Our good friend Keith is back to his panhandling ways. But in order to be more in line with the Christmas Holiday Spirit, Keith begged for money dressed as Santa Claus, rather than his traditional banana costume. Keith claims to be making a documentary film on panhandling. I still maintain that he simply likes to dress up. I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a Little Bo Peep costume in his closet one time. His previous efforts at panhandling (in the banana suit) can be found here.

It started with Ben Miller. I gave a cardboard sign guy a buck, and Ben berated me, saying that these guys make more than we do, and probably live in nicer places. He even suggested that this guy might have driven to work, parking his car around the corner, no doubt with back up cardboard signs in the trunk. I doubted this. Sure, maybe there is an eccentric or two out there who has money but signs it anyway, but they'd have to be the exception. Right? So, I decided to see how much money I could make on the freeway off-ramps of my town. Then I got competitive. I was gonna be the best card board sign guy ever.

Each film in George Romero's zombie series has stretched further into the future of a zombie infested world than its predecesor. Night of The Living Dead takes place over the first 24 hours after the outbreak. Dawn of The Dead, chronicles some longer term survivors who take refuge in a shopping mall a few weeks after that, as society crumbles around them. The third and weakest film, Day of The Dead, takes place months later in a millitary outpost whose residents begin to lose their own sense of civility as they search for other survivors and attempt to piece together a taxonomy of these ghouls that plague them.

So naturaly Land of The Dead gives only a quick nod to the outbreak of zombie infestation during the opening credits, before zooming several years forward in time to a city near Pittsburgh that has used its three rivers and a series of electric fences to build a zombie-free safe haven.

Larry Elder rules the Moral Court

The call came at about noon.

�Hey Keith, wanna be on TV?�

It was Brett, my old roomie who�d gone to Hollywood to achieve his dream of being a starving actor. He�d failed horribly at the starving part and was getting gigs regularly, so I knew he was serious.

�Hell yeah! What do I got to do.�

�A woman named Sara is gonna call you and ask you about a conflict you would like to resolve on the Moral Court. Describe a conflict. She loves it. She brings you to Hollywood.�

�Great, what�s the conflict?"

�You�ll think of something. I gotta go.�

Brett had previously set me up with a gig pretending to be a series of weird characters who call in to morning DJs. I�d always wondered where they found such bizarre people and was a bit disillusioned to know they were just big fakers like me�getting up at 4 in the morning for a quick fifty-dollar phone call.

I tightened the screws on my thinking cap, but no conflicts were coming to my mind.

The phone rang again.

�Hi Keith, this is Sara with CDC productions.� (All names have been changed to protect myself.)

I had to think fast. OK, I�d gone to a record store with my roommate Patrick; and he found a rare Partridge Family album that some idiot had marked fifty cents. Patrick didn�t have any money. So I bought the record and we shared it. I now had an opportunity to sell the album for two grand. But Pat�s furious that I�d even consider selling it, and is now not speaking to me.

�So he moved out over this?�

Wow! Talk about leading the witness... Sure, so he moved out.

The story was fake, of course�all but the record and Patrick�s passion for it. The record came with a plastic Partridge Family shopping bag�the name of the record being �A Bagful of Hits.� Patrick�s copy was in mint condition and included the shopping bag.

Knowing she was deciding if we were �television worthy,� I gave one final push.

�Patrick will be great on the show. He dresses like a cowboy�rope tricks and all.�

�He dresses like a cowboy?!�

�Yep.�

�Keith, I�d love to have you on.�