Guilty Pleasures, T-Shirts, and an odd discovery...

Okay, I am really going off into weirdland here. First I have a confession: I am a closet "A-Team" fan. I really don't know what the attraction is here, since basically the plot of every show is the same. But actually, I have found that since I entered nursing, I have been attracted to these mindless, action/adventure shows that are full of funny one-liners, and the more separated from my reality as an ICU nurse, and the challenging and often painful situations that I see there, the better. So there is the excuse for my guilty pleasure. The "A-Team" has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of homeless people found on the street, long-term drug users who are facing heart failure in their early 30's, people who have tried to overdose on whatever, etc. But I digress, sort of.

Anyway, my favorite character on the show is Murdock, the institutionalized, but more eccentric than mentally ill pilot of the Team. Since I have days off during the week, I have occasionally caught reruns on TV Land of "The A-Team" and must attest to the fact that they have truly been a guilty pleasure for me. After all, I could be listening to NPR, meditating, or reading the Wall Street Journal.

So anyway, they had too many nurses scheduled on my unit today, so I got cancelled early this morning. Experience has taught me that if I am cancelled in the morning, it will only take a couple of hours for the charge nurse to call me and say "Please come in, as soon as you can make it!" So there I was, at 7:00 am, waiting around for a call (after I had finished cleaning out yet another flooded section of my basement, but that's another story).

So I decided to while away my short time off at the computer, trying to find out one of my favorite "A-Team" trivia questions: What the heck were the sayings on Murdock's t-shirts? He always had some sort of saying on his t-shirt, but it was always obscured by the leather jacket that he wore.

So I checked out the usual places: TV Land, the Internet Movie Database, to no avail. However, I did find out that the actor who played Murdock has a webcast/blog: http://www.howlingmadradio.com for the morbidly interested. (I tried to link the site, but something went kerflewy every time I tried to publish it with the link. Anyone interested will have to access the site the "old fashioned way:" cut and paste. Heh).

So I thought 1. Maybe I will find out the secret of these T-shirts on his website, and 2. this could be quite entertaining.

So much for that. Apparently the actor (Dwight Schultz) is more than a bit right of center, so to speak. I listened to a couple of the webcasts sort of like the way you might look at a terrible road accident: "I can't look, I can't look away."

The first thing that I listened to was Mr. Schultz lamenting about how "we" lost both the House and the Senate during midterm elections, while he was in Spain. If this had been a live cast, I probably would have called in to ask if he had cast an absentee ballot or whether he was complaining about what everyone else did and he had no part of.

I got home from work tonight (yep, they called me in to work), and I decided to give the webcast another chance. So I tuned into a webcast that was supposed to be funny, and ended up listening to a really bad satire of the Vice President talking about how it was politically incorrect to say "Christmas" because the word contained "Christ."

I will admit that I have only listened to two of these webcasts, but it was enough to make me think I had accidentally stumbled upon Rush Limbaugh's website, or the site from Fox News Network. I know that it is unrealistic to attribute characteristics of a character to an actor, but this was absolutely the last thing I was expecting! It was something like looking forward to an interview with John McCutcheon (or Peter Gabriel if you don't know who J.M. is), only to hear him talking like Howard Stern.

Now, before anyone permanently labels me as a flaming liberal, I have to say that I have been involved in state and local politics, and I have found that the issues are much more complex than either party can convey in a three-minute sound byte. I also consider myself to be a raging independent (I think both major parties in the US are old enough to know better), and I am a notorious cross-party voter. So I may tune in again just to make sure my first impression was correct.

Oh, well, I still have "Howling Mad Murdock" and the gang and lots of stuff getting blown up on the "A-Team" on my days off.

But dangit, I still don't know what those T-shirts said.