If it bends, it's funny...

If you’ve every seen Lost In Translation, you learned that Japan is crazy. Absolutely, bat shit crazy. Crazy game shows, crazy porn, crazy hobbies and of course, Sailor Moon.

The problem is that when crazy is kind of “your thing” you end up having to go to ridiculous extremes to keep finding the newest level of crazy. That’s the only explanation for this – a TV show where some poor bastard is made to believe that everyone around him has just been killed by a sniper and that he himself is probably about to die.

It goes without saying that the show is awesome.

They could never imagine a world with a "pause" button.

As a kid, Leave It To Beaver was one of my absolute most favourite shows. It was corny, not particularly funny and seemed to exist in a completely different world than the small town Canadian suburbs of the late 1970s where I watched it from.

But still, the tame and lesson filled adventures of Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver resonated with me. Maybe it was the strangeness of the fake 1950s setting. Maybe I found the show’s earnestness more palpable than the cloying kids of more modern shows like The Brady Bunch. Or perhaps I dug Hugh Beaumont’s suits and suave demeanor – he was, after all, the original Don Draper. Dunno.

Anyhow, it was on a second season episode that Beaver brought home a letter from his teacher to give June and Ward. Recently, the good people at Shorpy were thoughtful enough to freeze their DVD on the one brief glimpse of the letter and transcribe it’s contents.

“My typing is lousy, but the typewriter isn’t so hot either. After all, why should I
take the blame for these mechanical imperfections, with which all of us must contend. Lew Burdette just hit a home run and Milwaukee leads seven to one in the series.”

The letter is clearly the work of some poor schlub on set – probably a production assistant of some kind or other – pulled away from his duties one day to craft the letter Mrs. Rayburn sent home with the Beav.  It’s awesome and it’s here.