A friend of mine recently alerted me to the fact that February 19th was the 534th birthday of Copernicus. Let the unmitigated nerdiness of that last sentence sink in for a bit.

I don’t mind telling you that I cared that it was Copernicus’s birthday. Here’s a hint: it’s certainly not because I love birthdays. I can take them or leave them. No, I care because Copernicus reminds me of the importance and near eternity of minds and ideas.

What do I mean by that? Well, it’s quite simple really.

Ok Ok… Whaddaya get when you mix Satan, an Evel Knievel wannabe, a sappy love story, and a couple of comic book authors obviously smoking some of the good stuff?

Ghost Rider.

No really…

If I were Ghost Rider I’d be pissed. He’s got powers so lame that the first time I saw a story about him, I thought it was a parody like The Tick. But no, he became one of the 80’s comic book “anti-heroes” along with other such stellar hero-hits like Swamp Thing, Spawn, and the Punisher.

My memories of Sesame Street – a production of the Children’s Television Workshop – are of happy times on a colorful avenue where I would have loved to live. There was always singing, everyone was happy, and jolly fun puppets roamed the Earth.

Take a look at it now. Your memories, if they are anything like mine, are not accurate. Watching Sesame Street with my son the last couple of months has been an eye-opening experience. It’s absolutely nothing like I thought, and it isn’t just the addition of several characters, including Zoe, Elmo and Rosita. It’s just a brown street with little color and the same problems as the real world.

I drove five hundred miles through a snowstorm so I could wait five hours in single-digit temperatures to watch assholes disrespect geniuses.

I am, of course, referring to last weekend’s Soulard Mardi Gras celebration in St. Louis, at which They Might Be Giants performed a free outdoor concert. For those of you who aren’t fortunate enough to have ever experienced Mardi Gras in St Louis it is essentially an event designed to allow every jack-off in a 4-state region to get drunk while they slowly freeze to death.

As you, the reader, have probably already read, the They Might Be Giants show was a bust. They were great, but the atmosphere created by the mindless buffoons who attended the concert was like termites constantly eating at my house of joy. I finally caved. Joyless and cold in St. Louis was I. Even the spectacular melodies of “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Why Did You Grow a Beard?” couldn’t combat and remedy the bitterness I was feeling.

So, onward I must trudge in this journey of life. I cannot wallow in this apparent defeat, for life is moving on. Remember Corky from Life Goes On? He moved on with life. And I don’t even have Down Syndrome.