A BIRTHDAY MESSAGE TO (AND FROM) TIM O'BRIEN

It's also my brother Tim's birthday today, the "Obie" of the family.  And as he's provided me with a Zonk, I thought I'd give him a showcase today,

He texted this picture to all the siblings:

That's Nancy Travis and Tim Allen in a publicity picture from the now-resurrected sitcom 'Last Man Standing'.  (ABC cancelled it, but FOX picked it up.)

Here's what he had to say about it:

"He's holding a salt water fish; she's got a fresh water puppy.  ( Large-mouth bass, hers. Bunker, his)   BUSTED with the props."

(O'Bservation: Timmy calls everything either a tiger or a puppy.)

Her fish from Wikipedia:
The large-mouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) is a freshwater game fish in the Centrarchidae (sunfish) family, a species of black bass native to North America. It is known by a variety of regional names, such as the wide-mouth bass, big-mouth bass, black bass, bucket-mouth, largies, Potter's fish, Florida bass, Florida large-mouth, green bass, Green trout, gilsdorf bass, Oswego bass, southern large-mouth and (paradoxically) northern large-mouth, LMB. The large-mouth bass is the state fish of Georgia, Mississippi, and Indiana, the state freshwater fish of Florida and Alabama, and the state sport fish of Tennessee.  

His fish, from Wikipedia:
Menhaden, also known as mossbunker and bunker, are forage fish of the genera Brevoortia and Ethmidium, two genera of marine fish in the family Clupeidae. Menhaden is a blend of poghaden (pogy for short) and an Algonquian word akin to Narragansett munnawhatteaûg, derived from munnohquohteau ‘he fertilizes’, referring to their use of the fish as fertilizer.  It is generally thought that Pilgrims were advised by Tisquantum (also known as Squanto) to plant menhaden with their crops.

I'm taking my brother's word for this.  He's the fisherman in the family, now that Dad is gone.  (And Tim has always been the one I thought was most like Dad.)

So thanks for bringing that up, Tim.  However, I think the creatives in the publicity department may have been going for an even more subtle joke than just that hers is bigger than his.

I think they knew it was from a different ecosystem.  Maybe Mike Baxter bought it from the store, just to have it on standby in case he didn't catch anything.  But he probably only was shopping for size and didn't consider its origin.  But even if it was a fresh-water fish that he bought, his wife Vanessa still showed him up with the size of her catch.

So there's Tim's contribution to my vision of the TV Universe.  I'm sure there'll be more someday....

Happy birthday, Timothy Ticklepepper!