• The Endtimes are coming. It's probably time to call Britney.

    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.

  • I cannot help but notice that no one is fleeing in horror from all the giant snakes

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    Well, everything seems to be under control around here. Swine flu is getting good and vaccinated, at least among you chirpy, vivacious Younger People. Windows 7 is out, giving us Mac people another great many reasons to direct smug, self-important smirks at each other (try it, it’s fun). The Balloon Boy’s weird parents will soon be given over to torture, as they should be. Yep, everything would be pretty much as solid as could be expected, were it not for the small flotilla of behemoth Burmese pythons slithering their way from Florida to the Lowcountry to devour us all.

    Now, unless you are aficionado of Celtic music or belts, there’s really no upside to learning that many thousands of snakes are en route to your town, and yet this may be the case, according to a story last week that has inexplicably not caused residents to scamper chaotically into the streets with curlers in their hair, slippers on their feet and mad rictus grins of horror frozen on their faces. Because, and I want to be absolutely clear on this, SNAKES ARE COMING TO KILL US ALL. You guys have your little slap-fights on the blogs about health care or whatever, I’ll be moving all my essential documents, potable water and slow, chewy smaller dogs to the top floor.

  • British supermarket has no love for Jedis in the hood

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    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    If there is anything in this world that drives me nuts, it is a grumpy Jedi.

    They are like this more than you think, always with the “These burlap robes are so itchy,” and the “I’m supposed to lift that whole ship out of that swamp but I’m starving” and the “Since he figured out post-death communication, Obi-Wan’s Force Spirit keeps dropping in during Me Time, if you catch my Jedi drift.”

    But on the whole, Jedis are supposed to be wise, enlightened and even-tempered, which is why it was peculiar this week to read of one of them getting all snippy with a British supermarket.

  • It's the end of the Croc as we know it (and I feel fine)

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    Full disclosure: I have never worn Crocs, except for that day with the unpleasant episode of the exploding garbage disposal, about which the less said, the better.

    But otherwise, that’s not for any particular reason other than that Crocs don’t come up much. I’m inside all day, and regrettably, I work for a company that requires me to wear human shoes to work (they have a similar policy regarding pants, which I oppose) and what’s more, I am cursed with larger-than-average feet, so wearing Crocs has the unsubtle effect of making me appear to have a small aircraft carrier to each of my legs, which is a highly confidence-rattling way to go about your day.

    But that’s OK with me, because very soon, Crocs will be known solely as the ridiculous rubber clown shoes that achieved immense popularity largely because Americans will buy anything if their neighbor has one, even if it makes you look like you’re wearing pickles on your feet.

  • I think it's great that you drafted Adrian Peterson. Now scram.

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    Attention friends, colleagues, family, people who hang out by the printer on Monday mornings, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stop talking about all the adorable things my son does if you stop issuing updates regarding your fantasy football team(s), because when you talk about your fictitious owning of fictitious Tom Brady I am doing what I imagine you do when I tell you about Jake’s considerable reading abilities: dreaming about ways to kill myself with whatever office supply is within reach (if it’s a letter opener, I’m in good shape; if it’s a stapler, I have to get a little more inventive).

    Evidently while I was on vacation, someone installed a bright orange placard on my desk that reads PLEASE COME OVER HERE AND EXULT ABOUT YOUR STABLE OF WIDE RECEIVERS. Because in this opening week for fantasy football nerds, it is Katie bar the door over here for people whose otherwise healthy fantasy worlds have expanded to include Peyton Manning.

    So let’s just get this out of the way: I’m really happy for you, but as these players exist primarily in your Firefox, I will have great difficulty generating the enthusiasm you’re fishing for when you say, “My first draft of the season. No. 1 pick. Who do I take?”

  • Insane Clown Posse coming to town, in a tiny car

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    Before anyone goes all crazy about the Insane Clown Posse performing on Hilton Head in October, a quick story: There was a time in probably 1972 when everyone was afraid of Alice Cooper, and his torrnents of blood, and his big dumb rock show, and his disembowelment and corpse makeup and all that, and the last time I encountered Alice he was, I believe, engaged in a round of televised golf on VH-1 with Hootie and the Blowfish.

    Actually, that’s not true — the last time I encountered Alice was in 2005, when I interviewed him in advance of a vintage Alice, ridiculous, over-the-top splattery concert in Florida, so of course we spent the entire time talking about my son.

  • Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Ridiculous Movie Trailer

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    Having seen nearly a half-dozen movies in the past year (with a 5-year-old at home, this figure is astonishing), it’s not like I’m naive about what’s required to bring familiar franchises to movie screens, be they reanimated comic books, defrosted video games or long-dormant toy franchises marketed entirely to Twitter-addicted white-and-nerdy thirtysomethings, not that I’m naming any names, “G.I. Joe.”

    Such films tend to require the same little toybox of ingredients: explosions, fire, fiery explosions, Megan Fox caressing truck engines, an editing philosophy that suggests the entire thing was cut by 30 glue-sniffing rhesus monkeys, the computer-generated destruction of one of the 7 Wonders of the World and, if there’s time, a talking Rasta frog, or maybe like an anthropomorphic hip-hop guinea pig.

    Sure, many of these are simply basic prereqs for making money with your silly movie. I’d rather be fully submerged in an Olympic-sized pool filled with ranch dressing than see the new “Transformers,” but I understand that it fills people’s needs to watch action flicks, as well as 28-year-old women pretending to be high-schoolers fleeing things sweatily in their underwear to blankly angry-sounding music performed by cupcakes such as Linkin Park. But doing it with Sherlock Holmes seems, to use a word I first learned from my English professors, redonkulous.

  • Ruining my son's life, starting now

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    There’s a kid in our neighborhood — I can’t name him because our neighborhood is pretty thoroughly Facebooked — who comes by a few times a week. He’s a good kid. He’s a little flighty and has some attention-span issues, but he’s a really sweet kid who we disappoint each time he shows up with our home’s deplorable video game situation.

    By “deplorable,” I mean we don’t have any. We are without Wii. There is no Xbox, no PlayStation. Somewhere in the garage, there’s a plastic tub with an ancient, ’87-vintage blow-on-the-Double-Dragon-2-cartridge old Nintendo, which represents the precise moment that my video game evolution reached its bitter end, much like real evolution did with Charles Krauthammer. I’m not even sure my TV — a fat, bulbous horror that is hopelessly confused by widescreen broadcasts — can handle these fancypants new systems without exploding. Somewhere, we are being pitied by the Amish.

  • Alligators: nice and kind of friendly, as long as they're completely taped up

    By JEFF VRABEL • 843-706-8140

    Here’s what I did at work last Friday: Held an alligator. With my hands. Both of them. That is an essential strategy, because holding an alligator with one hand is a terrible idea, because no matter how you do it the gator is going to be hanging in some fashion, and that is highly unsafe, especially if the hanging portion contains the mouth. So I used both, which was good news for the alligator, because when you’re being held by someone who is quivering uncontrollably, the effect is probably that of a pleasant massage.

    I was holding an alligator because it was brought to the office by gator wrangler/guy who could snap my spine in half like a pretzel stick Joe Maffo of Critter Management, a company that specializes in the removal of alligators from things, such as pools, ponds, baby seats and refrigerators. If there’s an alligator that needs to be relocated — often, it seems, because of tourists trying to impress someone by playing a minivan version of “Man Vs. Wild” or attempting to snap a cool picture for the breakroom bulletin board — it is his job to do so, which is the mathematical opposite of my job, which involves trying to tap-tappity funnies at 2 a.m. for one of these “newspapers” that my grandkids will be asking me about in the way that I ask about, say, stegosauruses, like: “Wait, they really had those?”

  • The Backstreets of Tennessee: How I missed joining Springsteen's band by MINUTES

    I attended last weekend’s Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn. — a sprawling four-day music fiesta jammed with bands, sweat, camping and things you can hold marijuana in — with one goal and one goal only: to meet Bruce Springsteen and, with any luck, have him adopt me as his full-time tambourine player, or, failing that, his son. This is, incidentally, how I attend everything.