Bosworth Lives Here ...

Q: What do you call three days of debating, fighting, pestering, and kvetching?
A: Father/son love.

Last weekend I had the rare joy of playing host to my Dad, who visited me in Iowa City on his way from Maine to California. Anyone who knows Sholom has a solid sense of what I mean when I say that the visit was eventful.

He came bearing gifts, including a sign he made for me out of a few pieces of driftwood he picked up on the beach in Maine. On this sign he wrote "Bosworth Lives Here." What tickled me most about the gesture was that he found a really original way to say, good work" or "I'm proud of you for trying something different" or maybe just "can I have a job?" Any way you slice it, he went out of his way to acknowledge a project that's been on my mind for the past few months. Ergo ... I share a simple photograph of the sign ...

In honor of the signpost, I've also created a Facebook group called "Bosworth Lives Here." I hope you'll all join ... I promise not to use the group in an attempt to mobilize a revolution. Click here to sign up for the "Bosworth Lives Here" Facebook group.

The Peanut Butter Mother F-cking Solution

Well, I recently got back to Iowa, and had a bunch of eventful things happen to me and everything, but I don't really feel like typing all that out at the moment. I'm too worked up, because I just found out the name of a movie I've been wondering about for about 20 years.

I saw this movie when I was about six, about a kid who wishes something (or something) and loses all his hair. Then he takes this peanut butter potion deal, which causes his hair to grow like 4 feet long. Then the kid gets kidnapped by an artist who is using human hair for his paint brushes. I have gone along for the past two decades not knowing the name of the movie, but, needless to say, it left an impression. At the time I had long hair, so this movie scared the bloody bejesus out of me. As I got older, this sense of fear turned to curiosity. What was the name of this movie? Had anyone else seen it?

Each time I asked someone I knew whether they'd seen a film like this, however, they returned a blank stare, as if to say: "Lavin, you are a nut."

But I'm not a nut.

(Not about this, anyway.)

I recently stumbled upon the name of the flick. "The Peanut Butter Solution." Then I found it on IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089789/ (It's also on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peanut_Butter_Solution, and there's a trailer on youtube) I immediately felt a combination of relief and self-righteous anger toward anyonewho ever doubted the existence of this movie.

Probably the funniest part of the experience was reading the the primary user review:

"I've been working in videos stores for 5yrs now and every time someone new comes and works in the video store I always ask have you ever seen a movie where this kid loses his hair and uses this stuff with peanut butter in it to make his hair grow. And everyone always looks at me strangely and say no. I had seen this movie in school a few times when i was 6 or 7 and it also scared the crap out of me and made a lasting impression but didn't know the name of the movie. So finally I did a random search and typed in peanut butter in a movie search engine and got the title Peanut Butter Solution."

You can't make this crap up. Anyone seen it?