Indeed, according to a story right here in the Newspaper written by my cubicle-mate, Patrick Donohue, who spent all of Feral Pig Infestation Reporting Day growing increasingly unhinged by panic, “There may be no slowing the state’s booming wild hog population, experts say.” Moreover, it turns out our state is home to the nation’s sixth-largest population of wild hogs. (It is also home to the nation’s fourth-largest collection of owners of the DVD of “Wild Hogs,” which is equally troubling.)

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

Let’s be honest with each other, Lowcountry people: A major reason that we expatriated ourselves here in the swamps — in addition to retirement, golf and/or the realization of our dream of opening a makeshift bar in a storage facility — is so that we could spend no small amount of time gloating at all of the slushy saps who have elected to live in the North, on purpose, despite considerable scientific evidence pointing to the fact that winter has been known to occur nearly every year.

Over the years and in my two separate stays here in the Lowcountry, I have done this a lot. I did it last week. I’ve done it enough so that I have been occasionally disinvited from important family gatherings. Now and again I’ll load up the weather forecast for Chicago, gasp in farcically overwrought Glenn Beck-ian horror at the shockingly low figure before me, do a genre shuffle for “Reggae” on the iPod and sit back and drink my morning margarita.

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

‘Avatar” is lame. You know it, I know it, portions of James Cameron’s animatronic exoskeleton know it. By contrast, though, and in the interest of objectivity, here is an incomplete list of people who seemingly don’t know it: billions of moviegoers all over the planet (ours), the lucrative international market and the important movie-industry people who will spend the better part of the next two months passing expensive awards around crowds of themselves.

Whatever. I am no stranger to standing alone when it comes to the hating of highly popular movies — seriously, two rum-and-cokes and one mention of “Forrest Gump” and I am not responsible for whatever happens to your carpet — so let me take this opportunity to start the local post-Golden Globes pre-Oscars “Avatar” backlash.

The Little Man has become interested in, and by “interested in” I mean “deeply consumed by,” a PBS show called “Dinosaur Train.” And while I can’t claim to be a mass-media expert like all those interesting people on TV, I can say that I find “Dinosaur Train” to be public television’s best-ever example of PURE AND UNRELENTING GENIUS.

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140
 

I have put off writing this column for three years now, because at some point its publication will jab a lengthy and irrevocably infectious splinter into the relationship between my son and me, probably even more than the horrible truth about what really happened to his fish when we got back from vacation. (I am afraid, little man, they did not go to the ocean for a visit.)

By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

‘What do you think about this 2012 madness?” Paul Mitchell asks me via the newsroom’s instant-message system earlier this week. Paul Mitchell is a line of high-end hair care products, but he also is an actual human person who works in the newsroom. At one time Paul, being of a considerably younger vintage, failed to correctly identify Bruce Springsteen on the television. Illogically, we’re friends anyway.