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


Tuesday, December 31, 2002  

You guys responded to a host of topics from December, which is good because frankly, you’re sucking wind on getting me travel tips for Austin. We're leaving next week, you know. Aside from a precious few notable and much appreciated exceptions, y’all have been pretty tight-lipped about the wonders we should experience in the capital of the fourth-largest state in the union (see? That’s what happens when I have to do my own research, people). Compared to the flood of tips I got regarding Seattle, the Austin info I’m getting isn’t even a trickle. If it doesn’t pick up in the next week, I’m going to have no choice but to conclude that Seattle is way, way cooler than Austin.

Here’s further proof of that statement, in the form of an e-mail from adopted Seattleite Gael at Pop Culture Junk Mail:

A friend was saying that she's always shocked when people say their "favorite" Christmas song is "Do They Know It's Christmas," because it's really not meant to be anyone's favorite song, it's a MORAL LESSON. Or, in her words, "People, have we forgotten the clanging chimes of DOOM?"

"There's a world outside your window...And it's a world of dread and fear...Where the only water flowing...Is the bitter sting of tears..."

I must confess, I had forgotten about that song when I said “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” was the most depressing. There’s certainly a case to be made for “Do They Know It’s Christmas” being a deeper bummer. But at least it tells you what to do about it. For me, the call to action redeems it, saves it from being completely dismal, expresses a message of positivity and hope. No, I’m not talking about the “Feeeeeed thuuuuuh WAAAAAH-orld” outro. I’m talking about this line:

Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you

Why, I believe I will! Thanks, God! I owe you a solid!

Wendy at Pound also chimed in. She says:

Man, I love it when someone writes the same thing I was thinking. Ever since I heard a version of that song with the "muddle through somehow" line in it, I have been fascinated with it, and it's one of my favorite Christmas songs now. This season I've been hearing a version by Coldplay (a band that has never terribly impressed me otherwise) that really does justice to what a sweet downer of a song it is, although it ultimately cops out by using the "shining star on the highest bough" line. And just the other day I was telling someone it was a good thing that they didn't use it or else you'd want to slash your wrists.

Based on that heads-up, I mailed my all my knives to Australia and gave Coldplay’s version a listen. Of course, I acquired a legitimate copy of said version from an authorized dealer of musical recordings in exchange for legal currency and not by downloading an illicit mp3 file via some insidious piece of file-sharing software, because I am a law-abiding citizen of this republic and not a scurvy pirate. It is indeed a perfect song for Coldplay. Those guys would sound sad if they were singing about having sex with a pile of chocolate-covered money at Disneyworld.

There’s also a version by Lucinda Williams in which I think she might actually be sobbing. Maybe next year I’ll collect all of these recordings on a mix tape and bring it to holiday parties. Then the following year, I won’t have to go to any.

Just imagine a transition here, okay? This is long enough as it is.

I had kind of a frightening moment last week when Trash called me from the study to say I had an e-mail.

“From whom?” I answered from the kitchen. Yes, I really talk like that.

“Val Kilmer,” she said.

No, she doesn’t really talk in hypertext links to my archives.

I nearly had a thrombo. Then I remembered what Val Kilmer looks like now, and I relaxed. Then I realized that Trash was just reading me the subject line on a note from a reader named Robin and I relaxed even more.

Man, I saw that commercial, and I had exactly the same reaction that you and Mrs. Trash did. "Who...wait a minute...is that VAL KILMER? Holy God, what the hell happened to him?" My roommate and I decided that he looks as though he's had reconstructive surgery. Or like a big alien bug has actually taken over his body, like Vincent d'Onofrio in "Men in Black." Either way, he looks like he's not only been beaten with the ugly stick, but perhaps had the whole ugly tree fall on his face. And quite frankly, it scares me a little.

I suspect Robin knows some people in the industry, because her theory is uncannily close to the truth. According to today’s Variety, the ugly tree was cut down, pulped, converted into paper, and used to giftwrap Kilmer for thirty-six hours as part of an elaborate prank. Tragic, really.

I also got this sad missive from Talula, under the plaintive-sounding subject line, “He was Batman.”

I just wanted to thank you for your comments regarding Val Kilmer. Here I was, feeling disturbed and wronged every time that commercial aired. But now I know I’m not alone. I just can’t believe that my over-a-decade-long crush on the actor has ended because of a camera. After all, this is a man who made “I’m your huckleberry” sound cool and threatening. Poor Val—a hat would have been a moral imperative.

Points for the Real Genius reference. Even a hat with an LCD display would have been an improvement.

Kelly wasn’t responding to a specific post, but she did send pictures. So she wins.

As much as I'm left in awe and amazement at the human-like qualities and antics of your much beloved cats, can they top this?

The amazing cat who sits up like a person, and yet still pees in sand box.





(And yes, that's how this cat normally sits. it's really weird. It's also quite disturbing to people who haven't been exposed to such things.)

People rhapsodize about the grace, dignity, and poise of the common domestic housecat. Those people have never met a common domestic housecat. I love the expression on this cat’s face; what he’s doing is completely normal to him. “What? I’m just sitting. Are you gonna get me a beer or what?”

Trash’s aunt’s cat used to sit like that sometimes. Normally he was very shy and would hide whenever anyone came over. But once in a while, when the aunt had only one guest, and the guest was female, he would sit on the floor, prop his back against the wall, fix his eyes upon the woman in question, reach down deliberately, and—sorry, Kelly—diddle himself.

He would do this outside of his caretaker’s line of sight, so she’d just be sitting there, wondering why, for example, her date was cutting her eyes to one side with increasing frequency and distress.

Or why Trash’s mom was demanding, “Does he have to stare at me while he does that?”

Or why the nun from the Catholic school down the street would wonder, “Is your cat okay?”

Good question, because it’s not like he could have been getting much out of it, being a) fixed, and b) a cat. I don’t care how much he dug the ladies; making his paw go boppity-boppity-boppity over his vestigial feline organ could have had no purpose other than messing with people’s heads. Which I can’t really condemn, given the lengths I sometimes go to for the same purpose. Hell, I even bought a domain name for that purpose.

I also can’t condemn it because that cat died two weeks ago. Rest in peace, Spice.

Dammit, look what I did. I wrote myself into a corner. How do you segue from a recently dead pet? You better have something like a war—wait, okay, here we go.

The preposition entry had readers at each other’s throats! Well, not really, but I had to trump it up a bit. Here’s what the Two B.O.B.s had to say:

so what if removing prepositions from the ends of sentences requires grammatical acrobatics. SO WHAT! just do it and quit yammering about how hard it is. honestly. don't you think if we had complex grammatical filters in place we'd be more inclined to THINK about what we say. we'd probably be more adept at avoiding verbal gaffes a la trent lott, would you not agree? okay maybe not. But still. we should think more about what we say and make a conscious effort to remove verbal static and prepositions from our daily lives. i'm just saying.

Good point. Grammatical rules exist to promote clarity and coherence, after all.

Others backed my position, stating that the preposition rule can actually obscure meaning, and for what? Erin explains:

I learned in graduate grammar class (yes, it was horrible, thanks for asking) that the "don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule was espoused by the poet Dryden in the 16th century because he thought that English should follow Latin grammar rules. It was a totally made up rule.

Wheee!

Stupid Dryden. He wrecks everything. But as Tresa learned during a job interview, it’s still dangerous to ignore the rule entirely—or is it?

I find this guy on Monster.com, send him my resume, and he calls me in. He was one of those sixty-year-old, pulled up by the bootstrap, "I never got any education and I'm going to prove to anybody who slows down that I never needed any, so immense is my natural genius" kind of guys. So I show up and eight hours later, we're still freaking talking! An eight-hour job interview!

He gave me a geography quiz, a personality test, and then he had me give him an extemporaneous writing sample. By that time it was about 4:30, I'd been there since nine with no lunch and at one point he even called my husband in (we only had one car so he came to pick me up at ten and got stuck waiting there all freaking day) to give him an interview. So he takes one look at my writing sample and tells me that it sounds like either I haven't written very much, or I didn't know what I was doing because I ended my first sentence with a preposition. I launched into a lengthy dissertation about the English language being a spoken and transitional language, blah blah blah whatever my professors used to say, and I could just see his ears close up. That's when I knew the job was lost. That was his thing to criticize and I criticized his criticism, which was just unacceptable. Another three months of unemployment was beyond worth not working for that guy. I can see that now. There's nothing so dangerous as a truly stupid person who thinks they are smart.

That guy sounds straight outta Seinfeld. I suspect that terminal preposition was actually Tresa’s subconscious mind refusing to get into the trunk like a good little hostage. Congratulations, Tresa. You owe your subconscious a solid.

Happy new year, and be safe tonight. I hate to think of anybody reading my yammering on the last day of their lives.

Wheee!

posted by M. Giant 3:25 PM 0 comments

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Monday, December 30, 2002  

The division of labor in our household isn’t specificially quantified, either verbally or in writing. But one thing that’s pretty clear is that I’m in charge of the laundry. I could talk about how I took the job over when Trash washed my favorite shirt in hot water and turned it into her favroite shirt, or I could launch into some quasi-feminist blather about freeing women from the drudgery of housework, but the truth is that I’m in it for the tips.

The thing is, Trash always forgets to empty her pockets before she puts her clothes in the basket. I never forget to check all the pockets before I put the clothes in the washer. Sometimes I’ll find a pen or an important receipt, thereby averting disaster. More freqently, I’ll find some cash in one of Trash’s pockets, thereby averting a trip to the ATM.

Yes, I get to keep the money I find. Many’s the time I’ve been sorting clothes, hollered out, “Tip!” and heard Trash answer with a growl of frustration. You’d think she’d learn. “How much?” she asks, and I tell her, truthfully, anywhere from three cents to thirty-some dollars.

I don’t mind the fact that she leaves the pockets to me, or the fact that she’s apparently never learned how to fold money and by the time I get it it’s become transdimensional origami. It would be pretty tacky of me to complain about that when I miss a few coins and they end up in the lint filter. After years of feeding money into coin-operated laundry machines, I’m plenty pleased to have reversed the situation.

It’s not enough for me to quit my job, especially since the cash is coming out of accounts we both share anyway, but it still brightens up the task and makes me feel like I’m getting paid for it. My rate for this past weekend was $5.06, which seems like a pretty stingy salary until you remember that I also got clean clothes out of the deal.

I suppose it would be nice of me to reciprocate by sneaking random amounts of petty cash into places where she’ll find it when she goes to pay the bills, but since she wouldn’t get to enjoy it then, it seems like it would kind of defeat the purpose. And I’d just as soon spare her that kind of heartbreak.

Lately there hasn’t been as much cash in her pockets. On the other hand, blank checks and credit cards have begun showing up. These items I return to her, saying “Cash only!”

For now, at least. I can’t wait until my credit card reader gets here.

* * *

Yeah, short entry today, but I’ve got a lot of mail to answer tomorrow. It’ll even out. See you then.

posted by M. Giant 3:34 PM 0 comments

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Friday, December 27, 2002  

Yesterday I thanked my sisters Debitches for the Christmas gifts they gave me. Debitch the Younger gave me a really cool scarf that’s all stripey and over ten feet long. Why, yes, I did watch a lot of Doctor Who growing up. Why do you ask?

Debitch the Elder gave me something else, and I’m going to have to back up a bit to tell you about it. Like a decade or so back.

The year we got married, one of Trash’s relatives sent us a highly specialized kitchen implement for Christmas. You know the more highly specialized a kitchen tool is, the more expensive and therefore highly coveted it’s going to be. You can get a sharp knife for a few bucks and use it for everything from chopping onions to opening hermetically sealed blister packages to dissecting your cat, but a quality watermelon peeler, which you can never use for anything other than peeling watermelons, is going to set you back a couple of bills. Clothes are the same way, but I’m going to reign in the topic drift because I’m on a deadline here.

So, like I was saying, this particular kitchen implement was highly specialized. Highly. It was designed to do one thing, and one thing only, and that was to cook hot dogs.

You can imagine the kind of hot dogs that would come out of such a device. You can imagine enjoying the authentic sidewalk cuisine of Times Square, Bourbon Street, and Michigan Avenue without ever leaving your kitchen. You can imagine the ultimate hot dog experience.

You can imagine it all you want, in fact, because it ain’t gonna happen.

Here’s how the hot dog cooker “worked:” It was a plastic box just slightly larger than the two-tape home video of Titanic. You’d plug the power cord into a standard electrical outlet. Then you’d open the clear plastic lid on top and drop the desired number of wieners into one or more of the four wiener-sized slots. Then you’d close the lid.

When the lid closed, metal electrodes would pierce each end of the wiener, infusing the meat with a hearty dose of pure, savory Northern States Power*. Mmm-mmm! Ampere-licious!

Basically, the hot dog got cooked the way Michael Jeter got cooked in The Green Mile, only with less screaming.

Wait, that’s not true. I didn’t scream at all when I saw The Green Mile, so it actually comes out even.

Unlike the hot dog, which didn’t come out even at all. I used the cooker once. Okay, even that’s not strictly true; I tested the cooker once, then never plugged it in again. Trash was afraid to even test it, so it fell to me. I popped a couple of wieners in and sparked it up. I ignored the way the thing sounded like an angry hornet trying to get out of a running vibrator. I braved the aggressive smell of Oscar Mayer ozone filling the air. Trash cowered on the other side of the room.

When the hot dogs were “done,” the ends of the wieners were somehow both rubbery and inelastic, and also very black. The middles were still refrigerator-cold. I only know that from touching them, because even I wasn’t about to eat meat that had just been used to complete a circuit. I don’t care that my hot dog contains assholes and eyeballs. I care that it tastes like a meat Popsicle with the stick pulled out and charred gum erasers stuck on the ends. I care that it smells like Old Sparky at 12:03 a.m. I care that it contains electrons that were in freaking Monticello five seconds ago.

We wondered whether the cooker might work better if we used a brand of hot dog with higher or lower conductivity. Unfortunately those nutrition labels only tell you the number of calories they have—not the number of ohms. So we gave up rather than run the risk of having a kitchen that smelled like that little room at Sing Sing. But since the cooker was a gift from a relative, we couldn’t throw it away. Instead, we gave it to my sister the following Christmas.

I don’t know that she ever even test-fired the thing. Mystifying, really, considering the sales job that Trash and I gave it. Instead, she wrapped it up and gave it to my other sister a year later.

Every year since, the joy of opening Christmas gifts at my parents’ house has been punctuated with curses as I, or one of my sisters, or one of our significant others, open a package that turns out to contain the dreaded wiener zapper. Sure, we’ll dress it up—Debitch the Younger presented it to Trash one year as a piece of Xena merch, and we gave it to Debitch the Elder’s S.O. last year along with a talking condiment dispenser—but every Christmas, someone else is taking the hot dog cooker home for a year.

This year it was me. Debitch the Elder boxed it up with some buns, ketchup, mustard, and actual hot dogs. We have no idea how long those hot dogs went unrefrigerated, but Trash and Debitch the Elder both assured me that they were unsafe to eat.

Such a shame to waste good hot dogs like that. If only there were some kind of Frankensteinian device that I could use to bring them back to life…hmm.


* Xcel Energy was still called NSP back then. I do research now, remember?

posted by M. Giant 3:19 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, December 26, 2002  

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Shout-out to my sisters. Since my niece's Internet pseudonym is Deniece, my sisters (marvelous people and loyal readers, the both of them) have asked that I refer to them in these pages as "Debitches." For real. Thanks for the Christmas gifts, Debitches.

As for the rest of you, are you tired of Christmas? Too bad. Since I didn't get this posted yesterday, you're just going to have to deal.

I've decided I like the original version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" better. By now, it's been almost completely obscured by the happy, peppy version. But those of you who’ve heard the original—first featured in the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis, and recorded again last year by James Taylor—know that that version is a sanitized travesty. Those who haven't? Hold onto your post-holiday letdown. You're going to need it to cheer you up.

Imagine the following sung by the voice of Judy Garland—that jaded, depressed, booze-and-pill-soaked, world-weary sound whose frequency resonates so perfectly with the atavistic racial memory of disenchantment and downward spiral. That sound is of course made all the more tragic in this case by the fact that Judy Garland was only twenty-two at the time.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight

Wait, what? "Next year?" What happened to "from now on?" I want my troubles to be out of sight "from now on,' dammit! By "next year" I’m going to have all new troubles. "Next year" doesn’t help me one bit.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yuletide gay

There’s a remark here for someone to make, but that would have to be someone other than straight, manly, testosterone-soaked little me.

Next year all our troubles will be miles away

"Next year" again? What is with this "next year" shit? I know what you're trying to pull. You're hoping that by next year I won't remember you said this. Well, it’s not going to work, missy. It hasn’t worked for fifty-eight years, and it’s not going to work this time either.

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more

Okay, that's fine.

Someday soon, we all—

Wait—no, it bloody isn't! "Once again" is supposed to be "Here we are." And "will be" is supposed to be "gathered." Judy tried to pull a fast one, but we’re too smart for her. "Here we are…gathered" is much happier. That’s a party! It’s happening right now! And you’re all invited! Where as "once again…will be" is a forlorn cry of denial from an abandoned loser who's never going to see a single one of her friends or relatives ever again. Think about it: fifty-eight Christmases longing for "once-again…will be" over another stiff drink at the corner bar, knowing that the cast of one's dream holiday party has probably begun a brisk dying-off process by now. It makes me want to kill myself. Who can blame Judy Garland for not wanting to face such a bleak prospect?

Someday soon, we all will be together
If the fates allow

Someday soon? Someday soon?!? It's been fifty-eight years, woman! Years! As in 'through the years," which is how most of us know this line. "Through the years" is something you can count on. "Through the years" is a tradition. "Through the years" is as solid as the ground under our feet, and the fates can just kiss our eggnog-dimpled asses. "Someday soon" goes into the DayRunner™ above the entry that reads, "manned Jupiter landing."

Unless you’re talking about the party we'll throw when we’re all dead, of course. The old line reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is that one Christmas, and every Christmas after it, every last one of us is going to be in the frozen earth.

Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow

Oh, God. You go on without me. I don't think I can make it.

I actually adore this line. It's so brilliant in its downer-ness, especially when you compare it to the line that Frank Sinatra had the songwriter replace it with: "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." I mean, look at that. It's practically a non sequitur. Of course its not as bad as some of the replacements that the Chairman brainstormed, such as "Set the table while I cut open the sow" and "Fetch me a Glenlivet with some ice right now" and "Tony Bennett is a communist, and how." None of those lines would have replaced the original in the public mind, but the image of a Christmas tree with one ornament on it has. Go figure.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas now

Uh, okay. I'll get right on that. Thanks for setting the mood.

Listening to these words, I realized for the first time that this song actually has a pretty sad melody. The new words can't change that. They're like bright, festive, holiday wrapping paper with a big red bow tied up and wrapped around a coffin. Especially when you consider the original original lyric; the one that was too dark even for sad, tragic Judy Garland; the one she talked the songwriter into ditching before she even sang it. I found it when I was researching today's entry, and here it is:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It may be your last

(I know that I’m often guilty of exaggerating or lying for comic effect, but what you just read was absolutely true; I really did do research.)

What a different world we'd be living in if little kids grew up singing that. Coming from a thirteen-year-old who’s been agitating since Halloween for a copy of GTA:Vice City, "it may be your last" would take on some fairly ominous undertones. And ominous overtones, for that matter. Not to mention some pretty freaking ominous tones right smack at eye level.

Bottom line: we’re talking about the most depressing Christmas song ever to go mainstream. And of course, there's only one thing to do with such an artifact. Play it loud.






"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" words and music by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. All lyrics are the property and copyright of their respective owners. All lyrics are provided for educational purposes and personal use only.

posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, December 24, 2002  

Damn. Here it is, Christmas Eve, and I didn’t get you guys anything. I feel like such a schmuck. You’ve all been so good to me, and here I am repaying you with bubkes. And it’s not like we Internet people can’t find ways to show our appreciation for all y’all. Like Odd Todd, for instance. Or James Lileks. On behalf of his readers, he donated a water buffalo to a family in Southeast Asia, for the love of Pete. I’m not even kidding. Can I compete with that? No, I bloody well can’t.

But here’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to make you all a promise. I’m going to promise you that 2003 is going to be the best full year of Velcrometer to date. Provided I make it to the end, that is.

I’ll promise to update five times a week, except when I don’t.

And those are just the promises I can think of right now.

And there are going to be big changes coming soon. Big!

Okay, maybe they’ll only seem big to me because I’m going to be the one who’s making them, but I’m the one behind the mike here. And when I say big, then believe you me, you’d just better nod and smile politely and then roll your eyes after I look away. Got it?

Wait, I just thought of something I can do for you guys!

Years ago, when Trash and I were much younger and not all that financially solvent, one of the gifts I gave her was a Christmas story I wrote. It made her so happy that I’ve written her a new Christmas story every other year ever since. Some have been more successful than others, but she always enjoys them.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to post a link to one of my best Christmas stories, and you can click on it and be moved and touched and all that by the spirit of Christmas glowing from your monitor screen. I feel much better now.

Yeah. Anyway.

Christmas story. Link coming right up.

Any second now.

As soon as I find a place to post it and figure out how.

You know, now that I think about it, it’s a little late for a Christmas story. Maybe I’ll do that next year.

Hey, I just thought of another promise! A Christmas story, coming December 2003! Woo Hoo! You’ll love it! And you will have totally forgotten about my promise by then, so it’ll totally be a surprise.

Oh, and one more surprise for you: I don’t know if I’ll update tomorrow or not! You don’t know! It’s a surprise either way!

Okay, I’m done now.

Have a happy December 25th, everyone.

posted by M. Giant 12:34 PM 0 comments

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Monday, December 23, 2002  

If I ever used this blog to post multimedia, I’d be doing it today. Then you’d see video clips from the pre-Christmas celebration that my mother-in-law had at her house the other night. On the other hand, it’s enough just to know that some of that footage exists.

* Like my sister-in-law opening present after present, grateful and pleased at her haul but simultaneously holding out a fading hope that one of the boxes would contain a George Foreman Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine™. As the pile of gifts dwindled, we could almost see her counting the months until her birthday. Then she opened her penulitmate gift, a medium-sized box sent up by Trash’s Grandmother in Des Moines. Sure enough, it was the Foreman. SIL celebrated joyously in her chair. Her Christmas was complete. We moved on.

Everybody’s attention was directed at the next person opening her gift; everybody but one, that is. “What is this??” SIL suddenly cried.

Apparently she’d opened the box to look at the grill and the recipes inside. And there may well have been recipes inside. But there were also old photographs, older letters, and any number of random items. There sure as hell weren’t no George Foreman™ in there.

Upon being presented with this irreplaceable collection of family documents and herilooms, this box of memories, this cubic foot of love and trust, SIL’s reaction was priceless: “Get it away from me right now.”

My mother-in-law knew that Grandma had bought SIL a George Foreman, and assured her that Grandma had simply wrapped and sent the George Foreman box she’d used for filing by mistake, rather than the George Foreman box that contained SIL’s grill. Which was presumably still at Grandma’s house among several boxes of old photographs and letters. A swap would be effected, and everything would be cool.

The bonus is that I can’t tell you how many times one of us has unwrapped a box at Christmas and asked, “is this really what’s in here? Really? YAY!” You’d think we’d have stopped getting stung by that kind of thing by now.

SIL’s mood was immeasurably improved by her final gift, a clock that marks off the hours by playing recorded fart noises.


* Like my neice Deniece (now eleven months old) opening a fascinating musical fingerpainting toy and then being rather confused but incredibly patient while her mom and her two aunts spent about ten minutes playing with it.

My Brother in Law: You totally moved her hand away from it!

Trash: I dd not!

My Brother in Law: (after switching his camera to playback mode and spending ten minutes queuing up footage) Are you sure you didn’t move her hand?

Trash: No.


* Like the moment when my mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law opened up an envelope from SIL that included a note saying that SIL was going to be doing something pretty generous and thoughtful.

Stepfather-in-law: (reading the note) SIL! This is too much.

SIL: No, it’s not.

Mother-in-law: Let me put on my glasses so I can read it.

SFIL: It’s too much.

SIL: It’s really not.

MIL: Where are my glasses?

SFIL: Really, it’s way too much.

SIL: SFIL, it’s not either, now just…

MIL: SFIL, have you seen my glasses?

SFIL: This is so nice of you. This is too much.

SIL: No, no, I just—

MIL: Are they in the kitchen?

SFIL: Really, SIL, this is too much.

SIL: No, SFIL, it’s not.

MIL: Oh, here they are.

SFIL: SIL, thank you. Very, very much.

SIL: You’re welcome.

SFIL: It really is too much.

SIL: It’s okay.

SFIL: Thank you.

SIL: You’re welcome.

(They hug.)

MIL: (reading the note) SIL! This is too much!

Brother-in-law: I am so glad I got all that on tape.

So am I, BIL. So am I.

posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments

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Friday, December 20, 2002  

The other night, Trash and I were watching TV and this commercial comes on with a guy talking about digital cameras. He looked familiar and yet somehow…wrong.

“Who is that?” she asked me in the tones which indicate that the fate of the universe hangs on my answer. For a moment, I wasn’t sure who it was. Clint Howard under a limp toupee? A man-tanned Steve Buscemi? Mitch Pileggi wearing a combover? Crispin Glover with lip implants? Whoever it was, he had been shot through a camera filter designed to maximize ugly.

Finally, I answered my wife. “It’s Val Kilmer,” I said.

And the universe collapsed in on itself.

What the hell? Val Kilmer is a handsome man! From Iceman spikes to a Jim Morrison mane to a Doc Holliday mustache to a rubber mask with pointy ears, Val Kilmer has always been able to pull off a look. But here he was, smirking out at us from beneath two limp flaps that, despite looking totally weightless, seemed to have distorted the very shape of his head so he looked like a character in a Gahan Wilson cartoon. Or a newborn preemie who’d had to be yanked out jaw-first with forceps. Or a man who’d spent the morning trying to lift pallets of bricks with his skull. I’m telling you, the man looked wrong.

Which I could respect if it was for a part. “Kilmer gets new hairstyle for role as young Joe Pantoliano” isn’t exactly “DeNiro gains 100 pounds to play Capone,” as entertainment headlines go, but I can see him doing it. But this? Not so much.

Especially because the new look completely undercuts the Val Kilmer persona that the commercial plays upon. I don’t remember exactly what he was saying because I was busy unsuccessfully trying to track the source of whatever tachyon beam was distorting Kilmer’s image so catastrophically, but it was something along the lines of “Can you believe that I’ve been intimidated?” We were supposed to identify with notorious Pushy Guy Val Kilmer because he once found digital cameras intimidating. Val Kilmer! Val Kilmer fears nothing! That’s why everyone in Hollywood hates him! Because he fears nobody!

Okay, the line would have had greater effect if spoken by Jack Nicholson or Clint Eastwood, obviously, but I’ll give that a pass. Even Val Kilmer in hero hair might have gotten away with it. But leaving aside the fact that technophobia and social anxiety disorder are on the same end of two entirely different continuums, seeing Val Kilmer looking like this made it easy to imagine him being intimidated by a greeter at Wal-Mart.

So what the hell is up with Val Kilmer’s hair? I mean, seeing him as the spokesman in that camera commercial—

Wait. Clearly the real question is, what the hell is up with Val Kilmer’s career?

posted by M. Giant 2:55 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, December 19, 2002  

Okay, when I started this daily yammer back in March, I figured that as long as I stayed away from insulting my friends and family by name, I’d be okay, karmically. Apply the golden rule, avoid golden showers. Seemed simple enough.

But as it turns out, someone or something is reading this every day and finding ways to twist it against me. Something with a long memory, an alarming affinity for dramatic irony, and a thorough mastery of the source code to the universe.

I’m not just talking about my dire prediction of a shower-door disaster that came so messily and scarily true yesterday. I’m not just talking about all the times I’ve announced my plans to fix something in the house only to have the project go tragically off the rails. I’m also talking about the time I made fun of my wife’s coworker MC because the back of his car seat fell off. Because guess what I’m sitting on right now?

I’ve talked about how attached I am to my chair at work. I really am. I’m more attached to my chair than anyone else here. I’m more attached to my chair than is strictly healthy. In fact, I’m more attached to my chair than the back of my chair is. Therein lies my problem.

I’ve sat in this chair every workday for the past six years. There’s no other chair in this office that I want to sit in all day, and here’s why: they all have lumbar support. Sure, everyone tries to trick me into thinking that lumbar support is a good thing, but I’ve figured out that in most cases, “support” is just another word for “something uncomfortable.” I mean, support hose? Underwire support? Athletic support? Sure, people say they want those things, but none of them are comfortable enough to sleep in. And support groups? When they show support groups in the movies, do those people look like they’re having fun?

What I love about my chair is its complete lack of lumbar support. It supports my ass, and I can lean back, but that’s it. I don’t have some “therapeutic” roll of foam rubber trying to nerve-pinch my lower back like a confused Vulcan, and I don’t need it. So how did I get a chair that’s different from everyone else’s? did I special-order it? Did I bring it from home? Nope. It’s just a little broken. Just broken enough, to be precise. Until recently.

Of course, the problem with relying daily on something that’s just slightly broken is the constant risk that it’ll either get fixed or completely broken. Ask Joe Cocker, who tried to quit smoking a few years ago and then had to start again when his voice began sounding like Bing Crosby’s. In the case of my chair, the back just sort of floats there instead of being rigidly bolted to the frame so it can push my vertebrae out of alignment. Every once in a while the one bolt that barely held it in place would work itself loose and drop to the floor, whereupon I’d have to pull out the Allen wrench and screw it back in. That was so worth not having to hang myself up in gravity boots for an hour every time I got home, though.

But last week, I went too far. While standing with my back against the chair back and the chair’s arms braced against the edge of my desk, I leaned back. The bolt popped out and the chair got just a little bit more broken.

I tried to screw the bolt back in like dozens of times before, but it didn’t work. Eventually I figured out that the end of the bolt had snapped clean off in its socket. The bolthole was completely plugged and I wasn’t getting it clear again without a cutting torch. So now the back of my chair is even more floaty than it was before, having nothing to hold it in place but pure inertia. Once or twice a day, I now have to reach behind myself and push the metal bar back into its socket. It’s still worth it, though.

How do I know this? When I was out of the office yesterday, taking care of my nearly-fragged wife, my boss sat in my chair, leaned back, and just…um…kept going. Rather than suing me, she rolled the chair into the coatroom, the back sitting flat on the seat like the shield of a fallen Viking warrior. I came back this morning to find it replaced with an intact model. I figured I’d give it a try, see how bad it really was.

Ten minutes later, I felt like someone had broken both of my hips, smacked me across the small of the back with a nail-studded railroad tie, and strapped me into an acceleration couch atop a Saturn V rocket. I decided my old chair wasn’t that broken, and retrieved it from the coatroom. I’m such a prima donna sometimes.

So now there are three chairs at my desk. The “guest” chair, the replacement chair, and My chair. It’s only a matter of time before My chair deteriorates beyond the point of usability. I plan to make use of that time by figuring out exactly how to break the replacement chair just enough so that it works the way I want it to.

And don’t tell me that sentence isn’t going to come back and bite me on the ass.

* * *

And now my archives are down. I'm being totally messed with here.

posted by M. Giant 3:24 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, December 18, 2002  

Remember these words from last week?

Every shower is a game of Russian Roulette in which the front halves of our feet are at stake. So I need to find some of those little guides posthaste, or, failing that, buy a whole new shower door assembly complete with new hardware. Or, failing that, look forward to the inevitable day when the pleasure of a morning ablution is somewhat marred by the sudden presence of millions of tiny, transparent knives and spears burying one of us to the ankles.

The good news, as it turns out, is that the door was made of safety glass, so 99.99% of it turned into comparatively benign chunks the size and shape of crushed ice. Trash and I are still picking the other .01% of it out of her epidermis.

Yes, she was the big loser in the Russian Roulette game this morning. I was still in bed when I heard a crash and a scream of terror. I was in the bathroom before she could even call my name. She was standing on one bleeding foot in a bathtub that appeared to be filled ankle-deep with a blue-raspberry Mr. Misty™, with a look on her face as if she’d just had a near miss from a tankbuster artillery shell. Which, in a sense, she had. I threw a bath towel down on top of the crunchy shrapnel on the floor and helped her to the living room, where I cleaned the blood off of her and applied Band-Aids™ where necessary.

The nurse at the Urgent Care Center told her she wouldn’t need stitches, but there were some things she’d need to look out for that might indicate bigger problems. These included rashes, skin irritation, itchiness, and coughing up neatly sliced sections of lung.

She’s having the itchiness, all right. She describes it as the feeling you get after you get a haircut, when the little hairlets poke your skin until you shower them off. Except in this case, it’s all over her body and instead of little hairlets, they’re wee little crystalline knives. Fun. Every few minutes or so, she’ll feel a concentrated itch or sting somewhere, and one of us will bring the tweezers and a bright light to bear on the spot until we fish out a barely visible sparkle.

Obviously neither of us went to work today, what with the recovery and cleanup and the PTSD and all. Like I said, the safety glass did its job by breaking into two sizes of fragment: too dull to maim, and too small to maim. The dull pieces were easy to deal with, the smallest ones about the size of a large Nerd™. It was the glittering dust that was a pain. But at least now the bathroom is cleaner than it’s been since…well, two days ago, which was when we cleaned it last. And I’m going to need to vacuum the whole house again, just in case we tracked it around. I wish I’d known this was going to happen. I wouldn’t have bothered vacuuming on Monday. On the other hand, now I know how many gallons make up a shower door panel (about three, judging from the size of the wastebasket I filled).

I feel responsible in a way. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if I’d gotten around to fixing the shower door track days ago. On the other hand, maybe it would have. Trash said it didn’t fall off the track; it was already closed when her own personal ice storm went down. That happens sometimes, you know. One day, at my previous place of employment, someone gently nudged a mailcart against a swinging glass door to open it, just like he did every day. One nanosecond later, shattered glass covered most of downtown Minneapolis. Just one of those things, like today. That sheet of glass hung in our bathroom for over nine years, sliding back and forth against the frame several times a day, and all it took to break it was a bump from an elbow that Trash didn’t even feel herself. Frightening. Whatever the cause, I wish it had been me in there when the glass was flying. I hate that she had to go through that blinding fear, and that she’s hurt now. I somehow got a wee little spur lodged in the skin next to my nose, and as I tweezed it out I was just happy that it meant one less stuck in her.

Trash is pretty sure she had the worst scare of her life today, and this is a woman who was once locked in the back seat of a police car with a suspect. I asked her if she wanted to write a guest entry today about her brush with death, but she declined, saying that all she’d be able to say about it would be “AAAAAAAHH!”

It’s a gray, rainy day here, perfect for pondering one’s mortality. After we got as much glass out of her as we could, she wrapped herself in blankets and curled up in an armchair. Orca, as if sensing her distress, crawled up to be next to her and offer the benefit of her fuzzy, comforting presence. She purred a couple of times, gave Trash a few affectionate head nudges, and vomited on her. Just to make the morning complete.

Later I’m going to go to the store to buy a shower curtain, but that’s going to be much later.

posted by M. Giant 2:41 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, December 17, 2002  

Lately, there’s an issue I’ve been spending way too much time thinking about. It’s something I haven’t found a way around. Especially now that I’ve got this blog that I spend so much time working on. It’s a somewhat controversial grammar rule that a lot of people have had enough of. But for others, it’s one they can’t live without. Churchill said, “That is nonsense up with which I shall not put;” or at least, Churchill is the guy whom that quote is most often attributed to.

Now is the time you’ve probably figured it out by.

Yes, I’m talking about the rule that claims that a preposition is something you should never end a sentence with. It’s something I’m tired of obsessing about. I’m hoping that after today’s entry, my system will have gotten it out.

Years ago, I thought I had this rule completely written off. Not that it was something I ever put too much thought into. I just assumed that everyone had figured out that its day was through. I agreed with them…until.

No, actually, I do still agree with the people who think that the preposition rule is one that should have been gotten rid of. The problem is that there are other people, people whose intelligence and abilities I respect and admire, who still think it’s a rule to live by. And that’s a reality that I can’t quite get my mind around.

See, when I do my final edit before posting every day (on the days when I do a final edit, that is), I always find stuff that the entry will be better off without. Typos and spelling errors are worth spending a couple of minutes on. Passive voice is generally, and rightly, looked down upon. As correctly are split infinitives, especially considering how easy those are to correct for. Of course, there are rules that I consciously ignore on occasion, just because there’s a certain way I want them to read like. Entries with fragments throughout. And if I listened to Microsoft Word’s grammar checker every time it told me that a sentence I composed was too long, well, let’s just say that I’d have a whole lot fewer long sentences in these pages, and I like to flatter myself that that particular quirk is one that people would miss if it disappeared, so Microsoft Word’s grammar checker is just going to have to get over the fact that it’s what I write like this in spite of. But as for ending sentences with prepositions, even Word doesn’t consider it worth calling me on.

The preposition thing, though, is hard to get over. That’s because I can drop those other idiosyncrasies, depending on what I’m writing about and whom I’m writing it for. It results in drier prose, but I can still get my point across. On the other hand, the preposition rule can demand some pretty tortured sentence construction if slavishly adhered to. Is the very meaning and sense of the language something that a seemingly arbitrary rule of grammar should be prioritized above? The rules of grammar should facilitate meaning, not leave it behind.

But as time passes, it’s a boundary that I find myself less and less inclined to step beyond. What if the person who reads one of my preposition-terminal sentence is someone that the rule is law to? Fine, I’m sure that happens all the time, but what if that person is an employer whom I might conceivably get offered a job by? Especially if that’s the only rule that person knows, and he or she can’t even write a contraction without looking in a dictionary to check which letters the apostrophe goes between. That’s the kind of humiliation I’d have trouble getting past.

As a result, this is a rule that I’ve gotten fairly good at writing around. 95% of the time, I can simply reconstruct a sentence so that I don’t have to choose, rather than forcing myself to go one way or another whenever the issue comes up. And this relatively new skill of mine, I’m a little bothered by. Maybe I should be totally militant about the rule; after all, everybody needs an injustice to rebel against. And a world where Kiefer Sutherland slams suspects against the wall and has to bellow, “For whom are you working?” isn’t a world I want to live in.

The bottom line, as far as I’m concerned, is that language should be like government in the sense that the people should be whom it’s of, by, and for. Not to mention from, about, under, with, and toward.

Or maybe this question upon which I’m hung is something over which I need to just get.

posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments

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Monday, December 16, 2002  

So we still have most of the furniture out of the basement from when we installed the new ceiling. I’ve been putting off moving everything back in there because I wanted to use this opportunity to paint the walls. And also because I didn’t want to move everything back in there.

What with the holiday rush, Saturday was the first chance I’ve had to slap a new tint up onto the masonite. Trash was out of the house all day, cranking out Christmas cookies like Mrs. Fields on speed. Every time we’ve painted since we first moved into the house, we’ve either had plenty of help or Trash and I did it together. I’ve always been curious as to what it would be like to paint a room by myself. Especially now that my curiosity has been satisfied about similar experiences, such as undergoing extensive root canal work.

I severely underestimated the amount of elbow grease it would take to get years of accumulated cigarette, candle, and furnace smoke off the walls. It probably wouldn’t have ever gotten so bad, but the basement light fixtures that came with the house were about as bright as the person who picked them out. Someone could have drawn occult symbols on the wall in charcoal and we never would have known. I’ve actually been in submarines that were less oppressive. But the combination of our shiny new white ceiling and new fluorescent lights made it apparent that I had some work to do before I applied the new color. Even when I turned off my 300-watt work light. Which I tried. But even I wouldn’t let myself get away with that.

So after several hours of scrubbing and taping off all of the edges and the woodwork, it was time to go get the paint.

“What?” you’re saying. “You didn’t even have the paint yet?” Well, no, but I had the color all picked out. Our house lacks a room with a red color scheme, so I was going to go with a kind of russet-brown color. I expected that this would match the furniture and the woodwork that we had down there, since I had taken the color directly from the matte on a painting we’ve had hung on the basement wall for years. Trash agreed (in exchange for her getting carte blanche from me on the new color of the second bedroom—in front of witnesses, no less), so I headed off to Home Depot with paint chips in hand.

In the actual paint aisle, I chickened out a bit. I decided to get the same hue in a lighter shade, out of fear that if I went too dark I would turn our basement into something that looked like the inside of a storm drain. So the color I went with was a kind of dusty tan. I paid for my two gallons of dusty tan paint, brought home my dusty tan paint, and spent several hours spreading my new, dusty tan paint on the basement walls.

Once it was on the walls, and the sun went down, and I shut off the work lights, my dusty tan paint became royal purple.

What the hell?!

I can think of a couple of things that went wrong. First, the lower half of our walls in the basement are made of a red-stained wood paneling. We have a brown leather sofa and another couch with a brown and gold floral pattern (it’s so much nicer than I made it sound). In that environment, and under the shiny new white ceiling and new fluorescent lights, the insufficient amount of red and brown in the paint color I chose just gave up and ceded equal ground to the dash of blue-gray.

It is also entirely possible that I’m color-blind.

But seriously, the color looked tan in the store. It looked tan on the ride home. It looked tan in the kitchen. Then I brought it downstairs, and I might as well have papered the walls with Vikings jerseys. Maybe the paint should have had warning label on it: CAUTION: Color will change dramatically below ground level. I don’t know.

I also don’t know why I didn’t just stop when I realized I had the wrong color. I think I was hoping that once I had it all evenly applied all over the room, that somehow it would counteract itself and look the way I intended it to. Instead, I just made my basement look like the inside of an eggplant.

Obviously we’re going to be repainting at the next possible opportunity (read: the first weekend in January, probably). Only two things have prevented it from being a total disaster: I only used one gallon, so I can bring the other one back. And I left the dropcloths and masking tape in place, so all that’s left to do is the actual painting. It’ll be just like putting on a third and fourth coat on the same project.

But this time, it’ll be in a good color. I know because Trash helped me pick it out this time.

posted by M. Giant 3:42 PM 0 comments

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Friday, December 13, 2002  

I still don’t have a TiVo, but I entered a sweepstakes to win one. I really shouldn’t link to it like that, because the more there are of you who enter, the smaller my chances of winning. Then again, I could always appeal to your sense of karma and count on the winner to pass the prize along to the guy who hooked you up. I’m just saying.

* * *

We’re going to Austin!

No particular reason. It’s not for business, we don’t have relatives there, and SXSW won’t be going on. It’s just that a Minnesota winter can be pretty grim if you try to get through it all in one sitting. So we like to head for more southerly latitudes for a few days every January, but we prefer to go to places we’ve never been to while avoiding the MTV Spring Break-type destinations (yes, we know Spring Break isn’t until a few months later, but you can’t be too careful). So this year we’re going to Austin. Last year we went to Georgia, and the year before we went to New Orleans. Apparently it’s always Spring Break on Bourbon Street, but we didn’t know that then, okay? Get your filthy mitts off my beads, dammit!

Anyway, since you guys came through so spectacularly on tips for our trip to Seattle, I’m putting out a call for suggestions of things for us to do in Austin. Omar has already graciously offered to show us around, and we’ll happily take him up on it, but he’s got a life of his own and can’t be expected to baby-sit us for five days. That’s your job.

So e-mail me. Tell me about the things you like to do in Austin, the things we should see, the places we should eat, the bands we should hear, the bars we should drink in (and not just the one where Jenna Bush got arrested, either). I’ll even trust you not to purposely suggest things you know will suck because you think those kind of experiences will make for good blog entries. They do, I agree, but that’s an excellent way to get yourself an engraved invitation to an exclusive gathering in Hell.

We’re going to be there (Austin, not Hell) January 8 through 13. Any tips you all have are welcome This is one of the cool things about having a blog that nobody tells you about: access to an interactive travel guide.

Of course, you let us down on New York and we ended up with nothing to do but sit and stare at each other in Lawre’s apartment for four days. This is your chance to redeem yourselves.

* * *

We’re also considering the possibility of a trip to Las Vegas. And not just because I think you haven’t read enough about Sin City on other Damn Hell Ass Kings sites this week. Our friends in Michigan say they’re going in February and we’re thinking about latching on to their excursion like the joy-sucking parasites we are. We don’t have plane tickets yet, but we have reserved a hotel room at the same place they’re staying.

Ever notice that when you say you’re going to Vegas, people always ask you, “where are you staying?” and you tell them, and they always know where it is? I can’t wait for people to start asking me that about this trip. I mean, I literally can’t wait. I’m answering a question I haven’t been asked about a trip that hasn’t been confirmed yet, and I’m gong to do it right now.

If we go, we’re staying at the Westward Ho Rear.

It actually exists. It’s actually called that. We’ll have to tell our parents that “You can reach us at the Westward Ho Rear.” We’ll get into taxicabs on Fremont Avenue at four in the morning drunk on complimentary cocktails and garish casino carpeting and financially liberating gains at the Pai-Gow table, and we’ll have to articulate the phrase “Westward Ho Rear.” We’ll send our grandmothers postcards from the Westward Ho Rear. God, I love Vegas.

And I haven’t even told you the best part yet.

It’s thirty dollars a night.

Westward Ho Rear. Thirty dollars a night.

A whole weekend going in and out of the back entrance of a thirty-dollar-a-night Ho. Sounds like heaven to me.

posted by M. Giant 3:33 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, December 12, 2002  

A few years ago, a friend of a friend was browsing a garage sale. This was a remarkably well-organized garage sale. Everything was sorted and labeled. I’ve never held a garage sale, but I’m pretty sure that if I did, the only label would be at the end of the driveway and it would read “MISCELLANEOUS CRAP” in letters two feet high. And now that I’ve described how I’d do the labeling, I assume I don’t have to get into how much sorting I’d do.

But this wasn’t my garage sale. It was someone else’s. Someone else who had a very developed sense of order. Sure, most of garage sales have areas divided into “clothes” (read: what the hell was I thinking buying that pashmina?), “books” (read: I’m never going to get through Gravity’s Rainbow or Finnegan’s Wake when Pirate of my Windswept Heart is still on the shelf), and “records” (read: you never know, you might find the Captain Beefheart album you’ve been looking for for ten years amid all those copies of Kissing to be Clever). But even those have a space for uncategorizable items that just get shoved together and leave you to figure it out. Good luck sussing out the purpose of that doodad on the table between the tire valve repair tool and the garlic press.

Unless you’re at the garage sale I’m describing, where such an item would be clealy labeled “blender tripod” or “doorframe broom” or whatever. Nothing was too random to rate a label. Including a headless Ken™ doll next to a Ziploc™ bag of Barbie™ shoes.

How would someone label such a tempting package? I’ll tell you.

The label read: “Headless Ken With Shoes. $0.25.”

How can you turn down a bargain like that? Headless Ken With Shoes, people! Where else are you going to get Headless Ken With Shoes at any cost, let alone the bargain price of one single quarter? I ask you, how much would you pay for headless Ken? And how much would you pay for an assortment of mismatched doll shoes? What if you could get them both in one place? For less than a dollar? If you try to tell me you’d walk away from an offer like that, you’re a big fat liar, that’s what. People spend decades drifting from one garage sale to another and never come across a find like that. They die unfulfilled, never knowing the thrill of browsing some anonymous citizen’s yard or garage and coming across the kind of treasure they never knew they were looking for.

Of course, the FOAF snapped it right up and took it to the register, gushing over the brilliance of the packaging and display. She begged to take the label with her.

“This is so great! It’s like found art! I can put it on my mantel! ‘Headless Ken With Shoes!’ I love it!”

“You could do that,” the garage seller allowed uncertainly.

The FOAF yammered on excitedly, ccomplimenting her host on her surrealist marketing savvy, not aware that the surrealist herself was growing increasingly confused. As it turned out, the surrealist was actually a literalist so far into literalism that she had tipped back over into surrealism. Hence the label.

Can I just say again, “Headless Ken With Shoes?”

But this was lost on the FOAF until the seller tried to participate: “You could put other shoes with it, and a sign that says ‘more shoes,’” she said, in the tone that people use when they’re tied to a chair and saying, “You’re absolutely right. Charles Manson certainly is a misunderstood genius.”

The FOAF suppressed the rest of her glee and finished the transaction. As she left, she glanced in her rearview mirror to see the amateur merchant quickly closing the garage door and taking down the sign.

And another artistic genius was crushed prematurely by an ill-timed review.

posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, December 11, 2002  

How glad are all of you that my niece Deniece (not her real name, obviously) has moved away so I can only see her every couple of months or so? And how much dread fills the pit of your stomach when I do?

Yes, Trash and I drove down to Iowa this weekend to deliver Christmas gifts to the relatives and see Deniece, who is now ten-and-a-half months old. I haven’t mentioned this before because it seems kind of immodest, but I appear to be one of Deniece’s favorite people. For whatever reason. She and her parents were in town a couple of weeks ago. Trash met them for lunch, but I wasn’t free. Deniece greeted Trash warmly enough, then started looking around for the guy who always shows up with her. The message was clear: y’all are fine and everything, but where’s my boy?

So in advance of our visit, Deniece’s mom admonished her not to ignore my wife in favor of me. Not that Deniece would be able to understand, mind you. All she understood was my name, which sent her into wiggly chuckles. I’m not letting it go to my head, though. Most of the women in my life outgrow that at some point. Not all, though, which has made for a few embarrassing moments in Detox.

But back to the point at hand, which is that Deniece was pretty happy to see us when we showed up. She flashed her radiant hockey-player smile and started pointing at things. That’s her new primary way of communicating. She knows a few words, and she’ll use an undifferentiated vowel noise when she doesn’t know the right word, but mostly she’s into pointing. It’s kind of an all-purpose gesture for her. Depending on the context, it means “hey, look at that” or “I want to look at that” or “what’s that” or “get me, I recently learned how to point.” She’s still not an expert, though. Sometimes she has to stare at her hand with an air of intense concentration while she gets it into pointing configuration, like a Prom Queen trying to do a Vulcan salute. Except cuter.

We let her open one of our Christmas gifts to her early. She doesn’t quite grasp the concept of opening gifts yet, mind you, but I’m sure that’ll change with lots of practice over the next few weeks. We got her an inflatable gym, which is basically a balloon shaped like a basket big enough for her to stand in. And there are these inflatable hammer shapes hanging from the handle over her head that she can reach up and bop so they’ll make a jingling noise. She loves it. She’d love it even more if it were big enough for all of us to join her in it, but she makes do with leaning against the sides and hollering if nobody’s within a few inches of her. And we like it because can you imagine the effect a giant balloon sitting on the carpet has on the fine, light hair of the baby standing inside it, directly under two other balloons? That’s right. She looks like a tiny human Tesla coil.

Did I mention she’s walking? She’s not going to be strolling to the park this week, but she’s definitely finding her feet. She can take a couple of steps in a row unaided. You just have to set her up first by getting her to stand up straight and balance on her own, which is sometimes a bit like balancing an egg on end. Then she’ll either stumble a few steps to the nearest person or decide she’s not in the mood and collapse the short distance to the floor. I can still beat her every time in a footrace, though, so go me.

But buy far the coolest thing she can do (at least IMHO) is say my name. “Mama” and “dada” are well and truly ensconced in her vocabulary, to the point where she’ll go into lengthy free-form riffs along the lines of “mamamamamama” and its masculine equivalent. And she’ll also emit a staccato vowel sound with a little sigh on the end of it once in a while. I jokingly commented that the staccato vowel sound with a little sigh on the end of it was her way of saying my name, since my real-life handle has a phoneme or two that nobody should expect a ten-and-a-half-month-old to produce. Then we realized that she was emitting it the same way every time. Then her parents asked her to say my name and she did it again. The same way. Twice.

She knows my name. She says my name. It’s a staccato vowel sound with a little sigh on the end of it to her, but that doesn’t matter. She’s still learning her first words and one of them is the word for me.

I’m going to get along pretty well with this kid.

posted by M. Giant 3:31 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, December 10, 2002  

Warning: Contains Spoilers.

The 20th James Bond film, Die Another Day, has been in theaters for a couple of weeks and has done pretty well. Lots of people have seen it. If you’re not one of those people, stop reading now, because I’m going to start wrecking it for you in about two paragraphs.

I admit my memory of the earlier Bond films isn’t terribly reliable, not least of all because I haven’t seen every one of them. And of course it’s unfair to apply the same standards to movies that were made forty years apart, even if they are in the same series. But in the older films, did Bond rely as much on his smoldering British sex-voodoo as he does now?

Sure, Connery got lots of tastefully lit poontang, going all the way back to Dr. No. But he was also reasonably good at figuring things out and following leads. The only thing 007 follows now is the thing in the trousers of his Brioni tuxedo. Where would Brosnan’s Bond—and by extension, the world—be without the effect of his mind-melting man-mojo?

We’ll go through Die Another Day, starting at the beginning. Obviously, at any of the points below, Ugly Bond’s movie would be over. But since this is an exercise in speculation anyway, we’ll ignore that for the purposes of our little thought experiment. This is where I start wrecking it for people who haven’t seen it. I’m not kidding, people. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

At the beginning of the film, Bond is captured and thrown into a North Korean prison, where he is tortured for fourteen months under the ardent supervision of an intense, sexy, female North Korean army officer.

Ugly Bond is tortured for about fourteen minutes under the half-assed supervision of a desultory, middle-aged functionary who loses his paperwork within a week. The torture is uninspired and brief, but Ugly Bond is still there to this day. Main bad guy is free to destroy the world.

Bond is traded back to MI6 in a prisoner swap. M (Academy Award Winner™ Judi Dench), believing that Bond cracked under torture, blames him for security leaks and coldly tells him, “You’re no use to anyone.”

Ugly Bond is told by M, “You’re no use to anyone. And put a shirt on, for God’s sake. Obviously they weren’t starving you.” Ugly Bond works out on his Ab-Ixnayer in prison while main bad guy destroys the world.

Bond escapes to a Hong Kong hotel, where he flings an ashtray through a mirror to discover the hotel manager and a video crew set up to film his tryst with a hot masseuse. Bond blackmails the manager into directing him to the secondary bad guy.

Ugly Bond flings an ashtray through a mirror. The ashtray lands on an empty floor. The mirror is added to Ugly Bond’s bill, for which he has to work several days of overtime while the main bad guy is busy destroying the world.

Bond encounters Jinx (Academy Award Winner™ Halle Berry) in Cuba. They swap cheesy pickup lines until it gets dark, whereupon they swap fluids. And snacks. Bond then follows Jinx to the island where the bad guy is.

Ugly Bond encounters Jinx and attempts a suave double-entendre. Jinx beats Ugly Bond unconscious.

Bond returns to London, where Q (John Cleese) treats him like an annoying idiot.

Ugly Bond returns to London, where Q treats him like an annoying idiot. Yay, Q!

Bond introduces himself to a fencing instructor (Madonna), who flirts with him and offers to introduce him to the main bad guy (Toby Stephens, son of Academy Award Winner™ Maggie Smith). Bond defeats the main bad guy in a swordfight and gets invited to the main bad guy’s party palace in Iceland, where the entire middle third of the movie takes place.

Ugly Bond introduces himself to a fencing instructor, who tells him, “Wait over there.” Main bad guy goes to Iceland and destroys the world.

Bond hits on Jinx some more in Iceland. He later rescues her from an automated laser which can be controlled with great precision, on multiple axes, and in three dimensions with one two-button controller.

Ugly Bond tries to hit on Jinx some more. She beats him unconscious again, but this time she also takes a grisly souvenir. Jinx later gets carved up by the automated laser. Main bad guy later destroys world.

Bond goes to bed with double agent Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) because he knows she wants him. This sets the stage for her to betray him so the main bad guy can destroy the world.

Ugly Bond goes to bed with double agent Miranda Frost because who knows when he’ll get another shot at some action? This sets the stage for her to betray him so the main bad guy can destroy the world.

Bond and Jinx pursue the main bad guy onto his private 747 and prevent him from destroying the world.

Ugly Bond pursues the main bad guy onto his private 747. Without backup, he dies a lot. Main bad guy destroys the world.

Don’t get me wrong. I dug the movie, in an I-paid-for-my-popcorn-with-my-frontal-lobe kind of way. On the other hand, people keep talking about how the Bond franchise needs to be “shaken up,” but obviously nobody is committed to doing any such thing. Sure, they’ll toss in an Oscar-winning Bond Girl or make 007 “play hurt” for an episode. But I won’t believe they’re serious about it until Her Majesty’s Secret Service issues a license to kill to Steve Buscemi. Let’s see who Britain’s greatest secret agent is then.

Oh, and sorry about all the spoilers.

posted by M. Giant 3:25 PM 0 comments

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Monday, December 09, 2002  

I remember hearing somewhere once that a house can go for seven years without any maintenance before it starts to fall apart. Someone needs to tell my house that.

Every time I wrap up some project or another on the house, I mentally set a timer to seven years. This is even though I know that other stuff in the house needs attention, and by the time I get finished doling out all my attention, other stuff will need attention. I’m not talking about cleaning, obviously; our living room carpet would be in pretty dire shape if I didn’t run the Singer over it at least twice in that time. I’m talking about actual projects, like the basement ceiling (not quite finished, but pretty functional) and fixing the toilet.

Yes, the toilet finally got fixed. The bucket in the basement has been retired from its sewage-catching duties and is once again back in action making soup for destitute orphans. The little nippers are so grateful.

But the house has caught on to the existence of the timer. The house hates the timer. The house thwarts the timer at every possible turn.

This last time, the toilet wasn’t even fixed before something else broke. My dad and I were balancing a couple of hundred pounds of porcelain on the edge of the bathtub so he could insert the small rubber Bundt cake that’s supposed to make sure everything we flush goes directly into the sewer without stopping in a bucket in our basement (and by the way, you don’t realize how small your bladder can be until the only toilet in your house is temporarily out of commission). Without realizing it, we snapped off one of the little plastic guides that are supposed to keep our shower door sliding smoothly along its track. To be more accurate, it was the last of the little plastic guides that are supposed to keep the shower door sliding smoothly along its track. Now the only thing holding up these deadly sheets of glass just like the one that beheaded David Warner in The Omen are a couple of little plastic wheels that are already in the habit of popping off every once in a while. So now our basement is dry, but every shower is a game of Russian Roulette in which the front halves of our feet are at stake. So I need to find some of those little guides posthaste, or, failing that, buy a whole new shower door assembly complete with new hardware. Or, failing that, look forward to the inevitable day when the pleasure of a morning ablution is somewhat marred by the sudden presence of millions of tiny, transparent knives and spears burying one of us to the ankles.

But I’m not just talking about the stuff I break in the process of fixing other stuff. It goes without saying that that happens. I’m talking about stuff like the fact that less than twenty-four hours after the first flush that kept the water inside the pipes, I broke our mailbox.

I didn’t back a school bus into it or anything, which is good as the mailbox is attached to the front of our house (okay, will somebody explain why I just typed “haus?”) and vehicular damage to it would have been unlikely to remain isolated to the mailbox itself. No, I just took out the mail the other night and closed the box with a little more gusto than was strictly necessary in order to dislodge the fluffy snow that was resting on top of it. I not only dislodged the snow, but one of the hinges, leaving the mailbox dangling at an angle from the remaining hinge. The only way we were going to receive our mail the next day was if I jammed the plastic pole from our miniature U.S. flag into the hole left by the broken hinge. It’s probably a violation of both the postal code and the flag code, but I’ve already bought a new mailbox that I plan to install tonight. Get off my ass.

The point, I guess, is that whenever we work on the house, there’s always some sense that we’re accomplishing something, and that at some point in the future, it’s actually feasible that we will reach that impossible state we call finished. Then I see some TV show about fixer-uppers and there’s a couple who have been living with a table saw in their Victorian kitchen for ten years, or I remember that we’ve never painted the upstairs bedroom, or I break the damn mailbox, and I realize that “finished” is never going to happen. The best we can hope for is probably “momentum,” and by definition that’s not really something that you can rest and bask in the glow of.

I guess this latest round of home improvement started just under two years ago, when my dad helped me remodel the kitchen. That means I have five more years to get everything else in the house done before the kitchen requires my attention again. The clock is ticking. I just hope I can beat it.

posted by M. Giant 3:19 PM 0 comments

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Friday, December 06, 2002  

The following headline appeared in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last weekend:

Hummer is a Bummer on Willy St., But It’s a Ball at the Mall

The headline-writing staff of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is either a lot more mature than I am, or a lot less mature than I am.

* * *

There’s something I do that makes everybody look at me like I’m an idiot. Actually, there’s a whole list of things I do that make everybody look at me like I’m an idiot, but I’m only going to tell you about one of them today. As per usual.

I cut the fingers off a pair of knit gloves and I wear them under my normal gloves.

I initiated this practice almost a decade and a half ago, when I was attending the University of Minnesota and the only way to get across Washington Avenue was to expose oneself to gusts of wind off the Mississippi River that were as keen as a tsunami of liquid nitrogen. Desperate to hold on to my personal BTUs, willing to do anything short of wearing a dorky hat, I basically invented thermal underwear for my hands. I haven’t looked back since.

Some of you will say, “duh, I’ve been doing that for years.” But based on the reactions of people I know, the majority of you will have some kind of weird resistance to the idea that is completely inexplicable to me. What’s the matter with you anyway?

The big objection is that “your fingers are the part of your hand that gets cold when you’re wearing gloves anyhow.” That’s true. I experimented for a while with wearing just the cut-off fingers under my gloves, but they’d go all over the place when I took the gloves off. Plus I looked pretty uncool when I was painstakingly applying what looked like ten little knitted condoms.

But here’s the thing; your fingers get cold because blood doesn’t want to flow to them in low temperatures. It would much rather be back in your torso where it’s nice and warm (and where you have how many layers on? Hmmm? Hypocrites). But if the main part of your hand is warm, the blood doesn’t have to travel as far from the extremities to get heated back up. Which means your fingers don’t get as cold. I have tested this phenomenon scientifically, and my subject pool, which consists of me, has reported 100% success.

The other advantage? People who wear just one pair of gloves or mittens have two choices when they actually want to use their fingers: enduring cold hands, or manipulating keys and change through an arm-end covering that reduces its effectiveness to that of one of those coin-operated crane games at the arcade. And speak to me not of fancy thin gloves whose ads promise that you’ll be able to perform neurosurgery while wearing them (even if you couldn’t before); if the weather is warm enough that you can get away with one of those thin sheaths stretched over your gripper, you don’t need it anyhow. And I’m not interested in those convertible mittens made famous by Jack Lemmon in Grumpy Old Men; if I wanted to wear mittens, I’d wear mittens. Whereas my under-glove allows me to minimize exposure while maximizing dexterity. Without them, I never would have succeeded in getting the Christmas lights on the house the other night. I would have been reduced to hanging them the way high school students hang toilet paper from trees. With them, the guy in the Jack London story I linked to yesterday might still be alive. He'd be very old, but he’d be alive.

And yet everyone thinks it’s dorky. You’d think people would know better in Minnesota of all places.

As a telecommunications analyst, a musician, a writer, and a husband, my fingers are important to me. That’s why I’m passing along my discovery, as a public service. At no charge. You’re welcome.

Unless someone decides to patent this idea, in which case I want a cut.

* * *

Speaking of getting a cut of things, you may have noticed the new link at the right that connects to the PDA version of the site. My boy Kraftmatik, one of my Krakathoom bandmates, not only figured out how to do it, but did it. He’d probably do it for you, too, if it’s worth a couple of C-notes to you (a bit of which I’d get as commission). If so, I can put you in touch with him. If not, then, as you were.

posted by M. Giant 3:53 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, December 05, 2002  

First of all, a big shout-out to my coworker T. Rex who did me a big favor today that saved me from being stranded at the office. I’d tell you the whole story, but it’s embarrassing to me.

*sknx*…

Ha! Hee, hee! Sorry, couldn’t keep a straight face there. I’ll try again: I’d tell you the whole story, but it’s boring.

Yep.

Wouldn’t want to be boring.

…

…Bwah ha ha!

Okay, moving along.

* * *

I strung the Christmas lights on our house last night. When we got back from our weekend in Wisconsin, we noticed that pretty much everyone who was going to light their houses lit them while we were gone. I can understand why some people might think Thanksgiving weekend is the ideal time to take care of this task. You have a couple of days off and four full hours of daylight. Personally, I don’t see it. Hanging lights in the dark is the way to go. I’m not just hanging decorations; I’m painting pictures with a palette of light, and the darkness is my canvas. You might just as well ask me to write these entries in lemon juice so I don’t know what I’ve said until I hold it up to a candle flame.

(Those of you who think that’s what I do already can shut up.)

Also, all of our weekends are been full between this past Labor Day and the next Winter Olympics. And since I work until 5:00 on weekdays, roughly three hours after sunset this time of year, this close to the Arctic Circle, I was stuck.

So there I was last night, in full dark and nine-degree Fahrenheit (-13 Celsius) weather, scrambling up and down ladders and using gutter clips, a staple gun, and duct tape to try to affix lengths of wire that had frozen to the consistency of raw vermicelli. I alternated between working with gloves that reduced my manual dexterity to that of seaweed, and with my fingers exposed to cold that reduced my manual dexterity to that of algae. My digits became nerveless stumps. How nerveless? When I came inside and reached into the refrigerator, my hands warmed up. When I accidentally brushed two exposed contacts on a broken bulb, I saw the rest of the string light up; I saw the spark coursing across my flesh; I heard the nasty buzz; I felt nothing. My hands were less responsive to galvanic stimuli than those of a freaking cadaver, okay?

But I got it done. It’s not quite up to my normal standards of Griswoldian excess—Trash didn’t want me scrambling around in the dark on that 75-degree-sloped skating rink we call a roof—but there are over a thousand tiny bulbs illuminating our front yard. And it only took me two hours.

That’s primarily because I streamlined the light testing and fixing process that gets so time-consuming. You know the drill: plug in the string, get nothing (or worse yet, get half the string lit), spend a half hour going along the length of the string looking for the bum bulb, fail to find the bum bulb, start unplugging each bulb one at a time and replacing it with one you know works, find one bum bulb but still have a half-dark string, check the fuse, change the fuse, drop the fuse, find the fuse, go through the string again until everything’s lit or the string is in the trash. I skipped a couple of steps last night; namely, everything between “get nothing” and “trash.” Electrical diagnostics seem so unimportant when a string of Christmas lights is cheaper than a Big Mac and one is rapidly turning into a Jack London protagonist two feet from one’s own front door. Life is short, and so became the flow chart: Lights? Up it goes. No lights? To the trash. Half the lights? Into the bushes.

What? The duds will be invisible at night, and during the day, nobody will know any better. Aside from the people I just told, that is, but if you’re all driving past my house every day then the dim bulbs I stuck in the bushes aren’t the ones I need to worry about.

The main thing is that the task is done, the house looks pretty when the lights are plugged in, and I have a lot fewer strings to reel up when it’s time for them to come down.

Of course, I won’t be in such a hurry to get back inside when it’s late May, but still.

posted by M. Giant 3:40 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, December 04, 2002  

Trash and I moved in together in the summer of 1990. That Christmas, someone in her family gave us a lovely Lenox™ china Christmas tree ornament emblazoned with the words “Our First Christmas 1990.”

We got married in 1991. That Christmas, someone else in her family gave us a lovely ornament emblazoned with the words “Our First Christmas 1991.”

Two First Christmases in a row? Houston, we have a family tradition.

Not that we could expect anybody but the most uninformed benefactor to help us commemorate our First Christmas when it was now our second as husband and wife and our third under the same roof. We were on our own. So the next year, we went out and bought ourselves an ornament that said “Our First Christmas 1992.” It was rather tacky-looking, but it was part of a set.

Over the years, the OFC set has grown, and they’ve gotten a bit more tacky over the years. In 1994, we bought a heart-shaped scrap of painted plywood with the slogan, but it lacked the year. So I wrote “1994” on the front of it in red felt-tip. It’s still partly legible. The following year, we had our ornament custom-made. An artisan at a State Fair kiosk painted “Our First Christmas 1995” on a blue bulb, registering some confusion when Trash let slip that this was only the latest in a series. We’ve bought several on vacations; the 1996 edition came from a shop in Myrtle Beach, SC and 2001’s was picked up during a visit to the Quad Cities. The ornament that reads “Our First Christmas 2002” is a small silver picture frame that can be hung on the tree. Of course we haven’t bothered to put a picture in it. Who do you think we are?

Up until a few years ago, the OFCs would go into the big crates of decorations with everything else, and when we’d decorate the tree there would always be a few minutes of “hey, where’s 1993?” or “what does 1997 look like, again?” Then we finally got smart and started putting all of them in a smaller box together. The smaller box still goes into the big crates, of course, but at least they’re all in one place. That’s the important thing.

In fact, it’s surprising how important it is.

It started out as a goofy gag so we could laugh at ourselves. And we still do. But we also save the OFC ornaments for last, and they always go on the side of the tree where people can see them. And we’re extra careful about putting them in their little box (which will probably have to be replaced in favor of a bigger box this year) at the end of the season. And one of us will always mention how some year in the future, we’ll have an entire Christmas tree covered with nothing but lights and garland and ornaments that say “Our First Christmas,” and we’ll have trouble finding boughs from which to hang all of them. Including the one with bride and groom teddy bears made out of dough that will have deteriorated to an empty coat of varnish by then.

So, now you want a neat little concluding paragraph wrapping up today’s entry, complete with zippy punchline and theme and maybe a callback to something further up? Come up with it yourself. I’m going to go kiss my wife.

posted by M. Giant 3:38 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, December 03, 2002  

We finally got our Christmas tree up and decorated. It’s pretty late for us this year; normally we’re decking the halls around Trash’s birthday (which was about two-and-a-half weeks ago, for those of you just joining us). But for one reason and another, we haven’t been able to nail down a big enough block of time to actually finish the job. Until last night.

You want an example of a reason? We have a permanent tree. I say “permanent” tree because in our house, we don’t use the words “fake,” “artificial,” “man-made,” “ersatz,” or any other word in relation to a tree that calls its legitimacy into question. It’s a thing I have. Our tree is fake, is it? Okay, smart guy, put your hand through it. That must be a “fake” scratch on your hand from a “fake” steel wire, right? Be sure and tell the doctor that when the “fake” lockjaw sets in. This ain’t no holodeck, Ebenezer.

As fiercely as I’m willing to defend the tree’s reality, however, I will admit that its years as the ideal holiday icon are behind it. Some of the permanent branches are bent and a lot of permanent needles have fallen off. Last year I had to suspend some of the droopier branches by tying knots around them with the light strings. Which was a pain, but it saved me the trouble of going through that whole tedious light-fixing diagnostic process with those strings this year because in January, Trash had to cut them off the tree with a blowtorch. Saved a lot of time in the long run, really.

So last week I hauled the old permanent tree out to prop it up for one more season. I’ve heard about people who have a tree that’s even more permanent than ours, in the sense that they leave it assembled, decorated, and lit year-round. They just unplug it, wheel it into a spare bedroom, and throw a dropcloth over it for eleven months. I kind of envy those people. Not because I wouldn’t miss decorating the tree every year, because I would, but because I’d like to have that kind of storage space. Of course, we don’t, so the tree gets boxed up and put into a closet in the basement for eleven months out of the year, just like the permanent trees of most normal people. Most normal people’s closets have doors, though, unlike this one. That left our cats free to sneak in there and do whatever.

Which brings me back to the propping.

So, after the propping but before the fluffing (by which I mean the process whereby you spread out the permanent branches to make them more full, but I’m using the word “fluffing” because my Google hits could use a little…oh, hell, fluffing), I noticed a distinctive odor had been transferred to my hands from the permanent needles.

“How do you get cat pee off of a Christmas tree?” I asked Trash.

Our minds raced in tandem, imagining the tedium of cleaning every tiny, fiddly, permanent bit of the tree with soapy washcloths.

“Wanna get a real tree this year?” she said.

Normally I would have said, “That is a real tree” or “Do you mean a live tree?” or something else in a similarly defensive vein. But my hands still smelled like cat pee. I said, “Yep.”

We can only assume that after we took down the tree last year and stored it, but before Strat’s bladder medication took effect…well, you can probably assume the same thing without needing me to spell it out.

We’ve talked idly about getting a live tree one of these years, but it’s never gotten past the talking stage. It never ceases to amaze me how efficiently a shot of cat pee in the right place can put an end to all discussion.

Don’t tell my cat that, though.

posted by M. Giant 5:11 PM 0 comments

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Monday, December 02, 2002  

Trash and I spent this past weekend in the Wisconsin Dells. Or, as some people know it, the Branson, Missouri of the North. Because there was a group of us, we rented a condo for the weekend rather than staying in a hotel. It was so much more comfortable and inexpensive than renting two or three rooms would have been. We had a kitchen and a fireplace and a VCR and satellite TV and plenty of room for everyone to sleep.

We can’t complain, obviously. We benefited from our hosts’ willingness to do something we’d never do, i.e., rent out our living space to strangers. And they charged us a lot less than we ever would have charged people to sleep in our beds, cook with our dishes, and criticize our taste in wall art while we weren’t there.

One of our favorite parts was the guest book. As far as we could tell, the condo is actually someone’s home (or second home), and they just clear out when somebody wants to rent it from them. It’s incredibly convenient for us, because we’re also renting their kitchen utensils, refrigerator, bedding, and every other household amenity. It’s all right there. People love it. And then they write about how much they love it in the guest book that the owners leave on the living room coffee table for that purpose.

Something about the guestbook and the semi-rustic setting seems to have inspired a few previous guests to wax poetic when they should have stuck to waxing their back hair. We mocked them, of course. And we tried to come up with a few things we would like to have seen written in the guest book, just to break up the monotony a little bit:

“It was so wonderful to spend our holiday at a place with a full kitchen. We never get to make tripe when we’re on vacation. Obviously we didn’t want to take your stock pot when we left, so the three leftover gallons in the fridge are there for you to enjoy, with our thanks.”

“We were so looking forward to staying in a home with a fireplace, but we learned its joys are overrated. The living room got so smoky. We had the switch on “closed” the whole time, but the curtains stayed open and the smoke kept coming. We appreciated everything else, though. You must get so tired of repainting after every time someone visits.”

“We loved everything here. That’s why we took it with us when we left.”

“Thank you for making your home available to us during this weekend. This will always be a special place for us. After all, you only lose your viginity once.”

“This place was perfect for us in every way. Between the garbage disposal, the fireplace, and the river flowing through the back yard, nobody will ever know what happened here this past week.”

“I don’t get to spend many weekends with my kids, so I wanted to make it special. This place exceeded all my expectations. The kids had a wonderful time with their dad and we made memories that will last them a lifetime. None of us wanted our time here to end, especially after I figured out how to unlock the porn channels.”

“As soon as I walked in, I knew this place was exactly what I’ve been looking for for monhs, and it would be the ideal location in which to end my life. My mortal remains are in the upstairs bathroom. Please contact…”

We wrote our own entry in the guest book, but it included none of the above phrases. We kept our written mockery pretty low-key.

Which, now that I think about it, may have been what everyone else had done before us.

posted by M. Giant 3:29 PM 0 comments

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Hi, I'm M. Giant. I'm here because while there's no shortage of people hurling their least significant thoughts and feelings up on the Internet, none of those people are me. I'm here because I've got nothing to say, and by God I'm going to say it.

My goal with this blog is to spend time writing something, anything, rather than just sitting around slackjawed. I hope to hone my writing skills, build a small but loyal following, then a slightly larger and more fiercely loyal following, ultimately culminating in the destruction of my enemies and total world domination.

Feel free to e-mail me if you like, but only if you don't mind that anything you say is likely to end up on the site. I can't guarantee that I'll be nice about it.

Thanks to blogger.com for the free hosting and page design template. All content copyright 2002-2007 M. Giant. You could steal from me, but you'd only be hurting yourself. Using me as your instrument.


And it's pronounced "velCRAWmeter", dammit.

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