John McCain’s visit to New Orleans, in the style of VH-1’s old "Pop-Up Videos":

Among the many reasons this blog has slowed to a crawl of late is the intrusion of a bunch of fun projects all at once, the sort of stuff I’d never have imagined I’d even try.

One of them, El Pantera, is a Mexican action/drama series whose first season has recently begun airing in the United States on Univision every Sunday night at 8.

I’ve been in Mexico City a lot recently, acting as sort of a creative story consultant as they enter the second season.  Not sure when the second season episodes will air in the U.S., but for those of you who hablan the español, you might still enjoy a peek in the meantime.

I had nothing to do with the current episodes, mind you; what you’ll see for the moment is simply the deep end of the pool I dove into.  Y no podía hablar español mucho mejor que usted, lo prometo.  So this was fascinating and challenging and fun beyond words.  In either language.

Obviously, it’s a completely different kind of storytelling than anything I’ve ever tried.  El Pantera is a major departure in many ways from the telenovela format which has dominated Mexican airwaves ever since they first got airwaves, but it’s still steeped in various cultural traditions and expectations that I’m only now starting to appreciate.  I was brought in to help the producers push the show further toward North American norms, but I’d give you pesos to panes dulces that they did most of the teaching.

I’ll probably mention this again as a heads-up when the second season starts airing here, whether that’s in a couple of months or sometime next year.

I’ll miss it, to be honest.  The folks there were as fun to work with as anybody in my whole career.

UPDATE: I wrote the below before I was sure how public my friend and his family were with his sudden, bizarre case of cancer; I’ve previously been close to people who didn’t want similar stuff to be public, since previous illness can wrongly affect their ability to get future work.

But my friend Mike Irwin is perfectly happy with everyone knowing his family could use your help.  You may recognize him from frequent TV appearances during the cable comedy boom of the early 1990s.  Whether it was Evening at the Improv, Carolines Comedy Hour, MTV’s Half-Hour Comedy Hour, and so on — Mike did them all.  Now it’s later in the story, and his family could use all the help, love, and support they can get.  Fortunately, not only are comedians already starting to line up to do benefits, there’s also the Mike Irwin Cancer Fund if you’d personally like to chip in with a donation right now.

Incidentally, Mike never smoked a cigarette in his life, nor is there any other obvious cause to point to.  This could happen to you or me just as easily.  Just, bang, cancer, stage four, and good luck.

But I just came back from a few days with Mike in the hospital in upstate New York, and he has some serious crap to deal with — stage four bone cancer is even harder than some of the stand-up one-nighters we went through together back in the day — but if there’s anybody I’d be willing to put money on right now, it’s Mike.

My love to him, his wife Esther, and their large menagerie of offspring.

A personal thing.

I got some hard news last week. A guy I’ve known for 22 years — half my life — somebody I started out with in comedy, a guy who was my best friend for a while and whom I remained close to for a number of years… has cancer.

Last night comes the news that it’s pretty advanced.

Won’t mention the name here, but he’s a dear friend, just a little older than I am. Good marriage, three boys, great attitude toward life, the sort of fellow who takes responsibility for his own mistakes and faces adversity with a shrug and a smile and a can-do attitude. I’ve seen him plow through some serious crap in this life. And now this.

Right this minute, he’s in a hospital somewhere going through seventeen kinds of emotional and physical hell trying to plow through this latest — and if anyone on earth can, he can, I assure you (and myself) — and his wife is either right there next to him or home trying to get a few shreds of sleep before going back to on hope patrol. I’ve been through that vigil with loved ones myself a few times, sometimes with good outcomes, sometimes not. What her husband, my old friend, is going through, I can only try to imagine.

And here’s the thing: I’m ashamed to realize that as much as I care for and admire this guy, we’ve been in gradually diminishing contact, geez, ever since I moved out of New York fifteen years ago. Adulthood and jobs sneak up, we move around, relationships change, and old friends sometimes phase nearly out of our lives unintentionally before we even realize it.

Now suddenly I’m here, and he’s there. Somebody hit the fast-forward button when nobody was looking.

But we were young together.

The things that stick in mind are things that mattered for no damn reason I can think of, other than the sheer daily fact of friendship. There was this barbecue on his porch on a clear spring night on the south side of Chicago, him and his first wife and a bunch of other young hopeful comedy people, back when I couldn’t afford my own place yet and they let me sleep under their stairs on the second floor. It wasn’t much — hell, it was barely anything — but thanks to them, it was home for a while. Or doing stand-up comedy together, early in our careers, in this giant barn-like building in a small farm town in western Ohio, with picnic tables for the seats and a lone spotlight that was as blinding as the sun. In New York, finding a bowling alley in Brooklyn that had ancient lacquered lanes so we could spin the ball from gutter to gutter, often whether we wanted to or not. Working on our acts in the back of a Howard Johnson’s hotel in St. Petersburg Beach, wondering where the odd life we’d chosen would eventually take us.

Strangely, as much as I find myself feeling fear, worry, and all those things for my friend right now — what I also feel, maybe more than anything is… gratitude.

I hope he knows how much I love him. Even if I’ve been out of touch.

I told his wife that if they need me to pack up and go live under the stairs again, I’ll go.

And when he makes it through this, I am so gonna drag his butt back to that bowling alley in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, my point for you, whoever you are, and whenever you may visit:

If you’re reading this, and you have a few old friends you’ve lost touch with, maybe you want to find a minute and say hey.

Call them. For no damn reason. Be young with them, as young as you are right now while you’re thinking of them.

And be grateful.

Here’s the local newspaper’s idea of a fun flash-animated baseball game:

No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.

This is really what April is like for Cleveland baseball fans.

I wish they’d win the World Series one of these years.  The fans deserve it.  They really do.

I was a loyal Sprint customer starting in 1986, when "U.S. Sprint" had the cheapest rates I could find. I traveled constantly even then, so long distance was a necessity, and saving a few cents per minute could really add up.

For more than 15 years, I accumulated points in the Sprint Rewards program, eventually racking up enough for several round-trip flights to Europe. I never took those, however, because in July 2002, Sprint suddenly changed the rules, politely telling screwing hundreds of thousands of customers to go screw themselves. The company is now subject to a class action complaint.

Obviously, I stopped being a Sprint customer, but I would have left anyway. T-Mobile had a much better deal for international travellers at the time, although now Skype is the way to go.

Nonetheless, two years ago, in January 2006, I got an unsolicited email from Sprint, totally out of the blue, asking me to be a part of the Sprint Ambassador program. Google around, and you’ll find that this was a klutzy attempt at guerrilla marketing, where Sprint shoved free phones at hundreds of bloggers, almost randomly, promising to engage our feedback while really just hoping we’d all be so blown away by a free phone — yippee! — that we’d froth pure joy to a cumulative hundreds of thousands of readers.

Thing is, the phone was OK, nothing more. Sprint hardly has a reputation for genius innovation. I put the phone on a shelf, figuring I’d give it to somebody who needed it someday. Meanwhile, the program didn’t quite get the desired results, and they shut it down about ten weeks ago with one last email farewell, including a phone number for anyone with Ambassador-related questions.

Still, I have a friend who still has Sprint service (I don’t let this come between us, though) and needs a new phone, so I figure maybe I can give her my old unused Sprint Ambassador handset.

So I contact Sprint today, hoping to get a few simple obvious questions answered. Or I try to. The Sprint Ambassador web presence? Gone; it now auto-forwards weirdly to some tech forum. The Sprint Ambassador customer service number, sent out just last January? Already dead.

OK, try Sprint’s regular customer service… and not only had the guy not ever heard of the program, he all but accused me, basically, of making it up. And no, he wouldn’t let me speak to a supervisor, not at first. When the supervisor finally came on the line, she hadn’t heard of the program, either, questioning the program’s existence even after I begged her to use that obscure research tool called Google.

Her actual suggestion: I should print out the emails from Sprint and take them to a Sprint retail store, and hope I could convince somebody there that the program actually existed.

Let’s review: Sprint shuts down the contact mechanism for one of its programs so thoroughly that now I’m supposed to bring Sprint its own emails in order to prove to Sprint its own programs existed?

Wow. I don’t want to call the Better Business Bureau. I want to call Franz Kafka.

This hereby completes my lifetime interactions with Sprint. I hope.