Courtesy of Marion County

Have you ever had to report something stolen to the police? Would you ever tell the police that someone stole all of your weed?

Would you then drive around drunk and call 911 again, while vomiting?

This guy did.

Philly Boy Roy, in his natural habitat

Last night, in the early moments of The Best Show on WFMU, PBR made a bold prediction: It will only take one game for nem Phightens to humiliate nem Yankees and win the World Series.

This led to a very improbable bet between the show’s host Tom Scharpling of Newbridge, North Jersey and Philly Boy Roy Ziegler of Roxborough.

Also discussed in this clip:

• Lipstick City, Barney Miller and Raul Ibanez guitars
• The appropriate age to begin dropping the F-bomb
• The Cin-A-Bon/milkshake deathwish
• Spinal Tap, Drum Power and WaWa Records
• An army tank driving through a lake of fudge pudding
• The time Peter killed a grip on the set of the Brady Bunch
• Whether pimpin’ is easy or not
• Whether it’s OK to put Peanut Chews into piñatas
• Whose bathroom area hurts

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My friend just sent me this link and I am baffled yet mesmerized. It’s one of the most surreal things I have ever seen. Does anyone have any idea what this is about?

It’s somewhat NSFW so be careful with the speakers.

h/t Rusty

photo from flyers.nhl.com

The NHL season starts Thursday! The Flyers play Carolina on Friday! I’m watching the Red Wings play a team called Farjestad BK right now! Unless the IT people stop me! So. Let’s take a look at all the predictions and soothsayings being predicted and soothsaid:

The Hockey News says the Flyers will win the Stanley Cup. It’s nice to hear somebody else say that besides myself to myself every year. Read why they love Philly here.

Jon Buccigross of ESPN sees the Flyers coming in 4th in the conference and concludes: “The Flyers are tougher and deeper and have higher expectations. They should. They are good; if they raise the Cup in June, it will not be a shock.”

I like Bucci, even though he a) thought it was a good idea for the Flyers to sign a bunch of Uruk-hai defensemen (Hatcher et al.) when everybody else was going for small and quick and b) quotes Guster with a straight face. Generally, though, Bucci doesn’t just like hockey, he gets it. Case in point:

The Flyers won a Stanley Cup in their seventh season of existence in 1973-74; they won another Cup the following season. In all, Philadelphia has made seven Cup finals appearances in 30 years. It’s quite a run. It’s no mystery why the Flyers have such a passionate and loyal fan base. Besides the cool-sounding name, a name that fits like few others in sports, and how the DNA of hockey fits perfectly with the DNA of Philly, the Flyers simply have been good for a long time.

If you were born in the mid-’60s in Philadelphia, you have been privy to one of the most consistent and entertaining hockey teams in the NHL. Cups, Broad Street Bullies, Bob Clarke’s toothless grin, Ron Hextall, Eric Lindros, the Legion of Doom, Keith Jones!, 378 goalies since 1997 and the current crop of players (drafted, traded for and/or free agents). The Flyers are once again an elite team, and there is a 7-year-old kid in south Jersey who will put on skates for the first time in the winter, fall in love with the game and this season’s Flyers team and become a Flyers fan for life.

Read his assessment of the East here.

Bleacher Report, which I guess is a web site, says the Flyers will come in 4th in their division and dismissed Chris Pronger as old. Read that here, for some reason.

Covers.com, a betting site, calls the Flyers “the new beasts of the East” and praises the Pronger deal. They conclude: “the Flyers are the most complete team in the Eastern Conference and have a great shot finishing at the top.” Read it here.

Sports Illustrated calls Ray Emery a wild card but sums it up like this: “On paper, they Flyers boast what could be the league’s most balanced and talented team, top to bottom. Anything less than a trip to the conference final would be a grim failure.” Read that here.

I saw this note getting passed around on Twitter earlier: “MontCo Animal Shelter is closing today. Having free adoption from 12-4p! Sadly, all remaining animals will be euthanized.”

Naturally, I re-tweeted it.

Turns out, though, that this was all a misunderstanding — the Montgomery County animal shelter in question is located in TEXAS, not Pennsylvania, but somehow this news got twisted around and applied to our home state. I called both Last Chance Ranch Animal Rescue in Quakertown and the Montgomery County SPCA in Conshohocken, and both confirmed that they will not be closing their doors.

We’re very glad all this is not true — but it’s still as good an opportunity as any to get more info on pet adoption. Please check out both shelters’ Web sites for more.

Photo | Mark Maglio

Daryl Hall and Angelica Huston?

The only good things about The Spectrum’s closing are the memories it’ll conjure the closer to implosion, and the rash of wildly amazing shows (Maxwell with Robin Thicke, Leonard Cohen, Halloween with Pearl Jam) in the wake of its finale.

And though we were excited by the notion of Hall & Oates playing out their hits on Oct. 23 in accordance with its first ever box set Do What You Want Be What You Are. We got triply thrilled when we heard that Todd Rundgren was on the bill.

Not only did the Upper Darby/Philly boy trio form what would be the Seventies Blue Eyed Soul Axis (all due respect to Boz Scaggs and Steely Dan). They all worked as one when the Runt produced H&O’s War Babies album 37 years ago. If you don’t know from this oft-maligned personal fave of mine,  oh ye “Kiss On My List” fans, dig this: Tonight (Wed. Sept. 15) you can catch Rundgren and Hall on the web series Live From Daryl’s House (livefromdarylshouse.com).

Reunited for the first time in eeooooooooooons doing “Better Watch Your Back” from War Babies, seven of each other’s best and a few covers by The Soul Survivors and Average White Band, this promises to be just a lick and a taste of the Philly brand cream cheese to come. Yum.

This would be funny if it weren’t the saddest, most frustrating, most infuriating thing I’ve ever seen. A reporter wanders the grounds of the 9/12 Tea Party protests in Washington D.C. and mostly lets these outraged citizens hang on their own words.

Have you seen this classic yet? Call it a prequel to Guido Beach. (Excerpts from Wildwood, NJ, the 1994 documentary by Carol Weaks-Cassidy and Ruth Leitman. Go to Ruthless Films for more info.)

This has certainly been making the rounds. A woman at a town hall meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., asks Barney Frank how he can support a Nazi plan, referring, of course, to the healthcare reform bill.  Frank tell this Obama=Hitler birther type what’s what. If you’ve not seen it, you need to see it now.

(h/t Rapa)

Carpets on the Ceiling by Alvaro Lopez-Moreno from last year’s Comics Issue

Just a reminder: We’re still accepting submissions for City Paper’s 2009 Comics Issue but TIME IS RUNNING OUT! They’re due Monday! Our favorites get published in the paper! In color! Even more get posted in an online slideshow! You can do it! Look at last year’s Comics Issue!

Click for Details.

I kinda liked Philly Turkey, the local Onion-ish satire site. When I remembered to go there, I usually found at least one thing to laugh at. They know Philly. Unfortunately my spam filter always gobbled up their email blasts, so I didn’t remember to go to the site that often. Anyway, I’m sad to hear they’re pulling the plug on the project over there. But I guess I’m not surprised since it was basically just two people (Jacob Lambert and Dan Baker) doing the whole thing. Quoth the epitaph:

Part of this is due to stamina. While we feel that the site still has a good deal of juice left, it’s a huge grind to put out. One person writes all of the Turkey’s stories, and one other person posts all of them. Outside of our fine cartoonists, that’s it. If we had a larger staff, exhaustion might not have been such a factor. However, as it now stands, if we didn’t kill it soon, it might have killed us first.

Right now, I’m not seeing any archives at phillyturkey.com, but I’m hoping that’ll change.

From last year’s Comics Issue

Just a reminder: We’re currently accepting submissions for City Paper’s 2009 Comics Issue. Our favorites get published in the paper! In color! Even more get posted in an online slideshow! You can do it! Look at last year’s Comics Issue!

Click for Details.

Now the city’s jumped in on the ongoing feud (and lawsuit) involving the Guardian Civic League, a black officers’ group and the not-infrequently-racist cop forum Domelights.com. The Inky reports today that the city has banned access to the site for all city computers, a move that follows on the heels of a similar decision by the Philadelphia Police Department.

That makes sense, as both the city and the PPD have a right to decide what sites their employees can access on the city’s dime. But according to that article, Guardian Civic League president Rochelle Bil is also saying that “her members’ goal was to shut down the site.”

That’s not so hot.

Yeah, the racist material on Domelights is really offensive, and yeah, it sucks that some people, including police officers, seem to take such great pleasure in posting it.

But, trite as it sounds, this is America. The owner of Domelights has a right to maintain his forum, as long as he doesn’t do it at work. He could, of course, refuse to publish racist material, but it’s his right to let it stand on his site.

More importantly, going after the forum itself is a misguided, pre-Internet-Era goose chase. Even if it were to succeed in shutting down the forum, the Civic League won’t have shut up the racists. They’ll find other forums, other ways to anonymously spew their stuff, and in the meantime they’ll be fueled by having had the man try to take away their constitutional right to do so.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a black police officer and have to work alongside the authors of some of those posts, especially not knowing who was who. All officers, and officers of color especially, have every right to hate the crap out of that site. But Bilal’s tactic seems to me to be a little like trying to kill the messenger.

Travel & Leisure is currently accepting data for its 2009 “America’s Favorite Cities” survey, and Philly is in the running. Drop by the T&L Web site and it’ll ask you to assess Philly (or any other city) through the lens of criteria like cleanliness, nightlife, shopping options, public transportation, environmental friendliness, food and drink and much more. Be honest.

(h/t phillydesign)