Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Monday, June 30, 2003 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XIV The original idea of the Reader Mail Slot was for me to answer questions for my readers. And, of course, make fun of people’s spelling when they write in with legitimate complaints. As it turns out, few of the complaints I get are of the legitimate variety, and some months the information tends to flow towards me rather than the other way around. This is one of those months. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, Boony has a question that should probably go in my Frequently Asked Questions page. If I had a Frequently Asked Questions page. Which I don’t, because in my case, Frequently Asked = Once. But I’ll answer this one anyway, in case someone else wants to know: Are you a relative of the Jolly Green Giant? The Jolly Green Giant is well known to us Brits for advertising a brand of sweet corn to us a few years ago. He had an annoying jingle and everything. That's not why I think he'd be related to you, though. You don't (a) advertise sweet corn or (b) have an annoying jingle. This is how I know that Boony has never met me in person. I do have an annoying jingle, which I actually prefer to think of as my personal theme music, but I only use it when I enter or exit a room. If I try to recreate it here, you won’t get the same effect and I will have worn out all of my vowel keys for nothing. No, the reason why I think you might be related is that you share a surname. However, you can't be related to the Big Friendly Giant, because, as every schoolkid knows, he's just a figment of the imagination of one Roald Dahl. Dude, the—I mean, bloke, the Jolly Green Giant is practically an institution over here. In fact, there’s a 55-foot statue of him in Blue Earth, Minnesota, which I was privileged to visit on one occasion a few years ago. You can stand right beneath him and let him tower over you. I’d tell you what’s under the loincloth, but the Blue Earth Chamber of Commerce would shut me down, family connections be damned. Let me field another query, this one from Julie: Have you ever entertained the notion of a search function for Velcrometer? You've no idea how stupidly long I Control-F-ed your archives for the word "need" to find the Trash/Chicklit entry ("I need this!"). Why didn’t you just search for “ChickLit?” (Please, please, please don't ask why I wasn't searching for "ChickLit".) Oh. Sorry. Forget I asked. As I told Julie, I would love to have a search function, because nobody would use it as much as I would. I’m always linking to older entries and doing Google searches like “Velcrometer fuchsia uvula” or “Velcrometer evil pants factory” or what have you. Having my very own search function would probably save me a lot of work, but I’d be the one doing the work to save myself the work, and I just can’t talk myself into that. Something I do need to do, however, is stop using the word “need” so much. If people have a need for an entry with word “need” in it and it turns out they need to Control-F until they need to ice their wrists, then I need to look at whether I’m overusing the word “need.” I’m obviously writing it more than I need to. There were a couple of other questions in my inbox, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time on them, so I’ll just answer them in a group: Yes; no, I do it all the time; hell no; Trash’s brother; because our digital camera is acting like a pissy baby: and no, I haven’t given birth recently. Thanks for your questions. Now to the answers. I idly speculated a couple of weeks ago on how nice it would be if I had a way to visually locate spots on the carpet that a cat has mistaken for a litterbox. And the readers came to the rescue. One of them was April: It doesn't require special goggles, but you can purchase the Stinkfinder Light from Drs. Foster and Smith: I haven't used it (my cat is some kind of litterbox-savant), but I hear it comes highly recommended. Forget the light; let’s just trade cats. From Anna: You can find the source of the cat piss smell by getting yourself a handheld black light and scanning a dark room. I had to do that myself when I returned from vacation *gag*. That’s nothing compared the mess I would have left in her comments page if she’d gotten back much later. And from Chris: All of the urine spots will glow due to the phosphates contained in most animal urine. REMEMBER: be emotionally prepared to see many spots glowing, even if only one of them is causing the odor you noticed it's not a bad idea to hit the brightest ones (a.k.a. more recent transgressions) with the love juice you got from kitty-Wal-mart. Obviously if three readers told me about this, it had to be true. So, with Chris’s warning in mind, I dug out some black light bulbs from Halloween, plugged them into a lamp, turned the lamp on, and prepared for the worst. “Okay, honey, hit the lights.” “Okay.” “Go ahead and turn them off now.” “They are off.” “Uh-oh.” You know what’s also handy for dealing with cat piss in the home? Vicks VapoRub™ on your upper lip. Works wonders. Also, there’s the leftover paint thing, which prompted almost as many responses. Caenis suggested I donate it to Habitat for Humanity, while Lucinda directed me to the local recycling website. I think I’ll give a can to each and see which operation ends up with both of them. The centipede topic, meanwhile, just won’t die, much like its subject. Kim was thoughtful enough to send me this: What you saw might have been a house centipede. Because it was the size of a house? That makes sense. There is a fairly good picture and description of it here. We started seeing these in our house about two years ago. They come in all sizes, from tiny up to 3 inches long. From? To? Three inches long is tiny, in my experience. We didn't know what they were until we found a fairly large one drowned in the cat's water dish, took it to a local nursery, and asked "What is this and how do we get rid of them?" They told us and recommended a product called "Borid" which is powdered boric acid. We sprayed it under all our baseboards and we haven't seen one in a while. Hey, I’ve seen that stuff, and I have to say, “oops.” Trash and I bought some because, going by the name, we assumed it was used to dispatch dull party guests. In case you’re wondering, it works for that too, as long as you use enough of it. They are considered "good" bugs, meaning they eat other bugs that you probably don't want, but it's hard to supress a primal "kill it kill it kill it now" reaction upon seeing one. That explains why I had to replace my monitor after I clicked on the link Kim sent me. The picture wasn’t as clear after I put a claw hammer through the screen, you see. Kim has sort of answered one question, but she has also raised the issue of why she makes her cat drink out of a horse trough. And then an entirely different Kimberly was thoughtful enough to send this along, completely unsolicited. It’s a guide to some of rural Des Moines’ hotter nightspots. You’ll notice if you click on the link that one of the places is in Lacona, the town that Trash’s mom and stepfather moved to in January. So next time we go visit them, we’ll have to stop by. I think it’ll be worth renting a tractor for the evening. Oh, and I’d also like to thank those of you who empathized with me when I needed it. For instance, Emmberry’s and Anna’s reactions to my NBA All-Star story were appropriately awed. And then there’s BlackDove: I live in Springfield, MA, home of the Basketball Hall of Fame...and I.Don't.Even.Care. Why the hell is it here? Did someone hallucinate an actual professional sports team *of any sort* here??? Jeez, let's all just go hang out at the Dr Seuss memorial, now that's something we can all get behind, right? Right? Two out of three isn’t bad. And I guess the third one shows that I’m reaching the appropriate demographic, if nothing else. And it’s also nice to know that people are there for me in a time whem everybody I know has already finshed reading Harry Potter and the Order of Fries while I’m still waiting around for Series of Unfortunate Events 10. People like SarahJanet: I know your pain. Harry is the only unfinished series I've still got on the go, because I've refused to start reading any other > ones. You think THIS is bad. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was SO MUCH WORSE! They delayed that third book, seriously, a million years. We were conviced he was DEAD and they just didn't want to tell us about it! So now, I refuse. I won't get committed to any other series until they're > finished. Because I am TIRED of living in fear that J. K. Rowling is going to be ASSASSINATED and we'll never know what happens to poor Harry. Hey, maybe the WMD inspection teams in Iraq should “find” evidence that Saddam Hussein planned to have Rowling whacked. That would shut a lot of people up. While I do appreciate SarahJanet’s sympathy, she’s probably already got her HP5. But then I got this note from JAdamson, which truly speaks to my malaise. It reads, in its entirety: I KNOW!!!!! Says it all, really. posted by M. Giant 3:36 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, June 27, 2003 Aiming to Pleas “I want to plead now because I was always raised, you know, that if you do the crime, you do the time.” -Jonathan Carpenter You know, what a standup guy. It’s good to see someone stepping up and taking responsibility for his actions, citing a moral upbringing as the reason for this show of integrity. I just hope nobody’s tacky enough to notice that Mr. Carpenter apparently wasn’t raised to not rape and murder people. Being a parent is hard, you know. Kids don’t come with instruction manuals. You hear about kids who make their parents worry by staying out too late, or getting one too many piercings, or, in Jonathan Carpenter’s case, walking into a stranger’s house in Long Prairie and leaving three dead people behind. But by pleading guilty, demanding no concessions whatsoever, sparing the county the time and expense of a trial, and resigning himself to spending the rest of this life and all of the next two in prison, Jonathan Carpenter has shown us that even when people disappoint us most, they still have in them to surprise us. Including the Deputy Attorney General, who said, "In my career, I've never seen this before where somebody pleads to murder with life without parole. Usually when you're looking at that, you figure that there's nothing to lose, so why not drag it through a trial?" Why not indeed? Perhaps because it would be wrong? I’m sorry, Mister Big Shot Deputy Attorney General, but Jonathan Carpenter was not raised that way. Even in the very midst of his bloody rampage, Jonathan Carpenter was thinking of the people that some might call his “victims,” after he’d raped one of them and his accomplice had murdered her mother and brother with knives from their own kitchen: "I put myself in Katie's situation. I know if I'd have watched my family get killed, I'd want to die, so I slit her throat." Talk about thoughtful! Just as Jonathan Carpenter spent his childhood learning about right and wrong from his mother (or perhaps the Baretta theme song), he has worked to pass those lessons on to his own children. Here’s what the mother of his kids had to say: "He was a good father until he went on a killing spree." Nice of her to mention, but there’s such a thing as damning with faint praise. Is he suddenly a bad dad now that his hands are awash in innocent blood? I ask you, did any of that blood belong to his children? No? than let’s not rush to judgement. Just because he turned out to be a bad non-killer doesn’t make him a bad parent. If anything, the government is making him a bad parent by putting him behind bars for the rest of his life, so he’ll never be able to wrap his gore-drenched arms around his babies again. Justice is indeed blind. There’s still the question of whether Jonathan Carpenter will plead guilty to two other murders he allegedly committed in northeast Minneapolis. "It certainly increases the likelihood that he would plead guilty to the [Minneapolis] murders, but that is ultimately up to him," says the Hennepin County Attorney. Well, I should say so! Jonathan Carpenter has given us all a clear demonstration that he’s eminently capable of making mature, responsible decisions in regards to the corpses stacked in his wake. I say we give him the benefit of the doubt. It certainly makes more sense that prosecuting him for more murders when he’s already going to be under the most severe sentence Minnesota has. What will they do if he’s convicted of those? Give him three more consecutive life sentences? They’ll probably let him serve them concurrently anyway. There is one guy who can’t be happy about this development, and that’s Jonathan Carpenter’s buddy Christopher Earl, who’s been saying all along he wasn’t even there. This kind of shoots his defense out of the water. Now he’ll claim it’s his word against the word of a confessed rapist/killer, and his prosecutors will be able to say, “yeah, but look how that rapist/killer was raised. His testimony is unimpeachable. Come on, Chris. If you did the crime, do the time. That’s what a responsible murderer does.” If nothing else, we can hope that Jonathan Carpenter’s conduct will set a higher standard of behavior for all of our nation’s murderers. * * * I finished reading Pamie’s novel, Why Girls are Weird, last night. Here’s what I learned: none of us will ever be as cool as Pamie, but buying her book is a step in the right direction. Do it now! posted by M. Giant 3:45 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:this shit is fucked up this is my uncle you talkin about (jon) yes what he did was wrong but you dont have to write shit about it it happened its done so just leave it alone.....
By Hmm...just found this post and I have to agree with the other poster. Jon was my ex from way back and you have no idea what led him down the path he was on. Yes what he did was horrid beyond words but when he got sober in jail and realized what he had done while heavily addicted and on drugs he sentenced himself to what was appropriate. In the right frame of mind he did know right from wrong and his life and the lives of the others involved in this tragedy including his children are not for you to post mockery blogs about.
By Whats fucked up IS WHAT he did!!!! There is no BUT! Leave it alone?? Tell that to the victims and the families of the victims who have to live "everyday" KNOWING how he tortured/murdered and raped thier loved ones! I bet if this were the other way around, you wouldn't be saying that,, He was a pathetic coward! Breann (mother of his kids) stated "they experimented with drugs when they were teens but not now"??... FAST forward to her latest drug convictions "after" she claimed that- NOW an adult! STOP MAKING EXCUSES,, WE ALL MAKE CHOICES!!
By I met Jon Carpenter around 2007 in Brooklyn Park when I was living in a studio apt on zane ave. He was the boyfriend of a girl upstairs and from the beginning I knew he was a troubled kid. I mean I was no angel but I wasnt violent like him. We all drank together and had some good times. 1 month before the killings he came to my house and seemed paranoid that he might have a warrant. We talked for a while and he said he was going to try and live a straight life but that it would be hard to get that part of him to stop hustling. I believed him and we exchanged numbers and said we would hang out sometime. Then I saw the news the very next month. I dont know what happened to you to make you do things like you did but youre dead now and youre square with the court of life. This world couldnt give you what you needed I guess. I hate what you became but I remember the Jon Carpenter with a big smile and ready to help a friend in need. That Jon Carpenter to me.....will be missed:)
By He knew he did wrong, but he couldn't do the right thing even after. his good friend chris told a friend what happened so they could be turned in. he was too afraid of jon to do it himself. and then jon had to take the easy way out. he couldn't even deal with prison and the life he deserved for his crimes. Now he leaves his friend to rot in prison for the stuff he did. chris may be guilty, but he's at least living with the consequences for his and jons actions.
By Thursday, June 26, 2003 Now’s as Good as Any to Start Drinking I took on a project for myself last night, one I sort of stumbled into. I became an amateur music transcriber. Emphasis on amateur. Here’s the thing: the band is playing a gig in a few weeks. Specifically, it’s a 60th birthday party. So we’re transforming into a swing band for the night. Even though we don’t have a horn section. Well, we do have half of one, in the sense that the Who had a guy who played the French horn. Herr Magnet and I could switch back to our old high school band instruments, but then we’d only have two horns, a guitar, and drums. Besides, if Herr Magnet is as rusty on the trumpet as I am on the saxophone, we’d have half of a very bad horn section. So we’re sticking to our standard line-up. That leaves Herr Magnet and Kraftmatik in the unenviable position of having to transpose jazzy horn parts into jazzy guitar parts, and I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am that that falls into the category of Not My Problem. I’ve got my hands full with the bit that’s not Not My Problem, thanks. Most songs from both swing eras contain a bass lines already, so all I have to do is figure them out. It would be an advantage if I had the kind of bass they typically used, i.e. the kind you stand next to. It would also help if I knew how to play it. But I don’t have that kind of time or money, so everyone’s just going to have to be satisfied with the one I strap on. And yes, I wrote that sentence just to get cheap Google hits. Don’t judge me. Some of the songs are turning out to be harder to learn than I expected. I figured everything would be built around walking bass lines and twelve-bar blues and other stuff that’s second nature to a rock musician like myself. Not always the case, as it turns out. For instance, some of these numbers meander off into lengthy jazz odysseys that I could maybe learn properly if I a) only had to learn one of them, b) had a couple more weeks, and c) wasn’t using those brain cells to store more important stuff like Spinal Tap references. Rock music tends to be eminently fakeable; when you know a song’s root chords and a couple of scales, you have enough information to quickly reproduce the bass lines of nine out of ten songs with a degree of accuracy that’s quite convincing to the casual listener. Especially if the bassist in question is as musically lazy. That’s probably true of swing music as well, to a point, provided one has years of background in that milieu. That musical vocabulary, if you will. Which I don’t. So for most of the songs I’m sticking to root notes with maybe a walking bass phrase dropped in here and there, and that should get me by. But there’s one song that has me almost completely stymied. Not coincidentally, it’s the one from which I borrowed a line for the title of this entry. It’s got a great bass line and I want to do it justice, which is hard enough on the verses given its unfamiliar (to me) variation on the walking bass scale, but then the prechorus goes all weird melodically. And I can sort of figure out how it does that, and I can sort of get it to circle around back to where it’s supposed to be on the chorus, but not both at the same time. And all of the tablature files I’ve found on the Internet are the same one, and it’s one that doesn’t work because the person who put it “together” is apparently a rock musician who doesn’t have any more of a clue than I do. So I’m basically on my own, which still wouldn’t be an issue except that when I try to learn it by ear, it goes so fast that even if I stumble on the right order of notes by accident, there’s no way I’m going to be able to remember what I did. I can play a great deal faster than I can think, you see. So there I was last night, creating My Very First Tab File. I don’t know how it’s generally done, but I know I did it wrong. For instance, I started from scratch using Times New Roman, not sparing the three seconds it would have taken me to realize that the Internet is swarming with blank Tab file templates in the proper Courier font, just sitting out there waiting for me to cut and paste and plug my notes in. I did it sitting in my computer chair with my bass in my lap, plucking notes and phrases while alt-tabbing back and forth between the Word document I was creating and a digital version of the song on Media Player (by the way, I bought and paid for two different versions of this song on two different CDs, so step off my fair-using ass, RIAA), playing the song, one bar at a time, over and over until my computer refused to do it any more. I’m serious; the player just quit working, even though my sound card was perfectly fine on every other application. Maybe it was just as disgusted as I was that after over an hour, I’d only managed to transcribe about thirty seconds of music, one note at a time. And then I thought back to that scene late in Amadeus, where F. Murray Abraham is scribbling down an entire score by hand, from dictation, in musical notation, without an instrument anywhere in the room to help him make sure he’s getting it right, while a socially and emotionally stunted jerkwad-savant is dying of syphillis two feet away from him, and he calls himself mediocre. And I thought, what the hell does that make me? No wonder they invented Rock & Roll. Swing is too much work. posted by M. Giant 3:29 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, June 25, 2003 Blow, Winds, Blow! Weird weather this week. We’ve had rain every night since Sunday, with accompanying phenomena that have been increasing in intensity. There was a window screen in our backyard yesterday morning. It wasn’t from our house. I don’t think it was from either of the houses next door, either. It might have come from my aunt’s house, come to think of it. In any case, it was gone when we got home from work last night. Maybe its owner came by and retrieved it. Or, given the storm that raged though the late morning yesterday, it could be anywhere by now. But then the sun came out around lunchtime. Then it went away again. By eight p.m., my glasses got fogged up just from stepping outside. And overnight, it was a full-on air raid. Our power went out overnight, so my clock radio didn’t know when to go off and I was late for work. Which actually turned out to be a good thing, because the storm also knocked out the air conditioning in our floor of the building and even casual business attire can be pretty uncomfortable when the office is ninety degrees, steamy as a rainforest, and devoid of any wind that didn’t originate from people screaming at each other. The place was uninhabitable until after 9:00. Of course, it could have been worse. Driving down France Avenue on the way to work this morning past non-functional traffic lights and leveled trees—big trees, mind you—I realized that we’re probably lucky to still have a roof. Which sounds kind of petty compared to the plight of folks in Buffalo Lake, who would consider themselves lucky today if they still had a town. And then there’s my coworker who lives less than a mile from me. She parked under a tree last night, hoping it would protect her car from hail damage. Instead, the tree greeted the morning sprawled across the car parked in front of hers. Talk about sucky protection. If it had hailed, she would have been screwed. I talked to our friend Banana on the phone today. She works at the Electric Fetus, a non-chain record store just south of Downtown Minneapolis. Interestingly enough, the Fetus was without electricity when she called. Which I guess made it, at least temporarily, the Acoustic Fetus. She asked if there was water in our basement. I haven’t been in our basement since last night. Therefore, as far as I know, no water. I should probably stay upstairs for another couple of days just to be sure. Normally I enjoy thunderstorms, to a point. They can be fun, as long as you’re not sitting in your basement watching snippets of TV between the interminable local weather alerts and you hear wall-filtered rainwater spattering onto the floor behind you (which, yes, happened once). They have such sucky timing, though. In this case, my parents came over on Saturday to help us with some yard work. My dad brought his gas-powered pressure washer, an amazing device that effortlessly rinsed years of accumulated grime and tree sap off the wood of our deck as if he was painting clean onto it with a roller. It also took off the moisture sealer, but we figured we’d reapply some this week. Of course, that requires a forty-eight-hour window of no rain and we’ve yet to see half that. Yes, the rain is preventing us from treating our deck with a coating that will protect it from the rain. After we removed the old coating just in time to expose it to one of the rainiest weeks of the deck’s existence. I’m pretty sure that’s ironic, if only in the Alanis sense. On the plus side, our yard is now full of nice, thick branches for us to burn in the chiminea. It’s raining firewood! Anyway, I don’t really have a punchy conclusion, since that would require some kind of insight or analysis that I don’t have. I just wanted to let y’all know that if I don’t post tomorrow, it’s because tonight’s storm squished me or fried my computer or turned the Twin Cities into a smoking crater or something. I just wanted to prepare you, so there are no nasty shocks for you guys. At least if you’re outside the Twin Cities. Those of you here in town, if you wake up in a smoking crater tomorrow morning, there’s not much I’ll be able to do for you anyway. posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:For those of you who included “the long holiday weekend apparently means no Reader Mail this month at Velcrometer” in your list of things to be thankful for yesterday, I would like to take a moment to say, “Psyche!” The fact that nobody will ever think that doesn’t prevent me from saying it. Just because you check in here doesn’t mean you don’t have a life. But not necessarily an mLife. I wrote up one of mLife’s commercials last week. Vanessa offers a woman’s perspective on the ad: Yeah, and: While, one the one hand, I find it nominally refreshing that for once in my damn life I see a commercial in which it is the woman who's all independent and advancing-career having and the guy who's all needy and concerned about the relationship... Why does her "traveling more" get automatically translated in his head as "you're going to leave me?" She has shit to do, dude. She still lives in your town, I assume, since you said "traveling" and not "moving." When she's gone, she'll be working. It's nice to finally see a relationship built on a solid foundation of trust on TV. Why is her success a source of extreme anxiety? You could pretend to be happy for her, jerk-o, since you're her boyfriend and all. And "I can come with you?" Whatever, stalker. Sweetheart, you're better off without him. There's a fine line between "clingy" and "creepy," believe you me. TV. Bah. Interestingly, I’ve since learned that the commercial was originally shot using two androgynous, vat-grown biological constructs, which explains their eerie resemblance to one another. The secondary gender characteristics were digitally added after the fact. This enabled the producers to shuffle several different versions without reshooting, and then test the various permutations on focus groups. The desperate guy/closed-off woman combination actually tested the second-best, but the client was leery about the most popular one, which featured a desperate skinhead and a closed-off Furry. By the way, I haven’t seen that ad on TV ever since. You’re welcome. While we’re on the subject of mLife ads, my referral logs tell me that a lot of people are curious about the song that’s playing on the commercial where the dad gives a phone to his daughter (a phone commercial that contains even less speaking. Are the creatives unclear on the concept of “telephone?”). I don’t know the song, but when I do I’ll post it here. Because my goal is to be no less than the Internet’s leading authority on mLife commercials. Everybody needs a niche, you know. I felt a little guilty about starting the next day’s entry by claiming to have been involved in a car accident when in fact no such thing had occurred. I’m inviting myself onto your desktop in a way, and I wondered if toying with any concern you might have for me—no matter how minor, no matter how briefly—might be seen as too manipulative. As Brooke said afterward: Okay, I was about to do the math as instructed and come to the conclusion that 5000 gallons of paint coverage divided by 6 square feet of Saturn equals Bahaha You Poor Stupid Bastard, but alas, my New Math sortie has been squashed by your "dream sequence" nonsense. So um, have a nice day then. Thanks to Brooke for assuaging my conscience. The week of cat entries got some good responses, including a correction. I made a reference to Orca having twenty claws. Kim quite reasonably pointed out that cats only have eighteen claws. Kim has not met Orca. I originally typed “all forty thousand” in that sentence about Orca’s claws, then later fixed it. I later confirmed that when Orca is asleep, she does in fact have only eighteen claws. I haven’t been able to count them when she’s awake because my eyes can’t move that fast. Jamie, however, came up with a suggestion for calming the cats down: It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. My friend Adam walks his cat on a leash. I know this wasn't the kind of reader mail you were looking for, especially since you seem to have enough cat troubles without being "the guy with a cat on a leash." They say taking him for walks has calmed down their cat Reggie enough so he doesn't try to escape as much and shreds way less of their stuff. The downside (and you knew there would be one) is that he won't go out after dark. Now, one or the other of them has to rush home from wherever they are at 4:30 p.m. so they can walk the cat before dark. Maybe your cats would enjoy being on a leash? Or maybe they'd just try to kill you again. Way ahead of you, Jamie. Sadly, my cats hate their leashes. They always squat real low and cling to the ground like they think I’m going to snap them up by their necks and try to fling them into the nearest tree. They should know better. I quit doing that when I figured out they didn’t like it. Plus people started calling me “the guy with a tree on a leash,” and that? I didn’t need. Finally, people came through in a big way with corroboration of the existence of Mighty Funny. Janice, Nicole, Jules, Verbena, Samantha, Sharon, Erich, Snarky McSnarkster, and my friend Corpkitten all paint a grim picture. Not only did Mighty Funny exist; he continues to exist. Worse yet, he’s mutated into a new form, like a virus or a cockroach, impervious to all attempts at extermination. Several of my correspondents were “kind” enough to link to a syndicated newspaper insert called “Mini-Pages,” which now serves as the base of operations for Mighty Funny’s reign of terror. Okay, it’s more like a petty bureaucracy of irritation, but still. Mighty Funny is no longer a superhero, but a rather simian-looking grade-schooler who has experienced a psychotic break and is now deluding himself that he’s a superhero. I’m not sure who thought that would be less sad. On the other hand, he has escaped from the four-panel shackles that previously bound him to his gruesome fate. So it’s a trade-off, I guess. I can’t be sure this is the same Mighty Funny I once knew, or if he’s an entirely new creation who happens to share the name. Or maybe Mighty Funny got sold to some other outfit the way Winnie the Pooh got sold to Disney, albeit with considerably different advantages to the buyer. The people who remember it in the form I described were in Michigan, so that probably means something. Somewhere there’s a missing link. That’s something I could research. Corpkitten gave me leads and everything: For resources if this is truly bothering you, try: The Harris Collection at Brown University Comic Research Library in British Columbia International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton Your best bet is Lucy at Ohio State University's Cartoon Research Library -- they have the most extensive holdings for newspaper comics, according to the librarians at MSU. I could do that. But it sounds suspiciously like work. And work is what I started this site to avoid. The full saga of Mighty Funny will remain in shadow; for now, just knowing he’s out there is enough. Enough to keep me up nights, that is. posted by M. Giant 12:31 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, June 24, 2003 My Cross to Bear At my last job, one of my coworkers was a young woman who grew up in Ohio. Dayton, perhaps, I’m not sure. Anyway, she was as tall as I am, and she used to talk about how hard it was to find shoes in her size. One day she asked a clerk at Payless what the deal was, and why they couldn’t order more shoes that might fit a statuesque woman with feet large enough to keep her from tipping over. The clerk explained, “Oh, we do, but the drag queens snap ‘em up as soon as they come in.” * * * My wife doesn’t much like shopping for clothes. Get your gender-stereotype-based comments out of the way; I’ll wait. Done? Okay, let’s move on. So Trash hates shopping, and if she didn’t spend nine to ten hours a day at an office right across the street from Southdale, she probably wouldn’t do it at all. As it is, every once in a while one of her coworkers will kidnap her during a lunch break and drag her over for a quick gander at the racks in Marshall Fields and New York & Company. The only thing Trash hates more than shopping for clothes is trying on clothes, so she’ll just grab a few things (provided they’re labeled with her sizes and marked down to a tenth their original price), pay for them, and hit the door. She tries them on when she gets home. Anything that trips her, cuts off her circulation, or doesn’t look as good as it did in the store goes back to whence it came, to wait for a woman of less discriminating tastes. That’s where I come in. No, I’m not the woman of less discriminating tastes. I simply mean that it falls to me to bring the rejects back to the store. I’d enjoy this task a lot more if it ended with me walking out of the mall with some new folding money in my pocket, but since all of these transactions take place via credit card, all I wind up with is a wad of cash register printouts and incrementally fewer women’s garments in the back seat of my car. I could rebel, and insist that Trash do her own returns, but then she wouldn’t shop at all and I’d have to keep her three outfits rotating through the laundry at all times. Apparently yesterday afforded her a wider shopping window than usual, because she found time to venture more deeply into the mall than the two stores closest to the entrance. Her trajectory brought her all the way to the center of the mall, where she scooped up a double fistful of bras at Victoria’s Secret and still made it back to her desk before her screensaver kicked in. Bras, people. Aren’t women supposed to make, like, appointments for fittings to make sure they get the right thing? And how come I’ve never been invited to one of them? Unsurprisingly, a couple of items in this small arsenal of double-barreled slingshots turned out to not be keepers. So last night, I stopped at the aforementioned delicates emporium to return them. There’s always that awkward moment where I’m expected to explain why I’m returning what I’m returning, and I’ve done this so many times I can never keep straight what was too big and what was too short and what made her look like Punky Brewster on crack, so I just answer in the fewest possible syllables and get out of there. In this case, since I’m in a Victoria’s Secret store, I’m already somewhat conscious of the clingy young couple ringing out at the other register. The woman running the register I’ve stepped up to asks me, “Did these not work out for you, or were they the wrong size?” I said, “Well I bought them for everyday wear, but then I realized they’re just a little too fabulous.” Or perhaps I said, “Girlfriend, if God wanted the blood to my boobies cut off, he would’ve done it himself.” Followed by a sassy head bob. Or, as is infinitely more likely, I grunted, “Uh, yeah.” “So they didn’t work out for you then?” she repeated. Correct. They didn’t work out for me. They barely fit around my torso, I can’t get the straps up over my shoulders, and yet the cups flap emptily in the breeze. Also, the color makes me look washed out, and they’re totally wrong with all of my dresses. Okay? I could have said they didn’t work out for my wife, of course, but to the other four people within two yards of me, that would have come out sounding like “OH, HO, HO, HO, LITTLE MISSY, I’M ALL MAN, DON’T YOU KNOW. THESE WEREN’T FOR ME. THEY WERE FOR THE MISSUS. IN FACT, SHE LOVES THESE! BUT I ONLY ALLOW HER TO KEEP THE ONES I CAN UNSNAP FROM THE FRONT IN TWO SECONDS FLAT, AND THESE CLASPS WERE JUST A TAD TOO SLOW ON THE DRAW, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING. USED TO BE I’D JUST CUT THE STRAPS WITH MY HUNTING KNIFE, BUT THAT GETS EXPENSIVE. NOW, HURRY UP AND CREDIT THAT BACK TO MY CARD SO I CAN GET HOME AND GIVE HER WHAT SHE NEEDS. HEY, WANNA SEE IT?” So rather than coming off as a desperately insecure cross-dresser, I took the route of the quietly embarrassed cross-dresser. I’m pretty sure that was the way to go. On the way home, I stopped at Payless. They didn’t have anything in my size. posted by M. Giant 3:15 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, June 23, 2003 It Was a Porsche It’s been a while since I saw anyone pick up their computer mouse and point it at the monitor like a remote control, but I’m happy to say that there are still plenty of people who phrase their queries to search engines as though they’re talking to the computer on Star Trek. Also, many of these people appear to be playing some kind of trivia challenge or something, because I’ve gotten a whole Googlewhack of hits today from phrases like "Tom Cruise" car dump into a lake in 'Risky Business"? and car "tom cruise" dump in lake in "risky business" and "risky business" cruise car dump lake, as well as several searches for "risky business" What kind of car did Tom Cruise dump into a lake and “WHAT KIND OF CAR DID TOM CRUISE DUMP INTO THE LAKE IN RISKY BUSINESS?” Because Google is more likely to understand your question if you shout. It’s like foreigners that way. At first I thought this was just one really, really curious individual desperate to find out just what got parked in Lake Michigan anyway, but the disparity of domains and time zones involved says otherwise. And yet the word “dumped” keeps showing up, indicating that they’re all trying to answer a question from a single source. In any case, they could have saved a lot of keystrokes (and gotten the answer, which my January archives don’t have) by using the phrase "joel goodson" dad's car. I’m sure many people did do just that, and my money’s on them for whatever prize they’re after. If anyone knows where the question comes from in the first place, let me know, okay? I’m not above whoring for more hits from net-unsavvy triviaphiles. Speaking of cars, something occurred to me the other day. In light of the setup, I’ll tell you right now that it doesn’t end badly. I was coming up to the four-way stop sign on my corner, and a kid on a bike was approaching the same intersection on the cross street, which happens to angle steeply downhill. He saw me coming and skidded to a panicked stop. I stopped before the crosswalk, and he’d stopped before the corner, so an accidental collision was out of the question. I waited for him to cross the street in front of my bumper, as he called out “sorry” through my open window. Then we were both on our way. Now, my question is, why was he sorry? He was at the intersection first. He had the right-of-way, which I gladly yielded. If he’d bounced off my hood, it would have been because I’d run the sign. In other words, it would have been entirely my fault. I felt like chasing the kid down and explaining it to him, and bouncing him off my hood until he got it, but then I had to wonder—would I really be doing him a favor? What if he gets in the habit of checking for stop signs that apply to cross-traffic, and a less scrupulous driver than myself (yes, such an animal may exist) rolls through while he’s trying to cross and gets a grille full of the kid’s spokes? Would my lesson in responsibility be any comfort to a nine-year-old being held together with dental floss and spackling compound in the Fairview-Southdale ICU? I can’t help thinking that such a transaction would put me pretty deeply in the red, karmically speaking. So I let him ride off thinking he’d dome something wrong. I’m not proud of it. It was just the least bad option, as I saw it. Which made me think that we need to come up with another less bad option: give kids cars. Think about it; right car vs. wrong kid = smushed kid, but wrong car vs. right kid = smushed kid again. It’s this whole “might makes right” philosophy that gets to me. Put a kid in a car and at least he’ll be safer. There are still some bugs to be worked out, like, for instance, the threat to public safety that a nation of licensed preteens would represent, and the elevated risk of Chicago’s destruction by flooding as Lake Michigan gets completely filled with Porsches. Maybe kids could drive Nerfmobiles with safety cages or something. It sounds crazy, but back when my own primary mode of transportation had two wheels, nobody ever thought that bicycle helmets would be as ubiquitous as they are now. Things change, you know. And it’s for the children. Won’t somebody please think of the children? posted by M. Giant 3:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, June 20, 2003 Gimme Five What the heck. Why not give this Friday Five thing a shot? 1. Is your hair naturally curly, wavy, or straight? Long or short? My hair isn’t completely straight, but that’s mostly due to the fact that my head is fairly roundish. If I had a square head, my hair could be used in geometry proofs. Except for the cowlicks. Apprently cows find me very tasty. I’m pretty sure my hair is naturally long, because it always reverts to that if I leave too much time between haircuts. Having naturally short hair would be a real time-saver, though. 2. How has your hair changed over your lifetime? It used to have some serious anger issues, but I think with age it has gained some perspective and realized that life is too short to be mad all the time. Now it’s much more mellow and has actually taken up Buddhist mysticism. There’s a great deal more of it scattered all over the world, I would imagine. If someone went around and collected all of the hair that’s been cut off my head in my life (assuming none of it’s been burned, dissolved, or otherwise reduced to its constituent molecules) and assembled it into some sort of hair golem it would probably stand thirty feet tall. All of which used to be inside my head. And I bet it would fetch twenty-some dollars, too. 3. How do your normally wear your hair? I normally wear it on my head. You do mean head hair, right? Just making sure. Sorry, I’ll be serious. I generally try to keep it fairly well centered. I might slide it over to one side or give it a cocky hip-hop twist if I’m going out clubbing, but I find the default configuration to be the most low-maintenance. 4. If you could change your hair this minute, what would it look like? There are things I like about my hair. I like how thick it is. I like the crazy bedhead I get that always astonishes overnight houseguests in the morning. I like that it makes the chicks look at me and think to themselves, “what is it about him that the cows find so tasty?” Changing anything might entail losing one or more of those things, and I’m not sure if it would be worth the risk. Besides, since I don’t have a mirror in front of me this minute, it would most likely look like ass. But since we’re in fantasy-land here, I’ll go with it. First of all, it would be animated. In other words, I would be able to make it stand straight up to express surprise, or point straight back when somebody’s yelling at me or the music’s too loud, or wave it around to simulate wind on a still day. While I’m at it, I might as well make it prehensile, if for no other reason than to allow me to type faster. It would also contain a portable DVD player, complete with a screen that folds down in front of my eyes so I never have to watch The Wedding Planner on an airplane ever again. It would also shed change every time I brushed it. Quarters only, please. 5. Ever had a hair disaster? What happened? The word “disaster” is kind of strong in relation to what can happen to one’s hair, but I’ll tell you about the two times I came closest to a bona fide “hair disaster.” I was about six years old. My parents tell me I tried to lick the space heater, and the next thing they knew I was dashing across the living room like a human torch, only with more screaming. Apparently my bowl-cut had gotten a little too close to the heating element. I got halfway down the block before my dad caught up with me and poured baking soda on my head and shoulders. By that time most of the flesh had melted off my skull, leaving flaming gobbets scattered in my path. I spent the next twenty-odd years in various hospital burn units all over the country as my senses and facial features were restored bit by bit, one by one. Today, you have to look fairly closely to see that my skin is actually an advanced form of Saran Wrap™. I had three unsuccessful tongue transplants before they found one that my mouth wouldn’t reject, and I’m still unable to roll my R’s. The years of painful recovery, solitude, and ultimate re-assimilation into society left me so psychologically malajusted that I find myself unable to concentrate on the simplest tasks unless I abduct, torture, and murder a randomly chosen person three times per year. Also, I got a really bad haircut once. posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, June 19, 2003 Check Out My Shorts I, Brow Last night Trash kissed me goodnight, pulled back, and looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. One of her hands reached out to gently fondle my left eyebrow. Then I felt an abrupt yank and I went into a brief, involuntary half-scowl, which immediately gave way to a voluntary full scowl of considerably longer duration. “Ow,” I remarked. “You have this eyebrow hair,” she said. “Yeah, I figured.” “It’s, like, two inches long, and it curls upwards…” “I get those some—Ow!” “It’s creeping me out.” “Okay, I’ll snip it in the morning.” “It’s going to keep me awake.” “How? By tickling you?” “Lemme try one more time.” “Okay, but you have to actually pluck it this--Ow!” “Creepshow.” “Did you get it?” “No.” “Fine, I’ll go snip it. Jeez.” Downstairs in the bathroom, I considered Aqua-Netting the hair to my forehead and going back to bed that way. But that would have led to me just coming right back downstairs again. * * * Penang Me Trash’s favorite meal is Penang Curry with Mock Duck from Chiang Mai Thai. It’s an evil-looking, green-orange, coconut-milk-based brew that loyalty to my wife prevents me from describing accurately. A couple of times a month, we’ll get a takeout order in a clear plastic container. Mixed with rice, it’s enough food for three or four meals. Not least of all because I won’t touch the stuff. It’s also handy for bringing in to work for lunch. Except that within minutes of its placement in the fridge, it separates out to this multi-layered horror that looks like it’s been in there since the last good episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. When you stir it up, it immediately returns to its marginally-less-scary form, but Trash’s coworkers don’t know that. All they know is that they went to get their lunches and there’s this vat of something that, again, loyalty to my wife prevents me from describing, and they’ll start arguing about whose turn it is to don the hazmat suit and get the thing out of there with a pair of Simpsons-opening-credit tongs. Never mind that it wasn’t there yesterday; the very fact that anything that was once edible could have attained this state of matter at all indicates that it occupies some kind of highly localized temporal anomaly and it must be disposed of before it gets to the end of the universe and drags their Hot Pockets™ with it. Then one or two or three o’clock rolls around and Trash is left in the break room going, “Who ate my lunch?” Then they all fall over each other trying to take credit for rescuing her from what she’d been planning to put in her mouth. She brought a drum of the stuff for today’s lunch. I meant to write her a note to stick on the container: ***DO NOT THROW*** TRASH’S LUNCH. FOR TODAY. JUNE 19. 2003. A.D. IT’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THIS. But I forgot. Instead, she made a circuit of the office, Penang in hand, going desk to desk to inform each one of her colleagues that she’d appreciate it if she could actually get to eat her lunch today. Some might argue that food that requires such measures is probably not worth the effort. I want no part of that argument. * * * Cataloging the Failures “Why do we have so many catalogs? I was only gone five days.” “I saved them for you.” “Gee, thanks.” “Are we going to do some shopping?” “Yep. Ooh, honey, look at that outfit! It says, ‘Cheap whoo-er.’” “Yes, it does.” “’Buy our clothes, cheap whoo-er.’” “What about that?” “You know, it seems like a perfectly nice, normal outfit, and yet…” “Cheap whoo-er?” “Exactly. I just don’t think the slacks and the sweater go with the O-face.” “How do you even find your way in and out of that thing?” “The green one? I don’t know, but I’m sure it helps if you’re a cheap whoo-er.” “Oh, are we done now?” “I am.” “But there’s still pages and pages of quality skankwear.” “Yes, and I’ll look again, when I’m a cheap whoo-er.” “Keep me posted on that, okay.” “Okay. Goodnight.” (Kiss, followed by look of curiosity and revulsion. See above.) posted by M. Giant 3:48 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, June 18, 2003 Rock & Roll Will Never Die, but the Grass Might I am old. This is how I know: A local radio station is holding a contest called “Ultimate Backyard Barbecue” or “Extreme Summer Picnic” or “Rock & Roll Garden Party” or something like that. The randomly chosen winner gets a party thrown in his or her backyard, with live entertainment by local music legend Martin Zellar, formerly of the fabulous Gear Daddies. They’ll also provide Subway™ sandwiches and Sierra Mist™ for 105 guests, presumably so they can lose ludicrous amounts of weight and participate in an incoherent branding strategy. So I’m thinking, damn, that sounds pretty cool. I mean, I dig Martin Zellar, and it’s been years since we had a huge blowout at our place, and maybe Krakathoom could even open for Marty and the guys. And then I think, “Oh, man, that’s going to kill my new grass.” Really, any way we arrange it is going to be detrimental to the rich, lush lawn I’ve reanimated this summer. If they lay a stage out on the grass, it’ll crush it beyond repair. But if the band plays on the driveway instead, 210 feet are going to trample my lovingly resurrected blades into a nutrient paste. It’s a dilemma. Then I thought that maybe they’d use a stage that’s raised up on four to eight short pillars, which would minimize the area that would be directly crushed by the weight. I could repair those little spots, I’m sure. I’d just have to make sure the musicians didn’t jump around too much on the stage and sink them into the turf. Then the only hard part would be keeping the audience on the driveway and the patio. Although, depending on the size of the stage, there might not be room for them on the grass, so the whole issue might be moot. And then I realized, wow, this whole line of thought is so not Rock & Roll. And then I think back to when we first bought the house way back in our early twenties, and we threw a Halloween party in which the whole premises were covered in fake spiderwebs, the basement was ankle-deep in beer, the cigarette smoke had to be cut into cubes so we could carry it outside, and we created “ambience” by setting fire to the living-room carpet. And now I can’t even envision a rock band in my back yard without also picturing fussy little rope railings and “keep off the grass” signs. Trash and I heard the commercial for the contest in the car on the way to work today, and I broke the news to her that she now was married to an old man, and how I had come to that conclusion. “Actually,” she confessed, “I was thinking that at least we wouldn’t have to be embarrassed about our back yard when people come over this year.” No, indeed. We got plenty of other stuff to be embarrassed about. posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, June 17, 2003 Harry Potter vs. the Baudelaire Orphans The fifth Harry Potter book comes out on Saturday, and for any of you to whom that is news, I’m curious as to why you’ve chosen this site as your only point of contact with the outside world. Let me know, hey? In any case, with people all over the world renting U-Hauls and adding rooms onto their houses to accommodate the 900-page tome, you might think our household would be one of them. You would be correct. Trash pre-ordered our copy on Amazon months ago and shortly a “young adult” book the size of a cinder block will leave a crater in our front yard. Whereupon Trash will breeze through it in a matter of hours and get down to the business of waiting for Book Six, a pulped sequoia which should keep her entertained during her first few days of retirement. Trash first discovered Harry Potter a couple of years ago. I don’t remember if it was in connection with her librarian training or just cultural osmosis, but reading the first book got her hooked. Not that it takes a great deal to hook a woman who never has to invest more than an afternoon in a full-length novel, but she was an instant fan. She bought the second and third books, and the fourth when it came out a couple of months later. When she got to Goblet of Fire’s famous cliffhanger ending, she had this to say: “AAARGH!” “You have to read these books,” she told me almost immediately, distraught. “So I can be as pissed off as you are right now? No thank you,” I said. Cliffhangers make me crazy. They’re bad enough at the end of a TV season, or in the second part of a film trilogy, but when one wraps up a book whose sequel isn’t due for at least a year, why would I want to let myself in for that kind of grief and heartache? “You only have to wait until next spring,” Trash pointed out. I refused. In fact, I planned to wait until all seven novels were out. I’d waited until four or five seasons into The X-Files to start watching that show’s early cliffhanger episodes on video, and that had worked out pretty well for me. I saw no reason why that shouldn’t be the case here. Trash saw lots of reasons, most of them traceable to the fact that she wanted someone to share her frustrations with. I wasn’t playing, though. I’m kind of a bastard that way. But she wasn’t completely foiled. She targeted other people in our peer group, and she lent her Harry Potter books out to them one after another, and then waited for them to call her in the middle of the night going, “AAARGH!” so she could go “I KNOW!” As we well know, J. K. Rowling made a liar out of my wife as the wait for Book Five accordioned out to a quarter-decade or so. In that time, Trash has actually prevailed upon me to read the first two books in the series, which I found very enjoyable and quite cliffhanger-free. I even saw both movies willingly. I’ll probably see the next one. But this is as far as I’m willing to go until books One through Seven are safely in our house. Instead, I recently got into Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events books. These slim volumes are much faster reading, are published more frequently, and are even more fun than Harry Potter by virtue of being almost entirely evil. Recently Trash finished rereading her four Harry Potter novels in preparation for receiving our airlift delivery next week. She got to the end, said “AAARGH!” as always, asked me again to read them as always, expressed her irritation at my refusal as always, and asked me how I was enjoying my Lemony Snicket books. “They’re great,” I said. “And I have several left.” “Go to hell,” she suggested. I was under the impression that A Series of Unfortunate Events had volumes up to the low teens. I only owned One through Nine, but I imagined that could be quickly remedied once I finished the last one in my collection. Book Nine, as it turns out, has a cliffhanger ending in a nearly literal sense. “Wow,” I said as I finished it, complacently closing the book and setting it aside. “I’ll have to pick up Book Ten tomorrow.” Book Nine, as it turns out, is the most recent one in print. “AAARGH!” I said. “What’s wrong?” Trash asked. “You should read these books,” I said. posted by M. Giant 3:34 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, June 16, 2003 Supporting the Troops Years ago, Trash’s brother was in the army for a few months. Normally you don’t only get to be in the army for only a few months and still come home in the passenger section of the plane, but he’d signed up to be a paratrooper and it turned out his body wasn’t up for it structurally. So he got a medical discharge. As the first and only sibling of ours who had gone out of state with the armed forces, we figured Brother-In-Law was entitled to lavish care packages from home. But apparently the army has rules about that sort of thing, especially during basic training, so we contented ourselves with sending letters. We put a lot of effort into creating these mailed missives. Not writing them, mind you. They hardly contained any writing at all. We preferred to communicate in pictures. Specifically, primitive stick-drawings in Crayola™ marker that made cave paintings look like Rembrandts. We would spend hours filing up sheets of typing paper with the kind of art that would get a four-year-old flunked out of daycare. The subject matter was invariably our lives in downtown Minneapolis. There would be stick M. Giant and stick Trash in their stick cubicles at work. There our stick selves would be, commuting to the stick office via stick skyway. We’d go to stick movies, attend stick concerts, and have stick picnics. And in every illustration, we would be closely accompanied by our two stick cats, whether their presence was appropriate or not in any given context. That included our visits to our stick apartment complex’s stick pool, during which our wet stick cats glared, droopy-whiskered, at the viewer. No detail of our lives was too dull, banal, or irrelevant to be rendered with unswerving amateurishness permeating every stroke. You know, kind of like this site, but before Blogger. We flattered ourselves that Brother-In-Law would post these masterpieces near his bunk so that he might look at them and be reminded of home and the people who loved him. We sent two or three of these packages, with fifteen or twenty full-sized drawings in each one. We didn’t expect any thanks, or even a response of any kind, because you know what boot camp is like. Any environment in which you’re given fifteen seconds to move your bowels isn’t going to be conducive to pouring out your heart in letters home. And phone calls? Forget it. We figured we’d hear from him at 6:00 am. on Christmas Day if we were lucky. One day he called us. Trash answered the phone, thrilled and amazed to hear his voice. She excitedly asked if he’d gotten our packages. He couldn’t talk long, but he needed to tell us something important. Please stop sending them. We found out later that mail call in the barracks is a highly public event. Each recruit is called up individually by name to get his mail. Anything larger than a simple one- or two-page letter must be opened in front of the entire unit and its contents exhaustively inventoried. You see where this is going. “LAW!” the drill instructor would bellow (because in the army they call you by your last name, you know). “FRONT AND CENTER!” Whereupon military regulations would require my brother-in-law to display to several dozen fighting men of our armed forces a small exhibit of work by what appeared to be the two worst artists in the world, one of whom was blind and the other of whom was suffering a perpetual grand mal seizure. All while paraphrasing our explanatory captions for their edification: “This is…my sister… and her husband…watching TV in their apartment…with their cats…This is my sister…and her husband…watching Fourth of July fireworks…and waving…” Reading that speech, it’s easy to imagine it being delivered at a reluctant whisper. Unless you’ve ever seen an army movie in your life. I think it was the “and her husband” that confused everyone. If it had just been “my sister,” everyone would have just assumed she was barely old enough to hold a marker. But then he had to explain that it was his older sister. As it was, the quality and quantity of drawings known to have been executed by adults raised the repeated question: “Are they retarded?” Our thoughtful gesture, intended to ease my brother-in-law’s transition to military life, had instead turned him into something of a pariah. In a place where anything that sets you apart, no matter how minor, can get you killed, we really weren’t doing him a favor. As it turns out. Quite the opposite, to the extent that he was willing to risk a court-martial and dishonorable discharge to get us to knock it off. So it was probably just as well that he turned out to not be built for jumping out of airplanes. That might have dogged him throughout his military career, even if he made general. He came home early, but I never again saw any of those pictures we’d labored so hard over, at nearly ten seconds a page. He must have run out of room in his luggage. During the recent conflict, Trash and I supported our soldiers in the Gulf by not sending them any pictures of any kind. The only sad part is that they’ll never know just how much we appreciate them. posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, June 13, 2003 Welcome Home A few days ago, one of the cats had an accident in our bedroom. I say one of the cats, but I suspect it was Strat. So, yeah. A Strat accident. A Straccident, if you will. But we can’t figure out where. All we know is that a faint cloud of urine smell is lingering in the room, and its source is resisting all efforts to find it. Theoretically, Trash and I shouldn’t have any trouble with this. She has a very sensitive nose, and should be able to track down an odor’s source with no problem. While I am willing to sniff right up to something to determine whether it’s clean or not. But it doesn’t work that way because Trash doesn’t want any part of it. So rather than it being a situation where she can and I will, we end up deadlocked in a situation where she won’t and I can’t. If we had some CSI-like device that would allow us to visually identify cat pee spatter using special goggles and a UV light, it would be fine. But we don’t. So it’s down to my inadequate nose and Trash’s unwilling one. Which leaves us cleaning one surface or item at a time, and for a while we think we got it, but then the cleaning-supply odor fades away and the telltale ammoniac signature is back. Last night I went through the sock hamper (we have too many socks to fit in a drawer, so we use a laundry basket instead), sniffing each one and hoping I wouldn’t end up having to wash the lot of them. As it was, I only found one pair of peed-on socks in the entire 15-gallon bin, and how the cat managed that I’ll never know. But while I was at it, I spent some time matching up the singles that have accumulated over the past several weeks. Trash was at her computer, listening to some MP3s and singing along. Even while yawning. At that point, reader, I did something I’m not proud of. I opened my mouth wide, emitted a series of undifferentiated vowels in an uncertain melody, and went back to what I was doing. “What was that?” Trash demanded mock-angrily. “I was singing along with you,” I explained mock-innocently. “There’s no need for mocking,” she pointed out. I disagreed, both in general and in specific. At that point, things got a little ugly. Trash resorted to an immature display of temper in a form that she only employs when she really wants to get my Irish up. To wit, she fired up her MP3 of Nelly’s “Hot in Herrrre,” my least favorite song of the millennium to date. There are two problems with this strategy. Firstly, it's like attacking somebody with a can of tear gas when you're sharing a phone booth with him, because she doesn't like the song any more than I do. Secondly—and she doesn’t yet realize this—is that I’m starting to get inured to it. I even shook my white booty for a few minutes just to show her how much she wasn’t getting to me, but she never even bothered to look around and I think I dislocated my kidney. “You know,” I commented, “this is going a lot faster now that I’m only matching my socks.” I was promptly rewarded with something by Pink. I don’t remember what specific event triggered the escalation to physical violence, but I can say that the conflict was brief but decisive. I bounced a pair of socks off the back of her neck. She didn’t much care for that. I gave her accusations that I’d dislocated her kidney the credence they deserved. But at that point, I decided it would be best to make peace before she broke out the stuff she used to listen to in the eighties. I got all apologetic and conciliatory and kissy-face and our little pretend war was over. You know, the one I’d started. It was just a fun little pissing match, our twisted way of each letting the other know how much they’d been missed. No feelings hurt, no harm done, just a low-key battle of minor irritations, one of the many ways we show our love. Also, if things got really nasty, she knows I could threaten to tell you all exactly what she listened to in the eighties, and that leads nowhere but to scorched earth. * * * Hey, fans of Angel, Monk, and Television Without Pity! Go to these threads on the TWoP forums if you’re interested in putting together a banner ad for your favorite shows while financially supporting your favorite TV site in the process. Trash hardly ever hangs out in the forums, and now she’s trying to start these discussions and nobody’s joining in. You’re going to give her a complex or something. And that’s my job. posted by M. Giant 3:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, June 12, 2003 Flying High The company I work for is a 401(k) recordkeeper. One of our most important functions—arguably, the most important function—is sending out quarterly statements to participants in the many plans we keep records for. It keeps them up to speed, and it gives them a means to keep us honest. It’s all about communication, customer satisfaction, and an environment of trust and respect. Yesterday we got a call from a customer who wanted no part of that. After almost nine years at this company, I figure I’ve heard, or at least heard about, every possible customer complaint. The guy who was angry about getting a statement every quarter, though, that was a new one. The representative who took the call explained that the statements go out automatically (which isn’t strictly true—a lot of work goes into getting all those documents accurately generated, printed up, and sent out four times a year). He didn’t care. She explained that quarterly statements are a required provision of our contract with his employer, our client. His employer, our client, could go screw as far as he was concerned. She pointed out that quarterly statements are mandated by the SEC, the IRS, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, the President of the United States, and the baby Jesus. He made it clear that as long as we planned to send those quarterly statements, he was going to stay on the phone and generate a ruckus. The rep’s team leader was sitting at the podium with me at the time, monitoring the call and giving me a play-by-play. “Maybe he’s getting a divorce and wants to hide the money from his ex,” I theorized. “Maybe he’s just crazy,” she countered. I’m not going to say I miss dealing with customers on the phone, but obviously the above exchange and its sequel demonstrate that after years of disuse, my instincts are as sharp as a cue ball. Eventually the team leader had to take the call herself, because this guy was clearly ready to take his issue all the way up to the baby Jesus and she was the next step in the hierarchy. Apparently she was highly-ranked enough for him to explain his reasons: “I’ve got half a garbage bag full of mail here, and I’m calling all the people who sent it to me and telling them to stop sending it,” he said in one second flat. Ah, so you’ve already taken apart all of your home electronics then, have you? Seriously, is this how a person not on speed would address this issue? I mean, I can see people’s objection to the sheer volume and irrelevance of most of what turns up in their mailboxes, but what he gets from us is three or four pages of highly detailed financial data that applies to nobody but him. In terms of annoyance and percentage of the total volume, he’s going after the wrong people. Leaving that aside, why doesn’t he just invest in a file cabinet and a wastebasket instead of calling innocent people who are doing their jobs and harrassing them for doing their jobs? How would he like it if someone harrassed him for doing his job while he was doing his job? Which happens to be airline pilot? So, I don’t know what this guy’s like in the air, but at home he’s bouncing off the walls in a way that seems chemcally assisted. I can see needing an extra cup of coffee to stay alert on, say, an overnight flight from LAX to Sydney. But maybe, just maybe, if you’re taking an afternoon off at home to do your ginkwork and you find yourself with enough time to personally contact everyone who ever sent you anything, you may want to consider cutting back on the go-pills or at least switching to a larger size captain’s hat or something. I’m just saying. The team lead tried to talk him down, but he remained insistent, talking at the speed of a Concorde. “Rules are made to be broken,” he chattered over and over again. I wonder if he’s shared that philosophy with the FAA or the Department of Homeland Security. That actually might explain why he has time to sit at home and bug people now. Which is kind of too bad, because it might be fun to bang on his cockpit door sometime and demand that he fly in such a way as to keep the sun out of my eyes. “Get it on the other side of the plane,” I’d snap. “I’m trying to sleep back here.” “I can’t do that without returning to our destination,” he might say. “So fly upside down. Rules are made to be broken!” Needless to say, such an exchange in a post-9/11 world would probably result in me swapping my podium for a chicken-wire cage at Guantanamo Bay. But until somebody kills three thousand people with a 401(k) recordkeeping company, we have to sit and take it. posted by M. Giant 3:25 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, June 11, 2003 Bringing the Outside In I finished painting the second bedroom last night. When I painted the basement, my mom pointed out what a bad idea it was to do it without opening the windows. I can’t remember if she pointed that out before or after I did it, but it was the dead of winter and I decided that staying warm was worth a couple of fume-induced hallucinations. I lived to regret that choice, because altered perceptions are the only thing that could have convinced me that the purple looked good when I was spreading it on. So this time I had the window open with a window fan blowing out of it. I also had the back door standing open with another fan blowing outside onto the deck full-blast so any bugs that wanted to come in would have to fly upwind. I couldn’t get any more ventilation without knocking down a load-bearing wall. So it’s good that I got plenty of ventilation. After I finished the first coat on the fourth wall, I went to do other stuff while I left it to dry. With the door still open. Between one thing and another, I got sidetracked and didn’t get back to the room until later. The bugs had arrived. The fan had actually worked in the sense that the room wasn’t swarming with life like that tent in the old Off! commercial. But an unexpected consequence was that the bugs that did get in were the ones that were able to—namely, the ones that could take me in a fight. There’s an old joke about how Minnesota has two sizes of mosquito: the kind small enough to fly through a screen door, and the kind big enough to open one. I now had several magnificent specimens of the latter which had braved the equivalent of hurricane gusts to leave their grubby little footprints on my freshly painted walls. Under normal circumstances, I would have just grabbed the flyswatter and started reaping, but in this case the balance of power was skewed. The room was empty, which meant they couldn’t find cover. So instead they hugged the freshly-painted walls, freshly-painted ceiling, and freshly-painted window and baseboard trim, as if they were fully aware that I wasn’t prepared to squish their grody guts on my pristine surfaces before my wife had even had a chance to see the room. They didn’t go near the windowpanes, or the wooden doors, or the dropcloth, or any other surface I hadn’t spent the last several days refurbishing. They were cynically using my fresh paint as a shield, which I’m fairly sure is in violation of the Geneva Convention. So I left them alone for a minute, concentrating instead on the larger targets of a pair of winged daddy longlegses that were hovering near the ceiling like a couple of little Apache helicopters. Don’t worry, I didn’t kill them. I captured the first one by deftly brushing a strip of duct tape against it and trapping it on the adhesive. Then I returned it to its natural habitat. I can’t help being such a kindhearted soul. The second one was a little more elusive, possibly because it had seen what had happened to its fellow, and possibly because I was on the phone while pursuing it. I don’t think my conversational partner noticed, which can’t say anything good about my conversational skills. After that, I had half a dozen mosquitoes or so to dispatch. Which meant that with the windowshade still removed, the neighbors were treated to the spectacle of me in paint-spattered clothes dashing around a tiny room and swatting at the air with strips of duct tape. I guess I should be glad that no chipmunks or squirrels wandered in. Or maybe they did, and they fell down the furnace vent because I’d removed the grate so I could spray-paint it. If that’s the case, it’s totally their problem. I won’t be turning the furnace on again until they’re no longer juicy anyway. posted by M. Giant 4:07 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, June 10, 2003 You Bet? You Better. I’m not much into gambling. Slot machines in particular hold no allure for me. I stick in a quarter, I pull a lever, nothing happens, and I’m already bored. And poorer. If someone would combine slot machines with video games and reward me for actual skill, I’d be all over that. Having the opportunity to win money and shoot zombies at the same time would undoubtedly make me better at both. Then I would be independently wealthy and free from fear of the undead. Instead I can only look back at all of the change I’ve lost on gambling machines and the rolls of quarters I’ve fed into “House of the Dead II.” (Oh, and the seventy bucks I scored the one time I played blackjack with a live dealer in my life, but that doesn’t count. That was Vegas.) And yet I live in a state where gambling is mandatory. They don’t call it gambling, of course. They call it “auto insurance.” But it amounts to the same thing. Think about it. Every time you pay your car insurance premium, you’re paying off a bet that you made and lost—a bet that you’d crash your car before your premium came due. If you “win” your bet by cutting off a mobile home and yanking your parking brake, the insurance company will buy you part of a new car and then make you pay shorter odds on your next bet. In other words, a higher premium. And that’s assuming they still want to play with you. As I can attest, insurance companies don’t need a lot of provocation before they decide to cash in their chips and go home. They’ll take your money for years without complaint, but just try going through a couple of years of accidents and speeding tickets and see how surly they get. All the money I paid them over the years, they owed me that new engine. But the house makes the rules. So I paid through my sinuses for a couple of years while my driving indiscretions receded into the distance. Then, a couple of months ago. I asked for new odds. I won’t tell you the name of my insurance company at the time, but when I called them at 1-800-PROGRESSIVE, I had a surreal conversation in which I learned that two years of having a flawless driving record gave me the opportunity to slash my semi-annual premiums by a dramatic .001%. And that was because I was a current customer. If I had been a new customer, I could have saved .002%. Time to look for a new casino. The next place I found was willing to cut me more of a break, on the order of two hundred bucks a month or so. I had them put the paperwork in motion, looking forward to having that much more disposable cash every month, which I would spend on taunting postcards to my previous insurance company. Then, while the last weeks of my old policy ticked away, my new insurer decided they didn’t want to play with me after all. This after signing me up, executing a policy, and giving me a month of coverage. Weasels. Apparently they balked at my claim history. Like I’m going to keep pulling out of my driveway without looking where I’m going, or trying to drive through puddles so large they have tides. I learned those lessons, okay? Can I please come out of my room, now? Because in a week I’m going to be without car insurance and I really think I need to address that. I blame the back-office bean counters for this, because my new and soon to be former agent was a total mensch about it. In his embarrassment and eagerness to make this right for me, he called up a colleague. Much to his shock and mine, the colleague’s company would not only take me on, not only do it quickly, but charge me half of what I’d been paying in car insurance for the last three years. Half. This may not seem like a big deal to those of you whose insurance companies think you shit ice cream and therefore charge you premiums that you can rank on your household budgets somewhere between “paper clips” and “gravity,” but for me it was the equivalent of a ten percent salary raise. I don’t know why they were willing to do that. The new agent explained something to me about “stacking coverage,” but all I heard was “blah blah blah HALF blah blah.” As far as I can figure, it’s like serving prison sentences concurrently, or it’s predicated on their assumption that I can only drive one of our cars at a time, but who cares? HALF! Sign us up! Deal us in! Do it now! That’s why it was such a bummer to get that letter that said they were denying us coverage. This sucked. We’d had about a month to enjoy our largesse. I wasn’t even hooked on the coke yet. And now I had to find another insurer, a process that had taken me months in the first place? I could do that, or I could call our agent in a panic. Always try the easiest thing first, I like to say. Apparently the letter was from one of the insurance company’s other subsidiaries who had gotten an inquiry from our agent, decided to pass, then told us instead of our agent. Because their commitment to customer service compels them to let us know they rejected us personally, even though we didn’t know they’d been approached in the first place. Our policy was still valid and would continue to be so. Still, we don’t need this stress. The whole purpose of insurance from the customer’s point of view is to help smooth out the bumps and edges in life, not create more of them. Maybe what we need is insurance insurance. Of course, with my history, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. posted by M. Giant 2:43 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, June 09, 2003 A House of a Different Color When we bought our house ten years ago, nearly every room in the place was painted a dingy, depressing, off-white color that called to mind a mixture of milk and urine. We timed our closing so that we would have two weeks before we had to be out of our apartment. We used some of that time to paint nearly every room in the house. We didn’t have a lot of time for a fancy design, so we just painted the whole main floor the same color: a cool gray so light it was nearly white. Walls and ceiling. It went with everything, it made the rooms seem bigger, and you could sit in them and have a conversation without wanting to get up and pee every ten minutes. Which was good, because we didn’t get around to taking down the hideous eagle-motif wallpaper in the bathroom until a few weeks later. The even more hideous orange-and-brown-wheat-pattern-on-cream paneling in the basement had primer on it within a half-hour of the closing. We painted it in a fresh, bright coat of off-white (because even the gray-white wouldn’t have gone with the wood paneling that makes up the lower half of the wall down there) which, in a matter of a couple of years, looked like a mixture of milk and urine. We left the upstairs bedroom the way it was—not because we liked it, but because that’s where all of our stuff was being stored as we moved in. We decided we could live with the spoiled-oatmeal color and the dorky southwestern stencil pattern on the wall for a few months. Three years ago, the bathroom went beige. Two years ago, we painted the kitchen blue and the living room blue-gray. Last year we did a purple faux-finish in the study, and we covered the moisture-crazed beige bathroom paint with a warmer tan. You already know what happened in the basement (or you will, if you follow the link). Since then, I painted it a robust sandy color that Dutch Boy calls “In The Rough,” which despite having a weaker name looks a whole lot better than the “Café Mystique” it covered. So now every room we painted when we moved in has been painted again. I’d be so much happier about that if I knew what to do with the seven gallons of grey-white that’s been fermenting in our basement for the past decade. Actually the second bedroom is still that color, but that’s changing this week. Three of the walls will be “Porpoise,” and the fourth will be “Mountain Ridge.” I’ve already painted the ceiling, and I’ve painstakingly covered the trim and window frames—which were still the original puke-beige—with a pure white enamel that goes on like glue and dries into a hard shell. One color’s going on tonight, the second is going on tomorrow, and on Wednesday I hope to have everything moved back into the room before I pick Trash up at the airport. Or maybe I’ll just leave it on the yard a while longer. I haven’t decided yet. This is the second room I’ve painted by myself, and I’ve learned that I don’t like painting rooms by myself as much as I thought I would. I figured it would be nice to not have to work around anyone, or share the roller pan, or let someone else spread the paint on. There was a time when I also figured it would be nice to spend seven hours on an airplane. You know how, if you’re on a road trip with someone, they can get snacks while you pump the gas? But if you’re alone, you have to pump the gas and then get snacks? I mean, you still get your gas, and you still get your snacks, but while you’re getting snacks the pump is lying dormant and while you’re filling your tank not a single snack finds its way into your possession. It’s the same thing with painting, but the work expands exponentially. There’s just a ridiculous amount of prep work that goes into painting. You have to wash, sand, spackle, sand again, wash again, and maybe spackle some more before you can really get going. And that’s just my personal grooming regimen. You have to get everything out of the room (and you don’t realize the sheer volume of crap the sparest room contains until you have to schlep it all out of there, especially if your wife uses her highly efficient storage methods). You have to spread a dropcloth or tarp to protect the carpet you can’t stand looking at anyway. You have to take off the wall outlet plates and switch plates so Deborah doesn’t come over to your house and shoot you in the face. You have to tape off the bits of the room you don’t want paint on, unless you’re a much better painter than I am. And you have to get all of the tools yourself; even if everything is in place, taped, tarped, emptied, smoothed, and cleaned, and its time to open your paint can and you realize you’ve got nothing to open or stir it with, all work stops until you and only you have fetched some silverware from the kitchen. I spent most of the weekend fiddling about with detail-level stuff to get the walls ready to paint, and if it ends up taking me more than forty-five seconds to roll on two coats of paint I’ll be very surprised. Which sucks, because painting is the fun part. As far as home improvement goes, there’s nothing I enjoy more than slapping up wide swaths of color on a bare wall. And it’s frustrating that it takes me so long to get to that point. The other time factor is one that I can’t figure out how to get around, and I don’t know how they manage it on Trading Spaces, even drawing on the resources of professional designers, apathetic husbands, former theater ingenues, carpenters with elastic tape measures, and a horde of offscreen worker bees, and that’s the “waiting for stuff to dry” issue. This wasn’t a big deal when we moved in and we painted the walls and ceiling the same color and left the trim as we found it, because we could put down a dropcloth, tape off the woodwork, and drop a frag grenade into a pail of Sears Easy Living™ carefully positioned in the center of the room. Now I’ve got ceiling paint, trim paint, “Porpoise” paint, and “Mountain Ridge” paint, all touching each other at various points, and if I try to do it by hand while the respective colors are still damp the room is going to be like stepping inside a Dali painting. Which sounds cool, but would probably clash with rest of the house. So instead I’m doing each color, waiting for it to dry enough to put tape on it without peeling it clean off, then masking it so I can have a nice, clean, Vern Yip-like line of demarcation. It’s that “letting it dry” bit that’s screwing up my schedule. Between the spackle and the primer and the various paints, I have to time everything pretty tightly if I don’t want my wife coming home to find the spare bed still in the living room. Five days to paint a ten-by-eight room, people. Meanwhile Frank Bielec is throwing enough colors on somebody’s living-room wall to make the Valspar Building look monochrome and doing it in two days. I don’t get it. I wish I did, though, because we’re going to have three colors on the walls in the upstairs bedroom and I don’t know if we can live with everything moved out of there for the two-week period it’ll take us to do it. On the upside, after ten-plus years the dorky southwestern stencil pattern on the spoiled-oatmeal walls doesn’t bother us as much as it used to. posted by M. Giant 2:52 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, June 06, 2003 Not Quite All Star Some years ago, a new Hilton hotel went up in Downtown Minneapolis. We used to drive by it every day on the way to work, and Trash said she wanted to stay there sometime. So we did. I made reservations six weeks in advance for us to stay there the weekend before Valentine’s Day 1994. I thought even that was cutting it a little close. I didn’t realize how close until much later. We checked in and spent a little time in our room, which was lovely. I had neglected to make dinner reservations in the restaurant downstairs, and I didn’t think much of our chances for getting in at this late date. But Trash called the concierge anyway, figuring we didn’t have much to lose. He picked up on the first ring, addressing her by name in the tone one uses to address one’s boss’s boss. He agreed that getting us into the restaurant tonight was indeed going to be tough, what with the late notice and the hotel being full and all, but he promised to make it happen if we didn’t mind waiting until 9:00 p.m. We were both working nights during the week then, so that time sounded ideal. Trash thanked him and hung up, already impressed with the level of service we were getting. After a while, we decided to head out and do a little shopping. Several of our neighbors rode down with us in the elevator. Generally I’m the tallest person in a given elevator, but on this occasion we were sharing it with several guys in suits who were so imposing that in their company I felt downright stumpy. I found myself looking forward to disembarking so I could go back to being at my accustomed place in the height bell curve. It was not to be. The Hilton’s rather large lobby was clogged with large men. Large, extremely well dressed men. At six-foot-two, I felt like a ten-year-old on a Senate floor in which everyone had abruptly swapped races. The vertically gifted were packed in so tightly that we could barely wend our way from the elevator to the front door. “It’s like half the NBA is in this room,” I cracked to Trash, seconds before she collided with a particularly towering specimen and found herself eyeball-to-sixth-shirt-button with Scottie Pippen. I was wrong. Whatever fraction of the NBA was in the room, it was quite a bit more than half. The floor shook gently beneath us, and we realized that the shockwaves were synchronized with the slow footfalls of Shaquille O’Neal, who was wandering across the far end of the lobby. The shoulders of basketball players we hadn’t seen in enough TV commercials to name formed a sort of second ceiling over our heads. “Does the NBA have an All-Star Game?” I asked Trash. “Yes,” said Trash, “and I forgot until just now that it’s here. This weekend.” “That explains it,” I said, scootching behind Hakeem Olajuwan and into the revolving door. My question to Trash about the NBA had been a serious one, which meant that this once-in-a-lifetime experience was being totally wasted on the wrong individuals. It was as if people who knew nothing about movies and cared even less were wandering around in Los Angeles and found themselves at the Oscars. And not just in the lobby, but in the third row of the auditorium. Because as we later found out, the sixth floor—where our room was—had apparently been set aside exclusively for the Hankses, Streeps, and Spielbergs of the basketball court, presumably after our reservations had been made. Which, when we thought about it, probably explained the concierge’s eagerness to help us get a coveted table for dinner that night. As far as he knew when my sixth-floor room number flashed up on his switchboard, I was Michael Jordan registered under an assumed name. At 9:00 we presented ourselves at the host’s podium in the restaurant. Three employees looked at us in astonishment and asked, “You’re the M. Giants?” in voices steeped in shock and contempt. We nodded, feeling shorter, poorer, and more unathletic than we’d ever felt in our lives. We resisted the urge to take a step back, expecting that we’d be asked to leave right about now. But they were stuck with us. They couldn’t exactly turn us away for not being NBA All-Stars, could they? We were led to a table between a photographer for The Sporting News and David Robinson. The hostess had steam pouring out of her ears. Whether the steam was the product of a brain-consuming rage or furious mental activity aimed at coming up with a plan for avenging herself on whoever had scammed her so thoroughly, we couldn’t tell. Back at our room, Trash and I congratulated ourselves on our good fortune, although our failure to be totally starstruck was somewhat disappointing. “This would be so cool if we cared at all about basketball,” I said. “We need to call somebody who does,” Trash agreed. We couldn’t think of anybody we knew. Finally Trash remembered a coworker of hers. Like her, he worked the night shift so we knew he’d still be up. She got him on the phone. “Go bang on Charles Barkley’s door and challenge him to some one-on-one,” he suggested. “‘BARKLEY! GET OUT HERE, YOU WUSS!’” Great, the one basketball fan we knew wasn’t reduced to incoherent tears of joy by our unexpected proximity to greatness. “We might be staying in a room between Patrick Ewing and J. R. Rider right now,” Trash persisted, ignoring my interjection that J. R. Ewing isn’t a basketball player. “You should probably keep it down, then,” he advised. We tell this story every once in a while, but we’ve never been able to share it with a basketball fan rabid enough to be as impressed as we want them to be. I mean, the photographer from The Sporting News was impressed that we found ourselves dining in Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood by pure chance, but that’s different. So any rabid basketball fans who may be reading, please feel free to burst into incoherent tears of joy. You know, over the thrilling experience of someone you’ve never met, nine years after the fact. I’ll just be over here. posted by M. Giant 3:53 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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