Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
|
M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Friday, February 27, 2004 Reader Mail, Episode XXII Apparently I’m entirely lacking in entrepreneurial spirit. I say this not only because I’ve haven’t earned a penny for writing this site in the nearly two years I’ve been doing it, but because I couldn’t spot a marketing opportunity if it walked up and sodomized me. Fortunately, that’s what my readers are for. No, not sodomizing. The other thing. Here’s Sarah: There is an easy solution to your vending machine problem. (1) Go to your friendly local Sam's Club. (2) Buy a vending machine and the snacks that you like. (3)Load snacks into vending machine and install it in the break room. (4)Enjoy your snacks. Not only will you be able to snack when you like on what you like, but you'll also be able to profit off of your co-workers lack of will power! And you don't even have to give me a commission for giving you the idea. Good, because you’d have to share it with DragonAttack and Oddmonster, who didn’t even ask me to buy a machine. Oddmoster sez: What you have in your latest entry is not a hunger problem, but the empty gnawing of Opportunity, my friend! Surely others in your office have felt the same lack occurring! Surely they too have tried to eat the candy dish! Here's the solution: Get yourself to a Costco-esque (Sam's Club? Food Warehouse? I've never been to Minnesota) and buy a buttload of candy for relative cheapness. If it were me, I'd need a responsible adult to go with, but YMMV. Also, purchase a padlock. Finally, get a big piece of cardboard and a Sharpie™. Take candy, padlock, cardboard and Sharpie™ to work. Lock the candy out of immediate reach, and come up with a catchy jingle for your cardboard, touting you as the new office vending machine, only with that all-important human touch. Sell candy to coworkers. Snack on candy. Make bank. Or if it's the change you need to get rid of for the authentic vending experience, set yourself up with a gumball machine on your desk. Bingo! I was actually considering launching some variation of one of these plans, and then our stage manager’s daughter presented me with an order form for Girl Scout Cookies and I signed my house over to her. So any major investments are going to have to wait. Much like I had to wait for my cookies. That was the longest two weeks of my life. Then there was this rather flattering question from Mike: Not to geek out or anything, but does your site support, like, an RSS feed or anything? Lawdy forbid that a body would have to actually go all the way to your site to read it or anything. An RSS feed? What a coincidence that you should ask, my good man, because I don’t have the first idea what that means. Nor do I know what an XML feed is. And yet, somehow I think I have one. I think. Try this link and see what happens. Considering that my web-fu is so poor that I normally can’t get italics right the first time, I make no promises. Finally, there’s a contentious debate that has been fouling our national discourse and pickup windows for years now. Ginny raises a point that I hope will bring an end to it. Seriously. Like you, I could almost get on board with the idea of Calvin pissing on Clear Channel. Almost. I was a pretty big Calvin and Hobbes fan, so the pissing stickers always irked me, because why did he need to piss on things? His best friend was a tiger. Game over. Exactly. Exactly. Game over. Today’s best search phrase: “A phrase to describe teens today.” I don’t know if you’re going to get an objective answer from the Internet. Could be a conflict of interest there. posted by M. Giant 5:07 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, February 25, 2004 Humpblog (2/25/04) I congratulated the Diarist Awards Finalists last quarter, so I should probably do the same this quarter, even at the risk of seeming self-congratulatory. Thanks to whomever nominated me, and to the panel for letting me sneak further along in the process. I've never met or even talked to either of the people I'm up against, but one of them sort of invited Trash and me to stay at their house once, I think. At least that's what we heard. It's a little complicated. * * * When I got home last night, there were three vans from the local cable company parked outside our neighbor's house. "They're getting all the cable," I commented to Trash. How many channels does it take to fill up three vans, anyway? * * * I just want to take a moment to show you my new desktop wallpaper picture:  That was my favorite episode of Angel ever. Turning the lead character into a preternaturally scowly Crank-Yanker made no sense, happened for no discernible story-driven reason, and was just about the funniest damn thing I've seen on TV in years. I'm convinced there'd be a lot more press for this episode if Angel hadn't already been taking up an inordinately large segment of the press cycle simply by getting cancelled the same week. Maybe this was the episode that could have saved it. And if Bobby Kennedy were still alive, he'd forgive Sirhan Sirhan. All TV shows should do this, immediately. Well? I'm waiting, CSI. I want to see a plush Marg Helgenberger with a Bert-width mouth and its eyes on opposite sides of its head; a Gary Dourdan with a forehead made of an entire yard of felt bunched up into twelve square inches; an even more neckless George Eads. Or they could go the gutless route and spin off CSI: Sesame Street with all new criminalists bopping around with fixed eyeballs and never being shown below the waist. I don't care, as long as I see characters analyzing cotton batting samples for DNA. * * * Last night, we decided that we're going to spend next week in Paris. Shortly thereafter, we decided not to. You wouldn't believe the deals they're offering to get to Paris right now. Maybe it's because the weather there right now is almost exactly the same as the weather here, or maybe it's because the national security briefings being ignored this month have to do with flights out of Charles de Gaulle, but we were very tempted. Logistical concerns made it unworkable, however, for reasons I sha'n't bore you with. So we looked for someplace else to fly to. Such a place had to be 1) warm, 2) interesting, 3) someplace we'd never been before, and 4) cheaper to get to than Paris. Turns out number four was the most common dealbreaker, eliminating countless glamorous destinations from Sydney to Little Rock. But we still have a car. Perhaps next week I'll be sending you breathless dispatches from exotic, exciting, Rochester! It could happen. * * * Deniece came up for a visit last weekend. It's a little alarming how much she's grown, just in the last two months since we saw her. She has a working vocabulary and can speak in complete sentences. She has ever-greater control of her movements, and when she doesn't, she quickly chirps, "I'm otay" from her new position on the floor. There's even a remarkable new feature that resembles an attention span. She understands what you say to her, provided you don't make it purposely confusing. All of which puts her well above some people I used to work with. Unfortunately for her, she can no longer pull off the toddler's selective verbal comprehension that keeps so many two-year-olds alive. Nobody will ever again believe that she really thinks "Come back down here" means "Climb faster," or that "Get your fingers out of there" means "Please yank that Disney tape out of the VCR manually." That's something she's still coming to terms with. We spent some time entertaining her with Windows screensavers, particularly the ones that are somewhat fish-like in nature. She's deep into a Finding Nemo phase right now (geddit? Deep? Never mind). Once the flying windows or flapping flags appeared on the screen, she got a kick out of hitting the keyboard and crowing, "I stopped it," once again demonstrating that in the area of computer savvy at least, her intellectual development is already well past that of some of my former coworkers. These piscine displays were just a warmup for the weekend's main event. Trash and I didn't go along when her mom brought her to Underwater World at the Mall of America, but we heard about it later. They've got an exhibit of fish now that look like the characters from Finding Nemo. Deniece's mom saw firsthand what might happen if science could find a way to cram the equivalent of seven years of Beatlemania into a two-year-old human being. NEMO!! I DON'T BELIEVE IT!!!! DORY!!!! AAAAAAAAAAH!!! MOMEEEEE, LOOK!!!! BUBBLES!!!!!!!! We've got to get that kid out of Iowa. Today's best search phrase: "Score bands names money coin fiver artist." Boy, I hear that. I don't understand it, but I hear it. posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, February 23, 2004 Putting the "Dead" in "Deadline" "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood appear on your forehead." - Gene Fowler There's going to be a third Project Greenlight contest and series this year. I'm hoping to enter for the third time, but the deadline's looking a little tight. Five days from now, to be precise. It's not that I haven't started my screenplay, because I have. It's been eating up a big chunk of my downtime the past month, in fact. But I haven't finished the rough draft yet, either. I think I'll have to schedule it so my rough draft is finished at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, and then complete all subsequent drafts in time for the 5:00 p.m. deadline. Most screenplays get rewritten on the set anyway, right? Originally my plan was to write a "winning" screenplay by February 28. Then I decided to write a "good" screenplay by February 28. Now, with five days to go, I'm beginning to realize that I may have to write a "barely long enough to qualify at ninety pages" screenplay now and try to make it a "good" screenplay later, when "winning" has long gone by the boards. This is the first time I've written a screenplay from scratch; my previous two entries were adapted from works I'd already written for different media. I figured that writing directly for the screen would be easier than adapting something else I'd already written. Indeed, as it turns out, I have many of the qualities of some of our best-known screenwriters, real and fictional; I've got the unshakable self-confidence of Charlie Kaufman from Adaptation, the effortless facility of Barton Fink, and the sheer talent of Joe Eszterhas. The first hurdle, of course, was the idea. That's always the hard part for me; if I'm going to write an original screenplay, I prefer to write one worthy of the term. Once I have a plot, the words themselves tend to pour forth like so much post-nasal drip. So when I got the contest announcement in my e-mail five or six weeks ago, I forced myself to sit at the computer and brainstorm for an hour or so. Though whether the term "storm" can accurately describe something that takes place in a vacuum is up for debate. Finally, a workable idea came. And the inaccuracy of that statement is tantamount to a mother saying a baby has come eight months before its birth, when in fact the only person who has done so is the father. It's a swell idea, and I stand behind it, but actually making it work is turning out to be a bitch. They say a screenwriter has to get the protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at him. I, on the other hand, came right at him with a Tomahawk missile. Also, he is blind, paraplegic, and entirely without hands. I'm working through it, but it presents many challenges. Another challenge is that I haven't been able to figure out how to pull off the central event in a way that does everything I need it to do. I have a heist movie without a heist, a con movie without a con. And no matter how much you may have enjoyed Ocean's 11, you'd have to agree that your enjoyment of it would have been diminished if the movie skipped straight to the closing credits as soon as everyone was inside the casino. On the plus side, I only have seventy pages written, so I've got plenty of room to take care of it. Just not plenty of time. As for making the ninety-page minimum, I'm confident I can pull that off. Filling four pages of screenplay format a day isn't that hard, if one doesn't mind that it's all crap, but sadly I do. If I'd had more time, I would have come up with a complete outline of the plot before I started writing it. Maybe I should have done that this time. But then I'd have zero pages of screenplay instead of the seventy I have now. This way's much better. I only have twenty to go, and it's the twenty that the rest of the thing is going to have to stand or fall on. But if I do run out of time, there's one surefire way to fill up all that white space: CUT TO: EXT. DAY A city sidewalk. Our protagonist begins shouting at passing traffic: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES M. GIANT A DULL BOY ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES M. GIANT A DULL BOY… I should remind Trash to hide the axe. Today's best search phrase "Fish revenge demo." Wow, everyone has Internet access these days. posted by M. Giant 3:08 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, February 20, 2004 Origin Story I got an e-mail from Trash’s old friend and baking partner Blaine today. She had a possible explanation as to why Trash hates shopping for clothes now. Several years ago, they were shopping together at a store whose name may well have inspired the title of the show Veronica’s Closet. Blaine was on the fence about whether to buy a very special matching set of frillies, and Trash helped her come down on the side of making the purchase. At the register, Trash mentioned that is wouldn’t be enough just to buy the unmentionables; Blaine would also have to wear them occasionally. Blaine said something like, “Yeah, I’ll be sure to flash you when I wear them.” They were coworkers at the time, so the chances of this happening were slim to—well, frilly. Blaine’s sarcastic remark triggered a filthy glare from the cashier, who didn’t say another word to them throughout the rest of the transaction. Trash and Blaine got all the way to the car before they figured out what must have caused offense; the cashier must have mistaken them for lesbians. This was right about the time Ellen DeGeneres was coming out, so the national conversation at that particular moment was quite focused upon lesbians. Yes, children, there was once a time when a woman had to reveal more about herself than a mere boob to get our attention. Some people must have thought lesbians were everywhere, practicing their lifestyle and ruining perfectly good straight actresses like Anne Heche. The cashier at VS must have been one of them. Upon coming to this realization, Trash (being Trash) was seized with a powerful urge to march back into the mall and give the cashier a good dressing down. “Yes, I’m a lesbian, and I’m proud of it!” my wife would proclaim. Sadly, there wasn’t room in the day’s itinerary to accomplish this vital mission. So that may be part of the reason Trash is averse to shopping these days. She just can’t stand rude people. As for the woman at the cash register, I can only hope that the seven intervening years have given her a chance to learn tolerance and understanding. Because if she’s still waging a one-woman battle to preserve the sanctity of transparent thong underwear, she’s got a long, lonely road ahead of her. Today’s best search phrase: “Attempted assery to murder.” I thought I’d seen all the episodes of Law & Order: Sex Police but I guess I missed this one. posted by M. Giant 6:44 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, February 18, 2004 Humpblog (2/18/04) I've been getting way too many packages in the mail the last couple of months, if you know what I mean, and sadly for you, you're about to. Trash got me a really nice watch for Christmas last year. It is shiny and pretty and I am wearing it right now. However, it is not perfect. Why, you ask? Because she ordered it from International Male. Which is fine, in itself. You can't look at and identify it as an International Male product. The drawback is that now we're on the International Male-ing list. Which means we get the International Male Catalog. Or, as I call it, the Biweekly Bulge. International Male. When too much is not enough. * * * Trash gets catalogs full of girl-clothes too, of course, but some of them are nice. Which is handy for her. She hates shopping. She hates trying on clothes. She hates spending money on them. So, really, catalogs are just the thing. And I'm fine with it because mailing back the clothes that turn out to not fit is easier than bringing them back to the store. I drove her to work this morning (we still do that once in a while) and she was paging through her Lerner's catalog, growing more and more excited. She has to wear business professional clothes five days a week, and it must get tiring for her to have to look so nice all the time (I personally think she looks nice in a t-shirt, but her boss doesn't seem to agree). Several items of quality business wear in particular caught her eye, which is unusual, and I think she just got swept away in the excitement of it all. That's the only explanation for what she said next: "I'm going to spend, like, a hundred dollars on clothes today." "A Hundred dollars?!?" I repeated, aghast. How many people do you know who are in a position to mock their spouses for not spending more money on themselves? I know it's weak, but when it comes to opportunities for mocking this chick I have to take what I can get. * * * Normally I leave the memes alone, but this visited states map is tempting. I can't resist; I'm simply too fascinated with myself. Here are the states I've visited. Includes everything from three decades' residency to one-hour airport layovers. Here are the states the show has broadcast from this season. Notice any overlap? Here are the states I've visited more than once. I'm not counting Washington; we flew there, spent some time, drove to Oregon, and drove back to fly home, but I think it still counts as one trip. Here are states I haven't been to. Kind of looks like somebody flicked a bloody hand at the map from somewhere over Nova Scotia. Here are the states I've gotten speeding tickets in. My record doesn't seem so bad when you look at it this way. Here's a map of the states where I've spotted multiple Oscar winners in person and Trash nearly sat on Viggo Mortenson: TypeError 'in ' requires character as left operand (Also, an error occurred while attempting to render the standard error message.)Traceback (innermost last): Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 150, in publish_module Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 114, in publish Module Zope.App.startup, line 199, in zpublisher_exception_hook Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 98, in publish Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 39, in call_object Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 252, in __call__ Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 283, in _bindAndExec Module Products.PythonScripts.PythonScript, line 314, in _exec Module Script (Python), line 30, in index_html - - Line 30 Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 252, in __call__ Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 283, in _bindAndExec Module Products.PythonScripts.PythonScript, line 314, in _exec Module Script (Python), line 13, in mainbody - - Line 13 Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 252, in __call__ Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 283, in _bindAndExec Module Products.PythonScripts.PythonScript, line 314, in _exec Module Script (Python), line 22, in projectbody - - Line 22 TypeError: (see above) Doesn't work for some reason. If I were California, I wouldn't be too happy about that. Create your own visited states map. As if you haven't already. * * * As long as I'm jumping on bandwagons here, I might as well fess up to doing something else that some other web writers have been getting into. The proofs arrived from my publisher yesterday. I'll have more information for you in the next few weeks. Today's best search phrase: "Tissue-trimming work station." That sounds nice. I get tired of always having to trim my tissue at the kitchen table, you know? posted by M. Giant 3:46 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, February 16, 2004 The Littlest Vet The original plan for this past weekend was to go down to Iowa for Deniece’s second birthday party. I don’t mean the party for her second birthday. I mean her second birthday party this year. Toddlers’ birthdays get pretty well booked up, you know. Don’t believe me? Her actual second birthday was on the twentieth of January—and apparently it’s still going on. For a while now, Deniece has been old enough to understand when we’re coming to visit, and to get excited about it. Her parents like to tell her as early as possible, because then she tends to spend hours watching out the front window for us, and she’s a lot easier to handle then. At least this is what her parents tell us. It could be so much flattery, for all we know. Sadly, between my working weekends and Trash’s out-of-town conferences, we haven’t been able to make it down there since before Christmas. We were beginning to worry that Deniece might have forgotten who we are. She’s at that dangerous age, you know, where she can permanently bond with the mailman or a waiter or something, causing us to lose our place in her heart forever. We were just going to go for the weekend, just long enough to refresh her memory of us, and then on Wednesday Strat decided that, you know, maybe eating’s just not for him any more. We were working on arrangements to have people come over and give him his twice-daily shots and everything, but he decided to complicate things by refusing to eat anything except straight tuna. And then refusing to eat that. We made an appointment with the vet (and if I haven’t said so before, I would just like to mention how much it rocks to have a veterinarian whose office is seven blocks away) and brought him in. She couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but she suggested a different food. He advised us to keep a close eye on him and watch his food intake and to bring him right in if he started, you know, dying. Somehow neither Trash nor myself felt comfortable leaving that instruction on a note in the kitchen for our hapless surrogate kitty caretakers. So we stayed home. We explained to Trash’s brother and his wife why we didn’t want to leave Strat, and they understood. Explaining it to Deniece, as it turns out, was a little more difficult. Trash got a call at work late last week. From Deniece. “Not coming? You and M. not coming?” “I’m sorry, Deniece, we can’t. Our kitty is sick.” “Strat sick?” “Yes, Strat is sick. We can’t leave him when he’s sick.” “I have medicine. I give him some.” “I don’t think that’ll work.” “Bring Strat. I take care of him. Make him better.” “That’s very sweet.” “You should give him a bath. Lots of bubbles.” “Lots of bubbles, huh?” “Bye!” So she’s not only old enough to get excited about us coming, she’s old enough to be disappointed when we cancel. We did stay home for the weekend, and Strat likes his new food, even when we don’t mix tuna in with it. The vet called with the test results, and his fructosamine is fine, although how anything with a name like “fructosamine” could ever be good is beyond me. Strat did survive the weekend, and he probably would have even in our absence, but whether we would have is another question entirely. Trash talked to the birthday girl again today. “Kitty better?” “Yes, Deniece, Strat feels much better.” “Strat all better?” “All better. I gave him a bath with lots of bubbles, like you said.” “LOTS of bubbles. Bye.” Less than a year ago, her word for bubbles was BAAH!. Now she can not only pronounce them, she can prescribe them. We have to get beck down there soon, before she starts veterinary school. Today’s best search phrase: None, but what’s with all the image searches all of a sudden? I have no idea what’s going on there. posted by M. Giant 4:37 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, February 13, 2004 ¿Que the Hell Pasa? (Part Dos) The fastest way to learn a foreign language is, or course, to immerse oneself in a culture where that language is the primary one. Part of the reason I decided to learn Spanish is because Trash and I were considering going to Puerto Vallarta this spring. Obviously a week of vacation isn't enough time to learn much, but I thought I could make the most of it with enough preparation. Now it looks like we probably won't be going, but that's okay because I still get to drive down East Lake Street every day on my way home from work. I tune the radio to the Espanol station, and that, along with reading the signs, is like a mini cultural immersion right there. Not that I can understand what they're talking about on the radio, but it makes about as much sense to me as what's happening on my language tapes, and I know all the words on those. To demonstrate what I mean, I present scenes 5-6. (Part Uno of this series is here.) Scene 5: Pedro sings an insipid song. This will be a vital plot point later. For now, it's merely the jumping-off point for a half-hour discussion of what Pedro is doing and in what language, and who is doing it, for those of you who can't remember that far back. The real action goes down when Pedro endeavors to count from one to fifty. He gets stuck on eleven, twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-nine; the thirties and forties are a veritable minefield. Fortunately he's at school, and thus he has access to the resources that will help him complete his task. So for help he turns to…the secretary? I'm not kidding. Every time he hits a bump, he asks Maria for the next number, to Maria's growing irritation. Jeez, senorita, don't blame the kid. Blame his "teacher," who is nowhere to be found. It's not Pedro's fault you have to do the job of two people. Yell at Mr. Garcia when he gets back from the dog track. Scene 6: We hear coins falling. "Is this music?" our host asks. "No, it's money," his counterpart responds, as if the two are mutually exclusive. This leads into a vignette of Maria attempting to count her money at her desk. Sadly, she is distracted by—you guessed it—that goddamn kid. Pedro reprises his insipid tune until Maria rudely shushes him: "Pedro! Quiet! I'm counting my money!" I don't remember any school secretaries having to say that to me when I was in first grade. Eventually, Maria establishes that her earthly fortune comprises fifty pesos—about $4.56 US, according to current exchange rates. Pedro is amazed at her fabulous wealth, even though it's less than what he's paying for tuition. Maria contemplates the helplessness of her situation: left in charge of an ADD anklebiter by an unstable teacher, underpaid, and unable to save enough money to quit. Fortunately, even the lowliest of individuals can always find somebody worse off upon whom to take out her frustrations. "And you, Pedro?" she asks sweetly. "Do you have fifty pesos?" Pedro, of course, does not. "How much money do you have, Pedro?" Two or three pesos. Pedro doesn't know exactly. Maria twists the knife. "Then count your money," she taunts. Pedro does. All three pesos of it, or twenty-seven cents. Maria's not done making him squirm. "Ah, thirteen pesos?" Pedro breaks down. "No, I don't have thirteen pesos. I have three pesos. I don't have ten pesos, I don't have five pesos, I don't have four pesos. I only have three pesos." He struggles to hold back tears. "Only three?" Maria says. "Oh, what a pity." As if she hadn't been tormenting the kid on purpose. It would have been kinder just to knock him down and steal the money, rather than lording over Pedro the fact that she could buy and sell him fifteen times over and still have enough left over for a gumball. But then, that's not likely, because a) that would be an inappropriate way for a school secretary to behave, and Mr. Garcia would probably disapprove when he found out what happened upon his return from the titty bar; b) then she would have fifty-three pesos, and we haven’t learned the word for fifty-three yet. Today's best search phrase: "Kidney infections and prickly spots." Can't have one without the other, you know. posted by M. Giant 3:23 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, February 11, 2004 Humpblog (2/11/04) Will you be my wife's friend? She needs it for work. She's researching networking sites at her job, and one of the ones she's trying to look into is orkut. Of course, one can't get into orkut unless an orkut member invites one. Which makes me a little curious about who the first member was, in a "did Adam and Eve have navels" kind of way, but never mind. The point is my wife needs friends! For her career! Who among you is there for her? Her e-mail address is llexuus@yahoo.com, by the way. UPDATE: Taken care of. Thanks. * * * I have this garment in my closet, and until yesterday I wasn't sure what it was. It was too thin to be a sweater, yet too heavy to be a long-sleeved T-shirt. Its mysterious nature had prevented me from wearing it up until now. But I like the color, so I put it on under my button-down. It wasn't until I was stuck at work for the day with the material against my skin that I realized: sweater. Itchy. * * * Check it out! New feature! The band I'm in has a couple of gigs coming up. I'm going to keep info on our future gigs posted over there to the right. Of course, there will be long periods where it says TBA, or contains dates that are in the past, because I'm really bad about updating my template (as demonstrated by the months it took me to get around to updating the little DHAK graphic). Did you know Trash used to think that TBA was the busiest band in the Twin Cities? Sometimes they'd be playing two or three bard a night! Doesn't that make you want to be her friend? * * * The mayor of a large southern city called me this morning. That's a first. Mayors of large southern cities never used to call me. This job rules. * * * There's a weblog called The Truth Laid Bear, which, in addition to being a weblog, ranks other weblogs two ways: by traffic and number of links. I'm way higher on one of those lists than I am on the other. Anyway, if you have a blog or journal or website and you're curious how it might stack up against thousands of others, you can register over there and it'll rank you. Go check it out. And I'm not just saying that to get people who link to me to sign up so I get credit for you. I would never do something that tacky. You're perfectly welcome to sign up and then link to me. It's entirely up to you. * * * Today's best search phrase: "What happens to a nail when you drop it in Sunkist soda." Finally, a question I can help someone with. In the spirit of scientific inquiry and healthy curiosity, I set up an experiment to discover exactly what does happen when you drop a nail into Sunkist soda. Are you ready? You're not going to believe this. I wouldn't have believed it myself if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, and I suggest you go out and bay a barrel of nails and a keg of Sunkist to liven up your next social gathering, because what happens when you drop a nail in Sunkist soda simply beggars the imagination. Are you ready? Seriously, are you ready? You don’t look ready to me. Get ready, dammit. Everyone's waiting for you. Okay. Here's what happens when you drop a nail in Sunkist soda: It sinks. posted by M. Giant 4:36 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, February 10, 2004 Feed Me Although I'm currently in the coolest job of my life, there are a few things I miss about the old job. I miss having half the commute time I do now. I miss a number of my old coworkers. I miss being chained to Call Management Systems monitors nine hours a day. Yes, I miss all of these things, except the last one. But right now, today, this minute, what I miss most are the vending machines. I don't know if I've made this clear, but I don't work at the MPR headquarters in downtown St. Paul. The show has its own small satellite office, a building near the confluence of the Mississippi River and Interstate 94. And there aren't enough of us here to support a vending machine. A fact which, today, weighs heavily on my heart. Or, more accurately, my stomach. We do have a kitchen, mind you. It's got a refrigerator/freezer and a microwave that'll be old enough to get into bars this June. And a water cooler and coffee machine. It also has a stove/oven and a dishwasher, which is a step up from my last job. And a Wurlitzer™ jukebox, which is pretty cool. Out back there's a deck with patio furniture, and a gas grill that we use for barbecues in the summer— I'm going to stop now before I completely torpedo any chance of making you feel sorry for me. Too late? Fine, screw it. Yes, we have a few amenities that wouldn't have been out of place in Silicon Valley five years ago, but I don't care about any of those right now because I'm hungryyyyy! I brought my breakfast from home, but I ate it already. I brought my lunch, and I ate that too. Ergo, I should be full. Yet I am not. Why is this? What is missing? Snacks! Snacks, I tell you! The most important meal of the day, if you're me. I need something tasty to snack on, preferably chocolatey, preferably crispy, preferably large. People come into my office, and I'm like a cartoon character hallucinating their transformations into giant Kit-Kats™. Moreover, now that I no longer have vending machines in my life, I have no use for change. It accrues in my pocket and on my night table and in out change bucket at an alarming rate now that there's more inflow than outgo. I still grab a handful of change every morning out of habit, but it just sits there uselessly in my pocket all day, mocking me. As if I didn't get enough mockery from inside my pants as it is. Today I thought, I don't have to live like this. I have a car here. I could go and get myself a snack. I actually went into Yahoo! Maps to find the nearest gas station. Sadly, we're in relative isolation here, and I would have been gone twenty minutes to fetch an eight-dollar package of Double-Stuf™ that would have been empty in my trash bin twenty minutes later, and that does nobody any good. Fortunately, our receptionist keeps a candy dish at her station. Unfortunately, the sucker I ganked from it wasn’t terribly filling. Also unfortunately, the dish itself was only marginally more so. I raided the kitchen cabinets, the contents of which are community property around here. I found a package of some kind of spirulina/protein powder that you mix with milk for a "meal." I was actually considering checking the fridge for milk, when my eyes alit on this warning: For best results, milk should be very cold. In other words, Tastes like toxic sludge. In still other words, For best results, just kill yourself instead. I could have sworn the cabinet contained taco shells at some point, and I was about to tear into a couple of those, but it turned out that although I accurately remembered the presence of a brightly colored “TACO” label, it was on an envelope that also bore the word “Seasoning.” And all that did was make me sneeze. Somebody who didn’t know me better might say I tumbled from the top of Maslow’s pyramid to the bottom in a matter of hours. I reject that interpretation. It’s only true if I would have given up my self-actualizing career in order to fulfill my base physiological needs. And I don’t think foraging through my coworkers’ desk drawers looking for snacks constitutes acting on such a decision. Maybe if they’d been sitting at their desks at the time. And if I’d actually found something and made off with it. And if I’d snarled at its rightful owner in the process. And if that person were my boss. But not to worry, because at least one of those conditions was never met. I’m stopping for snacks on the way home, though. Today’s best search phrase: “How to fold money blind.” It’s tricky. Money can sense blindness, you know, and one of those presidents is liable to nip off a fingertip. Especially that pissy old prick Jackson. Godspeed. What? I didn’t say that. That was the person reading this to you. Don’t blame me, dude. posted by M. Giant 6:47 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, February 06, 2004 Let There Be—AAAAAH!! Humpblog? What humpblog? Bygones. Let's move on. Our kitchen has a ceiling fan/light fixture that's been there since before we moved in, and as I may have mentioned before, I hate it. It has four light sockets, but only two or three of them work, and one of those dangles from the fixture like the eyeball of a pug dog that's been briskly smacked in the back of the head. We need to get Laurie from Trading Spaces in there to take it down. "Thanks, that's all," we'll say. "We don't need yellow walls or a backsplash made of amaaaaaazing fabric that cost you fifty bucks a yard. Seriously, you're done now." We got home from New Orleans this week and all of the bulbs were burnt out. Nice welcome. The sight of that filled me with more despair than did the charnel-house stank emanating from whatever was fermenting in the garbage disposal. After giving Strat his evening shot (which was complicated by not having a kitchen light to hold the syringe up to check for bubbles, but at press time he had yet to be felled by a pulmonary embolism, so yay), I brought up a couple of light bulbs and went to work. I've described the process of changing a bulb on this fixture before, so I don't need to go into it again. While I stood there twisting the one of the old bulbs for ten, fifteen minutes, I thought for the umpteenth time about how nice it would be to have a new fan/light in there. One day we'd get around to replacing it, and then every time the bulbs burned out I wouldn't have to worry about something going wrong, so the last thing I'd see before everything goes black would be a flash and a puff of smoke. The last thing I saw before everything went black was a flash and a puff of smoke. I also heard Trash let out a startled yelp, so I knew I wasn't dead. Also, my heart was beating in a healthy, non-fibrillatory rhythm. I could tell because it had leapt up between my ears. The reason everything had gone black is because I'd somehow shorted out the circuit that supplies power to 75 per cent of the house. No problem. I'll just Helen-Keller my way down to the basement, grope for the popped breaker, and throw it back on. As expected, the power comes back on. As not expected, the power goes back off after a tenth of a second. Repeat until frustrated shouts drift down from upstairs. Rather than cursing the darkness (some more) I found a flashlight to investigate the source of the short. As it turned out, I'd twisted the socket clean off the wires, leaving the exposed leads in contact with each other. "I need to separate these," I told Trash. "You want to go downstairs and turn the power off?" She thinks I'm funny sometimes, but not always. Now our kitchen has a ceiling fan/light fixture combo with two light sockets that work. One of these dangles from the fixture like the eyeball of a pug dog that's been briskly smacked in the back of the head. One of the non-functional ones has been replaced by two live wires that are insulated from each other by a few inches of empty space. If a professional basketball player stops by and brushes against them with his forehead he's going to have some very short and intense hallucinations. But it's okay, because one day we're going to get around to replacing it. I’m thinking that day might be tomorrow. Today's best search phrase: "How to download the movie Thirteen without Evan Rachel Wood without paying a penny." I can understand being cheap, but if you're that dead set against Evan Rachel wood, maybe you should consider downloading a different movie. posted by M. Giant 11:18 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, February 02, 2004 Where Are the Comment Cards? There’s a saying here in New Orleans: If you like it, tell everyone. If you don’t like it, don’t tell no one. The diner we had brunch at today makes it difficult to obey the spirit of that rule, but fortunately the double-negative gives an English major like myself exactly the loophole he needs. The “hostess” told us to sit anywhere, but she neglected to mention the fact that the booth we chose was equipped with a cloaking device. That’s the only explanation for the fact that while we sat there for ten minutes dragging our newspaper pages through drifts of powdered condiments, three restaurant employees five feet away were fussing over how best to push three tables together for the party of six that came in behind us. They had their drinks and were giving their food orders before our presence was even acknowledged. We’d probably still be waiting if Trash hadn’t winged a saltshaker at a waiter’s head. At this point, we figure that he’d already kissed his tip good-bye, because to call the service minimal would be an insult to minimalists, people named Minnie, and indeed minutes. He took our order, brought our food, and two minutes later threw the bill on our table and said, “they’ll take care of you up front.” “Everything tastes fine, thanks,” we called out to his retreating back. A few minutes later, Trash’s coffee cup was empty. “We can get you some more at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way back to the hotel,” I suggested, “because we’re never going to see our waiter here again.” As it turned out , I was wrong because the waiter passed nearby to refill the party of six’s cups, and all we had to do to get his attention was set fire to his pants. He turned around and filled Trash’s mug, saying magnanimously, “As long as I have the coffee pot out…” “You’re a lucky girl,” I told Trash. “The stars have aligned just right for you this morning, that’s for damn sure. He had the pot out, otherwise you’d have had to go pound sand.” Maybe we were just on the wrong side of Canal Street, because we had the opposite experience service-wise at a place in the French Quarter this evening. Our team of three—count them, three—waitrons had a way of popping up out of the floor at our elbow whenever we needed them. So we really came out even. * * * I was backstage at the show at New Orleans’ Saenger Theater last night, working and listening to the show. My boss talked about a bookstore here, just off Jackson Square, called Faulkner House Books. Today, Trash and I were wandering around the Quarter, and we just happened to walk past Faulkner House Books. “Should we go in?” “Yeah, let’s go in.” We went in, just in time to hear my boss’s voice on the store radio, talking about the store we had just entered. What are the odds of somebody from the show walking into a store that was mentioned on the show, at the exact moment in the show’s Sunday rebroadcast when the store is mentioned? On the show, I mean? Would that question make any more sense if I didn’t have big ol’ frozen Bourbon Street frozen hurricane in me? Maybe I’ll answer that question after I go get another one. Today’s best search phrase: “GTA Vice City stretched Hummer for Vice City.” Either way, I approve. posted by M. Giant 7:30 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
