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Columbo: The Retirement Years

26 Apr

April 26, 2025

It has always been a source of disappointment to me that ABC denied us Columbo’s Last Case, Peter Falk’s proposed final farewell to Columbo.

OK, maybe it isn’t as disappointing as the 2006 NLCS, but I was there, I saw the series end on Carlos Beltrán taking strike three, thank you very much, so yes, maybe I take that one a little personally.

SWING YOU BASTARD!

But I digress. The Columbo series may not have been at the top of it’s game, but the final movie, Columbo Likes the Nightlife (2003) showed that there was still “just one more thing” left in the series. Falk had an idea of a final episode to retire Lt. Columbo, but the brass at ABC thought, among other things, that Peter Falk was too old and his health wasn’t good enough and did not think they could insure him. (They may have had a point, but I’m not going to go into that here.) Paramount tried the same thing with DeForest Kelley at one point.

So what would retirement look like for Lt. Columbo? He and his wife may or may not have had children (some fans aren’t convinced he had a wife) but he did have nieces and nephews, and he did take pride in his family, so I think his later years would look something like this:

Yup. that’s about right.

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I Was Voter Suppressed! (Kinda Sorta)

3 Nov

November 2, 2024

Today was the big day when I decided to exercise my right as a citizen to vote in the big election. Unfortunately, they were not accepting ballots for who I want kicked out of the Big Brother house so I had to settle for voting for President. Who knew that was up for grabs again?

Since I was already there I got on line and after a few minutes of acquainting myself with the candidates and grumbling about what happened to David Palmer and why he wasn’t up for reelection, it was my turn at the sign-in desk.

This is completely true. I know I say that all the time but trust me, this is really truly completely true, not the mostly semi-true that I usually mean. This happened exactly the way it is written below. Honest! (Seriously, would the Editors and Staff of Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride let me write it if it wasn’t true? Well, despite that, what follows is truly true to the most truthful period, comma, and colon. And I had a colonoscopy recently so I have medical documentation.)

The wait was fairly short, about ten minutes, and then I got to the check-in desk. A middle-aged woman was behind the desk and she ran through the brief instructions with all the enthusiasm of someone who already repeated those instructions 400 times that day. I gave her may name and address, she entered the info on a tablet, swung it around, and asked me the info on the screen was correct. It was.

She then asked me to sign on the screen. I did so, and she swung it back around to check the signature. After she looked at it for far too long, she said to me, “is this your signature?”

I replied “Yes. You saw me sign it.”

She then erased it from the touch screen. I was signed in to vote and she had effectively eliminated me from voting.

She then showed me her voter registration book and told me “sign it more like this.” She pointed to my signature in the book. She said “that’s your signature from when you registered.”

I said to her, “do you know how old that is?”

She said yes, although she did not, and looked in the book. She then told me “it’s from the 1980’s.”

I was expected to sign my name in 2024 exactly the same way I did when Bill Cosby was reigning as TV’s Top Dad, OJ Simpson was playing the goofy Nordberg in The Naked Gun, and Brian Mulroney was still the Canadian Prime Minister. (That last one is for the international audience, eh?)

So I imitated the decades old signature and swung the tablet back and the woman scrutinized it and then, she actually did this, took her finger and somehow altered my signature. Then she gave me the ballot and sent me off to vote.

Of course, the irony of it all is that when it was time to vote, I didn’t even write in my own name for President.

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