15 Minute Lunch

I'm afraid to ask

2012-01-30T19:43:00.003-05:00

But I'm hoping my wife is doing this with her finger or a spoon and not her tongue.

I'm back from Orlando and this weather can suck it.

2012-01-24T21:39:00.002-05:00

So after a week-long geekfest in Orlando, I'm back in the beautiful northeast. The day before we were flying home, I texted my friend Vidna and and told him I wasn't coming back and to just go ahead and sell all my stuff and send me the money. Unfortunately, he couldn't work fast enough and we got kicked out of the nice hotel we were squatting in and had no choice but to book a much cheaper room for a couple of days.

We did get to visit Epcot, and it really hasn't changed much in the last few years. I was kind of surprised that China was still the same size. I figured it would have taken over by now but I guess Mickey keeps a tight reign on shit like that. I am currently moving pictures from my phone and my blackberry and my iPad and yes, even an actual camera and should have something to report in the next day or so. A work-trip like this one is usually 90% exhausting and 10% fun, and this one was no exception, so I'm still sorting out the good bits from the pain.

Also, I'm pretty sure I need a new spine if anyone has a spare. I think mine is crumbling to dust.

Random stuff from my phone.

2012-01-10T19:37:00.008-05:00

Sometimes when I see something that makes me laugh, I take a picture of it. Then I forget about it completely. Eventually I need to clean them off my phone to make some space, and I try to remember what it was about that particular thing that made me laugh. Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes... well, not so much.

Why did I take this picture, for instance?

I have no clue. It was something I saw at work, but now I have no idea what the hell I thought I was going to do with it. I really have to start writing some of these ideas down.

How about this one?

"Yo, OTIS! Elevator broke!"

I saw this CD in the store a few weeks ago:

Did you ever notice it makes Art Garfunkel look like he has a giant porn 'stache?

No? It's just me?

At what point in someone's day do they decide they'd like nothing more in life than a tramp stamp for their SUV?

If you're gonna do that shit, at least center it on the window.

I'm really glad they're finally getting rid of all the Christmas decorations at work. This deranged looking Santa has been standing on the corner of my row for almost two months now:

He looks like he should have a bottle of Jack in his hand. But he doesn't. What he does have in his hand is what really has me worried:

I had absolutely nothing to do with that.

Or how about this picture I've entitled Cleveland, Encapsulated:

Here's some gay mermen christmas ornaments for your enjoyment:

Man. I really have to start working out again.

Lastly, have you heard about this new thing called Owling? It's supposed to be the new "planking." If planking wasn't quite stupid enough for you, now you can perch somewhere and have someone take a picture of your dumb ass. I'm not even sure if Owling is a real thing, but go see for yourself.

All I have to say is this:

Ok, so that last picture wasn't from my phone.

That you know of.

The long walk.

2011-12-24T18:00:00.012-05:00

When Paul and I graduated from high school, he went away to Oswego College in western NY, and I stayed home and commuted to a local college. It was an odd time for two kids who had known each other since 7th grade and had spent the better part of six years as inseparable friends. For the first time since we met, we weren't a ten minute drive or a 20 minute bike ride away from each other. There also wasn't anything called "unlimited long distance" so we didn't talk on the phone much because it was expensive. Neither one of us was much of a phone guy anyway, unless a girl happened to be involved.

We both hated college, and hated what our lives had become. I had unexpectedly been accepted into my father's alma mater, and it was a great school, so I felt I had to at least give it a shot.

I had originally planned to go to RIT in Rochester, NY, but between my unexpected acceptance and (the ridiculously stupid reason of) not wanting to leave a rock band I was currently playing in, I decided to stay home and go to Union College instead. I think if I'm honest with myself, getting accepted there was also a little bit of a relief, since the thought of leaving home was a little scary to me at the time. That first year of college wasn't a great period in my life. The band broke up, I was miserable, I had no real friends because all my old friends were gone and since I wasn't living on campus, I didn't have much of an opportunity to make new ones. I wasn't even sure I had made the right choice of schools.

And electrical engineering? That shit is hard. I have to give my father credit for sticking it out, especially while working a full time job. I don't think I inherited much of his smarts, however, because I had no natural aptitude for math, and almost as little for physics, so it quickly became clear that I was destined to be a C student at best. Every day was going to be a constant struggle to study hard enough and long enough to pass my required engineering classes. It wasn't until I was almost a year into it that I realized the handicap I was working under -- all the other kids who lived on campus "studied together" regularly, and by studied together, I mean they passed around the test answers from the previous year's classes. I was the only idiot trying to get by on brains alone.

Paul was in a similar situation, but with the added burden of having left a girlfriend when he went away to school. He had been dating a junior, so when he went off to college, she got to stay behind. They tried to make it work for a while, but you know how it is when you're 19 -- your mind runs away with you and your head fills with all sorts of imaginary betrayals. Given the long distance nature of their relationship, they sort of unofficially broke up even though he was still in love with her, or at least he thought he was. At the time, I thought it was more of an obsession, since when we did talk on the phone, that's mostly what we talked about. I think she was a kind of anchor for him -- a link to home, a link to the the past, a link to everything good and honest and fine in his life. All the things that being "away" seemed to change and erode. I spent a lot of time doing what you need to do for friends sometimes; I reassured him, agreed with his assessments, told him things were going to work out; even though I knew I was probably just telling him what he wanted to hear.

It's amazing how all-encompassing your problems can seem when you're in college, but when you look back on them ten or twenty years later, they seem so insignificant. Test scores, grade point averages, girls who like you and girls who don't, whether you'll have a part time job for the summer -- writing it down makes it look even more ridiculous. Even so, the pressure can seem immense; I think because behind it all, there is something so daunting that you are only able to think of it in abstract terms. Your future. Your career. The rest of your life. Abstract concepts that, if you were anything like I was while in college, you could only allow yourself to think about for short periods of time, otherwise the unanswerable questions might drive you insane.

The summer after high school graduation was a weird time for us. Summer had barely begun, yet the end of it was always in the back of our minds. We spent the whole three months wondering what was going to happen with our girlfriends and even with our own friendship. We hiked a lot in the woods near his house, talked about our plans and, because we were geeks, played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. We played the same campaign on and off for most of the summer, until my character Jaxom died in a random cave-in while on a quest. It didn't seem fair, and still doesn't, but by that time in our lives we both knew that life isn't always fair. Sometimes a cave-in happens when you least expect it and there's not a damned thing you can do about it.

We did see each other on and off during that first year, but since my school used some ridiculous thing called a Tri-mester, which split the school year into three equal parts with short breaks in between, our time off never overlapped. He used to come home for break after I had already gone back, and sometimes just for kicks, I'd drive by in the morning and pick him up in the Impala and he'd go with me to my classes. We'd sit in the back and he'd spend about a week being a bad influence on me, drawing cartoons and designing knives and swords in the margins of his notebook while I was desperately trying to understand whatever the teacher was attempting to explain. Once in a while, just to be a wise-ass, he'd raise his hand and answer a question. I don't remember him ever getting one wrong.

It was during the first of these breaks that we vowed we'd start writing letters to each other while he was away, but instead of doing it the normal and sane way, we decided to do it in the spirit of our D&D campaigns -- complete with an ink-dipped fountain pen, parchment paper and medieval script. We called them Scrolls, and even managed to send the first few as rolled up parchments in mailing tubes. The tubes didn't last long because they were a pain in the ass and expensive to mail, so we switched to envelopes almost immediately. The scrolls themselves contained lots of ornate drop caps and plenty of thees, thous and thines with a lot of -eth endings on the verbs to keep things interesting. Over time, we named our own kingdoms and wrote as the relative monarchs of said kingdoms, both trapped by our responsibilities, both looking forward to the day when we could afford to leave our castles for a period of time and wander the land as common woodsmen.

Completely geeky, I know. Even so, it always brightened my day when I checked the mail and had a new scroll from my friend. They always began with "Hail and well met, Lord Virgil," and just reading that salutation brought a smile to my face and lifted my spirits. In fact, it still does. We imparted news officially, as if it were news of the kingdom, and we spoke of our women in couched terms, referring to them as m'lady, harlots or wenches, depending upon our mood and their behavior. The mailman must have thought we were completely nuts, given the sealing wax and weird crests and symbols on the outside of the envelopes.

I saved them, tucked away inside an old notebook from school, and tonight is the first night I've looked at them since Paul passed away in '09. After he died, his wife found some of the scrolls I had written to him - which he had kept the same way I had - and she gave them to me. It was interesting to see both sides of the correspondence in one place, and it was a shock to see, some 25 years later, how depressed and beaten down we both were, and how much strength we took from each other's words of encouragement, even though they were disguised as Kingly Missives.

There was one scroll from Paul that I find myself thinking about every Christmas eve. It was a particularly bleak one because he had finally come to the conclusion that it was over between him and his girlfriend and he was feeling depressed and a bit adrift, and Christmas break was coming up. For the first time since he had gone away, he wasn't planning to see her when he came home for break. At the same time, I had a crush on a girl who liked me "as a friend," and she was all I could think about. I was also seriously contemplating a change of schools, and I hadn't had the guts to spring that on my parents just yet. I had finally figured out that electrical engineering wasn't for me, and I was averaging somewhere around a 2.5 GPA. Needless to say, neither one of us felt much like celebrating.

In the correspondence, we talked about honor and friendship, our own mortality and the future, and the importance of staying true to your beliefs, and to your friends. The scroll began with his news of the break up, and ended with him asking me to write back and tell him what I truly thought about his situation. We knew that even as events in our lives forced changes upon us, we would always be friends -- and through this series of scrolls, two very introverted geeks were able to admit to each other that sometimes in life you need to lean on your friends, and that each of us would be there for the other, no matter what our futures may bring.

He closed his scroll with this:

Snow, falling softly.

Songs and bells ring through the winter night.

People laughing and close....distant they seem.

This is Christmas - a time of love, or so they say.

Where is that love for me? Do you feel the same, my brother?

While others are merry, I shall be empty.

In your kingdom, is it the same?

I will walk in that dark and holy night,

and I will meet you in the fresh snow, and I will smile.

For this Christmas, we celebrate friendship and brotherhood.

Merry Christmas, my Brother. My friendship and fellowship is my gift to you.

Geeky? Without a doubt. Heartfelt and sincere? As sincere as a 19-year-old kid can be, and that's pretty goddamned sincere. Corny? It may seem so now, but it didn't at the time. At the time, it was a lifeline. That was a dark Christmas for both of us, but we helped each other get through it.

The following year, I transferred to Siena college and he did the same, and we spent four more years in Academia where we muddled through most of computer science, decided that it sucked, and ultimately switched to marketing and advertising, which was interesting and pretty easy if you were creative. Mostly what I remember about those years was the sheer amount of fun we had.

Eventually, we got out of school and got decent jobs; I somehow managed to marry the girl I had that crush on, and a couple of years later, he married a girl he met one summer up at The Slug's family camp. On some level, it's like that first miserable college year never existed. Time fades memories and if you're lucky, you remember the good times better than the bad. Based on some of the stuff I wrote, I think that's definitely the case for me, because I was one gloomy son of a bitch on paper.

Even back then, we both realized life was short. I think Paul felt it more intimately than I did, and I think he also somehow knew that he'd have less time on earth than most. We had more than one conversation about how the life expectancy of your typical viking was about 39, and the life expectancy of a viking warrior was probably much less than that. We marveled at the fact that you could be considered a wise old elder at the age of 35, even though as 19 year old kids, we couldn't even imagine being that ridiculously old. I think that knowledge of his mortality drove him much of the time -- then and later on in life -- and it's probably why he had accomplished more in his 45 years than most people could given twice that number.

Back in 2004, we found ourselves once again living in houses that were roughly ten minutes from each other by car. As a result, for five years we spent countless Sunday mornings drinking coffee and hanging around in each other's workshops. When the snow flew, we'd invariably joke about that scroll, and swear that one Christmas eve, when both of us were home and our wives were asleep on the couch, we'd take that long winter walk. He'd start out from his house and I from mine, we'd meet somewhere in the middle and, with little fanfare save a handshake and a quiet "Hail and well met, brother," we'd break out the flask of Drambuie and toast our lives and the sheer, unbelievable good fortune that had graced us with this enduring friendship.

Every Christmas eve, especially when the moon is full and there's fresh snow on the ground, I sorely regret never having taken that walk. Maybe someday, many years from now or in the blink of an eye, it will still happen -- if there is indeed something after this life, as he always believed.

In the meantime, I'll raise a glass of Drambuie to my friend, my brother, and take a moment to remember the good times we had.

Merry Christmas, Mate.

Hail, and well met.

Step on my back, break your mother's crack.

2011-12-22T17:16:00.017-05:00

Or something like that.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a muscle spasm in between my shoulder blades, up toward my neck, so I went to the doctor. He gave me a prescription for a week's worth of muscle relaxers, and sent me on my way. I took maybe three of them over the course of the next day, and in a few days the spasm was gone. Also, I almost missed work because you do NOT want to wake up in the morning after you take one of those things.

I thought that would be the end of it, but no. For some reason, ever since then, when I hunch over at the computer to type, or extend my left arm while I'm sitting, I get what feels like a tingle in the middle of my back, and it radiates down to the first finger and thumb on my left hand. It's the weirdest thing. I figured it would go away in a day or so, but it didn't. So finally, last week I told my wife I was going to go back to the doctor, and she said, "Why don't you try my chiropractor? He's really good." I was skeptical. I watched as many Two and a half men reruns at dinner time as the next guy, and I'd never really been to a chiropractor, even though I've had friends and relatives swear by it. Me, I've always thought of it as a pseudo-science at best, similar to acupuncture. Maybe there's something to it and maybe not.

So I agreed to give it a shot. I know there are some bone-crackers who get into the kooky-spooky spiritual aspects of things and start talking about your energies and your aura and the color of your poop, but when I had my first appointment, this guy didn't seem like that at all. He seemed to be pretty much focused on the mechanics of your body; your posture, your joints, your spinal curvature, things that made sense to me. It was more like talking to a physical therapist. The other thing I liked about him is he put me on the table with my face nestled in some kind of vinyl butt, looked at my spine, felt around a little bit, and said nothing major was "out," which I think is the highly scientific term chiropractors use when they describe your bones. "Your C5 and C7 are out," they might say. Where they have gone, and what they might be up to while they are out is anybody's guess. Whatever it is, they are apparently not supposed to be doing it. I'm pretty sure it involves a hot-sheet hotel in a seedy part of town.

So he asked me more about the referral pain down my arm, told me to lie facedown on the table, and then hooked me up to electricity. He put contacts on my back and connected wires to them, and then I'm guessing he took the ends of the wires and jammed them straight into a 220 volt socket, because suddenly my shoulder muscles contracted, my arms went straight out and my head tried to pull itself into my ass from the wrong direction. (On second thought, there's probably not really a right direction.) Anyway, this went on for a few seconds until he got it adjusted. After he dialed it back to 11, I was just ever-so-slightly shrugging my shoulders every three seconds, like I just didn't care about something over and over. He put some some sort of moist heat pack over the electrodes and my shoulders, and then left me there for 10 minutes.

When he came back, he worked over the shoulder muscle for a few minutes, rubbed some sort of camphor and menthol goop into my neck, told me he thought my pain and weird tingling fingers were due to a muscular problem, and charged me $65. I didn't feel much different, other than now I smelled like someone rubbed me down with Ben Gay and vodka, so I made another appointment and went home. In my head, I figured I'd give this guy a week or two, and then I'd head to an orthopedic or something.

The next appointment went about the same, and again there wasn't much improvement. He sent me for an X-ray, and what that told him is that due to not having great posture (have you ever seen an X-ray of a drummer's spine?) I had lost some of the "curve" in my neck. There was also some bone spurs in my cervical vertebrae because I'm old as dirt and I guess after you turn 40 your bones start doing weird shit to protect themselves and in another 20 years I'll probably have extra phalanges sprouting out of my coccyx or something.

He said the X-ray wouldn't show a disc problem, so he wanted to get an MRI if my insurance would cover it. I said they'd cover it, but only about this much of it. Either way, he said he thought I could benefit from a good stretching and decompression. I figured he was going to give me some 5th generation, crooked, copy machine printout of some exercises that featured a faceless figure with an oval head and lots of dotted lines, but instead he brought me into the next room where this happened:

I sat back on the table and he put my neck into a vise, and then strapped my head to this sled-like assembly. Attached to the sled was a cable that ran up to the back of the table, and the whole thing was attached to a computer. He programmed it, and after making sure I wasn't too uncomfortable (I wasn't, considering I was strapped to a machine being controlled by what looked like an IBM 486 pc from the early 90's) he turned the lights on low and told me he'd be back in 15 minutes.

The first time it went to 27 pounds of pull, I was pretty sure I was going to be paralyzed from the neck down. I remembered the quality of the graphics on that video screen and prayed it wasn't running Windows Me under the covers, because that OS was so bad it would pull your head off your body just for the fun of watching you die.

After a while though, it started to feel kind of good. It would slowly pull up to 27 pounds, then release to 14 or so. Then back up again. Before I knew it, the 15 minutes were up, and I wanted one of these things for my living room.

I've been on it twice so far and I can't really tell if it does anything or not. It feels pretty good when it stops, but then again, so does stabbing a fork into your eye. I know one thing, I'm going broke in this place. Really what's happening is I'm paying thirty five dollars for someone to give me a half-assed back rub and then pull gently on my head for 15 minutes.*

What I mean to say is, if it's truly muscular like he says, I could probably go to an actual massage therapist and pay about fifteen bucks more for an hour-long massage.

I have the MRI scheduled for Wednesday, so I'm probably not going back to him until I have some pictures of the inside of my spine. Wish me luck.

*That sounds dirty, but I'm leaving it.

Beans, Beans are good for your heart.

2011-12-20T19:59:00.011-05:00

So the other day, I made these:

Well, I didn't actually make them, I mean I didn't grow them in my garden or anything. But still, I had something to do with their transition to that state.

If you didn't know, I'm a bit of a coffee snob. If someone offers me a cup of coffee and I accept, and they immediately take the can of Maxwell House out of the freezer, I always have second thoughts. Sometimes I'll change my mind and say I'd like tea instead, or sometimes I'll choke it down if I'm trying to be polite. I think "Good to the Last Drop" is probably one of the biggest and oldest marketing lies out there. In other words, I prefer to grind my own beans and I am partial to a darker roast and using a french press.

And then it all went to hell, because I read a stupid article on the stupid internet about how I could roast my own stupid coffee using nothing but a stupid $20 ebay popcorn popper.

I had to try it. Apparently the popper I wanted was called a WestBend Poppery, or Poppery II. I found a Poppery II cheap, so I Bought it Now, baby. Then I went on a search for green coffee beans, having visions of the sweet, sweet aroma of freshly roasted coffee wafting through my house.

I researched a few other things, too. Technically, coffee is "stale" about 5 days after it's roasted. You can slow that down with vacuum packing, but once you open your bag, use it up quick. Green coffee beans supposedly stay fresh and good for 6 months to a year in their unroasted state. I learned about chaff, and first crack and second crack. I found a place called Sweet Maria's, and I ordered up some coffee.

I got the popcorn popper first. It sounded like a worn out blow dryer with a bad bearing, but it got pretty hot and looked clean. I cleaned it up a little more, found a glass lantern chimney to replace the plastic top, and waited for my coffee to arrive.

I had ordered the "sampler pack" which means I got about 8 pounds of coffee total, with four different types of beans from different countries. It finally showed up a few days after the popper, and I was ready to roll.

The labels on the beans read like terms you'd hear at a wine or beer tasting. "Fruited bittersweet balance, chocolate biscuit, plum, sweet spices like cinnamon, ginger, clove and coriander" was on one package, and another read "Dried mango, peach, tamarind, rustic chocolate" (Rustic chocolate? That doesn't sound very appetizing.) I was excited. I had to try this asap.

I set everything up on the kitchen counter and plugged the popper in. I opened one of the bags of coffee and dumped in around 4-5 ounces of green beans, and got a wooden spoon to stir it with until it lost enough moisture to stir itself.

The first thing I noticed was that roasting coffee smells like ass. It smells nothing at all like coffee, and instead of a heavenly aroma of coffee wafting through my house, instead what I had was something that smelled like rotten grass slowly heating up in the sun. I turned on the fan over the stove, and started stirring the beans with the handle of the spoon. Immediately I noticed another problem. In order to look at the coffee, I had to put my head directly over the top of the popper, and since it's a hot air popper, air that smelled like ass was blowing directly into my face. It was like being forced to talk to someone with bad breath because they have something you want. After a minute or so, I noticed the chaff starting to come off the beans. This is the outer skin of the coffee bean, and it's very light. Think of that thin covering over a peanut when you take it out of the shell. Like that. This isn't so bad, I thought, leaning in for another stir.

Suddenly, I was in the middle of a brown, smelly snowstorm and chaff was blowing all over the kitchen. I had half-expected some kind of mess, which is why I decided to do this when my wife wasn't home. It was then that I heard what they call "first crack" and it sounds exactly like it was described. Sort of a popcorn-y sound, but not quite. It was less violent, maybe more like the sound you'd hear if you broke a candy cane in half. Suddenly, all the beans were doing this, and the popper was getting pretty lively. The smell didn't really improve much, however.

After most of the chaff had blown away, the beans started to brown. After about 14 minutes of this, I heard what I thought was "second crack" which sounds just like first crack except it's one higher. I wanted a nice dark roast, so I kept things going for a bit, watching the color of the beans until I had what I wanted. The fan over the stove wasn't cutting it, and the room was getting a little bit hazy. I was pretty sure that I saw the beginning of a little smoke, but I wasn't positive. Maybe the bean fumes were getting to me.

When I had a color I could live with, I unplugged the popper and dumped the beans into a metal colander, in order to quickly cool them. As I swished them around, I leaned in to take a little whiff, and sadly, things hadn't improved. It didn't smell like rotten grass anymore, but it certainly didn't smell like coffee. But that was OK. It was my first try, and I figured I did something wrong. I dumped the beans into an airtight container, and cleaned up my mess. Mission accomplished, sort of.

That night while I was in bed, I kept smelling that ass-grass roasting coffee smell. My wife didn't mention anything when she got home, so I figured airing out the house had worked OK, but this was really strong. It took me a few minutes to realize it was my hair. From sticking my face over the popper, I had that oily stench pretty much embedded in my scalp.

The next morning, I went downstairs to the kitchen and opened the container and...it was coffee! Honest to god, fantastic smelling, fresh-roasted coffee that smelled like you would expect it to. I brewed it up, and I thought it tasted pretty good for my first attempt. It wasn't as strong as Starbucks, but it wasn't as bitter either. I am now going to try a bunch of other bean types, and roasting times, just to see what I end up with. Also, I'm doing this in my shop now. No more kitchen counter. Here's a little video of that roast in the first picture when it was almost done.

I've tried all four in my sampler pack and here's what I've written down in my log so far:

Ethiopia Harar Longberry:

What I am supposed to taste: Hints of dried mango, peach, tamarind, and spicy cinnamon

What I actually taste: Weak-ass Coffee

Sumatra Dry-hulled Aceh Bukit:

What I am supposed to taste: Fruity, chocolate biscuit, plum, sweet spices

What I actually taste: Your Basic Really Good Restaurant Coffee

Brazil Cerrado DP Fazenda Aurea:

What I am supposed to taste: creamy body, very nutty, chocolate in darker roasts, banana, melon

What I actually taste: Average Coffee

Costa Rica Bajo Canet de Tarrazu:

What I am supposed to taste: Brightness (?), heavy fruit aromatics, banana, melon, orange peel, dark brown sugar

What I actually taste: More Coffee

So clearly I have to work on my tasting skills, because I have none. They all taste like coffee to me. Good, and fresh, but similar in nature. I need to learn more about the limitations of this corn popper method, too. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I need to get an $800 home roaster so I can turn into a pretentious dickhead and pretend I taste all that stuff in those descriptions.

More so, I mean.

Doing it wrong.

2011-12-07T20:14:00.006-05:00

This has to be the ballsiest way ever to commit suicide:

Flesh-eating piranhas kill man in Bolivia

By The Associated Press

Authorities say piranhas attacked and killed a young man who leaped into a river infested with the flesh-eating fish in northeastern Bolivia.

Daniel Cayaya is a police official in the small city of Guayaramerin. He tells The Associated Press that the 18-year-old man was drunk when he jumped out of a canoe in the nearby town of Rosario del Yata, 400 miles north of the capital of La Paz.

Cayaya says the man bled to death after the attack, which occurred last Thursday. First word of the incident emerged Tuesday, when it was reported by the Erbol radio station.

Cayaya says the police suspect suicide because the man was a fisherman in the region who knew the Yata river well.

That's just crazy. It's like deciding to kill yourself by juggling a bunch of hornets nests while dancing a jig on a fire-ant hill.

I probably won't buy these.

2011-12-05T21:43:00.012-05:00

They confuse me. Do they give you the crabs? Or take them away?

And what's up with the company name? Utz? It sounds like the noise you make when someone hits you in the solar plexus with oh, I don't know, a giant crab, for instance. Come on, snack food machine filler guy, stop being a lazy piece. I know you put shit like this in the machine just so you don't have to fill it as often. Next thing you know, we'll have three different rows of Necco wafers up in there to keep those disgusting Chuckles company. Is there anything more vile in taste and consistency than the black Chuckle? No, there is not.

So let's dispense with The Crab Chip, ok? Bring back the Cheddar SunChips, or the extra crunchy Cheetos. You know, the real food. Crabs and Lobsters are nothing more than nasty looking, underwater bugs. All you people who say you love the taste of lobster and crab -- face it; you just love the taste of melted butter.

Speaking of bugs, did you guys see this thing? Holy shit. My wife would have a stroke if she saw one of these in the house. Also, I wouldn't recommend stomping on it to kill it. I have a feeling it might shoot up your pant leg like a giant mayonnaise packet or something. I mean, I'm not afraid of bugs as a general rule, but that thing eats carrots.*

Whole carrots.

Jesus.

*I did some additional reading and it turns out that some people cook these bugs and eat them. That's just disgusting. But I suppose if you could feed it a carrot, a potato and some celery right before you cook it, you could save some time on Weta stew.

Edit: OK, i bought them today. First they are...not horrible. They are extremely salty, and they remind me a little bit of the old Wise Barbecue chips we used to get when I was a kid. I ate most of the bag, but didn't finish them. Sorry to say, they're not my favorite. I think that honor has to go to:

They are awesome. Trust me.

Free Willy.

2011-11-22T17:50:00.017-05:00

As regular visitors here might be aware, my wife makes hats, scarves and headbands, which she sells on both Etsy and on her website at www.anniesoriginals.com. In fact, right now, she has a free shipping special going on that runs until Christmas, so consider this my annual plug. Tell her Johnny sent you. It won't get you any discounts, but there's an outside chance it might help me get lucky. It's worth a shot, anyway.

She can also take special orders right up until two weeks before Christmas, so if you want special colors or a certain kind of wool (I have an awesome hat made out of alpaca) just email her and let her know. Hats and scarves only, please. Why do I say that? Let me tell you why.

The other night, she walked in to my office holding her laptop, and she had an odd look on her face. She said, "You're not going to believe this, but I got an e-mail from a lady who wants me to actually crochet -- "

I interrupted her and said, "A penis warmer?" She looked at me like I was psychic or something. Crazy, but psychic.

"Yeah! How'd you know?" she asked. I honestly had no idea how I knew. I just immediately knew. Maybe I am psychic. Or maybe that just says something about how long we've been married.

In case you've never seen one, (a warmer, that is) they generally look like this:

"My dad used to have a red, white and blue one in his dresser drawer when I was a kid," I said. "It was very patriotic."

"Really? Your dad?" she asked in disbelief. She looked stunned and a little horrified, like she was picturing my father wearing it. Or trying to not picture him wearing it, and failing. Then I started picturing him wearing it, so I quickly explained things to clear that mental image for both of us.

"No, no -- he didn't seriously wear it. It was in one of those joke boxes that said something like - 'Just a little present to keep you warm this winter.' One of his friends gave it to him as a gag gift, I think. Or maybe it was my mother. That sounds like her."

She looked relieved.

"It's one of the few fun things I ever found in there when my mother used to punish me by sending me to their room instead of my own," I said. "It didn't look like it would fit anything human." (I had gotten in trouble for going through their drawers, but it had been worth it. It was right up there with the time I found the 'pin-the-boobs-on-the-girl' party game in my grandmother's attic.)

"This lady sounds like she really wants one, but I'm not sure I have time to make it," she said. "Plus I'd have to find a pattern."

"If you make it, I'll model the prototype for you, " I said. "But you may have to size the final product up a bit." She laughed and said, "What do you think I should I tell her?"

"Google it," I said. "I'm sure there's a link you can send her if you don't have time to make one. There are probably a million places selling those things."

Turns out I was right. If you Google "willy warmer" or "penis warmer," you will see hundreds of different types of warmers in all sizes and colors. You may even see some that are being modeled by their very proud owners if your google safe-search isn't turned on. (Trust me. Leave it on.)

So anyway, this got me thinking. I wasn't sure exactly why there were so many. I figured -- gag gifts, ok -- but there were people actually using these things. As in, they had knitted willy warmers as a regular part of their wardrobe. Right up there with socks and shoes, shirts and ties.

So I thought, Maybe it's just me, and this *isn't* really weird. And then I immediately thought, No, it is.

With that in mind, I'm going to conduct an informal poll of the men reading this blog post right now:

Question: Has your junk ever been cold? Ever?

Obviously if you are one of those polar bear freaks, you don't have to answer, because you are bat-shit crazy and therefore your survey response is rendered invalid. I realize I can't speak for everyone here, (and I concede that there may be a random person with some sort of Raynaud's disease of the penis reading this right now) but for the most part I'd have to say that it's like a furnace down there -- summer, winter, rain or shine -- it doesn't matter. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that if someone invented some kind of cooling device that you could strap on like one of these warmers, guys would be buying them in droves.

And here's another thing. Most of these are made of wool, or some sort of Acrylic/Wool blend. Wool is two things: Incredibly warm, and incredibly itchy. I've never owned a wool sweater that didn't need a shirt under it, and I can only wear a wool hat for so long before I'm scratching my head like I have a colony of lice setting up a terrorist camp behind my ears. So my second question is this: Why? Why would you want something that itchy placed directly on something that already itches more than its fair share in relation to other body parts? I've included this handy graph to help you understand the ratios here:

By all means, feel free to disagree with me, but I am willing to go on record as speaking for the majority of people who don't have some kind of extenuating circumstances on/in some other part of their body and say this:

You never, ever need to intentionally add any additional heat or irritation down there. Period.

That would be like going to the beach and saying, "You know what my ass crack is missing? Sand. Lots and lots of sand."

Now that I went off on that tangent, let me loop back around and point out that if you want a nice hat or scarf, or are looking for a unique, hand-made Christmas gift for someone special, my wife uses very nice yarn that won't make anything itch. Plus, free shipping for a limited time. You can't beat that.

Just don't ask her to knit you a willy warmer because she won't do it.*

*Unless you pay her a ton of money and let her make it out of alpaca or cashmere and promise to never, ever send her a photo of anyone actually wearing it.

I'm in trouble, you guys.

2011-11-13T13:10:00.016-05:00

The other day I stopped over to my dad's house after work, just to catch up and see if he needed a hand with anything. We ended up getting the leaves off the pool cover. He bought this net that goes over the cover and the idea is that you're supposed to be able to just peel back the net and all the leaves will come with it. It works, kind of, but the problem you have is by the time you've pulled them all to one end, you've got about a hundred and fifty pounds of wet, slimy leaves that you aren't sure what to do with. We eventually hauled the swampy goop out on to the grass, then scooped it into some garbage cans, then put the net back. By the time we were done, my arms smelled like I had just given a deep-tissue massage to the creature from the black lagoon.

After we washed up, we went upstairs because he had some computer questions for me. First off, computers and my father do not get along. It's like he emits some sort of anti-energy that just makes electronics do bad things to good people. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I've fixed his computer many, many times over the years, from DOS 5.0 on up. I think the worst stretch was probably Windows Me. That OS was such a steaming pile of crap I finally told him that unless he let me upgrade him to XP, I wasn't going to work on it anymore.

Anyway, that's all in the past. Now he has a newer Dell, a flatscreen monitor, and a CPU that more than meets his needs. There hasn't been much in the way of computer support lately other than a question here and there about getting pictures in and out of the thing. He has three grand-kids now and they keep him pretty busy taking pictures. So I sat down and flipped the power on and waited for his machine to boot while he went and changed his clothes.

Here's where the story gets interesting. There was a folded piece of paper on the desk, and I picked it up. It had two things written on it, and they were:

johnnyvirgil@nycap.rr.com

15minutelunch.blogspot.com

Oh, shit.

My father had finally found my blog. I'm not sure exactly why I feared this, but I wanted to immediately kill the person who told him about it. I wasn't sure if he had already read it, or if he was just planning to check it out and hadn't gotten around to it yet. When and if he did, the next domino that would fall is that he would find out I wrote a book. You're probably wondering why I never told him I had written a book, or that I write a blog. I'll get to that in a bit, if you're still reading by then. (I have no idea where I'm going with this post, just so you know.)

I had a very strange reaction to this news. I immediately felt like I was 10 years old again, and in the dog house, waiting for my dad to get home from work. Like I had done something wrong, which is an odd reaction to have about something I've put so much time and effort into over the years. Even now, this entire chain of events mystifies me, and I've spent the last few days trying to figure it all out, because intellectually, I find it patently ridiculous, but there's this little kid part of me that still doesn't want him to read it.

I've been trying to figure out what this says about our relationship, given that I'm not living in his basement and delivering pizzas part-time or anything. I mean, I'm a responsible, modestly successful adult with a decent job, a lovely wife and a nice house in the woods, right? So why the hell would I care if he read my blog or my book? After thinking about this for a while, I've come to the conclusion that it's because my father is a lot of things that I'm not.

My father has always been my biggest inspiration. He's done some amazing things in his life, and I've always held him up as an example of how to be a good man, a good husband and a good father. He joined General Electric when he was fresh out of high school, and was accepted into a sort of work-study program they offered at the time. You'd work during the day as an apprentice, and they would pay for you to take college courses at night. Their goal was to turn you into an electrical engineer or something else they could use. If you didn't do well in class, all bets were off and you were out. My grandfather didn't have the money to send my father to college, so this was his only way to get there, and he was determined. He worked his ass off and made it through, and he and my mother were married shortly thereafter.

Our childhood seriously couldn't have been better, and I'm thankful every day for the fantastic memories he's provided me, and the sacrifices he's made throughout his life to make our lives easier. He and my mother raised four children to adulthood, and I really couldn't ask for a more involved father, or a better role model, when it comes to that. And therein lies the rub, I think. Sometimes, his expectations (or my perception of them, at least) can be hard to live up to.

First, let me tell you a little bit more about my dad:

1. Staunch Roman Catholic

2. Right wing conservative

3. Thinks most TV sitcoms are offensive

4. Thinks all R-rated movies are trash

5. G-rated sense of humor

6. Strict moral philosophy

So you can see where we might be at odds a little bit. For instance, I don't personally think that R-rated movies and raunchy sitcoms are going to cause the end of civilization as we know it. (I think it's probably going to be China, and reality TV, if you care.) I've been writing this blog since 2005, and I'm not above going for the easy laughs, as you are all probably aware. Basically, any absurdities I see that make me crack a smile, or anything that makes me wonder if we're all insane will usually end up here. To me, these pages are a harmless diversion that allow me to vent with some degree of anonymity about the crap I see every day. I think my reaction to finding the address of my blog written down on a piece of paper on my dad's desk was mostly related to the above list.

Do I sometimes say things in my blog that might not be appropriate in polite company? Check.

Do I write some stuff my father wouldn't find funny in the slightest? Double Check.

Do I write some stuff he might find morally offensive? Check. Check. Check.

I think each of us contain multitudes -- we are different people to our friends, spouses, co-workers and parents; our personalities and behavior somewhat depend upon the moment in time we find ourselves in. Like the parent of a toddler who curbs their use of crude language when the child is within earshot, or the feigned politeness we show to the cop who pulls us over, we vary our behavior -- in effect, who we are at that very moment -- to fit our current situation.

Take, for instance, the father-son dynamic. I believe the framework of this relationship is built when you are fairly young -- and good or bad, it continues to exist at some level, unchanging, regardless of how old you both become. I will always be my father's son, and as a result, that fact transforms me to some extent. I will always be the kid, he will always be the parent. I modify my behavior in an effort to fit into this particular version of me that I think he expects to see. For instance, I very rarely swear* when I am around him, and I only share humorous stories if they are solidly G-rated. I basically become Opie Taylor from Mayberry, and that's how it's always been. My brothers and my sister do it too. Hell, maybe everyone does the same thing around their parents and I just never realized it.

On the other hand, there's always the possibility that it's not what he expects. I don't know. Maybe he wouldn't give two shits if I made a off-color joke or dropped an f-bomb in conversation. I'm not really sure, to be honest. When the four of us were growing up, we very rarely subjected to physical discipline. An occasional, well-placed spanking wasn't out of the question, but mostly it was the sternly uttered words, "I'm really disappointed in you" that really caused us to feel remorse for whatever we had done.

So I think my initial reaction was nothing more than the deep-seated, subconscious echo of a dorky 10-year-old kid desperately scared of disappointing his old man. Interestingly enough, however, knowing that on an intellectual level doesn't necessarily make the feeling go away. My father is the kind of person who makes you want to strive to be a better man, which is an amazing trait to have, however I think the problem is we don't always agree on what constitutes "better." And I think I'm finally OK with that, and I hope he is too.

I remember one time when I was in college, I was doing a series of cartoons for the school paper. One of the characters was named Joshua Stone, and he had a tall basketball playing roommate named Sky, and the joke was that Josh had recurring flashbacks and for some reason, Sky could see them. I put Dr Ruth's face on a spider's body once. (Trust me, it was hilarious.) Anyway, my father came and talked to me about it one night, concerned that the cartoons I had been drawing were becoming drug-related. I assured him that I was not, in fact, taking drugs, and that I was just drawing a stupid cartoon for the paper, and I understood that he probably didn't find it funny. Also, as you can probably guess, that was my last cartoon for the paper. Intentionally or not, our conversation had sucked the fun out of it for me, and made me believe that perhaps it wasn't the best use of my time. I've always kind of regretted giving that up so easily.

That was then, and this is now. So, my father knows about my blog, and I assume he also knows about my book. For all I know, he's already read it just never said anything. So the big questions become these: (1) Am I going to continue to write this blog, and (2) Will I write differently, censoring myself, always with the potential audience of my father in the back of my mind?

The answers are "Yes, I will continue as long as I find it fun," and "No, not if I can help it." I'm pretty solidly me, and I guess at this point, he has probably accepted (if not always approved of) all aspects of the person I've become. He did his best, and I think we're both pretty confident that I turned out OK. (For the most part, anyway.) Besides, I figure it's always his prerogative to simply stop reading if he doesn't enjoy my particular brand of humor. Maybe I'll even give him a copy of my book for Christmas.

I'm just hoping he doesn't ground me.

*I've often wondered about this mystical power that we give words. Who decides the relative order of crudeness? What makes "shit" worse than "crap" and "crap" worse than "poop" and "poop" worse than "feces?" It's really funny when you think about it. As far as I can tell, it's all the same shit. Different day, perhaps, but still....

Magic.

2011-11-11T15:11:00.001-05:00

I needed to pass this on. It gives me goosebumps every time.

Happy Halloween, Ladies.

2011-10-31T19:16:00.015-04:00

I'm afraid WhirlyBird will have to wait. I took a look at my Google Analytics yesterday and got a little swept up in the search terms people used to get here. I haven't looked in quite a while and I was beginning to forget how sick and twisted and generally confused by the internet people are. So with that as an introduction, I'm going to let Google entertain me today. And maybe you, too. I guess that's always an added bonus. So here you go:

Fantastic Google Searches that Somehow Led People to My Site

بنات تركيات -- Unfortunately, I don't know what you're asking. Or even what you want of me. I tried a few translation programs on the web, and the only hit I could find was this video for someone or something called Turkey Blocks. So I think it has something to do with chicks in tight pants coming out of some sort of genie teapot and then dancing to the music of someone who looks like a 12-year-old middle-eastern pimp. And there might be invisible turkeys. At least that's my interpretation.

!z!zz!zzzz!,!!zzzzzzz!!zz,zzz -- I'm not exactly sure how you found my blog while electrocuting yourself, but I hope you enjoyed your brief time here. In your next life, remember the hot wire is black. Usually. Unless you're wiring a 4-way switch and then it's too complicated for me. On second thought, don't pay attention to anything I say and hire an electrician.

Animals Humping -- Way to be non-specific. You don't care what sort of animals, you just want to see them doing it. I'm going to have to break it to you gently -- you were led astray by the Great Google. There are no animals humping here. There are animals, and there may be a small amount of humping, but there are no animals humping.

baking soda and lemon for vagina -- I've heard of the baking soda thing, but the lemon is new to me. My advice to you is to skip the lemon. At that point, it's starting to sound a little too much like a recipe. I'm half tempted to tell you to just dip it in egg whites and then roll it in breadcrumbs, but I'm pretty sure that would be bad advice.

Belly mold -- I'm not sure what you're looking for here. A way to make a mold of your belly or a solution to a disgusting medical problem. Just in case it's the latter, there's this amazing stuff called Mold Armor that I recently discovered. I sprayed a little on my moldy black porch railing and it was like a small miracle. I'm not sure if it's safe for your belly or not, but I can guarantee that if you have anything even slightly discolored up in there, it wont be for long. You'll probably get a free bleaching in the bargain just from the run-off.

Dear Scrotum -- I had to do some research on this one. Turns out, it's one of the oldest McCartney/Lennon feuds on record. Ultimately, even though the song was written by Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney, Lennon did finally relent and go with McCartney's suggestion that he use the name "Prudence" instead.

Geddy Lee in the swimming pool! -- I am still laughing at the exclamation point. It makes it sound like Geddy snuck into Bernie Mac's back yard one night at 2 am and made a little too much noise. When Bernie's wife yelled downstairs to find out what was going on, Bernie yelled back "Geddy Lee in the swimmin' pool! Call the po-lice!"

how to keep your cat's butt from smelling -- I think you might have the front of your cat and the back of your cat mixed up. Usually it's the nose that does the smelling. I drew a little diagram to help you out:

Keep that picture handy and do me a favor. Make sure you refer to it before you kiss your cat's nose again.

octopus in a bikini melting an ice cube -- I am at a loss here, since I have no idea how this search brought you to my blog; yet I cannot get this image out of my mind. It haunts me. Octopus. Bikini. Ice. There's only one thing that can get my mind off this bizarre combination of oddities. And that is:

things made with human skin -- That's pretty horrifying, and I supposed it's appropriate for someone prepping for Halloween. I guess that search turned up a few too many links because the next search was a little more specific:

human skin britches -- There ya go. Now you're getting the idea behind Google. Next time add in your waist size and inseam and I think you'll be all set. You may also want to rethink the "britches" part, grandpa. Try "pants" or "trousers" or "chaps," if you really want to get kinky. You'll eventually end up at The Gap like everyone else but at least you tried.

Happy Halloween, everyone! (Save me a Reese's. )

Opposites don't always attract.

2011-10-21T17:07:00.014-04:00

Last weekend I am pretty sure I experienced the absolute opposite ends of the musical spectrum, and it may have temporarily broken my music bone. On Friday, I got a call from Yort and he said his friend was playing at a place in Saratoga and asked if I wanted to go. I asked him where, and he said "Caffe Lena's." I said, "HELL YEAH!" and made the devil signs with my hands and then went and told my wife to not wait up because I was going to go out with Yort and get all folked up.

Caffe Lena, if you don't know, is an historic musical venue in Saratoga, NY. I've been there a few times, and while I'm not generally a fan of folk music, it doesn't hurt my insides as much as rap or country so sometimes I've been known to sit through a set or two when asked. This place is famous and the list of people who have played in this room is staggering, considering it's about the size of my living room and kitchen area combined, and has a low, dingy drop ceiling and no ventilation. And did I mention that they don't serve alcohol of any kind? Not even an Irish coffee to be had. This place is strictly sandwiches, pastries, coffee and tea. So you have to either really enjoy this sort of music or be there at the behest of a friend to voluntarily sit through it while stone cold sober.

The trio we were there to see is called Bread and Bones, and even though it's folk, they are really good musicians. The harmonies were spot on, and the lyrics were pretty cool from a story-telling perspective. At the very least, I could certainly appreciate the craftsmanship. At one point the ukulele came out, and the singer said, "You can't play an unhappy song on the ukulele." I leaned over to Yort and said "Hey, it's just like a wave runner!"

So the other bad thing about this place is that it's soooo small you can't really make comments or jokes because you have 15 people in the audience paying rapt attention, and if you even try to sneak a fart out in the middle of a song everyone in the room instantly knows it. So I kept further comments to myself and we cooled it on the jokes after a while and just listened to the songs because people were starting to get a little pissed off, I think.

Bread and Bones were the opener and I wanted to leave afterward but I guess that's not really good form since the four of us were about 1/3 of the audience. So we stayed through the break and caught up with Yort's friend for a bit. At that point the coffee was going right through me so I hit the bathroom. There wasn't an inch of the wall not covered by graffiti -- it was crazy. And they were really, really adamant about not peeing on the floor:

I especially appreciated the fact that, rather than just saying "DON'T PEE ON THE FLOOR" they gave you several possible alternatives, each of which were pre-approved and management sanctioned. The fact that the sign itself looked like it had been pissed on many times in its history was a standing testament to the passive-aggressive behavior that apparently runs rampant in hardcore folk circles.

Next up, we had Sally Spring. Sally and her husband are a duo, and he plays a pretty decent guitar. Not a fan of his backup singing style but Sally had a pretty good voice. Sally also played guitar and it was friggin' amazing to watch her because she is at a slight disadvantage:

As Yort said, "I'll never complain about how hard it is to play guitar with my short, stubby fingers ever again." It was kind of mesmerizing at first, but after a while you sort of got used to it. OK, no you didn't. But it was still pretty amazing and an incredible example of not letting a handicap stop you from accomplishing your dreams.

So I'm all good on the Folk music for a while. For me, it's sort of like that piece of fruitcake your great-aunt gives you when you visit her on Christmas. When you're eating it with your coffee you're thinking, "Hmm, this isn't so bad. I can choke this down to make her happy." but after about the 3rd bite you're ready to wad it into a ball and stick it to the underside of the table and hope nobody notices. Then when she gives you the leftovers, you politely thank her and throw it out of your car window on the way home.

The next night, we headed to the Palace in Albany for a concert by Dream Theater, a band that Yort is a huge fan of. I can appreciate that they're all complete masters of their respective instruments and I like some of the music but unfortunately I'm not a huge fan of the singer's voice. He's got great pipes, but he's a little too Queensryche-ish for me. My friend happens to be their tour manager so he generally gets us in for free and it's always good to catch up with him. It was a really great show, and I was glad I went because they recently got a new drummer named Mike Mangini, and I had been wanting to hear him play. He's ex-Extreme and ex-Steve Vai, and he's an incredible player. The funniest thing about this band is that they make me feel tall. On stage, they look like giants, but when you meet them in person, they're all like five six. The new drummer is about 5' 3" I think. His set is pretty crazy, and takes about two and a half hours to set up. I sent this video to Yort and after viewing it he said, "So I assume you're heating your house tonight with the remnants of your destroyed drum set?"

All great guys though. This was the first time we got to meet all the members of the band. Normally, one or two will show up for the after-show, but I think there may have been radio station involved or something because they all came down. It was the first time we had met John Myung, the bass player, and when I shook his hand it felt like I grabbed onto the root of a tree. I looked down at our hands and I immediately saw what a lifetime of playing 6-string bass for hours a day could do to you. His fingers looked like they were the transplanted toes of an albino chimpanzee. They were all bulbous on the ends and formed entirely of hard, yellow callouses, with a thick, half-inch long fingernail on each. His fingers could have punched through a steel door. The shit we do for our art, I guess. Amazing bass player even though he doesn't have human hands.

We talked to James Labrie about his performance and how good his voice sounded and he said he's been taking better care of it lately. I asked him about a technique I read about once where you can dunk the top half of your head in a sink full of warm salt water and actually breathe in through your nose a little and suck the water into your nasal cavity. It's sort of like a full metal jacket neti pot. He just looked at me strangely for a second and then Yort said, "Are you asking him if he drowns himself?" Then James said, "I have to go stand over here now," and edged away from us. Not really, but that's what it felt like. Anyway, a fantastic show as always.

This weekend I'm depressing myself doing winter-prep yard work. I don't know what the hell I'm doing -- I sat down to write about whirlyball, and this came out instead and I decided to post it anyway. What can I say. I'm a mess. I need some blue sky autumn weather. This rainy stuff is sucking the life out of me.

Today is a day like any other day. Except with Angels.

2011-10-18T10:41:00.009-04:00

My buddy Rob's new book comes out today. I read an advance copy and it was a ton of fun. It is the best sequel to Mercury Falls ever written and if you haven't read the first one, I would totally recommend getting both books and reading them together. Well, maybe sequentially would be better. I suggest starting with Mercury Falls, in other words. Not that you couldn't read this one first and then back-track but then you'd be all kinds of Star-Wars messed up and you wouldn't care about Anakin at all. No wait, I'm getting confused.

At any rate, if you like Douglas Adams and quick humor, get this book. I'm already looking forward to the third in the series, because the 2nd book is setting up the dominos for some big stuff to come. You can get it here.

I'll let Rob tell you about it in his own words:

This has been a wild ride, starting with self-publishing Mercury Falls in 2009, getting picked up by AmazonEncore in 2010, and now having them publish the sequel. During that time Amazon Publishing went from being a notion floating around in Jeff Bezos' head to being the worst nightmare of the big publishing houses - the same publishing houses that wouldn't give me the time of day three years ago, by the way. Pardon me a moment while I shed one very small tear.

Fortunately, I've never written with agents or publishers in mind. I've never tried to write something that was "marketable" or that fit into any defined niche. I just write books that are interesting and fun. And guess what? When you give readers the opportunity to buy reasonably priced books that are interesting and fun, people buy them! I've been absolutely thrilled and humbled at the success of Mercury Falls, and I'm especially thankful to those of you who have supported me from way back in my Mattress Police days. Thanks, guys. You made my dream come true.

I hope you enjoy the new book. I worked hard on it.

Rob

Sick. In more ways than one.

2011-10-17T19:30:00.008-04:00

So I'm some kind of sick. Not sure what it is, but I feel like I got bit by some tropical insect that sucks the life out of you and makes it so all you want to do is sleep. I'm not sure if it's allergies or what, but I feel like my head is a balloon on a string floating slightly above my neck. So my Cleveland trip story will need to wait a few days until I hopefully don't feel like a steaming pile. In the meantime, I saw this on the way home:

I know what you're thinking. So what? They're all excited and happy about having an open apartment for rent and wanted to share the news. I can certainly understand that.

A little too happy, I think. I don't think smiley faces and balloons are really appropriate, given the, um, circumstances:

I'll be back in a day or two, I promise. Assuming I don't succumb to what I can only assume is a tsetse fly bite. If so,

Robo Nurse. For the guy who has everything.

2011-10-11T19:43:00.009-04:00

Now put your elbows on the table and relax, as my doctor says.

I finally got my blackberry service back, so I was able to transfer a few pictures from my trip to the old home office last week. We flew out to meet with the team and also to play whirlyball, the most ridiculous game in the world. In case you don't know, it's sort of like a combination of basketball and lacrosse, except you're riding around in a bumper car with no steering wheel. And yes, it's about as absurd as it sounds. I hope to tell you this tale of adventure in the next day or so.

Until then, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the sky. Although I wouldn't recommend that position if Robo Nurse is standing behind you. She looks like she means business.

Book your stay now!

2011-10-04T19:54:00.007-04:00

Don't pass this up! Book your romantic getaway weekend today at Shady Pines B&B, a quaint Bed and Breakfast nestled in the woods of upstate New York.

Two cute cottages and one master suite available for rent by the day or week (3-day minimum).

Master suite features a fully-equipped kitchen, Master bedroom and adjoining full bath. Cottages have shared bathroom and outside dining area, both only a short walk from your sleeping quarters. The smaller cottage sleeps two, the larger, four. All three are heated by a centrally located fire pit. Please call 518-893-0545 for reservations.

In other news, Yort and I built these last weekend.

Yes, it sucked. We made a stack of kindling trying to get the wedges cut right. I wish I took a "before" picture because those old stairs were built out of 2x12's and blocks of wood 15 years ago by monkeys with hammers who needed a quick way to get from one floor to the other without climbing a rope ladder or installing a Bat-pole.* (Although if they did the Bat-pole, I probably would have left it.)

*I never noticed before today that Batman's pole was fatter than Robin's, although I guess it stands to reason.

Wish you were here.

2011-09-27T21:35:00.005-04:00

Well, not all of you at the same time. That would probably ruin it.

We went camping with our friends Vidna, Pootie and Bee last weekend, and had a great time. Just wanted to post up a few shots. Looks like this weekend is another wash-out. I can't catch a break, weather-wise.

I don't even bother to take pictures any more. I just bring these guys. It's like having a really good camera that carries itself.

You can check out a couple of Vidna's shots here and here, and one of Pootie's here.

Stomping. It's all the rage.

2011-09-26T10:43:00.019-04:00

I saw a commercial for these the other day -- they're a new kind of slipper for kids that basically do action X when you stomp on them. They flop their ears, open their eyes, flap their mouths... It's a pretty good idea, if perhaps a tad unsafe on the stairs. They're basically a non-electronic version of those light-up sneakers all the kids had a few years ago.

I'm pretty sure they didn't they do any sort of marketing research before naming these things, though. Almost all the names rely on some sort of dumb alliteration. BeBop Bunny, Perky Puppy, etc. They went off the rails a bit with "Playful Blue Puppy." I think they may have been running out of steam at that point.

Then there's this one:

The Unusual Unicorn? What makes him unusual? The fact that his horn looks like soft-serve ice-cream? Because that's pretty unusual. Or maybe not. I don't have any unicorns so I'm probably not the best judge of horn quality. Maybe it's just the first word they stumbled upon that met their very low alliteration standards. On the flip side, I'm now going to assume that the 'usual' unicorns are the ones I see all the time. I probably won't even brake for them when they're crossing the street anymore. BAM! Who gives a crap. Those stupid things are all over the place.

And this:

Yes, it's the One-Eyed Monster, which is not at all a euphemism that's been around since the dawn of time. They had to go and muddy the waters, didn't they? Now when someone asks me if I'd like to see their One-Eyed Monster, I'm going to need to clarify a few things first. Are they a pair? Are they fuzzy? Wait, this isn't really helping. Not only is the name highly suspect, but apparently it's been knighted like Paul McCartney, because it's using the honorific "Sir." Like that lends them some credibility or something. I can see the marketing execs sitting in the conference room brainstorming about the name. "There's just something missing. We need to pump these up. Add something to make that One-Eyed Monster stand up and be noticed. Hey! I know! Let's just add a 'Sir' on the front. Hell, it worked for Alec Guinness, and he was a nobody."

Initially, what I found confusing was the question of whether or not they are two separate monsters. After thinking about it for a few seconds, I determined that they would have to be, otherwise they'd just be a regular two-eyed monster that had been even more inappropriately named.

I don't know. It's probably just me, but there's something in my brain that refuses to accept "stomping" as a valid activity if One-Eyed Monsters are involved.

I'll probably have to go for the BeBop Bunny.

See you in September.

2011-09-13T21:18:00.012-04:00

Who remembers that song? My dad, that's who. I'm not that old. But be warned -- this post will be the equivalent of "HEY YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY LAWN!"

It's autumn, and therefore I am spending a lot of time in the Adirondacks. I wait for this season all year, but it's always so fleeting. This past weekend my wife and I went to one of our favorite haunts, and the weather was perfect.

We weren't sure what to expect because of all the storm blowdown we've been hearing about, not to mention the washed out roads. The access road to this place isn't great to begin with, so we figured there was a pretty decent possibility that we'd be turning around at some point. We got a bit worried when we saw a sign on the access road about a bridge being out, but when we got to the lake the only thing there that indicated something was going on was a big-ass crane. But the work was done and for the most part, we had the place to ourselves. We paddled out to one of our favorite sites, and it was vacant so we took it.

It's always interesting to see what the idiots got up to on labor day weekend. Other than the typical issue of people not knowing how to dig a frigging hole and cover it back up if they have to go to the bathroom, the site wasn't in bad shape. Some melted cans and bottles in the fire ring, but not too much garbage in the site proper. But how ridiculous and disgusting is this?

Yeah, so I had to actually touch that thing in order to move it far, far away from our site. The most digesting part? As I was moving it, the bottom fell out. You haven't lived until you've heard a sound like PHUT! and felt a 5-gallon pail of liquified fecal matter suddenly become almost weightless.

People are stupid. Do they think the rangers have nothing better to do than go around the lake and retrieve 5 gallon pails of crap? I just don't understand this mentality.

Also, over the years I've gotten pretty good at telling whether someone I've never seen or met is a stupid asshole or not. For instance, if you do this to a live tree, you are a stupid asshole:

Why do I keep coming back here? Because of this:

I'll move poop for that if I have to, I guess. But I also bought a canoe carrier. My theory is that if I can go somewhere more difficult to get to, there will be fewer stupid assholes. But there may be a fault in my logic because there are different types of stupid assholes. There are lazy stupid assholes who 2-stroke it in with a cooler full of beer, but there are also meathead stupid assholes who decide to prove how badass they are by hiking ten miles with a keg of beer on each shoulder. I guess we'll see.

It was pretty peaceful except for about an hour on Saturday afternoon when a family of five came in for a day of kayaking - mom, dad, and their three kids. The kids were loud and obnoxious and pre-teens and therefore incapable of shutting the hell up for any length of time greater than or equal to three seconds. They also felt the need to stop at the flat rock in the middle of the lake directly across from our campsite and get out. The kids repeatedly threatened to jump in and the parents repeatedly yelled at them to get back in their boats. At the top of their lungs. For a solid 30 minutes.

It's a ROCK for god's sake. It's not a ride at Disneyland. They were also trying to imitate the loons and failing miserably. They sounded more like german police cars. The loons were having none of it, and immediately vacated the premises.

We then witnessed the exact moment that primitive humans discovered the echo. They yelled things and were amazed and delighted that the spirit of the mountain yelled the exact same thing back at them. In their own voices. It was apparently like magic. They did this for another ten minutes until I couldn't take it any more and yelled "HEY YOU KIDS! GET OFF OF MY LAKE!"

No, I didn't. I just yelled "SHUT UP!" -- and they actually did.

Hello? Have you noticed that there isn't another sound for miles EXCEPT FOR YOU? No, you have not.

And why? Because you are clueless idiots. Anyway, sorry for the rant. This vacation stuff is supposed to be relaxing.

On the way home, we saw this:

I can immediately tell you a few things about this family:

1. Their house smells like cat pee and wet dog.

2. You probably don't want to walk in their yard.

3. You should never, ever eat anything they bring to the bake sale.

I still owe you guys a few stories, but between trying to see if I have enough material for another book, insulating my basement and trying to get outside as much as possible this month, I've been neglecting my poor old blog. Oh, and my computer has been in the basement for the last week because it's the only one I have with a camera on it and we've been trying to figure out which one of the cats has the poops.

That's a good use of a $2300 computer, right?

Auto Repairs made easy.

2011-09-01T19:11:00.008-04:00

I met my brother for lunch today and he was showing me his new car. I asked him what kind of mileage it got, and he told me around 22, which I thought was really low.

Turns out it's a V8 with all-wheel drive. I asked him to pop the hood and show me the engine, since I'm a guy and I like looking at V8's because it's in my blood.

He popped the hood and here's what I saw:

Seriously? V8, I don't even know you any more. There was a little door for the windshield washer fluid, and a dipstick. That's it.

It might as well have a sticker on it that says:

Either that, or it should just have a mechanical arm that reaches out and grabs your wallet out of your back pocket and then punches you in the nuts with it.

Hey Kids. Don't be afraid of the dark.

2011-08-25T20:34:00.007-04:00

There's this movie that's coming out soon called "Don't be Afraid of the Dark." It's a remake, although I don't recall the original -- but I don't care because I'm a fan of Guillermo del Toro, so I have high hopes.

I love a good horror movie and my wife hates them, so I don't get to see them as often as I'd like because they're really more fun to watch with someone else who appreciates a good scare. My friend Yort asked me if I had seen the previews for this movie yet, and then he sent me this picture:

I've since seen the preview, and this thing lives between your sheets, down toward your feet.

Holy shit, don't listen to that guy doing the voice over. Based on what I'm seeing in the preview, you should be TOTALLY afraid of the dark. They should name this movie "Be Scared Shitless of The Dark." Lulling you into a false sense of security with that other title is not only really mean, it's false advertising. I could see it if you shined your flashlight down to the bottom of the bed and your sheets were suddenly full of kittens or Care Bears or something, but really, this thing is totally uncalled for. If you haven't seen the trailer, it's here.

OK, maybe Care Bears were a poor choice on my part.

At least the teeth are small and crooked, so if this happens to you, I hope you're an orthodontist because then at least you'd have something to bargain with.

At least five times a day.

2011-08-23T15:18:00.005-04:00

and then they just SIT THERE. Waiting.

It reminds me of this:

On unplugging the cable.

2011-08-21T16:22:00.007-04:00

Today is one of those days where I talk about nothing, so be prepared. I just got done gluing foam panels to my basement walls with some sort of toxic construction adhesive so I think I'm a little high right now. I think the peach center of my brain might be a little affectioned but so far my righting seams to be ok corral.

As some of you might know, I cancelled my Netflix subscription when they practically doubled their price -- just to show them who was boss. I'm sure they don't give a shit because I haven't even received a single "we want you back" email since I quit. Reed Hastings has a plan, and I'm apparently not part of it. I may join again at some point in the future, but right now I figure I'll try RedBox in combination with a few other things. I already have an Amazon prime account so I get that streaming for free. I recently purchased a Roku box that I really like and have subscribed to Hulu Plus, so I'm very close to cutting the cord on regular cable TV. True, Hulu makes you watch commercials, but generally only a single 30 or 60 second spot (for now). It's really amazing to me how un-annoying a single commercial is. Seriously you barely notice it. It makes me realize how out of control regular TV has become.

Just the other day, Amazon announced they are now streaming the entire family of Star Trek shows -- Classic, STNG, DS-9, Enterprise, Voyager, and the movies. I recently finished Wil Wheaton's book, Memories of the Future Vol. 1, in which he looks back on the first season and grades each episode after making merciless fun of each with some truly hilarious commentary. When I heard that they were streaming all this, I decided to watch the first episode of STNG to see if it could possibly be as bad as he remembered it to be. It was, in fact, horrible, and other than the fact that they introduced Q, the main highlight for me was that they separated the saucer section from the engines and guns. I am pretty sure that never happened again as long as the series ran. Before doing that, however, they had to evacuate the families and get them all into the saucer section. During the evacuation, I saw something else that I am pretty sure never happened again in the show, and I, for one, am extremely glad of it, because it was horrible:

WTF is THAT??

Is that what we're going to be wearing in the future? If it is, then just kill me now. I don't want to have to use spray tan on my legs. That actor? I can almost guarantee he spends every day of his waking life just praying none of his friends or family see that shit. That's practically a mini-dress. Or maybe we should call it a mani-dress.

If he worked in Engineering and dropped a wrench by mistake, Geordi would probably herniate himself trying to get to it first just so he didn't have to watch his guy bend over and flash his grundle, because even in the electromagnetic spectrum that would be something you can't unsee.

Also in my search for TV alternatives, I messed around with Boxee. I think it started out as a computer-only thing, but now they have a hardware box like Roku, except it's a really weird shape, it's twice the price and doesn't support Hulu Plus. Last night I was playing around with Boxee for the mac, just to see what was new, and I stumbled on this icon for one of their channels:

At first I thought it was a channel for "Yay! I pooped!" but it turns out it's just an exercise station.

In other news, the wife and I took a trip to Ogunquit Maine with our friends Vidna and Pootie last weekend. We stayed right on Marginal Way and it was awesome. It was an amazing trip and we had some serious fun and I'll tell you about it in a bit. Vidna and Pootie, as usual, took a million pictures. Here's one of my favorites of his and another of hers. And yes, that's me on the rocks. Both of these pictures were taken at one in the morning using nothing but a long exposure and the light of a full moon. It was an amazing night. One more, with a poem our friend Paul wrote.

OK. I think lightning just almost hit my house so I'm gonna shut the computer down for now. Pager duty tomorrow! I can't wait. It makes my life complete.

A Few? None? Ohhh, I see where you're going with this.

2011-08-18T16:30:00.008-04:00

As a small part of my job, I occasionally have to set up the odd conference room in the reservation system. We require specific information to do this, so we make people fill out an on-line form that lists all the info we require, and when they submit it, this form routes directly to me.

Here's an actual (and totally awesome) form submission I received yesterday:

Sometimes, the fact that my job consists of doing nothing but moving around invisible data with zero lasting value depresses me.

But not today.

Watch me move my lips as I read.

2011-08-09T19:09:00.004-04:00

I can't believe I actually agreed to this, seeing as how my biggest fear is public speaking, but I am apparently doing a book reading/signing at a local bookstore with a buddy of mine, Glen Feulner.

It's Wednesday the 17th from 7-8pm, at The Book House, the last cool independent bookstore in our area.

I'm up first, and I'll probably read one or two stories, possibly with a short intermission for the EMTs to resuscitate me, then he'll finish up the evening. He's going to read some excerpts from his book "Worlds Without End" which I honestly know nothing about since he hasn't given me a copy yet. (I better get one Wednesday is all I'm saying, Feulner.)

To be fair, I don't think he's read my book yet either, so this gig has the potential to be sort of like Jimmy Buffett opening for SlipKnot.

So if you're in the area and bored, stop by and say hi. It's a pretty cool place.

I have awesome friends.

2011-08-06T00:38:00.000-04:00

I got this card today:

Once they get a taste of blood, you have to put them down.

2011-08-02T16:45:00.032-04:00

I've been a woodworker for a long time. I have all sorts of bladed and dangerous tools in my shop -- radial arm saws, table saws, band saws, routers, as well as draw knives, adzes, scorps and travishers. All of these things can reach out and bite you if you're not careful, and some can take very big bites indeed. I've always had a strict safety regimen and I very rarely deviate from it. I always wear my safety glasses like that tool whore Norm Abrams told me to, and I've never had a problem.

It's too bad he never warned me against doing cardio workouts, because if he did, I wouldn't be typing this with nine fingers right now -- although just by looking at him I probably should have guessed that he doesn't approve of that particular activity. So yes. I'm blaming Norm Abrams for this. And each individual member of the band Guster.

Before you get all grossed out, the finger that is sitting this one out is currently doing so at the end of my hand, right where he is usually stationed, however he's sticking straight out and covered in a bandage. He also has his own heartbeat and is throbbing like a mofo because he has a bunch of stitches that are holding his head on, and typing is a giant pain in the pointer. I currently spend most of the day with my hand in the air like I have a very important question.

So here's the short version of the story:

And here's the long version:

I was downstairs in the basement, and wasn't feeling quite up to a P90X workout because it was getting late, so I decided to do a mile or two on the treadmill. As I started running, I heard a loud clacking noise coming from the front of the treadmill. It's almost a gym-quality piece of equipment that we've had for over five years, and until now it's been flawless. I can't work out with the treadmill self-destructing, so I turned it off and decided to take a look. I removed the front cover, just to see if it was something obvious, or something more serious like a bearing.

It really didn't make a lot of noise when it was off, so I started it up slowly, and listened carefully to the drive mechanism, trying to figure out if it was coming from the motor side or the roller side. I still couldn't tell, so (here comes the stupid part) I lightly rested my hand on top of the motor side of the pulley. Hmmm. Felt OK. That meant it was the lower roller pulley. I reached down to touch the top of that pulley and I don't know if I slipped or if it grabbed my finger or what, but the next thing I know there was a noise like someone breaking a pretzel stick that had been wrapped in a wet paper towel, and I yanked my hand back and made a fist. I've had cuts on my fingers before, and this wasn't bleeding much yet so I figured it probably wasn't too serious. I ran upstairs to the bathroom, turned on the water and adjusted the temperature with one hand. I wanted to wash out the cut because my hands were completely covered in grease.

When I put my lacerated and now bleeding finger under the stream of water, the pain was incredible - probably because the tip of my finger from the nail-bed up bent back like a pez dispenser -- a pez dispenser exposing a pez candy that looked a lot like the flavor was "bone." I stopped the water and grabbed a gauze pad from under the sink and wrapped it up tight because it had started bleeding pretty heavily. Then I yelled upstairs for my wife. There must have been some urgency in my voice because when I said, "I fucked up my finger pretty bad," she went into professional EMT mode, even though she's not an EMT. After she made sure she didn't have to go into the basement to pick up any loose digits, she grabbed her keys and off we went.

When we got to the ER thirty minutes later (after following a car going 35 mph the whole way, driven by someone who either had multiple gunshot wounds to the chest or else was just really old) wonder of wonders, there wasn't a bunch of people there before us. The receptionist/nurse took my information and then made me come around the counter and sit in a chair next to her so she could assess the damage.

Of course, by that time, the gauze was extremely hard to remove, since it was stuck to the top half of the finger and every time I tried to unwrap it, it kept pulling the top of the finger back off. She gave me a little pink tray full of water and I tried soaking it off. I pulled lightly on it, and the cold water felt like fire. I was dropping a few F-bombs through clenched teeth as I did this, and suddenly a half-dozen black 3-ring binders came flying off a shelf behind us and hit the floor. I looked at my wife and said, "That's probably Paul telling me not to be such a pussy.*"

After it finally came loose, they stuck me in a wheelchair and gave me a ride to a room. Just the air going past it hurt, but it felt good compared to what pulling off that gauze was like.

We sat for a bit, and a PA came in. I'm pretty sure she was in high school. "What did you do?" she asked. I held up my hands and said "Well, let's compare these two hands." Since my hands were greasy, they immediately started me on an antibiotic IV drip and gave me a tetanus shot and some morphine. Then she broke out the giant Novocain needle and jacked it into about five places in my hand, and sent me down the hall for x-rays to see if the finger was broken. It was. So that meant the bone was exposed to air, which I guess is a bad thing, infection-wise, because her concern seemed to go up a notch. When she was talking to the orthopedic on call, I got to hear cheery words like "amputated" and "completely flayed" and then she continued her conversation outside the room.

Apparently he told her to "sew it up as best you can" and that he would see me the following day. I was a little apprehensive about that "as best you can" statement, since I wasn't sure if it was intended as a reflection of her ability or the relative state of my busticated pez dispenser. Since I'm so tactful, I said, "So....done many of these?" It sounded like I was trying to pick her up in a bar or something. "So, come here often?" Like that. She just laughed and said, "Tons." (Especially around the 4th of July, it turns out.) She seemed pretty confident, so I let her do her thing. She scrubbed my finger like it was an old pot, but I didn't feel a thing, other than spraying water. After she was done washing, the table looked like someone had killed a chicken on it. She cleaned that up, and then got to stitching up what was left.

When she was done, she had put twelve stitches in a semi-circle from one side to the other, and my finger looked like a tiny Frankenstein. She warned me that depending on the break and other trauma, I might not get to keep it. If it wouldn't have been an infection risk, I would have put a little face on it with a sharpie. While she was out finding some sort of special, non-stick, antibiotic impregnated bandages, I took a few more pictures. She came back and wrapped it up so my finger was sticking straight out like I was giving someone directions to a gas station. I looked at my wife and said, "I AM AWESOME AT DOORBELLS! OH! AND CAVITY SEARCHES!" I poked my finger forward a few times. The morphine had definitely kicked in. She just laughed and told me to stay away from her and the cats.

The PA handed me a prescription for antibiotics, a prescription for Vicodin, and a prescription for some other drug that is supposed to help you not get an upset stomach from the first two. She described all the drugs and what they were for and said, "The antibiotic may give you diarrhea," then followed it up with "The Vicodin will probably constipate you." I thought about that for a second then said, "So in other words --smooooooth sailin!" She didn't comment on that one. I guess Vicodin/poop jokes are pretty thin in the first place and my delivery at that point was lacking. They let us go, and told me I was supposed to come back to the ER if my finger got really cold or bled through the dressing.

After a night of feeling my heartbeat in my finger and getting no real sleep other than that provided by a Vicodin daze, I was pretty beat. Of course it had bled through during the night, but there was nothing I could do about it but hope it wouldn't make it too difficult to unwrap. I popped another Vicodin and we drove down to the orthopedic's office.

The followup was a bit anticlimactic. The ortho took a look at the x-rays, examined the stitches, and then told me to wait a few days and once it scabbed over, start rinsing it with hydrogen peroxide once a day to keep infection away. He said this as he's handling my finger without gloves on, so I'm treating his advice as suspect. Then he put a single piece of gauze over the finger, jammed a plastic thumb cover on it and taped the whole thing down. WTF, bone-doctor guy? Good thing it was still a little numb from the novocain. I think because it was just a finger and I didn't have a femur anywhere outside my body, he didn't feel it was worthy of his concern.

When we got back home, I actually dialed into work because I had a couple of phone meetings to attend. This was Thursday. At the end of the day, I filled out my time sheet for the week and signed off on it. It wasn't until the next day that I realized that I had gone the whole previous day thinking it had been Friday. To paraphrase Rick James, "Vicodin is a helluva drug."

Right now I'm getting pretty good at touch-typing with nine fingers, which kind of amazes me. It is my dominant hand, however, so things like button fly jeans are not my friend. Neither is my toothbrush.

Also, if I smell like poop for the next week or so, just know that I tried, OK?

Oh yes, one more thing -- when I was down in the basement unplugging the treadmill (never trust them after they've eaten flesh) I found this on the floor:

I'm saving it in case I need it later. I probably won't though, because my friend Vidna sent me this link. Bastard.

* A bunch of years ago, I got a call from Paul on a Sunday afternoon. He said, "Hey, I cut myself pretty bad, can you drive me over to that urgent care place?" I said sure, and headed over to pick him up. When I got there, he had his forearm and hand wrapped in a towel. He had been testing a sword to failure, and when it snapped he put it through the bottom of his hand and his wrist. He pulled the towel aside and wiggled his fingers. "Check this out," he said. "You can see the tendons in my wrist moving up and down through the hole in my wrist bone." We didn't know it at the time, but one of the other tendons had snapped back up into his forearm. It was a mess. The dude had a pain tolerance you would NOT believe.

Free Chair.

2011-07-29T15:32:00.004-04:00

Since I am now an expert at giving away free stuff, as witnessed by my record-breaking three-minute giveaway of Some Kind Of Ass Building Torture Device, I have decided to help out other folks who have free stuff to give away.

There's a really nice recliner out in front of a house near me, and it's been there for two weeks without a single bite. I figure it's a marketing problem. Who wants a smelly used chair, am I right?

I made this sign and put it on the chair, and I'm pretty sure it addresses most peoples' main reservation about taking a free chair from the side of the road:

As of last night, the chair was still there, but I'm certain it's only a matter of time.

Also, typing is really hard because I chopped off the top half-inch of my index finger the other night. I can't wait to tell you about that little piece of stupidity.

Off to raid the Vicodin bottle. Wish me luck.

Bite me.

2011-07-26T20:51:00.016-04:00

The mosquitoes are brutal right now, and every time I go outside it's like an all you can eat buffet of my exposed bits. That's the one bad thing about living in the woods in upstate NY -- the black flies of spring hand off to the deer flies of summer, and the mosquitoes are just all the damn time. Once, last year, I had about four or five of them trying to suck the blood out of my steak as it cooked on the grill. That's hardcore blood suckage right there. You have to be serious about your meal to try that shit.

I actually used to use an insect fogger around the place, but it tended to kill the butterflies, too, which wasn't optimal when your wife has a giant flower garden and happens to really like butterflies. So I laid off the fog for the last couple of years, and the flying insects have made a magnificent comeback. I was trying to take a few garden pictures the other day and was absolutely eaten alive while doing so. On the plus side, as I was swatting and swiping and swearing, it reminded me of a story.

The Snitch, Houdini and I were in the back yard riding on the whirly bird, and even though Houdini didn't know it, we were trying to make him sick. We were having a difficult time of it though, because it was only the three of us and the thing was completely unbalanced. Every time we got up any sort of speed one of the legs would start coming off the ground and the whole thing would threaten to tip over. We really could have used Markie. With a fourth for balance, we could get that thing moving so fast Houdini would be begging us to stop.

The Snitch and I heard it at the same time, and looked at each other. A faint droning in the distance, a high-pitched whine that sounded a little like a cross between an electric drill and a coffee grinder; a sound that could mean only one thing.

"THE MOSQUITO TRUCK IS COMING!" The Snitch yelled, jumping off the whirly bird without warning, almost sending Houdini and me to the ground in a pile of twisted metal and bruised ass-parts.

We jumped off too, and followed The Snitch as he ran into the house. "THE MOSQUITO TRUCK! THE MOSQUITO TRUCK IS COMING!" he screamed again, like some sort of mid-70s version of Paul Revere.

We had a job to do, and we took it seriously. Whenever the mosquito truck threatened our neighborhood, it was our job to protect our house by running around and closing all the windows. If we didn't, the inside of our house would be filled with dense, white clouds of DDT. The truck would drive slowly down one side of the street, traveling at perhaps ten miles per hour, spouting enormous gouts of fog, then it would come back up the other side and do the same thing again, pointing in the opposite direction. Sometimes we'd catch a break and they'd start on the other side and the wind would be blowing away from our house, but usually they waited until dusk on the most stagnant days, and the fog could sometimes hang around for 30 minutes or more. We didn't have much time.

As we ran around slamming windows, we could hear the obnoxious whine getting closer. It was loud, and the sound bored into your head like a muted chainsaw stuck on full throttle. Houdini ran to the front bay window and closed the bottom sliders and yelled, "I think I can see the fog! Hurry!" You'd think we were in a monster movie or something, and if The Fog touched us, our skin would bubble up and our eyes would pop and we'd instantly be reduced to raw, smoking meat and bones. Actually, the real reason was because my mother hated the smell of the fog, and so we did everything in our power to make sure the house was sealed tight against the poisonous fumes. If we got them all closed in time, we felt like heroes. This time, we made it with minutes to spare.

We ran back outside as the truck turned the corner and headed toward us, belching smoke toward our side of the street. We grabbed our bikes, and waited. Well, the Snitch and I did. Houdini was still a little too young to be allowed to ride by himself on the street. The front door on the house across the street opened, and Markie ran down the stairs. He mounted his own bike, jumped two curbs, rode directly across our front lawn and joined us.

"You guys riding?" he asked, nodding toward the truck lumbering toward us.

"Yeah," I said. "Looks like it'll be a good one, too. It's really still outside."

As the truck crawled by, we watched as the giant cloud billowed slowly toward where we were waiting. The greasy, kerosene-like stink of the fog enveloped us, and even though it burned my eyes and made me cough a little bit, I sort of liked the smell. It was a weird combination of charcoal lighter fluid and bug spray and it smelled like summer. We all thought it was incredibly cool to be standing five feet away from someone you could suddenly barely see. Inhaling poison, but that's beside the point.

But hey, it was 1972. Who knew? They were just figuring out that cigarettes were bad for you. To my mother's credit, she told us that we weren't allowed to follow the truck, but sometimes we didn't listen. If she happened to be away at a neighbor's house, or if we were across the street at Markie's when we heard the distant whine, we'd close all the windows and do it anyway.

We pulled in behind the truck, pedaling hard to catch up. We were in a crowd of about a half-dozen other kids on bikes, and a few more just running behind. It was sort of a mess back there because nobody could see, and we tried to avoid running into each other. Not only were we blind, we were also deaf. The truck was incredibly loud when you were literally ten feet from the power nozzle that was blasting out the fog. I remember that you could feel some kind of warmth, but I'm not sure if it was the hot exhaust coming from the truck, the residual heat from the sun-baked pavement, or some by-product of the fog-making process itself.

"It's gonna turn down Broderick street!" Markie yelled over the incessant whine of the fogger jets. We already knew this, because we were watching the same truck Markie was, but we were so excited to be flying in a cloud that nobody even yelled out the standard retort, "No Shit, Sherlock!" As the truck turned, we hung back a bit, because it was fun to let it get a little ahead so the fog had a chance to build up. Then you could go a little faster and not worry about passing the truck.

We were following the truck down the street and had just started coasting down a slight hill, The Snitch directly to my left and Markie on the right. Markie was probably ten feet away from me, and the fog was so thick I could barely see the outline of him and his bike. Suddenly there was a crashing noise and Markie disappeared behind me. I heard him yell "SHIT!," and The Snitch and I reluctantly peeled off from the pack and turned around, moving back up the hill through the thinning fog toward Markie.

When we reached him, he was just picking his bike up off the street and checking out the front tire. "What the heck happened?" I asked. And then as the fog cleared from both the street and my brain, it all clicked.

"Car got in my way," he said, looking down at the scrape on his elbow.

He had ridden directly into a parked car, and it was awesome.

From then on, we always rode down the center of the street when inhaling our poison gas.

It was much safer.

Check please.

2011-07-19T18:23:00.007-04:00

I wrote a check the other day, and I felt like I was trying to remember how to speak high school French or something. First I wrote the amount where I was supposed to write the name, so I tore that one out. Then when I finally got that straight, I drew the line before I had written in the second part of the dollar amount. Apparently I don't know the difference between dollars and cents. I signed it, and handed it over, only to have it handed back because I neglected to date it. I probably looked like I shouldn't be allowed to live on my own, but that's what it's come to.

I write maybe two checks a year. Everything else is swipe this, wave that, click the button for the other thing. I pay my bills from my bank's website, or automatic deduction from my checking account, or even with this ridiculously old-school thing called Quicken. I'm pretty sure I may have actually forgotten how to write. It's that bad.

Apparently Indiana is phasing out cursive starting this fall, and I am pretty sure children everywhere are rejoicing. Granted, it was on its way out even when I was in high school, but to stop it completely is sort of a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, it's practically useless and it's true that most things are done on a computer now, but on the other hand, it's supposed to help with comprehension and also hand-eye coordination. I don't know if I buy that, but from a purely selfish standpoint, we had to suffer through that shit so they should have to as well. Plus if there's no cursive, all the kids will have to come up with their own symbol to use when they sign stuff. I guess Prince was ahead of his time. A hundred years from now everyone will probably just sign shit with a talking hologram of themselves, or a DNA sample.

I really noticed how utterly inept I've become at writing while I was signing books. At first I tried cursive, just because I thought it would look more professional. I felt like I had brain damage. I kept forgetting the order of letters, putting extra loops where there shouldn't be any... finally I just gave up and started printing the inscriptions, which was only marginally better. I must have wrecked 4 or 5 books so far -- just because I made such a mess of them I couldn't bear to send them out. And for those of you who actually received signed books and still could barely make out what I wrote -- you have a frame of reference as to how bad the ruined ones actually are.

In fact, I actually did send out some that I probably shouldn't have, but they cost me almost five bucks a pop, so I apologize if you got something that looked like it was scribbled on by a pre-schooler.

If it's any consolation, the signature looks different on every one of my credit cards, so I'm probably wide open for identity theft. You probably won't get much though.

Love,

Get Ready.....FIGHT!

2011-07-14T18:29:00.006-04:00

Weener!

OK, I generated a random number between 1 and 64 and it came up all 31's.

If I counted correctly, (skipping my own comment) it looks like the winner is Robin.

The second Robin. Sorry, first Robin. Thanks everyone! E-mail me and I'll get your details and get you hooked up. (Also, if you don't want the Initech shirt, let me know.)

Fake Company.

2011-07-09T14:16:00.008-04:00

Hey everyone, I know it's been slow around here lately -- I have a bunch of stuff to write about, but it doesn't get dark until after 9pm, so sue me. In the meantime, just to placate all you sonsabitches, I'm going to have a little contest.

As you know, once in a while I get offers that are along the lines of "Your blog readers would love our {x}! If you write a review of {x}, and post a couple of links, we'll give you a huge discount and let you pass these amazing savings on to your readers!" Number one, don't give me a so-called "discount" on crap nobody wants and try to pass it off like you just did me a huge favor or gave me a free iPad or something. I'm pretty sure they're not interested in your automatic squirrel feeder. Number two, I'm not your whore.

Well, that turns out to be not entirely true. Sometimes I am your whore, if you offer up something that tweaks my geek bone enough. Also, I'm not sure exactly where my geek bone is, but I think it just moved.

The other day I was contacted by crazydogtshirts.com, and they said they'd give me four shirts of my choice to give away in a contest, and all I'd have to do is hit them with some links in the post. That sounded easy, however I am normally not a "funny tee-shirt" kind of guy, mostly because I don't think most tee-shirts that try to be funny actually are, and also because I would probably never wear them. Since I'm all about transference, I figure everyone who reads my blog is exactly like me and wouldn't wear tee-shirts with sayings on them either. (I'm giving you guys the benefit of the doubt here. Don't prove me wrong. If I find out you're wearing some free mustache rides crap out in public, we're done here.) These guys, however, have some cool retro stuff, which I would totally wear. I would also wear some of their shirts that sport fictitious company logos from my favorite geek movies. Hence the bone-tweaking.

So long story short, I'm going to give you a chance to win a four-pack of my personally picked favorites. Here are the shirts that are up for grabs -- your choice of sizes:

Added bonus if you can name the movies they're from without asking the interwebs. And yes, I own copies of all of these movies. Don't judge me.

I'm not going to make you jump through hoops because I know how you are. You are not hoop jumpers. It's all I can do to get you to leave a comment in the first place. So I'm going to make this easy.

In order to win these beauties, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post. That's it. I'll let it percolate for a bit, then in a few days, or whenever the entries seem to stop, I'll pick a random winner. Also, in your comment, let me know if you've bought my book or not. It won't have any bearing on whether you win or lose, but it will satisfy my curiosity.

Good luck! Also, free mustache rides.

P.S. - If you can spare a few bucks to help out a friend, please read this.

Mr. C's Great and Wondrous Show.

2011-07-04T19:48:00.006-04:00

In honor of this country, absent friends, new friends and laziness, I'm going to do something I've never done before -- I'm going to resurrect a post from the past. My friend Paul's birthday would have been the 28th of June, and he's been on my mind a lot lately.

When Paul and I were still living at home, Paul's parents hosted an annual 4th of July cookout. Every year I would spend most of the day over there stuffing my face with hot dogs and hamburgers and pasta salads and chips. Before we turned 18, we'd steal beer when nobody was looking, chug them in the basement, and hide the empties behind the bar. Later on, when we were legal, we'd bring our own beer so we didn't have to drink his dad's Black Label. All in all, it was a good party, and we looked forward to it. The food was always good, and the fireworks afterward were the highlight of the day. I don't think I missed a single fourth of July there throughout all of high school and college.

After dark, when the coffee was brewing and the desserts were on the table, Paul's dad would break out a metric ton of illegal fireworks and put on a show for everyone in attendance. Most of the neighbors came over to watch, too. Everyone would applaud and ooh and ahhh over them, and Mr. C loved every minute of it. Because it was a residential neighborhood and fireworks in New York are technically illegal, he always went easy on the rockets and tended to stick with the stuff that stayed earthbound. I'm not talking snakes and sparklers here, I'm talking things like giant spinners, jumping jacks, boards full of nailed up pinwheels, and ground blooms.

Paul liked rockets though, so his dad always got him a few extra-large rockets that he was allowed to launch over in the baseball field of the nearby school. Part of our yearly routine would be to head over to the field at dusk and launch one right before the show started at the house. Then after his dad's show, we'd go back over with the others and send them up, too.

The one year I'll always remember is the year that things didn't go according to plan. That year, I think Paul and I were getting bored with the same old thing. We were probably around 15 years old, we were tired of the whole "family cookout" extravaganza. In our minds, we had become too cool for that. As we were walking down the street toward the shortcut through the woods to the schoolyard, Paul said, "I wonder what would happen if you lit one of these things horizontally? Ya think it would go anywhere?"

"I dunno," I replied. "It would have to be on something pretty smooth."

"Like the road," he said, looking up and down the street to see if there was anyone around.

There wasn't. Everyone was in their backyards with their grills going full-bore. The fronts of the houses were deserted.

"Yeah, like the road," I agreed. "The road would do it."

The road that Paul lived on was about a quarter of a mile long, and straight as an arrow until the right angle turn slightly past his house. He laid the mammoth bottle rocket down flat in the middle of the street and took out his lighter.

"Think we should?" he asked.

I could already tell he'd made up his mind to do it, regardless of what I said.

"It's your rocket," I said. "I'm just here to watch."

For some reason, I think we both expected that the rocket would just shoot straight up the middle of the street and that would be that. A boom, a laugh, and it would be over. Looking back on it now, I have no idea why we would have believed that sort of trajectory was even a remote possibility. These rockets were powerful, and wanted to go up.

He checked again for cars and people, and when he didn't see any of either, he reached down with his lighter and lit the fuse. While we were clearly ignoring the majority of the safety instructions written on the rocket, among them being minor details like "CAUTION: VERTICAL LAUNCH ONLY," and "USE WITH ADULT SUPERVISION" we did follow the bit that said "light fuse and back away quickly." We very quickly put about 20 feet between us and the sputtering rocket.

If you've ever lit the fuse on a large rocket, you know there's always that second or two when the fuse disappears into the body of the rocket and nothing happens. You wonder if it's a dud, or if it's just taking its sweet time. You are torn between waiting for something to happen, or walking up to it to see what's going on.

The fuse disappeared into the rocket, and nothing happened. We looked at the rocket, then at each other, and then back at the rocket. Paul said, "I think it's a d--" and then the street erupted.

The rocket took off down the road with a deafening whoosh! amid a huge shower of silver sparks and a billowing cloud of smoke. This was made all the more impressive because the rocket only traveled about a hundred feet down the street before it hooked left and jammed itself under the front tire of the neighbor's car with a loud, hollow PONK!

It sat there spewing an ever-increasing shower of sparks as we looked on in horror. I barely had time to think, "no, no, no, No, NO!" before the rocket petered out.

We had taken a step or two toward the car before we remembered what came next -- and decided that maybe moving toward this thing wasn't such a good idea.

What came next was not good.

As we watched, cringing, the rocket made a noise like a warm bottle of seltzer being stabbed with a knife, and then shot two dozen flaming red balls in all directions. The balls started spinning around madly, bouncing around under the car and jumping onto front lawns and driveways alike. Then, almost simultaneously, each of the 24 burning balls changed color to vivid green and exploded with a high-pitched crack.

At that point we figured the worst was over. We were wrong.

We had been watching this unfold for what seemed like an hour, but had been, in reality, perhaps six to ten seconds. A split-second later, fresh activity began under the tire. We looked at each other with expressions that were half "What the fuck did we just do?" and half, "What the fuck should we do?" For lack of an answer to either question, we just continued to stand there and watch as another huge cloud of smoke and a fresh burst of golden sparks shot out of the jammed rocket, right before it blew itself to tiny smoking pieces with an explosion that sounded like a mortar shell.

"HOLY SHIT!" Paul exclaimed.

I had no immediate answer to that that statement. It really said it all.

We waited another minute for the car to explode, and when it didn't, we walked cautiously toward it to assess the damage. Surprisingly, other than some gray powder burns on the tire, there wasn't any. There were some scorches on the road from the fire balls hopping around and exploding, but there didn't seem to be anything else burning. We figured we had gotten lucky and that maybe we weren't going to end up owing anyone a new paint job.

Unbelievably, we were still the only people on the street. We quickly gathered up all the bits of plastic, un-jammed the wooden stick from under the tire and nonchalantly walked away, as if it had been someone else entirely who had almost blown up the neighbor's car and lit the entire subdivision on fire.

When we got back to his house, we stole a couple more beers, drank them in the basement and then headed out back to watch his dad's show. It was great, as usual. We clapped and hooted at every one he set off, even the ones we thought were lame. Looking back on it now, it was great to be there surrounded by family and friends, with nothing but good times ahead of us.

The potential of those days was staggering.

Happy 4th of July, mate. I miss you.

Shock the Monkey.

2011-06-29T19:46:00.011-04:00

Monday night, Vidna and his wife accompanied us to the orchestra. Not just any orchestra, mind you - but the New Blood orchestra, fronted by none other than Mr. Peter Gabriel.

It was a thoroughly amazing show, and while a little too political in places for my simple tastes, I accept that with Peter. He puts his money and his heart where his mouth is, and there is no doubt that the man has a passion for his work and is still at the top of his game.

I have never had tears in my eyes at a concert before, unless you count that one Click Five concert where I realized I was the oldest person in the audience and was forced to weep silently into my coke because I discovered that they did not, in fact, serve alcohol on the premises. No, these were a different sort of tears.

The first song that really hit me was "Wallflower" - one of my all-time favorites. I always thought it was either about someone in a mental institution, or a song about political prisoners. I guess from what he was saying, it's the latter. I think I got the mental institution idea from the movie "Birdy" for which Peter did the soundtrack. A weirdass movie to be sure, but one worth watching. There was just something about that song and the orchestra backing him... the raw emotion of the song was somehow multiplied ten-fold. If you've never heard it, here's a non-orchestral version. The orchestral arrangement made it truly haunting.

For me, the standout of the concert was the story he told about a yoga retreat he went on with his elderly father. It was a type of yoga where you use the other person's body weight to aid you in your stretching. He said it was the most intimate physical contact he'd had with his dad in years. When the trip was over, he said his father hugged him like he hadn't since he was a small boy.

Then he said, "This next song is a reminder to cherish the time you have with your friends and family, and let them know how much you love them, because you never know how long you're going to have each other." Then he played the song "Father, Son."

Until I heard that yoga story, I never really understood what that song was about -- but now it's brilliantly clear. Those words, combined with the orchestral arrangement and the black and white film of Peter and his dad walking side by side almost had me bawling like a little kid. I kept it together though, because I'm a mean, heartless son-of-a-bitch with no feelings.

That you know of.

Here's a video of that particular song, directed by Anna, his daughter. Go watch it now. I'll wait.

Added bonus -- We almost got to see a drunk chick climb over a row of seats and start a fight with a girl behind her who apparently told her to shut up. The shushing was warranted though, because for some reason the drunk chick had decided that an orchestral concert was the best place to have a loud, personal conversation with her friend. Security finally had to get involved and calm her down. I love people.

Also, this cracked me up. We parked next to this mobile dumpster:

Of course I had to get a picture, because number one, it was disgusting, and number two, I knew you bastards wouldn't believe me when I told you how bad it was unless I had proof. So there you go.

The funny part? When I was converting the picture file for this post, I noticed the name of the magazine floating on the waves of crap:

Mission: Fail.

(If that car belongs to anyone reading this -- Sorry. You really are a slob, though.)

Anyway, if you get the chance, go see Peter on this tour. Yeah, it's a little weird, and yeah, you might wonder if you should maybe wear a tux, but one thing is for sure. You won't regret it.

Tight and Firm.

2011-06-27T19:19:00.000-04:00

Interested? Go here to check it out. You guys get first dibs, but don't blame me if you hurt your ass.

[Believe it or not, it's gone already! About three minutes after I posted it. Apparently, ass-blasting is all the rage.]

Also, this is pretty awesome. Thanks for all the great reviews!

Capitalism at its worst.

2011-06-18T18:37:00.006-04:00

A couple of weeks ago we joined a group of our friends in Philly for a 5K cancer walk. We were doing it in memory of a friend who recently lost her fight against breast cancer. It was a pretty short one-day event, not like one of those three-day marathon deals where you end up doing sixty miles or something, but we wanted to be there for it.

She never let her disease define her, and she lived her life to the fullest every day. She was one of the best people I've ever known, and the memory of her laughter, her sense of humor and her simple every day kindness will be with me forever. We were honored to be a part of it, even though we had to wear bright pink shirts her husband supplied. On the front they had our "team name," and on the back, a picture of our friend sporting the mohawk she had for a few minutes before she shaved her head. Pink isn't really my color, but there sure was a lot of it on the walk, so I learned to live with it.

The crowd was pretty amazing, but there was one thing I didn't expect -- I didn't expect the freelance vendors using the event to sell their crap to the crowd. Like I'm gonna buy some sketchy pretzel from a dude selling them out of a ratty box sitting in a shopping cart. "Yeah, give me one of those $5 bubonic pretzels. No, I don't mind that you look like you haven't taken a shower in two weeks and you aren't even wearing gloves. Can I have one from the pile you just coughed on? Thanks."

At one point during the walk, my buddy Pete's wife (who is Australian) said, "Oh look! Fairy floss!" I immediately turned to see what the hell she was talking about, and I saw nothing resembling either end of that odd combination of words.

"What did you say?" I asked. "Fairy what? Floss?"

She pointed and said, "Yes, fairy floss, right over there." I looked where she was pointing and saw a guy selling cotton candy.

"You mean the cotton candy?" I asked.

"Yeah, we call it fairy floss in Australia. We have lots of different slang terms for stuff," she added.

I saw someone with a full-sized poodle on a leash, so to bust her balls, I pointed at the dog and asked, "So, what do you call those in Australia?"

Before she could reply, Pete says, "Those are Barkie Sheep."

I don't know why that struck me so funny, but I swear I almost had to stop walking I was laughing so hard. I still laugh when I picture that. Yeah, I know. I'm easily amused.

The worst example of capitalistic idiocy we saw was some d-bag loudmouth New Yorker selling tee-shirts right before the finish line.

The shirts had an American flag overlaid with a picture of Osama Bin Laden with the words "REST IN PISS" written below the picture. And of course he's screaming like a carnival barker. "GETCHER OSAMA SHIRTS HERE! REST IN PISS! RIGHT HERE! REST IN PISS! FIVE BUCKS EACH!" Ridiculous. I'm as happy as the next guy that OBL got what he deserved, but this wasn't the time or the place to be selling such trash. Some people have no sense of decency, I guess. I hope he bought 10,000 of those shirts and paid for them by borrowing the money from Vinnie Kneecaps, because I'm pretty sure he has about 9,990 left that he can't get rid of. Sometimes bad things happen to bad people.

And now for something completely different.

I recently went looking for a particular .jpg file on my hard drive at work and found a cache of temporary files stored by our instant messaging program. Apparently, every time you send a screen shot to another user, a temporary jpg file is created on your local drive. Some of these jpg files were a complete mystery to me, but I know I sent them to someone at some point in the past.

I discovered that I have a tendency to make fun of the stock photos they use in some of our computer-based compliance training. The training courses are required, and are usually about scams, phishing, diversity, privacy or security -- basically all the things a large corporation has to worry about. Thanks to a little program called Snag-it, it's very easy to grab some of the graphics and add a little text balloon to them, which I apparently have a tendency to do. For your enjoyment, I pasted them below:

This next one is the result of a co-worker's misspelling of the word "ominous."

This one? No idea:

I'm just including this because it was in there and it's still funny:

Do all the evil villains who try to sell you fake passports look like this? According to BigStockPhoto.com, they do:

My hands are HUGE. They can touch anything but themselves...

Just cuz:

I think this next one had to do with customer relations, but I added the last three lines so now I think it's about sexual harassment.

Anyway, enjoy your weekend. And rest in piss. If that's your thing, I mean.

Put on your smoking jacket and join me for a brandy.

2011-06-13T23:10:00.003-04:00

A while ago I submitted my book to this site that interviews Kindle authors, and apparently it passed some sort of muster and I was deemed worthy to be "interviewed." I have no idea if that means I'm one out of a hundred, or simply the only one who stood still while everyone else took a step back. Either way, it was fun.

I wasn't interviewed in person, but that's ok with me -- that way I didn't have to change out of my Batman pajamas. They e-mailed me a set of questions and I e-mailed the answers back.

It just hit today, so if you want to know what makes my depraved little mind tick, head on over and check it out.

Thanks!

also:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Snitch, Houdini and Me

by Johnny Virgil

Giveaway ends July 11, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Anyone on goodreads.com?

2011-06-12T13:27:00.003-04:00

I just joined this not too long ago, but have sort of stalled on it. If anyone reading this is a member, I could use a few new "goodreads friends" to share book lists with.

Check it out if you get a chance and join up if you haven't already. It's pretty cool.

Walk it off.

2011-06-07T16:36:00.024-04:00

I'm on pager duty this week, and I'm hoping it's not as bad as it was when I had it a few weeks ago, but I'm not counting on it. I know it's part of the job, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. There's a few of us in the rotation now, so we only have it for about one week out of every four. I dread getting it, when I have it I'm cranky, I can't sleep, and all I want is for it to be over. I guess it could be worse. At least I'm not all bloated and crampy.

I've probably mentioned this before, but every place I've ever worked, right up until I was hired at my current place of employment, has gone out of business -- and every time I've managed to jump ship just before said ship sank to the bottom of the ocean. A few posts back I told you about one of the first jobs I had -- the one that involved cleaning rotten vegetation out of some guy's back yard -- but that wasn't my only pre-paycheck job. As far as regular "paycheck jobs" go, I've delivered newspapers, stocked shelves at a small supermarket, worked as a delivery boy for a local pharmacy (where I learned how to drive a stick on a POS Volkswagen beetle with no heat or air conditioning), worked as a pump jockey at a gas station, a sales clerk at a record store, a sales clerk at a tobacco store, and even worked at a music warehouse one summer putting stickers on LPs. Every single one of these places went tits up. After college, I put three more companies out of business. So, yeah. My kung fu is strong.

Since I've been at my current job for more than a decade, I think it's safe to say that either the curse has been lifted, or the company is so big it's like a redwood tree and I'm a lowly powder-post beetle. There was one other pre-paycheck job, and I'm going to tell you about it. I had almost forgotten about the whole thing because I only had it for about 30 minutes, and really, in the grand scheme of things, it probably shouldn't be considered a job since I never officially got paid for it.

When I was a kid, I played baseball. If you're a regular reader here, you probably already know I'm not really into sports, so this news may come as a shock to you. Even as a fair to middling player at best, I eventually worked my way up from standing around avoiding bees in center field to actively playing first base on a winning team. I was a lefty, so it worked out well -- I could snap the ball to second and third without turning turning my body first, and those precious seconds resulted in many an out. This position also resulted in my left foot being punctured by a fat-ass, cleat-wearing catcher who decided I was a little too high up on the bag. I think that bloody hole in my foot signaled the beginning of the end for any interest in baseball I may have had.

One benefit they bestowed upon us older players was that we could act as umpires at the intermediate kids' games for extra money. These were usually very boring affairs because nobody had invented Tee-ball yet, so most of the time the game consisted of 8-year-old kids getting walked around the bases, one bad pitch at a time. A few of my friends had done the umping thing, and they'd received nine bucks a game. That wasn't chump change, and it was totally worth it, even though the games were slow as death and got called half the time because of darkness. They should have been called because of suckness, but unfortunately, that never happened.

Every parent thought that their kid should play no matter how bad he was, and generally the team coaches tried to do a little of that. If one team had a giant lead, they'd start playing their shitty kids until the other team started to catch up, and then the first string went back in. This wasn't a league rule of course, so you had the occasional asshole who would run up the score just to make some sort of statement. Usually, these particular coaches were called "Dad" by a couple of kids on the team, and almost without fail their kids were little assholes too.

So I got a gig as an umpire. I was pretty excited, and a little scared. Unfortunately, there was one thing I hadn't foreseen, and that one thing was that I would be incredibly bad at it, and would never do it again as long as I lived.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon and I rode my bike to the park. It was a big park, and there were about four or five baseball diamonds, all with different games going on. I had forgotten the slip of paper that told me which game I was supposed to be officiating, so I had to ride around to each field until I found the two teams waiting impatiently for their ump. I introduced myself to the coaches, and they handed me a big pile of equipment. I had never umped before, and this stuff was a little daunting. I looked at the mask, the chest protector, the neck protector, the big, apple-shaped chest pad (which was different from the protector) and the shin pads -- and had no idea where to start.

I randomly began strapping stuff on, starting with mask and chest pad. At first I thought I had stepped in dog shit on my way to the field but almost immediately realized that it was the mask I was smelling. I pulled it off my face and looked at it. The backside was padded leather and apparently, I wasn't the first ump to use it that day. It was dank with some other person's face sweat. I could see the salty white marks near the edges where it was beginning to dry. I put the mask down temporarily and tried to put on the chest pad. The buckles were messed up on that one, and the last guy who had worn it must have been twice my size. The game was already starting late because I hadn't been able to find the right playing field, and now everyone was watching and waiting impatiently for me to dress myself in all this happy horse shit. I was getting more nervous by the second. I could hear a few muttered comments, a couple of exasperated sighs, and a few snickers from some of the kids. By the time I strapped on the neck protector, the shin guards and replaced the stinky mask, I felt like a blind, smelly turtle. I could barely move. I couldn't see much through the bars on the mask, and the shin guards were so long I couldn't really squat down without my legs feeling like they were going to separate at the knees.

Finally, I was ready. Or at least as ready as I'd ever be -- nervous, blind, sweating, and clueless. Right before they officially started the game, I got some bad news. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I would be the only umpire. Normally, there would be an infield ump too, for the runners on base, but I was informed I was going to have to do double duty and call those as well. No pressure.

The thing about having no infield ump was that I was clearly in no position to see what was going on out there. Additionally, each team not only had a regular coach, but also a first base coach and a third base coach, each of whom had some skin in the game because their kids were clearly legends in their own minds, and this shit was as serious as a heart attack.

They knew All The Rules, too. And if there was one thing you didn't want to get involved with, it was a fight between two douchebag dads who each thought they were Alexander Cartwright reincarnated. You'd hear them saying shit like, "No! A pitch is a ball delivered to the batter by the pitcher. It doesn't matter how it gets to the batter! No, Goddammit, he can try to hit it if he wants to. The batter can hit any pitch thrown! It doesn't matter if it bounced! Oh, yeah? Get a life, you stupid asshole!" (Note to all parents or prospective parents: Don't live your life vicariously through your children, OK? It makes everyone around you think you are an insufferable tool, and is completely embarrassing to your kids. It's just a game. Really, take it from me -- nobody will think less of you if your little Stevie doesn't get to pitch the last inning because the coach took pity on the other team and put in that slow kid who couldn't hit home plate with a conversion van.)

Anyway, this essentially meant that I was screwed from inning one. Oh, and have I mentioned that I had only the most rudimentary grasp on the rules of baseball? No? OK, stick that in there, too. I didn't really know a balk from a bunt when it came down to it.

Things started out OK. The first team had a good pitcher. And by good, I mean he really had no business being on the plate. This was good for me because (a) he never came remotely close to the strike zone, so I was pretty confident. It's easy to yell "Ball!" when you saw the baseball kick up a puff of dust five feet before the plate, and (b) the coach had basically told all the kids on his team to never swing unless they were three balls or two strikes down. Every single one of them walked. This umping stuff is easy money, I thought. After the pitcher walked three guys and the bases were loaded, the coach decided to change him out and things immediately went downhill. Not for them, but for me.

I had grown complacent. I got used to looking for the puff of dust, or seeing the ball sail over the catcher's head and yelling "Ball one! Ball two! Ball three!" over and over. Unfortunately an eight-year-old has a strike zone the size of a frigging postage stamp, and I hadn't been counting on this new guy and his ability to actually pitch.

The bases were loaded, and the pitches were coming in without the tell-tale dust cloud. I began to think that some of them were close to being actual strikes, so I called them as such. I was having a hard time of it, though. I started hearing things like "C'mon Ump! That was a horrible call!" and "Jesus, that almost hit him! Strike my ass!" and "Hey Ump, did you forget your glasses?" (Yes, I sucked, but also yes, these were grown men taunting a 14 year old trying to make nine dollars. My only solace is that most of them will be dead soon, and the ones that aren't will probably be eating jello cups in a nursing home and cursing their asshole kids who never visit. I'm not bitter.)

Anyway, all this taunting was really starting to get to me. I was badly flustered. I could barely remember to yell out what it was I thought I saw, let alone yell it out with any authority or accuracy. At one point, I watched a pitch come in and I didn't say anything. I suddenly realized that they were all waiting on me, so I yelled "BALL THREE!" and someone yelled back "The count was already three and one!" I immediately corrected myself. "I MEAN BALL FOUR!" I yelled. "BALL FOUR! Take your base, runner." So sue me. I had lost track. After we sorted out the confusion and a run walked in, at least one team was happy about the job I was doing. The next batter up was a big, hefty kid who looked like he would be stepping on first basemen in a couple of years.

The first pitch was right down the middle. The kid just stood there like he was waiting for a bus. "STRIKE ONE!" I yelled confidently. The pitcher wound up and threw the next pitch. According to my practiced eye, this one was just on the inside corner of the strike zone, so I called it. "STRIKE TWO!" I got a few groans on that call, mostly because the hefty kid had backed up trying to make it look like the pitch was closer to him than it really had been. Even so, I was reasonably confident about it. If this kid threw strikes, I had nothing to worry about until people started actually hitting the ball and making people run directly at me. That caused me to worry even more. Calling people safe or out at the plate? That sounded like a nightmare.

My worrying caused my mind to wander a bit from the task at hand. I still wasn't any better at envisioning the tiny little strike zone between the tiny elbows to the tiny knees. At least this big-boned son-of-a-bitch was making my job a little easier. The next pitch came in really high, so in my best ump voice, I confidently yelled, "BALL ONE!"

This was immediately greeted by a chorus of dissent. "OH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!" "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, UMP?" "COME ON! ARE YOU BLIND?" I heard all these and worse.

Then the chanting started.

"UMP GO HOME! UMP GO HOME! UMP GO HOME!" Kids, parents, coaches -- it seemed like the whole world wanted my head on a stick. A few of the wives were telling their husbands to shut up and leave me alone, but it didn't seem to be working.

I took off my mask and threw it to the ground and yelled "IT WAS UP AROUND HIS EYES!" I was pretty much hysterical, and tears were about ready to start streaming from my eyes. "WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THAT CALL? WHAT WAS WRONG WITH IT?" I kicked at some dirt, and stood there defiantly, trying to maintain some semblance of dignity.

The chanting died down and everyone was staring at me.

One of the coaches said, "Uh, kid...he actually swung at that pitch."

I didn't say anything, but I could feel my face turning beet red. He had swung at the pitch. He had swung at the pitch, and somehow I had missed it. Fighting tears, I slowly took off all the smelly umpire equipment and stacked it into a neat pile next to home plate. Without another word, I got on my bike and rode home, thus ending my short-lived career as an umpire.

I don't think I even told my parents this story, so there you go. As you probably figured out, I wasn't asked to umpire any future games.

At least now when people ask me why I hate baseball, I can just point them to this post.

Suck it, baseball.

Should I be freezing my ass off in June?

2011-06-02T20:56:00.007-04:00

Just curious. It was 91 degrees yesterday and today I have a coat on. I need to move to a place that doesn't have 4 seasons a week. I feel like I should be making an appointment to get my snow tires put on soon.

Speaking of tires, has anyone ever ordered from Tirerack.com? I used them a few times, and so far I like them. You can have your new tires shipped to a installation center near you, and then just drive there and they slap them on. You can also order wheel and tire combinations, and that's what I did. I finally got tired of paying $72 bucks every time I needed to switch from my regular tires to my snows and another $72 to switch them back. I figured if I purchased some cheap wheels, I could just leave the tires mounted, change them over myself and in two seasons I'd have made my money back.

Things never work out the way you'd like them to with automobiles, at least in my experience.

I went to their website and punched in my make and model, and then picked a good performance summer tire and the cheapest wheel they said would fit. They also told me I needed four tire pressure sensors, and that I would have to have my dealer activate them for me to make the big orange TPMS light on the dashboard go out. So I pulled the trigger on those as well, for another $138 bucks.

When the tires showed up, they looked pretty good. I jacked up the car, stuck them on and everything was great. They were quiet, the car handled much better and I was happy -- until I got another person in the car and happened to drive over a railroad track. The first time the tires were forced up inside the wheel-well, I thought I ran over a cat. There was a huge screeching-scraping noise as the tires and the outside edge of the wheel-well fought it out. The metal wheel-wells won handily, and the tires got pretty scraped up.

I also managed to find time to stop by the dealer and they told me it would cost $95 to switch over the new sensors, and that the computer could only store one set of numbers at a time. That meant I had traded a (2 x $72) expense a year for a (2 x $95) expense. So far so good. This idea was really starting to pan out for me.

I started researching that little issue, because that was bullshit right there. I found a little device that cost $150 and would allow me to program my own car computer, and switch between two sets of TPMS sensors. So for those of you keeping score at home, I would now break even in three years instead of two.

When I received the device, it was supposed to first suck the codes out from my winter tires, and store those in a "winter" setting, then allow me to input my "summer" values. I followed the directions, and the device wiped out my existing codes just like it was not supposed to do, and so now I have no way of knowing what codes are assigned to my winter tires without having someone take them off the rim and write the numbers down. There's an additional fifty bucks come November. Oh, and add another six months to my break-even. I'm clearly doing this wrong.

I called up Tire Rack, and told them that the tires were committing suicide on my wheel-wells, and they went away for a while and consulted their computer, then came back and said "Oh yeah, there should have been a warning on those wheels. They don't really work with your car. If you have an alignment done, they can add some camber to them so they might not rub. Or I can get you into a wheel with the right offset." I figured an alignment would cost me another 70 bucks, and I didn't want to go down the road with my tires looking like / \ because it would affect my mileage, and they'd obviously wear out faster, so I asked him what other wheels they had.

The only ones they had with the right offset (a) looked like rice-boy wheels, and (b) were twice the price of the ones I had originally purchased. I bent over and placed my order even though the wheels were butt-ugly. I didn't care anymore. I just wanted something that I could take on the highway without having to worry about the tires turning into grated cheese at 75 mph.

They did agree to refund my entire purchase price, including shipping both ways, so I can't fault them for their customer service, even though it was a huge pain in the ass and completely their fault.

So now I figure with the price of the new fancy rice-boy wheels, I'm up to about 4.5 years before I break even, which is probably about a year longer than I'll actually own the stupid car. To add insult to injury, the new wheels are much closer to the body of the car, which means it doesn't handle nearly as well as it did with the first set I bought. I was thinking of tinting the windows and adding a spoiler and one of those really loud exhaust systems that sounds like a swarm of bees, but then I'd have to buy a shitload of polo shirts so I could pop the collars, and really, who needs that added expense?

One for the geeks

2011-05-24T14:33:00.004-04:00

I finally figured out who Darkseid reminds me of:

Early bird gets the (rapture) worm.

2011-05-21T17:39:00.005-04:00

Our friends are coming over for dinner at 6 pm, so I put this on the front lawn:

I'm pretty sure I'll still be here in the morning...

2011-05-21T11:28:00.004-04:00

Witchypoo.

2011-05-17T17:28:00.005-04:00

For reasons that escape me, I had an opportunity to google "witchypoo" not too long ago.

What I got was the following screen:

I immediately thought, What in the holy hell is that thing in the middle? At first I thought some madman had grafted breasts onto other breasts, or someone's penis enlargement surgery had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Or maybe it was a lump of discorporate flesh somehow being kept alive by eldritch means. None of these possibilities seemed out of the question, even after I zoomed in:

I linked back to the website that was generating such disturbing images and just tossing them up on the web for unsuspecting surfers to see, and found this. Now I want one.

Also, I am trying to convince my wife to make me one of these.

In other news, I was the asshole yesterday.

You know that guy in the car behind you who beeps at your stupid ass when the light turns green and you didn't notice the change because you're putting on your make-up or texting your bestie or dicking around with your ipod? That was me yesterday.

I'm sitting at a red light, second in line behind some girl in a Ford Escort, just blasting the tunes and trying to get to the post office before they closed. The light turns green and she just sits there. I wait about five seconds, then give her a polite little toot on horn. She doesn't move. I wait another five seconds then tap it again. Ten seconds later, there's still nothing but brake lights in my face. Finally, I lean on the horn a little, thinking I didn't get her attention the first time. She looks up into her rear view, and I raise my hands in the universal "What the Fuck, Lady?" gesture...

... just as the ambulance rushes through the intersection, lights and sirens blazing.

So if you're reading this, girl in the Escort, I'm sorry I was an inadvertent asshole.

In my defense, my music was pretty loud.

Mexico 2011 - Part VI

2011-05-04T21:34:00.013-04:00

OK, I'm back. I still have to finish this story of our trip home from Mexico, even though the trip seems like something that happened in a dream. Or maybe in a former life. I still vaguely remember being relaxed and on a beach somewhere, but that could just be a false memory. But then I find pictures like this one on my computer and if I didn't take them then who did?*

....anyway, to wrap this up, the next day was gorgeous, which was kind of a bummer, and it seemed like the water was much calmer than it had been the previous six days. Up until the last day, we had seen nothing but red flags and wind on the beach. Still, we were very sad that we had to leave.

We packed up all of our stuff, evenly dividing everything and trying to make sure that neither of our suitcases were over 50 lbs. I didn't want to get busted at the luggage scale like I did last time and be on the hook for an extra fifty bucks. Even so, I put all my dirty underwear and socks in an outside pocket just in case I had to jettison some cargo at the US Airways counter. I wasn't convinced their scales weren't set a tad light just to make some extra cash from people who had flights to catch.

When we got to the airport it was incredibly crowded, as it probably always is. We tipped our driver and sent him on his way and prepared ourselves to stand in line. It took us nearly two hours to snake our way around the velvet ropes to check our bags. Our baggage was under the 50 pound limit, we had no issues going through security, and our plane was even on time, so things were going great. The only casualty was my belt. It went into the x-ray machine, but didn't come out. Since nobody but me seemed too concerned about finding it, I let it slide, and just assumed it was jammed in the machine or something. I bet the lady x-raying the suitcases is probably wondering why every bag has the same exact belt in it.

Our gate was near a drugstore kiosk, which I found fascinating. It was basically a room made of four glass walls, and the walls were lined entirely with prescription drugs of every type, leaning heavily toward antibiotics, boner pills and anti-depressants, none of which I currently need. It was good to know they've got my future covered, though.

On every flight up until this point, we were always last in line to get on the plane, and this one was no exception. I'm not sure what you have to do to get out of "Zone 5" but apparently printing your boarding passes on line 24 hours ahead of time isn't it. When we finally boarded, it looked like we were in luck, because after everyone boarded, there didn't appear to be anyone sitting in the third seat in our row. We figured we could stretch out a bit on our way back to Charlotte.

Just before they were ready to back the plane away from the gate and take off, the last guy got on board.

He looked like a dirtier version of Tommy Chong. As he got closer to us, I could feel my wife starting to tense up. He had stringy gray hair and a scraggly beard, and glasses that looked like they had been dipped in olive oil and then rolled around in a pot of dandruff. He had a bandana wrapped around his head and when he smiled, he revealed a distinct lack of teeth. He continued walking toward us. He stopped at our row, and looked down at the seat next to my wife, then up again at the seat number. She visibly recoiled as he slung his filthy backpack off his shoulder and put it down on the seat next to her so he could dig his grimy sweatshirt out of it. His originally white tee shirt was yellowish-brown with sweat and god knew what else, and you could see the creases on his neck, which were all the more noticeable because of the sheer amount of dirt and crud that had been packed into them.

He smelled like a burning bushel of cow shit that a group of people were trying to extinguish by pissing on. It was horrible. After he shrugged into his sweatshirt, he reached up and put his knapsack in the overhead. Then he sat down -- in the row directly in front of us. My wife stopped praying. Out loud, at least.

Still, the flight to Charlotte was very long. I started out breathing through my shirt but then I realized I could direct the overhead air jets away from me at full blast. That induced some sort of venturi effect and I no longer smelled his unwashed ass as acutely as I had before. I spent the first five minutes of the flight looking closely at the top of his head to make sure there was nothing jumping around up there, and I'm not even kidding.

I think there should be some sort of sign at the airlines like they have at the amusement park. Instead of saying "In order to ride this attraction, you must be this tall" it would say something like "In order to ride on this aircraft, you must not be a dirty, disgusting scumbag."

Seriously, if you can afford a plane ticket, you can afford to find a way to wash your filthy ass before you get on a plane with other people. It's just common courtesy. And just so you don't think I'm making this up, here's my admittedly poor but totally un-retouched cellphone photo of him:

OK, maybe I embellished the stink lines a little. But they were there, trust me.

The gods of travel had smiled upon us -- or if not smiled, at least grinned sarcastically -- presumably to pay us back for the hell that was our last trip out of Mexico. Even so, they had also given us a little something to keep us humble, and remind us of who was in charge. I was OK with that.

So that's basically it. We escaped unscathed, and my wife even managed to not get sick when we got home. I went to work the following day and by 3pm it was like I had never left. It's amazing how answering e-mail for six hours can immediately erase a week's worth of relaxation. It doesn't seem fair. At least we have our CD by local musician Victor Mayer, so that will help us keep the memories fresh until next time. He could be singing about wolverines having sex with canned beans for all I know, but I still like it.

Playa del Carmen, we hope to see you soon. Thanks for another fantastic trip!

*my wife, in this case.

Holy rhythm method, Batman.

2011-04-28T20:32:00.005-04:00

If I had a vagina, it would be tired just looking at that. It's your body, not a clown car, for god's sake.

Mexico 2011 - Part V

2011-04-24T20:09:00.007-04:00

The next day our big plan consisted of eating, drinking, sitting on the beach and then, before dinner, getting massages at the "massage palapa" at the front of the resort:

They also have an indoor spa, but we figured it would be more memorable on the beach. I can get a massage in a small, stuffy room that smells like lavender and sweat right here in the States.

This beach option can be hit or miss, because you are still within a coconut's throw of the pool, and if the pinky-ponkey-donkey sisters were in, you'd have very little chance of experiencing anything approaching relaxation. We stopped in and spoke to the masseuse about scheduling, and she said that she was the only one working today, so we wouldn't be able to get them at the same time. There wasn't a waiting list so we decided to head to the beach and told her we'd catch up with her later.

My wife was still having trouble sitting and walking, so breakfast was short, since the wooden chairs were tough even on a non-boiled ass. You can't beat the view from the breakfast table though:

After breakfast we went back to the room and slathered up with 50 SPF sunblock, making doubly sure to get all the exposed but hard to reach spots. I had been doing pretty good with the sunscreen and was basically just as white as I had been before we left the snow and ice.

I think I scared the housekeeper one day because I walked out on the deck and she ran away screaming "Blanco Fantasma! Blanco Fantasma!" I thought she was saying I was fantastic, but it turns out that it meant something else entirely.

Rare sighting: Ghost of the Mahekal Beach Resort

We made some drinks and sat on the beach until it was almost too late to grab lunch, but we forced ourselves to eat some tacos (fish and chicken) and way too much guacamole. After lunch, we went for a little walk just so we didn't feel like total manatees, and when we got back, we decided it was time for the last little treat of the vacation: our massages.

My wife went over and talked to the masseuse, and she said she could take us right then. My wife decided to go first, and I grabbed a beach chair and read for a bit. It was a 40 minute massage, so I had some time to kill. I was pretty relaxed already, so I must have dozed off, because it seemed like only ten minutes had passed and she was back.

"How was it?" I asked.

"Amazing," my wife replied. "She said she's ready for you now. She didn't do much on my legs because they were so burned, but she was really good and the oils she used smelled great."

Now I have to tell you something about me and massages. I don't generally get them. One, I think they're kind of a waste of money, and two, I'm always a little uncomfortable with being rubbed down like I just won the Kentucky derby.

So this massage on the beach was going to be my second. Not my second on the beach, but my second ever.

The first was on a little anniversary getaway about five years earlier, and it was an "in room" massage at a hotel, and we were both there at the same time. It was OK, and nothing to write home about, but it turned out to be pretty relaxing. So I figured this one would be no different; some battle axe would pound on my back for 40 minutes and that would be that.

I walked up the beach and into the palapa and said hello, and she asked me if I wanted the same massage that my wife had -- the relaxation massage, I think it was called. I said yes and she pulled the sheets down over the doorways, handed me a towel and said, "OK. Please to remove everything, then lie down on the table under the towel."

"Everything?" I asked.

"Everything," she replied. "Your watch and ring, too. I will wait outside."

"Uh...what about my underwear?" I asked, just to be sure I wasn't misinterpreting anything. I didn't want to be the unexpected gringo penis she talked about at dinner that night.

"Everything," she said emphatically, then left the tent.

So I was standing in a building with two walls made of sticks in the sand, and the other two walls were made of sheets tied in the middle with ribbons. There were gaps between the sticks large enough to throw baseballs through, and the sheets were flapping madly in the breeze, opening themselves up to the beach and the pool in alternate flaps.

I quickly stripped down to my just my underwear, and waited for a break where nobody was walking by and the flaps were relatively calm and I dropped trou and climbed up on the exam -- er, massage table and lay face-down. I tried a few times to toss the towel over my ass, but failed miserably. I finally had to stand up, wrap the towel around my waist, then lie down again.

Finally, she asked me if I were ready for her, and I said "Yes, but this towel might not be." She laughed and came back in the tent. The first thing she did was untuck the towel and change its orientation -- she wanted it lengthwise, covering my legs from my waist to my feet. Then she put on some soft music, then adjusted the "face holder" in the table so it was comfortable. When I was situated, she got the warm oil and drizzled it on my back. She stood at the head of the table, and started working on my shoulders and upper arms, then moved to the side and started on my triceps and biceps, all the way out to my finger tips. When I was too tense, she'd shake my arm lightly, trying to get me to loosen up.

After a while, the hot oil and her strong hands put me into kind of a trance -- I was finally starting to relax. She hit the middle of my back, then my lower back, then walked around to my feet. She put oil on them too, and massaged the soles. Then she moved up my calf, and suddenly there was a blast of cold air on half my ass as she flipped the blanket over and started massaging my upper-inner thigh. She was getting right in there, too, and I must have tensed up because the next thing I know she's jiggling my butt cheek just like she did my arm earlier, however in this case her little universal signal for "loosen up" didn't work. Probably because I was lying there with a strange woman's hand on my ass and I knew she was staring directly at some pretty major back-ball and (oddly) I wasn't completely comfortable with that.

She flipped the towel over to the other side, and then did the same thing to my other butt cheek. It was this sliding, pressing motion that started at my knee and ended just shy of my prostrate exam. I tried to go with it, but I felt a little like I had been abducted by aliens and was being prepped for my probe.

After she covered my butt with the towel again, she did a little percussion solo on my back again, and then she was done. She didn't actually tell me she was done -- she just stopped. I lay there for a few minutes waiting for her to say something but she didn't. Finally, I just looked up and she smiled and said, "You have a lot of tension in your shoulders." I think the tension probably came from somewhere a little farther south, but I didn't say anything. I thanked her, tipped her and walked back to my beach chair.

"How was it?" my wife asked.

"Um, pretty good, " I said. "Very relaxing, except for the part where she told me to get completely naked and then used my grundle as a stop block."

So then it was all over but dinner at our favorite pizza place one last time, and the trip home the next day. That will be my final installment, probably tomorrow if I can get to it. Don't worry, it'll be short because nothing major happened, other than they apparently give free plane tickets to homeless deadheads now.

Mexico 2011 - Part IV

2011-04-19T21:40:00.008-04:00

We swam single file, then ducked behind a large group of stalactites that were touching the water, and into a tunnel. There wasn't much head clearance, and I was in front of my wife, trying to keep her from whacking her head on something. All you could hear was the Canadian lady hyperventilating through her snorkel and splashing like a wounded seal. I was worried my wife was going to flip out in the confined space, but she was doing great. Afterward, she said she wasn't nervous at all.

I, however, wasn't doing so great for two reasons. The first was that my snorkeling vest was too small for me. I tend to sink like a stone since I don't have much in the way of body fat, and in fresh water this vest didn't hold enough air to actually keep my head out of the drink. Hector kept stopping to make sure everyone was still with him and to tell us what was coming up, but whenever he did that, I'd sink to the level of my eyeballs. That was OK unless I was actually trying to talk. So that was the first reason. The second reason was because during his first stop, as I was kicking my feet to keep my ears out of the water so I could hear him, I inadvertently connected with some very rough limestone and took the first layer of skin off my foot. I'm pretty sure I tossed a choice word or two up through my snorkel, but I don't think anyone heard me over the sounds of the Canadian woman who was still trying desperately to use up all the air we had.

The second cave was very cool, and it made me wish I had sprung for that underwater camera housing I was looking at before we left home. There was a light in this cave too, but it wasn't very bright. Hector turned to us and said, "There is a giant spider in this cave. Do you want to see him?"

My wife is deathly afraid of spiders. There is no reason why, she just is. She immediately tensed up and looked like she was trying to figure out how to run, even though she was currently floating in ten feet of water in a dark cave. Hector started pointing his flashlight at the low ceiling, hunting for something. Finally, he found it. "There! There is the spider! Do you see?" he asked. Luckily for everyone involved, it was only a limestone formation that looked like a giant spider, and that was good because it meant that I wouldn't be dragging an unconscious woman back through the cave passageways.

Hector had been dragging around an orange rescue ring, presumably in case someone needed rescuing. After we looked at the spider, Hector told us the last cave didn't have lights, but not to worry, because we had the flashlights. He said if anyone got tired or scared, they could hold onto the ring. We started moving again, this time into a passageway that was so dark you couldn't even see the walls. It was at this point that I wished I was one of the flashlight guys because the guy in the back who actually had the damned thing was pointing it everywhere except in the direction we were heading. At one point the light just disappeared completely and it took me a second to realize that the guy was ten feet below me, looking at some kind of rock formation or something. When we were all finally in the last cave, we moved to the center and Hector told us to take our masks and snorkels off. I wasn't sure exactly why, so I was a little hesitant since when I did that it was difficult for me to keep my face out of the water. Everyone was sort of gathered around the orange ring, holding onto it with one hand. I stuck my hand out there too, and that helped with my buoyancy. I took my mask and snorkel off, and so did everyone else.

Hector said, "Now turn off the flashlights." The lights went out, and the darkness folded over us. You couldn't tell if your eyes were open or closed. Suddenly, it was a little harder to breathe. I think because the Canadian lady was still doing all the air.

Hector told us to be quiet and still, and to listen. He said, "Think about this. You are five miles into the jungle, in a cave twenty feet under the ground. You might be able to find your way out, but... you might not." I didn't realize right away that he was trying to set a mood, so I said, "So what you're saying is, we should tip you really, really well." He laughed and continued. "The Mayans would come in here with nothing. No lights. No snorkels. Nothing but their sacred beliefs, and the knowledge that they were approaching the entrance to their underworld. So take a moment, and be silent, and think of these people and their sacred cenotes, which you now share."

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, and it was an interesting experience. I've been in a few caves before, but never floating in water. It was a little claustrophobic, like I imagine being in a sensory deprivation tank might be. After a bit, he told the flashlight holders to turn the lights back on, and we swam back to the platform. I don't think we swam back the same way, but it's entirely possible. All the passageways looked kind of alike.

After we climbed back out of the cave, Hector broke open the cooler, and we had some drinks. The sun was incredibly bright, and the warm air felt amazing. I was starving at this point, so I passed on the beer, since I didn't want to be drunk for the brutal ass-pounding we were sure to receive on the ride out. The cenote owner had a large screen house there with a whole line of Mexican hammocks inside. We all grabbed a hammock and relaxed for a bit before we stuffed ourselves back in the van and headed out of the jungle. Next stop: Akumal.

On the way out, Hector stopped and picked some cotton from a bush, and handed it around, and told us about a certain kind of tree that was very important because of the sap inside. I didn't quite get what the sap was used for. It was kind of like a 5th grade field trip, only without the quiz. I should have been paying more attention.

By the time we got to the bay, Hector had my wife convinced she was going to be swimming with the sharks. Luckily, that wasn't the case. I asked Hector if we were going to eat first, and he said no, we were going to eat after we went snorkeling. I asked him why and he said, "We tried it, but many people, they get sick and feed the fishes." On the one hand, I didn't want to feed the fishes, but on the other I was hungry as hell and willing to chance it.

The snorkeling itself was amazing, and it was my wife's first time. She felt comfortable because the water wasn't deep, and hey, we weren't in the dark under 16 tons of rock. We were out there for a couple hours, and saw a giant red crab, an eagle ray, a stingray, about 4 or 5 turtles (which is what I wanted to see) and a bunch of smaller fish. The reef has a lot of sand all over it, maybe from the rough water, I'm not sure. After we were done, we finally got to eat lunch.

As part of the deal, we each had a wristband that allowed us into the buffet at the Akumal Beach Resort. The only kicker is, they don't let you go into the restaurant if you're wet. Since nobody told us to bring a change of clothes, I didn't have a dry shirt. Luckily, Hector had a spare shirt in the van and he loaned it to me. The buffet wasn't great, but at that point I would have eaten just about anything. After lunch we were allowed to hang around on the beach for a few hours, and then we were ready to head back to the hotel.

We were the first ones back at the van and Hector was already there, just hanging around and waiting. I dug 200 pesos out of my pocket and gave it to him. "Thanks for not leaving us in the cave," I said. He laughed. "Do you like Bon Jovi?" he asked, holding up a CD. "Uh, no. Not really," I replied. "Yeah, I do not either," he said, putting it away. I think he thought all Americans liked Bon Jovi. He dug around in his bag for a moment, then pulled out some kind of crazy Mexican dance music by someone I think he said was named Mia or Maria. He said she was a huge star in Mexico, but that this CD was "something else that she didn't normally sound like." It took him a while to explain it. "It is her, but not really, just her voice, and different music." It suddenly occurred to me what he was talking about. He didn't have the english word for "remix." I didn't have the heart to tell him I liked dance music even less than Bon Jovi. He asked what kind of music I liked and I rattled off a half-dozen prog bands from the 70's that he'd never heard of, and he laughed, shaking his head. "I'm old," I told him.

By that time, everyone was wandering back to the van and we piled in for the return to the hotels. Since we were farthest away, we were dropped off last. We got the tour of Playacar, a giant resort and then two other places in town. The weird thing is, I don't think anyone tipped Hector. They got out, thanked him for the trip, sometimes shook his hand and sometimes not, but that was it -- unless they had given it to him at another time, as I did. I felt bad so when he dropped us off, I slipped him another 100 when I gave him his shirt back and told him it was a "shirt rental fee." My wife hugged him, and I think he liked that. He was a really good guide, and I thought it was totally worth 300 pesos to come back in one piece.

When we got back to the hotel, and my wife got out of the car, she winced a little. I asked her what was wrong, and she said her legs hurt. I looked at them, and said, "Um, I think you got a little sunburn." Her entire body looked like this:

Apparently, she had forgotten to put sunscreen on her legs and ass. She had a perfectly straight delineation between the front of her body, which was pasty white, and the back, which was the color of an angry plum, if plums had emotions and were capable of rage. It was not good, and she knew it was only going to get worse as the night wore on.

By the time we had gone to dinner and made it back to the room, she could barely bend her legs. She will kill me for putting her ass on the internet, but some things have to be seen:

I could feel the heat coming off her ass from six inches away. I made Family Guy jokes which were not appreciated, then I went and got the aloe. I dug around in the first aid kit and came up with some swabs with benzocaine on them. So I swabbed her ass with those first, then tried ice, but she said it was too cold.

Thanks to US Airways, we only had a 3oz. bottle of aloe. I told her to lie down on the bed, and I used the entire bottle. She wanted me to put it on thick, and let it sit there since everything was too sore to rub it in, so I did. She looked like one of those guys who slather themselves with Vaseline in preparation for swimming across the English channel. Since she didn't want to lie there with her ass hanging out, she covered it with her nightgown. I started reading, and the next thing I know we were both asleep.

A few hours later, we woke up. She woke up first, and when she got up to brush her teeth and wash her face, she discovered she had a problem. The aloe had dried, and her nightgown was now stiff as cardboard and stuck to her ass like a coat of paint.

I have to admit, I laughed. Call me a bad husband or whatever, but holy crap it was funny. I told her to get in the shower until it loosened up, but she decided to go with the more painful "peel it slowly like a band-aid" method for some reason. Ten minutes later, after we had carefully and painfully separated her buttcheeks from her nightgown, we went back to bed.

The next day was our last day -- and we had planned to just relax, lie on the beach and maybe get massages at the resort spa.

Somehow, I didn't think a massage was in the cards for her, but she proved me wrong.

Continue to Part V

Lunch Lady.

2011-04-18T18:12:00.006-04:00

Sometimes, if there's a lot of leftovers from dinner I'll bring my lunch to work the next day. Normally, I'll just grab a "recycled" Starbucks paper bag out of the cabinet, since we tend to save and reuse. This morning, however, these were my only choices:

Bath and Body Works was too bright, the LOFT handles were too ribbony and weird, and Miss Scarlett...well, let's just say the last time I had this dilemma, I tried crossing out the "Miss" with a Sharpie and writing "Mr." but I still got laughed at.

The obvious thing to do? I bought lunch at the cafeteria.

No, actually, I took "The Spa at Mirror Lake Inn."

I wasn't very manly, but at least I was upscale.

Mexico 2011 - Part III

2011-04-16T15:00:00.014-04:00

When we got back to our room, we weren't entirely sure what animal we were looking at. The first three days were easy. First we had whales and a stingray, then an octopus, then what I am pretty sure was a mother monkey and her child...but then we got this:

I wasn't sure what to make of it. At first I thought it was a really bad crab, but then I decided that it was just a pile of folded towels with a face. If this had been an actual animal, I think its latin genus would be Noetiphucthis.

I think we got this one as a warning, because I didn't realize until after our trip that it's considered standard protocol to tip your housekeeper daily. Instead, what I did was wait until our second-to-last day, and then give her a lump sum in person. Little did I know that by day three she was probably cleaning the toilet with our pillow cases. I think we were cool after that because this was what we got on our last day:

I still wasn't sure what they were supposed to be, but at least they had recognizable body parts.

Anyway, by that time we had amassed a fairly large quantity of "eyes and mouth" stickers. Needless to say, they were stuck on some pretty hilarious body parts. Which is not to say that (as a middle-sized white boy) my body parts are hilarious, because they are no laughing matter.

This particular variation was named Antonio, and coincidentally enough, he sounded exactly like Antonio Bandaras:

Then this happened:

The funniest thing about that last picture (other than the fact that it reminds me of this) is that I completely forgot that I had stuck those there and I put my shirt on. We went out for drinks, and then for dinner, then more drinks, and by the time we got back to the room it was about 11 pm. They had been stuck to my nipples for over five hours, and I had forgotten about them until I took my shirt off to go to bed. At first we laughed and laughed. Then I tried to take one of them off, and the laughing stopped. Mine, anyway.

You know how they get those to stick to something as porous and rough as a towel? I'm going to tell you. My educated guess is that they use some sort of glue that is very close in chemical composition to Liquid Nails construction adhesive. Seriously, I almost tore my own nipples off. I swear they were stretched out two inches before the adhesive even thought about letting go. I immediately made a mental note to cancel my nipple wax appointment for the following week.

At that point, my tender nipples and I were ready for bed. Speaking of bed, I think there was something fairly large living in our palapa roof, because every day when we got back to the room, there were one or two little turds on the coverlet. They were either insect, mammal or reptile, but I'm no expert so I was hoping for reptile. The closest thing I could compare them to were caterpillar turds. Last year I had a "kissing bug" drop down on me and latch onto my face, so this year I came prepared. I bought this before we left:

No blood sucking bastard was going to give me Chagas disease if I could help it. The next morning I could tell that my purchase had been worthwhile because there was a cucaracha the size of my thumb on the wall above the bed. I have no idea what roach crap looks like, but in retrospect, perhaps he was the culprit. It also protected us from (in no particular order) three beetles, two centipedes, another smaller roach, a spider, and some kind of black and white creature with a face like a praying mantis. This is all a good thing since I tend to fall asleep on my back with my mouth hanging open. Incredibly attractive mental image, I know. I was thinking of asking for a different room, but I figured we were pushing our luck already with the first switch. I took the net down every day and put it in the closet so that housekeeping could do their thing, then put it back up every night.

The next morning we got up bright and early for our excursion to Akumal and the cave. We were supposed to get picked up at 8:00, but at 8:15 we were still waiting. Our resort is sort of on the north end, so it's usually either the first or last pickup, depending on where you're going, and where the other people in your group are staying. At about 8:20, a car pulled up and a guy got out, walked up to us and asked us if we were waiting for the trip to Akumal and the cave. We said we were, and he informed us that the van would be along shortly. He took our paperwork and disappeared.

A minute or so later, a white van pulled up with a bunch of people in it. There were no markings on the van. It looked rented. A young guy with a chin beard and soul patch got out of the van and said his name was Hector, and that he'd be our guide. The only two seats in the van that were still free were in the front, so we got in next to Hector and strapped on our seat belts. We drove out through town, and got on the highway. A few minutes later, Hector pulled over to the side of the road and put his hazard lights on. He then unbuckled his seat belt and turned around so he was facing everyone in the van.

"Hello," he said. "My name is Hector, and I am sorry to say that you will be stuck with me all day today. This is my first time doing this tour. I am sorry we are late, but I was in jail last night. I'm still a little drunk." He pronounced it "yail."

He then outlined what was going to happen. First we were going to go to a cenote and cave system that was on private property. After that we'd head to Akumal and snorkel, then have a late lunch at the Akumal resort restaurant on the beach, then we'd have a couple hours to hang out on the beach and then we'd head back to the resort.

After the details were ironed out, we got driving again. I wasn't sure what the purpose was of pulling over on the highway rather than just give us the spiel in the parking lot of the resort. Maybe it was to keep us from running away.

A few minutes after we passed the signs for Akumal, we pulled off to the side of the road in front of what looked to be an abandoned building with a 4-wheel-drive pickup truck parked out in front of it. We drove behind the building and then stopped in front of a dirt road.

Hector turned to my wife. "Have you ever had a Mayan massage?"

"No, not yet," she replied. "We're supposed to be getting massages tomorrow."

"Ah," Hector said. "You are about to get one right now. How about the rest of you? Have you ever had a Mayan massage?" Apparently, my wife wasn't the only one who hadn't.

Hector started the van moving again. "Here we go," he said. "One Mayan massage coming up."

We hit the first pothole and I almost crapped my own liver. "Is good, no?" Hector asked, a big grin on his face. Only 4,325 more potholes to go.

After about fifteen minutes of riding on this bumpy, narrow, one-lane road, we were pretty deep in the jungle. I kept thinking that we could all disappear and nobody would ever know. Every time we rounded a corner and I thought we were going to be there, it was nothing but more jungle and single-lane road. Once in a while, we'd cross another intersecting dirt road, usually marked with a rusty metal fence accompanied by a wrecked truck or a pile of debris.

Just about the time I thought none of us were going to live to see breakfast, Hector turned to my wife and said, "Tell me. Does anyone know you are here?"

"No, nobody knows we're here," my wife replied. Hector laughed and said, "Ah, good." He nodded and said, "You will be the sacrifice."

"Well, the resort. The resort knows we are here," she added quickly. "And our friends and family, of course. Everybody knows we are here."

"Everybody, ay? Ah, that is too bad," he said. "You would have made a good sacrifice. Now we will have to pick someone from Canada. Or Germany." He looked looked in the rear view mirror at the others in the van, and there were a few nervous laughs. "What are you laughing at?" Hector said. "I am not kidding." Then he smiled. That Hector. What a joker.

Eventually we came up on a small house in the middle of nowhere, with a few goats and chickens outside in a fenced in area. There was a chain across the road. Hector beeped his horn and a guy came out and they spoke to each other in Spanish. They laughed a lot and I was pretty sure they were negotiating as to who was going to get what part of the ransom money. After the guy opened the back of the van and took a beer out of the cooler, he dropped the chain and we drove on. A few minutes later, we came upon this:

(I still don't know much about this place, other than this "tour company" was the only one allowed in here. If anyone reading this knows what the name of this place is, let me know.)

Hector got everyone out of the van and pointed out the bathrooms, which he euphamistically referred to as "composting toilets" but were in reality just your standard issue smelly outhouses. He said that once we got in the cave, we'd be in there for about an hour, so he recommended that if we had to use the bathroom, that we do it now. He handed out snorkels, vests and masks and said we wouldn't be using flippers in the caves. He then said he had to run around the back of the building to turn on the generator so we'd have lights.

Being the sort of guy that I am, my thought process upon hearing this was: Generator. Cave. Water. 120 volts. Mexico. Fuck. I didn't share my thoughts with my wife, however. I'm dumb, but not that dumb. Once he came back, he led us to the cave entrance and we descended. There was a set of stone steps, then a really steep section of wooden steps that led to a platform in the main cave. Here's a couple of pictures from the platform:

Hector then told us some of the history of the cenotes, how they were formed, the significance of the underground rivers to the people of Mexico both today and in the past. He also told us about how the Mayans believed that the cenotes were the entrance to the afterlife. He wasn't kidding about that sacrifice thing, though. They seriously used to do that shit. He was actually quite knowledgeable, and it totally exposed his lie about this being his first tour. He was clearly a seasoned pro with a lot of historic knowledge about his culture. After he was done, he said that he needed volunteers to hold the flashlights. I was screwing around at the other end of the platform looking a dive line down in the water, so I wasn't paying attention. In retrospect, I wish I had been, because having one of the flashlights would have been helpful. He only had three, so he wanted one in the front of the snorkel group, one in the middle and one at the end, since we'd be going in single file, with him in the lead. He had a headlamp, and while everyone was taking pictures, Hector was putting new batteries into the flashlights.

My wife was a little nervous getting into the water, so I got in first. She sat on the edge of the platform and dropped in feet first. Unfortunately, she didn't push off, so she almost wrenched her shoulder out of its socket when her arm decided to stay on the platform while the rest of her was well on the way to the water. She was immediately in pain, but after a minute or two, she shook it off.

"We will be going through a tunnel into another cave," Hector said. "So do not hit your head on the stalactites. Your head, I do not care about so much, but the stalactites take over a hundred years to grow an inch."

"When we get to the second cave, I will count you again before we go on to the last cave," he said. "If you are still nine, that is good. If you are eight, oh well." He smiled, shrugged his shoulders and pulled his mask down over his face.

We headed into the dark.

Continue to Part IV

Mystery Solved.

2011-04-14T21:40:00.011-04:00

Remember a few posts ago, I told you that I received a strange but interesting package from someone in the military who is apparently stationed in Israel? Well, it turns out it was actually intended for me after all.

About 3 months ago, I stumbled on an old action figure in my basement. The figure was called "Erik the Viking." I can't remember if he belonged to me or The Snitch, but I had no emotional attachment to him, since I was more of a Major Matt Mason / GI Joe kind of guy. Unfortunately for Erik, for reasons that are known only to the long-dead executives at Marx Toys, he was sort of an unmanly teal color, so I never played with him much. I didn't have any of the rest of the set, and he really didn't go with the Johnny West and his Indian sidekick. Never bring a viking sword to a gun fight, I always say. And never fight wearing teal.

Here he is on my kitchen counter with his (and I quote) Mighty Viking Horse {tm}:

The other thing that made Erik sort of unappealing to me was his Mighty Viking Haircut. He rocked a pretty serious pageboy:

We did sort of have that haircut in common, now that I think about it:

Anyway, to make a long story boring, I posted Erik up on e-Bay, where he sat, neglected for six days. On the seventh day, he received a bid. He was now worth approximately $3.00. And that was with his horse. So the auction ended, and I contacted the winner because the shipping was going to be twice as much as the merchandise, and I wanted to make sure he was OK with that. The address was to a military base, and so I asked him which branch he was in. He didn't really tell me specifically I don't think -- he just said he had a collection of Marx action figures back at home, and wanted to have a couple with him as a little reminder that real life was waiting out there somewhere.

I thought that was awesome, so I told him that I was sending Erik out as a gift, and throwing in a copy of my book as well, just to thank him for his service. Then I promptly forgot about it -- until today, when I logged into e-bay and saw his name on my list of shipped items and recognized it.

Since there was no note inside the package I received, I am assuming it was sort of a "thank you" for sending the stuff out. That's pretty cool, if you ask me.

Also, when I was looking for that pageboy picture of me, I found another picture of The Snitch, Houdini and me when we were in that whiteboy rap group that one time:

The next Mexico post is about half way done... hopefully I'll finish it up Friday if I don't have a dirty martini and fall asleep.

Word.

Mexico 2011 - Part II

2011-04-11T21:20:00.014-04:00

After our drinks, we headed to our room to check it out. It was nice, but it wasn't in the section we had last year, so we were sort of bummed. It was more expensive because it was a "single" in that there was no second floor, so you didn't have someone stomping around upstairs. The downside was that it was on the busy path leading toward the restaurant, and since it was single, it was on the ground floor. I'm not sure if the structure had settled since it had been built, or if they didn't level the ground first, but when you walked into the room the entire floor was tilted from left to right. Over the space of about 20 feet it must have been a difference of six inches. My wife kept running into things. You always felt like you were drunk even when you weren't, which really cut down on your bar tab, but you had to stay in the room a lot.

We slept there for the first night but the following day we asked to be moved to a room on the second floor and more toward the back of the resort. It was a cheaper room by 30 bucks a night, and they made us sign something that said we accepted the fact that they wouldn't be refunding us the difference. It was still worth doing from our perspective, since we liked to use the hammocks on the porch and it's much more relaxing and private when you're not on a main thoroughfare. I'm not a people person to begin with, and saying hi to everyone who walked by got old pretty fast. I started doing things like this, so they would just avert their eyes and walk by extra quickly:

The first couple of days we didn't do much of anything. We sat on the beach, walked in the sun, read books and basically just relaxed and tried to forget about the rest of the world for a while. Especially our little section of that world, which was still 20 degrees and covered in three feet of snow. I felt like all I did was eat, drink and read because, well, that is pretty much all I did. In fact, for the first three days, we considered the day a success if we managed to get up off the beach chairs long enough to eat lunch before we were too drunk.

After three days on the beach, you start to notice things. And people. For instance, every day, like clockwork, this guy would come out and stand there like this for about ten minutes:

Every time I'd see him standing there, I'd hear this music in my head. I'm not really sure what his super power was, but if I were a betting man, I'd say it was most likely the power to undress women with his eyes.

I guess I wasn't the only one who was wondering just what the hell he was looking at, because then this happened:

I was going to go stand next to them so my wife could get a picture of all three of us, but she wouldn't let me.

He might have been one of the yoga people. Our resort was hosting some sort of famous yoga guy program for the week. I saw one guy laying on his back outside his room doing jazz hands (and feet) over and over. I'm not sure what yoga position that is, (upward facing cockroach?) but he looked like he was trying to levitate but didn't quite have the specifics down yet.

There were a lot of crunchy people on display, and when I say "on display," I mean that literally.

In other words, there was a lot of the topless happening, even more so than last year. And again, it was really, really bad. This just confirms my suspicion that it's never the 25 year old hot chicks with the perfect bodies who are topless. It's always women like the ropey looking granny with orange hair, a face like Geddy Lee and boobs that are two feet long that are walking around all comfortable in their skin. I guess after a while you just get used to it, but I'm not sure. I knew it was bad when the wind actually caused her tits to flap a little. I kept waiting for her to toss one over each shoulder, catch some air, and take off like a flying squirrel. I made my wife promise that she'd never walk around topless on the beach, and in turn she made me promise that I'd never wear a banana hammock.*

On the third day, we also decided we wanted to Do Something. We didn't exactly know what, but we wanted to ease into it. Nothing too strenuous. We decided our first excursion was going to be to X-Caret the next day, just because it was close, the weather report was looking a bit iffy and we figured there'd be more places there to get out of the rain. Turns out that a 40% chance of rain in the forecast means absolutely nothing in PDC. The next day was crazy hot. Once you got away from the sea breeze, it was like you had a burning cinderblock sitting on top of your head.

Really, the only thing you can do at that point is get one of these:

Yep. It's exactly what it looks like. A 120 peso ice-cream headache with a face. Our lunch buffet was included in the ticket price, but drinks were not...so you guessed it. They push the drinks a little. But that was ok. This monster was like a 64 oz. Slushie except it was made with fresh fruit juices instead of syrup the flavor of blue. Yes, I know, I look like an axe murderer in that picture.

We didn't pay for any of the extras like the dolphin swim, the SNUBA or the sea-walk, but we did get to float through the "underground river" which I think was almost entirely man-made. It was a good snorkel intro for my wife, though, since she doesn't swim much and we were planning on going to Akumal the next day. Of course, they took your picture around every corner, then tried to sell them to you at the end for $13 each. I thought that was entirely reasonable, except they print them all regardless of whether you actually want to buy them, so the cost and waste is probably huge. They should just pop them up on screens like they do at the amusement parks.

As an aside, X-Caret is like a maze. The cartoon maps they hand out seem to serve no purpose other than to taunt you with things that you can't seem to get to. At every intersection, they have these stylized icon-type pictures that are supposed to tell you what is where, but they leave a bit to be desired. Maybe this is the heat stroke talking, but it shouldn't be that difficult to tell the difference between a butterfly and a freakin' BAT. We never did get to see the Bat Cave, which is a bummer. I told my wife I was looking forward to checking out the giant computer but she just looked at me like I was an idiot so I don't think she got it. On second thought, maybe she did.

Yeah, she probably did.

Eventually, we did get to see some sea turtles, although the map wasn't much help. I just kept following the shoreline and kicking giant iguanas out of my way until it looked like we were close, then we headed up toward the path again. Here's one that burped at me:

By about three pm, we were pretty much done. Everyone said that we needed to stay and "see the Mayan show" which was from six to nine, but both of us were about as dehydrated as a roadkill toad in the summer, and all we wanted to do was get back to the hotel, get some drinks and sit by the pool until it was time to shower up for dinner. So that's what we did. We took a taxi back, and got a few drinks and went to the pool.

Unfortunately, the pool had been taken over by a pack of wild 10-year-old girls, and they had all been snorting pixie stix or something, because they were hopped up. The were playing a kind of water tag where the person who is "it" has to guess what word the others in the pool were thinking of, based on category and letter, and when they guessed right, the person in the water would try to get to the other side before the person who was "it" could dive in and catch them. So needless to say, this was very loud. That's OK, though. Kids are loud. We understand that. And since we can't afford Adult Only hotels, we play the hand we're dealt.

What put us over the edge was how they determined who was to become it.

When I was a kid, a simple and quick "NOT IT!" uttered before anyone else was enough to make sure you weren't it -- whoever said it last was the one doing the chasing. Easy, right? Even a quick eeny, meeny, miny moe would do in a pinch. It appears that things have gotten a little more complicated since then, because here's the way it's done now:

Inky, Pinky, Ponky!

Daddy bought a donkey,

The donkey died, Daddy cried,

Inky, Pinky, Ponky!

The worst part? Whoever gets the last Ponky isn't "it." No. Instead, that person is "safe." The more astute among you will have immediately grasped the seriousness of this variation, in that if you have eight screaming ten-year old girls in a pool, in order to determine who is it for each game, you have to listen to that fucking rhyme at least seven times. Also, the girl doing the rhyme had a voice like she smoked a pack a day. I don't know how that's even possible, but there you go.

We decided to pack up our drinks and head back to our porch hammocks and see what sort of towel animals housekeeping had left for us. On the way, we stopped at the front desk and asked about getting a ride to Akumal. Instead, we ended up signing up for a tour to both Akumal and a cave - both in one day. That story I will save for the next post.

Also: You go, Ghandi.

Continue to Part III

*in public.

Mexico 2011 - Part I

2011-04-09T17:07:00.012-04:00

How to even begin? I suppose, like any trip, it begins with the prep, which included packing our suitcases. We did two things differently this year -- first, my wife decided to forgo bringing every article of clothing she owns, and two, we decided to use a cooler on wheels as one of our suitcases. Yeah. We're high-class. The reason for this was two-fold -- the resort we were staying at didn't have refrigerators in the rooms, and last year we bought a styrofoam cooler when we got there, but it was kind of crappy so we turned a five-dollar bag of ice from the bar into room temperature water almost every single day. We figured we'd actually save money buying and bringing the cooler, which we kind of did. The only bummer was that when we checked in we found out that they now rented small dorm-room-type cube refrigerators for something like five bucks a day. Live and learn. On the plus side, we got asked four times whether we were carrying fish, beef, human organs or anything else that might require the cooler to be full of dry ice.

We also had the pleasure of having our cooler given the once-over by a drug sniffing German shepherd. Or maybe they used him for detecting explosives, or Cuban cigars. I'm not really sure. All I had in there was some snorkeling equipment and all of our toiletries, including a ton of over-the-counter medication, just in case we needed it. This caused me a little bit of trouble when we were checking the bags and the airline employee said, "Sir, What's in the cooler?" and I replied, "Just some snorkel equipment and a ton of drugs." I amaze myself with my own stupidity sometimes.

Our flight from Albany to Cancun was uneventful, however we had a two-hour layover in Charlotte, North Carolina. No offense Charlotte, but y'all need to step it up and get your asses out of the 80's. I dig that decade as much as the next guy, but seriously, I never saw so many shoulder-length mullets in my life. Also, I thought the sign at the end of the moving walkway that said "Prepare to Step Off" needed a comma and "Bitch" at the end, but my wife wouldn't loan me her sharpie. If one of you could take care of that, I'd appreciate it.

For once, we didn't get stuck sitting next to someone with bad breath or body odor on the plane. We also avoided sitting next to someone huge who squeezes under the arm rest into our seats. In fact, in this case, I'm pretty sure we were the smelly ones, since we had eaten some pretty heavy garlic the night before. I think Karma paid us back on the return trip, but I'll get to that later.

When we landed in Cancun, we grabbed our bags and went outside to find our ride. He was holding up a sign with my name printed on it, and he immediately led us to his van. He wasn't as personable as the driver we had last year, and didn't offer to stop for drinks, or even tell us his name. He just drove. I tipped him anyway because I was in a good mood, and we were finally on the ground and at our hotel.

We got there just in time for happy hour, which was a fortuitous turn of events. We were thirsty, and needed some bottled water at the very least. Not drinking the tap water is kind of a given, but I always wondered about the ice. I brought a Steri-Pen with us because I have a notoriously sensitive stomach, and the last thing I wanted was a case of the trots in a place where you can't flush the toilet paper. Someone on the playa.info forum told me that if the ice is cylindrical and has a hole in it, it's made from bottled, purified water. We ordered up a couple of drinks and I was glad to see the ice in my cup was as described. It was then that I noticed the drink special:

I didn't want to tempt fate, so I refrained from ordering one. It probably wasn't the best name for a drink special in Mexico, all things considered. It reminded me of the time I was walking through the mall in Cleveland and the drink special at the coffee shop was called the "Pumpkin Spice Steamer."

Sitting at the outside bar is always good for overhearing the conversations of others. Our entertainment for the evening was a hippie-ish woman of about 60 who was regaling some people she just met at the bar with tales about her favorite subject, which turned out to be herself. She also insisted upon calling children "little people" instead of "children" or the more colloquial "kids." She would say things like, "Yes, the resort is excellent for the little people. They provide them with so many activities, like painting pottery and ping pong" and "The restaurant was very good, but the menu didn't have any options for the little people." Of course, this instantly conjured up images in my mind of leprechauns standing on boxes to reach the ping-pong table, and sitting on phonebooks while painting ceramics and ordering appetizers and rounds of green beer. About the tenth time she said "little people" I couldn't hold back anymore. "KIDS." I said to my wife, probably too loudly. "Just call them KIDS, for fuck's sake." I got shushed by my wife, and deservedly so. What can I say? I hadn't eaten since six in the morning and my drink was getting right on top of me.

Her conversation got better (and by better, I mean funnier) once she moved off the "little people" kick. Her next tale was all about how she was now retired, but finding a lot of satisfaction with what she called her "second career." I swear to you, I almost shot pina coloda out of my nose when the woman she was chatting with asked her what her second career was and she replied, (with an earnest gravitas only attainable by reaching the highest pinnacle of self-delusion), that she was now a Story Teller. I guess she went to the local library once a week and made up stories for the kids -- excuse me -- little people. I'm sure it's very rewarding, however it's probably not really what you'd consider a career. If that's the case, I'm pretty sure making fart noises with your armpits while watching wheel of fortune could also be considered a career. Oh well, it was amusing anyway, and I wish her luck. At least she wasn't a hedge fund manager.

Part II in the next few days. Same Bat channel. Now it's time to eat drink and be Mary. What? She dresses nice, and I like her style.

Continue to Part II

One of these things doesn't go with the others.

2011-04-08T14:00:00.003-04:00

So according to the fine folks at Barnes & Noble, people who bought my book also bought:

Shit My Dad Says

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Assholes Finish First

The Zombie Survival Guide

and...

The Year of Living Biblically

I totally get the first three, and hey, who doesn't want to survive the coming Zombpocalypse? But that last one? God works in mysterious ways.

Mail from Israel. I think.

2011-04-06T20:20:00.008-04:00

I got back late last night from spending a week in Mexico, and today I went through all the mail we had held at the post office while we were gone. There was a big envelope on the bottom of the pile, addressed to me. I opened it up, and here's what was inside:

1. A VHS tape of something called In The Footsteps of Christ.

2. A book entitled Chicken Soup for the Veteran's Soul.

3. Three coins from Israel, one with a "1/2" on it, one with a "1" and one with a "10"

4. A pin that says "Ambassador's Protective Detail" around the outside, and an official seal inside that says "United States of America - Department of State"

5. A tiny piece of a blue and gold glass plate inside of an envelope with "Roman Glass, made 2,000 years ago. Found in Israel" written on it.

It all came from someone named Robert Muha with a DPO return address. I have no idea who that is, but I'm assuming the stuff was destined for a completely different person than the one currently typing this.

I took some notes while on our trip. I'm still compiling them, but there's a Mexican adventure in your immediate future.

Now excuse me while I go scratch the living hell out of my sunburn.

Dominoes?

2011-03-28T21:39:00.004-04:00

I saw this in the parking lot today:

And all I could think of was this video.

No, it didn't happen. It was really windy today, but they were all hanging on to that rope, unfortunately.

I keep wondering what the hell they were doing touring the parking lot. At one point they all squatted down in unison, like some sort of duck and cover drill, only without the cover part. Maybe they're teaching drive-by shooting preparedness earlier these days, who knows.

Hey Kid. C'mere. I got a job for ya.

2011-03-22T21:25:00.048-04:00

It was kind of warm on Sunday and even though I still have almost three feet of snow in my yard, it got me thinking about the spring cleanup that is presumably not too far in my future. Looking at the muddy, slushy driveway and the dead brush just beginning to poke through the snowbanks, It reminded me of my first real job working for someone else.

When I was about twelve years old, I decided that my allowance wasn't enough. I wanted a bb gun with all my heart and soul, and my mother said there was no way she was going to sign off on that. I petitioned my father, and he agreed that I could have one. However, because my mother was completely against it, there were two stipulations. One, he said I'd have to buy it myself, and two, I could only use it when he was supervising.

Since my allowance was only two bucks a week, I think he figured that it wasn't going to happen for a long time, especially given my tendency to immediately spend at least half of my weekly money on popular 45s. (For those of you who don't know, "45s" were flat, circular pieces of vinyl with tiny grooves in them. Inside these grooves lived various songs, and when you put a needle in the groove and spun the disc at 45 revolutions per minute, this needle chased the song around and made it come out of your speaker.) The first thing I did was ask my mother for a raise in my allowance, but she knew why I was asking and said no. She wasn't totally heartless, however -- if I really wanted to work, she could always drum up something for me to do.

Up until then, I had never had a job that I had to travel to on my own. The things I would do for next to no money were ridiculous. For instance, I can remember sitting on the living room floor putting thousands of neon orange price stickers on plastic bread bags. I think I got paid two cents a bag, which meant I had to stick a lot of stickers to make anything resembling actual folding money. They all had to be facing a certain way, and be placed in approximately the same spot. I can't remember how my mother stumbled on to that money making venture. I think she signed us up for it because it kept us busy and it also kept us in one spot.

I have no idea why the Friehofers bakery didn't have machines for that, and I also have no idea how they got away with letting some little kid's grubby hands come into contact with something that would ultimately hold foodstuffs, but there it was. They'd drop off huge boxes of bread bags and rolls of stickers and The Snitch and I would sit there on the floor for hours slapping those stickers on the bags until eventually the plastic bag smell made us stoned and a little sick to our stomachs and we didn't even know what we were doing anymore. I still can't smell the inside of a fresh plastic bag without it making me a little queasy in the back of my brain.

Another job we got occasionally was to ride around in the back of a pickup truck running flyers, phone books, menus or whatever other crap the guy up the street was hired to distribute. He paid us three cents a house, and it was really hard work, especially in late July when the temperate and humidity combined to make it unbearable to even be outside. This guy Tom would sit in the air-conditioned cab smoking cigarettes with the window cracked, and we'd be breathing engine exhaust and getting heatstroke in the bed of the truck. And we ran the whole time. We ran because the more houses we hit, the more money we made. Every once in a while, when one of us started weaving or stumbling, he'd let us sit inside with him for a few minutes and give us a drink of water. After about the third time of going on one of these all-day flyer runs, I was done. I had to get a real job. One that was ongoing, and didn't involve the potential need for IV fluids. I needed cash, and lots of it. I was going to get a bb gun if it was the last thing I did.

When I imparted my tragic tale to my mother, she grudgingly said, "I'll see what I can do about finding you something, but you are NOT getting a bb gun, regardless of what your father says."

A few days later, she called me in from the backyard with some good news. "Would you be interested in doing some yard work for extra money?" she asked. "A friend of Carol's has a next door neighbor who is looking for someone to do regular yard work for him." I jumped at the opportunity even before I knew how much it paid. I was an expert at yard work, since my father made us do it every spring at both our house and our grandmother's house. I hated it, but it turned out that this Mr. Payne guy was supposedly willing to pay me $2.00 an hour -- and since my previous income was roughly three dollars a week (including extra-chore bonus money from my dad), I thought I had hit the bb-gun jackpot.

Of course my mother had to check out the situation first, so we drove over there and knocked on the door. A man answered, and he was the oldest person I had ever seen. Stooped and wrinkled, with his pants pulled up to his armpits and held there with suspenders, he looked like a garden gnome without the pointy hat and beard. He invited us in, and my mother explained the situation. He eyed me up and down like he was sizing me up for a coffin, and they agreed to the terms of my indentured servitude. I was to report for duty the next Saturday, at 9 am sharp. He would provide the lawn mower, garbage bags and other assorted tools. I would provide the labor.

The one thing we forgot to do? Actually look at the back yard.

That was a mistake.

It rained all week, so I was thinking I wasn't going to be able to go, but Saturday morning dawned bright and clear. I jumped out of bed and changed into what my mother embarrassingly called "play clothes" (and I just called "clothes") -- jeans and sneakers that were too ratty to wear to school, and an old T-shirt that was slightly too small for me and had a hole in the back from where I ripped out the tag because it made my neck itch. I went downstairs and my mother was already sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee, talking on the phone. I grabbed my regular bowl of Cap'n Crunch, poured in some milk, and sat down to eat. I was so gung-ho that I didn't even take the time to let it get a little soggy, which, if you know anything about the Cap'n you know that's a recipe for disaster. Fresh Cap'n Crunch was like eating a bowl of broken glass -- it would shred the roof of your mouth something fierce.

My mother hung up the phone and turned her attention to me. "Big day, huh?" she said. "Do you want me to take you over in the car, or are you going to ride your bike?"

"No, I'll ride my bike over," I said. "I know where the house is."

I was also excited about the fact that she was finally letting me cross Central Avenue by myself (even if I did have to promise to walk my bike across) and the hill on the back side of Red Fox Drive was really steep and fast. Once I got to the top, I could coast the rest of the way to his house if I ignored the stop signs.

When I got there, it didn't look like anyone was home. The curtains were all closed and there was nobody outside. I walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. I could hear this loud, weird music coming from somewhere deep inside - old music that sounded like black and white movies. I rang the doorbell again and waited some more, eyeing the front yard to see how bad it was. The grass was long from the week of rain, and there were some leaves in the shrubs up by the house, but it didn't look too bad. I opened the screen door and was just about to pound on the inside door with my fist when it opened, and Mr. Payne glared at me. "Do you always just walk into people's houses uninvited?" he asked.

"No, I was, I mean, I rang the bell, but --," I stammered, backing up a step and letting the screen door close again. This was not going well. He stepped out onto the front stairs and said, "Come with me and I'll show you where the lawnmower and rakes are. I'll expect you to put them all back exactly where you found them. Understood?"

I nodded.

He shuffled to the side of the house and opened the garage door. There was an old car in there with no plates that looked like it hadn't been on the road in ten years, and on the wall next to it hung a few different shovels, a thing that looked like some kind of spiked roller, a fertilizer spreader, and below that, leaning against the wall, was something I didn't recognize. "Here you go," he said. "Start with the front, and then do the back. The back will probably take you longer."

"Where's the lawnmower?" I asked.

"Right in front of you," he said, irritated at my stupidity. I looked again as he pointed to the thing I didn't recognize. It turned out that Mr. Payne's lawnmower was a reel mower, probably purchased around the time the Korean war ended.

"I'm paying you two dollars an hour," he said. "I don't want you working slow on purpose and taking advantage, understand? There are work gloves on the wheelbarrow over there if you need them."

I nodded again, and he turned abruptly and walked back into the house, leaving me standing there in the garage. I took the mower out to the front lawn, and pushed it experimentally over a patch of grass. Little green snippets of grass cascaded out of the back, and my nose was instantly filled with their sweet scent. The mower was in good shape - sharp and well oiled -- but holy hell, it was like pushing a stalled volkswagen. I had to lean my whole body into it to get it to move, then I had to keep it moving or do the whole procedure over again. Momentum was my friend that day.

It took me about three hours to mow the lawn and rake under the shrubs and bag the leaves, and by then it was getting pretty hot outside, and I was sweating buckets from pushing the stupid mower. I hadn't brought any water with me, and I was thirsty. There was a hose by the front of the house, so I walked up to it, turned it on and waited for it to get cold. I drank deeply, tasting rubber and chlorine but not caring. It was cold and wet and quenched my thirst, and I gulped it greedily.

"Don't drink out of that!" a voice snapped from the window just above me. Startled, I dropped the hose, and soaked my foot as I scrambled to turn the faucet off as quickly as I could.

""You're not an animal," Mr. Payne said. "Dear God, you'll probably be pissing in the bushes next. If you want a drink of water, or need to use the bathroom, come up to the house and ring the bell."

I hadn't even thought of that, but now that he mentioned it, I did kind of have to go. "Yes Mr. Payne," I said. I paused, then added, "Can I... use your bathroom now?" He didn't answer, but a few seconds later the front door opened. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you where it is." He paused for a second, looked at the front yard and said grudgingly, "Not bad."

That was high praise indeed. At least I was pretty sure I'd get paid now. I walked into the house and it was nice and cool. It was dark too, with the shades drawn. He closed the front door, then motioned down the hall at an open door. "Be quick about it," he said.

I peed as fast as I could, aiming for the side so it was quiet, and then flushed and washed my hands. I didn't want to use his clean hand towels since I was pretty grimy, and I couldn't tell if they were towels for using or just for looking at. I didn't really understand the finer details of this, however my mother had both, and it stood to reason that Mr. Payne might too, so I just wiped them on my shirt. It felt good; even though my shirt was clammy with sweat, the water was cool against my chest. I walked back down the hall to the front door, which he had reopened and seemed to be guarding. "Come on, come on, hurry it up," he said. "You're making me let all the cool air out."

The door practically hit me on the ass as I stepped out onto the front stairs. Mr. Payne was clearly serious about his internal air temperature management.

OK, I thought. Halfway done. I grabbed the mower and walked toward the back of the house. The back yard was fenced in with a six-foot-tall stockade fence, and I propped the lawn mower up against it and went back to get the rake and bags. The gate looked like it hadn't been open in a while, and there was a rusted padlock hanging open on a clasp. I took the lock off, and grabbed the handle. The hinges were spring-loaded and they screeched loudly as the gate moved. When I finally got it open, I couldn't believe my eyes.

The grass in the back yard looked like a wheat field. I don't think it had been cut in four or five years. In the far corner of the yard was a gigantic maple tree, and the ground under it was thick with rotted, wet leaves. The leaves had also blown up against all three sides of the fence and the back of the house. I could just make out the top of one of the basement windows poking above the matted vegetation. The only place there wasn't grass up to my waist was under the tree and up against the fence - and those areas were a six-inch-deep, spongy mess.

I'll say this for my young self. I didn't give up easily. Or maybe it was a case of not knowing my limitations. I grabbed the bags and my work gloves and started in on the leaves first, thinking if I could get them cleaned up I might be able to do something with the grass.

The leaves smelled like death when you stirred them up, and there were....things....living in them. Squirmy pale grey things that didn't like the light, ants and beetles and worms and centipedes. His entire backyard was a fucking compost heap and it was alive with the process of decomposition. After the first hour I was soaked in sweat and swamp funk, and had collected four hefty bags of muck. I looked around at what I had accomplished. I had collected the leaves on maybe 1/8th of the yard. I tried to move one of the bags, and I think it weighed more than I did. I dragged the wet sack of putrescence toward the gate, and about half-way there, the bottom of the bag broke and I fell on my ass. The leaves slurped from the bag as a single, juicy mound.

I sat up and just stared at the mess. The heat and frustration and the utter ridiculousness of what I was trying to accomplish suddenly struck me full-force, and I hung my head down between my knees and started crying. This was no job for a 12 year old. There was no way I could do this alone. The yard from hell had beaten me.

Embarrassed by my tears and the small amount of progress I had actually made, I did what any 12-year old in my soggy, rancid shoes would do.

I quit.

In fact, I actually stood up and proclaimed my intention. "I quit this," I hissed vehemently, wiping the traitorous tears from my eyes with the back of my glove. I picked up the rake and threw it down again for effect. "I QUIT!," I repeated, more firmly this time.

Then I got on my bike and rode home. I didn't put the tools away, and I didn't tell Mr. Payne I was quitting -- I just left. By the time I hit the top of Red Fox Drive, I had convinced myself that I no longer cared. I was done with that place. I just wanted to get clean and forget about the whole thing. There was no way I was ever going back there, and nobody was going to make me.

I stuck my bike in the garage and went up to my room and just sat there. My initial elation at having had the balls to quit began to give way to other thoughts. Guilty thoughts. That's what happens when you think too much. My parents were going to kill me, or even worse, be disappointed in me. Mr. Payne was probably going to have me arrested for leaving all his stuff out to be stolen, and worst of all, I'd never get my $14.

I didn't remember falling asleep, but I woke up when the phone rang. I didn't think anything of it, until I heard my mother yell, "It's OK, his bike is here!" and then I heard her come inside and run up the stairs. A second later, the door to my room burst open and she looked like she didn't know whether to hug me or kill me. "What are you doing here?" she asked. "You scared me half to death! I was about ready to call the police! I can't believe you just left without telling anyone. Mr. Payne called me, and he was frantic. He said all the tools were just lying in the middle of the yard and you were nowhere to be seen. He thought you were kidnapped or something. Jesus, John, what were you thinking?"

She paused for a second, slightly taken aback when she finally noticed my condition. "You look like you were rolling around in the swamp," she said.

"I practically was," I answered. "I'm not going back there. It's too hard. And he's mean," I added.

I explained the whole thing to her. She agreed that it sounded horrible, but she made sure I understood it was wrong of me to just leave. Some jobs are hard, she said, and that was the nature of them. She explained that by taking the job, I had agreed to a contract of sorts and I couldn't quit without telling Mr. Payne my reasons, and I was not getting out of doing that. "If you don't want the job, that's fine," she said. "But you owe Mr. Payne an apology for leaving without telling him. And if you don't finish the job, you can't expect to be paid for the work you've already done. That's not fair."

"I think he owes us an apology for not telling us how bad it was," I countered, still sulking.

I lost the argument, however, and shortly thereafter we were in the car on the way back to Mr. Payne's house.

When we got out of the car, my mother walked to the side of the house and looked through the open gate. "Holy shit!" she said. "You did not just hear me say that," she added hastily.

"A reel mower?" she said, shaking her head. "I guess I can see your point."

I TOLD you," I replied.

We walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. When Mr. Payne answered, my mother explained that I had something to say to him. "I'm sorry I left all your stuff out and took off," I said. "And you should've told us about the back yard," I added quickly. My mother smacked me in the shoulder with the back of her hand. "John!" she said, trying to be stern and failing completely. "That's not how you talk to adults."

I apologized again, and my mother told me to go wait in the car. She and Mr. Payne spoke for a while and when she came back to the car, she said, "Mr. Payne has a deal for you. Since you did such a good job on the front yard, he's agreed to pay you an extra two dollars an hour if you finish cleaning up the leaves in the back, and he's agreed to buy a new gas-powered lawn mower if you want to keep doing his yard work for him. I'm supposed to call him tomorrow morning with your answer.

"No," I said immediately.

"Well, I would advise you think about it over night and let me know tomorrow," she said. "Four dollars an hour is a lot of money, and I'm sure he could get someone else to do it for less. I don't want you to be sorry you passed up this opportunity."

The next morning, I told my mother that I had reconsidered. I had thought about how long it would take me to save $50 for the bb gun using just my allowance versus the four dollars an hour Mr. Payne was willing to pay me. Given the math, I decided that I wanted to keep the job, as disgusting as it may be. The next time I went over to Mr. Payne's house, there was a brand new gas-powered lawn mower sitting next to the dusty car, all ready to go. I knocked on the door, and told him I was back and ready to get started again. He handed me a box of extra-heavy-duty bags like nothing had ever happened and said, "Don't over pack them and you'll be fine."

Over a period of about two weeks I got the back yard cleaned up. Eventually, I even started to take pride in how it looked. I edged around the big maple tree, and even fertilized the grass for him and set the sprinklers. I figured the faster the grass grew, the more times a week I'd have to mow it and the more money I'd make. It didn't take long before I had my bb gun money, but by the time I had enough, I no longer needed it.

Much to my mother's dismay, my father had come home with a C02-powered Marksman air pistol that looked like a Colt 45 and shot bb's, pellets and darts. He set up a range in the back yard, and we took turns shooting at targets and learning all about gun safety. Oddly, it turned out to be not as much fun as I thought it would be. I think sometimes that's the way it is with stuff you lust after as a kid. Sometimes, the anticipation and sheer, naked longing for something you want makes the fantasy of owning it better than the reality.

I worked for Mr. Payne for almost four years, and only quit when I got my first job making deliveries for the local drug store. He was actually a pretty cool old guy once I got to know him, and doing his yard work taught me a lot about personal responsibility at a time when I really needed the lesson.

Oh, and the booming music? It turned out that he and his wife had been classical music lovers, and he collected antique audiophile equipment. He had a 78 rpm record collection that spanned an entire wall of his finished basement listening room. He told me that she had passed away a few years before, and playing their favorite music always made him feel closer to her. I was too young to really understand that at the time, but now...well, now I know exactly what he meant.

One day he asked me if I liked music. I said I did, and he asked if I wanted to see a cool "new" record player he had just purchased. He seemed really excited about it, so I said sure. He took me into the listening room and showed me a record player that had two tone arms, set opposite from each other, one to play records that spun clockwise and one for records that spun counter-clockwise. I guess at some point in history they hadn't quite decided which way a record should spin, so for a short period of time, some turntables had both. He was elated that he had finally found one and could now play some of the records in his collection that he couldn't before.

That day, he paid me eight bucks to sit there for four hours and listen to classical music with him and drink lemonade. I didn't want to take the money, but he insisted.

You know what? It was totally worth it. To both of us.

Jaipuri Pants. Made from stuff.

2011-03-13T21:18:00.004-04:00

I ordered these for my wife.*

It's good to know they're made of....something.

I just hope I don't get the pair that's made from human skin. I hate sending shit back.

*not really.

I have a raft of crap to share.

2011-03-05T22:48:00.021-05:00

When I was a kid, my father had an amazing vegetable garden. He grew tomatoes the size of cantaloupe, and cucumbers the size of baseball bats. Our garden was awesome, and it was also stolen, but I'll get to that. I didn't mind going down there at dusk to gather vegetables, but I hated it during the day. I hated it because it was full of wasps, bees, and yellowjackets, and I was deathly afraid of them. It was the same reason I hated playing centerfield in baseball. Everyone else was concerned about fly balls, and I was concerned about the fact that they stuck me in a clover-filled, continually buzzing, bee-infested hell. It's no wonder I sucked.

Here's why I hate bees. When I was about 6 or 7 years old, we embarked on our annual trip to Markie's grandmother's camp on Lake St. Catherine in Vermont. The camp was right down by the water, and the road ran behind the camps, about a hundred feet up the hill. Since they frequently had multiple guests which usually meant multiple cars, they had built a retaining wall and leveled out a fairly large parking area up by the road.

When we got there, Markie was already up by the road waiting for us. The second the car stopped moving, The Snitch and I jumped out.

"Hey you guys! Wanna go fishing?" Markie said, not wasting any time.

My mother interjected. "Life jackets," she said. "And no standing up in the boat."

"Yeah!" The Snitch said. "Let's go!" We couldn't wait. We were so excited to finally be there, that we just leaped off the top of the retaining wall instead of taking the steps. The second we hit the ground we were in trouble for two reasons. One, because we knew were weren't supposed to jump off the wall, and two, because unbeknownst to us, this wall provided the living quarters for half the world's population of white-faced hornets. If you know anything about these things, I don't have to tell you what vile little bastards they are. If you don't, this sums it up nicely:

Bald-faced hornets are protective of their nests and will sting repeatedly if the nest is physically disturbed. They are more aggressive than both the wasps normally called yellowjackets and members of the Vespa genus, and it is not considered safe to approach the nest for observation purposes. The bald-faced hornet will aggressively attack with little provocation.

They are the Sean Penn's of the insect world, and they were all over us. We ran down the hill screaming, slapping wildly at our heads, necks and faces as the hornets stung us repeatedly. If we were smart, we would have immediately run to the dock and jumped into the lake, but we were kids so we did the dumb thing, which was to run inside the camp. The kitchen was thrown into complete chaos as Markie's mom, sister and grandmother were suddenly surrounded by screaming kids and a cloud of seriously pissed off hornets. By the time we got everything under control, we had all been stung about a dozen times each, and everyone else in the kitchen had been stung at least once or twice. It was a great first ten minutes at camp. We never did get out fishing that day, mostly because venom and Benadryl takes a lot out of you.

So now you know why I hate bees.

Back to the garden. Our backyard was bordered by a body of water that you could refer to as a bog if you wanted to be kind, and a disgusting swamp if you wanted to be accurate. We all called it the swamp because were were nothing if not honest. It was the kind of water that looked like iced tea, but if you stirred up the mud at the bottom it smelled like rotten eggs. As a result of this swamp being where it was, we had a chain link fence all along the border to our backyard, and just past the fence, there was a steep hill down to this crystal clear water. My father was loathe to give up this sloping land as a lost cause, so he put a gate in the fence to allow access to his beautiful waterfront.

Markie, The Snitch and I played along the shoreline of this cesspool constantly when we were kids. We caught frogs, pollywogs (our name for tadpoles), salamanders and probably a few random diseases, but we had fun. There was a narrow channel behind our house that led out to a larger body of water we called "The Pond." We ice skated on it every winter, and even tried fishing in it once or twice, since we knew there were bullheads living there. We knew this because one extremely hot summer, the pond dried up almost completely and the entire population of bullheads was concentrated in a writhing black puddle about four feet square. It was disgusting, but that didn't stop us from walking out there and grabbing a half dozen in a bucket and bringing them home and putting them in my mother's ornamental water feature in front of the house.

One day, when we were bored, I looked at Markie and The Snitch and said, "You guys wanna build a raft?" I thought it would be cool to build a raft like the ones I always saw on TV. It didn't look that hard, and we had access to everything we needed. It didn't take much to convince them, and they both signed on to the project since it beat fighting over who was going to grab the next leopard frog.

Obviously, all you need to build a raft are a few good-sized logs, and a bunch of boards to nail across them. It took us about two hours to go out to where they had started logging, and find two 24" wide, four-foot-long white pine logs, then roll them all the way from the woods to our back yard. We also "found" a pile of pressure-treated 2x4's in the woods and brought those home too. When we had the logs evenly spaced, we nailed the boards to the top. Boom. Instant raft. It weighed so much the three of us could barely move it. "You think it'll float?" asked Markie. "Yeah, I think once we get it in the water it'll be lighter," I said.

As you can see, my vast, encyclopedic knowledge of watercraft design was learned entirely from watching Saturday morning cartoons. We thought that once it hit the water, we'd all be bobbing around like Huck and Tom on the Mississippi.

We moved it by flipping it end over end. By luck, the last flip placed it upside down at the water's edge. One more flip would place the entire raft in the water, and then we'd be on our way. When we were ready, we all lined up behind it. "OK, ready?" Markie said. "FLIP IT!"

We heaved it up on end, then shoved it over hard. It hit the water and made a sound like "SPLUT!" which was clearly not a floaty sound. It obviously needed to be farther out. We all got behind it again and shoved as hard as we could, and instead of floating free, it plowed mud like that was its job. As we strained our puny, pre-teen muscles, the raft sunk down to the level of its top boards and got completely hung up on the swampy bottom. It had moved a total of about three feet from shore and was floating about as well as a bridge abutment.

Markie hopped from shore onto the raft and it sunk a little more, the tea-stained water lapping at his sneakers. He walked to the far edge, and rocked it a bit. It wasn't budging. "Go get the skimmer pole," I said to The Snitch. He ran back to the garage and got the aluminum pole from the pool skimmer. We handed it to Markie, thinking maybe he could push off with it. No such luck. It wasn't moving. At this point we realized that our cartoon physics had failed us miserably.

"I don't think this is gonna work," I said. "I think it's too heavy."

"At least we can use it for a platform to catch pollywogs," The Snitch said. He always was a "half-full" kind of guy.

We tried to pull it back out, but that wasn't any more successful than pushing it farther in. This problem required some additional thought. We didn't want to abandon it completely, since we figured we could use the wood for something else, but we also didn't want to stand in disgusting swamp water in order to dismantle it. We all remembered the story about the kid from Broderick Street who had gone swimming in the pond on a dare and came out covered in leeches. That wasn't going to happen to us. We weren't going to end up with leech feet. No way. We weren't going in there without some kind of protection.

We pondered the problem, and thought maybe we could use garbage bags, or even just wear a pair of old sneakers and socks. It would still be gross and disgusting work, but it would get our boards back. Our other option was to wait until late August when the swamp dried up a little, which might allow us to walk out there on relatively solid ground and pry the good wood off the top.

Meanwhile, my father was hatching his own unrelated plan. He didn't have room for a garden in our backyard, and that fact sorely pained him. What he did have, however, was about 30 feet of sloping shoreline that he didn't particularly care for. His plan was to expand his back yard into the swamp, thereby creating an area he could use to plant vegetables that would no doubt flourish from all of the disgusting fertilizer they would be able to suck up from the bottom. Roughly, this would involve cutting into the hill, building a retaining wall, then pushing the excess dirt out into the water until it created a new shoreline, which, while technically not his, was not likely to be contested by the actual owner of the swampy mess.

We were only peripherally aware of this civil engineering exercise, and didn't give it much thought. As long as we didn't have to do any of the work, we didn't care. We were preoccupied with getting the raft out of the muck without ending up with leech-covered ankles.

Unfortunately, this is where our two separate plans butted heads. One day we came home from school, changed out of our school clothes and went down to the raft, which we had taken to calling our "dock" since calling it a raft was kind of a misnomer since rafts generally float and move about freely, whereas docks do not.

In the meantime, my father had gotten himself some telephone poles from somewhere. I have no idea where they came from, but I can only assume he must have had lineman connections. Apparently, just chopping off the hill wasn't enough. He figured it would be hard to level the newly created ground, since he was originally planning to just push the dirt out into the water. In his new plan, he decided to use the telephone poles to actually box in an area of the swamp, and then get a few extra truck loads of dirt to fill it in, basically creating a giant raised bed for his garden that extended out into the swamp.

This was all fine and dandy, except for one thing: when The Snitch and I went to check on the progress, we realized that the far corner of the new garden plot was now entirely supported by our raft, which had apparently become an integral part of his design. We complained indignantly to our father, but it did no good. We watched as wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of dirt finally covered our outstanding workmanship, turning it into the abutment it was always fated to be.

We went across the street and broke the news to Markie. He was bummed and a little miffed that my father had the unmitigated gall to use our raft without asking us first, but he also realized that there wasn't much we could do about it. Later that summer, we discovered an old styrofoam sailboat that someone had dragged to the pond, and that was infinitely better since it actually floated. We used a long pole and pushed ourselves around the pond and down through all the feeder channels and it was amazing, like the time Scooby Doo and Shaggy had to rescue the rest of the gang from the swamp witch, only in our version there were way more mosquitoes and (we think) one less swamp witch.

Over the ensuing years, we never really forgot about the raft, and always joked about how our kid logic told us it would actually float. Even today, we give my father crap about using it without our permission.

I can still remember being down in the garden years later, studiously avoiding bees while gathering vegetables for my mother. Sometimes I'd take an extra second to walk over to the water's edge and look down, where I could just barely see the edge of our raft sticking out from under the stacked telephone poles, just to see how it was holding up.

We moved out of that particular house when I was a junior in high school, but even now, in my mind's eye, our raft is still there, solidly supporting my dad's old garden just like it was meant to.

[edit: Holy crap! Thank you, Google Earth.]

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PS - we have a winner! Actually two winners. While there were quite a few good ones, (and some that made me a little scared to piss you guys off) my favorite was written by ArtistMommy because I didn't expect it. I also liked Magic27's "Didn't see that truck" entry (even though there was an extraneous word in there), so I'm going to call that one a winner too.

Congrats! E-mail me your mailing addresses and I'll get the books right out to you. Also let me know if you want me to sign it. Thanks for playing everyone. I enjoyed it and I hope you did too! You guys are more twisted than I am.

A little contest

2011-02-28T17:45:00.002-05:00

I took this photo today.

I guess someone's apology didn't go as well as expected.

There's a story here, and I want you to write it.

For a free copy of my book, leave me a funny haiku about the circumstances behind this picture.

I'll pick my favorite and declare them the winner. Deal? Deal.

(Yes, I'm stalling because I haven't finished my next post yet.)

Have fun!

Find me Lil' Scrappy, beotch.

2011-02-18T22:44:00.012-05:00

Good old Travis got me hankerin' to do one of these, and since I haven't done one in forever, and I have another post that I'm still working on, I figured it was time. So thanks to the modern wonders of search engine tracking, allow me to present:

Fantastic Google Searches That Somehow Led People To My Site.

Your tits rotated -- I know you can't be talking about *my* tits, so I'm assuming you're talking about someone else you know. My first thought is that you have to be more specific if you want my help. You can't just walk up to your friend and be all nonchalant like, "Oh hey, by the way, your tits rotated. Just thought you might want to know." My guess is she'd probably already know, because that shit hurts. You are going to need to be prepared to give her some solid advice. For instance, did they just do a 360 in place? (That's considered the most painful of the tit rotations.) Or did the end up on her back? These are important questions, and before I give you any advice, I really need more info. For instance, if she's old, and starting to sag, I hope she got the 180. They are rare, but they're also the best of all possible tit rotations. That way they stay perky for a few more years. Kind of like flipping over your mattress.

Biggie Gibb - Being very knowledgeable about music, I think I can help you in your search for this rare information. Ah, Biggie. I remember him well. The one Gibb brother who went his own way. While Robin, Maurice and Barry formed the BeeGees and subsequently became huge stars along with their brother Andy, Biggie chose to blaze his own trail after he was asked to leave the band due to severe anger management issues and his desire to take the band in another direction. The final straw was an altercation with Maurice in the recording studio, over the elder Gibbs' refusal to use the original title of Biggie's soon-to-be-hit song, "How Deep is Your Love now, Motherfucker?"

Here's a very rare early promo picture:

May I see a real picture of drackila? - No you may not.

What kind of fungus smells like burning? - I am pretty sure it's this kind:

They say a blast of Tinactin will fix everything.

Do guys need to wash their ass? - For fuck's sake, YES. FECES COMES OUT OF IT ON A (hopefully) REGULAR BASIS. I get like 20 of these a month. Who the hell started this rumor, anyway? Some dirty-assed son of a whore, I know that much. It's ridiculous. Why wouldn't you wash the one thing on your body that has the most potential to smell the absolute worst?

Dremel sex - I'm not sure I'm your guy on this one. To me, this just sounds painful. The only time I've used a dremel tool is to carve - coincidentally - wood. As a general rule, I don't think "sex" and "carving things" go well together, if you really want the relationship to last. If you are ending a relationship abruptly, however, I think sometimes carving is involved. That and super-gluing seem to be pretty popular options. I'll take the superglue if I have to pick one.

google get me information on lil scrappy -- OK, first of all, Google is not a person. It's also not a genie, or a leprechaun or anything else that grants you wishes. You don't have to address it by its first name, because it really doesn't have one. Nor does it have a last name. It's not like some guy in an orange apron who comes up to you in Home Depot and says, "Hi, I'm Google Lewbowski. Can I help you find anything?" It's a search engine running on a server. You don't have to be polite. Second of all -- lil' scrappy? Google should just tell you no. Is that some rap guy or Scooby Doo's nephew? I always get them confused.

How to tell if your pants are too tight for the office - This is an easy one. Here is the way you tell: If you have to ask that question, then yes, they are. Go change, you slut. Or at least go take off that underwear and put on a thong because it's giving you a serious case of the quad-cheek and that look is no good for anyone, at the office or otherwise.

OK, there's more, but I'm out of steam, so I'm going to bed. I'm still not quite over this cold, which has been kicking my ass since Monday. Have a great weekend, everyone!

p.s. -- Just one more small reminder. I know I'm a pain in the ass, but if you actually bought my book, please try to leave a review on Amazon or B&N's website. I really appreciate it!

Happy Valen....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

2011-02-14T17:45:00.021-05:00

Last night, I could NOT fall asleep. My mind was full of ideas; stupid stuff I didn't have to worry about at all, and other stuff that was slightly more important, although truth be told, there wasn't much I was going to do about any of it at two in the morning. I had a head full of random bits of information, all whirling around in my brain like it was one of those clear plastic cages that they pump full of money and you have to stand in the windstorm and grab whatever you can. I usually drop into a snooze the second my head hits the pillow, however last night, that didn't happen. I basically pulled an all-nighter, for no good reason. In fact, the reason I'm writing this now is so I don't fall asleep -- because if I do, I'll be up late again, thereby perpetuating my misery. So I'm here to say this post will suck, and you can blame it on the sleep deprivation.

Here's an example of my thought processes last night that, in real time, took about 20 seconds: Man, I wonder when those 20 books I ordered are going to get here... I knew I should have paid extra for fast shipping. They probably didn't even start making them yet, then after that I have to wait for UPS. I'll bet the UPS truck is probably going to get stuck in our driveway. This snow sucks. Good for snowboarding, though. I have to get the rack back on the car before we go with Doug and Colleen at the end of the month. Hope Gore's not icy. The ice on our roof is brutal. Has to be four inches thick. How the hell am I going to melt all that? I really don't want it raining in the living room again. That sucked. I should have planned on being home tomorrow -- I could turn on the heat cables. I don't need water dripping from the basement rafters again, either. I wonder when the contractor is going to call with the pricing on finishing the basement? It's been like two weeks. Shit, I have to go to sleep. I'm going to be a zombie tomorrow. I could get a solid 4 hours of sleep if I just fell asleep NOW....no NOW.....OK, NOW... relax and think about nothing... deep breaths, breathe in, breathe out...Whose brilliant idea was it to put nipples on George Clooney's Batman costume? It clearly didn't need nipples. Wow, that was a screwed up movie. I have to remember to update my netflix queue...

Now picture 6 more hours of that.

I finally fell asleep a little after 3am. For those of you keeping score at home, I have to get up at 4:30 for work. I must have been crushing some last minute dreaming, because when I woke up I remembered about four different discrete yet seemingly simultaneous dreams. I wasn't even sure the human mind could do that, but I think I was probably delirious. When my alarm went off, I was flying and sailing a boat. At the same time. I mean like it was a big sailing ship, and I was sailing it myself, however I was also flitting around the ship like some sort of faerie pirate. I have no idea.

At work today I was fine until after I ate lunch. My morning coffee wore off and I was so tired that I actually almost fell asleep installing the new Microsoft Office 2010. Damn that is a pig of an install. It had to take 30 minutes, easy. During the install, I closed my eyes for a second at 20% and a split-second later, I opened them again and it was at 15%, which confused me and made me think of this cartoon:

So I'll be skipping my workout tonight, and heading directly to bed and I plan to be asleep by nine. Added bonus, I'm coming down with a cold. I love winter. Hey, here's a random fact for you -- this month, 67 searches for some variation of "Why do I shiver when I Pee?" landed people on my page. I am the new pee shiver expert of the internet, you guys.

Lastly, before I fall asleep, there's a new little link over there on the upper right -- if you want to buy a book and have me deface it for you, that's how you go about getting it done.

So anyway, Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Speaking of that, here's one I got from my buddy Mike in second grade:

It might just be my imagination, but I think I'm getting a gay porn-ish vibe there for some reason.

P.S. - How the hell does Joan Cusack keep getting work? Her voice was made for silent film and her face was made for radio.

It's raining Wrens.

2011-02-03T19:50:00.006-05:00

The other day I stumbled on a story related to all those birds dropping dead last month and it turned out that apparently, some of them were killed intentionally.

Here's an excerpt:

"Not all the mysterious bird die-offs that have been witnessed around the globe recently are due to unexplained causes. A recent mass die-off event witnessed in Yankton, South Dakota was traced back to the USDA which admitted to carrying out a mass poisoning of the birds.

After hundreds of starlings were found dead in the Yankton Riverside Park, concerned citizens began to investigate. Before long, a USDA official called the local police and admitted they had poisoned the birds. "They say that they had poisoned the birds about ten miles south of Yankton and they were surprised they came to Yankton like they did and died in our park," says Yankton Animal Control Officer Lisa Brasel, as reported by KTIV.

The USDA then confirmed the story and explained it was all "part of a large killing" in Nebraska. Some of the birds that ate the poison apparently flew all the way to Yankton before succumbing to the poison.

According to the report, the USDA has killed more than four million birds over the last several years. There's even an official spreadsheet here from 2009.

Here's a few examples on the spreadsheet that caught my eye:

96,000 feral pigeons. Feral pigeons? Holy shit, those sound pretty dangerous. It's probably good that they are taking those things out.

1,259,714 european starlings. That right there is a whole lot of birds. The USDA must really hate europeans for some reason. The really odd part is that each animal has a few different categories, and two of them are Intentional and Unintentional. For instance, the starling breakdown looks like this:

Intentional Unintentional

1,259,714 2

So somewhere a conversation like this took place:

"Hey, how many starlings did we kill? Was it 1,259,714? "

"Yeah. Oh, and those two that Steve ran over with his SUV. Don't forget those."

I'd also like to know how they got such specific numbers. Who's the poor bastard who gets the job of counting up all the dead birds? "One... two... three... four...wow, this job really sucks... five... six... seven..."

Then like 14 hour later, "8,764...no wait...765? Crap, now I have to start over."

In other news, there's a group of feminist activists in Kiev, Ukraine. Femen's leader, 26-year-old Anna Gutsol, explains: "Our goal is active Ukrainian women who want to be involved in society and politics."

To me, that doesn't really sound like a traditional goal, per se, because saying your goal is "active Ukrainian women" makes you sound like someone who posts personal ads on Craigslist. But lack of effective mission statement aside, their main claim to fame is that they apparently do all their protesting topless.

Their official slogan is "Our God is woman, our mission is protest, our weapons are bare breasts."

Far be it from me to question their choice of weapons, but here is a short list of things bare breasts cannot generally do:

1. Shoot holes in stuff.

2. Protect your home.

3. Kill from a distance.

4. Kill.

You'll note that I said generally do, and that's only because I'm aware of this.

Do you like boxes of shit in your house? Get a cat.

2011-02-02T22:23:00.012-05:00

We have three cats, one of which is an incredibly spoiled Siamese named Jesse:

He's pretty awesome, and he jumps up and drapes himself over my shoulders and rides around. We also have two other "lesser cats" that were here long before him. Unfortunately, he hates the idea that they even exist, and we're constantly breaking up fights.

Periodically, my wife will talk about getting another Siamese kitten, and my usual response to that is, "Three cats is my absolute limit. When we're down to two, we'll think about it."

So the other night, we were sitting on the couch and she started talking about it again...so I just sat there and stared at the other two cats sleeping in front of the wood stove. Finally, she said, "What are you doing?"

"Oh nothing," I said, distractedly. "Just trying to figure out which one of the other cats I'm going to have to kill."

Fast forward to the next day. I'm working from home, and sitting on the couch with the computer on my lap, and my wife is at work. Maggie, one of the two 14-year-old cats, is standing behind the wood stove and suddenly starts hacking on a hairball. She finally coughs it up, and then just... falls over. Like someone tipped over a statue of a cat. She's lying there, not moving. I run over and drag her out into the open and try to stand her up. She falls over again. I feel like I'm trying to balance a bike that doesn't have a kickstand. All I can think is, "Shit! This fucking cat is going to die, and my wife's going to think I killed it." I immediately call her at work, to throw off any suspicion, should worst come to worst.

"Hey, um...I think something's wrong with Maggie," I said.

"What do you mean?" she replied.

"She just... kind of... fell over," I said, warily.

"What do you mean, she fell over?" she asked, alarmed.

"Hang on," I said, and put the phone down.

I tried again to stand the cat up, and this time she stayed up. She was shaking like a leaf, but she wasn't falling over and that was a decided improvement.

I picking up the phone again. "I thought she was gonna die, but now I don't think so," I said. "Maybe. It could go either way. She looks a little weird. Stoned. Shaking a lot."

I started to feel like I was constructing a shitty alibi or something, so I wrapped it up.

"I'm not sure why I called," I said. "Don't worry about it, she's probably fine."

I could tell she didn't believe me, but she hung up anyway, since she was at work.

I turned my attention back to Maggie, who was now lying down in one of the cat beds, looking a little tired, but pretty much normal.

"You just have to last until she gets home from work," I said, pointing my finger at her. "Don't fuck me over."

It turned out she was fine, and still is.

I'm pretty sure I got punk'd by my cat.

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ps - if you get a chance, check out my buddy Glen's blog here. He's trying to convince me to do a book reading with him at a local bookstore. I'm a little apprehensive about it, but if I did do it, which story or stories from my book do you guys think I should read?

Don't Fear the Scraper.

2011-02-01T18:03:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, I got this e-mail at work from the company that handles our travel. I think either they're sensationalizing things just a little, or... we're all dead.

Brace For Travel Delays As Multi-Day Dangerous, Destructive Winter Storm To Hit Monday - Wednesday

A multi-day, multi-region potentially historic and destructive winter storm will unleash its fury beginning Monday and will last through Wednesday. When everything is said and done, the storm may very well impact a third of the population of the United States; approximately 100 million people. Its reach will be felt from the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies to the Ohio Valley to the coast of New England.

Accompanied with the winter storm will be a severe thunderstorm threat across the South capable of producing damaging winds, hail and a few tornadoes.

Incredible ice accumulation with some towns/cities experiencing as much as an inch of ice. This is a destructive and crippling amount of ice which could knock out power to potentially hundreds of thousands of customers for days or even weeks.

I especially like "Unleash its fury." It's better if you read it in the voice of that guy who does all the movie preview voice-overs.