They Call Me Steely McBeam

If I told you that my nickname in college was "Steely McBeam," then you'd assume that I had a pretty interesting and fulfilling dating life. If I told you that my SAG professional screen name was "Steely McBeam," you'd think that I was doing fairly well in my porn career, and you'd do a Google image search as soon as you got to a computer in private.

Though I do now plan to slyly incorporate the name Steely McBeam into my most intimate conversations with the opposite sex, I will not be able to claim sole ownership of it. The Pittsburgh Steelers have introduced a new mascot, a yellow skinned, five o'clock shadowed, hard hat and flannel shirt wearing steel worker recently named by a contest winner as Steely McBeam.

The idea of a mascot has been the subject of controversy amongst Steelers fans for their entire 75 year history, as divisive there as the concept of "Reagan Democrats." Before McBeam, the Steelers had set themselves apart as a team of stark simplicity, a simple two color uniform scheme with the iconic U.S. Steel Corp. logo placed on only one side of the helmets, the other side staying fully black. Who needs all the decorations? (See the Buffalo Bills who add another stripe or stroke somewhere on the uni every year to no avail.) Helmets are for hitting the other guy in the head. There were never cheerleaders, and the previous attempt at mascotting the club in the 80's was run out of town on a barge down the Ohio. Rumor has it it's calling bingo games at a retirement home outside Louisville.

This year, to highlight the organization's 75th anniversary, they brought the mascot idea back. Kids may respond to it, as they do Barney and Weird Al Yankovich, but we adult fans are very uncomfortable with the change. Steeler football has always been about football, no playful distractions beyond Bill Cowher's domineering chinbone or spit shower of fury. Steeler Nation is the largest nationwide fan base in the NFL, often enough to make away games feel like home games. Kids love the Steelers because they dominate. They win. They play hard and look tough. They are among the few things in pop culture that have not gone cartoony or given into the infantilization of the modern era in which everything has to bring us back "to our childhoods" as if American adults are afraid to ever feel more than arm's length away from the security blankets of our toddler years or the musical mobile above our cribs.

The defenders say, "Kids like it." But I say kids need to learn to admire things that are purely for grown ups on a grown up level. They go to church and they have to sit there and shut up. No giant, stuffed smiling Jesus needed to appease them. They learn respect. They have to go to school and shut up and learn. Teachers don't put on hand puppets and squeak like Pee Wee Herman to hold their attention. (The ones that do should be shot.) They don't need to have professional football angled towards them like a Kool Aid commercial. The game is awesome enough, spectacle enough. The players are amazing enough. Look at them, those mighty Steelers, and learn to emulate their relentless, dominating, enemy crushing ways.

My fear is that kids will be asking for a Steel McBeam doll for Christmas when they should be asking for helmets and cleats. When I was a boy, every year I begged my parents to buy me a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform for Christmas. I used to play one-on-one football with a kid down the street named Tim. Much to my horror one year on the day after Christmas, he showed up to play wearing an entire Miami Dolphins uniform, the home whites in kids size, head to toe, helmet and all. He couldn't have been more pleased with himself. His father was the neighborhood dentist. All of us kids' crooked teeth had paid for that uni. And there I was, in my many layers of sweatshirts, thermal underwear and dungarees, unsafe with no head gear at all but for my red and blue hand-me-down stocking cap. But I won that day, cleverly taking advantage of the way his slightly large helmet limited his peripheral vision. I won with speed and cunning and flat out muscle. I won the Steelers way, pretty boy. And Timmy's uniform got filthy, and he got in trouble.

The following Christmas, I got a set of Steelers pajamas, gold pants and a white pullover with a Steelers helmet on the chest. Believe me, I seriously considered wearing it a top my layers of sweatshirts and pants the next day. But fate helped me make the better decision not to so as to avoid the lifetime of derision that surely would have followed that choice.

Forget the mascot, Steely McBeam, and his jaundiced skin and bibbed overalls. Why is he wearing ski pants? And Steelers fans, please stop referring to him as a coal miner. That would make no sense whatsoever. Plus, he has no lamp on his helmet and still has a glimmer of hope in his eyes as if life has not yet completely destroyed him, so he can't be a coal miner (or a lonely writer of blogs).

Well, it could be worse. We could have what the Baltimore Ravens have: > See Ravens Pride.

Cashcall, Gary Coleman and the Tiny Print

Look, the last thing I want to do is give Gary Coleman a hard time. He's been handed enough of that on his own with the kidneys and the hormones, the money with the parents thing and the not so great job placement stint as a security officer on the edge. I was a big fan as a child. I emulated him in every way on Diff'rent Strokes. I even tested out my own catch phrase for a while: "I don't know. Why don't you tell me?" My Mom hated it. Turns out that precociousness is much less precious when you're not pulling in $80,000 per episode. I voted for him for Governor of California. I cried when his blind date went bad at the end of Star Dates. I even pulled for him to win The Surreal Life Fame Game until I realized that it was Emmanuel Lewis and that his heart wasn't really into winning, he was a compromiser, and his attempted manipulations were obvious and weak. Then the SR Fame Game for me became all about Andrea Lowell for diff'rent strokes altogether.

But all kidneys aside, Gary Coleman is best known for being the victim of birth circumstance with the apparent parental squandering of his fortune. He'd earned over $7 million while starring on the show and made over $17 million from all his work during that period (1978-1986). Yet somehow, some way, every penny of that got recirculated into society, and Gary never got to enjoy it for the years beyond when he was enjoying it at least a little bit.

So his story became one of the former child star seeking out his rebound, still loved and adored in his adult years, but not paid back for the joy that he gives. He's taken seemingly every job that has come along: music videos, cameos in TV movies and low rent TV commercials. In walks Cashcall.

Actually, it was the other way around. Gary walked into the Cashcall offices. As the story goes, when he went to their offices to close the loan he had taken out with them, he was introduced to the company's boss who encouraged Gary to pay off his loan by appearing in Cashcall ads.

What he should have said was, "What'chu talkin' 'bout, Cashcall?" But instead he took the deal, and now in the spots he proudly proclaims, "Cashcall helped me. They can help you too... Pay your bills on time and everyone will love you." Alas, it's all about being loved, especially by Cashcall.

One of the best things about DVR technology is that you can pause the TV screen at any time. I started doing this during shows like the FBI Files and Forensic Files. Whenever they show someone's suicide note, hand written or signed confession on screen with just some parts highlighted, I pause it and read the entire thing for myself. It's great for the History channel, too, civil war letters, Stalinist propoganda articles, secret Nazi documents and such. Then I started doing it with commercials, things like car leases that seem too good to be true. You pause it, and you can read how high the initial down payments are supposed to be. (Plymouth has gone one step ahead of me. They have an extremely suspicious lease offer of $99/month on their PT Cruiser. Not that I'd ever lease one because I'm not 20 years old, a woman, and a big fan of Trading Spaces reruns. But I paused it, and it says, "See our website for details." Hmmm. That should be against the law - a sales two-stepper.)

And so to the DVR pause on the Coleman Cashcall ads. I'd never seen a screen so filled with such tiny print. Nothing good ever needs to written on such nanoscale.

Here's what Cashcall and Coleman are offering via tiny text: "The APR for a typical loan of $2,600 is 99.25% with 42 monthly payments of $216.55..." Those payments add up $9,095.10 to pay back a loan of $2,600. Over three and a half years, that's paying back three and a half times the amount you borrowed. 99.25%!!!!! These rates are even brazenly published right on their website. > See for yourself.

I have damned many a bank that offers credit cards at a mere 22.9% APR. Now I recognize their magnanimous generosity and good will.

I know the story. Anyone who ends up at the Cashcall window is not just simply trying to pay off their one, single, small debt. They are people who've been overwhelmed with debt, cannot get assistance from any reputable banking institution anymore, and are just trying to get the worst of the creditors (like the IRS) off of their backs. So they borrow from Bealzebob to pay Paul. Still have that twinge of sympathy for the adorable Gary Coleman? It's sympathy for the devil's pudgy cheeked surrogate.

If you've ever been majorly in debt, as I have, then you know how difficult it is. You start to juggle the creditors with a Worst-First List. You look for the quick fix wherever you can get it. The difficult but appropriate thing to do is to make a long term plan and face the facts that a lot will have to be sacrificed until you can climb all the way out. A lot. I suffered through four years of the worst M-F job (M-F not necessarily meaning Monday thru Friday) of my life to get myself out debt a few years back. Many of you know, I had to resist quitting several times a day, every single day. It was a harrowing, dark period of my life which scarred me with bitterness and lack of pity. But I got out of debt. The hardest thing about it is that to make the large payments on a realistic payoff plan, you have to pre-calculate, plan it out and then pay over almost every penny that you earn all the way until you are through, which means no spending money ever, and certainly no savings or safety.

Then I got back to zero and an all new struggle against the great costs of living began. But it's better than signing any paper that has a 99.25% APR. Those people and their spokespersons are not out there to help you. In fact, the reality is, no one is - especially not people on TV. I just wish you hadn't done it, Gary.

p.s. Don't call me for help, people. I have no money.