From the monthly archives:

January 2004

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I’m feeling a bit random today, and luckily the random absurdity has been piling up. I saw the sign pictured above during a recent visit to UNC Hospitals. I thought it was a bit zen for a traditional western medicine establishment. (Actually, I first noticed “Remember 3C” and thought, “There must be a ‘Remember 2B,’” and drove around until I found it. My apologies to anyone who had recently had a major organ removed who might have been waiting on the sidewalk in a wheelchair.)

At the hospital, I also saw this, on a Mustang. I will make no further comment other than to direct your attention to the handcuffs hanging from the rearview mirror.

There’s a banner ad that keeps popping up on Yahoo aimed at people who suffer from acid reflux (or GERD, which will always sound like an East German weightlifter to me). It reads, “Bowl of pasta, or bowl of pain?” Bowl of Pain needs to be the name of a band right now. Get on it, people.

The Hardback Café used to put a chalkboard out front with the specials on it. One day it read, “Gazpacho – the cold soup of Spain,” a quote from the Pepper’s Pizza menu. Later in the day someone changed it to “the cold soup of pain,” and still later it read, “the cold soup of space.” I can never hear gazpacho mentioned without thinking of that and telling the story, often to people who have heard it four or five times.

Finally, randomly, I got an email from a friend the other day who is a highly-accomplished professional in his field. He was mortified to notice that he had let the Microsoft Word autocorrect feature get a bit away from him. In a proposal to a client, he meant to say he would “provide coaching and feedback to others.” What he actually proposed was that he would “provide coaching and feedback to otters.”

If that’s a real job, I want it.

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Pet Smarts

2004.01.28

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After five years I have come to the conclusion that, as sweet as he is, Hastings is not the sharpest flea comb in the drawer. Let’s just say it’s a good thing he’s domesticated. As with most cats, he is primarily concerned with eating, napping, parasitically sucking up body heat, and chasing imaginary rodents. He used to be really good about eating. I would put a small bowl of dry food down in the morning and he would stand there until he finished it, and that was that. Then, during last year’s ice storm, I really screwed up. I felt bad for making him stay in a cold house all day while I decamped to places restored of power, so I started giving him a snack at night. The first time I did it, he looked at me with an incredulous expression that seemed to say, “What?! You mean you can feed my anytime you want?!” And from then on I was doomed.

For the past year he has followed me around relentlessly, and meows plaintively whenever I walk into the kitchen. Any time I stand up, he is on me like a cheap furry suit. And of course, he greets the dawn by jumping on my bed and putting his nose in my mouth. (“Oh, you’re awake? Well then you might as well feed me.”) I finally got tired of it and inaugurated the Full Bowl Policy two weeks ago. Many of my cat-owning friends keep a bowl of dry food constantly replenished and their cats eat whenever they feel like it. Sure, some of them are a bit, er… zaftig, but they also aren’t leaping around like Chinese acrobats on the Ed Sullivan show every time you get up to go to the bathroom.

On Day One of the FBP when I filled his bowl to the brim, Hastings thought it was Kitty Christmas. Since then he’s gotten used to it, but whenever I top up the bowl he looks at me as if to say, “I’ve never loved you more.” I think he’s gained maybe a pound, and for him that probably isn’t a bad thing.

But has it changed his behavior? Has it my eye. He still meows at me when I walk past the cabinet where his cat food is kept. When I point to his full bowl, he kind of shrugs and goes, “Oh, right.” And he still wakes me up in the morning and tries to herd me downstairs when I head for the bathroom. I realize he’s an animal, but like some kind of pathetic parent with a child vying for a spot in a magnet school, I want him to be exceptional. (Then again, as far as intelligence goes, I’m the one trying to reason with a cat here.)

Maybe he needs a tutor, or some flashcards.

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Ooh, Shiny

01.27.2004

A few weeks ago, Jean came over for dinner and gave the hairy eyeball to my stove, which I’m assuming has been here since 1978 when the house was built. At first I was confused because I thought it was pretty clean, and not just by my pathetically lenient standards. “You know you can get [...]

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Baby, It's Cold Outside

01.26.2004

I set out Sunday morning in the snow with the promise of freedom toast and a kind word. I turned around and came home ten minutes later after discovering three things: 1. Plooblewagon’s boy-racer low-profile tires love dry pavement, but they get all confused and belligerent when they encounter anything slippy. 2. The vast majority [...]

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Roar

01.22.2004

White tigers have been in the news a lot lately, and not just because one of them tried to make a sequined canapé out of either Siegfried or Roy. (Like I care which one.) An Argentinean tiger recently gave birth to sextuplets in the Buenos Aires zoo, for instance. There’s so much tiger talk that [...]

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Faking It

01.20.2004

original photo Luke Frazza/AFP When Time Warner Cable announced they would be adding BBC America, I could hardly contain my excitement. I’ve been a huge Anglophile since I was ten years old, and my favorite shows have almost always been British – especially British mysteries. My cat, for instance, is named for Hercule Poirot’s sidekick. [...]

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Dave Thomas Is Getting A Chance To Do Something Like This

01.15.2004

My name is Dave Thomas. It doesn’t matter if I introduce myself as David Thomas or David B. Thomas, I still get, “Huh, like the founder of Wendy’s?” As if it might have escaped my attention. (It used to be one in ten people said, “Like the guy from SCTV?” and I usually liked those [...]

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I Wore a Suit Today, Oh Boy

01.13.2004

If I were given the choice between opening a door marked “All-Day Meeting,” or another one marked “Five Minutes of Root Canal,” I would stop and think hard for a moment and then say, “This is a stupid metaphor.” If it’s even a metaphor. I know it’s not a simile. Or an analogy. Maybe it’s [...]

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I've Served My Time in Hell

01.12.2004

Mark holding court in Hell – photo by Primo I’m sure you’re all readers of Maxim magazine, if not subscribers, so you already know that my favorite bar, Hell, was awarded “Bar o’ the Month” in the January issue. Since I love the bar and all who sail within in her, I will pretend that [...]

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Meatwad

01.08.2004

One of the problems with exposing myself to reality TV is that I also expose myself to TV commericials, and I will buy anything anyone tells me to. As a result, I found myself on Wednesday driving about 20 minutes round trip to pick up a Hardee’s Low Carb Thickburger. “How did they make a [...]

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