Soodhalter’s Informagoriam

This is a list of the top five TV episodes we all wished for that never came to fruition.

1. Judge Wapner has a heart attack: This episode of the People’s Court start’s normally. The plaintiff is George Adamson, a Motel 6 owner in Albuquerque. The defendant is a cat owner from Kazakhstan who was a customer of Adamson’s. The cat was allegedly having digestive issues, and Adamson wants the defendant to pay to have the carpet shampooed, curtains replaced, and walls repainted. The defendant is counter suing, claiming emotional damage to his cat that now is taking antidepressants. The case proceeds as normal until Judge Wapner begins to have a heated exchange with the defendant. Suddenly, Wapner jumps up, yelps, and grasps his chest. He staggers a few steps and takes a fantastic spill into the witness box, destroying it in the process. Rusty the Bailiff kneels at Wapner’s side to check on him. Rusty then draws his side arm and begins firing into the air, stating repeatedly that everyone must leave the courtroom. We then cut to Doug Llewelyn, standing outside the courtroom. Llewelyn calmly interviews both the plaintiff and the defendant, asking them for a response to the outcome of the trial. Wapner later recovers after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery to continue the show for many more years.
2. Screech Almost Wins the Talent Show: In this episode of Saved by the Bell, Bayside High School is having a talent show. Along with many other students, the main characters all eagerly sign up promising each other that they will not let the competition interfere with their friendships. As the day of the competition nears, however, the pressure to win is clearly grating on everyone; and Zach, Lisa, Kelly, Slater, Jesse, and Screech are barely speaking to one another. By the day of the competition, the viewers are meant to think that the gang may split up for good. The actual competition is set up so that in each round, the contestants who get the most cheers from the crowd get to advance. The final round pits Screech against his ‘former’ best friend, Zach Morris. Mr. Belding announces that for the final round, there will be a special guest judge. A curtain on the stage rises, revealing Judge Wapner sitting at his bench. Screech and Zach perform their respective acts. It is clear that Wapner prefers Screech’s performance. After deliberating for a few moments, Wapner prepares to deliver his verdict. Suddenly, Wapner jumps up, yelps, and grasps his chest. He staggers a few steps and takes a fantastic spill into some band equipment. Rusty the Janitor kneels at Wapner’s side to check on him. Rusty then draws his side arm and begins firing into the air, stating repeatedly that everyone must leave the auditorium. We then cut to Doug Llewelyn, who calmly interviews Mr. Belding in his office. The event helps the gang realize how much more important their friendship is than winning some competition.
3. Donna Martin’s New Boyfriend: In this episode of Beverly Hills 90210, Tori Spelling’s character, Donna Martin, starts to secretly date a new beau without telling any of her friends. Soon, the others become curious and pester her about it until she agrees to reveal his identity the following night at dinner. The next evening, the gang is at an Italian restaurant. Donna Martin walks in and dramatically reveals that her boyfriend is none other than Judge Joseph Wapner. Everyone is initially shocked, but the dinner ends up going very well. Judge Wapner is fun to be around and has many great stories tell about his years as a judge. The teens do worry, though, because he has ordered a great deal of fried foods with cream sauces and a double serving of Chocolate Fudge Explosion Death with a triple helping of ice cream. After a commercial break, we join Donna Martin and Judge Wapner at Wapner’s retirement condominium. They are passionately kissing and embracing. Suddenly, Wapner jumps draws back and yelp, grasping his chest. He staggers a few steps back before taking a fantastic spill through an arrangement of expensive vases that have been placed precariously. Rusty, the condo maintenance man rushes in and kneels at Wapner’s side to check on him. Rusty then draws his side arm and begins firing into the air, stating repeatedly that Donna must leave the condominium. The show then cuts to Doug Llewelyn, who calmly interviews a confused Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestly) about the preceding events. The show then ends in the manner which it would normally end.
4. Woman Dressed as a Clown Wins One Million Dollars: In this edition of Let’s Make a Deal, Monty Hall has a female contestant on stage who is dressed as a clown. She has thus far accumulated an old rusty bicycle, five hundred thirteen dollars in cash, and a plastic toad. Monty shows the contestant three closed doors. She can trade in her money and tchotchkes to choose one of the doors. Behind two doors are items even more worthless than the ones she is holding, and behind the third door is something of great value. The clown-woman agonizes for a good five minutes. Finally she chooses door number two. Monty Hall confirms that she is sure of her decision. Hall proceeds to open the door. Inside is none other than Judge Wapner. He is yelping and grasping his chest. He staggers out for a few steps before taking a fantastic spill into the mystery box that the clown-woman earlier passed over. As Wapner crashes through the box, the stuffed animal booby prize inside is revealed, confirming that it was a good decision to not choose that box. The contestant looks disappointed, thinking that the ailing Wapner is her prize and worrying that she is not going to know how to take care of him. Monty Hall tells her not to fret so quickly as he strolls over to prone Wapner. Hall reaches under Wapner’s judicial robes and feels around for a few minutes. Finally, he retrieves a paper sack, which he then takes to the contestant. The sack contains one million dollars, the actual prize the contestant has won. She is ecstatic. Rusty, who is in the crowd, dressed as a bailiff, walks to the stage and kneels next to Judge Wapner to check on him. He then draws his side arm and begins shooting into the air stating repeatedly that everyone must leave the studio. The show then cuts outside to Doug Llewelyn, who calmly interviews a bewildered audience member who is dressed in a full body suit with airbrushed musculature on the outside.
5. Prince Tuesday Ascends to the Throne: Mister Rogers Neighborhood has always been known for dealing with serious issues head on in a manner that is palatable to children. This episode is no different; in it, we learn that people sometimes die in horribly tragic circumstances. The most of the show proceeds normally with Mr. Rogers entering, changing clothes, and singing his song at the beginning. After talking to the children about nice ways of dealing with acrimonious situations, he goes on a filmed tour of an airplane factory. As the show nears its end, the trolley takes the viewers to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe to observe the activities of its citizens. King Friday has proclaimed this day to be the day during which citizens of the neighborhood may adjudicate disputes of less than fifty gold pieces. Unfortunately, the judge who has administrated such proceedings in the past has moved to Someplace Else. However, King Friday has brought in a temporary replacement, none other than Judge Joseph Wapner. As the judge is about to start the first proceeding, he suddenly jumps up, yelps, and grasps his chest. After staggering around for a few moments, he takes a fantastic spill, destroying a hill and the royal castle before coming to rest on top of King Friday. Rusty the puppeteer comes out and kneels next to Wapner to check on him. Rusty draws his side arm and begins firing into the air as he repeatedly states that everyone needs to leave the neighborhood. As Wapner is rushed to a hospital with Rusty at his side, King Friday is declared dead at the scene. As per the laws governing Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Prince Tuesday is immediately coronated King Tuesday XIV of Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The trolley then returns to Mister Rogers’ apartment where Doug Llewelyn calmly interviews Rogers about the preceding events. Mister Rogers explains to the viewers that life can be short and that any of them could die from a giant man in judicial robes collapsing on them at any moment. He then quickly changes into his street clothes and leaves without the usual singing and fanfare.

For a while now, I have needed a new desk chair. The chair I currently have is made of gray nylon fabric and stuffed with who-knows-what. In my New Orleans apartment, it befell an accident, which caused it irreparable harm. One day, I tripped and spilled an entire bowl of soupy foodstuffs (vegetable soup) onto the chair. I tried in vain to blot the soup and clean the chair. It was to no avail. Mildew set in not long after that; and, though I can Febreeze and shampoo the chair in order to keep it usable, the chair will never be whole again. I am fighting a losing battle. As such, I have long been pining for a nice, high-backed, executive leather office chair to my current germ-infested throne. I prefer leather, or faux leather, to repel any future soups. I have also wanted to get a solid steel file cabinet for my office. I have two large, plastic file drawers, but they are overfilled and broken. I have been on a quest to find these items at a discounted price.

Not long ago, my uncle suggested that I look into a consignment auction house. At such a place, I could bid on used office furniture and filing cabinets at discounted prices. He suggested one in particular called Worstell. Once a month, this place takes all the lots of stuff it has acquired, a great deal of which is furniture, and puts it on the auction block. Worstell is located off the south loop past MLK off Mykawa. I decided to “borrow” his truck one Saturday and see what Worstell had to offer.

I arrived a bit after 10:00AM. Parking was spread out, partially in a cement lot and partially in various white dirt gravel areas. The entrance was not immediately visible to the uninitiated. Fortunately, there was a stout, 6’5” man who appeared to know his way around an auction house. He showed me to the entrance. Due to some indoor plumbing issues, there were portable toilets arrayed outside the entrance. It was a windy day, creating a situation in which an unpleasant smell spread quickly throughout the entrance area like some kind of nasty convection oven. The guy who had been nice enough to lead me there made a joke about the wind exacerbating the situation. It was not really so much a joke as it was a simple statement of fact and common sense. I laughed, though, to be nice. That was a mistake. He walked near me for a good ten minutes making jokes about smelly porto-toilets, until he finally exhausted all possible ways to make a comment about portable toilets and wind.

Along with the bombardment of jokes from my new, beefy, comedian-friend, I was confronted with a plethora of other sounds, sights, and smells that were, at first, discombobulating. I walked around to get my bearings. There were many signs referring to a man named Col. Worstell who seems to be the proprietor of the establishment and a former military officer. I never saw him though, so he may have just been a mythological figure, such as Col. Sanders. In order to be able to bid on anything, I had to lay down a $100 deposit, which would go toward any purchase I made and was refundable in the event that I made none. I received a card indicating that I was bidder number 146. I walked around with my new found bidding might and was able to find some fine looking executive leather chairs and a group of twenty-seven file cabinets.

There were two auctioneers. Each had his own golf cart vehicle in which he would drive to different lots with a portable PA system in order to administer the auction with fast speech patterns and word combinations with which I was unfamiliar. One of them may have been Col. Worstell, but I am not sure. I decided that I needed to stand near the auctioneer who was hocking lots of furniture items. I figured if I observed long enough, I would understand how these auctions were structured, and perhaps I would be able to decipher the auction language so that I could participate. I spent the next few hours immersed in what can only be described as an auction subculture.

Apparently, a full denim outfit is all the rage on the auction circuit, with overalls running a close second. The uniform for all the staff members working the auction floor was a denim shirt with “Worstell” on the front and a pair of similarly colored denim jeans. There were also quite a few bidders who wore this same outfit (sans Worstell embroidery), making it hard to differentiate them from auction employees. The auctioneer had five or six floor people who assisted him in the bidding process. The lead floor guy was an obese man with an abnormal beard, a point on which I will later elaborate. His job was to look over various lots of items and choose how they were going to be grouped for bidding purposes. He would then announce the nature of the auction in auction speak. The auctioneer would then attempt to start the bidding at a certain price. If no one bid, he would begin lowering the price until someone started bidding. All the auctions I observed were one of three types: one-money, choice, or x-number items times the money. One-money is an auction where an entire lot will be sold for the highest bid price. Choice refers to an auction in which there are multiple similar items. The highest bid is the price per unit, and the highest bidder has a choice as to how many units he takes and which ones he takes. X-number items times the money is similar to choice except that the highest bidder is obligated to take all the similar items and at the highest bid price per item.

Once the bidding a under way, the duty of the obese, bearded man and his minions on the floor was to troll through the crowd looking for bids that might otherwise go unnoticed by the auctioneer. Whenever they came across somebody who was bidding up the price of the item, the floor minions would yell “yeah!” or “oh yeah!” From my point of view, I just thought folks in the crowd were getting excited about the group of chairs for sale. Sometimes the floor minions would also try to goad bidders into bidding again after they were outbid to further raise the price of the item. Finally, after the bidding stops, the auctioneer ends the auction and confirms the number of the bidder. If the auction is choice, the winning bidder chooses which of the items he wants on the spot.

I stated earlier that the lead floor minion was an obese, bearded man. This seemed to be an apt generalization of many of the bidders, as well. I do not mean to imply that all Worstell denizens are obese; however, a larger than average percentage of this population seemed to have a severe weight problem. When I use the term obese, I am not using the term pejoratively to mean “fat” or “overweight”. These people were suffering from morbid obesity, a.k.a hyperobesity. For many I saw, it had gotten to the point where their bodies no longer find a place to sensibly put new mass and was just distributing it in random pockets throughout the body. I think the lifestyle inherent in the auction subculture may play a role in this high rate or morbid obesity in the population. These auctions literally last all day, so the auction house has a food station. The food station serves some of the greasiest food I have seen; and I spent five years in New Orleans, so I have seen my fair share of it. There were nachos with fake cheese substance and real sour cream, greasy burgers and hot dogs with a vast array of greasy toppings, and pizza so greasy, that the paper plate on which it is served falls apart due to grease saturation by the end of the meal. The predominant drinks were R.C. Cola and Tab. Though most bidders were standing during the auctions, it still seemed to be a fairly sedentary activity. Many of these people also appeared to be bidding on items to sell at their weekday peddling operations, an occupation that involves much sitting.

This pattern of abnormally large people reminds me of a time when I went garage sailing with a friend of mine three Octobers ago. At one particular garage sale, there was a rotund man, about 6 foot 7 inches and possibly 400 pounds, who had just sealed the deal on a vast ammount of the junk this home owner was selling. This rotund man was in a large pair of overalls and sporting a considerable beard. He told the proprietor that we would be back in a truck later to pick up all this junk and that he would then be on his way to Austin to participate in some sort of peddling fair. This rotund man now makes more sense in light of my Worstell experiences. Yet another inconsistency in my life has been resolved. This man may have even been at Worstell that day. Anyhow, I digress…

The beard situation, at Worstell, was also simply out of control. Many people, both corpulent and otherwise, had bushy, unkempt facial hair, the likes of which I have never seen. These were not your normal, well-groomed facial hair worn by professors and people who are balding. The beards were so extensive that food could be lost in such a beard for a good week before it is discovered. Many of the gentlemen also had an abundance of ear hair. Unlike most of the ear hair situations I have encountered in the past, these were not confined to the area immediately outside of the canal. There were men with pinnas (outer projections of the ears) covered in hair. One man in particular appeared, from a distance, to have dirt on his ears. When he passed close to me, I was shocked to see that it was just a generous distribution of hair. He was a particularly interesting character, dressed in a gray t-shirt, matching olive colored vest and shorts, and a Neil Young style fedora. He had skin the consistency of worn leather and was sporting this creepy smile on his face. He spent his time bidding on random stuff (some chairs, an unidentifiable wheeled object, and an elaborate map of East Asia).

He was one of the many nodders, who bid by giving the slightest nod to one of the floor minions or the auctioneer, signifying their wish to bid up the price of the item being sold. I imagine the nod is so slight so as to be shrewd and not give away how interested one is in the item. The shrewder the person, the more slight the nod that person has. There was one lady who was bidding on a group of desks, choice, who was squinting so that he eyes would not belie her nonchalant attitude. Her nod was the most slight than the rest of the bidders.

For the vast majority of bidders, though, hand signals were the chosen method for bidding on an item. From what I observed, everybody seems to have his or her own, custom hand signal. One’s bidding signal is what sets him apart others who have similar bodily structures and abnormal, unkempt beards. One man, dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeve plaid button-down shirt, would pace back and forth during an auction session, never looking directly at the auctioneer or any of the floor minions. When he wished to bid on an item, he would swing his arm upward from a resting position, hand palm-up. When his arm had swung as far up as possible, he would let it go limp so that the momentum would force his arm to bend at the elbow allowing his cupped hand to slap his should. He would continue pacing back and forth as he did this with a blank expression on his face. Most simply consisted of raising one’s hand and executing some small, patented maneuver. There were many shooting guns and custom waves. One guy would raise his hand and shoot off a two-fingered gun barrel while at the same time craning his neck forward so that his chin was jutting outward.

There were a few interesting characters who did not match auction denizen stereotype. There was this weird Asian lady dressed in a full body spandex suit, dripping with golden costume jewelry and sporting a pair those indoor, unnecessarily tinted, nonprescription, fashionable glasses. She was bidding all over the place. She also seemed to know and be socializing with many of the rotund, bewhiskered men. I didn’t think she was particularly attractive, but she was probably auction-hot. I think she was what is known as an auction babe. There was also a gentlemen helping his blind wife around as she felt her way along with her cane. They were not bidding on anything, they simply walked around and sat in various places. Perhaps she just wanted to hear some speedy bidding and auctioneering. Finally, there were two rather shiny young men dressed in shiny fashionable shirts and pants who looked like they were on their way to go clubbing. Their hair was slick and crusty from hair gel. I do not know on what they were bidding.

It took the auctioneer over two hours to make his way over to the filing cabinets on which I wished to bid. In that time, I thought I had a handle on how the system worked. It turns out I was wrong. First, I lost a brief bidding war to somebody for the filing cabinets, which were being sold in a choice auction. The winning bidder took all twenty-seven. Then, there was a pause in the action so that the auctioneer and floor minions could deal with my nemesis, who took all the file cabinets. The crowd broke out into conversation. Everybody was telling auction jokes. I thought I had this auction language down, but I could not understand any of these jokes. There were a few where I just didn’t get the punch line, but for the most part, I could not even understand what they were saying. They were using words which I had heard before; but in that particular order, I did not know what they meant. There was one joke in which the only thing I understood was that the bearded man was talking of his wife or a wife in general. Everyone laughed heartily at this humor. After the joking ceased, a 4 foot six inch woman who resembled Golda Meyer walked up to me. She looked me right in the eye and shook her head. She seemed to disapprove of something I was doing (I wasn’t doing anything). It was at this point I decided it was time to leave. The auction group was nowhere near the chairs on which I wanted to bid, and it was not turning out to be cost effective to wait in this building all day to save a few bucks. The whole place was starting to give me the creeps. Overall, this was a interesting experience, but I do not think I will be returning to the auction houses any time soon.

Tulane University Magazine - News

The Tulane website has an article about all the connections between Tulane University and Hollywood folks that are up for Oscars this year. It is an interesting article that seems to be the institutional equivalent of someone at a party matter-of-factly dropping names of famous people to whom he or she is peripherally connected. In fact, in my dealings with Tulane both as a student and as an employee, the university exhibited many of the traits of an extremely insecure person who would act in such a manner at a party. The tone of the article is oddly light, though, considering that it ends by describing how one of the Israeli Olympians who was murdered at the Munich Olympics was a Tulane graduate; the point being that Tulane is connected to the Stephen Spielberg movie, Munich, because of this young man’s fate. This certainly is a valid fact that is on topic, but it seems a bit creepy to bring it up as a factoid.