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, February 27, 2008 Fortune's Fool While looking for a snack in the pantry today, I spotted a couple of fortune cookies that came with the Vietnamese takeout Trash and I had a couple of weeks ago. I snagged them both and headed back to the computer. But while trying to open the first one, I lost control of the wrapper and the fortune cookie flew straight out in front of me, shattering on the study floor. This seemed a bit like bad juju. I was almost afraid to retrieve the little slip of paper from the wreckage, as though it might now say "Everyone knows you're a fraud" or "You're going to die." What it actually said wasn't a great deal better: Be content with your lot. One cannot be first in everything. I had just decided to tape this inspirational little koan to my computer monitor to keep me humble when I decided to open the other, non-crushed fortune cookie instead (take your own advice, first fortune). That fortune cookie actually survived the trip from the wrapper to my mouth intact, and it rewarded my care with it accordingly. Here's what this one said: Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together as they do in you. Too late, fortune cookies! You can't suck up to me now. The damage is done. Oh, who am I kidding? That was just what I needed right then. I sat back happily in my office chair, ignoring the sound of fortune shrapnel crunching under the wheels. So what I've decided to do is glue both little strips together back to back and carry them around with me in my pocket. For moments when I need a spiritual lift or a reminder to keep it real but don't know which one, I can just pull it out and read whichever side faces me. First, though, I'm going to sweep up the fortune cookie crumbs. It's only right to clean up the mess I made. And of course I'm going to do it naked, because I'm dead sexy. But not the sexiest. And I'm okay with that. P.S. In bed. posted by M. Giant 4:31 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Wow, funny and wise, a great blog combination. But I suppose in the spirit of things I should point out that it's not the funniest or wisest of all...
By Ahem, you better not be first in bed. I don't care how pretty you are.
By Tuesday, February 26, 2008 Dewey Time Thanks to everyone who's donated to the Dewey Donation Systam book drive already. I thank you for your generosity, as does my hot librarian wife. If, however, you've been holding back because you want to make sure you get entered into the drawing to win a GALLEY of MY BOOK that has been SIGNED by ME, now is the time to stop holding back. If you donate books or money to the drive today or tomorrow (or you already did yesterday), you're in the running. Oh, and also? Some kids in need get books and valuable supplies to help them grow up safely into productive members of society who will one day make your life better. I'm just looking out for you here. Go! posted by M. Giant 8:55 AM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, February 24, 2008 Not Cool Loyal (and erratic but lucky) readers of this blog already know about Squirrel Goodnut, the gargantuan, food-stealing squirrel who lives in our neighborhood and whom M. Small has semi-adopted. We haven't seen him for a while. I thought it was because ever since I got back from Florida, it's been too cold to even look outside, let alone go there. But today, when it briefly went above freezing long enough for me to take down one of our Christmas decorations and stick it in the garage, I discovered the real reason he's been incommunicado: he's been working on a project. Check this out:  Yes, in case you're reading this in text-only mode or are simply a person who can't believe what you're looking at: that's an Igloo cooler with a hole gnawed through it. I didn't think anything edible was in there, but clearly Squirrel Goodnut could tell otherwise (outsmarted again!). That was one of the coolers Trash used when she and Blaine made their cookies this past Christmas. No, we didn't lose any two-month-old gingersnaps, but a couple of forgotten bricks of Philadelphia Cream Cheese would have been better off staying forgotten. They were still there, though, merely nibbled a bit around the corners. Which made me realize: Squirrel Goodnut never got in there. Those were mere mouse-bites. As big as that hole is, it's not big enough to accommodate our giant squirrel. Which means tonight, Squirrel Goodnut sneaked into our garage tonight to get back to his long-term project, thinking tonight might be the night he finally got his fat ass through there to the prize, and found it gone. I'd feel bad for him, but fortunately today Trash found a bag of raisins so old they're almost grapes again. M. Small and I scattered those around and filled up the "bird feeder" with them. So if he can't spend another evening shredding injection-molded plastic shaving by painful shaving, there's a possibility he might be able to get roaring drunk. And if he gets behind the wheel of a little car that and ends up wrapped around a laundry-line pole, I just hope it isn't one of ours. posted by M. Giant 8:31 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:Erm... uh.... I hate to tell you this, but that's not the work of a squirrel or a mouse. Trust me. It's a rat. I'm speaking from experience here. Mice can chew through cardboard, but it takes a rat to chew through hard plastic like that. Oooooof...
By Carol, I've seen squirrels do that sort of thing to garbage cans though. My parents bought those really thick rubbermaid cans when I was a kid, and the squirrels were through them in a week. It's possible that it is a squirrel or a rat.
By We used to have one of those bird feeders that had a weighted metal panel that would cover the holes to deter squirrels. Over time, the squirrels chewed through the metal, exposing the holes. Those tenacious bastards are tough.
By I should have taken a picture of the remaining cream cheese, which was barely touched. A rat would have gotten in there and cleaned it out. Unless it's a rat that's as big as Squirrel Goodnut, in which case, does aybody want to buy a house?
By You're right -- a rat probably would've downed that cream cheese whereas squirrels? Probably more fussy in the cuisine department. Living in DC, our rats are as big as squirrels, if not bigger... and that cooler sure looked like rat chew to me. Squirrels around here stick to bird feeders and garbage cans, but rats devour the coolers and vinyl siding. It's so gross.
By
I sympathize with your squirrel problems. I lived in an old house in college and the major problem I had with that house was that a squirrel had taken up residence IN THE WALLS. He used to wake me up at 5am with his scratching. For the longest time I thought it was that the upstairs neighbors had a dog with long claws.
By Wednesday, February 20, 2008 M. Small has a surprising facility for making unexpected connections. For instance, the weekend before we went to Florida, we all went to my niece Deniece's birthday party, which was at a bowling alley. M. Small got to enjoy for the first time the experience of pushing a four-pound orb of plastic down the lane, and watching excitedly as it bounced slowly between the bumpers and nudged a few bowling pins down several minutes later. And then the following weekend, we were on the plane to Florida, and he was looking out the window over the wing, full of questions. Why is that wing so long? Because it needs to be, to hold up a big plane. What's that thing under the wing? The engine. What keeps the plane together? Bolts and rivets and welding and glue. Who made this plane? A company called Boeing. "We went Boeing last week!" he said excitedly. Well, at least he wasn't calling it "goaling" any more. * * * I didn't want to jump the gun on telling you this, but I'm sure I'm allowed now. I'm donating a signed galley of my forthcoming book as one of the Dewey Donation System prizes for donors. So if you donate books or money or whatever to the drive, yo could win said signed galley. You! Oh, and I'll be the one signing it. Just wanted to make that clear. posted by M. Giant 4:27 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Love him! Can't wait to see him, squeeeeee!
By Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Just Dewey It This post is directed at those of my readers who do not also read Pamie, Glark, or Damn Hell Ass Kings: So listen up, you two. It's time again for the mostly-annual book drive in which Pamie and Glark select one or more library-type entities in need and direct the Internet to drop several hundred pallets of books on top of them. And by "the Internet," I mean "you." This year's beneficiaries: The Children's Institute: "We provide healing and care for children who've been affected by violence so they can grow up to lead healthy lives." And they have a library. And the library needs books. And you want to give books, which is why you're still reading. Seriously, it's not like anything funny is going to happen further along in this entry. The Rockhouse Foundation, "committed to improving the human condition of children in Jamaica through capital projects that transform learning environments, programs that support child development, and partnerships that leverage the great people working with Jamaica's children." Tell me that's not something you can get behind. Oh, it is, but you don't want to donate books? Fine, feel free to donate computers or bookcases or small furniture for tiny Jamaican butts instead. I'm not picky. I just wanted to let both of you know about this, because I know you wouldn't want me to let you miss out on an opportunity to exercise your generous nature. Velcrometer readers are the best readers on the Internet, which is why I 'm not afraid to use big words. Now go! 
posted by M. Giant
7:55 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:You forgot to mention the thing of extreme interest to M. Giant fans!
By Sunday, February 17, 2008 Starving M. Small is 99.9% potty-trained now. It was kind of a drawn-out process, and worth any number of blog entries if I wanted to get into that kind of material, but I hope you'll forgive me for not having fully gotten my fingers into that rich, thick, fertile, brown soil, so to speak. We knew that his first few weeks out of diapers would be more messy, not less. No surprises there. What did surprise us was how long it suddenly started taking us to get him to bed at night. The procedure is normally pretty simple, and has been in place for quite some time, whichever one of us is putting him down that particular night. After he's gotten his teeth brushed and his pajamas on and he's settled down in his race car bed, the first thing we do is read him some of his storybooks, generally around five. The books themselves rotate in and out of his favor, with some books only getting read once a month and others being demanded more than once every night for weeks in a row. Then the lamp goes off and we tell him a story we make up, often featuring M. Small as the protagonist, having conversations and adventures with talking versions of our cats and the cast of Cars. Then there's a lullaby or two, a brief snuggle, and he goes to sleep while Trash and I get on with our lives. But he is nothing if not a scammer, and as soon as he realized how invested we were in getting him potty-trained -- which is to say not as much "invested" as "dangerously leveraged" -- he started using it to his advantage. Like, during every stage of the going-to-bed process, he'd announce, "I have to go to the bathroom." Or, I know what you're thinking: he's bluffing. Fine. You change his underwear and pajamas and bedding if he's not. And he wasn't, for the longest time. I remember one night in particular when Trash started putting him to bed a bit before eight while I went down to weecap The Apprentice. When I came upstairs at 9:30, they were on their fifth trip to the bathroom, representing the fifth time M. Small insisted, "I'm starving!" (Tangent here: M. Small, for reasons none of us can fathom, thinks that "starving" means the exact opposite of what it actually means, in the sense of "I've got a poo coming on.") Trash was frustrated that it was taking over an hour and a half to get the kid to bed, but she couldn't exactly get mad at him, since he was producing the goods every time she helped him up onto the throne. And on this and every other night, every time he got back to his bedroom, no matter where in the bedtime process we left off, no matter how tired he'd been at the time, he was wide awake again and had to start all over. Before long, it was taking up to two and a half hours of concentrated effort just to get him to bed every night. This was an untenable situation, because Trash and I count on the hours between his bedtime and ours to get all manner of stuff done: housework, recaps, research, each other, what have you. We tried everything to get the evening-eating process back down to a manageable length. We tried keeping him up late so he'd crash right away, but that just meant it was even later when he finally fell asleep. We tried taking advantage of the fact that he hasn't learned how to lie yet, asking him when he claimed to be starving, "are you just pretending?" Sometimes he'd say yes, but he'd already woken himself up by then. And we tried dosing him with black tar heroin, but it's hard to find in the neighborhood. Then Trash hit on the counterintuitive idea of putting him to bed earlier. I confess that I was like, "Great, now I can spend four hours getting him to sleep tonight instead of three." But it turned out I was wrong, because his falling-asleep "sweet spot" turns out to be right at eight o'clock, which was about when we had previously just been starting to put him to bed. After an hour and only one fake bathroom trip that night, he was sound asleep. So that's the new pattern. Last night I got him down in a record 45 minutes, and thus had two and a half hours free to play Guitar Hero III. Parenting is easy! Now if we could just get him to sleep through the night again. posted by M. Giant 12:28 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:
Want to trade kids for a while? I'll send you my 3-year-old for potty and sleep training administered by experts with recent experience and I'll take your adorable wonderful child and teach him about the wonderful world of Wallace and Gromit obsession. It's a fair trade. Really.
By
Our youngest is 7, and although he's well past the potty training stage, he still knows how to stretch out the going-to-bed process as long as is humanly possible. So we adopted your strategy of starting earlier and backtiming from his ideal fall-asleep time.
By We start around 8 pm and if we're lucky our 2-year-old asleep by 9:30. Problem is, we want to be in bed by 9 pm if we can manage it (I'm pregnant and tired; my husband gets up at 4:15 am for work). I truly can't imagine taking even longer for her bedtime. She's potty trained for solids already... I wonder, would it be so terrible to let her sleep in diapers until she potty trains herself for liquids?
By Oh, Bunny.... so, your kid also spouts things like "Porridge today, Gromit! Chuesday!" and "Cracking toast, Gromit!", eh? Thank GOD I'm not alone.
By Thursday, February 14, 2008 Loveline For as long as I can remember, our local paper has done a thing called "Lovelines" every Valentines Day. It's a special section of classified ads where readers who are in new relationships get to send in romantic messages to their new partners and have them run in the paper. You can even have them include simple graphics and the color red for a little extra. What it amounts to is a cheap way to rake in some revenue in a time of leanness brought about in part by online alternatives to dead-tree editions. Which is weird, because I can't seem to find this year's Lovelines on the paper's website. In fact, for all I know, they've discontinued it entirely. It's not like I'm about to go pick up a dead-tree edition just to find out. I know I just referred to people in new relationships. It's open to people in longer-term relationships too, but it's not like we use them. Unless it's like a tradition for them or something. I placed one for Trash way back in the early nineties, and she laughed and told me to save my money from now on. So what we do instead -- in the years when we remember -- is I go through the ads that other people placed, find one that could be from me, and then claim it as my own. It's not like it's stealing; the person who placed the ad still gets to enjoy it, as does their partner, and they're totally oblivious to the fact that Trash and I are sharing the joy they paid for. If it's like stealing anything, it's more like stealing wireless Internet access from your next door neighbor (which we also do sometimes, but they gave us their password so that's not really stealing either). It's harder than you think to find an ad written for another couple that fits yours as well. It was easier years ago, because a lot of people used their initials, and both mine and Trash's are fairly common. But now everyone has e-mail addresses and online aliases, and try as I might, I can't seem to convince Trash that Tripod666 is really me. So I guess I'm going to just have to bite the bullet and compose one of my own again for Trash. Obviously it's too late to get it into print, so I'll just put it up here. The advantage is that I don't have to pay extra for the colors and graphics, so I can pull out all the stops. [GIANT RED HEART] TO Lois [IN RED] [ROW OF LITTLE CUPIDS] Our marriage has been the best thing that ever happened to me, along with the kids and our dog Ghost. I bet were the happiest couple in St. Paul, and I look forward to the next 26 Valentine's days w/u! [LITTLE RED HEART] Happy Valentine's Day [LITTLE RED HEART] Love, Jack [IN RED] [BIG RED HEART] Yes, I know some of the specifics were off, but you have to respect traditions. Especially the romantic ones. posted by M. Giant 5:30 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Your email link sent me to bible college again! Are you trying to tell us something?!
By
OMG - We totally do that too! (The appropriating of another's ad thing, I mean.) Neither of us has ever actually paid for a real ad, so you've got us there, but years ago we started joking that "Oh yes, I did get a Loveline ad for you this year.... it's *this* one" and now it is a V Day tradition. (We still get the dead-tree version of the paper delivered daily, call us Luddites if you must.)
By Hey M Giant, can you fix your email link? It goes to some spam Bible college. Thanks!
By Now I have to go listen to "Lovelines" by the Replacements over and over.
By Monday, February 11, 2008 Starstruck When I was at the grocery store yesterday, my cashier-of-a-certain-age discreetly pointed out a local celebrity to me. "That's Paul Magers," she said. Now, people in both the Twin Cities and Los Angeles viewing areas know that Paul Magers hasn't been on the air here for several years. But she quickly rallied. "Wait, not Paul Magers, the guy who does the weather," she corrected herself. "Paul Douglas?" I asked. "Yes!" she whispered excitedly. Using the discreet don't-look-now turn I've honed over the years during several trips to New York, L.A., and backstage at a certain radio show, I scanned the lines for someone who looked like this guy:  But I didn't see him. I figured he was too far away, and the cashier's eyes were just sharper than mine. But she quietly insisted that he was only two lanes down, and was the only one on his cell phone. I had already seen the guy she was referring to, and he looked more like this:  "Wow, there he is," I said agreeably. But because this wasn't enough excitement, she also had to inform me that among their regular customers was another news personality, specifically, "that Oriental girl." I could have provided her the name the person I suspected she was talking about, an ethnically ambiguous local anchor with an Italian surname, but I really wanted to get out of there before she could see in my eyes that I've been inside Al Franken's house. Maybe this is something that happens to supermarket cashiers after a certain number of years. Constantly surrounded by photographs of actual celebrities for their entire shifts, they start seeing imaginary ones everywhere they look. This woman really needs to move to Los Angeles, where she will literally see celebrities every day, whether they're there or not. For instance, on my last visit there with Trash, we were just driving in from LAX when I realized that the driver of the car in the next lane over was Larry David. I thought it a little odd that he would be driving an 84 Honda Civic up La Cienega that early on a Saturday morning, but there was no mistaking that hairline from the back. If my cashier relocated to Hollywood, she would have experiences like mine from the moment she woke up until she finally passed out at the end of the day, giddy from starstruck exhaustion on the sidewalk in front of Mann's Chinese Theater. Who knows, she might even spot Paul Magers. posted by M. Giant 7:15 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:So, Jan-Michael Vincent was at your supermarket, eh?
By Could have been Sven Sundgaard, though, based on your sample picture. Did his ears stick out?
By I'd only be excited to see Paul Douglas while out and about if it was without the hair piece. That might make my year, so great is my disdain of toupees.
By Friday, February 08, 2008 Traveling Companion My parents' vacation rental house is about an hour from the airport in Fort Myers, which gave M. Small plenty of time to pass out in his car seat on Wednesday afternoon while they were driving us to catch our plane home. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was being kind of grumpy, and not such great company while he was awake. On the other, it meant he was going to be awake for the whole flight home. 5:57 p.m. EST: As I wrestle to get the car seat strapped into his window seat, he keeps trying to squeeze past me into the aisle while other people are boarding. At 6'2", I have never before been so grateful for the complete lack of space between one row of airplane seats and the next. For some reason, it's a lot harder to get that thing buckled in on the right side of the plane. Remind me to get us seats on the left side of the plane fro now on, at least until he's sixteen. 6:03 p.m. EST: "I have to go to the bathroom." You never like to tell a kid who's only been potty trained for a couple of months that he's going to have to wait. But that's exactly what I do. I hear someone a couple of rows away saying, "We're off to a great start." I make a mental note to disable his oxygen mask at the first opportunity. 6:04 p.m.: EST: "Can you read me a story?" Only too happy to, my boy! My dad had even taken us to the local Books A Million that very morning, since M. Small was almost as tired of the three books we'd brought down as I was. So of the new books he had, did he want one of the Curious George paperbacks, or one of the Cars ones. "I want Ratatouille, he announced. This was in reference to the book I'd read to him in the store but hadn't bought, on the grounds that it was a hardcover the size of a barn door. He's still asking for it, two nights after we got home. We may need to pick that up soon. 6:28 p.m. EST: Somewhere over Tampa, I decide I can't put off his need to visit the potty any longer. I don't think the seatbelt sign has gone off yet. Ask me if I care. 6:50 p.m. EST: "Can I watch Ratatouille?" Sure, kid, I'll just pop in the DVD her on the airplane and you can go to town. Fortunately, my parents bought him a portable DVD player last year. It is a lifesaver. I can't even tell you how many times it's saved his life. 6:51 p.m. EST: "I have to poo." Back to the bathroom. Poo is not forthcoming, although he does give it a go. At one point, with me standing over him perched on the plastic horseshoe and the two of us taking up nearly every cubic inch of space in there, he actually says to me, "Could you give me a little privacy?" That would be a no. 7:15 p.m. EST: The movie is put aside for a while, and we read stories. I'm particularly proud of one of our acquisitions, a two-in-one Cars tie in that has several sheets of stickers in the middle. He spends a pleasant hour taking stickers off the sheets and placing them over similar illustrations in the book, lending it a Picasso-esque quality. Now I know what animated films would look like if Pablo were alive and working for Pixar. 7:15 p.m. CST: Whoa, what happened there? 7:28 p.m. CST: For the first time in history, a parent asks a toddler, "Are we there yet?" 7:42 p.m. CST: After watching a bit more Ratatouille, M. Small decides to watch his I Love CAT Machines DVD instead. A half-hour of construction-equipment porn follows. M. Small asks me repeatedly, "Can you get me a power shovel?" I reply, "You have an excavator. What's the difference between an excavator and a power shovel?" He is happy to explain: "Can you get me a power shovel?" Unsurprisingly, the flight attendant is of no help whatsoever. 8:04 p.m. CST: On final approach, M. Small grabs my glasses of my face and drops them into the space between his seat and the bulkhead. The seatbelt sign is back on, so I can't get up to go after them. We have a big argument. This is partially my fault. While we were in the pool at Nana and Grandpa's, he would occasionally snatch my specs and drop them in the drink. This was funny, until I realized the bottom of the pool was cement and it was scratching the lenses. Ten minutes before I'm going to have to guide him half-blind through a busy airport, it's not remotely amusing. He smoothes it over by telling me how much he loves me, kissing me, and advising me, "Be happy." I defy the seatbelt sign for long enough to get them back. He has learned his lesson, and will not throw my glasses again until the next evening at home, popping out one of the lenses. 8:22 p.m. CST: We dock at the jetway, and the bing of the seatbelt light going off is immediately followed by the metallic popcorn sound of 180 buckles coming undone at the same time. I take M. Small out of his car seat, and he seems startled to realize that there are people in the row behind us. "They were there the whole time," I assure him. He rallies quickly, however, and as we wait to get off, he helpfully explains to them where we are and how the airplane works. 8:46 p.m. CST: Trash meets us outside the airport, and asks if he slept on the flight. "No," I say. "And I'll be sleeping in the car on the way home, if you don't mind." posted by M. Giant 9:18 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:They must teach stuff like "Be happy!" to kids in secret toddler school because it's so sweet, in theory...
By Tuesday, February 05, 2008 Snowbirds It's been snowing on and off for the past two days in Minneapolis. Fortunately, I'm coming to you from here:  I almost wasn't. A few weeks ago, Trash got tickets for M. Small and me to fly down to visit my parents while they're on their extended vacation in Florida. She couldn't come because she's teaching a class at one of the local universities and couldn't fit it into her schedule. I was already nervous about traveling alone with M. Small -- not the plane, so much, but also navigating the airport without backup. It's hard enough to get through security these days, wrestling the bags and the car seat and taking off every metal thing I'm wearing from my glasses to my ammo belt. But M. Small requires full attention at all times in public places, aside from the fact that he starts crying the moment you lay him down on the conveyor belt until you pick him up at baggage claim. So the night before we were supposed to leave, we tried to check in from home. Except we couldn't seem to get seats together, either online or over the phone. Trash and I both kind of started to freak out. It's not like I was about to let M. Small sit in a different part of the plane from me, next to a stranger. Because, after all, there would be no way for said stranger to know when M. Small really had to pee or whether he just wanted to see the M. Small-sized bathroom again. I would never do that to some unsuspecting passenger (yes, I was kidding about baggage claim). So I ended up talking to three different people at the airline on Saturday night, and while they all but guaranteed that I'd be able to sit next to M. Small, it was that "all but" that made us nervous. One of the people actually suggested I buy two more tickets that night, in order to reserve seats that way. Leaving aside the fact that our budget for this trip didn't really allow for that, I didn't understand how people buying seats the night before got precedence for seat reservations over people who bought them three weeks before. But 5:30 the next morning, all three of us piled into Trash's car, hoping for the best. I had the same argument with a ticket agent and the First Class supervisor. I assume the First Class in the latter's job title referred to airplane seating, because she wasn't able to give me any seats on the spot either. Even when I asked them to call ahead to the gate and make sure we were all set, they refused. But we decided to go on ahead, expecting to have to return. We said goodbye to Trash, and headed on through security. I needn't have worried. As bad as I thought it would be, I was able to get both of us and all of our stuff through in less than forty-five minutes once we reached the front of the line. And then we went to the departure gate, where I was fully ready to plunk M. Small's adorable little bum on the counter and plead my case for like a half hour. But then the ticket agent handed me our two boarding passes, already printed out, just waiting for us, with our names on them. For adjacent seats. I think the airline was just showing us who was in charge. So here we are now in Florida, where M. Small spent most of the first day marveling, "I don't need a coat!" and the rest of the day in the pool with me. We're flying back tomorrow. Fortunately, we already have our seats reserved. posted by M. Giant 9:39 AM 4 comments 4 Comments:And if you are wondering if Trash is bitter and resentful, considering our snowfall yesterday, why yes she is.
By
We've talked about just one of us (and the kids) going to Florida to visit the in-laws. I don't think I want to navigate the airport with TWO kids by myself. I'm impressed, M.Giant.
By Yuh-huh. Check that animated computer weather map for the last 24 hours in the Chicagoland area, too. So many pretty colors!
By
M G, That sunshine and pool look fabulous! Hope you guys had a great time. Now, I seek your advice:
By Sunday, February 03, 2008 El Burrito I've always assumed that 30 Rock was greatly exaggerated in terms of how absurd it can really be to work for a subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Company. But then I got my 1099 form in the mail the other day. I know I didn't get someone else's form, because the address and the Social Security number on it were both correct. The amount on the form was off by a considerable amount, which was not entirely surprising. But the name was off by even more. Apparently the media empire has been laboring under the misconception that my name is in fact "El Burrito." Trash called me at work yesterday to tell me about it, but it wasn't entirely real to me until I got home and saw it for myself. And as much as I'd love to claim to the IRS that "El Burrito" is one of my aliases, it seemed safer to call about getting a new 1099 generated. Trash was the one who actually made the call, and she quickly found herself on the line with an outsourcing facility somewhere in India. And the guy tried to help, but from what Trash told me about the conversation afterwards, he didn't really seem to appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Or, more accurately, the silliness of it. He decided to start by addressing the incorrect total first. "What should the amount be, Mrs. Burrito?" he asked politely. Trash kind of had to explain that no, in fact, there was nobody named "Burrito" in the household. Apparently burritos are not a common food item in India, so he wasn't aware of how it sounded until she kindly explained to him how it would sound if someone addressed him by the name of a menu item. "It's like if someone thought your name was Mr. Satay." "My name is Mr. Satay," he answered. "Okay, then, if your name was Mr. Curry," Trash floundered. After that she ended up on hold for several minutes. Apparently he resented the comparison to one of my fellow Sheinhardt Wig Company employees, the one on the Today show named Ann. He may not know what a burrito is, but he knows enough not to appreciate that. So I don't really know what happens next. All I know is that I appear to have a new nickname. posted by M. Giant 6:28 PM 13 comments 13 Comments:el burrito grande.
By Welcome to my life. :)
By see, when you mentioned that earlier i thought you were making some kind of weird joke i didn't get. i apologize for my density, mr. burrito.
By It is a huge oversight that they're not using your full name, El Burrito Supremo.
By Does that make M. Small = M. Taquito?
By
And they said that whole Bravo takeover thing would be seamless . . .
By
Can't stop laughing. The comments make it even better!
By
I would love to have an alias as interesting as El Burrito. I am particularly amused that it's not just the last name of "Burrito" with your correct first name but "El Burrito".
By
At least you GOT a 1099 - we're still waiting on ours.
By I'll always know you don't have a racist bone in your body because your first instinct wasn't to say, "Hey, they sent me Omar's 1099 by accident!"
By How come YOU always get the funny 1099 Forms? Dang.
By Omar - so I take it your 1099 didn't have your name as "Dat Dere Lutefisk"?
By
Now that I look more closely, it says, "OK Dere, Buddy, You Betcha!"
By 
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