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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Friday, February 26, 2010 Housequake Trash and I heard a strange noise on Tuesday afternoon, at what we later learned was 2:39 p.m. I was in the study, and I heard a soft thump, along with the house giving a little creak like it does sometimes when a door is slammed. I assumed a cat had jumped off our bed upstairs and hit the floor with a little more force than usual. It sounded a little different to Trash, who was out in the living room. To her, it sounded like a large chunk of ice had fallen off the house in what we laughingly refer to around here as a thaw. All she was certain about was that the sound came from outside, but she's deaf in one ear, so her triangulations of the source of noises is worse than useless. In any case, we didn't give it any more thought. On Tuesdays, our friend Bitter picks up M. Edium from school a little early. She stopped by our house to pick up the car seat about a half hour after the noise, which we'd already forgotten about. But then later she told us about how on the way over to the Montessori school, she noticed hazy smoke drifting across the intersection, and heard some sirens not for away. She mentioned this to me later on, and I snatched up this very laptop to check the local paper's website to see if there had been any mention of a fire. In fact, a house had blown up, and not that far away. Exactly a mile from ours, in fact. At 2:39 p.m. According to the article, a contractor had cut a gas line. That triggered an evacuation of the house and the whole block, so when the house exploded, nobody was killed or even hurt, which was the good news. The bad news was that the next morning, when I wanted to drive past the crater to rubberneck, you still couldn't get within a block because of all the barricades. The street the house is on, which is a major thoroughfare through the neighborhood, was open again that evening when it was time to drive M. Edium to his gymnastics class. As we passed, basically we saw a snowy pile of rubble, surrounded by floodlights, with at least one TV reporter doing a stand-up from across the street. I told M. Edium what had happened. Upon learning everyone was safe, his main concern was for the contractor who had cut the gas line. He was sure it was an accident, and hoped the contractor would not get fired. I have no details on that score. I probably wouldn't have even thought about this today, except for how this morning, Trash realized two things at the same time. One was that the kettle had been on the stove for a long time, and the other was that she was starting to smell gas. I ran into the kitchen and saw the knob on full blast, but no flame under the kettle. It's one that tends to spit when overfilled, and I could only assume the water had doused the flame. Hard not to think of that crater a mile away at a moment like that. Especially with M. Edium home with us on Fridays. So I opened the one non-shrinkwrapped window in the kitchen, and turned on the hood fan, and opened the front door, and the back door, and the window at the top of the stairs to vent it all out. After a few minutes, the danger had clearly passed. And more importantly, Trash was able to enjoy her cup of tea. In an intact house. I know this entry would probably have been more interesting if our house actually had blown up. It certainly would have made for a more interesting local news week. But all in all, I think I prefer it this way. posted by M. Giant 9:22 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:I just had a heart attack in the middle of that entry.
By A reasonable series of actions to the gas in the kitchen *EXCEPT* for turning on the vent-a-hood. When in the presence of a possibly explosive gas mixture, it is IMPERATIVE that no electrical devices are switched on or off. Turning things on/off can make sparks, especially things like fan motors.
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The title made me think of the Prince song, which had me concerned about how family-friendly this entry would be!
By I have a strong desire to check the gas lines at my house, even though we don't have any...
By Wednesday, February 24, 2010 Over Lap Even with both of us working at home, mornings around here can be a little hectic. We race around trying to get M. Edium conscious and dressed and fed and out the door, because he doesn't work from home. His Montessori school is a long way from perfecting telecommuting technology. So then I usually drive him to school, come home (in a hurry if I have a morning conference call coming up), and proceed to get myself yelled at. I'm late for Exie's morning lap-snuggle, and he's not happy about it. Even if I'm actually early. Trash started calling me "Crazy Cat Person" when she started working at home, which is totally unfair. First of all, the whole point of having cats is to bond with them, and if that involves letting them curl up in your lap while you're working on your laptop, then where's the harm? Secondly, it only looks like Exie's in my lap for four hours nonstop; he takes several breaks during that time, some of them as long as a few minutes. And finally, I see no problem with being motivated to keep certain members of our household happy when they have a history of expressing unhappiness by peeing on our shit. And does it really interfere with my daily routine? How could it, when it's part of it? Yes, I might occasionally wish I could get up to turn on my printer, or get something from the back of my desk, or make it to the bathroom before the whites of my eyes turn yellow. Trash not only doesn't understand this, she doesn't contribute to the effort. She claims that the cats can't get as comfortable on her, due to her workspace configuration and the way she sits and the less expansive real estate of her lap. Worse yet, when she wants me to do something, she expects me to get up and do it right away, whether the cat has just arrived or is fast asleep. Is that even fair, I ask you? I mean, it's not like that grease fire in the kitchen is going to just run away if I don't get to it in the next ten minutes. I even get mocked for my understanding of their separate snuggling styles. Phantom is a little more high-maintenance. Generally confining her snuggles to the afternoon, she'll purr and writhe happily for an indefinite period of time, but becomes mightily offended if I shift my legs while they're under her. And in exchange for keeping her cooped up inside, making her crap in a plastic pan that I then scoop out daily, and only checking her food and water bowls a few times a day, I think a little deep vein thrombosis is the least I can endure in return. Whereas Exie, who as I've said is more of a morning snuggler, will put up with pretty much anything. It doesn't matter how many times I cross and uncross my legs; until he decides he's done, he'll stay up there until he falls down. It's the falling down where his version of high-maintenance comes in. Trusting to the point of arrogance, he sees it as my job to keep him from rolling right off should he sleepily shift positions. It's not as bad as it used to be, whatever Trash might say. Yes, I did get pretty good at one-handed typing during those periods when he would expect me to support his unconscious head lest he spill limply to the floor like a furry Slinky, but it is with mixed emotions that I tell you that those days seem to be over. Mostly. But to Trash, all this just translates into "Crazy Cat Person." I think she's just jealous. I've told her she can snuggle in my lap during the workday too, but so far she hasn't taken me up on it. Maybe I should stop insisting she leave room for the cats there. posted by M. Giant 10:03 AM 6 comments 6 Comments:I promise, she isn't just jealous. Those cats have M. Giant TRAINED, and he is totally a crazy cat person. I'm talking full-on nutter.
By Wow. I'm sort of with Trash on this one. And my husband is also a crazy cat person. I think we need a support grou.
By Perfect! Some people just don't get how great it is to have a cat in your lap.
By My husband is ALSO a crazy cat person! He's in grad school/seminary, so whenever I call home and he's doing his homework, he reports which cat is in his lap. He works at a computer desk most of the time, so it's not unusual for him to have one in his lap, on on the back of his chair and one on the printer.
By I can't sit down for more than a minute before one of may cats cops a squat. Would I change it? Never.
By Having cats sit on yo doesn't make you a Crazy Cat Person. It makes you something even better: Cat Furniture.
By Saturday, February 20, 2010 Cold and Dark As I write this, it's February 20th a date that has been much on my mind of late. It's not just because it's now officially Late February, with all its accompanying connotations of the Minnesotan winter being almost half over and patches of pavement peeking damply up at the sky here and there. Although I suppose the symbolism of renewal and hope is certainly apropos. This date has been on our refrigerator for some time. It's on a homemade business card that a young woman left behind at the end of an unannounced visit back in January. A visit that was itself a lifeline of portent in those even colder, even darker days. The legend printed at the top bears a message of deliverance no less powerful, in their way, than the Twenty-third Psalm, although in much fewer words. These words are: GIRL SCOUT COOKIES Delivery Dates: Feb 20 to Mar 15 There's a photo of the young angel herself, who has gazed out at us these many days with such constancy and steadiness, as if saying, "Hold on. I'll come back. And when I do, everything will be all right." I recall her first visit well. It was a lethargic Sunday afternoon. Trash, M. Edium, and I were sitting around the kitchen table, listening to the frigid wind whistle past outside with its grim freight of claimed souls, debating in the slate-colored daylight whether the frost patterns on the window looked more like the ruins of Hiroshima or the Ebola virus, when the doorbell rang. Needing only a visit from a persistent petition-flogger or a door-to-door vivisectionist to make this day complete, I fatalistically flung open the door, and heard the one sales pitch in the world to which I have no resistance whatsoever. "Would you like to buy some Gi--" Trash was at my side in a flash, inviting the youthful seraphim and her beatific attendant inside to make the order while I dashed upstairs to find where we've been keeping the checks since we went to online bill-pay. "How many Thin Mints should we order?" I heard her calling up after me, her voice Dopplering sharply. "All of them!" I hollered back. But Trash, being of a cooler head, reminded me that there would be other opportunities this year. All the coworkers she buys them from, for instance. But in our frenzy of joy, we'd forgotten that we are both working from home now, and thus have no coworkers to buy from. At least not until we get M. Edium into the Girl Scouts. So we didn't realize we'd put in a ridiculously small order until too late. But even the fourteen boxes we ordered are something to look forward to. Now that the day foretold by the prophecy is at hand, we can now spend all our days on the front step, awaiting our second visitation, letting our spirits rise every time we hear a knock at the door, or the doorbell, or somebody walking down our street, or the sun coming up. That business card also has a phone number on it, and it's going to be difficult not to call it for updates. Hourly. And this is because, out of the Thin Mints we ordered last year, I'm down to two little cookies, waiting in the freezer, and I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to leave them alone. posted by M. Giant 8:41 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
As not only the mother of a newly minted Daisy Scout this year, but also as the newly minted leader of said child's Daisy troop, I appreciate and applaud your support of the Girl Scout Cookie sales.
By Mine arrive Tuesday. I am agog. Agog! I tell you.
By Wednesday, February 17, 2010 Gym Dandy II One of the things Trash likes about the gym we signed M. Edium up for is the loyalty points program. She wanted to get started racking them up right away, which is why she immediately called her sister and had him sign up her six-year-old, whom I will call Denephew. She not only signed him up, she signed him up for the same class M. Edium was taking, at the same time, on the same night. We're really happy having an only child, but one of the results of that is that whenever M. Edium gets around one or more of his cousins, he gets wound up. I had my doubts about this arrangement when we headed over to M. Edium's first official class, but I also had my hopes that his usual excitement would be channeled into all the directed jumpin and running around that goes on in there. Especially now that I knew the rules about parents not being allowed in there. Which turned out to be a good thing, because if we had been, I would have been in there yelling at him instead of only pressing my angry, snarling face against the glass. M. Edium and Denephew quickly emerged as the problem children, but after a short time the class separated into two groups and they were split up. And several minutes later, M. Edium even followed his group to the other side of the gym. He wasn't so bad during the time they were off in their separate groups, but then the class reunited at the edge of the room, and bouncy balls were handed out, and he quit listening all over again, even as Denephew continued to behave. You know that feeling when your kid is that kid. And if you don't, keep reading. In the car on the way home, after I had explained that we would not be stopping for fries as Trash had suggested, I gave him a pretty hard time for not doing what the teacher said. M. Edium, who is always truthful, almost to a fault, asked me, "Could you hear what the teachers were saying?" Now, I never yelled, I never swore, I did anything scary, but I confess I may have resorted to sarcasm. "So are you saying," I asked, "that the teacher was telling all of the kids but you to put their feet on the ball, but you were supposed to throw your ball at Denephew's head?" Silence from the back seat. "And when the teacher told the other kids to pick up their balls in their hands and carry them around in the circle, she told you to keep throwing yours at Denephew's head?" Still nothing. "And that at the end of class, the teacher had all the other kids put their balls away, but you were supposed to keep throwing yours at Denephew's head?" To his credit, he was not saying that. The next week, class was preceded with dire warnings about what would happen if he didn't listen better. At the top of the list of threatened occurrences was no more gymnastics classes. Which I was a little worried about myself, as I wasn't sure we could get our money back at this point. But it turned out okay. I suspect part of this was because Denephew, being a year older, had been promoted to a different class that meets on a different day at a different time. Which is win-win, because we get to keep our referral points, M. Edium gets more out of his lessons, and Denephew is in much less danger of sustaining severe head trauma. At least until the next family gathering. posted by M. Giant 5:25 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Wow--I have SO been there. My oldest is usually very well behaved, but if there's another kid who is acting wild, she usually thinks that kid is hilarious. She not only eggs on the wild child, but sometimes ends up participating in whatever craziness that kid is cooking up. It's mortifying when you hear your kid getting singled out--repeatedly.
By Sunday, February 14, 2010 Dare for Dinner For about a year now, Trash and I have been having our friend Chao over pretty regularly for what she calls "Bad Food Night," although it's anything but. We can't remember all of the magnificent successes of this tradition, but we do remember what kicked it off. Trash of all people hit on the idea of making meatloaf, but instead of using plain saltine crackers for the filler, we'd use Chicken in a Biskit™ crackers. It ended up being one of the best meals we ever made. Instead of bland meatloaf, it was infused with that delicious bird-dust that makes Chicken in a Biskit the magical gourmet experience it is. Alas, Trash hates Chicken in a Biskit on both philosophical and gustatory grounds, so she wasn't even able to sit at the table with us while Chao, his nephew, and I polished off not only the whole meatloaf, but a three-liter bottle of store-brand grape soda. She can be a bit of a food snob. But that hasn't stopped her from coming up with more recipes she thinks will scare us away. The more whiskey-tango, the better Which, as long as there's meat (and especially bacon) in it, hasn't happened so far. This is not to say there hasn't been a misstep or two. For instance, there was the time I burned the beer-marinated meat on the grill. I don't like burned, Chao doesn't like beer, and Trash doesn't like meat, so that one had three strikes against it right away. Then there was the batch of bacon brownies I decided to make. Originally the plan was to simply coat the backing pan in bacon grease, but when Trash suggested replacing the cooking oil with it as well, I couldn't resist, even though I should have. The brownies smelled fine, sort of, but they tasted like brownies that had been used to clean the barbecue. But other than that, everything has been a success, if by "success" you mean "stuff we love that Trash finds disgusting." It's especially fun since she makes most of it. I can't even recall what all has come out of our slow-cooker, oven, and stove on these nights, which is too bad. Most nights, we (that is, Chao and I) say this was a success, and we'll have to try it again. But so far all that's come around again is the original Chicken in a Biskit meatloaf. Most of these recipes are either invented on the fly, or Trash finds them online at prestigious gourmet sites like Epicurious, Bon Appetit, or This Is Why You're Fat. Or sometimes we'll just search for recipes based on a certain ingredient. That's how we ended up with Sour Cream Chicken in a Biskit Chicken last week. You start by marinating chicken in sour cream for an hour (you know, just to get that sour cream flavor all through it). Then you "dredge" it through a mixture of Chicken in a Biskit crumbs, grated parmesan, and tarragon, and throw it in the slow-cooker with a couple of sticks of butter. We probably could have gotten by with a stick and a half, but the Chicken in a Biskit stuffing that resulted was nothing short of transcendent. In fact, we're pretty sure we're going to do that one again, and soon. We liked it enough to even remember it. And though last week's Pepsi roast with egg noodles was another standout, we need to start recycling some of these ideas already. Maybe this week we'll come back to the barbecue bacon lasagna. That was good stuff, and this time I won't even overcook it. posted by M. Giant 9:18 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:How long in the slow cooker?
By I was caught unawares by a pretty severe snowstorm several years ago, and I found out that stale Cheez-Its make awesome meatloaf filler.
By Seriously, it was amazing. I'd pay top dollar in a restaurant for it, but sadly, there aren't a lot of restaurants that offer slow cooker meals - which is ridiculous.
By Friday, February 12, 2010 Cold Case Cram Until very recently, my only interaction with the show Cold Case was telling my DVR to start recording it because The Amazing Race was running over into its time slot again. My knowledge was purely general, but I understood that it's about a team of police detectives who work unsolved cases from the past, aided by highly evocative flashbacks and the fucked-up hair of lead actress Susanna Thompson. And even that knowledge proved imperfect, because the lead actress is in fact Kathryn Morris. But lately, Trash has been keeping the TV on in our office during work days, and despite my best efforts to mentally tune it out, I've unwillingly absorbed several recent episodes in reruns on TNT. And more than one assumption I had about the show has proved incorrect. For one, I thought it would be extra-challenging for our heroes to work these cases that date back decades. For someone whose experience with TV procedurals consists mainly of watching several seasons of CSI, I couldn't see how they could accomplish anything when all forensic evidence was long gone, if it had ever been properly collected at all, back in the days before anyone had ever seen so much as an episode of Quincy. Obviously that leaves nothing but yellowing documents and eyewitness accounts, which is where the evocative flashbacks come in. Now, if you don't know any more about the show than I did a couple if weeks ago, here's where you might begin to wonder if it sometimes strays into the realm of philosophy. There are fertile fields to plow here, from meditations on the mutability of memory to explorations of the subjectivity of perception, and as many as half a dozen unreliable narrators a week whose every self-serving recollection should be fair game to be picked apart. If you can stop them from showily phasing back into their younger selves before your eyes all the time, that is. Instead, it's a cross between Murder She Wrote and Quantum Leap, with an occasional dash of L&O:SVU-style sexual ickiness to keep the demo numbers from skewing older than they already are. As previously mentioned, the show's all about the evocative flashbacks. No matter how long ago, or how peripheral the interview subject's involvement with the case, their memories are literally photographic. They remember every little detail of the relevant scene, right down to what carefully selected period song was playing at the time. And we all know what it's like when someone tells us a story. There are digressions and omissions and interruptions any number of obstacles to getting at what really happened. But not on Cold Case. I think that what sets Detective Rush and her team apart from the rest of the force is their magical ability to listen to people's blurry memories and absorb everything in it as though they just watched the flashback themselves -- cheesy period-specific photography gimmicks and all. And nobody ever lies, except by omission. Often they'll re-interview a subject who left something out, but it's a whole, self-contained scene that they now share in its entirety -- including one recent episode in which a social worker gave a detailed account of how he hit on a toddler he was supposed to be looking out for. So I've learned nothing about police work, perception, or memory. What I have learned is that I never want to live in Philadelphia, where the show is set. The music's too loud, there are perverts around every corner, and if you get killed, nobody's going to figure out who did it until years after you've withered away to a worm-ridden skeleton. But obviously I'm thinking too much about this, especially with regard to a show that's not been on long enough that some of the "old" murders will soon start taking place during the years it's been on the air. I might even be thinking about it more than the writers of Cold Case do. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out how I can find room in my busy weekend schedule to get to one of those showings of Rashomon. posted by M. Giant 8:00 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:At least it's not another reality show with the apparent goal of proving the premise: People Suck.
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TNT is quicksand for the work-at-home writer since it provides background noise but never particulatly engages the brain (like, for example, something enjoyable on TCM). I've probably seen most episodes of *Cold Case,* am on my second round of
By Tuesday, February 09, 2010 Secret Santa Right around Christmas, when Amazon boxes were all but hailing down on our house, one showed up containing a mystery. It was a pair of Star Wars items. One was a Star Wars Science kit. Star Wars Science, as you've probably surmised, is a line of Star Wars-themed science experiments. In this case, it was a volcano that's a miniature version of the one that famously turned Anakin Skywalker into a crispy critter. It has containers where you pour ingredients that then bubble up and overflow like lava. The other item was an R2-D2 Play-Doh playset. It comes with a couple of containers of Play-Doh, and a toy R2-D2 that can be used to make different Play-Doh shapes but is cool enough to be fun even without Play-Doh. Now, if I told you that M. Edium has played with everything he got for Christmas, I'd be lying. But he has spent lots of quality time with both of these gifts. And it's not hard to see why. If there's anything he likes better than Play-Doh, it's volcanoes. If there's anything he likes better than volcanoes, it's science. If there's anything he likes better than science, it's Star Wars. And if there's anything he likes better than Star Wars, it's Play-Doh. So obviously with such a perfectly targeted gift, we assumed that it had been sent by a close friend. But the tag had no sender's name, and we couldn't figure out how to research it. Hell, he still has his wish list under the name "M. Tiny." If we can't find out how to change that, we're not going to be smart enough to research an anonymous gift. It would have been easy just to tell him that it came from Santa Claus, but that would be lying, wouldn't it? So we asked some of our friends who hadn't already given him a gift or sent one with their name on it, "Did you send this to him?" They'd always be like, "…no…" and then a few days later, a gift for M. Edium would show up from them. Which was really not our intention. And I'd appreciate you not telling him about this when he gets older, because I don't want him shaking the trees in Januarys to come, hoping to take the edge off his post-holiday letdown. So now I come to the point of this entry, now that I think we're far enough from Christmas for my intent not to be misinterpreted. Please don't take this the wrong way. Did you send them? posted by M. Giant 8:24 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Hi M. Giant - I sent these gifts to M. Edium. I'm a long-time reader of this website and your TWOP recaps and wanted to send a little something to M. Edium as a way to thank you for the entertainment you have provided.
By Sunday, February 07, 2010 Assault and Battery So then I got in the trunk of the car and pulled the lid shut. Oh, I seem to be starting in the middle. Let me back up. In a two-telecommuter house, there isn't a lot of driving. In fact, there have been times when if we didn't have to bring M. Edium to school, we wouldn't leave the house at all for a week. We kind of wish he'd learn to drive himself already. In the meantime, though, Trash likes me to alternate between the two cars when I drop him off and pick him up. She's got some crazy, superstitious idea that if we don't drive both cars semi-regularly, then on some cold morning one of them won't start. Back in December, I proved to her how silly that was when I got in her car for the first time in a week, started it right up, and drove it over to Walgreens. Of course, when it came time to drive home, I had to call Chao to come give me a jump because the battery was dead, but still. Chicks, right? It happened a few more times after that, although the other times it was always in the driveway, so I could just hook the jumper cables to my car, which has a battery that was new last summer. Trash thought the battery in her car was also relatively new -- newer than the car, at least, which we bought almost five years ago. But I had to tell her that I had never replaced her battery. I knew this, because I had never seen it. I'd thought it was odd the time I went to jump my car battery off of hers and found nothing under the hood but one red terminal sticking out of a black plastic cover. Which I removed in search of the battery itself. I was halfway to the driveway before I gave up the search, and I never did find the thing. Turns out that's because on her make and model of car, the battery lives in the trunk. This is a feature of which I was not aware. In addition to the added convenience of having to move all the crap in the trunk around to get to the battery, when it's time to replace it you have to get the kind of battery that has little vents built into the side. This allows certain gases to escape that would otherwise build up in the trunk and cause the car to explode. It also adds about a hundred bucks onto the price of a replacement battery. Win-win-win! That's why we decided not to pick up a new battery at the beginning of January. And since it was still working most of the time, we convinced ourselves it was the cold preventing it from starting and it would be fine in the spring. Which is only, like, five months away. I had even resigned myself to jumping her car every Tuesday afternoon, before she went to St. Paul to teach her class. But then last Monday, even jumping it didn't work. We resigned ourselves to buying that expensive new battery. But at least now it was going into February expenses rather than January. And we worked it into our budget by dividing out the extra cost into a new category called "explosion prevention" (I suspect this category has possibilities for justifying some other wish-list stuff that I have yet to fully explore). So I replaced the battery. Normally this kind of thing takes me a long time, but I got a new set of sockets for Christmas and I still knew where they all are, which saved me the time I usually have to spend looking around for the right ones. Once that was all done, it started right up, over and over. Trash drove to school on Tuesday, and drove back on Tuesday night. No problems at all. But just to be sure, and to humor my wife's little misconceptions, I decided to drive M. Edium to school in her car on Thursday. It wouldn't start. So we went in my car, and after I got home, I decided to try to figure it out. The only thing I could think of, in my spectacularly rudimentary understanding of cars, was that something was draining the battery while the car was off and parked. I once owned a used station wagon whose glove compartment door didn't always shut, so the light in there stayed on. That was fun to come back to that time we'd left it at a parking lot at O'Hare for a week. But that wasn't the issue here. Trash's glove box doesn't have a light, and her interior lights weren't staying on, and we'd quit recharging our laptops on her cigarette lighters weeks before. But what about the trunk light? Could that be staying on all the time? If the car even has one? Which I didn't remember it having? I popped the trunk and found the little bulb assembly. It felt really hot, hotter than it should have felt after being on for less than a minute. And it didn't seem to be turning off, even as I peered at it through the tiniest of cracks before the trunk lid actually shut. That must be it. I figured out how to unlatch it from inside the trunk and unplug it from its cable, then brought it inside and set it on Trash's desk. "I think that's your problem," I said. "Go jump my car," she said. I went jumped her car. At least it started after only a few minutes of charging, so I knew the new battery wasn't a complete waste of money. The old battery, by contrast, was totally dead. After being constantly drained by something mysterious for two months, that is. But I still felt I should test my theory. I popped the trunk light back into place, where it started glowing obligingly. And then I got in the trunk of the car and pulled the lid shut. People find themselves shut in car trunks all the time on TV, at least on the shows I recap, but this was my first time (as an adult, that is; I can't say for sure whether I've ever ridden in a trunk before in my life, but your blood would freeze at the stories of how my siblings and cousins and friends and I were sometimes driven from place to place in the days before car seats). It's not comfortable for a person my size, especially in a bulky overcoat. I hadn't really cleaned it out, so stuff was poking into me. Plus it was really, really dark. Yes, it was dark. So much for my theory. I lay stuffed in there for a minute, wondering what to do next. There I was, no closer to the solution of the problem, and now I was in a trunk. It was a dark Thursday morning of the soul. Would my cell phone get reception in here? Could I even reach my pocket to get it out in this position? But then I popped the trunk button on my car remote and climbed out. I think I know what to do now. It's clear that electricity is going somewhere it's not supposed to when the car isn't running. So all I need to do is crack open the fuse box. I'll remove the fuses and then replace them one at a time, and each time I take one out, I'll stick a pair of metal tweezers into the empty slot until I find one that shocks me. And then I'll throw away the fuse that went into that slot. Problem solved! Honestly, I don't know why people complain so much about the cost of car repair when it's so easy to do it yourself. posted by M. Giant 7:16 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:i love your article but above all i love the way you perform on the about me!!!
By Wednesday, February 03, 2010 Pop History (Apologies to Glark for the title) Have you seen those commercials paid for by the Corn Growers of America or whatever? At some picnic or birthday party, someone busts out some juice or similarly wholesome treat. A tight-assed counterpart remarks, "Isn't that made with high fructose corn syrup?" Our hero, politely enough, is like, "So?" Then the tight-ass says, "Well, you know what they say about high-fructose corn syrup." And then our hero is like, "No, what do they say?" And the tight-ass has to be all "well…uh…" and it's not like the HFCS booster is going to help them out here. What happens next is that the tight-ass gets totally schooled, getting such tight science as "high-fructose corn syrup doesn't cause that much cancer" or "high-fructose corn syrup has way less mercury than a thermometer from 1952" dropped on them. Boo-yah! And it's not like I care one way or another or anything, but all those commercials make me want to do is find out as much as I can about "what they say" about high-fructose corn syrup. Because if these commercials tell you anything, it's that you never know who's going to call you out on your uninformed ignorance about the most esoteric subject, and I don't want that to happen to me. Even then I wasn't all that worried about this danger, until I started seeing all these "throwback" and "legacy" sodas in the stores lately. The ones made with sugar instead of the dreaded High Fructose Corn Syrup. So far I've only tried Pepsi Throwback, and to be honest, I couldn't tell the difference at first other than the fact that it comes in the old red-white-and-blue can I remember from childhood rather than the current "deflated Harlem Globetrotters basketball at midnight" look of the current packaging. But now I could totally tell them apart in a blind taste test. At least that's what I tell myself. I have yet to try "Legacy Dr. Pepper," and haven't even checked out the packaging closely to see if they've brought back that cryptic clock or the old 99 44/100 slogan. And although "Throwback Mountain Dew" features the character that earned it the nickname "Hillbilly Piss" back in the day, even it isn't going to try and market something in 2010 that promises to "tickle your innards." Mainly, I'm waiting for Coca-Cola to come out with the revival of the original recipe they sold over a hundred years ago. That will be some real excitement. In the meantime, I'm practicing using my most condescending attitude to ask, "No, what do they say about cocaine?" posted by M. Giant 8:43 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:If you want to know "what they say" about corn syrup, read "Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. It's basically about how the corn industry and government subsidies of said industry are Eeeevil. I started reading it, and it was interesting and very informative, but my book mark is still on page 50 (and I started it in October). Ultimately I decided I would rather spend my free time reading novels by Lisa See instead. I do plan on going back to it... eventually?
By Throwback/heritage sodas really do taste better. I am just old enough (39) to remember the difference. Sugar sweetened soda is slightly more acidic and less sweet. My favorite aspect is the lack of aftertaste. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that both Pepsi and DP were childhood favorites. Still, I won't be fully satisfied until the return of New York Seltzer.
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