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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Saturday, July 31, 2004 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XXVII I love my readers. Y'all are so helpful after the fact. Like Julie, for instance. Where was she when Trash and Bitter and I were haring aimlessly around the city of Hastings, Minnesota on the Fourth of July, trying to find the best vantage point to watch stuff blow up? Well, she'll tell us where she was: I'm sure a good half dozen people have emailed you already, but -- for what I'm sure will be many future 4th of July trips to Hastings -- head to the Hastings Country Club golf course on Westview Drive just south of 15th Street. Bring a blanket, lie on a big hill and have the fireworks explode directly above you. (This year, two actually misfired and exploded on the ground. No one lost any limbs so, in the end, it was pretty sweet.) Awesome! It's always fun when a conflagration is a dome rather than a sphere. But your confusion was justified. I flew home for the show to surprise my family and damned if there weren't 50 people doing fireworks (big, real ones!) in their backyards. From the country club hill, we could see them all over the place. (Since when are they legal in MN?) Since the year before last, if I'm not mistaken. Actually, as far as I know, the big ones still aren't legal here. Every once in a while the neighbor kid will light up something that just sits in our shared driveway and sends up a shower of flame and smoke and sparks and noise and ash, and we've never been busted by the gendarmes, so I think they're kosher. I think you're not allowed to have anything very big or anything that flies through the air, just as a basic rule of un-blown-off thumb. I don't know. Since we don't have kids of our own, we don't have much reason to keep recreational explosives in the house. Sherry offered some help with Trash's computer problem: If the heatsink is installed on top of the CPU oriented the wrong way, 'backwards' so to speak, the symptoms of which you speak will sooner or later show up. I just had that very problem occur, and no computer repair person caught it. It wasn't until I called a friend in California in ranting despair that I found that out. I took my computer apart myself, turned the heatsink around, and now it works fine--though I have a new hard drive, new OS and trashed all my old files during the computer repair person phase--it was a "virus" according to them, even though no virus detection software found anything. I responded: Ooh, I think we'll try that. It sounds easier and cheaper than a new hard drive, which is what Best Buy tells us we need. Which they had. To which she said: I don't know about "easier;" it was quite the ordeal to strip the computer down and get the heat sink off the CPU, and it wasn't cheaper, because I'd already spent the money on all the other attempts at solutions (heh). Hope the heat sink is all it is on Trash's computer and not a bad hard drive! Actually, it's looking like it was neither. Trash's computer came back from the shop a couple weeks ago and it's been working fine ever since (knock on a giant sequoia). I think it was a gremlin that escaped when they opened the case. Which then went home in someone else's computer. So if you're reading this somewhere in the Twin Cities area, and your computer started shutting itself down for no reason after it came back from Best Buy, you should… Hell, I don't know what to tell you. I kind of figured your system would crash before you read this far. Trash's near-death experience fifteen years ago (every word of which was true, for those of you who speculated) prompted one reader to share her own near-death experience from…um…that day. I would like to thank you for making me laugh at some else's terror on the very day of the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me. Today I heard my cat make the most horrific squealing sound. I ran down the hall from the front den into the kitchen where I found a full grown adult bear. An angry bear that was not happy that my cat was protecting her home. Instinct kicked in and I screamed bloody murder. The bear seriously peed on the floor running out of the back door, where it grabbed its cub. The neighbors came running and of course stopped wayyy short and stared. Very helpful people. Purple hearts all around. The cat had pursued the bear out the door into the yard and a fight was brewing so I threw a 30lb tin of bird seed at the bear followed by a lawn chair then a table then one of the neighbors. (Oh I SHOULD have!) The neighbors? Stood and gaped at the crazy lady fighting the 200lb bear. Think King of the Hill kind of standing around. I managed to drive it away from my little 9 lb cat and grab her and run in the house, which was a mess of course. It took me an hour to clean up after the bear, and the cat is shaken up but fine. So, some thug from our Martin Luther King Blvd versus a bear? I'll take the bear, thanks. Sayer That was a close one. I hate it when bears kill my readers. Also, I think Sayer needs to start her own website. There's probably an eager web audience out there for stories from a local neighborhood unarmed bear wrangler. Except we'll all worry about her so much that she'll never be able to stop updating, even if we get posts like: "Not mauled today." "Still not dead." "Posting this from inside my house, and not a bear's colon." Otherwise we'll always wonder what happened to her. Speaking of which…that e-mail came from her last week and I haven't heard from her since. Yeah, she definitely needs a blog. Today's best search phrase: "Sexy hazmat suit." I think there's a huge market there just waiting to be tapped. Just because you're in an environment where you need protection from deadly pathogens and toxins doesn't mean you can't show a little hoochie, right? posted by M. Giant 5:39 PM Thursday, July 29, 2004 Humpblog Sorry the Humpblog is late this week. I’m on the road and posting using a dial-up connection, and it’s taken me the whole extra day to upload anything. Sue me. Actually, don’t, because I hate that. * * * Do you live in or near New York City? Do me a favor then. Go see the shows mentioned below. While you're at it, do me another favor and pretend you didn't know who these people were until I told you about them. Oh, yeah, the shows. * * * Sars is my boss at Television Without Pity. Over the past year and change, she's explored the meaning of afterlife in a series called "Famous Ghost Monologues" at Tomato Nation. If the word "monologues" in the title makes you think of a stage show, you're not alone because now it is a stage show. This one, to be precise: Selections From "The Famous Ghost Monologues" Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex 312 West 36th Street New York, NY August 5-7, 8 PM Tickets available through SmartTix or by calling (212) 868-4444. I'd go, but Trash and I are expecting company that weekend. Also, we live about eleven hundred miles away. * * * Wing Chun is one of the other bosses at Television Without Pity, and the first person who ever paid me to write something funny. She wrote a novel at the age of thirteen, which she published a couple of years ago, fully cognizant that The Diary of Anne Frank it ain't. And then somebody else made it into a musical that is part of the New York International Fringe Festival. This one, to be precise: The Adams Conglomerate High School Drama Club Presents: Tales of the 8th Grade!! Follow the fictional adventures of four teenage girls as they experience friendship, love, death, smoking, sex, pedophilia, kidnapping, basketball... you know, high school stuff. Friday, August 13: 7 PM Sunday, August 15: 4 PM Sunday, August 22: 3:30 PM Wednesday, August 25: 7:45 PM Saturday, August 28: 12 PM Tickets available at http://www.fringenyc.org/basic_page.asp I'd go, but chances are very good that even up to the very last performance, Trash and I will still live about eleven hundred miles away. Whew, I need to sit down for a second. All this sucking up is starting to give me symptoms of oxygen deprivation. * * * Among the random detritus in the very-back of my station wagon is a rather beat-up box of Puffs™. I was reminded of this fact on the way back from Iowa the other day. Trash and I had stopped at a rest area, and we closed the windows when we left the car in the parking lot. As we got back on the road, we must have reopened them—including the back ones—just so. Because Puff™ after Puff™ kept popping straight up into view from behind the back seat. I noticed it first in the rearview mirror, as these diaphanous items began flitting around inside the car in ever greater numbers. Trash, in the shotgun seat, didn't realize what was happening until one of them fetched up against the back of my head. “What the hell?” she shouted over the wind. “I have a box of Puffs™ in the back,” I shouted back. She looked behind her. The back seat and cargo area looked like that scene towards the end of Ghostbusters. Trash cracked up laughing, and I closed the rear windows. The Puffs™ settled down, some of them along the highway. The cool thing is, now I know what to do if I ever get carjacked. * * * Hey, check out this item from Asociated Press: STRATFORD, Conn. -- It was a case of potty rage. Two men were arrested after a fight broke out over a public toilet. Andres A. Diaz, 52, was using the bathroom at a Burger King while Joseph Manuel Augusto, 37, waited for his turn Friday night. The two got into an argument when Diaz emerged after what Augusto thought was too much time, police said. Heated words escalated into a physical fight. The two men allegedly bumped chests, then chased each other around the restaurant with their weapons - Augusto was armed with a small razor pocket knife and Diaz brandished a Burger King straw dispenser, police said. No one was injured. Hmm. Razor knife versus straw dispenser, and yet no one was hurt. You suppose one of these guys was bigger than the other? They should have ordered some onion rings. I had some tonight, and they give you this sauce with it now that made me so happy I could never use a straw dispenser as a weapon. I'd sooner make sweet love to it. Fortunately, I got my dinner to go, or the next entry of this blog would be rather interesting indeed. * * * Today's best search phrase: To be honest, at this point the thought of sitting and waiting for my referrals to load on this dial-up connection makes me want to kill myself. posted by M. Giant 6:17 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, July 26, 2004 Shut Up, Movie Is it possible to be stalked by a movie? Even if you've never seen it? I ask because we were down in Iowa this past weekend. My niece Deniece was spending the night with Trash's mom, which meant that Deniece's parents had a free evening to go out with us. Lucky them. What we usually do is head to a nearby pole-barn with a liquor license, where they have karaoke on Saturday nights. While we were debating whether to do that or just take a nap, the definitive karaoke film came up. No, not Lost in Translation. I was surprised that of the four of us, two had actually seen this movie (neither of them were me). Although I don't know if it's accurate to say that Trash "saw" it, as she left the room whenever any plotline aside from the Paul Giamatti/Andre Braugher one was on the screen. Considering she was in a hotel room at the time, the repulsive power of the rest of the movie must be something indeed. Anyway, Deneice's mom and Trash tried to reconstruct the movie based on their imperfect, slightly-overlapping, corrupted-by-blind-hatred memories of it. At first this was to jog the memory of Trash's brother, so he could try and remember if he'd seen it, but it went on considerably after that objective had been achieved. By then, I was calling bullshit that any filmmaker would ever try to pass off a major character who makes a living as a "karaoke hustler," played by Huey Lewis or no. After a while, I said, "Why are we still talking about this movie?" "Yeah!" everyone said. "When we could be renting it?" I finished. "No!" everyone said. We did end up at the karaoke bar. It was actually busier than I've ever seen it, having been taken over by some kind of frat-boy karaoke band. Seven of these mooks hopped up on stage together and massacred that Lee Greenwood song in a way that made me miss the subtle, understated elegance of Invincible Girl's performance at last year's JournalCon. One of the heretofore absent regulars—the one who gives off a strong Jerri Blank from Strangers With Candy vibe—poked her head in and promptly disappeared. The frat-boy-band took the stage again, this time to sing "Seven Bridges Road" by the Eagles. You know that song, right? It's basically harmonies and an acoustic guitar. You don't touch it if you don't know what you're doing. We cringed under out table in anticipation of the horror that was about to be unleashed upon us. And then they nailed it. While applauding sincerely, we realized what these guys were. They were karaoke hustlers! After a while, Jerri Blank returned to take back the place with a small army of her compatriots, the frat-boy-band slaughtered "Man of Constant Sorrow," and the earth was spinning on its proper axis again. Then, driving back home to Minneapolis yesterday, we were station-surfing and came upon Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow singing "Cruisin'." What the hell? That song was a) released as a single and b) gets radio airplay? Someone had better explain this parallel universe's rules to me before I hurt myself in it. Is there some kind of The Ring-like deal about this movie where if you spend a certain amount of time talking about it you get sucked into its spell somehow? I don't know, but if Paul Giamatti and Andre Braugher walk buy me in the next week or so, I'm sticking to them like Gwyneth to her Oscar. Today's best search phrase: "'boppity boppity boppity' oh my." I was all ready to be offended at User Boppity's arrival here when he was clearly looking for something having to do with self-love, when I was sure I must have been talking about something completely innocent. And then I went back to the archives and found out I was talking about self-love after all, The feline variety, no less. So carry on, User Boppity. posted by M. Giant 6:43 PM Friday, July 23, 2004 Magic Bus If a friend calls you on the telephone and says they're lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to know what they should do, the best response is "Run!" - Chris Rock Minneapolis doesn't have a Martin Luther King Boulevard, as far as I know, but if it did, it would be East Lake Street. I mentioned Lake Street earlier this week as being quite useful for scaring the hell out of suburbanites. Many years ago, one of those suburbanites was my then-girlfriend Trash. Barely twenty years old at the time, having moved into her new apartment a scant week before, Trash found herself at a late play practice at the U of M. Nobody was around who could drive her home, so Trash decided to venture Minneapolis's public transit system for the first time ever. Trash knew that the 17 bus would bring her within a block of home. So when an 18 bus showed up, she figured, "close enough," and hopped on. By the end of the route, somewhere in Richfield, it was abundantly apparent to her that her ride's numerical proximity to her desired transport did not have a geographical analogue. Fortunately, the driver took pity on her and offered to drop her off at Lake Street on his way back to the bus garage downtown. From there, she could take the 21A home. Interesting thing about the 21A: It's a rubber ranch on wheels. The 21A was in fact the subject of a one-man play that's very popular here on the tundra. I've never seen the whole thing, but my understanding is that the play 21A is largely about how nuts are easier to find on the titular bus than in a Payday candy bar. But Trash never even got on the 21A, because events intervened. There was only one other passenger on the bus, and Trash—young, blonde, beautiful and alone—apparently drew his attention. Since she hadn't yet discovered the various methods for being left alone on a bus (rapid-fire, under-the-breath cursing; constant scratching; vigorous drooling), this fellow approached with a conversational opening and subsequent line of questioning that even the most violent, misogynistic rapper would have decried as ungentlemanly. The driver caught on, and when he got to Lake Street he let Trash off the bus and then took off before the other passenger could follow her, basically kidnapping. Trash stood on the corner, happily waiting for the 21A, never realizing that her fan might get off the bus a few blocks down and return for her. When she looked off to her right and spotted a familiar figure in white running toward her from a couple of blocks away, the need for a plan B became immediately apparent. Trash darted into a 24-hour check-cashing place and managed to impress upon its lone on-duty employee the urgency of her situation. The check-cashing guy assessed her and then locked the door, ten seconds before Trash's new friend flung himself at it, raging profanely until the check-casher called the police. One of Minneapolis's finest arrived shortly, and the next thing Trash's very scary but not yet technically criminal pursuer knew, he was being driven to an outer-ring suburb and dropped off. Unfortunately for Trash, the last bus home had already gone by while she was under siege. The officer saw the distraught state of this young woman to whose rescue he had just come, and offered her a ride home. She gratefully accepted and he escorted her to the back of his squad car. Alas, this was only the beginning. Before driving her home, the officer told her, "I just gotta do something first." He then proceeded to drive about a block down Lake, cross the street, flip on his flashers, jump out of the car, and take part in a full-on police raid that seemed to involve more police cars than the filming of The Blues Brothers. Thus, Trash found herself locked in the backseat of an otherwise empty police car in the middle of the parking lot of the most disreputable bar in South Minneapolis as cops and suspects swarmed around her outside the car. Perp after screaming perp was slammed against the hood, the trunk, the windshield, every window as the barely-ex-teenager from the northern suburbs cowered inside. The low point, however, was when somebody opened the back door, thrust two huge, handcuffed men in next to her, and sealed the three of them in together. Trash was beside herself. Would that this were more than a figure of speech, given the specimens who actually were beside her. One of them gave her an appreciative looking over. "Your hands ain't cuffed," he observed. "Whyn’t you come over here. Make me happy." Not a moment too soon, she was pulled from the car and placed in another one, this one parked in the very middle of Lake Street. From this slightly more removed vantage point, she could see dozens of people being cuffed, taken off, and loaded into paddywagons. And, in many occasions, slammed against this new car, as well. "See you downtown," some of them called cheerily to her. It wasn't until she was moved to a third car that an officer was finally available to bring her home. He asked for her address. Mind you, at this point she was in an advanced state of bugging, and probably couldn't have remembered her brand-new address even if she wasn't. Again, she had only lived there for a week. The officer who had taken charge of her witnessed a complete meltdown. He ended up guiding himself to her apartment using the fluctuations in her panic level as he got closer or further away, much as one would use a Geiger counter to locate a source of radiation. The moral of the story? The 18 bus does not go the same direction as the 17 bus. Please keep it in mind. Today's best search phrase: "Anus steak." Well, that didn't take long. posted by M. Giant 5:40 PM Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Humpblog (7/21/04) The "check engine" light on my car came on a few weeks ago. I was ready to be all self-sufficient and diagnose the problem myself. I figured I'd take a few minutes and "pull the codes." Let me explain that phrase for those of my readers who are even less mechanically inclined than myself. When the check engine light goes on, that’s when a savvy driver says, "Hey, I think it's trying to tell me something." But what? That's where pulling the trouble codes comes in. Pulling the codes is a procedure whereby you basically say to your car's computer, "What's wrong, girl?" And then the check engine light blinks on and off in a kind of Morse code that tells you that your carburetor's fallen down a well or your alternator is in the path of a forest fire or whatever the hell. Sadly, the procedure for pulling codes is not something that the authors of my Saturn Owner's Manual saw fit to include, never mind the codes themselves. So I called my dad, who suggested I tighten the gas cap. Thanks, Dad! Problem solved. The light hasn't come on since. Tarzan need no silly engine codes! Tarzan tighten gas cap! This morning I started my car. The check engine light still doesn't come on. But the dome light was blinking on and off regularly. All by itself, at half-second intervals. It kept doing it even after I turned it off. What the hell is that about? Even my Owner's Manual was like, "Shit, don't look at me" on the subject. After a minute or so, it stopped. But listen, any other Saturn owners whose dome lights flashed off and on by themselves at about 9:00 Central Time? Drop me an e-mail, because if this is a signal for some kind of alien invasion we should probably know about it. * * * So it seems that 24 is dropping all of its regular cast members except Kiefer next season. I already knew this from the spoiler thread at Television Without Pity (one drawback of being a moderator is that one tends to get spoiled). In fact, on Sunday night I had a dream that even Kiefer had left the series, and had been replaced by another former co-star of Alex Winter's whose distinctive first name began with a K. A few posters on TWoP's 24 boards might even go so far as to call that a nightmare. I think it was because I'd just watched Matrix Revolutions that night. I'd tell you more about the dream, but I figure that if you want to be told a pointless, meandering story in which Keanu mopes around and which has a negligible plot and no discernible ending…well, see previous sentence. * * * Just got back from the Kieran's Pub Quiz. As some readers may recall, our team won last month, so this time we got to come home with little trophies engraved with our team name: 3rd Place Dick. G.Grod was never a fan of the name, but even he had to admit that seeing it professionally engraved on a metal plate lends it a certain air of legitimacy. Alas, only three member's of last month's winning team (us, in case you're really not paying attention) were there to claim their trophies tonight: myself, Linda, and G. Grod. Trash had some work thing, and Zen Viking is in Vermont or some such, so we brought in Pub Quiz virgin DragonAttack, who I must say did an excellent job of filling in for two people. Even so, it was clear early on that a repeat victory was way out of our reach. We started out in the bottom half of the field, and drifted around in the middle for most of the rest of the quiz, right up to round five, which saw us in eighth place out of twenty. Which was why we were as surprised as anyone when we won the thing again. We'd chosen the final round—the music round—as our "joker round" which is the round where a team's score is doubled. Correctly answering nine and a half questions that round (we choked on the title of that country song by the Rolling Stones) was enough to vault us into the lead—"Out of nowhere," as the quizmaster aptly put it. So now we have a streak going. Now we’re a dynasty. Now we're one of those teams whose names the other teams whisper to each other in astonishment when they hear they're ahead of us. Now we’re one of those teams with more than one trophy. We should have known. You get three Damn Hell Ass Kings on a trivia team, and everyone else is in for a spanking, as a number of Seattleites learned a couple of years ago. And I can't help thinking that the team name doesn't hurt either. * * * Today's best search phrase: "My cat peed on me." Well, I did ask for it. The hit, I mean. Not the peeing. posted by M. Giant 9:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, July 19, 2004 Honk if Your Horn Works If someone had told me a year ago that Minneapolis's Lake Street was good for anything besides scaring the hell out of white suburbanites, I would have disbelieved that person. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, nobody takes Lake Street; the traffic is too bad. But if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Lake Street is the longest straight line between my house and my office. And since the freeways that are perfectly passable in the morning become positively Los Angeleno in the afternoon, surface streets are the way to go. The thing about Lake is it's one of the older, if not original, streets in Minneapolis. There's a traffic light every other block, but Lake Street—and most of the buildings that flank it—was built before God invented left-turn lanes. The result of this should be rush-hour gridlock, but most of the traffic lights are accompanied by signs forbidding left turns between 4 and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Remarkably enough, it actually works. While far from goose-shit smooth, afternoon Lake Street traffic is nowhere near the nightmare it would be if it weren't for those signs. Because, believe it or not, people actually obey them. At least, they did until my car horn broke. The only way to get anywhere on Lake is to constantly switch back and forth to the lane that's moving the fastest at that particular moment. Or, if neither lane is moving because everyone's stopped at a red light, you get in the lane that has the fewest cars waiting to go. Especially at the no-left-turn intersections, because it's not like one of the two cars is going to hold everyone up waiting to take a left. Unless my car horn is broken, which it is. And which they do. During my first eight months of this commute, getting stuck behind somebody who was flouting this relatively simple traffic rule was rare indeed. Annoying, but rare. Now that I can't do anything about it, it happens almost once a week. And flashing my brights at an offender isn't really going to send much of a message, especially when he's three or four cars ahead of me. Screaming at someone won't do the trick either. At least, it didn't seem to be working for that really angry guy going the opposite direction from me in a dune buggy. Obviously I need to get my horn fixed. There have been a few occasions where the lack of one has been life-threatening, in addition to these rage-induced aneurysms I keep having on the way home. There were three separate occasions during the Fourth of July weekend alone: Driving north on France in the outside lane, we were passing a car in the inside lane when it started coming over. I hit the brakes, and she checked her blind spot before hitting me, which is not as good as checking your blind spot BEFORE YOU MAKE THE DAMN LANE CHANGE, but a horn would have come in handy at that particular time. And also for the next several blocks of following her at full blast. Moments later, a guy came to a stop sign on a cross street. He checked very carefully that no traffic was coming at him from the right. His right was completely clear. No one on the right at all. Too bad I was NEARLY LEVEL WITH HIS FENDER COMING FROM HIS LEFT when he started pulling out in front of innocent, horn-less, no stop-sign-having, right-of-way-using me. Idiot. I think the only reason he stopped was because the woman in his shotgun seat saw us in time. And the very next day, some addlepated moron in a BMW (which in this case stood for "Bimbo in My Way") nearly sideswiped us on the freeway. Although I don't think that one was because she didn't see us. I think it was because she was TWEEZING HER EYEBROWS IN HER REARVIEW MIRROR AT SEVENTY-FIVE MILES PER HOUR. She needed a good honking-at anyway. My Dad's been under my hood, and it's not the fuse, like I thought it was. Otherwise it would be fixed by now. No, it's somewhere in the wiring, or in the horn itself. Dad's looking into getting me the parts it needs. I heard once about somebody who had one of the old Volkswagen Beetles, back when they had the engine in the back and the trunk in the front. This person installed a big-ass air horn off of a semi-truck under his hood. That way, when somebody cut off his Bug, he'd treat them not to a Herbie-like beep, but a deafening BWAAAAAAAAAA!!! The reaction was invariably priceless. I'm thinking of doing the same thing to my Saturn when I replace my horn. Of course, I'll miss my engine, but I'll be so happy to have a horn again that I won't even care. The neighbors might, though. Today's best search phrase: "M. Giant Velcrometer." It's nice to know that every once in a while, Google bring me someone who finds exactly what they're looking for. posted by M. Giant 8:38 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Saturday, July 17, 2004 Sign of Bad Luck I drove Trash to work Thursday morning, because she was going to a company function in the evening. From which I would also be picking her up. After I dropped her off, I headed to my own office along an unaccustomed route. That's the only reason I saw the sign in front of the Burger King: TRY OUR NEW PREMIUM ANUS STEAK BURGER NOW HIRING I really need to become one of those bloggers who take their digital cameras with them everywhere. I figured I'd be able to get away with coming back later, because are BK managers really in the habit of proofreading their signs daily? I would be back after work, since I had to drop off Trash's computer at the local Best Buy anyway, and I would simply be sure to have my camera with me when I returned to the neighborhood. A lengthy digression about that particular errand: Trash computer has recently gotten into the habit of shutting itself off for no reason and with no warning. The screen goes black and the LEDs on the tower go dark. It turns back on just fine, but then of course there's that insulting, accusatory, and manifestly unfair assertion that "Windows was not shut down properly," which, after a couple of hundred times in the past two weeks, has put Trash in the mindset that the only "proper" way to shut down Windows is with explosives. Trash was ready to wipe the hard drive and re-install Windows (because she knows how to do that stuff), but I wasn't so cavalier about the value of the files on her computer. Sadly, attempting to back the files up in any way—from saving them on floppies, to burning them to CDs, to G-Mailing them to me—only resulted in the computer taking one of its petulant and increasingly frequent naps. So I brought it to Best Buy. The technician plugged it in and booted it up, but nothing happened except the appearance of a series of error messages that, if printed out, would have rivaled a phone book in volume. She unplugged it again, then set it back on the counter in front of me. She offered to let me leave it for a few days and let them run some diagnostics. I agreed. She started entering my information into their computer. Which crashed. She moved to a different computer. It also crashed. When the hell did computer viruses become airborne, anyway? The technician became increasingly confused and frustrated. Meanwhile, Trash's computer sat on the counter between the two terminals that had just frozen up. It had stopped looking simply intractable, and had now taken on the appearance of something downright malevolent. So it took me a good twenty minutes to get out of there, which, added onto my eight-hour workday, proved to have been more than enough time for some enterprising Burger Vassal to climb the ladder and restore their sign to the correct "ANGUS STEAK BURGER" plug. Which was sad, because I had my camera with me now. I was going to snap the sign and put it up here, complete with a little story and a caption or perhaps alt-text that read, "Thanks, but I'll have the Chicken Sandwich." But even that modest plan was scuttled. I suppose I could have taken the picture anyway and PhotoShopped it, but that would have been A) dishonest, and b) way beyond my current capabilities with PhotoShop. Stupid computer, wrecking everything. I hope they exorcise it but good. There must be some way I can make this right. Some way I can rescue this comic opportunity that was snatched from beneath my nose. Even if it means changing the sign myself. But how can I get access to it? Well, it did still say "NOW HIRING." * * * Today's best search phrase: "Rusty neti pot equals danger." It'll just have to do until the hits for "Anus steak burger" start pouring in, I suppose. posted by M. Giant 5:13 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, July 14, 2004 Humpblog (7/14/04) A couple of years ago, Trash and I stopped at the IKEA in Schaumburg, Illinois on our way back from Chicago. Among the many indispensable household items we acquired there for less then the price of a new hardcover was a box of straws. Just regular old bendy drinking straws, but emblazoned with the name GROGGY and drenched in IKEA mystique. When we ran out of them, we were sad. Then last Thanksgiving we cat-sat for a colleague of Trash's when she and her family went to Chicago. The only payment we asked was a new box of straws from IKEA. That box, too, is now nearly depleted. It's got maybe a couple of weeks left, and we don't know anyone who's going to Chicago in that time. But it's okay because now we have our own IKEA! Right here in the Twin Cities! As of today! I don't know why I'm not there right now. * * * For me, morning radio shows are just something to be turned off (or more often, snooze-buttoned off) as quickly as possible when the alarm goes off. I don't really care which station is on, as long as the hosts are loud enough to irritate me into some form of consciousness. The guys on the station I currently listen to certainly fit that bill. The weird thing is that one morning I was dreaming that a bunch of guys were playing poker on the radio. Which is just stupid and nonsensical and dream-logical enough that a person can reasonably dream about it. But this morning, when the last snooze expired, Trash and I were already up and on the other end of the room. I can't claim to have been fully awake yet, because if I had been, I might have cared to stay tuned in long enough to confirm that the zany members of the wacky morning crew were actually doing what I thought they were doing. Which was playing poker on the radio. Now I'm wondering if that idiot dream I had wasn't a dream, but something I was actually hearing before coming fully aware for the day. If that's the case, it isn't the fault of my idiot subconscious, but that of idiot radio hosts and program directors. Who, being awake, should really know better. We'll see tomorrow. * * * I got the chance to invite somebody to GMail. I was hoping that might happen so I could have some sort of silly contest or something, but Deann brought my attention to this instead. It's a way to match people with invites to US troops overseas who could use an e-mail account big enough to store movies and pictures from home. So I gave my invite to a Marine somewhere. It's only fair. He did send in the funniest parody lyrics to the theme from 7th Heaven, after all. * * * Today's best search phrase: "Flaccid bladders." Sometimes even I wonder what the hell I'm doing to get these kinds of hits. posted by M. Giant 7:57 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, July 12, 2004 Garage Rock We don't close the window on our detached garage very tightly, so it's not difficult for small animals like mice and chipmunks to enter and hang out inside. Which they do. And then they get into the birdseed and sock it away in pockets in the exposed fiberglass insulation. That's gotta be tasty: eating seeds and nuts from a bed of fiberglass. Mmm, mmm, just the thing to get you through a long winter, in the sense of not. But as we discovered last year, larger animals can get inside too. Animals like housecats. I know this because I can sit at my computer at home and, through the window of my study, watch as the neighbors' indoor/outdoor cat Moonbeam lets herself into our garage. She knows she's not supposed to be doing that, I think. The few times I've surprised her in there, she flees in panic, even though she and I have a friendly relationship in general. How friendly? She likes to sit on my lap next to my bass during band practice. Which is pretty friendly. So the only reason she could have for running from me is her own sense that she's in trouble. Not that it even bothers me much. When I see her sneaking into our garage I could easily get up, put my shoes on, go outside, and chase her out, but it's really not worth it. She's usually done with whatever she's doing in there by the time I could get to her anyway. And besides, she's done all the damage in there that she can at this point. What kind of damage? Remember those little rodent nests in the fiberglass insulation? You know how cats react to rodents? Yeah. Last spring we discovered that several long strips of fiberglass insulation were hanging down from the garage ceiling, some of them all the way to the floor. Still, "damage" isn't really the right word, and I'm not just saying that because my neighbors read this sometimes. That insulation needed to go anyway, and she just made the stuff on the ceiling easier to reach. I get rid of a few sections a week, and thanks to Moonbeam I haven't had to haul out the ladder once. Now when I see her go in the garage, I'm hoping she'll pull down a few new sections, but she's never in there long enough. Stupid cat. I glanced out the window earlier tonight and saw her slinking into the garage. I turned back to my work. A few minutes later, she slunk back out. And a minute after that, so did another cat. A black-and-white one. Made me glad that both of our cats are strictly indoor models. I've seen this cat around the neighborhood a few times before. I didn't realize he was tomcatting in the literal sense. I wonder if I should say anything to the neighbors. I'm not sure about the condition or provenance of Moonbeam's girl kitty parts, though. And if it turns out to be nothing, she'll probably resent me and not want to sit on my lap any more. But now that I know where she's been, I'm not sure I want that either. Today's best search phrase: "How to attach studs to cinder blocks." Yeah, that'll keep 'em from wandering off. posted by M. Giant 7:02 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, July 09, 2004 Go Fourth and Multiply Aaaaand another memorable July Fourth experience gets added to the archive. Trash and Bitter and I went down to my parents' new house in Prescott, Wisconsin for dinner, and then we went out onto the Mississippi River in their boat. There were still hours of daylight left, so we cruised into Hastings, then turned around and headed up the St. Croix for a spell. I thought the plan was to view fireworks while afloat, which would have been a first for me, but Mom and Dad had been out past dark a couple of nights before and were still kind of desiccated after being sucked dry by the mosquitoes. So that wasn't going to happen. Instead, Dad docked the boat at the marina just before dark and zipped the cabin into a cocoon of bug screens just in time to repel the invasion. We figured we'd be able to see the Hastings fireworks over the trees to the south of King's Cove. After a few minutes of muted booms and some indistinct flashes above the southern treeline, it was apparent that we'd figured wrong. Trash and Bitter and I bid my parents thank-you and farewell and dashed off in search of a better vantage point. Here's the thing about Hastings. It's not really that big a city, so you think it'd be easy to get in the car and zero in on the place where stuff is getting blowed up overhead. But that fails to take into account the fact that Hastings is a border town. The border being that of Wisconsin, where fireworks are legal. You can look across the river from Hastings and see fireworks stands, okay? You can fold a Benjamin into a paper airplane and sail it across the Mississippi, and some accommodating cheesehead will pack a shopping bag full of goodies that go bang, duct-tape it to a rocket, and fire it right into your hands. And then you have stuff that you can launch into the air which will explode into a spectacular conflagration while simultaneously confusing the poor suckers from out of town who are looking for the real thing. We were struck by the low signal-to-noise ratio in terms of Hastings' aerial explosions. Struck upside the head repeatedly, in fact. "They're going off up there." "Okay." "Wait, they're behind us now." "Already?" "Turn right here." "Turning. How far this way?" "Oh, they're behind us again." Of course, we didn't realize what was really going on until the real thing was over, and after I had accidentally committed us to driving the wrong way over the Highway 61 bridge. We eventually found ourselves on a road overlooking the river from the south bank. The elevation was such that we could see the top half of whatever they were blowing up over Harriet Island in downtown St. Paul, twenty-two miles away. We didn't get the chest-pounding thud, but there was a low rumble. One of those white-flash daisy-cutters went off, and I counted the seconds until the bang arrived. I'm currently in the neighborhood of seventy-eight thousand. After that ended, we didn't linger long, because the mutated super-mosquitoes that had attacked my parents on the boat on Friday night had relocated to the area around the streetlight I had wisely parked beneath. We headed home. "They're still going!" "Where?" "Over there!" "Okay!" "Why are we driving?" "So we can get to a place where we can see better." "Oh, for God's sake." "Never mind, they're over again." We were heading home again when the airspace immediately over our car burst into crimson flame. Our faces lit up scarlet, as if we were suddenly in the Bradys' darkroom. I pulled over at once. Sadly, it was just some people in their backyard. I think maybe they thought we'd pulled over to yell at them for attacking our vehicle with a low-level airburst. That's probably what I would think if someone happened to drive right under my miniature reenactment of London during the Blitz. But we waved them on. "Don't stop on our account," we said. They didn't. They stopped because they were out. Disappointing, but not the worst experience a group of people have ever had in Hastings. The Dillinger Gang, for instance. Today's best search phrase: "Echinacea doppleganger." Are people still Googlewhacking? I thought that was over. posted by M. Giant 4:34 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, July 07, 2004 Humpblog (7/07/04) Giant pandas? Still not pregnant. What I love about the story is the photo that Yahoo chose to illustrate it with: 
Don't beat yourself up, Ling Ling. I'm sure you have many good qualities that will be one day be appreciated by a female giant panda. Somewhere. Probably long after you're dead at this rate, but one must look on the bright side. * * * As if I needed another reason not to go to the Mall of America. I've known for years that the place's very parking lots are enough to drive one into a stabbing rage. Now some 59-year-old with a knife proves it. Really, how bad did the guy really want to park right there? I don't get this. What pisses me off most of all is people who sit in their vehicles and block the aisle because someone's "about to leave." That someone then invariably takes ten minutes to pull out of their Holy Grail of a spot while cars back up behind the smart shopper all the way to the street. But even that’s not a stabbing offense. That's a rear-ending offense. Except that there's always another car between me and the maddeningly patient spot-waiter. So it usually ends up being a driving-around-the-moron-and- finding-another-perfectly-good- spot-and-parking-in-it- and-making-sure-when- walking-to-the-door-to- go-past-the-the-still-waiting- driver-and-give-him- or-her-a-withering-look offense. You'd be surprised at how satisfying that is. And no knives required. * * * And now, a bunch of random-ass links, because I had actually planned to be in bed by now. Goth Martha Stewart. as if sending her to jail wasn't punishment enough. At first I thought this was just another online collection of weird roadside landmarks, but that Muffler Man looked kind of familiar. Then I realized that one of his brothers used to preside over a stretch of road that I traversed every day when I lived in Ham Lake with my family. Come to find out he's been sold and moved to Joliet, Illinois. I think back to all the times I passed that giant dude, and the notion that he's not there any more…well, it makes me almost give a shit. Next time someone tells you to go to Hell, you can ask them, "Which entrance?" Especially if you live in the UK. Finally, some good old-fashioned time-wasting. You know, except for the old-fashioned part, because this really isn't all that old-fashioned at all. Not that I'm ever on the bleeding edge of this kind of thing anyway. It's an online graffiti generator, is what it is. Knock yourself out. Thanks to Trash for today's links. Today's best search phrase: "Dishonest sister-in-law in Indiana." Is the searcher hoping to actually find one or something? posted by M. Giant 8:56 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, July 02, 2004 Shameless Name-Dropping Entry Trash and I have actually encountered a fair number of celebrities for Midwesterners. There is, for instance, my boss. But he's not the first famous person either of us have been face-to-face with. Or face-to-another-part with, for that matter, but I'm getting ahead of myself. There are the stars I used to ferry to and from the airport when I worked at the Minnesota State Fair, which were the first famous people I ever spoke to, but that’s a different entry. This one, to be precise. And then there were the sightings in New York. And several through my work. But the biggest density of stars we've ever spotted in one place was in February 2002, at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. We were in town with our friends Dirt and Banana, staying at her dad's house on the beach. Our visit coincided with the Film Festival, so Trash and Dirt and I decided to check it out. The big event of the Festival was the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award to a pre-Oscar Sean Penn. It was held in a groovy old movie theater on State Street whose interior is designed to look like a Mexican village. I kept expecting El Guapo to ride in at any moment. But that was after we got inside. Before we got inside, there was the ninety-minute wait outside on the red carpet. Actually, let me restate that. We were in a line that ran parallel to the red carpet. The red carpet was for people who did not have to wait in line. And we got a pretty good look at those people. So in case you're wondering whether celebrities look somehow different in person, they really don't. For instance, Sean Penn looks exactly like Sean Penn. Robin Wright Penn looks nothing like Sean Penn, but is a dead ringer for Robin Wright Penn. Vince Vaughn looks like Vince Vaughn, except less puffy than he was in The Cell.Two-time Academy-Award-Winner Kevin Spacey looks exactly like two-time Academy-Award-Winner Kevin Spacey. Lars Ulrich, admittedly, looks like an overly tanned Troll™ doll, but he's the exception that proves the rule. Anyway, once we got inside and found seats, the actual thing was quite the deal. I thought a presentation was just a presentation. No, first there was the three-hour career retrospective. Moderator Leonard Maltin spent the time alternating between showing clips of Penn's career highlights and trying to see how far he could cram his tongue up the fundament of the visibly uncomfortable honoree. Which wouldn't have been so bad, except Maltin would name the film as the lights went down, whereupon the woman behind us would invariably say, "Great film." And then, when the scene was over and the lights came back up, the woman behind us would invariably say, "Great scene." Which was preferable to what she was doing the rest of the time, which was fighting a heroic battle for control over her sinuses. I dubbed her "The Phlegmbot." Anyway, about two hours and change into the proceedings, Trash had to make a pit stop. Keep in mind that the place was packed, so extracting herself from the middle of our row was no easy task. I believe she did make the most of the opportunity to shoot a filthy look at The Phlegmbot as she exited, however. The event dragged on, and Trash failed to return. I felt bad for her, having to miss Spacey's presentation speech, because Spacey was doing his Christopher Walken impression and we both love that. Trash never actually made it back to her seat. We met up with her again after the show, and she told us what had happened instead: After going out to the lobby and asking a group of smokers where the restroom might be (a group that included, among others, Michael Imperoli and Jon Voight), she came back into the theater with little hope of finding her seat again in the dark, let alone inserting herself into it without causing more trouble than the operation was worth. So she just came back in, walked a short distance down the aisle, and planted herself right there. Sadly, "right there" was on a guy's foot Trash apologized profusely, and the gentleman smiled at her understandingly (maybe he thought she was famous). She ended up parking it on the floor next to his seat, wondering why that guy she'd just sat on looked so familiar. Penn's film clips included bits from the movies he'd directed, as well: The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard, The Pledge. An actor in one of those clips also looked familiar to Trash. But it wasn’t until Spacey was at the part of his speech where he listed the great actors Penn had directed—"Nicholson, Huston, Morse, Mortensen"—that Trash put it together. She had sat on Aragorn. So there's another exception. Viggo Mortensen is much cleaner in person. That was my big disappointment of the evening. I didn't get to meet nearly as many celebrities as Trash did. Also, the entire time Sean Penn was on stage, nobody ever said a word about Shanghai Surprise. Today's best search phrase: "Assless vinyl shorts." That makes sense. Vinyl doesn't breath, so if you're going to have shorts made out of it, you want some sort of ventilation. So what could be more reasonable than making them assless? I predict everyone will be wearing these by August. posted by M. Giant 8:59 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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