The latest show to featured in my Dave’s Drive-in section is the series pilot for the most excellent show Friday Night Lights.

If you haven’t seen FNL or came to the show late, you can head over to the Drive-In and start from the beginning.

This is one the best dramas to hit network TV in years. Dare I say, it’s cable quality programming.

To enjoy the show, you don’t have to be into football (anymore than you had to be into optometry to appreciate Ralph Malph’s father on Happy Days).

The production quality and acting are excellent and the writers manage to depict small town Texas life without creating caricatures. The main family in the show will become an immediate favorite. And regardless of your gender or sexual preference, you will be wholly unable to deny that Tim Riggins is greatest teen hunk to hit the small screen in years. Around my house, we watch the show wearing our new Dillon Panther hats (though we tell some people the P stands for Pell).

Trust me, the show will have you by the opening credits.

Aside from a sore neck, a bad back and keyboard-related fingertip sensitivity, here are the latest five reasons why I think I might be a little too old for blogging.

1. The commercials that air during the nightly news actually speak to me. I do have a restless leg. My wife and I often recline side by side in separate outdoor tubs, watch the sunset and wonder, “Are we ready?”. I eat Flomax like tic tacs. And I haven’t taken a shit without any outside help since the late nineties.
2. The other day I called time. For you youngsters, that means you pick up the handset of your landline phone and dial p-o-p-c-o-r-n (or 767 anything) and an automated female voice gives you the exact time. It turns out that the time lady retired. The service (and with it my longest running conversation) has been shut down (at least in my neck of the woods) since September of 2007. The point here is that I called time in the first place. What’s next? Using a cell phone that doesn’t have jiggling icons?
3. My attire: I have perfected and am now locked in to what I call the faux tourist look. Everyday, I wear khaki pants, a gray t-shirt and a bright yellow windbreaker with the words San Francisco emblazoned in blue. I wear it indoors and out. I am writing in that outfit at this very moment (I should be trying to get a senior rate at a movie theater).
4. I recently approached a female officemate and said “Gee, your hair smells terrific.” She had never heard of the commercial or the product. The whole exchange nearly resulted in a sexual harrassment suit. Luckily we settled out of court after I agreed to let her call me avuncular for the rest of 2008.
5. I occasionally find myself feeling nostalgic for people I’ve jerked off to.

You probably haven’t given much thought to reading your own obituary. Presumably, you won’t be around to see it. But on occasion, public obituaries are published prematurely giving the subject a glimpse of how he’ll be remembered.

If I say the name Alfred Nobel, your first reaction might be to connect the man to the Nobel Prize. A modern reader would certainly expect to see mention of the prizes in the lede of any Nobel obituary.

Such was not the case, however, when a French newspaper ran a several years premature obituary of Alfred Nobel. Imagine Nobel pouring a cup of joe and opening up a morning newspaper to read:

“Le marchand de la mort est mort (“The merchant of death is dead”): “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”

When you invent dynamite and build your fortune on armaments, you might expect a mention of these biographical details in your obit. Still, the phrase “Merchant of Death” was likely not a big hit around the Nobel household.

Alfred Nobel had the opportunity, in the ensuing years, to change the way he would be recalled. He left a large pile of cash for the institution of the Nobel Prizes, and to a large extent, it worked. Nobel changed his own obituary.

It’s interesting to imagine your own obituary and to wonder how you’d change your last few weeks, months or years with that in mind. Perhaps it’s a bit morbid to put a lot of thought into your own obituary. But what about considering an obituary, not of your life, but of the week gone by. If an objective journalist were to chronicle the past seven days of your life, would you like what was written? If not, what are your plans for next week?

Fortunately, I just wrote this remarkably interesting and thoughtful post, so I am totally set until at least next Tuesday.

It’s fairly rare that a few tears can capture America’s attention. Yet, somehow, it has happened twice in week. The first example was Hillary’s much heralded eye-watering ahead of the New Hampshire primary. The second occurred at a Terrell Owens press conference following the Dallas Cowboys lackluster defeat at the hands of the New York Giants in the NFC playoffs.

The appearance of tears often brings up questions or concerns about those from whose eyes the saline emanates, and these moments are no different. In the case of Hillary, we wonder: Were the tears real? Is it OK for a politician to cry? Do we hold different expectations about a female presidential candidate. Did she simply, at that precise moment, realize once and for all “what is is.”

In the case of Owens, we wonder: Is he crazy? Is he nuts? How much were the shades?

Ultimately, the more important questions are about us. Can we open ourselves up to a little emotion? Do we feel more or less connected to the crier? In two cases mentioned here, it is difficult for me to experience any self-reflective clarity because I was, coincidentally, crying myself during the realtime broadcasts of the two events. Both times it was (as usual) because of a recurring and traumatic flashback to the moment, in ninth grade, when my mom would not let me go to Journey at the Greek Theater, giving me no reason other than, “It’s just not necessary.”

So I’ll leave it to you to analyze…

Will either of these tearful moments stand the test of time? There have certainly been several tears that forever changed us all. I don’t think there’s a person in my cohort who ever again tossed an open sack of garbage out the car window after seeing this 1971 public service commercial.

Months following the release of this commercial, littering went down. Media stereotype levels remained pretty static. And for whatever reason, my mom didn’t think it was necessary to buy me a canoe.

Super pollster Frank Luntz has served up a “Politics of Sex” survey for Playboy Magazine. While nothing can evacuate hemoglobin from a centerfold-inspired stiffy as fast as knowing that Luntz’s work is just a few page flips away, it is interesting to note that after all the hype and blather, Republicans and Democrats have fairly similar sex lives.

Before we get into the numbers, I should mention my own bias on this matter. I just simply will never, ever believe that a Republican can fuck as good as me. I possess the perfect set of characteristics for the task: I’m Jewish (at least three chicks fainted when I performed an improvised riff during my haftorah portion), I am neurotic and guilty enough to be preoccupied with pleasing others, I can palm a medicine ball, and my circumcision was performed by a guy who formerly did the marble work for the Washington Monument.

That said, here’s what Luntz found out via a series of surveys and, one assumes, a pretty extensive thought experiment.

More people under 40 have sex at least once a week than vote for president once every four years. Turns out folks prefer boning to “change.”

25 percent of all Republicans and 35 percent of all Democrats have had more than 10 sexual partners in their lifetime—a higher percentage than vote in congressional and local elections.

55 percent of Republicans have sex at least once a week, compared with just 43 percent of Democrats. OReilly as an aphrodisiac?

14 percent of Thompson supporters and 12 percent of Obama supporters claim to have sex “almost every day.” 5 percent of Clinton and Giuliani supporters have sex that frequently. Unfortunately, a large majority of Thompson supporters accidentally fucked right through the primaries.

On average, Republicans say they were 18.4 years old when they first had sex. Independents were 17.6 and Democrats 17.5. Translation: There is a 10-11 month window during which Republicans are most vulnerable to Fox News.

58 percent of respondents think Bill Clinton was the sexiest president of the past 40 years; Ronald Reagan is second, with 22 percent. 38 percent say Richard Nixon was the least sexy; Bill Clinton is second, with 18 percent.

23 percent of all Republicans and 24 percent of all Democrats would “definitely” or “probably” say yes to a one-night stand in the Oval Office with a president they found physically and sexually attractive.

51 percent of all Republicans and 67 percent of all Democrats have watched porn with their sexual partners. So, what, the rest of them are watching porn with other people’s partners?

55 percent of people who attend church every week consider themselves to be “sexually adventurous.” Here “adventurous” refers dry humping atop a pile of recent Heritage Foundation policy papers.

Americans of both parties say they are more turned on by intelligence than by physical appearance. Finally, something we really have in common: We lie.