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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Sunday, November 30, 2003 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XIX One of my JournalCon peeps Dawnie kicks things off this month with, appropriately enough, a return to one of the popular topics from last month. Given your recent run-in with the ladybugs, I thought you'd appreciate this. And I did. I especially appreciated not being the one who had eaten the ladybug. But as I pointed out to Dawnie, as much as she didn’t want to eat a ladybug, the ladybug probably ended up having a worse day than Dawnie did. I also appreciate Sharon, who was not only extremely helpful when I was researching Charlottesville, but who also shared this story after I stayed up all night making sure to get home: I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who struggles to get the hang of business trips. I made the mistake once of booking a redeye flight from Albuquerque to Charlottesville via the Atlanta airport. On Mother's Day. I thought I'd have the plane to myself, because who the hell else would be flying on a plane leaving Albuquerque at midnight on a Saturday night on Mother's Day weekend? As it turns out, an ENTIRE PLANE LOAD of Taiwanese tourists on a package tour that I REALLY hope they got a good rate on! The plane was a 737 with three seats on either side of the aisle, completely packed with small Asian people experiencing the wonders of a different time zone, except for me: a large, blonde farm girl from Virginia who stood at least a head taller than anyone else on the plane and felt even more conspicuous than usual sitting on the aisle seat so that I could stretch my legs out into the aisle, rather than ramming them into the back of the seat in front of me forcefully enough to cut off the circulation to my feet. Let's just say I didn't get a lot of sleep on that flight. Although it would have been easier if the flight attendants hadn't insisted on rolling the drinks trolley up and down the aisle every 30 minutes. Ugh. Forget the "One China" policy; Taiwan just needs to start celebrating Mother’s Day and everything else will fall into place. Speaking of traveling through Cincinnati, Regan has been there—literally: I'm voting the Cincy airport as one of the worst to be stuck at and hungry. I got trapped there on the way back from England. It's got like fifteen gates and two places to eat; I don't understand that. What makes it worse is that you got on a plane at 10 A.M. and flew for 10 hours and it's 3 P.M.?!?!?!, so most of the time you sit there thinking "what the hell?" After that, you need one of everything to keep you entertained. I talked about how there was nothing to eat for breakfast in the terminal we transferred through on the way to Charlottesville. We transferred through a different terminal on the way home, and this one had a more complete array of dining options. But by that point, I was so exhausted that the very thought of facing an omelet was physically intimidating to me. Should have done it the other way around. But then if the airlines listened to me, a lot of things would be different. For instance, the airplane would pick me up at my house and taxi out to 50th Street, which would serve as a runway. Stupid airlines. Finally, my sister DeBitch the younger (who is half of a company that does environmental assessments and is therefore in a position to know these things) clues me in on something about which I was more clueless than I realized: Hey, just thought you would like to know that a level 5 hazmat suit won't do you any good when you're painting your room. There is no such thing. Oh, man. That guy who sold me that hazmat suit on East Lake Street is in for such a tongue-lashing. Personal protective equipment is rated from D to A, D meaning that you are wearing a shirt, A meaning a full-on space suit. I thought you did research before you printed this stuff. :) Debitch the Younger (your hazwhopper trained sister) I did do research on this. I totally saw it on The X-Files once. On the plus side, I am now familiar with the term "hazwhopper." That makes up for a lot. Today’s best search phrase: "'amy-wynn' ty –pastor." I’m sorry, but even if Amy Wynn Pastor marries Ty Pennington, that’s not going to be her name. posted by M. Giant 7:52 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, November 26, 2003 Humpblog (11/26/03) Welcome, TWoP Survivor recap readers! If I’d known you were all coming I would have straightened up a little. Big thanks to Miss Alli for the lovely shout-out. You should check out her site too, if you haven’t already. It’s really good and I hear she has a keg over there. As long as you’re here, this is what Strega was talking about in last spring’s Angel recap. I still get traffic from that sometimes, and they must wonder what’s going on. Which might also be the case this time, but I’ve done what I can. * * * It generally isn’t hard to come up with something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. If you live in Canada, you can be grateful that your Thanksgiving is in October, before winter socks you a good one. If you live in the U.S., you can be grateful that you don’t live someplace where winter has already socked you a good one. And if you live in Minnesota, which gets screwed both ways, you can generally be thankful that you’re not being tortured in a North Korean prison. And even if you are, Thanksgiving is probably going to come and go without your knowing about it anyway. This year’s even more of a no-brainer for me because I’m now getting a salary and benefits for writing comedy. So, you know. Duh. * * * I just heard about something called a turducken. Aside from being a flagrant violation of a rule I have about eating anything with the word "turd" in it, how does someone come up with the idea of serving a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey? I am not making this up. Is just one dead bird with bread up its ass not enough vicarious humiliation for you? * * * This is an old link, but then again, this isn’t a real blog. Before you buy one of those printer ink cartridge refill kits, read this. Actually, read it anyway. It’s funny. * * * Back in the eighties, there was this big push to get people to start wearing seatbelts. And I guess it worked, because it seems like back then most people didn’t and now most people do. Even on TV. Compare an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard to an episode of Moonlighting and you’ll see what I mean (not that that’s the only difference). As I remember, the centerpiece of the seatbelt campaign was a photo of a highway patrolman, looking as sad as the captain on Law & Order: Sex Police, with this caption: "I’ve never unbuckled a dead man." I haven’t seen or heard that slogan for a very long time. There were two possible explanations for that slogan, if it was ever true. One is that even an accident that turned your car into a scale model of a Frank Gehry building and required the jaws of life, a can opener, and a centrifuge to separate you from it would have no power over the immortality-bestowing talisman of your seatbelt. The other was that nobody wore seatbelts anyway, so it was like saying "I’ve never pulled out a dead man in a full suit of armor." Or maybe he just used scissors. Now I know which one (or which two) it is, because I recently heard a statistic that seatbelts only reduce traffic fatalities by something like fifty per cent. And that a certain percentage of people killed in car accidents weren’t wearing seatbelts, and the percentage was less than one hundred. I’m still going to keep wearing my seatbelt, if only because the way I drive I’d rattle around like a BB in a basketball without it, but now I know that dead people are getting unbuckled all the time. Happy Thanksgiving! Drive safely! * * * The Diarist Award finalists for this quarter are up, and while I’m not one of them, there is a lot there to make me happy. There are well-deserved nominations for people I’ve met in person, like Monty and Anna Rain and Sundry and Chiara and Mo and Invincible Girl and Emily, and people I’ve only e-mailed with, like Robin and pamie. Some of them are even up against each other, which makes me marginally less happy, but only marginally. What makes me a little bit more less happy is that my wife Trash isn’t a finalist. I got an e-mail a few weeks ago notifying me that she was nominated for Best Guest Entry, along with her grad school buddies CorpKitten and Chao, for New York Stories Parts 1-5. However, that category doesn’t appear on the finalist page. I can only assume this means there weren’t enough other nominees to make up an actual category. That’s what happened the quarter that I was on the awards committee. There was only one Best Guest Entry nominee, so we eliminated the category for that quarter. Nobody else on the committee seemed to care that I was the one who’d nominated it. Assuming the same thing happened this quarter, what this means is that my wife and her friends were the only nominees, which is as good as getting the actual award, except that now I don’t get all the extra traffic from the finalists page and don’t get to put that little graphic in my template. So it’s not really as good at all for me. I’ll have to make it up to my wife and her friends some other way. Their award will be remembered along with other non-awards like the one for the guest entry I nominated, as well as the non-Oscars for Beauty and the Beast and Andy Serkis. You go vote. Seriously. Go on. We’ll be okay. * * * Today’s best search phrase: "Buy Novocaine for numbness." Dude, I’ll promise you right now that that’s never going to cure it. posted by M. Giant 1:17 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, November 24, 2003 Wake Me When It’s Over I tend to have whacked-out dreams when I sleep in unfamiliar surroundings. Take last night, for example. Trash and I had recently moved back into the apartment complex in downtown Minneapolis where we used to live. She was getting on the bus to go to work, as she frequently did at that time, and I had walked her across the street to the bus stop, as I frequently did at that time. As the bus pulled up, I realized I didn’t have the keys to get back into the apartment. Or even into the building. No pockets, you see, what with me being in my underwear and all. I asked Trash for the keys. She didn’t have them. There was no time to verbally express me displeasure with her at this development, as she was already boarding. All I could do was flip her a highly energetic and heartfelt bird. (In light of her reaction when I recounted that part of the dream to her earlier, I should give serious thought to doing that more often.) So there I was on the sidewalk next to Hennepin Avenue in my BVDs. I would have been even more pissed off if I hadn’t also been holding a large pillow. That was the only thing that allowed me to keep my dignity intact. Now I had to figure out how to get back into our apartment, a predicament compounded by the fact that I couldn’t remember our apartment number, or which floor we were on, or even which of the complex’s seven buildings on three city blocks we lived in. We’d just moved back, after all. Maybe I could check at the management office; they might even give me a spare key. They wouldn’t consider me suspicious at all. They’d be sure to help me out. Who’d be walking in there wearing nothing but an undergarment and a pillow who didn’t live there, anyway? That still left the question of how to get into the building. Otherwise I was going to have to go to work like this. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long before some guy came out. I dashed over to catch the door, but he studiously avoided eye contact and deliberately closed the door behind him. This is the problem with living in an apartment building: you can’t pick your neighbors. You could end up living next to someone really cool, or you could end up living next to some tight-ass who won’t even hold the security door open for a total stranger in his underwear. But I was in luck, because the lock hadn’t engaged. In seconds, I was in the hallway, contemplating my next move. Which, as it turned out, was to wake up. In my bed, in the house where I’ve lived for over ten years, in the bedroom I’ve slept in for ten years’ worth of nights. Which was only unfamiliar by virtue of having become three quite lovely and complimentary shades of green over the weekend, as opposed to the oatmeal-and-whiz hue it had been since we moved in. Props to Trash’s brother and his wife for coming all the way from Iowa to make that happen, by the way. Just the last part, I mean. They didn’t have anything to do with the rest of that stuff. Today’s best search phrase: “How do paper towels exurb water.” Hope that makes up for a weak entry. As interesting as dreams may be for the dreamer, the person to whom they’re being recounted rarely finds them all that exurbing. posted by M. Giant 4:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, November 21, 2003 Just Breathe The painting project in our upstairs bedroom has reached the point of no return. I just hope I can get through it alive. It seems my recent cold brought along an old friend: my asthma from last spring. Most of my cold symptoms have faded, but I’m still inexplicably stuck with this intermittent Piggy-from-Lord-of-the-Flies wheeze that manifests at inopportune times. And what time could be more inopportune than a week when our bedroom is going to be filled with plaster dust and paint fumes? The other night I scooped joint compound into all of the nail holes and cracks and various other irregularities in our bedroom walls and ceiling, which are legion. Gave it all twenty-four hours to set. Then fired up the power sander. I like repairing wall surfaces. I’m actually sort of handy at it. I like the way I can slather light-gray goo into a gap and come back the next day and smooth it into a white space as smooth as a mirror. The dust from that last process, I’m not such a big fan of. This stuff is so fine, it’s barely a solid. It’s more like vapor. It spreads and fills the room and settles on everything in a nearly weightless layer. It hovers in the air, coating my glasses and getting inhaled into my respiratory system, where it hopes to be reconstituted back into its initial, semi-liquid form, only more phlegmy. Not this time. That’s likely to kill me, the condition I’m in. But it had to be done, with in-laws coming up this weekend to help us paint. The walls had to be ready when they got here. So I patched, and I sanded, but I treated that dust like weaponized anthrax this time. I threw a plastic dropcloth over our (stripped) bed and Trash’s computer desk, the only two items of furniture still in the room. I opened both windows and positioned electric fans at them, blowing outside full-blast. I donned a dust mask to keep from breathing the stuff, and a hat to keep it out of my hair, which made me look like a darker Michael Jackson. Then I went and took a nap in the garage. No, not really. I sanded, and the dust went everywhere, as it does. In the room we sleep in, no less. Before I took my mask off I folded up the dusty dropcloth into a thick, unwieldy envelope of terror, vacuumed the dust off the floor and the walls (and out of the air, waving my little Dirt Devil™ Hand-Vac around randomly like some kind of low-rent Ghostbuster), changed out of my dusty clothes, and mailed them to Bangladesh. Then I rinsed myself off so as not to carry a single speck of dust to bed with me. I was kind of wishing I had a level five hazmat suit, but most of DIY home improvement is all about improvising anyway. And it worked. No asthmatic attacks of any kind all night. This was two nights ago. Last night I got started painting the trim, so it’ll be all nice and dry and masking-tapeable when the crew arrives tomorrow. Trash busied herself slapping coats of primer on those dumbass wall stencil patterns that we’ve hated since day one. At one point, I dislodged a tiny little coke-line of plaster dust that had landed on the top of one of the baseboards. And me without a dust mask. I managed to hold my breath just long enough to fling myself out the window. No, not really. I didn’t panic. There wasn’t enough dust there to bother me. Flash forward to 6:30 this morning, an hour before my alarm goes off. I find myself in a dream where I am physically unable to sigh and the very act of breathing requires conscious effort. Which, soon enough, renders me conscious. I get up, go downstairs, take a couple of hits off the inhaler, and lie down on the living-room sofa to wait for my lungs to kick in again. Our bedroom’s going to be so nice when it’s finished. It’ll be done up in different shades of sage and green that will be a huge improvement over the depressing off-yellow we’ve been living with all this time. Too bad I won’t ever be able to sleep up there. Today’s best search phrase: “Springy heated dreamy genius penises.” Okay, that wasn’t a search phrase. It was the subject line on a spam e-mail I got. But now it’ll turn up on future searches, so I think that counts. posted by M. Giant 2:40 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, November 19, 2003 Humpblog (11/19/03) I was channel-surfing late that night in Charlottesville and I came across a performance by The Folksmen. You may remember them as the folk group played by Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean in A Mighty Wind. They were performing “Old Joe’s Place,” the song they sing in the movie about an Alice’s Restaurant-type establishment where some of the letters in the “Eat at Joe’s” sign are burned out. I wasn’t watching A Mighty Wind, though. It was an episode of Saturday Night Live. From nineteen years ago. This was back in 1984, when the regular SNL cast included Guest and Shearer, and McKean showed up to host an episode. If they did a Spinal Tap number on the show I missed it, but seeing them all made up like The Folksmen nineteen years ago felt like falling into a time warp. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that footage ended up in A Mighty Wind later. Imagine—a fake group with a real history. * * * Deniece has an electronic piggy bank that plays the “Winnie the Pooh” theme whenever she drops a coin in. Pennies, quarters, Sacajawea dollars and Krugerrands all get the same tune, so she normally gets pennies. If she hears change jingling, she’ll make her appeal: “Munnee. Peeeez?” The penny goes in, the tune starts, and Deniece does a little dance. “Munnee. Peeeez?” Repeat until broke. Her dad is becoming increasingly ambivalent about the connection between money and dancing that must be getting programmed into her brain this early in life. * * * I made an appearance in Rocksnobs a few days ago. The conversation transpired much as DragonAttack said. But props to her for having the discretion to not mention that my first concert was Kenny Loggins. * * * I keep getting all these “delivery failure” messages in my inbox. Anyone who didn’t know better would think I’ve been trying to send e-mails to all these people I’ve never heard of, claiming that I can “do what V1agra can’t.” Which is a promise I try not to make except in very specific circumstances. I would think it was because my e-mail address got hijacked by a spammer, but it’s happening on my Yahoo! mail too. I’d think it was a virus, but it’s leaving my Outlook mail alone. I can only assume that the spammers have graduated to using mind-control rays on me without my knowledge. I’m going to print this paragraph out and carry it in my pocket in the event that they make me do something that gets me arrested. * * * This story cracks me up. Just the fact that the threatening behavior in question consists of glaring through a window at someone makes me wonder, why is it now easier to get a restraining order than an order of fries? And then the glarer, rather than saying, “So?” says, “I wasn’t glaring.” When did glaring become illegal anyway? Excuse me. I should say, “the alleged glarer.” Also, at the risk of sounding like a network TV promo announcer, be sure to read the last paragraph. Some parents really do suck. Trash's question: what if somebody vacuumed while glaring? * * * Today’s best search phrase: "merry little christmas" "be your last". Yes, my goal is to become your one-stop shopping place for depressing holiday lyrics. Unless that involves work on my part, of course. posted by M. Giant 3:01 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, November 17, 2003 Portrait of the Artist as a Sick Man Thanks from Trash to everyone who sent her birthday wishes. Now she feels like her birthday has actually happened. * * * So Trash and I went down to Iowa this week to visit Deniece and also to have our pictures taken. Deniece’s mom, my sister-in-law, is a photographer in training, and she needed some portraits for her portfolio. I, in turn, needed an author photograph to send to my publisher, so it worked out great for everyone. Aside from the whole getting sick thing, that is. Two weeks ago, Trash went to Detroit and got sick. Then she came home, and I went to Virginia, and she stayed sick. Then I came home, and she went to Detroit again, and got better. We spent about one out of three nights together for that week and a half, and I managed to get her rhino-funk anyway. This may make me the only person in history who ever got his wife’s cold over the phone. Although the combination of not sleeping last Saturday and arousing my allergies with a metric shitload of dust a few days later may have been factors. Whatever, the case, my instructions to my sister-in-law—“just make me look literate”—were bound to be undercut by my own appearance. Of course dark circles underneath red-rimmed eyes that betray a mind tweaking on off-brand cold medicine, and a scabby, crimson nose serving as the headwaters for twin rivers of phlegm don’t necessarily preclude literacy, but I have to suspect that they kind of tend to draw attention away from it. So on Saturday, when my sister-in-law asked me if I wanted color or black-and-white for the photos, it was a no-brainer. Maybe a moody monochrome would translate “miserable cold sufferer” into “tormented genius.” If nothing else, my feverish shivering was bound to make a gauze filter unnecessary. While we were at it, my sister-in-law took a few shots of Trash and me together. We’ll have an arty-looking black-and-white portrait to put up on the shelf and point out to guests: “There’s Trash and me with the flu.” So I ended up staying home today to try and get better. Also to avoid spreading it to my coworkers. A bunch of them are going to San Diego this week, and the last thing I need is to read about an outbreak of Minnesota flu in Southern California. I hope that’s enough of a karmic credit to make up for a short entry today. And if not, get off my back. I’m sick. Today’s best search phrase: “Saturn.” That’s it. Maybe I need to stop talking about my car so much. posted by M. Giant 2:17 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Saturday, November 15, 2003 Go Trash…It’s Your Birthday So, today (Saturday) is my wife Trash’s birthday, and I was just planning to sneak away for a few minutes so I could write something about how grateful I am that she’s chosen to spend yet another full year of her life in mine. But then, I only have a few minutes, so that’s not going to happen. It’s pretty much an ongoing lifetime project. If you have a few minutes, however, feel free to drop her a little birthday greeting at llexuus@hotmail.com. Keep in mind that this website wouldn’t exist in its present form without her love and support. There’d just be one of those “Page not found” messages, and what fun is that? So go ahead and e-mail her. She won’t mind. Thanks. posted by M. Giant 11:08 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, November 12, 2003 Humpblog Maybe Wednesday should be blog day around here. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bad idea. I’m just thinking out loud. As you’ll see below, I’m not about to stop either. * * * I remember when DeForest Kelley died. I was saddened, but not surprised. I’d picked him for a dead pool a couple of years ago, after all. No regular members of any Star Trek cast had passed away at the time, and he was the oldest member of a high-risk group at a time when sixties TV stars were dying off like germs in an autoclave. I seem to remember that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country barely got made because they had so much trouble insuring the guy. For similar reasons, I was saddened but not surprised to hear about Art Carney’s death. Of all the recognizable cast members of The Star Wars Holiday Special, he was the oldest (and I say “recognizable” because I’m not counting the guy who played Chewbacca’s wife, who was 49 at the time). Until yesterday I wasn’t even sure he was still alive, to be honest. Now he’s bought a little more time for Diahann Carroll, Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, and Jefferson Starship. Wherever he is now, the Force will be with him and every day is Life Day. * * * We’re finally painting the upstairs bedroom, the only room in the house that hasn’t been painted at least twice since we moved in ten years ago. It’s the only room that hasn’t been painted once since we moved in. We’ve been slowly clearing stuff out of there over the past couple of weeks so we’ll have room to work. Now there’s all this empty space, and we don’t miss ninety-five per cent of what used to be there. We’ll see how much of it comes back. Last night, I rolled up the large area rug that’s been on the floor up there the whole time. We’ve had this rug longer than we’ve been married. It’s probably going to end up in the living room after we take the carpet out. My parents took it home and gave it a thorough cleaning it once—they said they got enough cat hair out of it to make a cat—but that was several years ago. Rolling it up last night kicked up so much dust and dander that my eyes and throat and sinuses reacted as if I’d been maced. Now when I cough it tastes kind of musty. Should that happen? * * * Trash and I are both in the midst of lulls at work. “Whatcha doin’?” “Nothing.” “Working on anything?” “No.” “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.” “I already told you I plan to have a burrito for lunch in two hours.” “That’s true.” “That’s literally the full extent of what’s going on in my life right now.” “Oh.” “Yes.” “So is anyone else in the office today?” “Yes.” “What are they doing?” * * * Got another gig coming up with the band in a couple of weeks. You should come, because it’s free. On Saturday, November 22, we’re at Betsy’s Back Porch in Minneapolis. 54th and Nicollet, 7:30 to 10:00 p.m. I think I’ll put a “next gig” box on the right side of the template there, for your stalking convenience. It’ll probably say “TBA” most of the time, which is fine considering how bad I am at updating my template anyway. Trash used to think TBA was the busiest band in the Twin Cities, by the way. They’d play half a dozen bars in one night sometimes. However did they do it? Today’s best search phrase: “How to hide a urine sample on your person.” I have a few ideas, but they kind of fall apart if one assumes the need to present the sample later on. Sorry. posted by M. Giant 2:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, November 11, 2003 I Don’t Like It My niece Deniece, two years old minus two months and two weeks, has her first complete sentence. I’m not counting the phrase she picked up from her grandma, with whom she stays a few days a week and who has two excitable dogs. “NO BARK!” is not a complete sentence, no matter how loudly she screams it. It’s not a sentence her parents are particularly thrilled about either. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. She’s not cursing or anything. That might even be less distressing, because at least then they’d know where it came from and would be able to limit the time I spend with her accordingly. No, Deniece’s first complete sentence, whose origins are completely shrouded in mystery, was this: “I don’ liiiiike it.” As far as I know, it remains her only complete sentence. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t. What other sentences does one need? It’s applicable to every situation that a simple nod or grunt can’t cover. I’ve known adults who get by on this one sentence alone. Of course, it drives her mother nuts. “Where did you learn that? Why must you keep saying it? Who are you? What happened to my happy, easygoing child, and who replaced her with this whiny princess?” This is something she pickled up pretty recently. I hadn’t seen her since before I started my new job in August, so when she came up a couple of weeks ago she was all excited for me to carry her around my father-in-law’s house so she could point at things and show off all the new words she’s learned. The Halloween decorations facilitated the process quite nicely. To a witch decoration: “Wish!” To a ghost decoration: “Ghoss!” To the hundreds of vaguely spherical orange blobs represented throughout the house: “Puckin!” To a particularly scary witch decoration: “I don’ liiiiike it.” My response: “Who are you?” Later, when Trash brought her upstairs to put her down for a nap in the spare bedroom, Deniece asked for me. Trash came down and fetched me. When she saw me, she asked for “Trash too!” Apparently it wasn’t quite naptime. Furthermore, the fact that she can now say Trash’s name correctly may have inspired the latter to cut her a little more slack. When Deniece hit the wall of fatigue a little later and started crying over things like standing there and suddenly deciding she was facing the wrong direction, we tried again. “Just put her down and walk out of the room,” Trash’s stepmother suggested. I carried Deniece upstairs and put her down. “Trash too,” she lamented. “That word, ‘too.’ I do not think it means what you think it means,” I told her, and left her to her nap. She didn’t liiiiike that. When she gets old enough to watch The Princess Bride, she’s going to remember that and she’s going to laugh and laugh. That afternoon, however, she simply to lay in the bedroom by herself and wailed “Trash tooo!” over and over, handily proving my previous observation. We left after she fell asleep, and she probably spent the next several days taking a hard look at her debating skills. A couple of weeks later, she and her parents were back here in Minneapolis. We celebrated her dad’s birthday at Kieran’s in downtown Minneapolis. She kept wanting to go to the windows and look at the “Cassles.” Fortunately we were in the back room, so nobody had to deal with what would have been her rather discomfiting fascination with the “gentlemen’s club” across the street from the front room. Which of course has a more castle-like façade than any of the buildings she could see from the back. We’re hoping she’ll still consider office buildings castles if she grows up to work in one. On the other hand, a career in that other kind of castle is likely to be discouraged. Today’s best search phrase: “Haw to steal a car.” I’d be upset about people trying to use my site to facilitate a life of crime if I weren’t so amused by the image of somebody trying to boost a set of wheels by walking up to it and laughing like a hillbilly. posted by M. Giant 2:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, November 09, 2003 Say Goodnight Writing this from my hotel room in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we just finished putting on our little radio show. It’s after midnight, and instead of sleeping I’m banging out an update that I’ll post after I get home. My flight’s at 6:00 a.m., and I’m expected in the hotel lobby at 4:45, and I don’t trust myself to wake up in the morning. I don’t trust the alarm clock (especially since it didn’t go off this morning), and I don’t trust myself to not just knock the receiver off the phone when my wakeup call comes in. The last thing I need is to get oilspotted on my first show on the road. Oilspotted, of course, is a road crew term for what happens when the tour bus leaves without you, for reasons that should be apparent if you’ve ever examined the pavement underneath where the bus used to be. I suspect it’s also pretty descriptive of how one would feel if one found oneself in a position to do that. I haven’t heard anyone in this crew use it yet, but I’ll see if I can help it gain currency around here. That’s my goal. It’s not such a dearly-held goal that I’m going to try to get it to take off by demonstrating it, though. So instead, I stay up all night at thirty-three years of age without a final in the morning and without a drop of liquor in me and I present, for your entertainment, my weekend. Friday, 4:45 a.m.: My alarm goes off at home. 5:15: The cab to the airport arrives at my house. 5:16: I actually wake up. The less said about the next five minutes, the better. 6:00: I’ve never been through airport security with a laptop computer before. I’m responsible for two that belong to the show, and I’m carrying them in a rolling suitcase that also belongs to the show, which also contains a slew of computer disks that belongs to the show, and a bulky digital still-video camera that, yes, belongs to the show. When you open this mess up, with all of its attendant cables, it probably looks exactly like a half-finished bomb. Plus I checked the bag with my clothes in it, because if the airline loses a suitcase they’d better lose that one; if the show doesn’t go on tomorrow night, several million disappointed listeners won’t care how neatly turned out I am. So here I am at the metal detector, unshaven, spectacularly bed-headed, with water-brushed teeth and not a stitch of clothing in my possession aside from what I have on. Airport security is nowhere near the nightmare for me this morning that it has every right to be. 6:55: Thank you for flying Buddy Holly Airlines… I think they swapped planes on us somewhere between ticketing and boarding. I’m supposed to be in an exit row. My boarding pass even says “EXIT” on it, right under the row number, which is thirteen. Row thirteen on this plane turns out to be the last row, and the nearest exit involves an eject handle. I’m still better off than the woman who boarded right behind me, who’s supposed to be sitting in row seventeen. I hope she wasn’t too cold riding on the tailfin. The suitcase would fit in a normal overhead bin, but in this WWII-era goony-bird, the only way that’s going to happen is if I take everything out, which kind of defeats the purpose of a suitcase. It goes under the seat in front of me. 10:00 (EST): Looking for breakfast at Terminal A of the Cincinnatti Airport. I’ve been up for over three hours, but it’s still a little early for Chinese. One of my three traveling companions, the show’s pianist and musical director, busts out some yogurt ant pita bread during the layover. He’s done scores of these tour shows over the past God knows how many years. “Being on the road is like camping for me,” he says. 11:20: On board another minivan with wings. I’m in row two, which would be first class on a normal airplane. But worry not, Public Radio members. On this plane the only perk of sitting this far forward is the view of the blue painter’s tape covering the window in the cockpit door. 12:40 p.m.: The Public Radio station in Roanoke, Virginia has sent someone to pick us up at the Charlottesville airport. As it turns out, our driver is the station’s general manager. Folks from the station treat us real good. 2:00 – 8:00: Now that we’re here, it’s time to get to work. Unpacking the road crates, setting up our remote office, printing and copying scripts, and something about a radio show. Rehearsal wraps at eightish, and everyone splits into one of two groups: the big steak group and the really big steak group. Go out. Burn a chunk of per diem. Come back. Call home. Say goodnight. Sleep for ten hours. Saturday, 11:00 a.m.: Head to the theater. Put show together. Get really good catered food. Try to keep freakouts to a minimum. 6:00 – 8:00: Do show. 8:10: Go outside and watch lunar eclipse with a couple of the actors and caterers. 8:10:30: Get back to work. We’re big in Charlottesville, apparently, so the 1,300-seat theater filled up fast enough to merit a second show, which starts at 9:30. After nine hours of work, we’re halfway done. The boss doesn’t like to do the same show twice, so we’ve got a second show to put together in an hour and a half, a job that normally takes all week. Try to keep freakouts to a minimum. 9:30: Second show starts. 11:00: The show reaches the halfway point of the printed rundown. When the boss doesn’t have to fit the show into a strict two-hour time slot, he, well, doesn’t. 11:30: The show’s still going. The segment producer comments that maybe I’ll just have to go straight to the airport after the show. Coming as it does six and a half hours before my flight home, this remark is not as absurd as it might sound. The show ends. We pack up. I couldn’t tell you what time, because I was starting to get a little punchy at this point. I may have dashed up to my boss, flung myself into his arms, and called him a bad mutha(shut yo’ mouf). I’ll get confirmation on that at a later date. I do know we got back to the hotel at 12:45 a.m. 12:46 a.m.: The tour manager bids me goodnight in the hotel lobby: “See you in four hours.” After this weekend, I need an easy day tomorrow. So it’s good that all I have to do is get home, go to the office and drop off the disk with the pictures I took for the website, stop by Dirt and Banana’s house to feed their cats, see Matrix Revolutions, and celebrate my father-in-law’s birthday. And it’s not like I’m going to do this on no sleep. I can sleep on the plane. Or rather, planes. 3:40: Finish typing entry. Save entry. 3:41: Say “screw it” and call front desk to get wake-up call. Like I said, I’ll post this when I get home. Unless I get oilspotted, that is. posted by M. Giant 10:33 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, November 05, 2003 The Prisoner I’ve written before about how my cat Strat likes to sneak out of the house. I just don’t feel like linking to those entries. You can take my word for it. Better yet, you can go through the archives. Better better yet, you can ask all of your friends to go through the archives. Whatever works for you. Anyway, until last weekend our house looked pretty nice from the street. What with all the painting and landscaping and so forth that Trash and my parents and I had done over the summer, we had what some might call curb appeal. It was pretty nice. Until last weekend. That’s because before last weekend, our storm door was a dingy, rickety horror that looked like rusted-out ass. Getting the rest of the house spiffed up made its assitude stand out even more. It looked like the door of a Joad house Photoshopped onto an otherwise perfectly respectable dwelling. That changed last weekend. Because, as I mentioned Monday, my parents came over and I helped them install a shiny, clean, new storm door. Now the house looks really nice instead of pretty nice. During the entire process, stretches of which necessitated the front door being ajar, Strat remained in the entryway in a state of high alert, waiting for all of us to look away at the same time so he could sneak out and rub his anus on the sidewalk or whatever it is he does. Except when the inside front door was closed. During those periods, he concentrated on opening it. Which, to our everlasting frustration up until last weekend, he is generally able to do when the door is unlocked. It was also to our everlasting frustration (up until this weekend) that the storm door would never latch properly on its own. It was old and out of true and probably installed by Dr. Jellyfinger in the first place, so getting it to shut properly required one to yank on it as if one were pulling a marlin out of the Gulf of Mexico. Generally not one’s first priority when one is trying to get into the house with an armload of groceries, mail, dry cleaning, beer, and donor organs. Especially when one figures that since we’re in the habit of locking the main door anyway once we’re inside, the cat will never get that far anyway. Funny little digression here: Friday afternoon, Trash called my office from home. “Did you see Strat this morning?” “I don’t remember.” “I don’t think I did.” “Okay.” “And I don’t think he slept on our bed last night.” “Oh.” “When did you let him out?” Arguing about who let the cat out and when is much more diverting and only slightly less productive than actually searching the actual neighborhood for the actual cat. So we did that first thing for a while, and then Trash went out to do the second thing. Apparently Strat had spent the night in our detached garage. The question of which one of us had let the cat out and when was never properly resolved, and it’s probably better that way, in the event that it was me. So one might think that Strat’s multiple escape attempts this past weekend while we were working on the door would have been especially irritating. This, as it turns out, is not the case. Having him constantly interrupt our efforts with his many abortive escape attempts served as a constant reminder that all future escape attempts would be abortive. We got the storm door hung, adjusted the pull on the closer just so, opened it up, and let it swing to. It latched automatically. Effortlessly. We looked at Strat through the storm door window and cackled at him evilly. We were probably tempting fate when we did that, but it’s been like three days and he hasn’t gotten out of the house since. Today’s best search phrase: None for me today. Go look at Pamie’s, if you haven’t already. posted by M. Giant 4:55 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, November 03, 2003 I’m Retiring That Sweater “I’m retiring that sweater,” I told Trash. The sweater in question is an absurdly soft, steel-gray chenille or something. It’s a long, loose v-neck that both hangs and clings. I don’t understand all this chick stuff. Apparently it’s incredibly comfortable and warm. But I have to imagine that it’s becoming less warm, because every time it gets washed there is less sweater. She can’t wear it without a shirt underneath it any more, because it’s growing transparent. Bits of black and silver fluff are coming off of the underlying infrastructure in expanding horizontal strips. Swatches of the garment’s grid-like armature are becoming exposed, to the point where it’s the only thing holding it together. Every time I wash it, everything else in that load of laundry comes out of the machine limned in a uniform coat of tiny, silvery-black fibers. I’m retiring that sweater. The sweater’s label says to dry it on the low setting. That’s what I do. Most of the other things in the load carry the same instructions, so it’s no problem. Then I open the dryer door and a tsunami of steel-gray fluff explodes into the laundry room, which instantly goes dark in a highly localized nuclear winter. Every time this happens, I think there can’t possibly be anything left of the sweater. Too much of its volume is in the lint filter and on my black clothes and in my lungs now. But I’m always wrong. It always comes out, intact but another stage further along in its slow but inexorable transformation into a mesh top. I’m retiring that sweater. It came out of the laundry first last night, which meant it was at the bottom of the laundry basket. It has to be that way. Otherwise it blows away when I come up the stairs. While I hung up the clothes, Trash rifled through her closet to get a pair of black pants. “What’s all over these pants?” she asked. “That sweater I’m retiring,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “I see what you mean. Now you have to rewash them.” “No,” I said, “now you have a pair of black pants that are sort of wooly-looking. It’s like two pairs of pants in one. “But I’m retiring that sweater.” Trash dug the sweater in question out of the bottom of the laundry hamper, making sad-kitten noises. “But it’s so soft and warm and comfy.” She held it up to her cheek. She hugged it to her body. She read a few stock prices through it. “And I’m retiring it,” I said. “Okay,” she said, accepting the inevitable. Dealing with her grief. Preparing to move on. Or so I thought: “Just don’t wash it any more,” she added. “So you’re giving up the sweater, but first you want to keep wearing it until it gets too stinky?” “Yes.” “Okay then.” She’ll probably be wearing the sweater well into next winter. There probably isn’t enough left of it to store a decent funk anyway. * * * I should say something nice about my wife now. How’s this: she refers to the movie Radio as I’m Retarded—Give Me an Oscar. Which I can’t not crack up at. * * * So my parents came over yesterday and I helped them install the new storm door on the front of our house. More on that some other day. At some point in the process, I got a small cut on my hand. It’s narrow, less than an inch long, just at the base of my right pinky on the palm side. It didn’t even call for a Band-Aid™. This morning at the office, I glanced at it. Guess what I found embedded in the slowly healing tissue? Tiny, silvery-black fibers. I’m retiring that sweater. Today’s best search phrase: “Instructions fix cavalier alternator.” See, this is important, because if your alternator won’t take its job seriously…Oh, all right, I’m sorry. I got nothing today. posted by M. Giant 4:25 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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