M. Giant's
Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks


Monday, October 21, 2002  

We went down to Iowa this past weekend to see Deniece (Trash’s brother’s daughter, for those of you who’ve forgotten). She’s nine months old now, and she’s talking with considerable fluency. Except her primary language appears to be Navajo, so that’s a little bit inconvenient for those of us who haven’t learned it yet. She does know a few English words, like “dada” and “oboe” and “Walla Walla.” She can’t seem to use them in context yet, but since she’s never seen a double-reed woodwind instrument, been to Washington State, or participated in an early twentieth-century avant-garde movement that sought to redefine the meaning of art, I can’t blame her for not wanting to just wait around until those subjects crop up in conversation.

She also has a lot more mobility than she did the last time we saw her. Back in August, her standard method of locomotion was dragging herself across the floor with her hands like a little sandworm. I sandworm with hands, granted, but you get the idea. Now she can crawl, but she prefers to pull herself up next to the coffee table or some other piece of furniture and sort of walk along that way. I thought about suggesting that my brother-in-law install a network of low railings so she can navigate the whole house by herself, but I soon realized that wasn’t such a swell idea. Judging by her behavior, some little gremlins are singing to her from inside the electrical outlets and she’s pretty keen to fish the little guys out of there. I don’t know what they’re singing, but it seems like a good bet that they’re sending her subliminal commands to spill everyone’s beverages. So maybe her dad shouldn’t facilitate her activities until those activities start being a little more constructive.

And she’s graduated to baby food. Fortunately, she’s still at the stage where she can eat baby food, but not yet at the stage where she’s figured out how to not eat baby food. She’ll be sitting in her chair, just looking around at everyone, soaking up all the attention, and then she’ll be all, “Hey! I have a mouthful of pre-masticated peas! How’d that happen?” So she’ll swallow that, get back to what she was doing, and—“What? Again? Fine, let me swallow this so I can go back to wiggling. Hey, look at me, I’m wiggling! Look at me wiggle! I can—d’oh! Okay, swallowing, swallowing, but this is the last time. I’m not opening my mouth again. I’ve got a lot of wiggling to do here. Hey, what’s that thing touching my bottom lip? I’ll just check it out with my—oh, goddammit!!”

Besides, what she really likes is Cheerios™. There the ideal combination of a fun shape and something she can stick in her mouth and not get it taken out. Thus she puts away about a box per week.

Deniece has always been a bit of a flirt, and now she seems to understand that dinner is an occasion that carries special romantic potential. She’ll smile fetchingly at you, apparently unaware that the come-hither effect is somewhat marred by the Linda-Blair-spew-looking stuff encrusting the lower half of her face (and an expanding segment of the upper half, after she sticks her fingers in her mouth and rubs her eyes). The overall impression is an unsettling combination of “Look at how cute I am!” and “Keep away! The sow is mine!”

There’s one other thing she does now that she didn’t do before: clapping. Her execution isn’t quite spot on yet, but she’s got a pretty clear grasp on the concept. Sometimes she’ll need to be prompted and sometimes she won’t, but she’s pretty much always up for giving herself a hand. Then everybody will smile really big and clap back at her and call her a good girl, and she’ll bask in the spotlight, blissfully unaware that it’s going to take a lot more than that to impress the admissions department at Harvard.

She’s a really happy kid, which is great. She seems to have figured out that things are going pretty well for her overall. And as much as we miss her and wish we could see her every day (okay, every other day), it’s interesting to see how much she’s grown over a period of a couple of months. For instance, now that she can clap, gripping fingers is so for six-month-olds. When she cries now, it’s because she wants something and not because every fiber of her being is suffused with black, bottomless despair. And since she’s learning how to get around, it’s no longer safe to just park her on top of the refrigerator for a couple of hours while the folks go shopping.

So that’s the latest with Deniece. No need to thank me; I’m happy to perform this service for all of you who have never come in contact with a miniature human before. You’re welcome.

posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments

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Friday, October 18, 2002  

The downside of having limited home maintenance skills is that when you have a major problem like, say, a toilet leaking water into the basement, there isn’t much you can do that doesn’t involve a) a bucket or b) a plumber’s phone number. The upside is that it doesn’t take nearly as much to give you a sense of Bob Vila-level competence as it does for other people.

Take our showerhead. Trash was about ready to take it this morning, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The water pressure in our shower has been getting a bit anemic recently. Apparently, mineral and water deposits had clogged up the little holes or something. It was such a gradual process that we didn’t really notice as it was happening. I think what happened is that staying with Lawre for a few days and using her shower demonstrated that not everyone has to wash themselves under the equivalent of four eyedroppers. Then we got home, and Trash commented that rinsing the shampoo out of her considerable quantity of hair was taking too long under the wimpy little trickle she had to work with. I made a non-committal “yeah, I’ll get around to it” noise. Then when I took my shower I realized that the wimpy little trickle wasn’t doing it for me, either. And when I’m being inconvenienced, it’s clearly time to take action.

Except I didn’t know whether I was going to have to ruin a toothbrush or buy a new shower head or what. Instead, I just did a little research and found a site with all sorts of helpful (and cheap) little household hints. It turns out that all I needed to do was remove the showerhead, take out the rubber washer, and boil it for five minutes in a mixture of water and vinegar (the showerhead, not the rubber washer). An added benefit is that a good whiff of vinegar steam is enough to give you a month off from having to trim your nose hairs.

So I did that last night, and then extracted the superheated showerhead with a pair of cooking tongs, feeling all competent and resourceful. I especially got a little ego boost from the fact that I hadn’t turned on the garbage disposal before I accidentally dropped the showerhead into it. That’s the kind of detail that separates a true handyperson from a dilettante, you know.

Then I screwed the showerhead back onto the pipe, and it only took me a minute or two to figure out that it was hanging loosely because I’d forgotten to stick the rubber washer back in. I took care of that and turned on the shower to rinse out the vinegar and see if it had worked. Given the volume of water that rushed out, both of those tasks were fairly well accomplished after a nanosecond or two.

Trash came out of the shower this morning with an exhausted smile on her face. “Fixed?” I asked. She nodded, unable to speak. Eventually she caught her breath and explained that it was much easier to shower with the “new” shower head, because not only was there enough water to get the shampoo out of her hair faster than a news camera clears out a whorehouse, but she didn’t even have to put any effort into standing or balancing herself, since the water pressure effectively pinned her to the far wall and held her suspended there. The only hard part was struggling upstream against the storm surge so she could turn off the flow and escape. Now I kind of wish we had a detachable showerhead with a hose, because with this kind of water pressure we could use it to disperse angry mobs.

It’s things like this that make me feel better about that bucket in the basement.

posted by M. Giant 2:57 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, October 17, 2002  

Still talking about New York. I promise I’ll shut up about it soon.

I kept thinking the subways were faster than they were. I mean, you go underground, sit down, and reemerge miles away. Zooming underneath the Manhattan traffic, whether it’s five p.m. or one p.m., makes it seem like you’ve entered an alternate dimension where time has no meaning. It was like “getting on the train” = “arriving,” and it took a few trips before I got used to that not being the case. That was the excuse I used for being late all the time, at least.

Generally we didn’t have anything to read on the train, and Trash wouldn’t let me take out my maps unless it was absolutely necessary (even though we had those laminated Streetwise maps that make the user look so much cooler then the average tourist), so there was a lot of people-watching going on. Among some of the things I learned: sky blue is the new black, one guy can make an unholy racket with a pair of drumsticks and a stroller full of five-gallon buckets, and there’s always someone more touristy-looking than yourself. I pointed out one couple who had a huge map out and unfolded on the train, but they were having difficulty with it due to the lack of a half-acre banquet table upon which to spread it. That thing wouldn’t have looked out of place on the wall of NORAD headquarters in WarGames. “No more complaining about my Streetwise," I told Trash. She just rolled her eyes at me.

One ride found us on a car between a group of dress-uniformed firefighters and a couple of young women who appeared to have boarded directly from the set of Center Stage. It was like Career Day for first-graders: “I want to be a fireman…I want to be a ballerina.” There are your two choices, right there.

Umbrellas in New York are just like pens in a classroom. Everybody has one, and nobody worries about them getting stolen or damaged, because it’s easy to get another one. A lot of restaurants have umbrella stands by the door. Using them felt a lot like leaving my car parked on the street with the keys in it. Or it would, if I’d only spent ten dollars on my car. As for the likelihood of an umbrella surviving the city for any length of time, the necessity of weaving through low-hanging, sidewalk-covering scaffolding every sixth block, under a veritable forest of “beautifying” trees with branches at exactly the perfect brolly-snagging height every third block, between nine million other umbrellas every single block, tends to reduce the life-expectancy of these fragile items to roughly that of antimatter. While walking around, we saw any number of abandoned skeletons lying twisted on the pavement, with shredded batwings flapping in the damp breeze. It was kind of sad. What was even sadder was the fact that our brand-new umbrella looked a lot like them after only two days.

You know what else? People in New York really dig themselves some Law & Order. At least the people I talked to do. Trash is a big enough fan that she’ll stop on it when she’s channel-surfing, but that show is practically a religion to New Yorkers, or at least to Manhattanites. I think it has something to do with the show being shot entirely on location and all of the addresses chung-chinging on the screen all the time so they can say “I know where that is!” or “My friend works there!” or “I got smashed at that bar!” I thought about sitting in front of the Friday night rerun with my Streetwise charting the various locations. You know, for navigating practice. But that was too geeky even for me. Besides, I can do that at home.

One last story. On our final day, we’d just left Lawre outside the building where she was going to take her exam. That makes it sound like we’d robbed her, beaten her unconscious, and left her for dead, but she was fine last we saw her (of course, that was before the exam). As we walked to the subway, Trash thought she heard Jon Stewart’s voice coming out of a passing radio. I clarified that the voice was actually coming out of a passing Jon Stewart, who was wearing a baseball cap and was looking unshaven, bordering on grizzled. With that, we were ready to pack the Celebrity Sighting Counter into our carry-on. We’d only used it to track random encounters on the street, which excluded several working actors and dancers who were at the wedding we attended on Saturday night. Thus we ended up with an artificially-low-but-still-respectable reading of four. New York rocks, dude.

* * *

Girl Detective is in Europe at the moment, so Trash is filling in for her. You heard me. Don’t try to pretend you’re not curious about what kind of writing would come from somebody who can tolerate such massive doses of me. Go check it out.

posted by M. Giant 2:41 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, October 16, 2002  

For various reasons, our trip to New York didn’t cost us a lot of money. The only way it could have been cheaper would be if we were getting deported and the INS let us get off the plane for a while at JFK. In fact, we’re looking into that for our next trip. Never let it be said that we aren’t bargain-hunters.

One of the ways we saved a lot of money was by forgoing a hotel in favor of staying with a very generous friend who moved to New York last year. I’ve referred to her as Laure in this space, after the character she played in the last show I saw her in. But since she’s now a diligent legal student, I should probably change her pseudonym to Lawre. Don’t worry, it’s still pronounced the same.

In any case, since she was kind enough to lend us keys to her place and let us sleep on her futon, I thought I’d repay her hospitality by relating an embarrassing story about her. See, this is why you should never do anything nice for anyone who maintains a weblog, ever.

One evening, years ago, a group of us were sitting around relating stories of our varied youthful indiscretions. You know, the kind of stories that you always wrap up by explaining how you avoided getting caught, or what happened after you got caught (I got caught every time, so there’s nothing new here for you, Mom and Dad). Most of us had taken a couple of turns already, except for Lawre. We prevailed upon her to spill.

Her story started off ordinarily enough. Parents out of town. She and a friend decided to take the car to get some coffee, despite having nary a driver’s license between them. Time passed, and when they were ready to put the car back in the garage, it was too late; the neighbors were home. And they were outside, in clear view of Lawre’s garage. Worse, these were neighbors who talked. Lawre figured she was pinched for sure.

But it wasn’t too late. I think they’d walked back from the coffee shop to make sure the coast was clear. For that reason, their joyriding hadn’t been noticed yet. All they had to do was get the car back into the garage without the neighbors seeing it. Being resourceful and quick-witted, Lawre came up with a sure-fire plan.

Her friend would go back and retrieve the car. Meanwhile, Lawre would distract the neighbors and get them out of the incriminating line of sight they currently occupied. The scheme couldn’t fail. It was absurd in its simplicity. And the diversion would be irresistible.

She would go into her basement, get the clown costumes out, and explain to the neighbors that she needed them to dress up in them and let her take pictures of them at the park for a school project.

Okay, maybe it was just absurd, period.

First of all: who has clown costumes in their basement? Aside from the Brady Bunch, I mean. Secondly, can you imagine a teenaged neighbor approaching you with such a bizarre request? Did Lawre think that “pictures of the neighbors at the park” sounded like a transparently false assignment, whereas adding the phrase “in clown costumes” gave it that necessary ring of verisimilitude? What would her answer have been a few days later when the neighbors, still Q-Tipping white greasepaint out of their ears, asked what grade she’d gotten on the assignment? What would her answer have been when the roll of film came back from the processors after a few weeks and her parents flipped idly through them, going, “us at the lake, birthday party, cat, cat, lake, party, lake, what the hell is this?”

As much I would have loved to hear about any of this story’s potential denouements, the sad truth is that by the time the clown suits had been exhumed from storage, the neighbors had left again, allowing Lawre to return the car to the garage without risking exposure. It’s a shame it turned out that way, really.

But at least now you know what to do the next time somebody asks you to dress up like a clown and go down to the park. Just offer to drive the car back yourself and pledge eternal silence.

posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, October 15, 2002  

1.

Here’s what I hate most about flying: for some reason, we always have to get up obscenely early in the morning to catch our flight. I prefer to acknowledge the existence of only one five o’clock per day, thanks very much, and when I’m throwing our suitcases into the car on the wrong side of the wrong five o’clock, it makes me a little owly. Our plane’s not going to be in the air until after sunrise, but I have to be behind the wheel when it’s so early that dinosaurs are still roaming the earth.

2.

One of the many reasons we like having Dirt and Banana for friends is because they live much closer to the airport than we do. So we drive to their place and park our car on the street in front of their house, which is cool because they charge us a lot less than the airport parking ramp does. From there it’s just a short Big-Wheel ride to the main terminal. Usually that’s pretty neato, but on the morning we left for New York we were sitting in our car waiting for our cab (Dirt and Banana don’t deserve to have us hauling them out of bed to cart our grumpy pusses to the airport at that hour) with the engine running and the heat on. See, when it’s that early in the morning, the sun hasn’t coalesced enough to reach critical mass for nuclear ignition, so it’s a bit nippy. That didn’t stop a predawn neighborhood watch guy from approaching our car all skittish-like and wonder what the hell we were up to. We calmly explained that we represented a neighborhood Al Qaeda cell and we were just going to spend a relaxing morning picking off commuter jets with shoulder-mounted SAM missiles. Okay, not really, but the guy needed a little talking down. People sitting in their own idling car on a public street with the license plates clearly visible and the daytime running lights on are clearly up to no good, you know. That’s just too sneaky by half.

3.

Here’s a question: whose brainwave was it to not open any of the stores in the airport before six a.m.? Maybe they wouldn’t get a lot of customers, but there’s an old joke that’s germane to the situation: it’s the Great Depression, and a guy has set up an apple stand on the sidewalk. His sign says, “Apples $50,000.” A guy comes up and says, “How many apples do you expect to sell at that price?” The apple seller says, “I only have to sell one.” My point? People in the airport at 5:30 in the morning are prepared to spend a lot more money for a cup of coffee than they will be four hours later. Hell, I would have bought a cup, and I like coffee about as much as I enjoy spent matches.

4.

Our cabdriver from LaGuardia asks if we’d object to taking the Queens Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan, since the Triboro Bridge is under construction. My wife decisively Picards her approval. The driver asks us where we’re coming back from. I guess we don’t scream “tourist” from every pore of our bodies after all. Maybe it was Trash’s quick response to the driver’s suggestion, but I resolve to cut down on the cursing anyway, just in case. After Trash explains that we are not returning but visiting from Minneapolis, the cabby lights up. He talks about the Twins, who at this point are still in contention for the American League pennant. He even assures us that now that the Yankees are out, New York is firmly behind our guys. I don’t know how he can speak so authoritatively about the hopes and dreams of nine million people, but given the outcome of the Twins-Angels series, thanks a lump, New York. He’s not done, though. He wants to talk about our soon-to-be-former governor. He wants to talk about our weather. He wants to talk about Duluth and Beaver Bay. He wants to talk about that embarrassing “Minneapple” nickname that some wag came up with years ago. He wants to crown Minnesota the Capital of the Upper Midwest. I just want to point out to my wife that that’s the United Nations building we’re driving past, but since Garrison Keillor up there isn’t taking a breath, all I can do is fingerspell “U.N.” and point. I’m not even kidding. By the time he drops us off at our friend’s apartment, I expect him to be wearing a T-shirt that says “Don’t blame me, I voted for Mondale.” He offloads our bags, tells us it was nice talking to us, and wishes us a pleasant stay. After that I can only assume that he goes right back to the airport to hop the very next plane to the Twin Cities. Trash and I wonder briefly if we should have picked up Twins hats before coming out here. “New York City luuurves Minneapolis!” I crow. Trash just hopes that New York City doesn’t start stalking Minneapolis. That would be creepy, with the Statue of Liberty sending all these gooey mash notes to the Mall of America, and the Empire State Building calling the Wells Fargo Tower its “soulmate,” and Shea Stadium buying giant panties for the Metrodome and what have you. At this point it occurs to us that we need a nap.

posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments

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Monday, October 14, 2002  

It's our last day here in New York, and I can't tell you what a thrill it is that the sun has finally deigned to acknowledge the existence of this little island.

Despite the weather, it's been a great trip. We got to wander all over Manhattan, eat plenty of great meals, witness the beautiful and moving wedding of an old friend, go on a bar crawl with Sars (if you can count two bars as a "crawl"), learn all about the subway, and use up an entire umbrella. Our plane leaves tonight at around sevenish, so we still have time today to do a little more exploring. More specifically, we're exploring the Strand bookstore near Union Square. It might not have been wise to leave that for our last day, actually. We may end up hanging there and not getting to the airport until some time next week. Time has a funny way of disappearing for us in bookstores.

Provided we aren't drawn too inexorably into the black hole of the printed word (the used printed word, no less), we'll be back on Central Time within the next twelve hours, and I'll be back to my regular schedule tomorrow. Thanks for your patience during these brief and sporadic updates. And thanks to New York.

posted by M. Giant 8:29 AM 0 comments

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Saturday, October 12, 2002  

Over the years, Trash and I have experienced firsthand some of the most famous weather in the world (and I 'm not just talking about the winters we stayed home):

London: Eight solid days of bright, warm sunshine, except the time we spent in Edinburgh, Scotland, where we found more bright, warm sunshine.

Seattle: Three days of bright, warm sunshine, followed by two days of bright, warm sunshine in Portland, capped off by one last sunny morning in Seattle.

New York City: Doesn't it ever stop freaking raining here? I had to buy new shoes and socks yesterday from a couple of friendly Russians in the finincial district because every step felt like I had sponges on my feet. I suppose we could stay out of the rain by riding the subway all over the island all day, but somehow one doesn't feel like one gets the full New York experience from that. Go figure.

Celebrity sighting counter: 2 (two-time Academy Award Winner Dianne Wiest. 3 if you count the head of the FDNY.)

posted by M. Giant 11:35 AM 0 comments

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Friday, October 11, 2002  

So, maybe somebody could have warned me that New York is the City That Never Sleeps before I agreed to haul my ass out of bed yesterday morning at a time when I'm normally just lying down. So is it true? Nobody sleeps here? I'm going to be so tired when I get home.

Actually, this is just a quick little update from the New York Public Library, which is fine because not much has happened yet. We've been wandering around Midtown Manhattan in the rain all afternoon. You could practically go for a mile without touching the sidewalk just by walking on the umbrellas. Of course, you'd have to be very light to avoid pissing off the owners of said umbrellas, which excludes us since we just had lunch at Roxy's. Looking at the menu, I just thought the food was expensive. Well, it is, but they also bury you in it.

Celebrity sighting counter: 1 (John Pankow, who played Ira on Mad About You.)

That's it for now.

posted by M. Giant 10:44 AM 0 comments

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Wednesday, October 09, 2002  

I had a fairly memorable dinner last night, and I thought I’d share the recipe with all of you so you can have a similar experience. Here’s how you make what I like to call “Pot Pie a la M. Giant.”

1. Buy a frozen pot pie.

2. Bring it to work one morning so you can microwave it for lunch. Don’t bother checking to see if it’s microwaveable.

3. At lunchtime, open the box and discover that it’s in one of the old-style aluminum foil pans and therefore cannot be microwaved unless you want to be known for the rest of your tenure as the guy who blew up the microwave.

4. Stick the pie back in the box. Stick the open box back in the freezer. Walk down to the deli in your building so you can spend twelve dollars on a turkey sandwich for lunch.

5. Forget about the open pot pie in the freezer at work for at least a week.

6. Bring home the pot pie in the open box. Stick it in the freezer at home. Forget about it for a month or so.

7. Stick it in the oven for dinner one night. Don’t forget to cut a slit in the top crust. We don’t have to be entirely unorthodox here.

8. After cooking for half the time suggested on the box, make a fast-food run to satisfy spouse’s sudden, inexplicable craving (no, she’s not pregnant). Turn the oven off and leave pot pie in while it cools.

9. Return home with fast food. Eat fast food with spouse.

10. Remove dried-out, slightly overdone pot pie from 120-degrees-and-cooling oven and stick in fridge uncovered.

11. Wait one day.

12. Get home from work twenty minutes before Buffy. Dump cold pot pie out of aluminum foil pan and onto plate. Microwave for three minutes.

13. Enjoy!

14. Okay, maybe “enjoy” would be too strong a word. Unless by “enjoy” you mean “pick reluctantly at what looks like the steaming, flaccid remains of some small, bald, woodland creature dropped from a great height as you wonder where the potatoes went, what caused the carrots to take on the consistency of asphalt in July, how the crust turned into sodden cardboard, and why all of the turkey chunks are dark meat.”

So it takes a little more time than the standard method. That’s how you know you’re going to end up with something really special. I subscribe to Bon Appetit magazine, but I maintain that the finest culinary delights are the ones that you discover for yourself. Mmm, yum-tastic.

In related news, nobody, but nobody is going to listen to me if I bitch about the food in New York now.

* * *

Speaking of which, I can’t promise updates for the next few days. We’re staying with a friend in Manhattan, but who knows whether she has a computer she’ll let me use, and I’m not about to go out and stand on some isolated dirt road all morning waiting for some farmer to maybe pick me up in a ’58 Ford pickup on his way to into “town” in hopes of finding a storefront Internet café somewhere. Depending on how cut off from civilization I end up being on this trip, you may just have to get through a weekday or two without me. But it could be worse. You could be me.

posted by M. Giant 3:24 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, October 08, 2002  

On my desk, I have a candy wrapper that I picked up a few months ago. There was candy in it at the time; I’m not some weirdo who goes around collecting discarded candy wrappers off the ground. As I ate the candy, I read the message printed on the wrapper:

“The best ideas come after you think you’ve run out of them.”

I’ve hung onto that wrapper for inspiration ever since. Thank God I did because today, something came to me.

Candy wrappers lie.

Stupid candy wrapper.

I’m going to limp through an entry today anyway. Don’t expect a theme or anything.

* * *

In Serres, Greece, a 66-year-old grandmother became a celebrity of sorts after telling a story about how she drove two knife-weilding burglars from her home.

"I grabbed his arm, pulled the knife from him and stabbed him in the gut," she said. "The two men were forced to flee."

Yesterday she admitted to making up the story when the blood on her clothes turned out to be tomato sauce. "The woman had made it all up because she wanted to convince her husband to spend more time with her at home," said a police official.

Let’s go back to her original story:

"I grabbed his arm, pulled the knife from him and stabbed him in the gut," she said.

Husband not hanging with you? Feeling neglected? Want to put a little spark back in the marriage? Just claim to be someone who’s capable of disarming a man and perforating a bowel. That ought to fix the problem. What’s for lunch, honey?

Besides, everybody knows that the proper way for grandmothers to get the attention they need is to shoot the person who’s ignoring her in the first place. Jeez.

* * *

I entered a screenplay in the second Project Greenlight contest. In order to qualify, each contestant has to read and review four other screenplays. I’ve read two so far.

If they’re representative of the general quality of the submissions, I’m really liking my chances this time around.

* * *

Okay, short notice, I know. But Trash and I are going to New York on Thursday. This’ll be the second time for both of us, and our first time together unless you count a three-hour layover at JFK, which you probably won’t. Heck, we’ll stop counting it ourselves on Thursday.

But anyway, since you guys came through for us so fabulously before our Seattle trip, I thought I’d hit y’all up for some recommendations. Because, really, the last thing we want is to be stuck in some backward, jerkwater burg like New York City with fuck-all to do on a Friday night. You guys are our only hope. E-mail me and rescue us. Do it now!

posted by M. Giant 3:30 PM 0 comments

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Monday, October 07, 2002  

Last night I walked up onto a stage, strapped on my bass guitar, and promptly stunk the place up.

Every Sunday night, Famous Dave’s in Uptown hosts its open jam. It’s a chance for dilettantes and wannabes from all over the city to perform in front of an audience with a real, live blues band. It’s kind of like karaoke with instruments. The bandleader is this skinny, old, balding guitarist with glasses, a long gray beard, and bib overalls. And I have no idea how he does it.

This is a guy who, week after week, has to put on an entertaining show while simultaneously dealing with genuinely talented musicians, show-offs, hacks, and slow-witted incompetents. He has no idea which category any given person falls into when he invites them onstage; he just has to make it work somehow. And it generally does.

That’s partially because it’s an open blues jam. An open speed metal or industrial jam would probably be less successful, but the blues has enough standards and conventions that in theory, anybody who can play a twelve-bar progression should be able to join in. In practice? Well, it’s still a good theory.

I’d been to the blues jam once before, in 2000. This was a couple of months after my band had successfully pulled off a demanding wedding gig and I was feeling pretty confident. I fouled up “Little Red Rooster,” then the piano/keyboard player let me redeem myself somewhat by calling out “Feelin’ Alright,” which we played while the bandleader changed a guitar string. I did quite a bit better on that one—all two chords of it—then the bandleader called the real bass player back onstage and I hadn’t been back since.

It was a humbling experience. I’d considered myself a fairly able improviser, as two of the guys in my band are pretty prolific songwriters and I’d never had trouble learning their tunes and coming up with bass parts quickly. However, it turns out that there’s a world of difference between “quickly” and “on the fly.” It’s an entirely different skill set. Especially when “quickly” applies to a basement practice session with three other guys, two of whom are also learning the song, and “on the fly” applies to a stage with professional musicians and an audience of a hundred or more, any number of whom are just waiting their own turn to blow the roof off the joint. The latter feels considerably less conducive to experimentation. Can you blame me for being spooked?

I didn’t mean to wait two years before getting back, but somehow its been pretty easy to find things I’d rather be doing on Sunday evenings than embarrassing myself in public. The last few weeks, though, I’ve been practicing at home a lot more (gig coming up), so I figured, what the heck. There’s only so much I can learn at home anyway, and I’m not going to become a brilliant live improvisational musician by playing along with the stereo. Not that my chances of becoming a brilliant live improvisational musician are much improved by playing live improvisational music, but they’re a little bit improved.

So last night I got there and put my name on the list. By the time it rotated around to me, the only member of the regular band onstage was the bandleader. The guy who’d come up to do vocals called out a slow blues in G, a song with which I was unfamiliar (and still am, to be totally honest). Slow blues sounded good to me, because it meant I could miss notes and still have time to find the right one. I was somewhat confused by the minor chords and half-step intervals, but I muddled through. Then he wanted to sing “Brick House.”

“Brick House?” I thought this was a blues jam. I didn’t sign up for no “Brick House.” Again, I muddled through, emphasis on muddle. I cannot honestly say that I brought the funk.

The bandleader, accurately perceiving that I was out of my depth, cut me some slack and called out a “straight-ahead shuffle in G, starting on the five.” Fortunately I knew what that meant, so I was able to pull it off well enough that at the end of the song, I could still walk off the stage under my own power. Overall, it was a little less humbling this time around, but only because I was more humble to begin with. I’ll probably go back before much longer. It’s the only way I’m going to develop the skills it’s going to take to actually make a contribution. Otherwise it’ll be like trying to learn how to bowl without ever going to the alley. Or some other stilted simile.

But I think I’ll wait a few weeks, just to give the bandleader time to forget me.

posted by M. Giant 3:33 PM 0 comments

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Friday, October 04, 2002  

Weird day.

First of all, I spent most of the morning under my desk, dismantling enough electronic equipment and wiring to fill an FBI surveillance van. You can imagine how much I’m looking forward to putting it all back together on Monday. Really, the time-consuming part was making and attaching all of these little labels to both ends of every cord I detached before I detached it, so I don’t go to put it back together, plug it all in wrong, and accidentally send myself forward in time or something. Sending myself back in time wouldn’t be so bad, because then I could warn myself to leave it alone and just make the IT department do it. But as Mom always told me, uncontrolled temporal displacement is not something you want to be rolling the dice on.

Where was I? Oh, right. So I get that out of the way, and then my boss tells me that the new voice recording system is here and it’s too big for the delivery guy to load onto the elevator from the dock to the second floor. This is another instance where a visit from my future self would have been handy, because he would have told me to say, “that’s his problem.”

Instead, I went down to the loading dock with the guy and led him back up to the second floor with a large pallet of boxes. The second pallet was quite a bit bigger. The delivery guy was right about it being too big to fit in the elevator. We would have had as much chance of that as we would have had parallel parking a Honda in there. So like an idiot, I signed for the thing and cut him loose, figuring that if nothing else, I could open up the crate and get the contents carried up in pieces.

While I was signing, a janitor walked up to us and asked me, “Do you have any idea where Ben Franklin is?”

Since answering the question would require me to know what Ben Franklin was in this context, I asked for clarification. The janitor explained that an electrician from a company called Ben Franklin was in the building doing some work. “I thought you might be able to help me but I guess you don’t have a clue he sneered, turning away.

I ran up behind him, hurled him to the floor, and started banging his head against the tiles while the delivery guy kicked him repeatedly in the stomach.

No, that never happened. Instead I snapped, “Hey! What’s your name?” He stopped short.

“Kevin,” he said.

“Kevin, do you talk to everyone that way, or just people at your workplace?”

“You’re not my boss.”

“Yeah, you’re right. What’s your boss’s name?”

“Boy, are you in trouble,” the delivery guy observed.

Long story short, dude was carrying his personal belongings out to the parking lot within an hour.

Okay, that didn’t happen either. I did roll my eyes extravagantly while the delivery guy made a sympathetic crack about his rudeness. I’m such a loser.

Anyway, now I was more worried about the larger-than-an-elevator-car box in the basement that I had made myself responsible for transporting upstairs. Once I cracked it open, it became apparent that the contents were going upstairs either in one piece or not at all. I drafted a couple of phone reps to help me load it onto a cart, but once we’d done that, it was clear the crate was going to be too tall to get through the door. We ended up borrowing some tools from the janitor (a different janitor) and tearing the crate apart. Fortunately the cabinet inside had wheels when we upended it, so getting it down the hall and up the elevator proved to be no more difficult than wheeling a fully stocked industrial refrigerator through a corn maze. No problem whatsoever.

So then I had to finish clearing off my desk and now my workspace looks like someone picked up one side of it and tipped it into a rolling wooden cart. Except of course for the single VCR I wired back up to the video wall so people could watch the game. I’m not used to seeing this much Formica from my seat. The sounds of my keystrokes echo strangely in the empty space. It’s like somebody attacked it with an experimental bomb that only destroys binders and office supplies.

It’s just going to get weirder, though, because tonight Trash and I are going to the Mall of America. On purpose. We’re seeing Girl Detective and G. Grod tonight, and we didn’t want to go downtown (Twins playoff game, torrential downpours, road construction, and terrorism evacuation drills) and they didn’t want to go Uptown (insufficient parking, torrential downpours, Uptown’s high idiot quotient on Friday evenings), so there we are. I think this will make a baker’s dozen of trips to the Mall for me since it was built. I should cut down, I think.

I wasn’t actually serious about the terrorism evacuation drills downtown. I think that might be going on at the Mall instead. We’ll see.

posted by M. Giant 3:24 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, October 03, 2002  

Over the past few weeks, my office has been in the process of being re-carpeted. It’s been happening in stages. They did another department a couple of weeks ago, half of my department this past weekend, and this weekend is when my area gets re-carpeted. I’ve been dreading it for over a month.

That’s not because the new carpet looks like it belongs in a casino, or because it’s about as plush and luxurious as a percale sheet stretched across the floor. It’s because it means I have to clean up my desk.

That would be bad enough under normal circumstances. In school, I was always the kid with the messiest desk. Periodically, my teachers would get tired of watching me rummage around in it for ten minutes before giving up on finding what I’d been looking for, and they’d make me clean it out. After a couple of hours of finding stuff I’d given up for lost, I would be admonished to try to keep it more organized from then on. And I did. Sometimes for as long as several minutes.

Likewise, my attitude towards keeping things clean served me rather poorly during my brief career in the food service industry. Not that I was committing any health code violations by any means, but I never quite got the hang of “clean as you go.” I was more of a “clean when there’s no other option besides getting fired” kind of guy. I guess the fact that I only lasted three weeks at that job demonstrates that I never quite got the hang of that philosophy either.

Once I got into the corporate world, I obviously discovered that there’s a lot more leeway. When you have your own space at the office, nobody cares how messy it is as long as your crap doesn’t spill out into the aisle and you’re not serving anyone food from your work surface. After I learned those two nitpicky little rules, things were much easier for me. Nobody ever made me clean my desk again (except for my worst-boss-ever who I think was trying to get me to quit so she wouldn’t have to give me a severance package, but that’s another story).

Of course, since nobody was making me do it, I got into the habit of doing it myself. I’m not claiming to be Felix Unger by any means, but I would always take action when things got to a certain point. When my desk drawers filled up, when I couldn’t remember the color of me desk, when the lower strata of papers in my inbox started turning to diamonds, then I’d take a few minutes out of my routine to get rid of stuff and straighten up a bit. Another factor was that in the corporate world, people made me change desks a lot more frequently than they did when I was in school, so stuff didn’t have quite as much time to build up.

Fast forward to today. I’ve described my desk before. If you’re too lazy to click on the link (or, as is more likely, if I’m too lazy to go back and add the link), then pretty much all you need to know about it is that it’s a circle twelve feet wide, and I sit in the middle of it. I have one drawer, which is just big enough to store two days worth of newspapers provided you fold them creatively.

Since I have no shelves, no file cabinets and minimal drawer space, 99% of my stuff is just out in the open. My manuals are on the counter-y part, and the computers and phones are about where you’d expect them to be. Everything else is just dumped in cardboard boxes on the floor. And it’s been that way for five years.

That’s right. I’ve sat in this desk for five years this month. I’m imagining what my elementary school desk would look like if I’d occupied the same one nonstop for grades 1-5. Probably it wouldn’t resemble a desk so much as a horrible accident at a paper mill.

My current desk doesn’t look like that, mind you. That’s because although I have practically no filing space, I have plenty of on-the-floor-under-the-desk space. And since I’ve never been on the verge of running out, I’ve just been adding to the growing carnage below normal sightlines.

But like I said, that all ends this week, because new carpet is going in over the weekend. So in addition to taping several miles of cabling to the underside of my work surface and dismantling the rack of VCRs that control the video wall, I have to go through all of the boxes of crap I’ve accumulated in the years I’ve been at this company. Among the stuff I found:

 Several years’ worth of reports that we stopped running five years ago and about which anybody stopped caring even earlier. By far the largest component by volume, getting rid of this stuff allowed me to relieve my workspace of enough paper to provide a Manhattan city block with phone books and a number of paper clips that, if melted down, would have yielded enough metal to manufacture an Apache helicopter.

 Over half a dozen birthday cards containing any number of signatures, some of them from people I don’t even remember. Looking at this small stack made me realize something: this job is making me old. See also:

 A coffee mug featuring the logo from a first-season NBC sitcom called Friends. Yeah, you heard me.

 An inexplicable odor of cat pee. Seriously, I don’t know.

 So many unused office supplies that when I brought them down to the mailroom they had to open a new wing.

I didn’t even finish cleaning it out before the end of the day. Tomorrow should be fun, what with all the dismantling and un-wiring I’ll be doing. But what I’m really looking forward to is Monday, when I’ll be able to see more of that new, casino-worthy carpet than I ever would have before.

posted by M. Giant 3:46 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, October 02, 2002  

Several years ago, when Trash worked downtown, she was in the habit of using her lunch breaks to bop over to the Barnes & Noble a block or two over. She’s usually a very punctual person, but if you get her around books, the very fabric of space-time curves away from her and she ends up being forced to struggle free of a temporal vortex that threatens to eject her clear out of the Einsteinian universe. That’s a fancy way of saying she had to rush back to work every once in a while.

On one particularly rushful walk back to the office, she found her exit from the building blocked by a small conversational grouping of people standing directly outside the heavy glass door. She wasn’t going to be able to even crack the door open until they moved. She tapped on the glass impatiently. Then she banged on the glass, a little more impatiently. Finally she had their attention. The two women stepped aside. The man turned and made a gesture that Trash interpreted as “Sorry, I’ll move now.” Trash reacted accordingly, and, she’ll freely admit, rather briskly.

Unfortunately, the gesture wasn’t a “Sorry, I’ll move now” gesture at all, but a “Hi, how are you?” gesture. That’s how Trash explained the fact that the man’s head was still in the door’s arc when she swung it open and it bashed him on the melon.

Trash came out of the door apologizing, explaining that she thought he was moving, she certainly didn’t mean to trepan him, and was he okay? Being who she is, she was able to convey all of this in about three phonemes, whereupon the man said it was fine, and just generally made agreeable and apologetic noises of his own. After an awkward couple of seconds, Trash was on her way.

Then she stopped. Froze. Slowly turned around to get another look at the man she’d just brained.

That’s [unnamed movie star], she realized.

Then she quickly turned back around and kept walking.

Think about it: what would you do? Go back and apologize some more, demonstrating that you’re the kind of person who thinks celebrities are more important than other people? “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were famous. Suddenly I’m not in a hurry any more.” But she’d also be saying that [unnamed movie star] isn’t important enough for her to have recognized him before he waved at her. What could anyone do but keep walking?

Besides, his two groupies were acting all offended on his behalf, and Trash didn’t have time to deal with them if they decided to throw down.

As for the man himself, who was in town shooting Feeling Minnesota at the time, he was pretty classy about the whole thing. When our local gossip columnist spotted him at some do or another a few days later and asked him to explain the welt on his braincase, he refused to explain. Of course, that might have been because he thought it would be cooler to let people think he’d been beaten up by his costar.

Now that I think about it, if some chick thumped me with a door because I was too addlepated to get out of her way, I’d probably claim to have been beaten up by a movie star, too.

Basically, Trash saw the humor in the incident, even though she felt a little embarrassed and guilty.

Not embarrassed or guilty enough to actually go see Feeling Minnesota, mind you.

posted by M. Giant 3:21 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, October 01, 2002  

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but Trash and I live with two cats. Since they’re cats, I’ll use their real names. I could come up with pseudonyms, but it’s not like you can Google them to find out where they live and start stalking them.

Strat was about eight months old when we rescued him from a stray’s life on the street. This was at the end of a long, cold winter, and the vet suggested that he might have a little neurological damage from living outside during his crucial growing period. We spent a lot of time playing with him, and he eventually figured out concepts like object permanence and inertia and gravity. Now he’s a big, sweet, fluffy lug who thinks he can still nap in a cracker box and has to have the kitty snacks on the floor pointed out to him with a fair degree of precision. He’s had a few other health issues which I will, in the future, shamelessly mine like the rich veins of comedy that they are.

Orca, on the other hand, has a bum rap for being a bitch. I maintain that she’s simply shy, a personality trait which appears to take on the form of hostility. She’s a small cat, but she has her space, and you invade it at your peril. I’m not one of those people who will chuckle indulgently when she snaps off the tip of someone’s finger; she knows that’s not okay and it’s going to earn her a time-out in the bathroom. But she also knows that a human being is big enough to kill her if it wants to, and unless it’s Trash or me, she’d just as soon it kept its distance, thanks. Her self-preservation instinct trumps her manners. That doesn’t make her a bitch. She’s just cautious. I say this with some authority, since she’s only ever really tried to kill me once.

But she’s a little weird. I don't have kids, but it must be like when you do and her or she (or they) has this genius-level I.Q., but you don't notice it so much because a) you're used to it, and b) it's always manifesting itself in the strangest ways via the most bizarre behavior. Or at least that's what it must have been like for my parents.

Also, Orca is one of the few cats in the world who's a hypochondriac.

You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Many years ago, she darted under our sleeper-sofa while we were opening it up and got her head caught in there for a second. We stopped before her fuzzy little noggin got pinched clean off, but a few days later she started walking around the apartment with her head all bobbly like Katharine Hepburn’s. We took her to the vet, where she immediately stopped doing it and they were unable to find anything wrong with her.

There was another time, when I'd taken a week off of work to build a deck behind our house. It wasn't going particularly smoothly, we were tracking mud all over the place, and the refrigerator quit working. You don't want to be working on an outdoor construction project without a working fridge. On top of that, Orca started dragging her back legs around. "Great," we thought, "now the cat's broken too."

No, it turned out she was just lazy. Again, the vet was unable to find anything wrong. Although it was nice of her to force us to take time off from building the deck and scheduling fridge repair so we could haul her prima donna ass in to the vet.

This past spring, she reached new heights of invention. Trash discovered a lump on the back of Orca's neck. I took her into the vet the next day (Orca, not Trash). Fortunately, we don't have cat cancer. The lump is a harmless mass of skin cells. How the cat figured out how to fake cancer, I'll never know.

Shortly after that episode, she got the sneezies. There's nothing cuter than a tiny creature sneezing uncontrollably, especially when they're dry sneezes. She probably just inhaled some plaster dust, given the fact that we'd been playing the home version of Trading Spaces. But of course we had to call the vet anyway, just to make sure she didn't have kitty tuberculosis or something.

Actually, I thought the sneezing was so cute that I considered having her fixed so she stayed that way. But I was too slow, and she recovered after a couple of days.

Now her new thing is to walk around crossing her front legs in front of each other. I’m not exaggerating. She’ll be strolling along, placing her left foot in front of and to the right of her right foot, and vice versa. Seen from above, it gives her stride a very even, measured weave. And it’s weird. But I don’t think it’s a sign of anything wrong with her. I just think she got bored again, and is experimenting with a new way of walking.

I’m going to tell myself the same thing when she starts walking around upright. It’s only a matter of time, and there’s going to be no other way to avoid getting freaked out about it.

posted by M. Giant 3:16 PM 0 comments

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Monday, September 30, 2002  

I’ve been writing this site for over six months now, and I have yet to get a full-on, toxic, screen-melting, eyelash-bleaching hate e-mail. I can only take that as a clear indication that I’m doing something really, really wrong.

Maybe it’s because when I complain about something, I tend to go for the easy targets, like U-Haul or Clear Channel. So earlier this month (9/6) I decided to go after Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. My inbox was flooded with responses. Or at least it would have been, if my inbox had a capacity of one.

One of the e-mails I got on the subject consisted of the subject line “9/6 Entry.” And that was all. No text whatsoever. I like to think that the message was so corrosive that Echelon, the FBI’s e-mail spying program, stripped it clean away and now the sender is being secretly detained somewhere awaiting his inevitable railroading into a perfunctory show trial before a military tribunal. What? It could happen.

The other e-mail, this one from Ernos, was perfectly nice, sharing some information about the golden age of comics. It also included this sentence:

Watterson pontificated quite a bit on comics as an art form, not just whining about the lack of space devoted to *his* art.

Unfortunately, since the sender was helpful and polite, I don’t feel right about pointing out all of the times Watterson never volunteered to give up his huge Sunday leader panel, thus possibly giving somebody else some breathing space for a change, instead preferring to grab as much real estate as possible so he could have room to create art elaborate enough to camouflage the fact that he was fresh out of ideas. I also won’t mention how Watterson’s refusal to license any C&H merchandise has forced us all to live in a world where the only enduring public artifact of the best comic strip of the late eighties is that picture of its urinating protagonist stuck to the pickup in front of you at the traffic light. In fact, I’ll even give Watterson points for quitting in the same decade that he realized he was tapped out. For examples of daily comic strip artists who failed to do that, I give you…90% of today’s comics page.

So, yeah. Even taking cheap shots at a popular and beloved figure yielded an unsatisfyingly benign response. But I’m not giving up. In October, I’ll explain how Anne Frank was a filthy slut.

Getting back to easy targets, Tim Bratcher has gone above and beyond the call of duty in the war against Clear Channel:

I’m the guy who wrote you about XM being Clear Channel. You know…they are based in SA, and when I pass their corporate headquarters, I make sure to shoot the bird out of my sunroof at their new, shiny building. It makes me feel better, without actually requiring me to do anything… activist-like. Or maybe I’m just a big kid.

ANYWAY, yesterday, I got pulled over because a police officer thought I was flicking HIM off. Yes officer, that’s right, I’m SURE you have a problem with the rowdy Volvo-drivers shooting you the bird…

I simply explained my distaste of all things Clear Channel, and he sent me on my way, admonishing me to not be QUITE so visible about my disdain.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us that civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance can bring about social change. We can bitch about Clear Channel all we want, but things aren’t going to get any better until more people start spending a few nights in jail with Tim once in a while. So get to it! I’ll coordinate things from out here.

By the way, Dr. King was an uninspired dresser. I’m just saying.

I thought someone might take offense at my entry about babies with glasses (9/16), but nobody did. Why won’t any of you think of the poor, defenseless babies? That’s not to say I didn’t get any responses at all, because I did. Like this one from Sam:

Now, as to the question of how to keep the glasses on: kids are always taking adults' glasses off, maybe because they very badly want to wear them. It makes people take them more seriously, after all. I, for one, would be damn sick of everyone cooing, "ooh, whadda CUTE widdo baby!" all day. I'd relish the occasional opportunity to see grown-ups turn and run, screaming in terror from the evil they expect me to wreak upon the heretofore unsuspecting masses. And hey, what's this? I get to wear glasses all day? Rock on!

Actually, that theory rings pretty true. My face has a somewhat youthful aspect, and I can vouch for the fact that all the cooing got pretty old about halfway though my sophomore year of college. Sadly, I didn’t get glasses until it was far too late to scare anyone with them. I had to resort to scaring people with my driving.

Did I mention that babies are evil? Not just babies with glasses, but all babies? Evil, I tell you. Including yours. If you have a baby, consider yourself warned.

Evil!

Finally, after my entry about M Giant’s Law (9/12), Girl Detective wrote about her method of finding stuff that’s lost (this is actually from her 9/15 blog entry but I’m using it anyway):

Perhaps the Girl Detective method for lost stuff is that if you insure it, you won't lose it. Our life insurance guy says that he's never yet had a claim in all the years he's been selling policies, so apparently for him this even works on lives, not just belongings. But outside of insurance, I've had great luck with the St. Anthony prayer, so keep it in mind the next time you lose something, big or small.

That’s great that the insurance thing works for her. Unfortunately, I lose everything. So in order to pay the premiums, I’d have to sell everything I own. And then I’d lose the money.

Hey, ever wonder why St. Anthony knows where everything is? Maybe it’s because he traffics in stolen goods and he’s trying to fence it. Something to think about.

Okay, that’s the mail for this month. And if you can’t find something up there to get pissed off about, you’re just not trying.

posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments

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Friday, September 27, 2002  

Trash and I are sort of into camping. We’re not fanatics or anything—you won’t ever see us in one of those dorm-fridge-sized bubble tents dangling from the side of a mountain in the Yukon in January, and we’re not the type to strap everything to our backs and hike seven miles from the car—but we pretty much know what we’re doing. We’ve got this tent that’s so huge it has a guest room, and I’m able to pop it up like a safety button on a botle of Snapple. Trash can build a roaring campfire in three minutes with a magnifying glass and a pile of rocks. We keep all our stuff organized in these cunning little plastic bins, so we can potentially set up camp, make dinner, clean the dishes, and strike camp in the time it took you to read this sentence. We’re not hardcore, but we’re experienced. Over the years, we’ve camped at dozens of campgrounds in seven different states.

(Told you it was a big tent.)

But this has been kind of a weird summer, so Trash and I haven’t had a chance to go camping. We were going to one weekend last month, but I got sick so that wasn’t happening. Trash went to meet BuenaOnda at a campground in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago, but my band was playing that weekend so I couldn’t go. And there was that morning I woke up in a Dumpster behind Dreamgirls, but I hadn’t planned that so I don’t think it counts.

We’re going camping this weekend. I’m pretty sure this is the latest in the year we’ve ever gone. We’re a bit apprehensive. In this part of the country, camping after the autumnal equinox can be an iffy business, and the weather forecast isn’t encouraging. But even if we end up spending the weekend shivering under a frigid gray drizzle and taking turns positioning our camp chairs directly over the fire, we do have a few things going for us:

 We have these bulky, silvery sleeping bags that are thick and heavy enough to allow us to spend a comfortable night on Pluto. Wrestling them back into their rolled-up form is a bit like trying to store a jumbo marshmallow inside a cocktail straw, but the effort will help keep us warm.

 So what if we get snow or freezing rain? After it stops, we can just strike the tent, spend the rest of the weekend in our new temporary igloo, and have a head start on packing the car when it’s time to go.

 We probably won’t need to buy much ice for the coolers. We’ll just preserve our perishables by packing them in frozen beer bottles.

 If all else fails, we have a backup plan. Trash tried to camp in April one year. That was when she discovered why God invented hotels.

So I’m a little curious to see what we’re made of. What kind of campers would we be if we only went when it was fun? The people who are really serious about camping are the ones who aren’t deterred by the prospect of a little suffering and misery. If we can’t hack this weekend, we can just forget about ever going pro.

* * *

I actually wrote that yesterday, since I didn’t think I’d have time to do an entry today, what with us leaving early so we could spend a weekend chipping away at the layer of ice on our gritty camp coffee.

And…this just in:

We’re not going.

We were planning to meet friends of ours who live in Michigan, but they’ve just informed us that hurricane-force winds, monsoon rains, and an impending blizzard were all it took to dissuade them from spending the next two nights in a small nylon envelope. Wusses. One of these days, somebody’s going to be looking for people to join an Antarctic water polo expedition, and you know who they’re going to call?

Well, not us, I hope.

* * *

Hey, Wil Wheaton! I know you’re reading, which is why I didn’t bother making a link out of your name so my page will show up on your referral logs. I don’t have to. Why? Because I know you’re already reading.

So hook a guy up with a link, would ya? I sat through that entire ST:TNG episode where you spent an hour mooning over the shapeshifter chick. Dude, you owe me for that shit. Link to me and we’ll call it even.

posted by M. Giant 3:08 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, September 26, 2002  

For some reason, I'm thinking about my first visit to Roswell, NM. This was back in 1997, before Roswell meant a lousy TV show, but just as it was starting to really embrace (read: whore) its status as a UFO capitol. Trash and I had flown into Albuquerque to get away from winter for a few days. We rented a car and drove all over the state, which doesn't take very long considering that the average freeway speed limit there is 115 m.p.h. We visited Santa Fe, Taos, Soccorro, and, of course, Roswell.

So we're on the road into town, having just passed a large military convoy (presumably loaded with reverse-engineered alien weapons and propulsion systems) and Trash asks me, "What are we doing here, anyway?"

I say, "Start looking for wreckage."

"What?"

"You know," I say. "Along the side of the road. Hey, you're not going to find anything if you keep staring at me like that."

Fortunately, I was mostly kidding. Which is good, because I later learned that the crash site was actually in a town called Corona, which we'd driven through obliviously an hour before. If I were Corona, I'd be kind of pissed about Roswell stealing my E.T. thunder like that.

Still, there we were in Roswell with no idea of what we should see or do there. Fortunately, someone told us about the UFO museum on Main Street.

We get there, and there's this overly friendly volunteer. She greets us effusively and hands us a colored pushpin so we can indicate on a large map where we came from. This volunteer is waaaaay too proud of this map. At the time of our visit they've only been in the building, an old movie theater, for a couple of months, so there are still some blank spots on the map. I stick the pin roughly where our house would be, and prepare to move on.

Except that this woman has just gone into raptures because she's from the Twin Cities area too. "Oh, my goodness!" she gushes, "What part are you from?"

Trash, the pathological conversationalist, lets slip that I grew up in Possum Holler, one of the northern suburbs of Minneapolis. Okay, it's not really called Possum Holler, but the real name of the town is too embarrassing. Garry Trudeau made it semi-famous as the headquarters of the Duke 2000 presidential campaign. And you thought he’d made it up.

Anyway, the museum volunteer nearly soils her pants at this. She's from Possum Holler too!

So now we're stuck. I have to listen to her run down this list of names of people who still live in a town I fled years before. Trash is trying to be nice about it, but I can tell she's wishing she'd kept her cakehole shut. The volunteer takes a picture of us in front of the "alien autopsy" prop in a display case that is the museum's most prized possession. She goes and finds one of the museum's founders, Glenn Dennis, so she can introduce this poor, old, ex-funeral director to some guy who used to live in her hometown. Glenn was nice, but he had even less of an idea why he was meeting me than I did. If you don't know who Glenn Dennis is, he was friends with a nurse who was present at the original alien autopsy in July 1947. So now that I’ve met him, I'm only three degrees of separation from an actual Gray, just because I lived in Possum Holler for most of my childhood.

Basically, here was a woman who dedicated all of her spare time to the contention that an alien spacecraft had traveled thousands of light years from Zeta Reticuli or something, across the trackless depths of space, using technology we can only dream about, only to smack into some guy's ranch seventy miles from where we stood.

Yet it was almost unbelievable to her that from a town of 45,000 people, two of them would end up at the number one tourist destination in New Mexico. Go figure.

posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, September 25, 2002  

I’ve spent an unhealthy percentage of my time on this earth trying to win money from Ben Affleck, and it doesn’t show any sign of letting up. One might say that when calculating the percentage of one’s life spent trying to win money from Ben Affleck, anything over zero is probably a sign of nothing good. Yet I can’t seem to stop.

It started a couple of years ago, when I entered the first Project Greenlight competition. Since I don’t have a file cabinet overflowing with finished screenplays, I didn’t have time to do more than a screen adaptation of a stage play I’d written a couple of years before. It isn’t accurate to say that I actually wanted to win the contest, per se; I just thought it would be good to make it to the later rounds and maybe get a little attention for my work. God knows that learning how to direct actors, figuring out camera angles, and teaching myself how to helm a feature film in front of the cameras of a reality TV show wasn’t exactly my idea of a prize. Look at what happened to the “winner,” Pete Jones, and his movie Stolen Summer. He got to deal with casting and logistical nightmares, being screamed at by the executive producer, looking like a schmuck to every viewer in HBO’s audience, and rumors that he only won because the “real” winner passed up the grand prize, all so his movie could get dumped onto three screens nationwide with all the fanfare and publicity of a Black Ops mission. Weigh that against the possibility of a few interested phone calls from someone at Lions Gate or Sony Classics and my real reason for entering should become apparent. Fortunately, my screenplay was idiosyncratic enough that I never had to make that decision.

I’m currently working on final revisions to the screenplay I’m planning to submit for PGL2. This time the deal is a little more tempting, since there are two separate contests for writers and directors. That means the winner of the screenplay contest a) wins $35,000, and b) doesn’t have to direct. Woo hoo!

But that’s not all. I’m also seeing what I can do to win the “million-and-change” that’s being given away in conjunction with Affleck’s current TV series, Push, Nevada. Although in this case, it’s not really accurate to say I’m trying to win it for myself. I’m sort of trying to do this with a group.

To be honest, even that isn’t accurate, since I don’t seem to be contributing much to the effort. Other people are much smarter and more committed than I am. On the other hand, judging from the show’s ratings, the field of potential winners is going to be fairly small. So there’s that.

I don’t know what it is that makes me so keen to relieve Ben Affleck of large bags of money. Could it be some kind of deep-seated envy I might feel towards a guy who’s younger than I am but already has a screenwriting Oscar? Nah, too obvious.

* * *

Several years ago, Trash and I took one of those online quizzes that supposedly match you with your ideal celebrity mate. This was before the Internet was awash in personality tests that tell you everything from your I.Q. to which character from What’s Happening!! you resemble the most. My results matched me up with Jennifer Lopez. Like I said, this was several years ago, so she was post-Out of Sight and pre-pop-diva-backlash. Not to mention years before anyone heard the phrase “J. Lo.”

Guess who Trash’s celebrity match was? I’ll give you a clue: he was post-Good Will Hunting and pre-Oscar-backlash, years before anyone had heard the phrase “put on this earth to make Matt Damon look smart.”

So now our celebrity matches are dating. Some of the gossips have claimed that their relationship is not long for this world. I’ve heard the talk. But if whatever is going for my wife and me is also going for them—and by the transitive property of equality, it may well be—I think these two smug, overexposed media whores might just stand a chance. Best of luck to you, kids. I mean that.

posted by M. Giant 3:25 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, September 24, 2002  

I have to hire a plumber, and so far I’m sucking at it.

I’ve done a little light plumbing of my own since we’ve owned the house. I replaced the kitchen faucet a few years ago. When I was done, hot water came out of the cold side and vice versa, but it worked. Besides, that wasn’t my fault; the hot water hose wasn’t long enough to reach, but the cold water hose was, so I had to swap them just to get them both connected. I had no choice.

Also, I was really getting tired of being under the sink by that point.

I liked to pretend that the catty-wompus arrangement was a deliberate manifestation of my penchant for non-conformity, but nobody bought it. That might have had something to do with Trash rolling her eyes like 20-sided dice at my B.S., but whatever. Now that the faucet works the way it’s supposed to (thanks, Dad!), I tend to keep quiet about it. Um, er, usually.

Another project that went okay was when I replaced the innards of our toilet last summer. For whatever reason, we were getting about a teaspoon of water per flush. Maybe that’s good for the environment, but not when the environment in question is your bathroom. When you have to keep an emergency kit next to the toilet containing a plunger, another plunger, a plumber’s snake, and a box of cherry bombs, it’s bad enough. When you have to crack open the kit every time you want to flush something less water-soluble than cotton candy, that borders on untenable. But I eventually got around to fixing that, and now you have to open the bathroom window every time you flush or the house implodes from the pressure differential.

But at least the water’s going down the pipe. Now the problem is that it’s not all going down the inside of the pipe.

I don’t know when or how this happened, but we’ve developed a leak from our toilet. Every time we flush, just a little bit more water splashes into our basement. The pipe runs down through the little-used utility room area of our basement, which is why we don’t know how long it’s been happening. Obviously, things would be different if every flush doused people on the other side of the basement while they were sitting on the couch watching TV. We’d have to take immediate action in that event. That couch would be moved so quickly that the cushions would appear to hang suspended in air for a moment.

But since the water is currently dripping into buckets we’ve placed on the concrete floor, the situation is, as they say, desperate but not serious. Since it’s not an emergency, I can take my time finding the best plumber for the job, and the one who will do the best work for the best price.

That’s a task that almost makes me wish I had raw sewage flooding my kitchen. At least then I could call the first plumber in the book and not wonder if I’m getting screwed. There’s really no price that most folks won’t pay to make the sewage not be in their kitchen any more, so it’s practically impossible to get more screwed than you already are. But when all you’ve got is a little drip, you feel obligated to keep the repair cost down to one house payment rather than two or three.

This is where it gets tricky. First of all, there are hundreds of plumbers in the phone book. Secondly, they all have full-page ads. And none of them give you the information you really need, like “We acknowledge the passage of time before you get your bill” or “We wear overalls to every job.” So you have to call them all to find out how much they’ll charge you. And even that doesn’t tell you anything. Some plumbers charge by the job rather than by the hour, and those guys won’t even give you a guess as to how much it’s going to cost you until they get out there. And it’s going to cost you this week’s grocery bill just to get them out there. Some of them charge less, but they make up for it by tossing in a truck fee, as if their vehicles run on sawbucks instead of gas. Trying to figure out how much your bill is going to be with those guys is like solving for x on an algebra equation that consists of x=x.

But I’m still reasonably sure that that method is going to set me back less than the plumbers who do charge hourly. That’s because they don’t charge hourly. Like the other guys, they have a minimum fee for each visit, plus an additional one-hour minimum that could potentially amount to trading a PS2 for a drain clog, plus a quarterly-hour rate that would be equal to having a parking meter in your house that you have to keep feeding with Spanish doubloons. Solve for y when x*y=y*x.

The bottom line is that I just don’t have enough information to make an informed decision, and that makes me crazy. I’ll probably just end up going with one of the companies that don’t charge extra for after-hours or weekend calls. Either that or talk my wife into sitting around the house some afternoon waiting for a guy who probably won’t show up until 10:30 p.m.

And no, trying to fix it myself is not, I repeat, not an option. I’m the reason “plumber” rhymes with “dumber.” I didn’t mind fiddling with the toilet when I was on top of the water, but this is entirely different. Furthermore, if I screw it up, I run the risk of effectively turning our basement into an open pit latrine. And then nobody will want to come over and watch Buffy with us.

On the other hand, if that happens, I get to stop shopping for plumbers and just pick one, because there won’t be time to call around. Hmmm…

posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments

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Monday, September 23, 2002  

I'm just going to start out today by saying that my wife is really, really lucky that John Entwistle is dead.

Now I'm going to back up.

As I've mentioned previously in this space, the last few weeks of summer saw American Idol fever invade our home like the foul contagion that it is. And it's a good thing that show ended when it did, because things were starting to get out of hand. Trash was showing everyone that clip of Anakin Boogie (we've decided that our favorite part is that liquidy snorfle that he uses to signal that he's done), and even our friends Dirt and Banana were sucked in.

As a few of you will admit to knowing, there's actually an American Idol concert tour on the road. All of the finalists from the show will be on the bill. Not only Kelly, Sideshow Bob, and Nikki, but also Tamyra, Christina, Ejay, R.J., A.J., D.J., P.J., Q.J., X.J., I.J., and that chick named Ryan will be there in person. You can bet I would be all over this if the tour ever came to the Twin Cities. That kind of mocking opportunity doesn't come along every day. That's probably why Trash refused to invite me.

There was talk about camping out for tickets or wearing out the phone's redial button on the on-sale date, but we're not in our twenties any more. Now one of us works for a corporation that owns a hospitality suite at the local concert hall. And really, nothing says "rock & roll" like a corporate hospitality suite. Right?

This meant that last week, Trash had to send one of her coworkers to the meeting in the downtown office where the tickets for the arena's various events are doled out. While people were furiously bidding and negotiating for the use of the suite during various hockey games, concerts, and other respectable events, Trash's coworker had to pipe up with, "Trash wants to use the suite for the American Idol concert."

Trash had been somewhat concerend that someone else might have dibs on the suite for that show. She needn't have worried. When Trash's coworker put in that bid, she might has well have placed a turd on the conference table.

Given the amount of respect that Trash's intelligence and abilities command at her workplace, there were several minutes of the meeting that were occupied by confirming that her coworker was actually talking about the right person. "Does she want the tickets for her child?" asked one attendee, presumably unaware that we don't have one. Or, more likely, fully aware that we don't have one, but eager to give Trash an out.

So Trash and Banana are going to the American Idol concert when it comes to St. Paul in November. Maybe I'll get them to write me a guest entry about it.

Today, I was talking on the phone to Trash and she mentioned how other coworkers were making fun of her AI jones. One of them had said, "Now, you're sure you wanted to see American Idol and not the Who, right?"

Anyone who's been reading this blog since July 1 is well aware of how I feel about the Who, and is therefore well aware that I wasn't about to let this pass.

"Excuse me?" I snapped when Trash let that comment slip. "You guys have the suite for the Who concert? And you didn't tell me? And you got tickets for American Idol instead?" But it was really more out of habit than anything else.

Since John Entwistle died (and hey, what's with all the recently-dead bass legends hogging the cover of Bass Player magazine this past year? I'm starting to think it would be safer to play underwater synthesizer), I don't have a lot of interest in paying good money to see the "Who's Left" tour. I might see it for free, though. As it turns out, the suite is already spoken for the night Roger and Pete are playing. So that decision is out of my hands.

Which I'm actually okay with. On the night Trash goes to hear Kelly Clarkson belt out a few, I'll be dropping my Thirty Years of Maximum R&B box set into the CD changer and see how many bass strings I can break before she gets home. Call it a tribute.

But if I were missing the chance to see three-quarters of the Who so Trash could sit through N.J., ¨¡.J., and ¥ð.J., I would have wheeled out the Big Guns of Guilt and opened fire.

See how I brought that back around to my lede? I don't know why you don't trust me more.

posted by M. Giant 3:17 PM 0 comments

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