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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Monday, May 31, 2004 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XXV Very tired right now. Too tired to write an entry, in fact. Too tired to even write a Reader Mail entry, in fact. I'm tempted to just turn on comments and say, "Write it your own damn selves." But that's like the online journal equivalent of sending out party invitations and then having everybody show up to find me crashed out on the sofa in front of an infomercial in my wifebeater with an open beer wedged between my man-boobs. So I'll at least put some pants on. Good thing I got plenty of mail this month. And that's not even counting all the suggestions for throat remedies everyone sent in. Those were numerous enough to constitute an entry on their own. Not this one, though. Hey, remember when that asshole almost killed me on I-94 a few weeks ago? Uli does: Hitting the horn so hard that you blow a fuse is quite an achievement. Until I got rid of my old bomb of a car last year, I survived quite some time with perhaps the only thing better than no horn - a horn that only worked when the steering wheel was turned at a certain angle. And that angle was, of course, hard-right turn or hard left-turn. Perfect for use when trying to avoid a substantial accident, but no use at all when trying to honk annoying pedestrians or tailgaters. Good luck with the repairs. Ah, yes. Repairs. What a concept. As we were stuck behind a slow driver the other day, Trash said, "You can honk when people do that." Not right now, I can't. Having a rental car with a functioning horn was one of the many perks of being in California last week. Another suggestion, this from one who knows the stretch of road of which I speak: I've seen that happen too many times, and although it might be satisfying to pull a 'Road Warrior' style move on him, I've got a better idea. Next time, get the plate, dial 911, and report a reckless, drunken driver with a weapon (his car) and let him enjoy the professionalism of the Minnesota State Patrol via a felony car stop (DRIVER! TAKE THREE STEPS TO YOUR LEFT! DRIVER! GET DOWN ON YOUR STMOACH, HANDS OUT TO THE SIDES!). Who knows, the a-hole might even have a warrant... Matt St. Paul They really do that, you know. As I learned to my chagrin after cutting off the wrong person a couple of weeks later. I'm kidding. That never happened. Kimberly from Squoogy remembers her commencement speaker, who, like mine, was also not Jon Stewart. Ha! My commencement speaker was the distinguished Madeleine Albright too. I don't remember what was going on in the world during the spring of 1998, but I remember she gave a speech about it. And I was a senior marshal so I was in the third row for it. Some of the highlights include: "Blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. I cannot believe that girl wore her bangs like that under her graduation cap. It looks ridiculous. Blah blah blah. Blah blah." Ok, that bangs part was probably me. Hey, that's the year I graduated! We must have been at the same ceremony. That's so cool. Although I must say it's not very nice of Kimberly to make fun of the way I wore my bangs. Hola, M. Giant, I've been reading your entries for a about a year now and I have to tell you how much joy my husband and I get from of your entries on Dr. Jellyfinger. You see, it seems that we live in a house owned by his cousin, Mr. Hamhands. In November, we bought a house built in 1938 and inhabited for 30+ years by one Mr. Hamhands, a denture maker with a "shop" he made for himself in the basement (was Dr. Jellyfinger by chance a dentist?). It seems that Mr. Hamhands thought it would be wise to put his artistic and technical skills to use around the house. Oh, the crap we are uncovering! We thought that the painted-over layers of wallpaper and the unbudging tape residue on the hardwood floors (wouldn't want those carpets to slide, ya know) were the worst of it. As we prepare to remodel the kitchen, we are discovering even more delights. We look forward to more tales of your updating efforts. Perhaps we will learn some tips on undoing the horrors that were committed against this lovely old house. Cheers, Lucy My best tip? A ten-gallon tank of gasoline and a road flare. You'll thank me later. Today's best search phrase: "TWoP 'Murder She Wrote'." Don't hold your breath, okay? posted by M. Giant 7:51 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, May 27, 2004 Overheard As a member of Travelocity, Trash’s default meal on any flight to anywhere is the vegetarian one. Since there isn’t room on an airplane galley for an unlimited number of options, the vegetarian meal also has to serve as kosher, vegan, and halal for all I know. And thus they are generally inedible. On one flight, Trash was delivered a meal that consisted of an apple and a ham sandwich. Then the flight attendant came back and said, "Oh, sorry, you’re supposed to have the vegetarian meal." And she left with the sandwich, never to return. The vegetarian meal, apparently, was an apple. It would almost have been better if she had grabbed it, peeled the ham off the bread, and plunked it back down in front of her. The vegetarian meal on Saturday morning was an envelope of oatmeal, a cup of warm water, an igneous bagel, and a battered banana. Trash remained unimpressed with the airline’s service for vegetarians. I said, "I don’t think the idea is to give you good service. I think the idea is to make you feel bad about being a vegetarian." * * * In San Francisco: "Why do they call it Golden Gate Park? You can’t even see the Golden Gate Bridge from here." "What’s the first thing you think of when you think of San Francisco?" "If that’s the criterion, why don’t they call it Rice-A-Roni park?" * * * In LA, a woman on a cell phone, near Robertson: "No, dude, seriously -- it tastes really great when you're high." * * * Today’s best search phrase: "'Bad tooth' flight remedy." I don’t know what to tell you. Try asking for a vegetarian meal. posted by M. Giant 9:38 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, May 21, 2004 Magic! So we're leaving for California tomorrow. It's been quite a while since we took an actual, honest-to-God vacation for any length of time. I'm not sure if anything since Hawaii counts, and that was a year ago. I almost feel guilty taking a vacation at this point in my life. I have not one, but two of the coolest jobs I could ever hope for, so what is it that I'm taking a vacation from? But then I figure, someday I might be working as a scuba diver in a water treatment plant, and I won’t want to have think back to vacations I didn't take now. So. As I've mentioned in the past, when we go on vacation we normally organize our accommodations after we arrive at our destination. But in light of everything we've read about the cost and scarcity of California real estate—which we assume applies even if one is only renting some for a few nights—we figured it would be safer to take care of this trip's lodgings in advance. Since I was reserving the rental car, it fell to my wife to deal with the hotel. Besides: she has the Mojo. (By the way, if you ever get to pick between having to reserve the rental car and reserving the hotel? Go with the rental car.) So Trash brought all of her online researching skills to bear, narrowing down tens of thousands of hotels in scores of neighborhoods down to a few likely candidates. She enlisted friends at work and at least one friend in another state, namely CorpKitten. Eventually, with CorpKitten's invaluable assistance, she settled on a place near Beverly Hills that's actually in our price range. She sent me a link to their website and I said, "Make it so." And for a short time, our ZIP code would be 90210. If you use all nine digits and then take some out, that is. But then Trash got an e-mail from our friend CorpKitten, drawing our attention to a place where we simply must stay: The Magic Castle. Trash was immediately enchanted (see? It works). I was happy with the other place, but Trash made a cogent argument for changing our reservations: "Magic Castle! Dude? Magic Castle!" "Yes, but—" "But Magic Castle!" She was all ready to cancel our reservations at the other place and book us at the Magic Castle. Fortunately, she realized it would be more prudent to do take those steps in the reverse order. Trash was all ready to switch us over, agreeing to pay way more than we've ever spent on a hotel room in our lives, and then Pamie mentioned something about how she thought you have to be a magician to stay there. Um. I was fine with that, because nothing makes a difficult decision easier than having one of the options eliminated by factors out of your control. But Trash wasn't quite ready to give up on the Magic Castle. She's so girly sometimes. She called the reservation desk, and talked to a guy, and they talked about when we needed the room, and when we were arriving, and whether a smoking room was okay, and then the clerk said, "Are you in the magic?" Trash hung up. So no Magic Castle for us. She was lucky the desk clerk wasn't a mentalist, and thus able to read her thoughts over the telephone wire. I offered to rent some Penn & Teller videos to see what I could pick up, but she was fine with letting it go. * * * Trash has an unrelated question for you. She's been struggling with laryngitis for several weeks now, and would like to have her voice back all of the time instead of just some of the time. We've tried ht beverages, cough drops, and resting her voice, but if any of y'all have any other suggestions, thoughts, or home remedies, feel free to pass them along. We'll be most grateful. Unless they wreck her voice for good, in which case you'll have yourself a shiny new pair of bitter enemies. Today's best search phrase: "Kiefer Sutherland big tit cat fight." Like I don't get enough of that kind of thing on the 24 forums. posted by M. Giant 8:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Humpblog (5/19/04) For those of you who haven't already seen this, Jon Stewart gave this year's commencement address at the College of William and Mary. Here's the link. For those of you who have already seen it, do you have to be so mean? It's not bad enough that my commencement speaker was Madeleine Albright, you have to rub in my constant behind-the-curve-ness? * * * And now, a couple of quick updates on some ongoing stories in my petty little world. * * * It's been six and a half weeks since I seeded the back yard for the umpteenth time. Looking out the window of my study, it appears to be an unbroken expanse of lush, green grass. That's because I haven't mown it yet. It merely means that from this angle, the grass that has come up is tall enough to conceal the gaping bare patches that mock me whenever I step out there. Also, at this distance it's impossible to differentiate the grass from the weeds, of which there are many. I'm still watering, of course. Normally the grass gets to this point and I take that as a "we'll take it from here," and I stop watering so diligently, just in time for the tree to draw its black shroud of shade over the yard without protecting it from the killing heat of summer. My grass is very Minnesotan that way. You know us; we'll insist we're fine from our beds in the Intensive Care Unit. But I'm not falling for it this time. It's trying to distract me, too. At the eastern end of the yard, in the shade of our garage and a mass of bushes, rhubarb has sprung up. This has never happened before, and it appears to be completely spontaneous. I don't care for rhubarb, so all it means to me is that I'll have less area to mow when I actually summon up enough courage to do so. I certainly won't be making pies out of it. In any case, I've now learned that the best way to enjoy the beauty of my back yard is through the window of my study. From here, it's perfect. * * * Strat has passed the five-month mark since going on insulin for his diabetes. We went through an unhappy period when he would try to run from us whenever we were holding a needle, and then shriek in pain when we actually stuck him with it. Just pulling up the fold of skin for the shot would send him into a panic and his claws would scrabble at the floor, if he was on the floor, or at us, if he wasn't. We began to wonder if maybe we were doing something wrong, or that he had some rare condition that was making the injections much more painful than our veterinarian had assured us they would be. We wondered if we weren't traumatizing him so severely that his life had become one long, living nightmare of terror and agony from which he could only escape by expiring of fright. No, it turns out he's just a big drama queen. Now his only reaction to the twice-daily shots is mild annoyance at being expected to hold still for the half-second that the procedure takes. He's become fatalistic about it. Whereas before, his attitude was "NOOOOOOO! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!" now it's more, "Now? Oh, all right." And then he drinks some water. I don't know if he figured out that the routine wasn't going to get dropped, or if all of the emoting just wore him out. In any case, his new outlook is a big time-saver for all involved. I just hope it doesn't start all over when we go on vacation next week. Today's best search phrase: "Kama Sutra for one." Who are you trying to impress there, sparky? posted by M. Giant 5:13 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 17, 2004 Music for the Masses So I want to thank everyone who came out to our gig on Saturday night, but I can't because there were so goddamn many of you. Seriously, I didn't realize we were going to end up packing you all in like processed cheese food. I apologize for any discomfort you may have experienced. If it makes you feel any better, I really didn't have any more personal space than you did, probably. Unless you were in that group of eight people sitting at the four-top, in which case there would have been no room at all for my amp. This was easily our biggest crowd yet. Trash tried to count it several times, but then people kept standing up or moving around or blocking her view, so she ended up estimating about eighty or ninety, in a space that comfortably seats about fifty. It was standing room only, until there was no room to stand any more. I wonder how the owner took all this. On the one hand, there were a huge number of potential customers. On the other, only a small percentage were actually able to reach the coffee bar. A good three-quarters of our audience was in a position where the only way they were going to get something to drink would be if a barista squirted it at them through a hose. And this was about forty-five minutes before we were supposed to start. We'd been telling everyone we'd go on around nine p.m., but come 8:15, people were already in place, and there didn't seem to be much room for newcomers (an assessment that soon turned out to be spectacularly wrong), so we figured we'd better start early rather than make a full room wait until nine. If we had waited, as full as it got, there would have been a riot, and there's nothing worse than rioting hippie acoustic folk fans. And then there were the people who came in just to get coffee, got it, and turned around and left. They'd come in and wonder where the hell their quiet corner coffee shop had gotten to. I actually heard one woman say to her friends, "Go. Quickly." As if the place were on fire. Which really would have sucked, given the population density in there. As a person who has written about fires at music venues before, I was glad that this place had both a front and back entrance that were clearly marked and not terribly inaccessible. Even so, in a crowded situation like that, one needs to have an emergency escape plan in place and ready to implement. I was glad of the huge plate-glass window immediately behind the stage. It's a storefront-type window that faces out towards Snelling Avenue, and it runs almost the entire width of the coffee shop. My escape plan was that if somebody anywhere in the place accidentally set fire to a napkin, or spontaneously combusted, or began smoking too vigorously, I'd stand up, pick up my amp, and hurl it out onto the sidewalk. It weighs sixty-five pounds, so I was confident that it would make a sizable hole. Which I would then be prepared to widen by reaming my bass guitar around in it, if necessary. The plan underwent a few evolutionary changes as the night progressed. Would I be able to pick up my amp in time to avoid the crush of people pouring towards the front door in flames, or should I just skip the amp altogether and just club the window out with my bass? And should I smash the window at all? While doing so would allow smoke and toxic fumes to escape, it would also allow more oxygen in to feed the hypothetical fire. I just don't have the training to make that kind of call. What tipped the decision for me was the fact that the front door opens inward. So I decided that making room for fifteen people to exit at one time could only be a net benefit. I might not have even been thinking about this, because there were only one or two people between me and the front door at any given time anyway. However, since the audience included my wife, my parents, and (judging by a few comments that Trash overheard) at least a few Velcrometer readers, I felt a certain obligation to not abandon them to roast alive. More than usual, I mean. Luck was with us, however, because the issue never came up. Since our entire pyrotechnic display consists of Will shifting the metal face of his resonator guitar under the track lighting, there probably wasn't much risk of it. Fortunately, our next gig will be outdoors, so we won't need to worry so much about overcrowding. If there's a fire, nobody need be trapped anywhere. But I should probably come up with an emergency plan in the event of hail the size of beer cans. Today's best search phrase: "Clogging cue sheets and funky lawn mower." This is why you store your cue sheets separately from your lawn mower. This is just common sense, people. 
posted by M. Giant
8:42 PM
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0 Comments:Saturday, May 15, 2004 Not Fit to Print Here's what I'm not writing about today: * The weather. Even though the weather in this state is seriously messed up. More than usual, even. Last week I was sitting in my office with the window open. Yesterday I was sitting in my office with the window closed and my spring jacket on and almost no feeling in my fingers. On Sunday night, I schlepped our hundred-pound window air-conditioning unit up from the basement, because our bedroom, being at the top of the house and all, gets too hot to sleep in at a certain point, even if we have the central air on. Then yesterday I got home from work and had to turn the central heating back on because it was fifty degrees in there with all the windows closed. I don't remember there being Mays like this when I was a kid. Of course I used to spend every May so giddy about the impending end of the school year that I probably wouldn't have noticed a rain of frogs. * My first hate mail as a Television Without Pity recapper, not quite a month after I got hired. Linda was excited for my having reached this landmark, but my little missive is nothing compared to some of the e-mails she's told me about. Which I'm also not writing about. * A project that Trash and I have been working on for a while. It's large and time-consuming, but it's connected to something I'm not ready to announce yet. Which has rendered the past several weeks chock-full of non-bloggable hours. * Writer's block. I'm not blocked. I'm not! * My current exercise routine that I embarked on at the beginning of last week, because that bores even me. * My theory that the amount of exercise I've done this week has already kick-started my metabolism, because the only evidence I have of that being the case is pretty gross. * The gig my band is playing tonight at the Ginkgo Coffee House at 721 Snelling Avenue in St. Paul at 9:00 p.m., because I think I've flogged that enough by now, don't you? Here's what I am writing about: * All the stuff I'm not writing about. Today's best search phrase: "Geek toddlers clothes." Sure, why not get an early start? You're never too young to get beat up at day care, right? posted by M. Giant 1:48 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 12, 2004 Humpblog (5/12/04) Just got back from this month's Pub Quiz at Kieran's. We did pretty well tonight. We came out strong, with a commanding first-place lead in the first two rounds. We predicted that that lead would evaporate, never to return. We were right. However, we did end up tied for third place. Which isn't bad. Furthermore, we were only four points behind the first place team, whose score was 101. So we all walked out with our heads held high. I should mention that our tem name has been in something of a state of flux. We used to be Mutant Enemy, but Trash and I are the only remnants of that team (which currently consists of us, Zen Viking, G. Grod, and Linda) so we switched to a team name we enjoyed when we were in Seattle: Monkey Knife Fight. But that wasn't doing much for us either, aside from hearing the Irish-accented quizmaster pronounce the word "moonkay" several times per quiz. So last month, we were sucking air on the music round, which is when they play the first few seconds of a song and you're supposed to identify the title and artist. One of the songs was one none of us had ever heard before, although we all agreed that it sounded like something Sting would perpetrate. So we guessed Sting for the artist, and for the title we made a blind guess: "Tantric Booty Call." It turned out to be Alanis anyway, but we did come away with a serviceable team name. At Kieran's, the first-place team gets little trophies, the second-place team gets bottles of wine, and the third-place team (which, in case you've just tuned in, was us this month) gets dick. So that's our team name for next month: Third Place Dick. Which is going to be really embarrassing if we end up in eighth or something. * * * Hey, Microsoft Word? When I type three asterisks and hit return, quit turning my first asterisk into a bullet point. You're not smarter than me, okay? God. * * * Once again, I'm going to pimp my band's next gig (as if I haven't been doing that pretty much constantly in the "next gig" box over there to the right). It's a CD release party at the Ginkgo Coffee House in St. Paul. Don't worry, it's not the confusing part of St. Paul. It's on Snelling and Minnehaha, which is between Interstate 94 and the State Fairgrounds. It's pretty easy to find from the airport, which is where I assume most of you will be coming from. The party goes from eight to eleven, and we're supposed to start playing at nine. But if you're a few minutes late, I'll make them wait until you get there. It's the least I can do. * * * Today's best search phrase: "Outdoor hiding clothes." Because actually looking up how to spell the word "camouflage" is hard, dude. posted by M. Giant 9:50 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 10, 2004 On the Floor There's always been one thing the most wrong with our house. What that that thing is has changed over the years, and it usually declines in severity. As we fix a Worst Thing, the second worst thing steps up and becomes the new Worst Thing. That's home ownership. That's how it goes. For instance, the day we closed, the biggest thing wrong with our house was The Color Of Every Surface In It. We enlisted an army of friends to get almost every room painted before we moved in a stick of furniture. But then we still had the orange shag carpeting in the basement that was so thick that when somebody spilled an entire can of Sunkist on it, nobody could find the spill. Even by touch. Sometimes things became the new Worst Thing without us having to fix anything; they just came up on their own. Like when the ancient fluorescent lights in the bathroom started taking so long to flicker on that we would hit the switch walking by, go do something else, and hope to come back to an illuminated facility a few minutes later. Like when rainwater flowed directly from the roof into our kitchen window, turning the wall plaster below it into oatmeal. Like when every flush of the toilet baptized our basement utility rom with water (and God knows what else). The past few weeks, we've been dealing with lots of Worst Things, sometimes at the same time. Our house looks better than it has since we moved into it (and probably better than it ever did before). Trash's mom came over one weekend, and my parents the next, and with their help we knocked over Worst Things like bowling pins. These were things I'd been dreading tackling for a long time—years, in at least one case—but we got to the point where the Worst Thing in our house that had any tenure at all was the color of the walls in the utility room. Which nobody in the world cares about. I guess I should mention that this was after I'd torn the carpet out of the living room. I mentioned a few weeks ago how I had the major brainwave of deciding do that on a Tuesday evening and didn't end up getting to bed until about four-ish. I don't think I mentioned the condition of the floor underneath. A previous owner—and I assume it was Dr. Jellyfinger because this had his jellyfingerprints all over it—had painted the living room off-white before installing the carpet. And had not bothered to put down a dropcloth, presumably because he figured, "Hey, I'm putting in carpet after this. Who cares about the hardwood floor? I'll never see it again." One wonders if he takes the same approach to neurosurgery. In any case, the wood floor wasn't stained as badly in the living room and hallway as it was in the room that is now the study. On the other hand, the study floor didn't look like a Jackson Pollock in monochrome, either. I count us very lucky that we had a nearly-room-sized area rug all ready to be deployed in there. I count myself even luckier that when it came to the margin of the floor (eighteen inches at its narrowest point), it was Trash and not I who ended up scrunched down on the floor using fingernails and a container of some caustic solvent called Goof-Off™ to peel away countless spatters of paint whose first sight of daylight in over a decade had come just days before. And Trash counts herself lucky once again for that area rug and the mess it hides. So obviously we're going to need to get the floor refinished, and soon. Goof-Off™ is also Varnish-Off™, do there's nothing protecting large areas of bare wood right now. I considered doing it myself again, but we're talking a much bigger space this time, and if you factor in the cost of the sanding drums and disks I'd have to buy, I wouldn't be saving that much money. Not to mention the inconvenience of ourselves and the cats being confined to the kitchen and basement for three or four 24-hour periods in a row while coats of polyurethane dry. Neither of those areas has a bathroom, and I can't see the cats being too pleased about having to share their litter boxes with us. So we'll probably have someone come do it in June when Trash is at a librarians' conference, or even in a couple of weeks while we're in California. And thus will begin the search for the new Worst Thing. But the new Worst Thing will be smaller and less conspicuous than any Worst Thing has ever been before in our house, so it's going to take a while to find it. I'd say at least ten minutes. Today's best search phrase: "How do I get trash off the TV?" Trash would like to point out that she's hardly ever on TV. posted by M. Giant 5:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 05, 2004 Humpblog (5/5/04) In Monday's entry, I forgot to mention the other tale of road rage from Friday. Although this is one of a decidedly different flavor. Trash was out on her lunch break to do some shopping for Dirt's birthday. She was trying to pull into the Shinder's parking lot, but a woman in her eighties was coming out in such a way as to block the entire driveway. Trash didn't honk, or make an obscene gesture, or even rev her engine. She simply gave the other driver a what are you doing? look. But Maude picked up on it, and as she exited the parking lot, she screamed, "FAAAAAWCK YOUUU!!!" out her open car window, her old-lady voice cracking as it dopplered past. Trash approved whole-heartedly. In fact, she's already decided that this is how she will interact with other drivers when she reaches her own golden years. It's like an empowering poem: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me And I will scream FAAAAAWCK YOUUU!!! At any motherfucker who looks at me cross-eyed. You wanna go? We'll go right now, motherfucker! * * * We had a guy come out this week to replace the floor in our entryway. The old entryway floor, as executed by the bane of my existence, our house's former owner Dr. Jellyfinger, was two dozen square feet of yellow-and-ivory linoleum tiles that were so poorly laid that they were curling up at the edges. He'd put them down on top of Masonite, over a perfectly good hardwood floor. Idiot. So the new floor is dark-gray ceramic tile that looks like marble. It's lovely. I picked out the grout for it the other night, deciding that charcoal would go best. And I stand by my choice. It's just that when the guy was grouting—a process which turns out to involve slathering waves of sticky goo on the tiles and then squeegeeing off the excess—the black stuff all over everything was kind of alarming-looking. This was the first time he'd ever worked with that color grout, he told us after it was too late to turn back. Mind you, black grout is just as water-soluble and non-staining as the white and almond he's accustomed to working with. It's just that that black sludge everywhere looked messier. Like it was a psychological thing. I can see where he's coming from. For instance, three cups of water spattered on your kitchen floor and walls is no big thing, but three cups of blood can be pretty alarming to look at. He didn't seem to take much comfort in my pointing that out. * * * Had a good band practice tonight. We were augmented by a fiddler and a mandolin player (who also produced the CD) and we sounded a lot like a real bluegrass band. In a good way. Speaking of the band, and of the CD, and of the temporary six-piece permutation thereof, you can come experience all three on Saturday, May 15. That's the CD release party. It's going to be at the Ginkgo Coffee House on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. We're going on at about 9:00 if you'd care to stop by. Today's best search phrase: "celebrity match unscientific." Oh, now you tell me. * "I Shall Wear Purple" poem by Jenny Joseph. posted by M. Giant 9:16 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 03, 2004 Road Rage I broke my car horn the other day. But I don't think it was my fault. I was heading to work on Friday morning on Interstate 94, at the back of a clump of cars going about sixty. I was in the middle lane of three. In my rearview mirror, this little blue Honda straight out of The Fast and the Furious was catching up to us in the right lane, pushing eighty. I had just enough time to think, Oh, he's going to be sad when he gets up here with the rest of us and there's nowhere else to go and then he was next to me. And then he was coming into my lane. Where I was. Seriously, he was over the dotted line before his back wheel was ahead of my front wheel. There was no room for his car in between mine and the car ahead of me. That didn't stop him. He jinked right over as if nobody was there. I braked, not to let the asshole in, but because if I hadn't he would have hit me. And I couldn't imagine my satisfaction at being in the right would have been much comfort while flipping end-over-end at sixty miles per hour. Naturally, I leaned on the horn. I held down both buttons as hard as I could, as if that would make it louder or something. I heard once about somebody who drove an old Volkswagen Beetle with the engine in the back, and they had installed a big, crazy airhorn off of a semitruck under the hood/trunk. People would hear that noise and wonder where the hell it was coming from. I was wishing for that horn at this particular moment. But all I could do was blow the horn I had until it quit working. Which it did. Otherwise, I'd probably still be honking it. At first, I squished the buttons so hard that when the horn quit working I thought I'd broken them. Which was sad, because I was nowhere near done yet. But then when I got to work and pressed the button on my keychain to set the alarm, there was no telltale horn chirp to tell me it was activated. There was just a soft, muffled click from under the hood. So the alarm was set, but since the alarm consists of the horn going off by itself, the anti-theft system didn't really have a lot of teeth. I've been without a horn in this car before, but it was worse then because it was in the winter. I'd be in a situation where I'd need my horn to send some complex signal like, "Uh, I wouldn't step out into that crosswalk if I were you, because I've got the green light and the roads are icy and if you dart out in front of me I don't know if I'm going to be able to stop it time." It was also worse because I had to take the car into the dealership to get the horn switch fixed. This time I'm pretty sure it's just a fuse, which I can fix on my own. That will of course involve making a trip to the auto-parts store, picking up a twenty-dollar chip of plastic and metal the size of a fingernail, opening my fuse box, and embarking on a lengthy process of trial and error which will inevitably force me to reset my clock and radio presets after I pull the wrong fuse. But at least I won't be paying someone else for labor. What I'd really like to do is find that Honda and use one of its fuses, preferably the one that goes with the starter. I'm not immune to road rage, but this was the most serious consideration I'd ever given to following a fellow motorist to his destination and curbstomping him. Mind you, the last time I tried to administer a crunchy beating, I ended up fighting my fellow fourth-grader to a draw, so I wasn't sure I could pull it off anyway. Instead, I pulled around next to him in the right lane (the spot he'd just abandoned, in fact) drew just slightly ahead of even with him (which I could do because we were still at the back of the pack), and gave him a "Look what your dick move accomplished, asshole" look. And then we were at my exit, so I pulled off. I'm only sad that I failed to get his license plate number, because you can bet your ass I'd be posting it here. Today's best search phrase: "Centipede tanning machine." Also known as a "toaster oven." posted by M. Giant 3:59 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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