We could say we knew him when ...

... but it wouldn't be true.

For a long time, I was pretty sure I had met Drew Carey once. The first time I watched The Drew Carey Show, I had one of those "I know this guy from somewhere" things going -- and when I found out he'd served in the Marine Corps Reserve, I connected that to a recollection (maybe true, maybe false) that my regiment (24th Marines) and his (23rd Marines) had been at the Marine Corps Base near 29 Palms, California at the same time, and in turn to a memory of a chubby jarhead cracking jokes in the chow line.

Turns out, the memory is entirely false, at least insofar as it concerns Carey. His tenure in the Corps was 1980-86, mine was 1984-95. Yes, there are two years of overlap there, but the 29 Palms incident would have taken place in 1989, and during the period of overlap I was in one of three places Corps-wise: Boot camp, Infantry Training School, or drilling with my own unit in Missouri. I doubt that Carey was in any of those places at the same time I was. And if the Marine Corps snapshot in his Wikipedia entry is any indication, he wasn't a food blister (not that there's anything wrong with that anyway -- I could stand to lose 50 pounds -- but in the Marine Corps, the fat kid tends to stand out).

So I don't know the guy, never knew the guy, never even met the guy. Bummer. Thinking I had met him did add a little something ... I dunno, frisson? ... something like that ... to my enjoyment of two already-great shows, The Drew Carey Show and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, though.

All of which is neither here nor there, except that if I'm going to blog about Drew Carey, I want to it to be longer than "Drew Carey is so f**king cool, and he just got picked to host The Price is Right." Some people do one-sentence blog posts. Me, I'm one of those War and Peace types.

Now, to the bullet points:

- Drew Carey is so f**king cool, and he just got picked to host The Price is Right!

- In another article about Drew Carey being so f**king cool and getting picked to host The Price is Right, Carey notes that he just finished filming some documentaries "for the Reason Foundation's upcoming web site." I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty f**king cool.

- I may not know Drew Carey, but my 5th grade teacher claimed to have dated Bob Barker in college. How f**king cool is that?