Though it hardly needs me to do so, I feel compelled to defend “Eight Is Enough,” a television show that still inflames the senses 30 years after its debut — if you judge by the charges of torture levied against it in the previous comments section and saw the headlines that ran in every newspaper in the world after Michael Phelps won his last gold medal:

“Eight Is Enough: Phelps Clinches Record With Relay Gold“–USA Today

AND

“For Phelps, Eight Is Enough — For Now“–Minneapolis Star Tribune

AND

“Eight Is Enough“–Philadelphia Inquirer

AND (my favorite)

“Eight Is Enough“–Manila Standard Today

It’s enough that “Enough” is still a muse for editors, Filipino and otherwise. “Eight Is Enough” appeared in worldwide headlines in August even before Phelps won his first gold, when the Olympics opened on 8/8/08 and superstitious couples — and Yogi Berra disciples — chose that date as their wedding day.

Though I only realize it now, the show surely had something to do with my becoming a columnist with a combover, like Tom Bradford of the Sacramento Register. (Prior to that, for most of my childhood, I had Adam Rich’s haircut.)

And while I can’t explain how one mother could give birth to eight children, six of whom are the same age — without a single set of multiples, mind you — I do know this: To me and all of my childhood friends, a Volkswagen bus will always be known as a “David Bradford van,” in honor of the most compelling van on television. Excluding, of course, the patriarch of this dynasty, Dick Van Patten.

All of which is to say that I won’t tolerate any “Eight”-hating from you Ogar-backed Octowussies on this interweb thing. I’ll continue to spend my days like bright and shiny new dimes — while remaining ever puzzled by these changing times.

In a reply to my previous post, Ogar writes:

“OK, Mr. Bringdown. You sure know how to clear out a room in a hurry. Not to stray too far off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone would care to extend this updated bit (with a nod to the great Joe Flaherty):

ABBOTT: The Who’s on first, The Band’s on second, Ludacris is on third.
COSTELLO: You know the musicians’ names?
ABBOTT: Well, I should…
COSTELLO: Then tell me who’s on first.
ABBOTT: That’s right.
COSTELLO: I wanna know the band on first.
ABBOTT: Oh, no, The Band’s on second.
COSTELLO: I’m not asking you who’s on second.
ABBOTT: Who’s on first.
COSTELLO: That’s ludicrous!
ABBOTT: No, he’s on third. We’re not talking about him.
COSTELLO: When you pay off the opening act every month, who gets the money?
ABBOTT: Every dollar of it. Why not? They’re entitled.
COSTELLO: Who is?
ABBOTT: Sure.
COSTELLO: So who gets it?
ABBOTT: Of course. Sometimes their wives come down and collect it.
COSTELLO: Whose wife?
ABBOTT: Uh-huh.
COSTELLO: Tell me, who’s on tomorrow?
ABBOTT: No.
COSTELLO: Whaddya mean, no?
ABBOTT: Tomorrow, Who’s not on.
COSTELLO: Who is?
ABBOTT: Yes…”

Today was the 10th anniversary of the bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland that killed 29 people – the very young, the very old, Protestants, Catholics, Spaniards, a woman seven months pregnant with twins – all of whom were going about their business on a Saturday afternoon when a red Vauxhall Cavalier exploded on a crowded street.

Among the victims were 12-year-old Sean McLaughlin, 21-year-old Julia Hughes, 18-year-old Gareth Conway, 48-year-old Ann McComb and 20-month-old Breda Devine.

If you don’t know much about Omagh, you might know the bleak, strangely beautiful U2 song “Peace on Earth,” from “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”:

“They’re reading names out/Over the radio/All the folks the rest of us/Won’t get to know/Sean and Julia, Gareth, Ann and Breda/They’re lives are bigger than/Any big idea/Jesus can you take the time/To throw a drowning man a line/Peace on Earth.”

There’s another lyric that goes: “She never got to say goodbye/To see the color in his eyes/Now he’s in the dirt,” an apparent reference to Donna-Maria Barker. She lost her 12-year-old son, James, in the bombing and told BBC documentary filmmaker Iain Webster about having to identify her son’s body: “I could see this green blood-stained sheet over him and a piece of cloth covered his face. It was taken off and James’ eyes were wide open. Beautiful green eyes. I wrapped my arms around his head and he was very cold. I never knew how green his eyes were until that moment.”

I played golf yesterday and was struck by how many signs there were on the course, and how many of those signs were universally ignored. Where’s the one place you’ll never find a bunker rake with a PLACE RAKE IN BUNKER sticker on it? In a bunker.

Scant attention was paid to the sign that said NO COOLERS ALLOWED, or to the cans in those fugitive coolers, cans that carried the plea: PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY.

Near as I could tell, every golfer before me declined to REPAIR ALL BALL MARKS — or to repair any ball marks — even as they were ignoring the signs to KEEP ENTIRE BODY IN CART.

And speaking of carts, when’s the last time you saw anyone heed the printed plea in a supermarket parking lot to RETURN CARTS HERE instead of leaving said cart in the middle of a parking space, usually the best space in the lot, usually the one I’m about to pull into?

These are the same people who pull on every door marked PUSH and push on every door marked PULL.

Some signs exist exclusively to be ignored: SPEED LIMIT 55, for instance, or LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT. I personally have failed to CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING when lighting a match, though that match is at least not lighting a cigarette, as I do believe the SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: SMOKING MAY CAUSE CANCER.

And then there are the signs that I want to believe in, even though — in my heart of hearts — I know they’re widely ignored. And so I’m always reassured when I see, in a restaurant bathroom, EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK. It’s only a placebo, but I don’t care. The sign itself is more important than the act it signifies.

We took our three-and-a-half-year-old to her first movie last week. I bought tickets and popcorn and 72-ounce sodas and made it all the way to the threshold of Theater Number Four when she screamed and wept and begged to go home. And so we pried her fingers from the door frame and left. The posters were too scary, she said. The film was “Kung Fu Panda.”

I immediately thought of the first movie I ever saw in a theater: “The Poseidon Adventure”, whose posters bore the tagline: “Hell, Upside Down.” Why my parents thought large-scale nautical death was a suitable subject for a 5-year-old, I cannot say. But I haven’t taken a cruise, celebrated New Year’s or listened to Maureen McGovern since.

After “Poseidon,” I was allowed a brief interval of innocence: A ration of one Disney flick per year – “The World’s Greatest Athlete” in ’73, “Herbie Rides Again” in ’74 and “The Apple Dumpling Gang” in ’75. Then one night in August of that year, while my mother hosted bridge club, my father abruptly announced that he was taking me and my brother Tom out to buy underwear for the upcoming school year. In fact, he took us to the Boulevard Theater in Minneapolis, where we saw “Jaws” — after which I really did need to buy new underwear.

Walking into the Boulevard, I put up a brave front. But my chin began to quiver at the sight of that already-famous poster, tagged: “The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying best seller.” I was duly terrified. From the opening moments, when a dead and naked girl was seen washed up on the beach, I feared Don Knotts and Kurt Russell would not rescue me with Disneyfied highjinks.

My father has always had a strange relationship with movies and – just to annoy his children – pronounces the word theater as “thee-AY-ter.” He sobbed through “Apollo 13″ and “Rudy.” When I took him to see “Lost in Translation”– I told him we were going to buy underwear – he said, during the closing credits, “That was different.” (It reminded me of the time Tom and I surprised him by grilling salmon steaks for him in the backyard. He took one bite and said, “Nice try.”)

Just last week, Dad took three of his grandchildren to see “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl Movie,” based on a popular line of dolls. When I asked him if the kids liked it, he said he thought so. Then he allowed that they were perhaps discomfited by the sight of their 74-year-old grandpa weeping openly throughout the film. “It was set in 1934,” he said, somewhat defensively, over the sound of my horse laughter. “The year I was born. And it brought back so many memories of that time that I . . . I just couldn’t help it.”

I asked him if he was going to send away for his own American Girl dolls, but he didn’t answer. He just told me to p*ss off.

There are few things you can open a can of — beer comes to mind, and whoop-ass — that are quite as satisfying as tennis balls. For starters, they’re the only product I can think of that still come in pull-tab cans.

Both art forms — tennis and pull-tab cans — peaked in the early 1980s and have been in steady decline ever since. So we should be grateful that tennis and pull-tab cans remain committed to one another long after everyone else has abandoned them, for opening that pull-tab can of tennis balls — kusshhh! — creates the same satisfying rush of air that comes with a newly opened can of coffee. (And as with coffee, the accompanying aroma is unmistakable.)

I thought of all of this two weeks ago, when I played tennis for the first time in years, and was surprised by how much I had missed everything about the game — including foraging for balls beneath a pile of leaves in a distant, chain-linked corner of the court and retrieving balls driven over that 12-foot Cyclone fence (and onto an adjacent playground) while trying to imitate George Brett’s swing.

That enthusiasm was renewed yesterday during the men’s final at Wimbledon, where tennisy titans Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played five sets of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots until Nadal — after nearly five hours of punch and counterpunch — finally sprung Federer’s head from his shoulders, ending a streak of five consecutive titles.

Few words in journalism are more overused than epic — though iconic is one. But this was the rare epic that was epic. It was a pleasure to watch two athletes care as much as Federer and Nadal appeared to. John McEnroe once told me that every year in Paris, when he broadcasts the French Open, he will wake up at least once in his hotel room in a cold sweat, having just dreamed of his come-from-ahead loss to Ivan Lendl in the French final. The French final of 1984.

And so one can imagine Federer a quarter century from now bedeviled by a similar nightmare — of his Wimbledon run literally fading to black. As he hoisted the silver salad plate of the runner-up in the flash-bulbed gloaming at Centre Court, I went to the garage and pantomimed a few ground strokes, looking forward to the next time I can open a new can of balls — and perhaps a can of whoop-ass — on some city court somewhere.

This morning’s newspaper carried a front-page story about itself: The incredible shrinking daily will soon shed another 25 percent of its pages, causing me to think about what I’ll miss most when it inevitably disappears altogether.

To be sure, I’ll miss racing my daughter down the driveway to retrieve the paper – or more often, racing her to the shrubs near the driveway and picking the paper off a bush as if it were some exotic, low-hanging fruit.

I’ll miss the delivery person, who shoots a left-handed hook shot over her car roof to get the paper vaguely near the driveway. I know the feeling. Whoever said “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades” never had a paper route.

I’ll miss the plastic hang bag that my newspaper arrives in. My father-in-law uses the bags for disposing of coffee grounds, but I prefer to load them with rolled diapers, like sausages into a casing.

I’ll miss reading the newspaper, starting with Sports and moving to Arts and eventually to the front section, devouring the paper from the inside out like a termite or tapeworm. Business, Food, Style and the like will be set aside for the kids as a finger painting dropcloth.

The daily newspaper remains one of the best weapons we have against ignorance. But it is also the single finest non-lethal weapon we have against houseflies, stunning them without staining the wallpaper. And I’ll miss that when it’s gone.

Mostly, though, I’ll miss spreading the Sports section to its fullest dimensions on the kitchen table, like Patton with a map of North Africa, and then putting my cereal bowl in the center of it to anchor everything down. I’ll miss spilling soggy Cheerios on its inside pages until Big Papi’s face turns translucent with Skim milk.

Forget “All The News That’s Fit to Print.” The slogan I’d like to see on a paper is “The Placemat You Can Read.”

The NBA would like its Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy to join the first rank of international trophies, alongside the Stanley Cup, the Oscar, and the woman who married Larry King.

And so the Larry – the Obie? – was emblazoned across 50 feet of parquet floor last night, and a giant 3-D replica graced the court during introductions (like one of those tethered inflatable dragons that lend a certain jauntiness to used-car lots) and the players wore trophy patches on their jerseys, and the Garden’s exterior was fitted with an enormous Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy hood ornament, and Kobe Bryant was forced – during a promotional spot – to make out with the trophy, giving pause to Jeff Van Gundy and new resonance to the phrase “trophy wife.”

The Obie — the Larry? — is sterling silver with an overlay of vermeil. Vermeil is an alloy of sterling silver, gold and other precious metals. (Dick Vermeil was something knights wore under their chainmail for protection, the original Under Armour.)

As for what to call it: Let’s go with the Larry. The Obie, alas, already exists. It’s awarded annually to Off-Broadway performers.

If it’s true that nostalgia is a warm bath, I am wrinkled like a prune after 16 consecutive screenings of this highlight reel: Larry Bird buzzer-beaters.

It is testament to Bird’s brilliance that a video of his game-winning shots is five minutes long. What’s more remarkable is that it’s only a sampling of Larry’s game-winners.

We see, for instance, the last-second shot Larry hit to send a 1987 game against the Bullets into overtime. But we don’t see the last-second shot he hit a moment earlier, the one that didn’t count because K.C. Jones had already called time out. Nor do we see the one he hit later, to win the game in double OT. In short, Larry has a highlight reel that requires its own highlight reel, something worth remembering as the Celts and Lakers tip off tonight.

And so I thought I’d follow up my previous Celtics posting — “Where Are They Now” — with another one, called “Where Was I Then?”

When Magic hit his “junior, junior, junior sky hook” to beat the Celtics in Game 4 of the ‘87 Finals, I threw the nearest thing to my grasp — a Mennen Speed Stick — against the wall of my apartment at 519 North 20th Street in Milwaukee. The deodorant and its casing shattered, leaving the room silent (and Ocean Surf-scented).

When Larry stole Isiah’s inbound pass two weeks earlier, I was on the unfinished side of my family’s basement in Bloomington, Minn., my head buried on the ping-pong table because I didn’t want to see the Pistons celebrate. That’s when my 14-year-old brother came running in from the finished side of the basement, the side with the TV, screaming, “Oh my God Bird stole the ball the Celtics won I can’t believe it!” To this day, it outranks those of Al Michaels, Russ Hodges and Vin Scully as my favorite sports call of all time.

When Larry needed the final shot to win the 3-point shootout on NBA All-Star weekend of 1988, I was crashing at my oldest brother’s swinging ’80s bachelor pad on State Street in Chicago. For two years my brother had been telling me Jordan was the better player, an argument I refused to entertain, even into the mid-’90s. So when Bird — a couple miles away at Chicago Stadium — shot the last ball on the rack, kept his crooked index finger in the air and turned his back before that moneyball splashed in, I jumped up and down hysterically on my brother’s white couch — think Tom Cruise on “Oprah” — before dissolving in a puddle of admiration, tears and urine.

When Larry won a meaningless game against the Bucks during the 1984-85 season, I was a freshman at Marquette with a Jamaican floor mate who liked to wind me up by knocking Larry. So when Larry threw up some rainbow bullshit that went in over Paul Mokeski, that floor mate — I remember his name: Marc Gayle — ran into my room in McCormick Hall and said, “Bird is the most incredible player I’ve ever seen.” I turned on the tape recorder I kept for taping lectures and asked him to repeat it. He did. And for the rest of the year I played that tape over and over on a loop.

To this day, when I think of Larry — and I’ve done so often this week — I hear that phrase in my head, in a heavily accented Jamaican dialect: “Bird is the most incredible player I’ve ever seen.”

Though a friend has been living in the 914 area code for the past six months now, he’s retained his old 212 prefix, so that anyone with Caller ID will assume he’s phoning from his Trump Tower penthouse, not his Westchester basement.

To him, 212 is a luxury label — he’s reluctant to switch brands to the generic equivalent. And he is hardly alone.

My parents teased my oldest brother in high school that he only liked Levi’s because of the tag. He insisted the tag had nothing to do with it: Levi’s fit him best. So I went to the clothesline with a needle-nosed pliers and ripped the red tag from the back right pocket of his blue cords. It was like pulling a healthy molar – it took forever, and left a ragged hole. Then I silently presented the tag at the dinner table, like a horse’s head, at which time my parents seized the needle-nosed pliers and tore me a ragged new hole.

But I made my point: My brother, to my knowledge, never wore the tagless Levi’s.

Likewise, I’ll bet any imbecile who buys this Rolls Royce does so largely for its $200,000 hood ornament.

I’m hardly immune. I bought a driver last week in the same way I buy wine: I weighed how much I was willing to spend, which label I liked best, and whether Greg Norman had anything to do with its production. Then I went home and pretended that I really loved it, when I have no idea if I did.

The same thing happened when I bought a riding lawn mower last year. I preferred the colors of the John Deere. And it came with a free hat. But I ultimately chose the Cub Cadet, because LeBron James drives one in a commercial. And you know he mows his own lawn. I’ve seen the grass stains on his Nikes in the NBA playoffs.

Such come-ons do not always work on me. Have you seen this commercial for Tropicana’s Pure Valencia orange juice? While dripping oranges jiggle on-screen in a kind of citric wet T-shirt contest, a siren’s voice declares it “The best orange juice Tropicana has ever made.” And it must be, because it comes in a vessel shaped like a premium vodka bottle. Even so, I’ll continue to buy my OJ in a cardboard can, from concentrate, and decant it from a plastic pitcher.

While traveling with the family the other day, my wife sent me to Target for toothpaste. I stood in an aisle of nothing but toothpastes, four shelves high, a quarter-of-a-mile long, before settling on Crest. But that scarcely narrowed the choices. There were 100 sub-labels of Crest, none of which were Just Plain Crest. In a panic, I chose Crest Pro Care over its immediate neighbors – Octobercrest and Pete’s Wicked Winter Crest – and regretted it that night, when I brushed (when I grouted?) my teeth with it.

I’ll leave the last word on branding to Ogar, who sent me the following e-mail this morning:

“Selling more crispies—or, rather, Shreddies—was indeed the goal of the 2008 ad campaign that took home last weekend’s Grand Clio award. Created on behalf of a Canadian cereal brand, this winking campaign sought to convince viewers that boring old square Shreddies had been radically reimagined as ‘New Diamond Shreddies.’ (In fact, the piece of cereal photographed on the front of the box had simply been rotated 45 degrees.)”