Year: 2003

Hellooo, ladies!

Yo yo yo. Time for a pizzost in the blizzog.

Mostly I wanted to post that photo, since Rebecky and Myküll liked the last Olympus manual photo so much. This one comes from an Olympus OM lens booklet, and gosh, I don’t know but I’m guessing it’s from the ’70s. I have a mental picture of a Japanese Olympus staff photographer approaching those guys on Daytona Beach or Muscle Shoals or whichever van-friendly shore they were oilily lounging about. I wonder what they were saying to him when the photo was taken, and if he understood it, and if he was glad he didn’t. And I wonder how many people looked at that photo and thought, “That makes me want to buy a new lens” It makes me want to throw away all my cameras. And possibly gouge out my eyes.

Good crop of spam lately. I got a whole bunch for mortgage refinancing, but once again it was the random text that showed up in the Outlook preview panel that made them fun:

My dog is very promiscuous. Take control of your money.

She was a very crafty little dorky head. We have hundreds of lenders to help you get the lowest rates.

His perverse sense of humor nauseated me. Find the best rates for home financing.

I got an email the other day from Pimple J. Channeling, and I’ve gotten five or six from Efrain Cobb, who really wants me to add inches. Efrain Cobb? I’m now apparently getting spam from the 18th century.

I stopped in a drugstore Friday night and was served by a clerk wearing an ill-fitting uniform shirt, with doodles and notes scrawled on her hands in multi-colored inks, an unfortunate nose piercing, and a Spongebob Squarepants sticker next to her right eye. Her nametag read “Beauty Advisor”

WARNING: CAR GEEKERY

After years of reading about them on various gearhead web forums, I bought a K&N air filter for Plooblewagon. They promise more efficient airflow than a stock filter, with increased horsepower and improved acceleration and throttle response. Best 30 bucks I’ve ever spent. There is a noticeable difference, and the engine revs much more freely from 4,000 RPMs to redline. Installing it was easier than changing a wiper blade, as Primo demonstrated when five minutes after I bought my car he was under the hood taking shit apart. The new filter is also supposed to have some effect on fuel economy. I think it either improves it, or cuts it in half. Don’t care. Car faster.

And no Rebecky, I don’t think one would help the Bonneville. But it would double its value.

In addition to being faster, Plooblewagon is also scratchier. The first blemish on its pristine Midnight Blue Mica exterior happened Friday, courtesy of a shopping cart at Lowes. Oh, well. It had to happen sooner or later. I once heard of someone who would take a ball peen hammer and put a dent in his new car the first day, just to get it over with. But I’ve always been able to willfully suspend disbelief and pretend that my car would stay perfect forever. That approach hasn’t worked too well in relationships, either.

Man. This entry is too boring to even proofread. But don’t worry…

Coming soon: more banknotes from the Plooble Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

I should go to bed, but I don’t feel like it. I had an interview today, and for some reason that makes me feel like I get to goof off for the next 48 hours. Putting on a suit is worth two days of lying on the couch watching daytime TV. “For an hilarious account of shopping for interview clothes to help one land a Soulless Corporate Job, check in with the estimable Rebecky“.

Cross your fingers for me. If I’m lucky and get the job, I’ll be able to drive 37 miles to work each day to sit in a cube ranch in a dumpy ’70s industrial building surrounded by strip malls and car dealerships and think of interesting things to say about gray boxes with wires coming out of them.

Should any potential employers happen to be reading this, please be assured that the preceding statement was merely bluster, designed to make me sound cool and anti-corporate to my hipster friends. In actual fact, I love nothing better than thinking of interesting things to say about gray boxes. Robust. Feature-rich. Extensible.

I got pretty fluent in the techno-marcom babble when I worked at Big Telecommunications Company Who Sucks and Laid Me Off, but it can easily become mind-numbing. A like-minded colleague and I were writing a document together, and we realized we had used the phrase “cost effective” about ten times in two pages, so we tried to come up with some alternatives. Our favorite was “cost-o-riffic,” and we accidentally sent the document out for review with that in it. You should have seen the flurry of indignation from the pocket protector crowd.

Every now and then I came across something in a piece of corporate literature that made me think there was someone else out there like me, grinding away in a cube and aware of the absurdity of corporate speak. The longer documents we wrote always had a glossary at the end, which was usually titled “Glossary and List of Acronyms.” One writer realized, rightly, that it’s not an acronym unless it makes a pronounceable word, like laser or scuba. He or she headed the glossary in one document “Glossary and Groups of Capital Letters Used Instead of Words.”

My favorite find came from a basic primer on the telecommunications industry:

The most common enemy of the public switched telephone network is the backhoe.

Perhaps the fact that I laughed for ten minutes after reading that will give you some insight into the state of mind I had attained. And hope to attain again! Really!

now THAT’S a banknote

I decided when I started this blog that I didn’t want it to turn into some kind of low-rent Andy Rooney-style whinge-athon, nor did I ever want to sound like a lame stand-up comedian. If I couldn’t think of anything more interesting to say than “What is the deal with… or “Who’s the genius who greenlighted… then I wouldn’t say anything at all.

Still, what is the deal with the new $20 bill? Who’s the genius who greenlighted that? It looks like an old twenty that’s been doodled on by an obsessive compulsive and then had a peach Snapple spilled on it. Why must we have the ugliest money on earth? Isn’t it bad enough that we flood the world with our worst TV shows, movies, music, beer and fast food? “Not to mention our foreign policy.”

The coolest money I’ve ever seen was in The Netherlands “also in the running for the coolest country I’ve ever seen”, back before they were forced to adopt the Euro “which could be worse I suppose, but it ain’t no sunflower”. The fifty guilder note pictured above is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, money or not. I wish I had kept one, but I visited when I was 17 and 50 guilders was an expensive souvenir back then.

There are a few web sites dedicated to the glory of the old Dutch money. Here’s a good one.

Why can’t we have money like that? Hell, I bet I could design a better bill than the stupid new twenty. Hang on.

There. What do you think?

the finger thing continues to sweep the nation

I’m trapped in my study. Four carpenters are here installing my new back door, which is going to be very nice “and for that I sincerely thank you, Mr. Burglar”. Since I can’t leave the house and the TV is in the room with the hammering, I’m stuck in here writing in my blog, IMing and surfing the web. It’s like having a job again.

Even though it’s my living room they’re tool-belting around in, every time I walk in there I feel as though I’ve wandered onto their construction site. They’re making no secret of the fact that, my house or not, they’d prefer it if I just stayed the hell away. Besides, I made the mistake of letting them see my drill, which is red and weak, as opposed to theirs, which are yellow and mighty. I have tool envy. “Knock yourself out, Myküll.”

There’s plenty of groaning and banging and cursing coming from the other room. I’m afraid to look. After every noise I expect to hear, “Mr. Thomas? Turns out the door doesn’t fit but you’ll have to pay for it anyway, and we’re going to leave your back wall open for the next six to eight weeks until the new door comes in, which is gonna be twice what this one was. And we’ve broken everything in your house” Hastings is locked upstairs in his secret hiding room, and he must think the world is coming to an end. His two least favorite things – loud banging noises and vacuuming – have been going on all day. “Adda said he’s sure we’re down here building a cat guillotine.” But he’s going to have hours of high-quality powersniffing tonight.

I had dinner Saturday night with the Blogtown All-Stars, minus Myküll “Rebecky, Jesse and Mr. and Mrs. Pinky”. We ate at Panang, a new Pan-Asian Sino-Thai Confusion restaurant in Chapel Hill, in the building formerly occupied by the much-missed Pyewacket. “There were guys at the bar who used to hang out at Pyewacket, which really confuses me since Pyewacket was cool and welcoming and Panang has an ambience you normally find only at airports and theme parks.”

I have a standard of service inherited from my German-born restaurateur grandfather, and it’s hard to match these days in any place charging less than $150 for a meal. Panang nearly blew my gaskets. It’s only been open for a week or so, but still, you would think they might have mastered the art of the water glass by now. While we were trying to figure out which darting apparition with a notepad was assigned to our table, we watched a conversation between a patron and the hostess. We couldn’t hear what was said, but it was obvious from the body language that the words “ridiculous” “incompetent and “never coming back were used. People at bare tables all around us gazed about helplessly like shipwreck survivors. Several times one of the black-clad underwaiters came up to our table and, very pleasantly, said things like, “You still don’t have your food? and “You still don’t have your check? with a bemused look that indicated he had as little control over the situation as we did. Food did show up randomly throughout the course of the two and a half hours we were there, and often it was what we ordered. Ridiculous. Incompetent. Never coming back.

The evening did have considerable charms, though, thanks to the company. We played one of my favorite restaurant games: everybody picks an item from the menu and uses that name for the rest of the evening. “I did this at Acme once with my friend Bill and his wife Jana. Bill was Sweet Butter Biscuit and I was Lime Rickey. We decided he was a middleweight boxer and I was his manager.” Saturday, Rebecky was Coconut Fried Rice, Jesse was Yam Pot, Mr. Pinky was Curry Mee and I was Volcano Pork Chop. “I always pick mine before I suggest the game.” And Pinky? Pinky was Pi Pa Duck. Of course she was. A Pi Pa Duckier person I’ve never met.

there comes a point in the evening when Carmen Miranda has a mustache

Halloween, Shmalloween.

That might be a little harsh, but Halloween in Chapel Hill can be a real pain in the ass. The town is invaded by thousands of dipshits in the lamest excuse for costumes, turning Franklin Street into a sea of, well, dipshits in lame costumes. I suppose my antipathy for this particular holiday stems from my days as a newspaper photographer, when I was forced to wade in neck deep and try to get a decent picture for the front page. “Whenever anything happened downtown, I had to be there. If it was a protest march, it meant I would basically be running backwards from Chapel Hill to Carrboro.” My search for one good photo became four hours of “hey, nice photographer costume,” interspersed with entreaties from drunken sorority girls in football jerseys to take their picture and mail it to them.

Okay, yeah, sure, it’s fun, but it doesn’t exactly bring out the best in the student population. On my way home tonight, in and around dodging costumed or shirtless inebriates lurching into the street, I saw a kid in a pink rabbit suit run out in front of a police car, apparently to alert the officer to the presence of an overturned shopping cart on the sidewalk. Thanks, Crimestopper Bunny! And it’s 3:30 a.m. and I can still hear the occasional “woohoo!” through my open window, not to mention revving engines and squealing tires. “Ah, that’s probably just Primo.” Oh, hey! I just heard an explosion! Terrific.

I suppose all this is making me sound even more curmudgeonly than usual, but I did have a good time tonight. I made the right decision, and spent the evening in Durham at a Halloween/birthday party for Mae West. I really do have a lot of very clever friends. Check out the costumes in the Halloween photo gallery, located over there. See? There. No, there.

I managed to sneak back into town without running down anybody in a cat suit, and dropped off the Tiki God and Goddess in Carrboro. On the way to my house I stopped at a light and noticed two women on the sidewalk, dressed as a naughty nurse and a naughty schoolgirl. “Okay, maybe Halloween isn’t so bad.” When I looked up again, they were walking toward my car with beseeching looks on their faces. I rolled down my window, with an exchange from “Detroit Rock City” running through my mind. “”This is how horror movies start.” “Yeah, but this is also how porno movies start!”” But since this is my public blog and not my private fantasy journal, they turned out to be two students from Charlotte who had gotten separated from their friends, and all they wanted was a ride to the house where they were staying.

Or was it?

“Gosh, it’s such a nice night,” the nubile nurse said in a husky voice, “and this uniform is awfully warm…”

I cannot in good conscience condone this type of behavior. Really. I can’t.

On my way to some nebulous nether region between Hillsborough and Durham Tuesday night “on a map it says “here be monsters”, I passed a church that proclaimed “Wal-Mart is not the only saving place” I can’t even begin to express all the reasons why that wigs me out, and if you’re the type of person who reads this blog, I probably don’t have to.

I’ve often wondered if there was a web site where pastors could find snappy new slogans to entice passing motorists, and lo and behold, there are dozens. “I’m not going to link to them, and I’m trying to be careful not to write too many words that might lead one of those pastors or members of their flock to this site, because the last thing I need is a bunch of Hallmarky Christophiles trying to redeem my soul. If you really want to find them, do a search using the word commonly used to describe the house of worship of the dominant religious affiliation in the Southern U.S. – rhymes with “lurch” – and the word for a thingy with words written on it.”

Most of the ones cataloged on those sites are pretty lame, but some are more than a little scary. How about “Jesus is returning – resistance is futile? Or “Firefighters rescue – only Jesus saves” Yeah, take that you prideful firefighters! Or “Going to church does not make you a Christian anymore than going to McDonalds makes you a hamburger” “Best not to think through the logic of that one too carefully.” “As sure as God puts his children in the furnace, He will be in the furnace with them” Thanks, God, but how about we just not get in the furnace? “May your teenage head banger meet The Ageless Heart Knocker! “I’m not sure, but I think they mean Elvis.”

One church even saw fit to quote that famous model of piety and chastity, Lord Byron: “Profanity is the linguistic crutch of the inarticulate” Fuck, I wish I’d said that. Still, the one that takes the biscuit for sheer Jesus-meets-Madison-Avenue icky crossover hatefulness is the one I saw a few years ago in front of a church near Pittsboro: “For all you do, His blood’s for you”

The reason I was thrashing Plooblewagon about in BFNC is because I was trying to find Greta’s parents’ Colonial manse for her birthday dinner, at which a good time was had by all. Her father the doctor led us in all kinds of Fun With Your Brain activities. For instance, I learned that because I have to visualize the route before I can give someone driving directions, that means I am parietal-lobe dominant. So all of you parietal-lobe submissives, drop me a line.

He also taught us something else that led to Ingrid doing this, but it’s funnier if I don’t explain it. But it’s not just Ingrid: all the cool, hip kids are doing it.

And finally, in case you were wondering, this is what I will look like when I’m 72. Not too shabby, huh?