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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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XXIII Most of the e-mails I got this month were jokes for the joke show, like I requested (and am still taking, if you want to send more). If you want to know what they were, listen to your local Public Radio station on April 17. Aside from all of those, each one of which I appreciated, there weren't many e-mails this month, but they were good ones. Check this out: No, you don't know me, but I was setting up a blog [which is neato, by the way. Check it out, you guys --M. Giant] on blogger.com last week and was able to solve a couple of technical issues by checking out how you did it on Velcrometer. Kind of alarming considering how frequently I screw up tricky HTML challenges like >I>italics>/. At least, I thought it was alarming at the time. Now that my day job includes, in addition to my previous duties, responsibility for a much larger website that gets quite a bit more traffic than this one does, I know from alarming. Well, It's flattering, in any case. As is this suggestion from previous e-mailer Josh: Dear Mr. Giant, I have just gotten both hands on the audiobook In A Sunburned Country, read by the author, Bill Bryson. I know you are tired of hearing about it, but what follows might be relevant. As I was listening to it, I thought I had an idea. I might be wrong about the idea thing, but I figured you would let me know either way. Why don't you have your readers vote on which entry they would most like to have in audioblog format, as read by the author? (I'm not sure which one I would pick.) It would be a big risk for you in any case. What if you have a speech impediment, or a queereyeforthestraightguyesque inflection. Would you want any of your fans to know? Would hearing your voice "spoil the magic"? Or what if the readers vote on an entry that you didn't write? Could your ego handle it? I know mine couldn't. Actually, my particular vocal curse is that of the "low-talker"; I'm one of those unfortunate people who have to put an inordinate amount of effort into projecting our voices above the din of air circulation. But thanks for your concern. You might do three short entries in three different voices or accents, or you could have two imposters mixed in with the real you. It would be like Joe Millionaire meets Survivor in a celebrity boxing match with Regis Philbin. I can't wait. Respectfully, Josh That’s really sweet, but here's the thing: it kind of strikes me as something I would do if I were desperate for attention, some kind of needy "prove to me that you love me!" move, a stunt to get people to tell me I'm funny even though they wouldn't ordinarily bother. So I'm all over it. I'll read one past entry, in my own voice. Blogger allows us users to post one free "audblog" entry as a trial. You guys get to pick which one it is. Send me an e-mail with the word "Audioblog" or "Audblog" somewhere in the subject line, and tell me the date of the entry you want me to read. It can be any entry from March 19, 2002 to April 15, 2004. I reserve the right to toss out votes for entries that are too long, too dependent on photos or hyperlinks, or not written by me (thanks, Josh). Send your e-mails between now and April 15, and I'll read the entry with the most votes (or the entry woth the vote, as the case may be) on Monday, April 19. Feel free to vote for more than one entry, but don't vote for the same entry more than once (or, if you do, use a different e-mail address so I don't know you're doing it). Don't worry about voter fraud, by the way; the ballots will be verified by an independent, impartial, third-party agency. Or perhaps my wife. Today's best search phrase: "Zen garden dollar store." Hey, inner peace don't come cheap, homeslice. posted by M. Giant 4:24 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, March 29, 2004 Who Could Axe for More? Beat this, suckas—I have a wife who actually likes buying me guitars. I've been meaning to buy a new electric six-string for a while, since the Kramer may parents bought me for my seventeenth birthday is now older than I was when I got it and pretty well used-up. But since my main instrument is, you know, the bass, it hasn't really been a priority. But then last weekend, in Wisconsin, we found ourselves in a music store because Chao needed to pick up a few sets of drumsticks for a gig the next day. I looked around at the selection of axes, but it left much to be desired. Most of the instruments carried a brand name that is less than famous, if not downright fictional. "I wish you would buy a guitar," Trash said to me. "I do too," I said. "Just not any of these." "You know I like it when you wish for things," she persisted. I was agreeable. "I wish this were a better music store." We agreed to hit the Guitar Center here in town sometime in the next week. Which, on Saturday, we actually did. There's a whole procedure when I go into a Guitar Center. Before I touch anything, I look at all the guitars. This is true whether I'm buying a twenty-five cent pick or a five-thousand-dollar heirloom instrument (not that I’ve ever done the latter, or particularly care to). I browse my way down the stands and wall racks, looking at the ones I can see myself owning, the ones that are worth more than I'll ever pay for any device that doesn't get inserted into my body by a thoracic surgeon, and the ones I wouldn't take home if the store paid me (coughWarlockcough). Certain instruments are goofy just by virtue of their very existence (eight-string basses? How averse to moving up and down the fretboard to you have to be?), and then there are perfectly nice guitars that have been fouled up by some questionable aesthetic decision. I noodled around on a Gibson that would have been perfectly nice had it not been some kind of Lynyrd Skynyrd edition. The big decal on the back wouldn't have bothered me so much, but the letters LYNYRD SKYNYRD emblazoned on the fretboard in mother-of-pearl inlay were a dealbreaker. I'm not about to buy a guitar that will have me hollering "FREE BIRD!" at myself, okay? I generally know what I'm looking for when guitar shopping. Something with a nice finish, because I'm shallow. A well-known brand, because I'm shallow and ignorant. And something that's easy to pick up and play, because I'm shallow, ignorant, and lazy. My stature as a guitar connoisseur, in fact, isn’t that much greater than my wife’s, who told me more than once, “Buy this one. It’s pretty.” “It’s left-handed,” I said, more often than not. I suppose I could restring it and play it upside down, but I’m already the opposite of Jimi Hendrix in enough other ways without drawing attention to that fact. Really, all I wanted was a basic Fender Stratocaster™ fresh from Mexico. I didn’t want any fancy add-ons, or a locking tremolo system (which, to any readers who are non-guitarists, is also known as “the part of the guitar that makes you have to spend ninety per cent of your time with your guitar getting the damn thing in tune”) or anything like that. She also tried to talk me into buying, by turns, an acoustic guitar, a twelve-string, a chrome-encased resonator, a banjo, a mandolin, a big honking Brian Setzer-looking Gretch hollow-body, a couple of acoustic-electrics, a pointy James Hetfield model, a couple of new electric basses, and a guitar amp. And this was on top of the Strat I’d already picked out. She was like a kid in a candy store by proxy or something. But she new enough to stay clear of the Warlocks, and when I said, "grab me that Flying V," she just looked at me. Now, I like guitars a lot, but I also like money, so I managed to get out of there with just one guitar (and a couple of straps and strings and a book of exercises for bassists which will one day enable me crush coal into diamonds with my left hand). After we got home, the neighbors (the one who are also my bandmates) stopped by on unrelated business and I showed off my new acquisition. As it turned out, they’d just come across a resonator they planned to keep on hand as a backup and they wondered if I wouldn’t mind keeping it at our house for a while, partially because space for instruments is at something of a premium over there, but mostly because they figured I'd enjoy having a resonator to fiddle around with. I happily agreed; two guitars for the price of one! What did I do, anyway? Meanwhile Famous Original Strat, the diabetic feline, seems a little jealous about sharing his house with a new namesake that I’m paying way too much attention to. I’ll have to me careful about his feelings, of course. Starting in a couple of days. Today’s best search phrase: “Your kidney stones are noisome to your health.” Oh, yeah? You think you know me? You don’t know anything about me, jerk! My kidney stones and I are very happy together. Why can’t you just leave us alone? posted by M. Giant 6:34 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, March 26, 2004 Looky Here, Part 2 Our digital camera crapped out at the time we replaced our basement ceiling about a year and a half ago. First-graders joke about ugly people breaking cameras. I’m here to tell you that ugly ceilings work just as well. I should clarify; I could still take pictures. I just couldn’t download them and share them with you. Until recently. Ready for the before pictures?  This is what our ceiling looked like before we started tearing it down. I know!  A wider angle. You still can’t see the water stains in the far background, but you can see the bi-level ceiling that the idiot who used to own the place built when he realized he’d started too high to hide all the pipes. Moron. We hates him, precious.  Trash wouldn’t let me tear down the old ceiling until the night before we were ready to start on the new one. Then she was bitter when she saw how much an improvement it was to have no ceiling at all. My finger in the upper right really dresses it up, don’t you think?  During. They say the basement is the safest place to be during a tornado. Clearly they are filthy liars.  Notice how the edge of the wall is wider on the top than on the bottom? This is not an optical illusion. It’s just one example of the non-Euclidean carpentry we had to deal with as part of Dr. Jellyfinger’s legacy. This is only the most visible manifestation. Also, we need to paint our stairs.  After. You totally want to make out with me right now, don’t you? I should mention that the walls are no longer that watery yellow color. Nor are they the bizarre purple color that went on over the watery yellow color. They are a lovely, rich almond shade. Also, that black thing on the upper right is the top corner of a cat tree, not a bite I took out of one of the tiles. Speaking of cats, are you ready to say “Awwww”?  That’s Orca in the foreground and Strat behind her.  Moments later and slightly closer. I should point out that that’s not their John LeCarre book; they’re not that literate. Anything beyond Grisham goes right over their fuzzy little heads. They used to spoon like this all the time. Now they hardly ever do, since Strat got diabetes. That makes us kind of sad. I can’t believe they don’t feel the same way, sometimes, a little. In between trying to kill each other, of course. Today’s best search phrase: “miss alli deborah sars and that guy.” Yes, we’re quite a group, aren’t we? posted by M. Giant 7:57 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Humpblog (3/23/04) Trash asked me, "What are you going to write about today?" I told her, "It's Wednesday. Humpblog day. I just throw out some random crap." That's my promise to you, my loyal readers: random crap every Wednesday. I give because I love. * * * I had the shortest cold in history a couple of weeks ago. I woke up at 4:00 a.m., the back of my throat on fire and my nose stuffed up like an extinct volcano. I thought, Oh, no, I'm getting a cold. I don't have the energy for this right now. Then I woke up again at 4:30 and felt fine. I think this is great. The only thing that would be better would be if I got a cold for a half-hour every night while I was sleeping and then never got one of those two-week jobbies at all again. I'd sign up for some of that action, toot-sweet. * * * How can this story not have the headline "Every Day He Writes the Book?" Seriously. I'm asking. * * * There was a foul and mysterious odor in our kitchen yesterday. Emphasis on mysterious, because our kitchen was and is clean. The trash was almost completely empty, there were no dishes in the sink, no wolverines had crawled under the center island to die. There wasn't even any general disarray in which something could hide and quietly putrefy, even though our noses were telling us that an errant pot roast was doing just that. I did everything I could think of; lighting a scented candle, taking out the trash (again), running the half-empty dishwasher, pouring some dish soap and baking soda and dish soap and some more baking soda into the running garbage disposal, et cetera. I never did discover the source of the foul and mysterious odor, but it was gone this morning. I do know it wasn’t a cat turd. The smell appeared before the cat turd did. It was just parked there on the kitchen floor when I walked by later, looking up at me innocently. All by itself. "Nobody here but us cat turds," it said pleasantly. At first I thought Strat had been “thinking outside the box” again, but then I noticed a faint trail leading from the…um…artifact…to the top of the basement stairs a few feet away. There are two possibilities, neither of which bear much thinking about (as I now know from bitter experience): One: it had escaped from the catbox and was slowly traversing the kitchen under its own power. Where it thought it was headed is a question that could give us all nightmares. Two: One of the cats had stepped out of the catbox with a grody little hitchhiker and dropped it off at the top of the stairs. Either way? Into the dumpster with you, Mr. Hanky. And then I went online to see if Swiffer™ makes something that involves a firehose. See? When I promise random crap, I deliver. Today’s best search phrase: “Baby Christina clean the catbox.” Hey, maybe that’s the problem. posted by M. Giant 4:49 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, March 22, 2004 Happy Birthday, Velcrometer! I believe it’s somewhat traditional to mention the second anniversary of one’s website when it rolls around. Last Friday, here’s what I did instead: 1. Got in the car and pointed it toward Lake Geneva. This is not unusual, as I do this every time I drive to the airport, but in this case I kept right on going. In LaCrosse, where we stopped for an early lunch, there is a Burger King right next to a McDonald’s. We vacillated a bit and found ourselves in the BK parking lot before we realized what we really wanted was McDonald’s. Was ready to turn around when I saw a sign on the fence behind the Burger King: “This way to McDonald’s entrance.” Followed the sign. Found ourselves in a dead-end alley behind the strip mall. “Well, that’s kind of diabolically clever,” Trash observed. “And possibly illegal.” We ate McDonald’s. 2. Arrived in Lake Geneva before the rest of the group. In this case, the group is a couple of Trash’s friends from grad school: Chao (no relation to other Chaos you may have read about ) and Corpkitten. You may remember them from last summer’s New York Stories, Parts One through Five. They’re coming from the Quad Cities and from Kalamazoo, so Lake Geneva is a point roughly equidistant from our various points of origin. On this particular occasion, they’re also bringing their significant others, Disqueen and the Latvian, respectively. Which is why I get to come. We’re renting a sprawling, three-bedroom house. We’re the first ones there, and the owner meets us, lets us in and shows us around. They’ve done all this renovation work themselves. Ah, I think, immediately upon stepping inside. Someone’s favorite Trading Spaces designer is Vern. CorpKitten and her husband the Latvian arrived shortly thereafter. Of the home’s many salutary features, his favorite is the hatch in the floor of the back mud room that leads into the creepy basement. We explored it in the late-afternoon daylight, because later would be bad. A) It will be dark, and B) we will have just seen Dawn of the Dead. The basement hatch is Evil Dead 2 enough as it is, thanks. 3. Went to a bar/restaurant for dinner. Trash got up and asked if the bathrooms were scary. “There are ice cubes,” I said. “Always a sign of class.” She looked at me quizzically. “Don’t you ever have ice cubes in the toilet?” I asked, being deliberately stupid. Corpkitten was now even more confused. “Ice cubes? For the dog?” When the rest of us are again able to speak, we clarify that I was talking about ice cubes in the urinal of the men’s room. But we can all see the value of putting ice cubes in the toilet to make drinking that much more pleasant for one’s dog. After all, who wants to go to the trouble of cluttering up one’s floor with a water bowl when one can simply brighten Rex’s day by tipping the ice cube trays into the shitter? That’s the sign of a true dog-lover, right there. There are running gags in every group weekend. “For the dog?” is this one’s. 4. Went to see Dawn of the Dead with Chao and the Latvian. The ladies stayed at the house. I thought Disqueen might be up for it, given that no movie could be scarier than living with Chao, but she passed. We gentlemen enjoyed it thoroughly. A couple of guys were sitting right in front of us. One of them moved away from his buddy one seat for a better sightline. A few minutes later, two other guys came in together, split off halfway down the aisle, and sat down in separate sections. Chao commented, “Wow, those guys are so not gay they aren’t even sitting together.” The guy right in front of us turned around and looked at Chao. “Oh, not you,” Chao said. We thought there was going to be a fight, but they laughed about it and then later we all took a shower together. Early on in the movie, it becomes apparent that it’s set in the greater Milwaukee area. Realized that, loosely speaking, I was in the greater Milwaukee area. Wondered if I should always go see scary movies in the geographical location where they take place. Then went back to the (creepy, isolated cabin) house in the heart of downtown Lake Geneva, hung out for a while, and went to sleep, where I dreamed an entire other version of the movie, this one set in Uptown Minneapolis. Woo hoo! Twice the upper-Midwestern bang for my zombie buck! Particularly the moment where I was dreaming about fleeing a mob of sprinting zombies while Trash, crawling over me to get to the bathroom, lost her balance and ended up with her hands clasped firmly around my ankles. I had what might euphemistically be called a “primal moment.” Fortunately, there was a washer and dryer in the house. Unfortunately, I’d unplugged them and slid them across the mud room floor to hold down the basement hatch after we got back from the movie. Everything’s a tradeoff. Especially where zombies are concerned. Today’s best search phrase: “Instructions for house sitter.” Good idea, but I don’t think mine will work for your house, unless you have a diabetic cat and a toilet that needs an occasional MacGyvering. You may just have to buckle down and write your own. posted by M. Giant 7:23 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, March 17, 2004 Humpblog (3/17/04) Happy St. Patrick's Day! It's the official holiday for people to drink until they find me amusing. Bottoms up, suckas! Personally, I'm glad I'm not spending this St. Pat's day the way I spent the last one. Anyway, this convenient list of most popular St. Patrick's Day expressions may come in handy for those of you who don't have enough luck o' the Irish to own an Onion desk calendar (or know someone who owns one; we're kind of annoying that way). 1. Kiss Me, I'm Conveniently Close By 2. Cead Mille Fuck'ye 3. Who's For A Song About Guns And Drink, Then? 4. Gi' Ou' Me Parade, Yeh Wee Homosexual Twit 5. Erin Go Bleaaarrrggh * * * I just found out last week that Allison Janney used to be on my show. Allison Janney! On my show! I find her awesome. This was, of course, years ago, before anybody knew who she was. I'm a little bitter that I came along too late to meet her, but it can't be helped; my job didn't even exist back then, never mind the fact that I wouldn't have been qualified for it anyway. Maybe it's just as well, considering the size of Trash's girl-crush on her. At least now, if I ever meet C. J. from The West Wing some time in the future, I'll have something to say to her besides "I find you awesome." Awesome people must get tired of hearing that all the time. * * * Want to see my new favorite blog? Click here. The obvious question is: what took so long? * * * What does the Secretary of the Interior do during a George W. Bush presidency? Ask Jessica Simpson, who told Gale Norton, "You've done a nice job of decorating the White House." How can she not be doing that on purpose? * * * There was a special Pub Quiz last night at Kieran's. We ended up in eighth place out of twenty-six teams. Our team was short a couple of members; Trash excused herself, as she was staring down the barrel of a Wednesday from Hell, and Miss Alli was going off and being famous. I find that five is a much better number than three for a Pub Quiz team, because two teammates isn't always enough to talk me out of being wrong. We did win a prize, though; each of us took home a shiny new Finnegan's™ pint glass, the reward for being in the dead center of the field of competitors at the end of round three. One doesn't often get awards for outstanding mediocrity like that. Maybe we should have snagged glasses for our absent teammates, but on the other hand, if they'd been there we wouldn't have gotten a consolation prize; we'd be looking at first place, dude. Just like next month. Or possibly the month after that. Today's best search phrase: "Hokey equipment." There's a hokey equipment store near my house. You can get a gun that shoots bubbles, or soft-focus camera filters, or hammers whose heads go flying off on the backswing. It's your one-stop shop for all things hokey. Unfortunately, I can't go in there because the sign over the door reading "Hokey-Dokey" makes me want to eat my own head. posted by M. Giant 5:11 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, March 15, 2004 M. Giant Got Back So, Trash and I bought a treadmill over the Internet a couple of weeks ago. We got a really good deal, and they even delivered it to our house. Of course, about a quarter of the price we paid was shipping and handling. I hope most of that was for the shipping, because the difficult part of the handling was left up to us. We got home from work and the box was standing there in the middle of our driveway like a cardboard phone booth, only heavier. We don’t own a hand truck, but we do own a small, wheeled luggage cart, whose design parameters I must have exceeded by an alarming margin when I wedged it under the bottom edge of the box. The axle was u-shaped by the time I got the thing wheeled around to the front door. Trash helped me wrestle it up the front stoop, an operation that was roughly akin to rotating the tires on a Buick without a jack. And it still remained to manhandle it through the front door, through the entryway, across the kitchen, down the basement stairs, and into the TV room. We weren’t going to make it. “How attached are you to the idea of exercising inside?” I asked Trash, but she had a better idea: open up the box and take the thing down in pieces. Which we did, and which ended up working out better than toppling the box down the stars would have, but the primary component was still so heavy that removing several sections of iron frame and twenty pounds of hand weights only reduced the overall load by a small fraction. We slid it across the kitchen floor, using a vast expanse of the vivisected box to protect the newish tiles. We managed to get it to the top of the stairs. Now came the fun part. Grunting. Swearing. Heaving. “Okay, that wasn’t so bad. Only eleven steps to go.” Step 2: We’d take a break if we weren’t both needed to hold the thing upright. Step 3: Is that stair tread splintering? Step 4: If we ever sell this house, the treadmill goes with it. Step 5: If we can get this downstairs, we won’t need it, because we’ll be either a) so buff by that point that a treadmill will be useless to us, or b) quadriplegic. Steps six through nine kind of run together in my fevered memory, but I’m pretty sure that it was step ten when the spinal disc between my L2 and L3 vertebrae popped out of its slot and whickered across the room like a gory, gelatinous tiddlywink, ultimately pasting itself to the far wall. Okay, I exaggerate. It barely broke the skin. No, I’m still exaggerating. I’m fine. Absolutely fine. Never better. Not one iota of back pain. Yes, I’m exaggerating again. At first it just felt like a muscle strain, like my ass does after a night of bowling (what did you think I was going to say? I’m talking about muscle pain. That other thing leaves a different kind of pain entirely, you pervs. Jeez). I figured it would be fine in a couple of days. And the pain wasn’t bad, even at that moment; I’d say it was about a mild “ow” on a scale from zero to OH MY GOD IN HEAVEN IT HURTS IT HURTS SO BAD PLEASE JESUS MOMMY MAKE IT STOP! In a couple of days it would be gone entirely and it would be like it had never happened. That was about two weeks ago. That mild “ow” has gone down several font sizes, and usually it’s absent entirely, but that wet, heavy snowfall from a week and a half ago had my new friends L2 and L3 informing me in no uncertain terms that it was time to stop shoveling soon. It’s not bad enough that I need to go to the doctor, I don’t think; it should go away if I give myself some time off from moving pianos. If not, I’ll go in. I’m setting a firm deadline: April 30, 2015. I’ve always had a certain fear of back injuries; one hears about people who hurt their backs and they’re never the same. They have pain until they have surgery, or die, or die having surgery. Or they get hooked on pills and turn into Chevy Chase. I’ve been lucky with my back all my life, especially when one takes into account the fact that my sister, Debitch the Younger, has had problems with hers in the past. Factor in my puny physique and it’s a wonder I can even pick up a bowling ball without spending the rest of the week in traction. Although I’ve never moved furniture for a living, I’ve moved it for friends plenty of times. I never had a minor injury until now (knock on bone), and I’m not kidding myself that this “injury” is anything but the most minor one possible. I’m seeing it as a warning that I’m thirty-four, and the days when I can lift items twice my weight with my back instead of my legs are drawing to a close. And you should be careful too, lest one day you hurt yourself to some similarly insignificant degree and find yourself reduced to inflating your stultifying tale to a thousand-word yammer just to burn off some bandwidth. As for me, I’ll be fine. I’ll spend a few hours on that thrice-damned treadmill over the next few weeks, and override my mild back discomfort with some severe calf and shin pain until I’m back at a hundred per cent. In the meantime, you want to grab me a soda? I don’t think I should get up. Today’s best search phrase: “Garbage disposal personification.” I have only the vaguest idea as to why somebody would want to research that, and it can only point to a concept for the WORST CHILDREN'S SHOW EVER. posted by M. Giant 6:50 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, March 12, 2004 Two Cats, Three Humans, One Nightmare It’s been a little over a year since Orca last rode in the cat taxi. Strat’s been in the cat taxi several times since December. I don’t even remember how long it’s been since they rode in it together. And yet somehow, they still remember that they don’t like it. We decided to bring them both in for a checkup, and the appointment was today. And I was on my own. As in the past, I decided to leave the cat taxi open in the middle of the living room all day in order to give them a chance to get used to its existence, and then blitzkrieg them into it when it was time to go. I should think about getting two cat taxis. Not to make it more comfortable for them, but to make it easier for me. Stuffing the second cat inside while trying to prevent the escape of the first is a tricky operation if one does not have a chainmail shirt and a tranq gun on hand. You know those trick cans of peanuts with the snakes that pop out? Try loading one of those with a spring from the suspension of an H2 and you have an idea what I was up against. These cats are both in their teens, and yet they are able to point their claws in directions that aren’t even on this plane of existence. I finally got them both in at the same time, but by the time I got the gate closed my scarf was in there with them. Also, my glasses. Off to the vet’s office, squinting nearsightedly through the windshield through what is fortunately only a six-block drive. Here now is a list of people Orca hates, from those she hates the most to those she hates the least: 1. Everyone. 2. Me. 3. Trash. 4. Veterinarians. Yes, normally veterinarians are Orca’s favorite people (and they loooove her, the gullible fools), but the palpable waves of terror pouring off of Strat had her in what I can only describe as a state. There were noises coming out of that box that were positively Lovecraftian. Once we got inside the examination room, that was the only thing coming out of the box, if they had their way. What’s the deal? They don’t want to get in the carrier at home, but they don’t want to come out of it at the vet’s office? Make up your minds! Pried them out one at a time, at least two times each, with the vet’s assistant holding the box and me all, “Come on out, sweeties. It’s okay. Don’t make me manhandle you in front of the nice cat care professional, okay?” Quick discussion of medical history, and the assistant leaves the three of us alone. The carrier’s on the floor with the gate closed now, so the cats are huddled together on the cold table in mutual panic, paying each other more attention than they have in months. The vet comes in. Discussion of Orca’s recent weight gain. Strat’s blood sugar is a little too low, down to 76, and Orca’s bile is right where it normally is, at three point eight million. “I see she’s got a little dandruff problem,” the doctor observes. “Is she normally like this or is it nerves?” She is not normally like this. At the moment, Orca is putting out more flakes than a General Mills plant. Considering that this is a cat who in the past has convincingly faked nerve damage, broken legs, and cancer, I’m not too worried. Indeed, I have suddenly realized that she has formulated and is attempting to execute a plan to escape from the room a few cells at a time. She is trying to teleport herself by the sheer force of her little kitty will. “Nerves,” I say to the doctor. Oddly, getting them back into the carrier is much easier here in the vet’s office. The process involves opening the gate, and then closing it after they dash inside. The end. Stop by next door to pick up some food for them. If they are excited about being in the source of all of their provisions, they don’t show it. Back home, where, once again, the cat taxi is not where the fickle little beasts want to be. And where, after inhaling clouds and clouds of frightened-cat-matter, my allergies have turned my nose into a phlegm firehose (or phirehogse, as the case may be). It’s a good thing cats don’t get sick as often as humans do. I don’t think I could take it. Today’s best search phrase: "Velcrometer fake cancer." Oh, wait, that was me. Doesn't count. I'll try again. Today's best search phrase: “Pictures of froot Puerto Ricans eat.” I hope this person isn’t looking for before and after. posted by M. Giant 7:57 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, March 10, 2004 Humpblog (3/10/04) The thing about eBay (he said, five years after everybody already knew all this stuff), is that you have to be careful not just when selling, but when buying. eBay likes to say that when you make the highest bid, you've "won" the item up for auction. Really? I won it? Does that mean I don't have to pay for it? No? Then shut up, eBay. Trash and I “won” the fourth season of The Sopranos on DVD. It arrived last week. It was a suspiciously small package for something that supposedly contained six CDs. But then, that’s to be expected. Apparently that’s how they package multiple DVD sets in CHINA. Not to be xenophobic or anything. In fact, all those Mandarin ideograms on the box were kind of exotic-looking. And given the price we paid, we wouldn’t have objected to watching the show around Chinese subtitles. Or even in Chinese, provided there was an English subtitle option. We might have even been able to put up with characters speaking English most of the time except for random Chinese phrases, like they used to do on Firefly. We’re not totally Amerocentric. But our DVD player is. For reasons that continue to escape me, DVDs from one side of the world don’t work in players from the other side. So our version of season four consists of the Sony logo and a text box that reads “C 13:00.” Now, I’d heard the show had gone downhill somewhat last year, but not that far. In the listing, the seller claims that the disks work just fine on her DVD player, artfully omitting the fact that her DVD player was purchased in Hong Kong. So we’ll be asking for our money back. If all else fails, this could be when eBay’s “buyer feedback” function comes in handy. I suspect I could unload some salty invective if called upon. Perhaps even in Chinese. * * * This week’s amusing spam, from “Luke,” with the subject line “Fwd: Hi”: Hey girl, Could you have lost me any faster? I don’t think so. I know I got the answer to not having a job. :) Last week I told you Yvonne had this new work at her house? I’m sorry, I don’t remember that conversation. Or Yvonne. Or you. She told me she was doing whatever she wanted and getting paid for it. Nice, eh? So anyway, I am thinking I might do it too, but not by myself, please do it with me. There’s a link t this point in the e-mail that I didn’t click on, but certain telltale words in the URL tell me they’re not selling Bibles. I bet we could do this like, part time, and still have plenty of time for classes. Call me right now, let's seriously talk about this, I know we could do well. Talk to you later, Eileen Hey, Luke! Did you know Eileen has hacked into your e-mail and has asked me to do webcam pr0n with her? I should also mention the other note I got with the subject line, “Russel the One-Eyed Wonder Muscle.” Dammit, I knew I should have given my online pseudonym more thought. Now it’s too late. Phooey. * * * Obviously this isn’t the only amusing e-mail I’ve gotten this week; I’d like to thank all of you who have found the time to share your favorite jokes with me. Please, keep them coming. I’ve gotten some really good ones already, and I appreciate every one of them (except for the one about—well, never mind what it was about. The sick bastard in question knows who he is). But I can still use more. It’s not too late. Be funny! * * * Today’s best search phrase: “The info of percent of people travel on planes on vacation time channel.” Wow, satellite TV has everything. posted by M. Giant 7:52 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, March 08, 2004 Dealing in Volume Every so often (and sometimes a couple of times a so often), Trash and I will go through some part of our house and get rid of a box or two of clutter. We drop it off at a nearby thrift store, and they give us a receipt for our taxes. They let us fill out how much we think the stuff is worth. I'm terrible at estimating that, so I simply fill in the amount I would have paid to be rid of it. Then our old clutter goes on their showroom floor, to become used clutter for those who can't or won't pay full retail price for new clutter. And as far as I can recall, there's not a thing we've given away that we ended up missing later. (Except for the things I gave away by accident because they happened to be in my car at the time, but we don't need to get into that.) So that's how we handle our excess clutter. Stuff that takes up space, that we have too much of, goes out the door in overflowing grocery totes and copy paper boxes without a second thought. Unless, of course, the stuff in question is books. A couple of months ago, we went through all of our books and decided to get rid of the ones that fill both of us with either hate or overwhelming disinterest. This, too, is a regular process, this being the second time we've done it since we moved here over a decade ago. We were merciless. Of our many thousands of books, the only volumes that survived were the ones we couldn't fit into three grocery bags. Off to Magers & Quinn, where a guy sorted through them and bought a bagful off of us. This left us with two grocery bags full of books, which I chauffeured around in the back of my car for a couple of months. I was of course careful not to give them away during the donation trips I made to the thrift store during that period. Last weekend, Trash and I decided to list a bunch of our rejected books on eBay. We put up groups of books in lots of three or four: "Four by Susan Conant," "Six by Sara Paretsky," "Three sort of pretentious artsy-fartsy books," "Seven random books with nothing whatsoever to do with each other." We set our shipping prices low and started the bidding lower still. By the time the auction was over we'd sold one group of books, at a price that nearly covered the amount we'd paid eBay for all of the listings. You know where else you can sell used books? Amazon. The listing process is less tedious, and unlike eBay, people actually go to Amazon to buy books. We're having much better luck that way. We've bought a lot of books from there, many of them used. It just never occurred to me to make the connection that those used books might have come from somewhere. From people like us, for instance. It is indeed handy to be married to a librarian. She knows things like this. In the past week, I've made three separate trips to two different post offices with seven bulging, duct-taped manila envelopes crammed with newspaper-wrapped books. The cash pouring into our PayPal account surpasses the postage we're paying, by enough to feed the parking meter in front of Magers & Quinn for an hour. Our regular clutter, we're just glad to be rid of. Book overflow, we want to get value for it. More importantly, we want someone else to get value from it. We've got curbside trash pickup, many area thrift stores, a city that recycles paper, and a chiminea in the back yard whose charred maw yawns hungrily at us every day. But we want these books to find good homes. And these are the books we don't even like. Today's best search phrase: "'On crutches' beach." Man, that sounds like a hard walk. posted by M. Giant 4:04 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, March 05, 2004 Looky Here Some people like to illustrate their journal entries with photos. And then there are those, like me, who illustrate almost two years worth of journal entries at once. I think everyone would do it that way if it weren’t such a stupid way to go about it. A year and change ago, I tried to post pictures of our basement ceiling replacement project. But the camera didn’t want to give up its photos, until I finally got around to buying and installing a memory card reader a couple of months ago. So those pictures didn’t go up until, well, today. Along with some others. Some may say I’m only doing this because I want to be like AB, to which the only reasonable riposte is: Who wouldn’t? Okay. Hit the lights. 
From July 2002: Trash settles down at the kitchen table for a light snack. No, not really. That’s Deniece at six months. She’s two now, so obviously Trash only eats other babies. 
Seattle: A Navy gunboat makes sure our tour cruiser doesn’t get too close to the battleship docked in Puget Sound. 
I began to have visions of Apocalypse Now. “Sampan off the port bow!” 
The Real World: Seattle house, featuring Space Needle shot nine million. 
I’m sorry, which of those boats is Paul Allen’s? They all look alike to me. 
Seattle: My city. Also, that random other chick’s. 
The reason people from Seattle have such great asses. 
Trash at Gasworks Park with beverages. 
Oregon’s Mount Hood, fresh out of the oven. 
New York: Trash and Lawre somewhere in the subway. I forget where, exactly. 
Lawre considers escaping from me by throwing herself on the tracks. I promise I'm not naked under my coat. That’s enough for today, I think. It may even be too many. More in a week or two, after this batch drops off the front page, because I’m incredibly cheap when it comes to bandwidth (as if my URL didn’t already tell you that). Today’s best search phrase: “‘desk’ and ‘dumped’ and ‘teacher’ and girl and stuff and cont.” I assume they meant “continued.” Otherwise that just makes no sense at all. posted by M. Giant 5:20 PM Wednesday, March 03, 2004 Humpblog (3/3/04) I finished the screenplay and got it submitted to Project Greenlight with a day to spare. It came in at 108 pages long, practically dead in the middle of the qualifying range for length. And it's decent, I think, considering the schedule I banged it out on. It does have its flaws, but it's not terrible. I can say that with confidence after having read one of the other entries. I now know from terrible. * * * Jokes! Give me jokes! I need jokes and I need them now! I put out this appeal not because I'm tired of this site not being funny (I still haven't figured out what to do about that), but for my job. We're doing our annual Joke Show in April, and the boss wants, like, ten thousand new jokes to sift through. And it's my job to get them. Help me out here. If you heard a new joke this year that you'd never heard before, pass it on. We're especially looking for jokes in these long-revered categories: - Light bulbs - Knock Knock - Blondes - Ole and Lena (or Minnesotan) - Engineer/Programmer - Guy walks into a bar - Miscellaneous Preferably nothing salty, ribald, raunchy, blue, filthy, off-color, or anything that will get us in trouble with the FCC. Saucy is fine. Insouciant is fine, too. Whatever-the-adjective-form-of-innuendo is will be okay. General rule: send jokes you can't tell your grandma, but not jokes you can't tell your mom. Unless they're both hippies, in which case your judgment on this kind of thing is probably totally sideways anyhow. Just send them all and I'll sort them out. I can't promise anything in return. If I get a lot, I can't even promise that I'll respond to each one. I certainly can't promise that your joke will get on the air. But what if it does? Won't you feel cool? * * * Overheard at our house during the Oscars: "Aren't they going to tell us what that guy won his Scientific/Technical Award for?" "I think it was for raising Brother Caleb's barn." "Accepting this award for The Return of the King: producer and director Jake Blues, and co-producer Faerie Princess." "What is that instrument Sting is playing?" "I don't know. Maybe at the end of the song something will pop out of it." "You know who's conspicuously absent this year?" "Ian McKellen's boyfriend." "Exactly." * * * So, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I've got a book coming out. I was thinking it might be amusing to tell you that it really has nothing to do with anything you've ever read here. That it's not a novel, or a memoir, or a collection, or an anthology, or even non-fiction. That, technically, it's not even a book. In fact, I could tell you it's a play. Yeah, that's it. A full-length play, intended to be performed on stage. And not something Kushneresque, or Stoppardian, but like something even further back in the dramatic canon. Like, seventeenth century or something. Like, I'd try and tell you that I sat down and wrote something…what's the word? Jacobean. One of those bloody post-Shakespeare revenge tragedies where everybody dies. But then I'd have to go all the way. I'd have to somehow convince you that the thing has five acts and practically no stage directions, and it's written in verse, in period language, and most of the scenes end in rhyming couplets, and characters don these transparent disguises that actually fool the other characters and sometimes speak in asides to the audience and use the word "meet" as an adjective. But then, just when you think you've got your footing, I'd add another layer of unlikelihood to this already creaking wedding cake. For instance, I could say that the lead characters of this supposed imagined hypothetical play are…women. Which would never happen, because back then women were played by teenage boys who couldn't be trusted with too much dramatic heavy lifting. A neo-Jacobean feminist revenge tragedy. Yeah, that's the ticket. But trying to pull off a scam like that would leave me in kind of an awkward position, because what I just described is exactly what it is. Seriously. No, seriously. Available this spring: The Sisters' Tragedy: An Anachronism in Five Acts from Paper Frog Productions, an imprint of Windstorm Creative Ltd. By me. Watch this space for ordering information, because I'm a big, big whore. * * * Today's best search phrase: "Dance marathon scrub pants." If that's not a sign that the clothing industry is getting too specialized, I don't know what is. posted by M. Giant 4:36 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, March 01, 2004 This Light Isn't Trash and I finally made it to Home De[s]pot this past weekend to get a replacement ceiling fan/light for the kitchen. Only three weeks after I said we would. For me, that's ahead of schedule. We walked past the light bulbs almost immediately after entering the store. "Do we need some of those?" Trash asked me. I didn't think so. We still have a raft of light bulbs from when we bought some at Sam's Club last May. So we picked out a ceiling fan. Trash shot down the ones I liked, in particular the three-bladed monster that looked like it had been stolen off a wind farm, and the ones with wicker blades shaped like palm fronds. So we went with a fixture that is largely similar to the old one, aside from the fact that you can actually change the light bulbs in it and the very sight of it does not fill me with hatred and rage. Then I mentioned that we needed a new light fixture for the laundry room. We've got a 48" fluorescent tube-hanger in there now, and I can't find tubes for it because it's an old fixture from when 48" tubes were actually forty-eight inches long rather than the forty-seven-and-a-quarter they are today. Is pressurized argon gas really so expensive that they save that much money shortening them? Whatever the case, I needed a modern fixture that will hold modern tubes rather than dropping them on the laundry-room floor all the time, because that white stuff they coat the insides of the tubes with doesn't always come out of black garments. And when you're doing laundry by candlelight, you don't notice until you go to put something on a few days later. I also needed a new fixture for the utility room, right above where the catbox is. The one there now isn't technically a fixture; it's just a socket for a bare bulb. And it doesn't work, even with a brand-new light bulb. How a porcelain and metal collar with no moving parts can quit working is beyond me, but the situation must be remedied if I am to get full visual enjoyment out of the cat turds and gigantic clumps of grit-infused urine as I scoop them out. I just hope I can figure out which circuit breaker to shut off when I fix it, since the normal "is the light off?" test won't apply. How sad would it be if I electrocuted myself and my wife came downstairs to find that the cats had half-buried me? And then we needed a new ceiling fixture to replace the one at the top of the bedroom stairs. There's really nothing wrong with the current one, aside from its being a) ugly, b) about to fall down, and c) only half-functional. On the other hand, it's getting more and more difficult to find ceiling-mounted lights that don't look like breasts. But we managed to find some fixtures that didn't feature a prominent metallic nipple, and we brought home one of those. On the way out, Trash noticed a table-lamp combo that we could put in the basement to replace the one that's been slowly collapsing for several years, so that went in the cart as well. On the way, out, Trash said, "Are you sure we don't need light bulbs?" I looked at the five different varieties of lighting components in our cart and said, "Not any more." After Trash assembled the new table lamp, the fan/light combo in our kitchen came down first because I hate it the most. Also, it is inexplicably back down to one working bulb, and I vowed three weeks ago that I'd never change another bulb in that thing again, and if I needed light, I could set fire to the blades. It didn't come to that, although I almost had to set fire to the ceiling to pull the old one down. I've mentioned Dr. Jellyfinger before, and how his long, incompetent shadow looms over me whenever I try to improve something in this house. Dr. Jellyfinger is the master of DIYETYRS (do-it-yourself-even-though-you-really-shouldn't) home improvement. A normal ceiling fan is attached not to the ceiling itself, but to a metal bracket attached to an electrical box inside the ceiling. Somebody should have told Dr. Jellyfinger this. Sadly, nobody did, which years later put me in the position of standing on a step stool in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, chipping away with a hammer and screwdriver at the petrified collar of plaster, caulk, and paint that gave the fan mount the appearance of having grown organically out of the ceiling. Trash heard all of my cursing from the other room, and nervously kept offering to help. I gave her a job when I finally got the old fan excavated from the ceiling. "Take this outside," I asked, handing her the thirty-pound motor, "and shoot it." That was the easy part. It turns out he'd installed the electrical box too high in the ceiling, which meant I'd have to chip away even more of the plaster to get the new fixture to fit on the bracket. With help from Trash, I fanhandled it into place, balancing it on one shoulder while doing the wiring with the other hand. That's not the best position in which to do wiring, because even the smallest electrical jolt from a pair of live wires is going to have that thing leaving great dents in the linoleum. Once the fan was up and in place and illuminated and whirling and not banging and swinging like Buddy Rich, I looked at the place where it meets the ceiling, and I had one of those chilling moments of dark clarity. One of those realizations I fear most. More times than I can count in the decade we've lived in this house, I've cursed Dr. Jellyfinger's made-up-by-me name for doing something that had cost me more effort to correct than it could possibly had saved him. In this case, I had undone his shoddy work, and I realized: I was going to have to do the exact same thing myself. I have no choice but to do it better than he did. This fan is never coming down, do you hear me? Today's best search phrase: "Wholesale overrun bankrupt magazine." That's a good one. Don't get me wrong, though; I only read it for the articles. posted by M. Giant 3:28 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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