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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Thursday, August 28, 2003 Afternoon Brake While I was still working at my old job, it occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to drop my car off at the Saturn dealership. Which, as I may have previously mentioned, is only one block away from my old office. There was nothing wrong with my car. I just figured that since I was about to start working at a location where we’re the only non-residence in a one-mile radius, I wouldn’t have the luxury of walking to work from a place that could fix my car, and therefore I should have it checked out while I had the chance, just to give it a tune-up and make sure nothing was about to go wrong with it. Naturally, I never got around to dropping the car off. Do I even have to continue? I suppose I should, just to be specific. The car’s not dead. It’s not even limping. But there’s this noise emanating from one of the driver’s side wheels. I don’t think it’s my brake pads wearing out, because I know what that sounds like. Also, the noise is intermittent, and it sometimes happens when I’m not applying the brakes at all. And it’s a little more nerve-grinding than the squeaker that’s supposed to let you know when it’s time to change your pads; it’s as if somebody installed an electric pencil sharpener in my axle. So my car is whining for attention, and whereas last week I could have had the guys at Saturn fix whatever it is for seven thousand dollars without my missing a minute of work, now I have to come up with some other plan. And I don’t think much of my chances of getting a Saturn dealership built on the lot where the Nordemeyers are living right now. If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t mind waiting until the weekend. But I don’t; it could just be a twist-tie from a bread sack tangled in my wheel rotor, or it could be a catastrophe waiting to happen, some impending breakdown that’ll wrench my wheel to the right and send me hurtling off the Lake Street Bridge and into the Mississippi River while my windshield comes loose and beheads me a half-second before the fuel line shreds and turns me and my car into a midair conflagration of charred rubber and steel and bone. And of course I notice this noise on my second day of work. Last week would have been better, of course. But even a couple of weeks from now would be preferable. Granted, I’m a writer now, and I don’t technically have a schedule, so it’s not like anyone’s pointedly glancing at their watch when I come and go. There’s really nothing stopping me from taking a half-day off to get my car fixed, and I probably wouldn’t even have to promise to write scripts longhand in the mechanic’s waiting room. There’s no reason I can’t take the time to deal with this. No reason other than my wish to establish myself as a reliable employee before I do something flaky like vanish for an afternoon, that is. Creative types have a certain reputation, you know. That’s not something I want to add to. Fortunately, Trash is coming to the rescue, as she so frequently does. She’s working from home on Friday, so I’ll be able to take her car to work. Meanwhile, she’ll take my car to a place in our neighborhood, walk home, and then go back with me to pick it up at the end of the day. Assuming my front end doesn’t spontaneously crumple like one of the agents in Matrix Reloaded used it as a springboard between now and then, that is. Today’s best search phrase: “Kicking across floor unsanitary victorian.” I’ll say. posted by M. Giant 5:25 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, August 26, 2003 The New Guy So far, this is the best job ever. Here’s the coolest part: there’s no training! I did have to go the Minnesota Public Radio offices in downtown St. Paul to learn about my benefits, but from there I went to the Prairie Home offices, said hi, and was shown to my desk. Where I sat down and started writing. And although I haven’t seen an actual check yet, I’m pretty sure I got paid to do it. My last job, when people come in they have to go through five to six weeks of training before they’re allowed to talk on the phone (I was up and running after four days, but that was a long time ago). Yesterday I banged out an entire comedy script my first half-day. Then, today, I wrote some more. Tomorrow I’ll do some more, and probably also some revisions. This job rocks! My office, which may turn out to be a temporary office, has four solid walls, a door that closes (at least I assume it closes; I haven’t checked yet, but it does have what appear to be hinges), and a window that looks out into the rear courtyard, which contains a radio transmitter tower. I can imagine the words I type going directly from the keyboard into the computer, and from there underground twenty feet to the tower, and thence over the entire metro area and indeed out into space. But then I’m glad that there are several weeks and a couple of people between me and that stage of the process. Safer that way. So it’s been going well. My boss is out on the road, on tour with the show, but we’re keeping in touch. He’ll be back next week. Meanwhile, I’m writing for a living. It’s what I do all day. This is the kind of thing I used to have to be sneaky about. Now it’s my job to goof off. The goofier I get, the happier my employer will be. That’s even worth the half-hour commute home. There’s some kind of karmic imbalance at work that can only mean that somebody, somewhere, got robbed. I just hope nobody ever figures out who. posted by M. Giant 3:55 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, August 22, 2003 Goodbye, Sort of Today’s my last day at work. It was the last time I cursed the morning traffic on the Crosstown, the last time pulling into the parking lot, the last time calling my wife when I get here, my last lunch break, my last 55-cent soda from the vending machine… This could go on all day. But I don’t want this to become too maudlin, so I’ll just get on with the entry. And so, below is a list of everything I’ll miss about my job apropos of today being my last day. And the day of my last visit to the bathroom, my last stop in the mailroom… The location. I’m in a building with a deli and a convenience store. It’s sometimes hard for me to get away for more than a few minutes, but that’s still enough time to run down and pick up a sandwich and a box of Kleenex™ for $37.50. The building is a block away from a Saturn dealership, so if I need to get my car fixed I can drop it off, walk to work, and walk back over to pick the car up at the end of the day. I’m surrounded by fast food restaurants, most of which I’ve gotten lunch from at least once over the past seven years. And we’re on one of the most commercially developed stretches of freeway in the metro area, so on my lunch hour I can pick something up at Home Depot, get a haircut, have my oil changed, buy movie tickets for the evening, and take an amusement park ride at the Mall of America. That lunch hour is going to run pretty long, but at least there won’t be much driving in it. Starting next week I’m going to be at a relatively isolated office in a residential neighborhood, and I’ll have to do my random errands on evenings and weekends like normal people. My coworkers. People like my friend T. Rex and others have kept me sane for years. I’m not the most approachable guy around here, which made it all the more surprising when I got here and the podium was decorated like a circus tent with streamers and balloons. As if that weren’t enough, the potluck they put together was diametrically opposed to the increasingly desultory affairs that have drifted through the Call Center in recent months. There was so much food here that I was almost wishing I’d passed it up in favor of something lighter, like a Hungry Man™ dinner. The number of people who have stopped by to congratulate me and wish me luck is almost enough to make me feel a little guilty about having secretly sabotaged all of their careers for no reason. My boss. Even though my boss at the Call Center isn’t a legendary broadcaster and best-selling author, she’s been great to work for. When she was promoted from being a manager to being the director of the department a few years ago, she confessed to me that she was a little nervous about being able to do the job. I told her, “You’ll be fine as long as you always listen to me.” I was mostly kidding, but the past several years have shown that she took my advice to heart. How she was able to rely on my input and still keep this department from crashing and burning is something I’ll never understand. Daily updates Having time to update every day, and the traffic that goes with that, is something I’ve gotten used to. I can only hope that I’ll attract more readers for the posts I do make when word gets out to more surfers about what an interesting job I have. I mean, it’s not like I’m a porn clerk, but you never know who might want to peek behind the scenes of a radio show. Or behind the speaker grille, as the case may be. Carpooling. Every morning, I drop Trash at her office and proceed to my own. Then at the end of the day I leave work, go back to her office, post an entry while she finishes up for the day, and drive her home. That’s over now. Now I work in the opposite direction and further away, so we’ll no longer share a commute. I’ll see the nice people who work with her much less frequently. We’ll be burning a lot more gasoline. We’ll see that much less of each other every day. That’s going to be the hardest part. That’s going to be the biggest adjustment. That’s what makes us sad just thinking about it. So why change jobs at all? Scroll down to yesterday’s entry. I know I will. I’ll catch you later. Like I said before, I’ll be updating again at some point; I just don’t know when. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading, and thanks especially to Wing Chun, because if she hadn’t published some of my earlier stuff and then invited me to join Damn Hell Ass Kings, I might still be wondering if anyone would ever hire me to write so much as a mailing label. You all rock. Today’s best search phrase: “@mputee naked pictures.” That little “at” sign in there is so I don’t encourage more searches like that. Oh, my God, that’s the last daily “Today’s best search phrase!” No, don’t get up. I’ll kick myself out. posted by M. Giant 3:13 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, August 21, 2003 Short-Timer I’ve been at my job for nine years. Nine years and one week, as of Friday. That’s longer than I’ve ever gone to any place every day. That’s longer than I was in elementary school and junior high combined, unless you count kindergarten. It's longer than anyone in my department, and longer than all but four or five people in the building. It’s a long-ass time. Changing my daily routine at this point is probably going to go about as smoothly as it did for Rain Man. But there’s stuff I won’t miss. For instance, the company that bought us out isn’t providing us with coffee any more. This would probably bother me if I were a coffee drinker. It bothers me enough that they’re also no longer stocking the break room with napkins, paper towels, plastic utensils, or a water cooler. I still hadn’t fully recovered from when they raised the price of a can of soda from a quarter, and that was like five years ago. I won’t miss that. I don’t know how I missed the change in the first place. I finally asked one of the managers what was going on and she confirmed it. “Jeez,” I said, “what am I gonna do now?” “I guess you’ll have to quit,” she said. I also won’t miss having to wait through six red lights every day to get outside a five-block radius of my office. Especially since one of the roads I take every day has been temporarily narrowed to one lane and a 4-way stop sign dropped into the middle of the block for no discernible reason. I won’t miss getting locked out of the office every time I forget my security badge, or getting locked in once I do gain admittance. I won’t miss being mistaken for the receptionist. I’ve got nothing against receptionists, of course; they do a great deal of necessary work that I would suck at. That’s why I’m not one. But a lot of people come into the building for the first time, see this big round desk through the glass wall, and assume I’m their first point of contact. Never mind that I’m behind a security door and the actual receptionist’s desk is visible from where they’re standing. They’ll stand there and tap on the glass like I’m a zoo animal until I get up and walk over and poke my head out and point them thirty feet to their left. People who are coming in for job interviews are especially guilty of this. I always tell the managers not to hire those people because they’ve already exposed themselves as morons. I won’t miss fiddling around with Excel reports for a week and a half of every month. Playing with spreadsheets used to be my favorite part of the job, but that was seven years ago, before I got promoted, and the other part of my job was getting yelled at on the phone. Even Excel becomes less magical and enchanting when you do it for most of a decade. I won’t miss being locked out of the majority of the Internet just because. I won’t miss the inability to check and respond to my personal e-mail during the day. I won’t miss getting kicked out of the network altogether every hour or so. I’m not assuming to much. These problems might exist at the new place, or they might not, but either way I won’t miss them. What else won’t I miss? I know there’s something I’m forgetting. Wait, I know—the feeling that I’m missing my calling, the guilt of feeling like I should be looking for paid writing gigs every spare minute of the day, the knowledge that I’m supposed to be doing something else with my life, the nagging and growing sense that I’m going to be sitting up at that podium until I’m seventy years old, hoping to die before the next month’s reports are due. I won’t miss that so much. So what will I miss? We’ll get into that tomorrow. That’ll probably be a much longer entry, so I figured I’d give you the whole weekend for that. * * * I want to congratulate a couple of our friends who graduated from childlessness yesterday. Mom, dad, and baby are happy and healthy, as they say. It’s also convenient for me because I’ll always be able to remember the kid’s age; he was born the week before I started my new job. Just like Deniece’s age is easy to remember because her birthday is two days after mine. And, as loyal readers know, it really is all about me. Welcome, little dude. * * * Trash’s coworkers celebrated my new job with me last night. It was a very moving evening, complete with a nice dinner, thoughtful presents, and musical numbers. I’m not kidding about any of that. And this was all on their own; Trash didn’t even know about most of it before the fact. As I’ve mentioned here before, Trash’s company helps people find new jobs and make career transitions. I found their direct and indirect help invaluable. And then they were nice enough to present me with a diploma they made up naming me an honorary graduate of the program. Emphasis on “honor,” as far as I was concerned. Thank you, Trash’s coworkers. No wonder she loves working there. * * * Today’s best search phrase: “glasses license floor bathroom lenses toilet case.” Wow, somebody had a rough morning. posted by M. Giant 3:21 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, August 20, 2003 T Minus Two Business Days I don’t know anyone who has ever moved out of an apartment and failed to leave it spotless. However, I don’t know anyone who has ever moved into an apartment that wasn’t dirty. The karmic math breaks down somewhere, and I can’t figure out why. The only reason I’m thinking about this is because I’ve been busy cleaning out my desk at work. Attentive, longtime readers will recall that it’s not really a desk; it’s a podium. Ignorant neophyte readers will click on the link, and nobody will judge them for it. So since I’m getting ready to vacate this edifice, which involves cleaning it out. One doesn’t realize how big this podium is until one starts to clean it. It’s nowhere near as bad as it would have been if I hadn’t ditched a ton of stuff last October, but I still had a lot of stuff to throw away. As I’ve learned, there’s a big difference between stuff nobody will ever ask me for again as long as I work here, and stuff nobody will ever ask me for again because I don’t work here. The second category is considerably larger, comprising the portion of my desk’s contents that I like to call “everything.” Then there’s the personal stuff I’m taking home. I actually started taking stuff home last week so it would be easier to pack up this week. The radio and the blue glass head went home last Wednesday, and now it’ll be easy to carry what’s left. Toys, pens, pictures of Trash and Deneice, a company laptop, all of it fits into one copy paper box, except for a few coffee mugs. I’ll probably just drive it around in my car over the weekend and bring it into the new office on Monday. Of course, I’m leaving the Zen Rock Garden here. It’s a gift to my coworkers, a little something for them to remember me by. Also, it’s a tray of sand. If I try and transport that thing, I’m going to end up with just a tray. And an aneurysm. The other big project has been cleaning out my network hard drive, deleting old files and organizing the ones that I’d saved in the wrong folders. It just seems kind of tacky to leave behind a bunch of random spreadsheets and documents that don’t apply to anything any more when even I don’t remember their original purpose. Aside from the ones that are pr0n in disguise, of course. Those get mailed directly to the CEO. Maybe now they’ll let me out of here a couple of days early. The only thing that has me flummoxed is the army of dust bunnies on my desk. These aren’t ordinary dust bunnies. They’re like dust Monty Python and the Holy Grail bunnies. The podium is a breeding ground for them because not all of it is level. Much of it slants downward, from three inches below keyboard level all the way to the inner wall of the podium. That means there’s no way to just sweep the little woofies onto the floor, unless you herd them into the little holes designed for cords and cables. And these guys don’t herd easy, especially in the numbers we’re talking about. I tried brushing them along with my hand and they rose up in such profusion that I momentarily disappeared from view. The only way to get rid of them is to get a paper towel wet enough to scoop them up, or suck them out with a DustBuster™. I’m bringing one in tomorrow. Along with a crate of tiny little Holy Hand Grenades. I only have two more days to get this space cleaned up, and I’ll have to do it in between continuing the brain drain that’s supposed to leave the managers in a position to cover for me. I really want to have the podium sparkling like new by Friday afternoon. That’s the only way it’s going to have time to get filthy again by Monday morning. posted by M. Giant 2:54 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, August 19, 2003 Wreath Havoc We were sitting around the table at the karaoke bar the other night with Trash’s brother and his wife, and we remembered a story from many years ago. This is back when we were still living in downtown Minneapolis. We’d decided to have a Christmas party in our complex’s party room. It was a really nice party room, but the downside was that it was in another building. Schlepping all the food, beverages and decorations to the next city block over the course of the afternoon became somewhat tedious. Fortunately, Trash’s brother was there, home from the Army, and eager to help out. It was quite handy to have him around to cart over the dessert trays, beer coolers, coffee urn, and buffet table while Trash and I caught up on our nap. He wasn’t quite so eager towards the end. The last thing he had to bring over was a gigantic pine Christmas wreath. The thing was almost as tall as him. So there he was, hauling it down the sidewalk along Hennepin Avenue in the wind and freezing weather. Coming towards him in the other direction was a somewhat disreputable-looking character. As they passed each other, the man didn’t say anything to my brother-in-law, or look at him, or even break his stride. But suddenly by brother-in-law was empty-handed, the wreath had reversed direction, and a skanky-looking dude was one wreath richer. My brother-in-law might normally have been intimidated by this fellow’s somewhat desperate appearance, but he was in a grouchy mood after several hours of carrying a party to the next building one armload at a time. He dashed back to the guy, grabbed the wreath back, and snapped “Get your own wreath!” The thief shrugged, said not a word, and went on his way. What I love about this story is my brother-in-law’s remark. Most people would say, “Hey!” or “What are you doing?” or maybe even “Give that back!” BIL’s statement was outstanding in its efficiency. It skipped right past the first response, implicitly acknowledged the answer to the second one, and offered a feasible solution to the guy’s imminent return to a state of wreathlessness. I also like how he didn’t question the guy’s wish to have a wreath. Of course everyone wants a giant wreath to brighten up their space. Whether that space is inside an expensive apartment complex or next to a bridge support a couple of blocks away, a six-foot circle of deciduous branches imparts holiday cheer and warmth. My brother-in-law didn’t begrudge anyone’s desire to have a six-foot wreath of their own, or judge it an unworthy goal for his fellow man. He merely pointed out that the way the man was going about it was only going to lead to disappointment and failure. Feel free to share this inspirational tale with your friends. Or, better yet, get your own inspirational tale. * * * Hey, did you know I’m going to be on a panel at JournalCon? It’s true. I’m all set. I’ve got my plane tickets, my hotel reservations, and a kicky little Kevlar number for my gig on “Raw is War: Blogs vs. Journals” discussion that is likely to devolve into a live-action version of Unreal Tournament. I’m not renting a car, but know this: if anyone at JournalCon makes a pilgrimage to the Salt Lick and doesn’t bring me I’m going to be hella pissed. Today’s best search phrase: “Dolphins barn hurling.” Wow, they can train those clever little beasties to do just about anything these days. posted by M. Giant 4:07 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, August 18, 2003 Deniece at 19 Months Time for another status report on our niece Deniece, who I’m pretty sure is officially a toddler now. She toddles. I’m not entirely sure what toddle means, but I know she does it. She engages in any number of means of self-contained locomotion. I’m not sure which of them would be considered toddling. Maybe that’s the thing she does where she runs around at top speed with her arms straight up in the air. The higher the speed, the higher the hands. If that’s what toddling is, it would make sense, because I know I’ve never seen an adult do that unless the goal was to look like a toddler. She’s learned some good stuff in the past month and a half. For instance, her version of Trash’s name is getting shorter and more consistent, which is encouraging. She’s also developed object permanence, the understanding that people and things continue to exist even when she can’t see them. I’m still working on that one myself. We can tell she’s mastered it because she’s also figured out how to ask questions without first learning who, what, why, when, or how. Instead, she just spreads her palms, tilts her head to one side, and says the name of whatever or whoever is on her mind in a comically exaggerated tone of curiosity. So with the exact same word, she’s able to say either “Mommy” or “Where’s Mommy? What’s she doing? When’s she coming back? Why am I here in the living room with you instead of in the kitchen with her? And how is she going to get my lunch off the ceiling, anyway?” Other new information: the names of colors. Purple is her favorite. Or at least it’s her favorite one to say. As her what color something is and her first answer will always be “poopo.” Ask her again and she sheepishly say “gweeeeen” or “yeoo” or “WED!” but that’s only if you don’t let her get away with “poopo.” She does love to say “poopo.” She is so not naming our next pet. Her other big project is learning to count to ten. She’s making pretty good progress, and can get through it with some prompting. And not the “say seven” kind of prompting either. The kind when you hold up fingers and have to keep reminding her that she’s not finished after four. Things get a little dicey after five; she keeps wanting to jump ahead to eight. She likes eight as much as she likes purple, apparently. “What’s after five?” “Eight!” “No, five…” “Six.” “Six…” “Eight!” “No, six… “Sik!” “What’s after six? Deniece, what’s after six? Is it five, six, seve—” “EIGHT!” That seems to build up her morale for the home stretch. For Christmas, Trash and I have decided to get her a purple eight. It’s exactly what she wants. That’s if there’s not a merry-go-round nearby, of course. Her parents took her to the Iowa State Fair last week and brought her on the carousel. She clung to her horse, screaming, whooping, and making equine noises while the operator, who must have been profoundly deaf, dozed at the switch. After ten minutes the ride stopped and she got off, ran back around to the entrance, and hollered for another turn, straining against the railing with a desperation that made Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice look mildly put out. Deniece’s mom frantically sent my brother-in-law to get more tickets before the child gave herself an aneurysm. Deniece ended up spending most of the afternoon riding around and around on a fiberglass horse, doing a reasonably accurate if alarmingly sustained impression of Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. At least she slept well that night. When we left yesterday, Deniece insisted on kissing us both goodbye, taking a few moments off from one of her favorite hobbies: blowing spit bubbles. She got to show us affection and dry her lips off on our faces at the same time. Girl has more stuff figured out than I do. posted by M. Giant 3:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, August 15, 2003 I Can See Clearly Now The glasses I’ve been wearing for almost four years got retired last night. It was way overdue. It’s not that the prescription was terribly outdated, or that the frames looked like they’d been cannibalized from a pair of aviator shades. It’s that the lenses were worn clear out. They were dull and foggy, as if I’d been cleaning them with steel wool. Periodically over the past year, the light would hit them just right and someone would notice their near-opacity. “You need to clean your glasses,” they might say. “Be my guest,” I’d say, handing them over. Then I’d wait patiently while with increasing puzzlement my well-meaning friend or family member would try to clear away grunge that wasn’t going anywhere. Defeated, they would eventually hand them back to me, saying, “You need new glasses.” Not any more. I picked out new frames last weekend, called in my prescription on Tuesday, picked up the new specs last night. They’re preferable in the sense of giving me sharper vision, a better fit to my head, and a snappy pair of magnetic sunglass clips that snap on and turn me into instant Neo. When I first put them on, I thought they were distorting my depth perception. In fact they were, but only because I’m used to things being blurrier when they’re farther away. Putting them on and looking out into the mall gave me a brief moment of disorientation, as if I were driving a car while looking through binoculars. It was great. Then, much later in the evening, I got a look at myself in the mirror before bed and wondered what the hell had happened to me. It’s not that I’d chosen the wrong frames and suddenly looked like a lemur. The issue was that I could see myself better than I had been able to in quite some time. The gauze had been ripped away from the camera lens, and it was a startling sight. I’ve always looked young for my age. I attribute this to clean living; no smoking, limited red meat intake, infrequent use of hard liquor, and black tar heroin only on the weekends. I’ve flattered myself that I look like a prematurely graying guy in his mid-to-late twenties. Now I know that that was just an illusion. Seeing myself through my new glasses was like suddenly aging five years. The newly sharpened focus of my vision combined with the bathroom light to bring the ravages of time into sharp detail. My tired eyes, eleven o’clock shadow, and slack skin painted the bleak picture of a man in his mid-thirties. If I hadn’t been having a good hair day I would have gone out and bought a Corvette that very second. And it’s not like I could go up to anyone and say, “Holy crap, look how old I look! Why didn’t anybody tell me I look this old?” They just would have assumed I knew. I would have to get through this on my own. My appearance wasn’t going to be a shock to anyone but me. That, of course, made it worse. I thought, Christ, my life is passing me by. I’m thirty-three, stuck in a dead-end job—wait, no I’m not any more! And then I looked around at the recently-renovated bathroom that had looked like ass just a year and a half before, in a house that had been falling apart just a few years before that. I thought about how I was entering my 144th month of marriage to my favorite person in the world. And I thought, yeah, I look thirty-three. But I’m supposed to look like thirty-three. And for the first time in a long, long time, I’m feeling like my career is catching up to the other great things in my life. It’s catching up to where it was supposed to be by now. Third-life crisis averted! Somebody get me a steak, a cigar, and some whiskey. * * * I don’t know if this is connected to the blackout, but I haven’t been getting my e-mail the past couple of days. It’s not even bouncing back, and Trash has checked. So if you’ve sent anything the last couple of days, I’m not ignoring you. You may want to send it again. I mean, I want to be able to make a fully informed decision about being able to drive a spike through a railroad tie with my tremendous man-hammer, you know? posted by M. Giant 3:38 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, August 14, 2003 Gridlock There are a couple of things in favor of living in Minneapolis rather than New York City, over and above the fact that we have electricity right now. One is that you can still smoke in bars here. Another is that during your lunch break, you can generally count on getting through any given traffic light in one cycle. Maybe two. And then today I spent about a half hour trapped on France Avenue just north of the Crosstown, which gave me plenty of time to remember that I don’t smoke anyway. The traffic jam wasn’t cause by any road construction, or an accident, or a cop pulling someone over on the bridge. It was just that the timing on the traffic light was all bollixed up. It would go green long enough to let maybe four cars onto the bridge. But there was only room for two of them, because the traffic light letting people off the bridge was bollixed up too. It was basically gridlock without a grid. Normally in this situation I’d just turn off the street and find some way around. But on this particular stretch of France Avenue, there aren’t any turnoffs. Well, there are, but they only lead directly into people’s garages. I suppose I could have pulled into someone’s driveway, asked to use their phone, and called for an airlift, but I doubted my employer would pay the expense just to get me back to the office on time. And then there was the option of jumping the curb and off-roading across fifteen or twenty immaculately manicured Edina lawns. But given the way some residents in Edina can be about their yards, those people would have thrown themselves under my tires to take me down. This course of action would have made about as much sense as yelling at a DEA agent to get out of your way because you’re late for a drug deal. So I sat there like a cow in a slaughterhouse chute for thirty minutes. I wasn’t even supposed to be there; I’d only scampered home because we had a site visit today and I forgot to wear a tie. At least the traffic jam gave me time to put it on. But did I remember to do that while I was waiting to get through the intersection? Oh, you give me too much credit. * * * Today’s lunch was the second of the two Hungry Man™ dinners I had in the freezer. The first one worked out pretty well because part of it was an ear of corn, which the freezing and microwaving processes had rendered totally inedible. That left me with a portion of chicken and potato shrapnel that made for a filling, but not intimidating meal. The one I had today was called “Backyard Barbecue.” When I chose it out of the freezer at the store, Trash said, “I bet it tastes just like that, too.” She was half right. And not about the barbecue half. I got four slabs of ersatz beast-flesh coated in enough barbecue sauce to cramp the taste buds of, oh, Tennessee, and infused with a massive dose of liquid smoke flavor. Alongside it was a tub of a mashed-potato-like substance. So the food wasn’t that great, but at least the portions were large. By the way, if anyone knows how to make mashed potatoes on the grill, I’d be curious about the procedure. I do appreciate the message on the box: “Refrigerate any unused portion.” In other words, “Nobody says you have to eat it all in one sitting, you freaking glutton.” You won’t see that on a Lean Cuisine™. Perhaps I would have stuck the rest in the break room fridge when I got full, but since I share two home-kitchen-sized appliances with over a hundred other people, it didn’t seem practical to just toss an open tray in there. Things have a way of getting tipped out onto the floor. I know because I tipped someone’s lunch out once, and watched in horror as it landed top down, lid off on the tile. I didn’t know whose it was and no one else was there, so I scooped it up and replaced it with an anonymous note of apology and a five-dollar bill. I’d hate to put anyone else in that situation, especially since I got a twofer deal on the meals in the first place. So I just kept putting it away. Slowly, gradually, over the course of a half hour, beyond full, beyond sated, until I was so bloated I couldn’t reach my keyboard. I am no longer a Hungry Man. I am a Sleepy Man. Last week I overheard someone in the break room talking about how a Hungry Man™ is just the right amount of food if he adds a salad. Dude must have the metabolism of a mosquito. Or he only eats once a week. Either way he’s on his own. I have failed to join the Hungry Man demographic. As failures go, that’s one I can live with. posted by M. Giant 3:46 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, August 13, 2003 Citizen Giant While I’m very excited about my new job, I must admit that there were a few minor issues I had to make my peace with. One is that it’s going to be a longer commute, and Trash and I won’t be able to carpool any more. Another is that there won’t be quite as many places to get lunch in the new place, although that may end up being a mixed curse. Bu the main drawback of accepting this job is that now I don’t get to be the governor of California. To be fair, there were other factors preventing me from pursuing that job. One is that I don’t live in California. But given some of the other candidates in the race, that seems like a minor quibble. There’s also the fact that I don’t understand most aspects of public policy or economics. So that would have been to my advantage. I was all ready to buy a hat, head down there, and throw it into the ring, but I had to stick around home in case I got called in for an interview. Obviously I made the right choice, but if I’d managed to miss out on both my dream job and the California statehouse, I would have been pretty owly. I’m not going to say Arnold’s going to get thumped; I live in Minnesota, remember? We had four years of local and national news media referring to our chief executive by his stage name. If nothing else, two months isn’t a lot of time for a star as big as Arnie to morph into a political candidate, which, judging from what the hardcore political geeks on both sides are saying about the guy, is probably to his advantage. But if he does plant that huge face of his into the California soil and Gray Davis doesn’t survive the recall anyway, it won’t take that many votes to win a plurality. Hell, Davis won a regular old vanilla election last year with something like one out of every ten Californians even being arsed to vote for him; I could probably make a decent showing if y’all registered to vote in California and pulled the lever for me. But of course you can’t because I’m not on the ballot. Unless you write me in. Man, how embarrassing would it be for those hundred-and-some candidates to get beaten by a write-in? Not that you should do that, because, like I said, I’m happy about my job. But if I weren’t—If I were still looking at an indefinite future of tapping on glass doors because I forgot my security badge again—I know how I would set myself apart from the current field of candidates. I would make a campaign promise. A no-lose campaign promise, in fact. If I kept it, I’d be that rare politician who actually keeps promises. If I didn’t, I’d go down in history, and nobody would be able to blame me for my failure. I would promise that while I was governor, no significant part of California would fall into the ocean. Now obviously this would require some accompanying caveats. Beach erosion doesn’t count, for instance. If someone kicks a rock or a seashell into the surf, I can’t help that. Mudslides should not be held against me. Islands are on their own. But if I get to the end of my first term and the San Andreas fault has not become coastline, I will have been the best governor in California history! And when reelection time rolls around, who’s going to want to take the chance on voting for some other clown and waking up underwater a week after inauguration? Nobody who loves their children, I’ll tell you that right now. This may some foster some division in the electorate. Any Lex Luthor types who have bought up major tracts of inland real estate will be likely to oppose my policy. They may even run for office themselves. Let ‘em try, I say. I’ve already demonstrated that I’m not afraid to compare them to Lex Luthor. Their kind of attitude is completely out of touch with the electorate and the realities of California, and as long as I’m occupying the Governor’s Mansion in Los Angeles, all of my constituents from Vancouver to Portland will know it. But of course, this entire discussion is academic, because I’m not on the ballot. I don’t even particularly want to be. This time. But for the next recall, I’m seriously considering taking some vacation days and going out to make a run at it. I just hope I will have accrued enough time off by Christmas. Today’s best search phrase: There were a lot of variations of the same search, which led me to conclude that the last episode of The Osbournes raised the question for some people as to whether Jack had really killed one of the dogs. And Google is leading those unfortunate people to me. I don’t know anything about that, but if the next Star Wars movie has a George Foreman Grill in it, I’m going to get mad traffic. posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, August 12, 2003 T Minus Eight Business Days Wow, check out my stats today (if they're working, that is). I’m going to start having cliffhangers all the time. What’s today’s cliffhanger? Find out—tomorrow! I also want to thank all of you who have e-mailed me with messages of support and congratulations. I appreciate every one, including the ones I haven’t responded to yet. It’s a party in my inbox right now, and everyone’s invited. Meanwhile, back in reality, I’m rapidly learning that there’s a big difference between documenting procedures so other people can cover for me for a couple of weeks, and documenting procedures so other people can cover for me forever. Part of the problem is that I don’t know who is going to be taking over for me after I leave. I don’t think anyone knows that yet. We certainly haven’t been grooming anyone to become a new Call Center Analyst, because, hell, M. Giant’s been here almost nine years; where’s he gonna go? So I have to write down these procedures so they’re just as understandable to the guy who keeps trying to sneak out carpet tiles in his briefcase as they are to my boss. It’s probably going to end up being a situation where the managers and my boss split up the stuff I used to do. Which would be fine, except the phrase “do stuff nobody else knows how to do” is practically my job description. That leaves me in the position of having to pass down my knowledge. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is orally, in which I explain and demonstrate to them the various stuff I do. The drawback to that is that it requires their participation, and since they currently have other priorities connected to the buyout and training the temps, they’re having difficulty finding the time to learn the skills that I employ to prevent this place from becoming a smoking crater. That leaves written documentation. Fortunately, I put together a “book of spells” a few years ago, and it’s serving as a handy foundation. Unfortunately, the original foundation took over a month to put together, and I’ve updated it maybe two or three times in the history of its existence. Pretty lackadaisical for a guy who has the word “anal” right in his job title. I’ve been going through it the last couple of days, and I will be very surprised if it doesn’t end up being twice as long as it is now. Provided I find the time to double its length, of course. I keep finding notes like, “do this for now and I’ll figure it out when I get back.” Well, this time I won’t be coming back, unless something goes terribly wrong at the new place, and if I leave the manual the way it is, things will go terribly wrong here as well. If I have to come back, I’m not going to want to deal with the mess I left. So I’m coming up with all of these highly detailed procedures, writing down and quantifying each tiny little detailed step of dozens of things I do all the time without even thinking about them. Imagine that dive Rodney Dangerfield does at the end of Back to School. Then imagine him describing how to do it in text so that it can be flawlessly performed by somebody who’s never seen a diving board before. This is my project for the next eight business days. And considering how frequently I whack my head on the edge of the pool my own self, I’m a bit daunted. I have told my boss that she can call me at my new job if there’s anything they’re stumped on. I can probably deal with the interruption, considering that I’ve written some of these entries at work with one hand on the Alt and Tab keys. What worries me is that I’m a fairly visual person, and when someone calls me with a question now it often ends with me walking over to their desk. In two weeks, that’ll be unworkable. Even if I drive, I’m still looking at a forty-five-minute round trip. Maybe I’ll tell my current boss that things will work out best if she just shuts the place down next Friday. I’ve never done that, so my experience won’t be missed in that case. Today’s best search phrase: “Are Freemasons controlling the rap industry?” Well, if they were, do you think the Internet would tell you? Those Freemasons are way too sneaky for that, you know. They hip, hop, and they don’t stop. posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, August 11, 2003 Now It Can Be Told Okay, maybe I exaggerated a little bit on Friday. I’m not, like, graduating to a higher plane of existence or anything, and Trash, having a life of her own, is going to continue to do so. If you’ve lost interest, feel free to come back tomorrow. In order to bring you up to speed on what’s been going on, I’ll need to give you a little backstory. A few months ago, my parents bought a boat. It’s a 29-foot cabin cruiser that they keep docked in Hastings, not far from where the Mississippi River says to the St. Croix, “I’ll take it from here.” They drive out to the marina and take the boat out for a spin every weekend they can, and some weekends when they can’t. Sometimes they don’t even bother taking it out; they’ll just hang out on the boat while it’s secured in its slip, and they’ll go below and take a nap, or maybe clean or polish something, or just enjoy the weather. They’re getting their money’s worth, that’s for sure. And it works out well for us, too, because they like to invite us out to take a ride with them quite frequently. One of those invitations fell on a Saturday two weeks ago. We were planning to go, but I had to call my mom and cancel because I was going to talk with Garrison Keillor. Whoops, I think I just gave the wrong backstory. Now I’ve totally undercut the tension, so everything leading up to the part where I got hired as the Staff Writer for the internationally broadcast radio show A Prairie Home Companion is going to seem like so much blathering. The question everyone keeps asking is, “How did this happen?” It’s a pretty standard apply-interview-offer narrative, aside from the part where one of the principals is Garrison Keillor. We talked a few times over the course of a couple of weeks, and then he introduced me to the Managing Director. She and I talked for a bit about my resume, the organization, benefits, salary, where I’d be sitting— “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “Is this an offer?” She affirmed that it was. “Okay,” I said. “Go on.” As it turns out, I’m starting two weeks from today. I get a salary that is a lot better than one might expect from a job in public radio, full benefits, and an office with a door. I’ve never had an office with a door before. Hell, it’s been six years since I had a workspace with more than one drawer. After we settled on my starting date (August 25—eek!) and said our good-byes, I got my car out of the (free) parking lot, drove two blocks, pulled over, and called Trash on the cell phone. If your lights dimmed at around 4:20 p.m. Central time on Friday afternoon, I’m afraid that’s due to the noise we made over the phone, which must have constituted a severe power drain. Then I called my parents, who were similarly congratulatory, and I drove straight to my current office to give my notice. My boss was great. She’s happy that I’m getting such a great opportunity to do what I want to do, yet flatteringly panicked about the hole I’m going to leave. I’ll probably be spending a lot of the next two weeks training some of my coworkers to do stuff only I know how to do. Before it was job security; now it’s a potential method of time-delayed sabotage. Not that I would ever want to do that, of course. I’ve gotten a lot out of working here over the years: skills, experience, and several hundred thousand American dollars. But it was never my calling. My calling would be the thing I’m going to start doing in two weeks. Writing. For money. For a living. For fun. At the same time. So, not to exaggerate, but I think this falls pretty squarely into the category of “life-changing.” I’ve been looking for writing gigs on and off for over a year, and I couldn’t get arrested. Then I land this. It’s hard to imagine a better job for a writer in the Twin Cities. I probably would have been happy writing technical manuals or furniture assembly instructions, at least for a while. Instead I’m going to be writing material for broadcast to 3.9 million people a week. So this is kind of a big deal for me. It’ll be nice for Trash, because she’ll have a husband who’s happier in his job, but on the other hand we won’t be able to carpool into work any more. It’ll be nice for my friends and family, with whom I’ll now be able to share interesting stories about work instead of anecdotes about my current job that have been known to send people into comas. That leaves you guys. I’ve got two weeks to go before anything changes in my daily routine, but I’ll be honest; I don’t think I’ll be able to keep updating every weekday after I start my new job. A good deal of my creative energy is going to be directed towards paying our mortgage, you see. But I have no intention of abandoning you entirely. Without all the great feedback from my regular and irregular readers, I doubt I would have had the motivation to keep this thing going at the level I have been. And I think that was a factor in the decision. So I owe part of this to you. I’m not going to ditch you now. That comes later. Kidding! No, I’m also going to keep doing this because it’s fun, and because I’m still going to want to write about stuff that won’t work on the radio, or fit on the show, or get past the FCC. It just might go down to a few times a week, or maybe a couple of times a month, or maybe somewhere in between. Maybe there’ll even be some wild fluctuations in output. I hope that’s okay with you. And if you want a more regular fix of my yammerings, check your local listings. The new season starts September 27. posted by M. Giant 3:25 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, August 08, 2003 The News Remember a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned that there were a few things going on that I couldn’t really talk about? And then I told you that I’d fill you in when something popped? Something popped today, in a fairly large way. The biggest thing I had going on, in fact. I’ve been making a lot of phone calls and sending a lot of e-mails, spreading the news. It’s been great. Everyone is so excited for me, and I must admit that I share their feelings. Now that it’s all turned out okay, I’m glad I kept it relatively quiet in the interim. I don’t know if it actually would have made a difference in the end, but I have to confess that I can be incredibly superstitious at times, and I didn’t want to do anything that might tip things out of my favor. This is pretty much all I’ve been thinking about ever since the process was set in motion. I couldn’t really bring myself to think that things would actually turn out this way, and at the same time I knew I’d be devastated if they didn’t. But now it’s safe to talk about. I’m so relieved, and excited, and nervous about what it all means. My life is going to change in so many ways, large and small. Everything is different now. Ever since I got the news, everything I’ve seen, everyone I’ve talked to, takes on a new significance for me. There are so many things I’ll be changing, so many things I won’t have to deal with any more, so many new opportunities, I still haven’t got my head completely around it all. I probably won’t for a couple more weeks. It'll even affect the blog, most likely. No, I’m not pregnant. Neither is Trash. But our lives will be changing. For the better, in most ways. And very soon. And now that it’s all arranged, decided on, locked in, whatever you want to call it, I can tell you all about it. Every detail. All the backstory, everything leading up to today’s events. I’m going to do a full briefing, bring you into the loop, give you the complete skinny. Monday. posted by M. Giant 4:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, August 07, 2003 Picture This Remember how I used to illustrate my home improvement entries with photos? Yeah, that was great. I was going to do that back when we replaced the ceiling in the basement. But then, for some reason, my digital camera stopped talking to my computer. I don’t know why. I don’t know how to fix it. I used to hope it was the serial cable instead of the actual camera that was causing the problem, but even that’s no good because do you know how hard it is to buy just a serial cable for a digital camera? As far as I can tell, it can’t be done. So screw it. You’ve waited long enough to see the fruits of our labor. Today is all about the before and after of various projects we’ve taken on around the house since the digital camera crapped out, back in November. Except they’re taken from Google’s image search instead of by my camera. So use your imagination a little bit. Here’s what our ceiling looked like last October:  Cozy, no? Obviously it had to come down.  That alone cheered the place up a lot. Plus it facilitated the switch to color from black & white. Man, going downstairs used to be like stepping into the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. And now, the new look.  Except with 2’ by 4’ tiles instead of 2’ by 2’, and not so many lights. Didn’t we do a good job? The next big project was replacing the old wall oven in the kitchen. You can see it in the background of this photo from my floor replacement entry. (The photo links don't work on that entry any more, and I'm too lazy to fix them. You're lucky you got a link. As you will soon see.)  God, we hated that thing. And not just because it was ugly. Too often a simple attempt to make a pan of biscuits turned into a scene like this:  Then my grandma gave us her old gas oven, which was ideal because it was old enough to fit in the old spot, yet in good enough shape to not make us fear for our lives when we used it. It looks like this:  Finding all the right gas line connections was a bit of a chore, but that was nothing compared to figuring out how to get it to hover in midair like that. Longtime readers may remember this slightly retouched photo of what I wanted the back yard to look like one day:  It looks a little like that now, even though one crop of grass has died off and I had to re-seed. But the real spectacle is the landscaping work accomplished by Trash and my mom:  I’m so proud. Oh, and remember that switch box I meant to fix? Yeah, I didn’t actually get around to completing that until Trash was in New York back in June. I still have the before picture:  And here’s what it looks like now, with the rewiring done and the wall all patched up:  It dresses the room up quite a bit, don’t you think? Finally, here’s a shot from our recent Hawaiian vacation:  Sorry. I’ll try to get more of a close-up next time. posted by M. Giant 3:07 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, August 06, 2003 Lockout I can’t honestly say that I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on. But recent weeks have demonstrated that I am prone to forget things that don’t have my head on them. Lemme ‘splain. The doors in our office are controlled by magnetic card key readers. Each employee is issued a card key. If you forget your card key one day, you don’t get into the office. Unless you tap on the glass doors, or time your arrival so you can piggyback your entrance with someone else’s, both options which involve special humiliations of their own. I used to leave my pass at home every couple of months or so, but it wasn’t a big deal because the receptionist had a stash of extra ones for the convenience of visitors and employees who forgot their badges at home. With the recent buyout of the company, she doesn’t have those any more. Even that wouldn’t normally be a problem, except that when the company changed hands, we swapped out old security badges for new ones. The old one wasn’t ideal; the photo on it was taken when I still had my goatee, and that combined with some unfortunate shadows made me look like a terrorist. But in its favor was the fact that it was hard to miss when I was going out the door in the morning. See, at night I empty out my pants pockets in the same spot in our bedroom. Wallet, change, keys, pens, cell phone, pager, computer disks, handcuffs, mace, lint, live frogs, and security badge all get dropped off in a spot where I can quickly scoop it all up again in the morning. It’s a system that’s worked pretty well for years. But the new security badge turns out to constitute a pretty serious glitch. The problem is it’s completely white and blank on one side, and the other side is completely white and blank except for the magnetic strip. As a result, it blends in far too well with the random notes and credit card receipts and other random scraps of paper that clutter my pants staging area. (No, I didn’t choose today’s topic just as an excuse to coin the phrase “pants staging area,” but I would have if I’d known.) So in the last month, I’ve shown up at work five or six times with no security badge. Twice this week, in fact, and I invite you to take another look at the day at the top of this entry. Even this wouldn’t be a big issue, because I can go the a long way around the hallway instead of across it without ever having to use a security door. That gets me to the break room. But there are two other factors which render this solution problematic. The first is that our office occupies two floors, and going from one to the other requires a card key. The other is that the bathrooms are in the hallway, outside the security door. So you can go out and hit the restroom, but you won’t get back in. No matter how much time you just spent on the throne. And having your bathroom visits limited in such a way makes unfettered access to the break room a decidedly mixed blessing. Pretty much the only thing I can do is borrow a coworker’s badge, but then that person is stuck inside the doors while I dash around the office doing all the stuff that’s been building up. And even that solution is less than ideal, because the glass walls in our office allow whomever I borrowed the pass from to watch me disappear behind the non-glass walls of the men’s’ room for forty minutes with the newspaper. I can’t help feeling self-conscious about that. I’ve noticed that the coworkers whose passes I’ve borrowed have pasted colorful stickers onto their badges. Perhaps I should try that. But then I have to buy stickers. I guess I could just steal their stickers and attach them to my badge, but they might catch on when they inevitably forget their passes at home and have to borrow mine. Especially if they also forget the newspaper and don’t have anything else to look at while they’re sitting in the stall. posted by M. Giant 3:39 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, August 05, 2003 Sofa, Not So Good In Douglas Adams’ novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, there’s a sofa stuck in a stairwell. Permanently. It can’t go in any further, and it’s jammed in so tightly that it won’t even come back out. In theory, this should be physically impossible. In practice, anyone who’s ever moved a sofa knows better. The owner of the sofa in question, who coincidentally also owns the stairwell, is so confounded by the situation that he’s created a computer program that uses 3-D modeling to find a way to rotate the sofa so that it can be freed. Instead of a screensaver, he has a constantly spinning sofa on his monitor. I don’t remember how the sofa gets out of the stairwell at the end of the book, but I think it involves either time travel or a Skilsaw or possibly both. These are the kinds of things I think about when Trash and my parents and I are trying to get their old overstuffed sofa into our basement. We couldn’t even get it through the side door without tearing the upholstery. We could barely get it down the stairs without crushing my dad beneath it. So getting the whole thing to pass through the landing at the bottom of the stairs, a space about the size of a phone booth but with a lower ceiling, was like convincing a housecat to give birth to a puma. Did I mention that the sofa has extendable footrests? Those handles sticking out of the ends, combined with the footrests constantly threatening to swing out and clock one of us in the jaw, combined with the additional structural weight from the mechanisms, added a few degrees of difficulty to an operation that started out with us wondering whether we might be better off just cutting a hole in the floor and dropping the sofa in from above. Eventually, with adjustments and reorientations measured in millimeters and minutes of degrees, we got the beast in there. It even bit one of us for our trouble; Dad grabbed the bottom of the frame and got a fistful of staple points, as if the thing was making one more gesture to show us just how unhappy it was to be there. I shudder to think what it would have done if the walls were still purple. If we ever move, we’re selling it with the house. Compared to that job, getting rid of the old couch—a bit of leather stretched over a low balsa wood frame, structurally similar to a World War I biplane fuselage—was like strolling through an empty airport terminal with a wheeled suitcase. And bringing down my parents’ old love seat helped me to finally realize why they’re called that. Now the only thing we have to do is figure out what to do with our old furniture, arrange the new furniture the way we want it, and wrestle the slipcovers onto my parents’ old furnishings. Slipcovers became very big for us this year. Trash has been getting more and more disgusted with the way the cats have shredded the arms of our sofas and easy chairs. Every time she agitated for replacements, I pointed out that the cats would just do the same thing to whatever we brought in. Then I would draw her attention to the chair that after a year in our living room looked as if part of it had been woven from used toupees. Cheap and ruthless, that’s me. My wife’s a lucky girl. So she got on eBay and found several high-quality slipcovers from Pottery Barn. These are quite nice, and the cats aren’t interested in shredding them, but the drawback is that they don’t come with instructions and I can never seem to get them on right. An hour of wrestling, jerking, tucking, tying, untying, and retying always leaves me with something that just looks like a beached whale in an ill-fitting straitjacket. It’s a straitjacket in an attractive designer color, granted, but that still isn’t the look I was going for. This is my life. Trying to get sofas into basements and into slipcovers when all I really want to do is get them under my ass. Sometimes the prospect of sitting on the floor doesn’t seem so bad. Today’s best search phrase: “pig trachea pictures.” The search phrases I get never cease to amaze me. People, Google has an image search function, okay? Click on the image tab and type in “pig trachea.” It’s much easier, you’ll get much more reliable results, and you can ogle as many pig tracheas as you want. posted by M. Giant 3:41 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, August 04, 2003 Four-Footed Freaks Something is happening to our animals. I’m not just talking about the cats. It’s odd enough to see Strat sprawled on his back in a chair with his feet pointing in every direction, as if someone had just snapped his neck and dropped him there from a great height. It’s disconcerting enough to be awakened at two in the morning by Orca, screaming as loud as she can around a mouthful of socks (which is suprisingly loud). But now it’s spreading. Trash and I were in our kitchen the other night, watching a squirrel freak out in our front yard. He was out there dashing around in an area with about a one-foot radius. There’s nothing special about this area; it’s just a flat, grassy spot that looks just like the rest of the front yard. But this squirrel was acting like something was scrambling its neurons from six inches below the turf. It was kind of entertaining, but then the squirrel started digging. Not to get all Carl Spackler about it, but our front yard isn’t really in good enough shape to get away with having squirrel-holes in it. Even so, I wouldn’t have minded if the squirrel had just been burying something. But it wasn’t. It would dig down a little bit, stick its head in the hole, and flail its body around for no apparent reason. Like it was pretending to be dragged underground headfirst or something. After three holes, I went outside to suggest the squirrel practice its mime routine elsewhere. When I opened the front door, the squirrel darted across the sidewalk and about five feet up the nearest tree, where it peeked at me suspiciously around the narrow trunk. It was like he was just waiting for me to go away so he could get back to what he was doing. I stepped closer to the tree and the squirrel climbed higher and stayed out of view. “I saw what you’re doing out here,” I told it. “Knock it off, okay? You’re making a mess.” Then I went back inside. This was not my original plan. The original plan was to let Strat out the front door and see what happened. Trash vetoed that, though. I don’t know why. It’s not like Strat would have caught it. Back in the kitchen, I watched out the window as the squirrel came down from the tree and picked up where he had left off. His head disappeared beneath the grass, and the rest of him spasmed as if he’d just bitten into a low-voltage cable. “Did you fertilize the lawn with crack?” I asked Trash. “I was just about to ask you that,” she said. We have a perfectly amiable relationship with the neighborhood squirrels, despite their insistence on practicing high-altitude precision acorn-bombing of our back yard. There’s even an albino squirrel that’s lived in the area for years, a sure sign that the humans get along pretty well with the rodents. But if the local fauna has succumbed to the influence of evil alien mind control rays, we may have to reassess that. Right now, I’m just going to keep an eye out for juggling birds and rapping mosquitoes. Today’s best search phrase: “projectile fungus from mulch.” You know, I’m all for projectile fungus, but if you’re looking for a way to get it from mulch you’re just wasting your time. posted by M. Giant 3:32 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, August 01, 2003 Dolphins! Science! Jazz! CorpKitten sent me an interesting article the other day, and the e-mail had that subject line. I’m going to talk about the article. What the hell, it won’t kill me to act like a blogger once in a while. Here, go read it. I’m posting a short entry today anyway, so you have time. I like the way the article uses jazz musicians and bottlenose dolphins to support the “small world” theory. However, it seems like they could have gone even further with the idea, and and found out how many jazz-playing dolphins know each other. I think the results of that study would be staggering. I’ve always been kind of interested in the “six degrees of separation” theory, ever since I first heard about it. It makes sense to me, and the best part of it is that it can never be proved false. Part of that is because of the indefinability of what constitutes a “connection.” For instance, I’m connected to the Pope by only two degrees if you consider Chao connected to him. In Chao’s case, that connection constitutes snapping a photo of the pontiff gliding unexpectedly past him on his indoor Popemobile. Obviously if one requires Chao’s connections to the Holy Father and myself to be symmetrical, my connection to the Pope breaks down. But one doesn’t, because a) few connections are symmetrical anyway, and b) I don’t own a Popemobile. On the other extreme, of course, there’s the hypothetical person in the Andes or the Sahara or the Arctic or a South Pacific island who has only ever met six people in his or her life. Any researcher who wants to use this person as a counterexample is going to have to find and contact and interview him or her, and whoops! Now that person is two degrees from everyone the researcher has ever met. Which, given this particular researcher’s field, is likely to be quite a few people. It seems like the Internet would be the ideal tool for not only testing the hypothesis, but making it self-fulfilling. That doesn’t seem to be the case as much as one might think. I'm not even talking about the Blogosphere. A few years ago I signed up at the Six Degrees website. I looked at it a few times, but I haven’t been back in years. I remember it primarily as a highly reliable tool for crashing my computer, actually, and once the novelty of that wore off I didn’t see a reason to continue. I didn’t even check it before I linked it so it might be pr0n now for all I know. It’s Friday, okay? I’m on cruise control. Hey, you too? Wow, small world. * * * There was someone in the office today who was dressed exactly like somebody’s WeatherPixie. Freaked me out a little. Do you think she was doing it on purpose? * * * Today’s best search phrase: “cream the rabbit and chao cheese pictures.” At first I had no idea what this person was looking for; I only knew I didn’t have it. Further research reveals that these are characters in a video game that also features Sonic the Hedgehog, one of the ever-growing category of topics that make me realize the world isn’t so small after all, and there are many, many things in it about which I know nothing. Then I wondered, having used those words, why I don’t get more hits for them. And then I realized it was because I wasn’t also using the words “Sonic the Hedgehog.” Well, problem solved. posted by M. Giant 3:34 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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