Hello, Pity

There are lots of people out there who are full of untapped promise... present company excluded of course. I mean, the mere fact that you are reading these words means you are living up to your maximum potential. Kudos to you!

For the rest of the idiots, there are books like this:

While I have not personally read The Guide to Confident Living, I can pretty much guarantee that its pages are filled with lessons such as "Believing in Yourself (Even When No One Else Will)" and "Grabbing That Tiger By The Tail!!"

I'm not saying these books don't have their place. The person who bought this book was probably in a really bad place--maybe they had just gone through a nasty divorce, or the loss of a loved one. Or maybe, just maybe, they had just endured a particularly soul-crushing job that left them a little stabby, and they needed some semblance of order in their lives.

One of the lessons that are in all of these books is "Visualizing and Organizing." Generally, this is the part of the book that says if you clean up the surroundings you can control, the rest of the world will somehow magically fall into place. I, for one, encourage that behavior--After all, that's probably the number one reason people dump these objects on the NeighborGoodies Table.

In an effort to get herself together, the gal who bought this book rushed out to Staples and grabbed a shit-ton of binders:


One important lesson from the NeighborGoodies Life-Improvement Seminar: Don't lose yourself while you improve yourself!™ Our heroine made sure to hold onto her quirky, fun personality by picking up some Hello Kitty stationary to fill her three-ring binder with:


She even enrolled in classes...
...and decorated her now-empty Consulting Skills Program notebook with a little froggy sticker...
...because how else will she "Hop" to success?

How did our heroine fare?

Well, according to the level of dust on the notebooks (as well as this calendar from 2006)...


...I think it's safe to assume that maybe she's still trying to Live Confidently in the Hollywood Hills.

So I guess the lesson here is to tell your dopey friends to come and read NeighborGoodies so that they, too, can experience their Maximum Potential! After all: If you hang out with idiots, then what does that make you?

Media Frenzy

In preparation for the Digital TV switchover here in the States, one NeighborGooder has donated all of their "classic" non-digital receivers and media to the Big Blue Table:

This rabbit ears attached to this Daewoo television initially made me think it was a 40 year old black and white set. However, this sticker tells a different story:

“Everyone loves a DVD…. New for 2005.”

I don’t understand. Did Daewoo just catch on to the DVD Bandwagon four years ago? Hadn’t Daewoo heard of DVD's for the first 10 years of their existence?

I suppose it's possible that this TV set really is in black and white; I mean if Daewoo is excited about this fancy "new" feature called a DVD player, perhaps color isn't something they've achieved yet. After all, they are still manufacturing TV's with rabbit-ears on them:

They have a remote, so some technology has clearly influenced them. I wonder if this was their first TV model without a VCR attached?

Speaking of VCRs: here's a semi-decent selection of movies that might actually be worth taking, if they weren't on VHS:


And, of course, what Media Cleanse would be complete without a sack of 80's Hair Metal Band cassette tapes...

...mixed in with various highlighters, Sharpies and pens?

So, if you are looking for some late 80's, early 90's era media and markers, the Luxurious Hollywood Hills has once again proven to be your one-stop-shop.

Year-End Blowout

Holy crap.

Apparently, there is a post-holiday surge that occurs on New Year's weekend on the NeighborGoodies Table. The amount of crap that has amassed on the Big Blue Table over the last few days is just ludicrous:


Frankly, I'm surprised the table didn't collapse under the weight of all these items. It'll take four thousand years to dig through this mess, so I'll just give you the highlights:

Inside of one of the white plastic trash bags is this pile of jolly uselessness:
Clearly, Santa's last stop before packing it up and moving back to the North Pole is the NeighborGoodies table, where drops off all of his undelivered items, such as leftover decorations...


...along with his beard, glasses...

...and trademark hat...
...complete with yellowing stains indicating just how hard he's been working through the holidays.

He also dropped off lots of unwanted gifts, like these royalty-themed books...

...which seem ROYALLY boring! There's also some non-royalty-themed books...

...which also fail to make me care. Santa also dropped off an open stack of tan paper...

...a terrifying faceless angel holding the kitty that sent her to heaven...

...this lovely lampshade and accompanying hot pink boa...
...a sack full of audio tapes...

...featuring such hits as "Renaissance Music for the Harp" and its follow-up smash "Irish Dance Tunes for All Harps: 50 Jigs, Reels, Hornpipes, and Airs!"And, of course, Christmas wouldn't be complete without a dual cassette tuner to play the cassettes on...
...and a basket to store them in.

There's already a pile of unwanted gifts amassing downstairs... And I will be happy to report on those tomorrow.

The Hole Truth

Today we have a basket:

And inside this basket, we've got a small selection of random NeighborGoodies:

I'm not actually sure what this neon green rectangle is. It's spongy, and since I don't know any better, I am going to have to assume that it is some sort of feminine hygiene product. It makes me wonder if this basket was actually someone's trash can before it became a NeighborGoodie.

It wouldn't surprise me at all, considering what else is in there:

What you're seeing now is a hand-held single hole puncher, some correction tape... and, my personal favorite, a plastic knife.

In the interest of fair and accurate reporting, I feel I should tell you now that I am a big fan of office supplies. I love going to stores like Staples and Office Depot and wandering the aisles. I don't know why, but I just love my accordion folders and my postage scale... and yes, my correction tape.

I know I have no practical use for it, but it is effing cool. I love white out as well, although I currently don't have any. Perhaps some kind NeighborGooder will change that in the future.

While I am pro-correction tape, I always was pretty much against the hand-held hole puncher. Even more useless to me than the correction tape, this instrument is designed to create one single hole in your paper. This item has always been a mystery to me. My mother (Tina) had one of these things when I was growing up and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with it. Judging by Tina's reaction, I was definitely not supposed to be using it to chop individual strands of our carpet ("mowing the rug") or poke holes in my shirt (playing "moth.")

But I did some research for you, kind NeighborGoodies Enthusiast, to unlock the Mystery of the Hole Punch. According to this awesome article at about.com, the hole punch was invented in 1885 by Benjamin Smith. It was originally called the Conductor's Punch, and is still used to mark train tickets to this day:

It's Patented!

A few years later, a guy named Charles Brooks improved upon the original design. Always concerned with keeping things tidy (he also invented the street sweeper!), Charles attached a little trap to capture all the round paper (or carpet) clippings, so that there wouldn't be any litter!

And yet, in a cruel twist of fate, his invention has been placed in a wicker rubbish receptacle... on a table full of waste... in a building full of white trash that no amount of correction tape can erase.

We Might Just Make it After All. . .

Cloris Leachman gave me the finger last week.

It was right after Betty White faux-flashed me.

Well, not just me... but me and my friend Erin. And about 598 other spectators as well. We were at the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences (The Emmy People) watching Betty get honored for her sixty years in television.

It was quite a spectacle. The still-sharp & hilarious 86 year-old Betty White was joined by dozens of special guests, including every single regular cast member from The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Except, of course, for Ted Knight, who is previously engaged... what with being dead and all).

Photo snagged from seriouslyomg. See more Here!

The stories they told were incredible and it reminded me of why I wanted to work in television in the first place.

And then I discovered this set of Production Binders on the NeighborGoodies Table, which reminded me of why I almost left television altogether:


On the middle binder, you'll note this logo--which made me shout out in unbridled terror:

You see, when I first moved to the Hollywood Hills, I worked on a lot of crappy shows.... including the first two years of the abortion that is the World Stunt Awards (WorSt Awards for short!) Basically, it's an awards show for stunt people. But it's much, much more than that. It is a nightmare from which I will never recover.

The first year I did it, I was a Production Coordinator, which is to say I had to do pretty much everything that no one else wanted to do. I was terrible at it, and it was the first time in my career that I failed at a job.

To be fair, show was cursed... By the end of it, there were 7 (seven!) non-stunt people with broken limbs of one sort or another (including the receptionist who fell down the stairs), one guy wound up in rehab, two audience members got hit in the heads with swords. A partial list of my own traumas include a broken car, a car accident (in a different vehicle), a near-beheading by a ninja, a run-in with a pissed off tiger and the decision of the owners of the first apartment I lived in kicking everyone in the building out in order to remodel (which, to be fair, led me to the apartment with the NeigbhorGoodies table. But I was still mad at the time.)

The universe was finding new and intricate ways to fuck me and everyone else involved in this show. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger got into the act and stole a giant box of cookies from me. (If you really need to know this story, check out my post on All Bitched Up about it.)

Oh, and did I mention that one of our crew guys up and died two days before the shoot? Because that happened, too. And we all kind of envied him.

It was--for a while--the most heinous experience of my career. (Until I worked on an even more piss-poor pile of poo once referred to as a "Big Bunch of Who Cares," which overtook the record as The Worst Show In The History of Everything sometime in 2005.)

Anyway, the WorSt Awards proved brutal, and I almost didn't survive them. I've done all I can over the years to wash away the emotional scars... mostly with booze at the WorSt Awards after-parties (of which I attended several after my tenure with them was finished. After all, who am I to turn down free booze and hot stuntmen?)

Whoever left these production binders emptied them out pretty good, leaving only the menu for Jerry's Deli inside of one...

...and this "TALENT" sign on the other:


The saddest part about all this: I'm still rattled to the core by the sight of that Taurus Logo. And also, I'm pretty sure I know the dude who left these NeighborGoodies... and I'm pretty sure he also worked with me on the "Big Bunch of Who Cares."

If I make it to sixty years in television, it'll be a miracle... And I'm pretty sure no one will be celebrating my body of work. And if they do, I pray to God they forget about the Big Bunch of Who Cares.

No Substitues

As the end of the school year begins to approach, someone here is cleaning out their classroom a little early.

I'm not exactly sure what this thing is, but it looks like the top part of a grade school desk, where kids store their pencils and pens for easy access. It may also be a part of a drafting table. Whatever the case, the rest of the piece of furniture is missing...but it is joined by the following items:


A couple of Rulers. . .
. . .an electric pencil sharpener. . .


. . .and this pencil holder. I'm only assuming this is a pencil holder, judging by what was surrounding it. It could also be a poorly designed drinking cup, I suppose.

Since it's clearly too soon for any real teacher to be ridding herself of these items, I started thinking that maybe these are the sad remnants of a Substitute Teacher.

The woman who lives across the hall from me has that Substitute Teacher vibe about her. She reminds me of my 7th Grade Substitute Teacher, Mrs. Whartenbie, who was brought in as a "Permanent Sub" when our nun took ill with some mysterious Catholic Disease. Like Mrs. W., my neighbor is not the kind of wooman who commands any sort of respect when she walks into a room full of children. No...when this short, mid-40's, semi-dumpy woman comes in with her messy over-the-top red hair, her messy over-the-top red makeup and her messy over-the-top outfits:

Yellow Pants!

. . .the kids smell blood and they pounce immediately...just like we did with Mrs. W.

OK, who am I kidding? I didn't do any of the actual tormenting. I was too busy being relieved that the kids had found someone else to abuse for a little while, leaving me and my nerdface alone. Unfortunately, the Permanent Subbery of Mrs. W. didn't last very long, as my classmates drove her away in tears within two weeks. She eventually ended up subbing only for third graders and below. Meh. Serves her right for giving me a B- on my English paper when I was the only one not actively trying to murder her.

Anyway, the woman across the hall has that same air about her. Single, desperately wanting to be liked, but constantly being giggled at and spitballed. I imagine the students may have finally gotten the best of her, so she has no use for any of the items she'd bring to her temporary desk each day...like this planter. . . .



. . .or these coffee mugs:


In all likelihood, she'd have some sort of flower inside of the planter that she'd carry to each classroom in an effort to control some part of the space that could never be hers...something permanent to hold on to in her topsy-turvey world.

The coffee mugs were brought in and taken home each day as well..likely because by the end of the day, there was a host of lugies and other materials produced by the grade school kids that no single woman should have to drink. But I don't feel too badly for her....no child should have to see a middle aged woman in yellow pants.