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


Monday, March 31, 2003  

Reader Mail Slot, Epiode XI

I have the best readers in the world, you know. I realize that a lot of you maintain your own online diaries and journals and blogs, and I respect your efforts. Some of you even inspired me to get into this in the first place. But compared to my readers, your readers suck. Unless they also read me, in which case they’re the best readers in the world. So hang on to those readers, other online diarists/journalers/bloggers. You won’t be getting better ones. Because mine—and the ones I share with you—are the best.

Seriously, these people are totally looking out for me. I’m not just talking about Victoria, who thoughtfully sent me a news story further supporting my long-held thesis that Clear Channel is evil (an executive summary: Clear Channel-owned radio stations have been sponsoring rallies in support of the government, which is currently hearing cases and complaints about Clear Channel. And then Clear Channel News covers those rallies. Evil!). I’m also talking about readers like B. Loppe, who brought an accessibility issue to my attention:

I dunno what the problem is, but for some reason none of your entries have loaded properly for the last week. The links from DHAK send me to the March 19 entry. Sometimes, by clicking the archives link for March, I can read all of the entries except the most recent one, but sometimes even that doesn't work.

Thanks to B.’s heads-up, I was able to immediately scramble my cadre of tech-support mavens to address the problem. In other words, I clicked the “forward” button on my Hotmail screen and sent it off to Blogger. I hope it works now. If it doesn’t, B. is reading this a week in the future! B., I hate to ask you for another favor, but could you send some early-April stock prices back to me here in the last day of March? Thanks a bunch.

Thanks also to Lori, who cleared up my confusion about the incredibly cheap and easy mortgage refinance we just did:

I just read your latest entry and had to comment. I work for said company and process mortgages. Time$aver refi's are a processor's dream, they go so quickly. The whole idea is to have a product that saves your customers time and hassle and makes them want to be a customer for life. Plus, we make money off of other loans. The percentage of Time$avers is pretty small compared to all the other type of loans we do.

And yet the percentage of refi’s I got this year that were Time$avers (and how much do I love that word?) comes out to an even one hundred percent. I daresay I got the fuzz-free end of that particular lollipop.

It's nice to see someone happy about doing business with my company. Basically, I'm just a big dork and when I read your post... Feel free to mock. ;)

Hey, everyone, look at the dork! She’s happy that people are happy with her company! She’s proud of her employer! I bet she even likes her job!!! God, what a…what a…

I’m sorry, I just need a moment.

…

Okay. I’m back. I guess I’m a little emotional, what with the sleep deprivation and all. But my readers, like Eden, are even helping out with that:

Put the spray bottle by the bed and point in the general direction of the caterwauling. You can do this without actually getting out of bed or opening your eyes. This seems to work on my most obnoxious cat, who after the 3rd or 4th shot jumps into bed and falls promptly asleep.

That’s a good suggestion, but I don’t have that kind of patience. So instead I invested in a pistol that shoots tranquilizer darts. I want to hear bang-squeak-thump. It’s working okay so far, but my aim isn’t so good with my eyes closed in the dark at 4:00 in the morning. Some of our furniture is starting to look pretty sleepy. And getting Trash out of bed in the morning has become quite the battle.

Like me, mnvnjnsn (is that a Fish Called Wanda reference?) is starting to wonder whether the cats know something we don’t:

I, too, have been awake every morning for the past week because of my cat. He would start meowing at around four, then pace about the bed, then finally knock breakable things onto the floor until I got up to let him out. And, as soon as I got back into bed, he would claw at the screen door to be let back in.

At first, I thought it was because Newman was concerned about his paper route. But what cat can successfully complete a paper route in the time it takes me to walk from the back door into the next room and get back into bed?

My other cats soon started to follow suit, and now four in the morning has become a flurry of activity, what with the cat fights, the sofa scratching, the caterwauling [there’s that word again]and whatnot.

I don't have any recommendations for remedying this problem, but I eat cookies while I wait for them to tire themselves out. Cookies and Vicodin.

When Strat first came to live with us, he was extremely nocturnal. He’d sleep all day and then spend the whole night jumping on our faces. Then we hit on the idea of manually adjusting his internal clock. I’m not talking about cracking him open and fiddling with jumper switches or anything. We just had any number of daytime activities or conversations that were abruptly interrupted by the following exchange:

“Where’s Strat? What’s he doing?”

“Is he sleeping?”

“FIND HIM! WAKE HIM UP!”

And we would, and Strat would say, in Cat, “WhaaaaaAAAAAT?”

Eventually it worked. I think it’s probably time for a readjustment. Trash and I just have to decide which one of us is going to have to take a day off work this week to keep him awake. But at least that’ll be easier than getting him off the Vicodin. God, he loves that stuff.

Lacrosse Dude came to my rescue on another front: that of the dirty little secret of digital cable:

I had to dumpster dive my parents old broken VCR so I could leave the house at a certain time slot. I was sad - my 2 VCR's were no longer enough - three shows in one time slot meant no going out.

LD Followed that up with highly technical instructions involving extra VCRs, cable splitters, digital terminals, S video, and some words I didn’t understand. Even so, I was game to give it a shot. But the results weren’t quite what I expected. I was testing the setup by taping VH1 while watching CBS, and by some mistake in wiring that I’ve yet to fully understand, I appear to have become the president of Viacom. Weird. I’d cancel Survivor this minute, but apparently I’m just a figurehead.

At least I didn’t break anything, unlike when I tried to wash my scarf. Wrecking my own stuff has led to a surprising amount of support from my readers. For instance, Eric Neely had this to say:

Yeah, you might have expected me to talk about your little Scarf Down post, but no such luck -- I'm here to talk about the Thundercats, and, in particular, Snarf.Wasn't he just the biggest waste of cartoon airtime ever? Where there any kids begging their parents for the fucking Snarf action figure?

You know, I was worried that my posts were getting too linear.

Theryn, a reader who seems to know a thing or two about knitting, helped me look on the bright side:

As a general rule, drying anything that is knitted is probably a bad idea. It sounds like your scarf is wool which means you felted it. You should be excited; felting is the most popular trend going in knitting now and you figured it out on your own.

Really? Because I felt horrible.

Oh, stop looking at me like that. I’m not sorry.

Something else I’m not sorry about is how I made you notice the way radio commercial actors never seem to pause for breath. How can I feel bad for you when regular reader (and writer) Kelly was forced to create that effect for a living? And then unfairly blamed for it by me?

I used to work for a recording studio as an audio engineer, and one of the things we did was this B2B project called "Newstrack"…For two years my main job was recording, and then editing, these pieces. During the editing process, one of the most common methods of cutting time (these voice over folks tend to run long) is to “cut out any pauses or unnecessary breathing” (my producer's words, not mine).

I appreciate the fact that Kelly seems to recognize the absurdity of the phrase “unnecessary breathing.”

It's not all that cutting edge, and it's not even really our (by "our" I mean the overzealous recording engineer) fault, because what the producers want, the producers get.

Especially if they work for Clear Channel.

It's just a matter of a quick cut and paste in digital performer or pro tools, a little smoothing around the edges, and wham, the poor schmuck who did the voice over sounds like he's oxygen deprived. A few times I actually even had to speed up the entire article to fit it, and while I managed to keep him from sounding like he'd just sucked the life out a helium balloon, he definitely sounded like he needed to cut back on the cappuccino.

That’s one reason why blogging is better than radio. Can you imagine what this site would look like if I had to cut out my paragraph breaks, margins, and all those space between letters and words just to fit into a specific space? Especially on Reader Mail days, when I already sometimes edit people’s hard-typed missives so aggressively for length that they look like someone dropped a piano on them? Well, you don’t have to, because I can just tell you it would look like a featureless black brick. If Clear Channel ever buys Blogger from Google, I'm outta here.

Okay, even though I basically have unlimited space, my time is anything but. So let’s wrap this up already.

Ever hear the phrase “mnemonic device” to describe some phrase or rhyme that’s designed to help you remember something? The word “mnemonic” comes from Mnemosyne, the ancient Greek goddess of memory. Significantly, so does this month’s last e-mail:

I just read your entry for today (re: bar trivia), and I couldn't help but point out (as I'm sure others will), that generally speaking: “A pint's a pound the world around.”

Normally, I’d come up with some brilliant way to say “shut up,” except for the sad fact that in any discussion, a rhyming couplet is a rhetorical nuke. Which is why O. J. Simpson is a free man today. Damn you, Mnemosyne! If an argument rhymes, it can’t be—something that…rhymes with…dammit!

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass on that little nugget for future reference. Might come in handy in future bar quizzes.

You know what else might come in handy? Knowing the name of the ancient Greek goddess of memory. If only I had some sort of mnemonic device…

Now, what was my theme again?

posted by M. Giant 3:32 PM 0 comments

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Friday, March 28, 2003  

Into the Woods

Because writing 500-1000 words a day on my own personal website just isn’t scratching my creative itch—okay, it is, but it’s also not earning me a cent—I’ve been sort of casting around for some paying freelance writing gigs. Trash has been a huge help; what with being a librarian with mad research skillz who helps people find work for a living, she’s found me enough resources to occupy an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of résumés. There’s a lot of stuff out there. Sadly, there’s a whole lot that I’m either not interested in or not qualified for.

Trash says that latter thing shouldn’t stop me, and that I shouldn’t take experience requirements so literally. That’s when I remind her of a certain job interview she sent me to in 1991, when I was unemployed for two months and getting less and less picky:

Potential Boss: So, you know C programming language?

Me: (in accordance with Trash’s pre-interview coaching) I could learn.

Abruptly-No-Longer-Potential Boss: Ah, I don’t think so.

Me: Okay, bye.

At least it was a short interview. But its specter rises up in my mind whenever Trash sends me a link to an online want ad that begins with the words “New York Times seeks Editor-in-Chief.”

“This is asking for applicants with at least sixty years experience running a large city newspaper,” I’ll point out to Trash.

“They’ll be lucky to get someone who has half that,” Trash says.

“A person with a sixth of that still has a decade more experience than I do.”

“Experience isn’t everything.”

“No, they also want people with several Master’s degrees.”

“Like they’re going to ask to see your diploma.”

“And at least three Pulitzer Prizes.”

“Tell them you’re working on those.”

“I’m really just working on the one.”

“You don’t have to volunteer that, though.”

“I suppose not. I mean, it’s not like they want me to know C or something.”

“Shut up!”

I certainly can’t accuse her of not believing in my abilities.

The thing is, I have to narrow down my possibilities somehow, because I don’t have time to send in queries or proposals for everything. I look for phrases like “successful candidate will be have proven ability to perform brain transplants” or “time-travelers preferred” so I can move on to the next listing. Then when I actually do find something that says “illiterate droolers welcome” I can spend the appropriate amount of time customizing my pitch, rather than indiscriminately carpet-bombing millions of places that aren’t going to hire me anyway.

And let’s not forget that there aren’t only the “not qualified fors,” there are the “not interested ins.”

Like what, you ask? Like Shoelace Grommet Weekly, which bills itself as North America’s only weekly publication dedicated to those little metal or plastic rings on your shoes. This 350-page periodical, with its circulation of twenty, is on the lookout for writers who can bring life and sparkle to shoe-hardware-related prose. Writers with five years experience in writing about the footwear appointment manufacturing are preferred. Representatives from the slip-on industry need not apply. I’m wearing slip-ons right now, and something tells me that they’ll know.

Not all magazines are so specialized, mind you. The eight annual issues of Driveway cast a wide net that includes both paved and gravel within its purview. Alas, try as I may, I just can’t come up with any heartwarming driveway stories. I can think of plenty of heartbreaking driveway stories, but the editors of Driveway assure us that they receive a glut of skinned-knee and squashed-pet essays from people who haven’t even bothered to comb through the magazine’s back-issues. I’m not going to make the same mistake.

And then there are the stacks and stacks of religious and inspirational magazines that get churned out every day. I had no idea the market for print versions of Touched by an Angel was so huge. Nobody who reads all this stuff would ever have time to go to church. And that’s not even the half of it, because it’s not confined to Christianity, either. I’m kind of starting to wish I’d paid a little more attention in Sunday School, because Satan Digest is offering seven cents a word for personal tales about the Prince of Darkness. At those rates, I’d almost be willing to make something up.

Given the Byzantine depths of the writer’s market, maybe it would be easier if I just hung up a shingle right here. I’d be more willing to do work that came to me rather than vice versa. If you want me to write something for you, drop me an e-mail and we’ll work it out. I don’t care if you want the Great American Novel or a blind item for the gossip column of Modern Phlebotomist. I’ll take a crack at it. Even if you’re from Shoelace Grommet Weekly.

posted by M. Giant 3:40 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, March 27, 2003  

Gleaming the Tube

It should be obvious by now that my self-assigned mandate with this blog is to make fun of things. And since my most frequent target is myself (run a statistical analyisis if you don’t believe me, and let me know what you find out), I’ve told hundreds of people things about myself that don’t always portray me in the best light. But really, it’s always been in the name of fun, and demonstrating that I can laugh at myself balances out in the end.

But even with all the light-hearted ribbing I’ve given myself, I’ve never told you anything that makes me blush just to think about it, the kind of thing that melts me down into a glistening puddle of shame. Until today. I just hope you’ll hear me out and not judge me too harshly. And if you never want to have anything to do with me ever again, I’m not in any position to blame you.

I bought a second TV this week.

It’s actually a TV/VCR combo with a thirteen-inch screen, a cubic foot or so of electronic equipment that set us back more than a hundred dollars. I wanted to get the Brand-Nifto model that would have been twenty bucks cheaper, but our VCR from that same manufacturer has screwed us over enough times that Trash shot that idea down. So now we have a silver Magnavox perched innocently on a chair in our second bedroom, trying not to look like a repudiation of everything we stand for.

Okay, obviously that’s an exaggeration. I’m not a TV snob. I don’t consider it an irredeemable cultural sinkhole, I don’t see it as a non-artform, I don’t drive around with a bumper sticker that says KILL YOUR TELEVISION. On the other hand, I have read the studies that indicate that the average American watches nine hundred hours of television per day, and I just don’t have that kind of time. I don’t want to end up as one of those people with permanent sofa-ass.

Actually, that’s not totally true either. There is some part of me, some unambitious slug-man-thing aspect of my personality that does wish I had nothing to do all day but channel-surf, pausing only to get food, go to the bathroom, and let the electrician in once a week to change the batteries in my remote. But then, whenever I’ve spent more than 119 unbroken minutes illuminated by the flickering phosphor glow, I start thinking, “My God, my life is slipping away!” and then I get up and check my e-mail or something before I come back to watch whatever’s on next.

It didn’t used to be an issue. For several years, I was working full-time (and frequently overtime) while also taking evening classes to finish my English degree. At the same time, and for a couple of years after, Trash was also working and attending graduate school to get her Master’s degree, a schedule which barely left her time to say TV, much less watch it. The only time we had to watch TV was Sunday night, when we’d watch The X-Files, the syndicated rerun of The X-Files, and Xena: Warrior Princess (shut up—it was good for a while and you know it). Three hours of television a week, which averaged out to .428571 hours per day. That put us way behind the national average and the relatively small amount of time I spent irradiating my brain cells enabled me to make calculations like the one you just saw.

But that was then. Now we have four hours of TV to watch per week, and the uptick in our viewing habits has sapped our intellects accordingly. How else to explain our decision to switch over to digital cable? The actual box and the transition was free, I assume because the cable company isn’t making any money on old-fashioned, analog, steam-powered, wind-up clockwork cable and they’re trying to get everyone to switch to the new kind. Which, in our case, they did by not revealing until it was too late that our days of watching one show while we taped another were over. That’s digital cable’s dirty little secret, you know. And if we’d been aware of that in advance, we’d probably have passed it up, since our four hours of appointment TV as scheduled by the networks only take up two hours of the actual week. Oops.

So now we’ve got this admission of defeat locked up in the guest bedroom like the madwoman in the attic, its telescoping rabbit ears waving around like the antennae of some loathsome metal bug. But just because it’s there doesn’t mean we’re a two-TV household. We’re not! We just have a backup, is all. Trash wants me to build a little table for it. I’m wondering if it would get better reception in the garage. Or perhaps in a rented storage locker somewhere.

* * *

On the other hand, whatever brain-sucking effects I’m suffering from my increased exposure to the tube, they’re clearly not affecting Trash. I can finally tell you that she’s been chosen as the President-Elect-Elect of the Minnesota chapter of the Special Libraries Association. In other words, she’s going to be the organization’s President in two years. Not bad for one of its youngest, newest members. It just demonstrates that so many things in this world are unfairly skewed towards the brilliant and talented.

Also, yay! I get to be First Lady!

posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, March 26, 2003  

Paging Dr. Schrödinger

So there’s this box. It’s airtight, opaque, and soundproof. The box contains a radioactive particle that has a fifty percent chance of decaying. If it does, it’ll trigger a mechanism that releases poisonous gas into the box. Which also contains a cat. Which will die if the particle decays.

So, does anybody know where I can get one of these boxes? Preferably with two radioactive particles?

Okay, actually there’s no such box in real life, and those of you who already knew that can skip to the next paragraph. The box is basically a thought experiment concocted by a theoretical physicist named Schrödinger, who never put an actual cat inside a potentially deadly box, as far as I know. It’s designed to illustrate how something can be in two seemingly contradictory states at once. The argument goes that since the cat has a fifty-fifty chance of being dead, until we open the box and find out, the cat is effectively neither alive nor dead. Or possibly both. The “both” part is why Schrödinger is famous, because people either hear that and shout GENIUS! like Jon Lovitz as Master Thespian or they say that it’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard.

Interestingly, I can’t tell you whether Schrödinger himself is dead or alive because I don’t know. I haven’t looked it up. And don’t e-mail me to tell me. Let’s just see how he likes it.

But the reason I’m inquiring about a box in the first place is Strat. A couple of nights ago, he decided for reasons known only to himself that our day should begin promptly at 4:30 a.m. Effective immediately. He has taken to communicating the new schedule to us, loudly and insistently, for fifteen minutes every pre-dawn half hour. He’s not hungry. He’s not thirsty. He’s just bored, and it’s time for us to get up.

We didn’t think much of it on Tuesday morning. Trash and I woke up for a little while, made the best of it, and went back to sleep. Again, for a little while. Because at 5:00 a.m., Strat loudly reminded us that we were a half-hour behind schedule. Then he provided us with lengthy, frequent, high-decibel updates on the situation thereafter. Although he was thoughtful enough to call it a morning sometime around seven-thirty, allowing us to sleep through our comparatively quiet alarms so we could be late for work.

Last night, we went to bed early, hoping to make up for lost rest. Strat decided we were all caught up sometime around 4:00 a.m. this morning, and commenced his impersonation of a squeaky air-raid siren from his perch on Trash’s computer chair. Around 5:30, I came to a more profound understanding of Schrödinger’s box and its concepts of simultaneous yet contradictory duality. I was neither asleep nor awake, yet I was both. I neither loved nor hated my cat, yet I did both. I neither strangled him nor stuffed him in a Schrödinger’s box, yet in the fitful dreams of my REM-deprived mind, I did both.

We’ve never locked the cat out of the bedroom for the night without a pretty good reason. Even when I developed an allergy to the way Strat would curl up on my chest and shed delicate little potholders of cat fur into my eyes, mouth, and nose, I started taking medicine rather than banishing him. I don’t mind a little mild blindness and asphyxiation now and then in the name of kitty affection, but since he’s a) messing with my sleep, and b) doing so by being a rude asshole, one more night of this is going to find him in the hallway trying to wake up the doorknob. The only times the cat has been evicted overnight, it’s been for his own health or safety.

Now that I think about it, that’s not really changing.

posted by M. Giant 3:48 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, March 25, 2003  

Hey, New York subway system? I get it, okay? I have gotten it through my head that despite the fact that you glide so smoothly underneath the stop-and-start gridlock of Manhattan streets, time does actually pass between my descent into and emergence from your echoing bowels. I get it. You don’t have to watch me appear on your Cathedral Street Station platform that I have all to myself and then strand me there while at the rate of two or three people per minute, the entire population of the Upper West Side joins me in peering hopefully up the tunnel. Duke Ellington told me to take the A-Train, damn you, and you’re not helping. I’ll even take a C, I don’t care. But don’t think I don’t know that you’re hoarding all the trains up in North Harlem, because I’ve seen enough of them going in that direction that their accumulated weight is probably threatening to tip the Battery clean up out of the river. I gave myself 45 minutes to travel seven miles, an unheard-of measure for a chronically late person like myself, and I don’t appreciate the way you’re forcing me back into a habit I’m actively trying to resist. I can just hear myself whining, “My train was late,” and even I don’t believe it. So that’s bad enough. But then, when you finally get me to 14th Street so I can switch to the L, which I do, you make me sit there on a motionless train for another eon or so. The train isn’t even on, or running, or whatever it is that subway trains do, and everybody else in the increasingly crowded car is spending their time looking at, looking at some more, and eventually winding their watches rather than talking to each other, so the only sound is that of additional geological layers being added somewhere overhead. And just when I start to think I’ve been buried alive in a huge mass coffin, the motor hums to life—then stops again. By this time I could have taken a cab to where I was going, taken one back, and walked back to my destination. On my buttcheeks.

I don’t think I could live in New York. The pace is too slow for me.

It turned out okay, of course, because they didn’t exactly dock me points for tardiness when I finally arrived; I wasn’t the last one there by any stretch. And I got to meet and hang out with some very cool people. It’s always fun to meet other Damn Hell Ass Kings in person. At least, it has been thus far. Maybe Pamie would beat me about the head and shoulders with a mop handle if I ever met her, but my past experiences with fellow DHAK-ites make that seem kind of unlikely. Or maybe that’s just what she wants me to think.

In any case, transit vagaries and Pamie’s violent tendencies aside, I had a very nice time in New York. Again. Lawre and her boyfriend (the latter of whose soon-to-be-published book you can and should pre-order here) were gracious and generous hosts; allowing me to crash on their futon for a couple of nights was only one of the many kindnesses they extended to me. For instance, they also introduced me to Shabu Shabu, a dining concept that would make me rich if I had the wherewithal to bring it to the Twin Cities. It’s like Mongolian Barbecue in that you pick your own ingredients, but instead of giving it to people who fry it up, you drop it yourself into a steaming soup pot built right into your table. The results are outstanding, provided you don’t screw it up for yourself—and if I managed to avoid that, you’ll do just fine. Now that I’ve said that, someone else in the Twin Cities can get rich off of it, and they’ll be getting rich from me eating there all the time, but the food is good enough that I won’t care. So get on that, idea thieves.

Our five-day visit in October seemed to fly by. This time I was out of the house for only sixty-four hours, but despite having gotten to spend time with friends old and new, as well as my younger sister, by Sunday evening I was eager to get home. The only explanation for that is that home was where Trash was. If she’d been with me I probably would have agitated to stay another week.

By the end of that week, I think my two-and-a-half days’ worth of clothes would have been stinky enough to walk home themselves. An observation that should in no way be interpreted as undercutting the romantic intent of the previous paragraph.

posted by M. Giant 3:48 PM 0 comments

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Monday, March 24, 2003  

My Eye

Today’s entry is going to come off as being a little bit on the experimental side. That’s because I can’t actually read what I’m writing. So “experimental” in this case actually means “lots of typos and misspellings. That’s the great thing about the word experimental. It can mean whatever yo want it to mean.

Earlier today, I had an eye appointment Ny glasses are getting so worn that I need new lenses, even though my prescription hasn’t changed much. Trash is in the sameboat, so we went together on what was supposed to be our lunch break. Only we forgot about the drops they put in your eyes that make them look like Evil Willow’s. That lunch break ended up being about two hours long, so it was kind of like being a CEO for a day. Granted, a CEO whose eyes don’t focus properly. So, yeah, it was pretty much exactly like being a CEO.

Except that CEOs prbably don’t have to put up with stuff like I did. After Trashwas done, she came into my examination room while the ophthalmologist was finishing up with me. I had my chin resting on the chin rest (because, really, what else am I going to put on something called a chin rest?) of some kind of face rack while the ophthalmologist peered through it into my brain. I was trying to keep my head completely still while fixing my gaze on the ophtalmologist’s earlobe as instructed. But in the dark room, without my glasses, I could see Trash in the background slowly leaning forward in her chair, lining herself up in my line of visoin and staring right back at me. That’s all, but it was about the funniest thing I’d seen all day. I couldn’t even see if she was making faces at me, but something abot her low-grade goofiness stuck me so funnny that I couldn’t keep from grinning. I figured the ophtlamologist must me almost finished counting my rods and cones, and I’d just have to go another couple of seconds. But those ticked by and I finally had to let out a giggle, not knowing if some sharp iron exploratory spar or retina-scorching laser was going to permanently blind me for abusing the chin rest. Normally I’m not one for “you had to be there” style humor, but I think it says something that I was nable to keep a straight face even at the risk of losing all depth perceptin for life.

Because I gotta tell you, permantly seeing the world the way I see it right now would kind of suck. I look back on this entry and all I see are blocks of grey text. Thet last paragraph looks a little long and I should probably break it up, but I’d just have to choose a random spot and I’d probably end up splitting a sentence in two.

I suppose I could type in a larger font or zoom in to 200% size, but that would violate the spirit of my little expeiment. Akso, it would require me to find the zoom and font buttons, and I think my ability to do that is still an hour or so off.

I will say that driving back to the office was a bit of an adventure. The drops they gave Trash were even stronger then the ones they gave me for some reason, so driving was out of the question for her. So I just maintined the largest possible traffic bubble for our car on the trip back, while Trash sat in the shotgun seat with her hands up but not extended, like Jim Breuer doing his dinosaur impression. It was like her instincts were telling her to compensate for her impaired vision by feeling for obstructions, even though she knew the only obstruction she was likely to encounter in that position was the passenger-side airbag. Meanwhile, bith of us were squinting through thiose dead sexy, vaguely eyeglass-shaped slices of tinted cellophane they give you so that stepping outside into the sun doesn’t make your eyes feel like this. Yes, driving to a place we were going to have to leave with with less-than-optimal optics was indeed poor planning on our part. But it gets worse.

Once we got back to Trash’s office, we had to sign the papers for our new mortgage.

You know what they say about signing papers you’ve never read. We figured we could suspend that rule, since we also couldn’t read our own signatures. It’s not as dumb as it sounds; Trash worked at the mortgage company for years, so she knew what everything said anyway. Her coworker, the notary who was witnessing our signatures (because God knows we werent’ in any shape to witness our own) pointed to where we needed to sign and initial: “More to the left…a little higher…there.” Without her, we would still be standing there, alternating between holding the papers at arms’ length and taking off our glasses and holding the papers at nose’s length. But between that and Trash’s knowledge of loan documentation, we were able to confidently grope for our pens and scratch out our names using muscle memory.

I don’t have a punchline today, and this blind typing is starting to give me a headache, so I’m going to stop now. It’s kind of abrupt, but it’s okay! It’s experimental!

posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments

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Friday, March 21, 2003  

Less is Mortgage

Trash and I refinanced our mortgage last August and we've been eating caviar for breakfast ever since. Okay, obviously that's not true, since I can barely talk myself into getting out of bed as it is without facing fish goo, but it's been nice paying that much less vig every month.

But Trash's sister works at the company that currently owns our mortgage, a company whose name, in conjunction with a wagon, was immortalized by a song in The Music Man. So we've been hearing about how mortgage interest rates hae been going even farther and farther down. With every eighth of a point, Trash has been threatening to refinance again. The only thing holding us back has been the inconvenience of closing. It's not just taking the time off work to go to an office and sign and initial papers until our very names have lost all meaning; it's dealing with people whose level of competence, in our experience, is so low they aren't qualified to stay home.

Then we found out how easy they're making it. Instead of asking you for documentation, they ask you for none. Instead of appraising your house to determine its value, they take your word for it. Best of all, instead of making you spend thirty minutes drinking bad coffee in a closing office, the mail you all the paperwork so you can just sign it and mail it back.

All of this convenience, and why? So you can give them less money. Granted, this option is only available to current mortgage holders with great credit, but one wonders how this business model benefits the company. I mean, talk all you want about customer loyalty, but how valuable is our business if the interest we're paying is barely enough to keep the break room in plastic spoons? Listen, I'm no economist...

I was actually done with that thought. I'm no economist.

But I do wonder if we're in some sort of reverse bubble. The last tgime this kind of giveaway was standard practice, we ended up with the phrase "dot-com casualty." Obviously I got into the game to late and too small to get hurt, but Blogger being free is the only thing that keeps me from operating at a loss.

On the other hand, I don't really need to make money as a blogger, because the next logical step is for mortgage companies to start paying me interest. And when they're hemorraghing money in my direction, I'll be able to raise the funds to do something I've always dreamed about.

Start my own mortgage company.

posted by M. Giant 10:14 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, March 20, 2003  

The Back Page

I’m not thrilled about this whole war thing, not least of all because it forced me to make the decision about whether to convert this thing into a warblog. I mean, I could sit and watch Fox News all day and post links to all the other warblogs and write blurbs about what the warblogs I’m linking to are saying and linking to, but I don’t want to. Why do all that research when I can just keep on making stuff up? Also, I’d suck at it. I may talk a big game, but my grasp of foreign policy, international relations, and geopolitical nuance really isn’t that much better than the President’s.

So instead, I’m going to bring your attention to stories that are being buried by all the war coverage. Just like Gary Condit caught a massive break on September 11, 2001, a lot of stuff that would usually be front-page is being released into the news cycle, but everyone’s too interested in the pounding Baghdad’s taking to pay any attention. So I’m here to fix that, with a few items from page 14B:

 In early May, the Grand Canyon will be closed to visitors and converted to a bombing range. When asked if the uneven terrain would make practice runs difficult, a high-ranking Air Force official explained, “It won’t be uneven for long.”

 Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has come under Democratic criticism for several of his decisions in office, revealed that he is in fact an undercover pinko commie civil libertarian who now describes his policies as “stress-testing the Bill of Rights.” “I can’t belieeeve what you guys let me get away with,” Ashcroft told a sparsely attended press conference. “Y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.”

 President George W. Bush has confessed to the murders of James McDougal, Ron Brown, and Vince Foster. Authorities have declined to arrest the president, saying, “We need to support our commander-in-chief during this time of war.”

 Epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta warn against the impending resurgence of a pathogen that can be transmitted with great speed. The CDC fears that the effects of “Boogie Fever” will be even worse than during the 1970s.

Star Wars Episode III, the final film in the series and the final film in director George Lucas’s career, had its worldwide theatrical release Wednesday. Early box-office receipts have led analysts to project that the film will gross over a hundred dollars.

 The ten largest manufacturers of those little LEDs on the front of your computer monitor have announced that each of these little LEDs contain a tiny video camera with a direct wireless feed to FBI headquarters. Some estimates place market penetration of these LEDs at anywhere between 99.99 and 99.9999 percent. When asked to comment, Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “See? This is what I’m saying!”

 O. J. Simpson’s tireless quest for “the real killers” has led him to an unavoidable conclusion. In a sparsely attended press conference, the former football star announced that the murderer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman was JonBenet Ramsey.

 American television networks ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, UPN, and CNN have been purchased by the Pentagon. When asked why WB was left out of the buy-up, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained, “Once we reschedule Buffy, American Idol, and According to Jim, Gilmore Girls can stay where it is.”

There’s a reason I didn’t link to the actual, legitimate news sources for these stories. If you’re vigilant, you may be able to find that reason cleverly encoded into the third sentence of this entry.

posted by M. Giant 4:44 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, March 19, 2003  

Here We Go

I posted the first Velcrometer entry one year ago today, which technically entitles me to do one of those year-in-review entries. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to.

I mean, I wasn’t planning on doing it anyway, much less with the world in its current state. In fact, as the march to war continues inexorably onward, it’s becoming more and more difficult to maintain this persona of the lighthearted, minutiae-obsessed purveyor of mindless Internet goofism. And you may or may not have noticed, but the strain is starting to show. And in some pretty strange ways, at that.

For instance, ever since the president’s last State of the Union address I’ve been too stressed to actually compose an entry every day. So I had no choice but to generate them randomly using those magnetic poetry sets. It was just a crutch at first, but now I’ve become so dependent on it that I can’t string a paragraph together unless I see it fully assembled on my refrigerator door. Including this one.

Also, remember the whole duct-tape and plastic sheeting fiasco? People took it seriously for about five seconds before it became a punchline. But I just can’t let it go. In fact, I’ve already sealed off a room in my house, just to be safe. I probably should have done that while I was inside the room so I don’t break the seal when it’s time to enter it, but the point is it’s a safe room. And of course, if a chemical attack hits the room, it’ll be contained and the rest of the house will be safe. It’s win-win, really.

But it’s not perfect, because I still have to leave the house and go to work. So I’ve fashioned a crude hazmat suit out of my leftover duct tape and a couple of clear plastic painter’s dropcloths. It wasn’t an easy task, considering that I lack the sewing skills to make a washcloth, but I got it done. And I can tell it’s completely airtight, because I passed out within ninety seconds of sealing myself into it. But then I came up with the idea of cutting a hole in front of my mouth and nose and closing off the opening with a coffee filter. It’s still not ideal, especially in terms of visibility, what with my glasses fogging up all the time. Driving was pretty hard at first, but once I figured out how to keep the honking horns at a consistent distance, things have gone much more smoothly. And the loud rustling of the plastic drowns out people’s comments, most of which don’t seem very supportive anyway. But when Saddam’s minions rain botulism toxin down on the Twin Cities, I’ll keep aging normally while everyone around me will become expressionless and wrinkle-free, leaving me the best actor in town. Pretty soon I’m going to have to figure out what to do about the sodden yellow paper towels bunched around my feet, but I’m hoping hostilities will be over before that situation becomes too untenable.

And I’m sorry, but I never expected these color-coded terror alerts to be as time-consuming as they are. I mean, first we were at Yellow, then Orange, then Yellow, and now we’re at Orange again. Jeez, have a little consideration, federal government! I mean, I know you pols have people who do this stuff for you, but those of us in your actual constituency find it a little tedious to always have to be repainting every room in our houses just because you’re feeling more tangerine than lemon this morning. I barely had time to finish painting the house orange during the last Orange Alert. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get around to painting the second bedroom yellow again this last weekend, so now I can just leave it orange, which is technically cheating but there is one coat of yellow paint under it and I don’t think the inspectors will look deeper than that.

Maybe I’m going a little overboard. Call me crazy if you want. But it’s only temporary. In a few weeks, Baghdad will fall, Saddam will be gone, and we’ll all be safe, right?

Right?

posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments

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Monday, March 17, 2003  

The Road to Credibility

Back in the days when my parents lived in the quaint northern exurb that P. J. O’Rourke once referred to as East Butthole, Minnesota, getting to their house involved traversing a half-mile or so of winding dirt road. As you know, an unpaved surface tends to rise up into a kind of washboard texture as traffic passes over it. You may know this, but years and years ago, before we were even married, Trash didn’t.

“What causes this?” she asked me in a shaky vibrato on one particularly tooth-loosening drive to the old homestead.

“Oh, you know,” I extemporized. “They have a machine that comes through and does it.”

“How come?” she asked.

“It’s to keep people from driving too fast on it. You see this curve here? If the road didn’t have all these tiny little speed bumps, people would go too fast. And dirt roads don’t give the traction that pavement does, so cars would be going into this ditch all the time.”

“I see,” Trash said. It made perfect sense to her, so she filed it away mentally.

Another day, my dad was driving away from the house on the same dirt road. He had to keep his speed down because the washboard phenomenon was particularly egregious on this particular occasion. Trash even commented on it.

“The machine must have come through pretty recently,” she mused over the noise of the rattling metal.

“What?” my dad said.

“The machine,” Trash repeated. “You know. The one that makes the bumps in the road.”

My dad’s expression began to change from confusion to amusement. Trash kept trying. She looked to me for help, but I was innocently watching the scenery pass by the other window.

“But he told me…but...I hate you!”

This was about a year and a half after I’d manufactured that canard in the first place, so in a way it was Trash’s fault for remembering what I’d said for so long. And, of course, for believing me.

So now that you know this little tale, what reason do you have for ever believing anything I ever tell you again?

posted by M. Giant 4:25 PM 0 comments

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Friday, March 14, 2003  

Oscar Predictions

I just got a threatening letter from the International Federation of Bloggers, Diarists, and Online Journalers. It seems I’m dangerously low on my quota of traditional entries, and if I don’t churn out some copy about some standard topics toot-sweet, they’re going to hack into my Blogger account and replace everything I’ve written with jokes about Viagra and Mahir. Now, last year I posted my Oscar™ predictions pretty late in the process, and I think that gave my prognostications an accuracy they otherwise wouldn’t have had. But not this year. Thanks to the IFBDOJ, I guess I’d better open that envolope right the hell now.

By the way, life is short, so please imagine your own ™s where appropriate in today’s entry.

Best Picture

Everyone says this is really a two-way race between Chicago and The Hours. Of course, we all know what happens in two-way races: the contenders split the vote and the Oscar ends up going to Marisa Tomei. Fortunately for Chicago and The Hours, Marisa Tomei is not nominated for Best Picture this year. Unfortunately for Chicago and The Hours, The Two Towers is. And that’s what’s going to win Best Picture. Don’t believe me? Fine, let’s look at the factors.

First of all, The Hours and Chicago have a couple of serious drawbacks that most people are failing to take into account. The fact that The Hours was adapted froom a book and the title changed from The Days because the studio felt that moviegoers would be reluctant to see a movie that sounded so long, kind of detracts from that movie’s gravitas. As do the shootouts and car chases added at the last minute. And Chicago’s dirty little secret is the Catherine Zeta-Jones curse. Her participation kills its chances of winning Best Picture, just as it did for Traffic, America’s Sweethearts, and Splitting Heirs. So that leaves three nominees.

Gangs of New York isn’t going to win because a) Martin Scorcese already has his Best Director award in the bag because even though nobody especially wants to reward him for this particular movie, everyone knows he’s been wating on his Oscar for almost as long as he’s been trying to make Gangs, and one major award for this movie is plenty; b) the last time the Academy gave a Best Picture award to a Leo movie, the backlash was so devastating that James Cameron got demoted from King of the World to Maker of Documentaries for Basic Cable Channels, and nobody wants to see that happen to Marty, and c) enough of John C. Reilly, already – the guy’s in three of the five Best Picture nominees, and if the other two aren’t going to win then this one sure as hell isn’t.

And The Pianist? Forget it. The only time Foreign Holocaust films clean up is when they’re in the Documentary category, and the last time the Academy made an exception to that rule they had to spend weeks lint-rolling Roberto Benigni off of their tuxedos. Besides, it’s bad enough that the aisles of the Kodak Theater will be clogged, Blues Brothers style, with law-enforcement personnel waiting to nab Roman Polanski’s statutory raping ass; they’re not going to take the additionl risk of sending a Best Picture statue to the Personal Effects room of the LA County lockup.

So that leaves The Two Towers, a nominee that enjoys several distinct advantages which the others don’t. First of all, since it’s not nominated for any other major awards, the voters feel like this is their only chance to give it one. Secondly, if they don’t they’re going to feel obligated to give next year’s Best Picture Oscar to The Return of the King, and nobody wants that foregone conclusion hanging over their heads. And thirdly, the movie’s title may confuse some of the more ignorant and easily confused voters into thinking it’s about September 11, which is an irresistible little morsel of Best Picture bait right there. So, The Two Towers it is, in an upset. You can’t argue with my logic.

Now that I’ve gone through all that, I don’t really have time to talk about the other awards. But that’s okay, because I don’t know the details of those other races quite as well and I’m not sure if I’d be able to bring the same level of insight and prescience to bear on them. But it’s going to be a great night anyway, because I’m going to be the only one who accurately predicted the Best Picture award, aside from a few deluded fanboys who’ll be sitting through the whole broadcast blowing on their twenty-sided dice for luck.

And if I’m wrong, don’t blame me; blame IFBDOJ.

* * *

Speaking of awards, thank you for the Diarist Award for last quarter. I want to be Jupiter and lie down in the firmament and make love to everybody! I kiss you!

posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, March 13, 2003  

Spit it Out

I told you yesterday that I’d let you know how we did at the Pub Quiz. So I guess I have to tell you.

We came in ninth.

I blame Seasonal Affective Disorder. That and the fact that my team did way too much listening to me. Well, they won’t make that mistake again, I’ll tell you what.

* * *

I used to have a rare talent that seems to have since disappeared. At least temporarily. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as this particular talent consisted of the ability to drool from the outside of my face.

It only happened when I was eating. Thai food in particular. And when I say “drool from the outside of my face,” I’m not talking about stuff leaking out between my lips and then calling that “outside;” I’m talking about the area in front of my right ear spontaneoudly growing damp for no discernible reason, other than that some of my salivary glands have become misaligned and are now pointing in the wrong directions (i.e., outward), or perhaps they just stepped outside to get some air and liked it so much they decided to try telecommuting.

I have a theory, although I was never able to get medical corroboration for it. Back in 1992, I had a gumball-sized cyst floating around under the skin below my ear. I had it surgically removed (after repeated attempts to pop it like a zit invariably ended in lots of crying on my part) and biopsied, whereupon it proved to be benign. I was left with three things: 1) a narrow white scar along the seam between my neck and jawline that nobody can see unless I point it out to them, which effectively scuttled my heroic but ultimately doomed efforts to take on the nickname “Blade”; 2) Negligible numbness on that side of my face due to the cyst’s proximity to the facial nerve, which has persisted ever since; and 3) some very confused spit glands.

The external drooling didn’t actually start happening until years later. I’d eat something particularly hot or particularly spicy or particularly both, and a little later I’d feel the faintest of tickles on my permanently sleepy skin, and I’d reach up idly with my fingers and wonder who the hell had licked me without my knowing about it.

I was able to be pretty discreet. I mean, it’s not like I was squirting high-pressure loogies across the room out of the side of my head, or trailing thick, frothy ropes onto my shirt collar. There was just a little residual moisture, as if I were lightly perspiring from my jaw hinge. It was easy to get away with; even when you’re at the kind of function where people are watching you to make sure you use the right fork or spoon or pair of pliers at dinner, they’re generally not on the lookout for mysterious facial dampness. So I’d just use my napkin to blot the corners of my mouth, then give it a quick swipe down where my sideburn would be if I had one. It made me look more continental in some way that nobody could quite put their finger on. At least that’s what I choose to believe.

But it also made Trash and my parents a little nervous, so they made me go to the doctor for it. We all have to say embarrassing things about ourselves to doctors at some point in our lives, and this was only the second-most embarrassing thing for me. What was worse was having to break out a McDonald’s hamburger in order to give a demonstration—and, ideally, a sample—to my highly skeptical nurse-practitioner.

“Maybe we should have a little talk about nutrition,” she said, doubtfully watching my bone-dry face as I self-consciously munched the burger. Apparently a third factor in this phenomenon is my comfort level, which at that point was as low as it would be for any man who was scarfing down a McDonald’s hamburger in front of a nurse-practitioner in hopes that drool would appear on the side of his face so she would be able to fix it and not think his cheese had completely slid off his cracker. That is to say, low.

Even though she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, even though she’d never heard of such a thing, even though she had no idea what could be causing it, she believed me for some reason I will never understand. She wasn’t so lucky when she brought the issue to her colleagues later on, all of whom gave her some grief for buying my story. She was pretty much reduced to telling me that it didn’t seem like anything that could hurt me (which I had already concluded), and to let her know if anything changed. I say “anything changed,” but the specifics of what she said to look out for are too gross to go into, so I’ll spare you those nightmares.

Sure enough, it hasn’t hurt me, and it’s even stopped for the most part. In fact, it hardly happens any more at all. So I don’t want you people filling up my inbox with a lot of morbidly curious dinner invitations, okay?

posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, March 12, 2003  

Spring into the Pub Quiz

I find myself thinking back to one of those long, lazy, dead-of-winter nights, the kind of uneventful Tuesday evening when I would drive through the falling snow after a long day at work, a day when all I wanted to do was go home, put on my flannel pajamas, and burrow under the covers with something to read and the woman I love. There’s just something about days like that. It’s mid-March now, but that day seems like yesterday.

That’s because it was. Jeez, is it ever going to be spring here?

Yes, I know, the forecast calls for temperatures in the forties tomorrow, the fifties Friday, and the sixties all weekend. That’s the only reason I didn’t bother blowing out the driveway last night; if the snow’s going to be gone in forty-eight hours anyway, I might as well save the gas. But I want it to be spring now. Nowww, consarnit!

Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll be less whiny soon.

* * *

Tonight’s Pub Quiz night at Kieran’s. I haven’t really talked about the Pub Quiz for a few months. That’s probably because our team exploits have been less than auspicious.

After getting third place followed by two second-place prizes in a row, we figured victory was in our grasp. Unfortunately, we kind of lost our momentum. I think December’s Quiz got cancelled entirely. In January, our friend Bitter was out of town burying her grandfather, which wouldn’t have affected out participation except that she also handles the reservations at the Pub and none of the rest of us thought to get our team a table in her absence. Oops. Last month, we took a thumping due to a variety of factors. One was that we were rusty. Another was that not all of our team was there. Yet a third was the fact that it had been moved to a different bar, so our home-field advantage was shot (yes, I know everyone else’s home-field advantage was shot too; just go with me here). But our biggest disadvantage was that we were in an area of the bar behind a staircase, which meant that we couldn’t see the quizmaster and for the first couple of rounds the only PA speaker was pointed away from us. After every question, the tables in our section would repeat the bits they’d heard until we’d reconstructed the entire question, and in the process we’d miss all of his little clues that he can never help dropping.

There was one first-round question that I think cost us the whole ballgame: “How many pounds are in a gallon of water?” Now, I know a liter of water has a kilogram of mass, and I know that a kilogram is 2.2 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but I couldn’t think off the top of my head how many liters are in a gallon, although I thought it might be somewhere around four (it’s 3.7854). So I was doing all this math on my napkin, trying to convert from English to metric and back again, with one of the vital calculations pulled fully-formed out of my ass like a 4-shaped turd, and I ended up guessing 9 pounds or something, but now that I have the correct formulae in front of me, I can say that a gallon of water weighs 8.32788 pounds. That didn’t help me at the time, though. Because, among other things, the question had been “How many pints are in a gallon of water?”

Stupid inadequately amplified Irish brogue. Made me want to walk up to the podium and pint him.

I’m not saying that we would have won if we’d gotten that one right and still missed the other ones we missed. At best, we might have come in seventh instead of eighth. But I think that early obstacle triggered in us a crisis of confidence from which we never fully recovered, even when they brought in a second speaker and pointed it at our area. By then it was too late. We already felt like losers, and losers we became.

We’re more optimistic about tonight’s Quiz, though. It’ll be back on our home territory (shut up), we’ll be able to hear the questions, and we’ve had a Quiz to get back into the groove. Another one of us will be missing this time, but we have a replacement coming in. Things will go much better for us tonight, and tomorrow I’ll tell you exactly how much better.

Unless it isn’t better at all, in which case I will have a fresh crop of lame excuses for you.

posted by M. Giant 3:49 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, March 11, 2003  

On the Air

Ever have someone point something out to you that you never noticed before, and now that they’ve made you notice it you can’t unnotice it, and now you have no choice but to hate the person who made you notice it forever?

I was just curious.

But you should listen closely to some radio commercials sometime soon. I don’t pretend to understand the root causes of the phenomenon I’m about to bring to your attention, although I’m sure that it’s somehow Clear Channel’s fault. All I know is that recently, the people who make radio spots have taken to editing out pauses for breath. Like, a lot.

It’s most noticeable in the ads that have only one person speaking. When there’s dialogue, the actors jump each others’ lines so quickly that they almost seem to be interrupting each other. But with the single-announcer variety, some of the worst offenders try to cram in so much information that the guy sounds like he’s interrupting himself, starting the next thought before he’s and it’s kind of annoying. See what I did there?

I first noticed it in an ad for a local dentist. Here’s what the copy probably looked like on the page:

…Call to set up an appointment. He’ll even use some of that Novocaine you’ve heard so much about. Told you he was a nice guy. Call…

Here’s what it sounded like on the air:

…Call to set up an appointme’ll even use some of that Novocaine you’ve heard so much abouTold you he was a nice guyCall…

Every time the ad came on, I would suck in a sympathetic draught of air when it was over. Even though his tone was relaxed and friendly, it had become impossible to listen to the ad without imagining the poor guy’s diaphragm stuffed halfway up his esophagus as he forces that last phoneme out between blue lips and collapses on the studio floor.

Intellectually, I know that some overzealous recording engineer used some bleeding-edge digital editing software to excise every picosecond of silence between sentences while the talent, judging by the volume of phlegm rattling around his larynx like ballbearings in a snare drum, stood outside the back door for five minutes and sucked down a pack of filterless smokes. But it’s still distracting.

And it also called my attention to how frequently (if less heavy-handedly) it’s done. Try speaking along with a radio ad sometime. You don’t have to memorize the words. Just go “aaaah” whenever the person is speaking. But don’t do it while driving, because the spots that will appear in front of your eyes at the twenty-second mark may impair your vision and hypoxia-induced unconsciousness is going to cause you to wake up with a bad headache if your out-of-control car tries to drive under a semi.

This is where I could launch into a you-kids-get-out-of-my-yard-inflected lament for the lost rhythms of natural speech, and how the current generation of radio professionals has no respect for the listener, and that this is just another example of advertising bombardment that numbs our senses and drives people to shoot up day care centers. But I’m not going to go into that whole rant, not least of all because it doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m just going to say three words: Boycott Clear Channel. That means the same thing anyway.

* * *

It doesn’t look like Pete Townshend is going down for the child pr0n thing. At least not very far down. He’s getting a formal caution. As long as I’m in anti-media curmudgeon mode, I should comment on how much more difficult that story was to find than the original (what with the original headline being on the front page of Yahoo! and all). So please assume that I am commenting thusly.

posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments

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Monday, March 10, 2003  

Pump Up the Volumes

I remember the first big bookcase Trash and I bought together. It came from a furniture store on Hennepin and Lake, three blocks from our apartment. It was nearly my height and cost us a little over thirty dollars. Along with a pair of shorter bookcases, it held all of our books. Eventually it filled up and I had to go back to the store to buy a new one. That time, we didn’t have a car and I had to borrow a hand truck from the store and wheel it three blocks up Hennepin Avenue, where I discovered that they look much smaller in the store and I’d gotten the wrong size, so I had to wheel it back down three blocks of Hennepin Avenue, and wheel the correct one three blocks back home, and then return the hand truck, and by this time I was on a first-name basis with the people dining at the hip sidewalk café at the halfway point. “Have a good evening, everyone,” I called out on my third trip home, and they waved and applauded and someone gave me half of his dessert.

Fast-forward twelve years. We still have that first bookcase, but I couldn’t tell you which one it is if you put it on top of me. We have about a dozen large bookcases which, along with that same pair of shorter bookcases, almost hold all of our books. During the past two years of sporadic home renovations, each one of those bookcases has been emptied, moved to a different room, sometimes moved back (and sometimes not), and reloaded, in many cases with whatever books were nearest to hand. That’s an exaggeration; we did manage to maintain different general areas for paperback novels, hardcovers, horror, SF, mystery and non-fiction, but the chaos was barely held at bay. Any organization existed only in the most general sense; our house was the only place where one could find The Autobiography of Malcolm X cover-to-cover with Doctor Who and the She-Bitches from Neptune.

This is something of a problem for me. If I’m looking for a book in that environment, I’m going to need to look in ten bookcases on at least two sides of as many as four different rooms. By the time I find what I’m looking for, I’ve forgotten what it is and I have to start over. And that’s if I don’t get distracted by all the other books I’ve been scanning past that are also not organized. It’s not an issue for Trash, which is something of a paradox given the fact that she’s a librarian and, according to the stereotype, should be arranging our shampoo bottles to correspond with the correct order of their colors in the visible spectrum. But in this sense, as in 95% of the other senses, she defies the stereotype. She can get away with it because she basically knows where every item in our house is at all times. So, in theory, I could ask her, “Hey, where’s my copy of The Stainless Steel Rat Paints the Ceiling?” and she would say, “On the second bookcase against the back wall in the study, third shelf down, about two-thirds to the right, between Love and Crude and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dummies.” But she can only do that if she was the last person to touch the object in question, which, in the case of The Stainless Steel Rat Paints the Ceiling, is almost never the case.

So we’ve been meaning to re-organize the books ever since we threw them all up in the air and stuck them into whichever shelf they landed closest to. But it seems like there’s always something more important to do, like stick the cat’s head in my mouth or play another round of “which of my eyes is open?” Besides, I’m always arguing with her over whether Samuel Taylor Coleridge should be filed under “Coleridge,” “Taylor,” or “dead guys,” or whether a given book with a lot of “I”s should be counted as a novel or a memoir, or whether something should go with the children’s books just because I like it, or whether we should skip traditional shelving systems altogether and sort them according to binding style. So we haven’t gotten around to it.

But Trash was out of town this weekend, and I found myself with a few hours to kill before I had to pick her up from the airport, and I went to work. Alphabetizing. Sexy, no?

The books in the study haven’t been alphabetized since we moved them there from what’s now the second bedroom, almost a year ago. The books in the living room have never been alphabetized (except all the Stephen King hardcovers were together, but I think they had just accreted that way as a result of each other’s gravitational pull). Which left me spending part of Saturday evening and much of Sunday afternoon handling most of the books we own. Never let anyone tell you that my weekends at home alone aren’t filled with glamour and excitement.

The secret was to not have any illusion that anything was going to stay exactly where I put it. I just saw my alphabetizing efforts as the beginning, a starting point for the real sorting and categorizing. Laying the groundwork, if you will, and since I got tired and stopped when there were still ranks of non-fiction hardcovers littering the living room floor, I kind of hope you won’t, because that would be a pretty cheesy pun on your part.

And you know what else I realized? This is going to be the first time we’ve really gone through all our books and put them in order since Trash graduated from librarian school. So that should mean a lot less disagreements now that people with advanced degrees have told her the stuff about shelving that I’ve been telling her for years. Like, maybe she’ll finally believe me now when I say that W comes before U in the alphabet.

I’ll let you know how it turns out. Unless it’s way too boring, of course.

posted by M. Giant 3:21 PM 0 comments

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Friday, March 07, 2003  

Celebrity Dirt!

Everyone has a brush-with-fame story. Aside from the piteously low readings on my celebrity-sighting counter during my last visit to New York, most of my brushes with fame took place during a twelve-day period that ended on Labor Day, 1989. That’s when I was a courtesy driver for the Minnesota State Fair.

The Minnesota State Fair is a big deal, at least in Minnesota. People in Chechnya aren’t so impressed with it, but that’s only because they’re ignorant. As I learned during orientation, the Minnesota State Fair is one of the largest, oldest, and most-attended State Fairs in the country. It’s the only one that’s entirely self-supported, taking no tax money for operations. It is a tradition, a landmark, an institution. It was bestowed upon us fully-formed from the heavens, and other State Fairs are tremblingly and unquestionably its bitch.

My older sister worked for the Fair for years. She was one of the people who booked acts to perform at the fair’s nine hundred free stages and the huge grandstand that’s bigger than the one in That Thing You Do. The Grandstand gets some big acts. It has to, to fill its 950,000 seats. The year I worked there, one of the acts was New Kids on the Block.

What? It was 1989, remember?

Anyway, Debitch the Elder helped me get hired as one of the crew of courtesy drivers. When we weren’t driving Fair bigwigs from place to place, we were driving free stage acts from place to place. And when we weren’t driving free stage acts from place to place, we were driving Grandstand acts from place to place. And when we weren’t driving Grandstand acts from place to place, none of us felt fully alive.

That might be because we were at the car wash, but still.

Although I dodged the NKOTB bullet—the guy who got hit by that ended up sitting in the van like a babysitter on wheels for fourteen hours—I did get a few chances to hold famous lives in my hands. I never veered into oncoming traffic and bawled at the Amazing Kreskin, “I bet you didn’t see this coming, didja?” But that’s not because I never had the chance.

The first celebrity I ever came within spitting distance of—and I know this because of all the celebrities I ever attempted to spit upon, he represented my first success—was Michael McDonald. Not the guy from Mad TV, but the guy from the Doobie Brothers, and a solo career, and that one duet with Patti LaBelle paradoxically titled “On My Own.” I was relieved to learn that his speaking voice is nothing like his singing voice, because they’d sent me to pick him up by myself, without an interpreter. I chauffered him from his hotel to the fair and the next day, I drove him and his band from the the hotel to the airport. They were passing around a box of homemade cookies given to them the previous night by someone named Ingrid (and by the way, thanks, Ingrid, whoever you are, for perpetuating the stereotype of Minnesota as West Scandinavia). They shared the cookies with me. I felt a little guilty about that because Ingrid clearly didn’t make those cookies for my unfamous nineteen-year-old van-driving ass, but I figured that that cookie was the closest I’d ever get to naughty backstage groupie sex. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life. That wasn’t one of them.

Speaking of naughty backstage groupie sex, the Commodores (sans Lionel Richie, of course—we’re still in 1989) swapped a few salacious stories. Okay, not really salacious, but more salty. Actually, not even salty, but with a light sprinkling of Mrs. Dash™. I’d give you details, but somewhere on Snelling Avenue one of the Commodores (I don’t know which one, but I can tell you it wasn’t Lionel Richie) remembered that somebody was driving the vehicle and lightly suggested that I not relay any of what I was hearing, or they’d come looking for me. Even if I wanted to risk facing the wrath of a Naval Board of Inquiry, the first rule of the Minnesota State Fair Courtesy Drivers’ Code clearly states that what happens in the vehicle, stays in the vehicle. Also, I can’t remember.

1989 also marked the twenty-year anniversary of the original Woodstock. In commemoration of the event, one of the Grandstand shows was a reunion of Woodstock acts who weren’t really doing anything else at the time. There was no Santana, no Who, no CSNY, and I’m pretty sure Jimi Hendrix was busy being dead, so the most famous performer at the show was Richie Havens. I drove Country Joe McDonald and some of the members of Canned Heat to the airport. This is where my famous discretion came in handy. First, I refrained from asking the guy in Canned Heat to sing in his “Kermit the Frog” voice. And second, I listened to Country Joe’s entire tirade about how his effenheimer cheer at the original festival killed his career without opening my mouth to point out that his effenheimer cheer at the original festival is the only reason anybody remembers him at all.

I gave one of my other passengers an option of possible routes to the airport: “We can take 35W to Crosstown, or we can go down Hiawatha Avenue, or we can cut through downtown and get on the highway to the danger zone!” Yes, Kenny Loggins was one of my passengers. No, I didn’t actually say that to him. Actually, you may not know this, but Kenny Loggins was the first live rock concert I ever saw. No, that wasn’t in 1989; it was several years earlier. But still, having a conversation with him while going down the road was kind of a kick. I still remember every word we said to each other:

Kenny Loggins: Could you turn some air on, please?

Me: Sure. [turns on air]

Yep, that’s me, hangin’ with the rockers. I was already beginning to suspect by that time that Kenny Loggins wasn’t a rocker per se, but that was driven home when I overheard him discussing the thesis of the review of his concert in the morning paper. If you’re a rocker, you don’t say “thesis” unless you’re in They Might Be Giants and everyone’s already gotten past the fact that you play the accordian.

Despite what Cartman’s mom thinks, Anne Murray is not a bitch at all. As I smoothly slipped her Lincoln Town Car into a sweet spot in front of the departure terminal that was roughly two-thirds the size of a Lincoln Town Car, she let out a pleased “Attaboy” that sounded considerably more sincere than the one she’d spared me twenty minutes before in her dressing room. Years later, when my driving record was all cluttered and I was paying through the bridge of my nose for car insurance, I had her write me a letter of commendation for my driving. But since she’s Canadian, it didn’t cut any ice with the American insurance companies. They’re so provincial. Although it’s Canada that has provinces, not America. I’m sorry, this is getting off-topic.

It was a fun job. I got to do different stuff, be outside, meet famous people, and I never had to bake on hot asphalt for fourteen hours in case Donnie Wahlberg wanted to send me up to Superamerica for some smokes. And I got a lot of fun stories about celebrities who can now Google themselves and sue me for today’s entry.

posted by M. Giant 3:38 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, March 06, 2003  

Cat-Sitting

As you know, we have two cats we take care of. This week, we’re taking care of five.

Dirt and Banana are in Santa Barbara this week, so we’re responsible for keeping their three pets alive. They do it for us when we leave town, after all. Plus they let us park our car in front of their house because they live close to the airport, which easily covers the favor-cost of the third cat. Good thing, too, because if they lived in the other direction we’d have no choice but to let one of their cats starve.

It wouldn’t be Lou, of course. Banana has had Lou for years, even before she met Dirt. Lou is a beautiful cat with a natural wood-grain finish coat. He looks as if he’s made out of sanded pine when he’s in repose. That is to say, usually. Lou used to come stay with us when Banana left town. We’d close off the basement to keep him separate from our cats, but the barrier was inevitably breached. There was some initial tension between Lou and Strat, but they eventually discovered their common interest in sitting in windowsills and staring outside, and they would swap windows and take turns monitoring different sectors of the perimeter like small, fuzzy, unarmed prison guards. They were so serious about it that you just had to hug them, whereupon they’d be all, “Hey, we’re monitoring the perimeter here! Jeeeez!” There were a few visits to Dirt and Banana’s place that ended with Lou trying to get us to take him home with us to see Strat. But Lou’s visits to us stopped when he and Strat had an unexplained falling out. And also when Banana’s household expanded to include Dirt and Edgar.

Edgar is the black cat, a full-grown ball of furry, ebon energy with the exuberance of a kitten. Sometimes I wonder if he’s part dog. When we go over to feed them, Edgar rushes up to us and either flops at our feet to be petted or orbits our ankles at high speed. Although that may be because his eyes are so close together that his depth perception can’t be so great. Edgar’s fun. He’ll play with you without you having to coax him, and he’s not encumbered with an excess of dignity that afflicts some cats. You can be sitting in a chair, watching TV, and he’ll hop up and make himself comfortable on top of your head. So Edgar gets to live too.

But then there’s Frank, a striking-looking beast. He’s white with blue-gray and black stripes that make his coat look like a spacesuit, and sky-blue eyes. He looks like a cat from the future—the next ice age, maybe. He’s the shyest of the three; normally when we go over we don’t see him come out of hiding for at least an hour. But when we’re the only human the cats have seen in a week and they’ve figured out that we’re the ones feeding them, he’s much more friendly. He “hides” under a kitchen chair where we can see him, rather than under the furnace. And when you do coax him out (or haul him out, as the case may be), he has a purr that you can hear from the next room. He had some health problems last year, but he’s back to 100% now. Actually it feels like 105% percent when you pick him up, but it’s all pure, grade-A cat meat. Considering Frank’s sweetness and everything he’s been through, I suppose he gets his food ration as well.

So, yeah, it’s a good thing Banana and Dirt live so close to the airport. If they ever move out to the suburbs, we’ll only have one option: get a third cat ourselves.

* * *

I normally avoid politics here, but I thought you might want a chance to express your opinion on the whole Iraq thingy. No, I don’t mean to me, whaddya want me to do about it? No, tell U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has put up a poll on his web page. Go click, one way or the other (link via Annatopia).

posted by M. Giant 3:36 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, March 05, 2003  

Scarf Down

My younger sister, the one who lives in New Jersey, gave me the coolest scarf in the world for Christmas. It was a good twelve feet long. I could wrap it loosely around my neck and still have the ends dangle down below my waist. If the cold got too severe—and it has—I could wrap a length around the lower part of my face and prevent my saliva from freezing inside my mouth. And it’s got multicolored stripes in yellow, purple, blue, and green so it looks like I got shot head-first through a circus tent. It was awesome.

No, I’m not confusing my tenses. Let me explain.

Monday morning is when the garbage and recycling trucks come through our neighborhood. Thus we like to have the bins out by the curb on Sunday night, because we have enough panicked haring around the house to do on Monday morning without carting the week’s refuse around on top of it.

This past Sunday night, I was in the process of gathering the trash from various receptacles around the house. We’d just gotten home from my mom’s birthday dinner and I still had my coat and scarf on. I figured I might as well get it done and finish up all of my outside-going for the evening as quickly as possible because although March did indeed come in like a lamb here in Minnesota, it came in like a seriously pissed-off lamb with a freeze-ray. So, like I said, I was making my way around the house and emptying the wastebaskets. The one in the bathroom is a bit tricky, as it’s a small container that we wedge between the toilet and the wall. I dumped it into a plastic bag without spilling too much of it on the floor, then wrestled it back into its niche.

At this point, I happened to glance down. My scarf was doing something it’s not supposed to do. It was dripping. Yes, in the course of bending over, I had dipped the ends of my beautiful scarf into the shitbowl.

Okay, it could have been worse. We don’t operate on the “if it’s yellow, let it mellow,” philosophy, and it hadn’t been that long since the toilet had seen a healthy shot of cleaning goo and a brush. But there are some dried liquids you don’t want hanging from your neck when you walk around in public, and toilet water—even clean toilet water—easily makes my top fifty.

So, off to the washing machine. I checked the little label on the scarf for instructions. Because that’s what I do. I read labels when I do laundry, because having my favorite shirt shrink to Trash-size once in my life was quite enough, thank you. But all I saw on the scarf’s label was a collection of cryptic icons with “X”es drawn through them. I examined them seriously: “Do not put in a blender. Check. Do not wear inside a teepee. Check. No parking. What? Do not iron. Yeah, as if.” Maybe I should have just brought it to the dry cleaners the next day, but living for two or three days without my scarf seemed only slightly preferable to wearing it while it was all toilet-y. And so, satisfied that cold water and the gentle cycle couldn’t do too much damage, I dropped it in and let ‘er rip.

After the spin cycle, it looked a little weird. The edges were kind of curly and there were these little woofies hanging off of it. That was new. I hoped that some time in the dryer on “delicate” mode would take care of that. I went to work on Monday with no scarf at all, and the minute I got home I went downstairs to see how it had fared in the dryer.

Well, it was dry, at least. But it was wrong, somehow. I gingerly took it out, draped it over my neck—

It reached my waist. Without the neck wrap. My twelve-foot scarf had shrunk to barely seven feet. And once you’ve had twelve, you can never go back to seven. As many former porn stars will agree.

In a state of considerable consternation, I showed it to Trash and told her what had happened. She looked at me as if to say, “you poor, dumb bastard.” “Fix it,” I begged, tugging on the abbreviated ends of my unnaturally abridged scarf.

I sent an e-mail to my sister, the text of which consisted primarily of “Aaaaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaah! Aaaah!” I explained the situation and asked if she could get me another one, since she’s in New Jersey and I’m not. I mean, yeah, I’m going to be on the East Coast myself in a couple of weeks, but that’s a couple of weeks too late. I need it now.

Her response said she got it in Toronto. I’m not going to be in Toronto until May, if at all, and that does me almost no good whatsoever. I was already thinking, “Hmm, whom do I know in Toronto?” when I got to the part about how my sister got it at a store that has outlets here in the Twin Cities. Hooray!

But here’s the thing. I haven’t been able to make it to said store yet. And its website is so slow it recalls the days when I connected to AOL via a 1400-baud modem. I haven’t called the store either. I’m kind of afraid to. I mean, they sold my sister that scarf at least eleven weeks ago. If I call and say, “Hey, do you have any freakishly long scarves with Yellow Submarine color schemes?” and the slacker-drone on the other end says no, I’m going to be inconsolable. If I go there and can’t find a replacement, I’m going to be inconsolable. And I’m going to have a very cold neck until Easter. Right now I’m in this state of limbo where I can still get my scarf back, at least in my head. But I can’t protract that limbo for very long, or it’ll end for sure.

Oh, and apparently the world is on the brink of war or something, but whatever. I’ve got my own problems, you know.

UPDATE: The store had the scarf. Now they have one less. Yay!

posted by M. Giant 3:47 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, March 04, 2003  

Is it Safe?

I’ve talked before about how my wife attracts random strangers who want to tell her all about their lives. It’s as if by merely occupying space, she’s broadcasting invitations to anyone and everyone to open up and share. Once, when we were at a play, she left during intermission to get a drink. She returned five minutes later with the bartender’s entire biography. If Trash has a superpower, this is it. Of course, all of the best superpowers are also curses that come with great pain and responsibility and which burden the lives of those who wield them. So, yeah, this is definitely a superpower.

Conversely, her kryptonite is dentist’s chairs. Sitting still under any circumstances is not her strong suit; we’re talking about a woman who can’t get to sleep until she’s wiggled around so much that the blankets are wrapped around her like a skin-tight toga (which is why I keep a comforter in reserve next to the bed during the winter). Factor in people digging around in her mouth, and doing it with power tools and iron hooks, and you’ve got the makings of the seventh circle of her personal hell. And I’m not in a position to be criticizing anybody’s dental hygiene, God knows, but at least I can stay in the chair until they tell me I can get up.

What, you think I’m kidding? After she came home one too many times still wearing a paper bib and with the hose of the plastic suction tube dangling from one corner of her mouth, they put a note in her chart instructing the receptionist to TAKE HER CAR KEYS AWAY whenever she checked in. Seriously. They don’t have to do that any more, though, because it’s become a matter of pride for her. Ever since she sat through a two-hour crowning and got a congratulations card from the whole dental staff. Again, not kidding.

But technically, I guess it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to describe dentist chairs as Trash’s kryptonite, because any kryptonite worth its atomic weight counteracts superpowers. As Trash learned yesterday, this is clearly not the case.

“So I’m getting married soon,” the hygienist said, “and I was trying to decide if I should invite my mom because she left when I was six months old.”

“Aaaaaaaah?” Trash said in confused sympathy around a mouthful of tools and fingers.

“So I decided to invite her, and now she’s all upset because I’m not asking her to get involved with the planning.”

“Uuuuhh haaaaaah.”

“And I told her, ‘listen, you left when I was six months old. You’re lucky I’m even inviting you.’”

“Herrrrherrrr ehhhhuh.”

“I know!”

“I haagh herhahhhurughghehuh.”

“Boy, I’ll say she was pissed. And I’m like, what’re you gonna do, leave again?”

“Oh aay!”

“Way. Now I don’t even know if she’s coming at all.”

At this point, the hygienist put down her tools and settled into so heart-to-heart girl talk. Although with all the gear still parked in Trash’s mouth, it would be more accurate in this case to describe it as a heart-to-rapidly-air-drying-uvula girl talk. The hygienist went on about her situation, pausing periodically to let Trash insert a supportive “gaaghyaghaah” or “hruuhee?” into the conversation at polite intervals.

So there she was, wanting the hygienist to stop talking so she could get out of the chair, wanting to get out of the chair so the hygienist would stop talking, the effects of the superpower and the kryptonite building on each other in an expanding, decelerating feedback loop of awkwardness and suffering.

The only break she got was when other clinic employees would pop their heads into the room and chirp at the hygienist, “How’s it going?” in a tone that barely left the phrase “on this, your first day” unsaid. If the hygienist hadn’t had to answer and thus display some manner of progress on the task at hand, Trash might still be there, listening to the tales of the hygienist’s sad, pathetic birthday parties over the years, while Trash’s car keys sat just out of reach.

Instead, after Trash had had enough cleaning and the hygienist had had enough therapy, Trash sat up and asked, “Is this your first day?”

“Oh, God, I wasn’t going to tell you, because I was afraid you’d ask for somebody else,” the hygienist confessed. Trash was frankly amazed that the hygienist had refrained from telling her anything.

Personally, I think the experience was Trash’s karmic punishment for not having to have twenty-three root canals. But that might just be me.

posted by M. Giant 3:15 PM 0 comments

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Monday, March 03, 2003  

Driving Premiums Up

It’s been two years since I got a speeding ticket. Two years and three days, to be exact. That means that if a cop pulls me over tonight—if a cop pulls me over five seconds from now—and gives me a ticket, I qualify for what’s called a diversion. What that means is that since my driving record is clear for the past twenty-four months, if I get a new citation I can go to court and say, “nuh-uhh, I was not neither going that fast, either.” And to save court costs, they’ll cut me loose and make me promise to behave for the next twelve months. If I can pull that off, it’ll be like today’s as-yet-hypothetical traffic ticket never happened.

This is the first time I’ve had two solid years of clean driving behind me since September of 1999, when my one-man vehicular crimewave commenced. I’ve been paying for my misdeeds behind the wheel ever since that sunny Utah afternoon. I’ve been counting the months until my three-year record would have only one speeding ticket on it. I made up a little Excel spreadsheet and everything. So when the three-year milepost from my second-most-recent expensive mistake flashed past, I got on the phone with my insurance company and said I no longer needed to pay the extortionate rates they charged driving time-bombs. I was rehabilitated, about as threatening to other drivers as a pedestrian on the sidewalk.

The customer service rep cheerily crunched the numbers, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t just imagining the note of approval in her voice upon hearing how I’d changed my ways. But as pleasant as that was, what I was really looking forward to hearing was the amount of cash I’d be saving on my insurance premiums now that I wasn’t Mr. Fast and Furious any more. The rep told me what I’d been paying on my current policy, a figure that made me wonder how I’d been able to pay for that and still buy air for the past three years. Then she read off what my premium would be if I cancelled the current policy and bought a new one.

The difference was enough to buy one person lunch for one business week. A business week with a holiday. And no Super-Sizing™. My record now has two fewer speeding tickets and one less accident, and yet the amount by which they’re reducing my premium is about what I’d expect for cleaning the road salt off my headlights.

I asked for an explanation. “Rates are going up,” is all they would say. “They’re going up all over. They’re going to keep going up.” So, to recap in executive summary form, rates are going up. They’re going up so fast that a brand-new policy for a driver with one ticket costs almost as much as a three-year-old policy for a driver with three tickets and an accident. And that, my friends, is Up. As in, “up yours, insurance companies.”

Maybe it’s because the last time I bought a car insurance policy we still had a World Trade Center. Terrorist activity and terrorist threats must play havoc with the actuarial charts. And so normal-driver rates have caught up with screaming-around-on-two-wheels-with-their-hair-on-fire-driver rates. I mean, if a cloud of VX nerve gas descends on Cleveland tomorrow, the grandparents and soccer moms are going to be hitting the median just as hard as the hot-rodders. But apparently State Farm won’t be covering cars lost in nuclear explosions. That’s got to drive premiums down a little bit, right (you just know the board of State Farm sat through The Sum of All Fears thinking, “Dude, if this really happens we’re going to get spanked.)? Maybe I should call them.

Of course, being unable to replace my car post-apocalypse will leave me at a crippling disadvantage if the economy ends up adopting the Mad Max model, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take if it’ll save me some substantial cash right now.

But all of this is beside the point, because it’s not just me I’m worried about. What about you, dear readers? You folks who can leave the driveway without the civil defense sirens going off, you law-abiding drivers, you people who’ve actually heard your own horn because you don’t drive fast enough to outrun the sound? How does it make you feel to know that a road hazard like me hasn’t been paying much more in insurance premiums than you are? You need to call your agents and tell them that you’re tired of carrying the scofflaws, that you want premiums that reflect what safe drivers you are. And what a safe driver I am too, now.

Here’s the bottom line: insurance is basically legalized gambling. We’re betting that our cars will be stolen or destroyed or driven into a crowd of schoolchildren by us or something in the next six months. It’s a bet we hope we’ll lose, and we’re happy to lose it every day except the day we send in the premium checks. I was hoping that with better odds, I wouldn’t be quite as much of a loser. I was wrong.

But I can’t wait until next year, when my last ticket drops off my record and I’ll be able to save another seventeen cents per year. That’s going to be sweet.

posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments

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Download velcrometer to your PDA. If you like that kind of thing, I mean.
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Mobile Velcrometer brought to you by 3232 Design, creators of awesomely venerable code.
other stuff i
wrote
Recaps at Television Without Pity.

I also blog at SparkLife.

And I had a column at Blogging Dad.
about
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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