We’re well-equipped for this. For instance, on Saturday, Mrs. Crappy pulled out our boxed set of Looney Tunes classics and popped them on for a traditional Saturday-morning slobfest.

This prompted the resumption of a long-standing debate in our house: “Rabbit of Seville” or “What’s Opera, Doc”?

If you’re of a certain age, chances are pretty good you don’t need any further explanation. But if you do: “Rabbit” is the Bugs Bunny episode where he is chased into the Hollywood Bowl by Elmer Fudd and proceeds to take over the production of “Barber of Seville,” featuring a complete makeover of Fudd.

“Opera” featured Fudd as a viking, chasing, and eventually killing, Bugs to the tune of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (you know, the “kill the wabbit, kill the WAAABIT” one…).

Both shorts are undeniably classics, but Mrs. Crappy and I have never agreed on which one is best; I’m a “Rabbit” guy and Mrs. Crappy will forever stand by “Opera.”

So, of course, I asked Twitter.

And Twitter mostly agreed with me. I saw 10 responses to my question (Twitter poll: Rabbit of Seville or What’s Opera, Doc?); seven people were with me and the other three sided with Mrs. Crappy.

But while we discussed the results, Mrs. Crappy and I came up with another one that, if I’m basing this on the short’s ability to make me giggle and nothing else, that for me might top the other two. Astoundingly, it wasn’t included in the DVD set we own, so we watched it online.

Yep. Giggling like I was an 8 year old again.

Here’s what I want you to do: Guess the short in the comments. Two hints: It’s a period piece and Bugs Bunny does not appear. I’ll have a $10 iTunes gift card ready for the first person to get it right (including the correct title!). And if you want, I’d also like to hear your favorite Warner Brothers cartoon as well.

Go!

And this one, my friends, is a doozy.

My friend @TheLegendofJill posted this to Facebook late Wednesday; I saw it this morning and had to take a look. What Jill posted:

1) Find out the song that was No. 1 the week you were born.
2) Find that song on YouTube.
3) Post that video on your wall without shame.

Jill was happy to post a video of Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” a delightfully cheesy slice of the late 1970s. In response, I joked that no one was making music videos in 1966.

And oh, how I wish I was correct. Had I been born a couple weeks earlier, it would have been The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” A week later? The Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” And I would have been perfectly happy with either classic Motown song.

But no.

Ladies and gentlemen, the No. 1 song on Oct. 12, 1966:

Let’s be straightforward here. I know this song. I know it well. And I’ve always hated it. As in, The Association’s “Cherish” Is One Of The Worst Songs In The History Of Music Hatred.

So, Jill. I found the song. I found and posted the video.

But posting it without shame? Sorry. No can do.

And I thought I would share.

• Most Read: That was nickname, the post about the origin of the Uncle Crappy name. It was followed by did it again, a two-year-old post about the pizza party we hosted (more about that one in a minute) and flw,ftw, another two-year-old post about our visit to Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob (the one with the pictures I wasn’t allowed to post).
• Commenters: You’re all awesome, but Becky is the most awesomest; she was the top commenter for the year. Ms. Hellohahanarf was followed by Large, Kewyson, Gina and RPM. Thanks, y’all.
• How they got here, Part One: Twitter is how you got here, which probably means I should do a better job of linking new posts there (or, you know, writing more posts in the first place). Twitter was followed by Networked Blogs — the Facebook app that I just shitcanned a couple days ago because it sucks — WordPress, Facebook and Google Reader.
• How they got here, Part Two: This is the fun one. I think of myself as having pretty good taste when it comes to food and especially drink. So when I looked through the search terms that brought people here most often, I was a bit surprised. Following “Uncle Crappy” (the most popular search term), the searches that got people here were for “Seagram’s Wine Coolers,” “wine cooler drinks” and “IC Light Mango.” There is an explanation here. The wine coolers references were part of the pizza party post, because Beth left a mess of them in our beer fridge (Um, thanks?) and, of course, I reviewed the mango monstrosity back in June in what turned out to be the fourth most-read post of the year.

Thanks, guys — that was a pretty good year, on your part at least. As for me, I’m going to find a way to muster more than the 106 posts I put up in 2011.

We’re a day away from another home football game, and I have my regular football partner with me tomorrow. That wasn’t the case a week ago, but it worked out pretty well anyway.

I’m always a little out of sorts when Mrs. Crappy can’t come to a game. She’s been my partner in Ohio Stadium for even longer than we’ve been married, and when she can’t come for some reason, I miss her terribly.

That was the case a week ago, when Mrs. Crappy was recovering from the nasty cold and didn’t come out to Columbus. It was the case for my dad too, as my Mom, who had been sick all week, came to the tailgate party but didn’t stick around for the game that night.

And that’s how I got to watch a game — that game — with my Dad.

Mrs. Crappy’s been my official football partner for more than a decade now, but my Dad and I go back even further. My first Ohio State game was with him — a Wisconsin game, no less, in 1974. Long before I was in high school, he made a point of taking me to what would be the last game between Upper Arlington — for whom I would play several years later — and Bishop Watterson, the local Catholic high school; that rivalry was ending as UA moved to a new conference, but I mostly remember the pre-game meal we shared at White Castle. There were Browns games in the old Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, including one bitterly cold game in which Cleveland secured a playoff berth.

And there were Ohio State games. Too many to count in the stadium — I was the default choice when mom decided it was too cold or rainy to go — and even more on TV in our house or elsewhere.

I am the way I am, in terms of football, because of him. He’s a little more understated these days, but the stuff I remember:

• TP-ing the house of a Michigan fan after the 1975 comeback win.
• Standing by the outerbelt waiving an enormous Ohio State flag — which I still have — at passing traffic after we watched the 1979 win against Michigan.
• Dangling my buddy Carolina Boy over the edge of our deck because he wore his Michigan gear to one of my folks’ Beat Michigan parties.

Has this rubbed off? As I gave what can only be described as a totally over-the-top pep talk at the end of our tailgate toast on Saturday, I heard someone say to my father: “Yeah, he’s your son.”

Father and son got to watch a remarkable game on Saturday night. Ohio State’s first late touchdown — the long Braxton Miller run — had both of us jumping up and down — something that’s not easy for Dad these days. We reacted differently to Miller’s long TD pass, though — as the stadium erupted around us, we could only look at each other in disbelief.

He’s got a few more games on me — to the tune of 20 seasons or so — but neither of us could come up with one that compared to last week’s win against Wisconsin. We saw an all-timer. And I got to share it with the guy who is the reason for me being the fan I am.

I get to watch this week’s game with Mrs. Crappy, and I’m happy she’s back. But I will always be grateful for — and I will never forget — last weekend.

Thanks, Dad.

I arrived in Athens, Ohio, in the fall of 1985. As I moved in at Washington Hall, I met my roommate for the first time. He had all the normal moving into college stuff — clothes, some music, stuff to hang on the walls.

But he also had a small, black vinyl bag, like a little suitcase. It was one of the last things he unpacked. He did so carefully, gently placing the bag and its contents on one of the two desks in the room. I hadn’t seen it before, but I knew what it was.

It was a Macintosh.

My roommate turned out to be kind of a tool, but he said I could use the Mac whenever I wanted. I used it a lot. My mother had an Apple II that I had a hard time deciphering, but the Mac was a whole different experience. No deciphering necessary. Jump in. Start doing.

My roommate and I managed to tolerate each other until January, and I moved to a different room. I didn’t miss him, but I missed that computer, especially after I started working at the student newspaper at OU. There were computers there, sort of. We had these black-box word processors and we had a newer system, which we not-so-lovingly called the POS (that actually stood for something besides Pieces of Shit, which was the common name in the newsroom). We had to code headlines, bylines, different type styles we used in the paper.

And I missed that Mac.

I didn’t return to The Post right away when I returned to Athens after the Army, but when I did, I was in for a nice surprise. We wrote stories on Mac Classics. We did all the design and pagination on Mac Quadras. And if we had technical problems during a late night, it was mostly because of the OOPS, our massive typesetting beast, and not the computers. Again — it was easy.

And since then, I’ve been hooked. Yes, I’ve worked on PCs since I started the professional portion of my career — and I’ve become pretty comfortable with them. But when I’ve had a choice about what we’ve used at home, I’ve always turned to Apple. I had — still have, actually — a Bondi Blue iMac (Rev. B, because I know you’re wondering). That was replaced with an eMac that still lives a happy life in my mother in law’s house. And I’m hoping that the iMac I’m writing this on will be with us for years.

And that says nothing of the other things. The music freak in me is still grateful for the old iPod that allowed me to carry dozens of Grateful Dead, Wilco and Phish shows — with room for plenty more — anywhere I went. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the iPhone is at least partially responsible for me finding the amazing group of friends I have here in Pittsburgh — not to mention having the still not-quite-fully-realized potential for changing how I do my job.

I don’t need Apple devices to do these things these days. I have two Android devices that I use and I like.  But Apple still does it better, and it won’t be long until I’m able to happily — and finally — get an iPhone 4.

It wouldn’t quite be accurate to say this is all the responsibility of one man. But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s hard to say that Steve Jobs changed the world — and changed how I live in it.

My relationship with MTV was always a little different.

Once I got past the initial thrill of just seeing the network, which turns 30 today, I was a little dismissive of MTV. There was some remarkable stuff there, sure, but between the endless stream of Top 40 stuff that I never found all that interesting and the fact that MTV largely ignored the music I was interested in — with the exception of 1987, otherwise known as the Summer of Touch — I generally didn’t find much there for me.

As I think about it now — more than a decade after MTV traded in music for crappy reality programming — I wish I had paid a little more attention. There was more good stuff there than I gave it credit for, and some of my favorite musical moments — and some sort of non-musical ones– were a direct result of watching.

I got to watch portions of the revived Woodstock festival — the fun one, not the ugly one a few years later — and seeing the Nine Inch Nails set — remember the mud flinging? — was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen on television anywhere; also, seeing the Allman Brothers set on that Sunday mornings was priceless.

But this is about video, right? I liked Nirvana, but I didn’t love them until I saw this:

The chilling Leadbelly song was the perfect way to wrap up their Unplugged set.

The 1993 VMAs did two things for me: I got the perfect version of “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Pearl Jam backing Neil Young, but that was preceded by something even better:

Stunning.

I can’t find the clip of my favorite REM appearance on MTV, even though I know it used to be available on YouTube. The band did a live set on the network not long after Bill Berry left the band. Before the launched into “Radio Free Europe,” Stipe urged the audience to shout FUCK throughout the song in hopes that MTV couldn’t use it on air. And then the band roared through a sloppy, garage-y and joyful version of the song. This is similar , especially in that Stipe can’t remember the words, but I have to find that clip again someday:

And yeah, the Summer of Touch:

I still love it. Happy birthday, MTV — turns out you weren’t so bad after all.

Whenever a space shuttle launches, I try to watch. I did so this morning, when Atlantis took off for the program’s final mission.

I was watching at lunch on Jan. 28,1986, when Challenger began what would be its last mission. I was a freshman at OU, and after pestering the editors for weeks, I had just been given a staff writer’s job at The Post, the independent student paper there. Journalism was I went to Athens after high school, but outside of a couple feature stories and the column that got my foot in the door the previous fall, I hadn’t really done much yet.

Watching the Challenger explode 73 seconds into its flight was horrifying, of course; I watched the footage over and over, stunned, while I stood in the little restaurant in Baker Center. And I’m not sure why it happened, but eventually something made me move, I walked to the other side of the building, where The Post had its offices, to see if there was anything I should be doing.

There was, of course. I didn’t get to my classes that afternoon, because one of the editors — might have been Ethel, now that I think about it — sent me out to collect reactions from fellow students. While I was doing that, others were talking to people in town and the campus editor — my editor — drove to another town in eastern Ohio to interview a friend of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who had died along with six astronauts on the flight.

I may still have a copy of that paper somewhere. I remember being proud of helping, in a small way, of getting that paper out.

When a catastrophe like the Challenger explosion happens, people tend to shut down while they process what they’ve seen and heard. The people in my business are wired differently, though — it’s not that we don’t share those emotions, but we’re able to put them aside and do our jobs. Looking back, that was the first day I knew I was wired that day. I came to Athens for OU’s journalism program; I knew on that day I had made the right choice.

I’ve written about the origin of the Uncle Crappy before, but that was many years ago, and for god’s sake don’t go back in the archives and look because they can be pretty rough. But a couple of you *coughgoonsquadsarahahem* have asked recently where the name came from, and I think I can probably do a slightly less awful job of re-telling the story here.

See, there is this bar…

The Union, in Athens, Ohio, was my bar from the day I returned to town after a couple years in the Army. I was familiar with it during my first try at college — it’s where I wore Grateful Dead t-shirts to hardcore shows, much to the consternation of my friends who were a bit more serious about metal than I was — but I was younger then and the combination of townies and PIBs was slightly intimidating.

When I returned to Athens, though, the Union was where I was comfortable. No one cared who you were or what music you listened to; if you could handle yourself on the pinball machine or the pool table — and if you bought a pitcher once in while — you were in. It had cheap hot dogs, decent-but-inexpensive beer, a killer jukebox and, most importantly, it was just a block from the offices of the student newspaper.

What’s not to like?

Our beer of choice back then was Lowenbrau Dark — it wasn’t nasty macro swill and pitchers were just $3.50 (Again — what’s not to like?). I couldn’t begin to count the nights, or the money, I spent there over the years, and I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.

The Union was a habit I shared with a pretty good number of friends from the student newspaper in particular, so much so that when we had reunions, we always ended up there. During one of those reunion weekends — please don’t ask me which one, because I have no idea — we started and finished the night there. I seem to recall going for a while before having to break the seal, but that detail isn’t especially important; what was important was what I saw when I walked in the men’s room for the first time that night.

The dark, stinky, graffiti-covered men’s room had a sort-of-functioning sink, one light, and two partitions that separated the toilet and the urinal from the rest of the closet-sized space. If I remember correctly, it had a holstein-themed paint job — black-and-white splotches, covered in graffiti, covering the walls. But that wasn’t there this night — I just remember dark red paint, accented by black Sharpie, all over everything but the plumbing fixtures.

I remember one other thing: Someone had started a list on the partition next to the urinal. The title? Suggested Band Names. And while I don’t recall any of the other names people had written on the list, I clearly, to this very day, remember No. 6.

Uncle Crappy.

I was so taken that I actually dragged the future Mrs. Crappy into the men’s room so she could share in my epiphany. I don’t think she was quite as impressed as I was, but the name was burned in my brain. I lack the musical talent to ever have a band to name, but once I had graduated from my horrible Geocities site to Blogger, I thought I should probably come up with a decent blog name; that, my friends, had to be Uncle Crappy.

(As a postscript of sorts: For years, Mrs. Crappy’s name on the blog was simply The Wife. She hates that term, but, fortunately for me, found it endlessly amusing that that was her name here. But when she showed some interest in Twitter, we found that @thewife had already been taken; she opted for Mrs. Crappy — over Aunt Crappy — instead, and was officially promoted to that title back in February 2009.)

I just wrote 700 words explaining where Uncle Crappy came from — @supa probably knows I’m like this already, right? — but the name has served me well over the years. It’s been worth it to me, especially since there are still a pretty good number of people in Pittsburgh who don’t have any idea what my actual name is.

That means I picked a good one, right?

If I had to pick one guy, outside of the immediate circle of musicians or lyricists, who was responsible for the success of the Grateful Dead, it would be Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

If you were a member of the GD circle, you knew him as Bear. If you bought LSD anywhere on the west coast in the late 1960s or early 1970s, you knew him simply as Owsley, the guy who cooked millions of doses, before and after the drug was deemed to be illegal in 1966.

Bear was killed on Sunday, in a car accident near his home in Australia.

Bear’s underground industry helped him finance the band, which he first saw at one of the Bay Area Acid Test shows. He bought gear, he paid for their living expenses and allowed them the time to develop from something of a novelty to the biggest band in the San Francisco area. He even took them in while he lived in Los Angeles for a spell, feeding the band’s members only steak — he thought vegetables were toxic and carbohydrates caused diabetes — kept them stoned nearly all the time, because they all lived in the lab where he was cooking the substance that paid for the band’s expenses.

He observed early on that the band’s live harmonies were horrible; he actually went as far as to suggest that they play only songs that didn’t require background vocals. The guys didn’t go for that, so Bear did the next best thing — he upgraded their monitors and sound system, a process that continued with him until he designed the Wall of Sound, a monstrous system that could produce crystal-clear sound at a staggering decibel level. For those two-and-a-half years, the band had to use two Walls of Sound, so one could jump ahead to the next venue while the band used the other for the current show. It was a sonic success but a business nightmare — the expenses associated with hauling two of those things around the country nearly bankrupted the band and was a big factor in the hiatus that started in 1974.

Bear was a notorious pain in the ass, and he pushed the band through the years about matters both artistic and acoustic. That had an impact, back then and today, as Weir said in a statement posted at Jambands.com:

He taught me to take myself and my interests out of the picture and work with the subject under consideration so that the best deductions or conclusions are made. I guess this means working from the point of view of the higher self, though that term never came up; it was always just assumed…Most important was the approach he taught me: Always be open and engaging – always critical and questioning, but not negatively so much as playfully.

There are pictures of Bear available through the magic of Google, and I’m not going to post any of them here. Bear preferred to be a behind-the-scenes guy, and that’s something I’ll respect here.

Instead, you get a Stealie, which Bear helped design as a stencil to easily identify the band’s gear. It’s a pretty good symbol of the impact he had on the band. He needed something to make his job and that of the crew a little easier; what he came up with because the best-recognized icon for an iconic band.

Thanks, Bear, for that and everything else.

I don’t follow this person, so I was watching the discussion through comments and re-tweets of those who do. I was curious about a couple of those — all marked with the #thiscityneeds hash tag — and took a look at his (?) stream.

And that was probably a mistake.

I found a long line of comments; some were funny, but most just came off as griping. And there was this one:

#thiscityneeds something to do after 6pm.

I hoping this guy was kidding (a possiblity, because he later tweeted that #thiscityneeds a better sense of humor. He also said #thiscityneeds fewer douchebags, which probably means I’m not getting Burgh Verified anytime soon). If he’s not, he couldn’t be more wrong.

You guys all know by now that Mrs. Crappy and I tend to travel a bunch during football season. We wouldn’t change our football weekends for anything, but without fail, there are always things here we’re missing because we’re in Columbus.

And now that the football travel is over for the year, we’re faced with dilemmas of a different kind — there’s too much stuff to do. If I had unlimited time, money and energy — and that last one is probably the biggest factor; my 44-year-old self needs more sleep than my 34-year-old self did — I would have gone to movie-slash-wing night last night and Bocktown’s birthday tonight. I would have figured out something — Dinner? Drinks with friends? — for Wednesday and Thursday. Friday?Brewfest. Saturday? Christmas beer tweetup and Girl Talk.

Don’t have time? I understand. Money’s tight? Believe me, I get it. But nothing to do? My friend, you’re not trying.

I’ve said this before — we love it here. One of the big reasons we bought a house in the city was to live in the city, close to everything we love to do and the people we love to spend time with. There are plenty of nights when we’re the ones going home early or maybe staying in — the old folks know their limitations — I can promise you one thing: We’re never bored.

This post wraps up two months of daily Uncle Crappy. If you look back, you’ll see that a pretty good number of the October and November posts were about the stuff we’ve done and the people that have made those experiences a pleasure. I’m going to keep going through December, because there will be no shortage of Pittsburgh things to write about.

And if at any point in the next four weeks you’re in danger of becoming bored, try asking someone what’s going on. You’ll get more suggestions than you know what to do with.