A Day in Irrevria

A grocery store, a bell ringer, and some annoyance

2009-08-25T18:55:00.000-04:00

Big Y World Class Market. Manchester, CT. Today. Normal supermarket commotion.

A dinner bell-style bell hangs unassumingly on the wall by the automatic exit doors. On her way out, a woman pushing a cart swings the rope inside the bell, which produces an enormous ding ding ding, as if a trolley was making its way through.

The bell silences the store’s front end. Heads turn. Murmurs. Cashiers, baggers, customers stop and peer. The bell-ringing woman exits without fanfare, small child in tow.

With business at a stand-still, everyone wants to know why the mysterious and previously silent bell is even there and why the hell the woman rang it. With the disruption fresh in our ears, people frown curiously. Some grimace in annoyance.

Bagger 1: What was THAT all about?
Bagger 2: I have no idea.
Customer ahead of me in line: I think that woman just had a meltdown.
Cashier: What was her PROBLEM?

On my way out, I read the sign that hangs beside the bell.
“Ring bell if you received excellent customer service today.”

The nerve.

A toilet metaphor

2009-08-20T19:33:00.000-04:00

The toilet seemed to work fine one day.

Then, we both leave the house. Off doing our own things.

Separate heartbreaking vacations.

During this time, it breaks. Tank cracks. Somehow.

Nobody sees it happen. It just does. We aren’t there.

Water runs. To the floor. To the basement. Things are ruined.

It seems salvageable. Repair the crack. Or replace the tank.

But no. They tell me it is too old. Whole thing must go.

“But it’s just the tank.”

“Nothing we can do.”

A plumber comes and switches the old for the new.

We carry the old to his truck. Leftover water sloshes. A drop jumps out onto my bare foot and I recoil.

Neighbors peer out their windows.

They only see what seems perfectly good being sent off to the dump.

Latin Night

2009-02-08T22:09:00.001-05:00

We saw the Denver Nuggets take on the New Jersey Nets last night in East Rutherford, in what turned out to be the Nuggets' worst loss in 12 years. The game was over four minutes into the third quarter.
Luckily we were still entertained as it was "Latin Night" at the IZOD Center.
Sponsored by Goya, makers of All-Things-Latin Food, the promotion's purpose was simple: To "honor the Latin community."
So how did they honor the Latin community? One horrifying way after the next.
1. Featured Latin-flavored dishes (seasoned with Goya products!) throughout the concession stands.
2. Had the white and black (and uno or dos Latina calientes) Nets dancers wearing Latin dress and dancing Latin dances to Latin music between timeouts.
3. Gave away a vacation to the Dominican Republic to a slim high school kid who made more baskets in 30 seconds than a portly high school kid, sponsored by Republica Dominica department of tourism.
4. Had Nets forward Eduardo Najera, conveniently the league's only Mexican player (and my personal favorite player, especially when he was with the Nuggets) come on the jumbotron arriba-aribba-ing something in Spanish every five minutes.
5. Shot Goya-themed T-shirts from a T-shirt cannon.

But my personal favorite:
6. Having the Nets dancers throwing Chipotle burritos into the audience.

We were cringing throughout. Can you imagine what they would have done for Asian night or how they would have honored the black community? What foods would they have thrown into the audience then?

I found a better way

2009-02-03T01:55:00.004-05:00

He rides my bumper like a jackass in some special hurry (to get where - his job that he certainly hates but is late for?) Unsatisfied with my speed, he jumps to the next lane to drive inches from the bumper of an old lady's car.

Now in a turn-only lane, I pass the old lady and the other driver. I beep my horn and point and glare at him to acknowledge his fine display of jackassiness. He then whips back into my lane to tail me, I thought, to retaliate for my beep and glare. My mind flashes forward to him tailgating me to my house -- just .2 miles away -- and the confrontation that follows. As my future self confronts him, nobly exclaiming "There's no need for any of this," he butts back into the right lane.

All fine until he is right beside me stopping for the red light. As he pulls up he is leaning on his horn, and has his middle finger ready hanging out his window. We make awkward eye contact, seperated only by six feet and the glass of my passenger window. He looks about 24.

Seeing my nemesis' portruding middle finger along with a bothered wtf face makes something unexpected shoot from my mouth: an outburst of laughter. I just put my hands in the air, laughing hard, and shrug my shoulders.

What I presume to be an unexpected reaction breaks his glare and he puts his middle finger away. And then he smiles, as if to say "You're right. This is silly, this game we play where you honk at me and then I honk at you and flip you off, the game where our blood pressures rise and we get really mad at each other but can't do anything about it because we're in separate moving vehicles, the game where we drive off in a huff and then when we get home or to work we retell the story, saying 'Oh you should have seen this idiot on the road'".

His guard collapses and we laugh at each other, suddenly just two guys, former strangers, former enemies, chuckling about old times. The light turns green and the cars ahead of him begin to move. As he drives away, with his hand still out the window, he waves.

I keep laughing all the way home, thinking that now if he followed me to my house, we'd probably end up being buddies and we'd have this really funny story about how we met.

New stories

2009-02-01T18:14:00.002-05:00

I'm pleased to have my story "Things to Consider Before Waking a Sleeping Bear" published at Johnny America. It went up today. Here's an excerpt:

The color of a bear’s fur is meaningless. Some brown bears are black and some black bears are brown. Some black bears (who are black) identify more with brown bears. Regardless, a bear will use its fur to trick you. And then maul you to death.

I am also happy to have another piece accepted at monkeybicycle called "A Modern Wedding." It should be up sometime soon.

Another "Bout" with Unconsciousness

2009-01-24T09:31:00.006-05:00

It started so innocent and blissful: At IHOP downing cakes and eggs and coffee with C.G., talking poetry (of all things . . .christ help us). Few places I’d rather be. But the cakes and eggs and coffee were just a precursor to the main event (heh, heh): “The Wrestler,” starring the ever trashy Mickey Rourke.

We took one car to the movie, which later proved to my benefit. All is well about 45 minutes in when the movie went from a little graphic and bloody to mind-wrenchingly graphic and bloody. Rourke’s character, Randy “The Ram” Ramdeeslamdeedam (or something like that) is a washed up, decrepit, hard scrabble pro wrestler forced to compete in low budget wrestling events in high school gymnasiums. The scene is a match between The Ram and some scrawny Hillbilly Jim-esque feller whose schtick is giving and taking sadistic punishment, using staple guns on one another, body slamming onto piles of barbed wire and smashing windows over heads. The fact that these cartoonish matches occur in real life (with real staples, windows and barbed wire . . .and real pain and real blood) coupled with the film’s gritty realism became too much for me. I don’t know exactly what triggered it, but I went unconscious (I seem to recall an especially graphic gash over an eye). It was sudden but I felt it coming for about three seconds before nodding off.

I have a history of this sort of thing (as documented here), so I’m sadly accustomed to it. But each time it happens, I get a little more aware in the midst of unconsciousness. In the moments before passing out, my eyes are still open but I can’t see anything, like a nighttime power outage where you are suddenly sitting in the dark. And then I shut down, asleep against my will. I had my head planted on my hand, which was supported by my arm and elbow, which was supported by the arm rest. I don’t know how long I was out – estimates put it at 5-10 minutes.

When approaching the surface of consciousness, I remember posing myself a series of questions. Not the “Who are you?” or “Where are you?” types, but more like disjointed forms of questions like “Is there truth in friendship?” and “Do dogs smell in color?” I would dwell on the question for a half second, decide it was too difficult and then pose another. I remember my eyes darting around frantically for information. When I regained semi-consciousness, I had tears in my eyes, sweat on my forehead, drool on my chin, which I tried to wipe away about four times. I also began choking on saliva that had inadvisably run down my throat, to which C.G. would later say “I was wondering what all that coughing was about.”

Gripped with vomitous nausea, I wobbled out of the theater, thinking a bit of fresh air would make things right. About 20 minutes later, C.G. found me sitting woozily on a lobby bench with my head in my hands, eyes the color the blood that got me into this mess.

He admitted that he could take or leave the movie at this point and we left. I needed a milkshake, something of a routine for me now after fits of unconsciousness or particularly nasty roller coasters.

I was still a bit punch drunk and C.G. drove my car home, having taken one of my spells, as C.G. put it, for me to finally let him drive my car.

How do you lie about your age?

2009-01-22T13:06:00.001-05:00

I always wondered why people who lie about their age always lie younger. Shouldn't they lie older, so that when people look at you, they say "wow, you look terrific for 58". Instead people are fixated on how terrible you look for 38 and how you must have spent 20 years as a carny/roustabout during the day and a waitress/cashier at a bowling alley at night.

Most people can lie older and five years older usually does the trick. When I was 29, I asked someone to guess how old I was. "38," was his response. I wept internally. Now, I've found I have to lie at least 15 years older before people think I look good for my age. Eighteen years if I've just awoken.

I think I'm back

2009-01-22T00:44:00.003-05:00

Not that you care or are even out there. But I think I'm going to start posting stuff here again. Sorry for the absence. It's just this whole MFA thing. You know.
Anyway, I added links to most of my stories and stuff that have been published on ye olde internet.
I also have another story coming soon at the ultra cool monkeybicycle.
Check in soon for a story about my latest trip to the dentist.

New essay in the Christian Science Monitor

2008-05-07T12:25:00.002-04:00

My essay on what it's like being a Shoe Guy came out in the Christian Science Monitor last weekend. Read it here.

Another Heart Attack

2007-11-08T14:49:00.000-05:00

About a conversation I overheard in the grocery store yesterday:

Two men in their late 60s or early 70s bump into each other in the dairy section. It appears to have been some time since they last saw one another. I hear snippets of greetings and something about finally being retired as I pass them on the way to the egg case. I pick up a carton of brown, organic, cage-frees and check to see if any are broken. As I make my way back toward the two men, I hear this treasure of an exchange:

Man No. 1: So what have you been up to?
Man No. 2: Not a whole lot. Had me another heart attack.
Man No. 1: Oh did you?
Man No. 2: Uh-huh.

The tone of this conversation was so casual, teetering on the verge of boredom. Man No. 2 could just as well have said he joined a bowling league. "Had me another heart attack" could have been substituted with "Got me a new riding mower" and nothing about the conversation -- the tone, the friend's response -- would have changed.

So that's what this old-timer's been up to? That's how he constitutes passing the days? He not only has had himself a heart attack, he's had himself another heart attack. By watching commercials for prescription medicine and retirement funds, you'd think all retired folk do is ride 3-speed bikes, play upper-class sports while wearing diapers and cherish their grandchildren between the preparation of home-cooked meals in sunshiny kitchens.

I would at least have expected a little more incredulousness from both men. I mean, this was not the first but at least the second time that no blood flowed anywhere near one of his four delicate, life-enabling chambers as the No. 1 worldwide cause of death for humans perhaps very nearly claimed another victim.

I should have eavesdropped a little longer to see how the conversation progressed. My guess is that it went something like so:

So what have you been up to?
Not a whole lot. Had me another heart attack.
Oh did you?
Uh-huh.
Was it serious?
Was what serious?
Your heart attack.
Oh. I suppose. [awkward pause] You see they have bacon and canned biscuits on special this week?
Is that right.
Uh-huh.

Monkey Dream

2007-10-25T13:38:00.000-04:00

I often dream of bizarre things but this one last night I can't shake from my head: I was walking through the ancient ruins of some foreign land (Peru?). Perched in an old window bay was a small monkey, a macaque perhaps. The peculiar thing about this type of monkey was that it would find the skulls of larger animals and craft them into masks. It was the only species besides humans to comprehend the idea of a mask.

So I see this little monkey wearing this giant skull on its head. I tried to take a photo but it ran away. The photo turned out blurry anyway.

What does this mean? Does the mask theme have anything to do with Halloween? There were some other odd things going on in these ruins (actually the ruins turned into a dilapidated child-care center later in the dream), but the monkey was the oddest.

Avoiding real-life foreshadowing

2007-10-23T11:23:00.000-04:00

I was walking up my hardwood stairs today wearing socks, cradling my open laptop in my left arm and clutching a full, hot cup of coffee in my right hand.

As I went up the stairs, my dog Tuffy was racing up with me under my feet.
Some background . . .

My laptop: Full of all my short stories, various other pieces of writing, school work, music downloads, photos.

The cup of joe: Coffee not important, but the mug it was in was hand-crafted pottery made by my wife Erin.

As I carefully made my way up the stairs I dreaded taking a fall. Not for fear of getting hurt or spilling coffee or even breaking the laptop. Rather, it was the metaphor of the fall that frightened me most.

Because if my life was fiction and my character simultaneously drops a) a machine equated to his creative expression and hard work, and b) a mug crafted by his wife's loving and caring hands, it could only be foreshadowing for the disaster and heartbreak looming around the corner.

Thankfully, I made it up the stairs unscathed.

A story about an elephant

2007-09-06T12:36:00.000-04:00

I wrote a story a while back which was basically a monologue from a guy who thinks the best way for him to make his mark in life would be to become an elephant.
The story, called "Being," was published today at a place called
A Cautionary Tale.

It's really short so an excerpt would basically constitute the entire thing.

Read the story here

Reach For Your Dreams

2007-08-31T18:16:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 46 seconds

People are always saying that you should reach for your dreams.

But that’s not really practical for everyone. For instance, last night I dreamt I was a juggling donkey.

But, you reply, when they say “reach for your dreams,” they don’t mean your actual dreams, the crazy or bizarre things that run through your head when are sleeping. Everyone’s dreams are weird. You’re not special. What they mean is to set goals, however lofty they may seem, and go after them no matter the costs.

OK. Agreed. But when I set out to make a list of lofty goals, the first two items on the list were:

1) Buy donkey suit

2) Learn to juggle

Irrevria update

2007-08-01T12:58:00.000-04:00

I'd like to trumpet a new story I had that was published. It's at Susurrus Magazine: The Literature of Madness. My story is called "Through the Monkey Glass." Here is a short excerpt:

Compelling the orangutan to return could be as easy as a banana, or perhaps four bananas or one giant fiberglass banana, approximately 60-65 feet high. (Note: Maybe the whole monkey-banana thing is just a stereotype. Example: Everyone thinks that bears eat honey and porridge when in actuality, the whole bear-honey-porridge thing originates in fables, cartoons and children's cereals. So it's probable that the concept of monkeys and bananas derived from some allegory, likely African. And because monkeys and bananas have been linked so seamlessly, perhaps now at zoos and in cartoons, monkeys eat bananas because "monkeys eat bananas." Or maybe monkeys eat bananas because they're readily available in their native habitat. If monkeys were introduced to different fruits and vegetables, perhaps they would prefer radishes, carrots or cherry tomatoes.)
On second thought, instead of bananas, I figured I should build a giant fiberglass vegetable tray.

I was also the featured writer for this issue of Susurrus, which basically consists of a short interview that goes deep on my inspiration and motives as a writer. Or something like that.

here's a link to the mag

Here's a link to the interview

New York Stories

2007-06-27T11:05:00.000-04:00

New York Stories

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 17 seconds

A trip to New York City is never just a trip to New York City. You see things you never intended to see and the stories you tell when you return home are not the stories you planned to tell on the way there.

Erin and I made a trip to the city Monday, taking along Ryan, a copy editing intern from Kansas City staying with us for the summer. It was his first trip to New York, which made me think back to my first time.

I was 25 and New York was one of Erin and I's first ventures into a large city alone. I remember being half excited, half nervous for five days straight, it being the first trip where my wallet went from my back pocket to my front pocket while I was still at the airport.

I remember seeing Times Square, overwhelmed by the consumeristic cacophony dancing, flashing and buzzing to the point where it all becomes silent and you just can’t stop looking up or snapping photos, trying to fill your camera with the enormity of the city. To me, Times Square is everything a first trip to New York is about. You feel like you’re at the epicenter of the universe, and you are.

But on our way home Monday, riding the MetroNorth line back into New Haven, we weren’t discussing the Statue of Liberty and how much bigger or smaller Ryan thought it was going to be. We didn’t talk about the view from atop of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the panoramic line of skyscrapers long enough to fill dozens of large cities. And we didn’t talk about how this was the first time where “What is this, Grand Central Station?” was a legitimate question.

Rather, we talked about the things we never expected, like the father on the subway who had to nearly fight off the old man trying to feed a giant pretzel to his 3-year-old daughter.

“It’s OK. No thanks. Please. No,” the father said, his hand shielding the face of the child to prevent the man’s hand from forcing the pretzel into her mouth. At one point the seemingly-normal-but-probably-nuts old man tried to reach around the father’s head and feed the kid from behind. The old man just smiled the entire time, oblivious to the father's paternal sense of peril.

My concern grew when the force-feeding pretzel man ended his zealous attempt with the girl and sat next to me. I sat nervously for the remainder of the ride, knowing that a giant piece of pretzel could be stuffed into my face at any time if I let my guard down.

We rehashed our dinner, where we descended a flight of stairs in Chinatown to enter a tiny, no-frills, Zagat-rated restaurant where we shared a table with a man whose crusty yellow eye infection produced a cloudy blue glaze over his left eyeball. As he answered his pesky cell phone with god-knows-why statements like “Fat Sal’s Pizza!” I couldn’t help but stare at the pale discolored ring around his unsightly chapped lips.

Before his shaky hand and unsure grip spilled a glass of water all over the table, he ended his last cell phone conversation “Can’t a guy eat his last meal in peace?”

It’s a question I normally would assume is asked sarcastically, but judging on how this guy was literally oozing with sickness, we all thought there was an outside chance he was serious.

Central Park was, of course, brought up on the ride home as well. Not for its thrilling example of city planning genius or its calming, oasis-in-the-city lake views or the solace of its intricate trail system. It was the nearly nude sunbathers, the deformed horns on the goat at the petting zoo and the handful of couples making out so vigorously that they approached NC-17 territory as we strolled past.

In the short term, it was the crazies that dominated our New York stories. It was the proselytizing subway rider who pleaded that you “make peace with your maker before you meet your undertaker.” It wasn’t the jutting dominance of the Empire State Building, the reality of the World Trade Center site or the bedlam of Times Square at night.

I’ll never forget seeing and experiencing these landmarks for the first time. After six trips to New York, the first one is the one I remember most.

But after you’ve seen all the sights in New York, it’s the craziness, the unexpected, the unplanned that forces you to return. After a few trips, you leave your camera at home and return with nothing but a handful of stories you never imagined telling.

The Butt Of The Joke

2007-06-26T10:47:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 12 seconds

Recently me and a friend of mine that I work with were discussing his home state of North Dakota. How cold does it get there? What do people from North Dakota do for fun? Why would anyone possibly have reason to visit North Dakota?

The conversation then gravitated toward who North Dakota's interstate rivals are and the states North Dakota looks down upon.

Namely, if a North Dakotan is telling a joke and needs a dumb character to jump out of an airplane without a parachute, screw in a light bulb in a haphazard fashion or outfit a submarine with insufficient windows, which state will this person reside?

The obvious answer to me would be South Dakota. I figured both Dakotas would claim to be the better Dakota, the real Dakota.

Rather, he said, the accepted states to utilize are Minnesota and Montana. (My first thought was what could be funny about Montana? Ranch hands? Mountaineers? Are there any glacier jokes floating around out there? A Google search produced this gem: Why is North Dakota so windy? Because Minnesota sucks and Montana blows.)

How North Dakotans feel toward Minnesota and Montana reinforces the notion that who the butt of the joke is changes by when and where you live and doesn't always make the most sense.

I was discussing this concept a few years ago with two friends of mine, one from Mexico, the other from Bolivia (An American, a Mexican and a Bolivian walk into a bar . . .). They said that when they need someone to be the butt of the joke, they use people from a place in Spain called Galicia. To me Galicia is a place I'd never heard of but presume is on a map. To them, it's where all the dumb people from jokes live. Who knew?

When I was in my golden joke-telling years (grade school, 1983-1989), the butt of the joke was always a Polack. Always. Sometimes the adjective "dumb" was added, just in case there was any confusion as this particular Polack's intelligence. As in, Did you hear about the dumb Polack that froze to death outside a theater? He was waiting to see the movie "Closed for the Winter." Ka-Blam! Whew that one was funny the first time I heard it.

Why a Polack? I have no idea. Probably something involving World War II. But to this day, I still see Polish people in a light that should probably be a tad brighter than it is.

Around this same time, a slew of Ethiopian jokes began to spring up, thanks to a historical famine in the African country from 1983-85. If there's one thing that makes for great laughs, it's famine. These jokes mainly had to do with hunger, starvation and the hilarity of being dangerously skinny.

Like this choice joke, which I might add, I learned from my brother in 3^rd grade: How many Ethiopians can you fit into a bathtub? None. They all slide down the drain.

Horrible, I know. And probably too soon.

Why other famished African nations never got the same treatment, I don't know. I'm still waiting to hear a Kenya joke or something that skewers those rascally Algerians.

But then something funny (not ha-ha) began to happen. Not only were Ethiopians targeted for famine-related humor, suddenly they got caught up being the dumb person in the joke. Take one joke for instance, also told to me in elementary school, likely at recess. The premise is three people walking through the dessert. Each has one item that will either keep them cool or nourish them in some fashion. The first guy has water, the second guy has food. And the third guy has a car door so that when it gets hot, he can roll the window down.

When that joke was told to me, the guy with the car door was an Ethiopian! That's not necessary!

I was also told a joke that consisted of people going down a skunk hole to see how long they could stand the smell. One by one they would go down the hole, each staying longer and longer before the smell forces them out. Well, when it was the butt of the joke's turn to go down the skunk hole, they waited and waited before the skunk finally came out complaining of the awful odor.

What type of person would smell so bad that even a skunk would abandon its home to flee the terrible stench? According to this joke in the form in which is was told to me, an Ethiopian.

So because of mass famine, Ethiopians wind up being made fun of for being skinny and ravenously hungry, which progressed into being made fun of for being dumb, which ballooned into flat-out, mean-spirited contempt.

Most of the time, the butt of the dumb joke is understandable. Not justified, but understandable, formulated from a regional rivalry, xenophobia or long-standing stereotype. Hippies, aggies, jocks, blondes, Polacks, Montanans.

But Ethiopians? They were starving, skinny and malnourished. And according to our jokes in the mid-80s, they were dumb too.

Getting Kids To Read

2007-06-18T23:07:00.000-04:00

Would anyone argue that books don't command the attention of America's youth as much as they once did?

With TV, DVDS, video games, instant messaging, text messaging, social networking, virtual worlds, camera phones, organized sports, organized play groups, organized snack times, forced and unforced naps, theme restaurants and ADD epidemics, is there even time for anything else? And if there were time, what kid would spend that time reading?

Sixty years ago, kids read because the only other option was listening to plays that featured a bunch of bored foley artists and came from a radio the size of a professional wrestler.

Once TV came along, books took another hit. But teachers and parents told kids to read, and being children of past generations, they did as they were instructed.

If you want kids to read in today's climate, you need to embark on some serious strategy being that it takes a bit more attention, effort and focus to read a book than to space out while watching someone else's zany cat bat at the air on YouTube.

You tell your kid to read now, you'll be lucky if he pauses his game of Guitar Hero before he tells you to F-off. Imagine how teachers feel as their assigned reading is likely bring a slew of cease and desist letters from parents' attorneys citing cruel and unusual emotional distress thrust upon the too-busy-to read-are-you-kidding-me students.

Battling students who'd rather read some random hottie's MySpace profile, unsupportive and uninvolved parents, all but the best teachers would rather just show the kids the movie in class than have them read the book (and for Romeo and Juliet, they pass on the 1968 classic for 1996's ultra-hip, modern vernacular, Leo DiCaprio version.).

To get books into the lives of children, educators had to go a step further. Call it creative enticement.

They could bite the bullet and just trade reading for cash, but in addition to studies that point out that this doesn't really work, it also wouldn't suit today's ever-slim school budgets. They could reward kids with cheap prizes or go with the standby school-wide ice cream or pizza party for students who meet certain literary goals. But since contemporary children eat Chuck E. Cheese whenever they damn-well feel like it and demand and receive DQ each time they pass it in the car, those once sought-after foods have become a drab burden more than anything.

Eschewing unadulterated bribery, schools with principals willing to take one for the team have resorted to another mode of reading enticement: voluntary public humiliation.

This can come in many forms, but taking on an embarrassing hair style seems to be most popular: a shaved head, a mohawk or some variation of socially unacceptable hair dye.

Principals and teachers have been known to kiss pigs, allow themselves to be dunked in pools of water or slime, take pies in the face or ingest something so clearly disgusting it forces other adults in attendance into a bout of dry heaves.

Still waiting to emerge is the principal who takes the humiliation reward too far, like promising to take shots to the groin from every kid who meets their goal. After getting a solid moon boot to the testicular region, the red-faced and sweating principal is doubled-over in pain as he gathers the composure to force the words "Thanks for reading William!"

The reasoning as to why this approach seems to get kids to read when nothing else will is simple. As a reward for completing a task, children get to watch an authority figure stripped of his power, losing a bit of dignity and thus being brought closer to their level.

He is no longer Principal Wilson; he's that goofy guy with the mohawk who personally invited the giggles and scorn.

So this tactic will work for the time being, that is until someone produces a video game that, using uploaded images, creates an animated digital version of their own principal. Students will then be able to play games where they are free to assault the principal with pies, water torture, sleep deprivation and, of course, countless kicks to the crotch.

Ready For The Real World

2007-06-13T11:57:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 24 seconds

They sit through the entire commencement.
And with a final word,
Students are dismissed for the last time.
After sixteen years, school is over.
It is a fleeting moment so pure, so exuberant.
Graduates, accomplished and uncontained,
Send their caps blissfully into the air.
But one keeps his on
To protect himself from falling caps.

Cool Rabbits

2007-06-10T18:56:00.000-04:00

Estimated Reading Time: 4.5 seconds

If I were a rabbit, I’d be one of those cool ones. One with the wristbands.

Some photos

2007-06-04T23:28:00.000-04:00

I have gone back through the years and pulled together some photos from various places Erin and I have traveled: Europe, New York, Chicago, St. Lucia, Mexico and elsewhere. You can view them here

Tacorral: So bad it's good

2007-06-02T14:26:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 4 seconds

The name Tacorral should have been warning enough.

What kind of restaurant gets its name from the awkward combination of a structure and a popular food item?

Would you eat at Burri-tower or Hambur-garage?

But the name might be the Mexican restaurant’s high point, considering the food was as authentic as a Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch, its walls were ripe with stereotypical Mexican knickknacks and its décor could only be described as naco.

After being seated in the sparsely-populated dining room, the first thing that came to our attention was the music. The best way for a fake Mexican restaurant to mask its fakeness is by piping in some authentic Mariachi.

Not Tacorral. Instead of anything remotely Mexican, Tacorral opted for music that sounded like something off The Brady Bunch. In a particular, one of those whacky Brady Bunch scenes where Peter’s science fair volcano display violently overflows, Tiger the dog runs through covered in soap suds and Alice somehow ends up getting a pie in the face.

I didn’t mind the music – primarily brass instruments playing upbeat songs half jazz-half showtune. I loved it, actually. But hearing it at a Mexican restaurant just made the place seem goofy and pathetic.

Amidst the near-neon blue and orange paint, piñatas hanging from the ceiling and serapes and miniature sombreros drooping from the walls, we kicked things off with an order of chips and sauce. When we got our chips and sauce, we discovered why the restaurant had chosen the word sauce in lieu of, say, salsa. Accompanying a basket of taco chips was a smooth red sauce that tasted distinctly like Ortega Taco Sauce. Not that I don’t like Ortega Taco Sauce, but I think if I were serving tortilla chips to guests at my house, even I would be too embarrassed to offer Ortega Taco Sauce.

Next was the main dish, a beef burrito for me. Considering the Brady Bunch music and the Ortega taco sauce, the burrito was exactly what you’d expect. Loaded with cheese, the meat had the distinct and familiar flavor of Old El Paso, the seasoning mix, not the venerable Old Texas town. By regular food standards, it was somewhat tasty. By Mexican food standards, it was laughable. It was at this point that I just sort of felt sorry for Tacorral and its so-bad-it’s-good production of Mexican cuisine.

Upon leaving, I commented that Tacorral was like a Taco Bell where you have to wait to be seated. Because people don’t go to Taco Bell for Mexican food. They go there for cheap, tasty food that happens to served inside some form of a tortilla and has vague connections to Mexico.

A friend who has also visited Tacorral suspects the restaurant is merely a front, citing the reality of white people serving bland, inauthentic Mexican food in a place that by most accounts is always virtually empty.

The only way Tacorral makes sense to me is if someone told two Americans to create a Mexican restaurant in one afternoon. Based on their misguided knowledge of Mexican culture, they’d rely on the clichéd images of piñatas and sombrero-wearing, mustachioed Mexicans catching a siesta while propped against a donkey.

They’d paint the walls colors they thought were Mexico-ish but were more suited for Miami’s South Beach. Their meat would be seasoned via spice packet and each dish would be loaded with cheddar cheese. For some reason the grocery store would be out of salsa, forcing them to go with taco sauce instead.

They’d head to Target in hopes of finding a last-minute Mariachi CD and end up settling on something called Gil Savagio’s Brass Orchestra, based on the false conclusion that his name sounded somewhat Hispanic.

It’s an explanation as good as any.

Cap'n Crunch Clean and Sober

2007-05-31T13:36:00.000-04:00

From here forth, the Cap'n will simply be known as Crunch.

After 44 years, Quaker Oats and Ari Steinowitz, the man who has played the Cap'n since the popular breakfast cereal's debut in 1963, have decided an image change was long overdue, saying that cereal-eating children can now expect a calmer, more laid-back Cap'n.

This comes following a string of bizarre actions culminating in his arrest in January after showing up to a Connecticut casino drunk without his toupee and missing his captains trousers and hat while attempting to wrestle a stuffed coyote.

Steinowitz pleaded no contest to charges of public intoxication, indecency, disorderly conduct and assault of a law enforcement official. He was sentenced to 64 days in jail, fined an undisclosed sum and ordered into mandatory substance abuse treatment.

It was this treatment that Steinowitz and Quaker Oats
say was the biggest catalyst for change.

Officials at the cereal giant have since acknowledged privately a growing concern for years about the Cap'n's suspected amphetamine addiction which led to an increasingly hyper-aggressive and overly-energetic insistence on people eating his cereal.

They point out the visual change over the years on the cereal boxes, going from a stoic if not weathered seaman in the 60s and 70s to the recent eye-bulging buffoon, saluting and grinning while practically forcing large spoonfuls of his cereal on anyone from coworkers to passing motorists to infants and
toddlers.

Quaker Oats officials said the return to a more dignified persona would be gradual. While temporarily keeping the name Cap'n Crunch, Steinowitz will now appear on cereal boxes wearing a 'do rag in place of a bulky captains hat. He'll also sport more of a neutral, almost sedated expression to better reflect the attitudes of today's youth.

Political Climate Crisis

2007-05-30T09:59:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 53 seconds

Then there were just two colors, two flavors, two ideologies and they thought it clever to call it a political spectrum.

They shouted past one another ideas that fit neatly between commercial breaks, serving as forced interruptions. Ideas were kept brief and small to fit this framework, not too complex, not too nuanced. To maintain an opinion short and simple was to repeat culturally acceptable ideology, to repackage conventional wisdom, to revisit what had been established before. And you agreed and nodded as what you already knew was confirmed by someone whose importance, you assumed, put them in front of a camera.

Voices that did not fit this template, voices willing to truly defy and provoke remained silent in favor of those waiting to comply. Those willing to discuss and listen, challenge and discern were kept quietly aside.

Instead, the shouting.

The two men claimed to disagree with one another but secretly had a common goal.
To argue over red and blue, black and white, good and evil, business as usual while their country burned in a hazy darkness.

A Pig To Haunt Your Sleep

2007-05-26T23:31:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute 21 seconds

At first sight, the photo could make the churchiest of church-goers curse in freakish wonder.

A dead pig weighing 1,050-something pounds and measuring 9 feet 4 inches.

Pigs just aren’t supposed to be that big, that monstrous.

About four times larger than the average feral hog, the pig would weigh more than a good-sized cow and dwarf the size of your average bull moose.

Once you rid the massive pig’s image from haunting your sleep, the most logical joke to make from the whole thing is “That’s a lot of bacon.”

Funny because it’s true. That is a lot of bacon. Roughly 22,727 slices of bacon.

But in all seriousness, the father of the 11-year-old who shot the pig confirmed that the bulk of the pig will be used to make sausage – 500 to 700 pounds of sausage, which converts into about 9,390 breakfast links (someone needs to put this guy and his family on heart attack watch ASAP.)

However, I think I’d have a hard time eating sausage that came from this rhinoceros of a pig.

I’d be afraid that the pig’s stuff would somehow get inside me and permeate my glands and nodes. I’d wake up the next morning with shiny gray skin, hands, feet and ears in freakish proportions, my fingers beginning to fuse and harden as my voice gets crazy deep and I sprout dark, thick hair everywhere.

The more sausage I eat, the more I look like a freakishly large pig.

Oh wait . . .

Tennis, Spiders and Terror

2007-05-25T00:23:00.001-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 4 seconds

Passing a tennis court as you walk back from the pharmacy you notice a man laying on his side just inside the baseline on the far end of the court.

Dozens of balls line the fence and sit at the foot of the net. A large empty practice basket straddles the service line.

You try to talk yourself out of investigating, offering the idea that the man had halted his practice to grab some quick shuteye on the court’s 112-degree surface. The blood spattered on the front of his white T-shirt jolts you from your comfort.

Walking briskly across the court, you approach the man, who is apparently breathing but unconscious. You inspect closer the small orange and red splatters on his shirt, noting in your head that it looks like he had been squirted by a spray bottle full of blood.

Looking for the source of the blood you go to lift his shirt. As you reach toward him, what you see sends a shock up your spinal column as you jump away in primitive flight.

Crawling all over the man’s shirt are thousands of tiny red baby spiders, some of which had been smashed to create the illusion of blood.

After a few moments, you deduce the man had been hit by some sort of bomb of spiders, the red being the spiders that splattered on impact. What had rendered him unconscious was beyond your comprehension, a potential truth so horrendous and terrifying you try to suppress it but fail.

Ten years earlier you would have called 911. But not now. Not with a man who had been hit by a bullet full of baby spiders which may or may not have stripped him of consciousness. If you see something, say something, you recall hearing.

You dial the Department of Homeland Security. Awaiting instruction, you back slowly off the court, returning reluctantly to a changed world.

Sarcasm Lost On Google

2007-05-21T12:27:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 59 seconds

With its complex algorithms that would make advanced extra terrestrial life wither dumbly, it's no secret that the super wizard computer geeks at Google have done some amazing things.

Not only can one type in the nonsense phrase "goat saddle" and actually see picture after picture of, you guessed, goats wearing saddles, but he can also find web sites that sell goat saddles and – I swear it – tips on how to make saddling a goat as pleasant as possible for you and the goat.

But what makes Google so successful as a business is how it recognizes key words within your search results and automatically generates relevant and potentially useful links to paid advertisers. So when searching for goat saddles, on the right of the screen are links to web sites where you can buy goats and saddles.

Google has applied this same technology to its e-mail program Gmail. But instead of recognizing key words in an internet search, it picks up on what it thinks is the content of your e-mail – keywords and phrases – and offers potentially relevant advertising links to the right of the message.

At first this seems a little creepy and a lot obtrusive. I imagine someone or something actually reading and comprehending the content of my e-mail and supplying the corresponding advertising.

But if you read the disclaimers and FAQs supplied by Google, you can be rest assured that it has nothing to do with monitoring or spying and everything to do with the complex algorithms and Google super wizards mentioned above.

While Google may pat itself on the back for being able to use artificial intelligence to decipher human correspondence, all in the name of advertising, I have discovered something Google is not too good at: Detecting sarcasm.

This played out simply the other day, in an e-mail exchange I had with a friend of mine who I'll call "Ted." (I'll also omit the names of anyone else to keep all identities anonymous).

It's important to know that it has been Ted's shtick to downplay his current position in life, his job, the city he lives in. He's not entirely happy with it but when he talks about it, he lays the sarcasm and hyperbole on thick. It's become sort of a joke, kind of like Ted's life (that was actually an example of how Ted might actually joke . . . see?).

The e-mail exchange went something like this:

Ted: You still want to have lunch tomorrow? If so, we should also include "Brian." I'm available around 1.

My biggest accomplishment this evening was [insert name of lame movie here]. My life is in F'ing shambles.

Me: That sorry excuse for a human being "Brian" and I were just discussing activities for tomorrow. We were thinking of playing some basketball and then going to lunch. Thoughts?

Ted: "Brian's" life is one of the only things that makes mine seem relevant. I'll be home from work around 1 so maybe hoops at 1:30 and lunch to follow?

Now I'm going to watch [insert name of lame movie here] and then go to sleep. F---.

So if you're a computer and/or robot reading this e-mail and looking for key words, some consistent subjects and relevant phrases, here's what you might deduce:

You've got two people talking about getting lunch and playing basketball. And then something else keeps coming up, like references to lives being in "shambles" and someone who is a "sorry excuse for a human being."

So I look to the right of the e-mail exchange and notice the specifically tailored advertising generated for this conversation.

Expectedly, there were links concerning the NBA and NBA playoffs. Good job Google, 1-for-1. Next up was one advertisement targeting overweight children and another offering tips for the overweight. I'll give Google a consolation prize for that but it was getting colder on relevant advertising, as the most prominent and abundant number of links it offered were quite different.

There was one for teenagers with troubled pregnancies, one advertising a "practical, proven program for parents of troubled teenagers," and another claiming that "surrogate mothers are needed."

Wow. I never knew our lives were this dire.

So maybe Google still has some work to do, to find a way to detect the dry wit of its users. Or perhaps Google is really a step ahead of me and Ted is actually dealing with a troubled teen pregnancy and just hasn't told me.

Today's Smell: Walgreens

2007-05-08T23:06:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 28 seconds

I walked into a Walgreens the other day looking for a muffin pan (A muffin pan at Walgreens you ask? Well, it’s only logical when you plan to have muffins on an easy Saturday morning and A) you discover that for some reason your only muffin pan is not in the drawer below the stove as usual but in some closet in your wife's classroom at school and B) there's a Walgreens less than 1/6-mile from your doorstep).
Immediately when I walked into Walgreens I was permeated with that smell. You know that smell. That Walgreens smell. I can't describe it in any other way than . . . Walgreens.
No matter if the Walgreens is in Denver, Kansas City, El Paso, Omaha or Manchester, CT, or if the Walgreens is 16 years old or 16 weeks old, all Walgreens smell exactly the same (true could be said of other discount chains, Target especially).

How can this be?

Certainly over the last 20 years, Walgreens has changed the bulk of its products, or perhaps began carrying more convenience foods and makeup and less camera supplies and toys. And yet the scent is exactly the same.

I want to know specifically what I am smelling.

Maybe the smell is the product of commercially unsuccessful, bargain DVDs placed near a cash register. Maybe the smell is a cocktail of hair clips and self grooming tools placed in proximity to cigarettes and Nicoderm patches. Maybe it’s the combined scent achieved when a photo processing center butts up against a dairy case.

Some I have spoken to about this think it’s a scent Walgreens sprays in all its stores. My only hesitation with this theory is that if Walgreens was to provide a scent for its stores, it would pick something like “sea breeze” or “flowers” over “Walgreens.”

Whatever makes up the smell, to me it’s one of the most remarkable, consistent and unique scents I have ever smelled while purchasing allergy pills and Pringles.

I carry my weight well

2007-04-26T13:11:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 48 seconds

"If you don't mind me asking . . ." said the guy who sits across from me at work. "But how much do you weigh?"

(For the split second after I heard the preface "If you don't mind me asking" my feeling was part fear, part excited anticipation. Anytime that statement precedes a question, the possibilities are endless. Have you ever shot someone in the face while hunting? How often would you say you are drunk at work?)

"If you forgive me for not answering, I'll forgive you for asking," I responded, turning my cheek and tilting my nose toward the ceiling.

Boo-yah! Take that! Asking me such a personal question. Shame on you! Shame on us all. I'm embarrassed for you, sir.

Actually I didn't really say that. It was a comeback Dear Abby advised a number of years ago to use when someone asks you a personal or embarrassing question. But I should have said it, not because I took offense to the question, but because it would have been quite humorous. As it turned out, I didn't mind providing an answer.

"205," I said.

"Really!?" he responded, with a bit more surprise in his voice than I had hoped. I questioned his reaction.

"Oh, it's just . . . you carry your weight well," he said.

This is something no one had ever said to me. I tried to figure out what this actually meant. I carry my weight well?

After some thought, I figured out that what he was really saying was that, by looking at me and my round face, he would have thought I weighed a lot more than 205. So rather than "you carry your weight well," he should have said "You know you're really not as obese as you look." Suddenly a euphemistic phrase turns into an emotionally-scarring insult.

But if I had to choose, carrying my weight well beats the alternative. I'd rather weigh 205 and appear to be 190 than to severely restrict my calories and exercise like mad to drop 15 pounds and actually weigh 190.

Because in the end, unless somebody asks (which apparently is not unheard of), no one really knows how much I weigh. If I look 190, I am 190.

Now bring on the chicken tenders.

More Assorted thoughts of no particular importance

2007-04-22T16:35:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minute, 9 seconds

Haircuts and shampoo

It never fails.

I get a haircut, go about my day and then go to bed. The next morning I feel my hair and remember that I got haircut and am happy that I finally took the time to get the haircut after three shaggy weeks of nagging myself.

However, all recognition of the new haircut disappears in the shower. Ready to wash my hair, I squeeze out the same amount of shampoo as I had the day before. This is, of course, way too much shampoo as the length of my hair has been trimmed by 50 percent.

Ultimately I am left with an abundance of lather that I have no use for, some of which undoubtedly runs into my eyes.

Depressing

I bought a pocket-sized notebook to record assorted thoughts of no particular importance while I am away from a computer or larger portion of paper. However, the first thing I write in it is "Georgy Girl," which serves as a reminder that I'd really like to download the 1966 oldie-but-goodie by The Seekers. I then note how lame I am.

Dogs vs. Mailmen: Hatred Not A Myth

The fact that my dog barks at the mailman is not the issue. Even I have the desire – albeit suppressed – to nervously shout and alert others if a stranger steps onto my porch, whether they be from Jehovah's Witness, Manchester Democrats, LDS or U.S Mail.

It's more of a concern as to when she starts barking at the mailman. Before I get to that, it's important to know that we live in a normal neighborhood where people freely and regularly walk up and down the sidewalk at all times during daylight hours, usually pushing a stroller or being pulled by a dog. Hellion, perched atop her lookout on the arm of the couch where she can monitor the neighborhood from the living room window, allows these pedestrians to walk past in silence.

But Monday through Saturday, Hellion begins to bark at around 11 a.m. I look out the window and see nothing. I look harder, opening the shades as far as possible and pressing my face against the glass to the point of pain to see what is the object of her ire. The mailman, walking his route, is across the street . . . five houses down. He is the size of a Cocoa Pebble to us. And yet she knows it's him, barking and growling, almost out of pure hatred. I compliment her on her remarkable eyesight – clearly better than mine – then tell her to pipe it down.

Maybe it's the blue wool pants, blue cotton blend shirt, eagle-emblazoned hat or the canvas sack of mail. Whatever it is, Hellion doesn't like it.

Where's the Laundromat?

We were driving in downtown Hartford today and were stopped at a stoplight. My window was down, letting the 78-degree air permeate the car's interior. A man on the sidewalk carrying a sack of laundry shouts at me.

"Hey, do you know where there's a laundry-mat?!"

Unfamiliar with that part of town I said I didn't know.

But after thinking about for a second, I was like "Man, you need a plan before you're walking down the street with a bag of dirty clothes."

Human-Sized Bunnies and Potentially-Evil Clowns

2007-04-07T23:33:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 57 seconds

Saturday's front page of the Hartford Courant featured unrelated photos of two entities in which I find unequivocally frightening: A human-sized Easter Bunny and a clown.

The bunny was holding a screaming baby, a baby whose screaming is for the first time whole-heartedly justified. If I were being cradled and potentially strangled dead by a grinning, man-sized rabbit, I would too scream with the fear of God.

If I saw that bunny anywhere outside, say, a mall or a fair or a parade, I would respond in one of two ways. Either I would retreat as fast as my aerobic condition permitted, or I would savagely beat it to death, depending on my access to an object that would inflict an adequate amount of blunt force trauma, a tire iron perhaps.

This clown - oddly clutching a stuffed cat - is a somewhat less threatening figure although highly unnecessary and potentially evil and dangerous. Clowns I have learned to coexist with just as long as they don't make any sudden moves or aggressive gestures in my presence or direction. (On the topic, I'm still unsure what I think about those "street performers" who stand still until you put money in their cup before doing some sort of robotic movement or some otherwise non-human action. Double-unsure if all robotic movement corresponds with a hidden whistling sound coming from their mouth).

I was trying to think of what else that could have been pictured on the page more frightening than the giant bunny or the clown. I finally settled on Hobo Dentist.

Assorted thoughts of no particular importance

2007-04-02T11:19:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 22 seconds

Free-Throw Routines

Nearly every basketball player has some elaborate routine they go through each time they shoot free throws.

For one guy it's four quick bounces in front then one methodical bounce to the right. Shoot.

For another guy it's five slow bounces, clutch the ball staring at the rim, take a deep breath, assume shooting position, knees bent with emphasis. Shoot.

Another player doesn't bounce it at all but employs a dramatic spin before he shoots.

There are as many different free-throw routines as there are players.

I'm assuming these routines, followed with remarkable accuracy, are two parts rhythm – a way to keep things consistent at the line – and one superstition.

This all makes sense . . . for someone who shoots 86 percent.

But guys who are shooting in the 50s? Doing the same thing at the line every time? C'mon. Shake it up. That little thing you do where you rotate the ball so that your hand rests on the same part each time before you send the ball bouncing off the rim has gotten you a deplorable 46 percent clip from the free throw line.

On Vomiting

How come whenever people throw up in movies they always a) sit or kneel on the bathroom floor; b) stick their entire head or face into the toilet c) rest their arms on the dirtiest part of the toilet as they vomit?

Granted I don't throw up as often as people tend to in movies, but when I do I am always standing with my face at least a foot and a half away from anything I had just urinated into within the last 24 hours.

Game Idea

I want to come up with a board game for people to play when they call in sick to work but aren't really sick.

I'm not sure what to call it.

Vague Fortune Cookies

I got a fortune cookie the other day that said "Taking chances may bring success."

May bring success? May?

What kind of vague, on the fence fortune is that?

Why not just say "Taking chances may or may not bring success."

If you're are going to be vague about whether or not taking chances will bring success, at least be specific about something.

Drink four beers before going to work. Your relaxed demeanor may take the edge off a tense workplace and see that your efficiency and creativity skyrocket. Or you may unexpectedly get somewhat aggressive and confrontational over a co-worker's innocent question about punctuation. They smell alcohol on your breath and send you shamefully home in a cab, immediately putting you on unpaid administrative leave.

The Go-Tart

2007-03-19T12:35:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 50 seconds

Today's topic: Kellogg's new version of the Pop-Tart, the Go-Tart.

The two products are made of the same goodness: mysteriously consistent crust, high-fructose laden fruit-like filling and the party-themed candy-coated top.

The only difference between the old and the new is the shape.

The Pop-Tart insists on sticking with its bulky, 3x4-inch rectangular travesty, a shape that hit its peak in the early 80s. The Go-Tart, on the other hand, takes the shape of the sleeker, more hip, and possibly healthier, Butterfinger.

The enhanced, streamlined contour makes the Go-Tart much easier to handle, easier to "grab and go," a joy to consume while operating a car and way more convenient to stuff into a purse, backpack or your giant, fat, salivating child's mouth.

My only take on this: Thank God. Anything they could do to make those clunky, complicated and hard-to-grasp Pop-Tarts easier to eat with a 21^st century, on-the-go, not-enough-time-to-hassle-with-a-POP-TART-anymore lifestyle would be a much welcomed improvement.

Just for the kids out there, here is the Go-Tart ingredient list:

ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID), HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, SUGAR, VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN, COTTONSEED AND HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED OIL† WITH TBHQ AND CITRIC ACID FOR FRESHNESS), CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF GLYCERIN, STRAWBERRY PUREE CONCENTRATE, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, CORNSTARCH, PEAR PUREE CONCENTRATE, SALT, APPLE PUREE CONCENTRATE, TAPIOCA STARCH, APPLE POWDER, LEAVENING (BAKING SODA, SODIUM ALUMINUM PHOSPHATE), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, DEXTROSE, MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES, CELLULOSE GEL, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, MILLED CORN, CORN SYRUP, MALIC ACID, CARAMEL COLOR, PROPYLENE GLYCOL ALGINATE, DATEM, CELLULOSE GUM, WHEY PROTEIN ISOLATE, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN AND/OR COTTONSEED OIL†, RED #40, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, CITRIC ACID, COLOR ADDED, NIACINAMIDE, REDUCED IRON, PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B6), RIBOFLAVIN (VITAMIN B2), THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B1), TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, TURMERIC COLOR, FOLIC ACID, BLUE #1, SOY LECITHIN.

Why I vacationed in Dallas

2007-03-07T13:17:00.000-05:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 24 seconds

Last month I asked if I could leave work a little early because I had an early morning flight to catch.

"Oh yeah? Where are you going?"

"Dallas."

He literally laughed. "Seriously?"

I was serious. I can understand why he found my answer humorous. Although a fine city nonetheless, people don't really see Dallas as a vacation hotspot. It's like Boise or Kansas City or Cleveland.

I gave him the short answer. We have friends there. Here's the long answer:

In April, 2001, we lived in Corpus Christi, Texas and had zero friends living within a 1,000-mile radius. New town, new jobs. It was understandable. Within six months, things started to change.

First came along Tapril, a combination of two people named Tate and April. Erin taught with April at Calallen High School. Tate was her husband, a lawyer. They turned out to be our first couple friend.

From my experience, couple friends create an inherently volatile situation where two people who enjoy each other's company decide to sit their spouses across from one another at a restaurant for a round of uninspired and painfully clumsy small talk while they laugh and talk it up like nothing unusual. Luckily, we and Tapril were able to avoid these follies.

Next, the baron landscape of friendship that was my workplace started to transform. It seemed that every few weeks, a new face would arrive and we would become friends. As people arrived, the circle got bigger and within a year, we had at least seven good friends (I define a good friend as someone you could hang out with by yourself, without the social buffer of another person to take the pressure of the awkwardness of dull conversations and the incompatibility you share).

It was the first time I had that many good friends since my fourth birthday party and that was only because my mom invited everyone on our street and the next street down.

Because of the size of our city, nobody lived farther than 15 minutes drive from anyone else. And our similar work schedules made it not uncommon to push two, even three tables together for post-work drinks and/or unnecessary face-stuffing.

If you wanted someone to hang out with, one person and usually more were up for it. This meant brunch at John and Helen's, Chinese lunch buffet with Ryan and John, camping with Karson (or Tapril), beading with Helen and Kari (that was Erin, of course, not me), reality TV with John, hillbilly concerts with Tapril, coffee before work with Karson, volleyball, karaoke, the beach, pool(s), IHOP and so on.

I don’t know if any of us realized how amazingly odd this was at the time.

But people early in their careers, especially anyone who works in newspapers likely will have somewhat of a transient life. You find a newspaper, work there for a year or three than move on, usually to a bigger paper, a bigger city.

Slowly, the same forces that lured everyone to Corpus Christi sent them away. We all began to go our separate ways. Except something funny happened, something odd and unimaginable. For their own unrelated reasons, all of our friends ended up in the same city again. Except us. We moved as far away as you could without applying for a work visa. And then moved again, just as far in another direction.

And that's what brought us to Dallas/Fort Worth. Besides trips to Denver to see family, it was the first trip where experiencing something new – a new city, a new culture, a new landscape – was not on the list.

We came with no plans, no sights to see. We came to do what we used to do on a near daily basis. Talk, laugh, drink, gossip and laugh some more. And we flew a thousand miles to do it.

The highlight of our trip for me was a single moment. Nothing terribly planned. We were all gathered at Karson's and had opened some wine that Ryan brought. Somebody asked whoever to do a toast. It was more for the sappy sentimentality than a group of people taking themselves seriously.

Ryan stepped up and out of nowhere, with glass held high and a gaze toward the ceiling for comedic effect, he said, "There are wood ships, and good ships, and ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships and may they always be."

A classic Irish toast and now a classic moment. It was hilarious, irreverent, sentimental and poignant all at once.

If Ryan had said the same words, holding the same wine, in front of the same people a few years earlier, I probably would have chuckled. But the meaning would have been lost. Because then, I lived 10 minutes away. And we would see each other tomorrow.

Rooting for nobodys

2007-03-02T22:58:00.000-05:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 4 seconds

When thinking about professional sports – say, the NBA – you think about sportsade endorsements, night club entourages, all-star games, Sportscenter highlights and theatrically overblown pre-game introductions.

But for all the famously overpaid, pampered, super celebristars, there are a couple guys on every team that sit at the end of the bench wearing their warm-ups throughout the game. They never get introduced before tipoff and rarely even play.

Although it may seem obvious and uninsightful, that guy, the guy who remains anonymous to fans and media plays on an NBA team.

That guy defied serious odds to make it to the most elite point possible.

At every level he played at – junior leagues, high school, college – he was likely the best player on the team, way ahead of the competition.

Right now he could walk in to any gym or crash any pickup game in the world and be the best player on the floor if not outright dominating. He’s a better player than 99.7 percent of people who have ever picked up a basketball.

Despite all of this, to most fans he “sucks.” He sits the bench. Not only is he not the star of his team, he hardly contributes anything. And if he does play, it is only because the score is so lopsided that his presence on the court will not have any effect on the game’s final outcome.

Among his peers, he is paid the least (albeit hundreds of thousands a year) and plays the least.

He has immense talent in some respects and zero talent in others. He suits up in front of thousands of people three times a week yet remains a nobody.

And while the salary probably makes the medicine go down, I can’t help but feel a little for these guys. They’ve made it to the pinnacle of basketball but on some levels are failures.

So the next time I go to an NBA game, I’m not going to cheer for the superstars. They have enough people who know them, love them and cheer them. After all, they’re in the NBA and they’re successful.

Mechanical bulls and me

2007-03-01T03:50:00.000-05:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 34 seconds

Perhaps it was because my first question was "Do they have a mechanical bull?"

But for whatever reason, when it was confirmed by sight that a mechanical bull was indeed in operation at the Stockyards in Fort Worth, Texas, it was instantly assumed that I would ride it.

No one else in our group of five even hinted at or entertained the slightest thought of they themselves taking a wild albeit unnecessary spin on the mechanical beast. But everyone questioned not if I should ride, but would the ride come immediately or after having given the ¾-lbs. burrito I had just eaten time to hit the bottom of my stomach.

I, of course, wouldn't have it any other way, this being my first encounter with a mechanical bull. And given the amount of thought I have given to the subject of mechanical bulls – talking about them, writing about them, joking about them – to not ride when given the opportunity would be unspeakable.

To me, mechanical bulls are inherently funny. For one, the honky tonk atmosphere of silly, skinny white guys in clownish shirts, funny hats and cowboy boots is a good start. Getting these fellers to ride a bucking machine based on the actions of an erratic and aggressive animal to the point of covering the contraption with the hide of a real bull and you have created something legendarily humorous.

The idea of riding a real bull is absurd enough. Take a powerful, angry, volatile, unpredictable animal and tie an ungodly strap around its private parts, making it more angry, volatile and unpredictable. Then, for the dumb witted, yee-haw fun of it, get on its back and stay on for as long as possible before getting tossed off like you were made of hay and held together by a pair of discarded overalls. Too easy? Well, you can only hold on with one hand. Oh yeah, and to make some sense out of this whole rigamaroll, once you get bucked off the dangerous beast, clowns shall run out to serve as distraction as you pick up your goofy hat and scamper off over some bleachers.

But with a mechanical bull, an absurd and, face it, idiotic event is replicated as entertainment for people who want to ride the bull but don't want the risk of being a) stomped b) disemboweled or c) having their neck snapped as they tumble to an unforgiving dirt surface.

An amusement ride is born. But unlike a normal thrill ride, which undoubtedly buckles you to your seat using straps and belts with the goal of keeping you safely attached to the vessel, a mechanical bull hopes for just the opposite. Its goal is to get you to fall off, and the more violently spectacular you are tossed aside, the better.

For the life of me I can't figure out why the idea of this activity is attractive to people. It is so avoidable, so bizarre, so funny.

To me, a mechanical bull is part absurd, part surreal, part volatile, wholly unnecessary and totally random. Which is almost exactly how I would describe my sense of humor.

And maybe that's the connection I feel with mechanical bulls. Perhaps the mechanical bull is the embodiment of my personality, representing a trait of mine that I value the most.

Perhaps that's why my friends didn't question if I would ride. It all seemed so natural.

So yes I rode. I rode because I would never forgive myself otherwise. Five dollars per ride? I had no choice, you see? Sign a release saying I can't sue regardless of how mangled I become after getting flipped off a mechanical animal? Saying no would be denying the essence of my being.

OK maybe that pushed it too far. But of course I rode.

My ride wasn't as spectacular as how I had planned it in my mind. I didn't cartwheel off the bull in a haphazardly fantastic style. I didn't lie in the mangled, crumpled heap on the ground as I had hoped.

But at least I rode. And at the same time, was able to cross a lifelong goal off my list.

And for the record, moving up on that list of goals were:

Learning to yodel
Developing a jaw-dropping tap dance routine to bust out at parties and small gatherings.

When a Product Becomes Irrelevant

2006-11-30T11:41:00.000-05:00

Everyone has seen those commercials where a group of hipsters demonstrate how incredibly free, exuberant and insanely hip their lives are. They're either playing Frisbee golf while wearing trendy sweaters and scarves or riding ultra-cool scooters while racing through traffic-free downtown streets, also wearing trendy sweaters and scarves. At the end you discover that the commercial was for a product that never even appeared prominently in the ad. Something like underwear or cola or hair care products. You are left scratching your head saying, "What was THAT all about?"

Of course corporations no longer sell products. They sell images and lifestyles. They tell you virtually nothing about the product itself and more about the type of life you will have if you buy it. Many times they tell you as little about the product they are selling as possible.

Could this be because they have nothing else to offer? Like a guy who drives a Hummer, perhaps they are trying to compensate for what they don't have. After all, they are probably thinking, it's just shampoo. With hundreds of options on shampoo, or virtually every product, most producing fairly similar results, why would someone choose one over the other?

Take light beer. Anyone who tells you that they have a preference over Bud Light, Miller Lite or Coors Light is kidding themselves. They all taste remarkably similar. The only way to separate themselves is by advertising and brand loyalty/recognition.

Even when Coors says that its beer tastes better because it "brewed cold and shipped cold" it has everything to do with its Rocky Mountain refreshment image and nothing to do with actual taste.

Or say you set 10 pairs of jeans out in front of someone – all similar in price and quality. What could make someone choose one over the other? Perhaps the image and branding the corporation has spent so much on to create. Toss in some brand familiarity and perhaps some trendy swing dancers in a commercial and suddenly one pair of jeans seems more desirable than the next.

The same could be said for virtually every product. Take away the global onslaught of ads, the theme stores and the athlete endorsements (actually athletes don't really endorse products as much as they appear in non-speaking roles, usually sweating profusely, extremely hungry or running up the stairs of an empty stadium) and Nike becomes any old company selling overpriced shoes made in overseas sweatshops.

But a Swoosh magically increases the value of footwear by 200 percent. After all, the Nike Swoosh tells you everything about what kind of athlete you can be or what kind of active, bold and aggressive lifestyle you can achieve. But nothing about shoes.

Flavor of the month: Turkey

2006-11-13T13:20:00.000-05:00

Today's discussion centers on turkey. But I'm not talking about Thanksgiving or anything that involves real, actual turkey.

I'm talking about the kind of turkey that you put on a sandwich, turkey that can be folded twice without coming apart, that slimy, ovalish, stretchable conglomerate appropriately placed next to the hot dogs at the grocery store.

Just because the package says "Turkey" does that make it turkey?

It reminds me of those disgusting strawberry candies. The thing I remember about them is that they taste nothing like a strawberry despite them trying to somehow fool you with the cellophane made to look like a strawberry. Like strawberry Jolly Ranchers, what they actually taste like is a distinct synthetic candy flavor labeled Strawberry.

Same goes for grape gum. When someone pops in a piece of grape Bubble Yum, they're after that artificial taste we now associated with grapes. Instead of calling the flavor Grape, they should have made up an entirely made-up name, as it is an entirely made-up flavor. Something like Grandoliciousness.

Of course they have to call it Grape in order to better associate it with food, hiding the fact that you are actually chewing on artificially flavored edible rubber that allegedly tastes like fruit.

Which gets back to turkey. Do turkey cold cuts taste anything like real, actual turkey?

No. They taste like . . . turkey cold cuts, a unique flavor that we have associated with a bird initially made famous by Pilgrims. Real turkey is eaten once, maybe twice a year, not everyday between slices of white bread.

I've never thought much about comparing real turkey to turkey cold cuts. But if you compare the taste of a Thanksgiving turkey and compare it to your typical turkey lunch meat, the two taste nothing alike.

The distinction became more clear when I noticed a new product at the grocery store. In the midst of the bright yellow and blue cardboard and plastic packaging of various flavors of artificially-shaped ham and baloney, a rectangular cardboard box – left predominantly in its natural cardboard color – caught my eye. Naturally, the product is called Natural Choice Oven Roasted Deli Turkey by Hormel.

Beside the name on the front is the word NEW printed on a leaf as well as the words ALL NATURAL INGREDIENTS** and NO PRESERVATIVES.

On the back are bullet points, differentiating further how the product is better than your run-of-the-mill cold cut. They are:

No Nitrate or Nitrite added
Minimally Processed
No Artificial Ingredients
Gluten Free
No MSG Added

Is this what it has come to? Has No Nitrite really become a selling point for food? How did we get to the point where all the sandwich meat is packed with Gluten, MSG and Artificial Ingredients . . . except for one? Makes you wonder what else is in all that other turkey.

And why must I now pay more for lunch meat that is Minimally Processed instead of Overly Processed?

Surprisingly, Hormel's Natural Choice actually tastes like real turkey. And instead of the rubbery ovals of "turkey" you find elsewhere, this turkey flakes and tears like you would expect turkey to do.

But the fact that I am amazed because there's a package proclaiming Turkey that contains actual turkey is somewhat of an eye-opener.

Why Thanksgiving is better than you think

2006-11-06T07:52:00.000-05:00

Halloween didn't go quietly this year. Judging by the number of Trick-Or-Treaters we've had living in three states in the past five years – about 18 total – I was under the impression that the spooky pagan holiday was on the verge of collapse.

Those feelings changed after a horrifying 106 youngsters rung our doorbell demanding candy this year. Perhaps Connecticut's rich history of heretics, witches and headless horseman gives Halloween higher holiday status than in, say, New Mexico.

With Halloween out of the way and no candy left over to make it all worth it, we now look forward to Thanksgiving, which is by far the best holiday we have to choose from in America.

It goes without saying that the most glorious aspect of Thanksgiving is that it is centered on binge eating. It's the one day where stuffing your giant face is completely and utterly socially acceptable and encouraged, if not downright required or coerced.

But for me what makes Thanksgiving so great – after the eating of course – is that it has somehow survived a commercial takeover.

I mean, when Easter gets to the point where it engulfs four aisles at Target, you know the corporate hijacking of holidays has become quite grave.

Most holidays – Valentine's Day, birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day – are all centered on what you will buy for whom. Beyond getting the day off, the only remarkable thing about Labor Day and Memorial Day are the sales advertised at stores like J.C. Penney. And how serious is the problem when our national economy convulses this way or that way depending on how much people muster to plunk down on others at Christmas? With money they don't have, no less.

But back to Thanksgiving. The only spending you're doing for Thanksgiving is at the grocery store. And face it, you were going anyway. You're just picking up a few extra items . . . like a bird that weighs as much as my dog.

In addition to subduing corporate America, Thanksgiving has apparently avoided something else that has attached itself to holidays: Music. If there's one thing that we like about holidays, other than spending money like it's not ours (it's not), it is holiday music.

We stage entire school Christmas performances just so we can showcase our beloved carols through the mouths of innocent children. Fourth of July is rife with patriotic propaganda. Easter has a host of crucifiction/ resurection hymns. New Years has its song whose title I still am unsure how to pronounce.

But Thanksgiving has been left alone. And Dido's "Thank You" or Andrew Gold's "Thank You For Being a Friend" don't count, contrary to one web site which ranks alleged "Thanksgiving Songs". (A couple Thanksgiving songs I'd like to see: "Amaizing Thanks," "Gord of Gords" and "O Cornucopia, We Thank Thee")

The only popular song I could find that mentions Thanksgiving specifically was Adam Sandler's "The Thanksgiving Song." (Imagine if there were just one popular Christmas song and that one song was called "The Christmas Tune and it was written and performed by Jack Black.)

Instead for Christmas you've got Silent Night packaged a hundred different ways. And then you've got to buy and send Christmas cards and then you have to buy all your presents, which forces everyone to the store at once because everyone put it off as long as possible which causes snarling holiday traffic, which makes everyone tired, cranky and moody. By the time the day rolls around, everyone is grumpy, in debt and depressed, then forced into contact with extended family. It's no wonder an innocent group of carolers can send someone right over the edge.

Thanksgiving, conversely, is a holiday with no fluff and no fat. No gifts, no songs, no candy and no symbolic explosions choreographed to music. Just right.

Red and blue at war

2006-10-30T13:08:00.000-05:00

How did red and blue become such polarizing colors?

Since the 2004 election results were famously color-coded by state, red or blue can now serve as answers for questions like "What is your stance on abortion?" or "How do you feel about warrantless wire taps?"

Regardless of how slim the margin of victory was, each state became a Red State or a Blue State overnight. If you were a Democrat in Alabama or a Republican in Vermont, you suddenly didn't exist, as if there is no middle ground.

As many have realized now, the Red State/Blue State scheme has turned into a divisive mechanism, leading people to exaggerated beliefs and sweeping judgments that lump entire regions of our country into one political party.

In reality, our country is extremely purple, sometimes with two precincts within a district within a state at voting odds with one another.

Of course, this isn't the first polarizing war between Red and Blue. Coke and Pepsi have been trying to get people to choose one over the other for almost a century.

Is this a war that needs to be fought? Is this a war that can actually be won (War on Terror, anyone. . .)?

Can we just stop it already, lay down our arms and admit that Pepsi and Coke are both delicious, similar-tasting beverages, each with their own distinctive subtleties to which some people may or may not favor over the other if they so choose?

Like Miami Herald sports designer Kevin Scott says, Coke and Pepsi are always going to each have 48 percent of the cola market regardless, but they spend hundreds of millions a year in advertising, scrapping away at the remaining 4 percent. Wouldn't those hundreds of millions be better spent hooking a more impoverished country's youth on sweet, fattening drinks for life?

The truth is I'm tired of being told that Coke Is It or that it is Always Coca-Cola. I don't need Pepsi informing me that it just so happens to be America's Choice and that Nothing Else Is A Pepsi.

Don't tell me that I have to prefer one over the other and that if I like Coke I must not like Pepsi and if I dislike Coke that must mean that I love Pepsi.

You, paid-off researchers, stop your studies where you unsuspectingly direct me to drink from two cups, one marked Pepsi, the other marked Coke and when I say I prefer one over the other you rip off my blindfold and mockingly inform me that they were both Coke.

I have better things to do and so should you.

I guarantee the next time I walk into a restaurant this is what will happen:

I'll have a Coke.

We have Pepsi, is that OK?

Yes it is OK. You know why? Because they're both equally refreshing.

Here's how simple this Pepsi vs. Coke thing is for me, and for you too, I would imagine. If Pepsi was magically $1 cheaper per 12-pack than Coke, I would probably become a Pepsi drinker. And vice versa, of course.

Now, if you're the type to say that you find Pepsi horribly rancid but adore every sweet droplet of Coca-Cola, perhaps it's because you've been led to believe that it is not an option to think they're both pretty OK.

I guess the Pepsi vs. Coke war is a lot like the political landscape in our country. On the far right (Coke) and the far left (Pepsi), you have people saying the other side are nothing but vile deceptors who want to destroy America. No middle ground. No gray areas. No I-can-see-your-points. Just ideology to the death.

Meanwhile there are millions of people stuck in the middle realizing that in the end, they both pretty much taste the same.

p.s. It is my goal to have a new post every Monday so make sure to check back then.

I put the gal in egalitarian

2006-10-23T09:05:00.000-04:00

The way a job gets done around our house is usually decided by one thing: Whatever needed to get done the longest ago is what gets done first. But not always.

How we divide these tasks is a mystery to me. I might do laundry and fix breakfast one day and Erin might mow the lawn or wash the car the next. And then the next time those duties come up, we switch. Basically, carry your weight or there will be trouble. Luckily there’s never been too much trouble.

Whether a job is traditionally done by a man or a woman has never factored in. The only job Erin won’t do, for some reason, is order pizza over the phone.

What started as a straight egalitarian approach to marriage has evolved. One moment I was barbecuing – the only cooking deemed acceptable by the manliest of men – the next I am looking up recipes for stuffed flounder. One moment Erin is painting the bathroom, the next she is snaking a clogged bathtub drain.

This philosophy of ours reached a level of absurdity over the weekend. Not thinking anything out of the ordinary was taking place, Erin and I went about separate activities. But then it suddenly donned on me: I was in the kitchen finely chopping an onion for a homemade tartar sauce while Erin was busy working with plumbing fixtures and hanging cement board in a shower renovation project she had embarked upon.

For a moment I had to set the mincing knife aside, take off my apron, sit down and think. OK I wasn't really wearing an apron, but I tried to understand how I was in the kitchen preparing sauces and batters while my wife swung a hammer in a gutted bathroom.

How did it get to this point? We had somehow gone as far as embracing a complete male/female role reversal. Being married for 8 years, it's not something that has happened over night. But it got a major boost this summer, when we moved to Connecticut and bought a house.

Generally our house is in great condition for being built in 1927. It's not a fixer-upper, as some in the renovation community might say, but has a few areas here and there that could be improved upon if a person either had the money to pay to have it done or had the desire to do it themselves.

Erin falls into the latter category. Always one with a hankering for DIY, this was her chance to take on some projects. Her first big project was the guest bathroom. This involved in part, ripping out the old sink, counter and shower and then rebuilding everything from scratch, newer, bigger, better. I pledged my support from the start, embracing her new hobby.

But I was clear on one thing: If she was going to become a home improver, it was her deal, not mine. If she wanted to spend her weekends ripping up tile, grouting, painting, soldering and making countless trips to Lowe's, then she was certainly entitled. But just because it's normally men who improve homes, I shouldn't be forced to contribute. Sure I would jump in for the heavy lifting or be around for the occasional task that required two people. She is fine with this.

My shunning of home improvement came down to one issue: I don't enjoy it. I would much rather spend my free time hiking, reading, watching movies or writing. Being roped into episodes of "Flip That House" before embarking on a grueling plumbing project sounds like the kind of activity I would take up if I were sent to prison. I shutter just hearing Erin use DIY slang like "rip" for cutting wood with a power saw, or "demo" instead of the cumbersome "demolition" or "hit" to describe anything that can be done quickly (you can hit a wall with paint, a board with screws or a tub with caulk, among other things.)

While this provides reason for Erin's non-traditional behavior, when it comes to my actions I can only offer the excuse that it's not unheard of for men to be into serious cooking. I mean, look at all those male celebrity chefs (OK, this is not good for my case as a Google search for "Flamboyant chef" returned 397,000 hits).

Looking ahead, I see our non-traditional roles become more non-traditional. Because if Erin insists on rewiring outlets, unclogging drains and installing new sinks, the least I can do is serve her cold lemonade and whip up a decent meal for when she takes a break. And once she is done with her bathroom renovation, it will be my job to clean the new shower, mop the new floor and every once in a while throw down some Comet on the new sink

Thoughts on eye patches

2006-10-13T13:40:00.001-04:00

I recently discovered why pirates and sailors are always shown wearing eye patches. You're probably thinking it has something to do with those bowed machetes pirates enjoy brandishing or perhaps just some hard living on the open seas. But you'd be wrong.

Turns out it has nothing to do with injured or defective eyes. Ah, maybe it's something with the eye patch helping them look through a telescope. Again, incorrect.

Here's the deal: Often times on a boat, a captain would have to go from the bright light of day above deck to the dank darkness below deck and quickly performing critical maneuvers. When going below deck, he removes the eye patch and has one eye that is instantly accustomed to darkness.

They may have been barbaric and slovenly, but when it comes to quickly acclimating one eye to darkness, pirates were a brilliant group of seamen.

This raised some further issues regarding eye patches.

Have eye patches ever been portrayed in a non-maritime-related movie for reasons other than a) an easy way to identify a villain; b) an easy way to identify a lunatic; or c) used as some sort of metaphor for shortsightedness?

The answer, simply, is no. This is certainly unfair as I'm sure there are some standout citizens out there who wear eye patches. However, when encountering someone with an eye patch in real life, the initial reaction is to think they are somewhat sinister.

I remember in high school there was one teacher who was known as "the crazy Vietnam vet" and then there was another teacher known as "the teacher with the eye patch." For most of my high school years, I assumed these two teachers were one and the same. In hindsight, I have to admit it makes such perfect sense. Now that I think of it, there was also a teacher with an artificial arm that had a hook on the end. He might've have been the crazy Vietnam vet. Or he might have been the teacher with the eye patch. Or maybe it's all the same guy, I'm not quite sure.

Thinking further, at what point does someone wearing an eye patch go from creepy to intriguing? What kind of position do you have to be in where an eye patch not only doesn’t hurt you but somehow elevates your status?

Certainly anyone in a creative field. You could play classical guitar, write sestinas or illustrate comic books, it wouldn't matter. But let's say you're a sculptor and you work with metal. You've got some talent and have established a bit of a following. You appear at art fairs around the country and do reasonably well. You're one of thousands of artists making work that is slightly different but somewhat indistinguishable from the next guy. In the end, we've all seen abstract curvature, kinetics and iridescent finishes.

Take that same artist, the same work and give him an eye patch. He goes from being gifted and determined to becoming a guru, a genius, a myth. He goes from being that promising sculptor from Minneapolis to being that distinguished, visionary sculptor with the eye patch with an inspired creative spirit.

On the opposite end, say you’re a middle manager wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and a stained tie working for a struggling communications company looking to hire a low-level accounts supervisor. You've already interviewed four people for the job, none of them terribly impressive. You have one interview left and you're really hoping that this one comes through. When that guy walks through the door with an eye patch, you have to admit you're a little disappointed. The eye patch is simply a variable you hadn't prepared for.

Now say the job comes down to two people, all things are equal except one has an eye patch. Whether you like it or not, that eye patch comes into play. If you hire the guy with the eye patch, it's because you consciously decided that the eye patch was irrelevant to the job at hand. Either that or you hire him simply because you couldn't not hire him because of the eye patch.

Who knows, despite initial reactions, perhaps an eye patch tends to help instead of hurt.

I can, however, think of one occupation where an eye patch is bad every time: Ice cream man. If you are driving an ice cream truck through a neighborhood looking for children to buy popsicles and gum and you're wearing an eye patch, fully expect your sales to fall by at least 60 percent. They'll fall by 75 percent if you have an eye patch and a fake arm with a hook. If you have an eye patch, a hook and you're a crazy Vietnam veteran, you just might be teaching high school somewhere.

Tall for a woman

2006-10-10T14:17:00.000-04:00

The other day I was doing some thinking about Erin's height. This came after I had described her to someone as being "tall for a woman." With the average height for women being 5 feet 3 ½ inches, she is tall for a woman standing at 5 feet 10 inches. However, I realized that the part about "for a woman" was key. Because, compared to men, she is not tall. If she were, say, 6-foot-3, she would be tall not only for a woman, but for a man as well. And she would probably wear 36x36 jeans, which is quite frightening.

This led me to another thought. Since men are taller on average than women – the national average for a man is 5-foot-9 – what if I figured out how tall Erin would be if she were a guy? And please, quell your instincts to associate my thoughts with some suppressed desire wishing Erin were not female.

Here's what I did: Using some basic ratios, I compared Erin's height to the height of the average American female, which Erin is roughly 7 inches taller than, then compared that height to the height of the average American man.
I have discovered that, when controlling for the height disparities innate to the human species in regard to gender, Erin would be a gangly 6-foot-4 ½ if she were not born with the misfortune of being female.

That is quite tall, I would say. And having three older brothers who range somewhere between 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-5, her being 6-foot-4 ½ wouldn't be abnormal in her lofty family.

What did I do with this information? I told her to immediately call her 6-foot-3 brother to stick it to him that he was the shortest sibling in the family.

(For the record, I would be a boring 5-foot-7 if I were a woman.)

I'm confused, aren't you?

2006-09-27T14:45:00.000-04:00

So the media is leaked excerpts of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that states the Iraq war has done nothing to combat terrorism but has instead made the fight harder.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the Bush administration has been force-feeding us for the past three years. (If something is repeated over and over, does that make it true? Some would argue "yes.")

Our invasion and occupation of Iraq strengthening the terrorist cause. This is certainly unacceptable information. George Bush responds, saying media accounts of the leaked report would only "create confusion in the minds of the American people."

Confused. That's what happens in George Bush's world when Americans hear facts. They become confused.

Can Americans not think? Can Americans not handle a nuanced, complex situation? According to Bush, no, we cannot. He wants the Iraq war to be like those new allergy pills that dissolve peacefully with a sweet, citrus burst the moment they hit your tongue. Instead, leaked reports are giving us those big horse-pills that fall apart in your mouth, tasting like you had just licked the floor of a pharmacy. With no water.

Come to think of it, if all the information you receive had been delicately crafted in Bush's fantasy land and/or filtered through Fox News, then I guess you would be confused.

We've been told again and again how necessary this war is, it being the central front to the war on terror. Fight them there or fight them here, they say. It's that simple. Wait, our government's top spy and intelligence analysts say Iraq has made the war on terror worse? That's . . . confusing.

When you hear "mission accomplished" and "last throes" and then watch thousands more U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians killed, that becomes confusing. When Bush succeeds at linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and then five years later says "Oh did I do that? My bad!" That becomes confusing.

Thanks. Do your best to confuse us and then blame us for being confused.

Endless shrimp

2006-09-14T12:39:00.000-04:00

I once ate six corndogs for lunch. Why six? Because that's how many there were. If eight had come in the package I would've had eight. And I would've felt the same way after eating them, disgusting. Not only because of the volume of corndogs, but for the simple existence of the corn dog itself. Take an unhealthy conglomeration of low-grade scraps from the floor of the slaughterhouse, process it all together into a fatty, salty, unnaturally shaped log of meat, batter it, fry it and put it on a stick to make an unhealthy choice easier to stuff into your face. What pleasure.

I once went to a pizzeria and ordered a 16-inch pizza. Once I ate my way through two-thirds of the pie, I felt the rest would be too little to take home and decided to finish the job. After the eighth and final piece, I stared at the empty pedestal the pizza had been served on. Not even crust had survived my caloric binge. I expressed a desire to purge then waddled out of the restaurant.

These had been two instances that I had always recalled as times I ate way too much for no good reason. I ate, ate and kept eating because food remained. Like a dog left alone with a platter of honey barbecued chicken wings, I stopped not out of choice but because the food ran out. I have to admit though, from time to time it's fun to do, as embarrassingly gluttonous, slobbish and unhealthy as that may sound. It's exactly why the moment I saw a chain seafood restaurant's commercials for all-you-can-eat shrimp, I knew I would take part. I couldn't think of a better predicament to be in, imagining myself sitting before platter after platter of shrimp with an unending supply of cocktail sauce.

Upon settling into a booth, I spotted the so-called endless shrimp on the menu. I questioned the waitress how the process worked. To start, she explained, you choose two dishes from the list of fried shrimp, coconut shrimp, popcorn shrimp, shrimp scampi and shrimp pasta. Once you polish off those two you can order more shrimp, one dish at a time, for as long as you want.

"Hell yes," I said, pointing at the selection on the menu. I imagined the waitress coming out at some point and muttering the line from Seinfeld "The ocean called. It's running out of shrimp." That's how much shrimp I planned to put away.

Already nestled in the land where shrimp never end, I was jostled with unexpected questions from the waitress. Garden salad or Caesar? Baked potato, mashed potato or French fries? In what-the-hey fashion I shrugged my shoulders and offered my request. More for the money, I thought.

Further adding to the feast was a basket of garlic butter biscuits laid on our table. What I thought would aid me in my overeating endeavors – starving myself in preparation – turned out to be the first downfall. So hungry was I that I inhaled a Caesar salad and three biscuits without much thought. My hunger deluded me into thinking salad and biscuits would bounce off me like Jell-O and saltine crackers.

After giving ample time to let the salad and biscuits begin to take effect, the shrimp finally arrived, fried and scampi per my specifications. Twelve of each assortment, the shrimp weren't jumbo but were not tiny either. Like the salad and biscuits, I put away 24 shrimp and a scoop of mashed potatoes with little effort.

And then I waited. The waitress was suddenly nonexistent. And as I sat, my stomach began to send a clear message to my brain. "Things are filling up down here, Jack."

The waitress reappeared and I quickly put in an order for coconut shrimp. And waited again. If they were going to advertise this never-ending shrimp extravaganza, I thought, at least have some ready to go.

And then it became clear. These were definite steps of conspiracy inserted into the endless shrimp process to limit the number of shrimp a person can humanly consume.
The salad and biscuits? Obviously it costs less to plump someone up on salad and biscuits than with shrimp. And the one-at-a-time policy gave waiters an opportunity to drag their feet when taking and putting in your next order.

"Bah!" I thought.

Nonetheless I put in order after order. I stopped after 60 shrimp, my head on the table as I groaned "No more shrimp." I stopped when the word "scampi" began to make me want to throw up, when grease and butter on my hands looked to be permanent. Unfortunately I also stopped because the waitress had once again disappeared, saying in some way, "OK, Jumbo, you've had enough."

Thoughts that result from spending 9 hours on the couch watching football and eating nachos

2006-09-11T22:55:00.000-04:00

Sunday was the first time I had heard of Rams' safety OJ Atogwe. Upon hearing his name pronounced (OH-jay Uh-TOG-way), it occurred to me that his name is Pig Latin for Joe Watog. This got me thinking of the possibilities of piecing together an All-Pig Latin team. With a first and last name that translates directly, OJ Atogwe would be a first-teamer, no doubt. People with last names only -- John Elway comes to mind -- would be second-teamers.

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An advertisement for the Schick Quattro razor raises the question again, "How many blades will finally be enough on a razor?"
To Schick, the answer is a paltry four. But to Gillette, makers of the Fusion shaving system, the answer is a resounding five, as they own current bragging rights in this game to see who can put the most unnecessary blades on a razor.
The sad thing is that there are very talented scientists, as we speak, trying to figure out how to make it seem like you need six blades on a disposable razor for the closest shave possible. But how close can a shave possibly get? What is the ultimate goal of all these additional blades on the razor? That your shave is so close that you'll never have to shave again? That your whiskers fret at the sight of so many blades, rescind back into your face and apologize profusely?

(In related news, Burger Kings rolls out advertising for its Triple Whopper. How many beef patties will it take before even the biggest slob finally says "OK stop stacking patties on my hamburger.")

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A beer ad touts that Miller Lite has half the carbs of Bud Light. Besides the concern over carbs being so 2003, if you are the type to obsess over carbs, perhaps beer shouldn't be your drink of choice.

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When people use the word workaholic, obviously they're using a derivative of the word alcoholic. Instead of being addicted to alcohol, they're addicted to work. Fair enough, but shouldn't it be called a workic? Even more annoying is the term chocoholic.
The only way these hybrid words would make sense is if you were addicted to drinking alcohol in the workplace or if you had a chemical dependency on alcoholic chocolate.

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Samsung unveils multiple versions of an advertisement for its flashy high definition TV, each version featuring a former-white-quarterback-turned-NFL-analyst. So far Steve Young, Troy Aikman and Dan Marino have participated. I can envision them getting the much older former-white-quarterbacks-turned-NFL-analysts Joe Theismann, Phil Simms and Terry Bradshaw to pitch for their standard, non-state of the art TVs.

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Speaking of white quarterbacks doing commercials, I saw Peyton Manning appear in five different ads (two for Gatorade, one for NFL apparel, one for Sprint and one for DirecTV).
What makes Peyton Manning the hottest NFL pitch man of the moment? To start he's a well-spoken, likable, goofy, nerdy white guy willing to poke fun at himself. Pretty much non-threatening and wholesome on anyone's scale. He's also the NFL's best quarterback, which doesn't hurt.

2006-09-08T00:44:00.000-04:00

Check out my latest short story An Original Performance Art Piece at Poor Mojo's Almanack.

Here's an excerpt:
Dave took some convincing but it wasn't anything a 10-pack of tacos, a quart of chocolate milk, a miniature ceramic burro and $75 cash couldn't do. He agreed to spread the word, but would go about it discreetly, seeking only musicians interested in the avante garde. The tactic nearly backfired when a quartet of low brass players thought the term "avante garde" was code for homosexuality. Dave was roughed up a bit before nimbly looking up the term in a pocket dictionary while his ribs were being stomped. Realizing the error, the low brass quartet apologized and treated Dave to an arrangement of the theme from Guys and Dolls.

Humiliation and destroyed relationships: A fantasy football draft story

2006-09-03T15:09:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 18 seconds

Fantasy football had always been a source of embarrassment and soiled relationships for me. While it usually takes an entire season to humiliate myself and destroy at least one acquaintance, this year I managed both before the season had even started.

My fantasy football draft was a disaster. But it wasn't who I did or did not draft – Tiki Barber, Anquan Boldin, Kurt Warner, blah, blah, blah – the players don't matter. It was the events surrounding the draft that made me want to find a necktie, a closet and cut my life short.

It was one of those drafts that take place online where you can draft live or have a robot pick your team using players you ranked at the last minute (computerized drafts are widely known to produce teams with four kickers, three defenses and a handful of players residing on injured reserve.) To start, the draft did not take place at a time likely be free of prior commitments and distractions . . . like "work" or "a career". It was held at 4:45 p.m. on a Thursday, which begs the question, "What productive citizen is free to devote an hour to something as superfluous as fantasy football at 4:45 on a Thursday?"

While technically "at work" during this time, what other choice did I have but to proceed with the draft and somehow draw as little attention to myself as possible?

My fundamental fear was that what I was engaging in would somehow become widespread knowledge. I imagined a large gathering of people – coworkers, interns, my boss, higher-ups, the bosses of my boss' boss – everybody all in one place. Somehow the fact that David Holub was drafting a fantasy football team online while on the company's clock would be broadcast in front of all.

But events that could possibly realize these grave fears were so remote that I didn't give them much thought. But from the start, there were forces working against me.

Being at work at 4:45 on a Thursday, I was forced to rank most of my players beforehand given the high likelihood that I wouldn't be able to devote my full attention to a live draft.

Upon arriving at work – 15 minutes until draft time – I immediately logged on to the draft site, the first successful logon for the day (the trusty web site had been in the crapper the entire day). Following that, I checked my e-mail and discovered a broomstick being firmly jammed into the spokes of my fantasy football draft plans.
A going away party had been scheduled at 4:30 that day. So skip it, you say. And I would have, if the going away honoree was anybody but my immediate supervisor, the kind soul who hired me and gave me a chance to do great things with my career.
And since the sendoff was for a manager, it attracted the types of higher-ups that wouldn't have shown for a going away party for, say, me.

Since I still had 15 minutes until the draft, I figured I would go to the party, hear some goodbye speeches and then silently slip out in the name of fantasy football. This worked perfectly. I hung around for a few minutes, made my presence known, did some glad-handing, slammed some cake into my face, then quietly backed out of the room and ran to relieve the robot from drafting my team.

Just when I thought I was in the clear, sheepishly drafting at my computer, I saw a coworker hustling from the room I had deserted five minutes earlier.

"There you are! Come on back!" she summonsed.

When I left the party, things seemed on the verge of winding down, the point where people engaged in mindless chitchat only to avoid having to go back to work. Apparently things had miraculously reorganized. And out of this reorganization came a worst-case scenario, something that would demand my presence, a public roll call, an event that would make those in attendance say "Where is Dave? What is he doing that would take him away from this special occasion?"

My departing boss had gifts for the members of her staff and had been handing them out publicly while saying something personal about each recipient.

"Awl Hell," I growled when discovering this fact.

My supervisor, my gift and the attention of many inquiring coworkers awaited my arrival. I tried to be vague explaining that I had just "stepped away." This didn't seem to suffice and I wound up broadcasting my whereabouts to all within earshot. Fortunately by that point, people were mingling and chatting and some had returned to their work. I graciously accepted my gift and attempted to genuinely apologize for my absence.

With the draft now common knowledge among many, I returned to my desk to see it through, dammit. But the problems didn't end there. Seemingly every time my turn would come to draft, my phone would ring or someone would stop by to discuss pesky work-related matter. But what could I expect at 4:45 on a Thursday?

By then the damage had been done. Everyone would see me from then on as the guy who selfishly skipped the going away party for his celebrated departing supervisor, someone who went out on a line to create his position and hire him, a person he should be indebted to and very well might never see again. All for something as meaningless, trivial and juvenile as fantasy football.

Or perhaps that was just how I felt.

Wayne Brady for $90/hour

2006-08-31T02:02:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 28 seconds

We didn’t know why we had gone to the Mohegan Sun Casino until we were there. On our way to hit the obligatory buffet to stuff our fat faces with absurd quantities of mashed potatoes before some low-stakes slots, I noticed a poster advertising a performance that evening by Wayne Brady, the improv comedian made famous by his stint on TV’s Whose Line is it Anyway.

“What pleasurable happenstance,” I thought as I stared into Wayne Brady’s way-too-white teeth on the performance bill.

Like that hot dog cooker you bought on impulse at Target, the Wayne Brady show was our first impulse comedy show.

However, tickets were $45 apiece. I don’t know if it was because we were in a casino, where matters of money seemingly cease to exist, but $45 didn’t seem too steep.

Told the show was sold out, we learned that there was a special line to stand in for the chance to purchase tickets on a first-come-first-serve basis if they become available due to cancellations.

Since there is no scalping on the reservation, as we learned earlier, I supposed the special line was the only way people without tickets could change their circumstances.

After the buffet, where I successfully put away four desserts, we went to stand in the Schlubs Without Tickets line a recommended-yet-inconvenient 1 hour and 15 minutes before Wayne Brady and his teeth sparkled in front of a live audience. We were the second couple in line.

Here are some of the highlights we see during that time:

**A kid with the babyface of a 10-year-old who was 6-foot-3. I desperately want to ask him if he had some sort of anti-aging disorder and was really 28 or if, as expected, he is indeed a grotesquely tall 9-year-old.

**The Connecticut Sun of the WNBA play a playoff game that night at the Mohegan Sun Arena. We watch thousands of fans headed to the game walk past. At first we recognize many of these fans only if they wear Sun gear – jerseys, hats, sweatshirts, etc. However, the closer we look, the more we notice couples or groups of women headed to the arena. I note that there is not a lot of long hair on these women. Or femininity. I am reminded of a story about the marketing tactics of the WNBA that I had read years earlier. Recognizing that the sight of hundreds of lesbians shuffle past is quite unique, I wonder what the gay male equivalent of a WNBA game is.

**The couple in line ahead of us is handed a ticket for free by a woman who claims “I don’t really want this.”

**A section of the floor in front of us has the slightest raise in the carpet, so slight that you can’t even tell by looking closely. This doesn’t stop a number of people from tripping, looking back to see what had tripped them, only to see nothing but ordinary casino carpet. Sorry saps, I mutter.

The Wayne Brady show began very impressively. To start, his stooge/assistant/fellow performer solicited the audience for words you wouldn’t find in a gangsta rap song. People shouted words like “dude,” “marshmallow” and “serendipitous” which were written on large sheets of paper.

Wayne came out to a hip-hop beat and performed an improv rap incorporating the words. I was quite impressed.

Unfortunately that was the show’s peak.

The rest of the improv sketches were what you would expect. People shouted out movie styles or occupations which Wayne would then incorporate into a song or sketch.

However, seemingly every other sketch ended at Wayne’s insistence because it was not funny and/or failed to go anywhere. Wayne had his moments – some good impressions of a mime, an Italian gangster and the band Creed. But ultimately his performance came off as hopelessly average, lacking the comedic zip he has displayed on bigger stages, for bigger audiences.

To make matters worse, the show ended after an hour, forcing us to shrug our shoulders and walk out of the theater wondering if Wayne would run back on stage and make us feel like we didn’t just waste $45.

Erin contemplated how much money we had just paid per minute for the show. I tried a quick calculation in my head before settling on “Too much.”

Call it buyer’s remorse.

Waking up to a marching band

2006-08-25T23:52:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 1 second

Like the unwitting target of a cruel and coordinated practical joke, I was woken up everyday this week by a marching band practicing across the street from my bedroom window.

Brass, percussion, barking band teachers, it was all there each morning.

By getting off of work at 12:30 a.m. and not hitting the sack until close to 3, I am normally still sleeping the peaceful sleep of a child at 9 a.m., the time when the marching band fired up each day.

Given the unlikely chance of being woken up by a marching band for five days straight, I am left to ponder the possibilities of what might wake me up next week.

Taking into account such factors as weather patterns, neighborhood history, tides and seasonal angst, there is a high probability that I will awaken to either a clown playing banjo in the kitchen, a high-stakes chili cook-off and auction next door or a cage of chimpanzees in the next room working on typewriters.

Coerced naps

2006-08-25T13:35:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

I’ve had a history of losing consciousness for some time now. Over the past 13 years I’ve done my share of fainting, blacking out six times since 1993.

I’ve managed to pass out from:

· Taking medicine to which I later learned that I was a tad allergic.
· A who-knows-why high school motivational speech in the auditorium from a guy who survived some horrific accident. (Things were going along fine until we’re suddenly watching a graphic video showing the inside of his ripped-to-shreds leg. I stayed semiconscious but my vision looked like a TV set on a channel it does not receive.)
· Watching my future wife get stitches taken out of her arm
· Getting shots before heading off to college

While my fainting seems to be medical in nature, it is more complex than that, not anything specific. It’s not like I would be fine as long as I avoid, say, those live surgery shows on cable (who watches those?) or gruesome crime scene photos. There’s something deep in my brain that for certain images says “OK if you don’t stop looking at that, I’m going to make you stop looking. Crazy brain. Just the fleeting thought of a ligament tear or bone dislocation makes me close my eyes, plug my ears and squirm helplessly wile humming Van Halen’s Panama. (Yes, Panama.)

I only see these tendencies becoming worse as I now get anxious in almost any medical situation. This includes medical situations involving my dogs. The last time I took the dogs to the vet I sat in the waiting room taking deep breaths through my nose to ward off any light-headedness.

My latest bout of fainting happened a few weeks ago during a trip to Minneapolis. What prompted the episode set the bar even lower on what will cause me to lose consciousness.

As we walked from our hotel to the car, I remembered that I had forgotten something in the room. I returned to the room as Erin went to pull the car around to pick me up.

Rushing back into the room I remembered that the large, heavy door would slam raucously if left to close on its own. Being a courteous fellow, I left my hand in the door to catch it before it slammed. This turned out to be a costly decision. Instead of possibly disturbing fellow hotel guests, my finger took the brunt of the door’s vicious closing.

While it hurt like a mother, there was something more that my mind couldn’t handle. After kicking the bed in hopes to somehow transfer the pain from me to the mattress, I helplessly began to feel dizzy.

But not only was I alone in a hotel room with the lone key, I was also expected promptly by Erin in the parking lot. I had to keep it together long enough to make it to the car.

Riding the elevator down, I instinctively put my hands on my knees and forced my head below my waist. Why I did this, I don’t know. In my haziness, I thought it seemed sensible.

By the time I was in the parking lot, I might as well have been in Guatemala although I did manage to recognize our rented PT Cruiser. Stumbling as I stepped into the car, my head hit the back of the seat almost instantly.

With a swelling body temperature and on the brink of losing consciousness, I retained enough wherewithal to adjust the a/c to a satisfactory level and enough embarrassment not to tell Erin exactly why I was about to take an involuntarily siesta.

Fortunately for me I didn’t have to. In our frequent state of goofiness, I have on more than one occasion faked like I was passed out. This usually goes on for a few moments until I get the tradeoff that I want from Erin: fake fainting for fake sympathy.

Given this history, Erin – rightfully so – thought I was joshing. “OK, wake up Dave,” Erin sings in sarcastic panic. Ten seconds go by as I remain unresponsive, my eyes shut. 20 seconds. 30 seconds. For a full 3 minutes Erin thinks I am still joking, well beyond the point of OK-it’s-not-funny-anymore.

As a lone tear trickles down my face and strange sounds originate in the back of my throat, Erin begins to understand that I am in la-la land and not just taking the pass-out game to an award-winning level.

I come to after about five minutes, sweating generously, battling confusion and a state of nausea. The constant ringing of the seatbelt chime doesn’t help me figure out what is happening. I find the only way to keep from throwing up is to close my eyes, which eases me back to a state of unconsciousness. A minute later I dry-heave myself awake and Erin smartly pulls over and opens the car door. Only a portion of my stomach’s contents come up.

By then I was beginning to emerge back into the world I had left 11 minutes earlier. My first request was for a milkshake.

I’m not sure why I passed out after slamming my finger in the door. This raises the frightening question of what I will pass out over next time. Clipping my dog’s nails. Taking a ball to the funny bone during a game of ping pong. Tweaking my hammy during a friendly game of hoops. These all have the potential to send me to the ground.

But as long as nothing crazy happens, like swallowing my tongue or fainting behind the wheel, I actually don’t mind the process. Right before you go, your world clouds up and half of you knows what’s going on and the other half doesn’t. Once the lights go out it’s the deepest sleep you can imagine, like one big coerced nap.

Why Crocs are so ridiculous

2006-08-21T23:57:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 20 seconds

Out at breakfast the other day, we sipped on our beverages as we kindly waited for our order.

I noticed a gentleman sitting at a table nearby wearing a long-sleeve button down shirt, no tie and khaki slacks. He was by himself but was in the midst of a lively business conversation. Not talking quietly, he used business jargon while speaking about such impressive matters involving The Presentation, Power Numbers and Selling Points. Not seeing his entire face, I assumed he was talking on one of those tiny phones people walk around with fastened to their ears that make you want to rip it off the side of their head and scream in their face.

But it was his choice of footwear that struck me as utterly ridiculous. I noticed that he chose to compliment his business casual attire with Crocs. Crocs on top of dark blue dress socks no less. Talking loudly into a cell phone about business nonsense was suddenly not one of his most unfavorable traits.

If you’re not familiar with Crocs, count yourself fortunate. Crocs are the brightly colored rubber, unisex gardening clogs that have somehow established themselves as hip and fashionable.

You might have noticed young children wearing them at the park, women wearing them to church or businessmen wearing them at your office complex.

I racked my brain trying to figure out how something so annoying and completely asinine could catch on. I have only one explanation.

Simply put, it was an experiment to see if it was possible to turn the lamest footwear imaginable into a wildly popular fad.

With the slogan being “Dumb on all levels,” they would base their concept on a shoe not known for its overall versatility or comfort, a shoe traditionally popular only among circles of middle-aged suburban housewives and other financially comfortable older women: gardening clogs.

“OK these are pretty stupid but I can see how someone might mistake these as so dumb they’re cool” one shoe developer remarked on an early prototype. “I think we can do worse.”

The team focused on color, starting with a shortlist of only the tackiest of shoe colors, hues designed to not match anything in your current wardrobe: Bright red, yellow, orange, baby blue.

As a final touch, they stripped away all signs of extravagance, focusing on a more simple, stripped down effect, made with nothing more than utilitarian plastic.

What you see (a cheap-looking, gaudy plastic gardening clog, not quite sandal, not quite shoe) is what you get. And they had the valor to price them anywhere from $30 to $50.

I have room in my heart for women and girls who choose Crocs. It doesn’t seem that crazy for them to wear these abominations out shopping, to the beach or to the park. Perfectly acceptable.

But for the guys who wear Crocs – especially with dark socks and business attire – I can’t force you to stop what you’re doing or intimidate you to change shoes. My only request is that you acknowledge that you wear women’s footwear. Just say it out loud to someone you don’t know, “I wear women’s footwear.”

And one more question for the guys: What would it take for you to not wear Crocs? Do they need to outfit each pair with wedge heels? Do they need to accessorize them with glitter or pink and yellow flowers? Or would you wear anything so long as somebody somewhere deemed it fashionable?

Questions for you, the reader:
1. Why do YOU think Crocs are so stupid?
2. What would it take for you to wear Crocs?
3. When was the last time you saw someone wearing Crocs that it made you want to pull all your hair out and stuff it down their throat until they had trouble taking oxygen?

A fit of laughter

2006-08-19T12:56:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 59 seconds

I saw Erin laugh so hard last night that I became frightened and mildly concerned for her safety.

The object of the prolonged hilarity will sound so stupid and distracting that I hesitate to mention this vital fact at all, as it certainly won’t sound funny.

We were watching a show that in part featured a gaggle of aging hippies, spiritualist and new-agers involved in a bout of individual experimentation expressed in the form of tribal dancing. This of course took place in a nicely lit dance studio to the beat of tribal congas. Their arms flailed and legs jimmied about. They danced as if they had been overcome by either the Spirit of the Goddess or perhaps some sort of hallucinogen. One middle-aged man bounced up and down with his eyes closed and an open-mouthed smile while making motions with his hands like a basketball referee calls traveling. These people were certainly possessed by something more than a conga drum, I thought.

The cameras were mostly trained on one person, the focus of the show. But there was another man, a gray and balding fellow in baby blue linen pants and no shoes. Never quite the focal point, he would shuffle in and about the screen performing a variety of free-form movements.

One of these jigs caught us both as quite humorous, Erin in particular.

Before I go further I have to explain something for those of you not familiar with Erin's laughing habits. Erin is generally a happy and content person (a student once asked her how she was able to smile all the time). We laugh at things consistently but the laughs are not always audible and seldom last longer than your standard ha-ha. This is to say that Erin is not a giggler and does not laugh at everything all the time.

Using our digital video recording device, we re-watched the footage of the dancing man. Once. Twice. We both laugh at equal intensities. Four times. Erin is laughing harder than me. Six times. It's clear things have gotten out of hand. Eight times. I am laughing at her laughing.

As we continue to watch the man dancing on a loop, Erin's laughter begins to sound like uncontrollable wailing, like that of a mother who had just buried her young fraternal twins. I begin to wonder if something evil has overtaken her body or is at least tickling her relentlessly. I get off the couch to look out the window but more just to make sure my eternal wellbeing is not hijacked.

I start to look away in horror, glancing back every now and then to notice her face is pained, almost pleading for something to make it all stop.

Just when I thought it was over, there would be silence before the sound of tribal congas started again and Erin would go back into an uncontrollable release.

I contemplated if I needed to take action. Should I call 911? The cops? Perform the Heimlich maneuver? I began to wonder if her wailing laughter might never stop, becoming a permanent part of our lives.

The experience reminded me of the phrase “A fit of laughter” so I decided to look the word “fit” up in the dictionary. It was defined as “A sudden, violent appearance of a disease.” It used as an example the phrase “A fit of malaria.” Perhaps Erin did take on a fit of malaria, presumably after being bitten by a very humorous mosquito.

Of course the laughing did finally stop after 12 viewings, possibly more. But it made me think about spells of uncontainable laughter.

It’s not so much that the object of your laughing is so funny – whether it is a home video, a friend’s anecdote or a new age dancer on TV. You think about it an hour later and say “OK it wasn’t THAT funny.” Rather, there must be something in our brains that simply triggers an emotional release, seizing the opportunity to dump some pent-up tension, much like when people find themselves literally sobbing unforgettably over spilled milk.

The new-agers on TV were taking part in tribal dancing as a form of self expression but mainly as a release of emotional and bodily tension, to free themselves of life’s stresses and anxieties. I guess Erin was doing the same.

S'mores: Our country's most overrated delight

2006-08-17T11:19:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 6 seconds

In a moment of spontaneity last week, Erin suggested we make s'mores. We already had the chocolate bars and were heading to the grocery store anyway, where a bounty of graham crackers and marshmallows surely awaited.

Just the thought of s'mores makes my mouth yearn for the rich, creamy gooeyness of roasted marshmallows soulfully uniting with smooth milk chocolate sandwiched between two crisp graham crackers. And that's precisely the problem I have. S'mores sound so good, so perfect and so tempting. It’s exactly what makes them the most overrated food in the United States.

Once you go to the trouble of making s'mores you tell yourself that you will never do it again.

Here's why:

· For starters, you have to build a fire. What a pain. (Without firewood or an appropriate fire grate in our backyard, we actually ignited our gas grill and took it from there. What idiots we are).

· Usually made outdoors where tables are often nowhere to be found, you find yourself – likely in the dark – fumbling around with loose graham crackers, chocolate, wrappers and piping-hot marshmallows, all near an open flame. Not the safety I like to see in childrens' food.

· Once the s'more is assembled, what you thought would be a warm sensation turns out to consist of chilled graham crackers, cold chocolate and a marshmallow that despite being engulfed in flames three seconds prior is still hard and cool in the center.

· Upon your first bite, the marshmallow oozes out the side onto you hands and half of the graham cracker crumbles onto the ground. The other half crumbles onto your shirt.

· Even with your enthusiasm, you are only able to eat two s'mores because they are so sweet. This leaves you with an entire box of graham crackers, a giant bag of giant marshmallows and a bucket of candy bars – loads of food items that you bought specifically for this event and will never use again.

Despite these things, s'mores enjoy a delightful reputation. Talk about s'mores and people light up, reminiscing about camping trips and other s'mores' stereotypes. There are s'mores that come ready-made as cookies, Häagen-Dazs makes s'mores ice cream and Hershey's puts out a s'mores candy bar, just to name a few.

The marshmallow package even features a picture of a s'more because they know just the sight of s'mores will get people to buy a pillow-sized package of marshmallows they wouldn’t buy otherwise (the marshmallows were grouped in a wink-wink section that included graham crackers and chocolate bars, not uncommon in supermarkets across the country).

I think it's time everyone revisit and reevaluate their feelings on s'mores. For such an impractical treat, s'mores have been over-hyped and overexposed for too long.

Who doesn't love deviled eggs?

2006-08-16T14:53:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 42 seconds

A barbecue over the weekend reminded of a food that immediately went to the top of my list of Most Underrated Foods: Deviled eggs.

Give me one example of a potluck or barbecue where the plate of deviled eggs wasn’t the first thing to go. While one person will take a spoonful of baked beans but skip the au gratin potatoes, the next person will take some au gratin and skip the baked beans. But they will both take a deviled egg.

People love these things. They shuffle through the line and if there are any deviled eggs left, people will take at least one but likely two or three without thinking.

We eat them in two bites, remark how we love deviled eggs and how we haven’t had them in a while and then somehow forget about them until our next potluck.

This left me scratching my head. Clearly everyone loves deviled eggs. Why aren’t deviled eggs everywhere? Why aren’t deviled eggs in the pre-made food section in the deli of your neighborhood grocer or listed anywhere on anyone’s list of favorite foods? Why aren’t deviled eggs included at all-you-can-eat buffets or featured on appetizer menus? Tell me you wouldn’t order that.

Why does it take a get-together meal for people to make deviled eggs? You might say it’s because they’re difficult and time-consuming to make. And you’d be wrong. Sure it takes 20 minutes of foresight to boil the eggs but once the eggs are boiled, it takes 10 minutes tops. Prove me wrong. Take three deviled eggs in your lunch today.

If they were sitting in front of me right now, I think I would eat at least eight deviled eggs. I bet you would too.

Up next: One of the most overrated foods in the United States

How did it get to this point?

2006-08-15T08:20:00.000-04:00

This blog entry is a comment on the previous blog entry regarding a ridiculous catalogue for baby merchandise I received in the mail. So I might be useful to scroll down to read that first . . .but I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything.

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 35 seconds

On the surface it appears that modern parents are into their kids more than ever, placing their children’s happiness and safety on a very high level.

At first glance, this catalogue seems to be all about kids and all about helping parents in their desire to keep them happy and safe. But I would argue that this catalogue enables parents to do just the opposite.

Items like crib nets and bars over windows allow parents to believe that they’ve insulated their children from danger. With an easy purchase they can eliminate any perceived threat they can think of.

Instead of supervising their children, parents can more easily buy supervision. They can cover appliances in plastic or mesh, install gates and bars on the entrances and exit of each room and secure every cabinet with a lock. Parents can check one more thing off that they don’t have to worry about. The line between a parent’s peace of mind and the safety of the child is blurred. Who is the boxed-in outlet cover for, the child or the “responsible” parent? (I won’t even discuss parents who surely buy these products just to keep up with others. Imagine being the only parent who doesn’t have rubber bumpers on all your table edges!)

Products like fire ladders, helmets and special crib blankets aren’t as much about child safety as much as they are for parent anxiety. They create the appearance that their children are safe when, in fact, their children were safe all along. The question isn’t the number of children who have died in house fires. The question is the number of children that have not died in house fires because their parents bought some sort of fire-safety device. That comparison, I’m sure, would not be promoted by the manufacturers of these products.

In addition to satisfying their safety obsessions, the catalogue also supplies parents with the necessities to keep children constantly occupied.

Kids have become conditioned to the need to be busy and entertained continuously. That’s why 3-year-olds have their own TVs and DVD players and 5-year-olds are playing hand-held video games at the Olive Garden. Meanwhile, parents outfit the back seats of the car with cup holders, TV screens and coloring tables. And, as the catalogue showed, they turn their bathtubs into delightfully colorful playpens full of toys, games and other gadgets to make routine bathing fun, interesting and engaging.

Am I suggesting that some of these products are not useful or in some cases necessary? No. I think many people create an environment that they deem secure, comfortable and entertaining and too often stop there, thinking they have provided as much as any parent could.

Do I think all safety and caution should be set aside? No. But we’ve gone thousands of years without nets on our cribs and helmets for our babies. What has changed?

Do I think parents should refrain from buying a few items to make their lives a little easier? Not really. But when you are carrying around a padded, foldable toilet seat cushion for your kid, just take a minute and try to remember how it got to that point.

You have got to be kidding

2006-08-13T11:54:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 42 seconds

Yesterday, I got a glimpse into a world of which I am not a part of. That world is the one of children and parenting and it came in the form of a catalogue I received innocently in the mail.

Recently moved in to a new house, we have discovered that the postal service will forward a lot of mail to a new address. Something it won’t forward, however, is catalogues. Those are stubbornly shipped to the same address relentlessly, regardless who lives at the residency (us) or who had the initial interest in, say, expensive mail-order fruit (the people who lived here before).

One of the catalogues that came with our house is called One Step Ahead: Thoughtfully Selected Products To Help With Baby . . . Every Step Of The Way.

Its cover features freaking adorable toddlers put into crap-your-pants cute Halloween costumes against their will. Although constrained in a scarecrow costume and pumpkin suit and sitting on a scratchy bail of hay, the two youngsters seem to be having a wonderful time. (I won’t even get into the other photo on the cover that features a kid in a penguin suit. What’s remarkable is the real penguin in the photo’s foreground, making it appear like the kid was dropped into the penguin house at the zoo. Now that would be a reason to smile.)

Also included on the cover is the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval to give the catalogue some official clout.

The first few pages were unremarkable – more Halloween costumes, strollers and stroller accessories, blocks, bookshelves and various devices to lug kids around in. (Let me say this. Until your kid is old enough to express an interest in Halloween – the ability to talk should be one requirement – putting them in a costume should be treated the same in society as dressing up your pets. That is to say, it should be mocked and ridiculed.)

Three-quarters through the catalogue, in the section titled Safety was when things got ridiculous. It was a picture of a baby crawling on a floor wearing a large bulbous, diaper-looking helmet. The level of sheer absurdity and parental nonsense that allowed this helmet to exist nearly made me strangle myself dead.

Judging by this catalogue, undoubtedly profitable and sent to thousands of households, there are many parents who, on the surface, seem to be obsessed and fanatical with their children’s safety and the perceived dangers they face.

The safety products sorted out into four main categories:

1. Coverings for household items to prevent kids from curiously jamming fingers, heads or limbs into or through dangerous objects.

Items included:
· Computer box cover
· TV button cover
· DVD player cover
· Power strip cover
· Stove shield
· Individual oven knob shields
· Bundled cords tube
· Loose cord tube
· A lock for the controls on the blinds
· Doorknob deactivating shield
· Toilet paper roll clamp
· spring-loaded outlet protector

Item that took it too far: If the spring-loaded outlet protector wasn’t enough, there is a plastic box that covers the entire outlet and the plugs going to the wall, leaving nothing to chance (Grown adults can’t even figure out how to plug or unplug anything!)

2. Barriers

Items included:
· steel white bars to place in a window (He’ll never play Superman again!)
· plastic to put over the banister rails
· mesh to put over the deck rails
· steel gates
· retractable gates
· foldable mesh gates
· fire place gates
· pressure-mount gates
· gates to match your oak woodwork
· gates to section off entire expansive living spaces

Item that took it too far: The shopping cart cover, a padded donut three feet in diameter that is harnessed around a sitting child. The disc creates a 360-degree area that is soft, empty, and germ-free where the kid cannot touch or put his fingers on or through anything dangerous or dirty. From the looks of it, he won’t be able to move at all, save for his arms and perhaps maybe some light neck stretching. Who knew that shopping carts were such dirty safety hazards?

3. Locks, locks and . . . locks

Items included:
· magnetic locks
· screw-less self-adhesive locks
· toilet locks
· a lock for cabinet knobs (looks and works like The Club on a car)
· A harness that keeps baby strapped into the shopping cart (doubles as a leash to keep baby tethered in the event baby is let out of shopping cart)
· security straps that lock corner cabinets
· oven door locks
· For that one cabinet that your kid can still open herself, there’s a wedge to put by the hinges so her curious hands won’t get crushed.

Item that took it too far: A device to keep that pesky dresser locked against the wall so it won’t fall on the unsupervised toddler who uses the open drawers as steps.

4. Products that scare their way into your home

Items included:
· Mesh feeder to place food in so your baby doesn’t choke on fresh produce, “invented by a dad whose baby nearly died choking on a biscuit,” the catalogue touts.
· Extra-wide sun canopy for your stroller. “Careful: most stroller canopies still leave some tender skin exposed! Don’t take chances,” it explains.
· The crib blanket that looks like a combination of a vest and a sleeping bag that “eliminates the danger of loose crib blankets, which can deprive baby of fresh air – a suspected cause of SIDS,” warns the catalogue. The stay-put blanket is endorsed by Fist Candle/SIDS Alliance and is flame retardant, according to the catalogue. (I think the only retardant thing here is the fact that people see this item as a necessity.)
· The memory foam “sleep positioner” that elevates a baby’s head to prevent plagiocephaly and acid reflux. (No Tums in the house?)
· A mesh bumper that lines a crib’s interior so no limbs can protrude from the death trap. There’s also the mesh tent to fit over the crib to thwart any escape attempts. I was under the assumption the point of crib was to keep the baby from rolling or crawling off to its doom while sleeping or being confined for other reasons. Thus the bars.

Item that took it too far: The aluminum and plastic fire ladder that is unrolled and lowered out the window in case of emergency. (The ladder is so lightweight and simple, even a 3-year-old can remember how to finagle this thing as flames and smoke consume his Pooh-themed room.)

For parents who not only deem safety No. 1 but also like to woefully coddle their children and shower them with frivolous creature comfort, the catalogue had plenty to offer. I implore parents who submit to these products to plainly admit that their lives and their households are fervently controlled by their kids.

Items included:

· A foldable, portable toilet “perfect for road trips!” Also the padded, foldable toilet seat cushion to place over hard, filthy, urine-stained toilet seats when your child must pee-pee away from their cushy home potty.
· As booster seats and high chairs at restaurants become woefully unacceptable, now there is a portable table chair that hooks onto any table. The chair is fully padded from top to bottom and “supports baby’s spine, head and neck.” There’s also the more simple Cooshie Booster that is billed as “soft, comfy and downright calming.”
· A tray to fasten into the car seat or stroller that provides a wide, flat surface, a cup holder and a tray for crayons.
· A stroller that offers toddlers the choice to either ride comfortably under the cover or stand up at the back while being pushed. Oh what choice!
· The lawn chair that straps to the back of luggage for the one time a stroller is inaccessible and walking is completely out of the question.
· According to the catalogue, car booster seats leave your child’s small legs dangling, causing poor circulation and numbness. For the frightened parent who likes to coddle their child as well, there’s the footrest that doubles as table that makes “your child’s booster feel like an easy chair.” If only it would make them shut up too?
· The alternative booster seat that the magazine titles “The Booster For Kids Who Hate Boosters. It’s roomier, it’s extra cushy” No further explanation needed.

Item that took it too far: The grotesque bath setup that includes a 56-piece magnetic number and letter set to place all over the tiled tub wall, a padded fish to cover that hard and ugly tub fixture, a plastic drain valve cover to protect against pinching and curious fingers, a basket that hangs across the tub for toys, a mesh net that suctions to the side of the tub wall for extra tub toys, a suctioning mirror with tray for still further toys, an organizer for the bathroom corner to house all the bathtub toys your kid forgot he had and a pitcher that shields baby’s eyes from suds while rinsing shampoo from baby’s hair (“Keep your eyes shut!” has grown ineffective).

I say people should just put their kids in giant padded hamster balls so that they do not risk touching anything or falling anywhere. And who knows, maybe they’ll make the balls sound proof.

Coming tomorrow: I get serious and try to figure out why this catalogue exists.

A Face That Will Make Me Happy

2006-08-10T00:17:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 56 seconds

I've been fairly disappointed with my facial expressions lately.

People have always compared my neutral, most natural look to that of a disgruntled, out-of-work mailman.

"What's wrong with you?" a co-worker inquires.

But in the end I can only give them the disappointing answer of "Unfortunately, this is how I look."

Over the years I have learned to deal with this.

Lately, however, the pressing concern regarding my facial expressions has been the face I use to friendly greet passing strangers in the hall at work or similar situations that call for mildly cordial behavior.

The last thing I want to do when acknowledging people is try to appear casually pleasant but come off as the type of guy who would “accidentally” rub into unsuspecting strangers on public transportation. That’s why when I pass someone, I feel like an intense, open-mouth toothy grin is not only too much work but risks being taken as creepy.

I don’t want to overdo it so I end up underdoing it. My unexpressive “friendly” face comes off as a smirk at best, a snub at worst. Ultimately I settle for this goofy, weird concoction where I pull the corners of my mouth apart, undoubtedly making me look like a meek toddler who has just pee-peed himself. Talk about creepy.

Erin suggested I just say “Hi” to everyone I pass and a smirky smile wouldn’t be the focal point. This sounded like a great idea. The first person I passed that day at work I addressed with a firm yet cheerful hello. I was mildly impressed with the results but promptly forgot to do it for the second person. My quick abandonment of the “Hello” plan didn’t occur to me until I was working on my “friendly” face in the mirror when I got home.

I’ve also had some concerns over my face and how well it indicates amusement during a humorous story someone might be telling me.

Let’s say Erin tells me a story that is funny enough to be mildly amusing but not funny enough to mandate a full smile or slight guffaw. I don’t have the appropriate face for this situation. Even though I might be amused and am trying to form a half-smile at least, it feels as though my face does not respond. And any level of fraudulence in a smile is not only strictly out of the question, most of the time it is physiologically impossible.

I thought about setting up a system with Erin where I would verbally disclose my level of amusement on a scale of one to 10. In the middle of her story I would respond by nodding my head, saying “6, 6” or “uh-huh, 7.5.”

Maybe the answer lies in just making whatever face feels natural to me in any given situation. If the person on the receiving end of my expression doesn’t like it, too bad.

But for now, I’ll be spending some more time in the mirror, in search of a face that will make us all happy.

Three thoughts

2006-08-05T22:50:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 47 seconds

I was wondering what the media’s obsession was with tacking on the words “full-blown” when discussing AIDS.

I questioned how AIDS got saddled with this modifier and if there is such a thing as partial AIDS or half-blown AIDS?

A Google search for “full-blown AIDS” returns 808,000 hits from sites such as the New York Times, the Advocate, BBC, NPR among countless others. What’s the deal? I thought.

Well, as I strolled through my Google search, I discovered this definition from scienceclarified.com:

Full-blown AIDS: The stage of HIV infection in which the immune system is so damaged that it can no longer fight off disease.

OK so perhaps full-blown AIDS is somewhat of an official term.

But given that, the words “full-blown” seem too informal and casual to be associated with a ravaging disease like AIDS.

Situations evolve into full-blown chaos and countries embark in full-blown civil war.

People are full-blown crack addicts and get full-blown drunk. I guess they also get full-blown AIDS.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think corn on the cob should be the official food of the American Dental Association.

It is the only thing in the world that will undoubtedly get me to floss my teeth.

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I can understand dialing a wrong number every once in a while. Who hasn’t hit the 9 and the 6 at the same time and for some reason the phone chooses the 9 and not the intended 6?

But ever since we moved to Connecticut and changed our cell phone numbers, Erin has been walloped by a seemingly coordinated attack of wrong numbers.

Possibly the oddest situation to rise from the barrage of mistaken callers are some of the folks who go through and leave messages if Erin doesn’t answer. This despite Erin’s clear and level-headed greeting of Hi, this is Erin. Leave me a message.

Now, if the inaccurate dialer were, say, speeding behind the wheel of a car doing their best not to commit vehicular manslaughter while late for the dentist and all they could muster was a quick Heygivemeacall, that would be one thing.

But some messages are thought out and contain important information. They have gone something like this:

Hi, this is Erin. Leave me a message

“Hi Bob, this is Maxine. I just wanted you to know that my father died. I know that you were very close to him too so I wanted you to know. I wanted you to know that I still love you and that I’m going to Puerto Rico next week. I’ll try to get a hold of you . . .

Or there was this guy:

Hi, this is Erin. Leave me a message

Hey Veronica, it’s Greg. Hey I heard you bought a multi-million dollar house! Uh, I’d like to come by and see it some time. I’ve been thinking about you lately and still really care about you so, uh, give me a call. Bye.

It’s as if these people set aside an hour on a Sunday to sit down and make a pride-eating phone call to a former love while breaking years of silence only to be forced to curb their emotions, quickly compose themselves and ad-lib on the spot into a phone machine.

Someone else’s phone machine at that. If only they knew.

All in the Family Feud

2006-08-04T00:18:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 36 seconds

I was flipping through the channels when I came across the middle portion of an episode of the (all new) Family Feud.

I mention the flipping part just to emphasize that I do not make a habit of watching game shows. Not even the ones with smart people, like Jeopardy!, hosted by the ambassador of perceived intelligence, Alex Trebek.

(Over the years I’ve come to believe that most game shows offer little more than a distraction, an activity that requires an amount of brain activity comparable to that of a plastic elephant. They are the types of shows that you innocently come across in a bout of boredom. Thirty minutes later you say “What just happened” as you self-loathe from the wasted time and contemplate how you gained nothing from the occasion, experiencing the same feeling you had a week earlier when you ate yourself sick on Krackel and Mr. Goodbars.)

What happened during the Family Feud did nothing to change any feelings I had about game shows.

The category was “Countries Besides the United States that Americans Most Admire.”

The top six answers were on the board. Already guessed correctly when I joined the show were:
1. England
2. Italy
3. Canada
4. France
5. Australia

The first family continued to guess.

“Spain!”
[X]

“China!”
[X]

“Japan!”
[X]

Ooh, soohry, as Alex Trebek might say, his Canadian accent poking slightly through.

As the rules of the Feud demand, it was now the second family’s turn to Steal. The family collaborates on one answer and if that answer is on the board, they win the round. In classic Feud fashion, each family member shouts out what they perceive to be the best answer. It is then the family leader’s ultimate decision on a final answer that he submits to the host.

When the family began shouting answers that I presumed they had discussed during their preceding huddle, I became horrified.

“Name a country besides the United States that Americans most admire,” repeated host Richard Karn, also known as Tim Allen’s dopey, flannel-shirt wearing sidekick from TV’s Home Improvement.

“Africa!” shouted one family member.

Perhaps they mean South Africa? I guessed in bewilderment.

“Europe!” another member of the team yelled.

OK seriously. Please be joking. They were not.

With a tone of confidence, the family’s entrusted leader offered his final answer. He spoke firmly with conviction.

“Europe.”

Host Richard contained his desire to shriek in terror, glancing more than once to the judges to see if the answer would be accepted or if the show would politely and humanely clarify the question, giving the family a chance to pull its name out of the crapper.

Unfortunately, he had to go through the embarrassing motions.

“Show meeeee Europe!”

What was not clear were some of the other answers discussed in the family’s huddle.

Asia and Antarctica, for sure.

I suspect Space and The World were also kicked around. Because, after all, those places are so incredibly admirable.

Seeking a celebrity

2006-07-31T23:57:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 7 seconds

Looking out on a sea of lights under a blazing moon nearly full, his country’s greatest city silently calm from above, but racing nonetheless just before midnight. This was to be the enduring impression, the lasting memory The Guy would savor of his maiden trip to New York.

It was 10:45 p.m. and the last elevator to the top of the Empire State Building would leave in 45 minutes. It was an elevator he had intended to be on.

And he would have been, had he not heard from a gathering of gawkers that Samuel S. Schooner was about to make a brief appearance outside the grand-opening of the Clair de Lune New York, a way-cool night spot talked up as the merd nouveau.

Judging by the budding spectacle, Mr. Schooner would have to be quite the breath taker, The Guy supposes.
“I know him from that movie about the future where people’s thoughts are tried in court,” says one guy in a red jacket. “He’s the young appellate lawyer. The young one. You’ve seen the movie.”

The Guy sheepishly shakes his head.

“Aw you’ve seen it,” the man demands before returning to his Sam Schooner lookout, losing interest in the conversation.

The Guy eavesdrops two young fashionistas, likely on a break from their quest to hook up.

“He’s the one going out with that redhead from Saturday Night Live,” says one of duo. “The one with the glasses. She’s hilarious . . . really, really hilarious.”

The Guy stands with his hands in the pockets of a jacket he picked up on clearance. It only takes eye contact for people to spill their pent up excitement.

“You know he’s got that instructional dance video!” says a woman toting three kids.

“I didn’t know that,” The Guy says, choosing to indulge her.

“Yeah. He’s the one who choreographed all of NSYNC’s videos. My kids just love ’em.”

“The videos or the choreographer?” The Guy asks.

The woman thinks for a moment, harder than The Guy intends for her.

“Both, I guess,” she says. “Yeah, definitely both.

“They love Sam Schooner. What a great role model. He’s so fit . . . and handsome. Don’t you think?” she says as she grabs The Guy’s arm and playfully jostles it.

He looks at her round face and estimates her to be in her early 40s. He imagines her 15 years and 45 pounds earlier and hypothesizes that she was once something of a vixen.

As more of the curious linger, the crowd begins to swell like liquid backing up in a clogged funnel.
“What’s everyone waiting for?” asks a man dressed for casual Friday.
“Sam Schooner is supposed to be coming,” The Guy says.
“Oh I’ve heard of him,” Casual Friday replies, staking out a spot.
As he stands in the crowd, The Guy thinks of the Empire State Building. Everyone knows someone who’s been there, that is, if they haven’t been there themselves. They’ve at least seen the pictures from the top. Who wants to hear about it from another person?

But think about how many can say they’ve seen Sam Schooner. There’s probably less than 100 people in the world who have seen him, not including his maids and nannies and family.
As they wait, the crowd swells, the buzz grows. Everyone trades stories of celebrities they had seen. That guy from Lynyrd Skynyrd on a plane, Malcolm Jamal Warner at a restaurant, Hal Sparks shopping.

These are the types of stories people want to hear, The Guy confirms. A brush with fame, a close encounter with a superstar.

Samuel Schooner finally arrives. He and his entourage walk just 15 feet away, creating a feeling one part nervous, two parts excitement. Just the rush The Guy expected.

Once home, The Guy searches the Internet to see who Samuel S. Schooner is.
He looks to see who he gave his final New York night for.

Too depressing to talk to

2006-07-28T01:45:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 59 seconds

The self-serve e-ticket kiosks stood guard, protecting the airline's full-time customer service representatives from travelers.

The man stepped up to one of the machines as he fumbled paperwork. His index finger made circles on the screen, searching for something to make sense to him, for something to jump out and walk him through the daunting mechanical process that stood between him and a boarding pass.

He donned a red tank top, perfect if his goal was to highlight the wisps of hair that could have been glued to his shoulders during some sort of prank.

"I never know how these things work," he said, making sure someone could hear him.

Even though the sun was not expected to rise for another three hours, I was in a giving mood.

"Just slide your credit card into that slot and it will pull up all your information," I said, beating the airline's customer service representatives to the punch at no charge.

"Oh I don't have a credit card," he replied.

Guy doesn't have a credit card. No problem, I thought. It's probably a good idea. No credit card, no debt. Others should live as he lives. I don't, however, think the reason this guy didn’t have a credit card has anything to do with responsible spending habits. Perhaps it was his disheveled hair, his ready-for-a-trim mustache, the tank-top-with-jeans look or his inability to work the self-serve kiosk.From my vantage point, everything about this guy was depressing.

And that was before he tried to explain how he got the ticket without a credit card.

"The only reason I got this ticket was because of a family emergency," he said with a tone of voice that begged me to reply with interest. Not sympathy, just interest.

That's too bad, I thought, using the time as an excuse not to indulge the poor fellow in conversation.

"And I'm unemployed so I get to go," he added.

I'm sorry to hear that, I respond in my head although I just made a painful face and shook my head sympathetically.

At this point, the man had spoken three times to me and was an efficient 3-for-3 in depressing sentences.

I wondered what was next. What else was falling apart in this guy’s life? Had he just put his dog to sleep before coming to the airport? Did his family emergency involve him needing a liver? Did the government have him on false child pornography charges?

In my callousness, I did not request any additional information. After all, I had a gate to sit in front of for the next hour.

As I headed down the terminal, I thought about the man. I thought about how much he had going on in his life. I also thought of how easily it was for him to divulge information to strangers like me.

With my luck, the only thing I was sure of was that he would likely be seated next to me on the plane.

I was never so glad to be so tired.

The Mannequin Experiment: Fund Raising

2006-07-20T10:27:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 55 seconds

We’ve all seen the exhausting movies or television shows: A family will lose something if they don’t raise money quickly to pay it off. This something is usually the house to a foreclosure, the family business to taxes or Dad to his gambling debts.

Well, something like that happened to me, only it wasn’t lapsed payments or taxes for which I needed the money. I had gotten myself involved in a series of experiments involving mannequins and performance-enhancing drugs. I needed cash for some anabolic steroids, a horse tranquilizer and a few amphetamines. But given the illicit nature of its use, the money had to be undetectable.

I needed to be creative. But most of all I needed to be discreet and inconspicuous.

Operation Stampout

During this operation, I jumped the neighborhood mailman, taking his uniform and his mail sack. I peeled off all the stamps, then delivered the entire sack of mail postage-due. I managed to collect $11 before the authorities seized the remaining mail and shut down the operation.

I managed to keep the uniform, but ultimately returned the mailman’s hair piece. We’re friends now.

Operation Paper Boy

With this plan I made my rounds of the neighborhood at 6:05 a.m. sharp to collect the day’s newspaper off each driveway. I then headed straight to one of a number of street corners to sell the papers at full price. This was by far the easiest and most profitable scheme, dropping a sum of $414 in the mannequin fund. I considered using this as full-time employment until I was accosted by a newspaper subscriber.

Apparently he had been watching me from the top of his flag pole for a couple of mornings. I was picking up his paper as usual. Taking advantage of my vulnerable position at the base, he repelled down the pole and performed a leg tackle that he later claimed to learn in the United States Marine Corps.

A brief scuffle ensued but ended when I forced the newspaper bag over his head as he was stuffing the entire comics page into my mouth. I spit out the page, worked the Jumble, then fled.

Operation No Parking

In my final attempt to raise funds, I decided to help the city, pad my pockets, and teach people a sound lesson at the same time. For three days, I patrolled the city streets looking for illegally parked cars and issued replica parking tickets. The only difference between my parking tickets and the city’s was the part that said who to make the check out to and where to mail it. Whereas the real parking tickets said to make checks payable to “County Clerk,” mine said to make checks payable to “Mannequin Steroid Fund” and to send it to my home address. An amazing 49 people went for it.

Sadly, it was busted up when I inadvertently ticketed the county clerk’s car. He paid the parking ticket, but later realized his error through a series of letters I sent him making fun of his checks (they featured Richard Simmons in various sports themes).

Sometimes you just need to let things go, but it’s not every day that you can hassle someone in a respectable government position over their Richard Simmons checks.

Did I ever complete the mannequin experiment? The short answer is no. The money I managed to raise I used to pay off gambling debts. I was glad I had the cash on hand because I was 24 hours from being put through a wood chipper.

The day I crapped out Chewbaca

2006-07-16T13:52:00.000-04:00

By Hellion

They never would have found out had Chewbaca’s head and Han Solo’s DL-44 blaster pistol not surfaced in my crap. But there they were – Han’s weaponry and what was left of Chewy – lodged haphazardly in my feces.

Never had my waste been brought to my attention. I crap and usually every week someone comes along and scoops it up and pleasantly discards of it. It was during this duty that what I had done was discovered.

I don’t know why I did it. I was probably just being young and stupid, as I was so often back then. It’s what got me my name, after all. But as I recall, there was a whole box of this stuff, a whole cast of characters. There was Andre the Giant, Kermit the Frog, E.T., one of the guys from Reservoir Dogs, Carmelo Anthony, Popeye, one or two Hot Wheels cars, Han Solo and, of course, Chewbaca. And as I remember, there were also two Pez dispensers – Batman and Robin – each with a package of candy.

It was the candy I was after. I don’t know how Han and Chewy got thrown into the mix but once I started I couldn’t stop. For fun I dragged nearly all the carnage out to the backyard through the dog door. The plastic and most of the cardboard from the boxes I buried, not so much as to hide the evidence, though. More out of instinct than anything.

How can I prevent this from happening next time? To start, when I destroy something – Star Wars figures or otherwise – I should take the time to thoroughly chew it beyond recognition. However, candy should never be left where a dog can get to it, much less in a box full of valuable collectibles.

Make it be known, I was after the candy. Han and Chewy were unfortunate collateral damage. But if candy is left out again, there’s no telling who might get in the way, although I can’t imagine crapping out Andre the Giant’s boots.

The Gambler

2006-07-14T10:40:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 42 seconds

I was standing in line at the Asian market, that’s where I get all my collared greens.

I was wearing a fake mustache, just like the old days. The only problem: Since I had last worn the fake mustache, I had grown a real mustache and had forgotten to shave it off. The glue was beginning to irritate.

A stranger entered the line behind me and set a pair of blue jeans on the checkout line conveyor belt.

“I didn’t realize they sold jeans at the Asian Market,” I thought to myself, although I suspect the clerk overheard me.

Then I looked down and noticed the man wasn’t wearing any pants. I was appalled, although I did admire his high-tops.

I made the mistake of making eye contact and the man proceeded to engage me in small talk. I politely replied that I was not a fan of small talk and suggested such topics as The Death Penalty, Labor Issues, and Campaign Finance Reform.

That’s when he asked me for my autograph. With encouragement from the clerk, I signed one of the store’s comment cards and handed it to the man.

He told me to sign my real name. I asked him what my real name was.

“Bob Barker,” he replied.

“Bob Barker, I am not,” I snapped.

He looked disappointed so I did my best Rod Roddy impersonation.

The man asked me if I was making fun of his sequin jacket, then stormed out of the market, opting not to pay for the head of lettuce in his hand. He was accosted by security.

On the way home, I thought of sheep.

Day 2

If it hadn’t been for the man screaming as he fell past my window, I never would’ve woken. It was 10 past 2 and I was wearing a mailman uniform which was odd because I work for UPS.

Something was bothering me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. To calm my anxiety I sat behind my drum set and did my best to play Drum Solo #5 from Pat Sajak’s album “Drummin’ Fool”. It’s one of his lesser known albums but a groundbreaker nonetheless.

I looked at the clock. 3:35. An hour of drumming and something was still eating away at me. As I was typing “cancer” into an Internet search engine, I finally figured out what had bothered me all morning. I’d woken up with Kenny Rogers’ hit song “Daytime Friends and Nighttime Lovers” stuck in my head.

As my folk remedy book suggested, I went to take a bath in tomato soup, only to find my bathtub filled with cream of potato.

I flipped the lever to drain the tub. When I returned, the soup had drained but the potatoes remained so I scooped them out and salvaged a potato salad.

As I left my house to go to the synagogue a man was waiting on my front porch. I greeted him with a “hi” and a firm nod. The man then put me in a headlock. I squirmed out of his grasp only to find myself in the midst of a full nelson.

After 15 minutes of negotiation he let me free and ran off. I could see that he was a slight man but the gimp mask make it impossible to distinguish a hair color.

The event inspired me to write a poem that started out about chocolate cake, but ended up correlating the feeding habits of the North American elk with the mating patterns of domesticated goats.

Still dazed, I decided to attend a random high school graduation. My purpose? To intimidate the key note speaker. I sat in the front row trying to establish eye contact. I made a few pointed stares and aggressive gestures but got no response.

That’s when I glanced at the program and realized the keynote speaker was blind.

“That would explain why he was wearing sunglasses even with the heavy cloud cover,” I thought to myself.

I still didn’t know why they had that dog sitting up on stage or how they got him to sit for so long. They must’ve promised him a bag of chips or a billiards party with his friends.

Remembering that blind people have keener hearing and a higher developed sense of smell, I messed my shorts then stole a trombone from a band member on stage. Before I could honk out the first few lines of the Christmas classic “Do you see what I see?” I was whisked away by three policeman and a vice principal.

I was told that I faced three charges: disturbing the peace, assaulting a member of the brass family (a woodwind would’ve been a lesser charge) and heckling a blind man, which is legal in 38 states. Unfortunately, mine was not one of them.

One of the policemen asked me if I’d like to spend the night in jail and I must’ve though he said Jell-O because I recommended a fruit salad recipe for them to try at their next potluck dinner. The policemen were not amused but the vice principal seemed interested.

As I made my way back home, I couldn’t help but remember the Alamo.

All in all, an exhausting day. And a strange one too. Something had not been right, but at least I could now go home and take off this mailman uniform.

Day 3

The newspaper woke me up when it hit the door. I was anxiously awaiting today’s news. For one, stocks had been continuing to fall (along with the people off my roof) and two, my rubber band ball was nearing 7 inches in diameter.

Before opening the door I noticed a man standing on the porch. Through a narrow vertical window to the side of the door, I asked him what he wanted. It was the man with the gimp mask. Shouting through the glass had gotten his attention. He turned around.

“I need that mailman uniform back”, he shouted “And I won’t put you in a headlock. I need to go to work.”

Sensing he was genuine, I unlocked the door and invited him in. When I returned with the uniform, the man had taken off the gimp mask. This took my by surprise.

“Why did you take off the gimp mask? Now I know your identity.”

“Oh this?” he replied, “I wasn’t trying to conceal my identity. I just wanted that uniform back.”

“Why didn’t you just ask for it?”

“I don’t know.”

“So why were you wearing the gimp mask?”

“I have fair skin. I always wear it when I‘m outside.”

I went on to ask him how I wound up with his mailman uniform. With a few minutes to spare before he started his route, he told me the story.

Apparently it all happened a couple of nights ago. I was in one of the taverns downtown, shooting some pool, drinking some chocolate milk. That’s when Spencer - the man in the gimp mask the next morning - came waltzing around.

He said he was flashing cash and acting like a big shot. First he insulted my red jacket and matching shorts, then said he’d like to hurry up and whoop me so he could get the table.

“You’re not going to beat me, I’m the best,” I reportedly told him.

“You wanna bet?” he challenged.

“Yes I do.” I said.

“What do you want to bet?” Spencer said.

I took a few minutes to think about it, then I responded. “That uniform your wearing.”

As my end of the bet I offered a Jimmy Carter collectors plate set that I had claimed was out in my trunk. This is odd, because I don’t have a Jimmy Carter collector’s plate set. I do keep a Karate Kid plate set in my trunk and some Alex Trebek cutlery in my glove box, but Jimmy Carter?

Regardless, the bet was on.

Needless to say, I won and Spencer produced the mailman uniform. I immediately put it on, then rushed on stage and sang a version of the Kenny Rogers hit “Daytime Friends and Nighttime Lovers”.

Unfortunately, the Gambler was on the premises en cognito and took offense to me “butchering his hit tune.”

A fight ensued and Kenny knocked me out in the seventh round of a 10 round bout. It seems my jab was getting slow and he caught my with an uncontested right hook that dropped me to the canvas.

That Kenny sure can box.

Spencer said he drove me home and dropped me off but forgot to get his uniform back.

Next thing I knew, I was laying in my bed the next morning, awoken by a man screaming as he fell past my window.

But at least that explains it. Now it all makes sense.

(This story originally appeared at The Cafe Irreal. It has a very special place in my heart, just behind the washer and dryer.)

Various exchanges involving a white man

2006-07-12T14:25:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 19 seconds

A white man and a black man pass each other in an office as drab and gray as the short-sleeved dress shirts each man wears.

“How ya doing?” the black man asks, never looking up.

Keeping his stride, the white man appears irritated and grumbles.

The black man stops, lifts his head and thinks of what just happened.

“Racist,” he says.

-------------------------------------------------------

A white man and a woman pass each other in an office, walking on carpet as stained as the burlap walls that separate each cubicle.

“Hello,” says the woman as they pass.

Keeping his stride, the white man appears irritated and grumbles.

The woman stops, lifts her head and thinks of what just happened.

“Sexist,” she concludes.

-------------------------------------------------------

A white man and a Jewish man pass each other wearing business ties as out of style as the desks to which they are returning to.

“Hi,” says the Jewish man, upholding the standard nicety.

Keeping his stride, the white man appears irritated and grumbles.

The Jewish man stops, lifts his head and thinks of what just happened.

“Anti-Semite,” he determines.

-------------------------------------------------------

A white man and another white man pass each in an office, walking under light as artificial as the leather of which their dress shoes are made.

“Hey,” says the first white man.

Keeping his stride, the other white man appears irritated and grumbles.

The first white man stops, lifts his head and thinks of what just happened. Puzzled, he hesitates. He offers the only plausible conclusion.

“Jerk?”

Savagely funny unintentional comedy

2006-07-10T01:26:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 14 seconds

I couldn't believe my ears when I heard it.

We attended a concert for the first time at the Mohegan Sun Arena which lies on the Mohegan Indian Reservation in Uncasville, CT. In addition to the 10,000-seat arena, the complex boasts the nation's second largest casino not to mention a hotel, shopping and fine dining and buffets to match. The reservation was about an hour from our house but Paul Simon is easily worth an hour and possibly up to 3 1/2 hours for my money.

Tickets in hand, we stood in a herd of concert-goers to enter the arena. As we filed through, a recorded voice gave the rundown of the ground rules. No outside food, no bottles, no firearms, no beach balls. Blah, blah blah.

But it was when the voice discussed the policy on reselling tickets at a price higher than one had paid that perked our ears .

". . . and please be reminded," the voice chimed, "Scalping is prohibited anywhere on the reservation."

With eyes a tad bigger and eyebrows a bit higher, we immediately faced each other. "Did I just hear what I. . .Did you just. . .Don't they realize. . ."

SCALPING IS PROHIBITED ON THE RESERVATION!

When else in my lifetime will this phrase be delivered in a more honest, respectable, serious and straightforward fashion? I can't possibly imagine.

The dangers of stuffed animals

2006-07-09T14:29:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes 17 seconds

Crisscrossed communication led us both to perform similar acts on the same day. I was in Tempe, AZ, the other performer in Kearney, Neb.

The mission was to infiltrate a toy store and blend in as oversized, motion-detecting stuffed animals. As unsuspecting children walked past we would offer phrases using an electronic-sounding voice.

Phrases would be of standard fare such as “I love hamburgers and “reading is fun.” But it was the more specific phrases like, “Hey you in the blue hoodie,” that got the most amazement from passers-by.

The mix up between us would have gone undetected had he – posing as a giant stuffed chimpanzee – not sent a panicked third-grader to the emergency room. After the chimp advised the boy to pull his finger from his nose, the child attempted to pummel the great ape.

Sustaining a shot to the midsection, the chimpanzee subdued the boy with a figure-four leg lock, pinning him on the floor even as he tried to escape. Seeing an oversized stuffed toy suddenly become animated sent the kid into hysterics and ultimately to the ER.

It was a story made for the wire services and local newscasts looking for odd national news for filler. Only after seeing the absurd story in the national press did shoppers from the Tempe store come forward with reports of an “oversized stuffed panda acting suspiciously human-like.”

This set off a media frenzy with dozens of other similar reports. Whether there was any truth to these reports I doubt. Thankfully I and the Nebraska performer, whose name I never learned, retained our cover and no substantiated human connection was ever made to the cases.

However, overwhelming news coverage began to cite “a growing trend of out-of-control stuffed animals” and an “epidemic of crazed plush toys.” A widely circulated study, commissioned by a prominent electronics manufacturer, offered reams of anecdotal evidence of stuffed animals choking, strangulating, tripping, mocking and blinding youngsters in Japan, England and throughout North America.

It wasn’t long before Congress introduced legislation barring all stuffed animals and/or plush toys standing 4 feet, 6 inches or taller.

And who says Americans don’t fear all the wrong things?

(This bit was edited out completely from a short story I am currently working on. I thought it was sort of funny but it was extraneous from the story. Look for a story with similar feats sometime in the future.
By the way, this piece was inspired by the book by Barry Glassner called The Culture of Fear. I highly recommend. I also highly recommed Butterball turkey bacon and Polaner All-fruit fruit spread. Strawberry is my favorite. Low in calories but packed with serious flavor.)

Small Talk

2006-07-07T14:03:00.000-04:00

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 20 seconds

I sat in my study, inspecting my socks as I put on my shoes before work. The socks – which I had thought of as one of my good pairs, two of my go-to guys, a pair I still considered in my starting lineup – were wearing out. The bottoms had worn thin and a hole had opened near one of the ankles, too low to hide behind the guise of a pant leg.

After I stood up and walked a few steps to the window, I could feel the sock tops beginning to lose their grip on my lower calf. A few more steps and they would have fallen to my ankles, unable to hold themselves up any longer.

Standing at the window, I opened the blinds enough that it would be easy for me to see out but require someone to go out of their way to look in. On the inside looking out, the neighborhood was silent. A man mowed his lawn down the street; a 9-year-old tossed a football to himself at the end of the cul-de-sac. Two women conversed at the bottom of a driveway. All from a distance. That was how I liked it.

I had considered buying a garage door opener.

Not because I didn’t want to get out of my car and lift the garage door myself, I usually don’t mind the task. I can appreciate the physical activity. I often wonder if that’s why we’ve become such an obese society. Too many garage door openers.

No, I bought a garage door opener to avoid my neighbor. I can press a button a block away and my garage will be open and waiting when I arrive, my driveway like the palm of a giant concrete hand that carries me into the garage then slowly closes, shutting me in from the annoyances of the neighborhood. With a glance into the rearview mirror, I escape direct contact with nothing more than a polite wave.

In his defense, my neighbor is not a bad person. He does not disturb me or cut down my trees or deflate my tires. He is not “up to no good.” His kids do not play ball on my lawn; his dog does not use my yard as if it were a Port-O-Can at a rockfest.

But my neighbor likes to chat.

Last week I pulled into my driveway and got out to open the garage door. My neighbor was out with the hose watering his shrubs. I inadvertently made eye contact.

“Hey there, Larry,” he said.

“Hey!” I shot back, unexpectently enthusiastic. As is usually the case with people, he knew my name and I did not know his. I was pretty sure it was Ed, but it could have been Ted and I had a small suspicion it was Arnold. But I think I would’ve remembered Arnold if it were Arnold.

Regardless, it was too late to clarify, as there had been at least eight conversations since he had moved in three months earlier.

The problem with Ed is that the only thing we have in common is the 12-foot patch of grass between our houses. The main topics available under these circumstances are terribly limited and inevitably gravitate to watering the grass and the general upkeep of our respective landscaping. Following that, it’s news and comment on how hot it’s been lately.

“How about this heat? It’s something else, huh?” he once asked.

“Whew! Is it hot enough for you?” he demanded on another occasion.

For one, and to be completely honest, it’s not hot enough for me. I’m cold natured. When others are uncomfortably warm in T-shirts and shorts, I’m relaxing casually in jeans and a fleece pullover. And two, it’s summer. It’s hot. I get it.

I’ve always tried to keep weather off limits in conversations with people I hardly know. It’s weather, we can’t control it, let’s move on.

Now, if it snows 4 ½ feet overnight, fine, let’s discuss the oddity of the occurrence. We can repeat all the records and superlatives we heard on the local news that morning. And if golf ball-sized hail plummets from the sky in a moment’s notice, we can gripe about how we normally park our cars in the garage but we happened to leave them out that afternoon only to see them damaged. We can compare insurance quotes and swap techniques we read on the Internet about how to repair hail damage yourself for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise, there are other activities I’d rather do and anything else I’d rather chat about if forced to chat.

One evening, Ed went after another standby: The Job. “How are things down at the newspaper?”

Before I understood the rules of small talk, a less-than-mild acquaintance asked me how my job was going and I actually told him.

I spoke of how we were down two copy editors while having to battle an overbearing managing editor and mediate arguments between the design director and the photo editor. My mouth sprawled about how we had more space to fill in the newspaper because of the declining number of ads sold and how that was consistent with a nationwide trend in the industry. Couple that with the rising cost of newsprint . . .

I realized I had lost person back at “Oh, wait’ll you hear this.” He had not cared about my employment situation, much less the state of newspapers in the United States. He probably just wanted me to ask him how his job was going so he could tell me how the local chamber of commerce was honoring him and 15 others later that month at the Outstanding Merchants banquet. He probably wanted to discuss his sales figures and the number of employees he now had working under him, which was most likely three but he would have said seven.

“How’s work going?” required a response along the lines of “Oh just fine,” or at worst a “Don’t even ask,” followed by a muted guffaw and a rolling of the eyes. “Don’t even ask” tends to strike a chord with most people, as I have found that hating your job is not uncommon.

But when Ed asked me about my job, maybe he was different. Maybe he really wanted to know. At least he knew what job I had.

“It’s going alright,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as if I had nothing to complain about.

Sensing my answer had been too short, I blurted out a phrase I had never used before, heard once in the midst of small talk, perhaps.

“Same old same old.”

He nodded, as if knowing exactly where I was coming from. Had he gone as far as he could at his job? Had his once ambitious career dreams completely faded?

Same old, same old?

He nodded because if I had asked him about his job, he would’ve replied with the exact phrase.

And I would have shook my head and said, “Yeah, tell me about it.”

(This story originally appeared in the literary journal Peeks and Valleys)

Sin City

2006-07-06T14:43:00.000-04:00

We never had fireworks growing up. That’s like burning your money, he would say.

Gambling is even worse. You don’t even get to see the fire as your money disappears.

He’s happy with his life of modesty. Always has been.

This city is flashy and dazzling. Unlike him.

The allure of winning so much while spending so little is unmoving.

He hates crowds and people aren’t far behind.

He doesn’t smoke and wouldn’t take a free cocktail if you paid him.

He’s not into “Asian massage” and has never had much desire to see the real Eiffel Tower. Much less a look-alike.

Entertainment has never juggled bowling balls.

Or made a tiger disappear.

Or balanced a wheel barrow on its head.

And it never takes place on concrete.

Or indoors. Or anywhere near neon.

I’d always wondered why we never vacationed here while I was growing up.

Now I know. Because my dad never took us.

(I wrote this after my first visit to Las Vegas in 2002)

What is a Patriot?

2006-07-03T15:59:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about what my country stood for and what it meant to be an American.

But a Patriot interrupted me.

He reminded me of Freedom and Solidarity. He told me what The Flag stood for. He talked of Unity, Pride, Sacrifice and Evil.

Everything was black and white, with us or against us.

There was no room for question. No room for disagreement. There were not two sides to the story. Not in a time of war. Dissent only aids the enemy and those who hate America. He shouted about Freedom but was the first to try to take it away. I could have free thought, expression and speech, as long as it agreed with his views.

Support Our Troops. Pray for our President. United We Stand. God Bless America. Land of the Free. Love It Or Leave It.

America can be a nation where our only political discourse is simple enough for a bumper sticker. It can be a nation under God, where we are to give unconditional support for Our Leader, a place of one accepted ideology. It can be a country where questioning the government is un-American, where free, critical thought produces sighs and intimidation.

Sounds like a great place to live, like the greatest country on earth.

Death from over-the-counter allergy medication (or Dozing Off A Cliff)

2006-07-03T04:37:00.000-04:00

“Hello, uh, Dave?”

“Um, no. This is Erin.”

“Oh, hi Erin. You’re using Dave’s phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Dave?”

“He dozed off.”

“Dozed off?”

“He dozed off . . . a cliff”

“He dozed off a cliff?”

“Yeah we were hiking along this cliff and he took some allergy medicine and got drowsy and dozed off, the cliff.”

“I don’t understand. He dozed off the cliff or he dove off the cliff?”

“He dozed off but I supposed both would be correct.”

“So he got tired and dozed off the cliff. Where is he now?”

“At the bottom of the cliff.”

“Sleeping?”

“Yes. Permanently.”

“From the medicine?”

“No, from the fall.”

“How did you get his phone?”

“I walked to the bottom of the cliff and took it from his pocket. We’ve paid the cell phone bill for the month so why not use the phone?”

“So you’re calling to tell me that my son dozed off a cliff and is lying dead on the ground at the spot he fell?”

“No. I was actually trying to call our friend Maury about dinner but accidentally hit Mom and Dad when I was scrolling through the address book.”

(Erin and I improvised this simulated conversation today while hiking. I had been drowsy from taking allergy medicine during a hike we took earlier in the week. On the hike today, as we were walking on a ridge lined by a sheer cliff to one side, Erin asked if I was drowsy from allergy medicine again. That’s when the idea of someone dozing off a cliff came up. This is how we pass the time.)

Discovering The Tall Club

2006-07-02T00:48:00.000-04:00

"Did you know there's a national club for tall people?" Erin asked, sitting in front of the PC, fresh off a Google search. "And they have a local chapter."

The club was called the Hartford Heights Tall Club and Erin wanted to know more. She was excited. Always a tall one, coming in at 5-10 1/2, she qualified for the club, a cool half inch over the mandatory 5 feet 10 inches needed to belong.

"How tall are you again?" she asked, already envisioning the tall club as an odd yet intriguing activity we could do together. We would go and hang out with tall people, take hikes with tall people, ride tall bikes with tall people and tell tall jokes with tall people. We would feel so exclusive.

"6-1," I said. I had clearly let her down as she informed me that the cutoff for men was 6-foot-2. I never felt so slight in my life.

We both agreed that I was almost there. In a joking-but-kind-of-serious-at-the-same-time fashion, we discussed lifts for my shoes or how one could go about concealing platform soles. But was all this worth it? Perhaps. For a moment I was extremely excited when I remembered that former NBA star Manute Bol, who stands at a league-record 7-foot-7 lives just down the road in West Hartford.

“Manute Bol has to be a member of the Hartford Heights Tall Club,” I said. “He probably runs the thing.”

The possibilities of hanging with Manute made my shortcomings that much more difficult to deal with.

The first thing that came to mind with a tall club was the Guinness Book of World Records photo of that freakishly tall guy who had some weird elephant disease that sprouted him to a height of 8 and a half feet. I imagined everyone looked like him, standing around in clothes from Big&Tall with size 19 shoes, holding martini glasses that appeared wee in their mammoth hands.

I wondered what could possibly occur at tall club meetings.

They probably hand out awards for best use of height in an act of kindness. A lanky 7-footer steps forward and receives applause for helping a crying child rescue a balloon off a restaurant ceiling. Later, a guy with a crazy-low voice shares with the group about how his hand got caught in a ceiling fan again while he was putting on a sweater and a woman with a head the size of George “The Animal” Steele’s follows with a story about how she was approached at church to play on the interfaith men’s basketball team. Everyone laughs because it’s all happened to them.

Even if I had the extra inch to meet their tall standards, could I go through with it?

To join a tall club, it seems that being tall would have to be a large part in how you define yourself as a person. You wear tall clothes, you have to duck under doorways, people ask if you played college hoops, short people have their pictures taken with you. These are all experiences that revolve around your height and you want to share them with those of like proportion with similar experiences. It seems only natural. Except that, even though I’m only an inch from joining, I’m far from defining myself as tall.

I don’t even consider the tall cutoff of 6-foot-2 tall for a man. You’d have to be at least 6-foot-4 before you’re tall in my tall book. And I realize my wife is tall for a woman, but 5-foot-10 doesn’t seem tall enough for a tall club either. For me, a woman has to be at least 6 feet before I say “Wow, she’s tall.”

And although I bet there might be one or two 7-footers at the Hartford Heights tall club, I doubt there are any whacky-hormone world record holders. That, of course, I’d pay to see.

In the meantime, you can be sure that I’ll be on the lookout for Manute Bol . . . or any other 7-foot-7, 140-pound men for that matter.

A shirt and some worries

2006-07-01T01:12:00.000-04:00

I bought a collared soft cotton shirt today for the clearance price of$11.95. Aside from the shirt being dark gray instead of dark green, as my color-blind eyes wrongly reported, I was presented with a dilemma at the register.

The clerk offered me free membership in the stores promotional club. Special discounts and coupons awaited me at no charge, he explained. Just supply my name and e-mail on the form they would fill in the rest and off I would go with a plastic card documenting my belonging, as I would head home to anxiously check my inbox for bargains.

That’s when I determined that enough was enough. I already have free membership cards for coffee, submarine sandwiches, the bookstore, grocery store, video store, a Cajun restaurant I can’t even recall existing and a wearhouse where I rented a wedding tuxedo for a marriage that was outlived by my store membership.

I don’t even want to discuss the weight of my wallet, thanks to all the plastic cards, punch cards, cardboard cards and keychain cards.

All these clubs make shopping unnecessarily stressful. Every time I buy I have to ask myself, Am I a member? Do I have a card to prove it? Can I save 10 percent? Do I qualify for special discounts? Is it my birthday? Am I amidst the magical three-day window that falls only once a quarter where I can save big time? I don’t know. Perhaps I am a member and I threw away the card and now that silly act just cost me $3.50.

I opted to decline the latest membership offer that came with my collared soft cotton shirt. Its just one more thing to worry about, one more thing to take up valuable space in my head. I simply don’t have room in my life or my wallet for another card.

Epilogue

The same shirt that came with the enticing store membership offer also came with a spare button. I always keep these buttons for some reason, usually putting them in the same drawer as my socks. I do this despite never having had a shirt that has lost a button. Ever. Even if I had a shirt lose a button, I doubt I would have the wherewithal to find the replacement that came with the original shirt, two years after its purchase.

I decided to lose the spare button immediately this time, directly into the trash. Like the membership, it would be one more thing to stash in the back of my head, if the slim opportunity ever arose for the button to be used. I just don’t have room for that button. Not in my life, or in my sock drawer.

The actions of passing motorists

2006-07-01T01:09:00.000-04:00

A selection of the ways real-life passing motorists dealt with the narrow yet drivable passage between the semi truck moving van outside my house and some guys pickup across the street while my stuff was being moved in last week:

Gray Minivan
Instruct me to move a pickup which doesnt belong to me and whose owner I am not familiar with.

Short school bus
After claims of illegal parking, hysteric rudeness in front of small school children and a denial of the bus capability to back up, call police.

Silver Volvo
Drive through the tight space faster than if the street were clear.

Red Cavalier
Honk incessantly at no one in particular

U.S. Mail truck
Following careful consideration, drive across pickup owners lawn.

Some thoughts on Identity Theft

2006-07-01T00:58:00.000-04:00

With my bank-issued debit card set to expire next month, I anxiously awaited a new card, hopefully with a later date imprinted on it. The card finally came with about 10 days to spare. Without my request, the precious-metal level had been upped on my shiny new card from gold to platinum. I was honored and ready to spend. But first, as always, I had to call a special number to activate it, for security reasons I'm sure.

Before activation, I was treated to a brief message about how I should pony up money for credit reports on a regular basis, you know, since we live in this dangerous time of identity theft and don’t you realize your credit is the most important thing in your life? I value my credit as much as the next but somehow tuned this message out.

Then it was on to activating my ATM card. After punching in a few numbers I was finished, but they wanted me to stay on the line for an important message. What was this important message about? Identity theft. For about a minute, a soothing yet firm recorded female voice warned me of the increasing dangers of identity theft. All I had to do to protect myself was sign up for a special protection program that would cost $4.95 a month. They would handle the rest. Press 1 to sign up or press 2 to foolishly pass. I pressed 2. But that wasn't the end. The female voice came back a bit harsher, a bit more urgent, speaking more precise and stern. She repeated her warnings of identity theft, asking if I was sure I wanted to put my sacred and irreplaceable identity foolishly on the line. I pressed 2 again, hung up then went and hid under my covers.

The dire warnings, the pleading, the urging, the attempt to fill me with fear about identity theft got me thinking about this new "crisis."

Identity theft seems to be everywhere. Rather the advertisement of identity theft seems to be everywhere, with credit card companies/banks being the first to warn and ultimately protect you from the identity thieves. (I bet everyone can name a current identity theft TV commercial)

Now the first question should be, when did banks and credit card companies start caring so much about the consumers they have centered their business on screwing over? We all know that there's only one thing they care about. Profit . . . and screwing you over, which to them is redundant.

So the epidemic of identity theft has gotten so bad that it is starting to cut in to the profits of the banks and credit card companies?

I'll go one further. It's all about fear. Who knows who this fear benefits. But just like the war on drugs (hello crack), welfare mothers, stranger crime, terrorism, airplane crashes, monkey pox, SARS, nuclear holocaust, kidnappers, Communism, anthrax, satanic cults, satanic lyrics and so on, identity theft is just the latest thing we have been told to fear. (The whys of fear are numerous but most center on the fact that fearful citizens are a) good consumers/great for business and b) manage to stay pretty orderly. Oh, and politicians know fear equals votes. What's the one issue Republicans still have an edge over Democrats on? Terrorism. They're the ones who will protect you from the bad men. If it were up to Democrats, your commute and your life would be cut short today by a dirty bomb).

With the fear of identity theft, the banks have at worst manufactured it or at best merely piled on, seeing it as a convenient way to take a little more of our money.

Identity theft even has a scary name. Identity theft. Your identity, the thing that makes you you, is being stolen by a faceless, hooded thieve.

But really, as far as I know, identity theft can be someone who came upon your credit card number from who-knows-where and uses it to fill up the car with gas and head on to Best Buy to get some awesome stereo equipment (this actually happened to us). I wouldn’t really say they stole our identity.

Now, I'm not saying that identity theft isn’t real or can't do damage on peoples lives. I'm just wondering if identity theft isn’t a little overblown. I'd also like to know who is profiting from it.

Now I'm going to go check my credit report, then buy a new security system for my fall-out shelter gun closet.